The Ugly Renaissance (22 page)

Carpe Diem: Sex and Death

Initially, it was the experience of the
Black Death that paved the way for the triumph of pleasure. With death lurking around every corner, people not only became more acutely aware of the imminence of the afterlife but also came to realize that life should be lived to the full while it lasted. As
Boccaccio observed in the prologue to the
Decameron
, the constant danger of infection pushed people to extremes. While some chose to lock themselves away in a desperate bid to avoid the pestilence, others were convinced that the best way to ward off the plague “
was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full, go round singing and merrymaking, gratifying all of [their] cravings whenever the opportunity offered.” Those who were of this opinion were driven to ever more indulgent excess by the realization that life was more precious than they had ever thought. Strict
sumptuary laws governing dress were all but forgotten, and there was suddenly a profusion of beautifully colored fabrics, delicate, fascinating embroidery, and risqué dresses for women. Pleasure became a way of life, and promiscuity appears to have increased no end. With crucial social barriers broken down by the fragmentation of family life, people gave themselves over to merrymaking and rampant sex whenever the occasion presented itself. Even monks and friars broke “
the rules of obedience and [gave] themselves over to carnal pleasures, thereby thinking to escape, and … turned lascivious and dissolute.”

Having witnessed the arrival of the plague firsthand, Boccaccio was deeply affected by this new, pleasure-loving ethic.
Although many of his early works betray a strongly amorous and even erotic spirit—especially
Il ninfale fiesolano
, the “aggressive and sadistic details” of which have occasionally been condemned as being “in execrably bad taste”—the lusty prose of his youth had always concealed a note of moral uncertainty, and he had even been moved to pen the wildly self-critical (but startlingly misogynistic)
Corbaccio
. After the first onslaught of the Black Death, however, Boccaccio shed his doubts. By the time he came to write the
Decameron
, he had fully embraced the unashamed joie de vivre of the post-plague period.

Widely regarded as Boccaccio’s prose masterpiece, the
Decameron
is set in Florence at the very height of the plague. Appalled by the devastation, its central characters—seven young women and three young men—decide to take refuge from the pestilence at a country estate just outside the city. Surrounded by “delectable gardens and meadows,” they devote themselves to “feasting and merrymaking” and determine to while away the ten days that follow by telling stories. It is the content of these tales that really testifies to the profound shift in attitudes toward desire in fourteenth-century Italy. Although some of the stories—such as the tale of Griselda—deal with questions of virtue and honor, the vast majority are lusty, bawdy yarns that teem with cuckolded husbands, randy monks, drinking binges, and almost continual fornication.

The imminence of death had persuaded Boccaccio that life could be more fun with a bit more sex. Yet he was still far from being a libertine and was careful to guard against the charge of outright immorality by adding a moralizing conclusion to some of his stories, as a formulaic nod to the vestiges of propriety. A good example is provided by the story of Berto della Massa, a young rogue who decides to disguise himself as a friar to pursue his nefarious desires more easily. Taking the name of Friar Alberto, he heads off to Venice, where he promptly conceives a burning lust for Monna Lisetta da Ca’ Quirino, “
a frivolous and scatterbrained young woman,” who comes to him for confession. In order to overcome her moral scruples, he persuades her that the archangel Gabriel has fallen in love with her and wishes to visit her at home that evening. Disguising himself with a pair of fake wings, Friar Alberto then appears in her bedroom and deludes the naive, awestruck Monna Lisetta into letting him have his wicked way. Only when her relatives discover his ploy and burst in on him during the act does his fun come to an ignominious end. After jumping out the window into the Grand Canal, he is ultimately caught, tied to a pillar near the Rialto, and covered with honey to attract flies. It is plain that this is meant to be a “moral” ending.
But while the storyteller (Pampinea) observes that Berto della Massa “got the punishment he deserved” and expresses her wish that “a similar fate should befall each and every one of his fellows,” it is equally clear that the function and appeal of the story is to amuse with humor and to excite the passions with ludicrous sexual adventurism. Rather than transforming the tale into a morally improving story, Berto della Massa’s comeuppance only increases its entertainment value.

For the most part, however, Boccaccio simply didn’t bother to conceal his celebration of sexual pleasure. At times, he was quite explicit and cheerfully played with Christian concepts to underscore the merit of enjoying life while it was still possible. Perhaps the best example is found when his characters set themselves to proving that nothing can possibly eradicate humanity’s natural desire for sex. In one story, a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl from Barbary named Alibech is so captivated by the Christian faith that she decides to run away to the desert so she can learn about religion from one of the devout hermits who reside there. After much wandering, she is eventually taken in by the pious young Rustico, who is determined not only to teach her virtue but also to resist her charms. But after giving her a harsh lecture about the importance of serving God by “
putting the devil back into Hell,” Rustico discovers that his moral fiber isn’t quite as tough as he had first thought. Within minutes, he is unable to suppress a raging erection. The exchange that follows is a tour de force of Boccaccio’s ethic. “Rustico,” Alibech asks,

“
what is that thing I see sticking out in front of you, which I do not possess?”

“Oh, my daughter,” said Rustico, “this is the devil I was telling you about. Do you see what he’s doing? He’s hurting me so much that I can hardly endure it.”

“Oh, praise be to God,” said the girl, “I can see that I am better off than you are, for I have no such devil to contend with.”

“You’re right there,” said Rustico. “But you have something else instead, that I haven’t.”

“Oh?” said Alibech. “And what’s that?”

“You have Hell,” said Rustico. “And I honestly believe that God has sent you here for the salvation of my soul, because if this devil continues to plague the life out of me, and if you are prepared to take sufficient pity upon me to let me put him back into Hell, you will be giving me marvellous relief, as well as rendering incalculable service and pleasure to God, which is what you say you came here for in the first place.”

“Oh, Father,” replied the girl in all innocence, “if I really do have a Hell, let’s do as you suggest just as soon as you are ready.”

“God bless you, my daughter,” said Rustico …

At which point he conveyed the girl to one of their beds, where he instructed her in the art of incarcerating that accursed fiend.

Boccaccio—perhaps like his audience—didn’t see any problem with this. In fact, in the conclusion to the story, he praises Rustico for preparing Alibech for her subsequent marriage to Neerbal, before adding that ladies should “
learn to put the devil back in Hell, for it is greatly to [God’s] liking and pleasurable to the parties concerned, and a great deal of good can arise and flow in the process.”

The belief that the imminence of death almost obliged one to indulge sexual desire endured well after the worst effects of the plague had subsided, and it had found its way from the
Decameron
into the mainstream of Renaissance culture by the middle of the fifteenth century. Although Petrarch’s self-denying morality continued to be admired and imitated, even his most devoted admirers began to cultivate the pleasure principle, and followed Boccaccio in justifying sexual abandon with reference to the uncertainties of life.

One of the clearest illustrations of the triumph of pleasure—and its relationship to death—is provided by the carnival songs (
canti carnascialeschi
) that became popular in Florence from the middle of the quattrocento onward and that may even have been instigated by Lorenzo de’ Medici himself. Specially commissioned for the occasion by a wealthy patron or a
brigata
(company of friends), such songs were a dramatic combination of musical excitement and visual display and were usually performed by professional singers on a richly decorated wagon. They were, by definition, titillating affairs. Yet two of the most popular
canti
of the high Renaissance testify to the symbiotic relationship between mortality and sex in the cultural imagination and to the importance of divine judgment in heightening pleasure.
Performed on a positively funereal carriage filled with singing skeletons, the “Canzona de’ morti” (Song of death) begins with a reminder that “anguish, tears and penance / torment us constantly” and proceeds to emphasize that death comes to us all, often unexpectedly. “We were once as you are now,” sang the skeletal performers, “You will be as we; / We are dead as you can see, / Thus dead will we see you.” But while it was a terrifying display of human frailty, its function in the carnival appears actually to have complemented the spirit of sensual abandon. In the
Trionfo di Bacco e Arianna
(Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne), Lorenzo de’ Medici
followed Boccaccio in using the imminence of death as a reminder of the importance of seizing sensual opportunities. Lorenzo summed it up nicely in the famous ritornello:

How beautiful is youth,

Which flies away nonetheless!

Let him who would be happy seize the day,

For tomorrow may not come.

If death and possibly Hell await, Lorenzo seemed to ask, why not enjoy life while you still can? As a young man, Michelangelo would certainly have heard this question posed—perhaps by Lorenzo himself—and there is a sense that it still lurked in his mind after he met
Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.

From the Dignity of Man to a Theory of Pleasure

There were good practical reasons for Boccaccio and Lorenzo de’ Medici to advocate sexual abandon in the face of death, but there still remained the problem of how to deal with the moral and religious issues that they tried to sweep under the carpet. Although “why not?” was a sufficient basis for bawdy storytelling and carnival revelry, it wasn’t exactly a compelling philosophical response to the theological injunctions against carnal pleasure, or an effective riposte to Petrarch’s grim and self-denying morality.

The central obstacle to sexual indulgence was the distinction between the body and the soul or intellect. For Petrarch, the soul was an unwilling prisoner of the body. The physical world was a lower, “perverted” form of reality, while the spiritual or intellectual realm that could be enjoyed only after death was the only genuine source of truth and happiness. Man would only be “himself” when he was freed from his corporeal form, and could only earn this reward by shutting himself off from earthly temptation.

For the Ligurian humanist
Bartolomeo Facio (ca. 1400–57), physical pleasure was the antithesis of human dignity. In his treatise
De hominis excellentia
(On the excellence of man), Facio explained that while man had been created in God’s image and likeness, only the soul was divine and celestial. In contrast to the body, which rotted and decomposed
after death, the soul was immortal and capable of returning to its heavenly origins. Thus it was clear that man’s dignity lay not in the actualization of corporeal pleasures but in the life of the soul and the contemplation of God. Facio even went so far as to castigate those blind men who, “
forgetful of their excellence and dignity, seek … corrupt and fleeting things so eagerly.” Sex, in other words, was most definitely infra dig.

By the mid-fifteenth century, however, this long-accepted dichotomy began to be challenged. Perhaps inspired by the sheer physical terror of the plague, men and women started to question whether the body and the soul were really all that different, and tentatively began to ask whether man didn’t possess a little more dignity than Petrarch and Facio had given him credit for.

It was the eclectic Florentine polymath
Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) who broke the mold.
Opposing the tough and uncompromising morality of previous centuries in his
De dignitate et excellentia hominis
(On the dignity and excellence of man), Manetti set out to offer a much more positive view of human nature. His approach was certainly original. It wasn’t that he disagreed with Petrarch, Facio, or even the forbidding medieval Pope Innocent III on fundamentals. He was quite happy to acknowledge that there
was
a difference between the body and the soul. But for Manetti, this didn’t mean that life had to be miserable. Quite the opposite. In Manetti’s view, God had created the world for man’s use. And although humanity did possess two natures—corporeal and spiritual—God had not only created man as a whole person but had also given him all the faculties necessary to fulfill his purpose within the scheme of creation. Created in God’s image, man had been endowed with a whole range of abilities—reason, intelligence, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and so on—that allowed him both to interpret the physical universe in accordance with the inclinations of his soul and to manipulate everything around him according to his own reason for the sake of salvation. Man thus became an almost Promethean inventor, capable not only of enjoying the world around him but also of shaping his own destiny. Rather than being condemned to endure the fickleness and instability of earthly existence—as Petrarch and Facio had believed—man was both the master and the measure of all things. As a consequence, Manetti believed that man was
“the most
beautiful, the most ingenious, the most wise, the most opulent, and the most potent” of all animals.