And he then finishes up with a characteristic reversion to efficacious solicitude for his clan, by marriage benefits for his young kinswomen in the future and by thought for his ancestors and predecessors in the past; and with a no less characteristic divinatory greatness of mind, by the creation of a kind of People’s College or Working-man’s University, which appears here curiously wedged in between the thoughts for his clan in the future and in the past. For he determines the points when the Protectors shall again provide for marrying honest poor girls of his three home villages, and for comforts for the prisoners at Christmas and Easter; when they are to “buy a large and well-situated house, and therein organize a public course of studies, with four Doctors of Law, four very learned Physicians, and two Masters of Grammar and Rhetoric, who shall, all ten, be each bound to deliver one lecture on every working day, and to devote all the rest of their time to the interests of the poor”; and when finally they are to provide for “Masses for his ancestors and predecessors,”—Masses for himself and immediate belongings having been already, no doubt, provided for in his previous Will, since we find such provisions repeated in his last Will, to be given later on.[315]
We thus get here a persistent preoccupation with the most manifold interests of the poor; a shrewd knowledge of men, and careful provisions calculated to rouse their indolence and to check their self-seeking; an utterly unsentimental, realistic, Charity-Organization sort of spirit shown in the insistence upon a careful and complete knowledge of the real degree and kind of want, and of the precise means appropriate for helping the various kinds of poor; a high estimate of knowledge, which he desires to offer to all, according to their various capacities and needs; and lastly, an entire freedom from pietism, for he thinks of, and provides for, harbour-works and the beautifying of the town. There is a large, open-air, operative, sanely optimistic and statesmanlike spirit about it all.
And if all this is in full keeping with, and but expands and supplements, the tenacious realism of a born organizer and administrator: the soaring idealism and universalism of his saint-friend Catherine’s stimulation, and his and her joint experiences and interests, are also directly suggested to us. For there is the special stress laid on the plague-stricken, whom they had tended together in 1493; the interest in physicians and in drugs for the poor, an interest in which she must have preceded him by twenty years or more; and the repeated preoccupation with the marrying of poor young women, and, next after it, with the convent-dowries of girls in socially similar circumstances, in each case especially of kinswomen of his own. This preoccupation was no doubt occasioned chiefly by the thought of his own most happy marriage and of his own children, the two elder now already well settled as Nuns, but the third still possibly to be married; yet we are also vividly reminded of Catherine’s own repeated occupation with the marrying of relatives of her own, and Limbania’s and her own early entrance, and wish to enter, into the Religious state. And then his benefactions include Catherine’s Hospital Church, her favourite Boschetto Church, and that Convent of the Grazie, the scene of her own conversion and the home of her sister Limbania, as well as of his daughters Battista and Daniela. But indeed the whole character of the outlook, in its successive absorption in, each time, just one particular task; in its occupation with succour in proportion to the divinely ordained and ready-found bonds and ties of nature, bonds and ties so dear to the omnipresent God; and in its, nevertheless, in nowise restricting itself to this interest, but moving on and on, distance appearing beyond distance, with love and welcome for all the heroisms and helplessnesses: is all marked with Catherine’s imperial spirit of boundless self-donation.
VII. Ettore in Rome and Naples; his Second Will; his Work in the Genoese Prisons.
1. Ettore in Rome.
And perhaps already in 1513, but, if so, not before March of that year (the date of Pope Leo’s accession), Vernazza was in Rome,—hardly, I think, for the first time. And Battista again tells us, in her long letter of 1581, how that “the incurables in Rome”—which was then, at the beginning of Giovanni de’ Medici’s (Leo X’s) reign, the brilliant centre of the Renaissance at its zenith—“were left to lie in baskets, moaning” for alms, “in the Churches. It was piteous to see them thus forsaken and badly cared for.”
Now there is good reason to think that Vernazza had known the Pope when, as Cardinal de’ Medici, he had, in 1500, stayed for some time in Genoa, in the house of his married sister, Donna Maddalena Cibò. And so Vernazza now presented himself before the Pope, “and said to him: ‘You, Holiness, have a fine work in hand, in patronizing the Arts and Letters: but you cannot leave this Rome of yours saddened by so piteous a spectacle.’” And the Pope thanked him, and begged him to accept the charge of founding and undertaking the government of the Arch-Hospital. And the two “Cardinals, Caraffa,” the vigorous and devoted, but harshly austere Neapolitan, who was, later on, joint-founder of the Theatines and then Pope Paul IV, “and Sauli,” the Genoese, “helped him in his work. Indeed the latter said to him: ‘If you require money, come to me.’”
And this Roman work of Vernazza straightway put forth two offshoots, far away. For “Caraffa founded in Venice a hospital on the model of the one in Rome.” And “there happened to be in Rome” at this time “a certain Bartholommeo Stella, a rich and very generous (molto galante) young man. And Vernazza saw him and gained such an influence with him as to end by sending him to Brescia, to promote there also these fruits of Christian faith.”
And in Rome itself “Leo X gave Vernazza practical proofs of his gratitude, and set him forth on his return journey with demonstrations of great honour (magnifiche demonstrazioni). And the Arch-Hospital having been thus set going and Vernazza being back in Genoa, Leo X addressed a Brief to him, informing him that his Hospital in Rome was in a state of confusion (andava sossopra); ‘I think’ (adds Battista) ‘because its Governors wanted each to be above the other.’ And he returned to Rome, and quieted all controversy.”[316] I take this second Roman journey to have been not before 1515; but it may have occurred any time before 1522, the year of Pope Leo’s death.