Italian school

“ The sixteenth century was remarkable for the transcendant excellence of the Italian painters; every city had its school, and each school preserved a different style, distinguished for expression, grace or dignity. By schools, we do not mean academies, for there were none when these great men came forth ennobling nature: they studied in the "academic groves" of the Arno and the Tiber, and were themselves the establishers of those schools, that fettered genius with scholastic rules, and from that day the arts began to decline ”

“ Italy is a poor country, but her sons and daughters are eager to learn, and, poor as they are, they are willing to make sacrifices rather than give up attending school.
Many of the art students are gone, and some of the schools are closed. Beppo the model is no longer to be found on the steps of the Piazza Espagne, but the love of art has sufficed to keep some of the art schools going, no matter how rigorous the conditions.
Music is in the soul of the Italian, and the conservatories will continue in session as long as there is a pupil left. ”

“ State the educational ideals of the new secondary schools evolved by the Italian humanistic scholars, and show whether these ideals have been best embodied in the German gymnasium or the English grammar school.
3. How do you explain the merchants and bankers and princes of Italy being more interested in the revival-of-learning movement than the Church and university scholars? Do such classes to-day show the same type of interest in aiding learning? ”

“ The master in each school, having no other assistance, does sometimes avail himself in a small degree of that of the elder boys, but the separation into distinct schools renders it impossible to make this very effective. The pupils are also sometimes set to question one another, but these are book questions and book answers. The whole number of pupils falls short of two hundred.
The Scuole Pie at Florence form a much more important establishment. The number of pupils is between eight and nine hundred. There are six schools of “lettere,” that is, of Latin and Italian grammar and composition ”

“ The fault is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is everywhere, not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must bear witness.
The first school which we visited was a girls' school, in which some forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years, were assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian Protestant, who had delegated her authority to different children under her. ”

“ IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART—THE BELLINI, 1422-1512—MANTEGNA, 1431-1506—GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498—IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518—FRA BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517—ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530.
I have come to the period when Italian art is divided into many schools—Paduan, Venetian, Umbrian, Florentine, Roman, Bolognese, &c., &c. With the schools and their definitions I do not mean to meddle, except it may be to mention to which school a great painter belonged. ”

“ In Vineland, New Jersey, there were four teachers in the public schools of Italian parentage. These teachers would be counted as Americans in every way. As they understand Italian, know the Italian immigrants and their children, they get better results in their school and community work than the native teacher. ”

“ Becoming a teacher in a private school of his own, he made a name as profound student of literature; and after the troubles of the ’48, when he held office under the revolutionary government and was imprisoned for three years at Naples, his reputation as a lecturer on Dante at Turin brought him the appointment of professor at Zurich in 1856. He returned to Naples as minister of public instruction in 1860, and filled the same post under the Italian monarchy in 1861, 1878 and 1879, having in 1861 become a deputy in the Italian chamber. In 1871 he became professor at Naples University. ”

“ Valiant and vigorous elements joined us from the universities. Italian schools are enriched by the glorious names of students who quitted their halls for political life and Fascism. These eager boys left, without regret and without wavering, a merry existence to face mortal dangers during punitive actions against betrayers of our country. Later on, to these heroes of bold youth I ordered the awarding of degrees ad honorem; they had given their blood freely so that their nation might be saved. ”

“ Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Naples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanliness is resolutely insisted upon. Many of the children were ragged; here and there was one hideous with ophthalmia; but there was not a clouded countenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should have great hopes for a nation of which the children can be taught to wash themselves.
There were fourteen pupils in the boys' superior school, where geography, mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and ancient history were taught. ”

“ At the time the Romantic School rose in Italian literature, say from 1815 till 1820, society was brilliant, if not contented or happy. In Lombardy and Venetia, immediately after the treaties of the Holy Alliance had consigned these provinces to Austria, there flourished famous conversazioni at many noble houses. In those of Milan many distinguished literary men of other nations met. Byron and Hobhouse were frequenters of the same salons as Pellico, Manzoni, and Grossi; the Schlegels represented the German Romantic School, and Madame de Staël the sympathizing movement in France. ”

“ In this, almost needless to say, Italy is not only a pioneer, but was the alma mater studiorum--of whom Linacre was so proud--for those desirous of knowledge of the classics and true scholarship from all over the world. From every country, France, Spain, Germany, distant Poland and Denmark, as well as England, those looking for opportunities for study that could not be obtained at home flocked to Italy. Besides, Italian teachers are to be found teaching everywhere, though Italy herself proved no stepmother to those who came to be nurtured in good learning at her great institutions. ”

“ At the middle of the fifteenth century Italy enjoyed undisputed pre-eminence in the world of learning. The sudden splendour into which the Renaissance had blazed up on Italian soil drew men's eyes thither more than ever; and to its ancient universities students from the North swarmed like bees. To graduate in Italy, to hear its famous doctors, perhaps even to learn from one of the native Greeks brought over out of the East, became first the ambition, and then the indispensable requirement of every Northern scholar who could afford it ”

“ As was to be expected under such circumstances, one of the features of the time was the improvement of the old universities and the formation of private societies of scholars, which expressed Italian intellectual needs as clearly as the foundation of the Royal Society expressed English needs at a later date. Two achieved special celebrity—the Roman Academy, persecuted by Pope Paul II. for its relapse into paganism, and the Platonic Academy at Florence, cherished by the Medici. ”

“ The rigid and indigestible character of modern education is not adapted, I repeat, to the Italian temperament, which is prime-sautier, subtle but inflammatory, impressionable but unresisting, and loses enormously when it is shut down in the hot stove of the so-called 'highest studies.' Even the national manners, naturally so graceful and charming in all ranks of Italian society, lose their suavity, their ease, their elegance, under the influence of the foreigner and the vulgarity of modern habits. ”

“ Universities and Schools The influence of antiquity on culture, of which we have now to speak, presupposes that the new learning had gained possession of the universities. This was so, but by no means to the extent and with the results which might have been expected.
Few of the Italian universities show themselves in their full vigor till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the increase of wealth rendered a more systematic care for education possible. ”

“ In Southern Italy, especially in Sicily, there is a large infusion of Greek and Saracen blood.
[2] His last words were, "Welcome, sister death."
[Pg 193]
CHAPTER II DANTE: LIFE AND MINOR WORKS
In the preceding chapter we have outlined the development of early Italian poetry, endeavoring to show how from the Sicilian school it was carried over to Tuscany; how Guido Guinicelli, in Bologna, had transformed it from a slavish imitation of the troubadours into a new school of symbolical philosophical poetry, and finally, how from Bologna the new doctrines spread to Florence. ”

“ All through the fifteenth century the universities of Italy, pre-eminent since their foundation for secular studies, had been gaining reputation by their offer of a wider education than the threadbare discussions of the schoolmen. The discovery and revival in the fifteenth century of Greek literature, which had stirred Italian society so profoundly, gave to the universities a northward-spreading fame. Northern scholars, like Rudolf Agricola, hurried south to find congenial air at the centre of intellectual life. ”

“ As schoolmasters in a stricter sense of the term, it is not easy to exaggerate the influence exercised by Italian students. They first conceived and framed the education that has now prevailed through Europe for four centuries, moulding the youth of divers nations by one common discipline, and establishing an intellectual concord for all peoples. ”

“ In the university most of the textbooks used are English, nevertheless many of the lectures are still delivered in Italian—for the convenience of some professors or to please the politicians, rather than for the benefit of the students. The number of students who enter the university without passing any examination in Italian is rapidly increasing; the longer the period of transition, the greater the detriment to the rising generation. ”

“ The education which such schools afford is universally appreciated—among ourselves who are divided, but more particularly among the Italians, who are all Catholics. It is in vain to kick against the goad, and this the Italian government will learn, some day, when it is cast forth as a rotten institution by the people, whose dearest wishes it ignores. It is of no use to suppose that Italy is advanced to a state of irreligion, and so requires a system of Godless education. ”

“ They constitute a course which aims not to increase the quantity of culture, but to change its character. It is an attempt to introduce the elementary teacher into those spiritual workshops which are the halls of a University, to induce him to take part in the original investigations which constantly contribute to the formation of our national 6 learning; which forever make and reshape our ideas and our convictions as to what we should want Italian science to be, the Italian concepts of life and literature ”

“ Not the teaching masters but the well-to-do and mature students themselves formed the corporations that were the earliest form of the university of Bologna. The supreme importance of legal studies was the outcome of the social, political, and intellectual condition of Italy. |The multiplication of universities.| The constant secessions that set up flourishing schools at Padua and Pisa, and covered Italy with smaller universities, were helped by the centrifugal tendency that had already become a marked feature of Italian politics. ”

“ What has come to be called a classical education was the immediate product of the Italian Renaissance. The universities of Bologna, Padua and Salerno had been famous through the middle ages for the study of law, physics and medicine; and during the 15th and 16th centuries the first two still enjoyed celebrity in these faculties. But at this period no lecture-rooms were so crowded as those in which professors of antique literature and language read passages from the poets and orators, taught Greek, and commented upon the systems of philosophers. ”

“ And, as the learned universities always derive their names from the city where they are established, as the university of Padua or Pisa, although the professors may be all, or in great part, from other states, so it is with the schools of painting, to which the name of the country is always attached, in preference to that of the master. In Vasari we do not find this classification of schools, and Monsignor Agucchi was the first to divide Italian art into the schools of Lombardy, Venice, Tuscany, and Rome. ”

“ The Italians became so much impressed with the advisability of permitting women to study at the universities, that a certain amount of co-education has existed all down the centuries in Italy and not a century has passed since the Thirteenth, which has not chronicled the presence of at least one distinguished woman professor at some Italian university. ”

“ Italy is still the home of art. The citizens of the transalpine nations still flock to her schools of painting, sculpture, and music. But in all else she must submit to be the scholar of her former pupils. It was not so in the sixteenth century. In those days Germans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen thronged the celebrated universities of Italy for instruction in law, science, medicine, and "the humanities." Italy was still the acknowledged leader of European civilisation, though on the very eve of ceasing to be so. ”