Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) To my son I still remember Hedley Bull his slow, regular footfall in front of the podium; the sudden way he would look up and turn his handsome head to us before asking in that droll Australian accent: “Gentlemen, it all hinges on the meaning of the word virtù. Bacon, Hobbes, Adams, Strauss, Skinner — they each provide an interpretation. What’s yours?” I knew in a few months he would no longer be with us. (Riddled with bone cancer he continued teaching with the assistance of daily morphine injections.) I also knew out of all the political philosophers we were studying that semester this one was my favorite. I raised my hand he gave me the floor: “Without virtù, even though a ruler may gain an empire he will fail to attain gloria. If I had to choose between Scipio Africanus and Agathocles I’d opt for the first, no question.” Pleased, he smiled and continued: “It’s all too easy to create utopian communities; it’s a lot more difficult to truly come to grips with harsh political realities. We have spent enough time on Plato and Augustine’s ‘What is as it ought to be.’ Let’s turn to Thucydides for he remains key.” Machiavelli survived that spring. Next semester, Adam Roberts (hired in Bull’s place) was not as charitable to the Florentine. As he sets his sights on deconstructing the “realist school” in lecture after lecture I kept thinking about one of our final sessions with Bull: “Could someone who wrote such poems and plays whose writing was so elegant whose thought, so sharp and lucid possessor of a sense of humor truly lack all morality and ethics? When we speak of him why do we allow the scarecrow created by the Catholic Church to carry the day?” When he was very ill and homebound I had gone to visit him one night and he gave me a volume of Machiavelli’s Letters which includes one addressed to Francesco Vettori his “benefactor” (10 December 1513) written while he was living in exile at his country retreat outside the city (the Medicis had returned to Florence, you see). After describing his daily work on the farm he eagerly turns to the coming of evening and his study where he is writing his “little work” On Principalities (later to become The Prince) at which point he observes: “And because Dante says it does not produce knowledge when we hear but do not remember I have tried to remember what a great man once said to me.” Same here, caro Hedley. Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) To my daughter Because she was a woman no one — neither the Vatican nor the Medicis, the Sforzas and the respectable condottieri — commissioned of her the religious or historical paintings that were the exclusive domain of the male artist. Perforce she turned to portraiture. She, of course, exacted her vengeance for in one of her self-portraits the one housed today in Poland’s Łańcut Museum she paints herself painting the Virgin embracing the holy infant. Despite her poise her somewhat irritated expression — as if having burst uninvited into her studio we are interrupting her finishing touches — throws into relief the courage and determination even Vasari acknowledged. After an eventful life she settled in Palermo with husband number three painting portraits for the next forty years. She was now so famous artists like Rubens and Van Dyck visited her to see “the brilliant woman” in the flesh. Van Dyck’s painting of the now elderly Sofonisba (almost ninety-two at the time) still survives. She looks at the young painter much like Michelangelo must have once looked upon her twenty-year-old self at their first meeting: “My dear Anthony we artists strive to immortalize a few traces of life before our unfurling shadows veil it all in oblivion. I wonder in the future what will people think when they see my work? Perhaps that I was a woman who spent her life fleeing her prison cell and shaking off the dust stifling her soul. You, however, as a man what do you know of dust?” Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) Theologians lost their night’s sleep pondering portentous questions: Why had God chosen to incarnate Christ as a man, not a woman or, for that matter, a donkey? But how was a donkey-Christ to preach the Jewish law? Or perform the miracle of Cana? Thoroughly amused by this scholastic nonsense Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly during his second sojourn in England to entertain his friend Thomas More. (Lacking the Dutchman’s humor the latter eventually lost his head whereas Henry VIII likely had more than his fair share for he was playing tennis when the executioner brought down the ax on More’s “very short neck”). In one of Oxford’s second-hand bookstores (I must have spent over twenty hours a week on Turl Street) I found one of Erasmus’ travel letters (to my knowledge the only scholar with the audacity to teach at both Oxford and Cambridge). I could not find a single fault with it: “English girls are divinely pretty and have a most admirable custom: When you go anywhere on a visit the girls kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you leave. They kiss you when you return. If you are lucky enough to get a taste of those soft and fragrant lips you will long to spend your life in that blessed land.” While Erasmus was exchanging kisses with English girls the teenaged Luther was conscientiously studying The Summa Angelica by Angelo Carletti di Chivasso, which twenty years later (along with the latest bull of Pope Leon X) he would toss into the fire in Wittenberg’s central square exclaiming as he did so: “the burning of sinful books is an age-old custom in Germany.” Undeniably true. Four centuries later this “age-old custom” still held strong. And books were not its only victims. Haris
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