Dante’s loathing of Epicurus, or of what he took to be his doctrine, was

certainly sincere. The poet of the life to come could not but detest the

denier of immortality; and a world neither made nor ruled by God, no

less than the vulgar objects of earthly life which the system appeared

to countenance, could not but be intensely repugnant to a nature like

his. But if we look closer, we find that certain doctrines of the

ancients made even on him an impression which forced the biblical

doctrine of the Divine government into the background, unless, indeed,

it was his own reflection, the influence of opinions then prevalent, or

loathing for the injustice that seemed to rule this world, which made

him give up the belief in a special Providence.[1124] His God leaves all

the details of the world’s government to a deputy, Fortune, whose sole

work it is to change and change again all earthly things, and who can

disregard the wailings of men in unalterable beatitude. Nevertheless,

Dante does not for a moment loose his hold on the moral responsibility

of man; he believes in free will.

The belief in the freedom of the will, in the popular sense of the

words, has always prevailed in Western countries. At all times men have

been held responsible for their actions, as though this freedom were a

matter of course. The case is otherwise with the religious and

philosophical doctrine, which labours under the difficulty of

harmonising the nature of the will with the laws of the universe at

large. We have here to do with a question of more or less, which every

moral estimate must take into account. Dante is not wholly free from

those astrological superstitions which illumined the horizon of his time

with deceptive light, but they do not hinder him from rising to a worthy

conception of human nature. ‘The stars,’ he makes his Marco Lombardo

say,[1125] ‘the stars give the first impulse to your actions,’ but

Light has been given you for good and evil

And free volition; which, if some fatigue

In the first battles with the heavens it suffers,

Afterwards conquers all, if well ‘tis nurtured.

Others might seek the necessity which annulled human freedom in another

power than the stars, but the question was henceforth an open and

inevitable one. So far as it was a question for the schools or the

pursuit of isolated thinkers, its treatment belongs to the historian of

philosophy. But inasmuch as it entered into the consciousness of a wider

public, it is necessary for us to say a few words respecting it.

The fourteenth century was chiefly stimulated by the writings of Cicero,

who, though in fact an eclectic, yet, by his habit of setting forth the

opinions of different schools, without coming to a decision between

them, exercised the influence of a sceptic. Next in importance came

Seneca, and the few works of Aristotle which had been translated into

Latin. The immediate fruit of these studies was the capacity to reflect

on great subjects, if not in direct opposition to the authority of the

Church, at all events independently of it.

In the course of the fifteenth century the works of antiquity were

discovered and diffused with extraordinary rapidity. All the writings of

the Greek philosophers which we ourselves possess were now, at least in

the form of Latin translations, in everybody’s hands. It is a curious

fact that some of the most zealous apostles of this new culture were men

of the strictest piety, or even ascetics (p. 273). Fra Ambrogio

Camaldolese, as a spiritual dignitary chiefly occupied with

ecclesiastical affairs, and as a literary man with the translation of

the Greek Fathers of the Church, could not repress the humanistic

impulse, and at the request of Cosimo de’Medici, undertook to translate

Diogenes Laertius into Latin.[1126] His contemporaries, Niccolò Niccoli,

Griannozzo Manetti, Donato Acciajuoli, and Pope Nicholas V.,[1127]

united to a many-sided humanism profound biblical scholarship and deep

piety. In Vittorino da Feltre the same temper has been already noticed

(p. 213 sqq.). The same Matthew Vegio, who added a thirteenth book to

the ‘Æneid,’ had an enthusiasm for the memory of St. Augustine and his

mother Monica which cannot have been without a deeper influence upon

him. The result of all these tendencies was that the Platonic Academy at

Florence deliberately chose for its object the reconciliation of the

spirit of antiquity with that of Christianity. It was a remarkable oasis

in the humanism of the period.[1128]

This humanism was in fact pagan, and became more and more so as its

sphere widened in the fifteenth century. Its representatives, whom we

have already described as the advanced guard of an unbridled

individualism, display as a rule such a character that even their

religion, which is sometimes professed very definitely, becomes a matter

of indifference to us. They easily got the name of atheists, if they

showed themselves indifferent to religion, and spoke freely against the

Church; but not one of them ever professed, or dared to profess, a

formal, philosophical atheism.[1129] If they sought for any leading

principle, it must have been a kind of superficial rationalism--a

careless inference from the many and contradictory opinions of antiquity

with which they busied themselves, and from the discredit into which the

Church and her doctrines had fallen. This was the sort of reasoning

which was near bringing Galeottus Martius[1130] to the stake, had not

his former pupil, Pope Sixtus IV., perhaps at the request of Lorenzo

de’Medici, saved him from the hands of the Inquisition. Galeotto had

ventured to write that the man who walked uprightly, and acted according

to the natural law born within him, would go to heaven, whatever nation

he belonged to.

Let us take, by way of example, the religious attitude of one of the

smaller men in the great army. Codrus Urceus[1131] was first the tutor

of the last Ordelaffo, Prince of Forlì, and afterwards for many years

professor at Bologna. Against the Church and the monks his language is

as abusive as that of the rest. His tone in general is reckless to the

last degree, and he constantly introduces himself in all his local

history and gossip. But he knows how to speak to edification of the true

God-Man, Jesus Christ, and to commend himself by letter to the prayers

of a saintly priest.[1132] On one occasion, after enumerating the

follies of the pagan religions, he thus goes on: ‘Our theologians, too,

fight and quarrel “de lana caprina,” about the Immaculate Conception,

Antichrist, Sacraments, Predestination, and other things, which were

better let alone than talked of publicly.’ Once, when he was not at

home, his room and manuscripts were burnt. When he heard the news he

stood opposite a figure of the Madonna in the street, and cried to it:

‘Listen to what I tell you; I am not mad, I am saying what I mean. If I

ever call upon you in the hour of my death, you need not hear me or take

me among your own, for I will go and spend eternity with the

devil.’[1133] After which speech he found it desirable to spend six

months in retirement at the house of a wood-cutter. With all this, he

was so superstitious that prodigies and omens gave him incessant

frights, leaving him no belief to spare for the immortality of the soul.

When his hearers questioned him on the matter, he answered that no one

knew what became of a man, of his soul or his body, after death, and the

talk about another life was only fit to frighten old women. But when he

came to die, he commended in his will his soul or his spirit[1134] to

Almighty God, exhorted his weeping pupils to fear the Lord, and

especially to believe in immortality and future retribution, and

received the Sacrament with much fervour. We have no guarantee that more

famous men in the same calling, however significant their opinions may

be, were in practical life any more consistent. It is probable that most

of them wavered inwardly between incredulity and a remnant of the faith

in which they were brought up, and outwardly held for prudential reasons

to the Church.

Through the connexion of rationalism with the newly born science of

historical investigation, some timid attempts at biblical criticism may

here and there have been made. A saying of Pius II.[1135] has been

recorded, which seems intended to prepare the way for such criticism:

‘Even if Christianity were not confirmed by miracles, it ought still to

be accepted on account of its morality.’ When Lorenzo Valla calls Moses

and the Evangelists historians, he does not seek to diminish their

dignity and reputation; but is nevertheless conscious that in these

words lies as decided a contradiction to the traditional view taken by

the Church, as in the denial that the Apostles’ Creed was the work of

all the Apostles, or that the letter of Abgarus to Christ was

genuine.[1136] The legends of the Church, in so far as they contained

arbitrary versions of the biblical miracles, were freely

ridiculed,[1137] and this reacted on the religious sense of the people.

Where Judaising heretics are mentioned, we must understand chiefly those

who denied the Divinity of Christ, which was probably the offence for

which Giorgio da Novara was burnt at Bologna about the year 1500.[1138]

But again at Bologna in the year 1497 the Dominican Inquisitor was

forced to let the physician Gabrielle da Salò, who had powerful patrons,

escape with a simple expression of penitence,[1139] although he was in

the habit of maintaining that Christ was not God, but son of Joseph and

Mary, and conceived in the usual way; that by his cunning he had

deceived the world to its ruin; that he may have died on the cross on

account of crimes which he had committed; that his religion would soon

come to an end; that his body was not really contained in the sacrament,

and that he performed his miracles, not through any divine power, but

through the influence of the heavenly bodies. This latter statement is

most characteristic of the time, Faith is gone, but magic still holds

its ground.[1140]

A worse fate befell a Canon of Bergamo, Zanino de Solcia, a few years

earlier (1459), who had asserted that Christ did not suffer from love to

man, but under the influence of the stars, and who advanced other

curious scientific and moral ideas. He was forced to abjure his errors,

and paid for them by perpetual imprisonment.[1141]

With respect to the moral government of the world, the humanists seldom

get beyond a cold and resigned consideration of the prevalent violence

and misrule. In this mood the many works ‘On Fate,’ or whatever name

they bear, are written. They tell of the turning of the wheel of

Fortune, and of the instability of earthly, especially political,

things. Providence is only brought in because the writers would still be

ashamed of undisguised fatalism, of the avowal of their ignorance, or of

useless complaints. Gioviano Pontano[1142] ingeniously illustrates the

nature of that mysterious something which men call Fortune by a hundred

incidents, most of which belonged to his own experience. The subject is

treated more humorously by Æneas Sylvius, in the form of a vision seen

in a dream.[1143] The aim of Poggio, on the other hand, in a work

written in his old age,[1144] is to represent the world as a vale of

tears, and to fix the happiness of various classes as low as possible.

This tone became in future the prevalent one. Distinguished men drew up

a debit and credit of the happiness and unhappiness of their lives, and

generally found that the latter outweighed the former. The fate of Italy

and the Italians, so far as it could be told in the year 1510, has been

described with dignity and an almost elegiac pathos by Tristano

Caracciolo.[1145] Applying this general tone of feeling to the

humanists themselves, Pierio Valeriano afterwards composed his famous

treatise (pp. 276-279). Some of these themes, such as the fortunes of

Leo, were most suggestive. All the good that can be said of him

politically has been briefly and admirably summed up by Francesco

Vettori; the picture of Leo’s pleasures is given by Paolo Giovio and in

the anonymous biography;[1146] and the shadows which attended his

prosperity are drawn with inexorable truth by the same Pierio Valeriano.

We cannot, on the other hand, read without a kind of awe how men

sometimes boasted of their fortune in public inscriptions. Giovanni II.

Bentivoglio, ruler of Bologna, ventured to carve in stone on the newly

built tower by his palace, that his merit and his fortune had given him

richly of all that could be desired[1147]--and this a few years before

his expulsion. The ancients, when they spoke in this tone, had

nevertheless a sense of the envy of the gods. In Italy it was probably

the Condottieri (p. 22) who first ventured to boast so loudly of their

fortune.

But the way in which resuscitated antiquity affected religion most

powerfully, was not through any doctrines or philosophical system, but

through a general tendency which it fostered. The men, and in some

respects the institutions of antiquity were preferred to those of the

Middle Ages, and in the eager attempt to imitate and reproduce them,

religion was left to take care of itself. All was absorbed in the

admiration for historical greatness (part ii. chap. iii., and above,

_passim_). To this the philologians added many special follies of their

own, by which they became the mark for general attention. How far Paul

II. was justified in calling his Abbreviators and their friends to

account for their paganism, is certainly a matter of great doubt, as his

biographer and chief victim, Platina, (pp. 231, 331) has shown a

masterly skill in explaining his vindictiveness on other grounds, and

especially in making him play a ludicrous figure. The charges of

infidelity, paganism,[1148] denial of immortality, and so forth, were

not made against the accused till the charge of high treason had broken

down. Paul, indeed, if we are correctly informed about him, was by no

means the man to judge of intellectual things. He knew little Latin, and

spoke Italian at Consistories and in diplomatic negotiations. It was he

who exhorted the Romans to teach their children nothing beyond reading

and writing. His priestly narrowness of view reminds us of Savonarola

(p. 476), with the difference that Paul might fairly have been told that

he and his like were in great part to blame if culture made men hostile

to religion. It cannot, nevertheless, be doubted that he felt a real

anxiety about the pagan tendencies which surrounded him. And what, in

truth, may not the humanists have allowed themselves at the court of the

profligate pagan, Sigismondo Malatesta? How far these men, destitute for

the most part of fixed principle, ventured to go, depended assuredly on

the sort of influences they were exposed to. Nor could they treat of

Christianity without paganising it (part iii. chap. x.). It is curious,

for instance, to notice how far Gioviano Pontano carried this confusion.

He speaks of a saint not only as ‘divus,’ but as ‘deus;’ the angels he

holds to be identical with the genii of antiquity;[1149] and his notion

of immortality reminds us of the old kingdom of the shades. This spirit

occasionally appears in the most extravagant shapes. In 1526, when Siena

was attacked by the exiled party,[1150] the worthy canon Tizio, who

tells us the story himself, rose from his bed on the 22nd July, called

to mind what is written in the third book of Macrobius,’[1151]

celebrated mass, and then pronounced against the enemy the curse with

which his author had supplied him, only altering ‘Tellus mater teque

Juppiter obtestor’ into ‘Tellus teque Christe Deus obtestor.’ After he

had done this for three days, the enemy retreated. On the one side,

these things strike us an affair of mere style and fashion; on the

other, as a symptom of religious decadence.

CHAPTER IV.

MIXTURE OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SUPERSTITION.

But in another way, and that dogmatically, antiquity exercised a

perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of

superstition. Some fragments of this had survived in Italy all through

the Middle Ages, and the resuscitation of the whole was thereby made so

much the more easy. The part played by the imagination in the process

need not be dwelt upon. This only could have silenced the critical

intellect of the Italians.

The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds

destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like

Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance,

and if they nevertheless retained a sturdy faith, it was because they

held that the higher destiny of man would be accomplished in the life to

come. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism

got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the

former as its consequence.

The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of

antiquity, or even of the Arabians. From the relations of the planets

among themselves and to the signs of the zodiac, future events and the

course of whole lives were inferred, and the most weighty decisions were

taken in consequence. In many cases the line of action thus adopted at

the suggestion of the stars may not have been more immoral than that

which would otherwise have been followed. But too often the decision

must have been made at the cost of honour and conscience. It is

profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and

enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its

support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish

to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side

of astrology.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century this superstition suddenly

appeared in the foreground of Italian life. The Emperor Frederick II.

always travelled with his astrologer Theodorus; and Ezzelino da

Romano[1152] with a large, well-paid court of such people, among them

the famous Guido Bonatto and the long-bearded Saracen, Paul of Bagdad.

In all important undertakings they fixed for him the day and the hour,

and the gigantic atrocities of which he was guilty may have been in part

practical inferences from their prophecies. Soon all scruples about

consulting the stars ceased. Not only princes, but free cities[1153] had

their regular astrologers, and at the universities,[1154] from the

fourteenth to the sixteenth century, professors of this pseudo-science

were appointed, and lectured side by side with the astronomers. It was

well known that Augustine and other Fathers of the Church had combated

astrology, but their old-fashioned notions were dismissed with easy

contempt.[1155] The Popes[1156] commonly made no secret of their

star-gazing, though Pius II., who also despised magic, omens, and the

interpretation of dreams, is an honourable exception.[1157] Julius II.,

on the other hand, had the day for his coronation and the day for his

return from Bologna calculated by the astrologers.[1158] Even Leo X.

seems to have thought the flourishing condition of astrology a credit to

his pontificate,[1159] and Paul III. never held a Consistory till the

star-gazers had fixed the hour.[1160]

It may fairly be assumed that the better natures did not allow their

actions to be determined by the stars beyond a certain point, and that

there was a limit where conscience and religion made them pause. In

fact, not only did pious and excellent people share the delusion, but

they actually came forward to profess it publicly. One of these was

Maestro Pagolo of Florence,[1161] in whom we can detect the same desire

to turn astrology to moral account which meets us in the late Roman

Firmicus Maternus.[1162] His life was that of a saintly ascetic. He ate

almost nothing, despised all temporal goods, and only collected books. A

skilled physician, he only practised among his friends, and made it a

condition of his treatment that they should confess their sins. He

frequented the small but famous circle which assembled in the Monastery

of the Angeli around Fra Ambrogio Camaldolese (p. 463). He also saw much

of Cosimo the Elder, especially in his last years; for Cosimo accepted

and used astrology, though probably only for objects of lesser

importance. As a rule, however, Pagolo only interpreted the stars to his

most confidential friends. But even without this severity of morals, the

astrologers might be highly respected and show themselves everywhere.

There were also far more of them in Italy than in other European

countries, where they only appeared at the great courts, and there not

always. All the great householders in Italy, when the fashion was once

established, kept an astrologer, who, it must be added, was not always

sure of his dinner.[1163] Through the literature of this science, which

was widely diffused even before the invention of printing, a

dilettantism also grew up which as far as possible followed in the steps

of the masters. The worst class of astrologers were those who used the

stars either as an aid or a cloak to magical arts.

Yet apart from the latter, astrology is a miserable feature in the life

of that time. What a figure do all these highly gifted, many-sided,

original characters play, when the blind passion for knowing and

determining the future dethrones their powerful will and resolution! Now

and then, when the stars send them too cruel a message, they manage to

brace themselves up, act for themselves, and say boldly: ‘Vir sapiens

dominabitur astris’--the wise man is master of the stars,[1164] and then

again relapse into the old delusion.

In all the better families the horoscope of the children was drawn as a

matter of course, and it sometimes happened that for half a lifetime men

were haunted by the idle expectation of events which never occurred. The

stars[1165] were questioned whenever a great man had to come to any

important decision, and even consulted as to the hour at which any

undertaking was to be begun. The journeys of princes, the reception of

foreign ambassadors,[1166] the laying of the foundation-stone of public

buildings, depended on the answer. A striking instance of the latter

occurs in the life of the aforenamed Guido Bonatto, who by his personal

activity and by his great systematic work on the subject[1167] deserves

to be called the restorer of astrology in the thirteenth century. In

order to put an end to the struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines at

Forli, he persuaded the inhabitants to rebuild the city walls and to

begin the works under a constellation indicated by himself. If then two

men, one from each party, at the same moment put a stone into the

foundation, there would henceforth and for ever be no more party

divisions in Forli. A Guelph and a Ghibelline were selected for this

office; the solemn moment arrived, each held the stone in his hands, the

workmen stood ready with their implements, Bonatto gave the signal and

the Ghibelline threw down his stone on to the foundation. But the Guelph

hesitated, and at last refused to do anything at all, on the ground that

Bonatto himself had the reputation of a Ghibelline and might be

devising some mysterious mischief against the Guelphs. Upon which the

astrologer addressed him: ‘God damn thee and the Guelph party, with your

distrustful malice! This constellation will not appear above our city

for 500 years to come.’ In fact God soon afterwards did destroy the

Guelphs of Forli, but now, writes the chronicler about 1480, the two

parties are thoroughly reconciled, and their very names are heard no

longer.[1168]

Nothing that depended upon the stars was more important than decisions

in time of war. The same Bonatto procured for the great Ghibelline

leader Guido da Montefeltro a series of victories, by telling him the

propitious hour for marching.[1169] When Montefeltro was no longer

accompanied by him[1170] he lost the courage to maintain his despotism,

and entered a Minorite monastery, where he lived as a monk for many

years till his death. In the war with Pisa in 1362, the Florentines

commissioned their astrologer to fix the hour for the march,[1171] and

almost came too late through suddenly receiving orders to take a

circuitous route through the city. On former occasions they had marched

out by the Via di Borgo S. Apostolo, and the campaign had been

unsuccessful. It was clear that there was some bad omen connected with

the exit through this street against Pisa, and consequently the army was

now led out by the Porta Rossa. But as the tents stretched out there to

dry had not been taken away, the flags--another bad omen--had to be

lowered. The influence of astrology in war was confirmed by the fact

that nearly all the Condottieri believed in it. Jacopo Caldora was

cheerful in the most serious illness, knowing that he was fated to fall

in battle, which in fact happened.[1172] Bartolommeo Alviano was

convinced that his wounds in the head were as much a gift of the stars

as his military command.[1173] Niccolò Orsini Pitigliano asked the

physicist and astrologer Alessandro Benedetto[1174] to fix a favourable

hour for the conclusion of his bargain with Venice (1495). When the

Florentines on June 1, 1498, solemnly invested their new Condottiere

Paolo Vitelli with his office, the Marshal’s staff which they handed

him was, at his own wish, decorated with pictures of the

constellations.[1175] There were nevertheless generals like Alphonso the

Great of Naples who did not allow their march to be settled by the

prophets.[1176]

Sometimes it is not easy to make out whether in important political

events the stars were questioned beforehand, or whether the astrologers

were simply impelled afterwards by curiosity to find out the

constellation which decided the result. When Giangaleazzo Visconti (p.

12) by a master-stroke of policy took prisoners his uncle Bernabò, with

the latter’s family (1385), we are told by a contemporary, that Jupiter,

Saturn, and Mars stood in the house of the Twins,[1177] but we cannot

say if the deed was resolved on in consequence. It is also probable that

the advice of the astrologers was often determined by political

calculation not less than by the course of the planets.[1178]

All Europe, through the latter part of the Middle Ages, had allowed

itself to be terrified by predictions of plagues, wars, floods, and

earthquakes, and in this respect Italy was by no means behind other

countries. The unlucky year 1494, which for ever opened the gates of

Italy to the stranger, was undeniably ushered in by many prophecies of

misfortune[1179]--only we cannot say whether such prophecies were not

ready for each and every year.

This mode of thought was extended with thorough consistency into regions

where we should hardly expect to meet with it. If the whole outward and

spiritual life of the individual is determined by the facts of his

birth, the same law also governs groups of individuals and historical

products--that is to say, nations and religions; and as the

constellation of these things changes, so do the things themselves. The

idea that each religion has its day, first came into Italian culture in

connexion with these astrological beliefs, chiefly from Jewish and

Arabian sources.[1180] The conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn brought

forth, we are told,[1181] the faith of Israel; that of Jupiter and Mars,

the Chaldean; with the Sun, the Egyptian; with Venus, the Mohammedan;

with Mercury, the Christian; and the conjunction of Jupiter with the

Moon will one day bring forth the religion of Antichrist. Checco

d’Ascoli had already blasphemously calculated the nativity of Christ,

and deduced from it his death upon the cross. For this he was burnt at

the stake in 1327, at Florence.[1182] Doctrines of this sort ended by

simply darkening men’s whole perceptions of spiritual things.

So much more worthy then of recognition is the warfare which the clear

Italian spirit waged against this army of delusions. Notwithstanding the

great monumental glorification of astrology, as in the frescos in the

Salone at Padua,[1183] and those in Borso’s summer palace (Schifanoja),

at Ferrara, notwithstanding the shameless praises of even such a man as

the elder Beroaldus,[1184] there was no want of thoughtful and

independent minds to protest against it. Here, too, the way had been

prepared by antiquity, but it was their own common sense and observation

which taught them what to say. Petrarch’s attitude towards the

astrologers, whom he knew by personal intercourse, is one of bitter

contempt;[1185] and no one saw through their system of lies more clearly

than he. The novels, from the time when they first began to appear--from

the time of the ‘Cento novelle antiche,’ are almost always hostile to

the astrologers.[1186] The Florentine chroniclers bravely keep

themselves free from the delusions which, as part of historical

tradition, they are compelled to record. Giovanni Villani says more than

once,[1187] ‘No constellation can subjugate either the free will of man,

or the counsels of God.’ Matteo Villani[1188] declares astrology to be a

vice which the Florentines had inherited, along with other

superstitions, from their pagan ancestors, the Romans. The question,

however, did not remain one for mere literary discussion, but the

parties for and against disputed publicly. After the terrible floods of

1333, and again in 1345, astrologers and theologians discussed with

great minuteness the influence of the stars, the will of God, and the

justice of his punishments.[1189] These struggles never ceased

throughout the whole time of the Renaissance,[1190] and we may conclude

that the protestors were in earnest, since it was easier for them to

recommend themselves to the great by defending, than by opposing

astrology.

In the circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent, among his most distinguished

Platonists, opinions were divided on this question. That Marsilio Ficino

defended astrology, and drew the horoscope of the children of the house,

promising the little Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., that he would one day

be Pope,[1191] as Giovio would have us believe, is an invention--but

other academicians accepted astrology. Pico della Mirandola,[1192] on

the other hand, made an epoch in the subject by his famous refutation.

He detects in this belief the root of all impiety and immorality. If the

astrologer, he maintains, believes in anything at all, he must worship

not God, but the planets, from which all good and evil are derived. All

other superstitions find a ready instrument in astrology, which serves

as handmaid to geomancy, chiromancy, and magic of every kind. As to

morality, he maintains that nothing can more foster evil than the

opinion that heaven itself is the cause of it, in which case the faith

in eternal happiness and punishment must also disappear. Pico even took

the trouble to check off the astrologers inductively, and found that in

the course of a month three-fourths of their weather prophecies turned

out false. But his main achievement was to set forth, in the Fourth

Book--a positive Christian doctrine of the freedom of the will and the

government of the universe, which seems to have made a greater

impression on the educated classes throughout Italy than all the

revivalist preachers put together. The latter, in fact, often failed to

reach these classes.

The first result of his book was that the astrologers ceased to publish

their doctrines,[1193] and those who had already printed them were more

or less ashamed of what they had done. Gioviano Pontano, for example, in

his book on Fate (p. 503), had recognised the science, and in a great

work of his own,[1194] the several parts of which were dedicated to his

highly-placed friends and fellow-believers, Aldo Manucci, P. Bembo, and

Sandazaro, had expounded the whole theory of it in the style of the old

Firmicus, ascribing to the stars the growth of every bodily and

spiritual quality. He now in his dialogue ‘Ægidius,’ surrendered, if not

astrology, at least certain astrologers, and sounded the praises of free

will, by which man is enabled to know God.[1195] Astrology remained more

or less in fashion, but seems not to have governed human life in the way

it formerly had done. The art of painting, which in the fifteenth

century had done its best to foster the delusion, now expressed the

altered tone of thought. Raphael, in the cupola of the Cappella

Chigi,[1196] represents the gods of the different planets and the starry

firmament, watched, however, and guided by beautiful angel-figures, and

receiving from above the blessing of the Eternal Father. There was also

another cause which now began to tell against astrology in Italy. The

Spaniards took no interest in it, not even the generals, and those who

wished to gain their favour[1197] declared open war against the

half-heretical, half-Mohammedan science. It is true that

Guicciardini[1198] writes in the year 1529: ‘How happy are the

astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies,

while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred

truths.’ But the contempt for astrology did not necessarily lead to a

return to the belief in Providence. It could as easily lead to an

indefinite Fatalism.

In this respect, as in others, Italy was unable to make its own way

healthily through the ferment of the Renaissance, because the foreign

invasion and the Counter-Reformation came upon it in the middle. Without

such interfering causes its own strength would have enabled it

thoroughly to get rid of these fantastic illusions. Those who hold that

the onslaught of the strangers and the Catholic reactions were

necessities for which the Italian people was itself solely responsible,

will look on the spiritual bankruptcy which they produced as a just

retribution. But it is a pity that the rest of Europe had indirectly to

pay so large a part of the penalty.

The beliefs in omens seems a much more innocent matter than astrology.

The Middle Ages had everywhere inherited them in abundance from the

various pagan religions; and Italy did not differ in this respect from

other countries. What is characteristic of Italy is the support lent by

humanism to the popular superstition. The pagan inheritance was here

backed up by a pagan literary development.

The popular superstition of the Italians rested largely on premonitions

and inferences drawn from ominous occurrences,[1199] with which a good

deal of magic, mostly of an innocent sort, was connected. There was,

however, no lack of learned humanists who boldly ridiculed these

delusions, and to whose attacks we partly owe the knowledge of them.

Gioviano Pontano; the author of the great astrological work already

mentioned (p. 280), enumerates with pity in his ‘Charon,’ a long string

of Neapolitan superstitions--the grief of the women when a fowl or a

goose caught the pip; the deep anxiety of the nobility if a hunting

falcon did not come home, or if a horse sprained his foot; the magical

formulæ of the Apulian peasants, recited on three Saturday evenings,

when mad dogs were at large. The animal kingdom, as in antiquity, was

regarded as specially significant in this respect, and the behaviour of

the lions, leopards, and other beasts kept by the State (p. 293 sqq.)

gave the people all the more food for reflection, because they had come

to be considered as living symbols of the State. During the siege of

Florence, in 1529, an eagle which had been shot at fled into the city,

and the Signoria gave the bearer four ducats, because the omen was

good.[1200] Certain times and places were favourable or unfavourable, or

even decisive one way or the other, for certain actions. The

Florentines, so Varchi tells us, held Saturday to be the fateful day on

which all important events, good as well as bad, commonly happened.

Their prejudice against marching out to war through a particular street

has been already mentioned (p. 512). At Perugia one of the gates, the

‘Porta eburnea,’ was thought lucky, and the Baglioni always went out to

fight through it.[1201] Meteors and the appearance of the heavens were

as significant in Italy as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, and the popular

imagination saw warring armies in an unusual formation of clouds, and

heard the clash of their collision high in the air.[1202] The

superstition became a more serious matter when it attached itself to

sacred things, when figures of the Virgin wept or moved the eyes,[1203]

or when public calamities were associated with some alleged act of

impiety, for which the people demanded expiation. In 1478, when

Piacenza was visited with a violent and prolonged rainfall, it was said

that there would be no dry weather till a certain usurer, who had been

lately buried at San Francesco, had ceased to rest in consecrated earth.

As the bishop was not obliging enough to have the corpse dug up, the

young fellows of the town took it by force, dragged it round the streets

amid frightful confusion, offered it to be insulted and maltreated by

former creditors, and at last threw it into the Po.[1204] Even Politian

accepted this point of view in speaking of Giacomo Pazzi, one of the

chief of the conspiracy of 1478, in Florence, which is called after his

name. When he was put to death, he devoted his soul to Satan with

fearful words. Here, too, rain followed and threatened to ruin the

harvest; here, too, a party of men, mostly peasants, dug up the body in

the church, and immediately the clouds departed and the sun shone--‘so

gracious was fortune to the opinion of the people,’ adds the great

scholar.[1205] The corpse was first cast into unhallowed ground, the

next day again dug up, and after a horrible procession through the city,

thrown into the Arno.

These facts and the like bear a popular character, and might have

occurred in the tenth, just as well as in the sixteenth century. But now

comes the literary influence of antiquity. We know positively that the

humanists were peculiarly accessible to prodigies and auguries, and

instances of this have been already quoted. If further evidence were

needed, it would be found in Poggio. The same radical thinker who denied

the rights of noble birth and the inequality of men (p. 361 sqq.), not

only believed in all the mediæval stories of ghosts and devils (fol.

167, 179), but also in prodigies after the ancient pattern, like those

said to have occurred on the last visit of Eugenius IV. to

Florence.[1206] ‘Near Como there was seen one evening 4,000 dogs, who

took the road to Germany; these were followed by a great herd of cattle,

and these by an army on foot and horseback, some with no heads and some

with almost invisible heads, and then a gigantic horseman with another

herd of cattle behind him.’ Poggio also believes in a battle of magpies

and jackdaws (fol. 180). He even relates, perhaps without being aware of

it, a well-preserved piece of ancient mythology. On the Dalmatian coast

a Triton had appeared, bearded and horned, a genuine sea-satyr, ending

in fins and a tail; he carried away women and children from the shore,

till five stout-hearted washer-women killed him with sticks and

stones.[1207] A wooden model of the monster, which was exhibited at

Ferrara, makes the whole story credible to Poggio. Though there were no

more oracles, and it was no longer possible to take counsel of the gods,

yet it became again the fashion to open Virgil at hazard, and take the

passage hit upon as an omen[1208] (‘Sortes Virgilianae’). Nor can the

belief in dæmons current in the later period of antiquity have been

without influence on the Renaissance. The work of Jamblichus or Abammon

on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, which may have contributed to this

result, was printed in a Latin translation at the end of the fifteenth

century. The Platonic Academy at Florence was not free from these and

other neo-platonic dreams of the Roman decadence. A few words must here

be given to the belief in dæmons and to the magic which was connected

with this belief.

The popular faith in what is called the spirit-world was nearly the

same in Italy as elsewhere in Europe.[1209] In Italy as elsewhere there

were ghosts, that is, reappearances of deceased persons; and if the view

taken of them differed in any respect from that which prevailed in the

North, the difference betrayed itself only in the ancient name ‘ombra.’

Nowadays if such a shade presents itself, a couple of masses are said

for its repose. That the spirits of bad men appear in a dreadful shape,

is a matter of course, but along with this we find the notion that the

ghosts of the departed are universally malicious. The dead, says the

priest in Bandello,[1210] kill the little children. It seems as if a

certain shade was here thought of as separate from the soul, since the

latter suffers in Purgatory, and when it appears, does nothing but wail

and pray. To lay the ghost, the tomb was opened, the corpse pulled to

pieces, the heart burned and the ashes scattered to the four

winds.[1211] At other times what appears is not the ghost of a man, but

of an event--of a past condition of things. So the neighbours explained

the diabolical appearances in the old palace of the Visconti near San

Giovanni in Conca, at Milan, since here it was that Bernabò Visconti had

caused countless victims of his tyranny to be tortured and strangled,

and no wonder if there were strange things to be seen.[1212] One evening

a swarm of poor people with candles in their hands appeared to a

dishonest guardian of the poor at Perugia, and danced round about him; a

great figure spoke in threatening tones on their behalf--it was St.

Alò, the patron saint of the poor-house.[1213] These modes of belief

were so much a matter of course that the poets could make use of them as

something which every reader would understand. The appearance of the

slain Ludovico Pico under the walls of the besieged Mirandola is finely

represented by Castiglione.[1214] It is true that poetry made the freest

use of these conceptions when the poet himself had outgrown them.

Italy, too, shared the belief in dæmons with the other nations of the

Middle Ages. Men were convinced that God sometimes allowed bad spirits

of every class to exercise a destructive influence on parts of the world

and of human life. The only reservation made was that the man to whom

the Evil One came as tempter, could use his free will to resist.[1215]

In Italy the dæmonic influence, especially as shown in natural events,

easily assumed a character of poetical greatness. In the night before

the great inundation of the Val d’Arno in 1333, a pious hermit above

Vallombrosa heard a diabolical tumult in his cell, crossed himself,

stepped to the door, and saw a crowd of black and terrible knights

gallop by in armour. When conjured to stand, one of them said: ‘We go to

drown the city of Florence on account of its sins, if God will let

us.’[1216] With this, the nearly contemporary vision at Venice (1340)

may be compared, out of which a great master of the Venetian school,

probably Giorgione, made the marvellous picture of a galley full of

dæmons, which speeds with the swiftness of a bird over the stormy lagune

to destroy the sinful island-city, till the three saints, who have

stepped unobserved into a poor boatman’s skiff, exorcised the fiends and

sent them and their vessel to the bottom of the waters.[1217]

To this belief the illusion was now added that by means of magical arts

it was possible to enter into relations with the evil ones, and use

their help to further the purposes of greed, ambition, and sensuality.

Many persons were probably accused of doing so before the time when it

was actually attempted by many; but when the so-called magicians and

witches began to be burned, the deliberate practice of the black art

became more frequent. With the smoke of the fires in which the suspected

victims were sacrificed, were spread the narcotic fumes by which numbers

of ruined characters were drugged into magic; and with them many

calculating impostors became associated.

The primitive and popular form in which the superstition had probably

lived on uninterruptedly from the time of the Romans,[1218] was the art

of the witch (Strega). The witch, so long as she limited herself to mere

divination,[1219] might be innocent enough, were it not that the

transition from prophecy to active help could easily, though often

imperceptibly, be a fatal downward step. She was credited in such a case

not only with the power of exciting love or hatred between man and

woman, but also with purely destructive and malignant arts, and was

especially charged with the sickness of little children, even when the

malady obviously came from the neglect and stupidity of the parents. It

is still questionable how far she was supposed to act by mere magical

ceremonies and formulæ, or by a conscious alliance with the fiends,

apart from the poisons and drugs which she administered with a full

knowledge of their effect.

The more innocent form of the superstition, in which the mendicant friar

could venture to appear as the competitor of the witch, is shown in the

case of the witch of Gaeta whom we read of in Pontano.[1220] His

traveller Suppatius reaches her dwelling while she is giving audience to

a girl and a servant-maid, who come to her with a black hen, nine eggs

laid on a Friday, a duck, and some white thread--for it is the third day

since the new moon. They are then sent away, and bidden to come again at

twilight. It is to be hoped that nothing worse than divination is

intended. The mistress of the servant-maid is pregnant by a monk; the

girl’s lover has proved untrue and has gone into a monastery. The witch

complains: ‘Since my husband’s death I support myself in this way, and

should make a good thing of it, since the Gaetan women have plenty of

faith, were it not that the monks baulk me of my gains by explaining

dreams, appeasing the anger of the saints for money, promising husbands

to the girls, men-children to the pregnant women, offspring to the

barren, and besides all this visiting the women at night when their

husbands are away fishing, in accordance with the assignations made in

day-time at church.’ Suppatius warns her against the envy of the

monastery, but she has no fear, since the guardian of it is an old

acquaintance of hers.[1221]

But the superstition further gave rise to a worse sort of witches,

namely those who deprived men of their health and life. In these cases

the mischief, when not sufficiently accounted for by the evil eye and

the like, was naturally attributed to the aid of powerful spirits. The

punishment, as we have seen in the case of Finicella (p. 469), was the

stake; and yet a compromise with fanaticism was sometimes practicable.

According to the laws of Perugia, for example, a witch could settle the

affair by paying down 400 pounds.[1222] The matter was not then treated

with the seriousness and consistency of later times. In the territories

of the Church, at Norcia (Nursia), the home of St. Benedict, in the

upper Apennines, there was a perfect nest of witches and sorcerers, and

no secret was made of it. It is spoken of in one of the most remarkable

letters of Æneas Sylvius,[1223] belonging to his earlier period. He

writes to his brother: ‘The bearer of this came to me to ask if I knew

of a Mount of Venus in Italy, for in such a place magical arts were

taught, and his master, a Saxon and a great astronomer,[1224] was

anxious to learn them. I told him that I knew of a Porto Venere not far

from Carrara, on the rocky coast of Liguria, where I spent three nights

on the way to Basel; I also found that there was a mountain called Eryx

in Sicily, which was dedicated to Venus, but I did not know whether

magic was taught there. But it came into my mind while talking that in

Umbria, in the old Duchy (Spoleto), near the town of Nursia, there is a

cave beneath a steep rock, in which water flows. There, as I remember to

have heard, are witches (striges), dæmons, and nightly shades, and he

that has the courage can see and speak to ghosts (spiritus), and learn

magical arts.[1225] I have not seen it, nor taken any trouble about it,

for that which is learned with sin is better not learned at all.’ He

nevertheless names his informant, and begs his brother to take the

bearer of the letter to him, should he be still alive. Æneas goes far

enough here in his politeness to a man of position, but personally he

was not only freer from superstition than his contemporaries (pp. 481,

508), but he also stood a test on the subject which not every educated

man of our own day could endure. At the time of the Council of Basel,

when he lay sick of the fever for seventy-five days at Milan, he could

never be persuaded to listen to the magic doctors, though a man was

brought to his bedside who a short time before had marvellously cured

2,000 soldiers of fever in the camp of Piccinino. While still an

invalid, Æneas rode over the mountains to Basel, and got well on the

journey.[1226]

We learn something more about the neighbourhood of Norcia through the

necromancer who tried to get Benvenuto Cellini into his power. A new

book of magic was to be consecrated,[1227] and the best place for the

ceremony was among the mountains in that district. The master of the

magician had once, it is true, done the same thing near the Abbey of

Farfa, but had there found difficulties which did not present themselves

at Norcia; further, the peasants in the latter neighbourhood were

trustworthy people who had practice in the matter, and who could afford

considerable help in case of need. The expedition did not take place,

else Benvenuto would probably have been able to tell us something of the

impostor’s assistants. The whole neighbourhood was then proverbial.

Aretino says somewhere of an enchanted well, ‘there dwell the sisters of

the sibyl of Norcia and the aunt of the Fata Morgana.’ And about the

same time Trissino could still celebrate the place in his great

epic[1228] with all the resources of poetry and allegory as the home of

authentic prophecy.

After the famous Bull of Innocent VIII. (1484),[1229] witchcraft and the

persecution of witches grew into a great and revolting system. The chief

representatives of this system of persecution were German Dominicans;

and Germany and, curiously enough, those parts of Italy nearest Germany

were the countries most afflicted by this plague. The bulls and

injunctions of the Popes themselves[1230] refer, for example, to the

Dominican Province of Lombardy, to Cremona, to the dioceses of Brescia

and Bergamo. We learn from Sprenger’s famous theoretico-practical guide,

the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ that forty-one witches were burnt at Como in

the first year after the publication of the bull; crowds of Italian

women took refuge in the territory of the Archduke Sigismund, where they

believed themselves to be still safe. Witchcraft ended by taking firm

root in a few unlucky Alpine valleys, especially in the Val

Camonica;[1231] the system of persecution had succeeded in permanently

infecting with the delusion those populations which were in any way

predisposed for it. This essentially German form of witchcraft is what

we should think of when reading the stories and novels of Milan or

Bologna.[1232] That it did not make further progress in Italy is

probably due to the fact that elsewhere a highly developed ‘Stregheria’

was already in existence, resting on a different set of ideas. The

Italian witch practised a trade, and needed for it money and, above all,

sense. We find nothing about her of the hysterical dreams of the

Northern witch, of marvellous journeys through the air, of Incubus and

Succubus; the business of the ‘Strega’ was to provide for other people’s

pleasure. If she was credited with the power of assuming different

shapes, or of transporting herself suddenly to distant places, she was

so far content to accept this reputation, as her influence was thereby

increased; on the other hand, it was perilous for her when the fear of

her malice and vengeance, and especially of her power for enchanting

children, cattle, and crops, became general. Inquisitors and magistrates

were then thoroughly in accord with popular wishes if they burnt her.

By far the most important field for the activity of the ‘Strega’ lay, as

has been said, in love-affairs, and included the stirring up of love and

of hatred, the producing of abortion, the pretended murder of the

unfaithful man or woman by magical arts, and even the manufacture of

poisons.[1233] Owing to the unwillingness of many persons to have to do

with these women, a class of occasional practitioners arose who secretly

learned from them some one or other of their arts, and then used this

knowledge on their own account. The Roman prostitutes, for example,

tried to enhance their personal attractions by charms of another

description in the style of Horatian Canidia. Aretino[1234] may not only

have known, but have also told the truth about them in this particular.

He gives a list of the loathsome messes which were to be found in their

boxes--hair, skulls, ribs, teeth, dead men’s eyes, human skin, the

navels of little children, the soles of shoes and pieces of clothing

from tombs. They even went themselves to the graveyard and fetched bits

of rotten flesh, which they slily gave their lovers to eat--with more

that is still worse. Pieces of the hair and nails of the lover were

boiled in oil stolen from the ever-burning lamps in the church. The most

innocuous of their charms was to make a heart of glowing ashes, and then

to pierce it while singing--

Prima che’l fuoco spenghi,

Fa ch’a mia porta venghi;

Tal ti punga mio amore

Quale io fo questo cuore.

There were other charms practised by moonshine, with drawings on the

ground, and figures of wax or bronze, which doubtless represented the

lover, and were treated according to circumstances.

These things were so customary that a woman who, without youth and

beauty, nevertheless exercised a powerful charm on men, naturally became

suspected of witchcraft. The mother of Sanga,[1235] secretary to Clement

VII., poisoned her son’s mistress, who was a woman of this kind.

Unfortunately the son died too, as well as a party of friends who had

eaten of the poisoned salad.

Next come, not as helper, but as competitor to the witch, the magician

or enchanter--‘incantatore’--who was still more familiar with the most

perilous business of the craft. Sometimes he was as much or more of an

astrologer than of a magician; he probably often gave himself out as an

astrologer in order not to be prosecuted as a magician, and a certain

astrology was essential in order to find out the favourable hour for a

magical process.[1236] But since many spirits are good[1237] or

indifferent, the magician could sometimes maintain a very tolerable

reputation, and Sixtus IV. in the year 1474, had to proceed expressly

against some Bolognese Carmelites,[1238] who asserted in the pulpit that

there was no harm in seeking information from the dæmons. Very many

people believed in the possibility of the thing itself; an indirect

proof of this lies in the fact that the most pious men believed that by

prayer they could obtain visions of good spirits. Savonarola’s mind was

filled with these things; the Florentine Platonists speak of a mystic

union with God; and Marcellus Palingenius (p. 264), gives us to

understand clearly enough that he had to do with consecrated

spirits.[1239] The same writer is convinced of the existence of a whole

hierarchy of bad dæmons, who have their seat from the moon downwards,

and are ever on the watch to do some mischief to nature and human

life.[1240] He even tells of his own personal acquaintance with some of

them, and as the scope of the present work does not allow of a

systematic exposition of the then prevalent belief in spirits, the

narrative of Palingenius may be given as one instance out of many.[1241]

At S. Silvestro, on Soracte, he had been receiving instruction from a

pious hermit on the nothingness of earthly things and the worthlessness

of human life; and when the night drew near he set out on his way back

to Rome. On the road, in the full light of the moon, he was joined by

three men, one of whom called him by name, and asked him whence he came.

Palingenius made answer: ‘From the wise man on the mountain.’ ‘O fool,’

replied the stranger, ‘dost thou in truth believe that anyone on earth

is wise? Only higher beings (Divi) have wisdom, and such are we three,

although we wear the shapes of men. I am named Saracil, and these two

Sathiel and Jana. Our kingdom lies near the moon, where dwell that

multitude of intermediate beings who have sway over earth and sea.’

Palingenius then asked, not without an inward tremor, what they were

going to do at Rome. The answer was: ‘One of our comrades, Ammon, is

kept in servitude by the magic arts of a youth from Narni, one of the

attendants of Cardinal Orsini; for mark it, O men, there is proof of

your own immortality therein, that you can control one of us; I myself,

shut up in crystal, was once forced to serve a German, till a bearded

monk set me free. This is the service which we wish to render at Rome to

our friend, and we shall also take the opportunity of sending one or two

distinguished Romans to the nether world.’ At these words a light breeze

arose, and Sathiel said: ‘Listen, our messenger is coming back from

Rome, and this wind announces him.’ And then another being appeared,

whom they greeted joyfully and then asked about Rome. His utterances are

strongly anti-papal: Clement VII. was again allied with the Spaniards

and hoped to root out Luther’s doctrines, not with arguments, but by the

Spanish sword. This is wholly in the interest of the dæmons, whom the

impending bloodshed would enable to carry away the souls of thousands

into hell. At the close of this conversation, in which Rome with all its

guilt is represented as wholly given over to the Evil One, the

apparitions vanish, and leave the poet sorrowfully to pursue his way

alone.[1242]

Those who would form a conception of the extent of the belief in those

relations to the dæmons which could be openly avowed in spite of the

penalties attaching to witchcraft, may be referred to the much read work

of Agrippa of Nettesheim on ‘Secret Philosophy.’ He seems originally to

have written it before he was in Italy,[1243] but in the dedication to

Trithemius he mentions Italian authorities among others, if only by way

of disparagement. In the case of equivocal persons like Agrippa, or of

the knaves and fools into whom the majority of the rest may be divided,

there is little that is interesting in the system they profess, with its

formulæ, fumigations, ointments, and the rest of it.[1244] But this

system was filled with quotations from the superstitions of antiquity,

the influence of which on the life and the passions of Italians is at

times most remarkable and fruitful. We might think that a great mind

must be thoroughly ruined, before it surrendered itself to such

influences; but the violence of hope and desire led even vigorous and

original men of all classes to have recourse to the magician, and the

belief that the thing was feasible at all weakened to some extent the

faith, even of those who kept at a distance, in the moral order of the

world. At the cost of a little money and danger it seemed possible to

defy with impunity the universal reason and morality of mankind, and to

spare oneself the intermediate steps which otherwise lie between a man

and his lawful or unlawful ends.

Let us here glance for a moment at an older and now decaying form of

superstition. From the darkest period of the Middle Ages, or even from

the days of antiquity, many cities of Italy had kept the remembrance of

the connexion of their fate with certain buildings, statues, or other

material objects. The ancients had left records of consecrating priests

or Telestæ, who were present at the solemn foundation of cities, and

magically guaranteed their prosperity by erecting certain monuments or

by burying certain objects (Telesmata). Traditions of this sort were

more likely than anything else to live on in the form of popular,

unwritten legend; but in the course of centuries the priest naturally

became transformed into the magician, since the religious side of his

function was no longer understood. In some of his Virgilian miracles at

Naples,[1245] the ancient remembrance of one of these Telestæ is clearly

preserved, his name being in course of time supplanted by that of

Virgil. The enclosing of the mysterious picture of the city in a vessel

is neither more nor less than a genuine, ancient Telesma; and Virgil the

founder of Naples is only the officiating priest, who took part in the

ceremony, presented in another dress. The popular imagination went on

working at these themes, till Virgil became also responsible for the

brazen horse, for the heads at the Nolan gate, for the brazen fly over

another gate, and even for the Grotto of Posilippo--all of them things

which in one respect or other served to put a magical constraint upon

fate, and the first two of which seemed to determine the whole fortune

of the city. Mediæval Rome also preserved confused recollections of the

same kind. At the church of S. Ambrogio at Milan, there was an ancient

marble Hercules; so long, it was said, as this stood in its place, so

long would the Empire last. That of the Germans is probably meant, as

the coronation of their Emperors at Milan took place in this

church.[1246] The Florentines[1247] were convinced that the temple of

Mars, afterwards transformed into the Baptistry, would stand to the end

of time, according to the constellation under which it had been built;

they had, as Christians, removed from it the marble equestrian statue;

but since the destruction of the latter would have brought some great

calamity on the city--also according to a constellation--they set it

upon a tower by the Arno. When Totila conquered Florence, the statue

fell into the river, and was not fished out again till Charles the Great

refounded the city. It was then placed on a pillar at the entrance to

the Ponte Vecchio, and on this spot Buondelmente was slain in 1215. The

origin of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline was thus

associated with the dreaded idol. During the inundation of 1333 the

statue vanished forever.[1248]

But the same Telesma reappears elsewhere. Guido Bonatto, already

mentioned, was not satisfied, at the refounding of the walls of Forli,

with requiring certain symbolic acts of reconciliation from the two

parties (p. 511). By burying a bronze or stone equestrian statue,[1249]

which he had produced by astro logical or magical arts, he believed

that he had defended the city from ruin, and even from capture and

plunder. When Cardinal Albornoz (p. 102) was governor of Romagna some

sixty years later, the statue was accidentally dug up and then shown to

the people, probably by the order of the Cardinal, that it might be

known by what means the cruel Montefeltro had defended himself against

the Roman Church. And again, half a century later, when an attempt to

surprise Forli had failed, men began to talk afresh of the virtue of the

statue, which had perhaps been saved and reburied. It was the last time

that they could do so; for a year later Forli was really taken. The

foundation of buildings all through the fifteenth century was associated

not only with astrology (p. 511) but also with magic. The large number

of gold and silver medals which Paul II. buried in the foundations of

his buildings[1250] was noticed, and Platina was by no means displeased

to recognise an old pagan Telesma in the fact. Neither Paul nor his

biographer were in any way conscious of the mediæval religious

significance of such an offering.[1251]

But this official magic, which in many cases only rests on hearsay, was

comparatively unimportant by the side of the secret arts practised for

personal ends.

The form which these most often took in daily life is shown by Ariosto

in his comedy of the necromancers.[1252] His hero is one of the many

Jewish exiles from Spain, although he also gives himself out for a

Greek, an Egyptian, and an African, and is constantly changing his name

and costume. He pretends that his incantations can darken the day and

lighten the darkness, that he can move the earth, make himself

invisible, and change men into beasts; but these vaunts are only an

advertisement. His true object is to make his account out of unhappy and

troubled marriages, and the traces which he leaves behind him in his

course are like the slime of a snail, or often like the ruin wrought by

a hail-storm. To attain his ends he can persuade people that the box in

which a lover is hidden is full of ghosts, or that he can make a corpse

talk. It is at all events a good sign that poets and novelists could

reckon on popular applause in holding up this class of men to ridicule.

Bandello not only treats the sorcery of a Lombard monk as a miserable,

and in its consequences terrible, piece of knavery,[1253] but he also

describes with unaffected indignation[1254] the disasters which never

cease to pursue the credulous fool. ‘A man hopes with “Solomon’s Key”

and other magical books to find the treasures hidden in the bosom of the

earth, to force his lady to do his will, to find out the secrets of

princes, and to transport himself in the twinkling of an eye from Milan

to Rome. The more often he is deceived, the more steadfastly he

believes.... Do you remember the time, Signor Carlo, when a friend of

ours, in order to win the favour of his beloved, filled his room with

skulls and bones like a churchyard?’ The most loathsome tasks were

prescribed--to draw three teeth from a corpse or a nail from its finger,

and the like; and while the hocus-pocus of the incantation was going on,

the unhappy participants sometimes died of terror.

Benvenuto Cellini did not die during the well-known incantation (1532)

in the Coliseum at Rome,[1255] although both he and his companions

witnessed no ordinary horrors; the Sicilian priest, who probably

expected to find him a useful coadjutor in the future, paid him the

compliment as they went home of saying that he had never met a man of so

sturdy a courage. Every reader will make his own reflections on the

proceedings themselves. The narcotic fumes and the fact that the

imaginations of the spectators were predisposed for all possible

terrors, are the chief points to be noticed, and explain why the lad who

formed one of the party, and on whom they made most impression, saw

much more than the others. But it may be inferred that Benvenuto himself

was the one whom it was wished to impress, since the dangerous beginning

of the incantation can have had no other aim than to arouse curiosity.

For Benvenuto had to think before the fair Angelica occurred to him; and

the magician told him afterwards that love-making was folly compared

with the finding of treasures. Further, it must not be forgotten that it

flattered his vanity to be able to say, ‘The dæmons have kept their

word, and Angelica came into my hands, as they promised, just a month

later’ (cap. 68). Even on the supposition that Benvenuto gradually lied

himself into believing the whole story, it would still be permanently

valuable as evidence of the mode of thought then prevalent.

As a rule, however, the Italian artists, even ‘the odd, capricious, and

eccentric’ among them, had little to do with magic. One of them, in his

anatomical studies, may have cut himself a jacket out of the skin of a

corpse, but at the advice of his confessor he put it again into the

grave.[1256] Indeed the frequent study of anatomy probably did more than

anything else to destroy the belief in the magical influence of various

parts of the body, while at the same time the incessant observation and

representation of the human form made the artist familiar with a magic

of a wholly different sort.

In general, notwithstanding the instances which have been quoted, magic

seems to have been markedly on the decline at the beginning of the

sixteenth century,--that is to say, at a time when it first began to

flourish vigorously out of Italy; and thus the tours of Italian

sorcerers and astrologers in the North seem not to have begun till their

credit at home was thoroughly impaired. In the fourteenth century it was

thought necessary carefully to watch the lake on Mount Pilatus, near

Scariotto, to hinder the magicians from there consecrating their

books.[1257] In the fifteenth century we find, for example, that the

offer was made to produce a storm of rain, in order to frighten away a

besieged army; and even then the commander of the besieged town--Nicolò

Vitelli in Città di Castello--had the good sense to dismiss the

sorcerers as godless persons.[1258] In the sixteenth century no more

instances of this official kind appear, although in private life the

magicians were still active. To this time belongs the classic figure of

German sorcery, Dr. Johann Faust; the Italian ideal, on the other hand,

Guido Bonatto, dates back to the thirteenth century.

It must nevertheless be added that the decrease of the belief in magic

was not necessarily accompanied by an increase of the belief in a moral

order, but that in many cases, like the decaying faith in astrology, the

delusion left behind it nothing but a stupid fatalism.

One or two minor forms of this superstition, pyromancy, chiromancy[1259]

and others, which obtained some credit as the belief in sorcery and

astrology were declining, may be here passed over, and even the

pseudo-science of physiognomy has by no means the interest which the

name might lead us to expect. For it did not appear as the sister and

ally of art and psychology, but as a new form of fatalistic

superstition, and, what it may have been among the Arabians, as the

rival of astrology. The author of a physiognomical treatise, Bartolommeo

Cocle, who styled himself a ‘metoposcopist,’[1260] and whose science,

according to Giovio, seemed like one of the most respectable of the free

arts, was not content with the prophecies which he made to the many

clever people who daily consulted him, but wrote also a most serious

‘catalogue of such whom great dangers to life were awaiting.’ Giovio,

although grown old in the free thought of Rome--‘in hac luce romana’--is

of opinion that the predictions contained therein had only too much

truth in them.[1261] We learn from the same source how the people aimed

at in these and similar prophecies took vengeance on the seer. Giovanni

Bentivoglio caused Lucas Gauricus to be five times swung to and fro

against the wall, on a rope hanging from a lofty winding staircase,

because Lucas had foretold to him the loss of his authority.[1262] Ermes

Bentivoglio sent an assassin after Cocle, because the unlucky

metoposcopist had unwillingly prophesied to him that he would die an

exile in battle. The murderer seems to have derided the dying man in his

last moments, saying that the prophet had foretold to him that he would

shortly commit an infamous murder. The reviver of chiromancy, Antioco

Tiberto of Cesena,[1263] came by an equally miserable end at the hands

of Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, to whom he had prophesied the worst

that a tyrant can imagine, namely, death in exile and in the most

grievous poverty. Tiberto was a man of intelligence, who was supposed to

give his answers less according to any methodical chiromancy than by

means of his shrewd knowledge of mankind; and his high culture won for

him the respect of those scholars who thought little of his

divination.[1264]

Alchemy, in conclusion, which is not mentioned in antiquity till quite

late under Diocletian, played only a very subordinate part at the best

period of the Renaissance.[1265] Italy went through the disease earlier,

when Petrarch in the fourteenth century confessed, in his polemic

against it, that gold-making was a general practice.[1266] Since then

that particular kind of faith, devotion, and isolation which the

practice of alchemy required became more and more rare in Italy, just

when Italian and other adepts began to make their full profit out of the

great lords in the North.[1267] Under Leo X. the few Italians who busied

themselves with it were called ‘ingenia curiosa,’[1268] and Aurelio

Augurelli, who dedicated to Leo X., the great despiser of gold, his

didactic poem on the making of the metal, is said to have received in

return a beautiful but empty purse. The mystic science which besides

gold sought for the omnipotent philosopher’s stone, is a late northern

growth, which had its rise in the theories of Paracelsus and others.

CHAPTER V.

GENERAL DISINTEGRATION OF BELIEF.

With these superstitions, as with ancient modes of thought generally,

the decline in the belief of immortality stands in the closest

connection.[1269] This question has the widest and deepest relations

with the whole development of the modern spirit.

One great source of doubt in immortality was the inward wish to be under

no obligations to the hated Church. We have seen that the Church branded

those who thus felt as Epicureans (p. 496 sqq.). In the hour of death

many doubtless called for the sacraments, but multitudes during their

whole lives, and especially during their most vigorous years, lived and

acted on the negative supposition. That unbelief on this particular

point must often have led to a general scepticism, is evident of itself,

and is attested by abundant historical proof. These are the men of whom

Ariosto says: ‘Their faith goes no higher than the roof.’[1270] In

Italy, and especially in Florence, it was possible to live as an open

and notorious unbeliever, if a man only refrained from direct acts of

hostility against the Church.[1271] The confessor, for instance, who was

sent to prepare a political offender for death, began by inquiring

whether the prisoner was a believer, ‘for there was a false report that

he had no belief at all.’[1272]

The unhappy transgressor here referred to--the same Pierpaolo Boscoli

who has been already mentioned (p. 59)--who in 1513 took part in an

attempt against the newly restored family of the Medici, is a faithful

mirror of the religious confusion then prevalent. Beginning as a

partisan of Savonarola, he became afterwards possessed with an

enthusiasm for the ancient ideals of liberty, and for paganism in

general; but when he was in prison his early friends regained the

control of his mind, and secured for him what they considered a pious

ending. The tender witness and narrator of his last hours is one of the

artistic family of the Delia Robbia, the learned philologist Luca. ‘Ah,’

sighs Boscoli, ‘get Brutus out of my head for me, that I may go my way

as a Christian.’ ‘If you will,’ answers Luca, ‘the thing is not

difficult; for you know that these deeds of the Romans are not handed

down to us as they were, but idealised (con arte accresciute).’ The

penitent now forces his understanding to believe, and bewails his

inability to believe voluntarily. If he could only live for a month with

pious monks, he would truly become spiritually minded. It comes out that

these partisans of Savonarola knew their Bible very imperfectly; Boscoli

can only say the Paternoster and Avemaria, and earnestly begs Luca to

exhort his friends to study the sacred writings, for only what a man has

learned in life does he possess in death. Luca then reads and explains

to him the story of the Passion according to the Gospel of St. Matthew;

the poor listener, strange to say, can perceive clearly the Godhead of

Christ, but is perplexed at his manhood; he wishes to get as firm a hold

of it ‘as if Christ came to meet him out of a wood.’ His friend

thereupon exhorts him to be humble, since this was only a doubt sent him

by the Devil. Soon after it occurs to the penitent that he has not

fulfilled a vow made in his youth to go on pilgrimage to the Impruneta;

his friend promises to do it in his stead. Meantime the confessor--a

monk, as was desired, from Savonarola’s monastery--arrives, and after

giving him the explanation quoted above of the opinion of St. Thomas

Aquinas on tyrannicide, exhorts him to bear death manfully. Boscoli

makes answer: ‘Father, waste no time on this; the philosophers have

taught it me already; help me to bear death out of love to Christ.’ What

follows--the communion, the leave-taking and the execution--is very

touchingly described, one point deserves special mention. When Boscoli

laid his head on the block, he begged the executioner to delay the

stroke for a moment: ‘During the whole time since the announcement of

the sentence he had been striving after a close union with God, without

attaining it as he wished, and now in this supreme moment he thought

that by a strong effort he could give himself wholly to God.’ It is

clearly some half-understood expression of Savonarola which was

troubling him.

If we had more confessions of this character the spiritual picture of

the time would be the richer by many important features which no poem or

treatise has preserved for us. We should see more clearly how strong the

inborn religious instinct was, how subjective and how variable the

relation of the individual to religion, and what powerful enemies and

competitors religion had. That men whose inward condition is of this

nature, are not the men to found a new church, is evident; but the

history of the Western spirit would be imperfect without a view of that

fermenting period among the Italians, while other nations, who have had

no share in the evolution of thought, may be passed over without loss.

But we must return to the question of immortality.

If unbelief in this respect made such progress among the more highly

cultivated natures, the reason lay partly in the fact that the great

earthly task of discovering the world and representing it in word and

form, absorbed most of the higher spiritual faculties. We have already

spoken (p. 490) of the inevitable worldliness of the Renaissance. But

this investigation and this art were necessarily accompanied by a

general spirit of doubt and inquiry. If this spirit shows itself but

little in literature, if we find, for example, only isolated instances

of the beginnings of biblical criticism (p. 465), we are not therefore

to infer that it had no existence. The sound of it was only

over-powered by the need of representation and creation in all

departments--that is, by the artistic instinct; and it was further

checked, whenever it tried to express itself theoretically, by the

already existing despotism of the Church. This spirit of doubt must, for

reasons too obvious to need discussion, have inevitably and chiefly

busied itself with the question of the state of man after death.

And here came in the influence of antiquity, and worked in a twofold

fashion on the argument. In the first place men set themselves to master

the psychology of the ancients, and tortured the letter of Aristotle for

a decisive answer. In one of the Lucianic dialogues of the time[1273]

Charon tells Mercury how he questioned Aristotle on his belief in

immortality, when the philosopher crossed in the Stygian boat; but the

prudent sage, although dead in the body and nevertheless living on,

declined to compromise himself by a definite answer--and centuries later

how was it likely to fare with the interpretation of his writings? All

the more eagerly did men dispute about his opinion and that of others on

the true nature of the soul, its origin, its pre-existence, its unity in

all men, its absolute eternity, even its transformations; and there were

men who treated of these things in the pulpit.[1274] The dispute was

warmly carried on even in the fifteenth century; some proved that

Aristotle taught the doctrine of an immortal soul;[1275] others

complained of the hardness of men’s hearts, who would not believe that

there was a soul at all, till they saw it sitting down on a chair before

them;[1276] Filelfo in his funeral oration on Francesco Sforza brings

forward a long list of opinions of ancient and even of Arabian

philosophers in favour of immortality, and closes the mixture, which

covers a folio page and a half of print,[1277] with the words, ‘Besides

all this we have the Old and New Testaments, which are above all truth.’

Then came the Florentine Platonists with their master’s doctrine of the

soul, supplemented at times, as in the case of Pico, by Christian

teaching. But the opposite opinion prevailed in the instructed world. At

the beginning of the sixteenth century the stumbling-block which it put

in the way of the Church was so serious that Leo X. set forth a

Constitution[1278] at the Lateran Council in 1513, in defence of the

immortality and individuality of the soul, the latter against those who

asserted that there was but one soul in all men. A few years later

appeared the work of Pomponazzo, in which the impossibility of a

philosophical proof of immortality is maintained; and the contest was

now waged incessantly with replies and apologies, till it was silenced

by the Catholic reaction. The pre-existence of the soul in God,

conceived more or less in accordance with Plato’s theory of ideas, long

remained a common belief, and proved of service even to the poets.[1279]

The consequences which followed from it as to the mode of the soul’s

continued existence after death, were not more closely considered.

There was a second way in which the influence of antiquity made itself

felt, chiefly by means of that remarkable fragment of the sixth book of

Cicero’s ‘Republic’ known by the name of Scipio’s Dream. Without the

commentary of Macrobius it would probably have perished like the rest of

the second part of the work; it was now diffused in countless manuscript

copies,[1280] and, after the discovery of typography, in a printed form,

and edited afresh by various commentators. It is the description of a

transfigured hereafter for great men, pervaded by the harmony of the

spheres. This pagan heaven, for which many other testimonies were

gradually extracted from the writings of the ancients, came step by step

to supplant the Christian heaven in proportion as the ideal of fame and

historical greatness threw into the shade the ideal of the Christian

life, without, nevertheless, the public feeling being thereby offended

as it was by the doctrine of personal annihilation after death. Even

Petrarch founds his hope chiefly on this Dream of Scipio, on the

declarations found in other Ciceronian works, and on Plato’s ‘Phædo,’

without making any mention of the Bible.[1281] ‘Why,’ he asks elsewhere,

‘should not I as a Catholic share a hope which was demonstrably

cherished by the heathen?’ Soon afterwards Coluccio Salutati wrote his

‘Labours of Hercules’ (still existing in manuscript), in which it is

proved at the end that the valorous man, who has well endured the great

labours of earthly life, is justly entitled to a dwelling among the

stars.[1282] If Dante still firmly maintained that the great pagans,

whom he would have gladly welcomed in Paradise, nevertheless must not

come beyond the Limbo at the entrance to Hell,[1283] the poetry of a

later time accepted joyfully the new liberal ideas of a future life.

Cosimo the Elder, according to Bernardo Pulci’s poem on his death, was

received in heaven by Cicero, who had also been called the ‘Father of

his country,’ by the Fabii, by Curius, Fabricius and many others; with

them he would adorn the choir where only blameless spirits sing.[1284]

But in the old writers there was another and less pleasing picture of

the world to come--the shadowy realms of Homer and of those poets who

had not sweetened and humanised the conception. This made an impression

on certain temperaments. Gioviano Pontano somewhere attributes to

Sannazaro the story of a vision, which he beheld one morning early while

half awake.[1285] He seemed to see a departed friend, Ferrandus

Januarius, with whom he had often discoursed on the immortality of the

soul, and whom he now asked whether it was true that the pains of Hell

were really dreadful and eternal. The shadow gave an answer like that of

Achilles when Odysseus questioned him. ‘So much I tell and aver to thee,

that we who are parted from earthly life have the strongest desire to

return to it again.’ He then saluted his friend and disappeared.

It cannot but be recognised that such views of the state of man after

death partly presuppose and partly promote the dissolution of the most

essential dogmas of Christianity. The notion of sin and of salvation

must have almost entirely evaporated. We must not be misled by the

effects of the great preachers of repentance or by the epidemic revivals

which have been described above (part vi. cap. 2). For even granting

that the individually developed classes had shared in them like the

rest, the cause of their participation was rather the need of emotional

excitement, the rebound of passionate natures, the horror felt at great

national calamities, the cry to heaven for help. The awakening of the

conscience had by no means necessarily the sense of sin and the felt

need of salvation as its consequence, and even a very severe outward

penance did not perforce involve any repentance in the Christian meaning

of the word. When the powerful natures of the Renaissance tell us that

their principle is to repent of nothing,[1286] they may have in their

minds only matters that are morally indifferent, faults of unreason or

imprudence; but in the nature of the case this contempt for repentance

must extend to the sphere of morals, because its origin, namely the

consciousness of individual force, is common to both sides of human

nature. The passive and contemplative form of Christianity, with its

constant reference to a higher world beyond the grave, could no longer

control these men. Macchiavelli ventured still farther, and maintained

that it could not be serviceable to the state and to the maintenance of

public freedom.[1287]

The form assumed by the strong religious instinct which, notwithstanding

all, survived in many natures, was Theism or Deism, as we may please to

call it. The latter name may be applied to that mode of thought which

simply wiped away the Christian element out of religion, without either

seeking or finding any other substitute for the feelings to rest upon.

Theism may be considered that definite heightened devotion to the one

Supreme Being which the Middle Ages were not acquainted with. This mode

of faith does not exclude Christianity, and can either ally itself with

the Christian doctrines of sin, redemption, and immortality, or else

exist and flourish without them.

Sometimes this belief presents itself with childish naïveté and even

with a half-pagan air, God appearing as the almighty fulfiller of human

wishes. Agnolo Pandolfini[1288] tells us how, after his wedding, he shut

himself in with his wife, and knelt down before the family altar with

the picture of the Madonna, and prayed, not to her, but to God that he

would vouchsafe to them the right use of their property, a long life in

joy and unity with one another, and many male descendants: ‘for myself I

prayed for wealth, honour, and friends, for her blamelessness, honesty,

and that she might be a good housekeeper.’ When the language used has a

strong antique flavour, it is not always easy to keep apart the pagan

style and the theistic belief.[1289]

This temper sometimes manifests itself in times of misfortune with a

striking sincerity. Some addresses to God are left us from the latter

period of Firenzuola, when for years he lay ill of fever, in which,

though he expressly declares himself a believing Christian, he shows

that his religious consciousness is essentially theistic.[1290] His

sufferings seem to him neither as the punishment of sin, nor as

preparation for a higher world; they are an affair between him and God

only, who has put the strong love of life between man and his despair.

‘I curse, but only curse Nature, since thy greatness forbids me to utter

thy name.... Give me death, Lord, I beseech thee, give it me now!’

In these utterances and the like, it would be vain to look for a

conscious and consistent Theism; the speakers partly believed themselves

to be still Christians, and for various other reasons respected the

existing doctrines of the Church. But at the time of the Reformation,

when men were driven to come to a distinct conclusion on such points,

this mode of thought was accepted with a fuller consciousness; a number

of the Italian Protestants came forward as Anti-Trinitarians and

Socinians, and even as exiles in distant countries made the memorable

attempt to found a church on these principles. From the foregoing

exposition it will be clear that, apart from humanistic rationalism,

other spirits were at work in this field.

One chief centre of theistic modes of thought lay in the Platonic

Academy at Florence, and especially in Lorenzo Magnifico himself. The

theoretical works and even the letters of these men show us only half

their nature. It is true that Lorenzo, from his youth till he died,

expressed himself dogmatically as a Christian,[1291] and that Pico was

drawn by Savonarola’s influence to accept the point of view of a monkish

ascetic.[1292] But in the hymns of Lorenzo,[1293] which we are tempted

to regard as the highest product of the spirit of this school, an

unreserved Theism is set forth--a Theism which strives to treat the

world as a great moral and physical Cosmos. While the men of the Middle

Ages look on the world as a vale of tears, which Pope and Emperor are

set to guard against the coming of Antichrist; while the fatalists of

the Renaissance oscillate between seasons of overflowing energy and

seasons of superstition or of stupid resignation, here, in this circle

of chosen spirits,[1294] the doctrine is upheld that the visible world

was created by God in love, that it is the copy of a pattern

pre-existing in Him, and that He will ever remain its eternal mover and

restorer. The soul of man can by recognising God draw Him into its

narrow boundaries, but also by love to Him itself expand into the

Infinite--and this is blessedness on earth.

Echoes of mediæval mysticism here flow into one current with Platonic

doctrines, and with a characteristically modern spirit. One of the most

precious fruits of the knowledge of the world and of man here comes to

maturity, on whose account alone the Italian Renaissance must be called

the leader of modern ages.

THE END.

INDEX.

A.

Academies, educational, 281.

Adrian VI., Pope, 121;

satires against, 162-164.

‘_Africa_,’ the, of Petrarch, 258.

Aguello of Pisa, 11.

Alberto da Sarteano, 467.

Alberti, Leon Battista, 136-138.

Albertinus, Musattus, fame of, 140-141.

Alboronoz, 102.

Alchemy, 539, 540.

Alexander VI., Pope, 109-117;

death of, 117.

Alfonso I., 49.

Alfonso of Ferrara, 99.

Alfonso the Great of Naples, 35, 95, 459-461;

contempt for astrology, 513;

enthusiasm for antiquity, 225-227, 228.

Alighieri Dante.--_See Dante._

Allegorical representations, 415.

Allegory, age of, 408-410;

superiority of Italian, 410-411.

Amiens, treaty of, 123.

‘_Amorosá Visione_,’ the, of Boccaccio, 324.

Antiquity, importance of, Dante on, 204-205;

reproduction of, 230-242.

Anti-Trinitarians, 549.

Apollo Belvedere, discovery of the, 184.

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 6, 7, 60.

Arabic, study of, 200-202.

Aragonese Dynasty, 16, 35.

Aretino, Pietro, the railer, 164-168;

father of modern journalism, 165.

Ariosto, 134;

and the Humanists, 273;

his artistic aim in epic, 326;

his picture of Roman society, 185;

‘_Orlando Furioso_,’ the, of, 325, 326, 327;

position as a Dramatist, 320;

style, 306;

satire on sorcery, 535-536.

Arlotto (jester), 156.

Army list, Venetian, 67.

‘_Asolani_,’ the, of Bembo, 243.

Assassination, paid, 450, 457.

Assassins in Rome, 109.

Astrology, belief in, 507-518;

protest against, 515.

Auguries, belief in, 520, 521.

Authors, the old, 187-202.

Autobiography in Italy, 332, 333.

B.

Bacchus and Ariadne, song of, by Lorenzo de Medici, 427-428.

Baglioni of Perugia, the, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32;

and the Oddi, disputes between, 29.

Bandello, as novelist, 306;

on infidelity, 443-444;

style of writing, 382.

Baraballe, comic procession of, 158.

Bassano, Jacopo, rustic paintings of, 354.

Belief, general disintegration of, 541-550.

Bembo, Pietro, 231;

epigrams of, 267;

his ‘_Historia rerum Venetarum_,’ 248;

letters of, 233;

the ‘_Sacra_’ of, 259.

Benedictines, the, 463.

Bernabö, boar hounds of, 13.

Bernadino da Siena, 235, 467, 469.

Bessarion, Cardinal, his collection of Greek MSS., 189.

Biblical criticism, 501.

Biographies, Collective, 330 sqq.

Biography, 328-337;

comparative, art of, 329.

Blondus of Forli, historical writings of, 245, 246.

Boar-hounds of Bernabö, 13.

Boccaccio, 151;

life of Dante, 329;

master of personal description, 344;

on ‘tyranny,’ 56;

representative of antiquity, 205;

sonnets of, 314.

Bojardo, as epic poet, 325;

inventiveness of, 324;

style of, 306.

Borgias, the crimes of the, 109-117.

Borgia, Cæsar, 109-117;

death of, 117.

Borso of Este, 49, 50, 51;

created duke of Modena and Reggio, 19;

welcome of, to Reggio, 417, 418.

Boscoli, Pierpaolo, death of, 542-543.

Botanical Gardens, 292.

Brigandage, 449-450.

Burchiello as Comedian, 320.

C.

Calumny at Papal Court, 161.

Calvi Fabio, of Ravenna, 278-279.

Cambray, League of, 68, 89.

Can Grande della Scala, Court of, 9.

Canzone, the, 310.

‘_Canzone Zingaresca_,’ of Politian, 354.

Capistrano, Giovanni, 467.

‘_Capitolo_,’ the, 162-163.

Cardano, Girolamo, of Milan, autobiography of, 334.

Caricaturists, 159.

‘_Carmina Burana_,’ the, 173.

Carnival, the, 407, 425-427.

Castiglione, 388.

Catalogues of Libraries, 190, 191.

Cathedral, Milan, founding of, 14.

Catilinarians, the, 105.

Catullus, as model, 264-265.

Cellini, Benvenuto, autobiography of, 333-334.

Celso, Caterina di San, 400.

Certosa, Convent of, founding of, 13.

Charles V., Emperor, action of, 123, 124.

Charles IV., Emperor, 17, 18.

Charles VIII. in Italy, 89, 90;

entry into Italy, 413.

Children, naming of, 250-251.

Chroniclers, Italian, 245;

Florentine, condemn astrology, 515.

Church dignities, not bestowed according to pedigree, 360;

the corruption of, 456;

held in contempt, 457-458;

regeneration of, 125;

secularization of, proposed by Emperor Charles V., 123;

spirit of reform in, 123.

Cicero, taken as model for style, 253-54.

Ciceronianism and revival of Vitruvius, analogy between, 256.

Ciriaco of Ancona, an antiquarian, 181.

Class distinction ignored, 359-368.

Clement VII., Pope, detested, 122;

flight of, 123;

temperament of, 309.

Cleopatra, the discovery of, 184.

Clubs, political, 387.

Colonna, Giovanne, 177-178;

Giulia Gonzaga, 385;

Vittoria, 386, 446.

‘_Commedia dell’Arte_,’ 320, 321.

_Commentaries_, the, of Pius II., 333.

Composition, Latin, history of, 252-253.

Condottieri, the, despotisms founded by, 22, 23, 24.

Convent of Certosa of Pavia, founding of, 13.

Cornaro, Luigi, Autobiography of, 335-337;

_Vita Sobria_ of, 244.

Corpse of girl, discovery of, 183.

Corpus Christi, feast of, celebration of, 414.

Corruption in Papacy, 106, 107.

‘_Cortigiano_,’ the, by Castiglione, 381, 388, 446.

Cosmetics, use of, 373-374.

Council of Ten, 66.

Country life, descriptions of, 306;

love of, 404-405.

Crime, for its own sake, 453-454;

prevalence of, among priests, 448-449.

Criticism, Biblical, 501.

Crusades, the, 485-486;

influence of, 285.

Culture, general Latinization of, 249-256.

‘_Curiale_,’ the, 378.

Cybò, Franceschetto, 108-109;

as gambler, 436.

D.

Daemons, belief in, 521-524, 531.

Dagger, use of the, 452.

Dante, Alighieri, 75, 76, 83, 130, 133, 135;

as advocate of antiquity, 204-205;

satirist, 155;

belief in freedom of the will, 498;

burial place of, 143;

desire for fame, his, 139;

influence of, 324;

influence of nature shown in works, 299;

life of, by Boccaccio, 329;

on Epicureanism, 496-497;

the Italian language, 378-379;

nobility, 360-361;

view of the sonnet, 312;

‘_Vita Nuova_’ of, 333.

Decadence of oratory, 241, 242.

‘_Decades_,’ the, of Sabellico, 248.

‘_Decameron_,’ the, 459.

‘_De Genealogia Deorum_,’ 205-207.

Demeanour of individuals, 369.

Descriptions of life in movement, 348-355.

Description of nations and cities, 338-342;

outward man, 343-347.

Difference of birth, loss of significance of, 354.

Dignities, Church, not bestowed according to pedigree, 360.

‘_Discorsi_,’ the, of Macchiavelli, 458.

Domestic comfort, 376-377;

economy, 132, 402-405.

Dress, importance attached to, 369-370;

regulations relating to, 370-371.

E.

Ecloques of Battista Mantovano, 352, 479.

Economy, domestic, 132, 402-405.

Education, equal, of sexes, 396;

private, 135.

Emperor Charles IV., 17;

submission to the Pope, 18;

Frederick II., 5-7, 69;

III., 19;

Sigismund, 18, 19.

Epicureanism, 496.

Epigram, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270.

Epigraph, the, 268, 269.

Equalization of classes, 359-368.

Erasmus, 254.

Ercole I., Duke of Ferrara, 487-489.

Este, House of, government of the, 46, 48;

Isabella of, 43, 44;

novels relating to, 51, 52, 53;

popular feeling towards, 49, 50.

Van Eyck, Hubert, 302, 303;

Johann, 302, 303.

Ezzelino da Romano, 6, 7.

F.

Fame, modern idea of, 139-153;

thirst for, evils of, 152-153.

Federigo of Urbino, 99.

Feltre, Vittorino da, 213-214.

Female beauty, Firenzuola on, 345-347.

Ferrante of Naples, 36, 37, 459-461.

Ferrara, flourishing state of, 47;

sale of public offices at, 47, 48.

Festivals, 406-428;

full development of, 407;

higher phase in life of people, 406.

Fire-arms, adoption of, 98-99.

Firenzuola on female beauty, 345-347.

Flagellants, the, 485-486.

Flogging, 403.

Florence, 61-87;

general statistics of, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80;

home of scandal-mongers, 161;

life more secure in, 440-451;

and Venice, birthplaces of science of statistics, 69-72.

Florentines, the, as perfectors of festivals, 408.

Foscari, Francesco, torture of, 66.

France, changed attitude of, 91, 92.

Frederick II., Emperor, 5-7, 69;

III., 19.

Frederick of Urbino, learning of, 227;

oratory of, 237.

Freedom of will, belief in, 497.

Friars, mendicant, 462.

G.

Gallerana, Cecilia, 386.

Gamblers, professional, 436.

Gambling on large scale, 436.

Gaston de Foix, 309.

Genoa, 86-87.

Germano-Spanish army, advance of, 122.

Ghibellines and Guelphs, political sonnets of, 312.

Ghosts, 521-523.

Giangaleazzo, 13-14.

Girls, in society, absence of, 399.

Girolamo Savonarola (see Savonarola).

Godfrey of Strasburg, 309.

Golden Spur, order of the, 53.

Gonnella (jester), 157.

Gonzaga, House of, of Mantua, 43;

Francesco, 43, 44;

Giovan Francesco, 213-214;

Isabella, 385.

Government, divine, belief in, destroyed, 507.

‘_Gran Consilio_,’ the, 66.

Gratitude as an Italian virtue, 440.

Greater dynasties, 35-54.

Greek, the study of, 195-197.

Guarino of Verono, 215.

Guelphs and Ghibellines, political sonnets of, 312.

Guicciardini, his opinion of the priesthood, 464.

Gymnastics first taught as an art, 389.

Gyraldus, historian of the humanists, 276.

H.

Hair, false, 372.

Hermits, 471.

Hierarchy, hostility to the, 458.

Hieronymus of Siena, 471-472.

‘_Historia rerum Venetarum_,’ the, of Bembo, 248.

History, treated of in poetry, 261.

Honour, the sentiment of, 433-435.

Horses, breeding of, 295-296.

Humanism in the Fourteenth Century, 203;

furtherers of, 217-229.

Humanists, fall of, in 16th century, 272-281;

faults of, 276;

historian of, 276;

temptations of, 275-276.

Human Nature, study of intellectual side of, 308-309.

Husband, rights of, 442.

Hypocrisy, freedom of Italians from, 439.

I.

‘_Il Galateo_’ of G. della Casa, 375-376.

Illegitimacy, indifference to, 21, 22.

Immorality, prevalent at beginning of 16th century, 432.

Immortality, decline of belief in, 541.

Individual, the, assertion of, 129, 130, 131;

the, and the Italian State, 129-138;

the perfecting of, 134-138.

Individuality, keen perception of Italians for, 329.

Infidelity in marriage, 440-441, 456.

Inn-keepers, German, 375.

Innocent VIII., Pope, election of, 107.

Inquisitors and Science, 291;

detrimental to development of drama, 317.

Instruments, musical, collections of 393.

Intolerance, religious, 6.

Isabella of Este, 43, 44.

Italians, cleanliness of, 374;

discoverers of the Middle Ages, 286;

journeys of, 285-288;

judges as to personal beauty, 342;

supremacy of, in literary world, 151;

writing of, 193.

Italy, a school for scandal, 160;

subject to Spain, 94.

J.

Jacopo della Marca, 467.

‘_Jerusalem delivered_’ of Tasso, delineation of character in, 327.

Jesting, a profession, 156.

Jews, literary activity of the, 199-201.

Journeys of the Italians, 285-288.

Julius II., Pope, character of, 118;

election of, 117.

K.

Knighthood, passion for, 364.