by Will Durant
In 1750 a closer invitation came: Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau, Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, asked him to paint the Imperial Hall of his newly built Residenz, or administrative palace. The proffered fee moved the aging master. Arriving in December with his sons Domenico, twenty-four, and Lorenzo, fourteen, he found an unexpected challenge in the splendor of the Kaisersaal, which Balthasar Neumann had designed; how could any picture catch the eye amid that radiance? Tiepolo’s success here was the crown of his career. On the walls he depicted the story of the Emperor Frederick Bar-barossa (who had kept tryst with Beatrice of Burgundy at Würzburg in 1156), and on the ceiling he showed Apollo Bringing the Bride; here he reveled in an ecstasy of white horses, gay gods, and the play of light upon prancing cherubs and filmy clouds. On a slope of the ceiling he represented The Wedding: handsome faces, stately figures, flowered drapery, garments recalling Veronese’s Venice rather than medieval styles. The Bishop was so pleased that he enlarged the contract to include the ceiling of the grand staircase, and two altarpieces for his cathedral. Over the majestic stairway Tiepolo pictured the continents, and Olympus—the happy hunting ground of his fancy—and a lordly figure of Apollo the Sun God circling the sky.
Rich and weary, Giambattista returned to Venice (1753), leaving Domenico to finish the assignment at Würzburg. Soon he was elected president of the Academy. He was of so amiable a disposition that even his rivals were fond of him, and called him II Buon Tiepolo. He could not resist all the demands made upon his waning time; we find him painting in Venice, Treviso, Verona, Parma, and doing a large canvas commissioned by “the court of Muscovy.” We should hardly have expected another major work from him, but in 1757, aged sixty-one, he undertook to decorate the Villa Val-marana near Vicenza. Mengozzi-Colonna drew the architectural setting, Domenico signed some pictures in the guest house, Giambattista deployed his brush in the villa itself. He chose subjects from the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Orlando furioso, the Gerusalemme liberata. He gave his airy illusionism full rein, losing color in light, and space in infinity, letting his gods and goddesses float at their ease in an empyrean raised above all care and time. Goethe, marveling before these frescoes, exclaimed, “Gar fröhlich und brav” (Very joyful and bold). It was Tiepolo’s last riot in Italy.
In 1761 Charles III of Spain asked him to come and paint in the new royal palace at Madrid. The tired Titan pleaded age, but the King appealed to the Venetian Senate to use its influence. Reluctantly, aged sixty-six, he set out once more with his faithful sons and his model Christina, again leaving his wife behind, for she loved the casinos of Venice. We shall find him on a scaffold in Spain.
5. Goldoni and Gozzi
Four figures, paired, stand out in the Venetian literature of this age: Apostólo Zeno and Pietro Metastasio, both of whom wrote librettos that were poetry; Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, who fought over Venetian comedy a comedy that became Goldoni’s tragedy. Of the first pair Goldoni wrote:
These two illustrious authors effected the reform of Italian opera. Before them nothing but gods, devils, machines, and wonders were to be found in these harmonious entertainments. Zeno was the first who conceived the possibility of representing tragedy in lyrical verse without degradation, and singing it without producing exhaustion. He executed the project in a manner most satisfactory to the public, reflecting the greatest glory on himself and his nation.67
Zeno carried his reforms to Vienna in 1718, retired amiably in favor of Metastasio in 1730, and returned to Venice and twenty years of peace. Metastasio, as Goldoni noted, played Racine to Zeno’s Corneille, adding refinement to power, and bringing operatic poetry to an unprecedented height. Voltaire ranked him with the greatest French poets, and Rousseau thought him the only contemporary poet who reached the heart. His real name was Pietro Trapassi—Peter Cross. A dramatic critic, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, heard him singing in the streets, adopted him, rechristened him Metastasio (Greek for Trapassi), financed his education, and, dying, left him a fortune. Pietro ran through the fortune with poetic license, then articled himself to a lawyer who exacted the condition that he should not read or write a line of verse. So he wrote under a pseudonym.
At Naples he was asked by the Austrian envoy to provide lyrics for a cantata. Porpora composed the music; Marianna Bulgarelli, then famous under the name of La Romanina, sang the lead; all went well. The diva invited the poet to her salon; there he met Leo, Vinci, Pergolesi, Farinelli, Hasse, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti; Metastasio developed rapidly in that exciting company. La Romanina, thirty-five, fell in love with him, twenty-three. She rescued him from the toil of the law, took him into a ménage à trots with her complaisant husband, and inspired him to write his most famous libretto, Didone abbandonata, which twelve successive composers set to music between 1724 and 1823. In 1726 he wrote Siroe for his inamorata; Vinci, Hasse, and Handel independently made operas of it. Metastasio was now the most sought-after librettist in Europe.
In 1730 he accepted a call to Vienna, leaving La Romanina behind. She tried to follow him; fearing that her presence would compromise him, he secured an order forbidding her to enter Imperial territory. She stabbed her breast in an attempt at suicide; this effort to play Dido failed, but she lived only four years more. When she died she left to her unfaithful Aeneas all her fortune. Stricken with remorse, Metastasio renounced the legacy in favor of her husband. “I have no longer any hope that I shall succeed in consoling myself,” he wrote, “and I believe that the rest of my life will be savorless and sorrowful.”67a He sadly enjoyed triumph after triumph till the War of the Austrian Succession interrupted operatic performances in Vienna. After 1750 he repeated himself aimlessly. He had exhausted life thirty years before his death (1782).
Opera, as Voltaire had predicted, drove the tragic drama from the Italian stage, and left it to comedy. But Italian comedy was dominated by the commedia dell’ arte— the play of improvised speech and characterizing masks. Most of the characters had long since become stereotyped: Pantalone, the good-humored, trousered bourgeois; Tartaglia, the stammering Neapolitan knave; Brighella, the simpleton schemer caught in his own intrigues; Truffaldino, the genial, carnal bon vivant; Arlecchino—our Harlequin; Pulcinello—our Punch; diverse towns and times added several more. Most of the dialogue, and many incidents in the plot, were left to extempore invention. In “those improvised comedies,” according to Casanova, “if the actor stops short for a word, the pit and the gallery hiss him mercilessly.”68
There were usually seven theaters operating in Venice, all named after saints, and housing scandalously behaved audiences. The nobles in the boxes were not particular about what they dropped upon the commoners below. Hostile factions countered applause with whistling, yawns, sneezes, coughs, cockcrows, or the meowing of cats.69 In Paris the theater audience was mostly composed of the upper classes, professional men, and literati; in Venice it was chiefly middle-class, sprinkled with gaudy courtesans, ribald gondoliers, priests and monks in disguise, haughty senators in robe and wig. It was hard for a play to please all elements in such an olla-podrida of humanity; so Italian comedy tended to be a mixture of satire, slapstick, buffoonery, and puns. The training of the actors to portray stock characters made them incapable of variety and subtlety. This was the audience, this the stage, that Goldoni strove to raise to legitimate and civilized comedy.
Pleasant is the simple beginning of his Memoirs:
I was born at Venice in 1707. .. . My mother brought me into the world with little pain, and this increased her love for me. My first appearance was not, as is usual, announced by cries; and this gentleness seemed then an indication of the pacific character which from that day forward I have ever preserved.70
It was a boast, but true; Goldoni is one of the most lovable men in literary history; and despite this exordium his virtues included modesty—a quality uncongenial to scribes. We may believe him when he says, “I was the idol of the house.” The father went off to Rome to study medicine, and then to Perugia to practice it; the mother was
left at Venice to bring up three children.
Carlo was precocious; at four he could read and write; at eight he composed a comedy. The father persuaded the mother to let Carlo come and live with him in Perugia. There the boy studied with the Jesuits, did well, and was invited to join the order; he declined. The mother and another son joined the father, but the cold mountain air of Perugia disagreed with her, and the family moved to Rimini, then to Chioggia. Carlo went to a Dominican college in Rimini, where he received daily doses of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae. Finding no drama in that masterpiece of rationalization, he read Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence; and when a company of actors came to Rimini he joined it long enough to surprise his parents in Chioggia. They scolded him, embraced him, and sent him to study law at Pavia. In 1731 he received his degree, and began to practice. He married, and “was now the happiest man in the world,”71 except that he came down with smallpox on his wedding night.
Gravitating back to Venice, he succeeded in law, and became consul there for Genoa. But the theater continued to fascinate him; he itched to write, and to be produced. His Belisarius was staged on November 24, 1734, with inspiring success; it ran every day till December 14, and his old mother’s pride in him doubled his joy. Venice, however, had no taste for tragedy; his further offerings in that genre failed, and he sadly took to comedy. Nevertheless he refused to write farces for the commedia dell’ arte; he wanted to compose comedies of manners and ideas in the tradition of Molière, to put upon the stage no stock characters frozen into masks, but personalities and situations drawn from contemporary life. He chose some actors from a commedia troupe in Venice, trained them, and produced in 1740 his Momolo cortesan {Momolo the Courtier). “The piece was wonderfully successful, and I was satisfied.”72 Not quite, for he had compromised by leaving all the dialogue unwritten except for the leading part, and by providing roles for four of the traditional masked characters.
He advanced his reforms step by step. In La donna di garbo {The Woman of Honor) he for the first time wrote out action and dialogue completely. Hostile companies rose to compete with his, or to mock his plays; the classes that he had satirized, like the cicisbei, plotted against him; he fought them all with success after success. But no other author could be found to furnish his troupe with suitable comedies; his own, too often repeated, forfeited favor; he was compelled, by the competition, to write sixteen plays in one year.
He was at his peak in 1752, hailed by Voltaire as the Molière of Italy. La locandera (The Mistress of the Inn) had in that year “a success so brilliant that it was … preferred to everything else that had yet been done in that kind of comedy.” He prided himself on having observed the “Aristotelian unities” of action, place, and time; otherwise he judged his plays realistically: “Good,” he said, “but not yet Molière.”73 He had written them too rapidly to make them works of art; they were cleverly constructed, pleasantly gay, and generally true to life, but they lacked Molière’s reach of ideas, force of speech, power of presentation; they remained on the surface of character and events. The nature of the audience forbade him to try the heights of sentiment, philosophy, or style; and he was by nature too cheerful to plumb the depths that had tortured Molière.
Once at least he was shocked out of his genial humor and touched to the quick: when Carlo Gozzi challenged him for theatrical supremacy in Venice, and won.
There were two Gozzi involved in the literary turmoil at this time. Gasparo Gozzi wrote plays that were chiefly adaptations from the French; he edited two prominent periodicals, and began the revival of Dante. Not so genial was his brother Carlo: tall, handsome, vain, and ever ready for a fight. He was the wittiest member of the Accademia Granelleschi, which campaigned for the use of pure Tuscan Italian in literature, rather than the Venetian idiom which Goldoni used in most of his plays. As the lover or cavalière servente of Teodora Ricci, he may have felt the sting when Goldoni satirized the cicisbei. He too wrote Memoirs— the white paper of his wars. He judged Goldoni as one author sees another:
I recognized in Goldoni an abundance of comic motives, truth, and naturalness. Yet I detected poverty and meanness of intrigue; … virtues and vices ill-adjusted, vice too often triumphant; plebeian phrases of low double meaning; … scraps and tags of erudition stolen Heaven knows where, and brought to impose upon a crowd of ignoramuses. Finally, as a writer of Italian (except in the Venetian dialect, of which he showed himself a master) he seemed not unworthy to be placed among the dullest, basest, and least correct authors who have used our language.... At the same time I must add that he never produced a play without some excellent comic trait. In my eyes he had always the appearance of a man who was born with a natural sense of how sterling comedies should be composed, but who—by defect of education, by want of discernment, by the necessity of satisfying the public and supplying new wares to the poor comedians through whom he gained his livelihood, and by the hurry in which he produced so many pieces every year to keep himself afloat—was never able to fabricate a single play which does not swarm with faults.74
In 1757 Gozzi produced a volume of verses expressing kindred criticisms in “the style of good old Tuscan masters.” Goldoni replied in terza rima (Dante’s medium) to the effect that Gozzi was like a dog baying at the moon—“come il cane che abbaja la luna.” Gozzi retorted by defending the commedia dell’ arte from Goldoni’s strictures; he charged that Goldoni’s plays were “a hundred times more lascivious, indecent, and harmful to morals” than the comedy of masks; and he compiled a vocabulary of “obscure expressions, dirty double-entendres, … and other nastinesses” from Goldoni’s works. The controversy, Molmenti tells us, “threw the city into a kind of frenzy; the case was discussed in playhouses, homes, shops, coffeehouses, and streets.”75
Abate Chiari, another dramatist stung by Gozzi’s Tuscan asp, challenged him to write a better play than those he had condemned. Gozzi answered that he could do this easily, on even the most trivial themes, and by using only the traditional comedy of masks. In January, 1761, a company at the Teatro San Samuele produced his Fiaba dell’ amore delle tre melarancie (Fable of the Love of the Three Oranges)— merely a scenario that showed Pantalone, Tartaglia, and other “masks” seeking three oranges believed to have magic powers; the dialogue was left to be improvised. The success of this “fable” was decisive: the Venetian public, living on laughter, relished the imagination of the tale and the implied satire of Chiari’s and Goldoni’s plots. Gozzi followed with nine other fiabe in five years; but in these he supplied a poetic dialogue, thereby in part admitting Goldoni’s criticism of the commedia dell’ arte. In any case, Gozzi’s victory seemed complete. The attendance at the San Samuele remained high, that at Goldoni’s Teatro Sant’ Angelo fell toward bankruptcy. Chiari moved to Brescia, and Goldoni accepted an invitation to Paris.*
As his farewell to Venice Goldoni produced (1762) Una delle ultime sere di Carnevale (One of the Last Evenings of Carnival). It told of a textile designer, Sior Anzoleto, who with a heavy heart was leaving in Venice the weavers whose looms he had so long provided with patterns. The audience soon saw in this an allegory for the dramatist regretfully leaving the actors whose stage he had so long supplied with plays. When Anzoleto appeared in the final scene, the theater (Goldoni tells us) “rang with thunderous applause, amid which could be heard, … ‘A happy journey!’ ‘Come back to us!’ ‘Don’t fail to come back to us!’”76 He left Venice on April 15, 1762, and never saw it again.
In Paris he was engaged for two years in writing comedies for the Théâtre des Italiens. In 1763 he was sued for seduction,77 but a year later he was engaged to teach Italian to the daughters of Louis XV. For the wedding of Marie Antoinette and the future Louis XVI he composed in French one of his best plays, Le Bourru bienfaisant (The Benevolent Boor). He was rewarded with a pension of twelve hundred francs, which was annulled by the Revolution when he was eighty-one years old. He solaced his poverty by dictating to his wife his Memoirs (1792)—inaccurate, imagi
native, illuminating, entertaining; Gibbon thought them “more truly dramatic than his Italian comedies.”78 He died on February 6, 1793. On February 7 the National Convention, on a motion by the poet Marie-Joseph de Chénier, restored his pension. Finding him in no condition to receive it, the Convention gave it, reduced, to his widow.
Gozzi’s victory in Venice was brief. Long before his death (1806) his Fiabe had passed from the stage, and Goldoni’s comedies had been revived in the theaters of Italy. They are still played there, almost as frequently as Molière’s in France. His statue stands on the Campo San Bartolommeo in Venice, and on the Largo Goldoni in Florence. For, as his Memoirs said, “humanity is everywhere the same, jealousy displays itself everywhere, and everywhere a man of a cool and tranquil disposition in the end acquires the love of the public, and wears out his enemies.”79
VI. ROME
South of the Po, along the Adriatic and spanning the Apennines, were the states of the Church—Ferrara, Bologna, Forli, Ravenna, Perugia, Benevento, Rome—forming the central and largest part of the Magic Boot.
When Ferrara was incorporated into the Papal States (1598) its Estense dukes made Modena their home, and gathered there their archives, books, and art. In 1700 Lodovico Muratori, priest, scholar, and doctor of laws, became curator of these treasures. From them in fifteen years of labor and twenty-eight volumes, he compiled Rerum italicarum scriptores (Writers of Italian Affairs, 1723-38); later he added ten volumes of Italian antiquities and inscriptions. He was rather an antiquarian than an historian, and his twelve-volume Annali d’Italia was soon superseded; but his researches in documents and inscriptions made him the father and source of modern historical writing in Italy.
