THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
The sixteenth century is a time of peculiar contrasts in Italy. The invasions which began with the coming of Charles VIII in 1494 continue and become more and more harassing. Italy comes to be regarded as the proper prey of the French and Spanish rulers. The Italian principalities, warring as ever with one another, welcome or repel the invaders in accordance with their own selfish interests. All this time there has been no unified government of Italy as a whole. Nominally the empire included all, but this was a mere theory which, for the most part, would not bear examination. Venice all along has claimed allegiance to the Eastern Empire, which since the middle of the fifteenth century has ceased to exist. Florence owes no allegiance to any outside power; it is strictly autonomous. The democratic feeling is still strong there notwithstanding the usurpations of the Medici. Venice and Florence with Siena and Lucca are the only republics remaining at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Of the scores of cities which formerly were republics, all the rest have come under the influence of tyrants, or have been brought into unwilling subordination to neighbouring cities. And now an even greater humiliation is in store for many of them at the hands of the transalpine conquerors.
Venice, recovering from her duel to the death with Genoa—the war of Chioggia—continues to hold closely to her old traditions. Her commercial prosperity continues for a time, but is gradually lessened through the loss of eastern territories and through the rivalry brought about by the discovery of America and of a sea route to India. Florence, having thrown off in 1494 the thraldom imposed by the Medici, makes spasmodic efforts to return to the old purely democratic system; but fails in the end. In 1569 Cosmo de’ Medici is made Grand Duke of Tuscany, a position which his successors will continue to hold for seven generations (till 1737). In a word the spirit of democracy is virtually dead in Italy, and as yet no local tyrant arises who has the genius to unite the petty principalities into a unified kingdom.
But if political Italy is chaotic and unproductive in this century the case is quite different when we consider the civilisation of the time. The vivifying influences of the previous century produced a development particularly in the field of art, which now shows great results. The early decades of the sixteenth century constitute an epoch of the greatest art development in Italy. This is the age of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, of Raphael, and of Titian, and of the host of disciples of these masters. Under the patronage of successive popes, the master painters are stimulated to their best efforts, and those wonderful decorations of the Vatican are undertaken which have been the delight of all later times.
The literary development, if it does not quite keep pace with the pictorial, nevertheless attains heights which it has only once before reached since classical times. All this culture development in a time of turmoil and political disaster seems anomalous, and, as just intimated, can only be explained as the fruitage of a development which had its origin in an earlier epoch. The validity of this explanation is illustrated in the rapid decline that takes place in Italy after the middle of the sixteenth century—an intellectual decline which is scarcely to be interrupted until the nineteenth century.