Renaissance in Italy, Volume 4 (of 7) / Italian Literature, Part 1

by John Addington Symonds

CHAPTER III.

THE TRANSITION.

The Church, Chivalry, the Nation—The National Element in Italian Literature—Florence—Italy between 1373 and 1490—Renascent Nationality—Absorption in Scholarship—Vernacular Literature follows an obscure Course—Final Junction of the Humanistic and Popular Currents—Renascence of Italian—The Italian Temperament—Importance of the Quattrocento—Sacchetti's Novels—Ser Giovanni's Pecorone—Sacchetti's and Ser Giovanni's Poetry—Lyrics of the Villa and the Piazza—Nicolò Soldanieri—Alesso Donati—His Realistic Poems—Followers of Dante and Petrarch—Political Poetry of the Guelfs and Ghibellines—Fazio degli Uberti—Saviozzo da Siena—Elegies on Dante—Sacchetti's Guelf Poems—Advent of the Bourgeoisie—Discouragement of the Age—Fazio's Dittamondo—Rome and Alvernia—Frezzi's Quadriregio—Dantesque Imitation—Blending of Classical and Medieval Motives—Matteo Palmieri's Città di Vita—The Fate of Terza Rima—Catherine of Siena—Her Letters—S. Bernardino's Sermons—Salutati's Letters—Alessandra degli Strozzi—Florentine Annalists—Giov. Cavalcanti—Corio's History of Milan—Matarazzo's Chronicle of Perugia—Masuccio and his Novellino—His Style and Genius—Alberti—Born in Exile—His Feeling for Italian—Enthusiasm for the Roman Past—The Treatise on the Family—Its Plan—Digression on the Problem of its Authorship—Pandolfini or Alberti—The Deiciarchia—Tranquillità dell'Animo—Teogenio—Alberti's Religion—Dedication of the Treatise on Painting—Minor Works in Prose on Love—Ecatomfila, Amiria, Deifiria, etc.—Misogynism—Novel of Ippolito and Leonora—Alberti's Poetry—Review of Alberti's Character and his Relation to the Age—Francesco Colonna—The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili—Its Style—Its Importance as a Work of the Transition—A Romance of Art, Love, Humanism—The Allegory—Polia—Antiquity—Relation of this Book to Boccaccio and Valla—It Foreshadows the Renaissance.

The two preceding chapters will have made it clear that the Church, Chivalry, and the Nation contributed their several quotas to the growth of Italian literature.[130] The ecclesiastical or religious element, so triumphantly expressed in the Divine Comedy, was not peculiar to the Italians. They held it in common with the whole of Christendom; and though the fabric of the Roman Church took form in Italy, though the race gave S. Francis, S. Thomas, and S. Bonaventura to the militia of the medieval faith, still the Italians as a nation were not specifically religious. Piety, which is quite a different thing from ecclesiastical organization, was never the truest and sincerest accent of their genius. Had it been so, the history of Latin Christianity would have followed another course, and the schism of the sixteenth century might have been avoided.

The chivalrous element they shared, at a considerable disadvantage, with the rest of feudal Europe. Chivalry was not indigenous to Italian soil, nor did it ever flourish there. The literature which it produced in France, became Italian only when the Guidi and Dante gave it philosophical significance. Petrarch, who represents this motive, as Dante represents the ecclesiastical, generalized Provençal poetry. His Canzoniere cannot be styled a masterpiece of chivalrous art. Its spirit is modern and human in a wider and more comprehensive sense.

To characterize the national strain in this complex pedigree of culture is no easy task—chiefly because it manifested itself under two apparently antagonistic forms; first in the recovery of the classics by the scholars of the fifteenth century; secondly in the portraiture of Italian character and temperament by writers of romance and fiction. The divergence of these two main currents of literary energy upon the close of the middle ages, and their junction in the prime of the Renaissance, are the topics of my present volume.

We have seen how tenaciously the Italians clung to memories of ancient Rome, and how their history deprived them of that epical material which started modern literature among the northern races. While the vulgar language was being formed from the dialects into which rustic Latin had divided, a new nationality grew into shape by an analogous process out of the remnants of the old Italic population, fused with recent immigrants. Absorbing Greek blood in the south and Teutonic in the north, this composite race maintained the ascendancy of the Romanized people, in obedience to laws whereby the prevalent and indigenous strain outlives and assimilates ingredients from without. Owing to a variety of causes, among which must be reckoned geographical isolation and imperfect Lombard occupation, the purest Italic stock survived upon the Tuscan plains and highlands, between the Tyrrhene Sea and the Apennines, and where the Arno and the Tiber start together from the mountains of Arezzo. This region was the cradle of the new Italian language, the stronghold of the new Italian nation. Its center, political, commercial and intellectual, was Florence, which gave birth to the three great poets of the fourteenth century. Though Florence developed her institutions later than the Lombard communes, she maintained a civic independence longer than any State but Venice; and her popolo may be regarded as the type of the popular Italian element. Here the genius of Italy became conscious of itself, and here the people found a spokesman in Boccaccio. Abandoning ecclesiastical and feudal traditions, Boccaccio concentrated his force upon the delineation of his fellow-countrymen as he had learned to know them. The Italians of the new age start into distinctness in his work, with the specific qualities they were destined to maintain and to mature during the next two centuries. Thus Boccaccio fully represents one factor of what I have called the national element. At the same time, he occupies a hardly less important place in relation to the other or the humanistic factor. Like his master Petrarch, he pronounced with ardor and decision for that scholarship which restored the link between the present and the past of the Italian race. Independently of their achievements in modern literature, we have to regard the humanistic efforts of these two great writers as a sign that the national element had asserted itself in antagonism to the Church and chivalry.

The recovery of the classics was, in truth, the decisive fact in Italian evolution. Having attained full consciousness in the Florence of Dante's age, the people set forth in search of their spiritual patrimony. They found it in the libraries. They became possessed of it through the labors of the scholars. Italian literature during the first three quarters of the fifteenth century merged, so far as polite society was concerned, in Humanism, the history of which has already been presented to the reader in the second volume of this work.[131] For a hundred years, from the publication of the Decameron in 1373 to the publication of Poliziano's Stanze, the genius of Italy was engaged in an exploratory pilgrimage, the ultimate end of which was the restoration of the national inheritance in ancient Rome. This process of renascent classicism, which was tantamount to ranascent nationality, retarded the growth of the vulgar literature. Yet it was imperatively demanded not only by the needs of Europe at large, but more particularly and urgently by the Italians themselves, who, unlike the other modern races, had no starting-point but ancient Rome. The immediate result of the humanistic movement was the separation of the national element into two sections, learned and popular, Latin and Italian. The common people, who had repeated Dante's Canzoni, and whose life Boccaccio had portrayed in the Decameron, were now divided from the rising class of scholars and professors. Cultivated persons of all ranks despised Italian, and spent their time in studies beyond the reach of the laity. Like some mountain rivers after emerging from the highlands of their origin, the vernacular literature passed as it were for a season underground, and lost itself in unexplored ravines. Absorbed into the masses of the people, it continued an obscure but by no means insignificant course, whence it was destined to reappear at the right moment, when the several constituents of the nation had attained the sense of intellectual unity. This sense of unity was the product of the classical revival; for the activity of the wandering professors and the fanatical enthusiasm for the ancients were needed to create a common consciousness, a common standard of taste and intelligence in the peninsula. It must in this connection be remembered that the vernacular literature of the fourteenth century, though it afterwards became the glory of Italy as a whole, was originally Florentine. The medium prepared by the scholars was demanded in order that the Tuscan classics should be accepted by the nation as their own. Toward the close of the fifteenth century, a fusion between the humanistic and the vulgar literatures was made; and this is the renascence of Italian—no longer Tuscan, but participated by the race at large. The poetry of the people then received a form refined by classic learning; and the two sections of what I have called the national element, joined to produce the genuine Italian culture of the golden age.

It is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to insist upon this point, which forms the main motive of my present theme. After the death of Boccaccio the history of Italian literature is the history of that national element which distinguished itself from the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous, and at last in the Decameron asserted its superiority over both. But the stream of intellectual energy bifurcates. During the fifteenth century, the Latin instincts of the new Italic people found vigorous expansion in the humanistic movement, while the vernacular literature carried on a fitful and obscure, but potent, growth among the proletariate. At the end of that century, both currents, the learned and the popular, the classical and the modern, reunited on a broader plane. The nation, educated by scholarship and brought to a sense of its identity, resumed the vulgar tongue; and what had hitherto been Tuscan, now became Italian. In this renascence neither the religious nor the feudal principle regained firm hold upon the race. Their influence is still discernible, however, in the lyrics of the Petrarchisti and the epics of Orlando; for nothing which has once been absorbed into a people's thought is wholly lost. How they were transmuted by the action of the genuine Italic genius, triumphant now upon all quarters of the field, will appear in the sequel of these volumes; while it remains for another work to show in what way, under the influences of the Counter-Reformation, both the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous elements reasserted themselves for a brief moment in Tasso. Still even in Tasso we recognize the Italian courtier rather than the knight or the ascetic. For the rest, it is clear that the spirit of Boccaccio—that is, the spirit of the Florentine people—refined by humanistic discipline and glorified by the reawakening of Italy to a sense of intellectual unity, determined the character of literature during its most brilliant period.[132]