For
Benvenuto had to think before the fair Angelica occurred to him; and
the magician told him afterwards that love-making was folly compared
with the finding of treasures. Further, it must not be forgotten that
it flattered his vanity to be able to say, 'The demons have kept their
word, and Angelica came into my hands, as they promised, just a month
later' (I, cap. 68). Even on the supposition that Benvenuto gradually
lied himself into believing the whole story, it would still be
permanently valuable as evidence of the mode of thought then prevalent.
As a rule, however, the Italian artists, even 'the odd, capricious,
and eccentric' among them, had little to do with magic. One of them, in
his anatomical studies, may have cut himself a jacket out of the skin
of a corpse, but at the advice of his confessor he put it again into
the grave. Indeed the frequent study of anatomy probably did more than
anything else to destroy the belief in the magical influence of various
parts of the body, while at the same time the incessant observation and
representation of the human form made the artist familiar with a magic
of a wholly different sort.
In general, notwithstanding the instances which have been quoted, magic
seems to have been markedly on the decline at the beginning of the
sixteenth century--that is to say, at a time when it first began to
flourish vigorously out of Italy; and thus the tours of Italian
sorcerers and astrologers in the North seem not to have begun till
their credit at home was thoroughly impaired.
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