Clusius, Carolus (Charles de l’Ecluse)
(1526-1609) Franco-Flemish physician and botanist
Clusius was born into a Lutheran family in Arras. From his travels in Spain, Portugal, France, Hungary, and Austria he introduced many new garden plants, especially bulbs, to western Europe. The imperial garden in Vienna, which he controlled from 1573 to 1587, was a source of plants from the East, including tulips from Turkey. Clusius was soon acknowledged by his contemporaries as the leading botanical authority of his day, and in addition to personal contacts made on his travels he had a network of correspondents throughout Europe. A number of the New World plants that he obtained were collected with the assistance of Sir Francis drake. He was an accomplished linguist and aided the circulation of fellow botanists’ vernacular works by publishing Latin translations or abridgments of them. Among texts to receive this treatment were two on Indian plants and spices: Garcia da Orta’s Portuguese Coloquios dos Simples, e Drogas he Cousas Medifinais da India (1563) and Cristoval Acosta’s Spanish Tractado de las Drogas y Medicinas de las Indias Orientales (1578), of which Clusius published abridgments in 1567 and 1582 respectively. He performed the same service in 1574 for a book on plants of the New World, Nicolas Monardes’ Dos Libros…de nuestras Indas Occidentales (two parts, 1569, 1571). His own first original work to be published was Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historia (1576), the fruit of a botanizing expedition he had made to Spain and Portugal. His magnum opus, Rariorum plantarum historia, was prepared during his years as professor at Leyden, where he re-planned the university’s botanic garden (Hortus Academicus) in 1594; it was published, as many of his books had been, by the Plantin press in 1601.
Cochlaeus, Johannes (Johann Dobneck)
(1479-1552) German humanist and Roman Catholic controversialist
He was born at Wendelstein, near Schwabach, and studied philosophy at Nuremberg (where he was a protege of pirckheimer) and Cologne. He was a Platonist and critical of the scholastics. About 1518 he was ordained priest in Rome, and from 1521 he was a bitter opponent of luther. In 1525 he strenuously opposed the printing of tyndale’s New Testament at Cologne. From 1526 he was a canon of Mainz, transferring to Meissen around 1535 and thence to Breslau (Wroclaw, now in Poland) in 1539. His history of the hussites in 12 books and his commentary on the words and deeds of Luther in the period 1517-46, both appeared in 1549.
Codussi, Mauro (Mauro Coducci)
(c. 1440-1504) Italian architect
Although he was born near Bergamo, Codussi was active from 1469 in Venice, where he developed a distinctive style based upon the classical architecture of Florence and central Italy. Early buildings included the church of San Michele in Isola (1469-79), which was the first Renaissance church in Venice. San Zaccaria (1483) and the Scuola Grande di San Marco (1485-95) are notable for their facades. The influence of alberti’s principles of architecture is evident in many of Codussi’s buildings, including his best-known edifices, the Torre dell’ Orologio (1496-99) and the Procurazie Vecchie (begun 1496) on the Piazza San Marco. Other major projects undertaken by Codussi were the churches of Sta. Maria Formosa (rebuilt 1492-1502) and San Giovanni Crisostomo (c. 1500), the latter being the first centrally planned Venetian church, the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista (1498), with its famous double staircase, and the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli (c. 1490) and Palazzo Vendramin-Calerghi (1501-09), both Lombardesque in style, but incorporating innovatory features, such as the free-standing classical orders on the facade of the latter palace.
Coecke van Aelst, Pieter
(1502-1550) Netherlands painter, print maker, and author
Coecke, who was born in Aelst, is believed to have studied under Bernard van orley and is recorded as a master at Antwerp in 1527. He visited Italy (c. 1530) and Istanbul (1533) and in 1535 may have accompanied Emperor Charles V on his Tunis campaign. He was still at Antwerp in 1544, but subsequently moved to Brussels, where he died. He had a large workshop with many pupils, including the young Pieter brueghel. His wife, Meyken Verhulst, was also an artist. No surviving paintings of Coecke’s can be identified with absolute certainty. His most famous composition, the Last Supper (c. 1527), is loosely based upon leonardo da vinci’s famous fresco; it exists in several versions, all possibly replicas of a lost original. Coecke’s numerous prints were highly influential and he also designed tapestries and stained glass. The drawings that he made in constantinople of the exotic costumes, rituals, and topography of the Ottoman capital may have been made with the idea of producing Flemish tapestries with Turkish subjects for the Ottoman market; his widow published them in the form of a much-reproduced series of woodcuts in 1553 (see illustration on p. 116). His most important work, however, was his summary of vitruvius’s book on architecture and his translation of the first part of serllo’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura e prospettiva (1539).
Coelho, Alonso Sanchez (Alonso Sanchez Coello)
(c. 1531-1588) Spanish painter of Portuguese extraction Born at Benifayo near Valencia, Sanchez Coelho was educated in Flanders and Portugal and later studied in Brussels, where he became a pupil of Antonio moro. In 1571 he succeeded his master as court painter to philip ii of Spain and established himself as a leading portraitist and royal favorite. Also influenced by Titian, he portrayed members of the Spanish court with great dignity and formality, as in his portraits of Elizabeth of Valois (c. 1560; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), Philip II (c. 1575; Prado, Madrid), and their daughter Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (1579; Prado, Madrid), later ruler of the Netherlands. Besides these portraits, which laid the foundation of the Spanish tradition of portraiture, Sanchez Coelho also produced a number of religious paintings for the Escorial, most of which were conventional and unremarkable. A portrait of St. Ignatius Loyola (1585) is now lost.
Colantonio (mid-15th century)
Italian painter Active in Naples from about 1440 to 1470, Colantonio was notable chiefly for his fusion of Flemish and Italian artistic styles. Colantonio was apparently familiar with the works of van eyck, among others, and employed many features of Flemish style in the extant paintings St. Vincent (c. 1456), painted for San Pietro Martire, and St. Jerome (Museo Nazionale, Naples), painted as part of an altar-piece for the church of San Lorenzo. A notable polyptych for San Severino is now lost. Colantonio’s successful blend of Flemish and Italian was subsequently imitated by his own pupil antonello da messina.
Colet, John
(c. 1467-1519) English humanist and educator
Born in London and educated at Oxford (1483-90), he went in 1493 to France and Italy to complete his studies; in Paris he met bude and in Florence he studied Plato and Plotinus. He also applied the newly discovered principles of textual criticism to the Church Fathers. In 1496 he returned to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he introduced the study of Greek. In 1499 he met erasmus at Oxford, subsequently exercising considerable influence on the lat-ter’s approach to the study of the Bible. In 1505 Henry VII made him dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and in 1509 he established St. Paul’s School, the largest Renaissance school to be founded in England. In his foundation statutes Colet decreed that "There shall be taught in the scole children of all nacions and contres indifferently." Such racial and religious tolerance was remarkable in 16th-century England. Colet’s approach to the Scriptures was to interpret them as living literature, going directly to the text rather than engaging in the mystical allegorization characteristic of Florentine Platonism.
John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. A 16th-century cast of the bust made for the cathedral by Pietro Torrigiano (1520s). This cast, which can be seen in St. Paul’s School, London, has stood in successive school buildings since before 1550.
Coligny, Admiral Gaspard de Chatillon
(1519-1572) French Huguenot leader in the Wars of Religion
He served in Italy and was colonel-general of the infantry before his appointment as admiral of France (1552). While a prisoner of war of Spain (1557-59), after the French defeat at st-quentin, Coligny converted to Calvinism. He endeavored to reach a compromise with the French monarchy, but after 1569 became the most important huguenot military leader. Although defeated by the Catholic forces at the battle of Poitou in August 1570, Col-igny managed to secure a reasonable compromise settlement under the treaty of St.-Germain the following year. He obtained considerable influence over the young king Charles IX, displacing the Catholic Guise faction at court, but his attempts to persuade Charles to send troops to the aid of the Dutch Protestants in their struggle against Spain alienated Charles’s mother and former regent catherine de’ medici. The guise family, who blamed Coligny for the assassination of Francis, Duke of Guise in 1563, made a botched assassination attempt on Coligny on August 22, 1572 and two days later ensured that he was one of the first Huguenots to die in the massacre of st. bartholomew.
Colleoni, Bartolommeo
(1400-1475) Italian condottiere Born near Bergamo, Colleoni first fought (1419) as a condottiere in southern Italy under the leadership of Braccio da Montone and then Muzio Attendolo (see sforza family). Colleoni served Venice on several occasions after 1431 and was highly esteemed for his skillful use of light field artillery. Anxious to retain the loyalty of such an able soldier, Venice made Colleoni its commander-in-chief (1454) and paid him lavishly. Colleoni lived luxuriously in his castle of Malpaga near Bergamo, where he received condottieri and also extended to artists and men of letters a cordial welcome that earned him a reputation as a patron of the arts. The famous bronze equestrian monument of Colleoni in Venice was created by verrocchio in 1485-88.
Colocci, Angelo
(1474-1547) Italian humanist Colocci was born at Iesi and from 1497 was a papal secretary, first to Leo X and then to Clement VII. According to Pomponius leto, Colocci was the true inspiration of Roman humanism. In 1537 he was made bishop of Nocera Umbra. He combined an interest in classical literature with a lively involvement in vernacular poetry, particularly the study of the origins of Italian poetry in Provence. He was himself a poet in both Latin and Italian and his house in Rome was a center for the discussion of literary theory and scholarship. He collected manuscripts and inscriptions but his collections suffered in the sack of Rome (1527). The surviving manuscripts are now in the Vatican library but the collection of inscriptions was dispersed. Colocci is a good example of the humanists’ ability to reconcile the demands of religious orthodoxy with allegiance to the values of the classical world.
Colombe, Michel
(1430/35-c. 1515) French sculptor Born in Brittany, Colombe was a member of a family of artists and brother of the miniaturist Jean Colombe (died 1529), who is associated with the Apocalypse manuscript in the Escorial (1482) and the completion of Les Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry (1485; Chantilly). Little is known of his early years, from which no works survive, and he is celebrated chiefly for just two sculptures. His masterpiece is the tomb (1502-07) of Francis II of Brittany and Marguerite de Foix in Nantes, with allegorical figures; his other work is the marble relief of St. George and the dragon (1508-09; Louvre, Paris) for the altarpiece of the chateau de Gaillon. The former of these works was designed by the sculptor Jean Perreal and also worked on by Girolamo da Fiesole; both works demonstrate Colombe’s successful combination of the French Gothic style with the artistic ideals of the Italians.
Colonia, Simon de
(died c. 1511) Spanish architect of German extraction
His father Juan (died 1481) came to Burgos in the 1440s and built the spires at the western end of the cathedral, and Simon succeeded his father in the post of master of the works there. His two chief monuments are the octagonal Capilla del Condestable (1482-94) at Burgos and the facade of the church of San Pablo, Valladolid (14901504), both in the early plateresque style. Simon’s son Francisco (died c. 1542) collaborated with him at Val-ladolid and succeeded him as master of works at Burgos (1511).
Colonna, Vittoria
(1492-1547) Italian poet A member of an illustrious Roman Ghibelline family, she was betrothed at the age of four and at 19 married to Fer-dinando d’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, to whom she was devoted. After his untimely death (1525) she lived mainly in convents, eventually settling in Rome; she became associated with religious reformers, though she remained within the Church through the influence of her adviser, Cardinal Reginald pole. Her many literary friendships and correspondents included Aretino, Bembo, Castiglione, Sannazaro, and particularly michelangelo, who addressed a number of poems and letters to her. Her own poems, Rime (published several times between 1538 and 1544), are mainly Petrarchan sonnets influenced by Bembo and are concerned with the memory of her husband and with Neoplatonic and religious subjects.
Colonna family
A noble Roman family, whose members were senators and cardinals from the 13th century. During the 14th century the Colonna’s bitterest rivals for power were the Caetani and Orsini families. As Pope Martin V (1417-31), Oddone Colonna increased his family’s wealth and power with generous grants of land in the Papal States. The next pope, eugenius iv (1431-47), tried unsuccessfully to force the family to return its estates, and over a century of bitter conflict with the papacy followed, especially when the borgia family was in the ascendancy. The power of the Colonna was eventually brought under control and the family was reconciled with the papacy in the later 16th century.
colossal order (giant order)
An architectural device in which columns or pilasters rise for more than one story in a facade. Originally devised by the Romans and used on such edifices as triumphal arches, the style was revived during the Renaissance, being reintroduced by Michelangelo who first incorporated it into the Capitol at Rome. After the Renaissance the colossal order was taken up by the Baroque movement and, later, by such 18th-century architects as Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor.
Columbus, Christopher (Cristoforo Colombo, Cristobal Colon)
(1451-1506) Italian explorer, credited with the discovery of the Americas
Columbus was born in Genoa and initially joined the family wool-weaving business, having received little education. At 14 he went to sea, and by 1477 had been to the Levant, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, and England. After settling in Lisbon, he married in 1479 and solicited patronage for an Atlantic expedition in search of a route to Asia. The king of Portugal refused, and Columbus left for Spain (1484). Through the aid of influential churchmen, Columbus eventually convinced Queen Isabella of the validity of his ideas; in turn, she persuaded King Ferdinand. On August 3, 1492 Columbus sailed from Saltes, an island near Palos, with 120 men and three small ships, led by the Santa Maria. He went first to the Canary Islands, then sailed westwards. In October he reached the Bahamas, much to the relief of his terrified crew. He proceeded to Cuba and Haiti (Hispaniola), where he founded the first Spanish settlement in the New World. On his return to Spain with gold, plants, birds, and six Indians, he was immediately made a grandee.
On September 24, 1493 Columbus set sail again. During the next three years he refounded the Hispaniola colony at Isabella and thoroughly explored and attempted to chart the West Indies. His third voyage in 1498 achieved landfall on the South American mainland, but mischief-makers persuaded Ferdinand to supplant Columbus as governor of Hispaniola, and Francisco de Bobadilla, the new governor, sent Columbus back to Spain in chains (1500). On his arrival, however, he was triumphantly vindicated, and in 1502 he set off to search for a route to Asia between Cuba and South America. This failed for obvious reasons, and Columbus returned (1504) to Spain much weakened in health. He died at Valladolid, but in 1542 his remains were transferred to Hispaniola.
Columbus’s own log of his first journey, or the paraphrase of it by Bartolome de las casas—opinions differ as to the status of the text—was edited and translated by J. H. Cohen along with other documents in The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1969). Columbus’s son Ferdinand (Fernando Colon) wrote the earliest biography of his father, translated into English by Benjamin Keen as
The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, by His Son Ferdinand (1959; 2nd ed., with new introduction, 1992). Since the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage his achievements have often been negatively reassessed; it has been pointed out that he was not the first European to reach the Americas and, irrationally, he is held responsible for the genocidal impact of the Spanish conquest upon the native Americans.
Comedy
There is little evidence of any significant staged comedy between the death of the Roman playwright terence (159 bce) and the late Middle Ages, when comic elements reemerged in the rough clowning that formed part of the mystery play and in the comic Vice of the morality play and the later interlude. In these, comic passages ridiculed everyday foibles, favorite subjects being love and money—that is, infidelity and financial chicanery. In France, the Feast of Fools was introduced in cathedral liturgies between Christmas and the Octave of the Epiphany (January 13) and gave an opportunity to the lower clergy to poke fun at their superiors with a parody sermon (sermon joyeux), an ass led into the church to add its bray to the responses, and other farcical proceedings. Secular farces, of which some 150 examples (each about 500 lines of octosyllabic verse) survive, evolved from these origins in France. Although there were doubtless many comic performances of some kind in the 14th and 15th centuries, they were apparently not considered worth preserving and documentation is therefore scarce. Under the auspices of the chambers of rhetoric medieval farce persisted well into the 16th century in the Netherlands; several such farces, known as esbattements, in a collection from this period made in Haarlem are representative of the genre. Furthermore, as with tragedy, comedy was not in the medieval view conceived of as a dramatic production. The statement by Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1190-c. 1264) in the Speculum maius, that a comedy is a poem which begins in misfortune and concludes happily, is the same general conception echoed by Dante in explaining the purpose of the Divine Comedy (Epistle to Cangrande). Chaucer’s one use of the word, at the end of Troilus and Criseyde (V 1788), reflects a similar understanding.
The revival of theatrical comedy in the Renaissance can be traced to the production in Ferrara in 1486 by Duke Ercole d’Este of plautus’s Menaechmi. ariosto, who was taken to this performance by his father, subsequently supervised theatricals at the Este court and took Roman comedy as his model, first in La cassaria (1508). The com-media erudita was soon well established in Italy and with the rise of the commedia dell’arte a rich and varied theatrical tradition emerged, with fruitful interaction between the two types of comedy. Productions in Latin or translations or adaptations of Plautus and Terence were common elsewhere as well in the early 16th century. In England henry viii ordered two performances of Plautus in 1526 as part of an entertainment for the French ambassador, and the boys of St. Paul’s School acted Terence’s Phormio before Cardinal Wolsey. In France ronsard translated Aristophanes’ Plutus and Etienne jodelle is credited with the first French comedy, Eugene (1552). Jacques grevin, Jean de la taille, Remy belleau, and Jean-Antoine de baif also adapted Plautus and Terence directly or were influenced by them via Italian works. Other early translators or adapters include Jean Meschinot (c. 142091), Octavien Saint-Gelais (1468-1502), and Charles Esti-enne (1504-64). Most French comedy before Moliere was written in octosyllabic verse, but the prose comedies of La Taille, Pierre de larivey, and Adrien tournebe are notable exceptions.
In Spain, Bartolome de torres naharro distinguished (in Propalladia, 1517) two types of play: the co-media a noticia (comedy of wit, emphasizing plot and intrigue) and the comedia de apariencia (or de tramoya or de ruido), the comedy of spectacle depending on stage machinery, scene changes, etc. The former type flourished in the voluminous work of Lope de vega, whose thoroughly anti-classical recommendations in Arte nuevo de hacer co-medias (c. 1607) include mixing comic and tragic elements and ignoring the unities.
In England the earliest important works are Nicholas udall’s classical academic comedy Ralph Roister Doister (written c. 1553), Gammer Gurton’s Needle (performed 1566), and George Gascoigne’s Supposes (performed 1566), the first surviving prose comedy, which Gascoigne adapted from Ariosto’s I suppositi. All three were first produced in an academic setting: in a London school, at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and at Gray’s Inn, respectively. Otherwise the works of shakespeare and Ben jon-son, written for the public theater or court performance, overshadow other English comedies. It has been noted that Shakespeare wrote every type of comedy—Plautine, romantic, pastoral, farce and the "dark" comedies—except satirical. This gap was filled by Jonson, whose plays are perhaps the best illustrations of the most common Renaissance view of comedy: a strong emphasis on its reformatory function in mercilessly exposing and ridiculing the vices and follies of man. Not only did Jonson observe the rules of classical construction, but he also developed a theoretical framework for his satire in the early comedies of humors and went on to write two of the comic masterpieces of the English theater, Volpone (performed 1606; printed 1607) and The Alchemist (performed 1610; printed 1612).
