DOCUMENTS: THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

More documents

Recommendations

Info

preach chastity and maintain concubines. They enjoin fasting and partake of splendid feasts . . . Only look today at the prelates. They are tied to earthly vanities. They love them. The cure of souls is no longer their concern . . . In the Primitive Church the chalices were made of wood and the prelates of gold - today - chalices of gold, prelates of wood! P. Miscatelli, Savonarola (1930) 9. The story of Savonarola is a mixture of tragedy and hysteria, in which a genuine pity for man’s condition became enraveled in hate and muddled by political intrigue. His denunciation of worldliness, his childish burning of vanities, his fiery condemnation of a lazy and corrupt clergy, were part of a threnody of the life of Europe, frequently heard, frequently forgotten; but Savonarola spoke at a time when the young Piero de Medici was displaying a singular lack of his family’s genius. Behind Savonarola loomed the discontented poor, who were eager for a change, eager for secular as well as religious hope. Those families whom the Medici had excluded and despised knew how to manipulate this superlative demagogue, this being whose wild sermons could inflame a multitude. So what started in evangelism finished in political revolution. The little people, the piagnoni (snivelers) as the old oligarchs called them, became a power in the land. Popolo e Libertà frequently echoed in the Piazza . . . in Florence . . . the oligarchs disliked both the rantings of Savonarola and the government of the people; in the wings lurked the exiled Medici - they were powerful in Rome. The inevitable end came: the rack and the fagot for Savonarola, the defeat of his piagnoni; and in the fullness of time, the return of the Medici. The whole Savonarola episode is a curious mixture of idealism, ineptitude, and iniquity. Certainly Savonarola wanted a Florentine government that represented more fully the whole citizenship - the poor and the dispossessed as well as the rich and the powerful. He also hated life, grew drunk on his own megalomaniac visions, preferred prophecy to policy, and welcomed the disasters he had done so much to promote. Ignorance married to prejudice, blind hatred linked with a disgust for life, proved an unsatisfactory basis for statesmanship, even when practiced by a saint. J.H. Plumb, The Italian Renaissance (1961) 10. I judge the principal and true profession of a Courtier ought to be in feats of arms, the which above all I will have him to practice lively . . . (The Courtier should excel) . . . in those studies which they call Humanity, and . . . have not only the understanding of the Latin tongue, but also of the Greek, because of the many and sundry things that with great excellency are written in it. Let him much exercise himself in poets, and no less in orators and historiographers, and also in writing both rhyme and prose, and especially in our vulgar tongue . . . Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier (1523)
11. Naturally he must excel, but should avoid seeming to do so; above all, he must cultivate grace of movement, and this Castiglione thought could only be achieved by the practice of sprezzatura, nonchalance, “so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done and said appear to be without effort and without almost any thought about it.” Polish was as necessary as prowess, in exercises of the mind as well as the body. The gentleman was, of course, literate, knowledgeable about the classics, and eloquent . . . After the mind and body came sensibility, connoisseurship. According to Castiglione, a gentleman might even be taught to paint - as, indeed, the Greek and Roman aristocrats had been. Music and its appreciation were necessities; music composed the mind, directed thought to gentle pleasures, inculcated a love of harmony . . . The lighter expressions of art as well as the weightier were proper pastimes - dances, masques, the parade of rhetoric, and, naturally, the pursuit of love (love, however, not lust). The conquest of the heart, the possession of the mind, were a courtier’s targets . . . J.H. Plumb, The Italian Renaissance (1961) 12. . . . (Men) are ungrateful, changeable, simulators and dissimulators, runaways in danger, eager for gain; while you do well by them they are all yours; they offer you their blood, their property, their lives, their children . . . when need is far off; but when it comes near you, they turn about . . . For a man who, in all respects, will carry out only his professions of good, will be apt to be ruined amongst so many who are evil. A prince therefore who desires to maintain himself must learn to be not always good, but to be so or not as necessity may require . . . Is it better to be loved than feared, or feared than loved It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but it is much safer to be feared than loved when one of the two must be chosen. Men on the whole are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards, covetous. As long as you succeed they are yours entirely . . . Men have fewer scruples in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage, but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails . . Nevertheless, a prince should inspire fear in such a way that if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared while he is not hated, and this will be true as long as he abstains from taking the property of his subjects or his women. But when it is necessary for him to take the life of someone, he must do it with proper justification and for manifest cause, and above everything he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their heritage . . .
Page 1 and 2: DOCUMENTS: THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
Page 3: Christ is my God; Cicero is the pri
Page 7: 15. Leonardo’s notebooks . . . ar

DOCUMENTS: THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?