It is rather by accident than design that The Story of Doctor Manente should be the first book to appear in this Lungarno Series. Yet the accident is also fortunate, since it would be difficult to find a work more typical of the times. It is true, Lasca was not a sensitive genius like Boccaccio: but then the Renaissance was by no means a sensitive period. Boccaccio was far lovelier than the ordinary, or even than most extraordinary men of his day. Whereas Lasca is of the day and of the city, and as such, as a local and temporal writer, he is a typical Florentine.
Again, this famous story is a magnificent account of what is perhaps the best Florentine beffa, or burla (practical joke) on record. The work is a novella, a short novel, composed of various parts which fit together with the greatest skill. In this respect the story is far superior to most of Boccaccio’s long novelle, which are full of unnecessary stuff, often tedious. Here we are kept sharp to essentials, and yet we are given a complete and living atmosphere. Anyone who knows Florence today can picture the whole thing perfectly, the big complicated palazzi with far-off attics and hidden chambers, the inns of the country where men sit on benches outside, and drink and talk on into the night, the houses with the little courtyards at the back, where everybody looks out of the window and knows all about everybody’s affairs. The presentation of the story is masterly, and could hardly be bettered, setting a pattern for later works. In character, each man is himself. One can see the sly, frail Lorenzo playing this rather monstrous joke. One can see Doctor Manente through and through. The Grand Vicar, so authoritative and easily cowed, what a fine picture of an Italian inquisitor, how different from the Spanish type! The people are people, they are Italians and Florentines, absolutely. There they are, in their own ordinary daylight, not lifted into the special gleam of poetry, as Boccaccio’s people so often are. And we have to admit, if Boccaccio is more universal, Lasca is more Tuscan. The Italians are, when you come down to it, peculiarly terre a terre, right down on the earth. It is part of their wholesome charm. But the rather fantastic side of their nature sometimes makes them want to be angels or winged lions or soaring eagles, and then they are often ridiculous, though occasionally sublime. But the people itself is of the earth, wholesomely and soundly so, and unless perverted, will remain so. The great artists were wild coruscations which shone and expired. The people remains the people, and wine and spaghetti are their forms of poetry: good forms too. The peasants who bargain every Friday, year in, year out, in the Piazza della Signoria, where the great white statue of Michelangelo’s David stands livid, have never even heard of the name David. If you say to them: My name is David, they say: What? To them it is no name. Their outward-roaming consciousness has never even roamed so far as to read the name of the statue they almost touch each Friday. Inquiry is not their affair. They are centripetal.
And that is Italian. This soaring people sticks absolutely to the earth, and keeps the strength of the earth. The cities may go mad; they do. But the real Italian people is on the earth, and the cities will never lift them up. The bulk of the Italian people will never be “interested.” They are centripetal, and only the little currents near to them matter.
So Doctor Manente! His courage and his force of life under all his trial are wonderful. Think of the howls, laments, prayers, sighs, and recriminations the northerner would have raised, under the circumstances. Not so the Doctor! He refuses to take an objective view of his mishaps, he refuses to think, but eats and drinks handsomely, sleeps, builds castles in the air, and sings songs, even improvising. We feel, when he comes back into the world, he is still good and fat. Mental torture has not undermined him. He has refused to think, and so saved himself the worst suffering. And how can we fail to admire the superb earthly life-courage which this reveals! It is the strength and courage of trees, deep rooted in substance, in substantial earth, and centripetal. So the Italian is, really, rooted in substance, not in dreams, ideas, or ideals, but physically self-centred, like a tree.
But the Italian also gets stuck sometimes, in this self-centred physicality of his nature, and occasionally has wild revolts from it. Then you get the sombre curses of Dante, the torments of Michelangelo and Leonardo, the sexless flights of Fra Angelico and Botticelli, the anguish of the idealists. The Italian at his best doesn’t quarrel with substance on behalf of his soul or his spirit. When he does, you see strange results.
Among which are the famous burle, or befle of the Renaissance period: the famous and infamous practical jokes. Apparently the Florentines actually did play these cruel jokes on one another, all the time: it was a common sport. It is so even in Boccaccio, though we feel that he was too true a poet really to appreciate the game. Lasca, who was a real Florentine of the town and taverns, was in heaven when there was a good, cruel joke being perpetrated. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who writes so touchingly of the violet, did actually play these pranks on his acquaintances — and if this is not a true story, historically it might just as well be so. The portrait of Lorenzo given here is true to life: that even the most gentle modern Italian critics admit. But they deny the story any historical truth; on very insufficient grounds, really. The modern mind, however, dislikes the befja, and would like to think it never really existed. “Of course Lorenzo never really played this trick.” But the chances are that he did. And denying the historical truth of every recorded beffa does not wipe the befja out of existence. On the contrary, it only leaves us blind to the real Renaissance spirit in Italy.
If every exalted soul who stares at Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Michelangelo and Piero della Francesca, were compelled at the same time to study the practical-joke stories which play around the figures of these men and which fill the background of the great artists, then we should have a considerable change in feeling when we visited the Uffizi Gallery. We might be a little less exalted: we should certainly be more amused and more on the spot, instead of floating in the vapour of ecstasized admiration.
The befja is real, the befja is earnest, and what in heaven was its goal? We can only understand it, I think, if we remember the true substantial, terre a terre nature of the Italian. This self-centred physical nature can become crude, gross, even bestial and monstrous. We see it in d’Annunzio’s peasant stories. We see it in the act of that Gonzaga of Mantua (if I remember right) who met his only son walking near the palace, and because the child did not salute with sufficient obsequiousness, kicked the boy ferociously in the groin, so that he died. The two centuries preceding the Renaissance had been full of such ferocity, beastliness. The spirit of Tuscany recoiled against it, and used every weapon of wit and intelligence against the egoistic brute of the preceding ages. And Italy is always having these periods of self-shame and recoil, not always into wit and fine intelligence, often into squeamish silliness. Indeed the Renaissance itself fizzled out into silly squeamishness, even in Lasca’s day.
There seems to be a cycle: a period of brutishness, a conquering of the brutish energy by intelligence, a flowering of the intelligence, then a fizzling down into nervous fuss. The befja belongs to the period when the brute force is conquered by wit and intelligence, but is not extinguished. It is a form of revenge taken by wit on the self-centred physical fellow. The beffe are sometimes simply repulsive. But on the whole it is a sport for spurring up the sluggish intelligence, or taming the forward brute. If a man was a bit fat and simple, but especially if he overflowed in physical self-assertion, was importunate, pedantic, hypocritical, ignorant, all infallible signs of self-centred physical egoism, then the wits marked him down as a prey. He was made the victim of some beffa. This put the fear of God into him and into his like. He and his lot did not dare to assert themselves, their pedantry or self-importance or ignorance or brutality or hypocrisy, so flagrantly. Chastened, they learned better manners. And so civilization moves on, wit and intelligence taking their revenge on insolent animal spirits, till the animal spirits are cowed, and wit and intelligence become themselves insolent, then feeble, then silly, then null, as we see during the latter half of the sixteenth century, and the first half of the seventeenth, even in Florence and Rome.
Like all other human corrective measures the beffa was often cruelly unjust and degenerated into a mere lust for sporting with a victim. Nimble wits, which had been in suppression during the preceding centuries, now rose up to take a cruel revenge on the somewhat fat and slower-witted citizen.
It is said that the Brunelleschi, who built the Cathedral dome in Florence, played the cruel and unjustified beffa on the Fat Carpenter, in the well-known story of that name. Here, the Magnificent Lorenzo plays a joke almost as unjustifiable and cruel, on Doctor Manente. All Florence rings with joy over the success of these terrific pieces of horse-play. The gentle Boccaccio tries to record such jokes with gusto. Nobody seems to have pitied the victim. Doctor Manente certainly never pitied himself; there is that to his credit, vastly: when we think how a modern would howl to the world at large. No, they weren’t sorry for themselves — they were tough without being hard-boiled. The courage of life is splendid in them. We badly need some of it today, in this self-pitying age when we are so sorry for ourselves that we have to be soothed by art as by candy. Renaissance art has some of its roots in the cruel beffa — you can see it even in Botticelli’s Spring: it is glaring in Michelangelo. Michelangelo struck his languishing Adam high on the Sistine ceiling for safety, for in Florence they’d have played a rare beffa on that chap.
So we have the story of Doctor Manente, history alive and kicking, instead of dead and mumified. It should be given to every student of that great period, the Italian Renaissance — and who is not a student of the period.
Whether the joke was ever played by the Magnificent, we may ask. Thin-skinned moderns will certainly shudder and say: No! The real historian will say: It is possible, but hardly probable! The artist will say: It sounds so true, it must be true! Meanwhile someone ought to annotate Lasca, and verify his allusions where possible.
I.asca means Roach, or some little fish like that. It was the nickname of Anton Francesco Grazzini, who was born in Florence in March 1504, just twelve years after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, which took place in 1492. Lasca arranged his stories, after the manner of Boccaccio, in three Suppers, and the Story of Doctor Manente is the only one we have complete from the third and Last Supper. The stories of the Second Supper and those of the First Supper, will occupy two volumes following on this one, and in the final volume will be included a study of Lasca. his life and his work.