Part 13 (1/2)
Europe had been too long accustomed to the idea of ecclesiastical unity to sit still without some attempt at reconciliation between the Catholics and Protestants. It was hoped that a Council would heal all wounds, smooth all difficulties, and bring back the irrevocable past.
The Popes, however, had come to regard Councils as inimical bodies with dangerous tendencies towards investigation and with hostile canons, and were inclined to take the risk of losing the tainted parts of Christendom altogether, rather than make use of so perilous an instrument to recover them. But the Emperor, Charles V, was insistent; his Empire, as well as the Church, was cracked, and in great danger of breaking in two. The Council was convoked, and met at Trent. The primary object was reconciliation; but everybody knew that no reconciliation was possible without radical reforms in the Church, so the papal party played its cards with exceeding wariness. The Lutherans did not attend, and the papal party, in order to forestall practical reforms, plunged into the comparatively safe matter of defining dogma, and defined it in such a way as to fence out all the Lutheran schismatics. The reformers, nevertheless, managed to sandwich in between the definitions of dogma various decrees for the reform of Church discipline. In Catholic theory an Ec.u.menical Council acts under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; but looking at this Council from a purely secular point of view, it is hard to find other guidance than the quarrelling interests of Pope, bishops, Emperor, Spaniards, French, and Italians. In fact, the Council was twice broken up. The first time the Pope, having taken alarm, declared the Council adjourned to Bologna. The second time the Lutherans, then at war with the Emperor, swooped down near Trent and frightened the Council away. It met again, for the third time. All hope of reconciliation with the Protestants had then pa.s.sed away, and the Council set to work as a purely Roman Catholic partisan body. A striking change of att.i.tude within the Council showed that since the early sessions the reforming party had won complete control. Paul IV (1555-59), a man of high character, formerly Cardinal Caraffa, head of the Roman Inquisition, had promulgated many edicts concerning reforms; and his successor Pius IV, Giovanni Angelo Medici of Milan (not of the Florentine family) (1559-66), who was Pope during the final sessions of the Council, followed his lead. Pius, a clever man who had received a legal training, instead of wasting efforts in persuading disputatious bishops, first made diplomatic arrangements with the Catholic sovereigns of Spain, France, and Austria, and then secured the embodiment of those arrangements in decrees by the Council. Nothing, however, could have been accomplished without the reforming spirit within the Church; Pius removed obstacles in its way and let it have full play. Stern rules were made against the corrupt practices, which had given Luther his strength. Canons regulated the conduct of the clergy, the duties of bishops, the affairs of monasteries and nunneries, and all matters connected with the great organization of the Roman Church. These reforms came too late to affect Protestant opinion, but they rallied the doubting, confirmed the faithful, and gave the Papacy wide-reaching moral support. The dogmas of the Church were cast in adamant, and secured the immense advantage of definiteness and fixity. The Council of Trent remains the princ.i.p.al monument of the Catholic Revival, and that Revival is certainly the most important event for Italy in the period immediately following the Renaissance. Pius IV, the clever lawyer, had a great share in the work of the Council, but his most skilful achievement was to maintain and confirm the doctrine of the subordination of Councils to the Papacy. This great stroke, as well as his share in the reforms, has won for him the t.i.tle of founder of the Modern Papacy.
In this manner the Papacy prospered during the very generations in which the greatness of Italy dwindled away. The fortunes of the two had wholly parted company. The Papacy, indeed, had made itself an Italian inst.i.tution,--never again would it seat a foreigner on the chair of St.
Peter,--but in all other ways it had ceased to have any national affections. Italy, her genius faded, her vigour faint, not only deprived of what might have been a great support, but even pushed down and held under by the help of her own greatest creation, the Church, ceased to be a country. She had become, in Metternich's famous phrase, a mere geographical expression, an aggregate of little states, with no tie between them except that of juxtaposition and of common subservience to foreigners. If we look at a map drawn at the close of the sixteenth century, we shall find the following political divisions:--
The Duchy of Savoy, The Spanish province of Lombardy, The Republic of Venice, The little Duchy of Parma, under the Farnesi, The little Duchy of Mantua, under the Gonzaga, The little Duchy of Modena, under the Este family, The little Duchy of Urbino, under the della Rovere who had succeeded to the Montefeltri, The Republic of Genoa, The Republic of Lucca, The Grand Duchy of Tuscany, under the Medici, The Papal States, The Spanish province of Naples, The Spanish province of Sicily.
Over them all, Spanish provinces, independent republics, Italian duchies, and Papal States, falls the shadow cast by the royal standard of Spain. Next to our consciousness of that dreaded banner, the most vivid impression which we take away is the contrast between the vigour of the Papacy and the weakness of Italy, and we draw the necessary inference that the fortunes of the two not only have wholly parted company, but also are wholly irreconcilable.
CHAPTER x.x.x
THE CINQUECENTO (16TH CENTURY)
The _Cinquecento_, as the Italians call the sixteenth century, exhibits in the arts the same disintegration and decay that we have found in the political life of Italy. Honesty, independence, genuineness fade away, and in their stead we find cleverness and effort. The high tide of the Renaissance was in the pontificate of Julius II, but the flood lingered on at the full till 1540, and then the ebb began. This is the date which the famous German scholar and critic, Jakob Burckhardt, a.s.signs as the limit of the Golden Age; and it is interesting to find how closely it corresponds with the political dates which marked the establishment of the new political order in Italy. In 1530 Florence was definitely handed over to the Medici; in 1535 the duchy of Milan was annexed to Spain; in 1540 the Pope sanctioned the Order of Jesus; in 1542 he established the Holy Office in Rome; in 1543 he accepted the scheme of an _Index Librorum Prohibitorum_; and in 1545 the Council of Trent was opened.
The change from maturity to decay was all-pervasive; yet it was slow, and a period of excellence and good taste intervened between the High Renaissance and the Baroque. This process is most clearly marked in architecture. During the High Renaissance dignity was law, the grand manner dominated, and charm determined subordinate parts. Domes were n.o.ble, loggias elegant, pilasters decorative, cornices well proportioned, ceilings splendid. After 1540 indications of decline appeared; but this fading brilliance was a kind of _gtterdmmerung_, and, though it heralded the Baroque, displayed at times a purity of detail and a n.o.ble restraint worthy of the earlier period.
Of the architects of this intervening stage the greatest was Giacomo Barozzi, surnamed Vignola after the little town where he was born in the province of Modena. He was a man of theories, had great knowledge of cla.s.sical architecture, and wrote a manual on the architectural orders which enjoyed great authority for two centuries and more. He built various buildings at Bologna, and designed a gigantic palace at Piacenza for the Farnesi, the ducal children of Alexander Farnese, Paul III, and nephews of the beautiful Giulia. The art of making gardens, of using cypress trees, greensward, pools, terraces, and clumps of ilex as joint partners with stone, brick, and stucco, in one artistic whole, had come into being in the sixteenth century; and Vignola was one of the masters of this new art. He designed the Farnese gardens on the Palatine Hill, since destroyed by time, neglect, subsequent owners, and eager archologists. He was an artist of great ideas, and sometimes caught the grand manner. On the other hand, he also helped to bring on the Baroque.
His famous church at Rome, the Ges, despite its vast, high-arching nave, lent itself with fatal facility to a gorgeous hideousness of decoration, and set the fas.h.i.+on for many imitative Jesuit churches, which caught the hideous gorgeousness but missed the grandeur of their exemplar. He had an important part in building the _Villa di Papa Giulio_ (Pope Julius III), a little outside the city walls, charming in its grace, its variety, and its succession of arcades, courts, loggias, bal.u.s.trades, grotto, terrace, and garden.
The next in rank, Bartolommeo Ammanati of Florence, may be called the court architect of Duke Cosimo I. He built two bridges across the Arno, the Ponte alia Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinit, finished the main body of the Pitti Palace, originally designed by Brunelleschi, and completed the elaborate Boboli garden, the pleasure grounds behind the palace. He also was drawn to Rome at the behest of villa-building Popes, and had a share in elaborating the plans of the Villa of Papa Giulio.
Giorgio Vasari, architect, painter, biographer, designed the Uffizi at Florence, painted many indifferent pictures, and wrote ”Lives of the Painters,” a garrulous, discursive, inaccurate, and delightful book.
Galeazzo Alessi of Perugia built the stately, tourist-haunted palaces of Genoa, once occupied by opulent merchants, and also the gigantic church of S. Maria degli Angeli, which covers the Portiuncula of St. Francis, like a bowl turned over a forget-me-not. Jacopo Tatti Sansovino of Florence was the architect of many n.o.ble buildings in Venice. Andrea Palladio of Vicenza embodied his pa.s.sionate love of cla.s.sical architecture in palaces and churches in his native town and in Venice.
During the revival of cla.s.sic enthusiasm in the eighteenth century Palladio became a demi-G.o.d. The captivated Goethe, as soon as he arrived at Vicenza, hurried to see the Palladian palaces. ”When we stand face to face with these buildings, then we first realize their great excellence; their bulk and ma.s.siveness fill the eye, while the lovely harmony of their proportions, admirable in the advance and retreat of perspective, brings peace to the spirit.” In Venice, he says, ”Before all things I hastened to the Carit.... Alas! scarcely a tenth part of the edifice is finished. However, even this part is worthy of that heavenly genius....
One ought to pa.s.s whole years in the contemplation of such a work.”
These men and their rivals kept alive the traditions of the great period; nevertheless, in course of time stiltedness and exaggeration usurped the place of elegance and force. A servile imitation of Roman models, an absolute acceptance of cla.s.sical correctness, prevailed; the cla.s.sic orders, especially the Corinthian, spread themselves everywhere; in one place barren and formal simplicity obtruded itself, in another pretentious magnificence. After 1580 the transition is complete; the baroque triumphs; sham tyrannizes, wood and plaster mimic stone, columns twist themselves awry; monstrous scrolls, heavy mouldings, crazy statues, gilt deformities, and all the contortions to which stucco and other cohesive substances will submit, hang and cling everywhere, inside and out. But this is to antic.i.p.ate, for the full revel of the Baroque takes place in the seventeenth century.
The same degeneration prevailed in sculpture. Michelangelo, in his statues in the Medicean chapel at Florence, ”Night” and ”Day,” ”Evening”
and ”Dawn” (1529-34), had achieved the utmost which thought and emotion could express in marble. They stand, pillars set up by Hercules, at the end of the n.o.ble sculpture of the Renaissance. His successors tried to imitate him, in vain; they produced bulk, or writhing or distortion. Yet some men of this period did excellent work: Benvenuto Cellini, delicate goldsmith, and sculptor of the Florentine Perseus; John of Bologna, who modelled the Flying Mercury; Taddeo Landini of Florence, who designed the charming fountain in Rome, in which several boys are boosting turtles into a basin above; Bandinelli, whose big statues are familiar in Florence, ”a man strangely composed,” as Burckhardt says, ”of natural talent, of reminiscence of the old school, and of a false originality which carried him beyond a disregard of nicety even to grossness.” After these men and a few others, sculpture followed architecture in its facile descent into the Baroque, and expressed itself in prophets, saints, and Popes, who stand in swaying and vacillating postures in nave and aisle, on roof and bal.u.s.trade. These decadent sculptors strictly belong to the next century; they are but heralded by the last works of the Cinquecento.
In painting, too, the same story is repeated all over Italy. In Florence after the close of the High Renaissance twilight darkened rapidly. There are few artists of note except two fas.h.i.+onable portrait painters, Pontormo and Bronzino, who display the characteristics of the period.
Bronzino's picture of the Descent of Christ into Hades almost justifies Ruskin's comment, a ”heap of c.u.mbrous nothingness and sickening offensiveness;” on the other hand, Pontormo's decorations in the great hall of the Medicean Villa at Poggio a Caiano are as graceful, gay, and charming as can well be imagined. After them in dreary succession come the decadent painters, who painted figures bigger and bigger in would-be Michelangelesque att.i.tudes, as may be seen in one of the rooms of the _Belle Arti_ in Florence. Elsewhere, also, the generation bred under the great masters faded away,--the sweet Luini of Milan, Leonardo's follower; the facile Giulio Romano, Raphael's pupil; the beauty-loving Sodoma of Siena; the romantic Dosso Dossi of Ferrara. These names show how loath the genius of painting was to leave Italy, but she obeyed fate; and, at the end of the century, we have the Caracci beginning to paint in Bologna, and Caravaggio (1569-1609) in Naples. It needs but a glance at these later pictures to see what a change had come over the spirit of beauty during the hundred years since Botticelli painted Venus fresh from the salt sea foam.
In literature, also, at the opening of the sixteenth century, we had the historian, Guicciardini; the political writer, Machiavelli; the poet, Ariosto; the cultivated Castiglione: at the end we have the pathetic figure of Torquato Ta.s.so (1544-95), who stands drooping, like a symbol of Italy. Ta.s.so is always inscribed in textbooks as one of the four greatest Italian poets, and it would be useless and impertinent to dispute the concordant testimony of many witnesses. Byron apostrophizes him, ”O victor unsurpa.s.sed in modern song;” yet one with difficulty avoids thinking that his sad story has added to the beauty of his poetry and heightened his reputation.
Torquato Ta.s.so was the last great genius of the Italian Renaissance, and stands there facing the oncoming decadence in gifted helplessness; he had many talents, a n.o.ble nature, a melancholy temperament, and a weak character. In boyhood his religious emotions and his intellectual faculties were both over-stimulated. His story is a medley of court favour, success, rivalry, suspicion. His home was Ferrara, but he wandered about, as a sick person seeks to ease his body by changing posture. Early forcing and some natural weakness combined to bring too great a strain upon his mind, which gave way, and the unfortunate man was put in a madhouse by his patron, the Duke of Ferrara. He was confined for seven years, but not ill treated. He died in the monastery of Sant' Onofrio on the Janiculum at Rome, where tourists stop to gaze at the poor remnant of an oak tree, under whose shade he used to sit.
Carducci, the great poet, says: ”Italy's great literature, the living, national, and at the same time, human literature, with which she reconciled Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and, in a Roman way, represented a renewed Europe, ended with Ta.s.so.” His sad story is a fitting epilogue to the Italian Renaissance.
This general course of ascent, culmination, and decline holds true even of Venice, except in chronology; for Venice preserved her independence from the normal Italian experience almost as resolutely in the arts as in politics. She produced no literature, piqued perhaps because Italy had taken the Tuscan dialect rather than hers for the national language; but in the arts, after decay had elsewhere set in, she bloomed in the fulness of perfection, as late roses blossom when other bushes show nothing but hips. Of her individual career a few words must be said.
In architecture and sculpture, the Lombardi, a Venetian family probably from Lombardy, flourished for nearly a hundred years (1452-1537), and left their mark on Venice, in tombs and statues, in churches and palaces. Contemporary with the last generation of Lombardi came the more gifted Alessandro Leopardi, who completed the great statue of Colleoni designed by Verrocchio, and gave a new impulse to Venetian sculpture.
While the Tuscan sculptors had been studying Roman remains, the Isles of Greece had been giving Greek models to their Venetian conquerors, and Leopardi in particular profited greatly by them. In the sister art the first famous architect after the Lombardi was the Florentine, Jacopo Sansovino, who spent most of a long life in Venice, where he built the Zecca, the Loggetta, the Libreria Vecchia (the Old Library), and also the Scala d'Oro (the Golden Stairway) of the ducal palace. Sanmicheli, a military engineer, as well as a builder of palaces, came from Verona to work in Venice. Palladio (1508-80), of whom we have spoken, came from Vicenza, and bequeathed his name to the neo-cla.s.sic style, known as Palladian.