Pleasure palaces were in fashion, and had fancy names: Belfiore, Belriguardo, La Rotonda, Belvedere, and, above all, the summer palace of the Estensi, the Palazzo di Schifanoia—”Skip Annoyance,” or, as Frederick the Great would say, Sans Souci (“Without Care”). Begun in 1391, finished by Borso about 1469, it served as one home of the court, and as a dwelling for minor members of the ducal family. When Ferrara declined, the palace was turned into a tobacco factory, and the murals that Cossa, Tura, and others had painted in the main hall were covered with calcimine. In 1840 this was removed, and seven of the twelve panels were salvaged. They constitute a remarkable record of the costumes, industries, pageantry, and sports of Borso’s time, strangely mingled with personages from pagan mythology. These frescoes are the happiest product of a school of painting that for half a century made Ferrara a busy center of Italian art.
Ferrarese painters humbly followed the Giottesque tradition until Niccolò III stirred the stagnant waters by bringing in foreign artists to compete with them —Iacopo Bellini from Venice, Mantegna from Padua, Pisanello from Verona. Leonello added stimulus by welcoming Rogier van der Weyden (1449), who helped to turn Italian painters to the use of oil. In the same year Piero della Francesca came from Borgo San Sepolcro to paint murals (now lost) in the Ducal Palace. What finally formed the Ferrara school was Cosimo Tura’s zealous study of Mantegna’s frescoes at Padua, and of the techniques taught there by Francesco Squarcione.
Tura became court painter to Borso (1458), made portraits of the ducal family, shared in decorating the Schifanoia palace, and won such acclaim that Raphael’s father ranked him among the leading painters of Italy. Giovanni Santi apparently relished Cosimo’s dignified and somber figures, his ornate architectural backgrounds, his landscapes of fantastic rocks; but Raffaello Santi would have missed in these pictures any element of tenderness or grace. We find those elements in Tura’s pupil Ercole de’ Roberti, who succeeded his teacher as court painter in 1495; but this Hercules lacked power and vitality, unless we except the Frans-Halsian Concert once ascribed to him in the London Gallery. Francesco Cossa, the greatest of Tura’s pupils, painted in the Schifanoia two masterpieces rich in both vitality and grace: The Triumph of Venus and The Races, revealing the charm and joy of life at the Ferrara court. When Borso paid him for these at the official rate—ten bolognini per foot of painted space—Cossa protested; and when Borso failed to see the point Francesco took his talents to Bologna (1470). Lorenzo Costa did likewise thirteen years later, and the school of Ferrara lost two of its best men.
Dosso Dossi revitalized it by studying in Venice in the heyday of Giorgione (1477–1510). Returning to Ferrara, he became the favorite painter of Duke Alfonso I. Ariosto, his friend, ranked him and a forgotten brother among the immortals:
Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Gian Bellino,
Duo Dossi, e quel ch’a par sculpe e colora
Michel, più che mortale, angel divino, Bastiano, Rafael, Tizian.5
We can understand why Ariosto liked Dosso, who brought into his pictures an outdoor quality almost illustrative of Ariosto’s sylvan epic, and bathed them in the warm colors that he had borrowed from the sumptuous Venetians. It was Dosso and his pupils who decorated the Sala di Consiglio in the Castello with lively scenes of athletic contests in the ancient style, for Alfonso liked athletics more than poetry. In his later years Dosso painted with uneven hand the allegorical and mythological scenes on the ceiling of the Sala dell’ Aurora. Here the pagan motives rampant in Italy triumphed in a celebration of physical beauty and sensuous life. Perhaps the decadence that now began in Ferrarese art—due chiefly to the exhausting cost of Alfonso’s wars—had one source in this victory of flesh over spirit; the passion and grandeur of the old religious themes faded from a largely secular art, leaving it predominantly decoration.
The most brilliant figure in this decline was Benvenuto Tisi, named Garofalo from his native town. On two visits to Rome he became so enamored of Raphael’s art that, though two years his senior, he enrolled as an assistant in the young master’s studio. When family affairs recalled him to Ferrara he promised Raphael to return, but Alfonso and the nobility gave him so many commissions that he could never tear himself away. He consumed his energy, and divided his ability, in producing a multitude of paintings, of which some seventy remain. They lack both force and finish; and yet one Holy Family, in the Vatican, shows how even the minor artists of the Renaissance could now and then touch greatness.
The painters and the architects were only a fraction of the artists who labored to please the fortunates of Ferrara. Miniaturists produced there, as elsewhere in that eager age, works of a delicate beauty on which the eye rests longer and more contentedly than on many a famous painting; the Schifanoia palace has preserved several of these gems of illumination and calligraphy. Niccolò III brought in tapestry weavers from Flanders; Ferrarese artists furnished designs; the patient art flourished under Leonello and Borso; the resulting tapestries decorated palace walls, and were lent to princes and nobles for their special festivities. Goldsmiths were kept busy making ecclesiastical vessels and personal ornaments. Sperandio of Mantua and Pisanello of Verona made here some of the finest medallions of the Renaissance.
Last and least was sculpture. Cristoforo da Firenze molded the man, Niccolò Baroncelli the horse, for a bronze statue of Niccolò III; it was set up in 1451, two years before Donatello’s Gattamelata rose in Padua. Beside it, in 1470, was placed a bronze statue of Duke Borso, calmly seated as became a man of peace. In 1796 both monuments were destroyed by revolutionists who branded the bronzes as mementos of tyranny, and melted them into cannon to end all tyranny and all wars. Alfonso Lombardi adorned the “Alabaster Chambers” of the Castello with stately statuary; then, like so many Ferrarese artists, he decamped to Bologna, where we shall find him in glory. The court of Ferrara was too narrow in its ideas, tastes, and fees to transmute evanescent wealth into immortal art.
III. LETTERS
The intellectual life of Ferrara had two roots: the University, and Guarino da Verona. Founded in 1391, the University had soon closed for lack of funds; reopened by Niccolò III, it led a half-starved existence until Leonello (1442) reorganized and refinanced it with an edict whose prelude deserves commemoration:
It is an ancient opinion, not only of the Christians but of the Gentiles, that the heavens, the sea, and the earth must some day perish; in like manner, of many magnificent cities nothing but ruins leveled with the ground can now be seen, and Rome the conqueror herself lies in the dust and is reduced to fragments; while only the understanding of things divine and human, which we call wisdom, is not extinguished by length of years, but retains its rights in perpetuity.6
By 1474 the University had forty-five well paid professors, and the faculties of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine were rivaled in Italy only by those at Bologna and Padua.
Guarino, born at Verona in 1370, went to Constantinople, lived there five years, mastered the Greek language, and returned to Venice with a cargo of Greek manuscripts; a legend told how, when a box of these was lost in a storm, his hair turned white overnight. He taught Greek at Venice, where he had Vittorino da Feltre among his pupils, and then at Verona, Padua, Bologna, and Florence, absorbing the classical scholarship of each city in turn. He was already fifty-nine when he accepted an invitation to Ferrara. There, as tutor to Leonello, Borso, and Ercole, he trained three of the most enlightened rulers in Renaissance history. As professor of Greek and rhetoric in the University his success was the talk of Italy. So popular were his lectures that students made their way through any rigor of winter to wait outside the unopened doors of the room in which he was scheduled to speak. They came not only from Italian cities, but from Hungary, Germany, England, and France; and many of them went forth from his instruction to fill vital posts in education, law, and statesmanship. Like Vittorino, he supported poor students out of his personal funds; he lived in humble quarters, ate but one meal a day, and used to invite his friends not to
feasts but to fave e favole—beans and conversation.7 He was not quite the equal of Vittorino as a moral paragon; he could pen virulent invectives like any humanist, perhaps as a literary game; but his thirteen children were apparently begotten on one wife, he was temperate in everything but study, and he maintained health, vigor, and mental clarity till his ninetieth year.8 It was chiefly due to him that the dukes of Ferrara supported education, scholarship, and poetry, and made their capital one of the most renowned cultural centers in Europe.
The revival of antiquity brought with it a renewed acquaintance with classic drama. Plautus, son of the people, and Terence, manumitted darling of the aristocracy, came alive again after fifteen centuries, and were acted on temporary stages at Florence and Rome, above all at Ferrara. Ercole I, in particular, loved the old comedies, and spared no revenues in producing them; one representation of the Menaechmi cost him a thousand ducats. When Lodovico of Milan saw a performance of this play at Ferrara he begged Ercole to send the players to repeat it at Pavia; Ercole not only sent them but went with them (1493). When Lucrezia Borgia came to Ferrara, Ercole celebrated her hymeneals with five of Plautus’ comedies performed by 110 actors, with lavish interludes of music and ballet. Guarino, Ariosto, and Ercole himself translated Latin plays into Italian, and performances were given in the vernacular. It was through imitation of these classic comedies that Italian drama took form. Boiardo, Ariosto, and others wrote plays for the ducal company. Ariosto drew up plans, and Dosso Dossi painted the fixed scenery, for the first permanent theater of Ferrara and modern Europe (1532).
Music and poetry also won the patronage of the court. Tito Vespasiano Strozzi needed no ducal subsidies for his verse, for he was the scion of a rich Florentine family. He composed in Latin ten “books” of a poem in praise of Borso; leaving it unfinished at his death, he bequeathed to his son Ercole the task of completing it. Ercole was well fitted for the assignment; he wrote excellent lyrics, Latin and Italian, and a longer poem, La caccia —The Hunt— dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. In 1508 he married a poetess, Barbara Torelli; thirteen days later he was found dead near his home, his body savagely pierced with twenty-two wounds. This is a mystery story still unsolved after four centuries. Some have thought that Alfonso had approached Barbara, had been repulsed, and revenged himself by hiring assassins to kill his successful rival. It is unlikely, for Alfonso, as long as Lucrezia lived, showed her every sign of fidelity. The desolate young widow composed an elegy whose ring of sincerity is rare in the usually artificial literature of the Ferrara court. “Why may I not go down to the grave with thee?” she asks the slain poet:
Vorrei col foco mio quel freddo ghiaccio
Intorpidire, e rimpastar col pianto
La polve, e ravivarla a nuove vita!
E vorrei poscia, baldanzosa e ardita,
Mostrarlo a lui che ruppe il caro laccio,
E dirgli: amor, mostro crudel, può tanto.*
In this courtly society, dowered with leisure and fair women, the French romances of chivalry were a daily food. In Ferrara Provençal troubadours had sung their lays in Dante’s time, and had left a mood of fanciful, not onerous, chivalry. Here, and throughout northern Italy, the legends of Charlemagne, his knights, and his wars with the Moslem infidels had become almost as familiar as in France. The French trouvères had spread and swelled these legends as chansons de geste; and their recitals, piling episode upon episode, hero upon heroine, had become a mass of fiction monumental and confused, crying out for some Homer to weave the tales into sequence and unity.
As an English knight, Sir Thomas Malory, had recently accomplished this with the legends of Arthur and the Round Table, so now an Italian nobleman took up the task for the cycle of Charlemagne. Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, was among the most distinguished members of the Ferrara court. He served the Estensi as ambassador on important missions, and was entrusted by them with the administration of their largest dependencies, Modena and Reggio. He governed poorly but sang well. He addressed passionate verses to Antonia Caprara, soliciting and publishing her charms, or reproaching her for lack of fidelity in sin. When he married Taddea Gonzaga he turned his muse to graze in safer pastures, and began an epic—Orlando innamorato (1486f)—recounting the troubled love of Orlando (i.e., Roland) for the enchantress Angelica, and mingling with this romance a hundred scenes of tilt, tournament, and war. A humorous legend tells how Boiardo sought far and wide to find a properly resounding name for the boastful Saracen in his tale, and how, when he hit upon the mighty cognomen of Rodomonte, the bells of the Count’s fief, Scandiano, were set ringing for joy, as if aware that their lord was unwittingly giving a word to a dozen languages.
It is hard for us, in our own exciting times, agitated even in peace with the tilts and tournaments of hostile words, to interest ourselves in the imaginary wars and loves of Orlando, Rinaldo, Astolfo, Ruggiero, Agramante, Marfisa, Fiordelisa, Sacripante, Agricane; and Angelica, who might have stirred us by her beauty, disconcerts us by the supernatural enchantments that she practises; we are no longer bewitched by sorceresses. These are tales that befitted a comely audience in some palace bower or garden close; and indeed, we are told, the Count read these cantos at the Ferrara court9—doubtless a canto or two at a sitting; we do Boiardo and Ariosto injustice when we try to take them an epic at a time. They wrote for a leisurely generation and class, and Boiardo for one that had not yet seen the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. When that disillusioning humiliation came, and Italy saw how helpless she was, with all her art and poetry, against the ruthless powers of the North, Boiardo lost heart, and after writing 60,000 lines he dropped his pen with a stanza of despair:
Mentre che io canto, o Dio redentore,
Vedo l’ Italia tutto a fiamma e foco,
Per questi Galli, che con gran valore
Vengon, per disertar non so che loco…*
He did well to end, and wisely died (1494) before the invasion had reached full force. The noble sentiment of chivalry that had found rough utterance in his poetry evoked only the rarest response in the troubled generation that ensued. Though he had earned a niche in history by developing the modern romantic epic, his voice was soon forgotten in the wars and turmoil of Alfonso’s reign, in the alien rape of Italy, and in the seductive beauty of Ariosto’s gentler verse.
IV. ARIOSTO
As we approach the supreme poet of the Italian Renaissance, we must remind ourselves that poetry is an untranslatable music, and that those of us to whom the Italian language is not a native boon must not expect to understand why Italy ranks Lodovico Ariosto only next to Dante among her bards, and reads the Orlando furioso with an affectionate delight surpassing that which Englishmen take in Shakespeare’s plays. We shall hear the words but miss the melody.
He was born on September 14, 1474, at Reggio Emilia, where his father was governor. In 1481 the family moved to Rovigo, but apparently Lodovico received his education in Ferrara. Like Petrarch he was set to study law, but preferred to write poetry. He was not much disturbed by the French invasion of 1494; and when Charles VIII prepared a second descent into Italy (1496), Ariosto composed an ode, in Horatian style, putting the matter in what seemed to him a proper perspective:
What signifies to me the coming of Charles and his hosts? I shall rest in the shade, hearkening to the gentle murmur of the waters, watching the reapers at work; and thou, O my Phyllis, wilt stretch thy white hand among the enameled flowers, and weave me garlands to the music of thy voice.10
In 1500 the father died, leaving to his ten children a patrimony sufficient to support one or two. Lodovico, the oldest, became father of the family, and began a long struggle with economic insecurity. His anxieties warped his character into a timidity and angry subservience unintelligible to those who have never hungered between rhymes. In 1503 he entered the service of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este. Ippolito had little taste for poetry, and kept Ariosto uncomfortably busy with diplomatic errands and trivia, for which the poet received 240 lire ($3000?) a ye
ar, irregularly paid. He sought to improve his position by writing lauds of the Cardinal’s courage and chastity, and defending the blinding of Giulio. Ippolito offered to raise his salary if he would take holy orders and become eligible for certain available benefices; but Ariosto disliked the clergy, and preferred to philander rather than to burn.
It was during his service with Ippolito that he wrote most of his plays. He had begun as an actor, and had been one of the company that Ercole sent to Pavia. When he himself devised dramas they bore the stamp of Terence or Plautus, and were frankly offered as imitations.11 His Cassaria was performed at Ferrara in 1508, his Suppositi at Rome in 1519 before an approving Leo X. He continued to write plays till his last year, and left the best of them, Scolastica, unfinished at his death. Nearly all turn on the classic theme of how one or more young men, usually through the wits of their servants, may possess themselves, by marriage or seduction, of one or more young women. Ariosto’s plays rank high in Italian comedy, low in the history of drama.
It was again during his employment with Ippolito that the poet wrote most of his enormous epic, Orlando furioso; apparently the Cardinal was no hard taskmaster after all. When Ariosto showed Ippolito the manuscript the realistic prelate, according to an uncertain tradition—se non vero, ben trovato— asked him, “Where, Messer Lodovico, have you found so much nonsense (tante corbellerie)?”12 But the laudatory dedication seemed to make more sense, and the Cardinal paid the cost of publishing the poem (1515), and secured all rights and profits of its sale to Ariosto. Italy did not think the poem nonsense, or thought it delectable nonsense; nine printings were bought up between 1524 and 1527. Soon the choicest passages were being recited or sung throughout the peninsula. Ariosto himself read much of it to Isabella d’Este in her illness at Mantua, and rewarded her patience with a eulogy in later editions. He spent ten years (1505–15) writing the Furioso, sixteen more in polishing it; every now and then he added a canto, until the whole ran to almost 39,000 lines, equivalent to the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.