As a patron of literature Lorenzo was no less active. He founded and developed a wonderful library in which the treasures of antiquity were collected, in the original or in copies, without regard to expense, from all parts of Europe. The art of book-making was carried to its highest development in this period. The manuscripts of the time are marvels of beauty. The ornamentation is beautiful, and the letters themselves are printed with a degree of regularity closely rivalling the uniformity of a printed page. And then not long after the middle of the century, just when this art of the scribe was at its height, the printing-press was introduced from Germany, and an easy mechanical means was at hand by which the most perfect technique could be attained. True, the connoisseur did not at first recognise the printed book as a possible rival of the old hand-made work. For a long time the collector continued to employ the hand workman, and the dilettante looked upon the printed book with much the same scornful glance which the modern collector of paintings bestows upon a chromo or lithograph. The first printing-press was set up, according to Von Reumont, at Subiaco in a Benedictine monastery in 1465. Some fifteen years later Vespasiano da Bisticci, writing about the library of the duke of Urbino, could proudly state that “All the volumes are of the most faultless beauty, written by hand, with elegant miniatures, and all on parchment. There are no printed books among them; the duke would have been ashamed to have them.”[2]
Notwithstanding the scornful attitude of the connoisseur, however, the art of printing books made its way rapidly. Hitherto the cost of production had rendered even the most ordinary book a luxury not to be possessed by any but the relatively wealthy. Naturally enough, an eager band of book lovers hailed the advent of the new method, despite its supposed artistic shortcomings; and before the end of the century there were printing-presses in all the important centres of Italy, and numberless classics, beginning with Virgil, had been given a vastly wider currency than had ever previously been possible. It is needless here to dwell upon the remoter influences of this rapid diffusion of classical treasures; but nowhere was the influence more important than in Italy.
Summarising in a few words the influences of the fifteenth century in Italy, it may be repeated that, as a whole, it is an epoch of industrial and commercial progress rather than of the greatest art. The culminating achievements of the century, the invention of the printing-press and the discovery of America were not Italian triumphs; though as the birthplace of Columbus and the home of Amerigo Vespucci, Italy cannot well be denied a share in the finding of the New World. Indeed, the association of Italy with this great achievement is perhaps closer than might at first sight appear. For on the one hand, it is held that the geographical work of Toscanelli was directly instrumental in stimulating Columbus to the conception of a western passage to India; while, in another view, the influence of the spirit of exploration and discovery fostered by the commercial relations of Italy in making possible the feat of Columbus, must have been inestimable. Be all that as it may, the discovery of the New World—made in the last decade of the century, and, as it chanced in the same year in which Lorenzo de’ Medici died—may well be considered not merely as a culminating achievement of the century, but as symbolical of that commercial and industrial spirit for which the century is chiefly remarkable.
We have now advanced to the date which is usually named as closing the mediæval epoch, but what has been said about the arbitrary character of this classification should be borne in mind. The discovery of America in 1492 did indeed mark the beginning of a new era in one sense, since it opened up a new hemisphere to the observation and residence of civilised man. That discovery, too, prepared the way for the demonstration of the fact that the world is round; hence it became an important corner-stone in the building of that new structure of man’s conception of cosmology of which the master builders were Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. But the building of this new structure,—a revolutionising of man’s conception of the cosmos,—did not come about in a year or a century; the superstitions based on the old conception of cosmology have not lost their hold on mankind even in our own day. It has even been suggested that the year 1859, when the promulgation of thought occurred which gave the death-blow to the old ideas of cosmogony, and which may be said for the first time to have rendered the old superstitions truly obsolescent,—that this year rather than the year 1492 might well be named as limiting the mediæval epoch. So perhaps it may be with more remote generations of the future, but for the twentieth century observer the older date will doubtless seem the better one. But, after all, the question is one of no moment. Considering the recognised arbitrariness of all such divisions it does not in the least matter as to the exact bounds given to the mediæval epoch.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
The sixteenth century is a time of peculiar contrasts in Italy. The invasions which began with the coming of Charles VIII in 1494 continue and become more and more harassing. Italy comes to be regarded as the proper prey of the French and Spanish rulers. The Italian principalities, warring as ever with one another, welcome or repel the invaders in accordance with their own selfish interests. All this time there has been no unified government of Italy as a whole. Nominally the empire included all, but this was a mere theory which, for the most part, would not bear examination. Venice all along has claimed allegiance to the Eastern Empire, which since the middle of the fifteenth century has ceased to exist. Florence owes no allegiance to any outside power; it is strictly autonomous. The democratic feeling is still strong there notwithstanding the usurpations of the Medici. Venice and Florence with Siena and Lucca are the only republics remaining at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Of the scores of cities which formerly were republics, all the rest have come under the influence of tyrants, or have been brought into unwilling subordination to neighbouring cities. And now an even greater humiliation is in store for many of them at the hands of the transalpine conquerors.
Venice, recovering from her duel to the death with Genoa—the war of Chioggia—continues to hold closely to her old traditions. Her commercial prosperity continues for a time, but is gradually lessened through the loss of eastern territories and through the rivalry brought about by the discovery of America and of a sea route to India. Florence, having thrown off in 1494 the thraldom imposed by the Medici, makes spasmodic efforts to return to the old purely democratic system; but fails in the end. In 1569 Cosmo de’ Medici is made Grand Duke of Tuscany, a position which his successors will continue to hold for seven generations (till 1737). In a word the spirit of democracy is virtually dead in Italy, and as yet no local tyrant arises who has the genius to unite the petty principalities into a unified kingdom.
But if political Italy is chaotic and unproductive in this century the case is quite different when we consider the civilisation of the time. The vivifying influences of the previous century produced a development particularly in the field of art, which now shows great results. The early decades of the sixteenth century constitute an epoch of the greatest art development in Italy. This is the age of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, of Raphael, and of Titian, and of the host of disciples of these masters. Under the patronage of successive popes, the master painters are stimulated to their best efforts, and those wonderful decorations of the Vatican are undertaken which have been the delight of all later times.
The literary development, if it does not quite keep pace with the pictorial, nevertheless attains heights which it has only once before reached since classical times. All this culture development in a time of turmoil and political disaster seems anomalous, and, as just intimated, can only be explained as the fruitage of a development which had its origin in an earlier epoch. The validity of this explanation is illustrated in the rapid decline that takes place in Italy after the middle of the sixteenth century—an intellectual decline which is scarcely to be interrupted until the nineteenth century.