Shelley in his portrait of Francesco Cenci has drawn a man in whom cruelty and incest have become appetites of the distempered soul; the love of Giovanni and Annabella in Ford’s tragedy is rightly depicted as more imaginative than sensual.  It is no excuse for the Italians to say that they had spiritualized abominable vices.  What this really means is that their immorality was nearer that of devils than of beasts.  But in seeking to distinguish its true character, we must take notice of the highly wrought fantasy which seasoned both their luxury and their jealousy, their vengeance and their lust.

[1] Italian literature is loud-voiced on this topic.  The concluding stanzas of Poliziano’s Orfeo, recited before the Cardinal of Mantua, the Capitoli of Berni, Bronzino, La Casa, and some of the Canti Carnasialeschi, might be cited.  We might add Varchi’s express testimony as to the morals of Filippo Strozzi, Lorenzino de’ Medici, Pier Luigi Farnese, and Clement VII.  What Segni (lib. x. p. 409) tells us about the brave Giovanni Bandini is also very significant.  In the Life of San Bernardino of Siena, Vespasiano (Vite di Illustri Uomini, p. 186) writes:  ‘L’Italia, ch’ era piena di queste tenebre, e aveva lasciata ogni norma di buoni costumi, e non era piu chi conoscesse Iddio.  Tanto erano sommersi e sepulti ne’ maladetti e abbominevoli vizi nefandi!  Gli avevano in modo messi in uso, che non temevano ne Iddio ne l’onore del mondo.  Maladetta cecita!  In tanto eccesso era venuto ogni cosa, che gli scellerati ed enormi vizi non era piu chi gli stimasse, per lo maladetto uso che n’avevano fatto ... massime il maladetto e abominando e detestando peccato della sodomia.  Erano in modo stracorsi in questa cecita, che bisognava che l’onnipotente Iddio facesse un’ altra volta piovere dal cielo zolfo e fuoco come egli fece a Sodoma e Gomorra.’  Compare Savonarola passim, the inductions to the Sacre Rappresentazioni, the familiar letters of Machiavelli, and the statute of Cosimo against this vice (year 1542, Sabellii Summa.  Venice, 1715; vol. v. p. 287).

The same is to some extent true of their cruelty.  The really cruel nation of the Renaissance was Spain, not Italy.[1] The Italians, as a rule, were gentle and humane, especially in warfare.[2] No Italian army would systematically have tortured the whole population of a captured city day after day for months, as the Spaniards did in Rome and Milan, to satisfy their avarice and glut their stolid appetite for blood.  Their respect for human life again was higher than that of the French or Swiss.  They gave quarter to their foes upon the battle-field, and were horrified with the massacres in cold blood perpetrated at Fivizzano and Rapallo by the army of Charles VIII.  But when the demon of cruelty possessed the imagination of an Italian, when, like Gian Maria Visconti, he came to relish the sight of torment for its own sake, or when he sought to inspire fear by the spectacle