La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
di quelle furie quali dentro alla terra fra’ cittadini mai restano,—sospetti, paure, maledicenti, ingiustizie, risse, e l’altre molte bruttissime a ragionarne cose, e orribili a ricordarsene.
(Add to this that you can retire to your villa and live there in repose, nurturing your family, getting things done yourself, on holidays talking pleasantly in the shade about oxen, wool, vines or seeds, without hearing rumors, or tales, or some of those other rages that never stop in the land of city dwellers–suspicions, fears, slanders, injuries, feuds, and other things too ugly to mention and too horrible to remember.)191
Here riposo (repose) is one of the blessings of villa life, which Alberti, like Taegio after him, contrasted with the maladies of city life. Another blessing is delight in the countryside. Immediately following the passage quoted above, Alberti called the villa “uno proprio paradiso” (one’s own paradise), because
vi godete in villa quelli giorni aerosi e puri, aperti e lietissimi; avete leggiadrissimo spettacolo rimirando que’ colletti fronditi, e que’ piani verzosi, e quelli fonti e rivoli chiari, che seguono saltellando e perdendosi fra quelle chiome dell’erba.
(at the villa you enjoy clean and airy days, open and very delightful. You have a very lovely view, beholding those leafy hills and verdant plains, and those springs and clear streams, which go leaping through and losing themselves in the waving grass.)192
In order to enjoy these blessings it was necessary, according to Alberti, to flee the maladies of the city, as he went on to say: “Puoi alla villa fuggire questi strepiti, questi tumulti, questa tempesta della terra, della piazza, del palagio” (At the villa you can flee these uproars, these tumults, this tempest of the land, piazza, and palace.)193 The sense of leisure gained from Alberti’s I Libri della Famiglia involves the ideas of repose, flight from the city, and enjoyment of the countryside.
In the second half of the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino and Alamanno Rinuccini developed further the interpretation of leisure as fuggire (fleeing). Ficino embellished a wall of the villa given him by Cosimo de’ Medici with the following inscription: “A bono in bonum omnia diriguntur. Laetus in praesens. Neque censum existimes, neque appetas dignitatem; fuge excessum, fuge negotia, laetus in praesens.” (All things are directed from the good to the good. Be joyful in the present. You must not value property or desire dignity. Flee excess, flee business, be joyful in the present.)194 The words “laetus in praesens” recall Horace’s verses:
laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est
oderit curare et amara lento temperet risu.
nihil est ab omni parte beatum.
(Let the soul be joyful in the present, let it disdain to be anxious for what the future has in store, and temper bitterness with a smile serene. Nothing is happy altogether.)195
Ficino’s inscription is pregnant with meaning because of the associations it makes. Not only does it link the serenity of which Horace wrote with the ancient Roman sense of leisure, retreat from negotium; it also connects both serenity and leisure with the villa and intellectual activity, by virtue of the fact that the setting in which it appeared was a particular villa, which Ficino named Academia after Plato’s Academy.
Rinuccini also associated leisure with serenity in his Dialogus de Libertate (1479), and he used a word for “serenity” that appears frequently in Taegio’s La Villa: tranquillità. From the beginning of the preface to his dialogue, Rinuccini offered a justification for living in the country to those who did not approve of him devoting more care to the management of his villa than to his business in the city. Rinuccini wrote Dialogus de Libertate one year after the Pazzi conspiracy, while he was in forced retirement at his villa outside Florence, which he made the setting for his dialogue. There he said he led “ab urbana frequentia et, quae ab ea fluunt, innumeris avaritiae atque ambitionis curis semotam vitam” (a life dis sociated from urban congestion and the immeasurable greed and abition which flow from it).196 Rinuccini’s description of the vices of city dwellers would be echoed nearly a century later by Taegio in La Villa (p. 2) where he wrote that he could not see anything in the city but “pride, ambition, greed, hatred, falsehood, and idolatry.” Rinuccini said that it was not his purpose to tell others how to live, only to explain why he chose his way of life, which was to attain “what the Greeks called euthemia, a word we might translate as spiritual well being, or simply tranquillity.”197 Rinuccini defined “tranquillity” in terms of his interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as follows:
Quod si Aristotelem sequi volumus qui non inhabitu sed in actu collocavit foelicitatem, hanc ipsam animi quietem et tranquillitatem carentiamque perturbationum fundamentum sedemque foelicitatis non immerito arbitramur, quod ita institutus animus facilime ad actionis aut contemplationis operationem sese conferet.
(If we agree with Aristotle’s conviction that happiness lies not in passivity but in action, we shall conclude that tranquillity is the essential foundation and basis of happiness because it allows us to devote ourselves properly to either action or contemplation.)198
In the soliloquy that concludes the dialogue, Rinuccini made clear that he felt justified in retreating from the city only because political conditions there had become unbearable for him. In words that are reminiscent of Seneca’s statement in De Otio, that a man has good reason for retiring “si res publica corruptior est quam ut adiuvari posit” (if the state is so corrupt that it cannot be helped),199 Rinuccini wrote,
Libertatis occupatoribus gratificer perpeti non possum. Propterea, hac, ut videtis, villula et hoc agello contentus, nullis anxius curis, nec quid agatur in civitate perquirens, quiete libereque vitam duco.
(I cannot peacefully tolerate the usurpers of our liberty. Therefore, as you see, I lead a quiet and free life, content with this little villa and farm, free from all anxiety, never inquiring into what goes on in the city.)200
For Rinuccini, as for Seneca, service to the state took priority over leisure. In fact, as soon as he was again offered a position in the government of the city, Rinuccini ended his retirement and returned to Florence. However, while it was possible, according to Rinuccini, to pursue a life of otium in either the city or the country, the setting he chose for his own “otium cum dignitate et sine interpellatione quietem” was “villula et hoc agello”; in other words, a villa.
In Taegio’s La Villa, ocio is leisure spent in the active pursuit of knowedge. It is associated with pleasure and tranquillity of mind, and it is made possible by villa life. Knowledge of the truth depends on leisure, a point Vitauro makes in La Villa (p. 12) by asking rhetorically, “How can [truth] be had except by means of discourse and leisure put to good use to acquire it?” By calling the leisure he associated with the pursuit of knowledge felice (happy) and productive of quiete d’animo (quiet of mind), Taegio was agreeing with Seneca, who “when in his Sabine [villa] … attended to his very honorable studies with happy leisure and great quiet of mind.” Taegio used the term tranquillità d’animo in connection with leisure as he described the the villa of Francesco Torniello: “He escapes to the sunny and very happy hill of Vergano, where with great tranquillity of mind he enjoys the freedoms and pleasures of the villa.” Taegio associated tranquillity of mind with the mythical golden age, as he penned these words (p. 16): “Hence if neither cities nor castles had ever been built, men living in the country with greatest concord and tranquillity of mind would pass their years in the manner in which the ancients did in the golden age.”201
For Taegio, the study of literature and philosophy constituted learning, and learning led to the kind of knowledge, “la cognitione del vero” (knowledge of the truth), that he called both “il fin dell’anima” (the spirit’s goal) and the highest pleasure. In La Villa (p. 147), at the beginning of the discussion of the three kinds of pleasure, Partenio says, “I don’t know anything more pleasing than learning, and while I read some book that satisfies me with noble food, I feel it nourishing my mind.” Near the conclusion of the same section, Vitauro tells Partenio that natural philosophy is the “appointed food for your mind.” According