A Short History of the Renaissance by Edith Sichel

Author:Edith Sichel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ozymandias Press

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE AND THE WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE

THE RENAISSANCE MADE AN EPOCH for women; it gave them a new field and a new importance. Its appeal to beauty, its quick social developments, the emotional energies and the varied activities that it involved, were peculiarly suited to their powers; and their frequent discussions in loggia or lemon grove about love and friendship, with all their analysis and nice distinctions between the “love for collective humanity, for irrational objects, for the Great-All; . for the Angels,” though they were little more than metaphysical babble, were yet so finely adapted to feminine intuition that they brought women into society, not as queens of chivalry, but as companions. Nor were women, with their need for expression, slow to make intercourse into an art. They did for life what painting, sculpture, poetry had effected for beauty and ideas; they were its interpreters. They stand, as it were, a race apart, independent of their several nationalities, with the same defects and qualities, the same outlook, recognizing their family likeness and holding correspondence with each other throughout Europe. Alike they were full of exuberant energy and curiosity; alike they showed a kind of naïve maturity, a paradoxical blending of art and instinct. Large, sunny, graceful, with a golden opinion of themselves and of others, to them everything seemed worth while.

They danced, they sang, they commanded troops, they read Virgil and Cicero and Greek philosophy, they brought up large families, they wrote treatises, they planned dresses, they governed provinces. They were brilliantly efficient; they went far, but they did not go deep.

Appreciative they were, but not discriminating; all their pedagogues were Apollos, and they had not that central warmth in themselves which would have made them feel the inadequacy of the academic spirit. Their largeness was, indeed, not a little like that of their cool unfurnished marble rooms; dignity and courage were their virtues rather than sensitiveness or humility, and they often showed the heartlessness of an untiring vitality intent upon its ends. Their education, the same as that of their brothers with whom they were sometimes brought up, was hardly a softening process. But it braced their bodies, and their amazing health was largely owing to their simple external view of life which kept them young and made grief appear a waste of time. Such an attitude was disastrous in many ways. The noblest issues of life were shut to them, their religion was a matter of observance and etiquette. The women of a country are in great measure the indicators of its faith, and had those of Italy been more spiritual, the Reformation might have taken root there. Vittoria Colonna, with her spiritual fervour, her persistent grief for her dead husband, her profound affection for Michael Angelo, was the exception, and she stands out in contrast to the rest of them.

There was Emilia Pia, from whom Shakespeare might have drawn his Beatrice – the life and light of the court at Urbino, “maistresse and ringleader of

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