The darkened world has now long missed the star
Which, while the shade still hung before my eyes,
Shone like a guide unto my steps afar.
Ne’er will the sweet and heavenly tones resound,
Silent the harmonies of that sweet lyre,
Now only in the angels’ bright world found.
Girolamo Benivieni, as his own words suggest, was in a measure the successor of Belcari. But while the latter wrote entirely under the influence of strictly orthodox Christianity, Benivieni sought to impart to his work the spirit of Greek philosophy which ruled the age in which he had grown up. While Belcari, again, united public activity with the contemplative life in which he loved to indulge, we are not informed that Benivieni, however deeply the events in his native country might move him, had any share in them beyond that of an author and a friend of many of the actors. Born in 1453, he survived friends and foes and the Republic itself. Intellectually active up to his last years, he kept true to the recollections of his most active years, and to the convictions he had then formed. Feo Belcari had been his leader in youth; Fra Girolamo Savonarola was the guiding star of his ripe manhood. Between the two, the representative of the contemplative man and the strenuous ascetic, stands a grave, beautiful figure, Pico of Mirandola, who had no less influence on Benivieni than the others. Only from its intimate connection with these three has Benivieni’s life—of which nothing else is known—a significance and importance, that cannot otherwise be explained. As he sang Belcari’s death, and defended the truth of Savonarola’s doctrines and predictions—more than thirty years after his death—before Pope Clement VII.,[420] so did he choose his last resting-place beside Pico,[421] whose death preceded his own by half a century. Benivieni illustrated his friend’s canzonets on Divine Love with a detailed commentary which proved how their minds accorded with one another.
Benivieni attempted the most various kinds of poetry—eclogues, canticles, canzonets, sonnets—which give him a place beside the two men whom we shall soon see taking the first places in poetry, Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici; while in popular songs, the Frottole, he retained the tradition which, whatever the learned might say, still represented the popular element in literature. He translated the Psalms and the ‘Dies Iræ’ into the terza rima, remodelled a novel of Boccaccio’s into stanzas, and made poetic translations from the Greek and Latin. His poems on religious philosophical subjects show him to have been in form and meaning one of those who aspired to mediate between Christianity and Platonism, a tendency also evinced by the commentary accompanying the poems we have mentioned, and addressed to Pico’s nephew, Giovan Francesco. Benivieni’s principal historical importance, so to say, consists in the sympathy he showed for the movement commenced by Savonarola, which found its especial poetical expression through him. His lauds, which, in their mysticism tinged with sensuousness, remind us at times of Fra Jacopone’s sentimentality, were sung by the people in the streets of the city, by high and low members of the Dominican order, in places where shortly before Medicean carnival-songs had resounded, and where piles of worldly vanity were heaped up to be followed soon by other forms of terrible ruin.
In the style which gives importance to Belcari’s and Benivieni’s poetry when the former still lived and the latter was in youthful manhood, a woman appeared who claims peculiar attention, because she exercised a decided influence on the personage who has given to this epoch the special stamp of his individuality. Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici was eminently gifted; we have seen her in several positions in life which display her clear understanding, caution, affection for her family, and care for their welfare, without arrogance or forgetfulness of her station. Her productions as a poet belong to the intellectual class. The six lauds[422] which remain of her poetry have this peculiarity, that they include the ecclesiastical year; and if their poetical value does not exceed others of the kind, they produce a favourable impression by avoiding the endless repetitions of similar poems. The Birth of Christ, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Life of Christ on earth, these are the themes of her hymns, some of which were sung to sacred, and some to profane airs. Beside these processional songs, Lucrezia wrote various Biblical histories in terza rima or in eight-lined stanzas: e.g., the ‘Lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist,’ the ‘History of Esther, Judith, and Tobias.’ Angelo Poliziano revised her poems, and her grandsons learned them by heart. Another poetess of the time, whose family was intimately acquainted with Lucrezia’s, Antonia Giannotti Pulci, attempted sacred dramas, in which her husband Bernardo made himself a name.
Besides poetry another branch of literature deserves attention, although the humanistic school diminished its powers, and restricted its influence without entirely depriving it of importance. It will be easily understood that, in the native country of Dino Compagni and the Villani, there could be no lack of such as continued to note down what they felt and heard, and what they had themselves a personal share in. Nowhere, perhaps, were such notices, either in the form of annals or chronicles, or as narratives of personal experience with a predominance of character drawing, so frequent and so valuable as here. In the last decades of the fourteenth century several writers had followed in the steps of the Villani with far more talent than they had. Donato Velluti, Marchionne Stefani, Gino Capponi wrote a description of the popular insurrections of 1378, in the course of which the reader is in danger of losing the thread if he does not keep the separate elements apart. The following century was active in this department, but however important in many cases the material may have been, the form and language betray the lowly position to which the humanistic literature had condemned this despised sister. Buonaccorso Pitti, Jacopo Salviati, and Neri Capponi wrote histories and commentaries which are partly personal memoirs, and all the more instructive because the epoch was one which claimed so fully the active participation of capable citizens at home and abroad. We may, perhaps, blame the weakness of the last-mentioned writer for placing his own deeds and those of his father, relations, and friends, in the foremost rank in commentaries, which extend nearly to his death in 1456; but where men like Gino and Neri Capponi have laboured in such a conspicuous manner, the circumstantial style is willingly accepted, as the inner life of a people can only be recognised and understood by a closer view of important persons. Other chroniclers, like Domenico Buoninsegni and Goro Dati, from whom less is to be gained for political history, are the more readily pardoned for their gossiping patriotism because the subject of their preference is a deserving one, and they furnish us with a quantity of information that is important for the history of civilisation.
A special place belongs to Giovanni Cavalcanti, the principal authority for the time from 1420 to 1440. The humanistic school had exercised more influence on him than on any of the historians of his day who wrote in the vulgar tongue, but in a manner which imprints the strangest character on his history. For we find here, grafted on the passionate description of a partisan who had fallen out with his own faction in the course of his work, a rhetorical wordiness and elegant would-be eloquence which clothes the strife of faction, with its loves and hatreds, in antiquated speeches and moralising sentences. The personality of the author in and for itself, as it meets us in his writings (we know nothing else of him), is characteristic; a nobleman of one of the oldest families, poor, oppressed, without any share in the administration, and with a full consciousness of the old conservative claims of the patricians, with a fierce contemptuous hatred of the lower classes, and a bitter grudge against the heads of the State, which leads him to charge Cosimo de’ Medici whom he so often praises with a diabolical design to destroy freedom. To all these annalists and historians we may add others, whose works are mostly printed, and include the times of Lorenzo or later, namely, Benedetto Dei, Bartolommeo Cerretani, Pietro Parenti, Giovanni Cambi. Similar to this branch of history, biography placed her achievements in the vulgar tongue beside those of the humanists, who, rivalling the Greeks and Romans, created much that was important and permanently valuable in a higher sense than their great historical works. Most unassuming, and, in spite of all solecisms and defects of form, most pleasing is the popular form of biography, in the hundred characteristic portraits by Vespasiano da Bisticci, to whom we owe innumerable deep views into the inner life for which we vainly seek among the learned historians.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vasari, in Michelozzo’s Life (Vite, Lemonnier’s edition, Flor. 1846, ff., iii. p. 271); and in Brunelleschi’s Life, a. a. O., p. 228. Michelozzo was born about the year 1391. It is generally understood that the building of the Palace took place before Cosimo’s exile, and they quote from Migliore (Firenze Illustrata, Flor. 1684, p. 198 ff.), which specifies ‘circa all’Anno 1430.’ There is no foundation for this statement. Moreover, Michelozzo was not in Florence in the year supposed (Fantozzi, Guida di Firenze, Flor. 1842, p. 457).