The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  Despite theological deterrents, crime flourished. Bravi in noble homes, brigands on the highway, pirates in the Mediterranean, political and amorous assassinations abounded. Paolo Giordano Orsini, like another Othello, strangled Isabella de’ Medici in her bed; Piero de’ Medici murdered his wife on suspicion of adultery; we have seen how John Webster turned the bloody story of Vittoria Accoramboni into The White Devil; and Shelley was to do likewise with Beatrice Cenci. Her father, Francesco Cenci, was a paragon of vice and brutality. In 1594 he was tried on a charge of sodomy, but escaped with a fine of 100,000 scudi. His first wife died after giving him twelve children. Having quarreled with his sons, he left Rome with Beatrice and his second wife, Lucrezia Petroni, and removed to a lonely castle on the road to Naples. There he imprisoned them in the upper rooms and treated them with great cruelty—though there is no evidence of incestuous relations with his daughter. Beatrice found means of having a liaison with Olimpio Calvetti, keeper of the castle. At the instigation, or in the pay, of Beatrice, of her stepmother, and of her brothers Giacomo and Bernardo, the keeper, with the aid of a professional assassin, killed the father in his bed (1598). The conspirators were arrested and tried; they pleaded unbearable provocation, and many citizens begged Clement VIII for clemency; he refused. Beatrice and Lucrezia were beheaded, and Giacomo was tortured to death.58

  Nevertheless, morals were improving, manners were softening, and Italian society had charms and graces that only the French could rival. Dress, in the upper ranks, was a colorful fancy of velvets, satins, and silks. About this time aristocratic women began to frame their faces, crown their heads, and drape their shoulders with the black silk mantiglia already popular in Spain. Men of social pretension still walked in high hose, but commoners and merchants, familiar with Turkish garb, were slipping into trousers. Italian comedy satirized the custom in the stock comic character Pantaleone, who became pantaloons and pants.

  As in most Latin countries, amusements were plentiful. Rome had its annual carnival before Lent; the streets, as Evelyn saw them in 1645, “swarm with prostitutes, buffoons, and all manner of rabble”;59 there were races in the Corso, with fleet steeds from Barbary, riderless but prodded by spurs hanging against their sides, and races of asses, buffaloes, old men, naked men, and boys; and plays were performed on movable stages in the open air. The arts of the dance, conversation, and flirtation graced homes, gardens, and streets. And was there an Italian who could not sing?

  V. THE BIRTH OF THE OPERA

  Religion, love, the dance, the court, even work shared in generating music. Evelyn found the rural Italians “so jovial and addicted to music that the very husbandmen almost universally play on the guitar … and will commonly go to the field with their fiddle.”60 Every ducal court had its choir and maestro di cappella; at Ferrara a female quartet famous as the “Concert of Ladies” moved Tasso to tears and rhymes. Madrigals of love wove their polyphonic plaints, making the adoration of woman, till married, almost as reverent as the litanies to the Mother of God. Masses, vespers, motets, and hymns rolled from a thousand organs; choirs of emasculated boys (evirati, castrati) began, about 1600, to thrill the naves; a Protestant visitor described Catholic church music “sung by eunuchs and other rare voices, accompanied by theorboes, harpsichords, and viols, so that we were even ravished.”61 Monks and nuns were trained into choruses that could stir even the savage breast to orthodoxy. Andrea Gabrieli, Claudio Merulo, and Andrea’s nephew Giovanni Gabrieli in succession drew thousands to St. Mark’s in Venice to hear their organ-playing, their orchestras, and their choirs. When Girolamo Frescobaldi played the great organ at St. Peter’s as many as thirty thousand crowded in or around the church to hear. His varied compositions, complex with their difficult experiments, influenced Domenico Scarlatti, and prepared for the harmonic evolutions of Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Musical instruments were almost as diverse as today. Toward the middle of the sixteenth century the violin, evolving out of the lyre, began to replace the viol. The first great violinmakers, Gasparo da Salo and his pupil Giovanni Maggini, worked at Brescia; from them, it seems, Andrea Amati learned the art and took it to Cremona, where his sons handed it down to the Guarneri and the Stradivari. The innovation encountered opposition from those who preferred the softer and gentler tones of the viols; for a century the viols, the lutes, and the violins competed; but when the Amati found ways of tempering the shrillness of the violin, the new instrument, helped by the growing predominance of soprano voices in vocal music, rose to unchallenged leadership.

  Compositions were still for the voice rather than for instruments. To this period belongs the romantic figure of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, who graced pedigree with music and murder with madrigals. Born in Naples (c. 1560), he became a virtuoso of the lute, married a highborn lady, had her and her lover killed on suspicion of adultery, fled to Ferrara, married Donna Eleonora d’Este, and published five books of madrigals whose adventurous harmonies and sharp modulations moved from Renaissance to modern polyphonic forms. In February 1600 Emilio de’ Cavalieri, in the Oratory, or prayer chapel, of St. Philip Neri in Rome, produced a semidramatic allegory, with only symbolic action, but with orchestra, dancing, chorus, and soloists; this “first oratorio” preceded by only eight months, and in many ways resembled, Peri’s opera Euridice. A generation later Giacomo Carissimi composed oratorios and cantatas whose monodic chants influenced the development of operatic recitatives.

  Many other lines of musical growth converged to produce the opera. Some medieval sacre rappresentazioni had added music and song to the action; in these, as in her Passion music, the Church was mother or nurse of opera as of so many other arts. Recitatives accompanied by music had been heard in late medieval courts. Renaissance scholars had pointed out that parts of Greek tragedies had been sung or recited to instrumental accompaniments. At the court of Mantua, in 1472, Angelo Poliziano united music and drama in his brief Favola di Orfeo; now that sad fable began its long odyssey through opera. The masque, so popular in sixteenth-century courts, provided another road to opera; probably the ballet, the lavish scenery, and the sumptuous costumes of modern opera descend from the dancing, the pageantry, and the gorgeous dress that predominated over the action in Renaissance masques.

  Toward the close of the sixteenth century a group of musical and literary enthusiasts, meeting in the home of Giovanni Bardi in Florence, proposed to revive the music drama of the Greeks by freeing song from the heavy polyphony and drowned-out language of the madrigals, and restoring it to what was believed to be the monodic style of ancient tragedy. One member, Vincenzo Galilei, father of the astronomer, set to monodic music parts of Dante’s Inferno. Two other members, the poet Ottavio Rinuccini and the singer Jacopo Peri, composed the libretto and the score for what may be reckoned the first opera, Dafne, which was produced in the home of Jacopo Corsi in 1597.62 The performance was so applauded that Rinuccini was invited to write the words, and Peri and Giulio Caccini the music, of a more substantial composition to celebrate the marriage of Henry IV and Maria de’ Medici at Florence (October 6, 1600). The Euridice there performed is the oldest opera still extant. Peri apologized for the imperfections of his hurried work, and hoped to “have opened the path for the talent of others, for them to walk in my footsteps to that glory to which it has not been given me to attain.”63

  It was attained by one of the major figures in the history of music. Claudio Monteverdi became an expert violinist in his native Cremona. At twenty-two (1589) he was made violinist to the Duke of Mantua; at thirty-five he was maestro di cappella. Critics hotly denounced his five books of madrigals (1587–1605) for double discords, “licentious modulations,” “illegal” harmonic progressions, and broken rules of counterpoint. “These new composers,” wrote Giovanni Artusi in Delle imperfezioni della musica moderna (1600–3), “seem to be satisfied if they can produce the greatest possible tonal disturbance by bringing together completely unrelated elements and mountainous collections of cacophonies.”64


  Turning his reckless hand to the new form that he had heard in Florence, Monteverdi produced at Mantua his first opera, another Orfeo (1607), with an enlarged orchestra of thirty-six pieces. The music and action marked a great advance over Peri’s Euridice. In Monteverdi’s second opera, Arianna (1608), the action was still more dramatic, the music more appealing; all Italy began to intone the deserted Ariadne’s lament, “Lasciate mi morire” (Let me die). In his expansion and reorganization of the orchestra, in his leitmotiv signalization of each character with a specific musical theme, in the overtures (sinfonie) with which he prefaced his operas, in the improvement of recitatives and arias, in the complex and intimate union of music and drama, Monteverdi marked as decisive an advance in opera as his contemporary Shakespeare was making in the theater.

  In 1612 Monteverdi moved to Venice as maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s. He composed more madrigals, but altered that declining form into such declamation that critics accused him of subordinating music (as Bernini would be accused of subordinating sculpture) to drama; and unquestionably Monteverdi—like nearly all opera—is musical baroque. In 1637 Venice opened the first public opera house, the Teatro di San Cassiano; there Monteverdi’s Adone ran from 1639 till Carnival of 1640, while at times his Arianna was filling another theater. When he produced his last opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642), Italy was happy to see that at the age of seventy-five Monteverdi (like Verdi with Otello at seventy-four) was still in the fullness of his powers. A year later he died, leaving the world of music inspired and rejuvenated by a creative revolution.

  VI. LETTERS

  It is astonishing to see the genius of Italy bubbling over in every field, even in this period of supposed decline. In abundance and fervor this was a fruitful age in the literature of Italy. Only a lack of time, space, and knowledge keeps us from doing it justice here.

  Italian scholarship naturally declined after the exhaustion of the Renaissance afflatus; one could not go on rediscovering Greece and Rome forever. The care of letters was now left to literary academies, whose very organization made them conservative. Almost every city in Italy had such a society, dedicated to the cultivation of literature and the mutual toleration of poetry. The Accademia della Crusca (i.e., of Chaff), founded in Florence in 1572, anticipated the French Academy by compiling a dictionary of the language (1612f.) and attempting to regulate literary style and taste.

  Italian historians were the best of the age. We have noted Sarpi’s passionate History of the Council of Trent. Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio produced a remarkably sympathetic account of the revolt in the Netherlands. He might have done more, but he died in conclave just as he seemed about to be chosen pope—done to death, said Nicius Erythraeus, by the snoring of a cardinal in the next cell, which deprived him of sleep for eleven successive nights.65 Cardinal Caesar Baronius compiled a massive history of the Church (Annales ecclesiastici, 1588–1607) in twelve folio volumes, which later scholars extended to thirty-eight; Ranke pronounced them quite free of charm,66 but Gibbon found them helpful, and the Cardinal made a laudable effort to be fair. “I shall love with a special love,” he wrote, “the man who most rigidly and severely corrects my errors.”67 Isaac Casaubon undertook to do this, but desisted after writing an introductory fragment of eight hundred folio pages.

  The theater prospered, while drama declined. Few memorable plays were composed, but many were produced, and with a scenic lavishness and histrionic skill that made Inigo Jones marvel and learn. Italian actors were in demand throughout the Continent. While in England female parts were taken by boys, in Italy they were played by women. Actresses were already deified; Tasso indited a sonnet to Isabella Andreini, who was not only a beautiful performer but a passable poetess and a good wife.

  Two plays stand out in this period, partly because they established a new genre on the stage—the pastoral drama. Tasso gave it impetus with his Aminta (1573); Giovanni Battista Guarini produced the classic example in Il pastor fido (1585). “If he had not read Aminta” said Tasso, “he had not excelled it.”68 Cardinal Bellarmine rebuked Guarini for the licentiousness of the play, saying that it had done more harm to Christendom than all the heresies of Luther and Calvin; however, a sedulous search has found no saucier scene than the pretty Corisca offering the “two apples” of her breast to the unappreciative Silvio, a hunter who “takes more joy in one beast caught … than in the love of all the nymphs that are.”69 Barring Silvio, the play, like nearly all the Italian poetry of the time, has a sensual temperature, fusing all life into love. The action transpires in a pastoral Arcadia, in that “fair Golden Age when milk was the only food,” no vice or grief stained humanity, and love was free from all censures and chains.70 What with Aminta and this Faithful Shepherd, and Montemayor’s Diana enamorada, and Sidney’s Arcadia, and Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, half the reading population of Europe was sent out to pasture.

  Crescimbeni listed 661 sonneteers who in the Italy of the sixteenth century had no trouble finding resonant rhymes for their variations of Petrarch.71 Some of the finest sonnets of the time were thrown off by Campanella and Bruno as sparks from their philosophic fire. Alessandro Tassoni satirized the sonneteers and the idolators of Petrarch, Marini, and Tasso in one of the most famous of Italian poems, La secchia rapita (The Stolen Bucket). As its victim was a powerful noble, no one would publish it; but the demand was so great that scribes prospered by copying it and selling it at eight crowns per manuscript; finally it was printed in France and smuggled into Italy. What charmed Italian readers was not only the aptness and sharpness of the barbs, but the episodes of pure poetry that interrupted the hilarity—the love story of Endymion delicately told, almost side by side with the picture of a senator traveling to heaven on a toilet stool.

  Only two Italian poets surpassed Tassoni’s acclaim in this epoch—Tasso and Giovanni Battista Marini. Born at Naples and bred for the law, Giovanni abandoned pleading for rhymes, and for a time enjoyed a vagabond life. The Marquis Manso, forgiving the licentiousness of Marini’s lyrics, gave him a room in his palace, where, at a respectful distance, the youth could look upon the somber decaying Tasso. For helping a friend to abduct a girl, he was thrown into prison. Released, he went to Rome, where the genial Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandino made him his private secretary. The Cardinal took him to Turin and there lost him to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy. For a while Marini sipped the wine and vinegar of court life. He made fun of a rival poet, Gasparo Murtola, who waylaid him, shot at him, missed him, but wounded a servant of the Duke. Murtola was sentenced to death; Marini had him pardoned, and won his rival’s warmest ingratitude. Imprisoned for satires too personally pointed, Marini accepted an invitation from Marie de Médicis to adorn her court at Paris (1615). The Italians in her retinue welcomed him as their voice in France; he was idolized, and he received fat sinecures; lords and ladies paid him well for pre-publication copies of his epic Adone. One such copy reached Cardinal Bentivoglio, who appealed to Marini to purge the poem of its lascivious passages; we do not know how far the author tried. Adone was published in Paris in 1623, was put on the Index, and became the rage and the theme of Italy. When Marini returned to Naples (1624) highwaymen pelted his coach with roses, noblemen came out to escort him, and beauties melted toward him from their balconies. A year later he died, aged fifty-two, at the apex of his wealth and fame.

  The Adone is an outstanding poem even in a country where poetry is almost as congenital as song. Its size deters us—a thousand pages, 45,000 lines. Its style indulges in all those tricks of speech that delighted Lyly in England, Guevara and Góngora in Spain, and some précieuses ridicules of the Hôtel de Rambouillet in France; marinismo was part of a European plague. The clever Italian had an almost sensual passion for words; he tossed them about in crackling antitheses, fanciful conceits, artful circumlocutions, even facile puns. But the Italian public of the sixteenth century, itself bubbling with hot speech, took no offense from this love of the wiles and jugglery of words. And what did such v
erbal conjuring matter in an epic that was a paean to sex in all its forms—normal, bestial, homosexual, incestuous? Here were the love myths of Hellas elegantly told; Mars and Vulcan sport with Aphrodite, and Zeus seduces Ganymede. The charms of the male body are the running theme, and the sense of touch is praised as the astonishing source of man’s keenest delights. The hero, Adonis, dowered with all the beauty of a girl, is courted by women, men, and beasts. Venus woos him with her smoothest arts; a bandit chief seeks to make him his mistress; at last the helplessly lovable lad is mortally wounded in the groin by a boar with the most amorous intentions. Was this effeminate concentration on sex a relief and escape from too much religion and too much Spain?

  VII. TASSO

  Torquato Tasso had many inducements to poetry. He was born at Sorrento (1544), where the sea is an epic, the sky a lyric, and every hill an ode. His father Bernardo was a poet, a courtier, a man of sensitivity and passion, who plotted against the Viceroy, was banished from the Kingdom of Naples (1551), and wandered from court to court, leaving wife and child impoverished behind him. Torquato’s mother, Porzia de’ Rossi, came of an old Tuscan family with culture in its blood. For three years the boy studied in a Jesuit school at Naples. He imbibed Latin and Greek in nerve-racking doses, and was trained to a profound piety that gave him in alternation theological tremors and an indescribable peace. At ten he joined his father in Rome; his mother’s death two years later left him deeply moved and long disconsolate. He accompanied his father to Urbino and Venice; there Bernardo published his own Amadigi (1560), which set medieval romance into verse.

  Torquato himself was now agitated with poetry. He was dispatched to Padua to study law, but the father’s example was more powerful than his precepts; the youth neglected statutes, and concatenated rhymes. He had long since fallen under Virgil’s spell; now he resolved to apply the Mantuan’s noble and serious style to those chivalric legends that Ariosto had treated with a twinkle in his eye. So he surprised his father by sending him Rinaldo, a romance in twelve cantos. Bernardo was saddened and pleased; he foresaw the vicissitudes of a poet with nothing but genius, yet he beamed to see his son, aged eighteen, rivaling in delicacy and imaginative verse the best poets of the time. He had the little epic published (1562), warmed his soul in the acclaim it received, and allowed Torquato to abandon law at Padua for philosophy and literature at Bologna. There the youth’s talent proved troublesome; he wrote prickly epigrams upon his teachers, was threatened with a libel suit, and returned precipitately to Padua.