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That he achieved so much in science, despite these handicaps and his labors in art, is among the miracles of a miraculous age.
the “false coin” of celestial promissory notes which they exchanged for the coinage of this world.
“As a day well spent makes it sweet to sleep, so a life well used makes it sweet to die.”
He was not the greatest scientist or engineer or painter or sculptor or thinker of his time; he was merely the man who was all of these together and in each field rivaled the best.
But, with all his limitations and incompletions, he was the fullest man of the Renaissance, perhaps of all time. Contemplating his achievement we marvel at the distance that man has come from his origins, and renew our faith in the possibilities of mankind.
the Seven Works of Mercy: clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, nursing the sick, visiting prisons, receiving strangers, burying the dead, and comforting the bereaved.
he seldom realized that the function of the body is to be the outward expression and instrument of a subtle and intangible spirit or character, and that the sovereign task of art is to find and reveal that soul through its veil of flesh.
In Signorelli painting passed at one step from the terrors and tenderness of medieval art to the strained and soulless exaggerations of baroque.
He had accomplished in art all that a skilled hand could do without a deepened soul to guide it.
the result was technically excellent, spiritually dead.
Those who desire “immortality” must pay for it with their lives.
Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa,—14 “Nature made him, and then broke the mold.”
He had outwitted every enemy but time.
and returned from the East with silks, spices, rugs, drugs, and slaves.
Dependent on the mainland for food, outlets, and raw materials, she fought a succession of wars to establish her control over northeastern Italy; dependent likewise on non-Italian areas, she was anxious to dominate the regions that supplied her wants, the markets that took her goods, the routes by which her vital commerce passed. She became by “manifest destiny” an imperialistic power.
She agreed with Europe that trade was more important than Christianity.
Guided by the informed reports of her ambassadors, the careful statistical records of her bureaucracy, and the astute statesmanship of her senators, Venice repeatedly won in diplomacy what she had lost in war.
Venice believed in ceremony and display, partly to impress ambassadors and visitors, partly to awe the population, partly to give it pageantry in place of power.
“Greece has not perished, but has migrated to Italy—which in former days was called Greater Greece.”
The lives of great men oft remind us that a man’s character can be formed after his demise. If a ruler coddles the chroniclers about him they may lift him to posthumous sanctity; if he offends them they may broil his corpse on a spit of venom or roast him to darkest infamy in a pot of ink.
he was a man as broad as his hatreds, and he recognized great art when he saw it. Perhaps he understood that he had immortalized himself not by the wars that he had won, but by giving the strange and incalculable divinity fretting in Angelo freedom to disport itself on the papal chapel vault.
This was his character, and his character was his fate.
A man is many men, to divers men and times; and not even the greatest portraitist can show all these features in one moment’s face.
It was an unwritten law that whatever one believed or doubted, no gentleman would utter anything critical of a Church that was morally so tolerant, and so munificent a patron.
But money, though it may finance the talent of scholars, seems rarely to feed the genius of poets.
but may appear incongruous to those who are forgetting the mythology of Greece and Rome and are making Christianity a literary mythology in its turn.
Time is the greatest vandal of them all.
Literature transformed Christian theology into pagan mythology, and replaced paradise with Olympus.
Now energy directed by a unifying will is almost the definition of genius.
“I have only too much of a wife in my art, and she has given me trouble enough. As to my children, they are the works that I shall leave; and if they are not worth much, they will at least live for some time.”
He did not need solitude in order to be himself.
He ignored the politics that were consuming Leo and Italy, perhaps feeling that the repetitious contentions of parties and states for power and privilege are the monotonous froth of history, and that nothing matters but devotion to goodness, beauty, and truth.
pecunia non olet—“money does not smell”—
He seems to have thought of his villa as not merely his home, but as a public gallery of art, to which the public might occasionally be admitted.
Getty?
Raphael’s work was the product of finished skill, not of profound feeling or conviction.
Leonardo puzzles us, Michelangelo frightens us, Raphael gives us peace.
In the arbitrary analogies of genius he finds his place just below the greatest, but with them: Dante, Goethe, Keats; Beethoven, Bach, Mozart; Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael.
Leo, a Medici first and a pope afterward, played the game as well as his corpulence, his fistula, his hunts, his liberalities, and his finances would allow.
He was a good man ruined by his virtues.
revolt. He was a glory and a disaster to the Church.
He loved beautiful form too much, too little the revealing significance that great art clothes in beautiful form.
He liked comfort too much to be great.
IN every age and nation civilization is the product, privilege, and responsibility of a minority.
The historian acquainted with the pervasive pertinacity of nonsense reconciles himself to a glorious future for superstition; he does not expect perfect states to arise out of imperfect men; he perceives that only a small proportion of any generation can be so freed from economic harassments as to have leisure and energy to think their own thoughts instead of those of their forebears or their environment; and he learns to rejoice if he can find in each period a few men and women who have lifted themselves, by the bootstraps of their brains, or by some boon of birth or circumstance, out of
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The most prosperous science was medicine, for men will sacrifice anything but appetite for health.
“I died of too many physicians.”
Marseille (1383) lengthened the detention period to forty days—la quarantine, and Venice followed suit in 1403.26
It is often the fatality of medicine that its heroic advances in therapy are balanced—almost pursued—by new diseases.
Italians since Lucretius have excelled in writing poetical didactic poetry, but who would have supposed that the undulant spirochete would lend itself to fluent verse?
but who now does reverence to his poor heroic skeptical squeak?
