The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  At the beginning of the sixteenth century Rome became the centre of the High Renaissance, but not long before that, at a time when Masaccio and Donatello were transforming art in Florence, the ancient centre of the world was a small town with ruins. For most of the thirteenth century the papacy had resided in Avignon, directed by seven consecutive French popes and 111 French cardinals; returning to Rome in 1377, it suffered the Great Schism, a period of forty years during which there were always two – and sometimes three – rival popes, each with his own set of cardinals and each claiming to be the legitimate pontiff. Only when the confusion was over and the papacy was in the hands of one man, the Colonna Pope Martin V (1417–31), could the rebuilding of Rome begin.

  The pace of growth was brisk. In little more than a century Rome became a city of palaces, fountains, paved streets and new churches; as it did so, the population increased from 17,000 to 115,000, making it the third-largest city in Italy after Naples and Venice. The building of the new was accompanied by much pillaging and destruction of the old: Egyptian granite from the Baths of Caracalla was taken for the fountains in the Piazza Farnese, and the Colosseum proved to be a handy quarry for the Ponte Sisto. No one could accuse the Renaissance popes of having a sentimental concern for conservation. They were intent on building monuments in the Eternal City that would emblazon their names for eternity: the della Rovere, Medici and Farnese, and later the Borghese, Barberini, Pamphilj and Chigi.

  The papacy’s greatest patron of the arts was also its most bellicose warrior, the della Rovere Pope Julius II, an impetuous and irascible pontiff devoid of spiritual tendencies who persuaded a reluctant Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, even though the artist grumbled that his profession was sculpture not painting – just as he grumbled later that he was not an architect when Pope Paul III cajoled him into taking over the building of the new St Peter’s. Julius did, however, recognize Michelangelo’s true vocation by commissioning him to sculpt two monuments to the della Rovere personal glory: the papal tomb, which he did not complete, and a papal bronze statue that was installed in a church in Bologna but removed a few years later and melted down for cannon for the Duke of Ferrara.

  Invariable priorities for Renaissance popes were the embellishment of Rome, the success and enrichment of their families, and the preservation – and, when possible, the extension – of the Papal States. Few pontiffs bothered much about religion until the Reformation except to employ interdicts and excommunication against their enemies. It is indeed difficult to understand these men without ignoring their religious roles and treating them instead as typical Renaissance princes, more brutal and rapacious than many, but similarly passionate about riches, art, power and their dynasties. Corruption in Rome was worse than anywhere else in Italy, perhaps because popes had more means to corrupt and more desire to be corrupted than other princes: people were prepared to pay a lot of money for a benefice and a fortune for a cardinal’s hat. Sometimes, however, cash was sacrificed to the principle of nepotism, relations being advanced to positions where they could be trusted to promote the interests of the pope and the rest of the family. Sixtus IV (1471–84), the first della Rovere pope, started the fashion by making three of his nephews cardinals (including the future Julius II) and awarding six bishoprics to one of them who died in his twenties. The Spanish Borgia pope, Alexander VI (1492–1503), was even worse, appointing his monstrous son Cesare Archbishop of Valencia at the age of sixteen and a cardinal the following year; later he made him Duke of Romagna and encouraged him to set up a Borgia state in the north that was mercifully short-lived.

  A more successful and somewhat more attractive dynasty was the Farnese, whose pontiff, Paul III (1534–49), was the brother of the Borgia pope’s mistress. Paul saw his son established as Duke of Parma and Piacenza, an independent duchy which his descendants ruled for the next 260 years (latterly through the female line) and then for a decade in the middle of the nineteenth century. He was also the grandfather of Alessandro Farnese, known as ‘the Great Cardinal’ for his charity and his political skills, and great-grandfather of another Alessandro, the renowned soldier who retained the southern Netherlands for Spain and might therefore be regarded – for better or worse – as the father of modern Belgium.

  Nepotism remained a compulsive papal habit for 200 years – except during the brief reign of the Dutch pontiff Adrian VI (1522–3) – until the Neapolitan pope, Innocent XII, put a stop to it late in the seventeenth century. Even so, it enjoyed a revival when the Braschi pope, Pius VI (1775–99), made one of his nephews a duke and another a cardinal shortly before the French Revolution. Corrupt and lamentable as it was in principle, nepotism also encouraged papal fantasies and military adventures: the Farnese in Parma, the Borgia in the Romagna, the Medici against the republicans of their native city – these families’ papal representatives were fighting primarily for their relations. In addition, nepotism damaged the reputation of the Church since it was hard for Christians to see much of a connection between the lives of Jesus and his disciples and those of the Renaissance popes and their courts. Many people in southern as well as northern Europe wanted the Church to be reformed, bishops forced to live in their dioceses and abuses such as selling indulgences ended. Yet the papacy wanted money a lot more than it wanted reform: as Pope Martin V is alleged to have said in the early fifteenth century, ‘Without reform the Church has been advancing for fourteen centuries; without money it might not last a week.’19

  At the Lateran Council of 1513–17 the reformers were decisively defeated. Assisted by Spain, the Church then retrenched, dogmatic and authoritarian, rejecting humanism and rejoicing in the eventual triumph of the Counter-Reformation over the classical values of the Renaissance. Paul IV, the elderly pope elected in 1555, burned books by the thousands, confined the Jews of Rome to ghettoes and ordered fig-leaves to be painted on to Michelangelo’s figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Most of his successors and their cardinals insisted upon a strict observation of the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63), the doctrinal essentials of the Counter-Reformation. The dynamic and influential Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo (1538–84 and canonized in 1610), ordered the prohibition of dances and carnivals and forced his priests to interrogate their parishioners for information about heretics and banned books. Although the papacy did make a few concessions to reformers at Trent – bishops were told to reside in their bishoprics – its refusal to compromise with Protestantism made the division of Europe inevitable and lost it England, Scotland, Zurich and Geneva, the Netherlands, most of Germany and Scandinavia. The Protestants in Italy soon emigrated, mainly to Geneva, but most Italians remained faithful to the Church, their devotion to the Virgin and the saints outweighing their dismay at the behaviour of the popes.

  As successful as the Farnese in the pursuit of family interest were the Medici popes, who twice succeeded in bringing their exiled family home to Florence and back to power. After 1530 Pope Clement VII and his recent foe and current ally, the Emperor Charles V, agreed that the Medici should become hereditary rulers of Florence and decided the line would begin with Alessandro, an illegitimate teenage great-nephew of the first Medici pope. When, a few years later, the newly anointed Duke Alessandro was murdered by a jealous cousin, no suitable descendants of Lorenzo the Magnificent could be found to succeed him, yet such was the magic of the family name that another Medici teenager was found to step in, a relation (luckily called Cosimo) so remote that he could not even claim as his ancestor the great Cosimo, the first member of the family to rule Florence.

  The new Cosimo proved to be as patient and skilful as the old one, dealing diplomatically with the most powerful of all emperors, from whose son he obtained – after a siege – the long-desired Siena, whose Palazzo Pubblico was soon decorated with the Medici coat of arms. He employed spies and confined political opponents, yet he succeeded in creating a stable administrative system that endured almost unopposed for 200 years. As befitted the age an
d its aristocracy, the Medici moved out of the family’s palace in the old city and crossed the Arno, installing themselves in the vast and ponderous Pitti Palace, where they had plenty of space to lay out the Boboli Gardens. More significantly, Cosimo came to regard his realm as the state not the city, a departure from the instincts and habits of previous Medici. He acknowledged he had a duty to develop the economy in the whole of his dominions, not just in the capital and its old contado. When the pope promoted him in 1569, Cosimo chose to take the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany; henceforth the Medici were not so much Florentines as Tuscans.

  Cosimo and his successors were able rulers and enlightened economists; some of them were also scientists. They developed Livorno (which for centuries the British insisted on calling Leghorn) as a free port and encouraged merchants from anywhere to settle there, including the Jewish ancestors of Benjamin Disraeli. They also tirelessly promoted agriculture, notably with energetic but largely unsuccessful attempts to drain the coastal marshes of the Maremma. The line died out, however, in an ambience of archetypal decadence. The penultimate grand duke, Cosimo III, who ruled longer than any Medici (1670–1723), was a bigot, a prude and a collector of holy relics. Under him the Tuscan navy was reduced to a total of three galleys while the army contained soldiers who were senile, lame and half-blind.20 His successor, Gian Gastone, achieved decadence in a different way: often drunk in public, he was a slothful homosexual with little chance of producing children with his frightening German wife. Widely mocked though he was, Gian Gastone was nevertheless a more sensible and tolerant ruler than his father. He reversed the Church’s encroachments in Tuscany and revoked anti-Semitic edicts; he also reduced taxes on the peasantry and abolished those levied on beasts of burden. Following his death in 1737, the family became extinct, though the duchy lived on under a new dynasty until, through no fault of its own, it was engulfed by the hysteria of the Risorgimento.

  The Medici’s last act encapsulated attitudes they had held for centuries towards their rights, duties and the importance of public relations. Gian Gastone’s sister, Anna Maria Ludovica, decreed that after her death (1743) all the family properties, all the paintings and statues and jewellery, should remain ‘for the ornament of the state, for the benefit of the people and for an inducement to the curiosity of foreigners’. Although this treasure was left to the next line of grand dukes, it was never ‘to be alienated or taken away from the capital or from the territories of the grand duchy’.21 It is still in Tuscany.

  4

  Adriatic Venice

  People have seldom felt neutral about Venice, a city that has provoked an abundance of contrasting emotions, love and hostility, envy and admiration, grief and gratitude. Since it ceased to be an independent state in 1797, most visitors have succumbed to its enchantment, to the beauty of its buildings, the appeal of its canals and the blending of light and stone and water. John Ruskin, who pronounced himself a ‘foster-child of Venice’, was its most vigorous and effective champion, the author of The Stones of Venice, a three-volume, mid-Victorian work of insight, polemic, fine writing and occasional silliness. His book might have deterred attempts at emulation, but it didn’t: as James Morris, one of the most evocative writers on the city, has remarked, Venice is ‘paved with purple passages’ – including some good ones of his own. Admitting it was ‘a great pleasure to write the word’ Venice, Henry James thought there might be ‘a certain impudence’ in writing any more. ‘There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject,’ he wrote; but he said it all the same, at length.1

  The enduring success of the Venetian Republic aroused the admiration of intellectuals from other Italian states where the republican experiment had failed. In the early sixteenth century the Florentine Guicciardini opined that Venice had the best government of all time, while his fellow Tuscan, the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino, lauded the city as a ‘universal fatherland’, a ‘refuge of displaced peoples’ and a ‘freedom common to all’.2 Subsequent writers extolled the tolerance and stability, the tradition of public service, the wealth and art and manners of this vigorous maritime republic. In his epitaph for the city William Wordsworth lamented the passing of ‘the eldest child of liberty’, a power that had held ‘the gorgeous East in fee’ and had subsequently acted as ‘the safeguard of the West’.* A later poetic sensibility suspired in Venice when Robert Browning came to live and die in the Ca’ Rezzonico, the sumptuous Baroque palace on the Grand Canal. He had already penned his personal epitaph: ‘Open my heart and you will see / Graved inside of it, Italy.’†

  Not all Victorians held such views. Many of them believed that Venice had been iniquitous, a decadent and corrupt state that had survived by means of prisons, spies and tyranny. The city was also considered backward and stuck in the past: radical Tory MPs in Westminster in the 1880s used ‘Venetian’ as an adjective to describe reactionary colleagues they considered elitist and oligarchic.3 Earlier Lord Byron had contributed to the myth of sinister Venice in his play The Two Foscari, in which the condemned man denounces the state for its spies, slaves and dungeons, its Bridge of Sighs, its ‘strangling chamber’ and its ‘torturing instruments’. A generation later, Giuseppe Verdi thought of turning the drama into an opera for his Venetian debut at the Fenice theatre; when it was pointed out that Venice was not the most appropriate venue for the work – descendants of the ‘villains’ still lived there – the composer substituted Ernani and took I due Foscari to be performed in Rome.

  Many of the state’s critics were French. Jean-Jacques Rousseau mocked its decadence, called its republic a sham and condemned the Council of Ten (which had charge of the state’s security) as ‘a tribunal of blood’, ‘horrible également’ to both patricians and people4 – a judgement so misguided it makes one wish its author had lived long enough to witness real tribunals of blood directed by his apostle Robespierre. Napoleon Bonaparte followed this deluded philosopher, tormenting dejected Venetian delegates in 1797 with his ignorant views on their state’s alleged tyranny. The first modern historian of Venice was Pierre Daru, previously Napoleon’s minister of war, whose eight-volume work depicts the republic as a hidebound and decadent oligarchy. While Daru (like his master) presumably took this line to justify the invasion and destruction of a neutral state, the motives of later historians are less obvious. Critics have zealously examined Venice’s blemishes, such as its slave-trading and its colonial rule – defects not unique to Venice – and its diversion of the Fourth Crusade in order to sack Constantinople in 1204. The historian Steven Runciman may have been right to describe this last event as one of the greatest of all crimes against humanity, yet 1204 was a single year in a 1,100-year history.5

  Everyone agrees that Venice is different from anywhere else. Visitors immediately see that it has no hills and that its streets are full of water; soon they also notice that it has neither ramparts nor a castle; the Doge’s Palace, the headquarters of the Venetian Empire, is unfortified. As they wander about, they will observe that there are no fountains, no ruins and not many statues in public places; since it was founded after the fall of Rome, it has no amphitheatres, no triumphal arches and no classical archaeologists. Nor does it have noblemen’s towers – those sinister structures that abounded elsewhere in the north – which accurately suggests a lack of murderous factions. The patricians had palaces, but these too are different. The external decoration – the harmonious arrangement of windows, pillars, balconies and arches – is concentrated on the façade, while the unadorned brick sides usually look at other brick sides across narrow lanes. While the patricians could do as they pleased with their façades, they were prevented by law from putting statues and balustrades on their roofs: all they were allowed were chimneys and – provided they were senior figures in the admiralty – a pair of small obelisks.6

  Most city centres in northern Italy are a mixture of architectural styles since the Romanesque, but in Venice the emphases are different and the proportions often inverted. The influence of Byzantium on t
he lagoon is obvious: St Mark’s is modelled on a church in Constantinople, and a number of Veneto-Byzantine palaces survive near the Rialto. Yet Venice is fundamentally Gothic, one of the few Italian cities to be thus blessed; it was still constructing in the Gothic style after the others had given up. The city has some great Renaissance buildings, especially those by Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio, but they – like the churches and palaces in elaborate Baroque – do not always seem to belong to Venice. Sansovino’s library, across the Piazzetta from the Doge’s Palace, is a beautiful structure yet it is unrelated to any earlier Venetian building; it is not even similar to the one adjoining it, the rusticated, practical Mint built at the same time by the same architect. One might say similar things – as Ruskin did‡7 – about Palladio’s great churches, whose geometrical harmonies are spread out across the water from St Mark’s: San Giorgio Maggiore, the Zitelle, the Redentore. In the mid-sixteenth century, when the wooden bridge on the Rialto was in danger of falling down, the Venetian authorities organized a competition to design an alternative in stone. Several famous architects, including Palladio and Michelangelo, put forward proposals, but the prize was awarded to the virtually unknown Antonio da Ponte because his plan showed an understanding of local topography. Palladio’s scheme, which only small boats could have passed under, would have been more appropriate in the spacious park of a country house in England.