The Civilization of Renaissance in Italy

Glory

 

To this inward development of the individual corresponds a new sort of  outward distinction--the modern form of glory.

 

In the other countries of Europe the different classes of society lived  apart, each with its own medieval caste sense of honour. The poetical  fame of the Troubadours and Minnesanger was peculiar to the knightly  order. But in Italy social equality had appeared before the time of the  tyrannies or the democracies. We there find early traces of a general  society, having, as will be shown more fully later on, a common ground  in Latin and Italian literature; and such a ground was needed for this  new element in life to grow in. To this must be added that the Roman  authors, who were not zealously studied, are filled and saturated with  the conception of fame, and that their subject itself--the universal  empire of Rome-- stood as a permanent ideal before the minds of  Italians. From henceforth all the aspirations and achievements of the  people were governed by a moral postulate, which was still unknown  elsewhere in Europe.

 

Here, again, as in all essential points, the first witness to be called  is Dante. He strove for the poet's garland with all the power of his  soul.33 As publicist and man of letters, he laid stress on the fact  that what he did was new, and that he wished not only to be, but to be  esteemed the first in his own walks.34 But in his prose writings he  touches also on the inconveniences of fame; he knows how often personal  acquaintance with famous men is disappointing, and explains how this is  due partly to the childish fancy of men, partly to envy, and partly to  the imperfections of the hero himself. And in his great poem he firmly  maintains the emptiness of fame, although in a manner which betrays  that his heart was not free from the longing for it. In Paradise the  sphere of Mercury is the seat of such blessed ones as on earth strove  after glory and thereby dimmed 'the beams of true love.' It is  characteristic that the lost souls in hell beg of Dante to keep alive  for them their memory and fame on earth, while those in Purgatory only  entreat his prayers and those of others for their deliverance.37 And in  a famous passage, the passion for fame--'lo gran disio dell'eccellenza'  (the great desire of excelling)--is reproved for the reason that  intellectual glory is not absolute, but relative to the times, and may  be surpassed and eclipsed by greater successors.

 

The new race of poet-scholars which arose soon after Dante quickly made  themselves masters of this fresh tendency. They did so in a double  sense, being themselves the most acknowledged celebrities of Italy, and  at the same time, as poets and historians, consciously disposing of the  reputation of others. An outward symbol of this sort of fame was the  coronation of the poets, of which we shall speak later on.

 

A contemporary of Dante, Albertinus Musattus or Mussatus, crowned poet  at Padua by the bishop and rector, enjoyed a fame which fell little  short of deification. Every Christmas Day the doctors and students of  both colleges at the University came in solemn procession before his  house with trumpets and, it seems, with burning tapers, to salute him  and bring him presents. His reputation lasted till, in 1318, he fell  into disgrace with the ruling tyrant of the House of Carrara.

 

This new incense, which once was offered only to saints and heroes, was  given in clouds to Petrarch, who persuaded himself in his later years  that it was but a foolish and troublesome thing. His letter 'To  Posterity' is the confession of an old and famous man, who is forced to  gratify the public curiosity. He admits that he wishes for fame in the  times to come, but would rather be without it in his own day. In his  dialogue on fortune and misfortune, the interlocutor, who maintains the  futility of glory, has the best of the contest. But, at the same time,  Petrarch is pleased that the autocrat of Byzantium knows him as well by  his writings as Charles IV knows him. And in fact, even in his  lifetime, his fame extended far beyond Italy. And the emotion which he  felt was natural when his friends, on the occasion of a visit to his  native Arezzo (1350), took him to the house where he was born, and told  him how the city had provided that no change should be made in it. In  former times the dwellings of certain great saints were preserved and  revered in this way, like the cell of St. Thomas Aquinas in the  Dominican convent at Naples, and the Portincula of St. Francis near  Assisi; and one or two great jurists so enjoyed the half-mythical  reputation which led to this honour. Towards the close of the  fourteenth century the people at Bagnolo, near Florence, called an old  building the 'Studio of Accursius' (died in 1260), but, nevertheless,  suffered it to be destroyed. It is probable that the great incomes and  the political influence which some jurists obtained as consulting  lawyers made a lasting impression on the popular imagination.

 

To the cult of the birthplaces of famous men must be added that of  their graves, and, in the case of Petrarch, of the spot where he died.  In memory of him Arqua became a favorite resort of the Paduans, and was  dotted with graceful little villas. At this time there were no 'classic  spots' in Northern Europe, and pilgrimages were only made to pictures  and relics. It was a point of honour for the different cities to  possess the bones of their own and foreign celebrities; and it is most  remarkable how seriously the Florentines, even in the fourteenth  century-- long before the building of Santa Croce--labored to make  their cathedral a Pantheon. Accorso, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and  the jurist Zanobi della Strada were to have had magnificent tombs there  erected to them. Late in the fifteenth century, Lorenzo il Magnifico  applied in person to the Spoletans, asking them to give up the corpse  of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi for the cathedral, and received the  answer that they had none too many ornaments to the city, especially in  the shape of distinguished people, for which reason they begged him to  spare them; and, in fact, he had to be content with erecting a  cenotaph. And even Dante, in spite of all the applications to which  Boccaccio urged the Florentines with bitter emphasis, remained sleeping  tranquilly in San Francesco at Ravenna, 'among ancient tombs of  emperors and vaults of saints, in more honorable company than thou, O  Florence, couldst offer him.' It even happened that a man once took  away unpunished the lights from the altar on which the crucifix stood,  and set there by the grave, with the words, 'Take them; thou art more  worthy of them than He, the Crucified One! ' (Franco Sacchetti, Novella  121.)

 

And now the Italian cities began again to remember their ancient  citizens and inhabitants. Naples, perhaps, had never forgotten its tomb  of Virgil, since a kind of mythical halo had become attached to the  name.  The Paduans, even in the sixteenth century, firmly believed that they  possessed not only the genuine bones of their founder, Antenor, but  also those of the historian Livy. 'Sulmona,' says Boccaccio, 'bewails  that Ovid lies buried far away in exile; and Parma rejoices that  Cassius sleeps within its walls.' The Mantuans coined a medal in 1257  with the bust of Virgil, and raised a statue to represent him. In a fit  of aristocratic insolence, the guardian of the young Gonzaga, Carlo  Malatesta, caused it to be pulled down in 1392, and was afterwards  forced, when he found the fame of the old poet too strong for him, to  set it up again. Even then, perhaps, the grotto, a couple of miles from  the town, where Virgil was said to have meditated, was shown to  strangers, like the 'Scuola di Virgilio' at Naples. Como claimed both  the Plinys for its own, and at the end of the fifteenth century erected  statues in their honour, sitting under graceful baldachins on the  facade of the cathedral.

 

History and the new topography were now careful to leave no local  celebrity unnoticed. At the same period the northern chronicles only  here and there, among the list of popes, emperors, earthquakes, and  comets, put in the remark, that at such a time this or that famous man  'flourished.' We shall elsewhere have to show how, mainly under the  influence of this idea of fame, an admirable biographical literature  was developed. We must here limit ourselves to the local patriotism of  the topographers who recorded the claims of their native cities to  distinction.

 

In the Middle Ages, the cities were proud of their saints and of the  bones and relics in their churches. With these the panegyrist of Padua  in 1450, Michele Savonarola, begins his list; from them he passes to  'the famous men who were no saints, but who, by their great intellect  and force (virtus) deserve to be added (adnecti) to the saints'--just  as in classical antiquity the distinguished man came close upon the  hero. The further enumeration is most characteristic of the time. First  comes Antenor, the brother of Priam, who founded Padua with a band...