This is the culminating gift of God, this is the supreme and marvelous felicity of man… that he can be that which he wills to be. Animals, from the moment of their birth, carry with them, from their mothers’ bodies, all that they are destined to have or be; the highest spirits [angels] are from the beginning… what they will be forever. But God the Father endowed man, from birth, with the seeds of every possibility and every life.18
No one cared to accept Pico’s multifarious challenge, but Pope Innocent VIII condemned three of the propositions as heretical. Since these formed so tiny a proportion of the whole, Pico might have expected mercy, and indeed, Innocent did not press the matter. But Pico issued a cautious retraction, and departed for Paris, where the University offered him protection. In 1493 Alexander VI, with his wonted geniality, notified Pico that all was forgiven. Back in Florence Pico became a devout follower of Savonarola, abandoned his pursuit of omniscience, burned his five volumes of love poetry, gave his fortune to provide marriage dowries for poor girls, and himself adopted a semimonastic life. He thought of joining the Dominican order, but died before he could make up his mind—still a youth of thirty-one. His influence survived his brief career, and inspired Reuchlin to continue, in Germany, those Hebrew studies which had been among the passions of Pico’s life.
Politian, who admired Pico generously, and corrected his poetry with the most gracious apologies, was a man of less meteoric lure, but of deeper penetration and more substantial accomplishment. Angelus Bassus, as he originally called himself—Angelo Ambrogini, as some called him—took his more famous name from Monte Poliziano, in the Florentine hinterland. Coming to Florence he studied Latin under Cristoforo Landino, Greek under Andronicus of Salonica, Platonism under Ficino, and the Aristotelian philosophy under Argyropoulos. At sixteen he began to translate Homer into a Latin so idiomatic and vigorous that it seemed the product of at least the Silver Age of Roman poetry. Having finished the first two books, he sent them to Lorenzo. That prince of patrons, alert to every excellence, encouraged him to continue, took him into his home as tutor of his son Piero, and provided for all his needs. So freed from want, Politian edited ancient texts—among them the Pandects of Justinian—with a learning and judgment that won universal praise. When Landino published an edition of Horace, Politian prefaced it with an ode comparable in Latinity, phrasing, and complex versification with the poems of Horace himself. His lectures on classic literature were attended by the Medici, Pico della Mirandola, and foreign students—Reuchlin, Grocyn, Linacre, and others—who had heard, beyond the Alps, the echo of his fame as scholar, poet, and orator in three tongues. It was not unusual for him to prelude a lecture with an extensive Latin poem composed for the occasion; one such piece, in sonorous hexameters, was nothing less than a history of poetry from Homer to Boccaccio. This and other poems, published by Politian under the title of Sylvae, revealed a Latin style so facile and fluent, so vivid in imagery, that the humanists acclaimed him as their master despite his youth, and rejoiced that the noble language which they aspired to restore had been taught to live again.
While making himself almost a Latin classic, Politian issued with fertile ease a succession of Italian poems that stand unrivaled between Petrarch and Ariosto. When Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano won a joust in 1475, Politian described La giostra in ottava rima of melodious elegance; and in La bella Simonetta he celebrated the aristocratic beauty of Giuliano’s beloved with such eloquence and finesse that Italian love poetry took on thereafter a new delicacy of diction and feeling. Giuliano tells how, going out to hunt, he came upon Simonetta and other lasses dancing in a field.
The beauteous nymph who feeds my soul with fire
I found in gentle, pure, and prudent mood,
In graceful attitude,
Loving and courteous, holy, wise, benign.
So sweet, so tender was her face divine,
So gladsome, that in those celestial eyes
Shone perfect paradise,
Yea, all the good that we poor mortals crave….
Down from her royal head and lustrous brow
The golden curls fell joyously unpent,
While through the choir she went
With feet well lessoned to the rhythmic sound.
Her eyes, though scarcely raised above the ground,
Sent me by stealth a ray divinely fair;
But still her jealous hair
Broke the bright beam, and veiled her from my gaze.
She, born and nursed in heaven for angels’ praise,
No sooner saw this wrong than back she drew—
With hand of purest hue—
Her truant curls with kind and gentle mien;
Then from her eyes a soul so fiery keen,
So sweet a soul of love, she cast on mine
That scarce can I divine
How then I ‘scaped from burning utterly.19
For his own mistress, Ippolita Leoncina, Politian composed love songs of exquisite grace and tenderness; and, overflowing with rhymes, he fashioned similar lyrics to be used by his friends as charms to exorcise modesty. He learned the ballads of the peasantry, and reshaped them into finished literary form; so rephrased they passed back into popularity, and have left echoes in Tuscany to this day. In La brunettina mia he described a village beauty bathing her face and bosom at a fountain, and crowning her hair with flowers; “her breasts were as May roses, her lips were as strawberries”; it is a hackneyed theme that never palls. Trying to recapture that union of drama, poetry, music, and song which had been accomplished in the Dionysian Theater of the Greeks, Politian composed—in two days, he vows—a little lyric drama of 434 lines, which was sung for Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua (1472). It was called La favola di Orfeo—The Fable of Orpheus— and told how Orpheus’ wife Eurydice died of a snake bite as she fled from an amorous shepherd; how the disconsolate Orpheus made his way down to Hades, and so charmed Pluto with his lyre that the lord of the underworld restored Eurydice to him on condition that he should not look upon her until quite emerged from Hades. He had led her but a few steps when, in the ecstasy of his love, he turned to look upon her; whereupon she was snatched back to Hades, and he was barred from following her. In an insane reaction Orpheus became a misogynist, and recommended that men should ignore women and satisfy themselves with boys after the example of sated Zeus with Ganymede. Woodland maenads, furious at his contempt of women, beat him to death, flayed him, tore him limb from limb, and rejoiced tunefully in their revenge. The music that accompanied the lines is lost; but we may safely rank the Orfeo among the harbingers of Italian opera.
Politian fell short of greatness as a poet because he avoided the pitfalls of passion and never plumbed the depths of life or love; he is always charming and never profound. His love for Lorenzo was the strongest feeling that he knew. He was at his patron’s side when Giuliano was killed in the cathedral; he saved Lorenzo by slamming and bolting the doors of the sacristy in the face of the conspirators. When Lorenzo returned from his perilous journey to Naples Politian welcomed him with verses almost scandalously affectionate. When Lorenzo passed away Politian mourned him inconsolably, and then gradually faded out. He died two years later, like Pico, in the fateful year 1494, when the French discovered Italy.