All in all, Giotto’s work was a revolution. We feel his faults because we know of the painting skills that were developed by the movement that he began. His drawing, modeling, perspective, and anatomy are painfully inadequate; art, like the medical science of Giotto’s time, was just beginning to dissect the human body, to learn the place, structure, and function of each muscle, bone, tendon, nerve; men like Mantegna and Masaccio would master these elements, and Michelangelo would perfect them, almost make a fetish of them; but in Giotto’s day it was still unusual to study, scandalous to represent, the nude. What is it, then, that makes the work of Giotto in Padua and Assisi a landmark in the history of art? It is the rhythmic composition, drawing the eye from every angle to the center of interest; the dignity of quiet motion, the soft and luminous coloring, the majestic flow of the narrative, the restraint of expression even in deep feeling, the grandeur of the calm that bathes these troubled scenes; and, now and then, the naturalistic portraiture of men, women, and children not as studied in past art but as seen and felt in the movement of life. These were the components of Giotto’s triumph over Byzantine rigidity and gloom, these were the secrets of his enduring influence. For a century after him Florentine art lived on his example and his inspiration.
In his wake came two generations of Giotteschi, who imitated his themes and style, but rarely touched his excellence. His godson and pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, almost inherited art; Taddeo’s father, and three of Taddeo’s five sons, were painters; the Italian Renaissance, like German music, tended to run in families, and prospered there through the transmission and accumulation of techniques in homes, studios, and schools. Taddeo began as an apprentice to Giotto; by 1347 he was at the head of Florentine painters; even then, however, he signed himself devotedly “Discepol di Giotto il buon maestro.”35 He became so rich through his industry as painter and architect that his descendants could afford to be patrons of art.
An impressive work long attributed to him but now ascribed to Andrea da Firenze shows how, in this first century of the Renaissance, Italy was still medieval. In the Capella degli Spagnuoli, or Chapel of the Spaniards, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican friars set up about 1370 a pictorial apotheosis of their famous philosopher. St. Thomas Aquinas, comfortably substantial but too devoted to be proud, stands in triumph, with the heretics Arius, Sabellius, and Averroes groveling at his feet; around him Moses, Paul, John the Evangelist, and other saints seem but accessories; below them fourteen figures symbolize seven sacred and seven profane sciences—Donatus grammar, Cicero rhetoric, Justinian law, Euclid geometry, and so on. The thought is still completely medieval; only the art, in design and color, shows the emergence of a new age from the old. The transition was so gradual that not for a century yet would men feel themselves to be in a different world.
The advance in technique is clearer in Orcagna, who stands second only to Giotto among the Italian artists of the fourteenth century. Named originally Andrea di Cione, he was called Arcagnolo—Archangel—by his admiring contemporaries, and lazy tongues shortened the appellation to Orcagna. Though often listed among Giotto’s followers, he was rather a pupil of the sculptor Andrea Pisano. Like the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance he was a master of many arts. As a painter he made a colorful altarpiece of Christ Enthroned for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, while his elder brother Nardo executed on the walls vivid frescoes of heaven and hell (1354–7). As an architect he designed the Certosa or Carthusian monastery near Florence, famous for its graceful cloisters and its Acciaiuoli tombs. As architects and sculptors he and his brother executed the ornate tabernacle in the Or(atory) San Michele in Florence. A picture of the Virgin there was believed to work miracles; after the Black Death of 1348 the votive offerings of survivors enriched the fraternity that managed the building, and it was decided to house the picture in a sumptuous shrine of marble and gold. The Cioni designed it as a miniature Gothic cathedral, with columns, pinnacles, statues, reliefs, precious metal, and costly stone; it is a jewel of trecento decoration.* Andrea, acclaimed for it, was appointed capomaestro at Orvieto, and shared in designing the façade of the cathedral. In 1362 he returned to Florence, and worked there on the great duomo till his death.
The immense fame of Santa Maria del Fiore—the largest church that had as yet been built in Italy—had been begun by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296. A succession of masters—Giotto, Andrea Pisano, Francesco Talenti, and many others—labored on it till our time; its present façade dates from 1887; even now the cathedral is incomplete, and must in good measure be rebuilt by every century. Architecture was the least successful of the arts in Renaissance Italy; it took half-heartedly from the north some elements of Gothic like the pointed arch, combined them with classic columns, and sometimes, as in Florence, topped the whole with a Byzantine dome. The mixture was incongruous and—barring some small churches by Bramante—lacked unity and grace. The façade of Orvieto and Siena were superb displays of sculpture and mosaic rather than honest architecture; and the accentuation of horizontal lines by the alternating strata of black and white marble in the walls depresses eye and soul, when the very meaning of the church should have been a prayer or paean rising to the skies. Santa Maria del Fiore—as the Florentine cathedral was called after 1412 from the lily in the heraldic emblem of the city—is hardly a flower; it is, but for Brunellesco’s illustrious dome, a cavern, whose dark vacuity might be the mouth of Dante’s Inferno instead of a vestibule to God.
It was the inexhaustible Arnolfo di Cambio who in 1294 began the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, or the Holy Cross, and in 1298 the loveliest structure in Florence, the Palazzo della Signoria, known to later generations as the Palazzo Vecchio. The church was finished in 1442 except for the façade (1863); the Palace of the Signory, or Old Palace, was completed in its main features by 1314. Those were the years that saw the banishment of Dante and Petrarch’s father; factional strife was in its heyday; so Arnolfo built for the Signory a fortress rather than a palace, and designed its roof with machicolated battlements; while the unique campanile, by the diverse ringing of its bell, served to call the citizens to parliament or to arms. Here the city fathers (priori, signori) not only governed but lived; and the temper of the time appears in the law that during their two months of office they were not to leave the building on any pretext whatever. In 1345 Neri di Fioravante spanned the Arno with one of the world’s famous bridges, the Ponte Vecchio, now cracked with age and many wars, but still precariously bearing impatient traffic and twenty-two shops. Around these proud achievements of the Florentine civic spirit, in the narrow streets that led from the cathedral and Signoria squares, rose the as yet modest mansions of the worried rich, the noble churches that transmuted merchants’ gold into art, the noisy shops of traders and artisans, and the crowded tenements of an industrious, rebellious, excitable, intelligent populace. In that frenzy of egos the Renaissance was born.
VII. “THE DECAMERON”
It was in Florence that Italian literature achieved its first and greatest triumphs. There Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, in the late thirteenth century, gave the sonnet its finished form; not there, but longing for it, Dante the Florentine struck the first and last true note of Italian epic poetry; there Boccaccio composed the supreme work of Italian prose, and Giovanni Villani wrote the most modern of medieval chronicles. Visiting Rome for the jubilee of 1300, and moved like Gibbon by the ruins of a mighty past, Villani thought for a while of recording its history; then, judging that Rome had been sufficiently commemorated, he turned back to his native haunts, and resolved “to bring into this volume… all the events of the city of Florence… and give in full the deeds of the Florentines, and briefly the notable affairs of the rest of the world.”36
He began with the Tower of Babel and ended on the verge of the Black Death, in which he died; his brother Matteo and his nephew Filippo continued the story to 1365. Giovanni was well prepared; he came of a prosperous mercantile family, commanded a pure Tuscan speech, traveled in It
aly, Flanders, and France, served thrice as prior and once as master of the mint. He had for those times an uncommon sense of the economic bases and influences of history; and he was the first to salt his narrative with statistics of social conditions. The first three books of his Croniche Fiorentine are mostly legend; but in later books we learn that in 1338 Florence and its hinterland had 105,000 inhabitants, of whom seventeen thousand were beggars and four thousand were on public relief; that there were six primary schools, teaching ten thousand boys and girls, and four high schools, in which six hundred boys and a few girls studied “grammar” (literature) and “logic” (philosophy). Unlike most historians Villani included notices of new books, paintings, buildings; seldom has a city been so directly described in all the departments of its life. Had Villani brought all these phases and details into one united narrative of causes, phenomena, personalities, and effects he would have transformed his chronicle into history.
Settling down in Florence in 1340, Boccaccio continued to pursue woman in life and verse and prose. The Amorosa Visione was dedicated to Fiammetta, and recalled in 4400 lines of terza rima the happier days of their liaison. In a psychological novel, Fiammetta, the bastard princess is made to tell the story of her deviation with Boccaccio; she analyzes the emotions of love, the torments of desire and jealousy and desertion, in Richardsonian detail; and when her conscience rebukes her infidelity she imagines Aphrodite chiding her for cowardice: “Make not thyself so timorous in saying, ‘I have a husband, and holy laws and promised faith forbid me these things.’ These are but vain conceits and frivolous objections against the power of Eros. For like a strong and mighty prince he plants his eternal laws; not caring for other laws of lower state, he accounts them base and servile rules.”37 Boccaccio, abusing the power of the pen, ends the book by having Fiammetta proclaim, to his glory, that it was he who deserted her, not she who deserted him. Returning to poetry, he sang in the Ninfale Fiesolano the love of a shepherd for a priestess of Diana; his triumph is described in fond detail, with some enthusiasm spared for natural scenery. This is almost the working formula of The Decameron.
It was shortly after the plague of 1348 that Boccaccio began to write this renowned concatenation of seductive tales. He was now thirty-five; the temperature of desire had fallen from poetry to prose; he could begin to see the humor of the mad pursuit. Fiammetta herself seems to have died in the plague, and Boccaccio was calm enough to use the name that he had given her for one of the least finicky raconteuses of his book. Though the whole was not published till 1353, some of it must have been issued in installments, for in the introduction to the Fourth Day the author replies to the criticism that had reproved the earlier narratives. As we have the book now it is a “century” of stories—a full hundred; they were not meant to be read in any great number at one time; published seriatim, they must have provided topics for many a Florentine evening.
The prelude describes the effects, in Florence, of the Black Death that struck all Europe in 1348 and afterward. Born apparently of the fertility and filth of Asiatic populations impoverished by war and weakened by famine, the infection crossed Arabia into Egypt, and the Black Sea into Russia and Byzantium. From Constantinople, Alexandria, and other ports of the Near East the merchants and vessels of Venice, Syracuse, Pisa, Genoa, and Marseille, aided by fleas and rats, brought it to Italy and France.38 A succession of famine years in western Europe—1333–4, 1337–42, 1345–7—probably sapped the resistance of the poor, who then communicated the disease to all classes.39 It took two forms: pulmonary, with high fever and spitting of blood, bringing death in three days; or bubonic, with fever, abscesses, and carbuncles, leading to death in five days. Half the population of Italy was carried off in the successive visitations of the plague from 1348 to 1365.40 A Sienese chronicler wrote, about 1354:
Neither relatives nor friends nor priests nor friars accompanied the corpses to the grave, nor was the office of the dead recited…. In many places of the city trenches were dug, very broad and deep, and into these the bodies were thrown, and covered with a little earth; and thus layer after layer until the trench was full; and then another trench was begun. And I, Agniolo di Tura… with my own hands buried five of my children in a single trench; and many others did the like. And many dead were so ill covered that the dogs dug them up and ate them, dispersing their limbs throughout the city. And no bells rang, and nobody wept no matter what his loss, because almost everyone expected death…. And people said and believed, “This is the end of the world.”41
In Florence, according to Matteo Villani, three out of five of the population died between April and September of 1348. Boccaccio estimated the Florentine dead at 100,000, Machiavelli at 96,000;42 these are transparent exaggerations, since the total population hardly exceeded 100,000. Boccaccio opens The Decameron with a frightful description of the plague:
Not only did converse and consorting with the sick give the infection to the sound, but the mere touching of the clothes, or of whatsoever had been touched or used by the sick, appeared of itself to communicate the malady…. A thing which had belonged to a man sick or dead of the sickness, being touched by an animal… in a brief time killed it… of this mine own eyes had experience. This tribulation struck such terror to the hearts of all… that brother forsook brother, uncle nephew… oftentimes wife husband; nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well nigh incredible), some fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children, as though they had not been theirs…. The common people, being altogether untended and unsuccored, sickened by the thousand daily, and died well nigh without recourse. Many breathed their last in the open street, whilst other many, for all they died in their houses, made it known to the neighbors that they were dead rather by the stench of their rotting bodies than otherwise; and of these and others who died the whole city was full. The neighbors, moved more by fear lest the corruption of the dead bodies should imperil themselves than by any charity for the departed… brought the bodies forth from the houses and laid them before the doors, where, especially in the morning, those who went about might see corpses without number. Then they fetched biers, and some, in default thereof, they laid upon a board; nor was it only one bier that carried two or three corpses, nor did this happen but once; nay, many might have been counted which contained husband and wife, two or three brothers, father and son, and the like…. The thing was come to such a pass that folk reckoned no more of men that died than nowadays they would of goats.43
Out of this scene of desolation Boccaccio pictures his Decameron as taking form. The plan for the pagan outing is made in “the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella” by “seven young ladies, all knit one to another by friendship or neighborhood or kinship,” who had just heard Mass. They ranged between eighteen and twenty-eight years of age. “Each was discreet and of noble blood, fair of favor and well-mannered, and full of honest sprightliness.” One proposes that they should lessen their chances of infection by retiring to their country houses, not separately but together, with their servants, moving from one villa to another, “taking such pleasance and diversion as the season may afford…. There may we hear the small birds sing, there may we see the hills and plains clad in green and the fields full of corn wave even as doth the sea; there may we see trees, a thousand sorts; and there is the face of heaven more open to the view, the which, angered against us though it be, denieth not unto us its eternal beauties.”44 The suggestion is accepted, but Filomena improves upon it: since “we women are fickle, willful, suspicious, and timorous,” it might be well to have some men in the party. Providentially at that moment “there entered the church three young men… in whom neither the perversity of the time, nor loss of friends and kinsfolk… had availed to cool… the fire of love…. All were agreeable, well-bred, and they went seeking their supreme solace… to see their mistresses, who, as it chanced, were all three among the seven ladies aforesaid.” Pampinia recommends that the young gentlemen be invited to join the outing. Neifile fears that this
will lead to scandal. Filomena answers: “So but I live honestly, and conscience prick me not of aught, let who will speak to the contrary.”
So, on the Wednesday following, they set out, preceded by servants and victuals, to a villa two miles from Florence, “with a goodly and great courtyard in its midst, and galleries and saloons and bedchambers, each in itself most fair, and adorned with jocund paintings; with lawns and grassplots round about, and wondrous-goodly gardens, and wells of very cold water, and cellars full of wines of price.”45 The ladies and gentlemen sleep late, breakfast leisurely, walk in the gardens, dine at length, and amuse themselves by matching stories. It is agreed that each of the ten shall tell a story on each day of the outing. They stay in the country ten days (whence the title of the book, from the Greek deka hemerai, ten days); and the result is that Boccaccio’s commedia umana counters each of Dante’s gloomy cantos with a merry tale. Meanwhile a rule forbids any member of the group to “bring in from without any news other than joyous.”