WHEN writing upon Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a prominent place must be allotted to letters and arts. At Urbino in particular, their progress was then great, their influence proverbial; and our next eight chapters will contain notices of them which would have interrupted the continuity of our previous narrative.

The reigns of Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo I. extended over a period which general consent has regarded as the most brilliant in Italian history, and which we have repeatedly named its golden age. High expectations are naturally entertained of literature, arts, and general refinement in a cycle of such pretension. We look for a rapid advance of thought in paths of learning and science whence during long centuries it had been excluded. We anticipate a widely disseminated zeal for classic writers, an eager rivalry to outstrip them in branches of speculative knowledge, which they especially cultivated. We imagine the imitative arts revived under the influence of new and more exquisite standards. And we reckon upon the diffusion of a taste and capacity for enjoying those things among classes hitherto excluded from such intellectual enjoyments. In each of these expectations the student of literary history will be gratified; yet there are several sorts of composition which, if separately examined, offer disappointing results, and scarcely a single work written during the fifteenth century has maintained universal popularity. The explanation is easy. This age was one of unprecedented intellectual activity, when men's minds were devoted to the acquisition of knowledge which they had laboriously to hunt out, and doubtingly to decipher. They had to cut for themselves tracks through an unexplored region, without grammars or commentaries to serve them as guides and landmarks. The toilsome habits thus formed were forthwith exercised for the benefit of subsequent investigators, and were applied to smoothing the path which they had themselves penetrated. Thus was it that the first successful scholars became grammarians and commentators. Surrounded by ample stores of intelligence, they had no occasion to cultivate new germs of thought. Their first object was to secure and render accessible the treasures which antiquity had unfolded to them; their next, to elaborate them in varied forms, to reproduce them in the manner most congenial to their intellectual wants. Thus they became more industrious than original, laborious rather than creative. Again, those who, on entering the garden of knowledge, thought of its fruits rather than of its approaches, instead of seeking the reward of their toils among the fair mazes of poetry and belles lettres, aimed at more arduous rewards, and climbed the loftiest and most slippery branches in search of golden apples. The harvest of scholastic philosophy which they thus gathered in may seem scarcely worthy of the fatigues given to its acquisition; but from the seeds so obtained, cultivated and matured as they have been by many after labourers, a copious and healthful store of intellectual food has been secured for subsequent generations. The work performed by these pioneers of learning and truth was, however, more calculated to crush than to inspire that more elastic fancy which preferred the flowery mead to the tree of knowledge. The spirit of the age was ponderous and prosaic, and the few who attempted to rise above its denser atmosphere into poetic regions were clogged by the trammels of a dead language, and by obsolete associations which they dared not shake off. The fifteenth century was consequently rich in scholars, copious in pedants, but poor in genius, and barren of strong thinkers.

These circumstances necessarily detract from the popular interest of Italian literary history at this important period, all influential to its after destinies, and we mention them in the conviction that general readers must feel disappointed with this portion of our work. The vast mass of materials then created now reposes in the principal storehouses of learning, much of it unpublished, and but a small part rendered accessible in recent editions. As it would be an unprofitable task to labour upon these materials for merely critical purposes, we have for the most part satisfied ourselves with an examination of the authors immediately connected with Urbino; nor shall we be tempted much beyond that narrow limit, by the facility of borrowing from those copious and intelligent writers who have successfully investigated the intellectual progress of Italy.

The revival of civilisation, and its handmaid arts, is a problem so inexplicable on the ordinary principles which regulate human progress,[64]—its causes were so complex, and many of them so remote, and singly so little striking,—that it were, perhaps, vain to hope for a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. It may be, that the ever revolving cycle of human affairs had brought round a period predestined to intellectual development, or that mind, awakening from the slumber of centuries, possessed the energies of renewed youth. But in a season of universal and sudden progress it is difficult to distinguish between cause and effect,—to decide whether mind aroused liberty, or if freedom was the nurse of intelligence.

The feeble hold which the popes retained over their temporal power during their residence at Avignon, and during the great schism, promoted the independence of the ecclesiastical cities, many of which then passed under the dominion of domestic tyrants, or assumed the privileges of self-government. In either case the result was favourable to an expansion of the human mind. The sway of the seigneurs, being based on no such aristocratic machinery as supported the fabric of feudalism, threw fewer obstructions in the way of individual merit. The popular communities could only exist by a diffusion of political and legislative capacity, and the commercial enterprises to which they in general devoted their energies increased at once the demand for public spirit and its production. Even those intestine revolutions to which democracies were especially subject contributed largely to the same end; for, although in such convulsions the dregs of the populace often rise to the surface, talent, when backed by energy and daring, there finds extraordinary opportunities for display. Indeed, the multiplication of commonwealths, under whatever form of government, tended, in a country situated as the Italian Peninsula then was, to the development of intellect. Defended by the Alps and the sea from invasion, their physical and intellectual advantages constituted an influence which supplied the want of union and nationality. They thus could safely pursue their individual aims, and even indulge in rivalry and contests which, though perilous to a less favoured people, were for them incentives to a praiseworthy and patriotic exertion. Whilst the separate existence of these petty states was calculated to promote both political science and mental culture, it rendered the one subservient to the advantage of the other, and, in the multitude of official and diplomatic employments, literary men found at once useful occupation and honourable independence. Nor was this result limited to one form of government. If the tempest-tossed democracy of Florence shone the brightest star in the Italian galaxy, the stern oligarchy of Venice shed an almost equal lustre in some branches of letters and art; and, on the other hand, the not less popular institutions of Pisa, Siena, and Lucca emitted but feeble and irregular coruscations. So also in the despotic states, whilst literature was ever cherished under the ducal dynasty of Urbino, and whilst it was favoured at intervals by the Sforza and Malatesta, the d'Este and Gonzaga, and by the Aragonese sovereigns of Naples, its genial influence was unknown in some other petty courts. Again, if we turn to the papal throne, we shall find the accomplished Nicolas, Pius, Sixtus, Julius, and Leo, sitting alternately with the Boeotian Calixtus, Paul, Innocent, and Alexander. From an impartial review of Italian mediÆval history it appears that democratic institutions were by no means indispensable to the expansion of genius, since the progress of letters and arts was upon the whole nearly equal in the republics and the seigneuries, under the tyranny of a condottiere or the domination of a faction.[*65]

But, before entering upon the proper subject of this chapter, it may be well briefly to consider the influence which the petty princes of Italy exercised upon the revival and cultivation of letters and arts. The dominion of these chiefs, though hereditary in name, was in general maintained, as it had been gained, by the sword. To them, as to the savage, arms were an instinctive pursuit, warfare a primary occupation. For their frequent intervals of truce (and in no other sense was peace known to them), their circumscribed sovereignty gave little occupation. Domestic polity was still an undeveloped science, and their leisure fell to be spent upon intellectual objects, or in grovelling debaucheries. The number who preferred the nobler alternative is very remarkable, when compared with the like class in other parts of Europe. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries literature was cultivated and art was encouraged by a large proportion of the sovereigns and feudatories of Italy, when the bravest condottieri were often their most liberal patrons. Such were the impetuous Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the gallant Francesco Sforza, the treacherous Ludovico il Moro; whilst the Gonzaga of Mantua, and the d'Este of Ferrara, but most especially the ducal houses of Urbino, extended, during successive generations, an enlightened and almost regal protection to genius of every shade. Nothing akin to this is to be found in the republics. Siena, Pisa, and Lucca produced many great artists, but literature found in them neither a cradle nor an asylum. The commercial communities of Venice and Genoa belonged to an entirely different category of circumstances; and Florence, though an exception to our remark, owed its pre-eminence not less perhaps to the patronage of the Medici than to an unparalleled prevalence of talent and public spirit among its citizens.

In times when the popular will, if not the source of power, was its best support, it became the interest of the dominant prince or party so to use authority as to please and flatter the masses; to cloak their own usurpations by throwing a lustre around their administration, and to preserve the confidence of their subjects by institutions calculated to promote the national glory. In this way individual talent might be stimulated, and public civilisation might advance, even whilst freedom was on the decline; and, as the means commanded by the seigneurs were ample, they could patronise genius, and surround their courts with literary retainers, who in democratic communities were left to their own resources. Thus the Sforza and the d'Este, even the savage Malatesta of Rimini, befriended genius, which found no haven in the republics of Genoa and Lucca, and, the fashion having once been established among their princely houses, letters were cultivated by not a few of these soldiers of fortune, but more especially by the ladies of their families.

These unquestionable facts are met by an allegation that the fountains of princely patronage were so tainted, their streams so generally corrupt, as to blight the fruits which they seemed to foster, and that their influence thus from a blessing became a curse. Let us examine a little the grounds for this assertion, for surely it is not by such sweeping and prejudiced denunciations that we shall arrive at truth. As to the ornamental arts, there cannot be a doubt that these received, throughout Italy, from governments of every form, as well as from numberless corporations and individuals, a hearty encouragement which might well shame our degenerate age. Yet the ducal palace at Urbino, the Palazzo del T at Mantua, the tombs of the Scaligers, and the medallions of Malatesta, yield the palm to no republican works of the same class. It was by Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, and by Duke Federigo di Montefeltro, that the undeveloped energies of new-born science, and the long neglected classics of Greece and Rome were nursed and tended through their years of infancy, which storms of faction, in most of the free states, condemned to neglect. The enlightened liberality of these princes, and of Malatesta Novello, founded libraries for the preservation of works composed under their own beneficent encouragement, as well as of manuscripts collected by them from all quarters at immense cost, and this when no republic but Venice aspired to such literary distinctions. Nor were the troubled waters of democratic strife safe for the poet's gay bark and light canvas. Even Dante, though made of sternest stuff, sought shelter in a courtly harbour from the hurricanes of Florentine faction. It is true that, in many compositions of minstrels trained in princely halls, the themes are ephemeral and the epithets overstrained, savouring, to a purer taste and more severe idiom, of unworthy subserviency; nor is the other polite literature, emanating from the same atmosphere, exempt from similar blemishes. But allowance must be made for the seducing fecundity of the language in superlatives, more redolent of dulcet sounds than of definite signification, a quality which has ever tempted Italian mediocrity to assume the borrowed plumes of poesy, and to conceal its native barrenness under magniloquent but flimsy common-places. The well earned gratitude of authors is fittingly paid in compliments, eulogies, or dedications, and as such coin is at the unlimited command of the debtor, and useful only to the receiver, its over-issue is fairly excusable. This results from principles inherent in human nature, and it matters little whether the obligations have been incurred from sovereigns or from subjects, under an autocrat or a democracy. Even among ourselves, in times when talent had more to hope from private patronage than from extended popularity, a similar currency was scarcely less in vogue, and it was only the poverty of our idiom that kept its circulation within bounds. Hence, were the independence of the best English writers of a century or two ago to be estimated from their dedicatory addresses, or their occasional odes, a condemnation as unreasonable as sweeping would go forth against names long inscribed in our temple of fame. This argument might easily be extended; but enough has been said to show that more was done for the support of letters under princely than under popular institutions, and that the adulatory epithets natural to the language, and inherent in the usages of Italy, are no certain index of base subserviency.

But, on the other hand, independent sovereignty, irrespective of political forms, was of primary importance to the encouragement of mental cultivation. The separation of Italy into a multitude of petty states converted almost every town into a capital, which its rulers and its citizens took equal pride in decorating. The patriotism thus generated was intense in proportion to the narrow field on which it was exercised, and an expenditure, restrained by severe sumptuary restrictions, found scope on monuments honourable to the public. Thus there ensued, between hostile communities and emulous factions, a rivalry in arts as in arms, whereby public institutions prospered, and individual genius was encouraged. Fanes, whose glories seem to defy the waste of time, were thus raised for the devotional requirements of the people; palaces grew up the bulwark of their liberties; citadels were fortified to rivet their chains; and even when the ultimate results were fatal to freedom, the talent and activity thus stimulated were sure to eventuate in industrial progress, as well as in the restoration of letters and the improvement of art.

The human mind, when aroused from its long and leaden slumbers, at first instinctively leaned for support upon such vestiges of ancient learning as had survived the wreck of ages. To excavate and examine these was the laborious task assumed by early students, in which Petrarch and Boccaccio sedulously joined. But, justly appreciating them as materials on which to found a new fabric, rather than as the substitutes for original thought, "the all-Etruscan three" happily combined enthusiasm for classic models with the power to rival them in a language simultaneously matured by themselves for the daring undertaking. The fifteenth century arrived; it was an epoch of reaction; one of other tendencies and tastes, when genius, as GinguenÉ has happily observed, was superseded by erudition. Entering the path which Petrarch had partially explored, its pioneers neglected the better portion of his example. They spent their energies in rummaging obscure recesses of monastic libraries, and wasted time and learning in transcribing, collating, and annotating the various manuscripts which thus fell within their grasp. In exhuming and renovating these monuments of a long-buried literature, they were forgetful of the fact that their dealings were with dead corpses; and whilst submitting the recovered fragments to philological analysis, they perversely sought to embody their own souls in these decayed members. As such materials were incapable of being reanimated, or even remodelled into more apt forms, this unnatural union was seldom effected without violence to the sentiment. Even the ablest writers devoted themselves to the arid task of scholia and translations, composing in the dead tongues such original works as they attempted. The result was a monstrous metempsychosis, whereby thought, enchained in uncongenial bodies, lost its due influence, and appeared in, at best, an unseemly masquerade. Hence the language of the century was Latin, its manner pedantic, its spirit coldly artificial.

But whilst the historian of that age laments the shackles thus imposed upon its literature, it were unjust to withhold from it the merit of preserving those treasures of ancient history and philosophy, eloquence and poetry, which, under happier auspices and more judicious treatment, have elevated thought, enlarged intellect, and enriched the style of later times. Although unable to refine the true metal from its dross, the pedants of "fourteen hundred" were miners who discovered the precious ore, and ascertained its component ingredients. The fashionable ardour for collecting early MSS. of ancient authors was very generally accompanied with untiring perseverance in mastering their intricacies. Philology and grammar thus grew into sciences, and their professors held the keys of human erudition. Deep ought to be our gratitude for the contingent of classical literature rescued from a rapid destruction by such arduous and self-denying labours; and a history of these discoveries, and of the zeal and enterprise volunteered by the early commentators and publishers of the ancient authors, would form an interesting monument of undaunted and generally successful diligence. Yet, in a comprehensive view of the results springing from these new tendencies, it is impossible to blind ourselves to the evils that emanated from them. From the nerve, grandeur, and elegance of Greek and Roman writers, there was much to learn with advantage; but their influence was directly antagonist to the highest sentiments of a Christian, and, in the main, a devotional people. When tried by such a test, their philosophy was hollow, their heroism selfish, their refinement corrupted. Nor was it only by reproducing the themes and the philosophy of distant ages that classicism clogged the elasticity of reviving literature. By inculcating extinct languages as the only means fitted for expressing their ideas, Italian literati checked the progress of their vernacular tongue,—that best bulwark of nationality,—and at the same time impeded the free expansion of thought, which, thus conducted into artificial channels, could but stagnate or freeze. The mind, habituated to find in literature a restraint, came to regard natural feeling as a solecism, living images as incongruous anomalies, warmth of sentiment as a blemish sedulously to be avoided. Under such false training, knowledge received the impress of a languid conventionality; and even those who condescended to write in Italian, chilled their compositions with the pedantry of antique idioms. The classic style thus introduced had many inherent defects. Borrowed plumage is seldom becoming, and servile imitations are always bad. Besides, the ancient type had been originally modelled by a people, and in an age, little sympathetic with those for whom it was now reproduced, and whose sentiments were cramped equally by the conventionalisms of an obsolete manner, or by the adoption of a dead tongue. Hence is it that the fifteenth century, so signalised by the diffusion of knowledge, and the advance of the fine arts, has bequeathed to us fewer eminent writers than those which immediately preceded and followed it, and that during its course Italian literature was unquestionably retrograde.

This is especially true of poetry, in an age of erudition when learning was essentially prosaic. The collation of manuscripts, the construction of grammars, the mastering of idioms, the revived subtleties of Greek dialectics, were ponderous studies with which the taste for literature of a lighter and more elastic tendency could ill assimilate. The chords whence Dante had evoked majestic notes, that seemed to swell from higher spheres, lay silent and unstrung; the lyre of Petrarch was left in feebler hands.

Nor was this the only evil resulting from an excess of the classical mania. Languages in which Christianity had not been naturalised were ill adapted for the expression of revealed truth; and the new scholarship, discarding the barbarisms of monastic Latin, imported into theological as well as profane compositions, the phrases of a pagan age. To find the personages of the Trinity, or even the hagiology of Rome, familiarly discussed under mythological names, is to us merely absurd and revolting;[*66] but when men, already imbued with classical predilections, were accustomed to mix up in words the objects of their worship with the demigods of their admiration, the natural consequence was a confusion of ideas nowise favourable to the maintenance of their faith or the purity of their morals.

A not less prejudicial element emanated from the revived philosophies of Greece, which now arrested attention and divided the speculations of learned men. That derived from Aristotle, and known to Europe through the sages of Arabia, had long occupied the cloisters, where alone mind was then exercised, or its operations studied. The rival system of Plato came directly from its native soil; and was first publicly taught in Italy early in the fifteenth century, by Gemistus Plato,[*67] of Constantinople. It attracted the notice of Cosimo Pater PatriÆ, who after having Marsilio Ficino, son of his physician, grounded in its mysteries by Greeks of learning, placed him at the head of an academy in Florence, instituted by himself for the dissemination of its doctrines. From thence these radiated, absorbing the attention of literary men, and enlisting many converts from the Stagirite faith. Aristotle and Plato became the watchwords of contending sects,[*68] and the usual jarring results of such logomachy were not long wanting. The merits of a question, at first exaggerated by its respective zealots, were lost sight of in the torrent of abuse which gradually superseded argument, and inflamed every evil passion. Far overleaping the legitimate limits or literary warfare, disputant logicians advanced from replies to libels, from words to blows, and, after exhausting the armoury of invective, had recourse to the dagger. But on a subject so painful we are not called to enter. Backed by the authority of Nicholas V., the zeal of Cardinal Bessarion, and the example of the Medici, the sublime and imaginative speculations of Platonism for a time prevailed over the more material system of the Stagirite, and Florence became their head-quarters. The human mind, unaided by revelation, has never invented any system so abstractly beautiful, so pure in its morals, so elevating in its conceptions, so harmonious in its conclusions. Its lofty ethics rank next to the doctrines of inspiration, for it taught that happiness is the natural result of virtue, and that the mischiefs entailed by the passions are ill repaid by their transient pleasures. Yet, though thus intrinsically calculated to ennoble and refine the heart of fallen man, the Platonic theories indirectly led to lamentable results, both to the religion and the morality of the age. The divine revelation was by them virtually superseded, and paganism, from an affectation, became a conviction, or, at the least, a prevailing fashion, warping the manners and phrases, the faith and spirit of the age. Men lived for the present world by the light of human reason, until they forgot or denied a future existence, and a holier wisdom. The first blow struck at this practical heathenism came from Paul II., a Venetian, who was behind the age in its knowledge, as well as in its extravagances, and who relentlessly persecuted what he had not the capacity to redargue. Mind was, however, no longer to be silenced by papal bulls, or trammelled by penal fetters: it regarded the use of such weapons as proof that the spiritual armoury contained none more serviceable, and learned to demur to an ecclesiastical despotism it already loathed. Succeeding pontiffs disavowed the policy of Paul: but the old respect for the papacy was shaken; doubts arrayed themselves against dogmas, cavilling superseded blind faith, until the dissolute example set by the courts of Innocent, Alexander, and Leo, converted scepticism into infidelity, apathy into open aggression. It is impossible to contemplate the great talents, the unwearied application, absorbed by these rival systems of philosophy, without a sigh that they should have been wasted on inquiries so purely speculative; yet, it cannot be denied that the controversy prepared weapons that have since done good service in many a better cause; that it developed mental energies, and matured intellectual discipline, from which the world continues largely to benefit.

Although the revival of letters had been advancing during several generations ere the chiefs of Montefeltro sought other laurels than those of the battle-field, it was reserved for these princes to contribute no mean aids towards their full development in that golden harvest which the fifteenth century saw gathered in. Indeed, the concurrent testimony of all writers has claimed for the sovereigns of Urbino a foremost place among the friends of literature. In the words of the general motto of this work, which well condense the prevailing opinion, "it is notorious beyond question even of the malignant, that the house of Montefeltro and della Rovere has for a long time past been that which [most] shed a lustre upon Italy by letters, arms, and every sort of rare worth, and that the court of Urbino may be termed a Pegasean spring, in the language of historic truth rather than of poetic hyperbole." It was to the successive reigns of Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo I. that such expressions were generally applied, and to them our attention will now be directed; but in a future portion of this work we shall endeavour to maintain for their della Rovere successors a similar reputation.

Were we to estimate the celebrities of Urbino by the encomiums of their partial countrymen, and measure their claims upon mundane immortality by the standard set up by Baldi Lazzari, Grossi, Cimarelli, and Olivieri, it would become our indispensable duty to add at least a volume to the present work. But these authors were deeply imbued with that peculiarly Italian patriotism which, narrowing its sympathies within the limits of a township or a petty state, enshrined provincial mediocrity in a temple of fame modelled upon a scale of national splendour. Believing that the dignity of their little fatherland depended upon the notices of its existence which they could worm out of antique memorials, however doubtful in authority, and upon the number of notable names they could connect with its localities, they tasked themselves to this investigation with industry worthy of a nobler and more useful object. Many folio volumes, ponderous in their contents as in their material, were the result; but they preserve only laborious trifling, a harvest of wordy conclusions gleaned from a soil barren of tangible facts, dissertations which may be summed up in the axiom ex nihilo nihil fit, "nothing comes of nought." Like those of the northern senachies, their themes were often legendary or invented, and it would have been scarcely a loss to literature had these productions been equally fugitive. Should the worthies mentioned in the following chapters seem scarcely to maintain the literary renown of Urbino, our readers ought in justice to remember that scarcely a tithe has found place in our pages of those whom zealous eulogists have placed upon the roll of Italian literati, but