This simile is characteristic both of Lorenzo's love for familiar illustration, and also of the age that dawned on Michelangelo's genius. In the same meter, but in a less ambitious style, is La Caccia col Falcone. This poem is the simple record of a Tuscan hawking-party, written to amuse Lorenzo's guests, but never meant assuredly to be discussed by critics after the lapse of four centuries. These pastorals, whether trifling like La Caccia, romantic like Corinto, or pictorial like Ambra, sink into insignificance beside La Nencia da Barberino—a masterpiece of true genius and humor, displaying intimate knowledge of rustic manners, and using the dialect of the Tuscan contadini.[476] Like the Polyphemus of Theocritus, but with even more of racy detail and homely fun, La Nencia versifies the love-lament of a hind, Vallera, who describes the charms of his sweetheart with quaint fancy, wooing her in a thousand ways, all natural, all equally in keeping with rural simplicity. It can scarcely be called a parody of village life and feeling, although we cannot fail to see that the town is laughing at the country all through the exuberant stanzas, so rich in fancy, so incomparably vivid in description. What lifts it above parody is the truth of the picture and the close imitation of rustic popular poetry[477]:
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Le labbre rosse paion di corallo: Ed havvi drento due filar di denti Che son più bianchi che quei di cavallo: E d'ogni lato ella n'ha più di venti. Le gote bianche paion di cristallo Senz'altri lisci ovver scorticamenti: Ed in quel mezzo ell'è come una rosa. Nel mondo non fu mai sì bella cosa. Ben sì potrà tenere avventurato Che sia marito di sì bella moglie; Ben sì potrà tener in buon dì nato Chi arà quel fioraliso senza foglie; Ben sì potrà tener santo e beato, Che sì contenti tutte le sue voglie D'aver la Nencia e tenersela in braccio Morbida e bianca che pare un sugnaccio. |
These lines, chosen at random from the poem, might be paralleled from Rispetti that are sung to-day in Tuscany. The vividness and vigor of La Nencia secured for it immediate popularity. It was speedily imitated by Luigi Pulci in the Beca da Dicomano, a village poem that, aiming at cruder realism than Lorenzo's, broke the style and lapsed into vulgarity. La Nencia long continued to have imitators; for one of the principal objects of educated poets in the Renaissance was to echo the manner of popular verse. None, however, succeeded so well as Lorenzo in touching the facts of country life and the truth of country feeling with a fine irony that had in it at least as much of sympathy as of sarcasm.
I Beoni is a plebeian poem of a different and more displeasing type. Written in terza rima, it distinctly parodies the style of the Divine Comedy, using the same phrases to indicate action and to mark the turns of dialogue; introducing similes in the manner of Dante, burlesquing Virgil and Beatrice in the disgusting Bartolino and Nastagio.[478] The poem might be called The Paradise of Drunkards, or their Hell; for it consists of a succession of scenes in which intoxication in all stages and topers of every caliber are introduced. The tone is coldly satirical, sardonically comic. The old man of Tennyson's "Vision of Sin" might have written I Beoni after a merry bout with the wrinkled ostler. When Lorenzo composed it, he was already corrupt and weary, sated with the world, worn with disease, disillusioned by a life of compromise, hypocrisy, diplomacy, and treason to the State he ruled. Yet the humor of this poem has nothing truly sinister or tragic. Its brutality is redeemed by no fierce Swiftian rage. If some of the descriptions in Lorenzo's earlier work remind us of Dutch flower and landscape-painters, Breughel or Van Huysum, the scenes of I Beoni recall the realism of Dutch tavern-pictures and Kermessen. It has the same humor, gross and yet keen, the same intellectual enjoyment of sensuality, the same animalism studied by an acute æsthetic spirit.[479]
To turn from I Beoni to Lorenzo's Lauds, written at his mother's request, and to the sacred play of S. Giovanni e Paolo, acted by his children, is to make one of those bewildering transitions which are so common in Renaissance Italy. Without rating Lorenzo's sacred poetry very high, either for religious fervor or æsthetic quality, it is yet surprising that the author of the Beoni and the Platonic sage of Careggi should have caught so much of the pietistic tone. We know that S. Giovanni e Paolo was written when he was advanced in years[480]; and the latent allusions to his illness and the cares of state which weighed upon him, give it an interest it would not otherwise excite. This couplet,
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Spesso chi chiama Costantin felice Sta meglio assai di me e 'l ver non dice, |
seems to be a sigh from his own weariness. Lorenzo may not improbably have envied Constantine, the puppet of his fancy, at the moment of abdication. And yet when Savonarola called upon him ere his death to deal justly with Florence, the true nature of the man was seen. Had he liked it or not, he could not then have laid down the load of care and crime which it had been the business of his whole life to accumulate by crooked ways in the enslavement of Florence and the perdition of his soul's peace. The Lauds, which may be referred to an earlier period of Lorenzo's life, when his mother ruled his education, and the pious Bishop of Arezzo watched his exemplary behavior in church with admiration, have here and there in them a touch of profound feeling[481]; nor are they in all respects inferior to the average of those included in the Florentine collection of 1863. The men of the Renaissance were so constituted that to turn from vice, and cruelty, and crime, from the deliberate corruption and enslavement of a people by licentious pleasures and the persecution of an enemy in secret, with a fervid and impassioned movement of the soul to God, was nowise impossible. Their temper admitted of this anomaly, as we may plainly see in Cellini's Autobiography. Therefore, though it is probable that Lorenzo cultivated the Laud chiefly as a form of art, we are not justified in assuming that the passages in which we seem to detect a note of ardent piety, are insincere.
The versatility of Lorenzo's talent showed itself to greater advantage when he quitted the uncongenial ground of sacred literature and gave a free rein to his fancy in the composition of Ballate and Carnival songs. This species of poetry offered full scope to a temperament excessive in all pleasures of the senses.[482] It also enabled him to indulge a deeply-rooted sympathy with the common folk. Nor must it be supposed that Lorenzo was following a merely artistic impulse. This strange man, in whose complex nature opponent qualities were harmonized and intertwined, made his very sensuality subserve his statecraft. The Medici had based their power upon the favor of the proletariate. Since the days of the Ciompi riot they had pursued one line of self-aggrandizement by siding with the plebeians in their quarrels with the oligarchs. The serious purpose which underlay Lorenzo's cultivation of popular poetry, was to amuse the crowd with pageantry and music, to distract their attention from State concerns and to blunt their political interest, to flatter them by descending to their level and mixing freely with them in their sports, and to acquire a popularity which should secure him from the aristocratic jealousies of the Acciaioli, the Frescobaldi, the Salviati, Soderini, and other ancestral foemen of his house. The frontispiece to an old edition of Florentine carnival songs shows him surrounded with maskers in quaint dresses, leading the revel beneath the walls of the Palazzo, while women gaze upon them from the windows.[483] That we are justified in attributing a policy of calculated enervation to Lorenzo is proved by the verdict of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, both of whom connect his successful despotism with the pageants he provided for the populace,[484] and also by this passage in Savonarola's treatise on the Government of Florence: "The tyrant, especially in times of peace and plenty, is wont to occupy the people with shows and festivals, in order that they may think of their own pastimes and not of his designs, and, growing unused to the conduct of the commonwealth, may leave the reins of government in his hands."[485] At the same time he would err who should suppose that Lorenzo's enjoyment of these pleasures, which he found in vogue among the people, was not genuine. He represented the worst as well as the best spirit of his age; and if he knew how to enslave Florence, it was because his own temperament shared the instincts of the crowd, while his genius enabled him to clothe obscenity with beauty.
We know that it was an ancient Florentine custom for young men and girls to meet upon the squares and dance, while a boy sang with treble voice to lute or viol, or a company of minstrels chanted part-songs. The dancers joined in the refrain, vaunting the pleasures of the May and the delights of love in rhythms suited to the Carola. Taking this form of poetry from the people, Lorenzo gave it the dignity of art. Sometimes he told the tale of an unhappy lover, or pretended to be pleading with a coy mistress, or broke forth into the exultation of a passion crowned with success. Again, he urged both boys and girls to stay the flight of time nor suffer the rose-buds of their youth to fade unplucked. In more wanton moods, he satirized the very love he praised, or, casting off the mask of decency, ran riot in base bestiality. These Canzoni a Ballo, though they lack the supreme beauty of Poliziano's style, are stylistically graceful. Their tone never rises above sensuality. Not only has the gravity of Dante's passion passed away from Florence, but Boccaccio's sensuous ideality is gone, and the naïveté of popular erotic poetry is clouded with gross innuendoes. We find in them the æesthetic immorality, the brilliant materialism of the Renaissance, conveyed with careless self-abandonment to carnal impulse.