THE ACADEMY, JULY 31, 1875
Renaissance in Italy; the Age of the Despots. By John Addington Symonds. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1875.)
THIS remarkable volume is the first of three parts of a projected work which in its complete form will present a more comprehensive treatment of its subject than has yet been offered to English readers. The aim of the writer is to weave together the various threads of a very complex period of European life, and to set the art and literature of Italy on that background of general social and historical conditions to which they belong, and apart from which they cannot really be understood, according to the received and well-known belief of most modern writers. Mr. Symonds brings to this task the results of wide, varied, and often curious reading, which he has by no means allowed to overburden his work, and also a familiar knowledge, attested by his former eloquent volume of Studies on the Greek Poets, of that classical world to which the Renaissance was confessedly in some degree a return.
It is that background of general history, a background upon which the artists and men of letters are moving figures not to be wholly detached from it, that this volume presents. By the “Age of the Despots” in Italian history the writer understands’ the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the twelfth and the thirteenth are the “Age of the Free Burghs,” and the sixteenth and seventeenth the “Age of Foreign Enslavement.” The chief phenomenon with which the “Age of the Despots” is occupied is that “free emergence of personal passions, personal aims,” which all its peculiar conditions tended to encourage, of personalities all alike so energetic and free, though otherwise so unlike as Francesco Sforza, Savonarola, Machiavelli, and Alexander VI., all “despots” in their way. Benvenuto Cellini and Cesare Borgia are seen to be products of the same general conditions as the “good Duke of Urbino” and Savonarola. Such a book necessarily presents strong lights and shades. The first chapter groups together some wide generalisations on the subject of the work as a whole, on the Renaissance as an “emancipation,” which, though perhaps not wholly novel, are very strikingly put, and through the whole of which we feel the breath of an ardent love of liberty. In the next two chapters the writer discusses the age of the earlier despots, the founders of the great princely families, going over ground well traversed indeed, but with a freshness of interest which is the mark of original assimilation, with some parallels and contrasts between Italy and ancient Greece, and led always by the light of modern ideas. One by one all those highly-coloured pieces of humanity are displayed before us, those stories which have made Italian history the fountain-head of tragic motives, all the hard, bright, fiery things, the colour of which M. Taine has in some degree caught in his writings on the philosophy of Italian art, and still more completely Stendhal, in his essay on Italian art and his Chroniques Italiennes. You can hardly open Mr. Symonds’s volume without lighting on some incident or trait of character in which man’s elementary power to be, to think, to do, shows forth emphatically, and the writer has not chosen to soften down these characteristics; there is even noticeable a certain cynicism in his attitude towards his subject, expressed well enough in the words which lie quotes from Machiavelli as the motto of his title-page: Di questi adunque oziosi principe e di queste vilissime armi, sara piena la mia istoria.
That sense of the complex interdependence on each other of all historical conditions is one of the guiding lights of the modern historical method, and Mr. Symonds abundantly shows how thoroughly he has mastered this idea. And yet on the same background, out of the same general conditions, products emerge, the unlikeness of which is the chief thing to be noticed. The spirit of the Renaissance proper, of the Renaissance as a humanistic movement, on which it may be said this volume does not profess to touch, is as unlike the spirit of Alexander VI. as it is unlike that of Savonarola. Alexander VI. has more in common with Ezzelino da Romano, that fanatical hater of human life in the middle age, than with Tasso or Lionardo. The Renaissance is an assertion of liberty indeed, but of liberty to see and feel those things the seeing and feeling of which generate not the “barbarous ferocity of temper, the savage and coarse tastes” of the Renaissance Popes, but a sympathy with life everywhere, even in its weakest and most frail manifestations. Sympathy, appreciation, a sense of latent claims in things which even ordinary good men pass rudely by — these on the whole are the characteristic traits of its artists, though it may be still true that “aesthetic propriety, rather than strict conceptions of duty, ruled the conduct even of the best;” and at least they never “destroyed pity in their souls. “Such softer touches Mr. Symonds gives us in the “good duke Frederic of Urbino,” his real courtesy and height of character, though under many difficulties; in his admirable criticisms on the Cortegiano of Castiglione; and again in his account of Agnolo Pandolfini’s Treatise on the Family, the charm of which has by no means evaporated in Mr. Symonds’s analysis; above all, in the beautiful description, in the seventh chapter, of the last days of Pietro Boscoli the tyrannicide, a striking instance of “the combination of deeply-rooted and almost infantine piety with antique heroism,” coming near as it happened, in his friend Luca della Robbia the younger, to an artist who could understand the aesthetic value of the incidents he has related.
I quote a very different episode as a specimen of Mr. Symonds’s style: —
“There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular felicity. On April 18,1485, a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription, ‘Julia, daughter of Claudius,’ and inside the coffin lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time. The bloom of youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open, her long hair floated round her shoulders. She was instantly removed, so goes the legend, to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old Pagan world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers her beauty was beyond imagination or description; she was far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII. feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried, secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl’s hair was yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic world.”
The book then presents a brilliant picture of its subject, of the movements of these energetic personalities, the magnificent restlessness and changefulness of their lives, their immense cynicism. As is the writer’s subject so is his style — energetic, flexible, eloquent, full of various illustration, keeping the attention of the reader always on the alert. Yet perhaps the best chapter in the book, the best because the most sympathetic, is one of the quieter ones, that on “The Florentine Historians;” their great studies, their anticipations of the historical spirit of modern times, their noble style, their pious humour of discipleship towards Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, not without a certain pedantry becoming enough in the historians of those republics which were after all “products of constructive skill” rather than of a true political evolution — all this is drawn with a clear hand and a high degree of reflectiveness. The chapter on “The Prince” corrects some common mistakes concerning Machiavelli, who is perhaps less of a puzzle than has sometimes been supposed, a patriot devising a desperate means of establishing permanent rule in Florence, designing, in the spirit of a political idealism not more ruthless than that of Plato’s Republic, to cure a real evil, a fault not unlike that of ancient Athens itself, the constant exaggerated appetite for change in public institutions, bringing with it an incorrigible tendency of all the parts of human life to fly from the centre, a fault, as it happened in both cases, at last become incurable. The chapter on Savonarola is a bold and complete portrait, with an interesting pendant on “Religious Revivals in Mediæval Italy;” and the last chapter on “Charles the Eighth in Italy” has some real light in it, making things lie more intelligibly apart and together in that tangle of events. The imagination in historical composition works most legitimately when it approaches dramatic effects. In this volume there is a high degree of dramatic imagination; here all is objective, and the writer is hardly seen behind his work.
I have noted in the foregoing paragraphs the things which have chiefly impressed and pleased me in reading this book, things which are sure to impress and please hundreds of readers and make it very popular. But there is one thing more which I cannot help noticing before I close. Notwithstanding Mr. Symonds’s many good gifts, there is one quality which I think in this book is singularly absent, the quality of reserve, a quality by no means merely negative, and so indispensable to the full effect of all artistic means, whether in art itself, or poetry, or the finer sorts of literature, that in one who possesses gifts for those things its cultivation or acquisition is neither more nor less than loyalty to his subject and his work. I note the absence of this reserve in many turns of expression, in the choice sometimes of detail and metaphor, in the very bulk of the present volume, which yet needs only this one quality, in addition to the writer’s other admirable qualities of conception and execution, to make this first part of his work wholly worthy of his design.