Thus was it that the Reformation had but an indirect influence on the Italian mind. The scanty seeds wafted across the Alps fell upon stony ground, and ere long withered away. But the great reaction of the papacy was not only directed against the new truths; it waged war upon every thing calculated to afford them a disguise under which they might become dangerous. The policy of pontiffs and the duty of the Inquisition tended to exclude all light, lest any rays of Protestantism should reach the faithful. During three centuries have these efforts been continued; and when we consider the talent by which they have been directed, the stern ministers by whom they have been carried out, we well may wonder that the Italian mind has not been utterly debased by foreign tyranny and priestly domination. They have sown the wind; it remains to reap the whirlwind.
The fashion for classic imitation was succeeded in Italy by an age of rhetoricians, with Bembo at their head, and the academies as their strongholds. But they either encouraged or inadequately repressed a too fluent facility which has ever since been the blemish of their mellifluous language. In Boccalini's satirical Ragguagli di Parnaso, some prolix writer is condemned to a perusal of Guicciardini's narrative of the Pisan war; but, after a brief essay, he avows his preference for the galleys to pursuing, through dreary details, the siege and capture of a pigeon-house. This biting jest is applicable in a far greater degree to other writers of the sixteenth century, whose cumbrous grandiloquence is often diluted by trivialities, or tinselled with factitious pomp. Yet there were some authors of purer taste, who resisted such extravagance, and it is curious to find Caro, della Casa, and Bernardo Tasso concerting measures for curtailing the use of superabundant compliments. The two principal points of their attack were the recent substitution of the feminine pronoun in the third person singular for the second person plural in addressing any one, and the indiscriminate use of Lordship, Excellency, Gentility, as courteous phrases, to the entire exclusion of Master and Madam. Against the former of these abuses Caro and Tasso declare open war; but, although they unite in condemnation of the latter as still more fatal to vernacular purity, and avow themselves ready to support any onset, each shrinks from leading the charge. "This age of ours is altogether given up to adulation. Every one, in inditing a letter, bandies 'lordship'; all expect it when addressed. And not, forsooth, our grandees alone, but even the middle classes and the very plebeians aspire to such distinctions, taking affront if they receive them not, and noting as blunderers all who do not offer them the like. Most silly and revolting does it seem to me that we should have to speak to one person as if he were another, always talking to a sort of ideal abstraction, quite different from the individual himself. Yet this abuse is now established and general." Thus far Caro, to whom Tasso replies, "Oh the wonderful charm of Italy, which every one seeks to destroy! It sufficed not that the Goths, the Vandals, and other strange and barbarous nations have sought, and still seek, to possess thee, and that multitudes flock hither from earth's farthest corners; even Lordships, never previously seen or known here, quitting their native Spain, are come in swarms to sojourn among us, and have so mastered our vanity and ambition that we cannot shake them from our shoulders." In a subsequent letter to Claudio Tolomei, Bernardo congratulates him on having applied the lash to such empty titles, and promises to follow his example by retrenching them all when he revises his own letters for the press.[133] But these attempts met with little success; redundant superlatives still lead Italian literature, and an Italian letter is little more than a tissue of exaggerated epithets, from its address to its signature.[134]
Few branches of human knowledge more flourished during the palmy days of Italian literature than the exact sciences, especially in connection with military affairs, and the elegant arts. Their application to both objects was received with marked favour by the successive Dukes of Urbino, who, for a century and a half, combined the pursuit of arms with the patronage of art. We have seen this done by Federigo and Guidobaldo I., for the defence of their duchy and the decoration of their capital; we now have to mention the progress of similar studies under the della Rovere princes. During the latter epoch, pure mathematics were brought into fashion by numerous translations of standard Greek works into Latin or Italian, a labour shared by various literati of Urbino, but especially by Comandino, Baldi, and Alessandro Giorgi. This, however, but served to facilitate their practical development in pursuits more congenial to those martial dispositions for which the inhabitants of Romagna have in all ages been noted. Whilst the revived literature of Greece and the philosophy of Plato flourished on the banks of the Arno, the exact sciences were cultivated in the highlands of Umbria, and took the practical turn of strengthening those fastnesses with which nature had provided that mountain-land. Francesco di Giorgio, of Siena, was less in request by Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo as architect of their stately palaces, than as the most famous military engineer of his time. Events which made their duchy the seat of repeated invasions early in the sixteenth century, as well as the warlike character of Francesco Maria I., maintained a demand for fortifications, and, from the school which thus grew up in his capital, there issued a series of military architects whose fame and services extended beyond the Alps.
The first of these whom we shall mention was Federigo Comandino, born at Urbino, in 1509, of a noble family. His grandfather was secretary of Duke Federigo, whose last confidential instructions he received, when death surprised that veteran general in the fens of Ferrara. Baldi has claimed the invention of those bulwarks in fortification called baluardi for his father, Gian Battista,[135] who built the walls at Urbino in the beginning of the sixteenth century. After a liberal education, Federigo passed several years at the court of Clement VII., nominally as a privy chamberlain, but really to amuse with learned disquisitions the Pontiff's leisure hours, on whose death he repaired to Padua, where he devoted ten years to the study of philosophy and medicine. Having graduated, he settled for clinical practice at Ferrara, but seems soon to have abandoned the healing art for mathematical research. He accompanied his sovereign, Guidobaldo II., to the camp at Verona when in the Venetian service, and, having gained his confidence by successfully treating him in a severe illness, he was selected to instruct him in astronomy and cosmography, as well as in military tactics and engineering. Soon, however, resuming his more abstruse studies, under the patronage of Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese, brother of Duchess Vittoria, he was carried by him to Rome, and introduced into the society of Annibale Caro, Fulvio Orsini, Baldassare Turrio, and Cardinal Cervini, the last of whom was cut off too quickly after his election as Marcellus II. to be able to benefit his friends. But for Comandino ambition offered few temptations, and courts had no charm. In studious retirement he devoted to the exact sciences the matured powers of a comprehensive and most retentive mind. He explored all that classical authors were known to have left on these subjects, and rendered again accessible much that lay forgotten among the rubbish of by-gone learning. He translated, and copiously edited, Ptolemy's treatise on the planisphere, which was published at Venice, in 1558, and, four years afterwards, gave to the world a work on the analemma, founded upon the same author's previous and imperfect discoveries. His labours were then transferred to the writings of Archimedes, several of which he printed for the first time, as well as the dissertations of Serenus and Apollonius upon conic sections, all with elaborate commentaries.
After spending the prime of life in these pursuits at Rome, he returned to his native duchy, where his instructions in mathematics were sought by Prince Francesco Maria, with whom he read and expounded Euclid's Elements; and afterwards, at the request of his pupil, published a Latin translation of them. It was about 1569 that he was visited there by a young Englishman named John Dea, whose love of the exact sciences induced him to seek so distinguished a professor, and who supplied him with some Arabic MSS., hitherto unknown.[136] Six years thereafter he was surprised by death, with many unfinished works on his hands, part whereof saw the light under the superintendence of the Marquis Guidobaldo del Monte. The life of a hard student is rarely one of varied incident; and even the voluble pen of his pupil Baldi has failed to illustrate that of Comandino with interest, beyond his scholiast labours.[137] Yet severity formed no part of his social character, and he was ready at all times to relax his toils by Epicurean indulgences, which are said eventually to have curtailed his life. To the last, however, his engrossing pleasure was in books; and, although his works number more translations than original compositions, he is ranked by Montucla among the most able and judicious of commentators.
One of the pupils whom Comandino left in his native state was Guidobaldo, Marquis del Monte, who was born of distinguished lineage, in 1544. Tiraboschi has cited, as a singular proof of the engrossing nature of his studies, the fact that his life offers a nearly total want of incident. So tranquilly did his days flow on at his castle of Monte Baroccio, amid abstruse occupations, that he seemed to have forgotten a world unconscious of his very existence, and the only memorials of his life are his works. His treatise upon Perspective successfully carried forward what had been indicated by Pietro della Francesca in the preceding century, and he was afterwards engaged upon the doctrine of Planispheres, the correction of the kalendar, and the solution of astronomical problems. But though thus devoted to abstruse science, he spared a portion of his thoughts for its practical branches, working upon mechanics, and translating from Archimedes. It is unnecessary here to go into an examination of results which modern discoveries have left far behind; the ground has been well sifted by Montucla, whose work indicates whatever is still of value in this class of now somewhat superseded labours. The Marquis was addressed by Torquato Tasso in a sonnet beginning Miserator de' gran celesti campi, and died early in the seventeenth century, survived by a younger brother, Francesco Maria, who had been made cardinal by Sixtus V.