Vincenzo Gioberti

“ In a book published in Paris, Gioberti drew the Cavour of the future with a penetration and a sureness of touch which would make a reader, who did not know the date, suppose that the words were written ten years later. Men of great talent, he said, rarely threw aside the chance of becoming famous; rather did they snatch it with avidity; and what fame more splendid could now be won than that of the minister of the Italian prince who should re-make the country? ”

“ Practical men like Cavour preferred the simple programme which Balbo put forward—the liberation of Italy from foreign yoke before all things—to Gioberti's mystical outpourings, much as they pleased the general. Gioberti, once a follower of Mazzini, and afterwards a priest, imagined a United Italy, with the Pope at its head, which, to unthinking souls, seemed to be on the road to miraculous realisation when the amiable and popular Cardinal Mastai Feretti was invested with the tiara. Cavour never had any hope in the Papacy as a political institution. ”

“ Very different is Gioberti! If he be not always as full of masculine strength, as Dante and Alfiere, still it is his great merit, to have spoken with admirable wisdom and eloquence, on the future of the fatherland, of which so much has been said in other countries, and there has been so much silence in our own ”

“ Different as the aims of the two men were—for Gioberti included even the Austrian government of Lombardy and Venice in his union—they embraced each other for the moment. Together they swept the peninsula. Every city from Palermo to Milan was aflame with the new ideas. The soberest patriots lost their composure, and many of the clergy began to dream wild dreams of political change, and to see visions of reformed conspirators kneeling at the feet of a democratic pope. We look back upon those days from the vantage-ground of experience, and we wonder that men should have been so deceived. ”

“ The rat will get out and leave the lion in the trap.
The "illustrious Gioberti" has fallen,—fallen for ever from his high scaffold of words. His demerits were too unmistakable for rhetoric to hide. That he sympathized with the Pope rather than the Roman people, and could not endure to see him stripped of his temporal power, no one could blame in the author of the Primato. That he refused the Italian General Assembly, if it was to be based on the so-called Montanelli system instead of his own, might be conviction, or it might be littleness and vanity. ”

“ Gioberti betook himself to France, Mazzini to England. Gioberti soon obtained an European reputation by his philosophical writings, but does not appear to have materially influenced French opinion in favour of his country. Mazzini, on the other hand, produced great effects by his mission to England, where the "swift, yet still, Ligurian figure; merciful and fierce; true as steel, the word and thought of him limpid as water" (Carlyle) , [1] fascinated the best men and women, and made the emancipation of Italy a cause dear to the heart of the people. ”

“ B. Spaventa, La Filosofia di Gioberti (Naples, 1854) ; A. Mauri, Della vita e delle opere di V. Gioberti (Genoa, 1853) ; G. Prisco, Gioberti e l’ ontologismo (Naples, 1867) ; P. Luciani, Gioberti e la filosofia nuova italiana (Naples, 1866-1872) ; D. Berti, Di V. Gioberti (Florence, 1881) ; see also L. Ferri, L’Histoire de la philosophie en Italie au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1869) ; C. Werner, Die italienische Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, ii. (1885) ; appendix to Ueberweg’s Hist. of Philosophy (Eng. tr.) ; art. in Brownson’s Quarterly Review (Boston, Mass.) ”

“ In 1828, a rumour of Pellico’s death in prison caused great excitement throughout Italy. On the 17th of September, 1830, he was released, by the amnesty of that year, and, avoiding politics thenceforth, devoted himself to religion. The Marchesa Baroli, at Turin, provided for his maintenance, by engaging him as her secretary and librarian. With health made weaker by his sufferings, Silvio Pellico lived on to the age of sixty-five, much honoured by his countrymen. Gioberti dedicated a book to him as “The first of Italian Patriots.” He died at Turin on the 1st of February, 1854. ”

“ Gioberti urged to him in vain that unsuccessful insurrections only discouraged the patriots and intensified the oppression. Mazzini, though he promised that he would not again encourage an insurrectionary movement, unless it started inside the country and independently of the exiles, argued that insurrection was the only means to rouse the masses. It mattered little if the first risings failed; they would keep alive the spirit, that one day would lead to victory. His hopes of the early triumph of the revolution grew slowly fainter ”

“ I take my stand on the solid principles established by Gioberti, and have no hesitation in regarding the white race as superior to all others in beauty; these, again, differ among themselves in the degree in which they approach or recede from their model. Thus the human groups are unequal in beauty; and this inequality is rational, logical, permanent, and indestructible.
Is there also an inequality in physical strength? The American savages, like the Hindus, are certainly our inferiors in this respect, as are also the Australians. The negroes, too, have 152less muscular power ”

“ He returns, like Wordsworth's great man, "to see what he foresaw." He will see his predictions accomplishing yet for a long time, for Mazzini has a mind far in advance of his times in general, and his nation in particular,—a mind that will be best revered and understood when the "illustrious Gioberti" shall be remembered as a pompous verbose charlatan, with just talent enough to catch the echo from the advancing wave of his day, but without any true sight of the wants of man at this epoch. And yet Mazzini sees not all: he aims at political emancipation ”

“ It would have been well for the political, though not the literary reputation of Mazzini if he had died about the same time in the good odour of the courage and capacity he had shown in the defence of Rome against the French. Although he had a great advantage over Gioberti in his perception of the need of national unity, he was unable to conceive of this otherwise than under Republican forms. He was hence almost as ready to thwart the Piedmontese as to expel the Austrian; he opposed every practical scheme for the redemption of Italy, from the Crimean expedition downwards ”

“ Mazzini was very suspicious of the new development; jealous that the nationalist movement had passed into other hands, that the credit of it went to men like Gioberti, who had halted in their faith, while he alone had held the banner high; sceptical of Charles Albert's and the Pope's intentions; angry at the tentative, compromising ambitions of the Moderates, at their repudiation of democracy, their trust in diplomacy and its pretences and deceptions. ”

“ Accidentally, a few prints of the works of Giotto, a few casts from those of Ghiberti, fall into their hands, and they see in these something they never saw before—something intensely and everlastingly true. They examine farther into the matter; they discover for themselves the greater part of what I have laid before you to-night; they form themselves into a body, and enter upon that crusade which has hitherto been victorious. ”

“ Technically—judged from the standpoint of workmanship in bronze—“The Creation Panel” is beyond criticism. Comparing it with a painting by Giotto, or, to take an artist of a later date, by Fra Angelico, we feel, however, that something is lacking. Though the subjects depicted are biblical, Ghiberti’s work lacks the spirituality which an artist working under the influence of Giotto, consciously or unconsciously, infused into his work. Italy in the fifteenth century had realized the fallacies that underlay the narrow creed of the Church and the too rigid philosophy of the Scholastics. ”

“ Poor Jovannic, it was at this moment that, to the fantastic and absurd character of the whole event, as arranged by Captain Hahn, there was now added a quality of sheer horror. The man upon the threshold was not like a man; vastly pot-bellied, so that the dingy white of his shirt was only narrowly framed by the black of his jacket, swollen in body to the comic point, collarless, with a staircase of unshaven chins crushed under his great, jovial, black-mustached face, the creature yet moved on little feet like a spinning-top on its point, buoyantly, with the gait of a tethered balloon. ”

“ And it would be well to look to the promise of the young as well as actual performances; for the power to do will grow. Of thirty-eight competitors convened at Florence, Lorenzo Ghiberti, only twenty-three years of age, was chosen to execute the celebrated doors; the work occupied forty years of his life. The work is immortal, if human work can be; and obtained this eulogium from Michael Angelo, that "they were worthy of being the gates of Paradise." He conferred honour upon his city, and received such as was worthy the city to bestow. ”

“ And when his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back: “Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars, everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people? Even my bread will not fail me.” The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. “Only he who has learned everything,” says Ghiberti, “is nowhere a stranger ”

“ He exercised the medical profession in Rome, but the attraction of literature proved irresistible for Giovio, and he was bent upon becoming the historian of his age. He presented a portion of his history to Leo X., who read the MS., and pronounced it superior in elegance to anything since Livy. Thus encouraged, Giovio took up his residence in Rome, and attached himself to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the pope’s nephew. The next pope, Adrian VI., gave him a canonry in Como, on the condition, it is said, that Giovio should mention him with honour in his history. ”

“ Giovio preferred Latin in the composition of his more important works. Though contemporary with Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Varchi, he adhered to humanistic usages, and cared more for the Latinity than for the matter of his histories. His style is fluent and sonorous rather than pointed or grave. Partly owing to the rhetorical defects inherent in this choice of Latin, when Italian had gained the day, but more to his own untrustworthy and shallow character, Giovio takes a lower rank as historian than the bulk and prestige of his writings would seem to warrant. ”

“ A medium of this kind had no darkening effect on the colours, but left their luminosity and clarity unimpaired. Still more important was the reform effected by Giotto in Italian painting with respect to selection of subjects and their manner of presentment. Ghiberti himself praises Giotto for having abandoned the rude style of the Greeks, and without leaning in this direction to an excess having introduced the truth and grace of Nature. Boccaccio, too, says of him that Nature is unable to create anything [Pg 323] that Giotto could not imitate to the point of deception [351] . ”

“ Giobniu, the divine smith of the old times, made a new sword and a new spear for every one that was broken in the great battle between the gods and the mis-shapen Fomor. "No spearpoint that is made by my hand," he said, "will ever miss its mark; no man it touches will ever taste life again." It was his father who, with a cast of a hatchet, could stop the inflowing of the tide; and it was he himself whose ale gave lasting youth: "No sickness or wasting ever comes on those who drink at Giobniu's Feast." Later he became a saint, a master builder, builder of a house "more shining than a garden ”

“ In private families, the sentiments of nature were extinguished by the blind fury of zeal and revenge: the majesty of the laws was violated or abused; the cities of the East were stained with blood; and the most implacable enemies of the Romans were in the bosom of their country. Jovian was educated in the profession of Christianity; and as he marched from Nisibis to Antioch, the banner of the Cross, the Labarum of Constantine, which was again displayed at the head of the legions, announced to the people the faith of their new emperor. ”

“ It is as a painter that Giotto is best known, and as such he did much to awaken art from its unnatural and stiff forms, and to introduce realism. “Campanile,” kăm-pa-nēˈla.
“Ghiberti,” gee-bĕrˈtee. (1378-1455.) He learned the trade of a goldsmith, but at that time the goldsmith’s art included others, especially designing and coloring. At first Ghiberti was a fresco painter, but was called to sculpture by his success with the bronze doors over which he spent most of his life. “San Giovanni,” jo-vänˈnee.
P. 142, c. 2.—“Donatello” do-nä-tĕlˈo. (1383-1466.) He was a native of Florence. ”

“ They abound in vivid sketches, telling anecdotes, fugitive comments, which unite a certain charm of autobiographical romance with the worldly wisdom of an experienced courtier. A flavour of personality makes them not unpleasant reading. While we learn to despise and mistrust the man in Giovio, we appreciate the author. It would not be too far-fetched to describe him as a sort of 16th-century Horace Walpole.
Bibliography.—The sources of Giovio’s biography are: his own works; Tiraboschi’s History of Italian Literature; Litta’s Genealogy of Illustrious Italian Families ”