We tire of these low literary quarrels. Yet they form an integral part of the history of Italian civilization; and the language of invective used in them, originating with Aretino and improved upon by Doni and Franco, became the model of vituperative style in Europe. Doni's "Earthquake, with the Ruin of a great Bestial Colossus, the Antichrist of our age," brings to mind a score of pamphlets, published in Europe during the conflict of the Church with Reformation. We find an echo of its strained metaphors in the polemical writings of Bruno and Campanella. The grotesque manner of the seventeenth century begins with Aretino and his satellites, just as its far-fetched conceits may be traced in the clear language of Guarini. Gongora, Marini, Euphues, and the Précieuses Ridicules of the Hôtel Rambouillet are contained, as it were, in germ among this little knot of refugees at Venice, who set their wits against the academical traditions of pure Italian taste.
A characteristic legend is told of Aretino's death. Two of his sisters kept, it is said, a house of ill fame; and the story runs that he died of immoderate laughter, flinging himself backward in his chair and breaking his neck, on hearing some foul jest reported by them. It is difficult to believe that this tale has any foundation in fact. We must take it as a scurrilous invention, proving the revolution of public opinion, which since his books had been put upon the Index in 1559, undoubtedly took place. Of like tenor is the epitaph which was never really placed upon his grave:[543]
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Qui giace l'Aretin poeta tosco, Che disse mal d'ognun fuorchè di Cristo, Scusandosi col dir: non lo conosco. |
His features, though formed upon a large and not ignoble type, bore in later life a mixed expression of the wolf and the fox; nor was it without oblique satire that the engraver of his portrait, Giuseppe Patrini, surrounded the medallion with a wolf's hide, the grinning snarl and slanting eyes of the brute mimicking the man's physiognomy. It was a handsome face, no doubt, in youth, when, richly attired in the satin mantle cut for him by a bishop, and mounted on his white charger, he scoured the streets of Reggio at Giovanni de' Medici's side, curling his blue-black beard, and fixing his bold bright eyes upon the venal beauties they courted in company. But the thick lips and open sensual mouth, the distended nostrils, and the wicked puckers of the wrinkles round his eyes and nose, show that the beast of prey and appetite had been encouraged through a life of self-indulgence, until the likeness of humanity yielded to victorious animalism. The same face, at once handsome and bestial, never to be forgotten after a first acquaintance, leans out, in the company of Sansovino and Titian, from the bronze door of the Sacristy in S. Mark's Church.[544] The high relief is full of life and movement, one of Sansovino's masterpieces. And yet it strikes one here with even greater strangeness than the myths of Ganymede and Leda on the portals of S. Peter's at Rome.
Aretino is, in truth, not the least of the anomalies which meet us everywhere in the Italian Renaissance. Was he worse, was he not even in some respects better than his age? How much of the repulsion he inspires can be ascribed to altered taste and feeling? To what extent was the legend of the man, so far as this is separable from the testimony of his writings, made black by posthumous malevolence and envy? These are the questions which rise in our mind when we reflect upon the incidents of his extraordinary career, and calmly estimate his credit with contemporaries. The contradictions of the epoch were concentrated in his character. He was a professed Christian of the type formed by Rome before the Counter-Reformation. He helped the needy, tended the sick, dowered orphans, and kept open house for beggars. He was the devoted friend of men like Titian, a sincere lover of natural and artistic beauty, an acute and enthusiastic critic. At the same time he did his best to corrupt youth by painting vice in piquant colors. He led a life of open and voluptuous debauchery. He was a liar, a bully, a braggart, venomous in the pursuit of private animosities, and the remorseless foe of weaker men who met with his displeasure. From the conditions of society which produced Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Pier Luigi Farnese and Gianpaolo Baglioni, it was no wonder that a writer resolved on turning those conditions to account, should have arisen. The credit of originality, independence, self-reliant character—of what Machiavelli called virtù—does certainly belong to him. It is true that he extracted the means of a luxurious existence from patrons upon whom he fawned. Yet he was superior to the common herd of courtiers, in so far as he attached himself to no master, and all his adulation masked a battery of menaces. The social diseases which emasculated men of weaker fiber, he turned to the account of his rapacious appetites. His force consisted in the clear notion he had formed of his own aim in life, and the sagacity with which he used the most efficient means for attaining it. The future, whether of reputation or of literary fame, had no influence over his imagination. He resolved to enjoy the present, and he succeeded beyond expectation. Corruption is itself a kind of superiority, when it is consummate, cynical, self-conscious. It carries with it its own clairvoyance, its own philosophy of life, its own good sense. More than this, it imposes on opinion and fascinates society. Aretino did not suffer from a divided will. He never halted between two courses, but realized the ideal of the perfettamente tristo. He lived up to Guicciardini's conception of the final motive, which may be described as the cult of self. Sneering at all men less complete in purpose than himself, he disengaged his conduct from contemporary rules of fashion; dictated laws to his betters in birth, position, breeding, learning, morals, taste; and vindicated his virility by unimpeded indulgence of his personal proclivities. He was the last, the most perfect, if also the most vitiated product of Renaissance manners. In the second half of the sixteenth century, when hypocrisy descended like a cloud upon the ineradicable faults of Italy, there was no longer any possibility for the formation of a hero after Aretino's type.
Thus at the close of any estimate of Aretino, we are forced to do justice to the man's vigor. It is not for nothing that even a debased society bows to a dictatorship so autocratic; nor can eminence be secured, even among the products of a decadent civilization, by undiluted defects. Aretino owed his influence to genuine qualities—to the independence which underlay his arrogance, to the acute common sense which almost justified his vanity, to the outspokenness which made him satirize the vices that he shared and illustrated.[545] We have abundant and incontrovertible testimony to the fact that his Dialoghi, when they were first published, passed for powerful and drastic antidotes to social poisons[546]; and it is clear that even his religious works were accepted by the pious world as edifying. The majority of his contemporaries seem to have beheld in him the fearless denouncer of ecclesiastical and civil tyrants, the humble man's friend, and the relentless detective of vice. The indescribable nastiness of the Dialoghi, the false feeling of the Vita di S. Catherina, which makes us turn with loathing from their pages, did not offend the taste of his century. While, therefore, he comprehended and expressed his age in its ruffianism and dissoluteness, he stood outside it and above it, dealing haughtily and like a potentate with evils which subdued less hardened spirits, and with personages before whom his equals groveled. We must not suffer our hatred of his mendacity, uncleanliness, brutality, and arrogance to blind us to the elements of strength and freedom which can be discerned in him.[547]