The Ugly Renaissance (20 page)

Joyful Love seemed to me and in his keeping

He held my heart; and in his arms there lay

My lady in a mantle wrapped, and sleeping.

Then he awoke her and, her fear not heeding,

My burning heart fed to her reverently.

Then he departed from my vision, weeping.

So intense was Dante’s obsessive love for Beatrice that the constant strain of thinking about her beauty made him ill. His friends became worried and, seeing that it was a girl who was causing his condition to deteriorate, pressed him to reveal her name. Gallantly, he refused to share his secret, but the gossip which spread quickly became sufficiently intolerable that Dante felt obliged to pretend he really loved someone else entirely.

It was a foolish mistake. Before long, Beatrice had heard that Dante was in love with another person. Given that she had previously guessed he had feelings for her, she was extremely annoyed. When they next met in the street, Beatrice pointedly snubbed him. Dante was devastated. “
I was so overwhelmed with grief,” he wrote in
La vita nuova
, “that … I went to a solitary place where I drenched the earth with bitter tears.”

Setting aside all pretense, Dante no longer made any secret of his love for Beatrice. But though he hoped always that her heart would soften, his passion was unrequited. Little by little, he became a laughingstock.
At a wedding, his rather affected swooning at his beloved’s beauty attracted the mockery of all present: even Beatrice poked fun at him.

After he endured this humiliating episode, some of the ladies who had laughed at Dante suggested a solution to his sorrows. There was of course nothing wrong with his love, but his error lay in his response to Beatrice’s disdain. Although he had previously written a great deal of poetry in the courtly tradition, his verses had been entirely devoted to self-pity, and he had suffered as a consequence of his willingness to wallow in despair. Since all agreed that Beatrice was as near to human perfection as could be found, Dante should concentrate not on his pain but on her incomparable beauty and virtue. In praising her in poetry, he could live his love in a different—and perhaps more edifying—manner.
Beatrice would inspire a new art, and that art would prove to be Dante’s salvation.

The transformation was instantaneous. Rather than picturing Beatrice merely as a prospective mistress or as an enchanting object of love, Dante crafted a poetic image of his beloved as an ideal of beauty, the very paradigm of all that was pure and good. She became a reflection of the divine, a model of virtue, and the inspiration for a powerful, redemptive poetry. In turn, Dante’s love ceased to cause him pain and instead—through his art—came to be the centerpiece of his moral universe.

Beatrice’s unexpected death on June 8, 1290, devastated Dante. He seemed almost to lose his mind with grief, and though he resolved never to speak about her “departure,” the final parts of
La vita nuova
testify to the extent to which the tragedy weighed upon his heart and mind. Yet however heartbreaking her passing might have been, her death only seems to have intensified Dante’s idealization of her as the archetype of virtue and beauty. From beyond the grave, she became the epitome of philosophy and heavenly perfection, a yet more powerful incentive to write, and a fixed star by which the shattered bark of Dante’s life could set its course.

Dante’s new attitude toward his love for Beatrice was most fully and clearly expressed in the first canto of the
Paradiso
. Opening his narrative with a heartfelt plea to Apollo—the god of poetry and wisdom—Dante begs to be given sufficient skill to sing of the “blessed kingdom” he is about to enter, and longs to be granted the laurel crown that symbolizes both love and literary genius. His plea ended, he is then amazed to see Beatrice appear before him, her gaze fixed upon the sun, contemplating the majesty of creation. Whereas Virgil had been Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, it is clear that Beatrice will be his companion through the ethereal realm. Her role is telling. Rather than being merely an “
expositor, … Beatrice is a superior intelligence … an instructress who explains the mysteries of nature, the structure of the heavens, the phased ascent from earth to the celestial empyraean.” Her beauty becoming ever more pronounced as their journey progresses, she unveils the universal truths and heavenly goodness that are both the subject of Dante’s verse and the object of his life. Although they are overlaid with elements of Aristotelian and Averroistic philosophy, it is clear that what virtue and beauty he perceives, he perceives because of her.

Abashed and a little timid at first, Michelangelo could not resist picturing himself as a new Dante and casting Tommaso in the role of a more passive—and perhaps rather nicer—Beatrice.

A
CT 2
: G
UILT AND
S
ORROW

Unfortunately for Michelangelo, the imitation of Dante only took him so far. There was, he rapidly discovered, a lot more to his relationship than could be modeled in Dantean terms. And—what was more—his feelings were more tortured than even Dante had experienced. Far from being content merely to worship the ideal that Tommaso represented, Michelangelo struggled with the implications of this idealism, and this feeling creeps through with particular force in the second phase of their relationship. As
Bartolomeo Angiolini observed in mid-1533, Michelangelo’s poetry had begun to express a palpable sense of suffering.

The slightest coolness from Tommaso could cut Michelangelo to the quick. As it was, the young man was often more than a little standoffish.
Although he claimed to esteem the artist more highly than anyone else on earth, his correspondence is occasionally somewhat distant and formal. At times—and especially during their separation in 1533—
Tommaso even teased him in a manner that hovers between friendly raillery and youthful cruelty.

The feelings of being punished for having come too close, too quickly, are perhaps expressed most eloquently in
The Fall of Phaethon
(
Fig. 13
), a drawing (of which three versions exist) that Michelangelo appears to have sent to Tommaso at around the time of Angiolini’s letter. Phaethon, having persuaded his father, Helios, to let him drive his chariot across the sky, is soon frightened by the heights to which he has risen. In panic, he veers wildly across the heavens until Zeus is compelled to strike him down with a thunderbolt. That Michelangelo pictures himself as Phaethon is clear.

But Michelangelo’s torment was also a product of a deeper and more disturbing sense of uncertainty. He was, as he recognized, powerless to resist the assaults of love, but the fact that this love often shaded off into homoerotic lust prompted a crisis of conscience. Although there was a vogue for close—and even intimate—relations between men in contemporary Italy, Michelangelo seems to have been conscious of the vicious terms in which
homosexuality was condemned by secular and religious
authorities. As a devout Christian, he knew that Tommaso should be a reminder of God’s goodness and that such sexual desire was wrong.

This burgeoning sense of guilt was well illustrated in one of a pair of drawings Michelangelo sent to Tommaso as a New Year’s gift at the end of 1532. Depicting the story of
The Punishment of Tityus
(
Fig. 14
), it dramatized a mythological tale of divine retribution. In punishment for having attempted to rape Zeus’s concubine, Leto, the giant Tityus had been hurled down into the deepest pits of Hades to endure horrific suffering.
In Michelangelo’s gift drawing, he is shown lying prostrate on the rocky ground of the underworld, while a monstrous eagle pecks hungrily at his liver. Picturing himself as Tityus, the pious Michelangelo not only showed that he harbored an irrational, physical passion for Tommaso but also demonstrated his fear of being punished for all eternity for his lust.

The feeling of guilt points toward the second phase in the evolution of Renaissance conceptions of love and sex and to another great influence on Michelangelo: Petrarch, perhaps the most important of Dante’s intellectual heirs. While staying in
Bologna shortly after his hurried departure from Florence in October 1494, Michelangelo read Petrarch’s vernacular verse alongside Dante’s love poetry with
Giovanfrancesco Aldovrandi, and in the years that followed, he nurtured an affection for the former that was at least as great as—if not greater than—his fondness for the
Commedia
and
La vita nuova
.

Insofar as Michelangelo’s relationship with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri is concerned, Petrarch’s real importance lies in his transformation of Dantean themes to encompass a sense of sorrow and guilt. While drawing on Dante’s love for Beatrice as a model for his own experiences, Petrarch added an entirely new ingredient to the mixture that was born of an altogether darker combination of torment and suffering.

It was in
Avignon on April 6, 1327, that Petrarch set out on a journey that would transform the course of his life. Early that morning, not long after dawn, he arrived at the church of Saint Clare for the Easter Sunday Mass. At twenty-two, he was quite the dandy. Arrayed in brightly colored and heavily perfumed clothes, he had, as always, gone to great trouble over his appearance.
As he later reminisced, he regularly spent hours curling his hair in the latest fashion and fretted incessantly whenever he went out for fear that the breeze would disturb his carefully arranged locks. What was more, he considered himself a man of
the world. By the standards of the day, he was certainly well educated. Having been trained in Latin grammar and rhetoric by
Convenevole da Prato in nearby Carpentras, he had gone on to study law at the universities of Montpellier and Bologna, two of the finest institutions of learning in Europe.
But even though he was well placed to carve out a future for himself as a lawyer, he had decided not to pursue the career for which he had been intended. After his father’s death the previous year, he had inherited a sizable sum of money and had returned to
Avignon to live a life of refinement and leisure, free from parental pressure and financial worries. He was a dreamer, with few aspirations other than to look good.

Easter Sunday was an opportunity to be seen, to strut around, and to be admired. The little church of Saint Clare would have been packed. Then the seat of the exiled papacy, Avignon was a thriving, bustling city, and this was the culmination of Holy Week. It was in this cramped little church that a young girl first caught Petrarch’s eye.

Her name was Laura.
Petrarch gives us little clue as to her full identity—the best guess is that she was perhaps Laura de Noves, an ancestor of the notorious Marquis de Sade—but it is at least clear that at sixteen or seventeen years old she was already beautiful beyond compare. She took Petrarch’s breath away. As he later recalled, there had never been “
such lovely eyes, either in our age or in the first years”; they melted him “as the sun does the snow.”
From that moment, he was in love—hopelessly, utterly, and completely. The mere sight of her was a source of sheer ecstasy, and though there was occasionally a platonic dimension to Petrarch’s feelings, there is no doubt that—unlike Dante’s affection for Beatrice—his passion was primarily physical in character.

But just as Dante had found with Beatrice, Petrarch’s love was unrequited. Although the mere sight of Laura had set his heart afire, she had not been struck by Cupid’s arrow. It was not that she spurned him or mocked him as Beatrice had tormented Dante. She was simply indifferent to him and gave Petrarch no sign of affection or even of recognition. If he burned with passion, Laura was the original ice queen. She was, in every sense of the word, unattainable; indeed, Petrarch hints that she might already have been married. The trope of ice and fire recurs frequently in his poetry as a metaphor for the contrast between the two.

It was all so evocative of the myth of
Apollo and
Daphne that Petrarch could not resist using the story (which was later painted by Pollaiuolo) (
Fig. 15
) as a metaphor for his dilemma. Like Apollo, he
was condemned to pursue a woman who fled from the very name of love, and yet, just as he seemed to catch up with the fleeing nymph, she escaped his grasp. The fact that Jupiter transformed Daphne into a laurel tree (Greek: Δάφνη; Latin:
laurus
) to save her from Apollo—the god of poetry and wisdom—seemed a telling detail.

For the next twenty-one years, Petrarch was tormented both by his love and by Laura’s coldness, and there are more than a few echoes of Dante in his accounts of this period. Petrarch’s life became one of longing and despair. Sometime after first seeing her, he purchased a little house in nearby Vaucluse in the hope of “curing” himself of his attachment.
But despite his bucolic solitude, Love followed him everywhere. A “hunter” of Laura, he had himself become the hunted. In one poem,
he even compares himself to Actaeon, who was transformed into a stag for having seen the naked Diana bathing and who was pursued forever by his own hounds, the very emblems of desire.

He was led ever deeper into a hopeless labyrinth from which there was no exit. Filled with sorrow, he wandered “through
fields and across hills” and “from mountain to mountain,” consumed by love and grief. His feverish mind played tricks on him.
His thoughts were no longer his own. Everywhere he turned, he seemed to encounter Laura. He saw her in the rocks and rivers and heard her voice in the morning breeze. Long after their first meeting, he would still see her “
in the clear water and on the green grass and in the trunk of a beech tree and in a white cloud … and in whatever wildest place and most deserted shore I find myself.” Much of the time, he felt he was experiencing a living death and sometimes longed to die.

In the midst of his misery, Petrarch turned to poetry, and in this respect his thought began to diverge somewhat from Dante’s. Drawing on both his classical learning and his deep familiarity with the troubadour tradition, he began work on the
Canzoniere
(Songbook)—the epic collection of poetry for which he is best known—as the vehicle through which to express his emotions. Consciously equating
amor
with
gloria
, he hoped to win Laura’s hand through literary fame.