Part 1

THE SONNETS

OF

MICHAEL ANGELO BUONARROTI

AND

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA

NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME TRANSLATED INTO RHYMED ENGLISH

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

AUTHOR OF 'RENAISSANCE IN ITALY' 'STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS' 'SKETCHES IN ITALY AND GREECE' 'INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF DANTE'

[Greek: Chruseon chalkeia]

1878

_TO

S.F.A._

PREFATORY NOTE.

After some deliberation, and at the risk of offending the sensibility of scholars, I have adopted the old English spelling of Michael Angelo's name, feeling that no orthographical accuracy can outweigh the associations implied in that familiar title. Michael Angelo has a place among the highest with Homer and Titian, with Virgil and Petrarch, with Raphael and Paul; nor do I imagine that any alteration for the better would be effected by substituting for these time-honoured names Homêros and Tiziano, Vergilius and Petrarca, Raffaello and Paulus.

I wish here to express my heartiest thanks to Signore Pasquale Villari for valuable assistance kindly rendered in the interpretation of some difficult passages of Campanella, and to Signore V. de Tivoli for calling my attention to the sonnet of Michael Angelo deciphered by him on the back of a drawing in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford.

Portions both of the Introduction and the Translations forming this volume, have already appeared in the 'Contemporary Review' and the 'Cornhill Magazine.'

DAVOS PLATZ:

_Dec. 1877._

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION

PROEM

MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

CAMPANELLA'S SONNETS

NOTES TO MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS

NOTES TO CAMPANELLA'S SONNETS

APPENDICES

INTRODUCTION.

I.

It is with diffidence that I offer a translation of Michael Angelo's sonnets, for the first time completely rendered into English rhyme, and that I venture on a version of Campanella's philosophical poems. My excuse, if I can plead any for so bold an attempt, may be found in this--that, so far as I am aware, no other English writer has dealt with Michael Angelo's verses since the publication of his autograph; while Campanella's sonnets have hitherto been almost utterly unknown.

Something must be said to justify the issue of poems so dissimilar in a single volume. Michael Angelo and Campanella represent widely sundered, though almost contemporaneous, moments in the evolution of the Italian genius. Michael Angelo was essentially an artist, living in the prime of the Renaissance. Campanella was a philosopher, born when the Counter-Reformation was doing all it could to blight the free thought of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit of exact enquiry, in a few philosophical martyrs, was opening a new stage for European science. The one devoted all his mental energies to the realisation of beauty: the other strove to ascertain truth. The one clung to Ficino's dream of Platonising Christianity: the other constructed for himself a new theology, founded on the conception of God immanent in nature. Michael Angelo expressed the aspirations of a solitary life dedicated to the service of art, at a time when art received the suffrage and the admiration of all Italy. Campanella gave utterance to a spirit, exiled and isolated, misunderstood by those with whom he lived, at a moment when philosophy was hunted down as heresy and imprisoned as treason to the public weal.

The marks of this difference in the external and internal circumstances of the two poets might be multiplied indefinitely. Yet they had much in common. Both stood above their age, and in a sense aloof from it. Both approached poetry in the spirit of thinkers bent upon extricating themselves from the trivialities of contemporary literature. The sonnets of both alike are contributions to philosophical poetry in an age when the Italians had lost their ancient manliness and energy. Both were united by the ties of study and affection to the greatest singer of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch, thrice diluted and emasculated, was the Phoebus of academies and coteries.

This common antagonism to the degenerate genius of Italian literature is the link which binds Michael Angelo, the veteran giant of the Renaissance, to Campanella, the audacious Titan of the modern age.

II.

My translation of Michael Angelo's sonnets has been made from Signor Cesare Guasti's edition of the autograph, first given to the world in 1863.[1] This masterpiece of laborious and minute scholarship is based upon a collation of the various manuscripts preserved in the Casa Buonarroti at Florence with the Vatican and other Codices. It adheres to the original orthography of Michael Angelo, and omits no fragment of his indubitable compositions.[2] Signor Guasti prefaces the text he has so carefully prepared, with a discourse upon the poetry of Michael Angelo and a description of the manuscripts. To the poems themselves he adds a prose paraphrase, and prints upon the same page with each composition the version published by Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1623.[3]

Before the publication of this volume, all studies of Michael Angelo's poetry, all translations made of it, and all hypotheses deduced from the sculptor's verse in explanation of his theory or his practice as an artist, were based upon the edition of 1623. It will not be superfluous to describe what that edition was, and how its text differed from that now given to the light, in order that the relation of my own English version to those which have preceded it may be rightly understood.[4]

Michael Angelo seems to have entertained no thought of printing his poems in his lifetime. He distributed them freely among his friends, of whom Sebastiano del Piombo, Luigi del Riccio, Donato Giannotti, Vittoria Colonna, and Tommaso de' Cavalieri were in this respect the most favoured. In course of time some of these friends, partly by the gift of the originals, and partly by obtaining copies, formed more or less complete collections; and it undoubtedly occurred to more than one to publish them. Ascanio Condivi, at the close of his biography, makes this announcement: 'I hope ere long to make public some of his sonnets and madrigals, which I have been long collecting, both from himself and others who possessed them, with a view to proving to the world the force of his inventive genius and the beauty of the thoughts produced by that divine spirit.' Condivi's promise was not fulfilled. With the exception of two or three pieces printed by Vasari, and the extracts quoted by Varchi in his 'Lezione,'[5] the poems of Michael Angelo remained in manuscript for fifty-nine years after his death. The most voluminous collection formed part of the Buonarroti archives; but a large quantity preserved by Luigi del Riccio, and from him transferred to Fulvio Orsini, had passed into the Vatican Library, when Michelangelo the younger conceived the plan of publishing his granduncle's poetry. Michelangelo obtained leave to transcribe the Vatican MSS. with his own hand; and after taking pains to collate all the autographs and copies in existence, he set himself to compare their readings, and to form a final text for publication. Here, however, began what we may call the Tragedy of his Rifacimento. The more he studied his great ancestor's verses, the less he liked or dared to edit them unaltered. Some of them expressed thoughts and sentiments offensive to the Church. In some the Florentine patriot spoke over-boldly. Others exposed their author to misconstruction on the score of personal morality.[6] All were ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed and obscure in thought--the rough-hewn blockings-out of poems rather than finished works of art, as it appeared to the scrupulous, decorous, elegant, and timorous Academician of a feebler age. While pondering these difficulties, and comparing the readings of his many manuscripts, the thought occurred to Michelangelo that, between leaving the poems unpublished and printing them in all their rugged boldness, lay the middle course of reducing them to smoothness of diction, lucidity of meaning, and propriety of sentiment.[7] In other words, he began, as Signer Guasti pithily describes his method, 'to change halves of lines, whole verses, ideas: if he found a fragment, he completed it: if brevity involved the thought in obscurity, he amplified: if the obscurity seemed incurable, he amputated: for superabundant wealth of conception he substituted vacuity; smoothed asperities; softened salient lights.' The result was that a medley of garbled phrases, additions, alterations, and sophistications was foisted on the world as the veritable product of the mighty sculptor's genius. That Michelangelo meant well to his illustrious ancestor is certain. That he took the greatest pains in executing his ungrateful and disastrous task is no less clear.[8] But the net result of his meddlesome benevolence has been that now for two centuries and a half the greatest genius of the Italian Renaissance has worn the ill-fitting disguise prepared for him by a literary 'breeches-maker.' In fact, Michael Angelo the poet suffered no less from his grandnephew than Michael Angelo the fresco painter from his follower Daniele da Volterra.

Nearly all Michael Angelo's sonnets express personal feelings, and by far the greater number of them were composed after his sixtieth year. To whom they were addressed, we only know in a few instances. Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso de' Cavalieri, the two most intimate friends of his old age in Rome, received from him some of the most pathetically beautiful of his love-poems. But to suppose that either the one or the other was the object of more than a few well-authenticated sonnets would be hazardous. Nothing is more clear than that Michael Angelo worshipped Beauty in the Platonic spirit, passing beyond its personal and specific manifestations to the universal and impersonal. This thought is repeated over and over again in his poetry; and if we bear in mind that he habitually regarded the loveliness of man or woman as a sign and symbol of eternal and immutable beauty, we shall feel it of less importance to discover who it was that prompted him to this or that poetic utterance. That the loves of his youth were not so tranquil as those of his old age, appears not only from the regrets expressed in his religious verses, but also from one or two of the rare sonnets referable to his manhood.

The love of beauty, the love of Florence, and the love of Christ, are the three main motives of his poetry. This is not the place to discuss at length the nature of his philosophy, his patriotism, or his religion; to enquire how far he retained the early teaching of Ficino and Savonarola; or to trace the influence of Dante and the Bible on his mind. I may, however, refer my readers who are interested in these questions, to the Discourse of Signor Guasti, the learned essay of Mr. J.E. Taylor, and the refined study of Mr. W.H. Pater. My own views will be found expressed in the third volume of my 'Renaissance in Italy'; and where I think it necessary, I shall take occasion to repeat them in the notes appended to my translation.

III.

Michael Angelo's madrigals and sonnets were eagerly sought for during his lifetime. They formed the themes of learned academical discourses, and won for him the poet's crown in death. Upon his tomb the Muse of Song was carved in company with Sculpture, Architecture, and Painting. Since the publication of the _rifacimento_ in 1623, his verses have been used among the _testi di lingua_ by Italians, and have been studied in the three great languages of Europe. The fate of Campanella's philosophical poems has been very different. It was owing to a fortunate chance that they survived their author; and until the year 1834 they were wholly and entirely unknown in Italy. The history of their preservation is so curious that I cannot refrain from giving some account of it, before proceeding to sketch so much of Campanella's life and doctrine as may be necessary for the understanding of his sonnets.

The poems were composed during Campanella's imprisonment at Naples; and from internal evidence there is good reason to suppose that the greater part of them were written at intervals in the first fourteen years of the twenty-five he passed in confinement.[9] In the descriptive catalogue of his own works, the philosopher mentions seven books of sonnets and canzoni, which he called 'Le Cantiche.'[10] Whether any of these would have been printed but for a mere accident is doubtful. A German gentleman, named Tobia Adami, who is supposed to have been a Court-Counsellor at Weimar, after travelling through Greece, Syria, and Palestine, in company with a young friend called Rodolph von Bunau, visited Campanella in his dungeon. A close intimacy sprang up between them, and Adami undertook to publish several works of the philosopher in testimony of his admiration. Among these were 'Le Cantiche.' Instead, however, of printing the poems _in extenso_, he made a selection, choosing those apparently which took his fancy, and which, in his opinion, threw most light on Campanella's philosophical theories. It is clear that he neglected the author's own arrangement, since there is no trace of the division into seven books. What proportion the selection bore to the whole bulk of the MS. seems to me uncertain, though the latest editor asserts that it formed only a seventh part.[11] The manuscript itself is lost, and Adami's edition of the specimens is all that now remains as basis for the text of Campanella's poems.

This first edition was badly printed in Germany on very bad paper, without the name of press or place. Besides the poems, it contained a brief prose commentary by the editor, the value of which is still very great, since we have the right to suppose that Adami's explanations embodied what he had received by word of mouth from Campanella. The little book bore this title:--'Scelta d' alcune poesie filosofiche di Settimontano Squilla cavate da' suo' libri detti La Cantica, con l'esposizione, stampato nell' anno MDCXXII.' The pseudonym _Squilla_ is a pun upon Campanella's name, since both _Campana_ and _Squilla_ mean a bell; while _Settimontano_ contains a quaint allusion to the fact that the philosopher's skull was remarkable for seven protuberances.[12] A very few copies of the unpretending little volume were printed; and none of these seem to have found their way into Italy, though it is possible that they had a certain circulation in Germany. At any rate there is reason to suppose that Leibnitz was not unacquainted with the poems, while Herder, in the Renaissance of German literature, published free translations from a few of the sonnets in his 'Adrastea.'

To this circumstance we owe the reprint of 1834, published at Lugano by John Gaspar Orelli, the celebrated Zurich scholar. Early in his youth Orelli was delighted with the German version made by Herder; and during his manhood, while residing as Protestant pastor at Bergamo, he used his utmost endeavours to procure a copy of the original. In his preface to the reprint he tells us that these efforts were wholly unsuccessful through a period of twenty-five years. He applied to all his literary friends, among whom he mentions the ardent Ugo Foscolo and the learned Mazzuchelli; but none of these could help him. He turned the pages of Crescimbeni, Quadrio, Gamba, Corniani, Tiraboschi, weighty with enormous erudition--and only those who make a special study of Italian know how little has escaped their scrutiny--but found no mention of Campanella as a poet. At last, after the lapse of a quarter of a century, he received the long-coveted little quarto volume from Wolfenbuttel in the north of Germany. The new edition which Orelli gave to the press at Lugano has this title:--'Poesie Filosofiche di Tommaso Campanella pubblicate per la prima volta in Italia da Gio. Gaspare Orelli, Professore all' Università di Zurigo. Lugano, 1834.' The same text has been again reprinted at Turin, in 1854, by Alessandro d'Ancona, together with some of Campanella's minor works and an essay on his life and writings. This third edition professes to have improved Orelli's punctuation and to have rectified his readings. But it still leaves much to be desired on the score of careful editorship. Neither Orelli nor D'Ancona has done much to clear up the difficulties of the poems--difficulties in many cases obviously due to misprints and errors of the first transcriber; while in one or two instances they allow patent blunders to pass uncorrected. In the sonnet entitled 'A Dio' (D'Ancona, vol. i. p. 102), for example, _bocca_ stands for _buca_ in a place where sense and rhyme alike demand the restitution of the right word.

At no time could the book have hoped for many readers. Least of all would it have found them among the Italians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom its energetic language and unfamiliar conceptions would have presented insuperable difficulties. Between Dante and Alfieri no Italian poet except Michael Angelo expressed so much deep thought and feeling in phrases so terse, and with originality of style so daring; and even Michael Angelo is monotonous in the range of his ideas and uniform in his diction, when compared with the indescribable violence and vigour of Campanella. Campanella borrows little by way of simile or illustration from the outer world, and he never falls into the commonplaces of poetic phraseology. His poems exhibit the exact opposite of the Petrarchistic or the Marinistic mannerism. Each sonnet seems to have been wrenched alive and palpitating from the poet's heart. There is no smoothness, no gradual unfolding of a theme, no rhetorical exposition, no fanciful embroidery, no sweetness of melodic cadence, in his masculine art of poetry. Brusque, rough, violent in transition, leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous--his poems owe their elevation to the intensity of their feeling, the nobleness and condensation of their thought, the energy and audacity of their expression, their brevity, sincerity, and weight of sentiment. Campanella had an essentially combative intellect. He was both a poet and a philosopher militant. He stood alone, making war upon the authority of Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in state-craft, and of Petrarch in art, taking the fortresses of phrase by storm, and subduing the hardest material of philosophy to the tyranny of his rhymes. Plebeian saws, salient images, dry sentences of metaphysical speculation, logical summaries, and fiery tirades are hurled together-- half crude and cindery scoriae, half molten metal and resplendent ore-- from the volcano of his passionate mind. Such being the nature of Campanella's style, when in addition it is remembered that his text is sometimes hopelessly corrupt and his allusions obscure, the difficulties offered by his sonnets to the translator will be readily conceived.

IV.

At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, philosophy took a new point of departure among the Italians, and all the fundamental ideas which have since formed the staple of modern European systems were anticipated by a few obscure thinkers. It is noticeable that the States of Naples, hitherto comparatively inert in the intellectual development of Italy, furnished the five writers who preceded Bacon, Leibnitz, Schelling, and Comte. Telesio of Cosenza, Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, Vanini and Vico of Naples are the chief among these _novi homines_ or pioneers of modern thought. The characteristic point of this new philosophy was an unconditional return to Nature as the source of knowledge, combined with a belief in the intuitive forces of the human reason: so that from the first it showed two sides or faces to the world--the one positive, scientific, critical, and analytical; the other mystical, metaphysical, subjective. Modern materialism and modern idealism were both contained in the audacious guesses of Bruno and Campanella; nor had the time arrived for clearly separating the two strains of thought, or for attempting a systematic synthesis of knowledge under one or the other head.

The men who led this weighty intellectual movement burned with the passionate ardour of discoverers, the fiery enthusiasm of confessors. They stood alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves, and wholly misunderstood by the people round them. Italy, sunk in sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden, exhausted with the unparalleled activity of the Renaissance, besotted with the vices of slavery and slow corruption, had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. The Church, terrified by the Reformation, when she chanced to hear those strange voices sounding through 'the blessed mutter of the mass,' burned the prophets. The State, represented by absolute Spain, if it listened to them at all, flung them into prison. To both Church and State there was peril in the new philosophy; for the new philosophy was the first birth-cry of the modern genius, with all the crudity and clearness, the brutality and uncompromising sincerity of youth. The Church feared Nature. The State feared the People. Nature and the People--those watchwords of modern Science and modern Liberty--were already on the lips of the philosophers.

It was a philosophy armed, errant, exiled; a philosophy in chains and solitary; at war with society, authority, opinion; self-sustained by the prescience of ultimate triumph, and invincible through the sheer force of passionate conviction. The men of whom I speak were conscious of Pariahdom, and eager to be martyred in the glorious cause. 'A very Proteus is the philosopher,' says Pomponazzo: 'seeking to penetrate the secrets of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares; he forgets to thirst, to hunger, to sleep, to eat; he is derided of all men; he is held for a fool and irreligious person; he is persecuted by inquisitors; he becomes a gazing-stock to the common folk. These are the gains of the philosopher; these are his guerdon. Pomponazzo's words were prophetic. Of the five philosophers whom I mentioned, Vanini was burned as an atheist, Bruno was burned, and Campanella was imprisoned for a quarter of a century. Both Bruno and Campanella were Dominican friars. Bruno was persecuted by the Church, and burned for heresy. Campanella was persecuted by both Church and State, and was imprisoned on the double charge of sedition and heresy. _Dormitantium animarum excubitor_ was the self-given title of Bruno. _Nunquam tacebo_ was the favourite motto of Campanella.