CHAPTER III.

THE TRANSITION.

The Church, Chivalry, the Nation--The National Element in

Italian Literature--Florence--Italy between 1373 and

1490--Renascent Nationality--Absorption in

Scholarship--Vernacular Literature follows an obscure

Course--Final Junction of the Humanistic and Popular

Currents--Renascence of Italian--The Italian

Temperament--Importance of the Quattrocento--Sacchetti's

Novels--Ser Giovanni's _Pecorone_--Sacchetti's and Ser

Giovanni's Poetry--Lyrics of the Villa and the Piazza--Nicolo

Soldanieri--Alesso Donati--His Realistic Poems--Followers of

Dante and Petrarch--Political Poetry of the Guelfs and

Ghibellines--Fazio degli Uberti--Saviozzo da Siena--Elegies on

Dante--Sacchetti's Guelf Poems--Advent of the

_Bourgeoisie_--Discouragement of the Age--Fazio's

_Dittamondo_--Rome and Alvernia--Frezzi's

_Quadriregio_--Dantesque Imitation--Blending of Classical and

Medieval Motives--Matteo Palmieri's _Citta di Vita_--The Fate

of _Terza Rima_--Catherine of Siena--Her Letters--S.

Bernardino's Sermons--Salutati's Letters--Alessandra degli

Strozzi--Florentine Annalists--Giov. Cavalcanti--Corio's

_History of Milan_--Matarazzo's _Chronicle of

Perugia_--Masuccio and his _Novellino_--His Style and

Genius--Alberti--Born in Exile--His Feeling for

Italian--Enthusiasm for the Roman Past--The Treatise on the

Family--Its Plan--Digression on the Problem of its

Authorship--Pandolfini or Alberti--The

_Deiciarchia_--_Tranquillita

dell'Animo_--_Teogenio_--Alberti's Religion--Dedication of the

Treatise on Painting--Minor Works in Prose on

Love--_Ecatomfila_, _Amiria_, _Deifiria_,

etc.--Misogynism--Novel of _Ippolito and Leonora_--Alberti's

Poetry--Review of Alberti's Character and his Relation to the

Age--Francesco Colonna--The _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_--Its

Style--Its Importance as a Work of the Transition--A Romance

of Art, Love, Humanism--The

Allegory--Polia--Antiquity--Relation of this Book to Boccaccio

and Valla--It Foreshadows the Renaissance.

The two preceding chapters will have made it clear that the Church,

Chivalry, and the Nation contributed their several quotas to the growth

of Italian literature.[130] The ecclesiastical or religious element, so

triumphantly expressed in the Divine Comedy, was not peculiar to the

Italians. They held it in common with the whole of Christendom; and

though the fabric of the Roman Church took form in Italy, though the

race gave S. Francis, S. Thomas, and S. Bonaventura to the militia of

the medieval faith, still the Italians as a nation were not specifically

religious. Piety, which is quite a different thing from ecclesiastical

organization, was never the truest and sincerest accent of their genius.

Had it been so, the history of Latin Christianity would have followed

another course, and the schism of the sixteenth century might have been

avoided.

The chivalrous element they shared, at a considerable disadvantage, with

the rest of feudal Europe. Chivalry was not indigenous to Italian soil,

nor did it ever flourish there. The literature which it produced in

France, became Italian only when the Guidi and Dante gave it

philosophical significance. Petrarch, who represents this motive, as

Dante represents the ecclesiastical, generalized Provencal poetry. His

_Canzoniere_ cannot be styled a masterpiece of chivalrous art. Its

spirit is modern and human in a wider and more comprehensive sense.

To characterize the national strain in this complex pedigree of culture

is no easy task--chiefly because it manifested itself under two

apparently antagonistic forms; first in the recovery of the classics by

the scholars of the fifteenth century; secondly in the portraiture of

Italian character and temperament by writers of romance and fiction. The

divergence of these two main currents of literary energy upon the close

of the middle ages, and their junction in the prime of the Renaissance,

are the topics of my present volume.

We have seen how tenaciously the Italians clung to memories of ancient

Rome, and how their history deprived them of that epical material which

started modern literature among the northern races. While the vulgar

language was being formed from the dialects into which rustic Latin had

divided, a new nationality grew into shape by an analogous process out

of the remnants of the old Italic population, fused with recent

immigrants. Absorbing Greek blood in the south and Teutonic in the

north, this composite race maintained the ascendancy of the Romanized

people, in obedience to laws whereby the prevalent and indigenous strain

outlives and assimilates ingredients from without. Owing to a variety of

causes, among which must be reckoned geographical isolation and

imperfect Lombard occupation, the purest Italic stock survived upon the

Tuscan plains and highlands, between the Tyrrhene Sea and the Apennines,

and where the Arno and the Tiber start together from the mountains of

Arezzo. This region was the cradle of the new Italian language, the

stronghold of the new Italian nation. Its center, political, commercial

and intellectual, was Florence, which gave birth to the three great

poets of the fourteenth century. Though Florence developed her

institutions later than the Lombard communes, she maintained a civic

independence longer than any State but Venice; and her _popolo_ may be

regarded as the type of the popular Italian element. Here the genius of

Italy became conscious of itself, and here the people found a spokesman

in Boccaccio. Abandoning ecclesiastical and feudal traditions, Boccaccio

concentrated his force upon the delineation of his fellow-countrymen as

he had learned to know them. The Italians of the new age start into

distinctness in his work, with the specific qualities they were destined

to maintain and to mature during the next two centuries. Thus Boccaccio

fully represents one factor of what I have called the national element.

At the same time, he occupies a hardly less important place in relation

to the other or the humanistic factor. Like his master Petrarch, he

pronounced with ardor and decision for that scholarship which restored

the link between the present and the past of the Italian race.

Independently of their achievements in modern literature, we have to

regard the humanistic efforts of these two great writers as a sign that

the national element had asserted itself in antagonism to the Church and

chivalry.

The recovery of the classics was, in truth, the decisive fact in Italian

evolution. Having attained full consciousness in the Florence of Dante's

age, the people set forth in search of their spiritual patrimony. They

found it in the libraries. They became possessed of it through the

labors of the scholars. Italian literature during the first three

quarters of the fifteenth century merged, so far as polite society was

concerned, in Humanism, the history of which has already been presented

to the reader in the second volume of this work.[131] For a hundred

years, from the publication of the Decameron in 1373 to the publication

of Poliziano's _Stanze_, the genius of Italy was engaged in an

exploratory pilgrimage, the ultimate end of which was the restoration of

the national inheritance in ancient Rome. This process of renascent

classicism, which was tantamount to ranascent nationality, retarded the

growth of the vulgar literature. Yet it was imperatively demanded not

only by the needs of Europe at large, but more particularly and urgently

by the Italians themselves, who, unlike the other modern races, had no

starting-point but ancient Rome. The immediate result of the humanistic

movement was the separation of the national element into two sections,

learned and popular, Latin and Italian. The common people, who had

repeated Dante's _Canzoni_, and whose life Boccaccio had portrayed in

the Decameron, were now divided from the rising class of scholars and

professors. Cultivated persons of all ranks despised Italian, and spent

their time in studies beyond the reach of the laity. Like some mountain

rivers after emerging from the highlands of their origin, the vernacular

literature passed as it were for a season underground, and lost itself

in unexplored ravines. Absorbed into the masses of the people, it

continued an obscure but by no means insignificant course, whence it

was destined to reappear at the right moment, when the several

constituents of the nation had attained the sense of intellectual unity.

This sense of unity was the product of the classical revival; for the

activity of the wandering professors and the fanatical enthusiasm for

the ancients were needed to create a common consciousness, a common

standard of taste and intelligence in the peninsula. It must in this

connection be remembered that the vernacular literature of the

fourteenth century, though it afterwards became the glory of Italy as a

whole, was originally Florentine. The medium prepared by the scholars

was demanded in order that the Tuscan classics should be accepted by the

nation as their own. Toward the close of the fifteenth century, a fusion

between the humanistic and the vulgar literatures was made; and this is

the renascence of Italian--no longer Tuscan, but participated by the

race at large. The poetry of the people then received a form refined by

classic learning; and the two sections of what I have called the

national element, joined to produce the genuine Italian culture of the

golden age.

It is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to insist upon this point,

which forms the main motive of my present theme. After the death of

Boccaccio the history of Italian literature is the history of that

national element which distinguished itself from the ecclesiastical and

the chivalrous, and at last in the Decameron asserted its superiority

over both. But the stream of intellectual energy bifurcates. During the

fifteenth century, the Latin instincts of the new Italic people found

vigorous expansion in the humanistic movement, while the vernacular

literature carried on a fitful and obscure, but potent, growth among the

proletariate. At the end of that century, both currents, the learned and

the popular, the classical and the modern, reunited on a broader plane.

The nation, educated by scholarship and brought to a sense of its

identity, resumed the vulgar tongue; and what had hitherto been Tuscan,

now became Italian. In this renascence neither the religious nor the

feudal principle regained firm hold upon the race. Their influence is

still discernible, however, in the lyrics of the Petrarchisti and the

epics of Orlando; for nothing which has once been absorbed into a

people's thought is wholly lost. How they were transmuted by the action

of the genuine Italic genius, triumphant now upon all quarters of the

field, will appear in the sequel of these volumes; while it remains for

another work to show in what way, under the influences of the

Counter-Reformation, both the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous elements

reasserted themselves for a brief moment in Tasso. Still even in Tasso

we recognize the Italian courtier rather than the knight or the ascetic.

For the rest, it is clear that the spirit of Boccaccio--that is, the

spirit of the Florentine people--refined by humanistic discipline and

glorified by the reawakening of Italy to a sense of intellectual unity,

determined the character of literature during its most brilliant

period.[132]

Many peculiarities of the Renaissance in Italy, and of the Renaissance

in general, as communicated through Italians to Europe, can be explained

by this emergence of the national Italic temperament. Political and

positive; keenly sensitive to natural beauty, and gifted with a quick

artistic faculty; neither persistently religious nor profoundly

speculative; inclined to skepticism, but accepting the existing order

with sarcastic acquiescence; ironical and humorous rather than

satirical; sensuous in feeling, realistic in art, rhetorical in

literature; abhorring mysticism and ill-fashioned for romantic

exaltation; worldly, with a broad and genial toleration; refined in

taste and social conduct, but violent in the indulgence of personal

proclivities; born old in contrast with the youth of the Teutonic races;

educated by long experience to expect a morrow differing in no

essentials from to-day or yesterday; demanding, therefore, from the

moment all that it can yield of satisfaction to the passions--the

Italians, thus constituted, in their vigorous reaction against the

middle ages, secularized the Papacy, absorbed the Paganism of the

classics, substituted an aesthetic for an ethical ideal, democratized

society, and opened new horizons for pioneering energy in all the fields

of knowledge. The growth of their intelligence was precocious and

fore-doomed to a sudden check; nor was it to be expected that their

solutions of the deepest problems should satisfy races of a different

fiber and a posterity educated on the scientific methods of

investigation. Unexpected factors were added to the general calculation

by the German Reformation and the political struggles which preceded the

French Revolution. Yet the influence of this Italian temperament, in

forming and preparing the necessary intellectual medium in modern

Europe, can hardly be exaggerated.

When the Italian genius manifested itself in art, in letters and in

scholarship, national unity was already an impossibility.[133] The race

had been broken up into republics and tyrannies. Their political forces

were centrifugal rather than centripetal. The first half of the

fifteenth century was the period when their division into five great

powers, held together by the frail bond of diplomacy, had been

accomplished, and when Italy was further distracted by the ambition of

unprincipled _condottieri_. Under these conditions of dismemberment, the

Renaissance came to perfection, and the ideal unity of the Italians was

achieved. The space of forty years' tranquillity and equilibrium, which

preceded Charles VIII.'s invasion, marked an epoch of recombination and

consolidation, when the two currents of national energy, learned and

popular, met to form the culture of the golden age. After being Tuscan

and neo-Latin, the literature which expressed the nation now became

Italian. Such is the importance of the _Quattrocento_ in Italian

history--long denied, late recognized, but now at length acknowledged as

necessary and decisive for both Italy and Europe.

In the present chapter I propose to follow the transition from the

middle ages effected by writers who, though they used the mother tongue,

take rank among cultivated authors. The two succeeding chapters will be

devoted to the more obscure branches of vernacular literature which

flourished among the people.

Franco Sacchetti, who uttered the funeral dirge of the fourteenth

century, was also the last considerable writer of that age.[134] Born

about the year 1335, of one of the old noble families of Florence, he

lived until the end of the century, employed in various public duties

and assiduous in his pursuit of letters.[135] He was a friend of

Boccaccio, and felt the highest admiration not only for his novels but

also for his learning, though he tells us in the preface to his own

three hundred tales that he was himself a man of slender

erudition--_uomo discolo e grosso_.[136] From this preface we also learn

that enthusiasm for the Decameron prompted him to write a set of novels

on his own account.[137] Though Sacchetti loved and worshiped Boccaccio,

he did not imitate his style. The _Novelle_ are composed in the purest

vernacular, without literary artifice or rhetorical ornament. They boast

no framework of fiction, like that which lends the setting of romance to

the Decameron; nor do they pretend to be more than short anecdotes with

here and there a word of moralizing from the author. Yet the student of

Italian, eager to know what speech was current in the streets of

Florence during the last half of that century, will value Sacchetti's

idiomatic language even more highly than Boccaccio's artful periods. He

tells us what the people thought and felt, in phrases borrowed from

their common talk. The majority of the novels treat of Florentine life,

while some of them bring illustrious Florentines--Dante and Giotto and

Guido Cavalcanti--on the scene. Sacchetti's preface vouches for the

truth of his stories; but, whether they be strictly accurate or not, we

need not doubt their fidelity to contemporary customs, domestic manners,

and daily conversation. Sacchetti inspires a certain confidence, a

certain feeling of friendliness. And yet what a world is revealed in his

_Novelle_--a world without tenderness, pathos, high principle, passion,

or enthusiasm--men and women delighting in coarse humor, in practical

jokes of inconceivable vulgarity, in language of undisguised grossness,

in cruelty, fraud, violence, incontinence! The point is almost always

some clever trick, a _burla_ or a _beffa_, or a piece of subtly-planned

retaliation. Knaves and fools are the chief actors in this comic

theater; and among the former we find many friars, among the latter many

husbands. To accept the _Novelle_ as adequate in every detail to the

facts of Florentine society, would be uncritical. They must chiefly be

used for showing what passed for fun among the burghers, and what seemed

fit and decent topics for discussion. Studied from that point of view,

and also for the abundant light they throw on customs and fashions,

Sacchetti's tales are highly valuable. The _bourgeoisie_ of Florence

lives again in their animated pages. We have in them a literature

written to amuse, if not precisely to represent, a civic society closely

packed within a narrow area, witty and pleasure-loving, acutely

sensitive to the ridiculous, with strongly-denned tastes and a decided

preference for pungent flavors. One distinctive Florentine quality

emerges with great clearness. That is a malicious and jibing humor--the

malice Dante took with him to the _Inferno_; the malice expressed by Il

Lasca and Firenzuola, epitomized in Florentine nicknames, and condensed

in Rabelaisian anecdotes which have become classical. It reaches its

climax in the cruel but laughter-moving jest played by Brunelleschi on

the unfortunate cabinet-maker, which has been transmitted to us in the

novel of _Il Grasso, Legnaiuolo_.

Somewhat later than Sacchetti's _Novelle_, appeared another collection

of more or less veracious anecdotes, compiled by a certain Ser

Giovanni.[138] He called it _Il Pecorone_, which may be interpreted "The

Simpleton:"

Ed e per nome il Pecoron chiamato,

Perche ci ha dentro novi barbagianni;

Ed io son capo di cotal brigata,

E vo belando come pecorone,

Facendo libri, e non ne so boccata.

Nothing is known about Ser Giovanni, except what he tells us in the

Sonnet just quoted. From it we learn that he began his _Novelle_ in the

year 1378--the year of the Ciompi Revolution at Florence. As a

framework for his stories, he devised a frigid romance which may be

briefly told. Sister Saturnina, the prioress of a convent at Forli, was

so wise and beautiful that her fame reached Florence, where a handsome

and learned youth, named Auretto, fell in love with her by hearsay. He

took orders, journeyed across the Apennines, and contrived to be

appointed chaplain to Saturnina's nuns. In due course of time she

discreetly returned his affection, and, managing their affairs with

prudence and decorum, they met for private converse and mutual solace in

a parlor of the convent. Here they whiled away the hours by telling

stories--entertaining, instructive, or romantic. The collection is

divided into twenty-five days; and since each lover tells a tale, there

are fifty _Novelle_, interspersed with songs after the fashion of

Boccaccio. In the style, no less than in the method of the book, Ser

Giovanni shows himself a closer follower of the Decameron than

Sacchetti. His novels have a wide range of incidents, embracing tragic

and pathetic motives no less than what is humorous. They are treated

rhetorically, and, instead of being simple anecdotes, aim at the varied

movement of a drama. The language, too, is literary, and less idiomatic

than Sacchetti's. Antiquarians will find in some of these discourses an

interest separate from what is common to works of fiction. They

represent how history was communicated to the people of that day.

Saturnina, for example, relates the myth of Troy and the foundation of

Fiesole, which, as Dante tells us, the Tuscan mothers of Cacciaguida's

age sang to their children. The lives of the Countess Matilda and

Frederick Barbarossa, the antiquity and wealth of the Tuscan cities,

the tragedy of Corso Donati, Giano della Bella's exile, the Angevine

Conquest of Sicily, the origin of Guelfs and Ghibellines in Italy,

Attila's apocryphal siege of Florence, supply materials for narratives

in which the true type of the _Novella_ disappears. Yet Ser Giovanni

mingles more amusing stories with these lectures;[139] and the

historical dissertations are managed with such grace, with so golden a

simplicity of style, that they are readable. Of a truth it is comic to

think of the enamored monk and nun meeting in the solitude of their

parlor to exchange opinions upon Italian history. Though he had the good

qualities of a _trecentisto_ prosaist, Ser Giovanni was in this respect

but a poor artist.

Both Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni were poets of no mean ability. As in his

prose, so also in his _Canzoni a Ballo_, the author of the _Pecorone_

followed Boccaccio, without, however, attaining to that glow and

sensuous abandonment which renders the lyrics no less enchanting than

the narratives of the Decameron. His style is smooth and fluent,

suggesting literary culture rather than spontaneous inspiration.[140]

Yet it is always lucid. Through the transparent language we see straight

into the hearts of lovers as the novelist of Florence understood them.

Written for the most part in the seven-lined stanza with recurring

couplet, which Guido Cavalcanti first made fashionable, these _Ballate_

give lyrical expression to a great variety of tender situations. The

emotion of first love, the pains and pleasures of a growing passion, the

anguish of betrayal, regrets, quarrels, reconciliations, are

successively treated. In short, Ser Giovanni versified and set to music

all the principal motives upon which the _Novella_ of feeling turned,

and formed an _ars amandi_ adapted to the use of the people. In this

sense his poems seem to have been accepted, for we find MSS. of the

_Ballate_ detached from the prose of _Il Pecorone_.[141] Among the most

striking may be mentioned the canzonet _Tradita sono_, which

retrospectively describes the joy of a girl in her first love; another

on the fashions of Florentine ladies, _Quante leggiadre_; and the

lamentation of a woman whose lover has abandoned her, and who sees no

prospect but the cloister--_Oi me lassa_.[142]

Ser Giovanni's lyrics are echoes of the city, where maidens danced their

rounds upon the piazza in May evenings, and young men courted the beauty

of the hour with songs and visits to her chamber:

Con quanti dolci suon e con che canti

Io era visitata tutto 'l giorno!

E nella zambra venivan gli amanti,

Facendo festa e standomi intorno:

Ed io guardava nel bel viso adorno,

Che d'allegrezza mi cresceva il core.

Franco Sacchetti carries us to somewhat different scenes. The best of

his madrigals and canzonets describe the pleasures of country life. They

are not genuinely rustic; nor do they, in Theocritean fashion, attempt

to render the beauty of the country from the peasant's point of view. On

the contrary, they owe their fascination to the contrast between the

simplicity of the villa and the unrest of the town, where:

Mai vi si dice e di ben far vi e caro.

They are written for and by the _bourgeois_ who has escaped from shops

and squares and gossiping street-corners. The keynote of this poetry,

which has always something of the French _ecole buissonniere_ in its

fresh unalloyed enjoyment, is struck in a song describing the return of

Spring[143]:

Benedetta sia la state

Che ci fa si solazzare!

Maladetto sia lo verno

Che a citta ci fa tornare!

The poet summons his company of careless folk, on pleasure bent:

No' siam una compagnia,

I' dico di cacciapensieri.

He takes them forth into the fields among the farms and olive-gardens,

bidding them leave prudence and grave thoughts within the lofty walls of

Florence town:

Il senno e la contenenza

Lasciam dentro all'alte mura

Della citta di Fiorenza.

This note of gayety and pure enjoyment is sustained throughout his

lyrics. In one _Ballata_ he describes a country girl, caught by thorns,

and unable to avoid her admirer's glance.[144] Another gives a pretty

picture of a maiden with a wreath of olive-leaves and silver.[145] A

third is a little idyll of two girls talking to their lambs, and

followed by an envious old woman.[146] A fourth is a biting satire on

old women--_Di diavol vecchia femmina ha natura_.[147] A fifth is that

incomparably graceful canzonet, _O vaghe montanine pasturelle_, the

popularity of which is proved by the fact that it was orally transmitted

for many generations, and attributed in after days to both Lorenzo de'

Medici and Angelo Poliziano.[148] Indeed, it may be said in passing that

Poliziano owed much to Sacchetti. This can be seen by comparing

Sacchetti's _Ballata_ on the Gentle Heart, and his pastoral of the

Thorn-tree with the later poet's lyrics.[149]

The unexpressed contrast between the cautious town-life of the burgher

poet and his license in the villa, to which I have already called

attention, determines the character of many minor lyrics by

Sachetti.[150] We comprehend the spirit of these curious poems, at once

popular and fashionable, when we compare them with medieval French

_Pastourelles_, or with similar compositions by wandering Latin

students. In the _Carmina Burana_ may be found several little poems,

describing the fugitive loves of truant scholars with rustic girls,

which prove that, long before Sacchetti's age, the town had sought

spring-solace in the country.[151] Men are too apt to fancy that what

they consider the refinements of passion and fashion (the finer edge,

for example, put upon desire by altering its object from the known and

trivial to the untried and exceptional, from venal beauties in the city

to shepherd maidens on the village-green) are inventions of their own

times. Yet it was precisely a refinement of this sort which gave

peculiar flavor to Sacchetti's songs in the fourteenth century, and

which made them sought after. They had great vogue in Italy, enjoying

the privilege of popularity among the working classes, and helping to

diffuse that sort of pastoral part-song which we still know as

Madrigal.[152] Sacchetti was himself a good musician; many of his songs

were set to music by himself, and others by his friends. This gives a

pleasant old-world homeliness to the Latin titles inscribed beneath the

rubrics--_Franciscus de Organis sonum dedit_; _Intonatum per Francum

Sacchetti_; _Francus sonum dedit_; and so forth.

The Ballads and Madrigals of Niccolo Soldanieri should be mentioned in

connection with Sacchetti; though they do not detach themselves in any

marked way from the style of love poetry practiced at the close of the

fourteenth century.[153] The case is different with Alesso Donati's

lyrics. In them we are struck by a new gust of coarse and powerful

realism, which has no parallel among the elder poets except in the

savage sonnets of Cecco Angiolieri. Vividly natural situations are here

detached from daily life and delineated with intensity of passion,

vehement sincerity. Sacchetti's gentleness and genial humor have

disappeared. In their place we find a dramatic energy and a truth of

language that are almost terrible. Each of the little scenes, which I

propose to quote in illustration of these remarks, might be compared to

etchings bitten with aquafortis into copper. Here, for example, is a

nun, who has resolved to throw aside her veil and follow her lover in a

page's dress[154]:

La dura corda e 'l vel bruno e la tonica

Gittar voglio e lo scapolo

Che mi tien qui rinchiusa e fammi monica;

Poi teco a guisa d'assetato giovane,

Non gia che si sobarcoli,

Venir me 'n voglio ove fortuna piovane:

E son contenta star per serva e cuoca,

Che men mi cocero ch'ora mi cuoca.

Here is a dialogue at dawn between a woman and her paramour. The

presence of the husband sleeping in the chamber is suggested with a

brutal vigor[155]:

De vattene oggimai, ma pianamente,

Amor; per dio, si piano

Che non ti senta il mal vecchio villano.

Ch'egli sta sentecchioso, e, se pur sente

Ch'i' die nel letto volta,

Temendo abbraccia me no gli sie tolta.

Che tristo faccia Iddio chi gli m'a data

E chi spera 'n villan buona derrata.

Scarcely less forcible is the girl's vow against her mother, who keeps

her shut at home[156]:

In pena vivo qui sola soletta

Giovin rinchiusa dalla madre mia,

La qual mi guarda con gran gelosia.

Ma io le giuro alla croce di Dio

Che s'ella mi terra qui piu serrata,

Ch'i' diro--Fa' con Dio, vecchia arrabiata;

E gittero la rocca, il fuso e l'ago,

Amor, fuggendo a te di cui m'appago.

To translate these madrigals would be both difficult and undesirable. It

is enough to have printed the original texts. They prove that

aristocratic versifiers at this period were adopting the style of the

people, and adding the pungency of brief poetic treatment to episodes

suggested by _novelle_.[157]

While dealing with the Novelle and the semi-popular literature of this

transition period, I have hitherto neglected those numerous minor poets

who continued the traditions of the earlier _trecento_.[158] There are

two main reasons for this preference. In the first place, the _novelle_

was destined to play a most important part in the history of the

Renaissance, imposing its own laws of composition upon species so remote

as the religious drama and romantic epic. In the second place, the

dance-songs, canzonets and madrigals of Sacchetti's epoch lived upon the

lips of the common folk, who during the fifteenth century carried

Italian literature onward through a subterranean channel.[159] When

vernacular poetry reappeared into the light of erudition and the Courts,

the influences of that popular style, which drew its origin from

Boccaccio and Sacchetti rather than from Dante or the Trovatori,

determined the manner of Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano. Meanwhile the

learned poems of the latest _trecentisti_ were forgotten with the lumber

of the middle ages. For the special purpose, therefore, of this volume,

which only regards the earlier stages of Italian literature in so far as

they preceded and conditioned the Renaissance, it was necessary to give

the post of honor to Boccaccio's followers. Some mention should,

however, here be made of those contemporaries and imitators of Petrarch,

in whom the traditions of the fourteenth century expired. It is not

needful to pass in review the many versifiers who treated the old themes

of chivalrous love with meritorious conventional facility. The true life

of the Italians was not here; and the phase of literature which the

Sicilian School inaugurated, survived already as an anachronism. The

case is different with such poetry as dealt immediately with

contemporary politics. In the declamatory compositions of this age, we

hear the echoes of the Guelf and Ghibelline wars. The force of that

great struggle was already spent; but the partisans of either faction,

passion enough survived to furnish genuine inspiration. Fazio degli

Uberti's _sermintese_ on the cities of Italy, for example, was written

in the bitter spirit of an exiled Ghibelline.[160] His ode to Charles

IV. is a torrent of vehement medieval abuse, poured forth against an

Emperor who had shown himself unworthy of his place in Italy[161]:

Sappi ch'i' son Italia che ti parlo,

Di Lusimburgo ignominioso Carlo!

After detailing the woes which have befallen her in consequence of her

abandonment by the imperial master, Italy addresses herself to God:

Tu dunque, Giove, perche 'l santo uccello ...

Da questo Carlo quarto

Imperador non togli e dalle mani

Degli altri lurchi moderni germani,

Che d'aquila un allocco n'hanno fatto?

The Italian Ghibellines had, indeed, good reason to complain that German

gluttons, Caesars in naught but name, who only thought of making money by

their sale of fiefs and honors, had changed the eagle of the Empire into

an obscene night-flying bird of prey. The same spirit is breathed in

Fazio's ode on Rome.[162] He portrays the former mistress of the world

as a lady clad in weeds of mourning, "ancient, august and honorable, but

poor and needy as her habit showed, prudent in speech and of great

puissance." She bids the poet rouse his fellow-countrymen from their

sleep of sloth and drunkenness, to reassert the majesty of the empire

owed to Italy and Rome:

O figliuol mio, da quanta crudel guerra

Tutti insieme verremo a dolce pace,

Se Italia soggiace

A un solo Re che al mio voler consente!

This is the last echo of the _De Monarchia_. The great imperial idea, so

destructive to Italian confederation, so dazzling to patriots of Dante's

fiber, expires amid the wailings of minstrels who cry for the

impossible, and haunt the Courts of petty Lombard princes.

In another set of _Canzoni_ we listen to Guelf and Ghibelline

recriminations, rising from the burghs of Tuscany. The hero of these

poems is Gian Galeazzo Visconti, rightly recognized by the Guelfs of

Florence as a venomous and selfish tyrant, foolishly belauded by the

Ghibellines of Siena as the vindicator of imperial principles. The

Emperors have abandoned Italy; the Popes are at Avignon. The factions

which their quarrels generated, agitate their people still, but on a

narrower basis. Sacchetti slings invectives against the _maladetta

serpe, aspro tiranno con amaro fele_, who shall be throttled by the

Church and Florence, leagued to crush the Lombard despots.[163] Saviozzo

da Siena addresses the same Visconti as _novella monarchia, giusto

signore, clemente padre, insigne, virtuoso_. By his means the _dolce

vedovella_, Rome or Italy, shall at last find peace.[164] This Duke of

Milan, it will be remembered, had already ordered the crown of Italy

from his Court-jeweler, and was advancing on his road of conquest,

barred only by Florence, when the Plague cut short his career in 1402.

The poet of Siena exhorts him to take courage for his task, in lines

that are not deficient in a certain fire of inspiration:

Tu vedi in ciel la fiammeggiante aurora,

Le stelle tue propizie e rutilanti,

E' segni tutti quanti

Ora disposti alla tua degna spada.

In another strophe he refers to the Italian crown:

Ecco qui Italia che ti chiama padre,

Che per te spera omai di trionfare,

E di se incoronare

Le tue benigne e preziose chiome.

An anonymous sonnetteer of the same period uses similar language[165];

Roma vi chiama--Cesar mio novello,

I' son ignuda, e l'anima pur vive;

Or mi coprite col vostro mantello.

The Ghibelline poets, whether they dreamed like Fazio of Roman Empire,

or flattered the Visconti with a crown to be won by triumph over the

detested Guelfs, made play with Dante's memory. Some of the most

interesting lyrics of the school are elegies upon his death. To this

class belong two sonnets by Pieraccio Tedaldi and Mucchio da Lucca.[166]

Nor must Boccaccio's noble pair of sonnets, although he was not a

political poet, be here forgotten.[167] That Dante was diligently

studied can be seen, not only in the diction of this epoch, but also in

numerous versified commentaries upon the Divine Comedy--in the _terza

rima_ abstracts of Boson da Gubbio, Jacopo Alighieri, Saviozzo da Siena,

and Boccaccio.[168]

Tuscan politics are treated from the Guelf point of view in Sacchetti's

odes upon the war with Pisa, upon the government of Florence after 1378,

and against the cowardice of the Italians.[169] His conception of a

burgher's duties, the ideal of Guelf _bourgeoisie_ before Florence had

become accustomed to tyrants, finds expression in a sonnet--_Amar la

patria_.[170] We frequently meet with the word _Comune_ on his lips:

O vuol re o signore o vuol comune,

Che per comune dico cio ch'io parlo.

A like note of municipal independence is sounded in the poems of Antonio

Pucci, and in the admonitory stanzas of Matteo Frescobaldi.[171]

Considerable interest attaches to these political compositions for the

light they throw on party feeling at the close of the heroic age of

Italian history. The fury with which those factions raged, prompts the

bards of either camp to curses. I may refer to this passage from Folgore

da San Gemignano, when he sees the Ghibelline Uguccione triumphant over

Tuscany:[172]

Eo non ti lodo Dio e non ti adoro,

E non ti prego e non ti ringrazio,

E non ti servo ch'io ne son piu sazio

Che l'aneme de star en purgatoro;

Perche tu ai messi i Guelfi a tal martoro

Ch'i Ghibellini ne fan beffe e strazio,

E se Uguccion ti comandasse il dazio,

Tu 'l pagaresti senza peremptoro!

Yet neither in the confused idealism of the Ghibellines nor in the

honest independence of the Guelfs lay the true principle of national

progress. Sinking gradually and inevitably beneath the sway of despots,

the Italians in the fifteenth century were destined to become a nation

of scholars, artists, _litterati_. The age of Dante, the uncompromising

aristocrat, was over. The age of Boccaccio, the easy-going _bourgeois_,

had begun. The future glories of Italy were to be won in the field of

culture; and all the hortatory lyrics I have mentioned, exerted but

little influence over the development of a spirit which was growing

quietly within the precincts of the people. The Italian people at this

epoch cared far less for the worn-out factions of the Guelfs and

Ghibellines than for home-comforts and tranquillity in burgher

occupations. The keener intellects of the fifteenth century were already

so absorbingly occupied with art and classical studies that there was no

room left in them for politics of the old revolutionary type. Meanwhile

the new intrigues of Cabinets and Courts were left to a class of

humanistic diplomatists, created by the conditions of despotic

government. Scarcely less ineffectual were the moral verses of

Bambagiuoli and Cavalca, or the Petrarchistic imitations of Marchionne

Torrigiani, Federigo d'Arezzo, Coluccio Salutati, Roberto di

Battifolle, and Bonaccorso da Montemagno.[173] The former belonged to a

phase of medieval culture which was waning. The elegant but lifeless

Petrarchistic school dragged through the fifteenth century, culminating

in the _Canzoniere_ of Giusto de' Conti, a Roman, which was called _La

bella mano_. The revival of their mannerism, with a fixed artistic

motive, by Bembo and the purists of the sixteenth century, will form

part of my later history of Renaissance literature.

One note is unmistakable in all the poetry of these last _trecentisti_.

It is a note of profound discouragement, mistrust, and disappointment.

We have already heard it sounded by Sacchetti in his lament for

Boccaccio. Boccaccio had raised it himself in two noble sonnets--_Apizio

legge_ and _Fuggit'e ogni virtu_.[174] It takes the shrillness of a

threnody in Tedaldi's _Il mondo vile_ and in Manfredi di Boccaccio's

_Amico il mondo_.[175] The poets of that age were dimly conscious that a

new era had opened for their country--an era of money-getting,

despotism, and domestic ease. They saw the people used to servitude and

sunk in common pleasures--dead to the high aims and imaginative

aspirations of the past. The turbulence of the heroic age was gone. The

men of the present were all _Vigliacci_. And as yet both art and

learning were but in their cradle. It was impossible upon the opening of

the fifteenth century, in that crepuscular interval between two periods

of splendor, to know what glories for Italy and for the world at large

would be produced by Giotto's mighty lineage and Petrarch's progeny of

scholars. We who possess in history the vision of that future can be

content to wait through a transition century. The men of the moment not

unnaturally expressed the querulousness of Italy, distracted by her

struggles of the past and sinking into somnolence. Cosimo de' Medici,

the molder of Renaissance Florence, was already born in 1389; and men of

Cosimo's stamp were no heroes for poets who had felt the passions that

moved Dante.

The Divine Comedy found fewer imitators than the _Canzoniere_; for who

could bend the bow of Ulysses? Yet some poets of the transition were

hardy enough to attempt the Dantesque meter, and to pretend in a prosaic

age that they had shared the vision of the prophets. Among these should

be mentioned Fazio degli Uberti, a scion of Farinata's noble house, who

lived and traveled much in exile.[176] Taking Solinus, the antique

geographer, for his guide, Fazio produced a topographical poem called

the _Dicta Mundi_ or _Dittamondo_.[177]

From the prosaic matter of this poem, which resembles a very primitive

Mappamondo, illustrated with interludes of history and excursions into

mythological zoology, based upon the text of Pliny, and not unworthy of

Mandeville, two episodes emerge and arrest attention. One is the

description of Rome--a somber lady in torn raiment, who tells the

history of her eventful past, describes her triumphs and her empire, and

points to the ruins on her seven crowned hills to show how beautiful she

was in youth[178]:

Ivi una dama scorsi;

Vecchia era in vista, e trista per costume.

Gli occhi da lei, andando, mai ton torsi;

Ma poiche presso le fui giunto tanto

Ch'io l'avvisava senza nessun forsi,

Vidi il suo volto, ch'era pien di pianto,

Vidi la vesta sua rotta e disfatta,

E roso e guasto il suo vedovo manto.

E con tutto che fosse cosi fatta,

Pur nell'abito suo onesto e degno

Mostrava uscita di gentile schiatta.

Tanto era grande, e di nobil contegno,

Ch'io diceva fra me: Ben fu costei,

E pare ancor da posseder bel regno.

Fazio addresses the mighty shadow with respectful sympathy. Rome answers

in language which is noble through its simple dignity:

Non ti maravigliare s'io ho doglia,

Non ti maravigliar se trista piango,

Ne se me vedi in si misera spoglia;

Ma fatti maraviglia, ch'io rimango,

E non divento qual divenne Ecuba

Quando gittava altrui le pietre e il fango.

The second passage of importance, more noticeable for a sense of space

and largeness than for its poetical expression, is a description of the

prospect seen from Alvernia, that high station of the "topless

Apennines," where S. Francis took the Stigmata, and where Dante sought

a home in the destruction of his earthly hopes[179]:

Noi fummo sopra il sasso dell Alverna

Al faggio ove Francesco fue fedito

Dal Serafin quel di ch'ei piu s'interna.

Molto e quel monte devoto e romito,

Ed e si alto che il piu di Toscana

Mi disegno un frate col suo dito.

Guarda, mi disse, al mare, e vedi piana

Con altri colli la maremma tutta

Dilettevole molto e poco sana.

Ivi e Massa, Grosseto e la distrutta

Civita vecchia, ed ivi Populonia

Ch'appena pare, tanto e mal condutta.

The whole of Tuscany and Umbria, their cities, plains, rivers and

mountain summits, are unrolled; and the friar concludes with a sentence

which well embodies the feeling we have in gazing over an illimitable

landscape:

Io so bene che quanto t'ho mostrato,

La vista nol discerna apertamente,

Per lo spazio ch'e lungo dov'io guato:

Ma quando l'uom che bene ascolta e sente,

Ode parlar di cosa che non vede,

Immagina con l'occhio della mente.

Such value as the _Dittamondo_ may still retain for students, it owes

partly to the author's enthusiasm for ancient Rome, and partly to the

sympathy with nature he had acquired during his wandering as an exile

over the sacred soil of Italy.

Another poem of Dantesque derivation was the _Quadriregio_ of Federigo

Frezzi, Bishop of Foligno.[180] It is an allegorical account of human

life; and the four regions, which give their name to the book, are the

realms of Love, Satan, Vice and Virtue.[181] To cast the moralizations

of the middle ages in a form imitated from Dante, after Dante had

already condensed the ethics and politics, the theology and science of

his century in the Divine Comedy, was little less than a hopeless task.

Nor need a word be spent upon the _Quadriregio_, except by way of

illustrating the peculiar conditions of the poetic art, here upon the

border-land between the middle age and the Renaissance. Federigo Frezzi

was intent on depicting the victories of virtue over vice, and on

explaining the advantage offered to the Christian by grace. Yet he chose

a mythological framework for his doctrine. Cupid, Venus and Minerva are

confused with Satan, Enoch and Elijah. Instead of Eden there is the

golden age. Nymphs of Diana, Juno, and the like, are used as emblems.

Pallas discourses about Christ, and expounds the Christian system of

redemption. The earthly Paradise contains Helicon, with all the antique

poets. Jupiter is contrasted with Satan. It is the same blending of

antique with Christian motives which we note in the Divine Comedy; but

the tact of the great artist is absent, and the fusion becomes

grotesque. After reading through the poem we lay it down with the same

feeling as that produced in us by studying some pulpit of the Pisan

School, where a Gothic Devil, all horns and hoofs and grinning jaws,

squats cheek by jowl with a Madonna copied from a Roman tomb. The

following description of Cupid recalls the manner of the Sienese

_frescanti_[182]:

Appena questo priego havea io decto

quando egli apparve ad me fresco et giocondo,

in un giardino ove io stava solecto.

Di mirto coronato il capo biondo

in forma pueril con si bel viso

che mai piu bel fu visto in questo mondo.

Creso haverai che su del paradiso

fusse el suo aspecto, tanto era sovrano,

se non che quando a lui mirai fiso

Vidi che haveva uno archo orato in mano

col quale Achille et Hercole percosse.

Here is the picture of the Golden Age, transcribed from Latin poetry,

much as it was destined to control the future of Italian fancy[183]:

Vergine saggia e bella el ciel adorna

di cui Virgilio poetando scripse,

nuova progenie al mondo dal ciel torna,

Rexe gia el mondo et si la gente visse

socto lei in pace che la eta dell oro

et seculo giusto et beato si disse.

La terra allora senza alcun lavoro

dava li fructi, et non faceva spine,

ne ancho al giogo si domava el thoro;

Non erano divisi per confine

anchora i campi, et nesun per guadagno

cercava le contrade pelegrine;

Ognuno era fratello, ognun compagno,

et era tanto amor, tanta pietade,

che ad un fonte bevea el lupo et l'agno;

Non eran lancia, non erano spade,

non era anchor la pecunia peggiore

che 'l guerigiante ferro piu si fiade;

La invidia allor vedendo tanto amore

di questo bene ad se genero pene

e desto gaudio ad se diede dolore.

A little while beyond this foretaste of the _cinque cento_, we find

Charon copied, without addition, but with a fatal loss of poetry, from

the _Inferno_[184]:

Vidi Caron non molto da lontano

con una nave in mezo la tempesta,

che conducea con un gran remo in mano:

Et ciaschuno occhio chelli havea in testa,

pareva come di nocte una lumiera,

o un falo quando si fa per festa.

Quando egli fu appresso alla riviera

un mezo miglio quasi o poco mancho,

scacci sua faccia grande vizza e nera.

Egli havea el capo di canuti biancho,

el manto adosso rapezato et uncto,

el volto si crudel non vidi un quancho.

Last upon the list of Dantesque imitators stands Matteo Palmieri, a

learned Florentine, who composed his _Citta di Vita_ in the middle of

the fifteenth century. This poem won for its author from Marsilio Ficino

the title of _Poeta Theologicus_.[185] Its chief interest at the present

time is that the theology expressed in it brought suspicion of heresy on

Palmieri. He held Origen's opinion that the souls of men were rebel

angels. How a doctrine of this kind could be rendered in painting is not

clear. Yet Giorgio Vasari tells us that a picture executed for Matteo

Palmieri by Sandro Botticelli, which represented the Assumption of the

Virgin into the celestial hierarchy--Powers, Princedoms, Thrones and

Dominations ranged around her in concentric circles--fell under the

charge of heterodoxy. The altar in S. Pietro Maggiore where it was

placed had to be interdicted, and the picture veiled from sight.[186]

The story forms a curious link between this last scion of medieval

literature and the painting of the Renaissance. After Palmieri the meter

of the Divine Comedy was chiefly used for satire and burlesque. Lorenzo

de' Medici adapted its grave rhythms to parody in _I Beoni_. Berni used

it for the Capitoli of the _Pesche_ and the _Peste_. At Florence it

became the recognized meter for obscene and frivolous compositions,

which delighted the Academicians of the sixteenth century. The people,

meanwhile, continued to employ it in _Lamenti_, historical compositions,

and personal Capitoli.[187] Thus Cellini wrote his poem called _I

Carceri_ in _terza rima_, and Giovanni Santi used it for his precious

but unpoetical Chronicle of Italian affairs. Both Benivieni and

Michelangelo Buonarroti composed elegies in this meter; and numerous

didactic eclogues of the pastoral poets might be cited in which it

served for analogue to Latin elegiacs. In the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_

it sometimes interrupted _ottava rima_, on the occasion of a set

discourse or sermon.[188] Both Ariosto and Alamanni employed it in their

satires. From these brief notices it will be seen that _terza rima_

during the Renaissance period was reserved for dissertational, didactic

and satiric themes, the Capitoli of the burlesque poets being parodies

of grave scholastic lucubrations. But no one now attempted an heroic

poem in this verse.[189]

To give a full account of Italian prose during this period of transition

from the middle age to the Renaissance is not easy. At the close of the

fourteenth century, S. Catherine of Siena sustained the purity and

"dove-like simplicity" of the earlier _trecento_ style, with more of

fervor and personal power than any subsequent writer. Her letters,

whether addressed to Popes and princes on the politics of Italy, or

dealing with private topics of religious experience, are models of the

purest Tuscan diction.[190] They have the garrulity and over-unctuous

sweetness of the _Fioretti_ and _Leggende_. But these qualities,

peculiar to medieval piety among Italians, are balanced by untutored

eloquence which borders on sublimity. Without deliberate art or literary

aim, the spirit of a noble woman speaks from the heart in Catherine's

letters. The fervor of her feeling suggests poetic imagery. The justice

of her perception dictates weighty sentences. The intensity with which

she realizes the unseen world of spiritual emotion, gives dramatic

movement to her exhortations, expositions and entreaties. These rare

excellences of a style, where spontaneity surpasses artifice, are

combined in the famous epistle to her confessor, Raimondo da Capua,

describing the execution of Niccolo Tuldo.[191] He was a young man of

Perugia, condemned to death for some act of insubordination. Catherine

visited him in prison, and induced him to take the Sacrament with her

for the first time. He besought her to be present with him at the place

of execution. Accordingly she waited for him there, praying to Mary and

to Catherine, the virgin saint of Alexandria, laying her own neck upon

the block, and entering into harmony so rapt with those celestial

presences that the multitude of men who were around her disappeared from

view. What followed, must be told in her own words:

Poi egli giunse, come uno agnello mansueto: e vedendomi,

comincio a ridere; e volse che io gli facesse il segno della

croce. E ricevuto il segno, dissi io: "Giuso! alle nozze,

fratello mio dolce! che tosto sarai alla vita durabile."

Posesi qui con grande mansuetudine; e io gli distesi il collo,

e chinami giu, e rammentalli il sangue dell'Agnello. La bocca

sua non diceva se non, Gesu, e Catarina. E, cosi dicendo,

ricevetti il capo nelle mani mie, fermando l'occhio nella

divina bonta e dicendo: "Io voglio."

Allora si vedeva Dio-e-Uomo, come si vedesse la chiarita del

sole; e stava aperto, e riceveva il sangue; nel sangue suo uno

fuoco di desiderio santo, dato e nascosto nell'anima sua per

grazia; riceveva nel fuoco della divina sua carita. Poiche

ebbe ricevuto il sangue e il desiderio suo, ed egli ricevette

l'anima sua, la quale mise nella bottiga aperta del costato

suo, pieno di misericordia; manifestando la prima Verita che

per sola grazia e misericordia egli il riceveva, e non per

veruna altra operazione. O quanto era dolce e inestimable a

vedere la bonta di Dio!

The sudden transition from this narrative of fact to the vision of

Christ--from the simple style of ordinary speech to ecstasy inebriated

with the cross--is managed with a power that truth alone could yield. A

dramatist might have conceived it; but only a saint who lived habitually

in both worlds of loving service and illumination, could thus have made

it natural. This is the noblest and the rarest realism.

If we trust the testimony of contemporary chroniclers, S. Bernardino of

Siena in the pulpit shared Catherine's power of utterance, at once

impressive and simple.[192] No doubt the preachers of the _quattrocento_

were influential in maintaining a tradition of prose rhetoric. But it is

not in the nature of sermons, even when ably reported, to preserve their

fullness and their force. Not less important for the formation of a

literary style were the letters and dispatches of embassadors. Though at

this period all ceremonial orations, briefs, state documents and

epistles between Courts and commonwealths were composed in Latin, still

the secret correspondence of envoys with their home governments gave

occasion for the use of the vernacular; and even humanists expressed

their thoughts occasionally in the mother tongue. Coluccio Salutati, for

example, whose Latin letters were regarded as models of epistolary

style, employed Italian in less formal communications with his office.

These early documents of studied Tuscan writing are now more precious

than his formal Ciceronian imitations. Private letters may also be

mentioned among the best sources for studying the growth of Italian

prose, although we have not much material to judge by.[193] The

correspondence of Alessandra degli Strozzi, recently edited by Signor

Cesare Guasti, is not only valuable for the light it casts upon

contemporary manners, but also for the illustration of the Florentine

idiom as written by a woman of noble birth.[194] Of Poliziano's, Pulci's

and Lorenzo de' Medici's letters I shall have occasion to speak in a

somewhat different connection later on.

The historiographers of the Renaissance thought it below their dignity

to use any language but Latin.[195] At the same time, vernacular

annalists abounded in Italy, whose labors were of no small value in

forming the prose-style of the _quattrocento_. After the Villani,

Florence could boast a whole chain of writers, beginning with Marchionne

Stefani, including Gino Capponi, the spirited chronicler of the Ciompi

rebellion, and extending to Goro Dati in the middle of the fifteenth

century. A little later, Giovanni Cavalcanti, in his Florentine

Histories, proved how the simple diction of the preceding age was being

spoiled by false classicism.[196] This work is doubly valuable--both as

a record of the great Albizzi oligarchy and their final conquest by the

Medici, and also as a monument of the fusion which was being made

between the popular and humanistic styles. The chronicles of other

Italian cities--Ferrara, Cremona, Rome, Pisa, Bologna, and even

Siena--show less purity of language than the Florentine.[197] Italian

is often mixed with vulgar Latin, and phrases borrowed from unpolished

local dialects abound. It was not until the close of the century that

two great writers of history in the vernacular arose outside the walls

of Florence. These were Corio, the historian of Milan, and Matarazzo,

the annalist of Perugia.[198] In Corio's somewhat stiff and cumbrous

periods we trace the effort of a foreigner to gain by study what the

Tuscans owed to nature. Yet he never suffered this stylistic

preoccupation to spoil his qualities as an historian. His voluminous

narrative is a mine of accurate information, illustrated with vivid

pictures of manners and carefully considered portraits of eminent men.

Reading it, we cannot but regret that Poggio and Bruno, Navagero and

Bembo, judged it necessary to tell the tales of Florence and of Venice

in a pseudo-Livian Latin. The "History of Milan" is worth twenty of such

humanistic exercises in rhetoric. Matarazzo displays excellences of a

different, but of a rarer order. Unlike Corio, he was not anxious to

show familiarity with rules of Tuscan writing, or to build again the

periods of Boccaccio's ceremonious style. His language bears the stamp

of its Perugian origin. It is, at the same time, unaffectedly dramatic

and penetrated with the charm of a distinguished personality. No one

can read the tragedy of the Baglioni in this wonderful romance without

acknowledging that he is in the hands of a great writer. The limpidity

of the _trecento_ has here survived, and, blending with Renaissance

enthusiasm for physical beauty and antique heroism, has produced a work

of art unrivaled in its kind.[199]

Having advanced so far as to speak in this chapter of Corio and

Matarazzo, I shall take occasion to notice a book which, appearing for

the first time in 1476, may fairly be styled the most important work of

Italian prose-fiction belonging to the fifteenth century. This is the

_Novellino_ of Masuccio Guardato, a nobleman of Salerno, secretary to

the Prince Roberto Sanseverino, and resident throughout his life at the

Court of Naples.[200] The _Novellino_ is a collection of stories, fifty

in number, arranged in five parts, which treat respectively of hypocrisy

and the monastic vices, jealousy, feminine incontinence, the contrasts

of pathos and of humor, and the generosity of princes. Each _Novella_ is

dedicated to a noble man or woman of Neapolitan society, and is followed

by a reflective discourse, in which the author personally addresses his

audience. Masuccio declares himself the disciple of Boccaccio and

Juvenal.[201] Of the Roman poet's spirit he has plenty; he gives the

rein to rage in language of the most indignant virulence. Of Boccaccio's

idiom and style, though we can trace the student's emulation, he can

boast but little. Masuccio never reached the Latinistic smoothness of

his model; and while he wrote Italian, his language was far from being

Tuscan. Phrases culled from southern dialects are frequent; and the

structure of the period is often ungrammatical. Masuccio was not a

member of any humanistic clique. He lived among the nobles of a royal

Court, and knew the common people intimately. This double experience is

reflected in his language and his modes of thought. Both are unalloyed

by pedantry, and precious for the student of contemporary manners.

The interest of the _Novellino_ is great when we regard it as the third

collection of _Novelle_, coming after Boccaccio's and Sacchetti's, and,

from the point of view of art, occupying a middle place between them.

The tales of the Decameron were originally recited at Naples; and though

Boccaccio was a thorough Tuscan, he borrowed something from the south

which gave width, warmth and largeness to his writing. Masuccio is

wholly Neapolitan in tone; but he seeks such charm of presentation and

variety of matter as shall make his book worthy to take rank in general

literature. Sacchetti has more of a purely local flavor. He is no less

Florentine than Masuccio is Neapolitan; and, unlike Masuccio, he has

taken little pains to adapt his work to other readers than his

fellow-citizens. Boccaccio embraces all human life, seen in the light of

vivid fancy by a _bourgeois_ who was also a great comic romantic poet.

Sacchetti describes the _borghi_, _contrade_, and _piazze_ of Florence;

and his speech is seasoned with rare Tuscan salt of wit. Masuccio's

world is that of the free-living southern noble. He is penetrated with

aristocratic feeling, treats willingly of arms and jousts and warfare,

telling the tales of knights and ladies to a courtly company.[202] At

the same time, the figures of the people move with incomparable vivacity

across the stage; and his transcripts from life reveal the careless

interpenetration of classes to which he was accustomed in Calabria.[203]

Some of his stories are as simply _bourgeois_ as any of

Sacchetti's.[204]

When we compare Masuccio with Boccaccio we find many points of

divergence, due to differences of temperament, social sympathies and

local circumstance. Boccaccio is witty and malicious; Masuccio humorous

and poignant. Boccaccio laughs indulgently at vices; Masuccio scourges

them. Boccaccio makes a jest of superstition; Masuccio thunders against

the hypocrites who bring religion into contempt. Boccaccio turns the

world round for his recreation, submitting its follies to the subtle

play of analytical fancy. Masuccio is terribly in earnest; whether

sympathetic or vituperative, he makes the voice of his heart heard.

Boccaccio's pictures are toned with a rare perception of harmony and

delicate gradation. Masuccio brings what strikes his sense before us by

a few firm touches. Boccaccio shows far finer literary tact. Yet there

is something in the unpremeditated passion, pathos, humor, grossness,

anger and enjoyment of Masuccio--a chord of masculine and native

strength, a note of vigorous reality--that arrests attention even more

imperiously than the prepared effects of the Decameron. One point of

undoubted excellence can be claimed for Masuccio. He was a great tragic

artist in the rough, and his comedy displays an uncouth Rabelaisian

realism. The lights and shadows cast upon his scene are brusque--like

the sunlight and the shadow on a Southern city; whereas the painting of

Boccaccio is distinguished by exquisite blendings of color and

chiaroscuro in subordination to the chosen key.

Masuccio displays his real power in his serious _Novelle_, when he gives

vent to his furious hatred of a godless clergy, or describes some

dreadful incident, like the tragedy of the two lovers in the

lazar-house.[205] Scarcely less dramatic are his tales of comic

sensuality.[206] Nor has he a less vivid sense of beauty. Some of his

occasional pictures--the meeting of youths and maidens in the evening

light of Naples; the lover who changed his jousting-badge because his

lady was untrue; the tournament at Rimini; the portrait of Eugenia

disguised as a _ragazzo de omo d'arme_--break upon us with the freshness

of a smile or sunbeam.[207] We might almost detect a vein of Spanish

imagination in certain of his episodes--in the midnight ride of the

living monk after the dead friar strapped upon his palfrey, and in the

ghastly murder of the woman and the dwarf.[208] The lowest classes of

the people are presented with a salience worthy of Velasquez--cobblers,

tailors, prostitutes, preaching friars, miracle-workers, relic-mongers,

bawds, ruffians, lepers, highway robbers, gondoliers, innkeepers,

porters, Moorish slaves, the panders to base appetites and every sort of

sin.[209] Masuccio felt no compunction in portraying vicious people as

he knew them; but he reserved language of scathing vituperation for

their enormities.[210]

From so much that is coarse, dreadful, and revolting, the romance of

Masuccio's more genial tales detaches itself with charming grace and

delicacy. Nothing in Boccaccio is lovelier than the story of the girl

who puts on armor and goes at night to kill her faithless lover; or that

of Mariotto and Giannozza, which is substantially the same as Romeo and

Juliet; or that of Virginio Baglioni and Eugenia, surprised and slain by

robbers near Brescia; or that of Marchetto and Lanzilao, the comrades in

arms, which has points in common with Palamon and Arcite; or, lastly,

that of the young Malem and his education by Giudotto Gambacorto.[211].

It is the blending of so many elements--the interweaving of tragedy and

comedy, satire and pathos, grossness and sentiment, in a style of

unadorned sincerity, that places Masuccio high among novelists. Had his

language been as pure as that of the earlier Tuscan or the later Italian

authors, he would probably rank only second to Boccaccio in the

estimation even of his fellow-countrymen. A foreigner, less sensitive to

niceties of idiom, may be excused for recognizing him as at least

Bandello's equal in the story-teller's art. In moral quality he is

superior not only to Bandello, but also to Boccaccio.

The greatest writer of Italian prose in the fifteenth century was a man

of different stamp from Masuccio. Gifted with powers short only of the

very highest, Leo Battista Alberti exercised an influence over the

spirit of his age and race which was second to none but Lionardo's.[212]

Sacchetti, Ser Giovanni, Masuccio, and the ordinary tribe of chroniclers

pretended to no humanistic culture.[213] Alberti, on the contrary, was

educated at Bologna, where he acquired the scientific knowledge of his

age, together with such complete mastery of Latin that a work of his

youth, the comedy _Philodoxius_, passed for a genuine product of

antiquity. This man of many-sided genius came into the world too soon

for the perfect exercise of his singular faculties. Whether we regard

him from the point of of art, of science, or of literature, he occupies

in each department the position of precursor, pioneer and indicator.

Always original and always fertile, he prophesied of lands he was not

privileged to enter, leaving the memory of dim and varied greatness

rather than any solid monument behind him.[214] Of his mechanical

discoveries this is not the place to speak; nor can I estimate the value

of his labors in the science of perspective.[215] It is as a man of

letters that he comes before us in this chapter.

The date of Alberti's birth is uncertain. But we may fix it probably at

about the year 1405. He was born at Venice, where his father, exiled

with the other members of his noble house by the Albizzi, had taken

refuge. After Cosimo de' Medici's triumph over the Albizzi in 1434, Leo

Battista returned to Florence.[216] It was as a Florentine citizen that

his influence in restoring the vulgar literature to honor, was destined

to be felt. He did not, however, reside continuously in the city of his

ancestors, but moved from town to town, with a restlessness that savored

somewhat of voluntary exile. It is, indeed, noteworthy how many of the

greatest Italians--Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Alberti, Lionardo, Tasso:

men who powerfully helped to give the nation intellectual

coherence--were wanderers. They sought their home and saw their

spiritual _patria_ in no one abiding-place.[217] Thus, amid the

political distractions of the Italian people, rose that ideal of unity

to which Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, Ferrara contributed, but which

owned no metropolis. Florence remained to the last the brain of Italy.

Yet Florence, by stepmotherly ingratitude, by Dante's exile, by the

alienation of Petrarch, by Alberti's homeless boyhood, prepared for the

race a new culture, Tuscan in origin, national by diffusion and

assimilation. Alberti died at Rome in 1472, just when Poliziano, a youth

of eighteen, was sounding the first notes of that music which

re-awakened the Muse of Tuscany from her long sleep, and gave new

melodies to Italy.

In his proemium to the Third Book of the _Family_, addressed to

Francesco degli Alberti, Leo Battista enlarges on the duty of

cultivating the mother tongue.[218] After propounding the question

whether the loss of the empire acquired by their Roman

ancestors--_l'antiquo nostro imperio amplissimo_--or the loss of Latin

as a spoken language--_l'antiqua nostra gentilissima lingua

latina_--had been the greater privation to the Italian race, he gives

it as his opinion that, though the former robbed them of imperial

dignity, the latter was the heavier misfortune. To repair that loss is

the duty of one who had made literature his study. If he desires to

benefit his fellow-countrymen, he will not use a dead language,

imperfectly comprehended by a few learned men, but will bend the idiom

of the people to the needs of erudition. "I willingly admit," he

argues, "that the ancient Latin tongue is very copious and of beauty

polished to perfection. Yet I do not see what our Tuscan has in it so

hateful that worthy matter, when conveyed thereby, should be

displeasing to us." Pedants who despise their mother speech, are

mostly men incapable of expressing themselves in the latter; "and

granted they are right in saying that the ancient tongue has

undisputed authority, because so many learned men have employed it,

the like honor will certainly be paid our language of to-day, if men

of culture take the pains to purify and polish it." He then declares

that, meaning to be useful to the members of his house, and to

bequeath a record of their ancient dignity to their descendants, he

has resolved to choose the tongue in which he will be generally

understood.

This proemium explains Alberti's position in all his Italian writings.

Aiming at the general good, convinced that a living nation cannot use a

dead language with dignity and self-respect, he makes the sacrifice of a

scholar's pride to public utility, and has the sense to perceive that

the day of erudite exclusiveness is over. No one felt more than Alberti

the greatness of the antique Roman race. No one was prouder of his

descent from those patricians of the Commonwealth, who tamed and ruled

the world. The memory of that Roman past, which turned the generation

after Dante into a nation of students, glowed in Alberti's breast with

more than common fervor.[219] The sonorous introduction to the first

book of the _Family_ reviews the glories of the Empire and the decadence

of Rome with a pomp of phrase, a passion of eloquence, that stir our

spirit like the tramp of legions waking echoes in a ruined Roman

colonnade.[220] Yet in spite of this devotion to the past, Alberti, like

Villani, felt that his Italians of the modern age had destinies and

auspices apart from those of ancient Rome. He was resolved to make the

speech of that new nation, heiress of the Latin name, equal in dignity

to Cicero's and Livy's. What Rome had done, Rome's children should do

again. But the times were changed, and Alberti was a true son of the

Renaissance. He approached his task in the spirit of a humanist. His

style is over-charged with Latinisms; his periods are cumbrous; his

matter is loaded with citations and scholastic instances drawn from the

repertories of erudition.[221] The _vivida vis_ of inspiration fails.

His work is full of reminiscences. The golden simplicity of the

_trecento_ yields to a studied effort after dignity of diction, culture

of amplitude. Still the writer's energy is felt in massive paragraphs of

powerful declamation. His eloquence does not degenerate into frothy

rhetoric; and when he wills, he finds pithy phrases to express the mind

of a philosopher and poet. That he was born and reared in exile accounts

for a lack of racy Tuscan in his prose; and the structure of his

sentences proves that he had been accustomed to think in Latin before he

made Italian serve his turn.[222] Still, though for these and other

reasons his works were not of the kind to animate a nation, they are

such as still may be read with profit and with pleasure by men who seek

for solid thoughts in noble diction.

Alberti's principal prose work, the _Trattato della Famiglia_, was

written to instruct the members of his family in the customs of their

ancestors, and to perpetuate those virtues of domestic life which he

regarded as the sound foundation of a commonwealth. The first three

books are said to have been composed within the space of ninety days in

Rome, and the fourth added at a later period.[223] It is a dialogue,

the interlocutors being relatives of the Alberti blood. Nearly all the

illustrative matter is drawn from the biographies of their forefathers.

The scene is laid at Padua, and the essay contains frequent allusions to

their exile.[224] No word of invective against the Albizzi who had

ruined them, no vituperation of the city which had permitted the

expulsion of her sons, escapes the lips of any of the speakers. The

grave sadness that tempers the whole dialogue, is marred by neither

animosity nor passion. Yet though the _Family_ was written in exile for

exiles, the ideal of domestic life it paints, is Florentine.[225] Taken

in its whole extent, this treatise is the most valuable document which

remains to us from the times of the oligarchy, when Florence was waging

war with the Visconti, and before the Medici had based their despotism

upon popular favor. From its pages a tolerably complete history of a

great commercial family might be extracted; and this study would form a

valuable commentary on the public annals of the commonwealth during the

earlier portion of the fifteenth century.[226]

The first book of the _Famiglia_ deals with the duties of the elder to

the younger members of the household, and the observance owed by sons

and daughters to their parents. It is an essay _De Officiis_ within the

circle of the home, embracing minute particulars of conduct, and

suggesting rules for education from the cradle upwards.[227] The second

book takes up the question of matrimony. The respective ages at which

the sexes ought to marry, the moral and physical qualities of a good

wife, the maintenance of harmony between a wedded couple, their separate

provinces and common duty to the State in the procreation of children,

are discussed with scientific completeness. The third book, modeled on

the _Oeconomicus_ of Xenophon, is devoted to thrift. How to use our

personal faculties, our wealth, and our time to best advantage, forms

its principal theme. The fourth book treats of friendship--family

connections and alliances, the usefulness of friends in good and evil

fortune, the mutual benefits enjoyed by men who live honestly together

in a social state.[228] It may be seen from this sketch that the

architecture of the treatise is complete and symmetrical. The first book

establishes the principles of domestic morality on which a family exists

and flourishes. The second provides for its propagation through

marriage. The third shows how its resources are to be distributed and

preserved. The fourth explains its relations to similar communities

existing in an organized society. Many passages in the essay have

undoubtedly the air of truisms; but this impression of commonplaceness

is removed by the strong specific character of all the illustrations.

Alberti's wisdom is common to civilized humanity. His conception of life

is such as only suits a Florentine, and his examples are drawn from the

annals of a single family.

I have already dwelt at some length in a former volume on the most

celebrated section of this treatise--the _Padre di Famiglia_ or the

_Economico_.[229] To repeat those observations here would be

superfluous. Yet I cannot avoid a digression upon a matter of much

obscurity relating to the authorship of that book.[230] Until recently,

this discourse upon the economy of a Florentine household passed under

the name of Agnolo Pandolfini, and was published separately as his

undoubted work. The interlocutors in the dialogue, which bore the title

of _Governo della Famiglia_, are various members of the Pandolfini

family, and all allusions to the Alberti and their exile are wanting.

The style of the _Governo_ differs in many important respects from that

of Alberti; and yet the arrangement of the material and the substance of

each paragraph are so closely similar in both forms of the treatise as

to prove that the work is substantially identical. Pandolfini's essay,

which I shall call _Il Governo_, passes for one of the choicest

monuments of ancient Tuscan diction. Alberti's _Economico_, though it is

more idiomatic than the rest of his _Famiglia_, betrays the Latinisms of

a scholar. It is clear from a comparison of the two treatises either

that Alberti appropriated Pandolfini's _Governo_, brought its style into

harmony with his own, and gave it a place between the second and the

fourth books of his essay on the Family; or else that this third book of

Alberti's _Famiglia_ was rewritten by an author who commanded a purer

Italian. In the former case, Alberti changed the _dramatis personae_ by

substituting members of his own house for the Pandolfini. In the latter

case, the anonymous compiler paid a similar compliment to the Pandolfini

by such alterations as obliterated the Alberti, and presented the

treatise to the world as part of their own history. That Agnolo

Pandolfini was himself guilty of this plagiarism is rendered improbable

by a variety of circumstances. Yet the problem does not resolve itself

into the simple question whether Pandolfini or Alberti was the plagiary.

Supposing Alberti to have been the original author, there is no

difficulty in believing that the _Governo_ was a redaction made from his

work by some anonymous hand in honor of the Pandolfini family. On the

contrary, if we assume Agnolo Pandolfini to have been the author, then

Alberti himself was guilty of a gross and open plagiarism.[231]

It will be useful to give some account of the MSS. upon which the

editions of the _Governo_ and the _Economico_ are based.[232] In the

first edition of the _Governo_ (Tartini e Franchi, Firenze, 1734) six

codices are mentioned. Of these the Codex Pandolfini A, on which the

editors chiefly relied, has been removed from Italy to Paris. The Codex

Pandolfini B was written in 1476 at Poggibonsi by a certain Giuliano di

Niccolajo Martini. Whether the Codex Pandolfini A professed to be an

autograph copy, I do not know; but the editors of 1734, referring to it,

state that the Senator Filippo Pandolfini, member of the Della Crusca,

corrected the errors, restored the text, and improved the diction of the

treatise by the help of a still more ancient MS. This admission on their

part is significant. It opens, for the advocates of Alberti's

authorship, innumerable suspicions as to the part played by Filippo

Pandolfini in the preparation of the _Governo_. Nor can it be denied

that the lack of an autograph of the _Governo_ renders the settlement

of the disputed question very difficult.

Of Alberti's _Trattato della Famiglia_ we have three autograph copies;

(i) Cod. Magl. Classe iv. No. 38 in folio; (ii) Riccardiana 1220; (iii)

Riccardiana 176. The first of these is the most important; but it

presents some points of singularity. In the first place, the third book,

which is the _Economico_, has been inserted into the original codex, and

shows a different style of writing. In the second place, the first two

books contain numerous corrections, additions, erasures and

recorrections, obviously made by Alberti himself. Some of the

interpolated passages in the first two books are found to coincide with

parts of the _Governo_; and Signor Cortesi, to whose critical Study I

have already referred, argues with great show of reason that Alberti,

when he determined to incorporate the _Governo_ in his _Famiglia_,

enriched the earlier books of that essay with fragments which he did not

find it convenient to leave in their original place. Still it should be

remembered that this argument can be reversed; for the anonymous

compiler of the _Governo_, if he had access to Alberti's autograph, may

have chosen to appropriate sentences culled from the earlier portions of

the _Famiglia_.

It is noticeable that the _Economico_, even though it forms the third

book of the Treatise on the Family, has a separate title and a separate

introduction, with a dedication to Francesco Alberti, and a distinct

peroration.[233] It is, in fact, an independent composition, and occurs

in more than one MS. of the fifteenth century detached from the rest of

the _Famiglia_. In style it is far freer and more racy than is usual

with Alberti's writing. Of this its author seems to have been aware; for

he expressly tells his friend and kinsman Francesco that he has sought

to approach the purity and simplicity of Xenophon.[234]

The anonymous writer of Alberti's life says that he composed three books

on the Family at Rome before he was thirty, and a fourth book three

years later. If we follow Tiraboschi in taking 1414 for the date of his

birth, the first three books must have been composed before 1444 and the

fourth in 1447. The former of these dates (1444) receives some

confirmation from a Latin letter written by Leonardo Dati to Alberti,

acknowledging the Treatise on the Family, in June 1443. Dati tells him

that he finds fault with the essay for being composed "in a more

majestic and perhaps a harsher style, especially in the first book, than

the Florentine language and the judgment of the laity would tolerate."

He goes on, however, to observe that "afterwards the language becomes

far more sweet and satisfactory to the ear"--a criticism which seems to

suit the altered manner of the third book. With reference to the date

1447, in which the _Famiglia_ may have been completed, Cortesi remarks

that Pandolfini died in 1446. He suggests that, upon this event, Alberti

appropriated the _Governo_ and rewrote it, and that the _Economico_,

though it holds the place of the third book in the treatise, is really

the fourth book mentioned by the anonymous biographer. The suggestion is

ingenious; and if we can once bring ourselves to believe that Alberti

committed a deliberate act of larceny, immediately after his friend

Pandolfini's death, then the details which have been already given

concerning the autograph of the _Famiglia_ and the discrepancies in its

style of composition add confirmation to the theory. There are, however,

good reasons for assigning Alberti's birth to the year 1404 or even

1402.[235] In that case Alberti's Roman residence would fall into the

third decade of the century, and the last book of the _Famiglia_ (which

I am inclined to believe is the one now called the third) would have

been composed before Pandolfini's death. That Alberti kept his MSS. upon

the stocks and subjected them to frequent revision is certain; and this

may account for one reference occurring in it to an event which happened

in 1438.

Is it rational to adopt the hypothesis of Alberti's plagiarism? Let us

distinctly understand what it implies. In his own preface to the

_Economico_ Alberti states that he has striven to reproduce the simple

and intelligible style of Xenophon[236]; and there is no doubt that this

portion of the _Famiglia_, whether we regard it as Alberti's or as

Pandolfini's property, was closely modeled on the _Oeconomicus_.

Cortesi suggests that the reference to Xenophon was purposely introduced

by Alberti in order to put his readers off the scent. Nor, if we accept

the hypothesis of plagiarism, can we restrict ourselves to this

accusation merely. In the essay _Della Tranquillita dell'Animo_ Alberti

introduces Agnolo Pandolfini as an interlocutor, and makes him refer to

the third book of the _Famiglia_ as a genuine production of

Alberti.[237] In other words, he must not only have appropriated

Pandolfini's work, and laid claim to it in the preface to his

_Economico_; but he must also have referred to it as his own composition

in a speech ascribed to the real author, which he meant for publication.

That is to say, he made the man whose work he stole pronounce its

panegyric and refer it to the thief. That Pandolfini was dead when he

committed these acts of treason would not be sufficient to explain

Alberti's audacity; for according to the advocates of Pandolfini's

authorship, the MS. formed a known and valued portion of his sons'

inheritance. Is it _prima facie_ probable that Alberti, even in those

days of looser literary copyright than ours, should have exposed himself

to detection in so palpable and gross a fraud?

Before answering this question in the affirmative, it may be asked what

positive grounds there are for crediting Pandolfini with the original

authorship. At present no autograph of Pandolfini is forthcoming. His

claim to authorship rests on tradition, and on the Pandolfini cast of

the dialogue in certain MSS. At the same time, the admissions made by

the editors of 1734 regarding their most trusted codex have been

already shown to be suspicious. It is also noticeable that Vespasiano,

in his Life of Agnolo Pandolfini, though he professes to have been

intimately acquainted with this excellent Florentine burgher, does not

mention the _Governo della Famiglia_.[238] The omission is singular,

supposing the treatise to have then existed under Pandolfini's name, for

Vespasiano was himself a writer of Italian in an age when Latin

scholarship claimed almost exclusive attention. He would, we should have

thought, have been eager to name so distinguished a man among his

fellow-authors in the vulgar tongue.