Florentines had other matters on their minds: meager harvests; hungry, even starving people haunting the city’s streets; plague breaking out. At last, the oligarchs acted: Savonarola was arrested and paraded through the streets while citizens lined the route to jeer at him. He was horribly tortured, confessed to everything he was asked to confess to, retracted his confession when he was removed from the strappado,23 was tortured again, convicted of heresy and schism, and finally burned at the stake, the very end he had wished upon all sodomites lurking in Florence’s midst. The date was May 23, 1498, just seven years after the man had preached his first sermon in the Cathedral.
France, a kingdom for untold centuries, exhibited a stability that was denied the independent city-states of Italy. The Italian communes, by their very nature, were more subject to the fickleness of crowds, otherwise known as voters, than were political entities that traced their legitimacy to a long tradition of sacred kingship. As nationality continued to grow in importance, a nation with a king found expansion easier and more natural. The league of city-states that Lorenzo tried to hold together in northern Italy (or any similar alliance) would always suffer from a weakness of unity not so characteristic of a country with an anointed king (or an empire with a Holy Roman Emperor). As nationalistic consciousness waxed ever stronger in Europe, Italy would continue to find itself at a disadvantage.
More than this, religion was primed to stoke new political conflicts everywhere. Would our Christianity be like that of Lorenzo or of Savonarola? Like that of Columbus or of Las Casas? Would we be humanists or firebrands? Imperialists or peacemakers? Tyrants or republicans? (There were no democrats, as yet.) Dictators or colleagues? Torturers or nurturers? Would we build pyres or throw parties? Would we read books and view pictures or poke our noses into other people’s affairs and tell them how to live? Would we be relaxed24 or reformed? And if reformed, what sort of reformers would we make?
The stage was now set for two kinds of expansiveness: the expansiveness of humanism, issuing in the easeful gorgeousness of the Renaissance, and the expansiveness of the Reformation, which would seek moral improvement both personal and institutional, as well as the abandonment of error. Neither Tomás de Torquemada nor Girolamo Savonarola could be strictly called Reformation figures; but both were reformers of the strictest sort, Counter-Reformation figures of Catholic Europe long before the Counter-Reformation, or even the Reformation itself, had properly got under way. Their ghostly presences will necessarily haunt some of the pages to come.
1 No one who knew anything thought the Earth was flat. This was an anti-Catholic fable created by a nineteenth-century Frenchman named Jean Antoine Letronne and disseminated widely to English speakers by Washington Irving in his unreliable biography of Columbus.
2 Valencia, Naples, and Sicily.
3 Insincere Jewish converts were labeled Marranos. Discovering and ejecting them from society became a Spanish obsession. An American friend recalls that when he applied to become a Jesuit in 1959, he had to sign a statement attesting that he had no Jewish blood. (My friend, as it turned out, did have a Jewish grandfather, though he did not know this at the time, and therefore responded falsely.) He was accepted into the order and began his training but left to pursue a secular career five years later.
The Jesuits were founded by Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish nobleman, toward the middle of the sixteenth century. When, or if, the question about Jewish blood was removed from their application I have not been able to ascertain to my satisfaction. But I would guess it was removed on or about December 16, 1968, which is when the Alhambra Decree was at last revoked! In late 2012 the Spanish government began to offer repatriation to descendants of expelled Jews, but not to the descendants of expelled Muslims.
4 Others fled to England (despite the royal ban), the Netherlands, Eastern Europe, and especially tolerant Italy. Still others, probably more than half of all Spanish Jews, migrated to Portugal, which would soon prove an unstable refuge.
5 The phrase auto de fe is Spanish; auto-da-fé, the more usual phrase in English, is Portuguese.
6 The torturers employed a considerable variety of devices. According to the incomplete list of Eduardo Galeano, these included “the barbed collar; the hanging cage; the iron gag that stifled unwanted screams; the saw that cut you slowly in two; the finger-stretching tourniquet; the head-flattening tourniquet; the bone-breaking pendulum; the seat of pins; the long needle that perforated the devil’s moles; the iron claw that shredded flesh; the pincer and tongs heated to fiery red; the sarcophagus lined with sharp nails; the iron bed that extended until arms and legs got pulled out of their sockets; the whip with a nail or knife at the tip; the barrel filled with shit; the shackles, the stocks, the block, the pillory, the gaff; the ball that swelled and tore the mouths of heretics, the anuses of homosexuals, and the vaginas of Satan’s lovers; the pincer that ground up the tits of witches and adulterers; the fire on the feet; among other weapons of virtue.” But some of these tortures, especially the sexual ones, may owe more to Victorian fantasy than to historical accuracy.
7 Humor can occasionally give us as just a perspective on such characters as do more stern-faced assessments. The Jewish comedian Mel Brooks played Torquemada in the film History of the World: Part I, in which he is introduced by another inquisitor with a New York accent: “Torquemada—do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada—do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada—do not ask him for mercy. Let’s face it, you can’t Torquemada [tawk ’im outa] anything!”
8 This passage, intended to serve as a direct quotation from Columbus (who wrote of himself in the third person), is taken from Samuel Eliot Morison’s biography of Columbus. Columbus’s original log is lost, so Morison “fit together” two surviving passages, one from a partial transcript of the log by Bartolomé de las Casas, the other from the biography of Columbus by his son Ferdinand, who also had before him a copy of the then-extant log.
9 Juana, a fluent linguist and graceful athlete, much loved and well tended by her mother, became after Isabella’s death a political chess piece in the twitching fingers of her father, who married her to Philip the Handsome, Archduke of Burgundy and son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Juana was crazy about Philip, who was indeed very handsome, but he, after a hot romance with the pouty teenage Juana, embarked upon the common practice among his peers of bedding all the beautiful ladies-in-waiting. Juana responded with fury, punishing the ladies severely and replacing them with ugly ones. In one case, she had an inamorata’s lustrous locks sheared off and left them on Philip’s pillow. After Philip removed himself to his native Flanders, Juana became progressively unhinged, screaming for hours one night at her castle gate in the freezing cold. Philip’s unexpected death by typhus (or, some said, by poison supplied by his father-in-law, who had come to find him too threatening a rival) seems to have rendered Juana permanently unstable. She kept Philip’s corpse beside her long beyond what was customary, perhaps even for months. Queen in name only, she spent the last three and a half decades of her long life in a locked, windowless room at the order of her young son, who would reign as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and whom we shall meet as a leading figure in the coming drama of Reformation. The shocking ill use of Juana at the hands of father, husband, and son may supply us with some reason to modify the contemporary diagnosis of madness. Despite her later confinement, Juana lived for a time at the center of European events, giving birth to a second emperor and to four queens. One of her younger sisters was the ill-used Catherine of Aragon, queen (for a time) of England.
10 In 1493, Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, solemnly affixed a line of global longitude between Spanish and Portuguese zones of exploration and conquest, the Spanish to have whatever “new” lands lay west of the line, the Portuguese whatever lay east. A year later, the line had to be modified somewhat because the original was too obviously drawn in Spain’s favor. It is to this demarcation that we may attribute the Portuguese overlay of the culture of Brazil (whos
e territory lies to the east of the line), as well as the lasting Portuguese influence on parts of Africa, whereas almost all of the rest of the Americas south of the Rio Grande owe their cultural overlay to Spain.
Many were the gifts from Alexander to the Spanish Monarchs. Perhaps as important as the line of longitude was the perpetual gift of the so-called Royal Third by which the Spanish kings were awarded two-ninths of all papal tithes to assist them in their wars against the Moors.
11 Columbus also had a letter from the Monarchs to Prester John, a legendary version of John the Apostle, the supposedly undying Christian ruler of some African or Asian country. (Europeans were unsure of its whereabouts, though certain of its existence.) And Columbus had on board an Arabic speaker, because it was thought that with knowledge of Arabic one could communicate in any Oriental tongue. Though no one thought it necessary to learn the languages of the unimpressive American natives, everyone was eager to address possible foreign potentates properly.
12 One might have expected that the Spaniards, encountering complex Indian cultures, would have approached them more or less as they had intended to approach the Chinese. But the superiority of European firepower easily persuaded the Spaniards that conquest, not diplomacy, was the obvious route to take. Moreover, the discovery of garish rituals of human sacrifice at the heart of these cultures meant that the Spaniards could easily convince themselves that their conquests were wars against anti-human evil. Once again, the Europeans were on God’s side.
13 A case can be made for the American seizure of the Philippine archipelago at the end of the nineteenth century as being one of the outermost waves of “European” conquest of “American” natives. The Americans certainly imagined themselves as bringing European civilization to benighted savages. The American president William McKinley, who initially thought the Philippines were Caribbean islands, proclaimed (according to one report) that there was nothing to be done but to “take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them.” The Filipinos had been evangelized by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and had a system of universal free public education from 1863, a year when such a system was still lacking in the United States. More than one million Filipinos, however, many of them civilians, would be killed in the course of the American occupation.
14 This assertion is an arresting twist on Platonic philosophy, which looks forward to the human soul’s achievement of true bliss by casting off its earthly body in death. In the same way, claims Donne, the human body (which Plato despised) finds its true bliss by casting off all its clothing. To those who catch Donne’s reference, this may be judged a humorous conceit.
15 The author acknowledges that, as a philosophy student at a Catholic seminary in the early 1960s, he was forced to swallow scholastic philosophy by means of this antiquated, enervating method and, therefore, knows far more about it than he might wish.
16 The English translations, which are mine, are necessarily inadequate. Robert Frost once defined poetry as what is lost in translation. Without being quite so absolute, I confess that the natural rhythm and expansiveness of Italian have no easy English equivalents. Rather, the natural terseness of English militates against its usefulness in word-for-word translation of Italian. Nor is there any way to successfully imitate feminine rhyme scheme (in which stress is laid on the penultimate, rather than on the last, syllable in each line). So read the Italian, if you can make any sense of it at all.
17 In French “the time returns,” meaning the Great Time.
18 See Volume I of the Hinges of History, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Chapter I, for the original confrontation of taste between Italians and Germans in the early fifth century.
19 Guicciardini is considered the father of modern history because of his use of official documents. He was, however, only nine when Lorenzo died.
20 Interdict was, in effect, the excommunication of everyone living in a particular city or country. Strictly speaking, it meant that all religious services were forbidden and no sacraments could be conferred. The consequence of this was that children could die without baptism and end up, therefore, in Hell, at least according to conservative theologians; and a similar fate awaited anyone who died without priestly absolution. But the interdict had been overused by the papacy, and so was no longer experienced as the extreme punishment it once had been. Often enough, local bishops and priests simply ignored it and continued their ministries.
21 Predicting divine vengeance for sin is a standard refrain of reproachful types, as is confirming that a current calamity has been imposed by God in response to sin—a favorite ploy of the American preacher Pat Robertson, who explained (along with Jerry Falwell) that the 9/11 attack had been meted out by God because Americans were allowing abortions to be performed and homosexuality to thrive. More recently, Robertson was able to enlighten us on the parlous state of the people of Haiti, who are being punished because they made a pact with Satan two centuries ago. God’s vengeance, in the estimation of such personalities, is remarkably lacking in discrimination, since those being punished so often have had little or nothing to do with the supposed crime.
22 “Lucrezia Tornabuoni was a remarkable woman, charming and spirited, profoundly religious and highly accomplished.… She was a poet of more than moderate ability. Since her interests were largely theological, most of her poems were hymns or translations into verse of Holy Writ. But they displayed a depth of feeling as well as a literary quality rarely to be found in such compositions.… Both her husband and her children, as well as her father-in-law, all seem to have adored her.” From Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici.
23 A method of torture whereby the victim’s hands are tied behind his back, after which his arms are lifted behind him by rope and pulleys and he hangs suspended in midair. The procedure causes terrible pain, normally dislocating both arms.
24 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a friend and publishing colleague, once described her family’s religious outlook by saying “We’re relaxed Catholics,” this in the midst of a public denunciation that I, as Doubleday’s director of religious publishing, had received from Cardinal John O’Connor, then archbishop of New York, because he disapproved of a book I had published. Her description was a play on words, the condemnatory phrase “lax Catholic” being well known to anyone brought up Catholic in the years prior to the partial relaxation of oppressive norms by the Second Vatican Council. I confess I find her description, offered as a sign of solidarity with me in my conflict with the archbishop, appealing.
II
THE INVENTION OF HUMAN BEAUTY
AND THE END OF MEDIEVAL PIETY
Beauty itself doth of itself persuade The eyes of men without an orator.
The Rape of Lucrece
Before the sobrieties of saints and the rigidities of reformers begin to consume all our attention, let us immerse ourselves once more in some of the unique pleasures bestowed on us all by those generous party givers, the Renaissance artists whose lavishness amazes still—even if we come to discern within their celebrations a singular seriousness of purpose and an unparalleled (and occasionally unpardonable) sense of self. There being no way, however, in a book of this size to do even rudimentary justice to Renaissance art, we shall have to content ourselves with a kind of morning bus tour, pointing out only a few of the more obvious delights in which this sensationally sensuous territory abounds.
1445?–1564: FULL NAKEDNESS!
The final collapse of the Greco-Roman world in the West entailed the loss of many things, among them statuary—or, more precisely, the classical tradition of sculpture. The freestanding figures, life-size and larger, that punctuated the public spaces of antiquity were sculpted no more; and gradually the ones that remained standing were lost beneath the waves of change and the rubble of decline. For one thing, Christian palates found nudity unacceptable (unless you were discreetly depicting Adam and Eve before the Fall), and so many of the subjects of ancient sculpture were nude. Worse still, so m
any of the nudes were pagan gods and goddesses, for whom there was no longer much call. And the idea of putting divinity and nudity together was downright scandalous. Yahweh, the God of the Jews who had become the God of Christians, was never described south of his waist. Whatever was there, no one had ever seen it. But more to the point (as it were), coupling divinity and nudity necessarily implied a sort of Holy Eroticism, an idea that could only make medieval standard-setters squirm. Whatever examples of Greco-Roman sculpture were not smashed or melted down mostly ended up buried or drowned, awaiting rediscovery in a more appreciative age.
The David of Donatello [Plate 1] must, therefore, have come as a great shock to viewers in Quattrocento Florence. This was not Donatello’s first David. An earlier one, sculpted perhaps as early as 1408, when Donatello had barely reached his twenties, and intended as a decoration for the Cathedral’s buttresses, is more in keeping with the artistic conventions of its time, well clothed in cloak and leather jerkin, if displaying a handsome right leg rising next to the severed head of the giant Goliath. But even in this earlier David, Donatello is an innovator, for David had all through the medieval centuries been portrayed as a bearded king of venerable years, playing his psalms on his plangent harp. This first David of Donatello is a sturdy boy, the sweet curls of his exquisitely shaped head bound by a viny chaplet, his wide-eyed face expressing the pathos and pietas of his young years. Though this youth would soon enough become the standard depiction of the biblical David, in the first decade of the Quattrocento (or 1400s) he was a startling departure.
But this figure was as nothing compared to Donatello’s second David, who stands free, never intended to be incorporated into niche, wall, or buttress as mere architectural adornment, as had been all the statues of the previous Middle Ages. He is intended—indeed, he demands—to be looked at solo, without reference to anything else. Struck in bronze, he is a boy, standing (as would a boy of the time) but two and a half inches higher than five feet. And he is brazen in more ways than one.
Heretics and Heroes Page 10