Moral Laxity in Renaissance Italy (1300–1534)

Sources and Forms of Moral Corruption

Historians’ prejudices never mislead them as much as when they try to determine the moral level of an age, unless their research concerns the decline of religious faith. In both cases, an exciting exception will attract their attention and distract them from the unrecorded average. If they approach the problem by proving a thesis—for example, that religious skepticism causes moral decline—their vision will be further obscured. Recorded accounts of events are also double-edged; almost anything can be proved according to a particular purpose. The works of Aretino, Cellini’s autobiography, and the correspondence of Machiavelli and Vettori can be cited to prove the prevalence of corruption; the letters of Isabella and Beatrice d’Este, or those of Elisabetta Gonzaga and Alessandra Strozzi, can be quoted to present a picture of sisterly affection and ideal family life. Only the reader must beware of being misled.

Many factors contributed to the moral decline that accompanied the intellectual rise of the Renaissance. Perhaps the basic factor was the increase in wealth derived from Italy’s important position on the trade routes between Western Europe and the East, as well as from tithes and annual contributions flowing to Rome from hundreds of Christians. Sin became more widespread as more money became available to finance it. The expansion of wealth weakened the ascetic ideal: men and women turned away from an ethic born of poverty and fear, which now conflicted with their impulses and means. With growing attachment, they heard Epicurus’s theory that one should enjoy life and consider all pleasures permissible unless their harms are proven. The seductive beauties of women triumphed over religion’s prohibitions.

Perhaps, alongside wealth, the important source of immorality was the instability of the political situation of the time. Factional struggles, successive wars, the increasing influx of mercenary soldiers and subsequent invasions of foreign armies into Italian soil—armies bound by no moral restraints—the frequent disruption of agriculture and trade due to war’s devastations, and the destruction of freedom by tyrants who replaced legitimate peaceful government with the force of despotism—all these made the lives of Italy’s people chaotic and broke the “crust of customs” that usually preserves morality. People found their ship adrift without anchor in a turbulent sea. Neither the state nor the Church seemed capable of protecting them; thus, individuals preserved themselves as best they could with arms or deceit; lawless people became their own law. Tyrants, who stood above the law and whose lives were short but intense, immersed themselves in every pleasure, and their actions became models for the wealthy minority.

The role of religious unbelief in freeing human wickedness must begin by distinguishing the religious skepticism of the educated minority from the persistent piety of the majority. Enlightenment belongs to minorities, and emancipation from restraints is individual; minds are not freed all at once and collectively. A few skeptics might protest against false sacred objects, fake miracles, and indulgences that promised salvation for money, but the people accepted them with fear and hope. In 1462, Pope Pius II, a scholarly man, went with several cardinals to the Milvian Bridge to see the head of the apostle Andrew, newly arrived from Greece; and the learned Cardinal Bessarion delivered an official speech when the precious relic was placed in St. Peter’s. People came from afar to visit Loreto and Assisi, flocked to Rome in jubilee years, went from church to church to venerate the cross, and climbed the Scala Santa on their knees—the holy staircase said to be the one Jesus himself ascended toward Pilate’s seat. Able people, while in good health, might laugh at these beliefs, but few Renaissance Italians failed to desire religious rites on their deathbeds. Vitellozzo Vitelli, that rough captain who had fought against Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia, before being strangled by Cesare’s agent, begged a messenger to go to Rome and seek the Pope’s indulgence. Women especially worshiped the Virgin Mary; almost every village had a miracle-working statue of her; now (c. 1524) the rosary had become a favored form of prayer. Every humble house had a cross and one or two sacred images, and a lamp always burned before one or more of them. Village squares and city streets might be adorned with a statue of Jesus or Mary placed in a separate canopy or a wall niche. Religious feasts were celebrated with such splendor and magnificence that they gave people the opportunity to forget their sufferings in joy; and every ten years, or thereabouts, a pope’s coronation set processions and games in motion that renewed memories of ancient Rome for lovers of antiquity. When Renaissance artists built and adorned Christian temples, depicted the heroes and stories of Christianity, introduced music, poetry, and drama into the scene, and added fragrant incense to the colorful and magnificent rites of worship, no religion equaled Christianity in beauty.

But this was only one side of a highly varied and contradictory scene whose description cannot be brief. In the cities, as is usual, many churches were relatively empty of crowds. But as for the countryside, hear what Saint Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, said around 1430 about the peasants of his diocese:

In the churches themselves, men sometimes dance and sing and leap with women. On holidays they spend little time on religious ceremonies and hearing the full prayers of the Mass, but more in playgrounds and taverns, or arguing in front of the church. When slightly provoked, they blaspheme against God and his saints. They are full of lies and perjury; their consciences are not troubled by adultery or the worst sins. Many of them do not even confess their sins once a year, and few participate in Holy Communion. … They resort to magic for themselves and their animals. They think not at all of God or the health of their souls. … Parish priests pay no attention to the flock entrusted to them, but care for its wool; they do not teach them through preaching, the rite of confession, or private counsel, but follow their ways and walk in the same errors as their followers.

Here too some allowance must be made, for no saint can be expected to speak of human behavior without anger. Yet we must accept the estimate of a sincere Catholic historian:

When the highest clergy were in such a state, it is no wonder if among the ordinary religious orders and non-monastic clergy every kind of vice and disorder became more prevalent than before. The salt of the earth had lost its savor. … There were priests of this kind who gave Erasmus and Luther, after their visit to Rome in the time of Julius II, the opportunity to write those more or less exaggerated stories about the clergy. But it is a mistake to think that the corruption of the clergy in Rome was greater than elsewhere; there is documented evidence of clerical immorality in almost every city of the Italian peninsula. In many places—for example, in Venice—the situation was much worse than in Rome. As some writers of the time testify with a tone of sorrow, it is no wonder if the influence of the clergy had waned and in many places no respect was shown to the priesthood. The immorality of the clergy was so scandalous that proposals for the marriage of priests were heard from every side. … Many monasteries were in a most deplorable state. Observance of the three basic vows—poverty, chastity, and obedience—had been completely abandoned in some monasteries. … The discipline of many nunneries had become equally lax.

What was more unforgivable than sexual disorders and gluttony was the activity of the inquisitorial courts. But this activity diminished in Italy in the fifteenth century. In 1440, the mathematician Amadeo de Landi was tried for materialism but acquitted. In 1478, Galeotto Marzio was condemned to death for writing that a good man would go to heaven no matter what his religion, but Pope Sixtus IV saved him. In 1497, a physician named Gabriele d’Asalo, through the intercession of his patients, was saved from religious perils, although he believed that Christ was not God but the son of Joseph and Mary, born in the usual ridiculous way; the body of Christ is not present in the sacred bread; and his miracles were performed not by divine power but through the influence of the stars; thus one legend drives out another. In 1500, Giorgio da Novara was apparently burned alive for denying the divinity of Christ and because he had no influential friends. In the same year, the Bishop of Aranda boldly declared that there is neither heaven nor hell and that papal indulgences are merely means to raise money. In 1510, when Ferdinand the Catholic tried to introduce the Inquisition in Naples, he met such firm resistance from all classes of the people that he was forced to abandon his purpose.

Amid the corruption of the Church, several centers for healthy reform existed. Pius II dismissed a prior of the Dominican order and brought monasteries in Venice, Brescia, Florence, and Siena, whose moral restraints had slackened, back to discipline. In 1517, Sadoleto, Giberti, Carafa, and other clerics made the Oratory of Divine Love a center for pious men who wished to take refuge from Rome’s pagan worldliness. In 1523, Carafa founded the Theatines, in which secular priests lived according to the rules of chastity, obedience, and poverty. Cardinal Carafa renounced all the benefices under his care and distributed all his goods among the poor; Saint Cajetan, another founder of that order, did the same. These sincere men, many of whom were nobles and wealthy, astonished Rome by their steadfast observance of the rules imposed on themselves and by their fearless visits to plague victims. In 1533, Antonio Maria Zaccaria founded a similar society of priests, initially called the Regular Clerics of Saint Paul the Apostle, but soon known as the Barnabites after the church of Saint Barnabas. Carafa drew up a reform or assistance program for Venetian priests, and Giberti carried out similar reforms in the diocese of Verona (1528–1531). Egidio Canisio reformed the Augustinian Hermits, and Gregorio Cortese made similar reforms among the Benedictines in Padua.

A significant effort at monastic reform in that age was the founding of the Capuchin order. Matteo di Basci, one of the Observant Franciscans in Montefalcone, thought he had seen Saint Francis in a vision and heard him say: “I want my rule to be observed to the last word, the last word, the last word.” Knowing that Saint Francis wore a four-cornered hood, he adopted one of that shape for himself. When he went to Rome, he obtained permission from Clement VII (1528) to found a new branch of the Franciscans distinguished by the “hood” and, by observing Saint Francis’s final rule, from the other branches of that order. These Franciscans wore the roughest clothing; they went barefoot throughout the year; they lived on bread, vegetables, fruit, and water; they observed strict fasts; they lived in narrow cells in huts made of wood and clay; and they never traveled except on foot. This new order did not have many members, but it was an inspiring example for the broader self-reform that entered the field among the poor orders of Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Some of these reforms were a response to Protestant reforms. Many arose spontaneously and were a sign of a saving vital force in Christianity and the Church.

Morality in Sexual Relations

Now, turning to the morality of the laity, and beginning with sexual relations, we must first note that man is naturally inclined to multiplicity, and only the strongest moral restraints, a moderate amount of poverty and hard work, and the constant supervision of a wife can impose monogamy on him. It is not clear that adultery was less common in the Middle Ages than in the Renaissance. And just as in the Middle Ages adultery was refined by the code of chivalry, so in the Renaissance, among the educated classes, it was softened by the idealization of the delicacy and spiritual charms of the cultivated woman. The more the difference in the level of education, culture, and social position between woman and man diminished, the more possible became the establishment of a new intellectual companionship between woman and man. Life in Mantua, Milan, Urbino, Ferrara, and Naples was enlivened and animated by charming and learned women.

Girls from noble families were kept relatively secluded from men who did not belong to their own family. The advantages of pre-marital chastity were earnestly taught to them; sometimes this teaching was so effective that, according to report, a young woman, after an assault on her honor, drowned herself in water. That woman was undoubtedly unique, for after her death a bishop undertook to erect a statue of her. In the catacombs of Rome, a young woman of the nobility strangled herself to avoid violation; her body was carried with great pomp, a crown of thorns on her head, through the streets of Rome. Nevertheless, the number of pre-marital affairs must have been considerable, or it would be difficult to account for the countless illegitimate children found in every city of Renaissance Italy. Having an illegitimate child was not considered a merit, but having one was not a great disgrace; a man usually encouraged his wife, upon marriage, to bring his illegitimate child into the house to be raised with his other children. Illegitimacy did not diminish a person’s worth, and the stigma society placed on it was not very important; moreover, legitimacy could be obtained by bribing a member of the Church. In the absence of legitimate or qualified heirs, illegitimate sons might succeed to property or even to the throne, as Ferrante I succeeded Alfonso I, King of Naples, and Leonello d’Este succeeded Niccolò III, lord of Ferrara. When Pius II came to Ferrara in 1459, he was received by seven princes, all illegitimate. Competition between bastards and legitimate sons was an important source of conflicts in the Renaissance. Half the stories deal with accounts of rape; and usually these stories are read or heard by women with only a slight and fleeting shame. Roberto, Bishop of Aquino, in the late fifteenth century, shamelessly described the morals of the young men of his diocese as corrupt and said that those young men had explained to him that chastity is an outdated principle and the question of virginity is on the verge of disappearing. Even incest had its advocates.

But as for homosexuality, we must say that it was almost a compulsory part of the revival of ancient Greek customs. The humanists wrote about it with a kind of literary affection, and Ariosto considered all of them addicted to it. Poliziano, Filippo Strozzi, and Sanudo (the chronicler) were rightly suspected of it. Michelangelo, Julius II, and Clement VII were accused of it in a weaker way; Saint Bernardino saw so many cases of this shameful act in Naples that he threatened the city with the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Aretino found this perversion equally common in Rome, and he himself, in the interval between living with a mistress and finding another, asked the Duke of Mantua to send him a charming boy. In 1455, the Council of Ten in Venice officially wrote how “the hateful sin of sodomy has increased in this city,” and “to avert divine wrath” appointed two men in each Venetian district to eradicate that act. The council noted that some men had taken to wearing women’s clothing and some women had adopted men’s dress, and the council called this practice “a kind of sodomy.” In 1492, the head of a nobleman and the head of a priest, who had been condemned for homosexual acts, were cut off in the Piazzetta and their bodies publicly burned.

These were of course exceptional cases that should not be generalized, but we can guess that homosexuality existed to a greater than usual degree in Renaissance Italy until the anti-Reformation measures.

The same can be said about prostitution. According to Infessura—who liked to make his statistics about papal Rome heavier—in 1490, among Rome’s population of 90,000, there were 6,800 “registered” prostitutes, and this figure of course did not include secret and unofficial prostitutes. In Venice, according to the 1509 census, there were 11,654 harlots among the city’s population of 300,000. One bold printer published a “catalog of all the important and respectable prostitutes of Venice, with their names, addresses, and fees.” On the roads these prostitutes solicited customers in taverns, and in the cities they were welcome guests of dissolute youths and amorous artists. Cellini tells of spending a night with a prostitute as “a small incident,” and describes a dinner party of artists in which he and Giulio Romano were among them; each man was asked to bring a woman of the heart. At a higher level, it was at Lorenzo Strozzi the banker’s party in 1519 that fourteen people, including four cardinals and three prostitutes, were invited.

Gradually, as wealth and refinement increased, people demanded prostitutes who were relatively educated and had social charm; and just as in Athens in the time of Sophocles a class of prostitutes called “hetairai” came into existence to satisfy this demand, so in late-fifteenth-century Rome and sixteenth-century Venice a group of “courtesans” emerged who competed with the most distinguished ladies in dress, manners, culture, and even weekly piety. While “simpler prostitutes” plied their trade in brothels, these “courtesans” lived in their own homes, entertained their clients magnificently, wrote poetry and sang, played instruments and composed songs, participated in cultural discussions, some collected paintings and statues and rare copies of the latest books, and some held literary salons. Many adopted classical names to rival the humanists—such as Camilla, Polyxena, Penthesilea, Faustina, Imperia, and Tullia. In the time of Pope Alexander VI, one shameless wit had composed a series of witty sayings in praise of the Virgin Mary or the saints and then, without the slightest shame, said similar things in the same book in praise of the distinguished prostitutes of his time. When one of these prostitutes named Faustina Mancini died, half of Rome mourned her death, and Michelangelo was among the many who composed odes in her memory. (Her daughter killed herself to avoid prostitution.) Tullia d’Aragona, the illegitimate daughter of Cardinal Aragon, was equally famous. Praised for her golden hair and shining eyes, generosity and contempt for money, charm of behavior and grace of speech, she was cherished like a princess in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Ferrara. The Mantuan ambassador in Ferrara, in a non-political letter to Isabella d’Este, describes her arrival thus (1537):

I must describe the arrival of a noble lady in our circle. This lady is so courteous in behavior and charming in manners that one cannot but consider her a divine being. She improvises all tunes and songs. … In Ferrara no lady, not even Vittoria Colonna, Duchess of Pescara, can equal Tullia.

Morto da Brescia painted an attractive portrait of her that seems to be that of a novice nun. She made the mistake of living longer than her beauties lasted. She died in a humble hut near the Tiber, and all her estate, which was auctioned, yielded no more than twelve crowns (150 dollars?). In all her poverty she had kept her lute and harpsichord. She also left a book whose title was: On the Eternity of Perfect Love.

Undoubtedly this title was a sign of the Renaissance custom of speaking and writing about Platonic love. If a woman could not commit adultery, she could at least make herself a vehicle for arousing a kind of poetic eloquence that made her the subject of poetry and a being whom men worshiped at her threshold and dedicated their works to her. The troubadours’ praises, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and Plato’s discourses on spiritual love had created in several circles a delicate feeling of woman-worship—usually another man’s wife. Most people paid no attention to this idea and wanted love honestly in its sensual form. They might compose sonnets in praise of the beloved, but their aim was cohabitation and, despite the novelists’ stories, not even one in a hundred of such love affairs ended in marriage.

Marriage was a financial matter, and money could not be tied to fleeting bodily whims. Engagements were made by family consultations, and often young people accepted the chosen mate for themselves without protest. In the fifteenth century, a girl who at fifteen was still unmarried was considered a disgrace to the family; in the sixteenth century the “disgraceful age” was raised to seventeen to make higher education possible for girls. Men, who enjoyed all the advantages and facilities of prostitution, were attracted to marriage only if the woman brought them a considerable dowry. In Savonarola’s time, many marriageable girls, lacking a dowry, were deprived of marriage. The government of Florence established a kind of state dowry insurance called the “Fund of Maidens” from which girls who had paid a small annual amount as insurance received capital for a dowry. In Siena there were so many unmarried young men that the government was forced to impose legal obstacles against combating celibacy; in Lucca, in 1454, a decree was issued forbidding all unmarried men from twenty to fifty from holding public office. Alessandra Strozzi wrote in 1455: “The times are not suitable for marriage.” Raphael painted portraits of fifty ladies but was unwilling to marry; and this was the only thing Michelangelo agreed with him on. The wedding ceremony itself wasted a large sum of money; Leonardo Bruni complained that his marriage had caused the loss of his entire inheritance. While people suffered from famine, kings, queens, and princes spent 500,000 dollars on weddings. When Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Naples, married, he set tables for 3,000 people on the shore of the Gulf of Naples. More splendid than that was the party in Urbino for Duke Guidobaldo when he brought his bride Elisabetta Gonzaga from Mantua; the ladies of the city, in beautiful dresses, lined the slope of a hill to welcome the bride. Before them their children held olive branches; musicians on horseback in orderly ranks sang a song composed for the occasion; and a very charming and graceful lady, in the role of a goddess, offered the new duchess the loyalty and affection of the people.

After marriage, a woman usually kept her family name, so Lorenzo’s wife was still called Donna Clarice Orsini. Nevertheless, a woman might add her husband’s name to her own—like Maria Salviati de’ Medici. According to medieval marriage custom, it was expected that love between husband and wife would mature in the various stages of married life, so that they would share each other’s joys and sorrows, and happiness and misfortune; and apparently in many cases this expectation was fulfilled. No maiden’s love for a youth could be deeper and truer than Vittoria Colonna’s for the Marquis of Pescara, for she had been betrothed to the Marquis since the age of four. No intimacy was greater than that of Elisabetta Gonzaga with her husband, who accompanied her sickly husband in all his misfortunes and exiles and remained faithful to his memory until her own death.

Nevertheless, adultery was common. Since most marriages among the upper classes were diplomatic unions for economic and political interests, many husbands considered themselves entitled to have a mistress; and the wife, though she might be saddened by this, usually closed her eyes to it or kept silent. Among the middle classes, some men thought that adultery was a legitimate amusement. Machiavelli and his friends apparently were not troubled by the stories they exchanged about each other’s infidelities. When in such cases the wife took revenge by imitating her husband, the husband often overlooked her action and raised the horns of jealousy higher. But the entry of the Spaniards into Italy via Naples, and following Alexander VI and Charles V, introduced Spanish “jealousy” into Italian life, and in the sixteenth century the husband felt that by zeal he must punish his wife’s adultery with death while preserving his natural advantages. A husband might abandon his wife and still prosper; the abandoned wife had no choice but to recover her dowry, return to her relatives, and continue her life in loneliness and without a guardian; she was no longer allowed to marry. She might enter a convent, but that convent expected a donation from her dowry. Generally, in Latin countries, adultery is tolerated as a substitute for divorce.

The Renaissance Man

The mixture of intellectual freedom and moral laxity created the “Renaissance man.” He was not sufficiently typical of such a state to truly deserve such a title; in that age as in all other ages there were several types; the “Renaissance man” was only more interesting, perhaps because he had an exceptional personality. The Renaissance peasant was the same as other peasants, until the invention of agricultural machinery made him industrial. The Italian laborer of 1500 was like his peers in the Rome of the Caesars and in Mussolini’s time; in truth, it is the profession that makes the man. The Renaissance merchant was like his contemporaries in the past and present. But the Renaissance priest differed from the medieval priest and the modern priest; he was less believing and more pleasure-seeking; he could make love and fight. Among these examples there was a astonishing gap that was the whim of the age and time; a type of human being that we think of when we recall the Renaissance; a unique specimen in history that, if Alcibiades had seen him, would have felt reborn.

The characteristics of this specimen revolved around two foci: intellectual and moral boldness, a mind that was sharp, awake, flexible, open to any idea and thought, sensitive to beauty, and eager for fame. He was a completely individualistic being determined to develop all his potential powers; he had a proud spirit that despised Christian humility; he despised weakness and fear; he opposed customs, prohibitions, popes, and sometimes even God. Such a man might lead a faction in the city and an army in the country; in the Church he gathered dozens of benefices and sources of contributions under his robe and used his wealth to ascend the ladder of power. In art, he was no longer like a medieval craftsman who worked anonymously with others in a collective work; he was “an individual and separate person,” who stamped his personality on his works, signed his paintings, and sometimes even engraved his name on a statue he had made, as Michelangelo did on the Pietà. Whatever the success of this “Renaissance man,” he was constantly striving and dissatisfied; he always wanted to break his limits and be a “universal man”—bold in imagination, decisive in action, eloquent in expression, and skilled in art; familiar with literature and philosophy, and sociable with women in the palace and with soldiers in the camp.

Immorality was part of his individualism. His aim was the successful expression of his personality, and his environment imposed no restraint on him from any side, whether submission to priests or fear of a supernatural faith; to achieve his purpose he used any means, and chose every pleasure he found in his path. Nevertheless, he had his own virtues. He was a realist and, except for a rebellious playfulness in love, spoke less nonsense. When he did not stain his hand with murder, he was well-mannered, and even in murder he preferred to act with grace and chivalry. He had energy, strength of character, and the power of unified will; he accepted the ancient Roman concept of virtue, in the sense of manliness, but added skill and intelligence to it. He did not commit useless cruelty, and in his susceptibility to compassion he surpassed the ancient Romans. He was vain and ostentatious, but this trait was part of his aesthetic sense and his attachment to elegance. His appreciation of beauty in woman and nature, in art and features, was an important pillar of the Renaissance. He had made love of beauty a substitute for love of morality; if such a specimen increased and prevailed, an aristocracy with irresponsible taste would emerge that would replace the great nobles and the wealthy.

Nevertheless, such a being was only one of the many types of the Renaissance man; how different he was from the idealistic Pico and his belief in the moral perfection of man; or the gloomy Savonarola, who closed his eyes to beauty but was captivated by moral steadfastness; or the gentle noble Raphael, who scattered beauty generously around him; or Michelangelo, who long before painting the Last Judgment had sketched it; or the eloquent Poliziano, who believed that even in hell there is mercy; or Vittorino da Feltre, the upright man, who had successfully instilled the teachings of Zeno into Christ; or the second Giuliano de’ Medici, whose merciful justice led his brother the Pope to consider him unfit to rule a country! Thus, in every attempt to summarize and describe correctly, we see that there was no being called the “Renaissance man.” There were men who agreed with one another in only one thing, and that was that life had never before been so lively. The Middle Ages had said “no” to life, or pretended to say so; but the Renaissance said “yes” with all its heart, soul, and strength.

The Renaissance Woman

The manifestation of woman was one of the brightest stages of that time. Her position in European history usually rose with wealth; although ancient Greece in the time of Pericles, which was very close to the East, must be excluded from this subject. When there is no fear of hunger, man’s wild desire turns toward the opposite sex; and if a man still exerts himself for gold, it is only to pour it at a woman’s feet, or to sacrifice it for the children she has brought him. If a woman resists a man, a man increases his love for her to the point of worship. A woman usually enjoys the power of steadfast reason against a man and forcing him to buy her charming favors dearly. If, with this, a woman adds intellectual delicacy and moral grace to her physical charms, she gives him the highest happiness a man can find in the center of his glory; and in return for this gift, a man raises her to the highest degree of sovereignty in his life.

But we must not imagine that the average woman in the Renaissance played such a delightful role; this happiness was only the lot of a few fortunate women, while the majority of women, as soon as they took off their wedding dress, were busy carrying the heavy burdens of housekeeping and enduring the severe hardships of family and remained entangled in them until the grave. Now, on the right time to beat a wife, listen to the words of Saint Bernardino:

I say to you men that you should never beat your wives when they are pregnant, for this is very dangerous. I do not say that you should not beat them, but choose the right time to beat them. … I know men who value a hen that lays an egg for them every day more than their wives. Sometimes that hen breaks a cup or a bowl, but the man, fearing that he might lose its fruit, that is, the egg, does not beat it. So how mad are men who cannot bear a word from their wife, who carries in her womb a fruit as beautiful as a child, because if the wife utters a word more than what the man considers appropriate, the man immediately takes a stick and begins to punish her; but you (men) tolerate the existence of a hen that constantly crows all day long, for the sake of its egg.

A girl from a good family was precisely trained to acquire and keep a happy husband; this was the main principle of her educational program; until a few weeks before her marriage she lived in the house or in a relatively secluded convent and learned from tutors or nuns teachings that were given to men of her class, except for scholars. She usually learned some Latin and became familiar from afar with the prominent figures of Greek and Roman history, and their literature and philosophy. She learned to play one of the musical instruments, and sometimes dabbled in sculpture or painting. A few women became scholars and discussed philosophical issues with men in public assemblies, like the Venetian scholar Cassandra Fedele; but this was very exceptional. A few good women wrote poetry, like Costanza Varano, Veronica Gambara, and Vittoria Colonna. But the educated Renaissance woman preserved her femininity, Christianity, and also her moral principles; and this gave her a unity of culture and character that deprived a Renaissance man of more resistance than upbringing.

Educated men of that age intensely felt the charm of such a woman; even to the extent that they wrote and read books about her containing a detailed and scholarly analysis of her enchanting beauties. Agnolo Firenzuola, a monk from the Vallombrosa monastery, wrote a dialogue entitled On the Beauties of Women and treated this difficult subject with such skill and breadth of knowledge that it was not fitting for a monk. He described beauty itself, in the manner of Plato and Aristotle, as “an orderly agreement, a harmony mysteriously obtained from the composition, unity, and connection of various parts, each of which is in itself proportionate and, in a sense, beautiful, but before being combined with other parts to form a connected body, is different and incompatible with them.” Then he proceeds to a precise examination of each part of the woman’s form and determines a standard for the beauty of each. The hair should be thick, long, and blond, that is, with a light yellow close to brown; the skin should be bright and shining, but its whiteness should not tend to pallor; the eyes should be black, large, and full, and its pupil white but slightly blue; the nose should not be turned up, for this state is particularly disruptive of proportion in a woman; the mouth should be small, but the lips full; the chin round and dimpled, the neck round and slightly long, but the Adam’s apple should not be visible; the shoulders broad and the chest prominent, sloping gently from above to the swelling of the breast below; the hands white, fleshy, and soft; the leg long and the foot itself small. We see that Firenzuola has spent a great deal of time on this subject and has discovered a new and pleasing topic for philosophy.

The Renaissance woman, not content with these gifts, like any other woman, dyed her hair, almost always blond, and added false curls to make it thick; those village women who had exhausted their beauty cut off the ends of their hair and offered them for sale. Interest in the use of perfume in sixteenth-century Italy had become a madness: hair, hats, shirts, stockings, gloves, and shoes all had to be perfumed; Aretino thanked Duke Cosimo for perfuming the purse of money he had sent him; “some objects belonging to that time have not yet lost their scent.” Women’s dressing tables were full of cosmetics that were usually placed in beautiful boxes of ivory, silver, and gold. Rouge was applied not only to the face but also to the breasts, which in large cities were usually uncovered. Special substances were used to remove skin spots, polish nails, and soften and smooth the skin. Flowers were placed in the hair and clothing; pearls, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, agates, beryls, topazes, and garnets were used in rings, bracelets, tiaras, and (after 1525) earrings; in addition, these gems might be used in head coverings, clothing, footwear, and fans.

If we judge by the portraits, women’s clothing was ornate, heavy, and uncomfortable. Velvet, silk, and precious furs hung in large folds from the shoulders, or—if the shoulders were bare—from hooks and rings on the chest. The long woman’s dress was fastened with a belt, and its skirt dragged on the ground behind the feet. Both the heel and the sole of wealthy women’s shoes were high to protect their feet from the dirt and filth of the streets; nevertheless, the upper part was often made of delicate gold threads. The handkerchief, which was now common among the upper classes, was made of delicate linen and often had gold-embroidered lines or a lace border, and was embroidered with silk. Sometimes the top of the dress reached around the neck and ended in a pleated collar with metal bands, and sometimes it rose even above the head. Women’s headwear was of various shapes: either a hood fastened with several wires, or hats like boys’ or foresters’ … The French who came to Mantua were amazed to see that Marchioness Isabella had put on a wonderful hat with jeweled feathers and under it had bared her shoulders and chest to the tip of the breast. Preachers complained about women’s bare breasts, which attracted the lustful eyes of men. Sometimes the love of nudity went so far that, according to Sacchetti, if some women took off their shoes, they would be completely naked. Most women confined themselves in corsets that were tightened by turning a key, so much so that Petrarch felt pity for their stomachs and said: “They are so compressed that they suffer as much for self-fashioning as the martyrs suffered for religion.”

The distinguished women of the Renaissance, armed with all these weapons, freed their sex from medieval restraints and monastic contempt and advanced it so far that they almost equaled men. These women, on equal terms, discussed literature and philosophy with men; or with wisdom, like Isabella, or with masculine power, like Caterina Sforza, ruled over city-states; sometimes they wore armor, followed their mates to the battlefield, and slightly refined their violent teachings. The Renaissance woman, when she heard news of a riot, refused to leave her room, was tolerant of opinions, and could hear realistic words without losing her politeness or charm. Renaissance Italy is full of women who, because of their intelligence or piety, achieved a high position for themselves: Bianca Maria Visconti ruled Milan so capably in the absence of her husband Francesco Sforza that her husband said he trusted her more than his entire army; this woman was also famous for her “virtue, mercy, charity, and physical beauty.” Or Emilia Pio, whose husband died in her youth, and who in the rest of her life honored her husband’s memory so much that she was never seen to attract a man’s glance; or Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother and educator of the Magnificent Lorenzo; or Elisabetta Gonzaga; or Beatrice d’Este; or the noble but accused of unchastity Lucrezia Borgia; or Caterina Cornaro, who made Asolo a school for poets, artists, and gentlemen; or Veronica Gambara, a poetess who had a literary circle in Correggio; or Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo’s chaste goddess.

Vittoria, without arrogant ostentation, possessed all the calm virtues of a Roman matron of the Republic, in addition to the noblest characteristics of Christianity. Her ancestors were distinguished people: her father, Fabrizio Colonna, was the chief constable of the Kingdom of Naples; her mother, Agnese da Montefeltro, was the daughter of Federico, the learned Duke of Urbino. In childhood she was betrothed to Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, married him at nineteen (1509); the love that united the two before and after marriage was more poetic than any ode exchanged between them during Ferrante’s battles. The Marquis was almost mortally wounded in the Battle of Ravenna (1502) and captured, used his captivity to write a book of loves, and dedicated it to his wife. But at the same time he continued his relationship with one of Isabella d’Este’s ladies-in-waiting. After his release, he returned to Vittoria and stayed with her for a short time; then he rushed successively to the battlefields, and his wife rarely saw him again. The forces of Charles V were led at Pavia (1525) and achieved a worthy victory. He proposed to her that if she participated in a conspiracy against the emperor, the throne of Italy would be hers; he thought about this proposal for a while, then revealed it to Charles. When he departed from life (November 1525), his wife spent the twenty-two years of her widowhood in charity, piety, and loyalty to her husband’s memory. When she was urged to remarry, she said: “My husband Ferrante, who seems to you dead, is not yet dead to me.” She spent the rest of her life in a silent semi-monastic seclusion in Ischia and then in convents in Orvieto and Viterbo, and later in Rome. In this city, while she herself apparently remained orthodox, she befriended several Italians who favored religious reform. For a while she was under the supervision of the inquisitorial court and friendship with her carried the danger of being accused of heresy. Michelangelo accepted this danger and found a strong spiritual love for her that he never dared to go beyond poetry.

The educated women of the Renaissance freed themselves without resorting to propaganda for freedom, and only with intelligence, competence, skill, and use of men’s increasing sensitivity to tangible and intangible charms. In their own time they had influence in every field: in politics, with their power in administering city-states in the absence of their husbands; in morality, with the mixture of their freedom with good manners and virtue; in art, with the maternal beauty that became a model for a hundred images of the Virgin Mary; and in literature, with opening their homes and smiles to poets and scholars. About women, as in any other age, countless satires have been said, but against every satirical verse, poems are also composed in their sincere praise. Renaissance Italy, like the French Enlightenment, was “bisexual”; women entered all fields of life; men were no longer tyrannical and harsh toward them and, under their influence, their behavior and speech had become refined; civilization, with all its moral laxity and intensity, had acquired a delicacy and refinement that had not been seen in Europe for a thousand years.

The Home

The growing refinement manifested itself in the shape of the home and life in it. While the homes of ordinary people remained in the previous state—that is, their walls were plastered or whitewashed; the floor was paved with stone slabs; it had an inner courtyard with a well; and around the courtyard there were one or two floors of rooms equipped with simple means of living—the palaces of nobles and nouveaux riches had a splendor and luxury that rarely could be found in the capitals of princes and kings beyond the Alps. The wealth that had concentrated in the Middle Ages and in the great churches was now poured into mansions whose furnishings, comforts, and decorations could hardly be found in the capitals of princes and kings beyond the Alps. The Chigi Villa and the Massimo Palace, both designed by Baldassare Peruzzi, included suites of rooms each adorned with columns and pilasters, or chain cornices, or gilded coffered ceilings, or walls and arches painted with marble fireplaces, or stuccos and arabesque designs, or marble or tiled floors. Every mansion had beds, tables, chairs, chests, and shelves with delightful designs and so sturdy that they seemed built for a century; its massive wardrobes were filled with silver vessels and beautiful ceramics; its beds were soft and comfortable, its carpets delicate and its curtains beautiful, and it had abundant linen sheets and bedspreads of durable fragrant linen. Large braziers warmed the rooms, and lamps, torches, and chandeliers lit them. What was rare in these palaces was children.

As the means of raising children increase, family restrictions also increase. The Church and the Bible commanded people to multiply their souls, but comfort recommended sterility. Even in the countryside, where children are a source of help, families with six children were very few; in the cities, where children were a burden, families were small—the wealthier, the smaller—and in many homes there was no child at all. That Italian families could have such beautiful children is evident from the works of painters, the panels of the choristers by Donatello and Luca della Robbia, and also from statues like the Youth of Saint John the Baptist by Antonio Rossellino (National Gallery of Art, Washington). Family unity, the sincere and mutual affection of parents and children, is interestingly evident amid the moral laxity of that time.

The family was still an economic, moral, and geographical unit. Usually the debt of an indigent member was paid by the other members—and this is strikingly contrary to the individualism of that age. Rarely could an individual marry or leave his city-state without the consent of his relatives. Servants were freed members of the family and spoke freely. Paternal power prevailed and was obeyed in all critical cases, but it was usually the mother who ruled the family. Maternal affection was as intense among princesses as among the poor. Beatrice d’Este writes to her sister Isabella about her nursing son: “I often wish you were here to see him, for I am sure you could never refrain from caressing and kissing him.” Most middle-class families kept a register of births, marriages, deaths, and interesting events of their lives, in the course of whose description there were sometimes sincere descriptions. In one of these registers, Giovanni Rucellai (ancestor of the playwright of the same name) wrote these words, which show Florentine pride, in his old age (c. 1460):

I thank God that He created me a rational and immortal being; in a Christian country; near Rome, the center of Christendom; in Italy, the most blessed country in the Christian world; and in Florence, the most beautiful city in the whole world. … I thank our Lord for my worthy mother who, although only twenty years old at the time of my father’s death, rejected all marriage proposals and devoted herself to her children; I also thank our Lord for my wife, who was equally worthy and truly loved me and cared for her house and children with complete sincerity; that the Lord preserved her for me for many years and her death was the greatest loss. With the memory of all these favors and countless blessings, now in old age I wish to separate myself from all worldly things to devote my whole soul to thanking and praying to You, O Lord, and to You, O living source of existence.

Two men, and perhaps one, around 1436 wrote treatises on the family and how to manage it. Agnolo Pandolfini was probably the author of an eloquent treatise called Treatise on the Government of the Family. Shortly afterward, Leon Battista Alberti compiled a treatise called Treatise on the Family, and the third book of it, “Economy,” is so similar to his previous treatises that some consider both different forms of a single treatise by Alberti. Perhaps both were original, but they resembled each other because they were based on Xenophon’s treatise on economy; but Pandolfini’s work is better. He too was a wealthy man who had served Florence as a diplomat and generously assisted public affairs. He wrote his treatise in his old age and arranged it in the form of a conversation with his three sons. His sons ask him whether they should seek public service; but he dissuades them on the grounds that public services require dishonesty, oppression, and theft, incite suspicion, envy, and insult. He says that the source of human happiness is not in public services or fame, but in his wife and children, his economic success, his good name, and his friends. A man should marry a woman who is sufficiently younger than him to submit to his constructive teachings and instructions; and in the first years of marriage he should teach his wife the duties of motherhood and the arts of housekeeping. A happy life is obtained from the economical and orderly use of physical health, talent, time, and money: from health through moderation, exercise, moderate food; from talent through the study of science and the formation of an honorable ethic motivated by religion and following the good; from time through the rejection of idleness; and from money through precise calculation and equating income, expenditure, and savings. A wise man first spends his money on acquiring a farm or property; so that not only a home in the countryside is provided for him and his family, but grain, wine, oil, poultry, wood, and other necessities of life are provided as much as possible. It is also good to have a house in the city, so that his children benefit from the cultural facilities there and learn some industrial arts. But the family itself should spend as much of the year as it can in the villa and countryside:

While every other property requires work and causes danger, fear, and despair; the villa has a great and honorable advantage; the villa is always faithful and kind. … In spring the green trees and the song of birds make you happy and hopeful; in autumn a little effort yields a hundredfold profit; throughout the year sorrow is removed from you. The villa is a place where good and honorable men like to gather. … Hurry to it, and flee from the pride of the rich and the insult of the wicked.

A man named Giovanni Campano, on behalf of millions of peasants, responded to this advice as follows: “If I had not been born a peasant,” I would easily have found the caress of the lord in this description of rural happiness, “but since I have been a farmer, what is pleasure for you is nothing but toil for me.”

Public Morality

Pandolfini was at least right in one judgment, and that was that commercial and public morality was the less attractive side of Renaissance life. In that time, as now, what formed the basis of judgment about persons was success, not virtue; even the upright Pandolfini was more desirous of wealth than of eternal life. In that time, as now, people were eager for money and made their consciences flexible enough to obtain it. Kings and princes responded to the call of gold with betrayal of their allies and breaking the most solemn covenants. Artists were no better than they: many of them took money in advance, left their work unfinished or did not start it at all, but did not return the money. The papal court itself was a great model of the lust for money; hear again the words of the greatest historian of the age:

A deep-rooted corruption had gripped almost all the officials of the papal court. … The number of irregular tips and unjust expectations had exceeded the past. In addition, documents were tampered with and even forged from all sides by officials. It is no wonder if I say that the loudest complaint about the corruption and extortion of papal officials had risen from all parts of Christendom. It was even said that in Rome every task could be done with money.

The Church still considered taking profit from money usury. Preachers attacked it, cities—for example, Piacenza—sometimes punished the usurer by depriving him of the grace of religious rites at death, and forbidding Christian burial rites for his corpse. But lending with interest continued, because in a developing commercial and industrial economy such a loan was necessary. Laws were enacted to prohibit usury at a rate exceeding twenty percent, but cases have been mentioned in which thirty percent interest was imposed on a loan. Christians competed with Jews in lending, and the city council of Verona complained that Christians’ conditions for lending were harsher than those of the Jews; nevertheless, public enmity was more directed at the Jews and sometimes manifested itself in anti-Semitic riots. The Franciscan order solved this problem for poor borrowers through donations and gifts called “charity funds”; from these funds, loans were first given to the poor without interest. The first charity fund was established in Orvieto in 1463; soon every large city established such a fund. The expansion of these funds required expenses and organization, and the Fifth Lateran Council (1515) gave the Franciscans the right to add a proportionate interest to each loan for administrative expenses. Some sixteenth-century theologians, having learned from this experience, permitted the determination of a small interest for loans. As a result of the competition of the “charity fund,” and perhaps also as a result of the increasing competence and rivalry of professional bankers, the interest rate rapidly decreased in the sixteenth century.

Industry, with its expansion, and with the disappearance of personal relations between employer and worker, became harsher. In the feudal regime, the serf, along with his exhausting duties, enjoyed some rights: it was expected of his lord to take care of him in illness, old age, economic recession, and war. In the Italian cities, the guilds performed such an operation for a higher class of workers, but in general the “free” worker, when he could not find work, was free to starve. When he found work, he was forced to accept it on the terms the employer offered; and those terms were harsh. Any invention and improvement in production and finance added to profits, but rarely increased wages. Merchants were as strict with each other as with their employees; we have heard things about their many tricks in competition, as well as about deceptive contracts and their countless tricks; when they cooperated with each other, their intention was to ruin their rivals in other cities. Nevertheless, there were cases of honor among Italian merchants, and Italian capitalists were famous throughout Europe for their integrity.

Social morality was a mixture of hardness and chastity. In the correspondence of that time there is much evidence of a spirit of kindness and affection, and the Italians could not compete in savagery with the Spaniards, or in massacring people with the French soldiers. Nevertheless, no nation in Europe could equal the Italian nation in that endless ruthless slander that surrounded prominent persons in Rome; and who but the Italians of the Renaissance could consider Aretino a divine being. Private violence and cruelty were prevalent. Family disputes flourished with the breaking of customs and faith and the imperfect enforcement of the law; people took personal revenge, and families killed each other’s members in successive generations. In Ferrara, until 1537, dueling to the death was legal and customary; even boys were allowed to fight each other with knives. Factional struggles were bitterer than anywhere else in Europe. Cases of assault and battery were countless. Buying assassins was as cheap as buying papal indulgences for sins. The palaces of Roman nobles were full of dagger-men who, at a sign from the master, committed murder. Everyone had a dagger, and poison makers had many customers; the people of Rome could hardly consider the death of any prominent or wealthy person natural. High-ranking people required that their food and drinks be first tasted by another person in their presence. In Rome there was talk of the wonderful story of a poison called “slow poison” that gradually—in a time sufficient for the poison maker to erase the traces of the crime—poisoned; everyone in those days had to be constantly in danger; every night if he left the house, he might be ambushed and robbed; and if he did not lose his life, he was lucky; even in the church he had no security, and on the highways he had to be prepared to confront bandits. The mind of the Renaissance man had to be constantly sharp like the blade of a sword amid these dangers.

Cruelty, sometimes collective and contagious, was prevalent. In 1502, a rebellion broke out in Arezzo against a group of cruel Florentine officials. Hundreds of Florentines were killed in the streets of Arezzo. One of the victims of this incident was hung naked and a burning torch was placed between his legs, and then the joyful crowd called his corpse “sodomite.” Stories of violence, cruelty, and lust were as popular as belief in people’s superstitions. The court of Ferrara, which on one side was illuminated by the light of poetry and art, on the other side had a horrible situation from princely crimes and royal punishments. Tyrants like the members of the Visconti and Malatesta families were examples and incentives for the aesthetic violence of the people.

The morality of war worsened with time. In the early days of the Renaissance, almost all battles were relatively mild clashes between mercenary soldiers who fought without madness and knew when to stop fighting. As soon as a few were killed on one side, the victory of the other side was certain; and a prisoner salable for ransom was more valuable than a killed enemy. As the “condottieri” became stronger, and the armies larger and more expensive, individuals were allowed to plunder conquered cities to compensate for their usual wages—which were sometimes not paid; resistance to plunder led to the massacre of the city’s inhabitants, and with the smell of blood, savagery increased. Even in this case, the cruelty of the Italians in war was much less than that of the invading Spaniards and French. Guicciardini says that when the French captured Capua in 1501, “they committed much bloodshed … and women, of every class and category, even those dedicated to the service of God, became victims of the lust or baseness of the French soldiers, and many of these poor creatures were later sold cheaply—apparently to Christians—in Rome.” As the Renaissance wars intensified, the enslavement of prisoners became more common.

There were cases of individual fidelity and citizens’ loyalty to the country, but in general, trickery gave popularity to deception. Generals put themselves up for auction and then, in the heat of battle, entered negotiations with the enemy to receive a higher price. Governments also changed their allies in the midst of war and allies became enemies with a stroke of the pen. Princes and popes revoked the safe-conducts they gave; governments secretly agreed to the murder of their enemies in other countries. In every city or camp there was a traitor. As examples, we mention these: Bernardino da Corte, who sold the castle of Ludovico to France; the Swiss and Italians who handed Ludovico over to the French; Francesco Maria della Rovere who prevented the papal forces under his command from going to the aid of the Pope in 1527; and Malatesta Baglioni who sold Florence in 1530: … so much so that as religious faith waned, the thought of right and wrong in many minds gave way to the sense of necessity; and since governments lacked the legitimacy that is established with time, the habit of obeying the law disappeared, and it became necessary for force to take the place of custom. The only remedy against the tyranny of governments was tyrant-killing.

Corruption flowed in all parts of the administration. Finally it was decided that the treasury administration in Siena be entrusted to a saintly monk, because every other official had committed embezzlement. Except in Venice, the reputation of the courts for bribery had reached the point of notoriety. Sacchetti says in one of his stories that one of the parties to a lawsuit gave a bull to a judge as a bribe, but the other party sent a cow and a calf to the judge and won. Justice was expensive, the poor were forced to forgo it. And usually killing was found cheaper than seeking justice. The law itself had progressed somewhat, but more theoretically. In Padua and Bologna, Pisa and Perugia, famous jurists lived—Chino da Pistoia, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Baldus degli Ubaldi. The interpretation of these jurists of Roman law dominated legal science for two centuries. As foreign trade expanded, maritime and commercial law also expanded. Giovanni da Legnano with his treatise on war opened the way for Grotius (1360). This treatise is the oldest known work on the laws of war.

But practice was less worthy than its theoretical aspect. Although the protection of life and property, especially in Florence, was maturing, it could not keep pace with crime. There were many jurists. Torture was also used in questioning witnesses, as in examining the accused. Punishments were savage. In Bologna, the condemned (to death) might be hung in a cage from one of the leaning towers and left in the heat of the sun. In Siena, the condemned to death was tied to a cart, driven slowly through the streets, and his ear pinched with red-hot tongs; in Milan, under the rule of Giovanni Visconti, Petrarch’s host, prisoners were cut into pieces. In the early sixteenth century, the custom began of condemning prisoners to row in warships; thus, prisoners whose feet were chained rowed the ships of Julius II.

Against these savageries we can mention the development of charitable organizations. Every man who made a will left an amount to be distributed among the poor of the relevant parish. Since beggars were countless, some churches had established kitchens similar to today’s “soup kitchens”; the church of Santa Maria in Campo Santo, in Rome, fed thirteen beggars every day, and two thousand poor every Monday and Friday. Hospitals, leper houses for incurable patients, the poor and orphans, penniless pilgrims, and repentant prostitutes were as numerous in Renaissance Italy as in medieval Italy. Pistoia and Viterbo were famous for the extent of their charitable works. In Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga founded a hospital called the “Great Hospital” to care for the poor and the sick; and he donated three thousand ducats from the state budget to it. In Venice there was a society called the Pilgrims, in which Titian and two members of the Sansovino family were members, that provided mutual assistance to its members, gave dowries to poor girls, and engaged in other charitable works. In 1500, Florence had seventy-three urban organizations dedicated to charitable works. Another organization for brotherhood and mercy was founded in 1244, but soon disappeared; this organization was revived in 1475; its members were ordinary people who visited the sick, engaged in other good works, and attracted people’s friendship with their brave care of plague victims; their passage through the streets in black robes and in silence is still one of the interesting sights of Florence. Venice also had a similar organization called the Brotherhood of San Rocco; Rome had a charitable organization called the Sodality of the Dolorosa, which is now 504 years old, and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici founded another charitable institution in 1519 to care for non-beggar poor and provide the means for the burial of the indigent. The private donations of millions of unnamed people somewhat alleviated man’s struggle against man, nature, and death.

Customs and Entertainments

Amid violence and dishonesty, the lively life of university students, and the irritability and kind nature of peasants and laborers, good manners grew as one of the arts of the Renaissance. Italy now led all of Europe in personal and social hygiene, dressing, table manners, cooking, speaking, and entertainments and, except for clothing, Florence held the leadership in Italy. Florence patriotically complained about the filth of other cities, and the Italians only equated “Tedesco” (German) with roughness of language and life. The ancient Roman custom of frequent bathing continued among the educated classes; the wealthy showed their ornaments and went to hot water, and, to atone for the sins of the digestive system, drank large quantities of sulfurous water every year. Men’s clothing was as ornate as women’s, with this difference that it had no jewels: tight sleeves and colorful stockings, and wonderful bag-like hats, of the kind seen in Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione. Men’s stockings were so long that they reached above the waist and divided the wearer into two incongruous parts so that his movements resembled a vulgar dance. But from the waist up, with a velvet doublet and a pleated and lace-trimmed silk collar, it was sometimes attractive; even gloves and shoes had lace borders. In a tournament between Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano, Giuliano wore clothes worth 8,000 ducats.

In the fifteenth century, a revolution in table manners became permanent, and that was the use of the fork instead of fingers. Thomas Coryat, who traveled in Tuscany around 1600, was amazed by this new custom and wrote about it: “This custom is not practiced in any other country I have seen in my travels.” The fork, spoon, and knife were made of brass and sometimes of silver and were lent to neighbors who arranged dinner parties. Food, except on banquet occasions, was simple and brief, but excess in variety of foods was obligatory at banquets. Spices—pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, cumin, ginger, and others—were used abundantly to flavor food and arouse thirst; therefore, every host offered his guests various wines. The history of the prevalence of garlic in Italy can be documented to 1548, but it was undoubtedly common long before that. Drunkenness or gluttony was not so common in Renaissance Italy; the Renaissance Italians, like the French a period later, were good eaters, not gluttons. When men were separated from the women of their family, they might invite one or two prostitutes to parties; just as Aretino did when he entertained Titian. More orderly men spent mealtime pleasantly with music, recitation of poems, and literary conversations.

The art of eloquence, that is, speaking in an intelligent way with elegance, politeness, clarity, and wit, was reinvented by the Renaissance. Greece and Rome were familiar with this art; and it was also kept alive to some extent in various parts of medieval Italy—for example, in the courts of Frederick II and Innocent III. Now, in Florence, Urbino, and Rome, it flourished again respectively under the rule of Lorenzo, Elisabetta, and Leo: nobles and their ladies, poets and philosophers, generals and scholars, artists and musicians, sometimes paid a tribute to religion, embellished their expression with a witty gesture, and enjoyed each other’s words. These conversations were so pleasing that many treatises and discourses were published in the form of conversations to capture and reflect the charm of speech. This went to excess and language and thought became overly artificial and refined; finally, excess in this situation diminished the masculine power of expression. Urbino took the place of France’s Rambouillet, and Molière attacked the “ridiculous précieuses” in time to preserve the art of eloquence for France.

Despite the affectation of a small number, Italian speech enjoyed such freedom of subject and praise and blame that today’s social customs do not allow such permission. Since ordinary conversations rarely reached the ears of well-mannered unmarried women, it was thought that sexual matters could be discussed openly. But apart from this subject, and even in the highest male circles, there was a kind of lack of restraint in sexual joking, a kind of cheerful freedom in poetry, and a kind of indecency in the theater that in our time is among the less presentable aspects of the Renaissance. Educated men sometimes wrote satirical poems on statues, and the refined Bembo wrote in praise of Priapus. Young men competed with each other in obscenity and chatter to prove their maturity. Men of all classes cursed and sometimes uttered blasphemous words that included the holiest names in Christianity. Nevertheless, neither polite expressions in other countries were so refined, nor forms of address so ornate; when women left each of their intimate male friends, they kissed his hand, and men kissed women’s hands; abundant gifts were exchanged between friends, and consideration in speech and action reached a stage that in northern Europe seemed strange and unprecedented. Italian books of manners and etiquette had many admirers beyond the Alps.

The same is true of dance, fencing, and other entertainment manuals; in entertainment too, as in conversation and blasphemy, Italy led the Christian world. On summer nights, girls danced in the squares of Florence, and the sweetest-moving of them won a silver tiara as a prize; in the villages, young men and women danced on the village green. In homes or formal dance parties, women danced with women or men, and men with men or women; in any case, the aim was grace and sweetness. In the Renaissance, the ball was popular; poetry and movement were added to the arts.

Card playing was even more popular than dancing, in the fifteenth century it had taken a mad form among all classes; Leo X himself was addicted to it. Sometimes card playing took the form of gambling; remember how Cardinal Raffaele Riario won 14,000 ducats in a game with the son of Innocent VIII. Men sometimes played dice, and during it sometimes took dice. This too became a chronic love that the law tried in vain to cure. In Venice gambling had ruined so many noble families that the Council of Ten twice prohibited the sale of cards or dice, and required servants to report whenever their masters revoked the anti-gambling law. The “charity fund,” which was established by Savonarola in 1495, required borrowers to refrain from gambling, at least until repaying their loan. Respectable people spent hours playing chess and loved expensive pieces; Giacomo Lordano in Venice had pieces worth 5,000 ducats.

Young people had their own games that were often played outdoors. Italian nobles learned riding, fencing and spear play, and practiced mounted hand-to-hand combat. For such competitions, cities, on certain holidays, cordoned off a place in the public square with ropes; and usually this place was chosen so that women could see the combatants from windows and balconies and encourage their favorite rider. Since these kinds of battles were not deadly enough, in 1332 some daring young men in the Colosseum in Rome made a kind of bullfighting in which a man on foot had to fight a bull with a spear; in that case only eighteen riders from the old families of Rome were killed in the fight with the bulls, and only eleven bulls were killed. Such competitions were occasionally repeated in Rome and Siena, but never pleased the Italians. Horse racing was more common and equally aroused the taste of the people of Rome, Siena, and Florence. Hunting, falconry, and races of running, boating, tennis, and boxing completed Italian sports and kept citizens individually fit, but collectively no benefit came from them and the defense of cities was left to mercenary soldiers.

On the whole, life, despite its sufferings and dangers and natural and supernatural horrors, was pleasant; city people enjoyed the pleasure of walking or riding to the countryside, riverbanks, or seashore; they grew flowers to decorate the house and adorn the person; and beside their villas they created beautiful gardens in geometric shapes. The Church was generous in holidays, and the government added holidays of its own. On the Venetian lakes, the Arno in Venice, the Mincio in Mantua, the entry of the Ticino in Milan, water festivals were held. Or, on special days, large groups moved through the city streets, with guild banners and floats prepared by world-famous artists; bands played music, beautiful girls sang and danced, dignified men strutted, and at night fireworks created wonderful shapes in the sky. On “Holy Saturday,” in Florence, three flint stones brought from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem lit a tallow candle, which in turn lit a wax candle, and the latter, moved by a artificial dove along a wire, reached a cart placed in the square in front of the cathedral and marked with the country’s chariot sign and set it on fire. On Corpus Christi, the procession of performers stopped to hear a hymn sung by girls and boys, or to see a scene from biblical history or pagan legends, displayed by one of the religious brotherhood organizations. If a great person came to the city, he might be welcomed with a “triumphal procession.” This procession was arranged in the style of ancient Rome with special chariots, that is, in the manner of a procession when a victorious general returned from war. When Leo X saw his beloved Florence in 1513, all the people of the city came out of their homes to see the passage of his triumphal chariot, which was painted and decorated by Pontormo, as it passed under the great triumphal arches. These triumphal arches were erected in the main street of the performers. Seven other chariots, which had images of famous figures of Roman history, formed the Pope’s procession; in the last chariot, a naked boy, painted with a wreath, announced the imminent golden age with the coming of the Pope; but that boy soon died as a result of the poisonous effect of that paint.

During Carnival, the floats of the groups were sometimes driven by their riders in Florence, representing abstract ideas such as “prudence,” “hope,” “fear,” and “death,” or “elements,” “winds,” and “seasons,” or a legend like the story of Paris and Helen or Bacchus and Ariadne, along with songs related to each scene; for such a “show” Lorenzo wrote his famous ode for youth and joy. On those Carnival nights, everyone, from playful children to cardinals, wore masks, engaged in joking and deception, and made love with such freedom that they took revenge for the restraints of Lent in advance. In 1512, when Florence was still happy—but unexpected misfortunes were only a few months away—Piero di Cosimo and Francesco Granacci made the “Mask of the Triumph of Death” for the Carnival display. This mask was a large triumphal chariot drawn by black buffaloes and covered with black cloth on which a large skeleton of “Death” with a scythe was depicted; around that skeleton several tombs and horrible ghosts were placed, on whose clothes white shining bones were painted; behind the chariot figures of masked people strutted, whose black hoods, both front and back, were painted with dead heads. From the graves made on the chariots, other figures had risen that, with the tricks of painting, looked like bones; these skeletons sang a song whose theme was: all people must die. In front and behind the chariot a group of wretched horses walked on which the bodies of the dead were. Thus, in the most important part of the Carnival, Piero di Cosimo, by reflecting Savonarola’s voice, condemned the merrymaking of the Italians and foresaw the calamity that was to befall them.

The Art of Theater

These mask and Carnival feasts were one of the foundations of Italian theater art. For often a tableau, usually from the history of the prophets, was performed on one of the chariots during the procession, or on temporary performance platforms erected along the procession’s path. But the first source of theater in Italy was a stage of Christianity that was performed by one of the guilds and sometimes by professional actors belonging to one of the religious brotherhood organizations that had made this their profession. These kinds of shows were called “devotione” in Italian. The texts of some of these devotiones have been preserved from the ravages of time and show astonishing dramatic power; for example, according to one of them, the Virgin Mary finds Jesus in Jerusalem and then loses him again; she rises madly in search of him, and cries: O my kind son! O my son, where have you gone? O my merciful son, when you left me, you were very sad! For the love of God, tell me where my son, where has he gone?

In the fifteenth century, especially in Florence, a more advanced type of show called “sacred play” was offered in the oratory of one of the guilds, or in the dining hall of a convent, or in a field, or in a public square. The scenery of these shows was often complex and ingenious: the heavens were usually represented with canopies painted with stars, clouds with wool hanging in the air, and angels with boys placed on metal nets and hidden in waving curtain hangings. The text of the play was usually in verse and had musical notes for viol and lute. Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pulci were among the poets who composed the texts of these religious plays in verse. Poliziano, in his book “Orfeo,” combined the form of sacred plays with pagan subjects.

At the same time, other elements of Italian life contributed to the creation of theater art. The “farce” shows, which had long been performed by wandering imitators in medieval cities, contained the main element of Italian comedy. Some actors were skilled in improvising dialogue for simple plays. This “commedia dell’arte” was a pleasant means for cultivating the satirical and mocking genius of the Italians. It was in these farce shows that the masks, or popular comedy characters, took shape and name: Pantalone, Arlecchino, Pulcinella or Punchinello.

The humanists, in a complex system of factors that led to theater art, played their role by reviving the texts of ancient Roman theater and bringing them to the stage. Twelve plays by Plautus were discovered in 1427 and created a new incentive for the progress of theater. In Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Siena, and Rome, the comedies of Plautus and Terence were performed; the old classical traditions took flight and crossed centuries to recreate non-religious theater again. In 1486, Plautus’s “Menaechmi” was performed for the first time in Italian and prepared the ground for transferring ancient theater art to the Renaissance. In the late fifteenth century, religious shows no longer attracted educated Italians; pagan subjects increasingly replaced Christian subjects and when local playwrights, like Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Aretino, wrote plays, their work was in the vulgar and shameless style of Plautus and differed greatly from the previously popular stories of Jesus and Mary. All the comic scenes of Rome, all the superficial plots that mistakenly revolve around gender or identity or status, all the vulgar characters of the play—including pimps and prostitutes, with whom Plautus satisfied the taste of the vulgar— and all the violence and vice of the old lower-class games reappeared in these Italian comedies.

Despite the preservation of Seneca’s plays and the recovery of Greek theater art, tragedy never found a stable place on the Renaissance theater stage. Even the upper classes wanted to be happy more than to be moved, and therefore did not welcome “Sofonisba” by Gian Giorgio Trissino (1515) and “Rosamunda” by Giovanni Rucellai, which was performed in the same year in the Rucellai garden in Florence in the presence of Leo X.

This was the misfortune of Italian comedy that it took shape when Italian morality had reached its lowest point. That plays like Bibbiena’s “Calandra” and Machiavelli’s “Mandragola” could satisfy the taste of the upper classes of Italy, even in the refined city of Urbino, and be performed in the presence of popes without raising a voice of protest, once again shows how intellectual freedom can go hand in hand with moral corruption. When the anti-Reformation measures began with the Council of Trent (completed 1545), the morality of the clergy and laity was severely supervised, and Renaissance comedy was removed from the circle of Italian society’s entertainments.

Music

One of the compensating aspects of Italian comedy was that music was played in the intervals between acts and dance and pantomime were shown. For, after love, music was the main entertainment and consolation of every class in Italy. Montaigne, who traveled in Tuscany in 1581, “was amazed to see peasants with lutes in their hands and shepherds beside them reciting Ariosto’s poems from memory;” Montaigne himself adds to this sentence: “But this is something that can be seen throughout Italy.” Renaissance painting has a thousand images of people playing; from angels playing lutes who slumber at the feet of the Virgin during her coronation, or singing seraphim, the work of Melozzo, to the joy of a man sitting behind a harpsichord in the Concert painting; and now look at that boy who is in the center of the painting of the Three Ages of Man by Sebastiano del Piombo, and one hardly imagines that he (that boy) is the painter himself. Literature similarly draws a picture of people who are busy reading and playing in their homes, at work, in the street, in music studios, in monasteries and nunneries, in churches, in processions and religious and secular shows, in the lyrical parts of theater curtains, or in outings outside the city, of the kind that Boccaccio has drawn in the Decameron. The wealthy had various musical instruments in their homes and held private parties. Women had clubs for playing and studying music. Italy was mad about music, and still is.

Folk songs were always popular and scholarly music in certain periods refreshed and rejuvenated itself from them; popular melodies were used with necessary changes to make complex madrigals, for religious hymns, even for parts of Mass music. Cellini says: “In Florence people were accustomed to gather in the streets on summer nights” and sing and dance. Street and market minstrels played sad or happy tunes on beautiful lutes; people gathered in front of Mary’s shrines in the streets or roads to sing songs in her praise; in Venice harmonious melodies rose from hundreds of boats toward the moon; and in the mysterious shadows of the winding canals, lovers, with great hope and a half-broken voice, offered songs to hesitant girls. Almost every Italian could sing and tune his voice simply with his fellow singers. Hundreds of these small popular songs have reached us under the title “frottola” (small fruits); they are usually short and amorous and made for a soprano voice that has a backing of tenor, alto, and bass. While in past centuries the tenor voice “held” the melody and took its name from this property, now, in the fifteenth century, the soprano was the melody holder—for this reason it was called soprano because it was written on the upper line of other melodies. This part did not need a woman’s voice, it was often sung by a boy or the falsetto of a young adult. (Castrati had not yet entered the papal choir in 1562).

Among the educated classes, considerable knowledge of music was necessary. Castiglione demanded from his courtiers sufficient aesthetic information in music “that not only cultivates men’s minds, but often tames wild animals.” It was expected of every educated person to read simple musical notes at a glance, to accompany with one of the musical instruments; and to participate in an impromptu group song in every assembly. Sometimes people participated in a “ballata” (ballad) that included a set of song, dance, and musical instrument sounds. Universities after 1400 had music courses and gave diplomas to graduates; there were hundreds of music schools; Vittorino da Feltre founded a music school in Mantua around 1425; “conservatories” of music have this name because in Naples many conservatori (orphanages) were used as music schools. With the use of printing for publishing notes, music spread more. Around 1476, Ulrich Han in Rome printed a complete prayer book with movable type for notes and lines, and in 1501 Ottaviano de’ Petrucci in Venice began printing motets and frottolas on a commercial scale.

In the courts, music was more important than any other art, except personal adornment. The ruler usually chose a favorite church whose choir was favored by him; he paid large sums to attract the most melodious and skilled people from Italy, France, and Burgundy; he trained new singers from childhood—and this is what Federico did in Urbino—and expected the members of the group to participate in state ceremonies and court feasts as well. Guillaume Dufay, from Burgundy, was in charge of music at the Malatesta court in Rimini and Pesaro, and also in the papal chapel in Rome, for a quarter of a century (1419–1444); Galeazzo Maria Sforza around 1460 arranged two choirs for the chapel and brought Josquin des Prez, who was then the most famous composer in Europe, from France to direct them. Ludovico Sforza, upon Leonardo’s entry into Milan, welcomed him as a musician, and it should be noted that when Leonardo went from Florence to Milan, he was accompanied by Atalante Migliorotti, who was famous for music and making musical instruments. A more famous person in making harps, lutes, organs, and clavichords was Lorenzo Gusnasco of Pavia, who had made Milan one of his residences. The court of Ludovico was full of singers: Narciso, Testagrossa, Cordier the Fleming, and Cristoforo Romano, whom Beatrice loved with a pure love. Pedro Maria the Spaniard led concerts in that palace, and also for the public, and Franchino Gaffurio founded a famous private music school in Milan and undertook its teaching himself. Isabella d’Este had a great love for music, made it the main subject for decorating her private room, and herself played several musical instruments well. When she ordered a clavichord to be made for Lorenzo Gusnasco, she emphasized that its keys should be very smooth, “because our hands are so delicate that if the keys are stiff, we cannot play.” Two famous musicians lived in her court; Marco Cara, the most skilled lutenist of the time, and Bartolomeo Tromboncino who made attractive madrigals and, because of his popularity for this work, when he killed his unfaithful wife, he was not punished and the matter was overlooked as a family dispute.

Finally, music resounded in churches, monasteries, and nunneries. In Venice, Bologna, Naples, and Milan, nuns sang the evening prayer so excitingly that people gathered to hear it. Sixtus IV founded the famous Sistine Chapel choir. Julius II added the “Julian Chapel Choir” to St. Peter’s, which trained singers for the Sistine choir; this chapel was the pinnacle of world music art in the Latin sphere during the Renaissance; the greatest singers from all Catholic countries of the world had gathered there. Chant was still the first rule of church music, but here and there the French “ars nova” had found its way into religious choirs in the form of a new counterpoint and prepared the ground for Palestrina and Victoria. Once the use of any musical instrument except the organ in the church was considered contrary to religious majesty, but in the fifteenth century several types of musical instruments entered the church to add to its music the charm and ornament of secular music. In the church of San Marco in Venice, the Flemish master Adrian Willaert from Bruges was in charge of the choir for thirty-five years and trained them so well for performing songs that it aroused the envy of Rome. In Florence, Antonio Squarcialupi founded a harmony school of which Lorenzo was a member. Antonio presided over the choir of the cathedral for a generation, and that church was so filled with music that it silenced any philosophical doubt. Leon Battista Alberti was a skeptical man, but when he heard the choir’s song, he believed:

All other forms of song become boring with repetition, only religious music never annoys. I do not know how others are affected, but in my blood the melodies and prayers of the church have the effect for which they are set, that is, to soothe spiritual pains and induce a kind of indescribable languor full of respect for God. What stony heart is there that does not soften when it hears the high and low of those regular sounds—those sounds that are complete and true and whose rhythm is so sweet and flexible. I assure you that it is impossible for me to listen to those Greek words (“Lord, have mercy on us”) that seek the remedy for human misery from God and not cry. Then I think what power music brings to soften and calm us.

Despite all these popularities, music was the only art in which Italy, for most of the Renaissance period, lagged behind France. As a result of being deprived of papal revenues due to the popes’ flight to Avignon, and with the inadequacy of culture in the tyrants’ courts in the fourteenth century, Italy at that time lacked the means and spirit necessary for higher music. In Italy madrigals were made, but those melodies, which were based on the songs of Provençal troubadours, were placed in a musical framework that contained a regular polyphony, so much so that the form of the composition lost its original solidity.

The glory of fourteenth-century music in Italy was Francesco Landino, organist of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. Landino, although blind from childhood, was considered one of the highest and most popular musicians of his time; people honored him as an organist, lutenist, composer, poet, and philosopher. But even he had taken a model from France, and his two hundred secular songs gave the Italian lyrics that “ars nova” form that had engulfed France a generation earlier. The “new art” was new from two directions: one from the direction that it also accepted dual rhythm like the ternary rhythm, which was previously necessary in church music, and invented a more complex and flexible notation. Pope John XXII, who interfered in every field, attacked the new art as a strange and corrupt art and banned it. His ban caused a disappointing transformation in Italian music. In any case, John XXII could not live forever, although (because of his long life) it sometimes seemed so; after his death at the age of ninety (1334), the new art triumphed in scholarly French music, and shortly afterward in Italy as well.

In Avignon, French, Flemish, and Dutch singers and composers formed the papal choir. When Rome again became the papal seat, the papal court brought with it many French, Flemish, and Dutch singers and composers, and these foreign musicians and their successors dominated Italian music. Until the time of Sixtus IV, all the voices of the papal choir were from beyond the Alps; and in the fifteenth century a foreign domination ruled music in the courts. When Squarcialupi died (c. 1475), Lorenzo replaced him with a tall Dutchman named Heinrich Isaac as organist of the Florence cathedral. Heinrich made notes for a number of canti carnascialeschi (Carnival songs) and for Poliziano’s lyrics and taught the future Pope Leo X to love French songs and even compose in their style. For a while French songs were sung in Italy, just as the Italians had previously recited the troubadours’ poems.

This invasion of Italian music by French musicians, which occurred a century before the invasion of that country by French soldiers, caused a revolution in Italian music around 1520. For these men who had come from the north—and the Italians they had trained—were immersed in the new art and used it to set Italian lyric poetry to music. In the works of Petrarch, Ariosto, Sannazaro, and Bembo—and later in the poems of Tasso and Guarini—they found delightful verses that were thirsty for music; in truth, was poetry, if not made specifically for melody, at least made to be recited eloquently? Petrarch’s book of songs had already captivated musicians, and now every verse of it, and some of its pieces, had been set to music several times. In world literature, Petrarch’s poems have been set to music more completely than those of any other poet. There were also small lyrics by unknown poets that, because they contained a simple and lasting feeling, shook the strings of every heart and called the strings of every instrument to respond, for example:

I saw beautiful girls under the summer trees

That one borrowed leaves and flowers from another,

And all murmured weaving flower crowns.

Among those charming sister readers, the most beautiful girl

Turned her charming eyes to me and said: “Take!”

I stood speechless like a lost lover and said nothing.

She read my heart and gave me her beautiful flower crown;

So I am her slave until the grave.

Composers chose the complete and complex art of the motet for these poems. The “motet” was a polyphony in which all four parts—which were sung with four or eight voices—instead of three parts being overshadowed by one part, had equal value, and all the complex intricacies of counterpoint and fugue turned the four independent melody branches into one harmonious branch. Thus the Italian madrigal of the sixteenth century—one of the most beautiful flowers of Italian art—bloomed. Music, which in Dante’s time was the servant of poetry, had now become its equal partner, so much so that it no longer obscured the words and did not darken the feeling. Rather it unified the two with music that aroused the soul together and with its technical skill delighted the minds of the educated.

Almost all the great composers of sixteenth-century Italy, even Palestrina, sometimes devoted their art to madrigal making. Philippe Verdelot, one of the French who lived in Italy, and an Italian named Costanzo Festa, share equally in the honor of creating this new form between 1520 and 1530; shortly after these two, Arcadelt, a Flemish musician residing in Rome, whose name appears in Rabelais’s work, entered the field. In Venice, Adrian Willaert retired from leading the choir to make the greatest madrigals of the time.

The madrigal was usually sung without the accompaniment of a musical instrument. There were many musical instruments, but only the organ had the audacity to accompany the human voice. Instrumental music in the early sixteenth century arose from forms of music that were specific to dance and group songs. Thus, the pavane, saltarello, and saraband came out of the state of accompanying dance and became instrumental pieces; and madrigal music, which was performed without singing, became an instrumental melody that was the distant ancestor of the sonata and therefore the origin of the symphony.

The organ in the fourteenth century had developed almost as much as today. Its pedal was built in Germany and the Netherlands in that century and shortly afterward became common in France and Spain; Italy delayed accepting it until the sixteenth century. At that time most large church organs had two or three keyboards with a number of “stops” and “couplers.” The large church organs themselves were works of art designed, carved, and painted by masters. The same interest in form was applied to making other musical instruments. The lute, the favorite musical instrument of homes, was made of wood and ivory; it was pear-shaped and had holes with beautiful designs for sound resonance; its neck was decorated with silver or brass; and its tuning pegs formed a right angle with its neck. A beautiful woman who had a lute on her lap and plucked it was an image that disturbed every sensitive Italian. The harp, cittern, psaltery, dulcimer, and guitar were also at the fingertips of musicians.

For those who preferred bowing to plucking, there were viols of various sizes, including the “tenor” type called viola da braccio that was held on the arm, and its “bass” type called viola da gamba that was held beside the leg. The viola da gamba was what later became the cello, and the viol around 1540 became the violin. Wind instruments were less common than stringed instruments. The Renaissance had the same objection as Alcibiades to playing music by puffing the cheeks; nevertheless, the flute, pipe, bagpipe, trumpet, horn, and flageolet existed. Percussion instruments—drum, tambourine, cymbals, tambourine, and castanets—added their noise to group music. All musical instruments had an Eastern origin, except the keyboard that, in addition to the organ, was added to other instruments to indirectly strike or pull the strings. The oldest of these keyboard instruments, the clavichord, appeared in the twelfth century and had caused a stir in Bach’s time; in this instrument, the strings were vibrated with brass jacks that were activated by the keys. In the sixteenth century, the harpsichord or harpsichord replaced it, whose strings were struck with a quill tip, or leather attached to wooden plectrums. When the keys were pressed, these plectrums rose.

All these instruments were still subordinate to the voice, and the great artists of the Renaissance were singers. But in the baptism of Alfonso of Ferrara in 1477, there is talk of a feast in the Schifanoia Palace in which a concert was performed by a hundred trumpeters, pipers, and tambourine players. In the sixteenth century, the government of Florence hired an official music band of which Cellini was a member. In this period concerts were given—but still for the aristocratic minority. On the other hand, solo playing reached a mad degree. People always went to church not to pray, but to hear the performance of a famous organist like Squarcialupi or Orcagna. When Pietrobono played the lute at the court of Borso in Ferrara, the souls of the listeners, according to report, flew to the other world. Great players were comfortable and popular in their time and did not expect posthumous fame, but in their lifetime they enjoyed considerable fame.

The theoretical science of music appeared a century after its practical aspect: players invented, masters criticized, and then approved. At the same time, the principles of polyphony, counterpoint, and fugue were created for ease of teaching and transmission. The main aspect of Renaissance music was not theoretical or even technical advances, but its increasing secularization. In the sixteenth century, what made advances and experiments possible was not religious music, but madrigals and court music. Alongside philosophy and literature, and by reflecting the pagan aspect of Renaissance art and the lax morality, sixteenth-century Italian music was freed from church supervision and found an incentive in love poetry; the ancient struggle between religion and sexual acts ended for a while with the victory of Eros. The domination of Mary ended and the elevation of woman began. But in both cases, music was the servant of the queen.

An Overview of the Situation

Was the morality of Renaissance Italy really worse than that of other countries of that time? Comparison in this regard is very difficult, because every view is tied to preference and selection. The age of Alcibiades in Athens had many parallels to the immoralities of the Renaissance age in sexual relations and politics; at that time also abortion was carried out on a large scale and there were educated courtesans; Greece of that age also at one time freed reason and instincts, and the Sophists who were like Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic attacked morality as weakness. Perhaps (in these cases our judgment is limited to vague influences) individual violence was less in ancient Greece than in Renaissance Italy, and religious and political corruption was also somewhat less. Throughout a full century of Roman history—from Caesar to Nero—we see more corruption in government and worse failure in marriage of that time than in the Renaissance; but even at that time many Stoic virtues were in the character of the Romans; Caesar, with all his conflicting ability and eagerness in bribery and love-making, was the greatest general in a nation of generals.

The individualism of the Renaissance was another direction of its intellectual vitality, but, compared to the collective spirit of the Middle Ages, it had an unsuitable situation in terms of ethics and politics. Political deception, betrayal, and crime were as common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France, Germany, and England as in Italy; but those countries were intelligent enough not to produce a Machiavelli to explain and expose the principles of statecraft in that way. Manners, not morality, were harsher north of the Alps than south of it—except for a small class in France whose members still preserved the best aspect of chivalry. Examples of this class were the knight Bayard and Gaston de Foix. The French, if they had an equal opportunity, showed as much talent for adultery as the Italians; see how the French “chose” syphilis; also pay attention to sexual mixing in French romances; consider the twenty-four mistresses of Duke Philip of Burgundy, as well as Agnès Sorel and Diane de Poitiers, who were mistresses of French kings, and then read Brantôme’s book as well.

Germany and England in the two fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were so poor that they could not compete with Italy in moral corruption. Therefore, travelers who traveled from those two countries to Italy were amazed by the moral laxity in Italian life. Luther, who visited Italy in 1511, concluded thus: “If hell exists, Italy is built on it, and I heard this myself in Rome.” The astonishing judgment of Roger Ascham, the English scholar who traveled to Italy around 1550, is famous:

I myself was once in Italy, but thank God my stay in that country was only nine days; nevertheless, in that short time, I saw the freedom to commit sin in that land in such a way that I had not seen in our high city, London, during nine years. I saw sin so free in that city that not only did it remain unpunished, but no one paid attention to it, just as in London wearing shoes or slippers instead is not deserving of blame. I then mention this proverb of the others: “An English Italian is the devil incarnate.”

We are more aware of Italy’s corruption than that of Europe beyond the Alps, because we know Italy better and the Italian laity made little effort to hide their moral corruption and sometimes wrote books in defense of it. Nevertheless, Machiavelli, who wrote such a book, considered Italy “more corrupt than all countries, and after that France and Spain”; he praised the Germans and Swiss as still possessing many of the masculine virtues of ancient Rome. With caution, we can conclude that Italy had fallen into immorality because it was richer and its government was weaker and the law had less control in it; and also because it was more advanced in intellectual development—that is, in a development that causes moral disruption.

The Italians made praiseworthy efforts to prevent that disruption. The most futile of these efforts were the enactment of restrictive regulations that in almost every city-state prohibited the wearing of clothing contrary to chastity; but the pride of men and women with a mysterious persistence prevailed over the occasional strictness of the law. The popes severely condemned moral corruption, but in some cases were carried away by the flow; their efforts to remove abuses in the Church were nullified by the laxity of the clergy, or their efforts to preserve their own interests; the popes themselves were rarely so wicked that history has described them, but they were more attached to reviving their political power than to restoring the moral integrity of the Church. Guicciardini says: “In this corrupt age of ours, the goodness of a pope is praised when it does not exceed the wickedness of other men.” The bold efforts for reform by the great preachers of the time like Saint Bernardino of Siena, Roberto da Lecce, Saint Giovanni da Capistrano, and Savonarola were usual. Their sermons and their listeners were part of the character of the age. They condemned sin with such an exciting description and detail that it increased their popularity; they invited heroes to abandon revenge and live in purity; they urged governments to free indigent debtors and return exiles to their homeland; they brought stubborn sinners back to observing sacred rites that had long been abandoned by them.

But even such powerful preachers failed. Instincts that had been formed over a hundred thousand years of hunting and savagery emerged from a moral gap—morality that had lost the backing of religious faith, a respected authority, and a firm law. That great Church that once ruled over kings could no longer rule itself and purify itself. The gradual destruction of political freedom in the countries had slowed that civic sense that had caused the freedom and nobility of medieval societies; and individualism had taken the place of the population of citizens. Deprived of the right to participate in government, and intoxicated by wealth, people turned to the pursuit of pleasure, and foreign invasion suddenly surprised them in the heat of pleasure. The city-states for two centuries had used their forces, tricks, and betrayals against each other; now it was impossible for them to unite against a common enemy. Preachers like Savonarola, who had found all their pleas for reform fruitless, wished for a heavenly calamity for Italy; they predicted the destruction of Rome and the ruin of the Church. France, Spain, and Germany, tired of paying tribute to make possible the wars of the Papal States and the luxuries of Italian life, looked with envy and wonder at the peninsula that had now lost will and power and whose beauty and wealth aroused the desire for aggression and plunder. Birds of prey gathered to eat the Italian hen.