by Will Durant
When, in 1814–15, the Austrians again became masters of northern Italy, Foscolo exiled himself to Switzerland, and thence to England. He supported himself by giving lessons and writing articles, and died in great poverty in 1827. In 1871 his remains were brought from England to Florence, and were buried in Santa Croce, in an Italy at last free.
“In Italy,” said Byron (who loved it nonetheless), “a man must be a cicisbeo [a “serving cavalier”], or a singer in duets, or connoisseur of operas, or nothing.”26 Italian opera, generated especially in Venice and Naples, still dominated the sounding boards of Europe, after a brief challenge by Gluck and Mozart; soon (1815) Rossini’s engaging melodies and tempestuous arias would steal the stage, even in Vienna. Piccini, after his bout with Gluck in Paris, returned to Naples, and was placed in house arrest for sympathizing with the French Revolution; after Napoleon’s conquest of Italy he was again invited to France (1798), but died there two years later. Paisiello, as composer and conductor, triumphed in St. Petersburg, in Vienna, in Paris, and in Naples under Ferdinand IV, then under Joseph, then under Murat. Domenico Cimarosa succeeded Antonio Salieri as Kapellmeister in Vienna, and produced there the most famous of his operas, Il matrimonio segreto (1792). In 1793 he was called back to Naples as maestro di capella by Ferdinand; when the French took Naples he received them gladly; when Ferdinand was restored he sentenced the composer to death, but was induced to commute this to exile. Cimarosa set out for St. Petersburg, but died at Venice on the way (1801). Meanwhile Muzio Clementi was composing and performing piano music in various capitals, and was preparing the once famous Gradus ad Parnassum (1817) for the instruction of young pianists everywhere.
Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) began at Geneva in 1797 his long career as a concert violinist. Loving his violin more passionately and faithfully than he loved any of the many women who throbbed to his music, he developed the possibilities of the instrument to unprecedented complexities of composition and performance. He composed twenty-four capricci, which astonished with the whimsicality of their developments. Elisa Bonaparte Bacciocchi appointed him music director at Piombino (1805), but that could not long keep him from the tours where his concerts were sure to bring him large audiences and pleasant wealth. In 1833 he settled in Paris. He gave twenty thousand francs to Berlioz, who was struggling with poverty, and encouraged him to compose Harold in Italy. Paganini’s strenuous working and playing brought him to exhaustion. He decided to leave the excitement of a capital that was frantic with genius and bubbling with revolution. He died at Nice in 1840, leaving—besides his capricci—eight concertos and numerous sonatas to challenge the violin virtuosi of the advancing century. The art of the violin is only now recovering from his antic pranks.
VI. ANTONIO CANOVA: 1757–1822
Italy in the age of Napoleon was too absorbed in war and politics, too poor in public spirit or private philanthropy, to generate such art, and particularly such architecture, as had exalted Italy when all Europe was sending “Peter’s pence” to the popes, and Florence, Venice, and Milan, as well as Rome and Naples, were rich and self-ruled. Some outstanding structures were raised: Luigi Cagnola’s Arco della Pace in Milan (1806–33); Antonio Selva’s Teatro la Fenice in Venice (1792); Cosimo Morelli’s Palazzo Braschi at Rome (1795), with its stately staircase; and Antonio Niccolini’s imposing façade (1810–12) of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. There was no memorable painting, but Italy’s sculptors were inspired by the excavations at Herculaneum to discard the eccentricities of baroque and the exuberance of rococo, and to seek the grace and calm and simple line of classic statuary. One of these sculptors left us work that still stops the eye, tempts the touch, and lives in the memory.
Antonio Canova was born in Possagno, at the foot of the Venetian Alps. Both his father and his grandfather were sculptors, specializing in altars and religious monuments. When the father died (1760) the grandfather took Antonio into his home, and later into his studio. The boy’s willingness to work and eagerness to learn caught the attention of Giovanni Falier, a patrician of Arsolo. Falier provided funds for Antonio’s study in Venice, and was rewarded with the youth’s first notable production, Orpheus and Eurydice.27 In 1779, with Falier’s approval, he set out for Rome. From that center he studied the remains of ancient art. More and more he was won to Winckelmann’s interpretation of Greek sculpture as aiming to represent ideal beauty through perfect form and line. He dedicated himself to the revival of the classic style.
His friends in Venice persuaded the government to send him an annuity of three hundred ducats for the next three years. This neither spoiled him nor deterred him. He frankly imitated classic models, and sometimes seemed to equal them; so his Perseus and The Pugilist, both done in 1800, were the only modern works deemed worthy to stand in the Belvedere of the Vatican beside world-acclaimed productions of classical antiquity.28 His Theseus Slaying the Centaur (1805)—a colossal marble group now in the once Imperial Gardens of Vienna—could easily be mistaken for an ancient masterpiece, were it not for the exaggeration of muscles and fury. Canova was at his best in softer moods congenial to his character, as in the Hebe of the National Gallery in Berlin; here the daughter of Zeus and Hera is the goddess of youth, caught in the mobile grace of dispensing wine to the gods.
In this fruitful year 1805 Canova began the most famous of his statues—the Venus Victrix of the Galleria Borghese in Rome. He persuaded Pauline Borghese, sister of Napoleon, to pose for this sensuous figure. She was then twenty-five, at the perfection of her form; but we are told29 that the artist used only her face as his model; for the drapery and the limbs he drew upon his imagination, his dreams, and his memories. He finished the work in two years, and then exposed it to the judgment of the public and his peers. They marveled at its proud beauty and loving finish; here was no mere imitation of some ancient masterpiece, but a living woman of her time, and, in her brother’s judgment, the fairest. Canova made her a gift to the generations.
In 1802 Napoleon asked Canova to come from Rome to Paris. Pope Pius VII, having just signed a concordat with the Consul, advised Canova to go, if only as one more Italian conqueror of France. Of the several portrait busts that the sculptor made of Napoleon, the most pleasing is in the modest Musée Napoléon at Cap d’Antibes; there the young warrior is a veritable Aristotle of meditation. Unreasonably more famous is the full-length statue which Canova made in plaster and then carved in one block of Carrara marble on his return to Rome. It was sent to Paris in 1811, and was set up in the Louvre; but Napoleon objected to it, allegedly because the little Winged Victory placed in his right hand seemed to be flying away from him. The figure was packed away out of sight. In 1816 the British government bought it, and presented it to Wellington. It now stands, eleven feet high, at the foot of the stairway in Wellington’s London palace, Apsley House. Canova came to Paris again in 1810 to make a seated statue of Marie Louise. The result was not prepossessing, but Napoleon gave the departing artist funds to repair the Florence Cathedral, and for financing St. Luke’s Academy (for artists) in Rome. After Napoleon’s fall Canova was made head of the commission appointed by the Pope to restore to their original owners the art works that had been sent to Paris by French generals.
He stood at the top of the Italian sculptors of his time, and was surpassed in Europe only by the now venerable Houdon (1741–1828). Byron, who was more at home in Italy than in France, thought that “Europe—the world —has but one Canova,”30 and “Such as the great of yore, Canova is today.”31 Part of his acclaim may have been due to the neoclassic wave that brought him, like David—both helped by Napoleon—to acknowledged leadership in his art. But Europe could not long be content to imitate or duplicate the art of antiquity; soon the Romantic movement subordinated line and form to color and feeling, and Canova’s fame faded.
It should not be irrelevant to add that Canova was a good man, known for modesty, piety, and charity, and capable of appreciating his competitors. He worked hard, and suffered from the malarial air of R
ome, and from carving massive monuments. In the summer of 1821 he left Rome, and sought clearer air and a quieter life in his native Possagno. There, on October 13, 1822, he died, aged sixty-four, mourned by all literate Italy.
VII. VALE ITERUM ITALIA
What was the algebraic total of the good and the evil done by France in Italy in this age? To a nation drugged into lassitude by foreign rule it brought the arousing cry and example of a nation rising in wrath and achieving freedom by its own will and deed. It brought a new and challenging spirit into the relations of the citizens to the state. It brought a Code Napoléon severe but constructive and defined, promoting order and unity, and legal equality in a people long divided by class and allergic to law. Napoleon and his hard-working administrators improved and cleansed the processes of government, expediting performance, multiplying public works, adorning the cities, opening boulevards and parks, clearing roads, marshes, and canals, establishing schools, ending the Inquisition, encouraging agriculture and industry, science and literature and art. The religion of the people was protected by the new regime, but lost the power to suppress nonconformity, and was made to contribute to the expenses of the state. Conversely it was the skeptic Napoleon who allotted funds to complete the Cathedral of Milan. The whole procedure of law was quickened and reformed; torture was outlawed, Latin was no longer required in the courts. In this period (1789–1813) Joseph and Murat in Naples, Eugène in Milan, were blessings to their realms, and would have been loved if they had been Italians.
The other side of the picture was conscription, taxation, and expert pilfering. Napoleon put an end to brigandage, but he appropriated works of art with such appreciation as perhaps they had ceased to receive in an Italy saturated with masterpieces. In Napoleon’s view conscription was the most rational and equitable method of protecting the new nations from domestic disorder and foreign rule. “The Italians,” he said, “should remember that arms are the principal support of a state. It is time that the youths who live in idleness in the great towns should cease to fear the fatigues and dangers of war.” Probably conscription would have been accepted as a necessary evil had not Italian conscripts found that they were expected to go anywhere to protect the interests of Napoleon or France; so six thousand of them were moved to the English Channel in 1803 to join in a problematical invasion of England; eighty thousand of them32 were pulled out of their native sunshine to sample the plains and snows and Cossacks of Russia.
Nor did the Italians agree about the patriotism of taxation. Here too the labor of Italy went not only to protect, govern, and embellish Italy, but also to help Napoleon meet the expenses of his expanding and precarious empires. Eugène was expected to win the love of his subjects while he was picking their pockets; taxes in his little kingdom rose from 82 million francs in 1805 to 144 million in 1812. The Italians added that such levies might have been more easily borne if the Emperor’s Continental Blockade had not deprived Italian industry of its English market, while export and import duties favoring France were hurting Italian commerce with France and Germany.
So, even before the Austrians came back, the Italians had tired of Napoleon’s protectorate. They felt that they were not only losing great art, but were being drained of the wealth they were creating in order that France might invade England and conquer Russia. This was not the dream their poets had dreamed. They admitted that the Pope’s functionaries had allowed a high degree of corruption to enter into the administration of the Papal States, but they did not like the rough handling of Pius VII by French officers, nor his long imprisonment by Napoleon’s command. At last they lost love even for the lovable Eugène, for it was through his hands that many of Napoleon’s most unwelcome edicts had been imposed; and when, after Leipzig, Napoleon was in danger of complete defeat (1813), they refused to support Eugène’s efforts to send him aid. The effort to liberate Italy through alien arms and rule failed; liberation awaited the development of national unity through native literature, statesmanship, and arms.
Napoleon himself, amid his many miscalculations, had foreseen these difficulties. In 1805—the year of his coronation as king of Italy—he said to Bourrienne:
The union of Italy with France can only be temporary, but it is necessary in order to accustom the nations [states] of Italy to live under common laws. The Genoese, the Piedmontese, the Venetians, the Milanese, the inhabitants of Tuscany, the Romans, the Neapolitans, hate one another…. Yet Rome is, from the recollections connected with it, the natural capital of Italy. To make it so, however, it is necessary that the power of the pope should be confined within limits purely spiritual. I cannot now think of this, but I will reflect upon it hereafter…. All these little states will insensibly become accustomed to the same laws; and when manners have been assimilated, and enmities extinguished, then there will be an Italy, and I will give her independence. But for that I must have twenty years, and who can count on the future?33
We cannot always trust Bourrienne, but Las Cases quotes Napoleon as having spoken to the same effect at St. Helena: “I have planted in the hearts of the Italians principles that can never be rooted out. Sooner or later this regeneration will be accomplished.”34 It was.
CHAPTER XXVII
Austria
1780–1812
I. ENLIGHTENED DESPOTS: 1780–92
IN 1789 Austria was one of the major states of Europe, proud of its history, its culture, and its power, with an empire far wider than its name. That name, from Auster, the south wind, justly conveyed the sense of a people Teutonically tough but good-natured and good-humored, sharing happily the joie de vivre and music madness of Italy. It had been a Celtic nation when, shortly before Christ, the Romans conquered it, and it seemed to have retained, across two millenniums, some Celtic vivacity and wit. At Vindobona (which became Vienna and then Wien) the Romans built an outpost of their civilization against intrusive barbarians; there Marcus Aurelius, between golden thoughts, held back the Marcomanni about A.D. 170; there Charlemagne placed the East Mark, or eastern boundary, of his realm; there in 955 Otto the Great set up his Osterreich, or Eastern Kingdom, against the Magyars; and there in 1278 Rudolf of Hapsburg established the rule of a dynasty that continued till 1918. In 1618–48 the south wind blew strongly Catholic, leading the old faith against the new in thirty years of war; and that faith was fortified when, in 1683, Vienna for a second time served as a bulwark of Christendom, throwing back the Turks. Meanwhile the Hapsburg monarchy spread the rule of Austria over the adjacent duchies of Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and the Tirol; over Bohemia (Czechoslovakia), Transylvania (Romania), Hungary, Polish Galicia, Lombardy, and the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). Such was the scattered realm that Europe knew as the Austrian Empire when, in 1797, Napoleon first knocked at Vienna’s gates.
The Hapsburg dynasty reached its final peak in the reign of Maria Theresa (r. 1740–80), that willful and wonderful matriarch who rivaled Catherine II and Frederick the Great among the monarchs of her time. She lost Silesia to Frederick’s Machiavellian grasp, but thereafter, with her people and her allies, she fought him to a deadlock of exhaustion. Surviving that conflict, she lived to place five of her sixteen children upon thrones: Joseph in Vienna, Leopold in Tuscany, Maria Amalia in Parma, Maria Carolina in Naples, Marie Antoinette in France. She reluctantly transmitted her realm to her oldest son, for she distrusted his agnosticism and reforms, and foresaw that her people, immovably in love with her, would be unhappy under any disturbance of their traditional beliefs and ways.
Her judgment seems justified by the troubles that bewildered Joseph, who shared the throne with her from 1765 to 1780, and then held it for ten years more. He shocked the aristocracy by freeing the serfs, and shocked the strongly Catholic population by flirting with Voltaire, allowing Protestant worship, and harassing Pius VI. Unsupported by the bureaucracy that enveloped him, he had to confess, in his last days, that the peasants, suddenly separated from their feudal lords, had made a mess of their liberty; that he had disrupted the economy; that
he had driven the upper classes in Hungary and the Austrian Netherlands to revolt, threatening the very existence of the Empire. His purposes were benevolent, but his methods were to rule by innumerable decrees which dictated the end without preparing the means. Frederick the Great said of him: “He invariably takes the second step before he takes the first.”1 He died (February 20, 1790) regretting his impetuous procedure, and mourning the popular conservatism that loved habit too much to bear reform.
His brother Leopold shared his aims but avoided his haste. Though he was only eighteen when made grand duke of Tuscany (1765), he tempered his power with caution, gathered about him mature Italians (e.g., Cesare Beccaria) familiar with the people, needs, and possibilities of the duchy, and, with their help, gave his historic realm a government that was the envy of Europe. When the death of his brother raised him to imperial leadership he had had twenty-five years of experience. He moderated some of Joseph’s reforms, and canceled others, but fully acknowledged the obligation of an “enlightened despot” to raise the educational and economic opportunities of his people. He withdrew the Austrian Army from Joseph’s ill-considered attack on Turkey, and, with some use of it, persuaded Belgium to return to the Austrian allegiance. He pacified the Hungarian nobles by recognizing the national authority of their Diet and constitution. He appeased the Bohemians by restoring to Prague the crown of Bohemia’s ancient kings, and accepting coronation there in St. Vitus’ Cathedral. He knew that in government the substance can be withdrawn if the form is retained.
