CHAPTER III. THE TRANSITION.

The Church, Chivalry, the Nation—The National Element in Italian Literature—Florence—Italy between 1373 and 1490—Renascent Nationality—Absorption in Scholarship—Vernacular Literature follows an obscure Course—Final Junction of the Humanistic and Popular Currents—Renascence of Italian—The Italian Temperament—Importance of the Quattrocento—Sacchetti's Novels—Ser Giovanni's Pecorone—Sacchetti's and Ser Giovanni's Poetry—Lyrics of the Villa and the Piazza—Nicolò Soldanieri—Alesso Donati—His Realistic Poems—Followers of Dante and Petrarch—Political Poetry of the Guelfs and Ghibellines—Fazio degli Uberti—Saviozzo da Siena—Elegies on Dante—Sacchetti's Guelf Poems—Advent of the Bourgeoisie—Discouragement of the Age—Fazio's Dittamondo—Rome and Alvernia—Frezzi's Quadriregio—Dantesque Imitation—Blending of Classical and Medieval Motives—Matteo Palmieri's Città di Vita—The Fate of Terza Rima—Catherine of Siena—Her Letters—S. Bernardino's Sermons—Salutati's Letters—Alessandra degli Strozzi—Florentine Annalists—Giov. Cavalcanti—Corio's History of Milan—Matarazzo's Chronicle of Perugia—Masuccio and his Novellino—His Style and Genius—Alberti—Born in Exile—His Feeling for Italian—Enthusiasm for the Roman Past—The Treatise on the Family—Its Plan—Digression on the Problem of its Authorship—Pandolfini or Alberti—The Deiciarchia—Tranquillità dell'Animo—Teogenio—Alberti's Religion—Dedication of the Treatise on Painting—Minor Works in Prose on Love—Ecatomfila, Amiria, Deifiria, etc.—Misogynism—Novel of Ippolito and Leonora—Alberti's Poetry—Review of Alberti's Character and his Relation to the Age—Francesco Colonna—The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili—Its Style—Its Importance as a Work of the Transition—A Romance of Art, Love, Humanism—The Allegory—Polia—Antiquity—Relation of this Book to Boccaccio and Valla—It Foreshadows the Renaissance.

The two preceding chapters will have made it clear that the Church, Chivalry, and the Nation contributed their several quotas to the growth of Italian literature.[130] The ecclesiastical or religious element, so triumphantly expressed in the Divine Comedy, was not peculiar to the Italians. They held it in common with the whole of Christendom; and though the fabric of the Roman Church took form in Italy, though the race gave S. Francis, S. Thomas, and S. Bonaventura to the militia of the medieval faith, still the Italians as a nation were not specifically religious. Piety, which is quite a different thing from ecclesiastical organization, was never the truest and sincerest accent of their genius. Had it been so, the history of Latin Christianity would have followed another course, and the schism of the sixteenth century might have been avoided.

The chivalrous element they shared, at a considerable disadvantage, with the rest of feudal Europe. Chivalry was not indigenous to Italian soil, nor did it ever flourish there. The literature which it produced in France, became Italian only when the Guidi and Dante gave it philosophical significance. Petrarch, who represents this motive, as Dante represents the ecclesiastical, generalized Provençal poetry. His Canzoniere cannot be styled a masterpiece of chivalrous art. Its spirit is modern and human in a wider and more comprehensive sense.

To characterize the national strain in this complex pedigree of culture is no easy task—chiefly because it manifested itself under two apparently antagonistic forms; first in the recovery of the classics by the scholars of the fifteenth century; secondly in the portraiture of Italian character and temperament by writers of romance and fiction. The divergence of these two main currents of literary energy upon the close of the middle ages, and their junction in the prime of the Renaissance, are the topics of my present volume.

We have seen how tenaciously the Italians clung to memories of ancient Rome, and how their history deprived them of that epical material which started modern literature among the northern races. While the vulgar language was being formed from the dialects into which rustic Latin had divided, a new nationality grew into shape by an analogous process out of the remnants of the old Italic population, fused with recent immigrants. Absorbing Greek blood in the south and Teutonic in the north, this composite race maintained the ascendancy of the Romanized people, in obedience to laws whereby the prevalent and indigenous strain outlives and assimilates ingredients from without. Owing to a variety of causes, among which must be reckoned geographical isolation and imperfect Lombard occupation, the purest Italic stock survived upon the Tuscan plains and highlands, between the Tyrrhene Sea and the Apennines, and where the Arno and the Tiber start together from the mountains of Arezzo. This region was the cradle of the new Italian language, the stronghold of the new Italian nation. Its center, political, commercial and intellectual, was Florence, which gave birth to the three great poets of the fourteenth century. Though Florence developed her institutions later than the Lombard communes, she maintained a civic independence longer than any State but Venice; and her popolo may be regarded as the type of the popular Italian element. Here the genius of Italy became conscious of itself, and here the people found a spokesman in Boccaccio. Abandoning ecclesiastical and feudal traditions, Boccaccio concentrated his force upon the delineation of his fellow-countrymen as he had learned to know them. The Italians of the new age start into distinctness in his work, with the specific qualities they were destined to maintain and to mature during the next two centuries. Thus Boccaccio fully represents one factor of what I have called the national element. At the same time, he occupies a hardly less important place in relation to the other or the humanistic factor. Like his master Petrarch, he pronounced with ardor and decision for that scholarship which restored the link between the present and the past of the Italian race. Independently of their achievements in modern literature, we have to regard the humanistic efforts of these two great writers as a sign that the national element had asserted itself in antagonism to the Church and chivalry.

The recovery of the classics was, in truth, the decisive fact in Italian evolution. Having attained full consciousness in the Florence of Dante's age, the people set forth in search of their spiritual patrimony. They found it in the libraries. They became possessed of it through the labors of the scholars. Italian literature during the first three quarters of the fifteenth century merged, so far as polite society was concerned, in Humanism, the history of which has already been presented to the reader in the second volume of this work.[131] For a hundred years, from the publication of the Decameron in 1373 to the publication of Poliziano's Stanze, the genius of Italy was engaged in an exploratory pilgrimage, the ultimate end of which was the restoration of the national inheritance in ancient Rome. This process of renascent classicism, which was tantamount to ranascent nationality, retarded the growth of the vulgar literature. Yet it was imperatively demanded not only by the needs of Europe at large, but more particularly and urgently by the Italians themselves, who, unlike the other modern races, had no starting-point but ancient Rome. The immediate result of the humanistic movement was the separation of the national element into two sections, learned and popular, Latin and Italian. The common people, who had repeated Dante's Canzoni, and whose life Boccaccio had portrayed in the Decameron, were now divided from the rising class of scholars and professors. Cultivated persons of all ranks despised Italian, and spent their time in studies beyond the reach of the laity. Like some mountain rivers after emerging from the highlands of their origin, the vernacular literature passed as it were for a season underground, and lost itself in unexplored ravines. Absorbed into the masses of the people, it continued an obscure but by no means insignificant course, whence it was destined to reappear at the right moment, when the several constituents of the nation had attained the sense of intellectual unity. This sense of unity was the product of the classical revival; for the activity of the wandering professors and the fanatical enthusiasm for the ancients were needed to create a common consciousness, a common standard of taste and intelligence in the peninsula. It must in this connection be remembered that the vernacular literature of the fourteenth century, though it afterwards became the glory of Italy as a whole, was originally Florentine. The medium prepared by the scholars was demanded in order that the Tuscan classics should be accepted by the nation as their own. Toward the close of the fifteenth century, a fusion between the humanistic and the vulgar literatures was made; and this is the renascence of Italian—no longer Tuscan, but participated by the race at large. The poetry of the people then received a form refined by classic learning; and the two sections of what I have called the national element, joined to produce the genuine Italian culture of the golden age.

It is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to insist upon this point, which forms the main motive of my present theme. After the death of Boccaccio the history of Italian literature is the history of that national element which distinguished itself from the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous, and at last in the Decameron asserted its superiority over both. But the stream of intellectual energy bifurcates. During the fifteenth century, the Latin instincts of the new Italic people found vigorous expansion in the humanistic movement, while the vernacular literature carried on a fitful and obscure, but potent, growth among the proletariate. At the end of that century, both currents, the learned and the popular, the classical and the modern, reunited on a broader plane. The nation, educated by scholarship and brought to a sense of its identity, resumed the vulgar tongue; and what had hitherto been Tuscan, now became Italian. In this renascence neither the religious nor the feudal principle regained firm hold upon the race. Their influence is still discernible, however, in the lyrics of the Petrarchisti and the epics of Orlando; for nothing which has once been absorbed into a people's thought is wholly lost. How they were transmuted by the action of the genuine Italic genius, triumphant now upon all quarters of the field, will appear in the sequel of these volumes; while it remains for another work to show in what way, under the influences of the Counter-Reformation, both the ecclesiastical and the chivalrous elements reasserted themselves for a brief moment in Tasso. Still even in Tasso we recognize the Italian courtier rather than the knight or the ascetic. For the rest, it is clear that the spirit of Boccaccio—that is, the spirit of the Florentine people—refined by humanistic discipline and glorified by the reawakening of Italy to a sense of intellectual unity, determined the character of literature during its most brilliant period.[132]

Many peculiarities of the Renaissance in Italy, and of the Renaissance in general, as communicated through Italians to Europe, can be explained by this emergence of the national Italic temperament. Political and positive; keenly sensitive to natural beauty, and gifted with a quick artistic faculty; neither persistently religious nor profoundly speculative; inclined to skepticism, but accepting the existing order with sarcastic acquiescence; ironical and humorous rather than satirical; sensuous in feeling, realistic in art, rhetorical in literature; abhorring mysticism and ill-fashioned for romantic exaltation; worldly, with a broad and genial toleration; refined in taste and social conduct, but violent in the indulgence of personal proclivities; born old in contrast with the youth of the Teutonic races; educated by long experience to expect a morrow differing in no essentials from to-day or yesterday; demanding, therefore, from the moment all that it can yield of satisfaction to the passions—the Italians, thus constituted, in their vigorous reaction against the middle ages, secularized the Papacy, absorbed the Paganism of the classics, substituted an æsthetic for an ethical ideal, democratized society, and opened new horizons for pioneering energy in all the fields of knowledge. The growth of their intelligence was precocious and fore-doomed to a sudden check; nor was it to be expected that their solutions of the deepest problems should satisfy races of a different fiber and a posterity educated on the scientific methods of investigation. Unexpected factors were added to the general calculation by the German Reformation and the political struggles which preceded the French Revolution. Yet the influence of this Italian temperament, in forming and preparing the necessary intellectual medium in modern Europe, can hardly be exaggerated.

When the Italian genius manifested itself in art, in letters and in scholarship, national unity was already an impossibility.[133] The race had been broken up into republics and tyrannies. Their political forces were centrifugal rather than centripetal. The first half of the fifteenth century was the period when their division into five great powers, held together by the frail bond of diplomacy, had been accomplished, and when Italy was further distracted by the ambition of unprincipled condottieri. Under these conditions of dismemberment, the Renaissance came to perfection, and the ideal unity of the Italians was achieved. The space of forty years' tranquillity and equilibrium, which preceded Charles VIII.'s invasion, marked an epoch of recombination and consolidation, when the two currents of national energy, learned and popular, met to form the culture of the golden age. After being Tuscan and neo-Latin, the literature which expressed the nation now became Italian. Such is the importance of the Quattrocento in Italian history—long denied, late recognized, but now at length acknowledged as necessary and decisive for both Italy and Europe.

In the present chapter I propose to follow the transition from the middle ages effected by writers who, though they used the mother tongue, take rank among cultivated authors. The two succeeding chapters will be devoted to the more obscure branches of vernacular literature which flourished among the people.

Franco Sacchetti, who uttered the funeral dirge of the fourteenth century, was also the last considerable writer of that age.[134] Born about the year 1335, of one of the old noble families of Florence, he lived until the end of the century, employed in various public duties and assiduous in his pursuit of letters.[135] He was a friend of Boccaccio, and felt the highest admiration not only for his novels but also for his learning, though he tells us in the preface to his own three hundred tales that he was himself a man of slender erudition—uomo discolo e grosso.[136] From this preface we also learn that enthusiasm for the Decameron prompted him to write a set of novels on his own account.[137] Though Sacchetti loved and worshiped Boccaccio, he did not imitate his style. The Novelle are composed in the purest vernacular, without literary artifice or rhetorical ornament. They boast no framework of fiction, like that which lends the setting of romance to the Decameron; nor do they pretend to be more than short anecdotes with here and there a word of moralizing from the author. Yet the student of Italian, eager to know what speech was current in the streets of Florence during the last half of that century, will value Sacchetti's idiomatic language even more highly than Boccaccio's artful periods. He tells us what the people thought and felt, in phrases borrowed from their common talk. The majority of the novels treat of Florentine life, while some of them bring illustrious Florentines—Dante and Giotto and Guido Cavalcanti—on the scene. Sacchetti's preface vouches for the truth of his stories; but, whether they be strictly accurate or not, we need not doubt their fidelity to contemporary customs, domestic manners, and daily conversation. Sacchetti inspires a certain confidence, a certain feeling of friendliness. And yet what a world is revealed in his Novelle—a world without tenderness, pathos, high principle, passion, or enthusiasm—men and women delighting in coarse humor, in practical jokes of inconceivable vulgarity, in language of undisguised grossness, in cruelty, fraud, violence, incontinence! The point is almost always some clever trick, a burla or a beffa, or a piece of subtly-planned retaliation. Knaves and fools are the chief actors in this comic theater; and among the former we find many friars, among the latter many husbands. To accept the Novelle as adequate in every detail to the facts of Florentine society, would be uncritical. They must chiefly be used for showing what passed for fun among the burghers, and what seemed fit and decent topics for discussion. Studied from that point of view, and also for the abundant light they throw on customs and fashions, Sacchetti's tales are highly valuable. The bourgeoisie of Florence lives again in their animated pages. We have in them a literature written to amuse, if not precisely to represent, a civic society closely packed within a narrow area, witty and pleasure-loving, acutely sensitive to the ridiculous, with strongly-denned tastes and a decided preference for pungent flavors. One distinctive Florentine quality emerges with great clearness. That is a malicious and jibing humor—the malice Dante took with him to the Inferno; the malice expressed by Il Lasca and Firenzuola, epitomized in Florentine nicknames, and condensed in Rabelaisian anecdotes which have become classical. It reaches its climax in the cruel but laughter-moving jest played by Brunelleschi on the unfortunate cabinet-maker, which has been transmitted to us in the novel of Il Grasso, Legnaiuolo.

Somewhat later than Sacchetti's Novelle, appeared another collection of more or less veracious anecdotes, compiled by a certain Ser Giovanni.[138] He called it Il Pecorone, which may be interpreted "The Simpleton:"

Ed è per nome il Pecoron chiamato, Perchè ci ha dentro novi barbagianni; Ed io son capo di cotal brigata, E vo belando come pecorone, Facendo libri, e non ne so boccata.

Nothing is known about Ser Giovanni, except what he tells us in the Sonnet just quoted. From it we learn that he began his Novelle in the year 1378—the year of the Ciompi Revolution at Florence. As a framework for his stories, he devised a frigid romance which may be briefly told. Sister Saturnina, the prioress of a convent at Forlì, was so wise and beautiful that her fame reached Florence, where a handsome and learned youth, named Auretto, fell in love with her by hearsay. He took orders, journeyed across the Apennines, and contrived to be appointed chaplain to Saturnina's nuns. In due course of time she discreetly returned his affection, and, managing their affairs with prudence and decorum, they met for private converse and mutual solace in a parlor of the convent. Here they whiled away the hours by telling stories—entertaining, instructive, or romantic. The collection is divided into twenty-five days; and since each lover tells a tale, there are fifty Novelle, interspersed with songs after the fashion of Boccaccio. In the style, no less than in the method of the book, Ser Giovanni shows himself a closer follower of the Decameron than Sacchetti. His novels have a wide range of incidents, embracing tragic and pathetic motives no less than what is humorous. They are treated rhetorically, and, instead of being simple anecdotes, aim at the varied movement of a drama. The language, too, is literary, and less idiomatic than Sacchetti's. Antiquarians will find in some of these discourses an interest separate from what is common to works of fiction. They represent how history was communicated to the people of that day. Saturnina, for example, relates the myth of Troy and the foundation of Fiesole, which, as Dante tells us, the Tuscan mothers of Cacciaguida's age sang to their children. The lives of the Countess Matilda and Frederick Barbarossa, the antiquity and wealth of the Tuscan cities, the tragedy of Corso Donati, Giano della Bella's exile, the Angevine Conquest of Sicily, the origin of Guelfs and Ghibellines in Italy, Attila's apocryphal siege of Florence, supply materials for narratives in which the true type of the Novella disappears. Yet Ser Giovanni mingles more amusing stories with these lectures;[139] and the historical dissertations are managed with such grace, with so golden a simplicity of style, that they are readable. Of a truth it is comic to think of the enamored monk and nun meeting in the solitude of their parlor to exchange opinions upon Italian history. Though he had the good qualities of a trecentisto prosaist, Ser Giovanni was in this respect but a poor artist.

Both Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni were poets of no mean ability. As in his prose, so also in his Canzoni a Ballo, the author of the Pecorone followed Boccaccio, without, however, attaining to that glow and sensuous abandonment which renders the lyrics no less enchanting than the narratives of the Decameron. His style is smooth and fluent, suggesting literary culture rather than spontaneous inspiration.[140] Yet it is always lucid. Through the transparent language we see straight into the hearts of lovers as the novelist of Florence understood them. Written for the most part in the seven-lined stanza with recurring couplet, which Guido Cavalcanti first made fashionable, these Ballate give lyrical expression to a great variety of tender situations. The emotion of first love, the pains and pleasures of a growing passion, the anguish of betrayal, regrets, quarrels, reconciliations, are successively treated. In short, Ser Giovanni versified and set to music all the principal motives upon which the Novella of feeling turned, and formed an ars amandi adapted to the use of the people. In this sense his poems seem to have been accepted, for we find MSS. of the Ballate detached from the prose of Il Pecorone.[141] Among the most striking may be mentioned the canzonet Tradita sono, which retrospectively describes the joy of a girl in her first love; another on the fashions of Florentine ladies, Quante leggiadre; and the lamentation of a woman whose lover has abandoned her, and who sees no prospect but the cloister—Oi me lassa.[142]

Ser Giovanni's lyrics are echoes of the city, where maidens danced their rounds upon the piazza in May evenings, and young men courted the beauty of the hour with songs and visits to her chamber:

Con quanti dolci suon e con che canti Io era visitata tutto 'l giorno! E nella zambra venivan gli amanti, Facendo festa e standomi intorno: Ed io guardava nel bel viso adorno, Che d'allegrezza mi cresceva il core.

Franco Sacchetti carries us to somewhat different scenes. The best of his madrigals and canzonets describe the pleasures of country life. They are not genuinely rustic; nor do they, in Theocritean fashion, attempt to render the beauty of the country from the peasant's point of view. On the contrary, they owe their fascination to the contrast between the simplicity of the villa and the unrest of the town, where:

Mai vi si dice e di ben far vi è caro.

They are written for and by the bourgeois who has escaped from shops and squares and gossiping street-corners. The keynote of this poetry, which has always something of the French école buissonnière in its fresh unalloyed enjoyment, is struck in a song describing the return of Spring[143]:

Benedetta sia la state Che ci fa sì solazzare! Maladetto sia lo verno Che a città ci fa tornare!

The poet summons his company of careless folk, on pleasure bent:

No' siam una compagnia, I' dico di cacciapensieri.

He takes them forth into the fields among the farms and olive-gardens, bidding them leave prudence and grave thoughts within the lofty walls of Florence town:

Il senno e la contenenza Lasciam dentro all'alte mura Della città di Fiorenza.

This note of gayety and pure enjoyment is sustained throughout his lyrics. In one Ballata he describes a country girl, caught by thorns, and unable to avoid her admirer's glance.[144] Another gives a pretty picture of a maiden with a wreath of olive-leaves and silver.[145] A third is a little idyll of two girls talking to their lambs, and followed by an envious old woman.[146] A fourth is a biting satire on old women—Di diavol vecchia femmina ha natura.[147] A fifth is that incomparably graceful canzonet, O vaghe montanine pasturelle, the popularity of which is proved by the fact that it was orally transmitted for many generations, and attributed in after days to both Lorenzo de' Medici and Angelo Poliziano.[148] Indeed, it may be said in passing that Poliziano owed much to Sacchetti. This can be seen by comparing Sacchetti's Ballata on the Gentle Heart, and his pastoral of the Thorn-tree with the later poet's lyrics.[149]

The unexpressed contrast between the cautious town-life of the burgher poet and his license in the villa, to which I have already called attention, determines the character of many minor lyrics by Sachetti.[150] We comprehend the spirit of these curious poems, at once popular and fashionable, when we compare them with medieval French Pastourelles, or with similar compositions by wandering Latin students. In the Carmina Burana may be found several little poems, describing the fugitive loves of truant scholars with rustic girls, which prove that, long before Sacchetti's age, the town had sought spring-solace in the country.[151] Men are too apt to fancy that what they consider the refinements of passion and fashion (the finer edge, for example, put upon desire by altering its object from the known and trivial to the untried and exceptional, from venal beauties in the city to shepherd maidens on the village-green) are inventions of their own times. Yet it was precisely a refinement of this sort which gave peculiar flavor to Sacchetti's songs in the fourteenth century, and which made them sought after. They had great vogue in Italy, enjoying the privilege of popularity among the working classes, and helping to diffuse that sort of pastoral part-song which we still know as Madrigal.[152] Sacchetti was himself a good musician; many of his songs were set to music by himself, and others by his friends. This gives a pleasant old-world homeliness to the Latin titles inscribed beneath the rubrics—Franciscus de Organis sonum dedit; Intonatum per Francum Sacchetti; Francus sonum dedit; and so forth.

The Ballads and Madrigals of Niccolò Soldanieri should be mentioned in connection with Sacchetti; though they do not detach themselves in any marked way from the style of love poetry practiced at the close of the fourteenth century.[153] The case is different with Alesso Donati's lyrics. In them we are struck by a new gust of coarse and powerful realism, which has no parallel among the elder poets except in the savage sonnets of Cecco Angiolieri. Vividly natural situations are here detached from daily life and delineated with intensity of passion, vehement sincerity. Sacchetti's gentleness and genial humor have disappeared. In their place we find a dramatic energy and a truth of language that are almost terrible. Each of the little scenes, which I propose to quote in illustration of these remarks, might be compared to etchings bitten with aquafortis into copper. Here, for example, is a nun, who has resolved to throw aside her veil and follow her lover in a page's dress[154]:

La dura corda e 'l vel bruno e la tonica Gittar voglio e lo scapolo Che mi tien qui rinchiusa e fammi monica; Poi teco a guisa d'assetato giovane, Non già che si sobarcoli, Venir me 'n voglio ove fortuna piovane: E son contenta star per serva e cuoca, Chè men mi cocerò ch'ora mi cuoca.

Here is a dialogue at dawn between a woman and her paramour. The presence of the husband sleeping in the chamber is suggested with a brutal vigor[155]:

Dè vattene oggimai, ma pianamente, Amor; per dio, sì piano Che non ti senta il mal vecchio villano. Ch'egli sta sentecchioso, e, se pur sente Ch'i' die nel letto volta, Temendo abbraccia me no gli sie tolta. Che tristo faccia Iddio chi gli m'à data E chi spera 'n villan buona derrata.

Scarcely less forcible is the girl's vow against her mother, who keeps her shut at home[156]:

In pena vivo qui sola soletta Giovin rinchiusa dalla madre mia, La qual mi guarda con gran gelosia. Ma io le giuro alla croce di Dio Che s'ella mi terrà qui più serrata, Ch'i' diro—Fa' con Dio, vecchia arrabiata; E gitterò la rocca, il fuso e l'ago, Amor, fuggendo a te di cui m'appago.

To translate these madrigals would be both difficult and undesirable. It is enough to have printed the original texts. They prove that aristocratic versifiers at this period were adopting the style of the people, and adding the pungency of brief poetic treatment to episodes suggested by novelle.[157]

While dealing with the Novelle and the semi-popular literature of this transition period, I have hitherto neglected those numerous minor poets who continued the traditions of the earlier trecento.[158] There are two main reasons for this preference. In the first place, the novelle was destined to play a most important part in the history of the Renaissance, imposing its own laws of composition upon species so remote as the religious drama and romantic epic. In the second place, the dance-songs, canzonets and madrigals of Sacchetti's epoch lived upon the lips of the common folk, who during the fifteenth century carried Italian literature onward through a subterranean channel.[159] When vernacular poetry reappeared into the light of erudition and the Courts, the influences of that popular style, which drew its origin from Boccaccio and Sacchetti rather than from Dante or the Trovatori, determined the manner of Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano. Meanwhile the learned poems of the latest trecentisti were forgotten with the lumber of the middle ages. For the special purpose, therefore, of this volume, which only regards the earlier stages of Italian literature in so far as they preceded and conditioned the Renaissance, it was necessary to give the post of honor to Boccaccio's followers. Some mention should, however, here be made of those contemporaries and imitators of Petrarch, in whom the traditions of the fourteenth century expired. It is not needful to pass in review the many versifiers who treated the old themes of chivalrous love with meritorious conventional facility. The true life of the Italians was not here; and the phase of literature which the Sicilian School inaugurated, survived already as an anachronism. The case is different with such poetry as dealt immediately with contemporary politics. In the declamatory compositions of this age, we hear the echoes of the Guelf and Ghibelline wars. The force of that great struggle was already spent; but the partisans of either faction, passion enough survived to furnish genuine inspiration. Fazio degli Uberti's sermintese on the cities of Italy, for example, was written in the bitter spirit of an exiled Ghibelline.[160] His ode to Charles IV. is a torrent of vehement medieval abuse, poured forth against an Emperor who had shown himself unworthy of his place in Italy[161]:

Sappi ch'i' son Italia che ti parlo, Di Lusimburgo ignominioso Carlo!

After detailing the woes which have befallen her in consequence of her abandonment by the imperial master, Italy addresses herself to God:

Tu dunque, Giove, perchè 'l santo uccello ... Da questo Carlo quarto Imperador non togli e dalle mani Degli altri lurchi moderni germani, Che d'aquila un allocco n'hanno fatto?

The Italian Ghibellines had, indeed, good reason to complain that German gluttons, Cæsars in naught but name, who only thought of making money by their sale of fiefs and honors, had changed the eagle of the Empire into an obscene night-flying bird of prey. The same spirit is breathed in Fazio's ode on Rome.[162] He portrays the former mistress of the world as a lady clad in weeds of mourning, "ancient, august and honorable, but poor and needy as her habit showed, prudent in speech and of great puissance." She bids the poet rouse his fellow-countrymen from their sleep of sloth and drunkenness, to reassert the majesty of the empire owed to Italy and Rome:

O figliuol mio, da quanta crudel guerra Tutti insieme verremo a dolce pace, Se Italia soggiace A un solo Re che al mio voler consente!

This is the last echo of the De Monarchiâ. The great imperial idea, so destructive to Italian confederation, so dazzling to patriots of Dante's fiber, expires amid the wailings of minstrels who cry for the impossible, and haunt the Courts of petty Lombard princes.

In another set of Canzoni we listen to Guelf and Ghibelline recriminations, rising from the burghs of Tuscany. The hero of these poems is Gian Galeazzo Visconti, rightly recognized by the Guelfs of Florence as a venomous and selfish tyrant, foolishly belauded by the Ghibellines of Siena as the vindicator of imperial principles. The Emperors have abandoned Italy; the Popes are at Avignon. The factions which their quarrels generated, agitate their people still, but on a narrower basis. Sacchetti slings invectives against the maladetta serpe, aspro tiranno con amaro fele, who shall be throttled by the Church and Florence, leagued to crush the Lombard despots.[163] Saviozzo da Siena addresses the same Visconti as novella monarchia, giusto signore, clemente padre, insigne, virtuoso. By his means the dolce vedovella, Rome or Italy, shall at last find peace.[164] This Duke of Milan, it will be remembered, had already ordered the crown of Italy from his Court-jeweler, and was advancing on his road of conquest, barred only by Florence, when the Plague cut short his career in 1402. The poet of Siena exhorts him to take courage for his task, in lines that are not deficient in a certain fire of inspiration:

Tu vedi in ciel la fiammeggiante aurora, Le stelle tue propizie e rutilanti, E' segni tutti quanti Ora disposti alla tua degna spada.

In another strophe he refers to the Italian crown:

Ecco qui Italia che ti chiama padre, Che per te spera omai di trionfare, E di sè incoronare Le tue benigne e preziose chiome.

An anonymous sonnetteer of the same period uses similar language[165];

Roma vi chiama—Cesar mio novello, I' son ignuda, e l'anima pur vive; Or mi coprite col vostro mantello.

The Ghibelline poets, whether they dreamed like Fazio of Roman Empire, or flattered the Visconti with a crown to be won by triumph over the detested Guelfs, made play with Dante's memory. Some of the most interesting lyrics of the school are elegies upon his death. To this class belong two sonnets by Pieraccio Tedaldi and Mucchio da Lucca.[166] Nor must Boccaccio's noble pair of sonnets, although he was not a political poet, be here forgotten.[167] That Dante was diligently studied can be seen, not only in the diction of this epoch, but also in numerous versified commentaries upon the Divine Comedy—in the terza rima abstracts of Boson da Gubbio, Jacopo Alighieri, Saviozzo da Siena, and Boccaccio.[168]

Tuscan politics are treated from the Guelf point of view in Sacchetti's odes upon the war with Pisa, upon the government of Florence after 1378, and against the cowardice of the Italians.[169] His conception of a burgher's duties, the ideal of Guelf bourgeoisie before Florence had become accustomed to tyrants, finds expression in a sonnet—Amar la patria.[170] We frequently meet with the word Comune on his lips:

O vuol rè o signore o vuol comune, Chè per comune dico ciò ch'io parlo.

A like note of municipal independence is sounded in the poems of Antonio Pucci, and in the admonitory stanzas of Matteo Frescobaldi.[171] Considerable interest attaches to these political compositions for the light they throw on party feeling at the close of the heroic age of Italian history. The fury with which those factions raged, prompts the bards of either camp to curses. I may refer to this passage from Folgore da San Gemignano, when he sees the Ghibelline Uguccione triumphant over Tuscany:[172]

Eo non ti lodo Dio e non ti adoro, E non ti prego e non ti ringrazio, E non ti servo ch'io ne son più sazio Che l'aneme de star en purgatoro; Perchè tu ai messi i Guelfi a tal martoro Ch'i Ghibellini ne fan beffe e strazio, E se Uguccion ti comandasse il dazio, Tu 'l pagaresti senza peremptoro!

Yet neither in the confused idealism of the Ghibellines nor in the honest independence of the Guelfs lay the true principle of national progress. Sinking gradually and inevitably beneath the sway of despots, the Italians in the fifteenth century were destined to become a nation of scholars, artists, litterati. The age of Dante, the uncompromising aristocrat, was over. The age of Boccaccio, the easy-going bourgeois, had begun. The future glories of Italy were to be won in the field of culture; and all the hortatory lyrics I have mentioned, exerted but little influence over the development of a spirit which was growing quietly within the precincts of the people. The Italian people at this epoch cared far less for the worn-out factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines than for home-comforts and tranquillity in burgher occupations. The keener intellects of the fifteenth century were already so absorbingly occupied with art and classical studies that there was no room left in them for politics of the old revolutionary type. Meanwhile the new intrigues of Cabinets and Courts were left to a class of humanistic diplomatists, created by the conditions of despotic government. Scarcely less ineffectual were the moral verses of Bambagiuoli and Cavalca, or the Petrarchistic imitations of Marchionne Torrigiani, Federigo d'Arezzo, Coluccio Salutati, Roberto di Battifolle, and Bonaccorso da Montemagno.[173] The former belonged to a phase of medieval culture which was waning. The elegant but lifeless Petrarchistic school dragged through the fifteenth century, culminating in the Canzoniere of Giusto de' Conti, a Roman, which was called La bella mano. The revival of their mannerism, with a fixed artistic motive, by Bembo and the purists of the sixteenth century, will form part of my later history of Renaissance literature.

One note is unmistakable in all the poetry of these last trecentisti. It is a note of profound discouragement, mistrust, and disappointment. We have already heard it sounded by Sacchetti in his lament for Boccaccio. Boccaccio had raised it himself in two noble sonnets—Apizio legge and Fuggit'è ogni virtù.[174] It takes the shrillness of a threnody in Tedaldi's Il mondo vile and in Manfredi di Boccaccio's Amico il mondo.[175] The poets of that age were dimly conscious that a new era had opened for their country—an era of money-getting, despotism, and domestic ease. They saw the people used to servitude and sunk in common pleasures—dead to the high aims and imaginative aspirations of the past. The turbulence of the heroic age was gone. The men of the present were all Vigliacci. And as yet both art and learning were but in their cradle. It was impossible upon the opening of the fifteenth century, in that crepuscular interval between two periods of splendor, to know what glories for Italy and for the world at large would be produced by Giotto's mighty lineage and Petrarch's progeny of scholars. We who possess in history the vision of that future can be content to wait through a transition century. The men of the moment not unnaturally expressed the querulousness of Italy, distracted by her struggles of the past and sinking into somnolence. Cosimo de' Medici, the molder of Renaissance Florence, was already born in 1389; and men of Cosimo's stamp were no heroes for poets who had felt the passions that moved Dante.

The Divine Comedy found fewer imitators than the Canzoniere; for who could bend the bow of Ulysses? Yet some poets of the transition were hardy enough to attempt the Dantesque meter, and to pretend in a prosaic age that they had shared the vision of the prophets. Among these should be mentioned Fazio degli Uberti, a scion of Farinata's noble house, who lived and traveled much in exile.[176] Taking Solinus, the antique geographer, for his guide, Fazio produced a topographical poem called the Dicta Mundi or Dittamondo.[177]

From the prosaic matter of this poem, which resembles a very primitive Mappamondo, illustrated with interludes of history and excursions into mythological zoölogy, based upon the text of Pliny, and not unworthy of Mandeville, two episodes emerge and arrest attention. One is the description of Rome—a somber lady in torn raiment, who tells the history of her eventful past, describes her triumphs and her empire, and points to the ruins on her seven crowned hills to show how beautiful she was in youth[178]:

Ivi una dama scorsi; Vecchia era in vista, e trista per costume. Gli occhi da lei, andando, mai ton torsi; Ma poichè presso le fui giunto tanto Ch'io l'avvisava senza nessun forsi, Vidi il suo volto, ch'era pien di pianto, Vidi la vesta sua rotta e disfatta, E roso e guasto il suo vedovo manto. E con tutto che fosse così fatta, Pur nell'abito suo onesto e degno Mostrava uscita di gentile schiatta. Tanto era grande, e di nobil contegno, Ch'io diceva fra me: Ben fu costei, E pare ancor da posseder bel regno.

Fazio addresses the mighty shadow with respectful sympathy. Rome answers in language which is noble through its simple dignity:

Non ti maravigliare s'io ho doglia, Non ti maravigliar se trista piango, Nè se me vedi in sì misera spoglia; Ma fatti maraviglia, ch'io rimango, E non divento qual divenne Ecuba Quando gittava altrui le pietre e il fango.

The second passage of importance, more noticeable for a sense of space and largeness than for its poetical expression, is a description of the prospect seen from Alvernia, that high station of the "topless Apennines," where S. Francis took the Stigmata, and where Dante sought a home in the destruction of his earthly hopes[179]:

Noi fummo sopra il sasso dell Alverna Al faggio ove Francesco fue fedito Dal Serafin quel dì ch'ei più s'interna. Molto è quel monte devoto e romito, Ed è sì alto che il più di Toscana Mi disegnò un frate col suo dito. Guarda, mi disse, al mare, e vedi piana Con altri colli la maremma tutta Dilettevole molto e poco sana. Ivi è Massa, Grosseto e la distrutta Cività vecchia, ed ivi Populonia Ch'appena pare, tanto è mal condutta.

The whole of Tuscany and Umbria, their cities, plains, rivers and mountain summits, are unrolled; and the friar concludes with a sentence which well embodies the feeling we have in gazing over an illimitable landscape:

Io so bene che quanto t'ho mostrato, La vista nol discerna apertamente, Per lo spazio ch'è lungo dov'io guato: Ma quando l'uom che bene ascolta e sente, Ode parlar di cosa che non vede, Immagina con l'occhio della mente.

Such value as the Dittamondo may still retain for students, it owes partly to the author's enthusiasm for ancient Rome, and partly to the sympathy with nature he had acquired during his wandering as an exile over the sacred soil of Italy.

Another poem of Dantesque derivation was the Quadriregio of Federigo Frezzi, Bishop of Foligno.[180] It is an allegorical account of human life; and the four regions, which give their name to the book, are the realms of Love, Satan, Vice and Virtue.[181] To cast the moralizations of the middle ages in a form imitated from Dante, after Dante had already condensed the ethics and politics, the theology and science of his century in the Divine Comedy, was little less than a hopeless task. Nor need a word be spent upon the Quadriregio, except by way of illustrating the peculiar conditions of the poetic art, here upon the border-land between the middle age and the Renaissance. Federigo Frezzi was intent on depicting the victories of virtue over vice, and on explaining the advantage offered to the Christian by grace. Yet he chose a mythological framework for his doctrine. Cupid, Venus and Minerva are confused with Satan, Enoch and Elijah. Instead of Eden there is the golden age. Nymphs of Diana, Juno, and the like, are used as emblems. Pallas discourses about Christ, and expounds the Christian system of redemption. The earthly Paradise contains Helicon, with all the antique poets. Jupiter is contrasted with Satan. It is the same blending of antique with Christian motives which we note in the Divine Comedy; but the tact of the great artist is absent, and the fusion becomes grotesque. After reading through the poem we lay it down with the same feeling as that produced in us by studying some pulpit of the Pisan School, where a Gothic Devil, all horns and hoofs and grinning jaws, squats cheek by jowl with a Madonna copied from a Roman tomb. The following description of Cupid recalls the manner of the Sienese frescanti [182]:

Appena questo priego havea io decto quando egli apparve ad me fresco et giocondo, in un giardino ove io stava solecto. Di mirto coronato il capo biondo in forma pueril con si bel viso che mai piu bel fu visto in questo mondo. Creso haverai che su del paradiso fusse el suo aspecto, tanto era sovrano, se non che quando a lui mirai fiso Vidi che haveva uno archo orato in mano col quale Achille et Hercole percosse.

Here is the picture of the Golden Age, transcribed from Latin poetry, much as it was destined to control the future of Italian fancy[183]:

Vergine saggia e bella el ciel adorna di cui Virgilio poetando scripse, nuova progenie al mondo dal ciel torna, Rexe già el mondo et si la gente visse socto lei in pace che la età dell oro et seculo giusto et beato si disse. La terra allora senza alcun lavoro dava li fructi, et non faceva spine, ne ancho al giogo si domava el thoro; Non erano divisi per confine anchora i campi, et nesun per guadagno cercava le contrade pelegrine; Ognuno era fratello, ognun compagno, et era tanto amor, tanta pietade, che ad un fonte bevea el lupo et l'agno; Non eran lancia, non erano spade, non era anchor la pecunia peggiore che 'l guerigiante ferro piu si fiade; La invidia allor vedendo tanto amore di questo bene ad se genero pene e desto gaudio ad se diede dolore.

A little while beyond this foretaste of the cinque cento, we find Charon copied, without addition, but with a fatal loss of poetry, from the Inferno [184]:

Vidi Caron non molto da lontano con una nave in mezo la tempesta, che conducea con un gran remo in mano: Et ciaschuno occhio chelli havea in testa, pareva come di nocte una lumiera, o un falo quando si fa per festa. Quando egli fu appresso alla riviera un mezo miglio quasi o poco mancho, scacci sua faccia grande vizza e nera. Egli havea el capo di canuti biancho, el manto adosso rapezato et uncto, el volto si crudel non vidi un quancho.

Last upon the list of Dantesque imitators stands Matteo Palmieri, a learned Florentine, who composed his Città di Vita in the middle of the fifteenth century. This poem won for its author from Marsilio Ficino the title of Poeta Theologicus.[185] Its chief interest at the present time is that the theology expressed in it brought suspicion of heresy on Palmieri. He held Origen's opinion that the souls of men were rebel angels. How a doctrine of this kind could be rendered in painting is not clear. Yet Giorgio Vasari tells us that a picture executed for Matteo Palmieri by Sandro Botticelli, which represented the Assumption of the Virgin into the celestial hierarchy—Powers, Princedoms, Thrones and Dominations ranged around her in concentric circles—fell under the charge of heterodoxy. The altar in S. Pietro Maggiore where it was placed had to be interdicted, and the picture veiled from sight.[186] The story forms a curious link between this last scion of medieval literature and the painting of the Renaissance. After Palmieri the meter of the Divine Comedy was chiefly used for satire and burlesque. Lorenzo de' Medici adapted its grave rhythms to parody in I Beoni. Berni used it for the Capitoli of the Pesche and the Peste. At Florence it became the recognized meter for obscene and frivolous compositions, which delighted the Academicians of the sixteenth century. The people, meanwhile, continued to employ it in Lamenti, historical compositions, and personal Capitoli.[187] Thus Cellini wrote his poem called I Carceri in terza rima, and Giovanni Santi used it for his precious but unpoetical Chronicle of Italian affairs. Both Benivieni and Michelangelo Buonarroti composed elegies in this meter; and numerous didactic eclogues of the pastoral poets might be cited in which it served for analogue to Latin elegiacs. In the Sacre Rappresentazioni it sometimes interrupted ottava rima, on the occasion of a set discourse or sermon.[188] Both Ariosto and Alamanni employed it in their satires. From these brief notices it will be seen that terza rima during the Renaissance period was reserved for dissertational, didactic and satiric themes, the Capitoli of the burlesque poets being parodies of grave scholastic lucubrations. But no one now attempted an heroic poem in this verse.[189]

To give a full account of Italian prose during this period of transition from the middle age to the Renaissance is not easy. At the close of the fourteenth century, S. Catherine of Siena sustained the purity and "dove-like simplicity" of the earlier trecento style, with more of fervor and personal power than any subsequent writer. Her letters, whether addressed to Popes and princes on the politics of Italy, or dealing with private topics of religious experience, are models of the purest Tuscan diction.[190] They have the garrulity and over-unctuous sweetness of the Fioretti and Leggende. But these qualities, peculiar to medieval piety among Italians, are balanced by untutored eloquence which borders on sublimity. Without deliberate art or literary aim, the spirit of a noble woman speaks from the heart in Catherine's letters. The fervor of her feeling suggests poetic imagery. The justice of her perception dictates weighty sentences. The intensity with which she realizes the unseen world of spiritual emotion, gives dramatic movement to her exhortations, expositions and entreaties. These rare excellences of a style, where spontaneity surpasses artifice, are combined in the famous epistle to her confessor, Raimondo da Capua, describing the execution of Niccolò Tuldo.[191] He was a young man of Perugia, condemned to death for some act of insubordination. Catherine visited him in prison, and induced him to take the Sacrament with her for the first time. He besought her to be present with him at the place of execution. Accordingly she waited for him there, praying to Mary and to Catherine, the virgin saint of Alexandria, laying her own neck upon the block, and entering into harmony so rapt with those celestial presences that the multitude of men who were around her disappeared from view. What followed, must be told in her own words:

Poi egli giunse, come uno agnello mansueto: e vedendomi, cominciò a ridere; e volse che io gli facesse il segno della croce. E ricevuto il segno, dissi io: "Giuso! alle nozze, fratello mio dolce! chè tosto sarai alla vita durabile." Posesi quì con grande mansuetudine; e io gli distesi il collo, e chinàmi giù, e rammentalli il sangue dell'Agnello. La bocca sua non diceva se non, Gesù, e Catarina. E, così dicendo, ricevetti il capo nelle mani mie, fermando l'occhio nella divina bontà e dicendo: "Io voglio."

Allora si vedeva Dio-e-Uomo, come si vedesse la chiarità del sole; e stava aperto, e riceveva il sangue; nel sangue suo uno fuoco di desiderio santo, dato e nascosto nell'anima sua per grazia; riceveva nel fuoco della divina sua carità. Poichè ebbe ricevuto il sangue e il desiderio suo, ed egli ricevette l'anima sua, la quale mise nella bottiga aperta del costato suo, pieno di misericordia; manifestando la prima Verità che per sola grazia e misericordia egli il riceveva, e non per veruna altra operazione. O quanto era dolce e inestimable a vedere la bontà di Dio!

The sudden transition from this narrative of fact to the vision of Christ—from the simple style of ordinary speech to ecstasy inebriated with the cross—is managed with a power that truth alone could yield. A dramatist might have conceived it; but only a saint who lived habitually in both worlds of loving service and illumination, could thus have made it natural. This is the noblest and the rarest realism.

If we trust the testimony of contemporary chroniclers, S. Bernardino of Siena in the pulpit shared Catherine's power of utterance, at once impressive and simple.[192] No doubt the preachers of the quattrocento were influential in maintaining a tradition of prose rhetoric. But it is not in the nature of sermons, even when ably reported, to preserve their fullness and their force. Not less important for the formation of a literary style were the letters and dispatches of embassadors. Though at this period all ceremonial orations, briefs, state documents and epistles between Courts and commonwealths were composed in Latin, still the secret correspondence of envoys with their home governments gave occasion for the use of the vernacular; and even humanists expressed their thoughts occasionally in the mother tongue. Coluccio Salutati, for example, whose Latin letters were regarded as models of epistolary style, employed Italian in less formal communications with his office. These early documents of studied Tuscan writing are now more precious than his formal Ciceronian imitations. Private letters may also be mentioned among the best sources for studying the growth of Italian prose, although we have not much material to judge by.[193] The correspondence of Alessandra degli Strozzi, recently edited by Signor Cesare Guasti, is not only valuable for the light it casts upon contemporary manners, but also for the illustration of the Florentine idiom as written by a woman of noble birth.[194] Of Poliziano's, Pulci's and Lorenzo de' Medici's letters I shall have occasion to speak in a somewhat different connection later on.

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 Œconomicus 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 personæ 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 Œconomicus. 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 Tranquillità 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 primâ 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 Tranquillità. 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 naïveté 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 Tranquillità 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, Niccolò 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 così 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 æsthetical 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 manœuvres, 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 Deyaniræ 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 già 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.

In Alberti, moreover, we study the best type of the Italian intellect as it was molded, on emergence from the middle ages, by those double influences of humanism and fine art which determined the Renaissance. Though his genius was rather artistic than scientific, all problems of nature and of man attracted him; and he dealt freely with them in the spirit of true modern curiosity. His method shows no trace either of mystical theology or of crooked scholasticism. He surveyed the world with a meditative but observant glance, avoiding the deeper questions of ontology, and depicting what he noticed with the realism of a painter. This powerful pictorial faculty made his sketches from contemporary life—the description of the gambler in the Deiciarchia; the portrait of the sage in the Teogenio; the domestic colloquies of Giannozzo with his wife in the Famiglia; the interior of a coquette's chamber in the Amiria—surprising for sincerity and fullness. As a writer, he has the same merit that we recognize in Masaccio and Ghirlandajo among the fresco-painters of that age. But Alberti's touch is more sympathetic, his humanity more loving.

He was not eminent as a metaphysician. From Plato he only borrowed something of his literary art, and something of ethical elevation, leaving to Ficino the mysticism which then passed for Platonic science. His ideal of the virtuous man is a Florence burgher, honorable but keen in business, open to culture of all kinds, untainted by the cynicism that marred Cosimo de' Medici, lacking the licentious traits of the Novelle. Alberti's Padre di Famiglia might have stepped from the walls of the Riccardi Chapel or the Choir of S. Maria Novella, in his grave red lucco, with the cold and powerful features. The life praised above all others by Alberti is the life of a meditative student, withdrawn from State affairs, and corresponding with men of a like tranquil nature. This ideal was realized by Sannazzaro in his Mergellina, by Ficino at Montevecchio, by Pico at Querceto. Just as his science and his philosophy were æsthetic, so were his religion and his morality. He conformed to the ceremonies of the Catholic Church. But the religious sentiment had already become in him rational rather than emotional, and less a condition of the conscience than of the artistic sensibility. Honor in men, honesty in women, moved his admiration because they are comely. The splendor of the stars, the loveliness of earth, raised him in thought to the supreme source of beauty. Whatever the genius of man brings to perfection of grace, he called divine, realizing for the first time the piety that finds God in the human spirit.[270]

The harmonious lines and the vast spaces of the Florentine Duomo thrilled him like music, merging the charm of art in the high worship of a cultivated nature. "This temple," he writes in a passage that might be quoted as the quintessential exposition of his mind,[271] "has in it both grace and majesty, and I delight to notice that union of slender elegance with full and vigorous solidity, which shows that while every member is designed to please, the whole is built for perpetuity. Inside these aisles there is the climate of eternal spring—wind, frost, and rime without; a quiet and mild air within—the blaze of summer on the square; delicious coolness here. Above all things I delight in feeling the sweetness of those voices busied at the sacrifice, and in the sacred rites our classic ancestors called mysteries. All other modes and kinds of singing weary with reiteration; only religious music never palls. I know not how others are affected; but for myself, those hymns and psalms of the Church produce on me the very effect for which they were designed, soothing all disturbance of the soul, and inspiring a certain ineffable languor full of reverence toward God. What heart of man is so rude as not to be softened when he hears the rhythmic rise and fall of those voices, complete and true, in cadences so sweet and flexible? I assure you that I never listen in these mysteries and funeral ceremonies to the Greek words which call on God for aid against our human wretchedness, without weeping. Then, too, I ponder what power music brings with it to soften us and soothe."

It would be difficult with greater spontaneity and truth to delineate the emotions stirred in an artistic nature by the services of a cathedral. It is the language, however, not of a devout Christian, but one who, long before Goethe, had realized the Goethesque ideal of "living with fixed purpose in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful."

Alberti both in his width of genius and in his limitations—in his all-embracing curiosity and aptitude for knowledge, his sensitiveness to every charm, his strong practical bias, the realism of his pictures, the objectivity of his style, his indifference to theology and metaphysic, the largeness of his love for all things that have grace, the substitution of æsthetical for moral standards, the purity of his taste, the tranquillity and urbanity of his spirit, his Stoic-Epicurean acceptance of the world where man may be content to dwell and build himself a home of beauty—was a true representative of his age. What attracts us in the bronze-work of Ghiberti, in the bass-reliefs of Della Robbia, in Rossellino's sleeping Cardinal di Portogallo, in Ghirlandajo's portraits and the airy space of Masaccio's backgrounds, in the lives of Ficino and Pomponio Leto, in the dome of Brunelleschi, in the stanzas of Poliziano, arrives at consciousness in Alberti, pervades his writing, and finds unique expression in the fragment of his Latin biography. Yet we must not measure the age of Cosimo de' Medici and Roderigo Borgia by the standard of Alberti. He presents the spirit of the fifteenth century at its very best. Philosophical and artistic sympathy compensate in his religion for that period's lack of pious faith. Its political degradation assumes in him the shape of a fastidious retirement from vulgar strife. Its lawlessness, caprice, and violence are regulated by the motto "Nothing overmuch" which forms the keystone of his ethics. Its realism is tempered by his love for man and beast and tree—that love which made him weep when he beheld the summer fields and labors of the husbandman. Its sensuality finds no place in his harmonious nature. Many defects of the century are visible enough in Alberti; but what redeemed Italy from corruption and rendered her capable of great and brilliant work amid the chaos of States ruining in infidelity and vice—that free energy of the intellect, open to all influences, inventive of ideas, creative of beauty, which ennobled her Renaissance—burned in him with mild and tranquil radiance.

This is perhaps the fittest place to notice a remarkable book, which, though it cannot be reckoned among the masterpieces of Italian literature, is too important in its bearing on the history of the Renaissance to be passed in silence. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or "Poliphil's Strife of Love in a Dream," was written by Francesco Colonna, a Dominican monk, at Treviso in 1467.[272] There is some reason to conjecture that he composed it first in Latin;[273] but when it appeared in print in 1499, it had already assumed the garb of a strange maccaronic style, blending the euphuisms of affected rhetoric with phrases culled from humanistic pedantry. The base of the language professes to be Italian; but it is an Italian Latinized in all its elements, and interlarded with scraps of Greek and Hebrew. The following description of the Dawn, with which the book opens, serve as a specimen of its peculiar dialect[274]:

Phoebo in quel hora manando, che la fronte di Matuta Leucothea candidava, fora gia dalle Oceane unde, le volubile rote sospese non dimonstrava. Ma sedulo cum gli sui volucri caballi, Pyroo primo, & Eoo al quanto apparendo, ad dipingere le lycophe quadrige della figliola di vermigliante rose, velocissimo inseguentila, non dimorava. Et coruscante gia sopra le cerulee & inquiete undule, le sue irradiante come crispulavano. Dal quale adventicio in quel puncto occidua davase la non cornuta Cynthia, solicitando gli dui caballi del vehiculo suo cum il Mulo, lo uno candido & laltro fusco, trahenti ad lultimo Horizonta discriminante gli Hemisperii pervenuta, & dalla pervia stella ari centare el di, fugata cedeva. In quel tempo quando che gli Rhiphaei monti erano placidi, ne cum tanta rigidecia piu lalgente & frigorifico Euro cum el laterale flando quassabondo el mandava gli teneri ramuli, & ad inquietare gli mobili scirpi & pontuti iunci & debili Cypiri, & advexare gli plichevoli vimini & agitare gli lenti salici, & proclinare la fragile abiete sotto gli corni di Tauro lascivianti. Quanta n el hyberno tempo spirare solea. Similmente el iactabondo Orione cessando di persequire lachrymoso, lornato humero Taurino delle sete sorore.

Whether Francesco Colonna prepared the redaction from which this paragraph is quoted, admits of doubt. A scholar, Leonardo Crasso of Verona, defrayed the cost of the edition. Manutius Aldus printed the volume and its pages were adorned with precious wood-cuts, the work of more than one anonymous master of the Lombardo-Venetian school.[275] It was dedicated to Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino.

For the student of Italian literature in its transition from the middle age to the Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia has special and many-sided interest. It shows that outside Florence, where the pure Italian idiom was too vigorous to be suppressed, humanistic fashion had so far taken possession of the literary fancy as to threaten the very existence of the mother tongue. But, more than this, it represents that epoch of transition in its fourfold intellectual craving after the beauty of antiquity, the treasures of erudition, the multiplied delights of art, and the liberty of nature. These cravings are allegorized in a romance of love, which blends medieval mysticism with modern sensuousness. Like the style, the matter of the book is maccaronic, parti-colored and confused; but the passion which controls so many elements is genuine and simple. The spirit of the earlier Renaissance reflects itself, as in a mirror, in the Dream of Poliphil. So essentially is it the product of a transitional moment that when the first enthusiasm for its euphuistic pedantry and æsthetical rapture had subsided, the key to its most obvious meaning was lost. In the preface to the fourth French edition (1600), Beroald de Verville hinted that the volume held deep alchemistic secrets for those who could discover them. After this distortion the book passed into not altogether unmerited oblivion. It had done its work for the past age. It now remains an invaluable monument for those who would fain reconstruct the century which gave it birth.

The Hypnerotomachia professes to relate its author's love for Polia, a nun, his search after her, and their union, at the close of sundry trials and adventures, in the realm of Venus. Poliphil dreams that he finds himself in a wild wood, where he is assailed by monstrous beasts, and suffers great distress of mind. He prays to Diespiter, and comes forthwith into a pleasant valley, through which he wanders in the hope of finding Polia. At the outset of his journey he meets five damsels, Aphea, Offressia, Orassia, Achoe, Geussia, who conduct him to their queen, Eleuterilyda.[276] She understands his quest, and assigns the maidens, Logistica and Thelemia, to be his guides into the palace of Telosia. They journey together and arrive at the abode of Dame Telosia, which has three gates severally inscribed in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin characters with legends, the meaning whereof is God's Glory, Mother of Love, and Worldly Glory. Poliphil enters the first door, and finds the place within but little to his liking. Then he tries the third, and is no better pleased. Lastly he gains admittance to the demesne of Love's Mother, where he is content to Stay. Lovely and lascivious maidens greet him kindly; and while he surrenders to their invitation, one of his attendants, Logistica, takes her flight. He is left with his beloved Thelemia to enjoy the pleasures of this enchanting region.

Thus far the allegory is not hard to read. Poliphil, or the lover of Polia, escapes from the perils of the forest where his earlier life was passed, by petition to the Father of Gods and Men. He places himself in the hands of the five senses, who conduct him to freewill. Freewill appoints for his further guidance reason and inclination, who are to lead him to the final choice of lives. When he arrives at the point where this choice has to be made, he perceives that God, the world, and beauty, who is mother of love, compete for his willing service. He rejects religion and ambition; and no sooner has his preference for love and beauty been avowed, than the reasoning faculty deserts him, and he is abandoned to inclination.

While Poliphil is dallying with the nymphs of pleasure and his own wanton will, he is suddenly abandoned by these companions, and pursues his journey alone.[277] Before long, however, he becomes aware of a maiden, exceedingly fair to look upon, who carries in her hand a lighted torch. With her for guide, he passes through many pleasant places, arriving finally at the temple of Venus Physizoe. This maiden, though as yet he cannot recognize her, is the Polia he seeks, and on their way together he feels the influences of her love-compelling beauty. They enter the chapel of Venus, and are graciously received by the prioress who guards that sanctuary. Mystical rites of initiation and consecration are performed. Polia lays down her torch, and is discovered by her lover. Then they are wedded by grace of the abiding goddess; and having undergone the ceremony of spousal, they resume their wanderings together. They pass through a desolate city of tombs and ruins, named Polyandrion, where are the sepulchers and epitaphs of lovers. Here, too, they witness the pangs of souls tormented for their crimes against the deity of Love. Afterwards they reach a great water, where Cupid's barge comes sailing by, and takes them to the island of Cythera. It is a level land of gardens, groves and labyrinths, adorned with theaters and baths, and watered by a mystic font of Venus. Near the Tomb of Adonis in this demesne of Love, Polia and Poliphil sit down to rest among the nymphs, and Polia relates the story of their early passion.

It is here, if anywhere, that we come across reality in this romance. Polia tells how the town of Treviso was founded, and of what illustrious lineage she came, and how she vowed herself to the service of Diana when the plague was raging in the city. In Dian's temple Poliphil first saw her, and fainted at the sight, and she, made cruel by the memory of her vows, left him upon the temple-floor for dead. But when she returned home, a vision of women punished for their hard heart smote her conscience; and her old nurse, an adept in the ways of love, counseled her to seek the Prioress of Venus, and confess, and enter into reconcilement with her lover. What the nurse advised, Polia did, and in the temple of Venus she met Poliphil. He, while his body lay entranced upon the floor of Dian's church, had visited the heavens in spirit and obtained grace from Venus and Cupid. Therefore, the twain were now of one accord, and ready to be joined in bonds of natural affection. At the end of Polia's story, the nymphs leave both lovers to enjoy their new-found happiness. But here the power of sleep is spent, and Poliphil, awakened by the song of swallows, starts from dreams with "Farewell, my Polia!" upon his lips.

Such is the frail and slender basis of romance, corresponding, in the details of Polia's narrative, to an ordinary novella, upon which the bulky edifice of the Hypnerotomachia is built. This love-story, while it gives form to the book, is clearly not the author's main motive. What really concerns him most deeply is the handling of artistic themes, which, though introduced by way of digressions, occupy by far the larger portion of his work. The Hypnerotomachia is an encyclopædia of curious learning, a treasure-house of æsthetical descriptions and discussions, vividly reflecting the two ruling enthusiasms of the earlier Renaissance for scholarship and art. Minute details of inexhaustible variety, bringing before our imagination the architecture, sculpture, and painting of the fifteenth century, its gardens, palaces and temples, its processions, triumphs and ceremonial shows, its delight in costly jewels, furniture, embroidery and banquets, its profound feeling for the beauty of women, and its admiration for the goodliness of athletic manhood, are massed together with bewildering profusion. Not one of the technical arts which flourished in the dawn of the Renaissance but finds due celebration here; and the whole is penetrated with that fervent reverence for antiquity which inspired the humanists. Yet the Hypnerotomachia, though sometimes tedious, is never frigid. With the precision of a treatise and the minuteness of an inventory, it combines the ardor of impassioned feeling, the rapture of anticipation, the artist's blending with the lover's ecstasy. It is a dithyramb of the imagination, inflamed by no Oriental lust of mere magnificence, but by the fine sense of what is beautiful in form, rare in material, just in proportion, exquisite in workmanship.

Whether the Hypnerotomachia exercised a powerful influence over the productions of the Italian genius, can be doubted. But that it presents an epitome or figured abstract of the Renaissance in its earlier luxuriance, is unmistakable. Reading it, we wander through the collections of Paul II., rich with jewels, intagli, cameos and coins; we enter Amadeo's chapels, Filarete's palaces, Bramante's peristyles and loggie; we pace the gardens of the Brenta and the Sforza's deer-parks at Pavia; we watch Lorenzo's Florentine trionfi and Pietro Riario's festivals in Rome; Giorgione's fêtes champêtres are set for us in framework of the choicest fruits and flowers; we hear Ciriac of Ancona discoursing on his epigraphs and broken marbles; before our eyes, as in a gallery, are ranged the bass-reliefs of Donatello wrought in bronze, Mantegna's triumphs, Signorelli's arabesques, the terra-cotta of the Lombard and the stucco of the Roman schools, the carved-work of Alberti's church at Rimini, the tarsiatura of Fra Giovanni da Verona's choir-stalls, doorways from Milanese and chimneys from Urbino palaces, Vatican tapestries and trellis-work of beaten iron from Prato—all that the Renaissance in its bloom produced, is here depicted with the wealth and warmth of fancy doting on anticipated beauties.

Of the author, Francesco Colonna, very little is known, except that he was born in 1433 at Venice, that he attached himself to Ermolao Barbaro, spent a portion of his manhood in the Dominican cloister of S. Niccolò at Treviso, and died at Venice in 1527. Whether the love-tale of the Hypnerotomachia had a basis of reality, or whether we ought to regard it wholly from the point of view of allegory, cannot be decided now. It is, however, probable that a substratum of experience underlay the vast mass of superimposed erudition and enthusiastic reverie. The references to Polia's name and race; her epitaph appended to the first edition; the details of her narrative, which somewhat break the continuity of style and introduce a biographical element into the romance; the very structure of the allegory which assigns so large a part in life to sensuous instinct—all these points seem to prove that Poliphil was moved by memory of what had really happened, no less than by the desire to express a certain mood of feeling and belief. Such mingling of actual emotion with ideal passion in a work of imagination, dedicated to a woman who is also an emblem, was consistent with the practice of medieval poets. Polia belongs, under altered circumstances, to the same class as Beatrice. The hypothesis that, whoever she may have been, she had become for her lover a metaphor of antique beauty, is sufficiently attractive and plausible. If we adopt this theory, we must interpret the dark wood where Poliphil first found himself, to mean the anarchy of Gothic art; while his emancipation through the senses and Thelemia characterizes the spirit in which the Italians achieved the Revival. The extraordinary care lavished upon details, interrupting the course of the romance and withdrawing our sympathy from Polia, meet from this point of view with justification. Veiling his enthusiasm for the renascent past beneath the fiction of a novel, Francesco Colonna invests the lady of his intellectual choice, the handmaid of Aphrodite, evoked from the sepulcher where arts and sciences lie buried, with rich Renaissance trappings of elaborate device. Beneath those exuberant arabesques, within that labyrinth of technically perfect details, suave outlines, delicate contours devoid of content, a real woman would be lost. But if Polia be not merely a woman, if she be, as her name πολια seems to indicate, at the same time the vision of resurgent classic beauty, then the setting which her lover has contrived is adequate to the influences which inspired him. The multiform and labored frame-work of his picture acquires a meaning from the spirit of the goddess whom he worships, and the presiding genius of his age dwells in a shrine, each point of which is brilliant with the splendor which that spirit radiates.

It is, therefore, as an allegory of the Renaissance, conscious of its destiny and strongest aspirations in the person of an almost nameless monk, that we should read the Hypnerotomachia. Still, even so, the mark of indecision, which rests upon the many twy-formed masterpieces of this century, is here discernible. Francesco Colonna has one foot in the middle ages, another planted on the firm ground of the modern era. He wavers between the psychological realism of romance and the philosophical idealism of allegory. Polia is both too much and too little of a woman. At one time her personality seems as distinct as that of any heroine of fiction; at another we lose sight of her in the mist of symbolism. Granting, again, that she is a metaphor, she lends herself to more than one conception. She is both an emblem of passion, sanctified by nature, and liberated from the bondage of asceticism, and also an emblem of ideal beauty, recovered from the past, and worshiped by a scholar-artist.

This confusion of motives and uncertainty of aim, while it detracts from the artistic value of the Hypnerotomachia, enhances its historical importance. In form, the book has to be classed with the Visions of the middle ages—the Divine Comedy, the Amorosa Visione, and the Quadriregio. But though the form is medieval, the inspiration of this prose-poem is quite other. We have seen already how Francesco Colonna, traveling in search of Polia, prayed to Jupiter, and how the senses and freewill guided him to the satisfaction of his deepest self in the service of Beauty. It is in the temple of Venus Physizoe (Venus the procreative source of life in Nature) that he meets with his love and is wedded to her in the bonds of mutual desire.[278] Christianity is wholly, we might say systematically, ignored. The ascetic standpoint of the middle age is abandoned for another, antagonistic to its ruling impulses. A new creed, a new cult, are introduced. Polia, whether we regard her as the poet's mistress or as the spirit of antiquity which has enamored him, is won by worship paid to deities of natural appetite. In its essence, then, the Hypnerotomachia corresponds to the most fruitful instinct of the Renaissance—to that striving after emancipation which restored humanity to its heritage in the realms of sense and reason. Old ideals, exhausted and devoid of vital force, are exchanged for fresh and beautiful reality. The spirituality of the past, which has become consumptive and ineffectively lapse of time and long familiarity, yields to vigorous animalism. The cloister is quitted for the world, religious for artistic ecstasy, celestial for earthly paradise, scholasticism for humane studies, the ascetic for the hedonistic rule of conduct. Criticised according to its deeper meaning, the Hypnerotomachia is the poem of which Valla's De Voluptate was the argument, of which Lorenzo de' Medici's life was the realization, and the life of Aretino the caricature. If it assumes the form of a vision, reminding us thereby that the author was born upon the confines of the middle ages and the modern era, it deals with the vision in no Dantesque spirit, but with the geniality of Apuleius. Allegory is but a transparent veil, to make the nudity of natural impulse fascinating. As in Boccaccio, so here the hymn of il talento, simple appetite, is sung; but the fusion of artistic and humanistic enthusiasms with this ground-motive adds peculiar quality, distinctive of the later age which gave it birth.

The secret of its charm, which, indeed, it shares with earlier Renaissance art in general, is that this yearning after freedom has been felt with rapture, but not fully satisfied. The season of repletion and satiety is distant. Venus Physizoe appears to Francesco Colonna radiant above all powers of heaven or earth, because he is a monk and may not serve her. Had he his whole will, she might have been for him Venus Volgivaga, and he the author of another Puttana Errante. Nor has she yet assumed the earnest mask of science. This element of unassuaged desire, indulged in longings and outgoings of the fancy, this recognition of man's highest good and happiness in nature by one who has forsworn allegiance to the laws of nature, adds warmth to his emotion and penetrates his pictures with a kind of passion. The arts and scholarship, which divide the empire of his soul with beauty, have no less attraction of romance than love itself. Nor are they separated in his mind from nature. Nature and antiquity, knowledge and desire, the reverence for abstract beauty and the instincts of a lover are fused in one enthusiasm. Thus Francesco Colonna makes us understand how Italy used both art and erudition as instruments in the liberation of human energies. For the thinkers and actors of that period, antiquity and the plastic arts were aids to the recovery of a paradise from which man had been exiled. They could not dissociate the conception of nature from studies which revealed their human dignity and freedom, or from arts whereby they expressed their vivid sense of beauty. The work they thus inaugurated, had afterwards to be continued by the scientific faculties.

One word may finally be said about the peculiar delicacy of this book. The Hypnerotomachia is no less an apotheosis of natural appetite than the Amorosa Visione. But it is more sentimental and imaginative, because its author had not Boccaccio's crude experience. It anticipates the art of the great age—the art of Cellini and Giulio Romano, goldsmith-sculptors and palace-builders; but it is more refined and passionate, because its author enjoyed those beauties of consummate craft in reverie instead of practice. It interprets the enthusiasm of Ciriac and Poggio, discoverers of manuscripts, decipherers of epigraphs; but it is more naïf and graceful than their work of erudition, because its author dealt freely with his learning and subordinated scholarship to fancy. In short the Hypnerotomachia is a foreshadowing of the Renaissance in its prime—the spirit of the age foreseen in dreams, embodied in imagination, purged of material alloy, and freed from the encumbrances of actuality.