Renaissance in Italy, Volume 2 (of 7) / The Revival of Learning

by John Addington Symonds

Quis dabit capiti meo Aquam? quis oculis meis Fontem lachrymarum dabit? Ut nocte fleam, Ut luce fleam. Sic turtur viduus solet, Sic cygnus moriens solet, Sic luscinia conqueri.

'Oh that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night! So mourns the widowed turtle dove; so mourns the dying swan; so mourns the nightingale.' Into these passionate words of wailing, unique in the literature of humanism by their form alike and feeling, breaks the threnody of the abandoned scholar. 'Ah, woe! Ah, woe is me! O grief! O grief! Lightning hath struck our laurel tree, our laurel dear to all the Muses and the dances of the Nymphs, beneath whose spreading boughs the God of Song himself more sweetly harped and sang. Now all around is dumb; now all is mute, and there is none to hear. Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears!'

This at least of grace the gods allowed Poliziano, that he should die in the same year as his friend Pico della Mirandola, a few weeks before the deluge prophesied by Savonarola burst over Italy. Upon his tomb in S. Marco a burlesque epitaph was inscribed—

Politianus
in hoc tumulo jacet
Angelus unum
qui caput et linguas
res nova tres habuit.
Obiit an. MCCCCLXXXXIV
Sep. XXIV. Ætatis
XL.[334]

Bembo, who succeeded him in the dictatorship of Italian letters, composed a not unworthy elegy upon the man whom he justly apostrophised as 'Poliziano, master of the Ausonian lyre.'

The fortunes of Roman scholarship kept varying with the personal tastes of each successive Pope. Calixtus III. differed wholly from his predecessor, Nicholas V. Learned in theology and mediæval science, he was dead to the interests of humanistic literature. Vespasiano assures us that, when he entered the Vatican library and saw its Greek and Latin authors in their red and silver bindings, instead of praising the munificence of Nicholas, he exclaimed, 'Vedi in che egli ha consumato la robba della Chiesa di Dio!'[335] Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini ranked high among the humanists. As an orator, courtier, state secretary, and man of letters, he shared the general qualities of the class to which he belonged. While a fellow-student of Beccadelli at Siena, he freely enjoyed the pleasures of youth, and thought it no harm to compose novels in the style of Longus and Achilles Tatius. These stories, together with his familiar letters, histories, cosmographical treatises, rhetorical disquisitions, apophthegms, and commentaries, written in a fluent and picturesque Latin style, distinguished him for wit and talent from the merely laborious students of his age.[336] A change, however, came over him when he assumed the title of Pius II. with the tiara.[337] Learning in Italy owed but little to his patronage, and though he strengthened the position of the humanists at Rome by founding the College of Abbreviators, he was more eager to defend Christendom against the Turk than to make his See the capital of culture. For this it would be narrow-minded to blame Pius. The experience of European politics had extended his view beyond the narrower circle of Italian interests; and there is something noble as well as piteous in his attempt to lead the forlorn hope of a cosmopolitan cause. Paul II. was chiefly famous for his persecution of the Roman Platonists;[338] and Sixtus IV., though he deserves to be remembered as the Pontiff who opened the Vatican library to the public, plays no prominent part in the history of scholarship. Tiraboschi may be consulted for his refusal to pay the professors of the Roman Sapienza. Of Innocent VIII. nothing need be said; nor will any student of history expect to find it recorded that Alexander VI. wasted money on the patronage of learning. To the Borgia, indeed, the world owes that curse of Catholicism, that continued crime of high treason against truth and liberal culture, the subjection of the press to ecclesiastical control.

Under these Popes humanism had to flourish, as it best could, in the society of private individuals. Accordingly, we find the Roman scholars forming among themselves academies and learned circles. Of these the most eminent took its name from its founder, Julius Pomponius Lætus. He was a bastard of the princely House of the Sanseverini, to whom, when he became famous and they were anxious for his friendship, he penned the celebrated epistle: 'Pomponius Lætus cognatis et propinquis suis salutem. Quod petitis fieri non potest. Valete.'[339] Pomponius derived his scholarship from Valla, and devoted all his energies to Latin literature, refusing, it is even said, to learn Greek, lest it should distract him from his favourite studies. He made it the object of his most serious endeavours not only to restore a knowledge of the ancients, but also to assimilate his life and manners to their standard. Men praised in him a second Cato for sobriety of conduct, frugal diet, and rural industry. He tilled his own ground after the methods of Varro and Columella, went a-fishing and a-fowling on holidays, and ate his sparing meal like a Roman Stoic beneath the spreading branches of an oak on the Campagna. The grand mansions of the prelates had no attractions for him. He preferred his own modest house upon the Esquiline, his garden on the Quirinal. It was here that his favourite scholars conversed with him at leisure; and to these retreats of the philosopher came strangers of importance, eager to behold a Roman living in all points like an antique sage. The high school of Rome owed much to his indefatigable industry. Through a long series of years he lectured upon the chief Latin authors, examining their text with critical accuracy, and preparing new editions of their works. Before daybreak he would light his lantern, take his staff, and wend his way from the Esquiline to the lecture-room, where, however early the hour and however inclement the season, he was sure to find an overflowing audience. Yet it was not as a professor that Pomponius Lætus acquired his great celebrity, and left a lasting impress on the society of Rome. This he did by forming an academy for the avowed purpose of prosecuting the study of Latin antiquities and promoting the adoption of antique customs into modern life. The members assumed classical names, exchanging their Italian patronymics for fancy titles like Callimachus Experiens, Asclepiades, Glaucus, Volscus, and Petrejus. They yearly kept the birthday feast of Rome, celebrating the Palilia with Pagan solemnities, playing comedies of Plautus, and striving to revive the humours of the old Atellan farces. Of this circle Pontanus and Sannazzaro, Platina, Sabellicus and Molza, Janus Parrhasius, and the future Paul III. were proud to call themselves the members. It is only from the language in which such men refer to Lætus that we gain a due notion of his influence; for he left but little behind him as an author, and used himself to boast that, like Socrates and Christ, he hoped to be remembered through his pupils. In the year 1468 this Roman academy acquired fresh celebrity by the persecution of Paul II., who partly suspected a political object in its meetings, and partly resented the open heathenism of its leaders. I need not here repeat the tale of his crusade against the scholars. It is enough to mention that Lætus was imprisoned for a short while, and that in prison he wrote an apology for his life, defending himself against a charge of misplaced passion for a young Venetian pupil, and professing the sincerity of his belief in Christianity. After his release from the Castle of S. Angelo he was obliged to discontinue the meetings of his academy, which were not resumed until the reign of Sixtus. Pomponius Lætus lived on into the Papacy of Alexander, and died in 1498 at the age of seventy. His corpse was crowned with a laurel wreath in the Church of Araceli. Forty bishops, together with the foreign ambassadors in Rome and the representatives of the Borgia, who were specially deputed for that purpose, witnessed the ceremony and listened to the funeral oration. Lætus had desired that his body should be placed in a sarcophagus upon the Appian Way. This wish was not complied with. He was conveyed from Araceli to S. Salvatore in Lauro, and there buried like a Christian.

While the academy of Pomponius Lætus flourished at Rome, that of Naples was no less active under the presidency of Jovianus Pontanus. It appears to have originated in social gatherings assembled by Beccadelli, and to have held its meetings in a building called after its founder the Porticus Antonianus. When death had broken up the brilliant circle surrounding Alfonso the Magnanimous, Pontanus assumed the leadership of learned men in Naples, and gave the formality of a club to what had previously been a mere reunion of cultivated scholars. The members Latinised their names; many of them became better known by their assumed titles than by their Italian cognomens. Sannazzaro, for instance, acquired a wide celebrity as Accius Syncerus. Pontanus was himself a native of Cereto in the Spoletano. Born in 1426, he settled in his early manhood at Naples, where Beccadelli introduced him to his royal patrons. During the reigns of Ferdinand I., Alfonso II., and Ferdinand II. Pontanus held the post of secretary, tutor, and ambassador, accompanying his masters on their military expeditions and negotiating their affairs at the Papal Court. When Charles VIII. entered Naples as a conqueror, Pontanus greeted him with a panegyrical oration, proving himself more courtly and self-seeking than loyal to the princes he had served so long. Guicciardini observes that this act of ingratitude stained the fair fame of Pontanus. Yet it may be pleaded in his defence that no moralist of the period had more boldly denounced the crimes and vices of Italian princes; and it is possible that Pontanus really hoped Charles might inaugurate a better age for Naples.

He was distinguished among the scholars of his time for the purity of his Latin style; to him belongs the merit of having written verse that might compete with good models of antiquity. His hexameters on stars and meteors, called 'Urania,' won the enthusiastic praise of his own generation, and subsequently served as model to Fracastoro for his own didactic poem. His amatory elegiacs have an exuberance of colouring and sensuous force of phrase that seem peculiarly appropriate to the Bay of Naples, where they were inspired. As a prose-writer it is particularly by his moral treatises that Pontanus deserves to be remembered. Unlike the mass of contemporary dialogues on ethical subjects, they abound in illustrations drawn from recent history, so that even now they may be advantageously consulted by students anxious to gather characteristic details and to form a just opinion of Renaissance morality. Throughout his writings Pontanus shows himself to have been an original and vigorous thinker, a complete master of Latin scholarship, unwilling to abide contented with bare imitation, and bent upon expressing the facts of modern life, the actualities of personal emotion, in a style of accurate Latinity. When he died in 1503, he left at Naples one of the most flourishing schools of neopagan poets to be found in Italy; Lilius Gyraldus employs the old metaphor of the Trojan horse to describe the number and the vigour of the scholars who issued from it.