The Opening of the Gate
“Il Duca perse lo Stato e la roba e la libertà, e nessuna sua opera si finì per lui.”—Leonardo da Vinci.

If the great movements of history could ever be said to turn on the existence of an individual, one might regard as the paradoxical result of Galeazzo Maria’s death the loss of Italy’s freedom. The young Milanese Brutus, in his noble rage against tyranny, little foresaw the three centuries of dark and hopeless servitude which by the unimpassioned workings of fate his blow would indirectly bring upon his country. The exclamation of the cynical Sixtus IV. at the news of the murder—To-day is the peace of Italy dead,—showed a clearer vision. The scheming Pope saw and gauged the unstable elements in the situation—the ambition of Naples and Venice, the helplessness of Duke Galeazzo’s ten-year-old successor, the contagion of disorder throughout Italy; remembered the aggressive Turk in the east, the adventurous Frank in the north, and forthwith set to work to precipitate the inevitable upheaval in the interests of his own family.

The trouble ahead was, however, as yet hidden. Milan kept calm. The air-bubble expectations of the conspirators had perished at the touch of reality. There was no attempt at a rising. The widowed Duchess assumed without opposition the supreme authority as regent for her son, the child Gian Galeazzo, with Cecco Simonetta as her chief minister. 148The dead Duke’s brothers, Sforza, Duke of Bari, and Lodovico il Moro, were absent in France, Ascanio the priest in Rome. But the situation was pregnant with danger, as Simonetta well knew. He suspended all Galeazzo Maria’s works of embellishment in the city, set the engineers and builders to construct new defences, threw a strong garrison into the Castle, and adopted every precaution against revolt. The chief menace came from the nobles of the old Ghibelline party. They hated Simonetta, who was a Sicilian and the creature of Francesco Sforza, with no interest apart from his master’s House, which he strengthened by depressing the great feudatories. The veteran minister was unpopular with the people too, because he was a foreigner, and because of the heavy taxes. Sforza and Lodovico, hurrying back from France, and joined by Ascanio, found a powerful party, headed by the fiery and restless soldier, Roberto di San Severino, ready to support them in overthrowing the government. But Simonetta was on the watch. He seized one of the chiefs of the disaffected party, and filled the city with troops. San Severino promptly fled to Naples, and the three princes retreated to a little distance, ready to escape. Their youngest brother, Ottaviano, a youth of eighteen, who was involved in their plot, also rode hastily out of the city, and finding himself pursued, leapt into the swollen Adda, and was washed off his horse and drowned. A formal decree banishing the elder princes was issued, and for the moment the danger was over and Simonetta triumphed.

Naples, however, ambitious for a foothold in Milan, embraced the cause of the exiles, and sent San Severino with an army to worry the ducal territories. The brothers themselves, from their different places of refuge, kept up communications with their partisans in the city, and intrigued against the government. 149Simonetta’s power depended upon the will of the Duchess Bona, a lady ‘of little good-sense,’ according to Commines. Though she left the guidance of affairs entirely to the minister, his influence could not compete with the charms of her handsome Ferrarese secretary, Antonio Tassino, to whom she could deny nothing. The inordinate presumption of this favourite soon conflicted with Simonetta’s authority. Lodovico Sforza, who far away had eyes and ears everywhere, was quick to profit by the dissension between these two powers at Court. The death, in 1479, of the elder brother Sforza—from excessive fat—helped to clear the path for the ambition of the Moro, who was now created Duke of Bari by the King of Naples, in succession to Sforza. To him the rebellious spirits in Milan looked henceforth as their leader. A number of the great nobles, the Borromei, the Da Pusterla—those old foes of the Dukes of Milan—the Marliani and others, aided the upstart Tassino to turn the Duchess against her husband’s faithful old servant. Beatrice da Este, wife of Lodovico’s half-brother Tristan, and other ladies in her intimacy, plied her with complaints of Simonetta, and entreated her to dismiss him and recall the banished Moro, who with the mercenaries of Naples was now preying on her territories. Tassino whispered the same persuasions between the endearments which she permitted from him. At last, one day Lodovico himself knelt before her, having at great risk returned to the city and made his way secretly through the gardens into the Castello. Heedless of his disobedience to her decree of banishment, the thoughtless woman received him with the utmost joy, and the whole city burst into a frenzy of welcome. Simonetta’s clear vision read the future. Most illustrious Duchess, said he, I shall lose my head, you your State. Deaf to his warning, Bona committed 150the government to her brother-in-law. Three days later Simonetta was arrested and carried to the Castle of Pavia, where, after he had lain a whole year in captivity, he was brought to trial, before one of the most vindictive of his personal enemies, on a charge of enormous crimes against the ducal House. He was tortured, and finally beheaded in the Castle yard. For putting him to so merciful an end, Bona took much credit to herself in an official notification of his trial and death sent to the various Courts of Italy.

The minister disposed of, the turn of the favourite came. From being Lodovico’s ally and tool, Tassino was now become a serious hindrance to Lodovico. His arrogance was overweening. He had boundless power over Bona, and was rapidly making himself absolute master in the palace. The crisis arrived in a struggle over the Rocchetta, the inner Keep of the Castle of Milan, which, with its strong garrison and impregnable defences, gave its commander virtual dominion of the whole city. Tassino persuaded the Duchess to appoint his father as Castellan, in the place of Filippo Eustachio, who had been put in charge of it by Duke Galeazzo. But Filippo, a staunch adherent of Lodovico’s, disobeyed her repeated commands to give up the keys, and sturdily resisted all her efforts to remove him, defying her threats and sentences, until the Moro had prepared a swift and sudden stroke. One day, at Lodovico’s bidding, Filippo and Gio. Francesco Pallavicino entered the apartments of the little Duke, at an hour when most of his attendants were out of the way, and snatching up the child, carried him across the narrow bridge which led from the Corte Ducale into the Rocchetta, and delivered him into the custody of his uncle. With the person of the sovereign in his possession, behind the defence of drawbridges, portcullises and artillery, and a strong 151body of soldiers faithful to himself, the Moro could dictate terms to the Duchess. She had no alternative but to surrender to him the regency and the guardianship of her son. As for Tassino, seeing himself overreached, he fled incontinently, to escape a worse fate, and stripped of everything but his perfumes and ivory combs, which were bundled after him, he disappears ignobly out of history. Bereft at once of lover, son and sovereignty, Bona was a piteous figure of helpless rage and grief. She declared she would abandon the Duchy, even if she had to climb out of the windows and cross the moat at the risk of her life. Lodovico, however, gently detained her in the Castle of Abbiategrasso, a virtual prisoner, until the subsidence of her shallow passion enabled her to submit to the new order of things and settle down, without power or authority, to a quiet life with her children, in the Castello of Milan again.

Thus, by a series of successful palace intrigues, Lodovico Sforza made himself supreme in Milan. He had still, however, to cope with the resentment of the nobles who had helped him to power, and now found themselves denied any share in it. Like all usurpers, Lodovico found ingratitude necessary to self-preservation, and from the first he studied to depress his more powerful subjects, choosing foreigners and men of modest degree as his ministers and advisers. Roberto di San Severino with many other nobles now took up arms against him. But they were completely defeated by Constanzo Sforza, an able general and a kinsman of the reigning House, and the turbulent San Severino, transformed into the Moro’s bitterest foe, quitted the Duchy, and went off to serve Venice in the war against Ferrara.

The masterly craft by which Lodovico Sforza had achieved his triumph, roused the admiration and fear 152of all Italy, which increased as, with the progress of time, he became the most conspicuous figure in Italian politics. About the enigmatic personality of this prince, history has confused our minds with contrary judgments, which romance has translated into a various caricature. His peculiar association with Italy’s greatest glory and greatest shame has thrown an exaggerated light and shade upon his memory. The Italian historians of this period make him the scapegoat for that calamity of Italy, which no one man, but the ancient and inherent sin of the whole nation, brought about. Guicciardini, while recording his many virtues of mind and heart, is glad to believe him guilty of the worst crimes of ambition and perfidy, and to discover in him a fatal self-conceit. Paolo Giovio speaks of him as born for the undoing of Italy. Modern inquirers have modified the traditional view of the Moro, by showing the baselessness of some of the worse charges against him, and by a diligent prying into all the details of his domestic existence, they have at once humanised and belittled the old picture of the man. Yet still the real Lodovico seems dark to us. It is not for nothing that the name of il Moro—the Moor—given to the dark-skinned boy in his childhood, has clung to him through history; it shows the conviction of his contemporaries and of posterity that it fitted not only his bodily appearance, but the complexion of his soul.

By his actions he must be judged. In the Italy of the Quattrocento, to do evil that good might come was excellent morality. The best men practised it, and differed only from the worst in the ends they pursued. Lodovico’s usurpation of power had its immediate justification in the salvation of the State. The prestige of his name, and his fine statesmanship, could alone avert the civil war and anarchy which Bona’s government 153was leading to, and oppose a barrier to the greed of Venice and Naples for Lombardy. The deposition of a weak woman by a strong and able man was an act unsingular in a country where beneath all law and convention reigned the tacit conviction that character was the true legitimacy. Once in power, he found that internal peace necessitated the sacrifice of the turbulent elements of which he had served himself to climb, and personal ingratitude became a public virtue. Freed from the prepotence of these restless spirits, the citizens could pursue their occupations undisturbed, and the prince could devote himself to his great schemes for the improvement of agriculture, the facilitation of commerce and the humanising of the people. It is these things—in which he carried on the noblest tradition of the Sforza domination—which are the Moro’s apology for much wrong-doing; it is these and not his ceaseless political activity, and immense prestige as a statesman, which make the story of Milan great during his reign, a period brilliant, joyous and prosperous beyond compare.

Though in title only regent for the young Duke, Lodovico was absolute sovereign. His extraordinary activity, resource and subtlety, backed by the boundless wealth of Milan, soon made his influence felt abroad. For the first year or two his cares at home kept him from interfering much in general affairs. The balance of power in Italy, deprived of the weight of Milan, wavered in consequence, and Sixtus IV., Naples and Venice did their utmost to swallow up Florence. The safety of the great Tuscan Republic, secured partly by the courage and address of Lorenzo de’ Medici, but more by the timely knock of the Turk at the door of Italy, at Otranto, was further assured by the fast-rising power of the new ruler of Milan, who by uniting his State in 1484, in a fresh alliance with Florence 154and Naples, restored to Italy that equilibrium which had been first established by his great father, Francesco.

The eleven years that followed the Peace of Bagnolo (1484-95) were the most splendid in the history of medi?val Italy. They were the culmination of a great ascent, preceding as great a downfall. Pressing upwards through the continual struggles, amid the phantoms and shadows of the earlier centuries, the chosen spirits of humanity had at last emerged upon a height, where, as in the light of unclouded morning, the whole world seemed spread out before and behind them, heaven itself within their reach, the gods themselves their fellows. In the general material prosperity out of which the fine flower of Italian civilisation in the Quattrocento had sprung, as in the cultured and artistic joy of life which was its highest expression, Milan, led by Lodovico Sforza, held a foremost place. Whatever may have been his secret motives, this prince exerted himself ceaselessly to conceive and carry out projects of enduring benefit to the country. Summoning the greatest brains in Italy to his service, he set on foot immense hydraulic works, by means of which wildernesses were converted into fruitful tracts, and new ways opened for the passage of merchandise and general traffic. He widened his father’s famous canal, the Naviglio Martesana, and the Naviglio encircling the city, employing the inventive genius of Leonardo da Vinci, to overcome the difficulty of the different levels by a system of locks, still existing in Milan to this day. He joined these canals with the ancient channel between Milan and Pavia, thus forming a navigable waterway between the Adda and the Ticino. Large districts hitherto unfertile owed their after prosperity to this enlightened ruler. He fostered agriculture, founding model farms and introducing improved breeds of cattle and horses. His pleasaunces and orchards round the Castello at Milan, 155and his country palaces and villas were so beautiful and fruitful that they were called earthly paradises. After a brief half century of the Sforza rule, the Duchy of Milan was become a vast garden, supporting an enormous population of hardworking peasants. Commerce flourished more than ever, every way being opened to it by wise and considerate measures. In the higher branches of industry the Moro’s vitalising interest and enthusiasm was as effective. His splendid patronage of art and letters made this city of prosperous traders the richest centre in Italy of the ?sthetic culture of the Renaissance. Attracted by his liberality and large ideas, the rarest genius of the age was at his command. Bramante of Urbino spent many years at Milan, building cupolaed temples and colonnaded palaces, and transforming the old medi?val city of the Visconti into the fair Renaissance vision of the Moro’s desire. For Lodovico and for Milan, Leonardo da Vinci did his greatest works. Perugino painted for the Moro the splendid Madonna with the Archangels, now in the National Gallery, and in the stimulating atmosphere a number of native artists of considerable distinction sprang up. Lodovico equally favoured men of letters and scientific inquirers. He invited them to Milan, and gave them great rewards, and did his utmost by grants and personal care to raise the University of Pavia and the schools founded at Milan by Galeazzo to a flourishing condition.

CANAL, VIA SAN MARCO

156But the merits of the Moro’s government were obscured to the people by his tyrannic methods. The peasants, groaning under the oppression of forced labour and of heavy and unjustly distributed taxation, were too preoccupied by their immediate grievances to care for the rich harvest which would ensue some day from the sacrifice of their sweat and their scanty gains. In their belief the Prince sought only self-glorification and the increase of the already fabulous ducal treasure. Their simple lamentations sound in the pages of the chroniclers like a dull threatening undertone in that wonderful symphony of rich and various instruments which the life of the Milanese Court was at this time.
157

CANONICA OF ST. AMBROGIO

One of the worst characteristics of a tyrant was, however, conspicuously absent in Lodovico Sforza. He was not cruel. Galeazzo’s horrible ways of enforcing the law no longer prevailed. The gallows vanished; fragments of quartered traitors adorned the gates no more, and such pains as justice or policy necessitated were administered out of the sight and, if possible, knowledge of the Moro. Even Guicciardini describes the Moro as mild and merciful. The sight of bodily suffering hurt his fastidious delicacy, his love of fair and seemly appearance, his fine sensibilities. His shrinking from blood was perhaps a sign of what may explain much that seems dark in his history—fear; of the decadence which fatally awaits races risen too swiftly to greatness. However that may be, his mildness did not win the hearts of the people for a sovereign who addressed them from behind the protection of iron bars and never admitted them to free and friendly audience. An ever-widening gulf divided their lives of elemental want and passion from the exquisite existence of subtle and various delight within the impassable 158walls of the Castello. It was for the Moro, we remember, that Leonardo sketched the plans of an ideal city, with an upper system of streets in which the sovereign and his chosen society of nobles and courtiers might pass, uncontaminated by the breath and odour of the multitudes below.

To the princes of the Quattrocento the people were but the necessary foundation of existence, ‘the mud on which proud man is built.’ And how incomparable was the fair fabric, so based, and composed of all the rarest elements of life. The story of the Moro’s Court is well-known to English readers. The joyous figures that peopled it are familiar to us, and the gorgeous pageants, the processions of princes and potentates and fair ladies, the stupendous display of wealth and beauty, the tourneys, feasts and dances, are tales oft told in biography and romance. In 1489 the long arranged marriage of the young Duke with Isabella of Aragon, granddaughter of King Ferrante of Naples, was celebrated with extraordinary pomp, and two years later the festivities were renewed for the double nuptials of the Regent himself with Beatrice da Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, and of her brother Alfonso, heir-apparent of Ferrara, with Anna Sforza, sister of Gian Galeazzo. All these splendours were far overpassed, however, in 1493, when the Moro’s diplomacy was rewarded by an imperial alliance for the House of Sforza, and Bianca Maria, the Duke’s remaining sister, rode forth from the Castello in a chariot of gold to her marriage with the Emperor Maximilian. The imagination reels with the descriptions of the rich robes and jewels, the pavilions and triumphal arches, the garlands, the blazoned hangings, the allegorical masques, the noise of music and of applauding crowds on these occasions. One would feel that Milan must have suffered an intolerable surfeit of colour and delight, did we not know 159that the gorgeous riot was shaped into symmetry and order by the supreme decorative taste of the Italian Quattrocento. All the beautiful neo-pagan conceits, the new vision of the gods of Olympus granted to that age, inspired these brief spectacles. Leonardo—Bramante—fashioned those gorgeous edifices of an hour, built up that wonderful seeming, ephemeral as the glories which it celebrated, and stayed those passing moments for ever in the history of the world.

Though it was the desire to outdo every other princely M?cenas which impelled Lodovico to bid highest for the services of great artists and scholars, it was not merely his liberality which held such a man as Leonardo at Milan, but rather his large appreciation, his sympathy with great and original ideas, his rare wisdom in leaving genius free to work in its own way. He had this, moreover, in common with that unique among the sons of the Italian Renaissance, that he, too, was a far seeker and the designer of things never to be finished. Leonardo came to Milan about 1483. There exists a copy, apparently in his own handwriting, of a letter recommending himself to the Moro, in which he enumerates all his qualifications for employment, beginning with his skill in the invention of military engines, and ending with his capacity to carry out any work in sculpture or painting as well as any other man, be he who he may. Vasari tells us that on his arrival in Milan he offered Lodovico a silver lute which he had fashioned himself in the form of a horse’s head, and in such a manner that in beauty and sonority of tone it surpassed every other instrument at the Court, and that the prince quickly became enamoured of his admirable gifts and conversation. The more intimate knowledge of the man revealed in his own notebooks has, however, changed the traditional picture of Leonardo as a fine 160courtier and brilliant wit and conversationalist, the centre of attraction at the Court, enjoying great revenues from the Moro and dissipating them in splendid living. We see him, instead, secluded with his pupils in the pleasant home which Lodovico gave him on the outskirts of the city, beside the Castello gardens, poring over some problem of construction or hydrostatics, striving to create a flying-machine or other novel engine. Or passing rapidly, according to his mood, from modelling the great horse to his painting in the refectory of Sta. Maria della Grazie, or tracing the exquisite contours of those beautiful favourites of the Moro, Cecilia Gallerani and her successor, Lucrezia Crivelli, mocked and allured in each shadowy face by that inscrutable smile of woman in which the secret of life seemed to hide itself. He evidently cared little to mingle with the social life of the Court, where perhaps he was neither able nor willing to express to a circle, alive to intellectual interests but enslaved by pedantry and charlatanism, those occult thoughts which even in his writings he hid in left-handed hieroglyphics. Yet he must have been a familiar presence in the palace, where he was constantly summoned for some work which to us seems strangely disproportioned to his genius—the arrangement of the water-supply for the Duchess’s bath, the designing of triumphal arches for a wedding pageant, or the costumes and accessories of some spectacular joust. Whatever it was, he did it with the interest of one for whom there is no great nor small, and for whom a moment as much as countless centuries holds eternity, and little things and big manifest alike the divine law of necessity.

Leonardo’s figure overshadows for us all others of Lodovico il Moro’s Milan. There were many others besides him, however, of highest reputation at the time in the chosen circle of the Court. The Moro, in his 161care for the intellectual improvement of his subjects, imported poets from Tuscany to teach them the art of composing sonnets. Ancient prejudice against all things Lombard withheld many of Leonardo’s countrymen from accepting the Sforza’s offers of honours and emoluments. But the sunshine of Court favour, come whence it might, was greedily accepted by the Florentine Bernardo Bellincione, whose gift for stringing together appropriate and flattering verses secured him the position of Court poet for many years at Milan. Nor could any small local passion restrain that bare-boned vagabond genius, Antonio Camelli—called il Pistoia after his native city—from quenching his perennial famine at the ducal table. But though he played the fool to amuse his patrons, il Pistoia was of much rarer stuff than Bellincione. Behind his cloak of buffoonery the tragedy of a serious and prophetic spirit hid itself, and a fine satire inspired the sallies of his fantastic muse. An irrepressible sonneteer, he poured forth streams of verse at Milan. A number of his sonnets allude to the politics of the day, and are of great interest.

These professors of poesy were very successful in propagating their art in Milan. Francesco Tanzi, one of the many versifiers at Court, declared that after the example of Bellincione, Milan was full of sonnets, and all the rivers and canals ran with the water of Parnassus. The poetic frenzy had invaded the whole of society, so that every young knight who desired the favour of ladies and princes had needs be skilled in making rhymes and improvising to the music of his lute. A flourishing school of poetry rewarded the Moro’s patronage and encouragement, and its most distinguished graduates were young nobles of the first rank—Gaspare Visconte, of the same stock as the old ducal House, and Antonio di Campo Fregoso, of a famous Genoese House. A 162singer of older and still higher repute in the ducal circle was that mirror of the graceful and cultured chivalry of the day, Niccolò da Correggio, who as the son of Beatrice da Este, wife of Tristan Sforza, was constantly at Milan, in devoted attendance upon his cousin, the younger Beatrice da Este. Marchesino Stanza, Girolamo Tuttavilla, Galeazzo di San Severino, Galeotto di Caretto, a lettered noble and chronicler of Montferrato, all swelled the tuneful choir. The Moro himself is said to have included sonnet-making among his myriad activities. Around these distinguished figures hovered a host of lyrists of various rank and accomplishment, both natives and pilgrims attracted from afar to this now famous shrine of the Muses. Men of other occupations added their voices in moments of leisure. Among these was Bramante, who, in the intervals of his labours as architect, engineer, painter and master of revels, competed eagerly for the laurel wreath.

The chief theme of their song, and the object of the gallant adoration and service of all, was the younger Beatrice da Este, who at fifteen came to Milan to be the Moro’s bride. To this child of tuneful Ferrara, trained from childhood upwards in all the ?sthetic traditions of its famous Court, an atmosphere of poetry, music and art was as natural as the air she breathed. With that full and eager vitality which she shared with her father, Duke Ercole, and her sister, Isabella of Mantua, she sought all beautiful and joyous things. In the Court of her rich and indulgent lord she could satisfy every desire. For the rich equipment of her person and her surroundings she had the rarest talent at her command. Leonardo da Vinci devised curious girdles for her. That finest of goldsmiths, Caradosso, carved the beautiful gems which she wore, and spent his most delicate workmanship on pax or reliquary for her oratory. To create her presentment 163in marble she could choose a Gian Cristoforo Romano, most cultured and graceful of young sculptors. Her love of sweet melody was fed by the crowd of skilled musicians who frequented this Court, where their art was traditionally welcome. Besides the Flemish priest Cordier, and the other ultramontane singers of Duke Galeazzo’s celebrated choir, there were here the viol player, Jacopo di San Secondo—the Apollo of Raphael’s Parnassus—whose strains were able to soothe the Moro in moments of fever and pain, Atalante Migliorotti, the friend and companion of Leonardo, and others numberless, nameless to us now. An incomparable craftsman, Lorenzo di Pavia, made instruments for her of purest tone, in cases of ivory and ebony most exquisitely worked. She played herself upon these, and had a sweet voice. Many a time with her devoted knight, Galeazzo di San Severino, model of all fashionable graces, and himself an accomplished singer, and her favourite Daino, most musical and delightful of fools, she and her ladies would make harmonious concert. As became a daughter of Este, Beatrice extended a princely patronage to scholarship and serious literature. Her secretary, the learned Vincenzo Calmeta, tells us that she engaged men suitably gifted to read aloud to her the Divina Commedia and the works of other Italian poets. She would give serious attention to literary debates, such as the lively poetic contention we read of between Bramante and Gaspare Visconte, on the respective merits of Dante and Petrarca.

Such encounters of sharp-sworded wit, so much in vogue at that time, were conducted at Milan with less pedantry and self-conceit than in Courts ruled by more strictly humanistic traditions. A freedom, gaiety and freshness animated the intellectual atmosphere here. The Moro’s extraordinary activity of mind and wide interests, Beatrice’s ardour, and capacity for enjoyment, 164fired all around them. The Duchess’s eagerness for culture was tempered by her love of sport and outdoor life. Her hawks and her hounds were a primary passion in this Ferrarese princess, and many a fair morning was passed in adventurous chase of the wild creatures in her husband’s vast hunting demesnes. She was a splendid horsewoman, and had unbounded courage. The lively sports in which she indulged with her ladies and cavaliers were not always of a refined order. The gaiety of the fifteenth century was ministered to by jests and practical jokes of incredible coarseness, and by all the obscenities of the allowed fools and monstrosities of nature who capered in grotesquely brilliant garb round every Renaissance princess. Yet into this full life the Duchess herself carried a redeeming innocence. In spite of her free intercourse with the young nobles, no lightest shadow ever rested on her fair fame.

The society in which she passed her bright, pure existence had, however, but lately had Galeazzo Maria for leader and example, and had forgotten all moral restrictions. When Beatrice came first to Milan she found her husband’s mistress, the beautiful poetess Cecilia Gallerani, installed in the palace itself. The whole of Milan was rotten beneath its fine vestures and its art and learning. Wealth and luxury had encouraged the love of pleasure natural in the people, and the ideal of freedom in thought and manners, the search for novel experience and sensation, the worship of the new old gods, born of the revived knowledge of antiquity, had induced immorality and corruption more than elsewhere in this city where voluptuous tastes were not restrained, as in the Florentines, by natural temperance. Everywhere in the midst of the joyous revels lust and evil passions were heaping up sins ready for the retribution to come. Corio, an eyewitness 165of these times, preludes his story of the great catastrophe by a vivid picture, adorned by the fashionable pagan conceits, of Milanese life during these years before the fatal 1495, when it seemed to the city and its Lord that everything was more firmly established in peace than ever before. No one thought of other than accumulating riches. Pomps and pleasures ruled the hours. The Court of our princes was splendid exceedingly, full of new fashions, dresses and delights. Nevertheless, at this time virtue was so much lauded on every side that Minerva had set up great rivalry with Venus, and each sought to make her school the most brilliant. To that of Cupid came the most beautiful youths. Fathers yielded to it their daughters, husbands their wives, brothers their sisters, and so thoughtlessly did they thus flock to the amorous hall that it was reckoned a stupendous thing by those who had understanding. Minerva, she too, sought with all her might to adorn her gentle Academy. Wherefore that glorious and most illustrious Prince Lodovico Sforza had called into his pay—as far as from the uttermost parts of Europe—men most excellent in knowledge and art. Here was the learning of Greece, here Latin verse and prose flourished resplendently, here were the poetic Muses; hither the masters of the sculptor’s art and those foremost in painting had gathered from distant countries, and here songs and sweet sounds of every kind and such dulcet harmonies were heard, that they seemed to have descended from Heaven itself upon this excelling Court.

We who know the after days of Milan watch the golden hours gliding by towards the darkness ahead, and the glory centring round the two doomed figures of Lodovico and Beatrice is pregnant for us with tragedy and grief. Corio continues with a description of these princes, in this so vain felicity, passing their time in divers pleasures, and speaks of the magnificent jousts and 166tournaments and military shows, and of the homage paid by the poets to the Moro as Lord both of war and peace. Yet, he adds, with all this glory, pomp and wealth, which seemed as though nothing could be added to it, Lodovico, not content, or unaware of his felicity, must needs reach higher still, that his fall might be the greater. And the chronicler, preparing himself to compose the cruel and unheard-of tale, fears that compassion will not suffer him to arrive at the piteous end without tears.

The Moro’s power was in fact unstably based. His was the right of natural ability to rule. But beside him the lawful sovereign had grown to manhood during these years. Gian Galeazzo Sforza—the engaging little boy reading Cicero in Bramantino’s fresco, now in the Wallace Collection—showed with advancing years little desire or capacity to govern. Amiable, weakly, and self-indulgent, he was perfectly content to leave the power to his uncle, for whom he had a love and admiration which are a touching element in the relationship of the two men—usurper and legitimate prince. Had they only been concerned, the Moro’s peculiar difficulties might never have arisen. He seems to have regarded himself sincerely at first as the vicegerent of his nephew. Dum vivis tutus et laetus vivo. Gaude, fili, protector tuus ero semper. These words, in the mouth of nephew and uncle, are the motto on a miniatured page in the History of Francesco Sforza, by Gio. Simonetta, printed in 1490. The picture shows Lodovico and Gian Galeazzo kneeling on the edge of a lake; in the midst of the water a ship with a youth in it and a Moor at the helm, and in the background a mulberry-tree (moro) spreading wide branches. This allegory—one of many such that we read of—may have expressed some real affection as well as self-exaltation in Lodovico, though after-events give it a strange irony.

167But the respective marriages of the two princes introduced another element into the situation. Beatrice da Este was not only the joyous spirit of festival and sport and all artistic delight, but a woman of strong character and intelligence. She quickly gained influence over her husband, and asserted herself in State affairs. The very narrowness of her youth and sex gave her power over the complex and wide-minded Moro, who adored her spirit and courage, and yielded to her as his great sire Francesco had yielded to Bianca Maria. Beatrice wanted the semblance as well as the substance of sovereignty, and the birth of her son, in 1492, added the new ambition of a mother to her desire. Isabella of Aragon, on her side, had a royal spirit; her soul swelled with rage and offended pride when the regent showed no intention of relinquishing the government to her husband. In vain she urged Gian Galeazzo to assume his rights; her exhortations only passed straight from the confiding boy into Lodovico’s ears. Her sense of wrong was further exasperated by Beatrice, who usurped the homage and consequence which should have been Isabella’s as consort of the sovereign. The rivalry between the princesses began very soon after Beatrice’s appearance on the scene, and that playful boxing-match of which we read, in which the Duchess of Bari knocked down her of Milan, was the symbol of a contest which involved fatal issues reaching far beyond the two women themselves.

Influenced by his wife’s ambition, and the birth of his son—also perhaps by the impossibility, when the hour came, of relinquishing the sweets of power and sacrificing his vast projects and the fruits of his past incessant labours to the claim of mere primogeniture represented by the feeble and already failing Gian Galeazzo—Lodovico was evidently scheming, after 1490, to make himself Duke of Milan. From the time of the Moro’s marriage 168the ceremonial homage which had been paid till then to the young Duke was gradually lessened. The tutelage which had been proper in his boyhood was now used to emphasize his incapacity. No single office or dignity was at his disposal. Ministers of State, captains of fortresses, generals and magistrates, all were appointed by Lodovico. At no point did his subjects come into contact with their real sovereign. He was dependent for all supplies upon the Moro, who kept absolute control of the immense Sforza treasure. The birth of his heir was but scantily celebrated, while that of Lodovico’s a little later was made the oc............