Chapter IV: Part 4

born in 1548 in the magnificent palace which her father, Bartolommeo Cappello, had built for himself near the Ponte Storto. Her mother died when Bianca was a little child, a misfortune which probably had no very great influence on the girl’s education or character, seeing how little the Venetian ladies occupied themselves with their children. She received the usual teaching, and learned to read and write after a fashion, and such of her letters as have been preserved show that her writing was anything but good. No doubt she had the usual number of pet birds and lap-dogs to play with, and plenty of sweetmeats, and when she was sixteen she was very like other girls of her class and age.

In Italy young girls are taught not to look out of the window in town. Bianca was terribly bored, and she looked out of the window. Opposite her father’s palace was a house occupied by two Florentine burghers, uncle and nephew, Bonaventuri by name, who represented the great Tuscan banking-house of Salviati.

Bianca looked out of her window, dreaming, no doubt, of the dancing lessons which she would be allowed to have when she should be married, and of other similar and harmless frivolities; and young Pietro Bonaventuri also looked out of the window, neglecting his ledgers.

The girl was very lonely and excessively bored. She never left the palace except to go with her father

[Sidenote: _Galliccioli, iii. 210._]

to their villa in Murano for a few weeks in the fine season. She was not even taken to church, because, some eighty years, earlier, a young girl called Giovanna di Riviera, when going to mass with her mother on the morning of the third of March 1482, had been picked up and literally carried off by a too enterprising lover. After that, young girls of good birth were not allowed to go to church, and mass was said for them in a little chapel at home.

Bianca was so terribly bored that she began to make signs to Pietro from her window. She had nothing else to do. One of her most important occupations was to sun her hair on the high ‘altana.’ That was a real pleasure, for the palace was gloomy, though it was new, and her room felt like a prison cell; but she could not be always sunning her hair.

The young banker’s clerk responded to her signals of distress with alacrity, and a dumb love affair began, apparently highly approved by the youth’s uncle, who was a man of business. On the night

[Sidenote: _1564._]

between the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth of December the two eloped and got away from Venice without being caught.

Bartolommeo Cappello’s appeal to the Council of Ten is extant. I give the most interesting part of it:--

‘I shall here expose, and not without tears, the cruel and atrocious deed of which I was the victim on the night of December the twenty-ninth. The scoundrel Pietro Bonaventuri, with the consent of his uncle, Giovanni Battista, and of accomplices whom I know not ... entered my house, which is almost opposite his, and carried off my only daughter, sixteen years old; he first took her to his house and then hid her from place to place, to my great dishonour and that of all my family.’

The document goes on in a strain of lamentation, and ends with the request that the Council of Ten should set a price on the head of the seducer, and bring the girl back to be locked up in a convent; and the unhappy father offered a prize of six thousand lire to any one who would bring him Pietro Bonaventuri, alive or dead. The letter expresses more hatred of the lover than sorrow for the lost child.

The Ten proceeded in the matter without delay; Pietro’s uncle was thrown into prison, and died there soon afterwards of a putrid fever. Bianca’s woman-servant and the latter’s husband, who was a gondolier, and who had, of course, both been acquainted with the plan of her flight, were arrested and tortured; as for Pietro and Bianca, they had been already some time in Florence, where they learned that they had both been condemned to death by default. The Ten had proceeded against the insignificant banker’s clerk with terrible energy.

But Bianca, who had been so dreadfully bored, now had too much to do. Pietro’s affairs did not prosper, and after selling the jewels she had brought with her, she was obliged to work with her hands in his house, which was not at all what she had bargained for. Chance favoured her, however, and she helped chance as well as she could, and succeeded in attracting the notice of Francesco de’ Medici. He was the son of Cosmo, the Grand Duke, and the brother of Isabella, then not yet drowned in her own basin by Paolo Giordano Orsini, and of Cardinal Ferdinando, who afterwards poisoned his brother and became Grand Duke. Francesco lost his heart to the beautiful Bianca, and she had no objection to winning it; Pietro Bonaventuri, who was a man of business instincts, but not sufficiently cautious, had no objection either. But old Cosmo, the Duke, was much scandalised by his son’s behaviour, though he himself had been accused of nothing less than loving his own daughter Isabella, and he remonstrated with Francesco.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘that I do not wish to weary you with preaching, but when things go too far you must learn what I think of you.’

Francesco learned, but does not seem to have been much affected by the knowledge, for he presently installed Bianca and her complaisant husband almost under the same roof with his wife. Pietro, however, was really so superfluous that he was soon suppressed, after which his widow occupied an official position in

the court of Tuscany as the acknowledged mistress of the heir to the throne. Francesco now attempted to get a reversal of the sentence passed on Bianca by the Council of Ten, and employed an influential person to plead the cause; but it was thought improper that such a case should be treated in the name of old Cosmo while he insisted on ignoring Bianca’s existence. Cosmo died in 1574, but still nothing was done.

It may be doubted whether any woman in Bianca’s situation ever went to such extremes of treachery and effrontery. Her victim, the gentle Archduchess Giovanna of Austria, Francesco’s wife, died at last in 1578, possibly without being helped out of the world, and Francesco married Bianca secretly two months later; but the marriage was not announced to the people until the year of mourning was over. Bianca was Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

The effect of the news in Venice was magical. The Senate made the following curious declaration:--

‘The Grand Duke of Tuscany having deigned to choose as his consort the lady Bianca Cappello, of noble Venetian family, endowed with such great qualities that we judge her worthy of that dignity, it is but right that our Republic should exhibit its satisfaction at the honour conferred upon it by this important and prudent decision of the said Grand Duke. We therefore decree that the aforesaid illustrious and puissant lady, Bianca Cappello, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, be declared the adopted and beloved daughter of our Republic.’

Bianca’s father, who, being a good Venetian, was almost as good a man of business as Salviati’s murdered clerk, and much more prudent, wrote a letter full of touchingly tender feeling to the daughter whom he had cursed so loudly and so long; he and his sons, Bianca’s brothers, were made Knights of the Golden Stole, and all the records of the scandalous trial that had taken place fifteen years earlier were burnt. Bianca’s public marriage and coronation took place on the twelfth of October 1579, and the Republic sent two ambassadors and the patriarch Grimani to show the Grand Duchess that all old scores were forgotten. She was thirty-one years old.

We know even more than is necessary of Bianca’s life and intrigues. She survived her triumph eight years, till she and her ill-gotten husband died of poison within a few hours of each other; but whether the drug was administered by the Cardinal Ferdinando, Francesco’s brother, or whether the two meant to give it to him and took it by mistake, is not clear. He himself declared that he had not poisoned anybody. It is at least certain that he would not allow Bianca to be interred in the Medici vault, but had her privately buried in the crypt of San Lorenzo.

The Venetian Republic did not go into mourning for its ‘well-beloved adopted daughter,’ since it was best not to quarrel with the Cardinal Grand Duke, who had probably suppressed her, though his physician made an autopsy and assured the public that she had died of frightful excesses of all sorts.

The moral of this unpleasing tale is that the manner of bringing up Venetian girls in the sixteenth century was not of a kind to develop their better instincts, for there is nothing to show that Bianca Cappello was very different from other girls of her time, except in the great opportunities for doing harm which fell to her share.

Probably the most enjoyable weeks of a noble Venetian girl’s life were those which preceded her marriage, and were chiefly spent in the preparation of her wedding outfit. The age was eccentric as to dress; it was the time of the huge Elizabethan ruffle and hoops; in Venice it was especially the time of clogs.

The latter had been introduced in the fourteenth century on account of the mud in the still unpaved

[Sidenote: _Urbain de Gheltof, Calzature._]

streets, and they continued to be worn and grew to monstrous dimensions after their usefulness had very much decreased. It became the rule that the greater the lady was, the higher her clogs must be, till they turned into something like stilts, and she could no longer walk except leaning on the shoulders of two servants. In China, the Chinese men, as distinguished from the Tartars, encourage the barbarous breaking of girls’ feet, because it makes it impossible for them to gad about the town when they are older, and still less to run away. The Venetian noblemen approved of clogs for the same reason.

M. Yriarte tells how a foreign ambassador, who was once talking with the Doge and his counsellors in 1623, observed that little shoes would be far more convenient than the huge clogs in fashion. One of the counsellors shook his head in grave disapproval as he answered: ‘Far too convenient, indeed! Far too much so.’

The civic museum in Venice contains two pairs of clogs, one of which is twenty inches in height, the other seventeen. Some were highly ornamented, and the Provveditori alle Pompe made sumptuary regulations against adorning them with over-rich embroidery or with fine pearls. At the same time, shoemakers were warned that they would be liable to a fine of twenty-five lire for any pair of clogs not of proper dimensions and becoming simplicity. Yet they continued to be worn of extravagant size and excessively ornamented till the end of the seventeenth century, when they suddenly sank to nothing, so that a clever woman of the time complained that the Venetian ladies were beginning to wear shoes no thicker than a footman’s.

They were especially affected by the nobles, for the burgher class wore them of much more moderate size. Altogether the life of the burghers’ wives was far more enjoyable; they occupied themselves with music and painting; they held gatherings at which men and women really exchanged ideas, and ‘academies’ at which women with a turn for poetry or science could compare themselves with the most gifted men of Venice.

The most alive of the noble women of the sixteenth century, the one of whom we have the most vivid impression, was assuredly Bianca Cappello, who was a monster of iniquity. The others, who had not her opportunities for great crime, all seem like lay figures, or common odalisques, who lived a sensuous existence that was never disturbed by an idea. But the burgher women amused themselves, and thought, and wrote, and sometimes even allowed themselves a little sentiment.

As for the women of the people, we know nothing about them, as there are no documents regarding them, but it seems probable that they were, on the whole, both happy and honest.

There was one more category of women in Venice, as elsewhere, a class that numbered eleven thousand six hundred and fifty-four members, towards the end of the century, all young, many of them fair, all desirous of pleasing, and all, strange to say, present at every public festival--the class of those who were outside of class, the gay and shameless free. A Venetian of those days made a catalogue ‘of all the chief and most honoured courtesans of Venice ... their names ... the lodgings where they live ... and also the amount of the money to be paid by noblemen and others who desire to enter into their good graces.’ This list is dedicated ‘to the most magnificent and gracious Madam Livia Azzalina, my most respected patroness and lady ... the princess of all Venetian courtesans.’ Moreover, at the end of the pompous dedication, the writer, who signs only his initials, adds that he kisses the gay lady’s ‘honoured hands.’

Some authors, taking this for a catalogue made out by the government, inform us that the Venetian Senate always gave courtesans the title of ‘deserving.’ Lord Orford refuted this calumny in a curious pamphlet quoted by Mr. Horatio Brown in his valuable and delightful _Venetian Studies_. The catalogue contains two hundred and fifteen names; at number two hundred and four stands the name of the famous Veronica Franco--‘that skilled writer of the sonnet and curiously polished verses which say so little and say it so beautifully,’ says Mr. Brown.

Tassini tells an anecdote in point. Two gentlemen were walking one day over the bridge near the Church of Saint Pantaleo, and they were confiding to each other their conjugal troubles. ‘Do you know who is the only honest woman in Venice?’ asked one of them. ‘There she is!’ He painted to a little marble head which is still visible in the front of a house below the bridge. The story went the rounds, and the bridge itself was re-christened ‘Il Ponte di Donna Onesta.’

The elegance of the gay ladies was incredible, and it was in order to be distinguished from them that respectable women little by little adopted the black silk gown and veil which they wore to the end of the Republic. The veil was black for married women and white for young girls.

I find in some statistics for the year 1581 the following statement as to the women of the better classes. There were 1659 patrician ladies, 1230 noble girls, 2508 nuns, and 1936 women of the burgher class. What could they do against 11,654? The note adds that all the others were women of the people.

VI

A FEW PAINTERS, MEN OF LETTERS, AND SCHOLARS

According to some trustworthy authorities, Raphael, Martin Luther, and Rabelais were born in the same year. The fact that they were certainly contemporaries with each other and with many other men of genius of contradictory types is one of the principal features of that most contradictory age. Signor Molmenti compares the gifts of Carpaccio and the two Bellini to rays that warm and gladden, those of Titian and Tintoretto to lights that dazzle but give no heat. In two centuries that immense change in art had taken place; from having spoken to the soul it had come to appeal to the eye.

The best painters of the fifteenth century touch us, and remain impersonal to us. What do we know, for instance, of Carpaccio’s dreams or struggles or sufferings while he was painting his great picture of Saint Ursula and her maiden company? We gaze upon those virgin faces, those crowns of martyrdom, those tenderly smiling women’s lips, those almost childlike gestures, and they touch us deeply. Perhaps we should like to ask them the secret of Carpaccio’s melancholy soul. But the lips move not, nor do the eyes answer; the eleven thousand maidens seem rather to beckon us away to that place of refreshment, light and peace, where we may hope that the great painter’s sadness ended at last. They tell us not of him, nor of themselves, but of heaven.

A hundred years have gone by, and still artists paint pictures; but they tell us no longer of anything but their own selves, their own lives, their own passions. It is the world that has changed; perhaps it is not faith that is gone, faith the evidence of things unseen, but most assuredly belief has taken flight and left men sceptical, the belief which is the mother of all bright dreams, and which must see in order to believe, if only in imagination, and, believing, cannot fail to see.

The time had come when the artists were interesting for their own sakes as well as for what they did, and when the reporter-chronicler thought it worth while to note every anecdote of their daily lives, to put down the names of their models, to tell us who sat to them for their Madonnas. And those names are mostly names of good and honest women, and we know to a nicety why they chose this face for one purpose and that for another. There is an end of all the legends of saintly heads begun by the artist and finished before morning by an angel’s hand. There is an end, too, of dreams of refreshment, light and peace. The artists of the sixteenth century are the most human of mankind, the most subject to humanity’s passions, its weaknesses and even its madness, and their works bear the stamp of the sensuous naturalism in which they lived.

The patrician Alvise Pisani possessed a beautiful house at San Cassian, standing on a tongue of land called Biri Grande. From the embrasured windows Murano could be seen, and the island of San Cristoforo, and of Pace; beyond these, in the distance, rose the tall tower of Torcello, and a dark line along the water marked the forest of the distant island called Deserto; to the left rose the Euganean Hills, to the right stretched a long beach of gleaming sand. The fishermen used to say that when the mysterious glow spread over the waters of the lagoon at night, the Fata Morgana had floated up the Adriatic and was bathing in the dark.

All those things might be seen from the windows of Alvise Pisani’s house; and there dwelt Titian, no longer the thoughtless gallant of his earlier days, but grave now, stately and magnificent. Violante is forgotten, he lives honourably with his wife Cecilia, but he

still keeps his love of conversation, his luxurious tastes, his lordly manner; and now he feels himself the equal of the great of the earth, and it amuses him to exchange letters with princes. For secretaries he has poets, historians, and even a cardinal; he is the Titian who will allow an emperor to stoop for the brush that has fallen from his hand. But few men ever had such grace and winning charm, and his house is ever open to his countless friends, a place of gathering, of wit and of good talk, where ladies are received, some of whom a later age will call blue-stockings, ladies who are members of learned academies, and ladies that play the lute.

Such was Titian, and such the house in which he was rarely alone. He had among many friends two at least with whom he was really intimate, the sculptor Sansovino, and Pietro Aretino the man of letters. The former was the friend of his heart and of his artistic intelligence; the latter he himself regarded as a sort of wild beast whom he had tamed and whom he kept to frighten his rivals and his enemies. He could not let a day go by without seeing both, and the three were generally together. If one of them was asked to dinner, he invariably begged his host to invite the other two.

They certainly did not resemble one another. Aretino was an adventurer who had tried most things: in his boyhood he had forged and stolen; in his young prime he had been a renegade monk, and then a courtier; in his maturity, to use one of his own expressions, he earned his living by the sweat of his ink. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had hired a house for

[Sidenote: _Tassini, under Carbon._]

him at the Riva del Carbon, for sixty soldi yearly, on the Grand Canal, and it was there that he followed an occupation which procured him all the necessaries and some of the luxuries of life. He made it his business to address the most abjectly flattering panegyrics to eminent persons, and even to sovereigns like Francis I. and the Emperor Charles V., and they rewarded him with presents of money or old wine. Or if some unlucky aspirant to office was in need of popularity or favour, Aretino quietly explained to him that a little article from his own pen could make or mar success; and there was nothing to be done but to pay, and to pay handsomely. Between the composition of one libel and the next, the amiable Tuscan lived riotously on his latest earnings with his two daughters Adria and Austria; in plain language he was a blackmailer, a voluptuary, a man of the highest taste, and of the lowest tastes.

No one loved him, but he was generally feared, and was therefore much sought after. His house was

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Annali._]

always full, and it was said that it was impossible to go there without meeting a scholar, a soldier, and a monk. He himself said pleasantly that the steps of his house were as much worn by the feet of visitors as the pavement before the Capitol was by the cars of triumphing Roman generals. Nor was it only those that could pay blackmail who mounted the stairs. The man was full of contradictions; the poor crept up to his door and did not return empty-handed. Aretino was charitable.

He could not bear to see a child crying for cold or hunger, nor to see men or women sleeping shelterless in the streets, and often he took in under his roof pilgrims and poor wandering gentlemen. On Easter day he never failed to feed eighteen little beggar children at his table. But when he was tired of his visitors, rich or poor, he took refuge with Titian at San Cassian, for Titian was the only human being whom he loved sincerely, and all the resources of his venomous wit and cruel pen were at the disposal of this one friend. As for Titian’s other friends, Aretino spared them, but the artist’s enemies he harassed without mercy.

He was a physical coward, of course, as all such men are. He hated Jacopo Tintoretto for two reasons, first, because his growing reputation was beginning to be a source of anxiety to Titian, and secondly, because he was too poor to be blackmailed and too proud to show himself in Titian’s house with the threadbare clothes which his wife, good soul, made him wear for economy’s sake. Aretino accordingly abused him, and Tintoretto heard of it and determined to put an end to it in his own way.

One day he met Aretino in the street, stopped him, and proposed to paint his portrait. The blackmailer was delighted, as the picture would cost him nothing and would certainly be valuable, and he at once made an appointment to go to Jacopo’s studio. On the appointed day he appeared punctually, and seeing an empty canvas ready for the portrait, sat down in a becoming attitude. But the painter’s turn had come. ‘Stand up!’ he said, and Aretino obeyed. Then Tintoretto pulled out a long horse-pistol. ‘What is this?’ asked Aretino, alarmed. ‘I am going to measure you,’ replied the artist, and he proceeded to measure his adversary by the length of the pistol. ‘You are two pistols and a half high,’ he observed; ‘now go!’ and he pointed to the door. Aretino was badly frightened, and lost no time in getting out of the house; and from that day he neither wrote nor spoke any word that was not flattering to Jacopo Tintoretto.

Aretino received another lesson one day from the famous Andrea Calmo. The latter was an extremely original personage, half man of letters, half actor, whose improvised speeches in the character of Pantaloon were so remarkable as to give rise to the mistaken belief that he had invented that mask. He also wrote open letters to prominent men, as Aretino did, and published them, and as his were quite as libellous as the Tuscan’s, and sometimes even more witty, they had

[Sidenote: _Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act iv. sc. 2 (Cambridge edition, 1863)._]

an immense success. In fifty years they went through fifty editions, and there is positive proof that Shakespeare was acquainted with them, for he quotes a line and a half from one of Calmo’s works:--

Venetia, Venetia,
Chi non ti vede non ti pretia.

Calmo’s chief virtue was neither patience nor forbearance, and it appears that Aretino irritated him exceedingly. One day his nerves could

[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Studi, and Nuovi Studi._]

bear no longer with the Tuscan, and he gave vent to his feelings in an ironical open letter addressed to the object of his dislike. Here is a fragment of it:--

‘You are not a rational, natural human being, but aërial, celestial, deified, a devout man and a calm one, esteemed by all, adorned with every treasure and with all the virtues that no one being possesses, from the East to the West. You are the temple of poetry, the theatre of invention, a very sea of comparisons--and you behave in such a manner as to scare even the dead!’

Titian’s other friend, Jacopo Sansovino, the celebrated architect, was also a Tuscan by birth, but was of quite another stamp. His youth had been wild, but he had then married a woman of great beauty and refinement whose name was Paola, and who completely dominated him. The couple were often seen at the house at San Cassian, as Titian and Cecilia his wife often visited them in their dwelling in Saint Mark’s Square close by the clock tower.

Sansovino was handsome still, and rather a fashionable person, but excitable withal and a brilliant talker; his life had been saddened for some length of time by the wild doings of his son, but to his great relief the young man at last took to literature and the art of printing. The Sansovino couple also made their house the general meeting-place of many friends, as Titian did.

Though Jacopo was a Tuscan, Venice made every effort to monopolise his time and industry after he had become famous throughout Italy, and he was appointed the official architect of Saint Mark’s. He was charged with the erection of the Mint and the Library, and of

a new Loggia to replace the very simple one in which the patricians had been accustomed to gather before the meetings of the Great Council, ever since the thirteenth century. How well he succeeded in that, the beautiful construction which fell with the Campanile amply showed.

While he was at work on the Library, Titian was called to Rome to execute an important commission, and set out in the certainty that on his return he should find the building finished and his friend covered with glory. The construction grew indeed, and was soon finished, with its two stories, of Doric and Ionic architecture, and the balustrade that crowns the edifice, and the really royal staircase, and all the rest.

But unhappily, on the night of the eighteenth of December 1545, the vault of the main hall fell in, with no apparent reason. Instantly all Sansovino’s rivals raised a terrific outcry, accusing him of having neglected the most elementary rules of his art, and asserting that the accident was altogether due to his negligence and incapacity. The zealous magistrate whose duty it was to oversee the construction of public buildings did not even wait for a proper warrant, but seized Sansovino instantly and sent him to prison.

Paola was in despair, and when the news was generally known, early on the following morning, the indignation of the architect’s friends knew

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Annali._]

no bounds. In a few hours Aretino wrote a consoling letter to Paola, another to Titian, explaining to him what had happened, and a series of libellous articles against every architect in Venice except Sansovino himself. No one escaped who could be supposed to have uttered a single word against the reputation of the artist in trouble. There was a certain architect called Sanmichele, a man of great piety--greater perhaps than his talent--a frequenter of Titian’s house, a rich man, too, such as Aretino delighted to fleece. Possibly also the good old artist’s character was irritating to the evil Tuscan, who could not see why a man should be both distinguished and virtuous, nor why Sanmichele should have a special mass said when he was about to begin an important work. One of Aretino’s favourite tricks was to use the most frightful language before the mild old man, till the latter, having exhausted entreaty and finding reproach useless, was driven to buy the blasphemer’s silence with a handsome present of rare old wine.

The occasion of Sansovino’s imprisonment seemed to Aretino an excellent opportunity for venting his spleen against the devout artist, and at the same time for obtaining a lucrative return for his industry. He therefore accused Sanmichele of being the direct cause of his friend’s arrest, and the abuse heaped upon him was so virulent and so persistent that its victim was obliged to have recourse to the usual bribe, which this time consisted of a fine basket of fish.

Sansovino’s friends soon triumphed, for they were many and powerful. I do not know whether a vaulted ceiling only just constructed can suddenly collapse and fall in of itself without some fault on the part of the architect, but Sansovino was unanimously declared to be entirely innocent, and the unlucky magistrate who, with some show of reason, had ordered his arrest was thrown into prison in his place.

His brilliantly successful career continued until he was eighty years of age, when, being too old for work, he was succeeded in the post of architect to the Republic by the celebrated Palladio. After that he lived eleven years longer in the society and friendship of Titian, who was two years older then he. On the register in the church of San Basso is to be found the following entry: ‘On November the seventh 1570 died Jacopo Sansovino, architect of the Church of Saint Mark; he was ninety-one years old and he died of old age.’

Aretino’s life had come to an abrupt close fourteen years earlier. I find in Tassini under the name ‘Carbon,’ Aretino’s place of residence, a statement of the singular fact that Aretino’s death was predicted a few months before it took place, though he was at that time perfectly well. The author of the _Terremoto_, addressing the Tuscan man of letters, says: ‘In this year LVI thou shalt

[Sidenote: _1556._]

die; for the appearance of the star to the Wise Men at the birth of Our Lord was held to be a great sign, and I now hold the comet of this year to be a little sign which comes on thy account, because thou art against Christ.’ In that year Aretino actually died. It is said that his death was caused by his falling off his chair when convulsed with laughter at an abominable story, and though there may be some exaggeration about the tale, the physiognomy of the man might justify it. No one regretted him. In the State Archives of Florence a letter from a Venetian has been found which says: ‘The mortal Pietro Aretino was taken to another life on Wednesday evening at the third hour of the night by a (literally) cannonade of apoplexy, without leaving any regret or grief in any decent person. May God have pardoned him.’

Titian died six years after Sansovino, surviving to be the last of the triad of inseparable friends. He was then ninety-nine years of age, and was carried off by the plague when, judging from the picture he was painting at the time of his death, he was still in full possession of his amazing powers. Of all the victims of the terrible epidemic, amongst tens of thousands of dead, he was the only one to whom the Republic granted a public funeral.

If we ask what was the ‘social standing’ of Titian and of some of the most famous Venetians, we shall find that they were simple members of a Guild, and were reckoned with the working men. The Golden Book was the register of the nobles, the Silver Book was reserved for the class of the secretaries, that is, of the burghers or original citizens; but he who exercised an art such as painting, sculpture, or architecture, belonged to the people. Like the commonest housepainter, or the painter of gondolas and house furniture, Titian and Tintoretto were subject to the ‘Mariegola,’ or charter of their Guild, and had to pass through the degrees of apprentice and fellow-craftsman before becoming masters.

The law was that ‘no painter, either Venetian or foreign, should be allowed to sell his paintings unless he was inscribed on the register of painters and had sworn to conform to the rules of that art,’ in other words, to the charter of the Guild. Furthermore, if

he sold his work anywhere except in his shop, he was liable to a fine of ten lire.

We know that neither Titian nor any of the great artists of his time rebelled against these regulations. They were all their lives ‘brethren’ of their Guild, and every one of them was obliged to obey the chief of the corporation in all matters concerning that fraternity, though he might be a mere painter of doors and windows. It was not until the eighteenth century that the artist painters organised themselves in a separate body called the College of Painters. The examination of Paolo Veronese, which I have translated in speaking of the Holy Office, shows clearly enough what a poor opinion the authorities had of artistic inspiration.

Many writers, amongst whom Monsieur Yriarte is an exception, have told us that literature and the sciences were not cultivated with any success in Venice during the sixteenth century. It is at least true that the few who occupied themselves with those matters displayed qualities not far removed from genius.

It was very common for the great Venetian nobles to play patron to poets, painters, and architects, and almost every name that became famous in the arts and sciences recalls that of some patrician or secretary who protected the artist, the writer, or the student. The Republic was often the refuge of gifted men whom political or personal reasons had exiled from their homes. Roman, Tuscan, and Lombard celebrities spent their lives in Venice and added their glory to hers. Who remembers that Aldus Manutius was a Roman? Or that Gaspara Stampa, who is always counted as one of the best of Venetian poets, was born in Milan? The Venetians, too, showed a wonderful tact in the degree of the hospitality they accorded. One need only compare the reception Petrarch met with in the fourteenth century, which was nothing less than royal, with the good-natured toleration shown to Pietro Aretino two hundred years later. The Republic’s treatment of the two men is the measure of the distance that separates the immortal poet from the brilliant and vicious pamphleteer. If the latter spent some agreeable years in Venice, that was due much more to the protection of a few friends than to any privileges granted him by the government.

There were certainly a great many intellectual centres in Venice at that time, and one might fill many pages with the names of the so-called academies that were founded and that flourished for a time. Almost every special tendency of human thought was represented by one of them, from the Aldine, devoted enthusiastically to classic Greek, to those academies which adorned their emptiness with such titles as ‘The Seraphic,’ ‘The Uranian,’ and the like, and which gave themselves up to the most unbridled extravagance of taste. Of such follies I shall only quote one instance, which I find in Tassini under the name ‘Bernardo.’

In the year 1538 the will of that academician was opened. He therein directed his heirs to have his body washed by three famous physicians with as much aromatic vinegar as would cost forty ducats, and each physician was to receive as his fee three golden sequins absolutely fresh from the mint. The body was then to be wrapped in linen clothes soaked in essence of aloes, before being ‘comfortably’ laid to rest in a lead coffin and enclosed in one of cypress wood. The coffin was then to be placed in a marble monument to cost six hundred ducats. The inscription was to enumerate the actions and virtues of the deceased in eight Latin hexameters, of which the letters were to look tall to a spectator placed at a distance of twenty-five feet. The poet who composed the verses was to receive one sequin for each. Moreover, the history of the dead man’s family was to be written out in eight hundred verses, and seven psalms were to be composed after the manner of the Psalms of David, and twenty monks were to sing them before the tomb on the first Sunday of every month.

We read without surprise that this will was not executed to the letter, and the tolerably reasonable monument erected to Pietro Bernardo by his descendants,

twenty years after his death, may still be seen in the church of the Frari.

There were also academies which bore names, devices, and emblems of a nature that might well shock and surprise us, were they not the natural evidences of that coming decadence, moral and artistic, whereof all Italy, and Venice in particular, already bore the germs.

Amongst the great names that belong to the end of the fifteenth century, as well as to the sixteenth, hardly any has more interesting associations for scholars than that of Aldus Manutius.

The founder of the great family of scholars and printers was born at Sermoneta in the Pontifical States in 1449, and was over forty years old when he finally established himself in Venice.

[Sidenote: _Firmin-Didot, Alde Manuce._]

He had been tutor in the princely family of Pio, where he had educated the eldest son, and he himself added the name to his own, though he did not transmit it to his descendants.

One of the legends about the origin of printing tells that it was invented in the Venetian city of Feltre, by a certain Castaldi, who was robbed of his invention by Germans, presumably Faust and Guttenberg. There is probably no foundation for this tale, but it is certain that the Venetians brought the art of printing to something near perfection within a few years of its creation, and that the government protected it by laws of singular wisdom and great severity, in an age when the idea of copyright was in its infancy.

Aldus was neither a money-maker nor a man given up to ambition; he was a true artist, and cared only for perfecting his art. When he first invented the italic type he was almost beside himself with delight, and instantly applied to the Council of Ten for letters patent to forbid any imitation of his work during ten years. The petition is curious, for Aldus went as far as to suggest to the Ten the penalties to be incurred by any one who defrauded him of his rights, and they were by no means light.

He dreamed of never allowing any work to leave his press which was less than perfect at all points. When he meditated the printing of a Greek classic, he gathered about him all the most conscientious men of letters in Venice; such men as Sabellico and Sanudo, the highly accomplished Cardinal Bembo, and Andrea Navagero all worked at comparing the best texts, in order to produce one that should be beyond criticism. In the course of such profound study, learned discussions arose and conclusions were reached which were destined to influence all scholarship down to modern times. Little by little, and without any artificial encouragement or intention, the workshop of Aldus became the gravest of classical ‘academies’; a vast amount of work was done there, and a very small number of books were very wonderfully well printed.

In two years five publications appeared, among which was the first Greek edition of Aristotle’s works. That Aldus might have done better is possible, and every reader of ancient Greek must deplore the selection of type he made for printing in that language. It is ugly, unpractical, and utterly inartistic, but such was the man’s influence that he imposed it upon scholars, and it is by far the most commonly used type to this day. Aldus might have done better; but, on the other hand, the unquestionable fact stands out that no one, in those days, did half so well, and that if his Greek type is unpleasing, his italic is beautiful and has never been surpassed; finally, good copies of his best publications bring high prices at every modern sale.

He and his friends were busy men, and spent whole days shut up together, thereby rousing much curiosity, and attracting many unwelcome visitors. At last Aldus was wearied by their importunity, and the loss of time they caused became a serious matter. He composed the following notice and put it up outside his press:--

‘Quisquis es, rogat te Aldus etiam atque etiam: ut si quid est quod a se velis perpaucis agas, deinde actutum abeas: nisi tanquam Hercules defesso Atlante, veneris suppositurus humeros. Semper enim erit quod et tu agas, et quotquot huc attulerunt pedes.’

I quote the Latin from Didot. It is hardly worthy of the editor, printer, and publisher of Aristotle, but Aldus himself printed it in the preface, addressed to Andrea Navagero, which precedes the edition of Cicero’s _Rhetoric_, published in 1514. Here is a translation of it:--

‘Whoever you are, Aldus begs you again and again, if you want anything of him, to do your business with few words and then to go away quickly; unless, indeed, you come as Hercules to tired Atlas, to place your shoulders under the burden. For there will always be something to do even for you, and for as many as bend their steps hither.’

The story even goes so far as to say that Erasmus came one day to Aldus’s door with the manuscript of his _Adagia_ under his arm, but that he was disconcerted by the notice and was going away, when the great printer himself caught sight of him and made him come in.

Aldus, who was not a Venetian, was not a man of business, and did not grow rich by his work. He gave his time lavishly, for no true artist, such as he was, ever said that time was money; and his expenses were very heavy, not the least being that incurred for the fine cotton paper he got from Padua. On the other hand, he hoped to encourage learning and to disseminate a general love of the classics. Some of his prices, however, were very high; for instance, a complete Aristotle sold for eleven silver ducats, which Didot considers equal to over ninety francs in modern French money. But a copy of the Musæus, which would perhaps sell to-day for forty pounds sterling, could be bought for a little more than one ‘marcello.’

Aldus had established himself in Venice about 1490. Eight years later, a visitation of the plague decimated the population, and the great printer himself sickened of it. Believing himself all but lost, he vowed that if he recovered he would abandon his art, which would be by far the greatest thing he could give up, and would enter holy orders. He recovered, but the sacrifice was greater than he could make, though he was a good man, of devout mind. He at once addressed a petition to the Pope, begging to be released from his vow, and M. Didot discovered in the Archives of the Council of Ten the favourable answer returned by Alexander VI., who, it will be remembered, was the Borgia Pope, of evil fame. It was, of course, addressed to the Patriarch, and it reads as follows:--

Venerable Brother:

Our beloved son Aldus Manutius, a citizen of Rome, set forth to us
some time ago that when the plague was raging he, being in danger
of death, took an oath that if he escaped he would enter the holy
orders of priesthood. Seeing that since he has recovered his
health, he does not persist in his vow, and seeing that in his
condition of poverty he cannot subsist otherwise than by the work
of his hands, whereby he earned his living, now therefore he
desires to remain a layman, and we have granted his petition. We
commission you therefore and command your fraternity to absolve in
our name the said Aldus from the vow he took, if he humbly requests
you to do so, and if things stand as he says, requiring of him a
return by such other acts of piety as it shall seem good to your
conscience to impose, and this if there be no other obstacle.

Given in Rome, August the eleventh, 1498, in the sixth year of our
Pontificate.

It is characteristic of the far-reaching power of the Council of Ten that this curious document should have been found in their Archives.

One year after having been released from his vow, Aldus married Maria, daughter of Andrea Torresano. I do not knew whether an attachment which perhaps dated from before the plague could have had anything to do with the great printer’s aversion to fulfilling his vow; if so, the world is deeply indebted to his wife. There was, however, a considerable interval in his career after 1498, during which no books were issued by the Aldine press, and those belonging to the first period have a much higher value than the rest.

Possibly children were born to the couple and died between the time of their marriage and the birth of their son Paulus Manutius in 1512, three years before the death of his father Aldus. The dates show the absurdity of the story that Aldus brought up his son to be a scholar and a printer like himself. He died when that son, who was destined to be famous also, was less than four years old. He breathed his last on the sixth of January 1516, being not yet sixty-seven years old, surrounded by his faithful friends and his manuscripts. Owing to his having married so late, and to his son not having been born till thirteen years after his marriage, the lives of the father and son cover the period between 1449 and 1574, no less than one hundred and twenty-five years.

Prince Pio, his former pupil and one of the most distinguished members of the Aldine Academy, claimed the honour of burying him at Carpi, a feudal holding of the Pio family. His body was carried thither with great pomp, and he was laid in state in the church of Saint Patrinian, surrounded by books, and was finally buried in the Prince’s family vault.

Another and very original type of scholar was Marin Sanudo, whose name occurs so constantly in all writings that deal with the sixteenth century in Venice. He was of a patrician family, and

[Sidenote: _Marin Sanudo, Diario; Mutinelli, Annali._]

was so early predisposed to observe and note everything of interest that when he was only eight years old he copied the inscriptions which Petrarch had written under the pictures in the hall of the Great Council, and it is thanks to his childish industry that we know the nature of those great works which were destroyed in the fire of 1474.

As the child grew up he cultivated the habit of making notes of all he saw and heard; and, though he strictly adheres to the principle of relating daily events briefly and clearly, he constantly reveals himself to us as a man of broad views and keen sight, cautious, slightly sceptical, and thoroughly independent. As soon as he had attained the required age he was admitted to the Council, and he kept a journal of everything that happened there. It is surprising to find that a government which knew everything should allow any one such full liberty to make notes. Possibly the value of his work was not at first understood, but when it was, the manner in which appreciation showed itself was not flattering to the chronicler.

The Republic always employed a regular official historian whose business it was to narrate the deeds and misdeeds of the government in a manner uniformly pleasant to Venetian vanity. One of the most successful writers in this manner was the untrustworthy Sabellico, and when he died Marin Sanudo aspired to succeed him, being in poor circumstances, and having on several occasions rendered services to the Republic. But to his infinite mortification Cardinal Bembo was appointed to the post, and, as if to add insult to injury, Sanudo was requested to place his valuable diaries at the disposal of the new public historian. Sanudo was deeply hurt, as may be imagined, but he was poor and in debt, and the paternal government of his business-like country easily drove him to the wall. For the use of his diary, and for his promise to bequeath it to the State at his death, he accepted a pension of one hundred and fifty ducats (£112) yearly. This small stipend was not enough to lift him out of poverty. The expense of the paper which he used for his notes was a serious item in his little budget, and the binder’s bill was a constant source of anxiety. He was often obliged to borrow money, and once he was imprisoned for debt. On the latter occasion he made the following entry in his journal:--

‘December eighteenth, 1516.--On this day in the morning a dreadful thing happened to me. I was going to Saint Mark’s to hear mass as usual when I was recognised by that traitor Giovanni Soranzo, to whom I have owed a hundred ducats for ten years, and forty-seven for a debt before that. Now I had solemnly promised that I would pay him the money, but in order to shame me he had me imprisoned till next day in San Cassian. I vow to be avenged upon him with my own hands.’

Having vented his wrath on paper, Sanudo promptly forgot his sombre vows of vengeance. For many years afterwards he went backwards and forwards

between the ducal palace and his own house at San Giacomo in Orio, where he had collected books and prints to a very great value. He was almost forgotten until very recent times, when he was rediscovered in his diary, and treated with the honour he deserves by his own countrymen.

There was no university in Venice, but the government encouraged those teachers who established themselves in the city and gave instruction in their own homes. In this way they formed little schools which quarrelled with each other over definitions, syllogisms, and etymologies in the most approved fashion. There is a good instance of one of these miniature civil wars in connection with the historian Sabellico. He was

[Sidenote: _Cicogna, Iscrizioni, i. 341._]

ferociously jealous of a certain learned priest called Ignatius, who taught literature, as he did, and had many more scholars. In his lectures Sabellico attacked Ignatius furiously, and did his best to destroy his reputation. The priest on his side held his tongue, and waited for a chance of giving his hot-headed adversary a lesson. At last Sabellico published a very indifferent work, of which the priest wrote such a keen criticism that the book was a dead failure. The State historian’s rage broke out in the most violent invectives, and from that time Ignatius was his nightmare, and the mere mention of his name drove him into uncontrollable fury, until, dying at last, Sabellico realised that his hatred of the priest had been the mortal sin of his life, and on his deathbed he sent for him and asked for a reconciliation. Ignatius freely pardoned him, and even delivered a very flattering funeral oration over his body a few days later.

A distinguished man of this period who deserves mention was Federigo Badoer, who may almost be said