THE reputation long enjoyed by the house of Montefeltro as patrons of letters and arts can scarcely be traced further back than Federigo, second Duke of Urbino. Yet the few memorials that remain of his father, Count Guidantonio, throw some scattered lights upon congenial tastes, and from these we select three letters to the magistracy of Siena, which are preserved in the Archivio Diplomatico of that city. The first of them is written in Latin, the others in Italian.

Among the traits of literary taste displayed by Duke Federigo, we learn from his biographer Muzio, that it was his custom to repair weekly to the Franciscan convent, and to encourage among its learned society debates and discussions on subjects analogous to their studies. Upon this somewhat loose foundation, he has been claimed as founder of the Assorditi, and it has been ranked among the earliest academies in Italy. We need not pause to investigate their respective titles to honours so questionable, now that such associations are generally recognised as prolific of two enormous literary nuisances, pedantry and puerility. From their antipathic contact genius long has fled, leaving the field open to triumphant mediocrity. Pretending to no original efforts, it was their narrow aim to imitate standard productions, or to ring the changes upon them in prosing and pointless commentaries. To indite two tomes of scholia on a sonnet of Petrarch was the dreary task that qualified for admission into the Florentine Academy; to string Platonic nothings into rhyme was the high ambition which numbered votaries by hundreds. The Assorditi were no exception from the usual category of mediocrity; and whether they were first associated under Federigo's protection, or, as Tiraboschi alleges, sprang into existence under Guidobaldo II., is of little moment to the literary history of Urbino.

In times when letters flourished chiefly at courts, patronage was the grand end of authorship, every work being inscribed to at least one high personage. The character and position of Federigo subjected him to a large share of such incense; but among the many dedications laid at his feet none perhaps was more fulsome, and at the same time more ingenious, than that prefixed by Marsilio Ficino to his Latin version of Plato's Essay on Monarchy. It narrates that Jupiter, willing to found on earth a model sovereignty, resolved to send down the beau-ideal of a ruler for its guidance. He, therefore, summoned the gods in full convocation, and presented to them his new creation, under the title Fideregum Orbinatem Ducem, which may be literally interpreted "Royal faith, ruler of the world," but which was corrupted by human idiom into Federigo Urbinate Duce. Pallas and Mercury thereupon, in presence of Truth, endowed the new prince with crown and sceptre; and the Academy, as a humble handmaid of these deities, inscribed to him Plato's work upon mundane sovereignty. Although we have had occasion to notice in our tenth chapter this Duke's taste for the graver studies of theology, philosophy, history, and Grecian literature, and to commemorate the fruit it produced in a variety of other dedications, yet few who distinguished themselves in these pursuits are sufficiently identified with Urbino to authorise our dwelling at any length upon their names. Guarino of Verona, Poggio Bracciolini, Donato Acciaiolo, Poliziano, and others of mark, may therefore be omitted; and we shall thus have very few prose authors to bring before our readers.

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Gentile de' Becci was probably a native of Urbino, but the interest attaching to his name is owing rather to the distinction attained by his pupils than to his own. He was selected by Pietro de' Medici to train up his son Lorenzo the Magnificent; and to have educated such a mind is an unexceptionable title to fame. Yet the Christian philanthropist who sighs over the dross which mingled with its ore, the impure uses to which its bright metal was in some respects misdirected, by a master who might have moulded it to holier purposes, and might have enriched by its talents the treasury of truth and the triumphs of religion, may well hesitate ere he grants to the preceptor of Lorenzo a reflected share of his glory, without also holding him responsible for that pagan epicureanism which spread like a pestilence from the Medicean court throughout Italy. Nor do the notices remaining of Becci tend to nullify such an inference. The favour of his patrons naturally obtaining for him rapid promotion, he was raised to the see of Arezzo in 1473. But his life was that of a statesman rather than that of a good pastor. We read of his tact as a diplomatist, his skill in public affairs, his dexterous civil administration of his diocese, by directing towards commercial industry energies which had wasted themselves on faction; we are assured that his popularity was confirmed by his encouragement of liberal arts, by his mild and courteous character; we are told that in political science his pen was ably employed. But regarding his theological attainments, the purity of his morals, the zeal of his clerical ministrations, his eulogists are silent. We may add that to him Guicciardini in some degree imputes the miscarriage of the proposed league of Italy against the French invasion in 1492, in consequence of his personal ambition, when sent to conduct the negotiations at Rome on the part of the Medici, whilst his thoughtless extravagance there wasted resources of the Florentines which might have been better spent on military preparations.

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Of Ludovico Odasio it is unnecessary to add anything to what we have already had occasion to say.[69] Francesco Venturini of Urbino is reputed the first after the revival who wrote a complete Latin grammar. It was dedicated to Count Ottaviano Ubaldini, and was printed at Florence in 1482, and again in his native town by Henry of Cologne, in 1493-4.[70] Among his pupils he is said to have numbered both Raffaele and Michael Angelo.[*71] Besides Berni da Gubbio, whose Diary has been edited in the Scriptores of Muratori, there were several annotators of events in their native duchy, whose prose writings remain in the Vatican Library, and have supplied us with useful information; but they were not historians, and it is unnecessary to bring them forth from their obscurity. Of one name, however, we may make an exception.

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Polydoro di Vergilio was born at Urbino about 1470, and studied at Bologna. His relation, Adrian Castellesi, who, when Cardinal of Corneto, was well known both in England and at Rome,[72] had been sent by Innocent VIII. as legate to Scotland, but remained at London in consequence of the death of James III. at the battle of Stirling. There he was joined by Polydoro, who, on taking priest's orders, had, through his influence, obtained from Alexander VI. the collectorship of an old house-tax in England called Romescot, or Peter's pence, originally imposed in Saxon times for the maintenance of English pilgrims to Rome. Aliens being there frequently objects of church preferment, he, in 1503, obtained the rectory of Church Langton in Leicestershire; and, on his patron's appointment in the following year to the see of Bath and Wells, the path of further promotion was opened to him. In 1507 he became prebendary of Lincoln and of Hereford, and archdeacon of Wells, on which he resigned his collectorship. In 1515 he shared an imprisonment in the Tower, brought upon Adrian by the jealousy of Wolsey, whose haughty spirit, disappointed of the purple, attributed the delayed honours to the Bishop's influence. Letters were consequently written by Sadoleto in Leo's name to the English court on behalf of Polydoro, and Wolsey having received the much coveted scarlet hat, there was no further pretext for his detention. The date of his return home is variously stated at 1534 or 1550, and he carried from Henry VIII. a recommendation which procured him letters of nobility from his own sovereign. His literary talents being probably somewhat overrated in Italy, the long residence he made in the hotbed of heresy, without exercising his pen in defence of his Church, appears to have brought the purity of his faith under suspicion. That there was no tangible ground for the imputation may be presumed from his spending the rest of his life unquestioned at Urbino, where he died in 1555, and was buried in the Duomo.

The favour which Vergilio obtained in Adrian's eyes was partly owing to his success in cultivating the niceties of the Latin tongue, to restore which in its purity was a favourite project of the Cardinal. Before quitting Italy he had dedicated to Guidobaldo I. his Proverbiorum Libellus, a volume scarcely meriting the controversy upon which he entered with Erasmus as to the priority of suggesting such a collection. In 1499 he finished his treatise De Inventoribus Rerum, which was placed in the index of prohibited works, in consequence of tracing certain liturgical observances back to pagan superstitions; Grossi, however, vindicates his orthodoxy by ascribing the obnoxious passages to heretical interpolation. His essay De Prodigiis is an attempt to explain upon natural principles all omens, auguries, and other superstitious observances. As it is inscribed to Duke Francesco Maria I., he probably returned to Italy before 1538.

But what chiefly interests us is a Latin History of England, which he is said to have undertaken at the suggestion of Henry VII., or more probably of Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, who procured him access to certain archives. This work, from being the first general compilation of the sort given to the public, obtained more consideration than its superficial and inaccurate matter deserved; and Mr. Roscoe well observes that it has not gained the suffrages of posterity, either by ability or freedom from bias. Among the impugners of its veracity are Whear, Humphrey Lloyd, Henry Savile, and Bishop Bale. Some of these excuse his blunders on the questionable plea of his ignorance of English government, dialects, and manners, while Leland regrets that a writer so little trustworthy should have cast over his deceptions the graces of style. Anticipating perhaps such an aspersion, he, in his dedication of the work to Henry VIII., dated from London in 1530, compared the chronicles of Bede and Gildas, crude in form and phraseology, to meat served without the salt which it was his object to supply. Yet while the English blame him for misrepresentations,—avenged in the stinging Latin epigram,

"Maro and Polydore bore Virgil's name; One reaps a poet's, one a liar's fame,"—

Giovio cites the testimony of French and Scotch authors to his partiality for the land of his adoption. More serious, but unestablished, is a charge greatly resented by his countrymen, that, after garbling records and ancient muniments thrown open to his examination, he consummated the outrage by destroying the evidence of his villainy. It may, however, be well to keep in view that, although Bale claims him as a willing reformer of certain Romish abuses, his adherence to that Church brought on him distrust of the Protestants, in an age when theological disputes were matter affecting life and limb.

In the Vatican is preserved a MS. of this history in two volumes folio, of 1210 pages, in twenty-five books, ending with the death of James IV. of Scotland in 1512. The narrative is preceded by a dedication in Latin to Francesco Maria II., from Antonio Vergilio Battiferri, grand-nephew of the author, which is dated in 1613, and mentions the MS. as autograph. Yet on the last leaf is this colophon, apparently in the same hand: "Rogo ut bene conserventur, simul cum aliis in cenobio venerand. monalium Sce. Clare de Urbino, quousque bella, Deo favente, cessabunt. Ego Federicus Ludovici Veterani Urbinus scripsi totum opus." But though not the original, that transcriber's name guarantees the accuracy of this copy. An extract from it in II. of the Appendix proves that the Leyden edition of 1651 is in fact a loose paraphrase of the work.[73]

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Vespasiano Filippi[*74] was a Florentine bibliopole, in an age when that commerce was carried on by persons of learning, whose business it was to transcribe, collate, and critically master the MSS. which formed its staple. He was thus in familiar intercourse not only with the literary men of the age, but with such princes and prelates as turned their attention to the promotion of reviving letters by multiplication and preservation of books. Of many such he has left us biographical notices, recently given to the world by Cardinal Mai from three MSS. in the Vatican library,[75] and in the Riccardiana of Florence. His collection of lives of illustrious ladies remains unedited. In the former work no memoir is so fully extended as that of Duke Federigo of Urbino, upon which we have in part drawn in our Second Book. It was inscribed to Duke Guidobaldo I., in a dedication which not only testifies to his father's martial skill, and a prowess that never knew defeat, but also to the prudence of his sway, and assures us that the great powers of Italy had frequent recourse to his judicious counsels. Unlike the pedantic writers among whom he lived, Vespasiano composed these memoirs in the language of the people for whose information he intended them; but the long interval that elapsed before they saw the light has necessarily prevented them from becoming in any degree popular. Muratori, though unable to give an account of their author, has printed his lives of Eugene IV. and Nicholas V., and characterises his style as possessing a simplicity more precious than eloquence.

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Two members only of the brilliant and lettered court of Guidobaldo have gained enduring celebrity from their writings—Castiglione and Bembo.[*76] The former may be considered a pattern of gentlemanly writing, the latter of scholarlike composition. We have already said what is necessary of both, and have introduced into our narrative an idea of Count Baldassare's Cortegiano, its objects and style. It is said to have been suggested by Louis XII., and written about 1516, but the author's preface seems to point at an earlier date. Two of his published letters to Bembo show how anxiously he awaited the suffrage of his friends, among whom it was handed about; but it was sent to press in 1528, only in consequence of the alarm of a pirated edition being in preparation, from a MS. which had been submitted to the famed Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara. The number of reprints which issued during the next fifty years was at least forty-two. A variety of circumstances conduced to this extensive and continued popularity. Books professing to initiate the many into habits and mysteries of refined society ever have claims on public curiosity, but the attraction was here increased by the dazzling reputation of the palace-circle at Urbino, as well as by the charms of erudition, wit, elegance, and worldly wisdom which sparkle in every page. It has, however, been remarked that most translations of the Cortegiano have failed to obtain the applause bestowed upon the original. The observation may be taken as a compliment to the polish of its diction, and to those delicacies of expression that bear no transplanting into another idiom. It also proves that the celebrity of this work rests much upon its style. The subject could scarcely be treated at such length without falling into that diffuseness and repetition, which, though clothed in beauty by the rich fluency of the Italian language, must always degenerate into monotony when rendered by the bold expletives of a less copious tongue.

In a period when princes and courts little resembled what they have since become, we possess from the pens of Machiavelli and Castiglione generalised portraits of both; and they may be relied on as genuine, although the Tuscan, like the tenebristi painters, overloaded his darker shadows, whilst the Mantuan Count employed the roseate tinting of licensed flattery. Roscoe considers the Cortegiano an ethical treatise, yet it belongs as much to belles-lettres as to moral philosophy. Its author has been called the Chesterfield of Italy, and the parallel is singularly apt. The Count and the Earl have each supplied "a glass of fashion and a mould of form" for the guidance of their courtly contemporaries, and the posthumous reputation of both with the world at large rests more upon their dicta as arbiters of politeness, than upon their rare diplomatic address and statesmanlike attainments. With all its interest as a picture of manners and a test of civilisation in that proverbially refined age, with every charm which elegance of style can impart, it is impossible to dwell on the Cortegiano without feeling that its influence was then fraught with evil. In the pages of that essay were first systematically embodied precepts of tact, lessons of adulation, all repugnant to the stern manners and wholesome independence of antecedent generations. The homely bearing of honest burghers, the rough and ready speech of men who lived in harness, were there put out of fashion by studied phrase and cringing flattery, too easy preparations for the effeminate euphuism and fulsome servility which Spanish thraldom soon after imposed upon Italy.

Another work of Castiglione, to which we have already had occasion to refer, is his letter, written in Latin, to Henry VIII., containing an account of Guidobaldo's death, with a somewhat meagre sketch of his character. But there is in its composition an air of effort, a straining at rhetorical effect, which leave upon us the inevitable conclusion that he thought more of his style than his hero. These faults and deficiencies belong, however, in a still greater degree to that more ambitious disquisition, wherein Bembo has sought to honour the memory of the Duke and Duchess, whose favour he had amply enjoyed. His few fugitive poems well merit the preference accorded to them by Tiraboschi over most contemporary effusions, from force of sentiment not less than felicitous expression. It would be difficult to rival in the literature of any age the pathos of that ode wherein his beloved wife is supposed to sigh over his prolonged absence, and send him the sympathetic yearnings of her long-suppressed affection. Of this, however, and his Tirsis, we have already said enough.[77]

The courtly qualities of Count Baldassare are acknowledged wherever his native literature is known; that they were not inconsistent with his observance of parental feelings is proved by an interesting Latin letter addressed to his children the year before his death, which has been preserved by Negrini in his Elogii Historici of the Castiglione family.

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The position which Bembo holds in the literature of Italy's golden age is not less singular than prominent. As an historian and poet, a philologist and rhetorician, and as a voluminous writer of official and private letters, he challenges criticism and has gained applause. It is, however, as a reformer of style that his claims have been most freely accorded, and his example held up to general imitation. Following the fashion of his day, he regarded classical, and especially Latin, attainments, as the attribute most needful for an accomplished man. But he went further; and, aware of the coarse and rugged manner into which literature had fallen, sought to correct Latin composition, and to perfect his own tongue, after the purest ancient standards. On this object he spared no pains, till by long and laborious practice he wrote in both with equal precision. He is said to have subjected each of his works to forty separate critical revisions, and no one can read a page without feeling that, as with too many of his countrymen, the manner has occupied quite as much thought as the matter. This naturally tended to an opposite extreme, for the studied structure of his sentences, and the fatiguing recurrence of mythological allusion, are blemishes greatly detracting from the pleasure afforded by his works.[79] Scaliger, accordingly, has scourged his pagan misnomers of divine things, while his "childish heresy" of abject Ciceronian imitation is ridiculed by Lansius and Lipsius. Yet there is justice in the test applied to them by Tiraboschi; for great and wide-spread evils require extreme remedies, and the prevailing laxity of style having been once brought into discredit by his example, those who followed were able to avail themselves of his guidance and taste, without falling into the rigidity and constraint which blemish his compositions. Indeed, notwithstanding these obvious blots, which hero-worship has mistaken for beauties, his History of Venice, his Essay on Imitation, his diplomatic and familiar correspondence, and even his poetry, must, when tried by then-received standards, be allowed a merit entitling them to the general suffrage of contemporaries. It is to his Latin prose that our strictures are most applicable. Forgetting, in his zealous imitation of Cicero, the allowance due to modern themes, principles, and feelings, he so slavishly followed that heathen philosopher's idioms, as to clothe what he meant for Christianity in the words of paganism. Even his letters, running in name of the successor of St. Peter, transmuted the Almighty into a pantheistic generality, our Saviour into a hero, and the Madonna into a goddess of Loreto. It may be feared that this latitudinarianism was not limited to manner, for an anecdote alleges him to have seriously recommended a young divine to avoid reading St. Paul's Epistles, lest they might mar his style.

Compositions conceived and executed in so eclectic a spirit could scarcely avoid falling into coldness and pedantry; and such are prominent faults in his Venetian history, and his tribute to Duke Guidobaldo,—two works especially connected with the subject of these pages. The former is the most important production of his pen, and was begun in 1529, by desire of the Signory, in continuation of Sabellico's narrative, It is comprised in twelve books, extending from 1487 to 1513, where it remained unfinished at his death, but was continued by Paruta. From a contemporary possessing talent, industry, leisure, and high literary reputation, as well as many opportunities of personal observation, very large expectations might be legitimately entertained. But as a churchman, he is said to have been jealously excluded from the Venetian archives, a condition which, in the judgment of Tiraboschi, ought to have disqualified him from the task, and which may account for, if it cannot excuse, the superficial character of the narrative, the poverty of graphic details, and the teasing absence of dates. On the composition, too, his classic mania has left its withering traces. It was his ambition here to rival the Commentaries of CÆsar; and, in perfecting the idiom of a dead language, he has constrained freedom of thought, and polished away the life and spirit of his theme. We have examined his pages, as an indispensable authority upon events which occupy several chapters of our work; but those who read Italian history for pleasure will generally prefer to do so either in the Italian tongue or their own. Conscious probably of this, the author himself translated the work into his vernacular language, and both versions were published soon after his death.

His dissertation on the characters of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino is written in Latin, and exhibits all those blemishes of style to which we have just referred, and which so strangely jar upon the fulsome flattery and elaborate verbiage which he labours to reduce into Ciceronian terseness. Though entitled a "Book," the whole occupies but a hundred pages in the octavo edition of his works (1567), whereof scarcely one third is original matter. It is addressed to NicolÒ Tiepolo, a literary gentleman of Venice, and professes to have been committed to writing for the satisfaction of some Venetians who, feeling an interest in Guidobaldo as their former guest, had applied to the father of Bembo for some account of his death. It is thrown into a dialogue between himself, Sadoleto, Filippo Beroaldo the younger, and Sigismondo [Conti?] of Foligno. The last-named personage supplies to their inquiries a narrative of the Duke's closing hours, addressed to Julius II., by Federigo Fregoso, along with the funeral oration pronounced at his obsequies by his preceptor Odasio. The former of these is written in a strain beseeming a heathen philosopher, rather than a Christian dignitary; the latter, which Tiraboschi has detected as very different from the printed oration, is to the full as turgid and tiresome as are most such efforts of Italian adulation; neither of them tell anything of importance that Castiglione has not better given us.

The whole discourse is, as I have had occasion to mention,[80] of but trifling value to the biographer of these personages. Facts are generalised until no substance remains; incidents and traits of character are lost in the multiplicity of epithets; and thus we have, instead of a speaking likeness, a vague and showy picture, overladen with ornaments until individuality is gone. The warmer emotions of the heart could scarcely, perhaps, be happily clothed in the abstractions of a dead tongue, unadapted to the times, and to circumstances which required the outpourings of unaffected grief; at all events, these measured periods and studied phrases give no real pleasure. Bembo was an elegant Latinist, but in such a work the language of nature could alone afford satisfaction. When we seek to know the true characters of his distinguished patrons, we are dismissed with an inflated rhetorical exercise; we are offered bread, and find it a stone. These strictures apply to the long funeral oration, but still more to the dull didactic discourse of the four friends, which wants the fire and feeling of the eulogy, and is soiled by gross details gratuitously introduced on a point at which good taste would have barely glanced. In all respects, the most interesting portion of the work is Fregoso's letter, upon which we have drawn in describing the death-bed of Guidobaldo. On the whole, this production may be dismissed with a doubt whether its prosiness or its pruriency is most offensive. Nor will the perusal of those papal brieves, extended by the same writer, which despoiled of his inheritance the Duke's adopted child, blasphemously ejecting him from the pale of Christendom, give a higher opinion of the sincerity of this ungrateful sycophant.

His other works, having no immediate reference to our subject, may be dismissed with few words. The Prose, a treatise upon rhetoric, intended to fix the standard of pure Italian composition, is a dialogue, to which Giuliano de' Medici and Federigo Fregoso are parties. Gli Asolani, a more juvenile production, was named from the castle of Asolo, at which some youths are represented as discussing the tender passion in all its moods and modifications. This theme, notwithstanding the tedious manner in which it is treated, gave it great popularity over western Europe in the sixteenth century, but the style and substance alike render it unpalatable to modern amateurs of light reading. His Latin treatise De Imitatione is a dull defence of his Ciceronian mannerisms; his essay in the same language upon Virgil and Terence a laboured philological critique; his De Ætna Liber a report of physical observations during an early residence near that volcano. His poetry, both Latin and Italian, enjoyed high reputation at a period when imitations of Petrarch had degenerated into common-place; for he succeeded in brushing away the rust of ages, and restoring much of the bright polish peculiar to the bard of Arqua. Lastly, his very numerous private and official letters have preserved to us a valuable store of facts, and much curious illustration of coeval manners and individual character.

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The share of laborious learning voluntarily borne by ladies of the highest birth in the fifteenth century is a singular problem. There was scarcely a sovereign family that could not boast among its daughters some votary of intellectual pursuits, in an age when mental cultivation was of a sort more calculated to overburden genius, than to give wings to fancy in her flight after knowledge. A familiar acquaintance with Latin was then requisite, being the key to modern as well as classic and biblical literature, and also the current language of diplomacy or courtly intercourse.[*81] The abstruse distinctions of ancient philosophy, the complex tenets of dogmatic theology, the fatiguing jargon of scholastic disputation, were all included in the circle of female accomplishments. Such were the graces for which Bianca d'Este, Isotta Nogarolo, and Veronica Gambara were famed; while another Isotta, paramour of the truculent Lord of Rimini, divided contemporary adulation between the beauties of her person and her mind. The vagueness of such eulogies might well justify scepticism as to the profundity of that lore they were intended to vaunt; but in the case of Ippolita Maria Sforza, daughter of Francesco Duke of Milan, and wife of Alfonso King of Naples, chance has afforded us a standard of the knowledge mastered by these learned ladies. It was for this princess that Constantine Lascaris composed the earliest Greek Grammar; and in the convent library of Sta. Croce at Rome there is a transcript by her of Cicero De Senectute, followed by a juvenile collection of Latin apophthegms curiously indicative of her character and studies. The house of Montefeltro could boast a full share of such distinction, in Princess Battista, wife of the wretched Galeazzo Lord of Pesaro, to whose literary celebrity we have elsewhere paid our tribute, and whose progeny we have seen maintaining the prestige of her accomplishments to the third generation. Her great-granddaughter Battista Sforza rivalled her accomplishments, and those of her cousin Ippolita Maria, and, when placed by her marriage at the head of the court at Urbino, contributed much to the literary reputation which it then first obtained. Its two succeeding duchesses of the Gonzaga race, although women of remarkable talent, did not carry so far the cultivation of their natural powers; but we have found, in their relative and associate Emilia Pia, one whose learning was scarcely less notable than her wit.

Such were the examples of female genius which emanated from the courts of Italy, and, spreading to her universities, installed feminine erudition in professorial chairs. Nor was this questionable practice limited within the Italian peninsula. Many Spanish dames were conspicuous in scholarship, and, at the close of the century, Salamanca and Alcala saw their professorships held with applause by ladies equally distinguished for birth and accomplishments.

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