Leonardo’s figure overshadows for us all others of Lodovico il Moro’s Milan. There were many others besides him, however, of highest reputation at the time in the chosen circle of the Court. The Moro, in his care for the intellectual improvement of his subjects, imported poets from Tuscany to teach them the art of composing sonnets. Ancient prejudice against all things Lombard withheld many of Leonardo’s countrymen from accepting the Sforza’s offers of honours and emoluments. But the sunshine of Court favour, come whence it might, was greedily accepted by the Florentine Bernardo Bellincione, whose gift for stringing together appropriate and flattering verses secured him the position of Court poet for many years at Milan. Nor could any small local passion restrain that bare-boned vagabond genius, Antonio Camelli—called il Pistoia after his native city—from quenching his perennial famine at the ducal table. But though he played the fool to amuse his patrons, il Pistoia was of much rarer stuff than Bellincione. Behind his cloak of buffoonery the tragedy of a serious and prophetic spirit hid itself, and a fine satire inspired the sallies of his fantastic muse. An irrepressible sonneteer, he poured forth streams of verse at Milan. A number of his sonnets allude to the politics of the day, and are of great interest.
These professors of poesy were very successful in propagating their art in Milan. Francesco Tanzi, one of the many versifiers at Court, declared that after the example of Bellincione, Milan was full of sonnets, and all the rivers and canals ran with the water of Parnassus. The poetic frenzy had invaded the whole of society, so that every young knight who desired the favour of ladies and princes had needs be skilled in making rhymes and improvising to the music of his lute. A flourishing school of poetry rewarded the Moro’s patronage and encouragement, and its most distinguished graduates were young nobles of the first rank—Gaspare Visconte, of the same stock as the old ducal House, and Antonio di Campo Fregoso, of a famous Genoese House. A singer of older and still higher repute in the ducal circle was that mirror of the graceful and cultured chivalry of the day, Niccolò da Correggio, who as the son of Beatrice da Este, wife of Tristan Sforza, was constantly at Milan, in devoted attendance upon his cousin, the younger Beatrice da Este. Marchesino Stanza, Girolamo Tuttavilla, Galeazzo di San Severino, Galeotto di Caretto, a lettered noble and chronicler of Montferrato, all swelled the tuneful choir. The Moro himself is said to have included sonnet-making among his myriad activities. Around these distinguished figures hovered a host of lyrists of various rank and accomplishment, both natives and pilgrims attracted from afar to this now famous shrine of the Muses. Men of other occupations added their voices in moments of leisure. Among these was Bramante, who, in the intervals of his labours as architect, engineer, painter and master of revels, competed eagerly for the laurel wreath.
The chief theme of their song, and the object of the gallant adoration and service of all, was the younger Beatrice da Este, who at fifteen came to Milan to be the Moro’s bride. To this child of tuneful Ferrara, trained from childhood upwards in all the æsthetic traditions of its famous Court, an atmosphere of poetry, music and art was as natural as the air she breathed. With that full and eager vitality which she shared with her father, Duke Ercole, and her sister, Isabella of Mantua, she sought all beautiful and joyous things. In the Court of her rich and indulgent lord she could satisfy every desire. For the rich equipment of her person and her surroundings she had the rarest talent at her command. Leonardo da Vinci devised curious girdles for her. That finest of goldsmiths, Caradosso, carved the beautiful gems which she wore, and spent his most delicate workmanship on pax or reliquary for her oratory. To create her presentment in marble she could choose a Gian Cristoforo Romano, most cultured and graceful of young sculptors. Her love of sweet melody was fed by the crowd of skilled musicians who frequented this Court, where their art was traditionally welcome. Besides the Flemish priest Cordier, and the other ultramontane singers of Duke Galeazzo’s celebrated choir, there were here the viol player, Jacopo di San Secondo—the Apollo of Raphael’s Parnassus—whose strains were able to soothe the Moro in moments of fever and pain, Atalante Migliorotti, the friend and companion of Leonardo, and others numberless, nameless to us now. An incomparable craftsman, Lorenzo di Pavia, made instruments for her of purest tone, in cases of ivory and ebony most exquisitely worked. She played herself upon these, and had a sweet voice. Many a time with her devoted knight, Galeazzo di San Severino, model of all fashionable graces, and himself an accomplished singer, and her favourite Daino, most musical and delightful of fools, she and her ladies would make harmonious concert. As became a daughter of Este, Beatrice extended a princely patronage to scholarship and serious literature. Her secretary, the learned Vincenzo Calmeta, tells us that she engaged men suitably gifted to read aloud to her the Divina Commedia and the works of other Italian poets. She would give serious attention to literary debates, such as the lively poetic contention we read of between Bramante and Gaspare Visconte, on the respective merits of Dante and Petrarca.
Such encounters of sharp-sworded wit, so much in vogue at that time, were conducted at Milan with less pedantry and self-conceit than in Courts ruled by more strictly humanistic traditions. A freedom, gaiety and freshness animated the intellectual atmosphere here. The Moro’s extraordinary activity of mind and wide interests, Beatrice’s ardour, and capacity for enjoyment, fired all around them. The Duchess’s eagerness for culture was tempered by her love of sport and outdoor life. Her hawks and her hounds were a primary passion in this Ferrarese princess, and many a fair morning was passed in adventurous chase of the wild creatures in her husband’s vast hunting demesnes. She was a splendid horsewoman, and had unbounded courage. The lively sports in which she indulged with her ladies and cavaliers were not always of a refined order. The gaiety of the fifteenth century was ministered to by jests and practical jokes of incredible coarseness, and by all the obscenities of the allowed fools and monstrosities of nature who capered in grotesquely brilliant garb round every Renaissance princess. Yet into this full life the Duchess herself carried a redeeming innocence. In spite of her free intercourse with the young nobles, no lightest shadow ever rested on her fair fame.
The society in which she passed her bright, pure existence had, however, but lately had Galeazzo Maria for leader and example, and had forgotten all moral restrictions. When Beatrice came first to Milan she found her husband’s mistress, the beautiful poetess Cecilia Gallerani, installed in the palace itself. The whole of Milan was rotten beneath its fine vestures and its art and learning. Wealth and luxury had encouraged the love of pleasure natural in the people, and the ideal of freedom in thought and manners, the search for novel experience and sensation, the worship of the new old gods, born of the revived knowledge of antiquity, had induced immorality and corruption more than elsewhere in this city where voluptuous tastes were not restrained, as in the Florentines, by natural temperance. Everywhere in the midst of the joyous revels lust and evil passions were heaping up sins ready for the retribution to come. Corio, an eyewitness of these times, preludes his story of the great catastrophe by a vivid picture, adorned by the fashionable pagan conceits, of Milanese life during these years before the fatal 1495, when it seemed to the city and its Lord that everything was more firmly established in peace than ever before. No one thought of other than accumulating riches. Pomps and pleasures ruled the hours. The Court of our princes was splendid exceedingly, full of new fashions, dresses and delights. Nevertheless, at this time virtue was so much lauded on every side that Minerva had set up great rivalry with Venus, and each sought to make her school the most brilliant. To that of Cupid came the most beautiful youths. Fathers yielded to it their daughters, husbands their wives, brothers their sisters, and so thoughtlessly did they thus flock to the amorous hall that it was reckoned a stupendous thing by those who had understanding. Minerva, she too, sought with all her might to adorn her gentle Academy. Wherefore that glorious and most illustrious Prince Lodovico Sforza had called into his pay—as far as from the uttermost parts of Europe—men most excellent in knowledge and art. Here was the learning of Greece, here Latin verse and prose flourished resplendently, here were the poetic Muses; hither the masters of the sculptor’s art and those foremost in painting had gathered from distant countries, and here songs and sweet sounds of every kind and such dulcet harmonies were heard, that they seemed to have descended from Heaven itself upon this excelling Court.
We who know the after days of Milan watch the golden hours gliding by towards the darkness ahead, and the glory centring round the two doomed figures of Lodovico and Beatrice is pregnant for us with tragedy and grief. Corio continues with a description of these princes, in this so vain felicity, passing their time in divers pleasures, and speaks of the magnificent jousts and tournaments and military shows, and of the homage paid by the poets to the Moro as Lord both of war and peace. Yet, he adds, with all this glory, pomp and wealth, which seemed as though nothing could be added to it, Lodovico, not content, or unaware of his felicity, must needs reach higher still, that his fall might be the greater. And the chronicler, preparing himself to compose the cruel and unheard-of tale, fears that compassion will not suffer him to arrive at the piteous end without tears.
The Moro’s power was in fact unstably based. His was the right of natural ability to rule. But beside him the lawful sovereign had grown to manhood during these years. Gian Galeazzo Sforza—the engaging little boy reading Cicero in Bramantino’s fresco, now in the Wallace Collection—showed with advancing years little desire or capacity to govern. Amiable, weakly, and self-indulgent, he was perfectly content to leave the power to his uncle, for whom he had a love and admiration which are a touching element in the relationship of the two men—usurper and legitimate prince. Had they only been concerned, the Moro’s peculiar difficulties might never have arisen. He seems to have regarded himself sincerely at first as the vicegerent of his nephew. Dum vivis tutus et laetus vivo. Gaude, fili, protector tuus ero semper. These words, in the mouth of nephew and uncle, are the motto on a miniatured page in the History of Francesco Sforza, by Gio. Simonetta, printed in 1490. The picture shows Lodovico and Gian Galeazzo kneeling on the edge of a lake; in the midst of the water a ship with a youth in it and a Moor at the helm, and in the background a mulberry-tree (moro) spreading wide branches. This allegory—one of many such that we read of—may have expressed some real affection as well as self-exaltation in Lodovico, though after-events give it a strange irony.
But the respective marriages of the two princes introduced another element into the situation. Beatrice da Este was not only the joyous spirit of festival and sport and all artistic delight, but a woman of strong character and intelligence. She quickly gained influence over her husband, and asserted herself in State affairs. The very narrowness of her youth and sex gave her power over the complex and wide-minded Moro, who adored her spirit and courage, and yielded to her as his great sire Francesco had yielded to Bianca Maria. Beatrice wanted the semblance as well as the substance of sovereignty, and the birth of her son, in 1492, added the new ambition of a mother to her desire. Isabella of Aragon, on her side, had a royal spirit; her soul swelled with rage and offended pride when the regent showed no intention of relinquishing the government to her husband. In vain she urged Gian Galeazzo to assume his rights; her exhortations only passed straight from the confiding boy into Lodovico’s ears. Her sense of wrong was further exasperated by Beatrice, who usurped the homage and consequence which should have been Isabella’s as consort of the sovereign. The rivalry between the princesses began very soon after Beatrice’s appearance on the scene, and that playful boxing-match of which we read, in which the Duchess of Bari knocked down her of Milan, was the symbol of a contest which involved fatal issues reaching far beyond the two women themselves.
Influenced by his wife’s ambition, and the birth of his son—also perhaps by the impossibility, when the hour came, of relinquishing the sweets of power and sacrificing his vast projects and the fruits of his past incessant labours to the claim of mere primogeniture represented by the feeble and already failing Gian Galeazzo—Lodovico was evidently scheming, after 1490, to make himself Duke of Milan. From the time of the Moro’s marriage the ceremonial homage which had been paid till then to the young Duke was gradually lessened. The tutelage which had been proper in his boyhood was now used to emphasize his incapacity. No single office or dignity was at his disposal. Ministers of State, captains of fortresses, generals and magistrates, all were appointed by Lodovico. At no point did his subjects come into contact with their real sovereign. He was dependent for all supplies upon the Moro, who kept absolute control of the immense Sforza treasure. The birth of his heir was but scantily celebrated, while that of Lodovico’s a little later was made the occasion of the most pompous rejoicings. The halls of the sovereigns in the Corte Ducale were gradually deserted, while Lodovico and Beatrice’s apartments in the Rocchetta were thronged. The self-seeking courtiers knew well where their devotion was most profitably placed. Besides, it was melancholy in the chambers of a sickly prince and a sad princess ever brooding over her wrongs. The two appeared less and less in public, and finally retired altogether to the Castle of Pavia, and their pathetic figures were almost forgotten on the joyous stage of Milanese life.
But they existed—a constant menace to the Moro, a weapon for his thousand enemies in the State, and for jealous Italy outside. Isabella’s piteous complaints to her grandfather, whom she implored to right her husband, inflamed the long-standing Aragonese hatred of the Sforza. The other powers—Venice, baulked in her greed of conquest by the strong hand of the Moro, and ever nervous for the cities which she had wrested from Milan in Filippo Maria’s time; Pope Alexander VI., who allowed no gratitude to the Sforza, although through Cardinal Ascanio they had been the means of his election, to interfere with his schemes for a new Borgian Italy; Florence, politically and commercially jealous of the Lombard State—all would have gladly seen the Moro overthrown and Milan depressed.