CHAPTER XXX
THE CINQUECENTO (16th Century)
The Cinquecento, as the Italians call the sixteenth century, exhibits in the arts the same disintegration and decay that we have found in the political life of Italy. Honesty, independence, genuineness fade away, and in their stead we find cleverness and effort. The high tide of the Renaissance was in the pontificate of Julius II, but the flood lingered on at the full till 1540, and then the ebb began. This is the date which the famous German scholar and critic, Jakob Burckhardt, assigns as the limit of the Golden Age; and it is interesting to find how closely it corresponds with the political dates which marked the establishment of the new political order in Italy. In 1530 Florence was definitely handed over to the Medici; in 1535 the duchy of Milan was annexed to Spain; in 1540 the Pope sanctioned the Order of Jesus; in 1542 he established the Holy Office in Rome; in 1543 he accepted the scheme of an Index Librorum Prohibitorum; and in 1545 the Council of Trent was opened.
The change from maturity to decay was all-pervasive; yet it was slow, and a period of excellence and good taste intervened between the High Renaissance and the Baroque. This process is most clearly marked in architecture. During the High Renaissance dignity was law, the grand manner dominated, and charm determined subordinate parts. Domes were noble, loggias elegant, pilasters decorative, cornices well proportioned, ceilings splendid. After 1540 indications of decline appeared; but this fading brilliance was a kind of götterdämmerung, and, though it heralded the Baroque, displayed at times a purity of detail and a noble restraint worthy of the earlier period.
Of the architects of this intervening stage the greatest was Giacomo Barozzi, surnamed Vignola after the little town where he was born in the province of Modena. He was a man of theories, had great knowledge of classical architecture, and wrote a manual on the architectural orders which enjoyed great authority for two centuries and more. He built various buildings at Bologna, and designed a gigantic palace at Piacenza for the Farnesi, the ducal children of Alexander Farnese, Paul III, and nephews of the beautiful Giulia. The art of making gardens, of using cypress trees, greensward, pools, terraces, and clumps of ilex as joint partners with stone, brick, and stucco, in one artistic whole, had come into being in the sixteenth century; and Vignola was one of the masters of this new art. He designed the Farnese gardens on the Palatine Hill, since destroyed by time, neglect, subsequent owners, and eager archæologists. He was an artist of great ideas, and sometimes caught the grand manner. On the other hand, he also helped to bring on the Baroque. His famous church at Rome, the Gesù, despite its vast, high-arching nave, lent itself with fatal facility to a gorgeous hideousness of decoration, and set the fashion for many imitative Jesuit churches, which caught the hideous gorgeousness but missed the grandeur of their exemplar. He had an important part in building the Villa di Papa Giulio (Pope Julius III), a little outside the city walls, charming in its grace, its variety, and its succession of arcades, courts, loggias, balustrades, grotto, terrace, and garden.
The next in rank, Bartolommeo Ammanati of Florence, may be called the court architect of Duke Cosimo I. He built two bridges across the Arno, the Ponte alia Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinità, finished the main body of the Pitti Palace, originally designed by Brunelleschi, and completed the elaborate Boboli garden, the pleasure grounds behind the palace. He also was drawn to Rome at the behest of villa-building Popes, and had a share in elaborating the plans of the Villa of Papa Giulio. Giorgio Vasari, architect, painter, biographer, designed the Uffizi at Florence, painted many indifferent pictures, and wrote "Lives of the Painters," a garrulous, discursive, inaccurate, and delightful book. Galeazzo Alessi of Perugia built the stately, tourist-haunted palaces of Genoa, once occupied by opulent merchants, and also the gigantic church of S. Maria degli Angeli, which covers the Portiuncula of St. Francis, like a bowl turned over a forget-me-not. Jacopo Tatti Sansovino of Florence was the architect of many noble buildings in Venice. Andrea Palladio of Vicenza embodied his passionate love of classical architecture in palaces and churches in his native town and in Venice. During the revival of classic enthusiasm in the eighteenth century Palladio became a demi-god. The captivated Goethe, as soon as he arrived at Vicenza, hurried to see the Palladian palaces. "When we stand face to face with these buildings, then we first realize their great excellence; their bulk and massiveness fill the eye, while the lovely harmony of their proportions, admirable in the advance and retreat of perspective, brings peace to the spirit." In Venice, he says, "Before all things I hastened to the Carità.... Alas! scarcely a tenth part of the edifice is finished. However, even this part is worthy of that heavenly genius.... One ought to pass whole years in the contemplation of such a work."
These men and their rivals kept alive the traditions of the great period; nevertheless, in course of time stiltedness and exaggeration usurped the place of elegance and force. A servile imitation of Roman models, an absolute acceptance of classical correctness, prevailed; the classic orders, especially the Corinthian, spread themselves everywhere; in one place barren and formal simplicity obtruded itself, in another pretentious magnificence. After 1580 the transition is complete; the baroque triumphs; sham tyrannizes, wood and plaster mimic stone, columns twist themselves awry; monstrous scrolls, heavy mouldings, crazy statues, gilt deformities, and all the contortions to which stucco and other cohesive substances will submit, hang and cling everywhere, inside and out. But this is to anticipate, for the full revel of the Baroque takes place in the seventeenth century.
The same degeneration prevailed in sculpture. Michelangelo, in his statues in the Medicean chapel at Florence, "Night" and "Day," "Evening" and "Dawn" (1529-34), had achieved the utmost which thought and emotion could express in marble. They stand, pillars set up by Hercules, at the end of the noble sculpture of the Renaissance. His successors tried to imitate him, in vain; they produced bulk, or writhing or distortion. Yet some men of this period did excellent work: Benvenuto Cellini, delicate goldsmith, and sculptor of the Florentine Perseus; John of Bologna, who modelled the Flying Mercury; Taddeo Landini of Florence, who designed the charming fountain in Rome, in which several boys are boosting turtles into a basin above; Bandinelli, whose big statues are familiar in Florence, "a man strangely composed," as Burckhardt says, "of natural talent, of reminiscence of the old school, and of a false originality which carried him beyond a disregard of nicety even to grossness." After these men and a few others, sculpture followed architecture in its facile descent into the Baroque, and expressed itself in prophets, saints, and Popes, who stand in swaying and vacillating postures in nave and aisle, on roof and balustrade. These decadent sculptors strictly belong to the next century; they are but heralded by the last works of the Cinquecento.
In painting, too, the same story is repeated all over Italy. In Florence after the close of the High Renaissance twilight darkened rapidly. There are few artists of note except two fashionable portrait painters, Pontormo and Bronzino, who display the characteristics of the period. Bronzino's picture of the Descent of Christ into Hades almost justifies Ruskin's comment, a "heap of cumbrous nothingness and sickening offensiveness;" on the other hand, Pontormo's decorations in the great hall of the Medicean Villa at Poggio a Caiano are as graceful, gay, and charming as can well be imagined. After them in dreary succession come the decadent painters, who painted figures bigger and bigger in would-be Michelangelesque attitudes, as may be seen in one of the rooms of the Belle Arti in Florence. Elsewhere, also, the generation bred under the great masters faded away,—the sweet Luini of Milan, Leonardo's follower; the facile Giulio Romano, Raphael's pupil; the beauty-loving Sodoma of Siena; the romantic Dosso Dossi of Ferrara. These names show how loath the genius of painting was to leave Italy, but she obeyed fate; and, at the end of the century, we have the Caracci beginning to paint in Bologna, and Caravaggio (1569-1609) in Naples. It needs but a glance at these later pictures to see what a change had come over the spirit of beauty during the hundred years since Botticelli painted Venus fresh from the salt sea foam.
In literature, also, at the opening of the sixteenth century, we had the historian, Guicciardini; the political writer, Machiavelli; the poet, Ariosto; the cultivated Castiglione: at the end we have the pathetic figure of Torquato Tasso (1544-95), who stands drooping, like a symbol of Italy. Tasso is always inscribed in textbooks as one of the four greatest Italian poets, and it would be useless and impertinent to dispute the concordant testimony of many witnesses. Byron apostrophizes him, "O victor unsurpassed in modern song;" yet one with difficulty avoids thinking that his sad story has added to the beauty of his poetry and heightened his reputation.