At the beginning of such a review, we cannot fail to be struck with the predominance of Florence. The superiority of the Tuscans was threefold. In the first place, they determined the development of art in all its branches. In the second place, they gave a language to Italy, which, without obliterating the local dialects, superseded them in literature when the right moment for intellectual community arrived. That moment, in the third place, was rendered possible by the humanistic movement, which began at Florence. The humanists prepared the needful literary medium by introducing classical studies into every town of the peninsula. Without this discipline, Tuscan could not so speedily have produced Italian, or have been so readily accepted by North and South. It may, indeed, be affirmed without exaggeration that, prior to the close of the fifteenth century, what we call the Italian genius was, in truth, the genius of Florence.
What the Lombards and Venetians produced in fine art and literature was of a later birth.[583] Yet the novelists of Lombardy, the Latin lyrists of Garda, the school of romantic and dramatic poets at Ferrara, the group of sculptors and painters assembled in Milan by the Sforza dynasty, the maccaronic Muse of Mantua, the unrivaled magnificence of painting at Venice, the transient splendor of the Parmese masters, the wit of Modena, the learning of the princes of Mirandola and Carpi, must be catalogued among the most brilliant and characteristic manifestations of Italian genius. In pure literature Venice contributed but little, though she sent forth a dictator, Pietro Bembo, to rule the republic of letters at the moment when the scepter was about to pass from Florence. Her place, as the home of Aldo's Greek press, and as the refuge for adventurers like Aretino and Folengo, when the rest of Italy was yielding to reactionary despotism, has to be commemorated. Of the northern universities, Padua preserved the tradition of physical studies, and Bologna that of legal erudition, onward from the middle ages. Both became headquarters of materialistic philosophy in the sixteenth century. The school of Vicenza had flourished in humane letters at the commencement of the epoch. But it declined early; while that of Ferrara, on the contrary, succeeded to the honors of Florence and Pisa. Genoa was almost excluded from the current of Italian culture. Her sumptuous palaces and churches, her sensual unsympathetic painting, belong to the last days of Italian energy. Her few great scholars owed their fame to correspondence and connection with the students of more favored districts.
From Romagna, the Marches of Ancona, and the Umbrian cities, more captains of adventure than men of letters or artists swelled the muster-roll of Italian worthies. We must not, however, forget the unique place which Urbino, with its refined society, pure Court, and concourse of accomplished men and women, occupies in the history of Italian civilization. The position of Perugia, again, is not a little singular. Situated upon the borders of Tuscany and Umbria, sharing something of the spirit of both districts, overshadowed by Papal Rome, yet harboring such broods of bravi as the Baglioni, conferring a tyranny on Braccio and the honor of her name on Pietro Vannucci, this city offers a succession of picturesque and perplexing contradictions. Perugia was the center of the most religious school of painting which flourished in the fifteenth century, and also the cradle of the religious drama. For the student of Italian psychology, very much of serious moment is contained in this statement.
Rome continued to be rather cosmopolitan than Italian. The power, wealth, and prestige of the Popes made their court a center; and men who settled in the Eternal City, caught something of its greatness. There is, however, no reason to recapitulate the benefits conferred by ecclesiastical patronage at various times on fine arts, scholarship, and literature. Rather must it be borne in mind that the Romans who advanced Italian culture, were singularly few. The work of Rome was done almost exclusively by aliens, drawn for the most part from Tuscany and Lombardy.
After Frederick II.'s brilliant reign, the Sicilians shared but little in the intellectual activity of the nation. That this was not due to want of capacity in the people, seems proved by their aptitude for poetry first shown at Frederick's Court, and next by the unrivaled richness of their dialectical literature, both popular and cultivated. Whether the semi-feudalism which oppressed the Southern provinces, checked the free expansion of mental faculty, admits of question. But it is certainly remarkable that, during the Renaissance, the wide districts of the Regno produced so little. Antonio Beccadelli was, indeed, a native of Palermo; but Pontano owned Cerreto for his birthplace. Valla claimed to be a Roman, and Sannazzaro traced his ancestry through Piacenza into Spain. These are the four greatest names of the period when Naples formed a literary center under the Aragonese dynasty. We have already seen that Naples, though not prolific of native genius, gave specific tone of warmth and liberty to literature. This may be ascribed partly to the free manners, bordering on license, of the South, and partly to the permanent jealousy subsisting between the Kingdom and the Papacy. The Novella produced humorous pictures of society at Florence, facetiæ in Rome, but bitter satires on the clergy at Naples. The scandals of the Church provoked the frigid animosity of Florentines like Machiavelli and Guicciardini; in Naples they led to Valla's ponderous critique and Sannazzaro's envenomed epigrams. The sensuousness of Poliziano assumed voluptuous fervor in Pontano's lyrics. Lastly, the Platonic mysticism of Florence, and the Peripatetic materialism of Bologna ended in the new philosophy of the Calabrian school. This crowning contribution of the south to Italy, this special glory of the sixteenth century, came less from Naples than from minor cities of Calabria. Telesio of Cosenza, Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, showed that something of the old Greek speculative genius—the spirit of Parmenides and Pythagoras—still lingered round the shores of Magna Græcia. Just as the Hellenic colonists at Elea and Tarentum anticipated the dawn of Attic philosophy, so did those robust and innovating thinkers shoot the arrows of their speculation forward at the mark of modern science.
It is tempting to pass from this review of the Italian provinces to meditations on a further problem. How far may the qualities of each district have endured from remote antiquity? To what extent may they have determined the specific character of Italian production in the modern age? Did the population of Calabria, we ponder, really inherit philosophical capacity from their Greek ancestors? Dare we connect the Tuscan aptitude for art with that mysterious race who built their cities on Etrurian hill-tops? Can the primitive ethnology of the Ligurian and Iapygian stocks be used to explain the silence of the Genoese Riviera and the Apulian champaign? Is a Teutonic strain discernible in the gross humor of the Mantuan Muse, or in the ballads of Montferrat? It would be easy to multiply these questions. But the whole subject of national development is still too obscure to admit of satisfactory answers.[584] All we can affirm without liability to error, amounts to this; that Rome never completely fused the divers races of the Italian peninsula, nor obliterated their characteristic differences. After the dissolution of her empire, we find the Italian provinces presenting local types in language, manners, sentiments, and intellectual proclivities. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to conjecture that certain of these differences sprang from the persistence of ethnological qualities, and others from the infusion of fresh blood from without.
The decisive fact of Italian history in all its branches at this epoch is the resurgence of the Latin, or shall we rather say, of the Italic spirit? The national consciousness survived, though dimly, through the middle ages; nor had the people suffered shipwreck in the break-up of the Roman power. This was due in no small measure to the fact that the Empire was the creation of this people, and that consequently they were in a sense superior to its fall. Roman civilization, Roman organization, Roman institutions, Roman law, were the products of the Italian genius; and when the Roman State declined, the home province suffered a less thorough-going transformation than, to take an instance, either Gaul or Spain. It would be paradoxical to maintain that the imperial despotism exercised a more controlling authority over the outlying provinces than over Italy proper. Yet something of this kind might be advanced, when we reflect upon the self-indulgent majesty of Rome herself; upon the sovereign privileges accorded to the chief Italian cities; upon the prosperity and vastness of Mediolanum, Aquileia and Ravenna. Local ties and local institutions kept a lasting hold upon the ancient no less than the medieval Italian; and long after Rome became the colluvies omnium gentium so bitterly described by Juvenal, the country towns, especially in the valley of the Po, retained a vigorous personality. In this respect the relation in which men of state and letters, like the Plinies, stood on one side to the capital and on the other to their birthplace, is both interesting and instructive. The citizens of the provincial municipia gloried in the might of Rome. Rome was for them the fulcrum of a lever which set the habitable globe in movement at their touch. Still the Empire existed for the world, while each Italian city claimed the duty and affection of its own inhabitants. When Rome failed, the cosmopolitan authority of the Empire was extended to the Church, or, rather, fell into abeyance between the Church and the resuscitated Empire. Just as the municipia flourished beneath the shadow of old Rome, so now the Communes grew beneath the Church and the new Empire. These two creations of the earlier middle ages, though formulated and legalized in Italy, weighed less heavily there than on some other parts of Europe. The Italians resisted imperial authority, and preserved their own local independence. The Northern Emperors were never really strong below the Alps except on sufferance and by the aid of faction. In like manner the Italian burghers tolerated ecclesiastical despotism only in so far as they found it convenient to do so. In spite of Gothic, Lombard, Frankish and German attempts at solidification, the cities succeeded in asserting their autonomy. The Italic stock absorbed the several foreign elements that mingled with it. Vernacular Latin, surviving the decay of literature, repelling the influence of alien dialects, prevailed and was the language of the people.
Notwithstanding this persistence of the antique type, the Italian nation, between the ages of Constantine and Frederick Barbarossa, was intellectually and actually remade. It was not a new nation like the English, French or Germans; for its life had continued without cessation on the same soil from a period antecedent to the birth of Rome. It had no fund of myth and legend, embodying its memories in popular epical poetry. Instead of Siegfried, Arthur or Roland, it looked back to the Virgilian Æneas.[585] Still it underwent, together with the rest of Europe, the transformation from Paganism to Christianity. It felt the influences of feudalism, while repelling them with obstinate and finally victorious jealousy. It owed something to chivalry, though the instincts of the race were rather practical and positive than romantic. It suffered the eclipse of antique culture, and borrowed from its conquerors a tincture of their style in art and literature. When these new Italians found a voice, they spoke in tones which lacked the ring of Roman eloquence. The massy fabric of the Roman syntax was dismembered. And yet their speech had more affinity to Roman style than that of any Northern people. The greatest jurists, ecclesiastics and statesmen of the middle ages, the interpreters of Roman law, the fabricators of solid theological edifices, the founders of the Catholic Church, the champions of the Imperial idea, were Italians, proving by their grasp of practical affairs and by the positive turn they gave to speculative inquiries, a participation in the ancient Latin Spirit.[586] Even when it is least classical, the medieval work of the Italian genius betrays this ancestry—in Lombard no less than in Tuscan architecture, in the monumental structure of the Divine Comedy, in the comprehensive digest of the Summa, in the rejection of sentimentalism from the tradition of Provençal poetry, in Petrarch's conception of scholarship, in the sensuous realism of Boccaccio.
The Revival of Learning was the acquisition of complete self-consciousness by this new race, which still retained so much of its old temperament. Ill at ease among the customs and ideals of Teutonic tribes; stubbornly refusing to merge their local independence in a kingdom; struggling against feudalism; accepting Chivalry and Gothic architecture as exotics; without national legends; without crusading enthusiasms; the Italians were scarcely themselves until they regained the right use of their energies by contact with the classics. This makes the Revival of Learning a national, a patriotic, a dramatic movement. This gives life and passion to a process which in any other country, upon any other soil, might have possessed but little more than antiquarian interest. This, and this alone, explains the extraordinary fervor with which the Italians threw themselves into the search, abandoning the new-gained laurels of their modern tongue, absorbing the intellectual faculties of at least three generations in the labor of erudition, and emerging from the libraries of the humanists with a fresh sense of national unity. At the same moment, and by the same series of discoveries, they found themselves and found for Europe the civilization of the modern world.
It is only by remembering that the Italic races, clogged by the ruins of the Roman Empire, and tardily receptive of Teutonic influences, resumed their natural activity and recognized their vocation in the Revival of Learning, that we can comprehend the radical revolution effected in all departments of thought by this event. In Architecture, the Gothic style, which had been adopted as it were with repugnance and imperfectly assimilated, was at once abandoned. Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, San Gallo, Michelangelo, Palladio, strove, one and all, to effect a right adjustment of the antique style to modern requirements. Foreign elsewhere, the so-called Palladian manner is at home and national in Italy. Sculpture, even earlier than architecture, took and followed the same hint. What chiefly distinguishes the work of the Pisan school from contemporary work of French or German craftsmen is, that here the manner of Græco-Roman art has been felt and partly comprehended. Painting, though more closely connected with Christianity, more perfectly related to conditions of contemporary life, owed strength and vigor in great measure to the same conditions. During the fifteenth century classical influences continued increasingly to modify the practice of the strongest masters. In literature, the effect of the Revival was so decisive as to demand a somewhat closer investigation.