The Reformation

by Will Durant

  The most mature Spanish history and the most famous Spanish novel of this period have been attributed to the same man. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was born at Granada some eleven years after its conquest by Ferdinand; his father had won laurels in the siege, and had been made governor of the city after its fall. Educated at Salamanca, Bologna, and Padua, Mendoza acquired a wide culture in Latin, Greek, and Arabic, in philosophy and law; he collected classic texts with the zeal of a Renaissance prince; and when Suleiman the Magnificent bade him name his reward for certain good offices he had performed for the Porte, he asked only for some Greek manuscripts. He rose to high place in the diplomatic service of Charles V at Venice, Rome, and the Council of Trent. Rebuked by Paul III for conveying some harsh message from Charles to the Pope, he answered with all the pride of a Spanish grandee: “I am a cavalier, my father was one before me, and as such it is my duty to fulfill the commands of my royal master, without any fear of your Holiness, so long as I observe due reverence to the vicegerent of Christ. I am minister to the King of Spain .... safe, as his representative, even from your Holiness’s displeasure.”58

  Recent research questions Mendoza’s authorship of the first picaresque novel in European literature—The Life and Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes. Though not printed till 1553, it had probably been written many years before. That a scion of a family only less noble than the king’s should make a thief his hero would be startling; more so that a man originally intended for the priesthood should include in his story such sharp satires of the clergy that the Inquisition forbade any further printing of the book until it had been expurgated of all offense.59 Lazarillo* is a waif who, as guide to a blind beggar, acquires the tricks of petty larceny, and rises to higher crimes as servant to a priest, a friar, a chaplain, a bailiff, a seller of indulgences. Even the worldly wise young thief is impressed with some of the marvels arranged by the indulgence peddler in promoting his wares. “I must confess that I, amongst many others, was deceived at the time, and thought my master a miracle of sanctity.” 60 This rollicking narrative set the gusto picaresco, or “style of the rogue,” in fiction; it evoked innumerable imitations, culminating in the most renowned of picaresque romances, the Gil Bias (1715–35) of Alain Lesage.

  Exiled from the court of Philip II for drawing his sword in an argument, Mendoza retired to Granada, composed incidental verses too free to be printed during his lifetime, and recounted the Moorish revolt of 1568–70 in an Historia de la guerra de Granada so impartial, so just to the Moors, that this too could not find a publisher, and saw print only in 1610, and then only in part. Mendoza took Sallust for his model, rivaled him, and stole a theme or two from Tacitus; but all in all, this was the first Spanish work that advanced beyond mere chronicle or propaganda to factual history interpreted with philosophical grasp and presented with literary art. Mendoza died in 1575, aged seventy-two. He was one of the most complete personalities of a time rich in complete men.

  Always, in these hurried pages, conscience runs a race with time, and warns the hurrying pen that, like the hasty traveler, it is but scratching surfaces. How many publishers, teachers, scholars, patrons, poets, romancers, and reckless rebels labored for half a century to produce the literature that here has been so narrowly confined, so many masterpieces unnamed, nations ignored, once immortal geniuses slighted with a line! It cannot be helped. The ink runs dry; and while it lasts it must be enough if from its scratches and splashes some hazy picture unfolds of men and women resting a while from theology and war, loving the forms of beauty as well as the mirages of truth and power, and building, carving, painting words until thought finds an art to clothe it, wisdom and music merge, and literature arises to let a nation speak, to let an age pour its spirit into a mold so fondly fashioned that time itself will cherish’ and carry it down tnrough a thousand catastrophes as an heirloom of the race.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  Art in the Age of Holbein

  1517–64

  I. ART, THE REFORMATION, AND THE RENAISSANCE

  ART had to suffer from the Reformation, if only because Protestantism believed in the Ten Commandments. Had not the Lord God said, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”? (Exodus 20:4) How was representative art possible after that sweeping prohibition? The Jews had obeyed, and had passed by art. The Moslems had almost obeyed, had kept their art decorative, largely abstract, often representing things, rarely persons, never God. Protestantism, rediscovering the Old Testament, followed the Semitic line. Catholicism, whose Greco-Roman heritage had overshadowed its Judaic origin, had more and more ignored the veto: Gothic sculpture had fashioned saints and gods in stone; Italian painting had pictured the Bible story, and the Renaissance had quite forgotten the Second Commandment in a blooming riot of representative art. Perhaps that old interdict had been meant to ban representation for magical ends; and the patrons of art, in Renaissance Italy, had the good sense to override a primitive and now meaningless taboo.

  The Church, greatest patron of all, had employed the arts to form the letterless in the dogmas and legends of the faith. To the ecclesiastical statesman who felt that myths were vital to morality, this use of art seemed reasonable. But when the myths, like purgatory, were manipulated to finance the extravagances and abuses of the Church, reformers forgivably rebelled against the painting and sculpture that inculcated the myths. In this matter Luther was moderate, even if he had to revise the Commandments. “I do not hold that the Gospel should destroy all the arts, as certain superstitious folk believe. On the contrary, I would fain see all arts .... serving Him Who hath created them and given them to us. The law of Moses forbade only the image of God.”1 In 1526 he called upon his adherents to “assail the... idolaters of the Roman Antichrist by means of painting.”2 Even Calvin, whose followers were the most enthusiastic iconoclasts, gave a limited approval to images. “I am not so scrupulous as to judge that no images should be endured... but seeing that the art of painting and carving .... cometh from God, I require that the practice of art should be kept pure and lawful. Therefore men should not paint nor carve anything but such as can be seen with the eye.”3 Reformers less human than Luther, less cautious than Calvin, preferred to outlaw religious painting and sculpture altogether, and to clear their churches of all ornament; “truth” banished beauty as an infidel. In England, Scotland, Switzerland, and northern Germany the destruction was wholesale and indiscriminate; in France the Huguenots melted down the reliquaries, shrines, and other vessels found in the churches that came into their power. We should have to recapture the ardor of men risking their lives to reform religion before we could understand the angry passion that in moments of victory destroyed the images that had contributed to their subjection. The demolition was brutal and barbarous, but the guilt of it must be shared by the institution that had for centuries obstructed its own reform.

  Gothic art ended in this period, but the Reformation was only one cause of its demise. The reaction against the medieval Church brought with it a distaste for the styles of architecture and ornament long associated with her. And yet Gothic was dying even before Luther spoke. It ailed in Catholic France as well as in rebellious Germany and England; it was consumed in its own flamboyance. And the Renaissance, as well as the Reformation, was fatal to Gothic. For the Renaissance came from Italy, which had never loved Gothic and had travestied it even in adopting it; and the Renaissance spread chiefly among educated people whose polite skepticism could not understand the enthusiastic faith of crusading and Gothic days. As the Reformation progressed, the Church herself, which had found in Gothic architecture her supreme artistic expression, was too impoverished by the loss of Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, and the inroads made upon her revenues by Catholic kings, to finance art as lavishly as before, or to determine taste and style. Day by day a secularizing, paganizing Renaissance asserted its classical predilections over the sacred tra
ditions of medieval faith and form. Men impiously reached over pious and fearful centuries to grasp again the earthloving, pleasure-loving passions of antiquity. War was declared against Gothic as the art of the barbarians who had destroyed Imperial Rome. The conquered Romans came back to life, rebuilt their temples, exhumed the statues of their gods, and bade first Italy, then France and England to resume the art that had embodied the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome. The Renaissance conquered Gothic, and in France it conquered the Reformation.

  II. THE ART OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE

  1. “A Malady of Building”

  In French ecclesiastical architecture Gothic fought successfully for a reprieve. Some old cathedrals added fresh elements, necessarily Gothic; so Caen’s St.-Pierre completed its famous choir; Beauvais built its south transept; and Gothic made almost its expiring effort when Jean Vast raised above that transept crossing a spire 500 feet high (1553). When, on Ascension Day, 1573, that towering audacity collapsed into the ruined choir, the disaster symbolized the end of the noblest style in architectural history.

  Lesser Gothic splendors rose in this period at Pontoise, Coutances, and a dozen other cities of France. In Paris, where every glance reveals some marvel from a believing past, two handsome Gothic churches took form: St.-Étienne-du-Mont (1492–1626) and St.-Eustache (1532–1654). But Renaissance features stole into them: in St.-Étienne the magnificent stone screen overarching the choir; in St.-Eustache the compound pilasters and quasi-Corinthian capitals.

  The replacement of ecclesiastical Gothic with secular Renaissance architecture reflected the taste of Francis I, and the humanistic emphasis on terrestrial pleasure rather than celestial hope. All the economic fruition, the aristocratic patronage, the pagan hedonism, that had fed the fires of art in Renaissance Italy now nourished the devotion of architects, painters, sculptors, potters, and goldsmiths in France. Italian artists were brought in to mingle their skills and decorative motives with surviving Gothic forms. Not only in Paris, but at Fontainebleau, Moulins, Tours, Bourges, Angers, Lyons, Dijon, Avignon, and Aix-en-Provence the brilliance of Italian design, the realism of Flemish painting, and the taste and bisexual grace of the French aristocracy combined to produce in France an art that challenged and inherited the Italian supremacy.

  At the head of the movement was a king who loved art with abandon and yet with discrimination. The lighthearted, smiling spirit of Francis I wrote itself into the architecture of the reign. Osez! he told his artists—“Dare!”4—and he let them experiment as even Italy had not allowed. He recognized the Flemish power in portraiture, kept Jean Clouet as his court painter, commissioned portraits of himself and his entourage by Joos van Cleve. But in all the arts of refinement and decoration it was Italy that inspired him. After his victory at Marignano (1515) he visited Milan, Pavia, Bologna, and other Italian cities, and enviously studied their architecture, painting, and minor arts. Cellini quotes him as saying: “I well remember to have inspected all the best works, and by the greatest masters, of all Italy”;5 probably the exaggeration is the ebullient Cellini’s. Vasari notes in a dozen instances the purchase of Italian art by Francis I through agents in Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan. Through these efforts Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s Leda, Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid, Titian’s Magdalen, and a thousand vases, medals, drawings, statuettes, paintings, and tapestries crossed the Alps to end their travels in the Louvre.

  The enthusiastic monarch, if he could have had his way, would have imported all the best artists of Italy. Money was to be lavished temptingly. “I will choke you with gold,” he promised Cellini. Benvenuto came, and stayed intermittently (1541–45), long enough to confirm French goldsmithry in a tradition of exquisite design and technique. Domenico Bernabei “Boccadoro” had come to France under Charles VIII; Francis employed him to design a new Hôtel de Ville for Paris (1532); nearly a century passed before it was finished; the Commune of 1871 burned it down; it was rebuilt to Boccadoro’s plan. Leonardo came in his old age (1516); all the world of French art and pedigree worshiped him, but we know of no work done by him in France. Andrea del Sarto came (1518), and soon fled. Giovanni Battista “II Rosso” was lured from Florence (1530), and stayed in France till his suicide. Giulio Romano received urgent invitations, but was charmed by Mantua; however, he sent his most brilliant assistant, Francesco Primaticcio (1532). Francesco Pellegrino came, and Giacomo da Vignola, and Niccolo dell’Abbate, and Sebastiano Serlio, and perhaps a dozen more. At the same time French artists were encouraged to go to Italy and study the palaces of Florence, Ferrara, and Milan, and the new St. Peter’s rising in Rome. Not since the conquest of ancient Rome by Greek art and thought had there been so rich a transfusion of cultural blood.

  Native and Flemish artists resented the Italian seduction; and for half a century (1498–1545) the history of French architecture was a royal battle between a Gothic style affectionately rooted in the soil, and Italian modes seeping into France in the wake of conquered conquerors. The struggle pictured itself in stone in the châteaux of the Loire. There Gothic still had the upper hand, and Gallic master-masons dominated the design: a feudal castle within a protective moat, with fortresslike towers rising at the corners in majestic verticality; spacious mullioned windows to invite the sun, and sloping roofs to shed the snow, and dormer windows peering out like monocles from the roofs. But the Italian invaders were allowed to depress the pointed arch back into the older rounded form; to arrange the façades in tiers of rectangular windows buttressed with pilasters and crowned with pediments; and to decorate the interiors with classic columns, capitals, friezes, moldings, roundels, arabesques, and sculptured cornucopias of plants, flowers, fruits animals, imperial busts, and mythical divinities. Theoretically the two styles, Gothic and classical, were incongruous; their fusion by French discrimination and taste into a harmonious beauty shared in making France the Hellas of the modern world.

  A fever of building—une maladie de batir, a wondering general called it6—now seized upon France, or Francis. To the old château at Blois he added (1515–19) for Queen Claude a north wing whose architect was a Frenchman, Jacques Sourdeau, but whose style was quite Renaissance. Finding it inconvenient to build a stairway within the addition, Sourdeau designed one of the architectural cynosures of the age—an external spiral staircase rising in an octagonal tower through three stages to an elegant gallery projecting from the roof, each stage richly adorned with a sculptured balcony.

  After the death of his burdened Queen, Francis turned his architectural passion to Chambord—three miles south of the Loire, ten northeast of Blois. There the dukes of Orléans had built a hunting lodge; Francis replaced this (1526–44) with a predominantly Gothic chateau, so vast—with its 440 rooms, and stables for 1,200 horses—that it required the labor of 1,800 workmen through twelve years. Its French designers made the north façade fascinating but confused with a maze of towers, “lanterns,” pinnacles, and sculptural ornament; and they distinguished the interior with a spiral staircase of great splendor, unique for a double passage that divided ascent from descent. Francis favored Chambord as a happy hunting ground; here his court loved to gather with all its trappings; and here he spent the declining years of his life. Most of the interior ornament was destroyed by revolutionists in 1793, in belated revenge on royal extravagance. Another Francis-can palace—the château of Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, was adorned with a majolica façade by Girolamo della Robbia, and was completely demolished in the Revolution.

  The extravagance was not confined to the King. Many of his aides treated themselves to palaces that still seem like importations from some fairy realm. One of the most perfect is Azay-le-Rideau, on an island in the Indre; Gilles Berthelot, who built it (1521), was not for nothing treasurer of France. Thomas Bohier, receiver-general of taxes in Normandy, built Chenonceaux (1513 f.); Jean Cottereau, finance minister, rebuilt the chateau of Maintenon; Guillaume de Montmorency raised a lordly palace at Chantilly (1530)—another casualty of the Revolution.
His son Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France, erected the chateau of Ecouen (1531–40) near Saint-Denis. The chateau of Villandry was restored by Jean le Breton, secretary of state; Ussé was completed by Charles d’Espinay. Add to these the hôtels or palaces of Valençay, of Semblançay at Tours, of Escoville at Caen, of Bernuys at Toulouse, of Lallemont at Bourges, of Bourg-theroulde at Rouen, and a hundred others, all products of this reckless reign, and we may judge the prosperity of the lords and the poverty of the people.

  Feeling inadequately housed, Francis decided to rebuild the chateau that Louis VII and Louis IX had erected at Fontainebleau, for this, said Cellini, was the spot In his kingdom that the King loved best.” The donjon and the chapel were restored, the rest was torn down; and on the site Gilles de Breton and Pierre Chambiges raised in Renaissance style a congeries of palaces connected by a graceful Galerie de François Premier. The exterior was not attractive; perhaps the King, like the merchant princes of Florence, thought a pretentious façade, so near the city, might draw an evil eye from the populace. He kept his esthetic flair for the interior; and there he relied upon Italians raised in the decorative tradition of Raphael and Giulio Romano.

  For ten years (1531–41) II Rosso—so named from his ruddy face—worked on the adornment of the Gallery of Francis I. Vasari describes the artist, then thirty-seven, as a man “of fine presence, grave and gracious speech, an accomplished musician, a well-versed philosopher,” and “an excellent architect” as well as a sculptor and painter;7 such were the undivided men of that expansive age. Rosso arranged the walls into fifteen panels, each adorned in High Renaissance style: a base of carved and inlaid walnut wainscoting; a fresco of scenes from classical mythology or history; a rich surrounding of stucco decorations in statuary, shells, weapons, medallions, animal or human figures, garlands of fruit or flowers; and a ceiling of deeply coffered wood completed the effect of warm color, sensuous beauty, and careless delight. All this was quite to the King’s taste. He gave Rosso a house in Paris, and a pension of 1,400 livres ($35,000?) a year. The artist, says Vasari, “lived like a lord, with his servants and horses, giving banquets to his friends.” 8 He gathered to his service half a dozen Italian, and several French, painters and sculptors, who formed the origin and nucleus of the “School of Fontainebleau.” At the height of his success and splendor his Italian temper ended his career. He accused one of his aides, Francesco Pellegrino, of robbing him; Pellegrino, after suffering much torture, was found to be innocent; Rosso, in shame and remorse, swallowed poison and died in agony at the age of forty-six (1541).