Alo, the patron saint of the poorhouse. These modes
of belief were so much a matter of course that the poets could make use
of them as something which every reader would understand. The
appearance of the slain Lodovico Pico under the walls of the besieged
Mirandola is finely represented by Castiglione. It is true that poetry
made the freest use of these conceptions when the poet himself had
outgrown them.
Italy, too, shared the belief in demons with the other nations of the
Middle Ages. Men were convinced that God sometimes allowed bad spirits
of every class to exercise a destructive influence on parts of the
world and of human life. The only reservation made was that the man to
whom the Evil One came as tempter, could use his free will to resist.
In Italy the demonic influence, especially as shown in natural events,
easily assumed a character of poetical greatness. In the night before
the great inundation of the Val d'Arno in 1333, a pious hermit above
Vallombrosa heard a diabolical tumult in his cell, crossed himself,
stepped to the door, and saw a crowd of black and terrible knights
gallop by in amour. When conjured to stand, one of them said: 'We go to
drown the city of Florence on account of its sins, if God will let us.'
With this, the nearly contemporary vision at Venice (1340) may be
compared, out of which a great master of the Venetian school, probably
Giorgione, made the marvelous picture of a galley full of daemons,
which speeds with the swiftness of a bird over the stormy lagoon to
destroy the sinful island-city, till the three saintS, who have stepped
unobserved into a poor boatman's skiff, exorcised the fiends and sent
them and their vessel to the bottom of the waters.
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