Renaissance in Italy Volume V Part 5

Most of them turn upon the foibles and the vices of the clergy. The fourth _Novella_, which is perhaps the best of all in style and humor, presents a truly comic picture of the parish priest, while the fifth describes the interior of a dissolute convent at Perugia, and the tenth exposes the arts whereby confessors induced silly women to make wills in the favor of their convents. Don Giovanni, Suor Appellagia, and Fra Cherubino, the chief actors in these stories, might be selected as typical characters in the Italian comedy of clerical dissoluteness.

[Footnote 100: See the Letters of Aretino, vol. ii. p. 239.]

[Footnote 101: All my references are made to the _Opere di Messer Agnolo Firenzuola_, 5 vols. Milan, 1802.]

[Footnote 102: _Storia della Lett. It._ lib. iii. cap. 3, sect. 27.]

[Footnote 103: In a letter to Aretino, dated Prato, Oct. 5, 1541, he says he had been ill for eleven years. It seems probable that his illness was of the kind alluded to in his _Capitolo_ "In Lode del Legno Santo" (_Op. Volg._ iv. p. 204).]

[Footnote 104: _Op._ ii. pp. 94, 130.]

[Footnote 105: For example, _Nov._ iv. is the same as Bandello's II.

xx.; _Nov._ vii. is the same as Il Lasca's ii. 10. and Fortina's xiv.]

Firenzuola prefaced his novels with an elaborate introduction, describing the meeting of some friends at Celso's villa near Pazolatico, and their discourse on love.[106] From discussion they pa.s.s to telling amorous stories under the guidance of a Queen selected by the company.[107] The introductory conversation is full of a dreamy, sensualized, disintegrated Platonism. It parades conventional distinctions between earthly and heavenly love, between the beauty of the soul and the beauty of the body; and then we pa.s.s without modulation into the region of what is here called _accidenti amorosi_.

The same insincere Platonism gives color to Firenzuola's discourse on the Beauty of Women--one of the most important productions of the sixteenth century in ill.u.s.tration of popular and artistic taste.[108]

The author imagines himself to have interrupted a bevy of fair ladies from Prato in the midst of a dispute about the beauty of Mona Amelia della Torre Nuova. Mona Amelia herself was present; and so were Mona Lampiada, Mona Amorrorisca, Mona Selvaggia, and Mona Verdespina.[109]

Under these names it is clear that living persons of the town of Prato are designated; and all the examples of beauty given in the dialogue are chosen from well-known women of the district. The composition must therefore be reckoned as an elaborate compliment from Firenzuola to the fair s.e.x of Prato.[110] Celso begins his exposition of beauty by declaring that "it is G.o.d's highest gift to human nature, inasmuch as by its virtue we direct our soul to contemplation, and through contemplation to the desire of heavenly things."[111] He then proceeds to define beauty as "an ordered concord, or, as it were, a harmony inscrutably resulting from the composition, union, and commission of divers members, each of which shall in itself be well proportioned and in a certain sense beautiful, but which, before they combine to make one body, shall be different and discrepant among themselves."[112]

Having explained each clause of this definition, he pa.s.ses to the appet.i.te for beauty, and tells the myth invented for Aristophanes in Plato's _Symposium_. This leads by natural transitions to the real business of the dialogue, which consists in a.n.a.lyzing and defining every kind of loveliness in women, and minutely describing the proportions, qualities, and colors of each portion of the female body.

The whole is carried through with the method of a philosopher, the enthusiasm of an artist, and the refinement of a well-bred gentleman.

The articles upon _Leggiadria_, _Grazia_, _Vaghezza_, _Venusta_, _Aria_, _Maesta_, may even now be read with profit by those who desire to comprehend the nice gradations of meaning implied by these terms.[113] The discourses on the form and color of the ear, and on the proper way of wearing ornamental flowers, bring incomparably graceful images before us[114]; and this, indeed, can be said about the whole dialogue, for there is hardly a sentence that does not reveal the delicate perceptions of an artistic nature.

[Footnote 106: Vol ii. p. 28. The poem put into Celso's mouth, p. 39, is clearly autobiographical.]

[Footnote 107: There is the usual reference to Boccaccio, at p. 32. I may take this occasion for citing an allusion to Boccaccio from the Introduction to _Le Cene_, which shows how truly he was recognized as the patron saint of novelists. See _Le Cene_ (Firenze, Lemonnier, 1857), p. 4.]

[Footnote 108: Vol. i. pp. 1-97. I may here allude to a still more copious and detailed treatise on the same theme by Federigo Luigino of Udine: _Il Libro della Bella Donna_, Milano, Daelli, 1863; a reprint from the Venetian edition of 1554. This book is a symphony of grateful images and delicately chosen phrases; it is a dithyramb in praise of feminine beauty, which owes its charm to the intense sympathy, sensual and aesthetic, of the author for his subject.]

[Footnote 109: Selvaggia was the lady of Firenzuola's _Rime_.]

[Footnote 110: See the _Elegia alle Donne Pratesi_, vol. iv. p. 41.]

[Footnote 111: Vol. i. p. 16. Compare the extraordinary paragraph about female beauty being an earnest of the beauties of Paradise (pp.

31, 32).]

[Footnote 112: _Ibid._ p. 21.]

[Footnote 113: _Ibid._ pp. 51-62.]

[Footnote 114: Vol. i. pp. 75-80.]

Firenzuola's adaptation of the _Golden a.s.s_ may be reckoned among the triumphs of his style, and the fables contained in his _Discorsi degli Animali_ are so many minutely finished novelettes.[115] Both of these works belong to the proper subject of the present chapter. His comedies and his burlesque poems must be left for discussion under different headings. With regard to his serious verses, addressed to Mona Selvaggia, it will be enough to say that they are modeled upon Petrarch. Though limpid in style and musical, as all Firenzuola's writing never failed to be, they ring hollow. The true note of the man's feeling was sensual. The highest point it reached was the admiration for plastic beauty expressed in his dialogue on women. It had nothing in common with Petrarch's melancholy. Of these minor poems I admire the little ballad beginning _O rozza pastorella_, and the wonderfully lucid version of Poliziano's _Violae--O Viole formose, o dolci viole_--more than any others.[116]

[Footnote 115: Vol. iii. The _Golden a.s.s_ begins with an autobiography (vol. i. p. 103).]

[Footnote 116: Vol. iv. pp. 19, 76.]

Except for the long illness which brought him to Prato, Firenzuola appears to have spent a happy and mirthful life; and if we may trust his introduction to the Novels, he was fairly wealthy. What we know about the biography of Antonfrancesco Doni, who also deserves a place among the Tuscan novelists, presents a striking contrast to this luxurious and amorous existence.[117] He was a Florentine, and, like Firenzuola, dedicated to religion. Born in 1513, he entered the Servite order in the cloister of the Annunziata. He began by teaching the boys intrusted to the monks for education. But about 1540 he was obliged to fly the monastery under the cloud of some grave charge connected with his pupils.[118] Doni turned his back on Florence; and after wandering from town to town in Northern Italy, settled at last in 1542 at Piacenza, where he seems for a short while to have applied himself with an unwilling mind to law-studies. At Piacenza he made the acquaintance of Lodovico Domenichi, who introduced him into the Accademia Ortolana. This was a semi-literary club of profligates with the Priapic emblems for its ensign. Doni's wild and capricious humor made him a chief ornament of the society; but the members so misconducted themselves in word and deed that it was soon found necessary to suppress their meetings. While amusing himself with poetry and music among his boon companions, Doni was on the lookout for a place at Court or in the household of a wealthy n.o.bleman. His letters at this period show that he was willing to become anything from poet or musician down to fool or something worse. Failing in all his applications, he at last resolved to make what gains he could by literature. His friend Domenichi had already settled at Venice, when Doni joined him there in 1544. But his stay was of brief duration. We find him again at Piacenza, next at Rome, and then at Florence, where he established a printing-press. The princ.i.p.al event of this Florentine residence was a definite rupture with Domenichi. We do not know the causes of their quarrel; but both of them were such scamps that it is probable they took good care, while abusing one another in general terms, to guard the secrets of their respective crimes. During the rest of Doni's life he pursued his old friend with relentless animosity. His invectives deserve to be compared with those of the humanists in the preceding century; while Domenichi, who had succeeded in securing a position for himself at Florence, replied with no less hostility in the tone of injured virtue.

[Footnote 117: My princ.i.p.al authority is Doni's Life by S. Bongi prefixed to an edition of the _Novelle_, 1851, and reprinted in Fanfani's edition of _I Marmi_, Florence, 1863.]

[Footnote 118: See Zilioli, quoted by Bongi, _I Marmi_, vol. i. p.

xiv.]

In 1547 Doni settled finally at Venice. The city of the lagoons was the only safe resort for a man who had offended the Church by abandoning his vows, and whose life and writings were a scandal even in that age of license. Everywhere else he would have been exposed to peril from the Inquisition. Though he had dropped the cowl, he could not throw aside the ca.s.sock, and his condition as priest proved not only irksome but perilous.[119] At Venice he lived a singular Bohemian existence, inhabiting a garret which overlooked one of the noisiest of the small ca.n.a.ls, and scribbling for his daily bread. He was a rapid and prolific writer, sending his copy to the press before it was dry, and never caring for revision. To gain money was the sole object of his labors. The versatility of his mind and his peculiar humor made his miscellanies popular; and like Aretino he wheedled or menaced ducats out of patrons. Indeed, Doni's life at Venice is the proper pendent to Aretino's, who was once his friend and afterwards his bitter foe. But while Aretino contrived to live like a prince, Doni, for many years at any rate, endured the miseries of Grub Street. They quarreled about a present which the Duke of Urbino had promised Doni through his secretary. Aretino thought that this meant poaching on his manors. Accordingly he threatened his comrade with a thorough literary scourging. Doni replied by a pamphlet with this singular t.i.tle: "Terremoto del Doni fiorentino, con la rovina d'un gran Colos...o...b..e.s.t.i.a.le Antichristo della nostra eta." His capricious nature and bizarre pa.s.sions made Doni a bad friend; but he was an incomparably amusing companion. Accordingly we find that his society was sought by the literary circles of all cities where he lived. At Florence he had been appointed secretary to the Umidi. At Venice he became a member of the Pellegrini. This academy was founded before the League of Cambrai in a deserted villa near the lagoons.[120] Mystery hung over its origin and continued to involve its objects. Several wealthy n.o.blemen of Venice supplied the club with ample funds. They had a good library, and employed two presses for the printing of their works. The members formed a kind of masonic body, bound together by strict mutual obligations, and sworn to maintain each other in peril or in want.

They also exercised generosity toward needy men of letters, dowered poor girls, and practiced many charities of a similar description.

Their meetings took place in certain gardens at Murano or on the island of S. Giorgio Maggiore. The two Sansovini, Nardi, t.i.tian, Dolce, and other eminent men belonged to the society; but Doni appears to have been its moving spirit on all occasions of convivial intercourse.

[Footnote 119: How Doni hated his orders may be gathered from these extracts: "La b.e.s.t.i.a.l cosa che sia sopportare quattro corna in capo senza belare unquanco. Io ho un capriccio di farmi scomunicare per non cantare piu _Domine l.a.b.i.a_, e spretarmi per non essere a noia a tutte le persone." "L'esser colla chierica puzza a tutti." His chief grievance was that he had made no money out of the Church.]

[Footnote 120: The greater part of what we know about the Pellegrini occurs in Doni's _I Marmi_. See also a memoir by Giaxich, and the notices in Mutinelli's _Diari Urbani_.]

The last years of this Bohemian life were spent beneath the Euganean hills in a square castle, which, picturesquely draped with ivy, may still be seen towering above Monselice. That Doni had acc.u.mulated some capital by his incessant scribbling, is proved by the fact that he laid out the grounds about his fortress with considerable luxury. A pa.s.sage quoted from the Venetian Zilioli serves to bring the man more vividly before us: "At the summit of the hill above Monselice stands the house where Antonfrancesco Doni indulged his leisure with philosophy and poetry. He was a man of bizarre humor, who had but little patience with his neighbors. Retiring from society, he chose this abode in order to give full scope in his own way and without regard for any one to his caprices, which were often very ludicrous.

Who could have refrained from laughter, when he saw a man of mature age, with a beard down to his breast, going abroad at night barefooted and in his shirt, careering among the fields, singing his own songs and those of other poets; or else in daytime playing on a lute and dancing like a little boy?" Doni died at Venice in the autumn of 1574.

Doni's _Novelle_ are rather detached scenes of life than stories with a plot or theme. Glowing and picturesque in style, sharply outlined, and smartly told, they have the point of epigrams. The fourth of the series might be chosen to ill.u.s.trate the extravagant efforts after effect made by the Italian novelist with a view to stimulating the attention of his audience. It is a tale of two mortal enemies, one of whom kills the father and the brother of his foe. The injured man challenges and conquers him in single combat, when, having the ruffian at his mercy, he raises him from the ground, pardons him, and makes him his bosom friend. Likelihood and moral propriety are sacrificed in order that the _Novella_ may end with a surprise.

Doni's _Novelle_, taken by themselves, would scarcely have justified the s.p.a.ce allotted to him in this chapter. His biography has, however, the importance attaching to the history of a representative man, for much of the literature of amus.e.m.e.nt in the sixteenth century was supplied by Bohemians of Doni's type. To give a complete account of his miscellaneous works would be out of the question. Besides treatises on music and the arts of design and a catalogue of Italian books, which might be valuable if the author had not used it as a vehicle for his literary animosities, he published letters and poems, collections of proverbs and short tales under the t.i.tle of _La Zucca_, dialogues and dissertations on various topics with the name of _I Mondi_, an essay on moral philosophy, an edition of Burchiello's poems ill.u.s.trated by notes more difficult to understand than the text, an explanation of the Apocalypse proving Luther to be Antichrist, a libel upon Aretino, two commonplace books of sentences and maxims styled _I Cancellieri_, a work on villa-building, a series of imaginary pictures, a comedy called _Lo Stufaiuolo_, and many others which it would be tedious to catalogue. It is not probable that any one has made a thorough study of Doni's writings; but those who know them best, report that they are all marked by the same sallies of capricious humor and wild fancy.[121]

[Footnote 121: Those I am acquainted with are _I Marmi_, _I Mondi_, _Lo Stufaiuolo_, the _Novelle_, and two little burlesque caprices in prose, _La Mula_ and _La Chiave_.]

A glance at the _Marmi_ will suffice to ill.u.s.trate Doni's method in these miscellanies.[122] In his preface to the reader he says it often happens that, awaked from sleep, he spends the night-hours in thinking of himself and of his neighbors--"not, however, as the common folk do, nor like men of learning, but following the whimsies of a teeming brain. I am at home, you see. I fly aloft into the air, above some city, and believe myself to be a huge bird, monstrous, monstrous, piercing with keen sight to everything that's going on below; and in the twinkling of an eye, the roofs fly off, and I behold each man, each woman at their several affairs. One is at home and weeping, another laughing; one giving birth to children, one begetting; this man reading, that man writing; one eating, another praying. One is scolding his household, another playing; and see, yon fellow has fallen starved to earth, while that one vomits his superfluous food!

What contrasts are there in one single city, at one single moment!

Then I pa.s.s from land to land, and notice divers customs, with variety of speech and converse. In Naples, for example, the gentry are wont to ride abroad and take the evening freshness. In Rome they haunt cool vineyards, or seek their pleasure by artificial fountains. In Venice they roam the ca.n.a.ls in dainty gondolas, or sweep the salt lagoons, with music, women, and such delights, putting to flight the day's annoyances and heat. But above all other pleasures in the cool, methinks the Florentines do best. Their way is this. They have the square of Santa Liberata, midway between the ancient shrine of Mars, now San Giovanni, and the marvelous modern Duomo. They have, I say, certain stairs of marble, and the topmost stair leads to a large s.p.a.ce, where the young men come to rest in those great heats, seeing that a most refreshing wind is always blowing there, and a delicious breeze, and, besides, the fair white marbles for the most part keep their freshness. It is there I find my best amus.e.m.e.nts; for, as I sail through the air, invisibly I settle, soaring over them; and hear and see their talk and doings. And forasmuch as they are all fine wits and comely, they have a thousand lovely things to say--novels, stratagems and fables; they tell of intrigues, stories, jokes, tricks played off on men and women--all things sprightly, n.o.ble, noteworthy and fit for gentle ears." Such is the exordium. What follows, consists of conversations, held at night upon these marble slabs by citizens of Florence. The dialogue is lively; the pictures tersely etched; the language racy; the matter almost always worthy of attention. One sustained dialogue on printing is particularly interesting, since it involves a review of contemporary literature from the standpoint of one who was himself exclusively employed in hack production for the press.[123] The whole book, however, abounds in excellent criticism and clever hints. "See what the world is coming to," says one of the speakers, "when no one can read anything, full though it be of learning and goodness, without flinging it away at the end of three words! More artifice than patience goes nowadays to the writing of a book; more racking the brains to invent some whimsical t.i.tle, which makes one take it up and read a word or two, than the composition of the whole book demands. Just try and tell people to touch a volume labeled _Doctrine of Good Living_ or _The Spiritual Life_! G.o.d preserve you! Put upon the t.i.tle page _An Invective against an Honest Man_, or _New Pasquinade_, or _Pimps Expounded_, or _The Wh.o.r.e Lost_, and all the world will grab at it. If our Gelli, when he wanted to teach a thousand fine things, full of philosophy and useful to a Christian, had not called them _The Cobbler's Caprices_, there's not a soul would have so much as touched them. Had he christened his book _Instructions in Civil Conduct_ or _Divine Discourses_, it must have fallen stillborn; but that _Cobbler_, those _Caprices_ make every one cry out: 'I'll see what sort of balderdash it is!'"

[Footnote 122: _I Marmi_, per Fanfani e Bongi, Firenze, Barbera, 1863, 2 vols.]

[Footnote 123: Parte ii. "Della Stampa."]

One might fancy that this pa.s.sage had been written to satirize our own times rather than the sixteenth century. More than enough, however, remains from the popular literature of Doni's days to ill.u.s.trate his observation. We have already seen how ingeniously he t.i.tillated public curiosity in the t.i.tle of his invective against Aretino. "_The Earthquake of Doni, the Florentine, with the Ruin of a Great b.e.s.t.i.a.l Colossus, the Antichrist of our Age_," is worthy to take rank among the most capricious pamphlets of the English Commonwealth. Meanwhile the Venetian press kept pouring out stores of miscellaneous information under bizarre t.i.tles; such as the _Piazza_, which described all sorts of trades, including the most infamous, and _Il Perche_, which was a kind of vulgar cyclopaedia, with special reference to physiology. Manuals of domestic medicine or directions for the toilette, like the curious _Comare_ on obstetrics, and Marinello's interesting _Ornamenti delle Donne_; eccentricities in the style of the _Hospidale de' Pazzi_ or the _Sinagoga degli Ignoranti_; might be cited through a dozen pages. It is impossible to do justice to this undergrowth of literature, which testifies to the extent of the plebeian reading public in Italy.

The Novelists of Siena form a separate group, and are distinguished by a certain air of delicate voluptuous grace.[124] Siena, though it wears so pensive an aspect now, was famous in the middle ages for the refinements of sensuality. It was here that the _G.o.dereccia brigata_, condemned to h.e.l.l by Dante, spent their substance in gay living.

Folgore da San Gemignano's pleasure-seeking Company was Sienese.

Beccadelli called the city _molles Senae_, and aeneas Sylvius dedicated her groves and palaces to Venus--the Venus who appeared in dreams to Gentile Sermini.[125] The impress of luxury is stamped upon the works of her best novelists. They blend the _morbidezza_ of the senses with a rare feeling for natural and artistic beauty. Descriptions of banquets and gardens, fountains and wayside thickets, form a delightful background to the never-ending festival of love. We wander through pleasant bypaths of Tuscan country, abloom in spring with acacia trees and resonant with song-birds. Though indescribably licentious, these novelists are rarely coa.r.s.e or vulgar. There is no Florentine blackguardism, no acerbity of scorn or stain of blood-l.u.s.t on their pages. They are humorous; but they do not season humor with cruelty. Their tales, for the most part, are the lunes of wanton love, day-dreams of erotic fancy, a free debauch of images, now laughable, now lewd, but all provocative of sensual desire. At the same time, their delight in landscape-painting, combined with a certain refinement of aesthetic taste, saves them from the brutalities of l.u.s.t.

[Footnote 124: _Novelle di Autori Senesi_, edited by Gaetano Poggiali, Londra (Livorno), 1796. This collection, reprinted in the _Raccolta di Novellieri Italiani_, Milano, 1815, vols. xiv. and xv., contains Bernardo Illicini, Giustiniano Nelli, Scipione Bargagli, Gentile Sermini, Pietro Fortini, and others. Of Sermini's _Novelle_ a complete edition appeared in 1874 at Livorno, from the press of Francesco Vigo; and to this the student should now go. Romagnoli of Bologna in 1877 published three hitherto inedited novels of Fortini, together with the rubrics of all those which have not yet been printed. Their t.i.tles enable us to comprehend the scruples which prevented Poggiali from issuing the whole series.]

[Footnote 125: _Imbasciata di Venere_, Sermini, ed. cit. p. 117.]

The foregoing remarks apply in their fullest extension to Sermini and Fortini. The best pa.s.sages from the _Ars Amandi_ of these authors admit of no quotation. Attention, may, however, be called to the graphic description by Sermini of the Sienese boxing-matches.[126] It is a masterpiece of vigorous dialogue and lively movement--a little drama in epitome or profile, bringing the excitement of the champions and their backers vividly before us by a series of exclamations and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed sentences. Fortini does not offer the same advantage to a modest critic; yet his handling of a very comic situation in the fourteenth _Novella_ may be conveniently compared with Firenzuola's and Il Lasca's treatment of the same theme.[127] Those, too, who are curious in such matters, may trace the correspondences between his twelfth _Novella_ and many similar subjects in the _Cent nouvelles Nouvelles_. The common material of a _fabliau_ is here Italianized with an exquisite sense of plastic and landscape beauty; and the crude obscenity of the _motif_ craves pardon for the sake of its rare setting.

[Footnote 126: _Il Giuoco della pugna_, Sermini, ed. cit. p. 105.]

[Footnote 127: See _Le Cene_, pt. ii. _Nov._ 10, and Firenzuola's seventh _Novella_.]

Bargagli's tales are less offensive to modern notions of propriety than either Sermini's or Fortini's. They do not detach themselves from the average of such compositions by any peculiarly Sienese quality.

But his _Trattenimenti_ are valuable for their introduction, which consists of a minute and pathetically simple narrative of the sufferings sustained by the Sienese during the siege of 1553.

Boccaccio's description of the Plague at Florence was in Bargagli's mind, when he made this unaffected record of a city's agony the frontispiece to tales of mirth and pa.s.sion. Though somewhat out of place, it has the interest which belongs to the faithful history of an eye-witness.