by Peter Burke
To understand and manipulate the world of earth, several techniques were available, including alchemy, magic and witchcraft. Their intellectual presuppositions need to be discussed.
Alchemy depended on the idea that there is a hierarchy of metals, with gold as the noblest, and also that the ‘social mobility’ of metals is possible. It was related to astrology because each of the seven metals was associated with one of the planets: gold with the Sun, silver with the Moon, mercury with Mercury, iron with Mars, lead with Saturn, tin with Jupiter, and copper with Venus. It was also related to medicine because the ‘philosopher’s stone’ which the alchemists were looking for was also the cure for all illnesses, the ‘universal panacea’.
Jacob Burckhardt believed that alchemy ‘played only a very subordinate part’ in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.26 It is dangerous to make general assertions about the popularity of such a deliberately esoteric subject as alchemy, but the odds are that he was wrong. The Venetian Council of Ten took it more seriously when they issued a decree against it in 1488. Several Italian treatises on the subject from the later part of our period have survived. The most famous is a Latin poem, Giovanni Augurello’s Chrysopoeia, published in 1515 and dedicated to Leo X; there is a story that the pope rewarded the poet with an empty purse. A certain ‘J. A. Pantheus’, priest of Venice, also dedicated an alchemical work to Leo before inventing a new subject, ‘cabala of metals’, which he carefully distinguished from alchemy, perhaps because the Council of Ten were still hostile. On the other hand, some people treated the claims of the alchemists with scepticism. St Antonino, the fifteenth-century archbishop of Florence, held that the transmutation of metals was beyond human power, while the Sienese metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio suggested that it was ‘a vain wish and fanciful dream’ and that the adepts of alchemy, ‘more inflamed than the very coals in their furnaces’ with the desire to create gold, ought to go mining instead, as he did.27
There are only a few tantalizing indications of the possible relation between alchemy and art and literature. Alchemy had its own symbolic system, possibly adopted as a kind of code, in which, for example, a fountain stood for the purification of metals, Christ for the philosopher’s stone, marriage for the union of sulphur and mercury, a dragon for fire. To complicate matters, some writers used alchemical imagery as symbols of something else (religious truths, for example). The Dream of Polyphilus, an anonymous esoteric romance published in Venice in 1499, makes use of a number of these symbols, and it is possible that this love story has an alchemical level of meaning. Vasari tells us that Parmigianino gave up painting for the study of alchemy, and it has been suggested that his paintings make use of alchemical symbolism.28 Unfortunately, the fact that alchemists used a number of common symbols (while giving them uncommon interpretations) makes the suggestion impossible to verify.
Magic was discussed more openly than alchemy, at least in its white form; for, as Pico della Mirandola put it:
Magic has two forms, one of which depends entirely on the work and authority of demons, a thing to be abhorred, so help me the god of truth, and a monstrous thing. The other, when it is rightly pursued, is nothing else than the utter perfection of natural philosophy … as the former makes man the bound slave of wicked powers, so does the latter make him their ruler and lord.29
It should be noted that Pico believed in the efficacy of the black magic he condemns.
From a comparative point of view it might be useful to define magic, cross-culturally, as the attempt to produce material changes in the world as the result of performing certain rituals and writing or uttering certain verbal formulas (‘spells’, ‘charms’ or ‘incantations’) requesting or demanding that these changes take place. It would follow from this definition that the most influential group of magicians in Renaissance Italy were the Catholic clergy, since they claimed in this period that their rituals, images and prayers could cure the sick, avert storms, and so on.30
From the point of view of contemporaries, however, the distinction between religion and magic was an important one. The Church – or, to be more sociologically exact, the more highly educated clergy – generally regarded magic with suspicion. Books of spells were burned in public by San Bernardino of Siena and also by Savonarola. It would be too cynical to explain this opposition to magic (and in some cases, as we have seen, to astrology) merely in terms of rivalry and competition. There were other grounds for clerical suspicion.
Magic could be black for two reasons. In the first place, it could be destructive as well as productive or protective. Secondly, the magician might employ the services of evil spirits. Thus Giovanni Fontana, a fifteenth-century Venetian who made a number of mechanical devices for use in dramatic spectacles, gained the reputation of a necromancer who received assistance from spirits from hell, just as John Dee gained a sinister reputation in sixteenth-century Cambridge as a result of the too successful ‘special effects’ that he contrived for a performance of Aristophanes. No doubt many of their contemporaries viewed Brunelleschi and Leonardo in a similar light. At a more learned level, the philosopher Agostino Nifo argued that the marvels of magic showed that – contrary to Aristotle’s belief – demons really existed.
The literature of the period is steeped in magic. Romances of chivalry, for example, are full of sorcerers and of objects with magical powers. In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the magician Merlino and the enchantress Alcina play an important part. Angelica has a magic ring, Astolfo is turned into a tree, Atlante’s castle is the home of enchantment, and so on. We should imagine the book’s first readers as people who, if they did not always take magic too seriously, did not take it too lightly either. They believed in its possibility. In the same milieu as Ariosto, at the court of Ferrara, Dosso Dossi painted a picture of Circe, the enchantress of the Odyssey, who attracted much interest in Renaissance Italy (Plate 8.1).
One reason for this interest in Circe is that she was taken to be a witch, notably by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (the nephew of Giovanni Pico), who published a dialogue on witchcraft in 1523 in which he made considerable use of the testimony of ancient writers such as Homer and Virgil.31 Witchcraft was the poor man’s magic, or rather the poor woman’s – that is, a considerable proportion of the elite of educated men distinguished magic from witchcraft and associated the latter with poor women, who were supposed to have made a pact with the devil, to have been given the power to do harm by supernatural means but without study, to fly through the air and to attend nocturnal orgies called ‘sabbaths’.32 Particularly vulnerable to these accusations were those villagers, male and female, who were called in by their neighbours to find lost objects by supernatural means or to heal sick people and animals. ‘Who knows how to cure illness knows how to cause it’ (Qui scit sanare scit destruere) went a proverb current at the time.33 It is more difficult to say whether the neighbours thought that these powers were or were not diabolical, and hardest of all to reconstruct what the accused thought she or he was doing. In Rome in 1427, two women confessed that they turned into cats, murdered children and sucked their blood; but the record does not tell us, in this case as in the majority of trials, what pressure had been brought to bear on the accused beforehand.
An illuminating and well-documented case is that of a certain Chiara Signorini, a peasant woman from the Modena area, accused of witchcraft in 1520. She and her husband had been expelled from their holding, whereupon the lady who owned the land had fallen ill. Chiara offered to cure her on condition that the couple was allowed to return. A witness claimed to have seen Chiara place at the door of the victim’s house ‘fragments of an olive-tree in the form of a cross … a fragment of the bone of a dead man … and an alb of silk, believed to have been dipped in chrism’. When Chiara was interrogated, she described visions of the Blessed Virgin, which her interrogator attempted to interpret as a diabolical figure. After torture, Chiara agreed that the devil had appeared to her, but she would not admit to having attended a ‘sabbath’
. The use of the cross and the holy oil, like the vision of the Blessed Virgin, may well be significant. After all, the period 1450 to 1536 was the high point of recorded visions of the Virgin in Italy.34 Some of the ‘spells’ which inquisitors confiscated took the form of prayers. What one group views as witchcraft, another may take to be religion. In this conflict of interpretations, it was the interrogator, backed by his instruments of torture, who had the last word.35
PLATE 8.1 DOSSO DOSSI: CIRCE
Nevertheless, a few writers did express scepticism about the efficacy of magic and witchcraft. The humanist lawyer Andrea Alciati, for example, suggested (as Montaigne was to do) that so-called witches suffered from hallucinations of night flight, and so on, and deserved medicine rather than punishment.36 The physician Girolamo Cardano pointed out that the accused confessed to whatever the interrogators suggested to them, simply in order to bring their tortures to an end.37 Pietro Pomponazzi, who taught the philosophy of Aristotle at the University of Padua, argued in his book On Incantations that the common people simply attributed to demons actions which they did not understand. He offered naturalistic explanations of apparently supernatural phenomena such as the extraction of arrows by means of incantations and the cure of the skin disease called ‘the king’s evil’ by virtue of the royal touch. Pomponazzi held similar views about some of the miracles recorded in the Bible and about cures by means of relics, arguing that the cures may have been due to the faith of the patients, and that dogs’ bones would have done just as well as the bones of the saints. It is not surprising to find that this book, which undermined the Church’s distinction between religion and magic, was not published in the philosopher’s lifetime.38
VIEWS OF SOCIETY
The first thing to say about ‘society’ in Renaissance Italy is that the concept did not yet exist. It was not until the later seventeenth century that a general term began to be used (in Italian as in English, French and German) to describe the whole social system. A good deal was said and written, however, about various forms of government and social groups, and about the differences between the present and the past.39
In Italy as in other parts of Europe, a recurrent image, which goes back to Plato and Aristotle, was that of the ‘body politic’ (corpo politico). It was more than a metaphor. The analogy between the human body and the political body was taken seriously by many people, and it underlay many more specific arguments. Thus a character in Castiglione’s Courtier could defend monarchy as a ‘more natural form of government’ because, ‘in our body, all the members obey the rule of the heart’.40 The ruler was often described as the ‘physician’ of this body politic, a commonplace which sometimes makes its appearance even in a writer as original and as deliberately shocking as Machiavelli, who wrote in the third chapter of The Prince that political disorders begin by being difficult to diagnose but easy to cure and end up easy to diagnose and difficult to cure.
However, in Italy this ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ language of politics was less dominant than elsewhere. A rival concept to the ‘body politic’, that of ‘the state’ (lo stato), was developing, with a range of reference which included public welfare, the constitution and the power structure. One character in Alberti’s dialogue on the family declares: ‘I do not want to consider the state as if it were my own property, to think of it as my shop’ (ascrivermi lo stato quasi per mia ricchezza, riputarlo mia bottega).41 ‘If l let a mere subject marry my daughter’, says the emperor Constantine in a play written by Lorenzo de’Medici, Saints John and Paul, ‘I will put the state into great danger’ (in gran pericolo metto / Lo stato). Machiavelli uses the term 115 times in his The Prince (and only in five cases in the traditional sense of the ‘state of affairs’).42
The existence within the peninsula of both republics and principalities made Italians unusually aware that the political system (governo, reggimento) was not God-given but man-made and that it could be changed. In a famous passage of his History of Italy, Francesco Guicciardini reports the discussions which took place in Florence after the flight of the Medici in 1494 about the relative merits of oligarchy (governo ristretto), democracy (governo universale) or a compromise between the two.43 This awareness of the malleability of institutions is central to the contemporary literature on the ideal city-state. The treatises on architecture by Alberti and Filarete sketch social as well as architectural utopias. Leonardo’s designs for an imaginary city express the same awareness that it is possible for social life to be planned.44 Machiavelli offers a quite explicit discussion of political innovation (innovazione). In Florence between 1494 and 1530 the many reports and discussions of political problems which have survived show that the new language of politics, and the awareness of alternatives it implied, was not confined to Machiavelli and Guicciardini but was much more widespread. It was this awareness which Jacob Burckhardt emphasized and discussed in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, in his chapter on ‘The State as a Work of Art’ (Der Staat als Kunstwerk).45
Awareness of differences in social status seems also to have been unusually acute in Italy; at least, the vocabulary for describing these differences was unusually elaborate. The medieval view of society as consisting of three groups – those who pray, those who fight and those who work the soil – was not one which appealed to the inhabitants of Italian cities, most of whom performed none of these functions.46 Their model of society was differentiated not by functions but by grades (generazioni), and it probably developed out of the classification of citizens for tax purposes into rich, middling and poor. The phrases ‘fat people’ (popolo grasso) and ‘little people’ (popolo minuto) were commonly used, especially in Florence, and it is not difficult to find instances of a term such as ‘middle class’ (mediocri).47
However, contemporaries did not think exclusively in terms of income groups. They differentiated families and individuals according to whether they were or were not noble (nobili, gentilhuomini); whether or not they were citizens (cittadini), in possession of political rights; and whether they were members of the greater or lesser guilds. One of the most important but also one of the most elusive items in their social vocabulary was popolare, because it varied in significance according to the speaker. If he came from the upper levels of society, he was likely to use it as a pejorative term to denote all ordinary people. At the middle level, on the other hand, a greater effort was made to distinguish the popolo, who enjoyed political rights, from the plebe, who did not. The point of view of this ‘plebs’ has gone unrecorded.48
This awareness of the structure of society and of potentially different structures is also revealed in discussions of the definition of nobility, whether based on birth or individual worth, which are relatively frequent in the period, from the treatise of the Florentine jurist Lapo da Castiglionchio (written before 1381) and Poggio Bracciolini’s dialogue On True Nobility to the debate in Castiglione’s Courtier (1528). This discussion needs to be placed in the context of political and social conflict in Florence and elsewhere, but it is also related to contemporary concern with the value of the individual (below, p. 203).
Renaissance Italy was also remarkable for a view of the past taken by some artists and humanists, a view which was possibly more widespread. With the idea of the malleability of institutions, already discussed, went an awareness of change over time, a sense of anachronism or historical distance.49 The term ‘anachronism’ is literally speaking an anachronism itself because the word did not yet exist, but, in his famous critique of the authenticity of the document known as the Donation of Constantine, the humanist Lorenzo Valla did point out that the text contained expressions from a later period. He was well aware that ‘modes of speech’ (stilus loquendi) were subject to change, that language had a history.50 Another fifteenth-century humanist, Flavio Biondo, argued that Italian and other romance languages had developed out of Latin. Biondo also wrote a book called Rome Restored, in which he tried to reconstruct classical Rome on the basis of literary evidence as well as the surv
iving remains. In another book he discussed the private life of the Romans, the clothes they wore and the way in which they brought up their children.51
By the later fifteenth century, this antiquarian sensibility had become fashionable. The humanist condottiere Federigo da Montefeltro once asked the humanist pope Pius II, who recorded the question in his memoirs, whether the generals of antiquity wore the same kind of armour as he did (an prisci duces aeque ac nostri temporis armati fuissent). In the Dream of Polyphilus, the Venetian romance already mentioned, the lover searches for his beloved in a landscape of temples, tombs and obelisks, and even the language is a consciously archaic Latinate Italian.52 Among the artists whose work illustrates the growing interest in antiquarianism are Mantegna and Giulio Romano. Like his master and father-in-law Jacopo Bellini, Mantegna was extremely interested in copying ancient coins and inscriptions. He was a friend of humanists such as Felice Feliciano of Verona. His reconstructions of ancient Rome in the Triumphs of Caesar or the painting of Scipio introducing the cult of the Cybele are the pictorial equivalents of Biondo’s patient work of historical reconstruction, even if they contain some ‘fantastic’ elements.53 As for Giulio Romano, his painting of Constantine in battle draws heavily on the evidence of Trajan’s Column, as Vasari pointed out in his life of the artist, ‘for the costumes of the soldiers, the armour, ensigns, bastions, stockades, battering rams and all the other instruments of war’.
Vasari himself shared this sense of the past. His Lives are organized around the idea of development in time, from Cimabue to Michelangelo. He believed in progress in the arts, at least up to a point, but he also believed that individual artists ought to be judged by the standards of their own day, and he explained: ‘my intention has always been to praise not absolutely but, as the saying goes, relatively [non semplicemente ma, come s’usa dire, secondo ché], having regard to place, time, and other similar circumstances.’54