Renaissance in Italy Volume I Part 18

The inherent feebleness of Italy in this respect proceeded from an intellectual apathy toward religious questions, produced partly by the stigma attaching to unorthodoxy, partly by the absorbing interests of secular culture, partly by the worldliness of the Renaissance, partly by the infamy of the ecclesiastics, and partly by the enervating influence of tyrannies. However bold a man might be, he dread of heretic; the term _paterino_, originally applied to religious innovators, had become synonymous in common phraseology with rogue. It was a point of good society and refined taste to support the Church. Again, the mental faculties of Italy had for three centuries been taxed to the utmost in studies wide apart from the field of religious faith. Art, scholars.h.i.+p, philosophy, and meditation upon politics had given a definite direction to the minds of thinking men, so that little energy was left for those instinctive movements of the spirit which produced the German Reformation. The great work of Italy had been the genesis of the Renaissance, the development of modern culture. And the tendencies of the Renaissance were worldly: its ideal of human life left no room for a pure, and ardent intuition into spiritual truth. Scholars occupied with the interpretation of cla.s.sic authors, artists bent upon investing current notions with the form of beauty, could hardly be expected to exclaim: 'The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is understanding.'[1] Materialism ruled the speculations no less than the conduct of the age. Pamponazzo preached an atheistic doctrine, with the plausible reservation of _Salva Fide_, which then covered all.

The more delicate thinkers, Pico and Ficino, sought to reconcile irreconcilables by fusing philosophy and theology, while they distinguished truths of science from truths of revelation. It seems meanwhile to have occurred to no one in Italy that the liberation of the reason necessitated an abrupt departure from Catholicism. They did not perceive that a power antagonistic to mediaeval orthodoxy had been generated. This was in great measure due to indifference; for the Church herself had taught her children by example to regard her dogmas and her discipline as a convenient convention. It required all the scourges of the Inquisition to flog the nation back, not to lively faith, but to hypocrisy. Furthermore, the political conditions of Italy were highly unfavorable to a profound religious revolution. The thirst for national liberty which inspired England in the sixteenth century, impelling the despotic Tudors to cast off the yoke of Rome, arming Howard the Catholic against the holy fleet of Philip, and joining prince and people in one aspiration after freedom, was impossible in Italy. The tone of Machiavelli's _Principe_, the whole tenor of Castiglione's _Cortigiano_, prove this without the need of further demonstration.

[1] It is well known that Savonarola's objection to cla.s.sical culture was based upon his perception of its worldliness. It is very remarkable to note the feeling on this point of some of the greatest northern scholars. Erasmus, for example, writes: 'unus adhuc scrupulus habet animum meum, ne sub obtentu priscae literaturae renascentis caput erigere conetur Paganismus, ut sunt inter Christianos qui t.i.tulo paene duntaxat Christum agnosc.u.n.t, ceterum intus Gentilitatem spirant'--Letter 207 (quoted by Milman in his Quarterly article on Erasmus). Ascham and Melanchthon pa.s.sed similar judgments upon the Italian scholars. The nations of the north had the Italians at a disadvantage, for they entered into their labors, and all the dangerous work of sympathy with the ancient world, upon which modern scholars.h.i.+p was based, had been done in Italy before Germany and England came into the field.

Few things are more difficult than to estimate the exact condition of a people at any given period with regard to morality and religion. And this difficulty is increased tenfold when the age presents such rapid transitions and such bewildering complexities as mark the Renaissance.

Yet we cannot omit to notice the att.i.tude of the Italians at large in relation to the Church, and to determine in some degree the character of their national morality. Against the corruption of Rome one cry of hatred and contempt arises from a crowd of witnesses. Dante's fiery denunciations, Jacopone's threats, the fierce invectives of Petrarch, and the thundering prophecies of Joachim lead the chorus. Boccaccio follows with his scathing irony. 'Send the most obstinate Jew to Rome,'

he says, 'and the profligacy of the Papal Court will not fail to convert him to the faith that can resist such obloquy.'[1] Another glaring scandal was the condition of the convents. All novelists combine in painting the depravity of the religious houses as a patent fact in social life. Boccaccio, Sacchetti, Bandello, and Masuccio may be mentioned in particular for their familiar delineation of a profligacy which was interwoven with the national existence.[2] The comic poets take the same course, and delight in ridiculing the gross manners of the clergy. Nor do the ecclesiasties spare themselves. Poggio, the author of the _Facetiae_, held benefices and places at the Papal Court. Bandello was a Dominican and nephew of the General of his order. Folengo was a Benedictine. Bibbiena became a cardinal. Berni received a Canonry in the Cathedral of Florence. Such was the open and acknowledged immorality of the priests in Rome that more than one Papal edict was issued forbidding them to keep houses of bad repute or to act as panders.[3] Among the aphorisms of Pius II. is recorded the saying that if there were good reasons for enjoining celibacy on the clergy, there were far better and stronger arguments for insisting on their marriage.[4]

[1] We may compare this Umbrian Rispetto for the opposite view.

A Roma Santa ce so gito anch'io, E ho visto co'miei occhi il fatto mio: E quando a Roma ce s'e posto il piede, Resta la rabbia e se ne va la fede.

[2] It may not be out of place to collect some pa.s.sages from Masuccio's Novelle on the Clergy, premising that what he writes with the fierceness of indignation is repeated with the cynicism of indulgence by contemporary novelists. Speaking of the Popes, he says (ed, Napoli, Morano, 1874): 'me tacer non solo de loro scelesti ed enormissimi vizi e pubblici e occulti adoperati, e de li officii, de beneficil, prelature, i vermigli cappelli, che all' incanto per loro morte vendono, ma del camauro del principe San Pietro che ne e gia stato latto partuito baratto non far alcuna mentione.' Descending to prelates, he uses similar language (p. 64): 'non possa mai pervenire ad alcun grado di prelatura se non col favore del maestro della zecca, e quelle conviensela comprare all' incanto come si fa dei cavalli in fiera.' A priest is (p. 31) 'il venerabile lupo.' The members of religious orders are (p. 534) 'ministri de satana.s.so ... soldati del gran diavolo: (p. 25) 'piu facilmente tra cento soldati se ne trovarebbero la meta buoni, che tra tutto un capitolo de frati ne fosse uno senza bruttissima macchia.' It is perilous to hold any communication with them (p. 39): 'Con loro non altri che usurai, fornicatori, e omini di mala sorte conversare si vedeno.' Their sins against nature (p. 65), the secret marriages of monks and nuns (p. 83), the 'fetide cioache oi monache,' choked with the fruits of infanticide (p. 81), not to mention their avarice (p. 55) and gross impiety (p. 52), are described with a naked sincerity that bears upon its face the stamp of truth.

[3] A famous pa.s.sage from Agrippa (De Vanitate Scientiarum) deserves a place here. After alluding to Sixtus IV, he says that many state officers 'in civitatibus suis lupanaria construunt foventque, non nihil ex meretricio questu etiam aerario suo acc.u.mulantes emolumenti; quod quidem in Italia non rarum est, ubi etiam Romana scorta in singulas hebdomadas Julium pendent Pontifici, qui census annuus nonnunquam viginti millia ducatos excedit, adeoque Ecclesiae procerum id munus est, ut una c.u.m Ecclesiarum proventibus etiam lenociniorum numerent mercedem. Sic enim ego illos supputantes aliquando audivi: Habet, inquientes, ille duo beneficia, unum curaturn aureorum viginti, alterum prioratum ducatorum quadraginta, el tres putanas in burdello, quae reddunt singulis hebdomadibus Julios Viginti.'

[4] Very few ecclesiastics of high rank escaped the contagion of Roman society. It was fas.h.i.+onable for men like Bembo and La Casa to form connections with women of the _demi-monde_ and to recognize their children, whose legitimation they frequently procured. The Capitoli of the burlesque poets show that this laxity of conduct was pardonable, when compared with other laughingly avowed and all but universal indulgences. Once more, compare Guidiccioni's letter to M. Giamb. Bernardi Opp. vol. i.

p. 102.

Some of the contempt and hatred expressed by the Italian satirists for the two great orders of S. Francis and S. Dominic may perhaps be due to an ancient grudge against them as a Papal police founded in the interests of orthodoxy. But the chief point aimed at is the mixture of hypocrisy with immorality, which rendered them odious to all cla.s.ses of society. At the same time the Franciscans embraced among their lay brethren nearly all the population of Italy, and to die in the habit of the order was thought the safest way of cheating the devil of his due.

Corruption had gone so far and deep that it was universally recognized and treated with the sarcasm of levity. It roused no sincere reaction, and stimulated no persistent indignation. Every one acknowledged it; yet every one continued to live indolently according to the fas.h.i.+on of his forefathers, acting up to Ovid's maxim--

Pro magna parte vetustas Creditur; acceptam parce movere fidem.

It is only this incurable indifference that renders Machiavelli's comic portraits of Fra Alberigo and Fra Timoteo at all intelligible. They are neither satires nor caricatures, but simple pictures drawn for the amus.e.m.e.nt of contemporaries and the stupefaction of posterity.

The criticism of the Italian writers, so far as we have yet followed it, was directed against two separate evils--the vicious worldliness of Rome, and the demoralization of the clergy both in their dealings with the people and in their conventual life. Contempt for false miracles and spurious reliques, and the horror of the traffic in indulgences, swelled the storm of discontent among the more enlightened. But the people continued to make saints, to adore wonder-working shrines, and to profit by the spiritual advantages which could be bought. Pius II., mindful of the honor of his native city, canonized S. Bernardine and S.

Catherine of Siena. Innocent VIII consecrated a chapel for the Lance of Longinus, which he had received from the Turk as part-payment for the guardians.h.i.+p of Djem. The Venetian Senate offered 10,000 ducats for the seamless coat of Christ (1455). The whole of Italy was agitated by the news that S. Andrew's head had arrived from Patras (1462). The Pope and his Cardinals went forth to meet it near the Milvian bridge. There Pius II. p.r.o.nounced a Latin speech of welcome, while Bessarion delivered an oration when the precious member was deposited in S. Peter's. In this pa.s.sion for reliques two different sentiments seem to have been combined--the merely superst.i.tious belief in the efficacy of charms, which caused the Venetians to guard the body of S. Mark so jealously, and the Neapolitans to watch the liqifaction of the blood of S.

Januarius with a frenzy of excitement--and that n.o.bler respect for the persons of the mighty dead which induced Sigismondo Malatesta to transport the body of Gemistus Pletho to Rimini, and which rendered the supposed coffin of Aristotle at Palermo an object of admiration to Mussulman and Christian alike. The bones of Virgil, it will be remembered, had been built into the walls of Naples, while those of Livy were honored with splendid sepulture at Padua.

Owing to the separation between religion and morality which existed in Italy under the influence of Papal and monastic profligacy, the Italians saw no reason why spiritual benefits should not be purchased from a notoriously rapacious Pontiff, or why the penalty of h.e.l.l should not depend upon the mere word of a consecrated monster. The Pope as successor of S. Peter, and the Pope as Roman sovereign, were two separate beings. Many curious indications of the mixed feeling of the people upon this point, and of the advantage which the Pope derived from his anomalous position, may be gathered from the historians of the period. Machiavelli, in his narrative of the ma.s.sacre at Sinigaglia, relates that Vitellozzo Vitelli, while being strangled by Cesare Borgia's a.s.sa.s.sin, begged hard that the father of his murderer, the horrible Alexander, might be entreated to p.r.o.nounce his absolution. The same Alexander was nearly suffocated in the Vatican by the French soldiers who crowded round to kiss his mantle, and who had made him tremble for his life a few days previously. Cellini on his knees implored Pope Clement to absolve him from the guilt of homicide and theft, yet spoke of him as 'transformed to a savage beast' by a sudden access of fury. At one time he trembled before the awful Majesty of Christ's Vicar, revealed in Paul III.; at another he reviled him as a man 'who neither believed in G.o.d nor in any other article of religion.

A mysterious sanct.i.ty environed the person of the Pontiff. When Gianpaolo Baglioni held Julius II. in his power in Perugia, he respected the Pope's freedom, though he knew that Julius would overthrow his tyranny. Machiavelli condemns this as cowardice, but it was wholly consistent with the sentiment of the age. 'It cannot have been goodness or conscience which restrained him,' writes the philosopher of Florence, 'for the heart of a man who cohabited with his sister, and had ma.s.sacred his cousins and his nephews, could not have harbored any piety. We must conclude that men know not how to be either guilty in a n.o.ble manner, or entirely good. Although crime may have a certain grandeur of its own, or at least a mixture of more generous motives, they do not attain to this.

Gianpaolo, careless though he was about incest and parricide, could not, or dared not, on a just occasion, achieve an exploit for which the whole world would have admired his spirit, and by which he would have won immortal glory: for he would have been the first to show how little prelates, living and ruling as they do, deserve to be esteemed, and would have done a deed superior in its greatness to all the infamy, to all the peril, that it might have brought with it.'[1] It is difficult to know which to admire most, the superst.i.tion of Gianpaolo, or the cynicism of the commentary, the spurious piety which made the tyrant miss his opportunity, or the false standard of moral sublimity by which the half-ironical critic measures his mistake. In combination they produce a lively impression of the truth of what I have attempted to establish--that in Italy at this period religion survived as superst.i.tion even among the most depraved, and that the crimes of the Church had produced a schism between this superst.i.tion and morality.

[1] _Discorsi_, i. 27. This episode in Gianpaolo Baglioni's life may be ill.u.s.trated by the curious story told about Gabrino Fondulo, the tyrant of Cremona. The Emperor Sigismund and Pope John XXIII. were his guests together in the year 1414. Part of their entertainment consisted in visiting the sights of Cremona with their host, who took them up the great Tower (396 feet high) without any escort. They all three returned safely, but when Gabrino was executed at Milan in 1425, he remarked that he only regretted one thing in the course of his life--namely, that he had not pitched Pope and Emperor together from the Torazzo. What a golden opportunity to have let slip! The story is told by Antonio Campo, _Historia di Cremona_ (Milan, 1645), p. 114.

While the Church was thus gradually deviating more and more directly from the Christian ideal, and was exhibiting to Italy an ensample of worldliness and evil living, the Italians, earlier than any other European nation, had become imbued with the spirit of the ancient world.

Instead of the Gospel and the Lives of the Saints, men studied Plutarch and Livy with avidity. The tyrannicides of Greece and the suicides of the Roman Empire, patriots like Harmodius and Brutus, philosophers like Seneca and Paetus Thrasea, seemed to the humanists of the fifteenth century more admirable than the martyrs and confessors of the faith.

Pagan virtues were strangely mingled with confused and ill-a.s.similated precepts of the Christian Church, while pagan vices wore a halo borrowed from the l.u.s.ter of the newly found and pa.s.sionately welcomed poets of antiquity. Blending the visionary intuitions of the Middle Ages with the positive and mundane ethics of the ancients, the Italians of the Renaissance strove to adopt the sentiments and customs of an age long dead and not to be resuscitated. At the same time the rhetorical taste of the nation inclined the more adventurous and pa.s.sionate natures to seek glory by dramatic exhibitions of personal heroism. The Greek ideal of [Greek: _to ealon_], the Roman conception of _Virtus_, agitated the imagination of a people who had been powerfully influenced by professors of eloquence, by public orators, by men of letters, masters in the arts of style and of parade. Painting and sculpture, and that magnificence of public life which characterized the fifteenth century, contributed to the subst.i.tution of aesthetic for moral or religious standards. Actions were estimated by the effect which they produced; and to sin against the laws of culture was of more moment than to transgress the code of Christianity. Still, the men of the Renaissance could not forget the creed which they had drawn in with their mothers' milk, but which the Church had not adjusted to the new conditions of the growing age. The result was a wild phantasmagoric chaos of confused and clas.h.i.+ng influences.

Of this peculiar moral condition the records of the numerous tyrannicides supply many interesting examples.[1] Girolamo Olgiati offered prayers to S. Ambrose for protection before he stabbed the Duke of Milan in S. Stephen's Church.[2] The Pazzi conspirators, intimidated by the sanct.i.ty of the Florentine Duomo, had to employ a priest to wield the sacrilegious dagger.[3] Pietro Paolo Boscoli's last confession, after the failure of his attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Medici in 1513, adds further details in ill.u.s.tration of the mixture of religious feeling with patriotic paganism. Luca della Robbia, the nephew of the great sculptor of that name, and himself no mean artist, visited his friend Boscoli on the night of his execution, and wrote a minute account of their interview. Both of these men were members of the Confraternita de' Neri, who a.s.sumed the duty of comforting condemned prisoners with spiritual counsel, prayer, and exhortation. The narrative, dictated in the choicest vernacular Tuscan, by an artist whose charity and beauty of soul transpire in every line in contrast with the fiercer fort.i.tude of Boscoli, is one of the most valuable original doc.u.ments for this period which we possess.[4] What is most striking is the combination of deeply rooted and almost infantine piety with antique heroism in the young patriot. He is greatly concerned because, ignorant of his approaching end, he had eaten a hearty supper: 'Son troppo carico di cibo, et ho mangiatccose insalate; in modo che non mi pare poter unir Io spirito a Dio ... Iddio abbi di me misericordia, che costoro m' hanno carico di cibo. Oh indiscrezione!'[5] Then he expresses a vehement desire for the services of a learned confessor, to resolve his intellectual doubts, pleading with all the earnestness of desperate conviction that the salvation of his soul must depend upon his orthodoxy at the last. He complains that he ought to have been allowed at least a month's seclusion with good friars before he was brought face to face with death. At another time he is chiefly anxious to free himself from cla.s.sic memories: 'Deh! Luca, cavatemi della testa quel Bruto, acci ch'

io faccia questo pa.s.so interamente da Cristiano'.[6] Then again it grieves him that the tears of compunction, which he has been taught to regard as the true sign of a soul at one with G.o.d, will not flow. About the mere fact of dying he has no anxiety. The philosophers have strengthened him upon that point. He is only eager to die piously. When he tries to pray, he can barely remember the Paternoster and the Ave Maria. That reminds him how easy it would have been to have spent his time better, and he bids Luca remember that the mind a man makes for himself in life, will be with him in death. When they bring him a picture of Christ, he asks whether he needs _that_ to fix his soul upon his Saviour. Throughout this long contention of so many varying thoughts, he never questions the morality of the act for which he is condemned to die. Luca, however, has his doubts, and privately asks the confessor whether S. Thomas Aquinas had not discountenanced tyrannicide.

'Yes,' answers the monk, 'in case the people have elected their own tyrant, but not when he has imposed himself on them by force.' This casuistical answer satisfies Luca that his friend may reasonably be held blameless. After confessing, Boscoli received the sacrament with great piety, and died bravely. The confessor told Luca, weeping, that he was sure the young man's soul had gone straight to Paradise, and that he might be reckoned a real martyr. His head after death was like that of an angel; and Luca was, we know, a connoisseur in angels' heads. Boscoli was only thirty-two years of age; he had light hair, and was short-sighted.

[1] For the Italian ethics of tyrannicide, see back, pp. 169, 170.

[2] See p. 166.

[3] See p. 398.

[4] It is printed in _Arch. Stor_, vol. i.

[5] 'I am over-burdened with food, and I have eaten salt meats; so that I do not seem able to join my spirit to G.o.d.... G.o.d have pity on me, for they have burdened me with food. Oh, how thoughtless of them!' His words cannot be translated. Naf in the extreme, they become ludicrous in English.

[6] 'Ah, Luca, turn that Brutus out of my head, in order that I may take this last step wholly as a Christian man!'

To this narrative might be added the apology written by Lorenzino de'

Medici, after the murder of his cousin Alessandro in 1536.[1] He relies for his defense entirely upon arguments borrowed from Pagan ethics, and by his treatment of the subject vindicates for himself that name of Brutus with which Filippo Strozzi in person at Venice, and Varchi and Molsa in Latin epigrams, saluted him. There is no trace of Christian feeling in this strong and splendid display of rhetorical ability; nor does any doc.u.ment of the age more forcibly exhibit the extent to which cla.s.sical studies had influenced the morality of the Renaissance.

Lorenzino, however, when he wrote it, was not, like Boscoli, upon the point of dying.

[1] It is printed at the end of the third volume of Varchi, pp.

283-95; compare p. 210. A medal in honor of Lorenzino's tyrannicide was struck with a profile copied from Michael Angelo's bust of Brutus.

The last thing to perish in a nation is its faith. The whole history of the world proves that no anomalies are so glaring, no inconsistencies so paradoxical, as to sap the credit of a religious system which has once been firmly rooted in the habits, instincts, and traditions of a race: and what remains longest is often the least rational portion. Religions from the first are not the product of logical reflection or experiment, but of sentiment and aspiration. They come into being as simple intuitions, and afterwards invade the province of the reason and a.s.similate the thought of centuries to their own conceptions. This is the secret of their strength as well as the source of their weakness. It is only a stronger enthusiasm, a new intuition, a fresh outburst of emotional vitality, that can supplant the old:--

'Cotal rimedio ha questo aspro furore, Tale acqua suole spegner questo fuoco, Come d'a.s.se si trae chiodo con chiodo.'

Criticism from without, internal corruption, patent absurdity, are comparatively powerless to destroy those habits of belief which once have taken hold upon the fancy and the feeling of a nation. The work of dissolution proceeds in silence and in secret. But the established order subsists until the moment comes for a new synthesis. And in the sixteenth century the necessary impulse of regeneration was to come, not from Italy, satisfied with the serenity of her art, preoccupied with her culture, and hardened to the infamy of her corruption, but from the Germany of the barbarians she despised.

These considerations will help to explain how it was that the Church, in spite of its corruption, stood its ground and retained the respect of the people in Italy. We must moreover bear in mind that, bad as it was, it still to some extent maintained the Christian verity. Apart from the Roman Curia and the Convents, there existed a hierarchy of able and G.o.d-fearing men, who by the sanct.i.ty of their lives, by the gravity of their doctrine, by the eloquence of their preaching, by their ministration to the sick, by the relief of the poor, by the maintenance of hospitals, Monti di Pieta, schools and orphanages, kept alive in the people of Italy the ideal at least of a religion pure and undefiled before G.o.d.[1] In the tottering statue of the Church some true metal might be found between the pinchbeck at the summit and the clay of the foundation.

[1] See the life of S. Antonino, the good Archbishop of Florence.

It must also be remembered how far the worldly interests and domestic sympathies of the Italians were engaged in the maintenance of their Church system. The fibers of the Church were intertwined with the very heartstrings of the people. Few families could not show one or more members who had chosen the clerical career, and who looked to Rome for patronage, employment, and perhaps advancement to the highest honors.

The whole nation felt a pride in the Eternal City: patriotic vanity and personal interest were alike involved in the maintenance of the metropolis of Christendom, which drew the suites of amba.s.sadors, mult.i.tudes of pilgrims, and the religious traffic of the whole of Europe to the sh.o.r.es of Italy. It was easy for Germans and Englishmen to reason calmly about dethroning the Papal hierarchy. Italians, however they might loathe the temporal power, could not willingly forego the spiritual primacy of the civilized world.

Moreover, the sacraments of the Church, the absolutions, consecrations, and benedictions which priests dispensed or withheld at pleasure, had by no means lost their power. To what extent even the nations of the north still clung to them is proved by our own Liturgy, framed in the tumult of war with Rome, yet so worded as to leave the utmost resemblance to the old ritual consistent with the spirit of the Reformation. Far more imposing were they in their effect upon the imagination of Italians, who had never dreamed of actual rebellion, who possessed the fountain of Apostolical privileges in the person of the Pope, and whose southern temperament inclined them to a more sensuous and less metaphysical conception of Christianity than the Germans or the English. The dread of the Papal Interdict was still a reality. Though the clergy of Florence, roused to retaliative fury, might fling back in the teeth of Sixtus such words as _leno matris suae, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius_, yet the people could not long endure 'the n.i.g.g.ardly and imperfect rites, the baptism sparingly administered, the extreme unction or the last sacrament coldly vouchsafed to the chosen few, the churchyard closed against the dead,' which, to quote the energetic language of Dean Milman,[1] were the proper fruits of the Papal ban, however unjustly issued and however manfully resisted.

[1] Latin Christianity, vol. vi. p. 361.

The history of the despots and the Popes, together with the a.n.a.lysis of Machiavelli's political ethics, prove the demoralization of a society in which crimes so extravagant could have their origin, and cynicism so deliberate could be accepted as a system. Yet it remains in estimating the general character of Italian morality to record the judgment pa.s.sed upon it by foreign nations of a different complexion. The morality of races, as of individuals, is rarely otherwise than mixed--virtue balancing vice and evil vitiating goodness. Still the impression produced by Renaissance Italy upon observers from the North was almost wholly bad. Our own ancestors returned from their Italian travels either horrified with what they had witnessed, or else contaminated. Ascham writes:[1] 'I was once in Italy myself; but I thank G.o.d my abode there was but nine days; and yet I saw in that little time, in one city, more liberty to sin than ever I heard tell of in our n.o.ble City of London in nine years. I saw it was there as free to sin, not only without all punishment, but also without any man's marking, as it is free in the City of London to choose without all blame whether a man l.u.s.t to wear shoe or pantocle.' Robert Greene, who did so much to introduce the novels of Italy into England, confesses that during his youthful travels in the south he 'saw and practiced such villany as it is abominable to declare.'[2] The whole of our dramatic literature corroborates these witnesses, while the proverb, _Inglese Italianato e un diavolo incarnato_, quoted by Sidney, Howell, Parker, Ascham, shows how pernicious to the coa.r.s.er natures of the north were the refined vices of the south. What princ.i.p.ally struck our ancestors in the morality of the Italians was the license allowed in sensual indulgences, and the bad faith which tainted all public and private dealings. In respect to the latter point, what has already been said about Machiavelli is enough.[3] Loyalty was a virtue but little esteemed in Italy: engagements seemed made to be broken; even the crime of violence was aggravated by the crime of perfidy, a bravo's stiletto or a slow poison being reckoned among the legitimate means for ridding men of rivals or for revenging a slight. Yet it must not be forgotten that the commercial integrity of the Italians ranked high. In all countries of Europe they carried on the banking business of monarchs, cities, and private persons.

[1] _The Schoolmaster;_ edn. 1863, p. 87. The whole discourse on Italian traveling and Italian influence is very curious, when we reflect that at this time contact with Italy was forming the chief culture of the English in literature and social manners. The ninth satire in Marston's _Scourge of Villanie_ contains much interesting matter on the same point.

Howell's _Instructions for forreine Travell_ furnishes the following ill.u.s.tration: 'And being in Italy, that great limbique of working braines, he must be very circ.u.mspect in his carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into a devill, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himself, and become a prey to dissolute courses and wantonnesse.'

[2] _The Repentance of Robert Greene_, quoted in the memoir to Dyce's edition of his Dramatic Works.

[3] See chapter v.

With reference to carnal vice, it cannot be denied that the corruption of Italy was shameful. Putting aside the profligacy of the convents, the City of Rome in 1490 is reported to have held as many as 6,800 public prost.i.tutes, besides those who practiced their trade under the cloak of concubinage.[1] These women were accompanied by confederate ruffians, ready to stab, poison, and extort money; thus violence and l.u.s.t went hand in hand, and to this profligate lower stratum of society may be ascribed the crimes of lawlessness which rendered Rome under Innocent VIII. almost uninhabitable. Venice, praised for its piety by De Comines,[2] was the resort of all the debauchees of Europe who could afford the time and money to visit this modern Corinth. Tom Coryat, the eccentric English traveler, gives a curious account of the splendor and refinement displayed by the demi-monde of the lagoons, and Marston describes Venice as a school of luxury in which the monstrous Aretine played professor.[3] Of the state of morals in Florence Savonarola's sermons give the best picture.

[1] Infessura, p. 1997. He adds: 'Consideratur modo qualiter vivatur Romae ubi caput fidei est.' From what Parent Duchatelet _(Prost.i.tution dans la Ville de Paris,_ p. 27) has noted concerning the tendency to exaggerate the numbers of prost.i.tutes in any given town, we have every reason to regard the estimate of Infessura as excessive. In Paris, in 1854, there were only 4,206 registered 'filles publiques,' when the population of the city numbered 1,500,000 persons; while those who exercised their calling clandestinely were variously computed at 20,000 or 40,000 and upwards to 60,000. Accurate statistics relating to the population of any Italian city in the fifteenth century do not, unfortunately, exist.

[2] _Memoirs,_ lib. vii. 'C'est la plus triomphante cite que j'ai jamais vue, et qui plus fait d'honneur a amba.s.sadeurs et etrangers, et qui plus sagement se gouverne, _et ou le service de Dieu est le plus solemnellement faict.'_ The prost.i.tutes of Venice were computed to number 11,654 so far back as the end of the 14th century. See Filiasi, quoted by Mutinelli in his _Annali urbani di Venezia._

[3] Satires, ii.

But the characteristic vice of the Italian was not coa.r.s.e sensuality. He required the fascination of the fancy to be added to the allurement of the senses.[1] It is this which makes the Capitoli of the burlesque poets, of men of note like Berni, La Casa, Varchi, Mauro, Molsa, Dolce, Bembo, Firenzuola, Bronzino, Aretino, and de' Medici, so amazing. The crudest forms of debauchery receive the most refined and highly finished treatment in poems which are as remarkable for their wit as for their cynicism. A like vein of elaborate innuendo runs through the _Canti Carnascialeschi_ of Florence, proving that however profligate the people might have been, they were not contented with grossness unless seasoned with wit. The same excitement of the fancy, playing freely in the lawlessness of sensual self-indulgence and heightening the consciousness of personal force in the agent, rendered the exercise of ingenuity or the avoidance of peril an enhancement of pleasure to the Italians. This is perhaps one of the reasons why all the imaginative compositions of the Renaissance, especially the _Novelle,_ turn upon adultery. Judging by the majority of these romances, by the comedies of the time, and by the poetry of Ariosto, we are compelled to believe that such illicit love was merely sensual, and owed its princ.i.p.al attractions to the scope it afforded for whimsical adventures. Yet Bembo's _Asolani,_ Castiglione's panegyric of Platonic Love, and much of the lyrical poetry in vogue warn us to be cautious. The old romantic sentiment expressed by the Florentines of the thirteenth century still survived to some extent, adding a sort of dignity in form at least to these affections.