The name of Lorenzo de' Medici is still more closely connected with the Canti Carnascialeschi or Carnival Songs, of which he is said to have been the first author, than with the Ballate, which he only used as they were handed to him. In Carnival time it was the custom of the Florentines to walk the streets, masked and singing satiric ballads. Lorenzo saw that here was an opportunity for delighting the people with the magnificence of pageantry. He caused the Triumphs in which he took a part to be carefully prepared by the best artists, the dresses of the maskers to be accurately studied, and their chariots to be adorned with illustrative paintings. Then he wrote songs appropriate to the characters represented on the cars. Singing and dancing and displaying their costumes, the band paraded Florence. Il Lasca in his introduction to the Triumphs and Carnival Songs dedicated to Don Francesco de' Medici gives the history of their invention[486]: "This festival was invented by the Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici. Before his time, when the cars bore mythological or allegorical masks, they were called Trionfi; but when they carried representatives of arts and trades, they kept the simpler name of Carri." The lyrics written for the Triumphs were stately, in the style of antique odes; those intended to be sung upon the Carri, employed plebeian turns of phrase and dealt in almost undisguised obscenity. It was their wont, says Il Lasca, "to go forth after dinner, and often they lasted till three or four hours into the night, with a multitude of masked men on horseback following, richly dressed, exceeding sometimes three hundred in number and as many men on foot with lighted torches. Thus they traversed the city, singing to the accompaniment of music arranged for four, eight, twelve, or even fifteen voices, supported by various instruments."
Lorenzo's fancy took the Florentine mind. From his days onward these shows were repeated every year, the best artists and poets contributing their genius to make them splendid. In the collection of songs written for the Carnival, we find Masks of Scholars, Artisans, Frog-catchers, Furies, Tinkers, Women selling grapes, Old men and Young wives, Jewelers, German Lansknechts, Gypsies, Wool-carders, Penitents, Devils, Jews, Hypocrites, Young men who have lost their fathers, Wiseacres, Damned Souls, Tortoiseshell Cats, Perfumers, Masons, Mountebanks, Mirror-makers, Confectioners, Prudent persons, Lawyers, Nymphs in love, Nuns escaped from convent—not to mention the Four Ages of Man, the Winds, the Elements, Peace, Calumny, Death, Madness, and a hundred abstractions of that kind. The tone of these songs is uniformly and deliberately immoral. One might fancy them composed for some old phallic festival. Their wit is keen and lively, presenting to the fancy of the student all the humors of a brilliant bygone age. A strange and splendid spectacle it must have been, when Florence, the city of art and philosophy, ran wild in Dionysiac revels proclaiming the luxury and license of the senses! Beautiful maidens, young men in rich clothes on prancing steeds, showers of lilies and violets, triumphal arches of spring flowers and ribbons, hail-storms of comfits, torches flaring to the sallow evening sky—we can see the whole procession as it winds across the Ponte Vecchio, emerges into the great square, and slowly gains the open space beneath the dome of Brunelleschi and the tower of Giotto. The air rings with music as they come, bass and tenor and shrill treble mingling with the sound of lute and cymbal. The people hush their cheers to listen. It is Lorenzo's Triumph of Bacchus, and here are the words they sing:
On rolls the car, and the crowd closes round it, rending the old walls with shattering hurrahs. Then a corner of the street is turned; while soaring still above the hubbub of the town we hear at intervals that musical refrain. Gradually it dies away in the distance, and fainter and more faintly still the treble floats to us in broken waves of sound—the echo of a lyric heard in dreams.
Such were the songs that reached Savonarola's ears, writing or meditating in his cloister at S. Marco. Such were the sights that moved his indignation as he trod the streets of Florence. Then he bethought him of his famous parody of the Carnival, the bonfire of Vanities and the hymn in praise of divine madness sung by children dressed in white like angels.[487] Yet Florence, warned in vain by the friar, took no thought for the morrow; and the morrow came to all Italy with war, invasion, pestilence, innumerable woes. In the last year of Pier Soderini's Gonfalonierato (1512) it seemed as though the Italians had been quickened to a consciousness of their impending ruin. The siege of Brescia, the battle of Ravenna, the League of Cambray, the massacres of Prato, the sack of Rome, the fall of Florence, were all imminent. A fascination of intolerable fear thrilled the people in the midst of their heedlessness, and this fear found voice and form in a strange Carnival pageant described by Vasari[488]: "The triumphal car was covered with black cloth, and was of vast size; it had skeletons and white crosses painted upon its surface, and was drawn by buffaloes, all of which were totally black: within the car stood the colossal figure of Death, bearing the scythe in his hand; while round him were covered tombs, which opened at all the places where the procession halted, while those who formed it, chanted lugubrious songs, when certain figures stole forth, clothed in black cloth, on whose vestments the bones of a skeleton were depicted in white; the arms, breast, ribs, and legs, namely, all which gleamed horribly forth on the black beneath. At a certain distance appeared figures bearing torches, and wearing masks presenting the face of a death's head both before and behind; these heads of death as well as the skeleton necks beneath them, also exhibited to view, were not only painted with the utmost fidelity to nature, but had besides a frightful expression which was horrible to behold. At the sound of a wailing summons, sent forth with a hollow moan from trumpets of muffled yet inexorable clangor, the figures of the dead raised themselves half out of their tombs, and seating their skeleton forms thereon, they sang the following words, now so much extolled and admired, to music of the most plaintive and melancholy character. Before and after the car rode a train of the dead on horses, carefully selected from the most wretched and meager animals that could be found: the caparisons of those worn, half-dying beasts were black, covered with white crosses; each was conducted by four attendants, clothed in the vestments of the grave; these last-mentioned figures, bearing black torches and a large black standard, covered with crosses, bones, and death's heads. While this train proceeded on its way, each sang, with a trembling voice, and all in dismal unison, that psalm of David called the Miserere. The novelty and the terrible character of this singular spectacle, filled the whole city, as I have before said, with a mingled sensation of terror and admiration; and although at the first sight it did not seem well calculated for a Carnival show, yet being new, and within the reach of every man's comprehension, it obtained the highest encomium for Piero as the author and contriver of the whole, and was the cause as well as commencement of numerous representations, so ingenious and effective that by these things Florence acquired a reputation for the conduct of such subjects and the arrangement of similar spectacles such as was never equaled by any other city."
Of this Carnival song, composed by Antonio Alamanni, I here give an English version.
These words sounded in the ears of the people, already terrified by the unforgotten voice of Savonarola, like a trump of doom. The pageant was, indeed, an acted allegory of the death of Italy, the repentance after judgment of a nation fallen in its sins. Yet a few months passed, and the same streets echoed with the music of yet another show, which has also been described by Vasari.[489] If the Car of Death expressed the uneasy dread that fell on the Italians at the opening of the century, the shows of 1513 allegorized their mad confidence in the fortune of the age, which was still more deeply felt and widely shared. Giovanni de' Medici had just been elevated to the Papal Chair, and was paying a holiday visit to his native city. Giuliano de' Medici, his brother, the Duke of Nemours, was also resident in Florence, where he had formed a club of noble youths called the Diamond. Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the titular chief of the house, presided over a rival Company named Il Broncone—with a withered laurel-branch, whence leaves were sprouting, for its emblem. The Diamond signified the constancy of Casa Medici; the withered branch their power of self-recovery. These two men, Giuliano and Lorenzo, are the same who now confront each other upon their pedestals in Michelangelo's Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. Both were doomed to an untimely death; but in the year 1513, when Leo's election shed new luster on their house, they were still in the heyday of prosperity and hope. Giuliano resolved that the Diamond should make a goodly show. Therefore he intrusted the invention and the poems to Andrea Dazzi, who then held Poliziano's chair of Greek and Latin literature. Dazzi devised three Cars after the fashion of a Roman triumph. For the construction of each chariot an excellent architect was chosen; for their decoration the painter Pontormo was appointed. In the first rode beautiful boys; in the second, powerful men; in the third, reverend grandsires. Lorenzo, in competition with his uncle, determined that the Laurel branch should outrival the Diamond. He applied to Jacopo Nardi, the historian of Florence and translator of Livy. Nardi composed a procession of seven chariots to symbolize the Golden Age, and wrote appropriate poems for each, which are still extant. In the first car rode Saturn and Janus, attended by six shepherds of goodly form, naked, on horses without harness. In the second sat Numa Pompilius, surrounded by priests in antique raiment. The third carried Titus Manlius, whose consulship beheld the close of the first Punic war. In the fifth Augustus sat enthroned, accompanied by twelve laureled poets. The horses that drew him, were winged. The sixth carried Trajan, the just emperor, with doctors of the law on either side. All these chariots were adorned with emblems painted by Pontormo. The seventh car held a globe to represent the world. Upon it lay a dead man in a suit of rusty iron armor, from the cloven plates of which emerged a living child, naked and gilt with glistering leaf of gold. This signified the passing of the Iron, and the opening of the Golden Age—the succession of the Renaissance to feudalism—the fortunes of Italy reviving after her disasters in the sunlight of the smiles of Leo. Magnus sæclorum nascitur ordo! "The world's great age begins anew; the golden years return!" Thus the artists, scholars, and poets of Florence symbolized in a Carnival show the advent of the Renaissance. The boy who represented the Golden Age, died of the sufferings he endured beneath his gilding; and his father, who was a baker, received ten scudi of indemnity. A fanciful historian might read in this little incident the irony of fate, warning the Italians that the age they welcomed would perish for them in its bloom. In the year 1513 Luther was already thirty years of age, and Charles V. in the Low Countries was a boy of thirteen, accumulating knowledge under the direction of the future Adrian VI. Whatever destiny of gold the Renaissance might through Italy be offering to Europe, it was on the point of pouring blood and fastening heavier chains on every city of the sacred land.
In my desire to bring together these three representative festivals—Lorenzo's Triumph of Bacchus, Alamanni's Car of Death, and Pontormo's Pageant of the Golden Age—marking three moments in the Florentine Renaissance, and three diverse moods of feeling in the people—I have transgressed the chronological limits of this chapter. I must now return to the year 1464, when a boy of ten years old, destined to revive the glories of Italian literature with far greater luster than Lorenzo, came from Montepulciano to Florence, and soon won the notice of the Medicean princes. Angelo Ambrogini, surnamed Poliziano from his home above the Chiana, has already occupied a prominent place in this work.[490] It is not, therefore, needful to retrace the history of his uneventful life, or again to fix his proper rank among the scholars of the fifteenth century. He was the greatest student, and the greatest poet in Greek and Latin, that Italy has produced. In the history of European scholarship, he stands midway between Petrarch and Erasmus, taking the post of honor at the moment when erudition had acquired ease and elegance, but had not yet passed on into the final stage of scientific criticism. What concerns us here, is Poliziano's achievement as an Italian poet. In the history of the vulgar literature he fills a place midway between Petrarch and Ariosto, corresponding to the station of distinction I have assigned to him in humanistic culture. Of few men can it be said that they have held the same high rank in poetry and learning; and had the moral fiber of Poliziano, his intellectual tension and his spiritual aim, been at all commensurate with his twofold ability, the Italians might have shown in him a fourth singer equal in magnitude to their greatest. As it was, the excellence of his work was marred by the defect of his temperament, and has far less value for the general reader than for the student of versification.
Lorenzo de' Medici could boast of having restored the mother tongue to a place of honor among the learned. But he was far from being the complete artist that the age required. "That exquisite flower of sentiment we call good taste, that harmony of intellect we call judgment, lies not within the grasp of power or riches."[491] A man was needed who should combine creative genius with refined tact in the use of language; who should be competent to carry the tradition of Italian poetry beyond the point where Boccaccio dropped it, while giving to his work the polish and the splendor of a classic masterpiece. It was further necessary that this new dictator of the literary commonwealth should have left the Middle Age so far behind as not to be aware of its stern spirit. He must have acquired the erudition of his eminently learned century—a century in which knowledge was the pearl of great price; not the knowledge of righteousness; not the knowledge of nature and her laws; but the knowledge of the life that throbbed in ancient peoples, the life that might, it seemed, yet make the old world young again. Moreover, he must be strong enough to carry this erudition without bending beneath its weight; dexterous enough to use it without pedantry; exuberant enough in natural resources to reduce his stores of learning, his wealth of fancy, his thronging emotions, to one ruling harmony—fusing all reminiscences in one style of pure and copious Italian. He must be gifted with that reverent sense of beauty, which was the sole survivirg greatness of his century, animating the imagination of its artists, and justifying the proud boast of its students. This man was found in Angelo Poliziano. He, and only he, was destined, by combining the finish of the classics with the freshness of a language still in use, to inaugurate the golden age of form. Faustus, the genius of the middle ages, had wedded Helen, the vision of the ancient world. Their son, Euphorion, the inheritor of all their gifts, we hail in Poliziano.