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LORENZO DE’ MEDICI

VOL. II.

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI

THE MAGNIFICENT

BY

ALFRED VON REUMONT

TRANSLATED from THE GERMAN by ROBERT HARRISON

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.

LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1876

[All rights reserved]

CONTENTS

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME.

FOURTH BOOK—continued.

Second Part.

TIME OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT.

Third Part.

THE FINE ARTS.

FIFTH BOOK.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUPREMACY OF THE MEDICI.

SIXTH BOOK.

LATER YEARS OF LORENZO DE’ MEDICI’S LIFE.

FOURTH BOOK—continued

SECOND PART

TIME OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT.

CHAPTER VI.

LORENZO AS A POET.

In April 1465, as already stated, Federigo of Aragon, Prince of Naples, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, then seventeen years old, met at Pisa. A letter addressed by the young Florentine to his royal friend, probably in the following year, begins thus:[1] ‘When thou, illustrious Federigo, didst visit the most ancient city of Pisa, thou didst turn our conversation to the subject of those who have written poetry in the Tuscan language, and didst manifest a laudable desire to see all their works collected by my care. Endeavouring to fulfil thy wishes, I had a diligent search made for all the old manuscripts, and chose from them the least imperfect, which I now present to your Highness, arranged in order in a book which I earnestly desire thee approvingly to accept, as a token of especial goodwill. Let no one despise this Tuscan tongue as poor and rude, for he who can rightly estimate its value will find it rich and well cultivated. There is, indeed, nothing vigorous or graceful, impressive or ingenious, witty, harmonious, or majestic, of which examples may not be found in our two greatest poets, Dante and Petrarca; and after them, by those whom thou, Prince, hast recalled to life.

‘Petrarca shows in one of his letters that the ancient Romans were acquainted with rhyme which, after a long interval, revived in Sicily, spread through France, and was restored to Italy, its original home. The first who gave our modern poetry its peculiar form of verse were Guittone of Arezzo and his Bolognese contemporary Guido Guinicello. They were both well versed in philosophy, and wrote profoundly; but the first is somewhat harsh and rude, deficient in ornament and eloquence. The latter, who is far more clear and elegant, was called by Dante “his father,” and the father of all who write sweet and graceful love songs. He was unquestionably the first to impress on our beautiful language that attractive colouring which the bard of Arezzo had but faintly indicated. After these shone Guido Cavalcanti, one of the keenest dialecticians and most admirable philosophers of his time. He was handsome in person, and his writings are to me in the highest degree attractive; his imagination is rich and wonderfully grand; his reasoning is weighty; his tone extremely dignified. These qualities are heightened by the rich charm of a style that sets them off like a resplendent robe. He needed but a wider field to have attained the highest honours.

‘Bonagiunta of Lucca and the notary of Lentino must not be overlooked; but though earnest and weighty writers, they were so destitute of refined taste, that they must be content to find a place in this collection of honoured names. Another contemporary of Guittone was Pier delle Vigne, of whom Dante said that “he had both the keys of Frederick’s heart.” Only a few short pieces by him remain, and they are not wanting in depth or earnestness.

‘And now come the two glorious suns that have illuminated our language—Dante, and he who stands hardly below him, Francesco Petrarca. In praise of them, silence, to use the words of Sallust concerning Carthage, is better than halting speech. Greatly in need of their polish stood Onesto, and the Sicilians who in order of time preceded them, and who were not without spirit or purpose. Cino of Pistoja, tender and full of feeling, deserves his reputation. He was the first, in my opinion, who thoroughly surmounted the antique roughness which Dante, so admirable in other respects, could not entirely avoid. A host of writers follow, ranking far below those I have named. All these of the past, and some of our own time, owe lasting thanks to thee, O Prince, who hast bestowed on them life, and light, and fame, acquiring for thyself a claim to greater renown than that of the Athenian Peisistratos, who rescued from oblivion the lays of Homer. He restored life to one; thou hast revived a whole host. At the end of the book, as it seemed not unpleasing to thee, I have added some sonnets and canzoni of my own, that when thou readest them, my goodwill and affection may be vividly recalled to thy mind. Though in themselves unworthy of a place beside the admirable works of the past, it may be useful to set them side by side for a comparison which can but enhance the perfections of the latter. Pray take then, O Prince, not only into thine house, but into thy heart and mind, both them and me, even as thou abidest a welcome guest in my heart and soul.’

Thus wrote Lorenzo de’ Medici apparently in 1466. On a subsequent occasion, in a gloss on his own poems such as it was the custom then for an author himself or some of his friends to write, he gave his opinion on the much-disputed question of the value of the vulgar tongue as the language of poetry. ‘If we want,’ he wrote, ‘to prove the worth of our language, we need only apply this test: does it express with ease all our thoughts and all our feelings? Nothing can be more satisfactory than the answer given us by experience. Our countrymen Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, have in their verses and discourses, whether grave or gay, proved clearly that every thought and feeling finds easy and natural expression in this tongue of ours. Whoever reads the “Commedia” sees various questions of theology and nature discussed with as much skill as success. He finds there the three degrees of style specified by orators—the simple, the florid, and the sublime, nay, more—Dante in himself presents a union of all the qualities which Greek and Latin writers display separately. Who again can deny the warmth, tenderness, and gaiety of Boccaccio? In his love poems he shows a mingled grace and fervour that neither Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius nor Catullus have equalled. Dante’s pithy sonnets and canzoni are scarcely surpassed by anything in prose or verse, and the readers of Boccaccio, whose learning was as great as the polish of his style, must admit that in him the faculty of invention contends with the variety and eloquence of his language. Any one who examines his “Decameron” with its endless diversity of subject, its descriptions of every conceivable situation produced by love and hate, hope or fear; its exhibition of countless intrigues and artifices; its characteristic representation of diverse natures, and its expression of every passion, will be convinced that for all this no language can be better adapted than our own. It is not the language that has been unfavourable to writers, but there has been a dearth of authors who could use it. To any one with a little practice, it is full of power, harmony, and grace. It appears to me richly endowed with all that constitutes the excellence of a language, and I am persuaded that a knowledge of what has been written in it is not only useful but necessary—more especially the works of Dante, which are both solid and profound. The commentaries of learned men on the “Commedia” bear witness to this no less than the allusions made to the work from the pulpit. We may look forward to the appearance of other excellent works in this language, which still preserves its freshness and is growing in elegance and copiousness. A prospect of still greater perfection is before it, should the dominion of Florence be extended, a thing not merely to be hoped but to be striven for by our gallant citizens with all their energies of body and mind. Though such a consummation cannot positively be predicted, since it depends on fate and the will of God, yet it is within the limits of possibility. For the present the following conclusion is enough. Our native speech has all the excellencies of a language in abundance, and we ought not to be dissatisfied with it, nor ought any one to blame me for writing in a tongue to which I was born and in which I was educated. Hebrew and Latin originally were no more than vulgar tongues, yet those who hold an honoured place in literature cultivated them to a degree of perfection that was never attained by the mass of the people.’

These remarks, which are followed by others on the sonnet and on Tuscan rhythm and metre, show that from his youth up Lorenzo de’ Medici thought much of the nature and history of the language of his country. His poems opened out no new path, but served with those of many among his contemporaries to give more freedom and grace of movement to the language, more facility for applying it to manifold aims and objects, and a richer variety of idiomatic forms. His masterly handling of the language was equalled by his command of versification. Harshness he has, and that force which will not avoid a difficulty. Nor is he wanting in archaic forms and illegitimate turns of expression, while he has echoes of the artificial manner which in the poet’s youth was regarded as modern classicism. We do not always meet with the refinement of ear, accuracy of taste, and fulness of harmony, which give such importance to his contemporary Poliziano, and mark him as the true leader of the great literary movement of the fifteenth century, a movement which, in its last decade, put an end to a state of things in which it is hard to say whether stagnation or perverted energy was the worst feature. Nevertheless, Lorenzo de’ Medici takes a conspicuous and peculiar place in this movement. Had he been only a literary man, he would have shone as such. As in his whole character, so also as a poet, is he the true representative of his time, a time that strove with pious care to restore the old, while it joyfully if doubtfully anticipated the opening of new vistas and formed the threshold between two great epochs, the blending of the sunset and the dawn. Lorenzo de’ Medici, while rightly estimating the character of the literature of Dante’s age, and perceiving that it and not the pedantry of the humanistic poets contained life and hope for the future, was, nevertheless, still influenced by the great fact of the first half of his century, the revival of classical culture. Even when he most nearly approaches the lyric poets who preceded him, it is not in imitation, like Bembo’s imitation of Petrarca. Even when Dante or Guido Cavalcanti, with their subtle dissection of feelings, partaking somewhat of the character of scholasticism, and their habit of treating even earthly things with a certain unearthly solemnity of tone, have been most evidently his guiding lights—still, through all, there pierces a spirit which could only have been aroused by the contact of modes of thought derived from the antique with modern life and experience, and by a direct knowledge of the creations of Hellenic genius, which to the fathers of Italian poetry were sealed books, whose very titles were unknown to most of them.

Lorenzo de’ Medici is no imitator of Petrarca, although echoes of Petrarca and even, through the latter, of the poetry of the Troubadours occur frequently in his compositions. But, apart from other details, he has one conspicuous trait in common with Petrarca—a quick sense of the beauties of nature. The hermit of Vaucluse and Arquà is, of all modern poets, the first to whom nature seems to have been especially revealed in her inner life and in the impression which she makes on the feelings; for in Dante it is rather the historical character of the landscape and the plasticity of sharply defined individual phenomena which come out most strongly. Like Petrarca, he who dwelt in the Tuscan villas and among the wooded Apennines found in nature an inexhaustible fountain whence flowed forth an ever-fresh stream of forms and images clothed in the most varied and brilliant colours. The richness and freshness of his treatment proves how quick were his eyes to receive and his mind to realise such impressions. He delighted to consecrate to the mental and moral refreshment of a residence in the country the hours and days which he could steal from his varied and often vexatious cares and occupations. If his poetic descriptions did not sufficiently declare it, his whole life would furnish a proof that there was in him not merely an active fancy, but an actual need, as well as a true and quick apprehension of nature. He has shown in the ‘Selve d’amore,’ and in the idyl of ‘Ambra,’ what were his powers of describing nature, not merely in the illustration of thoughts and feelings, but as an independent picture complete in itself.

The greater part of his sonnets and canzoni consists, as may be imagined, of love poems. But the individualising characteristics of his poetry save them from the monotony usually inseparable from this style; for where there is no variety of tone, there is a variety of situation and colouring. The lover and poet is with Lorenzo always a disciple of philosophy, and the subject of his poems, decked in all the brilliant colours of fancy, retreats into the background infinitely more than with the great poets of the Trecento. In reading Lorenzo’s poems, one gives little more than a passing thought to Lucrezia Donati, whose name even is revealed to us only by the poet’s friends. Beatrice and Madonna Laura have been the objects of careful historical research—scarcely any one has troubled himself about the fair Florentine, sprung from a race whose name filled the history of the city when that of Medici was still unknown. The reason is not merely that Lucrezia’s bard was no Dante or Petrarca, and that his poetry, however fresh and genuine, and however important as completing a character unique in its way, yet held but a secondary place in the mind and life of Lorenzo de’ Medici; but the ideal creation threatens to swallow up the personality. The story connected with the beautiful girl lying on the bier, in which the poet sets forth how he sought and found a worthy object for his affection, sufficiently indicates that he rather transferred to this object what had already assumed a living shape in his own mind than received his impulse from it. To the greatest of Italy’s poets the angel-bride of his early youth became the ideal in which all his thoughts and feelings were wrapt up; the ideal stood before the eyes of Lorenzo de’ Medici before he knew her whose form he clothed in the magic of spiritualised desire.

The disciple of the Platonic philosophy, giving a description of his beloved one in the commentary on his sonnets,[2] thus declares himself in his definition of the nature of love. ‘Whoever seeks the true definition of love, will find that it consists in the desire for beauty. This being so, whatever is ugly repels him who truly and worthily loves. The beauty of the countenance and soul of our beloved one impels us to seek beauty in other things; to rise to that virtue which is beauty on earth as in heaven, and to reach at length the highest beauty—the Divinity, our final goal and resting-place. The necessary conditions of a true, worthy, and elevated love, appear to me to be two: first, that the object shall be one, then that the love shall be constant. It is not given to all to fulfil these conditions, seeing that but few women possess the lofty power of attaching men so entirely to themselves that they shall never offend against the two conditions without which there is no true love.’ But his philosophical view of life and human happiness is contained in a longer poem in terza rima, (‘L’Altercazione’), in which Marsilio Ficino is personally introduced as teacher, and decides between the poet and his interlocutor. The former has left the tumult of the city, the confusion of party politics, the throng of the market, to bring his soul to a haven of rest, a life free and secure from anxiety, in the solitude of the country. He describes what he seeks and hopes to find in this retreat to the shepherd whom he meets; the latter points out to him the toils and troubles of his humble lot, and how he drags on day after day beneath ever-renewing cares. Then Marsilio comes to place in their true light the worth and the worthlessness of sublunary things; to show how happiness depends neither on the high position of the one nor the lowly station of the other, but is to be found in the knowledge and love of the Author of all things. As may be seen from this sketch of its contents, the poem contains nothing original, but it is pleasing from its life-like description of contrasts, and interesting as a token of the earnest self-introspection of a richly and variously endowed mind.[3]

The three idyls which we possess of Lorenzo de’ Medici are so many witnesses to the many-sidedness of his genius. The first, ‘Corinto’ (the name of the shepherd who sings his love), resembles the eclogues of the ancients, which were soon to become the models of so many writers, and especially of Sannazaro. Following the precedent of Boccaccio, it is in terza rima, a metre better suited to a series of narratives and descriptions than to a subject in which the lyrical element preponderates. ‘Nencia da Barberino’ is pure nature—in some parts severe nature, with a rich vein of quaint humour and a charming local colour. It is an idyl in eight-lined stanzas, redolent of Tuscan soil, describing the Tuscan people, their manners and modes of speech, with a succession of apostrophes, eulogies, and comparisons, including some that are strange enough. Such are the so-called rispetti,—those songs of the people, especially country people, which sometimes in their fantastic flights soar up to the sun and stars, and sometimes borrow their similes from the humblest things. Lorenzo has, in fact, here put together a whole poem of rispetti, in which the serious and the comic alternate, and through the mouth of a lover has applied to one rustic beauty what would have sufficed for a whole bevy of maidens. These rispetti are evidently learned from the people, who to this day produce thousands of these half-lyric, half-epigrammatic songs, particularly in the hill-country of Pistoja, for, as an old proverb says, ‘the mountaineers have thick shoes and fine brains.’[4] They are to be heard also in other parts of the Florentine and Sienese dominions, as far as the Maremma, from whence they extend into the Roman Campagna. Some of the rustic verses are peculiar to the poet, who exercises himself freely in a style that permits great variety, and who rivals the people among whom he mingles in fantastic flights and quaint similes, producing a somewhat motley but richly coloured and life-like picture. Luigi Pulci has furnished a companion piece to ‘Nencia.’ Poliziano, without confining himself to a special subject, has also tried his hand at these little songs, which seem to flow spontaneously from Tuscan pens, and form a branch of literature highly important in its relation to the character of the people.

While in ‘Nencia’ the popular and burlesque element prevails, the third of these idyls, ‘Ambra,’ belongs to the province of mythology. Its importance lies far less in the story itself—one of the oft-told tales after the Ovidian pattern—than in the grand descriptions of nature to which the fable gives rise. The scene is the villa of Poggio a Cajano, on the decoration of which the princely owner bestowed so much trouble and expense, the results of his work being repeatedly destroyed by the overflow of the Ombrone in its descent from the Pistojan mountains to the level ground around the low hill on which Cajano stood. A small islet in the river bore the name of Ambra, which was transferred to the villa itself. The dykes raised for its defence did not fulfil Poliziano’s hope that the stream would spare the flower-garden. In the poem, Ambra is the nymph beloved by the shepherd Lauro. Her charms, seen when bathing, attract the river god, and she only escapes from his wild pursuit by the help of Diana, who, at her entreaty, changes her into a rock, on which the villa is then built. As in ‘Nencia’ the ottava rima adapts itself to a burlesque and popular subject, so here it developes a surprising power in descriptions of the natural occurrences that caused the destruction of the pleasant rustic dwelling, and of the events which are made to precede them.

As ‘Ambra’ inclines to the descriptive, so does another little poem in eight-line stanzas called ‘The Hawking Party’ (‘La Caccia con Falcone’), a lively picture of a universally favourite pastime to which our poet was almost passionately addicted. The fresh morning on which the party sets out, the adventures and intermezzos on the way, the rivalry and excitement of the huntsmen, the manœuvres of the chase, with the birds and dogs, carefully trained, yet not always to be relied on, the return in midday heat, and the cheerful meal, which reconciles the tired disputants and brings the day to a close,—all this is described with the most vivid reality, and with an amount of detail that could only come from an initiated sportsman. We are in the midst of the cheerful company that crowded around the gay and stately young man. For the poem dates some time before the year 1478, as is proved by the circumstance that Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, is one of the chief persons present, together with Luigi Pulci, Foglia Amieri, Dionigi Pucci, and several others less easy to distinguish by name. A whole stanza is taken up with the names of the falcons, the number of which shows that this was indeed a princely hunt, such as often took place at Pisa or Poggio a Cajano.

The poem in terza rima which bears the name of ‘I Beoni’ (‘The Drinkers’), or ‘Simposio,’ resembles the ‘Nencia’ and the ‘Hawking Party’ in so far as it describes Florentine and Tuscan manners. In rhythm, tone, and manner, it is very different from the others; for although in ‘Nencia’ peasant life sometimes receives a burlesque covering, the poem never becomes satire, nor sinks to that degree of low comedy which degenerates into vulgarity. This, however, is the case in the ‘Beoni,’ a series of chapters in which the poet describes the manners and adventures of a company of jolly fellows, whom he meets near Porta Faenza as he is returning from Careggi, at the moment when they are setting out for Ponte a Rifredi, a little place about a mile away from the town, and which takes its name from a bridge over the little stream Terzolle. The business of the company is to taste a cask of wine which they have heard highly praised. The poem is not wanting in humour, and offers a lively picture of convivial rather than social manners, such as long existed in Tuscany, and of which we possess many literary monuments. Although unfinished, it is long, and monotonous in spite of the variety of its situations; its dry comedy often degenerates into downright coarseness, such as might lead to very unfavourable conclusions with regard to the morals even of the higher classes and the clergy, who in part are represented here. ‘I Beoni’ makes an unpleasant impression from another point of view. Not only is the metre that of the most sublime poems in the Italian language; the outward arrangement of the poem, as well as a number of particular turns, are burlesque imitations of the great poets. This is a proof of keen observation, of wonderful and many-sided power; but it has a darker side. If we are to recognise in this production the beginning of Italian satire, we can all the more justly measure the distance between these ‘chapters’ and those brilliant mirrors of the time which immediately followed that of Lorenzo de’ Medici—the satires of Lodovico Ariosto.

Like the ‘Beoni,’ the dance-songs (‘Canzoni a ballo’) and the songs of the carnival (‘Canti carnascialeschi’), especially the latter, often pass the limits which separate social gaiety from burlesque and satire. Yet the nature and object of these songs demand the predominance of the lyrical element. The dance songs are explained by the old traditional customs of the Tuscan people, and Lorenzo did but follow examples furnished by the age of Dante; examples differing in character of all degrees, from the grave and sententious to the popular and comic. The musical accompaniment, in which popular old tunes alternate with later compositions, naturally influences the form of these songs; but the poet handles the form with the greatest ease, and knows how to give to metre and rhyme a variety that corresponds with the changes of mood, and prevents the monotony which the matter and subject might produce. For the subject is love and its enjoyments, in which the sensual and humorous preponderate. Here prevails the sway of that epicureanism which sees in the material satisfaction of our desire for enjoyment the solution of the problem of life, which regards as lost the time spent on all else, snaps its fingers at a severe moral judgment, and ends in outspoken nihilism, mocking even at love and happiness. The sum of worldly wisdom here taught is—enjoy yourself as much as you can, and lose no time about it; it is not the action that matters, but only that it should not reach the ears of those who would be sure to give it a bad name; ill-will and the conflict of interests bring blame, not things in themselves. Even more clearly than in the dance-songs is this cynicism seen in the ‘Lays of the Carnival,’ which, like the former, are intended for choruses, mostly with alternate parts.

The following pages, which treat of the manners of the time, will describe the bacchanals, which were not new in Florence, but which Lorenzo de’ Medici increased, and not merely for the humour of the thing, to a degree that has cast on his memory a reflection which an exact comparison of the poet’s circumstances with the past would hardly justify. The abundant imagination and many-sided wit of these gay compositions may be admired, but, even were the licence less, it would be impossible to take real pleasure in them when once the purpose underlying them is perceived. Such songs were traditional in Florence and other places, as were also the people’s carnival societies, of which Lorenzo made use for his popular festivals, and for which he wrote even in the days of his highest authority—perhaps even more especially then. To these songs the accomplished choir-master of San Giovanni, the German Heinrich Isaak, commonly called Arrigo Tedesco, composed melodies for three voices. Even before the event which exercised so great and injurious an influence on life and morals—the plague of 1348—songs were openly sung, the levity and revolting coarseness of which contrasted strangely with the pious canticles which resounded in the evening before the image of the Madonna and other shrines. The ‘Decameron’ refers to them, and the Chronicles of Modena give us the beginning of a drinking-song which bears witness to the confusion of tongues that had arisen, probably among the mercenary bands: ‘Trinche gote Malvasie—mi non biver oter vin.’ The poems destined for singing increase in number from the fourteenth century onwards.[5] Lorenzo only perfected in form, rendered more significant, and finally turned to account for other purposes, what he found ready in the life of the people. A greater contrast to these frivolous productions than even his wanderings on the heights of speculation, his effusions of philosophic poetry and tender aspiring sentiment, is offered by the poems on religious subjects, of which Lorenzo found examples in his own family. The mystery-play, ‘Rappresentazione dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo,’ composed, according to the prologue spoken by the angel of the Annunciation, for the brotherhood of San Giovanni, is said to have been acted at the festivities which celebrated the marriage of Maddalena de’ Medici. It is certain that Lorenzo’s son, Giuliano, then just ten, and perhaps also Piero, took part with other youths and boys of noble houses in the representation held by the said company in 1489. The legend of Constantia, daughter of Constantine the Great, who was said to have been cured of leprosy at the tomb of St. Agnes on the Nomentan Way, and that of the martyrs John and Paul, who suffered death in Rome on the Cœlian, are here blended with the story of the division of the empire among Constantine’s sons, of the reign of Julian the Apostate, and his death in the Parthian war, and formed into a whole in which strange confusion and leaps from one subject to another do not prevent much poetical beauty and moral and political teaching. Like other earlier and contemporary pieces of this kind, it is more lyric than dramatic; in particular it has no dramatic unity. But if the dramatic element is weak, the historical character of one of the two chief persons, the Emperor Julian, shows an accuracy of conception which, with regard to this prince, must have been rare at that period. In this respect Lorenzo’s drama commands an interest far superior to that which we take in most productions of this class. Since the statue of Victory was taken away from the Curia—so speaks the Emperor—success no longer crowns the Roman arms, which once subdued the world. Only by returning to our old gods can we recall victory to our standards. But the object is not to be attained by this alone, or by taking from the Christians wealth and goods which should be forbidden them by the teachings of their own faith. The head of the empire must again command the old reverence, and this cannot be if the ruler hands over the cares of government to others, while he heaps up treasure and thinks only of amusement. If he is rich, his riches are but lent him to share with his people, and relieve necessity wherever he finds it. Power and property belong not to him, but to the community; he is the steward who has the satisfaction and the glory of distributing to others what fate has placed in his hands.

Julian is a man of energy, conscious of the extent and difficulty of his task; Constantine in his old age is the representative of the melancholy which overcomes him, who feels that the burden of government has become too heavy for his shoulders. Who knows whether the poet is not drawing from the experience of his own heart when he puts into the mouth of his hero the description of the labours and dangers of sovereignty, which wear out body and soul, while others see in it the height of happiness, never reflecting that they can sleep while one is watching who holds the scales in his hand, to whom all eyes are turned; who lives not for himself, but for others, who must be the servant of servants:

How often does the man that envies me
Not know that happier far than I is he.

Strange contrasts of height and depth there were in this man—contradictions in his life as well as in his poetry. Like his mother, he tried his hand on spiritual songs, and his hymns of praise display an individuality and fulness of conception wanting to other compositions of this kind which perhaps surpass his in freshness and simplicity. Besides songs in which the teachings of Platonism give a peculiar colouring to the faith of the Church, we find others in which the tone of the older hymns to Mary has been successfully adopted. If these lauds have not the same ardently soaring strain as those of Benivieni; still we can well imagine that they were sung alternately with the latter when the opposition to the worldly spirit encouraged by their author had gained the victory. This, too, is one of the contrasts which abound in the history of Lorenzo de’ Medici. The lauds give us a deep insight into his mind. They are, in some degree, the agonised cry of a soul which, instead of finding satisfaction in the glory and splendour, the wealth and enjoyments of the world, is repelled by its emptiness, and feels driven further and further away from the highest good, of which the love once kindled within it had grown cold amid the cares and pleasures of this life:

Thou seekest life where nought hath living breath;
Thou seekest joy where nought avails save death.

CHAPTER VII.

MARSILIO FICINO AND CRISTOFORO LANDINO.

In order to gain a complete view both of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s own life and of his influence on the scientific progress of his time, it is necessary to contemplate the circle in which he was placed in his youth, and which, though greatly modified in the course of years, preserved the same character in essentials to the end. The persons of whom it was composed carry us back to the time of Cosimo. The first we meet are Marsilio Ficino and Cristoforo Landino. Both owed their rise to the house of Medici; both contributed to its glory.

The last twenty-five years at least of Ficino’s life were occupied with the endeavour to reconcile Platonism and Christianity, to make the one expand within the other. At the end of 1473, when forty years old, he entered holy orders, after seriously weighing the duties and obligations of that sacred office, and after coming to the conclusion that there is nothing on earth nobler than a good priest, nothing more vile than an unworthy one. At the same time he held counsel with his own mind as to the direction of his philosophical studies. The example of St. Augustine, who, after he became a Christian, inclined to the Platonics of the Christian era, decided him the more easily, because it confirmed the direction of his whole previous life. When he became aware how Platonism recognises Christian dogma on account of the analogies which the latter presents to its own doctrines, he thanked God, and felt himself confirmed in his Christian faith. He did not, however, long remain free from a suspicion of the divergence which Platonism had caused in the mediæval development of Christian teaching from the Aristotelian system, which was the standing-ground of scholasticism, in its efforts to reconcile the faith of the Church with the researches of reason. He had started from the view that religion and philosophy are sisters. As true philosophy, he says, is the loving study of truth and wisdom—as God alone is truth and wisdom—so true philosophy is nothing but genuine religion, and genuine religion nothing but true philosophy. Religion is innate in every man; every religion is good, in so far as it turns to God, but Christianity is the only true one, inspired by the divine power which dwelt in its Founder. For himself, he declares he needs nothing but the teaching of Christ. He would rather believe divine things than know human ones; for divine faith is more secure than human knowledge, and what proceeds from it is confirmed by true science. But there are spirits for whom the authority of the divine law is not enough, and who require the arguments of reason. Divine Providence has ordained that the teachings of Platonism should agree in many things with those of Christianity, in order to bring such spirits to Christ; for, as Augustine said, with the exception of a few things the Platonists were Christians. As Plato always connects religion with philosophy, and does not merely disclose to us the principles and order of natural things, like Aristotle, but teaches us our duty towards Him who orders all things by number, measure, and weight; so he himself has no other object than to make this intimate connection clear, so far as his weak powers permit.

Any one who puts together his numerous remarks on Christianity, dogma, and morality, although he may deem some of his views peculiar, cannot reproach him with constructing a Christianity of his own. Though he found such an agreement between Moses and Plato that he saw in the latter only a Moses writing in the Attic tongue, and though he compared the life of Socrates with the life of Jesus, yet he acknowledged in the Socratic doctrines only a confirmation of the Christian, and guarded himself against seeing in the Greek philosopher a shadow of the Saviour, and from interpreting the Christian mysteries by Platonic writings. Strange was the position of the thinkers of that time, placed as they were between Christianity and the strongly-reviving influences of heathen antiquity, and we should do them great injustice did we not consider the spirit which governed the whole of that period. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola believed he had found in the Cabala the foundation of the faith and the explanation of the Christian mysteries; both he and Marsilio held confidential evening discussions with learned Jewish doctors on the divine inspiration of the Prophecies, and plunged deep into both ancient and mediæval Hebrew lore. By a gradual enlightenment of his mind, filled with the fantastic images of the later Platonism and the half rationalistic mysticism founded on it, Pico came back to the pure Christian faith, which finds in Holy Scripture a living heavenly force whose wonderful power raises man to the height of divine love. Marsilio Ficino’s mysticism, increased by his strong tendency to astrology, assumed in more than one of his writings a colouring which made his friends uneasy. In 1489 he was even accused of magic before Pope Innocent VIII., but was cleared of the charge partly by his own apology, partly by his friends, Francesco Soderini, Ermolao Barbaro, and the archbishop Rinaldo Orsini, who was then at Rome.

Marsilio Ficino always keeps in view the connection between Christianity and philosophy, both in his speculations and in the practical application of his principles and their corollaries. If we are astonished at the fantastic flights which seem to lead him far away from the course he had traced out for himself, we yet gain a clear and comprehensive development of the aim of his whole teaching, the attainment of the highest happiness by the individual as well as by the community, the end for which God created us. In the harmony between the spirit of government and the divine law, whence the written law is derived, he recognises the essential element of general well-being. As regards forms of government, he decides that many are good, if rightly administered—aristocracy, if its limits are not too narrow; democracy, if it produces respect for law. Mob rule is a polypus, all limbs and no head; tyranny has no legal ground and no legitimate limits. Monarchy would be preferable, if it could be maintained according to Plato’s ideal, by power and wisdom united. But the true end of all forms of government and civil constitutions, both in theory and practice, can be reached neither by the few nor by the many, but only by the co-operation of the united forces of the human race, by the maintaining and enforcing of uniform laws by a ruler who is raised above all enmity, ambition, and envy, because he is acknowledged and loved by all. The Christian Platonist, who lived to see the beginning of the new era, the dawn of which had been heralded by the school to which he attached himself, arrived at the summit of his philosophical and political speculations exactly at the same standpoint which the greatest poet of the middle ages had reached more than a century and a half before him, amid the conflict of parties in the State. Wide as was the difference between their positions and experiences of life, and between the civil and political conditions both of their own immediate home and of a large part of Italy, this is a remarkable circumstance, which explains the interest felt by Marsilio Ficino in that book, so diversely judged, in which Dante Alighieri developes his theory of monarchy—a work well-nigh forgotten, despised by the learned on account of its style, and sealed to the generality, till the Platonist of the Medicean times made it accessible to his contemporaries by a translation.

Numerous works were composed by Marsilio Ficino, who occupied himself not only with philosophy but with theology, medicine, and music, and was wont to say that they belonged to each other like body, soul, and spirit in nature. His book on Christian doctrine, begun after his entrance into the priesthood, seems to have been finished in the beginning of 1475, and appeared in the following year, with a declaration that the author submitted himself in all things to the judgment of the Church. He presented his work to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Rather more than two years later he seems to have finished his translation of Plato’s works from the manuscripts given him by Cosimo and by Amerigo Benci. These he submitted to the revision of Demetrius Chalcondylas, Antonio Vespucci, and Giovan Battista Buoninsegni, and also sought advice from Angelo Poliziano, Landino and Bartolommeo Scala. Filippo Valori bore the expenses of the printing, which seems to have been completed at the end of 1482—a proof how men of high Florentine families assumed the character of Mæcenas. Meanwhile, the industrious writer had concluded his great work on the Platonic doctrine of immortality (‘Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animarum’), which came out at the same time with the translation of the writings on which it was founded. The Laurentian library possesses the parchment manuscript which was given to Lorenzo. It contains ideas new and old blended together, and comprising the philosophic system of its author and the defence of the supernatural against Materialism and Pantheism, which at that time numbered many disciples, in opposition to the Platonic school. The scientific value of this work, in which the doctrines of Plato and the teachings of his most dissimilar scholars in ancient and modern times are not easy to distinguish, must rest on its own merits, as must the validity of Lorenzo’s remark that the Materialists, for whom there is no life in the next world, are already dead in this. But we cannot deny the importance of Ficino’s great work in the history of civilisation, nor question its beneficial influence on the time.

Then followed a series of smaller writings on separate questions of philosophy, translations connected with them, and a life of Plato. Cosimo de’ Medici wished to see the works of Plotinus translated by Ficino, an undertaking to which the latter only devoted himself long after the death of its originator, and to which he was chiefly encouraged by Pico della Mirandola. According to his own words, he recognised in this new task a leading of Providence. As the Latin nations had learned to know Plato, the collector of the traditions of religious philosophy, so they should also learn to know Plotinus, who first drew forth from darkness the theology of the ancients and searched into its mysteries. This work was finished in 1486, and a detailed commentary on it in the summer of 1491. Lorenzo had undertaken to defray the cost of printing, and promised to do the same for a new edition of Plato’s works, the former one being inadequate. But the printing was only completed a month after the death of the generous patron—‘magnifico sumptu Laurentii patriæ servatoris.’ After this came a translation of the mystic theology of the writer calling himself Dionysius the Areopagite. Lorenzo Valla, who surpassed most of his contemporaries in keenness of criticism and knowledge of antiquity, had already raised a doubt as to its genuineness, as had also other writers. But this work, perhaps that of a Platonist of the fifth century, fitted in with Marsilio’s system too well not to be accepted by him as valid testimony; another example showing how, like the Alexandrian school, these later disciples wandered from their original models without knowing or intending it; with this difference, that the Neoplatonism of old ran in sharp contradiction to Christianity, while that of more modern times aimed at a union with it.

The philosophic ‘Macrobioticon,’ an original work, was finished in 1490, and dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici and King Matthias Corvinus. Far more interest attaches to Marsilio’s correspondence, which embraces the twenty years between 1474 and 1494—the only product of his literary activity that has a real value at the present time. In these letters his opinions and motives are mirrored with life-like originality, and they afford much information as to his life, his occupations, his social relations, and his friends. The twelve books (which he, following the example of many contemporaries, arranged himself, because apocryphal writings were in circulation) are all dedicated to men of high position or friends of the author: Giuliano de’ Medici, Federigo of Montefeltro, Matthias Corvinus, Bernardo Bembo, Filippo and Niccolò Valori, and others.

Marsilio’s extraordinary literary activity, the more astonishing in a man of delicate health, did not interfere with the performance of his duties as a priest or as a secular teacher. He preached often, not only in his own parish church at Nevoli, but also in Florence, at the church of the Angeli and in the cathedral. His personal relations, to which his correspondence bears witness, were very numerous. Paol’ Antonio Soderini, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Carlo Marsuppini the younger, Piero and Giovanni Guicciardini, Bernardo Canigiani, Bernardo Dovizj of Bibiena, afterwards cardinal; Lorenzo’s nephew Cosimo de’ Pazzi, Bernardo Rucellai, Pier Filippo Pandolfini, Francesco Sassetti, Ugolini Verini, and many others, were his pupils and remained attached to him; while from Leon Battista Alberti and Cristoforo Landino downwards, all the learned men whom Florence or Italy possessed were in communication with him. At an important moment of his life he called three of these, namely, Piero Soderini (afterwards Gonfaloniere for life), Piero del Nero, and Piero Guicciardini, his three brothers in the search after truth; and on March 6, 1482, he stood sponsor to Guicciardini’s son, afterwards the famous statesman and historian. Foreign lands as well as Italy sent their sons to hear his lectures, and more than one of these foreigners remained gratefully attached to him. Among others he became acquainted with several Germans; Johannes Reuchlin and Ludwig Wergenhans (Nauclerus), provost of Stuttgart, who with Gabriel Biel, professor of scholastic philosophy at Tübingen, and the learned theologian Peter Jacobi, of Arlon in Luxemburg, accompanied Count Eberhard of Würtemberg when in the spring of 1482 he undertook the expedition to Rome, which will be mentioned hereafter. Marsilio maintained the most intimate personal relations with Martin Preninger, chancellor of the bishopric of Constance, and afterwards professor of canon law at Tübingen. This man was twice in Italy in the year 1492 on business of Eberhard’s, and his correspondence with Marsilio bears witness to a friendship and agreement of opinions rare to meet with. Marsilio was wont to say that he possessed two friends, one in Germany, the other in Italy, who represented the alliance between philosophy and jurisprudence, namely, Martinus Uranius (Preninger’s literary name) and Giovan Vittorio Soderini. He had Greek manuscripts copied for his Swabian friend, and kept him informed of what was going on in the field of science, as well as of what he was doing himself. Another of his German correspondents was Georg Herwart of Augsburg, who made his acquaintance in Florence; Reuchlin’s younger brother Dionysius and Johann Strehler of Ulm also received introductions to him, when being sent by the Count of Würtemberg to study in Italy they enjoyed the notice of Lorenzo de’ Medici and were received into the house of Giorgio Antonio Vespucci. Numerous princes, temporal and spiritual, beginning with Matthias Corvinus, who tried vainly to attract him to Ofen like Argyropulos, were in regular correspondence with him, asked his advice on points of theology and philosophy, and sought his criticism on various works.

Amid all these unsought testimonies of honour and confidence, Marsilio Ficino remained simple, unpretending, easily satisfied. His delicate health compelled him to lead a quiet life, and suffices to explain the melancholy humour that often stole over him when alone. Yet in company which he liked, and which afforded food for his mind in unrestrained intercourse, he was cheerful and sympathetic. His musical talents, bringing change and refreshment from serious studies, helped to season his conversation. With his plectrum, an instrument which he himself perfected, he resembled the poet-sages of the mythic age. He was seldom absent from Platonic banquets, and had been an habitual guest of Lorenzo’s grandfather when the latter invited learned men to his house. He loved a country life above all things, and passed a great part of his time on the little estate of Montevecchio. In later years he often went to see Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano, when they were staying in his neighbourhood—the one at Querceto, the other at Fiesole; and still oftener to Lorenzo, when he was living at Careggi. He was received as a welcome guest at the villas of Valori, Canigiani, Cavalcanti, and others. At Montevecchio he instituted a peculiar yearly festival. On SS. Cosmo and Damian’s day he assembled the old tenants (‘coloni’) of his first and greatest patron and entertained them with music and singing. His independence of mind was in no way diminished by intercourse with those who, through birth or a successful career, held a higher position in life. He once wrote thus to Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose fondness for pleasure in his earlier, perhaps also in his later days, appeared to Ficino excessive, and caused him anxiety: ‘In the name of the eternal God I intreat thee, my dearest Prince, to economise every moment of this brief life, lest there come over thee vain remorse for dissipation and irreparable harm. The consciousness of lost time drew deep sighs from the great Cosimo in my presence, when he had reached the age of seventy. Trifling occupations and empty pastimes rob thee of thy true self; they make thee a slave, who art born to be a ruler. Free thyself while thou canst from this miserable servitude; only to-day canst thou do so, for only to-day is thine own; to-morrow it will be too late.’

When the young Raffaelle Riario was made a cardinal, he addressed to him warnings and counsels similar to those given in a like case, fourteen years later, by Lorenzo to his son, who was departing for Rome. He reminded him that, since he owed his high rank not to his own merits, he was the more bound to justify by his manner of life the preference bestowed on him. His memorable appeal to Pope Sixtus IV. during the war of 1478[6] shows how he could combine outspokenness with reverence for the head of the Church, which the Bishop of Arezzo, a far higher dignitary than he, and Francesco Filelfo made light of. His was the frankness of a lover of truth whose soul was filled with grief for the evils which had befallen the flock, and no less for the blots which in an unhappily complicated affair had fallen on the reputation of a supreme pastor who ought to be revered for his wisdom and goodness.

Like a true philosopher, Marsilio Ficino never strove after outward splendour. His income was most modest. Besides his little farm, he received from Lorenzo two benefices of which the revenue was small, as he was obliged to entrust them to curates, but which would have sufficed for his modest requirements had he not been besieged in his later years by a swarm of needy relatives. Without the aid of rich friends, the publication of his works would have been impossible. Amid the restlessness and discontent of the learned men of his time, who were rushing breathlessly after wealth and honours; amid the greediness for ecclesiastical benefices, even among those who were not priests like himself, Marsilio Ficino, contented and devoted to science, is a fine example of the realisation of those philosophic doctrines which in the case of so many were only spiritual luxuries or a means of making money. It is this that gives interest to his character and work, though his writings have lost their value except in their connection with the history of learning. Lorenzo’s attachment to him remained unchanged till his last hour; it shows itself in his poems as vividly as in his letters. ‘Write to me,’ he says in a letter addressed to him from Pisa, about 1473,[7] ‘whatever occurs to your mind, for nothing ever comes from you that is not good; you never have an unworthy thought, so that you can never write me anything that will not be useful or agreeable. What makes me long for your letters is that in them you combine elegance of expression with solidity of contents, so that in both respects they leave nothing to be desired.’ And in the philosophic poem mentioned above, on the independence of happiness from outward position, he thus describes Marsilio’s appearance, with a touch of the warm feeling that inspired Dante on meeting his master Brunetto, at the sight of the ‘dear, good, fatherly face:’

Marsilio is this, of Montevecchio,
Whom heaven has filled with its own special grace,
That to the world its mirror he may be?

This is that faithful follower of the Muses,

In whom are grace and wisdom aye united,
And never separated one from other;

From us and all worthy of highest honour.[8]

Cristoforo Landino stands far below Marsilio Ficino in scientific importance. But both as a professor and in the learned circle of the Medici he held a peculiar position; and by one of his literary works he opened out a path which hundreds trod after him without taking away the relative value of his labours. His life was not like that of his contemporary and friend, dedicated solely to literature. As Chancellor of the Magistracy of the Guelphic party, and one of the secretaries of the Republic, he was concerned in public affairs till a late period of his life.[9] During the lifetime of Pope Eugene IV. he passed some time in Rome, and studied those antiquities the decay of which made a painful impression on him, as on other Florentines of his time. But when complaining, like others, that the travertine of the amphitheatre is broken up and burnt for chalk, and that the antique sculptures lie about mutilated, he exaggerates strangely when he says:[10]

Though round the mighty city thy gaze contemplative wanders,
Vainly around does it look for monuments vanished and gone.

In January, 1458, he accepted the professorship of eloquence and poetry at the University, and gathered round him a continually renewed circle of hearers, his influence being equalled by that of no contemporary save Ficino. In 1460 he began to lecture on the Italian poems of Petrarca, being desirous to stem the tide of contempt for the vulgar tongue which still existed in learned circles. Though in this respect he deserves all praise, yet his remarks on contemporaries, on Bruni, Alberti, Palmieri, show how he was himself still prejudiced in his view of the philological treatment of the language. His labours in the field of classical philology have no great weight. He wrote a commentary on Horace and one on Virgil, the former of which he dedicated to Guidobaldo of Montefeltro, and the latter to the young Piero de’ Medici. He also translated Pliny’s ‘Natural History,’ and undertook translations of modern Italian works, such as Giovanni Simonetta’s Latin ‘History of Francesco Sforza,’ which was published at Milan in 1490. He composed a letter-writer and a formulary for speeches, which was printed two years later, with a dedication to Duke Ercole d’Este. But the true centre of his activity and its importance lies elsewhere—in his relation to and share in that intellectual movement amid which the Medici lived, and in his position as a leader of the revival of the study of Dante. In illustration of the first point, his ‘Disputationes Camaldulenses,’ which belong to the history of Lorenzo’s youth, deserve especial consideration.

Amidst the fir and beech woods which still cover the Casentino hills, where they rise towards the Apennines, lies the convent which gave its name to the order of St. Romuald. For nearly a thousand years countless pilgrims and travellers have rested within the hospitable walls of Camaldoli, which now seem threatened with abandonment and desolation. The Medici had long kept up intimate relations with the Order. Cosimo and his brother were frequent visitors to the monastery of the Angeli; and here, in the mother-convent of the Casentino, Madonna Contessina had built a chapel to the Baptist. The connection lasted long. Lorenzo’s son Giovanni dedicated some peaceful days in his youth to contemplation and prayer here, as did many before and after him who sat on the chair of St. Peter or were reckoned by the Church among her saints—Gregory IX., Eugene IV., Paul III., Francis of Assisi, and Charles Borromeo. More than four centuries ago, there assembled here a select society composed of elements the most diverse and yet congenial. Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici came to exchange the noise and glare of the city for the delicious freshness and solitude of the woods. Piero and Donato Acciaiuoli, Alamanno Rinuccini, whose youthful studies had been directed by Poggio Bracciolini, and who had been one of the best pupils of Argyropulos, Marco Parenti, and Antonio Canigiani, accompanied the youths. Cristoforo Landino and his brother Piero came up from their home in the valley to the cooler height of the convent, where they also met Leon Battista Alberti and Ficino. Thus many of the most eminent men of the Medicean circle assembled round Lorenzo and Giuliano, who, notwithstanding their youth, were already accustomed to take part in serious discourse. The abbot, Mariotto Allegri, as host, was the centre of the circle; but it was Alberti who, with his many-sided knowledge and easy command of it, gave the tone to the evening’s discourse.

On the following morning, after the whole company had assisted at mass in the church of the convent, they all moved along the pleasant woodland path leading to the summit of the mountain ridge, past the little group of dwellings and gardens, the place where, according to the legend, the saint had a dream which led him to change his black Benedictine robe for the white one which continued to be worn at Camaldoli, as it is represented in Andrea Sacchi’s fine picture at the Vatican. We know not whether the travellers reached the neighbouring mountain ridge, the watershed of Italy, whence the eye looks down on Romagna and takes in the wide sweep of the far-off Adriatic. The narrator makes the company halt on the height near a spring, under the shelter of a mighty beech; a tree which, defying the mountain storms, overtops all other trees on the Apennines, whose brow it adorns here in the midst of fine pasture lands. Here Leon Battista, again taking the lead in the conversation, dilated on the good effects of retirement and meditation on the mind of the statesman and the scholar, and showed that only when the mind is set free from contact with the individual does it become capable of embracing the whole. Then turning to the two young men the speaker reminded them that their father’s failing health would probably soon call them to the guidance of state affairs, which, he said, were already in some degree entrusted to their care. After a somewhat extravagant eulogium of Lorenzo’s qualities, his courage, prudence, and moderation, Alberti continued to set forth how, notwithstanding such qualities and the moderate bearing he had hitherto displayed, quiet meditation or discourse held with a confidential circle on the deepest questions of human nature could not but be beneficial to the community. When the learned man thus adopted the Platonic principle, according to which complete abstinence from worldly pursuits brings our nature most surely to perfection, it would not have been difficult for Lorenzo, who was already well acquainted with this doctrine, to show that a man who practically applied and followed this principle must necessarily be brought into contradiction with his duties as a citizen; whereas the two phases of our nature—the active and the contemplative life—not divided, but united and balancing each other, lead to the true fulfilment of the purpose of existence.

From the objection put into the mouth of the young man and directed against Landino’s own teaching, as well as from the praises bestowed on Lorenzo’s conduct, it is clear that the date of the conversation is shortly before the death of Piero de’ Medici, when the Pitti transactions had given evidence of the prudence and talents of his son. The visit to Camaldoli may have taken place earlier, but the ‘disputations,’ which are the actual conversations expanded and embellished, were certainly not composed before 1470. In the discourses of the three following days Alberti again took the lead, and expounded the connection of the ‘Æneid’ with Platonic philosophy. What is here said of the character of Virgil’s poetry, of the ancient wisdom therein, which has become common property, of the poet’s knowledge and reverence for antiquity, of the relation between the poetical garniture and the more solid contents of the work, was probably drawn from Landino’s own Virgilian studies, for the author of the book speaks through the mouths of those to whom he attributes the conversations held in the woods of Camaldoli. He dedicated his work to Federigo of Montefeltro. If, as it seems, this dedication to the valiant and accomplished prince of Urbino was made in 1472, the book has a certain connection with the sad occurrences at Volterra, in which Lorenzo de’ Medici’s action belied only too strongly the Platonic theory of wisdom.[11]

If Cristoforo Landino is ever mentioned nowadays, it is only on account of his studies of Dante, which constitute his only value in the eyes of posterity. The study of the ‘Divine Comedy’ went through the most varied phases in Florence as elsewhere. On the petition of divers citizens (see above, vol. i. p. 80) in 1373, fifty-two years after Dante’s death, the Republic decreed the establishment of public lectures on his great poem.[12] On Sunday, October 3, in the church of Sto. Stefano, Giovanni Boccaccio began the lectures, the interruption of which by his death shortly after was lamented by Francesco Sacchetti. Messer Antonio, priest of Vado, and Filippo Villani succeeded him. A mass of commentaries were composed almost immediately after the poet’s own time, partly by his own friends. Numerous copies of the poem were in circulation; that which was formerly in the library of the convent of Sta. Croce, and is now in the Laurentiana, was attributed to Filippo Villani. Most of these copies were faulty. ‘I am trying,’ wrote Coluccio Salutati to Niccolò of Todi, at the beginning of the fifteenth century,[13] ‘to get a correct copy of the work of our divine Dante. Believe me, we possess nothing more sublime than these three poems, nothing more richly adorned, nothing more carefully worked out, nothing which penetrates further into the depths of knowledge. What only comes to others in part this one man has mastered as a whole. His moral precepts are sublime; he throws light on natural history and theology, and his masterly handling of language and rhetoric is such that it would be difficult to find equal beauty of style even in the greatest writers. With him the laws, manners, tongues, the history of all nations, shine like stars in the firmament with such majesty that no one can equal him in this respect, far less surpass him. Wherefore do I say all this? That my eagerness to obtain a correct text may cause thee less astonishment.’

This enthusiasm for Dante—an enthusiasm which one cannot but feel was less for the poet than for the man who had mastered more than any other all the learning of his time—was, however, by no means shared by all the learned men of the fifteenth century, whose threshold Coluccio barely crossed. Niccolò Niccoli, by his attacks on his great countryman, exposed himself to obloquy from which he never recovered; though it must not be forgotten that the words in which Niccoli calls Dante’s book reading for cobblers and bakers are only found in a writing of Leonardo Bruni, who was just as excitable as Niccoli himself. Niccoli’s rage seems to have been especially excited by the unclassical Latin in Dante’s letters; but the reproach which he brings against Dante, that he knew nothing of classical literature, and drew all his information from monkish compendiums—a reproach which, strangely enough, he also applies to Petrarca and Boccaccio[14]—resembles other tokens of the pride of the humanistic school too strongly to be seriously examined. The lecture given at the end of 1430 by Francesco Filelfo against the censurers of Dante, and the controversial treatise composed for the same object by Cino Rinuccini, father of Alamanno, are sufficiently clear proofs how false was the judgment of many. Filelfo himself declared, more than forty years later, that he undertook the public exposition of the ‘Divine Comedy’ of his own accord, and in deference to a general wish.[15] About the close of the fourteenth century Filippo Villani wrote a short life of Dante; a longer biography came out in 1436 written by Leonardo Bruni; twenty years later he was followed by Gianozzo Manetti. Not long after the latter, Gian Maria Filelfo, Francesco’s son, who had many opportunities of acquiring information from the poet’s descendants living in Verona, wrote a new biography which he dedicated to Pietro Alighieri, and which the latter sent, at the end of 1467, to Piero de’ Medici and Tommaso Soderini.[16] The erection in Sta. Maria del Fiore of a monument in the shape of the poet’s statue was decreed in 1465. Ten years later, the picture painted by Domenico di Michelino was placed in the north aisle of the church.[17] In literature the great poet’s countrymen had wandered far away from the path which he had pointed out; but they guarded his memory faithfully, and the beautiful manuscripts which appeared about the middle of the fifteenth century, shortly before the introduction of printing, prove how much his work was held in honour.

In 1472 a German named Johann Numeister (Neumeister), and a native of Fuligno, printed the ‘Divine Comedy’ for the first time in that Umbrian city.[18] Other impressions at Mantua, Jesi, and other places were followed in 1477 by the first edition at Venice, with a commentary of the fourteenth century. At last, after Florence had allowed nine editions to take precedence of her, the first Florentine edition appeared in the summer of 1481, with the glosses of Cristoforo Landino. A Silesian named Nicolaus (Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna) had the honour of presenting to the poet’s native city the text of his work, accompanied by the commentary in smaller type, in a form highly creditable to his still youthful art. The Magliabecchian library possesses the copy, printed on parchment, which Landino presented to the Signoria, with a speech which also appeared in print.[19] Rich miniatures at the beginning, arabesque borders, a medallion portrait of Dante, and on the binding, striped with the Florentine colours, red and white, niello-work representing the lion and Hercules, the seal of the commonwealth, with the lily-shield and that of the red cross, show with what pretensions this edition came forth. By a decree of somewhat tardy justice the Republic reinstated the exile of 1301 in his civil rights and honours, and placed his statue, crowned with laurel, in the baptistery of San Giovanni. In a Latin address Ficino set forth the rejoicings of Florence at the restoration of his honour by the hands of one of his fellow-citizens; and Benivieni celebrated in harmonious terza rima the fulfilment of the prophecy in which the exile predicted his future fame, and his ultimate return to his ungrateful city:

With other voice forthwith, with other fleece,
Poet will I return, and at my font
Baptismal will I take the laurel crown.[20]

The Signoria showed itself grateful to Landino. It gave him a tower on the ramparts of Borgo alia Collina, where he dwelt, and its possession was confirmed to his descendants in 1563 by a sentence of the supreme civil court of Florence, the Rota, when the magistrates of the Parte Guelfa claimed it as public property. His work is not remarkable for critical thoroughness and correctness, but for the commentary, which had great influence on opinion at the time and long afterwards. Six if not seven reissues in different places before the end of the century show with what approval this edition was received. It encountered formidable rivals, with respect to the text, in 1502, in the first Aldine, and with respect to the commentary in 1544, in Alessandro Vellutello’s work, which was soon followed by others; yet it retains some value even now. While Landino was earning well-deserved fame by this fruit of diligent study, the lectures in the cathedral on the ‘Divine Comedy’ were entrusted, in 1483, to the preaching friar Domenico da Corella, who had taken part in the council, and dedicated his Latin poem on the life of the Virgin Theotokon to Piero de’ Medici in 1468. Marsilio Ficino had long previously turned his attention to Dante when he dedicated his translation of the ‘De Monarchia’ in 1467 to his friends Bernardo del Nero and Antonio Manetti. The latter, who occupied himself much with copying old codices, is remembered among students of Dante by his dialogue (between himself and Benivieni) on the position, form, and extent of hell. Marsilio’s dedication states that he had held much discourse with the two men named on the questions raised by this political treatise, and that they were thereby led to discuss the ‘Divina Commedia.’ As Dante treated in his poem of the kingdom of the blessed, of the regions of the wretched, and of the place where departed souls abide waiting for redemption, so in his book on monarchy he treated of the realms of those who are still waiting and hoping in this world. The perception, imperfect though it be, of the spiritual connection between the great poem and its author’s other works, shows a progress in the appreciation of Dante remarkable at the time, and to this Cristoforo Landino had practically contributed.

Lorenzo’s great interest in the most sublime poet of the middle ages is shown both by testimonies in his own writings and by a letter written to him, April 13, 1476, by the above-named Antonio Manetti, then governor of the small town of San Giovanni, in the Val d’Arno. This letter[21] shows that Lorenzo had come to an understanding with the Venetian ambassador, Bernardo Bembo, for the purpose of soliciting from the senate of that Republic the return of Dante’s mortal remains from Ravenna to Florence. ‘Magnificent Lord,’—thus the letter begins—‘I am told that the Venetian ambassador has returned home. Remembering what you once told me, as we returned from visiting him shortly after Matteo Palmieri’s funeral, when we were near the house of Antonio Pucci, I wish you would bring that matter to a conclusion. I know not what greater pleasure I could have in my life than to witness the return of those remains which the magnificent ambassador promised to obtain when he went back to his own country; the more so as I am sure that, with your greatness and magnanimity, you will do whatever is in your power to give to the remains of such a man the reception they deserve, as to sepulture and crown. Great acts are for the magnanimous; but what could be greater than this? I commend myself to your Magnificence. May the Lord be with you.’

Twice already, in 1396 and 1426, when the Polenta family, which had offered hospitality to the exiled poet, was still reigning at Ravenna, the Florentines had tried to get back his remains. But both times they failed; and they had no better luck in 1476, nor again under the reign of Leo X., when Michael Angelo offered to raise the monument to his great countryman, whom he resembled in more respects than one. Seven years after the date of Antonio Manetti’s letter, Bernardo Bembo, when Podestà at Ravenna, caused Dante’s sepulchre to be restored. He had been too rash in the promise given to Lorenzo de’ Medici, but he did all that lay in his power to honour the memory of the father of Italian poetry.

CHAPTER VIII.

LUIGI PULCI AND ANGELO POLIZIANO.

An influence hardly less important than that of the philosophers and grammarians was exercised on Lorenzo and his epoch by the literary innovators who, with some infusion of classic learning, were not so pedantic as the early humanists, while they bore the impress of the teaching of the preceding century. The Medici were to these men of letters, just as much as they were to the philosophers, the centre to which their several rays converged, and Lorenzo’s name is inseparable from the names of several among them. One in this brilliant circle holds a different position from the rest. He took as a poet the part which Landino took as a critic in the revival of the study of Dante. Matteo Palmieri holds a place by himself. The first glance into his great poem, the ‘City of Life,’ (‘Città di Vita’) shows it to be an imitation of the ‘Divine Comedy;’ but only in the outward form. It is a philosophical work, the object of which is to describe and correct the problems and abuses of citizen life. It contains no real poetry, but has the merit of popularising the doctrines of moral philosophy in language somewhat lifeless, indeed, yet expressive, comparatively pure, and free from the philological follies of the age. The book became known only within a narrow circle. Theological criticism discovered in it the heretical doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which indeed Alamanno Rinuccini avowed without scruple in his funeral oration on the poet, and the work was suppressed. In later years the author wrote an unfinished history of the world, and a life of the grand seneschal Nicola Acciaiuolo. He had been a pupil of Traversari and Marsuppini, had held important offices of state, and after fulfilling several embassies with honour, died at a ripe age in 1475.[22]

While this faint echo of Dante was addressing itself to the higher classes, and proving how large was the retrogression from the beginning of the fourteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century, the popular poetry, of which the religious side has been already noticed, began to sound a natural strain in a lighter style. Burlesque, which belonged to the character of the people, was allowed considerable play. The sonnets that came forth from the barber’s shop of Domenico, called ‘Burchiello,’ in the very heart of old Florence, the Calimala, and the market, enjoy a reputation that must be taken on trust. They were chiefly experiments in the Florentine vulgar tongue—full of allusions and trivialities; but occasionally they take a flight which may serve to throw light on social and political matters, if all the writings attributed to this man, who died at Rome in 1448, are really by him. Another burlesque poet, Matteo Franco, whom we shall meet again, belonged to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household, and used to hold with other poets, particularly with Luigi Pulci, satirical and not always very seemly sham-fights as a social pastime. But far more important for this period was the rise of a new style which was destined to give to the sixteenth century its special poetic character. Of the brothers Pulci, scions of an old family somewhat reduced in circumstances, one, Bernardo, tried his hand both as an original writer and a translator of eclogues; the two others are among the cultivators of the poetry of chivalry, which began its course as a branch of literature under their auspices. Both Luca and Luigi belong to the immediate Medicean circle. Luca Pulci, the eldest brother, born at Florence in 1431, is commonly designated as the author of the poem on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s tournament, which only retains a place in literature because it records an event in the life of a celebrated man. But the assumption of this authorship is by no means certain, for the first edition bears the name of Luigi Pulci, whose literary fame it would not enhance. That Luca was intimate with the young Medici is shown by the fact that at their desire he began the poem ‘Ciriffo Calvaneo,’ which two generations later was partially continued by Bernardo Giambullari for another Lorenzo, grandson of the Magnificent. It is a poetical version of a popular romance of chivalry, which in its Italian form bears the title of the ‘Povero Avveduto,’ and relates the battles and adventures of the time of King Louis d’Outre-mer of France, in 921-954.[23] Luca Pulci, after some unlucky banking affairs at Rome and Florence, died in 1470, in the debtors’ prison of the Stinche, and left to his brothers the burden of a large family. He was, as we have said, the eldest of the brothers; but it is probable that his ‘Ciriffo’ was preceded by Luigi’s ‘Morgante.’ We are led to assume this by the fact that Luigi chose a far better subject.[24] His poem must have been written in and after 1460, and the cantos must have followed close upon each other. We learn from the author himself that its original conception was due in part to Lorenzo’s mother. In a letter addressed by him to Lorenzo from Fuligno, December 4, 1470, he held out prospects of a new heroic poem.[25] That a serious and pious woman like Madonna Lucrezia should be patroness of a work more or less offensive in a religious point of view may be matter of surprise. But after making allowance for the tendencies of the time, which saw no harm in a mixture of religion and burlesque, and, amid the strictest devotional practices, treated questions of faith with incredible unceremoniousness, it must be remembered that this lady was wont for the sake of genius to judge leniently many things in literature and in life that were questionable. Thus she remained a supporter of Angelo Poliziano after he had fallen into disgrace with her daughter-in-law, and presented him with her religious poems when the unfavourable rumours as to his faith and morals could be no secret to her. But Luigi Pulci, the free-thinker and loose mocker, who mixed up quotations from St. John’s Gospel with open expressions of unbelief, found in her an active and zealous friend till her life’s close.

The ‘Morgante Maggiore’ was the beginning of the romantic epopee, which successfully laid hold of the cycle of Carolingian legends that had been rendered accessible to the Italian nation by the ‘Chronicle’ of Turpin and the book of the ‘Reali di Francia.’ This choice of a subject was all the happier because Florence attributed her restoration to Charlemagne, as may be read carved in stone in the church of the Apostles. The style of the work is original. Amid all its prodigies the old knightly romance is serious and full of faith. Christianity is always the foil to the chivalry which sprang from it, and which is animated by its spirit. ‘Morgante’ (the story takes its name from the giant who accomplishes his strange exploits) is not a satire on chivalry, but it is so saturated with burlesque that it assumes a very peculiar character. Neither is it a denial of Christianity, from which, on the contrary, it derives here and there a deeply religious tone; but it is Christianity struggling with scepticism and denial, so that the faith of the Church and the people is driven into the background. In this respect ‘Morgante’ is a true mirror of the time. With its perfect command of the subject, bound down to no poetical rules or precedents, it is a mixture of seriousness and irony, Christianity and unbelief, Biblical texts and profane witticisms. It is full of the most glaring contrasts of sound common-sense and folly, of elegance and coarseness, of lofty intellectual flights and mere buffoonery. There is in this poem more richness of imagination and spontaneity than perhaps in any other work before the appearance of the ‘Orlando Furioso;’ passages occur full of the deepest pathos, and showing a feeling that belongs only to a real poet—passages too often followed by a grotesqueness that tends to destroy their effect. The qualities here united in very unequal degrees were developed and discriminated by later poets. The importance of Luigi Pulci lies less in his poem, which falls short of perfection in every way, than in the fact that his work contains the germs of the romantic epopee in all its various branches. In considering that the two parent poems of chivalry in Italian, the ‘Morgante’ and ‘Ciriffo,’ originated in the Medicean house, let it be remembered how much this branch of poetry, up to the ‘Jerusalem Delivered,’ with which it terminates, was connected with that Court life which is so constantly represented in its varied productions. From the household of Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, who at the highest pinnacle of their fame did not abandon the simplicity and comfort of free citizen life, to the ceremonious Court of Alfonso of Este, is certainly a very long step. Though the Pulci did not go so far as to weave into their ottava rima a genealogy of their patrons reaching back to demigods, still theirs was a kind of poetry destined to enliven stately banquets.

Luigi Pulci’s intimacy with Lorenzo is shown by his oft-quoted letters, which throw some side-lights on the various relations between patron and client, and on the commissions, rather political than literary, entrusted to the latter. The author of ‘Morgante’ was sincerely attached to his young patron. When the latter was going to Southern Italy in 1466, before the Neroni and Pitti conspiracy, Pulci wrote to him from the convent of Alverina:[26] ‘Dost thou really mean to leave me buried in the snow among these woods, lonely and comfortless, while thou goest to Rome? Is it really my fate that, whatever thou mayest think of me, as the climax of my ill-luck, I must never mount a horse by thy side? Am I to come to that only when I am an old man? How often have we talked about Rome, and now shall I not accompany thee?—can it be because I should increase the expenses of the journey? Let not that trouble thee; amid all my troubles I will yet do thee credit. A horse is all I ask of thee; for I shall find so many friends yonder, and will manage so well, that I will not be a burthen to thee, as perhaps thou fearest. Truly thou art wrong to pass me by, not to mention that it would hurt me more than anything in this world. Do not treat me as if I were old iron, for I shall soon be well if thou carest for me.’ And Lorenzo really did care for him. Two years later Pulci wrote to him from Pisa: ‘If thou dost not wish people to believe or know that I am thy friend, and have some influence with thee, placard it on the walls—at thine own expense, of course; as for some time past having had no money to pay away, I have been paying with thy name instead. Wherever I show myself people whisper, “That is Lorenzo’s great friend.”’ That Pulci’s money matters were not in brilliant order we have already seen. His brother’s business misfortunes brought him into great difficulties. ‘Never yet have I made a plan,’ he wrote to Lorenzo after Luca’s failure, ‘that Fate did not destroy in an hour what I had taken a year to build up. I must have come into the world like hares and other poor animals, doomed to be the prey of the huntsman. It is my fate to love thee, and to be very little in thy company.’ That the Medicean bank helped him out, but that the loans were very unimportant and notorious besides, we learn from a petition dated from his estate at Mugello, May 14, 1479, to the effect that Lorenzo would grant him a longer delay for the repayment of a hundred gold florins. He was evidently included in the measures which were rendered necessary by the bad state of the Medicean finances at that time. Pulci, who among others was very intimate with the Sanseverini, seems to have been employed by Lorenzo especially at Naples, Bologna, and Milan, both before and after this period. The last of the poet’s letters known to us, written from Verona, August 28, 1484, shows him to us in the suite of Roberto da Sanseverino and his son Fracasso, who were on their way to Venice. He died in Padua shortly after, but nothing is known about his death.[27]

Luigi Pulci was about seventeen years older than his princely friend Lorenzo de’ Medici, while the man who entered into the closest and most productive intellectual relations with Lorenzo was a few years his junior. In 1464 a boy of ten came to Florence to seek maintenance and instruction in the house of some not very wealthy relatives. He had been rendered fatherless by one of those tragedies which bring to light and stigmatise the wild passions and party hatred that in the Tuscan communes of the fifteenth century mocked at justice, and which, though so fearful in punishment, was so powerless for the protection of the citizens. Benedetto Ambrogini of Montepulciano, a jurist of a not undistinguished family, who had held civil and judicial offices at home and abroad, had in the previous year applied to Piero de’ Medici[28] for protection against the bloodthirsty enmity of fellow-citizens and neighbours, to which he soon after fell a victim, leaving unprovided a widow with five children, of whom the above-named boy was the eldest.[29] Angelo, who took from his birthplace the name of Poliziano, early became acquainted with the serious side of life; for although as a child he showed brilliant talents and made rapid progress, he was in danger of being compelled to seek a living as assistant in a shop, and of renouncing the studies to which he was ardently devoted. At fifteen he expressed this tormenting dread in a Latin poem addressed to the young but celebrated philologer, Bartolommeo Fonte, who at that time assisted him with guidance and encouragement.[30] In the year 1469-70 he studied at the Florentine university, and at seventeen he wrote Greek epigrams. He had the privilege of listening to the men who kept alive the traditions of the university’s best days, Argyropulos and Andronikos Kallistos, Landino and Ficino. That polite literature attracted him more than philosophical lectures he declares himself, saying that he had done with philosophy as dogs with the Nile: one drink, and then away! ‘Nature and youth drew me to Homer, and with all the zeal and industry of which I was capable I set myself to translate him into Latin verse.’ In one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of his Latin poems, the distichs addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici in commendation of his master Kallistos, he sets forth how the latter was reading the Trojan war in Argive verse. In this poem he alludes to the time when he hopes to sing the deeds of Lorenzo, then limited to youthful exercises, and his adroit conduct in the matter of the Pitti conspiracy, which Poliziano commemorates in a later elegy.[31]

It must have been about 1470 that he began to translate the ‘Iliad.’ Carlo Marsuppini had translated the first book; Angelo began with the second. It was a great undertaking for a young man. A Latin Homer had been the in votis up to that time; and now the work was begun by one who had but just entered the world and was still unknown, but who displayed an ease and grace of diction, melodiousness and richness of versification, that caused general surprise. This work and the admiration it excited opened the Medicean house to the young poet. It was probably Ficino who recommended the ‘Homeric youth’ to Lorenzo. The young head of the house, who had only become independent the year before, took him up; and whatever changes outward and inward occurred in Lorenzo’s life, the man who owed his brilliant endowments to Heaven, and their early and happy recognition to him kept faithful; he stood beside his patron’s death-bed and ere long followed him to the tomb. The dedication of the second book contains praises of the generous protector—praises lavish according to custom, but not untrue if the custom and the glory with which the young ruler of Florence had surrounded himself be taken into consideration.[32] A troop of panegyrists followed, Marsilio Ficino at their head. There was no lack of exaggeration. The head of the Platonists raised a flattering doubt whether any one could discover if the Greek or the Latin text of this Iliad was the original; another asked who had the greatest merit, he who had given occasion for the undertaking, or he who had accomplished it. Meanwhile the translator went on with his work; and when, two years after the completion of the second book, he presented the third to his patron, he expressed a hope that after finishing the whole he might begin an epic poem on a subject taken from Lorenzo’s own life, the war of Volterra. The ‘Iliad’ was never finished, the epic was never written. Lorenzo, who knew the world much better than did Angelo, probably objected to the glorification of an expedition of questionable prowess and of unquestionable barbarity. In like manner, when his son Leo was raised to the cardinalate, he disapproved of the eulogium which Poliziano addressed to the Pope. When Poliziano described the most important and dramatic event of his patron’s life, the conspiracy of the Pazzi, it was in prose.

The man who had received the young poet into his house and enabled him to give all his time to study was doubtless also the cause of his sending a specimen of his work to Cardinal Ammanati, who kept up such intimate relations with the Medici. Poliziano’s address to this Prince of the Church[33] was modest. He wrote that he was doing like the eagle, which carries its young as soon as they are out of the shell into the light of the rising sun, that their eyes may become accustomed to its splendour. The cardinal, in whom survived the humanistic tradition of the days of Pius II., returns him phrase for phrase without offending against truth. The verses were wonderfully harmonious for so young a writer; the enterprise was useful as an introduction to great things. But if Homer could be asked whether he wished to be turned into Latin, he feared that the old poet, feeling the impossibility of a perfect rendering, would prefer to remain a citizen of Kolophon rather than become a Florentine, and would consider the pallium a more suitable vesture than the toga. In 1473, our poet had addressed some verses full of sonorous but very ordinary flattery to the spendthrift Cardinal of San Sisto, Pietro Riario, on the occasion of his appointment to the archbishopric of Florence. Instead of the expected present, he was put off with fine speeches, and, after the fashion of poor poets, complained bitterly.[34]

About this time, also, he was rewarded with nothing but words by another cardinal, a very different man from Riario. He must have said to himself that the days of Nicholas V. were over, although Sixtus IV. hardly yielded to him in his zeal for collecting books. He never seems to have become acquainted with the Pope, and the disagreement which gradually arose between the latter and Poliziano’s protector deprived him of all opportunity of doing so. Four books of the translation of Homer are in existence;[35] whether the work proceeded further is uncertain. It was twice interrupted, and the second interruption decided its fate. Poliziano may, in the progress of his studies, have come round to the views of the Cardinal of Pavia, and have doubted whether a Latinity which strove after the elegance of the Augustan age was suited to the old Greek epic.

The first short interruption was a journey to Mantua with Cardinal Francesco da Gonzaga, in August 1472. The intimate relations between the Gonzaga and the Medici, which corresponded to those between the Marquis Lodovico and the city of Florence, have been already spoken of. Francesco took the youthful poet with him from the Medici house. Poliziano, then aged eighteen, had already given proof of uncommon talent on the occasion of a visit to his native city, where his arrival was celebrated with brilliant festivities. Here originated the drama of ‘Orpheus,’ which made an epoch in literature, less by its actual merit than as the first example of a profane drama in the Italian tongue. Mysteries had long been popular; the modern drama, even when treating modern historical subjects, still more when, as in the works of Alberti and Gregorio Correr, it was directly modelled on the antique, had always adhered to the Latin language. In a letter to one of the cardinal’s suite, Messer Carlo Canale (who was, it may be mentioned, the second or third husband of the mother of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia), the author states that ‘Orpheus’ was composed in two days, amid constant noisy distractions, and that it was written in the vulgar tongue in order to be more intelligible to the hearers—‘an imperfect work, fitted to bring its father shame rather than honour, and worthy of the fate prepared by the Lacedæmonians for children born weakly or crippled.’ This ‘favola’ is not a drama; it is a succession of lyrical pieces, with an ode inserted in Latin Sapphics, in praise of the cardinal, which Baccio Ugolini, another member of the Medicean circle and of Landino’s school, sang to the lyre in the character of ‘Orpheus.’[36]

The Mantuan journey was a short episode. Some smaller Latin poems, including the beautiful and pathetic elegy on the death of Albiera degli Albizzi, the charming bride of Sigismondo della Stufa, in 1473, kept Poliziano in the same mood, and cannot fairly be considered as interruptions to his Homeric work. A longer interruption was caused by Giuliano de’ Medici’s tournament, which was a challenge to Angelo to write the fairest flower in his poetic garland.[37] He himself alludes to this interruption in the seventh stanza of the ‘Giostra:’

E se qual fu la fama, il ver rimbomba,

Che d’Hecuba la figlia, o sacro Achille,
Poi che ‘l corpo lasciasti entro la tomba,
T’accenda ancor d’amorose faville,
Lascia un poco tacer tua maggior tromba,
Ch’io fo squillar per l’italice ville.
E tempra tu la cetra a’ nuovi carmi,
Mentr’io canto l’amor di Giulio e l’armi.

The subject in itself is poor. The author must have felt this, even had he not been warned by Luca Pulci’s verses on the tournament of Lorenzo. The ‘Stanzas’—the title by which Poliziano’s poem is best known—are counted among the gems of Italian literature. They were the first of the kind expressing real melody without artificiality, being remarkable for their artistic flow and carefulness of composition. But for a few harsh and ignoble expressions, they have never since been surpassed in point of form, though Ariosto may have more variety and freedom of movement, and Tasso more harmony. But how do these beautiful stanzas of ottava rima treat their subject? In the first book it is left altogether out of sight. The tournament gives place to mythology, the Piazza Sta. Croce to the gardens and palace of Venus. All the flowers and trees of the most highly-favoured climates, all animals of the chase and the peaceful park, the whole of Olympus, are introduced; reminiscences of all the classic poets from Lucretius to Claudian, even to the Christian singers, wanderings of an exuberant fancy through the realms of beauty and love,—all these combine and disport themselves in such perfect freedom, that it matters not whether they have anything to do with the subject or not. At the beginning of the second book the poet seems at last to bethink himself that he intended to sing the praises of a Medici. He therefore makes Cupid relate to Venus the glories of the Tuscan race, and begins with the preparations for great deeds which such vast mythological machinery demands. The youth is awakened and armed, but not without assistance from Olympus. The poem breaks off abruptly, and in its closing stanzas there gleams a sad presentiment of the cruel fate which was so soon to put an end to a life apparently destined to glory and happiness, and with it to a work already highly valued as a fragment, and which gave the tone to the poetry of the age just beginning. Who shall say whether it was not well for the poem that it remained a fragment? for the disproportion between the unimportance of the subject and the pomp of the treatment might have come out too strikingly had it been continued. This poem, intended to celebrate the acts of Giuliano, is addressed to his brother. The dedicatory stanza speaks of Lorenzo without circumlocution as the ruler of Florence:

High-born Lorenzo, laurel[38] in whose shade
Thy Florence rests nor fears the lowering storm,
Nor threatening signs in heaven’s high front displayed,
Nor Jove’s dread anger in its fiercest form;
O to the trembling Muse afford thine aid—
The Muse that courts thee timorous and forlorn,
Lives in the shadow of thy prosperous tree,
And bounds her every fond desire to thee.[39]

Angelo Poliziano continued to write Latin verses. His epigrams, odes, and elegies are valuable both as conveying a knowledge of the persons and tendencies of a memorable period, and as proofs of a versatility and classical spirit to be found in none of his contemporaries and in few subsequent writers. The philologers of the fifteenth century wrote Latin verses with ease; but the only poet among them is Poliziano. His works abound in imitations of all kinds, as do those of the later Roman poets. But Poliziano feels, thinks, and writes like a Roman; if not like a poet of the Augustan age, at least like one of the time of Statius, whom he resembles in more ways than one, having written ‘Sylvæ’ like him. He is more classical than some of those who are included in the ranks of the poets of antiquity.

A peculiar grace, fulness of thought, and great variety, give to his poems a charm not often found in modern Latin verses, which seldom display a living individuality. To descriptions of modern life and modern localities, whose very names seem unsuitable to a classic sphere, he can give a native classical colouring, without any apparent effort, yet with the most consummate art. Most remarkable among his writings, by its grace and naturalness and an intermingling of joy and sadness, is the elegy on a bunch of violets given him by a beloved hand; a poem which, in the sixteenth century and in our own, has been an object of study to the choice spirits who wish to acquire pure classic inspiration in a modern form.[40] Poliziano here challenges a comparison with Lorenzo de’ Medici, who treated the same subject in two of his loveliest sonnets. The ‘Sylvæ,’ poems of Angelo’s later years, from 1482 to 1486, added to his reputation, though in happy turns of thought and warmth of feeling they are inferior to many of his smaller pieces. They are four poems in heroic metre, prolusions to his philological lectures at the Florence University, to a chair in which he was appointed on December 23, 1485, the degree of Doctor of Common Law being conferred on him by Archbishop Rinaldo Orsini at his palace, in the presence of Lorenzo’s son Piero.[41] The first of these poems,[42] ‘Manto’ (the name of the Theban prophetess, which was assumed by the Italian city founded by her son), treats of Virgil, his works, his place in literature, his importance for all time.

As the first of the ‘Sylvæ’ was intended as an introduction to Virgil’s ‘Bucolics,’ so the second, ‘Rusticus,’ was to serve the same purpose for the ‘Georgics,’ and for the works and times of Hesiod. The third, ‘Ambra,’ took its name from the Medicean Poggio a Cajano, but the name has little connection with the poem, which refers to localities only at its close, and is devoted to an analysis of Homeric plays regarded from a pseudo-Herodotean and pseudo-Plutarchian point of view. The last and longest of the ‘Sylvæ,’ bearing the strange title of ‘Nutricia: the Reward of the Nursing-mother,’ describes the origin, progress, and influence of the poetry and the poetics of classical times, passes on to the author of the ‘Divine Comedy,’ and ends by singing the praises of Cosimo de’ Medici and his successors. The abundance and versatility of Lorenzo’s talents were perhaps never more truly and happily expressed than in the closing verses of this poem; and when the praises of living and powerful men appear in such a setting as this, we may accept them without complaining. After describing his labours in the field of sentimental poetry, to which belong the greater part of Lorenzo’s earlier poems, his other poetical productions and his whole intellectual character are thus spoken of:—

Non vacat argutosque sales, Satyraque bibaces
Descriptos memorare senes, non carmina festis
Excipienda choris, querulasve animantia chordas.
Idem etiam tacitæ referens pastoria vitæ
Otia, et urbanos thyrso extimulante labores,
Mox fugis in cœlum, non seu per lubrica nisus
Extremamque boni gaudes contingere metam.
Quodque alii studiumque vocant, durumque laborem,
Hic tibi ludus erit, fessus civilibus actis,
Huc is emeritas acuens ad carmina vires.
Felix ingenio, felix cui pectore tantas
Instaurare vices, cui fas tam magna capaci
Alternare animo, et varias ita nectere curas.

Poliziano wrote the ‘Nutricia’ in October 1486, at the villa of Fiesole. In the following verses he prophesied of the times to come and the future greatness of his pupil, Piero, if the latter, fulfilling the bright promise of his youth, should walk in the footsteps of his father:—

It jam pene prior, sic, ô sic pergat, et ipsum
Me superet majore gradu, longeque relinquat
Protinus, et dulci potius plaudatur alumno,
Bisque mei victor illo celebrentur honores.

A merciful fate spared the poet from witnessing the failure of hopes the fulfilment of which had already become very doubtful when he was prematurely called away. Anyone versed in the history of those days who may now climb the pleasant heights of Fiesole, which new buildings and roads have altered but not transformed, will think with interest of Angelo’s abode here in the country-house of the Medici, which he describes in a letter to Marsilio Ficino. ‘If the summer heat oppress thee at Careggi, the cooler air of Fiesole will be pleasant to thee. We have plenty of water between the slopes of the hill, and while gentle winds constantly refresh us, the glare of the sun troubles us little. During the ascent to the villa it appears enclosed in trees, but the spot, when reached, commands an extensive view as far as the town. The neighbourhood is thickly inhabited, yet I find here the quiet which suits me. But I will tempt thee with yet another attraction. Pico sometimes wanders beyond the limits of his own grounds, breaks in unexpectedly upon my solitude, and carries me away from my shady gardens to his evening meal. You know how things are there; no superfluities, but everything as it should be, and with the spice of his conversation. But thou must be my guest; with me thou shalt find as good a table and perhaps better wine, for Pico and I are rivals in respect to wine.’[43]

The ‘Sylvæ’ are dedicated to three young men belonging to the Medicean circle and one who stood outside it. Lorenzo—the son of Pier Francesco de’ Medici, grandson of Cosimo’s brother—whose name stands at the beginning of ‘Manto,’ was at that time on friendly terms with the members of the elder branch of his race. He afterwards became estranged from them; a change the effects of which did not cease when his posterity had entered upon the dominion of Florence, and the last remaining descendant of Cosimo’s line sat on the throne of France. Gifted with poetical talents, and no unworthy rival of his more famous relatives, the younger Lorenzo was a friend of Poliziano’s, who dedicated to him among other things a description of the villeggiatura at Poggio a Cajano. ‘Rusticus’ was intended for Jacopo Salviati, who, when these verses were written, in 1483, had been designated as Lorenzo’s son-in-law; so that Poliziano, who had first sung the praises of the unlucky Archbishop of Pisa and then openly insulted him with extravagant accusations, passed lightly over the troublesome past. ‘Ambra’ was sent to Lorenzo Tornabuoni, son of Giovanni, and for a time a pupil, together with Piero de’ Medici, of our poet, who in one of his letters praised his intellectual gifts and knowledge of classical literature. He was a faithful adherent of his relatives, not only in prosperity but also in adversity, which fell on him even more heavily than on them. In the days of Savonarola he was accused of taking part in a conspiracy in favour of the exiles, and, with Niccolò Ridolfi, the father of Lorenzo’s son-in-law, suffered on the scaffold in 1497, at the age of thirty-two, a victim to mob-law. The last of these poems, ‘Nutricia,’ was dedicated, in 1491, several years after its composition, to the Cardinal of Sant’Anastasia, Antonio Pallavicino Gentile of Genoa, who had great influence in state affairs under Innocent VIII. and Alexander VI., and took much interest in literature and literary men. At the close of the dedication Poliziano gratefully alludes to the cardinal’s efforts to further his cause with the Pope.

As we have said, the ‘Sylvæ’ were prolegomena to lectures on literature. To a cycle of another kind, to lectures given at Florence in 1483 on the Aristotelian philosophy, Poliziano composed a prose introduction, probably the strangest ever heard at any university.[44] The very title—‘Lamia’ (the Witch)—sounds strange, and we almost suspect a joke, but find that the author is in earnest. The beginning of this address to his students is highly characteristic. ‘Have you ever heard tell of witches? When I was a little boy my grandmother used to tell me about the witches in the neighbouring wood, who eat up naughty children. Fancy what an image of terror a witch was to me in those days! In the neighbourhood of my little villa at Fiesole there is a little brook, hidden by the shadow of the hill-side, and the women of the place who go there to draw water say that it is a place of meeting for the witches. But what is a witch? Plutarch of Chæronea, who was as grave as he was learned, relates that the witches have artificial eyes which they can put in and take out at their pleasure, just as weak-sighted old people do with their spectacles, which they stick on their noses when they want to look carefully at something and then put back into the case; or as others do with their false teeth, which they lay aside with their clothes when they go to bed;—not to mention your helpmeets, ye married men, with their bought braids and curls. If a witch desires to take a walk she puts in her eyes, and wanders through streets and alleys, squares and markets, churches and offices, taverns and baths, looks at everything, thrusts her nose into everything, meddles with everything, let a man do what he may. She has the eyes of an owl and a spy, like the old maid in Plautus. She can find out a grain of sand, and bury herself in the narrowest cranny. When she gets home, as soon as she reaches the threshold, she takes out her eyes and puts them in her pocket. Out of doors she has eyes like a lynx, at home she is blind. You ask what she does then? She sits spinning yarn, and humming a little song from time to time. Have you Florentines never known such witches, who know nothing of their own business, but are always busy about other people’s? No? Yet there are many of them in all cities, even here in yours. But they go about in disguise—you take them for men and women, but they are witches. Once it befell that some of them, happening to see me, stood still, and looked at me curiously, as those desirous to buy are wont to do. They whispered to each other, with uncouth gestures, “That is Poliziano—that is the rhymester who has suddenly dressed himself up as a philosopher,” and then they hurried away like wasps robbed of their sting. What they meant by their discourse is not clear to me; whether it displeases them that a man should be a philosopher, which, however, I am not, or that I venture to play the philosopher without having the material to do so. Let us now see what sort of a creature it is that men call a philosopher. You will soon perceive that I do not belong to the species. I say this not because I think that you believe it, but that no one may take it into his head to believe it. Not that I should be ashamed of the name, if it agreed with the facts, but because I prefer to keep free from titles which are not due to me:

Ne si forte suas repetitum venerit olim
Grex avium plumas, moveat cornicula risum.

This therefore is the first point. The second is, whether the condition of a philosopher is bad. When I have proved the contrary I will speak to you briefly of myself and the subject of my lectures.’ After this introduction follows a sketch of the course of Grecian philosophy, and an exposition of the work of the later schools of thought.

The man who raised to such a height the poetry of his native tongue, and the idiom from which it sprang, was deeply interested in popular poetry. He went hand in hand with his patron and friend in efforts to bring back language and literature ‘from the constraint of false rules to truth and nature.’ Both found the popular minstrelsy in the peculiar shape it retains to the present day, and differing completely in tone from the songs of other lands. In the rispetti the ottava rima predominates, treated freely as it was in Boccaccio’s days for epic poetry. Even the sentimental pieces are epigrammatically pointed, and full of antitheses, which give an impression of artificiality and imitation of the antique, more especially in southern Tuscany and the Roman district. They are not narratives, nor do they develope a state of mind, but they vividly describe momentary emotion. Without making up a whole history with such little songs, like Pulci and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Poliziano composed a series of rispetti describing joy and sorrow, accepted and especially despised love. They are partly in dialogue, frequently in a natural easy style, which reminds us of improvisations, more tender in expression, more flexible in diction than the two writers above mentioned, who not unfrequently betray that they are mocking at their own work. Other similar songs, but without internal connection, display a versatility resulting naturally from the way in which they originated. These fugitive poems grew within the Medicean circle, products of social intercourse in the villa and in evening walks in the garden; or, like the dance-songs (ballate), of which Poliziano wrote a great number, they were sung with music in the public squares. In short, they belonged to the life of the people who had furnished models for the rhymes composed for them by the poets of quality, with greater refinement, and not always without a secondary object in view.

Poliziano’s versatility is wonderfully shown in the labours he undertook in the field of classical philology while thus wandering through the woods of poetry. He was one of the first to establish the true principles of textual criticism; at the request of Innocent VIII. he translated Herodian’s Roman history into Latin,[45] and made the writings of Hippocrates and Galen accessible to those of his countrymen who were not acquainted with Greek. On the latter occasion he claimed the assistance of the learned doctor Pietro Leoni, who was then lecturing in Padua, to secure the correct rendering of the medical terms.[46] The most talented poet of the fifteenth century was also the philologer who, while equal to others in knowledge of antiquity, represents its spirit with more truth and originality. In trying to rival the classical letter-writers, Poliziano followed a fashion that had influenced statesmen and men of learning from Petrarca downwards. He left a mass of epistolary testimony to the character of his age, the value of which must not be lightly estimated, though it may not always answer the expectations raised by the names. Like Ficino and others, Poliziano had arranged his Latin correspondence for publication, and wrote a dedication to Piero de’ Medici, when death cut short his career.[47] More interesting to us than the generality of these letters, which nevertheless contain valuable matter, are his confidential letters in the vulgar tongue, not meant for publication. Even this highly gifted man was not free from the bad habit of the learned men of the fifteenth century—the intermixture of Latin phrases with Italian when the subject gave no occasion for it.

CHAPTER IX.

POLIZIANO IN THE MEDICEAN HOUSE. SCALA AND RUCELLAI.

For many of his contemporaries Lorenzo de’ Medici was the frequent subject of verse, especially Latin verse, which the complimentary art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries preferred as the more dignified, even after Italian poetry had secured a position by considerable achievements. Many of these poetical productions have been rescued from oblivion only to sink back again, unless they contribute to the historical knowledge of the period. Their literary worth consists merely in a talent for form which was surpassed by most of the Latinists of the following century. Fortunately the court-poet of the Medici was Poliziano. Many of his epigrams are addressed to Lorenzo, and the elegance of the form as well as the warmth of feeling which breathes through all he wrote about his patron, diminishes that impression of servility which is inseparable from this kind of poetry. Praise of his discretion and foresight, of his words and deeds—wishes that he may attain the age of Nestor, as he already possesses his wisdom—thanks for favour granted, and offers of future service, are the themes of verse, as well as the merits of a swift runner, of a Spanish hound, of a tree before the Medicean house, supposed to be dead, but which had bloomed again, and of the brook of Ambra. During Giuliano’s lifetime, the concord between the two brothers was the object of praise; they were called Castor and Pollux, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Angelo wrote an agreeable love-poem of some length on the name of Giuliano. He thoroughly belonged to the Medicean household. He was still young when Lorenzo entrusted to him the education of his son Piero; but before the latter was eight years old dissensions occurred which caused the poet-pedagogue many an hour of discomfort.

In the summer of 1478, when war and sickness made a residence in Florence undesirable, Lorenzo, as already stated, sent his wife and children to Pistoja, where they were hospitably received in the house of Andrea Panciatichi, the head of an influential family inclined to the Medici. They were accompanied by Angelo Poliziano, other masters, and a doctor. Here Piero, only seven years old, with his great-uncle Giovanni Tornabuoni received Ercole d’Este, who was going to take the command at Florence. In October they exchanged their residence at Pistoja for the villa at Fiesole, where the family circle was increased by the sons of Niccolò Orsini, Count of Pitigliano. And here arose a difference between the mother and the tutor. Clarice was a good and careful mother. Giovanni, who was not yet three, had soon after his birth given occasion for anxiety, and been a great trouble to her and to his grandmother, on account of his delicate health. Concerning Giuliano, then a few months old, whose constitution always remained feeble, she wrote later to her husband: ‘I will care for him as a mother should, but I beseech you to take care of yourself for the children’s sake and mine.’ Poliziano’s mode of bringing up did not satisfy her. Not that she began with a prejudice against him; the good terms on which they had once been are proved by the letters which he addressed to her on several occasions when he was absent from Florence with Lorenzo.[48] He bestowed great care on his young pupil, of whose writing and composition he sent specimens to the father. ‘I shall not fail,’ he wrote to Lorenzo from Pistoja, September 20, ‘in attention and fidelity. I know what I owe to your Magnificence, and I feel for Piero and your other children an affection equal to that of a father. Should anything unpleasant occur, I will endeavour myself to bear it, out of love to you, to whom I owe everything.’ These words show that there was already something amiss. Four weeks previously he had written: ‘I am busy with Piero, and encourage him to write, and I think in a few days you will receive a letter which will astonish you. We have a master here who teaches writing in a fortnight, so that it seems quite a miracle. The children are particularly happy, and look quite blooming. Piero never leaves my side. I would that I could serve you in greater things; but this is my work, and I fulfil it with joy. But I beg you to ensure, either by letter or by a messenger, that my authority shall not be restricted, so that I may the more easily guide the boy and fulfil my duty. Nevertheless, act therein according to your pleasure. Whatever may happen, I will bear it with equanimity.’ And on the same day: ‘We get on as well as we can, but I cannot escape a few collisions.’ That he was dissatisfied, dull, and longing to be near Lorenzo, is clear from all his letters at this time, both to Madonna Lucrezia and to her son.

To make matters worse, came the villeggiatura at Caffaggiuolo, whither Clarice went in November. This was, from position and climate, a melancholy winter residence, where loneliness and bad weather seem to have put the excitable man doubly out of humour, and all the more so because Lorenzo’s old tutor, Gentile Becchi, who lived at the country house with the family, grew very unsociable in consequence of the sad circumstances of the time, which weighed heavily on the mind of this vehement accuser of the Pope. Gentile had felt the events of the spring deeply, and had been terribly cast down by the death of Giuliano. Poliziano had tried to cheer him with an ode, which has acquired historical importance from the testimony it bears to the hopes of foreign aid which were cherished by the adherents of the Medici and many of the Florentine people; hopes which were but very partially fulfilled.[49]

AD GENTILEM EPISCOPUM.

Gentiles animi maxima pars mei,

Communi nimium sorte quid angeris?
Quid curis animum lugubribus teris,

Et me discrucias simul?

Passi digna quidem perpetuo sumus

Luctu, qui mediis (heu miseri) sacris
Illum, illum juvenem vidimus, O nefas!

Stratum sacrilega manu!

At sunt attonito quæ dare pectori

Solamen valeant plurima, nam super
Est, qui vel gremio creverit in tuo,

Laurens Etruriæ caput.

Laurens quem patriæ cœlicolum pater

Tutum terrifica gorgone præstitit;
Quem Tuscus pariter, quem Venetus Leo

Servant, et Draco pervigil.

Illi bellipotens excubat Hercules;

Illi fatiferis militat arcubus;
Illi mittit equos Francia martios,

Felix Francia regibus.

Circumstat populus murmure dissono;

Circumstant juvenem purpurei patres;
Causa vincimus et robore militum;

Hac stat Juppiter, hac favet.

Quare, O cum misera quid tibi Nenia,

Si nil proficimus? quin potius gravis
Absterisse bono lætitiæ die

Audes nubila pectoris.

Nam cum jam gelidos umbra reliquerit

Artus, non dolor hanc perpetuus retro
Mordacesve trahunt sollicitudines,

Mentis, curaque pervicax.

Thus rendered by Roscoe:—

O Friend, whose woes this bosom shares,
Why ceaseless mourn our mutual cares?
Ah! why thy days to grief resign,
With thy regrets recalling mine?

Eternal o’er the atrocious deed,
‘Tis true our kindred hearts may bleed,
When he, twin glory of our land,
Fell by a sacrilegious hand!

But sure, my friend, there yet remains
Some solace for these piercing pains,
Whilst he, once nurtured at thy side,
Lorenzo lives, Etruria’s pride.

Lorenzo, o’er whose favoured head
Jove his terrific gorgon spread;
Whose steps the lion-pair await,
Of Florence and Venetia’s state.

For him his crest the dragon rears;
For him the Herculean band appears;
Her martial succour Gallia brings—
Gallia, that glories in her kings!

See round the youth the purpled band
Of venerable fathers stand;
Exulting crowds around him throng,
And hail him as he moves along.

Strong in our cause and in our friends,
Our righteous battle Jove defends;
Thy useless sorrows then represt,
Let joy once more dilate thy breast.

To animate the clay-cold frame,
No sighs shall fan the vital flame;
Nor all the tears that love can shed
Recall to life the silent dead.

The poem seems to have had little or no effect, and the poet himself became infected with melancholy. ‘The news from this place,’ wrote Poliziano to Madonna Lucrezia, on November 18, ‘is that it rains violently and incessantly, so that it is impossible to leave the house, and instead of hunting we have taken to playing ball, that the children may have exercise. I sit by the fire in dressing-gown and slippers, and if you saw me you would take me for melancholy incarnate; for that is what I seem to myself. I do, see, hear nothing that cheers me, so deeply have our misfortunes affected me. Sleeping or waking, I have nothing in my head but these fancies. The day before yesterday we were all in joyful excitement, because we heard that the sickness had ceased. Now we are down again, as there is said to be some still going about. In town we have at least some comfort, if it is only that of seeing Lorenzo come home safe and well. Here, everything makes us uneasy, and I assure you I am dying of melancholy, such a burthen is loneliness to me. Monsignore (Becchi) shuts himself up in his own room, with no company but his thoughts; and I find him so cast down and full of care that his society only increases my own sadness. Ser Alberto del Malerba (a priest who was then in the Medicean household) recites the service all day long with the children. When I am tired of studying, my fancy goes off on a chase through pestilence and war—grief for the past, anxiety for the future. I have no one to turn my thoughts to him, and am dying of weariness. And here I have not my Madonna Lucrezia to whom I can vent my feelings.’

At last matters came to an open breach. On May 6, 1479, Poliziano wrote to Lorenzo from Careggi: ‘I am here at Careggi, having left Caffaggiuolo by command of Madonna Clarice. The grounds of my departure, I desire, aye I earnestly entreat, to be allowed to explain to you by word of mouth, for it is a prolix affair. I believe that, when you have heard me, you will find that the wrong is not all on my side. For decency’s sake, and in order not to go to Florence without your orders, I came here, and am waiting till your Magnificence informs me what I am to do. For I am yours, though the world itself should turn upside down; and if fortune will not smile upon me in your service, that will not prevent me from always faithfully devoting myself to that service. I commend myself to your Magnificence, and am entirely at your commands.’ What had moved Madonna Clarice to this strong measure is clear. She could have nothing to say against the scholar; but the man inspired her with very little confidence, although we cannot think that she was influenced by the evil rumours which were afterwards spread as to Poliziano’s moral conduct—rumours characteristic of a time that delighted in the most dishonouring accusations. Men of letters were so full of exaggerated self-importance, and so incapable of controlling their tongues or their pens, that Lorenzo’s wife probably had right on her side. She wanted to superintend her children’s education; the tutor would not suffer it. ‘As for Giovanni,’ wrote he to Lorenzo from Caffaggiuolo on April 6, when he enclosed a letter from Piero, ‘his mother makes him read in the Psalter, which I cannot at all approve. When she does not interfere with him his progress is surprising, so that he can read without any help.’ To give the Psalter to a child of three as a reading-book is certainly a strange proceeding. But if, as we must suppose, it was the translation made for Clarice by Marsilio Ficino, the scholar of the fifteenth century could not make the same objection which was made in the next by another scholar, who received the cardinalate—Pietro Bembo—to the reading of St. Paul’s Epistles: that they spoilt one’s style.

At this time Lorenzo was so much occupied with the crisis in public affairs that strife in his own household must have been doubly troublesome to him. He did not think of restoring to his post the pedagogue who had been turned out of doors. He offered him the villa at Fiesole, where Poliziano wrote Latin verses in praise of Lorenzo, about the leisure he was himself enjoying, of the pleasant view towards the city of the Muses, and of the winding Arno,[50] but evidently put no bridle on his tongue. ‘I should like,’ wrote Madonna Clarice to her husband on May 28 from Caffaggiuolo,[51] after affectionately entreating him to take care of his health during the continued sickness, ‘not to be put into a fable like Luigi Pulci in Matteo Franco’s verses. I also wish that Messer Angelo shall not be able to boast of remaining in the house in defiance of me, or of your having offered him a home at Fiesole. You know I told you that if it was your will that he should remain here, I would be content, and although I have had to submit to his rudeness, I would bear it patiently if such were your decision, though I cannot believe it possible.’ Clarice’s remonstrances must have made some impression on Lorenzo. Although Poliziano saw him frequently, he remained excluded from the house. He repeatedly and urgently commended his cause to Madonna Lucrezia, to whom he represented his difficult position, if the hopes set on Piero came to nothing.[52] He begged her to try to fathom Lorenzo’s intentions concerning him. The tutor of Giovanni Tornabuoni’s sons, Martino della Comedia, gave lessons to Piero for a time, as did also Bernardo Michelozzi (son of the architect), who actually educated Giovanni, and was afterwards Bishop of Forlì. Poliziano’s impatience and vexation are clearly shown. ‘I shall be much surprised,’ he wrote, ‘if they let Piero lose his time, and it really would be a pity. I understand that Messer Bernardo is there, but I cannot quite see how he is to go on with my work, unless he remains permanently. In this case, indeed, it will be just as well that the shell has burst. But I do not believe it, and therefore I beg you to find out Lorenzo’s intentions, that I may judge whether to arm myself for the tourney or the battle. I will always order myself according to Lorenzo’s wishes, for I am certain that he sees deeper into things than I, and that he will guard my honour as he always has done, and as my faithful services give me some right to expect.’

When the reconciliation took place cannot be discovered from Poliziano’s letters, which are missing for several years at this period. The verses addressed to Lorenzo on his return from Naples, show that at that time Poliziano had not returned to his house.[53] A year after, in 1481, Piero was again entrusted to his guidance; for the Latin dictation for him,[54] in which the siege of Otranto by the Duke of Calabria is mentioned, is of this year. In these subjects for translation, which sometimes treat of contemporary events, sometimes allude to this or that occurrence of daily life, we vainly seek any really healthy food for a youthful mind. Their want of connectedness and gravity gives no brilliant testimony to the highly gifted man’s powers of teaching. But Piero had other teachers besides Poliziano; among them was the theologian Giorgio Cenigno, in whose learning and conduct Lorenzo, who was often present at his lectures, had great confidence, and to whose judgment he afterwards submitted the defence of Pico della Mirandola. This is the same man who many years later took so decided a part with Reuchlin against those who accused him of heresy. Giovanni del Prato, afterwards Bishop of Aquila, and Antonio Barberini, a professor of theology at Florence, were also called in.[55] When Piero went to Rome, in 1484 and again in 1488, the first time to welcome Pope Innocent VIII., the second time to be married, Poliziano accompanied him, and he remained until his death a member of the most intimate circle of the family. He never was a priest, though he held a couple of ecclesiastical benefices.

We can well understand that the choice of a man of such uncommon intellectual gifts as a tutor, at a time when everything was expected to give way to classical culture, found many eulogists; and the words of Cristoforo Landino in his dedication of Virgil’s works to Piero de’ Medici do not stand alone. Piero was wanting neither in understanding nor the desire to learn, and the instruction he received was not wasted so far as concerns the elegant culture which was fast superseding the more practical education of older times. But the essential principle of a serious moral view of the world Angelo Poliziano could not give to his pupil, for he had it not himself. The father rejoiced in the progress of the son, promoted as it was by the liberal, scientific, artistic and social movement of which the house of Medici formed the centre. Piero, like his father, entered life early, and was thus prepared for the position he was in some degree destined to inherit. He always showed interest in scientific matters. It was at his desire that his tutor made the collection of letters above mentioned, which, however, were not printed till after Poliziano’s death and Piero’s banishment; a collection which, like many of the kind, contains much that for the writer’s honour had better have remained unprinted. But posterity has not confirmed Poliziano’s judgment on his pupil. It was the judgment of a courtier. In Piero, thus he wrote to Pico della Mirandola,[56] there lived again the spirit of his father, the virtue of his grandfather, the humanity of his great-grandfather, the honesty, piety, generosity, and high-mindedness of all his ancestors.

If Lorenzo could not keep the peace in his own house between his wife and a literary friend, still less could he keep it between the latter and another member of his confidential circle. To this belonged, like Poliziano, a man whose literary merits contributed nothing to the celebrity of the age, but who attained to a higher and more secure position than most of his compeers because he showed himself a manageable and useful tool. Bartolommeo Scala,[57] born about 1430 at Colle in the valley of the Elsa, has himself described his origin and the commencement of his fortunes in a letter to Poliziano, and he deserves at least some credit for avowing so openly what it is true everybody already knew. ‘Deprived of all worldly goods, poor, and born of parents of low degree, I came here, without means, without claims, without protectors, without relations. Cosimo, the father of the country, took me up, and I rose in the service of his family.’[58] His father was a miller, and the youth’s first years in Florence were passed in bitter want, as we know from the letters of Cardinal Ammanati, who was there in not very brilliant circumstances. As in the case of other protégés, Cosimo’s favour was continued by his heirs. This only will account for the fact that, after the death of Benedetto Accolti, Scala received the office of chancellor.[59] Although by no means without cultivation and practice in business, Scala stood far below those who had preceded him with so much distinction in the chancellorship, since the days of Coluccio Salutati to the time of the man whom he replaced. For Benedetto Accolti, who died in the prime of manhood, did honour to the name which his family had already acquired in the field of learning, and united sound knowledge of law with unusual elegance of expression; while his eloquence and excellent memory rendered him peculiarly fit for the various solemnities at which addresses and replies had to be made without long preparation. His Latin history of the first Crusade, founded on French materials, and dedicated to Piero de’ Medici, is valuable as the source whence Torquato Tasso drew the subject of his ‘Gerusalemme.’

Fortune continued to favour Bartolommeo Scala, and even in the great commotion of 1494 he was not overthrown. Posts of honour, embassies, knighthood, riches, fell to his share. He was Lorenzo’s confidant, and in constant correspondence with him on civil and political affairs. In the storms of 1478 and the following years he was of no small use to him, and it was chiefly through him that Lorenzo always kept the Signoria well in hand. Scala had a pretty villa—which afterwards passed to the Guadagni[60]—on the slope of the hill at Fiesole, and his town house (now belonging, with its beautiful gardens, to the Count della Gherardesca) still bears on its walls the coat of arms which he adopted in allusion to his name. As two of his predecessors had written a history of Florence, he thought it needful to do the same. His work, which comes down to Charles of Anjou, has no intrinsic value; and his other writings are even more utterly forgotten than those of the obscurest among his contemporaries. That he was most anxious to give no ground of displeasure to foreign princes on whose relations to Florence he was obliged to touch in his history is shown by his oft-repeated request to the Ferrarese ambassador for information about the Este family, ‘because he wished to write in praise of that illustrious house.’[61]

Bartolommeo Scala’s position made him boastful. His letters to Poliziano are full of the most ridiculous conceit.[62] ‘Thou wilt hardly venture to compete with my honours. The Florentine people have raised me first to the Priorship, then to the Gonfaloniership, and now to the rank of senator and knight, with such unanimity that many were of opinion there had never been a more popular act; besides which I have the brilliant testimony of Lorenzo de’ Medici that distinction was never conferred on one more worthy.’ Whereupon Poliziano did not fail to pay him back with an abusive answer. His boast of praise from Cosimo and Lorenzo was a lie; the latter had often said that in advancing him he was influenced by other considerations, not by his own opinion, and had often given Poliziano Scala’s official papers to correct, as the latter must have known very well. Lorenzo had prevented the former from destroying the mocking iambics on Scala,[63] saying it was a pity to sacrifice such good verses. Lorenzo de’ Medici was dead when the two became involved in that violent strife which gave rise to accusations as passionate, coarse, and spiteful as those flung about by Filelfo, Poggio, and Valla. But in the lifetime of Lorenzo a quarrel broke out between the two men, who emulated each other in abasing the moral dignity of scholarship.

There seems to have been another cause of strife besides literary rivalry—Scala’s beautiful and accomplished daughter Alessandra. Like many other women of her day, she devoted herself in her youth to the study of Greek, and her teachers were Demetrius Chalcondylas and Johannes Lascaris. That Poliziano was inspired with a violent passion for her is shown by his Greek epigrams.[64]

‘Now at last have I found the object I long have been seeking,

Object of loving desire, present in all my dreams.’

But Alessandra, though she exchanged Greek verses with her admirer, and sent him flowers and received small presents, seems to have been very far from returning his affection. She tells him plainly that he has not found what he sought; paying him at the same time compliments on his learning and fame, which do not seem to have consoled him much. When the disdainful beauty gave her hand to Michael Marullus Tarcagnota, a Greek established in Italy early in life, jealousy made Poliziano pour forth a torrent of abuse, which provoked corresponding replies. Time had been when verses addressed by Poliziano to Lorenzo, son of Pier Francesco de’ Medici, the patron of Marullus, overflowed with praises of the Greek, who was pronounced superior to Catullus.[65] Now just as immoderate in the opposite sense, Angelo’s invectives were most extravagant against the man who had become his happy rival. Under the name of Mabilius, he satirised his person and writings, heaping upon him all the abuse that could be raked out of the poems of antiquity.[66]

Personalities of every kind, moral and physical, are flung backwards and forwards usque ad nauseam. Poliziano’s hooked nose and crooked neck, and the supposed infidelity of both combatants are mutually held up to contempt. Well-turned though the epigrams may be, they were better absent from the works of a great poet. Alessandra, the innocent cause of strife, having become a widow, withdrew to the convent of San Pier Maggiore, and died there in 1506.

Among those who rivalled the professed men of learning while taking an active part in public affairs, Alamanno Rinuccini holds a foremost place.[67] He was descended from an old noble family, whose castle near San Donato alla Collina, on the road which leads from Florence to Arezzo, along the left bank of the Arno, still keeps much of its mediæval character. Born in 1419, he was a pupil of Poggio and Argyropulos; in his translations from the Greek and his original Latin writings he displayed a perfect command of both tongues, and his house was a place where his friends met for learned discourse. He rose to the highest offices in the city, and fulfilled with equal zeal the chancellorship of the Universities of Florence and Pisa, various diplomatic embassies, and a post in the war department conferred on him in 1495, three years before his death. Like his father Filippo and his brother Neri, he left valuable notes on contemporary events. Although an old partisan of the Medici, he nevertheless, while fully admitting Lorenzo’s intellectual gifts, passes on him a severe judgment, showing how the spirit of independence still survived among the aristocracy, and how hard it was for the Medici to secure their support, even by raising them to office. At the same time the virulent attacks on Lorenzo’s government throw a strange light on the character of the writer, who never failed to profit by the favours bestowed on him. It was much the same with Bernardo Rucellai, one of the most esteemed members of the Medicean circle. He controlled his ambition during the life of his brother-in-law Lorenzo; but when that firm hand was gone and personal considerations no longer restrained him, he took his own course. He had early distinguished himself in his classical and philosophical studies, and while scarcely more than a youth was a professor at the University of Pisa. Of his Latin historical writings, that on the war of Pisa is founded on the narratives of Gino and Neri Capponi; that on the wars of Charles VIII. of France possesses some intrinsic value as the narrative and judgment of a contemporary whose high position opened to him trustworthy sources of information. Both display his command of style; and his topography of ancient Rome shows how well versed he was in ancient literature.[68] The first principle of this work is a mistake, because it rests on the so-called regionarii, that arbitrarily interpolated version of the old topographical texts; but Rucellai surpassed all his predecessors in thoroughness of learning. At Lorenzo’s death he entered upon a new phase, not merely in political life. It was he who, after the storms which burst over Florence in 1494, received into his new house, with its large and beautiful gardens in the Via della Scala, the Platonic Academy, then in danger of sharing the ruin of the Medici. In these ‘Orti Oricellari’ the Academy was kept alive through the brilliant but unquiet times that followed.[69] Here, where Bernardo Rucellai brought together some of the sculptures scattered at the plundering of the Medici palaces, Niccolò Machiavelli read his book on the art of war; here in 1516 Leo X. was present at a representation of the tragedy of ‘Rosmonda,’ written by Bernardo’s son Giovanni; and here in 1522 was laid the plot against Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici which put an end to the Academy for ever.

CHAPTER X.

ERMOLAO BARBARO AND PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA.

The Florentines and other Tuscans gathered together at this period of manifold intellectual activity were joined by men from other parts of Italy, coming as transient visitors or permanent residents. Three of these deserve especial consideration—Bernardo Bembo, Ermolao Barbaro, and Pico della Mirandola. We have already seen Bembo as Venetian ambassador, in the difficult state of affairs which followed on the conspiracy of the Pazzi. He had received this honourable appointment several years before, and held it until peace was restored. The relations between Venice and Florence were not always pleasant and confidential; but the Venetian ambassador knew how to make himself agreeable and to inspire confidence. Poliziano praised his activity and caution in affairs of state, his amiability in personal intercourse, his interest in literature, his union of seriousness and gaiety.[70] Ficino and Landino were on friendly terms with him, as their correspondence and literary communications prove. Bembo was one of the members of the Platonic Academy, and a banquet given to him by his colleagues in 1480 is described by Marsilio in his book on Platonic theology. He was an ardent lover of books, and wrote a beautiful hand; the octavo form of the Aldine editions, the first variation from the old folio or large quarto usual until then, is said to have been an imitation of one of his manuscripts.[71] Bernardo’s son was with him during his residence on the banks of the Arno, and the pure dialect to which the boy’s ear became accustomed falling on good ground, led to that scientific treatment of the Italian tongue which has given Pietro Bembo a claim to be considered a distinguished master of the language he handled with so much power and facility of expression.

One of those who were in constant literary intercourse with Lorenzo, and assisted him in collecting manuscripts, &c., was Ermolao Barbaro the younger. Literary faculty was the heritage of his family. His grandfather, Francesco Barbaro, held friendly intercourse with the scholars of Rome and Florence and with Cosimo de’ Medici. He also made at Venice the largest collection of books of that time, and devoted himself zealously to studying the texts, as is proved by his copy of Homer preserved in the library of St. Mark. Young Ermolao was brought up by the care of a learned uncle of the same name, who was Bishop of Treviso and for many years administered the bishopric of Verona.

Francesco owed some of his accomplishments to Matteo Bosso, whom we shall meet again in the abbey at Fiesole; and at Rome a classical turn had been given to his studies by Pomponio Leto. He was a young man when the Republic, which looked quite as much to the learned accomplishments as to the political capacity and noble birth of her envoys, sent him to the Emperor Frederic, to Lodovico il Moro, and to Innocent VIII. The last embassy was not propitious to him.

When in 1491 he accepted the Patriarchate of Aquileia from the Pope without asking the consent of the Republic, this offence against law and precedent was punished by the senate with deprivation and banishment, and Barbaro died near Rome, of an infectious disease, in the summer of 1493, at the early age of thirty-three.[72] Of his many works, chiefly on Greek writers, none seem now to justify his reputation. His studies on Pliny’s ‘Natural History’ hold an honourable place among the critical investigations begun in his day, and his lively wit shines forth in his letters.

Ermolao came through Florence on his way to Rome in the spring of 1490. As Lorenzo de’ Medici was then at the baths of Vignone, his eldest son received the stranger with the honour due to his rank and the friendly relations between the families. Piero’s letter to his father has some literary as well as personal interest:[73] ‘Illustrious father,—By a letter from you which reached Ser Piero yesterday morning I was informed of your desires with respect to Messer Ermolao, who arrived yesterday after dinner. His arrival was, so to say, unexpected, and I only heard of it about an hour before. I went to meet him, as did four or five others, and he had to go first to the hotel, as his quarters were not yet ready, whither he afterwards came on foot. As soon as he had arrived, I went to him, according to your desire, to invite him to us, and to inquire how long he intended to stay. I invited him for to-day, and heard that it was his intention to remain only the one day, as he wants to travel to-morrow as far as Poggibonzi or some other place, so that he may reach Siena before noon on the following day. Whether he means to stay there I do not know. To-day he has been our guest, and I cannot say how much pleasure this has given him. Besides his suite, which consists of his brother (Luigi), a secretary of St. Mark, and a doctor, we invited the persons whom he wished to see; they were the Count della Mirandola, Messer Marsilio, and Messer Agnolo of Montepulciano, to whom, as we wished to have an inhabitant of the city and yet to keep within the circle of intimate friends and scholars, we added Bernardo Rucellai. Whether we did right I know not. After dinner I showed him the house, the coins, vases, sculptured stones—in short everything, including the garden (near San Marco), which he especially liked, though he does not seem to understand much about sculpture. The value and age of the coins interested him greatly; they were all astonished at the quantity of fine things. I cannot tell you much about him, except that he speaks very elegantly, as far as I can judge, and that he likes to show his reading by quoting the ancients, sometimes in Latin. His appearance is on the whole very good; he is temperate in all things, which is probably needful for him, as he seems to have a very delicate constitution. He is said to be an adroit man of business, which I rather doubt, as he seems to me somewhat ceremonious. He could not display greater friendship for you than he does, and I believe he means it. He received all the honour done him with much gratitude, not at all after the Venetian fashion; and indeed nothing but his dress shows him to be a Venetian. According to his own account, he has a great desire to see you, and he says he will willingly go out of his way to meet and salute you; which I think it my duty to mention, in case it should meet your views. He also says that he is commissioned by his Signoria to salute you. He has been honourably treated by the citizens, and received compensation for having to alight at the hotel. This morning, before he came to dinner, he presented himself to the Signoria, with complimentary greetings.’ That the learned Venetian fulfilled his intention of saluting Lorenzo on his way, we learn from Lorenzo himself, who wrote to his agent at Siena on May 15 as follows: ‘Ermolao was here early this morning, and continued his journey after staying a while with me.’[74]

When Ermolao Barbaro fell into disgrace with his own government, Lorenzo took his part warmly. Among other things he tried to persuade the Pope to give him the red hat, probably hoping that such a distinction would reconcile the Signoria to him. Ermolao’s father gratefully acknowledged his friend’s efforts. ‘This morning,’ wrote Poliziano to Lorenzo from Venice,[75] ‘I visited Messer Zaccheria Barbaro, and when I spoke of your favour he answered weeping, and as it seemed with a full heart. The sum of his discourse was this: he has no hope save in you. He made it clear to me that he is aware how much he owes you. Therefore carry out what you have planned, and keep a higher object in view.’ Greek clay vases, given to Poliziano for Lorenzo, were to prove the gratitude of the Procurator of St. Mark and the ex-ambassador. But the Signoria evidently did not approve of a stranger intermeddling in the affairs of one of their citizens; for when Luigi Barbaro received from his brother’s successor orders to return from Rome, he was told at the same time not to come through Florence.[76]

All plans and calculations were overthrown the following year by the death of Lorenzo and of the Pope, soon followed by that of Ermolao himself. That the offer of the cardinalate would hardly have altered the views of the senate as to the duty of an ambassador to receive nothing from a foreign sovereign without special permission, is shown by a parallel case which occurred in the next century, that of Marc’Antonio da Mula (Cardinal Amulio).

In the circle of Florentine scholars there was no brighter star than Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; and yet not one of them has left so little to justify the contemporary fame of this ‘Phœnix of spirits.’ Yet he was something more than a specimen of the sciolism and abstruse pedantry that sought to dazzle contemporaries without leaving anything solid or useful to posterity. Giovanni Pico fought manfully against the errors of his time, and promoted investigations on many subjects; but the results of his labours are not discoverable in the picture of the time as a whole, to which he contributed but a few traits, instead of producing a work of durable value that would have vividly represented the progress of science. Born and brought up in the highest circles of society, it is remarkable that with his quick and passionate temperament he devoted himself to scientific work, ardently and perseveringly, without any external inducement to do so. He comes forth like a meteor, in brilliant but momentary splendour. He was a younger son of Gian Francesco Pico, Lord of Mirandola and Count of Concordia, and Giulia Bojardo, daughter of Feltrino Count Of Scandiano, whose grandson Matteo Maria made himself famous as the author of ‘Orlando Innamorato.’ In his childhood Giovanni showed unusual quickness of perception and desire to learn, which was observed and encouraged by his mother. At fourteen he went to study canon law at the University of Bologna, after which he pursued philosophy and theology, languages and literature, at various universities, and soon displayed a talent for disputation. He was intended for holy orders, and while still almost a boy was seen, like Giovanni de’ Medici, in the dress of an Apostolic protonotary. He was not much over twenty when he came to Florence at the beginning of 1484. Recommended by his birth and connections, as well as by Ercole d’Este, whose sister Bianca was his sister-in-law, he became intimate with the Medici, and lived like a great man; at the same time he pursued his studies diligently, and formed friendships with Ficino, Landino, and Poliziano. The last has described him graphically and with a fair amount of truth. ‘Nature,’ he says, ‘appeared to have showered upon this man, or rather this hero, all gifts of body and mind. He was slender and well made, and something divine seemed to shine in his face. He was acute in perception, gifted with an excellent memory, indefatigable in study, clear and eloquent in expression. One doubted whether he shone most by his talents or his moral qualities. Versed in every branch of philosophy, favoured by his perfect knowledge of several languages, he showed himself sublime and above all praise.’

What distinguished the young scholar from all the other members of the Florentine circle except Marsilio Ficino—though it did not attract much attention till it brought him into difficulties with Rome—was his study of mediæval Jewish literature, to which he must have found special incitement at Florence.[77] For it was here that he began to study those Jewish mysteries which in Alexandria were first mixed up with the doctrines of the Bible, like Neoplatonism with the wisdom of the Athenians, and were developed under the name of Cabbalah into a lasting tradition of revelation. Following in the steps of Ficino, Giovanni Pico found the teachings of Christianity confirmed by those of Platonism; while the Jewish doctrines furnished him with stronger proofs, for what Ficino did not demonstrate from Platonism, Pico drew from the Jewish mysteries. He was quite right in recognising analogies not to be found in the Greek doctrines; but it is evident that he stood on ground where investigation and the play of fancy might bring him into danger; more especially as he included magic within the circle of his researches. It was nothing more than the natural magic which consists mainly in the contemplation of the powers of the heavenly bodies, but he stated in plain words his opinion that no science could afford us a clearer view of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Cabbalah.

It may easily be conceived what a sensation was made in Florence by a distinguished young man of such appearance, talents, and tendencies. His arrival occurred at a lucky moment. The end of the Ferrara war left a clear field for other than political affairs, and the reputation of Lorenzo de’ Medici had just then reached its zenith. The presence of Giovanni Pico gave a new distinction to his whole circle. He was one by himself. Ficino and Poliziano had shone by the early maturity of their talents, but to them study was the necessary object of their lives; while this youth of high rank, on whom everything smiled, rivalled them in perseverance and success and surpassed them in universality of knowledge. Soon after his arrival at Florence, in a letter to Lorenzo, he spoke highly of the poems which the latter wrote on Dante and Petrarca; but this does not prove that his judgment was sound, and it may, perhaps, not have greatly impressed Lorenzo himself, though it doubtless did him no harm in the Medicean circle. In 1485 he went to continue his studies at Paris, returning thence at the beginning of the next year. This year he was involved in two troublesome affairs, one of which—though injurious to his reputation—was only of a passing nature, but the other cast a shadow over the whole of his after-life, and put an end to the gaiety of his youth.

The eloquent disciple of the Platonic Academy suddenly found himself involved in a love adventure that was only too real. ‘Count Giovanni della Mirandola,’ wrote the Ferrarese envoy Aldovrandino Guidoni on May 12, 1486, to Duke Ercole,[78] ‘has been living for nearly two years in such splendour and in the enjoyment of such universal esteem as has hardly fallen to the lot of any one before in this city. A few days ago he gave out that he was going to Rome, and sent forward all his luggage. On his arrival at Arezzo, where resided a lady with whom he had a love affair—the beautiful wife of one Giuliano de’ Medici, engaged in the administration of taxes there—the said lady, according to previous agreement, left her husband’s house. She pretended to be going for a walk, but just outside the town she mounted behind the count. He had about twenty people with him, some on horseback, some on foot, besides two mounted bowmen. When the people saw the lady surrounded by this train there was an uproar. The storm-bell was rung and the count was followed in pursuit, which became so hot that the count was obliged to give up his fugitive. Every one of his suite that could be reached was killed and stripped in the mêlée, and many of the citizens also were left dead. Thanks to their good horses, the count and his chancellor got away to Marciano (in the valley of the Chiana), where they were arrested. The Ten, before whom the case was laid, at first gave orders to liberate the count and keep the chancellor, but afterwards they commanded both to be kept under arrest. Probably nothing will be done to him, but the chancellor—on whom the chief blame is laid—may come off badly, the more so as the matter concerns the wife of a Medici, who, though poor, is still one of the family. In truth, the count’s mishap is much to be regretted, for he used to be considered a saint as well as a man of learning, and now he has lost greatly in public opinion, though, indeed, love has brought many into like errors.’ Duke Ercole’s mediation was needless, as Pico was at once set free, and the good easy husband received back into his house the faithless wife, who pleaded forcible abduction. She was a rich young widow of low degree when he married her shortly before. Pico’s own remarks on the whole affair display his penitence. ‘His sin grieves him,’ he said of himself, ‘and he does not defend his conduct. He seems to deserve forgiveness just because he attempts no excuse. Nothing is weaker than man, nothing is mightier than love!’

The Roman affair was not so easily disposed of. After the adventure at Arezzo, Pico went to Rome, where, to establish the favourite Florentine thesis of an agreement between Platonism and Christianity, and the assistance to be derived from the former in combating heresy, he announced a public disputation on 900 questions, to which, besides philosophy and theology, law and natural science, magic and the Cabbalah, Arabia and Chaldæa, had contributed their quota. Thus the most brilliant intellects, sometimes even more than others, pay tribute to pedantry. The fruitful seed that lay buried in these investigations was in a great measure choked up with the dull rubbish from which the age was unable to free itself. Many of the affirmations of the young scholar (which might well seem questionable at that time) were impeached as contrary to the faith, and the disputation was stopped. On August 5, 1486, Innocent VIII. signed a brief against the theses put forth by Giovanni Pico, denouncing their author in no sparing terms. The long interval between the signature and the publication, which did not take place till December 15, instead of helping to smooth the difficulty, only increased it. The author of the controverted propositions—so his opponents maintained—being secretly informed of the papal decision, hastily wrote an apology for them, had it secretly printed in Naples, and pre-dated it, so that he should not appear to be defending assertions already condemned by the highest ecclesiastical authority. The accused denied this, and declared that he had only received the brief on January 6, 1487, on his journey to France. In any case, his written defence furnished his opponents with a pretext by which to set the Pope against him and cause him to receive a citation to Rome. It was even determined to arrest him, as we see from a letter addressed to the Pope from Siena, December 5, by the Bishop of Lucca, excusing the non-fulfilment of the papal orders on account of his absence from his see.[79]

The ‘Apology,’ dated May 31, 1486, is dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici. ‘God is my witness,’ says the author in the introduction, ‘that I dedicate this writing to thee, O Lorenzo, not as thinking it worthy of such a man, but because I have long known that I owe all I possess to thee. Whatever I am or may become is thine and will remain thine. I say less than I would, and my words are too cold to express the love and reverence which I have long felt and shall continue to feel for thee. To these feelings I am moved by the numerous proofs of favour that have proceeded rather from thy mind towards me than from thy position, and which are as rare as they are characteristic of thee. Receive this apology with kindness; the gift is small, but it is a testimony of my lasting devotion. If thou shouldst turn to it from the important affairs which claim thy attention, remember that it is a sketch rather than a work carefully thought out, a task imposed on me by others rather than chosen by myself, and that I present it to thee, not as a proof of talents and learning to which I am a stranger, but as a token, I repeat, of my entire devotion.’

Lorenzo, Ercole d’Este, and Pico’s relatives, took an active interest in his troubles. All through 1487, while the accused was abroad, the affair dragged on without result. The chief hope was in Lorenzo, whose influence with the Pope was known to be great and increasing, and it was not his fault that matters did not get on. He did not wait for the entreaties of Pico’s brother Antonio, who came to Florence in February 1488 to beg for his interposition at Rome. He had already, on January 19, written to the ambassador Lanfredini, giving a warning against extreme steps, since excommunication or the like against a man so young and so learned might drive the most moderate beyond all patience. The solution he suggested was that Pico should be allowed to go free to Rome and justify himself to the Pope in person. The envoy did not quite agree with Lorenzo’s view, being of opinion that the count would do better to leave theology alone; nevertheless he bestirred himself zealously on his behalf. ‘To my great satisfaction and joy,’ writes Lorenzo to him on March 22, 1488,[80] ‘I have been informed of the agreement made by you with the Holy Father concerning the count. In pursuance of your intimation, I shall invite the count here. I feel assured he will conduct himself so that his Holiness shall be satisfied with him, for which object no efforts shall be wanting on my part.’ So Giovanni Pico returned to Florence and Lorenzo continued his intercession. But there were still grave difficulties in the way of an adjustment, and the accused was very shy of appearing at Rome. He lived sometimes in Florence, sometimes at the neighbouring villa of Querceto and the abbey of Fiesole, where he pursued Hebrew and Chaldee studies with great ardour, and worked out a commentary on Genesis. In June 1489, Florence conferred the freedom of the city on her illustrious guest, and gave him the right of acquiring property to the value of 6,000 gold florins. It is evident that Lorenzo was anxious to bind him more and more closely to himself and his home. ‘The Count of Mirandola,’ he wrote on June 19 to Lanfredini,[81] ‘is staying permanently with us, and lives as retired as a monk, continually working at theology, and commenting on the Psalms, &c. He reads the service as is usual for priests, strictly observes the fasts, and has the most simple household that necessity permits. He appears to me a pattern for others. But he desires to be cleared before the Holy Father from the charges brought against him, and to receive a brief by which he shall be re-admitted as a true son and a good Christian. I have this much at heart too, for there are few men dearer to me or that I esteem more highly. To my mind he is a true Christian, for he conducts himself so that the whole city would be ready to stand surety for him. Endeavour to obtain this brief in due form, that his conscience may be set at rest. This will stand in the first rank among the many pleasures you have procured me.’

The affair, however, made no progress. The intention at Rome seemed to be to commission the Bishop of Vaison to receive the explanations of Pico, who declared himself ready to submit simply and entirely to the papal decision. About this time the publication of his commentary on Genesis gave fresh scandal. A feeling hostile to him seemed to be gaining ground. On August 17, Lanfredini wrote that Lorenzo had better advise the count simply to beg for absolution and perform the needful penance. On October 6 he declared that it was only out of consideration for Lorenzo that the Pope was so lenient to the culprit; to satisfy Lorenzo by giving the cardinalate to his son was quite another thing—so his Holiness had said—from lending an ear to his intercessions in a case where the faith was at stake. Finally Lorenzo lost patience when he found that the Pope was in the hands of his friend’s opponents. ‘I am greatly displeased,’ he wrote in October 1489, ‘at hearing of the censures on Mirandola’s work. If I were not convinced that this persecution arises from envy and malice, I would not speak of it. Various learned and God-fearing theologians here have read the book, and all approve it as excellent and Christian. I myself am not such a bad Christian that I would keep silence and accept the book if I thought otherwise. If he only said the Credo, these malicious spirits would smell heresy in it. If the pressure of business did but permit his Holiness to take personal cognizance of the matter and discover the truth, I am certain the whole thing would fall to pieces and the truth would come to light. But the Pope has to depend on others, and this poor man cannot defend himself. If he gives his reasons, he is said to be speaking against the Holy Father! If he had only to deal with his enemies unprotected by the papal authority he would soon put them to silence. His misfortune is that he has to deal with malicious ignorant foes who shield themselves behind the head of the Church. I have already hinted to you my suspicion that they are trying to drive him to despair, and thereby to some rash step which might really be directed against his Holiness. For believe me, Giovanni, this man has it in his power to work both good and evil. His life and conduct prove the first; if he is forced to turn another way, I personally shall lose little thereby, for whatever direction he may take, he will be attached to me as I to him. I have never succeeded in quite making you understand this. Without going into particulars now, I will merely observe that an attempt has been made to persuade him into a step which might have given great offence; but I have always prevented it, so that he is come here, where he is leading a virtuous life and is in peace. These devils tempt him with their persecutions, and they are only too readily believed.’

This letter shows how deeply the writer was moved. His earnest remonstrances succeeded at least so far that Pico, who, like Galileo afterwards, had been relegated to a villa in the neighbourhood of Florence, was left unmolested in the city. At this time occurred the visit of Reuchlin, who came to Italy for the second time in 1490 in the suite of a son of Duke Eberhard, and now became personally acquainted with the man who had given the most decisive impulse to his studies, which, like the Italian’s, aimed at harmonising the results of Jewish and Greek wisdom with Christian faith and knowledge. These studies entered in Germany upon a new sphere of influence stretching far beyond the scope of Pico, but not more free from danger, and involving the German in conflicts similar to those of the Italian. Pico’s Roman troubles were augmented by others. The dispute between his brothers Galeotto and Antonio put him into pecuniary straits, and obliged him to seek the aid of the Duke of Ferrara.[82] Obstructions at Rome were endless. Neither Lorenzo de’ Medici nor Innocent VIII. lived to see the conclusion, which was brought about at last by a brief of Alexander VI., June 18, 1493, in which Giovanni Pico was fully acquitted. The trouble and anxiety caused by this affair made the deepest impression on his mind. His nephew and biographer relates that he heard from his own mouth how great a change it produced in his mind and life.[83] Excepting a visit to Ferrara, where at the duke’s desire he was present at a chapter of the Dominican order, he quitted Florence no more. We have seen him in the country, in frequent intercourse with Ficino and Poliziano. He lived entirely for science; and the wealth which enabled him to collect a treasury of books was also freely bestowed on the needy; in these good works he was assisted by his attached friend Benivieni. He burned his Latin poems, which he had collected in five books and given to Poliziano for correction. The latter had altered a few things, as he said, after the example of him who found fault with the sandals of the goddess of beauty because he could find none with herself; and because a few verses seemed to him to be only of the rank of a knight, while the rest were patrician and senatorial. Poliziano lamented his friend’s resolve in a letter accompanied by a Greek epigram. He could not remember, he said, ever to have read anything more charming, elegant and polished. ‘Ye silly gods of love,’ thus ends the epigram, ‘why did ye fly to Pico, who is the leader of the Muses?’ Poliziano approved of his friend’s poetical attempts, and admired his commentary on Benivieni’s canzone on Platonic love, which the school of Florentine literature reckons among its most important works, more than his deeper studies, when in the rustic solitude of Querceto he wrote an extensive treatise against astrology, destined to form part of a great polemical work on sects hostile to Christianity.[84] Poliziano thought it was lost time:

‘Pico, what hast thou to do with this? Thou’rt wasting thy powers:
Truly thy style is too good for this generation of jugglers.’

Savonarola, on the contrary, who was a friend of the author in his later years, and read the unfinished work, expressed mingled pleasure and regret over it; pleasure in the stand made by the work against widespread errors, regret at the premature death of the gifted author. We must not judge Pico della Mirandola by what he has left behind. He paid a heavier tribute to the weaknesses of the time than many others who were not equal to him in intellectual capacity. His whole personality must be considered; it is a typical one. This scion of a princely house, who quitted the world at two-and-thirty, who had measured the heights and depths of the learning of his time, who, with all his abstruse scholarship, preserved a simplicity and amiability of character that drew all hearts to him, is by far the most brilliant figure in that brilliant circle. After four centuries Pico della Mirandola remains the highest representative of early maturity of intellect. But he is something more; in conjunction with the man whose friendship was so warmly expressed, he did more than any other to give a value and importance to a period which, with all its defects, was beneficent and noble.

The sad fate of two other members of the Florentine literary circle who were not Tuscans, as well as the circumstance that both filled public offices in Florence, justifies us in mentioning them together, though several decades separated them. They are Stefano Porcaro and Pandolfo Collenuccio. The former, a Roman knight, was the friend and correspondent of Poggio, Filelfo, Ciriaco, and Traversari, holding a position of influence at home and abroad.[85] He was led into the fatal conspiracy of 1453 against Nicolas V. rather by memories of antiquity and of Cola Rienzi than by his Florentine connections. In the Podestà’s palace may be seen, in what was formerly the chapel, a picture of the Madonna painted on the wall, presented, in 1490, by Pandolfo Collenuccio of Pesaro, then judge of the supreme court. Ficino, Pico, Poliziano, admired the intellectual gifts and varied talents of this learned man. It was wonderful, wrote the latter, what he was capable of; he managed the affairs of princes with great sagacity, was surpassed by none in the elegance of his prose and verse, and decided intricate suits with a rare knowledge of law. He commanded the most varied knowledge with such mastery that he made further discoveries when others fancied they had found out everything. This sound judge of classical literature was also a student of natural history, and one of the first to apply the science of history to the vulgar tongue. He made use of his connection with Germany, where he had been as envoy from Duke Ercole d’Este to King Maximilian, to make large acquisitions for the Florentine libraries. His execution in 1504, by command of Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro, on pretext of high treason in the Borgia disturbances, was one of those tragedies of which there was never any lack in the petty courts of Italy.[86]

CHAPTER XI.

THE UNIVERSITY OF PISA. MANUSCRIPTS AND CRITICISM. PRINTING. PLATONIC SYMPOSIA.

The circle of Florentine celebrities which, though its members were continually changing, always retained its peculiar character, included men of smaller importance than many of those already described, but yet worthy of mention. Among these are the philologer-poets who, in endeavouring to follow Poliziano, lost their individuality in imitations of the Roman poets of the Flavian and following periods. Their verses have but an historical and local interest for posterity, and even the sixteenth century, so busy with Latin verse-making, passed judgment upon them very freely.[87] Ugolino Vieri, who Latinised his name into Verino, celebrated his native city and its famous men in three books of a poem, ‘De Illustratione urbis Florentiæ,’ which spite of a few happy characteristics, is barely more than a dry catalogue. Naldo Naldi has acquired a more lasting reputation by his biographical works than by his numerous verses. People sang each other’s praises without end; and such laudations, though endurable from a Poliziano, are tiresome from inferior hands. Alessandro Bracci, one of the secretaries of state; Giovan Battista Cantalicio, afterwards Bishop of Penne and Adria; Tommaso Baldinotti of Pistoja; Alessandro Cortesi, the talented scion of a family of San Gemignano very intimate with the Medici; Piero Riccio, known under the Latinised name of Crinitus, and author of a history of the old Latin poets; these and many other pupils of Ficino, Landino, and Poliziano, belong to the dii minorum gentium. Verses by some of them have been printed, while heaps lie in manuscript in the Laurentian library to testify to the intellectual activity of the time.[88] The verses of the Roman Carlo de’ Massimi in praise of Pisa University have some interest for the history of literature. Literary productions of every kind were sent to Lorenzo from all quarters; he was the great patron of authors. Much of what he received he sent on to San Marco and to the Abbey of Fiesole, as may be seen by the inscriptions in the volumes.

All these men, small and great, found in Lorenzo their Mæcenas. But he showed very early that he invested the position of patron with more serious importance than his predecessors had done. When scarcely three-and-twenty he brought about the restoration of the University of Pisa, which was not only an act of justice, but, apart from its literary importance, a token of ripe political insight that helped to counterbalance in some degree the miseries inflicted on Volterra in the same year (1472). The university, formed in the fourth decade of the fourteenth century out of the existing public schools, and confirmed in 1343 by Clement VI., fell into decay from political causes later in the century, and finally succumbed to Florentine enmity. The mutual animosity of the two cities is only to be paralleled in the history of antiquity. Twenty-five years after the subjection of Pisa, the Ministry of War at Florence wrote to Averardo de’ Medici, their commissioner in the subject town:[89] ‘According to general opinion here, the most effectual means of securing the town is to empty it entirely of Pisan citizens and peasants, concerning which we have written to the Captain of the People till we are tired. He answers that he is hindered by the soldiery and officers. We now command thee to go to him and persuade him to spare no harshness or severity, as we perceive that no other remedy will avail. We have confidence in thee that thou wilt at once set everything to work, for thou couldst do nothing more pleasing to this whole people.’ The efficacious result was that the city was ruined, the marshy neighbourhood left fallow to become the home of fever, and the fleet vanished. So rooted was this hatred that when Pisa had freed herself amid the confusion which followed on Lorenzo’s death, Bernardo del Nero—a usually moderate man of the Medicean party—declared that against the Pisans nothing availed save force; all prisoners of war must be slain after the example of the Genoese, who let the Pisan captives taken at Meloria languish to death in prison.[90]

Lorenzo early perceived that the blind enmity which ruined Pisa was overshooting the mark. As his family held considerable property in the district he frequently had occasion to visit the city, whose position made it a halting-place for many travellers between northern and southern Italy. Pisa must not be allowed to give the Florentines any more trouble, but neither should it be allowed to perish. Two considerations in particular seem to have prompted the re-establishment of the old university. The first was the quiet, which was more favourable to study than the busy life of Florence; the second was the number and cheapness of dwellings, which were in increasing danger of falling to ruin since trade had departed from its old abodes, and the inhabitants were nearly all poor people. Yet Lorenzo needed great power and moral courage to set himself against rooted hatred and stubborn prejudices. On December 19, 1472, was issued the decree by which the university was restored to life.[91] A board of management was appointed—the Officiales studii—consisting of five Florentine citizens: Tommaso Ridolfi, Donato Acciaiuolo, Andrea Puccini, Alamanno Rinuccini, and Lorenzo de’ Medici. The yearly endowment was to consist of 6,000 gold florins, and the statutes of the University of Florence were to be in force at that of Pisa. Members of the state were to be entitled to academical honours and the authority to practise in Pisa alone. To raise the salaries of the professors, Pope Sixtus IV. consented to a tax on the clergy to the amount of 5,000 florins in five years, a tax which was renewed by his successor in 1497 for another five years, and drew complaints from Ficino, Poliziano, and others. Only the philosophical and literary branches of study were to continue at Florence.

The credit of all this was justly given to Lorenzo. ‘I heard a few days ago,’ wrote Antonio de’ Pazzi to him from Padua, January 29, 1473,[92] ‘that by your direction a new university is to be founded at Pisa; at which not only we Florentine students, but foreign ones too, are greatly delighted, seeing that Pisa is a city eminently suited for it, and because the scheme proceeds from a man who will strive to acquire honour by this as by all else that he undertakes.’ Scholars came flocking from all parts, and first among them Francesco Filelfo. He had found an asylum with the Sforza at Milan; but, dissatisfied and restless, extravagant and in debt, he tried to change his position. During the pontificate of Pius II. he made several attempts to this end, but, failing in his hopes, he attacked the pontiff before and after death with his usual invectives, and in consequence was imprisoned for a time. In April 1473 he applied to Lorenzo. Some time before he had managed to flatter Lorenzo’s father into forgetting his offences against Cosimo so far as to hold one of his sons over the font; and when in Florence in the autumn of 1469, shortly before Piero’s death, he obtained a loan from Lorenzo.[93] The letter which he now addressed to the latter[94] is curiously characteristic of the man. He attacks those who had long been in their graves—Marsuppini, Poggio, and their ‘synagogue.’ He begins by declaring that the Milanese chancellor, Cecco Simonetta, had advised him to prefer Pisa to Rome, where he was much wanted; and he ends with the artless assurance that Lorenzo must know well he cannot find in all the world a second Filelfo nor one more devoted to him. In another letter he remarks in the same style: ‘You are aware that at the present time no one can stand a comparison with me in my own branch.’ Simonetta, from Pavia, seconded the appeal, and sang the vain man’s praises. Lorenzo answered by asking what salary would be required, but the negotiation fell through, which Medici probably did not much regret, as he must have felt some hesitation in attaching the quarrelsome old man to his young establishment. Besides, the sentence of banishment once passed on Filelfo was still in force, and his services in the way of literary invective after the conspiracy of the Pazzi had not yet smoothed the way to his return. When he was at last summoned to Florence as professor of eloquence and moral philosophy, he had scarcely time to greet the city he had left for nearly half a century before he died, a few days after his arrival, in the summer of 1481, in his eighty-third year.

The new-born university, which was opened in November 1473, soon took its share in the working of many active forces in diverse directions. In its very earliest years it would have risen to the highly flourishing condition it afterwards attained had not various unfavourable circumstances come in the way. The unhealthy air of the city and neighbourhood had not been sufficiently taken into consideration. War, desolation, poverty, made matters worse, just at the time when Florence was also a prey to disease. For six years the establishment kept moving from place to place. Professors and students wandered away to Pistoja and Prato, and sometimes to Florence—even Empoli and San Miniato were thought of—till the state of affairs was improved, and the hitherto scattered lecturers were brought together in a university building erected by the care of Lorenzo. There was no lack of difficulties with the professors; the Sienese Bartolommeo Sozzini and the Milanese brothers Decio, all professors of law, gave Lorenzo a great deal of trouble by their unruly conduct. Among the best professors at the outset were the jurists Baldo Bartolini of Perugia and Francesco Accolti of Arezzo, brother of the Florentine chancellor, and a pupil of Filelfo; Piero Leoni of Spoleto, already mentioned, who afterwards, to his misfortune, became Lorenzo’s family doctor; the humanists Lorenzo Lippi of Colle and Bartolommeo of Pratovecchio. Special honours fell to the share of the Roman Francesco de’ Massimi, who came to the university at its opening as professor of law, was made Principal the next year, and gained such esteem both by his lectures and by his endeavours to establish and maintain a better understanding between the two hostile cities, that the rights of citizenship were conferred on him and his descendants, and he was permitted to add the arms of Pisa to his own.[95] The salaries of the professors were mostly considerable, and Lorenzo repeatedly contributed to them out of his own funds. The archbishop, Filippo de’ Medici, supported him in his efforts to benefit the institution, which was conducive both to the honour and advantage of the see. That pecuniary difficulties could not be escaped, however, is clear from the fact that in 1485, in consequence of the non-payment of the papal allowance, a retrenchment of 2,000 florins was deemed needful.

The philosophical and philological lectures continued, as has been said, at Florence, and scholarly activity there seemed in nowise diminished by the re-animation of the sister city. Among the native professors, Bartolommeo della Fonte (Fontius) made a name equally distinguished in Latin and Greek literature, and left Latin memoirs on contemporary events from 1448 to 1493, the value of which is not to be measured by their brevity.[96] His friendship with Poliziano became clouded when he obtained the chair of eloquence vacant by Filelfo’s death. He does not seem to have held it long, as he undertook the superintendence of Matthias Corvinus’ library at Ofen. The study of Greek flourished. The chair once occupied by Argyropulos and Theodoros was filled by the Athenian Demetrios Chalcondylas, who kept it longer than anyone else, and left a better reputation, both for learning and morality, than many Greek grammarians. Poliziano, who is supposed to have perfected his knowledge of the Hellenic tongue under him, addressed him in several Greek epigrams, which give no hint of the rivalry afterwards said to exist between them. A fine testimony to his Homeric studies is the edition of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ which came out in 1488. Three years before, at the age of nearly seventy, he left Florence for Milan, where he long continued to teach, having been gladly welcomed by Lodovico Sforza, who rivalled the Medici in his patronage of science and art. Chalcondylas’ place at Florence was taken by Johannes Lascaris, who formed many fruitful connections with Milan, France, and Rome, in the days of Lorenzo’s son. The knowledge of Greek was, perhaps, never so widespread among high-born youths anywhere as in those days in the Tuscan city to which, Poliziano said, Athens with its native soil and all its possessions had transferred itself. In truth, strangers eager to learn came from all quarters—England, Germany, Portugal—just as of old everybody went to Athens. Here Alessandro Farnese acquired that knowledge of the language and literature of Greece which the greyhaired Pope Paul III. had not yet lost. Poliziano thus addressed the hearers of Chalcondylas:

Seek the Pierides not in their ancient home, O ye poets:

For in this city of ours dwells now the heavenly choir.

Where, do ye ask, have they chosen among us a place to abide in?

All the nine ye will find safe in Chalcondylas’ breast.

Textual criticism was a work taken up less by foreigners than by Italians: in Rome, especially by Lorenzo Valla and Pomponio Leto; in Florence, by Landino, Poliziano, and Pico. Lorenzo not only encouraged those personally intimate with him to this work, but urged others to it, particularly the members of the Academy, which, having weathered the storms of Paul II.’s reign, flourished with renewed vigour under Sixtus IV., a Pope who felt no fear of the baptized heathens. Bartolommeo Platina, writing to Lorenzo[97] to recommend the Milanese sculptor Andrea Fusina, adds that the man felt assured of obtaining his desire if he, Platina, interceded for him. ‘Farewell, and believe me, thou hast few who love and honour thee like Platina.’ On March 30, 1488, Lorenzo wrote to Lanfredini on behalf of a friend of Pomponio Leto:[98] ‘Doubtless you know, at least by name, Pomponio, one of the most famous scholars in Rome, if not the very first, and a man much attached to me and our whole house, so that I am greatly desirous of doing him a favour.’

The art of studying manuscripts had first to be put on a sound basis. The rich harvest of discoveries was now almost at an end, a few objects of interest turning up only occasionally. Collectors had naturally enough given themselves up to delight in the prizes thus gained, without troubling themselves much about criticism. The necessity of criticism became more strongly felt and exercised as continued study of the old authors involved a stricter examination of the correctness of the manuscripts. At first people had been too much inclined to believe generally in their great age, and had been misled in individual cases by the chronological notes at the end of the codices. Often, as in the Medicean codex of the later books of the Annals of Tacitus, the date was fixed in the fourth Christian century, when in reality the parchments were written on by a later copyist. The corrupt state of the manuscripts called for correction, but the correction was mostly arbitrary. Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Francesco Barbaro, and others, sought to supply what was needed, but of rules they knew nothing. In this, above all, shines the transcendent merit of Poliziano; though even he indulged largely in conjecture, when in his youth he self-complacently fancied that his work on Catullus surpassed everything of the kind. Nor did he stand alone in this respect. Ermolao Barbaro in his edition of Pliny in 1492, Marullus in his critical works on Lucretius, confess how often they had had recourse to emendations of their own devising. But Poliziano thoroughly perceived that a secure basis was only to be obtained by a comparison of MSS. where more than one existed. When this was not the case he tried to get a foundation for his conjectures from notes and parallel passages. Many printed books from his library bear on their margins traces of this comparison of MSS., to which he alludes in one of his letters to Lorenzo.[99] The collection of critical studies which he published in 1489 under the title of ‘Miscellanea,’ at Lorenzo’s desire and with a dedication to him, is a lasting memorial of his learning and acumen. A painful impression is made by his dispute with Filelfo’s pupil Giorgio Merula,[100] the editor of ‘Plautus.’ This man had been invited to Milan by Ludovico il Moro, gave philosophical lectures there, and though previously an admirer of Poliziano, now professed to find errors and plagiarisms in his works. Sforza showed his good sense by trying to calm the irritation of the Florentine when appealed to by him.

Poliziano’s critical work on the correction of the text of Justinian’s ‘Corpus Juris’ holds an honourable place in the history of this subject. This famous copy of the Pandects was avowedly acquired by Pisa at the conquest of Amalfi, whither it had doubtless come as a gift from some Greek emperor, and on the overthrow of Pisa it was transferred to Florence. Poliziano’s views of its age and authorship may have been exploded by later criticism, but for the foundations of a better text than that of the later MSS., and the two editions printed from them, we still owe him thanks.[101]

While the Latin works of the humanists were being done into the vulgar tongue, the practice of translating Greek works into Latin was continued. Alamanno Rinuccini translated Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ and moral writings, as well as Philostratos’ ‘Life of Apollonius of Tyana,’ which excited special interest in an age much busied with the theologising philosophy of the later Greeks. Alessandro Bracci did the same for the histories of Appian, and Poliziano, as has been mentioned, translated those of Herodian for Innocent VIII. The movement, begun in Florence and Venice, had spread all over Italy. In the most palmy days of these studies the invention of printing produced in the whole world of letters a change, the possible extent of which was at once felt, though it could not yet be measured. Books had hitherto been things for the great and opulent, and not seldom were to be obtained only by personal labour. There were difficulties even in the highest circles. The spread of the new art produced not only a material increase of literary productions, but led naturally to an immense increase of criticism. In earlier times bitter complaints had been heard of the corruption of the texts. The few attempts that had been made to attain greater correctness now became a recognised branch of study. Every corrector was not indeed a Poliziano, a Barbaro, or a Merula. The last complains, in his edition of ‘Plautus’ of 1472, that learned and unlearned alike busied themselves with correcting books; a circumstance which limits the value of more than one editio princeps to its mere rarity, and explains the fact that many of the correctors of that time rivalled their predecessors the copyists in the arbitrariness of their proceedings. But even in the case of the learned the canons of criticism were by no means fixed.

It is remarkable that Florence, which, when printing was introduced into Italy, stood at the head of all literary movement, is by no means the first city that appears in the annals of typography. In 1465, three years after the capture of Mainz by Adolf of Nassau had scattered to the four winds the printers established there, two Germans set up the first printing-press in the Benedictine monastery at Subiaco, whence ere long it was removed to the house of the Massimi at Rome. Four years later Venice followed, then the Umbrian and other cities. In November, 1471, appeared the first book printed in Florence, the commentary of Servius on Virgil’s ‘Bucolics,’ which was followed in the following January by the ‘Georgics,’ and in October, 1472, by the ‘Æneid.’ But if the city fell behind many others in point of priority, this honour is due to her, that one of her sons cut and founded his own types, without needing the services of a foreigner. The goldsmith Bernardo Cennini was the first Italian who set himself up as an independent artist in this line.[102] Born in Florence, January, 1415, he was first a silk-weaver and then a goldsmith, and was concerned in the bronze doors of the Baptistery, and other great works. His art led him to manufacture types for printing. The inscription in the book printed by him, with the help of his sons Domenico and Pietro, the first as compositor, the second as corrector of the press,[103] shows that he was proud of the achievement: ‘To Florentine minds nought is arduous.’ The book shows an artistic mind in its form and typographical arrangement, but the round type is lacking in sharpness and evenness. The pecuniary result can scarcely have been worth the trouble and outlay. When we find that Cennini, after spending sixteen months on the production of the folio volume, pledged his house for a loan of 120 florins, we can understand why he returned to his old occupation, and why no other book printed by him is forthcoming. In course of time Bernardo Cennini, whose sight had suffered greatly, became consul of his guild, and died in 1483, twelve years after the attempt which brought him a name and somewhat tardy honours.

Next a German who had established himself in Florence, Johannes, son of Peter of Mainz, printed Boccaccio’s ‘Filocolo’ in 1472, and afterwards joined the typographical society which took its name from the Dominican nunnery at Ripoli.[104] Its local habitation is still shown in one of the schoolrooms of the educational institute named after the same in the Via della Scala. From this establishment, founded by the spiritual directors of the convent and connected with a type-foundry, issued first, in 1476, some lauds and prayers, then the ‘Commentary of Donatus’ and the ‘Legend of S. Catherine of Siena,’ which, both in the common form and in copies with illuminated initials, obtained a great circulation. This printing establishment, in which many both of the clergy and laity had a share, and in which the nuns were employed as compositors, produced a great deal of work during its short existence of eight years. In 1477 printing was begun by Nicolaus of Breslau, already mentioned; in 1478 he brought out the ‘editio princeps’ of Celsus, and three years later Landino’s ‘Dante.’ In 1481, Antonio Miscomini printed Savonarola’s ‘Triumphus Crucis,’ a proof of the increasing notice attracted by the eloquent and learned Dominican. Next came Ficino’s ‘Platonic Theology,’ and translation of ‘Plotinus.’ In 1488 the series of Greek books issued in Florence opened brilliantly with the ‘Homer,’ dedicated to Lorenzo’s eldest son. Chalcondylas undertook the correction, the difficulty of which called forth his remark, in the preface, that the text had been so corrupted by the carelessness of copyists that it was, so to say, impossible to find it entire in any codex, however old. The expenses were borne by Bernardo and Neri, sons of Tanai de’ Nerli, a noble citizen. Lorenzo Alopa of Venice is said to have printed the beautiful volume, which was soon followed by numerous others. The most celebrated Florentine family of typographers, that of the Giunta, did not begin their labours till Lorenzo de’ Medici had long been in his grave.

The extended use of typography had, however, as yet by no means diminished the value of manuscripts or put an end to the work of the copyists, while the need and difficulty of unearthing literary treasures was as great as ever. The explanation of this is to be found in the material perfection to which the art of the copyists had been brought, a perfection of which the proud consciousness was expressed in Vespasiano’s disdainful remark on printing. This branch of industry went on flourishing for many years, to disappear at last and leave scarcely a trace behind. One of the most brilliant, though not the most important, of the treasures of the Laurentiana, the works of St. Augustine in sixteen folio volumes full of miniatures and ornaments, was begun in the time of Piero de’ Medici and finished shortly before the death of Lorenzo (two of the volumes are dated 1491). It may not have been completed till the time of his second son, unless the escutcheon with the balls and the Triregnum points to Leo X. only as the possessor of the work and not as concerned in its execution.

In the diffusion of literary treasures, both of classical and modern works, and in the relations of the latter to the general public, who now for the first time became really acquainted with them, was brought about that great change which gives to this period double importance in the history of intellectual development. At Lorenzo’s death this revolution had hardly reached its first stage; but his keen vision perceived its growing importance when he observed that in the course of twenty-eight years Italy had come to take a more prominent share than other lands in the activity of the press. This showed, quite as much as the previous rapid development of Greek literature, that the country was ready to make an independent and profitable use of the gifts of foreign countries. The invention of printing and the discovery of America were in some degree the two great landmarks of Lorenzo’s life. The first created actual publicity, the second opened a new horizon to the world.

Never were manuscripts more eagerly collected and copied than in those days. The sum of the collections was not so great as in the days of Poggio and Leonardo Bruni; still the libraries were increasing everywhere. Greece, which had contributed so largely to enrich the West in the first half of the century, and after the fall of the Eastern empire, was still the principal mine. Witness the two journeys of Johannes Lascaris, the second of which, like that of Bernardo Michelozzi, was entirely devoted to searching the monastery of Mount Athos. Its results, as already stated, reached Florence after Lorenzo’s death. As early as 1472 Lorenzo had projected a building, probably near the palace in the Via Larga, destined to contain the great number of manuscripts collected by his grandfather, his father, and himself. This appears from a letter addressed to him by Vespasiano da Bisticci, in which the latter recalls their frequent conversations on the subject, and adds that such an undertaking would do great honour to Lorenzo as well as to the town; and that he had written about it to the Duke of Calabria, the Count of Urbino, and Alessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, knowing how much pleasure it would give them. Doubtless the manifold cares and disturbances which prevented Lorenzo from imitating his grandfather in the number and splendour of his buildings hindered him from executing this plan in good time. Consequently at his premature death the library was but half finished. It is now impossible to make out even the site of the building, since it is uncertain whether it was the same chosen many years afterwards by his nephew Pope Clement VII. for the existing Mediceo-Laurentian library. We still possess the inventory of the private library of the Medici, drawn up in 1495, when the books were made over to the convent of San Marco. There they remained, through many vicissitudes, till 1508, when Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici bought them and transferred them to Rome; after his death they returned to Florence, to form the chief part of the San Lorenzo collection.[105]

It may be imagined that many of Lorenzo’s fellow-citizens were his rivals in book-collecting. A fine library had once been formed by Piero de’ Pazzi, son of Andrea. Francesco and Angelo Gaddi followed his example, and the great public library of their native city contains many books once in their possession. Poliziano’s friend, the accomplished merchant Filippo Sassetti the elder, also made a large collection. The good custom of making special bequests to secure these literary treasures from dispersion was kept up. Boccaccio had done this, and Riccoli, Traversari, Cardinal Piero Corsini and others; and in like manner Ugolini Guigni, Bishop of Volterra, left his books to the Benedictine abbey at Florence.[106] In 1477, Jacopo Salvini, Bishop of Cortona, bequeathed his collection to Lorenzo de’ Medici.[107] The latter had literary correspondents everywhere. In 1476 we find him corresponding with the Milanese Gio. Francesco della Torre, who, with Maestro Bonaccorso of Pisa, had purchased the books of Andronikos Kallistos, when the latter purposed returning from Lombardy to his own home.[108] Giovanni Rossi of Candia, who had been employed by Cardinal Bessarion, was also made use of by Lorenzo, apparently to look after copies of manuscripts.[109] Among those more closely connected with him in later years, Poliziano, Pico, and Ermolao Barbaro took charge of the enrichment of his collection and that of the convent libraries of San Marco, Fiesole, and San Gallo. Ho said once to Poliziano, he wished that he and Pico could procure him so many books that his income would not suffice to buy them, and he should be obliged to pawn his household goods. He kept copyists in many places, especially at Padua, which, as the residence of so many great scholars and from its connection with the Levant through Venice, was a spot favourable to book collectors.

The difficulty and expense of obtaining manuscripts in earlier times has been already noticed. Even in Lorenzo’s latter years it was by no means easy, and his correspondence shows that once, in the very height of his glory, he had to apply in his own handwriting to a prince who was probably under obligation to him, in order to obtain the loan of Dion Cassius. ‘There is in your Excellency’s library,’ he wrote on February 5, 1486, to Duke Ercole d’Este, ‘a historian, by name Dio, de Romanis historiis, that I earnestly desire to see, both on account of the enjoyment and consolation which history affords me, and because my son Piero, who has some knowledge of Greek literature, has begged me to help him to become acquainted with this author, who, I understand, is very rare in Italy. Your Excellency can understand how highly I shall prize the favour, if you will lend me the book for a few days.’ Notwithstanding their intimacy, the Duke did not send the original, but allowed a copy to be made by a copyist sent to Ferrara for the purpose. Two years later he had Niccolò Leoniceno’s translation copied for Lorenzo, on condition that it was neither to be printed nor allowed to go any further.[110] In the spring of 1491 Poliziano was, as we have seen, in Venice, where he bought for his patron a quantity of manuscripts now in the Laurentiana. He was refused permission to see Cardinal Bessarion’s collection of books, although the Ferrarese ambassador used his influence with the Doge Agostino Barbarigo—a strange token of petty mistrust.[111] ‘Your diligence in having Greek works copied, and the favour you show to scholars,’ wrote Poliziano to Lorenzo about this time, ‘procures for you such honour and attachment as no one has enjoyed for many years past.’ He mentioned at the same time the admiration for Lorenzo expressed by a Venetian poetess honoured by all scholars and literary men, as well as by popes and kings. ‘Last evening I visited Cassandra Fedele,[112] to whom I presented your salutations, Lorenzo; she is really admirable, both in Latin and in the vulgar tongue, withal very modest, and, in my opinion, also beautiful. I left her astonished. She is devoted to you, and speaks of you as if she knew all about you. Some day she will certainly come to Florence to visit you, so prepare to do her honour.’

Lorenzo’s example did not fail to bring forth fruit in his own house. Leo X. laboured all his life to follow it, with a zeal in collecting which showed that his father’s spirit survived in him. Piero, with his tutor Poliziano, superintended the arrangement and enrichment of the library, sending reports about it to his father, when the latter was ill at the baths. We learn from one of his letters[113] that the Medici, in the interests of their library, took advantage of the death of King Matthias Corvinus (April 4, 1490) to secure a number of his copyists and agents who were then thrown out of employment. That monarch vied with the book collectors of his time, and spent more than 30,000 gold florins yearly on the increase of his library at Ofen. In 1488 he sent an agent to Florence with full power to make purchases and superintend the taking of copies. The efforts made by this active and high-minded ruler of a people still half barbarous, however capable of development, were always assisted by Lorenzo, as became his friendly relations with Matthias. Long before the days of Matthias Corvinus there had been a literary and artistic connection between Florence and Hungary through Filippo Scolari, commonly called Pippo Spano by his countrymen, from his title of Count Palatine (Obergespann) of Temesvar; he held an influential position under Sigismund of Luxemburg. The connection with the Italian literary world had been actively kept up by the powerful Archbishop of Gran, Johann Vitez, who founded a high school at Ofen; still more by his nephew, Janus Pannonius, Bishop of Fünfkirchen, who studied at Padua under Guarino, and visited Cosimo de’ Medici at Careggi.

From his youth Lorenzo had extended his attention beyond what are called literary treasures in the narrower sense. In another field, bordering at once on the study of antiquity and on that of history, his name must also be mentioned with distinction. The range of classical studies was extended to ancient monuments. Rome, for centuries active only in destruction, began to be ashamed of the bad name which such barbarism had brought upon her. The time of Sixtus IV., with all its sins, was the turning-point. Like his successor and namesake, Sixtus V., the Pope did not entirely refrain from demolishing ancient monuments; but works of art and inscriptions were safe. The Roman Academy strove to wipe out the blot pointed at in an epigram by Pius II.

The great increase in the collection of old inscriptions drew attention to those valuable witnesses of old times. At the same time the disappearance of these memorials through decay and careless removal gave warning that their contents must be secured by copying. What had been once undertaken by Nicola Signorini, Giovanni Dondi, Poggio, Ciriaco, perhaps even before them by Cola di Rienzi, was now continued under the guidance of Pomponio Leto and his friends, with the sympathy of all Italy. Inscribed stones were diligently collected in Rome, Naples, and northern Italy. Bernardo Rucellai copied a number of epigraphs from the originals in Rome. One of the most valuable of these collections of transcriptions was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici by its author, the Dominican Fra Giocondo of Verona. He was one of those many-sided geniuses frequent at the time; versed in classical literature and in knowledge of antiquity. His pupil, Julius Cæsar Scaliger, called him a living library of ancient and modern learning. He was an engineer and architect, active in many ways at Rome, at Venice, and in France, and at an advanced age master-builder of the Vatican Basilica, under Leo X. The copy of the collection of inscriptions presented by Fra Giocondo to Lorenzo de’ Medici, who came in contact with him through Alessandro Cortesi, has disappeared, but other copies remain. The dedication of the work is an eloquent lamentation over the state of ancient Rome, and over the dispersion or destruction of stone and bronze tablets. It offers a warm tribute to their value, and an acknowledgment of Lorenzo’s interest in these studies. Poliziano and other friends made use of the careful work of the energetic Veronese, who was in communication both with the future Pope and his brother Giuliano, to whom he dedicated his commentary on Cæsar’s ‘Gallic War,’ and the later edition of ‘Vitruvius.’[114]

Such were the literary tendencies which, notwithstanding the rivalry of other cities, had their chief centre and focus at Florence; such was the circle of men which had gathered together in this city. Vacant places were soon filled up again. Like Lorenzo himself, several of the most prominent were in the prime of life, and younger men began to make good their claims. Such were Marcello Virgilio Adriani, who, after Scala’s death, restored the chancellorship to its pristine glory, and Bernardo Dovizj, who grew up in the house of the Medici, and afterwards gained a worldwide reputation as Cardinal of Bibiena. Whatever personal divergences there might be in the group, Lorenzo held them all together: all did homage to him, all acknowledged him as their leader. It was no cringing homage to a mighty lord; many of those who stood nearest to him gained little in worldly goods by their position, and others were too high and independent to need his help. It was the homage due to a richly endowed mind with noble aims and endeavours. Regardless of all inequalities of rank and position, freedom and ease reigned in this circle. When the meetings were academical, they were free from the formality which afterwards crept into academical life. Lorenzo de’ Medici, cheerful and sociable, maintained unconstrained intercourse with his literary friends. He received them everywhere: in the house in Via Larga, in the garden of San Marco, in the villas at Careggi and Poggio a Cajano. The more intimate of them accompanied him also when he went to the baths or to Pisa, or when he paced the convent cloisters in serious discourse with the clergy. The Platonic Academy, an inheritance from his grandfather, was only one manifestation of this multiform social life. It was so strangely composed that it is not surprising the Platonists sometimes fell into very un-Platonic ways. There is something half comic about a letter of Landino’s dated 1464, the year Cosimo died;[115] it is a petition on behalf of the herald of the Priory Palace, who had been dismissed from his post for keeping a girl hidden two days in his room. He solicits pardon upon the following pleas: his wife was expecting her confinement, he had two little daughters and an aged mother, and was a member of the Platonic Academy.

Lorenzo sometimes took part in the meetings of the learned society, which he was fond of summoning to Careggi, being less disturbed there than in the city. In both places the Symposia were renewed which, according to Alexandrian tradition, were to celebrate the day of Plato’s birth and death (November 7). Marsilio Ficino has described one of these banquets which took place under the presidency either of Lorenzo or Francesco Bandini.[116] Among the guests were Marsilio and his father, Landino, Antonio degli Agli Bishop of Fiesole, Carlo and Cristoforo Marsuppini, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Bernardo Nuzzi, and Tommaso Benci. The academical celebration or exercise succeeded the repast. Plato’s ‘Symposion’—the book which treats of the tokens of love at similar happy meetings, and a commentary on which Marsilio furnished in his treatise on love—was used as a starting-point for free disputation, the parts being divided among the persons present. Giovanni Cavalcanti developed the ‘Phædro,’ and showed how the birth of Eros from the conjunction of the earth with chaos, amid the throes of creation and the struggle for light, signified the original motive force of all that is good, noble, and beautiful in mankind. With this discourse was connected the exposition, also allotted to Cavalcanti, of the speech of Pausanias on the double Aphrodite, and Urania; on the distinction and confusion between moral and physical affections, their emanation, extension, stages of purification, and participation in the manifold forces of nature. Landino undertook to explain the speech of Aristophanes. According to this, love is the never-sleeping longing of man for a return to his former state of oneness with the Divine, from which Zeus, in wrath, had divided him by means of his earthly form and by sin. To Carlo Marsuppini fell the discourse of Agathon, which glorifies the qualities of the god who is at once so various and yet blends all variety into unity. Tommaso Benci devoted himself to pointing out the connection between the Christian view and the supposed inspired words of the priestess Diotima, who disclosed to Socrates the nature of a love that raises man to the highest good or sinks him to the lowest depths of evil. Cristoforo Marsuppini undertook to bring into harmony with the Socratic doctrine of Love the poems of Guido Cavalcanti, to which, as an emanation of Greek philosophy in the arena of the new-born Italian literature, great importance was attached by contemporaries, especially by Lorenzo de’ Medici. Such were the occupations of these famous assemblies. Their positive scientific results were not great, yet they afford a brilliant testimony to the cultivation which enabled the upper classes in Florence to take part in the noblest intellectual efforts.

While poetry and philosophy were thus flourishing, the exact sciences were making considerable progress. It is doubtful whether Fra Luca Paciolo, of Borgo San Sepolcro—who first recalled true geometry to life by his exposition of Euclid, and who exercised so much influence on Leonardo da Vinci—began his labours during the lifetime of Lorenzo. But Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, the physician, philosopher, naturalist, and mathematician, commenced his studies as early as the days of Cosimo the Elder. In 1468 he laid down the famous meridian in Sta. Maria del Fiore, primarily for the purpose of ascertaining exactly the solstices in order to fix the festivals of the Church. The importance of the work was appreciated by later generations, and the task was performed more perfectly 300 years afterwards, at the suggestion of La Condamine.[117] It is well known that Toscanelli, who died in 1482, aged seventy-five, exerted great influence on the mind of Christopher Columbus by his calculations of the longitudinal extent of Eastern Asia, which, however, rested chiefly on Marco Polo’s mistaken hypotheses. Long after Toscanelli’s death, Columbus—when upon his first voyage—made use of the map, marked with the latitudes and longitudes, which the former had once sent to Lisbon. It was in the last years of Lorenzo’s life that a man whose name is more famous than his deeds, and who has been the subject of renewed controversy in our own times, left his home to seek a new one in Southern Spain.[118] The family of Amerigo Vespucci, which reckoned among the navigator’s near relatives men of both scientific and political importance, was sometimes on friendly, sometimes on hostile terms with the Medici; but we hear nothing of any personal relation between him and Lorenzo. About the age of forty, Amerigo settled in Seville, where he joined the banking and commercial house of his fellow-countryman Giovanni Berardi. Well furnished with knowledge, to which his learned uncle Giorgio Antonio had contributed not a little, he began a course of practical preparations for the undertaking which led him to the Far West. Not with the Florentines, but with a schoolman of Lorraine, originated the name of the new continent which, as long as the world stands, will recall Amerigo Vespucci. Still the Florentines rightly rejoiced in the fame of their countryman. A later generation has seen the house of his forefathers turned into a hospital, and has inscribed on it in homage to his memory: ‘Ob repertam Americam sui et patriæ nominis illustratori amplificatori orbis terrarum.’ When the news of his discoveries made in the voyage of 1497 reached Florence, the Signoria had the above-named house illuminated for three nights, a distinction they were wont to bestow only on the most conspicuous merit.

THIRD PART.

THE FINE ARTS.

CHAPTER XII.

COSIMO AND PIERO DE’ MEDICI IN THEIR RELATION TO ART.

The early years of Cosimo de’ Medici were passed during the great revolution in art by which realism, united with reminiscences of the antique, enforced its claims, and, superseding the Gothic and Pisan styles in architecture and sculpture, restricted that of Giotto, in painting, to a narrow circle of recognised types. Art had struck out for itself these new paths before Cosimo became ruler of the whole state; but he influenced its rapid development by his active sympathy and by a liberality rarely equalled by private individuals or even by princes. Independently of the encouragement he afforded to talent in his princely capacity, he gave honourable commissions to artists from his own resources. In personal intercourse with them he united a thorough knowledge of art with a sympathetic affability which did equal honour to them and to himself. His two favourite architects, Brunelleschi and Michelozzo, have been already mentioned. The former died eighteen years before him, the latter survived him about six years. He justly valued their genius, and promoted a friendly understanding between them while employing both on important works. It was Brunelleschi who continued the building of the church of San Lorenzo and the abbey of Fiesole.

After the days of Giovanni di Bicci both branches of the Medici seem to have been reunited. The church of San Lorenzo was the parish church of Cosimo’s branch, and the burial-place of both. As early as 1415 there had been a talk of enlarging this sacred edifice, which dated from the earliest years of Christianity. Three years later a street at the back, the Via de’ Preti—a name ill-suited to the occupations of its inhabitants—was assigned to the Chapter for the purpose of enlargement. They began to rebuild the choir in 1419.[119] With other members of wealthy families, Giovanni de’ Bicci, having pledged himself to build some chapels, undertook the sacristy, which, for harmony of proportions, both in its cupola and ground-plan, and for the excellence of its decorations, claims the highest admiration. What the father had begun the son continued on a larger scale. On September 23, 1440—while the building of the new church was proceeding under the direction of Brunelleschi, the older one still being in use—Cosimo buried his brother Lorenzo there. Upon this occasion Pope Eugene IV. sent the cardinals and prelates of his court with the banner of the church and his own, and 100 wax candles. Two years later Cosimo proceeded to complete the choir and cupola on condition of gaining the right of patronage for himself and his heirs, in return for which privilege he gave the chapter a state bond for 40,000 florins towards the expenses of the building. On May 15, 1457, the court of the Canonica was begun; it was finished, as well as the high altar and those in the transepts, four years after, and finally the high altar was consecrated by Archbishop Orlando Bonarli on August 9, 1461. Two years before, a college for young clergy had been opened near the church, which retains its chapter to this day.[120] San Lorenzo is a basilica with columns. It has arches resting on an entablature laid on the capitals, a square end to the choir, a cupola, a flat roof, and chapels of no great depth. A walk through the cloisters of the Canonica recalls times long gone by. Two ranges of arcades enclose the quadrangle and lead to the little dwellings of the canons and to the famous library, which, in its present form, is a work of later days. The mighty dome of the cathedral and the bell-tower of Giotto look down into these cloisters, the stillness of which contrasts with the din of the busy streets around; while its whole appearance reminds the spectator of the homely simplicity, the frugality, and noble generosity which prevailed at the time of its erection.

The work said to have been executed for Cosimo at Fiesole by Brunelleschi was scarcely less important. At the foot of the hill there, in the valley of the Mugnone, lay the old abbey church, believed to be the original cathedral of the Etruscan city. In 1439, by command of Pope Eugene IV., it was handed over by the Benedictines to the regular canons of St. Augustine; and Cosimo de’ Medici, who was a friend of the Prior—Don Timoteo of Verona—began the new building. The church still retains the middle compartment of its original façade, belonging to the præ-Gothic period. Containing a nave and chapels of considerable dimensions, the building is simple and artistic. Doubts have been thrown on Vasari’s assertion that it is really Brunelleschi’s, it being quite unlike his other works.[121] The building of the convent presented many difficulties on account of the slope of the ground, and was finished by Cosimo’s son in 1466. It has long been diverted from its original use, but continued to be the domicile of the founder and his family, whose arms were carved upon it, at a later period. Here the Platonic Academy held its meetings, and here a great-grandson of Cosimo donned the purple as cardinal, and another—Giuliano, Duke of Nemours—drew his last breath. In later days the church was enriched with many beautiful works of art; but in vain do we look round the great building, which neither Brunelleschi nor Cosimo lived to see completed, for the learned men and the collection of books that were once in a double sense its best ornaments.[122]

Brunelleschi’s work in the neighbourhood of the city was surpassed in grandeur by a building of Michelozzo’s within the walls. In 1436 the Medici brothers obtained from Pope Eugene IV. the cession of the Silvestrine[123] convent of San Marco to the Dominicans of Fiesole, who had just settled beside the little church of San Giorgio, on the left bank of the Arno. In the following year the rebuilding of the convent and restoration of the church was begun; not without difficulties on the part of the former owners, who actually entered a protest at the Council of Basle. The cost of reconstruction was borne mainly by the Medici, with some assistance from the community. The church was consecrated on the feast of the Epiphany, 1442, by Cardinal Acciapacci, Archbishop of Capua, in presence of the Pope and his court.[124] A considerable portion of the convent was finished in 1443; but the whole was not completed till eight years later. The traces of Michelozzo’s hand are no longer to be seen in the church; the choir and apse were rebuilt two hundred years after him.

It is impossible to walk through the great courts, the broad vaulted corridors, the endless rows of cells opening into the passages, and the noble library, without remembering that this convent was the scene of many famous events in peace and war that influenced the fate of the city, and left their mark in the history not of Italy only, but of the human mind.[125] Cosimo was continually employing Michelozzo, who, besides the family palace, built for him the Noviciate of Sta. Croce and the adjoining chapel; remodelled the villas at Careggi, Cafaggiuolo, and Trebbio, and executed other works, some of them beyond the Tuscan border. Among the latter was the decoration of the palace at Milan, entrusted to him by Francesco Sforza, for which purpose Michelozzo visited that city. Here also he built for Pigello Portinari, director of the Medicean bank, a chapel in Sant’ Eustorgio after the model of that of the Pazzi in Sta. Croce. Cosimo’s sons employed him likewise. He is commonly believed to have designed for Piero the elegant chapel of the Annunziata, over whose altar hangs the thirteenth century picture of the Annunciation, which gave rise to the building of the church. This building, a quadrangular open chapel, with fluted Corinthian columns of marble supporting a richly decorated entablature, and enclosed by an elegant brass trellis, was executed by Pagno di Lapo Partigiani, a sculptor of Fiesole, and consecrated by Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville, Archbishop of Rouen, on Christmas day, 1452.[126]

About the same time, Michelozzo executed for Piero the marble tabernacle destined to contain a figure of Christ in the nave of the basilica of San Miniato. It consists of a canopy supported on composite marble columns and pilasters, the interior richly decorated with rose-coloured ornaments of glazed earth in square panels. On the frieze is the Medicean device, the three feathers with the diamond ring and the motto Semper, on the arch the escutcheon of the Calimala guild, in relief. Inside the tabernacle stands the altar with painting and predella.[127] For Giovanni, Cosimo’s younger son, Michelozzo built on the heights of Fiesole a villa, visible from a great distance, which afterwards passed to the Mozzi family. The architect was also employed by connections of the Medici. For Giovanni Tornabuoni he built the great palace near Sta. Trinità, which still gives its name to the street. To gain more space, it afterwards became necessary to demolish the front part of this palace, which, with its ground floor of rustic-work and its plain arched windows, had a somewhat sombre effect.

While Michelozzo’s time was chiefly taken up by the Medici, Brunelleschi was active in other quarters. The progress and final completion of his great work, the dome of the cathedral, has already been mentioned. On August 30, 1436, the roofing-in was celebrated by the pealing of all the bells in the city and the chanting of a Te Deum. Eight years later the scaffolding was raised for building the lantern, which was begun in 1446, shortly before the death of the great master, who was succeeded by Michelozzo.[128] His beautiful arcade at the Foundling Hospital has been mentioned. The similar loggia of San Paolo was placed opposite Sta. Maria Novella, at the southern end of the piazza. He built a chapel for the Pazzi family in the front court of the convent of Sta. Croce. Its walls are covered with Corinthian pilasters, high niches, and terra-cotta alto-rilievos; the cupola rests on two side-arches richly panelled and decorated with designs in glazed earth; the pendants being ornamented with terra-cotta rilievos of the Evangelists. Decoration and colour are here kept just within the limits of good taste. Andrea de’ Pazzi began the building, which was finished by his son Jacopo, so that Brunelleschi can hardly have lived to see its completion.[129] The official residence of the Capitani di parte Guelfa in the Via delle Terme, rebuilt by Brunelleschi, still exists, though with many alterations. The architect saw only the beginnings of his second greatest work, the palace of Luca Pitti. In Vasari’s time, when Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence, purchased the unfinished building—appropriately called, by an art-writer of those days, muraglia—the original plan was no longer to be found. Many alterations were made in succeeding centuries down to the present, when the extensive wings, intended as halls, were built. But the façade has kept its original stamp, and Vasari’s words remain true—that Tuscan architecture has produced no richer or grander creation. This grandeur is united with the greatest simplicity; and it is the absence of all ornament upon the three stages of rustic-work, with their gigantic bow-windows, crowned with galleries, which gives the building its peculiar character. The palace is said to have been begun in 1440, long before the time of Luca Pitti’s ephemeral greatness.[130] His villa at Rusciano was begun about the time of Brunelleschi’s death, so that the great artist saw little of the execution of his plan, which was carried on by Luca Fancelli. While Brunelleschi here aimed at attaining the whole effect by the majesty and harmony of the proportions, in the palace of Jacopo de’ Pazzi he allowed more play to decoration.

It is doubtful whether Cosimo de’ Medici employed the most learned artist of the time, Leon Batista Alberti. His chief works in Florence, with one exception, were executed for the Rucellai. Among them may be mentioned the palace, the loggia, the upper part of the façade of Sta. Maria Novella, finished in 1470; and the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre at San Pancrazio, an imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.[131] The Rucellai palace, in which are retained the bow-windows divided by small columns, points to the days of Bramante. It exhibits a combination of flat decorative pilasters of various orders with smooth rustic-work, antique ornaments on the rectangular doors, and traces of the square form in the bow-windows. Alberti also made designs for another work, which has given occasion to so many objections that its defects have been attributed to alterations by another hand. This is the choir of the Annunziata, commenced in 1451 by Lodovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, who, as victorious commander-in-chief of the Republic, desired to found a memorial at once of his piety and his thankfulness. A quarter of a century elapsed before the building was finished by Luca Fancelli. The exterior is octagonal, the interior round, with several chapels in irregular order, and numerous windows round the base of the large cupola, which is closed, and was ornamented in the seventeenth century with figures in fresco. In our own day redecoration has given to the choir as well as the rest of this dazzlingly-gilt church a thoroughly modern appearance.[132]

Sculpture, no less than architecture, was in full activity. Here also we find in the foremost rank those artists whom the Medici had attached to themselves; among whom Donatello stood first, while his pupils benefited by the favour shown to him. The Medici mansion was full of Donatello’s works. Over the arches in the front court are eight medallions by him, with reliefs in marble; and he restored many of the antique heads over the doors. His other works are all scattered. During Cosimo’s exile, the bronze David with his foot on the head of Goliath was taken away and set up in the palace-yard of the Signoria. The owner seems to have been shy of reclaiming it, and finally, in May 1476, his grandsons sold it to the municipality.[133] During the second exile of the Medici, another work of Donatello’s was taken from their house and placed at the great gate of the same palace, with an inscription recalling the events of 1494.[134] This is the group of Judith and Holofernes, full of expression, but forced and offending against the rules of plastic composition. A loss to be regretted is that of the bronze bust of Madonna Contessina, which Donatello executed for her husband.

San Lorenzo still contains many of his works, placed there by the indefatigable benefactor of this church. Besides the decorations of the sacristy, &c., there are the reliefs on the pulpits; artistically they are in fault by their superabundance and want of repose, but the fault is one of a man of talent. In point of technical execution, they show a distinct retrogression when compared with contemporary works. It was not only in works of this kind that Donatello displayed an extravagance that belies the sense of beauty. He did so even in the dancing children executed in marble relief for the organ at Sta. Maria del Fiore.

Vespasiano da Bisticci describes Cosimo’s attachment to this man. ‘He was,’ says he,[135] ‘a great friend of Donatello, and of all painters and sculptors. Finding there was little work for the latter, and not liking Donatello to remain inactive, he entrusted to him the pulpits and the doors of the sacristy at San Lorenzo; giving orders that whatever he needed for his own requirements and those of his four assistants should be paid to him weekly from the Medici bank.’ As Donatello did not dress to Cosimo’s liking, the latter presented him with a cloak and hood, an upper garment to wear under the cloak, and a whole suit, sending all this to him on the morning of a feast day. Donatello put the new things on a few times only, declining to wear them any longer, lest ‘people should think he had grown effeminate.’ How thoroughly Donatello was regarded as belonging to the Medici household is shown by the fact that the Marquis Ludovico Gonzaga once asked Cosimo to send the artist to Mantua to execute a shrine modelled in 1450, to be set up during the expected visit of Pope Pius II.[136] Many other artists were on confidential terms with Cosimo and his family. Michelozzo’s two sons belonged almost to the family circle. In the last years of Cosimo, Donatello could no longer work, so his generous patron maintained him, and recommended him to his son Piero. The latter gave him a farm, as he said, ‘to provide him with bread and wine.’ The artist, however, gave back the gift in legal form, not wishing to embitter his life with household cares; whereupon Piero had the value of the produce assigned to him at the bank. In 1462 Piero granted him space for a vault in San Lorenzo, near the sacristy; and here, where so many of his works are to be seen, he was buried in 1468, not far from those who had so valued him during life.[137]

After Donatello, most closely connected with the Medici, father and son, were two masters who, while fairly admitting the claims of the realistic principle, carried it out in a different spirit and in more ideal forms. Lorenzo Ghiberti, who finished the second door of the Baptistery in 1452, with the help of his son Vettorio, and in spite of his seventy-two years, undertook the commission for a third. He continued till the later years of Cosimo busily engaged on the rich silver reredos, in which Michelozzo, Verocchio, Bernardo Cennini, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and others, had a share. He also designed the great rose-window of Sta. Maria del Fiore, at which Francesco di Domenico Livi of Gambassi, who learned glass-painting in Germany, was working in 1436, and Bernardo di Francesco in 1443. Glass-painting in the true sense of the word was then just beginning to flourish; until that time coloured windows had been produced by simply putting variously tinted glass together in mosaic patterns. Many trod in the steps of Francesco Livi: notably Ser Guasparre da Volterra, who worked in the cathedral at Siena; while in Florence, Pisa, and Arezzo, the art was practised by the Jesuates of the order of the B. Giovanni Colombini, who were established in Florence in 1438, in the convent of San Giusto before Porta Pinti, and there built the great church which was pulled down in 1529. It was chiefly by them that Sta. Maria del Fiore, Sta. Croce, San Michele, and other buildings, were glazed with coloured windows.[138]

In 1440 Ghiberti finished for the cathedral the shrine of St. Zanobi, one of his finest works. To Piero de’ Medici he furnished goldsmith’s work which brought him great admiration and commissions from Pope Eugene IV. Besides this master, now growing old, the Medici employed a younger one, Luca della Robbia. His style is graceful rather than grand; full of tender and lively expression of feeling, and pleasing execution in drapery and grouping. His works in the cathedral show equal fertility of invention and technical skill. One is the marble relief for the organ gallery, representing a boy and girl playing and dancing, executed in 1438 as a companion-piece to that of Donatello;[139] and the other, not so good, is the door of the sacristy, finished in 1463, with its bronze reliefs of the Madonna, the Evangelists, and the Fathers of the Church.[140] The monument to Benozzo Federighi, Bishop of Fiesole[141] (who died in 1450), with the figure lying on the bier, displays his capabilities in this direction. But Luca della Robbia is less distinguished by his sculptures in marble and brass than by the reliefs in glazed earth which, called after him, were supplied by his descendants for 100 years. They still abound in Florence and the whole of Tuscany, even to the mountain convents of the Apennines and the modest churches of remote towns, while numbers of them have wandered into foreign lands. Anyone taking a walk in Florence may enjoy these charming creations: lunettes or groups above the doors of churches and houses, medallions of infants on the portico of the Foundling Hospital, heads of saints, tabernacles, heraldic escutcheons, some plain white on a blue ground, some with a judicious mixture of colours and a rich border of entwined leaves and fruit. These works form an almost inexhaustible treasury, with a marked character of graceful earnestness and truth to nature; a help to architecture as long as the decorative element kept its place in the old manner, which in the fourteenth century employed both glass and colour. But they were invaluable for interior decoration, for which Brunelleschi used work in ‘Terra della Robbia’ in the Pazzi chapel. Luca himself decorated for Cosimo de’ Medici a room in his palace and the buildings in Sta. Croce, and for Piero the tabernacle in San Miniato; in the latter church he also assisted in giving to the chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal the charm of harmonious perfection.

In the last years of Cosimo de’ Medici grew up a whole generation of younger sculptors. Their most important works are sepulchral monuments, which became richer and grander as time went on. Formerly people had, as a rule, been content with sarcophagi more or less decorated, like that of Noferi, the father of Palla Strozzi, who died in 1418 and is buried in the sacristy of Sta. Trinità, beneath an arch resting on elegant corbels, and on the edges of which are seen pretty genii playing. Twenty or thirty years later these simple monuments were still the most usual, even for men of importance. Neri Capponi lies in the church of the Santo Spirito in a marble coffin bearing on the front his portrait in relief between two genii; Orlando de’ Medici rests in that of the SS. Annunziata in a sarcophagus ornamented with his coat of arms, and occupying with rich architectural accessories the whole side of a chapel. These were both works of Simone, whom tradition makes a brother of Donatello.[142] But talented artists soon attempted greater things. Desiderio da Settignano (so called after the pleasantly situated little village, two miles east of the city, where Michel Angelo was nursed by a stonemason’s wife) was a pupil of Donatello, and thus came into contact with the Medici, who employed him in San Lorenzo. In the Strozzi palace may be seen his fine thoughtful marble bust of Marietta, daughter of Filippo Strozzi the elder and Fiammetta Adimari. His masterpiece is the monument of Carlo Marsuppini in Sta. Croce, a figure of the dead man resting on the sarcophagus in a niche crowned by a lunette, with a Madonna in relief.[143] Notwithstanding some overloading in the accessories, it shows what he might have become had he not died in 1464, at the early age of thirty-six. The sarcophagus, resting on lions’ claws and richly adorned with flowers, leaves, and streaming ribands, is one of the most beautiful productions of decorative sculpture. Desiderio had many emulators, to whom we owe some of the finest monuments of this kind. Among them were the brothers Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino. The former, who worked a good deal out of Florence as architect to the Popes, does not seem to have been employed by the Medici. The only thing he is said to have done for them is a marble fountain, decorated with children and dolphins, in one of the courts of their palace; and of its fate nothing is known. But the city contains excellent works by both, exhibiting a similarity to Della Robbia’s style. Two of Bernardo’s works are the graceful monument to Beata Villana in Sta. Maria Novella, and that of Leonardo Bruni in Sta. Croce.[144] The conception, proportions, and technical finish of these works entitle them to rank among the best productions of a period rich in monuments. The most perfect work of the kind, however, is that by Antonio Rossellino to the Cardinal of Portugal, in San Miniato al Monte. James of Portugal, nephew of King Alfonso V., had come in bad health to Florence, where he died in 1459 aged twenty-six. In the basilica, then belonging to the Olivetans, where he was buried, was built a chapel, unrivalled in symmetry of form and beauty of detail. The roof is set off with reliefs in glazed earth, the walls are inlaid with marble, the altar, the bishop’s throne, and the floor of opus Alexandrinum are admirable. What was formerly the altar-piece—by Pollaiuolo—is now in the Uffizi. The monument stands in a large niche, with a curtain slightly drawn back. The sarcophagus is an imitation of the coffer afterwards used for the tomb of Pope Clement XII. in the Lateran. The figure of the departed, wearing his mitre, rests on a pall held by two seated boys; an architectural wall-drapery is terminated by a cornice, at each end of which is a kneeling angel bearing a crown and a palm-branch; in the arch above are the Virgin and Child surrounded by a rich garland and upheld by angels in relief. The figure of the cardinal surpasses all else of its kind in grace, dignity, and beauty, while in technical work it is perfection. The head and the folded hands were modelled from nature.[145] A blessed peace seems diffused over the whole figure, which realizes what Vespasiano da Bisticci says of the departed, whom he had known in life: ‘He was outwardly handsome, but his soul was more beautiful than his body; and by the holiness of his life and conversation he was fitted to stand beside the saints of old.’[146]

To these artists must be added Mino da Fiesole, who, though a pupil of Desiderio da Settignano—his senior only by a few years—seemed to have formed himself more on the model of Donatello. His groups of figures in relief, of which the chief are at Rome, are not always happy; his monumental statues, of which the two most remarkable in Florence are of later date, have great dignity and beauty. In his portrait-heads there is a peculiar delicacy and truth, indicating careful study of nature, and of which the bust of Bishop Leonardo Salutati, in the cathedral of Fiesole, is an excellent example.[147] In the Medici house were busts by him of Piero and his wife, the former of which is now in the Uffizi. In ornamentation, particularly in arabesque, Mino is inferior to none; and it is impossible to mistake his influence in this respect at Rome, where, from the time of Nicolas V., the number of monuments rapidly increased. The works of Giuliano da Majano in Florence, where he was occupied in 1463-1465 with inlaid woodwork for San Domenico, near Fiesole, and the sacristy of Sta. Maria del Fiore, are of much less importance. Neither he nor Antonio Filarete, founder of the great door of St. Peter’s, are known to have done any work for the Medici. That the latter was one of their protégés, however, may be seen not only by the dedication to Piero of his treatise on architecture, but also by a letter addressed by him to Piero from Milan, December 20, 1451, thanking him for a recommendation to Francesco Sforza: ‘I am at your service for whatever I can do. Dispose of me as you please. Commend me to his Excellency your father, and your brother Giovanni. With God’s help, I hope to do honour here both to myself and you; I say to you, because for your sake and in consequence of your recommendation his Lordship shows me great favour. He thinks of appointing me chief architect to the cathedral, which naturally meets with opposition, I being a stranger; but I hope they will yield to their lord’s desire.’[148]

The goldsmith’s art, which in the preceding century had reached great perfection in Tuscan cities and was closely connected with sculpture, attained through niello-work to engraving on copperplate. The name of Maso Finiguerra, who executed the celebrated pyx for the Baptistery in 1452, is inseparable from the history of the Medicean splendour.

For painting, whether in its general development or its particular productions, the period under consideration is less important than for the sister arts, at least as far as the Medici are concerned. The two greatest masters, in different lines, of the first half of the century, Masaccio and Fra Angelico, continued to adorn Florence with their works. The former, at his death in 1443, left unfinished the Brancacci chapel in San Pietro del Carmine, the high school of all later works of the kind. Unluckily, the fresco has perished in which he represented the consecration of the church in 1422, with a group of remarkable men of the time: Giovanni d’Averardo de’ Medici, Niccolò da Uzzano, Baccio Valori, Lorenzo Ridolfi, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masolino da Panicale, and others. Fra Angelico decorated the chapter-house, corridors, and cells of the convent of San Marco with his wall-pictures, which represent religious art in its loveliest bloom, a free modification of the principles of Giotto’s school. He was busy here till Eugene IV. called him to Rome, where he painted the two chapels in the Vatican for this Pope and his successor, Nicolas V. He died in 1455. His greatest pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, followed his master from Rome to Orvieto, and in 1459 painted the private chapel of the Medici, his most pleasing work. The ‘Adoration of the Angels’ is here represented amid a rich landscape, with choirs of angels, numerous spectators, and festive scenes, painted with a cheerful colouring that recalls Gentile da Fabriano. Later, when painting in San Gemignano and at Pisa, Gozzoli was still connected with the Medici, and in his first fresco in the Campo Santo, the ‘Curse of Ham,’ a group in the foreground represents the members of the family as he had known them in earlier years.

The realistic tendency exhibited by Masaccio grew more prominent in Paolo Uccello, who was evidently influenced by sculpture, especially by Donatello. In some of his most important frescoes, those in Sta. Maria Novella, representing the history of the Creation, and the figure of John Hawkwood in Sta. Maria del Fiore,[149] the very colouring, grey upon grey, aims at producing the effect of sculpture. This painter’s study of perspective made him exaggerate that branch of his art. The austerity of Andrea dal Castagno’s style is not softened by the colouring. The repulsive expression of his group of St. John and St. Francis in Sta. Croce supports the legend of the murder of Domenico Veneziano, which has adhered to Andrea’s name till our own day, though he died four years before his supposed victim.[150] The most important works he has left are the figures of sibyls and of famous men, executed in a hall of the villa formerly belonging to the Pandolfini at Legnaia, but now removed to the National Museum at the Palace of the Podestà. The characteristic figures, among whom are Nicola Acciaiuolo and Pippo Spano, produce a great effect. Neither Andrea nor Uccello seems to have been employed by the Medici, who did, however, engage Domenico Veneziano, Andrea’s fellow-worker on the lost frescoes in Sta. Maria Nuova, a painter much influenced by Fra Angelico. The repeated occurrence of the Medici’s patron saints, Cosmo and Damian, in pictures of which the origin cannot be clearly traced, points to the conclusion that they were commissions from the family or their friends. But the painter most highly favoured by Cosimo and his sons was Fra Filippo Lippi, whose manners and conversation were as great a scandal to the Carmelite order as Fra Angelico’s whole life was an ornament to that of St. Dominic. Disorderly, loose in morals, always in difficulties and need of money, he yet gained patrons by his undeniable talent, which unites force and animation to Angelico’s intensity of feeling. Lippi’s grouping and composition is various, free, and rich, showing a realistic study of nature. He worked a great deal for the Medici, who made presents of his pictures to the Pope and King Alfonso, and procured him commissions abroad. His greatest work, the frescoes in the chapel in the choir of the Collegiate Church of Prato, was finished for the Provost Carlo de’ Medici, whose likeness may be seen in the representation of the burial of St. Stephen. It was through Cosimo, who had many connections in Umbria, that Fra Filippo went to Spoleto, where he executed in the cathedral the scenes from the history of the Madonna which were finished after his death in 1469 by his assistant Fra Diamante.

Among the painters employed by Cosimo and his sons were the two Peselli, Giuliano d’Arrigo, and his grandson Pesellino; the former followed the artistic tendencies represented by Giotto, the latter was an earnest disciple of the realistic school. Much of the Medici furniture was painted by them, according to a fashion of the time, continued till the middle of the sixteenth century. Presses and coffers (cassoni) were ornamented with compositions of small figures, taken from history, sacred or profane, animals, hunting-scenes, &c. In the Florentine collections are many paintings of this kind, even down to Andrea del Sarto and his friends and pupils, the original destination of which is shown by their form. They were not all Florentines who painted for the Medici. A Veronese, Matteo de’ Pasti, wrote to Piero in 1441, that he trusted to send him works such as he had never before seen.[151] He probably alluded to the convex tablets (now in the Uffizi collection) representing scenes from Petrarca’s triumphs, which were doubtless intended to decorate a room. The various dealings of the Medici with Flanders, from the time of Cosimo, contributed to draw attention in Florence to the Van Eyck school of painting, which influenced Italian art in the fifteenth century, particularly in point of technicalities. It was through Tommaso Portinari, director of the Medici bank at Bruges, that the church of the hospital of Sta. Maria Nuova—an old foundation of the family—obtained the most important work of the Flemish school to be found in Tuscany. This was the masterpiece of Hugo van der Goes, the ‘Adoration of the Shepherds,’ containing portraits of the members of the donor’s family.[152] The Flemish pictures mentioned by Vasari as being in the possession of the Medici (one of them, a portrait of Tommaso Portinari, is now in the Pitti Palace), prove the interest awakened by these works, great as was their difference in conception from Italian art.

It is easy to imagine that other branches of artistic industry were furthered by this artistically inclined family at a period of such varied activity, and that their house kept constantly filling with treasures of all kinds. For it was the pride of the princes and rich citizens—and even of such as had to deny themselves many of the comforts of life in order to satisfy a noble passion—to surround themselves with ancient and modern works, to decorate halls, staircases, and courts with marbles and other antiquities; to collect old coins and intaglios; to deck their rooms with statues and sculptures by living artists, with handsome furniture, silver plate, rich silken hangings and carpets.

Among the records of the Rinuccini family are notes of the cost of goldsmiths’ work furnished by Finiguerra and Pollaiuolo.[153] Cosimo’s love for these things was shared by his brother Lorenzo and both his sons. An inventory of the antique coins, cameos, gems, mosaic tablets; and enamels preserved in the house in the Via Larga, mentions 100 gold and 503 silver coins, a number of intaglios set as seals and rings, Greek and Roman mosaic tablets, valuable vases, precious stones to the value of more than thirty thousand gold florins.[154] The silver plate here, as well as at the villas, was not reckoned in. Mention has already been made of the travelling antiquaries who carried about with them manuscripts and objects of art, and were at once scholars and colporteurs. But purchases were also made for the Medici abroad. Antiquities came from Rome, Naples, Viterbo, and other places. Donatello was accustomed to restore injured antique marbles, a custom which was later carried to extremes, and led to mischief. Worked carpets (Arazzi) came from Flanders, where Bruges was the chief emporium for works of art, though Antwerp fairs were often visited.[155] A letter of Carlo de’ Medici to his half-brother Giovanni, written from Rome, apparently in the autumn of 1451,[156] shows that Cardinal Barbo, afterwards Pope Paul II., was in competition with the Medici, and was not above a little gentle compulsion: ‘I bought some time ago about thirty silver medals from an assistant cf Pisanello, who is lately dead. I know not how Monsignore di San Marco heard of it, but, meeting me accidentally in the church of the Santi Apostoli, he took me by the hand, and would not let me go till he had got me to his house and taken all I had about me—rings and coins to the value of about twenty florins. There was no getting them back, and in the end I have had to let him keep the things, after a vain appeal to the Pope.’ The complaint is repeated in a letter of 1455. As we shall see, however, such losses were more than made up to the Medici at the death of Paul II.

Such were the relations of Cosimo and his sons to art-life in Florence. The great movement had begun before they took the helm of the state; but they exercised great and beneficial influence on its development, and always set a praiseworthy example to their fellow-citizens. In this respect they thoroughly understood their time. The tone and manner of their relations with artists is particularly attractive; it was inspired by true refinement of feeling. Merchant princes as they were, whose help was generally coveted, they kept up a confidential intercourse with men of talent, as among friends and equals. In the requests addressed to them there is no tone of servility; the traditions of free citizenship continued in all social relations. So it was also at a later period, when Cosimo’s grandson had attained the position of a ruling prince; Lorenzo’s bearing was the same, and contributed not a little to his powerful influence over his fellow-men. In many cases, as with Antonio Squarcialupi, the musician and organ-builder, he merely continued a connection begun by his father, uncle, and grandfather. Antonio, who in his writings adopted the pseudonym Degli Organi, belonged to an old family who had once been ‘Signori’ at Poggibonzi in the Elsa valley, and who on account of their rank were long excluded from office. It was not till 1453 that Antonio became a member of one of the smaller guilds, though before that time he was intimate with the Medici household. After spending some time at Naples with King Alfonso, in 1450, he wrote from Siena on November 26 to Giovanni de’ Medici at Volterra, as follows:[157] ‘Dearest gossip, dutiful greeting and salutation! As you doubtless know, it is now about a month since I returned from Naples. Since then it has never ceased raining, or I should have come to see you. The bad weather has hindered me not only from coming, but also from writing, as I kept waiting for the sky to clear. Now, God be thanked for all things. If I were to tell you about Naples, and the majesty of the king and his court, there would be so much to say that I must needs take all the scriveners in Rome into my employ for five days. So for the present I will say nothing about it, and will only tell you that Cardinal Sta. Maria sets great store by his organ; wherein he is quite right, for truly it deserves it. I promise you on your return the satisfaction of hearing one which cannot fail to please you. It is destined for Antonio di Migliorino, who I trust will not object to my letting you see and hear it. Now I will trouble you no further. Commend me above all to Madonna Contessina, Messer Piero, and all the rest.’

In the spring of 1438, Domenico Veneziano wrote from Perugia to Piero as follows:[158] ‘Noble and honoured sir, greeting. I have to inform you that by God’s grace I am in good health, and hope to see you well and happy. I have made inquiries after you at various times, and never received any news save through Manno Donati, who told me that you were at Ferrara in very good health, which gave me great pleasure. Had I known your place of abode sooner, I would have written to you, both for my own satisfaction and as it is fitting. My position is in truth far below yours, but my hearty attachment to you and all yours gives me boldness to write to you, to whom I owe so much.’ One-and-twenty years later this same Piero, then at Careggi, was thus addressed by Benozzo Gozzoli, who was painting the chapel in the Medici house at Florence:[159] ‘My dearest friend, I informed your Magnificence in a previous letter that I am in need of forty florins, and begged you to advance them to me; for now is the time to buy corn and many other things that I want, whereby I shall save, and get rid of a heavy load of care. I had resolved to ask nothing of you till you had seen my work, but I now find myself compelled to ask this favour. Therefore, be indulgent; God knows I am endeavouring to please you. I also reminded you to send to Venice for some ultramarine, for in the course of this week one wall will be finished, and for the other I shall need ultramarine. The brocades and other things can then be finished as well as the figures, or even sooner. I am working with all possible diligence. I have nothing more to add save my salutations.’

These confidential relations between the Medici and the artists did not prevent them from carefully settling minor details when giving an order, such as the use of ultramarine and gold, and still smaller matters. Even with regard to the actual composition remarks were not spared, not merely concerning the saints to be placed in the Madonna pictures and other votive tablets, but also as to other figures and accessories. Piero de’ Medici was not satisfied with some angels that Benozzo had introduced in the chapel; the painter defended them, but added that he could put a cloud to cover them. Needless to say that all matters of business—prices, instalments of payment and work, &c.—were settled with scrupulous exactness. This belonged to the character of the time, and to the Florentine love of order and mercantile habits; a characteristic which never fails, and remained in the Medici nature even in Cosimo’s magnificent grandson. Strict supervision was indeed necessary in the case of these colossal undertakings. It was more especially needful with a disorderly man like Filippo Lippi, who passed his whole life in want of his own making; witness his letters to Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici: ‘If there is a wretched monk in Florence, it is I!’ His protectors pitied him and judged his sins leniently, if we rightly understand the remark in one of Giovanni’s letters, to the effect that they had a laugh over Fra Filippo’s error. It refers presumably to the well-known story of the elopement of Spinetta Buti from the convent at Prato, where she was being educated; a story the details of which, as in other instances, are inaccurately given by Vasari.[160] The interest taken by the Medici in this painter descended to Lorenzo. On his return from Rome he wanted to have Fra Filippo’s mortal remains brought from Spoleto to Florence, and when this was refused, he assisted Filippo’s son in erecting a monument in Spoleto Cathedral.

It was in the time of Cosimo that the written history of art began its first feeble efforts. Its forerunner was Cennino Cennini of Colle in the Elsa valley, a pupil of Angelo Gaddi apparently at Padua, where he was in the service of Francesco da Carrara. Towards the end of the fourteenth century he wrote a book on painting, which is of great value for the study of artistic practice before the victory of oil-painting over tempera, as it is also for the history of modelling, casting, plaster-work, gilding, &c.[161] This book treats merely of technicalities; but in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s commentaries an unfinished treatise on architecture and the proportion of figures is combined with notices of ancient art and also of modern, from its re-awakening in the second half of the thirteenth century down to the writer’s own time and works.[162] The latter portion is the principal source whence Giorgio Vasari drew his knowledge of past times. Ghiberti’s contemporary Filarete has given many notices, valuable for the history of art, referring to Medicean times, in his treatise on architecture, which he dedicated—in styles differing according to the persons and circumstances, to two patrons, Piero de’ Medici and Francesco Sforza, in 1460.[163] These notices, as well as technical remarks, were also made use of by Vasari, whose judgment on Filarete’s confused book is just, though rather severely expressed.

CHAPTER XIII.

BUILDING IN THE DAYS OF LORENZO DE’ MEDICI.

Architecture was always a subject of great interest to Lorenzo de’ Medici; he possessed an unusual knowledge of the art.[164] It was he who made the plan for the façade of Sta. Maria del Fiore, which was executed in wood by Jacopo Sansovino and painted in chiaroscuro by Andrea del Sarto more than twenty years after the designer’s death, when his son, Pope Leo X., made his public entry into Florence.[165] We shall see what share he took in the project for the completion of this façade. He was intimate with several of the chief architects of the time. A letter, written to him from Rome by Alberti,[166] unluckily not on the subject of art but about a proposed exchange of property, shows on what good terms they were: ‘I am glad that thou dost address me in confidence worthy of our old friendship; and as I am conscious of my obligations, I am ready to do for thee and at thy desire anything that can be agreeable to one who loves thee. If what thou askest of me were not founded on reason, thou wouldest neither have consented to act as mediator thyself, nor have sought out a third party to do so.’ The brothers Da Majano and Sangallo enjoyed his interest and assistance both in and outside of Florence, where a great deal of building was carried on. Yet he built nothing more himself than a convent and a villa. Of the convent not a trace is left, and the façades of the cathedral and of the church of the Santo Spirito—in which he was so much interested—still await completion, as does that of San Lorenzo, though Pope Leo X. made preparations for the immediate execution of the works. The finest building of Lorenzo’s time in Florence was erected, not for him but for a family which, although connected with his, was destined to maintain a long struggle with it—namely, the Strozzi.

Considering how intimate Lorenzo was with the brothers Da Majano, it seems strange that he employed them so little. There is no authentic record of Giuliano having been employed in Florence except as a worker in wood. He was engaged on the choir-stalls in Sta. Maria del Fiore in 1471 and the following years, and in the audience-chamber of the palace of the Signoria (finished ten years later), where his younger brother Benedetto executed the marble doors, and where he was associated with Francesco di Giovanni, called Francione, master of Baccio Pontelli, who did a great deal of work at Rome and Urbino.[167] Giuliano’s works in Rome, where, according to Vasari, he built—under Paul III.—the palace of San Marco and a galleried court, now no longer in existence, are buried in impenetrable obscurity. It is certain that he was there in the time of Sixtus IV., and also that he began the stalls in the choir of Perugia Cathedral, which were finished in 1491 by Domenico del Tasso, one of the Florentine family of wood-workers and architects.[168] It is needless to repeat how the calling and labours of architect and wood-worker (magistri lignaminum, legnaiuoli) merged one into the other, even in the next century, like those of sculptor and goldsmith. In his latter years Giuliano was more abroad than at home. In 1478 he was at Recanati, in the States of the Church, building a palace for Antonio Giacomo Venier, Cardinal of Cuença, who appealed to Lorenzo that he might urge the dilatory artist to go on with his work:[169] ‘As the said Master Giuliano is a most devoted servant of your Magnificence and eulogist of your excellent qualities, and apparently cannot be moved unless stirred up by you, we beg you to address him on the subject, and to see that he goes to Recanati at the appointed time to finish what he has begun.’ In the spring of 1481 Giuliano was passing through Urbino, where the palace of Federigo of Montefeltro made such an impression on him that he induced Lorenzo to ask the duke for a drawing of it. This the duke had executed by Baccio Pontelli, who continued the beautiful work of Luciano Lauranna. ‘My lord the duke,’ wrote Pontelli to Lorenzo,[170] ‘answered very graciously that I was to make the drawing, but that he would prefer sending your Magnificence the house itself, that you might rule in it as in your own.’ It was doubtless Lorenzo’s doing that Giuliano was summoned to Naples. This must, therefore, have happened after the reconciliation in 1480. Notwithstanding the many commissions he received there—for King Ferrante and his eldest son were both much given to building, and after the expulsion of the Turks from Otranto the kingdom enjoyed a few years’ peace—there is no need to suppose that he took up his abode there permanently, for artists were generally given to wandering. The famous triumphal arch of King Alfonso in Castelnuovo—not finished till the sixteenth century—is probably in no part his work; but certainly to him may be attributed the Porta Capuana, excellent in point of architecture but disfigured by modern additions.[171] Giuliano died at Naples in the autumn of 1490, and Lorenzo’s expressions concerning his loss, in a letter to the Duke of Calabria,[172] show how highly he esteemed him: ‘Your Excellency’s letter informs me of the death of Giuliano da Majano, which causes me sincere regret, both on account of our intimacy and because he was engaged in your Excellency’s service, and his death will leave many a work unfinished. As you contemplate continuing these, I hear that you want me to procure you another architect, on which subject Paol’ Antonio Soderini writes to me in detail. It will give me pleasure if your Excellency will command my services and be satisfied with my arrangements, as was the case with Giuliano; at whose death I have at least the satisfaction that you have been pleased with the work of one who entered your service on my recommendation.’

Giuliano’s brother Benedetto, ten years his junior, was not employed as an architect by Lorenzo. His share—as wood-carver—in the works at the palace of the Signoria has been already referred to. But his masterpiece was a work of architecture executed in the last years of Lorenzo’s life, and—if we except the Pitti Palace, which stands alone—the most perfect specimen of palatial architecture that Florence has to show. The story of the building begun by Filippo Strozzi the elder in 1489 makes a curious study of manners and an interesting chapter in the history of art. When Cosimo de’ Medici contemplated building himself a house, he was afraid of rousing disapproval by too much splendour; more than half a century later another rich citizen felt the same anxiety. He saw the commonwealth and city in altered circumstances, and had before his eyes the warning example of Luca Pitti. Lorenzo Strozzi, who wrote a life of his father, tells of this grand undertaking:[173] ‘When Filippo had made due provision for his descendants—as he thought more of fame than of money, was fond of building, and intelligent in the art—he decided, as the surest way of handing down his name to posterity, to erect such a building as should make a name for him and his throughout Italy and beyond it. He found, however, one great hindrance in the way. The man who was at the head of the Government might take it into his head that the reputation of another would put his own into the shade, and Filippo was in great dread of exciting envy. So he had it rumoured about the city that his children were so numerous and his house so small that, now they were grown up, he must provide an abode for them, which could be better done in his lifetime than after his death. Then he began, with all sorts of circumlocutions, to talk—first to master-masons and then to architects—on the necessity of building a new house. At times he spoke as though he would begin soon; then made a show of being still undecided and unwilling to spend in a hurry the fruits of many years’ labour. Thus artfully did he conceal the object he had in view in order to attain it better. He used to repeat, a comfortable citizen-like house was enough for him, good but not grand. Now the masons and architects, after their kind, kept enlarging upon his plans, which was just what pleased Filippo, though he pretended to the contrary, and declared that they drove him to what he was neither willing nor able to do.

Now it happened that he who then governed the destinies of the city desired to see it embellished in every way; his opinion being that if he was responsible for good and evil, so would beauty or ugliness be laid to his account. Deeming that so large and costly an undertaking would be difficult to estimate and superintend, and might (as often happens with merchants) either destroy the originator’s credit or ruin him altogether, he began to meddle in the matter, and asked to see the plans. When he had examined them, he suggested divers embellishments, and advised the use of opus rusticum. But the more Filippo was encouraged the more he pretended to draw back. He declared he would on no account have opus rusticum, as it was unsuitable to the condition of a citizen, and would entail heavy expense. He was building, he said, with a view to his own comfort, and not for pomp; and thought of making shops on the ground floor, to produce an income for his sons. To this everybody objected, pointing out how ugly and inconvenient it would be. Still Filippo continued his remonstrances, and said complainingly to his friends that he had begun an undertaking which he only hoped he might bring to a successful end; he wished he had never spoken of it, rather than have got into such a labyrinth. The more he pretended to be afraid of the cost, to conceal the greatness of his intentions and the extent of his wealth, the more he was urged and encouraged to the building. Thus by adroitness and caution, he managed what, had he conducted himself otherwise, would either have been forbidden or have brought him under no little suspicion.

The first thing to be done was to gain space for the casa grande. And space was limited. The Strozzi palace lies at the west end of the old town, in a quarter now, perhaps, the liveliest in the city, and doubtless animated even at that time, being close to the old market and to the square named after the church of Sta. Trinità, whence may be seen the bridge of the same name. Several distinguished families dwelt, and some still dwell, in the immediate neighbourhood: the Buondelmonti, Altoviti, Gianfigliazzi, Bartolini, Alamanni, Viviani, Tornabuoni, Vacchietti, Antinori, and others. According to the original plan, the building was to stand free, with a square and garden on the south, extending as far as the Via Portarossa, where stand the houses of the Davanzati and Torrigiani. But the plan was imperfectly executed. A tolerably large square is on the eastern side, but on the south only a narrow space, now bridged over, divides the palace from neighbouring buildings; on the west the street (Via de’ Legnaiuoli) is of moderate width, and on the north it is only since the front of the Tornabuoni house was rebuilt a few years ago (see p. 125), that sufficient space and light has been gained to get a view of the noble edifice, which on this side was formerly quite hidden.

On August (July?) 16, 1489, Filippo Strozzi laid his foundation-stone. His memoirs contain a description of the important proceeding, characteristic of the habits of the time. ‘At the moment when the sun came up over the mountains, I laid the first stone of the foundations, in the name of God, as a good beginning for myself, my successors, and all who may have a share in the building. I caused a mass of the Holy Ghost to be sung at the same hour by the brethren of San Marco, another by the nuns of Murate, a third in my church, Sta. Maria di Lecceto, and a fourth by the monks there (who are under some obligation to me), with a prayer for a blessed beginning to the work. The time for laying the foundation-stone was fixed by a horoscope by Messer Benedetto Biliotti, Maestro Niccolò, and Messer Antonio Benevieni, doctors; also Bishop Pagagnotti and Messer Marsilio (Ficino), who all confirmed it as lucky. I sent twenty lire to the brethren of San Marco, to be distributed in alms as they thought good, and as many to Murate. I spent ten lire in smaller alms. To Benedetto Biliotti I gave four ells of black damask, costing twenty lire. I had to breakfast Maestro Jacopo the master-mason, Maestro Andrea the founder, Filippo Buondelmonti, Marcuccio Strozzi, Pietro Parenti, Simone Ridolfi, Donato Bonsi, Ser Agnolo, Lorenzo Fiorini, and other of my friends.’

The ground floor was not yet half built when Filippo died, on May 14, 1491. After him, the house was the abode of fortune and greatness; but how many storms burst over it in the days of his youngest son and of his grandchildren!

The Strozzi Palace is a great square building, nearly a hundred feet high, and a hundred and twenty feet wide; it displays rustic work in its greatest perfection, and, notwithstanding the severity and simplicity of its construction, is more attractive than any other building of this style. The stories, of nearly equal elevation, are divided by strongly defined string-courses, and are composed of great blocks of ashlar (now blackened by nearly four centuries) of unequal length, but in even horizontal lines—opus rusticum throughout, but more evenly hewn than in the houses of the Medici and the Pitti, and other buildings. The ground floor has a grand arched doorway on each of the three façades, and small square windows at a considerable height above the stone parapet that runs round the whole. The two upper stories have arched windows divided by small marble columns, with the crescent of the family arms in the panels, and surmounted, like the doors, with upright blocks of ashlar. The handsome but half-finished cornice and the courtyard, both by Simone del Pollaiuolo called Cronaca, and the famous iron lanterns, belong to a period later than that now under consideration. The founder had thought he could complete the building out of his income, without touching his capital; but, owing to untoward circumstances and dissensions among the sons, the work was not brought to its present state of relative completeness till forty-two years after Filippo’s death.

In Lorenzo’s letter to the Duke of Calabria, after the death of Giuliano da Majano, he states that he was endeavouring to replace the lost one. ‘On looking about among the master-builders here, I find no one who, in my opinion, can be compared with Giuliano. I have, therefore, written to Mantua, to a Florentine there, whose capabilities and practice in building ought, I think, to qualify him for the work to be done. If this should come to nothing, and we can make no better choice, we shall be obliged to choose the least bad one possible (il manco reo che sarà possibile) in this place.’[174] These words sound strange from Lorenzo, when Benedetto da Majano and Giuliano da Sangallo were both in Florence. The most probable explanation is that present engagements prevented them from leaving the city, and therefore, Lorenzo’s choice fell on Luca Fancelli, who holds a subordinate place in the history of art. Benedetto must have been already known at Naples, and Lorenzo himself had, in 1488, sent to King Ferrante the plan of a palace, by Sangallo,[175] who, in consequence, went to Naples. Giuliano, son of Francesco Giamberti, had been from his childhood known to the Medici family, to whom in Cosimo’s and Piero’s days his father furnished woodwork. He himself, instructed by his father and Francione, acquired great skill in this art, did some work in Sta. Maria del Fiore, in the palace of the Signoria, and at Pisa, and even in later years continued to style himself Legnaiuolo. The Giamberti family must have been intimately connected with the Medici, for after the death of Giuliano de’ Medici his little son Giulio was taken care of in their house in Borgo Pinti, where the Panciatichi-Ximenes palace now stands. Giuliano Giamberti afterwards followed two branches of architecture, fortification and palace-building, with great success. In his latter years he was engaged on Sta. Maria del Fiore and St. Peter’s at Rome.

In the autumn of 1472, Giuliano, then twenty-nine, was at Rome, working for Sixtus IV.[176] What he actually did there, where so many Tuscans were employed, is unknown. That he made long and frequent sojourns there is proved by his excellent studies of antique buildings, that have been so useful to later investigators, and by his intimate connection with Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. The war of 1478 called him home, where he served as an engineer in defending various places. The restoration of peace enabled him to resume his works at Rome; one of which, the castle of Ostia, begun probably for the above-named cardinal, and finished in 1486, marks an important step in military architecture, while its picturesque beauty indicates the eye of a true artist.[177] Long before this castle was finished, Giuliano must have begun at home the building which raised him highest in the esteem of Lorenzo de’ Medici—the villa at Poggio a Cajano. Francione and others had submitted plans; Lorenzo chose that of Giuliano. The situation is favourable, on a hill of no great elevation, but with a clear view on three sides. The house is reached by a broad flight of steps, and is of the regular Tuscan type, which continued to later times. The portico before the hall, with its gable decorated with a frieze in Terra della Robbia, displays a tendency to the antique. The great hall has a barrel-vault, the dimensions of which gave rise to a doubt as to the possibility of its execution.

At the time when Giuliano is supposed to have gone to Naples, a great work begun by him in his native city can scarcely have been ready for habitation. This was the convent of the Augustinian Friars in front of the Porta San Gallo, the immediate occasion of which was Lorenzo’s liking for the preacher Fra Mariano of Genazzano. The work was important enough to give the artist a new name, under which the whole family became famous. According to Vasari, it was Lorenzo who first used the appellation, and on Giuliano’s playful remark that he was taking a backward step in abandoning his old family name, Lorenzo replied that it was better to make a name by one’s own merits than to inherit one.[178] Only a part of the huge building was completed, and this was totally destroyed in 1529. To Lorenzo is attributed the idea of rebuilding the castle on the Poggio Imperiale near Pozzibonzi, the importance of which had been but too clearly shown in the wars of 1478-79, and he obtained the commission for Giuliano. The work began in 1488, was afterwards directed by Giuliano’s younger brother, but finally sank into as complete ruin as the works of Henry of Luxemburg on the same spot. Nothing is known of what Sangallo did in Milan, whither he is believed to have gone on Lorenzo’s recommendation, with the plan of a palace, for Lodovico il Moro, and where he met Leonardo da Vinci.

His great patron was no longer living when he began, for Giuliano Gondi, on the Piazza San Firenze, the palace which, though unfinished, still produces a pleasing effect with its fine proportions, its artistic arrangement of rustic work on the first and second stories, and its elegant arcade.[179] The court of the convent of Sta. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (Cestello), in the Via de’ Pinti, is one of Giuliano’s earlier works, not wanting in character or grace. Nothing is known of independent works by Antonio, Giuliano’s brother and frequent assistant, during Lorenzo’s lifetime. His time of activity in Tuscany and Rome, both as a military builder, and as an architect of churches and palaces, began under Alexander VI. and lasted till only a degenerate scion was left of the race of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The Aretine art-historian rightly says that these two brothers left architecture as an inheritance to their family. It was they who mainly contributed to keep up in Tuscany a tradition which was never quite false to the Quattrocento, even when the Renaissance had been overgrown with a certain grotesqueness.

Lorenzo was concerned in two great works, neither of which came to perfection. The building and decoration of the façade of Sta. Maria del Fiore went on till about the middle of the fifteenth century. Donatello and his school contributed to it the marble facings and statues which were carried up to the rose-windows over the side doors.[180] The completion of the work was all the more to be desired as the gilt cross had gleamed above the lantern of the dome since May 30, 1472. On February 12, 1490, the following decree was issued by the consuls of the wool-merchants’ guild:[181] ‘Forasmuch as of late several of the chief citizens have repeatedly called to mind what a great dishonour it is to this city that the front of the cathedral church should remain in its present condition, to wit, unfinished, and also that the parts already executed in nowise correspond to the rules of architecture, and are bad in many ways, and that it would be highly praiseworthy to come to some conclusion on the matter, the said consuls have resolved and given authority to the present and future master-builders of the church to regulate expenditure and arrange everything that shall seem to them good and profitable for the said purpose now and hereafter.’ This decree shows that in the minds of those concerned the fate of the existing portions of the façade was as much decided as ninety-six years later, when they were destroyed after very brief deliberation.

On January 5, 1491, a commission met, under the presidency of the two master-builders Maso degli Albizzi and Tommaso Minerbetti, to pass judgment on the numerous models and designs (modelli et designi undique habiti et collecti). Many who were not personally present had sent in plans: Benedetto da Majano, Francesco di Giorgio, Filippino Lippi, Andrea Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo. There were two designs by Giuliano da Majano, then lately dead. No less than twenty-nine artists had come forward, among whom were Cronaca, Benedetto da Majano, Francione, Lorenzo di Credi, Domenico Ghirlandajo, Pietro Perugino, Andrea Contucci of Montesansovino, Andrea della Robbia, Sandro Botticelli, Alesso Baldovinetti, and others who, except in this case, are known only as goldsmiths or painters. Lorenzo de’ Medici himself had sent in a design. The meeting was held in the portico and the loggia of the office of works (Opera), the arches of which—now blocked up and containing a fine marble bust of the first grand duke on the façade—may be seen behind the choir of the cathedral. The models and designs having been examined, were reported on by Tommaso Minerbetti, whereupon Carlo Benci—a canon and one of the competitors—being asked his opinion, rose and said that he held it advisable to take the opinion of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a man so versed in architecture that if they followed him they would be the least likely to fall into error. Bartolommeo Scala recommended that a decision should be adjourned to give opportunity for further deliberation. Others took the same view, but thought it better to wait no longer than was absolutely needful. Then Lorenzo de’ Medici rose, and said: ‘All who had sent in models or designs were deserving of praise; but as the work in question was one of lasting importance, long and grave deliberation was needful, and it was advisable to postpone a decision in order to consider the matter further.’ Pietro Machiavelli and Antonio Manetti, architects, supported him, the rest were silent. Sixteen months later he who had started the whole affair lay in his grave. Then came times when Florence had other things to think of than the façade of her cathedral. For the latter, however, it was well that the rebuilding was not begun at that time, for Giuliano da Majano and Giuliano da San Gallo would have been just as incapable of producing work corresponding with the main character of the building, as were Buontalenti or Dosio under the Grand Duke Ferdinand I., or Baccio del Bianco—a decorative painter rather than an architect—of whose façade the foundation-stone was actually laid in 1636. The old unfinished façade might not correspond with the mighty pile that had developed under the hands of so many architects, but the new one would have disfigured it for ever.[182]

The church of the Santo Spirito, too, remained unfinished. Great damage had been done by a fire on March 22, 1471, and three months after contributions were voted out of the taxes for the restoration,[183] as had been done before. In consideration of this the municipality made it a condition that the escutcheon of the lilies and the cross should be placed beside those of the guilds. There was some difference about the doors, as appears from a decree of the master-builders in 1486, and from a letter of Giuliano da Sangallo to Lorenzo,[184] which also shows the want of agreement between the former and Giuliano da Majano. Six architects were to deliberate on the matter, and Majano seems to have carried the day, to the disgust of Sangallo, who expresses a hope that Lorenzo on his return will not allow such a fine building to be spoiled. Further information is wanting. It is to be regretted that the exterior was not finished then, while the traditions of Brunelleschi’s time were still in a great measure alive. On the other hand, a great deal was done in the interior of the choir of Sta. Maria del Fiore. In the palace of the Signoria also much work was accomplished in the first and second stories—especially the latter—in the audience chamber, and neighbouring apartments. It cannot be doubted that Lorenzo had a share in all this. The Sala dell’Orologia in the palace took its name from the curious clock made by Lorenzo della Volpaia for the Medici house, and afterwards placed in this hall, whence it has strayed to the Museum of Natural History. It is a handsome piece of work, after the pattern of those made in the fourteenth century by the Paduan Giovanni Dondi (degli Orologi), showing the courses of the planets, the signs of the zodiacal and celestial phenomena, and it brought great fame to its maker, who was appointed clockmaker to the city in 1500.[185] Volpaia had a rival in one Dionisio da Viterbo, who, in June, 1477, was recommended by the rich Sienese banker Ambrogio Spannocchi to Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom he wished to show an ornamental clock with numerous figures that moved at the same time.[186]