 |
| Renaissance Man, Warts
and All |
|
|
James Fenton
copyright © 2005
|
Originally published
in The Guardian
29 October 2005
|
Autobiography in its contemporary forms is
so pervasive and so popular that it is easy to suppose that
it has always been with us, or that every age in the past, and
every great literary culture, had its own version of it. In
fact, the further back we look, the fewer examples we find.
Questions which for the modern writer have become matters of
diplomacy, nuance and tone - to what extent can I be frank about
my family? how can I tell a story that redounds to my credit
without coming across as boastful? conversely, how much do I
want the reader to know about my failures and shortcomings?
- were once unimaginably forbidding obstacles. In an age that
lived by its codes of honour, how could any writer conceive
of presenting himself in a less than favourable light?
The amazing Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), when
he set out to write The Book of My Life, found himself
short of precedents, classical or otherwise. He wanted to write
something to rival the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
but he saw that Marcus Aurelius had depicted himself as he thought
he ought to be. Today we probably hardly think of the Meditations
as autobiographical, but the first chapter is a series of acknowledgments
of his mentors. These formal acts of obeisance (like the lists
of acknowledgments in an Oscar-winner's speech) build up into
a self-portrait.
The other precedent Cardano mentions is Josephus,
who wrote truthfully of his own life, but with all his shortcomings
carefully suppressed. Cardano by contrast is only a few pages
into his self-portrait when he mentions (and this would have
been one of the reasons why early writers though he must be
mad) that he was impotent between the ages of 21 and 31. He
devotes a chapter to his vices, which include a tendency to
retain servants whom he knows to be utterly useless to him,
or even a cause for shame, and a tendency to get landed with
pets. "I become the owner of all sorts of little animals that
get attached to me: kids, lambs, hares, rabbits, and storks.
They litter up the whole house."
A pioneer of algebra, he was addicted to gambling,
and he makes an interesting distinction between being addicted
to (or as he puts it "immoderately given to") a thing, and actually
liking it. He did not love gambling, he says, but he loathed
the necessities which goaded him to it - "calumnies, injustices,
poverty, the contemptuous behaviour of certain men, the lack
of organisation in my affairs, the realisation that I was despised
by many, my own morbid nature…" One half expects him to add
low self-esteem, for that is surely what he is describing.
He has a gripping chapter called "Perils, Accidents,
and Manifold, Diverse, and Persistent Treacheries," which begins
with him walking to the university in Pavia where he taught,
and pausing to relieve himself by a ruined wall. Because he
is unable to follow his companion along a snow-covered part
of the street, he misses being killed by a tile that falls from
a roof. On another occasion he suddenly decides, for no reason,
to cross a street, and immediately a great mass of cement falls
from a cornice onto the spot he would have reached had he not
crossed over.
From such accounts of portents we move on to
academic disputes fought hard and dirty. He is denounced for
unnatural relations with his young male servants (a common hazard
of Renaissance life). He avoids a booby-trap. He wakes in the
night to find a sapphire ring missing from his hand, calls for
a light and discovers, with difficulty, that the ring has mysteriously
found its way under the bed. In such cases it is not the weight
of the incidents themselves, but the glimpses they offer of
everyday domestic life - the panic in the dark, the servant
unable to find a light, the strange behaviour of a candle -
that are precious to us.
In a world in which everyone lives in fear
of poisoning, Cardano, to his complete dismay, finds his elder
son accused of plotting the murder by poison of his wife. The
son is executed, and the father's life and reputation are shattered.
Mathematician, astrologer, physician, among his many works he
had written three books on poison. The Book of My Life
was reissued in 2002 in paperback, with notes and a good introduction
by Anthony Grafton, by New York Review Books. Grafton tells
us that, although Cardano was famous and respected when he died,
had he lived somewhat longer "he might have ended on a pyre
like Giordano Bruno."
|
|
|
