The Ugly Renaissance (21 page)

Yet what really set Petrarch apart from Dante was the agony that lay beneath these layers of suffering and ambition. Despite being crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341, Petrarch was troubled by the fact that unrequited love and glory seemed to bring him only sorrow, a question that had apparently not concerned Dante too greatly. It seemed
to pose a profound—and deeply moral—problem. Why was it that no matter what he did, he was completely unable to find happiness or even solace?

It was precisely this question that Petrarch addressed in the
Secretum
, perhaps his most intimate and autobiographical work. At the beginning of the dialogue, he pictured a fictional representation of himself brooding on his mortality and consumed with misery. Although he is terrified of the imminence of death, “Franciscus” is unable to understand how best to shake off the sorrow that affects his soul.

Miraculously, a mysterious woman—the personification of Truth—appears before him and tells him that his condition is the consequence of looking for happiness in all the wrong places. The better to explain this, she invites the ghostly figure of “Augustinus”—representing Saint Augustine—to guide Franciscus. As Augustinus explains, what Franciscus considers happiness isn’t happiness at all. Both his unrequited love for Laura and his quest for poetic glory are grounded on the belief that happiness can be found somewhere here on earth. But, says Augustinus, such a belief is absurd. Since all temporal things will inevitably change, disappear, or die, any attempt to find happiness in them is doomed to failure. Being rooted in this world, love, sex, and glory in particular bring Franciscus nothing but grief and despair, and the unfortunate man is obliged to confess that it is “
want, grief, ignominy, sickness, death, and all such ills” that cause him such torment. As Augustinus explains, “true” happiness consists only in the immortal and unchanging. It can only be found in the company of God after death. Slowly but surely, he persuades Franciscus that the one sure way to earn such joy is to shed all his worldly desires and devote himself to virtue.

The solution, Augustinus explains, is to meditate on death with greater sincerity and fervor. If Franciscus were to recognize the reality of his mortality and the inevitability of his own death, he would, Augustinus claims, not fail to realize the foolishness of seeking happiness in transient things.
Equipped with a proper understanding of the true nature of the “self”—the immortal soul imprisoned within a mortal body—Franciscus would naturally concentrate his attention on preparing his soul for the next life and would devote himself unhesitatingly to virtue.

Although Petrarch was intellectually convinced by his own argument, he was still not fully persuaded, and as 1347 drew to a close, the
fires of his love still burned as brightly as ever. But then a tragedy of such magnitude struck Italy that he could not help but be convinced.

In early 1347, just as Petrarch was completing the first draft of the
Secretum
, the
Black Death arrived. Brought from the East on twelve Genoese galleys, it first hit the port of
Messina in Sicily, before spreading swiftly and inexorably throughout Italy. After hitting
Catania, the nearest coastal city, it had infected most of Sicily within weeks. Three months later, in January 1348, the disease reached
Genoa, carried by galleys bringing spices from the East, and tore down the Ligurian coast with breathtaking speed. By spring, it had reached
Florence, and before summer had arrived, virtually every town and city from Palermo to Venice was in the grip of the mysterious and appalling sickness.

A sense of bewilderment and confusion took hold as people scrambled for some way of treating the disease. Special plague hospitals, often staffed by volunteers from among the mendicant orders, were hastily established in many cities, and in Venice surgeons were granted a rare dispensation to practice their art. But in the absence of any clear understanding of how the plague was spread, there was almost no hope. In
Pistoia, the importation of cloths or linens was forbidden, markets were carefully controlled, and all travel to places known to have fallen victim to the plague was banned. In
Milan, much harsher measures were employed. When the plague first struck, the three houses in which it was found were completely sealed. The doors were nailed shut, the windows were bricked up, and the people inside—whether healthy or sick—were left to die.

But it was all to no avail. Throughout 1348, the plague raged unabated. It struck indiscriminately: rich and poor, old and young, men and women, all fell victim to the infection. The mortality rate was appallingly high. Although historians continue to debate the exact figure, at least 45 percent—and perhaps as much as 75 percent—of the population was wiped out in the space of three years of horror. The
Chronicon Estense
recorded that in just two months sixty-three thousand people died, and in the thriving port of Venice around six hundred people were dying every day at the height of the plague. In Florence,
Marchionne di Coppo Stefani estimated that ninety-six thousand deaths occurred between March and October 1348. In
Bologna, it was reported that six out of every ten individuals succumbed, and one chronicler claimed that in the comparatively modest town of
Orvieto more than 90 percent
of the inhabitants fell victim to the plague between the spring and the autumn of 1348.

Predictably, the plague had a colossal impact on moral attitudes. Preachers, penitents, and artists developed a preoccupation with mortality and sin. Acutely conscious of the fragility of life and seeking to explain the pestilence as a punishment for moral lassitude, they began to find particularly potent meaning in the theme of the
triumphus mortis
(triumph of death).
Francesco Traini’s depiction of precisely this topic in the Camposanto in Pisa shows a scene teeming with figures suffering from the plague that provides a sense of the guilt brought on by the imminence of death. Hovering above a mass of corpses, two small, winged creatures hold aloft a parchment scroll bearing the following inscription:

Knowledge and wealth,

Nobility and valor

Mean nothing to the ravages of death.

By way of illustrating this point, a huge, sinister woman with clawed feet and bat-like wings flies over the middle of the scene, a terrifying embodiment of Death itself. Her attendants circle around. Cackling demons sweep down to carry sinners off to Hell, while a few pacific angels pluck innocent children away for the peace of Heaven. Watching the whole scene from the cliff top, two bearded priests reflect on the state of mankind and anxiously study the Bible. It is unclear what text they are reading: perhaps they are searching for words of consolation, perhaps they are looking to follow the teachings of Christ more avidly, or perhaps they are finding in Revelation the chilling sense that they are indeed witnessing the end of times.

Petrarch—no less than Traini—was profoundly affected by the plague and by the moral transformation it brought about. Traveling between
Parma and
Verona in the early months of 1348, he saw the appalling effects of the pestilence firsthand. Almost every day he received news that another friend or relative had died, and his letters—such as that written
on hearing of the death of his kinsman
Franceschino degli Albizzi—are filled with heartrending lamentations. But the worst was yet to come.

On May 19, 1348, Petrarch received a terrible letter from his friend
“Socrates” (Ludwig van Kempen). Laura was dead. He was heartbroken. “
My lady is dead,” he wailed, “and my heart has died with her.” He had no desire to linger further in life. As he put it in one particularly affecting sonnet:

Life flees and does not stop an hour,

And Death comes after by great stages;

And present and past things,

Make war on me, and the future also,

And, remembering and expecting both weighs

Me down on this side, and on that …

I see the winds turbulent for my voyaging,

I see storm in port, and wearied now,

My helmsman, and the masts and lines broken,

And the beautiful stars, at which I used to gaze, extinguished.

But gradually, he came to revisit Augustinus’s words in the
Secretum
. Now it was painfully clear that no real happiness could be found on earth—not when someone as dear to him as Laura could be snatched away so cruelly. Her death seemed to illustrate how fragile the world was and how foolish worldly desires really were.

His love underwent a last and dramatic metamorphosis. In place of the burning, sexual passion that had consumed him in his youth, Petrarch found himself drawn to Laura’s memory by a more spiritual longing. He continued to love her, not for her body, but for her soul. In Petrarch’s verse, Laura herself is transformed. The taunting mistress now became a figure of redemption, a spirit capable of leading him to virtue. In one particularly telling poem, Petrarch flees the scorching effects of temptation and seeks refuge beneath the branches of the laurel tree that represents his beloved. The “beautiful leaves” protect him from the storms of worldly desire, and as he contemplates its virtuous shade, the laurel is transformed once again, assuming the form of a crucifix.
From beyond the grave, Laura pointed the way not to lust or glory but to heaven. It was an enduring idea. This image—which was later picked up and developed by
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), Serafino
Ciminelli dell’Aquila (1466–1500), and in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s
Orlando innamorato
(1476–83)—was ultimately to find its expression in
Baldassare Castiglione’s claim that “
the kinds of beauty which every day we see in corruptible bodies” were unworthy of the affections of a noble lover.

Death had indeed triumphed, and the terrible sufferings the pestilence had brought were a reminder of the need to put away worldly pleasures. Mindful of the fleetingness of life and the imminence of judgment, man should repudiate sex; and even love—in its conventional form—should be despised. In its place, man should cling to virtue and pursue the love of the divine in the hope of attaining happiness in the next life. Even though Petrarch repeatedly failed to adhere to his own dictates (and even went on to father a number of children while in holy orders), he clearly acknowledged that chastity and devotion represented the only way forward. As
Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora’s
The Combat of Love and Chastity
(ca. 1475–1500) illustrated, the sharp arrows of desire should break against the soul’s chaste shield (
Fig. 16
). Forged in the dark night of sorrow, it was a grim ethic that made man an insensible pilgrim in the body and required life to be lived with closed eyes on bended knee. And what was more, the tense relationship between love, sex, and death that underpinned it seems to have appealed to Michelangelo for some time.

A
CT 3
: T
HE
P
LEASURES OF THE
F
LESH

As
The
Punishment of Tityus
suggests, Michelangelo seems to have taken to heart the Petrarchan dichotomy between physical desire and death. Throughout the verses he addressed to
Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, he went to great lengths to stress that—because he recognized his own mortality—his love was utterly chaste. This was, indeed, the basis on which Michelangelo pleaded for greater intimacy with the distant young man. “
Your soul,” he claimed in a poem written in 1533, “more willing to respond / than I dare hope to the chaste fire that glows / within me, will have pity and draw close.”

But despite his protestations, Michelangelo’s demeanor seemed to suggest that his intentions were not altogether pure. Already in late 1532 or early 1533, tongues had begun to wag. Gossips began to speculate that Michelangelo, far from being chaste, was in fact a dirty old man. When
this reached Tommaso’s ears, he was unable entirely to dismiss his suspicions and actually refused to see the artist for a while.
Distraught, Michelangelo felt obliged to pen a verse rejecting the accusations.

Although Michelangelo had sincerely endeavored to conquer his physical passions, he had been unable to succeed. Even as he protested his chastity, he admitted that he wanted to have “
my sweet and longed-for lord forever stay / folded in these unworthy, ready arms.” At times, he actually seemed to revel in his sexual longings and gave way to his libido with unashamed excitement while simultaneously recalling his pious intentions.

In attempting to justify his lust, Michelangelo came to turn Petrarch’s argument on its head. Precisely because life was so short and sin resulted in damnation, he felt he really should just surrender himself to the passion that he was unable to conquer entirely. In a verse written in ca. 1534–35, he confessed that he was still pained by the realization that the “misery” of his affection for Tommaso was more important to him than virtue, but since God had not punished him by striking him dead, he could see no reason to refrain from his desire. And since he was unable to resist the lust that would surely land him in Hell after death, Michelangelo believed that Tommaso’s embrace might be the only taste of Heaven he could hope to experience. A powerless captive of the young man’s beauty, he was forced to conclude that it would be best to play the devout, lustful martyr until he died. As he put it at the end of the verse:

If only blest when caught and conquered here,

no wonder I remain, naked, alone,

the prisoner of a well-armed cavalier.

In succumbing to physical passion in defiance of the pains of death, Michelangelo set himself at a distance from both Dante and Petrarch. Yet as he was diverging from two of the more dominant literary constructions of love, he was simultaneously drawing on an entirely different tradition of thought that used the fragility of human existence as justification for the unfettered indulgence of sexual pleasure. Here, Michelangelo was not so much reenacting the experiences of an individual figure as playing the role of a priapic Bacchus that represented the spirit of an entire period of Renaissance history. It consisted of two
parallel strands, each of which brought together art and life in a manner that was even more intense—and even more exciting—than anything that had gone before.