Durants' SoC.
Vol. V The Renaissance.
Pages 593-595
Manners and Amusements.
Amid violence and dishonesty, and the boisterous life of university students, and the rough humor and kindliness of peasant and proletaire, good manners grew as one of the arts of the Renaissance. Italy now led Europe in personal and social hygiene, dress, table manners, cooking, conversation, and recreations; and in all these except dress Florence claimed to lead Italy. Florence patriotically mourned the filth of other cities, and Italians made ‘Tedesco’, (German), a synonym for courseness of language and life. The old Roman habit of frequent bathing continued in the educated classes; the well-to-do displayed their finery and “took the waters” at various spas, and drank sulphurous streams as an annual penance to purge digestive sins. Male dress was as ornate as female, except for jewelry: tight sleeves and colored hose, and such wonderous baggy bonnets as Raphael caught on Castiglione. Hose ran up the legs to the loins, splitting men into tunic and silk frills and ruffles of lace; even gloves and shoes sported wisps of lace. At a tournament given by Lorenzo de’ Medici, his brother Giuliano wore garments costing 8000 ducats.
A revolution in table manners came in the fiffteenth century with the increasing sustitution of a fork for fingers in carrying food to the mouth. Thomas Coryat, touring Italy about 1600, was struck by the novel custom,”which”, he wrote, “is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels”; and he shared in introducing the idea into England. Knives, forks, and spoons were of brass, sometimes of silver—which was lent out to neighbors preparing banquets. Meals were modest except on such occasions or at State functions; then excess was compulsory. Spices—pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, juniper, ginger etc.—were used in abundance to flavor food and stimulate thirst; hence every host offered his guests a variety of wines. The reign of garlic in Italy , can be traced back to 1548, but doubtless had begun long before. There was very little drunkeness or gluttony; the Italians of the Renaissance, like the later French, were gourmets, not gourmands. When men were apart from their families they might invite a courtesan or two, as Aretino did when he entertained Titian. More careful people would grace the meal with music, poetic improvisations, and educated conversation.
The art of conversation—‘bel parlare’—to speak with intelligence, urbanity, courtesy, clarity, and wit—was reinvented by the Renaissance. Greece and Rome had known it, and here and there in medieval Italy—as at the courts of Frederic II and Innocent III – it had been kept precariously alive. Now in Lorenzo’s Florence, in Elizabetta’s Urbino, in Leo’s Rome, it flourished again: nobles and their ladies, poets and philosophers, generals and scholars, artists and musicians met in the companionship of minds, quoted famous authors, made an occasional obeisance to religion, graced their language with a light fantastic touch, and basked in one another’s audience. Such conversation was so admired that many essays and treatises were cast in dialogue form to appropriate its elegance. In the end the game was carried to excess; language and thought became too precious and refined; an enervating dilettantism softened manliness. Urbino became Rambouillet in France, and Moliere attacked ‘les precieuses’ just in time to save the art of good converse for France.
Despite the preciosity of a few , Italian speech enjoyed a freedom of subject and epithet that would not be allowed by social manners today. Since general conversation was rarely heard by unmarried women of good character, it was assumed that sex might be openly discussed. But beyond this, and even in higher male circles, there was a loosness of sexual jest, a gay freedom in poetry, a course obscenity in drama, that seem to us now among the less presentable aspects of the Renaissance,. Educated men could scribble lewd verses on statuary, the refined Bembo wrote in praise of Priapus. Youths competed in obscenity and profanity to prove their maturity. And yet the phrases of courtesy had never been so flowery, forms of address had never been so gracious; women kissed the hand of any intimate male friend on meeting or leaving him, and men kissed the hand of a woman, presents were ever passing from friend to friend; and tact of word and deed reached a development that seemed unattainable in northern Europe. Italian manuals of manners became favored texts beyond the Alps.
The same was true of Italian handbooks of dancing, fencing, and other recreations; in recreation, as in conversation and profanity, Italy lead the Christian world. Card playing was even more popular than dancing; in the fifteenth century it became a mania in all classes. Often it involved gambling. Men gambled also with dice, and sometimes loaded them. The Council of Ten twice forbade the sale of cards or dice, and called upon servants to report masters violating these ordinances. Young men had their special games, mostly in the open air. The upperclass Italian was trained to ride, wield sword and lance, and tilt in tournaments. As these combats proved insufficiently mortal, some rash youths, in the Roman Colosseum in 1332, introduced the bullfight; on that occasion eighteen knights, all of Roman families, were killed, and only eleven bulls.
