by Will Durant
Bologna, under papal rule since 1506, had in this age a second flowering, in a school of painting that dominated Italy for two centuries and spread its influence into Spain, France, Flanders, and England. Lodovico Carracci, son of a prosperous butcher, returned to Bologna after studying art in Venice, Florence, Parma, and Mantua. Tintoretto had warned him that he had no genius for painting, but Lodovico felt that industry could substitute for genius, and that he had genius too. He stirred with his enthusiasm his cousins Agostino and Annibale Carracci—one a goldsmith, the other a tailor. The two went off to Venice and Parma to study Titian and Correggio. When they came back they joined with Lodovico in opening (1589) the Accademia degli Incamminati—”of those setting out on the road.” They provided instruction in the elements the history, and the technique of art, and a careful study of the masters; they rejected the “manneristic” stress on the mannerisms or peculiarities of any individual master; they proposed, rather, to unite the feminine tenderness of Raphael, the delicate eloquence of Correggio, the masculine vigor of Michelangelo, the chiaroscuro of Leonardo, and the warm coloring of Titian all in one comprehensive style. This “Eclectic school” made Bologna rival Rome as the art capital of Italy.
The pictures bequeathed by the Carracci are countless; many of them are in the Bolognese Accademia di Belle Arti; some are in the Louvre; but one finds them anywhere. Lodovico’s own product is the least attractive, but appears at its best in a luminous Annunciation and an excellent Martyrdom of St. Ursula, both in the pinacoteca of the academy. Agostino is represented by a powerful Communion of St. Jerome—which did not prevent him from meeting a wide demand for obscene prints. Annibale was technically the most gifted of the clan, having derived from Correggio a refinement of line and color rarely achieved by his cousins; see the voluptuous elegance of his Bacchante in the Uffizi Gallery, the perfect female form in The Nymph and the Satyr in the Pitti Palace, and the perfect male form in The Genius of Fame in Dresden; and in Christ and the Samaritan Woman (Vienna) he produced one of the masterpieces of this period—figures worthy of Raphael, a landscape anticipating Poussin.
In 1600 Annibale and Agostino accepted the invitation of Cardinal Farnese to come and paint the gallery of his palace in Rome. They chose an appropriate subject and painted The Triumph of Bacchus, a Rubensian riot of feminine charms. Thence Agostino went to Parma, where he painted a great fresco for the Casino; and Annibale proceeded to Naples, whose Museo Nazionale still shows his characteristic counterpoint of The Holy Family with Venus and Mars. The three cousins, so long united in art, were far apart in death: Agostino in Parma (1602), Annibale in Rome (1609), Lodovico still faithful to Bologna—the first to come and the last to go (1619).
The new school trained several of the most famous painters of the period. One of them, Guido Reni, had the largest following of any painter in Europe. After his early budding under the care of the Carracci, he yielded to the lure of Rome (1602), worked there for twenty years, then returned to Bologna to produce pictures whose pious sensuality and sentimental grace made them a welcome bridge between the orthodoxy of the faith and the heresies of the flesh. Guido himself seems to have been sincerely religious, and is reputed to have kept himself virginally intact to the end. The self-portrait in the Capitoline Museum shows him in youth, pretty as a girl, with blond hair, fair complexion, and blue eyes. His masterpiece is the Aurora frescoed on the ceiling of the Rospigliosi Palace in Rome: the goddess of the dawn flying through the air, followed by gallant horses drawing a disheveled Phoebus in his chariot, and accompanied by dancing females of lovely face and form, representing the hours, with a winged cherub giving a Christian imprimatur to a pagan ecstasy. Guido painted other mythologies—the Rape of Helen in the Louvre, the Apples of the Hesperides in Naples, the voluptuous Venus and Cupid in Dresden. From the Old Testament he took his famous Susannah and the Elders (Uffizi). But for the most part he was content to picture again the old themes dear to the people and the Church, the story of Christ and his mother, all suffused with what merciless critics denounce as a maudlinII exaggeration of sentiment. He did well, however, with the Apostles, as in the St. Matthew of the Vatican; he painted a magnificent head of St. Joseph (Brera), and in the Vatican’s Martyrdom of St. Peter he tried the harsh realism of Caravaggio. Returning to sentiment, he painted for the galleries his famous St. Sebastian, showing the saint calmly receiving arrows into his perfect frame. In all this oeuvre we perceive the skill of well-trained technique; but when we compare these saccharine sanctities with Raphael’s Stanze or Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, we are moved not by the fullness of color and the smoothness of line, but by the “loss of nerve” in Reni’s art. He dreamed forgivably when he wrote, “I should like to give to the figure I am about to paint such beauty as that which dwells in Paradise”;13 but he gave himself away when he boasted that he had “two hundred ways of making the eyes look up to heaven.”14
Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri) followed Guido’s policy of pleasing at once the pagans and the devotees; and as these two were often one, it proved a profitable plan. He was more complex than Guido, modest and shy, in love with music and his wife. He too learned his art in Bologna and then sought the fauna and florins of Rome. His success there aroused the envy of his local competitors; they accused him of plagiarism; he retired to Bologna, but was recalled by Gregory XV to be chief architect, as well as chief painter, to the Vatican. With some of the old Renaissance versatility he designed the now vanished Villa Ludovisi at Rome and part of the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati. Moving on to Naples, he began a series of frescoes in the cathedral. Despite difficulties multiplied by the Neapolitan painters, he had almost completed his assignment when he died (1641), aged sixty, still in the vigor of his art. His greatest picture is The Last Communion of St. Jerome, in the Vatican. On the basis of this chef-d’œuvre Poussin ranked Domenichino second only to Raphael among painters;15 we respect the enthusiasm more than the judgment. Ruskin thought Domenichino “palpably incapable of doing anything good, great, or right in any field, way, or kind whatsoever”;16 we admire neither the judgment nor the rhetoric.
The last of the three famed pupils of the Carracci was lamentably called Guercino—”Squint-eyed”—from an accident that distorted his eye in infancy; but his mother called him Giovanni Francesco Barbieri. He was already a painter, influenced by the masculine style of Caravaggio, before he came to study with the Carracci; so he mediated in art between Bologna and Rome. Like Guido he remained unmarried, lived semimonastically, and displayed the best qualities of the Catholic Reformation in his quiet and decent life. He has left us many pleasing pictures, scattered from Rome to Chicago. He was the weakest and most lovable of the Bolognese school.
The basic theory of the Eclectic school, that a great artist can be formed by trying to unite the diverse excellences of his predecessors, was surely a mistake, for it is often the character of genius to express a personality and strike out new paths; but the Accademia degli Incamminati served well to transmit a tradition and a discipline without which genius may run to excesses and bizarreries. The prosperity of the school was due in part to its ready co-operation with the needs of the Church. The reformed papacy and the expanding Jesuits required fresh representations of the Christian story, and vivid incitations to piety and faith. The Bolognese painters touched every chord of feeling in the worshiper; their Madonnas and Magdalens spread throughout Catholic Christendom. Who shall deny that the people were grateful for these inspirations, or that in providing them the Church proved herself the most understanding psychologist in history?
4. Naples
The Papal States had long since absorbed Forlì, Ravenna, Rimini, and Ancona; Urbino was added in 1626, Pesaro in 1631. Thence southward through Foggia, Bari, and Brindisi to the heel—and through Taranto, Crotone, and Reggio Calabria to the toe—of the Magic Boot, and across from Scylla to Charybdis through Sicily, and northward along the west coast to Capua, was the Kingdom of Naples, since 1504 a viceroyalty of Spain. A populat
ion of three million passionate souls labored in burning poverty throughout that sprawling realm to finance the splendor of its brilliant capital. Evelyn saw and described Naples in 1645:
The chief magistrates, being prodigiously avaricious, do wonderfully enrich themselves out of the miserable people’s labor … The structure of the city is, for its size, the most magnificent of any in Europe: the streets exceeding large, well paved, having many subterranean passages for the sewerage; which renders them very sweet and clean … To it belongeth more than 3,000 churches and monasteries, and these the best built and adorned in Italy. The people greatly affect the Spanish gravity in their habit; delight in good horses; the streets are full of gallants on horseback, in coaches and sedans … The women are generally well-featured, but excessively libidinous.17
Everybody seemed jovial, full of music, romance, and piety; but under that singing surface, and under the eyes of the Inquisition, heresy and revolution brewed. In this regno the philosopher Telesio lived and died (1588); in Nola, near Naples, Bruno was born (1548). In 1598 Campanella took part in a rebellion that aimed to make Calabria an independent republic; the plot failed, and the poet-philosopher spent the next twenty-seven years in jail.
In 1647 Naples went hysterical with one of those operatic uprisings that periodically disturbed agrarian exploitation in Italy. Tommaso Aniello, popularly known as Masaniello, was a fish hawker whose wife had been heavily fined for smuggling corn. When the Spanish governor laid a tax on fruit to finance a navy, and the growers and the vendors of fruit refused to pay the imposition, Tommaso called for an armed revolt. A hundred thousand Italians followed him as he marched to the viceregal palace to demand withdrawal of the tax. The frightened Viceroy yielded; Tommaso, aged twenty-four, became master of Naples, and he ruled it for ten days. Fifteen hundred opponents were executed in a delirium of dictatorship; a lower price was decreed for bread, and a baker who failed to comply was roasted alive in his own oven18—but Tommaso’s enemies wrote the history. We are told that Masaniello dressed in cloth of gold, transformed his humble home into a palace seething with authority, and cruised about the bay in a sumptuous gondola. On July 17 he was assassinated by desperadoes in the pay of Spain. His dismembered body was recovered and reunited by his followers, who gave him a lordly funeral. The leaderless revolt died away.
A somber religious art maintained itself under the archbishops and the viceroys. In 1608 the Church spent a million florins to build, in the Cathedral of San Gennaro, the Cappella del Tesoro as a shrine for the two phials containing the coagulated blood of St. Januarius, patron of Naples. Twice a year, the people were told, the blood must liquefy and flow in order that Naples should prosper and be safe from Vesuvius.
Painting in Naples was for a time controlled by a triumvirate of jealous artists, Corenzio, Caracciolo, and Ribera, determined that all Neapolitan painting should be done by themselves or their friends. They sent such threats to Annibale Carracci that he fled to Rome, where he died soon afterward from the effects of a hectic journey under a hot sun.19 When Guido Reni came to decorate the Chapel of the Treasure he received a warning to leave Naples or die; he left almost at once, his work hardly begun. Two of his assistants, who stayed behind, were put on a galley and never heard of again. Domenichino came, completed four frescoes in the Chapel despite repeated erasures of his work, and then fled before Ribera’s threats; he returned under the Viceroy’s pledge of protection, but died shortly afterward, possibly by poison.20
With all his crimes, José or Giuseppe Ribera must be commemorated as the greatest painter of this period in Italy. Spain claims him through his birth at Xátiva, near Valencia (1588); he studied for a time under Francisco de Ribalta; but in early youth he made his way to Rome. There he lived in ragged poverty, copying frescoes and gathering crusts, until one of those art-loving cardinals who still felt the afflatus of the Renaissance took him into his palace and gave him bed and board, colors and clothes. Sedulously Giuseppe copied the works of Raphael in the Vatican and of the Carracci in the Farnese Palace. Then, finding his passion dulled by comfort, Lo Spagnoletto—”the little Spaniard”—ran away to Parma and Modena to study Correggio. He returned to Rome, quarreled with Domenichino, and moved to Naples. There or at Rome he fell under the influence of Caravaggio, whose brutal style confirmed him in the dark naturalism that he may already have learned from Ribalta. A rich picture dealer took a fancy to him and offered him a pretty daughter in marriage. The penniless Giuseppe thought the proposal a joke, but when it was repeated he leaped into marriage and prosperity.
Now he painted The Flaying of St. Bartholomew, with such bloody verisimilitude that when it was exposed to public view it drew a crowd of gazers more interested in blood than in art. The Viceroy—that same Osuna who conspired against Venice—asked for the picture and its author, was fascinated, and gave Ribera charge of all decorations in the palace. The insatiable Spaniard frightened off all competitors until the commission to fresco the Chapel of the Treasure was given to Giovanni Lanfranco, his friend. He himself executed the altarpiece, representing the incombustible St. Januarius issuing unsinged from a fiery furnace.
Thereafter Ribera was the unchallenged master of his art in Naples. He seemed able at will to rival the tenderness of Raphael and Correggio without falling into the sentimentality of Guido Reni or Murillo, and to raise the realism of Caravaggio to a higher power by the intensity of his conception and the depth of his coloring. Let us instance only the Pietà and the Lamentation in the church and monastery of San Martino—”a work before which, as an embodiment of the solemn majesty of grief, all similar representations of that century sink to mere theatrical spectacles.”21 Or, from the mythologies, take the Archimedes in the Prado—precisely such a wrinkled old Sicilian as one might find in Syracuse today. Stepping out from the Bible and history into the streets, Ribera found variety for his art in realistic snatches from common life; and in the Barefoot Boy of the Louvre he gave a lead to Velázquez and Murillo.III
Ribera’s defects leap to the eye—an exaggerated violence, a fondness for wrinkles and ribs, and a thirst for blood; Byron noted that
Spagnoletto tainted
His brush with all the blood of all the sainted.22
His dark colors and somber emphasis frighten and depress us, but in a Naples inured to Spanish rule and moods this tenebroso style found a ready acceptance. Every new church or monastery competed for him; Philip IV and the Neapolitan viceroys were avid customers; Ribera’s paintings and etchings were more widely diffused in Spain than those of Velázquez—who visited him twice in Italy. His home was one of the finest in Naples, and his two daughters were paragons of brown loveliness. One of them had the distinction of being seduced by another Don Juan, Philip IV’s natural son, who carried her off to Sicily and, soon tiring of her, abandoned her to a Palermo nunnery. Ribera almost succumbed to grief and shame; he sought consolation by giving to pictures of the Virgin the remembered features of his lost Maria Rosa; but within four years of her tragedy he died (1652).
II. ROME AND THE POPES
The capital of the Papal StatesIV and of the Roman Catholic world was now a city of the second rank, with some 45,000 souls in 1558, rising to 100,000 under Sixtus V (1590). Montaigne, coming to it in 1580, thought it more extensive than Paris, but having only one third as many houses. Criminals and prostitutes (before Sixtus V) constituted a sizable part of the population; many a noble had a standing staff of ruffians. Poverty was general but genial, alleviated by papal charity, ecclesiastical ceremonies, religious hopes. The old aristocratic clans—Orsini, Colonna, Savelli, Gaetani, Chigi—had declined in income and power, though not in claims and pride; younger families—Aldobrandini, Barberini, Borghese, Farnese, Rospigliosi—were taking the lead in fortune and influence, usually through connections with the popes. Papal nepotism had another heyday: the Aldobrandini reaped a harvest from the election of Clement VIII, the Ludovisi from Gregory XV, the Barberini from Urban VIII, the Borghese from Paul V. Paul’s nephew,
Cardinal Scipione Borghese, enjoying plural benefices and 150,000 scudi per year, laid out the Villa, and built the Casino, Borghese (1615), founded its rich art collections, and earned a moderate immortality in marble from his protégé Bernini. Many of the cardinals used their wealth to support literature and art.
A succession of strong popes now helped the Roman Church to survive despite the loss of Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Britain to the Reformation. The Council of Trent had confirmed and enhanced the supremacy of the popes over the councils, and the young and vigorous Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—was pledged and devoted to the papacy. Antonio Ghislieri, Dominican friar and Grand Inquisitor, became Pope Pius V in 1566 at the age of sixty-two. The saintliness of his personal life seemed to him fully consistent with his severity in pursuing heresy. He withdrew from the Bohemian Catholics the right previously granted them to receive Communion in wine as well as bread. He excommunicated Elizabeth of England and released the English Catholics from her allegiance. He urged Charles IX of France and Catherine de Médicis to prosecute war against the Huguenots till these should be utterly and mercilessly destroyed.23 He commended the harsh measures of Alba in the Netherlands.24 He labored with his dying strength to prepare the armada that defeated the Turks at Lepanto. He never mitigated a penal sentence;25 he encouraged the Inquisition to enforce its rules and penalties.