After marriage the woman usually kept her own name; so Lorenzo’s wife continued to be called Donna Clarice Orsini; sometimes, however, the wife might add her husband’s name to her own—Maria Salviati de’ Medici. In the medieval theory of marriage it was expected that love would develop between man and wife through the varied partnerships of marriage in joy and sorrow, prosperity and adversity; and apparently the expectation was fulfilled in the majority of cases. No love of youth for maiden could be deeper or truer than that of Vittoria Colonna for the Marquis of Pescara, to whom she had been engaged from the age of four; no loyalty could have been greater than that of Elisabetta Gonzaga, accompanying her crippled husband through all his misfortunes and exiles, and faithful to his memory till her death.
Nevertheless adultery was rampant.49 Since most marriages among the upper classes were diplomatic unions of economic or political interests, many husbands felt warranted in having a mistress; and the wife, though she might mourn, usually closed her eyes—or her lips—to the offense. Among the middle classes some men assumed that adultery was a legitimate diversion; Machiavelli and his friends seem to have thought nothing of exchanging notes about their infidelities. When, in such cases, the wife avenged herself by imitation, the husband was as like as not to ignore it, and wear his horns with grace.50 But the influx of Spaniards into Italy, via Naples and Alexander VI and Charles V, brought the Spanish “point of honor” into Italian life, and in the sixteenth century the husband felt called upon to punish his wife’s adultery with death, while preserving his pristine privileges unimpaired. The husband might desert his wife and still prosper; the deserted wife had no remedy except to reclaim her dowry, return to her relatives, and live a lonely life; she was not allowed to marry again. She might enter a convent, but it would expect a donation of her dowry.51 In general, in the Latin countries, adultery is condoned as a substitute for divorce.
IV. RENAISSANCE MAN
The combination of intellectual enfranchisement and moral release produced “the man of the Renaissance.” He was not typical enough to merit that title; there were a dozen types of man in that age as in any other; he was merely the most interesting, perhaps because he was exceptional. The Renaissance peasant was what peasants have always been until machinery made agriculture an industry. The Italian proletaire of 1500 was like those of Rome under the Caesars or Mussolini; occupation makes the man. The Renaissance businessman was like his past and present peers. The Renaissance priest, however, was different from the medieval or modern priest; he believed less and enjoyed more; he could make love and war. Amid these types was an arresting mutation, a sport of the species and the time, the kind of man we think of when we recall the Renaissance, a type unique in history, except that Alcibiades, seeing him, would have felt reborn.
The qualities of this type revolved about two foci: intellectual and moral audacity. A mind sharp, alert, versatile, open to every impression and idea, sensitive to beauty, eager for fame. It was a recklessly individualistic spirit, set on developing all its potential capacities; a proud spirit, scorning Christian humility, despising weakness and timidity, defying conventions, morals, tabus, popes, even, occasionally, God. In the city such a man might lead a turbulent faction; in the state, an army; in the Church he would gather a hundred benefices under his cassock, and use his wealth to climb to power. In art he was no longer an artisan working anonymously with others on a collective enterprise, as in the Middle Ages; he was “a single and separate person,” who stamped his character upon his works, signed his name to his paintings, even, now and then, carved it on his statues, like Michelangelo on the Pietà. Whatever his achievements, this “Renaissance man” was always in motion and discontent, fretting at limits, longing to be a “universal man”—bold in conception, decisive in deed, eloquent in speech, skilled in art, acquainted with literature and philosophy, at home with women in the palace and with soldiers in the camp.
His immorality was part of his individualism. His goal being the successful expression of his personality, and his environment imposing upon him no standards of restraint either from the example of the clergy or from the terror of a supernatural creed, he allowed himself any means to his ends, and any pleasure on the way. None the less he had his own virtues. He was a realist, and seldom talked nonsense except to a reluctant woman. He had good manners when he was not killing, and even then he preferred to kill with grace. He had energy, force of character, direction and unity of will; he accepted the old Roman conception of virtue as manliness, but added to it skill and intelligence. He was not needlessly cruel, and he excelled the Romans in his capacity for pity. He was vain, but that was part of his sense of beauty and form. His appreciation of the beautiful in woman and nature, in art and crime, was a mainspring of the Renaissance. He replaced the moral with the esthetic sense; if his type had multiplied and prevailed, an irresponsible aristocracy of taste would have supplanted the aristocracies of birth or wealth.
But, again, he was only one of many kinds of Renaissance man. How different was the idealistic Pico, with his belief in the moral perfectibility of mankind—or the grim Savonarola, blind to beauty and absorbed in righteousness—or the gentle gracious Raphael, scattering beauty about him with an open hand—or the demonic Michelangelo, haunted with the Last Judgment long before he painted it—or the melodious Politian, who thought there would be pity even in hell—or the honest Vittorino da Feltre, so successfully binding Zeno to Christ—or the second Giuliano de’ Medici, so kindly just that his brother the Pope considered him unfit for government! We perceive, after every effort to abbreviate and formulate, that there was no “man of the Renaissance.” There were men, agreeing only in one thing: that life had never been lived so intensely before. The Middle Ages had said—or had pretended to say—No to life; the Renaissance, with all its heart and soul and might, said Yes.
V. RENAISSANCE WOMAN
The emergence of woman was one of the brightest phases of the period. Her status in European history has usually risen with wealth, though Periclean Greece, too near the Orient, was an exception. When hunger is no longer feared, the male quest turns to sex; and if man still despoils himself for gold, it is to lay it at a woman’s feet, or before the children she has given him. If she resists him he idealizes her. Usually she has the good sense to resist him, and to make him pay dearly for the boons whose contemplated splendor swells his veins. If, moreover, she adds graces of mind and character to her body’s charms, she gives man the highest satisfaction he can find this side of glory; and in return he raises her to an almost queenly dominance in his life.