Chapter III: The Transition (2)

The historiographers of the Renaissance thought it below their dignity to use any language but Latin.[195] At the same time, vernacular annalists abounded in Italy, whose labors were of no small value in forming the prose-style of the _quattrocento_. After the Villani, Florence could boast a whole chain of writers, beginning with Marchionne Stefani, including Gino Capponi, the spirited chronicler of the Ciompi rebellion, and extending to Goro Dati in the middle of the fifteenth century. A little later, Giovanni Cavalcanti, in his Florentine Histories, proved how the simple diction of the preceding age was being spoiled by false classicism.[196] This work is doubly valuable--both as a record of the great Albizzi oligarchy and their final conquest by the Medici, and also as a monument of the fusion which was being made between the popular and humanistic styles. The chronicles of other Italian cities--Ferrara, Cremona, Rome, Pisa, Bologna, and even Siena--show less purity of language than the Florentine.[197] Italian is often mixed with vulgar Latin, and phrases borrowed from unpolished local dialects abound. It was not until the close of the century that two great writers of history in the vernacular arose outside the walls of Florence. These were Corio, the historian of Milan, and Matarazzo, the annalist of Perugia.[198] In Corio's somewhat stiff and cumbrous periods we trace the effort of a foreigner to gain by study what the Tuscans owed to nature. Yet he never suffered this stylistic preoccupation to spoil his qualities as an historian. His voluminous narrative is a mine of accurate information, illustrated with vivid pictures of manners and carefully considered portraits of eminent men. Reading it, we cannot but regret that Poggio and Bruno, Navagero and Bembo, judged it necessary to tell the tales of Florence and of Venice in a pseudo-Livian Latin. The "History of Milan" is worth twenty of such humanistic exercises in rhetoric. Matarazzo displays excellences of a different, but of a rarer order. Unlike Corio, he was not anxious to show familiarity with rules of Tuscan writing, or to build again the periods of Boccaccio's ceremonious style. His language bears the stamp of its Perugian origin. It is, at the same time, unaffectedly dramatic and penetrated with the charm of a distinguished personality. No one can read the tragedy of the Baglioni in this wonderful romance without acknowledging that he is in the hands of a great writer. The limpidity of the _trecento_ has here survived, and, blending with Renaissance enthusiasm for physical beauty and antique heroism, has produced a work of art unrivaled in its kind.[199]

Having advanced so far as to speak in this chapter of Corio and Matarazzo, I shall take occasion to notice a book which, appearing for the first time in 1476, may fairly be styled the most important work of Italian prose-fiction belonging to the fifteenth century. This is the _Novellino_ of Masuccio Guardato, a nobleman of Salerno, secretary to the Prince Roberto Sanseverino, and resident throughout his life at the Court of Naples.[200] The _Novellino_ is a collection of stories, fifty in number, arranged in five parts, which treat respectively of hypocrisy and the monastic vices, jealousy, feminine incontinence, the contrasts of pathos and of humor, and the generosity of princes. Each _Novella_ is dedicated to a noble man or woman of Neapolitan society, and is followed by a reflective discourse, in which the author personally addresses his audience. Masuccio declares himself the disciple of Boccaccio and Juvenal.[201] Of the Roman poet's spirit he has plenty; he gives the rein to rage in language of the most indignant virulence. Of Boccaccio's idiom and style, though we can trace the student's emulation, he can boast but little. Masuccio never reached the Latinistic smoothness of his model; and while he wrote Italian, his language was far from being Tuscan. Phrases culled from southern dialects are frequent; and the structure of the period is often ungrammatical. Masuccio was not a member of any humanistic clique. He lived among the nobles of a royal Court, and knew the common people intimately. This double experience is reflected in his language and his modes of thought. Both are unalloyed by pedantry, and precious for the student of contemporary manners.

The interest of the _Novellino_ is great when we regard it as the third collection of _Novelle_, coming after Boccaccio's and Sacchetti's, and, from the point of view of art, occupying a middle place between them. The tales of the Decameron were originally recited at Naples; and though Boccaccio was a thorough Tuscan, he borrowed something from the south which gave width, warmth and largeness to his writing. Masuccio is wholly Neapolitan in tone; but he seeks such charm of presentation and variety of matter as shall make his book worthy to take rank in general literature. Sacchetti has more of a purely local flavor. He is no less Florentine than Masuccio is Neapolitan; and, unlike Masuccio, he has taken little pains to adapt his work to other readers than his fellow-citizens. Boccaccio embraces all human life, seen in the light of vivid fancy by a _bourgeois_ who was also a great comic romantic poet. Sacchetti describes the _borghi_, _contrade_, and _piazze_ of Florence; and his speech is seasoned with rare Tuscan salt of wit. Masuccio's world is that of the free-living southern noble. He is penetrated with aristocratic feeling, treats willingly of arms and jousts and warfare, telling the tales of knights and ladies to a courtly company.[202] At the same time, the figures of the people move with incomparable vivacity across the stage; and his transcripts from life reveal the careless interpenetration of classes to which he was accustomed in Calabria.[203] Some of his stories are as simply _bourgeois_ as any of Sacchetti's.[204]

When we compare Masuccio with Boccaccio we find many points of divergence, due to differences of temperament, social sympathies and local circumstance. Boccaccio is witty and malicious; Masuccio humorous and poignant. Boccaccio laughs indulgently at vices; Masuccio scourges them. Boccaccio makes a jest of superstition; Masuccio thunders against the hypocrites who bring religion into contempt. Boccaccio turns the world round for his recreation, submitting its follies to the subtle play of analytical fancy. Masuccio is terribly in earnest; whether sympathetic or vituperative, he makes the voice of his heart heard. Boccaccio's pictures are toned with a rare perception of harmony and delicate gradation. Masuccio brings what strikes his sense before us by a few firm touches. Boccaccio shows far finer literary tact. Yet there is something in the unpremeditated passion, pathos, humor, grossness, anger and enjoyment of Masuccio--a chord of masculine and native strength, a note of vigorous reality--that arrests attention even more imperiously than the prepared effects of the Decameron. One point of undoubted excellence can be claimed for Masuccio. He was a great tragic artist in the rough, and his comedy displays an uncouth Rabelaisian realism. The lights and shadows cast upon his scene are brusque--like the sunlight and the shadow on a Southern city; whereas the painting of Boccaccio is distinguished by exquisite blendings of color and chiaroscuro in subordination to the chosen key.

Masuccio displays his real power in his serious _Novelle_, when he gives vent to his furious hatred of a godless clergy, or describes some dreadful incident, like the tragedy of the two lovers in the lazar-house.[205] Scarcely less dramatic are his tales of comic sensuality.[206] Nor has he a less vivid sense of beauty. Some of his occasional pictures--the meeting of youths and maidens in the evening light of Naples; the lover who changed his jousting-badge because his lady was untrue; the tournament at Rimini; the portrait of Eugenia disguised as a _ragazzo de omo d'arme_--break upon us with the freshness of a smile or sunbeam.[207] We might almost detect a vein of Spanish imagination in certain of his episodes--in the midnight ride of the living monk after the dead friar strapped upon his palfrey, and in the ghastly murder of the woman and the dwarf.[208] The lowest classes of the people are presented with a salience worthy of Velasquez--cobblers, tailors, prostitutes, preaching friars, miracle-workers, relic-mongers, bawds, ruffians, lepers, highway robbers, gondoliers, innkeepers, porters, Moorish slaves, the panders to base appetites and every sort of sin.[209] Masuccio felt no compunction in portraying vicious people as he knew them; but he reserved language of scathing vituperation for their enormities.[210]

From so much that is coarse, dreadful, and revolting, the romance of Masuccio's more genial tales detaches itself with charming grace and delicacy. Nothing in Boccaccio is lovelier than the story of the girl who puts on armor and goes at night to kill her faithless lover; or that of Mariotto and Giannozza, which is substantially the same as Romeo and Juliet; or that of Virginio Baglioni and Eugenia, surprised and slain by robbers near Brescia; or that of Marchetto and Lanzilao, the comrades in arms, which has points in common with Palamon and Arcite; or, lastly, that of the young Malem and his education by Giudotto Gambacorto.[211]. It is the blending of so many elements--the interweaving of tragedy and comedy, satire and pathos, grossness and sentiment, in a style of unadorned sincerity, that places Masuccio high among novelists. Had his language been as pure as that of the earlier Tuscan or the later Italian authors, he would probably rank only second to Boccaccio in the estimation even of his fellow-countrymen. A foreigner, less sensitive to niceties of idiom, may be excused for recognizing him as at least Bandello's equal in the story-teller's art. In moral quality he is superior not only to Bandello, but also to Boccaccio.

The greatest writer of Italian prose in the fifteenth century was a man of different stamp from Masuccio. Gifted with powers short only of the very highest, Leo Battista Alberti exercised an influence over the spirit of his age and race which was second to none but Lionardo's.[212] Sacchetti, Ser Giovanni, Masuccio, and the ordinary tribe of chroniclers pretended to no humanistic culture.[213] Alberti, on the contrary, was educated at Bologna, where he acquired the scientific knowledge of his age, together with such complete mastery of Latin that a work of his youth, the comedy _Philodoxius_, passed for a genuine product of antiquity. This man of many-sided genius came into the world too soon for the perfect exercise of his singular faculties. Whether we regard him from the point of of art, of science, or of literature, he occupies in each department the position of precursor, pioneer and indicator. Always original and always fertile, he prophesied of lands he was not privileged to enter, leaving the memory of dim and varied greatness rather than any solid monument behind him.[214] Of his mechanical discoveries this is not the place to speak; nor can I estimate the value of his labors in the science of perspective.[215] It is as a man of letters that he comes before us in this chapter.

The date of Alberti's birth is uncertain. But we may fix it probably at about the year 1405. He was born at Venice, where his father, exiled with the other members of his noble house by the Albizzi, had taken refuge. After Cosimo de' Medici's triumph over the Albizzi in 1434, Leo Battista returned to Florence.[216] It was as a Florentine citizen that his influence in restoring the vulgar literature to honor, was destined to be felt. He did not, however, reside continuously in the city of his ancestors, but moved from town to town, with a restlessness that savored somewhat of voluntary exile. It is, indeed, noteworthy how many of the greatest Italians--Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Alberti, Lionardo, Tasso: men who powerfully helped to give the nation intellectual coherence--were wanderers. They sought their home and saw their spiritual _patria_ in no one abiding-place.[217] Thus, amid the political distractions of the Italian people, rose that ideal of unity to which Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, Ferrara contributed, but which owned no metropolis. Florence remained to the last the brain of Italy. Yet Florence, by stepmotherly ingratitude, by Dante's exile, by the alienation of Petrarch, by Alberti's homeless boyhood, prepared for the race a new culture, Tuscan in origin, national by diffusion and assimilation. Alberti died at Rome in 1472, just when Poliziano, a youth of eighteen, was sounding the first notes of that music which re-awakened the Muse of Tuscany from her long sleep, and gave new melodies to Italy.

In his proemium to the Third Book of the _Family_, addressed to Francesco degli Alberti, Leo Battista enlarges on the duty of cultivating the mother tongue.[218] After propounding the question whether the loss of the empire acquired by their Roman ancestors--_l'antiquo nostro imperio amplissimo_--or the loss of Latin as a spoken language--_l'antiqua nostra gentilissima lingua latina_--had been the greater privation to the Italian race, he gives it as his opinion that, though the former robbed them of imperial dignity, the latter was the heavier misfortune. To repair that loss is the duty of one who had made literature his study. If he desires to benefit his fellow-countrymen, he will not use a dead language, imperfectly comprehended by a few learned men, but will bend the idiom of the people to the needs of erudition. "I willingly admit," he argues, "that the ancient Latin tongue is very copious and of beauty polished to perfection. Yet I do not see what our Tuscan has in it so hateful that worthy matter, when conveyed thereby, should be displeasing to us." Pedants who despise their mother speech, are mostly men incapable of expressing themselves in the latter; "and granted they are right in saying that the ancient tongue has undisputed authority, because so many learned men have employed it, the like honor will certainly be paid our language of to-day, if men of culture take the pains to purify and polish it." He then declares that, meaning to be useful to the members of his house, and to bequeath a record of their ancient dignity to their descendants, he has resolved to choose the tongue in which he will be generally understood.

This proemium explains Alberti's position in all his Italian writings. Aiming at the general good, convinced that a living nation cannot use a dead language with dignity and self-respect, he makes the sacrifice of a scholar's pride to public utility, and has the sense to perceive that the day of erudite exclusiveness is over. No one felt more than Alberti the greatness of the antique Roman race. No one was prouder of his descent from those patricians of the Commonwealth, who tamed and ruled the world. The memory of that Roman past, which turned the generation after Dante into a nation of students, glowed in Alberti's breast with more than common fervor.[219] The sonorous introduction to the first book of the _Family_ reviews the glories of the Empire and the decadence of Rome with a pomp of phrase, a passion of eloquence, that stir our spirit like the tramp of legions waking echoes in a ruined Roman colonnade.[220] Yet in spite of this devotion to the past, Alberti, like Villani, felt that his Italians of the modern age had destinies and auspices apart from those of ancient Rome. He was resolved to make the speech of that new nation, heiress of the Latin name, equal in dignity to Cicero's and Livy's. What Rome had done, Rome's children should do again. But the times were changed, and Alberti was a true son of the Renaissance. He approached his task in the spirit of a humanist. His style is over-charged with Latinisms; his periods are cumbrous; his matter is loaded with citations and scholastic instances drawn from the repertories of erudition.[221] The _vivida vis_ of inspiration fails. His work is full of reminiscences. The golden simplicity of the _trecento_ yields to a studied effort after dignity of diction, culture of amplitude. Still the writer's energy is felt in massive paragraphs of powerful declamation. His eloquence does not degenerate into frothy rhetoric; and when he wills, he finds pithy phrases to express the mind of a philosopher and poet. That he was born and reared in exile accounts for a lack of racy Tuscan in his prose; and the structure of his sentences proves that he had been accustomed to think in Latin before he made Italian serve his turn.[222] Still, though for these and other reasons his works were not of the kind to animate a nation, they are such as still may be read with profit and with pleasure by men who seek for solid thoughts in noble diction.

Alberti's principal prose work, the _Trattato della Famiglia_, was written to instruct the members of his family in the customs of their ancestors, and to perpetuate those virtues of domestic life which he regarded as the sound foundation of a commonwealth. The first three books are said to have been composed within the space of ninety days in Rome, and the fourth added at a later period.[223] It is a dialogue, the interlocutors being relatives of the Alberti blood. Nearly all the illustrative matter is drawn from the biographies of their forefathers. The scene is laid at Padua, and the essay contains frequent allusions to their exile.[224] No word of invective against the Albizzi who had ruined them, no vituperation of the city which had permitted the expulsion of her sons, escapes the lips of any of the speakers. The grave sadness that tempers the whole dialogue, is marred by neither animosity nor passion. Yet though the _Family_ was written in exile for exiles, the ideal of domestic life it paints, is Florentine.[225] Taken in its whole extent, this treatise is the most valuable document which remains to us from the times of the oligarchy, when Florence was waging war with the Visconti, and before the Medici had based their despotism upon popular favor. From its pages a tolerably complete history of a great commercial family might be extracted; and this study would form a valuable commentary on the public annals of the commonwealth during the earlier portion of the fifteenth century.[226]

The first book of the _Famiglia_ deals with the duties of the elder to the younger members of the household, and the observance owed by sons and daughters to their parents. It is an essay _De Officiis_ within the circle of the home, embracing minute particulars of conduct, and suggesting rules for education from the cradle upwards.[227] The second book takes up the question of matrimony. The respective ages at which the sexes ought to marry, the moral and physical qualities of a good wife, the maintenance of harmony between a wedded couple, their separate provinces and common duty to the State in the procreation of children, are discussed with scientific completeness. The third book, modeled on the _Oeconomicus_ of Xenophon, is devoted to thrift. How to use our personal faculties, our wealth, and our time to best advantage, forms its principal theme. The fourth book treats of friendship--family connections and alliances, the usefulness of friends in good and evil fortune, the mutual benefits enjoyed by men who live honestly together in a social state.[228] It may be seen from this sketch that the architecture of the treatise is complete and symmetrical. The first book establishes the principles of domestic morality on which a family exists and flourishes. The second provides for its propagation through marriage. The third shows how its resources are to be distributed and preserved. The fourth explains its relations to similar communities existing in an organized society. Many passages in the essay have undoubtedly the air of truisms; but this impression of commonplaceness is removed by the strong specific character of all the illustrations. Alberti's wisdom is common to civilized humanity. His conception of life is such as only suits a Florentine, and his examples are drawn from the annals of a single family.

I have already dwelt at some length in a former volume on the most celebrated section of this treatise--the _Padre di Famiglia_ or the _Economico_.[229] To repeat those observations here would be superfluous. Yet I cannot avoid a digression upon a matter of much obscurity relating to the authorship of that book.[230] Until recently, this discourse upon the economy of a Florentine household passed under the name of Agnolo Pandolfini, and was published separately as his undoubted work. The interlocutors in the dialogue, which bore the title of _Governo della Famiglia_, are various members of the Pandolfini family, and all allusions to the Alberti and their exile are wanting. The style of the _Governo_ differs in many important respects from that of Alberti; and yet the arrangement of the material and the substance of each paragraph are so closely similar in both forms of the treatise as to prove that the work is substantially identical. Pandolfini's essay, which I shall call _Il Governo_, passes for one of the choicest monuments of ancient Tuscan diction. Alberti's _Economico_, though it is more idiomatic than the rest of his _Famiglia_, betrays the Latinisms of a scholar. It is clear from a comparison of the two treatises either that Alberti appropriated Pandolfini's _Governo_, brought its style into harmony with his own, and gave it a place between the second and the fourth books of his essay on the Family; or else that this third book of Alberti's _Famiglia_ was rewritten by an author who commanded a purer Italian. In the former case, Alberti changed the _dramatis personae_ by substituting members of his own house for the Pandolfini. In the latter case, the anonymous compiler paid a similar compliment to the Pandolfini by such alterations as obliterated the Alberti, and presented the treatise to the world as part of their own history. That Agnolo Pandolfini was himself guilty of this plagiarism is rendered improbable by a variety of circumstances. Yet the problem does not resolve itself into the simple question whether Pandolfini or Alberti was the plagiary. Supposing Alberti to have been the original author, there is no difficulty in believing that the _Governo_ was a redaction made from his work by some anonymous hand in honor of the Pandolfini family. On the contrary, if we assume Agnolo Pandolfini to have been the author, then Alberti himself was guilty of a gross and open plagiarism.[231]

It will be useful to give some account of the MSS. upon which the editions of the _Governo_ and the _Economico_ are based.[232] In the first edition of the _Governo_ (Tartini e Franchi, Firenze, 1734) six codices are mentioned. Of these the Codex Pandolfini A, on which the editors chiefly relied, has been removed from Italy to Paris. The Codex Pandolfini B was written in 1476 at Poggibonsi by a certain Giuliano di Niccolajo Martini. Whether the Codex Pandolfini A professed to be an autograph copy, I do not know; but the editors of 1734, referring to it, state that the Senator Filippo Pandolfini, member of the Della Crusca, corrected the errors, restored the text, and improved the diction of the treatise by the help of a still more ancient MS. This admission on their part is significant. It opens, for the advocates of Alberti's authorship, innumerable suspicions as to the part played by Filippo Pandolfini in the preparation of the _Governo_. Nor can it be denied that the lack of an autograph of the _Governo_ renders the settlement of the disputed question very difficult.

Of Alberti's _Trattato della Famiglia_ we have three autograph copies; (i) Cod. Magl. Classe iv. No. 38 in folio; (ii) Riccardiana 1220; (iii) Riccardiana 176. The first of these is the most important; but it presents some points of singularity. In the first place, the third book, which is the _Economico_, has been inserted into the original codex, and shows a different style of writing. In the second place, the first two books contain numerous corrections, additions, erasures and recorrections, obviously made by Alberti himself. Some of the interpolated passages in the first two books are found to coincide with parts of the _Governo_; and Signor Cortesi, to whose critical Study I have already referred, argues with great show of reason that Alberti, when he determined to incorporate the _Governo_ in his _Famiglia_, enriched the earlier books of that essay with fragments which he did not find it convenient to leave in their original place. Still it should be remembered that this argument can be reversed; for the anonymous compiler of the _Governo_, if he had access to Alberti's autograph, may have chosen to appropriate sentences culled from the earlier portions of the _Famiglia_.

It is noticeable that the _Economico_, even though it forms the third book of the Treatise on the Family, has a separate title and a separate introduction, with a dedication to Francesco Alberti, and a distinct peroration.[233] It is, in fact, an independent composition, and occurs in more than one MS. of the fifteenth century detached from the rest of the _Famiglia_. In style it is far freer and more racy than is usual with Alberti's writing. Of this its author seems to have been aware; for he expressly tells his friend and kinsman Francesco that he has sought to approach the purity and simplicity of Xenophon.[234]

The anonymous writer of Alberti's life says that he composed three books on the Family at Rome before he was thirty, and a fourth book three years later. If we follow Tiraboschi in taking 1414 for the date of his birth, the first three books must have been composed before 1444 and the fourth in 1447. The former of these dates (1444) receives some confirmation from a Latin letter written by Leonardo Dati to Alberti, acknowledging the Treatise on the Family, in June 1443. Dati tells him that he finds fault with the essay for being composed "in a more majestic and perhaps a harsher style, especially in the first book, than the Florentine language and the judgment of the laity would tolerate." He goes on, however, to observe that "afterwards the language becomes far more sweet and satisfactory to the ear"--a criticism which seems to suit the altered manner of the third book. With reference to the date 1447, in which the _Famiglia_ may have been completed, Cortesi remarks that Pandolfini died in 1446. He suggests that, upon this event, Alberti appropriated the _Governo_ and rewrote it, and that the _Economico_, though it holds the place of the third book in the treatise, is really the fourth book mentioned by the anonymous biographer. The suggestion is ingenious; and if we can once bring ourselves to believe that Alberti committed a deliberate act of larceny, immediately after his friend Pandolfini's death, then the details which have been already given concerning the autograph of the _Famiglia_ and the discrepancies in its style of composition add confirmation to the theory. There are, however, good reasons for assigning Alberti's birth to the year 1404 or even 1402.[235] In that case Alberti's Roman residence would fall into the third decade of the century, and the last book of the _Famiglia_ (which I am inclined to believe is the one now called the third) would have been composed before Pandolfini's death. That Alberti kept his MSS. upon the stocks and subjected them to frequent revision is certain; and this may account for one reference occurring in it to an event which happened in 1438.

Is it rational to adopt the hypothesis of Alberti's plagiarism? Let us distinctly understand what it implies. In his own preface to the _Economico_ Alberti states that he has striven to reproduce the simple and intelligible style of Xenophon[236]; and there is no doubt that this portion of the _Famiglia_, whether we regard it as Alberti's or as Pandolfini's property, was closely modeled on the _Oeconomicus_. Cortesi suggests that the reference to Xenophon was purposely introduced by Alberti in order to put his readers off the scent. Nor, if we accept the hypothesis of plagiarism, can we restrict ourselves to this accusation merely. In the essay _Della Tranquillita dell'Animo_ Alberti introduces Agnolo Pandolfini as an interlocutor, and makes him refer to the third book of the _Famiglia_ as a genuine production of Alberti.[237] In other words, he must not only have appropriated Pandolfini's work, and laid claim to it in the preface to his _Economico_; but he must also have referred to it as his own composition in a speech ascribed to the real author, which he meant for publication. That is to say, he made the man whose work he stole pronounce its panegyric and refer it to the thief. That Pandolfini was dead when he committed these acts of treason would not be sufficient to explain Alberti's audacity; for according to the advocates of Pandolfini's authorship, the MS. formed a known and valued portion of his sons' inheritance. Is it _prima facie_ probable that Alberti, even in those days of looser literary copyright than ours, should have exposed himself to detection in so palpable and gross a fraud?

Before answering this question in the affirmative, it may be asked what positive grounds there are for crediting Pandolfini with the original authorship. At present no autograph of Pandolfini is forthcoming. His claim to authorship rests on tradition, and on the Pandolfini cast of the dialogue in certain MSS. At the same time, the admissions made by the editors of 1734 regarding their most trusted codex have been already shown to be suspicious. It is also noticeable that Vespasiano, in his Life of Agnolo Pandolfini, though he professes to have been intimately acquainted with this excellent Florentine burgher, does not mention the _Governo della Famiglia_.[238] The omission is singular, supposing the treatise to have then existed under Pandolfini's name, for Vespasiano was himself a writer of Italian in an age when Latin scholarship claimed almost exclusive attention. He would, we should have thought, have been eager to name so distinguished a man among his fellow-authors in the vulgar tongue.

Granting the force of these considerations, it must still be admitted that there remain grave objections to accepting the _Economico_ of Alberti as the original of these two treatises. In the first place, the _Governo_ is a masterpiece of Tuscan; and it is far more reasonable to suppose that the _Economico_ was copied from the _Governo_ with such alterations as adapted it to the manner of the _Famiglia_, than to assume that the _Economico_ received a literary rehandling which reduced it from its more rhetorical to a popular form. The passage from simple to complex in literature admits of easier explanation than the reverse process. Moreover, if Alberti admired a racy Tuscan style and could command it for the _Economico_, why did he not continue to use it in his subsequent compositions? In the second place, the _Governo_, as it stands, is suited to what Vespasiano tells us about Agnolo Pandolfini. He was a scholar trained in the humanities of the earlier Renaissance and a statesman who retired from public life, disgusted with the times, to studious leisure at his villa. Now, Giannozzo Alberti, who takes the chief part in the _Economico_, proclaims himself a man of business, without learning. Those passages of the _Governo_ which seem inappropriate to such a character are absent from the _Economico_; but some of them appear in Alberti's other works, the _Teogenio_ and _Della Tranquillita_. From this circumstance Signor Cortesi infers that Alberti, working with Pandolfini's essay before him, made such alterations as brought the drift of the discourse within the scope of Giannozzo's acquirements. The advocates of Alberti's authorship are bound to reverse this theory, and to assume that the author of the _Governo_ suited the _Economico_ to Pandolfini by infusing a tincture of scholarship into Giannozzo's speeches.[239]

We have still to ask who could the author of the _Governo_, if it was not Agnolo Pandolfini, have been? The first answer to this question is: Alberti himself. The anonymous biographer tells us that he wrote the first three books at Rome, and that he afterwards made great efforts to improve his Tuscan style and render it more popular. It is not, therefore, impossible that he should himself have fitted that portion of his _Famiglia_ with new characters, omitted the Alberti, and given the honors of the dialogue to Pandolfini. The treatise, as he first planned it (according to this hypothesis), has a passionate digression upon the exile of the Alberti, followed by a declamation against public life and politicians. To have circulated these passages in an essay intended for Florentine readers, after Alberti's recall by Cosimo de' Medici, would have been unwise. Alberti, therefore, may only have retained such portions of them as could rouse no animosity, revive no painful reminiscences, and be appropriately placed upon the lips of Pandolfini. As it stands in the _Governo_, the invective against statecraft is scarcely in keeping with Pandolfini's character. Though he retired from public life disgusted and ill at ease, the conclusion that no man should seek to serve the State except from a strict sense of duty, sounds strange when spoken by this veteran politician. Taken as the climax to the history of the wrongs inflicted upon the Alberti, this passage is dramatically in harmony with Giannozzo's experience.[240] With regard to the noticeable improvement of style in the _Economico_, we might argue that after Alberti had enjoyed facilities at Florence of acquiring his native idiom, he remodeled that section of his earlier work which he intended for the people. And the same line of argument would account for the independence of the _Economico_ and its occurrence in separate MSS. Had Alberti designed what we now call a plagiarism, what need was there to call attention to it by prefixing an introduction to the third book of a continuous treatise?

It is not, however, necessary to defend Alberti from the charge of fraud by suggesting that he was himself the author of the _Governo_. There existed, as we shall soon see, a class of semi-cultivated scribes at Florence, whose business consisted in manufacturing literature for the people. They re-wrote, re-fashioned, condensed, abstracted whatever seemed to furnish entertainment and instruction for their public. Their style was close to the vulgar speech and frankly idiomatic. That one of these men should have made the necessary alterations in the third book of the _Famiglia_ to remove the recollection of the Alberti exile, and to prepare it for popular reading, is by no means impossible. The _Governo_ is shorter and more condensed than the _Economico_. The rhetorical and dramatic elements are reduced; and the material is communicated in a style of gnomic pregnancy. If it was modeled upon the _Economico_ in the way I have suggested, the writer of the abstract was a man of no common ability, with a very keen sense of language and a faculty for investing a work of art and fine literature with the _naivete_ and grace of popular style. He also understood the necessity of providing his chief interlocutor, Agnolo Pandolfini, with a character different from that of Giannozzo Alberti; and he had the tact to realize that character by innumerable touches. Great additional support would be given to this hypothesis, if we could trust Bonucci's assertion that he had seen and transcribed a MS. of the _Governo_ adapted with a set of characters selected from the Pazzi family. It would then seem clear that the _Governo_ was an essay which every father of a family wished to possess for the instruction of his household, and to connect with the past history of his own race. Unluckily, Signor Bonucci, though he prints this Pazzi _rifacimento_, gives no information as to the source of the MS. or any hint whereby its existence can be ascertained.[241] We must, therefore, omit it from our reckoning.

As the case at present stands, it is impossible to form a decisive opinion regarding the authorship of this famous treatise. The necessary critical examination of MSS. has not yet been made, and the arguments used on either side from internal evidence are not conclusive. My own prepossession is still in favor of Alberti. I may, however, observe that after reading Signor Cortesi's inedited essay, I perceive the case in favor of Pandolfini to be far stronger than I had expected.[242]

Space will not permit a full discussion of Alberti's numerous writings; and yet their bearing on the best opinion of his time is so important that some notice of them must be taken. Together with the _Famiglia_ we may class the _Deiciarchia_, or, as it should probably be written, the _De Iciarchia_.[243] This, like the majority of his moral treatises, is a dialogue, and its subject is civic virtue. Having formed the ideal family, he next considers the functions of householders, born to guide the State. The chief point of the discourse is that no one should be idle, but that all should labor in some calling worthy of the dignity of man.[244] This seems a simple doctrine; but it is so inculcated as to make us remember the Guelf laws of Florence, whereby _scioperati_ were declared criminals. It must not, however, be supposed that Alberti confines himself to the development of this single theme. His _Deiciarchia_ is rather to be regarded as a treatise on the personal qualities of men to whom the conduct of a commonwealth has been by accident of birth intrusted.

A second class of Alberti's dialogues discuss the contemplative life. In the _Famiglia_ and the _Deiciarchia_ man is regarded as a social and domestic being. In the _Tranquillita dell'Animo_ and the _Teogenio_ the inner life of the student and the sage comes under treatment. The former of these dialogues owes much of its interest to the interlocutors and to the scene where it was laid.[245] Leon Battista Alberti, Niccolo di Veri dei Medici, and Agnolo Pandolfini meet inside the Florentine Duomo, which is described in a few words of earnest admiration for its majesty and strength.[246] These friends begin a conversation, which soon turns upon the means of preserving the mind in repose and avoiding perturbations from the passions. The three books are enriched with copious allusions to Alberti's works and personal habits--his skill as a musician and a statuary, the gymnastic feats of his youth, and his efforts to benefit the State by intellectual labor. They form a valuable supplement to the anonymous biography. The philosophical material is too immediately borrowed from Cicero and Seneca to be of much importance. The _Teogenio_ is a more attractive, and, as it seems to me, a riper work.[247] Of Alberti's ethical discourses I am inclined to rate this next to the _Famiglia_; nor did the Italian Renaissance produce any disquisition of the kind more elevated in feeling, finer in temper, or glowing with an eloquence at once so spontaneous and so dignified. We have to return to Petrarch to find the same high humanistic passion; and Alberti's Italian is here more winning than Petrarch's Latin. Had Pico condescended to the vulgar tongue, he might have produced work of similar quality; for the essay on the Dignity of Man is written in the same spirit.

The _Teogenio_ was sent with a letter of dedication to Lionelle d'Este not long after his father's death.[248] Alberti apologizes for its Italian style and assures the prince it had been written merely to console him in his evil fortunes. The speakers are two, Teogenio and Microtiro.[249] The dialogue opens with a passage on friendship, and a somewhat labored description of the grove where Teogenio intends to pass the day. Microtiro has come from the city. His friend, the recluse, welcomes him to the country with these words: "Ma sediamo, se cosi ti piace, qui fra questi mirti, in luogo non men delizioso che vostri teatri e tempi amplissimi e sontuosissimi." This strikes the keynote of the treatise, the theme of which is the superiority of study in the country over the distractions of the town. Reading it, we see how rightly Landino assigned his part to Alberti in the Camaldolese Discussions.[250] That ideal of rural solitude which the Italian scholars inherited from their Roman forefathers, receives its earliest and finest treatment in this dialogue. It is not communion with nature so much as the companionship of books and the pursuit of study in a tranquil corner of the Tuscan hills, that Alberti has selected for his panegyric.[251] "The society of the illustrious dead," he says in one of the noblest passages of the essay, "can be enjoyed by me at leisure here; and when I choose to converse with sages, politicians or great poets, I have but to turn to my bookshelves, and my company is better than your palaces with all their crowds of flatterers and clients can afford."[252] After enlarging on the manifold advantages of a student's life, he concludes the book with a magnificent picture of human frailty, leading up to a discourse on death.

It is noticeable that Alberti, though frequently approaching the subject of religion, never dilates upon it, and in no place declares himself a Christian. His creed is that of the Roman moralists--a belief in the benignant Maker of the Universe, an intellectual and unsubstantial theism. We feel this even in that passage of the _Famiglia_ when Giannozzo and his wife pray in their bed-chamber to God for prosperity in life and happiness in children.[253] There is not a word about spiritual blessings, no allusion to Christ or Madonna, though a silver statue of the Saint with ivory hands and face is standing in his tabernacle over them[254]--nothing, indeed, to indicate that this grave Florentine couple, whom we may figure to ourselves like Van Dyck's merchant and wife in the National Gallery, were not performing sacrifice and praying to the _Di Lares_ of a Roman household. The Renaissance had Latinized even the religious sentiments, and the elder faiths of the middle ages were extinct in the soundest hearts of the epoch.[255]

A third group of Alberti's prose works consists of his essays on the arts.[256] One of these, the Treatise on Painting, was either written in Italian or translated by Alberti soon after its composition in Latin.[257] The Treatises on Perspective, Sculpture, Architecture and the Orders are supposed to have been rendered by their author from the Latin; but doubt still rests upon Alberti's share in this translation. It is not my present business to inquire into the subject-matter of his artistic essays, but rather to note the fact that Alberti should have thought it fitting to use Italian for at least the most considerable of them. We have already seen that his chief motive to composition was utility and that he recognized the need of bringing the results of learning within the scope of the unlettered laity. We need not doubt that this consideration weighed with him when he rehandled the matter of Vitruvius and Pliny for the use of handicraftsmen. Nothing is more striking in the whole series than the business-like simplicity of style, the avoidance of rhetoric, and the adaptation of each section to some practical end. We have not here to do with aesthetical criticism, but with the condensed experience of a student and workman. In his exposition of theory Alberti corresponds to the practice of Florence, where Ghirlandajo kept a _bottega_ open to all comers, and Michelangelo began his apprenticeship by grinding colors.

Though the subject of these essays lies beyond the scope of my work, it is impossible to pass over the dedication to Filippo Brunelleschi, which is prefixed to the Italian version of the _Pittura_. Alberti begins by saying that the wonder and sorrow begotten in him by reflecting on the loss of many noble arts and sciences, had led him to believe that Nature, wearied and out-worn, had no force left to generate the giant spirits of her youth. "But when I returned from the long exile in which we of the Alberti have grown old, to this our mother-city, which exceeds all others in the beauty of her monuments, I perceived that many living men, but first of all you, Filippo, and our dearest friend the sculptor Donatello, and Lorenzo Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia and Masaccio, were not of less account for genius and noble work than any ancient artist of great fame." After some remarks upon industry and the advantages of scientific theory, he proceeds: "Who is there so hard and envious of temper as not to praise the architect Filippo, when he saw so vast a structure, raised above the heavens, spacious enough to cover with its shadow all the Tuscan folks, built without any aid from beams and scaffoldings, a miracle of art, if I judge rightly, which might in this age have been deemed impossible, and which even among the ancients was perhaps unknown, undreamed of?" After this exordium, he commits to Brunelleschi's care his little book on painting, _quale a tuo nome feci in lingua toscana_. The interest of this dedication lies not only in the mention of the five chief _quattrocento_ artists by Alberti, and in the record of the impression first produced on him by Florence, but also in the recognition that, great as were the dead arts of antiquity, the modern arts of Italy could rival them. It is an intuition parallel to that which induced Alberti to compose the _Famiglia_ in Italian, and proves that he could endure the blaze of humanism without blindness.

In the fourth group of Alberti's prose-works we come across a new vein of semi-moral, semi-satirical reflection. These are devoted to love and matrimony, giving rhetorical expression to the misogynistic side of the _Novelle_. Alberti professes himself a master in the lore of love. He knows its symptoms, diagnoses and describes the stages of the malady, and pretends to intimate acquaintance with the foibles of both sexes. Yet we seem to feel that his knowledge is rather literary than real, derived from books and pranked with a scholastic show of borrowed learning. Two lectures addressed by women to their own sex on the art of love, take the first place in this series. The one is called _Ecatomfila_, or the lady of the hundred loves; the other _Amiria_, or the lady of the myriad.[258] The former tells her female audience what kind of lover to choose, neither too young nor too old, not too rich nor yet too handsome; how to keep him, and in what way to make the most of the precious acquisition. She is comparatively modest, and the sort of passion she implies may pass for virtuous. Yet her large experience of men proves she has arrived at wisdom after many trials. Her virtue is a matter of prudent egoism. Amiria takes a different line. Heliogabalus might have used her precepts in his _Concio ad Meretrices_. Her discourse turns upon the subsidiary aids to beauty and the arts of coquetry. Recipes for hair-dyes, depilatories, eye-lotions, tooth-powders, soaps, lip-salves, ointments, cosmetics, skin-preservers, wart-destroyers, pearl-powders, rouges, are followed up with sound advice about craft, fraud, force, feigned passion, entangling manoeuvres, crocodile tears, and secrecy in self-indulgence. The sustained irony of this address, and the minute acquaintance with the least laudable secrets of an Italian lady's toilet it reveals, place it upon the list of literary curiosities. Did any human beings ever plaster their faces with such stuff as Amiria gravely recommends?[259]

The _Deifira_ is a dialogue on the cure of a distempered passion, which adds but little to Ovid's _Remedium Amoris_; while two short treatises on marriage only prove that Alberti took the old Simonidean view of there being at least nine bad women to one good one.[260] His misogyny, whether real or affected, reaches its climax in an epistle to Paolo Codagnello, which combines the worst things said by Boccaccio in the _Corbaccio_ with Lucian's satire on female uncleanliness in the _Amores_.[261] The tirade appears to be as serious as possible, and, indeed, Alberti's generalities might be illustrated _ad libitum_ from the _Novelle_. It is no wonder that women resented his treatment of them; and one of his most amusing lesser tracts is a dialogue between himself and a lady called Sofrona, who took him to task for this very epistle. In answer to her reproaches he is ceremoniously polite. He also gives her the last word in the argument, not without a stroke of humor. "It is all very well of you, men of letters, to take our characters away, so long as we can rule our husbands and make choice of lovers when and how we choose. All you men run after us; and if you do but see a pretty girl, you stand as stock still as a statue."[262] After this fashion runs Sofrona's reply.

Alberti's misogynistic essays remind us how very difficult it is to understand or explain the tone of popular literature in that century with regard to women. That the _Novelle_ were written to amuse both sexes seems clear; and we must imagine that the women who read so much vituperation of their manners, regarded it as a conventional play with words. Like Sofrona, they knew their satirists to be fair husbands, fathers, brothers, and, in the capacity of lovers, ludicrously blind to their defects. The current abuse of women, in which Petrarch no less than Alberti and Boccaccio indulged, seems to have been a scholastic survival of the coarse and ignorant literature of the medieval clergy. Cloistered monks indulged their taste for obscenity, and indemnified themselves for self-imposed celibacy, by grossly insulting the mothers who bore them and the institution they administered as a sacrament.[263] Their invective tickled the vulgar ear, and passed into popular literature, where it held its own as a commonplace, not credited with too much meaning by folk who knew the world.

The pretty story of Ippolito and Leonora, could we believe it to be Alberti's, might pass for a palinode to these misogynistic treatises.[264] It is the tale of two Florentine lovers, born in hostile houses, and brought after a series of misadventures, to the fruition of honorable love in marriage. The legend must have been very popular. Besides the prose version, in which the lovers are called Ippolito de' Buondelmonti and Leonora de' Bardi, we have a poem in _ottava rima_, where the heroine's name becomes Dianora. A Latin translation of the same novel was produced by Paolo Cortesi, with the title _Hyppolyti et Deyanirae Historia_. But since Alberti's authorship has not been clearly proved, it is more prudent to class both Italian versions among those anonymous products of popular literature which will form the topic of my next chapter.

Of Alberti's poems few survive; and these have no great literary value. Out of the three serious sonnets, one beginning _Io vidi gia seder_ deserves to be studied for a certain rapidity of movement and mystery of emotion.[265] It might be compared to an allegorical engraving by some artist of the sixteenth century--Robeta or the Master of the Caduceus. Two burlesque sonnets in reply to Burchiello have this interest, that they illustrate a point of literary contact between the people and the cultivated classes. But, on the whole, the Sestines and the Elegy of Agiletta must be reckoned Alberti's best performances in verse.[266] Here his gnomic wisdom finds expression in pregnant, almost epigrammatic utterances. There are passages in the _Agiletta_, weighty with packed sentences, which remind an English reader of Bacon's lines on human life.[267] Still it is the poetry of a man largely gifted, but not born to be a singer. It may be worth adding to this brief notice of Alberti's rhymes, that he essayed Latin meters in Italian. The following elegiac couplet belongs to him[268]:

Questa per estremo miserabile epistola mando
A te che spregi miseramente noi.

It is not worth printing. But it illustrates that endeavor to fuse the forms of ancient with the material of modern art, which underlay Alberti's practical experiments in architecture.

It may seem that too much attention has already been given to Alberti and his works. Yet when we consider his peculiar position in the history of the Renaissance, when we remember the singular beauty of his character, and reflect that, first among the humanists of mark, he deigned to labor for the public and to cultivate his mother tongue, a certain disproportion in the space allotted him may be excused. What his immediate successors in the field of erudition thought of him, can be gathered from a passage in Poliziano's preface to the first edition of his work on Architecture.[269] "To praise the author is beyond the narrow limits of a letter, beyond the poor reach of my powers of eloquence. Nothing, however abstruse in learning, however remote from the ordinary range of scholarship, was hidden from his genius. One might question whether he was better fitted for oratory or for poetry, whether his speech was the more weighty or the more polished." These great qualities Alberti placed freely at the service of the unlettered laity. He is therefore the hero of that age which I have called the period of transition.