Italy

ITALY. - The Italian region corresponds, within its natural boundaries, to that part of Europe which extends south of the Alpine arc, from the mouth of the Var to the Quarnaro.

I. GEOGRAPHY.

The surface area of the Italian region is around 325,000 sq km. That of the Italian State, on the other hand, as it emerged from the Second World War, remains somewhat below that figure (301,021 sq km.), not only as a result of the recent mutilations on the western frontiers (Colle del S. Bernardo, Passo del Moncenisio, Valle Stretta, "hunting territories" on the headwaters of the Tinea and Vesubia rivers, and the upper and middle Val di Roja: in total 710 sq km.) and eastern

(Zara, Istria, middle and upper Isonzo Valley: 7,390 sq km., without counting the 783 sq km. of the Free Territory of Trieste), but also because the political boundaries of the pre-war territory (310,190 sq km.) did not coincide, either, with the natural ones. There remained and remain, therefore, outside the Italian State, besides those already mentioned, strips that geographically belong to the Italian region: the Principality of Monaco (1.5 sq km.), Italian Switzerland (3,933 sq km.), the Nice region and Corsica (9,409 sq km.), and the Maltese Archipelago (316 sq km.).

Italy, which occupies a median position among the southern European peninsulas, is the smallest of these: of its area, one fifth belongs to its insular part, two fifths to the properly peninsular part and as much to the continental part. Characteristic of its shape, often likened to a boot, are the oblique development of the peninsula relative to the parallels and the strong disproportion between its length (1,200 km.) and its width, which averages 350 in continental Italy and 150 in the peninsular part. To that same obliquity is due the fact that this disproportion almost entirely disappears when one considers the extreme coordinates of latitude (from 47° 5' 30" N. of the Vetta d'Italia to 35° 29' 24" N. of the point of Cala Maluk on the island of Lampedusa) and those of longitude (from 6° 22' 59" E. Greenwich of the Rocca Chardonnette in the Cottian Alps to 18° 31' 18" E. of Cape Otranto): the difference is respectively 13° 36' 6" and 13° 58' 19". The advantages due to the position of the peninsula are evident: in the middle of the Mediterranean, between the two basins that constitute it, it acts as a bridge between the opposite shores; it lies halfway between the natural gateway (Gibraltar) and the artificial one (Suez Canal) of this basin, and therefore along the sea, land and air routes between the north-eastern Atlantic and western Europe on the one hand, and northern Africa, western and southern Asia and Australia on the other.

In the physical configuration of Italian territory, hills (40%) and mountains (39.6%) predominate. Plains occupy barely 1/5 of the surface: of these, the only one that stands out for its dimensions and its complex geographical importance is the Po Valley, which the Alps and Apennines enclose on three sides, and which opens onto the Adriatic with a broad lagoon fringe. The Alps and Apennines, although orographically joined, differ not only in the greater average height of the former, of which only the shorter and steeper inner slope belongs to Italy, but also in the less rugged forms of the latter, of which, besides the presence of high plateaus (Abruzzi) and volcanic zones (Sub-Apennines), the frequency of more or less extensive intermontane basins is characteristic, often corresponding to filled-in lakes. The relief of the major islands can, in substance, be traced back to that of the Apennines (Sicily), even if in Sardinia more properly sub-Apennine features prevail and Corsica rather recalls the Alps. On the whole, whether because of the variety of structure and forms that their complicated geological history has determined, or because of the alternation, even over short distances, of raised and depressed zones, or zones distinguished by the nature of the dominant rocks (typical, for example, in this regard, is the spread of limestone in the central-southern regions), or because of the arrangement of the mountain masses relative to the peripheral seas, or finally because of the consequences that followed for the original vegetation cover or are revealed in particular economic vocations, the Italian landscape presents a rich range of nuances. The regional compartmentalization that results is far more minute than appears from the 24 historical units recognized by tradition and administration: numerous place names still perpetuate, in local usage, the vitality of distinctions sufficient to characterize continental (Monferrato, Brianza, Cadore), peninsular (Lunigiana, Mugello, Marsica, Cilento) and insular (Valdemone, Gallura, Balagna; only a few examples are chosen at random) strips, each having a more or less clear geographical individuality.

Such a compartmentalization also recalls climatic diversities, natural given the considerable extent in latitude of Italian territory, though attenuated, as regards thermal regimes, by the protective action of the Alpine barrier and by the equalizing influence of the Mediterranean. Less frankly maritime types occur in northern Italy, as a consequence not so much of its continentality as of the nearby Pannonian-Balkan region: notable therefore is the thermal contrast between the side facing the Adriatic, which feels its influence more, and that on the Tyrrhenian, benefited by the tepid breath of the western winds. As for rainfall, more abundant in the Prealps and the upper Apennines, less in the plains and especially in the South, its average annual quantity is everywhere above 500 mm. (and considerably higher in the Alpine area) and therefore generally adequate to the needs of cultivation, except for a few strips (Tavoliere delle Puglie). It should be noted, however, that these precipitations, while tending to concentrate in the summer season in southern Italy and the islands (which therefore suffer from a prolonged summer drought), present two maxima (autumn and late spring) in the rest of the peninsula, and a single summer maximum (with a winter minimum) along the Alpine arc.

These climatic conditions, together with the shape of the territory and the arrangement of the relief, explain why Italy lacks notable river arteries, except for the Po (650 km.; basin 75,000 sq km.), the only one comparable to the major European watercourses. The inconstancy of regimes, the steep gradients and therefore the poor navigability are common characteristics of almost all the others, and are accentuated in the South and the islands. The lakes are relatively numerous, of which the largest are found along the Alpine rim, as well as coastal ponds and the typical lagoons (Venetian-Romagnol littoral). With the presence of the latter, which attest to insufficient drainage of waters in the coastal regions, must be connected the spread of malaria, which long constituted the most pernicious endemic disease that afflicted Italy.

Italian territory, inhabited since the most remote antiquity (at least since the Middle Paleolithic), constitutes one of the European zones of highest population density. It is not surprising, therefore, that original vegetation and fauna have undergone such profound transformations there as to be recognizable only in strips and in residual forms. Both the Mediterranean scrub (an association of trees and shrubs with persistent leaves, characteristic of coastal and sub-coastal regions) and the forest have almost everywhere given way not only to cultivation, but also to grazing, while many swampy or floodable areas or, conversely, steppe-like ones have also been won over to agriculture. Moreover, the transformation continues in our own day with land reclamation, destined to gain ever new spaces for the growing population.

In the last hundred years, in fact, it has more than doubled. The first official census of the population of the Kingdom of I. (Dec. 31, 1861) established the presence of 21.8 million inhabitants, corresponding, within the present borders, to a total of 25.6 million souls.

The average density of the Italian population (153 inhabitants per sq. km.) is exceeded, in Europe, only by that of the United Kingdom (207) and of Germany (193): the higher figures of Belgium (282) and Holland (293) relate to territorial bases comparable with our regions. The population lives, as a rule, scattered through the countryside or gathered in small centers in the northern and central regions; in southern I. and in the islands, on the other hand, it deserts the countryside and agglomerates in large villages and in cities. Around 1800, however, there were in I. only 5 urban centers with over 100,000 inhabitants (Naples with 400,000, Palermo with 200,000, Rome with 150,000, Venice with 140,000 and Milan with 130,000) and until twenty years ago none of our cities exceeded a million inhabitants. Today the communes with more than 50,000 inhabitants are 77 (of which 65 are provincial capitals) and 14 have a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants (Messina, Verona, Taranto, Padua, Brescia, Livorno, Reggio Calabria, Ferrara, Cagliari, La Spezia, Parma, Modena, Bergamo, Reggio Emilia), 6 have more than 250,000 (Palermo, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Catania and Bari), 2 have more than 500,000 (Turin and Genoa) and three have a million (Rome [1,650,000], Milan [1,287,000] and Naples [1,021,000]).

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Slightly less than 50% of the active population lives by agriculture (including hunting and fishing), a third by industry (including transport and communications), less than a tenth by commerce (including credit and insurance); the rest is employed in public administrations (4.3%), in domestic economy (3.6%), in the liberal arts and in worship (1.5%), etc. This subdivision refers to the 1936 census: fifty years earlier agriculture alone absorbed 3/5 and industry less than 1/4 of that same total.

Only 7.8% of the territorial area of the State is unproductive; the agricultural and forest area is divided as follows: arable land 43.2%, woods and chestnut groves 18.6%, specialized woody crops 7.8%, productive uncultivated land 5.1%, meadows, meadow-pastures and permanent pastures 17.4%.

The Mediterranean character of Italian agriculture is well brought out by its most typical productions and also by the scant specialization of its crops, the herbaceous ones being as a rule intercropped with tree crops (mulberry, vine, olive, almond, etc.). Cereal production, although relatively notable (second place among European states, excluding the U.S.S.R., for wheat, third for maize), does not cover domestic needs, so that the relevant items usually figure among the most conspicuous in imports. Wines and oils once fed a fair export flow, but by now the only agricultural products that make their weight felt in exports are dried fruit and citrus fruits, although the latter must now face growing, successful competition.

I. has a modest livestock patrimony (in millions of head, 1948: 9.4 sheep; 7.9 cattle; 3.8 pigs; 2.2 goats; 1.6 horses), further damaged by the recent two wars. Northern I. was known for its flourishing rearing of the silkworm: the average harvest of cocoons exceeded, in normal times, 300,000 quintals; which assured it first place in Europe for silk production.

Forest reserves are negligible (timber is one of the preeminent items in imports) and the benefit derived from fishing is modest, its maritime branch being substantially limited to national waters.

The last great world conflict struck hard at Italian industry, which had made conspicuous progress after 1900, despite the position of inferiority in which the territory finds itself because of the absolute lack or scarcity of indispensable raw materials. Among the sources of energy, the only one of which I. has an abundance is hydroelectric power, which has over a million plants and produced, in all, 20.8 million Kwh in 1949; but, apart from the uneven regional distribution of the installations, it is already insufficient for internal consumption (energy is imported from Switzerland) and can be supplemented only in minimal proportions by fossil fuels (especially lignites) or liquid fuels (limited to Emilia), and by the likewise considerable production of methane (236.2 million cubic meters in 1949). Among metallic minerals only mercury, aluminum (with a total lack, however, of cryolite), lead and magnesium stand out.

This greatly hampers the expansion of a heavy industry equal to the need, and the same can be said, in substance, for the other branches of activity (one need only think of the lack of cotton), with the exception of the food industries and a few of lesser account. Nonetheless, the abundance of manpower, the good specific training of the workers, the traditional industriousness and ingenuity of the Italian people have allowed Italian industry to figure among the foremost in Europe, both for the size of its production and for its high technical level: above all the textile branch (silk mills, cotton mills, artificial fibers and wool), which in peninsular-Venetian I. counts a powerful complex of plants, not only covered national needs, but gave life to a strong export current.

The admirable progress of the national economy that occurred in the last fifty years could not, however, prevent the trade balance from closing in deficit; a deficit nonetheless made up as a rule by emigrants' remittances, by the resources of the maritime industry, by the freights of the merchant marine and by the interest on capital invested abroad. Normally 60%, in value, of imports was absorbed before the war by the raw or semi-finished materials necessary to industry, 20% by raw materials or food products and the rest by manufactured goods. In exports about 40% consisted of finished products, 30% of specialized foodstuffs (wines, oils, citrus fruits, fruit, etc.), 20-25% of semi-finished materials and the remainder of raw materials. Germany was at the head both of customers and of suppliers, followed, at a considerable distance, by the United States, Great Britain and France. The recent postwar period has brought about notable shifts: in 1949 the United States alone absorbed 35.3% of imports, followed by Australia (5.6%), Argentina (5.3%) and Germany (4.4%), while in exports Argentina holds first place (12.3%), followed by Great Britain (10.6%), France (5.7%) and Switzerland (5.5%).

Internal communications have at their disposal a road network of over 170,000 km. (of which 21,000 are state roads and 42,000 provincial roads), without counting the approximately 600 km. of motorways (almost all in northern I.). The railways (23,222 km. in 1942), much damaged by the war, have by now, in substance, returned to prewar efficiency (21,643 km. in 1950), while motor-vehicle transport has received a notable impulse and now exceeds the prewar figures. For its merchant marine, I. was in 1939 in 6th place in the world as regards tonnage (3.5 million tons) and among the first for the efficiency of its services; a position that, despite the losses suffered (tonnage in 1950 reduced to 2.6 million tons), the country is on its way to reconquering. Civil aviation too (41,033 km. of lines in 1949) has regained altitude after the wartime interlude.

In 1939 Italian control extended over a territory of over 3.5 million sq. km. with 14.3 million inhabitants.

The fate of the formerly Italian Africa is still uncertain, except for Somalia (v.), returned to Italy by resolution of the UN (Dec. 21, 1949), with the mandate to administer it under a trusteeship regime and to prepare its independence.

II. CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

1. GEOLOGY

Italy is the image of a providential design, with its mighty physical unity, well defined within the frame of its natural frontiers, the Alps and the sea, and connected internally by the branches of the Apennines and by the numerous river arteries that furrow the Peninsula in every direction.

Formed in the marine depths in the remotest millennia and first raised from the waters with the crystalline rocks that form the intimate framework of the Alpine system and with the Calabrian-Sicilian zone of the Apennine chain, then covered again by the sea and once more emerged with other lands for some time joined to Africa, subsequently separated by fractures, foldings and various submersions, then filled in the great inlet at the foot of the Alps with alluvial deposits, covered here and there by volcanic eruptions, while the ice was melting and retreating, Italy is found almost definitively constituted with the Quaternary age in the very middle of the Mediterranean, like an immense pier thrust southward, in the direction of the Levant, and to the north connected to the Danubian region.

A geological torment, to which an equal torment in its historical life seems to correspond, where emersions and submersions perpetually alternate, the fractures and recompositions of moral and political life, in the contested world of Mediterranean and then European civilization.

But Italy's geological past still weighs upon its historical becoming, determining constant influences no less on the conformation of civilization than on plant and animal life. The very ancient conjunction with Africa influenced the primitive flora and fauna of Italy; its Mediterranean character influenced the reciprocal exchanges between region and region; volcanic development influenced the fertility of the soil; the richness of the coasts influenced maritime life; the variety of the internal regions influenced the flourishing of local separatism; but in compensation the frequency of valleys cut by rivers facilitates communications and connections even between distant regions.

2. THE NAME

It was derived for Italy from a tribe of the most ancient Indo-European stage, situated at a point in Bruttium (present-day Calabria) that took its name from the calf (vitelio vitilu: ox, bull), certainly the sacred animal of the group; rendered by the Greek writers as Trzklz. The name went on extending as far as Taranto (4th century), then to central Italy (3rd century) from the Arno to the Rubicon, and in the administrative reform ordered by Augustus it reached the ring of the Alps from the Var to the Arsa in the Istrian peninsula: « hacc est Italia diis sacra » (Pliny, Nat. hist., III, 5, 46). The origin of the name is confirmed by the fact that at the outbreak of the Social War (90-87 B.C.) provoked by the Italic Allies (Marsi, Samnites, Lucani) for the equalization of rights with Rome, the bull was chosen by the rebels as a coin symbol and the name of Italica was given to the city of Corfinium, the center of the insurrectionary movement.

Other names of Italy are: Hesperia, for its western position with respect to Greece; Ausonia, a Greekized form of Aurunci, an Oscan people bordering the Greek colonies of southern Italy; Oenotria, by eponymy from an Oenotrius colonizer of the country; the historian Antiochus of Syracuse (5th century, in Dion. Hal., I 35, followed by Aristotle, Polit., VIII, 1329 b) derived the name Italy from an eponym Italus.

3. THE FIRST PEOPLES

Italy too had, like all the peoples of Europe, after the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages, an Eneolithic age not very different from the Neolithic one, initiator of metallurgy with the first imperfect alloys of copper and which preceded the bronze industry, followed then by the Iron Age which, in the Mediterranean, unlike other regions, falls in full history.

Its position made it the great crucible, where all the human elements of the great Mediterranean civilization came to meet and coexist in its dolicho-mesocephalic variety of the south and brachycephalic or Alpine variety of the north, with funeral rites differing from place to place, from the most ancient of inhumation to that of incineration. Accordingly, various prehistoric civilizations flourished in Italy, but they are due to peoples mostly practicing inhumation and ascribed to a single race, the dolichocephalic Mediterranean one.

The descendants of this stock, which is Mediterranean, and which populates the whole peninsula and the islands while preserving the ancestral custom of inhumation, are known by the names of Ligurians who, akin to the Iberians, were spread through northern Italy, part of central Italy, Corsica and Sardinia, Malta and Pantelleria, with different local names; the others, in southern Italy, and authors, it seems, of the first painted pottery.

Upon these Neolithic peoples there superimposed themselves, descending through the Julian Alps from the transalpine countries, the Indo-Europeans in two waves, an older one (ca. 2500 B.C.) which cremated its dead and occupied a good part of the peninsula reaching as far as eastern Sicily, the other more recent (1500 B.C.), practicing inhumation, already in possession of iron.

Thanks to this twofold immigration, without entering into too minute distinctions and subdivisions, often of debatable matter, the ethnographic situation of Italy is as follows:

A. Italic Indo-Europeans: 1. Latins, settled in the center of Latium; Falisci around Civita Castellana. To the east and south of Latium the Aequi in the upper valley of the Aniene, the Volsci from the Lepini Mountains to the sea, the Hernici on the territories of Ferentino and Anagni.

2. Italics of the Oscan-Umbrian group, also called Umbrian-Sabellian: Sabines (Safini), in the centers of Terni and Rieti; Umbrians, settled in the upper course of the Tiber; Marsi, in the basin of the Fucino; Peligni, to the west of this basin; Picentes and Pretuzi, on the Adriatic coast between Ancona and Adria; Vestini and Marrucini on the same coast on the two sides of the Pescara; Campani, in Campania; Samnites, in the mountainous center, with capital Bovianum; Frentani on the slope

Adriatic side of Molise; Lucanians, from the Tyrrhenian coast to the Gulf of Taranto; Bruttians in present-day Calabria.

B. Non-Italic Indo-Europeans: Greeks of Magna Graecia and Sicily; Celts in northern Italy, divided into the tribes of the Insubres, on Lake Maggiore and Lake Como; Cenomani, on Lake Iseo and Lake Garda; Lingones, south of the lower course of the Po; Boii, between the Po and the Apennines; Senones on the Adriatic between Ravenna and Ancona; Siculi and Sicani in eastern and central Sicily; Veneti, an Illyrian tribe, settled in Venetia and Istria; Iapygians, another Illyrian tribe settled in Apulia and divided into the three tribes of the Daunians, in northern Apulia below the Gargano, the Peucetians to the southeast of the former, and the Messapians in the present-day Salento peninsula, once called Calabria.

C. Non-Indo-European populations: Ligurians from the mouths of the Arno to the Ticino; Corsi; Sardinians; Elymians, on the western tip of Sicily; Etruscans, between the Apennines and the Tyrrhenian; Phoenicians at certain points on the coast of western Sicily and in Sardinia.

4. INFLUENCES OF EXOTIC CIVILIZATIONS: PHOENICIANS, GREEKS, ETRUSCANS

From 1000 onward, Phoenician ships plow the Mediterranean and, according to Thucydides, precede the Greeks in frequenting the coasts of Sicily, occupying the promontories and the adjacent islands. But nothing Phoenician came to light from the explorations of the eastern side of Sicily, unlike the western side.

Phoenician traces are found in Malta, but none earlier than the 7th century, at Motya, at Soluntum, at Panormus, especially in this last, a heavily fortified gate and a point of support in the Tyrrhenian for the Phoenician expansion that spread from Sicily into Sardinia. Nora seems to have been the oldest city of the island, the oldest Phoenician colony, succeeded in importance by Cagliari. But Phoenician culture had little influence on Italy, lacking an originality of its own and reduced to a decorative repertoire drawn from Mycenaean art. Of a very different nature was the Greek influence, when the Hellenic colonial movement intensified most, during the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. It was the Greeks, not the Phoenicians, who transmitted to the peoples of Italy the use of writing, in forms derived from ancient Hellenic alphabets, and, along with writing, much of their knowledge in poetry, science and law, in religion, in philosophy.

Magna Graecia was the name given to the broad region occupied by them, comprising: the south of the peninsula, where the principal colonies were Taranto, Sybaris, Croton. Taranto lasted the longest; Sybaris, which remained legendary for the softness of its customs, was later subjugated by Croton, famous for its athletes. In Sicily the city most notable for its monuments was Syracuse, but Gela, Agrigentum, Messina and, further west, Segesta, Selinus and Himera, which Strabo considers part of Magna Graecia, are also to be remembered. On the mainland, on the other hand, Cumae was one of the richest, built upon a volcanic rock, a very active landing place for merchants who brought the vases of Greece in exchange for grain; a bulwark of Italic civilization and a mediator of Hellenic civilization toward the peoples of central Italy. A colony of Cumae was Naples, the new city. The rivals of the Greeks were the Carthaginians, whom only Rome was destined to expel from Italy.

A third ethnic and cultural element, likewise of exotic origin, is represented by the Etruscans. If the Greeks kept strictly to the coast, preferring the hills that jut out over the sea, almost to shield themselves against the interior, and there founded a colonial city, endowing it with a port, the Etruscans, by contrast, entered through the river mouths and valleys into the open plain and immediately threw themselves into the interior of the Italic region and sought to establish a center of territorial organization, a capital. Their origin is disputed; some hold them to be of overseas origin, which is the more probable thesis; others derive them from transalpine regions and hold that they later descended from the Po valley into Tuscany. Their language too is shrouded in obscurity. The Etruscans concentrated especially in the territory of the Umbrians comprised between the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Arno and the Tiber, and settled there with a firmness that was not attained elsewhere. The time is likewise uncertain. Some place their Tyrrhenian beginning around 1000 B.C., others three centuries later. The Etruscan nation had a magnificent and luxurious development, which suggests a highly refined and aristocratic civilization. To the 7th century belong the tombs of the Ori, exquisitely worked in the jewels that adorn them, especially the tombs along Lake Bolsena, near Capodimonte. Volterra was a rich city of ample perimeter; it had cyclopean walls, five meters thick with 7 km. of circuit. Etruria was a dodecapolis, a confederation of 12 cities, with a bond expressed by an annual meeting in a locality where the common sanctuary stood.

5. THE ETRUSCAN INFLUENCE ON THE LATINS

Toward the end of the 7th century the Etruscans crossed the Tiber and blocked the first villages of Rome: this, according to the legend, is what closes the monarchical period of Rome with three Etruscan kings, authors of the union of the various villages on the left bank of the Tiber into a single city.

Built by Etruscan craftsmen was the greatest temple of Rome, dedicated to the Capitoline triad. For religion v. ETRUSCHI, RELIGIONE degli. Not only the temple, the dwelling, the tombs did the Etruscans give to the Romans and the Italics: also the orientation of the temple and of the street grid on which the houses are distributed; uses and customs, funeral games, gladiators, insignia of power such as the fasces, the construction of walls and gates, the art of architecture and of engineering applied to public works.

In the 6th century, expanding into Latium and toward the sea, they occupied Campania, where Capua was the principal city. But even more notable was their settlement in the Po plain, which is assigned to around 500 B.C. The Etruscans of the Arno valley, having climbed the Apennine passes, would have emerged into the broad plain which they populated with cities, some on piles: Adria, Mantua, Ravenna, Bologna, Rimini, Cesena, Modena, Parma, Piacenza. The mighty warlike invasion of the Gauls ruined all the work of organization undertaken and already carried forward by the Etruscans toward the Alps, thus delaying the attainment of this natural boundary by the unified peninsular peoples. On the whole the Etruscan conquest asserts itself in breadth more than in solidity. A confederation of several cities, each with full autonomy, not a bundle of compact forces; a regime of cities, as in Greece; not a unitary State, but small States.

Here, by contrast, is the work of Rome: the gradual, continuous rise of a single city that centralizes everything around itself, with a rigidly unitary policy. This is what accounts for the Etruscan disappearance and the absorption of all the other peoples into the great Roman structure, after the fall of the Etruscan bulwark of Veii, which stood facing Rome, on the banks of the Tiber.

6. THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM OF I[taly]

Even in the most ancient times the peoples of I[taly] present themselves with a proud will to be distinct from place to place, in government, in customs, in methods of work, in burial rites. The geographical unity was set against by the variety of life and of peoples. The question whether it is possible to speak of an Italian population fused by Rome through its work of political unification must be resolved positively in the sense that Rome left I[taly] ethnically as it had received it from the preceding centuries; so much so that the regional differences of dialect, of custom, and of somatic features still exist in present-day I[taly], but they do not cancel the fundamental unitary character of the history of I[taly], because this was facilitated by the geographical unity of the country; by the fact that four of the populations most widely diffused within it: the Italics, Greeks, Celts and Illyrians, belong to the same Indo-European stock, while the Latins, placed at the center of the Italian region, on the banks of a navigable river, at the border of the civilized peoples of Etruria and Campania, created a political system that, after subjugating those peoples, facilitated their progressive assimilation.

7. ROME AND ITS CONQUESTS

The founding of Rome is traced back to 754-53 B.C. The first historical period of the city is the regal one (754-509), which was succeeded by the Republic, which lasted until 23 B.C., and which constituted the most constructive epoch of Roman history. Territorial expansion is accompanied by class struggles due to conflicts of economic interests and to the plebeians' will to be legally placed on an equal footing with the patricians. The conquest of I[taly] required a little less than 300 years and was the most difficult undertaking.

The conquest of I[taly] increased the Mediterranean's attractive forces upon Rome. But its coincidence with Carthage's greater power in these waters, on the western side, from Spain to Sicily, made the conflict between Rome and Carthage inevitable. From the Punic Wars Rome emerged greatly enlarged in territory, dominating almost the whole of both sides of the Mediterranean. With the defeat of Zama (202 B.C.) Carthage lost Spain and Sicily. With the pursuit of Hannibal in the East and after the victories against Antiochus king of Syria, Rome occupied Macedonia and Greece, and opened for itself the roads of Asia. In 146 B.C. it held, unchallenged, the empire of the Mediterranean.

Serious was the struggle opened by the Italics against Rome; having cooperated in the latter's great conquests, they asked to be equal to the Romans in the privileges and civil rights that were attached to the condition of Roman citizens within the ambit of Rome.

This was the Social War (91-88 B.C.), won by the Italics, who obtained the condition of Roman citizens. I[taly] in turn shared with Rome the fortunes of the Empire, of which it constituted the center and which it helped to found.

8. TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE MORAL AND POLITICAL ORDER

Profound was the revolution in customs, promoted by contacts with the East. The Roman world begins to orientalize itself in its habits of life, depressing the advantages of the Hellenic culture that had given the Romans a sense of measure and of balance and of moral harmony, in art and in thought.

The breadth of the frontiers increases the difficulties of defense and the occasions of war. Dangers grow from hour to hour, together with the occasions for military and political adventures.

Spartacus raises the masses of slaves; Mithridates, king of Pontus, stirs up the East; Catiline conspires against the Senate; pirates obstruct sea traffic. Already Rome is also experiencing the gravity of the Germanic pressure that acts along the line of the Alps and overflows into the Po plain. In the leaders of the armies the attractions of fortune grow, and so do the incentives to risk one's fate. Power is no longer an element of order, but the prey of ambitions: Caesar and Pompey aspire to it, as Marius and Sulla had before them. While Pompey contends with Mithridates for the lands of the East, Caesar subjugates Gaul, the first episode of the conquest of the Empire. The attempt at an agreement among Caesar, Pompey and Crassus to divide the command over the lands of the Republic turns into an armed conflict between the first two, after the death of Crassus in a clash with the Parthians, and is resolved in the victory of Caesar, thus absolute master of Rome.

Although he poses as a democratic reformer, and by his laws defines himself as a friend of the people, his guise as an almost omnipotent dictator inspires a republican conspiracy that saw in him the old form of government endangered (March 44). But Brutus, who wants to be the defender of liberty, kills Caesar, not Caesarism. A triumvirate among Octavian, Caesar's nephew, Antony and Lepidus ended with the struggle between Antony and Octavian and saw the affirmation of the latter after the naval victory of Actium (31 B.C.).

9. THE EMPIRE OF ROME

Octavian, apparently restoring the republic, gave life to a monarchical regime: the principate. The territory subject to Rome was divided into 18 provinces: ten senatorial, for which the Senate designated proconsuls; the other eight imperial, governed directly by legates of Augustus; the principal merit of the imperial regime was its particular interest in their conditions.

The imperial age marks the highest point of Rome's organization in its maximum development of spatial, constructive and monumental life.

From the shores of the Atlantic the Empire extended as far as the regions near the Caucasus, and from the edge of the African deserts to a great part of Britannia, leaving everywhere indelible traces of civilization with its roads, bridges, aqueducts, its sense of order and discipline, the Empire of law, the unity of law.

Even more remarkable was the affirmation of Christianity, which overturns the local gods, unifies peoples in the worship of one God alone, and brings a revolution in the moral, juridical and social order of the classical world.

Octavian imposes a truce on party struggles and proclaims the Roman pax. In foreign policy he aims to create a frontier line to protect Romanity from barbarian invasions; but the Rhine-Danube line was not crossed, except to ascertain the superiority of the Germanic tribes moving beyond it.

Caesarian power reached its apogee by drawing close to the absolutist traditions of the East and dissolving into a military government which, because of the vastness of the frontiers, was poorly sustained by the strength of its own army. Thus it had to resort to the help of the barbarian element, accepting ever more humiliating and dangerous pacts, while Roman society dozed off into political servitude, outwardly softened by public games and masked in the eyes of the rich by the labor of slaves in growing numbers. Nevertheless the Epicurean spirit that spread through Roman society did not divert it from the study of lofty moral problems, and culture reworked the philosophical thought of Hellas, which helped consciences to better feel the innovating force of Christianity. Poetry rose to artistic dignity with the great poets of the golden age. Stoicism helped to tolerate the harshness of the political moment, urging the soul to a resigned acceptance of tyranny itself. This grew sharper under the first successors of Augustus; it was mitigated by goodness of works, by years of peace and by improvements in the condition of slaves, of the poor, of orphans, under the Antonine emperors.

Public offices lost their political prestige. The Romans abandoned the old magistracies, the civic consciousness languished, and participation in government no longer constituted an ambition for the citizen.

Then politico-military events profoundly transformed the structure of the Empire, especially following the upheavals that endangered its cohesion during the 3rd century. The division into West and East had by now matured: the former of Latin language, the latter predominantly of Hellenistic language. With this, Rome ceased to be the directing center of government and administration, which for the West was moved for a time to Milan and to Trier; Constantine in 330 founded Constantinople, the new Rome, which became the true capital of the East. To supply the army, the recruits of Italy were no longer sufficient; all the provinces of the Empire contributed to it, and even that was not enough: it became necessary to resort to barbarian auxiliaries who entered it in throngs, before assailing the Empire in force as invaders. They already had some province in their custody. Theodosius had to cede to them certain lands of the Balkans, in 378 A.D., receiving them as federates of the Empire; the Goths mounted guard on the Danube.

Indeed, their barbarians would have wished to prolong the life of the Empire, substituting the Germans for the Romans in the army and in the higher organs of government: thus thought Ataulf when he married Galla Placidia, the daughter of Theodosius. The plan failed through the opposition of internal groups, jealous of the Roman nationality, offended by foreign contacts. With the beginnings of the 5th century the Western Empire repaired to Ravenna as to a safer place; in Rome there remained the head of the universal Church who, with the ruin of the institutions, rose to be defender of the Italic people. Pope Leo I went to meet the terrible Attila and obtained that he leave part of Italy unscathed, delaying its sack. But the breach was open. Rome itself was several times assailed and despoiled. The barbarians no longer appeared as isolated warrior bands, but as masses of people without a homeland and without land who wished to settle on the rich soil of the Empire.

The attempt succeeded for Odoacer, leader of the Heruli, who, having deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West, to whom he gave an annual pension, sent back to Constantinople the imperial insignia of the West in order to give a concrete aspect to the new fact: the cessation of the direct authority of the Empire in the West (476 A.D.).

Italy had become a barbarian kingdom, which still wished to call itself Roman, indicating the two types of subjection to the sovereign. Odoacer began the traditions of Regnum as opposed to the old Imperium, but did not dare to call himself rex Italiae: with a greater sense of respect for the supremacy of the East he called himself rex in Italia.

The fortune of Odoacer awakened the ambitions of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who, favored by the policy of the East of weakening the barbarians with other barbarians, drove out Odoacer and established a new Kingdom at Ravenna. But in vain did he dream of placing himself in the furrow of Romanity and removing the contrast between the barbarian element and Roman civilization; scarcely was he dead when the former attempted to suffocate the latter, until the East with Justinian (v.) regained the upper hand with the ending of the Gothic wars, which sowed all Italy with ruins. The Byzantine regime in its turn was overthrown by the Lombard invasion (568) with which, one may say, the Middle Ages began.

10. CHRISTIANITY IN ITALY

Rome did not intend to impose in Italy and then in the Empire its specific religious forms, nor to destroy the traditional cults and the sanctuaries of the individual places with which the public manifestations of the social life of the inhabitants were closely connected. It was, however, inevitable that with the prevailing of the new political orders the local religious traditions should decline: and with their progressive ceasing they also ceased to constitute a social force, being reduced at most to simple personal superstitions. A common bond and mark of legitimism became the cult of Rome and of the emperor insofar as he personified the governing power; even the new priestly colleges supplanted those proper to each city or region. Very soon, however, the Oriental cults of Isis, Cybele, Mithras, etc. took on wide popularity within the different social classes, which the militias, the merchants, the slaves took care to transport everywhere, sometimes creating capricious contaminations of cults and beliefs. Against all this heterogeneous symbiosis of religious practices, which persisted in Italy until the 4th century and beyond, Christianity opposed its spiritual intransigence founded on a solid structure of truths and a precise moral code. Toward the middle of the 1st century it was already established in Rome and from there it spread first of all in Latium and Campania. Unfortunately, the particulars that would shed light on the successive phases of the diffusion are almost entirely lacking, especially for the regions of the south and the islands. Local traditions, however late, attempt to reconnect the origin of their Churches with St. Peter and his immediate disciples; in any case, appeal is nowhere made to apostles of other provenance. Naturally the major centers became in their turn centers of evangelization and organization in the surrounding cities. In this condition were found above all Ravenna for Emilia, toward the end of the 2nd century, Milan for Liguria, toward the beginning of the 3rd, and a little later Aquileia for Venetia and Istria. The fact, moreover, that the cities were numerous in the central regions of Italy and that they were independent of one another meant that the episcopal sees were numerous there from the beginning, unlike the northern regions where the cities were comparatively few. It is known in any case that in 251 some sixty bishops, if not all, at least for the most part Italian, were present at a council in Rome; and since certainly not all the bishops could have been present there, the number of sees was greater.

With this their first organization the Italian Churches overcame the imperial persecutions. On this subject too particular notices are lacking. Martyrs, numerous particularly in Rome and in the surrounding countries more profoundly Christianized, were not lacking even in the other regions, especially during the Empire of Maximian, but reliable historical sources are lacking that would offer precise and certain data. With the Constantinian peace Christianity spread in depth, and new episcopal sees were founded in all the provinces, both through the zeal of the Roman pontiffs and through the spirit of proselytism which must have been quite lively. Nor did the Arian struggles, which certainly had their repercussion also in Italy (it suffices to mention the Council of Rimini of 359) and particularly in Milan and Aquileia, delay the definitive settling of the new faith. It was particularly St. Eusebius of Vercelli and then St. Ambrose of Milan who promoted the rise of new Churches; the same must have occurred through the work of the bishop of Aquileia in Venetia and in the adjoining transalpine provinces. However, while throughout the early Middle Ages there was no other intermediate authority between the bishops and the pope, in cis-Apennine Italy, between the 4th and 5th centuries, on the other hand, the two great metropolises were constituted in the north, first of Milan then of Aquileia. To Milan were subject Liguria and then Raetia I, to Aquileia Venetia and Istria, Raetia II, Noricum and Upper Pannonia. Political reasons led in the 5th century advanced into the 5th century to establish in Emilia the metropolis of Ravenna. The bishops of the three northern metropolises gathered around their metropolitans; the bishops, however, of peninsular I. and of the islands gathered regularly every year around the Roman pontiff, to deal there with current needs; only occasionally did the representatives of the entire Italic episcopate gather in Rome.

The controversies concerning the Pelagian doctrines had only passing repercussions among the clergy of Venetia; instead a grave fracture came to be created in the Italian episcopate in the middle of the 6th century, as a consequence of the condemnation of the "Three Chapters" willed by the Council of Constantinople of 553. Supposing that the work of St. Leo the Great had been impaired, the bishops of central and northern I. protested against the Emperor and against Pope Pelagius I. The bishops of Tuscia and of the Ravennate submitted. Those, however, of the metropolises of Milan and of Aquileia gave rise to a schism that died out for Milan at the beginning of the 7th century, but that for Aquileia lasted that entire century and gave rise to the patriarchate of Aquileia in Lombard territory and to that of Grado in the region that remained subject to the Empire; not even with the extinction of the schism could the original unity of the metropolis be rebuilt.

Alongside the definitively organized hierarchy there came a new force that was not independent of it, but soon acquired an autonomous development: that of monasticism. Introduced into I. on the example of the East after the middle of the 4th century, it found followers among the clergy that continued to gather around its bishop, but particularly among the laity, men and women, with an organization at first uncertain, oscillating between the eremitic life and the cenobitic, that is with common life. It was St. Benedict of Norcia (v.) who, during the Gothic wars, from the height of Montecassino compiled a Regula that gave absolute preference to cenobitism by ordaining communities in which, alongside prayer, work, particularly agricultural, was made obligatory. Having spread also among the barbarian peoples, it was at once a powerful reviver of spirituality, in the midst of a world that threatened to become brutish in hatreds and in moral and social misery, and at the same time of civil life by contributing, thanks to work and fraternal coexistence, to the progressive rebirth of better economic and social relations. Later to Benedictine monasticism was added also that of Eastern origin which reached as far as Rome but had particular expansion in southern I. and in Sicily (v. BASILIANI D'I.).

Thus organized, the Church in I. faced the barbarian invasions and the upheaval of the public institutions that were their consequence. A new task began alongside that entrusted to it by its Divine Founder: that of saving the relics of civilization and of supporting and directing its efforts toward new destinies.

11. THE MIDDLE AGES

The brief reconstitution of Italian unity, albeit under Byzantine dominion, with its capital at Ravenna, is entirely overturned by the invasion of the Lombards. These barbarians, having descended (568) without any imperial investiture, begin on their own account an enterprise that leads them to constitute a kingdom exclusively their own with capital at Pavia and with two almost autonomous appendages: the Duchies of Spoleto and of Benevento which occupy almost the entire mountainous backbone of the Apennines. But their ambition does not stop here: having recovered from internal upheavals, they aim at the cities of Apulia and of Lucania where they encounter the Byzantines and then also the Muslims; but they also aspire to the conquest of the cities of Campania; they press upon Ravenna and the Pentapolis, and from Tuscia upon Rome. The Italic populations, however, despite the heresies (Monothelitism and the question of the images) that Constantinople attempted to impose even by force, intended to remain faithful to the Empire, providing perhaps by their own initiatives for defense; it always represented civilization against the barbarian orders and it was not wished that these should supplant the lex Romana. In this reaction the Roman pontiffs were at the head, and not even the conversion of the Lombards changed political-national relations with them, so much so that when the last Lombard kings, having already occupied Ravenna, thought they had Rome in their hands, the popes, in defense of what still remained Roman, including the Venetian lagoons and Istria, resorted, in full agreement with the citizen nobility, to the intervention of the Franks. Even the Eastern Empire did not show itself opposed to this intervention, thinking that it could prove useful to it to drive out the barbarians with other barbarians, according to the maxim of Byzantine policy. But Charlemagne, who led the Franks into I. in 773, arranged matters differently: he proclaimed himself king of the Lombards, that is of the northern Kingdom and of the two Duchies, and assured to the Roman See the instituire sancti Petri, that is the countries that the Lombards had not yet firmly occupied, while to the Byzantines there remained in the south the countries still subject to their dominion. At Christmas of 800 Pope Leo III, evidently obeying a classical tradition, reconstituted with Charlemagne the Empire of the West with the concept of having a qualified defender for Rome and for the Church of the West, which at that moment was almost entirely comprised within his dominion. He henceforth, besides king of the Lombards, becomes Roman emperor (a qualification that would last until the dawn of the 19th century), but precisely in Rome and its dependencies he is not truly sovereign and his authority encounters that of the Pope; this was certainly not without conflicts for him and his successors. Thus opened a brilliant though brief period, during which feudalism matured, the great lay principalities were constituted and then also the ecclesiastical ones, the great monasteries that arose everywhere widened their influence. Unshakable principle: only Catholicism guided by the pontiff was to govern consciences, inform the laws, correct customs, direct the conversion of the infidels.

A new surge of barbarism, due to the decline of Frankish dominion and to the invasion of the Hungarians, raged during the brief period of the national kings; while the Muslims, having conquered Sicily, were infiltrating the entire peninsula, and it was only with difficulty that they could be withstood and driven out. The great feudal lords, at odds among themselves, aimed to wrest privileges from the sovereign and to make themselves as independent as possible; but by weakening the sovereign power they weakened themselves all the more, both in the face of the common enemy and in the face of their own subjects, who tended to do to them exactly what they did to the sovereign, fragmenting possession (and this was a good thing), but also fragmenting power, increasing arbitrariness, often setting land against land, castle against castle. Bishoprics and monasteries, by receiving gifts of lands and by enriching themselves with exemptions and privileges, likewise became, in this fragmentation of powers, secularized organisms; they surrounded themselves with vassals, and they replaced the counts even in lordship over the cities; thus it already happened by the end of the 9th century with the bishops of Parma, Reggio, Arezzo, Trento, Novara, Vercelli, and Aquileia. Other sees, such as Milan, if they did not hold direct lordship over the cities, held it, and extensively, over castles, valleys, rivers, etc. The abbey of Farfa (like that of Montecassino in the south) had such power as to dare to contend even with Rome. All this gradually drew the prelates into the orbit of the sovereign, to whom they were bound to render service and oath and from whom they received investiture of the fiefs attached to their office, creating an easy confusion between the spiritual and the temporal. This indeed drove sovereigns and princes to meddle in the internal affairs of the Church, to appoint bishops and abbots at their own discretion, and to claim tithes for themselves. The ancient legal institutions and concepts declined; and one sees high ecclesiastical offices entrusted all too often to rough men-at-arms and ambitious courtiers, ready to squander the ecclesiastical patrimony to the advantage of partisans and vassals, with very little concern for ecclesiastical discipline; simony became customary, and even relations with the supreme ecclesiastical authority threatened to bend before the greed of the great city families and the pressure of that feudal world which engulfed all operating forces, religious and national alike. With the sovereigns of the House of Saxony the Holy Roman Empire was reconstituted, now in the service of the German nation, and the Italian Kingdom of the north remained included within it as well; but in vain did those sovereigns attempt to make their power felt in the south, which remained far less influenced by feudal institutions. To emancipate itself from feudal constraints and to create new, more civilized relations would henceforth be the aim both of the pontiffs and of the Italian population, animated by new spirits and forces. The former, more conscious and more programmatic, found its strength in the spiritual awakening due in good part to the great monastic reforms that succeeded one another until they took concrete form in the Franciscan movement, which arose in Italy at the beginning of the 13th century, and in the Dominican movement, which found in Italy its most favorable acclimatization; both of these attained the most complete independence from the feudal system. When this was at its height (mid-11th century), the moral reform of the Church gained strength, and under Gregory VII it also assumed a juridical aspect in the struggle over investitures, which lasted half a century and whose result was a clearer definition of the freedom and rights of the Church. This struggle had its dramatic episodes in Italy, and the emperors of the House of Franconia vainly consumed their best forces there. Meanwhile the Normans succeeded in forming a solid unitary kingdom in southern Italy, soon adding to it Sicily reconquered from the Muslims and triumphing over the various regional elements that kept the country divided. The papacy maintained its dominion in central Italy, far milder and less organic than the Norman one. In the north, more dramatic and complicated events took shape, whereby ecclesiastical reform proceeded in step with popular movements of a social and political character at once. Many forces were shaping a new age, rich in future: the maritime cities—Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi—had the Mediterranean as their field of action and, under the pressure of a freer and broader economy, tended to become independent republics with their own sphere of commercial exploitation. In the inland cities, thanks to specialized craftsmen, to skillful exchange of money, to a shrewd and industrious bourgeoisie, the Commune organized itself socially and politically above the power of the bishop and in opposition to the feudal lords of the countryside.

The city denied the old tributes to the Caesar beyond the Alps with lordly pride and rejected his envoys as elements foreign to Italy. The dispute broke out between the cities, which aspired to a life of their own, and the Swabian emperors, who tried to keep them within their own orbit of servitude. Sustained by the Church, which aimed to make more solid and efficient the freedom won through the struggle over investiture, the cities drew together in league, grew strong with the new motto "libertas," and wrote with their city Statutes the new law of Italy. The Empire was defeated. The victory of Legnano removed the obstacles to the development of the Commune, an Italian creation, the maker of all future history.

The Commune was an expansive force: it conquered the countryside, subdued the rural feudal class, dominated the great trade routes, created around itself ever broader political and economic unities, prepared the modern State; it had its own finances, its own army, and where possible even a merchant fleet; it organized military leagues, fought other Communes, and dreamed of wide dominion. The demands of war centralized powers, lulled democratic forms to sleep, and opened the way to small and great local and regional dictatorships.

Hence the broader and more complicated organisms, lordships and principalities, which gave rise to the problem of a more unified and more secure political arrangement in the peninsula, now attempting the federal solution (such was the idea of Cola di Rienzo), now the unitary solution with Gian Galeazzo Visconti in Milan and with Ladislaus, King of Naples. Vain hopes, nullified by mutual jealousies, by habits of local freedom, by the immaturity of national consciousness, and even more by the balance of forces among the various parties aspiring to establish a great kingdom, so that the attempts of one side were paralyzed by those of the opposite side. Unity appeared as a danger to liberty. In such conditions it was possible to reach only a system of political equilibrium that only the personal prestige of Lorenzo the Magnificent managed to prolong.

But such an equilibrium, upheld by petty expedients and deceptive compromises, could not produce lasting agreements. None of the contracting States—Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples...—was willing to renounce its own autonomy and remained distrustful of the others. When the great monarchies of Europe, France and Spain, militarily stronger, laid claim to supposed rights and threw their armies onto the peninsula, it found a force of collective resistance only too late, and Italy lost its freedom.

Studi: F. Dahn, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, 4 voll., Berlino 1881-98; F. Gregorovius, Storia della Città di Roma nel Medio-Evo, 4 voll., tre net. Roma 1900; F. Chalandon, Histoire de la domination Normande en Italie et en Sicile, Parigi 1907; L. Halphen, Etudes sur l'administration de Rome au Moyen âge (351-1755), Parigi 1907; L. M. Hartmann, Geschichte Italiens im Mittelalter, 3 voll., Gotha-Lipsia 1897-1911; L. Duchesne, Les premiers temps de l'Etat Pontifical, Parigi 1911; L. Fliche, La Réforme Grégorienne, 2 voll., Lovanio 1924-25; F. Schneider,

Rom und Romgedanke im Mittelalter, Munich 1926; H. Grisar, Roma alla fine del mondo antico, 2 vols., 2nd ed., Rome 1931; G. Volpe, Il Medioevo, 2nd ed., Florence 1932; R. Morghen, La concezione dell'Impero romano-germanico e la tradizione di Roma da Carlo Magno a Federico II, in Rend. Acc. Lincei, sess. VI, vol. XIII, 1936; E. Jordan, L'Allemagne et l'Italie au XIIe et XIIIe siècles, Paris 1939; G. Romano-A. Solmi, Le dominazioni barbariche in I. (393-888), 3rd ed., Milan 1940; L. Salvatorelli, L'I. comunale dagli inizi del sec. XI alla metà del sec. XIV, 2 vols., ibid. 1940; E. Garin, Il Rinascimento italiano, Milan 1941; G. Falco, La Santa Romana Repubblica. Profilo storico del Medio Evo, Naples 1942; E. Dupré Theseider, L'idea imperiale di Roma nella tradizione del Medioevo, Milan 1942; L. Sorrento, Medievalia, Brescia 1943; Ch. Petit-Dutaillis and P. Guinard, L'Essor des états d'Occident, 2nd ed., Paris 1944; P. Brezzi, Roma e l'Impero medievale, Bologna 1948; N. Valeri, L'I. nell'età dei Principati, Milan 1949; L. Salvatorelli, I. medievale, Milan n.d.; R. Cessi, Regnum ed Imperium in I., Bologna 1949; G. Fasoli, I Re d'I., Florence 1949; G. Mollat, Les Popes d'Avignon, 10th ed., Paris 1950; L. Simeoni, Le Signorie, Milan 1950.

12. MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AGE

a) The conquest of I. — "Year 1494: a most unhappy year, the first of the miserable years," wrote Guicciardini, yet not concealing his great astonishment at the wealth of our cities: robust as economic organisms, masters of art and science, conspicuous centers of a new movement of civilization, animated by the protection of pontiffs and lords.

The conflict that troubled Guicciardini lay in the existence of a civil superiority of Italy, compromised at the very moment when Italy itself was about to become the most coveted prey of the great monarchies of Europe, strong in their own political unity.

I. is a constellation of five major states that balance one another with difficulty: Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples; also independent are some minor states: Savoy, Mantua, Ferrara, Saluzzo, Modena, Genoa; Sicily and Sardinia are dependencies of the Aragonese of Spain.

Shattered and therefore weak, worn down by internal jealousies, incapable of lasting agreements, I. became the common object of the ambitions of the young powers, since it meant the richest treasure of Mediterranean goods and fortunes, an open road toward Asia and toward Africa; with numerous ports, merchant or war shipping, banking and industrial wealth, a robust reserve of men, weapons and provisions. First France and Spain, then the Empire, Switzerland, the Turks, set their sights on the conquest of I. or of a part of it.

b) Attempts at a French king. — France worked out an Italian policy by invoking old rights over Lombardy and the Kingdom of Naples, without thinking any longer of the other shore. It abandoned its aspirations to England: it also renounced expansion toward Flanders, Germany and Spain in order to have Italy. Charles VIII, although he had taken the title of "King of Sicily and Jerusalem," aspired only to the Kingdom of Naples, as heir of the Angevins.

His government disapproves of this war: it does not see what security a land so distant can offer. But his love of adventure urges him on, just as it urges on Ludovico il Moro, usurper of Gian Galeazzo and related by marriage to the King of Naples; the Neapolitan barons, in conflict with the crown, drive him toward the conquest even more. The enterprise meets no resistance because of the superiority of Charles VIII's artillery. Having crossed Mont Cenis in September 1494, he passes through Milan after obtaining the Duke's promise of free passage, and heads toward Florence; Pietro de' Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, pays him homage, but is forced to leave his city, where the people are in ferment. When the King wishes to impose odious terms on the Republic, he is confronted with the threat of Pier Capponi and gives up his demands. In Rome he forces Alexander VI into agreements. On February 22 of the following year he enters Naples, celebrated by the barons, and takes possession of the kingdom. The lightning success of the French arms is promptly answered by a coalition among Spain, the House of Austria,

Venice, Milan and Alexander VI: the beginning of a policy of alliance that arose around the Italian problem; Charles VIII, overwhelmed by the forces of the league, barely opened a passage for himself at Fornovo (6 July 1495) and took refuge in France.

In 1498, Charles VIII died without descendants. He was succeeded by his cousin Louis XII (1498-1515) of the House of Valois-Orléans. Already lord of Asti in Italy, he assumed the title of king of the Two Sicilies and duke of Milan, laying claim to the Milanese as heir of Valentina Visconti, daughter of Gian Galeazzo. He allied himself with Venice, to which he promised Cremona and the Ghiaradadda, and entrusted the command of his troops to Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, a Milanese. Il Moro fled to Germany; there he gathered forces but was defeated at Novara and taken to France, where he ended his days as a prisoner. Louis XII remained lord of Milan. From there, having joined forces with Cesare Borgia, the son of Alexander VI who had carved out a lordship of his own with certain cities of the Marches and Romagna, he moved to the conquest of Naples. Secret agreements with Ferdinand of Aragon, king of Spain and Sicily, for a partition of the Kingdom, exposed him to disputes over border questions that cost him the renunciation of the Kingdom (1504). Naples becomes, together with Sicily, a province of the Kingdom of Spain.

The Venetians, having grown in power with the acquisition of Cremona, the Ghiaradadda and some ports of Apulia and cities in Romagna, seemed on the point of having the peninsula at their mercy, so that Machiavelli wrote: "Either it will be a door that opens all Italy to them, or it will be their ruin."

On the death of Alexander VI in 1503, Julius II ascended the papal throne; to reclaim the cities of Romagna that had been taken from him, he joined the League of Cambrai with the German Caesar, France and Spain against Venice (1508): the latter, defeated at Agnadello (1509), renounced in favor of the pope and the king of Spain its new possessions. Then Julius II set out to drive the French out of Italy with the force of another league, called the Holy League (Oct. 8, 1519). The Spaniards and the Imperial forces joined it, alongside the English and then the Swiss and the Republic of Venice itself. The peninsula was once again reshaped. Maximilian Sforza, son of the Moor, received the Duchy of Milan. The Republic of Florence, which had sided with the French, was overthrown and fell back into the hands of the Medici (Aug. 1512). Parma and Piacenza were ceded to the pontiff Julius II; the Swiss took Locarno and the Valtellina.

In 1515 Francis I, who had succeeded his cousin Louis XII on the throne of France (1515-47), recovered the Milanese with the battle of Marignano (Sept. 13-14) and subjugated Genoa.

c) The contest between France and Spain. — The following year Ferdinand the Catholic, king of Spain, was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old grandson, who three years later, in rivalry with Francis I, was elected emperor. The vastness of the domains that Charles V gathered with the twofold crown of Spain and Germany stifled France on every side, while his overseas possessions seemed to confer on him a worldwide sovereignty. Francis I dared to oppose such power, and the struggle fought in Italy and in France, with the participation of the major states, lasted 39 years: from 1520 to 1559, with fortune mostly adverse to the French, and it brought profound upheavals in the territorial system of the peninsula. Francis I began the war in 1521. A Spanish-German army conquered Milan. The Swiss, in the service of France, attacked the imperial army near Milan, at the Bicocca, but were defeated; Genoa too was taken from France and Lombardy was given to Francis II Sforza, brother of Maximilian. Francis I descended from France into Italy by way of Mont Cenis and reoccupied Milan (Oct. 1524). Charles's troops withdrew into Pavia, which was besieged by the French. After 4 months of siege a pitched battle was engaged (Feb. 24, 1521), disastrous for Francis I, who was taken prisoner and led to Madrid. Everything was lost. The Italian states felt the danger of Habsburg power and drew closer to France (Aug. 1525), followed by England, which also took part in an Italian policy.

Having regained his freedom, Francis I was at the center of a league now against the Imperial forces, together with Pope Clement VII, the Venetians, the Florentines and Sforza. Once again the pope appeared as the liberator of Italy. But the troops of the league had no luck. Rome was attacked and sacked by the Landsknechts (1527); the Pope, having taken refuge in Castel Sant'Angelo, after nine months ransomed his city with money; meanwhile plague devastated Italy, and poverty and dissolution struck everyone, from peasants to artists, scattered and exiled. A brief truce marked by the Peace of Cambrai (1529) restored Sforza to Milan and the Medici to Florence, while Charles V, lord of Naples, received the imperial crown at Bologna (Feb. 21, 1530). Florence, where the republic had been restored in 1527, tried to resist the return of the Medici, and for 10 months withstood the siege of the Imperial forces, defended by Michelangelo's fortifications. In August it surrendered, and the Medici returned and remained there until 1737.

The sack of Rome and the capitulation of Florence close the golden period of the Renaissance. In 1520 Raphael died, a year later Leonardo, in 1527 Machiavelli, in 1533 Ariosto, the following year Correggio, in 1531 Andrea del Sarto. Men of letters and artists moved to foreign courts and spread there the light of their genius. The Italian Renaissance became European, while it declined in its land of origin. The age of the Reformation began.

After Luther's triumphs in Germany, in 1545 the Council of Trent opened (v. TRENTO, CONCILIO di).

Meanwhile in 1536 the conflict was resumed. Francis I, without a declaration of war, with unjustified violence, entered Turin on Apr. 3, considered the base of the Imperial resistance and a new starting point for the conquest of Lombardy: Piedmont remained in Francis's possession for 23 years.

In 1536 Charles V abdicated, leaving the Empire to his brother Ferdinand I and the Spanish domains to his son Philip II; the House of Austria was no longer a single bloc, but was divided into two branches, that of Austria and that of Spain. The war continued, having reached its sixth resumption. Henry II, who succeeded his father Francis I in 1547, renewed the past hostility, but for a shorter time and with an adverse fate. Philip II opened his way to Paris with the battle of St. Quentin (Aug. 1557). The peace treaty concluded at Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) affirmed Spanish predominance in Italy: Lombardy, the Neapolitan territory, Sicily, Sardinia and the State of the Presidi (fortresses on the Tyrrhenian Sea) remained in Spain's possession for a century and a half. Piedmont returned in part to the Savoy, in the person of Emmanuel Philibert, the fighter of St. Quentin alongside the Imperial forces. The Duchy of Florence, which would soon be a grand duchy, remained with the Medici, enlarged by the Sienese territory.

d) The Spanish period: activity and passivity. — This period of war was not entirely passivity for Italy. It lost men, lands, weapons, but it never lost the prestige of its own intellectual superiority.

The new arrangement was already a step forward: it offered greater political homogeneity by gathering a larger number of lands under the same state authority.

Regression occurred in economic and civil life and in industrial and agricultural production; the best went into exile, the nobility withdrew from its customary activities, the bourgeoisie was stifled by foreign competition and by the transoceanic movement of business, from which it remained excluded. But life was not everywhere wretched and provincial; that stretch of Italy still free from the foreigner re-entered great politics, resumed the old contest between France and Spain, and took advantage of every new development, above all to pursue an autonomous policy. Through the work of Piedmont, Italy ceased to be a passive element of European politics. Already with Emmanuel Philibert it carried its weight in the destinies of Europe; he regarded his state as "the bastion of Italy"; he sought an outlet to the sea, buying Oneglia; he imposed the use of our language in public acts. Even more decisively Italian was the diplomatic and military activity of Charles Emmanuel, who attempted an action in concert with the France of Henry IV to shake Habsburg hegemony. He pressed not so much on the transalpine possessions as on the Po valley side, aiming at Milan; he aimed at Genoa, which however resisted; but he succeeded in acquiring Finale; he obtained from Henry IV the Saluzzo region and possessions on French soil. He fought twice to have Montferrat. He opposed the Habsburg settlement in the Valtellina. Great politics also attracted Venice. It gave signs of strong vitality in the struggle against the Turks at Lepanto (1572), in the defense, however ruinous, of Cyprus and Candia, in the occupation of the Peloponnese, which it held from 1699 to 1718.

Tuscany made great efforts to escape the common danger of decline, and with Grand Duke Cosimo I (1537-1574), then with Ferdinand I (1587-1609), it had moments of commercial and port flourishing. The Papal State, which divided the Spanish domains of the north from those of the south, was a brake on the spread of Madrid's power. Entirely devoted to the restoration of Catholicism, it recovered the forces of order and discipline that had made the greatness of the papacy in the Middle Ages, and it availed itself of the Council of Trent (1545-63), of the Order of the Jesuits, as of other Orders and Congregations, and of the Supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition in Rome for a systematic struggle against heresy, which had presented itself as threatening in Italy too.

Italy gave its daily contribution to this work of religious restoration and still lived in solidarity with the Church, refusing its adherence to Protestantism. While the papacy nurtured the ideal of a Christian humanism that would not sacrifice, as the old humanism had, the cult of virtue to that of art, the leaders of the Catholic reform placed moral perfection above every other perfection, accomplishing prodigies of Christian spirituality, transfused into religious and civil works, not envisioned by the Lutheran leaders: schools, orphanages, hospitals, oratories for children, colonies of missionaries in distant lands, etc.

e) Italy and the wars of succession. — The internal situation of Italy changes radically with the three wars of succession: Spanish, Polish, and Austrian. The first, concluded with the treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714), takes from Spain its possessions in Italy, and assigns to Austria the Milanese, with the addition of the Mantuan territory taken from the Gonzaga, enemies of the Empire, of Naples and of Sardinia; it gives Sicily to Victor Amadeus II with the royal title; the second war (Peace of Vienna, 1718) assigns Tuscany to the Duke of Lorraine, Francis Stephen, the Medici having died out with Gian Gastone; it takes from Austria Naples and Sicily, which it transfers to Don Carlos of Bourbon, leaving to Austria, along with the Milanese, Parma and Piacenza; it assigns Novara and Tortona to the King of Piedmont, Charles Emmanuel III; the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), which closes the third war, reduces Austrian dominion in Italy to Lombardy alone, and extends the Savoyard Kingdom as far as the Ticino with the upper Novarese and the Oltrepò Pavese.

These wars found Piedmont prepared to play upon the old Franco-Habsburg dualism, and to seek among foreign powers a point of support in order to connect itself with the forces of Europe and enter actively into international life.

Between the first and second wars falls the adventure of Giulio Alberoni, the cardinal who was prime minister at the court of Madrid, with his grandiose program of taking from Austria the provinces of Italy, in order to give them to the sons of Elizabeth Farnese, whom he had joined in marriage with Philip V of Spain. Unhappy outcome: Alberoni was dismissed.

Victor Amadeus had to accept Sardinia in exchange for Sicily, ceded to Austria. In the war of the Polish succession, Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy found a place of combat with the promise of the Milanese, denied and later reduced to the handing over of a few cities.

In the third war, the Austrian one, the same King renews his collaboration with the same stake of Milan, in which he installs himself for a few months, and then approaches it with another step forward, after the brilliant victory of Assietta (1747). A year earlier, Genoa had driven out the Austrians who had entered Liguria.

f) The reform period. — And now fifty years of peace. The territorial situation remains unchanged, except for the loss of Corsica, which Genoa sold to France in 1768 in order to free itself from the continuous island turmoil. A peace fruitful in ideal and real advances. No longer a movement of armies, but of thought: study of economic-administrative problems; examination of the problem of Italy: the necessity of a free Italy begins to be outlined, so that it may stand alongside the great powers of Europe. Muratori presents the history of Italy in an organic body. Vico maintains the intimate autonomy in the development of peoples, within eternal rules.

Parini deplores the idleness of the nobles; Alfieri the servility of Italy; Genovesi its economic disunion; Baretti its political division; Verri the obstacle of internal barriers; Filangieri the lack of colonies on the other shore; Beccaria the inhumanity of criminal law and the monopoly of labor. Philosophers and men of letters urge the governments of Italy to carry out reforms that increase the products of industry and of the land, reduce class privileges, make the clergy equal to the laity in tax obligations, free the lands from mortmain and labor from the shackles of medieval corporatism; reforms that favor trade on the road system and inland navigation. The inferiority of the small States within the small provincial economy is felt. Italy begins to be considered on a plane of national interests: here is the Galeani Napione project of 1780 for a unitary federal organization of the peninsula, for a military and commercial agreement among all its States. He invokes the moral influence of Rome and hopes for the effective primacy of the Savoy. The first great idea of a national collaboration, with the pontiff at its head, supreme moderator of a large-scale Savoyard policy.

From the fifty years of peace, cultured Italy profits, also in order to favorably welcome the doctrinal novelties that would mature with the French Revolution.

In fact, the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen is welcomed in the cenacles of the philosophers and in the Masonic lodges of Italy with enthusiasm: it promotes the formation of a democratic republican party, unitary according to some, federal according to others. The principle of popular sovereignty is likewise welcomed, whose significance is appreciated as a public affirmation of the right to independence from foreign dominion; it creates "patriotism," no longer local or cultural, but national and democratic.

g) The French period. - The Masonic lodges turn into Jacobin clubs. Legal reformism is succeeded by revolutionary agitation. The new ideas already have their advocates in Naples (1794), Palermo (1795), and Bologna (1794). Napoleon crosses the Alps in 1796 with promises of liberty. The party of the innovators, flattered and credulous, facilitates his march. He comes to fight Austria in the Po Valley in order to open for himself the road to Vienna through the Alpine passes.

The King of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus III, accepts the war by entering the first coalition alongside Austria, and is its first victim.

Bonaparte, having defeated the Austro-Sardinians at Montenotte and Millesimo, forces Victor Amadeus III to cede the county of Nice and Savoy, and the fortresses of Cuneo, Tortona, and Alessandria. Piedmont becomes a free transit route for the French. Bonaparte enters Milan on 12 May 1796 and pushes on toward Mantua, which capitulates in Jan. 1797.

This first war against Austria closes with the Treaty of Campoformio, which gives Austria the Veneto in exchange for Belgium for France. Napoleon continues the Italian campaign for the conquest of the entire peninsula, aiming also at Rome.

Pius VI has disavowed those French priests who had sworn their oath to the Republic: for this reason France regards the Holy See as hostile. The Italian common people are hostile as well. The victories of the sans-culottes in fact have a response in a conservative sense in the rural and urban riots that seek to defend their own traditions and their own Church; the most clamorous were the Veronese Easter, on the anniversary of the Sicilian Vespers.

Bonaparte encourages the innovators to rise up against the old governments and establishes an Italic legion to which the tricolor flag is given. The old regime falls everywhere. Regional republics arise, Italian, but protected by the French military commands and by Bonaparte's delegates. Here is the Cisalpine Confederation (7 Jan. 1797: Parma, Modena, Ferrara, Reggio) which, enlarged by Lombardy, became the Cisalpine Republic (18 July 1797); then others of the same stamp, the Ligurian, the Roman, with the arrest of the Pope (taken to France as a prisoner), then the Parthenopean (24 Jan. 1799), provoked by the useless intervention of Ferdinand IV to restore the Papal States; likewise Tuscany, transformed into the Etruscan Republic; and lastly the Sardinian Kingdom, where Charles Emmanuel IV, having succeeded Victor Amadeus III, had to renounce Piedmont in favor of France, withdrawing to Sardinia, just as Ferdinand of Naples had withdrawn to Sicily.

Napoleon's momentary absence from Europe, for the Egyptian enterprise, brings the Austrians back to Italy,-

-ready with the Russians (1799). It is the reaction of the 13 months; the republics fall, the former kingdoms rise again. But with Napoleon's return, a new upheaval. The victory of Marengo secures for him Piedmont and Lombardy. The former is incorporated with Genoa into France, the latter renews the Cisalpine Republic, which shortly thereafter, after the assemblies of Lyon, takes the name of the Italian Republic. Tuscany with the State of the Presidi becomes the Kingdom of Etruria for Louis I, son-in-law of the King of Spain, in exchange for Parma and Piacenza: the Pope and Ferdinand IV return to their States.

The development of French imperialism, aimed at the conquest of Europe, changes the map of Italy once again. The Italian Republic becomes the Kingdom of Italy (1805): viceroy Napoleon's stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, but with the addition of Parma, while Genoa is annexed to France. In 1806 the Kingdom is enlarged by the Veneto, but its dominions on the other shore are annexed to France under the name of the Illyrian Provinces.

In 1807 Tuscany and Parma become departments of France, and Florence becomes the capital and seat of the court for Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon's sister.

In 1808 the Kingdom of Italy is enlarged by the Marches in order to place it in more direct communication with the Kingdom of Naples, which passes from Ferdinand Bourbon to Joseph Bonaparte; the latter then, having been made King of Spain, cedes it to Joachim Murat. On 17 May 1809 Rome is declared a city of the Empire and all the remaining pontifical territory becomes French territory. Pius VII is deported to Savona.

In 1810 the Kingdom of Italy acquires also the Trentino and the Alto Adige up to the Bressanone gorge. But shortly thereafter everything collapses together with Napoleon's fortune. Of the Napoleonic rulers, in 1814 only Murat remains in Italy: but he vainly attempts with the proclamation of Rimini (March 1815) to keep the Kingdom, which is retaken by Ferdinand IV.

The Austrians enter Milan on 30 May 1814.

h) Restoration and liberal ferment. - The Congress of Vienna decides the new destinies of Italy with the final act of 9 June 1815; the Lombardo-Veneto is given to Austria; Genoa is added to Piedmont; Modena and Reggio pass to an Austrian archduke, Francis IV of Este; the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to Ferdinand III of Lorraine; the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to Ferdinand I of Bourbon, formerly Ferdinand IV. The Pope is reinstated in his domains, while Austria keeps a garrison at Ferrara and strives to direct Italian politics.

The years that follow are a continuous ferment of innovative ideas and a preparatory work for the national recovery. The impetus is still the Napoleonic episode. Twenty years of Italo-French contacts had passed, fruitful even in their daily frictions.

The harsh experience dampened the first illusions. People began to believe no longer in a liberty bestowed, but in one earned. The anti-Napoleonic movements prepared by a secret society called the Raggi, prelude to the Carbonara, and the famous attempt of the Cisalpine general Lahoz to give to Alfieri's anti-French sentiment the eloquence of arms, had already put to the test the national conscience, trained by the insurrectionary proclamations of Bonaparte himself. Italy now proceeds along that road, turning to profit the positive results of French domination. If France had given a vain illusion of political liberty, it had nevertheless, if only formally, promoted the exercise of a certain civil and administrative liberty.

Thus Italy resumed the work interrupted by the Congress of Vienna, but with its own initiatives. Here is the first Risorgimento, which has the same men as yesterday, the former Italian officers of Napoleon. The ideal of independence that conspires in the societies flows into the constitutional movements of 1820-21 and then of '30-31, which it was erroneously hoped to coordinate with the foreign insurrections, first of Spain, then of France. Austria stifled them at birth. The last Carbonaro movement, which broke out in 1831 at Modena, was crushed by Duke Francis IV.

Out of these straits Mazzinianism is born with the new principle: the unitary Republic. Means of action:

Italian initiative, the intervention of the people, a conception of life as a battle, acceptance of trial as a means of resurgence, harmony between thought and action. Immediate goal: the liberty of Italy, but as an essential condition for the liberty of Europe and the world. Ultimate goal: Rome as the seat of a theocratic-lay council of the peoples for a brotherhood without boundaries and without distinctions of race. Instruments of propaganda: Young Italy, which was both an association and a newspaper.

The revolutionary idea gained ground, but G. Mazzini's activism translated into a vain sacrifice of young lives. Criticism of Mazzinianism was born, just as the latter had criticized Carbonarism. Other means were sought. Vincenzo Gioberti looked to the Church. With his "Primato degli Italiani" (1843) he sought to prepare for Italy a pontiff who would be the inspirer of the national revolution, drawing from Italy's history the tradition of a papacy always in solidarity with the Italian cause. This is the historical premise of the neo-Guelph party; the Italian expression of a European movement, Catholic-liberal Romanticism. Chateaubriand had written about 20 years earlier: "The Italian arts had a Leo X; could Italian liberty not have another Leo?" Mazzini trusted in the people. Now trust was placed in the Pope and in the princes. Massimo D'Azeglio (1846) censured insurrectionary uprisings and upheld the necessity of creating a national public opinion around Italy's economic problems in order to spur action by governments in a liberal direction and to create harmony between the princes and the people.

The election of Pius IX (1846) seemed to fulfill such aspirations. He began the Risorgimento on the ground of legality and state action. His reforms found the princes of Italy willing to be equally reform-minded. Public opinion called for a constitution. It was awaited in the name of the new Pontiff who raised the fateful cry: "Bless, Great God, Italy." Pius IX became a symbol. When Vienna rose up, stirred by the revolution in Paris, Milan rose and fought its Five Days to drive out Radetzky's Austrians. Venice too was in flames. The intervention of Piedmont was invoked, and Charles Albert resolved upon war. On 27 March 1848 he crossed the Ticino and moved beyond the Mincio. The first campaign of independence, with military contingents flowing in from every state of the peninsula, in fact also from the Papal State, together with numerous volunteers, had a happy beginning at Goito and Peschiera, but an ill-fated epilogue at Custoza (23-25 July). The abandonment of the princes, made distrustful by the fact that Piedmont would hear nothing of reaching a federal league, brought about dissolution. Radetzky re-entered Milan on 6 August and Charles Albert re-entered Piedmont. The following year, Charles Albert took up the challenge again but was once more defeated at Novara (23 March 1849). He abdicated in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel II and went into exile at Oporto, where he died on 28 July.

Neo-Guelphism did not fare well, both because of the failure to reach agreement among the princes, since Piedmont's supremacy was feared, and because of the subversive machinations of the Mazzinian extremists. After 1849 the conspiracies were renewed.

i) Cavour and Piedmont. — But the Italian question was taken up again and monopolized by Piedmont, and Cavour, who looked to Paris and London, gave it luster. And from those capitals attention was likewise directed to Turin. The understanding came about over the Crimean War. Piedmont, asked for aid, took part in it, together with the Franco-British, against Russia. At the peace Congress in Paris, Cavour gathered the first international sympathies. These were the first fruits of a liberal European policy. Then came the meeting with Napoleon III at Plombières and the commitment to French collaboration in the war against Austria. The second campaign of independence (1859) was rapid from Magenta to Solferino. Lombardy was independent; Venetia, however, remained Austrian. But Cavour reaped a broader harvest. He stirred the populations of central Italy (Modena, Parma, Bologna, Tuscany) to rise. He annexed their territories by plebiscitary vote. The monarchical idea prevailed through the revolution, skillfully steered in favor of the House of Savoy. Thus when Garibaldi's march halted at the Volturno, Cavour did not leave the anti-Bourbon initiative entirely at the mercy of the party of action with its Mazzinian and sinister background. He feared the republic and for this reason sent King Victor through the Marches and Umbria to meet Garibaldi, who yielded to the royal army and withdrew to Caprera.

ii) The Kingdom of Italy. — On 14 March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed at Turin, in the first national Parliament composed of 214 senators and 413 deputies, representatives of all the regions. On 6 June Cavour died, who was diplomatically preparing the acquisition of Venice and Rome.

Of the two problems, one was resolved by La Marmora through the alliance with Prussia, which had risen against Austria's hegemony, and then through a campaign in 1866 in Venetia both by land (Custoza) and by sea (Lissa). The other, after the Garibaldian attempts, crushed by the Savoyard intervention (Aspromonte) and by the joint Franco-Pontifical forces at Mentana (1867), was resolved thanks to the fall of Napoleon III (1870); the defeat at Sedan gave freedom of action to the Italian government, which no longer considered itself bound by the September Convention (15 September 1864), which had been followed by the transfer of the capital from Turin to Florence for the surveillance of restless Garibaldianism. On 20 September 1870 the Italian troops entered Rome and Pius IX shut himself up in the Vatican. Still missing from national unity were the territories of Trento, Trieste and Istria.

There remained now, for the completion of the national enterprise, the spiritual and material unification of the young State, which had only its outward form in common. A heavy mass of problems weighed upon the new Parliament, composed of a Right and a Left corresponding to the two main tendencies of all the national movements: the moderate party and the party of action, the monarchists and the republicans. The solution of the financial problem, first in order of time, was the last merit of the Historical Right; the balanced budget was achieved in 1876, indeed surpassed with a surplus of over 20 million; the railway and telegraph networks, powerful means of union, had doubled.

In that year the Right yielded the government to the Left, which had little by little renounced its anti-monarchical program. Agostino De Pretis was the first of the old republicans to don ministerial garb, followed later by Cairoli, Crispi, Nicotera, Zanardelli. The regime of popular sovereignty became more pronounced. But foreign policy was at odds with domestic policy: the latter drew closer to democratic France with gradual extensions of the electoral franchise; the former drew close to the Central Empires through the Triple Alliance (1887), Rome's response to the French occupation of Tripoli.

The ministry of Francesco Crispi attempted (1887-96) a military policy for colonial purposes, but with dictatorial tendencies, culminating in the disaster of Adua. The Socialist Party, officially born in 1892, began with Leonida Bissolati, supported by Felice Cavallotti, a vigorous opposition to any military adventure.

The government responded with exceptional laws and numerous arrests. Crispi had to resign (March 9, 1896), handing over power to a man of the Right, the Marquis of Rudinì. On July 29, 1900, the assassination of King Umberto marked the decline of the old I[taly] and the decisive affirmation of a liberal and democratic government, first with Zanardelli, then with Giolitti, from 1903 to 1914. These were years of strong industrial growth sustained by the bourgeois politics of big business, with an eye also to the working classes, hence respect for the freedom to strike, protection of emigrants, a campaign against malaria, and support for cooperativism, public housing, welfare and assistance institutions, and insurance. In the general economy, large industry, land reclamation, agricultural credit, and the railways were favored. And while the socialist party abandoned its program, the socialization of property, leaning toward a moderate State reformism, the Church softened its claims to temporal power, so that gradually the Catholic masses too entered the social and political arena, counterposing to liberal agnosticism and Marxist materialism the Christian conception of public life.

m) Subversive laws against the Church. - As regards policy toward the Church, it was inspired, as already in the Kingdom of Sardinia, by the principle of separation between the two powers. This was what the Cavourian motto "a free Church in a free State" was meant to signify, whose application could not, however, fail to result in measures contrary to the rights of the Church herself. A beginning had been made as early as 1848 with a law against the Jesuits and the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, who were evicted; and with the establishment of the principle that difference of religious confession should not be an obstacle to the enjoyment of civil and political rights and to eligibility for civil and military offices. With the Siccardi law of 1850, disputes of the clergy of a civil character, benefice-related contests and those concerning Church property and offenses committed by ecclesiastics were subjected to the lay judge, thus abolishing the ecclesiastical forum; the royal placet was imposed in order for religious institutions to acquire new properties. By another law of 1851, so-called "dead hand" properties were taxed. In 1852 civil marriage before the public authority was introduced and all legal effect was removed from religious marriage, and marriage thus contracted by persons bound by sacred Orders or by solemn vows was also made valid. By a law of May 1855, juridical personality was taken away from religious Orders, no longer recognized as moral entities; collegiate churches and benefices without care of souls were abolished and an Ecclesiastical Fund was created with their assets for the needs of the Church. The political upheavals of 1859-61, through which among other things the Romagna, the Marches and Umbria were taken from the Pontiff and the Kingdom of I[taly] was proclaimed with Rome as its capital, increased the grounds for discord, all the more so since the Piedmontese legislation was extended to all the territories (and also to the Veneto after 1866), more or less modified according to the localities, without any regard for ecclesiastical authority. Special laws in 1866-67, completing the previous ones, had as their principal object the suppression of religious Congregations, without however preventing the members of individual institutes from continuing their common life, forming private societies without legal property and recognition. And as such they continued to exist or organized themselves afterward, placing the properties they managed to redeem or acquire under a regime of private possession. Only parishes were recognized the right to possess immovable property; for the Institutes recognized as moral entities, and precisely the Roman Church as such, episcopal mensas, seminaries and other institutes for the formation of the clergy, institutes for missions, factory boards, and various foundations for the care of souls; it was established that the properties possessed by them, or to be obtained afterward, were to be converted through the action of the State by registering in the public debt of the State itself an annuity of five per cent in favor of the owning entity. In this conversion, however, thirty per cent was assigned to the Fund for Worship (v.), which partly supplanted the Ecclesiastical Fund; and other burdens were added to the detriment of the ecclesiastical estate, besides taxes and levies. All this, besides creating an upheaval in the entire ecclesiastical order and a distrust among Catholics toward the new regime, led to the withdrawal of Catholics themselves from political life, which was intensified by the occupation of Rome (1870), which opened the Roman Question (v.), and it came to be held as a rule of conduct the "non expedit", that is, the inopportuneness of electing and being elected in political elections (hence the maxim: neither elected nor electors); an inopportuneness that was very soon authoritatively interpreted as unlawfulness. In Rome the laws in force in the Kingdom were applied, and it was intended to provide for public relations between Church and State with the Law of Guarantees (v.), of May 13, 1871.

The lay spirit took new courage after the constitution of the unified Kingdom, thanks also to the constant work of Freemasonry (v.); in 1875 the theological Faculties in the universities were abolished, in 1877 religious instruction was removed from secondary schools, and even in elementary schools it was gradually hindered with often contradictory prescriptions, attempting even to exclude from teaching any minister of worship. In the field of charitable works, so numerous and well endowed, the government interfered with particular ferocity in order to strip them of any religious character and to exclude in many cases the ministers of worship. This happened particularly with the law of 1890, by which priests were excluded from the Congregations of Charity established in the individual municipalities with the assets and revenues of pious benefactors and already placed under the supervision of the Church. This triumphant laicism, which cloaked itself in patriotism and always showed itself to fear a restoration of temporal power, went so far as to proclaim, in the name of science, the Church the enemy of progress and liberty. It is no wonder, therefore, that grave difficulties were created for those initiatives and associations that proposed the defense of the age-old religious tradition and that, by virtue of the proclaimed liberty, could not be officially impeded or suppressed. Matters proceeded thus until the First World War, when, thanks to the loyalism of Catholics and the merits of the Holy See, it was thought that it was indeed posit was possible to reach an understanding with the Italian State, and it was in this spirit that the Lateran Pacts (v.) could be reached.

n) The 20th century. — The beginning of the century saw Italy driven toward a foreign and colonial policy that culminated in the occupation of Libya and the Dodecanese (1912) and in Italian participation, once Austria's obligations under the Triple Alliance had been violated, in World War I (v.). This war, while it restored the country almost fully within its natural and ethnic borders, marked, with the consequent impoverishment and with the difficulty of reinvesting in peacetime life the enormous number of demobilized men, the beginning of a series of agitations; while the governments attempted to put an end to these with the conception of various social welfare measures and by letting the momentum of the popular masses run its course (Giolitti), the Fascist movement (v. FASCISM; MUSSOLINI, BENITO) arose, formally as a non-Marxist revolutionary force, but with a strongly nationalist orientation.

The weakness of the ministries of the time, the reluctance of the Popular (v.) and Socialist Parties to assume the responsibilities of government, and the king's fateful repugnance to proclaiming a state of siege, led to the so-called "March on Rome" and to Mussolini's premiership (28 Oct. 1922).

Fascism in power, after a period in which it seemed willing to share the direction of public affairs with certain democratic parties, assumed, taking as its occasion the events that followed the assassination of the Hon. Matteotti, the character of a single party, dissolving or forcing the opposition parties to dissolve, and then tirelessly continuing the work of eliminating political adversaries (Special Tribunal, etc.). In domestic policy it distinguished itself by a series of measures of a social character and, despite its attitudes and ideologies, often in conflict with the doctrine of the Church, as has been pointed out several times by Pius XI (cf. in particular Non abbiamo bisogno: AAS, 23 [1931], pp. 285-312), by the reconciliation with the Holy See (v. LATERAN PACTS); in foreign policy, by revisionist attitudes toward the peace treaty and by an expansionist tendency, especially in the colonial field. Salient expressions of this policy were the war against Ethiopia (1936) and the annexation of Albania (1939). The isolation in which Italy found itself drove the Fascist government into close collaboration with National Socialist Germany and with Japan, and into the conclusion of a treaty of military alliance (the so-called "Pact of Steel," 1939), following which Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940 alongside Germany (v. WORLD WAR, II).

The activity of the anti-Fascist parties, which had not ceased, in Italy and abroad, to keep alive the spirit of opposition to Fascism, and the unfavorable course of military operations, finally moved the Crown to an act of force; taking as its occasion a vote of the Grand Council of Fascism that had put Mussolini in the minority, the King forced the latter to resign (25 July 1943), entrusting the premiership of a government of technical figures to Marshal P. Badoglio. That government found itself under the necessity of continuing for the moment the war alongside Germany and of negotiating at the same time with the United Nations for the cessation of hostilities. The news of the signing of the armistice of Cassibile, disseminated on 8 Sept. 1943, gave rise to a German reaction, which concluded, a few days later, with the occupation of a considerable part of Italy (as far as Naples), with the liberation of Mussolini and with the establishment by him, in northern Italy, of the so-called Italian Social Republic (28 Sept. 1943).

Some of the members of the legitimate government, following the King and the Crown Prince, found refuge in southern Italy. Once war had been declared on Germany (15 Oct. 1943), it was obtained that the United Nations, also in consideration of the loyal fulfillment of the armistice obligations, would accept the limited collaboration of the Italian armed forces, recognizing for Italy the status of co-belligerent.

In the Italy occupied by the Germans the anti-Fascist Parties, having constituted themselves as the National Liberation Committee, waged a violent struggle against the occupier and its Fascist satellites; the history of the Italian resistance has notable and obscure events, which saw united all those — priests, soldiers, partisans — who did not wish to bow to foreign and domestic arrogance; who contributed, by their sacrifice, to the achievement of total liberation, brought about by the victory of the armies of the United Nations (Apr. 1945).

The same Parties had obtained from King Victor Emmanuel III the commitment to retire into private life after the liberation of Rome (4 June 1944); his son Umberto, with the title of Lieutenant General of the Realm, exercised the royal prerogatives until his father's abdication (9 May 1946). Following the commitment equally assumed by the king, on 2 June 1946 the elections were held to decide on the institutional form of the State; elections that gave the majority to the republic. The Constituent Assembly, appointed by simultaneous vote, drafted the Constitution of the Italian Republic, which was promulgated on 27 Dec. 1947 (v. REPUBLIC).

III. ECCLESIASTICAL ORGANIZATION.

The ecclesiastical organization of I. consists of 288 dioceses, which comprise: a) Rome; b) the 7 suburbicarian Sees; c) the 18 conciliar Regions. The dioceses are listed according to the Annuario Pontificio of 1951.

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I. ROME

The Bishop of Rome is the Pope, Vicar of Jesus Christ, successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the universal Church.

II. SUBURBICARIAN SEES: ALBANO; FRASCATI; OSTIA; PALESTRINA; PORTO and S. RUFINA; SABINA and POGGIO MISTETO; VELLETRI.

III. ABRUZZESE CONCILIAR REGION: a) immediately subject: archdioceses: L'AQUILA; dioceses: MARSI; PENNE-PERCARA; TERAMO and ATRI; TRIVENTO; VALVA and SULMONA; b) Metropolitan: 1) CHIETI with the suffragan: VASTO; 2) LANCIANO with the suffragan: ORTONA.

IV. BENEVENTAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) immediately subject: nullius abbey of MONTEVERGINE; b) Metropolitan: BENEVENTO with the suffragans: ALIFE; ARIANO; ASCOLI SATRIANO and CERIGNOLA; AVELLINO; BOIANO-CAMPOBASSO; BOVINO; LARINO; LUCERA; S. SEVERO; S. AGATA DEI GOTI; TELESE or CERRETO SANNITA; TERMOLI.

V. CALABRIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) immediately subject: archdioceses: CATANZARO; COSENZA; ROSSANO; dioceses: LUNGRO for the Italo-Albanians; MILETO; S. MARCO and BISIGNANO; SQUILLACE; b) Metropolitan: 1) REGGIO CALABRIA with the suffragans: BOVA; CASSANO ALL'IONIO; GERACE; NICASTRO; NICOTERA and TROPEA; 2) S. SEVERINA with the suffragan: CARIATI.

VI. CAMPANIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) immediately subject: archdioceses: GAETA; dioceses: AVERSA; nullius abbey: MONTECASSINO and ATINA (prelature); nullius prelature: B.MA VERGINE MARIA DEL S.MO ROSARIO or POMPEI; b) Metropolitan: 1) CAPUA with the suffragans: CAJAZZO; CALVI and TEANO; CASERTA; ISERNIA and VENAFRO; SESSA AURUNCA; 2) NAPLES with the suffragans: ACERRA; ISCHIA; NOLA; POZZUOLI; 3) SORRENTO with the suffragan: CASTELLAMMARE DI STABIA.

VII. EMILIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: dioceses: FIDENZA; PARMA; PIACENZA; b) Metropolitan: 1) MODENA and NONANTOLA, with the suffragans: CARPI; GUASTALLA; REGGIO EMILIA.

VIII. TUSCAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: archdioceses: LUCCA; dioceses: AREZZO; CORTONA; MONTALCINO; MONTEPULCIANO; PIENZA; nullius abbey: MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE; b) Metropolitan: 1) FLORENCE, with the suffragans: COLLE VAL D'ELSA; FIESOLE; MODIGLIANA; PISTOIA and PRATO; S. MINIATO; SANSEPOLCRO; 2) PISA, with the suffragans: APUANIA; LIVORNO; PESCIA; PONTREMOLI; VOLTERRA; 3) SIENA, with the suffragans: CHIUSI; GROSSETO; MASSA MARITTIMA; SAVONA-PITIGLIANO.

IX. LATIAL CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: dioceses: AQUAPENDENTE; BAGNOREGIO; CIVITA CASTELLANA; ORTE and GALLESE; MONTEFIASCONE; NEPI and SUTRI; TARQUINIA, formerly Corneto Tarquinia, and CIVITAVECCHIA; VITERBO and TUSCANIA, formerly Toscanella; ALATRI; ANAGNI; AQUINO, SORA and PONTECORVO; FERENTINO; SEGNI; TERRACINA; SEZZE and PRIVERNO, formerly Piperno; TIVOLI; VEROLI; nullius abbeys: S. MARTINO AL MONTE CIMINO; S. PAOLO FUORI LE MURA; SANTI VINCENZO E ANASTASIO ALLE TRE FONTANE; S. MARIA DI GROTTA-FERRATA; SUBIACO.

X. LIGURIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Metropolitan: 1) GENOA, with the suffragans: ALBENGA; BOBBIO; CHIAVARI; LUNI (LA SPEZIA); SARZANA and BRUGNATO; SAVONA and NOLI; TORTONA; VENTIMIGLIA.

XI. LOMBARD CONCILIAR REGION: a) Metropolitan: 1) MILAN with the suffragans: BERGAMO; BRESCIA; COMO; CREMA; CREMONA; LODI; MANTOVA; PAVIA.

XII. LUCANIAN-SALERNITAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: archdioceses: AMALFI; dioceses: CAMPAGNA; CAVA and SARNO; MELFI and RAPOLLA; nullius abbey: S.MA TRINITÀ DI CAVA DEI TIRRENI; b) metropolitan: 1) ACERENZA and MATERA, with the suffragans: ANGLONA-TURSI; POTENZA; TRICARICO; VENOSA; 2) CONZA, with the suffragans: LACEDONIA; MURO LUCANO; S. ANGELO DEI LOMBARDI and BISACCIA; 3) SALERNO, with the suffragans: ACERNO; DIANO-TEGGIANO; MARSICO NUOVO; NOCERA DEI PAGANI; NUSCO; POLICASTRO; VALLO DI LUCANIA.

XIII. MARCHIGIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: archdioceses: ANCONA and NUMANA, formerly

Umana; CAMERINO; dioceses: ASCOLI PICENO; FABRIANO and MATELICA; FANO; JESI; OSIMO and CINGOLI; RECANATI and LORETO; TREIA; apostolic administration: LORETO; b) Metropolitan: 1) FERMO with the suffragans: MACERATA and TOLENTINO; MONTALTO; RIPATRANSONE; S. SEVERINO; 2) URBINO with the suffragans: CAGLI and PERGOLA; FOSSOMBRONE; MONTEFELTRO; PESARO; S. ANGELO IN VADO and URBANIA; SENIGALLIA.

XIV. PIEDMONTESE CONCILIAR REGION: a) Metropolitan: 1) TURIN with the suffragans: ACQUI; ALBA; AOSTA; ASTI; CUNEO; FOSSANO; IVREA; MONDOVÌ; PINEROLO; SALUZZO; SUSA; 2) VERCELLI, with the suffragans: ALESSANDRIA; BIELLA; CASALE MONFERRATO; NOVARA; VIGEVANO.

XV. APULIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: dioceses: FOGGIA; GRAVINA and IRSINA, formerly Montepeloso; MOLFETTA; GIOVINAZZO and TERLIZZI; MONOPOLI; NARDÒ; TROIA; nullius prelature: ALTAMURA and ACQUAVIVA DELLE FONTI; b) Metropolitan: 1) BARI, with the suffragans: CONVERSANO; RUVO and BITONTO; 2) BRINDISI, with the suffragan: OSTUNI; 3) MANFREDONIA, with the suffragan: VIESTE; 4) OTRANTO, with the suffragans: GALLIPOLI; LECCE; UGENTO; 5) TARANTO, with the suffragans: CASTELLANETA; ORIA; 6) TRANI and BARLETTA, with the suffragans: ANDRIA; BISCEGLIE.

XVI. ROMAGNAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: archdioceses: FERRARA; b) Metropolitan: 1) BOLOGNA, with the suffragans: FAENZA; IMOLA; 2) RAVENNA, with the suffragans: BERTINORO; CERVIA; CESENA; COMACCHIO; FORLÌ; RIMINI; SARSINA.

XVII. SARDINIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Metropolitan: 1) CAGLIARI, with the suffragans: IGLESIAS; NUORO, formerly Galtellì-Nuoro; OGLIASTRA; 2) ORISTANO, with the suffragans: ALES and TERRALBA; 3) SASSARI, with the suffragans: ALGHERO; AMPUTIAS and TEMPIO; BOSA; OZIERI.

XVIII. SICILIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: archdioceses: CATANIA; dioceses: ACIREALE; PIANA DEGLI ALBANESI for the Italo-Albanians; nullius prelature: S. LUCIA DEL MELA; b) Metropolitan: 1) MESSINA, with the suffragans: LIPARI; NICOSIA; PATTI; 2) MONREALE, with the suffragans: AGRIGENTO; CALTANISSETTA; 3) PALERMO, with the suffragans: CEFALÙ; MAZARA DEL VALLO; TRAPANI; 4) SIRACUSA, with the suffragans: CALTAGIRONE; NOTO; PIAZZA ARMERINA; RAGUSA.

XIX. UMBRIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: archdioceses: PERUGIA; SPOLETO; dioceses: AMELIA; ASSISI; CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE; CITTÀ DI CASTELLO; FOLIGNO; GUBBIO; NOCERA UMBRA; NORCIA; ORVIETO; RIETI; TERNI and NARNI; TODI.

XX. VENETIAN CONCILIAR REGION: a) Immediately subject: archdioceses: TRENTO; dioceses: BRESSANONE; UDINE; b) Metropolitan: 1) VENICE, with the suffragans: ADRIA; BELLUNO and FELTRE; CHIOGGIA; CONCORDIA; PADUA; TREVISO; VERONA; VICENZA; VITTORIO VENETO; 2) GORIZIA and GRADISCA, with the suffragans: TRIESTE; CAPODISTRIA.

IV. JURIDICAL CONDITION OF THE CHURCH.

1. In the pre-Concordat period the idea had already gained ground that the Catholic Church, in the face of the Italian political order, was not a private association regulated by common law (a thesis upheld by the so-called separatists), nor a public entity of the State (a thesis upheld by the lay jurisdictionalists who advocated a centralization of religious organizations within the State), but that it was to be taken into consideration just as it stood in its own order with its historical and traditional position. Consequently the prevailing opinion in doctrine was that the Church was recognized as an institution of public law, that is, as a subject to which legal relations carried on within Italian public law refer, for the satisfaction of collective interests which, however, the modern State does not consider as belonging to the State. After the entry into force of the Lateran Pacts (v.) no further doubts can arise concerning the subjectivity, for State public law, of the Church, and it has been authoritatively specified that this is « a wholly special subjectivity which some have thought they could approximate, with some degree of approximation, to that of foreign States » (Del Giudice). The wording of the first part of art. 7 of the new Constitution of 1948 confirms and, if possible, accentuates the opinion referred to above, since if « the State and the Catholic Church are, each in its own order, independent and sovereign », it is clear that the State considers the Church « in its constitutional unity, as an institute separate and extraneous to itself, endowed with original sovereignty in the pursuit of its own ends, with which it can enter into relations of external law and therefore conclude conventions of an external order ».

2. The prevailing doctrine and case law deny, on the other hand, to the Church private-law capacity in Italian law for various reasons, among which the principal ones are the following: 1) that the Church was not recognized as a legal person of private law even by the legal systems of the former Italian States and that such recognition was not granted to it subsequently; 2) that art. 831 of the current civil code (analogously to what was provided by arts. 433 and 434 of the 1865 civil code) recognizes the holding of patrimonial relations by individual ecclesiastical bodies, but not by the Church in its unitary complex, and that art. 29 lett. a of the Concordat, in the illustrative listing of the ecclesiastical bodies that had retained private-law personality, makes no mention whatsoever of the Church. Although the question has no practical aspect, given that private-law personality is expressly recognized to the Holy See, one cannot fail to note how, in the light of the Lateran Pacts and of the constitutional provision recalled above, the Church presents itself, before the Italian legal order, with the typical characteristics attributed by canon law, and, therefore, first of all can. 100 § 1 must be recalled, which lays down that the Church has moralis personae rationem ex ipsa ordinatione divina.

3. Nevertheless, as has been said, the dominant doctrine recognizes to the Catholic Church subjectivity for Italian public law, inferring it, besides from the governing principles of the concordatory order and in particular from the commitment contained in art. 1 of the Concordat (« Italy assures to the Church the free exercise of its jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters »), from various provisions of positive law, by which the most relevant aspects of the Church's power of supremacy relating to the regulation of religious interests are taken into consideration.

From arts. 1, 31 and 34 of the Concordat and from art. 7 of the Constitution it is gathered that the State leaves the Church free to issue legal norms and that such norms are relevant also for the Italian legal order, provided they do not contradict the regulation laid down by the State. This does not exclude that, where the necessity is found for an adaptation or adjustment of the norms referred to the referring law, additional or secondary norms may be established which, although formally traceable to the will of the State, may derive either from an autonomous self-determination of that State, or from commitments which that State entered into in the external order (concordats). Without entering into the theoretical controversy, still lively among writers, as to whether the recognition of the Church's power of government (potestas iurisdictionis) takes the technical form of renvoi or of recession or of a general recognition for matters not regulated by State law, it seems that emphasis should be placed on a peculiarity of the concordatory system, namely that the relations which are formed within the ambit of the canonical order, unlike those arising in foreign legal orders (provided they concern matters remitted to the exclusive competence of the Church), present themselves for the law of the State as legally relevant relations, independently of an explicit reference by the State law itself. Thus art. 31 of the Concordat admits a relevance of canonical acts relating to the erection of new ecclesiastical bodies, and on the basis of such erection their recognition for civil effects will follow. Likewise, certain manifestations of will or of knowledge of the organs of the Church in the exercise of their administrative power acquire the capacity to produce further effects in our legal order: art. 5 of the Concordat not only provides that the precondition for the validity of the act of admission of an ecclesiastic to a public employment is the « nulla osta » of the diocesan Ordinary, but that « the revocation of the nulla osta deprives the ecclesiastic of the capacity to continue to exercise the employment or office taken up ». Art. 9 of the Concordat specifies that « buildings open for worship are exempt from requisitions or occupations »; art. 10 that one cannot « proceed to the demolition of buildings open for worship, except upon prior agreement with the competent ecclesiastical authority »; art. 19 that « the choice of archbishops and bishops belongs to the Holy See »; art. 21 that « the provision to ecclesiastical offices belongs to the ecclesiastical authority »; art. 26 that « the appointment of the holders of major and minor benefices and of whoever temporarily represents the see or the benefice has effect from the date of the ecclesiastical provision ».

In all the abstract hypotheses mentioned, the legal order of the State directly takes into consideration canonical acts which are connected to the exercise of powers proper and exclusive to the Church.

4. Specific consideration is then merited by the norms which recognize full effect in Italy to the manifestations of knowledge (attestations) of ecclesiastical organs in the exercise of the potestas iurisdictionis (art. 8 of the law of 27 May 1929, no. 847; art. 2714 of the civil code; arts. 29 lett. 1, 30 last paragraph of the Concordat), since, if certifying activity is a typical external manifestation of the administrative function exclusively reserved to the public officials of the State, it is truly indicative that concordatory law has explicitly recognized an analogous probative effect to acts performed within the canonical order by ecclesiastical officials, acts which — as has been exactly specified — have a unitary character, however different the canonical relation may be which, through them, comes into contact with the State legal order and however different the effects that follow upon that contact (Giacchi).

5. It is still controversial in doctrine whether the concordatory legislation has recognized to the Church a jurisdictional power in the proper sense.

Since there can be no doubt about the legitimate faculty of the Church to judge controversies relating to matters of an ecclesiastical nature and to the exercise of disciplinary power, the problem that has divided secular doctrine is whether the exercise of that faculty presupposes recognition by the State of a true and proper ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The term jurisdiction must here be understood in the technical sense of state law, that is, « the function whose purpose is the realization of the concrete will of the law through the substitution of the activity of public organs for the activity of private individuals or of other public organs » (Chiovenda). A first opinion observes that, since the unity of jurisdiction is a fundamental principle of the state legal order, if the Italian legislator had intended to derogate from that regulative principle with respect to ecclesiastical bodies, it would have had to declare so expressly, issuing norms directed at regulating relations between state and ecclesiastical jurisdictional organs and, in particular, conflicts of jurisdiction, lis pendens, etc., whereas the legislator has not provided for the existence of an ecclesiastical jurisdiction even in the codes of criminal procedure and civil procedure subsequent to the Lateran Pacts.

The prevailing orientation of doctrine, moreover, is toward recognizing a jurisdictional power of the Church in the strict sense only in matrimonial matters, on the basis of art. 34 of the Concordat (paragraphs 4, 5, 6) and of arts. 17 and 22 of the law of 27 May 1929, no. 847, whereby the principle of the unity of the State's jurisdiction does not exclude that « by the will of the State itself, to which jurisdiction belongs relatively to its own legal order, this may be exercised, with effects also in the state order, not only by special judges rather than ordinary judges, but also by extrastate or even non-state judges » (Del Giudice).

It seems, however, that recognition of the Church's autonomy (understood as the unconditional faculty of laying down juridical norms in religious matters not regulated by the law of the State) postulates recognition of all activities inherent in the exercise of that same autonomy and therefore also of the function to which is entrusted the power to apply abstract norms to concrete cases. Particularly indicative, in support of the thesis of recognition of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in all matters reserved to the Church's autonomy, seems to be art. 23, 2nd paragraph, of the Treaty, which reads: « the judgments and measures issued by ecclesiastical authorities and officially communicated to the civil authorities, concerning ecclesiastical or religious persons and relating to spiritual or disciplinary matters, shall without further ado have full juridical effect, also for all civil effects, in Italy ».

6. However the aforesaid norm, inserted by evident systematic error in the Treaty rather than in the Concordat, may be interpreted, it is clear that the Italian State, after 1929, has recognized in the Church an exclusive disciplinary power that postulates — substantially innovating the system of art. 17 of the Law of Guarantees — the obligation of the State to give effect to ecclesiastical measures and judgments in the matter and to declare its own lack of competence with respect to any actions brought in this same matter before the civil courts.

From what has been summarily set forth, it follows that the positive Italian law in force recognizes in the Catholic Church its position, its traditional structure and therefore the power to issue juridical norms, to grant, suppress or modify rights in ecclesiastical matters, to give life to concrete manifestations of will and of knowledge in the exercise of the administrative function (power of supremacy), to judge controversies among its members, to ascertain and punish offenses committed by its officials. It follows that the Church presents itself, before the Italian legal order, as a person of public law with the same characteristics and the same purposes attributed by the canonical order in which it arose.

7. A problem connected with that concerning the juridical condition of the Church in Italy is whether the law in force recognizes the Catholic religion as the religion of the State. As is well known, the Albertine Statute of 1848, in art. 1, expressly sanctioned that « the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion is the sole religion of the State » and that « the other cults now existing are tolerated in conformity with the laws ». That enunciation was expressly recalled by art. 1 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which reads: « Italy recognizes and reaffirms the principle consecrated in art. 1 of the Statute of the Kingdom, whereby the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion is the sole religion of the State ». In addition to that express declaration, the Concordat and other subsequent state laws contain various provisions from which a juridical situation of favor for the Catholic religion is inferred, even if, as has been authoritatively observed, it remains very far from the ideal of a Catholic State cherished by the Church. Art. 36 of the Concordat affirms that « Italy considers the teaching of Christian doctrine according to the form received from Catholic tradition as the foundation and crown of public instruction »; art. 29, letter i, prohibits and punishes the abusive use of ecclesiastical dress. Moreover, the already mentioned arts. 31 and 34 of the Concordat indicate the profound difference of treatment accorded to the Catholic religion as compared with the other cults. That difference emerges, likewise, from the law of 16 January 1936, no. 77, which, in art. 1, establishes that « the service of spiritual assistance with the armed forces of the State is instituted in order to integrate the spiritual formation of the youth that forms part of the militias according to the principles of the Catholic religion », as well as from arts. 402-405 of the penal code, which provide for and punish the crimes of vilification of the religion of the State, offenses against the religion of the State by vilification of persons and by vilification of things, and the disturbance of religious functions of the Catholic cult. Art. 406, in confirmation of the aforementioned difference of treatment, establishes that the facts provided for above (with the exception of mere vilification) against a non-Catholic cult are punished with a lesser penalty.

Following the promulgation of the new Italian Constitution, which abrogated the Statute of 1848 and which, in arts. 8 and 19, not only sanctions the principle of the equality of all confessions before the law, but specifies that « all have the right to profess freely their own religious faith in any form, individual or associated, to propagate it and to exercise its cult in private or in public, provided that it does not involve rites contrary to good morals », the abrogation of the norm recognizing a religion of the State has been maintained by some authors and by some jurisdictional bodies. In confirmation of such an opinion it has been observed that during the proceedings of the Constitution the proposal of the deputy Gennaro Patricolo, directed at having the Catholic religion declared the « official religion of the Republic », was not taken into consideration, and that the Hon. De Gasperi himself (already then President of the Council), in the sitting of 25 March 1947, stated verbatim: « we, if it is necessary, at the appropriate moment, are prepared to vote with you to remove from the penal code any humiliation of minorities »; which has been interpreted in the sense that the content of art. 1 of the Statute would be in conflict with the programmatic and ideological principles proclaimed by the Constitution, which would represent « a complete text not integrable by reference to other texts ».

It has been objected that "the Lateran Treaty conferred not on art. 1 of the Statute but on the principle enshrined in it a further and different validity, that of an international juridical norm," and that "for the purposes of this new norm, by which Italy bound itself toward the Holy See to treat the Catholic religion as the official religion of the State, the continued validity of the royal Statute or its abrogation, even total, became substantially irrelevant circumstances" (Lener). The same author later specified that "in the Lateran Pacts that principle, already isolated, generic and by then uselessly solemn in the Statute, is integrated by a series of concrete determinations, of direct and consequential applications, which make the religion of the State also a true and complex juridical institution, around which all the other institutions of the new systematic ordering of ecclesiastical matters in Italy gravitate."

The Court of Cassation, by decision of 16 January 1950, laid down the principle that "the Constitution, while proclaiming the equal freedom of all religious confessions, premises that relations between the State and the Catholic Church are regulated by the Lateran Pacts, whereby the principle established in art. 1 of the Treaty between the Holy See and Italy is constitutionally recalled, according to which the Catholic religion is the sole religion of the State."

Although it must be noted that, even in the face of the aforementioned problem, the new constitutional Charter shows a lack of organic coherence derived from the fact that the opposing political orientations did not find, in the legislative travail, that higher synthesis which alone ensures the enunciation of univocal programmatic principles, examining the problem under discussion on the basis of the various norms recalled above and in particular in the light of art. 7 of the Constitution, one cannot fail to recognize that the Italian positive legal order has taken the Catholic religion into consideration as juridically preeminent over all other religious confessions and that, consequently, art. 1 of the Treaty, which took up an enunciation already contained in the abrogated Albertine Statute, is still in force with all the relative consequences.

Pietro Gismondi

V. LITERATURE.

1. THE ORIGINS

As long as the classicist method of the search for excellent form prevailed in the study of Italy's literary monuments, Italian literature was ranked third among the classical literatures, after Greek and Latin, and as such and because it was such it was studied, not only in Italian culture but in the rest of Europe, for the needs of a didactics of art that prescinded from any historical justification. It had not been the first in order of time among the vernacular literatures of the new Europe; but the order of time counted little or nothing, apart precisely from a historical justification; and its critics and its rhetoricians quickly disposed of all that "medieval," Gothic and barbarous baggage, which did not demonstrate sufficient and evident connections with the dictates of good taste educated in the study of the ancients.

To study the origins means, in any case, to prepare oneself to understand the first conditions of a living organism; and the words that were first spoken, in the new Italic vernacular, throughout the thirteenth century, took their place in a world that opposed to the theoretical and practical affirmation of universalisms the most punctilious and tenacious defense of particularisms. We shall not assert outright that the encounter and complementarity of universalism and particularism is destined to be forever the character and mark of Italian literary civilization: certainly it was a theme never again forgotten; and its method, which calls the person to overturn the abstractness of theoretical and practical affirmations into the concreteness of individuated reality, links back to that first encounter. If there was a century invaded by universalistic affirmations, it was the thirteenth. While the Islamic power that had half a millennium earlier shattered Mediterranean civilization was declining, there advanced that Mongol invasion which overflowed from Asia toward the West, and touched Silesia and the Adriatic, before dissolving in Europe and becoming static in China. The Empire, around Frederick II, seemed to regain decisive force and to base on a firmly organized state organism its prerogatives over the political conduct of the Christian world. The Church with Innocent III had extended its spiritual and moral guidance well beyond the northern boundaries of Romanity: above all it had expressed from its bosom those religious Orders of the Mendicants, Franciscans and Dominicans, which called the multitudes to a far more intense participation in the charismatic life than seemed to have occurred through the schemes of feudal society. Beside the Church and the Empire the civilization of the thirteenth century knows a third institution, the school, which with the Parisian Studium seems to complete the triad, and to distribute among the three great nations of the West the direction of a universal conduct of life: to the Italians the priesthood, to the Germans the Empire, to the French the Studium: institutions that did not already belong to one or another or the third people, but called the peoples to the common good, and substituted the loving effusion of the gift for the pride of possession. At this point Christianity speaks its historically most decisive word: the temptation to spend the treasure of individuality in the genericness of political experiences and intellectual experiences so vast, is great; but the Christian cannot forget that the center of the world is man, the individual man, one by one, not the abstract idea of man, or his dominion over the physical world. The son of a Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, traveled the entire Eurasian continent and advanced in honors at the court of the monarch of the widest Empire, Qubilai Khan, before returning to Italy and mingling in the city wars and suffering Genoese imprisonment. But the son of an Assisi merchant, having rejected the temptations of chivalric adventure and of the adorned life, crucifies himself to the Cross of Christ and proclaims perfect joy in willing acceptance, and unlimited freedom when the bond of bodily pain seems tightest, and the brotherhood of all creatures, daughters of God: the vastest dominion falls to Francis of Assisi.

And his is the Canticle of the Creatures: historically, the first document of a poetics in the Italic vernacular that recognizes for itself the right to expressive universality: which at the height of liturgical prayer, the doxology, proposes the simple and immense formula of a dialect phrase: «Laudato sì, mi Signore». The scanty earlier testimonies of a vernacular language used for literary purposes, apart from whatever may be accidental in the survival of this or that document (but by recognizing absolute value to chance one can do statistics, not history), testify to a certain hesitation. The other European literatures: Scandinavia, France, Provence, had already expressed themselves in memorable works: saga, epic, love lyric; and this firstborn among the nations of Europe remains loyal to that Latin which does not belong to her more than to the others, by now reduced to the cipher of an intellectual language, the «grammar», wonderfully suited to the needs of doctrine, but also for this reason alien to that process of individuation which belongs to poetry. Scarcely documented, before the year 1000, are, in the Latin placiti, formal testimonies, which in order to be understood had to be pronounced in the vernacular, and popular songs and proverbs recalled by the chroniclers. It is almost always a matter of a Latin culture, classical, scholastic, which occasionally opens itself to the expressions of a vernacular and marginal culture. The perspectives change in the 12th century, with the Ritmo of a Tuscan jester, who at a bishop's court asks for the gift of a horse, and, perhaps later, with the Ritmo cassinese, which proposes to devout listeners the spiritual contrast between the man of the East, ascetic, and the man of the West, carnal. Military life and castle life receive less attention in I., where culture turns, instead, to group life and civilization is civic: by contrast, the equilibrium between Latin culture and vernacular culture is realized within the circle of ecclesiastical life. In this sense too the beginning of the new literature falls to the Canticle of the Creatures, which calls man, man alone, and for what he is, not aided by the class to which he belongs, but by nature and Grace, to participation in the universal life, among the other creatures that praise God, for which he too praises Him. And the mark of style, through which the intensity of poetic life is measured, is defined in the arduous process of translation, imitation, meditation, upon the scriptural texts.

The figurative arts rush tumultuously into this space opened by the Franciscan message; and throughout the Renaissance they will never again forget their religious justification: so much so that they remember it even later, as of a lost paradise. Literature, through the very prevalence in it of those intellectual values to which scholasticism recognized autonomy of method, proceeds to more circumspect acquisitions. And while a Franciscan literature continues, Latin and vernacular at first, later and then amply summarized in the stupendous prose of the Fioretti, while the tumultuous participation of the people and of the confraternal companies in religious life is expressed in the songs of the Laudesi, along the religious «revivals» that pervade the whole Duecento, and is summed up in the Laude of Iacopone da Todi, the vernacular attempts new acquisitions. Here what matters are not chronicle notices and critical verifications, but historical perspectives, in which to place individual works: therefore, after having indicated the center of the new literature in the life of the Christian people which expresses with new words the search for God and His praise, other searches and other understandings are noted, often complementary to that one, because every act of human life was, in that custom of the Italian Duecento, understood in its transcendental justification, and in any case never isolated in the pride of self-sufficiency. Moralism and mime alternate: the one reflects the demand for universality, the other the taste for the particular: a mirror, this encounter too, of the antithesis that animated the whole civilization of Europe. Moralism belongs rather to northern Italy, and one sees it boldly and ascetically fashioned in the work of Uguccione da Lodi; restlessly mocking in that of Gerardo Patecchio; prolonged to the end of the century in the very broad work of intentions and shrewd in stylistic rendering of Bonvesin da la Riva. Mime, which almost always escapes literary documentation, since it centers on the improvisation of a performance that bends to the occasional needs of an assembly, and is embodied in the very body of the actor, is a constant of that poetry. Francis of Assisi has recourse to a poetic technicality, whether he entrusts to Brother Pacificus, «king of verses», the task of turning to the praise of divine Love the profane songs said for love of a woman, or whether he himself intones songs in the vernacular of France and in the vernacular of I.; and to a directorial technicality, when he institutes the crib of Greccio, initiating a form of popular dramaturgy that will develop among the Laudesi. Mime accompanies, limits and oversees all the expressions of learned poetry, almost as if demanding an account of genericizing evasions: not for nothing do we see it, in the anthology of Sicilian poets or in the center of I. with Ruggeri Apuliese da Siena, introducing the ironic and realistic counterpoint by which the conquests of high lyric will be accompanied.

For it is of this that we must now speak, before observing the whole varied and manifold life summed up in Dante's work. The Provençal example, of a splendidly modulated poetics, versed in the customs of an aristocratic society, was most effective: but the mimetic demand to observe the environment and to circumscribe it, and to evaluate concretely, within the group, the correspondence of the word, leads to the search for and the definition of the circle. Frederick II offers his court: an ideal environment, to be sure: those poets referred to the imperial curia as to an ideal place of gathering, from whatever part of Italy they came. But the most authentic among them (their leader Iacopo da Lentini, called the Notary), promoted a higher understanding, and in the modes of the Provençal school sought an original form. The very invention of the sonnet, destined to be, alongside and more than the canzone, the prosodic and metrical frame of so much Italian lyric poetry, orients the new taste toward a precious psychological fragmentism, and guides one to secure value for sentimental intimacy in itself, independently of the courtly canons that solemnized the lyric of love. And through poetic practice the language is refined, is modulated on the omnipresent model of Latin, which remains the language of doctrine and a constant reference even for vernacular literature, goes beyond municipalism, and takes shape in a national «koiné». The teaching of that first great Sicilian season of illustrious literature was never again lost, even when, after the decline of the Swabian dynasty, the center of culture shifted toward the north. Around Guittone del Viva of Arezzo a poetic school formed, attentive to the mediation of doctrine and to the intellectual tradition: until with Guido Guinizelli of Bologna the new poets become aware of their destiny, called to express lyrically a loving dominion over all reality. The religious inspiration, which had remained implicit, expresses itself explicitly in the new poetry, and the language of love is also a form of officiation, not entirely profane, of eternal truth.

In the canzone Al cor gentil repara sempre amore the first Guido boldly declares the universality of the amorous investiture, and already prepares himself for judgment before the throne of God; and the program of the Stil Novo receives from it direction and meaning. The faithful of Love of the Florentine school, which follows in his footsteps (Dante calls him his father and the father of the other better rhymers of love than he)

and on the example of the second Guido, Cavalcanti, offer to the new people of Italy, through lyrical inventions, the proclamation of a life open to the totality of spiritual presences, religious and Christian. But in confirmation of the breadth of such experiences that the lyric boldly affirms in the direction of the religious spirit, almost hastening, within the circle of the laity, indeed from the common people, to the verification of the Franciscan message, and keeping pace with the forms of profane poetry (profane only insofar as it accepts to move toward divine Revelation in response to human solicitations), we shall not forget three works that declare the very broad circle within which move the spiritual interests of the new civilization, at the sunset of that immense century. One is in Latin, in that Latin of Italian usage, full of vernacular locutions, and wholly vernacular in syntax, attentive without intellectual preoccupations to the vicissitudes of men and things: the Cronicon of Salimbene da Parma, a Franciscan friar, whom the richness and gladness of a new life open to a message of joy brings into the spectacle of Italy's ruinous strife. The other, in French, is by a merchant who, in the footsteps of the Franciscan missionaries Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William of Rubruck, in order to reach Qubilai Khan, traverses all of Asia, sojourns in an Orient of historic marvels, and brings back to Europe the news, but more the sense of an immense human space that is given to the individual man to fill: the Milione of Marco Polo. But in the vernacular is the third book, the Novellino, a collection of facts, legends, and anecdotes, gathered from every quarter, which from the vast world, from the distances in time and space, brings everything back to the cautious, harmonious, most limpid Florentine intelligence.

2. HUMANISM AND RENAISSANCE

The Novellino, then, like the Stilnovism, also leads back to Florence; and from so vast a horizon, from frequenting all the life and all the experience of the world, from participating, actively making concrete, in all the proposals of medieval universalisms, one is reduced, in order to decide the new fate of the word, to a civic circle; but civic civilization is the civilization of Italy. Florence is not a hegemonic city: its political power is mediocre, and even its economic power is notable rather for its multiplicity and extent than for the mass of its commercial investments: besides, in the Italy of that time everything unfolds through the energy of spiritual presences, and to deny the calculation of forces, the arithmetical measure of the real. That provincial city of the march of Tuscany decides, instead, to have an immense part in the drama of the age. Very close to the court of Rome, where, as the overbearing power of the barons of the countryside declines, the Tuscans assert themselves under Nicholas III and Boniface VIII, and financially powerful at the court of the Capetians, it has a part in the transfer of the Curia to Avignon: a circumstance most important in the history of the Italian fourteenth century, insofar as it indirectly favors philological technicality and political technicality. And when Henry VII of Luxembourg attempts an imperial restoration, still beneath the walls of Florence, besieged in vain by the emperor, there is confirmed what Italian particularism already knew since Legnano and now rediscovers with a clearer decision: that the new life will have to unfold around individuals who little tolerate abstract, chivalric, and feudal investitures, who demand to understand what they are and to live in their own way within a limited circle boldly observed to the very end. From then on, and until the civilization of the Renaissance reaches its extreme conclusions, everything destined to be alive in Italy passes through Florence, and there is tested, takes shape, and is found again, in the light of that lively intelligence, in that animated encounter of contemplative and active men.

Nor need one repeat what was already clear in the culture of the origins, that nothing is alive in Europe that is not re-observed and welcomed in Italy. From then on the message of the new civilization, the new forms of understanding established among people through the language of words and images, the new custom that takes shape behind the new words, radiate from Florence.

But Florence decides as a political organism, as a sphere of practical interests, as a city where a language and a custom are celebrated: the ultimate destiny belongs to man alone; and the epoch of universal decisions that depend on the choice of men alone began with Francis of Assisi, the Poverello. He who truly decides for Florence, and in a certain sense for all those who speak a language that is still hers, wholly alive with him in the intimate lips of its connections and in the most remote echoes of its meaning, and which we have learned from his imagining and from the rhythm of his drama, is Dante. And just as his itinerary will be from the earthly city to the infernal city and to the celestial city, "from Florence into a righteous and sound people," from exile to the empirical homeland, so not only is his poem an epic of man and a dramaturgy of the universe, but it is a Florentine chronicle. If the whole life of the century converged upon Florence, the whole life of Florence is individuated in Dante. The whole life, mark you: natural and supernatural; and Dante becomes the demiurge of that history precisely and solely because he is not content to be a participant in history, does not return from an abstract experience to an abstract proposal (like those who claim to secure human life for history while prescinding from the person), is not merely a praxis or merely an intellect; although the measure of his active participation in things is superabundant in him, and prodigious is his intellectual light; but because he decides for a total life, aided by Grace and by reason, and by Revelation led back, through the experience of the whole natural and supernatural life of men, to its legitimate term, the contemplation of God. Indeed, from the Commedia there begins in the civilization of I. the prevalence of the poetics of vision, with the stupendous luxuriance of the figurative arts; and again from the Commedia, with its possession of the past and present world and of reason and ancient culture, understood as a summit of excellence upon which the message of Christ has descended in the fullness of time, the new Humanism emanates. Nor could the poetics of the person, proposed by Dante who guides man on his journey of the Cross toward the glory of God, ever later be entirely forgotten (not even in times of rhetorical classicism, when it was thought that the exercise of art sufficed unto itself, not even in times of realism, when the task of poetry was believed to be the recording of external reality).

Here has arrived, after him who opens it, the time in which this word, Humanism, becomes explicit. If we have retained, in entitling the paragraph, the traditional hendiadys, Humanism and Renaissance, it was not because the first were not enough to define the movement of the new civilization. But first of all in order to understand better that this epoch is a chapter of a perennial Christian humanism, which refers back to the dogma of the divine integration of the human with a clarity and an insistence perhaps unknown neither before nor after. Secondly, so as not to forget that this is a partial and complex application of the Pauline meditation on the new Adam, who is reborn in Christ and through Christ: a chapter of that immense yearning for renewal that in the second millennium invests the whole of life. Finally, so as not to neglect the traditional indication, which with the word "humanism" more willingly indicates the philological aspect of that historical phenomenon which in the word "renaissance" (and "renovatio" and "reformatio") is observed in an ontological acceptation. The dualism of the first millennium, which had sometimes flowed into a violent Manichaean opposition, is optimistically reconciled. Already Thomism had restored a dignity to nature, albeit lowered by sin, and had restored to reason the right to arrive by its own means, if not at the possession of being, at an intellectual notion of truth, and to ancient philosophy the glory of having touched the thresholds of Christian Revelation. But the new literature, and all the culture that follows from it, declares itself ready to re-elaborate an image of man in the fullness of his regained dignity. The program is implicit in Dante: we shall not say that it is forthwith concordantly understood and applied by Italian men of letters: on the contrary, if we wish to seek a documentation, entrusted to art, of this vast tendency, we shall rather have to follow the vicissitudes of painting and sculpture (and more of the former, because of its character of immediate translation of the datum of visibility, which it could learn from Dante). Literary culture lingers in drawing the consequences of Alighieri's poetics. On one side it is prolonged in a more provident search for Latin expression, in a better archaeological knowledge of antiquity, in an acquisition of the classical world, a world of excellent forms, and ends by forgetting the original complementarity of classical culture and Christian life, the former understood as the "limbo" of the latter, as a dignified but melancholy waiting for the fullness of time: this is archaeological and philological humanism, directed toward the document or the repetition of the formal datum. On the other side Florence maintains the leadership of vernacular culture, willingly reducing every novelty to the measure of a somewhat finicky and circumscribed sphere of city life, or insisting on a stylistic technicality worth not much more than an artisan tradition. Throughout the fourteenth century and for a good part of the fifteenth, Florentine literature, almost bypassing the second and third of the trecento's "three crowns," Petrarch and Boccaccio, remains municipal (albeit sometimes with the supple grace of Franco Sacchetti, author of very sprightly novellas and very graceful canzoni a ballo); and it balances itself in the discussion on the pre-eminence of Latin and the vernacular; until it rediscovers precisely in its municipalism — when philological humanism has completed its parabola — the freedom and breadth of genial inventions, in the last years of the fifteenth century, with Luigi Pulci, with Lorenzo de' Medici, with Angelo Poliziano. Meanwhile the rest of I., always orienting itself toward Florence, goes on acquiring the sense of the new literature.

Everything is measured for centuries by sighting the new forms in comparison with Dante: Petrarch and Boccaccio themselves, with a work of immense genius and very broad efficacy, hold themselves almost within a thematic variation at the outer limits of Dante's work. The Canzoniere continues the stylism and, through the elaboration of the love poetry of Cino da Pistoia, suspends elegiac meditation in a vague reflection of waiting, of melancholy, of transfiguration: still the itinerary of Beatrice from earth to heaven, in Laura alive and in Laura dead. But the religious problematic of the passage is echoed rather than suffered, meditated rather than individuated: and the Trionfi abstractly repeat the story from Love to Eternity, with the image of a life that passes beneath decorous and emphatic arches, with encounters of long processions of illustrious men. If Petrarch adorns himself and vanishes into the elegiac indistinct, even while taking refuge in prayer, Boccaccio links himself back to the narrative prior to Dante in his minor works, develops it with great boldness, welcomes and solemnizes the themes of the Novellino, and finally attempts the antithesis of the Commedia in the Decameron: a human comedy, indeed, not directly suffered, but viewed from afar, sad and happy cases, various vicissitudes in the vast world, disconsolate precipices of misfortune and joys of merry senses, recounted by the "ten" who take refuge in a villa to escape the plague. Both, outside the vulgar sphere, aimed at a more solemn dignity of study, attending to the cultural organization of philological humanism; both had a very high dignity of thought, the one recalling Platonism and St. Augustine in the most assiduous readings of men of letters, the other celebrating poetry as divine word. Both suggested to Italian civilization two modes that were very frequently followed even many centuries after them: the one, the wise and gentle play of feelings eluded in melodic effusion; the other, the norm of realistic observation, detached from any moral commitment, grasped in the relation of comic play: melodrama and comedy, though two centuries were needed for such forms to become common currency. The history of the poetic images of Italian literature is always very long, and must be followed through assiduous transpositions: among us there does not exist that fervent and tense attention which allows prompt assimilation, and perhaps imposes the superficial persuasion of works soon accepted, soon exhausted, and diverted from their secret life.

The literary culture of the Quattrocento opens a dualism between humanistic culture and popular literature: far less pronounced, in the act, than it may seem to one who wishes to establish a dialectical opposition between the two themes, expecting that the literature of the Cinquecento will reconcile the thesis of the poetry of the people with the antithesis of humanistic literature, in the synthesis of Cinquecento formalism or polygraphism. The philological and archaeological doctrine of the Italian humanists lays the foundations of a literary culture and of an educational method proposed, and through the Italian example diffused, to all of Europe. Lorenzo Valla defines more completely than anyone else the modes of the new requirements of the Latin language (it was a matter of a choice that extracted from Latin literature, anthologically, the best, responding to the taste of the golden age) and also in philosophy proposes a generic syncretism, on the foundation of a renewed Epicureanism. But Vittorino da Feltre, with quite another depth of moral life, arranges the new pedagogy, avoids the excess of scholastic intellectualism, harmonizes physical aptitudes and the education of taste, and on the foundation of a lovingly observed Christianity tempers individualism with the demands of social life. Centers of new culture multiply throughout the peninsula; and the academies of Florence, with its predominantly philosophical bent, of Rome, with more lively archaeological and historical preoccupations, of Naples, where poetry is the more active study, orient the diverse preoccupations of scholars and ensure the multiplicity of directions, with the concord of everyone's ready attention to the intellectual life of each. Patronage too, which assures to literature and culture (previously left to the free initiative of cities and monastic Orders) the sometimes heavy protection of the court and of politics, spreads in this time: a solution certainly historically imposing to the problem of the relations between diffused culture and social life. Printing is the means devised to multiply participation in cultural discovery; the typographic workshops founded everywhere diffuse religious texts and classical texts. The foundation of the new culture and the proposal of a humanity that integrates Christian Revelation with the treasure of ancient intelligence spreads from I. to Europe.

But the dualism of philological humanism of strict classicizing observance (dualism of pagan culture opposed to Christian Revelation; of classical forms preferred to forms of the vernacular tongue) is nothing but a polemical phase; quite another breadth and importance is assumed by the proposal to arrange the two elements for a process of integration: the new man, if he is enriched by the treasures of ancient wisdom, is nothing but a Christian more richly sharing in life. This is understood by observing how transitory is the intransigence of the followers of pure Latinity: the pedantic humanist who takes refuge in his Latin and his Greek to escape the assaults of contemporary custom and morality soon becomes ridiculous; even when philological and philosophical humanism does not become an incendiary machine against Christian society. In I. there prevails an accord of common sense and good sense, which seek to avoid extreme proposals; nor can it be forgotten, in I., that the discovery of the ancients had been reached through the work of great vernacular poets, and that a rich vernacular culture had preceded a rich classicizing culture, and not vice versa. The ease with which Florentine culture of the late Quattrocento succeeds in being Greek, Latin and vernacular at the same time demonstrates the direction that the history of culture is about to take; and the new poetic inventions become even more fruitful at Ferrara, where the existence of a centuries-old dynasty, of chivalric traditions, and a certain Gothicizing archaism promote on an even broader basis the understanding of the new syncretism. At the court of Ercole I, one of the most provident and thoughtful princes of I., the taste for romance readings, for the poems and tales of France, is set alongside the readings of the classics, promoted by Guarino Veronese, a master of classicism for the whole of Ferrarese culture; and the Este poets, from Boiardo to Ariosto, go on summarizing in harmony a dream of amorous and warlike adventure.

In these years, between the enterprise of Charles VIII and the sack of Rome, between 1494 and 1527, occurs the catastrophe of the civic civilization of I. which, clashing against the great unitary States guided by a national dynasty (France and Spain), fails to save its independence. The political crisis of I. grows immeasurably in the crisis of Europe, indeed of the world: a religious crisis, which divides Christian "politics," while the traditional enemy of the East, Islam, organizes itself as a state in the inheritance of Byzantium; an economic crisis, which the great geographical discoveries, the discovery of America, the sea passage to the Indies, European oceanic dominion, overturn every traditional arrangement. I. finds itself at the head of European culture, but with the most serious indictment, promoted by the facts, of an absolutely inadequate political preparation. Moreover, it finds itself faced with unforeseen consequences of its own words; and suffers the fate that befalls its hero, Christopher Columbus, who sets out to discover new lands where to spread the faith of Christ, and unleashes the most gigantic contest of egoisms the world has ever seen, entire continents opened to the greed of adventurers without restraint or law; who returns from his voyages in chains, after having liberated so much space; who places the experience of his art as a navigator of the Ocean Sea at the service of human knowledge, and unwittingly closes his own country within an inland lake, laid waste by the fleets of the Barbary pirates. For his destiny is to live, and Italy lives; and even in literature, precisely in those years of the nation's decadence, it makes the proposal of a culture of the people and offers the fruits of its civic civilization and its humanism to a national civilization. The impulse of imagination and of the word multiplies: the new writers speak to the people of the nation, no longer to the rulers of a single city: Florentine civilization becomes Italian. Niccolò Machiavelli attempts the founding of a political technicality that may work the miracle of saving Italy from the barbarians; he does indeed renounce the transcendental justification of political life as moral life, he takes a step backward by confining the operations of the State within the limits of an immanent praxis, but he takes a step forward by assigning to the life of the nation a dignity of faith and hope. Ludovico Ariosto, whom Cervantes calls a Christian poet, in that whirlwind of war dreams of an adventure harmoniously and providentially recomposed in peace, accepts the old inheritance of the Empire as a graceful frame within which to bring his amorous warriors safely to port, inspires a generous trust in men, beyond evil and strife, ranges in fantasy across the world, and recomposes it in peace in the dignity of a noble and prudent word. Baldassarre Castiglione, who as ambassador of the Pontiff to Charles V could not prevent the sack of Rome and died of it, proposes the model of a life attentive to everyday gestures yet lofty, capable of drawing harmony and dignity from the perfection with which small things are observed and brought to their natural end.

With them literature leaves the limits of the humanistic and civic individualism of the great fourteenth-century writers: truly Erasmus of Rotterdam's departure from Italy marks a turning point in the history of European culture. But not even Erasmus, diligent as he was in opposing Luther's nationalistic deviations and in preserving the Catholic values of tradition and reason, foresees that the next phase of European culture belongs no longer to an intellectual aristocracy that speaks Latin and watches over the customs and beliefs of all while guiding the responsible leaders, but to the peoples with their needs of concrete life, with their different languages and various customs. It is along this path that Italian culture sets out; and its forerunner is that Teofilo Folengo who, humanist and philosopher, gentleman and friar, sets against the Ciceronian elegances of Valla no longer the shrewd syncretism of Erasmus, but the plebeian vitality of his macaronic epic. The first European imitators of Italian humanistic literature, including that in the vernacular, from the Marquis of Santillana to Geoffrey Chaucer, thus from the Iberian feudal lord to the English bourgeois well regarded at the king's court, had sought to learn models of more refined elegance; but certainly they had not permitted themselves to go beyond the boundaries of medieval vernacular literature: the pastime of a class life, within the limits of very well defined occasions. But the new literatures of their peoples welcome the word and the intention of sixteenth-century Italian literature, even if partly deprived of its native elegances; they welcome its poem, its novel, its novella, its theater, in the most immediate and most effective expression: they welcome more readily the vernacular translations than the original forms. With some delay relative to sixteenth-century Italy, the peoples of Europe move toward national and popular literatures: Spain first and then England: with a slower process France, which has to assimilate or abandon the immense inheritance of its medieval vernacular literature. This is the most imposing phenomenon of European culture: the rise of national literatures on the example of the literature of Italy: and the process is not finished until Romanticism brings Germany and Russia too into European culture.

The chronicle of Italian literature during the Cinque-

the sixteenth century, from Machiavelli, Ariosto and Castiglione to Torquato Tasso, with whom the new modes of the Baroque age become a consciously suffered experience, has less importance, although the anthology of it is very rich. Prevalence of polygraphs: writers, often by profession, who offer to a very active book market, of European importance, the works that can have the most success. On the other hand there are works, such as Benvenuto Cellini's Vita, that seem to detach themselves entirely from any historical justification, and reflect the most unconstrained inspiration of a spontaneous posturing under the direct impulse of a rich nature. Finally, as regards culture kept under academic surveillance, we have the most circumspect compositions, elaborated according to the canons of a very rigorous didactics of art, which was being elaborated, also in application of the new literary criticism. But it would be nothing but partiality or historiographical prejudice to repeat for the literature of the sixteenth century the usual accusation of inertia, of classicizing conformism, of scant life. A judgment that has a long history: from the Protestant and Enlightenment polemic, aimed at condemning every work that arose within the sphere of the culture of the Catholic Reformation, to the Romantic polemic, anything but inclined toward those who accepted being defined by the modules of a formal intelligence and a classical tradition, to the historians of the Risorgimento who willingly connected political decadence with literary decadence. But a judgment no truer for being more repeated; and the life of the word was rarely so fervent as then. The very opposition of language and dialect attests to it: that swarming of particular linguistic forms could arise only when the national language had completed its evolutionary process toward the stability and dignity of literary codification. The dialects are a gift of the literature of the people-nation: without the intention and the play of antithesis they would not have that character of polemic, of adventure, of undisguised ease in discovering a minor reality. And, still on the subject of language, it should be observed how precisely in the stylistic exercise of the lyric poets — hastily grouped under the designation of Petrarchists, or rather, after their head of school, a great man of culture, a great politician of literature, and a theorist of language and of Platonic love, the Venetian Pietro Bembo, founder of vernacular classicism, called outright Bembists — the scheme of the Petrarchan verse and its lexicon are turned toward a most subtle invention of poetry. Della Casa, Galeazzo di Tarsia, Tansillo, to arrive at the stupendous inventions of Tasso, are great lyric poets, and exquisitely define the truth of an image that moves through suggestions of encounters, gathered in an arcane meditation: nor would European lyric poetry, between Góngora and Shakespeare's sonnets, around the revolution of the French Pléiade, be historically comprehensible without them. For an equally large space, more frequented by popular attention, the novellieri turn: Bandello offers innumerable themes to the narrative and dramatic literature of Europe; and Straparola inaugurates the fairy tale, preluding those magical adventures that go beyond the Baroque in search of Romanticism. And still from the sixteenth-century I. there spreads through Europe the literary and moral dream of Arcadia, inaugurated by a Neapolitan, Sannazzaro (v.), who lived through the catastrophe of the Aragonese dynasty and of the independence of the Kingdom: a «place» more than a form of literature, this Arcadia, which from the Spain of Montemayor passes to the England of Sidney and Shakespeare, and likewise throws a bridge toward Rousseau and Romantic Europe. Finally it is here, in the sixteenth-century I., that the historiography of the new Europe is founded; from Guicciardini, who in the course of the Italian wars sees the premises for a more complex conception of statism, to the romantic curiosities of the historian of Europe Giambullari. And from historiography is born political doctrine, just as from historiography and political doctrine the diplomatic technique grows: the humanistic solution of literature, an enhancement of man, serves to assure the plant-man of I. of being exemplary even when political conditions are adverse; and Italian is the pedagogical systematization of culture.

Finally, three ideal places are indicated by this sixteenth-century culture, to serve as mediation between the invention of the word and the reflection of custom: the court, the theater and the academy. The court, a sign of excellence of living and of the political conduct of the State, gathers remote ancient and medieval inheritances, but is codified in the Renaissance I., precisely while the importance of the States of the peninsula declines and it introduces the courtly civilization of Baroque Europe and the model of aristocratic society. The theater, more open to popular attention, mirrors the requirements of elegance and selectness of the court, which contributes so much to its formation, but carries the inventions of art among the people. Finally the academy sits to guard the humanistic literary tradition, catalogues excellent works, gathering around them the historical and linguistic notions that illuminate them, and selects the exemplary and imitable forms.

3. THE BAROQUE AGE

During the Baroque age Italian literature seems to detach itself from common life and to continue apart the repetition of its most characteristic motifs. The intellectual unity of Europe, an immense task accomplished by the Middle Ages, had indeed been the premise of Humanism; and the cultural hegemony of I., in its fertile centuries, had confirmed that belonging. But as the sixteenth century declined, Italian culture, even if still celebrated and admired, could rely less on itself. And yet one cannot, after the recent studies that have removed the stale conception of a mortal Italian decadence following the Renaissance, dismiss with a hasty mention an epoch that may have expressed itself in forms other than literary ones (the architectural language and the musical language are exercised over a territory far vaster than the literature and the painting of the Renaissance itself: in reality, they have welcomed into themselves the themes elaborated in other expressive forms), but that unfolded with stupendous coherence and that allowed the recovery of an intact fecundity of spiritual life, at the advent of the Romantic age. Here we are led to cross the limits of traditional periodization. As long as one spoke of secentismo or even of marinismo, one certainly gave up writing history, but one could consider oneself justified in the condemnation: in order to welcome into a unitary intelligence the new inventions of language, it is necessary to leave behind the political and formalist convention of «decadence», and to broaden the perspective. The Baroque age begins when sixteenth-century literature becomes, as has been seen, popular and national; and it ends by passing over into Romanticism: although the Enlightenment and encyclopedic intellectualism believed it had liquidated forever, in the name of the lights and of reason, the rights of fantasy in opening the way, and illuminating it for others, toward being. And yet it must be recognized that in I. the ancient stupendous unity of artistic research, so permeated with moral life, gives way, on account of that easy naturalization of Christianity in custom. Morality and fantasy separate: the one supervises the life of relationship in a rigid norm of the licit and the illicit, and in the observance of the rule; the other unleashes itself in an adventure that risks at every step losing every documentable relation with reality.

More universal than any other form of encounter, than any other ideal "place" for an understanding among people, is the theater: which from its very origins seems to contain within itself the necessity of its destiny and orients itself toward the aspects that the Baroque age would see codified and diffused. It had begun with comedy; and they had barely arrived at the founding of a true and proper theater, at establishing a language and a custom, when the first Italian comic playwrights, Ludovico Ariosto, Niccolò Machiavelli, Pietro Aretino, Angelo Beolco marked out a road that was to be traveled for centuries. If Ariosto begins in a highly literary manner with the open and loose formula of the Suppositi, where the tricks of the servants still recall the ways of the jongleur, Ruzzante, who begins precisely from jonglerie, arrives at the studied, classicizing restraint of the Anconitana. Here we are not concerned with the catalogue of comedies, from the anonymous Ingannati, enormously successful throughout the theater of Europe, to the Candelaio of Giordano Bruno, overflowing with humors and virulence, where the author invades the stage pursuing the masks of his own phantoms, with an excess, perhaps, of words. Literary comedy takes on color from the artisanal inventions of the commedia dell'arte players, who nonetheless from that comedy have learned the scheme and the relationship of serious and comic characters, so that the mimetic language may be understood and the play of improvisation made possible; and parallel to the entry of Neapolitan actors into the companies of the commedia dell'arte, toward the end of the sixteenth century, is the influence exercised by Neapolitan comic playwrights, among them Della Porta. The other form of Italian theater of the Baroque age escapes from the word toward music, just as comedy escapes from the word toward mime; and we speak of it because in contact with music the word now denatures itself, now enriches itself. Men of letters like Rinuccini, Rospigliosi, Zeno, testify that theater in music accepts the aid of intelligence; and the "poet" (in reality librettist, because the authentically poetic interpretation of the subject belongs, in the theater of the Baroque age, to the musician) establishes a relationship between the word and music that can no longer be forgotten, if it is true that the "poetic" word, from then on, becomes saturated with music, and becomes wholly song-like: such in the eighteenth century Italian theater would appear to Burney. And finally tragedy, which in the custom of the theater is replaced by melodrama, maintains its own literary tradition. Tragic works of great note are printed, more than they are performed, throughout that age: from the Orazia of Aretino to the Giulio Cesare of Pescetti, from the tragedies of Federico della Valle, wonderful for religious inspiration and deep intensity of moral life, to the Aristodemo of Dottori, to the Merope of Maffei, to the dramaturgies of Gravina, Martello, Conti. It is precisely of dramaturgy that we must speak, that is, of reflective construction, of an organic proposal entrusted to the word, without too much concern for the journey it will make among people, entrusted to stage fortune. On the other hand, precisely this attitude of literature saves for Italian culture the possibility of opening itself, whenever it may be, to the great literary dramaturgies of England, Spain, France, which had not known the extreme, intimately logical theatricality of the theater of the commedia dell'arte and of opera, and had remained more faithful than the Italians to the mission of the word.

We would propose, in order to facilitate for the summary the understanding of a world as complex as the one that Italian literature goes on promoting and illuminating, to look also at a geographical distribution of literature. Humanism could tend to free itself from overly strong ties to places, but the popular civilization of the Baroque certainly cannot forget, for the sake of abstract reason, concrete nature; and from nature come the images with which the imagination nourishes itself, images now obliviously accepted, in a trust that the Renaissance had recommended, now suspected, for a more scrupulous control of their effects. The ideal center of Italian literature now shifts toward the south: the Neapolitan Academy had arranged a culturalistic justification; it had fallen to the precursor Sannazzaro to indicate in the fiction of Arcadia the ideal meeting place between literature and nature; and the "Neapolitan" group of Petrarchist lyric poets already brings into the elaboration of Petrarchan themes a novelty of invention more freely abandoned to the suggestions of feeling and image. Of his Sorrentine birth there certainly remembers

Torquato Tasso, whom the traditional biographical picture always pushes back to the north, between his Bergamasque father and the Florentine origins of his mother and his first blessed and then fateful stay in Ferrara. But here too nature is stronger than culture, if indeed it need not rather be said that, through the wretched vicissitudes of a life so painfully suffered, Tasso realizes that meeting of native fantasizing impulse and of historical and rationalistic academicism, which allows the immense fortune of his work. That culture, that academicism, despite the misgivings and doubts, knew how to open themselves, then, to new messages. Through Tasso the two great themes of the new culture become Arcadian escape and heroic escape: Aminta, precisely, and Gerusalemme; but the Arcadian escape is composed into an exquisite, most musical cadence of elaborated harmony, through which every suggestion is forgotten of an impetuous and tremendous nature, or indeed diabolical, as it appears in so many zones of northern naturalism; and in the sacred exploit it intends the sign and the guidance of Providence: "e sotto i santi segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti." The idyllic conception of nature remains firm awaiting Arcadian codification: a Chiabrera, who touched all poetic modes, as if to anthologize them, varies only their formal experiences; and the mixture of romantic adventure and history, the great Tassian novelty, awaits nothing less than Romanticism. In the meantime, through Giambattista Marino and the Marinists, the center of the observation and reading of poetry shifts from tradition and reasonableness to imagination: differently anticipated by the theorists of the sixteenth century, founders of the new justifications of literature, the Marinist lyric poets accept that the poetic word be outright metaphor. Evidently this passage, that is, the justification of imagination, and the validation of art, not insofar as it is reduced, through the process of variations, to reason, but insofar as it "invents," through metaphor, new correspondences and discovers the previously hidden realm of "marvels," awaits Vichian theorization. It falls to Vico in fact to summarize, by theorizing them, all the valid motifs of Baroque culture: and ideally he joins it to Romanticism. Certainly one must abandon the interpretation, by now outdated, that limited him to the opposition to Cartesian intellectualism, and that other, more widespread, that makes him the discoverer of modern immanentist idealism: for the results of modern investigations, of Vico's Catholicism one cannot put in doubt the attitude of sapiential philosopher and historian of Providence. But here let it suffice to observe him as a summarizer of so many salient themes of Italian literature of the Baroque age: literature of the people, prevalence of the sentimental and the fantastic, allusiveness of metaphor and historical life of the image: it is through him that history also welcomes the life of the imagination.

Meanwhile, the tradition of solemn literature, often reduced to a grand manner, was not dying out. Its center is Florence; and it is to Florence that the respect for authenticated and classicizing forms, the guardianship of the purity of the language, and an immediate and rather unreflective harmony of literature and reason, achieved diplomatically by recognizing whatever was reasonable in the traditional, all lead. It is to Florence that the tradition of civic lyric poetry, aimed at the celebration of solemn subjects, leads: the Ferrarese Testi and the Pavese Guidi, around the Florentine M. Filicaia. In Florence the tradition of historical or political studies is maintained, along with that particular concreteness of acute and circumspect observation that was the inheritance — one might say the methodological inheritance — of the Florentine historians, prolonged in the Venetian and Piedmontese political writers. But interests were broadening in the meantime, and if an Aretine who lived in Florence, Vasari, became an art historian, it is still to the ideal canon of Tuscan historiography that the great historians of the age lead, even in their very different dispositions: from Baronio, father of ecclesiastical history (he was, in fact, of the Oratory, very close to that St. Philip Neri who, with a stupendous ease and a marvelous ingenuousness of faith, knew how to nourish Catholicism with the language of the Florentine intellect), to the documentary precursor of Muratori, the Modenese Sigonio; from Paolo Sarpi, though so inflamed with political vehemence in his polemical historiography, and certainly more open to the tendencies of intellectualism than to a religious problematic, to the other historian of the Council of Trent, the highly documented and most attentive Sforza Pallavicino. And it is still to Florence that scientific prose leads, developing organically in an uninterrupted tradition: if fable-making and the discovery of nature's marvels had, at the decline of the Renaissance, kindled the hermetic prose of Leonardo, around Galileo Galilei a literary notation of scientific discovery is elaborated, which is worth far more, as an acquisition of nature and a marvelous fullness of art, than the Arcadian adventures; down to Redi and Magalotti, these are the idyllic and epic writers of scientific prose. Yet the picture of Tuscan culture would not be complete without taking into account a regional and municipal accent that this culture preserves. The guardianship of the Florentine language and diction, entrusted to the Accademia della Crusca, is never deprived of academic games and innocent pastimes; and literary and philological erudition, between Borghini and Salvini, maintains a tone of cheerful sprezzatura; and Michelangelo's nephew, Buonarroti the Younger, sums up with stupendous versatility the grand-ducal culture, both in his work as an academician and in the marvelous comedies of the Tancia and the Fiera.

A different discourse must be made when the center of the perspective of literary historiography shifts toward Milan: for the inheritance of Lombard moralism, which had spoken its word in the origins and had remained as if submerged in the political catastrophe of the Duchy, rises again with the decline of Spanish rule. Carlo Maria Maggi, between the Senate and the schools of Brera, between the friendship of Vico and the panegyric of Muratori, marks and interprets this renewal: whose most authentic expressions are not in the illustrious language and style, which Maggi nonetheless interprets with adequate polish, but in dialect. The taste for the circumscribed circle and for the observation of custom will no longer be lost, after the example of his lyrics and his comedies; and Parini will be affected by it, even amid the solemn commitments accepted and pursued by his illustrious muse. Parini, in fact, succeeds in bringing back among the people, to a concreteness by then lost of observation and analysis, the most solemn tradition of Italian literature. On the one hand he (who sets out from Arcadia, and who has learned so much from the stylistic and moralistic transformation of the so-called eighteenth-century renewal, and proceeds already from Frugoni to Bettinelli, to Cesarotti, traversing in his tireless and most attentive work the entire literary development of the eighteenth century) links himself to the academicism of the grand manner; but on the other, "first painter of the costume of the gentry," he attends to that reality of things seen, of circumspect notations, which with the grand manner seems and is not in contrast: for the contrast is resolved in Parini into a spirited comic play. Nor should one forget, among the themes that most animate Milanese society in the eighteenth century, the social, economic and political preoccupations of that most active patriciate: around the Verri brothers, Cesare Beccaria and the periodical Il Caffè a new fervor of intellectual life, of freely assumed responsibilities, manifests itself; and encyclopedic intellectualism, with its practical concerns and its anti-traditionalism, predominates there. Parini avails himself of everything; and it is still upon such a prepared environment that the poetic, historical and moral revelation of the Romantics will descend.

On all sides one perceives the rise of this energetic and active moral life. Has the Baroque age, then, set? And is this eighteenth-century renewal nothing but a phase of the prevailing rationalism, victorious after the predominance of sentiment and imagination between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? So it would seem to one who reflects that it is, after all, a movement of aristocratic and intellectual minorities, averse to Baroque populism and irrationalism. In reality, the poetics of sensationalism is far more reducible to an intention of conciliation than to a polemic: it too will in fact serve to prepare Romantic sentimentalism. Absolute monarchies and reforming princes, even in Italy, supported this intellectualism and promoted broad tendencies of encyclopedic culture; but in Italy it remained an episode, except in the political sphere. Enlightened princes, whether directly, like Charles III of Bourbon, or indirectly, through their prime ministers, like Bogino, Du Tillot, Fossombroni, and Frenchifying men of letters (from Ferdinando Galiani to Melchiorre Cesarotti) or Anglicizing and later Germanizing ones (from Gastone Della Torre Rezzonico to Aurelio de' Giorgi Bertola) certainly did not observe the life of the multitudes and the customs native to our country. Catholicism endured at the center of social life, and to it were attuned the language of music (the advent of opera buffa signified a most important turning point in lyric theater, which through it opened to a fresher sensibility, to a more direct observation, and exercised predominant influences on Romantic populism) and the language of architecture: Baroque, even in the rediscovery of reality minutely observed, are the great Venetian painters. The word of Parini (we link ourselves to him once more, to remove every diaphragm between the various forms of art, in a historical perspective that nonetheless centers on literature in order to understand the civil life of Italy: "ut pictura poësis") goes from the Arcadia of the Vita Rustica to the Romantic description of the Notte which, foretelling the new poetry, nonetheless turns its gaze back to the novel of other times "allor che gl'inciti avi eran duri ed alpestri...". And when foreigners come down into Italy, they rediscover the customs of the Baroque age, and marvel that such ready harmony of life in such lively verve of sentiment and intellect is realized without first letting itself be disciplined and admonished by the pedagogic sourness of intellectualism. The same Arcadia, the Roman academy that establishes colonies everywhere, and that gathers all poets in its seats, and the beau monde with them, with its Renaissance heritage, with its pre-Romantic languor, tells how the old, in Italy, flows blandly into the new, without revolutionary clamor. In its easy and undemanding pastoral fiction it continued the syncretistic classical-Christian program of the Renaissance and welcomed naturalists and poets, playwrights and scholars: a kind of immense encyclopedia, spoken rather than written, aimed at the reasonable search for whatever of the past might be useful to the future, and at welcoming well-born persons in a lordly and affable manner.

Finally, returning to the theater, Italian literature accepts this, among its ideal meeting places, in order to attempt new paths. And first with Metastasio it sums up in simple and adorned words how much music that most musical civilization had diffused to the wind, chipping every corner of the country. Then with Goldoni, who starts from an ingenuous and emphatic literary apprenticeship, until he realizes that the tradition of the commedia dell'arte can be modified only from within, through a shrewd attention that transports the mimetic play into a sphere of moral commitment, not proclaimed nor solemnized, but nonetheless sincere and willing, he gives of those customs a most animated image, and sums up in a musical cadence, even more subtle and expert than the melodic abandon of Metastasio, the sense of that life between operas and caprices. Last, with the ambition of new heroic times, Alfieri.

4. ROMANTICISM

The literature of the Baroque age, within these broader limits in which it is placed, had fulfilled worthy tasks; and proposed an assiduous understanding between imagination and custom; and saved and diffused a poetic tradition, keeping alive and active the artistic inventions and the humanistic conception of life itself. But a crisis of culture is felt ever more acutely in the last decades of the eighteenth century, even among us; it seems suspended, while the wars of the Revolution and the Empire cause the last vestiges of feudal Europe to disappear and re-propose a political solution of that popular nationalism which was also an attitude diffused by the literature of the Baroque age in all nations; finally it issues in the literary polemic most widely shared and most important for the customs and moral life of the West after literary humanism: of which it is also, in its depths, an integration. Romanticism, which is kept in view here only in the perspective of the history of Italian literature, entered first into polemic with the intellectualistic and rationalistic interpretation of life and literature, principally represented by French culture; it continued by promoting the sense and sentiment of the life of peoples, guarded by that profound and ingenuous poetic quality that was denied to reflective literatures, and animated the national movements of nineteenth-century Europe; it rose against formal rules and against rhetoric, seeing in classicism the academic codification of the spontaneous inventions of creative poets, and affirmed the freedom and truth of art. Not only was classicist codification breached, but the very dualism of custom and imagination, where in Italy the Baroque poetics had come to a halt, was overcome in the search for a spiritually vaster commitment, where poetry might be a testimony of the whole spiritual life. Nevertheless, a literary polemic bears upon the proposals that seem more urgent or that are more easily understandable; and of the vast program the Italian Romantics, while knowing the ultimate inductions of the metaphysics of art, upheld above all the theme of popular literature; and they accepted that Italy was, as it was, a place of election no longer of academicizing scholars, in search of the canons of abstract beauty, but of all those who saw in poetry an intrinsic form of living, the spontaneous revelation of a rich nature. The consequences that were drawn in the political sphere from this attitude were obvious; and Il Conciliatore, to whose editorship there gave their work, with others, Pellico, Porro Lambertenghi, Confalonieri, Borsieri,

Di Breme, Berchet (who had begun in Italy the Romantic polemic with the Lettera semiseria di Crisostomo) soon fell under suspicion with the Austrian police, who nonetheless had not looked askance, at first, at the attention of this new Lombard culture to the young German literature. Political persecution swept those generous men into the imprisonment of Spielberg and the harsh vigils of exile; and it was an occasion for them to rediscover, in a more dramatic commitment, the Christian sense of life: which, in the days of literary discussions, could have been only an easygoing attention reacting to the easygoing skepticism of sensationalism. By this path too Italian literature re-proposed itself at the center of the moral and historical life of the nation.

But a literary polemic works to ascertain the truth of poetry; and the Italian Romantics had behind them and beside them the authentic texts of that profound renewal which they were seeking; and even of the Conciliatore the ideal animator had been Manzoni, who, however, deliberately did not write for newspapers: Manzoni who stands at the summit of the new literature, and who with a wholly rhetorical amplification (which for that very reason would also have displeased him) can be considered the founder of modern Italian literature. It was Vittorio Alfieri who initiated in I. a proto-Romantic movement that was to develop, through Foscolo, into the Christian humanism of Manzoni: even if he remains immune to certain polemical consequences when, intent on an ideal dramaturgical canon, he escapes into an exalted zone of classicism and political prophetism. It falls to him, in any case, insofar as criticism discerns what is active in his truest words, to initiate in Italian literature that powerful movement which sentimental and operatic individualism transfigured into ethical individualism, and the formalistic humanism of the academic tradition into integral humanism. Alfieri is waiting: for the stirrings of the soul that slowly make their way to light in the gloom of pitiless destinies and in the proud force of opposing wills, «in the clash and impetuosity of tremendous affections» as Parini said, astonished and a little jesting; for a self-aware literature that exalts the dignity of man-the-poet; for the «future Italian people». And the waiting is fulfilled, through the vital experience of the poets who after him, ideally his disciples, arrange themselves in an active process of interpretations. It falls to Foscolo to plunge back into a historical sphere more actively reassumed the Alfierian ideal man, and to surround with pity and with the sense of great declines the story of heroes, surpassing by so much, in depth, the fervent and cordial multiplicity of the literary work of Vincenzo Monti, who nevertheless reintroduces, through ingenious imitations and his incomparable translation, the reading of Dante and Homer. And it falls to Manzoni, who begins where Foscolo ends, from morality and history, to retrace the story of men illuminating it with Christian Revelation, and to seek ever more inwardly the ideals of liberty, morality and truth, which had first appeared on the poetic eve of his youth. The conversion marks, with the Inni sacri, the beginning of an observation of the social world seen in those zones of feeling and of religious life that had previously escaped notice or been neglected; and the Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, which prove, today, a necessary mediation between the Inni and the Tragedie on the one hand, and I promessi sposi on the other, lead back to its Catholic origin that Italian popular custom which so much Protestant and Enlightenment polemic had despised, which Romanticism regards with such a different eye. But Leopardi seems to interrupt that animated concordant ascent. His poetry begins by approaching the heroic dreams and passionate escapes of melodrama, and his philosophy organizes itself according to the schemes and themes of eighteenth-century intellectualism; but it acquires a very different scope when, after the collapse of illusions, it narrows into the refuge of the idyll, into the animated space, into the silences of the cosmos and of human destiny, anxiously questioned. His word, the more it narrows into crystalline form, the more it learns; and in comparison with Manzoni one sees that his message is of solitude, while the message of the other is participation, and the one experiences from within the word as much as the other investigates and attempts from the world of moral life. Italian literature after Manzoni orients itself toward the complementary terms, but still referable to him, of Pellico and Tommaseo: the spiritual tragedy of a moral liberty won in the slavery of a prison generously suffered, and the animated and sensuous acquisition of the created universe, in the work of Tommaseo poet and narrator and historian and reader.

The new culture grows upon the new literature: with an attention to a religious problematic that earlier times had ignored; with a historical and spiritual responsibility that goes beyond all caution. A new criticism forms and tests itself, progressively perfecting its methods reflectively: it links back to Vico, and is enriched by the experiences of all the Romantic literatures of Europe. Indeed, the moral and national commitment of the new literature leads philosophers and politicians to evaluate through the literary document the historical life of the Italian people, which one now attempts to understand in its entirety, and to scrutinize in its spiritual physiognomy; Gioberti and Mazzini, Balbo and Settembrini, Cattaneo and Bonghi, to set some better-known names in facile antitheses, have theoretical and political interests that balance and integrate with the study and practice of literature. New currents, from Hegelianism to positivism, succeed one another upon the first antithesis proposed by Romantic humanism, but the center of the new criticism and the new historiography remains this: a more experienced method of research retries the great documentary compilations of the eighteenth century of Mu-

Muratori and Tiraboschi, and the Middle Ages, which the Romantics regarded as an epoch of election, is scrutinized in every aspect, but one always returns to integrate those proposals. The work of Francesco de Sanctis, which sums up the criticism and literary historiography of the entire century, declines where it resigns itself to the Hegelian wave that submerges Europe for a brief time, and where it repeats the stale historiographical schemes of encyclopedism, but it is incomparably active where it attempts, in the text, the secret of the person. His legacy spreads so as to temper both the assertive positivism of the nineteenth-century epigones, around D'Ancona, and the dogmatism of the neo-Hegelians who, toward the end of the century, come forward to attempt a new synthesis that substitutes idealism for the realism of the positivists. Through this continuation of Romantic criticism, enriched and never overwhelmed by new experiences, modern culture is founded upon a more prudent awareness of the demands of spiritual life and acquires ever more extensively the truth that the poets had enclosed in the synthesis of poetry, awaiting the time when it would make explicit the new word. Manzoni and Leopardi become, far more than names, the poles where the life of the word and, through it, of custom gathers: the pitying participation of the solitary man in the story of all; and the immense solitude of man lost in an impenetrable cosmos.

Somewhat scattered and adventurous, compared with such lofty poetic and intellectual commitments, was the minor literature of the nineteenth century; but it seemed that there was no time, in the wars of the Risorgimento, for the work of poetry. And it was also true that what was now at stake was translating into terms of political and social coexistence that deeper stratum of reality which the word of the poets revealed; and that language and custom had to adapt and rise to the acquisition. Patriotic poetry had begun with a masterpiece: Manzoni's Marzo 1821: the proclamation of Risorgimento nationalism, with its religious, indeed sacral, accent, a restrained emotion, a stupendous dignity of emotion and of daring; it had continued in the poems of Berchet, already more polemical, and therefore tied to the political situation, rather than capable of transforming it by mastering it; it abounded progressively as the century advanced, progressively moving away from its initial religious severity, and it willingly dispersed itself in acclamations and in adventure too easy and more precipitate than suffered; until at the end of the century, once the story of the "Risorgimento" was concluded, it rediscovered in the lyric and epic of G. Carducci, of G. C. Abba, of G. Marradi, and of C. Pascarella, of G. Pascoli and of G. D'Annunzio something of the deep seriousness of the primitive inspiration. Moreover, a decline and a recovery occurs throughout literature in general. Lyric poetry barely knew the Leopardian depths and the daring of Tommaseo, and immediately declines into the historical vignettes skillfully staged and ambitiously celebrated by A. Aleardi; and Giovanni Prati often also produces journalism in verse, when he chases the occasions of the moment. Only beginning with Giacomo Zanella, who relives with religious accent the scientific naturalism of his time, do you perceive that reality is being attempted anew in the deep and in the immense; and, if reality is circumscribed with Vittorio Betteloni and with Emilio Praga, still one learns not to forget that poetic exercise is not something abstract, but a light of truth offered by the word in the world. Thus in Antonio Fogazzaro and in Arturo Graf, at times with ambitions and vain aspirations: thus in Mario Rapisardi, with an emphasis that vainly attempts to regain the Leopardian prodigy from the outside: until in Giulio Salvadori, so humble and detached, after his conversion, from literary cliques, nature and history, which are the two themes of nineteenth-century lyric poetry, are summed up in a sense of the divine and in liturgy. A similar historical line runs through the century in narrative: Manzoni sums up in himself the historical evolution not, we would say, of the genre, but rather of narrative language: and he himself imposes that passage from the historical novel to the psychological novel, to the novel of manners, down to the conquests of verism which Verga knots together, proposing the new canon of a literature committed to a total evaluation and to an effort of absolute objectification. Thus Tommaso Grossi, Giuseppe Rovani, Ippolito Nievo, Collodi, Anton Giulio Barilli, Luigi Capuana extend themselves in an assiduous and circumstantial experience, certainly very fertile. At the end of the century, between Emilio De Marchi and Antonio Fogazzaro, the observation of manners yields to a morally and spiritually highly active problematic. The theater, which had slowly descended from the Alfierian stage to mingle among the people on the example of Goldoni (thus, between the tragedies of Giovambattista Niccolini and the comedies of Giraud, of Nota, of Bon), also attempts, but less frankly than narrative, a vast and communicative expressiveness. Giacometti, Ferrari, Torelli, Giacosa, Giacinto Gallina converge on the exemplary theater of Giovanni Verga, from which the new realist theater of Marco Praga and of Roberto Bracco develops; and they accompany (accompanied, at times) the work of the performers, who make native, that is artisanal and sometimes dialectal, the inventions of the contemporary theater of France.

This nineteenth-century literature, only apparently minor, which swarms with innumerable names and summons social life out of the inertia of inveterate custom to a more active participation, through language, in the life of all, seems at the end of the century to renounce the Manzonian recommendation and to attempt again the grand manner of old and Montian memory. Poetry of a literature that proceeds by peaks and by emblems: the three crowns of the second nineteenth century, Carducci, Pascoli, D'Annunzio, set themselves against, or would like to, the three of the first, Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi: which nevertheless are also prolonged among them, as they had been more or less tacitly perceived throughout the whole course of this new literary history. Add to this the poetic "mythography" vulgarized in Europe, from the romantic epigones to the decadents and Parnassians and symbolists. Foscolo's historicism is at the basis of Carducci's historical poetry; Manzonian realism suggests more than one theme to the Pascolian idyll; and D'Annunzio willingly draws back toward Monti. The fortune of Leopardi has another history: Carducci believed in good faith that he understood him, when he began as his squire and that of the other classics, but he remained on the surface of the patriotic poems; Aleardi had read the Consolivo, and Zanella — the one of the Attichello — still in his own way the Idilli; Rapisardi finally had attempted Lucretius through the lyrics of the Neapolitan period; but the authentic fortune of Leopardi in Italy is more recent: and it begins with the poetics of Giuseppe Ungaretti and with the Ronda. The three do not avail themselves only of echoes, they also conclude the history begun by those: remaining fatally a step behind the goals reached by them. Carducci escapes from the Foscolian proposals, does not resolve himself to that humanism so intimately sorrowful and pitiful, nor does he tolerate the irony with which Manzoni pursues politics and history: his history is an immense theater played in the open air, under the benign eye of the triumphant sun. Pascoli, who has learned much from the spiritualistic tendency of Italian men of letters in the last years of the century (the "knights of the spirit," between Fogazzaro and Matilde Serao), and who takes pleasure in the poetry of mystery, and who returns to a religious frequency in order to elude it in studies on the esoteric and symbolistic spiritualism that he attributes to Dante, is certainly the most daring in his poetic proposals. But D'Annunzio dissolves life into sense and history into dust, although he believes he is celebrating the former with an inexhaustible capacity for enjoyment, and raising the latter to imperial splendors, decorating its deeds with the ruddy monuments of his songs and his orations. Custom immediately takes possession of the proposals of the three. At the basis of the social understandings of the early twentieth century he places precisely Carduccian historicism and polemicism, which in that decline of our history substitutes for authentic religious and moral life the religion of great and inimitable memories, a kind of self-worship of what the people has done in time, the cult of a greatness oratorically exalted. From Pascoli he learns a pathetic trust in sentimental goodness and, remembering Edmondo De Amicis (because even the major poets are read through the minor ones), a hasty reconciliation of socialism and nationalism. Finally, imitating at its worst the "inimitable" D'Annunzio, even the superhumanistic solution is proposed and accepted. The historical course of Italian political life between the Libyan war and the Second World War is, in nuce, contained in what the social and political custom of Italy borrowed from its poets.

A fundamental collection of texts is still the edition of the classic works dedicated to H. E. Signor Melzi d'Eril, Duke of Lodi, 255 vols., Milan 1803-14, known under the antonomastic designation of Classici italiani, followed by the Edizione delle opere classiche italiane del ser. XVIII, 153 vols., ibid. 1818 ff. Among modern collections are the Biblioteca nazionale of the publisher Le Monnier of Florence, from 1843 onward, the Biblioteca di classici italiani of the publisher Sansoni of Florence, from 1855, the Scrittori d'I. of the publisher Laterza of Bari, from 1910, the Classici italiani of the Unione Tipografica Editrice Torinese, from 1911 to 1931, and the Classici Mondadori, of the publisher Mondadori, Milan, from 1934.

For literary histories, these have historical rather than critical value: G. Gimma, Idea dell'I. letterata, Naples 1723, and the very erudite G. Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana, Modena 1872-82, corrected and reprinted from 1787-94; G. M. Crescimbeni, L'Istoria della volgar poesia, Venice 1730-31. To the culture of the Risorgimento belong, promoted by the current of Giobertian thought, and albeit overturning its political orientation, the Storia della letteratura italiana, by P. Emiliani Giudici, Florence 1855, the Lezioni di letteratura italiana, by L. Settembrini, Naples 1868-70, and the Storia della letteratura italiana by F. De Sanctis, Naples 1870-71. The modern collection in which the most active Italian historiographical research has been gathered is the Storia letteraria d'I., by centuries, of the publisher Francesco Vallardi of Milan, from 1868.

5. LITERATURE OF THE CONTEMPORARIES

A diversity is evident between the literature of today, too easily dispersed into dust, and that of a yesterday which extends over centuries: when the great unitary constructions of thought were either explicitly called into question in the discussions of critics or implied by writers no less than by readers; and celebrated meeting places opened up to culture, where the dignity of letters was respected, if not their primacy. The very literature of the Romantic age, insofar as it coincides in time with the Risorgimento and with the political vicissitudes of the unified State, had nonetheless found a center of its own in national politics, and the attention of verism, after the fervors of the early nineteenth century, had meant raising even the humblest characters to the epic of everyone's life. To fix a diversity is nonetheless necessary, and the life of literature is pluralistic: let us therefore try to understand; and may the names of the living, no longer excluded from the encyclopedic review, help to illustrate the vicissitudes of a multiplicity that one attempts to summarize toward a unitary justification.

Literary criticism takes the first place in this review for more than one reason: first of all because it comes forward to pronounce the accessit of literary works, which in other times attempted on their own the fortune of the public. The nineteenth century labored to bridge the gap between the letteary culture. The twentieth century proposes it again, both because of the decline of the bourgeois direction of society and because of the practical necessity of feeding the thirst for fantastic escape of the multitudes of mass civilization: for whom, moreover, the novel or the drama no longer suffice, overwhelmed by the cinema, which is the visual translation of the novel, and by sporting agonism. Criticism attempts to save the values of form and of the moral person, which are out of place among the multitudes. The inveterate order has by now been overturned, and if in Renaissance civilization critical reflection was an occasional fact that followed, when it existed, upon artistic creation, already in Romantic culture criticism had assumed a task of mediation. Finally, it must be recognized, given the refinement of the means at the disposal of literary criticism and given the even statistical extension of critics and of works of literary criticism, in comparison with other forms of writing, it seems that the figure of the narrator who thinks of nothing but writing novels and short stories, or of the playwright who looks to his characters and wants nothing more, no longer even survives: such an acclaimed novelist turns out to be a more astute moralist and essayist, such a critic attempts in novels and dramas experiments that later serve him in essay-writing and in literary historiography. And in literary criticism we fix the work of Benedetto Croce, through which to survey the old and the new, as a point of necessary convergence. Italian Romantic humanism is summed up in Croce: although he remains on this side of the metaphysical exigency of absolute spirituality that had animated it; and although the new historico-idealistic encyclopedia in which he composes the notion of the real, making a literary experience its center, as is characteristic of the new Italian culture, still represents the descending branch of a parabola. But his polemical efficacy, in transforming the materialist immanentism of the positivists into idealistic immanentism, was admirable, even if the Crocean philosophical encyclopedia withdraws from the dualistic, De Sanctisian and in a certain sense Aristotelian premises that had justified the first Estetica, and accepts the direction promoted by the idealism of Giovanni Gentile. In half a century and more of fervent work, even within the confines of a thought that has no other heaven than the fictitious and scenographic one of history, painted in admirable perspectives, he guided the literary policy of I., and secured for his own doctrine and his own method a not unfruitful hegemony, gradually changing and updating the discussion, and allowing others to linger (but did it not rather surpass him?) over the philosophical premises of his Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale. Meanwhile he provided for a publicistic systematization of the literature of the new I. and for that anthology of the poets of I. and of Europe who agreed, or were made to agree, with the rules of the idealistic school. As proof of his cultural intransigence, modulated into smiling wit and superior condescension, there is the separatism between poetry and doctrine (indeed, wisdom!) imposed on the reading of Dante, and, to touch on the second founder of Italian culture, the deduction from poetry to gnomic and oratorical writing proposed for the work of Manzoni; or the caution in avoiding, whether the matter concerned the Baroque age or the Romantic age, the recognition of the centrality of religious and Catholic experience in those new orientations of culture. Indisputable is the truth of his positive results, in the sphere of reading: and it was the application of a humanistic method; but inevitable are the abstractnesses and the insuperable prohibitions in his methodological and historiographical proposals: abstractness and humanism, in positions that his followers hardened, remained to fight one another and divided the field from the very first years of the century. Especially in Florence the new men of letters, with Giovanni Papini at their head, made of Romantic ideas an experience that equally vast Italian culture had not yet done, and they threw themselves into the ideal conquest of the world: Papini, proceeding from acquisition to acquisition, re-emerged after the Uomo finito, and confessed his conversion in the Storia di Cristo; but the magic of "idea-forces" continued to attract publicists and politicians, many believing that Christianity too was precisely an idea, indeed rather than a reality: the nationalists, for example, who looked to Corradini, with many affinities in the camp of the historicists and the futurists. To avoid overcrowding this schematic chronicle with names, let us be content to indicate as representative of literary journalism in the years of the First World War F. Marinetti, leader of the futurists, and D. Serra, the retiring, deeply humane initiator of a new method of reading. Historicism meanwhile went on to conquer official culture, solemnized, with Carduccian and D'Annunzian accents, in the celebrations that prepared the new undertakings of the unified nation and in the propaganda that sustained them, introduced into the schools by the Gentile reform, and encyclopedically ordered in Gentile's second great work, which was the Enciclopedia Italiana: where it left intact the transcendental faith of the Christian generations, it was able to assist with some occasion the religious revival of those years: where it circumscribed itself within itself, immanentistically, it was reduced all too often to a heraldic collection of patents and emblems of nobility, and it withdrew the people from the commitments and responsibilities of an authentic moral life. Criticism and literature withdrew to one side: D'Annunzio living and declining, and while politics between the two wars turned to the dictatorial solution, it was not a time for literary literatures. The Accademia d'I., instituted in 1926, was to suffice, not only for legitimate ambitions, but for the official recognition of the importance of creative and reflective culture. Criticism learned from Serra, who died on the Podgora after a literary testament in which he recommended individual decision as the ultimate term for a judgment of value, the study of the word and of style: a Carduccian descent that was found again in Cesare de Lollis, who aided the stylism and Leopardism of the Ronda (certainly the most significant review of the immediate postwar period: in it they promoted, among others, a new "neoclassical" attention to the facts of language and style — Riccardo Bacchelli, Antonio Baldini, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Emilio Cecchi, destined naturally, as is the way of fertile literary experiences, to find again each his own path and himself by different roads), which finally organized itself into a more robust and consistent critical method in Giuseppe de Robertis, and later, with a complex experience of philological methods, which link him back to experiences of inquiry and method that are not touched upon here, as more scientifically than literarily committed, in Gianfranco Contini. But it learned from Serra also something else: so that many who passed through the phases of stylism did not stop there (all the men of the Ronda, for example): the study of man, the investigation of custom and of historical life as the occasion of man, the word understood as the revelation of the individual secret. And this has been the most fertile current of literary criticism in the years that, after the Second World War, we must still call the years of the armistice. Riccardo Bacchelli even in his critical pages orients himself toward this moralism, from which he passes to a spiritualism experienced in the deepest message of Revelation. Giuseppe Toffanin, the renewer of studies on humanism, still avails himself of this study of man led back to his eternal species. Concetto Marchesi himself, the historian of Latin literature and of the great figures of declining classicism, Seneca and Tacitus, arrives there, though finding in it a limit rather than a liberation. To it turn, with very extensive concerns, P. Bargellini and F. Casnati, S. d'Amico and G. de Luca, men of the most diverse orientation as of diverse provenance, from S. Tilgher to N. Sapegno to Zottoli. The rigorous critical and erudite philologism of Mario Casella, in his Romance studies, investigates precisely in this direction for his most acute doctrinal syntheses. One may say that such moralistic humanism, understood as a central experience, and disregarding the polemical impoverishment in which Luigi Russo exhausts it, has been a much frequented occasion of fertile encounters: in it are recognized A. Momigliano and F. Flora, the one a reader of attentive psychological penetration, the other of inflamed imagination and sensibility, P. Pancrazi does not disdain it, while he stiffens in his circumspect reviewing caution, and Angelini passes through it, wandering in an effusive spirituality. But a moralism can become aphoristic, and is exhausted in the sentence and the example: not for nothing did two of the most active writers of the older generation, Ugo Ojetti, who came to literature from journalism, and Angelo Gatti, who came from history and author of a novel Ilia e Alberto, which was the most explicit index of the new religious concerns of the armistice, pay to moralism a final tribute, which nevertheless reveals, in Sassoria and in the Massime e caratteri, their nature and their limits. To bring critical literature out of that limit of moralism, there served the solicitations of French literature (Claudel, Gide, Valéry, and the experiences summed up in Du Bos), of German literature (between the poetics of Rilke and the criticism of Gundolf), of English and American literature (in a story more historical than polemical: the Catholicizing directions of Anglo-American literature, from Chesterton to T. S. Eliot, to fix two opposite and complementary terms) and finally of the Catholic solution given by the Russian Ivanov, overcoming European symbolism through ritualism (and Ivanov, converted to Catholicism, came to die in I., where for years he exercised an influence all the deeper the less acclaimed and noticed by the hasty politicians of literature): there served above all the so-called hermetic movement that gathered them: where the demand for the total commitment of art and of moral life in the exercise of literature made itself felt and irrepressible: where, naturally, different intentions and habits also gathered, in the expectant conciliatoriness of that review, Il frontespizio, which at the turn of the new years exercised an efficacy comparable to that exercised at the first turn by the Ronda. Others made their vigil of arms elsewhere; and Oreste Macrì and Luciano Anceschi did not renounce making a vast historical world the center of textual inquiry; while Carlo Bo, the most active and consistent, nevertheless rearranged hermetic attentions in two directions: the direction of spiritualism, toward the secret of the soul, and the direction of surrealism, toward the automatic emblematism that stiffens and dehumanizes the irrational suggestions of the subconscious. The second postwar period hastily thought to elude the responsibilities proposed by hermeticism, and made the polemic of literary pretexts flourish again, taking refuge on the positions of historicism or even of positivism: in vain, although the chronicle is invaded by it, moralism availed itself of it, which had been the immediate predecessor of hermeticism; above all, the concep-

the conception of integral humanism, which defines itself in the poetics of the person and recognizes in the testimony of the individuated word, pursued backwards into the secret of the soul, the most authentic itinerary for the knowledge of concrete man. And it is no negligible episode of that ideological process which has placed religious experience back at the center of cultural inquiry, confining to the abstract what to generations now past seemed concrete: the scientific hypothesis for the positivists, and historical report for the idealists; and demonstrating concrete the man who partakes of Being.

An understanding of the new literature is not reached without circumscribing it within the occasions of history and custom, after having set in order the apparatus of a method and of a critical experience. The literature of the armistice unfolds along a baleful course of forgetful and vainglorious years, suspended over an abyss all the more ignored the more it made a display of political strength and historical awareness: while the fate of the great national States declines and the civilization of Europe, by now spread across the planet, no longer finds its center in Europe. Yet, in such precarious conditions of life, and while the premonitory signs of catastrophe gather, and in the distraction of a custom now closed to the defense of a petty particularism, now easily euphoric in the pleasure of improvisation, literary culture asserts itself in the multiplicity of works and commitments. And here we shall inquire whether, in the varied commingling of proximate inheritances and of the external solicitations of politics and polemic, through the years of the armistice, there came to light what we believe to be, and what indeed must be, the new literature.

To begin with lyric poetry, which is wont to experience in purity of colloquy the encounter of the soul and the word, two currents had alternated in the last years of peace, and were prolonged through the war into the armistice: that of the crepuscular poets, with Guido Gozzano as their leader, and that of the Futurists, with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as their leader: the former absorbed in a penumbra escorted to live on ambiguous sentiments and to let themselves die (a Pascolian attitude, without the daring with which Pascoli attempted the universe and sought the Faith), the latter acclaiming force, gesture, sense, the idols of the hour (behind a still D'Annunzian model, but rejecting the proposal of an exercise of art and the last indications of contemplative and "nocturnal" prose). The two schools were prolonged and became confused: crepuscularism was rediscovered in the work of Marino Moretti, soon turned from lyric to narrative, and a short-story writer and novelist of very broad commitment, and of infinite variety of figures, often surly and ironic, in the play of his penumbras; and Futurism as the preliminary experience of many; from Papini still to Palazzeschi: who found his vein in an irony all too often pitiless, powerful in sign and vivid in spite. The dialect authors — still working in the memory and the custody of municipal life the nineteenth-century triad of G. B. Porta, G. G. Belli and S. Di Giacomo — continued on their way: Trilussa counterposing the ironies of his political and social satire to the immobility of Pascarella, who after the moved and comic epic of the Scopetta dell'America silently and vainly attempted that of the history of I.; more observed, as poets of Roman dialect; but every city of I. had its own. Ada Negri was still writing poetry, she too passing from the socialism of her first battles to a spiritualism ever more Christianly asserted. Angiolo Silvio Novaro and Antonino Anile attempted, the one in a simple and absorbed manner, the other with a more robust measure of classicism, zones of religious life; while F. Pastonchi endlessly celebrated a mastery of D'Annunzian stamp. Meanwhile new poets were growing, of few words and great echoes, like Clemente Rebora, or of remote ambitions, like Arturo Onofri: Dino Campana had passed like a shooting star (and of each one would need to follow the parabola of life: Rebora in a convent, Onofri toward esotericism, Campana in the darkness of madness: a sign, in any case, that the easy programs of positivism and hedonism had been dismissed, and that the exercise of the word was becoming an inquiry into life). But a new poetics begins, consciously by now, with Giuseppe Ungaretti, the lyric poet of man's life, who through the renunciation of war and of the stony ground rediscovers a universal sense of life: indeed Life, if one follows him in his Christian parabola. Beside him, in a different cadence, and with more or less adventurous restlessness, Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo accept the poetics that it was wished to define as hermeticism. More lyrically effusive are other poets, not so harshly committed as Ungaretti to deciding of life upon the word, Diego Valeri, Renzo Pezzani, Carlo Betocchi: let not the return of these poets to a more unfolded songlike suggestion appear as condescension to the easy charms of closed melody: even Umberto Saba, who nonetheless has a long and broad circuit of poetic experiences, returns upon himself, absorbed.

To these experiences of a lyric poetry intent on the sense of the absolute — even of those who refuse to knock, almost for fear of hearing the door open, at the Father's house — the forms of narrative must be related. Of course, the experience is extensive and horizontal rather than intensive and vertical; and it has behind it a nineteenth-century narrative tradition not easily forgotten: one that had indeed concluded with that Verga-Fogazzaro antithesis (the one intent on the conquest of the real, the other on suggesting sentimental evasions into the indistinct) which repeated the other antithesis between Manzonian concreteness and the allusiveness of narrative in verse and of psychological narrative. D'Annunzio had made the novel another mode of the exalting proclamation of himself. With various softenings many narrators of precious occasion were linked back to him — Luciano Zuccoli, Ugo Ojetti, Giuseppe Brunati, G. A. Borgese; but Alfredo Panzini set himself against these preciousnesses, precisely behind the screen of a stylistic refinement and a literary experimentation shared by all of Carducci's pupils: among whom Adolfo Albertazzi prolonged it down to those years; and Federico De Roberto too arrived there. Umberto Fracchia, Salvatore Gotta, Virgilio Brocchi were among the most acclaimed novelists of the first postwar period: when, however, working together in a literary life still followed by a trusting bourgeois public, all the forms of literature could flow into narrative: Massimo Bontempelli, with his magical realism, alongside the epigone of the Macchiaioli and of Neri Tanfucio, Ferdinando Paolieri; more closely observed were Federico Tozzi, in a realistic direction, and Italo Svevo, with his absorbed and painfully insistent psychologism: alongside the bland archaism in verse of Riccardo Balsamo Crivelli. Other names that perhaps returned more frequently to readers' memory are Francesco Chiesa, the robust Ticinese interpreter of geographical and historical landscapes, and beside him his fellow-countryman Giuseppe Zoppi; Michele Saponaro, Bonaventura Tecchi, Milly Dandolo, Bianca de Maj, Emilia Salvioni, and then the host of writers who approached narrative forms while preserving various interests, such as G. B. Angioletti, Bruno Barilli, Francesco Lanza, Carlo Linati, Antonio Baldini, Orio Vergani, Curzio Malaparte: while the Tuscans Bruno Cicognani and Delfino Cinelli committed themselves to more expansive forms. The commitment gradually grew in those who reached artistic maturity in the last years of the armistice: Corrado Alvaro and Gianna Manzini worked slowly and in depth. A summary might be valid which, as against a D'Annunzian Borgese, a Panzini ironist and contradictor precisely of that custom, and the crepuscular Moretti, observes the authentic narrative venture of Riccardo Bacchelli, the only narrator who has so much force of imagination and so nourished a need for moral life as to traverse a completed parabola: thus the satirical and comic deviations of Palazzeschi, of C. Zavattini, and closer to us of G. Marotta, of V. Brancati, of Santucci, have their value. As against the satirical variations stands the somewhat sententious and circumspect commitment of the neorealists, most fortunate in the second postwar period, even if their leader, Alberto

Moravia, worked from the first, and most of them served their apprenticeship in the last years of the armistice; such as Guido Piovene and Cesare Pavese and Vasco Pratolini.

To conclude this hasty and necessarily confused and deficient survey, let dramatic literature serve, where the first armistice saw the work of Luigi Pirandello, who concluded centuries of comedy and of direct theatricality. Before him and beside him had ranged the epigones of verism and of the theater of poetry: Dario Niccodemi was working, acclaimed, while authors of broader scope fell silent, such as Roberto Bracco, Marco Praga, Renato Simoni; while on the D'Annunzian furrow, later departing from it toward the satire of manners, stood the much-acclaimed Sem Benelli. It fell to Ercole Luigi Morselli to trace the parabola of returns to the earth and the hearth, after the flight of heroic dreams. The typical form of the Italian theater of the armistice was the grotesque: its initiator Luigi Chiarelli; but other authors were also affected by it: P. M. Rosso di San Secondo, Enrico Cavacchioli, and with a more varied disposition Gino Rocca. Another much-experimented form was that of the intimist theater (as it was called with an insufficient formula) of Cesare Vico Lodovici, Giuseppe Lanza, Fausto Maria Martini; and we shall recall Alberto Colantuoni, Federico Valerio Ratti, Giovanni Cavacchioli. Chronicle prevails up to Ugo Betti, who succeeded in restating human dramas in a perspective more morally intent than that customary in the now dissolved bourgeois theater. Nevertheless, beyond these names, and others passed over in silence so as not to close their search—which seems to us in full development—in a provisional judgment, it must be remembered that the theater opens itself to writers who occasionally entrust to it words promptly and widely understood; as exemplarily Riccardo Bacchelli; and that in theatrical language the experiences of directors and the circumstances of critics also have the value of an indication: a chronicle that is naturally forbidden to us. The movement from novellism to symbolism had also accompanied, in Italy too, the history of the pre-war theater: emblematism and ritualism with the newest words: although this historical trace (novellism, symbolism, emblematism, liturgy) is probably to be found in every work of worth.

This forest of proposed names is too dense, and too randomly thinned: it will happen that today's reader does not traverse it, continually hindered and led astray; and that tomorrow's reader, with more mature judgment, will link to names here implied or left unspoken a more explicit discourse: it is laborious to understand the truth of the word and the rationality of history in the chronicle and the chatter of contemporaries. But conclusions must also be drawn from a sketch of a balance sheet: one would wish to suggest these points useful to the understanding of contemporary literature: the word subtracted from the sphere of individual freedom, in the two directions of abstractionism (the image not mastered, which superimposes itself on moral responsibility and abolishes it) and of propaganda (the image that serves the dissemination and apology of a political situation); and the word that summons around itself the process of moral life, that commits the individual and reveals him, that confesses his creativity and freedom, increasing his reader: a poetics of the person, on the part of the poet, who passes final judgment on himself and on the world, in poetizing, and an exegesis, on the part of the reader, who summons around the word the responsibility of all historical life. That the literature of the contemporaries, despite the din of the chronicle and the confusion of tongues, moves in the second direction, therefore on the track of perennial humanism, is certain.

VI. ART IN ITALY.

The artistic manifestations of the peoples who from the most ancient times inhabited the territories of the Italian peninsula are closely connected with the others, proper to the civilization that under various aspects flourished in the Mediterranean basin. Thus until the civilization of Rome itself came to impress a distinct character of its own upon those manifestations, generating works of architecture, sculpture and painting that clearly testify to the creative power of a people certainly among the most artistically gifted.

1. FROM THE 1ST TO THE 6TH CENTURY

When later the civilization of the Roman Empire, having completed the cycle of its dominion, yielded before the new spirit that informed Christianity, this found in the artistic genius of the Italians some of its noblest and most significant expressions. Nevertheless, before the freedom of worship was granted at the beginning of the 4th century with the edict of Milan, it will be more appropriate to speak of an art of the Christians than of a truly and properly Christian art. Indeed, in the most ancient paintings of the hypogea and of the Christian catacombs, as in the most ancient sculptures having as their subject figurations alluding to the new faith, the stylistic characters that inform them are the same as those of contemporary sculptures and paintings having pagan subjects as their theme.

Only toward the end of the 3rd century and at the beginning of the 4th, in the paintings of the catacombs and in sculpture, can one sometimes recognize an exasperated or pathetic vision of forms that suggests how the new spirituality directed some artists toward new researches.

To the ideals of ancient classicism, which had set the perfect harmony of the human limbs as the ultimate term of beauty, new ideals are opposed.

There results a hallucinated, at times frenetic, vision of a reality in continuous becoming, and in every aspect of that reality the artist resolves the world of his thoughts.

Thus one arrives at the deformation of images, at the decomposition of planes and of plastic masses, at crude contrasts of form and color, at a dramatization of form and color that mirrors precisely the convulsive agitation of the thought of the new anti-classical ideals.

A new anti-academic, anti-official vision of reality asserts itself.

To understand them in their intimate values, the most ancient architectures created in Italy as places of worship by the Christians, after the Constantinian edict, reflect an analogous situation. Until the 4th century the majesty of Rome was mirrored, for the peoples subject to it, not only in its force and its laws, but also in the grandeur and the granitic imposingness of its buildings. Beside them, therefore, the lean essential structures of the Christian basilicas, erected in Rome by Constantine, testified to the presence of new or at least distinct interests both in the field of their functionality and in the aesthetic field (v. ARCHITECTURE; BASILICA; CHURCH). Here it must be emphasized that in the vast rectangular spaces, preceded or not by the quadriporticus, divided internally into three or five naves, essentially chromatic and luministic values were exalted, that is, those values that were destined to remain at the basis of the further developments of the art of the entire Middle Ages. It would nevertheless be an error to think that such new architectural characteristics, established immediately in the most ancient Christian basilicas of Rome, as moreover also in similar contemporary, and perhaps more ancient, buildings of the East, were in some way consecrated in their peculiar aspects by particular reasons other than the functional and spiritual ones mentioned above. They were buildings extraordinarily modern for their time and in which, with respect to traditional forms, there was already effectively at work that process of simplification, of disinterest in the somewhat emphatic opulence of the ancient classical forms which would constitute, until the rise of the Romanesque age, one of the dominant motifs of the evolution of our architectural forms.

It is logical therefore that in Christian buildings destined for other functions or in buildings that arose in provinces far from the most lively center of cultural, spiritual and artistic expansion, which at the beginning of the 4th century Rome still was for Italy, traditional architectural modes and forms should still be preserved with even greater tenacity.

Thus in S. Salvatore of Spoleto, which goes back to the 4th century, in S. Lorenzo of Milan, built between the 4th and 5th centuries. Nevertheless it is interesting to note how, even in buildings of central plan, during the 5th century that principle of simplification mentioned above was evident, as in the church of S. Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian, formed by three concentric rings. On these three rings rests directly in a vertical sense, that is, not set on vaults, the weight of the roof covering.

Rome in the 6th century was already invaded by Greek religious who introduced Oriental elements into the local architectural culture. This indeed, still perfectly alive in the churches of S. Pietro in Vincoli and of S. Pancrazio, in the basilica of Pope Pelagius, which arose near the tomb of the martyr Lawrence, in place of a more ancient construction probably Constantinian, shows itself to be giving way to more properly Oriental architectural modes and sensibilities, evident not only in the use of the pulvini that surmount the capitals of the matroneum, but more in the chromatic vivacity that derives within the building from the complex play of shadows and lights generated by the loggia that runs, besides on the side walls, on the internal narthex, and by the arcades that must also have been on the apse wall and placed the interior of the basilica in communication with a particularly sacred place, probably the tomb of the martyr, in the nearby catacomb. Such a taste for the vivacity of the plays of shadows and lights, for the architectural picturesque, which in Rome would have at the time of Pope Honorius I (625-38) its noblest manifestation in the church of S. Agnese fuori le Mura, also characterizes a complex series of constructions of Campania. It is a group of extremely interesting buildings, such as the basilica of S. Felice at Cimitile, built by St. Paulinus between 394 and 402, that contemporary with it of S. Gennaro extra moenia at Naples, built by the bishop Severus, to whom the other of S. Giorgio Maggiore is also due, while the other of S. Giovanni Maggiore goes back to the 6th century. In these buildings, which have apses with arcades supported by columns, or openings that placed the interior of the church in communication with the exterior or with a deambulatory, for example in the baptistery of S. Giovanni in Fonte, of the 5th century, and in the other of Nocera dei Pagani, there predominates, as in the ancient traditional Campanian architecture, a wholly particular taste for the scenographic and the architectural picturesque, characteristic of the Neapolitan builders. It then in Campania was in some way corroborated with the elements of Oriental taste which also there, as in Rome, arrived as reflections of Byzantine artistic culture.

The evolution of sculpture during the first centuries of the Faith presents analogous characteristics. Indeed, to understand how from the fierce realism of the time of the Severans one can reach the simplified forms, the abstract expressions, the spirituality of the sculptures of the 4th-5th and 6th centuries, it is necessary to keep in mind the complex of facts, precisely of a spiritual order, that characterize that age.

What has been said of the catacomb paintings of the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 4th century also holds for sculpture. Thus, while a group of marbles, even of Christian subject, shows a decided fidelity to the modes proper to the veristic tradition of Hellenistic-Roman courtly sculpture, others depart decidedly from that tradition; and while the reliefs of the arch dedicated in Rome to the emperor Constantine already denote the prevalence in the capital of an anti-academic and anti-classical taste, the later famous sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, prefect of Rome, who died in the year 350, still shows fidelity to traditional Hellenistic modes. Keeping such ideas in mind, it will be easier to understand the value of many sculptures of the 4th and 5th centuries, as of so many reliefs of sarcophagi and of the gigantic imperial statues, whose apparently inferior workmanship is in opposition not only to the classical beauty of the ivory diptych of the Nicomachi and the Symmachi (375-94) but to that of the diptych of Anicius Probus which is, precisely like the door of S. Sabina, of the first half of the 5th century, and of the still later Brescia casket. These ivory reliefs were works destined for an environment by its nature more bound to traditions and also to the formalisms of past ages (v. IVORY).

On the other hand, as in architecture, so too in sculpture the taste for certain formal refinements, for certain delicate pictorial effects, for certain expressions wholly suffused with subtle melancholy, must also be understood, in some works of the 5th and also of the 6th century, as a reflection of a typical aspect of Byzantine artistic civilization in which one of the most operative elements was the Hellenistic-Oriental figurative tradition.

If the Christian East has preserved none of the great pictorial decorations executed during the reign of Constantine and of his immediate successors, in Rome and in other cities of Italy there remain numerous mosaics and frescoes that can give a sufficiently clear idea of the different states through which the pictorial culture of that age passed and the different tendencies that characterize it between the 4th and 6th centuries; that is, from when Christianity became the official religion of the Empire to when Byzantine art extended its influences over the entire Christian world.

The official character that Christianity assumed from the 4th century onward, together with the need to express itself in forms universally accepted and understood, meant that those aforementioned expressive and anti-classical modes could not be universally used in the decoration of the new churches. This is perhaps the fundamental reason why in the pictorial decorations and mosaics of the 4th and of a great part, at least, of the 5th century, the stylistic modes of the ancient Hellenistic-Roman tradition were frequently used. Thus in the mosaics of the annular vault of the mausoleum of St. Costanza, thus in those of a small apse of the Lateran Baptistery, thus in the mosaic itself of the apse of St. Pudentiana, where, as in the mosaic in a small apse of the oratory of St. Aquilinus near S. Lorenzo in Milan (4th-5th centuries), connections with Eastern art are also evident. The modes more proper to Hellenistic-Roman painting return instead in the mosaic of the Roman church of St. Sabina (412-32), while in the twofold series of mosaics of St. Mary Major rebuilt by Sixtus III (432-40), and presumably of his time, the signs of a precise dualism appear clearly. In fact, while the panels of the nave reflect modes of the Hellenistic tradition, in the decoration of the triumphal arch, alongside a new strongly marked drawing rhythm, one finds a pictorial impetuosity, a boldness in violent juxtapositions of colors, an extraordinary richness of imagination coupled with a most severe order such as in no other earlier work, such as to convince one that we are truly faced with the work of a great artist who felt most intensely the drama of the formal expression of his age. Such a drama finds a very different external manifestation in the other Roman mosaic composed at the time of Leo the Great (440-61) in St. Paul's. This, although much tampered with and restored, denotes the prevalence of a decorative taste, whose signs were already also present in Rome in reliefs and paintings of the 4th century, and which in Byzantine art would have its fullest expression. On the other hand, forms of the Hellenistic-Roman tradition, even later, between 526 and 530, found their most typical expression in the mosaic of the apse of the church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, as if that traditional language, precisely on the point of transforming itself, wished to accentuate some of its typical characteristics. Between the 4th and 6th centuries, therefore, there was in Rome a continuous alternation of pictorial modes. In Campania the Hellenistic modes seem then to prevail, more than anything else, but the reflection of the pictorial manners used at that time in North Africa also reached the region. Thus, while the oldest examples of the Neapolitan catacomb paintings show themselves to be faithfully connected to the frescoes of Herculaneum and Pompeii, in those of the 4th and 5th centuries the reflections of a light Oriental Hellenism dominate. As happens in the marvelous mosaics of S. Giovanni in Fonte and in the paintings of S. Gennaro extra moenia in Naples, to be assigned to the 5th century.

But already at that time the clearest and most luminous reflections of the new artistic civilization that flourished at Byzantium were reverberating upon Ravenna (v. BIZANTINA, ARTE).

In the 5th century Ravenna becomes the artistic capital of Italy. It has already been said that in Rome in the 5th century the values of mass, typical of ancient classical architecture, resolved themselves into chromatic values of surface. This phenomenon, from the 5th century onward, is accentuated at Ravenna in the three principal architectural monuments of that age preserved there: the basilica of S. Giovanni Evangelista, the mausoleum of Galla Placidia and the Baptistery of the Orthodox. There it appears above all, wherever one feels the architecture of those buildings to be strictly connected to their chromatic decoration, that this annuls in a certain way the very peremptory logic of the structures still bound, as in Rome, to traditional forms.

Analogous characteristics are found in other Ravennate constructions of the time of Theodoric, particularly in S. Apollinare Nuovo, in S. Apollinare in Classe, in the basilica of S. Vittore, in that of the Holy Spirit and in S. Andrea. But in other Ravennate buildings, equally of the 6th century, more complex and different characteristics appear instead. Such buildings are: the mausoleum of Theodoric, the Baptistery of the Arians and the basilica of S. Vitale. In the mausoleum of Theodoric, if from one point of view the elements that connect it to the Roman tradition are fairly clear, one must admit that particular technical modes and the monolith roof itself orient one to think it the work of Dalmatian builders; while the frieze that runs at the top already shows the presence of motifs proper to barbarian goldsmithing. The Baptistery of the Arians, instead, although also of central plan, and which in its original arrangement was constituted by an octagonal perimeter zone circumscribing a building with a tetra-apsidal plan, as there were also in Rome, is a type of construction that, at Ravenna, reveals itself, as Giovannoni observes, an interesting link of conjunction between the modes proper to the architecture of the Romans and those of the basilica of S. Vitale; another most important Ravennate monument of that age, strictly connected, by its characteristics, to preceding and contemporary Byzantine buildings and particularly to the Constantinopolitan church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus.

The evolution of Ravennate sculpture of the 5th and 6th centuries equally shows connections both with the Roman tradition and with Eastern taste, in a most important series of carved sarcophagi in which the images, rendered with rigorous plastic sense, have their bodies delicately modeled beneath the transparent fabrics, with a taste not different from that observed in the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, even if at Ravenna the connections with Hellenistic-Oriental forms are more evident. In other reliefs, instead, as in many capitals and in some chancel screens, an ever greater aversion to the realistic corporeity of modeling is evident; one begins to speak through symbols, in relation to a whole series of new spiritual values rendered more complex by Oriental intellectualism and contrasting with those of antiquity, which had exalted man in the perfect harmony of bodily beauty.

These ideas must also be kept in mind in order to understand the values of the pictorial forms that appear in a marvelous series of mosaics of the 5th and 6th centuries that decorate the walls and apses of the Ravennate churches. The great names of Galla Placidia, of Theodoric, of Amalasuntha, of Justinian, of Theodora are linked to those fantastic decorations that even today, centuries later, give the sense of what Ravenna must have been in those distant times, when within its walls and its marshes there met the old persistent Roman tradition, the young barbarian blood, the fruits of the new Christian civilization. Only perhaps by contemplating those mosaics, by questioning the ecstatic faces of the Saints and of the mysterious personages who appear there with a new bewilderment in their eyes, by scrutinizing the soul, the sense of life of those men and those women who now appear in an empire miraculously unreal and yet true, can one understand its drama and feel the need for that richness, for all that gold, more perhaps than through the study of so many other manifestations and memories of those distant times.

At Ravenna the Latin artistic civilization defends its last positions, still seeking to assimilate new Oriental elements, and it does not succeed. The art that comes from the East is the reflection of a most wealthy and magnificent court; it has the fascination of new things and of what belongs to the most powerful; moreover, it comes from that East whence arrive, together with traditions, the miraculous stories and legends, the themes of their graphic representations, the iconographic schemes and with them the reflections of a new psychology that appears in painting before in any other form of art.

In the mosaics that cover the entire interior of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, elements already known in Roman and Hellenistic art of the 4th and 5th centuries are easily recognized. Yet those images already live in a world that is no longer the real and determinate one in which one had been accustomed to encounter them; the same may be said of the figures in the vault of the Baptistery of the Orthodox, where the decorative scheme is also closely linked to Eastern modes. But it is in the 6th-century mosaics of S. Apollinare Nuovo that the new spirit animating Eastern art seems by now to dominate unchallenged in the twofold array of Saints and of Saints that, along the wall of the church's main nave, issuing from the city of Classis and from the imperial Palace of Ravenna, draw near, advancing toward the presbytery, to the thrones of the Redeemer and of the Virgin, which, thus placed at the ends of the two arrays, serve as it were to balance the composition. Other mosaics in the upper zone of the same nave of the church show various orientations more closely bound to the veristic tradition of courtly classicism, but they certainly do not reflect with equal power the new sense of life that by then dominated the civilization of that time. And so it is that in another Ravenna church, in S. Vitale, through the work presumably of artists come from the East, the wise Emperor and the fateful Theodora appear surrounded by their courts in a setting — that of the church's presbytery — in whose decorations are recognized some of the highest testimonies of the figurative civilization reflected by the East upon Ravenna. Here, in the apse decoration of S. Apollinare in Classe, in that of the chapel of the archbishop's palace, and in the mosaics that were in S. Michele in Africisco (later transported to Berlin) and in other works besides, albeit in varying degrees, the direct reflections of Eastern figurative culture appear in the 6th century.

Although the Ravenna mosaics that have come down to us are very numerous, they represent but a small part of those that between the 5th and 6th centuries adorned the walls and apses of the churches of the city and of the territory over which its political and spiritual dominion extended. Another splendid 6th-century mosaic that can be linked to those of Ravenna is that of the cathedral of Parenzo. Perhaps, had more of them been preserved, it would probably be possible to speak, with greater foundation than has been done so far, of a Ravenna school of painting, the first most luxuriant branch of Byzantine art, which by then had already begun the process of conquering and absorbing the art of all Europe.

2. FROM THE 7TH TO THE 11TH CENTURY

The architectural forms that in the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries had evolved according to a very clear logic, connected to the new spiritual orientations of the Italian people, from the 6th to the 8th century almost everywhere show the signs of a further extreme impoverishment. Then at the beginning of the 9th century throughout Italy there runs as it were a shiver of renewal that seems to foreshadow certain aspects of Romanesque art; yet that artistic flowering in the 10th century is again dispersed, but its fruits will be gathered with greater awareness in the 11th and 12th centuries. In any case, precisely between the 7th and 11th centuries, particularly in three Italian centers is it possible to follow the evolution of architectural forms: Rome, Ravenna and its territory, and Campania.

At Rome, at the beginning of the 7th century, and properly to the pontificate of Honorius I (625-38), must be assigned the construction of the church of S. Agnese fuori le Mura, which is among the most beautiful Roman churches of the early Middle Ages and where the reflections of Eastern art appear very vivid; reflections evident also in the coeval church dedicated to the Sts. Quattro Coronati, transformed in later periods. But in the other constructions that can be assigned to the 7th century (S. Giorgio in Velabro) and to the 8th (S. Maria in Cosmedin) there dominates absolutely a sense of impoverishment and of reduction to the bare minimum of what had been the beautiful architectural forms of the 4th and 5th centuries. Yet at the beginning of the 9th century, during the pontificate of Paschal I (817-34), great churches are built, decorated with highly interesting mosaics that reflect a particularly happy moment for Roman artistic culture, perhaps to be connected with that sense of renewed grandeur of papal power linked to the politics of the Carolingian age. The churches of S. Maria in Domnica, of S. Prassede, of S. Cecilia in Trastevere and the subsequent one of S. Marco show in the ample sweep of their main naves, in the solemnity of their proportions, in the elegance of their decorative elements a refined and sure taste for formal beauty, truly exceptional for that age. In Campania, on the other hand, even if it is not possible in those centuries, owing to the scarcity of testimonies, to speak of a true and proper evolution of architectural forms, it should be observed how even between the 7th and 8th centuries there continues to prevail that taste for the scenographic and the picturesque that the Campanian masters of the early Christian era had inherited from the architects of the classical period. Thus in the arcaded apse of the small cemetery basilica of Prata near Avellino, which is of the 7th century, thus in the complex centrally planned church of S. Sofia at Benevento, which must be assigned to the 8th; and thus also in the destroyed church of S. Maria delle Cinque Torri of Cassino. The same tendencies appear in two churches to be assigned to the 10th century: S. Salvatore and S. Michele in Corte at Capua.

Very interesting is the evolution of architectural forms in the Ravenna territory between the 7th and 11th centuries. Then in fact, once the direct Eastern influences had ceased, in the course of four centuries the ancient themes were developed in an almost autonomous manner in a long series of constructions that in many respects prelude certain characteristics of the Romanesque architecture of northern Italy. Among the works of the 7th century are remembered the parish churches of S. Pietro in Silvia near Bagnacavallo, of S. Maria di Rontà and of S. Pancrazio near Russi; among those of the 8th, besides the Ravenna bell towers of S. Giovanni Evangelista and S. Pietro Maggiore and the parish church of S. Pietro in Trento, while to an age to be placed between the 8th and 9th centuries are to be assigned the parish churches of S. Vittore in Valle near Cesena, the church of S. Maria in Arcevoli near S. Arcangelo di Romagna and the parish church of the Tò near Brisighella. Also connected to the architecture of the Ravenna territory is the round church of S. Donato at Zara (801-804), which has very lively points of contact with S. Vitale of Ravenna, and the cathedral of Torcello in the parts that can be assigned to the 11th century, as well as the abbey of Pomposa near Codigoro, especially its bell tower, founded only in 1008: among all the buildings that have been mentioned it is certainly the most beautiful, the tallest, the strongest, the one that can truly symbolize in Italy the advent of a new sense of life that will not be long in revealing itself in Romanesque art.

Orientations substantially analogous to those of architecture are shown between the 7th and 11th centuries also by the other arts of design. This although in sculpture and in painting there assume tasks of decisive importance the barbarian influences (v. BARBARICA, ARTE) in the former and the Byzantine ones (v. BIZANTINA, ARTE) in the latter.

Even before the 7th century, indeed from the time of Theodoric, certain works of goldsmithing and certain decorative friezes show stylistic features and motifs different from the traditional ones of classical art. In fact, besides in the tomb of the great king at Ravenna, throughout a whole series of golden crosses, fibulae, discs, and necklaces found in the barbarian necropolises, new decorative motifs recur. They are expressed in forms extremely crude compared with the classical ones, but over these, by now exhausted and weary, they are decisively gaining the upper hand, even in marble reliefs. What interests the chisel masters is essentially the contour, by now destined to express not a physical verisimilitude of the images but essentially a decorative rhythm. The relief, having become flat, is almost always very crude. The marbles seem more incised and hollowed out than sculpted. The repertoire of representations also changes, and only in certain works that can be considered of a popular character, and therefore more tied to the old tradition, are scenes and figures found that show illustrative intentions.

The typical motif of the marbles datable between the 7th and 11th centuries is the braid, which generally serves to delimit spaces in which strangely stylized figurations recur that one would not always succeed in understanding in their meaning were it not for the aid of a sort of traditional symbolism. The term "barbarian" assigned to these sculptures also implies a judgment. And although in them there recur, as formative elements, both the memory of late classicism and that of Byzantine art and that precisely of the so-called barbarian art (v.), and although it is possible to recognize in the different regions different characteristics, albeit determined by craft customs, there is undeniable a connection of these plastic modes between the Italian marble-workers and those of the other territories of the Mediterranean basin. Thus everywhere a common low level was reached, a sort of primitivism justified by the common ignorance and by the aversion to realistic representations proper to the Eastern mentality. Reliefs having such characteristics and datable precisely between the 7th and 11th centuries are encountered throughout I. However, to be remembered, particularly in the north of the peninsula, are those of the museum of Pavia, the others of the Christian museum of Brescia, the truly conspicuous group of Cividale (where some marbles can be dated with precision between the 8th and 9th centuries), a chancel screen of S. Colombano of Bobbio, etc. In central I[taly] the richest group is in Lazio, particularly in Rome: at S. Maria in Cosmedin, at S. Sabina, at S. Saba, at S. Clemente, at S. Giovanni a Porta Latina, at S. Marco, at S. Maria del Priorato, at S. Maria in Trastevere, etc.

Campania too during this period gave very interesting signs of a vitality of its own, whether by elaborating classical motifs of local tradition however rich in classical memories (Calvi-Cimitile-Naples S. Aspreno), or, toward the 11th century, by drawing on decorative schemes of oriental taste (almost certainly known through fabrics) the motifs with figures of more or less fantastic animals on plutei and panels (Sorrento, Museo Correale; Rome, Museo Barracco; Berlin, Museo Federico).

Meanwhile, while in the south between the 10th and 11th centuries there arrive reinvigorated influences of orientalizing classicism almost driven by the new reflowering, after the iconoclastic controversy, of Byzantine art, in the north of the peninsula the testimonies of that reflowering penetrate through the Veneto, coming into contact with Carolingian culture (v. CAROLINGIA, ARTE). And it is in Milan that these two currents meet, generating a series of masterpieces, the greatest of all being the golden altar of the basilica of S. Ambrogio signed by a Magister Faber Vuolvinius in the time of bishop Angilbert II (824-59). Characters in a certain sense analogous, but with a decided prevalence of Hellenistic modes, are found again in the ciborium that surmounts the altar of Vuolvinius, connected also to later works, such as an ivory bucket of archbishop Godfrey (974-80) and to other works in ivory (v.), and finally, in the 11th century, to the ciborium of S. Pietro at Civate.

The reign of Justinian, the victories of Belisarius and Narses, the general spread of oriental spirituality and of Byzantine culture and finally the migrations caused by the iconoclastic struggle brought it about that in I[taly], especially in Rome, during the 7th century and then in the subsequent epochs, the modes of Byzantine painting acquired a decided predominance which, having come into contact with traditional Italian modes, assumed in I[taly] a new complex variety of aspects.

Some of these paintings in fact appear stylistically closer to the pure Byzantine language, others very far from it. Thus, while the images of the apse mosaic of the church of S. Agnese fuori le Mura (625-28) as well as the older ones of the triumphal arch of S. Lorenzo (578-90) and others still, also of the 7th century, have along with beauty the sense of the "officiality" of Byzantine art, in other Roman figurations the original models grow heavier, pressing shadows and contours and removing from the images that sense of transcendence which was one of their greatest fascinations. In other cases, on the other hand, as in the apse decoration of S. Maria Antiqua, the oriental scheme is interpreted with the swift and sure modes of summary painting of which even in the East there are conspicuous testimonies. Until in the 9th century, in the time of Paschal I (817-24), as has already been noted in the architectural field, we witness a true and proper flowering of Roman art testified by a series of mosaics that have characteristics of their own in S. Prassede, in S. Cecilia in Trastevere, in S. Maria in Domnica and, a little later, in S. Marco. Color triumphs there absolutely and it is difficult to recall that those images are arranged according to ancient and consecrated figurative schemes.

Everything here is new or at least seen and realized with new eyes and spirit. A novelty that nevertheless is very difficult to connect even remotely with Carolingian culture, Nordic in any case, whose reflections however in the same 9th century appear in Rome in other paintings of the underground basilica of S. Clemente, above all in an Assumption of the Virgin, where there is a dramatic animation, an expressive violence quite different from that of the contemporary and older popularizing Roman paintings.

Dramatic agitation, violence and expressive power that with a different intonation also reflect certain paintings of S. Vincenzo al Volturno and others of the underground church of S. Crisogono in Rome, whose modes prelude those that will be more proper to Benedictine art (v. BENEDETTINA, ARTE). For the 10th century the pictorial remains are very scanty and of almost always uncertain attribution; the works of the 11th century, on the other hand, already reflect the characteristics of the new time that is rising, that of the Romanesque age. The various intonations more or less linked to traditional and popularizing forms or to the different gradations of oriental art appear similarly, but in works of lesser importance, in the other Italian regions. Nevertheless a separate mention is deserved by the paintings of S. Maria foris portam at Castelseprio near Varese, to be assigned, perhaps, to the end of the 7th or the beginning of the 8th century and reflecting in their narrative vivacity and in their disdainful sureness and elegance characteristics proper to the most genuine Hellenistic tradition, alive also in the miniatures, of the type of that indeed found in Rome in the 7th and 8th centuries, above all in the paintings of the church of S. Maria Antiqua.

3. THE ROMANESQUE AGE OF THE 11TH-13TH CENTURIES

The elements therefore that in varying measure, according to environments and ages, operate in the development of art in I[taly], from the 4th to the 11th century, are various and manifold. At the base remain those of the Hellenistic-Roman tradition onto which are superimposed and successively fused the others of Byzantine culture, of oriental Hellenism and of Nordic culture, whether initially under the aspect of barbarian art as, at a later time, of Carolingian and Ottonian art. Each of these elements in its successive passing leaves a sort of sediment that enriches the humus from which blossoms, in that characteristic reflowering of spirits and of culture that is proper to all of Europe and to a great part of the East during the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, Romanesque art (v.). To define the various aspects that Italian art assumes during the Romanesque age is an extremely arduous task; it cannot, in any case, be understood in its most intimate values without taking into account how at that time the people rose to become a determining element in the very political life of the cities, of the regions, of the States that had come into being in the peninsula. Of that people and of its individual and organized forces, nourished by spiritual and religious values, Romanesque art is the highest and most legitimate expression. And while the sentiment and the cult of beauty spread everywhere, the artists appear above all intent on a continuous search for the new and the original, strengthened by the revived naturalistic spirit. And it is the singularity of the individual that triumphs even if placed at the service of a complex and almost instinctive civil and religious organization, of which the great cathedrals built in that age appear the most characteristic expression.

The field of the arts in I. is then extremely varied in aspects and characters according to the traditions, the cultural precedents and the contacts proper to the men of the different regions, sometimes of the different cities. Bearing this in mind, it will appear evident how in the particular case of the artistic manifestations of the Romanesque age what matters most is the power and the felicity of the expression of the vital spirits that inflame consciences.

Architecture then regains in I. an absolute pre-eminence over the other arts, also because it subordinates all of them to itself in the complexity of its expression. It has been observed a little earlier how one of the characteristic motifs of the Italian early Middle Ages is constituted by the exaltation of essentially chromatic and luministic values in opposition to the plastic ones of the architecture of the ancients. But behold, during the new age in some Italian regions, those in more direct contact with central and northern Europe, where some of the characteristic aspects of Gothic art were being prepared within the very forms of Romanesque, there occurs what from certain points of view may even appear a return to those principles of structures with contrasting masses proper to ancient architecture. But in the Romanesque architecture of northern I. and of the eastern slope of the Apennines, to those characters of ancient art others are added or substituted. Because in the new architectures space is as it were made sensible, enclosed within organic forms of stone. To the clear, limpid opposition of plastic masses proper to ancient architecture there is substituted a different organization of heavy and massive structural elements. And buildings are constructed that take on a frowning and warlike appearance through the constant use of turning vaults on bricks and pillars of brown stone, through the complexity of the plans, through the use of loggias and matronea that thicken, in the scantily illuminated interiors, depths of severe shadows, through the lively and complicated plastic decoration whose elements have the strangest origins. In Tuscany instead and in Latium, and generally in the regions of the other slope of the Apennines that faces the Tyrrhenian, architectural culture preserves at its base the characters that it had assumed in the first centuries of Christianity. That is, the love for clear spatial harmonies, for the alignments of columns and entablatures, for the restful sweep of the arcades that follow one another toward the apses, for the great smooth walls on which painters, inlayers and mosaicists spread their beautiful chromatic fantasies.

If this division into two distinct currents can be valid for a schematic classification of the Italian architectural manifestations of the Romanesque age, it will suffice to examine this a little more deeply to note immediately very different gradations and also contaminations, the most varied from region to region. And while Lombardy will appear, from the 11th century onward in northern I., as the territory where more than in any other there are revealed novelties of intent through the constant use of ribbed vaults turned on clustered piers - intents manifest in S. Ambrogio in Milan and reaffirmed in other churches of the same city and in those of Pavia, S. Michele and S. Pietro in Ciel d'oro, in S. Abbondio (1091) and in S. Fedele in Como, whose overall scheme had a wide echo also outside I. and in so many others that it is not possible to enumerate - in Piedmont, in Liguria, in the Veneto and in Emilia the architecture assumes characters, though distinct, not different.

In Piedmont, where the Lombard forms are received almost purely in S. Benigno at Fruttuaria, in the basilica of S. Evasio at Casale Monferrato and in the Sagra S. Michele itself near S. Ambrogio, they take on some originality in the decoration of other buildings, such as SS. Nazario and Celso at Montechiaro di Asti, while some direct French influence is noted here and there, as in S. Fede at Cavagnolo Po and in the abbey of Vezzolano.

Lombard elements recur then very frequently, indeed they form almost the foundation of them, in the Romanesque architecture of Liguria. Thus in S. Paragonio at Noli; but at Genoa in the Cathedral, consecrated in the year 1118, in the church of S. Maria in Castello and in that of S. Donato, alongside the Lombard elements those of Tuscan origin are also very clear. And entirely Lombard in character are also the constituent elements of Emilian Romanesque architecture. Thus at Modena in the Cathedral designed in 1099 by the Lombard Lanfranco, thus in the cathedral of Ferrara completed in 1135 and which preserves elements of Modenese forms, thus in those of Parma and Piacenza, whose facades are characterized by the superimposed arcades that help to lighten their appearance. More varied is the character of the architecture in the Veneto where, on the mainland, at Verona, in S. Maria Antica, in S. Lorenzo, in S. Zeno, begun in 1120 and completed in 1138, the common Lombard foundation is enriched by the search for pictorial and luministic values, such as also appear in the apse of the Duomo. At Venice meanwhile, in the basilica of S. Marco, a deliberate orientation toward Byzantine schemes is manifest. Thus the great church, rebuilt around 1063 by the doge Domenico Contarini in place of a much older construction with a basilical plan, received a Greek-cross plan and five domes, like the church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus at Constantinople. Next to S. Marco there then stood at Venice also the campanile, rebuilt after the collapse of 1904, which recalls forms connected to the Lombard ones, like the exterior of the duomo of Torcello; but also the interior of this church, the other one of S. Fosca also at Torcello and the duomo of Murano reveal likewise Oriental influences. And the Oriental influences, whether mixed with Emilian elements and descending from the Veneto, or also arrived by direct influence from the sea, appear also in the Marche, harmonizing with constructional details by then proper to the Lombard tradition. Thus in the church of S. Croce near Sassoferrato, in S. Vittore at Chiusi, in S. Claudio al Chienti, in the very beautiful S. Maria di Portonuovo and in what may be considered the architectural masterpiece of the region in the Romanesque period: S. Ciriaco at Ancona, where a tone of frankly Byzantine taste joins with manners that vividly recall the Lombard tradition. These, then joined to Umbrian, Abruzzese, Apulian and Dalmatian infiltrations, appear still in other buildings of the Marche, such as S. Maria di Piazza, also at Ancona, decorated on its facade with little arcades by a master Filippo in the year 1210.

In Umbria, in the heart of the peninsula, meanwhile, the Lombard elements likewise penetrate, fusing there with those of the pre-existing local tradition, which harked back to Early Christian elements, and with others deriving from Lazio and Tuscany. Thus in S. Gregorio at Spoleto begun in 1079, in the duomo of Foligno and in that of Assisi and in the cathedral of Narni, while in S. Pietro at Spoleto the division of the front into panels adorned with sculptures, which recalls very ancient local motifs, shows an interest in pictorial values that at other times, as in S. Felice at Narco, in the facade of the cathedral of Spoleto, in the lesser facade of the duomo of Foligno, in S. Michele at Bevagna, take true dominion through the presence of mosaics.

In Apulia it is still the elements of Lombard taste that prevail in S. Nicola at Bari which, begun in 1087 by the Benedictine Elias and consecrated in 1197, remained the exemplary construction for most of the Apulian Romanesque buildings. But alongside the Lombard ones there also appear Oriental elements, such as the great arches of the sides and the "curtain" that hides the apses. To S. Nicola are linked the duomo of Bari, the cathedral of Bitonto, the duomo of Trani, the cathedral of Ruvo.

Oriental elements prevail instead in maritime Apulia where the characteristics of Lombard architecture are as it were attenuated. Thus in the cathedrals of Taranto and of Otranto, with their simple basilical forms, thus in the buildings with a cross plan such as the cathedral of Canosa, consecrated in 1101, covered with five domes, thus in the mausoleum of Bohemond that rises next to that cathedral, thus in the duomo of Molfetta.

The very close affinities that some churches of the Capitanata show with certain aspects of contemporary Pisan architecture do not plausibly depend on inexplicable influences from Tuscany, but rather on common derivations from Oriental models, especially from Syria and Palestine. Thus the arcades that clothe the exterior of the cathedrals of Troia (1093-1125) and of Siponto (1117), S. Basilio at Troia and the sanctuary of Monte S. Angelo. In Calabria and Basilicata meanwhile the same elements of architectural culture recur, although those that denote direct relations with the East are more vivid: S. Marco at Rossano, Cattolica at Stilo, S. Giovanni Vecchio near Stilo, S. Maria di Tridetti.

Abruzzese architecture, although in many respects it links back to Lombard derivations in some of its most significant monuments, such as the Valvense basilica or that of S. Pelino at Pentima, especially in the taste for a rich plastic decoration, seems to depend on Apulia. But sometimes, as at S. Clemente at Casauria near Torre de' Passeri, transalpine elements intervene.

The elements that characterize Sicilian architecture of the Romanesque period are the Arab one and the Norman one, the latter of which, in fairly pure forms, is also encountered in Calabria. Among the constructions of frankly Arab character are indicated, in Sicily, S. Giovanni degli Eremiti at Palermo (1132) and S. Cataldo of the same city, both crowned with hemispherical domes. S. Maria dell'Ammiraglio, "the Martorana", built by George of Antioch in 1143, takes up instead Byzantine schemes even if Arab decorative elements recur there, which are moreover very intense also in the Palatine Chapel (ca. 1140). In the duomo of Palermo, instead, begun to be built in 1185 by the English bishop Walter Offamilio, in the cathedral of Cefalà (1131) and in that of Monreale, had built by William II between 1166 and 1189, the Arab and Oriental elements admirably fuse with the Norman ones, creating true masterpieces among the highest manifestations of Italian Romanesque architecture.

In Campania the abbey church of Montecassino, erected by the great abbot Desiderius and consecrated by Alexander II in 1071, according to the ancient basilical plan, with three naves, was a model for many churches of the region where new Oriental elements then also arrived, either by direct influence or deriving from Sicily. Thus in the church of the Crocifisso and in the duomo of Salerno consecrated in 1083, thus in that of S. Angelo in Formia near Capua, also of the 11th century, thus in the duomo of Caserta vecchia consecrated in 1153, where the Arab elements acquire precise definiteness, as in the cloister and in the still original parts of the duomo of Amalfi, in the duomo in S. Maria Gradillo and in S. Giovanni in Toro at Ravello etc. etc.

In Latium during the Romanesque age there were two principal centers of architectural culture, Rome and the Viterbo area. In Rome an important group of buildings denotes a precise return to forms similar to those of the city's most ancient churches. Thus S. Maria in Cappella of the 11th century, thus S. Crisogono and S. Maria in Trastevere, of the 12th century, thus S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura of the 13th century. While in other churches such as S. Clemente, 11th-12th centuries, and in the porticoes of S. Giorgio in Velabro, of S. Cecilia, of S. Lorenzo, of the SS. Giovanni e Paolo and in the series of the very numerous bell towers that rise beside the sacred buildings, from that of S. Giovanni a Porta Latina to that of S. Silvestro, to those of S. Giovanni and of S. Maria in Cosmedin, constructive principles connected with ancient local tradition are asserted, even if now assumed to a new dignity of style. Linked to the typically classicizing taste of the buildings just mentioned is the architectural activity of the Roman marble-workers, often designated by the name of Cosmati (v.). Thus in the half-ruined S. Maria di Fälleri (12th century) and above all in the portico that precedes the cathedral of Civita Castellana (v.). Its authors were Jacopo di Lorenzo and his son Cosma. To the members of another family of marble-workers, that of the Vassalletto, are owed the two marvelous cloisters of the Lateran and S. Paolo built at the beginning of the 13th century.

Among the most interesting buildings of the territory north of Rome, toward Tuscany, is S. Flaviano of Montefiascone. An 11th-century church with two orders which in plan recalls the ancient cathedral of Arezzo, while in elevation it connects to Lombard forms. These appear almost pure in the church of S. Maria in Castello at Tarquinia, which is of the 12th century. At that time two very beautiful churches were being built at Tuscania: S. Pietro, consecrated at the end of the 11th century, and S. Maria Maggiore of a few decades later, but both the one and the other completed in their decoration at a later date. With greater stylistic unity work was meanwhile being done at Viterbo, where S. Giovanni in Zoccoli (11th century), the church of S. Maria la Nova and the Cathedral, in the solemn harmonious division of spaces, connect to Tuscan forms.

It is in fact during the Romanesque age that Tuscany, where Lombard architectural elements also penetrate, assumes a precise classicizing intonation that in many respects preludes the Renaissance. Thus at Florence, where, with the Baptistery rebuilt or adapted between the 11th and 13th centuries, S. Miniato al Monte completed between 1018 and 1063, the church of the SS. Apostoli also built in the 11th century, the Badia of Fiesole begun in 1093 and the churches of S. Salvatore and S. Jacopo Sopr'Arno erected, buildings of perfect harmonious unity are created, where the alignments of columns and piers, on which serene arcades turn, the inlaid polychrome marble revetments, the clear relationships of surfaces, of voids and solids, the refined elegance of the plastic elements, denote a stylistic rigor and a precise selection of values that would remain at the basis of the Florentine architectural culture of the Renaissance.

Similar aspirations animate the Pisan architects, more ready nevertheless to welcome Lombard and Oriental elements as well. Thus in the Cathedral begun by Buschetto in 1063, consecrated in 1118 and then extended toward the façade by Rainaldo in the second half of the 12th century. The Baptistery, begun by Diotisalvi in 1153, the bell tower begun in 1173 and attributed to Bonanno, and all the other Pisan churches built between the 12th and 13th centuries, are affected by the influence of the marvelous Cathedral. Its forms were reflected, albeit with varying intonation, at Pistoia in S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas, begun in the second half of the 12th century and, albeit to a lesser degree, in S. Andrea and in S. Bartolomeo in Pantano, as well as at Lucca, where the Pisan forms harmonized with those of Lombard origin and with the inflections, above all chromatic, that the Pistoians had known how to give to the Pisan ones. Thus in the cathedral of S. Martino, where in the early years of the 13th century a Guidetto of Lombard origin was working, and thus in S. Michele in Foro with its most elegant façade: a masterpiece. To the forms of the Pisan churches, which are also found at Arezzo in the Pieve, the churches of Sardinia built between the 11th and 14th centuries on a basilical and colonnaded scheme are attuned. Suffice it to cite among the most important S. Gavino of Porto Torres and the SS.ma Trinità of Saccargia.

In some minor centers of Tuscany, to the forms derived from Florence, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia others are associated, sometimes of local intonation, almost always accompanied by Lombard elements. Thus in the pievi of Romena and Gropina, in the cathedral of Sovana, at Badia ad Isola, and finally in the complex Benedictine abbey of S. Antimo at Castelnuovo dell'Abate, begun in 1118, where elements of ultramontane origin also recur. The intense renewal of civic, political and religious life in the Romanesque age also decisively influenced the developments of civil architecture, of which there are very numerous testimonies in the cities and places of Italy. The great civic palaces, the houses of the major families, the grandiose convents, the walls and the very towers of defense then testify to a lively interest in elegance, beauty and architectural picturesqueness that is also reflected in vast building complexes and in the harmonious urbanistic arrangements of streets and squares. Thus in Lombardy, in Tuscany, in Latium and in so many cities of Emilia, at Venice, which then shapes its characteristic appearance closer to that of the fabulous Orient than to that of Europe, in Campania, where Caserta vecchia is an entirely admirable Romanesque complex, thus along the Amalfi coast and then in Apulia and finally in Sicily, where at Palermo the Royal Palace, the great and the small Cuba and the Zisa, a splendid place of delights, testify to the refined decorative taste of the Arabs willingly welcomed in the region.

The sculpture of the Romanesque age likewise follows an evolutionary process analogous to that of architecture. Thus while in the Po plain, and generally in the regions east of the Apennines, one can point to a group of works connected to the expressive modes of all of central Europe, in other territories of the peninsula, where the forms and traditions of ancient classical art were more alive, these prevail in a conscious imitation of the antique. In those environments, on the other hand, where the art and taste of the Orient, whether Hellenistic or Byzantine or even Arab, had penetrated through political and commercial contacts, the Oriental elements are absorbed and then re-expressed with individual accents. A common tendency, in any case, is a new manifest will to express feelings with clarity by vividly posing the figures. These, on the other hand, now detach themselves from the backgrounds in a gradual process of emancipation from architecture, whereby the sculptures cease to be a decorative accompaniment of the buildings in order to become statues, images, which, posed with human gestures, are the living commentary of the architectures.

While such tendencies are being asserted, the first great artistic personalities begin to define themselves in Italian art. That of Wiligelmo (v.), above all at Modena, while his pupils Niccolò (v.; facade of the cathedral of Ferrara [1135], the cathedral and S. Zeno in Verona) and Guglielmo (S. Zeno) interpret its typical motifs with individual accents. But it is the Lombard Benedetto Antelami (v.) who in the second half of the 12th century, in his sculptures at Parma and Borgo S. Donnino, achieves in a synthesis of vision the various tendencies which had by then long been fermenting in the peninsula, bringing them to definitive formal concreteness. So much so that, it may be said, he was then the master for all of Italy, even for those who never saw a work of his. And it is truly difficult to determine with precision, in the work of the sculptors active between the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, just how far beyond Lombardy and Emilia the direct or indirect memory of Antelami extends. It certainly reached the Venetian lagoon, where the master carvers fused those vigorous and highly expressive forms with those of Hellenistic and Byzantine art, generating a true masterpiece in the central portal of the basilica of S. Marco; likewise, with accents in which inflections of Lombard and Eastern taste can be recognized, many masters who worked along the Adriatic coasts, as far as Apulia, then a very lively center of sculptural activity, expressed themselves still in the first half of the 13th century.

There, from as early as the 11th century, Byzantine and Muslim elements had been elaborated with a vigor of popular character (the ambo and the episcopal chair of the cathedral of Canosa, works respectively by an Accetto and a Romualdo [1078-1085]) and therefore also forms of a classicizing flavor and of Nordic accent (the episcopal chair of S. Nicola in Bari, 1088). These elements continue to be developed during the 12th and 13th centuries, but with a gradual predominance of classical accents determined by more frequent contacts with the Hellenistic East. Thus in the apse sculptures of the cathedral of Bari, in those of the cathedral of Ruvo, thus at Castel del Monte, and finally in the pulpit of the cathedral of Ravello carved by Nicola di Bartolomeo da Foggia in 1272. The masters of sculpture then radiate from the land of Apulia to announce in the name of ancient art the advent of a new era, in the Abruzzi, in Campania, as far as the banks of the Arno, where Nicola da Puglia would mark out with resonant classical accents the substantial forms of his sculpture.

Closely connected with the Apulian and Lombard forms were those of the sculpture of the Abruzzi, assuming particular characteristics through the predominance of a lively and luxuriant decorative taste. The interlace, now rigid with openwork, now flat, now hooked and bristling, achieved sudden effects of plasticism in the rosettes, in the friezes, in the figures, even producing true masterpieces, as in the ciborium of S. Clemente at Guardia al Vomano, in the ciborium and the pulpit of S. Maria in Valle Porciana near Rosciolo, and in the admirable pulpit of S. Clemente at Casauria (12th century), fiercely Romanesque in its classicizing panels where rosettes rich in aggressive plastic evidence dominate. And Apulian elements can also be discerned in Umbria.

In Sicily too, apart from the motifs of Arab character frequent in the region, the essential tonality of the sculpture was conferred by classicism, whether derived from a centuries-old tradition reinvigorated by the contributions of Apulian and Campanian masters, or imported by artists from the Hellenistic East. Thus the capitals of the great churches built by the Norman kings had classical forms, those of the cathedral of Monreale above all, as did the reliefs, the friezes and the figures of the pulpit of the Palatine Chapel in Palermo, while in the cloister of Monreale, alongside the local masters, Lombards, Romans and Campanians worked.

The local classicizing tendencies, strengthened by contacts with Hellenistic-Eastern culture, were then predominant also in Campania, where in the 13th century the timely contribution of the Apulians arrived, such as that of the masters active at Capua in the Castle of Frederick II and of Nicola di Bartolomeo da Foggia at Ravello. Meanwhile, also in Campania, a large host of mosaicists was adorning, as in Sicily and Rome, pulpits and ambos, iconostases and candelabra with resplendent mosaics. Thus in the pulpits of Calvi and of Caserta Vecchia, of Sessa Aurunca, of Cava dei Tirreni, of the cathedral of Capua and of that of Salerno. In Latium the activity of sculptors was between the 12th and 13th centuries so closely bound to that of architecture that it is almost impossible to examine it separately. In any case, the classical forms directly inspired by antiquity prevail; sometimes, as in the candelabrum for the paschal candle at S. Paolo fuori le Mura, from Early Christian marbles. And this not only in the friezes, the capitals, the cornices, but also in the not frequent sculptures in the round. Marble-workers of the families of the Cosmati (v.) and of the Vassalletto (v.) are the authors of the most characteristic examples of those sculptures, but alongside them there is a whole array of sculptors working intensively, sometimes drawing again on motifs that are also Nordic, as in a lunette at Capranica di Sutri in the hospital and in the later portal of S. Maria Maggiore at Tresconia, or frankly Neo-Hellenistic, as in the baptistery of Grottaferrata, or of distant Etruscan inspiration as often in the Viterbo area, in the capitals and decorative elements of S. Flaviano at Montefiascone and of S. Pietro at Tuscania (11th century).

In Tuscany too, a classicizing taste prevails in decorative sculpture, but of a classicism almost always inspired by Neo-Hellenistic-Eastern art. Then strong personalities of sculptors, rich also in experiences of Lombard art, and in whom the spirits of ancient Etruscan art seemed also to revive, expressed themselves in Tuscany with accents of their own and of great vitality. Thus Guglielmo, author of the ancient pulpit of the cathedral of Pisa (1159-62), thus Bonanno Pisano (v.), thus Gruzamonte (v.) and Biduino who worked at Pistoia, thus the author of the plutei of S. Miniato in Florence, a follower of that Guido Bigarelli who in 1245 signed the baptismal font of Pisa. Bigarelli was a Lombard, as was Guidetto (v.), who at the beginning of the 13th century worked at Lucca in the cathedral and contracted works for the parish church of Prato. Meanwhile there arrived at Pisa from his native Apulia Nicola (v.), called Pisano, who, nourished in his own land on a pure Hellenistic culture, through contact with the vigorous plastic art flourishing in the territories of ancient Etruria matured the fullness of his expressive capacities, laying the solid foundations of the renewal of Italian sculpture.

During the Romanesque period, between the 11th and the 13th century, Italian painting elaborated the premises for freeing itself from the concepts and forms of Byzantine art, which had deeply marked its previous developments. However, it must immediately be noted how at that time, in the reflowering of culture and of interest in matters of art, with the intensifying of relations with the East, whose reflections are clear also in the field of architecture and sculpture, the ancient ties in the field of painting seemed bound to be strengthened as well. In fact, as had not happened for centuries, it is between the 11th and 12th centuries that Eastern artists were called to Italy, to the Veneto, to Sicily, to Campania to paint and compose mosaics, while some of our greatest masters, precisely on the solid foundations of Eastern pictorial culture, laid the fundamental elements of their expressive language.

In any case, in order to understand the apparent contrast of such a premise, it is necessary to recall how during the early Middle Ages, alongside the courtly and official pictorial manifestations, all more or less of a Byzantinizing intonation, there had continued to live in Italy a pictorial current of a popular intonation that pursued narrative aims. Now it happens that during the Romanesque period these two principal pictorial currents, the courtly and the popular, tend gradually to bring their interests into alignment. And while painters of courtly culture bend, adapt and transform their refined language in order to induce it to express new concepts, the popular painters refine the elements of their own language, causing it to assume a new dignity of style. Until Giotto himself, a pupil of the Byzantinizing Cimabue, availed himself of those premises "to change the art of painting from Greek into Latin" (Cennini).

Between the 11th and 12th centuries the liveliest centers of pictorial culture in Italy were Rome and Campania, the Veneto, particularly Venice, and Sicily. In Rome the activity of local masters was very intense; they created their masterpiece at the close of the 11th century in the frescoes of the church, today underground, of S. Clemente, while they carried on a notable activity in the neighboring territories of Latium, at Tuscania in S. Pietro, at Castel S. Elia, at Tivoli where the famous Salutatore bears witness to the refined elegance that that style of popular origin had reached. In Campania, meanwhile, new ideas also in matters of art radiated from the center of Montecassino. This is attested by the frescoes of S. Angelo in Formis near Capua, of the second half of the 11th century, and by the paintings of S. Vincenzo al Volturno, to be placed among the most significant manifestations of Benedictine artistic culture (v. BENEDETTINA, ARTE).

In Venice the immense blanket of mosaics that covers the basilica of S. Marco, canceling the plastic values of the structures, was executed between the 11th and 13th centuries and is for the most part the work of Eastern artists (v. BIZANTINA, ARTE). These, however, had in the local painters intelligent and ready followers who completed their works and repeated their forms in the mosaics of the cathedral of Torcello, in those of the cathedral of Murano, of S. Giusto in Trieste, of the apse of S. Ambrogio in Milan.

More concentrated in time is the activity of the Byzantine mosaicists who between about 1140 and 1200 worked in Sicily, at Palermo in the church of S. Maria dell'Ammiraglio and in the Palatine Chapel, at Monreale in the Cathedral, at Cefalù also in the Cathedral, at Messina and then again at Palermo in the rooms of the Royal Palace of King Roger the Norman and in the castle of the Zisa (v. BIZANTINA, ARTE).

During the 13th century in Latium the stylistic modes already defined in the field of popular art between the 11th and 12th centuries became established, but the courtly ones also had a notable development, having already imposed themselves in a series of grandiose mosaic works such as the decoration, by Eastern artists, of the abbey church of Grottaferrata and, by our own masters, of that of the apses of S. Clemente and of S. Maria in Trastevere. Moreover, at the beginning of the 13th century in Rome itself artists summoned from Venice worked with distinctly Eastern accents to decorate the apse of S. Paolo.

Of the intensifying of relations with the East there is also testimony in the work of certain Roman painters such as the authors of the frescoes of the Sacro Speco of Subiaco, of the crypt of the cathedral of Anagni, of the chapel of St. Sylvester near the church of the SS. Quattro Coronati. And on Eastern foundations Jacopo Torriti (v.) and Filippo Rusuti (v.) elaborated their art, and so did Pietro Cavallini (v.) himself, who is without doubt the greatest artist Rome had during the Middle Ages.

Similar modes were followed by painting in Umbria, where in the 12th century Alberto Sotio was active and then a group of masters who, toward the end of the 13th century, came together in the basilica of St. Francis at Assisi, almost completely freed from Byzantine modes, intent on working alongside Romans and Tuscans. Nevertheless the liveliest center of Italian pictorial culture already in the second half of the 13th century was Tuscany.

At Lucca the family of the Berlinghieri was active and then, toward the end of the century, Deodato Orlandi worked there, active also at Pisa where Giunta (v.), at the beginning of the 13th century, had expressed himself with highly dramatic accents. Arezzo then boasted Margaritone (1230), while at Siena Guido (v.) and a Vigoroso and numerous other painters were active, preparing the advent of the greatest of the Sienese masters of the 13th century: Duccio di Buoninsegna (v.).

At Florence at the beginning of the 13th century a group of mosaicists led by Jacopo Minorita was active, but artists of greater prominence were certainly the athletic Coppo di Marcovaldo (v.) and the Master of the Magdalen, imbued as they were with Byzantine culture, the sure foundation of the great art of Cenni di Pepi called Cimabue (v.). Beside the majestic figure of Cavallini and the most spiritual one of Duccio, Cimabue may perhaps appear more rough and violent, and also less skillful. But in him, who exalts the constructive line of the images, who defines volumes violently, in him who in his measured gestures, in his flashing glances has the dramatic expressive faculty of the ancient Etruscans, is to be recognized the master of Giotto and a foreannouncement of what the very great art of painting would be in Florence in the centuries to come.

4. GOTHIC ART (v. GOTICA, ARTE) AND THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. - While the forms of Romanesque art were evolving as mentioned above, from the end of the 12th century the modes proper to Gothic culture were also arriving in our peninsula. The first to make them known were the architects of the Cistercian monks. It is without doubt an error to evaluate the beauty of the Italian architectures of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, marked by the characters of the Gothic style, according to whether they are more or less close to the models from beyond the Alps, generated by feelings, aspirations and tastes foreign to our land. In fact the Italian architects of the 13th and 14th centuries who made use of pointed-arch forms assumed from them only those elements that were more easily assimilable and in harmony with their mentality and their expressive needs.

Therefore it should not cause astonishment if beside a series of constructions where Gothic art expresses itself in all its efficiency, such as the church of S. Maria in Flumine near Ceccano (end of the 12th century), the abbey of Fossanova (1208), that of Casamari (1217), that of S. Galgano (1218), the other of S. Maria d'Arabona near Chieti, the later one of S. Martino al Cimino, works directed by French architects for the Cistercians, there then arises a series of buildings in Lazio, in Abruzzo, in Tuscany, in which of the Gothic forms only certain wholly external aspects are assumed, which immediately insert themselves into the characteristic modes of the local architectural dialect with at times very tasteful interpolations. An encounter of Romanesque elements and Gothic forms is to be recognized in S. Andrea of Vercelli (1219) and in many other constructions of northern Italy of the 13th century where those encounters also generate buildings of great architectural expressiveness. Like the abbey of Chiaravalle Milanese (v.) and the other great abbeys of Morimondo, of Cerreto near Lodi and also of Chiaravalle della Colomba near Piacenza. From these the Gothicizing accents spread also to the major centers, where the pride of a Romanesque architectural tradition was more solid, refining it, until toward the end of the 13th century, while in Tuscany there was already a turning to Renaissance forms, at Milan the Cathedral was founded. Carried on laboriously for centuries almost always under the direction of foreign architects, it has nevertheless preserved the unitary sense of its style, so much so that the construction is certainly among those that in Italy reflect most vividly tastes from beyond the mountains. In Emilia meanwhile, from the 13th century onward, Gothic linearism grafts itself almost naturally onto the gentle local Romanesque taste, and not only in buildings that were completed in the 13th century in pointed-arch forms, such as the baptistery of Parma and the cathedrals of Fidenza, Piacenza and Ferrara, but assuming well-distinct characters in S. Francesco of Piacenza and in the very beautiful one of Bologna, from which the same S. Petronio derives, begun in 1390 by Antonio di Vincenzo.

In the Veneto Gothic elements arrived through the valleys of Trentino and also from Venezia Giulia. They appeared thus at Treviso inserting themselves into S. Nicolò, at Verona in S. Anastasia and in the Cathedral, at Vicenza in S. Lorenzo, at Venice in the course of the 13th century in the two churches of the SS. Giovanni e Paolo and of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, solemn, airy, most ample, a full and complete possession of the elements of pointed-arch architecture joined to a wholly Italian feeling for harmony and color. From them one may say all the other Venetian constructions of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries derive. In the Veneto, however, the Emilian pointed-arch elements are also alive, most evident at Padua both in the great church of the Santo and in that of the Eremitani and in the chapel of the Scrovegni at the Arena. A most important center of Gothicizing architectural culture was, during the 13th and 14th centuries, Umbria, where in 1228, at Assisi (v.), the construction of the basilica of St. Francis was begun: among the most original Italian Gothic constructions, a model for almost all the other Umbrian churches of the time. Also in the cathedral of Orvieto, begun to be built in 1290 but completed almost a century later in the marvelous facade designed by Lorenzo Maitani, the echoes of the great model are still alive

Umbrian model. And from Umbria the forms of St. Francis reached the Marches, where others of Gothic intonation came down the coast from the Veneto and Emilia and met yet others, those that the Cistercians had imported there in the abbeys of Chiaravalle, della Costagnola and di Fiastra. St. Mark's of Jesi and St. Francis of Ascoli Piceno are the two most notable Gothicizing monuments of the region, where pointed-arch forms, often reflected only in decorative details, continued to be used until the 15th century, when Giorgio da Sebenico, sculptor and architect, worked in Ancona on the Loggia dei Mercanti and on the portals of St. Augustine and of St. Francis delle Scale. In Abruzzo the forms of Burgundian architecture imported at the end of the 12th century and diffused at the beginning of the 13th in numerous buildings, such as the already mentioned S. Maria di Arabona, were readily received, especially in their decorative elements, together with those of Apulia. Thus in S. Giovanni in Venere at Fossacesia, in the church of S. Maria in Atri, in S. Clemente at Casauria, in S. Maria di Lanciano (1227), in the cathedral of Atri (1223), etc. Also in the 14th and 15th centuries the Gothicizing churches of Abruzzo had characteristic quadrangular façades, sometimes embellished with elegant cornices or with a polychrome facing, such as the masterpiece of the architecture of that region, the church of S. Maria di Collemaggio (1288) near L'Aquila (v.). In Apulia, Basilicata, Sicily and Campania, which during the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries were subject to the dominion of Norman, German or French princes, architects from beyond the Alps often worked. In Apulia the church of Sts. Nicholas and Cataldus at Lecce and that of St. Catherine at Galatina are particularly interesting, before the elegant forms of the time of Frederick II spread, which have their highest expression in Castel del Monte; French Gothicizing features, evident in Basilicata in St. John the Baptist at Matera, in Calabria in the cathedral of Cosenza (reconsecrated in 1222), in Sicily at Cefalù in the cathedral and in St. Augustine at Trapani, are superimposed on Arab pointed-arch forms; and they are accentuated in St. Nicholas at Agrigento and in the cathedral of Castrogiovanni. Thus in Naples in S. Eligio, begun around 1250, and in the oldest, apsidal part, in S. Lorenzo Maggiore, founded before 1285; while the other Neapolitan buildings erected between the 13th century and the beginning of the 15th, such as the Cathedral, the church of S. Maria Donna Regina and S. Pietro a Majella, must be considered as interpretations of the Gothic language. A language which now, going back up the coast toward Lazio, will be found again, as soon as its borders are crossed, in the already mentioned Cistercian abbeys of Fossanova, Casamari and Valvisciolo, from which derive the Gothicizing buildings of the centers of the Ciociaria, such as the churches of Ferentino, Amaseno, Priverno, Sezze and so on, up to Subiaco, where Gothicizing forms are found in S. Benedetto. Thus from the Cistercian abbey of S. Martino del Cimino derive many Gothicizing forms of the Viterbo area.

In Rome the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, built around 1280, is said to have been erected by the two friars Sisto and Ristoro, to whom is also assigned the most beautiful church of S. Maria Novella in Florence.

We have thus come to speak of the Gothicizing architectural forms in Tuscany, that is, of the region whose architects knew how to make use of those forms as elements to be originally elaborated, as expressive means that can be bent to express new ideas, to reflect new needs. Thus did the two friars already mentioned in S. Maria Novella, thus the Sienese masters who had their model in S. Galgano and raised the most beautiful Cathedral and the churches of St. Dominic and St. Francis in their city; thus the Pisan interpreters of pointed-arch forms, thus finally Arnolfo di Cambio (v.) in S. Croce and in S. Maria del Fiore, so ample and solemn in the great sweep of its openings and coverings as to deserve as its logical crowning not a Gothic tiburio but the great dome of Filippo Brunellesco. The soaring of the members, the pointed arch of the vault, the binding of the different parts, stand there to indicate the mastery of the elements and tendencies of Gothic art. The clarity of the planes over which the light placidly spreads is the same that dominates Romanesque architecture, the same that will imprint itself on Renaissance architecture. It is fully and totally Florentine, Italian.

Pointed-arch forms between the 13th and 14th centuries were also very widely employed in civil architecture and, in northern Italy, continued to appear throughout a great part of the 15th century. The lines of the major buildings, such as the public and municipal palaces, the episcopal residences, the castles and the dwellings of the patricians, then had, compared with the Romanesque age, greater soaring in height, greater elegance of ornament and wider windows and doors, although almost always in those buildings Romanesque and Gothic elements appear fused and superimposed. Thus in the Palazzo pubblico of Piacenza, in the municipal palace of Bergamo, in that of Como, in the Broletto of Brescia, in the Arengario of Monza, in the Palazzo della Ragione of Milan, in which city the beautiful Loggia degli Osii and the Palazzo Borromeo are also to be remembered, thus again in the one called di S. Giorgio in Genoa, in the Palazzo del Trecento of Treviso and in the public palace of Udine. Then Venice gave enthusiastic adherence to the decorative pleasantries of Flamboyant Gothic, so much so as to inform not only the external crowning of St. Mark's, but to make it the distinctive element of its civil architecture in a marvelous series of buildings that runs from the Doge's Palace to the Ca' d'oro, and has its masterpiece in the famous door called della Carta. In Emilia at Bologna, in the palaces built in Gothicizing forms between the 13th and 14th centuries, a type of elegant civil building is elaborated which will have its highest expression in the Palazzo dei Notai and in the Loggia dei Mercanti. Thus in Tuscany, where the civil architectures of that age are very numerous, culminating in the Palazzo della Signoria of Florence and in that of the Comune of Siena; in Umbria, with the public palaces of Todi, Perugia and Orvieto; in Lazio, it would suffice to cite the Palazzo dei Papi of Viterbo, 13th century; in Campania, Calabria and Apulia a series of splendid castles built by Frederick II testifies to the high cultural level of his court.

The Gothic architectures of central Europe, the great French cathedrals of the 12th and 13th centuries, had been training grounds for an infinite number of sculptors. Their images, like the architecture, reflected the sense of soaring, the typical tendency toward vertical development that is proper to Gothic taste, while in the friezes, the cornices, the capitals, fabulous anthropomorphic figures sprang from a tangle of lines and relief interlacements. Architecture and sculpture lived united in the buildings, which had their logical completion in the colored stained-glass windows. Almost always different was the appearance of the Gothicizing architectures in Italy, where only in the cathedral of Milan, in the crowning of St. Mark's in Venice, in the baptistery and in the little church of S. Maria della Spina in Pisa, in the facades of the cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto and in a few other constructions, does Gothic decorative taste assert itself in works of sculpture inseparably connected to the developments of architecture in a unified vision, so that even the very personalities of the major artists who worked there remain as it were absorbed in the whole of the work. Also in the field of sculpture Tuscany then assumed a sort of preeminence over the other regions of Italy, although Nicola (v.), called Pisano, drew his origins from Apulia. In Pisa as in Siena, alongside Nicola, a group of pupils and followers was working in the mid-13th century, but of these, among the major ones, only Fra Guglielmo da Pisa (v.) aimed to follow the master's art; for the others, whether Arnolfo di Cambio (v.), who worked especially in Rome and Florence, or Giovanni Pisano, Nicola's son, proceeded along quite different paths. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 14th century, alongside these great personalities, three different currents can be distinguished in Tuscany itself, which then, over the course of the century, intersect and overlap. One is the Pisan one, the most faithful to Giovanni's forms; another is that of the Florentines, upon whom Giovanni exercised a very notable influence despite the looming personality of Giotto, who himself practiced the art of sculpture; the third is that of the Sienese, which, although for the most part formed by Pisano's collaborators in the works for the facade of the Cathedral, is the most faithful to the spirit of the art that had already flourished in Siena itself over the course of the 13th century. Of the Sienese masters of the 14th century the most interesting are Tino di Camaino (v.), Lorenzo Maitani (v.), Goro di Gregorio, Agostino and Agnolo di Ventura, and Gano; while Andrea (v.) di Ugolino da Pontedera, called Pisano, active especially in Florence on a door of the Baptistery and in Orvieto, and Nino Pisano, more than great, a most active sculptor, are the best-known representatives of a large group of Pisan masters. Then in Florence Francesco Talenti and above all Andrea Orcagna pursue in their images a sense of massive monumentality, which has almost a flavor of polemic in comparison with the simpering attitudes that Sienese and Pisan sculpture was assuming in the mid-14th century. The Tuscan plastic manners radiated into Lombardy through the work of Giovanni di Balduccio (v.) and were there also for the most part adopted by the Campionesi masters (v.), to whom the art of the Dalle Masegne (v.) is connected, a typical expression of 14th-century Venetian sculpture. In Florence, meanwhile, Nicolò di Pietro Lamberti da Arezzo was working, who in his majestic sculptures asserted ideals that foreshadow those of the Renaissance.

The painting of the 14th century in Italy had orientations of taste for the most part entirely foreign to those of Gothic art, even if elements of that culture characterize its aspects in some cases.

Thus Giotto (v.) certainly cannot be said to reflect Gothic elements in his extraordinary expressive power, elements which he nevertheless certainly knew, if only through miniatures: the same ones that were surely seen, in Siena, by Duccio, Simone Martini, Lippo Memmi, Ugolino, Barna and the Lorenzettis, and that influenced the developments of their art.

Which art, precisely because of those attitudes, was soon well received in Florence itself, so much so that exchanges of influences immediately began, as the works of Bernardo Daddi (v.), of Maso, of Giottino, of the Master of the Vaults of Assisi and of Taddeo Gaddi (v.) well testify, among the Florentines who had seen Giotto himself at work, and the Sienese, among whom the Lorenzettis themselves, who were also called to work in Florence.

In Florence, among the masters of the second generation of the 14th century, the one who excels above the others is Andrea Orcagna (v.), already encountered as a sculptor and who, even more than his brother Nardo di Cione, seeks to superimpose upon the solid Giottesque forms the pleasantries of Sienese decorativism, which still found favor in the painting of Andrea Bonaiuti, of Agnolo Gaddi (v.), of Antonio Veneziano and of others still who cross the threshold of the 15th century, such as Lorenzo di Bicci, Gherardo Starnina (v.) and Spinello Aretino. Among the most direct followers of Andrea Orcagna, one will further recall a group of very active painters at the close of the 14th century, such as Giovanni del Biondo, Pietro Nelli, Nicolò di Pietro Gerini and his son Lorenzo.

These also underwent the influence of Giovanni da Milano (v.), a Lombard active in Florence in the middle of the century. Among the Sienese active in the second half of the 14th century, on the other hand, are to be remembered especially Andrea Vanni (v.), Bartolomeo Bulgarini, Bartolo di Fredi and his son Andrea, Luca di Tomé, then the very active Taddeo di Bartolo, Lippo Vanni, Mino del Pelliccio and Paolo di Giovanni Fei, who with many others extend well into the 15th century while remaining faithful to the figurative tradition of the beginning of the century.

If we now consider the painting of the fourteenth century in the other territories of Tuscany and in the other regions of Italy, one may even gain the impression that its evolution everywhere depends directly or indirectly on Giotto or on Simone and the Lorenzetti. This is because those masters essentially represent two positions of the spirit that took concrete form in two tendencies which could be followed even by those who knew the paintings of the great Florentine and the great Sienese only by hearsay. Thus, at Pisa, Francesco Traini (v.) and other local painters, craftsmen of no greater worth than many others active in the various territories of central and southern Italy. At Naples, however, the art of Giotto and of Simone, like that of Cavallini, was also directly known through the works those masters left there; and Roberto di Oderisio demonstrates this, if the very beautiful frescoes of the church of the Incoronata belong to him. Of great importance at that time was also the activity of the Riminese school of painting, which had in Giuliano da Rimini its earliest master, linked to Cavallini's manner, and then in Giovanni Baronzio (v.), in Giovanni da Rimini (v.), in Pietro da Rimini and in the great master who painted the Crucifix of the Tempio Malatestiano, assigned by some scholars to Giotto himself, its most characteristic representatives, at times inclined to the forms of the Giottesques, at others to those of the Lorenzetti followers. The painting of the Riminese is connected to that of the Emilians, a notable group of whom worked at Bologna, where around the middle of the fourteenth century there were active a Vitale, a Jacopo de Bavosi, a Simone dei Crocifissi, Lippo Dalmasio and Jacopo degli Avanzi, as well as a Jacopo di Paolo active until 1426. Other Emilians of merit were Barnaba and Tommaso da Modena. The latter worked in the Veneto, where the precious forms of the Venetian Madonneri (v.), despite the activity of Giusto de' Menabuoi (v.) and of the great Guariento (v.), had delayed the spread of Giottesque naturalism. But behold, around 1380, in Padua itself, a marked naturalistic sense asserting itself once more in the work of the Veronese Altichiero and Avanzo. These now partook of the forms proper to a pictorial taste which in Lombardy had created its masterpiece in the frescoes of the Porro chapel at Mocchirolo, now at Brera, the work of a painter close to but not to be identified with Giovanni da Milano. A painting, that of the Lombards and Venetians of the late fourteenth century, which aspires to sumptuous decorative effects, and which is inclined to a sinuous heraldic elegance; inclined, that is, to a certain sharp expressiveness proper to Northern art, whose influences then began to penetrate into Italy, contributing to the formation of masters such as Stefano da Zevio (v.), Pisanello (v.), Gentile da Fabriano (v.), Masolino da Panicale (v.) himself and other great painters active at the beginning of the fifteenth century, to be ascribed to the current known as the "International Gothic."

5. THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE RENAISSANCE

One of the most characteristic aspects of the Renaissance is a sudden happy change of season, which brings about a lively reawakening of human personality and therefore a search for whatever may enhance it. Hence also the passionate study of antiquity, whose fabulous grandeur was a living concept, a study that led artists to the imitation of ancient monuments.

In this, the culture takes on attitudes at times analogous to the Romanesque period. This is evident above all in Florence, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, in the fields of architecture and sculpture, in manifestations that must be ranked among the highest and most expressive of the Renaissance itself.

Thus in the architectures of Filippo Brunelleschi (v.), which have a close bond with the works of the Romanesque period and which represent, together with those of Leon Battista Alberti (v.), another supreme Italian genius of that age, the foundation of the further developments of Renaissance architecture. To the work and even more to the different attitudes of the two toward ancient classicism are linked the developments of fifteenth-century Tuscan architecture and of a great part of Italy which is linked to that of the Tuscans.

Thus to Brunelleschi's art refer back Donatello (v.), Michelozzo Michelozzi (v.), Pagno di Lapo Portigiani (1408-70), sculptor and architect, active also at Bologna with Antonio di Simone fiorentino, thus that Maso di Bartolomeo (ca. 1406-56) who worked at Urbino, thus finally Luca della Robbia (v.) himself in the architectural elements of his compositions and Lazzaro Cavalcanti, and Antonio Manetti Ciaccheri. And Brunelleschians too were architects who, being much younger than the master, never saw him at work. Thus Benedetto and Giuliano da Majano; the latter indeed inclined in his later works to the taste of Alberti. As also Giuliano da Sangallo (v.) conceded much to the Albertian taste. He remained instead almost entirely immune from that somewhat swollen and oratorical sense, the one who can be considered the last Brunelleschian of Florence: Simone del Pollajolo called il Cronaca (30 Oct. 1457-21 Sept. 1508), author among other things of the church of the Salvatore and of S. Francesco near S. Miniato, which Michelangelo affectionately called "la bella villanella," to underscore its spontaneous grace.

Also Ventura Vitoni of Pistoia preserved the Brunelleschian taste fairly purely down to the early years of the sixteenth century, reflecting the old master's love for the slender, continuous line, the same that gives life to so much Florentine painting of the fifteenth century.

Beside these architects, behold the group of Alberti's followers taking shape. Theirs is an architecture that tends to the exaltation of plastic masses, to grandiosity, which springs from the excess of structural power whose value Alberti knew how to grasp in the architecture of the ancients. Thus in the architectures of Bernardo Rossellino (v.) and of Agostino di Duccio (v.), thus in those of Baccio Pontelli (v.) at Rome and in the Marches, and of Matteo Nuti at Fano and Cesena, in those of Luca Fancelli, disseminator of the Albertian style at Mantua. Meanwhile, beyond the two fairly homogeneous groups, behold the activity of two other very great artists taking shape: Luciano Laurana (v.) and Francesco di Giorgio Martini (v.). But while the former had no continuators or followers in his most pure art, Francesco di Giorgio had many admirers and imitators, and it suffices to mention Giacomo Cozzarelli, Lorenzo di Mariano called il Marrina and the greatest of all, the graceful and elegant Baldassarre Peruzzi (v.).

It is well now to turn one's gaze to the other Italian regions, where the forms of the Gothic tradition had remained more alive. In Campania and in Sicily, the forms of Catalan architecture found favor, determining at Palermo certain aspects of the art of Matteo Maria Carmelivari. In the north, on the other hand, the elements of transalpine Flamboyant Gothic insert themselves easily into the soil traced by the Campionesi masters and on the example of the great fabric of the Milanese cathedral, and find favor even if, with the Solari family, Lombard architecture at first maintains intonations closer to the ancient Romanesque simplicity. The echoes of this, together with those of French Gothic, appear in many constructions of Piedmont, while in Liguria other Lombard masters work, who descend together with those of the Canton of Ticino toward the sea.

But, as has already been mentioned, the masterpiece of Italian Gothicizing architecture was to be found in the fifteenth century in Venice, in the work first of the continuators of the Dalle Masegne, and then of the sculptor-architects of the Buon family (v.), who also worked alongside Lombards and Tuscans, creating a group of architecture in which elements of the classical tradition, fabulous memories of the distant East, modes proper to the flamboyant Gothic, elegances of Tuscan forms, Lombard chromatic delicacies, fuse into a unity in architectures where, at times, it seems that the very laws governing the statics of buildings are as it were overturned. Thus in the deep porticoes, in the great loggias, in the mirror-like verandas along the canals, whose waters reflect the extraordinary architectures encrusted with polychrome marbles, creating a phantasmagoria of lights and colors that will never have an equal.

Then, even in central Italy, Renaissance forms take on the character of a measured classicism. In Emilia, at Ferrara, Pietro Benvenuti and Biagio Rossetti worked; at Parma, Bernardino Zaccagni; at Piacenza, Alessio Tramello; and while at Bergamo Giovanni Antonio Omodeo created his precious masterpiece in the Colleoni chapel, the Lombardo and then Mauro Coducci (v.) introduced into the colorful Venetian world Lombardesque elements, which Donato Bramante (v.) himself had welcomed and most ingeniously elaborated from the time when, around 1480, he had begun to work in Lombardy.

He is truly a great knot in the development of the history of architecture, and the date of his transfer to Rome, which occurred in all likelihood in the centenary year 1500, is one of the most significant in the history of Italian art. For through his work Italian architecture substantially changes its tone. The memories of Gothic linearism, more or less alive in the followers of Brunelleschi, like the more or less archaeological classicizing of the Albertians, or any other bond to traditional forms and tastes, are overcome and resolved. Bramante in Rome teaches the world, and Raphael (v.) himself, the way of seeing the ancients, and of understanding classicism not as a dead language, but as a living element of culture, of being itself. The tempietto of S. Pietro in Montorio consecrates this moment, so much so that the intonation of the new architecture is owed to the rhythms determined in it. Raphael, Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine, Baldassarre Peruzzi, the Sangallo, Antonio the Elder, Antonio the Younger and then their followers give Rome and a great part of Italy a new face. And mindful of Bramante's work will still be Cristoforo Solari in Lombardy, Pietro Isabello at Bergamo, Andrea Marchesi da Formiggine at Bologna, and Cola dell'Amatrice himself in the architectures of the Marches and Abruzzo. Until Michelangelo, himself assuming those forms, gave them a new sense of life, whereby the architectural organism is determined by new masterly relationships, which are those of his sculpture.

Relationships that could be admired but not imitated, as the best of those who wished to approach with humility of heart the genius understood, such as Jacopo del Duca, Bartolomeo Ammannati (v.) and Giovanni Antonio Dosio, and Giorgio Vasari (v.) himself in his most beautiful works, Bernardo Buontalenti and the other Tuscan mannerists, until Jacopo Barozzi called il Vignola, a pupil of Serlio, sought a new chasteness in architectures (v. RIFORMA CATTOLICA, ARTE della), in accordance with what he also theorized in his book on the Ordini dell'architettura. Giacomo della Porta, Martino Longhi the Elder, Flaminio Ponzio, Domenico Fontana, the great builder and organizer of the Rome of Sixtus V, Ottavio Mascarino and other lesser figures, among whom the ingenious Pirro Ligorio should not be confused, were all direct or indirect followers of Vignola, whose tastes in many respects met, toward the end of the sixteenth century, with those of other architects who looked to Palladio, another most powerful genius of Italian architecture. In the Veneto the forms derived from Bramante had already spread, as has already been mentioned, in the last years of the fifteenth century and the very first of the sixteenth, until Jacopo Sansovino, a Tuscan who had worked in Rome, after the famous sack of 1527 had moved to Venice, where his classicizing took on tones of grace and magnificence, a faithful mirror of the new taste that on the lagoon was taking on characteristic aspects. A taste that was reinforced by Sammicheli, whose architecture in many respects preludes that truly splendid one of Palladio himself, whose serene art, still toward the end of the century, with its limpid measure had marked a sort of limit to the absolute freedom of imagination proper to the Venetians. Vincenzo Scamozzi then repeated its accents well into the seventeenth century, also instructing Longhena, mindful, despite the forms weighed down by Baroque exuberance, of Palladio and perhaps more of Sansovino, marking almost a posteriori the ideal path that links the art of Tuscany, still quattrocentesque of the first Sansovinian experiences, to the taste of the most opulent Venetian Baroque.

An evolutionary process that has some resemblance to that followed by a great Perugian architect but educated in Rome: Galeazzo Alessi (v.), who at Genoa and Milan left so deep a mark of himself also through the work of his followers, such as Pellegrino Tibaldi (v.), active besides in his native Bologna (a very notable architectural center where toward the end of the sixteenth century the work especially of Francesco Morandi is to be remembered), in the Marches, in Lombardy and in Piedmont. At Ferrara there then worked Alberto Schiatti and Battista Aleotti; at Parma Francesco Fornovo, Gian Battista Magnan and Giovanni Boscoli; at Modena Francesco Guerra, and others still in Romagna and the Marches, marked by a certain purification and austerity of forms, those preferred by the Catholic reform.

6. THE SCULPTURE OF THE RENAISSANCE

The evolution of sculpture during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took on aspects similar to those of architecture; so that also with regard to it, it is appropriate to begin this rapid account by recalling what was done in the very first years, precisely, of the fifteenth century in Tuscany. Above all in Florence, where the already mentioned Niccolò di Pietro Lamberti, Bernardo Ciuffagni (v.), Nanni di Banco (v.), the best of all, and Nanni di Bartolo attempted in varying degrees to free themselves from tradition, even if the Gothic taste was not entirely renounced by them. So that, except for Nanni di Banco, they all seem to remain somewhat uncertain about the path to follow, nor is that taste renounced by the supreme Lorenzo Ghiberti (v.), nor by Jacopo della Quercia (v.), whose plastic force, which at times seems to link him to the work of Giovanni Pisano, makes him at the same time appear strained toward the future; and in him one grasps more than an announcement of Michelangelo himself.

He who instead in every respect announces the new times is Donatello (v.), the friend and companion of Filippo Brunelleschi and of Masaccio; he announces them and brings them about, anticipating, also in his researches into light and movement, those which would be the goals pursued by sculptors at the end of the century.

Michelozzo Michelozzi (v.), Bertoldo (v.), who repeated Donatello's teachings to his pupil Michelangelo, and Bellano were direct followers of the master. While other Florentine sculptors, such as Bernardo Rossellino (v.) and Desiderio da Settignano (v.) above all, and also Agostino di Duccio (v.), in whom multiple aspects of Gothic linearism live again, sought to grasp from Donatello's art especially a certain grace that in the master is too spontaneous not to be transformed, in the work of imitators, often into affectation. Thus in Mino da Fiesole (v.), in Antonio Rossellino (v.) and in Benedetto da Majano (v.), when in Florence the glazed terracottas of the Della Robbia were enjoying great fortune, a family of sculptors and modellers that in Luca had its founder and its greatest artist.

But it was precisely in the second half of the fifteenth century that Donatello's work was to provide the stimulus for two other very great Tuscan masters: Antonio del Pollaiuolo (v.) and Andrea del Verrocchio (v.), in their investigations of movement and light. Antonio del Pollaiuolo sought to achieve those effects by means of the energetic line of his contours, Andrea del Verrocchio by means of a certain "sfumato" produced by the light that spreads over the vibrant, caressed surfaces, as would be the case with Leonardo (v.), who was in fact a pupil of Verrocchio.

Thus the history of sculpture in Florence appears wholly bound and knit by ties, almost internal veins, with a strange if not indeed prodigious sense of determination, to generate the work of the greatest geniuses, unless one were to hold that what was done in the course of the fifteenth century in Florence truly sums up in itself what was pursued in the other territories of Tuscany and in the other regions of the peninsula. So, although at Lucca Matteo Cividali has works of merit, one feels that his art would perhaps not have existed without the direct inspiration of Antonio Rossellino and Benedetto da Majano. While at Siena, the birthplace of Jacopo della Quercia, one will never forget the works that Donatello left in the city. Likewise the Vecchietta, that Lorenzo di Pietro who was also a painter besides a goldsmith, as were Neroccio di Bartolomeo and Francesco di Giorgio Martini himself.

In Emilia there then worked alongside the Tuscans a great master who had likewise come from outside: Niccolò da Bari, more commonly called Niccolò dell'Arca; dependent on him are the Modenese Guido Mazzoni, active also in Naples and, though to a lesser degree, Sperandio Mantovano (1425-95) and Vincenzo Onofri, a Bolognese of whom there are records from 1450 to 1518.

In Lombardy a particular manner of understanding plasticism was being elaborated, which can be connected, by analogies, to the search for chromatic values already evident in the Lombard pictorial works of the fourteenth century and also to the local architectural taste. Indeed the first Lombard sculptors who reflect some Renaissance idea, such as a Matteo Raverti and a Jacopino da Tradate, have no greater interest than the other sculptors, German or Germanizing, active at Milan in the Cathedral in the middle of the century. Nor do the brothers Cristoforo (d. 1482) and Andrea (d. 1495) Mantegazza express different concepts, so that one must come to Antonio Omodeo (1447-1522) to point to a great sculptor as well as a great architect. His sculpture, like that of Andrea Bregno and of Luigi Capponi, active in Rome, sometimes has the delicacy of wax and the softness of ivory and a certain luminosity of surfaces as would be the case in the painting of the Lombard followers of Leonardo. The Cazzaniga, the Rodari, Pietro da Rho, Benedetto Briosco, depend more or less on Omodeo, exponent of a taste that was successful also in Venice. There, after the Dalle Masegne and the Bon, architects and decorators of the Porta della Carta (1438-42), in which Pietro Lamberti collaborated, there also worked in the field of sculpture Pietro Lombardo with his sons Antonio and Tullio, while from Dalmatia other masters came to work on the opposite shore of the Adriatic: the already mentioned Giorgio da Sebenico, Andrea di Niccolò Alessi da Durazzo, Antonio Rizzo (v.), who left distinguished masterpieces in Venice, Giovanni Dalmata (v.), active in Rome alongside Andrea Bregno, and finally the greatest of all: Francesco Laurana (v.), who worked also in Naples and above all in Sicily, where he met Domenico Gagnini (v.), who continued an art by then weary in repeating ancient schemes when for over thirty years Leonardo and Michelangelo were pursuing far different goals also in the field of sculpture: Leonardo continuing Verrocchio's investigations, the fleeting sense of form in movement; Michelangelo without deviating from the furrow of Giotto, of Masaccio, of Donatello, exalting the plastic force of images, whereby he arrives at the spirituality of form almost consumed by the very ardor of the imagination.

The antithetical positions of Leonardo and Michelangelo could not fail to mark clearly distinct goals for sculptors; even for those, like Andrea Sansovino (v.), whose vision had already been determined when the two rose to full mastery in the fields of art. But the sculptures of Andrea, like the youthful ones of Jacopo Sansovino (v.), had very notable elements to attract. Hence the easy preference of many, who asked of art above all illustrative values and pleasantness of decoration, and hence also the diffusion of the manners of an Andrea di Pietro Ferrucci (1465-1526) and of a Niccolò Tribolo (1500-50), always mindful, besides the forms of Sansovino, of a certain grandiosity or, at least, Michelangelesque oratory; oratory that is often found also in other followers of Andrea, among whom are to be placed, besides Francesco da Sangallo (1494-1576), that Domenico Aimo, called the Bologna or the Varignana (who according to Vasari completed at the death of the master himself the relief with the transit of the Virgin for the S. Casa of Loreto), Ercole Seccadenari, Amico Aspertini the painter, Francesco da Milano and some other equally active in Emilia.

Also Simone Mosca and Pietro Torrigiano, who worked much in England and in Spain, can be indicated as followers of Sansovino. They had affinities of intent with other sculptors; thus the Lorenzetto (v.), Raffaello da Montelupo (v.) or Pier Jacopo Bonacolsi of Mantua (d. 1528), Andrea Briosco called the Riccio (v.) of Padua, Maffeo Olivieri (1484-after 1534) of Brescia, Vittore Gambello of Venice, Francesco di S. Agata and still others, who assume in their works order and composure from the neoclassicists. Thus above all Tullio Lombardo and Alessandro Leopardi (1450-1523), author of the famous pillars of Piazza S. Marco, Paolo Savin, Giovanni and Antonio Minelli, Giovanni Dentone, Paolo Stella, Zuan Maria Padovano called the Mosca and Zouan Zorzi called Pirgotele, who, in the first half of the sixteenth century, create between Padua and Venice an environment of highly refined neoclassicizing plastic culture.

And here one would have to recall the belated ornamentalists, also Tuscan, such as Benedetto da Rovezzano of Canapole, Lorenzo di Mariano called the Marrina and Bernardino di Giacomo of Siena, Silvio Cosimi active in Pisa, Florence, Volterra and Genoa, a most refined sculptor, and still others, while one cannot forget the Emilian modellers, Alfonso Lombardi and Antonio Begarelli above all, to whose activity is linked so much polychrome sculpture in wood and stucco from the beginning of the sixteenth century in Lombardy and Piedmont. Sculpture that has its masterpiece at the S. Monte near Varallo Sesia in the compositions that unfold against the backgrounds of Gaudenzio Ferrari.

Then the oldest tradition of the Lombard ornamentalists is maintained in Milan by Agostino Busti called the Bambaja (1483-1548) and by other minor artists who work also at Pavia in the Certosa, and traditional elements revive in Naples in the elegant grace of a Giovanni da Nola (v.) and of his pupil Girolamo Santacroce (1502-37), active alongside the master with other minor artists, such as Giovan Domenico d'Auria, Giovanni Antonio Tenerello and Annibale Caccavello. Of these masters and of the very numerous others active in southern Italy and in Sicily, the best was without doubt the son of Domenico Gagnini, Antonello, active as has been said in Sicily: a conservative he too, but sometimes a poet.

But alongside the traditionalists the new sculpture instead proceeded by other paths, even if of Michelangelo's impetuous vehemence the imitators and followers grasped only the most showy and superficial aspects, many times without even suspecting the intimate profound drama of the master, whereby he arrived at the very dissolution of form.

Montorsoli, Raffaello da Montelupo, Tiberio Calcagni, and Francesco da Sangallo, who were also at his side and sometimes collaborated with him, drew from him only principles that became for them not merely useless but harmful to expression. Better were Daniele da Volterra (1509-66), at times of a powerful realism, and Jacopo del Duca, most faithful even to the memory of the master, and Baccio Bandinelli, who learned pictorial subtleties from Rustici, his teacher, and from Andrea Sansovino. The latter was also the teacher of another Florentine soon drawn into Michelangelo's orbit, that Giovanni Bandini known as dell'Opera, just as Nanni di Baccio Bigio and Domenico Poggini, a diligent and at times exquisite sculptor, and Vincenzo de Rossi were drawn into it. Thus among the Tuscan Michelangelesques one would also have to place Pierino da Vinci, a sculptor of delightful putti, and Bartolomeo Ammannati. Benvenuto Cellini (v.) too falls within the orbit of the Michelangelesques, despite the proud master's considering himself superior to Buonarroti himself, and so do Vincenzo Danti (v.) of Perugia, Francesco Camilliani, Michelangelo Naccherino, active in Naples, and many other masters whose mere names it would be too long to repeat here.

Meanwhile in the Veneto, still from the stock of Jacopo Sansovino's art, derives a strong group of sculptors, among them Danese Cattaneo, teacher to the great Venetian portraitists of the Cinquecento, Tiziano Minio, and Alessandro Vittoria, whose inspiration and impetuous temperament found no equal save in Tintoretto; while Girolamo Campagna (1550-1623), Francesco Segala (1564-93), and Tiziano Aspetti (1565-1607) carry, together with Camillo Mariani (1556-1611), a powerful sculptor active in Rome, and with Nicola Roccagliata, to the very threshold of the Baroque age the now distant memory of the greatest models.

In Lombardy, where Cristoforo Solari known as il Gobbo had worked, transferring into the Cinquecento still traditional manners, there arrives from Arezzo Leone Leoni (1509-90) (v.), active also with his son Pompeo, in Mannerist manners which in Milan assume, with Annibale Fontana (1540-87), Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527-96) (v.), and Francesco Brambilla (d. 1599), attitudes that prelude the Baroque. In Lombardy this tendency is opposed by the other that centers on the Della Porta, a family of stonecutters whose most authoritative representatives are Gian Giacomo (d. 1555) and Guglielmo (d. 1577), active in Genoa and in Rome, where other Lombards then worked in a Mannerist vein, such as Prospero Bresciano (d. 1599), Ambrogio Bonvicino (ca. 1552-1622), Giovanni Antonio Paracca da Valsolda, Silla Longhi da Viggiù, Ippolito Buzio, and Stefano Maderno (v.), who accomplished his masterpiece in the recumbent statue of St. Cecilia; alongside them worked also Leonardo da Sarzana and the Romans Pier Paolo Olivieri, Flaminio Vacca, and Cristoforo Stati, almost all of them active in S. Maria Maggiore in the Sistine and Pauline Chapels, where one also encounters Pietro Bernini (v.), father of the great Gian Lorenzo. In closing this account of Italian sculpture of the Renaissance, it will be well to recall once more Tuscany and the work of some of its great masters, among whom one would also wish to place Giambologna (v.) who, born at Douai in France, lived and worked in Florence alongside Pietro Francavilla of Cambrai (1555-1613), Giovanni Caccini (1556-1612), Pietro Tacca (v.), a most remarkable sculptor, Taddeo Landini (ca. 1561-ca. 1596), author in Rome of the beautiful fountain of the Turtles and of other sculptures, Manno Fiorentino, a goldsmith, author of that wonder that is the Farnese casket in the Museum of Naples, and that Andrea Gentili (1519-1609), born at Faenza but Tuscan in art and education, who left in the Treasury of the Vatican Basilica a cross and two gilt-silver candlesticks.

7. THE PAINTING OF THE RENAISSANCE

Mention has already been made in I. of the current known as the International Gothic and of its principal representatives, among whom in Florence one must point to, besides Masolino, Lorenzo Monaco, who nevertheless appears more an archaizer than a master attracted by those same courtly elegances that enchanted Stefano da Zevio, Gentile da Fabriano, or Pisanello. Elegances that interest, at the beginning of the century, also other notable Italian painters, especially of northern Italy, such as Giovannino de Grassi and the Zavattari brothers in Lombardy, Jacobello del Fiore and Michele Giambono in Venice, very many Piedmontese, numerous Emilians and, in the Marches, Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni da Sanseverino. Different, on the other hand, appear at once the goals aspired to, in Florence, by Masaccio (v.), whose value in the field of painting may be compared to that of Brunellesco and Donatello in those of architecture and sculpture. But compared with theirs, that of Masaccio appears a newer art, made of a substantial austerity, of a vigor, of an absoluteness in peremptory expression. Novelties those of Masaccio which it was not easy to understand without a mind mature enough to grasp their supreme values; and yet all the Florentines of the first half of the Quattrocento, beginning with Masolino himself, for one reason or another, appear as it were irradiated by the great light that emanates from Masaccio.

Thus fra' Giovanni da Fiesole known as the Beato Angelico (v.), thus Filippo Lippi (v.) and Francesco Pesello known as il Pesellino (v.), thus Benozzo Gozzoli (v.), painters who depend directly on the Angelico, and pursue goals different from the purely spatial ones of a Paolo Uccello (v.) and an Andrea del Castagno (v.), certainly closer to the substantial comprehension of Masaccio's art.

Then in the field of Florentine painting the art of Domenico Veneziano (v.) assumed a quite special importance, a painter who illuminates his images with a vivid light in order to reveal their form and exalt their compactness above all through color. With such an approach Domenico Veneziano paved the way for Piero della Francesca (v.).

Piero's art tended toward abstraction through an absolute purity of style. One could certainly not think of rendering the reality of life with Piero's means, in comparison with whom Benozzo Gozzoli, just to cite an example and not to speak of the contemporary Flemings, had qualities far more engaging as a narrator. Nevertheless there were not a few who attempted the compromise, first among them Baldovinetti (v.), who, going back to his teacher, Andrea del Castagno, tried to render through painting the sense of the motion of images. That is, of form and movement together, as Antonio del Pollajolo (v.) also wished to do. But in Pollajolo the line, which delimits very clear fields of color, conferred together on the plastically felt images the sense of motion. A plasticism, that of Pollajolo, which finds its counterpart also in the tormented, skillful painting of Verrocchio, himself a disciple of Baldovinetti.

The vision filtered essentially through the energetic and functional line returns in the works of Cosimo Rosselli, a disciple of Neri di Bicci, and of Lorenzo di Credi, and has its greatest champion in one of the major and most famous artists that Florence had in the Renaissance: Alessandro Filipepi known as Botticelli. Alongside these, in the last thirty years of the century, artists of lesser prominence were able to produce works still famous today, also because they had an extraordinary quality as narrators.

Thus Domenico Bigordi, known as Ghirlandaio, the eldest of an active family of painters; thus Filippino Lippi, the son of Filippo; thus others certainly inferior to them, such as Fra Diamante, Pier Francesco Fiorentino, Zanobi Machiavelli, the so-called Amico di Sandro, Jacopo del Sellaio, Raffaellino del Garbo, and the elegant, sentimental Francesco Botticini. But the art of Piero della Francesca was decisive for the developments of painting in the second half of the fifteenth century, not only in Florence but throughout central Italy. While in Siena, where Giovanni di Stefano, known as il Sassetta, had certainly contributed to Piero's own formation, Giovanni di Paolo, Sano di Pietro, Neroccio, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini maintained a language of archaic tone, exquisitely larded with Gothic elegances, on the borders between Umbria and Tuscany. Luca Signorelli of Cortona took up on his own account, founding himself on Piero, the problem of the harmony between form and movement. Piero's art also served as a basis for Melozzo da Forlì. And from Melozzo the reflection of Piero extended to his followers, to Marco Palmezzano, to Giovanni del Sega, to G. B. Rositi and so on, while through direct vision in Montefeltro the art of the painter of Borgo was reflected by Fra Carnovale, Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, Evangelista di Pian di Meleto, and Donato Bramante.

From Piero likewise derives the best painting of Lazio in the second half of the fifteenth century, such as that of the master who frescoed in the Roman convent of Tor de' Specchi the stories of St. Frances of Rome, that of Lorenzo da Viterbo, and that of Antonio degli Aquili, known as Antonizzo Romano, who placed himself at the head of a "crowd" of very active craftsmen in Lazio until about 1525. At that time throughout central Italy there was also widely diffused among the minor painters the sweet, persuasive but affected tone assumed by Umbrian painting which, in the work of Pietro Vannucci, known as il Perugino, himself also a descendant, indeed in his youth a pupil, of Piero, had reached the heights of art. Perugino, from his earliest maturity, had worked amid a group of admirers and followers such as Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Bernardino di Betto, known as il Pinturicchio, Andrea d'Assisi, known as l'Ingegno, and his pupil Tiberio da Assisi, il Pastura, F. Melanzio, Sinibaldo Ibi, Giovanni di Pietro, known as lo Spagna. Then to Perugino's workshop came, at the age of seventeen, Raphael himself (v.). It was the year 1500.

But before mentioning the further developments of pictorial art in central Italy, it will be well to recall what had been done in the course of the fifteenth century in the north of the peninsula, in the Veneto, where from the first half of the century Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Andrea del Castagno, and Donatello had worked, bringing the testimony of the artistic renewal that had taken place in Tuscany. At that time Andrea Mantegna, who in Padua had been a pupil of Francesco Squarcione, was orienting himself precisely toward Donatello's achievements, arriving at a painting of strong plastic relief that also influenced the development of painting in Ferrara, the city where Piero himself had worked. Now the artists tend toward a tormented plasticism, mindful of clawing Gothic elegances, yet now also nourished by intense color. Bono da Ferrara, Cristoforo and Lorenzo da Lendinara, and then above all Cosimo Tura, Francesco del Cossa, Ercole de' Roberti, carry out an extremely vivacious painting, rich in inventions, bold and romantic, sluggish and sweet at once; a painting that then in Lorenzo Costa, who abandons Ferrara for Bologna, is softened and calmed in the environment dominated by the personality of F. Raibolini, known as il Francia, himself educated in art by M. Zoppo, who in his youth had been a pupil of Squarcione.

Painting in Lombardy too feels Mantegnesque influences; in fact, after an initial preference for the forms of the International Gothic, which had had in Michelino di Besozzo, in the Zavattari brothers, and in Bonifazio Bembo their most notable representatives, the true Renaissance begins here with Vincenzo Foppa, from whom derive Zenale and Butinone of Treviglio and Ambrogio da Fossano, known as il Bergognone, the latter a fine painter, endowed with a temperament both gentle and strong.

To Foppa are linked the Piedmontese: Martino Spanzotti of Casale, Defendente Ferrari or De Ferrari of Chivasso, Macrino d'Alba, and, albeit indirectly, the Niçois Ludovico Brea, very active in Liguria. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, known as il Sodoma, also received his first rudiments of art from Spanzotti, before going to Siena in the last decade of the fifteenth century, when Gaudenzio Ferrari, born ca. 1480 in Valduggia, crowned with his strong, frank, spontaneous, festive painting the art of the early Renaissance in Piedmont and Lombardy.

Of far vaster possibilities, meanwhile, in the second half of the fifteenth century, Venetian painting proved itself capable, realizing the forms of a language that in the course of the sixteenth century would have a decisive pre-eminence over the rest of Italy.

Late did the Venetians set about freeing themselves from the forms of the International Gothic, whose flowery elegances were delightfully grafted onto the refined expressions of an art, ever mindful of the East, that at the beginning of the fifteenth century still prevailed in the lagoon. It was the painters of the Murano school who gave the first signs of a renewal in an extra-Gothic sense: Antonio Vivarini, who collaborated with Giovanni d'Alemagna, and Bartolomeo Vivarini, who certainly also considered the works of Mantegna, while Carlo Crivelli persisted in the search for heraldic elegances of a still Gothic stamp. But in him there are also recollections of his training under Mantegna and the sight of works by Giovanni Bellini, the major master of the early Venetian Renaissance.

This Giovanni Bellini belongs to a family of illustrious painters. His father Jacopo, an archaizing but most noble master, had been a pupil of Gentile da Fabriano, and his brother Gentile continually confirms his fidelity to tradition. Nevertheless, to explain Giovanni's originality and his new vision of things, it is worth recalling how in 1475 Antonello da Messina arrived in Venice, a formidable characterizer of images in the manner of Flemish painting, and an exalter by means of color of the plastic values of forms turned and squared with geometric taste.

Giovanni Bellini had painted by placing colors side by side within delimited fields, so that each color fulfilled a function of its own; now, considering the works of the man from Messina, he perceived how, in order to give the sense of volume, it is necessary to render the sense of the air that vibrates around things, harmonizing the colors according to tonal relationships (v. CHIAROSCURO). It would be Giorgione da Castelfranco who would carry such a fundamental discovery to its extreme consequences; so that with him modern painting is born.

Nevertheless, between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, Giovanni Bellini is still the dominant personality in the Venetian pictorial environment, and all depend on him more or less directly; thus Vittore Carpaccio, thus Alvise Vivarini, Bartolomeo Montagna, Cima da Conegliano, Marco Basaiti, Vincenzo Catena, and many, many others, but no one, except Giorgione, was more gifted than he. When in 1506 Albrecht Dürer visited Venice for the second time he noted: "Bellini is very old and is still the best painter." At that time the master was 76 years old, but he was tirelessly industrious, and so for 10 more years. Michelangelo had by then already painted the vault of the Sistine Chapel, Raphael the Stanze, Titian, his true heir and that of Giorgione, the Sacred and Profane Love of the Borghese Gallery.

Truly extraordinary times were those of the first twenty years of the 16th century, when so many geniuses lived and worked in I. at the same time, the memory of each of whom would be enough to illuminate an era, to make a country illustrious. Architects, sculptors, painters among the greatest the world has ever had. Above all painters, the artists who gave to the dreams, to the hopes of men and to the very images of the Faith the appearances and the faces that even today stand as the supreme term of beauty.

Rome at the beginning of the century, even in the field of painting, seems to acquire a sort of pre-eminence over the other cities of I., because at that time some of the greatest geniuses of pictorial art converged there and at the same time worked there at the court of the Pope. But centers no less important immediately appear today in our eyes to be those of other cities: particularly Florence, Venice and Parma, the latter having become, thanks to Correggio, the foremost of the Emilian cities.

In Florence, at the beginning of the century, the field of painting, despite the presence and activity of so many other masters even younger than he and yet more closely tied to traditional forms, is held by Leonardo da Vinci. It is Leonardo in fact who resolves in an almost unexpected and new manner the ancient problem of Florentine painting, that is, of giving to bodies, along with the sense of volume, that of motion. The Pollaiuolo had hoped to have reached this by means of energetic line. Leonardo, on the other hand he draws the almost phosphorescent form out of the soft atmosphere, models it with light itself, denying the limpid, solid, squared, marble or stone world in which, since Cimabue, the Florentines had believed, and dreams of light images immersed in an air traversed by vapors that blur the contours and soften the gentle transitions of indefinite planes so as to give a sense of prolonged motion.

Among the first Florentine painters who tried to approach him were the magniloquent Fra Bartolomeo della Porta and Mariotto Albertinelli, who nevertheless could never forget his first master, Piero di Cosimo. But beside them there is a whole host of minor artists who through their mediation draw near, as if by reflection, to Leonardo's forms: Fra' Paolino da Pistoia, Giovanni Antonio Sogliani, Giuliano Bugiardini, Francesco di Cristofano called Franciabigio, Francesco d'Ubertino called Bacchiacca, Francesco Granacci, Ridolfo Bigordi called il Ghirlandaio and his follower Michele di Ridolfo. In Florence itself, an heir of Leonardo with quite different possibilities is Andrea del Sarto. One of the few who also knew how to look to Michelangelo without remaining vanquished by his heroic fury.

Michelangelesque accents would have very deep echoes throughout the sixteenth century and everywhere in I., but, while Raphael was alive in Rome, they seemed bound to yield to the grace of the artist from Urbino, who nevertheless for his part was not insensitive to the charm of Buonarroti, as happened to his own pupils, such as: Giulio Pippi called Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni called il Fattore, Giovanni da Udine, Pierino Bonaccorsi called Perin del Vaga; but there were many more who formed Raphael's circle, when he was working at the papal court, overwhelmed with commissions of every sort, or who continued the master's work by repeating his schemes, not his happy grace: a secret that Raphael himself could not have taught.

At that time, in Parma, Antonio Allegri called il Correggio was painting. Mindful of the musical cadences of Francia, of the devout images of Bianchi Ferrari, attracted by the new marvels of Venetian painting, Correggio had seen Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome and had been impelled by them toward new grandeur of composition. Nevertheless the artist whom he most surely understood and loved was Leonardo, even if in place of Leonardo's sfumato he substitutes a new manner of sifting and tempering in shadows and lights the precious pictorial matter of the Venetians. This gives his harmonious painting a tone of serene happiness.

In Parma Correggio left, besides distinguished works, a notable school in which painters of great quality worked. First among all Francesco Mazzola called il Parmigianino, and Girolamo Bedoli called Girolamo Mazzola. The latter, endowed with an exceptional taste for decoration, sometimes seems truly to prefigure the painters of the seventeenth century. Beside those two greater figures one should recall Correggio's own son, Pomponio Allegri (1522 - d. after 1580), Francesco Maria Rondani (recorded 1512-57), Michelangelo Anselmi (recorded 1522-44) and Giorgio Gandini del Grano (recorded 1532-58).

While Correggio's followers were working in Parma, in Milan a group of painters handed down to the sixteenth century certain aspects of Leonardo's art, although Lombard painting of the early sixteenth century depends perhaps less than is generally believed on the great Florentine. In fact many of the so-called Lombard Leonardesques, though attracted by the master's genius, not only failed to penetrate his spirit but reveal themselves rather as linked to the local pictorial tradition established before Leonardo's arrival. On the other hand, painters of clear and distinct personality such as Bernardino Luini (v.) or Boltraffio (v.) or Cesare da Sesto will certainly not be considered Leonardesques, and even less so the already mentioned G. B. Bazzi called il Sodoma, whose painting has Lombard origins, like that of Gaudenzio Ferrari and, by reflection, that of Bernardino Lanino.

But the moment has now come to mark the position then assumed by the Venetians in the great picture of sixteenth-century Italian painting. A position that after 1520 can be called one of absolute predominance, for quantity and quality of great masters, for novelty of aims, for richness of future developments.

The great decisive importance that Giorgione has for the development of painting, and not only Venetian painting, has already been mentioned. By decisively shifting a painting's interest from drawing to color, or better still to its chromatic tonality, he conceives the painting as a harmony of colored lights, so that the imagination acquires every right to free expression.

Giambellino himself, in the fullness of his happy maturity, seemed attracted by the novelties of the master of Castelfranco, but more decisively the followers and pupils of the great master were as it were absorbed into the halo of Giorgionesque taste. Thus Vincenzo Catena and Marco Basaiti, thus Vittore Belliniano, thus the great Sebastiano del Piombo, before he was attracted in Rome into Michelangelo's orbit, thus finally the greatest of the painters Venice ever had: Titian. Titian who in a deeply moved, utterly free vision of the world exalted the idealizing power of color, of which the plastic masses of his compositions are the material, distributed in the vibrant and luminous atmosphere.

Beside him, initially still tied to the fifteenth-century tradition but soon attracted into Giorgione's orbit, worked Jacopo Palma the Elder, Giovanni Busi called il Cariani and Bernardino Licinio, and then Domenico Mancini, Giulio and Domenico Campagnola, Girolamo dal Santo, Domenico Capriolo and Lorenzo Luzzo called il Morto da Feltre. Then Martino da Udine called Pellegrino da S. Daniele and Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone decisively transferred to the Friulian province the Giorgionesque novelties of Jacopo Palma and Titian, while Gian Girolamo Savoldo and Girolamo di Romano called il Romanino in Brescia, on the foundation of their Lombard culture, insert elements derived from Lotto and Giorgionesque motifs, and make use of luministic effects to give plastic relief to objects or to accentuate the effect of movements. Callisto Piazza da Lodi, il Ferramola, Andrea da Minerbio, Francesco Prato, Gualtiero Gualtieri, Altobello Melone were the principal followers of Romanino. A mixture of Venetian and Lombard elements is revealed also in the Veronese Giovanni and Giovanni Francesco Caroto, Paolo Morando called il Cavazzola and Francesco Torbido called il Moro, who in Verona was, together with Bonifacio Pitati, the best interpreter of the Giorgionesque and Titianesque manner. Thus in Treviso memories of Giorgione, of Palma and of Titian fed the poetics of Paris Bordone and the less promising one of Polidoro da Lanciano called Lanzani.

Even the painting of Giovanni Luteri called Dosso Dossi, the greatest painter Ferrara had in the sixteenth century, and that of his brother Battista di Dosso, descends entirely from Venice, from Giorgione and from Titian, and finds its highest expression in a fantastic richness of precious colors.

Another artist of the greatest importance for the diffusion of Venetian accents, even if expressed with a highly personal and inimitable intonation, was Lorenzo Lotto, active in the Marches, in Bergamo and in Brescia, where he contributed decisively to the formation of the two best painters that city had during the sixteenth century: il Moretto and Gian Battista Moroni.

Meanwhile, while such a great number of masters were turning decisively toward Venetian art, in the first half of the century some Emilian and even Venetian masters lingered under the influence of Roman painting; that is, of a Raphaelesque mannerism of very little value. This is evident in some works of Benvenuto Tisi, called il Garofolo, in other late works of G. B. Benvenuti, called l'Ortolano, and of Nicola Pisano, as well as in others by Bartolomeo Ramenghi, called il Bagnacavallo, and finally in some paintings by Innocenzo Francucci da Imola and by Girolamo Pennacchi da Treviso.

But in 1518 Jacopo Robusti, called il Tintoretto, was born in Venice, and ten years later Paolo Caliari, called il Veronese, was born in Verona. With their art, which descends from that of Titian but is even freer, more fanciful and richer, Venetian painting concludes its Renaissance cycle.

However, alongside Tintoretto, one must also remember the activity of his collaborators: Antonio Vasilacchi, called l'Aliense, Andrea Vicentino, Domenico, Marco and Marietta Tintoretto, and that, sometimes more brilliant, of Andrea Meldolla, called lo Schiavone. Just as alongside the activity of Veronese one cannot forget that of Antonio Badile, Giambattista Zelotti, Giovanni Antonio Fasolo, Paolo Farinati, Francesco Montemezano, Domenico Riccio, called il Brussasori, and finally that of Veronese's heirs, his brother Benedetto and his sons Carletto and Gabriele. But it would be unjust not to emphasize also the activity of Jacopo da Ponte, called il Bassano after his native city; a dazzling painter whose works can at times worthily figure alongside the sumptuous paintings of Veronese and the dazzling scenographies of Tintoretto. From Jacopo, the art of painting was transmitted to his sons: Francesco, a painter of landscapes and genre scenes, Leandro, a portraitist of some pretension, Giovan Battista and Girolamo, who mark the decline, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, of this workshop.

Having thus marked the highest points of the evolution of Italian pictorial art of the Renaissance in the work of its major representatives, it will be worthwhile once again to return to Tuscany, to Florence, where in the circle of fra' Bartolomeo and of Andrea del Sarto around 1510 Jacopo Carrucci, called il Pontormo, the most refined and restless of the Florentine painters of the sixteenth century, emerges, and to recall alongside him Giovan Battista Rosso and Domenico Puligo and their followers Battista Naldini, Francesco Brina and Girolamo Macchietti and Mirabello Cavalori and Jacopo Coppi; a group of strange, unscrupulous, sometimes tragic painters, in whom, together with a widespread incurable melancholy, the sense of a crisis determined by the awareness of the inevitable decline of art after the glory of the first years of the century is clear (v. MANIERISMO).

How to oppose that decline if not by remaining faithful to the forms of the masters who had obtained the greatest successes? to a tradition consecrated in illustrious works? It is the illusion cultivated by a group of stragglers active between the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century in Siena. It is the illusion of Bernardino Fungai, of Giacomo Pacchiarotti, of Girolamo del Pacchia, who cling to the tradition of Sodoma; to which in truth also refer artists endowed with a vein, albeit subtle, of true poetry, such as Andrea del Brescianino and Arcangelo Salimbeni, and masters such as Baldassarre Peruzzi, a great architect, and Domenico Beccafumi, in whose strange painting one also catches echoes of the art of fra' Bartolomeo and of Mariotto Albertinelli. It is the illusion that gives confidence to many other painters, more or less mere craftsmen, of central Italy: from Gerolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta, to Girolamo Genga of Urbino, to Raffaellino del Colle, to Livio Agresti da Forlì, to Luca Longhi da Ravenna who, imitating Raphaelesque forms, think they can preserve some happy gift of the master. It is the illusion that spreads in southern Italy, to Naples, where Andrea Sabatini da Salerno works, a painter, in truth, not devoid of qualities, and where Pirro Ligorio is born, an antiquarian and architect as well as a painter, and in Sicily where Giacomo Aliprandi, Vincenzo degli Anziani called da Pavia, Antonello Riccio and Filippo Paladino work. While around Giulio Romano, active in Mantua, there is a whole host of imitators who repeat Raphaelesque schemes; in Genoa, alongside Pierino del Vaga, a group of decorators works. Then, in the studio of Pierino del Vaga himself, Taddeo Zuccari and his brother Federico make their first true experiences in Rome; Federico, most famous in his time, carried the echoes, albeit rather distinct, of the Urbinate master up to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Likewise Giuseppe Cesari, called il Cavalier d'Arpino, active until 1640, practiced the art of painting in Rome; the most authoritarian and pompous of the mannerists.

With a very different result had Agnolo Bronzino in Florence, initially a pupil of Pontormo, one of the greatest portraitists of all time, looked with admiration at Raphael and above all at Michelangelo, but also at the Flemish. He died in 1572, leaving behind him a group of imitators and followers who sometimes, like Alessandro Allori, seek by means of chiaroscuro to make use of color in a plastic function, while at other times they dry out and harden the models as Giovanni Maria Butteri does. And still essentially to Michelangelo looked Francesco Salviati, Jacopino del Conte and Daniele da Volterra (v.) and Battista Franco and Giorgio Vasari and Marcello Venusti who, Lombard by origin, approached the great master with devout emotion, following the path marked out by Sebastiano del Piombo. And still in the group of the Michelangelesque painters one can place Pellegrino Tibaldi, from Emilia, while other Emilian mannerists such as Niccolò dell'Abate, Lelio Orsi da Novellara, Girolamo da Carpi, Giacomo Zanguidi, Proguero Fontana and his daughter Lavinia, Dionisio Calvaert and Bartolomeo Passarotti, Camillo and Giulio Cesare Procaccini, have connections with the tradition of Dosso, of Correggio and of Parmigianino.

Nor should one forget the group of masters active in Cremona in the Lombard-Venetian tradition of Boccaccio Boccaccino, of Pordenone and of Correggio, among whom Galeazzo Alessi, Francesco Bembo, Altobello Melone, Camillo Boccaccino, Bernardino and Gervasio Gatti, Giulio, Antonio, Vincenzo and Bernardino Campi, who left so many works in the churches of Cremona and trained in the art of painting, together with Andrea Mainardi and G. B. Trotti called Malosso, Sofonisba Anguissola.

Masters who repeat old forms academically and in a mannerist way, as, in the Veneto, Girolamo da Santacroce and Cesare da Conegliano and Stefano dell'Arzere, from Padua; in the Veneto, where some reflection of Roman and Tuscan academicism also reaches the painting of Giovanni Frattini and of Giulio Licinio, an imitator of Vasarian forms, like Bernardino India of Verona. Painters without genius, like the many of the Vecellio family, descendants and collateral relatives of Titian, and in general the eclectic continuators of the Venetian tradition. Among whom, however, one can remember Jacopo Palma the Younger, above all mindful of Tintoretto, while Alessandro Varotari, called il Padovanino, repeated Titianesque and Veronesian ideas.

Still others sought compromises in the second half of the sixteenth century between the Venetian-Lombard tradition and the Roman-Tuscan one; thus Giuseppe Porta, called il Salviati, and Girolamo Muziano. Then, in the mid-sixteenth century, in Tuscany, intensifying the elements of their eclecticism, certain truly remarkable painters acquired a new freedom, such as Santi di Tito, Bernardino Poccetti, Domenico Cresti called il Passignano, Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli, Lodovico Cardi called il Cigoli, Andrea Boscoli, Aurelio Lomi. Alongside them others likewise sought in eclecticism a way out of imitative Mannerism: thus Scipione Pulzone da Gaeta, a most noble portraitist, Nicolò Circignani and Cristoforo Roncalli called delle Pomarance, Ippolito Scarsella called lo Scarsellino, from Emilia, Luca Cambiaso from Genoa, and finally a truly great painter, extremely significant for his times: Federico Barocci, who knew how to distance himself from the plasticism proper to the Roman Mannerists in order to orient himself toward the study of Correggio, in search of shifting effects of light and color. Then, while around his personality other painters of central Italy gathered, such as the Sienese Francesco Vanni, Ventura Salimbeni, Alessandro Casolani and Pietro Sozzi, the announcement of new times for the art of painting had already been given by the Carracci in Bologna. They too placed the painting of Correggio as the solid foundation of their eclecticism.

8. BAROQUE AND ROCOCO

Among the typical aspects of the spiritual attitude of the artists of the sixteenth century is the almost unanimous conviction that at the beginning of the century art had exhausted its last expressive possibilities. From this conviction it was deduced that it was not possible to attain beauty by departing from the manner of the greatest masters (v. MAMIERISMO), and that a new beauty could be attained only by combining in a single "manner" the essential characteristics of the great masters of the past (v. ECLETTISMO). It is useless to add that neither the one nor the other assumption could lead to the hoped-for results, inasmuch as the first started from the concept of the immobility of artistic language, while the second imagined that a new one could be created by summing or contaminating the forms of different languages, each of which, logically, excluded the others. On the positive side there was, in any case, a sense of dissatisfaction that drove the freer spirits to emerge from those straits, overcoming the concepts that determined them, and continuing along the path already undertaken by the great masters. Therefore, once again, it is not appropriate to speak of decadence when referring to the evolution by which the art of the sixteenth century was transformed into the art called Baroque (v. BAROCCA, ARTE). An attribute that in the past had an even pejorative meaning, but that today serves above all to designate the artistic manifestations of the seventeenth century and of a large part of the eighteenth. During that period, particularly during the seventeenth century, Rome assumed in the artistic field an undisputed pre-eminence also with regard to other European nations. Rome was then the place in the world where the Baroque language was spoken with the most genuine and pure accent, even if elsewhere the same language generated expressions of very notable value.

a) The architecture of the seventeenth century. - Already in the architecture of the second half of the sixteenth century a massive and heavy sense of forms was manifest, born of a rhetorical exaltation of masses. The force and grandeur of Michelangelo's architecture, having become a sort of inert materiality in the work of the hacks, in the best of them, especially in Giacomo della Porta, in Carlo Maderno and in Flaminio Ponzio, had served to arouse a taste for the movement of surfaces and of the plastic masses themselves, realized above all as a function of light. But those three architects, who cross the threshold of the seventeenth century, nourished all the foundations of their culture in the preceding century, even if their work truly seems to conclude one era and open another. Carlo Maderno above all, who had worked alongside Domenico Fontana, and had therefore kept Borromini and Bernini in his employ and guided them in their first undertakings.

Yet alongside Maderno, until the middle of the century, the elements of Mannerist architectural culture are as it were perpetuated in the work of a group of architects who oppose to Baroque modes a severe, most dignified firmness of expression, mindful, but not servile, with respect to forms, of the great masters of the sixteenth century. Thus Giovanni Battista Soria (1581-1651), thus Vincenzo della Greca, Fausto Rughesi, Martino Longhi the Younger, Algardi in his architectures, the very remarkable Carlo Rainaldi, also mindful of Pietro da Cortona and author of the splendid church of S. Maria in Campitelli, thus Antonio del Grande (op. 1652-71) who recalls Maderno in the façade of the Palazzo Doria on Piazza del Collegio Romano, thus G. A. de Rossi himself (1616-93), likewise full of sixteenth-century dignity in the façade of the Palazzo Altieri. While these builders were active in the course of the seventeenth century, in the same Rome two true geniuses enunciated new architectural modes: Francesco Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. And alongside them Pietro Berettini da Cortona, of a slightly lesser stature than that of the masters, but who knew how to move along paths parallel to those of Bernini.

Borromini is a free, bold, unprejudiced inventor of most ingenious, sinuous forms reminiscent of elastic Gothic projections; Bernini, and also Pietro da Cortona, two builders who in the search for a new solemn, aulic, monumental architectural dignity grasped from the architecture of the ancients the sense of powerful rhythm rather than the formal elements, and accentuated that rhythm with a new free oratory, which in their followers sometimes became thunderous, gesticulating and emphatic.

From Borromini and his somewhat floral taste many aspects of eighteenth-century architecture, and not only Italian, would blossom, while from Bernini and from Pietro da Cortona, once the group of their immediate collaborators had disappeared, one may say that nothing descends but a general teaching of aulic dignity, valid also for the architects who in the

In the eighteenth century they still looked to the same Borromini. Among the former we should recall, besides the already mentioned De Rossi, Ciro Ferri, Cosimo Fancelli, Giovan Battista Contini and Antonio Gherardi, and above all Carlo Fontana (1634-1714); while among the latter, besides Francesco de Sanctis, author of the successful arrangement of the steps of the Piazza di Spagna (1723-26), Giuseppe Sardi (1680-1753), Gabriele Valvassori (1683-1761), Domenico Gregorini (1700-77) and Filippo Raguzzini, author of the theatrical little palaces of Piazza S. Ignazio, and finally that Paolo Amali who in the mid-eighteenth century executed the facade of the Palazzo Doria on Via del Plebiscito, and other lesser or even later architects, such as the ingenious Carlo Marchionni.

But even before the middle of the eighteenth century, neo-sixteenth-century forms had still enjoyed success in Rome, such as those of a Nicola Salvi (v.; 1697-1751), author of the facade of the Trevi Fountain, of Luigi Vanvitelli (v.), Neapolitan by birth but Roman by education, and of the two Florentines Alessandro Galilei (1691-1736) and Ferdinando Fuga (1699-1781; v.). Neo-sixteenth-century forms that would take on a new appearance in Cosimo Morelli and in Pietro Camporese the elder, active in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the world of culture was already wholly imbued with the new neoclassical ideals, of which a reflection is found in Rome in the work of G. B. Piranesi as a decorator rather than as an architect.

The fortunes of the architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Tuscany were certainly not equally lively, where, not so much the taste for classical antiquity as the conviction of an undisputed, though by then faded, pre-eminence kept architects bound to sixteenth-century forms more than elsewhere. And not only Giovan Antonio Dosio (1533-1609), a Michelangelesque epigone, but B. Buontalenti (1536-1608) accustomed his many pupils and followers to the same deference, among them Giulio Parigi (1580-1635) and Matteo Nigetti (1560-1649). The latter, collaborating with Gherardo Silvagni (1579-1675), erected the facade of the church of S. Gaetano, which represents the closest approach of seventeenth-century Florentine architecture to Roman taste; a taste to which indeed G. B. Foggini (1653-1737), author of the Feroni chapel in the church of the S.ma Annunziata, also draws near, while Ferdinando Ruggeri (active between 1705-40) in the facade of S. Firenze, later completed by Zanobi del Rosso, created a pleasing model of Florentine "baroque", dry and linear, which enjoyed success and considerable diffusion.

Other Florentine architects active between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Matteo Segaloni, Francesco Silvani (1620-85), Paolo Falconieri (1670-1702), Alessandro Cecchini, Giuseppe Ruggeri and Bernardo Fallani, author of that little palace known as the Livia (1775), of an intonation so sixteenth-century as to deserve in not distant times even an attribution to Michelangelo.

In the other cities of Tuscany the sense of attachment to tradition was no less. Thus, at Empoli, where Simone Bonistalli worked, active in the first half of the seventeenth century; at Siena, where B. Giovannelli (1601-76) erected the celebrated Chigi Chapel in the Cathedral; at Pisa, where C. Pugliani built the most noble palace known as "Alla Giornata".

In Umbria at that time Giacomo Giorgetti (1603-79) built some palaces at Assisi and collaborated with Martelli on the construction of the dome of S. Maria degli Angeli, while later Pietro Carattoli (1748-58) built the beautiful Palazzo Gallenga-Stuard-Antinori to designs by Bianchi. In the Marche, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notable architecture was built by that Giacomo Torelli of Fano, author of the Teatro della Fortuna in his city, by Giovanni Branca (d. 1645), treatise writer and architect at the sanctuary of Loreto, by the men of Macerata Paolo Floriani, military architect (d. 1638), author of the Palazzo comunale of his city, by G. B. Capitani and finally by C. Saccocci of Ascoli, author of the church of the Carmelites in Ascoli Piceno itself.

In Campania the architecture of the seventeenth century is wholly dominated by the very notable personality of Cosimo Fanzago (1591-1678) of Bergamo, even though alongside him other architects worked, such as G. B. Contini, Arcangelo Guglielminelli, G. G. Conforto, the notable Dionisio Lazzari, Ferdinando Sanfelice, Mauclerio Vaccaro and finally Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, also a painter and sculptor, active in the first half of the eighteenth century together with Antonio Medrano, before Luigi Vanvitelli assumed full dominion at Naples, impressing on architecture a character of grandeur and elegance that his son Carlo carried on into the early years of the nineteenth century.

In the architecture of southern Italy, the Leccese baroque constitutes an almost separate island, having its greatest exponent in Giuseppe Zimbalo, called lo Zingarello, active in the second half of the seventeenth century, and in his pupil Giuseppe Cino, active until the eighteenth century, when Achille Carducci also worked, who with other architects worked in that city, conferring on its buildings a strange appearance in which, alongside scanty memories of the Renaissance, live the more distant ones of the Middle Ages and the impressions of Spanish taste. The reflections of this are also evident in Sicilian baroque architecture, which nevertheless had in the eighteenth century in G. B. Vaccarini (1702-68) a truly great master, author, with a few others, of the reconstruction of Catania destroyed by the earthquake of 1693. Alongside Vaccarini should be remembered the Battaglia and the Di Benedetto families and that Pompeo Picarale (1668-1746) who was the author of the beautiful facade of the cathedral of Syracuse. At Palermo worked Andrea Cirincione, author of the church of S. Domenico, begun in 1640 and finished by Lorenzo Olivieri (1723-70); Paolo (1634-1714) and Giacomo (1643-1732) Amato, the first author of the church of the S. Salvatore, the second of that of the Pietà.

Naturally different characteristics has the architecture of northern Italy. At the beginning of the seventeenth century at Turin worked Ascanio Vittozzi (1539-1615) of Orvieto, who impressed on the center of the city that austere and composed sense that Carlo Castellamonte (d. 1640) confirmed by creating the Piazza S. Carlo, and his son Amedeo continued by building the Palazzo reale. Into this environment, marked by a lordly austerity, came in the middle of the century Guarino Guarini (v.; 1624-83), a fanciful and most daring Borrominian from Modena, who then dominated the field of architecture at Turin, as Filippo Juvarra (v.) of Messina, an architect of sublime elegance, was to dominate that of the first half of the following century, anticipating almost neoclassical attitudes that in Benedetto Alfieri, another Piedmontese architect, resolve into searches for refinements with somewhat French rococo accentuations.

In Lombardy the first architect who had a truly baroque taste was that Francesco Maria Richini (1583-1658), with however that measure of academic seriousness that is proper to Lombard architectural taste. Alongside Richini worked Carlo Buzzi and then Giuseppe Rusnati in the facade of S. Maria della Passione (1692). Later is the work of Giovanni Ruggeri, author of the Palazzi Cusani and Litta, the latter completed after the middle of the eighteenth century by Bartolomeo Belli and Carlo Giuseppe Merli. In the last thirty years of the century Giuseppe Piermarini dominated at Milan, the much-celebrated author of the Teatro alla Scala (1778) and of other buildings of cold Vanvitellian intonation that was even mistaken for neoclassical. Among the architects active in Liguria in the baroque age are remembered: Bartolomeo Bianco, from Como (d. c. 1651), builder of splendid palaces among them that of the University; G. A. Falcone and P. F. Cantone, authors of the Palazzo reale; Filippo Parodi, Corradi, author of the Palazzo Rosso, Antonio Ricca who gave the designs for the churches of S. Pancrazio (1690) and of the Madonnetta (1695), and finally the eighteenth-century Gregorio Petonidi and Andrea Tagliafichi, before Simone Cantore, toward the end of the eighteenth century, assumed neoclassical attitudes.

Another important center of Baroque architecture is Emilia, where in the seventeenth century the path of austere composure that sixteenth-century Mannerism had impressed upon its buildings continued to be followed. Thus the Bolognese seventeenth century appears characterized above all by a taste for opulent but restrained decoration, such as had been used at the beginning of the century by Floriano Ambrosini (1605) in the remodeling of the Cathedral, which Antonio Levanti, author of S. Maria della Grada and of the anatomical theater of the Archiginnasio (1638), and G. G. Monti (1620-1692) and Bartolomeo Provaglia substantially confirmed.

More interesting are G. B. Bergonzoni (1629-92), who rebuilt the oratory of S. Maria della Vita, G. B. Natali, F. Dotti (1670[78]-1759), author among other things of the sanctuary of the Madonna di S. Luca, and Alfonso Torregiani (d. 1764), also author of the beautiful dome and the slender tower of S. Giorgio in Reggio Emilia. It is worth recalling also the family of the Galli da Bibbiena (v.), architects and stage designers famous throughout Europe for the theaters, palaces and churches they built.

In the other Emilian cities between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there worked, besides G. B. Aleotti known as l'Argenta (1546-1636), at Parma; Bartolomeo Luigi Avanzini, a Roman, at Modena; Luca Danesi of Ravenna (1598-1672), active at Ferrara together with Francesco Mazzarelli, while toward the end of the eighteenth century an interesting activity that foreshadowed Neoclassical aspects was carried on by Giuseppe Pistocchi (1744-1814) of Faenza, who studied in Rome and also worked in Ravenna and Milan.

A wholly particular character was assumed and maintained during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by architecture in Venice, where the memory of Andrea Palladio, of Sammicheli and even that of Sansovino was never extinguished, also because Vincenzo Scamozzi, a faithful Palladian, had repeated the accents of the master well into the seventeenth century, training Baldassarre Longhena, who never forgets Palladio and Sansovino himself. Nor did Giuseppe Sardi (1620-90) forget them, nor Alessandro Tremignon, author of the church of S. Moisé, until Andrea Tirali (1660-1737) and then Andrea Mazzari (1686-1766) brought back into their buildings the purest forms of Palladio, as did Giovanni Scalfarotto (1700-64) in S. Simeone Piccolo and his nephew Tommaso Temanza (1705-89), author of the very beautiful church of the Maddalena. Throughout the Veneto the echoes of Palladio resounded; above all at Vicenza, where Vincenzo Scamozzi had a continuator in Antonio Pizzocaro and in the Muttoni, Francesco and Antonio, and then in Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi (1719-90) and in Attone Calderari (1730-1803), while at Verona worked Domenico Curtoni, nephew and pupil of Sammicheli, and then Adriano Cristofoli (1717-88), author of the perspectives of Villa Bettoni on Lake Garda, inspired by distant recollections of Vignola. Then Giacomo Quarenghi of Bergamo (1744-1817), after having gained his experience as a Palladian architect also at Subiaco, emigrated like many other architects of his age to Russia and contributed to giving a modern city face to St. Petersburg and Moscow. Those were the years in which Andrea Memmo, Temanza and Algarotti, basing themselves on the theories of Carlo Lodoli, expressed also in their writings certain ideas fundamental for the further developments of architectural art.

b) Sculpture. - Also for sculpture, seventeenth-century Rome, from the very first years of the century, assumed a tone of absolute predominance over the other Italian cities. Stefano Maderno (1571-1636) has already been recalled, but here it will be worth also naming Camillo Mariani, from Vicenza, who recalls Vittoria in the statues of S. Bernardo alle Terme, and then Francesco Mochi, who models with impetuosity and movement and also with already Baroque theatricality, so that he truly seems to preclude the art of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose importance as a sculptor equals and perhaps surpasses that as an architect. And Bernini, against whom only the academic sculpture of the Bolognese A. Algardi can be set, was truly the master of the century, which was dominated by him also through the vast output of his collaborators, pupils and followers, both Italian and foreign.

Among the collaborators are remembered his brother Luigi (1612-1677) and his son Paolo (1647-72), Giacomo Antonio Fancelli (1606-71), who worked on the statue of the Nile on the fountain of Piazza Navona, alongside Lazzaro Morelli (1608-1690), Claudio Adam, Francesco Baratta, Antonio Raggi and Andrea Bolgi, Ercole Ferrata, a collaborator with G. Lucenti, A. Giorgetti and L. Morelli also on the angels of Ponte Castel S. Angelo and on other undertakings of the master.

Of these sculptors some were more or less slavish imitators of Bernini, others, such as Ferrata, though also charting their own path, in which the example of Algardi himself was also of value, who, despite his posing as anti-Berninian and academic, did not manage to remain entirely immune to Berninian influences, to which the Fleming Duquesnoy also yielded. A satellite of Algardi was Giuseppe Peroni (1626-63), and his follower too was the very notable Domenico Guidi (1625-1701), who worked on the monument to Clement IX in S. Maria Maggiore designed by Rainaldi. At that time there was also in Rome Francesco Cavallini, memorable for the works left in the church of the Gesù e Maria, Giuliano Finelli (1601-57) and Giuseppe Mazzuoli, a Berninian even though, with Tommaso Amantini and Melchiorre Cafà the Maltese, he was a pupil of Ferrata.

In the second half of the century, an artist of very notable prominence in Rome is Camillo Rusconi (1658-1728), a Lombard, who happily brings together the suggestions of Bernini with the pictorialism of a Pietro da Cortona and, at times, a certain solemn oratory of Algardian inspiration. To him can be compared, besides Giuseppe Rusconi (1687-1758), the Lombard E. B. Maini, author of the monument to Innocent X in S. Agnese, and the Ligurian Francesco Schiaffino, as well as Monnot and Le Gros, two Gallicized Frenchmen, and then Carlo Monaldi and Bernardino Cametti (1682-1736), author of lively portraits. At that time they were gaining their first experiences in the field of sculpture, besides Agostino Cornacchini, two great masters of the Roman eighteenth century: Filippo della Valle (1698-1770) of Florence, elegant and composed, a pupil in Florence of G. B. Foggini, and Pietro Bracci, a Roman. Both worked on the Trevi Fountain together with other eighteenth-century Romans or Romanized artists such as B. Pincellotti, F. Queirolo, B. Ludovisi, A. Corsini.

Those were the years in which the new Neoclassical ideals were consecrated in Rome by the theories of Winckelmann, and Giuseppe Ceracchi (1751-1802), even before Canova arrived in Rome, was sculpting figures that have strange insertions, copies of ancient sculptures, mingled with opulences of Baroque draperies reminiscent of C. Rusconi.

If in this way the plastic language evolved in Rome between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is now interesting to see what aspects Berninism assumed at the same time far from its major center of irradiation: in Tuscany, for example, where the taste for Bernini's "picturesque" must immediately be distinguished from a certain pictorialism that in Florentine sculpture of the seventeenth century derives from the Mannerists of the sixteenth century. Thus a certain chiaroscuro of T. Landini (d. 1594) preludes the highly refined manners of Pietro Tacca of Carrara, who had worked in his youth alongside Giambologna and who in turn set on the path of art, besides his son Ferdinando, Giovanni Gonnelli known as the Blind Man of Gambassi, while G. B. Caccini worked alongside him. But the true innovator of Tuscan sculpture of the seventeenth century is G. B. Foggini, also an architect. Alongside him there then worked numerous other Tuscan sculptors such as G. Catani, Marcellini, Piamontini (1692-1739), Gioacchino Fortini and Giovanni Baratta of Carrara (1670-1747). The last master of the Tuscan eighteenth century was that Innocenzo Spinazzi who, educated in Rome by Maini, went to Florence in 1784 to teach at the Academy, where his pupil was Francesco Carradori (1747-1821), who with Stefano Ricci marks in Tuscany the transition to Neoclassicism.

More lively and interesting is the story of sculpture in Campania where, after Michelangelo Naccherino and Pietro Bernini, Tuscans active in Naples between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, there were active the Bergamasque Cosimo Fanzaga, already mentioned as an architect, and Giuliano Finelli, who in Rome drew close to Bernini. To the latter, on the other hand, Fanzaga himself soon turned, setting himself up as a disseminator of the new forms among the many who frequented his very busy workshop, such as Innocenzo Mangani of Florence, later emigrated to Sicily, and his collaborators in the works of the charterhouse of S. Martino and of the abbey of Montecassino. A characteristic Neapolitan setting of the eighteenth century is the chapel of the Sansevero di Sangro called della Pietadella; founded in 1590, it was rebuilt at the beginning of the seventeenth century and decorated between 1749 and 1766. Several worked there: Queirolo, Corradini, Paolo Persico, Francesco Celebrano (1729-1824) and Giuseppe Sammartino (1720-93), the best of all and the most active among the sculptors that Naples had in the second half of the century. These were, besides Persico, Andrea Violami, G. Salomoni, A. Brunelli and still others whose names are sometimes recalled together with those of Celebrano, the Vaccaro, the Sammartino, also among the modellers and figurine-makers of the presepe scenes that then enjoyed very great vogue in Naples.

Meanwhile in Sicily, from a group of craftsmen who throughout the seventeenth century disseminated distant Berninian echoes, there suddenly leaps out, most luminous, the figure of perhaps the greatest sculptor that Italy had between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth: Giacomo Serpotta (v.), a Palermitan, who left a certain number of imitators and followers, among whom it is worth naming, besides his son Procopio, Domenico Castelli, Paolo Corso, Vincenzo Messina and finally, the latest but the best, I. Marabitti (1719-97).

We must now turn our gaze to northern Italy, whence so many sculptors had come down at the end of the sixteenth century to work in Rome. In Emilia at the beginning of the century Giulio Cesare Conventi (1577-1640) was active, the master of Algardi, to whom the sculpture of Camillo Mazza (1602-72) is linked through discipleship, while with Giuseppe Mazza (1653-1741) and Andrea Ferretti (1673-1744), his pupil, we enter fully into the eighteenth century, which in Bologna has a curious sculptor in that Ercole Lelli (1702-66), most skilled at making anatomical models, the flayed figures, of which examples are preserved in the anatomical amphitheater of the Bolognese Archiginnasio.

In Lombardy seventeenth-century style in sculpture asserts itself with Dionigi Bussola (1612-87) who, after studying in Rome, returned to Milan to carve statues for the Duomo, and G. B. Maestri known as il Volpino, likewise active in the Milanese Duomo between 1662 and 1680, but who also worked in the charterhouse of Pavia and in the sanctuary of Varallo. Giuseppe Rusnati too, who died in 1713, worked in Milan and Pavia. At Alzano Maggiore, near Bergamo, Andrea

Fantoni of Rovetta left a famous pulpit, while G. B. Barberini of Laino acquired between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century a great name as a stucco decorator. Of the Lombard sculptors of the eighteenth century there is little to say: their activity was almost entirely absorbed by the decoration of the Duomo of Milan.

In Liguria Pierre Puget, a French Berninian, worked between 1661 and 1667 in Genoa, where his assistant was Daniele Solari (1634-98). But of greater prestige was the art of Filippo Parodi (1630-1700), who also lived in Rome alongside Bernini and was then called to the Veneto to work. With Parodi there often worked also Francesco Biggi. Also to be remembered are Bernardo (1686-1725) and Francesco M. (1691-1765) Schiaffino, P. Bocciardo (1710-1791) and N. Traverso (1745-1823), who after a journey to Rome returned to Genoa imbued with Neoclassicism.

Baroque sculpture in Piedmont is almost entirely the work of artists who came from outside, and in the church of Superga one finds French and Roman Berninians. Local artists, on the other hand, were the Clemente family, of whom one Stefano Maria (1719-94) is notable, and also the artists of the Bernero family, of whom a Giovanni Battista (1736-96) was also in Rome, as in Rome were, in the mid-eighteenth century, Ignazio and Filippo Collino.

Much more interesting, for the goals achieved, is sculpture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Venice. In the seventeenth century in truth, with the deaths in 1608 of Vittoria, in 1607 of Tiziano Aspetti, in 1623 of Girolamo Campagna, the ties with tradition were interrupted. Indeed there was, as in painting, a pause, and one must reach the middle of the century to find, together with sculptors who immigrated from Bologna, Genoa and elsewhere, the name of some Venetian of merit. One of these is that Francesco Penso known as il Cabianca (1665-1737), a pupil of the Fleming Giusto Le Court, as of the same were pupils in Venice Francesco Cavrioli, Michele Ungaro and Tommaso Ruer.

An expressive work of the plastic culture of the Venetians at the beginning of the eighteenth century is the complex, colossal funeral monument of the Valier family erected on a design by Andrea Tirali in SS. Giovanni e Paolo at the beginning of the eighteenth century. There worked, with Pietro Baratta of Carrara, Antonio Tarsia (1665-1739) and Giovanni Bonazza (1695-1730), the latter of whom, with his sons Tommaso and Antonio, worked for the chapel of the Rosary in the same church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, having at his side the Trevisan Giuseppe Toretti (1660-1743), Alvise and Carlo Tagliapietra. While A. Corradini, famous for his veiled statues, sought and found fortune far from his homeland, there worked in Venice two great sculptors who have spirit and assume forms independent and new even with respect to the preceding Berninism: they were Giovanni Maria Morlaiter and Giovanni Marchiori, who derives from the Bonazza but also from Andrea Brustolon (v.); it is they two, Morlaiter and Marchiori, who are the true masters of the best Canova.

c) Painting. — The panorama outlined a little earlier of the Italian pictorial situation around 1590 was, in general terms, anything but comforting. The reigning Mannerism gave no hope that by that path it would be possible to escape the confines of formulas and conventions.

Only the most modern knew then how to look with admiration at the Carracci (v.), drawing advantage from their eclecticism, and only the most unprejudiced applauded the first revolutionary undertakings of Caravaggio.

The Carracci, in fact, represented the possibilities of a pictorial modernism sufficiently conformist, while to the most unprejudiced it was clear that the true novelties were then being enunciated by Caravaggio. His great reform in fact refers not only to the object of art, that is, to its naturalistic verism, but above all to his new sense of chiaroscuro, to his "luminism," whereby, with what the light does not vivify being annulled in zones of shadow, pictorial compositions take on new aspects and it is light itself that generates a touching vitality of space.

Once these positions are clarified, it will be permissible to group around the name of the Carracci and their neo-sixteenth-century attitude, and therefore around the name of Caravaggio, two fairly distinct bands of painters. Fairly distinct, one says, because the forays of the one into the domains of the others, especially of the Carracceschi into those of the followers of Caravaggio, were frequent and also profitable.

The Bolognese and the Emilians in general were all for the Carraccesque academy, and not only those of the generation between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Francesco and Antonio Carracci, Croce and Tacconi), but Guido Reni, a truly great painter who had made his debut working alongside the mannerist Calvaert, as did immediately afterward his younger fellow pupil Domenico Zampieri, called il Domenichino, who soon left Bologna for Rome and Naples.

From Reni, who had a very flourishing school in Bologna, depend Luca Ferrari (1605-54), active in Emilia and the Veneto, Carlo Sementi and Elisabetta Sirani, Gessi, Domenico M. Canuti and Simone Contarini of Pesaro (1612-1648), an elegant and fine painter, and then the vigorous Guido Canlassi, called Cagnacci (1601-81).

From the Domenichino, on the other hand, move in Rome Alessandro Fortuna, Camassei, Pietro del Po, Canini, Passeri and the Calabrian Francesco Cozza, truly very mediocre painters.

Better, certainly, was Alessandro Tiarini (1577-1668), who, although he too entered the Carraccesque orbit, remained an isolated figure, while another Emilian, Francesco Barbieri, called il Guercino da Cento, sometimes approaches Caravaggio through the boldness of his chiaroscuro, in this quite different from an illustrious fellow pupil of his, that Francesco Albani who passed from Calvaert to the Carracci, and imitated Reni with affected and mannered attitudes that anticipate eighteenth-century graces, as did his pupil Cignani (1628-1719), from whom Franceschini set out. But alongside the Guercino had also lived the Gennari, Coralli and Ludovico Lama (1597-1646), and also Lanfranco, a painter of great worth as well as of importance as a disseminator of Emilian Carraccesque forms — sometimes also tinged with Caravaggism — in central and southern Italy.

Among the other Emilians of merit, particular mention should be made of Bartolomeo Schedoni, Cavedone, Bonone (1569-1632), Lionello Spada (1576-1622), Lorenzo Garbieri (1580-1654), Mastelletta (1575-1655), P. A. Barbieri (1603-49), F. Boselli of Piacenza (1650-1731).

While in Emilia Carraccism gathered some of the most vigorous pictorial energies of the seventeenth century, in Florence Cigoli and Passignano likewise attempted, though to a lesser degree, a path parallel to that of the Bolognese Academy. From those intentions there set out for art, with Bilivert and Corradi, Cristofano Allori (1577-1621), Matteo Rosselli (1579-1651), master of Vignali (1592-1664), of Lorenzo Lippi (1606-64) and of Carlo Dolci (1616-86). Also Francesco Furini (1604-49) and Baldassare Franceschini, called il Volterrano (1611-89), a witty and sometimes Cortonesque painter, descend from Rosselli; as does the best of all, that Giovanni Mannozzi, called Giovanni da S. Giovanni. While these were the Florentine orientations, in Siena Cristofano Rustici, called il Rustichino (1595-1625), and Rutilio Manetti (1571-1639) fell under the seductions of Caravaggio, as in Pisa did Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi (v.) and O. Riminaldi (1598-1630), who in Rome also approached the Domenichino. In Lucca the best were P. Paolini (1603-81), and the later and more eclectic A. Gherardini.

In Rome meanwhile the Carraccesque taste had an authoritative continuator in Andrea Sacchi and then in Carlo Maratta, vaguely Raphaelesque like Giovan Battista Salvi, called il Sassoferrato, while there operated the squad of Caravaggeschi led by Bartolomeo Manfredi (1572-1605) and by Giovanni Serodine of Ascona (1594-1631), a squad to which Valentin, French by birth but Roman by adoption (1600-32), immediately adhered, and later Orazio Borgianni. And Caravaggeschi were also Carlo Saraceni of Venice (1585-1620), Angelo Caroselli (1585-1652) and, all things considered, Gherardo Honthorst, called delle Notti, and with him other foreigners such as Terbrugghen, Baburen and Elsheimer, certainly among the most significant German painters of the seventeenth century. Pier Francesco Mola himself (1652-66), exponent of a neo-Venetian tendency, to which Testa (1611-50) also adhered, is in many respects a Caravaggesco. A painter of broader possibilities and of very great intelligence was Pietro Berrettini da Cortona, who sums up an enormous quantity of experiences ranging from Venetian painting to the Carracci, from Polidoro da Caravaggio to the study of ancient sculpture. A very great architect, in painting he was above all a festive decorator, opulent and cheerful at the same time. A host of painters followed him who invaded Italy and half of Europe, but of whom, along with the already mentioned Testa, it will suffice to name only Francesco Romanelli (1610-62) and Ciro Ferri. From him, however, depend, even if indirectly, our two greatest perspectivists, who in the churches of Rome have left so many marvels of their art: G. B. Gaulli, called Baciccia, from Genoa, and Brother Andrea Pozzo from Trentino. At that time in Rome there is also an interesting group of landscape painters, both Italian and foreign, and it suffices to recall, along with the already mentioned Elsheimer, Teniers, Nicolas Poussin, Paul Brill, Claude of Lorraine and Agostino Tassi. Very interesting is the story of seventeenth-century painting in Naples, where Caravaggio himself in 1607 had left masterly works that aroused extraordinarily vivid forces, which took concrete form above all in the personalities of Battistello Caracciolo, Bernardo Cavallino and Mattia Preti, among the most faithful to the master; while in parallel there worked with greater freedom and personal interpretations of Caravaggism and of the art of Ribera, Paolo Finoglia, Massimo Stanzione, Cesare and Francesco Fracanzano and then Salvatore Rosa, while Luca Giordano unleashed with very great gifts his decorative imagination on the examples, besides Neapolitan ones, of Lanfranco, of Pietro da Cortona and of Paolo Veronese, preparing the advent of eighteenth-century painting.

At that time Naples also boasted a formidable group of painters of "still lifes" such as Ruoppolo (1620-83) and Giuseppe Recco (1635-95), and of flowers such as Belvedere, De Caro and Realfonso; and also of battles such as, besides Rosa, Aniello Falcone and Domenico Gargiulo.

In Sicily in the seventeenth century the great painter was Pietro Novelli, called il Monrealese, who profited from his Neapolitan experiences and from his encounters with Van Dyck and Ribera. Alongside him should be recalled his daughter Rosalia, Antonio Grano and Giacomo Lo Verde.

But it is time now to return to the North, to Genoa above all, where onto the decorative tradition of Luca Cambiaso-Paggi is grafted the painting of Domenico Fiasella (1589-1669), and from it moves that of Valerio Castello (v.), of Gregorio de Ferrari (1644-1726), of Bartolomeo Biscaino (1632-57) and of Domenico Piola (1628-1703), the best known of a numerous family of painters.

Meanwhile, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck had arrived in Genoa and had given great proof of their abilities, and alongside them, before and after, a substantial group of Flemish painters, from Willem van Deynen to Cornelis de Wael, to Jan Roos who Italianized his name to Rosa, to Jan Hovart and Pieter Bael. Without taking their contribution into account, it would be impossible to judge correctly not only so much painting described as minor or genre painting — such as that of Anton Maria Vassallo (d. 1657), a painter of flowers, fruit and animals, of Sinibaldo Scorza (1589-1631) and of Giovan Benedetto Castiglione (1610-1665) himself — but also the richer painting to which the art of Bernardo Strozzi, of Travi, of Cassana, of Carbone and of Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari (1598-1669) is linked. Other seventeenth-century Genoese of notable stature are those of the numerous Piedmontese-Lombard family of the Carlone, who, like Strozzi, depended artistically in Genoa on the Sienese Sarri, while they had connections with the Milanese painters Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo (1584-1638) and Gioacchino Assereto (1600-49). Baciccia has already been mentioned among the Cortoneschi, in Rome.

In Lombardy, since Caravaggio had emigrated while still a boy, the Bolognese Procaccini enjoyed very great fame and even authority in Milan at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Giulio Cesare above all, whose origin goes back to Correggio, and then Giovan Battista Crespi, known as il Cerano, who had developed an courtly and solemn manner of drawing, clear and pale in color; and then Mazzuchelli known as il Morazzone (1571-1626), a powerful and grandiose painter in rendering sorrowful attitudes and expressions. From Morazzone descends Del Cairo (1598-1674), while from Procaccini and Cerano derives Daniele Crespi (1590-1630), perhaps a relative of that master. Also to be remembered are Carlo Francesco Nuvoloni (1608-61) and Carlo Ceresa (1609-79), who had a similar formation but were also influenced by Guercino, and Evaristo Baschenis (1617-77), an excellent painter of still lifes.

In Piedmont during the seventeenth century there were no local painters of merit worth naming, apart from that of the classicizing Moncalvo (1568-1625).

Thus, all things considered, compared with what had been done in the sixteenth century and what would be done in the eighteenth, the production of Venetian painting in the seventeenth century is also scanty, since it, like sculpture, for the most part during the seventeenth century lived in the wake of the great sixteenth-century art. Alessandro Varotari known as il Padovanino, already mentioned, died in 1648 and is a last fruit of the tradition of the Old Master. From him depend the traditionalists Pietro Vecchia (1605-78), Pietro Liberi (1614-87) and Gerolamo Ferabosco (1604-79), a portrait painter and master of Lazzarini from whom Tiepolo would derive, and Giulio Carpioni (1611-74), a witty and lively master. More interesting in any case is the current that derives from the foreigners who moved to the lagoon in the first half of the seventeenth century. Among them, a role of the very first rank was played by Domenico Fetti (1589-1624), a Roman Caravaggist, Giovanni Liss (1600-30), a free and bold Dutchman who, expert in Italian painting from Titian to Caravaggio, truly anticipates the times to the point of sometimes appearing an eighteenth-century painter, and finally Bernardo Strozzi, the Genoese already mentioned. Three painters who, if they give much to Venice, also take much from Venice, from the Venetian chromatic taste, for their art, especially Strozzi, who on the other hand had the greatest following in Venice. From him depend among others Francesco Maffei of Vicenza (1620-60), Antonio Carneo (1637-92), Langetti and Antonio Zanchi (1631-1722); the best Venetians of the seventeenth century. It is they who prepare the great painting of the Venetian eighteenth century, even if the latter, compared with their art, may appear more a break than a continuation.

However, before speaking of that painting which truly marked a pre-eminence over that of the other regions of Italy and in many respects of Europe, it will be appropriate to return to Naples and to Rome and then to central and northern Italy, where during the eighteenth century an enormous amount was done in the field of painting, and profitably so.

In Naples, indeed even before the seventeenth century came to a close, the characteristics of eighteenth-century painting were all determined in the work of Francesco Solimena, of whom Francesco de Mura was a most faithful follower. Corrado Giaquinto, who in Rome met Conca, also depends in part on him. Both Paolo de Matteis (1663-1728) and De Mura, like Giaquinto, like the later and more pleasing Giacinto Diana (1730-1803), sometimes incline toward the rococo arabesque; while from Solimena himself descend Giuseppe Bonito (1707-89) and Gaspare Traversi. Two painters who with liveliness and vigor mark the character and nature of their figures with accents that fully revive in the eighteenth century the finest Caravaggesque vein.

Then in Rome the fortunes of painting seemed destined to continue those of the previous century, owing to the perpetuation of the decorative and Venetianizing current energetically represented by the Lucchese Giovanni Coli and Francesco Gherardi (1643-1704), by Baciccio and by Fretel Pozzo, both of whom died in 1709, owing to the dominant presence of Maratta and to a certain Caravaggism always present in many, especially among the minor painters. From Maratta, who crosses the century, carrying almost intact his distant inheritance from Raphael and the Carracci, depend essentially G. Chiari (1654-1727) and then A. Masucci (1691-1758), from whom derives Pozzi (1708-68). Also B. Luti (1666-1724) of Lucca is a follower of Maratta, though tinged a little with Caravaggism, and S. Conca too would become a Maratta follower in Rome.

Also interesting is the Venetian Francesco Trevisani (1656-1746), the most delightful Michele Rocca, of Parma, (1675-1751) and the Frenchman Pierre Subleyras (1699-1749) and then the painters of Ascoli Antonio Amorosi (c. 1660-c. 1740), mindful of Feti, and Giuseppe and his son Pierleone Ghezzi, better portraitists than painters of churches.

The current of classicizing landscape painting was always alive, with Andrea Locatelli (1660-1740) as a most notable representative, soon joined by Giovan Paolo Pannini of Piacenza (c. 1691-c. 1764), to whom the Venetian view painters owe much, and also the Frenchman Hubert Robert (1733-1806), active in Rome and, in a certain way, also the great Giambattista Piranesi, who felt ancient classicism in a much more vivid, romantic and passionate way than did so many foreigners in his time attracted to Rome by neoclassical ideals. Thus one certainly cannot place alongside the first neoclassicists a Marco Benefial (1684-1764), a verist if anything; while Pompeo Batoni (v.), Domenico Corvi (1721-1803), Antonio Cavallucci (1752-95), and Giuseppe Cades (1750-99), more than anything else seek to defend eighteenth-century positions in opposition to the abstract neoclassicism of so many foreigners who, following Winckelmann, pontificated from Rome. Whether they were A. R. Mengs, a Bohemian, Angelica Kauffman, a Swiss, or David himself, who in 1784 in Rome painted the famous Oath of the Horatii. In Florence, in the period of transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, it will be appropriate to remember Alessandro Gherardini (1655-1723), mindful of Luca Giordano, the less lively author Domenico Gabbiani (1652-1726) and then Sebastiano Galeotti (1676-1746) and Giovan Camillo Sagrestani (1600-1728). Painters also connected to Bolognese decorative and chromatic pleasantness, such as the later Giov. Domenico Ferretti (1692-1768), author of sumptuous decorative machines in churches of Florence, Pistoia and other Tuscan cities.

At the beginning of the century in Bologna, the now elderly Carlo Cignani (1628-1719) was still active and highly authoritative, along with his favorite pupil Marcantonio Franceschini (1648-1729) and G. G. del Sole (1654-1719) and the new, highly polished

Guido », while Vittorio Maria Bigari (1692-1772) soon became the greatest of the Bibbiena view painters, to whom the decorative current of the Gandolfi is also connected in some way.

But in Bologna there also worked another great master, announcing far more important novelties: Giuseppe Maria Crespi, called lo Spagnuolo, a pupil not only of Canuti and Cignani but also of Giannantonio Burrini (1656-1727). A major master, Crespi, to whom are linked not only the stylistic manners of some of his descendants, sons and grandsons, but the painting of

In Liguria the leading representative of the old Genoese decorative current during the eighteenth century was Gregorio de Ferrari (1644-1726), alongside whom one may recall Domenico Parodi (1668-1740), who in his youth had also studied in Venice, and Paolo Girolamo Piola (1666-1724), like de Ferrari, whose nephew he was. Alongside these decorators, however, one of the most novel, significant and even disconcerting personalities of the time now took shape: that of Alessandro Magnasco, called il Lissandrino. In Piedmont in the eighteenth century, in the field of painting, no personalities of great importance can be discerned. In Turin, where numerous masters from other regions gathered at the court of Savoy, among the local painters P. F. Beaumont (1699-1766), of a French family, and Vittorio Amedeo Cignaroli (1747-93), a most elegant landscape painter, stood out in any case. In Lombardy too things did not go much better, and the genre painters such as Angelo Maria Givelli (d. 1730), Francesco Londonio (1723-83), the landscape painter C. A. Tavella (1667-1738) and the flower painter G. Vincenzina are linked to the Ligurians. But in Brescia there then worked Giacomo Ceruti, in Bergamo Giuseppe Ghislandi, called fra Galgario (v.), and in Mantua Giuseppe Bazzani, three very remarkable personalities. With Bazzani the eighteenth-century painting of Lombardy took on a brisk and rapid manner such that it itself appeared a link with Venetian painting, as did also that of certain Veronese such as Antonio Balestra, Giambettino Cignaroli (1706-70) and Pietro Rotari (1707-62), a refined portraitist who went in search of fortune through the courts of Europe. In relation with the Veronese and the Lombards were also the Trentine painters Giuseppe Alberti (1664-1730), Paolo Troger (1698-1763) and the group of the Unterbergher. Giambattista Lampi (1751-1830), despite his chromatic pleasantries of eighteenth-century flavor, is already, as the limiting dates of his life suggest, a painter of more modern times.

And it will now be time to say something about eighteenth-century Venetian painting, one of the greatest glories of Italian art. The relations that Venetian painting had with that of the other Italian regions are immediately declared by two great artists: Sebastiano Ricci, who in 1682 was in Bologna, in 1695 in Milan where he saw Magnasco, and then in Florence and later still even in Paris; and Giambattista Piazzetta, "great master of shadow and light," who in Bologna was a pupil of Crespi. If Ricci's art, most tasteful, was Venetian in touch and color, that of Piazzetta is the highest expression of a refined pictorial taste; and the more one deepens one's knowledge of it, the more it appears necessary to the very expression of the Venetian mentality and pictorial culture, necessary to the very formation of the personality of G. B. Tiepolo (v.), certainly the most famous and also the most gifted artist that Venice had in the eighteenth century. Many were the followers of Tiepolo then, and not only the painter's son: Giandomenico, a most remarkable artist, sometimes superior in achievement to his own father, but also Francesco Zugno (1709-1787), Fabio Canal (1703-67) and his son Giambattista (1745-1825), and Jacopo Guarana (1720-1808). Among the followers of Piazzetta, Giuseppe Angeli (1709-1798), Domenico Maggiotto (1713-94) and Francesco Cappella (1714-84) had renown; while among the direct followers of Ricci are to be remembered, besides his nephew Marco (1676-1729), Gaspare Diziani (1689-1767) and Francesco Fontebasso (1709-69).

Other Venetians in relation with foreign painting were Jacopo Amigoni (1675-1752), very active abroad as well, and Giannantonio Pellegrini (1675-1741). Also to be remembered are two masters born in Carnia: Nicola Grassi (1682-1749) and Giambattista Pittoni (v.), and a most delicate painter, in her time most famous and highly esteemed throughout Europe: Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), author, like the Longhi (v.), of most spirited portraits. But this rapid account of eighteenth-century Venetian painting would not be, I will not say complete, but not even set out with sufficient clarity, if one did not recall the value and importance of the group of landscapes that descends from the painting of Marco Ricci (1673-1729), the nephew of Sebastiano, and continues with that of Giuseppe Zais (1750-84), of Francesco Zuccarelli (1702-88), of Francesco Battaglioli; and alongside the landscapes, that of the view painters which has its foundation in the painting of Francesco Carlevaris (1658-1730), continues in that of Michele Marieschi and of Antonio Canal, called il Canaletto (1697-1768), most important for the developments of so much European landscape painting, from which derives that of his nephew and pupil Bernardo Bellotto (1720-80), very active in Germany as well, and concludes with the great art of Francesco Guardi (1712-93), also a pupil of his brother Giannantonio (1698-1760). Guardi, besides being a view painter, was a painter of figures and above all a great poet of color, of a clear, brilliant, vivid color, leaping as in the canvases of the church of the Angelo Raffaele: a true masterpiece.

When Guardi was painting his last splendid canvases, the new neoclassical ideals found echoes on the lagoon too, and from afar, from Rome, another great Venetian dominated the field of art: Antonio Canova.

9. MODERN ART

Already in speaking of the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it has occurred to note here and there the evident signs of an anti-Baroque spirit. Reflected, that is, in the works, was the need to contain expression within a moderate and composed scale, whence the aspiration toward a simple and straightforward form. To this aspiration the artists of the age of Enlightenment responded by turning to the past, to a determined past, proposing namely the imitation of classical antiquity. This brings about the spread of an expressive language, linked also to the spirits that would animate the Romantic movement (v. ROMANTICISMO), the neoclassical one (v. NEOCLASSICISMO), which spread with the speed and seductions of fashion throughout Europe.

The liveliest center in Italy of such a movement is Rome, whence in the mid-eighteenth century G. G. Winckelmann and A. R. Mengs defined and proclaimed the neoclassical principles and theories. And it is in Rome that the oldest architectural manifestations marked by the new taste are found, in the work carried out by Michelangelo Simonetti (1724-81) and by Pietro Camporese the Elder (1726-79) around 1772 in the Vatican in the construction of the block of buildings that joins the Casino of Innocent VIII with the porticoes of the ancient garden of the Belvedere which, once arranged, took the name of Museo Chiaramonti. These were spaces—that of the Round Hall, of the Octagonal Hall, of the Greek-cross Hall, and so on—evidently studied on ancient models. As contemporaneously on ancient models were exemplified certain architectures by Antonio Asprucci (1723-1808) and by Mario (1764-1804), his son, at Villa Borghese and, later, by A. R. Stern (1771-1820) in the construction of the new wing of the Museo Chiaramonti.

Another notable center of Neoclassical architecture was, at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early years of the nineteenth, Milan, where, after the Vanvitellian Piermarini, Ludovico Pollack (1751-1806), Giovanni Antonio Antolini (1754-1822), Luigi Cagnola (1762-1833) and Luigi Canonica (1762-1844) were active. Meanwhile in Turin Ferdinando Bonagnore (1767-1843) was building, in imitation of the Pantheon, the church dedicated to the Gran Madre di Dio. His pupil was Luigi Canina (1795-1856), who was to give his greatest proofs in Rome, working on the monumental entrance of the Villa Borghese. In Genoa Carlo Barabino (1768-1835) worked in Neoclassical forms, while in Florence Giuseppe Cacioli (1770-1828) and Pasquale Poccianti (1774-1858), who built his best works in Livorno, showed a desire to move toward the new fashion. Other Tuscan architects of this age were Luigi Combray Oiguy (1779-1843) in Florence, Cosimo Rossi Melocchi (1758-1820) in Pistoia, and Lorenzo Nottolini (1787-1851) in Lucca. In Emilia at that time G. M. Soli (1745-1823), also active in Venice, and N. Bettoli (1780-1854) worked in Modena. In the Veneto the best, certainly the best known, at that time was G. A. Selva (1751-1819), but the famous temple of Possagno is the fruit of an idea of Canova (v.). In Trieste Matteo Pertsch (1780-1834), Antonio Mollari and Pietro Nobile (1774-1845) were active, the latter the author of that church of S. Antonio whose facade forms the backdrop to the characteristic Canal Grande of Trieste.

Also worthy of memory is the activity of Venanzio Marvuglia (1729-1814) in Sicily, that of Leopoldo Laperuta and of Pietro Bianchi da Lugano (1787-1849) in Naples, where he built S. Francesco di Paola and where Antonio Niccolini (1772-1850) of S. Miniato also worked, famous above all for having given the Teatro S. Carlo its present appearance.

G. G. Winckelmann, who had sensibility for nothing if not corporeal beauty, enunciated the most authoritative Neoclassical precepts, proposing the study and imitation of the statues of the golden period of Hellenic art, and he himself formulated a theory to this effect as early as 1745 in his « Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks ». A book that came to comfort not only the anti-Baroque attitudes evident also in the sculpture of the first half of the eighteenth century, but to encourage sculptors such as the Roman Giuseppe Ceracchi (1751-1802) to copy, until Antonio Canova came to dominate the field of sculpture. Small, however, more than it may seem, was the group of true Canovians, among whom at Rome Adamo Tadolini (v.) initially held first place. In fact, the more calculated, deliberate, mechanical and therefore easy to understand and repeat Neoclassicism of an Albert Thorwaldsen exercised greater attraction on the young at that time, and he had a continuator in Rome in Luigi Bienaimé (1793-1878). In Rome at that time F. M. Laboureur (1767-1831) worked with some independence from the two. In Naples, on the other hand, Antonio (1778-1866)

and Gennaro Cali (1799-1877) followed Canova, while in Florence, a pupil of Carradori, Stefano Ricci (1765-1837), himself also a Canovian, worked in a Neoclassical manner, as in Genoa did G. Gaggini (1791-1876), and in Milan — where Franchi had already proposed the new taste — the Roman C. Pacetti (1758-1826) who, having obtained a teaching post at Brera in 1803, trained the sculptors of the Arco della Pace, some of whom already turned toward « Purism », such as Benedetto Cacciatori (1794-1875) and Pompeo Marchesi (1789-1838). Also Neoclassical sculptors of some merit are the Piedmontese G. B. Comolli (1775-1830) and the later Innocenzo Fraccaroli (1805-82), a Venetian, educated in Venice and Rome.

A discussion analogous to the one made for sculpture and architecture should now be repeated for painting, which in the mid-eighteenth century, in many respects and in the orientation of even notable artists, showed a certain impatience with the emphasis, the mawkishness, the pietism, the oratory of the Baroque artists. In this connection the name of P. Batoni is often invoked, an emulator or imitator of A. R. Mengs, the latter a true Neoclassicist to the point of imitating or falsifying ancient paintings, while the greatest Neoclassical achievements in Rome itself were attained by the Frenchmen Louis David first and then the young Ingres. Among the Italians oriented in a clearly Neoclassical sense, mention should be made of the painters of the Milanese circle, such as Giuliano Traballesi (1727-1808), Andrea Appiani, the greatest of all, Giuseppe Bossi (1777-1815), and the Venetians, among whom Canova should also be placed, and Lattanzio Quarena (1768-1853), and Domenico Pellegrini (1759-1840). In Venice there is also a Tuscan pupil of Batoni, that Teodoro Matteini (1754-1831) who was the teacher of M. Grigoletti (1801-70), author of completely Neoclassical altarpieces and of witty portraits.

It was more from Batoni than from a David and other foreigners active in Rome that Vincenzo Camuccini, also the author of numerous paintings on sacred subjects, drew his instruction. At that time in Rome itself, more traditionally, B. Pinelli (1787-1835), Gaspare Landi of Piacenza (1756-1830) and the Aretine Pietro Benvenuti (1769-1844) worked, the latter having returned in 1804 to Florence, where he found the environment formed by Luigi Sabatelli (1777-1850), the best Neoclassical painter of Tuscany, although his Neoclassicism is often more conceptual than formal.

The term « Purist » (v. PUNTATO) was transferred to the field of the figurative arts from that of letters, retaining a meaning very similar to the original. It serves in fact to designate the manifestations of the arts of design that stand intermediate between the Neoclassical and the more properly Romantic ones. The Purists will therefore seek their source of inspiration no longer exclusively in classical antiquity but predominantly in the manifestations of the artistic culture of Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Thus among the architects active in Rome between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, one will not hesitate to place among the Purists Giuseppe Valadier, a follower of Palladio, and Luigi Poletti, the architect to whom so much of the reconstruction of the ancient Basilica Ostiense is due, Antonio Sarti (1797-1880) and then Pietro Camporese the Younger (1807-73). A Purist from the Marche, also active in Lazio and Umbria, was Ireneo Aleandri.

In Lombardy Carlo Amati (1776-1832), author, with Zanoja, of the facade of the Duomo, used Purist forms in the church of S. Carlo in Milan, as did Giovanni Perego in the Palazzo Rocca Saporiti, and Rodolfo Vantini (1791-1856), active in Milan and in his native Brescia, where he erected the lighthouse of the cemetery.

In Tuscany, the appellation of Purist would also be deserved by numerous artists of the Neoclassical period, ever nostalgic for serene sixteenth-century cadences. However, the architects of the first generation of the century were generally more openly desirous of renewing those forms, such as Gaetano Baccani (1792-1867) and Telemaco Bonajuti in Florence. In Emilia, among the Purists, one should place Giuseppe Nadi of Bologna (1780-1814), while in Venice Antonio Diedo, a pupil and collaborator of Selva, but author in forms between Neoclassical and Purist of numerous buildings, including sacred ones, Francesco Lazzeri, Gian Alvise Pigazzi and Lorenzo Santi of Siena, who used

Palladian forms in the Palazzo del Patriarca in Venice and Neoclassical forms in the pavilion near the royal palace where the Associazione del Bucintoro has its seat. Among sculptors, Purist ideas initially manifested themselves in Tuscany, where Lorenzo Bartolini, taking Quattrocento examples as his model, proclaimed that he admired the antique but did not wish to copy it. Among Bartolini's followers are to be remembered Luigi Pampaloni (1791-1887), Pasquale Romanelli (1812-87), A. Costoli (1803-71), U. Combi (1807-95) and Emilio Demi (1798-1863), the best of them all, whose "Madre educatrice" of the Graban asylum in Livorno is worthy of note, a sculpture in which, as in many works of the other masters, one already senses a Romantic spirit breathing. Thus too in Rome in certain works of Pietro Tenerani (1789-1869), who after having been a pupil of Thorvaldsen and having imitated him turned to Bartolini and then to an even freer imitation of the true in portraits, some of them truly very beautiful.

Representatives of pictorial Purism, the "Nazarenes" grouped in Rome around Overbeck, were Tommaso Minardi of Faenza, Filippo Agricola, the early Francesco Hayez (v.) of Venice, as well as certain moments of G. Bezzuoli (1784-1855), who succeeded Benvenuti in teaching at the Florentine Academy.

The Romantic attitude of the spirit that substantiates the Neoclassical and Purist movement will appear all the clearer and more defined when it advocates the need, on the part of artists, to externalize their own creative faculties beyond every bond. Hence the varied aspect of the art of the Romantic period, whether as a predilection for particular themes and forms, the medieval ones, or as a need to express freely the "tumult of sad thoughts" that now disturbs souls, or, finally, as a search for new stylistic modes and new expressive techniques.

This granted, it will be recognized as the fruit of Romantic attitudes both the architecture of Amati and Zanoja for the facade in ogival forms of the Milanese Cathedral, and that of Baccani when in Florence he builds the medievalizing bell tower of S. Croce, and that of Giuseppe Jappelli (1783-1852) of Venice, a great architect, renewer and disseminator in Italy of the English garden type, and finally that of Alessandro Antonelli, who summed up in his works the Italian constructive experiences of thousands of years, creating new architectural forms of the highest expressive value.

In the field of sculpture as in that of painting, Romantic attitudes manifest themselves essentially both in the subjects and in the forms that prelude to verism and the new technical researches of the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus among sculptors one will remember, along with Pio Fedi (1816-92), author of the famous Rape of Polyxena in Florence in the Loggia della Signoria, Vincenzo Canzani (1818-87) and G. Dupré himself. Thus between Purism and Romanticism there also worked in Rome Filippo Gnoccarini (1804-75) and Ignazio Jacometti (1819-83), author of the group The Kiss of Judas at the Scala Santa.

In Milan certain followers of Bartolini assume Romantic attitudes, such as Alessandro Puttinati (1801-72), Giovanni Pandiani (1809-79), Pietro Magni (1817-77), Antonio Tantardini (1829-79), author of the Moses of the archbishopric, Giuseppe Argenti (1819-1901) and Giovanni Strazza (1818-75). In the times when in Milan itself Vincenzo Vela was making his first veristic experiments in a frankly Romantic environment, as in Venice Luigi Borro (1826-86), one of the best artists of his times.

Also in the field of painting the academic skill of the Purists was useful to the Romantics for narrating passionate events and for investigating and rendering with methodical acuteness the variety of sentiments reflected in human faces. Hence the very notable results then achieved in the field of portraiture.

Francesco Hayez is a typical expression of Romantic taste between Venice and Milan, where Giovanni Carnevali, known as il Piccio (1804-73), evokes Correggio-like chiaroscuro, and Domenico Induno, who soon betrays the declared derivation from Hayez, composes pictures that are like episodes of painted novellas. In Tuscany such taste is well represented, beyond the later works of Giuseppe

Bezzuoli (1784-1835), by Antonio Ciseri (v.), as well as by Stefano Ussi (1822-1901) and Antonio Puccinelli (1822-1907). In Rome it is instead represented by a complex array of fresco painters who in the churches restored or enriched at the time of Pius IX and afterward paint with composure and academic skill miracles and martyrdoms of saints and robed images of prophets. Francesco Podesti, P. Gagliardi, Cesare Mariani, Francesco Grandi (v.), Cesare Fracassini, are the most authoritative representatives of the Roman school. Better, that is freer, at times these painters, like Cesare Maccari, a pupil of L. Mussini in Siena, when they paint portraits and also compositions in which the unprejudiced observation of the true is caught in healing passages of landscape, within whose ambit the freest renewal in the field of painting was to take place, as the landscape painters who descend from Antonio Pitloo (1796-1837) suggest from the early years of the century in Naples; thus Giacinto Gigante (1804-76), Consalvo Carelli (1808-1900) and the Palizzi.

A separate mention is due among the Romantics to Luigi Galli (1822-1900), Lombard by origin, but who studied with Sabatelli and looked restlessly above all at the foreigners and at Correggio, achieving a painting not without attractions although fragmentary and at times almost monochrome.

The aspirations to freedom joined to dissatisfaction with the old stylistic languages, whether those of the Neoclassical Purist or Romantic academy, led ineluctably toward the middle of the nineteenth century to the search for new expressive means that would render individual sentiment with greater immediacy. From this derive architectural eclecticism and the new technical researches of sculpture and painting.

Nineteenth-century architectural eclecticism had two distinct moments. At first architects assume and reproduce simultaneously, according to the functions for which the building is destined, this or that architectural style; at a second moment contaminations between the various styles and arbitrary elaborations of their elements become ever more frequent, until, disarticulated in their logical connections, those languages lost every expressive validity. Among the architects who in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the first twenty-five years of the present one nevertheless won fame, one will remember: Carlo Ceppi of Turin (1829-1921), who in his homeland built the new church of S. Giovannino in Corso, that of the S. Cuore, the front of that of S. Tommaso, the bell tower and the side of the beata Madonna degli Angeli, a mixture of medieval and Renaissance forms; nor did the works of his pupils, Carlo Velasco and Angelo Reycend, prove more coherent. Similar concepts were expressed in Genoa by Domenico Cervetto in building the church of the Immacolata (1856-73), while in Lombardy Gothic or Romanesque-Gothic forms were preferred, especially for churches. Among the most active Lombard architects are Carlo Maciachini (1818-99), Giovanni Ceruti (1842-1907), Giuseppe Mengoni (1829-77), author of the layout of the piazza del duomo of Milan and of the Galleria; among the Venetians, instead, Pietro Selvatico Estense (1803-80) and Giacomo Franco (1818-95), author of the cathedral of Lonigo, which to Boito seemed "the most beautiful church that has been erected in I[taly] for so many years past." In Emilia, Edoardo Collamarini (1846-1928) was then acquiring fame, author of the church of the S. Cuore in Bologna, while in Florence, where Nicola Matas (1798-1872) was building the scholastic facade of S. Croce and E. de Fabris (1808-83) that of the Cathedral, G. Poggi (1811-1901) dominated the field of architecture, author above all of felicitous urban planning solutions.

In Rome, where Virginio Vespignani, after Poletti's death, continued the basilica of St. Paul, after 1870 a substantial group of local architects enjoyed success, such as Gaetano Kock, Pio Piacentini, Raffaello Ojetti, who adopted late-Renaissance forms in their civil buildings, until Giuseppe Sacconi of the Marche (1854-1905) and Guglielmo Calderini of Umbria (1837-1916) won respectively in 1883 and 1888 the competition for the monument to Victor Emmanuel and the Palace of Justice. Two works that had a decisive influence on all Italian architecture until the First World War. In that period, in Rome itself, through the work of Luca Carimini (1830-90), of Andrea (1817-1911) and Carlo Busiri Vici (1856-1923), of Domenico Iannetti (1815-1881), of Vespignani himself and of others, churches were built with Romanesque and Gothic architectural forms, as they continue to be built even today. However, in recent times not only in Rome but in many other Italian cities the theme of the church has been taken up with passionate interest also by architects who follow more modern orientations and who have sought to give new expressions to the ancient sentiments of religious piety, even using the forms of organic rationalism (v. ARCHITETTURA; CHIESA; MODERNA, ARTE).

The rendering of images, pursued with academic care by sculptors and painters, became more acute and methodical when around the middle of the nineteenth century realistic verism, itself a consequence of Romantic postulates, attracted artists. Thus among sculptors in Tuscany with G. Dupré, T. Sarrocchi (1824-1901), his pupil, and Enrico Pazzi (1819-99) and then Adriano Cecioni; while in Rome Pietro Tenerani continued to work with success, in Turin Carlo Marocchetti (1805-67) and Vincenzo Vela (v.) and then the Lombard Odoardo Tabacchi (1836-1905) prepared the forms of that allegorical and celebratory or illustrative sculpture through which acquired a name in Lombardy and Piedmont Giuseppe Cossano of Trecate, Vincenzo Giani of Como (1831-1900), Gabriele Ambrosico (1844-1918) as well as David Calandra (1856-1915) and Leonardo Bistolfi (1859-1933) and finally Pietro Canonica and Edoardo Rubino. Then, while in Venice Antonio Dal Zotto (1852-1918) was working, a pupil of Borro, in Rome, where in 1865 the Genoese verist G. Monteverde (1837-1917) settled, there emerged independent of the academy a great sculptor: Ercole Rosa (1846-73), to whom E. Ferrari (1849-1929) and then A. Apolloni (1857-1923) are linked.

It is again for the accentuation of veristic elements that F. Maccagnani (1825-1930), the Neapolitan Achille d'Orsi (1845-1929), E. Ximenes (1835-1927), the Sicilians M. Rutelli, and Domenico Trentacoste active in Florence like Cesare Zocchi and Raffaello Romanelli (1856-1938) who have erected so many monuments in the squares of Italy, are to be remembered. However, plastic realism also led sculptors toward other researches, those parallel to pictorial Impressionism. Thus from Tabacchi's school came Giuseppe Grandi (1843-94), who modelled skilfully in a continuous search for chiaroscuro effects, like Francesco Berzaghi (1839-1892) a vigorous pupil of Strazza and of Vela, and from Grandi descended Medardo Rosso whose soft, most delicate sfumato dissolves forms (v. MODERNA, ARTE).

Orientations analogous to those of sculpture were followed by painting in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, when onto the foundation of Romantic expression was grafted veristic research. Naturalistic verism not only in a formal but also in a chromatic sense, such as that pursued, on the Venetian example, by Federico Faruffini (1831-69) in Milan, and then by Daniele Ranzoni (1849-89) as by Tranquillo Cremona (1837-78), who are, with Luigi Conconi, the most representative exponents of the Milanese "scapigliatura." To which group is also linked so much illustrative and episodic painting as that of Vincenzo Gola, of Eugenio Gignous and of Mosè Bianchi (1840-1904) and, in a certain way, that of Giovanni Segantini whose technique is linked to that of the Divisionists (v. DIVISIONISMO) like that of V. Grubicy (1851-1920), of Angelo Morbelli, of Pelizza da Volpedo, of Carlo Fornara, of Gaetano Previati (v.).

Nineteenth-century naturalism had a most fertile ground in Campania, which possessed precisely its own taste for a contingent, episodic, characterizing truth. In this sense one can also understand certain values of the landscape painting of the Gigante, the Palizzi and the Carelli. An art more domestic than bold, to which the accomplished painting of Domenico Morelli, the most illustrious nineteenth-century Italian painter, stands almost in contrast also for the commitment of its subjects, but with which the other of Bernardo Celentano (1835-63) and that of Edoardo Tofano (1838-1920)

almost agrees, like the rough naturalism of a Michele Cammarano (1835-1920) and then the festive and illusory painting of Edoardo Dalbono (1841-1915). While Giacchino Toma (1836-91) must be placed much higher for a truly intimate, almost mysterious sense of colour and above all of light, typically Neapolitan. And it is on this path, that of a lively and pronounced luminism, that it is possible to encounter still others among the best painters of the nineteenth-century Neapolitan tradition: Giuseppe de Nittis (1846-84), who emigrated very early to Paris, F. P. Michetti and A. Mancini.

Meanwhile in Tuscany, in some small compositions of Puccinelli around 1850, one can perhaps point to the first signs of that movement called the "macchiaioli" (v.), certainly the most important of the pictorial movements of nineteenth-century Italy, which gathered in Florence numerous painters, the principal of whom was Giovanni Fattori, and almost all of whom were, between 1860 and 1870, like many other Italians, among them most notably G. Boldini (1845-1931), in Paris, already universally recognized even before the middle of the century as the new artistic capital of Europe. Then Luigi Serra, of Bologna, author of the paintings in the apse of the church of St. Mary of the Victory in Rome, had contacts with the Tuscan milieu. At this point the work of Adolfo de Carolis (v.) is also to be remembered. In the second half of the nineteenth century in Venice Giacomo Favretto (1849-87), Guglielmo Ciardi (1836-1922), Pietro Fragiacomo (1836-1922) and others took up again the manners of the tradition of the vedutisti, while Ettore Tito (1859-1939), with greater ambition, assumed oratorical attitudes of some decorative effectiveness, going back, nothing less, to Tiepolo.

Meanwhile the Impressionist taste (v. IMPRESSIONISMO) gradually gained ground everywhere; in Rome with Nino Costa (1826-93), to whose painting is linked that of the macchiaioli and of a notable array of local landscape painters, in Lombardy, where after Vittorio Avondo work A. Fontanesi with L. Delleani (1830-1908), while from Impressionist manners, in their various gradations and derivations, depends all the most modern art, from that of Armando Spadini (1883-1925), splendid for richness of colour, a reflection of an intimate serene world, to that of the boldest and most disconcerting painters of today, who after the various futile attempts to go back to a past that inexorably cannot renew itself, with movements however uncomposed and strange (v. CUBISMO; ESPRESSIONISMO; FUTURISMO), in a continuous alternating change of orientations or tendencies, seek to render with adequacy of expression the drama of our age.

Art, moreover, like time has its seasons, and to periods of greater flourishing and splendour others succeed of poverty and abandonment, as necessary to its course as are the rigours of winter and so that spring may return to manifest itself in all its splendour. This is not a hope, it is a certainty.

Emilio Lavagnino

VII. SCHOOL SYSTEM.

1. CONFIGURATION

The current configuration of the Italian school system is the result of a centuries-long elaboration in which four phases can be distinguished: the first begins with the sovereign determinations of 4 Oct. 1848, which marked a decisive turning point in the school policy of Piedmont, and concludes with the Casati law of 13 Nov. 1859, which fixed into an ordered system the outlines of institutions sketched out over more than a decade of legislative gestation and prudent experimentation. The second phase embraces the entire period between 1860 and 1922 and is characterized by the slow evolution of the principles and institutions of the Casati law, gradually adapted to the needs of the political and administrative unification of the country and to the demands arising in the course of social development. On the historical foundation of this slow and progressive formation, the third phase, that of reforms, opens in 1923. The first, implemented by G. Gentile, reaffirmed the pre-eminent value of the humanistic tradition; the second, which remained unfinished, was inspired by a modern conception of humanism, open to an understanding of the social value and the educational efficacy of work: it had only a beginning of implementation with the law of 1 July 1940, which reorganized the middle school in accordance with the provisions of the "Carta della scuola." The last phase, which may be called one of democratic revision of the systems, opens in 1943, and heralds a radical transformation, inspired by the most modern pedagogical needs and experiences and by the realization of the social principles enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic.

The overlapping of reforms and the fragmentary character of a legislation that is among the most arduous and tormented do not prevent us from discerning the main lines of the historical development of the school system.

a) Nel campo dell'istruzione elementare. - Due processi appaiono soprattutto rilevanti: la graduale estensione dell'obbligo scolastico e la progressiva statizzazione della scuola elementare.

The obligation of elementary education, already affirmed by the Casati law, was reaffirmed by the Coppino law of 15 July 1877, which established its duration from the 6th to the 10th year of age. The Orlando law of 8 July 1904 extended it to the 12th year, and the decree of 31 Dec. 1923, no. 3126, to the 14th. Thus established, the duration of compulsory schooling was confirmed by art. 34 of the Constitution, which prescribes that "lower education, imparted for at least eight years, is compulsory and free." As for elementary school, which the Casati law had left to the municipalities, the Daneo-Credaro law of 4 June 1911 began its transformation, providing for the transfer to the State of the schools of the smaller municipalities. In 1931 the State took over the burdens of the municipalities that had retained autonomous administration of the school, opening the way to total direct management, which was in fact assumed from 1 Jan. 1934. The process of state takeover was completed in 1938 with the transfer to the direct dependence of the education authorities of the so-called "rural schools," which since 1923 had been entrusted to the management of delegated bodies.

b) In the field of secondary education. - The aims and structure of the liceo-ginnasio, through the changing of systems and programs, have remained practically unchanged down to our own day. Studies and projects intended to counteract the encyclopedism of this institution culminated, with the law of 21 July 1911, no. 860, in the establishment of the sections of modern liceo-ginnasio, which were to pursue an essentially formative aim by means different from those proper to the classical liceo, "opening the minds of the young to the most living and renewing ideals of modern life." The new sections, also because of the difficulties that arose

…matured with the world war, failed to establish themselves and were abolished with the Gentile reform. Yet the need that had brought them into being did not disappear with them, and Gentile himself sought to better accommodate it with the establishment of the liceo scientifico, which also replaced the physics-mathematics section of the technical institute. The most significant transformations in this sector concern the evolution of the very concept of secondary education, which was once limited to classical education alone.

Under the Casati law, technical education, which was also divided into two levels and was provided in technical schools and technical institutes, both of three years' duration, belonged to the primary branch, and teacher training education, then called "normal," had an analogous position. The evolution of technical education onto the secondary plane began after the radical reorganization ordered in 1883, with the development and establishment of the physics-mathematics section of the technical institutes, which, albeit in a limited sector, fulfilled tasks analogous to those of the liceo, as a school preparing for university studies. With the innovations introduced by the Gentile reform in the organization of the technical institutes, which were endowed with a four-year lower course that included the teaching of Latin, the secondary character of technical education was definitively acquired. But the reform went further, including within secondary education (or middle education, as it was defined along with it) the education which, following upon elementary education, was intended to complete it, and which was provided in the school called, precisely, complementary, established in place of the old technical school. With this, the humanistic precondition of secondary education was overcome.

But an analogous function of completing elementary education was performed by the "supplementary classes for vocational initiation," established by the same Gentile reform, as a continuation of the elementary school properly so called (sixth, seventh and eighth class). Between supplementary education and post-elementary education the difference was little more than a nuance. The way was therefore open to the transfer of the supplementary classes onto the level of the middle school, carried out later with the law of 7 Jan. 1929, which merged the aforesaid classes and the complementary school, as well as other similar scholastic institutions dependent on the Ministry of National Economy, into a single secondary school of initiation to work, later reorganized by the decree-law of 7 Jan. 1929, no. 8, and the law of 22 Apr. 1932, no. 490, into the present secondary school of vocational initiation.

Meanwhile, another unifying process had been brought about with the transfer to the Ministry of Public Education of all the schools and vocational institutes dependent on the Ministry of National Economy (1928) and of the nautical institutes dependent on the Ministry of the Navy (1929). Thus the favorable conditions were established for a general and uniform reorganization of technical education, carried out with the law of 15 June 1931, no. 889. As for teacher-training education, the law of 21 July 1911, no. 861, attempted its first approximation to secondary education, understood in the traditional sense of classical education, by establishing two-year teacher-training courses, as a continuation of the isolated ginnasi. Taking up the inspiring motives of that experiment, the Gentile reform transformed the old normal schools, which had a strictly vocational character, into istituti magistrali, with a broad humanistic basis, placed on the same level as the licei.

c) Higher education. - The historical development of the systems of higher education is largely influenced by the evolution of the principle of freedom of teaching. The Casati law was inspired by a "middle system of freedom supported by those precautions that keep it within due bounds" and took care to establish "the degree for every order of studies."

As regards higher education, the law recognized in anyone who had the qualification the faculty of holding private courses, leaving students free to attend them in preference to the official courses.

The Gentile reform extended the concept of freedom of teaching, recognizing in the universities administrative, didactic and disciplinary autonomy, and accentuated that particular aspect of freedom itself which is manifested in the free formation of the study plan on the part of the students. In the Gentile system, the limit and guarantee of freedom of study, which was later somewhat restricted in 1935, with the distinction between fundamental (compulsory) and complementary (optional) subjects, was the value of simple academic qualifications attributed to degrees and diplomas and the consequent institution of the state examination for admission to professional practice. Art. 33 of the Constitution has accepted the principle of university autonomy, establishing that "institutions of higher culture, universities and academies have the right to give themselves autonomous systems, within the limits of the laws of the State."

2. FREEDOM OF TEACHING

Another essential aspect of freedom of teaching concerns the relations between the State and private individuals in the field of instruction and education.

The Casati law, inspired, as has been said, by a middle system of freedom, largely admitted the participation of private initiative, under the supervision of the State, from which only paternal instruction was expressly excluded, that is, instruction given within the family. In 1929, with the Concordat with the Holy See, it was established that universities, seminaries, academies, colleges and other Catholic institutes for the formation of ecclesiastics depend solely on the Holy See, without any interference from the Italian scholastic authorities.

Save for the aforesaid exclusions, freedom of teaching has remained hitherto circumscribed and subject to an administrative authorization or concession. A radical innovation to this system was brought about by art. 33 of the Constitution, which configures freedom of teaching as a true and proper subjective right, establishing that "Bodies and private individuals have the right to establish schools and institutes of education."

3. RELIGIOUS TEACHING

As the foundation of public instruction, the Italian scholastic system placed, from its very origins, religious teaching, in the form received from Catholic tradition. Once the laicist prejudice was overcome, with the evolution of pedagogical thought, which with the Coppino laws of 1877 had interrupted the constant educational tradition, religious teaching was restored by Gentile with the decree of 1 Oct. 1923 no. 2185, as "foundation and crowning of elementary instruction." In the following years it was introduced into the middle schools and especially into the istituti magistrali, as an optional subject. Finally, with art. 36 of the Concordat, Italy recognized religious instruction as the foundation and crowning of all public instruction and agreed that the relevant teaching, already given in the elementary schools, should have further development in the middle schools, according to programs established by agreement with the Holy See. It was further agreed that the teaching should be given by teachers recognized as suitable by the diocesan Ordinary and that the textbooks adopted should have the approval of the ecclesiastical authority. Art. 36 of the Concordat was fully implemented by the law of 5 June 1930 no. 824.

4. THE PRESENT SYSTEM

a) Elementary instruction is divided into three grades: preparatory, lower and upper. Instruction of the preparatory grade has a recreational character and tends to discipline the first manifestations of the character and intelligence of children. It is given in the nursery schools established, normally, on the initiative of moral bodies. Instruction of the lower grade has as its object the first elements of knowledge and is given in the first three classes of the elementary school; that of the upper grade, given in the fourth and fifth class, develops and completes the elements acquired in the preceding classes. Elementary instruction of the lower and upper grades is compulsory and free for children from 6 to 14 years of age. Elementary instruction for blind, deaf-mute, abnormal and physically handicapped children is provided by schools with a special system. Other special schools provide for the instruction of illiterate adults, such as the regimental and prison schools and the courses of the recently established popular school, which respond to purposes analogous to those of the pre-existing evening, holiday and summer schools.

b) Secondary education, also called intermediate or second-level education, has as its object the systematic complements of knowledge and is divided into two main branches: the humanistic branch, which is inspired by spiritual values and prepares students for the continuation of studies at universities and higher institutes, and the technical branch which, in its prevailing consideration of practical values, prepares students for the exercise of professions connected with the economic life of the nation. First-level secondary education is imparted in the middle school and in the remaining classes of the ginnasio, in the school and in the secondary courses of vocational guidance, in the technical school and in the female vocational school. Second-level secondary education is imparted in the classical lyceum, in the scientific lyceum, in the teacher-training institute, in the technical institute and in the school of professional teaching for women. The two branches of second-level secondary education have a common institutional basis in the middle school, a three-year school, which has a preparatory and orientational character. The concluding manifestation of this character of the school is the opinion that the commission for the licenza examinations expresses, with regard to each candidate, concerning the aptitude to continue studies and the appropriate course to follow. Under certain conditions, however, access to second-level technical studies is also open to those coming from lower schools of the same branch. The middle school is entered by means of an admission examination upon completion of the tenth year of age.

To the humanistic branch of secondary education belong the remaining classes of the ginnasio, the classical and scientific lyceum and, at least tendentially, the teacher-training institute.

The remaining classes of the ginnasio (4th and 5th class) virtually form, together with the classical lyceum, to which they are generally attached, a single five-year institute. The ginnasio course, which concludes with an admission examination to the lyceum, is entered with the licenza of the middle school.

The classical lyceum, a three-year school, fulfills the traditional task of classical education of preparing students for universities and higher institutes. It concludes with a maturity examination that opens access to all university faculties, except that of magistero.

The scientific lyceum has the purpose of developing and deepening the education of young people who aspire to university studies in the faculties of sciences and of medicine and surgery. The course of the scientific lyceum is five years and ends with the scientific maturity examination which gives access to all university faculties, except those of letters and philosophy, jurisprudence and magistero.

The teacher-training institute, a four-year school, prepares students for teaching in elementary schools and for studies in the faculty of magistero, which is entered by competition. It concludes with a qualification examination, which is a legal title of admission to the magistral competitions, and gives access, in addition to the faculty of magistero, to university studies for the attainment of the degree in foreign languages.

The magistral school, a three-year school, which prepares students for teaching in nursery schools, has an uncertain physiognomy, inasmuch as it is not yet precisely defined in the general system of secondary education and in the particular branch to which it belongs. It is entered with the licenza of the middle school, or by examination, after three years from the attainment of the elementary licenza, or from admission to a middle school.

To the technical branch of secondary education belong the school and the courses of vocational guidance, the technical school, the female vocational school, the school of professional teaching for women and the technical institute.

The secondary school of vocational guidance, a three-year school, has the purpose of imparting the compulsory post-elementary education and of preparing students for the various trades, for the practical exercise of agriculture and for clerical functions of an executive order. It is divided into four main types: agrarian; industrial and artisan; commercial; maritime. Two or more types of schools may be organized in a single institute; the schools of each type may have a specialized orientation. The secondary courses of vocational guidance correspond, depending on their duration, to the first or the first two years of the complete school. The first class of the school and of the courses is entered with the elementary licenza, or by admission examination.

The technical school, a two-year school, completes the preparation of those who hold the licenza of the school of vocational guidance in order to form suitable workers. It is divided into three types: agrarian, industrial and artisan, commercial. Each type of school may have different specializations. At the end of the course, one obtains, respectively for each type, the title of rural agent, of qualified technician or artisan, and of commercial accountant.

The female vocational school, a three-year school, prepares students for the good governance of the home and for the exercise of practical professions proper to women. It is entered with the licenza of the school of vocational guidance or with the licenza of the middle school. The course of the female vocational school concludes with a licenza examination that confers the diploma of professional suitability for the specialization followed.

The school of professional teaching for women, a two-year school, prepares students for the teaching of women's crafts and domestic economy. It is entered with the licenza of the female vocational school, or by a supplementary examination, to which are admitted those who are already provided with a diploma of maturity or of qualification.

The technical institute, a five-year school, prepares students for the exercise of technical and administrative professions and functions in the field of agriculture, industry and commerce. It is divided into five sections: agrarian, industrial, nautical, commercial and for surveyors.

All sections of the technical institute are entered with the licenza of the middle school. The third class of the industrial, agrarian and commercial sections is entered, by special suitability examination, by those who hold the licenza of the technical school of corresponding orientation. The course of the technical institute concludes with a technical qualification examination, which, depending on the section in which it is taken, confers the title of agrarian expert, industrial expert, chief technician or master of arts, accountant and commercial expert, surveyor. In the nautical section one obtains the diploma of candidate for the command of merchant ships or for the direction of engines or for the profession of naval constructor, depending on the specialization followed in the course of studies. The diploma of technical qualification gives access to the faculties of economics and commerce and of statistical and actuarial sciences.

c) Higher education has the purpose of promoting the progress of science and of providing the scientific culture necessary for the exercise of offices and professions. It is imparted in the universities and in the state and free higher institutes. The universities are constituted by a variable number of faculties and schools, established in their respective statutes. The higher institutes have one or more faculties and related schools.

The faculties that may be established are the following: jurisprudence; political sciences; economics and commerce; demographic and actuarial statistical sciences; letters and philosophy; magistero; medicine and surgery; veterinary medicine; pharmacy; mathematical, physical and natural sciences; engineering; mining engineering; industrial chemistry; architecture; agrarian.

The duration of studies is five years for the attainment of the degree in engineering, in architecture and in industrial chemistry; six years for the attainment of the degree in medicine, four years for all other degrees. Certain degree courses are two-year, but they are entered after a two-year propaedeutic period of other university studies. The studies for the attainment of diplomas have a duration varying from one to three years.

Teachings are divided into fundamental, which are compulsory, and complementary, which are optional.

Degrees and diplomas have exclusively the value of academic qualifications; authorization to practice a profession is obtained through state examinations.

Schools may have special purposes and in that case they issue academic qualifications like the faculties (schools of aeronautical engineering): or purposes of further training and specialization for those who already hold academic qualifications.

Refresher, integration and cultural courses may also be established, which generally issue simple certificates of attendance, and seminars for practical exercises.

The Universities of Bologna (founded in the 11th century), Modena (12th century), Padua (1222), Naples (1224), Siena (1246), Macerata (1290), Rome (1303), Perugia (1307), Pisa (1343), Florence (1349), Pavia (1361), Ferrara (1391), Turin (1405), Parma (1422), Catania (1444), Messina (1548), Sassari (1556), Cagliari (1596), Palermo (1778), Genoa (1812), Milan (1923), Bari (1923), and Trieste (1924) are state universities.

Also borne by the State are the Higher Polytechnic Institute of Turin (1843), the Higher Polytechnic Institute of Milan (1862), the Higher Institute of Economics and Commerce of Venice (1868), and the Higher Institute of Architecture of Venice (1926). Four other state higher institutes have a special system: the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (1813), which prepares students for secondary teaching; the Oriental Institute of Naples (1888), the Higher Naval Institute of Naples (1920), and the University for Foreigners of Perugia (1925).

For free universities and higher institutes, see below, no. 5.

d) Artistic education constitutes a separate branch of education, with particular systems that have few connections with the other branches. It is provided in the school of art and the institute of art, in the artistic lyceum, in the academy of fine arts, in the conservatory of music, in the national academy of dramatic art, and in the national academy of dance.

The school of art, lasting three years, prepares specialized craftsmen and may be isolated or attached to the institute of art, of which, in that case, it constitutes the lower course. One is admitted to it with the elementary school certificate. The institute of art, lasting three years, trains students in applied art work and prepares heads or master craftsmen. It is divided into various sections. The artistic lyceum, lasting four years, prepares young people for the continuation of studies in the academy of fine arts and in the faculty of architecture. The second two-year period of the four-year course is, for that purpose, divided into two sections. One is admitted to it by entrance examination. The academy of fine arts comprises courses in painting, sculpture, decoration and stage design, each lasting four years. One is admitted to it with the maturity diploma obtained in the corresponding section of the artistic lyceum, or with the certificate of the institute of art. The conservatory of music is a complex of schools lasting from six to ten years. The teaching, differentiated in each school, is divided into periods of varying duration. The first period is entered with the elementary school certificate or by entrance examination.

The system of artistic education comprises two special institutes based in Rome: the National Academy of Dramatic Art and the National Academy of Dance. The first, lasting three years, prepares actors and directors for the dramatic theatre: the second consists of an eight-year course for the training of female dancers and a three-year advanced course for the training of soloists, teachers, choreographers and dance composers.

5. THE NON-STATE SCHOOL

The participation of bodies and private individuals in the field of instruction and education manifests itself in forms that may have different legal effect. The typical expression of freedom of teaching is the private school subject solely to authorization for opening and to government supervision, for the protection of the institutions of the State, public order and good morals.

Authorization is given, for elementary schools, by the superintendent of studies, and, for secondary schools, by the Ministry of Public Education. Under conditions that vary in the different branches of teaching, private schools may be granted the legal value of the studies and qualifications obtained there. Elementary schools run by corporations, associations and moral bodies may be placed on an equal footing with those of the State, on condition that they have a system conforming to the latter and are public and free of charge. Equal footing is obtained by means of an agreement between the superintendent of studies and the bodies concerned. In the branch of secondary education a distinction is made between pareggiate, parificate and legally recognized schools. Pareggiamento may be granted to schools run by moral bodies that have a teaching system conforming to that of state schools and that recruit their teaching staff by public competition. An institute analogous to pareggiamento was parificazione, granted from 1925 to schools conforming to state schools run by certain bodies (boarding schools, educational institutions, etc.) independently of the condition of recruiting teaching staff by competition. An extension of the effects of parificazione came with "legal recognition", established by the law of 19 January 1942 and which may also be granted to schools managed by private individuals, always subject to the requirement of substantial conformity of the teaching system to that of state schools. Pareggiamento and legal recognition are granted by ministerial decree.

In the sector of higher education, the legal value of the degrees and diplomas issued by free universities and higher institutes is a direct consequence of the administrative and teaching autonomy proper to this branch of teaching, rather than the effect of a formal act of recognition or parificazione. In fact art. 1 of the current consolidated text of 31 August 1933, no. 1592, declares that higher education is provided in state universities and institutes and in free universities and higher institutes. It follows that the degrees and diplomas issued by free universities and higher institutes should have ipso iure the same value as the degrees and diplomas issued by the corresponding state universities and higher institutes, and the formal acts of recognition or parificazione a merely declaratory value.

The Universities of Urbino (1564), of Camerino (1727) and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan (1924) are free.

The "Bocconi" University of Economics and Commerce of Milan (1902) is a free higher institute. An analogous position is held by the pareggiati higher institutes of teaching of Naples "Suor Orsola Benincasa" (1901), of Rome "Maria S.ma Assunta" (1939), of Salerno (1944) and of Genoa (1947).

A sui generis position is held by the universities and higher institutes dependent on the Holy See (subtracted, as has been said, from any interference by the Italian school authorities) insofar as the degrees in Sacred Theology, issued by the faculties approved by the Holy See, and the diplomas issued by the school of Paleography, Diplomatics and Archival Studies of Vatican City are recognized in the Italian State, in accordance with art. 40 of the Concordat.

Substantial modifications to the regime of non-state education will be made in relation to the directive norms contained in art. 33 of the Constitution. The attribution of a true subjective right to the opening and operation of merely private schools is in fact incompatible with the current requirement of prior authorization.

On the other hand, the very institutions of equalization, parity and legal recognition will have to be reorganized and adapted to the new concept of "parity" which, according to the Constitution itself, while entailing obligations, must ensure "full freedom" for the schools that enjoy it. - See plates XXII-XXXIII.

Lucio D'Arconte