Happily for Chaucer, it was in Flanders, France, and Italy that he negotiated for Edward and Richard. In December, 1372, he traverses all France, and goes to Genoa to treat with the doge of commercial matters; then he repairs to Florence, and having thus passed a whole winter far from the London fogs (which already existed in the Middle Ages), he returns to England in the summer of 1373. In 1376 a new mission is entrusted to him, this time a secret one, the secret has been well kept to this day; more missions in 1377 and 1378. "On Trinity Sunday," 1376, says Froissart, "passed away from this world the flower of England's chivalry, my lord Edward of England, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, in the palace of Westminster by London, and was embalmed and put into a leaden chest." After the obsequies, "the king of England made his children recognise ... the young damoisel Richard to be king after his death." He sends delegates to Bruges to treat of the marriage of his heir, aged ten, with "Madame Marie, daughter of the king of France"; in February other ambassadors are appointed on both sides: "Towards Lent, a secret treaty was made between the two kings for their party to be at Montreuil-on-sea. Thus were sent to Calais, by the English, Messire Guichard d'Angle, Richard Stury, and Geoffrey Chaucer."[472] The negotiation failed, but the poet's services seem nevertheless to have been appreciated, for in the following year he is again on the highways. He negotiates in France, in company with the same Sir Guichard, now become earl of Huntingdon; and again in Italy, where he has to treat with his compatriot Hawkwood,[473] who led, in the most agreeable manner possible, the life of a condottiere for the benefit of the Pope, and of any republic that paid him well.
These journeys to Italy had a considerable influence on Chaucer's mind. Already in that privileged land the Renaissance was beginning. Italy had, in that century, three of her greatest poets: the one whom Virgil had conducted to the abode of "the doomed race" was dead; but the other two, Petrarch and Boccaccio, still lived, secluded, in the abode which was to be their last on earth, one at Arqua, near Padua, the other in the little fortified village of Certaldo, near Florence.
In art, it is the century of Giotto, Orcagna, and Andrew of Pisa. Chaucer saw, all fresh still in their glowing colours, frescoes that time has long faded. Those old things were then young, and what seems to us the first steps of an art, uncertain yet in its tread, seemed to contemporaries the supreme effort of the audacious, who represented the new times.
Chaucer's own testimony is proof to us that he saw, heard, and learnt as much as possible; that he went as far as he could, letting himself be guided by "adventure, that is the moder of tydinges." He arrived without any preconceived ideas, curious to know what occupied men's minds, as attentive as on the threshold of his "Hous of Fame":
For certeynly, he that me made
To comen hider, seyde me,
I shulde bothe here et see,
In this place wonder thinges ...
For yit peraventure, I may lere
Some good ther-on, or sumwhat here,
That leef me were, or that I wente.[474]
He was thus able to see with his own eyes the admirable activity, owing to which rose throughout Italy monuments wherein all kinds of contradictory aspirations mingled, and which are nevertheless so harmonious in their ensemble, monuments of which Giotto's campanile is the type, wherein we still recognise the Middle Ages, even while we foresee the Renaissance—with Gothic windows and a general aspect which is classic, where the sentiment of realism and everyday life is combined with veneration for antique art, where Apelles is represented painting a triptych of Gothic shape. Pisa had already, at that day, its leaning tower, its cathedral, its baptistery, the exterior ornamentation of which had just been changed, its Campo Santo, the paintings of which were not finished, and were not yet attributed to Orcagna. Along the walls of the cemetery he could examine that first collection of antiques which inspired the Tuscan artists, the sarcophagus, with the story of Phædra and Hippolytus, which Nicholas of Pisa took for his model. He could see at Pistoja the pulpit carved by William of Pisa, with the magnificent nude torso of a woman, imitated from the antique. At Florence the Palazzo Vecchio, which was not yet called thus, was finished; so were the Bargello, Santa-Croce, Santa-Maria-Novella. Or-San-Michele was being built; the Loggia of the Lansquenets was scarcely begun; the baptistery had as yet only one of its famous doors of bronze; the cathedral disappeared under scaffoldings; the workmen were busy with the nave and the apse. Giotto's campanile had been finished by his pupil Gaddi, the Ponte Vecchio, which did not deserve that name any better than the palace, had been rebuilt by the same Gaddi, and along the causeway which continued it, through clusters of cypress and olive trees, the road led up to San Miniato, all resplendent with its marbles, its mosaics, and its paintings. On other ranges of hills, amid more cypress and more olive trees, by the side of Roman ruins, arose the church of Fiesole, and half-way to Florence waved in the sunlight the thick foliage overshadowing the villa which, during the great plague had sheltered the young men and the ladies of the "Decameron."
The movement was a general one. Each town strove to emulate its neighbour, not only on the battlefields, which were a very frequent trysting-place, but in artistic progress; paintings, mosaics, carvings, shone in all the palaces and churches of every city; the activity was extreme. Giotto, who had his studio, his "botega," in Florence, worked also at Assisi, Rome, and Padua. Sienna was covering the walls of her public palace with frescoes, some figures of which resemble the paintings at Pompeii.[475] An antique statue found within her territory was provoking universal admiration, and was erected on the Gaïa fountain by the municipality; but the Middle Ages did not lose their rights, and, the republic having suffered reverses, the statue fell into disgrace. The god became nothing more than an idol; the marble was shattered and carried off, to be treacherously interred in the territory of Florence.[476]
The taste for collections was spreading; the commerce of antiquities flourished in Northern Italy. Petrarch bought medals, and numbered among his artistic treasures a Madonna of Giotto, "whose beauty," he says in his will, "escaped the ignorant and enraptured the masters of the art."[477] This brightening of the land was the result of concurring wills, nor did it pass unobserved even then; towns enjoyed their masterpieces, and, like young women, "se miraient en leur beauté." Contemporaries did not leave to posterity the care of crowning the great poets of the time. Italy, the mother of art, wished the laurel to encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a tomb. Rome had crowned, in 1341, him who, "cleansing the fount of Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove": the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though somewhat tardy, the honour was no less great for Dante: public lectures on the "Divine Comedy" were instituted in Florence, and the lecturer was Boccaccio.[479]
It was impossible that a mind, from infancy friendly to art and books, should not be struck by this general expansion; the charm of this literary springtime was too penetrating for Chaucer not to feel it; he followed a movement so conformable to his tastes, and we have a proof of it. Before his journeys he was ignorant of Italian literature; now he knows Italian, and has read the great classic authors of the Tuscan land: Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. The remembrance of their works haunts him; the "Roman de la Rose" ceases to be his main literary ideal. He was acquainted with the old classics before his missions; but the tone in which he speaks of them now has changed; to-day it is a tone of veneration; one should kiss their "steppes." He expresses himself about them as Petrarch did; it seems, so great is the resemblance, as if we found in his verses an echo of the conversations they very likely had together by Padua in 1373.[480]