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The Flowering of the Renaissance. Vincent Cronin
Читать онлайн.Название The Flowering of the Renaissance
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008106171
Автор произведения Vincent Cronin
Издательство HarperCollins
Rome succeeded Florence as the political and intellectual leader of Italy, a development symbolized shortly before 1500 when, at the Pope’s bidding, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s favourite artist, Antonio Pollaiuolo of Florence, added figures of Romulus and Remus to the ancient bronze statue of the suckling She-Wolf. Julius II and Leo X, two of the most powerful and interesting of the Renaissance popes, sought to put into practice a modified version of Christian humanism. They strengthened Rome politically and made it the most civilized city in Europe.
What the popes did was disliked by many, particularly in Germany. When Luther attacked the notion of merit and rejected the popes’ teaching authority, Germans rallied to him; in 1527 a largely German army sacked Rome. These events brought to a head earlier doubts and plunged Italy into a crisis: intellectual, theological, moral and artistic. A period of heart-searching began. Could Italians summon up an adequate answer to the Lutherans? And could they, in face of so widespread a threat, save the principles of Christian humanism?
The answers lie in the texture of Italian life and civilization during the cinquecento. This is surveyed, with a particular eye to the crisis, first in Northern Italy generally, then more specifically in Venice which, after the Sack of Rome, emerged as the chief centre of Christian humanism. All the trends apparent in Venice and elsewhere found expression at the Council of Trent, the Church’s galvanic attempt to find an answer to the crisis posed not only by Lutheranism but in the very fruits of the Italian Renaissance itself. It is the tragedy of Trent that the Church, despite much goodwill on both sides, ultimately came down against the main principles of Christian humanism. The effects of this decision on Italian civilization and the resultant ‘conformism’ offer a striking parallel with events in the Communist world today. Venice alone preserved a measure of independence and artistic vigour and held alight the torch of freedom; her example was to prove an inspiration to those men of the nineteenth century who succeeded in liberating Italy and establishing once again the principles of Christian humanism.
A PILGRIM arriving in Rome in the jubilee year of 1500 would have been surprised by the city’s appearance. Instead of close-knit streets and stone houses tightly belted by a powerful wall, he would have found a patchwork of fields, vineyards, gardens, marshes and ponds interspersed with clusters of wooden, single-storey houses with outside staircases and balconies, the whole lying loosely within a huge circuit of wall so broken-down that it was easier to pass through the gaps than the gates. This remains of a wall, fourteen miles long, had been built by Aurelian for a city of one million inhabitants; now there were only 40,000, less than in Florence or Venice or Naples. Cattle grazed among the four upright columns of the Forum, hence its name of Campo Vaccino, and the aqueducts had been so shattered by ten sets of invaders during the Dark Ages that even their purpose was forgotten by many: one pilgrim, a Douai draper, was told that ‘the aqueducts were used formerly to bring oil, wine and water from Naples.’
This city-amid-fields offered no arresting landmark: no cathedral, no town hall, no castellated palace. St Peter’s was merely one large church among 280 others, their shabby, often crumbling exteriors giving no hint of the gleaming mosaics within. Seven of them, the Stational churches, had to be visited by pilgrims claiming a plenary indulgence—remission of punishment due to past sins: according to Dom Edme, Abbot of Clairvaux, who went round them in 1521, the visit took eight hours, on poor tracks, sometimes through marshes ‘where the mules sank up to their tails.’
Whereas most Italian cities were famous for this or that product—Lucca for silk, Venice for ships, Milan for steel—Rome produced nothing at all. She had no industries, no raw materials. In 1500 she just about met her needs in corn, grown in the Campagna’s black, difficult soil, but as the century progressed, most of her bread was baked from imported grain. Romans disliked the flat wine of Latium, and so wine had to be imported too, mainly from Corsica, Crete and Naples. Cloth came in from Florence, paper from Fabriano, soap from Genoa, knives and swords from Milan, carpets from Turkey.
To meet the cost of these goods Rome had only her pilgrim trade. The town where St Peter had been crucified and St Paul beheaded attracted 50,000 pilgrims annually. According to the census of 1527, Rome had 236 inns, lodging houses and taverns, one to every 288 inhabitants, compared with one per 1488 inhabitants in Florence. The best of them, the Bear, Sun, Ship, Crown, Camel and Angel, stood close to the Pantheon, and their landlords would send boys to the city gates in order to solicit customers among the pilgrims, most of whom arrived in Lent, a third of them on their own horses. In order to gain the plenary indulgence Italians had to spend fifteen days in Rome, non-Italians eight. During this time they lived well—consumption of meat was extremely high—and they bought guide-books and souvenirs. To the Romans they were an indispensable source of income.
Even without foreign pilgrims, Rome was a cosmopolitan place. Most of its inhabitants had been born outside Rome, 20% were non-Italians, chiefly Spaniards and Germans, while only 16% or 6,400 were Roman born. Of these a handful possessed citizenship and though they claimed the right to rule their city, in practice it was the Pope who ruled, for not only was he by far the largest employer, but he collected and spent the revenue. It was the Pope who chose the Governor—a cleric—and he who paid all the magistrates. True, an ordinary Council met regularly, composed of the various municipal magistrates, and also less often a Great Council, which included the same persons and selected civic notables. The Councils sometimes passed bold decrees against the Pope’s will, but hardly ever dared put them to the test. A popular rising in 1143 had instituted 56 senators, but the Popes had whittled them down to one. This last senator dressed in fine sunset colours—crimson gown, brocade cloak and fur cap—he had the right to a page and four servants, he carried an ivory sceptre, but his power was nil. There was also a Colonel of the Militia of the Roman People—but no militia.
The Romans accepted this. There was no powerful leaven of craftsmen as in Florence, and therefore little republican feeling. Roman citizens were usually of noble or gentle birth and content with trappings of power that vaguely recalled imperial splendour. Yet what privileges they did possess—be it only the Conservators’ right to music at meals—they clung to tenaciously, and on tiny points of protocol they made many a petition to the popes.
The Romans of 1500 retained certain characteristics of their forebears. They loved ceremonies and spectacles. They responded to fine phrases and rolling sentences. They expected of their ruler dignity and largesse, and if they did not get it abused him with satirical and licentious songs. They had a cosmopolitan outlook, though this did not necessarily imply breadth of vision. But they were not grave like the classical Romans. They were turbulent, rowdy and changeable as their weather. When a new pope was elected, they looted, as though by right, his old palace, and when he died, the interregnum was bloodied with murder.
This unproductive half-decrepit city, swept in winter by the icy tramontana and in autumn by a sultry miasmal breeze that caused tertian fever, might long ago have been abandoned to wolves, nettles and ivy but for the fact that it was the see of St Peter, and therefore the seat of government of Catholic Christendom. Here the Curia kept archives and registers of appointments; here they administered justice and held final courts of appeal; it was here that a Flemish burgher applied if he wished to drink milk in Lent, here that a Spaniard who had traded with the Turk sought absolution. But behind the bustle of day-to-day business, much of it petty, lay a central, crucial fact: it was here in Rome that the man who claimed to be the Vicar of Christ sought to preserve and interpret to the world Christ’s message.
In order to accomplish this task the Bishop of Rome decided at a very early date that he required to be independent. It was perhaps the most far-reaching decision ever taken in the Church when the Bishop of Rome, like the bishops of other cities, agreed to accept estates bequeathed to him in the wills of fervent Christians. From being a property-owner, the Bishop of Rome gradually became a lord of towns