GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO. 



GUIDO RENI. 



222 



been effected by the parliament, or sovereign assembly of the people, 

 according to the old practice of the republic, and at the instigation of 

 those very refugees, Strozzi, Valori, Salviati, Ridolfi, and others, whose 

 ambition not being satisfied, because the duke did not choose to give 

 all his authority into their hands, made them now assume the language 

 of popular discontent. But he slurred over the serious charges of 

 cruelty, licentiousness, and other abuses of power, which were sub- 

 stantiated against the duke. The emperor, engrossed by his numerous 

 state affairs, dismissed the Florentine question by stipulating with the 

 dnke that the refugees should have a full amnesty, and be allowed to 

 return to Florence, and be restored to their property. He tried at 

 the same time to make the duke acknowledge himself his feudatory : 

 but Gnicciardini prevented this, for although hostile to a popular 

 form of government, he was anxious to maintain the political inde- 

 pendence of his country under a native ruler. When the Duke Ales- 

 vandro was murdered by hia cousin and companion in debauch, 

 Lorenzino de' Medici, in January 1537, Guicciardini by hia timely 

 measures prevented a popular explosion, and by his influence in the 

 council obtained the appointment of Cosmo de' Medici as governor of 

 the Florentine republic, with a fixed income of 12,000 golden florins 

 a-year, and under the express condition that he should do nothing 

 without the advice of his council. Here however Guicciardini miscal- 

 culated, and he was told so at the time by his brother-councillor 

 Vettori : he wished to establish something like the government of 

 Oenoa or Venice ; bnt the circumstances of those states were very 

 different from those of Florence, where the Medici had been for a 

 century past the hereditary leaders of a powerful party, and were sup- 

 ported by foreign powers. The event soon undeceived Guicciardini. 

 Cosmo, aspiring, and clever, with more self-command than his prede- 

 cessor Alessandro, soon exchanged his title of governor for that of 

 duke, and established himself as absolute lord not only of Florence, 

 but of all Tuscany. [COSMO I.] Guicciardini remained for some 

 time attached to him ; but finding his advice disregarded, he resigned 

 hia office, and withdrew to his country-house at Arcetri, where he 

 employed himself in writing the contemporary history of Italy, which 

 was not published till more than twenty years after his death. He 

 died in his retirement, in May 1540, at the age of 58, and his death 

 was said to have been hastened by disappointment at the untoward 

 result of his political exertions. 



Of Guicciardiui's history, the first sixteen books were published in 

 1561, the other four appeared afterwards, and the whole twenty 

 together were published for the first time at Venice in 1569 : ' Istoria 

 d'ltalia di Francesco Guicciardini, gentiluomo Florentine, libri xx.' 

 The work was afterwards frequently reprinted both in Italy and in 

 other countries, and it has been translated into several European 

 languages. The old Italian editions are mutilated from political 

 motives ; the first unmutilated edition was that under the fictitious 

 date of Fribourg, 3 vols. 4 to, 1775; but the most complete and correct 

 odition is that by Professor Rosini, of Pisa, 10 vola. 8vo, 1819-20, with a 

 luminous essay by the editor concerning Guicciardini's life and writings. 



Guicciardini stands by common consent at the head of the general 

 historians of Italy. His narrative, which embraces the period from 

 1494 to 1532, is that of a contemporary who had seen and participated 

 in many of the events which he relates. He is very prolix, differing 

 in this respect from the concise nervousness of his countryman 

 Mnchiavelli, and his minuteness is sometimes wearisome. He has 

 adopted Livy's custom of putting speeches into the mouths of his 

 principal historical personages, and sometimes the sentiments he 

 makes them express are not consistent with facts, as Foscarini has 

 observed in his ' History of Venetian Literature.' In his narrative he 

 has been charged, not with stating untruths, but with colouring and 

 disguising truth when be speaks of parties which he dislikes, such as 

 the Florentine popular leaden, the French, and the court of Rome, 

 which, after the death of Clement VII., became hostile to the Medici. 

 In his tone he cannot be called either moral or patriotic. Like 

 Machiavelli, he belongs to the school of positive or matter-of-fact 

 historians ; ha considers men such as he found them to be, and not 

 such as they might or ought to be ; he relates with the same coolness 

 an atrocious act as a general one; and he seems to blame failure 

 resulting from incapacity, or weakness, or scrupulousness, more than 

 the success resulting from boldness and abilities, however unprincipled. 

 Like some other statesmen, he considers an error in politics as worse 

 than a crime. It must be observed however that Uuicciardini lived 

 in an age of triumphant dishonesty, that he was the contemporary of 

 the Borgias, of Ferdinand of Aragon, of Ludovico Sforza, Bourbon, 

 Pef cara, and the wont of the Medici ; and it is no wonder therefore 

 that he ascribes the acts of public men to two great sources, selfish 

 calculation, or passion, and seldom, if ever, to virtue, or disinterested- 

 ness. Collections have been made of the moral and political 

 aphorisms scattered through hU work, by his nephew Ludovico 

 Guicciardini (Antwerp, 1586), by Anghiari (Venice, 1625), and others. 

 Corbinelli published another collection of principles and sentences 

 which it appears that Guicciardini had written separately for his own 

 guidance : ' Consigli e Avvertimenti in materia di Re Pubblica e di 

 Privats,' Paris, 1576. Part of bis correspondence was published by 

 Frit Remigio, in his ' Consideration! civili sopra 1'Istoria di Francesco 

 Uuicciardini,' Venice, 1582. Other letters of Guicciardini, written 

 during his Spanish legation, have been published by Rosini : ' Lcga- 



zione di Spagna," Pisa, 1825. Botta, a Piedmontese writer who died 

 in 1837, has written an able continuation of Guicciardini's history in 

 50 books : ' Storia d'ltalia continuata da quella del Guicciardini sino 

 al 1789, di Carlo Botta,' 10 vols. 8vo. 



GUIDO, D* AREZZO, who stands very prominently in all musical 

 histories as the discoverer of the path which led to the invention of 

 the modern system of Dotation, and of the true art of teaching singing, 

 together with other improvements, was born at Arezzo in Tuscany, 

 towards the end of the 10th century. When young he entered the 

 Benedictine monastery of that city, probably as a chorister, and after- 

 wards became a monk of the order. There he first conceived a new 

 method of writing music, and of instructing in the art ; and having 

 well digested his plan, he there also carried it into effect, at a school 

 opened by him for the purpose. On the old system, it is stated, ten 

 years were consumed in acquiring a knowledge of plain song only ; 

 Guide's, we are told, reduced the years to as many months. His 

 success excited, as commonly happens, the jealousy of his brethren, 

 and he was driven to seek an asylum in another monastery. This we 

 learn from his letter to Michael, a brother monk ; and from the same 

 it appears that the fame of his school having reached the ears of 

 Pope John XIX., he was invited to Rome, and had the honour not 

 only of explaining to the sovereign pontiff the nature of his new 

 method, but of teaching the holy father to sing by it. 



On his return from Rome he visited the abbot of Pomposa, in the 

 duchy of Ferrara, who persuaded him to settle in that place. Here 

 it was he wrote his ' Micrologus,' or brief discourse on music, in which 

 most of his inventions are described, as well as his method of instruc- 

 tion. But his doctrine of solmisation, or the use of the syllables ut, 

 re, mi, fta, is not mentioned in that work ; it is explained in a small 

 tract under the title of 'Argumentum novi Cantus inveniendi.' The 

 date of his death is unknown : it was probably about the middle of 

 the llth century. 



To Guido we are indebted for the invention of the Staff, namely, the 

 lines and spaces ; for the reformation of the Scale, as also of the mode 

 of notation, and for the art of Solmisation. Musical instruments 

 being, it is to be presumed, very imperfect in his day, he taught his 

 scholars to sing by a monochord, for the proper division of which 

 he gives precise rules: but his^reliance was on a system of hexa- 

 chords, or scales of six notes, which he substituted for the ancient 

 tetrachords, and on the syllables he applied to the different sounds. 

 To this invention Guido is mainly indebted for the fame he has so 

 long enjoyed. The art of counterpoint, and other important dis- 

 coveries made before and after his time, have been attributed to him, 

 but the assertions which have assigned to the ingenious ecclesiastic that 

 to which he has no title, and never claimed, have been fully refuted. 



GUIDO RENI (whom we place here as being, like Raffaelle more 

 generally known by his Christian name) was born at Bologna in 1574, 

 where he studied painting, first under Denis Calvart, a Flemish artist 

 of high reputation, and afterwards visited the school of the Caracci, 

 who are reputed to have been jealous of him. He appears to have 

 been some time undecided with respect to the style he should adopt. 

 At first, as might be expected, he followed the Caracci, preferring how- 

 ever the manner of Ludovico. On visiting Rome he carefully ex- 

 amined every thing worthy the attention of an artist, and was en- 

 raptured with the works of Raffaelle. He was also much struck with, 

 the great effect of the style of Caravaggio, which he attempted for a 

 time, but happily laid it aside for the style peculiarly his own, in 

 which the felicitous combination of grace, ease, grandeur, and elegance, 

 with the highest perfection in the mechanical parts, lightness of pencil, 

 freedom of touch, and exquisite delicacy, obtained him the universal 

 applause of his contemporaries, and have secured him the lasting 

 admiration of posterity. His genius was not indeed equally adapted 

 to all subjects. He preferred and excelled in those in whioh tender- 

 ness, pathos, or devotion predominate ; and in these he is distinguished 

 from all other painters. He had a peculiar manner of painting the 

 eyes large, the mouth small, the nostrils compressed, and the toes 

 rather too closely joined. His heads are considered by many as equal 

 to those of Raffaelle in correctness of design and propriety of expres- 

 sion, an opinion in which we do not coincide : as regards intellectual 

 character, sentiment, and purity, there can be no comparison made 

 between them. His standard of female beauty was founded on the 

 antique, the 'Venus de' Medici' and the 'Daughters of Niobe,' and 

 hence perhaps has arisen a certain monotony. He finished his pictures 

 with great care ; his colouring is extremely clear and pure, but some- 

 times, especially in his later pictures, there is a greyish cast which 

 changed into a lurid colour. It is to be lamented that an incurable 

 propensity to gambling reduced him to distressed circumstances, so 

 that his necessities compelling him to work for immediate subsistence 

 without due regard to his honour and his fame, many of his later 

 performances are much inferior to those which he painted in his 

 happier days. He died August 18, 1642, aged sixty-eight. His works 

 have always and justly been admired all over Europe, continually 

 rising in estimation and value. Among his most celebrated works 

 were an altarpiece in the church of St. Philip Neri at Fano, repre- 

 senting Christ delivering the Keys to St. Peter ; a ' St. John,' iu the 

 Archiepiscopal Gallery at Milan; the 'Virgin and Child and St. John,' 

 in the Tanaro Palace at Bologna; and the ' Penitence of St. Peter after 

 denying Christ,' with one of the apostles comforting him, in the Zam- 



