documents. Only at the end of the fourteenth century was
the triumph of paper decided when printing, beginning its
career, needed a substance of moderate price to receive the
impression of characters.
Italy eagerly took possession of the new invention. In
1465 there were printers at Rome, in 1469 at
of R ietters an Venice and Milan. Nowhere else was rever-
ence for antiquity so ardent and the search
after manuscripts so earnest. Italy seemed desirous of
14 REVOLUTION IN INTERESTS. [BOOK III.
escaping from the spectacle of her vices and her degrada-
tion by living again in the ancient times whose remains she
piously disinterred. In every city schools were restored and
libraries founded. At Rome Pope Eugenius IV. re-estab-
lished the Roman University, and Nicholas V. sent learned
men everywhere for the discovery of manuscripts; he had
translations made of the Greek historians and of many fathers
of the Church, and he founded the library of the Vatican.
At Naples Alphonso the Magnanimous protected Lorenzo
Valla and Pontano, the restorers of the Neapolitan Academy,
and he demanded nothing from Lorenzo de Medici as price
of reconciliation save a manuscript of Titus Livius. At
Florence and Pisa, Cosmo and Lorenzo the Magnificent
commenced the Mediceo-Laurentian library, afterward so
famous, and offered an honorable asylum to the learned men
of all lands. Cosmo, the founder of the Academia della
Crusca, charged Marcilo Ficino with translating and ex-
plaining Plato, and with commencing against Aristotle, the
philosophical oracle of the Middle Ages, a war which was
to aid in the enfranchisement of the human mind. Genoa,
called La Superba because of its marble palaces, remained
under foreign domination and outside this grand movement,
but Venice participated in it. Not far from the ancient Uni-
versity of Padua, rose in 1470 that of Venice.
The descendants of the turbulent barons were changing
their fortresses into cabinets of study and forgetting their
arms for their books. Rome saw the lord Pic de la Miradola,
having become paladin of science, sustain against every
comer theses in all languages and upon all subjects. The
somber Ludovico il Moro himself at Milan protected artists
and learned men. He restored the University of Pavia, he
encouraged the first appearance of Bramante; the great
Leonardo da Vinci, whom he had appointed director of the
Academy of Painting and Architecture of Milan, sculptured
for him an equestrian statue, which the soldiers of Louis
XII. broke in pieces; he also painted in one of the convents
of the city that " Holy Supper" which is, or rather was, his
masterpiece. The secondary states obeyed the general im-
pulse: the Gonzagas at Mantua, the Montefeltris at Urbino,
and especially the illustrious house of Este at Ferrara. But
among all these glorious names we must reserve a special
place for those of Julius II. and of Leo X. The first in
the midst of his negotiations and wars found time to attract
CHAP. XII.] THE RENAISSANCE. 14!
and retain at his court a host of men eminent by their eru-
dition, their knowledge of the beautiful, and their genius.
One thing suffices for his renown: he commenced St. Peter's
at Rome, and charged Michael Angelo with the erection of
the cupola. "Belles lettres," said he, "are silver to plebeians,
gold to nobles, and diamonds to princes." The day when
the Laocoon was found in the baths of Titus he had the bells
rung in all the churches of Rome. The second, sprung from
the family of the Medici, was much more prince of letters and
artists than pontiff of Christians. "To favor the progress of
letters," said he himself, "is an important part of pontifical
duties." Raphael painted for him the frescoes of the
Vatican, Michael Angelo those of the Sixtine Chapel, and
he paid five hundred sequins for a manuscript copy of the
first five books of Titus Livius, which he hastened to have
printed. Sometimes his name is given to this century; it is
a flattery, but not an injustice.
This revival of taste for ancient erudition was among the
Latins unhappily not the revival of masculine virtues and the
strong thoughts of Rome and Athens. Thus Italian litera-
ture, more learned in the sixteenth than in the fourteenth
century, was less original and less virile. The authority of
Aristotle was thrown off indeed, thanks to the perusal of his
eternal rival Plato, whose works were edited in 1513 at Venice
by the Aldi, but nothing whatsoever in philosophy was
created. From ancient historians was borrowed the art of
grouping facts and of interrupting the narrative by conven-
tional discourses; but Italy formed neither a Herodotus nor
a Tacitus. Geography was discovered in Ptolemy, botany
in Dioscorides, medicine in Galen and Hippocrates, but no
contribution was made to these sciences. In a word, the
depths of Italian nationality and genius gave birth to noth-
ing as in the century of Dante.
Without speaking of Sannazzro and his "Piscatory Idyls,"
of Vida, who sung of chess and silkworms in so beautiful
Latin before writing his Christiad, how could one find any
personal inspiration, however small, in the Ciceronian
Bembo, that favorite cardinal of Leo X. who did not listen to
sermons because their language was so poor, and who swore
per deos immortalis, who called the Virgin Dea Lauretana,
and believed that, man being henceforth unable to create
anything new in literature, there was hereafter only one thing
to do : in Latin to imitate Cicero, in Italian to imitate
I4 2 REVOLUTION IN INTERESTS. [BOOK III.
Petrarch. Sadoleto, at least to this reverence for Cicero,
added that of virtue and a spirit of toleration which makes
his memory more fragrant to us even than do his beautiful
Latin letters.
At this epoch Italy had only two great writers, Ariosto
and Machiavelli, and a celebrated historian, Guicciardini ; a
number of stylish artists and not a single work of powerful
originality, because the imagination and the mind were never
at the service of grand ideas or of elevated and pure senti-
ments. The " Orlando Furioso " was published in 1515, the
very year when, at the expense of Italy, Francis I. gained the
battle of Marignano. Count Boiardo had recently written
the "Orlando Inamorato," where the details of chivalrous
poems were still gravely taken in a serious fashion. Ariosto
gave the antithesis. His semi-heroic, semi-comic poem,
contradictory of history and of moral truth, is a masterpiece
of imagination and grace, but in truth when one thinks in
the midst of what circumstances Ariosto imagined all his
fairy scenes one is tempted to repeat the words of the Car-
dinal of Este, "Ah! Master Ariosto, where have you found
so much fiddle faddle?" An incident paints the spirit of the
time: Bembo, the friend of Ariosto, wished him to write his
poem in Latin verse. "I prefer," replied the poet, "to be
the first among the Tuscan poets rather than hardly the
second among the Latins." And he was right: this "riddle
faddle" has survived by that which makes books survive by
its style.
It is to be noted as characteristic of morals rather than of
literature that Boccaccio had had a numerous progeny of
story-tellers more licentious than himself. This immorality
gained possession of the theater and there increased, for the
eyes saw what the ears alone heard. The first two modern
comedies, the " Calandra" of Cardinal Bibbiena and the
"Mandragola" of Machiavelli, which were represented at
the pontifical court, are sullied by those obscenities which one
still finds in the epic of Ariosto; and Aretino was by Julius
II. made Knight of St. Peter while waiting to be appointed
cardinal. The characters the most strongly tempered gave
themselves up to indulgence. Thus Machiavelli first com-
promised his vigorous mind by the most trivial productions,
and when personal suffering had awakened in his soul the
sentiment of the sorrows of his country he began his political
works by " II Principe," a book which one would take as an
CHAP. XII.] THE RENAISSANCE. 143
act of despair. He there reduces to a theory, in a style as cold
and direct as the theory, that policy of egotism and of cruelty
which made of perfidy an art, of assassination a means, and
which immolated to the end proposed all ideas of integrity.
Let us condemn this pernicious book "which taught to rifle
the rich of their goods, the poor of their honor, all of their
liberty," but let us recognize that it accuses the century
for which it was composed as well as the hand which wrote
it: century of Leo X., who gave a safe conduct to a cardinal
and had him slain on his arrival; of Caesar Borgia, who
deceived and poisoned the lords of the Romagna; of Ferdi-
nand of Naples, who allured his nobles to a festival and there
butchered them; of Ferdinand the Catholic, who counted
it an honor to be perfidious ; of those, finally, who organized
the abominable treachery of St. Bartholomew. Success was
everything, morality nothing. Montaigne himself found vice
necessary. "The public welfare," he dares to say, "re-
quires treason, falsehood, and massacre." And he is not
without esteem for "those citizens, more vigorous and less
timid, who sacrifice their honor and their conscience as the
ancients sacrificed their life for the salvation of their
country."
Behold the world as it was when issuing from the Middle
Ages, and which we have had to purify!
At this epoch only three countries thought and produced:
Italy was the first, France the second, then came Germany.
As to England, she was cicatrizing the wounds of the War of
the Roses ; Spain had her eyes turned less upon antiquity
than toward America and its mines, toward Italy and the
Netherlands with their rich cities and their fertile fields
where the bands of Charles V. so loved to war and pillage.
The French language had simplicity and forcible expres-
sions, but it lacked amplitude, elevation, clearness. If
imagination, good sense, Gallic gayety, sparkled in its writ-
ings of prose and verse, triviality, diffuseness, bad taste,
disfigured its best books. But antiquity once refound, the
writers drank at this fruitful source, and the genius of
France, tempering itself better than that of any other mod-
ern nation, acquired that high and national tone, that de-
corum, that limpid transparency, which have won for it the
pacific empire of Europe.
Francis I., who has been called the Father of Letters, did
not create the movement, which was produced of itself, but
144 REVOLUTION IN INTERESTS. [BOOK III.
it was aided by him. The venerable University of Paris with
its faculty of theology, the Sorbonne, could not change its
spirit and method. On the model of the Italian academies
and by the advice of the learned Bude the king founded in
1530 an establishment entirely for the laity, the College of
the Three Languages, or the College of France. Hebrew,
Greek, Latin, medicine, mathematics, everything that was
new or that carved out for itself new ways, was there taught
gratuitously. The Hebraist Vatable, the Hellenist Danes,
the mathematician and orientalist Postel, the learned Tur-
nebe, and the fluent Lambin saw flocking to their able teach-
ing those pupils to whom the university dealt out knowledge
so parsimoniously. Francis I. did not create the royal print-
ing house, which dates only from Louis XIII. in 1640, but
he caused to be engraved and cast, according to the beautiful
forms of the Venetian types of Aldus Manutius, the characters
of Garamond, who by his order intrusted them to the most
distinguished printers, called royal printers to the Estienne,
for example, that they might serve in the beautiful editions
published by these private establishments. He bought
manuscripts of ancient authors in Italy, Greece, and Asia
to increase the growing wealth of the royal library, and he
had a great number edited.
French erudition then began those great works which
placed it during three centuries at the head of European
science. With Cujas, Pithou, Denis Godefroy, Doneau,
Dumoulin, jurisprudence shone with a splendor which was
equaled nowhere else and which has not been eclipsed. In
learned letters Danes, Postel, the great Ciceronian Dolet,
burned alive at thirty-six, the first Hellenist of Europe,
Bude, Lefebvre d'Etaples, the Estiennes, dynasty of
printers, more able than the best scholars of the time, pub-
lished a multitude of learned books which revealed the twin
antiquities, sacred and profane, from which our civilization
has sprung.
In letters properly so called one can distinguish in this
century, as it were, four groups of writers: at its commence-
ment Marot and his elegant badinage, Rabelais with his
wine-seasoned and audacious fancy ; at its close Mathurin
Regnier, the satirist, all three heirs of the old Gallic genius;
at the middle Ronsard and the pleiad of poets "whose
muse in French spoke Greek and Latin"; beside these
during the religious wars Amyot and Montaigne, fervent
CHAP. XII.] THE RENAISSANCE. 145
worshipers of antiquity, but who, unlike the school of Ron-
sard, did not sacrifice to it the national language; finally, be-
tween the sixteenth century which was finishing and the
seventeenth which began, Malherbe, the poet of Henry IV.,
who regulated like his master the unrestrained movement of
the preceding age, and prepared the calm grandeur of that
which was to follow. In all, two books which have remained
and which the most delicate still read, the "Essais" and "Gar-
gantua, " without reckoning many pages of Amyot, many
pieces of Malherbe, many verses of Mathuriri Regnier, and
the entire "Satire Menippee." Calvin and d'Aubigne have
a place apart, the latter for his "Memoires" and his "Trag-
iques," the former for his "Christian Institutes."
Germany did not yet speak its own language. At least it
is in Latin that its men of learning, even of intellect, like
Ulrich von Hutten, wrote. The most illustrious was then
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467-1536). He had this pecul-
iarity that, in the midst of the effervescence of the sixteenth
century which so radically affected character, he was a
cold and sarcastic man who a century later would have been
a skeptic if he were not one already, and who sacrificed
nothing to those ideas to which then others sacrificed all. A
choir boy when nine years old; a canon at seventeen, after-
ward canceling his vows; a student at the college of Mon-
taigu at Paris, where to gain his livelihood he gave lessons to
an English gentleman, who afterward attracted him to Eng-
land; shortly after at Boulogne, where he received the cap of
doctor in theology; at Venice with Aldus Manutius; then
again in England at the house of Chancellor Thomas More;
sought after by the sovereigns Henry VIII., Leo X., Adrian
VI., Francis I., who in vain had him tendered by the learned
Bude the direction of the recently founded College of France,
and in the midst of this court of monarchs preserving an
independence skillfully adjusted to alarm no one such was
Erasmus. "Literary people, " said he, "resemble the great
figured tapestries of Flanders, which produce effect only-
when seen from a distance." From this sort of intellect and
of wit he has been called the Voltaire of his time. No writer
in fact exercised at this epoch a more extended empire. His
epigrams against the ignorance, the libertinage, and the glut-
tony of the monks and his attacks against indulgences,
seemed to indicate him to the Reformers as one of them-
selves. But he was too prudent to engage in so ardent a
1 46 RE VOL UTION IN IN TERES TS. [BOOK III.
fight. "Luther," said he, "has given us a salutary doctrine
and very excellent counsels; would that he had not destroyed
their effect by unpardonable faults. But even if there were
nothing to criticise in his writings I should never have felt
disposed to die for the truth. All men have not received
the courage necessary for martyrdom; had I been put to
the test I exceedingly fear I should have done like St.
Peter." He remained therefore outside the party of "sedi-
tious truths," entirely devoted to his favorite authors, a lover
of pure language and of beautiful Latin. ' 'Erasmus," cried
Luther, "is Erasmus and by no means anything else." His
principal works are the "Praise of Folly," his "Adages," and
his "Colloquies, " satirical dialogues in the style of Lucian
where the clergy and the monks have especially to suffer. But
over the organization of studies he had a predominant influ-
ence. It is he who caused to triumph the present system
of pronunciation of ancient Greek, and who banished from
instruction the clumsy and barbarous forms of scholasticism.
He attacked the new pedants no less than the ancient; in his
"Ciceronianus" he turns into derision those purists so scru-
pulous for the expression and so careless of the thought. In
1516 he had published the first Greek edition of the New
Testament.
Another personage was claimed by the Netherlands, the
Spaniard Vives, who was a professor at Louvain and Bruges,
and who was almost peer of Bude and Erasmus.
In Germany the literature of the Middle Ages continued
in the Meistersanger schools which still abounded in Swa-
bia and Franconia. At Nuremberg in 1558 there were no
less than 250 mastersingers who met in the choir of the
cathedral after divine service. The most celebrated was
the cobbler Hans Sachs, who wrote 10,840 verses. The
"Narrenschiff, " or "Bark of Fools," by the Strasburger
Sebastian Brandt, and its continuation by one of his com-
patriots, Thomas Murner, had an immense and somewhat
lasting success, which, however, could not extend beyond the
sixteenth century. Despite the fecundity of Hans Sachs
this popular literature was dying. Reverence on the other
hand for learned letters was rapidly extending, and the
Renaissance counted a large number of German Ciceronians:
Reuchlin, who introduced into France the study of Hebrew,
and who was the master of Melancthon; Hegius, the mas-
ter of Erasmus; Celtes; Beatus Rhenanus; Dalberg, who
CHAP. XII.] THE RENAISSANCE. 14?
founded at Heidelberg the first German academy, and a
library which was the finest in Europe until the Thirty
Years' War; Hutten, the author of'Litterge Obscurorum
Virorum" and poet laureate of the Emperor Maximilian;
and a crowd of others, in fine, who would have made Ger-
many enter under full sail into the new current of modern
civilization if one of them, Luther, had not let loose upon
his country the theological tempests which suddenly arrested
the intellectual outburst, and brought about what historians
have called the iron age of German literature.
Far inferior to the ancients in letters, the Italy of the six-
teenth century equaled or surpassed them in the arts. The
pointed architecture had no longer the severe
of R a e rts' SSance grandeur characterizing that of the thirteenth
century. In the fifteenth reigned the flam-
boyant Gothic where architectural lines were wrested in
countless windings. It was dazzling; it was neither simple
nor grand. In France the effort was made to reject the
ancient style; they distorted it, but introduced nothing else.
Italy, where pointed architecture never reached the perfection
which it attained beyond the mountains, early demanded
architectural inspiration from antiquity; at the close of the
fourteenth century Christian temples were erected for
which they endeavored to borrow from the Greeks the
exquisite purity of their lines and from the artists of the
Middle Ages the religious expression which they had so
well attained.
The Florentine Brunelleschi was the real creator of this
new architecture. He drew the ancient Greek orders from
oblivion; for the pointed substituted the rounded arch, and
for the tortured lines of the flowery Gothic the straight line
of Greek temples or the elegant curve of the Roman dome.
His cupola of the cathedral of Florence precedes by a cen-
tury that of Michael Angelo at St. Peter's in Rome, and is
fully as grand. In face of the elaborate ornamentation of
the Venetian artists his pupils preserved in the new system
the stern sobriety which Brunelleschi had given it. But it
was reserved to Bramante, the uncle of Raphael, to carry the
architecture of the Renaissance to the utmost degree of per-
fection. The palace of the Chancery and the court of the
Vatican are models. It was Bramante whom Pope Julius
II. intrusted with designing the plan of St. Peter's at
Rome. Arrested by death, he had as successor Michael
I4 8 REVOLUTION IN INTERESTS. [BOOK III.
Angelo, who borrowed from him the idea of the celebrated
cupola.
In the thirteenth century Nicolas and Andrea of Pisa
had thrown off the yoke of conventional art and of Byzantine
tradition, and had created Italian sculpture. The pulpits of
Pisa and Siena and the tomb of St. Dominic at Bologna
are examples. Lorenzo Ghiberti in the fifteenth (1378-
1455) placed himself in the first rank by his two doors of the
Baptistery of Florence, "worthy of being placed at the en-
trance of paradise," said Michael Angelo. Beside this great
artist, Donatello (1383-1466), less elevated in style, more
energetic in expression, founded the Florentine school of
sculpture, of which Andrea Verocchio (1432-88) and Alex-
andro Leopardi were the illustrious representatives, and
which has as its principal characteristic the exact and studied
imitation of the model, or naturalism, as it has been called.
The masterpiece of Donatello was a statue of St. Mark of
such fidelity that after having long gazed upon it Michael
Angelo exclaimed, "Mark, why dost thou not speak to me?"
Their contemporary, Luca della Robbia, almost all of whose
works are made of a varnished baked earth which resembles
pottery, preserved the simplicity of the sculpture of the
Middle Ages while giving it an almost antique purity of style.
Ornamental sculpture, chained to tradition before the
Renaissance, became with Lombardi and Benvenuto Cellini,
the famous goldsmith, an admirable art at the same time as a
flourishing industry.
The superiority of the Italians over the Greeks in sculp-
ture and architecture is easily contestable; not so in painting.
In the thirteenth century Giotto (1276-1366), friend of
Dante and of Cimabue, last painter of the Byzantine school,
created a new system. More truth in expression and dra-
pery, more correctness and exactness in the design, a begin-
ning of form, passion, and grandeur united to grace in the
composition such are the qualities which during a century
made of Giotto the greatest painter of Italy.
Giottesque painting was dominant until the early years
of the fifteenth century. At this period two important
modifications in material processes brought about a veritable
revolution in the practice even of the art. On the one hand
principles of linear perspective, taught by Ucello (died 1472),
were applied; to this the mathematician Manetti contrib-
uted; on the other hand the brothers Van Eyck of Bruges
CHAP. XII.] THE RENAISSANCE. 149
(1370-1450) perfected the processes of painting in oil to such
a degree that painting in distemper was abandoned, and
fresco was employed only to decorate the walls of great
monuments.
Italy counted then three great schools: the naturalist
school of Florence, founded by Masaccio (1402-43), who
finally ceased to observe typical characters or Byzantine
formalism, which Giotto still preserved; the Umbrian
school, religious and spiritualistic, which had at its head
Perugino; finally, the colorist school at Venice, whose chief
was Giovanni Bellini.
At this moment when study of nature and knowledge of
design had already made great progress, but when it was still
left to unite grace to the design, harmony to color, and
especially the beau-ideal to the truth of forms, there ap-
peared six men of extraordinary genius, the greatest painters
of Italy and of all time Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo,
Correggio, Giorgione, Titian, and the divine Raphael.
If the creative power of the Renaissance and of the six-
teenth century existed anywhere it was in Michael Angelo
Buonarotti. He was born in 1474 near Arezzo of an illustri-
ous patrician family, and showed from boyhood so strong an
inclination for drawing that it triumphed over the aristocratic
prejudices of his family. The men of that age embraced
everything. He was an incomparable sculptor, a great archi-
tect, though stormy and incorrect, a painter of the first rank,
an eminent engineer; charged with fortifying besieged Flor-
ence, he defended it twelve months. He was well versed
in anatomy, and with his artist hand dissecting the dead,
acquired that profound acquaintance with the internal struc-