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"But if we embrace in our judgment not only Cosimo Pater patriae, but his descendants Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leo X, and Clement VII, we may admit that in the patronage of learning and art the Medici have never been equaled by any other family in the known history of mankind."

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Savonarola, continued: Page 144-145 hard cover copy.

He wrote a tender letter to his parents begging their forgiveness for disappointing the expectations they had had of his advancement in the world. When they importuned him to return he answered angrily: "Ye blind! //why do you still weep and lament? You hamper me, though you should rejoice . . . What can I say if you grieve yet, save that you are my sworn enemies and foes to Virtue? If so,then I say to you, "Get ye behind me, all ye who work evil!" (See note 8: Villari, "Savonarola", 129)

Six years he stayed in the Bologna convent. He proudly asked that the most humble tasks be given him, but his talent as an orator was discovered, and he was set to preaching. In 1481 he was transferred to San Marco in Florence, and was assigned to prech in the church of San Lorenzo. His sermons there proved unpopular ; they were to theological and didactic for a city that knew the eloquence and pollish of the humanists. His congregation dwindled week by week. The prior set him to instructing novices.

It was probably in the next five years that his final character was formed. As the intensity of his feelings and purposes increased they wrote themselves upon his features in the furrowed and frowning forehead, the thick lips tight with determination, the immense nose curving out as if to encompass the world, a countenance somber and severe, expressing an infinite capacity for love and hate, a small frame racked and haunted with visions, frustrated aspirations and introverted storms.

"I am still flesh like you," he wrote to his parents, "and the senses are unruly to reason, so that I must struggle cruelly to keep the Demon from leaping upon my back."

He fasted and flogged himself to tame what seemed to him the inherent corruption of human nature. Alone in his cell he glorified his solitude by conceiving himself as a battlefield of spirits hovering over him for evil or for good.

Finally, it seemed to him that angels, archangels, were speaking to him. He accepted their words as divine revelations; and suddenly he spoke to the world as a prophet chosen to be messenger of God.

He avidly absorbed the apocalyptic visions attributed to the Apostle John, and inherited the eschatalogy of the mystic Joachim of Flora. Like Joachim he announced that reign of Antichrist had come, that Satan had captured the world, that soon Christ would appear to begin His earthly rule, and that divine vengeance would engulf the tyrants, adulterors and atheists who seemed to dominate Italy.

Comments, anyone?

Page 145-146 hard cover book

When his prior sent him to preach in Lombardy (1438), Savonarola abandoned his youthful pedagogic style, and cast his sermons into the form of denunciations of immorality, prophecies of doom, and calls to repentance. Thousands of people who could not have followed his earlier arguments listened with awe to the newly impassioned eloquence of a man who seemed to be speaking with authority.

Pico della Mirandola heard of the friar's success. He asked Lorenzo to suggest to the prior that Savonarola should be brought back to Florence. Savonarola returned. (1489). Two years later he was chosen prior of San Marco, and Lorenzo found in him an enemy more forthright than any that had ever crossed his path.

Florence was surprised to discover that the swarthy preacher who a decade before had chilled them with argument, could now awe them with apocalyptic fantasies, thrill them with vivid descriptions of the paganism, corruption and immorality of their neighbors, lift up their souls to repentance and hope, and renew in them the full intensity of the faith that had inspired and terrified their youth.

"Ye; women, who glory in your ornaments, your hair, your hands, I will tell you you are all ugly. Would you see true beauty? Look at the pious man or woman in whom spirit dominnates matter, watch him when he prays, when a ray of the divine beauty glows upon him when his prayer is ended. You will see the beauty of God shining in his face, you will behold it as if were the face of an angel."

Men marveled at his courage. He flayed the clergy and the papacy more than the laity, the princes more than the people, and a note of political radicaliam warmed the hearts of the poor:

In these days there is no grace, no gift of the Holy Spirit that may not be bought or sold. On the other hand, the poor are oppressed by grievous burdens, and when they are called to pay sums beyond their means the rich cry unto them, "Give me the rest!"

There be some who, having an income of fifty [florins per year] pay a tax on one hundred, while the rich pay little, since the taxes are regulated at their pleasure. Bethink ye well, O ye rich, for affliction shall smite ye. This city shall no more be called Florence but a den of thieves and bloodshed. Then shall ye all be poverty-stricken . . . and your name, O priests, shall be changed into a terror. (6 -- Simondi, 659; Villari, "Life and Times of Savonarola", 45; Beard, 116.)

It sounds like an old tune, doesn't it?

Lorenzo was disturbed. His grandfather had founded and enriched the monastery of San Marco. He himslef had given to it lavishly. It seemed to him unreasonable that a friar, who could know little of the difficulties of government, and who idealized a liberty that had been merely the right of the strong to use the weak without hindrance by law, should now undermine, from a Medici shrine, that public support upon which the political power of his family had been built. He tried to appease the friar; he went to Mass in San Marco's, and sent the convent rich gifts.

Savonarola scorned them and remarkd in a subsequent semon that a faithful dog does not leave off barking in his master's defense because a bone is thrown to him. When he found an unusually large sum, in gold, in the alms box, he suspected that it came f rom Lorenzo, and gave it to another monastery, saying that silver sufficed the needs of his brethren.

Lorenzo sent five leading citizens in to argue with him that his inflammatory sermons would lead to useless violence, and were unsettling the order and peace of Florence. Savonarola answered by telling them to bid Lorenzo to do penance for his sins.

A Franciscan friar famous for eloquence was encouraged to preach popular sermons wiht a view to drawing the Dominican's audience away. The Franciscans failed. Greater throngs than ever before came to San Marco, until its church could no longer hold them.

For his Lenten sermon of 1491 Savonarola moved his pulpit into the cathedral; and though that edifice had been designed to contain a city, it was crowded whenever the friar was scheduled to speak. The ailiing Lorenzo made no further effort to interfere with his preaching.

Can you imagine a friar, in that day and age in a progressive, economically strong, vital, intelligent area, disrupting an entire city that contained wealthy, influential, powerful men, just by preaching sermons? There's a lot to talk about here.

Page 147-148

After Lorenzo's death the weakness of his son Piero made Savonarola the greatest power in Florence

With the reluctant consent of the new pope, Alexander VI, he separated his convent from the Lombard Congregation ( of Dominican monasteries ) of which it had been a part, and made h imself in practice the independent head of his monastic community.

He reformed its regulations, and raised and morel and intellectual level of the friars under his rule. New recruits ointed his flock, and most of its 250 members developed for him a love and fidelity that upheld him in all but his final ordeal.

He became bolder in his criticism of the laic and clerical immorality of the time. Inheriting, however unwittingly, the anticlerical views of the Waldensian and Patarine heretics who still lurked her and there in northern Italy and central Europe, he condemned the worldly wealth of the clergy, the pomp of ecclesiastical ceremony, "the great prelates with splendid miters of gold and precious stones on their head . . . with fine copes and sotles of brocade."

He contrasted the affluence with the simplicity of the priests in the early Church; these "had fewer gold miters and fewer chalices, for what they possessed were broken up to relieve the needs of the poor,, whereas our prelates, for the sake of obtaining chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support.

He had predicted that Lorenzo and Innocent VIII wo;uld die in 1492, They did.

Now he predicted that presently the sins of Italy, of her despots and her clergy, would be avenged by a dire disaster, and that there after Christ would lead the nations in a glorious reform; and that he himself, Savonarola, would die a violent death.

Early in 1492 he foretold that Charles VIII would invade Italy, and he welcomed the invasion as the chastening hand of God.

His sermons at this time, says a contemporary, were "so full of terrors and alarms, cries and lamentations, that everyone went about the city bewildered, speechless, and, as it were, half-dead."

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TO CONTINUE WITH DURANT:

On July 21, 1495 Alexander wrote a brief note to Savonarola:

To our well-beloved son, greeting and the apostolic benediction.
We have heard that of all the workers in the Lord's vineyard thou art the most zealous,
at which we deeply rejoice, and give thanks to Almighty God. We have likewise heard that
thou dost assert thy preditions proceed not from yu but from God. * Therefore we desire, as
behooves our pastoral office, to have speech with thee consideirng these things, so that,
being by these means better informed of God's will, we may be better able to fulfil it. Wheretofore
by thy vow of holy obedience, we enjoin thee to wait on us without delay, and shall welcome theee
with loving kindness.

The Church, to check false prophets, had pronounced such claims to be heretical.

The letter was a triumph for Savonarola's enemies, for it placed him in a situation where he must either end his career as a refirnerm ir fkagrabtkt disobey the Pope. He feared that once in the papal power he would never be allowed to return to Florence. He might end his days in a Sant' Angelo dungeon. If he did not come back his supp0rters would be ruined.

On their advice he replied to Alexander that he was too ill to travel to Rome.

That the Pope's motives were political appeared when he wrote to the Signory on September 8 protesting against the continued alliance of Florence with France, and exhorting the Florentines not to endure the reproach of being the only Italians allied with the enemies of Italy.

At the same time he ordered Savonarola to desist from preaching, to submit to the authority of the Dominican vicar-geberal in Lombardy, and to go wherever the vicar-general bid him.

Savonarola replied (September 10) that his congregation was unwilling to subordinate itself to the vicar-general , but thqt meanwhile he would refrain from preaching.

Alexander, in a conciliatory respnse (October 16) repeated his prohibition of preaching, and expressed the hope that when Savonarola's health should permit, he would come to Rome, to be received in "a joyful and fatherly spirit."

There, for a year, Alexander let the problem rest.

Robby

His first sermon of the year reopened the conflict with the Pope. It was an event in the history of Florence. Half the excited city wished to hear him, and even the vast duomo could not contain all who sought entry. Within they were packed so tightly that no one could move. A group of armed friends escorted the prior to the cathedral. He began by explaining his long absence from the pulpit and affirmed his full loyalty in the teachings of the Church.

But then he issued an audacious challenge to the Pope:-

The superior may not give me any command contrary to the rules of my order. The pope may not give an coommend opposed to charity or the Gospel.

I do not believe the pope would ever seek to do so, but were he so to do, I would say to him, "Now thou aart not pastor. Thou art not the Church of Rome. Thou art in error."

Whenever it be clearly seen that the commands of superiors are contrary to God's commandments, and especially when contrary to the precepts of charity, no one is in such case bound to obedience..

Were I to clearly see that my departure from a city would be the spiritual and temporal ruin of the people, I would obey no living man that commanded me to depart. . . . forasmuch as in obeying him I should disobey thhe commands of the Lord.

I think this is one of the most exciting, stimulating parts of history I've ever read. How anyone could sit on his or her hands and not comment on this period and this stubbornly courageous man, I really don't know.

Let's hear what you think.

Robby

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Quoted from the book

As the Lenten season of 1497 approached, that Arrabiati prepared to celebrate carnival by such festivities, processions, and songs as he been sanctioned under the Medici. To counter these plans Savonarola's loyal aide, Fra Domenicao, instructed the children of the congregation to organize a quite different celebration. During the week of Carnival -- preceding Lent -- these boys and girls went about the city in bands, knocked at doors, and asked for -- sometimes demanded -- the surrender of what they called "vanities or cursed objects. (anathemase) -- pictures considered immoral, love songs, carnival masks and costumes, false hair, fancy dresses, playing cards, dice, musical instruments, cosmetics, wicked books like the Decameron or the morgante maggiore.

On the final day of Carnival, February 7, the more ardent supporters of Savonarola, singing hymns, marched in solemn procession, behind a figure of the Infant Jesus carved by Donatello abd borne by four children in the guise of angels, to the Piazza della Signoria. There a great pyramid of combustible material had been raised, 60 feet high and 240 feet in circumference at the base.

Upon the seven stages of the pyramid the "vanities" collected during the week, or nonw brought to the sacrifice, were arranged or thrown, including precious manuscripts and works of art. Fire was set to the pyre at four points, and the bells of the Palazxo Vecchio were rung to acclaim this first Savonarola "burning of the vanities."

More from Durant:

The Lenten semon of the friar carried the war to Rome. While accepting the principle that the Chrch should have some terra firma of temporal powers, he argued that the wealth of the Church was the source of her deterioration. His invective now knew no bounds.

The torch teems with bloodshed, yet the priests take no heed;
rather, by their evil examples, they bring spiritual death upon all.
They have withdrawn from God, and their piety consists in spending
their nights with harlots. . . . . They say that God hath no care
of the world, that all cometh by chance, neither believe they that
Christ is present in the sacrament . . . . Come hither, thou ribald
Church. The Lord saith: I give thee beautiful vestments, but thou
have made idols of them. Thou hast dedicated the sacred vessels to
vainglory, the sacraments to simony. Thoue has become a shameless
harlot in thy lusts; thou art lower than a beast; thou art a monster of
abomination. Once thou felt shame for thy sins, but now thou art
shameless. Once anonointed priests called their sons nephews, but now
they speak of sons . . . . And thus, O prostitute Church, thou hast displayed
thy foulness to the hwole world and stinkest unto heaven.

Savonarola suspected that such tirades would earn him excommunication. He welcomed it.

Many of ye say that excommunication will be decreed . . . . For my
part I beseech Thee, O Lord, that it may come quickly . . . .Bear this
excommunication aloft on a lance, open the gates to it! I will reply
to it, and if I do not amaze thee, then thou; mayest say what thou
wilt. . . O Lord, I seek only Thy cross! Let me be persecuted, I
ask this grace of Thee. Let me not died in my bed, but let me give my
blood for Thee, even as Thou gavest thine for me.

Whew! And what do you say about that?

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Quoting from Durant:

IV. THE REPUBLIC AND THE MEDICI (1408-1534)
The chaos that had almost nullified government in the later years of Savonarola's ascendancy was not mitigated by his death.. The brief term of tow momths allowed to each Signory and gonfaloner made for a hectic discontinuuity in the executive branch, and inclined the priors to irresponsibility and corruption.

In 1502 the Council, dominated by a triumphant oligarchy of rich men, sought to overcome part of this difficulty by electing gonfalonier for life, so that while still subject to the Signory and Council, the he might face the popes and the secular rulers of Italy on terms of equal tenure.

The first man to receive this honor was Pietro Soderini, a millionaire friendly to the people, an honest patriot whose powers of mind and will were not so eminent as to threaten Florence with dictatorship.

He enlisted Machiavelli among his advisors, governed prudently and economically, and used his private fortune to resume that patronage of art which had been interrupted under Savonarola. With his support, Machiavelli replaced the mercenary troops of Florence with a citizen militia, which finally (1508) forced Pisa to yield again to a Florentine "protectorate."

But in 1512 the foreign policy of the Republic brought on the disaster that Alexander VI had fortold. Through all the efforts of the "Holy League" of Venice, Milan, Naples, and Rome to rid Italy of its French invaders Florence had persisted in its alliance with France.

When victory crowned the League it turned in revenge upon Florence and sent its troops to replace the republican oligarchy with a Medicean dictatorship. Florence resisted and Machiavelli labored strenuously ot organize its defense. Its outpost, Prato, was taken and sacked, and Machiavelli's militia turned and fled from thee trained mercenaries of the League. Soderini resigned to avoid further bloodshed. Guiliano de Medici, son of Lorenzo, having contributed 10,000 ducats ($250,000) to the League treasury, entered Florence under the protection of Spanish, German and Italian arms. His brother, Cardinal Giovanni, soon joined him; the Savonarolan constitution was abolished, and the Medicean ascendancy was restored. (1512)

CONTINUING WITH DURANT:

Giuliano and Giovanni behaved with moderation, and the public, surfeited with excitement, readily accepted the change. When Giovanni became Leo X (1513) Giuliano, having proved too gentle to be a successful ruler, yielded the government of Florence to his nephew Lorenzo. This ambitious youth died after six years of reckless rule.

Cardinal Giulio de Medici, son of the Giuliano who had been slain in the Pazzi conspiracy, now gave Florence an excellent administration, a nd after he became Clement VII (1521) he ruled the city from the papal chair. Florence took advantage of his misfortunes to expel his representatives (1527) and for four years it again enjoyed the trials of liberty.

But Clement tempered defeat with diplomacy, and used the troops of Charles V to avenge his ousted relatives. An army of Spanish and German troops marched upoon Florence (1529) and repeated the story of 1512. Resistance was heroic but vain, and Alessandro de Medici began (1531) a regime of oppression, brutality, and lechery unprecedented in the annal of the family. Three centuries would pass before Florence would know freedom again.

Thank you, MALLYLEE and FIFI for posting here. Let's try to keep this discussion rolling until ROBBY's return. We're about to start "ART UNDER THE REVOLUTON", which I'm sure will be fascinating to discuss.

An age of political excitement is usually a stimulant to literature, and we shall study later two writers of the first rank -- Machiavelli and Giucciardini -- who belonged to this period, But a state always verging on bankruptcy, and engaged in almost permanent revolution, does not favor art -- and least of all architecture.

Some rich men, skilled in floating on a flood, still gave hostages to fortune by building palaces. Giovanni Francesco and Artistotele da Sangallo, working on plans by Raphael, raised a palatial mansion for the Pandolfini family.

In 1520-4 Michalangelo designed for Cardinal Giulio de Medici a Nuovo Sagrestia, or New Sacristy, for the church of San Lorenzo -- a simple quadrangle and modest dome, known to all the world as the home of Michelangelo's finest sculptures, the tombs of the Medici.

I'll continue this tomorrow morning when the light is better, folks. I'll be 79 July 2nd, and these old eyes just ain't what they used to be.

Robby

Among the Titan's rivals was the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who worked with him in Lorenzo's garden of statuary, and broke his nose to win an argument. Lorenzo was so incensed by this violence that Torrigiano took refuge in Rome. He became a soldier in Cesar Borgia's service, fought bravely in several battles. Found his way to England, and designed there one of the masterpieces of English art -- the tomb of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey.

Wandering restlessly to Spain, he carved a handsome Madonna and Child fir the Duke of Arcos, But the duke underpaid him. The sculptor smashed the statue to bits. The vengeful aristocrat denounced him to the Inquisition as a heretic. Torrigiano was sentenced to severe punishment, but cheated his foes by starving himself to death.

This is one impetuous Italiano. Bite off your nose to spite your face? Wonder if vino had anything to do with this?

Florence had never had so many great artists at one time as in 1492, but many of those fled from her turbulence and lent their reknown to other scenes. Leonardo went to Milan, Michalangelo to Bologna, Andrea Sansovino to Lisbon. Sansovino took his cognomen from Monte San Savino, and made it so famous that the world forgot his real name, Andrea di Domenico Contucci. Born the son of a poor laborer, he developed a passion for drawing and for moderliing in clay. A kindly Florentine sent him to the studio of Antonio dei Pollaiuolo.

Maturing rapidly, he built for the church of Santo Spirito a chapel of the Scrament, with statues and reliefs "so vigorous and excellent," said Vasari, "that they are without a flaw." Before it he placed a bronze grille that halts the breath with its beuaty.

King John VII of Portugal begged Lorenzo to send the young artist to him. Andrea went and labored nine years there in sculpture and architecture. Lonesome for Italy, he returned to Florence (1500) but soon passed to Genoa and finally to Rome.

In Santa Maria del Popolo he built two marble tombs -- for Cardinal Sforza and Basso della Rovere -- which won high acclaim in a city then (1506-7) buzzing with geniuses.

Leo X sent him to Loreto, and there (1523-8 ) Andrea adorned the church of Santa Maria with a seris of reliefs from the life of the Virgin, so beautiful that the angel in the Annunciation seemed to Vasari "not marble but celestial."

Soon afterward Andrea retired to a farm near his native Monte San Savino, lived energetically as a peasant, and died in 1529 aged sixty-eight.

What a marvelous life for an artist! Comments?

Meanwhile the della Robbia family had faithfully and skillfully carried on the work of Luca in glazed clay. Andrea della Robbia exceeded in longevity even the eighty-five years of his uncle, and had time to train three sons in the art -- Giovanni, Luca and Girolarmo.

Andrea's terra cottas have a brilliance of tone and a tenderness of sentiment that snare the eye and still the feet of the museum traveler. A room in the Bargello is rich with him, and the Hospital of the Innocents is distinguished by his decorative lunette of the Annunciation.

Giovanni della Robbia rivaled his father Andrea's excellence, as one may see in the Bargello and the Louvre. The della Robbias almost confined themselves to religious subjects through three generations.. They were among the most fervent supporters of Savonarola, and two of Andrea's sons joined the Brethren of San Marco to week salvation with the friar.

The church I grew up in in Haverhill, Massachusetts has a room adjoining the sanctuary, which is separated by a retractable wall. When there was a congregation overflow, the wall was opened, and people were seated in this room.

The church itself is very English Gothic in appearance; heavy, it seems to me. It weighed on me every time I went in it. In the room next to the sanctuary there is, however, a copy of a della Robbia madonna and child. That piece of bas relief on the wall lightened the atmosphere, and brought a breath of fresh air into the place.

"Andrea's terra cottas have a brilliance of tone and a tenderness of sentiment that snare the eye and still the feet of the museum traveler. "

Isn't that glorious writing? I know exactly what he means.

The painters felt Savonarola's influence most deeply. Lorenzo di Credi leaned his art from Verrocchio; imitated the style of his fellow student Leonardo, and took the tenderness of his religious paintings from the piety nurtured in him by Savonarola's eloquence and fate.

He spent half his life painting Madonnas; we find them everywhere -- in Rome, Florence, Turin, Avignon, Cleveland, the faces poor, the robes magnificent. Perhaps the best is the Annuciation in the Uffizi. At the age of seventy-two, feeling it time to take on the savor of sanctity, Lorenzo went to live with the monks of Santa Maria Nuova, and there, six years later, he died.

How about someone else posting links to artwork? It's easy. Just copy the URL of the page and paste it here.

CONTINUING WITH DURANT

Piero di Cosimo took his cognomen from Cosimo Rosselli, for "he who instructs ability and promotes well-being is as truly a father as the one who begets."

Cosimo came to the conclusion that his pupil surpassed him. Summoned by Sixtus IV to decorate the Sistine Chapel, he took Piero with him, and Piero painted there "The Destruction of Pharoah's Troops in the Red Sea" with a gloomy landscape of water, rocks and cloudy sky.

He has left us two magnificent portraits, back in the Hague; of Giuliao da Sangallo and Francesco da Sangallo. Piero was all artist acaring little for society or friendship, loving nature and solitude, absorbed in the pictures and scenes that he painted.

He died unconfessed and alone, having transmitted his art to two pupils who followed his example by surpassing their master:- Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto.

MORE FROM THE BOOK.

Baccio della Porta took his last name from the gate of San Piero where he lived. When he became a friar he received the name Fra Bartolommeo -- Brother Bartholomew. Having studied with Cosimo Rosselli and Piero di Cosimo, he opened a studio with Mariotto Albertinelli, paointed many pictures in collaboration with him, and remained bound to him in a fine friendship till parted by death.

He was a modest youth, eager for instruction and receptive to every influence. For a time he sought to catch the subtle shading of Leonardo, When Raphael came to Florence, Baccio studied perspective with him, and better blending of colors. Later he visited Raphael in Rome and painted with him a noble "Head of St. Peter". Finally, he fell in love with the majestic style of Michelangelo, but he lacked the terrible intensity of the angry giant, and when Bartolommeo attempted the monumental he lost in th e enlargement of his simple ideas the charm of his qualities -- the rich depth of his colors, the stately symmetry of his composition, the piety and sentiment of his themes.

QUOTED FROM THE BOOK

He was deeply stirred by the sermons of Savonarola. He brought to the burning o the vanities al of his paintings of the nude. When the enemies of the friar attacked the convent of San Narco in 1498, he joined in its defense. In the course of the melee he vowed to become a monk if he survived. He kept his pledge and in 1500 he joined the Domican monastery at Prato.

For five years he consented to add his masterpieces in blue, red and black to the rosy frescoes of Fra Angelico. There, in the refectory, he painted a "Madonna and Child" and a "Last Judgment." In the cloisters a "San Sebastian", and in Savonarola's cell a powerful portrait of the friar in the guise of St, Peter Martyr.

The "San Sebastian" was the only nude that he painted after becoming a monk. Originally it was placed in the church of San Marco, but it was so handsome that some women confessed to having been stirred to wicked thoughts by it, and the priest sold it to a Florentine who sent it to the King of France.

Fra Bartolommeo continued to paint until 1517 when disease so paralyzed his hands that he could no longer hold a brush. He died in that year, at the age of forty-five.

What a loss to the world when Bartolommeo's nudes were consigned to the burning of the vanities. What a shame!

TO CONTINUE:

His only rival for supremacy among the Italian painters of this period was another disciple of Piero di Cosimo. Andrea Domenico d"Agnolo di Francesco Vannucci is known as Andrea del' Sarto because his father was a tailor. Like most Renaissance artists he developed quickly, beginning his apprenticeship at seven. Piero marveled at the lad's skill in design, and noted with warm approval how Andrea, when a holyday closed the studio, spent his time drawing the figures in the famous cartoons made by Leonardo and Michelangelo for the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio.

When Piero became in old age too eccentric a master Andrea and fellow student Franciabigio set up their 9own "bottega", and for some time worked together.

Andrea seems to have begun his independent career by painting in the court of the Annunziata Church (1509) five scenes from the life of San Filippi Benizi a Florentine noble who had founded the order of the Services for the special worhsip of Mary.

These frescoes, though sorely injured by time and exposure, are so remarkable for draughtsmanship, composition, vividness of narrative, and the soft merging of warm and harmonious colors, that this atrium is n ow one of the goals of art pilgrims in Florence.

For one of the female figures Andrea used as model the woman who in the course of these paintings became his wife -- Lucrezia del Felde, a sumptuously beautiful shrew whose dark face and raven haunted the artist in all but his dying days.

We wish you well, ROBBY, and hope you'll soon be able to return to this fold.

QUOTED FROM THE BOOK

In 1515 Andrea and Franciabigio undertook a series of frescoes in the cloisers of the Scalzo fraternity. They chose as subject the life of St. John the Baptist, but it was surely Andrea's hand that in several figures displayed one of his specialties, picturing the female breast in all that perfection of its texture and form.

In 1518 he accepted the invitation of Francis I to come to France. There he painted the figure of Charity that hangs in the Louvre. His wife back in Florence begged him to come back. The king granted permission on Andrea's pledge to return, and entrusted him with a considerable sum to buy works of art for him in Italy.

Andrea, in Florence, spent the royal funds in building himself a house, and never went back to France.

Facing bankruptcy nevertheless, he resumed his painting, and produced for the cloisters of the Annuziata a masterpiece which, said Vasari, "in design, grace, excellence of coloring, and relief, proved him far superior to all his predecessors" -- who included Leonardo and Raphael.

The "Madonna del Sacco" -- absurdly called because Mary and Joseph are shown leaning against a sack -- is now damaged and faded, and no longer conveys the full splendor of its color; but its perfect composition, soft tones, and quiet presentation of a family -- with Joseph suddenly literate, reading a book -- make it one of the great pictures of the Renaissance.

FROM THE BOOK

In the refectory of the Salvi monastery, Andrea challenged Leonardo with a "Last Supper" (1526) choosing the same moment and theme -- "One of you shall betray me." Bolder than Leonardo, Andrea finished the face of his Christ; even he, however, fell far short of the spiritual depth and understanding gentleness that we associate with Jesus. But the apostles are strikingly individualized, the action is vivid, the colors are rich and soft and full, and the picture as seen from the entrance of the refectory conveys almost irresistily the illusion of a living scene.

The Virgin Mother remained the favorite subject of Andrea, as of most artists of Renaissance Italy. He painted her again and again in studies of the Holy Family, as in the Borghese Galllery in Rome, or the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

He pictured her in one of the treasures of the Uffizi Gallery as "Madonna del Arpie, Madonna of the Harpies". This is the fairest of the Lucrezia Virgins, and the Child is the finest in Italian art.

Acoss the Arno in the pitti Gallery, the "Assumption of the Virgin" shows Apostles and holy women lookiing up in amazement and adoration as cherubim raise the praying Madonna -- again Lucrezia -- to heaven. So, in Andrea's colorful illuminations, the moving epos of the Virgin is complete.

FROM THE BOOK

There is seldom any sublimity in Andrea del Sarto, no majesty of Michelangelo, not the unfathomable nuances of Leonardo, nor the finished perfection of Raphael, nor yet the range and power of the great Venetians. Yet he alone of all the Florentines rivals the Venetians in color and Coreggio in grace. His mastery of tones -- in their depth and modulation and transparency -- might well be preferred to te lavishment of color in Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

We miss varity in Andrea; his paintings move in too small a circle of subject and sentiment. His hundred Madonnas are always the same Italian mother, modest and lovely and at last cloyingly sweet. But no on surpassed him in composition, few in anatomy, modeling and design.

"There is a little fellow in Florence," said Michelangelo to Raphael, 'who will bring sweat to your brow if ever he is engaged in great works."

Andrea himself never lived to full maturity. The victorious Germans,, capturing Florence in 1530, infected it with plague, and Andrea was one of its victims. His wife, who had aroused in him all the heartaches of jealousy that beauty brings to marriage, shunned his room in those last fevered days. The artist who had given her an almost deathless life died with no one by his side at the age of forty-four.

About 1570 Jacopo di Empoli went to the court of the Annunziata to copy del Sarto's "Nativity". An old lady who had come to Mass stopped beside him and pointed to a figure in the forground of the painting. "It is I," she said. Lucrezia had outlived herself by forty years.

Quoted from the book

The few artists we have here commemorated must be viewed not as a record, but as representatives of the plastic and graphic genius of this period. There were other suclptors and painters of the time, who still lead a ghostly existence in museums -- Benedetto da Rovezzano, Franciabigio, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio and hundreds more.

There were half-secluded artists, monastic and secular, who still practised the intimate art of illuminating manuscrips, like Fra Fastachio and Antonio di Girolamo.

There were calligraphers whose handwriting might excuse Frederigo of Urbano for regressing the invention of print. There were mosaicists who despised painting as the perishable pride of a day, wood carvers like Bacco d'Agnolo , whose carved chairs, tables, chests and beds were the glory of Florentine home, and nameless other workers in the minor arts.

Florence was so rich in art that she could bear the depredations of invaders, pontiffs and millionaires from Charles VII to our own times, and still retain so much of delicate workmanship that no man has ever compassed all the treasures deposited in that one city by the two centuries of the Renaissance. Or by one century; for just as the great age of Florence in art had begun with Cosimo's return from exile in 1414, so it ended with Andrea del Sarto's death in 1530.

Civil strife, Savonarola's puritan regime, siege and defeat and plague, had destroyed the joyful spirit of Lorenzo's day, had broken the fragile lyre of art.

The great chords had struck, and their music echoed throughout the peninsula. Orders came to Florence artists from other Italian cities, even from France, Spain, Hungary, Germany and Turkey. To Florence flocked a thousand artists to learn her lore and form their styles -- Piero della Francesca, Perugino, Raphael . . . . . From Florence a hundred artists took the gospel of art to half a hundred Italian cities and to foreign lands. In those half hundred cities the spirit and taste of the age, the generosity of wealth, the heritage of technique worked together with the Florentine stimulus.

Presently all Italy, from the Alps to Calabria, was painting, carving, building, composing, singing, in a creative frenzy that seemed to know, in the fever of the time, that soon the wealth would vanish in war, and the pride of Italy would be humbled under an alien tyranny, and the prison doors of dogma would close again upon the marvelous exuberant mind of Renaissance man.

What a marvelous era for art. Don't you love this? "The prison doors of dogma would close again"

I have sworn I'd get to Florence before I die. If some kindly, saintly benefactor would take me under his or her wing, I'll make it.

We do injustice to the Renaissance when we concentrate our study on Florence, Venice and Rome. For a decade it was more brilliant in Milan, under Lodovico and Leonardo, than in Florence. Its liberation and exaltation of woman found their best embodiment in Isabella d'Este at Mantua. It glorified Parma with Correggio, Perugio with Perugino, Orvieto with Signorelli.

Its literature reached an apex with Ariosto di Ferrara, and it cultivation of manners at Urbino in the days of Catiglione. It gave name to ceramic art at Faenza, and to the Palladian architectural style at Vicenza..

It revived Siena with PInturicchio and Sassetta and Sodoma, and made Naples a home and symbol of joyous living and idyllic poetry. We must pawss leisurely through the incomparable peninsula from Piedmont to Sicily, and let the varied voices of the cities merge in the polyphonic chorus of the Renaissance.

The economic life of the Italian states in the fifteenth century was as diverse as their climate, dialects and costumes. The north, i.e. above Florence, could have severe winters, sometimes freezing the Po from end to end. Yet the coastal region around Genoa, sheltered by the Ligurian Alps, enjoyed mild weather in almost month.

Venice could shroud its palaces and towers and liquid streets in clouds and mist. Rome was sunny but miasmic. Naples was a climatic paradise.

Everywhere, at one time or another, the cities and their countryside suffered those earthquakes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, famiines, plagues and wars that a Malthusian Nature suddenly provides to compensate for the rperoductive ectasties of mankind.,

In the towns the old handicrafts supplied the poor with a living and the rich wih superfluities. Only the textile industry had reached the factory and capitalist stage. One silk mill at Bologna contracted with the city authorities to do "the work of 4000 spinning women."

Petty trademen, merchants of import and export, teachers, lawyers, physicians, administrators, politicians, made up a complex middle class. A wealthy and worldly clergy added their color and grace to the courts and the streets, and monks and friars wandered about seeking alms or romance.

The aristocracy of landowners and financiers lived for the most part within the city walls, occasionally in rural villas. At the top a banker, condottierre, marquis, duke, doge, or king, with his wife or mistress, presided over a court hampered with luxuries and gilded with art.

In the countryside the peasant tilled his modest acres or some lord's domain, and lived in a poverty so traditional that it seldom entered his thoughts.

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Slavery existed on a minor scale, chiefly in domestic service among the rich, occasionally as a supplement and corrective to free labor on large estates, especially in Sicily. Here and there even in northern Italy Genoese merchants imported them from the Balkans, southern Russia, and Islam. Male or female Moorish slaves were considered a shining ornament in Italian courts.

In 1488 Pope Innocent VIII received a hundred Moorish slaves as a present from Ferdinand the Catholic, and distributed them as gratuities among his cardinals and friends. In 1501, after the capture of Capua, many Caputan women were sold as slaves in Rome.

These stray facts illustrate the morals rather than the economy of the Renaissance. Slavery rarely played a significant role in the production or transport of goods.

Transport was chiefly on muleback or by cart, or by river, canal or sea. The well-to-do traveled on horseback or in horse drawn carriages. Speed was moderate but exciting. It took two days and a good spine to ride from Perogia to Urbino -- sixty-four miles. A boat might take fourteen days from Barcelona to Gebia.

Inns were numerous, noisy, dirty and uncomfortable. One at Padua could house 100 guests and stable 100 houses.

Roads were rough and perilous. The main streets of cities were paved with flagstones, but were only exceptionally lighted at night. Good water was brought in from the mountains, rarely to individual homes, usually to public fountains artistically designed, by whose cooling flow simple women and idle men gathered and distributed the news of the day.

Thanks, folks. It was a lovely weekend, topped off by dinner yesterday at a chop chop Hibachi Japanese restaurant where I was called "Mama San".

Robby wrote that his shoulder is better, but still tender. He might come by this week. Thinking of you, O Great Facilitator!

Mama San Mal

The city-states that divided the peninsula were ruled in some cases -- Florence, Siena, Venice -- by mercantile oligarchies, more often by "despots" of diverse degree, who had superseded republican or communal institutions viriated by class exploitation and political violence.

Out of the competition of storng men one emerged -- almost always of humble bitrh -- who subdued and destroyed or hired the rest, made himself absolute ruler, and in some cases transmitted his power to his heir. So the Visconti or Sforza ruled in Milan, the Scalgieri in Verona, The Carraresi in Padua, the Gonzagas in Mantua, the Estensi in Ferrara.

Such men enjoyed a precarious popularity because they laid a lid upon faction, and made life and property safe within their whim and the city's walls. The lower classes accepted them as a last refuge from the dictatorship of ducats. The surrounding peasantry reconciled itself to them because the commons had given it neither protection nor justice nor freedom.

The despots were cruel because they were insecure. With no tradition of legitimacy to support them, subject at any moment to assassination or revolt, they surrounded themselves with guards, ate and drank in fear of poison, and hoped for a natural death. In their earlier decades they governed by craft, corruption, and quiet murder and practised all the arts of Machiavelli before he was born.

After 1430 they felt more secure through santification by time, and contented themselves with pacific means in domestic government. They suppressed criticism and dissent and maintained a horde of spies. They lived luxuriously and affected an impressive pomp.

Nevertheless, they earned the tolerance and respect. even, in Ferrara and urbino, the devotion of their subjects, by improving administrations, helping the people in famine and other emergencies, relieving unemployment with public works. building churches and monasteries, beautifying their cities with art, and supporting scholars, poets and artists who might polish their diplomacy, brighten their aura and perpetuate the name.

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The despots waged frequent but usually petty war, seeking the mirage of security through the advancement of their frontiers, and having an expensive appetite for taxable terrain. They did not send their own people to war, for then they would have to arms them, which might be suicidal. Instead, they hired mercenaries and paid them with the proceeds of conquests, ransomes, confiscations and pillage.

Dashing adventurers came down over the Alps, often with bands of hungry soldiers in their train, and sold their services as "condottieri" to the highest bidder, changing sides with the fluctuations of the fee. A tailor from Estes, known in England as Sir John Hawkwood and in Italy as Acuto, fought with strategic subtlety and tactical skill against and for Florence, amassed several hundred thousand florins, died as a gentleman farmer in 1394, and was buried with honors and art in Santa Maria del Fiore.

The despot financed education as well as war, built schools and libraries, supported academies and universities. Every town in Italy had a school, usually provided by the Church. Every major city had a university. Under the schooling of humanists, universities , and courts, public taste and manners improved. Every second Italian became a judge of art; every important center had its own artist, and its own architectusral style. The joy of life spread, for the educated classes, from one end of Italy to the other. Manners were relatively refined, and yet instincts were unprecedentedly free. Never since the age of Augustus had genius found such an audience, such stimulating competition and such liberty.

In northwestern Italy and what is now southeastern France lay the principality of Savoy-Piedmont, whose ruliing house was till 1945 the oldest royal family in Europe. Founded by Count Humbert I as a dependency of the Holy Roman Empire, the proud little state expanded to a moment of glory under the "Green Count" Amadeus VI (1343-83), who annexed Geneva, Lausanne, Aosta and Turin, which he made his capital.

No other ruler of his time enjoyed so fair a reputation for wisdom, justice and generosity. The Emperor Sigismund raised the counts to dukes (1418), but the first duke, Amadeus VIII, lost his head when he accpted nominaton as Antipope Felix V (1439), A century later Savoy was conquered by Francis I for France.

Savoy and Piedmont became a battleground between France and Italy. Appollo surrendered them to Mars; they remained in the backwater of the Italian torrent, and never felt the full flow of the Renaissance. In the rich Turin Gallery, and in his native Vercelli, are the pleasant but mediocre paintings of Defendente Ferrari.

South of Piedmont, Liguria embraces all the glory of the Italian Riviera. On the east the Riveria di Levante, or Cost of the Rising (Sun); on the west Riviera del Ponente, or Coast of the Setting, and at their junction Genoa, almost as replendent as Naples, on a throne of hills and a spreading pedestal of blue sea.

To Petrarch it has seemed "a city of Kings, the very temple of prosperity; the gate of joy", but that was before the Genoese debacle at Chiaggia (1378) While Venice recovered rapidly through the orderly and devoted cooperation of all classes in restoring commerce and solvency, Genoa continued a tradition of civil strife between noble and noble, nobles and commoners. Oligarchic oppression provoked a minor revolution (1383). The butchers, armed with the persuasive cutlery of their trade, led a crowed to the palage of the doge, and compelled a reduction of taxes and the exclusion of nobles from the government.
,br>In five years (1390-4) Genoa had ten revolutions, ten doges rose and fell. Finally order seemed more precious than freedom, and the harassed republic, fearing adsorption by Milan, gve itself over, with its Rivieras, to France (1396).

Two years later the French were expelled in a passionate revolt. Five bloody battles were fought in the streets, twenty palaces were burned, government buildings were sacked and demolished. The value of a million florins was destroyed. Genoa again found the chaos of freedom unbearable and surrendered itself to Milan (1411). The Milanese rule became intolerable, revolution restores the republic (1415), and the strife of factions was resumed.

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The one element of stability amid these fluctuations was the Bank of St. George. During the war with Venice the government had borrowed money from its citizens, and had given them promissary notes. After the war it was unable to redeem these pledges, but it turned over to the leaders the customs dues of the port. The creditors organized themselves into the Casa di San Giorgio, the House of St. George. chose a directorate of eight governors, and received from the state a palace for their use.

The House or Company was well managed, being the least corrupt institution in the republic. It was entrusted with the collection of taxes. It lent some of its funds to the government and received in return substantial properties in Liguria, Corsica, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea.

It became both the state treasury and a private bank, accepting deposits, disocunting notes, making loans to commerce and industry. As all factions were financially tied to it, all respected it, and left it unharmed in revolution and war. Its magnificent Renaissance palace still stands in the Piazza Caricamento.

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The fall of Constantinople was an almost fatal blow to Genoa. The rich Genoese settlement at Pera, near Constantinople, was taken over by the Turks. When the impoverished republic once more submitted to France ( 1458 ), Francesco Sforza financed a revolution that expelled the French and made Genoa again a dependency of Milan (1464) The confusion that weakened Milan after the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforsa (1476) allowed the Genoese a brief interlude of freedom; but when Louis XII seized Milan (1499) Genoa too succumed to his power.

At last, in the long conflict between Francis I and Charles V, a Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, turned his ships against the French, drove them out of Genoa, and established a new republican constitution (1528), Like the govenments of Florence and Venice, it was a commercial oligarchy. Only those families were enfranchised whose names wer inscribed in "il libro oro" (The Golden Book).

The new regime -- a senate of 400, a doge elected for two years -- brought a disciplined peace to the faction, and maintained the independence of Genoa till the coming of Napoleon.

Comments? Please.

Amid the passionate disorder the city contributed far less than her due share to Italian letters, science and art. Her captains explored the seas avidly, but when her son Columbus appeared aong them, Genoa was too timid or too poor to finance his dream.

The nobles were absorbed in politics; the merchants in gain. Neither class spared much for the adventures of the mind.

The old cathedral at San Lorenzo was remodeled in Gothic (1307) with a majestic interior. its chapel of San Giovanni Battista (1451f) was adorned with a handsome altar and canopy by Matteo Civitali and a somber statue of the Baptist by Iacopo Sansovino.

Andrea Doria effected almost as significant revolution in Genoese art as in govenment. He brought Fra Giovanni da Montorsoli from Florence to remodel the Palazzzo Doria a(1529) and Perino del Vaga from Rome to adorn it with frescoes and stucco reliefs, grotesques and arabeques. The result was one of the most ornate residences in Italy.

Leone Leoni, rival and foe of Cellini, came from Rome to cast a fine medallion of the admiral. and Montorsoli designed his tomb. In Genoa, the Renaissance did not long antedate Doria, and did not long survive his death.

Back to the book III PAVIA

Between Genoa and Milan the ancient city of Pavia lay quietly along the Ticino. Once itt had been the sea of the Lombard kings. Now, in the fourteenth century, it was subject to Milan, and was used by the Visconti and the Sforzas as a second capital.

There, Galeazzo Visconti II began (1360) and Gian Galeazzo Visconti commpleted the majestic Castello that served as a ducal residence for its second founder, and as a pleasure palace for the dukes of Milan. Petrarch called it "the noblest product of modern art," and many contemporaries ranked it first among the royal dwellings of Europe.

The library contained one of the most precious collections of books in Europe, including 951 illuminated manuscripts. Louis XII, having taken Milan in 1499, carried off the Pavia library among his spoils, and a French army destroyed the interior of the castle with the latest artillery (1517).

Nothing remains except the walls.

PAVIA CONTINUED:

Though the Castello is ruined, the finest jewel of the Visconti and the Sforzas survives intact -- the Certosa, or Carthusian monastery, hidden off the highway between Pavia and Milan. Here, in a placid plain, Giangaleazzo Visconti undertook to build cells, cloisters and a church in fulfilment of a vow made by his wife.

From that beginning until 1499 the dukes of Milan continued to develop and embellish the edifice as the favorite embodiment of their piety and their art. There is nothing more exquisite in italy.

The Lombard-Romanesque facade of white Carrera marble was designed, carved and erected (1473f)by Cristoforo Mantegazza and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo of Pavia sponsored b y Galeazzi Maria Sforza and Ludovico di Moro. It is too ornate, too fondly gifted with arches, statues, reliefs, medallions, pilasters, capitals, arabesques, carved angels, saints, sirens, princes, fruits and flowers to convey a sense of unity and harmony. Each part importunes attention regardless of the whole. But each part is a labor of love and skill. The four Renaissance windows by Amadeo would of themselves entitle him to the remembrance of mankind.

In some Italian churches the facade is a brave front on an otherwise undistinguished exterior; but in this Certosa di Pavia every external feature and aspect is arrestingly beautiful: the stately attached buttresses, the noble towers, arcades, and spires of the north transept and the apse, the graceful columns and arches of the cloisters.

Within the court the eye rises from these slender columns thtough three successive stories of arcades to the four superimposed colonnades of the cupola. This is an ensemble harmoniously conceived and admirably wrought.

Within the church everything is of unsurpassed excellence; columns rising in clusters and Gothic arches to carved and coffered caults; bronze and iron grilles as delicately designed as royal lace; doors and archways of elegant form and ornament; altars of marble studded with precious stones, paintings by Perugino, Borgognone, and Luini, the magnificent inlaid choir stalls, the luminous stained glass, the careful carving of pilllars, spandrels, archivolts and cornices, the stately tomb of Giangaleazzo Visconti by Cristoforo Romano and Benedetto Brioso, and, as the last relic of pathetic romance, the tomb and figures of Lodovico il Moro and Beatrice d'Este, here united in exquisite marb le, though they died ten years and five hundred miles apart.

In a like union of diverse moods the Lombard, Gothic and Renaissance styles are here wedded in he most nearly perfect architectural product of the Renaissance.

For under lodovico the Moore, Milan had gathered fair women to create and unrivaled court, and supreme artists like Bramante, Leonardo, and Caradosso, to snatch the leaderhsip of Italy, for one bright decade, from Florence, Venice and Rome.

To continue about Giangaleazzo's accomplishments:-

All this time he had hardly moved from Pavia or Milan. He liked intrigue better than war, and achieved by subtlety more than his generals won for him by arms. Nor could political enterprises exhaust the fertility of his mind.

He issued a code of laws including the regulation of public health and the compulsoy isolation of infectioius disease.

He built the Castello of Pavia, and began the Certosa di Pavia and the cathedral of Milan.

He called Manual Chrysolras to the chair of Greek in the University of Milan, fostered the University of Pavia, helped poets, artists, scholars and philosophers and relished their company.

He extended the Naviglio Grande, or Great Canal, from Milan to Paiva, thereby opening an inland waterway across the breadth of Italy from the Alps through Milan and the Po to the Adriatic Sea, and providing irrigation for thousands of acres of soil.

The agriculture and commerce so promoted encouraged industry. Milan began to rival Florence in woolen goods. Her smiths made weapoons and armor for warriors throughout western Europe . In one crisis two master armorers forged arms for six thousand soldiers in a few days.

In 1314 the silk weavers of Lucca, impoverished by faction and war, had migrated by hundreds to Milan. By 1400 the silk industry was well developed there, and moralists complained that clothing had become shamefully beautiful.

Giangaleazzo protected the flourishing economy with wise administration, equable justice and reliable currency, and a tolerable taxation that extended to clergy and nobility as well as laymen and commoners.

Under his prodding the postal service was expanded. In 1425 over a hundred horses were regularly employed by the post. Private correspondence was accepted at post offices, and traveled all day -- in emergency, alll night as well.

In 1413 Florence had an annual state revunue of 4,000,000 gold florins ($100,000,000), Venice 11,000,000, Milan 11,000,000.

Kings were glad to have their sons and daughters marry into the Visconti family. Emperor Wenceslas merely crowned fact with form when in 1395 he gave imperial sanction and legitimacy to Gian's title of duke, and invested him and his heirs with the duchy of Milan "forever."

Visconti continued.

This proved to be fifty-two years. Gian's older son, Gianmaria Visconti was thirteen when his father died. (1402) The generals who led Gian's victorious armies competed for the regency. While they fought for Milan, Italy resumed her fragmentation. Florence recaptured Pisa; Venice took Verona, Vicenza and Padua. Siena, Perugia and Bologna submitted to invidual despots. Italy was as bafore, and worse.

Gianmaria, leaving the government to oppressive regents, devoted himself to his dogs, trained them to eat human flesh, and joyfully watched them feed on the live men whom he had condemned as political offenders or social criminals. In 1412 three nobles stabbed him to death.

His brother Filippo Maria Visconti seemed to have inherited the subtle intelligence, the patient industry, the ambitious and farseeing poicies of his father. But what had been sedentary courage to Giangaleazzzo became in Filippo sedentary timidity, a perpetual fear of assassination, a haunting belief in human perfidy.

He shut himself up in the castle of Porta at Milan, ate and grew fat, cherished superstitions and astrologers. Yet by pure craft he remianed to the end of his long reign the absolute master of the country.

He married Beatrice Terida for hermoney, and condemned her to death for infidelity. He married Maria of Savoy, kept her secluded from all but her ladies in waiting, brooded over his lack of a son. He took a mistress and became partly human in his affection for the pretty daughter Bianca who was born of this liaison.

He continued his father's patronage of learning, called noted scholars to the University of Padua, and gave commissions to Brunellesco and the incomparable medalist Pisanello.

He ruled Milan with efficient autocracy, suppressing faction, maintaining order, protecting peasants against feudal eactions, and merchants against brigandage.

By deft diplomacy and adroit manipulation of his armis he restored to Milanese allegiance Parma and Piacenza, all of Lombardy to Brescia, all the lands between Milan and the Alps. In 1421 he persuaded the Genoese that his dictatorship was milder thann their civil wars. He encouraged marriages between rival families, so ending many feuds.

For a hundred petty tyrannies he set up on, and the population, shorn of liberty but free from internal strife, grumbled, propered and multiplied.

He had a flair for dingin able generals; suspected them all of wishing to replace him, played them off against one another and kept war brewing in the hope of regaining all that his father had won and his brother had lost.

A breed of powerful condottieri developed in his wars with Venice and Florence: Giattamelata, Colleoni, Camagnola, Braccio, Forrebraccio, Montone, Piccinino, Muzio Attendolo.

Muzzio was a country lad, one of a large family of male and female fighters. He won he cognomen Sforza by the strength of body and will with which he served Queen Joanna Ii of Naples. He lost her favor and was thrown into prison. His sister, in full armor, forced his jailers to set him free. He was given command of one of the Milanese armies, but was drowned soon afterward while crossing a stream.

His bastard son, then twenty-two, leaped into his father's place and fought and married his way to a throne.

Francesco Sforza was the ideal of Renaissance soldiers: tall, handsome, athletic, brave, the best runner, jumper, wrestler in his army; sleeping little, marching bareheaded winter and summer; winning the devotion of his men by sharing their hardships and rations, and leading them to lucrative victories by strategy and tactics rather than by superior numbers or arms.

So unrivaled was his reputation that enemy forces on more than one occasion, laid down their arms at sight of him, and greeted him with uncovered heads as the greatest general of his time.

Ambitious to found a state of his own, he allowed no scruple to hinder his policy. He fought alternately for Milan, Florence and Venice until Filippo won his loyalty by giving him Bianca in marriage, with Cremona and Pontremoli as her dowry. (1441) When, six years later Filippo died heirless, bringing the Visconti dynasty to an end, Francesco felt that the dowry whould include Milan.

The Milanese thought differently. They proclaimed a republic names Ambrosian from the masterful b ishop who had chastened Theodosius and converted Augustine a thousand years before.

But the rival factions in the city could not agree. The dependencies of Milan snatched the opportunity to declare themselves tree. Some of them fell before Venetian arms; danger was imminent of a Venetian or Florentine attack. Moreover, the Duke of Orleans, the Emperor Frederick III and King Alfonso of Aragon all claimed Milan as their own.

In this crisis a deputation sought Sforza, gave him Brescia, and begged him to defend Milan. He fought off its enemies with resourceful energy, but when the new government made peace with Venice without consulting him, he turned his troops against the republic, besieged Milan to the edge of starvation, accepted its surrender, entered the city amid the acclamation of a hungry populace and dulled the lust for liberty by distributing bread.

A general assembly was summoned, comprised of one man from each household. It invested him with the ducal authority over the protests of the Emperor, and the Sforza dynasty began its brief and brilliant career. (1450)

CONTINUING WITH DURANT

His (Sforza's) elevation did not change his character. He continued to live simply and to work hard. Now and then he was cruel or treacherous, alleging the good of the state as his excuse. Generally, he was a man of justice and humanity.

He suffered a lawless sensitivity to the beautfy of women. His accomplished wife killed his mistress, and then forgave him. She bore him eight children,, advised him wisely in politics, and won the people to his rule by succoring the needy and protecting the oppressed.

His administration of the state was as competent as the leadership of its armies. The social order that he enforced brought back to the city a properity thhat dimmed the memory of its suffering and its fitful liberty. As a citadel against revolt he began to build the enormous Castello Sforzesco.

He cut new canals through the land, organized public works, and built the Ospedale Maggiore. He brought the humanist Filelfo to Milan, and encouraged education, scholarship and art. he lured Vincenzo Foppa to Milan to develop a school of painting.

Threatened by the intrigue of Vennice, Naples and France, he held them all at bay by winning the decisive support and firm friendship of Cosimo de' Medici. He disarmed Naples by wedding his daughter Ippolita to Ferdinand's son Alfonso. fHe checkmated the Duke of Orleans by signing an alliance with Louis XI of France.

Some nobles continued to seek his death and his power, but the success of his government disordered their plans, and he lived to die, in peace, the tradiitonal death of generals. (1466)

Robby

Robby

Robby

Born to the people, Sforza's son, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, never knew the discipline of poverty and struggle. He gave himself up to pleasure, luxury, and pomp, seduced with special religish the wives of his friends, and punished opposition with a cruelty that seemed to have descended to him, deviously and mysteriously, through the kindly Bianca from her Visconti blood.

The people of Milan, inured to absolute rule, offered no resistance to his despotism, but private vengeance punished what other public terror brooked. Girolamo Oligiati grieved over a sister seduced and then discarded by the Duke; Giovanni Lampognani throught himself despoiled of property by the same lord. Together with Carlo Visconti they had been trained by Niccolo Montreno in Rooman history and ideals, incuding tyrannicide froom Brrutus to Brutus. After imploring the help of the saints, the three youths entered the church of St. Stephen, where Caleazzo was worshiping, and stabbed him to death. (1476)

Lampugnani and Visconti were killed on the spot. Oligiati was tortured till almost every bone in his body was broken or torn from its socked. He was then flayed alive. To his last breath, he refused to repent. He called on pagan heroes and Christian saints to approve his deed, and died with a classic and Renaissance phrase on his lips: "Death is bitter, but fame is everlasting."

Robby

Robby

Robby

TO CONTINUE:

Lodovico governed efficiently. Around his summer cottage at Vigevano he developed a vasty experimental farm and cattle-breeding station. Experiments were made there in cultivating rice, the vine, and the mulberry tree; the dairies made butter and cheese of such excellence as even Italy had not known before. The spacious stables sheltered the stallons and mares rhat bred the finest horses in Europe.

Meanwhile, in Milan, the silk industry employed twenty thousand workers and captured many foreign markets from Florence. Ironmongers, goldsmiths, woodcarvers, enamelers, potters, mosaicists, glass painters, perfumers, embroiderers, tapestry weavers and makers of musical instruments contributed to Milanese industry, They adorned the palaces and personages of the court with ornaments and exported sufficient surplus to pay for the softer luxuries that came from the East.

To ease the traffic of men and goods, and "give the people more light and air", Lodovico had he principal streets widened. The avenues leading to the Castillo were lined with palaces and gardens for the aristocracy, and the great cathedral , which now took its definitive form, rose as a rival focus of the city's throbbing life.

Milan in 1491 had a population of 128,000 souls. It prospered under Lodovico as not even under Giangaleazzo Visconti, but complaints were heard that the profits of this flourishing economy went rather to strengthen the regent and glorify his court rather than raise the populace from its immemorial poverty.

Householders groaned at the heavy taxes, and riots of protest disturbed Cremona and Lodi. Lodovico answered that he needed the money to build ew hospitals and cae for the sick, to support the universities of Pavia and Milan, to finances experiments in agricultues, breeding, and industry, and to impress with the art and lavish magnificence of his court ambassadors whose governments respected only those states that were rich and strong.

Robby

Robby

Durant: 6/22/07

Beatrice was a girl of fourtten when she came to Lodovico. She was not especially pretty; her charm lay in he innocent gaiety with which she approached and appreciated life. She had grown up in Naples and learned ita joyous ways. She had lelt it before it could spoil her girlishness, but it had imparted to her a carefreee extravagance which now, in the lap of Lodovico's wealth, so indulged itself that Milan called her "amantissima del lusso" --- "madly in love with luxury."

Everybody forgave her, for she diffused such innocent merriment --- "spending day and night," reports a contemporary chronicler, "in singing and dancing and all manner of delights."

The whole court caught her spirit, and joy was unconfined. The grave Lodovico, some months after their marriage, fell in love with her, and confessed for a while that all power and wisdom were negligible things beside his new felicity.

Under his care she added graces of mind to the lure of her youthful esprt. She learned to make Latin speeches; dizzied her head with affairs of state, and ata times serveed her lord well as an irresistible ambassadress. Her letters to her still more famous sister, Isabella d'Este, are fragrant flowers in the Machiavellian jungle of Renaissance strife.

With joyful Beatrice to lead the dance, and hard-working Lodovico to pay the bills, the court of Milan became now t he most splendid not only in Italy but in all of Europe. The Castello Sforzeco expanded to its fullest glory, with its majestic central tower, its endless maze of luxurious rooms, its inlaid floors, its stained glass windows, its embroidered cushions and Persian carpets, its tapestries telling again the legends of Troy and Rome; here a ceiling by Leonardo, there a statue by Cristoforo Solari or Cristoforo Romano, and almost everywhere some luscious relic of Greek or Roman or Italian art.

In that resplendent setting scholars mingled with warriors, poets with philosophers, artists with generals and all with women whose natural charms were enhanced by every refinement of cosmetics, jewelry and dress.

The men, even the soldiers, were carefuly coiffured and richly garbed. Orchestras played a combination of musical insturuments, and song filled the halls.

While Florence trembled before Savonarola and burned the vanities of love and art, music and loos morals reigned in Lodovico's capital. Husbands connived at their wives' amours in exchange for their own excursions. Masked balls were frequent, and a thousand gay costumes covered a multitude of sins. Men and women danced and sang as if povery were not stalking the city walls, as if Frances were not planning to invade Italy, as if Naples were not plotting the ruin of Milan.

How about some comments on these shows of extravagance right next door to poverty?