Chapter VI: The Vanguard of the Renaissance (2)

His philosophical works, amongst which may be mentioned a treatise on _Solitary Life_, and another on _Good and Bad Fortune_, are scarcely less bombastic. The sentiments display neither truth nor depth of thought. They are merely a show of words on some given subject. The author pre-determines his view of the question, and never examines the arguments for the purpose of discovering the truth, but of vanquishing the difficulties which oppose him, and of making everything agree with his own system. His letters, of which a voluminous collection has been published--which is, however, far from being complete--are perhaps more read than any other of his works, as they throw much light upon a period which is well worthy of being known. We do not, however, discover in them either the familiarity of intimate friendship or the complete openness of an amiable character. They display great caution and studied propriety, with an attention to effect which is not always successful. An Italian would never have written Latin letters to his friends, if he had wished only to unfold the secrets of his heart; but the letters of Cicero were in Latin, and with them Petrarch wished to have his own compared. He was, evidently, always thinking more of the public than of his correspondent; and in fact the public were often in possession of the letter before his friend. The bearer of an elegantly written epistle well knew that he should flatter the vanity of the writer by communicating it; and he therefore often openly read it, and even gave copies of it, before it reached its destination.

It is difficult to say whether the extended reputation which Petrarch enjoyed, during the course of a long life, is more glorious to himself or to his age. We have elsewhere mentioned the faults of this celebrated man--that subtlety of intellect which frequently led him to neglect true feeling, and to abandon himself to a false taste; and that vanity which too often induced him to call himself the friend of cruel and contemptible princes, because they flattered him. But, before we part with him, let us once more take a view of those great qualities which rendered him the first man of his age--that ardent love for science to which he consecrated his life, his powers, and his faculties; and that glorious enthusiasm for all that is high and noble in the poetry, the eloquence, the laws, and the manners of antiquity. This enthusiasm is the mark of a superior mind. To such a mind, the hero becomes greater by being contemplated; while a narrow and sterile intellect reduces the greatest men to its own level, and measures them by its own standard.

This enthusiasm was felt by Petrarch, not only for distinguished men, but for everything that is great in nature, for religion, for philosophy, for patriotism, and for freedom. He was the friend and patron of the unfortunate Rienzi, who, in the fourteenth century, awakened for a moment the ancient spirit and fortunes of Rome. He appreciated the fine arts as well as poetry, and he contributed to make the Romans acquainted with the rich monuments of antiquity, as well as with the manuscripts which they possessed. His passions were tinctured with a sense of religion which induced him to worship all the glorious works of the Deity, with which the earth abounds; and he believed that, in the woman he loved, he saw the messenger of that heaven which thus revealed to him its beauty. He enabled his contemporaries to estimate the full value of the purity of a passion so modest and so religious as his own; while to his countrymen he gave a language worthy of rivalling those of Greece and Rome, with which, by his means, they had become familiar. Softening and ornamenting his own language by the adoption of proper rules, he suited it to the expression of every feeling, and changed, in some degree, its essence. He inspired his age with that enthusiastic love for the beauty, and that veneration for the study of antiquity, which gave it a new character, and which determined that of succeeding times. It was, it may be said, in the name of grateful Europe that Petrarch, on the 8th of April, 1341, was crowned by the senator of Rome, in the Capitol; and this triumph, the most glorious which was ever decreed to man, was not disproportioned to the authority which this great poet was destined to maintain over future ages.[e]

EARLY ITALIAN PROSE

Already, for half a century, Italian poetry had been cultivated with ardour and with success, and in Dante’s time there was scarcely a well-educated Florentine who could not at need rhyme a sonnet or write a short song in the vulgar tongue. It was not so easy to write in prose; for if the poet had a language and rules of style, there had not yet been a learned time for the prose writer; he had no fixed rules, the form in short which allows a writer to express his thought in the logical order necessary to convey all its shades of meaning, to show up its striking points, artistically to subordinate the less important or purely expletive parts. The poet, on the contrary, at his first attempt met with metrical forms, long adopted and practised in Provençal, a parent idiom, whose rules could, without any difficulty, be applied to Italian. He found moreover that the Provençal poetry, whose prosody he borrowed, had taken with slight differences the same subjects which he wished to sing in Italian; so that he found a poetical storehouse, if the expression may be allowed, of comparisons, epithets, connecting links, phrases, and permissible inversions.

It was not so with prose. The Italian language, which could without difficulty adopt the Provençal metrical system, found no prose developed which it could take as a model. Latin was the only perfect type which it could imitate; but the complete absence of any declension, the relatively limited number of conjunctions, the impossibility of freeing itself completely from analytical order, which it experienced in common with all modern languages, did not allow it to be modelled on Cicero, as poetry was modelled on Bertrand de Born or Sordello. To reach this point of perfection two or three more centuries were needed, during which deep thinkers and great artists moulded this refractory material.

It is true that the Latin historians, who were perfectly known, might have been taken as examples to be copied and even imitated; for these writers had treated the same kinds of subject which were again about to be attempted. However, there was one difference: ancient history, after all, was far distant, and the resemblance between the subjects was more apparent than real; or at least, if this resemblance really existed, men were too interested in the events to be able to judge them and compare them with others as coldly as we are accustomed to do. To sing the praises of his lady’s eyes, to express sentiments of fidelity or sadness, to paint chivalrous tournaments, it suffices to have read or to have listened to the Provençal troubadours, and the same words, with very few changes, can almost be transported from one language into the other. Imagine, on the other hand, a poor chronicler of the Middle Ages imitating Sallust or Titus Livius: could the vernacular furnish him with a single word to render those of his model--and the prose writer, accustomed to think in Latin, could he find in Italian a single expression equivalent to his thought? Whence could he have drawn that common fund of ideas and formulas which is so necessary to write a real history, however matter of fact, however little philosophic it might be? Even in order to relate facts, putting aside all thought of interest, one must have ideas.

But the difficulty was far greater when abstract subjects were treated. There is even some confusion in the beautiful prose of Dante’s _Convito_, and even in the scholastic digressions of _The Divine Comedy_, although at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Italian language was already far more developed than one hundred years before; and, to go no further, some idea of the extreme difficulty of such an enterprise may be found by calling to mind the obstacles which had to be overcome by the first French and German philosophers who had the courage and self-denial to expose in their mother-tongues (which were then nearly formed) ideas reasoned in Latin; for a certain effort is needed to follow the French and German writings of Descartes and Wolff, while their Latin works present no difficulty. Therefore, besides the general and constant causes for the priority of poetry to prose, there was in Italy a special cause which contributed to develop poetry first in the vulgar tongue; this cause was the existence of Provençal poetry, already flourishing and cultivated.

A fact common alike to the literary history of Italy and to that of all other nations is that the first attempts in prose were generally historical writings. In fact, among all primitive people we see that the first use they made of free speech was to decompose the epic poems, to give the importance of historical tradition to stories of popular imagination. Thus we see the Ionian chroniclers, up to Herodotus, add the history of contemporary events to the deeds of heroes of fable, just as the first Florentine chroniclers, till Villani, trace back the origin of their native town and its early history to Roman names whose traditions were doubtless retained in the popular poems prior to the Provençal school which reigned in Italy towards the middle of the fourteenth century, and relate, without metre or rhythm, what the Florentine woman of the time of Frederick Barbarossa sang, seated at her spindle:

“_Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia_
_De’ Trojani, di Fiesole, e di Roma._”

--DANTE.

However this may be, it was only about this time that the use of the vernacular spread little by little; that public treaties and commercial correspondence began to be written in this language, and the public already preferred to read in the Italian language stories and other works written originally in Latin or sometimes in Provençal. But these writings can scarcely be considered literary works; they cannot, therefore, be taken as the starting-point of a history of Italian prose.

Just as the first Italian poems had been written in Sicilian dialect, soon replaced by the Tuscan dialect, so the first somewhat important and truly literary work in Italian prose was written in Sicilian dialect, while nearly all the prose writers of the following period were Tuscans; and this fact is sufficiently explained by the general history of Italy in the thirteenth century.

While Florence and all the centre of the peninsula were in a state of civil war, or painfully working to attain an independent municipal life, Naples, the home of the Hohenstaufens and the capital of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was enjoying profound peace, royal luxury, great freedom of thought, and all the refinements of life, in the midst of institutions which may be considered perfect for their time. Queen Constanza had already granted special protection to the Provençal poets, and her son, Frederick II, only placed above the troubadours of the south of France the learned philosophers of Baghdad and Cordova, as if the great man only believed himself understood or appreciated by those whose glance was not troubled by religious, political, or local passions. The influence of this brilliant court, which united taste for science with frivolity, where serious discussions on law and philosophy alternated with the gay Provençal wisdom, and where displays of chivalry and love songs diverted the greatest statesmen of the Middle Ages after the fatigues or annoyances of politics, this preponderant influence made the Sicilian nation for a time the chief actor in the history of Italy, and their language the dominant organ of the rising literature; and it is not surprising that the first great work in Italian prose was written in the dialect made popular by the beautiful songs of the emperor Frederick II and his famous chancellor Pietro delle Vigne, King Enzio, and the brave Manfred, his half-brother.

Matteo Spinelli, the contemporary of these poets of noble birth, has left a chronicle under the very characteristic title “journal,” which enables us to judge at once what Italian prose was at that period. If we quote this work of Spinelli’s first, it is not because we are unaware of the numerous and often vague attempts which preceded him; but all previous writings may be considered as uncertain groping. The language of these works is not even completely Italian yet, and the true modern idiom has been considered to rise in all its individuality in the poems of Ciullo d’Alcamo and in the _Journals_ of Spinelli. Moreover, the work of the Sicilian chronicler (although, as its name seems to indicate, it was a diary scarcely intended for publication) offers by its very extent more ample matter for literary and philological study than certain inscriptions, deeds, laws, decrees, and other documents of similar nature.

We do not mean to say that the _Journals_ have nothing Latin about them, or that they are written in pure Italian or Sicilian. Latin words, even phrases, which recall the customs of a dead language, are frequently found in the midst of a speech in all other respects purely Italian; but these souvenirs are always isolated, and do not alter the general character of the tongue, which is essentially Sicilian. But what distinguishes the style of this delightful teller of stories is not only the sweetness characteristic of the dialect he employed, but also a certain carelessness, a certain freedom in the construction of his sentences. In the first prose writer of a language one certainly does not expect Ciceronian periods; it appears perfectly natural that all his sentences should be co-ordinate, instead of being subordinate to one another, and that he should simply join his propositions by copulative conjunctions, instead of arranging them in incidental phrases; but with Spinelli, we simply find conversational language, and nothing more; that is to say, his style is wanting in clearness. He writes as he would have spoken to an attentive audience, with all the assistance to be derived from gesture, intonation, and expressive glance. This conversational style, applied to written works of great length, is often unintelligible unless interpreted by a clever reader, who recites it as an actor recites his rôle in a comedy. In the end it becomes wearisome by the very fact that the necessary explanation, which recitation would give, is wanting. But, on the other hand, there is an animation which the finest art could not produce--each word, each expression creates a picture. One might be listening to a loquacious barber, on the lookout for the gossip of the day, serving up hot the talk of the town.

This is Spinelli’s specialty; he must not be looked on as a historian, not even a political chronicler, but as a teller of stories, often amusing, nearly always animated. The events of contemporary history are only mentioned incidentally in the midst of town and country gossip. But apart from the style and light shade of irony which form one of the charms of Boccaccio, Spinelli’s stories are not less wanting in interest than the stories of the _Decameron_. This is the great merit of the _Journals_; their historic value is almost worthless, and, on account of serious errors (chiefly those of chronology), they become dangerous guides for the reader who takes them seriously and refers to them for information on the period and country in which Spinelli lived. There is a great difference to be seen when one passes from this expansive and unpretentious gossip to professional men of letters, to the somewhat pedantic orators of Florence, from the neglected Sicilian dialect to the already majestic and developed language of Tuscany.

The study of rhetoric was first cultivated in Florence, and we see, by Dante’s education, the importance attached to this branch of knowledge. However, the earliest rhetoricians, such as Buoncompagni and Guidotto of Bologna, seldom employed the vernacular. The honour of fixing, so to say, the Tuscan dialect, of raising the Italian patois to the rank which Latin had occupied exclusively till then, belongs to Brunetto Latini, of whom Villani tells us that he was “the first to polish the Florentines,” and to whom Dante, his pupil, raised a monument more durable than any other claim to immortality which the poor orator possessed: “You taught me how man can make himself immortal, and it is right that while I live my tongue should declare the gratitude which I feel.”[g]

BOCCACCIO

But these after all are only tentative efforts. The first writer to make use of the new vehicle as a medium for really artistic prose of a creative type was a Florentine of a slightly later epoch, the contemporary of Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, the famous author of the _Decameron_. Boccaccio was born at Paris, in 1313, and was the natural son of a merchant of Florence, himself born at Certaldo, a castle in the Val d’Elsa, in the Florentine territory. His father had intended him for a commercial life, but before devoting him to it, indulged him with a literary education. From his earliest years, Boccaccio evinced a decided predilection for letters. He wrote verses, and manifested an extreme aversion to trade. He revolted equally at the prospect of a commercial life, and the study of the canon law, which his father was desirous of his undertaking. To oblige his father, however, he made several journeys of business; but he brought back with him, instead of a love for his employment, a more extended information, and an increased passion for study.

He at length obtained permission to devote himself wholly to literature, and fixed on Naples as his place of residence, where letters then flourished under the powerful protection of Robert, the reigning monarch. He was quickly initiated in all the sciences at that time taught. He acquired also the rudiments of the Greek tongue, which, though then spoken in Calabria, was an abstruse study with the early scholars. In 1341, he assisted at the celebrated examination of Petrarch, which preceded his coronation at Rome; and, from that time, a friendship arose between him and the poet, which terminated only with their lives. At this period, Boccaccio, distinguished no less for the elegance of his person than for the brilliancy of his wit, and devoted to pleasure, formed an attachment to a natural daughter of King Robert, named Maria, who for several years had been the wife of a Neapolitan gentleman. This lady he has celebrated in his writings, under the name of Fiammetta. In the attachment of Boccaccio, we must not look for that purity or delicacy which distinguished Petrarch in his love for Laura. This princess had been brought up in the most corrupt court of Italy; she herself partook of its spirit, and it is to her depraved taste that the exceptionable parts of the _Decameron_, a work undertaken by Boccaccio in compliance with her request, and for her amusement, are to be attributed. On his side, Boccaccio probably loved her as much from vanity as from real passion; for, although distinguished for her beauty, her grace, and her wit, as much as for her rank, she does not seem to have exercised any extraordinary influence on his life; and neither the conduct nor the writings of Boccaccio afford evidence of a sincere or profound attachment.

Boccaccio quitted Naples in 1342, to return to Florence. He came back again in 1344, and returned for the last time in 1350. From that year, he fixed himself in his native country, where his reputation had already assigned him a distinguished rank. His life was thenceforth occupied by his public employments in several embassies; by the duties which his increasing friendship to Petrarch imposed on him; and by the constant and indefatigable labours to which he devoted himself for the advancement of letters, the discovery of ancient manuscripts, the elucidation of subjects of antiquity, the introduction of the Greek language into Italy, and the composition of his numerous works. After taking the ecclesiastical habit, in 1361, he died at Certaldo, in the mansion of his ancestors, on the 21st of December, 1375.

The _Decameron_, the work to which Boccaccio is at the present day indebted for his highest celebrity, is a collection of one hundred novels or tales. He has ingeniously united them, under the supposition of a party formed in the dreadful pestilence of 1348, composed of a number of cavaliers, and young, intelligent, and accomplished women, retired to a delightful part of the country, to escape the contagion. It was there agreed that each person, during the space of ten days, should narrate, daily, a fresh story. The company consisted of ten persons, and thus the number of stories amounted to one hundred. The description of the enchanting country in the neighbourhood of Florence, where these gay recluses had established themselves; the record of their walks, their numerous fêtes, and their repasts, afforded Boccaccio an opportunity of displaying all the treasures of his powerful and easy pen.

These stories, which are varied with infinite art, as well in subject as in style, from the most pathetic and tender to the most sportive, and, unfortunately, the most licentious, exhibit a wonderful power of narration; and his description of the plague in Florence, which serves as an introduction to them, may be ranked with the most celebrated historical descriptions which have descended to us. The perfect truth of colouring; the exquisite choice of circumstances, calculated to produce the deepest impression, and which place before our eyes the most repulsive scenes, without exciting disgust; and the emotion of the writer, which insensibly pervades every part, give to this picture that true eloquence of history which, in Thucydides, animates the relation of the plague in Athens. Boccaccio had, doubtless, this model before his eyes; but the events, to which he was a witness, had vividly impressed his mind, and it was the faithful delineation of what he had seen, rather than the classical imitation, which served to develop his talent.

The praise of Boccaccio consists in the perfect purity of his language, in his elegance, his grace, and above all in that _naïveté_ which is the chief merit of narration, and the peculiar charm of the Italian tongue.

Unfortunately Boccaccio did not prescribe to himself the same purity in his images as in his phraseology. The character of his work is light and sportive. He has inserted in it a great number of tales of gallantry; he has exhausted his powers of ridicule on the duped husband, on the depraved and depraving monks, and on subjects, in morals and religious worship, which he himself regarded as sacred; and his reputation is thus little in harmony with the real tenor of his conduct. The _Decameron_ was published towards the middle of the fourteenth century (in 1352 or 1353), when Boccaccio was at least thirty-nine years of age; and from the first discovery of printing, was freely circulated in Italy, until the Council of Trent proscribed it in the middle of the sixteenth century. At the solicitation of the grand duke of Tuscany, and after two remarkable negotiations between this prince and popes Pius V and Sixtus V, the _Decameron_ was again published, in 1573 and 1582, purified and corrected.

Many of the tales of Boccaccio appear to be borrowed from popular recitation, or from real occurrences. We trace the originals of several, in the ancient French _fabliaux_; of some, in the Italian collection of the _Centi Novelli_; and of others, again, in an Indian romance, which passed through all the languages of the East, and of which a Latin translation appeared as early as the twelfth century, under the name of _Dolopathos_, or _The King and the Seven Wise Men_. Invention, in this class of writing, is not less rare than in every other; and the same tales, probably, which Boccaccio had collected in the gay courts of princes, or in the squares of the cities of Italy, have been repeated to us anew in all the various languages of Europe. They have been versified by the early poets of France and England, and have afforded reputation to three or four imitators of Boccaccio. But, if Boccaccio cannot boast of being the inventor of these tales, he may still claim the creation of this class of letters. Before his time, tales were only subjects of social mirth. He was the first to transport them into the world of letters; and, by the elegance of his diction, the just harmony of all the parts of his subject, and the charm of his narration, he superadded the more refined gratifications of language and of art, to the simpler delight afforded by the old narrators.

It is unnecessary to speak here of Boccaccio’s other Italian works, beyond naming his romances _Fiammetta_ and _Filocopo_, and his heroic poems _La Teseide_ and _Filostrato_. The Latin compositions of Boccaccio are voluminous, and materially contributed, at the time they were written, to the advancement of letters. The most celebrated of these works are two treatises; the one on the genealogy of the gods, and the other on mountains, forests, and rivers. In the first, he gave an exposition of the ancient mythology; and in the second, rectified many errors in geography. These two works have fallen into neglect, since the discovery of manuscripts then unknown, and in consequence of the facilities which the art of printing, by opening new sources, has afforded to the study of antiquity. In the age in which they were composed, they were, however, equally remarkable for their extensive information and for the clearness of their arrangement; but the style is by no means so pure and elegant as that of Petrarch. But, while the claim to celebrity, in these great men, is restricted to the Italian poetry of Petrarch and to the novels of Boccaccio, our gratitude to them is founded on stronger grounds. They felt more sensibly than any other men that enthusiasm for the beauties of antiquity, without which we in vain strive to appreciate its treasures; and they each devoted a long and laborious life to the discovery and the study of ancient manuscripts. The most valued works of the ancients were at that time buried among the archives of convents, scattered at great distances, incorrect and incomplete, without tables of contents or marginal notes. Nor did those resources then exist, which printing supplies, for the perusal of works with which we are not familiar; and the facilities which are afforded by previous study, or the collation of the originals with each other, were equally wanting. It must have required a powerful intellect to discover, in a manuscript of Cicero, for example, without title or commencement, the full meaning of the author, the period at which he wrote, and other circumstances, which are connected with his subject; to correct the numerous errors of the copyists; to supply the chasms, which, frequently occurring at the beginning and the end, left neither title nor divisions nor conclusions, nor anything that might serve as a clew for the perusal; in short, to determine how one manuscript, discovered at Heidelberg, should perfect another, discovered at Naples. It was, in fact, by long and painful journeys that the scholars of those days equipped themselves for this task. The copying a manuscript, with the necessary degree of accuracy, was a work of great labour and expense. A collection of three or four hundred volumes was, at that time, considered an extensive library; and a scholar was frequently compelled to seek, at a great distance, the completion of a work, commenced under his own roof.

Petrarch and Boccaccio, in their frequent travels, obtained copies of such classics as they found in their route. Among other objects, Petrarch proposed to himself to collect all the works of Cicero; in which he succeeded after a lapse of many years. Boccaccio, with a true love of letters, introduced the study of the Greek to the Italians, not only with the view of securing the interests of commerce or of science, but of enriching their minds, and extending their researches to the other half of the ancient world of letters, which had, till then, remained hidden from his contemporaries. He founded, in Florence, a chair for the teaching of the Greek language; and he himself invited thither, and installed as professor, Leontius Pilatus, one of the most learned Greeks of Constantinople. He received him into his own house, although he was a man of a morose and disagreeable temper; placed him at his table, as long as this professor could be induced to remain at Florence; inscribed himself among the first of his scholars, and procured at his own expense, from Greece, the manuscripts, which were thus distributed in Florence, and which served as subjects for the lectures of Leontius Pilatus. For the instruction of those days consisted in the public delivery of lectures with commentaries, and a book, of which there perhaps existed only a single copy, sufficed for some thousand scholars.

LESSER CONTEMPORARIES OF PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO

There is an infinite space between the three great men whose works we have just enumerated, and even the most esteemed of their contemporaries; and, though these latter have preserved, until the present day, a considerable reputation, yet we shall only pause to notice their existence, and the epoch to which they belong. Perhaps the most remarkable are the three Florentine historians of the name of Villani. Giovanni, the eldest, who died in the first plague, in 1348; Matteo, his brother, who died in the second plague, in 1361; and Filippo, the son of Matteo, who continued the work of his father to the year 1364, and who wrote a history of the literature of Florence, the first attempt of this kind in modern times. Two poets of this age shared with Petrarch the honours of a poetic coronation: Zanobi di Strada, whom the emperor Charles IV crowned at Pisa in 1355, with great pomp, but whose verses have not reached us; and Coluccio Salutati, secretary of the Florentine Republic, one of the purest Latinists, and most eloquent statesmen whom Italy in that age produced. The latter, indeed, did not live to enjoy the honour which had been accorded him by the emperor, at the request of the Florentines. Coluccio died in 1406, at the age of seventy-six, before the day appointed for his coronation, and the symbol of glory was deposited on his tomb; as, at a subsequent period, a far more illustrious crown was placed on the tomb of Tasso.

Of the prose writers of Tuscany, Franco Sacchetti, born at Florence about the year 1335, and who died before the end of the century, after filling some of the first offices in the republic, approaches the nearest to Boccaccio. He imitated Boccaccio in his novels, and Petrarch in his lyric poems; but the latter were never printed, while of his tales there have been several editions. Whatever praise be due to the purity and eloquence of his style, we find his pages more valuable as a history of the manners of the age, than attractive for their powers of amusement, even when the author thinks himself most successful. His 258 tales consist, almost entirely, of the incidents of his own time, and of his own neighbourhood; domestic anecdotes, which in general contain little humour; tricks, exhibiting little skill, and jests of little point; and we are often surprised to find a professed jester vanquished by the smart reply of a child or a clown, which scarcely deserves our attention. After reading these tales, we cannot help concluding that the art of conversation had not made, in the fourteenth century, an equal progress with the other arts; and that the great men, to whom we owe so many excellent works, were not so entertaining in the social intercourse of life as many persons greatly their inferiors in merit.

Two poets of this time, of some celebrity, chose Dante for their model, and composed after him in _terza rima_, long allegories, partly descriptive, partly scientific. Fazio de’ Uberti, in his _Dettamondo_, undertook the description of the universe, of which the different parts, personified in turns, relate their history. Federigo Frezzi, bishop of Foligno, who died in 1416, at the Council of Constance, has, in his _Quadriregio_, described the four empires of Love, Satan, Virtue, and Vice. In both of these poets we meet, occasionally, with lines not unworthy of Dante; but they formed a very false estimate of the works of genius, when they regarded the _Divina Commedia_ not as an individual poem, but as a species of poetry which anyone might attempt.

The passionate study of the ancients, of which Petrarch and Boccaccio had given an example, suspended, in an extraordinary manner, the progress of Italian literature, and retarded the perfection of that tongue. Italy, after having produced her three leading classics, sank, for a century, into inaction. In this period, indeed, erudition made wonderful progress; and knowledge became much more general, but sterile in its effects. The mind had preserved all its activity, and literary fame all its splendour; but the unintermitted study of the ancients had precluded all originality in the authors. Instead of perfecting a new language, and enriching it with works in unison with modern manners and ideas, they confined themselves to a servile copy of the ancients. A too scrupulous imitation thus destroyed the spirit of invention; and the most eminent scholars may be said to have produced, in their eloquent writings, little more than college themes. In proportion as a man was qualified by his rank, or by his talents, to acquire a name in literature, he blushed to cultivate his mother-tongue. He almost, indeed, forced himself to forget it, to avoid the danger of corrupting his Latin style; and the common people thus remained the only depositaries of a language which had exhibited so brilliant a dawn, and which had now again almost relapsed into barbarism.[e]

ART IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

Turning from literature to the not distantly related field of art, let us glance at some of the tentative efforts which prepared the way for the succession of Florentine masters that were presently to take the lead in this field and hold it for some centuries.

The Renaissance, that is, the resurrection, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, of ideas and forms of classic antiquity, was preceded by individual efforts which, though often failing to reach the mark, ought to be taken account of in the history of this great revolution. The plastic memories of the Græco-Roman world have played in the preoccupation of the Middle Ages a more considerable rôle than is usually thought. Mere force of events put our ancestors in the presence of ancient _chefs-d’œuvre_, and they had to look at them whether they would or not. Some saw in them only idolatrous monuments, and have found fault with them as such. Others attributed to them magic virtues; some have given themselves up to the admiration they felt in looking at the immensity of Roman ruins, the richness of early materials, the perfection of the handiwork. These latter, it might be affirmed, are the most numerous. Even during the most sombre period of the Middle Ages, all Europe felt the fascination that Rome, the oldest city _par excellence_, exercised for twenty centuries. That which attracted from far and near thousands of visitors to the banks of the Tiber was not only the promise of indulgencies, a desire to pray on the tomb of martyrs, to contemplate basilics resplendent with gold and precious stones, but also memories left by the cæsars.

After having heard with a kind of incredulity the marvels of this incomparable city, one is further amazed by the number of its temples, palaces, baths, and amphitheatres. Have not reliable authors told us that she lately possessed thirty-six triumphal arches, twenty-eight libraries, 856 public baths, twenty-two equestrian statues in gilded bronze, eighty-four of the same in ivory, obelisks, and innumerable colossi?

From the twelfth century popular imagination laid hold of these pictures, transforming and amplifying them. Wondrous tales became current and were incorporated in works received as authoritative--the _Descriptis plenaria Votius Urbis_, the _Graphia aurea urbis Romæ_, and lastly the _Mirabilia civitatis Romæ_. Again at the end of the fifteenth century the valiant Charles VIII, wanting to give his subjects some idea of the town into which he had lately entered lance in hand, caused one of these records of another age to be translated for them. A few extracts will show with what strong faith these stories worthy of _The Thousand and One Nights_ were received before the Renaissance:

“Inside the capital was the greater part of a golden palace adorned with precious stones and said to equal the third part of the world, in which there were as many statues of images as there are provinces in all the world. Each image had a tambourine round its neck, placed with mathematical art, so that if any region was in rebellion against the Romans, immediately the image of the province turned its back to the image of the city of Rome, which was the largest and dominated the others, and the tambourine at its neck sounded. Then immediately the Capitol guards told this to the senate, and people were forthwith sent to expugn that province.

“The horses and nude men denote that in the time of the emperor Tiberius there were two young philosophers, that is, Praxiteles and Phitas, who said they were so wise that anything the emperor said in his room, they not being there, could report word for word. And they did as they said, not demanding money for it, but to be always remembered, so the philosophers have two marble horses with their feet on the ground, which denote the princes of this century. And they who are naked on the horses denote that their arm, high and held out, and their bent backs speak of things to come, and as they are naked, so the science of this world was naked and open to their understanding.”

From admiration to imitation is only one step. Artists in their turn went to work and took without scruple from what was a common heritage. Doubtless many of these borrowings are unconscious or really only show up the immense inferiority of the copyist. But is the influence of the antique less striking? One must recall in this order of ideas the splendid creations of architects in the Roman period--the duomo, the campanile, and the baptistery of Pisa, the baptistery of Florence, and the basilica of San Miniato, the duomo of Lucca, and so many _chefs-d’œuvre_ raised according to principles that innovators of the following age, the champions of Gothic style, were so audaciously to trample underfoot.

Nicholas Crescentius (son of the celebrated tribune) in the eleventh century, impelled by a desire to renew the ancient splendour of Rome, had the elegant little house at Ponte Rotto built of antique fragments. Similarly the emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1121-1190) had these former glories in mind, when he had graven on his seal a view of Rome with the Colosseum. But it was to his illustrious grandson Frederick II (1184-1250) that the honour is due of first pleading the cause of the Renaissance, and he should rightly be placed at the head of the precursors. We possess numerous witnesses of his love for the monuments of ancient art.

Now we see him striking _Augustales_, those curious imitations of Roman imperial money, bearing on one side an effigy crowned with laurels, with the epigraph AVG. IMP. ROM. and draped in the fashion of the cæsars; on the reverse an eagle with outspread wings with the epigraph FREDERICVS. Again he buys for a considerable sum (230 oz. of gold) an onyx cup and other curiosities. From Grotta Ferrata he takes away two bronzes, statues of a man and of a cow serving for a fountain, and carries them to Lucera. The church of St. Michael of Ravenna furnishes the monolithic columns he requires for his buildings at Palermo. Near Augusta in Sicily, he caused excavations to be made in the hope of discovering ancient remains. Once, it is true, yielding to urgent necessity he had several Roman monuments at Brindisi destroyed that he might use the materials in constructing a citadel. He tried just as he was departing for Palestine to make the town safe from any attacks, but political reasons outweighed his antiquarian scruples.

The work dreamed of by Frederick II as amateur was realised by his contemporary Nicholas of Pisa (1207?-1278) who, in the thirteenth century, held imitation of the antique as a principle, and used it as a mirror by which nature might be the more clearly shown. His attempt seems prodigious to us to-day; it supposes a power of initiative which Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Van Eyck have hardly equalled. Imitation with him was not confined to accessories--ornaments, costumes, armour--nor to types, nor to proportions of figures, which are all stumpy, as in the Roman sarcophagi of the decadence. The spirit of his work recalls ancient models.

“Nicholas,” says M. Gebhardt,[n] “in the pulpits of Pisa and Siena, and in the shrine of San Dominico at Bologna, recalls the traditions of a great art with a naïve gravity and assured taste. He is hardly a neo-Greek or a superstitious antiquary, but is imbued with the most generous principles of antique sculpture--the harmonious ordering of the scenes, the skilful employ of space where many persons move in a narrow frame, the majestic tranquillity of pose, the finely ordered draperies, the noble heads. But his eye and hand still express the fashion of primitive sculpture; the movements express awkward timidity, the faces are sometimes heavy. He gives an impression of Roman work at the end of the empire. Nicholas of Pisa (Niccolo Pisano), if he discovered and studied the Greek, did not renounce nature, and, in his best pieces, he has returned to a study of life. It is in this that he shows himself an intelligent disciple of the ancients. Apart from Nicholas of Pisa, the Italian masters each put their own personality in the antique; none were servile copyists, and it is Nicholas, the first and consequently the least learned, whose chisel has left the most instructive reminiscences.”

One of the most noted pupils and collaborators of Nicholas, Brother Guglielmo of Pisa (born about 1238, died after 1313), was inspired with like principles, but not so strongly. In the pulpit of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas at Pistoia, he has succeeded better than his master, in reconciling pagan reminiscences with Christian ideas.

The historic sentiment is one of the distinctive traits of the school of Nicholas of Pisa. It has recourse not only to antique marbles as models of style, but to documents as well. Whilst, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, painters and sculptors gave the costume of the period to sacred characters, their predecessors of the thirteenth century tried to restore, aided by archæology, the costumes of Christ and his family, the apostles, martyrs, as absolutely as did the Renaissance champions two hundred years later. Fra Guglielmo has pushed these scruples very far; his apostles wear the toga, tunic, and sandals, and hold a rolled volume in the hand.

In the _Descent of the Holy Ghost_ he seeks, moreover, faithfully to reproduce the types of the primitive church, above all in the figures of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. As with the sculptors of sarcophagi in Rome, Milan, and the south of France, there is a complete absence of nimbi, showing to what extent Nicholas of Pisa and his like disdained mediæval tradition, at least as regards types, costumes, and attributes. In the scene just mentioned one remarks also the grouping of the apostles. They are placed in two ranks, one behind the other, just as in a curious mosaic in the chapel of St. Aguilino (church of St. Lawrence at Milan). An arrangement differing very little is found in another bas-relief on the pulpit--that is, Christ washing the disciples’ feet. The women’s dresses deserve special mention. In the _Annunciation_ and _Visitation_, Mary and Elizabeth have the head half covered with a fold of their mantle so as to expose the forehead and the greater part of the hair. They might be Roman matrons.

In his quality as a member of the order of St. Dominican, Fra Guglielmo had more than once to reprove the too pagan tendencies of his master. The position of another disciple of Nicholas, Arnolfo of Cambio (died in 1310), the architect of the dome of Florence, was not less delicate, but for other reasons. One is surprised to see this master, the promoter of a style departing so singularly from antique tradition, returning to the latter when he exchanges the builder’s compass for the sculptor’s chisel. Let us hasten to add that the departure is not so great as one might think. In his tomb of the cardinal of Braye at Orvieto, Arnolfo has known how to give the Virgin a serene majesty, a simplicity which does not lack grandeur, without pushing imitation as far as his master. He shows still more entire independence in the tabernacle of St. Paul beyond the walls, near Rome. If one did not know Arnolfo to have been Nicholas’ disciple, it would be difficult to imagine it in looking at this hybrid monument.[i]

Without attempting even to name the other lesser schools of sculpture and of architecture that were beginning to make their influence felt, let us turn to culminating artistic achievements of the epoch, as represented in the work of the great Florentines Cimabue and Giotto.

_The Tuscan School of Painters_

It is an undisputed fact that the revival of painting, like that of sculpture, commenced in Tuscany. It is equally certain that about the middle of the thirteenth century, or a little later, which is the point at which improvement first manifested itself, the prevailing style was the Byzantine, introduced by Greek artists from Constantinople. But it has not by any means been clearly discerned wherein the peculiarities of that style consisted; and it has been usually assumed that it was a rude and defective manner which, as the first step in advance, the Italian painters had to discard. Materials are extant which justify a different conclusion, and evince that the introduction of this foreign taste, gross and faulty as it was, truly formed the first stage in improvement.

From the ninth century till the middle of the thirteenth, painting among the Byzantine artists differed from contemporary Italian works in several important particulars. In both quarters art was timidly imitative; but in the Eastern Empire the models from which it borrowed were more various than in the West, and the execution was usually better; the fashion of the drapery and ornament had a peculiar character of semi-oriental barbarism; and, while in both countries the drawing of the figure was generally bad, the common tendency of the Greeks was to lengthen it disproportionally, and that of the Italians to represent it as short and squab. But the most palpable distinctions were two in the technical treatment. First, in the oldest Italian paintings the vehicle of the colours is transparent, and the tone is therefore light and clear; in the works from Constantinople the tone is dark and yellowish, being produced by the use of some colouring matter which, if modern chemists have rightly analysed it, was wax. The second difference was this--that the Greeks, besides ornamenting their draperies richly with gilding, surrounded their figures with a golden ground; a barbarous practice, of which the oldest Italian works exhibit no trace. In those early productions of the thirteenth century, where we can trace the first ameliorations of art, we discover most, or all, of these peculiarities derived from the Greek style; some of them prevailed very long; and the most objectionable, the flaunting ground, was not entirely discarded even in the time of Raffaelle.

The oldest name celebrated in Italian painting is that of Cimabue, who, born about 1240, died in 1300. On the strength of his merit the Florentines claim the glory of having resuscitated art--a pretension which the school of Siena seems to have some right, in the person of Duccio, to contest with them. The works of Cimabue were Byzantine, in their style, in their colouring, and in their blaze of gold; and tradition says that he was taught in his youth by Greek artists. He improved, it is true, upon that school; but, though everything regarding him is obscure, there is no sufficient reason for believing that his improvement consisted in any departure from its principles. To him are commonly assigned some ill-preserved fresco paintings in the church of St. Francis at Assisi, which at all events give an idea of the masters from whom he learned; but his boldness and loftiness of conception are more clearly evinced by two rudely grand figures of Madonnas on wood, both at Florence, the more celebrated of the two in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the other in the Ducal Gallery.

To this great artist succeeds the Florentine Giotto (1276-1336), whose history and works are somewhat better known. The Italian novelists have preserved anecdotes of his wealth, his ugliness, and his profane wit. The story which describes him as a shepherd boy, discovered by Cimabue drawing rude figures on a stone, is perhaps too picturesque to be true; and his undoubted pieces display a marked dissimilarity in spirit to those of his alleged teacher, while they deviate also from the Byzantine style in colouring, if in nothing else, having a clear rosy hue which indicates a return to the older Italian method, though it is also an improvement on it. In the theory of his art, however, Giotto departed essentially from all his predecessors. When we combine the criticisms of the older writers with the few pictures which still can be certainly or probably identified as his, we may describe his characteristics as consisting in an attempt, made under manifold difficulties, but attended with surprising success, to establish, instead of the rude, vague, devotional loftiness of Cimabue, a beauty derived from a closer observation of life, as well as enlivened by a better and less formal expression of ordinary human feeling. His only existing work, which is ascertained by a genuine inscription, is one in the church of the Santa Croce in Florence, containing five divisions, of which that in the centre represents the Saviour crowning the Virgin. The gallery of the Florentine Accademia delle Arti contains some small compositions of his, representing, in a fashion half religious and half comic, events from the history of St. Francis. Frescoes in the upper church of that saint at Assisi, assigned to Giotto by some critics, have been pronounced by others to be inferior, and unlike his genuine remains; but others on the vaulted roof of the subterranean part of the same building are undoubtedly his, and resemble the pieces of the academy both in execution and in spirit. Other pictures laying claim to his name occur in various galleries throughout Italy as well as elsewhere.[e]

Notwithstanding all the enthusiasm that has been bestowed upon the paintings of Giotto, it must frankly be admitted that these are to be regarded as remarkable only when viewed in relation to the art of the time in which they were produced. To extol them as masterpieces according to the standards that were developed by the later Florentines would be to throw criticism to the winds. But the architectural efforts of Giotto may be praised with less reserve. The Campanile of Florence has aroused the enthusiasm of most critics who have viewed it; Ruskin[k] declares that “of living Christian works, none is so perfect as the tower of Giotto.”

The same writer speaks with equal enthusiasm of Giotto’s work in another field: “Of representations of human art under heavenly guidance,” he says, “the series of bas-reliefs which stud the base of this tower of Giotto must be held certainly the chief in Europe. Read but these inlaid jewels of Giotto once with patient following, and your hour’s study will give you strength for all your life.” This may be held by colder criticism to be an over-enthusiastic estimate, but few who have come under the spell of the Campanile will wish to modify the eloquent words in which Ruskin characterises that structure as a whole.[a]

_Ruskin’s Estimate of Giotto’s Tower_