THE WARS OF RELIGION

 

CHAPTER 14

THE END OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

 

THE period, or movement, which has in comparatively recent times come to be termed "the Renaissance", must of course in many senses be said not to have reached its end to this day; nor does it seem as if anything short of a new inroad of the barbarians could check or reverse the impulses which many causes combined to stimulate in the fifteenth century, or could arrest the development of thought, in all its branches, ethical, political, social, religious, scientific, along the lines then traced out (the lines, namely, of free and fearless enquiry, untrammelled by à priori conceptions or implicit deference to authority). If we consider the matter from the most obvious point of view, that of the revival of classical study, we find that the most modern scholar has done no more than enlarge the boundaries of the territory first acquired for learning by such men as Filelfo and Valla; while speculation and enquiry, which then first in modern times claimed the right to roam freely over the whole domain of possible knowledge (and sometimes beyond it), are still as unfettered as ever in western Europe.

Local and temporary reactions, however, there have doubtless been; and of these Italy affords the most conspicuous example. It was safer in 1500 to teach that the soul was mortal, than it was in 1550 to maintain the doctrine of justification by faith. Dante, with his ideal of a universal monarch ruling in righteousness, under whom each man should be free to develop his own faculties in the way he deemed best, might even have regarded Machiavelli's possibly more practicable conception of a State, in which, whether one man or a majority ruled, expediency should be the only motive and force the sole method, as a sad reaction towards the barbaric community.

Yet, though the seeds of political and moral decay were abundant in Italy when the sixteenth century opened, to outward appearance all was brilliant enough. This century, known to Italians as the Cinquecento, is regarded by them as the golden age of their literature. It is dangerous for foreigners to criticize this estimate; and, if quantity of production and wide diffusion of literary culture alone be regarded, there is perhaps no reason against accepting it. If, again, we consider vernacular prose, an age which produced writers of the rank of Machiavelli, Castiglione, Guicciardini, Paruta, Ammirato, Vasari, can hold its own with any; when, however, the claim is made on the ground of its poetical production there is more difficulty in admitting it. Paradoxical as it may seem to say so of an age that gave birth to the two works which have placed Ariosto and Tasso third and fourth on the list of Italian poets, and even given them a conspicuous position among the poets of the world, the Cinquecento was not a poetical period. It turned out an immense quantity of verse, often of excellent quality: but of the poetry which stirs the nobler passions and emotions, which deals, as Dante puts it, with love (other than the merely animal), with courage, and with right conduct, we find, save in a sonnet or an ode here and there, few specimens. Always inclined to sensuality rather than to sentiment, to envy rather than to worship, to criticism rather than to admiration, cynical yet not reticent, the Italian genius had received stimulus more than chastening from the revival of letters in the previous century. Cleverness was abundant; character was lacking; and cleverness without character, while it may produce admirably finished verses, polished raillery, and even charming descriptions of beauty, is not a soil in which the highest poetry will thrive. Serious and cleanly-living men there were, no doubt, both clerical and lay. Among the former may be mentioned Giberti, Bishop of Verona, and Cardinals Contarini and Morone; among the latter the critic Ludovico Castelvetro, the scholar Aonio Paleario, and the artist Michelangelo Buonarotti. But the churchmen were preoccupied with the problem of reforming the Church without rending Christendom asunder; and the laymen, with the exception of the last-named (whom Wordsworth has, not without reason, coupled with Dante), had no very great poetic gift. Even in him it manifested itself but sparingly; it was there, however; and enough of his work remains to justify the momentary lapse into seriousness of the usually flippant and mocking Berni, when he calls him "at once a new Apollo and a new Apelles" and bids the commonplaces of elegant verse hold their peace for evermore: "He utters things, the rest of you mere words"

Petrarchianism

One great merit must be conceded to the men of the Cinquecento, the restoration (for Italy, it may almost be said, the introduction) of the vernacular to its rightful place in literature. Two hundred years before, Dante had both by precept and by example made an effort in this direction; but the flood of Humanism had quickly swept it out of sight, and even Petrarch based his hopes of fame far more on his Latin writings than on the vernacular poetry by which alone he is remembered, but which forms hardly more than an infinitesimal portion of his entire work. The tradition of Italian prose was indeed kept alive almost entirely by the work of one man of universal genius, Leon Battista Alberti (1407-72); but verse practically disappears during the first two-thirds of the century, reviving towards its close in the vigorous, if rugged, romance of Boiardo and the burlesque of Luigi Pulci. The influence of these two writers on Ariosto marks their importance as pioneers in the revival of Italian literature. No man of their contemporaries, however, had more of the true poetic spirit than Lorenzo de' Medici (1448-92). His sonnets and odes (canzoni) are of finer quality than any similar verse since the death of Petrarch; and one seems to catch in them at times an echo of the less highly finished but also less self-conscious work of the pre-Petrarchian age, the dolce stil nuovo of the expiring thirteenth century. Both he and his friend Politian had felt something of the invigorating influence of the racy Florentine folk-songs; and, if Lorenzo had lived free from the entanglements of politics and statecraft, the course of Cinquecento poetry might have taken another turn. Unfortunately the fashion was left to be set by the courtly poets. Cariteo of Naples (1450-1510), a Catalan by birth, imbued with the artificial manner of the later Provencals, and a student of Petrarch, was the coryphaeus of the school. He was seconded by Tebaldeo of Ferrara (1460 c.-1537), the Court poet to the accomplished Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella of Este, and by two other Neapolitans, Serafino of Aquila (1466-1500) and Sannazaro (1458-1530). These, as a somewhat later writer observes, were cast into the shade by Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), the arbiter of letters for his age, who forms a kind of link between Humanists and Cinquecentists. By him, as much as by any man, Italian poetry was directed into the attractive but dangerous path of Petrarchianism, whence a straight track led downwards to the depths of seicentismo, with its conceits, its false taste, its insincere sentiment, and general lack of all masculine quality.

Pietro Bembo (1470- 1547) poet, and cardinal

Bembo was born in Venice to an aristocratic family. His father was an ambassador for the Venetian state, and while still a boy Pietro was able to accompany him on many of his travels; one of the places he visited was Florence, there acquiring a love for the Tuscan form of Italian, a love which was to prove so important in literary and musical history. He studied Greek for two years under the Greek scholar Lascaris at Messina, and afterwards went to the University of Padua. Further travels included two years (1497-1499) spent at the Este court in Ferrara, under the reign of Ercole d'Este I then a significant literary and musical center. While there he met Ariosto and commenced writing his first work, Gli Asolani, a dialogue on the subject of courtly love. The poems in this book were reminiscent of Boccaccio and Petrarch, and were widely set to music in the 16th century. Bembo himself preferred his poetry to be performed by a female singer accompanied by a lute, a wish which was granted to him when he met Isabella d'Este in 1505 and sent her a copy of his book.

In 1502 and 1503 he was again in Ferrara, and had a love affair with the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, who was the wife of Alfonso d'Este. He left around the time of Josquin des Prez's hire by Ercole I d'Este as composer to the chapel, and in time to avoid the plague which decimated the city in 1505, claiming the life of renowned composer Jacob Obrecht

Between 1506 and 1512 he lived in Urbino, and it was here that Bembo began to write his most influential work, a prose treatise on writing poetry in Italian, Prose della volgar lingua, although it was not to be published until much later. In 1513 Bembo accompanied Giulio de' Medici to Rome, where he was soon after appointed secretary to Leo X. On the pontiff's death in 1521 he retired, with impaired health, to Padua, and there lived for a number of years, during which he continued to write, and in 1525 finally published his famous Prose della volgar lingua. In 1529 he accepted the office of historiographer to Venice, his native city, and shortly afterwards was appointed librarian of St Mark's.

Pope Paul III in 1539 made him a cardinal, and Bembo went back to Rome. While there he continued to write and revise his earlier work, in addition to studying theology and classical history; he received as reward the bishoprics of Gubbio and Bergamo. He died in Rome in his 77th year.

Bembo, as a writer, attempted to restore some of the legendary "affect" that ancient Greek had on its hearers, but in Tuscan Italian instead. He held as his model, and as the highest example of poetic expression ever achieved in Italian, the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio, two 14th century writers he assisted in bringing back into fashion. In the Prose della volgar lingua he set Petrarch up as the perfect model, and discussed verse composition in detail, including rhyme, stress, the sounds of words, balance, and variety. In Bembo's theory, the specific placement of words in a poem, with strict attention to their consonants and vowels, their rhythm, their position within lines long and short, could produce emotions ranging from sweetness and grace to gravity and grief in a listener. This work was of decisive importance in the development of the Italian madrigal, the most famous secular musical form of the 16th century, as it was these poems, carefully constructed (or, in the case of Petrarch, analyzed) according to Bembo's ideas, which were to be the primary texts for the music.

Other works by Bemboinclude a History of Venice from 1487 to 1513 (published in 1551), as well as dialogues, poems, and essays. His early Gli Asolani< explains and recommends Platonic affection, somewhat ironically considering his affair with LucreziaBorgia, married at the time to his employer. His edition of Petrarch's Italian Poems, published by Aldus in 1501, and the Terzerime, which Aldus published in 1502, were also influential. Printer and composer Andrea Antico, active in Rome, was also influenced by Bembo; the early composers of the Venetian School, such as Adrian Willaert, helped to spread his theories among composers during that period of quick change. Willaert's collection of madrigals, Musica nova, show a close connection with Bembo's ideas.

The typeface Bembo is named after him.

We need only glance at any of the numerous anthologies compiled towards the middle of the sixteenth century, to be assured that the faculty of producing verses, more especially sonnets, for the most part faultless in form, was then enjoyed by almost every cultivated person. Now and again one comes across verses bearing the stamp of sincerity, as in the case of Michelangelo (who however was not a favorite with the anthologists, and whose poems had to be "re-made" in order to win any popularity), and his friend Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara (1492-1545); but such are rare, and rather than in these, or even in the lyrics generally, the true spirit of the age is to be found in the so-called capitoli, or burlesque essays in verse on every sort of subject, mostly trivial and frequently indecent, though more perhaps in the way of allusion and double meaning than in outspoken obscenity. That the metre in which these jocosities were composed was the terza rima, invented (as it would seem) by Dante for his sacred poem, and used by Petrarch for his Triumphs, possibly added to their piquancy. This metre, which, save for a metrical chronicle or two, seems to have almost dropped out of use in the fifteenth century (Boccaccio's ottava rima being found more available for long narrative poems), had towards the close of it been revived by Lorenzo de' Medici for short, religious meditations, as well as for idylls in the classical style, and by the Venetian Antonio Vinciguerra for satires more or less after the manner of the Romans, in which kind it was presently used by Ariosto, Alamanni, and others. From the Horatian satire to the capitolo, at least in its more respectable form, is no very long step; and it is perhaps not surprising that this form of poetic recreation should have attained the popularity that it did.

Berni and 'Bernesque' verse

For a time everybody wrote capitoli (prelates, artists, scholars, poets). The most notable exponent of the art was perhaps Francesco Berni (1497-1536), who has given his name to the spirit embodied in this class of literature. Berni is one of the most curious figures of the time, and in some respects typical of the forces at work during the later Renaissance, which, combined with the political conditions, were to bring about the change noticeable after the middle of the century. For the Petrarchians he had little respect. Unlike his contemporary Molza, who could turn out with equal facility an amatory sonnet and an indecent capitolo, Berni as a rule avoided any display of sentiment, whether real or fictitious. Even when he is serious the reader is never certain that he will not at any moment fly off into a tissue of whimsicalities. His capitolo "In Praise of Aristotle", containing much sane and sensible eulogy of the philosopher, is addressed to a cardinal's French cook, and ends with burlesque regrets that Aristotle had not left a treatise on "roast and boiled, lean and fat". Yet Berni was more than a flippant cynic. His sincere attachment to such men as Gian Matteo Giberti, the reforming Bishop of Verona, to whom he for a time acted as secretary, or the grave and pious Pietro Carnesecchi, shows that he could appreciate goodness; while the scathing sonnet, couched in a tone of unwonted ferocity, which he hurled at Pietro Aretino, at a time when that infamous personage was in high favor with powerful princes, proves that in the matter of cynicism he was prepared to draw a line. His words on Michelangelo, already quoted (which, curiously enough, he uses also of Aristotle), are evidence that he could respect seriousness in others; and he had a vein of it in himself. For the work by which he is perhaps, or for long was, best known, the rifacimento, or recasting, of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato into a style more congenial to the fastidious taste of the Cinquecento, he wrote (about 1530) some stanzas, couched, in spite of a few outbreaks of his usual mirthfulness, in what seems a tone of genuine piety. Though we cannot, with Vergerio, regard the lines as evidence of anything in the nature of "conversion" on Berni's part, or, in spite of the phrase "Lutheran means good Christian", of any definite adhesion to Protestant views, they show that he had moods in which he regretted the lack of practical religion in Italy, and hoped for better things. Berni died in 1535, not yet forty years old. Had he lived a few years longer he might have shared, at the hands of the papal authority, the doom of his friend Carnesecchi.

PIETRO CARNESECCHI

Born in Florence, he was the son of Andrea Carnesecchi, a merchant who under the patronage of the Medici, and especially of Giulio de' Medici as Pope Clement VII, rapidly rose to high office at the papal court.

He came into touch with the new learning at the house of his maternal uncle, Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi, in Rome. At the age of twenty-five he held several rich livings, had been notary and protonotary to the Curia and was first secretary to the pope, in which capacity he conducted the correspondence with the nuncios (among them Pier Paolo Vergerio in Germany) and a host of other duties.

By his conduct at the conference with Francis I of France at Marseille he won the favour of Catherine de' Medici and other influential personages at the French court, who in later days befriended him. He made the acquaintance of the Spanish reformer Juan de Valdés at Rome, and got to know him as a theologian at Naples, being especially drawn to him through the appreciation expressed by Bernardino Ochino, and through their mutual friendship with the Lady Giulia Gonzaga, whose spiritual adviser he became after the death of Valdés. He became a leading spirit in the literary and religious circle that gathered round Valdés in Naples, and that aimed at effecting from within the spiritual reformation of the church. Under Valdés' influence he wholeheartedly accepted Luther's doctrine of justification by faith, though he repudiated a policy of schism.

He was also an intimate friend of the poetess Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Fondi in 1535.

When the movement of suppression began, Carnesecchi was implicated. For a time he found shelter with his friends in Paris, and from 1552 he was in Venice leading the party of reform in that city. In 1557 he was cited (for the second time) before the tribunal in Rome, but refused to appear. The death of Pope Paul IV and the accession of Pope Pius IV in 1559 made his position easier, and he came to live in Rome. With the accession of Pope Pius V in 1565 the Inquisition renewed its activities with fiercer zeal than ever.

Carnesecchi was in Venice when the news reached him, and betook himself to Florence, where, thinking himself safe, he was betrayed by Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, who wished to curry favour with the pope. From July 1566 he lay in prison over a year. On September 21, 1567 sentence of degradation and death was passed on him and sixteen others, ambassadors from Florence vainly kneeling to the pope for some mitigation, and on October 1 he was publicly beheaded and then burned.

Folengo

Another writer of this period, who has received perhaps less attention than he deserves, is Teofilo Folengo, of Mantua (1492-1543). The mocking spirit which was as powerful in him as in Berni, but manifested itself in a somewhat cruder form, led him to make sport both of the romances of chivalry, long popular in northern Italy, which Boiardo and Pulci had lately brought back into the realm of literature, and of the classical revival, if, as seems probable, the "Macaronic" style, of which he was, though not the inventor, the most conspicuous exponent, was intended to burlesque the achievements of the fourteenth century scholars. Folengo, who began and after an intervening period of reckless and vagabond living ended his career as a Benedictine monk, also had his moods of spiritual perplexity. He has given an allegorical account of his own aberrations, moral and speculative, and of his subsequent conversion (which, as with Dante, appears to have come about at the age of thirty-five) to the right way, in the curious and highly enigmatical work called Chaos del Triperuno (a strange farrago of prose and verse, Latin, Italian, and Macaronic, abounding in anagrams and other fanciful devices, with passages of remarkable beauty interspersed here and there, justifying the author's claim that his verses, if not Tuscan, are sonorous and terse). Folengo had written his Macaronic poems under the name of Merlino Cocaio, and later a burlesque Italian epic, the Orlandino, under that of Limerno Pitocco. In the Chaos he introduces Merlino and Limerno debating the question of Latin versus the vernacular, and makes it clear that his sympathy is with the latter. Yet he could turn out a good Latin verse, and was well read in the Classics. The Macaronea, or romance of Baldus, has the credit of having given suggestions to Rabelais, and perhaps for that reason has alone preserved the fame of its author; but the Chaos is far better worth perusal by anyone who desires to understand a remarkable phase of later Renaissance thought. In the Orlandino the author had ventured upon some plain-spoken criticism of the Church and the Orders, such as was safe enough in the early years of Clement VII; in the Chaos the censure is repeated, though more covertly, and "evangelical" theology is favourably contrasted with "peripatetic"

Boiardo and Ariosto

No spiritual difficulties disturbed the mind of the one poet of that age whose name is known outside the circle of the closer students of its literature. Ludovico Ariosto, the son of a Ferrarese nobleman, was born in 1474 at Reggio, where his father was governor of the citadel. His natural bent towards letters was not encouraged by his father, a somewhat arbitrary person, who made him study law; and he was twenty before he had a chance of learning at all events classical Latin, in which he presently composed with elegance and facility. He seems, however, at no time to have come under the influence of the Humanistic fashion, which probably took less root at Ferrara than in most of the other literary centres of Italy. Ferrara was rather the headquarters of the epic based on the medieval chivalric romances. The House of Este could boast by far the oldest pedigree of any of the ruling Italian families, and had a fancy, as it would seem, to claim descent from one of the legendary heroes. Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano (1434-94!), the author of the Orlando Innamorato, which may be said to be the parent of not only the Furioso, but a long line of similar but less conspicuous works, was himself in the service of Dukes Borso and Ercole, and like the elder Ariosto was at one time governor of Reggio. Another citizen of the same State, Francesco Bello, known as the Blind Man of Ferrara, about the same time composed, it would seem, for the Marquis of Mantua, the Mambriano, another poem of the same cycle. Ariosto therefore grew up in the atmosphere of the narrative romantic school; and though he could on occasion Petrarchise with the most proficient follower of that style, and indeed acquired a reputation by his early essays in the lyrical line, his slightly cynical genius was not likely to find its expression in that direction. He was twenty years old when Boiardo died, and the Innamorato was in every man's mouth (quite a sufficient stimulus for a young man conscious of poetical talent).

The ottava rima, which had become the recognised medium for the romance of chivalry, was just the vehicle suited to an intellect like his humorous, sensible, devoid alike of enthusiasm and of rancour. In this metre it is impossible to be pathetic, or even serious, for more than a very few lines together; the periodical recurrence at short intervals of the sudden interruption to the flow of the verse caused by the rhyming couplet with which each stanza concludes, by cutting the sense into lengths produces a monotony which would be intolerable, did not the same structure lend itself so readily to epigram, or to some quip in the form of a calculated piece of bathos. Of its admirable adaptability to avowed burlesque, Pulci in the last generation had given some evidence, and Tassoni a century later was to give full proof. The oblivion into which, in spite of the efforts of scholars to resuscitate it, Boiardo's really great poem has fallen, is not improbably due to the fact that he took himself too seriously; its best chance of surviving was probably due to Berni's treatment. Apart from the fluency of his diction and the felicity of his phrase, Ariosto lives, because (if the term may be allowed) he kept his tongue in his cheek. From his agreeable Satires, to a modern taste perhaps the most readable of all his works, we learn more about the character and circumstances of Ariosto than we know of any great poet since Horace, whom in some respects he resembles. He reveals himself as a sensible, tolerant, ironical man of the world; studious of his own comfort, though without any taste for luxury; devoid of ambition or enthusiasm; excellent in his family relations; in matters of religion and morals conforming to the rather lax standard of the age, but not falling below it. His patron, Cardinal Ippolito of Este, has incurred much obloquy for a remark alleged to have been made by him to the poet on the appearance of his great work. Yet it is not difficult to believe that to Ariosto himself a considerable part of the machinery of his poem, a good many of the wondrous feats performed by heroes with enchanted arms and preposterous names, would appear most aptly described by the rude and unquotable term which the prelate thought fit to apply to them. Nor does it seem probable that the highly artificial and sophisticated society of an Italian Court can have been deeply moved by the recital of simple, not to say savage, motives, the elementary passions of an age which every reader knew to be mythical. Except in very primitive stages of civilisation fairy tales do not greatly move adults. Ariosto's vogue was no doubt mainly due, partly to the delicate flavour of burlesque which is never absent for many stanzas together, even in passages where one feels that he is really trying to be pathetic (for instance, the death of Brandimarte with the truncated name of his mistress on his lips), and partly to the episodical novelle, mostly licentious, but told with admirable wit, rather of the Bernesque order, however, than of the Boccaccesque. The chivalry of Ariosto is obviously as self-conscious and artificial as the Platonic love philosophy of Bembo or the pastoral raptures of Sannazaro.

Castiglione

Two writers indeed of this age leave an impression of absolute sincerity. Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) was one of the few men of his time of whom it can be said that all we know of him whether in public or in private life is wholly to his credit. As a young man he was for some years attached to the Court of Urbino, at that time, under Guidubaldo of Montefeltro and his Duchess Elizabeth Gonzaga, standing highest both in culture and in morals of any in Italy. There the best wits of the day, with Bembo at their head, met and debated questions of art, letters, ethics; soldiers, scholars and poets, churchmen and laymen (not always perhaps very distinguishable from one another) were alike welcome. Guidubaldo died in 1508; and a little later (but certainly before the date usually assigned, 1516), Castiglione, doubtless foreseeing that times were at hand which would end these cultivated recreations, set down his reminiscences of them in the form of a book, which he entitled Il Cortegiano, "the Perfect Courtier". Purporting to be an answer to a request from one Alfonso Ariosto, a kinsman (it is said) of the poet, for some account of the qualifications required to form a perfect courtier, it professes to narrate a discussion on this subject held at Urbino in the spring of 1506. How far it is founded on anything that had really taken place is uncertain, and the author had selected a date for it when he himself was absent in England; but we may safely assume that similar conversations were a common form of diversion at the Feltrian Court, and that in many of these Castiglione had taken part. Reading it, one is transported into a world as remote on the one hand from the prurient indecencies of the capitoli as it is on the other from the treacheries and assassinations of which we have ample evidence elsewhere. A spirit of "sweet reasonableness" pervades the whole discussion; one might think that the cardinal virtues were taken for granted, and that the only question was how they could best be acquired. It is true that some of the jests and anecdotes used by way of illustration without disapproval on the part of either of the two eminently virtuous ladies who direct the conversation are somewhat freer than would now be permissible in a similar company; but they are open and above board. Nothing of the nature of innuendo or double meaning is to be found from one end to the other. The question as to the duty of a courtier in the case of his prince giving him an order to commit murder does once come to the front, and is, it must be said, fenced with; but this dilemma, of which examples must have been familiar to all the company, is avowedly put as an extreme case. Ultimately, after touching on many topics, some sufficiently remote from the main subject, the dialogue comes round to the character of the prince himself; and the good prince is sketched, in terms such as the moralists of all ages and countries had made familiar. "God", we are told, "delights in, and is the protector of those princes who will imitate Him not in display of power and demand of adoration from men, but in striving to be like Him in goodness and wisdom; whereby they may be His ministers, distributing for the good of mankind the gifts which they receive from Him". The good prince will give his subjects such laws as will enable them to live at ease, and enjoy what should be the end of all their actions, namely, peace. He will teach them the art of war, not out of lust for empire, but that they may defend themselves against a possible tyrant, succour the oppressed, or reduce to subjection, for their own better government, such as may deserve it. Penalties should be for amendment or prevention, not vindictive.

Baldassare Castiglione, count of Novilara (1478–529) was born into an illustrious Lombard family near Casatico, near Mantua, where his family had constructed an impressive palazzo. The signoria (lordship) of Casatico (today part of the commune of Marcaria) had been assigned to an ancestor, one Baldasare da Castiglione, a friend of Ludovico II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, in 1445.The later Baldasare was related to Ludovico through his mother, Luigia Gonzaga. In 1520, at the age of sixteen, Castiglione began his humanist studies in Milan, which would eventually inform his future writings. However, in 1499, after the death of his father, Castiglione left his studies and Milan to succeed his father as the head of their noble family. Soon his duties seem to have included representative offices for the Gonzaga court; for instance, he accompanied his marquis for the Royal entry at Milan of Louis XII. For the Gonzaga he traveled quite often; during one of his missions to Rome, he met Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, and in 1504 a reluctant Francesco Gonzaga allowed Castiglione to leave his service in Mantua and take up residence at Guidobaldo's court at Urbino. Urbino was at that time the most refined and elegant among Italian courts, with a magnificent library of illuminated incunambula. Duke Guidobaldo was an invalid whose fragile health barred him active participation in society. Its cultural life was therefore directed and managed by his wife, duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga and her sister-in-law, Maria Emilia Pia. Activities included intellectual contests and the reading and composition of poetry and plays. Among the most frequent guests were: Pietro Bembo, Giuliano de' Medici, Cardinal Bibbiena, Ottaviano and Federigo Fregoso, and Cesare Gonzaga, a cousin of both Castiglione and the duke. All of these were to appear as characters in Castiglione's famous dialogue,The Courtier.

In 1506, Castiglione wrote (and played in) a pastoral play, his eclogue Tirsi, in which allusively, through the figures of three shepherds, he depicted the court of Urbino. The work contains echoes of both ancient and contemporary poetry, recalling Poliziano and Sannazzaro as well as Virgil (the presence of such allusions was part of the Renaissance aesthetic and flattered the knowledge of the audience). Castiglione wrote about his works and of those of other guests in letters to other princes, maintaining an activity very near to diplomacy, though in a literary form, as in his correspondence with Ludovico da Canossa. Upon Guidobaldo's death in 1508, his adopted son, Francesco Maria della Rovere, succeeded him as duke of Urbino. Castiglione remained at his court; with Francesco Maria, he took part in Pope Julius II's expedition against Venice, an episode in the Italian Wars: for this he received the title of Conte di Novilara, a fief near Pesaro.

When Pope Leo X was elected, Castiglione was sent to Rome as an ambassador of the duke of Urbino. In Rome he formed friendships with many artists and writers; among these, Raphael, a native of Urbino, soon became a close friend, frequently asking for his suggestions. Raphael gratefully painted a famous portrait of Castiglione, now at the Louvre. In 1516, Castiglione was back in Mantua, where he married the youthful Ippolita Torelli, descendant of another ancient noble family; two passionate letters he wrote to her, expressing deep sentiment, have survived. She unfortunately died only four years later. At that time Castiglione was in Rome again as an ambassador, this time for the Duke of Mantua. In 1521, Pope Leo X conferred on him the tonsura (first sacerdotal ceremony), and thereupon began Castiglione's second, ecclesiastical career.

In 1524, Pope Clement VII sent him to Spain as Apostolic nuncio (ambassador of the Holy See) in Madrid, and in this role he followed Charles V to Toledo, Seville and Granada. At the time of the Sack of Rome (1527), the Pope suspected him of a "special friendship" for the Spanish emperor Charles: in effect, Castiglione ought to have informed the Holy See about the intentions of Charles V, for it was his duty to investigate what Spain was planning against the Eternal City. On the other side, Alonso, brother of Juan de Valdés and secretary of the emperor, publicly declared that the Sack of Rome was a divine punishment for the many sins of the clergy. Castiglione, who was in an awkward position, responded to both the Pope and Valdés in two famous letters written from Burgos. In his lengthy letter to Valdés, the nuncio deplored the Sack and harshly criticized Valdés' comments about it. Castiglione's letter to the Pope, dated December 10, 1527, on the other hand, argued rather daringly that several aspects of Vatican policy had been ambiguous and contradictory, undermining Castiglione's attempts to pursue peaceful and fair agreement with the Empire, and that this lack of consistency on the part of the Church's actions had provoked Charles V to attack. Castiglione unexpectedly received the Pope's apologies and was greatly honored by the emperor. In retrospect, it is virtually certain that Castiglione had not been negligent in his diplomatic duties in Spain and bore no responsibility for the Sack of Rome. The popular legend that he died of remorse is without foundation: he died of a fever in Toledo, Spain, on February 2, 1529, at the age of 50.

The book of the courtier (PDF)

Castiglione's ideal of civil government is, it will be seen, not very unlike that expounded by Dante two hundred years before in the De Monarchia, and somewhat later sketched by Petrarch in his treatise addressed to Francesco da Carrara. Petrarch's maxims, "Nothing is more alien to the nobility of princedom than the wish to be feared", "Love, if you would be beloved", "Love your neighbour as yourself", are all implicitly contained in the idea which the interlocutors of the Cortegiano have formed of a good prince. The spirit of medieval chivalry (too seldom, it may be feared, exemplified in the practice even of the Middle Ages, but at any rate recognised and respected) pervades the whole book. The Cortegiano was privately circulated for many years before it was published. When it did appear in 1528 it was received with the applause of Christendom. Within a generation it had been translated into all the principal European languages, and before the end of the century had been reprinted in one or another of them more than, a hundred times. Castiglione, as has been said, was beyond doubt absolutely sincere. In him, as Charles V observed when he died, the world lost one of its best gentlemen, los mejores caballeros. He held that not the number but the goodness of his subjects makes the greatness of a prince. Upon prince and people he enjoins le virtù (the virtues, as generally understood, not virtè, "efficiency"); and in the teeth, as it now seems to us, of all contemporary experience, he sincerely believes that in this way the prince might achieve security and his subjects tranquility. The influence of the cannot be traced to any-great extent in subsequent history.

Machiavelli

A very different destiny awaited another book written almost at the same moment. The Prince and its author have been fully dealt with in an earlier volume. Here it is only needful to recall that this work also, circulated for many years in manuscript before it was given to the press; that, though it was then reproduced with fair frequency, its popularity never came within a long distance of that enjoyed by the Courtier; that it became at once the mark for a storm of criticism, and long before the century was out had made its author's name a by-word in Europe for all that was unscrupulous and dishonest in politics; while its maxims are those which have governed the practice of statesmen in general for the last three hundred years. Machiavelli, it may be noted, knows nothing of chivalry, and even less of the Sermon on the Mount. Do to others, not as you would they should do to you, but as you suspect they would like to do to you, is his principle of government.

From the publication of the Prince more than from the Sack of Rome, or the religious troubles in Germany, or any other of the events to which it has been referred, the end of the Renaissance may be dated. Both on its weaker and its stronger side it was countered by such views of social and civil relations as those which Machiavelli formulated. It had depended largely on make-believe; Machiavelli insisted on looking facts fairly in the face. It set a high value on a lettered and studious life, which Machiavelli, though enjoying it himself, held in small esteem. It encouraged individualism; and with individualism raison d'état, of which Machiavelli was the first great exponent, has never made any terms. The maxim, "It is expedient that one man die for the people", would have commanded his instant adhesion.

Machiavelli (1469–1527) born in Florence, Italy, the third son of attorney Bernardo di Niccolò Machiavelli and Bartolommea di Stefano Nelli. The Machiavelli family are believed descended from the old marquesses of Tuscany, and to have produced thirteen Florentine Gonfalonieres of Justice, one of the offices of a group of nine citizens selected by drawing lots every two months, who formed the government, or Signoria. Machiavelli was born in a tumultuous era — Popes waged war, and the wealthy Italian city-states might anytime fall, piecemeal, to foreign powers — France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire — and political-military alliances continually changed, featuring condottieri who changed sides without warning, and weeks-long governments rising and falling.

Rigorously trained to manhood by his father, Machiavelli was taught grammar, rhetoric and Latin. He did not learn Greek, even though Florence was at the time one of the centers of Greek scholarship in Europe. In 1494, he entered Florentine government service as a clerk and as an ambassador; later that year, Florence restored the republic — expelling the Medici family, who had ruled Florence for some sixty years. He was in a diplomatic council responsible for negotiation and military affairs, undertaking, between 1499 and 1512, diplomatic missions to the courts of Louis XII in France, Ferdinand II of Aragón, in Spain, and the Papacy in Rome, in Italy proper. Moreover, from 1502 to 1503, he witnessed the effective state-building methods of soldier-churchman Cesare Borgia(1475 – 1507), who was then enlarging his central Italian territories.

Between 1503 and 1506, Machiavelli was responsible for the Florentine militia, including the City’s defence. He distrusted mercenaries (cf. Discourses, The Prince), preferring a politically-invested citizen-militia, a philosophy that bore fruit — his command of Florentine citizen-soldiers defeated Pisa in 1509; yet, in August of 1512, the Medici, helped by Pope Julius II, used Spanish troops to defeat the Florentines at Prato; Piero Soderini resigned as Florentine head of state, and left in exile; then, the Florentine city-state and the Republic were dissolved. For his significant role in the republic's anti-Medici government, Niccolò Machiavelli was deposed from office, and, in 1513, was accused of conspiracy, and arrested. Despite torture "with the rope" (the prisoner is hanged from his bound wrists, from the back, forcing the arms to bear the body's weight, thus dislocating the shoulders), he denied involvement and was released; then, retiring to his estate, at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, near Florence, he wrote the political treatises that earned his intellectual place in the development of political philosophy and political conduct.In a letter to Francesco Vettori, he described his exile:

When evening comes, I return home [from work and from the local tavern] and go to my study. On the threshold, I strip naked, taking off my muddy, sweaty work day clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and, in this graver dress, I enter the courts of the ancients, and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world.

As a writer, Machiavelli identified the unifying theme in The Prince and the Discorsi: "All cities that ever, at any time, have been ruled by an absolute prince, by aristocrats, or by the people, have had for their protection force combined with prudence, because the latter is not enough alone, and the first either does not produce things, or when they are produced, does not maintain them. Force and prudence, then, are the might of all the governments that ever have been or will be in the world".

Machiavelli died in 1527. His grave site is unknown, but a cenotaph honouring him was erected at the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence. The Latin legend reads: TANTO NOMINI NULLUM PAR ELOGIUM (No eulogy would be adequate to praise so great a name).

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Machiavelli at any rate was in earnest; Humanism had never been entirely so; still less, as we have seen, the greatest writers in the revived vernacular. The Renaissance had eaten enough, drunk enough, and played enough; it was time for it to be gone. Italy, too, had now begun to reap the full fruit of the fatal policy begun by Urban IV, when he called in Charles of Anjou to make an end of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in Naples. For nearly three hundred years the rivalry had continued. Hohenstaufen had passed its claim on to Aragon, Aragon to Habsburg; while that of Anjou was defended by the Crown of France. The Peace of Crépy finally awarded the prize to Spain; and, though Paul IV made one more attempt to revive the traditional policy of the Popes, and a French army appeared once more on Italian soil, the ruler of Spain was now ruler also of Flanders, and a battle in north-eastern France decided that the "Kingdom" was to remain under Spanish rule. Milan was in the like case; the republic of Florence had fallen for the last time in 1530; Siena held out till 1555; but it may be said that from 1544 onwards Italy outside the republic of Venice was under the domination either of Spain directly, or of local despots, incapable, even if they had been so minded, of offering any resistance to Spain (a condition of things clearly unpropitious to the growth of original or vigorous literature).

Other causes too were at work, arising doubtless more or less directly out of this. With the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis wars ceased for the time to be waged for the acquisition of territory. Such as were waged during the remainder of the century were fought in a cause which preeminently withdraws men's interest from all other topics, that of their right to hold their own opinions. A man of letters can go on comfortably enough with his work, so long as he knows that the defeat of his own side will merely mean that he will have to pay court and taxes to another Prince; it is otherwise when it may involve the termination not of his literary labors only but of his life and liberty as well. Italy was indeed free from the actual war which in the course of the century devastated Germany, France, and the Netherlands; men had not even the opportunity of fighting for their opinions. But the danger was none the less pressing. The Church, which presently condemned Machiaveli's writings, showed itself an adept in his methods. That the end justifies the means, and that the prudent ruler will seek to be feared rather than loved, were maxims in favor no less with the spiritual than with the temporal powers.

The Inquisition, imported from Spain by Paul III in 1542, and its companion institution, the Index of Prohibited Books, were not compatible with an independent literature. "The study of the liberal arts is deserted, the young men wanton in idleness and wander about the public squares." Such is the observation of Aonio Paleario, a scholar who in later years had good reason to know all about the Holy Office. Paul IV, to whom, as Cardinal Caraffa, the inception of the new system had been due, wielded its weapons with fresh vigor. The publication of one heretical work rendered all books issued by the same publisher liable to prohibition. Nor was the use of this "poniard drawn against men of letters" confined to official initiative. To shout or, better, whisper "heretic" was an effective way of getting rid of a literary rival. It was in this way that Ludovico Castelvetro of Modena (1505-71), the most eminent critic of his day, was driven to fly for his life and seek an asylum in the territories of the Grey Leagues, where the papal writ did not run. Nor was safety in all cases attained by abstinence from publishing. Carnesecchi, imprudently venturing back to his native Florence, in reliance on the personal friendship of Duke Cosimo, was there arrested, it is said at the dinner-table of his patron, by order of Pius V, taken to Rome, tried on a number of charges, of most of which he had already under a former Pope been acquitted, and after many months of imprisonment, not without torture, executed in 1567. Yet Carnesecchi had, so far as is known, published nothing. The accusations against him referred entirely to matters of opinion, as expressed in private correspondence and conversation. As an illustration of the methods introduced by the so-called Counter-Reformation, the case of Carnesecchi is perhaps more notable than the more often quoted one of Giordano Bruno. The latter, as an apostate monk, a loose liver, the wielder of an acrid and often scurrilous pen, had at least given provocation and caused something of scandal in several countries of Europe. Nothing of the sort could be charged against the gentle and decorous ex-protonotary of Clement VII, who, whatever may have been his speculative opinions, had never broken with the Church, and, so far as appears, had kept all its ordinances blameless. Carnesecchi's relations with the Catholic reformers have been referred to in an earlier volume. But he was not only the friend of Giulia Gonzaga, of Valdes, Flaminio, and Pole; he was also on intimate and affectionate terms with the artists and men of letters who frequented Rome in the days of Clement VII. Friendly mention of him occurs in the capitoli of Berni, Mauro, Molza, and others; Michelangelo, Sebastian del Piombo, Benvenuto Cellini, were among his acquaintances. He was somewhat under sixty years of age at the time of his death; his adult life coincides almost exactly with the period from the Sack of Rome to the promulgation of the decrees of Trent; and a survey of his career and fate affords as striking an indication as could well be found of the distance which the world had travelled between those events.

Speroni. The novelists

By the middle of the century most of the more eminent names in the literature of its early years had disappeared. Ariosto, Berni, Molza, Machiavelli, Castiglione, had all been dead a longer or a shorter time. Bembo became a Cardinal in old age, and lingered till 1547. Among the veterans surviving was Giovanni délia Casa, now Archbishop of Benevento, who atoned for the laxity of his earlier life and writings by the zeal he displayed in the suppression of heretics. He had yet five years to live; and it was three years longer before his most popular work, the Galatea, a manual of good manners, not devoid of humour, made its appearance. The long life of Sperone Speroni (1500-88) constitutes him a link between the age of Ariosto and that of Tasso, and perhaps accounts for the reputation which he enjoyed in his lifetime, but which posterity has not sustained. He received his education under Pomponazzo, and lived to have his opinion sought by Ronsard and to receive a letter on the condition of Paris in 1582. The neglect into which his writings have fallen is perhaps scarcely deserved. He was an early champion of the vernacular against the claims made for Latin, and staunch in his admiration of Dante at a time when the academic taste of a decadent age affected to depreciate him. He also claimed to have made Italian a vehicle for philosophic discussion, for which Latin alone had hitherto been regarded as suitable. The dialogue was his favorite form of literary expression, and he managed it often with pleasing effect. His tragedy in the classical style, Canace, though now hardly readable, has a certain importance in the history of the drama. In it appears for the first time the irregular metre, composed chiefly of short, uneven lines, which was afterwards adopted by Tasso in the Aminta and by Guarini in the Pastor Fido; and which we now associate mainly with opera. Another of its characteristics, the blending of rhymed and unrhymed lines, has a singularly unpleasing effect to a foreign ear, but seems never to have lost its attraction for Italians. The piece is however chiefly notable for the protracted literary controversy to which it gave rise; of which to a modern reader the most curious feature is perhaps that it deals entirely with questions of literary form and dramatic structure.

The offensiveness of the subject does not appear to have struck the author (who, it must in justice be said, has treated it as decently as was possible) or his critics, as in any way unsuited to dramatic representation. This however is but characteristic of the period. The tragedies of Giovanbattista Giraldi, called Cinthio (1504-73), as well as his novels, afford constant testimony to the appetite of the contemporary public for sanguinary and horrible fiction. It would seem as if the taste of the age, seared by the horrors which it saw around it in actual life, required something very drastic to secure the purging of the passions which, its trusted authority had told it, was the aim of tragedy. One who had lived through the Sack of Rome would hardly obtain from the most revolting situations of the Orbecche or the Selene anything more than an agreeable shudder. For anything like true pathos or real insight into the human heart the reader of these productions will seek in vain. The artificiality which taints the whole imaginative literature of the time is here also conspicuous; and the heroes and heroines of tragedy are as conventional and as unlike the human beings whom we know as the shepherds and nymphs of the pastorals. Even the novels, in which the Italian genius is perhaps seen to most advantage, are full of "common form" and often wearisome from mannerism. Besides Cinthio, the most noted writers in this line were Matteo Bandello (1490-1561), a Dominican who became Bishop of Agen, and is judged by Italian critics to be the most successful imitator of Boccaccio; Anton Francesco Grazzini, called Il Lasca, who was also a copious writer of capitoli in the Bernesque style, and who, living from 1503 to 1584, forms another link between the days of Leo X and those of Pius V, Sebastiane Erizzo, Gianfrancesco Straparola of Caravaggio, in some ways the most original of all, and Girolamo Parabosco. With the exception of Grazzini, whose stories did not see the light till the middle of the eighteenth century, all these published their collections of tales between 1550 and 1567.

This remarkable output of fiction points to a certain stagnation in speculative and other serious modes of literary activity. But the fiction itself illustrates the change that had come over society. From Boccaccio to Firenzuola every novelist had drawn much of his most popular and most scandalous material from the alleged doings of the clergy, both regular and secular. This had now become too risky a source of entertainment; and of the writers just named (with one exception in the case of Parabosco), only Bandello, who when his stories were published was safe in his French see, and Grazzini, who, as has been said, did not entrust his to the press, have ventured to avail themselves of it. In point of morals they are in no way better than their predecessors; and the taste for horrors already referred to is conspicuous, especially in the case of Cinthio, whose work, by the way, passed no less formidable a scrutiny than that of Cardinal Michèle Ghislieri, the future Pope Pius V; but the Church is left alone. The principle was carried to its furthest point when a few years later the Decameron of Boccaccio was twice "reformed" by the substitution of lay for clerical personages throughout; the incidents, even the most indecent, remaining otherwise unchanged. Some outward improvement in morals probably did take place in the latter half of the century; it may be imputed as a merit to Pius V that he hung Niccolo Franco, once the friend, in later days the enemy, always the rival in obscenity, of Pietro Aretino; but the reputation which, as is proved by contemporary memoirs and letters, Italians enjoyed in a country so far from strait-laced as France, is enough to show that little-real amendment of morals had been brought about.

Alamanni

Didactic poetry, so far as the modern languages are concerned, may be said to have been an invention of this period. Among the earliest of the didactic poets is the Florentine Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556), who in early years took a part in the heated politics of his native city, which led to his exile. He took refuge in France, where he spent the latter half of his life, and enjoyed the favor of two Kings. Here he published in 1546 his poem, La Coltivazione, which, though the Api of Rucellai had preceded it by a few years, may be regarded as practically the first example in this kind. For Rucellai's poem belongs more properly to another class, which was to become increasingly popular, as direct imitation of the classical authors in their own tongue went out of fashion, that is to say, the rendering of their works into the vernacular. Le Api, though expanded, it may be said diluted, by additions of the author's, is in substance, a translation of the Fourth Georgic. Alamanni, on the other hand, while borrowing freely from Virgil wherever his matter afforded an opening, has introduced so much that is his own, both in the handling of the theme proper and in the more ornamental parts, that his work may fairly be called original. The influence of the classical tradition is plainly seen in the invocations of pagan deities with which every book opens, and generally in the exclusive employment of the pagan pantheon, as well as in the adulatory passages addressed to Francis I and other members of the French royal House. Something of the didactic spirit pervades Alamanni's chivalric romance, Giron il Cortese. In this curious poem the author attempts to adapt to the taste of a generation which had shed the last remnant of medievalism and had almost ceased to understand banter, a form of poetry which a large admixture of the humorous element had made acceptable to its fathers. He eschews all the supernatural business of wizard and fairy; and the narrative is constructed solely with the view of exhibiting the merits of its hero, and demonstrating by his example the beauties of the virtue which he illustrates. Alamanni keeps, it has been said, a school of courtesy open to all comers, and gives a complete course on the subject. In spite of the somewhat eccentric judgment of Varchi, who to the scandal of later Italian critics is said to have preferred it to the Furioso, the Giron is now forgotten; but the Coltivazione can still be read with pleasure by those upon whom the languid cadence of Italian blank verse (a recent, and perhaps not very fortunate introduction of Giovan Giorgio Trissino) does not pall. It has also a special claim on our regard as the first notable essay in a class of poetry for which the English genius has shown itself specially adapted. In a sense the Coltivazione may be said to be the spiritual progenitor of the Seasons, the Task, and the Excursion.

Something has already been said of the tendency shown by literature in the days of its greatest vigor and brilliancy to centre itself in the Courts of the various Italian Princes. To the Courts the custom was no doubt beneficial, humanising and refining a society which otherwise might not improbably have found its sole recreation in the coarser forms of animal enjoyment; but to letters it was not an unmixed advantage. The desire to please and amuse a patron, or to earn the immediate applause of a coterie, does not conduce to the production of the highest and most durable class of work. When the change in the political circumstances of Italy had shorn the Courts of their brilliancy, and at the same time rendered independent thinking dangerous, the tendency to fall back on the coterie for encouragement becomes more conspicuous; and it is from this time that we may date the widespread development of Academies in Italy. The idea was of course not new. Soon after the middle of the fifteenth century a number of humanists had founded an academy at Rome for the purpose of research and learned intercourse. For one or another reason, however, this had fallen under suspicion, and its members were severely treated by Paul II. It revived again in the palmy days of Leo X, to be finally broken up by the Sack of Rome, which scattered its members, or such as escaped with their lives, abroad throughout Italy, many in a state of indigence, most with the loss of books and all portable property. The Platonic Academy, founded at Florence by Cosimo de' Medici, fostered by Lorenzo, and continued, perhaps in a somewhat more social and less learned form by the famous meetings in the gardens of Bernardo Rucellai, survived till 1522, when a conspiracy, in which several of its members were involved, against Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, then governing Florence, caused the execution of some, and the exile of others, among the latter being Alamanni. The Neapolitan Academy, which numbered among its earliest members the humanist Beccadelli, called Panormita, and Pontanus, lasted long enough to include Sannazaro, but seems soon after the beginning of the century to have broken up into a number of smaller societies. These, as often happened, came under suspicion as centres of heterodox opinions, and perhaps also of political disaffection; and the Viceroy, Don Pedro de Toledo, who had been baffled by the united opposition of the nobles and the commons in an attempt to introduce the Inquisition, found it expedient to dissolve them. In the place of these older institutions, founded for the most part in the interest of serious learning, there sprang up all over Italy a host of bodies, bearing fantastic names, and partaking largely of the character of mutual admiration societies. At best they occupied themselves with polite literature, laying down rules for composition and the use of words, or debating trivial points of taste. Among the best known were the Umidi of Florence (afterwards the Florentine Academy), the Inflammati of Padua, and the Intronati of Siena. The most famous of all, and the only one that has survived till the present day, was the Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1572 by Grazzini and other members of the Florentine Academy. Their great vocabulary of the language, though belonging to the prescientific era of philology, was the earliest attempt made to produce a full record of a modern language, and is still of great service. It was constantly reprinted with improvements between 1612 and 1738, and is at present under revision.

Translations. The Tassos

One not unimportant result of this close attention to style and structure was that Italian, having been the latest of the European tongues to come into existence as a literary language, was the earliest of them to complete the process and emerge in the form which has practically continued till our own day. Before the end of the sixteenth century, at a time when French to some extent, English and German still more, retained traces of archaism, Italian was being written to all intents and purposes, both in prose and verse, as the best writers write it now. This early perfecting of the instrument of expression, by making the thing to be said of less importance than the mode of saying it, doubtless contributed to the dethronement of Italian literature from the position which up till about the middle of that century it had held in Europe. It is significant that among the host of translations from Italian into English which were made during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, a very small proportion consists of works published after 1560. On the other hand, translations from ancient authors into Italian become increasingly popular. Anguillara's Metamorphoses, Annibale Caro's Aeneid, Davanzati's Tacitus, have done as much for the fame of those translators as all their other works; while Francesco Strozzi's Thucydides, the architect Andrea Palladio's Caesar, and Lorenzo Vendramin's translations from Cicero are examples of the same kind of work by less known writers. Even the Latin works of Italian authors began to appear in a vernacular dress. Thus Sansovino made a new version of the treatise of Peter Crescentius on agriculture, stating in his dedication to Duke Guidubaldo of Urbino that, though the Duke knew plenty of Greek and Latin, he was sure that he preferred "this most sweet and most honoured tongue", and reedited Acciaiuoli's translation of Leonardo Bruni's History of Florence, the Latin original being yet unprinted. A similar fate befell Dante's treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia, a translation of which by Giovan Giorgio Trissino appeared in 1529, while the original had to wait yet half a century for publication. The revenge of the vernacular may be said to have been complete.

The change which passed over literature in the period under consideration is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the careers of Bernardo and Torquato Tasso, father and son. Their joint lives almost exactly coincide with the century, extending from 1493 to 1595. Bernardo, the father, lost his own parents early, but showing literary promise was educated at the cost of his uncle, a bishop. Following the usual practice of men of letters, he attached himself in course of time to various persons of rank. In 1528 he was with the Duchess Renée of Ferrara, and was thus at that Court during the later years of Ariosto's residence in the city. Afterwards he was for many years attached to Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, with whom, or in his service, he went at various times to Tunis, Spain, Flanders, and Germany. At forty-six he married, and began to set seriously to work on the romantic epic which was the ultimate ambition of every poet at that time (more than sixty works of the kind are said to have appeared in the course of the century). He had already a reputation as a writer of the fashionable pastorals and sonnets. He had also experimented not unsuccessfully with various forms of stanza, shorter than those of the old canzone, including the Spanish quintillas. For the theme of his great work, at the instance of certain Spanish nobles, he adopted the tale of Amadis de Gaula, which in both Spanish and French versions had achieved such a popularity that the sage La Noue a little later felt obliged to inveigh against it as the type of the romances on which in his view his countrymen wasted their time. Its influence on the career of Don Quixote will also be remembered. Much of Bernardo Tasso's Amadigi was composed under difficulties. His patron fell into disgrace as having taken a prominent part in the opposition to the Viceroy's scheme of introducing the Inquisition, and transferred to the French interest such support as after banishment and confiscation it remained in his power to give. Tasso, involved in the same condemnation, lost all his property. His wife died; and he with difficulty obtained the custody of his son Torquato, a boy of twelve. Finally he found hospitality at the Court of Urbino. Here the poem was completed, not without much consultation of Speroni (whose advice to write in blank verse Tasso had happily disregarded), Varchi, Giraldi, and many other eminent critics. Here we see the academic system in full operation. Rather than rely on their own judgment and face criticism, writers had come to prefer forestalling it, by shaping their work in accordance with the taste of all potential critics. The natural result followed. The Amadigi, published at Venice in 1560, was received with general applause, and has ever since sunk deeper and deeper into oblivion, in spite of the admitted beauty of its versification and the skill of its construction.

Torquato Tasso, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Freed, 1580), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem. He died a few days before he was due to be crowned as the king of poets by the Pope. Until the beginning of the 19th century, Tasso remained one of the most widely read poets in Europe.

Torquato Tasso (1544-95), when his father died, had already achieved some reputation by his Rinaldo, published, somewhat to his father's regret, when he was but eighteen. He was then in the service of Cardinal Ludovico of Este. For him, as for so many of his predecessors, the Court of Ferrara provided shelter and livelihood during the greater part of his troubled existence; and, if his relations with its lord were less happy than those of earlier poets, there seems no reason to ascribe the fact to any intentional unkindness on the part of his patron, still less to any voluntary misbehaviour of his own. Tasso's life has been recorded more frequently and more minutely, perhaps, than that of any other poet ancient or modern; while his character and conduct, his personal affairs generally, have given rise to an all but unparalleled amount of discussion. Tasso was a man of true poetical genius, of a singularly refined and sensitive nature. His early life, surrounded by domestic troubles, and largely spent in wandering with his father from place to place, furnished the worst training possible for a nervous lad of precocious intellect. As he grew up, the prospect must, to a man of imagination, have been profoundly depressing. The only career open to a young man in Italy by which any fame could be earned was that of letters; and even there the chances were not very promising, with the inquisitor on the one hand, and the pedant on the other, ready to pounce upon all that showed boldness of thought or originality of expression. From the latter we gather that Tasso suffered much; of the Inquisition he had a constant, though causeless dread. In 1575, and again in 1579, we find him going out of his way to consult inquisitors as to some imagined heterodoxy which he fancied himself to have detected in his own opinions. Self-consciousness, the constant anxiety to know what people think of you, was the malady of the age; and Tasso was its first and most illustrious victim. The sense of humour, which is, perhaps, its best antidote, had perished in Italy; nor has it often revived since. From one end of the Gerusalemme to the other there is not a laugh. On the contrary, the fountain of laughter is a perilous snare, which good knights are bidden to shun with disdainful visage as something impious and soul-destroying. It was this fatal tendency to take life too seriously, that, more than the vivacity of his wit or the keenness and accuracy of his apprehension, brought Tasso, at the age of thirty-six, to the pitiful condition which moved Montaigne to anger even more than to pity. Tasso has been called "the heir of Dante, gone astray in mid-Renaissance". With Dante's faith and moral seriousness, however, he failed to combine Dante's power of defiance; and the lack of it brought him to the madhouse. The possession of it, however, would probably have brought him to the halter and stake.

Torquato Tasso's Early life

Born in Sorrento, son of Bernardo Tasso and Porzia de Rossi,. His father had for many years been secretary in the service of Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno, and his mother was closely connected with the most illustrious Neapolitan families. The prince of Salerno came into collision with the Spanish government of Naples, was outlawed, and was deprived of his hereditary fiefs. Tasso's father shared in this disaster of his patron. He was proclaimed a rebel to the state, together with his son Torquato, and his patrimony was sequestered. These things happened during the boy's childhood. In 1552 he was living with his mother and his only sister Cornelia at Naples, pursuing his education under the Jesuits, who had recently opened a school there. The precocity of intellect and the religious fervour of the boy attracted general admiration. At the age of eight he was already famous.

Soon after this date he joined his father, who then resided in great poverty, an exile and without occupation, in Rome. News reached them in 1556 that Porzia Tasso had died suddenly and mysteriously at Naples. Her husband was firmly convinced that she had been poisoned by her brother with the object of getting control over her property. As it subsequently happened, Porzia's estate never descended to her son; and the daughter Cornelia married below her birth, at the instigation of her maternal relatives.

Tasso's father was a poet by predilection and a professional courtier. Therefore, when an opening at the court of Urbino was offered in 1557, Bernardo Tasso gladly accepted it. The young Torquato, a handsome and brilliant lad, became the companion in sports and studies of Francesco Maria della Rovere, heir to the duke of Urbino. At Urbino a society of cultivated men pursued the aesthetical and literary studies which were then in vogue. Bernardo Tasso read cantos of his Amadigi to the duchess and her ladies, or discussed the merits of Homer and Virgil, Trissino and Ariosto, with the duke's librarians and secretaries. Torquato grew up in an atmosphere of refined luxury and somewhat pedantic criticism, both of which gave a permanent tone to his character.

At Venice, where his father went to superintend the printing of the Amadigi (1560), these influences continued. He found himself the pet and prodigy of a distinguished literary circle. But Bernardo had suffered in his own career so seriously from dependence on the Muses and the nobility that he now determined on a lucrative profession for his son. Torquato was sent to study law at Padua. Instead of applying himself to law, the young man bestowed all his attention upon philosophy and poetry. Before the end of 1562, he had produced a narrative poem called Rinaldo, which was meant to combine the regularity of the Virgilian with the attractions of the romantic epic. In the attainment of this object, and in all the minor qualities of style and handling, Rinaldo showed such marked originality that its author was proclaimed the most promising poet of his time. The flattered father allowed it to be printed; and, after a short period of study at Bologna, he consented to his son's entering the service of Cardinal Luigi d'Este.

France and Ferrara

In 1565, Tasso for the first time set foot in that castle at Ferrara which was destined for him to be the scene of so many glories, and such cruel sufferings. After the publication of Rinaldo he had expressed his views upon the epic in some Discourses on the Art of Poetry, which committed him to a distinct theory and gained for him the additional celebrity of a philosophical critic. The age was nothing if not critical; but it may be esteemed a misfortune for the future author of the Gerusalemme that he should have started with pronounced opinions upon art. Essentially a poet of impulse and instinct, he was hampered in production by his own rules.

The five years between 1565 and 1570 seem to have been the happiest of Tasso's life, although his father's death in 1569 caused his affectionate nature profound pain. Young, handsome, accomplished in all the exercises of a well-bred gentleman, accustomed to the society of the great and learned, illustrious by his published works in verse and prose, he became the idol of the most brilliant court in Italy. The princesses Lucrezia and Leonora d'Este, both unmarried, both his seniors by about ten years, took him under their protection. He was admitted to their familiarity. He owed much to the constant kindness of both sisters. In 1570 he travelled to Paris with the cardinal.

Frankness of speech and a certain habitual want of tact caused a disagreement with his worldly patron. He left France next year, and took service under Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara. The most important events in Tasso's biography during the following four years are the publication of Aminta in 1573 and the completion of Gerusalemme Liberata in 1574. Aminta is a pastoral drama of very simple plot, but of exquisite lyrical charm. It appeared at the moment when music, under Palestrina's impulse, was becoming the main art of Italy. The honeyed melodies and sensuous melancholy of Aminta exactly suited and interpreted the spirit of its age. Its influence, in opera and cantata, was felt through two successive centuries.

The Gerusalemme Liberata

The Gerusalemme Liberata occupies a larger space in the history of European literature, and is a more considerable work. Yet the commanding qualities of this epic poem, those which revealed Tasso's individuality, and which made it immediately pass into the rank of classics, beloved by the people no less than by persons of culture, are akin to the lyrical graces of Aminta. Its hero was Godfrey of Bouillon, the leader of the first Crusade; the climax of the epic was the capture of the holy city. It was finished in Tasso's thirty-first year; and when the manuscripts lay before him the best part of his life was over, his best work had been already accomplished.

Troubles immediately began to gather round him. Instead of having the courage to obey his own instinct, and to publish the Gerusalemme as he had conceived it, he yielded to the critical scrupulosity which formed a secondary feature of his character. The poem was sent in manuscript to several literary men of eminence, Tasso expressing his willingness to hear their strictures and to adopt their suggestions unless he could convert them to his own views. The result was that each of these candid friends, while expressing in general high admiration for the epic, took some exception to its plot, its title, its moral tone, its episodes or its diction, in detail. One wished it to be more regularly classical; another wanted more romance. One hinted that the Inquisition would not tolerate its supernatural machinery; another demanded the excision of its most charming passages, the loves of Armida, Clorinda and Erminia. Tasso had to defend himself against all these ineptitudes and pedantries, and to accommodate his practice to the theories he had rashly expressed. As in the Rinaldo, so also in the Jerusalem Delivered, he aimed at ennobling the Italian epic style by preserving strict unity of plot and heightening poetic diction. He chose Virgil for his model, took the first crusade for subject, infused the fervour of religion into his conception of the hero Godfrey. But his natural bias was for romance. In spite of the poet's ingenuity and industry the stately main theme evinced less spontaneity of genius than the romantic episodes with which he adorned it, as he had done in Rinaldo. Godfrey, a mixture of pious Aeneas and Tridentine Catholicism, is not the real hero of the Gerusalemme. Fiery and passionate Rinaldo, Ruggiero, melancholy impulsive Tancredi, and the chivalrous Saracens with whom they clash in love and war, divide the reader's interest and divert it from Goffredo.

The action of the epic turns on Armida, the beautiful witch, sent forth by the infernal senate to sow discord in the Christian camp. She is converted to the true faith by her adoration for a crusading knight, and quits the scene with a phrase of the Virgin Mary on her lips. Brave Clorinda dons armour like Marfisa, fighting in a duel with her devoted lover and receiving baptism from his hands at the time of her pathetic death; Erminia seeks refuge in the shepherds' hut. These lovely pagan women, so touching in their sorrows, so romantic in their adventures, so tender in their emotions, rivet the readers' attention, while the battles, religious ceremonies, conclaves and stratagems of the campaign are easily skipped. The truth is that Tasso's great invention as an artist was the poetry of sentiment. Sentiment, not sentimentality, gives value to what is immortal in the Gerusalemme. It was a new thing in the 16th century, something concordant with a growing feeling for woman and with the ascendant art of music. This sentiment, refined, noble, natural, steeped in melancholy, exquisitely graceful, pathetically touching, breathes throughout the episodes of the Gerusalemme, finds metrical expression in the languishing cadence of its mellifluous verse, and sustains the ideal life of those seductive heroines whose names were familiar as household words to all Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Tasso's self-chosen critics were not men to admit what the public has since accepted as incontrovertible. They vaguely felt that a great and beautiful romantic poem was imbedded in a dull and not very correct epic. In their uneasiness they suggested every course but the right one, which was to publish the Gerusalemme without further dispute.

Tasso, already overworked by his precocious studies, by exciting court-life and exhausting literary industry, now grew almost mad with worry. His health began to fail him. He complained of headache, suffered from malarious fevers, and wished to leave Ferrara. The Gerusalemme was laid in manuscript upon a shelf. He opened negotiations with the court of Florence for an exchange of service. This irritated the duke of Ferrara. Alfonso hated nothing more than to see courtiers leave him for a rival duchy.

Difficult relationships in the Court of Ferrara

Alfonso thought, moreover, that, if Tasso were allowed to go, the Medici would get the coveted dedication of that already famous epic. Therefore he bore with the poet's humours, and so contrived that the latter should have no excuse for quitting Ferrara. Meanwhile, through the years 1575, 1576 and 1577, Tasso's health grew worse.

Jealousy inspired the courtiers to malign and insult him. His irritable and suspicious temper, vain and sensitive to slights, rendered him only too easy a prey to their malevolence. In the 1570s Tasso developed a persecution mania which led to legends about the restless, half-mad, and misunderstood author. He became consumed by thoughts that his servants betrayed his confidence, fancied he had been denounced to the Inquisition, and expected daily to be poisoned. Literary and political events surrounding him contributed to upsets and the mental state, with troubles, stress and social troubles escalating. In the autumn of 1576 Tasso quarrelled with a Ferrarese gentleman, Maddalo, who had talked too freely about some same-sex love affair; the same year he wrote a letter to his homosexual friend Luca Scalabrino dealing with his own love for a twenty-one year old young man Orazio Ariosto; in the summer of 1577 he drew his knife upon a servant in the presence of Lucrezia d'Este, duchess of Urbino. For this excess he was arrested; but the duke released him, and took him for a change of air to his country seat of Belriguardo. What happened there is not known.

Some biographers have surmised that a compromising liaison with Leonora d'Este came to light, and that Tasso agreed to feign madness in order to cover her honor, but of this there is no proof. It is only certain that from Belriguardo he returned to a Franciscan convent at Ferrara, for the express purpose of attending to his health. There the dread of being murdered by the duke took firm hold on his mind. He escaped at the end of July, disguised himself as a peasant, and went on foot to his sister at Sorrento. The conclusions were that Tasso, after the beginning of 1575, became the victim of a mental malady, which, without amounting to actual insanity, rendered him fantastical and insupportable, a cause of anxiety to his patrons. There is no evidence whatsoever that this state of things was due to an overwhelming passion for Leonora. The duke, contrary to his image as a tyrant, showed considerable forbearance. He was a rigid and not sympathetic man, as egotistical as a princeling of that age was wont to be. But to Tasso he was never cruel; unintelligent perhaps, but far from being that monster of ferocity which has been painted. The subsequent history of his connection with the poet corroborates this view.

While at Sorrento, Tasso yearned for Ferrara. The court-made man could not breathe freely outside its charmed circle. He wrote humbly requesting to be taken back. Alfonso consented, provided Tasso would agree to undergo a medical course of treatment for his melancholy. When he returned, which he did with alacrity under those conditions, he was well received by the ducal family. All might have gone well if his old maladies had not revived. Scene followed scene of irritability, moodiness, suspicion, wounded vanity and violent outbursts.

In the madhouse of St. Anna

In the summer of 1578 he ran away again; travelled through Mantua, Padua, Venice, Urbino, Lombardy. In September he reached the gates of Turin on foot, and was courteously entertained by Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy. Wherever he went, wandering like the world's rejected guest, he met with the honour due to his illustrious name. Great folk opened their houses to him gladly, partly in compassion, partly in admiration of his genius. But he soon wearied of their society, and wore their kindness thin by his querulous peevishness. It seemed, moreover, that life was intolerable to him outside Ferrara. Accordingly he once more opened negotiations with the duke; and in February 1579 he again set foot in the castle.

Alfonso was about to contract his third marriage, this time with a princess of the house of Mantua. He had no children, and unless he got an heir, there was a probability that his state would fall, as it did subsequently, to the Holy See. The nuptial festivals, on the eve of which Tasso arrived, were not therefore an occasion of great rejoicing for the elderly bridegroom. As a forlorn hope he had to wed a third wife; but his heart was not engaged and his expectations were far from sanguine.

Tasso, preoccupied as always with his own sorrows and his own sense of dignity, made no allowance for the troubles of his master. Rooms below his rank, he thought, had been assigned him ; the Duke was engaged. Without exercising common patience, or giving his old friends the benefit of a doubt, he broke into terms of open abuse, behaved like a lunatic, and was sent off without ceremony to the madhouse of St. Anna. This happened in March 1579; and there he remained until July 1586. Duke Alfonso's long-sufferance at last had given way. He firmly believed that Tasso was insane, and he felt that if he were so St. Anna was the safest place for him. Tasso had put himself in the wrong by his intemperate conduct, but far more by that incomprehensible yearning after the Ferrarese court which made him return to it again and yet again.

It was no doubt very irksome for a man of Tasso's pleasure-loving, restless and self-conscious spirit to be kept for more than seven years in confinement. Yet one must weigh the facts of the case rather than the fancies which have been indulged regarding them. After the first few months of his incarceration he obtained spacious apartments, received the visits of friends, went abroad attended by responsible persons of his acquaintance, and corresponded freely with whomsoever he chose to address. The letters written from St. Anna to the princes and cities of Italy, to warm well-wishers, and to men of the highest reputation in the world of art and learning, form the most valuable source of information, not only on his then condition, but also on his temperament at large. It is singular that he spoke always respectfully, even affectionately, of the Duke. Some critics have attempted to make it appear that he was hypocritically kissing the hand which had chastised him, with the view of being released from prison, but no one who has impartially considered the whole tone and tenor of his epistles will adopt this opinion. What emerges clearly from them is that he labored under a serious mental disease, and that he was conscious of it. Meanwhile, he occupied his uneasy leisure with copious compositions. The mass of his prose dialogues on philosophical and ethical themes, which is very considerable, belong to the years of imprisonment in St. Anna. Except for occasional odes or sonnets—some written at request and only rhetorically interesting, a few inspired by his keen sense of suffering and therefore poignant—he neglected poetry. But everything which fell from his pen during this period was carefully preserved by the Italians, who, while they regarded him as a lunatic, somewhat illogically scrambled for the very offscourings of his wit.

Nor can it be said that society was wrong. Tasso had proved himself an impracticable human being; but he remained a man of genius, the most interesting personality in Italy. Long ago his papers had been sequestered. In the year 1580, he heard that part of the Gerusalemme was being published without his permission and without his corrections. The following year, the whole poem was given to the world, and in the following six months seven editions issued from the press. The prisoner of St. Anna had no control over his editors; and from the masterpiece which placed him on the level of Petrarch and Ariosto he never derived one penny of pecuniary profit. A rival poet at the court of Ferrara undertook to revise and edit his lyrics in 1582. This was Battista Guarini; and Tasso, in his cell, had to allow odes and sonnets, poems of personal feeling, occasional pieces of compliment, to be collected and emended, without lifting a voice in the matter. A few years later, in 1585, two Florentine pedants of the Crusca Academy declared war against the Gerusalemme. They loaded it with insults, which seem to those who read their pamphlets now mere parodies of criticism. Yet Tasso felt bound to reply; and he did so with a moderation and urbanity which prove him to have been not only in full possession of his reasoning faculties, but a gentleman of noble manners also. The man, like Hamlet, was distraught through ill-accommodation to his circumstances and his age; brain-sick he was undoubtedly; and this is the Duke of Ferrara's justification for the treatment he endured. In the prison he bore himself pathetically, peevishly, but never ignobly. He showed a singular indifference to the fate of his great poem, a rare magnanimity in dealing with its detractors. His own personal distress, that terrible malaise of imperfect insanity, absorbed him. What remained over, untouched by the malady, unoppressed by his consciousness thereof, displayed a sweet and gravely-toned humanity. The oddest thing about his life in prison is that he was always trying to place his two nephews, the sons of his sister Cornelia, in court-service. One of them he attached to Guglielmo I, Duke of Mantua, the other to Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Parma. After all his father's and his own lessons of life, he had not learned that the court was to be shunned like Circe by an honest man. In estimating Duke Alfonso's share of blame, this wilful idealization of the court by Tasso must be taken into account. That man is not a tyrant's victim who moves heaven and earth to place his sister's sons with tyrants.

Late years

In 1586 Tasso left St. Anna at the solicitation of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Prince of Mantua. He followed his young deliverer to the city by the Mincio, basked awhile in liberty and courtly pleasures, enjoyed a splendid reception from his paternal town of Bergamo, and produced a meritorious tragedy called Torrismondo. But only a few months had passed when he grew discontented. Vincenzo Gonzaga, succeeding to his father's dukedom of Mantua, had scanty leisure to bestow upon the poet. Tasso felt neglected. In the autumn of 1587 he journeyed through Bologna and Loreto to Rome, and taking up his quarters there with an old friend, Scipione Gonzaga, now Patriarch of Jerusalem. Next year he wandered off to Naples, where he wrote a dull poem on Monte Oliveto. In 1589 he returned to Rome, and took up his quarters again with the patriarch of Jerusalem. The servants found him insufferable, and turned him out of doors. He fell ill, and went to a hospital. The patriarch in 1590 again received him. But Tasso's restless spirit drove him forth to Florence. The Florentines said, "Actum est de eo." Rome once more, then Mantua, then Florence, then Rome, then Naples, then Rome, then Naples—such is the weary record of the years 1590-94. He endured a veritable Odyssey of malady, indigence and misfortune. To Tasso everything came amiss. He had the palaces of princes, cardinals, patriarchs, nay popes, always open to him. Yet he could rest in none. Gradually, in spite of all veneration for the sacer vates, he made himself the laughingstock and bore of Italy.

His health grew ever feebler and his genius dimmer. In 1592, he gave to the public a revised version of the Gerusalemme. It was called the Gerusalemme Conquistata. All that made the poem of his early manhood charming he rigidly erased. The versification was degraded; the heavier elements of the plot underwent a dull rhetorical development. During the same year a prosaic composition in Italian blank verse, called Le Sette Giornate, saw the light. Nobody reads it now. It is only mentioned as one of Tasso's dotages—a dreary amplification of the first chapter of Genesis.

It is singular that just in these years, when mental disorder, physical weakness, and decay of inspiration seemed dooming Tasso to oblivion, his old age was cheered with brighter rays of hope. Pope Clement VIII ascended the papal chair in 1592. He and his nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini of San Giorgio, determined to befriend the poet. In 1594, they invited him to Rome. There he was to receive the crown of laurels, as Petrarch had been crowned, on the Capitol.

Worn out with illness, Tasso reached Rome in November. The ceremony of his coronation was deferred because Cardinal Aldobrandini had fallen ill, but the pope assigned him a pension; and, under the pressure of pontifical remonstrance, Prince Avellino, who held Tasso's maternal estate, agreed to discharge a portion of his claims by payment of a yearly rent-charge. At no time since Tasso left St. Anna had the heavens apparently so smiled upon him. Capitolian honors and money were now at his disposal. Yet fortune came too late. Before he wore the crown of poet laureate, or received his pensions, he ascended to the convent of Sant'Onofrio, on a stormy 1 April 1595. Seeing a cardinal's coach toil up the steep Trasteverine Hill, the monks came to the door to greet it. From the carriage stepped Tasso and told the prior he had come to die with him. He died in Sant'Onofrio in April 1595. He was just past fifty-one; and the last twenty years of his existence had been practically and artistically ineffectual. At the age of thirty-one the Gerusalemme, was accomplished. The world too was already ringing with the music of Aminta. More than this Tasso had naught to give to literature but those succeeding years of derangement, exile, imprisonment, poverty and hope deferred endear the man to readers. Elegiac and querulous as he must always appear, Tasso was loved better in the Romantic period because he suffered through nearly a quarter of a century of slow decline and unexplained misfortune.

The disease Tasso began to suffer from is now believed to be schizophrenia. Legends describe him wandering the streets of Rome half mad, convinced that he was being persecuted. At times he was imprisoned for his own safety by the Duke in St. Anne's lunatic asylum. Though he was never fully cured, he was able to function and resumed his writing. The Gerusalemme was published by his friends Angelo Ingegneri and Febo Bonna, mostly with the consent of the poet.

GUTENBERG EBOOK JERUSALEM DELIVERED

 

Montaigne praises Tasso for judgment and ingenuity. The former quality he showed very clearly in his selection of the theme for his great poem, and in his decision to adopt for its treatment the epic rather than the romantic manner. The Carolingian and Arthurian cycles had not perhaps possessed much "actuality", even for the generations which welcomed and enjoyed the Morgante and the two Orlandos; but they lent themselves admirably to the sub-flavour of burlesque, in which, as has been seen, those generations delighted. What could be made of them when treated seriously and with reverence the Amadigi was there to show; and Tasso, dutiful son though he was, could not but be aware that such success as his father's poem had had was due less to its own interest than to the personal esteem in which the writer was held by some whose verdict would set the fashion, and that it was not likely to be repeated. The Crusades, on the other hand, were sufficiently remote to have become heroic, yet sufficiently recent to retain some vital interest, especially at a moment when the Muslim power was a real and pressing terror to Christendom. It was characteristic of the age, but perhaps a testimony to the enduring qualities of the poem, that a controversy, futile but none the less animated, at once arose as to its merits in comparison with the Furioso. It lasted for at least two hundred years; by the end of which time critics began to see that the two were not in pari materia, and that personal preference was no fit canon of judgment.

History; biography; letters

If the Renaissance, with its materialism, its self-satisfaction, its reluctance to look facts in the face, had led to the decay of imaginative literature, it may claim, perhaps in virtue of these very qualities, to have cleared the ground in other directions, and made possible the development of other branches of literary composition, which in their modern form took their rise in the latter half of the century. Vasari's Lives of the Painters appeared in 1550, when its author had just entered on his fortieth year. Modern research may have detected blunders in it; but at any rate Vasari undertook his work, as his account of its inception shows, with a full consciousness of the value of accuracy, and we may suppose with an honest intention of achieving it. It marks the first stirring of the scientific spirit in history, the desire to get at facts first. Biography becomes increasingly common; and, just as ordered history takes the place of the older chronicles, valuable in their way, and often charming in their artlessness, but for the most part devoid of criticism or arrangement, so the domestic records, which had been frequent in Italian families, pass into regular memoirs, like those of Benvenuto Cellini, the spiritual father it may be said of all who have written autobiography. The kindred art of letter-writing, not unsuccessfully cultivated by Berni, Casa, and others, reached, so far as the modern vernaculars are concerned, after the middle of the Cinquecento as high a stage as it ever held. The supremacy in this, as in memoir writing, subsequently passed to France; but Italy holds her own at first with the elegant and copious correspondence of the younger Tasso, and the racy letters full of keen observation written to his friends at home by the Florentine merchant, Filippo Sassetti (1540-88), from Portugal and India, in 1580 and the following years. In reading these letters, which but for an occasional Florentinism, and a little more ceremony in address than is now common, might have been written in the last century, it is hard to realise that the writer might, so far as dates go, have received the episcopal benediction of Monsignore Bembo. The mere statement of the fact may serve to remind us that the real line of separation between the medieval and the modern world has to be sought, not in the fifteenth, still less in the fourteenth century, but about (rather after than before) the middle of the sixteenth.