the name of Limerno Pitocco, he composed the ‘Orlandino,’ in which chivalry appears only as a ludicrous setting for a crowd of modern figures and ideas. Under the name of Merlinus Coccajus he described the journeys and exploits of his phantastic vagabonds (also in the same spirit of parody) in half-Latin hexameters, with all the affected pomp of the learned Epos of the day. (‘Opus Macaronicorum’). Since then caricature has been constantly, and often brilliantly, represented on the Italian Parnassus.
About the middle period of the Renaissance a theoretical analysis of wit was undertaken, and its practical application in good society was regulated more precisely. The theorist was Gioviano Pontano.374 In his work on speaking, especially in the third and fourth books, he tries by means of the comparison of numerous jokes or ‘facetiæ’ to arrive at a general principle. How wit should be used among people of position is taught by Baldassar Castiglione in his ‘Cortigiano.’375 Its chief function is naturally to enliven those present by the repetition of comic or graceful stories and sayings; personal jokes, on the contrary, are discouraged on the ground that they wound unhappy people, show too much honour to wrong-doers, and make enemies of the powerful and the spoiled children of fortune;376 and even in repetition, a wide reserve in the use of dramatic gestures is recommended to the gentleman. Then follows, not only for purposes of quotation, but as patterns for future jesters, a large collection of puns and witty sayings, methodically arranged according to their species, among them some that are admirable. The doctrine of Giovanni della Casa, some twenty years later, in his guide to good manners, is much stricter and more cautious;377 with a view to the consequences, he wishes to see the desire of triumph banished altogether from jokes and ‘burle.’ He is the herald of a reaction, which was certain sooner or later to appear.
Italy had, in fact, become a school for scandal, the like of which the world cannot show, not even in France at the time of Voltaire. In him and his comrades there was assuredly no lack of the spirit of negation; but where, in the eighteenth century, was to be found the crowd of suitable victims, that countless assembly of highly and characteristically-developed human beings, celebrities of every kind, statesmen, churchmen, inventors, and discoverers, men of letters, poets and artists, all of whom then gave the fullest and freest play to their individuality? This host existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and by its side the general culture of the time had educated a poisonous brood of impotent wits, of born critics and railers, whose envy called for hecatombs of victims; and to all this was added the envy of the famous men among themselves. In this the philologists notoriously led the way—Filelfo, Poggio, Lorenzo Valla, and others—while the artists of the fifteenth century lived in peaceful and friendly competition with one another. The history of art may take note of the fact.
Florence, the great market of fame, was in this point, as we have said, in advance of other cities. ‘Sharp eyes and bad tongues’ is the description given of the inhabitants.378 An easy-going contempt of everything and everybody was probably the prevailing tone of society. Macchiavelli, in the remarkable prologue to his ‘Mandragola,’ refers rightly or wrongly the visible decline of moral force to the general habit of evil speaking, and threatens his detractors with the news that he can say sharp things as well as they. Next to Florence comes the Papal court, which had long been a rendezvous of the bitterest and wittiest tongues. Poggio’s ‘Facetiæ’ are dated from the Chamber of Lies (bugiale) of the apostolic notaries; and when we remember the number of disappointed place-hunters, of hopeless competitors and enemies of the favourites, of idle, profligate prelates there assembled, it is intelligible how Rome became the home of the savage pasquinade as well as of more philosophical satire. If we add to this the wide-spread hatred borne to the priests, and the well-known instinct of the mob to lay any horror to the charge of the great, there results an untold mass of infamy.379 Those who were able protected themselves best by contempt both of the false and true accusations, and by brilliant and joyous display.380 More sensitive natures sank into utter despair when they found themselves deeply involved in guilt, and still more deeply in slander.381 In course of time calumny became universal, and the strictest virtue was most certain of all to challenge the attacks of malice. Of the great pulpit orator, Fra Egidio of Viterbo, whom Leo made a cardinal on account of his merits, and who showed himself a man of the people and a brave monk in the calamity of 1527,382 Giovio gives us to understand that he preserved his ascetic pallor by the smoke of wet straw and other means of the same kind. Giovio is a genuine Curial in these matters.383 He generally begins by telling his story, then adds that he does not believe it, and then hints at the end that perhaps after all there may be something in it. But the true scape-goat of Roman scorn was the pious and moral Adrian VI. A general agreement seemed to be made to take him only on the comic side. Adrian had contemptuously referred to the Laöcoon group as ‘idola antiquorum,’ had shut up the entrance to the Belvedere, had left the works of Raphael unfinished, and had banished the poets and players from the court; it was even feared that he would burn some ancient statues to lime for the new church of St. Peter. He fell out from the first with the formidable Francesco Berni, threatening to have thrown into the Tiber not, as people said,384 the statue of Pasquino, but the writers of the satires themselves. The vengeance for this was the famous ‘Capitolo’ against Pope Adriano, inspired not exactly by hatred, but by contempt for the comical Dutch barbarian;385 the more savage menaces were reserved for the cardinals who had elected him. The plague, which then was prevalent in Rome, was ascribed to him;386 Berni and others387 sketch the environment of the Pope—the Germans by whom he was governed388—with the same sparkling untruthfulness with which the modern feuilletoniste turns black into white, and everything into anything. The biography which Paolo Giovio was commissioned to write by the Cardinal of Tortosa, and which was to have been a eulogy, is for any one who can read between the lines an unexampled piece of satire. It sounds ridiculous—at least for the Italians of that time—to hear how Adrian applied to the Chapter of Saragossa for the jaw-bone of St. Lambert; how the devout Spaniards decked him out till he looked ‘like a right well-dressed Pope;’ how he came in a confused and tasteless procession from Ostia to Rome, took counsel about burning or drowning Pasquino, would suddenly break off the most important business when dinner was announced; and lastly, at the end of an unhappy reign, how he died of drinking too much beer—whereupon the house of his physician was hung with garlands by midnight revellers, and adorned with the inscription, ‘Liberatori Patriæ S. P. Q. R.’ It is true that Giovio had lost his money in the general confiscation of public funds, and had only received a benefice by way of compensation because he was ‘no poet,’ that is to say. no pagan.389 But it was decreed that Adrian should be the last great victim. After the disaster which befell Rome in 1527, slander visibly declined along with the unrestrained wickedness of private life.
But while it was still flourishing was developed, chiefly in Rome, the greatest railer of modern times, Pietro Aretino. A glance at his life and character will save us the trouble of noticing many less distinguished members of his class.
We know him chiefly in the last thirty years of his life (1527-1557), which he passed in Venice, the only asylum possible for him. From hence he kept all that was famous in Italy in a kind of state of siege, and here were delivered the presents of the foreign princes who needed or dreaded his pen. Charles V. and Francis I. both pensioned him at the same time, each hoping that Aretino would do some mischief to the other. Aretino flattered both, but naturally attached himself more closely to Charles, because he remained master in Italy. After the Emperor’s victory at Tunis in 1535, this tone of adulation passed into the
Jovian. Pontan.
Pontanus,
Comp. Fedra Inghirami’s funeral oration on Ludovico Podocataro (d. Aug. 25, 1504) in the
This was the plan followed by Leo X., and his calculations were not disappointed. Fearfully as his reputation was mangled after his death by the satirists, they were unable to modify the general estimate formed of him.
This was probably the case with Cardinal Ardicino della Porta, who in 1491 wished to resign his dignity and take refuge in a monastery. See Infessura, in Eccard. ii. col. 2000.
See his funeral oration in the
How he used his tongue at the table of Clement VII. is told in Giraldi,
The charge of taking into consideration the proposal to drown Pasquino (in Paul. Jov.
In the passages collected in Gregorovius, viii. 380 note, 381 sqq. 393 sqq.
Comp. Pier. Valer.
E.g. Firenzuola,
Comp. the names in Höfler,
The words of Pier. Valerian,
