FIG. 23—IACOPO DELLA QUERCIA: The Nativity
FIG. 24—IACOPO DELLA QUERCIA: Noah’s Ark
FIG. 25—PERUGINO: Self-portrait
FIG. 26—PINTURRICCHIO: The Nativity
FIG. 27—ANDREA MANTEGNA: Lodovico Gonzaga and His Family
FIG. 28—ANDREA MANTEGNA: Adoration of the Shepherds
FIG. 29—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Portrait of Isabella d’Este
FIG. 30—TITIAN: Portrait of Isabella d’Este
Part III. This section follows page 384
FIG. 31—GIOVANNI BELLINI: Madonna degli Alberetti
FIG. 32—GIOVANNI BELLINI: Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredano
FIG. 33—GIORGIONE: Sleeping Venus
FIG. 34—GIORGIONE: Concert Champêtre
FIG. 35—TITIAN: Sacred and Profane Love
FIG. 36—TITIAN: Venus and Adonis
FIG. 37—VITTORE CARPACCIO: The Dream of St. Ursula
FIG. 38—TITIAN: Assumption of the Virgin
FIG. 39—CORREGGIO: Sts. John and Augustine
FIG. 40—CORREGGIO: [The Mystic] Marriage of St. Catherine
FIG. 41—PARMIGIANINO: Madonna della Rosa
FIG. 42—Majolica from Faenza
FIG. 43—RAPHAEL: The Pearl Madonna
FIG. 44—RAPHAEL: Portrait of Pope Julius II
FIG. 45—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Pietà
FIG. 46—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Creation of Adam
Part IV. This section follows page 608
FIG. 47—RAPHAEL and GIULIO ROMANO: The Transfiguration
FIG. 48—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici
FIG. 49—TITIAN: Portrait of Aretino
FIG. 50—TITIAN: Portrait of Pope Paul III
FIG. 51—TITIAN: Portrait of Charles V
FIG. 52—TITIAN: Venus of Urbino
FIG. 53—TITIAN: Portrait of a Young Englishman
FIG. 54—TITIAN: Self-portrait
FIG. 55—TINTORETTO: The Miracle of St. Mark
FIG. 56—TINTORETTO: Presentation of the Virgin
FIG. 57—PAOLO VERONESE: Self-portrait
FIG. 58—PAOLO VERONESE: Portrait of Daniele Barbaro
FIG. 59—PAOLO VERONESE: The Rape of Europa
FIG. 60—PAOLO VERONESE: Mars and Venus
FIG. 61—DANIELE DA VOLTERRA: Bust of Michelangelo Buonarroti
BOOK I
PRELUDE
1300–77
CHAPTER I
The Age of Petrarch and Boccaccio
1304–75
I. THE FATHER OF THE RENAISSANCE
IN that same year 1302 in which the aristocratic party of the neri (Blacks), having seized the government of Florence by force, exiled Dante and other middle-class bianchi (Whites), the triumphant oligarchy indicted a White lawyer, Ser (i.e., Messer or Master) Petracco on the charge of having falsified a legal document. Branding the accusation as a device for ending his political career, Petracco refused to stand for trial. He was convicted in absence, and was given the choice of paying a heavy fine or having his right hand cut off. As he still refused to appear before the court, he was banished from Florence, and suffered the confiscation of his property. Taking his young wife with him, he fled to Arezzo. There, two years later, Francesco Petrarca (as he later euphonized his name) burst upon the world.
Predominantly Ghibelline—yielding political allegiance to the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire rather than to the popes—little Arezzo experienced in the fourteenth century all the tribulations of an Italian city. Guelfic Florence—supporting the popes against the emperors in the struggle for political authority in Italy—had overwhelmed Arezzo at Campaldino (1289), where Dante fought; in 1340 all Aretine Ghibellines between thirteen and seventy were exiled; and in 1384 Arezzo fell permanently under Florentine rule. There, in ancient days, Maecenas had been born; there the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would see the birth of Giorgio Vasari, who made the Renaissance famous, and of Pietro Aretino, who for a while made it infamous. Every town in Italy has fathered genius, and banished it.
In 1312 Ser Petracco rushed north to welcome the Emperor Henry VII as one who would save Italy, or at least its Ghibellines. As sanguine as Dante in that year, Petracco moved his family to Pisa, and awaited the destruction of the Florentine Guelfs.
Pisa was still among the splendors of Italy. The shattering of her fleet by the Genoese in 1284 had reduced her possessions and narrowed her commerce; and the strife of Guelf and Ghibelline within her gates left her with scant strength to elude the imperialistic grasp of a mercantile Florence eager to control the Arno to its mouth. But her brave burghers gloried in their majestic marble cathedral, their precarious campanile, and their famous cemetery, that Campo Santo, or Sacred Field, whose central quadrangle had been filled with soil from the Holy Land, and whose walls were soon to receive frescoes by Giotto’s pupils and the Lorenzetti, and whose sculptured tombs gave a moment’s immortality to the heroic or lavish dead. In Pisa’s university, soon after its establishment, the subtle jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato adapted Roman law to the needs of the age, but phrased his legal science in such esoteric verbiage as brought both Petrarch and Boccaccio down upon his head. Perhaps Bartolus found obscurity prudent, since he justified tyrannicide, and denied the right of governments to take a man’s property except by due process of law.1
Henry VII died (1313) before he could make up his mind to be or not to be a Roman emperor. The Guelfs of Italy rejoiced; and Ser Petracco, unsafe in Pisa, emigrated with his wife, his daughter, and his two sons to Avignon on the Rhone, where the newly established papal court, and a rapidly expanding population, offered opportunities for a lawyer’s skill. They sailed up the coast to Genoa, and Petrarch never forgot the unfolding splendor of the Italian Riviera—towns like diadems on mountain brows, slipping down to green blue seas; this, said the young poet, “is liker to heaven than to earth.”2 They found Avignon so stuffed with dignitaries that they moved some fifteen miles northeast to Carpentras (1315); and there Francesco spent four years of happy carelessness. Bliss ended when he was sent off to Montpellier (1319–23), and then to Bologna (1323–6) to study law.
Bologna should have pleased him. It was a university town, full of the frolic of students, the odor of learning, the excitement of independent thought. Here in this fourteenth century were given the first courses in human anatomy. Here were women professors, some, like Novella d’Andrea (d. 1366), so attractive that tradition, doubtless fanciful, described her as lecturing behind a veil lest the students should be distracted by her beauty. The commune of Bologna had been among the first to throw off the yoke of the Holy Roman Empire and proclaim its autonomy; as far back as 1153 it had chosen its own podesta or city manager; and for two centuries it had maintained a democratic government. But in 1325, while Petrarch was there, it suffered so disastrous a defeat by Modena that it placed itself under the protection of the papacy, and in 1327 accepted a papal vicar as its governor. Thereby would hang many a bitter tale.