The revival of letters in Italy—Influence of the princes—Classical tastes tending to pedantry and paganism—Greek philosophy and its effects—Influence of the Dukes of Urbino.
WHEN writing upon Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a prominent place must be allotted to letters and arts. At Urbino in particular, their progress was then great, their influence proverbial; and our next eight chapters will contain notices of them which would have interrupted the continuity of our previous narrative.
The reigns of Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo I. extended over a period which general consent has regarded as the most brilliant in Italian history, and which we have repeatedly named its golden age. High expectations are naturally entertained of literature, arts, and general refinement in a cycle of such pretension. We look for a rapid advance of thought in paths of learning and science whence during long centuries it had been excluded. We anticipate a widely disseminated zeal for classic writers, an eager rivalry to outstrip them in branches of speculative knowledge, which they especially cultivated. We imagine the imitative arts revived under the influence of new and more exquisite standards. And we reckon upon the diffusion of a taste and capacity for enjoying those things among classes hitherto excluded from such intellectual enjoyments. In each of these expectations the student of literary history will be gratified; yet there are several sorts of composition which, if separately examined, offer disappointing results, and scarcely a single work written during the fifteenth century has maintained universal popularity. The explanation is easy. This age was one of unprecedented intellectual activity, when men's minds were devoted to the acquisition of knowledge which they had laboriously to hunt out, and doubtingly to decipher. They had to cut for themselves tracks through an unexplored region, without grammars or commentaries to serve them as guides and landmarks. The toilsome habits thus formed were forthwith exercised for the benefit of subsequent investigators, and were applied to smoothing the path which they had themselves penetrated. Thus was it that the first successful scholars became grammarians and commentators. Surrounded by ample stores of intelligence, they had no occasion to cultivate new germs of thought. Their first object was to secure and render accessible the treasures which antiquity had unfolded to them; their next, to elaborate them in varied forms, to reproduce them in the manner most congenial to their intellectual wants. Thus they became more industrious than original, laborious rather than creative. Again, those who, on entering the garden of knowledge, thought of its fruits rather than of its approaches, instead of seeking the reward of their toils among the fair mazes of poetry and belles lettres, aimed at more arduous rewards, and climbed the loftiest and most slippery branches in search of golden apples. The harvest of scholastic philosophy which they thus gathered in may seem scarcely worthy of the fatigues given to its acquisition; but from the seeds so obtained, cultivated and matured as they have been by many after labourers, a copious and healthful store of intellectual food has been secured for subsequent generations. The work performed by these pioneers of learning and truth was, however, more calculated to crush than to inspire that more elastic fancy which preferred the flowery mead to the tree of knowledge. The spirit of the age was ponderous and prosaic, and the few who attempted to rise above its denser atmosphere into poetic regions were clogged by the trammels of a dead language, and by obsolete associations which they dared not shake off. The fifteenth century was consequently rich in scholars, copious in pedants, but poor in genius, and barren of strong thinkers.
These circumstances necessarily detract from the popular interest of Italian literary history at this important period, all influential to its after destinies, and we mention them in the conviction that general readers must feel disappointed with this portion of our work. The vast mass of materials then created now reposes in the principal storehouses of learning, much of it unpublished, and but a small part rendered accessible in recent editions. As it would be an unprofitable task to labour upon these materials for merely critical purposes, we have for the most part satisfied ourselves with an examination of the authors immediately connected with Urbino; nor shall we be tempted much beyond that narrow limit, by the facility of borrowing from those copious and intelligent writers who have successfully investigated the intellectual progress of Italy.
The revival of civilisation, and its handmaid arts, is a problem so inexplicable on the ordinary principles which regulate human progress,[64]—its causes were so complex, and many of them so remote, and singly so little striking,—that it were, perhaps, vain to hope for a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. It may be, that the ever revolving cycle of human affairs had brought round a period predestined to intellectual development, or that mind, awakening from the slumber of centuries, possessed the energies of renewed youth. But in a season of universal and sudden progress it is difficult to distinguish between cause and effect,—to decide whether mind aroused liberty, or if freedom was the nurse of intelligence.
The feeble hold which the popes retained over their temporal power during their residence at Avignon, and during the great schism, promoted the independence of the ecclesiastical cities, many of which then passed under the dominion of domestic tyrants, or assumed the privileges of self-government. In either case the result was favourable to an expansion of the human mind. The sway of the seigneurs, being based on no such aristocratic machinery as supported the fabric of feudalism, threw fewer obstructions in the way of individual merit. The popular communities could only exist by a diffusion of political and legislative capacity, and the commercial enterprises to which they in general devoted their energies increased at once the demand for public spirit and its production. Even those intestine revolutions to which democracies were especially subject contributed largely to the same end; for, although in such convulsions the dregs of the populace often rise to the surface, talent, when backed by energy and daring, there finds extraordinary opportunities for display. Indeed, the multiplication of commonwealths, under whatever form of government, tended, in a country situated as the Italian Peninsula then was, to the development of intellect. Defended by the Alps and the sea from invasion, their physical and intellectual advantages constituted an influence which supplied the want of union and nationality. They thus could safely pursue their individual aims, and even indulge in rivalry and contests which, though perilous to a less favoured people, were for them incentives to a praiseworthy and patriotic exertion. Whilst the separate existence of these petty states was calculated to promote both political science and mental culture, it rendered the one subservient to the advantage of the other, and, in the multitude of official and diplomatic employments, literary men found at once useful occupation and honourable independence. Nor was this result limited to one form of government. If the tempest-tossed democracy of Florence shone the brightest star in the Italian galaxy, the stern oligarchy of Venice shed an almost equal lustre in some branches of letters and art; and, on the other hand, the not less popular institutions of Pisa, Siena, and Lucca emitted but feeble and irregular coruscations. So also in the despotic states, whilst literature was ever cherished under the ducal dynasty of Urbino, and whilst it was favoured at intervals by the Sforza and Malatesta, the d'Este and Gonzaga, and by the Aragonese sovereigns of Naples, its genial influence was unknown in some other petty courts. Again, if we turn to the papal throne, we shall find the accomplished Nicolas, Pius, Sixtus, Julius, and Leo, sitting alternately with the Bœotian Calixtus, Paul, Innocent, and Alexander. From an impartial review of Italian mediæval history it appears that democratic institutions were by no means indispensable to the expansion of genius, since the progress of letters and arts was upon the whole nearly equal in the republics and the seigneuries, under the tyranny of a condottiere or the domination of a faction.[*65]
But, before entering upon the proper subject of this chapter, it may be well briefly to consider the influence which the petty princes of Italy exercised upon the revival and cultivation of letters and arts. The dominion of these chiefs, though hereditary in name, was in general maintained, as it had been gained, by the sword. To them, as to the savage, arms were an instinctive pursuit, warfare a primary occupation. For their frequent intervals of truce (and in no other sense was peace known to them), their circumscribed sovereignty gave little occupation. Domestic polity was still an undeveloped science, and their leisure fell to be spent upon intellectual objects, or in grovelling debaucheries. The number who preferred the nobler alternative is very remarkable, when compared with the like class in other parts of Europe. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries literature was cultivated and art was encouraged by a large proportion of the sovereigns and feudatories of Italy, when the bravest condottieri were often their most liberal patrons. Such were the impetuous Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the gallant Francesco Sforza, the treacherous Ludovico il Moro; whilst the Gonzaga of Mantua, and the d'Este of Ferrara, but most especially the ducal houses of Urbino, extended, during successive generations, an enlightened and almost regal protection to genius of every shade. Nothing akin to this is to be found in the republics. Siena, Pisa, and Lucca produced many great artists, but literature found in them neither a cradle nor an asylum. The commercial communities of Venice and Genoa belonged to an entirely different category of circumstances; and Florence, though an exception to our remark, owed its pre-eminence not less perhaps to the patronage of the Medici than to an unparalleled prevalence of talent and public spirit among its citizens.
In times when the popular will, if not the source of power, was its best support, it became the interest of the dominant prince or party so to use authority as to please and flatter the masses; to cloak their own usurpations by throwing a lustre around their administration, and to preserve the confidence of their subjects by institutions calculated to promote the national glory. In this way individual talent might be stimulated, and public civilisation might advance, even whilst freedom was on the decline; and, as the means commanded by the seigneurs were ample, they could patronise genius, and surround their courts with literary retainers, who in democratic communities were left to their own resources. Thus the Sforza and the d'Este, even the savage Malatesta of Rimini, befriended genius, which found no haven in the republics of Genoa and Lucca, and, the fashion having once been established among their princely houses, letters were cultivated by not a few of these soldiers of fortune, but more especially by the ladies of their families.
These unquestionable facts are met by an allegation that the fountains of princely patronage were so tainted, their streams so generally corrupt, as to blight the fruits which they seemed to foster, and that their influence thus from a blessing became a curse. Let us examine a little the grounds for this assertion, for surely it is not by such sweeping and prejudiced denunciations that we shall arrive at truth. As to the ornamental arts, there cannot be a doubt that these received, throughout Italy, from governments of every form, as well as from numberless corporations and individuals, a hearty encouragement which might well shame our degenerate age. Yet the ducal palace at Urbino, the Palazzo del T at Mantua, the tombs of the Scaligers, and the medallions of Malatesta, yield the palm to no republican works of the same class. It was by Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, and by Duke Federigo di Montefeltro, that the undeveloped energies of new-born science, and the long neglected classics of Greece and Rome were nursed and tended through their years of infancy, which storms of faction, in most of the free states, condemned to neglect. The enlightened liberality of these princes, and of Malatesta Novello, founded libraries for the preservation of works composed under their own beneficent encouragement, as well as of manuscripts collected by them from all quarters at immense cost, and this when no republic but Venice aspired to such literary distinctions. Nor were the troubled waters of democratic strife safe for the poet's gay bark and light canvas. Even Dante, though made of sternest stuff, sought shelter in a courtly harbour from the hurricanes of Florentine faction. It is true that, in many compositions of minstrels trained in princely halls, the themes are ephemeral and the epithets overstrained, savouring, to a purer taste and more severe idiom, of unworthy subserviency; nor is the other polite literature, emanating from the same atmosphere, exempt from similar blemishes. But allowance must be made for the seducing fecundity of the language in superlatives, more redolent of dulcet sounds than of definite signification, a quality which has ever tempted Italian mediocrity to assume the borrowed plumes of poesy, and to conceal its native barrenness under magniloquent but flimsy common-places. The well earned gratitude of authors is fittingly paid in compliments, eulogies, or dedications, and as such coin is at the unlimited command of the debtor, and useful only to the receiver, its over-issue is fairly excusable. This results from principles inherent in human nature, and it matters little whether the obligations have been incurred from sovereigns or from subjects, under an autocrat or a democracy. Even among ourselves, in times when talent had more to hope from private patronage than from extended popularity, a similar currency was scarcely less in vogue, and it was only the poverty of our idiom that kept its circulation within bounds. Hence, were the independence of the best English writers of a century or two ago to be estimated from their dedicatory addresses, or their occasional odes, a condemnation as unreasonable as sweeping would go forth against names long inscribed in our temple of fame. This argument might easily be extended; but enough has been said to show that more was done for the support of letters under princely than under popular institutions, and that the adulatory epithets natural to the language, and inherent in the usages of Italy, are no certain index of base subserviency.