The Flowering of the Renaissance - Vincent Cronin

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An innovation in the second half of the century was their right to a silk mitre and red biretta, as well as red caparisons and gilded stirrups for their genets and mules. With a retinue of between 80 and 100 servants each, the cardinals did on a smaller scale what the Popes were doing: built and stocked libraries, commissioned pictures embodying the recent discovery of perspective and took an interest in the city’s classical remains.

      In the City of God St Augustine had described the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 as a punishment for sin, in particular for the continuance of pagan practices and, ever since, classical remains had been viewed with awesome guilt. But with the discovery of Latin texts and inscriptions, scholars began to take a closer interest in ancient history and to study the ruins of Rome for their own sake. The first man to do so seriously is known as Flavio Biondo—inexactly as it happens, because Flavio is just an Italian form of Flavus, which in turn is a Latin form of Biondo. He usually signed Blondus Forliviensis, being a native of Forlì in the Papal States, and is best called simply Biondo. Born in 1392, he received a good education and trained as a notary. In 1420 he began a close friendship with Guarino of Verona, a pioneer humanist schoolteacher, and in 1423 married Paola Michelini, a noble lady of Forlì, who bore him ten sons. In 1433 he moved to Rome, and the following year was named apostolic secretary. As well as being a scholar Biondo evidently possessed presence and initiative, for he was sent on diplomatic missions to Venice and to Francesco Sforza, then just an ambitious condottiere. Biondo loved Rome with all the passion of a provincial. In his spare time he measured old buildings and tracked down faded streets until he was able to reconstruct the topography of ancient Rome, publishing his results in 1444–6 in three books entitled Roma instaurata. During the pontificate of Nicholas V he travelled the length and breadth of Italy in order to compile a historical and geographical survey of the peninsula, Italia illustrata, the first of its kind since antiquity. He also sought to interest various rulers, notably the King of Naples, in uniting Italy against the Turk. He returned to Rome and in 1459, four years before his death, published his masterpiece, Roma triumphans.

      Biondo’s idea, like all revolutionary ideas, was very simple. His aim was to explain how pagan Rome became triumphant, in the hope that the Pope by emulating Rome’s methods might himself become triumphant. He ascribed the greatness of ancient Rome to her administration, military discipline, customs and institutions, and, above all, to her religion. He began Book I with a quotation from Cicero: ‘Other nations may surpass the Romans in numbers, in the arts, in practical skills, but in religion, piety and theology we leave the rest of the world a long way behind.’ He also quoted Livy’s story about the praetor Gn. Cornelius who was heavily fined for daring to upbraid M. Emilius Lepidus, the Chief Pontiff: ‘the Romans,’ commented Biondo, ‘wished religion to rank above secular affairs.’

      Biondo then sought to show that the Papacy, in structure, institutions and customs, was a continuation of the Roman Republic and Empire. Such Christian practices as virginity, fasting, vows, the placing of flowers on a grave had their origin in pagan Rome. After his death a Pope lay in state on a dais, just like the Emperors of old. But Biondo thought the Pope corresponded more to a Consul than to an Emperor, and the cardinals to Senators. Cicero had claimed that Rome was ‘the rock of all the world and all nations’, and that the world found joy and glory in being subject to her. This claim was still valid, but the aims of Christian Rome were higher: she ‘prepares souls for eternal glory as once the pagan Republic pursued ephemeral glory.’ However, in dedicating his book to Pius II Biondo dropped to a lower conception of glory: he expressed the hope that Pius would soon be celebrating ‘a most brilliant and glorious triumph’ over the Turk.

      Biondo’s book was to prove enormously influential. His declaration that the Church of Rome was the natural successor of ancient Rome was basically a half-truth, but he accumulated such a wealth of illustrative detail that he made it seem convincing. The abiding effect of the book was to make Romans aware of their past no longer as a remote relic, but as a living presence interwoven in the fabric of daily life, not something to be guilty of but something to love. Just as Leonardo Bruni had awoken patriotism in Florence in 1400 with a panegyric praising his city as the successor of ancient republics, so Biondo awoke Roman patriotism and a healthy ambition to emulate the past. From now on classical Rome was to be an abiding influence.

      Biondo’s book was not, however, without dangers. It played down the unique character of Christianity, which at times seems to be merely one more manifestation of the eternal city, and by ignoring the part played by Greek ideas and techniques in Roman civilization, it diverted attention from Greek authors, the study of which had proved so fruitful in Florence.

      Biondo, as we have seen, compared the Popes to Consuls, and the cardinals to Senators. That is to say, he thought that the Church resembled and should continue to resemble the Roman Republic. However, since the Republic had given way to the Empire before becoming, in Biondo’s eyes, the Church of Rome, it was natural for any reader who believed in unlimited papal power to assume that the Church was the new Empire, the Pope the new Emperor. This in fact is what usually happened, and the effect of this kind of interpretation can be seen in the following incident, recounted by Pius II in his Commentaries, a book whose title and third-person style is modelled on the Commentaries of Julius Caesar.

      One hot summer’s day Pius was travelling from Santa Fiora to Rome. Because of gout, he was carried on a gilded litter, accompanied by a colourful suite of courtiers and horsemen. Pius’s stern nature relaxed on such journeys. He noted the blue of flax fields, the scarlet of wild strawberries, the orange of beeches in autumn, and he liked picnics, especially if a fresh-caught trout was served. As the procession wound over the hills they came on a cowherd tending his beasts. The cowherd realized that some great lord was approaching, and thinking the dust and heat might have made him thirsty, he took out his gourd, squatted beside one of the cows and filled the gourd with milk. Then, excited but hesitant, he offered it to the man who sat in the gilded litter. Pius looked fastidiously at the gourd, which was very dirty and covered with grease. It would be easy to hand it to one of his cardinals or simply to order the procession forward. But suddenly there came to his mind a passage from Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes. Travelling in a distant land, Artaxerxes arrived at a stream where a peasant offered him water in his cupped hands, and Artaxerxes gratefully quenched his thirst. So finally Pius accepted the gourd and, to the cowherd’s great satisfaction, drank the milk.

      This small event has a triple interest: it shows how men steeped in classical literature tended to see life as a palimpsest; it shows a humanist acting graciously in imitation not of Christ but of a pagan; and it shows the Pope to whom Biondo had dedicated his book identifying himself with an absolute monarch whose nod, like that of the Roman Emperors, could signify life or death.

      If Biondo’s book awoke Rome to a sense of her own great past, it also therefore provided a new notion of the Papacy. Henceforth, and throughout the sixteenth century, the Pope was to see himself as in some sense the successor not only of Peter but also of the Roman Emperors. The medieval concept of the Pope as ‘priest-king’ no longer carried much weight, whereas this ‘historical’ theory of the Pope’s temporal power made an appeal to men enamoured of the classical world, though it was not calculated to please the Germans, who considered their own Holy Roman Emperor to be the lawful successor of the Caesars. The theory was further enhanced by the publication in 1470 of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. This provided portraits of Julius Caesar and eleven Emperors in unforgettable detail. The book was widely read and constantly reprinted. It was complemented by the publication of Tacitus’s Histories and books 11–16 of the Annals, the three works between them providing a picture of the early Empire much more vivid than any available picture of the Republic in its prime. It was probably Suetonius’s work that gave Sixtus IV the idea of commissioning from Platina the Lives of the Popes, in which Christ is referred to as ‘Emperor of the Christians’.

      The new ideal had much in it of good. The early Roman Emperors helped to spread civilization throughout Europe, and Rome’s proudest title had been not Conqueror of Nations but caput mundi, Head of the World. Used with discretion and in the spiritual sense specified by Biondo, it could lead to a new sense of unity within Christendom.

      But the ideal was also open to grave abuse, for the Emperors had tried and often

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