Medicine was the only science that made any significant progress in this period of Italy’s decline. The greatest scientists of the age spent many years in Italy as students and teachers—Copernicus from 1496 to 1506, Vesalius from 1537 to 1546; but we must not steal them from Poland and Flanders to further honor Italy. Realdo Colombo, who succeeded Vesalius as professor of anatomy at Padua, expounded the pulmonary circulation of the blood in De re anatomica (1558), probably unaware that Servetus had proposed the same theory twelve years before. Colombo practised the dissection of human cadavers at Padua and Rome, apparently without ecclesiastical opposition;19 he seems also to have vivisected dogs. Gabriele Fallopio, a pupil of Vesalius, discovered and described the semicircular canals and the chorda tympani of the ear, and the tubes, now named after him, that bear the ova from the ovaries to the uterus. Bartolommeo Eustachio described and gave his name to the Eustachian tube of the ear and the Eustachian valve of the heart; to him also we owe the discovery of the abducens nerve, the suprarenal bodies, and the thoracic duct. Costanzo Varoli studied the pons Varolii—a mass of nerves on the undersurface of the brain.
We have no figures as to the effects of medicine on human longevity in the Renaissance. Varoli died at thirty-two, Fallopio at forty, Colombo at forty-three, Eustachio at fifty; on the other hand Michelangelo lived to eighty-nine, Titian to ninety-nine, Luigi Cornaro to approximately a century. Born at Venice in 1467 or earlier, Luigi was rich enough to indulge in every luxury of food, drink, and love. These “excesses caused me to fall a prey to various ailments, such as pains in the stomach, frequent pains in the side, symptoms of gout… a low fever that was almost continuous… and an unquenchable thirst. This evil condition left me nothing to hope for except that death should terminate my troubles.” When he was forty his physicians abandoned all medicaments and advised him that his only hope of recovery lay in “a temperate and orderly life…. I was not to partake of any foods, either solid or liquid, save such as are prescribed for invalids; and of these in small quantities only.” He was allowed to eat meat and drink wine, but always in moderation; and he soon reduced his total daily intake to twelve ounces of food and fourteen of wine. Within a year, he tells us, “I found myself entirely cured of all my complaints…. I grew most healthy, and have remained so from that time to this”20—i.e., age eighty-three. He found that this order and moderation of physical habits made for similar qualities and health of mind and character; his “brain remained constantly in a clear condition;…. melancholy, hatred, and the other passions” left him; even his esthetic sense was sharpened, and all lovely things seemed to him now more beautiful than ever before.
He spent a quiet and comfortable old age at Padua, undertook and financed public works, and wrote, at eighty-three, his autobiographical Discorsi della vita sobria. Tintoretto has pictured him for us in a delectable portrait: bald head but ruddy face, eyes clear and penetrating, wrinkles spelling benevolence, white beard thinned with years, hands still revealing, so near to death, an aristocratic youth. His octogenarian vivacity encourages us as he rallies those who thought life after seventy to be a meaningless valetudinarian procrastination:
Let them come and see, and wonder at my good health, how I mount on horseback without help, how I run upstairs and uphill, how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am, how free from care and disagreeable thoughts. Peace and joy never quit me…. All my senses (thank God!) are in the best condition, including the sense of taste; for I enjoy more the simple food that I now take in moderation than all the delicacies that I ate in my years of disorder…. When I come home I see before me not one or two but eleven grandchildren.… I take delight in hearing them sing and play on different musical instruments. I sing myself, and find my voice better, clearer, and louder than ever…. My life, therefore, is alive, not dead; nor would I exchange my old age for the youth of such as live in the service of their passions.21
At eighty-six, “full of health and strength,” he wrote a second discourse, expressing his joy at the conversion of several friends to his way of life. At ninety-one he added a third essay, and told how “I constantly write, and with my own hand, eight hours a day, and…. in addition to this I walk and sing for many other hours… For I feel, when I leave the table, that I must sing…. Oh, how beautiful and sonorous my voice has become!” At ninety-two he composed “A loving exhortation… to all mankind to follow the orderly and temperate life.”22 He looked forward to completing a century, and to an easy death through the gradual diminution of his senses, feelings, and vital spirits. He died peacefully in 1566; some say at ninety-nine, others at one hundred and three or four. His wife, we are told, obeyed his precepts, lived to nearly a century, and died in “perfect ease of body and security of soul.”23
We must not expect to find a major philosopher in so small a span of space and time. Iacopo Aconzio, an Italian Protestant, in a treatise De methodo (1558), prepared part of the way for Descartes; and in De strata-gematibus Satanae (1565) he had the audacity to suggest that all Christianity might be reduced to a few doctrines held by all Christians, and not including the idea of the Trinity.24 Mario Nizzoli made a path for Francis Bacon by inveighing against the continued reign of Aristotle in philosophy, appealing for direct observation against deductive reasoning, and denouncing logic as the art of proving the false to be true.25 Bernardino Telesio of Cosenza, in De rerum natura (1565–86), Joined Nizzoli and Pierre La Ramée in the spreading revolt against the authority of Aristotle, and called for empirical science: Nature must be explained in her own terms through the experience of our senses. What we see, said Telesio, is matter acted upon by two forces: heat coming from the sky, cold rising from the earth; heat producing expansion and motion, cold producing contraction and rest; in the conflict of these two principles lies the inner essence of all physical phenomena. These phenomena proceed according to natural causes and inherent laws, without the intervention of deity. Nature, however, is not inert; there is a soul in things as well as in man. Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno, and Francis Bacon would all take something from these ideas. Some measure of liberalism must have survived in the Church to let Telesio die a natural death (1588). Twelve years later the Inquisition would burn Bruno at the stake.
III. LITERATURE
The great age of Italian scholarship was now ended: France took the torch when Julius Caesar Scaliger migrated from Verona to Agen in 1526. Note the effect of war upon the book trade: in the last decade of the fifteenth century Florence published 179 books, Milan 228, Rome 460, Venice 1491; in the first decade of the sixteenth century Florence published 47, Milan 99, Rome 41, Venice 536.26 The academies founded for classical scholarship—the Platonic Academy at Florence, the Roman Academy of Pomponius Laetus, the Neacademia at Venice, the Neapolitan Academy of Pontanus—died out in this period; the study of pagan philosophy was frowned upon except in a Scholastified Aristotle; and Latin gave place to Italian as the language of literature. New academies sprang up, chiefly devoted to literary and linguistic criticism, and serving as central exchanges of ears for the poets of the town. So Florence had the Della Crusca Academy (1572) and the Umidi; Venice had the Pellegrini, Padua the Eretei; and each new society took a sillier name. These academies encouraged talent and stifled genius; poets struggled to obey the rules laid down by the purists, and inspiration fled to airier haunts. Michelangelo belonged to no literary academy, and though he, like the rest, indulged his Muse in trite conceits, and forced his fire into cold Petrarchian molds, his sonnets, rough in form but warm in feeling and thought, are the best Italian poetry of the time. Luigi Alamanni fled from Florence to France, and composed a poem on agriculture—La coltivazione— which did not fall far short of Virgil’s Georgics in combining tillage with poetry.* Bernardo Tasso rehearsed, in the misfortunes of his life, the vicissitudes of his famous son Torquato; his lyrics are among the choicest artificialities of the age; his epic, Amadigi, versified with heavy seriousness the chivalric romance, Amadis de Gaul. The Italian public, missing in it Ariosto’s leavening humor, gave it a quiet burial.