Italian Fantasies

by Israel Zangwill

And that Mantuan populace that poured in like a stage-crowd to hear its Dukes take the oath of fidelity—are the supers, too, dismissed for ever with the run of the dynasty? And the Dukes themselves, the haughty Gonzagas, is it possible that they are crumbled even more irredeemably than those plasterless walls of their palace? Can it be that Mantegna’s portraits are less phantasmal than the originals?

“For the honour of the illustrious Lodovico the Magnificent and Excellent Prince, and unconquered in Faith, and his illustrious Consort Barbara, the incomparable glory of women, his Andrea Mantegna, the Paduan, executed this work in 1473.”

At last, at last something lives and breathes in this vast wilderness of shadows. Bless you, Barbara, incomparable glory of women, with your strong masculine face; and you, too, Magnificent long-nosed Lodovico. Far have I been driven in my dream—I am wandered even to the adjoining ruin of the Ducal Castle—but now I am with the quick, with pigments whose life, though it has its fading, is a quasi-immortality compared with our transience. Go, get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her to be painted, for this canvas complexion is the sole that will last.

Isabella d’Este lives at Vienna, recreated by Titian, and at Paris Vittore Pisano shows us what a princess of her house was like, painting beauty of face and brocade against a Japanese background of flowers and butterflies. A more shadowy life she lives in this legend of the princess of the Renaissance, which the prince of Italian writers has revived in his novel, “Forse che si, forse che no,” a book in which my Italian friends tell me d’Annunzio has won yet another triumph of language, old words being so cunningly mingled with new that they do not jar, but chime. D’Annunzio is a demi-incarnation of the Renaissance spirit, exanimate of the Christian half, and it is characteristic that the qualities round which his adoration of Isabella plays are the qualities not of a great lady, but of a great courtesan; a leader of the demi-monde. But as d’Annunzio lives in a half-world, what can his heroines do but lead it? His Isabella d’Este—as re-created through the worshipful eyes of Aldo—is the rival in dress of Beatrice Sforza, Renata d’Este, and Lucrezia Borgia; marchionesses borrow her old clothes as models, Ippolita Sforza, Bianca Maria Sforza, and Leonora of Aragon are hopelessly out-dressed. Her sister Beatrice alone sticks like a thorn in her side—Beatrice whose wardrobe had eighty-four accessions in two years! But Isabella squeezed ninety-three into one year!! Lucrezia Borgia, when she went to marry Alfonso d’Este, had two hundred marvellous chemises; Isabella outdid her, and even Lucrezia must have recourse to her for a fan of gold sticks with black ostrich feathers. Isabella invented new styles and new modes, and the fashion of the carriage at Rome. Isabella loved gems, particularly emeralds, and succeeded in obtaining the most beautiful in existence. She had her goldsmiths at Venice, at Milan, at Ferrara. She possessed not only the finest jewels, but the finest settings, rings, collars, chains, bracelets, seals, and so through the list of gewgaws and baubles. She was the admiration of France. She adored perfumes and compounded them, and masks, and sent Cæsar Borgia a hundred, and had the most exquisite nail-files for manicuring, and was head over ears in debt—per sopra ai capelli—for she had a mad desire to buy everything that took her whimsy. Has any one ever better summarised the eternal courtesan?

Not a word about the nobler Isabella, the kind-hearted lady who was always interceding for criminals or unfortunates; not a word of the Isabella of unspotted reputation in an age of demireps (naturally d’Annunzio would hush this up); not a whisper of the Isabella who felt the defence of Faenza against Cæsar Borgia “as a vindication of the honour of Italy.” Scarce a hint of the inspirer of humanism, the patroness of some of the finest artists of all time; still less any suggestion of the other Isabella, the housewife who sent salmon-trout to her friends, the philosopher who, when the King of France had entered Naples, pointed out to her lord that the discontent of the people is more dangerous to a monarch than all the might of his enemies on the battlefield, and the worldly wise woman who, when he was hesitating over an inglorious military appointment, bade him take the cash and let the credit go.

So complex an Isabella is beyond the scope of d’Annunzio, whose Isabella Inghirami is an elemental creature of passion and tragedy.

“Forse che si, forse che no.” An inhabitant of the full world, beholding this motto written and rewritten in the ceiling-labyrinth of the Gonzaga Palace, might fall into contemplation of the labyrinth of human life, and see this device scribbled all over it; he might hail it as the philosophy of Montaigne in a nutshell, and jump, if he were a novelist, at this magnificent setting for some tale of high speculative fantasy. But for d’Annunzio there can be only one problem lying between these mighty opposites. Will a woman yield to her lover, or will virtue resist him? To this petty issue must these measureless words be narrowed. ’Tis not even a forse. With d’Annunzio there can be no negative in such an alternative. And so the mighty Mantuan ruin which has known so many desolations receives its last humiliation, and passes into literature as a background for lust. Sunt lachrymæ rerum.

The true Isabella d’Este has been as much rarefied by the Renaissance legend as she has been materialised by d’Annunzio. For she cannot be wholly exonerated from d’Annunzio’s panegyric. “Would to God,” she cried at sight of her brother-in-law’s treasure, “that we who are so fond of money possessed as much.” It was this treasure of the Duke of Milan’s that did, indeed, make her sister Beatrice a thorn in her side, if also a rose in her breast, since darling Duchess Beatrice set the pace at a rate ruinous to the Marchioness of Mantua. Isabella could not even go to Venice at the same time as Beatrice, lest all that magnificence (whose very leavings overwhelmed me in her Palace) should appear shabbiness. And when she lost her mother, she appeared more anxious about the proper shade of mourning than the proper sentiment of grief. (How came d’Annunzio to have missed this trait? What a chance for analysis of the æsthetic temperament!) More pardonable was her anxiety as to the colour of the hangings in the Moro’s rooms, her hurried borrowing of plate and tapestries, when he impended with that suite of a thousand. But even for Beatrice’s death she seemed to find some satisfaction in the ultimate reversion of her much-coveted clavichord, and she found it possible to borrow a Da Vinci portrait from the Duke’s former mistress—her sister’s cross. Nor—after the Duke was in exile—does it seem very loyal to that fallen idol and faithful admirer, to have ingratiated herself with the French conqueror. That she should rejoice in the election to the papacy of her profligate kinsman, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, was perhaps not unnatural, but when every allowance is made for her virtues, it must be admitted that she was not utterly unworthy of d’Annunzio’s admiration.

She was, in brief, a Magnificent One, and if the Magnificent Ones are, as a rule, less monstrous when they are women, at the best they are a seamy shady lot, grinding the faces of the poor, that their babes may lie in foolish cradles of gold, and building themselves lordly pleasure-houses designed by hirelings of genius. Even Da Vinci prostituted his genius to plan a bathroom for that minx of a Beatrice, and a pavilion with a round cupola for the castle-labyrinth of his Most Illustrious Prince, Signor Lodovico. Yet Lodovico must be commended for his taste, which is more than can be said for the Magnificent Ones of to-day, who are apt to combine the libertine with the Philistine. Save for the mad King of Bavaria, I can recall no modern monarch who has had a man of genius at his Court. The late King Leopold exacted gold and executed evil on a scale beyond the dreams of the Moro, but where were his Leonardos and Bramantes? Burckhardt tells us that the Renaissance Despot, whose sway was nearly always illegitimate, gathered a Court of genius and learning to give himself a standing; the pompous dulness of our modern Courts shows that Gibbon’s plea for stability of succession failed to reckon with the stagnation of security.

Prosaic compared with the fate of the Palace at Mantua is the fate of the Castle of Ferrara, the cradle of Isabella d’Este. ’Tis one of those gloomy massive four-towered structures that recall the fables of the giants, with its moat still two yards deep and its drawbridge intact—a barbarous mediæval pile, forbidding by daylight and sinister in the moon, with a great clock that has so much leisure that it strikes the hour before every quarter.