Part
One: The Lives of Mantuan
A
Carmelite Conversation conducted by Philip Harvey on Zoom on Wednesday the 1st
of March 2023
Isabella d'Este, a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci made circa 1499-1500
The
most famous writer born in the region of Mantua in northern Italy is the Roman
poet Virgil. Two of his works are the Georgics, and pre-eminently the Aeneid.
Virgil was born about seventy years before the birth of Christ, a date to keep
in mind when reading another of his most famous poems, the set of pastoral
dialogues called the Eclogues. This was a form of poetry he more or less
invented himself based on the Greek Theocritus. Their influence on Western
poetry ever since has been sizable. Of especial interest is Eclogue IV.
Sicelides
Musae, paulo maiora canamus…
Sicilian
Muse, I would try now a somewhat grander theme.
Shrubberies
or meek tamarisks are not for all : but if it’s
Forests
I sing, may the forests be worthy of a consul.
Ours is the crowning era foretold in prophecy
:
Born
of Time, a great new cycle of centuries
Begins.
Justice returns to earth, the Golden Age
Returns,
and its first-born comes down from heaven above.
Look
kindly, chaste Lucina, upon this infant’s birth,
For
with him shall hearts of iron cease, and hearts of gold
Inherit
the whole earth – yes, Apollo reigns now.
And
it’s while you are consul – you, Pollio – that this glorious
Age
shall dawn, the march of its great months begin.
You
at our head, mankind shall be freed from its age-long fear.
All
stains of our past wickedness being cleansed away.
This
child shall enter into the life of the gods, behold them
Walking
with antique heroes, and himself be seen of them,
And
rule a world made peaceful by his father’s virtuous acts.
(Virgil
Day-Lewis 18)
This
translation of the opening of Eclogue IV by Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the
actor, shows why interpretations vary: the poem never names “the first-born”,
the Wunderkind who has come in present time to inaugurate the new Golden Age.
We may read the poem as a simple celebration of peace breaking out, or as a political
expression of eternal recurrence with Virgil acclaiming the power clique of the
day. However, early Christians read Eclogue IV as a prophecy of the Messiah, as
though the poet were another Isaiah. This reading, right or wrong, took such
hold in late Antiquity that it has become inseparable in later reception of Virgil
in general. As another translator puts it, “The Church, as it gained strength
in Rome, was quick to claim Virgil as one of nature’s Christians before the
time of Christ. When the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century
established Christianity as the state religion, he identified the Child of
Virgil’s prophecy with Christ; and much later Dante made it clear that he
regards Virgil as the next best thing to a Christian.” (Virgil Rieu 142) It is this big picture setting
that illuminates the adulatory Renaissance knowledge of Virgil 1500 years later
and its creative imitations of his poetry, not least his Eclogues.
Other
poets hailing from the region of Mantua are the 13th-century Provençal
troubadour Sordello, later the subject of a long poem by Robert Browning. And
the 15th-century Carmelite humanist Baptist Spagnoli, the subject of today’s historical
Entertainment. He was born in Mantua on the 17th of April 1447. As
his name announces, his ancestors were Spanish, his father being a nobleman
serving at the Mantuan court of the formidable Gonzaga family. Johannes
Baptista Spagnolo and other variants are common, variations on his name
accelerating after he becomes a household name associated with his hometown:
Baptista Mantovano, Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus, and Battista the Mantuan.
Such was his fame through the next two centuries that this became The Mantuan, or
simply Mantuan, as we might refer to Prince or Madonna. Or the way we refer to
Andrew Barton Paterson simply as Banjo. Mantuan is what I will call him throughout
this paper.
Mantuan
was writing from an early age. His youthful discovery of poetry manifested
itself in the composition of eclogues, the form developed fifteen centuries
earlier by Mantua’s most famous poet. The ten eclogues that have come down to
us were written at different times in his life and they express those changing
times in his life in ways that could be construed as a biography. That is how I
am going to read them.
Una
puellares inter pulcherrima turmas virgo erat…
Among
a company of young women there, one girl was most beautiful: blond, taller than
the others, some twenty years old, able with her radiant face to vie with and
overcome the nymphs of the day. The fringe of her veil, glittering with gold
flecks, was pulled back toward her temples and fell on a breast enclosed by the
bronze clasp of her robe; a clasp of polished iron squeezed together her waist;
and a pleated border of fresh white linen hung down at her feet. When the lad
saw her, he perished. Beholding her, he drank in love’s flames and swallowed down
its unseen fires into his heart, fires that can be neither extinguished by
water nor lessened by shade or herbs and magical murmurings. Forgetting his
herd and the losses to his household, he was wholly consumed by the fires of
love and spent his bitter nights in sorrow.(Piepho1
17)
Eclogues
are pastoral dialogues, conversations between shepherds about a chosen subject.
This was Virgil’s classical example and during the Renaissance the eclogue enjoyed
a huge vogue across Italy, and later in places like England. Mantuan is one of
the preeminent practitioners of the eclogue at this time, as well as its
populariser. Here in his Eclogue II, ‘De amoris insania’ (‘On Love’s Madness’),
two shepherds named Faustus and Fortunatus reflect in turn on the passions of
young love. Their opinions swing between understanding how such passions are aroused,
the risks of dishonour and foolishness that can result, the root causes of
passion that can destroy a person if gone unchecked, the difficult outcomes of
envy that develop once pleasure alone must be satisfied. Although we know little about Mantuan’s early personal
life, that the three opening eclogues focus on this theme of honour and madness
in love tells the reader something about Mantuan’s own preoccupations at the
time. In Eclogue III (‘The Unhappy Outcome of Mad Love’), the shepherds Faustus
and Fortunatus agree that “Love is common to all of us, an interest shared by
all young men … Often grief and other feelings unhinge our judgment. Troubled
words oft issue from a troubled mind.” (Piepho1 23). But Fortunatus is out of
sympathy with the young man Amyntas and his insane love, which portends self-harm
and even suicide.
A
shock occurs at Eclogue IV ‘De natura mulierum’, in which Mantuan indulges in
invective against women, a poem that is misogynistic and temperamentally alien to
the other eclogues. This relentlessly negative attack on the character of women
does not bear recitation here but must be acknowledged and placed in its
context. What happened? Critics skirt around this eclogue, yet to me the poem
speaks of possibly some unresolved conflict in his life that needed
unburdening. Is Eclogue IV simply a rant, an exercise in unpleasantry? Or is it
a clue to his decision to enter the Carmelite Order in Ferrara in the year
1463? Evidence in his later life tells us that Mantuan enjoyed the company of
women, worked well with women, and was respectful of their power and role in
society. Yet Eclogue VII is a poem about a young man who
enters a religious order, who has chosen a world of male relationships. The poem
opens by speaking of his calling to be a shepherd in the literal pastoral care
sense of the Gospel, the clergy who tend their flock: “When Christ was born in
a stable, heavenly spirits sang to the shepherds in their sheepfolds of the birth
of God the Son … God called Himself too a shepherd, and he called sheep those
men of mild disposition and tranquil mind.” (Piepho1 63). Yet unusual
details, regarded by many as drawn from Mantuan’s own personal life, are listed:
Durus
et immitis pater …
His
stern, harsh father and domineering stepmother burdened Pollux sorely in his
youth when that fresh time of life is wont to prompt sweet thoughts. And since
his patience, weak from this longstanding burden, failed him and by no stratagem
could he gentle their hatred, he resolved to attempt his escape. But one thing,
though he wished to go, long held him: he loved too impetuously, for love is
the universal error of youthful years. Love is a strong force, but cruelty a
stronger. He went, and departing … with a mournful look he lamented in words
such as these: “Ah, my girl, will you allow tears to flow from your eyes when
you see that you have been left behind by your lover, so dear to you? Will you sigh at all at my leaving? By chance
will you ever cruelly forget me? Will your heart be able to grow so cold – that
heart that has so often filled my eyes with tears?”(Piepho1
63-65)
There
is conjecture about whether Mantuan was born illegitimate, but whatever the
case, these lines describe a youth at pains to separate himself from difficult parents
and an unhappy love affair, his desire being met in a remarkable vision of
Mount Carmel, first home of the original hermits known as Carmelites who lived
there in Palestine amidst the ongoing crusades sometime in the 12th-13th
centuries. Remarkable, first as a paradisal vision of Carmel, a heavenly home
that meets the needs of the person in search of complete meaning. Remarkable
second, because the vision itself is delivered by a nymph, in keeping with the pastoral
poetic tradition of Virgil, “a virgin crowned with a girls’ coronet” who could
be construed as Blessed Virgin Mary or a messenger of the goddess Aphrodite.
Such is the multicultural world of Humanist Mantua, where Christianity and
Classicism speak virtually with one voice.
Hic
ad opem vigilo indefessa ferendam …
Therefore
put an end to your delay. Flee the alluring palace of an imminent death. Seek a
secure, secluded seacoast where, facing Idalian waves, in my honour Mount Carmel
raises high in the air its head wreathed in green trees. To the patriarchs of
old this place first provided caves and houses of trees within a grove thick
with ilex. From this peak reverence for God comes, led off into your mountains,
just as streams issue from an unceasing fount or many descendants from a single
sire. Within the woods of this peak where the silver fir rises high, where the
bark of the rich pitch-pine and terebinth oozes with resin, after you have
successfully led a life of innocence, your youth will soon be renewed with the
change of years. To a better place forever green shall I raise you. You will be
the gods’ immortal companion. You will be allowed to move through Heaven … and
be permitted to learn of the heavens both above and below. (Piepho1
67)
In
1483 Mantuan was first elected vicar-general of his congregation of reformed Carmelites.
He anticipates, in some ways, the major reforms that took place in the next
century under Teresa of Avila and others. Like significant leaders through the
history of the Order, he strove to return to the basics of a simple life and a
simple rule. As an inheritor of the Mantuan reform within the Order, which gave
Mantuan Carmelites autonomy and a certain self-direction, he carried an
independence of spirit. For example, in his first term of office Mantuan was active
in the debate over the controversy of the correct colour of the habit: Mantua
wore grey, the rest of the Order still wore black. A papal bull promulgated in
that year (1483) reaffirmed the black habit, very much against the views of
Mantuan and his friends, who insisted the original colour of the habit had been
white, light brown, or grey. Mantuan appealed the case before Pope Sixtus IV
(Piepho1 xxix) which led to the adoption of an undyed grey habit for all
members of the Order. We feel a sense of bemusement about this argument, until
we reflect that people today likewise can fight tooth and nail over the correct
colour of their organisation, school, or football team. Like those imbroglios,
the real point is about some larger issue. The 1483 dispute was over a return
to the austere origins of the Order and its Rule and a rejection of the decadence
into which some parts of the Order had fallen, symbolised in their black habit.
As Mantuan remarked later in life, “we were wearing white, that true and ancient
colour: the others continued just as they sought to be – utterly blackened.” (Piepho1 xxx)
We
tend to forget, reading history, that people are not the sum of their
controversies. In 1489, for example, Mantuan visited Loreto, the flying house
that landed near the Adriatic coastline, the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto. The purpose that he and his companions had was
to take responsibility for this significant place of worship on behalf of the Carmelites,
but also the Church in general. During the plague of 1482, when he lived in
Bologna, he “vowed to go on pilgrimage to Loreto if the plague should quickly
cease, which it did. [Mantuan] himself was present for the installation of the
new community at the shrine.” (Sewell 3) He also wrote a history of this famous
shrine.
His
regular re-election to governance of the congregation, and appointment to
political summits to sort out state conflicts, even wars, tells us he was a
capable, trusted and popular administrator. During all of this time he wrote
and published other poetry, as well as discourses, much of which remains
unavailable to us to this day because it’s all in Latin. Proper translation of
his spiritual discourses is overdue. Mantuan composed poems about the saints, which
would have been used as fresh versions of their lives for daily worship. He
also composed a long Marian poem entitled Parthenice Mariana. In 1493 he was appointed
Director of Studies at the Carmelite Monastery in Mantua, all of which was
happening when the Gonzaga court was at the height of its authority in Italy. Sometimes
reading his life we are given the powerful impression he was the right person
in the right place at the right time.
Eclogue
VI is an unusual use of the form to discuss the relative merits of city and country
life. He takes the unusual non-Virgilian step of prizing the country over the city.
It is unclear if the poem is not devised to prompt opinions from listeners,
though it must give something of Mantuan’s perspective on city life:
To note the Cities Follies, lest thine
eye
Deceiv'd (perhaps) with shews,
should'st these men hold
More wise, more happy that in burnish'd
gold,
Rich Purple, or fine Skarlet
glitt'ring shine,
I many men have seen with these mine
eine
In brave apparrel with Majestick pace
Walking about the publick Market
place,
Whom secret hunger and domestick want
Have sorely pinch'd, as if concomitant.
Doubtlesse in this the greatest
follies lie:
For feyned wealth is reall poverty:
And what doth sloth of life, or
sluggishnesse
But madnesse in reality expresse?
…
And ther' another kind of fools, a
sort
Immedicable, yet of great report,
Lawyers, Court brawlers, pleaders of a
cause,
Skill'd to gain money, Tyrants of the
Laws.
They sel their Patronage for golden
pay,
To trifle Causes out with long delay,
To make them long depend with a
dilemme,
A vanity is, a Vintage is to them
...
They that are rulers of the people,
they
That govern others, making them obey,
The more command, the more of pow'r
they have,
The more insultingly they rage, they
rave.
O where are pious Rulers now, O where
Do pieties and justice Friends appear,
Whom (once) our Fathers sitting by the
fire
Were wont to name, remember and
admire.
All things go now to wrack: the
Temple's spoil'd
Demolish'd, ruin'd, robb'd, defac'd,
defil'd,
And of the wrongs complains: the poor
lament,
Sigh, groan: The widows weep with
discontent.
But what's the cause which doth these
mischiefs cause?
Because base Lust doth rule in stead
of Lawes.
(Harvey
57-61)
Mantua
was one of the decisive cities of Renaissance times, standing “between the
frontiers of Milan and Venice, and it was in the interests of both to see an
autonomous Mantuan territory, guaranteeing, even if it taxed, their riverine
trade, its rulers available for hire to either side as military commanders.”
(Hale 200) The court of the Gonzaga family, established generations before, enjoyed
immense prestige. When the Gonzagas were not engaged in military contests of
varying success, they were employing statecraft to resolve conflicts by
diplomacy, or were promoting civic achievement at home, which meant cultural pursuits
of all kinds, including writing, writers enjoying the court’s special
protection.
Central
to our Entertainment today is a woman from the ducal family of Ferrara, by name
Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), a classically trained patrician who cultivated Humanist
interests in Mantua, extending patronage in all directions. Isabella’s portrait
by Leonardo da Vinci was made at the turn of the sixteenth century. It is enough
to say that Mantuan was one of her inner circle, in order to understand the
respect in which he was held in that society. Such was his social standing in
the city, he delivered the funeral oration for Isabella’s mother, Eleonora of
Aragon. He participated in an informal
academy founded by Isabella, the Accademia de Santo Pietro, overseen by such authors
as Baldassare Castiglione, who produced ‘Il Cortegiano’ (‘The Courtier’), one
of the most celebrated works on court life, manners, diplomacy, and the new social
philosophy of the Italian Renaissance. He counted amongst his friends the
artist Andrea Mantegna and both the Pico della Mirandolas, Giovanni and
Gianfrancesco. We gain deeper appreciation of Mantuan’s confidence in rewriting
his Eclogues by reading of his patron’s own cultural outlook. As Werner
Gundersheimer writes:
“[Isabella d’Este] saw nothing inconsistent about
combining a devout Christianity with her classical and even pagan interests.
She supported convents and monasteries, and took a keen interest in recruiting
singers for the ducal chapel. Some of these, however, may have doubled in
service as performers of the secular songs (frottola) composed at Mantua by
Cara and Tromboncino. Any more than it stood in the way of her festive life at
Mantua, her piety did not interfere with her anti-papal policy, designed to
prevent threats to the autonomy of Mantua and Ferrara.” (Hale 127)
This
last point is worth keeping in mind when reading his poems attacking Rome.
While they are appeals to reform in the church, their most immediate concerns
are personal to do with Italian politics and rivalries, rather than the big
picture of European affairs. Mantuan’s skills as a negotiator and peacemaker
were bolstered by being at the court. He was invited to broker the peace
between Francis I and the Duke of Milan, but age and ill-health stopped him from
travelling. In 1513 he became Prior General of the Carmelite Order, but again
it may have been age and ill-health that prohibited his attendance at the Fifth
Lateran Council of reform in Rome. Historians to this day are divided over this
question. Brocard Sewell draws strength from somewhere when he says, “[Mantuan]
attended the Council of the Lateran, where it is said that his vast learning
and wonderful; knowledge of theology commanded the attention of the whole
assembly, that no question was decided without taking his opinion, and that the
pontiff himself seemed to pay special regard to all that he had to say.”
(Sewell 4) This glowing report must be put beside the view held by others that
there is no actual proof of Mantuan ever attending the Lateran Council. More
work has to be done on his role in the Council, as between these two positions
falls the shadow. It is worth noting certain outcomes of the Council in this
context. A requirement that a
local bishop give permission before the printing of a new book. A call to all
philosophy teachers to complement any lesson that contradicts the Christian
faith with "convincing arguments" from the Christian point of view. Requirement
for documented competence in preaching. (Lateran)
As
it turned out, due to age and illness Mantuan died in 1516 in his namesake city.
The Lateran Council continued a while longer on its list of reforms, closing
just seven months before Martin Luther posted his advertisement for a lecture
of 95 theses on a church door in Germany.
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