The narratives, averaging six pages in length, were seldom original with Boccaccio; they were collected from classical sources, Oriental writers, medieval gesta, French contes and fabliaux, or the folklore of Italy itself. The last and most famous story in the book is that of the patient Griselda, which Chaucer adopted for one of the best and most absurd of The Canterbury Tales. The finest of Boccaccio’s novelle is the ninth of the fifth day—of Federigo, his falcon, and his love, almost as self-sacrificing as Griselda’s. The most philosophical is the legend of the three rings (I, 3). Saladin, “Soldan of Babylon,” needing money, invites the rich Jew Melchisedek to dinner, and asks him which of the three religions is the best—the Jewish, the Christian, or the Mohammedan. The wise old moneylender, fearing to speak his mind directly, answers with a parable:
There was once a great man and a rich, who, among other very precious jewels in his treasury, had a goodly and costly ring…. Wishing to leave it in perpetuity to his descendants, he declared that whichever of his sons should, at his death, be found in possession thereof, by his bequest unto him, should be recognized as his heir, and be held by all the others in honor and reverence as chief and head. He to whom the ring was left held a like course with his own descendants, and did even as his father had done. In brief, the ring passed from hand to hand, through many generations, and came at last into the possession of a man who had three goodly and virtuous sons all very obedient to their father, whereof he loved all three alike. The young men knowing the usance of the ring, each desiring to be the most honored among his folk… besought his father, who was now an old man, to leave him the ring…. The worthy man, who knew not himself how to choose to which he had liefer leave the ring, bethought himself… to satisfy all three, and privily let make by a good craftsman other two rings which were so like unto the first that he himself scarce knew which was the true. When he came to die he secretly gave each one of his sons his ring, wherefore each of them, seeking, after their father’s death, to occupy the inheritance and the honor and denying it to the others, produced his ring in witness of his right, and the three rings being found so like one another that the true might not be known, the question which was the father’s very heir abode pending and yet pendeth. And so I say to you, my lord: of the three Laws given by God the Father to the three peoples, each people deemeth itself to have His inheritance, His true Law and His commandments; but of which in very deed hath them, even as of the rings, the question yet pendeth.
Such a story suggests that in his thirty-seventh year Boccaccio was not a dogmatic Christian. Contrast his tolerance with the bitter bigotry of Dante, who condemns Mohammed to perpetually repeated vivisections in hell.46 In the second story of The Decameron the Jew Jehannat is converted to Christianity by the argument (adapted by Voltaire) that Christianity must be divine, since it has survived so much clerical immorality and simony. Boccaccio makes fun of asceticism, purity, the confessional, relics, priests, monks, friars, nuns, even the canonization of saints. He thinks most monks are hypocrites, and laughs at the “simpletons” who give them alms (VI, 10). One of his most hilarious stories tells how the friar Cipolla, to raise a good collection, promised his audience to display “a very holy relic, one of the angel Gabriel’s feathers, which remained in the Virgin Mary’s chamber after the Annunciation” (VI, 10). The most obscene of the stories tells how the virile youth Masetto satisfied an entire nunnery (III, ). In another tale Friar Rinaldo cuckolds a husband; whereupon the narrator asks, “What monks are there that do not do thus?” (VII, 3)
The ladies in The Decameron blush a bit at such stories, but enjoy the Rabelaisian-Chaucerian humor; Filomena, a girl of especially nice manners, tells the tale of Rinaldo; and sometimes, says Boccaccio’s least happy image, “the ladies kept up such a laughing that you might have drawn all their teeth.”47 Boccaccio had been reared in the loose gaiety of Naples, and most often thought of love in sensual terms; he smiled at chivalric romance, and played Sancho Panza to Dante’s Don Quixote. Though twice married he seems to have believed in free love.48 After recounting a score of stories that would today be unfit for a male gathering, he makes one of the men say to the ladies: “I have noted no act, no word, in fine nothing blameworthy, either on your part or on that of us men.” In concluding his book the author acknowledges some criticism of the license he has used, and especially because “I have in sundry places written the truth about the friars.” At the same time he congratulates himself on his “long labor, thoroughly accomplished with the aid of the Divine favor.”
The Decameron remains one of the masterpieces of world literature. Its fame may be due more to its morals than to its art, but even if immaculate it would have merited preservation. It is perfectly constructed—superior in this respect to The Canterbury Tales. Its prose set a standard that Italian literature has never surpassed, a prose sometimes involved or flowery, but for the most part eloquent and vigorous, pungent and vivacious, and clear as a mountain stream. It is a book of the love of life. In the greatest disaster that had befallen Italy in a thousand years Boccaccio could find in his vitals the courage to see beauty, humor, goodness, and joy still walking the earth. At times he was cynical, as in his unmanly satire on women in the Corbaccio; but in The Decameron he was a hearty Rabelais, relishing the give and take, the rough and tumble, of life and love. Despite caricature and exaggeration the world recognized itself in the book; every European language translated it; Hans Sachs and Lessing, Molière and La Fontaine, Chaucer and Shakespeare, took leaves from it admiringly. It will be enjoyed when all of Petrarch’s poetry has entered the twilight realm of the praised unread.
VIII. SIENA
Siena would have challenged the claim of Florence to have begotten the Renaissance. There too the violence of faction raised the temperature of thought, and communal pride nourished art The woolen industry, the export of Sienese products to the Levant, and the trade of the Via Flaminia between Florence and Rome gave the city a moderate affluence; by 1400 the squares and principal streets were paved with brick or stone; and the poor were rich enough to stage a revolution. In 1371 the woolworkers besieged the Palazzo Pubblico, broke down its doors, expelled the businessmen’s government, and set up the rule of the riformatori. A few days later an army of two thousand men, fully equipped by the mercantile interests, made its way into the city, invaded the quarters of the proletariat, and slew men, women, and children without discrimination or mercy, spitting some on the lance, hacking others with the sword. The nobility and the lower middle class came to the rescue of the commons, the counterrevolution was defeated, and the reform government gave Siena the most honest administration that the citizens could recall. In 1385 the rich merchants rose again, overthrew the riformatori, and expelled four thousand rebel workmen from the city. From that date industry and art declined in Siena.*
It was in this turbulent fourteenth century that Siena reached the zenith of her art. On the west side of the spacious Campo—the main square of the city—rose the Palazzo Pubblico (1288–1309); the adjoining campanile, the Torre de Mangia, rearing its slender height to 334 feet, is the most beautiful tower in Italy. In 1310 the Sienese architect and sculptor Lorenzo Maitani went to Orvieto and designed the lordly façade of the cathedral there; he and other Sienese artists, and Andrea Pisano, engaged in a frenzy of decoration on the portals, pilasters, and pediments, and produced a miracle in marble to commemorate the miracle of Bolsena. In 1377 the great duomo of Siena received a similar façade from designs left by Giovanni Pisano, perhaps too ornate, but still one of the wonders of inexhaustible Italy.
Meanwhile a brilliant band of Sienese painters had carried on where Duccio di Buoninsegna had left off. In 1315 Simone Martini was commissioned to decorate the Hall of the Great Council in the Palazzo Pubblico with a maestà, i.e., a Coronation of the Virgin; for Mary was, in law as well as in theology, the crowned queen of the city, and might properly preside at meetings of the municipal government. The picture dared comparison with the maestà that Duccio had p
ainted for the cathedral five years before; it was not so large, nor so overlaid with gold; like that “majesty” it betrayed the Byzantine derivation of Sienese painting by the immobile features and lifeless pose of its crowded characters; perhaps it made some advance in color and design. But in 1326 Simone went to Assisi; there he studied the frescoes of Giotto; and when he was invited to picture in a chapel of the Lower Church the life of St. Martin he escaped from the stereotyped faces of his earlier work, and achieved a memorable individualization of the great Bishop of Tours. At Avignon he met Petrarch, painted portraits of the poet and Laura, and won an appreciative mention in the Canzoniere. These brief lines, said Vasari, “have given more fame to Simone than all his own works have done… for a day will come when his paintings will be no more, whereas the writings of such a man as Petrarch endure for all time”; no geologist would be so optimistic. Benedict XII made Simone official painter to the papal court (1339); and in that capacity he illustrated the life of the Baptist in the papal chapel, and of the Virgin and the Saviour in the portico of the cathedral. He died at Avignon in 1344.
That secularization of art which Simone had essayed in his lay portraits was extended by Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Perhaps after studying in Florence, Pietro abandoned the sentimental traditions of Sienese painting, and produced a series of altar pictures of unprecedented power, sometimes of savage realism. In the Hall of the Nine (Councilors) in the Palazzo Pubblico Ambrogio painted four famous frescoes (1337–43): Evil Government, The Consequences of Evil Government, Good Government, and The Consequences of Good Government. Here the medieval habit of symbolism, superseded by Giotto, is retained; majestic figures represent Siena, Justice, Wisdom, Concord, the Seven Virtues, and Peace—the last reclining gracefully like a Pheidian deity. In Evil Government Tyranny is enthroned, and Terror is his vizier; merchants are plundered on the road; faction and violence incarnadine the town. Against the same architectural background Good Government shows a population happily busy with handicrafts, amusements, and trade; farmers and merchants lead into the city mules laden with food and goods; children play, maidens dance, viols make silent music; and over the scene a winged spirit flies, figuring Security. Perhaps it was these energetic brothers—or Orcagna, or Francesco Traini —who painted the immense fresco, The Triumph of Death, in the Campo Santo at Pisa. A hunting party of lords and ladies richly attired comes upon three open coffins in which royal corpses lie festering; one hunter holds his nose at their smell; above the scene hovers the Angel of Death, wielding an enormous scythe; in the air ministers of grace escort saved souls to paradise, while winged demons drag most of the dead into hell; serpents and black vultures entwine and consume the naked bodies of women and men; and below, kings, queens, princes, bishops, cardinals writhe in the pit of the damned. On a neighboring wall the same authors, in another immense fresco, painted on the left a Last Judgment, and on the right a second vision of hell. All the terrors of medieval theology here take physical form; it is Dante’s Inferno visualized without mercy and without stint.
Siena never emerged from the Middle Ages; there, as in Gubbio, San Gimignano, and Sicily, they survived the Renaissance. They never die, but patiently, subtly bide their time to come again.
IX. MILAN
In 1351 Petrarch returned to Avignon. Probably at Vaucluse he wrote a pretty essay, De vita solitaria, lauding the solitude that he could bear as a healing medicine but not as a sustaining food. It was shortly after this return to Avignon that he brought the medical fraternity down upon his head by exhorting Pope Clement VI, who was in failing health, to beware of doctors’ prescriptions. “I have always begged my friends, and ordered my servants, never to let any of these doctors’ tricks to be tried on my body, but always to do the exact contrary of what they advise.”49 In 1355, exasperated by some therapeutic fiasco, he composed an intemperate Invective Against a Physician. He was not much better disposed toward lawyers, “who spend their entire time in disputations…. over trival questions. Hear my verdict upon the whole pack of them. Their fame will die with their flesh, and a single grave will suffice for their names and their bones.”50 To make Avignon completely distasteful to him Pope Innocent VI proposed to excommunicate Petrarch as a necromancer, on the ground that the poet was a student of Virgil. Cardinal Talleyrand came to Petrarch’s rescue, but the air of saintly ignorance that now perfumed Avignon sickened the laureate. He visited his monk brother Gherardo, wrote a wistful treatise De otio reliogiosorum (On the Leisure of Monks), and toyed with the idea of entering a monastery. But when an invitation came to him to be the palace guest of the dictator of Milan (1353), he accepted with a readiness that shocked his republican friends.
The ruling family in Milan bore the name Visconti from having often filled the post of vicecomites, or archiepiscopal judges. In 1311 the Emperor Henry VII appointed Matteo Visconti his vicar in Milan, which, like most cities in northern Italy, loosely acknowledged itself as part of the Holy Roman Empire. Though Matteo made serious blunders he governed so ably that his descendants held power in Milan till 1447. They were seldom scrupulous, often cruel, sometimes extravagant, never stupid. They taxed the people heavily for the numerous campaigns that brought most of northwestern Italy under their rule, but their skill in finding competent administrators and generals brought victory to their arms and prosperity to Milan. To the woolen manufactures of the city they added a silk industry; they multiplied the canals that extended the city’s trade; they gave to life and property a security that made their subjects forgetful of liberty. Under their tyranny Milan became one of the richest cities of Europe; its palaces, faced with marble, lined avenues paved with stone. With Giovanni Visconti, handsome, indefatigable, ruthless or generous at need or whim, Milan reached its zenith; Lodi, Parma, Crema, Piacenza, Brescia, Bergamo, Novara, Como, Vercelli, Alessandria, Tortona, Pontremoli, Asti, Bologna acknowledged his rule; and when the Avignon popes contested his claim to Bologna, and visited him with excommunication, he fought Clement VI with courage and bribery, and with 200,000 florins won Bologna, absolution, and peace (1352). He paid for his crimes with gout, and adorned his despotism with the patronage of poetry, learning, and art. When Petrarch, arriving at his court, asked what duties would be expected of him, Giovanni replied handsomely: “Only your presence, which will grace both myself and my reign.”51
Petrarch remained eight years at the Visconti court in Pavia or Milan. During this comfortable subjection he composed in Italian terza rima a series of poems that he called Trionfi: the triumph of desire over man, of chastity over desire, of death over chastity, of fame over death, of time over fame, of eternity over time. Here he sang his final word of Laura; he asked pardon for the sensuality of his love, conversed with her chaste ghost, and dreamed of being united with her in paradise—her husband having apparently gone elsewhere. These poems, challenging comparison with Dante, represent the triumph of vanity over art.
Giovanni Visconti, dying in 1354, bequeathed his state to three nephews. Matteo II was a sensual incompetent, and was fraternally assassinated for the honor of the house (1355). Bernabò governed part of the duchy from Milan, Galeazzo II the remainder from Pavia. Galeazzo II was a capable ruler who wore his golden hair in curls and wedded his children to royalty. When his daughter Violante married the Duke of Clarence, son of King Edward III of England, Galeazzo dowered the bride with 200,000 gold florins ($5,000,000), and gave the two hundred English attendants of the groom such presents as outshone the generosity of the wealthiest contemporary kings; the leavings of the wedding banquet, we are assured, could have fed ten thousand men. So rich was trecento Italy, at a time when England was bankrupting herself, and France was bleeding herself white, in the Hundred Years’ War.
X. VENICE AND GENOA
In 1354 Duke Giovanni Visconti sent Petrarch to Venice to negotiate peace between Venice and Genoa.
“You see in Genoa,” the poet had written, “a city in the act of ruling, seated on rough hillsides, superb in walls and men.”52 The merchan
t’s itch for gain, pitting the sailor’s pluck against the sea, had plowed lanes of Genoese commerce through the Mediterranean to Tunis, Rhodes, Acre, and Tyre, to Samos, Lesbos, and Constantinople, through the Black Sea to the Crimea and Trebizond, through Gibraltar and the Atlantic to Rouen and Bruges. These enterprising businessmen developed double-entry bookkeeping by 1340, and marine insurance by 1370;53 they borrowed money from private investors at seven to ten per cent, while in most Italian cities the rate ranged from twelve to thirty. For a long time the fruits of trade were divided, never amicably, among a few rich families—the Doria, the Spinola, the Grimaldi, the Fieschi. In 1339 Simone Boccanera led the sailors and other workers in a successful revolution, and became the first of a line of doges that ruled Genoa till 1797; Verdi commemorated him in an opera. The victors in their turn divided into hostile family groups, and disordered the city with costly strife, while Genoa’s great rival, Venice, thrived on order and unity.
Next to Milan, Venice was the richest and strongest state in Italy, and without exception the most ably governed. Its craftsmen were famous for the elegance of their products, mostly made for the luxury trade. Its great arsenal employed 16,000 men; 36,000 seamen manned its 3300 vessels of war or trade; and in the galleys freemen, not slaves as in the sixteenth century, plied the oars. Venetian merchants invaded every market from Jerusalem to Antwerp; they traded impartially with Christians and Mohammedans, and papal excommunications fell upon them with all the force of dew upon the earth. Petrarch, who had ranged from Naples to Flanders in his “love and zeal for seeing many things,” marveled at the shipping he saw in the Venetian lagoons: