The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

In this respect, as in others, Italy was unable to make its own way healthily through the ferment of the Renaissance, because the foreign invasion and the Counter-Reformation came upon it in the middle. Without such interfering causes its own strength would have enabled it thoroughly to get rid of these fantastic illusions. Those who hold that the onslaught of the strangers and the Catholic reactions were necessities for which the Italian people was itself solely responsible, will look on the spiritual bankruptcy which they produced as a just retribution. But it is a pity that the rest of Europe had indirectly to pay so large a part of the penalty.

The beliefs in omens seems a much more innocent matter than astrology. The Middle Ages had everywhere inherited them in abundance from the various pagan religions; and Italy did not differ in this respect from other countries. What is characteristic of Italy is the support lent by humanism to the popular superstition. The pagan inheritance was here backed up by a pagan literary development.

The popular superstition of the Italians rested largely on premonitions and inferences drawn from ominous occurrences,1200 with which a good deal of magic, mostly of an innocent sort, was connected. There was, however, no lack of learned humanists who boldly ridiculed these delusions, and to whose attacks we partly owe the knowledge of them. Gioviano Pontano; the author of the great astrological work already mentioned (p. 280), enumerates with pity in his ‘Charon,’ a long string of Neapolitan superstitions—the grief of the women when a fowl or a goose caught the pip; the deep anxiety of the nobility if a hunting falcon did not come home, or if a horse sprained his foot; the magical formulæ of the Apulian peasants, recited on three Saturday evenings, when mad dogs were at large. The animal kingdom, as in antiquity, was regarded as specially significant in this respect, and the behaviour of the lions, leopards, and other beasts kept by the State (p. 293 sqq.) gave the people all the more food for reflection, because they had come to be considered as living symbols of the State. During the siege of Florence, in 1529, an eagle which had been shot at fled into the city, and the Signoria gave the bearer four ducats, because the omen was good.1201 Certain times and places were favourable or unfavourable, or even decisive one way or the other, for certain actions. The Florentines, so Varchi tells us, held Saturday to be the fateful day on which all important events, good as well as bad, commonly happened. Their prejudice against marching out to war through a particular street has been already mentioned (p. 512). At Perugia one of the gates, the ‘Porta eburnea,’ was thought lucky, and the Baglioni always went out to fight through it.1202 Meteors and the appearance of the heavens were as significant in Italy as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, and the popular imagination saw warring armies in an unusual formation of clouds, and heard the clash of their collision high in the air.1203 The superstition became a more serious matter when it attached itself to sacred things, when figures of the Virgin wept or moved the eyes,1204 or when public calamities were associated with some alleged act of impiety, for which the people demanded expiation. In 1478, when Piacenza was visited with a violent and prolonged rainfall, it was said that there would be no dry weather till a certain usurer, who had been lately buried at San Francesco, had ceased to rest in consecrated earth. As the bishop was not obliging enough to have the corpse dug up, the young fellows of the town took it by force, dragged it round the streets amid frightful confusion, offered it to be insulted and maltreated by former creditors, and at last threw it into the Po.1205 Even Politian accepted this point of view in speaking of Giacomo Pazzi, one of the chief of the conspiracy of 1478, in Florence, which is called after his name. When he was put to death, he devoted his soul to Satan with fearful words. Here, too, rain followed and threatened to ruin the harvest; here, too, a party of men, mostly peasants, dug up the body in the church, and immediately the clouds departed and the sun shone—‘so gracious was fortune to the opinion of the people,’ adds the great scholar.1206 The corpse was first cast into unhallowed ground, the next day again dug up, and after a horrible procession through the city, thrown into the Arno.

These facts and the like bear a popular character, and might have occurred in the tenth, just as well as in the sixteenth century. But now comes the literary influence of antiquity. We know positively that the humanists were peculiarly accessible to prodigies and auguries, and instances of this have been already quoted. If further evidence were needed, it would be found in Poggio. The same radical thinker who denied the rights of noble birth and the inequality of men (p. 361 sqq.), not only believed in all the mediæval stories of ghosts and devils (fol. 167, 179), but also in prodigies after the ancient pattern, like those said to have occurred on the last visit of Eugenius IV. to Florence.1207 ‘Near Como there was seen one evening 4,000 dogs, who took the road to Germany; these were followed by a great herd of cattle, and these by an army on foot and horseback, some with no heads and some with almost invisible heads, and then a gigantic horseman with another herd of cattle behind him.’ Poggio also believes in a battle of magpies and jackdaws (fol. 180). He even relates, perhaps without being aware of it, a well-preserved piece of ancient mythology. On the Dalmatian coast a Triton had appeared, bearded and horned, a genuine sea-satyr, ending in fins and a tail; he carried away women and children from the shore, till five stout-hearted washer-women killed him with sticks and stones.1208 A wooden model of the monster, which was exhibited at Ferrara, makes the whole story credible to Poggio. Though there were no more oracles, and it was no longer possible to take counsel of the gods, yet it became again the fashion to open Virgil at hazard, and take the passage hit upon as an omen1209 (‘Sortes Virgilianae’). Nor can the belief in dæmons current in the later period of antiquity have been without influence on the Renaissance. The work of Jamblichus or Abammon on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, which may have contributed to this result, was printed in a Latin translation at the end of the fifteenth century. The Platonic Academy at Florence was not free from these and other neo-platonic dreams of the Roman decadence. A few words must here be given to the belief in dæmons and to the magic which was connected with this belief.

The popular faith in what is called the spirit-world was nearly the same in Italy as elsewhere in Europe.1210 In Italy as elsewhere there were ghosts, that is, reappearances of deceased persons; and if the view taken of them differed in any respect from that which prevailed in the North, the difference betrayed itself only in the ancient name ‘ombra.’ Nowadays if such a shade presents itself, a couple of masses are said for its repose. That the spirits of bad men appear in a dreadful shape, is a matter of course, but along with this we find the notion that the ghosts of the departed are universally malicious. The dead, says the priest in Bandello,1211 kill the little children. It seems as if a certain shade was here thought of as separate from the soul, since the latter suffers in Purgatory, and when it appears, does nothing but wail and pray. To lay the ghost, the tomb was opened, the corpse pulled to pieces, the heart burned and the ashes scattered to the four winds.1212 At other times what appears is not the ghost of a man, but of an event—of a past condition of things. So the neighbours explained the diabolical appearances in the old palace of the Visconti near San Giovanni in Conca, at Milan, since here it was that Bernabò Visconti had caused countless victims of his tyranny to be tortured and strangled, and no wonder if there were strange things to be seen.1213 One evening a swarm of poor people with candles in their hands appeared to a dishonest guardian of the poor at Perugia, and danced round about him; a great figure spoke in threatening tones on their behalf—it was St. Alò, the patron saint of the poor-house.1214 These modes of belief were so much a matter of course that the poets could make use of them as something which every reader would understand. The appearance of the slain Ludovico Pico under the walls of the besieged Mirandola is finely represented by Castiglione.1215 It is true that poetry made the freest use of these conceptions when the poet himself had outgrown them.

Italy, too, shared the belief in dæmons with the other nations of the Middle Ages. Men were convinced that God sometimes allowed bad spirits of every class to exercise a destructive influence on parts of the world and of human life. The only reservation made was that the man to whom the Evil One came as tempter, could use his free will to resist.1216 In Italy the dæmonic influence, especially as shown in natural events, easily assumed a character of poetical greatness. In the night before the great inundation of the Val d’Arno in 1333, a pious hermit above Vallombrosa heard a diabolical tumult in his cell, crossed himself, stepped to the door, and saw a crowd of black and terrible knights gallop by in armour. When conjured to stand, one of them said: ‘We go to drown the city of Florence on account of its sins, if God will let us.’1217 With this, the nearly contemporary vision at Venice (1340) may be compared, out of which a great master of the Venetian school, probably Giorgione, made the marvellous picture of a galley full of dæmons, which speeds with the swiftness of a bird over the stormy lagune to destroy the sinful island-city, till the three saints, who have stepped unobserved into a poor boatman’s skiff, exorcised the fiends and sent them and their vessel to the bottom of the waters.1218

To this belief the illusion was now added that by means of magical arts it was possible to enter into relations with the evil ones, and use their help to further the purposes of greed, ambition, and sensuality. Many persons were probably accused of doing so before the time when it was actually attempted by many; but when the so-called magicians and witches began to be burned, the deliberate practice of the black art became more frequent. With the smoke of the fires in which the suspected victims were sacrificed, were spread the narcotic fumes by which numbers of ruined characters were drugged into magic; and with them many calculating impostors became associated.

The primitive and popular form in which the superstition had probably lived on uninterruptedly from the time of the Romans,1219 was the art of the witch (Strega). The witch, so long as she limited herself to mere divination,1220 might be innocent enough, were it not that the transition from prophecy to active help could easily, though often imperceptibly, be a fatal downward step. She was credited in such a case not only with the power of exciting love or hatred between man and woman, but also with purely destructive and malignant arts, and was especially charged with the sickness of little children, even when the malady obviously came from the neglect and stupidity of the parents. It is still questionable how far she was supposed to act by mere magical ceremonies and formulæ, or by a conscious alliance with the fiends, apart from the poisons and drugs which she administered with a full knowledge of their effect.

The more innocent form of the superstition, in which the mendicant friar could venture to appear as the competitor of the witch, is shown in the case of the witch of Gaeta whom we read of in Pontano.1221 His traveller Suppatius reaches her dwelling while she is giving audience to a girl and a servant-maid, who come to her with a black hen, nine eggs laid on a Friday, a duck, and some white thread—for it is the third day since the new moon. They are then sent away, and bidden to come again at twilight. It is to be hoped that nothing worse than divination is intended. The mistress of the servant-maid is pregnant by a monk; the girl’s lover has proved untrue and has gone into a monastery. The witch complains: ‘Since my husband’s death I support myself in this way, and should make a good thing of it, since the Gaetan women have plenty of faith, were it not that the monks baulk me of my gains by explaining dreams, appeasing the anger of the saints for money, promising husbands to the girls, men-children to the pregnant women, offspring to the barren, and besides all this visiting the women at night when their husbands are away fishing, in accordance with the assignations made in day-time at church.’ Suppatius warns her against the envy of the monastery, but she has no fear, since the guardian of it is an old acquaintance of hers.1222

But the superstition further gave rise to a worse sort of witches, namely those who deprived men of their health and life. In these cases the mischief, when not sufficiently accounted for by the evil eye and the like, was naturally attributed to the aid of powerful spirits. The punishment, as we have seen in the case of Finicella (p. 469), was the stake; and yet a compromise with fanaticism was sometimes practicable. According to the laws of Perugia, for example, a witch could settle the affair by paying down 400 pounds.1223 The matter was not then treated with the seriousness and consistency of later times. In the territories of the Church, at Norcia (Nursia), the home of St. Benedict, in the upper Apennines, there was a perfect nest of witches and sorcerers, and no secret was made of it. It is spoken of in one of the most remarkable letters of Æneas Sylvius,1224 belonging to his earlier period. He writes to his brother: ‘The bearer of this came to me to ask if I knew of a Mount of Venus in Italy, for in such a place magical arts were taught, and his master, a Saxon and a great astronomer,1225 was anxious to learn them. I told him that I knew of a Porto Venere not far from Carrara, on the rocky coast of Liguria, where I spent three nights on the way to Basel; I also found that there was a mountain called Eryx in Sicily, which was dedicated to Venus, but I did not know whether magic was taught there. But it came into my mind while talking that in Umbria, in the old Duchy (Spoleto), near the town of Nursia, there is a cave beneath a steep rock, in which water flows. There, as I remember to have heard, are witches (striges), dæmons, and nightly shades, and he that has the courage can see and speak to ghosts (spiritus), and learn magical arts.1226 I have not seen it, nor taken any trouble about it, for that which is learned with sin is better not learned at all.’ He nevertheless names his informant, and begs his brother to take the bearer of the letter to him, should he be still alive. Æneas goes far enough here in his politeness to a man of position, but personally he was not only freer from superstition than his contemporaries (pp. 481, 508), but he also stood a test on the subject which not every educated man of our own day could endure. At the time of the Council of Basel, when he lay sick of the fever for seventy-five days at Milan, he could never be persuaded to listen to the magic doctors, though a man was brought to his bedside who a short time before had marvellously cured 2,000 soldiers of fever in the camp of Piccinino. While still an invalid, Æneas rode over the mountains to Basel, and got well on the journey.1227

We learn something more about the neighbourhood of Norcia through the necromancer who tried to get Benvenuto Cellini into his power. A new book of magic was to be consecrated,1228 and the best place for the ceremony was among the mountains in that district. The master of the magician had once, it is true, done the same thing near the Abbey of Farfa, but had there found difficulties which did not present themselves at Norcia; further, the peasants in the latter neighbourhood were trustworthy people who had practice in the matter, and who could afford considerable help in case of need. The expedition did not take place, else Benvenuto would probably have been able to tell us something of the impostor’s assistants. The whole neighbourhood was then proverbial. Aretino says somewhere of an enchanted well, ‘there dwell the sisters of the sibyl of Norcia and the aunt of the Fata Morgana.’ And about the same time Trissino could still celebrate the place in his great epic1229 with all the resources of poetry and allegory as the home of authentic prophecy.

After the famous Bull of Innocent VIII. (1484),1230 witchcraft and the persecution of witches grew into a great and revolting system. The chief representatives of this system of persecution were German Dominicans; and Germany and, curiously enough, those parts of Italy nearest Germany were the countries most afflicted by this plague. The bulls and injunctions of the Popes themselves1231 refer, for example, to the Dominican Province of Lombardy, to Cremona, to the dioceses of Brescia and Bergamo. We learn from Sprenger’s famous theoretico-practical guide, the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ that forty-one witches were burnt at Como in the first year after the publication of the bull; crowds of Italian women took refuge in the territory of the Archduke Sigismund, where they believed themselves to be still safe. Witchcraft ended by taking firm root in a few unlucky Alpine valleys, especially in the Val Camonica;1232 the system of persecution had succeeded in permanently infecting with the delusion those populations which were in any way predisposed for it. This essentially German form of witchcraft is what we should think of when reading the stories and novels of Milan or Bologna.1233 That it did not make further progress in Italy is probably due to the fact that elsewhere a highly developed ‘Stregheria’ was already in existence, resting on a different set of ideas. The Italian witch practised a trade, and needed for it money and, above all, sense. We find nothing about her of the hysterical dreams of the Northern witch, of marvellous journeys through the air, of Incubus and Succubus; the business of the ‘Strega’ was to provide for other people’s pleasure. If she was credited with the power of assuming different shapes, or of transporting herself suddenly to distant places, she was so far content to accept this reputation, as her influence was thereby increased; on the other hand, it was perilous for her when the fear of her malice and vengeance, and especially of her power for enchanting children, cattle, and crops, became general. Inquisitors and magistrates were then thoroughly in accord with popular wishes if they burnt her.

By far the most important field for the activity of the ‘Strega’ lay, as has been said, in love-affairs, and included the stirring up of love and of hatred, the producing of abortion, the pretended murder of the unfaithful man or woman by magical arts, and even the manufacture of poisons.1234 Owing to the unwillingness of many persons to have to do with these women, a class of occasional practitioners arose who secretly learned from them some one or other of their arts, and then used this knowledge on their own account. The Roman prostitutes, for example, tried to enhance their personal attractions by charms of another description in the style of Horatian Canidia. Aretino1235 may not only have known, but have also told the truth about them in this particular. He gives a list of the loathsome messes which were to be found in their boxes—hair, skulls, ribs, teeth, dead men’s eyes, human skin, the navels of little children, the soles of shoes and pieces of clothing from tombs. They even went themselves to the graveyard and fetched bits of rotten flesh, which they slily gave their lovers to eat—with more that is still worse. Pieces of the hair and nails of the lover were boiled in oil stolen from the ever-burning lamps in the church. The most innocuous of their charms was to make a heart of glowing ashes, and then to pierce it while singing—

Prima che’l fuoco spenghi,Fa ch’a mia porta venghi;Tal ti punga mio amoreQuale io fo questo cuore.

There were other charms practised by moonshine, with drawings on the ground, and figures of wax or bronze, which doubtless represented the lover, and were treated according to circumstances.

These things were so customary that a woman who, without youth and beauty, nevertheless exercised a powerful charm on men, naturally became suspected of witchcraft. The mother of Sanga,1236 secretary to Clement VII., poisoned her son’s mistress, who was a woman of this kind. Unfortunately the son died too, as well as a party of friends who had eaten of the poisoned salad.

Next come, not as helper, but as competitor to the witch, the magician or enchanter—‘incantatore’—who was still more familiar with the most perilous business of the craft. Sometimes he was as much or more of an astrologer than of a magician; he probably often gave himself out as an astrologer in order not to be prosecuted as a magician, and a certain astrology was essential in order to find out the favourable hour for a magical process.1237 But since many spirits are good1238 or indifferent, the magician could sometimes maintain a very tolerable reputation, and Sixtus IV. in the year 1474, had to proceed expressly against some Bolognese Carmelites,1239 who asserted in the pulpit that there was no harm in seeking information from the dæmons. Very many people believed in the possibility of the thing itself; an indirect proof of this lies in the fact that the most pious men believed that by prayer they could obtain visions of good spirits. Savonarola’s mind was filled with these things; the Florentine Platonists speak of a mystic union with God; and Marcellus Palingenius (p. 264), gives us to understand clearly enough that he had to do with consecrated spirits.1240 The same writer is convinced of the existence of a whole hierarchy of bad dæmons, who have their seat from the moon downwards, and are ever on the watch to do some mischief to nature and human life.1241 He even tells of his own personal acquaintance with some of them, and as the scope of the present work does not allow of a systematic exposition of the then prevalent belief in spirits, the narrative of Palingenius may be given as one instance out of many.1242

At S. Silvestro, on Soracte, he had been receiving instruction from a pious hermit on the nothingness of earthly things and the worthlessness of human life; and when the night drew near he set out on his way back to Rome. On the road, in the full light of the moon, he was joined by three men, one of whom called him by name, and asked him whence he came. Palingenius made answer: ‘From the wise man on the mountain.’ ‘O fool,’ replied the stranger, ‘dost thou in truth believe that anyone on earth is wise? Only higher beings (Divi) have wisdom, and such are we three, although we wear the shapes of men. I am named Saracil, and these two Sathiel and Jana. Our kingdom lies near the moon, where dwell that multitude of intermediate beings who have sway over earth and sea.’ Palingenius then asked, not without an inward tremor, what they were going to do at Rome. The answer was: ‘One of our comrades, Ammon, is kept in servitude by the magic arts of a youth from Narni, one of the attendants of Cardinal Orsini; for mark it, O men, there is proof of your own immortality therein, that you can control one of us; I myself, shut up in crystal, was once forced to serve a German, till a bearded monk set me free. This is the service which we wish to render at Rome to our friend, and we shall also take the opportunity of sending one or two distinguished Romans to the nether world.’ At these words a light breeze arose, and Sathiel said: ‘Listen, our messenger is coming back from Rome, and this wind announces him.’ And then another being appeared, whom they greeted joyfully and then asked about Rome. His utterances are strongly anti-papal: Clement VII. was again allied with the Spaniards and hoped to root out Luther’s doctrines, not with arguments, but by the Spanish sword. This is wholly in the interest of the dæmons, whom the impending bloodshed would enable to carry away the souls of thousands into hell. At the close of this conversation, in which Rome with all its guilt is represented as wholly given over to the Evil One, the apparitions vanish, and leave the poet sorrowfully to pursue his way alone.1243

Those who would form a conception of the extent of the belief in those relations to the dæmons which could be openly avowed in spite of the penalties attaching to witchcraft, may be referred to the much read work of Agrippa of Nettesheim on ‘Secret Philosophy.’ He seems originally to have written it before he was in Italy,1244 but in the dedication to Trithemius he mentions Italian authorities among others, if only by way of disparagement. In the case of equivocal persons like Agrippa, or of the knaves and fools into whom the majority of the rest may be divided, there is little that is interesting in the system they profess, with its formulæ, fumigations, ointments, and the rest of it.1245 But this system was filled with quotations from the superstitions of antiquity, the influence of which on the life and the passions of Italians is at times most remarkable and fruitful. We might think that a great mind must be thoroughly ruined, before it surrendered itself to such influences; but the violence of hope and desire led even vigorous and original men of all classes to have recourse to the magician, and the belief that the thing was feasible at all weakened to some extent the faith, even of those who kept at a distance, in the moral order of the world. At the cost of a little money and danger it seemed possible to defy with impunity the universal reason and morality of mankind, and to spare oneself the intermediate steps which otherwise lie between a man and his lawful or unlawful ends.