Renaissance in Italy Volume II Part 11

[Footnote 226: He first came to Italy in 1430, professed Greek at Ferrara from 1441 to 1450, and died in Campania about 1478. He translated many works of Aristotle. His own book on Grammar was printed by Aldus in 1495.]

Among the Greeks protected by Bessarion, pa.s.sing notice may be made of Andronicus Callistus, whose lectures found less favour at Rome than they afterwards obtained at Florence, where he had the great Poliziano for his pupil. He was one of the first of the Greeks to seek fortune in France.[227] Nor must Demetrius Chalcondylas be omitted, who fled from Byzantium to Rome about the year 1447, and afterwards professed Greek in the University of Perugia. A letter written by one of his pupils, Gian Antonio Campano,[228] gives such an agreeable impression of the effect he produced in the city of the Baglioni, that I will translate a portion of it. 'A Greek has just arrived, who has begun to teach me with great pains, and I to listen to his precepts with incredible pleasure, because he is a Greek, because he is Athenian, and because he is Demetrius. It seems to me that in him is figured all the wisdom, the civility, and the elegance of those so famous and ill.u.s.trious ancients. Merely seeing him, you fancy you are looking on Plato; far more when you hear him speak.' It was a young man of twenty-three who wrote this, the companion, probably, of such magnificent youths as Signorelli loved to paint and Matarazzo to describe.[229] It is interesting to compare this letter with the panegyric pa.s.sed upon Ognibene da Lonigo five years after his death by Bartolommeo Pagello in an oration delivered at Vicenza. The young men of Vicenza, said the rhetorician, left their dice, their duels, their wine cups, and their loves to listen to this humanist; his learning wrought a reformation in the morals of the town.[230] Such were the fascinations of scholarship in the fifteenth century.

[Footnote 227: Raffaello Volaterrano, quoted by Tiraboschi, vol. vi.

lib. iii. cap. 2, 16.]

[Footnote 228: See Tiraboschi, vol. vi. lib. iii. cap. 2, 17.]

[Footnote 229: See my _Sketches in Italy and Greece_, article 'Perugia.']

[Footnote 230: Tiraboschi, vol. vi. lib. iii. cap. 5, 46.]

The Greeks. .h.i.therto mentioned quitted their country before the capture of Constantinople. It is, therefore, wrong to ascribe to that event the importation of h.e.l.lenic studies into Italy. Their Italian pupils carried on the work they had begun, with wider powers and n.o.bler energy. All the great Grecians of the third age of humanism are Italians. Florence received learning from Byzantium at the very moment when the Greek Empire was about to be extinguished, and spread it far and wide through Europe, herself achieving by far the largest and most arduous portion of the task.

In pa.s.sing down to Naples, we find a marked change in the external conditions under which literature flourished. Men of learning at the Courts of Italy occupied a position different from that of their brethren in the Papal Chancery. They had to suit their habits to the customs of the Court and camp, to place their talents at the service of their patron's pleasure, to entertain him in his hours of idleness, to frame compliments and panegyrics, and to repay his bounty by the celebration of his deeds in histories and poems. Their footing was less official, more subject to the temper and caprices of the reigning sovereign, than at Rome; while the peculiar advantages, both political and social, which, even under the sway of the Medicean family, made Florence a real republic of letters, existed in no other town of Italy.

At Naples there was no such thing as native culture. The semi-feudal n.o.bility of the South were addicted to field sports, feats of arms, and idleness. The people of the country were sunk in barbarism. In the cities there was no middle cla.s.s a.n.a.logous to that of the more northerly republics. Nevertheless, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies played an important part in the development of Italian literature.

While the Mussulmans held sway at Palermo, Sicily was the most refined and enlightened state of Southern Europe. Under the Norman dynasty this Arabic civilisation began to influence North Italy, and during the reign of Frederick II. Naples bade fair to become the city of illumination for the modern world. The failure of Frederick's attempt to restore life to arts and letters in the thirteenth century belongs to the history of his warfare with the Church. What his courtiers effected for the earliest poetry of the Italians is told by Dante in the treatise 'De Vulgari Eloquio.' For our present purpose it is enough to notice that the zeal for knowledge planted by the Arabs, tolerated by the Normans, and fostered by the House of Hohenstauffen in the south of Italy, was an exotic which took no deep root in the people. No national poem was produced in the golden age of Frederick's brief supremacy; no stories are told of Neapolitan carters and boatmen reciting the sonnets of his courtiers. As culture began, so it continued to exist at Naples--flourishing at intervals in close connection with the sovereign's taste, and owing to local influences not life and vigour, but colour and complexion, suavity and softness, caught from the surrounding beauties of the sea and sh.o.r.e.

Each of the dynasties which held the throne of the Two Sicilies could boast a patron of literature. Robert of Anjou was proud to call himself the friend of Petrarch, and Boccaccio found the flame of inspiration at his Court.[231] In the second age of humanism, with which we are now occupied, Alfonso of Aragon deserved the praise bestowed on him by Vespasiano of being, next to Nicholas V., the most munificent promoter of learning.[232] His love of letters was genuine.

After making all deductions for the flattery of official historiographers, it is clear that Alfonso found his most enduring satisfaction in the company of students, listening to their debates on points of scholarship, attending their public lectures, employing them in the perusal of ancient poets and historians, insisting on their presence in his camp, and freely supplying them with money for the purchase of books and for their maintenance while engaged in works of erudition. Vespasiano relates that Beccadelli's daily readings to his master were not interrupted during the campaign of 1443, when Alfonso took the field against Francesco Sforza's armies in the March.[233]

The Neapolitan captains might be seen gathered round their monarch, listening to the scholar's exposition of Livy, instead of wasting their leisure at games of hazard. Beccadelli himself professes to have cured an illness of Alfonso's in three days by reading aloud to him Curtius's Life of Alexander, while Lorenzo Valla describes the concourse of students to his table during the recitations of Virgil or of Terence.[234] Courtiers with no taste for scholarship were excluded from these literary meetings; but free access was given to poor youths who sought to profit by the learning of the lecturers. The king, meantime, sat at meat, now and then handing fruits or confectionery to refresh the reader when his voice seemed failing. His pa.s.sion for the antique a.s.sumed the romantic character common in that age. When the Venetians sent him one of the recently discovered bones of Livy, he received it like the relic of a saint; nor could the fears of his physicians prevent him from opening and reading the MS. of Livy forwarded from Florence by Cosimo de' Medici, who was then suspected of wishing to poison him. On his military excursions he never neglected the famous sites of antiquity, saluting the _genius loci_ with pious thanks at Ovid's birthplace, and expressly forbidding his engineers to trespa.s.s on the site of Cicero's villa at Gaeta.[235]

Alfonso was no less a.s.siduous than his contemporaries in the collection of books. The Palace library at Naples was his favourite place of recreation; here Giannozzo Manetti found him among his scholars on the famous occasion when the king sat through a long congratulatory oration like a brazen statue, without so much as brushing away the flies that settled on his face. His MSS. were dispersed when Charles VIII. occupied Naples, and what became of them is doubtful.[236]

[Footnote 231: I may refer to Petrarch's Letters pa.s.sim, and to the solemn peroration of the _Africa_.]

[Footnote 232: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 445, 446.]

[Footnote 233: _Vita di Alfonso_, p. 59. _Vita di Manetti_, p. 451.]

[Footnote 234: See Tiraboschi, vol. vi. lib. i. cap. 2, 17.]

[Footnote 235: Pontano, _De Principe_, and Panormita, _De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi Regis_, furnish these anecdotes.]

[Footnote 236: The MS. of Livy referred to above is now in the library at Holkham; see Roscoe's _Lorenzo_, p. 389.]

Among the humanists who stood nearest to the person of this monarch, Antonio Beccadelli, called from his birthplace Il Panormita, deserves the first place. Born at Palermo in 1394, he received his education at Siena, where he was a fellow-student with aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini.

The city of Siena, _molles Senae_, as the poet himself called it, was notorious throughout Italy for luxury of living. Here, therefore, it may be presumed that Beccadelli in his youth enjoyed the experiences which he afterwards celebrated in 'Hermaphroditus.'[237] Nothing is more striking in that amazing collection of elegies than the frankness of their author, the free and liberal delight with which he dwells on shameless sensualities, and the pride with which he publishes his own name to the world. Dedicated to Cosimo de' Medici, welcomed with applause by the grey-headed Guarino da Verona,[238] extolled to the skies by Antonio Losco, eagerly sought after by Bartolommeo, Bishop of Milan--this book, which Strato and Martial might have blushed to own, pa.s.sed from copyist to copyist, from hand to hand. Among the learned it found no serious adversaries. Poggio, indeed, gently reminded the poet that even the elegance of its Latinity and the heat of its author's youth were hardly sufficient excuses for its wantonness.[239]

Yet the almost unanimous verdict of students was favourable. Its open animalism, as free from satire as from concealment, took the world by storm; while the facile elegance of fluent verse with which the sins of Sodom and Gomorrha were described placed it, in the opinion of scholars, on a level with Catullus.[240] When the Emperor Sigismund crowned Beccadelli poet at Siena in 1433, he only added the weight of Imperial approval to the verdict of the lettered public.

[Footnote 237: Published at Paris in 1791 among _Quinque ill.u.s.trium Poetarum Lusus in Venerem_, and again at Coburg in 1824, with annotations by F.G. Forberg.]

[Footnote 238: A man of about sixty-three, and father of twelve legitimate children.]

[Footnote 239: _Poggii Opera_, pp. 349-354.]

[Footnote 240: Poggio, while professing to condemn the scandals of these poems, writes thus:--'Delectatus sum mehercle varietate rerum et elegantia versuum, simulque admiratus sum res adeo impudicas, adeo ineptas, tam venuste, tam composite, a te dici, atque ita multa exprimi turpiuscula ut non enarrari sed agi videantur, nec ficta a te jocandi causa, ut existimo, sed acta existimari possint.'--_Poggii Opera_, p. 349.]

The Church could not, however, tolerate the scandal. Ever since the days of Petrarch and Boccaccio, monks had regarded the study of antique poetry with suspicion. Now their worst fears were realised.

Beccadelli had proved that the vices of renascent Paganism were not only corrupting Italian society in secret, but that a young scholar of genius could openly proclaim his partic.i.p.ation in the shame, abjure the first principles of Christian morality, and appeal with confidence to princes and humanists for sympathy. The Minorite Friars denounced the 'Hermaphroditus' from their pulpits, and burned it, together with portraits of the poet, on the public squares of Bologna, Milan, and Ferrara.[241] Eugenius IV. proscribed the reading of it under penalty of excommunication. Dignitaries of the Church, who found it in the hands of their secretaries, did not scruple to tear it to pieces, as a book forbidden by the Pope and contrary to sound morality.[242] Yet all this made but little difference to Beccadelli's reputation.[243]

He lectured with honour at Bologna and Pavia, received a stipend of 800 scudi from the Visconti, and in 1435 was summoned to the Court of Naples. Alfonso raised him to the rank of n.o.ble, and continually employed him near his person, enjoying his wit, and taking special delight in his readings of cla.s.sic authors. As official historiographer, Beccadelli committed to writing the memorable deeds and sayings of his royal master.[244] As amba.s.sador and orator, he represented the King at foreign Courts. As tutor to the Crown Prince, Ferdinand, he prepared a sovereign for the State of Naples. This favour lasted till the year 1471, when he died, old, rich, and respected, in his lovely villa by the Bay of Naples. A more signal instance of the value attached in this age to pure scholarship, irrespective of moral considerations, and apart from profound learning--since Beccadelli was, after all, only an elegant Latinist--cannot be adduced. The 'Hermaphroditus,' therefore, deserves a prominent place in the history of Renaissance manners.

[Footnote 241: Especially Bernardino da Siena, Roberto da Lecce, and Alberto da Sarteano. See the note to p. 353 of Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_.]

[Footnote 242: See Vespasiano, _Vita di Giuliano Cesarini_, p. 134.]

[Footnote 243: A curious letter from Guarino to Beccadelli (Rosmini's _Vita di Guarino_, vol. ii. p. 44, and notes, p. 171) describes the enthusiastic reception given in public to an impostor who pretended to be the author of _Hermaphroditus_.]

[Footnote 244: _De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi Regis Memorabilibus._ aeneas Sylvius wrote a commentary on this work, in the preface to which he says, 'Legere potui, quod feci, corrigere vero non potui; nam quid est quod manu tua emissum correctione indigeat?'--_Opp. Omnia_, p.

472. This proves Beccadelli's reputation as a stylist.]

Those among us who have had the curiosity to study Beccadelli's 'Hermaphroditus' will find sufficient food for reflection upon his post of confidence and honour at the Court of Alfonso.[245] Yet the position of Lorenzo Valla at the same Court is even more remarkable.

While Beccadelli urged the levity of youth in extenuation of his heathenism, and spoke with late regret of his past follies,[246] Valla showed the steady front of a deliberate critic, hostile at all points to the traditions and the morals of the Church. The parents of this remarkable man were natives of Piacenza, though, having probably been born at Rome, he a.s.sumed to himself the attribute of Roman.[247]

Before he fixed his residence at Naples, he had already won distinction by a 'Dialogue on Pleasure,' in which he contrasted the principles of the Stoics and Epicureans, making it clear, in spite of cautious reservation, that he upheld the rights of the flesh in opposition to the teaching of philosophies and Churches. The virtue of virginity, so strongly prized by Christian saints, was treated by him as a violence to nature's laws, an intolerable torment inflicted upon man as G.o.d has made him.[248]

[Footnote 245: What the biographers, especially Vespasiano, relate of Alfonso's ceremonious piety and love of theological reading makes the contrast between him and his Court poet truly astounding.]

[Footnote 246:

'Hic faeces varias Veneris moresque profanos, Quos natura fugit, me docuisse pudet.']

[Footnote 247: 'Romam, in qua natus sum ... ego sum ortus Romae oriundus a Placentia.']

[Footnote 248: The nave surprise with which Vespasiano records the fact of virginity (see especially the Lives of Ambrogio Traversari and the Cardinal Portogallo) shows how rare the virtue was, and what mysterious honour it conferred upon men who were reputed to be chaste.]

The attack opened by Valla upon the hypocrisies and false doctrines of monasticism was both powerful and novel. Humanistic freedom of thought, after a.s.suming the form of witty persiflage in Poggio's anecdotes and appearing as pure Paganism in Beccadelli's poems, now put on the sterner mask of common sense and criticism in Lorenzo Valla. The arms which he a.s.sumed in his first encounter with Church doctrine, he never laid aside. To the end of his life Valla remained the steady champion of unbia.s.sed criticism, the living incarnation of that 'verneinender Geist' to which the reason of the modern world has owed its motive force.

Before leaving Rome at the age of twenty-four, Valla tried to get the post of Apostolic Secretary, but without success. It is probable that his youth told less against him than his reputation for plain speech and fearlessness. In 1431 we hear of him at Pavia, where, according to the slanders of his enemies,[249] he forged a will and underwent public penance at the order of the Bishop. This, however, is just one of those stories on which the general character of the invectives that contain it, throws uncertainty. Far more to our purpose is the fact that at this period he became the supreme authority on points of Latin style in Italy by the publication of his 'Elegantiae.' True to his own genius, Valla displayed in this masterly treatise the qualities that gave him a place unique among the scholars of his day. The forms of correct Latinity which other men had picked out as they best could by close adherence to antique models, he subjected to critical a.n.a.lysis, establishing the art of style on scientific principles.

[Footnote 249: Poggio and Fazio are the authorities for this incident.]

When Alfonso invited Valla to Naples in 1437, giving him the post of private secretary, together with the poet's crown, he must have known the nature of the man who was to play so prominent a part in the history of free thought. It is not improbable that the feud between the House of Aragon and the Papal See, which arose from Alfonso's imperfect t.i.tle to the throne of Naples, and was embittered by the intrigues of the Church, disposed the King to look with favour on the uncompromising antagonist of Papacy. At all events, Valla's treatise on 'Constantine's Donation,' which appeared in 1440, a.s.sumed the character of a political pamphlet.[250] The exordium contained fierce personal abuse of Eugenius IV. and Cardinal Vitelleschi. The body of the tract destroyed the fabric of lies which had imposed upon the Christian world for centuries. The peroration ended with a menace.

Worse chastis.e.m.e.nt was in store for a worldly and simoniacal priesthood, if the Popes refused to forego their usurped temporalities, and to confess the sham that criticism had unmasked.

War to the death was thus declared between Valla and Rome. The storm his treatise excited, raged at first so wildly that Valla thought it prudent to take flight. He crossed the sea to Barcelona, and remained there a short while, until, being a.s.sured of Alfonso's protection, he once more returned to Naples. From beneath the shield of his royal patron, he now continued to shoot arrow after arrow at his enemies, affirming that the letter of Christ to Abgarus, reported by Eusebius, was a palpable forgery, exposing the bad Latin style of the Vulgate, accusing S. Augustine of heresy on the subject of predestination, and denying the authenticity of the Apostles' Creed. That a simple humanist, trusting only to his learning, should have dared to attack the strong places of orthodoxy--its temporalities, its favourite code of ethics, its creed, and its patristic authorities--may well excite our admiration. With the stones of criticism and the sling of rhetoric, this David went up against the Goliath of the Church; and though he could not slay the Philistine, he planted in his forehead the first of those many missiles with which the battery of the reason has a.s.sailed tyrannical tradition in the modern world.

[Footnote 250: _De falso Credita et Ement.i.ta Constantini Donatione._]

The friars, whom Valla attacked with frigid scorn, and whose empire over the minds of men he was engaged in undermining, could not be expected to leave him quiet. Sermons from all the pulpits of Italy were launched at the heretic and heathen; the people were taught to loathe him as a monster of iniquity; and finally a Court of Inquisition was opened, at the bar of which he was summoned to attend.

To the interrogatories of the inquisitors Valla replied that 'he believed as Mother Church believed: it was quite true that she _knew_ nothing: yet he believed as she believed.' That was all they could extract from the disdainful scholar, who, after openly defying them, walked away to the king and besought him to suspend the sitting of the Court. Alfonso told the monks that they must leave his secretary alone, and the process was dropped.

On the death of Eugenius, Nicholas V. summoned Valla to Rome, not to answer for his heresies and insults at the Papal bar, but to receive the post of Apostolic Writer, with magnificent appointments. The entry of Valla into the Roman Curia, though marked by no external ceremony, was the triumph of humanism over orthodoxy and tradition. We need not suppose that Nicholas was seeking to bribe a dangerous antagonist to silence. He simply wanted to attach an ill.u.s.trious scholar to his Court, and to engage him in the labour of translation from the Greek.

To heresy and scepticism he showed the indifference of a tolerant and enlightened spirit; with the friars who hated Valla the Pope in Rome had nothing whatsoever in common. The att.i.tude a.s.sumed by Nicholas on this occasion ill.u.s.trates the benefit which learning in the Renaissance derived from the worldliness of the Papacy. It was not until the schism of the Teutonic Churches, and the intrusion of the Spaniards into Italy, that the Court of Rome consistently adopted a policy of persecution and repression.

A large portion of Valla's biography is absorbed by the history of his quarrels with Poggio, Georgios Trapezuntios, and other men of mark.

Enough has already been said about these literary feuds; nor need I allude to them again, except for the purpose of bringing a third Court-scholar of Alfonso's into notice. Bartolommeo Fazio, a native of La Spezzia, occupied the position of historiographer at Naples. In addition to his annals of the life of Alfonso, he compiled a book on celebrated men, and won the reputation of being the neatest Latinist in prose of his age. Fazio ventured to criticise the style of Valla, in whose works he professed to have detected five hundred faults of language. Eight books of invectives and recriminations were exchanged between them; and when both died in 1457, this epigram was composed in celebration of their animosity:--

Ne vel in Elysiis sine vindice Valla susurret, Facius haud multos post obit ipse dies.

The amus.e.m.e.nt afforded to Roman emperors by fights in the arena, and to feudal n.o.bles by the squabbles of their fools, seems to have been extracted by Italian patrons from the duels of well-matched humanists.