The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09

by Unknown

RAPHAEL

The one great rival of Michelangelo, and the one painter whom posterity has been disposed to rank even above him in genius is Raphael. This wonderful man was the son of an obscure painter in Urbino. He studied under Perugino, and is believed to have profited largely also through study of the works of Leonardo and of Michelangelo, but particularly from Narcaccio.[a] To Michelangelo’s cartoons as well as to his Sistine ceiling, Raphael certainly owed deep obligations. In his twenty-sixth year, invited by his kinsman Bramante, he migrated to Rome, where he laboured with unwearied industry from that time till his death, which took place when he was thirty-seven years old, and about to be raised by Leo X to the rank of a cardinal.

Raphael found the mechanism of art nearly complete, and its application no longer exclusively ecclesiastical. These two circumstances gave full play to that union of powers, which his mind possessed to an unequalled extent. Far less correct than Michelangelo in drawing and anatomy, less profound in his study of the antique, and less capable of dealing with those loftiest themes that may be said to hover on the very brink of impracticability, he yet possessed knowledge of a high order, an elevated sense of sublimity and energy within his own sphere, an extensive and felicitous invention, and a feeling of beauty and grace which was the very purest and most divine that art has ever boasted. The idealism of his genius was united to a perception of character and expression, and a dramatic power of representing human action, which he used with the happiest effect when his subject called for their exercise. His admirers are influenced more by their own prepossessions than by his peculiar merits, when they give the preference to his Madonnas, saints, angels, or apostles, to his portraits, or to his historical and epic compositions.

Tiziano Vecelli Titian

(1477-1576)

The general progress of Raphael’s manner may be traced with sufficient certainty. He appears at first as little more than the ablest pupil of Pietro; inspired by all the warmth and tenderness of the Perugian school, but embarrassed by all his master’s timidity and littleness. When he had become acquainted with the bolder spirit and the better mechanism of the Florentines, we see how his genius gradually extricated itself, and how, though still guided by the devotional temper of his youthful models, he attained greater freedom both in handling and invention. In his earliest works at Rome he struggles to emerge into a sphere wider than either of these: his idealism is not lost, but it is strengthened by a more intimate acquaintance with life and nature; and both his fancy and his power of observation are rendered gradually more efficient by an improved technical skill, by greater ease and strength of drawing, by greater mastery of colour as well as of light and shade, and by rapid approaches towards that unity of conception and that breadth of design, which ennoble his finest works.

Till we find Raphael in Rome, we must be contented to trace his progress by his altar-pieces, and two or three portraits. Of genuine pictures belonging to this youthful period, and still in Italy, several possess very high merit; and one of these,—the Borghese Entombment,—painted after the artist had nearly emancipated himself from the Umbrian trammels, is equal to the best of his works both in expression and composition.

His great frescoes cover the walls and part of the roofs, in four of the state-rooms belonging to the old Vatican palace. The first chamber, called that of the Segnatura, was finished in 1511; and under the reign of the same pope, Julius II, the next apartment, named, from its main subject, that of the Heliodorus, was partly painted. After the accession of Leo X, the artist completed that chamber, and proceeded to the third, that of the Incendio, which he finished in 1517. For the fourth, the hall of Constantine, he left the designs, which were painted by his surviving pupils. Under Leo he also designed the small frescoes in the arcade called Raphael’s Loggie; and in the same pontificate he produced the celebrated Cartoons.[h]

With this brief summary, and with no more than a mere mention of the great Venetian painters, Titian and Tintoretti, and that other great contemporary painter Correggio, we must turn from the art of the period to catch the barest glimpse of the two or three literary figures of the time, before we turn back to the sweep of political events. Michelangelo himself was a poet, but we shall not attempt to deal here with this side of the multiform genius of that extraordinary man. Instead we shall turn to the central literary figure of the epoch, Ariosto.[a]

Ariosto

Lodovico Ariosto was born on the 8th of September, 1474, at Reggio, of which place his father was governor, for the duke of Ferrara. He was intended for the study of jurisprudence, and, like many other distinguished poets, he experienced a long struggle between the will of his father, who was anxious that he should pursue a profession, and his own feelings, which prompted him to the indulgence of his genius. After five years of unprofitable study, his father at length consented to his devoting himself solely to literature.

The Orlando Furioso of Ariosto is a poem universally known. It has been translated into all the modern tongues; and by the sole charm of its adventures, independently of its poetry, has long been the delight of the youth of all countries. It may therefore be taken for granted, that all the world is aware that Ariosto undertook to sing the Paladins and their amours at the court of Charlemagne, during the fabulous wars of this monarch against the Moors. If it were required to assign an historical epoch to the events contained in this poem, we must place them before the year 778, when Orlando was slain at the battle of Roncesvalles, in an expedition which Charlemagne made, before he was emperor, to defend the frontiers of Spain. But it may be conjectured, that the romance writers have confounded the wars of Charles Martel against Abd el Rahman, with those of Charlemagne; and have thus given rise to the traditions of the invasion of France by the Saracens, and of those unheard-of perils, from which the west of Europe was saved by the valour of the Paladins. Every reader knows that Orlando, of all the heroes of Ariosto the most renowned for his valour, became mad, through love for Angelica; and that his madness, which is only an episode in this long poem, has given its name to the whole of the composition, although it is not until the twenty-third canto that Orlando is deprived of his senses.

It does not appear that Ariosto had the intention of writing a strictly epic poem. He had rejected the advice of Bembo, who wished him to compose his poem in Latin, the only language, in the opinion of the cardinal, worthy of a serious subject. Ariosto thought, perhaps, that an Italian poem should necessarily be light and sportive. He scorned the adopted rules of poetry, and proved himself sufficiently powerful to create new ones. His work may, indeed, be said to possess an unity of subject; the great struggle between the Christians and the Moors, which began with the invasion of France, and terminated with her deliverance. This was the subject which he had proposed to himself in his argument. The lives and adventures of his several heroes, contributed to this great action; and were so many subordinate episodes, which may be admitted in epic poetry, and which, in so long a work, cannot be considered as destroying the unity.

The poem of Ariosto is, therefore, only a fragment of the history of the knights of Charlemagne and their amours; and it has neither beginning nor end, further than any particular detached period may be said to possess them. This want of unity essentially injures the interest and the general impression which we ought to derive from the work. But the avidity with which all nations, and all ages, have read Ariosto, even when his story is despoiled of its poetic charms by translation, sufficiently proves that he had the art of giving to its individual parts an interest which it does not possess as a whole.

Machiavelli

From Ariosto we turn to his great contemporary, the illustrious secretary of the Florentine republic, Niccolo Machiavelli, a man of profound thought, and the most eloquent historian and most skilful politician that Italy has produced. But a distinction less enviable has attached his name to the infamous principles which he developed, though probably with good intentions, in his treatise, entitled Il Principe; and his name is, at the present day, allied to everything false and perfidious in politics.

Machiavelli was born at Florence, on the 3rd of May, 1469, of a family which had enjoyed the first offices in the republic. We are not acquainted with the history of his youth; but at the age of thirty he entered into public business as chancellor of the state, and from that time he was constantly employed in public affairs, and particularly in embassies. He was sent four times, by the republic, to the court of France; twice to the imperial court; and twice to that of Rome. Among his embassies to the smaller princes of Italy, the one of the longest duration was to Cæsar Borgia, whom he narrowly observed at the very important period when this illustrious villain was elevating himself by his crimes, and whose diabolical policy he had thus an opportunity of studying at leisure. In the midst of these grave occupations his satiric gaiety did not forsake him; and it was at this period that he composed his comedies, his novel of Belfagor, and some stanzas and sonnets which are not deficient in poetical merit. He had a considerable share in directing the councils of the republic as to arming and forming its militia; and he assumed more pride to himself from this advice, which liberated the state from the yoke of the Condottieri, than from the fame of his literary works. The influence to which he owed his elevation in the Florentine Republic was that of the free party which contested the power of the Medici and at that time held them in exile. When the latter were recalled in 1512 Machiavelli was deprived of all his employs and banished. He then entered into a conspiracy against the usurpers, which was discovered, and he was put to the torture, but without wresting from him, by extreme agonies, any confession which could impeach either himself or those who had confided in his honour. Leo X, on his elevation to the pontificate, restored him to liberty.

Machiavelli has not, in any of his writings, testified his resentment of the cruel treatment he experienced. He seems to have concealed it at the bottom of his heart; but we easily perceive that torture had not increased his love of princes, and that he took a pleasure in painting them as he had seen them, in a work in which he feigned to instruct them. It was, in fact, after having lost his employs that he wrote on history and politics, with that profound knowledge of the human heart which he had acquired in public life, and with the habit of unweaving, in all its intricacies, the political perfidies which then prevailed in Italy. He dedicated his treatise of the Principe, not to Lorenzo the Magnificent, but to Lorenzo, duke of Urbino, the proud usurper of the liberties of Florence, and of the estates of his benefactor, the former duke of Urbino, of the house of Rovere. Lorenzo thought himself profound when he was crafty, and energetic when he was cruel; and Machiavelli, in showing, in his treatise of the Principe, how an able usurper, who is not restrained by any moral principle, may consolidate his power, gave to the duke instructions conformable to his taste. The true object, however, of Machiavelli could not be to secure on his throne a tyrant whom he hated, and against whom he had conspired. Nor is it probable that he only proposed to himself to expose to the people the maxims of tyranny in order to render them odious; for an universal experience had, at that time, made them known throughout all Italy, and that diabolical policy which Machiavelli reduced to a system was, in the sixteenth century, that of all the states.

It was also at this period of his life that Machiavelli wrote his History of Florence, dedicated to Pope Clement VII, and in which he instructed the Italians in the art of uniting the eloquence of history with depth of reflection. He has attached himself, much less than his predecessors in the same line, to the narration of military events. But his work, as a history of popular passions and tumults, is a masterpiece. He was again employed in public affairs by the pope, and was charged with the direction of the fortifications, when death deprived his country of his further services, on the 22nd of June, 1527, three years before the termination of the Florentine Republic.[c]