All the art world knows the story how the officers of the Inquisition-pursuant to a decree of the Council of Trent that all erroneous teaching must be avoided in art—summoned Veronese before them (1573), and demanded to know why he had introduced so many irreverent irrelevancies into The Feast in the House of Levi (Venice)—parrots, dwarfs, Germans, buffoons, halberdiers…. Paolo replied boldly that his “commission was to ornament the picture as seemed good to me. It was big, and with room for many figures…. Whenever an empty space in a picture needs filling up, I put in figures as the fancy takes me”—partly to balance the composition, and also, doubtless, to feast the observant eye. The Inquisition ordered him to amend the painting at his own cost, which he did.37 That inquest marked the passage, in Venetian art, from the Renaissance to the Counter Reformation.
Veronese had no distinguished disciples, but his influence overleaped generations to share in molding the art of Italy, Flanders, and France. Tiepolo recaptured his decorative flair after a long intermission; Rubens studied him carefully, learned the secrets of Paolo’s coloring, and inflated Veronese’s plump females to Flemish amplitude. Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain found in him a guide to the use of architectural ornament in their landscapes, and Charles Lebrun followed Veronese in designing vast murals. To Veronese and Correggio the painters of eighteenth-century France looked for inspiration in their idyls of fêtes champêtres and aristocratic lovers playing at Arcadia; here stemmed Watteau and Fragonard; here rose the rosy nudes of Boucher, the gracious children and women conceived by Greuze. Here, perhaps, Turner found something of the sunshine with which he illuminated London.
So, in Veronese’s blaze of color, ended the Golden Age of the Adriatic Queen. Art could hardly go further in the direction that it had followed from Giorgione to Veronese. Technical perfection had been reached; the heights had been scaled; now there would be a slow descent until, in the eighteenth century, Tiepolo would rival Veronese in decorative painting, and Goldoni would be the Aristophanes of Venice in a last burst of splendor before the republic’s death.
VI. PERSPECTIVE
As we look back across the heyday of Venetian art, and diffidently seek to assess its role in our heritage, we may say at once that only Florence and Rome rivaled it in excellence, splendor, and scope. It is true that the Venetian painters, even Titian, probed less deeply than the Florentines into the secret hopes and feelings, the despairs and tragedies of men, that often they loved the raiment and the flesh too keenly to reach the soul. Ruskin was right: after the Bellini, and excepting Lotto, real religion fades from Venetian art.38 The Venetians could not help it if the collapse of the Crusades, the triumph and spread of Islam, the deterioration of the papacy at Avignon and in the Papal Schism, the secularization of the papacy under Sixtus IV and Alexander VI, and finally the secession of Germany and England from the Roman Church, had weakened the faith even of the faithful, and had left many vigorous spirits no better philosophy than to eat and drink and mate and disappear. But never elsewhere had Christian art and pagan art lived in such contented harmony. The same brush that painted a Virgin painted a Venus next, and no one effectively complained. Nor was it a sybaritic art or life of luxury and ease; the artists worked themselves to exhaustion, and the people whom they portrayed were often men who fought battles and governed states, or women who ruled such men.
The Venetian painters were too enamored of color to match the careful draftsmanship of the Florentine masters. But they were good draftsmen none the less. A Frenchman once said that l’été c’est un coloriste, l’hiver c’est un dessinateur—”summer is a colorist, winter is a designer”;39 the leafless trees reveal pure line. But those lines are still there under the green of spring, the brown of summer, and autumn’s gold. Beneath the glory of color in Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese there is line, but it is absorbed by the color, as the structural form of a symphony is concealed by its flow.
Venetian art and literature sang the glory of Venice even as her economy sank to ruin in a Mediterranean dominated at one end by the Turks and deserted at the other by a Europe seeking American gold. And perhaps the artists and poets were justified. No vicissitudes of trade or war could extinguish the proud memory of a marvelous century—1480–1580—during which the Mocenigo and Priuli and Loredani had made and saved imperial Venice, and the Lombardi and Leopardi had adorned her with statuary, and Sansovino and Palladio had crowned her waters with churches and palaces, and the Bellini and Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto and Veronese had lifted her to the art leadership of Italy, and Bembo had sung impeccable songs, and Manutius had poured forth, to all who cared, the literary heritage of Greece and Rome, and the irredeemable, irrepressible, Mephistophelean Scourge of Princes had sat enthroned on the Grand Canal, judging and milking the world.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Waning of the Renaissance
1534–76
I. THE DECLINE OF ITALY
THE wars of invasion were not yet at an end, but they had already changed the face and character of Italy. The northern provinces had been so devastated that English envoys advised Henry VIII to leave them to Charles as a punishment. Genoa had been pillaged; Milan had been taxed to death. Venice had been subdued by the League of Cambrai and the opening of new trade routes. Rome, Prato, and Pavia had suffered sack, Florence had been starved and financially bled, Pisa had half destroyed herself in her struggle for freedom, Siena was exhausted with revolutions. Ferrara had impoverished herself in her long contest with the popes, and had dishonored herself by abetting the irresponsible attack upon Rome. The Kingdom of Naples, like Lombardy, had been ravaged and plundered by foreign armies, and had long languished under alien dynasties. Sicily was already the nursery of brigands. The only consolation of Italy was that its conquest by Charles V had probably saved it from spoliation by the Turks.
By the settlement of Bologna (1530) the control of Italy passed to Spain with two exceptions: cautious Venice retained her independence, and the chastened papacy was confirmed in its sovereignty over the States of the Church. Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Milan became Spanish dependencies, ruled by Spanish viceroys. Savoy and Mantua, Ferrara and Urbino, which had usually supported or connived with Charles, were allowed to keep their indigenous dukes subject to their good behavior. Genoa and Siena retained their republican forms, but as Spanish protectorates. Florence was compelled to accept another line of Medici rulers, who survived by cooperating with Spain.
The victory of Charles marked another triumph of the modern state over the Church. What Philip IV of France had begun in 1303 was completed by Charles and Luther in Germany, by Francis I in France, by Henry VIII in England, and all in Clement’s pontificate. The powers of northern Europe had not only discovered the weakness of Italy, they had lost their fear of the papacy. The humiliation of Clement injured the respect that the transalpine populations had felt for the popes, and prepared them mentally for their secession from Catholic authority.