Torquato Tasso was the last great genius of the Italian Renaissance, and stands there facing the oncoming decadence in gifted helplessness; he had many talents, a noble nature, a melancholy temperament, and a weak character. In boyhood his religious emotions and his intellectual faculties were both over-stimulated. His story is a medley of court favour, success, rivalry, suspicion. His home was Ferrara, but he wandered about, as a sick person seeks to ease his body by changing posture. Early forcing and some natural weakness combined to bring too great a strain upon his mind, which gave way, and the unfortunate man was put in a madhouse by his patron, the Duke of Ferrara. He was confined for seven years, but not ill treated. He died in the monastery of Sant' Onofrio on the Janiculum at Rome, where tourists stop to gaze at the poor remnant of an oak tree, under whose shade he used to sit. Carducci, the great poet, says: "Italy's great literature, the living, national, and at the same time, human literature, with which she reconciled Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and, in a Roman way, represented a renewed Europe, ended with Tasso." His sad story is a fitting epilogue to the Italian Renaissance.
This general course of ascent, culmination, and decline holds true even of Venice, except in chronology; for Venice preserved her independence from the normal Italian experience almost as resolutely in the arts as in politics. She produced no literature, piqued perhaps because Italy had taken the Tuscan dialect rather than hers for the national language; but in the arts, after decay had elsewhere set in, she bloomed in the fulness of perfection, as late roses blossom when other bushes show nothing but hips. Of her individual career a few words must be said.
In architecture and sculpture, the Lombardi, a Venetian family probably from Lombardy, flourished for nearly a hundred years (1452-1537), and left their mark on Venice, in tombs and statues, in churches and palaces. Contemporary with the last generation of Lombardi came the more gifted Alessandro Leopardi, who completed the great statue of Colleoni designed by Verrocchio, and gave a new impulse to Venetian sculpture. While the Tuscan sculptors had been studying Roman remains, the Isles of Greece had been giving Greek models to their Venetian conquerors, and Leopardi in particular profited greatly by them. In the sister art the first famous architect after the Lombardi was the Florentine, Jacopo Sansovino, who spent most of a long life in Venice, where he built the Zecca, the Loggetta, the Libreria Vecchia (the Old Library), and also the Scala d'Oro (the Golden Stairway) of the ducal palace. Sanmicheli, a military engineer, as well as a builder of palaces, came from Verona to work in Venice. Palladio (1508-80), of whom we have spoken, came from Vicenza, and bequeathed his name to the neo-classic style, known as Palladian.
In painting first came the famous Bellini family, Jacopo (1400-64?) and his two sons, Gentile and the more gifted Giovanni, painter of tenderest Madonnas; after them came Carpaccio, painter of St. Jerome and his lion, and of St. George and his dragon. Then followed in rapid succession the most gifted group of painters that ever lived together, all born within twenty years of one another, as if to prove how prodigally Nature could endow a petty province that had the luck to please her: Giorgione, from Castelfranco on the Venetian mainland, of highest fame and disputed pictures; Titian, of Cadore, noblest of portrait painters; Palma Vecchio, of Bergamo, creator of the most glorious of animals, the superb Venetian women; Sebastiano del Piombo, who painted the Fornarina of the Uffizi Gallery long attributed to Raphael, and deserved his fortune of being pupil to Giorgione and friend to Michelangelo; Lorenzo Lotto, of Bergamo, another painter of exquisite women, high-bred men, noble saints, and poetical angels; Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone, inferior only to Titian; Bonifazio from Verona, painter of patrician luxury; Paris Bordone, of Treviso, so uncertain in merit, yet at his best so rich in hue, so tender in sentiment, so admirable in his pictures of Venetian ceremonial; and at the close, the giant Tintoretto (1512-94) and Paolo Veronese (1528-88) the glorious: all, though in different degrees, splendid in colour, voluptuous ministers to the sensuous eye. This cluster of names serves to show that while elsewhere in Italy art was dwindling into mannerism and exaggeration, Venice put forth an extraordinary burst of pictorial magnificence; yet even in Venice at the end of the century none of the great men were left.
The reason for this decadence of the arts from their splendour in the early decades of the century is not easy to assign; no one can say why genius spurts up in one spot or in one individual, why the brilliant Italian race should have achieved so many masterpieces and then have become ineffectual. One can merely notice, whether as a cause or an accompanying phenomenon, that, with individual exceptions,—no man could be nobler than Michelangelo,—Italy of the High Renaissance was a great moral failure. In intellectual achievement the Italians eclipsed the world; in morality they stumbled about like blind men. This lack of morality finds its fullest expression, at least its most conspicuous expression, at the very time of the culmination of the arts. Let me illustrate.
The night that the Duke of Gandia, son of Pope Borgia, was murdered in Rome (1497), a wood-seller, living beside the Tiber, saw several men come cautiously to the river. They peered about and made a sign to some one behind. Up came a horseman, with a dead body lying across his horse's back, head and heels dangling down; the horse was turned rump to the river, and two men on foot seized the body and flung it into the water. The wood-seller was asked why he had not reported the fact. He answered that he had seen some hundred bodies thrown into the river at that spot, and had never heard any inquiries made. The duke's brother, Cæsar, was at the time believed to have done the deed, but evidence fails.
The same Cæsar Borgia, bearing the somewhat ambitious motto Aut Cæsar aut nihil, energetic, ruthless, vigorous, ingenious, and plausible, embodied the Italian conception of what a political leader should be; so much so, that Machiavelli, the greatest of Italian political writers, cites him as a model. Machiavelli was a patriot, animated by real love of his country, but he was free from our conceptions of morality, or perhaps sceptical of Italian virtue, and believed that the achievement of liberating Italy from foreign tyranny could only be accomplished by the qualities of an Iago. In the chapter in "The Prince" entitled "In what manner Princes should keep faith," he says: "How praiseworthy it is for a Prince to keep faith, to practise integrity and eschew trickery, everybody knows; nevertheless, within our own lifetime and our own experience, we know that those Princes have done great things who have made small account of good faith and have known how to turn men's heads by means of trickery, and in the end have surpassed those who planted themselves on loyalty.... Therefore a prudent lord ought not to keep faith, when keeping faith would make against him, and the reasons which made him promise are no more. If men were all good this precept would not be good; but as they are bad and would not keep faith with you, you, too, ought not to keep faith with them; and a Prince will never lack legitimate reasons to colour the breach.... I shall even make bold to say this, that to have certain moral qualities and always observe them is bad, but to seem to have them is good; as to seem to be pious, faithful, kind, religious, honest, or even to be so, provided your mind be so adjusted that, in case of need, you will know how to be the opposite. For you must know that a Prince, and especially a newly crowned Prince, cannot do all the things for which men are esteemed good, for, in order to maintain the state, they are often obliged to act contrary to humanity, contrary to charity, contrary to religion; therefore, he must have a mind prompt to veer with the wind and the fluctuations of fortune; and, as I have said, not to forsake the good, if may be, but to know how to cleave to evil, if he must."
Another illustration shall be the life of Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), born the child of an artist's model in a hospital at Arezzo, who, by wit and infinite impudence, by toadying, bullying, and blackmail, worked his way to such a position that he could say, "Without serving courts I have compelled the great world, dukes, princes, kings, to pay tribute to my genius." Once a pious lady, the Marchesa di Pesaro, remonstrated with him upon his life, and bade him mend his ways. He wrote back: "I must say that I am not less useful to the world, or less pleasing to Jesus, spending my vigils upon trifles than if I had employed them on works of piety. But why do I do this? If princes were as devout as I am needy, my pen would write nothing but misereres.... Let us see. I have a friend named Brucioli, who dedicated his translation of the Bible to the Most Christian King [of France]. Four years passed and he got no answer. On the other hand, my comedy, 'The Courtesan,' won a rich necklace from this same king; so that my Courtesan would have felt tempted to make fun of the Old Testament, if that were not a trifle unbecoming. Forgive me lady for the jests I have written, not from malice, but for a livelihood. All the world does not possess the inspiration of divine grace. Music and comedy are to us what prayer and preaching are to you. May Jesus grant you His grace to get for me from Sebastiano di Pesaro [her husband?] the rest of the money of which I have only received thirty scudi; for this I am in anticipation your debtor." Of Pietro Aretino a recent Italian critic says: "His memory is infamous; no gentleman would mention his name before a lady." Yet, perhaps, we may doubt if he was peculiarly bad; he possessed the cynical views of morality current at the time. Aretino made a fortune, received knighthood from the Pope, nearly obtained a cardinal's hat, and was painted by Titian.
The following anecdote is taken from the autobiography of the famous goldsmith and sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71). He was travelling on a sort of canal boat on his way from Venice to Florence. "We went to lodge for the night in an inn on this side of Chioggia, on the left as we were approaching Ferrara. Our host wished to be paid, according to his custom, before we went to bed. I told him that in other places it was the custom to pay in the morning, but he said, 'I wish to be paid, according to my way, in the evening.' I replied that men who wanted their own special way would have to make a world to suit their special way, because in this world that was not the way things were done. The host answered that I need not vex my wits, for he wished to do according to his way. My companion was trembling for fear, and poked me to be quiet lest the host do worse; so we paid him, according to his way, and went to bed. We had excellent new beds, everything new, spick and span; in spite of this I did not sleep a wink, thinking all night long what I could do to revenge myself; first I thought of setting fire to the house, next of cutting the throats of the four good horses that he had in his stable; I could see that this would be easy to do, but not how it would be easy for me and my companion to escape afterwards. At last I hit on a plan. In the morning I put my companion and all the things into the canal boat. When the horses were hitched to the rope that pulled the boat, I said that they must not start the boat till I got back, as I had left a pair of slippers in my room.... When I got in the room I took my knife, which was sharp as a razor, and I cut the mattresses on the four beds to little bits, so that I knew I had done more than fifty scudi worth of damage." Throughout a delightful autobiography, which we need not accept too literally, Cellini exhibits a perfectly unmoral disposition, a mind with no sense of social law and no respect for anything except Michelangelo and art.
These four men, Cæsar Borgia, Machiavelli, Aretino, and Cellini, possessed fortitude, energy, subtlety, and courage, but they showed no appreciation of the fundamental social virtues, loyalty, trust, subordination of self to the general good; and for this reason they enable us to understand why Italy fell like a ripe apple, without resistance, into the lap of foreigners and lay helpless under Jesuit, inquisitor, petty duke, and Spanish viceroy, and why freedom to think and freedom to act faded from art and intellectual life as well as from political life.