SOURCE: Introduction to The History of Italy, by Francesco Guicciardini, translated and edited by Sidney Alexander, Princeton University Press, 1969, pps. xxv, 59-60, 127-28.

[In the following excerpt, Alexander compares Guicciardini's writing style to that of several twentieth-century writers, asserting that Guicciardini's style is modern because it focuses on the individual in history.]

"If we consider intellectual power [the Storia d'Italia] is the most important work that has issued from an Italian mind." The judgment is that of Francesco de Sanctis, surely himself one of the foremost Italian minds. But like a great many classics, Guicciardini's History of Italy (published for the first time in 1561, twenty-one years after the author's death) is more honored in the breach than in the observance. Which is a pity, for if not every word need be read, surely a great many of them should be read, not only for the light they cast on a dark time in Italian (and European) history but for the light they cast on the processes of history. For most readers (I do not speak of professional historians) the chief interest here resides not in the details of treaties long since crumbled into dust, or the shed blood of dynasties, but rather in the perennial mystery of human behavior.

Francesco Guicciardini might be called a psychological historian—for him the motive power of the huge clockwork of events may be traced down to the mainspring of individual behavior. Not any individual, be it noted, but those in positions of command: emperors, princes, and popes who may be counted on to act always in terms of their self-interest—the famous Guicciardinian particolare.

Guicciardini's style is Jamesian, Proustian—that is to say, his basic meanings reside in his qualifications. His mind portrays itself in its sfumatura: the conditions, the exceptions, the modifications, the qualifications with which the author weighs every human act and motivation. He had not read, of course, but he was a fellow Florentine of Leonardo da Vinci who wrote (in mirror-writing in his arcane notebooks) that slashing attack on the abbreviatori—those impatient abbreviators of anatomy who do not realize that "impatience, mother of folly, praises brevity," and that "certainty is born of the integral cognition of all the parts.…"

So Leonardo over his cadavers and messer Francesco over the bleeding body of Italy—there is indeed a similarity in the stance of both men: a distrust of systems, a scorn for theory, a reliance upon experience, a surgical dispassion, a moon over a battlefield. So with lunar indifference the vegetarian da Vinci designs war chariots for the Sforza and serves Cesare Borgia, the enemy of his country. And so Francesco Guicciardini, who favors a republic, is for many years the faithful servant of Medici tyrants. The scientific temperament can lead to schizophrenia: makers of atomic bombs can work for one side or the other. There is the public mask and the private face; what decides is self-interest:

I know no man who dislikes more than I do the ambition, the avarice, and the lasciviousness of the priesthood: not only because each of these vices is odious in itself, but also because each of them separately, and all of them together, are quite unsuitable in men who make profession of a life dedicated to God.… And yet the position I have served under several popes has obliged me to desire their greatness for my own self-interest; and were it not for this, I would have loved Martin Luther as myself.…¹

Truth resides therefore in the specific instance, in the particolare, in the clash of egotisms as these work themselves out in great events. And yet, his cold surgical eye fixed on this cause, cautious Francesco Guicciardini does not conclude that he has isolated the cause. No historian was ever less monomaniacal. Even though he would seem to have tracked the motive power down to its source in individual behavior—more especially individual ambition—ultimately all is mystery, for all rests in the hands of Fortuna. And the lady has aged; she is more implacable than the goddess of Fortune whom Machiavelli felt could still be taken by assault, the lady who yielded at least 50 percent of the time to man's intervention. Guicciardini's Fortuna is more impersonal, distant; no one can ever predict how she will act, whether favorably or unfavorably; the world has become very bleak indeed. Man acts, always in terms of self-interest; he attempts, if he is wise, to weigh all possibilities with reason and a clinical knowledge of human behavior; he will preserve his dignity, his honor (the sole quality which the fickle goddess cannot sully); but what ultimately ensues is beyond all calculation.

If you had seen messer Francesco in the Romagna … with his house full of tapestries, silver, servants thronged from the entire province where—since everything was completely referred to him—no one, from the Pope down, recognized anyone as his superior; surrounded by a guard of more than a hundred landsknechts, with halberdiers and other cavalry in attendance … never riding out with less than one hundred or one hundred and fifty horse; immersed in governing bodies, titles, "Most illustrious lords," you would not have recognized him as your fellow citizen … but considering the importance of his affairs, his boundless authority, the very great domain and government under him, his court and his pomp, he would have seemed on a par with any duke rather than lesser princes.…

Thus Francesco Guicciardini depicts himself, to the life, as he appeared and behaved at the time when he was governor of the central Italian province of the Romagna. Like his contemporary and fellow Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli—but on a much more exalted level—he had always been an active participant in the politics he wrote about; and all his writings, like Machiavelli's, are the fruits of enforced idleness. Guicciardini's History, his last and greatest work, was the compensation of a man of action removed against his desire from the scene. Like Niccolò after 1512, a braintruster out of work, messer Francesco after 1537, no longer persona grata to the Medici back in power after the siege, retires to his villa in the green hills of Santa Margherita in Montici above his native Florence and commences for the third time to write a history of his epoch.

But now his vision has broadened. He is fifty-five years old; he has seen much, experienced much, been confidant and adviser to three popes; now the great spider must cast his web much wider than in his earlier attempts at writing the traditional humanistic history of his city-state. Now the youthful Florentine History must become the History of Italy (a title itself never applied by Guicciardini), and since Italy has become the cockpit where Hapsburg Charles V struggles with Valois Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor versus Most Christian King, Guicciardini's Storia d'Italia becomes perforce the history of Europe. Since Thucydides no vision had ranged so far. As in a Greek tragedy, after the prologue of Laurentian peace and prosperity, the fates begin to spin out the tragic succession of events from the French invasion of Charles VIII in 1494 to the death of Pope Clement VII in 1534, years dense with dramatic happenings and calamities which seem to confirm Guicciardini's disenchanted convictions.

On the surface he seems to be following the conventions of the chroniclers; patiently telling his story year by year; draping, like any good Renaissance humanist, his actors in togas; imitating—like Biondo, like Machiavelli—the classical historians, especially Livy and Tacitus; inventing stage speeches uttered by his captains on the eve of every battle; intending to deal exclusively with what was considered the true business of the historian: politics and war.

Intending, I say, for the greatness of the Storia is where it deviates from its set models, as a novel is successful only when the characters talk back to their creator and go their own ways against the author's will. Imitation of the ancients is first supplemented and then superseded by meticulous documentation from municipal archives (many of which Guicciardini had simply taken home to his villa from the Palazzo dei Signori); the text is rewritten more than seven times and not for stylistic concerns alone.

And as Guicciardini examines his world, the tumultuous world of the end of the fifteenth and the first three decades of the sixteenth century, his history, almost against the author's will, begins to comprehend far more than mere dynastic politics and wars. The discovery of the new lands misnamed America; the invention of those terrifying weapons called cannon; the first appearance of syphilis; the threat of the Turks and the greater threat of Martin Luther whose Christ-centered theology reduces the Church as Copernicus' heliocentric astronomy had reduced the earth; the history and huckstering of the Swiss, most dreaded mercenary soldiery of Europe; battle pieces full of gallantry and butchery; the incredible corruption of the Borgia and the martyrdom of Savonarola; the origins of Church claims to secular power; a brilliant picture gallery of Renaissance popes; the sack of Rome; the siege of Florence; the amatory complications of Henry VIII—all this and more we find in a richly orchestrated narrative wherein are embedded many of the famous maxims or Ricordi which the historian had been secretly writing all his life for his own edification. But now, confined to instances rather than abstracted in the void, how much more resonant are these scathing pessimistic opportunistic observations!

He is the master of the fillip; in the solemn Ciceronian periods of his rhetoric, how his irony flickers: a dragon's tail. "So that as a result of reverence for their way of life, the holy precepts which our religion contains in itself, and the readiness with which mankind follows—either out of ambition (most of the time) or fear—the example of their prince, the name of Christian began to spread marvelously everywhere, and at the same time the poverty of the clerics began to diminish."

Vanity vanity, Guicciardini seems always to be saying; and yet his art offers the comfort of a true discovery, a light placed in focus, a scientific examination carried to its limits. His capacity to reveal the psychology of single personages by relating them to the logic of events is truly extraordinary. His profiles are constructed from within, just as are his plots, crimes, wars, treaties, grave and dramatic moments in Italian history. The master builder always, he never loses command of his grand design.

But with all his fine discriminating political sense, his absence of dogmatism, his openness to the lessons of experience, his extraordinary sensitivity to the play of interests, there is something inhuman about the ice palace of this greatest of Italian historians. The irony is that Guicciardini, who abjures all system building, has fallen victim to a reductive fallacy that equally distorts the range and variety of human behavior. Although (unlike Machiavelli) he believes that man is essentially good, in practice he depicts him as almost invariably bad. Hence his psychological portraiture is all nuance and monochrome. Here are his comments on Piero de' Medici in exile asking advice of the Venetian senate:

Nothing certainly is more necessary in arduous deliberations, and nothing on the other hand more dangerous, than to ask advice. Nor is there any question that advice is less necessary to wise men than to unwise; and yet wise men derive much more benefit from taking counsel. For, whose judgment is so perfect that he can always evaluate and know everything by himself and always be able to discern the better part of contradictory points of view? But how can he who is asking for counsel be certain that he will be counseled in good faith? For, whoever gives advice (unless he is bound by close fidelity or ties of affection to the one seeking advice) not only is moved largely by self-interest, but also by his own small advantages, and by every slight satisfaction, and often aims his counsel toward that end which turns more to his advantage or is more suitable for his purposes; and since these ends are usually unknown to the person seeking advice, he is not aware, unless he is wise, of the faithlessness of the counsel.

An almost mathematical exposition of ethical relations, an algebra of behavior. Who has ever put it so neatly? But isn't the very precision, almost predictability, of this world without ideals itself an intellectual construction, cleaving to experience and yet remote from it? Throughout the Storia such Guicciardinian structures glimmer, subtle spider webs of psychological analysis on the rich green field of sheer storytelling.…

None of Guicciardini's writings were issued during his lifetime. Only in 1561 were the first sixteen books of the Storia (out of twenty) published in Florence, and three years later the last four appeared separately in Venice. Many others followed this first edition, all of them, however, based not directly on the manuscripts but on the expurgated Torrentino text of 1561 which had appeared while the Council of Trent, the general staff of the Counter-Reformation, was in full session. Hence, in all these editions certain passages considered injurious to the Roman pontiffs were truncated, especially in Book Four, wherein Guicciardini traces the origin of Church claims to temporal power. Finally in a magnificent edition dated from Freiburg,² Guicciardini's History was published in its entirety according to the manuscript conserved in Florence, the final version which had been revised and corrected by the author himself, containing the mutilated passages. The Ricordi had various partial editions between 1576 and 1585; his other writings were extracted from the family archives and published in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Within the very sixteenth century that saw its first publication, the History of Italy was swiftly translated into French, Latin, Spanish, German, Flemish, as well as the first English "translation" by Geffray Fenton of which I will speak later. According to Roberto Ridolfi, whose brilliant biography and Guicciardini studies have done more than anything else to see the record straight, in the same Cinquecento Italian editions alone, both integral and partial, counted almost one hundred. Obviously poor messer Francesco is another of those not infrequent cases of posthumous literary success.

The English version by Sir Geffray Fenton, an Elizabethan literatus, first published in London in 1579, is most curious. Fenton knew no Italian and his "translation"—considered his major work and greatly successful in his time—was derived not from Guicciardini's original text but from the foreign language Fenton knew—namely French. Fenton based his work on the 1568 French version of Chomedey; what we have therefore is a translation of a translation! As Paolo Guicciardini has pointed out in his Le Traduzioni Inglesi della Storia Guicciardiniana (Olschki, Firenze, 1951) Fenton's dependence on the French version is proved by the fact that he maintained in his English text the spellings of proper names used by Chomedey instead of adopting, which would have been more logical, the Italian spellings. Thus we have Petillane for Pitigliano, Triuulce for Trivulzio, Francisquin Cibo for Franceschetto Cibo, Ceruetre for Cerveteri, etc.

Furthermore I have discovered that Fenton indulges throughout his text (which is remarkably faithful considering that it is second hand) in numerous excisions, paraphrases, omissions, ellipses, and revisions, frequently in the interest of courtly bows to the English ruling house. In any case, to render it available to the modern reader, Fenton's knotted Elizabethan English would require a translation, in which case we would have a translation of a translation of a translation!

The only other integral English version of the History of Italy is that by Austin Parke Goddard, published in ten volumes in London over the years 1753 to 1756. Goddard was expert in Italian, had studied and resided in Italy for many years at the invitation of Cosimo III, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who was a friend of his family. Furthermore, aside from his expertise in the language, Goddard's intentions were scrupulously to adhere to Guicciardini's phraseology rather than redo it "in a very elegant Style."

But unfortunately the road to paraphrase is paved with good intentions. Goddard extracts wholesome lessons from Guicciardini and then puts them into courtly periwigged English. What he has accomplished for the most part is a good, sometimes sparkling paraphrase of the Storia d'Italia, clothing it in the opulent Gibbonsonian style of eighteenth-century historical rhetoric. Much more serious are Goddard's frequent variations of meaning, reinterpretations, polite omissions, invented gallantries—a general transformation of Guicciardini's feeling-tone from solemn Latinate obliquity and acerbity to a very English mixture of manners and morals.

Hence we have the unusual situation that since Guicciardini's classic was first published more than four hundred years ago, the only two integral versions in English of his work are both disqualified as true translations—one because it was not based on the original Italian text, the other because it is a paraphrase.³

There is a theory and practice of translation in our day which, in an effort to avoid the archaicism and "no-language" of translatese, leaps to the other extreme and gives us Romans of antiquity who talk pure Hemingwayese.

But I should say that a true translation, while rendering available to the modern reader the speech of another time and culture, will also preserve the savor of that speech, the flavor of that time. A pinch of antiquity must be added. A good translation of a sixteenth-century text should be redolent of its period. It should bring us back there; we should not only understand it, we should be permeated by it in a kind of historical osmosis, research through the pores. To render Guicciardini in clear modern English available to the modern reader may be admirable pedagogy but it is not the art of translation.

I have called Guicciardini a Proustian historian—that is, a vision and a logic manifested in a certain kind of language. The stylistic challenge I set myself therefore was more than searching for English equivalents that would avoid archaicism on the one hand and clear modern English (which is archaicism in reverse) on the other. I have tried instead to re-create an English that would be faithful to the literal meanings of the text, and yet convey Guicciardinian involutions, his Ciceronian periods, his Proustian longueurs—an English that would convey in the twentieth century the flavor of a personalized Latinate Italian style of the sixteenth century.⁴

Enmeshed in this web, one found that one was searching the processes of Guicciardini's thought. Sometimes one had to cut the interminable sentences, balanced like some incredible trapeze act, clause upon (and within) clause, often a page high. Sometimes one had to clarify Guicciardini's casual way with antecedents and pronouns, substitute proper names for his strings of ambiguous he's and him's. (Those scholars who claim that Guicciardini never writes other than crystal-clear merely betray thereby their ignorance of the text.) Great monuments are not marred by scratches, even Homer nods (or makes us), and Guicciardini's marvelous rhetoric is not without its faults of overelaboration, density, impenetrable thickets.

The true translator must only clear up as much of this Sargasso Sea as is absolutely necessary to make for passage. But to clarify what was ambiguous in the original is not translation but explication. The job of the translator is not to make clear that which was not clear, but to render in another tongue (and sometimes another century) the same degree and kind of ambiguity wherever this occurs.

Guicciardini's chief literary fault is his prolixity—the inevitable outcome of his obsessive search for detail, his quest for truth by amassing all particulars—which gave rise to the legend of the Laconian (condemned because he had used three words where two would do) who was offered his freedom if he read entirely through Guicciardini's interminable account of the siege of Pisa, but who pleaded—after attempting a few pages—that he be sent instead to row in the galleys.

I hope the reader will be able to savor in these pages (from which most of the siege of Pisa has been cut) something of Guicciardini's extraordinary qualities as a historian. Scholars debate whether Francesco is more res than verba, but I should say that if there is a discrepancy between his hard skeletal thinking and the rhetorical artifices in which it is shrouded, this literature is very important. To transform it into simple modern English is to destroy those obliquities which are the very mark of the man: his intellectual clarity, his astuteness, his diplomatic visor glinting at all times.

The present version consists of more than half of the original enormous text and, in view of what I have indicated with regard to Fenton and Goddard, may justly claim to be the first extended English translation that is not a paraphrase or derived from a secondary source. Selections have been made from all twenty books, so organized as to present a running and coherent narrative from first to last, tied with bridge passages wherever necessary. In the light of Thoreau's "If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?" I have excised only repetitious episodes—thus a few battles serve as the models for Guicciardini's descriptions of many battles; a few examples suffice for his thirty or so invented set speeches.

Guicciardini's History of Italy has been pillaged for the past four hundred years as the chief source of Renaissance history and politics. Now the modern reader will be enabled for the first time in English to go to the source itself, and experience immersion in a world remote perhaps in time but discouragingly up-to-date so far as man's political behavior is concerned.

Notes

¹ The entire quotation from the Ricordi, second series, No. 28, reads:

lo non so a chi dispiaccia più che a me la ambizione, la avarizia e le mollizie de' preti: si perché ognuno di questi vizi in sé è odioso, si perché ciascuno e tutti insieme si convengono poco a chi fa professione di vita dependente da Dio; ed ancora perché sono vizi sì contrari che non possono stare insieme se non in un subietto molto strano. Nondimeno el grado che ho avuto con più pontefici, m'ha necessitato a amare per el particulare mio la grandezza loro; e se non fussi questo rispetto, arei amato Martino Luther quanto me medesimo, non per liberarmi dalle legge indotte dalla religione cristiana nel modo che è interpretata ed intesa communemente, ma per vedere ridurre questa caterva di scelerati a' termini debiti, cioè a restare o sanza vizi o sanza autorità.

² This edition, dated 1774-76, was actually published in Florence; the fiction of its having been printed in "Friburgo" was obviously intended to deceive the censor. This is the first edition, after the editio princeps, to be based on the Codex Mediceo Palatino, and the first to restore almost all the passages Bartolomeo Concino, the Secretary of Duke Cosimo I, had expurgated in the original edition which Agnolo Guicciardini, the historian's nephew, had dedicated to the Duke (see Alessandro Gherardi, ed. La Storia d 'Italia, Firenze, 1919, I, p. clxxviii).

³ More serious is the fact that both Fenton and Goddard omit practically all of the famous forbidden passages—the sections in Book III concerning the incestuous loves of the House of Borgia; Book IV on the effect of the new discoveries of Columbus and the Portuguese on interpretations of Sacred Scripture; Book X on Cardinal Pompeo Colonna inciting the people of Rome to rebel against the papacy; as well as numerous Guicciardinian anticlerical ironies such as his remark that the Holy Ghost must have inspired the cardinals in the election of Adrian VI, etc.

Neither Fenton nor Goddard, of course, could make use of most of these omissions since they were restored only in the "Friburgo" edition which appeared after their works. Available to them in print were two suppressed sections of the Storia published in a Protestant pamphlet in Basel (Pietro Perna, 1569). The 1618 Fenton in my possession declares on the title page: "The third Edition, diligently revised, with restitution of a Digression towards the end of the fourth Booke, which had bene formerly effaced out of the Italian and Latine copies in all the late Editions." None of the other cuts, however, are restored. Goddard prints two of the scandalous passages from Books III and IV in an appendix but flatly declares them spurious (Paolo Guicciardini, Le Traduzioni Inglesi della Storia Guicciardiniana, pp. 12-15, 24, Olschki, Florence, 1951; and Vincent Luciani, Francesco Guicciardini and His European Reputation, pp. 35 ff., K. Otto, New York, 1936).

⁴ Luciani, op. cit., p. 35: "A gifted translator would attempt to render in the foreign tongue the serious majestic level of the Italian." This follows an acute and detailed analysis of the various inadequacies—both scholarly and artistic—of Fenton and Goddard.