CHAPTER VI.

LORENZO DE' MEDICI AND POLIZIANO.

Period from 1470 to 1530--Methods of treating it--By

Chronology--By Places--By Subjects--Renascence of Italian--At

Florence, Ferrara, Naples--The New Italy--Forty Years of

Peace--Lorenzo de' Medici--His Admiration for and Judgment of

Italian Poetry--His Privileges as a Patron--His _Rime_--The

Death of Simonetta--Lucrezia Donati--Lorenzo's Descriptive

Power--The _Selve_--The _Ambra_--_La Nencia_--_I Beoni_--His

Sacred Poems--Carnival and Dance Songs--Carri and

Trionfi--Savonarola--The Mask of Penitence--Leo X. in

Florence, 1513--Pageant of the Golden Age--Angelo

Poliziano--His Place in Italian Literature--_Le

Stanze_--Treatment of the Octave Stanza--Court

Poetry--Mechanism and Adornment--The _Orfeo_--Orpheus, the

Ideal of the Cinque Cento--Its Dramatic Qualities--Chorus of

Maenads--Poliziano's Love Poems--_Rispetti_--Florentine

Love--La Bella Simonetta--Study and Country Life.

In dealing with the mass of Italian literature between the dates 1470

and 1530, several methods suggest themselves, each of which offers

certain advantages, while none is wholly satisfactory. In the _first_

place we might adopt a chronological division, and arrange the chief

authors of whom we have to treat, by periods. Lorenzo de' Medici,

Poliziano, Luigi, Pulci, Boiardo, and Sannazzaro would be the leading

names in the first group. In the second we should place Ariosto,

Machiavelli, Guicciardini and the minor historians of Florence. Bembo

would lead a third class, including Castiglione, La Casa, and the

Petrarchistic poets of the Academies. A fourth would be headed by

Pietro Aretino, and would embrace the burlesque writers and minor

critical prosaists of the decadence. The advantage of this method is

that it corresponds to a certain regular progression in the evolution of

Italian genius during that brief space of brilliant activity. Yet the

chronological stages are not sufficiently well marked to justify its

exclusive adoption. The first group is separated from the rest by a real

interval, since the men who compose it died, with one exception, before

the close of the fifteenth century, about the year of Charles VIII.'s

entrance into Italy.[459] But the authors of the second, third, and

fourth groups lived almost contemporaneously, covering the whole period

of Italy's greatest literary glory and deepest national discomfiture,

and witnessing the final extinction of her liberty in the settlement

effected by the policy of Charles V.[460] Nor, again, can we trace in

the several phases of literature they represent, so clear a process of

expansion as may be detected in the successive stages of artistic or

humanistic development. When the work effected by the first group was

accomplished, both the language and the literature of Italy became in a

true sense national, and the cultivated classes of all districts,

trained in the common discipline of humanistic studies, set themselves

with one accord and simultaneously to the task of polishing the mother

tongue. This fact in the history of Italian literature suggests a

_second_ method of classification. We might take the three chief centers

of renascence at the close of the fifteenth century--Florence, Ferrara,

Naples--and show how the local characteristics of these cities affected

their great writers. Rome during the pontificate of Leo X.; Urbino under

the rule of Guidubaldo Montefeltre; Milan in the days of the last

Sforzas; Venice at the epoch of Aldo's settlement; might next be chosen

to illustrate the subsequent growth of Italian culture, when it ceased

to be Tuscan, Neapolitan, and Ferrarese. Yet though this local method of

arrangement offers many advantages, and has the grand merit of fixing

the attention upon one important feature of intellectual life in

Italy--its many-sidedness and diversity, due to the specific qualities

of cities vying with each other in a common exercise of energy--still it

would not do for the historian of Italian culture at one of its most

brilliant moments to accentuate minor differences, when it ought to be

his object to portray the genius of the people as a whole. In a word,

this classification has the same defect as the treatment of the arts by

Schools.[461] Moreover, it cannot fail to lead to repetition and

confusion; for though the work we have to analyze was carried on in

several provinces, yet each Court and each city produced material of the

same general character. Novels, for example, were written at Florence as

well as Milan. Rome saw the first representation of comedies no less

than Ferrara. The romantic epic was not confined to the Court of the

Estensi, nor dissertations on the gentle life to that of Urbino. We are

led by the foregoing considerations to yet a _third_ method of

arrangement. Would it not be scientific to divide the literature of the

Renaissance into its chief branches, and to treat of the romantic epic,

the _novella_, the stage, the idyll, lyric verse, essays in prose,

histories, and so forth, under separate chapters? Undoubtedly there is

much to say for such a treatment of the subject. Yet when we consider

that it necessitates our bringing the same authors under review in

several successive sections, confuses chronology, and effaces local

distinctions, it will be seen that to follow this system exclusively

would be unwise. It is too strictly analytical for our purpose. That

purpose is to draw a portrait of the Italian spirit as expressed in the

vernacular literature of about seventy years of exceptional splendor;

and perhaps it will be conceded by the student that instinct, conscious

of the end in view, conscious also of these several methods, but

unwilling to be hampered by any one of them too rigorously followed out,

will be a safer guide than formal accuracy.

I therefore propose in the remaining chapters of this book to adopt a

mixed method, partaking of the chronological in so far as I shall

attempt to show a certain process of evolution from the renascence led

by Lorenzo de' Medici to the decadence typified in Pietro Aretino,

insisting upon local peculiarities where it can be clearly proved that

these contributed an important element to the total result, and relying

on the classification by subjects for bringing scattered details under

general consideration. Five men of the highest eminence mark stages in

the history we have to review. These are Poliziano, Ariosto and

Machiavelli, Bembo and Pietro Aretino. Chronologically, they represent

four moments of development--the initial, the consummate, the

academical, and the decadent. But if we discard chronology and regard

their intellectual qualities alone, we might reduce them to three.

Merging Poliziano and Bembo in Ariosto, retaining Machiavelli and Pietro

Aretino, we obtain the three prominent phases of Renaissance culture in

Italy--firstly, serene, self-satisfied, triumphant art, glorying in the

beauty of form for form's sake, and aiming at perfection in style of

sunny and delightful loveliness; secondly, profound scientific analysis,

taking society for its object, dissecting human history and institutions

without prejudice or prepossession, unqualified by religious or ethical

principles, pushing its logical method to the utmost verge of audacity,

and startling the world with terror by the results of its materialistic

philosophy; thirdly, moral corruption unabashed and unrestrained,

destitute of shame because devoid of conscience, boldly asserting itself

and claiming the right to rule society with cynical effrontery. Round

Ariosto are grouped the romantic and idyllic poets, the novelists and

comic playwrights, all the tribe of joyous merry-makers, who translated

into prose and verse the beauty found in painting of the golden age.

With Machiavelli march the historians and political philosophers, the

school of Pomponazzi and the materialistic analysts, who led the way for

a new birth of science in the Baconian speculations of the Cosentine

academy. Aretino is the coryphaeus of a multitude of scribes and

courtiers, literary gladiators, burlesque authors of obscene _Capitoli_,

men of evil character, who used the pen for poniard, and were the fit

successors of invective-writers.

If we turn from men to cities, and seek to define the parts played by

the several communities in this work of creating an Italian literature,

we shall find that Florence fixes the standard of language, and

dominates the nation by the fame of her three poets of the fourteenth

century. Florence, moreover, gives birth to Machiavelli, Guicciardini,

and the political theorists who form a group around them. Florentine wit

and humor lend a certain pungency to all the products of the golden age.

Naples adds the luxury of southern color, felt in Sannazzaro's waxen

paragraphs and Pontano's voluptuous hendecasyllables. Ferrara develops

the chivalrous elements of the romantic epic, shelters Ariosto, and

produces the pastoral drama, that eminently characteristic product of

the late Renaissance. Milan is the home of Bandello, who takes the first

rank among the novelists and leads a school of Lombard writers in that

style. Rome does little for the general culture of the nation, except

that in the age of Leo the Papal Court formed a center for studious men

of all classes and qualities. Her place in literature is therefore

analogous to that she occupies in art and scholarship.[462] Aretino

chooses the city of the lagoons for his retreat, not without a certain

propriety; for Venice had become the Paris of the sixteenth century, and

here the press was more active than elsewhere in Italy. His instinct led

the master of lampoon, the prince of pamphleteers, to the city which

combined the utmost license of printing with the most highly developed

immorality of manners. Thus, seen from many points of view and

approached with different objects of study, men, places, and matter

alike furnish their own pivots for treatment. Italy, unlike England and

France, has no political and intellectual metropolis, no London and no

Paris, where the historian may take his stand securely to survey the

manifold activities of the race as from a natural center. He must be

content to shift his ground and vary his analytic method, keeping

steadily in mind those factors which by their interaction and

combination determine the phenomena he has in view.

We are now at length upon the threshold of the true Renaissance. The

division between popular literature and humanistic culture is about to

end. Classic form, appropriated by the scholars, will be given to the

prose and poetry of the Italian language. The fusion, divined and

attempted, rather than accomplished by Alberti, will be achieved. Men as

great as Machiavelli and Ariosto henceforth need not preface their _cose

volgari_ with apologies. The new literature is no longer Tuscan, but

Italian--national in the widest and deepest sense of the word, when

Venetian Bembo, Neapolitan Sannazzaro, Ariosto from Reggio, Boiardo

Count of Scandiano, Castiglione the Mantuan and Tasso the Bergamasque

vie with Tuscan Pulci and Poliziano, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in

the creation of the golden age.

The renascence of Italian took place almost simultaneously in three

centers: at Florence under the protection of the Medici, at Ferrara in

the castle of the Estensi, and at Naples in the Aragonese Court. Rome

from the pontificate of Innocent VIII. to that of Leo X. was almost dumb

and deaf to literature. Venice waited till the period of the press.

Milan produced nothing. It was but gradually that the wave of national

culture reached the minor states. The three cities to which Italy owed

the resurrection of her genius were ruled by princes, and the new

literature felt the influence of Courts from the commencement. Indeed,

the whole conditions of Italy had been altered since the death of

Boccaccio in 1375. The middle ages had been swept away. Of their modes

of thought, religious beliefs, political ideals, scholastic theories,

scarcely a vestige remained. Among the cities which had won or kept

their independence during the fourteenth century, only one remained free

from a master's yoke; and even Venice, though she showed no outward

signs of decadence, had reached the utmost verge of her development. The

citizens who had fought the battles of the Communes round their banners

and their sacred cars, were now quiet burghers, paying captains of

adventure to wage mimic warfare with political or commercial rivals in

neighboring States. A class of professional diplomatists corresponding

to these mercenary war-contractors had arisen, selected from the ranks

of the scholars for their rhetorical gifts and command of Latin style.

The humanists themselves constituted a new and powerful body, a nation

within the nation, separated from its higher social and political

interests, selfish, restless, greedy for celebrity, nomadic, disengaged

from local ties, conscious of their strength, and swaying with the vast

prestige of learning in that age the intellectual destinies of the

race. Insolent and ambitious in all that concerned their literary

pretensions, these men were servile in their private life. They gained

their daily bread by flatteries and menaces, hanging about the Courts of

petty despots, whose liberality they paid with adulation or quickened

with the threat of infamy in libels. At the same time the humanists,

steeped in the best and worst that could be extracted from the classics,

confounding the dross of Greek and Roman literature with its precious

metal in their indiscriminate worship of antiquity, and debarred through

want of criticism from assimilating the noblest spirit of the pagan

culture, had created a new mental atmosphere. The work they accomplished

for Italy, though mixed in quality, had two undeniable merits. Not only

had they restored the heritage of the past and broken down the barrier

between the ancient and the modern world, bringing back the human

consciousness from the torpor of the middle ages to a keen and vivid

sense of its own unity; but they so penetrated and imbued each portion

of the Italian nation with their enthusiasm, that, intellectually at

least, the nation was now one and ready for a simultaneous progress on

the path of culture.[463]

It so happened that at this very moment, when the unity of Italy in art

and scholarship had been achieved, external quiet succeeded to the

discords of three centuries. The ancient party-cries of Emperor and

Church, of Guelf and Ghibelline, of noble and burgher, of German and

Latin ingredients within the body politic had gradually ceased and been

forgotten. The Italic element, deriving its instincts from Roman

civilization, triumphed over the alien and the feudal; and though this

victory was attended with the decay of the Communes that had striven to

achieve it, yet the final outcome was a certain homogeneity of

conditions in all the great centers of national life. Italy became a

net-work of cultivated democracies, ruled by tyrants of different

degrees. The middle of the fifteenth century witnessed the commencement

of that halcyon period of forty years' tranquillity, destined to be

broken by the descent of Charles VIII., in 1494, upon which Machiavelli

and Guicciardini from amid the tempests of the next half century looked

back with eyes of wonder and of envy. Constantinople fell, and the

undoubted primacy of the civilized races came to the Italians. Lorenzo

de' Medici was regarded as the man who, by his political ability and

firm grasp of the requisite conditions for maintaining peace in the

peninsula, had established and secured the equilibrium between mutually

jealous and antagonistic States. Whether the merit of that repose, so

fruitful of results in art and literature for the Italians, was really

due to Lorenzo's sagacity, or whether the shifting forces of the nation

had become stationary for a season by the operation of circumstances,

may fairly be questioned. Yet there is no doubt that the unprecedented

prosperity of the people coincided with his administration of Florence,

and ended when he ceased to guide the commonwealth. It was at any rate a

singular good fortune that connected the name of this extraordinary man

with the high-tide of material prosperity in Italy and with the

resurrection of her national literature.

The figure of Lorenzo de' Medici has more than once already crossed the

stage of this history.[464] Whether dealing with the political

conditions, or the scholarship, or the fine arts of the Renaissance, it

is impossible to omit his name. There is therefore now no need to sketch

his character or to inquire into the incidents of his Florentine

administration. It will suffice to remind the readers of this book that

he finally succeeded in so clinching the power of the Casa Medici that

no subsequent revolutions were able to destroy it. The part he played as

a patron of artists and scholars, and as a writer of Italian, was

subordinate to his political activity in circumstances of peculiar

difficulty. While controlling the turbulent democracy of Florence and

gaining recognition for his tyranny from jealous princes, he still

contrived to lead his age in every branch of culture, deserving the

magnificent eulogium of Poliziano, who sang of him in the

_Nutricia_[465]:

Tu vero aeternam, per avi vestigia Cosmi

Perque patris (quis enim pietate insignior illo?),

Ad famam eluctans, cujus securus ad umbram

Fulmina bellorum ridens procul aspicit Arnus,

Maeoniae caput, o Laurens, quem plena senatu

Curia quemque gravi populus stupet ore loquentem

Si fas est, tua nunc humili patere otia cantu

Secessusque sacros avidas me ferre sub auras.

Namque, importunas mulcentem pectine curas,

Umbrosae recolo te quondam vallis in antrum

Monticolam traxisse deam: vidi ipse corollas

Nexantem, numerosque tuos prona aure bibentem....

Quodque alii studiumque vocant durumque laborem,

Hic tibi ludus erit: fessus civilibus actis,

Huc is emeritas acuens ad carmina vires.

Felix ingenio! felix cui pectore tantas

Instaurare vices, cui fas tam magna capaci

Alternare animo, et varias ita nectere curas!

Lorenzo de' Medici was the last apologist for the mother speech, as he

was the first and chief inaugurator of the age when such apologies were

no longer to be needed. He took a line somewhat different from Alberti's

in his defense of Italian, proving not merely its utility but boldly

declaring its equality with the classic languages. We possess a short

essay of his, written with this purpose, where he bestows due praise on

Dante, Boccaccio and Guido Cavalcanti, and affirms in the teeth of the

humanists that Petrarch wrote better love-poems than Ovid, Tibullus,

Catullus or Propertius.[466] Again, in his epistle to Federigo of

Aragon, sent with a MS. volume containing a collection of early Tuscan

poetry, he passes acute and sympathetic judgments on the lyrists from

Guittone of Arezzo to Cino da Pistoja, proving that he had studied their

works to good purpose and had formed a correct opinion of the origins of

Italian literature.[467] Lorenzo does not write like a man ashamed of

the vernacular or forced to use it because he can command no better. He

is sure of the justice of his cause, and determined by precept and

example and by the prestige of his princely rank to bring the literature

he loves into repute again.

No one could have been better fitted for the task. Unlike Alberti,

Lorenzo was a Florentine of the Florentines, Tuscan to the backbone,

imbued with the spirit of his city, a passionate lover of her customs

and pastimes, a complete master of her vernacular. His education, though

it fitted him for Platonic discussions with Ficino and rendered him an

amateur of humanistic culture, had failed to make a pedant of him. Much

as he appreciated the classics, he preferred his Tuscan poets; and what

he learned at school, he brought to bear upon the study of the native

literature. Consequently his style is always idiomatic; whether he seeks

the elevation of grave diction or reproduces the talk of the streets, he

uses language like a man who has habitually spoken the words which he

commits to paper. His brain was vigorous, and his critical faculty

acute. He lived, moreover, in close sympathy with his age, never rising

above it, but accurately representing its main tendencies. At the same

time he was sufficiently a poet to delight a generation that had seen no

great writer of verse since Boccaccio. Though his work is in no sense

absolutely first rate, he wrote nothing that a man of ability might not

have been pleased to own.

Lorenzo's first essays in poetry were sonnets and _canzoni_ in the style

of the _trecento_. It is a mistake to classify him, as some historians

of literature have done, with the deliberate imitators of Petrarch, or

to judge his work by its deflection from the Petrarchistic standard of

pure style. His youthful lyrics show the appreciative study of Dante and

Guido Cavalcanti no less than of the poet of Vaucluse; and though they

affect the conventional melancholy of the Petrarchistic mannerism, they

owe their force to the strong objective spirit of the fifteenth century.

Lorenzo's originality consists in the fusion he effected between the

form of the love-lyric handed down from Petrarch and the realistic

genius of the age of Ghirlandajo. This is especially noticeable in the

sonnets that describe the beauties of the country. They are not

penetrated with emotion permeating and blurring the impressions made by

natural objects on the poet's mind. His landscapes are not hazy with the

atmosphere, now luminous, now somber, of a lover's varying mood. On the

contrary, every object is defined and classified; and the lady sits like

a beautiful figure in a garden, painted with no less loving care in all

its details than herself.[468] These pictures, very delicate in their

minute and truthful touches, affect our fancy like a panel of Benozzo

Gozzoli, who omits no circumstance of the scene he undertakes to

reproduce, crowds it with incidents and bestows the same attention upon

the principal subjects and the accessories. The central emotion of

Lorenzo's verse is scarcely love, but delight in the country--the

Florentine's enjoyment of the villa, with its woods and rivulets, the

pines upon the hillsides, the song-birds, and the pleasures of the

chase.

The following sonnet might be chosen as a fair specimen of the new

manner introduced into literature by Lorenzo. Its classical coloring,

deeply felt and yet somewhat frigid, has the true stamp of the

_quattrocento_[469]:

Leave thy beloved isle, thou Cyprian queen;

Leave thine enchanted realm so delicate,

Goddess of love! Come where the rivulet

Bathes the short turf and blades of tenderest green!

Come to these shades, these airs that stir the screen

Of whispering branches and their murmurs set

To Philomel's enamored canzonet:

Choose this for thine own land, thy loved demesne!

And if thou com'st by these clear rills to reign,

Bring thy dear son, thy darling son, with thee;

For there be none that own his empire here.

From Dian steal the vestals of her train,

Who roam the woods at will, from danger free,

And know not Love, nor his dread anger fear.

That Lorenzo was incapable of loving as Dante or Petrarch or even

Boccaccio loved, is obvious in every verse he wrote. The spirit in him

neither triumphs over the flesh nor struggles with it, nor yet submits a

willing and intoxicated victim. It remains apart and cold, playing with

fancies, curiously surveying the carnival of lusts that hold their revel

in the breast whereof it is the lord. Under these conditions he could

take the wife his mother found for him at Rome, and record the fact in

his diary[470]; he could while away his leisure with venal beauties or

country girls at his villas; but of love in the poet's sense he had no

knowledge. It is true that, nurtured as he was in the traditions of

fourteenth-century verse, he thought it necessary to establish a titular

mistress of his heart. The account he gives of this proceeding in a

commentary on his own sonnets, composed after the model of the _Vita

Nuova_, is one of his best pieces of writing. He describes the day when

the beautiful Simonetta Cattaneo, his brother Giuliano's lady, was

carried to her grave with face uncovered, lying beneath the sunlight on

her open bier. All Florence was touched to tears by the sight, and the

poets poured forth elegies. The month was April, and the young earth

seemed to have put on her robe of flowers only to make the pathos of

that death more poignant. Then, says Lorenzo: "Night came; and I with a

friend most dear to me went communing about the loss we all had

suffered. While we spoke, the air being exceedingly serene, we turned

our eyes to a star of surpassing brightness, which toward the west shone

forth with such luster as not only to conquer all the other stars, but

even to cast a shadow from the objects that intercepted its light. We

marveled at it a while; and then, turning to my friend, I said: 'There

is no need for wonder, since the soul of that most gentle lady has

either been transformed into yon new star or has joined herself to it.

And if this be so, that splendor of the star is nowise to be wondered

at; and even as her beauty in life was of great solace to our eyes, so

now let us comfort ourselves at the present moment with the sight of so

much brilliance. And if our eyes be weak and frail to bear such

brightness, pray we to the god, that is to her deity, to give them

virtue, in order that without injury unto our sight we may awhile

contemplate it.' ... Then, forasmuch as it appeared to me that this

colloquy furnished good material for a sonnet, I left my friend and

composed the following verses, in which I speak about the star

aforesaid:

"O lucid star, that with transcendent light

Quenchest of all those neighboring stars the gleam,

Why thus beyond thine usage dost thou stream,

Why art thou fain with Phoebus still to fight?

Haply those beauteous eyes, which from our sight

Death stole, who now doth vaunt himself supreme,

Thou hast assumed: clad with their glorious beam,

Well mayst thou claim the sun-god's chariot bright.

Listen, new star, new regent of the day,

Who with unwonted radiance gilds our heaven,

O listen, goddess, to the prayers we pray!

Let so much splendor from thy sphere be riven

That to these eyes, which fain would weep alway,

Unblinded, thy glad sight may yet be given!"

From that moment Lorenzo began to write poems. He wandered alone and

meditated on the sunflower, playing delightfully unto himself with

thoughts of Love and Death. Yet his heart was empty; and like Augustine

or Alastor, he could say: "nondum amabam, sed amare amabam, quaerebam

quod amarem amans amare." When a young man is in this mood it is not

long before he finds an object for his adoration. Lorenzo went one day

in the same spring with friends to a house of feasting, where he met

with a lady lovelier in his eyes even than La Simonetta. After the

fashion of his age, he describes her physical and mental perfections

with a minuteness which need not be enforced upon a modern reader.[471]

Suffice it to say that Lucrezia Donati--such was the lady's

name--supplied Lorenzo with exactly what he had been seeking, an object

for his literary exercises. The _Sonetti_, _Canzoni_, and _Selve

d'Amore_ were the fruits of this first passion.

Though Lorenzo was neither a poet nor a lover after the stamp of Dante,

these juvenile verses and the prose with which he prefaced them, show

him in a light that cannot fail to interest those who only know the

statesman and the literary cynic of his later years. There is sincere

fervor of romantic feeling in the picture of the evening after

Simonetta's funeral, even though the analytical temper of the poet's

mind is revealed in his exact description of the shadow cast by the

planet he was watching. The first meeting with Lucrezia, again, is

prettily described in these stanzas of the _Selve_:

What time the chain was forged which then I bore,

Air, earth, and heavens were linked in one delight;

The air was never so serene before,

The sun ne'er shed such pure and tranquil light;

Young leaves and flowers upon the grassy floor

Gladdened the earth where ran a streamlet bright,

While Venus in her father's bosom lay

And smiled from heaven upon the spot that day.

She from her brows divine and amorous breast

Took with both hands roses of many a hue,

And showered them through the heavens that slept in rest,

Covering my lady with their gracious dew;

Jove, full of gladness, on that day released

The ears of men, that they might hear the true

Echoes of melody and dance divine,

Which fell from heaven in songs and sounds benign.

Fair women to that music moved their feet,

Inflamed with gentle fire by Love's breath fanned:

Behold yon lover with his lady sweet--

Her hand long yearned for clasped in his loved hand;

Their sighs, their looks, which pangs of longing cheat;

Brief words that none but they can understand;

The flowers that she lets fall, resumed and pressed,

With kisses covered, to his head or breast.

Amid so many pleasant things and fair,

My loveliest lady with surpassing grace

Eclipsed and crowned all beauties that were there;

Her robe was white and delicate as lace;

And still her eyes, with silent speech and rare,

Talked to the heart, leaving the lips at peace:

Come to me, come, dear heart of mine, she said:

Here shall thy long desires at rest be laid.

The impression of these verses is hardly marred by the prosy catalogue

of Lucrezia's beauties furnished in the _Innamoramento_. Lorenzo was an

analyst. He could not escape from that quality so useful to the

observer, so fatal to artists, if they cannot recompose the data

furnished by observation in a new subjective synthesis. When we compare

his description of the Age of Gold in the _Selve_,[472] justly

celebrated for its brilliancy and wealth of detail, with the shorter

passage from Poliziano's _Stanze_, we measure the distance between

intelligent study of nature and the imagination which unifies and gives

new form of life to every detail. The same end may be more briefly

attained by a comparison of this passage about roses from Lorenzo's

_Corinto_ with a musical _Ballata_ of Poliziano[473]:

Into a little close of mine I went

One morning, when the sun with his fresh light

Was rising all refulgent and unshent.

Rose-trees are planted there in order bright,

Whereto I turned charmed eyes, and long did stay

Taking my fill of that new-found delight.

Red and white roses bloomed upon the spray;

One opened, leaf by leaf, to greet the morn,

Shyly at first, then in sweet disarray;

Another, yet a youngling, newly born,

Scarce struggled from the bud, and there were some

Whose petals closed them from the air forlorn;

Another fell, and showered the grass with bloom;

Thus I beheld the roses dawn and die,

And one short hour their loveliness consume.

But while I watched those languid petals lie

Colorless on cold earth, I could but think

How vain a thing is youthful bravery.

Trees have their time to bloom on winter's brink;

Then the rathe blossoms wither in an hour,

When the brief days of spring toward summer sink;

The fruit, as yet unformed, is tart and sour;

Little by little it grows large, and weighs

The strong boughs down with slow persistent power;

Nor without peril can the branches raise

Their burden; now they stagger 'neath the weight

Still growing, and are bent above the ways;

Soon autumn comes, and the ripe ruddy freight

Is gathered: the glad season will not stay;

Flowers, fruits, and leaves are now all desolate.

Pluck the rose, therefore, maiden, while 'tis May!

That is good. It is the best kind of poetry within Lorenzo's grasp. But

here is Poliziano's dance-song:

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,

In a green garden in mid month of May.

Violets and lilies grew on every side

Mid the green grass, and young flowers wonderful,

Golden and white and red and azure-eyed;

Toward which I stretched my hands, eager to pull

Plenty to make my fair curls beautiful,

To crown my rippling curls with garlands gay.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,

In a green garden in mid month of May.

But when my lap was full of flowers I spied

Roses at last, roses of every hue;

Therefore I ran to pluck their ruddy pride,

Because their perfume was so sweet and true

That all my soul went forth with pleasure new,

With yearning and desire too soft to say.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,

In a green garden in mid month of May.

I gazed and gazed. Hard task it were to tell

How lovely were the roses in that hour;

One was but peeping from her verdant shell,

And some were faded, some were scarce in flower.

Then Love said: Go, pluck from the blooming bower

Those that thou seest ripe upon the spray.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,

In a green garden in mid month of May.

For when the full rose quits her tender sheath,

When she is sweetest and most fair to see,

Then is the time to place her in thy wreath,

Before her beauty and her freshness flee.

Gather ye therefore roses with great glee,

Sweet girls, or ere their perfume pass away.

I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,

In a green garden in mid month of May.

Both in this _Ballata_ and also in the stanzas on the Age of Gold, it

might almost seem as though Poliziano had rewritten Lorenzo's exercise

with a view to showing the world the difference between true poetry and

what is only very like it.

The _Selve d'Amore_ and the _Corinto_ belong to Lorenzo's early manner,

when his heart was yet fresh and statecraft had not made him cynical.

The latter is a musical eclogue in _terza rima_; the former a discursive

love-poem, with allegorical episodes, in octave stanzas. Up to the date

of the _Selve_ the _ottava rima_ had, so far as I know, been only used

for semi-epical poems and short love-songs. Lorenzo proved his

originality by suiting it to a style of composition which aimed at

brilliant descriptions in the manner of Ovid. He also handled it with an

ease and brightness hitherto unknown. The pageant of Love and Jealousy

and the allegory of Hope in the second part are both such poetry as only

needed something magical from the touch of Ariosto to make them

perfect.[474] As it is, Lorenzo's studies in verse produce the same

impression as Bronzino's in painting. They are brilliant, but hard,

cold, calculated, never fused by the final charm of poetry or music into

a delightful vision. What is lacking is less technical skill or

invention than feeling in the artist, the glow of passion, or the charm

of spiritual harmony. Here is a picture of Hope's attendant train:

Following this luckless dame, where'er she goes,

Flit dreams in crowds, with auguries and lies,

Chiromants, arts that cozen and impose,

Chances, diviners, and false prophecies,

Spoken or writ in foolish scroll and glose,

Whose forecast brings time flown before our eyes,

Alchemy, all who heaven from our earth measure,

And free conjectures made at will and pleasure.

'Neath the dark shadow of her mighty wings

The whole deluded world at last must cower:--

O blindness that involves all mortal things,

Frail ignorance that treads on human power!--

He who can count the woes her empire brings,

Could number every star, each fish, each flower,

Tell all the birds that cross the autumnal seas,

Of leaves that flutter from the naked trees.

His _Ambra_ is another poem in the same style as the _Selve_. It records

Lorenzo's love for that Tuscan farm which Poliziano afterwards made

famous in the sonorous hexameters he dedicated to the memory of

Homer.[475] Following the steps of Ovid, Lorenzo feigns that a shepherd

Lauro loved the nymph Ambra, whom Umbrone, the river-god, pursued

through vale and meadow to the shores of Arno. There he would have done

her violence, but that Diana changed her to a rock in her sore need:

Ma pur che fussi gia donna ancor credi;

Le membra mostran, come suol figura

Bozzata e non finita in pietra dura.

This simile is characteristic both of Lorenzo's love for familiar

illustration, and also of the age that dawned on Michelangelo's genius.

In the same meter, but in a less ambitious style, is _La Caccia col

Falcone_. This poem is the simple record of a Tuscan hawking-party,

written to amuse Lorenzo's guests, but never meant assuredly to be

discussed by critics after the lapse of four centuries. These pastorals,

whether trifling like _La Caccia_, romantic like _Corinto_, or pictorial

like _Ambra_, sink into insignificance beside _La Nencia da

Barberino_--a masterpiece of true genius and humor, displaying intimate

knowledge of rustic manners, and using the dialect of the Tuscan

_contadini_.[476] Like the _Polyphemus_ of Theocritus, but with even

more of racy detail and homely fun, _La Nencia_ versifies the

love-lament of a hind, Vallera, who describes the charms of his

sweetheart with quaint fancy, wooing her in a thousand ways, all

natural, all equally in keeping with rural simplicity. It can scarcely

be called a parody of village life and feeling, although we cannot fail

to see that the town is laughing at the country all through the

exuberant stanzas, so rich in fancy, so incomparably vivid in

description. What lifts it above parody is the truth of the picture and

the close imitation of rustic popular poetry[477]:

Le labbre rosse paion di corallo:

Ed havvi drento due filar di denti

Che son piu bianchi che quei di cavallo:

E d'ogni lato ella n'ha piu di venti.

Le gote bianche paion di cristallo

Senz'altri lisci ovver scorticamenti:

Ed in quel mezzo ell'e come una rosa.

Nel mondo non fu mai si bella cosa.

Ben si potra tenere avventurato

Che sia marito di si bella moglie;

Ben si potra tener in buon di nato

Chi ara quel fioraliso senza foglie;

Ben si potra tener santo e beato,

Che si contenti tutte le sue voglie

D'aver la Nencia e tenersela in braccio

Morbida e bianca che pare un sugnaccio.

These lines, chosen at random from the poem, might be paralleled from

_Rispetti_ that are sung to-day in Tuscany. The vividness and vigor of

_La Nencia_ secured for it immediate popularity. It was speedily

imitated by Luigi Pulci in the _Beca da Dicomano_, a village poem that,

aiming at cruder realism than Lorenzo's, broke the style and lapsed into

vulgarity. _La Nencia_ long continued to have imitators; for one of the

principal objects of educated poets in the Renaissance was to echo the

manner of popular verse. None, however, succeeded so well as Lorenzo in

touching the facts of country life and the truth of country feeling with

a fine irony that had in it at least as much of sympathy as of sarcasm.

_I Beoni_ is a plebeian poem of a different and more displeasing type.

Written in _terza rima_, it distinctly parodies the style of the Divine

Comedy, using the same phrases to indicate action and to mark the turns

of dialogue; introducing similes in the manner of Dante, burlesquing

Virgil and Beatrice in the disgusting Bartolino and Nastagio.[478] The

poem might be called The Paradise of Drunkards, or their Hell; for it

consists of a succession of scenes in which intoxication in all stages

and topers of every caliber are introduced. The tone is coldly

satirical, sardonically comic. The old man of Tennyson's "Vision of Sin"

might have written _I Beoni_ after a merry bout with the wrinkled

ostler. When Lorenzo composed it, he was already corrupt and weary,

sated with the world, worn with disease, disillusioned by a life of

compromise, hypocrisy, diplomacy, and treason to the State he ruled. Yet

the humor of this poem has nothing truly sinister or tragic. Its

brutality is redeemed by no fierce Swiftian rage. If some of the

descriptions in Lorenzo's earlier work remind us of Dutch flower and

landscape-painters, Breughel or Van Huysum, the scenes of _I Beoni_

recall the realism of Dutch tavern-pictures and Kermessen. It has the

same humor, gross and yet keen, the same intellectual enjoyment of

sensuality, the same animalism studied by an acute aesthetic spirit.[479]

To turn from _I Beoni_ to Lorenzo's Lauds, written at his mother's

request, and to the sacred play of _S. Giovanni e Paolo_, acted by his

children, is to make one of those bewildering transitions which are so

common in Renaissance Italy. Without rating Lorenzo's sacred poetry very

high, either for religious fervor or aesthetic quality, it is yet

surprising that the author of the _Beoni_ and the Platonic sage of

Careggi should have caught so much of the pietistic tone. We know that

_S. Giovanni e Paolo_ was written when he was advanced in years[480];

and the latent allusions to his illness and the cares of state which

weighed upon him, give it an interest it would not otherwise excite.

This couplet,

Spesso chi chiama Costantin felice

Sta meglio assai di me e 'l ver non dice,

seems to be a sigh from his own weariness. Lorenzo may not improbably

have envied Constantine, the puppet of his fancy, at the moment of

abdication. And yet when Savonarola called upon him ere his death to

deal justly with Florence, the true nature of the man was seen. Had he

liked it or not, he could not then have laid down the load of care and

crime which it had been the business of his whole life to accumulate by

crooked ways in the enslavement of Florence and the perdition of his

soul's peace. The Lauds, which may be referred to an earlier period of

Lorenzo's life, when his mother ruled his education, and the pious

Bishop of Arezzo watched his exemplary behavior in church with

admiration, have here and there in them a touch of profound

feeling[481]; nor are they in all respects inferior to the average of

those included in the Florentine collection of 1863. The men of the

Renaissance were so constituted that to turn from vice, and cruelty, and

crime, from the deliberate corruption and enslavement of a people by

licentious pleasures and the persecution of an enemy in secret, with a

fervid and impassioned movement of the soul to God, was nowise

impossible. Their temper admitted of this anomaly, as we may plainly see

in Cellini's Autobiography. Therefore, though it is probable that

Lorenzo cultivated the Laud chiefly as a form of art, we are not

justified in assuming that the passages in which we seem to detect a

note of ardent piety, are insincere.

The versatility of Lorenzo's talent showed itself to greater advantage

when he quitted the uncongenial ground of sacred literature and gave a

free rein to his fancy in the composition of _Ballate_ and Carnival

songs. This species of poetry offered full scope to a temperament

excessive in all pleasures of the senses.[482] It also enabled him to

indulge a deeply-rooted sympathy with the common folk. Nor must it be

supposed that Lorenzo was following a merely artistic impulse. This

strange man, in whose complex nature opponent qualities were harmonized

and intertwined, made his very sensuality subserve his statecraft. The

Medici had based their power upon the favor of the proletariate. Since

the days of the Ciompi riot they had pursued one line of

self-aggrandizement by siding with the plebeians in their quarrels with

the oligarchs. The serious purpose which underlay Lorenzo's cultivation

of popular poetry, was to amuse the crowd with pageantry and music, to

distract their attention from State concerns and to blunt their

political interest, to flatter them by descending to their level and

mixing freely with them in their sports, and to acquire a popularity

which should secure him from the aristocratic jealousies of the

Acciaioli, the Frescobaldi, the Salviati, Soderini, and other ancestral

foemen of his house. The frontispiece to an old edition of Florentine

carnival songs shows him surrounded with maskers in quaint dresses,

leading the revel beneath the walls of the Palazzo, while women gaze

upon them from the windows.[483] That we are justified in attributing a

policy of calculated enervation to Lorenzo is proved by the verdict of

Machiavelli and Guicciardini, both of whom connect his successful

despotism with the pageants he provided for the populace,[484] and also

by this passage in Savonarola's treatise on the Government of Florence:

"The tyrant, especially in times of peace and plenty, is wont to occupy

the people with shows and festivals, in order that they may think of

their own pastimes and not of his designs, and, growing unused to the

conduct of the commonwealth, may leave the reins of government in his

hands."[485] At the same time he would err who should suppose that

Lorenzo's enjoyment of these pleasures, which he found in vogue among

the people, was not genuine. He represented the worst as well as the

best spirit of his age; and if he knew how to enslave Florence, it was

because his own temperament shared the instincts of the crowd, while his

genius enabled him to clothe obscenity with beauty.

We know that it was an ancient Florentine custom for young men and girls

to meet upon the squares and dance, while a boy sang with treble voice

to lute or viol, or a company of minstrels chanted part-songs. The

dancers joined in the refrain, vaunting the pleasures of the May and the

delights of love in rhythms suited to the _Carola_. Taking this form of

poetry from the people, Lorenzo gave it the dignity of art. Sometimes he

told the tale of an unhappy lover, or pretended to be pleading with a

coy mistress, or broke forth into the exultation of a passion crowned

with success. Again, he urged both boys and girls to stay the flight of

time nor suffer the rose-buds of their youth to fade unplucked. In more

wanton moods, he satirized the very love he praised, or, casting off the

mask of decency, ran riot in base bestiality. These _Canzoni a Ballo_,

though they lack the supreme beauty of Poliziano's style, are

stylistically graceful. Their tone never rises above sensuality. Not

only has the gravity of Dante's passion passed away from Florence, but

Boccaccio's sensuous ideality is gone, and the _naivete_ of popular

erotic poetry is clouded with gross innuendoes. We find in them the

aeesthetic immorality, the brilliant materialism of the Renaissance,

conveyed with careless self-abandonment to carnal impulse.

The name of Lorenzo de' Medici is still more closely connected with the

_Canti Carnascialeschi_ or Carnival Songs, of which he is said to have

been the first author, than with the _Ballate_, which he only used as

they were handed to him. In Carnival time it was the custom of the

Florentines to walk the streets, masked and singing satiric ballads.

Lorenzo saw that here was an opportunity for delighting the people with

the magnificence of pageantry. He caused the Triumphs in which he took a

part to be carefully prepared by the best artists, the dresses of the

maskers to be accurately studied, and their chariots to be adorned with

illustrative paintings. Then he wrote songs appropriate to the

characters represented on the cars. Singing and dancing and displaying

their costumes, the band paraded Florence. Il Lasca in his introduction

to the Triumphs and Carnival Songs dedicated to Don Francesco de' Medici

gives the history of their invention[486]: "This festival was invented

by the Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici. Before his time, when the cars

bore mythological or allegorical masks, they were called _Trionfi_; but

when they carried representatives of arts and trades, they kept the

simpler name of _Carri_." The lyrics written for the Triumphs were

stately, in the style of antique odes; those intended to be sung upon

the _Carri_, employed plebeian turns of phrase and dealt in almost

undisguised obscenity. It was their wont, says Il Lasca, "to go forth

after dinner, and often they lasted till three or four hours into the

night, with a multitude of masked men on horseback following, richly

dressed, exceeding sometimes three hundred in number and as many men on

foot with lighted torches. Thus they traversed the city, singing to the

accompaniment of music arranged for four, eight, twelve, or even fifteen

voices, supported by various instruments."

Lorenzo's fancy took the Florentine mind. From his days onward these

shows were repeated every year, the best artists and poets contributing

their genius to make them splendid. In the collection of songs written

for the Carnival, we find Masks of Scholars, Artisans, Frog-catchers,

Furies, Tinkers, Women selling grapes, Old men and Young wives,

Jewelers, German Lansknechts, Gypsies, Wool-carders, Penitents, Devils,

Jews, Hypocrites, Young men who have lost their fathers, Wiseacres,

Damned Souls, Tortoiseshell Cats, Perfumers, Masons, Mountebanks,

Mirror-makers, Confectioners, Prudent persons, Lawyers, Nymphs in love,

Nuns escaped from convent--not to mention the Four Ages of Man, the

Winds, the Elements, Peace, Calumny, Death, Madness, and a hundred

abstractions of that kind. The tone of these songs is uniformly and

deliberately immoral. One might fancy them composed for some old phallic

festival. Their wit is keen and lively, presenting to the fancy of the

student all the humors of a brilliant bygone age. A strange and splendid

spectacle it must have been, when Florence, the city of art and

philosophy, ran wild in Dionysiac revels proclaiming the luxury and

license of the senses! Beautiful maidens, young men in rich clothes on

prancing steeds, showers of lilies and violets, triumphal arches of

spring flowers and ribbons, hail-storms of comfits, torches flaring to

the sallow evening sky--we can see the whole procession as it winds

across the Ponte Vecchio, emerges into the great square, and slowly

gains the open space beneath the dome of Brunelleschi and the tower of

Giotto. The air rings with music as they come, bass and tenor and shrill

treble mingling with the sound of lute and cymbal. The people hush their

cheers to listen. It is Lorenzo's Triumph of Bacchus, and here are the

words they sing:

Fair is youth and void of sorrow;

But it hourly flies away.--

Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;

Naught ye know about to-morrow.

This is Bacchus and the bright

Ariadne, lovers true!

They, in flying time's despite,

Each with each find pleasure new;

These their Nymphs, and all their crew

Keep perpetual holiday.--

Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;

Naught ye know about to-morrow.

These blithe Satyrs, wanton-eyed,

Of the Nymphs are paramours:

Through the caves and forests wide

They have snared them mid the flowers.

Warmed with Bacchus, in his bowers,

Now they dance and leap away.--

Youths and maids enjoy to-day;

Naught ye know about to-morrow.

These fair Nymphs, they are not loth

To entice their lovers' wiles.

None but thankless folk and rough

Can resist when Love beguiles.

Now enlaced with wreathed smiles,

All together dance and play.--

Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;

Naught ye know about to-morrow.

See this load behind them plodding

On the ass, Silenus he,

Old and drunken, merry, nodding,

Full of years and jollity;

Though he goes so swayingly,

Yet he laughs and quaffs alway.--

Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;

Naught ye know about to-morrow.

Midas treads a wearier measure:

All he touches turns to gold:

If there be no taste of pleasure,

What's the use of wealth untold?

What's the joy his fingers hold,

When he's forced to thirst for aye?--

Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;

Naught ye know about to-morrow.

Listen well to what we're saying;

Of to-morrow have no care!

Young and old together playing,

Boys and girls, be blithe as air!

Every sorry thought forswear!

Keep perpetual holiday.--

Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;

Naught ye know about to-morrow.

Ladies and gay lovers young!

Long live Bacchus, live Desire!

Dance and play, let songs be sung;

Let sweet Love your bosoms fire;

In the future come what may!--

Youths and maids, enjoy to-day;

Naught ye know about to-morrow.

On rolls the car, and the crowd closes round it, rending the old walls

with shattering hurrahs. Then a corner of the street is turned; while

soaring still above the hubbub of the town we hear at intervals that

musical refrain. Gradually it dies away in the distance, and fainter and

more faintly still the treble floats to us in broken waves of sound--the

echo of a lyric heard in dreams.

Such were the songs that reached Savonarola's ears, writing or

meditating in his cloister at S. Marco. Such were the sights that moved

his indignation as he trod the streets of Florence. Then he bethought

him of his famous parody of the Carnival, the bonfire of Vanities and

the hymn in praise of divine madness sung by children dressed in white

like angels.[487] Yet Florence, warned in vain by the friar, took no

thought for the morrow; and the morrow came to all Italy with war,

invasion, pestilence, innumerable woes. In the last year of Pier

Soderini's Gonfalonierato (1512) it seemed as though the Italians had

been quickened to a consciousness of their impending ruin. The siege of

Brescia, the battle of Ravenna, the League of Cambray, the massacres of

Prato, the sack of Rome, the fall of Florence, were all imminent. A

fascination of intolerable fear thrilled the people in the midst of

their heedlessness, and this fear found voice and form in a strange

Carnival pageant described by Vasari[488]: "The triumphal car was

covered with black cloth, and was of vast size; it had skeletons and

white crosses painted upon its surface, and was drawn by buffaloes, all

of which were totally black: within the car stood the colossal figure of

Death, bearing the scythe in his hand; while round him were covered

tombs, which opened at all the places where the procession halted, while

those who formed it, chanted lugubrious songs, when certain figures

stole forth, clothed in black cloth, on whose vestments the bones of a

skeleton were depicted in white; the arms, breast, ribs, and legs,

namely, all which gleamed horribly forth on the black beneath. At a

certain distance appeared figures bearing torches, and wearing masks

presenting the face of a death's head both before and behind; these

heads of death as well as the skeleton necks beneath them, also

exhibited to view, were not only painted with the utmost fidelity to

nature, but had besides a frightful expression which was horrible to

behold. At the sound of a wailing summons, sent forth with a hollow moan

from trumpets of muffled yet inexorable clangor, the figures of the dead

raised themselves half out of their tombs, and seating their skeleton

forms thereon, they sang the following words, now so much extolled and

admired, to music of the most plaintive and melancholy character. Before

and after the car rode a train of the dead on horses, carefully selected

from the most wretched and meager animals that could be found: the

caparisons of those worn, half-dying beasts were black, covered with

white crosses; each was conducted by four attendants, clothed in the

vestments of the grave; these last-mentioned figures, bearing black

torches and a large black standard, covered with crosses, bones, and

death's heads. While this train proceeded on its way, each sang, with a

trembling voice, and all in dismal unison, that psalm of David called

the Miserere. The novelty and the terrible character of this singular

spectacle, filled the whole city, as I have before said, with a mingled

sensation of terror and admiration; and although at the first sight it

did not seem well calculated for a Carnival show, yet being new, and

within the reach of every man's comprehension, it obtained the highest

encomium for Piero as the author and contriver of the whole, and was the

cause as well as commencement of numerous representations, so ingenious

and effective that by these things Florence acquired a reputation for

the conduct of such subjects and the arrangement of similar spectacles

such as was never equaled by any other city."

Of this Carnival song, composed by Antonio Alamanni, I here give an

English version.

Sorrow, tears, and penitence

Are our doom of pain for aye;

This dead concourse riding by

Hath no cry but Penitence.

Even as you are, once were we:

You shall be as now we are:

We are dead men, as you see:

We shall see you dead men, where

Naught avails to take great care

After sins of penitence.

We too in the Carnival

Sang our love-song through the town;

Thus from sin to sin we all

Headlong, heedless, tumbled down;

Now we cry, the world around,

Penitence, oh penitence!

Senseless, blind, and stubborn fools!

Time steals all things as he rides:

Honors, glories, states, and schools,

Pass away, and naught abides;

Till the tomb our carcass hides,

And compels grim penitence.

This sharp scythe you see us bear,

Brings the world at length to woe;

But from life to life we fare;

And that life is joy or woe;

All heaven's bliss on him doth flow,

Who on earth does penitence.

Living here, we all must die;

Dying, every soul shall live,

For the King of kings on high

This fixed ordinance doth give:

Lo! you all are fugitive

Penitence, cry penitence!

Torment great and grievous dole

Hath the thankless heart mid you:

But the man of piteous soul

Finds much honor in our crew;

Love for loving is the due

That prevents this penitence.

These words sounded in the ears of the people, already terrified by the

unforgotten voice of Savonarola, like a trump of doom. The pageant was,

indeed, an acted allegory of the death of Italy, the repentance after

judgment of a nation fallen in its sins. Yet a few months passed, and

the same streets echoed with the music of yet another show, which has

also been described by Vasari.[489] If the Car of Death expressed the

uneasy dread that fell on the Italians at the opening of the century,

the shows of 1513 allegorized their mad confidence in the fortune of the

age, which was still more deeply felt and widely shared. Giovanni de'

Medici had just been elevated to the Papal Chair, and was paying a

holiday visit to his native city. Giuliano de' Medici, his brother, the

Duke of Nemours, was also resident in Florence, where he had formed a

club of noble youths called the Diamond. Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the

titular chief of the house, presided over a rival Company named Il

Broncone--with a withered laurel-branch, whence leaves were sprouting,

for its emblem. The Diamond signified the constancy of Casa Medici; the

withered branch their power of self-recovery. These two men, Giuliano

and Lorenzo, are the same who now confront each other upon their

pedestals in Michelangelo's Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. Both were doomed to

an untimely death; but in the year 1513, when Leo's election shed new

luster on their house, they were still in the heyday of prosperity and

hope. Giuliano resolved that the Diamond should make a goodly show.

Therefore he intrusted the invention and the poems to Andrea Dazzi, who

then held Poliziano's chair of Greek and Latin literature. Dazzi devised

three Cars after the fashion of a Roman triumph. For the construction of

each chariot an excellent architect was chosen; for their decoration the

painter Pontormo was appointed. In the first rode beautiful boys; in the

second, powerful men; in the third, reverend grandsires. Lorenzo, in

competition with his uncle, determined that the Laurel branch should

outrival the Diamond. He applied to Jacopo Nardi, the historian of

Florence and translator of Livy. Nardi composed a procession of seven

chariots to symbolize the Golden Age, and wrote appropriate poems for

each, which are still extant. In the first car rode Saturn and Janus,

attended by six shepherds of goodly form, naked, on horses without

harness. In the second sat Numa Pompilius, surrounded by priests in

antique raiment. The third carried Titus Manlius, whose consulship

beheld the close of the first Punic war. In the fifth Augustus sat

enthroned, accompanied by twelve laureled poets. The horses that drew

him, were winged. The sixth carried Trajan, the just emperor, with

doctors of the law on either side. All these chariots were adorned with

emblems painted by Pontormo. The seventh car held a globe to represent

the world. Upon it lay a dead man in a suit of rusty iron armor, from

the cloven plates of which emerged a living child, naked and gilt with

glistering leaf of gold. This signified the passing of the Iron, and the

opening of the Golden Age--the succession of the Renaissance to

feudalism--the fortunes of Italy reviving after her disasters in the

sunlight of the smiles of Leo. _Magnus saeclorum nascitur ordo!_ "The

world's great age begins anew; the golden years return!" Thus the

artists, scholars, and poets of Florence symbolized in a Carnival show

the advent of the Renaissance. The boy who represented the Golden Age,

died of the sufferings he endured beneath his gilding; and his father,

who was a baker, received ten scudi of indemnity. A fanciful historian

might read in this little incident the irony of fate, warning the

Italians that the age they welcomed would perish for them in its bloom.

In the year 1513 Luther was already thirty years of age, and Charles V.

in the Low Countries was a boy of thirteen, accumulating knowledge under

the direction of the future Adrian VI. Whatever destiny of gold the

Renaissance might through Italy be offering to Europe, it was on the

point of pouring blood and fastening heavier chains on every city of the

sacred land.

In my desire to bring together these three representative

festivals--Lorenzo's Triumph of Bacchus, Alamanni's Car of Death, and

Pontormo's Pageant of the Golden Age--marking three moments in the

Florentine Renaissance, and three diverse moods of feeling in the

people--I have transgressed the chronological limits of this chapter. I

must now return to the year 1464, when a boy of ten years old, destined

to revive the glories of Italian literature with far greater luster

than Lorenzo, came from Montepulciano to Florence, and soon won the

notice of the Medicean princes. Angelo Ambrogini, surnamed Poliziano

from his home above the Chiana, has already occupied a prominent place

in this work.[490] It is not, therefore, needful to retrace the history

of his uneventful life, or again to fix his proper rank among the

scholars of the fifteenth century. He was the greatest student, and the

greatest poet in Greek and Latin, that Italy has produced. In the

history of European scholarship, he stands midway between Petrarch and

Erasmus, taking the post of honor at the moment when erudition had

acquired ease and elegance, but had not yet passed on into the final

stage of scientific criticism. What concerns us here, is Poliziano's

achievement as an Italian poet. In the history of the vulgar literature

he fills a place midway between Petrarch and Ariosto, corresponding to

the station of distinction I have assigned to him in humanistic culture.

Of few men can it be said that they have held the same high rank in

poetry and learning; and had the moral fiber of Poliziano, his

intellectual tension and his spiritual aim, been at all commensurate

with his twofold ability, the Italians might have shown in him a fourth

singer equal in magnitude to their greatest. As it was, the excellence

of his work was marred by the defect of his temperament, and has far

less value for the general reader than for the student of versification.

Lorenzo de' Medici could boast of having restored the mother tongue to a

place of honor among the learned. But he was far from being the complete

artist that the age required. "That exquisite flower of sentiment we

call good taste, that harmony of intellect we call judgment, lies not

within the grasp of power or riches."[491] A man was needed who should

combine creative genius with refined tact in the use of language; who

should be competent to carry the tradition of Italian poetry beyond the

point where Boccaccio dropped it, while giving to his work the polish

and the splendor of a classic masterpiece. It was further necessary that

this new dictator of the literary commonwealth should have left the

Middle Age so far behind as not to be aware of its stern spirit. He must

have acquired the erudition of his eminently learned century--a century

in which knowledge was the pearl of great price; not the knowledge of

righteousness; not the knowledge of nature and her laws; but the

knowledge of the life that throbbed in ancient peoples, the life that

might, it seemed, yet make the old world young again. Moreover, he must

be strong enough to carry this erudition without bending beneath its

weight; dexterous enough to use it without pedantry; exuberant enough in

natural resources to reduce his stores of learning, his wealth of fancy,

his thronging emotions, to one ruling harmony--fusing all reminiscences

in one style of pure and copious Italian. He must be gifted with that

reverent sense of beauty, which was the sole survivirg greatness of his

century, animating the imagination of its artists, and justifying the

proud boast of its students. This man was found in Angelo Poliziano. He,

and only he, was destined, by combining the finish of the classics with

the freshness of a language still in use, to inaugurate the golden age

of form. Faustus, the genius of the middle ages, had wedded Helen, the

vision of the ancient world. Their son, Euphorion, the inheritor of all

their gifts, we hail in Poliziano.

When Poliziano composed _Le Stanze_ he was nearly twenty-four years of

age.[492] He had steeped himself in the classic literatures. Endowed

with a marvelous memory, he possessed their spirit and their substance.

Not less familiar with Tuscan poetry of the fourteenth century, he

commanded the stores of Dante's, Petrarch's and Boccaccio's diction.

Long practice in Greek and Latin composition had given him mastery over

the metrical systems of the ancient languages.[493] The daily habit of

inditing songs for music to please the ladies of the Medicean household,

had accustomed him to the use of fluent Italian. The translation of the

_Iliad_, performed in part before he was eighteen, had made him a

faithful imitator, while it added dignity and fullness to his

style.[494] Besides these qualifications for his future task of raising

Italian to an equality with Latin poetry, he brought with him to this

achievement a genius apt to comprehend the spirit of the Renaissance in

its pomp and liberty and tranquil loveliness. The noble and yet sensuous

manner of the great Venetian painters, their dignity of form, their

luxury of color, their boldness and decision, their imperturbable

serenity of mundane joy--the choicer delicacy of the Florentine masters,

their refinement of outline, selection of type, suggestion of restrained

emotion--the pure design of the Tuscan sculptors, the suavity and

flexibility of the Lombard _plasticatori_--all these qualities of

Italian figurative art appear, as it were in bud, in the _Stanze_.

Poliziano's crowning merit as a stylist was that he knew how to blend

the antique and the romantic, correct drawing with fleshly fullness.

Breadth of design and harmony of color have rarely been produced in more

magnificent admixture. The octave stanza, which in the hands of

Boccaccio was languid and diffuse, in the hands of Lorenzo harsh, in the

hands of Pulci rugged, became under Poliziano's treatment an

inexhaustible instrument of varying melodies. At one time, beneath his

touch, the meter takes an epic dignity; again it sinks to idyllic

sweetness, or mourns with the elegy, or exults with the ode. Its

movement is rapid or relaxed, smooth or vibrating, undulatory or

impetuous, as he has chosen. When we reflect how many generations of

poets it required to bring the Sonnet to completeness, we may marvel at

this youth, in an age when scholarship absorbed inventive genius, who

was able at one stroke to do for the octave stanza what Marlowe did for

our Blank Verse. Poliziano gave to Ariosto the Italian epical meter

perfected, and established a standard of style amid the anarchy which

threatened the literature of Italy with ruin.

Yet it must be confessed that, after all, it is chiefly the style of

Poliziano that deserves praise. Like so much else of Renaissance

work--like the Farnesina frescoes in Rome, or Giulio Romano's luxuriant

arabesques at Mantua, or the efflorescence of foliage and cupids in the

bass-reliefs of palace portals at Venice--there is but little solid

thought or serious feeling underneath this decorative richness. Those

who cannot find a pleasure in form for its own sake, independent of

matter, will never be able to do Poliziano justice. This brings us to

the subject of the _Stanze_. They were written to celebrate the prowess

of Giuliano de' Medici, Lorenzo's brother, in a tournament held at

Florence in the beginning of the year 1478. This fact is worth

consideration. The poem which opened a new age for Italian literature,

had no nobler theme than a Court pageant. Dante had been inspired to

sing the epic of the human soul. Petrarch finished a portrait of the

life through love of an impassioned man. Boccaccio bound up in one

volume a hundred tales, delineating society in all its aspects. Then the

Muse of Italy fell asleep. Poliziano aroused her with the full deep

intonations of a golden instrument. But what was the burden of his song?

Giuliano de' Medici loved the fair Simonetta, and bore away the prize in

a toy-tournament.

This marks the change effected by a century of prince-craft. Henceforth

great poets were to care less for what they sang than for the style in

which they sang. Henceforth poetry in Italy was written to please--to

please patrons who were flattered with false pedigrees and absurd

mythologies, with the imputation of virtues they never possessed, and

with the impudent palliation of shame apparent to the world. Henceforth

the bards of Ausonia deigned to tickle the ears of lustful boys and

debauched cardinals, buying the bread of courtly sloth--how salt it

tasted let Tasso and Guarini tell--with jests or panegyrics. Liberty

could scarcely be named in verse when natives and strangers vied

together in enslaving Italy. To praise the great deeds of bygone heroes

within hearing of pusillanimous princes, would have been an insult. Even

satires upon a degraded present, aspirations after a noble future,

prophecies of resurrection from the tomb--those last resorts of a

national literature that retains its strength through evil days--were

unknown upon the lips of the Renaissance poets. Art had become a thing

of pleasure, sometimes infamous, too often nugatory. The fault of this

can scarcely be said to have rested with one man more than with another;

nor can we lay the blame on Poliziano, though he undoubtedly represented

the class who were destined to continue literature upon these lines. It

was the combined result of scholarship, which for a whole century had

diverted the minds of men to the form and words of literature; of

court-life, which had enfeebled the recipients of princely patronage; of

tyranny, which encouraged flattery, dissimulation, and fraud; of foreign

oppression, which already was beginning to enervate a race of slaves; of

revived paganism, which set the earlier beliefs and aspirations of the

soul at unequal warfare with emancipated lusts and sensualities; of

indolence, which loved to toy with trifles, instead of thinking and

creating thought; of social inequalities, which forced the poet to eat a

master's bread, and turned the scholars of Italy into a crowd of servile

and yet arrogant beggars. All these circumstances, and many more of the

same kind, were slowly and surely undermining the vigor of the Italian

intellect. Over the meridian splendor of _Le Stanze_ we already see

their influences floating like a vaporous miasma.

Italy, though never so chivalrous as the rest of Europe, yet preserved

the pompous festivities of feudalism. Jousts were held in all great

cities, and it was reckoned part of a courtier's business to be a

skillful cavalier. At Florence the custom survived of celebrating the

first of May with tournaments, and on great occasions the wealthy

families spent large sums of money in providing pastimes of this sort.

February 7, 1468, witnessed a splendid spectacle, when Lorenzo de'

Medici, mounted successively on chargers presented to him by the Duke of

Ferrara and the King of Naples, attired in armor given by the Duke of

Milan, bearing the _fleurs de lys_ of France conferred upon the Medici

by Louis XI., and displaying on his pennon for a motto _Le Tems

revient_, won the prize of valor before the populace assembled in the

square of S. Croce. Luca Pulci, the descendant of an ancient house of

Tuscan nobles, composed an adulatory poem in octave stanzas on this

event. So changed were the times that this scion of Florentine

aristocracy felt no shame in fawning on a despot risen from the people

to enslave his city. Yet the spectacle was worthy celebration. Lorenzo,

the banker's son, the Platonist, the diplomatist and tyrant, charging in

the lists of feudalism beneath Arnolfo's tower, with the lilies of

France upon his shield and the device of the Renaissance on his

banner--this figured symbol of the meeting of two ages in a single man

was no mean subject for a poem!

From Poliziano's _Stanze_ we learn no such characteristic details

concerning Giuliano's later tournament. Though the poem is called _La

Giostra_, the insignificant subject disappears beneath a wealth of

illustration. The episodes, including the pictures of the Golden Age and

of the garden and palace of Venus, form the real strength of a

masterpiece which blent the ancient and the modern world in a work of

art glowing with Italian fancy. That _La Giostra_ has no subject-matter,

no theme of weight to wear the poet thin through years of anxious toil,

no progress from point to point, no chain of incidents and no romantic

evolution, is a matter of little moment. When Giuliano de' Medici died

before the altar by the hand of an assassin on April 26, 1478, Poliziano

laid down his pen and left the _Stanze_ unfinished.[495] It cannot be

said that the poem suffered, or that posterity lost by this abrupt

termination of a work conceived without a central thought. Enough had

been already done to present Italy with a model of the style she needed;

and if we ask why _La Giostra_ should have become immediately popular

in spite of its peculiar texture and its abrupt conclusion, the answer

is not far to seek. Poliziano incarnated the spirit of his age, and gave

the public what satisfied their sense of fitness. The three chief

enthusiasms of the fifteenth century--for classical literature, for

artistic beauty, and for nature tranquilly enjoyed--were so fused and

harmonized within the poet's soul as to produce a style of unmistakable

originality and charming ease. Poliziano felt the delights of the

country with serene idyllic rapture, not at second hand through the

ancients, but with the voluptuous enjoyment of the Florentine who loved

his villa. He had, besides, a sense of form analogous to that possessed

by the artists of his age, which guided him in the selection and

description of the scenes he painted. Again, his profound and refined

erudition enabled him "to shower," as Giovio phrased it, "the finest

flowers of antique poetry upon the people." Therefore, while he felt

nature like one who worshiped her for her own sake and for the joy she

gave him, he saw in her the subjects of a thousand graceful pictures,

and these pictures he studied through a radiant haze of antique

reminiscences. Each stanza of _La Giostra_ is a mimic world of beauty,

art, and scholarship; a painting where the object stands before us

modeled with relief of light and shade in finely modulated hues; a brief

anthology of daintily-culled phrases, wafting to our memories the

perfume of Greece, Rome, and Florence in her prime. These delicate

little masterpieces are, turn by turn, a picture of Botticelli, a fresco

by Giulio Romano, an engraving of Mantegna, a bass-relief of young

Buonarroti, or a garden-scene of Gozzoli, expressed in the purest

diction of all literatures by a poet who, while imitating, never ceased

to be original.[496] Nothing more was needed by a nation of idyllic

dreamers, artists and scholars.

What Poliziano might have achieved, if he had found a worthy theme for

the employment of his powers, it would be idle to ask. It is perhaps the

condemnation of the man and of his age that the former did not seek

heroic subjects for song, and the latter did not demand them--in a word

that neither poet nor public had in them anything heroic whatsoever. The

fact is undeniably true; but this does not deprive Poliziano of the

merit of such verses as the following:

After such happy wise, in ancient years,

Dwelt the old nations in the age of gold;

Nor had the font been stirr'd of mothers' tears

For sons in war's fell labor stark and cold;

Nor trusted they to ships the wild wind steers,

Nor yet had oxen groaning plowed the wold;

Their houses were huge oaks, whose trunks had store

Of honey, and whose boughs thick acorns bore.

Nor yet, in that glad time, the accursed thirst

Of cruel gold had fallen on this fair earth:

Joyous in liberty they lived at first;

Unplowed the fields sent forth their teeming birth:

Till fortune, envious of such concord, burst

The bond of law, and pity banned and worth;

Within their breasts sprang luxury and that rage

Which men call love in our degenerate age.

A somewhat earlier composition than _La Giostra_ was _La Favola di

Orfeo_, a dramatic poem similar in form to the _Sacra Rappresentazione_,

with a classical instead of a religious subject.[497] To call it a

tragedy would be to dignify it with too grand a title. To class it with

pastorals is equally impossible, though the songs of the shepherds and

wood-nymphs may be said to have anticipated the style of Tasso's

_Aminta_ and Guarini's _Pastor Fido_. Nor again is it properly speaking

an opera, though it was undoubtedly meant for music. The _Orfeo_

combined tragedy, the pastoral, and the opera in a mixed work of

melodramatic art, which by its great popularity inspired the poets of

Italy to produce specimens of each kind, and prepared the public to

receive them.[498] Still, in form and movement, it adhered to the

traditions of the _Sacra Rappresentazione_, and its originality

consisted in the substitution of a Pagan for a Christian fable.

Unerring instinct guided Poliziano in the choice of his subject. Orpheus

was the proper hero of Renaissance Italy--the civilizer of a barbarous

world by art and poetry, the lover of beauty, who dared to invade Hell

and moved the iron heart of Pluto with a song. Long before the

composition of _Orfeo_, Boccaccio had presented the same conception of

society humanized by culture in his _Ninfale Fiesolano_. This was the

ideal of the Renaissance; and, what is more, it accurately symbolized

the part played by Italy after the dissolution of the middle ages. In

the myth of Orpheus the humanism of the Revival became conscious of

itself. This fable was the Mystery of the new age, the allegory of the

work appointed for the nation. Did we dare to press a metaphor to the

verge of the fantastic, we might even read in the martyrdom of Orpheus

by the Maenads a prophecy of the Italian doom. Italy, who had aroused

Europe from lethargy with the voice of poetry and learning, who had

inaugurated a new age of civil and social refinement, who thought she

could resist the will of God by arts and elegant accomplishments, after

triumphing over the rude forces of nature was now about to violate the

laws of nature in her vices, and to fall a victim to the Maenads of

incurrent barbarism, inebriate with wine and blood, indifferent to the

magic of the lyre, avengers blindly following the dictates of a power

that rules the destinies of nations. Of this Italy, Poliziano, the

author of _Orfeo_, was himself the representative hero, the protagonist,

the intellectual dictator.[499]

The _Orfeo_ was sent with a letter of dedication to Messer Carlo Canale,

the obsequious husband of that Vannozza, who bore Cesare and Lucrezia

Borgia to the Pope Alexander VI. Poliziano says that he "wrote this play

at the request of the Most Reverend the Cardinal of Mantua, in the space

of two days, among continual disturbances, and in the vulgar tongue,

that it might be the better comprehended by the spectators." He adds:

"This child of mine is of a sort to bring more shame than honor on its

father."

There is good reason to believe that the year 1472, when the Cardinal

Francesco Gonzaga returned from Bologna to Mantua, and was received with

"triumphs and pomps, great feasts and banquets," was the date of its

composition. If so, the _Orfeo_ was written at the age of eighteen. It

could not have been played later than 1483, for in that year the

Cardinal died. At eighteen Poliziano was already famous for his

translation of the _Iliad_. He had gained the title of _Homericus

Juvenis_, and was celebrated for his powers of improvization.[500] That

he should have put the _Orfeo_ together in forty-eight hours is hardly

so remarkable as that he should have translated Herodian in the space

of a few days, while walking and dictating. For the _Orfeo_ is but a

slight piece, though beautiful and pregnant with the germs of many

styles to be developed from its scenes. The plot is simple, and the

whole play numbers no more than 434 lines.

To do the _Orfeo_ justice, we ought to have heard it with its own

accompaniment of music. Viewed as a tragedy, judged by the standard of

our Northern drama, it will always prove a disappointment. That mastery

over the complex springs of human nature which distinguished the first

efforts of Marlowe, is almost wholly absent. A certain adaptation of the

language to the characters, in the rudeness of Thyrsis when contrasted

with the rustic elegance of Aristaeus; a touch of feeling in Eurydice's

outcry of farewell; a discrimination between the tender sympathy of

Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting; a spirited representation of

Bacchanalian enthusiasm in the Maenads; an attempt to model the Satyr

Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yet conscious of its

anguish--these points constitute the chief dramatic features of the

melodrama. But where there was the opportunity of a really tragic

movement, Poliziano failed. We have only to read the lament uttered by

Orpheus for the loss of Eurydice, in order to perceive how fine a

situation has been spoiled. The pathos which might have made us

sympathize with the lover in his misery, the passion approaching frenzy

which might have justified his misogyny, are absent. Poliziano seems to

have already felt the inspiration of the Bacchic chorus which concludes

the play, and to have forgotten his duty to his hero, whose sorrow for

Eurydice is stultified and made unmeaning by the prosaic expression of a

base resolve. Yet, when we return from these criticisms to the real

merit of the piece, we find in it a charm of musical language, a

subtlety of musical movement, which are irresistibly fascinating.

Thought and feeling seem alike refined to a limpidity that suits the

flow of melody in song. The very words evaporate and lose themselves in

floods of sound. Orpheus himself is a purely lyrical personage. Of

character, he can scarcely be said to have anything marked; and his part

rises to its height precisely in the passage where the singer has to be

displayed. Thus the _Orfeo_ is a good poem only where the situation is

less dramatic than lyrical, and its finest scene was, fortunately for

the author, one in which the dramatic motive could be lyrically

expressed. Before the gates of Hades and the throne of Proserpine,

Orpheus sings, and his singing is the right outpouring of a

musician-poet's soul. Each octave resumes the theme of the last stanza

with a swell of utterance, a _crescendo_ of intonation, that recalls the

passionate and unpremeditated descant of a bird upon the boughs alone.

To this true quality of music is added the persuasiveness of pleading.

Even while we read, the air seems to vibrate with pure sound, and the

rich recurrence of the tune is felt upon the opening of each successive

stanza. That the melody of this incomparable song is lost, must be

reckoned a misfortune. We have reason to believe that the part of

Orpheus was taken by Messer Baccio Ugolini, singing to the viol.[501]

Space does not permit me to detach the whole scene in Hades from the

play and print it here; to quote a portion of it would be nothing less

than mutilation.[502] I must content myself with this Chorus of the

Maenads, which contains, as in a kernel, the whole dithyrambic poetry of

the Italians:

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

With ivy coronals, bunch and berry,

Crown we our heads to worship thee!

Thou hast bidden us to make merry

Day and night with jollity!

Drink then! Bacchus is here! Drink free,

And hand ye the drinking-cup to me!

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

See, I have emptied my horn already;

Stretch hither your beaker to me, I pray;

Are the hills and the lawns where we roam unsteady?

Or is it my brain that reels away?

Let every one run to and fro through the hay,

As ye see me run! Ho! after me!

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

Methinks I am dropping in swoon or slumber;

Am I drunken or sober, yes or no?

What are these weights my feet encumber?

You too are tipsy, well I know!

Let every one do as ye see me do,

Let every one drink and quaff like me!

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

Cry Bacchus! Cry Bacchus! Be blithe and merry,

Tossing wine down your throats away!

Let sleep then come and our gladness bury:

Drink you, and you, and you, while ye may!

Dancing is over for me to-day.

Let every one cry aloud Evohe!

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

It remains to speak of the third class of poems which the great scholar

and supple courtier flung like wild flowers with a careless hand from

the chariot of his triumph to the Capitolian heights of erudition. Small

store, indeed, he set by them--these Italian love-songs, hastily

composed to please Donna Ippolita Leoncina, the titular mistress of his

heart; thrown off to serve the turn of Giuliano and his younger friends;

or improvised, half jestingly, to meet the humor of his princely patron,

when Lorenzo, quitting the laurel-crowned bust of Plato, or the groves

of Careggi, or the audience-chamber where he parleyed with the envoys of

the Sforza, went abroad like King Manfred of old with lute and mandoline

and viol to serenade the windows of some facile beauty in the twilight

of a night of June.[503] Little did Poliziano dream that his learning

would pass away almost unreckoned, but that men of after time would

gather the honey of the golden days of the Renaissance from these

wilding garlands.[504] Yet, however slightly Poliziano may have prized

these productions of his early manhood, he proved that the _Canzone_,

the _Rispetto_, and the _Ballata_ were as much his own in all their

multiformity of lyric loveliness, as were the rich sonorous measures of

the octave stanza. Expressing severally the depths of tender emotion,

the caprices of adoring passion, and the rhythmic sentiment that winds

in myriad movements of the dance, these three kinds of poem already

belonged to the people and to love. Poliziano displayed his inborn taste

and mastery of art in nothing more than in the ease with which he

preserved the passionate simplicity of the Tuscan _Volkslied_, while

giving it a place among the lyrics of the learned. We have already seen

how that had been achieved by Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and afterwards in

a measure by Lorenzo de' Medici. But the problem of writing love-poetry

for the people in their own forms, without irony and innuendo, was not

now so easy as it had been in the fourteenth century, when no barrier

had yet arisen between educated poets and the folk. Nor had even

Boccaccio, far less Lorenzo, solved it with the exquisite tact and

purity of style we find in all Poliziano's verses. In order to

comprehend their charm, we must transfer ourselves to Florence on a

summer night, when the prince is abroad upon the streets attended by

singing-boys as beautiful as Sandro's angels. The professor's chair is

forgotten, and Plato's spheres are left to turn unheeded. Pulci and

Poliziano join hands with girls from the workshop and the attic. Lorenzo

and Pico figure in the dance with 'prentice-lads and carvers of

wood-work or marble. All through the night beneath the stars the music

of their lutes is ringing; and when the dancing stops, they gather round

some balcony, or hold their own upon the square in matches of improvised

melody with the unknown rhymsters of the people. What can be prettier

than the ballad of roses made for "such a night," by Angelo

Poliziano?[505]

Poliziano's _Rispetti_ are written for the most part in _ottava rima_.

This form alone suffices to mark them out as literary reproductions of

the poetry upon which they are modeled. In the _Rispetti_ more than the

_Ballate_ we notice a certain want of _naivete_, which distinguishes

them from the racier inspirations of the popular Muse. That passionate

insight into the soul and essence of emotion which rarely fails the

peasant in his verse however rude, is here replaced by _concetti_

rounded into pearls of fancy with the daintiest art. Those brusque and

vehement images that flash the light of imagination on the movements of

the heart, throbbing with intensest natural feeling, yield to carefully

selected metaphors developed with a strict sense of economy. Instead of

the young _contadino_ willing to mortgage Paradise for his _dama_,

worshiping her with body, will and soul, compelling the morning and the

evening star and the lilies of the field and the bells that swing their

notes of warning over Rome, to serve the bidding of his passion, we have

the scholar-courtier, who touches love with the finger-tips for pastime,

and who imitates the gold of the heart with baser metal of fine

rhetoric. Still we find in these _Rispetti_ a quality which their rustic

models lack. This is the roseate fluency and honeyed rapture of their

author--an exquisite limpidity and ease of diction that reveal the

inborn gift of art. Language in Poliziano's hand is plastic, taking form

like softest wax, so that no effort of composition, no labor of the file

can be discerned.

Nec pluteum caedit nec demorsos sapit ungues.

This line of Persius denotes the excellences no less than the faults of

his erotic poetry, so charming in its flow, so fit to please a facile

ear, so powerless to stir the depth of the soul or wring relenting from

reluctant hearts. Compared with the love-poetry of elder poets, these

_Rispetti_ are what the artificial epigrams of Callimachus or the

Anacreontics of the Alexandrian versifiers were to the ardent stanzas of

Sappho, the impassioned scolia of Pindar. While they fail to reflect the

ingenuous emotions of youth exulting in the Paradise of love without an

afterthought, they no less fail to embody philosophy or chivalrous

religion or the tragedy of passions in conflict. They are inspired by

Aphrodite Pandemos, and the joys of which they tell are carnal.[506]

What has been said about the detached _Rispetti_, is true of those

longer poems which consist of many octave stanzas strung together with a

continuity of pleading rhetoric. The facility bordering on negligence of

their construction is apparent. Verses that occur in one, reappear in

others without alteration. All repeat the same arguments, the same

enticements to a less than lawful love. The code of Florentine wooing

may be conveniently studied in the rambling paragraphs, while the levity

of their declarations and the fluency of their vows, doing the same

service on different occasions, show them to be "false as dicers'

oaths," mere verses of the moment, made to sway a yielding woman's

heart.[507] Yet who can help enjoying them, when he connects their

effusiveness of fervent language with the episodes of the _Novelle_,

illustrated by figures borrowed from contemporary frescoes? Those sinewy

lads of Signorelli and Masuccio, in parti-colored hose and tight

jackets, climbing mulberry-tree or vine beneath their lady's window;

those girls with the demure eyes of Lippo Lippi and Bandello, suspending

rope-ladders from balconies to let their Romeo escape at daybreak: those

lovers rushing, half-clad in shirt or jerkin, from bower and bed-chamber

to cross their swords with jealous husbands at street corners; rise

before us and sing their love-songs in these verses of Poliziano,

written for precisely such occasions to express the very feelings of

these heroes of romance. After all, too, there is a certain sort of

momentary sincerity in their light words of love.

Three lyrics of higher artistic intention and of very different caliber

mark the zenith of Poliziano's achievement. These are the portrait of

the country girl, _La brunettina mia_; the canzone to _La Bella

Simonetta_, written for Giuliano de' Medici; and the magnificent

imitation of Petrarch's manner, beginning _Monti, valli, antri e

colli_.[508] They are three studies in pictorial poetry, transparent,

limpid, of incomparable freshness. A woman has sat for the central

figure of each, and the landscape round her is painted with the delicacy

of a _quattrocento_ Florentine. _La Brunettina_ is the simple village

beauty, who bathes her face in the fountain, and crowns her blonde hair

with a wreath of wild flowers. She is a blossoming branch of thorn in

spring. Her breasts are May roses, her lips are strawberries. The

portrait is so ethereally tinted and so firmly modeled that we seem to

be looking at a study painted by a lover from the life. Simonetta moves

with nobler grace and a diviner majesty[509]:

In lei sola raccolto

Era quant'e d'onesto e bello al mondo.

* * * * *

Un'altra sia tra le belle la prima:

Costei non prima chiamesi, ma sola;

Che 'l giglio e la viola

Cedono e gli altri fior tutti alla rosa.

Pendevon dalla testa luminosa

Scherzando per la fronte e suoi crin d'oro,

Mentre ella nel bel coro

Movea ristretti al suono e dolci passi.

She is the lady of the _Stanze_, whom Giuliano found among the fields

that April morning[510]:

Candida e ella, e candida la vesta,

Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba;

Lo inanellato crin dall'aurea testa

Scende in la fronte umilmente superba.

Ridegli attorno tutta la foresta,

E quanto puo sue cure disacerba,

Nell'atto regalmente e mansueta;

E pur col ciglio le tempeste acqueta.

* * * * *

Ell'era assissa sopra la verdura

Allegra, e ghirlandetta avea contesta

Di quanti fior creasse mai natura,

De' quali era dipinta la sua vesta.

E come prima al giovan pose cura,

Alquanto paurosa alzo la testa;

Poi con la bianca man ripreso il lembo,

Levossi in pie con di fior pieno un grembo.

All the defined idealism, the sweetness and the purity of Tuscan

portraiture are in these stanzas. Simonetta does not pass by with a

salutation in a mist of spiritual glory like Beatrice. She is surrounded

with no flames of sensual desire like the Griselda of Boccaccio. She

sits for her portrait in a tranquil light, or moves across the canvas

with the dignity of a great lady:

Lei fuor di guisa umana

Mosse con maesta l'andar celeste,

E con man sospendea l'ornata veste

Regale in atto e portamento altero.

It was a rare and fugitive moment in the history of art when Poliziano

could paint La Simonetta in these verses, and Lippo Lippi showed her

likeness on cathedral walls of Prato. Different models of feminine

beauty, different ideals of womanly grace served the painters and poets

of a more developed age; Titian's Flora and Dosso Dossi's Circe

illustrating the Alcina of Ariosto and the women of Guarini. Once more,

it is the thought of Simonetta which pervades the landscape of the third

canzone I have mentioned. Herself is absent; but, as in a lyric of

Petrarch, her spirit is felt, and we are made to see her throned

beneath the gnarled beech-branches or dipping her foot in the too happy

rivulet. Something just short of perfection in the _staccato_

exclamations of the final trophe reminds us of Poliziano's most serious

defect. Amid so much tenderness of natural feeling, he fails to make us

believe in the reality of his emotion. Not passion, not thought, but the

refined sensuousness of a nature keenly alive to plastic beauty,

educated in the schools of classical and Florentine art, and gifted with

inexhaustible facility of language, is the dominant quality of

Poliziano's Italian poetry. The same quality is found in his Latin and

Greek verse--in the plaintive elegies for La Bella Simonetta and Albiera

degli Albizzi, in the _Violae_ and in that ode _In puellam suam_[511]

which is the Latin sister of _La brunettina_. The _Sylvae_ add a new

element of earnestness to his style; for if Poliziano felt deep and

passionate emotion, it was for Homer, Virgil and the poets praised in

the _Nutricia_, while the _Rusticus_ condenses in one picture of

marvelous fullness the outgoings of genuine emotion stimulated by his

love of the country.

Hanc, o coelicolae magni, concedite vitam!

Sic mihi delicias, sic blandimenta laborum,

Sic faciles date semper opes; hac improba sunto

Vota tenus. Nunquam certe, nunquam ilia precabor,

Splendeat ut rutilo frons invidiosa galero,

Tergeminaque gravis surgat mihi mitra corona.

That is the heart-felt prayer of Poliziano. Give me the tranquil

scholar's life among the pleasures of the fields; my books for serious

thought in studious hours; the woods and fields for recreation; with

moderate wealth well-gotten without toil; no bishop's miter or triple

tiara to vex my brows. It is the same ideal as Alberti's. From this

background of the modest rural life emerge three splendid visions--the

Golden Age, when all was plenitude and peace; Orpheus of the dulcet

lyre, evoking harmony from discord in man's jarring life; and Venus

rising from the waves to bless the world with beauty felt through art.

Such was the programme of human life sketched by the representative mind

of his century, in an age when the Italians were summoned to do battle

with France, Germany and Spain invasive of their borders.

Poliziano died before the great catastrophe. He sank at the meridian of

his fame, in the same month nearly as Pico, two years later than

Lorenzo, a little earlier than Ficino, in the year 1494, so fatal to his

country, the date that marks the boundary between two ages in Italian

history.

FOOTNOTES:

[459] Lorenzo de' Medici, b. 1448, d. 1492. Poliziano, b. 1454, d.

1494. Luigi Pulci, b. 1432, d. about 1487. Boiardo, b. about 1434, d.

1494. Sannazzaro, b. 1458, d. 1530.

[460] Machiavelli, b. 1469, d. 1527. Ariosto, b. 1474, d. 1533.

Guicciardini, b. 1482, d. 1540. Bembo, b. 1470, d. 1547. Castiglione,

b. 1478, d. 1529. La Casa, b. 1503, d. 1556. Pietro Aretino, b. 1492,

d. 1557.

[461] See _Fine Arts_, p. 183.

[462] See _Revival of Learning_, pp. 215 _et seq._; _Fine Arts_, pp.

183 _et seq._

[463] It is right to say here that considerable portions of Southern

Italy, the Marches of Ancona and Romagna, Piedmont and Liguria,

remained outside the Renaissance movement at this period.

[464] See _Age of the Despots_, pp. 277, 520, 542; _Revival of

Learning_, pp. 314-323; _Fine Arts_, pp. 263, 387. See also _Sketches

and Studies in Italy_, Article on Florence and the Medici.

[465] _Op. Lat._ p. 423.

[466] _Poesie di Lorenzo de' Medici_ (Firenze, Barbera, 1859), pp.

10-19.

[467] _Ibid._ pp. 24-34. Notice especially the verdict on Cino and

Dante, p. 33.

[468] Read for instance No. xii. in the edition cited above, "Vidi

madonna sopra un fresco rio;" No. xviii., "Con passi sparti," etc.;

No. xlvii., "Belle fresche e purpuree viole."

[469] _Ibid._ p. 97.

[470] "Tolsi donna ... ovvero mi fu data," from the _Ricordi_ printed

in the Appendix to Roscoe's _Life_.

[471] "Innamoramento," _Poesie_, pp. 58-62. Compare "Selve d'Amore,"

_ib._ pp. 172-174.

[472] _Poesie_, pp. 206-213.

[473] _Ibid._ p. 236.

[474] _Poesie_, pp. 190-194, 200-204.

[475] See the peroration to _Ambra_, in the _Sylvae_; Poliziano, _Prose

Volgari e Poesie Latine_, etc. (Firenze, 1867), p. 365: Et nos ergo

illi, etc.

[476] _Poesie_, p. 238.

[477] _Ibid._ p. 239.

[478] _Poesie_, p. 294.

[479] If anything had to be quoted from _I Beoni_, I should select the

episode of Adovardo and his humorous discourse on thirst, cap. ii.

_ib._ p. 299. For a loathsome parody of Dante see cap. v. _ib._ p.

315.

[480] The date is 1489.

[481] Especially "O Dio, o sommo bene," and "Poi ch'io gustai, Gesu;"

_ib._ pp. 444, 447. Likewise "Vieni a me;" _ib._ p. 449.

[482] Guicciardini, in his _Storia Fiorentina_ (_Op. Ined._ vol. iii.

88), writes of Lorenzo: "Fu libidinoso, e tutto venereo e constante

negli amori suoi, che duravano parecchi anni; la quale cosa, a

giudicio di molti, gli indeboli tanto il corpo, che lo fece morire, si

puo dire, giovane." Then, after describing his night-adventures

outside Florence, he proceeds: "Cosa pazza a considerare che uno di

tanta grandezza, riputazione e prudenza, di eta di anni quaranta,

fussi si preso di una dama non bella e gia piena di anni, che si

conducessi a fare cose, che sarebbono state disoneste a ogni

fanciullo."

[483] _Canzone per andare in maschera, facte da piu persone._ No place

or date or printer's name; but probably issued in the lifetime of

Lorenzo from Mongiani's press. There is a similar woodcut on the

title-page of the _Canzone a Ballo_, Firenze, 1568. It represents the

angle of the Medicean Palace in the Via Larga, girls dancing in a ring

upon the street, one with a wreath and thyrsus kneeling, another

presenting Lorenzo with a book.

[484] _Ist. Fior._ viii.; _Stor. Fior._ ix.

[485] _Trattato circa il Reggimento e Governo della Citta di Firenze_

(Florence, 1847), ii. 2.

[486] _Tutti i Trionfi, Carri, etc._, Firenze, 1559. See the edition

dated Cosmopoli, 1750.

[487] In this place should be noticed a sinister Carnival Song, by an

unknown author, which belongs, I think, to the period of Savonarola's

democracy. It is called _Trionfo del Vaglio_, or "Triumph of the

Sieve" (_Cant. Carn._ p. 33):

To the Sieve, to the Sieve, to the Sieve,

Ho, all ye folk, descend!

With groans your bosoms rend!

And find in this our Sieve

Wrath, anguish, travail, doom for all who live!

To winnow, sift and purge, full well we know,

And grind your souls like corn:

Ye who our puissance scorn,

Come ye to trial, ho!

For we will prove and show

How fares the man who enters in our Sieve.

Send us no groats nor scrannel seed nor rye,

But good fat ears of grain,

Which shall endure our strain,

And be of sturdy stuff.

Torment full stern and rough

Abides for him who resteth in our Sieve.

Who comes into this Sieve, who issues thence,

Hath tears and sighs, and mourns:

But the Sieve ever turns,

And gathers vehemence.

Ye who feel sin's offence,

Shun ye the rage, the peril of our Sieve.

A thousand times the day, our Sieve is crowned;

A thousand times 'tis drained:

Let the Sieve once be strained,

And, grain by grain, around

Ye shall behold the ground

Covered with folk, cast from the boltering Sieve.

Ye who are not well-grained and strong to bear,

Abide ye not this fate!

Penitence comes too late!

Seek ye some milder doom!

Nay, better were the tomb

Than to endure the torment of our Sieve!

[488] Life of Piero di Cosimo.

[489] Life of Pontormo.

[490] _Revival of Learning_, pp. 345-357, 452-465.

[491] Carducci, Preface to his edition of _Le Stanze, L'Orfeo e Le

Rime di Messer Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano_ (Firenze, 1863), p. xxiii.

[492] This poem must have been written between 1476, the date of

Simonetta's death, and 1478, the date of Giuliano's murder, when

Poliziano was about twenty-four. Chronology prevents us from regarding

it as the work of a boy of fourteen, as Roscoe thought, or of sixteen,

as Hallam concluded.

[493] His Latin elegies on Simonetta and on Albiera degli Albizzi, and

those Greek epigrams which Scaliger preferred to the Latin verses of

his maturity, had been already written.

[494] From _Le Stanze_, i. 7, we learn that he interrupted the

translation of the _Iliad_ in order to begin this poem in Italian. He

never took it up again. It remains a noble torso, the most splendid

extant version of a Greek poem in Latin by a modern hand.

[495] By a strange coincidence this was the anniversary of his love,

Simonetta's, death in 1476. The close connection between her untimely

end--celebrated by Lorenzo de' Medici in his earlier _Rime_, by

Poliziano in his Latin Elegy and again in the _Giostra_--and the

renascence of Italian poetry, makes her portrait by Botticelli della

Francesca in the Pitti interesting.

[496] I must refer my readers to the original, and to the translations

published by me in _Sketches and Studies in Italy_, pp. 217-224. The

description of Simonetta in the meadow (_Giostra_, i. 43 and

following) might be compared to a Florentine Idyll by Benozzo Gozzoli;

the birth of Venus from the waves (i. 99-107) is a blending of

Botticelli's _Venus_ in the Uffizzi with his _Primavera_ in the Belle

Arti; the picture of Venus in the lap of Mars (i. 122-124) might be

compared to work by Piero di Cosimo, or, since poetry embraces many

suggestions, to paintings from the schools of Venice. The

metamorphoses of Jupiter (i. 104-107) remind us of Giulio Romano. The

episode of Ariadne and the Bacchic revel (i. 110-112) is in the style

of Mantegna's engravings. All these passages will be found translated

by me in the book above quoted.

[497] I believe the _Favola di Orfeo_, first published in 1494, and

republished from time to time up to the year 1776, was the original

play acted at Mantua before the Cardinal Gonzaga. It is not divided

into acts, and has the usual "Annunziatore della Festa," of the _Sacre

Rappresentazioni_. The _Orphei Tragaedia_, published by the Padre

Ireneo Affo at Venice in 1776, from two MSS. collated by him, may be

regarded as a subsequent recension of his own work made by Poliziano.

It is divided into five acts, and is far richer in lyrical passages.

Carducci prints both in his excellent edition of Poliziano's Italian

poems. I may refer English readers to my own translation of the

_Orfeo_ and the note upon its text, _Studies and Sketches in Italy_,

pp. 226-242, 429, 430.

[498] The popularity of Poliziano's poems is proved by the frequency

of their editions. The _Orfeo_ and the _Stanze_ were printed together

or separately twenty-two times between 1494 and 1541, thirteen times

between 1541 and 1653. A redaction of the _Orfeo_ in octave stanzas

was published at Florence in 1558 for the use of the common people. It

was entitled _La Historia e Favola d'Orfeo alla dolce lira_. This

narrative version of Poliziano's play is still reprinted from time to

time for the Tuscan _contadini_. Carducci cites an edition of Prato,

1860.

[499] No one who has read Poliziano's Greek epigrams on Chrysocomus,

or who knows the scandal falsely circulated regarding his death, will

have failed to connect the sentiments put into the mouth of Orpheus

(Carducci, pp. 109-110) with the personality of the poet-scholar. That

the passage in question could have been recited with applause before a

Cardinal, is a fact of much significance.

[500] Perhaps Ficino was the first to give him this title. In a letter

of his to Lorenzo de' Medici we read: "Nutris domi Homericum ilium

adolescentem Angelum Politianum qui Graecam Homeri personam Latinis

coloribus exprimat. Exprimit jam; atque, id quod mirum est ita tenera

aetate, ita exprimit ut nisi quivis Graecum fuisse Homerum noverit

dubitaturus sit e duobus uter naturalis sit et uter pictus Homerus"

(_Ep._ ed. Flor. 1494, lib. i. p. 6). Ficino always addressed

Poliziano as "Poeta Homericus."

[501] Among the frescoes by Signorelli at Orvieto there is a _tondo_

in monochrome, representing Orpheus before the throne of Pluto. He is

dressed like a poet, with a laurel crown, and he is playing on a

violin of antique form. Medieval demons are guarding the prostrate

Eurydice. It would be curious to know whether a rumor of the Mantuan

pageant had reached the ears of the Cortonese painter, or whether he

had read the edition of 1494.

[502] The original should be read in the version first published by

the Padre Affo (Carducci, pp. 148-154). My translation will be found

in _Studies and Sketches in Italy_, pp. 235-237.

[503] "La notte esceva per Barletta (re Manfredi) cantando strambotti

e canzoni, che iva pigliando lo frisco, e con isso ivano due musici

Siciliani ch'erano gran romanzatori." M. Spinello, in _Scr. Rer.

Ital._ vii. Spinello's Chronicles are, however, probably a

sixteenth-century forgery.

[504] A letter addressed by Poliziano to Lorenzo in 1488 from

Acquapendente justifies the belief that the cultivation of popular

poetry had become a kind of pastime in the Medicean circle. He says:

"Yesterday we set off for Viterbo. We are all gay, and make good

cheer, and all along the road we whet our wits at furbishing up some

song or May-day ditty, which here in Acquapendente with their Roman

costume seem to me more fanciful than those at home." See Del Lungo's

edition of the _Prose Volgari_, etc., p. 75.

[505] See above, p. 378. For translations of several _Ballate_ by

Poliziano I may refer to my _Sketches and Studies in Italy_, pp.

190-225.

[506] For translations of detached _Rispetti_, see my _Sketches and

Studies in Italy_, p. 197.

[507] I have translated one long _Rispetto Continuato_ or _Lettera in

Istrambotti_; see _Sketches and Studies in Italy_, pp. 198-201. It is

probable that Poliziano wrote these love-poems for his young friends,

which may excuse the frequent repetitions of the same thoughts and

phrases.

[508] In Carducci's edition, pp. 342, 355, 363. The first seems to me

untranslatable. The second and third are translated by me in _Sketches

and Studies, etc._, pp. 202-207.

[509]

But she who gives my soul sorrow and mirth,

Seemed Pallas in her gait, and in her face

Venus; for every grace

And beauty of the world in her combined.

Merely to think, far more to tell my mind,

Of that most wondrous sight, confoundeth me;

For mid the maidens she

Who most resembled her was found most rare.

Call ye another first among the fair;

Not first, but sole before my lady set:

Lily and violet.

And all the flowers below the rose must bow.

Down from her royal head and lustrous brow

The golden curls fell sportively unpent.

While through the choir she went

With feet well lessoned to the rhythmic sound.

[510]

White is the maid, and white the robe around her,

With buds and roses and thin grasses pied;

Enwreathed folds of golden tresses crowned her,

Shadowing her forehead fair with modest pride:

The wild wood smiled; the thicket, where he found her,

To ease his anguish, bloomed on every side:

Serene she sits, with gesture queenly mild,

And with her brow tempers the tempests wild.

* * * * *

Reclined he found her on the swarded grass

In jocund mood; and garlands she had made

Of every flower that in the meadow was,

Or on her robe of many hues displayed;

But when she saw the youth before her pass,

Raising her timid head awhile she stayed;

Then with her white hand gathered up her dress,

And stood, lap full of flowers, in loveliness.

[511] Praised for their incomparable sweetness by Scaliger, and

translated into softest Italian by Firenzuola.