A Short History of Italy (476-1900)

The Two Sicilies, 1494-1516

In the south, it will be remembered, Alfonso the Magnanimous, as the grateful humanists dubbed him, had united Sicily and the mainland; but on his death (1458) the kingdom fell asunder. Sicily, as a part of the Kingdom of Aragon, devolved on a legitimate brother, whereas Naples, claimed as a conquest, was bequeathed to a bastard son, Ferdinand the Cruel. The two kingdoms followed their respective dynasties for nearly fifty years, when Sicily came by inheritance to Ferdinand of Aragon. That crafty and eminently successful monarch, not satisfied with Castile, Granada, Sicily, and a transatlantic realm, but coveting the Kingdom of Naples, conspired with Louis XII of France, who now represented the traditional Angevin claim; the two invaded the coveted kingdom, and divided it between them (1500-1). Naturally, the rogues disagreed over the division of the spoils, and fell foul of each other. The Spaniards were triumphant, and the Kingdom of Naples was annexed to the crown of Spain. Thus the Two Sicilies were reunited under the Spanish crown, and on Ferdinand's death (1516) descended to his grandson, the Emperor Charles V. The unfortunate kingdom remained an appanage of Spain for two hundred years.

Venice, 1453-1508

In the northeast Venice still led a brilliant career, like a charming woman who has received some fatal hurt and does not know it, but instinctively lives more brilliantly than ever. Her fatal hurt was the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks (1453). At first the only obvious ill consequence was war. Venice, willy-nilly, stepped into the place of Constantinople, and became "the bulwark of the West." She waged war after war with the Turks and maintained her reputation for valour and resolution, but Turkey was too strong for her, and little by little stripped her of her long-drawn-out empire of coast and island. A far worse blow than direct war was the cutting of the great trade routes with the East, which damaged all the maritime cities of Italy, but Venice most. Turkey stopped the supplies of Venetian greatness, and slowly but surely sapped Venetian strength. On the stoppage of the straight road to Asia, the blocked current of commerce poked about for a new way, and discovered that it could reach the East by doubling the Cape of Good Hope. Commerce thus avoided Turkey, but it also abandoned the Mediterranean, great centre and source of ancient civilization, and left the maritime cities of Italy stranded, as it were, on the shores of a forsaken sea.

This doom, however, was still hidden in the obscurity of the future, and Venice appeared to be at the height of prosperity. The French ambassador, Philippe de Commines, called her "the most triumphant city I have ever seen." The Venetians were a people apart from other Italians; they never suffered from foreign invasion, or domestic revolt; they lived in isolation, maintained their own customs and usages, and enjoyed a sumptuous, opulent life, in proud security. Venice was the richest, the most comfortable, the best governed city in the world. In military strength she was commonly reckoned the first power in Italy, with the Papacy, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Duchy of Milan about equal in second rank. Venice entertained no suspicion of any seeds of decadence, and continued her greedy career of annexation on the mainland, with a haughtiness worthy of ancient Rome. She laid hands on part of Romagna, and angered the Popes who had a title thereto, which, however imperfect, was much better than the Venetian title. She provoked the Emperor Maximilian, of the House of Hapsburg, who claimed Verona as an Imperial city; and to the west she came into dangerous competition with the French invaders. These enemies, taking their cue from the piratical seizure of Naples by the French and Spanish, agreed together to partition the Venetian territory on the mainland, and invited all the powers of Europe to join them and take a share of the booty. The coalition planned a kind of joint-stock piracy. This was the League of Cambrai (1508), which stripped Venice of all her Italian territory, and threatened the city herself. The allies, however, fell out among themselves; and Venice, by biding her opportunity, in the course of time managed to recover most of her lost territory. Thus, though for a season the Barbarians brought the haughty city to her knees, she weathered the storms better than the rest of Italy, and continued to maintain her independence for three centuries to come.

The Papacy deserves a chapter to itself.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE PAPAL MONARCHY (1471-1527)

The Papacy found itself in an exceedingly difficult situation. It had to adapt an ecclesiastical system, matured in the Middle Ages, to new political systems, to new knowledge, to new thought, in short, to a new world. During its struggle with the Empire, the course before it, however arduous, had been plain, namely, to abase the Emperors; during its captivity at Avignon, its duty to return to Rome (though individual Popes were blind or indifferent) likewise had been plain; during the schism, the one end to be aimed at was union. But now everything was new, and a new policy had to be devised. There were three matters which required particular consideration: the demand for reform which came from across the Alps; the great intellectual awakening of the Renaissance; and the ambitions of the other Italian powers. For these problems the solution which the Papacy tried was twofold: to establish a firm pontifical principality, and to use the new intellectual forces as a motive power to keep itself at the head of Christendom. By a strong pontifical principality the Papacy hoped to secure itself against the covetousness of the other Italian states. By using the new intellectual forces it hoped to range them on its side, and so to choke, or at least to overcrow, the ultramontane cry for reform. One need not suppose that such a plan was consciously thought out in detail from the beginning; rather it was the course which the Papacy gradually took, partly from theory, partly under the stress of passing circumstances.

We remember that the Council of Constance closed the Great Schism, and sent Martin V (1417-31) back to Rome as sole Pope. His pontificate marks the end of the old Republican commune, which had made so much trouble for Popes and Emperors in days past, and therefore marks the first definite stage in the transformation of the Papacy into a local secular power. Rome, although she did not deny herself an occasional outbreak in memory, as it were, of good old days, settled down into a papal city.

The most interesting part of the papal story is the process that went on within the Church. The intolerable burden of ecclesiastical taxation, the growth of heresy, and the degeneration of the clergy, as well as the Great Schism, had roused Europe to a sense that something must be done, and Europe attempted the old remedy of Ecumenical Councils. At Constance the question of general reform had come up, but the papal party had managed to prevent action. At the next Council, held at Basel, internal difficulties appeared still more plainly. Party lines were sharply drawn; the ultramontanes, as before, wished to subject the Popes to the supremacy of Councils, to substitute an ecclesiastical aristocracy of bishops in place of a papal monarchy, and, as it were, transfer the centre of ecclesiastical gravity from Rome across the Alps. Feeling ran so high that the Council split in two. Part followed the Pope to Italy, and part stayed in Basel and elected an anti-pope (1439). It looked as if schism had come again, but the danger passed. The anti-pope resigned; unity was restored and lasted for seventy years.

Nicholas V, as we have seen, hoped to maintain the Papacy at the head of Christendom by means of the new intellectual forces. Such a conception was purely Italian, and showed plainly enough that the Papacy had ceased to represent Christendom, had ceased to be the real head of a Universal Church, and had become a purely Italian institution. While Nicholas and his successors were thinking of culture and of becoming Italian princes, the pious ultramontanes, comparatively indifferent to the intellectual excitement of the Renaissance, were thinking of sin and of the remedy for sin. The papal Curia was clever, but did not foresee that to subordinate the old conception of the Papacy as the head of the religious and ecclesiastical organization of Europe to the new conception of it as an Italian principality would surely alienate the Teutonic peoples; it did not foresee that the Renaissance, with its spirit of examination, investigation, criticism, with its encouragement of the free play of the human mind, was necessarily preparing the way for the Reformation. But the Curia perceived the opposite difficulties, to which we are generally blind, that unless the Papacy did establish itself as a temporal power, it might well be reduced to another Babylonish Captivity by a king of Naples, a duke of Milan, or even by some condottiere. And it perceived that other difficulty as well, that if the Papacy turned against the intellectual movement, the intellectual movement would, in self-defence, turn against the Papacy.

The Popes did indeed seek to revive the old rôle of the Papacy in one respect. They tried to arouse the sentiment of Christendom against the invading Turks, and to lead a crusade themselves. But the time for such a course had passed. The kings and princes of Europe were busy with their own kingdoms and principalities and would not budge; and the Papacy was obliged to give up the plan. Discouraged by this failure it naturally turned to the new theory of a little papal kingdom and vigorously put the theory into practice. The three Popes who accomplished this task were Francesco della Rovere, Sixtus IV (1471-84), Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI (1493-1503), and Giuliano della Rovere, Julius II (1503-13). Their careers must be looked at more closely.

Sixtus IV was the son of a peasant. Educated by the Franciscans, he became distinguished as a scholar in theology, philosophy, and ecclesiastical affairs, and was chosen general of the order. When Pope, after a last futile attempt to start a crusade, Sixtus openly abandoned the rôle of Pontiff of Christendom and became an Italian prince. Energetic and masterful, he set to work to consolidate the loose and insubordinate papal territories into a compact state. The task was not easy, and one of the obstacles in his way was lack of men whom he could trust. It was of little advantage to gather together an army, or to capture a city, if the papal general or governor found his own interests opposed to papal interests. Loyalty was held in scant esteem by Italians of the Renaissance. Sixtus met the difficulty by employing his nephews. This policy was by no means the beginning of papal nepotism, but these nephews happened to be young men with marked tastes for greed, ferocity, and dissipation, and brought the system into especial notoriety. To one nephew the Pope gave a cardinal's hat, four bishoprics, an abbey, a patriarchate, as well as free access to the papal treasury. When this young man had died of dissipation, the post of chief favourite descended to his brother. For him the Pope procured a wife from the ducal house of Sforza, and began to carve a dukedom in Romagna, with the intention of adding slices cut from the neighbouring states. This young man was arrogant, ignorant, and brutal, with no interests except ambition and the chase. In due course he was murdered. Whatever effect nepotism of this character produced across the Alps, it served certain purposes in Italy. Sixtus made himself feared, and advanced the project of a papal kingdom to a point where his successors were able to take it up and complete it.

Sixtus also pursued Nicholas's plan of making Rome the first city of the world in art and magnificence. He brought together architects and artists, and patronized art and literature. But this aspect of the plan to maintain the Papacy at the head of Christian Europe belongs rather to the story of the high Renaissance, and must be postponed to the next chapter.

We may pass over the next Pope, who was not distinguished except for a frank recognition of his illegitimate children, and for what then appeared a whimsical desire to maintain peace, and proceed to the notorious Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI. It was in Borgia's pontificate that the French invasion of 1494 took place. This introduction of a new and terrible element into Italian politics frightened him as well as other Italian rulers, for he knew that the Papal State would never be strong enough to resist single-handed such an army as that of Charles VIII, and he tried to form a union of the Italian powers for common defence. His policy met little success, especially as he himself, seeing advantages to be gained from a French alliance, whirled about, granted to the French king a dispensation for divorce, to the French favourite a cardinal's hat, and made a separate treaty for himself (1499). Borgia did no more than any other Italian prince would have done, but he must bear his share of the responsibility. It was a deliberate sacrifice of Italian for papal interests. Whether that was justifiable or not is another matter. The Pope wished to establish a Pontifical State, and acted in the manner which he thought would be most likely to achieve success.

Borgia also followed the example set by Sixtus, and raised his family to power and rank, partly, of course, from affection, but partly in order to strengthen the Papacy. His task was to reduce the papal vassals in the Pontifical States to obedience and so to create a strong central government. The instrument he employed was his son Cæsar Borgia. This brilliant young man has won a great reputation, owing in large measure to Machiavelli's admiration. He was an athletic, handsome, taciturn man, quick, cunning, and cruel. He began his career in the Church, but at the time of his father's reconciliation with France, gave up his cardinal's hat, and was created duke by the French king. Cæsar made an excellent instrument for rooting out the disobedient vassals of the Papal State. They were crafty, greedy, and false; he was craftier, greedier, and falser than they. He dispossessed them with ruthless vigour, and established himself in their stead. His energy and success were extraordinary, and frightened other Italian rulers. None knew how far his ambition might stretch, or how far the Papacy might be able to push him. The direct military power of the Pontifical State was not very great and could readily be measured, but the indirect power of the Papacy as head of the Christian Church was vague and alarming. Nevertheless, Cæsar's principality, which rested wholly on the Papacy, fell to pieces when his father died.

Borgia's attitude towards the arts belongs to the next chapter; but in respect to them as well as to the Pontifical State, he followed what I have called the twofold policy of the Popes of the Renaissance. That policy undoubtedly had its advantages; but it also had its disadvantages, and these appear more conspicuous in Borgia's pontificate than in any other. The establishment of papal dominion, as we have seen, encouraged, if it did not necessitate, nepotism; and nepotism involved prodigality and dissipation. The Popes used their families to strengthen their position; and the upstart families, giddy with sudden wealth and power, misbehaved. The nephews of Sixtus rendered some service to the Papacy, but they caused scandal. Cæsar Borgia rendered greater services, and caused still greater scandal. The other branch of the twofold policy, by a different path, led to the same result. Patronage of arts and letters involved great expense and encouraged luxurious tastes; luxury led to idleness, and idleness to vice. The Roman atmosphere had never been favourable to spiritual life, and now, surcharged with the classical spirit of the Renaissance, practically extinguished religion.

For centuries the Roman Curia had been a butt for the arrows of satire. The minnesingers of Germany, the troubadours of Provence, had paused in their amorous ditties to compose bitter gibes against the greed and luxurious life of the great Roman prelates. Taunts such as this became household phrases: Curia Romana non quaerit ovem sine lana.[19] Dante had put priest, prelate, and Pope into hell. Petrarch had written scathing verses:—

One of the best tales in the "Decameron" turns on the conversion of a Jew, who goes to Rome, sees the conduct of Pope and cardinals, and becomes convinced that only a Divine Church can support so staggering a burden. In Borgia's time the Curia outdid itself, and Borgia led the way. He acknowledged his children, and lavished papal revenues upon them; he bestowed a cardinal's hat on Alexander Farnese, founder of the Farnese family, for the sake of Giulia Farnese, his frail sister; he sanctioned ballets and theatricals of a scandalous nature in the Vatican palace, and encouraged his sons and his cardinals in a dissolute life. Vice was not all; the odour of crime infected the air. The Pope's son, the Duke of Gandia, was murdered, so was his son-in-law, husband of his daughter Lucrezia. Cardinals died mysteriously. The common voice, whispering low in Rome and loud elsewhere, ascribed these murders to Cæsar Borgia. It appeared as if the Pope believed the charges himself. "Cæsar," he said, "is a good-natured man, but he cannot tolerate affronts." Lucrezia, too, became the object of the grossest slanders. No doubt common gossip then, as always, raised a tree of falsehood from a mustard grain of truth; but credulity accepted every accusation as true. North of the Alps the simple-minded Germans shuddered and crossed themselves. Even the Romans were shocked. When the Pope died, no man would touch his body; it was dragged by a rope fastened to its foot from the bed to the grave, and there tumbled in. No one doubted that his soul had gone to hell.

Alexander VI violated every rule of domestic morality; nevertheless, Pope Julius II (1503-13) violated the sacred character of priest as fundamentally, though in a much less repulsive way. Julius, a nephew of Sixtus IV, was a fiery soldier, a high-aspiring prince, a man of great qualities, impatient and magnificent. Had he been duke of Milan or King of Naples, he would have presented a noble figure; but a Pope armed cap-à-pie, entering a conquered city through the breach battered by his cannon, was as clear a defiance of the evangelical spirit of the reformers as the private profligacy of Pope Borgia.

Julius pursued the twofold policy of the Papacy with greater zeal and greater success than any of his predecessors. His furious energy completed the work of making the incohesive states of the Church into a compact principality; and he is the real founder of the absolute Papal State, the first real Pope-king. He achieved equal success in the other branch of the policy, and revelled in the kindred spirit of the High Renaissance. Julius exalted Rome to the place of first city in the world; and if the world had asked for art from the Papacy instead of asking for religion, it would have been abundantly satisfied. But Germany was thinking of sin, of vice, of simony, of taxation, and was becoming conscious of an extreme national antipathy to Italian rule; and when a young German monk, like Martin Luther, went to Rome, instead of taking pleasure in the architecture, painting, and sculpture that adorned the city, he was horrified at the lack of religion.

Julius, however, was entitled to a sense of accomplishment at his death. He left to his successors a little kingdom in the middle of Italy, and he had made Rome the centre of the arts. Not till the days of his successors did the failure of that policy appear. By a kind of poetic justice the utter failure of art to satisfy the demand for reform, for purity, for religion, was proved during the pontificates of the two Medici, Leo X and Clement VII. The Medici had patronized the arts, both in Florence and in Rome, and the arts repaid the Medici with enjoyment and renown. But the Medici had done nothing for the spirit of reform; on the contrary, they had helped crush Savonarola, and the spirit of reform turned upon them. Germany hoisted the standard of secession during the pontificate of Leo, and an army of the unfaithful sacked Rome during that of Clement.

Leo X was a fat, clever, cultivated man, with no great virtues and no real vices. "Let us enjoy the Papacy since God has given it to us," is the sentiment put into his mouth, and serves to characterize his reign. Bred in his father's intellectual circle, and a member of the luxurious Roman society, Leo shared the tastes of both. He was a connoisseur of works of art, and derived genuine æsthetic pleasure from them; he was also fond of agreeable company, good cookery, the chase, and most forms of social amusement. His political conduct was not of much real consequence, as matters had gone too far. In the interminable struggle between Charles V and Francis I, the Papacy tried to hold a balance of power, and bargained with both sides; but, as the Spaniards, in possession of both Milan and Naples, were the stronger, the Papacy generally found its advantage on that side. As to the larger matter of the ecclesiastical unity of Christendom there was practically nothing to be done. The causes which split the Teutonic world from the Latin were already matured. It was too late to stop the Reformation. Luther might have been dealt with more shrewdly, but the forces behind him could not have been kept in check. Leo excommunicated Luther (1520), and the Imperial Diet at Worms condemned him and his doctrine, but the unity of the Church was doomed.

To Leo succeeded his cousin Clement VII, after a brief pontificate by the last foreign Pope. Clement was incompetent, and failed to realize the gravity of his situation; neither he nor Rome understood the crisis they had reached. The prevailing state of mind may be inferred from this extract from the diary of a young Roman burgher: "I saw this Pope the first day of May, 1525, come in the morning of the Feast of SS. Philip and James to the Church of the Holy Apostles, and after celebrating high mass, remain all day and night in the palace of the Colonna.... That day it was an old and foolish custom in the Colonna palace (which connects with the church and has windows looking in it), to throw various kinds of fowls and animals into the church to the people who were there, all of the lowest sort. They also put a pig in the middle of the church up high, and whoever was able to climb up and take it, won it; and on top of the roof were kegs and pots of water, which they poured on the persons who climbed up. The amusement of those gentlemen, and of the rest who looked on, was to see the crowd in a mess, battling, shrieking, pushing, shoving, like beasts,—a merrymaking not becoming in a church or any sacred edifice." The diary adds: "Now let people learn to know the souls of the great and especially of priests, how wicked, deceitful, and false they are, how full of fraud and knavery."[20] There were plenty of other facts to prove this conclusion. The merrymaking was doomed to cease.

The incompetent Pope was totally at a loss what policy to follow, not knowing whether it was better to incline towards the Empire or to France. He shifted at the wrong time, joined a league against the Empire, then wriggled and shuffled, and so drew upon himself and the devoted city the punishment due to a long course of wickedness. The Imperial army, a ruffian host of Germans (many of them Lutherans), Spaniards, and Italians, under the command of the traitor Bourbon, was encamped in the north; the unpaid soldiers clamoured for plunder, and Bourbon led them to Rome, carried the neglected walls by assault, and put the city to sack. Rome was a little city, with perhaps 90,000 inhabitants, but rich in the oblations and tribute money of Christendom; the churches were decked with gold and silver, the palaces stuffed with precious paintings, tapestries, and ornaments of every kind. Popes, cardinals, and princes had rivalled one another in accumulations of works of art and articles of luxury. Though license, profligacy, and crime had then shut out Rome from the sympathy of the world, it is impossible to read to-day of the horrors of the sack—men murdered, mothers, daughters, nuns outraged, old men and priests brutally insulted, churches and sacred relics defiled—without the sharpest pity. For eight days the devilish work went on, and but 30,000 inhabitants were left, so many had fled, or been killed, or made prisoners (1527).

Terrible was the punishment that Clement witnessed,—Rome sacked, the liberty of Italy taken away, the Roman Catholic Church rent in two.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE HIGH RENAISSANCE (1499-1521)

We are now at liberty to return to the great intellectual and artistic movement that lifted Italy to the primacy in Europe, and reached its zenith in the period of time to which the last two chapters have been devoted. This is the culminating period, in which the greatest masters did their work, and separates the earlier and more experimental stage that preceded it from the later stage of exaggeration and decadence which followed. The movement swept all the arts along with it. It produced the greatest men in literature since Petrarch, the greatest architects since the Gothic masters of the Ile de France, the greatest sculptors since Praxiteles, the greatest painters that ever were.

Italian literature cannot compare with English literature or French in compass, variety, richness, or delicacy. Indeed, except for Dante, it would have rather a thin and tinkling sound. Nevertheless, in the High Renaissance it roused itself brilliantly. Niccolò Machiavelli was the ablest writer on the policy of government between Aristotle and Burke. Guicciardini was the first modern historian. Count Baldassare Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier" is as singularly excellent in its way as Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Of this book, which portrays fashionable society at the elegant court of Urbino, Tasso says: "So long as there shall be princes and courts, so long as ladies and gentlemen shall meet in society, so long as virtue and courtesy shall abide in our hearts, the name of Castiglione will be held in honour." The book purports to be a series of conversations between the duchess and her guests concerning the proper qualities of a perfect gentleman. This society, no doubt, is a little affected, stilted, and conceited, but it is dignified, well-behaved, and high-minded. These people discuss deportment, athletics, propriety of speech, whether one must keep within the Tuscan vocabulary of Petrarch and Boccaccio or may make use of the vernacular spoken elsewhere, whether painting or sculpture is the nobler art, what a gentleman's dress should be, and so on. The discussion proceeds to the proper behaviour of a lady, and by natural steps to love. Bembo, a famous littérateur, here takes the floor, plunges into Platonic ideas, and argues that the higher love, governed by reason, is better than lower love, and will lead to contemplation of universal beauty; but that even this stage of love is imperfect, and the lover must mount higher still, until his soul, purified by philosophy and spiritual life, sees the light of angelic beauty and, ravished by the splendour of that light, becomes intoxicated and beside itself from passion to lose itself in the light. "Let us, then, direct all the thoughts and forces of our soul to this most sacred light, which shows us the way that leads to heaven; and following after it, let us lay aside the passions wherewith we were clothed at our fall, and by the stairway that bears the shadow of sensual beauty on its lowest step, let us mount to the lofty mansion where dwells the heavenly, lovely, and true beauty, which lies hidden in the inmost secret recesses of God, so that profane eyes cannot behold it,"[21] etc. This may savour somewhat too much of Platonic rhetoric, but such feelings were genuine, emotionally genuine, even if they proved evanescent in practice; they were familiar to Lorenzo dei Medici and his friends, and to the nobler spirits throughout Italy, and are as characteristic of the period as its cruelty, treachery, or sensuality. The effect of such cultivated circles upon art must have been great; they gave artists encouragement, sympathy, employment, and by the union of fashion and intelligence helped educate the taste of a larger public. It must be remembered that both Bramante and Raphael came from Urbino.

Poetry, with the delightful spontaneity and capriciousness of Italian genius, chose Ferrara, the home of the House of Este, to hang its laurels in. There Matteo Boiardo wrote the "Orlando Innamorato" (Roland in Love). This poem is an epic of chivalry concerning Charlemagne's court, and deals seriously, and yet at times ironically, with the subject of Roland's love for the beautiful Angelica. It was left unfinished, and Lodovico Ariosto (1474-1533) picked up the thread and carried it on, far more brilliantly and far more ironically, under the title "Orlando Furioso" (Roland Crazed). Ariosto's poem, which was immensely popular, was intended to entertain, and it succeeded; its variety, wit, irony, sarcasm, and levity make it entertaining even now. Inferior in moral and sensuous beauty to Spenser's "Faerie Queene," it is far easier to read. Its interest for us lies in the light it sheds on the intellectual state of educated Italians of the Renaissance, especially in regard to religion. Biblical allusions, sacred north of the Alps, are lugged in to give a touch of humour, as, for instance, where one of the knights, Astolfo, goes on a search for Roland's lost wits and meets St. John the Evangelist, who drives him to the moon in Elijah's chariot; or where, in another passage, St. Michael finds that the goddess of Discord has not obeyed his commands, "the angel seized her by the hair, kicked and pounded her incessantly, broke a cross over her head, till Discord embraced the knees of the divine envoy and howled for mercy." Ariosto, himself, conformed to the rites of the Church. Like most educated Italians he accepted them as conventional forms, tinged possibly with supernatural power, and kept ecclesiastical ideas wholly separate from moral ideas. His sceptical, ironical, Epicurean attitude towards non-material things is characteristic of the decadence of this period in which mental activity had outgrown morality.

Ariosto was a gentleman of birth and position. He spent most of his life in the service of his princes, the House of Este. In later life he withdrew from their employment, and lived in his own house, parva sed apta (small but suitable), to which the literary pious still make pilgrimages. He wrote the "Orlando Furioso" between 1505 and 1515, and thereafter devoted most of his leisure to improving and polishing it. Basking in the sunshine of fashionable admiration, he little suspected that another man, who had spent his life in mighty feats of architecture, painting, and sculpture, would in his old age write sonnets that should be read and reread like a breviary by serious men and women who passed his own luxurious rhetoric unheeded. Michelangelo's sonnets (some of which were written to Vittoria Colonna) are the noblest embodiment of those high ideas of love which came down from Plato to the philosophers of the Palazzo Medici in Florence and the courtiers at the ducal palace in Urbino. They are crammed to bursting with passionate intensity, and in that respect have no equals, even in English.

In the fine arts the High Renaissance has a score of famous men. Among them three or four stand head and shoulders above their fellows. Each is marked by extraordinary individuality of talents, character, and disposition: Michelangelo by passionate fury—terribilità; Raphael by sweet serenity; Bramante by his even commingling of poise and ardour; Leonardo by his noble curiosity.

Of Leonardo, Vasari says: "Sometimes according to the course of nature, sometimes beyond and above it, the greatest gifts rain down from heavenly influences upon the bodies of men, and crowd into one individual beauty, grace, and excellence in such superabundance that to whatever that man shall turn, his very act is so divine, that, surpassing the work of all other men, it makes manifest that it is by the special gift of God, and not by human art. This was true of Leonardo da Vinci; who, beside a physical beauty beyond all praise, put an infinite grace into whatever he did, and such was his excellence, that to whatever difficult things his mind turned he easily solved them." Leonardo (1452-1519) was a Florentine. He was trained by the subtle Verrocchio, from whom he learned the smile, if it be a smile, on the faces of his portraits of women. After leaving Verrocchio's workshop he went to Lombardy, where he spent sixteen years at the court of Milan. There he did a hundred different things: he modelled a great equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza (since destroyed), painted portraits, drew architectural designs,—for a cupola, a staircase, a bathroom, a triumphal arch, etc.,—executed hydraulic works, studied the cultivation of the grape, and played on his silver lyre. In the refectory of a Dominican monastery he painted his fresco of The Last Supper. One of the novices, who watched this handsome young painter at work, says that sometimes he would dash up the scaffold, brush in hand, put a few touches and hurry down; sometimes he would paint from sunrise to sunset without stopping even to eat; sometimes he would stand for hours contemplating the different figures. After Sforza's fall, Leonardo left Milan, and for a time took service with Cæsar Borgia as military engineer and architect. He subsequently returned to Florence, and finally went to France, where he died.

Little remains of all that Leonardo planned. A half-destroyed fresco, a few easel pictures, some incomparable drawings, some treatises on his arts, some apothegms, are enough, however, to justify his fame. One of his apothegms, Tu, o Iddio, tutto ci vendi a prezzo di fatica (Thou, O God, sellest us everything at the price of hard work), is but poorly borne out by his own prodigal portion of genius, which rather supports Vasari's view that God makes special gifts. Very rarely has any man received the native endowment of Leonardo da Vinci.

The greatest architect of the High Renaissance was Bramante of Urbino. He, like Leonardo, worked in Milan during the resplendent reign of Lodovico Sforza. There he did much charming work and imposed his personality on Lombard architecture; but his great reputation was made in Rome, whither he went, drawn by the great Romeward flow of art, when the French invasion drove the fine arts from Milan. In Rome, Bramante became the papal architect. He shares with Raphael and Michelangelo the honour of making St. Peter's basilica and the Vatican palace what they are. He also built a little building, whose historical importance is ludicrously out of proportion to its size, it being as little as St. Peter's is big. It is a tiny circular temple in the court of a church on the Janiculum hill across the Tiber. On the ground floor a Doric colonnade encircles the temple, on the second story a balustrade. A dome, capped by a lantern, covers the whole. It is the first building which fully reproduced the style and spirit of antiquity. It set the fashion for the architecture of the sixteenth century, and determined, among other indirect and not altogether happy results, the plan of St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Capitol in Washington.

It was not chance which took Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo to Rome. They went because the papal court, pursuing its policy of maintaining the Papacy at the head of Christendom by means of culture, summoned them to come. Rome never produced great artists. She never was artistic, any more than she had been spiritual. But just as in earlier times she had drawn spiritual forces to herself and used them, so now she attracted to herself and used the artistic forces of Italy. She had been making ready for years; step by step as she had become more secular, she had also become more artistic, more intellectual. For seventy years every Pope contributed to this end. Eugenius IV employed distinguished humanists as his secretaries, and invited the most notable painters and sculptors to Rome. Nicholas V conceived the splendid scheme of making Rome the mistress of the world's culture. Pius II, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, was the most eminent man of letters of his age. Paul II was a virtuoso in objects of art and increased the grandeur of the papal court. Sixtus IV improved the city, built the Sistine Chapel, and employed Botticelli, Perugino, Signorelli, Ghirlandaio, and Rosselli to decorate it. Innocent VIII brought Mantegna from Padua and Pinturicchio from Perugia to embellish the Vatican palace. Pope Borgia made Pinturicchio his court painter; and that charming master decorated the papal apartments in the Vatican with the great bull of the Borgia crest, and with portraits of the Pope's children and (so Vasari says) of the lovely Giulia Farnese as the Virgin with the Pope worshipping her.

Popes and cardinals felt the great movement and many strove to lead it, but the master figure of the Renaissance at Rome was the fiery Julius II, whose plans in the arts were even more grandiose than in politics. He was the centre of this period, as Cosimo and Lorenzo had been in their generations. Less astute than Cosimo, far less subtle and accomplished than Lorenzo, he was a much more heroic leader than either. His hardy, weather-beaten face in Raphael's portrait, with its strong, well-shaped features, shows his imperious, arrogant, irascible, and yet noble, nature. This Pontiff brought to Rome the greatest genius of the Renaissance, Michelangelo, bade him build for him a monumental tomb, more splendid than any tomb ever built, twelve yards high and proportionately wide and deep, and decked with two or three score statues. Such a gigantic monument could not have found room in the old basilica of St. Peter's, and therefore, as St. Peter's was the proper place for it, it became necessary to proceed with the larger plans of Nicholas V. Piecing and patching did not suit Julius. He discussed plans with his architects Bramante and Giuliano da San Gallo, and then resolved to pull down the old basilica, founded by Constantine and Silvester, despite its thousand years of sacred associations, and build a new church in its place. Bramante's fiery enthusiasm for great designs matched the Pope's. Satire suggested that in heaven he would say to St. Peter, "I'll pull down this Paradise of yours and build another, a much finer and pleasanter place for the blessed saints to live in." He designed the new church in the form of a Greek cross with a cupola, proposing, as it were, to lift the dome of the Pantheon on the basilica of Constantine, an enormous ruin in the Roman Forum. This gigantic plan befitted the new papal scheme of making Rome the head of Europe and the Papacy the head of culture. The corner-stone was laid on April 18, 1506, and the old building was demolished piecemeal, the choir first, the nave last; and in its place, as demolition proceeded bit by bit, the cathedral now standing rose, slowly lifting its great bulk in the air, and finally reached completion and consecration in 1626. The greatest architects of Italy succeeded one another as masters of the works, Bramante, Giuliano da San Gallo from Florence, Fra Giocondo from Verona, Raphael, Antonio da San Gallo the younger, Baldassare Peruzzi from Siena, and Michelangelo, who, when an old man, took charge and designed the dome.

The Vatican was altered according to Bramante's plans in order to make it a fit abode for the head of cultured Christendom: Michelangelo painted his frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12); and Raphael began to paint the stanza della segnatura. Raphael, the most charming figure in the world of art, was equally charming in life. Vasari says: "Among his exceptional gifts I take notice of one of such rare excellence that I marvel within myself. Heaven gave him power in our art to produce an effect most contrary to the humours of us painters, and it is this: the artists and artisans (I do not refer only to those of meaner sort, but to those who are ambitious to be great—and art produces many of this complexion) who worked in his atelier were so united and had such mutual good-will, that all jealousy and crossness were extinguished on seeing him, and every mean and spiteful thought vanished from their minds. Such unity was never seen before. And this was because they were overcome both by his courtesy and his art, but more by the genius of his good nature, which was so full of kindness and overflowing with charity, that not only men, but even the beasts almost worshipped him."

At this time, too, classic art, owing to the discovery of antique statues, had its fullest effect. The Nile, now in the Vatican, had been found in a Roman garden, the Apollo Belvedere in a vineyard near the city, and the Laocoön and many others here and there. Of the discovery of the Laocoön a record remains. "I was at the time a boy in Rome," wrote Francesco, son of Giuliano da San Gallo, the architect, "when one day it was announced to the Pope that some excellent statues had been dug up out of the ground in a grape-patch near the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The Pope immediately sent a groom to Giuliano da San Gallo to tell him to go directly and see what it was. Michelangelo Buonarroti was often at our house, and at the moment chanced to be there; accordingly my father invited him to accompany us. I rode behind my father on his horse, and thus we went over to the place designated. We had scarcely dismounted and glanced at the figures, when my father cried out, 'It is the Laocoön of which Pliny speaks!' The labourers immediately began digging to get the statue out; after having looked at them very carefully, we went home to supper, talking all the way of antiquity."[22]

Thus these various forces—the discovery of antique statues, the passion for art, the eager Italian intellect, the conception of Rome as the mistress of culture, the character of Julius II and the genius of Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael—worked together to cover the Papacy with a pagan glory in its time of religious need. On the other hand, as these monumental works required vast sums of money, the sale of indulgences and the exaction of tribute buzzed on more rapidly than ever.

Leo X (1513-21) has given his name to this age of papal culture, but he was not entitled to the honour; he had the inborn Medicean interest and enjoyment in intellectual matters, a nice taste, and some delicacy of perception, but it needs no more than a look at his fat jowl in Raphael's portrait to see that he could not have been a motive force in a great period. He stands on an historic eminence as the last Pope to wield the Italian sceptre over all Europe, the last to send his tax-collectors from Sicily to England, from Spain to Norway, the last to enjoy the full heritage of Imperial Rome.

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