- Dr Yasmin Haskell
Eugene Delacroix, ‘The Barque of Dante’ (1822) Oil on canvas, 189 x 242 cm
Musee du Louvre, Paris
Courtesy: Mark Harden
In the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan hero, Aeneas, is granted an extraordinary dispensation to visit the land of the dead while still alive. In the Underworld, Aeneas meets his father, who reveals to him the glorious future destiny of the Roman people. He famously sums up Rome’s achievements in the following verses: ‘Others – I do not doubt it – shall shape the breathing bronze more smoothly, and draw living faces out of the marble; others shall plead cases more eloquently, and describe the movements of heaven with a pointer, and tell the rising stars. You, Roman, remember, to rule the nations with your power – these will be your arts – and to put your stamp on peace, and to spare the vanquished, and to crush the proud.’ The modern reader cannot help but feel that Rome comes off second best in this implicit comparison with Greece – although time would look more favourably on the artistic accomplishments of the Roman poets, especially Virgil. In fact, we might be tempted to attribute some of the gifts that Virgil attributes to the Greek genius to the Italians of a later generation, namely the Renaissance.
It is difficult to think of another country that has distinguished itself so much in the visual arts. I remember reading somewhere that an estimated 40% of the world’s art treasures are crammed into the modestly proportioned Christmas stocking that is the Italian peninsula! And when we think of Italy and art, we think first of the Italian Renaissance, of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael … But what sort of Renaissance produced a Michelangelo? The ‘Italian Renaissance’ is an historiographical minefield, and modern scholars have learned to tread carefully over the intellectual debris of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That appealing, iconic story of a millennium of darkness followed by a new dawn of urban regeneration, the recovery of pagan literature giving rise to the modern, secular, ‘individual’, is now widely regarded as myth. As for the artistic Renaissance, if we take Giotto (died 1337) as our starting point, it predates the Renaissance rediscovery of classical antiquity, both of manuscripts and marbles, by at least a century. And what of the literary Renaissance? When does that begin? With Petrarch (1304-1374), the last, great medieval man who simultaneously invented and buried the Middle Ages? I suspect that many Italianists would award that crown to a poet of the previous generation: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321).
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In a famous letter to Giovanni Boccaccio (1314-1375), Petrarch, the father of humanism, commends his protegé’s pious admiration for the poetry of Dante (Fam. XXI.15.12). But some scholars have suspected that Petrarch is engaged in a sort of Oedipal struggle with the poet of the Divine Comedy. Let us first recall how Dante had saluted Virgil in Inferno 1. 79-87: |
 Petrarch.
Courtesy: Peter Sadlon.
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“Now, art thou that Virgilius and that fountain
Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech?”
I made response to him with bashful forehead.
“O, of the other poets honour and light,
Avail me the long study and great love
That have impelled me to explore thy volume!
Thou art my master, and my author thou,
Thou art alone the one from whom I took
The beautiful style that has done honour to me.”
Boccaccio, although he was converted by Petrarch to a life of Latin scholarship, is a writer best known to us today as the author of the Decameron, a collection of raunchy, Italian short stories. It is ironic, if not altogether surprising, that Petrarch, too, will be remembered chiefly for the Canzoniere, his Italian love sonnets to Laura, rather than his unfinished Latin epic on the life of Roman general, Scipio Africanus … At the height of the Renaissance, in the heyday of Michelangelo and Raphael, hundreds of lesser poetic talents flocked to Rome from all over Italy, hoping to catch the eye of the Latin-loving pope, Leo X (son of Lorenzo de’ Medici). This was an age of papal panegyric and debates over ‘correct’ Latin style. Should one write like Cicero, or aspire to a more eclectic prose, or even – heaven forbid – ‘be oneself’? The great Dutch humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, was scandalized by the pettiness and worldliness of the Roman papal bureaucracy, and satirized, in his Ciceronianus, the curialists who felt obliged to refer to nuns as ‘Vestal virgins’. Was this, then, Petrarch’s immediate legacy to Italian literary life – a stifling cultural cringe …?
We must, of course, read between the lines. Like ‘Renaissance’, ‘humanism’ may not be all that it was once claimed to be – a secular, modernist, philosophy, prefiguring libertinism and Enlightenment – but its achievements, and in particular the achievements of the Italian humanists, are real, distinctive, and very much with us today. They can also seem deceptively undramatic. Paul Oskar Kristeller has suggested that perhaps the humanists’ most lasting gift to us was their script – the one you are reading now, and which we call ‘Roman’ because the humanists took it to be (it is actually based on the late Carolingian miniscule). The uncluttered script of the humanists, the long lines of their books (which further enhanced legibility), are paralleled in the clarity they strove for in explicating the texts of the ancients. The humanists no longer regarded the ancients as so many disembodied ‘authorities’, to be pillaged and quoted out of context, but as historical individuals whose lives were as real as their own – whose world must be recreated by coaxing their words back to life.
Patient, painstaking scholarship of the sort that the Italian humanists practised is unfashionable today. It looks to us like pedantry, and in our time when (almost) everything is translated, it is difficult to recapture the hunger with which the likes of Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) chased down and devoured their Latin manuscripts. Yes, of course they didn’t really rediscover the classical texts – they had always been there, in the great medieval monasteries of Northern Europe – but it was the humanists who had the imagination to see them with fresh eyes, and in promoting them (and themselves …), imparted an enthusiasm for those dead, white, Mediterranean males that has never left us. As humanism spread beyond Italy, it leavened the Reformation and European vernacular literatures. Even ‘pedantry’ sometimes had spectacular pay-offs. The unlikely masterpiece of Roman humanist, Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), was a rambling work on Latin usage, and yet his exposure of the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’ as an eighth-century forgery – a document that purported to invest the papacy with secular dominion over Western Europe – brilliantly demonstrated the political devil in the detail. Valla paved the way for Erasmus, who applied scrupulous humanist scholarship not to the works of pagan antiquity, but to the New Testament. The better humanists are, as Charles Nauert Jr has suggested, forerunners of the modern intellectual.
| Renaissance Italy’s achievements in painting, sculpture, and architecture are, no doubt, more accessible to a modern audience than the quiet revolutions of humanist scholarship and education. It is the visual (and later, the musical) Italy that has the most instant appeal. But to return to my earlier question: What sort of Renaissance produced a Michelangelo? He was certainly no Latinist, no humanist, although he was a keen student of ancient sculpture, and worked for popes and princes who were steeped in humanist culture. The ‘divine’ Michelangelo, driven, convinced of his own genius, wholly devoted to his art, is the emblematic Renaissance artist. But the painter of pagan Sibyls and worshipper of the naked human form was also a |
 Detail of Charon ferrying souls to Hell by Michelangelo Buonarotti, from 'Last Judgment' (1537-41) Fresco Cappella Sistina, Rome.
Source: Christus Rex et Redemptor Mundi
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Text © Assoc. Prof. Yasmin Haskell
Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
credo equidem, uiuos ducent de marmore uoltus,
orabunt causus melius, caelique meatus
describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
hae tibi erunt artes, pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.
(Virgil, Aeneid 6. 847-53)
2See, e.g., the introduction to Charles G. Nauert Jr, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995).
3See, e.g., M. L. McLaughlin, ‘Humanism and Italian Literature’, in J. Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 224-45.
4 Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from the Modern Library Edition of Matthew Pearl.
5 ‘Renaissance Humanism and Classical Antiquity’, in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert Rabil Jr, vol. 1, p. 8.
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Profile :: Dr Yasmin Haskell
Dr Yasmin Haskell is Cassamarca Foundation Associate Professor in Latin Humanism at the University of Western Australia. This post was created to broaden awareness of the tradition of Latin writing in Europe since the Renaissance, and to promote greater understanding of the values that lie at the heart of modern European culture. Prior to her recent return to Australia, Yasmin held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, England, where she was based in the department of Italian. She was a fellow in Classics/ Modern Medieval Languages at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1995-2002. Yasmin’s main area of research is the literature and culture of the Society of Jesus (before the suppression of 1773); the bulk of her publications to date have been on early modern didactic poetry.Yasmin grew up in Sydney. Her love of Italy was engendered in her by her parents, who met in Rome in the 60s. (Her mother was a pupil of the bel canto diva, Toti dal Monte, and her father a Rome scholar in architecture at the British School.) Yasmin considers Rome a second home, and is a convinced believer in the adage: Per Roma non basta una vita (‘For Rome one lifetime is not enough’).
Dr Yasmin Haskell held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship between 1999 and 2002. She won a publishing contract with the British Academy through the PDF Monograph competition, and her book on Jesuit Latin didactic poetry is published in summer 2003. In the early modern period, the subjects of poems in the didactic genre were as multifarious as they were topical, including meteorology and magnetism, raising chickens and children, writing and conversation. Dr Haskell considers poems on the social and medicinal benefits of coffee and chocolate illustrating the particular perspective. of Jesuit ideology.
-Editor.
Loyola's Bees - Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry Yasmin Haskell, Cassamarca Foundation Associate Professor in Latin Humanism, University of Western Australia.
Price: £50.00 (Hardback)
0-19-726284-8
Publication date: 11 September 2003
OUP/British Academy 366 pages, 8 figures, 234mm x 156mm
Series: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs.
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