ship of Florence in 1473, and that of the sack of Rome in
1527. But the literature which then flourished so luxuri-
antly was directly initiated by the great triumvirate of the
Dante fourteenth century — Dante, Petrarch, and Boc-
1265-1821 Q^QQiQ Dante is one of the few pre-eminent
spirits that refuse to be classed with any particular age or
movement. The materials he used were mediaeval, such
as he found ready to his hand — old themes, many of them,
well worn by generations of use. It is his own genius
which has ennobled them, and breathed into them eternal
freshness. The ^ Vita Nuova,' with all its marvellous
beauty and freshness, is but the culmination of a long
series of love poems, from the light amorous lyrics of
Troubadours and Trouv^res, to the mystical intense sonnets
of Guido Guinicelli, Dante's immediate predecessor. Love
in the * Vita Nuova ' is sublimed into a purely spiritual
emotion, raising the soul into the highest realms of trans-
cendental thought ; and yet, in its note of utter sorrow, it
finds an echo in every grief-stricken human heart. Again,
in the ' Divine Comedy,' written in order to glorify the
memory of his *Most Blessed One,' Dante takes the
popular forms of allegory and vision ; he takes the thoughts
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and teachings of Scholastic philosophers about the world
beyond, and he informs these elements with a spirit so
vast, so all-comprehensive, and yet so vitally and intensely
human, that long after the theories on which it is based
are disproved and thrown aside, the great poem stands
unshaken as the one epic of the soul of man. Dante had
nothing to do with the Revival of Learning. It is in. his
use of Italian as a medium that he is most nearly related
to the Renaissance. Partly from a patriotic desire to
promote the formation of a literary Italian, partly because
he perceived how eminently the sonorous melody of his
own tongue was suited for his purpose, he denied himself
the wider range of readers that Latin would have given
him, and used the dolce stil nuovo (or ' sweet new style *) of
Tuscany, thus raising the still uncertain half-accepted idiom
into a literary language.
The position of Petrarch is much more easily appre-
hended. He was, as we have seen, the first to direct
Petrarch, attention to the value of classic culture. It was
1804-1874 ^j^^ g^Qjj ^ expect much in his work that could
be called the fruit of such studies, but the poet had from
a child a wonderful instinct for style, and a delicate ear,
which enabled him to appreciate and imitate the qualities
that give strength and sweetness to the Latin of Cicero and
Virgil. By uniting these qualities to his own melodious
Italian, he produced lyric verse of such grace and dignity
that it caused the emulation and despair of many genera-
tions of imitators. Though bom seventeen years before
the death of Dante, he has in his look-out upon life none of
the mediaevalism or mysticism of the great master. His
sonnets in praise of Laura treat of love as the modem
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ITALIAN LITERATUKE 71
poets treat it, idealised indeed, but still the absorbing
human passion, with its mingling of good and ill, of joy
and sorrow. The poets who came after chose Petrarch as
their master in preference to Dante. Dante's material
was mediaeval ; his language was not the perfected Italian
of Petrarch ; and besides, the men of the Renaissance could
not scale the heights where the elder poet was at home.
It was only in art that the Italian Renaissance touched the
sublime. The keynote of the time was that which
Boccaccio sounded — a frank, unabashed enjoyment of the
things of this world; indifference or scepticism with
regard to all that lies beyond or above it. The only
enthusiasm left when the enthusiasm for antiquity died
away was the adoration of beauty, and it was by the
pictorial sense that poets and novellieri apprehended
beauty. They rejoiced in form, and colour, and deli-
cate detail, as if they had been painters, making matter
of small account in comparison with style.
When Dante's wonderful vision died away, Love was
left soaring in the empyrean — almost out of range of mortal
vision. If Petrarch brought it down nearer to human
Boccaccio, ways, it was Boccaccio who caught it by the
1818-1876 ^ings and made it the sport of the men in the
street. Boccaccio the bourgeois, son of a Florentine burgher
and a Parisian grisette, was bom in 1313. Gay, sensuous,
pleasure-loving, he takes life as he finds it, laughing at its
sins and follies, shrugging his shoulders at its goodness ;
but venerating its genius and worshipping its beauty. The
* Decameron,' the collection of tales by which he is best
known, has been called the Human Comedy, as the anti-
thesis of the ' Divine Comedy.' In it he laughs in the
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face of all the spectres that had chilled and awed a super-
stitious world. Idealising nothing, shocked at nothing, he
sets down all he sees around him : the horrors of the plague ;
the love-intrigues of disloyal wives and faithless monks ;
the comic buflfooneries of the shop and the street ; the joyous
gaieties of rich young men and maidens. Caring only for
the picturesque, he confuses Pagan and Christian mythology
with easy indiflference. He has little indeed in common
with the proud disdainful spirit of Dante, whose life he
wrote, and whom he endeavoured to interpret to his own
generation. If Petrarch found a host of imitators in the
Golden Age, widely though he was sundered from it by the
profoundness of his emotions, it was natural that Boccaccio
should exercise a still greater influence. His prose at its
best is very charming — luxuriant, picturesque, rhythmic.
It suflers from the defects of its qualities — overloading,
verbosity, circumlocution — faults which were inevitably
exaggerated by imitators, and which caused Boccaccio's
influence over later prose to be unfortunate.
After Boccaccio's death in 1375, there followed the lull
of a hundred years, during which all the intellect of the
nation was devoted to humanistic studies, and the course
of Italian literature ran in obscure channels. Even Dante
was forgotten in the worship of Virgil, Cicero and Plato.
But when the task was accomplished, and Italy was once
more in touch with her great past, the national tempera-
ment emerged just as it had shown itself in the fourteenth
century, only having exchanged some of the enthusiasm
and reverence of youth for the cynicism of middle life.
The first scholar of distinction to attempt a fusion
between classic culture and popular literature was Leo
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ITALIAN LITEHATUHE 78
Battista Alberti, who, in his ' Trattato della Famiglia,'
points out the folly of abandoning a tongue which was
Alberti ^^* ^^^ ^®® from anything distasteful, but had
c. 1405- the additional merit of being generally under-
stood. But the true native melody was really
awakened by Lorenzo de' Medici, who exerted his immense
influence as a statesman and a patron of art and letters, to
Lorenzo '^©store to its rightful position the language that
de' Medici, Dante and Petrarch had used. Lorenzo the
1448-1492 ,, .^
Magnificent was no great poet. His verses are
such as one would expect from a brilliant highly cultivated
man of the world. They are clever, racy, picturesque, and —
in accordance with the fashion — not a little obscene. And
yet here, in Lorenzo's poetry, the last place in the world,
perhaps, that we should have looked for it, we find touches
of a quite modern interest in the simple doings of the
peasants ; not the languishings and pipings of Arcadian
shepherds, but the homely love affairs of Tuscan lads, the
realities of their daily work, and the troubles that wind and
weather bring them ; and of a quite modern appreciation
of the subtler beauties of landscape, of the effects of colour
in earth and sky. The old poets sing of nothing but
courtly people and spring. Lorenzo sings of peasants
and of autumn.* His carnival songs show how well
this prince knew how to please and entice his people ;
their wild Bacchic choruses were on the lips of every
Florentine. But his songs were eclipsed by those of his
friend Politian, whose distinguished position as a Latin
poet has already been noticed. Politian was a true poet ;
the master of an exquisite style, formed by an artistic
^ See Eujphorion, by Vernon Lee, vol. i. p. 165.
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74 THE RENAISSANCE
blending of a wealth of classic memories with a genuine
love of nature. His themes were often trivial enough
Poiitian, (mock toumaments, the light vows of illicit love,
1454-1494 obsequious adulation of princely patrons) ; but the
men of his time, to whom form was everything, matter
nothing, were abundantly satisfied with the incomparable
sweetness of the music to which he set them. Here are a
couple of verses from one of his ballads, flung oflf, like most
of his Italian poems, as a recreation in the midst of his
classic studies :
I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day,
In a green garden in mid month of May,
Violets and lilies grew on every side
'Mid the green grass and young flowers wonderful.
Golden and white and red and azure-eyed ;
Towards which I stretched my hands, eager to pull
Plenty to make my fair curls beautiful.
To crown my rippling curls with garlands gay.
I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day.
In a green garden in mid month of May.
For when the full rose quits her tender sheath,
When she is sweetest and most fair to see.
Then is the time to place her in thy wreath,
Before her beauty and her freshness flee.
Gather ye therefore roses with great glee,
Sweet girls, or ere their perfume flee away.^
Lorenzo was a wise ruler, and his firm hand held the
quarrelsome cities in equilibrium. After his death Italy
entered on a period of the wildest disorganisation. In
1494 Charles VIII. of France, aspiring to the crown of
Naples, and invited by Italian princes in order to gratify
1 Translated by J. A. Symonds.
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ITALIAN LITERATURE 76
their petty animosities, overran the country, sometimes
opposed by a feeble resistance, sometimes hailed as the
saviour of the nation. Lorenzo's son and successor, Piero,
was expelled by the Florentines for his base betrayal of
their interests to the king. Charles was soon obliged by
home aJBTairs to return to France, having accomplished
nothing, but leaving behind him increased disorder and
new dissensions. Other Powers followed his example, and
during the next fifty years Italy was constantly trampled
under foot by foreign armies, coming, as often as not, at the
invitation of some Pope or Prince. Social life was no less
disorganised. In the confusion, private as well as public
morality became a dead letter. The election of a Borgia
to the Papacy was a master-stroke of cynicism. Society
was permeated with unimaginable wickedness. * Italy,'
said Lorenzo the Magnificent, * is a sink of all the vices.'
And yet this very time of corruption and disorder was the
* Golden Age ' of Italian literature. Poets and novelists
poured forth songs and stories, in which we look in vain
for any lament for the discord by which their unhappy
country was being rent in pieces. Devoid of a sense of
national unity, and each trusting to the power of intrigue
to save his own city, they gave themselves up to the
jovial indifference, the absorption in sensuous beauty, which
they had inherited from Boccaccio.
Narrative poetry is the first branch of this literature
which claims our attention. There are three principal
mediaeval sources from which poets have drawn their stores
of chivalric romance. These are the legends of Arthur,
which have been the favourite with Northern poets ; of
Amadis of Oaul, which attracted the Spanish and Portu-
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guese ; while the imagination of the Italians was held by
the stories of Charlemagne and his paladins. It was the
Chanson de Boland or Orlando, one of Chariemagne's
knights, which furnished material to Pulci, Boiardo, and
Boiardo, c. Ariosto. Of these Boiardo was the only one who
1484-1494 treated the legends at all in the spirit of the
northern romancists. In his * Orlando Innamorato ' we
find something of the mystery and glamour that surrounds
the Teutonic epics — something of their high intention
mingled with his own Italian joyousness. But Boiardo's
poem had little influence on his generation, and was soon
Pulci, superseded. Pulci's light, ironic treatment was
1482-1484 mQre in accord with the spirit of his time. It
must be remembered that Chivalry, whence these legends
arose, was never quite acclimatised in Italy, where the
Feudal system, of which it was the flower, had not taken
root. The salt of Italian life lay in her bourgeoisie, as may
be seen by a glance at the parentage of the great Floren-
tines. Neither were the Italians a fighting race. The
constant warfare between city and city was waged by hired
condottieriy who, entrenched in their complicated armour,
passed from one bloodless battle-field to another. The
tales of chivalry never gripped their imaginations and
stirred their hearts as they have done in our country. Sir
Philip Sidney ' never heard the old song of Percie and
Douglas that he found not his heart stirred more than
with a trumpet ' ; but the Italian poets took the stories
from the people, turning them over and playing with them
with sceptical amusement ; using them merely as a ground-
work for a thousand fantastic, but incomparably ingenious
and artistic, embellishments, Pulci's * Morgante Maggiore '
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ITALIAN LITERATURE 77
was recited canto by canto at Lorenzo's table for the enter-
tainment of his guests, and it was written to suit the taste
of this typical Renaissance audience — critical, freethinking,
quick to appreciate a classical allusion, highly sensitive
to beauty of form, but not readily moved to high en-
thusiasms. X^
In Ariosto we find the same spirit united to higher
poetical power. Ariosto was the pre-eminent poet of the
^j^gtQ Italian Renaissance. In him, as in Shakespeare
1474-1588 and Rabelais, are reflected in their highest develop-
ment all the characteristics of his race and time. Though
possessing rare genius, he sought no subject worthy to in-
spire it, but was content to take up Boiardo's theme where
the elder poet had dropped it. He was not a great epic
or dramatic poet, like Virgil or Shakespeare ; he could not,
like Dante, sweep the whole gamut of human emotions ; he
was never whirled away in a tornado of passion like Mar-
lowe ; he was incapable of the moral earnestness of Spenser ;
but such perfection as he chose to aim at he fully attained.
* Art for Art's sake ' was the guiding principle of this
bizarre age, the one strong enthusiasm that gave it great-
ness. To paint pictures in words that could vie with the
paintings of Raphael and Titian ; to enrich a perfect out-
line with minute and exquisite detail, with wealth of glowing
colour — this was the aim of the Renaissance poets, and here
Ariosto was supreme. The ' Orlando Purioso ' was pub-
lished in 1515. Its lack of passion and depth prevent it
from ranking among true epics ; but its satire, its vivid
delineation of character, no less than its sensuous charm and
its perfect form, single it out as the greatest poem of the
period. Ariosto was not great enough to escape the two
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vices that disfigure all the literature of his time, licentious-
ness and servile flattery. There were very few literary
men who were not the parasites of some prince or eccle-
siastical dignitary from whom they made a living either by
gross adulation or by blackmail. Thus Ariosto celebrates
the praises of patrons whom he hated and despised,
fawning on them for gold in verses of undying beauty.
Pietro Aretino usually preferred the method of black-
mail.
This extraordinary man, who began life as a flunkey,
and was dismissed for stealing, raised himself, by sheer
force of colossal impudence, to a position whence he could
Aretino ^®^ tribute on kings and nobles, sometimes
1492-1557 threatening them with his scurrilous pen, some-
times flattering them in terms that were themselves an
insult. In him were summed up all the vices of his time.
If in Ariosto's verse we see the ' enchantments of Circe,'
Aretino gloats over the brute-like forms that wallow at her
feet. Keeping a harem in his palace at Venice, and pouring
out verses of inconceivable obscenity, he poses as the
relentless denouncer of vice and the ' scourge of princes.*
But the man was extraordinarily clever, unscrupulous and
unconventional, and — he was the fashion. The greatest
personages of his day vied with one another in showering
gifts and honours upon him, in spite of his shameless
and open bragging of his power of extorting such things.
Noble and virtuous ladies, such as Vittoria Colonna,
the friend of Michael Angelo, did not disdain to corre-
spond with him. His works consist of comedies, bur-
lesques, epistles, and religious romances. In style he did
good service for his native tongue. Trading upon his
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ITALIAN LITEKATURE 79
own ignorance, he set at defiance all the rules of the purists,
whether they were slaves to the classics or to the i/recentisti^
and wrote in vigorous, homely, racy Italian. As he says,
very pertinently, ' It is far better to drink out of one's
own wooden cup than another's golden goblet ; and a
man makes a finer show in his own rags than in stolen
velvets/
Aretino's daring unconventionality gave piquancy to
his writings ; but the prevailing taste was in favour of a
^ close imitation of fourteenth-century authors.
Petrarch- The innumerable verse writers of the time
gathered themselves into academies where they
minutely studied the styles of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and
tried to reproduce them with the aid of lists of words and
phrases used by their models. Italian poetry, which was
so abundantly (too abundantly) poured out, was warped
and cramped by being forced into the Petrarchistic mould ;
for Petrarch's age had passed away, and his chivalrous,
serious temper was almost as obsolete as many of his
words. The most distinguished of the Petrarchisti was
Bembo Bembo, author of the 'Asolani,' whose equally
1470-1547 devoted imitation of Cicero in his Latin writings
we have already noticed. This conventional elegance was
aimed at even by the writers of the ' Capitoli,' a peculiarly
degraded species of burlesque verse which was immensely
popular. It was invented by Bemi, more honourably
Bemi c. known as the author of a rifacimento or revised
1497-1585 version of Boiardo's * Orlando Innamorato.'
The influence of Boccaccio was chiefly felt by the
novelists, for it was from the * Decameron ' that the novella
was derived. It is a significant mark of the shallowness
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80 THE RENAISSANCE
of this brilliant period that the most popular of all forms
of literature should have been these collections of light
tj^Q brief tales. For the novelle did not, like the
Noveiiieri modem novel, make any demand upon the author's
capacity for delineating character or constructing a plot.
Short enough to be recited aloud, they are mere anecdotes
of every-day incidents in middle-class lives : love-intrigues,
practical jokes, misdoings of clerical hypocrites — wittily
and gracefully told, enriched here and there with gems of
description or an appeal to the emotions. They were thus
admirably suited for a society which only asked to be
amused, while they ai^e of use to the historian as vivid little
pictures of contemporary manners. The form of the
'Decameron' was usually followed. Boccaccio supposes
his stories to have been told by a company of young men
and maidens who had taken refuge in a garden outside
Florence during the plague. This brigataj or band of ladies
and their cavaliers, who have been thrown by some accident
upon their own resources, appears in most collections —
French and Spanish as well as Italian ; and strange indeed
are some of the stories which are put into the mouths of
high-bom maidens. The best known of the host oi noveiiieri
who thronged Italy during the first half of the sixteenth
BandeUo c. ceutury is Bandello. The fact that he was a
1480-1562 bishop did not deter him from penning, in pure
amusement, the most scurrilous stories of immorality among
bishops, priests and monks. No one minded. The moral
sense was dead in Italy. No vice was too abominable to
be regarded with anything but humorous tolerance.
No department of light literature had a more wide-
spread influence than that of pastoral romance. This
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ITALIAN LITERATURE 81
was a revival of the old bucolic ideal, with a chivalresque
element added. Being wholly unreal, it gave full scope for
the literary instinct and the pictorial imagination of the
Italians. In the land of Arcadia anything might happen :
shepherds discourse philosophy and marry princesses. Pan,
Apollo, and Diana are as much at home as the errant
knight and the distressed damsel. It was Jacopo
zaro,i458- Sannazaro who first mapped out and named this
land of primitive innocence, in his delightful
romance ' Arcadia ' (published 1504). This book, which
contains some of the most exquisite pieces of word painting
even of that age, was received with enthusiasm both in
and out of Italy, and passed through sixty editions before
the end of the century. It consists of twelve pieces of prose,
each introducing an eclogue. In England it was imitated
by Sidney in his work of the same name, and it inspired
Spenser's ' Shepherd's Calendar.' In France and Spain it
produced many romances on the same model, the most
famous of which is ^ The Diana Enamorada ' of Montemayor.
In Italy itself it gave birth to the pastoral drama, from
which, by a natural development, sprang the opera, the
glory of the Italian stage.
But the literature of the Renaissance does not consist
entirely of the picturesque, imaginative, over-sweet varieties
which we have been discussing : it has also a positive,
critical side ; and this manifested itself in the new attention
that was paid to political literature. The faculty of writing
history was among the best of the gifts of the Renaissance.
The III the Middle Ages it had ceased to exist. The
historians chronicles and annals of the old writers are of
the most meagre and bald description, a mere record of
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reigns and battles. They had no conception of the scien-
tific method by which the historian selects and arranges his
facts, looking for their inner significance, tracing eflect to
cause, throwing himself back into the past to make it live
again, or disengaging himself from his own times to view
them in perspective. It was in Florence that this faculty
was first developed among modems. The Florentines of this
period had, by a constant succession of intrigues, experi-
ments, and changes in the form of government, arrived at
a condition of political self-consciousness which, combined
with their > critical analysing spirit, formed the necessary
atmosphere for history writing. The father of Florentine
history was Villani, the contemporary of Dante.
He was the first to perceive that the conditions
of every-day life among a people are of more significance
than the proceedings of its government ; the first to give
facts and statistics illustrating those conditions. He, with
his brother and son, brought the chronicle down to the
year 1365. But it was during the eventful period of the
life of Florence that followed the expulsion of the Medici
(1494-1537) that written history was produced in its
perfection. The events of that interesting time are
chronicled by no less than eight contemporary historians,
all possessing in a greater or less degree the discriminating
analytical power. Of these the most eminent were Machi-
avelli and Guicciardini, both of whom were historians of
the highest order.
Nicholas Machiavelli was born in 1469. During the
exile of the Medici from Florence he occupied the post of
Secretary to the Republic. On their return in 1512,
he was obliged to leave the city and return to his farm in
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ITALIAN LITERATURE 83
the country. It was during his banishment there that
he wrote * The Prince,' the book in which he lays down
Machia- ^J^^se principles of cold, relentless policy, of un-