Alfonso rejoiced at the news, and struck a new medal EX ORE LEONIS, “from the jaws of the lion.” Francesco Maria returned to Urbino, and was once more restored to his throne. In Rome the bankers despoiled themselves. The Bini firm had lent Leo 200,000 ducats, the Gaddi 32,000, the Ricasoli 10,000; moreover, Cardinal Pucci had lent him 150,000, and Cardinal Salviati 80,000;102 the cardinals would have first claim on anything salvaged; and Leo had died worse than bankrupt. Some others joined in condemning the dead Pope as a maladministrator of great wealth. But nearly all Rome mourned him as the most generous benefactor in its history. Artists, poets, and scholars knew that the heyday of their good fortune had passed, though they had no suspicion yet of the extent of their disaster. Said Paolo Giovio: “Knowledge, art, the common well-being, the joy of living—in a word, all good things—have gone down into the grave with Leo.”103
He was a good man ruined by his virtues. Erasmus had rightly praised his kindness and humanity, his magnanimity and learning, his love and support of the arts, and had called Leo’s pontificate an age of gold.104 But Leo was too habituated to gold. Raised in a palace, he learned luxury as well as art; he never labored for his income, though he faced perils bravely; and when the revenues of the papacy were placed in his trust they slipped through his careless fingers while he basked in the happiness of recipients, or planned expensive wars. Proceeding on the lines laid down by Alexander and Julius, and inheriting their achievements, he made the Papal States stronger than ever, but he lost Germany by his extravagance and his exactions. He could see the beauty of a vase, but not the Protestant Reformation taking shape beyond the Alps; he paid no attention to a hundred warnings sent him, but asked for more gold from a nation already in revolt. He was a glory and a disaster to the Church.
He was the most generous, but not the most enlightened, of patrons. With all his patronage no great literature arose in his reign. Ariosto and Machiavelli were beyond him, though he could appreciate Bembo and Politian. His taste in art was not as sure and lordly as that of Julius; it was not to him that we owe St. Peter’s or The School of Athens. He loved beautiful form too much, too little the revealing significance that great art clothes in beautiful form. He overworked Raphael, underestimated Leonardo, and could not, like Julius, find a way through Michelangelo’s temper to his genius. He liked comfort too much to be great. It is a pity to judge him so harshly, for he was lovable.
The age received his name, and perhaps rightly; for though he rather took than gave its stamp, it was he who brought from Florence to Rome the Medicean heritage of wealth and taste, the princely patronage that he had seen in his father’s house; and with that wealth, and papal sanction, he provided an exciting stimulus to such literature and art as excelled in style and form. His example stirred a hundred other men to seek out talent, support it, and set northern Europe a precedent and standard of apprecation and worth. He more than any other pope protected the remains of classic Rome, and encouraged men to rival them. He accepted the pagan enjoyment of life, and yet, in his own conduct, remained remarkably continent in an uninhibited age. His support of the Roman humanists helped to spread into France their cultivation of classic literature and form. Under his aegis Rome became the throbbing heart of European culture; thither the artists flocked to paint or carve or build, the scholars came to study, the poets to sing, the men of wit to sparkle. “Before I forget thee, Rome,” wrote Erasmus, “I must plunge into the river of Lethe…. What precious freedom, what treasures in the way of books, what depths of knowledge among the learned, what beneficial social intercourse! Where else could one find such literary society, or such versatility of talent in one and the same place?”105 The gentle Castiglione, the polished Bembo, the learned Lascaris, Fra Giocondo, Raphael, the Sansovini and Sangalli, Sebastiano and Michelangelo—where shall we find again, in one city and decade, such a company?
BOOK V
DEBACLE
CHAPTER XIX
The Intellectual Revolt
1300–1534
I. THE OCCULT
IN every age and nation civilization is the product, privilege, and responsibility of a minority. The historian acquainted with the pervasive pertinacity of nonsense reconciles himself to a glorious future for superstition; he does not expect perfect states to arise out of imperfect men; he perceives that only a small proportion of any generation can be so freed from economic harassments as to have leisure and energy to think their own thoughts instead of those of their forebears or their environment; and he learns to rejoice if he can find in each period a few men and women who have lifted themselves, by the bootstraps of their brains, or by some boon of birth or circumstance, out of superstition, occultism, and credulity to an informed and friendly intelligence conscious of its infinite ignorance.
So in Renaissance Italy civilization was of the few, by the few, and for them. The simple common man, named legion, tilled and mined the earth, pulled the carts or bore the burdens, toiled from dawn to dusk, and at evening had no muscle left for thought. He took his opinions, his religion, his answers to the riddles of life from the air about him, or inherited them with the ancestral cottage; he let others think for him because others made him work for them. He accepted not only the fascinating, comforting, inspiring, terrifying marvels of the tradicional theology—which were daily reimpressed upon him by contagion, inculcation, and art—but he added to them, in his mental furniture, the demonology, sorcery, portents, magic, divination, astrology, relic-worship, and miraclemongering that composed, so to speak, a popular metaphysics unauthorized by the Church, which deprecated them as a problem sometimes more troublesome then unbelief. While the uncommon man in Italy was half a century or more ahead of his class beyond the Alps in wealth and culture, the common man south of the Alps shared equally with his transalpine peers the superstitions of the time.
Often the humanists themselves surrendered to the genius or stultus loci, and sprinkled their Ciceronian pages with the spirit or foolishness of their surroundings. Poggio revels in portents and prodigies like headless horsemen migrating from Como to Germany, or bearded Tritons rising from the sea to snatch fair women from the shore.1 Machiavelli, so skeptical of religion, suggested the possibility that “the air is peopled with spirits,” and declared his belief that great events are heralded by prodigies, prophecies, revelations, and signs in the sky.2 The Florentines, who liked to think that the air they breathed made them clever beyond compare, held that all important events happened on Saturday, and that it was a sure misfortune to march out to war by certain streets.3 Politian was so upset by the Pazzi conspiracy that he attributed to it a disastrous rainfall that followed it, and condoned the youths who, to end the rain, exhumed the corpse of the chief conspirator, paraded it through the city, and then flung it into the Arno.4 Marsilio Ficino wrote in defense of divination, astrology, and demonology, and excused himself from visiting Pico della Mirandola on the ground that the stars were in an unfavorable conjunction5—or was it a whimsy? If humanists could believe so, how could the people, with no advantage of leisure or education, be blamed for thinking of the natural world as the shell and instrument of numberless supernatural powers?