A Garden of Girls; Or, Famous Schoolgirls of Former Days

by Mrs. Thomas Concannon

The little picture-children for whom Dominici pleads, that Madonna Bartolommea’s boys and girls may make friendship with them early, were not forgotten by Vittorino. Be sure, when, at his request, Madonna Paola sent her painter to cover the walls of the study-halls and galleries with “frescoes of children playing,” the tiny Jesukin, and dear Saint John, who was as an elder brother to Him, were to be seen there, playing together—in the carpenter’s shop, mayhap, when Elizabeth had taken her boy to Nazareth to visit his small cousin, or by the covered well under the palm-tree in Zachary’s garden, when the sweet spring days had called Mary and her bambino to the hill-country.

Poor Lodovico must have felt the change rather hard at first. He had been accustomed to get up whatever time he liked, do as little as he pleased, and have his interest aroused by nothing except questions of eating and drinking. One really thinks there must have been something diseased in poor Lodovico’s extraordinary appetite. Our ancestors would have seen in him a fellow victim of Cathal MacFinguine, King of Munster, in whom there entered the Demon of Gluttony through eating the apples, whereon the Scholar of Fergal, son of Maelduin, had put his heathen charms, “so that the demon abode in the throat of Cathal, to the ruin of the men of Munster during three half-years; and it is likely he would have ruined Ireland during another half-year.”

At all events, Vittorino took Lodovico in hand at once. He was only allowed to eat at mealtimes; but at first his meals were set at short intervals, and there was no stint on the quantity of food; which, however, was as plain as possible, so that the appetite should not be over-stimulated.

Gradually, the meals became fewer, and Vittorino, discovering that Lodovico’s voracity was as much the result of an empty mind and starved interests as anything else, had the inspiration to accompany them with little entertainments. He had singers, and musicians, and storytellers placed in the dining-hall; and, lo! Lodovico, listening to them, forgot his plate, for the nonce, and did not notice the loss of it, when an attendant, on a sign from Vittorino, bore it quietly away.

With Carlo, the second son, the master pursued quite a different plan. Carlo was growing too fast, and spending his energies too rapidly in the ardour which he put into his games. Vittorino saw to it that the boy should have as much to eat as he wished at meal times. Between meals he had permission to eat, too—but only bread.

His attention to the food of his pupils and to their bodily welfare give the key to Vittorino’s whole educational system. The “Mens sana in corpore sano,” is as an educational ideal, not the exclusive possession of the Greeks. I have tried to show how vitally it influenced education in the Middle Ages; but, undoubtedly, Vittorino found new ardour for his pursuit of it in the image of the “Academy,” which his Greek studies had conjured up for him, and kept constantly before his mind.

But the little boys and girls, for whom Vittorino was going to assume responsibility, had something more than a body and a mind to be developed. They had each an immortal soul. The recognition of that fact must, logically, alter any system of education, not founded on it, into something very different. And so the Christian school of Mantua, forming colonists for this world, and citizens for heaven, was something essentially different from the Platonic Academy, however much it may have borrowed from it.

The strengthening and developing of body, and mind, and soul—that is, in a few words, what the whole system of Vittorino aimed at. It is in the harmonious ordering of the different studies and exercises, which he chose for the perfecting of the three parts of men, that the chief excellence of the “Casa Giocosa” consists.

“You are rearing your children for God,” the Blessed Giovanni reminded Madonna Bartolommea. Vittorino never forgot this for a moment, nor did he ever allow his pupils to forget that they had been “created and placed” in this world by God, “to know Him, love Him, and serve Him, and by that means to gain Everlasting Life.”

The common day began with hearing Mass in the school chapel. After Mass, the Office of Our Lady was recited, and a short instruction in some point of Christian Doctrine was given to the school. But this teaching was not theoretic only. He taught them not only what Christians must believe, but showed them how Christians must act. And so we find his pupils, in the after years, distinguished, among all the men and women of Italy, by their practical Christianity. Lodovico, once the self-indulgent, grew into the Marchese Lodovico, chaste and sober, and wise and kind—the best of the Gonzaga Princes. Little Frederick Montefeltro, sent as a hostage to the Mantuan Court, rejoiced, in the years when men spoke of him as the “Good Duke of Urbino,” that the chances of war had brought him such good fortune as to make him the pupil of such a master. Ever before his eyes he would have that master’s image, and as much as might be, he would carry out his system of life in the order of the Ducal Palace. So Vittorino’s portrait adorned one of the walls of the famous palace, with these words written under it: “In honour of his saintly master, Vittorino da Feltre, who by word and example, instructed him in all human excellence, Frederico, has set this here.” And better still, “the Court of Urbino was framed on the precepts which the Duke had learnt in the Casa Giocosa, and became in its turn a school where Italian princes sent their sons to be trained in knightly exercises and elegant manners.” And so we trace, in a direct line of descent from the “Casa Giocosa,” “the best book that was ever written upon good breeding,” as Doctor Johnson testified to Boswell: “‘Il Cortegiano’—the best book, I tell you, and you should read it.” An advice which one could not do better than repeat.