Vittoria recaptured, without proud display, all the quiet virtue of a Roman heroine of the Republic, and combined with it the noblest features of Christianity. She had distinguished ancestry: her father was Fabrizio Colonna, grand constable of the Kingdom of Naples; her mother, Agnese da Montefeltro, was a daughter of Federigo, the scholarly Duke of Urbino. Betrothed in childhood to Ferrante Francesco d’Ávalos, Marquis of Pescara, she married him at nineteen (1509); and the love that united them before and after marriage was a finer poem that any of the sonnets that they exchanged during his campaigns. At the battle of Ravenna (1512) he was wounded almost to death, and was taken prisoner; he took advantage of his captivity to compose A Book of Loves, which he dedicated to his wife. Meanwhile he had carried on a liaison with one of Isabella d’Este’s maids of honor.62 After his release he returned to Vittoria briefly, then sallied forth on one campaign after another, so that she seldom saw him again. He led the forces of Charles V at Pavia (1525), and won a decisive victory. Offered the crown of Naples if he would join a conspiracy against the Emperor, he thought it over for a while, then revealed the plot to Charles. When he died (November, 1525) he had not seen his wife for three years. Ignorant of, or ignoring, his infidelities, she spent her twenty-two years of widowhood in works of charity, piety, and devotion to his memory. When she was urged to marry again she replied: “My husband Ferdinand, who to you seems dead, is not dead to me.”63 She lived in quiet retirement at Ischia, then in convents at Orvieto and Viterbo, then in semiconventual privacy in Rome. There, while herself remaining apparently orthodox, she befriended several Italians who sympathized with the Reformation. For a time she was placed under the surveillance of the Inquisition, and to be her friend was to risk indictment for heresy. Michelangelo took the risk, and developed for her an intense spiritual affection that never dared go beyond poetry.
The educated women of the Renaissance emancipated themselves without any propaganda of emancipation, purely by their intelligence, character, and tact, and by the heightened sensitivity of men to their tangible and intangible charms. They influenced their time in every field: in politics by their ability to govern states for their absent husbands; in morals by their combination of freedom, good manners, and piety; in art by developing a matronly beauty which modeled a hundred Madonnas; in literature by opening their homes and their smiles to poets and scholars. There were innumerable satires on women, as in every age; but for every bitter or sarcastic line there were litanies of devotion and praise. The Italian Renaissance, like the French Enlightenment, was bisexual; women moved into every sphere of life; men ceased to be coarse and crude, and were molded to finer manners and speech; and civilization, with all its laxity and violence, took on a grace and refinement such as it had not known in Europe for a thousand years.
VI. THE HOME
The rising refinement showed itself in the form and life of the home. While the dwellings of the populace remained as before—unadorned whitewashed stucco or plaster walls, flagstone floors, an inner court usually with a well, and around the court one or two stories of rooms furnished with the simple necessaries of life—the palaces of the nobles and nouveaux riches took on a splendor and luxury again recalling Imperial Rome. The wealth that in the Middle Ages had been concentrated on the cathedral now poured itself out into mansions equipped with such furniture, conveniences, delicacies, and ornaments as could hardly be found, north of the Alps, in the seats of princes and kings. The Villa Chigi and the Palazzo Massimi, both designed by Baldassare Peruzzi, enclosed a labyrinth of rooms, each ornate with columns and pilasters, or fretted cornice, or gilded coffered ceiling, or paintings on vault and walls, or sculptured chimney pieces, or stucco carvings and arabesques, or floors of marble or tile. Every mansion had elegant beds, tables, chairs, chests, and cabinets built for a century and cut to please the eye; its massive credences or buffets were loaded with silver plate and fancy pottery; it had soft and comfortable beds, fine carpets and handsome drapes, and linen abundant, enduring, and perfumed. Great fireplaces warmed the rooms, and lamps, torches, or chandeliers lighted them. All that was lacking in these palaces was children.
For family limitation rises as the means for supporting children mount. The Church and the Scriptures bade men increase and multiply, but comfort counseled infertility. Even in the countryside, where children were economic assets, families of six children were rare; in the city, where children were liabilities, families were small—the richer the smaller—and many homes had no children at all.64 What lovely children Italian families could have appears in the bambini and putti of the artists, the cantorie of Donatello and Luca della Robbia, and such sculptural portraits as The Young St. John of Antonio Rossellino in the Washington National Gallery. The solidarity of the family, the mutual loyalty and love of parents and children, stand out all the more attractively amid the moral looseness of the times.
The family was still an economic, moral, and geographical unit. Usually the debts of one defaulting member were paid by the rest—a marked exception to the individualism of the age. Rarely did any member marry or leave the state without the family’s consent. Servants were freeborn free-spoken members of the family. Paternal authority was supreme, and was obeyed in all crises; but normally the mother ruled the household. Maternal love was as fond in the princesses as in the paupers. Beatrice d’Este writes about her baby boy to her sister Isabella: “I often wish that you could be here to see him, as I am quite sure that you would never be able to stop petting and kissing him.”65 Most families of the middle class kept a register of births, marriages, deaths, and interesting events, interspersed here and there with intimate comments. In one such family record Giovanni Rucellai (ancestor of the dramatist of the same name) wrote, toward the end of his life (c. 1460), these proud words of a Florentine:
I thank God that he has created me a rational and immortal being; in a Christian country; close to Rome, the center of the Christian faith; in Italy, the noblest country in Christendom; and in Florence, the most beautiful city of the whole world…. I thank Our Lord for an excellent mother, who, though only in her twentieth year at the time of my father’s death, refused all offers of marriage, and devoted herself wholly to her children; and also for an equally excellent wife, who loved me truly, and cared most faithfully for both household and children; who was spared to me for many years, and whose death has been the greatest loss that ever has or could have befallen me. Recalling all these innumerable favors and benefits, I now in my old age desire to detach myself from all earthly things in order to devote my whole soul to giving praise and thanks to Thee, my Lord, the living source of my being.66
Two men, who were perhaps one, wrote, about 1436, treatises on the family and its governance. Agnolo Pandolfini was probably the author of an eloquent Trattato del governo della famiglia; Leon Battista Alberti, soon afterward, composed a Trattato della famiglia, whose third book, “Economico,” is so largely similar to the earlier treatise that some have thought the two works were different forms of one essay by Alberti. Perhaps they are both genuine, so alike because they both based themselves upon Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Pandolfini’s performance is the better. Like the Rucellai, he was a man of means, serving Florence as diplomat, and contributing generously to public causes. He wrote his treatise toward the end of a long life, and cast it into the form of a dialogue with his three sons. They ask him should they seek public office; he advises against it, as necessitating acts of dishonesty, cruelty, and theft, and as exposing one to suspicion, envy, and abuse. The sources of a man’s happiness lie not in public office or fame, but in his wife and children, his economic success, his good repute, and his friends. A man should marry a wife sufficiently younger than himself to submit to his instruction and molding; and he should teach her, in the early years of their marriage, the obligations of motherhood and the arts of household management. A prosperous life comes from the economical and orderly use of health, talent, time, and money: of health through continence, exercise, and a moderate diet; of talent through study and the formation of honest character by religion and example; of time through shunning idleness; and of money through a careful accounting and balancing of income, expenditure, and savings. The wise man will invest first of all in a farm or estate, so arranged as to provide him and his family not only with a country residence, but with corn, wine, oil, fowl, wood, and as many as possible of the other necessaries of life. It is well also to have a house in the city, so that the children may use the educational facilities there, and learn some of the industrial arts.67 But the family should spend as much of the year as possible in the villa and the country: