[131] Lettere, vol. ii, p. 80.
[132] Sarpi's Life by Fra Fulgenzio, p. 64.
[133] Fra Fulgenzio's Vita di F. Paolo, p. 42. Venetian Dispatches in Mutinelli's Storia Arcana, vol. iii. p. 67.
[134] The treatise which Sarpi translated was Gerson's Considerations upon Papal Excommunications. Gerson's part in the Council of Constance will be remembered. See Creighton's History of the Papacy, vol. i. p. 211.
[135] Sarpi's correspondence abundantly proves how very grave was the peril of Papal Absolutism in his days. The tide had not begun to turn with force against the Jesuit doctrines of Papal Supremacy. See Ranke, vol. ii. pp. 4-12, on these doctrines and the counter-theories to which they gave rise. We must remember that the Papal power was now at the height of its ascension; and Sarpi can be excused for not having reckoned on the inevitable decline it suffered during the next century.
[136] Lettere, vol. i. p. 312.
[137] Sarpi's Letters, vol. ii. pp. 179, 284.
[138] Ibid. pp. 100-102.
[139] Bianchi Giovini, Vita di Fra P. Sarpi, vol. ii. p. 49.
[140] A.G. Campbell's Life of Sarpi, p. 174.
[141] Sarpi's Letters, vol. i. pp. 231, 239.
[142] Ibid. pp. 220, 222, 225.
[143] Vita del Padre F. Paolo Sarpi, Helmstat, per Jacopo Mulleri, MDCCXXXXX.
[144] Dispatch to Fr. Contarini under date September 25, 1607, quoted in Campbell's Life of Sarpi, p. 145.
[145] Fulgenzio's Life, p. 61. A.G. Campbell asserts that this celebrated mot of Sarpi's is not to be found in Fulgenzio's MS. It occurs, however, quite naturally in the published work. The first edition of the Life appeared in 1646, eight years before Fulgenzio's death. The discrepancies between it and the MS. may therefore have been intended by the author.
[146] A full account of them is given by Bianchi Giovini in his Biografia, chap. xvii.
[147] Vita di F. Paolo, pp. 67-70.
[148] Vita di F. Paolo, p. 68: 'Le cose che vennero a pubblica notizia e certe sono: che molte persone nominate in quella cifra, di Padre, fratelli, e cugini, per le contracifre constò, dal Generale de' Servi in fuori, niuna esser di dignità inferiore alia Cardinalizia.'
[149] Sarpi says that no crime happened in Venice without a friar or priest being mixed in it (Lettere, vol. i. 351).
[150] Lettere, vol. ii. p. 169.
[151] Opere di Paolo Sarpi, Helmstädt, 1761, vol. i. pp. 200, 233, 311; vol. ii. pp. 89, 187.
[152] This contradicts the opinion of Hallam and Macaulay, both of whom were convinced that Sarpi was a Protestant at heart. Macaulay wishes that he had thrown off the friar's frock. In a certain sense Sarpi can be classified with the larger minds among the Reformed Churches of his age. But to call him a Protestant who concealed his real faith, argues coarseness of perception, incapacity for comprehending any attitude above and beyond belligerent Catholicism and Protestantism, or of sympathizing with the deeply-religious feelings of one who, after calculating all chances and surveying all dogmatic differences, thought that he could serve God as well and his country better in that communion which was his by birthright. To an illuminated intellect there was not in the seventeenth century much reason to prefer one of the Reformed Churches to Catholicism, except for the sake of political freedom. It being impossible to change the State-religion in Venice, Sarpi had no inducement to leave his country and to pass his life in exile among prejudiced sectarians.
[153] Lettere, vol. ii. pp. 3, 18, 96, 109, and elsewhere.
[154] Ib. vol. ii. p. 6.
[155] Lettere, vol. i. p. 237.
[156] Ib. p. 268.
[157] Ib. vol. ii. pp. 29, 48, 59, 60, 125.
[158] Ib. p. 120, 124.
[159] Ib. p. 226.
[160] Ib. p. 217.
[161] Ib. p. 427.
[162] Lettere, vol. ii. p. 283.
[163] Ib. p. 110, 311.
[164] Ib. vol. i. pp. 220, 222, 225, 231, 239.
[165] Campbell's Life, p. 132.
[166] Ib. p. 133, 135.
[167] Lettere, vol. ii. p. 86.
[168] Ib. vol. i. p. 283.
[169] It is worthy of notice, as a stern Venetian joke, that when the Jesuits eventually returned to Rialto, they were bade walk in processions upon ceremonial occasions between the Fraternities of S. Marco and S. Teodoro—saints amid whose columns on the Molo criminals were executed.
[170] Lettere, vol. i. p. 126; Opere, vol. vi. p. 40.
[171] Opere, vol. vi. p. 145.
[172] Fulgenzio's Life, p. 98.
[173] Ibid. p. 105.
[174] Ibid.
[175] Letter of the Superior to the Venetian Senate, printed in the Lettere, vol. ii. pp. 450-453. It is worth meditating on the contrast between Sarpi's and Bruno's deaths. Sarpi died with the consolations of religion on his bed in the convent which had been his life-long home. Bruno was burned alive, with eyes averted from the crucifix in bitter scorn, after seven and a half years spent in the prisons of the Inquisition. Sarpi exhaled his last breath amid sympathizing friends, in the service of a grateful country. Bruno panted his death-pangs of suffocation and combustion out, surrounded by menacing Dominicans, in the midst of hostile Rome celebrating her triumphant jubilee. Sarpi's last thoughts were given to the God of Christendom and the Republic. Bruno had no country; the God in whom he trusted at that grim hour, was the God within his soul, unrealized, detached by his own reason from every Church and every creed.
[176] See Renaissance in Italy, vol. ii. pp. 299, 300.
[177] Lettere del Guarini, Venezia, 1596, p. 2.
[178] Alberi, Relazioni, series 2, vol. ii. pp. 423-425.
[179] Lettere, p. 195.
[180] In this year it was published with the author's revision by Ciotto at Venice. It had been represented at Turin in 1585, and first printed at Venice in 1590.
[181] Guarini may be compared with Trissino in these points of his private life. See Renaissance in Italy, vol. v. 303-305.
[182] Lettere, p. 196.
[183] Il Pastor Fido, per cura di G. Casella (Firenze, Barbéra, 1866), p. liv.
[184] I might have further illustrated this point by quoting the thirty-five lines in which Titiro compares a maiden to the rose which fades upon the spray after the fervors of the noon have robbed its freshness (act i. sc. 4). To contest the beauty of the comparison would be impossible. Yet when we turn to the two passages in Ariosto (Orl. Fur. i. 42, 43, and xxiv. 80) on which it has been modeled, we shall perceive how much Guarini lost in force by not writing with his eye upon the object or with the authenticity of inward vision, but with a self-conscious effort to improve by artifices and refinements upon something he has read. See my essay on 'The Pathos of the Rose in Time,' April, 1886.
[185] Even Silvio, the most masculine of the young men, whose heart is closed to love, appears before us thus:
[186] Telesio, Bruno, Campanella, Salvator Rosa, Vico, were, like Marino, natives of the Regno.
[187] It is worth noting that Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis was first printed in 1593, thirty years previously.
[188] Ferrari, in his Rivolnzioni d'Italia, vol. iii. p. 563, observes: 'Una Venere sospetta versa lagrime forse maschili sul bellissimo Adonide,' etc. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, in like manner, is so written as to force the reader to feel with Venus the seduction of Adonis.
[189] With the stanza quoted above Marino closes the cycle which Boccaccio in the Amoroso Visione (canto xlix.) had opened.
[190] On this point I may call attention to the elaborate portraits drawn by Marino (canto xvi.) of the seven young men who contend with Adonis for the prize of beauty and the crown of Cyprus. Quite as many words are bestowed upon their costumes, jewelry and hair-dressing as upon their personal charms.
[191] I have pleasure in inviting my readers to study the true doctrine regarding the place of touch among the senses as laid down by Ruskin in Modern Painters, part iii. sec. 1, chap. ii.
[192] The hypocrisy of the allegory is highly significant for this phase of Italian culture. We have seen how even Tasso condescended to apply it to his noble epic, which needed no such miserable pretense. Exquisitely grotesque was the attempt made by Centorio degli Ortensi to sanctify Bandello's Novelle by supplying each one of them with a moral interpretation (ed. Milano: Gio. Antonio degli Antoni, 1560, See Passano's Novellieri in Prosa, p. 28).
[193] What I have elsewhere, called 'the tyranny of the kiss' in Italian poetry, begins in Tasso's Rinaldo, acquires vast proportions in Guarino's Pastor Fido, and becomes intolerable in Marino's Adone.
[194] See the climax to the episode of Filauro and Filora.
[195] In support of this opinion upon Marino's merit as a poet, I will cite the episode of Clizio (canto i. p. 17); the tale of Psyche (iv. 65); the tale of the nightingale and the boy—which occurs both in Ford and Crashaw, by the way (vii. 112); the hymn to pleasure (vii. 116); the passage of Venus and Adonis to the bath (viii. 133); the picture of the nymph and satyr (viii. 135); the personification of the Court (x. 167); the Cave of Jealousy (xii. 204-206); the jewel-garden of Falserina (xii. 218); Falserina watching Adonis asleep (xii. 225); Falserina's incantations (xiii. 233); Mars in the lap of Venus surrounded by the loves (xiii. 245); Venus disguised as a gypsy (xv. 290); the game of chess (xv. 297); the leave-taking of Venus and Adonis (xvii. 332); the phantom of dead Adonis (xviii. 357); the grief of Venus (xviii. 358-362); the tales of Hyacinth and Pampinus (xix. 372-378). The references are to ed. Napoli, Boutteaux, 1861.
[196] There are passages of pure cantilena in this poem, where sense is absolutely swallowed up in sound, and words become the mere vehicle for rhythmic melody. Of this verbal music the dirge of the nymphs for Adonis and the threnos of Venus afford excellent examples (xix. pp. 358-361). Note especially the stanza beginning:
There is nothing more similar to this in literature than Fra Jacopone's delirium of mystic love:
Only the one is written in a Mixo-Lydian, the other in a Hyper-Phrygian mood.
[197] There is a streamlet called Reno near Bologna.
[198] See Scherillo's two books on the Commedia dell'Arte and the Opera Buffa.
[199] For the date 1615 see Carducci's learned essay prefixed to his edition of the Secchia Rapita (Barbera, 1861).
[200] Canto i. 2.
[201] Canto xii. 77.
[202] So Heine wrote of Aristophanes. See my essay in Studies of the Greek Poets.
[203] Canto viii. 33, 34.
[204] See Baini, Life of Palestrina, vol. ii. p. 20.
[205] While the choir was singing, the orchestra was playing concerted pieces called ricercari, in which the vocal parts were reproduced.
[206] See the original passages from contemporary writers quoted by Baini, vol. i. pp. 102-104. Savonarola went so far as to affirm: 'Che questo canto figurato l'ha trovato Satanasso,' a phrase quite in the style of a Puritan abusing choirs and organs.
[207] See Michelet, Histoire de France, vol. xi. pp. 76, 101, vol. xii. p. 383 (Paris: Lacroix, 1877).
[208] Baini, i. p. 196.
[209] It will be remembered that this Silvio Antoniano was one of the revisers of Tasso's poem, and the one who gave him most trouble.
[210] In the Dedication of the Mass of Pope Marcello to Philip II. in 1567 Palestrina only says that he had been constrained by the order of men of the highest gravity and most approved piety to apply himself ad sanctissimum Missae sacrificium novo modorum genere decorandum, and that he had performed his task with indefatigable pains and industry (Baini, op. cit. vol. i. p. 280). But it is noteworthy that of the three Masses furnished for the approval of the congregation, the first was entitled Illumina oculos meos, and that an anecdote referring to this title relates Palestrina's earnest prayers for grace and inspiration during the execution of the work (ibid. p. 223, note.)
[211] See Renaissance in Italy, vol. iv. pp. 263, 305.
[212] Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, by Vernon Lee.
[213] The three founders of the school were thus born precisely during the most critical years of the Council. They felt the Catholic reaction least. That expressed itself most markedly in Domenichino, born seventeen years after its close.
[214] Nich. Poussin, b. 1594; Claude, 1600; Gaspar Poussin, 1613; Salvator Rosa, 1615; Luca Giordano, 1632; Canaletto, 1697.
[215] I of course except Venice, for reasons which I have sufficiently set forth in Renaissance in Italy, vol. iii. p. 347. Long after other schools of Italy the Venetian was still only adolescent.
[216] I have not thought it worth while to write down more than a very few names of the Mannerists. Notice how often they worked in whole families and indistinguishable coteries.
[217] Everyone familiar with European picture-galleries will remember cabinet pieces by the Caracci, especially Ecce Homos, Pietàs, Agonies in the Garden, which look like copies from Correggio with a dash of added sentimentalism.
[218] I have mainly used the encyclopedic work entitled Felsina Pittrice (Bologna, 1841, 2 vols.) for my study of the Eclectics. This is based upon the voluminous writings of the Count C.C. Malvasia, who, having been born in 1616, and having enjoyed personal intercourse with the later survivors of the Bolognese Academy, was able to bequeath a vast mass of anecdotical and other material to posterity. The collection contains critical annotations and additions by the hand of Zanotti and later art students, together with many illustrative documents of the highest value. Reading this miscellaneous repertory, we are forced to regret that the same amount of characteristic and authentic information has not been preserved about one of the greater schools of Italy—the Venetian, for example.
[219] He acquired a somewhat infamous celebrity by his obscene engravings in the style of Giulio Romano.
[220] Malvasia has preserved, in his Life of Primaticcio, a sonnet written by Agostino Caracci, in which the aims of the Eclectics are clearly indicated. The good painter must have at his command Roman or classic design, Venetian movement and shadow, Lombard coloring, the sublimity of Michelangelo, the truth to nature of Titian, the pure and sovereign style of Correggio, Raphael's symmetry, Tibaldi's fitness and solidity, Primaticcio's erudite invention, with something of Parmigianino's grace (Fels. Pittr. vol. i. p. 129). Zanotti adds: 'This sonnet is assuredly one which every painter ought to learn by heart and observe in practice.'
[221] See Malvasia, op. cit. vol. i. p. 277; vol. ii. p. 57. The odd thing is that Malvasia tells these stories of the Lodovico-Aphrodite and the color-grinder-Magdalen with applause, as though they proved the mastery of Annibale Caracci and Guido.
[222] The later Eclectics—Spada, Domenichino, Guercino—were to some extent saved by the influences they derived from Caravaggio and the Naturalisti. But they had not the tact to see where the finer point of naturalistic art lies for a delicately minded painter. They added its brutality, as employed by Caravaggio, to the insipidities of the Caracci, and produced such horrors as Domenichino's Martyrdom of S. Agnes.
[223] This tradition of Guido's childhood I give for what it is worth, from Malvasia, op. cit. vol. ii. p. 53. In after life, beside being piously addicted to Madonna-worship, he had a great dread of women in general and witches in particular. What some will call spiritual, others effeminate, in his mature work, may be due to the temperament thus indicated.
[224] Malvasia, op. cit. p. 53, p. 178. The latter passage is preceded by a discussion of the nude in art which shows how Malvasia had imbibed Tridentine morality in the middle of Italy glowing with Renaissance masterpieces.
[225] Lo Spada and Guercino, afterwards to be mentioned, were certainly colorists.
[226] Modern Painters, vol. i. p. 87.
[227] I allude to the Tintoretto in S. Maria dell'Orto at Venice, and to the Luini in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan. Yet the model of Luini's S. Catherine was the infamous Contessa di Cellant, who murdered her husband and some lovers, and was beheaded for her crimes in Milan. This fact demonstrates the value of the model in the hands of an artist capable of using it.
[228] When I assert that the age was losing the sense of artistic reserve, I wish to refer back to what I have written about Marino, the dictator of the age in matters of taste. See above, pp. 273, 274.
[229] Go to S. Andrea nella Valle in Rome, to study the best of them.
[230] Michelangelo Amerighi da Caravaggio (1569-1609).
[231] For the historian of manners in seventeenth-century Italy those pictures have a truly precious value, as they are executed with such passion as to raise them above the more careful but more lymphatic transcripts from beer-cellars in Dutch painting.
[232] See above, part I. p. 47.
[233] But the men who used the word failed to perceive that what justified these qualities in Michelangelo's work was piercing, poignant, spiritual passion, of which their age had nothing.
[235] The great picture by Dosso Dossi, to which I have alluded, is in the Modenese gallery.
[236] The passage from Lodovico Caracci through Poussin to Reynolds is direct and unbroken. 'Poussin,' says Lanzi, 'ranked Domenichino directly next to Raffaello.' History of Painting in Italy, Engl. Tr. vol. iii. p. 84.
[237] Perhaps a generation will yet arise which shall take the Caracci and their scholars into favor, even as people of refinement in our own days find a charm in patches, powder, perukes, sedan-chairs, patchouli, and other lumber from the age despised by Keats. I remember visiting a noble English lady at her country seat. We drank tea in her room, decorated by a fashionable 'Queen Anne' artist. She told us that the quaintly pretty furniture of the last century which adorned it had recently been brought down from the attic, whither her fore bears had consigned it as tasteless—Gillow in their minds superseding Chippendale.
[238] It is only because I am an Englishman, writing a popular book for English folk, that I thus spend time in noticing the opinions of Joshua Reynolds. Addressing a European audience in this year grace, I should not have thought of eddying about his obsolete doctrine.
[239] Twenty millions of years is of course a mere symbol, x or y.