Travelogue 1228 – 30 December

A Ciascun’Alma 

Dante is quirky. The use to which he puts poetry is something unique. I was young when I read the “Vita Nuova”, and that is appropriate. The book is a collection of poems by a young man, a self-conscious genius, dangerous to himself, and perhaps to others. He desired to braid a story thread, upon which to string a set of poems, the works that had made his reputation. It was a story to make sense of a decade of his life, the shape of which might have left him uneasy, a period of his life he felt should be interpreted for the public. And he sculpted a story of unrequited love and the death of his beloved, of great chivalry and mystery and romance. He gave it coherence and appeal. He gave himself a mission.

Florentine society was a public one. There was essentially no private life. Someone like Dante would have accrued a set of unedited public stories that dogged him from youth, like fragmented scenes that everyone had seen, that no director had moulded into a play. At best, they contributed to various unflattering portraits that gossips traded in the marketplace. Dante wanted to be the director of an epic film, rather than stock character in a commonplace farce.

The first poem in the book is a sonnet. He wrote it when he was about 18. It was a poem he circulated among his peers, among other poets, inviting their responses. 

A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core
Nel cui cospetto ven lo dir presente,
In ciò che mi rescrivan suo parvente
Salute in lor segnor, cioè Amore.

Greetings in the name of Love, he says, to any who may see these words. He tells the story of a dream. It is three in the morning, and he sees Love walking with his, the poet’s, heart in one hand and Beatrice attending him on the other. He cheerfully bade her eat Dante’s heart. She did, and Amore left, weeping.

Dream literature is not too unusual in medieval culture, but now, recorded in a sonnet, an ornate form still new, evolved from the troubadours’ songs of devotion, and sent around for comment among the young poets of Florence, this was provocative and odd.

“To this sonnet I received many answers, conveying many different opinions; of the which one was sent by him whom I now call the first among my friends [Guido Cavalcanti], and it began thus, ‘Unto my thinking thou beheld'st all worth.’ And indeed, it was when he learned that I was he who had sent those rhymes to him, that our friendship commenced.” This is from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation in the nineteenth century.

A friendly rival, Dante da Maiano, ridiculed him, writing back in his own sonnet response that it sounded as though Dante ought to consult a doctor and have his testicles washed. This anecdote did not make it into the “Vita Nuova”.

But this is how he started. Dante’s work was always personal. He made the general particular. The god Amore took a vivid interest in him. And any description of Hell ought to be eyewitness.

Travelogue 1227 – 27 December
Cold Holiday

It’s been a cold Christmas. There is a thin layer of ice on the canal behind our building, though there is none on the rivers. The waters still dance on the River Schie, under the busy bridges, and the gulls and ducks bathe there, as though it were summer.

The skies are clear, a bright and untroubled blue, like desert skies, like polar skies, perfect as stone, though scarred by the trails of planes. The air they provide us is sharp to the taste, crisp. I cross the bridge with a gaze held up in wonder.

The streets of the city are holiday calm, a relief. I cycle through the cold, grateful for the subdued traffic. There are others. They are bundled up against the chill. They lumber along like bears on their delicate bikes, in heavy coats and hats. They hold the handlebars with gloves. And they pedal less as though they have somewhere to go and more as though they are curious or lost. They might never arrive, though they have left early.

Passing over the river again, I travel down the road made of bricks. The trees have done their work, spreading roots underneath the layer of human work, and rippling the surface, making the bricks buckle and testing the tires of the bicycles that pass there. The bike rattles. I navigate the wrinkled map of the road, as I have done a hundred times before. There is no hurry.

Travelogue 1226 – 25 December

Next Came Padre Mio

And then came Guido Guinizelli, Bolognese poet of the mid-thirteenth century, probably born about a decade before the death of Giacomo da Lentini, and a decade after the birth of Dante. Guinizelli never met the great Florentine, Dante Alighieri, in life, but they met in Purgatory. 

Dante was passing through the seventh terrace of Purgatory, where lust is punished, Someone volunteered to explain to him what he was seeing, and when Dante discovered the name of that soul was Guido Guinizelli,

 

quand’io odo nomar sé stesso il padre
mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai
rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre;

 

he is humbled and grateful. He called him his father, and father to all those who wrote in the dolce stil novo.

 

But what was the substance of this “sweet, new style” that Dante celebrated? It was beautiful language, of course, but it was more. Consider Giacomo’s lovely sonnet, “Molti amadori la lor malatia,” and the case he built for the patient’s diagnosis. This penchant for constructing logical argument continues in Italian poetry. It appeals to examples from nature, to primitive scientific observation, and to philosophy.

 

Consider the beginning of this canzone by Guinizelli, one of the most famous poems of the era,

 

Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore,
com’ a la selva augello in la verdura,
nè fe’ amore avanti gentil core,
nè gentil core avanti amor natura;
ch’ adesso che fue il sole
sì tosto lo splendore fue lucente,
nè fue avanti il sole;

In two lines, he compares love retreating into the heart to a bird retreating into the woods. And then he spends five lines exploring a rather fine distinction. Neither does love come before the heart, he says, nor the heart before love; just as light does not precede the sun, nor the sun precede light.

 

It is in precise constructions like this that the roots of our sonnet spread. Poets compare and contrast; they offer definitions and delicate analyses. And these, in turn, define the poet. This makes the sonnet the poetic form of the Renaissance and Age of Science. Michelangelo wrote sonnets, as did Galileo.

Travelogue 1225 – 20 December 

The First Ever?

There might be a contender for first sonnet ever written, or at least, earliest surviving sonnet. It’s written by Giacomo da Lentini somewhere near eight hundred years ago. What survives of Giacomo the Notary’s sonnets escape from their own time only thanks to Tuscan collectors, and they survive only in Tuscan translation. None have arrived in the original Sicilian dialect.

No one from our time would dare speculate about which of Giacomo’s sonnets came first. It takes the optimism of an American writing in the 1920s, indulging in some Victorian romanticism, to think this way. Good for him. It’s fun.

To be fair, Mr Wilkins of Southern Methodist University admits in his short article that it can be little more than guesswork. He applies himself transparently. There were only 25 surviving sonnets. Some are parts of sonnet cycles, so we can eliminate many based on sequence. Some apply rhyme schemes that can be deduced to be later experiments. Some show other characteristics that seem experimental, like equivocal and internal rhymes (though I wonder how he applies this analysis when all poems have been translated into Tuscan). He thinks it unlikely that the first sonnet would be anything too sophisticated or philosophical. It has to be a love poem, since the roots of the form are the songs of troubadours. Of the two sonnets that have not been eliminated, one is already complaining about his lady’s response to him. The final one must be the best candidate.

“Molti amadori la lor malatia,” Giacomo writes, “portano in core….” Many lovers carry their sickness in their hearts, he says. The sickness, or “distress” according to the translation Mr Wilkins has quoted, is, of course, love or the effect of love. The sonnet must be a story of love: this is thirteenth-century Sicilian poetry, written for the court, based on Occitan tradition. So, yes, the topic is amore. And who becomes impatient with that? Who questions the Renaissance painters this way? “Oh, Leonardo, not another ‘Last Supper’?”

The little story inside the sonnet is that the narrator is helpless to hide his love. Amore has made him powerless. He is paralysed. That is the effect of the malatia, the distress of being in love. He can:

nè di meve non ò neiente a fare,

Se non quanto madonna mia voria,

ch’ella mi pote morte e vita dare.

 

He can neither move nor do anything, unless his beloved wills it, she who holds the power of life or death.

 

As we know, the argumentation must change in the final sestet. The octave describes the symptoms of his malatia, and now we must review the result. In the volta, he tells us, “Su’ è lo core, e suo sono tutto quanto.” His heart is hers; everything of him is hers. He continues:

 

e chi non à comsiglio da suo core,

non vive imfra la gente como deve.

 

And he who has lost the counsel of his won heart cannot live in society as he should. It’s like a doctor’s summation of a patient’s case.

 

Lovely stuff. And it is precisely that clinical, analytical nature of the narrative that becomes a part of the code of the sonnet, and ties this form so closely to the development of the Renaissance.

Travelogue 1224 – 13 December
The Notary

We can actually trace the birth of the sonnet back to one person in one time in one familiar place, in Sicily. In those days, Sicily was not yet a subject of Spanish royalty. Spain was not even Spanish yet. It was the thirteenth century, and Spain was a collection of smaller kingdoms, one being Muslim. Sicily had passed from Norman rule to German. It was the fiefdom of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who had been born in Italy and raised in Palermo. The Normans before him had unified Sicily and made the kingdom one of Europe’s wealthiest. Frederick was a product of Norman marriages into great European families, and he himself was one of those rulers who popped up in European history, a nexus of all the intermarrying, suddenly in possession of vast swaths of Europe.

There was a notary in the court in Palermo named Giacomo da Lentini, the guiding spirit among a group of active poets, favourites of the emperor, a royal who himself dabbled in poetry. Giacomo wrote many “songs” of the traditional variety, including the eight-line strambotto, a sweet series of rhyming couplets that was usually accompanied by the lute. It was best suited to witty messages of love or satire.

Giacomo the notary also experimented with other forms. He tried adding a turn of six more lines onto the strambotto, with a different rhyme scheme and a different the pace. The resulting “turn” between the two sections, the volta, suggested all sorts of possibilities. The second section could be a new perspective, a change of topic, or even an answer to the question posed in the first lines. This little song, the “sonnet”, became the form most suited to the age, a form that poets turned to for centuries as the most refined vehicle for their most delicate feelings. Some say the sonnet was the very voice of the Renaissance. Some have suggested that the form was indeed a kind of catalyst for the Renaissance.

Maybe half a century after Giacomo had died, Dante spotted the poet Bonagiunta Orbicciani in Purgatory. Bonagiunta had also been a notary, and he had lived in Lucca. He had bridged the generations between Giacomo and Dante. He also bridged the cultures, Sicilian to Tuscan, writing poetry in Tuscan dialect, inspired by the Sicilian styles. Bonagiunta spoke to him:

 

“O frate issa vegg’io,” diss’elli, “il nodo

che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne

di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’ odo!”

 

With regret, he sees how they had fallen short of the “Sweet New Style” that Dante propounded, that Dante’s generation, after Guido Guinizelli’s model, had perfected. Bonagiunta lists himself and the Notary and Guittone d’Arezzo as those who had failed to reach Dante’s heights. But, of course, that Bonagiunta has a cameo in the “Purgatorio” at all suggests that Dante knew what he owed to the Notary and his other thirteenth-century antecedents.

Travelogue 1223 – 8 December
Father Figures

So here we have the strange heritage of Vittoria, of savagery and refinement: Pompeo, her cousin, leading troops into the Vatican in thirsty vengeance, and then returning to a palace to eat figs and write delicate poetry; her husband, her “bel sole”, Fernando, a vicious man in combat, bloodthirsty and self-serving.

Her father, Fabrizio, was a famous condottiero in his own right, fighting against the French of his day for the Spanish and for the pope. The French king then was Louis XII, and the issue was, again and still, the French king’s right to the throne of Naples. Louis was a bit more successful than his successor. He did manage to obtain the crown, though he only held it for three years. He traded it away in 1504, when the pressure from the Spanish became too much.

Fabrizio was such a famed warrior in his day that he was appropriated by Machiavelli to be a character in his book, “The Art of War”. The book takes the form of a dialog, in good Renaissance form, and Fabrizio is more or less the tutorial spirit in that dialog, lecturing the others on ancient Roman discipline and strategy. In one sense, the dialog was an extension of the humanist hunger for all things ancient; in another, it was a concession to the modern spirit, in which large nations states would deploy large, standing armies and bring to heel the small feudal and mercantile states. Not for much longer would suffice the plucky bands of knights, citizens or mercenaries that skirmished through the Middle Ages.

In a similar way, cultural production was being regimented, lined up in neat rows of well-regulated formats, and the Italians were marking the boundaries. By the end of the fifteenth century, literary forms were firmly decided. By the end of the next century, musical ones would be. In Vittoria’s case, the forms for poetry were well-established; as evidenced by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s tract on the sonnet, her favoured format was already much the fashion by the time of her birth. The nobility were fluent in sonnet structure, as though in a courtly language, specifically in the Petrarchan sonnet structure. Petrarch was their guiding light.

Called the father of the Renaissance, Petrarch did not originate the sonnet, or even the structure that took his name. That was settled upon some time in the mid-thirteenth century. But Petrarch, writing in the fourteenth century, devoted such passion to the project that would become his Canzoniere, his “song book”, composed largely in sonnets, that it became the model of love poetry for hundreds of years. Certainly, in the early sixteenth century, the Petrarchan form was undisputed pinnacle.

Travelogue 1222 – 1 December
Condotta

Pompeo Colonna’s service as condottiero in the service of the Spanish Neapolitans and the Holy Roman Emperor was not done. He participated in the great sack of Rome in 1527, though his military role was a minor one, and though he seemed most concerned with harbouring cardinals and nuns who otherwise would have been in harm’s way. He assumed some degree of control over the Vatican and the Borgo during the darkest days of the occupation, but it seems hard to determine what, if any, control anyone really had in the anarchic conditions. Eventually, he left, as many others did, when plague threatened in June of 1528.

Of course, Pompeo was not a condottiero in the classic sense of the early Renaissance, when free-wheeling generals led their mercenary troops from conflict to conflict, with the only allegiance being to their condotte, their contracts. They played the delicate balance of power among small city-states with little regard for patriotism or loyalty.

But now the field was too crowded with grand armies of grand nation states for the old-fashioned adventurers to thrive. Italy had become a small pond, and the stakes were too high for the small fish. Pompeo never really wavered in his loyalty to the Spanish.

He was rewarded for his service. He became, by order of Charles V, the Lieutenant General of the Kingdom of Naples, and later the Viceroy. And he was ever attentive to the needs of the emperor. In 1532, Charles V was obliged to raise troops to defend Vienna from the Turks. Pompeo

And in Naples, he spent time with his cousin Vittoria. He was not all blood and glory. He was a courtier, and a sophisticate. He held his own in the company of his peers, attending parties and writing poetry. He dedicated one to his cousin, who was becoming famous around Italy for her poetry. It was called De Laudibus Mulierum, “In Praise of Women”. The topic was a minor fashion of the time, and perfectly suited to honour Vittoria. Unfortunately, the poem does not seem to have survived.

Travelogue 1221 – 27 November
Pompeo

Vittoria Colonna’s cousin, Pompeo was about thirteen years older than her. He was a colourful character, a cardinal and a condottiero. He was vicious and jealous; he was also cultivated and politic.

His branch of the Colonna family was high nobility in both Rome and Naples. He grew up fighting the Guelf Orsini, just like any good Colonna, and then fighting for the Spanish rulers of Naples. At age 22, he launched his ecclesiastical career, quickly rising to the rank of bishop under Julius II and of cardinal under Leo X, in 1517.

With several popes, he had very public disputes. His dispute with Julius II led him to invade Rome in 1513, after Julius’s death, and delay the start of the conclave that would choose the new pope. He had felt slighted by the late pope and his Curia, who had condemned him for his rebellion in 1511 over the appointment of foreign cardinals.

A Medici pope, Leo X, was elected in 1513, after he had made peace with the Colonna. Life was good under Leo X and under the subsequent Dutch pope, Adrian VI. The latter was a tutor to the Emperor when he was young, and Pompeo had helped elect him for the Emperor. For a dozen years, Pompeo collected his titles, benefices, and territories.

But trouble began for him when Adrian VI died unexpectedly, less than two years into his papacy. Giulio de’ Medici, cousin to Leo X, had been in the wings for a long time. He had been raised by Lorenzo the Magnificent and had known Michelangelo when the sculptor was coming of age. For his cousin, Leo X, Giulio had been a close advisor and a capable statesman. It was his time.

Pompeo didn’t like it, but he was forced to vote for Giulio de’ Medici, at the end of a long conclave, because Giulio threatened to throw his weight behind an Orsini. He gave the Medici his vote, but in exchange he received the highest position possible in the Curia, and a lavish palace in Rome.

Three years later, the diplomatic pressures on the papacy had grown to a boiling point. The pope had agreed to an ill-advised compact with the French. The French king had invaded Italy, and had been captured in his first major battle (by the armies of Fernando d’Avalos). Immediately upon his release, Francis I, the king of France, began building another alliance, which would become the League of Cognac.

Emperor Charles V lobbied intensely for papal support. But when the Spanish ambassadors praised Pompeo, the pope insulted him. The Spaniards threatened to peel away Siena and Florence from his control if he sided against them. But Clement VII sent them away.

Giulio de’ Medici, Pope Clement VII, was known to be an intelligent, refined, and capable man, but history also knows him as a leader with the worst political instincts. He joined sides with the French. The Spanish were true to their word, and they invaded the Papal States. Pompeo himself led an army of nearly 4,000 into Rome. The people of Rome stood down, and they allowed the army to march to the Vatican. There, the troops ransacked the Vatican and the Basilica of St Peter, while Clement VII fled to the Castel Sant’Angelo.

It was an eerie rehearsal of the disaster that would unfold only eight months later, but it was Romans on Romans, and entirely the result of the Italians’ own savage politics.

Afterward, Clement VII unleashed a persecution of the Colonna family. Vittoria’s brother Ascanio spirited her away, withdrawing her from the convent and fleeing to Ischia. Pompeo himself withdrew to Naples.

Travelogue 1220 – 19 November
Weak Cognac

The sack of Rome in 1527 stands in history as unique and tragic in its scale. It left tens of thousands dead, maimed, or in flight. Churches were desecrated, historic treasures were plundered, monuments and ancient buildings were damaged or destroyed. The impact on society, church and history were deep and irreversible. The era of the great nation states was dawning, and this event only confirmed the inexorable fate of city-states, like the misstep of a giant that crushed a cherished old temple.

But it would be a mistake to see the event as an anomaly, as something that stands alone in kind (vs degree). It would be a mistake to see the Romans or the Italians in general, as only victims. In this regard, it is easy for sympathetic readers to forget that the Vatican was sacked only one year earlier, and it wasn’t by the Germans. It was by Romans.

The Orsini and the Colonna were rival Roman lines of nobility that had connived against each other and fought for centuries. The history of the Orsini reached even further than that of the Colonna. There were Orsini popes as early as the eighth century. And by the late Middle Ages, the two families had settled into the division found in many Italian communities, known as Guelph and Ghibelline. The Orsini supported the papacy and the Colonna the Holy Roman Emperors. In the sixteenth century, this became bitingly relevant, as Emperor Charles V inserted himself into the Italian conflicts.

The pressures building on the Medici pope, Clement VII, elected in 1523, were enormous. The French and Spanish began lobbying him relentlessly for support: alliance, money, and troops. The Spanish were juggernauts, and King Francis I – the French king captured by the armies of Vittoria’s husband in 1525 – managed to cobble together a fragile alliance against them in 1526, the League of Cognac. Clement VII joined this group, with Venice, Florence, and Milan. It might have been a good concept, but, with a typical flourish of self-interest, Florence took this occasion to attack Sienna. They failed to take it, and their loss rose like a signal over the land that it was open season on the papacy.

Travelogue 1219 – 15 November
La Doglia

I heard recently that widows are happier after the death of their mate than before, just speaking statistically. Vittoria Colonna never remarried, despite the hopes of all the scheming noble families. She made her position in life and society very clear. She spent nearly a year among the nuns of San Silvestro in Capite after the death of Fernando. And she began to write, and she wrote copiously, about her dear departed husband in sonnet after sonnet. Fernando appeared over and over as her "bel sole", her sun, her "lume eterno", her everlasting light.

“Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia,” she wrote in one famous sonnet. I write to vent the internal pain.

It's hard to say whether her pain was real or performative. The case is strong for the latter – it lasted an awfully long time, and generated quite a few poems, poems that were shared far and wide, - but generally, I think that “both-things-are-true” arguments get short shrift in modern thinking. We would rather not admit that human psychology is hypocritical by nature, or to put it more gently, that we condemn complex emotion by calling it hypocritical.

After living nearly a year among the nuns in Rome, Vittoria was forced to leave. Her brother Ascanio fetched to take her to safety in their palace outside Rome, in Marino. The Colonna family was quarrelling with the Medici Pope, and their properties and lives were in peril again. Disgusted by Roman politics, she returned to Ischia early in 1527.

“Oh! Che tranquillo mar, oh che chiare onde …”, she wrote upon her return to Ischia. What a tranquil sea, what clear waves! Fortune had smiled on her this once. Only a few months later, Rome was entered by imperial troops, mostly German, and subjected to atrocities that printed themselves on the history of Europe indelibly, locked in the code of violence and hatred that would guide the Reformation for a century and a half. In a year, Rome’s population was reduced by some 80%. Only a wave of plague drove the pillaging army away in February 1528.

Travelogue 1218 – 11 November
Troubles

The gaiety of youth passes. Life has changes in store. It is hard to estimate, when one is young, how much change a decade can effect. One full decade has not passed, even yet, since Trump was elected for the first time. It was 2016, and we had an idea that history was a huge ship that was nearly imperturbable. No storm could rock it. Momentum would carry it on. Changing course on the high seas would require more effort than a small group of zealots had the stamina for. We could afford to wait out one errant administration, this one storm.

In 1516, one of Vittoria’s brothers died. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the church in Wittenberg. In context, these were tragedies on a scale that seemed manageable. But these were first links in a chain. Challenges of a different order were awaiting in the next decade, as Vittoria entered her thirties.

In 1520 and 1522, she lost her parents. In 1522, Fernando took on the Emperor’s commission, and it was the last time she saw him. In 1525, after the battle with the French, in which the French king was captured, Fernando was something of a hero. The forces looking to unite Italians against the emperor momentarily saw in him an opportunity. They approached him to change allegiance. Vittoria, when she caught wind of the conspiracy, urged her husband in letters to be loyal. Ultimately, he did, capturing the messenger of the conspirators, torturing him and prosecuting him.

I have read that Vittoria fell ill that summer. The cause is not known, but she was bedridden. Maladies drifted back then, lifted by breezes, touching down here and then, nameless and dry, robbing people of vitality. It appears in biographies without cause. No one is quite sure what took Fernando away at the moment it did, almost a year after the battle that left wounds on him. They say Vittoria battled illness the rest of her life.

It was December when Fernando died. She was on her way to his bedside; she had made it as far as Viterbo, just north of Rome. There she received news of his passing. She returned to Rome, and she retreated into the convent of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome. She entered only days after Fernando passed, and she stayed until the autumn of the next year. Friends high in the church appealed to the Pope to forbid the nuns of the convent to allow Vittoria to join them by taking orders. This gives us an idea how esteemed she was, both as a dazzling member of the nobility and of the litterati, but also as a marriageable commodity.

Travelogue 1217 – 4 November

Sposata 

 

Vittoria and Fernando were married in 1509, when she was 17, and they lived together in Ischia together for two years before Fernando went off to war. In 1512, he joined the Spanish armies in the north of Italy, and almost immediately he was captured by the French, which provides the first of a neat set of bookends in his career. He wasn’t detained in Milan long by the French, thanks in large part to connections with the Colonna family, and he was kept comfortably.

Imprisoned by the French in Milan, Fernando wrote a ‘Dialogo d’Amore’ to his wife. It hasn’t survived. Vittoria responded with 112 lines in terza rima, which did survive, the oldest sample of her poetry that we have. She wrote:

 

“Se Vittoria volevi, io t’era appresso;

Ma tu, lasciando me, lasciasti lei.”

 

If you wanted Victory, I was right next to you. But, in leaving me, you left her. Her letter was a piece too pretty, full of classical allegory and puns, as was the custom.

 

Fernando was returned to the family, but he stayed only briefly. He was off to war again the next year, and he fought for the Spanish with honour, almost without respite, for nine years.

 

Life carried on at Ischia. Vittoria and her aunt, Costanza, gathered their literary luminaries, writers with names like Musefilo, Filocalo, Giovio, Minturno, Cariteo, Rota, Sanazzaro, and Tasso, and the island enjoyed something of a reputation for culture. “Superbo scoglio,” Bernardo Tasso wrote in a later sonnet about Ischia, “altero e bel ricetto / Di tanti chiari eroi, d’imperadori!” Proud rock, high and beautiful retreat, for such heroes, such conquerors!

 

Naples was the nearest major court, where the aggressive Spanish kingdom was based. Here, the d’Avalos family from Ischia could consort with the nobility of the realm. According to contemporary accounts, Vittoria and her aunt were dazzling.

 

The year was spent in celebrations and ceremony, pageants, parties, and religious observations. Gaiety and extravagance were the order of the day, gold and silk, sumptuous dress and sumptuous food. I just read about a wedding banquet in Naples that ran to 27 courses and only finished at five in the morning.

Travelogue 1216 – 27 October
Fernando

Vittoria Colonna was engaged when she was three. The boy was also from a noble family, of course, a family originally of Spanish descent. Fernando’s grandfather, Íñigo, came to Italy with Alfonso V, King of Aragon, who was also King of Sicily. Alfonso had a claim to the throne of the Kingdom of Naples, and he spent much of his reign pursuing that claim. His rivals included the Sforzas and the Anjous, and, during the early years of the wars, his rivals enjoyed the favour of the Colonna pope Martin V, whom we have met in Florence during the days of Brunelleschi.

In an interesting side-note, this same Íñigo, Vittoria Colonna’s grandfather by marriage, is a candidate to be author of “Curial and Güelfa”, a chivalric romance written in Castilian, which survives in only one manuscript. It’s written in Spanish, but is Italian and French in its sentiment and devices.

Curial is a poor knight, and Güelfa is a noblewoman and widow. She takes him under her wing and tutors him, until rumour drives him away from her. He travels and engages in great tournaments and deeds of knight errantry all over Europe, always coming back to Güelfa, who more or less spurns him. He ranges farther afield, captured as a slave in Africa, finding his fortune, raising an army against the Turks. But eventually, he comes home, a fully realised warrior and gentleman, and he and Güelfa wed.

So Íñigo d’Avalos fought for Naples. So did his son. So did his grandson. It was this ongoing dispute over Naples that eventually drew the French into Italy in 1494. This was the invasion that toppled the Medici (temporarily) and brought Savonarola into power in Florence. This was the beginning of the destructive Italian Wars that kept the peninsula in turmoil for the next sixty years or so. In this context, King Alfonso and his successors needed warriors.

Fernando Francesco d'Ávalos d'Aquino was nobility, and so he was trained to fight. Fight he did, all his short adult life. He was good at it. For ten years, he led troops for the Spanish interests in the Italian Wars. By 1522, he had attracted the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Fernando agreed, rather reluctantly, to lead Catholic imperial troops in Italy, though they were chronically underpaid and discontented. And he helped lead them to victory in Pavia, where, in a battle to break a siege of the city, imperial soldiers took the French king, Francis I, captive.

Unfortunately, Fernando didn’t live long to advance any further. He died in the same year, aged 36, his body, if not his spirit, broken by the years of tough military life. He left Vittoria Colonna widowed at the young age of 33.

Travelogue 1215 – 19 October
Finger On the Page

The most familiar portrait of Vittoria Colonna is by Sebastiano del Piombo. It was executed in the year 1520, (the year Vincenzo, the great lutenist was born; the year Pope Leo X had Michelangelo start on the Medici funerary chapel in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence,) and it portrayed the 28 year-old with the finger of one hand on the page of an open book and the other hand to her heart. (Interestingly, this portrait of the very Roman Colonna by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo is housed in Spain, the homeland of her husband’s family.) If Vittoria’s gesture seems familiar, it is because it echoes the pose of Mary in many Renaissance versions of the Annunciation. Mary’s piety is notated by her studiousness.

Vittoria was raised by her fiancé’s family on the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples. She was educated by her fiancé’s aunt, Costanza, Duchess of Francavilla and defender of Ischia against the French. Costanza was a serious patron of the literary arts. She gathered a circle of poets and philosophers around her, several who were famous at the time, though Vittoria’s would become the most enduring name. Aside, perhaps, for Costanza herself, who some have theorized was the real “Gioconda”!

Travelogue 1214 – 14 October

Weird Cultures

Maybe there’s something virtuous about weirdness. I mean “virtuous” in a sense inherent in the word’s Latin roots, something robust, something strong.

I think that two things can safely be said about Florence in the 1400s. The society, the culture, the polity were robust and they were weird. I was reminded of the latter in reading a sample of Pico della Mirandola’s “900 Conclusions”.

In 1486 (the new Sistine Chapel was consecrated in 1483, complete with wall frescoes by Botticelli and Perugino,) the young philosopher proposed to defend his 900 Conclusions against “any philosopher or theologian, even from the ends of Italy”. He proposed to do this in Rome, but on his way there, he could not help but get himself in trouble. He tried to run off with the wife of a Medici in Arezzo and ended up (albeit briefly) in prison. He was 23 years old.

 

A few samples from the “900 Conclusions”:

·       The world’s craftsman is a hypercosmic soul.

·       No angel that has six wings ever changes.

·       Every soul sharing in Vulcan’s intellect is sown in the moon.

 

It should be remembered that Pico and Ficino (one of Florence’s premier humanist scholars) both were enthusiastic about magic and esoteric studies. Pico revived a study of the Kabbalah. And both were sincerely pious Christians, too. Pico was largely responsible for the rise of Savonarola, a fundamentalist monk who took over the city for four years during the crisis of the French invasion of Italy. Pico was committed to becoming a monk himself, when suddenly he died, age 31, the same year that the city drove out Piero de’ Medici.

 

All this to say, it’s easy to forget, as we lionize our Renaissance heroes, how idiosyncratic they could be, and how idiosyncratic also the culture that they nurtured and that nurtured them.

 

This I report as the American culture enthusiastically explores its own weirdest corners under the stewardship of the Grand Wizard of Weird, the (alleged) star of the Epstein files and the creepy don of the deal. Is all this, in the unsettling way of this world, a sign of a healthy culture reasserting itself, doubling down on its weirdness? It could be argued, I suppose, that the more lopsided the belief system, the more its people will fight to protect it: a perversion of Keirkegaard’s “leap of faith”. Reasonable people, by this logic, are inherently weaker in their social structures because there is just less passion aroused in the defence of transparently rational systems.

 

It should be held in mind, though, that Late Renaissance culture, robust and fertile as it was, developed before a backdrop of crisis and turmoil. Italy was becoming a battleground for the superpowers of the age, and there were plenty of relatively sober people who were convinced that the end was coming, that the year 1500 would bring the Last Judgement.

Travelogue 1213 – 10 October
Colonna

Vittoria Colonna was born in the fateful year of 1492, the year Lorenzo the Magnificent died, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the year young Michelangelo completed his marble relief sculpture, “Batte of the Centaurs”. She was born into the famous Roman noble family in a villa outside of Rome.

The Colonnas were an ancient family. They claimed their ancestry could be traced back to Julius Caesar’s own clan. They appeared in recorded history in the eleventh century, among the extended family of the Counts of Tuscany. This heritage, emerging from the Lombard era, is obscure, but they were already installed at the Castle called Columna outside Rome.

Medieval Rome – and the papacy - was a battleground for aristocratic families throughout the first centuries of the second millennium, and the Colonna family were nearly always in the mix. This required of them that they suffer exile from time to time. They suffered it in the fourteenth century, when a family squabble precipitated the Avignon papacy. For nearly a hundred years, the papacy was captive in France. Poetically, it was a Colonna pope, Martin V, who brought the papacy permanently home to Rome in 1420, during Brunelleschi’s time.

The family suffered exile again as the sixteenth century dawned, when Vittoria Colonna was only nine, because of a conflict with the Borgia pope, Alexander VI. Alexander used the French wars in Italy to consolidate his power over the city and the Papal States.

Noble families always had options. The Colonna family had married into so many noble families over the centuries that they had refuge ready. Fabrizio, Vittoria’s father was grand constable to the King of Naples. They moved to the island of Ischia. Already, at the age of three, Vittoria had been engaged to marry the son of a general in the king’s service, a boy who would become the Marquis of Pescara. The boy was Spanish by blood, and born in Naples, but he was heir to lands on the other side of Italy, a place I’m not sure he ever visited.

Travelogue 1212 – 2 October
Conscience

It’s sure that Brunelleschi’s dome was immediately famous. I imagine it took only a generation for the building to become an established symbol of the city. For Florentines, for Tuscans, and perhaps farther. Certainly, the popes cast a jealous eye on Florence’s architectural achievements.

By the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s waning years, when he wrote his essay on sonnets, when young Michelangelo was getting started, impressing patrons with his first productions, the Duomo was half a century old, still exciting, while also slipping into the background, an unchanging component of scenery on a stage set for great things.

By the time a century had passed since the Duomo was consecrated, Lorenzo’s great grandson, Cosimo, was ruling as the Duke of Florence. Duke was a title created by the Medici pope, Clement VII, for his illegitimate son, Alessandro. Alessandro did not last long; he was murdered by a jealous cousin. Duke Cosimo ruled then for more than thirty years. Perhaps the young lutenist, Vincenzo, played for Cosimo in his first years as duke. Cosimo was a great patron of the arts, after all.

The world was different than in Brunelleschi’s day. The republican past seemed a romance. But the Duomo still stood, one hundred years old, gathering soot from hearth fires, tall symbol of the city of art and influence, and still a source of pride. To give some perspective, the Empire State Building is just approaching the completion of its first century now. And the Eiffel Tower is approaching 140 years.

Michelangelo, son of Florence, was in Rome. He felt nervous in Medici Florence. A Medici was also in charge of Rome, but the second Medici pope, Clement VII, was a liberal-minded and a generous man, having less need than the Medici in Florence for continuous consolidation of power. The Florentine republican instinct died hard. One of Clement’s last acts of patronage before he passed away in 1534 was to commission the “Last Judgement” in the Sistine Chapel from Michelangelo. The artist carried on with the huge fresco, through the rest of the decade, under the reign of Paul III.

Paul III was a Farnese, a friend of the Medici. The sculptor and the pope may have known each other from Lorenzo’s days in Florence, when Farnese studied under the Florentine humanist, Giulio Pomponio Leto. The new pope was an old man, but he was alert, ambitious, and tireless. He was a reformer. The Protestant rebellion was in full swing in northern Europe. In the year of Paul’s accession, Luther completed his German translation of the Bible. In response to the rebellion, the pope launched a stern reform movement, the first sincere response to Protestant accusations of corruption. He called the Council of Trent. He oversaw sincere efforts to root out abuses among the Curia.

He also oversaw an aggressive reaffirmation of church doctrine along conservative lines. He approved the founding of the Jesuit order. And, in history, his pontificate became known as the starting point of the Counter-Reformation, a force of some magnitude over the next few centuries.

However, history is messier than the colourful maps that divide Europe into solid blocks of territory. People wrestled with their conscience in every country. Even in Rome. Even Michelangelo, artist for the popes, struggled with his conscience.

Travelogue 1211 – 30 September
One Sunset

The sky was a geometry. It was a blue field for play. There were lines crossing. The shapes formed were dreams of Euclid. There were white lines arcing in straight lines across the curving space of our sky. The lines were evaporating, erasing themselves. The sky was more than blue. There were shades darkening. There were gradients of colour. They were settling near the bottom, like syrup in a glass of tonic. There were wisps of the irrational, clouds that were not geometric. They soaked in the sweet colours, the red tones, the raspberry and the pomegranate. They glowed.

There are so many planes in Holland’s skies. They multiply, chasing each other like fuzzy white rabbits across the field. They play in their big, blue field where there are no fences, no furrows, no hills, and just space to run. And can draw there, abrasive scratches against their unearthly ground. They can bring impossible ideas to brief life, those straight lines, straight lines that curve, that might have inspired Newton and then Euclid, if the skies had existed back then, the skies in which the sun set, the skies in which metal rabbits played.

The fools who find contrails sinister, who read them like verses left by Nostradamus’s left hand, those poor minds, cheated out of adult thought, they might find the sight terrifying. Or offensive. Or worthy of righteous action. They find themselves incapable of aesthetics. They are made indignant by the proofs of geometry. They are confused by the purity of lines. They might become bewildered at the entrance of Newton, the peacemaker. May they find breath again.

For now, the night is gaining on the lines, and they are turning red with fright.

Travelogue 1210 – 25 September
Measuring Strings

A hundred years after Martin V returned to Rome, and after Brunelleschi had begun on the dome of the Duomo, in the year of Henry VIII’s Field of Cloth of Gold in Calais, a boy was born in a small town between outside Pisa and Florence. The boy was named Vincenzo, and he was destined to become one of the best lutenists of the century. He attracted attention early with his musical talent, and he studied under renowned masters. He played for great patrons, and he wrote many pieces for the lute, some of which have survived until today. Here is a nice example.

For most of his adult life, he lived in Florence. There, he became a regular member of the famous Florentine Camerata. This was a group of musicians and humanists who met to discuss the state of art, music and drama. It engendered a number of theoretical studies. It became something of an incubator for ideas that led to the reform of music and the birth of opera. Jacopo Peri, who wrote the first opera, was too young to have participated in the Camerata, but was inspired by their advocacy for Greek tragedy, and given tools by their theory; for example, the “recitative”, which allowed rhythms of natural speech in musical composition. This is often attributed to Vincenzo’s work on monody, or the single voice.

That was how far the Renaissance had come since the days of Brunelleschi and his mirror. There were learned debates about Greek music and tragedy. Modern music and drama were to emulate their Greek models. They read the Greeks, they documented their thoughts, and, more importantly, they applied it to what they saw and heard.

Vincenzo, for his part, wanted theory to sound like reality. Theories about music were still medieval, dominated by the speculations of ancient philosophers, who saw magic in nature. The intervals between musical notes were to be seen as divine ratios. They were messages from the gods, and the medieval were unlikely to tamper with things divine. But Renaissance artists like Brunelleschi and our lutenist Vincenzo were artisans who believed in the practical world. They were fine with the church, but they wanted to speak more accurately about their craft. It didn’t seem like an insult to God to do that, to make sense of what they saw and heard, what they experienced with their own fingers on the fretboard.

Vincenzo tested those medieval intervals, found they were not accurate. He conducted experiments. He laid strings across enlarged, table-like fretboards, and he hung weights off them to test tension. He tried different types of strings, of different sizes and materials. He kept records of his results, and he calculated new values for the intervals, more accurate ratios. His eldest son, Galileo, had a talent for mathematics.

These experiments were a trial run for the scientific method. They had results that ran quite beyond the interests of the lutenist. He did publish his results, and they did make waves among scholars of music. It did contribute to the birth of opera, and to the practice and theory of music afterward. But, more importantly, they were a brick in the foundation of empirical science. They were a template for research. They formed the mind of one formative thinker for the coming age of science, his son, who was born the day Michelangelo died.

Travelogue 1209 – 15 September
The Eccentrics and Science

The Medici family collected artists and philosophers, and their fields of study flourished. The individuals fared as they fared, most living hand to mouth, lucky if they received some small stipend for their work, no artist so grotesquely rich as some artists have become in our time.

They had passion, and they had flair. Florence in its glory years was full of eccentrics. One of our fonder moments of eccentricity features Filippo Brunelleschi standing before the ancient Battistero with a painting and a hand mirror before his face. It was an experiment in perspective. And a public one, at that, a just tribute to the republican origins of art. “Come look,” he may have said, as people gathered. In the mirror was a tiny peephole, and also in the panel. The panel was likely a mirror itself, painted on one side with a likeness of the Battistero. “No, hold the back of the painting to your face,” he said, helping a citizen line up the panel, the mirror, and the background. “What do you see?” They answered with wonder, “San Giovanni!” The Battistero, the painting of the building lining up perfectly with the reality. Brunelleschi had already something of the reputation as a wonder-worker; the mirror stunt was only confirmation.

The likeness of the Battistero was crafted, of course, according to his new method of perspective, using a vanishing point, horizon and orthogonal lines. The trick was a psychological one, adopting one point of view, the human eye of one individual viewer. This was the art made by humanists. This contrasted with God’s viewpoint, in which all points in time and space were equal and accessible. The human viewpoint was individual and anchored to one privileged location.

The trick was a scientific one. Apply geometrical principles. Test and replicate. Does it look accurate? Can the bystanders in the Piazza del Duomo confirm the success of the technique. Then the principles were sound. Twenty years after his public experiment, the young Leon Battista Alberti codified Brunelleschi’s principles in his book, “De Pictura”, and the Renaissance project, as a broad-based phenomenon among artists, was born.

It makes sense that the artists of the day would be among the first scientists. They had to understand the chemistry and physical properties of their paints, boards, metals, plaster, and stone. Being more architect than artist in his later years, Brunelleschi concerned himself with space and dimension. There was no other recourse than mathematics. In Rome, he had assigned himself the task of documenting in sketches all the ancient buildings he could find, and tradition tells us that this is when he began thinking about perspective. How would he capture the essence of what he was seeing? Accuracy became important for the purposes of reconstruction and imitation. Replication was essential to the scientific project.

Travelogue 1208 – 8 September
The Busy Hive

Why can we never sit still? While we discuss history, while some people make history, the ceaseless activity of humanity, like the frenetic motion in a populous hive, carries on with its customary intensity. While Petrarch heralds a new age, standing on the Capitoline Hill as a representative of the renatae litterae (a Renaissance), the hive is abuzz with activity. It is only six years later that Cola di Rienzo rises to seize power in Rome. One of his acts during the roughly six months of his self-declared tribunate is to call for a united Italy – five hundred years before Garibaldi. He succeeds in calling representatives from electors and head of the Holy Roman Emperor to sit beside representatives from all principalities in Italy in an assembly as he announced a new Italian federation. Petrarch is surprised and delighted.

But Cola di Rienzo didn’t last. He was erratic, and he couldn’t stand against the forces of reaction arrayed against him. He was run out of town. Some years later, he was turned into a tool for the Avignon popes, smuggled back into Rome to sow chaos, and was turned on by his own mob.

Neither could King Robert of Naples last, the enlightened monarch who acted as patron to Petrarch being only mortal. His death in 1343, only two years after Petrarch’s laureate ceremony, was a blow to the poet, and one that may have led him to a humbler assessment of the state of cultural renewal. He thereafter spoke about the “Renaissance” project (his idea, but not his term) as one delayed, one destined for the future.

I think of Trump’s big project, written in sand by a petulant and greedy child. It seems unstoppable, and probably is, for the moment. But even in triumph, it is already being undermined. Locally, regionally, nationally, thousands of people are innovating in small ways that chew into the same tapestry that the Trumpistas are weaving, like the myriad, miniature forces of nature working on the greedy, little boy’s sandcastle. In a generation, the Trump “legacy” will be unrecognizable.

I think of a fresco by Bicci di Lorenzo that survives from 1420, the year that Pope Martin V departs Florence to begin his Rome project, and in that fresco the pope is consecrating a new church in Florence. The style of the painting is still medieval, the clergy and the nobility in attendance standing in tidy rows, and the perspective so flat and simplified that the scene is like pages in a book. The faces are serene and nearly indistinguishable. The protagonist of the fresco is the church itself, the old Sant’Egidio. And while the church is small and yellow, with red tile above, it signals some Gothic intention, with high arched windows beneath two high-peaked roofs. There is no symmetry; each door bears a different shape, and sparse, small windows are set by no plan. Small gargoyles guard the main door. The only hint of new aesthetics might be the round window above the doorway and what appears to be the terracotta piece in the tympanum. Old and new are simultaneous; people are busy with both, all the time.

Occasionally, I stop by the central train station for a coffee. I travel west to east across the city every day; the station convenient. There is a café next to the roltrap for Spoor 3, where I can perch at a counter by the window and watch the people rush. I watch the hive. I listen to its buzz. Why does a writer with a strong misanthropic streak volunteer to stop the midst of it? There is a sort of wisdom that resides in the centre of the hive, a calm within the storm. I don’t walk away with much of it, meaning I am no wiser when I find it, but I do sense it, and find a kind of rest inside of it.

Travelogue 1207 – 5 September
Wild Rome

Rome had already provided the inspiration for the poets and philosophers. For them, the Renaissance was well under way. Since Petrarch had discovered the letters of Cicero, Roman language, literature, style and ideas had formed a guiding light for the writers. But not many had actually travelled to Rome.

Petrarch himself had gone to Rome in 1337. Inspired by the wild and magnificent ruins of the forum, he had started on his epic Latin poem, “Africa”. He returned in 1341 to be crowned on the Capitoline Hill with laurel wreath and proclaimed Poet Laureate, with the blessing of the Roman Colonna family and King Robert of Naples. It was an unorthodox choice of location. The papacy was in France, and Paris was the centre of academic culture in Christendom.

Rome was a bit untamed. A new pope was elected in 1417, and he lodged in Florence. Martin V may have been a familiar figure to Brunelleschi and his cohort. The architect was forty that year. He was completing his first commission, the drawings for the Ospedale degli Innocenti. He and his friend Donatello had taken their place as leading voices among the artists in Florence.

There is a story that Donatello and Brunelleschi travelled to Rome to study the buildings left by the empire. Perhaps they accompanied Martin V on his return to the city in 1420, when he brought home the papacy after its years of division and exile. It was his task to build the foundations of the Renaissance papacy. He brought to it the same intensity of purpose as the artists set on laying the foundations of a new classicism in art.

Did the sight of those ancient ruins provide the kind of inspiration to Brunelleschi that they did to Petrarch?

Travelogue 1206 – 2 September
A Dream in the Centre Square

Like Christopher Wren in London or Bernini in Rome, Filippo Brunelleschi left an indelible mark on Florence, a legacy you saw in every quarter of the old city, whether in the Medici’s Basilica of San Lorenzo, or the Ospedale degli Innocenti nearby, or Santa Felicita across the river, or in Santa Croce, in Santo Spirito, or, of course, in the great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, his most remarkable achievement and the enduring symbol of Florence. The Duomo stood above the city old and new, and it became instantly and for centuries an element of Florentine identity, even human identity, something permanent and sublime, an object huge and intricate and yet immediately recognisable.

I have written about this before: years ago, while travelling to Perugia by train, I had a transfer in Florence at 4:00 in the morning. I had enough time to walk into the town centre. I stood before the Duomo all alone that morning, in silence, marvelling at the bulk and the beauty. It was like a dream. A six-hundred-year-old dream.

Imagine the labour involved in the manifestation of Brunelleschi’s design! It might be said that architecture, like theatre, is an art of collaboration, and that writers and architects are only the first in a chain of contributors to the final piece of art. His buildings took decades to finish, and the work incorporated the ingenuity and elaboration of other architects and artists, many of them happy to be a part of the legacy, as the master’s reputation grew. And then there were the hundreds of masons and labourers. I wonder how they all related.

Brunelleschi started humbly enough. He may have been the first of the architectural superstars in Europe, but he started in the way that most did, apprenticing as a goldsmith and sculptor, as Michelangelo did, and many others. His first job as architect was the Ospedale degli Innocenti, and he immediately set himself apart, drawing something we call classically Renaissance, something that was new then. What he drew was elegant, symmetrical and sparse in adornment, thin columns and arches and simple white. I can’t imagine how it struck the minds of those so accustomed to the Gothic. It might have provoked some objections: “Is this the drawing of a child? We are paying for grandeur.” But clearly he was the right mind for the time. Change swept through the Italy and then Europe. It was centuries before anyone looked back to rediscover the charms of the Gothic.