Rituals, Images, and Words: The Varieties of Cultural Expression In Late Medieval And Early Modern Europe [Illustrated] 250350907X, 9782503509075

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RITUALS, IMAGES, AND WORDS Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 3

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KATERN 1

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LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES Editorial board under the auspices of The Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Ian Moulton (Arizona State University) Frederick Kiefer (University of Arizona) Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) Charles Zika (University of Melbourne)

Advisory Board Jaynie Anderson (University of Melbourne) John Cashmere (La Trobe University) Megan Cassidy Welch (University of Melbourne) Albrecht Classen (University of Arizona) Robert W. Gaston (La Trobe University) John Griffiths (University of Melbourne) Anthony Gully (Arizona State University) Bill Kent (Monash University) Anne Scott (Northern Arizona University) Juliann Vitullo (Arizona State University) Emil Volek (Arizona State University) Retha Warnicke (Arizona State University)

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RITUALS, IMAGES, AND WORDS Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe Edited by

F. W. Kent and Charles Zika

H

F

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rituals, images and words : varieties of cultural expression in late medieval and early modern Europe. (Late medieval and early modern studies ; 3) 1.Communication and culture - Europe - History - 16th century 2.Communication and culture - Europe - History 17th century 3.Communication and culture - Europe - History - To 1500 4.Communication and culture - Italy - History 16th century 5.Communication and culture - Italy - History - 17th century 6.Communication and culture - Italy History - To 1500 7.Renaissance 8.Renaissance - Italy I.Kent, F. W. (Francis William), 1942- II.Zika, Charles 940.2'1 ISBN-10: 250350907X

© 2005, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2005/0095/15 ISBN: 2-503-50907-X Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper.

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Contents

Contributors

ix

Figures

xiii

Acknowledgements

xix

Introduction F. W. KENT AND CHARLES ZIKA

1

Part One: Religious Rituals The Religious Confraternities of High Renaissance Florence: Crisis or Continuity?

9

NICHOLAS ECKSTEIN

The Death of a Heretic, Florence 1389

33

NICHOLAS SCOTT BAKER

Cultivating Charisma: Elisabeth de Ranfaing and the Médailliste Cult in Seventeenth-Century Lorraine

55

SARAH FERBER

Part Two: The Rhetoric of the Image Affective Devotion and the Early Dominicans: The Case of Fra Angelico ROBERT W. GASTON

87

Art History and the Resistant Presence of a Saint — The chiesa vecchia Frescoes at Rome’s Tor de’ Specchi

119

CYNTHIA TROUP

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Contents

vi Separating the Men from the Boys: Masculinities in Early Quattrocento Florence and Donatello’s Saint George

147

PATRICIA SIMONS

Henry VII’s ‘miraculum orbis’: Royal Commemoration at Westminster Abbey 1500–1700

177

PETER SHERLOCK

Gardens of Love in Venetian Painting of the Quattrocento

201

JAYNIE ANDERSON

The Witch of Endor: Transformations of a Biblical Necromancer in Early Modern Europe

235

CHARLES ZIKA

Part Three: The Written and Oral Word Iustus ut palma florebit: Pier Soderini and Florentine Justice

263

LORENZO POLIZZOTTO

Personal Literary Anthologies in Renaissance Florence: Re-Presenting Current Events to Conform to Christian, Classical and Civic Ideals

277

DALE KENT

The Fear of Schism

297

PETER HOWARD

The Literary Career of Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653): The Constraints of Gender and the Writing Woman

325

STEPHEN KOLSKY

Style and Substance in the Early Writings of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola W. G. CRAVEN

343

An Insatiable Appetite for News: Isabella d’Este and a Bolognese Correspondent

375

CAROLYN JAMES

Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive in the Time of Lorenzo de’ Medici F. W. KENT

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Contents

vii

The Younger Castracani

405

LOUIS GREEN

Index

427

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Contributors

JAYNIE ANDERSON has been Herald Chair of Fine Arts in the University of Melbourne from 1997. She has published many books and articles on Venetian painting, including ‘Giorgione the Painter of Poetic Brevity’ (1997), and ‘Tiepolo’s Cleopatra’ (2003). She is one of the curators for the forthcoming exhibition, ‘Bellini, Giorgione and Titian: The Renaissance of Venetian Painting’, scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Washington in June 2006, and in October 2006 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. She is convenor of the 32nd International Congress of Art History, Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, to be held at the University of Melbourne in January 2008. NICHOLAS SCOTT BAKER is a cultural historian of early modern Europe, with a particular interest in Renaissance Italy. He received a BA (Hons) and an MA from the University of Melbourne. He is currently a PhD candidate at Northwestern University. His dissertation focuses on the social culture and identity of the Florentine patriciate during the transition from a republic to a monarchy in the early sixteenth century. BILL CRAVEN taught Renaissance Italy and Early Modern Europe in the former History Department, Faculty of Arts, at the Australian National University for nearly thirty years. His contribution to this volume was written while he was a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts. His article ‘Coluccio Salutati’s Defence of Poetry’ appeared in Renaissance Studies, 10 (1996); ‘Vanities, Bonfires and Popular Religious Culture’ appeared in Our Medieval Heritage: Essays in Honour of John Tillotson, edited by Linda Rasmussen, Valerie Spear and Dianne Tillotson (Merton Priory Press, 2002). NICHOLAS ECKSTEIN is the Cassamarca Lecturer in Italian Renaissance History at the University of Sydney, and a former Fellow and Visiting Professor of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. He is the

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contributing editor of a volume of collected essays in the Villa I Tatti series, The Brancacci Chapel: A Symposium on Form, Function and Setting (Florence: Olschki, 2005), and is currently completing the manuscript of a monograph on the same subject. SARAH FERBER is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Queensland, where she teaches early modern European history and the history of modern bioethics. Her book Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France was published by Routledge in 2004. ROBERT GASTON (PhD, The Warburg Institute, The University of London) teaches art history at La Trobe University, specializing in Italian art 1300–1650, and in aspects of the classical tradition. He is currently completing a book on decorum, a jointly authored volume on liturgical change in San Lorenzo, Florence, 1370–1509, and two volumes on Pirro Ligorio’s antiquarian manuscripts for the Edizione Nazionale of Ligorio’s writings. He has held senior research fellowships at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. Among his recent publications is: ‘Eleonora of Toledo’s Chapel: Lineage, Salvation, and the War against the Turks’, in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 157–80.

is Senior Lecturer in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University. He has published in the area of medieval sermon studies, and the Florentine Renaissance, including Beyond the Written: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus 1427–1459 (Florence: Olschki, 1995). His current research and publications relate to ‘the aural space of the sacred’ in Renaissance Florence, the relationship of preaching to the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel at the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, the Botticelli frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, liturgy and devotion at San Lorenzo, the letters of Archbishop Antoninus and the cura animarum, and a book-length study of spirituality and devotion in Renaissance Florence. He has held fellowships at the European University Institute, Florence, the Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, Bologna, and ‘Villa I Tatti’: the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. PETER HOWARD

LOUIS GREEN,

formerly Reader in History at Monash University, has worked on the political history and historiography of Florence and Lucca in the fourteenth century, having published Chronicle into History (1972), Castruccio Castracani (1986), and Lucca under Many Masters (1995). More recently he has been examining the relationship between the literary culture of northern and central Italy in the later Middle Ages and its social background and, having written several articles on this subject, is currently engaged in the preparation of a book Towards the Renaissance,

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which aims to trace the interconnections between changing conditions in this region over this period and the innovations in outlook which emerged during it. His contribution to this volume, however, reflects his earlier interest in developments in the city of Lucca in the mid to late trecento. CAROLYN JAMES is Cassamarca Lecturer in Italian Studies in the School of Historical Studies, Monash University. In 2002, while a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard University Centre for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, in Florence, she began a research project exploring the political role of princely consorts in Renaissance Italy. She is currently analysing the correspondence of Isabella d’Este, the self-styled first woman of the Renaissance, and her husband Francesco Gonzaga. She is also preparing a translation of the two hundred and fifty surviving letters of Margherita Datini to be published in the series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret King and Albert Rabil for the University of Chicago Press. DALE KENT is Professor of History at the University of California at Riverside, and author of The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence 1426–1434 (1978), Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century, with F. W. Kent (1982), and Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (2000). She is currently preparing a study of society, culture and politics entitled Fathers and Friends: Patronage and Patriarchy in Early Medicean Florence. F. W. KENT

is Professor of History and Australian Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University. He was the foundation director of the Monash University Centre in Prato, and has recently taken up the general editorship of the multi-volume critical edition of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s letters. A specialist in the social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy, especially Florence, he published Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Johns Hopkins University Press) in 2004.

STEPHEN KOLSKY is Associate Professor in Italian Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has recently published with Brepols The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in the Italian Renaissance (2005). He has published widely in the field of Italian Renaissance studies and is currently working on a monograph on Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and the debate on women in the early sixteenth century. LORENZO POLIZZOTTO is a Professorial Fellow in the Department of European Languages and Studies at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of The Elect Nation: The Piagnoni Movement in Florence 1494–1545; La missione di G. Savonarola in Firenze; and The Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence.

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PETER SHERLOCK is an Australia Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne, investigating the relationship between memory and identity in early modern England. He has recently published articles in Gender and History and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and is working on a book entitled Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England.

is Professor in History of Art at the University of Michigan and the author of many articles on gender and sexuality in the Italian Renaissance. Those essays have treated such issues as portraiture of women, the construction of masculinity, the visual representation of chess, lesbian visibility in the Renaissance, and ‘Anatomical Secrets: Pudenda and the Pudica Gesture’, in Das Geheimnis am Beginn der europäischen Moderne, edited by Gisela Engel and others (2002). She continues to work on ocular politics and rhetorics of sexuality. PAT SIMONS

CYNTHIA TROUP’s

historical research is currently focussed on the devotional culture of the Tor de’ Specchi in Rome. She is completing a PhD in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, where she has been involved in teaching European and Italian Renaissance History. She has taught art history in the Department of Theory of Art and Design at Monash University, and as guest lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of Melbourne. In 1995 she received an inaugural Australian Foundation for Studies in Italy award, which made possible the commencement of her research in Rome. Her publications include the study The Image as Body: Reflections on Language and Art Restoration through Neri di Bicci’s ‘Ricordanze 1453–75 (Melbourne: Monash Publications in History, 1998); two previous articles on aspects of the cult of Santa Francesca Romana, and numerous articles and essays in the fields of contemporary art, music, and performance.

CHARLES ZIKA is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. His research is in late medieval and early modern German history, and has included areas such as humanism and magic, religious practices and authority, moral order and celebration, and the European witch-hunt. His most recent book is Exorcising our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

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Figures

Gaston, Affective Devotion and the Early Dominicans 1.

Fra Angelico, Christ on the Cross between the Virgin and Cardinal Torquemada and Saint John the Evangelist. Tempera on wood panel, c. 1446. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, the Hervey E. Wetzel Bequest Fund.

2.

Unknown artist, The Crucified Christ. Woodcut from Johannes de Turrecremata, Meditationes, 1467. Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Inc. 4. 2. By permission of the Stadtbibliothek, Nuremberg.

3.

Fra Angelico, The Mocking of Christ. Fresco. Convento di San Marco, Florence. Photograph courtesy of Alinari, Florence.

Troup, Art History and the Resistant Presence of a Saint 1.

Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Virgin and Child with Saints Benedict and Francesca Romana. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome.

2.

Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Francesca Romana Heals Ianni, Injured in the Leg. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome.

3.

Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Death of Francesca Romana. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome.

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Figures

xiv 4.

Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Francesca Romana Heals the Injured Arm of a Poor Man. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome.

5.

Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Francesca Romana’s Ecstasy in the Vineyard. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome.

Simons, Separating the Men from the Boys 1.

Donatello, St. George. Statue, with base relief of ‘St. George Killing the Dragon’ and gable relief of ‘God the Father Blessing’. Marble, c. 1415–17. Or San Michele, Florence (Photograph courtesy of Alinari, Florence / Art Resource, New York).

2.

Donatello, St. George. Marble, c. 1415–17. By permission of the Museo Nazionale, Florence.

3.

Donatello, St. George. Marble, c. 1415–17. By permission of the Museo Nazionale, Florence.

Anderson, Gardens of Love 1.

Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, The Garden of Love. Oil, tempera, and gold on panel, c. 1465–70. By permission of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

2.

Studio of Antonio Vivarini, A Trellis of Roses in the Garden of Love. Tempera on panel, c. 1465–70. Collection of Pietro and Tatiana Scarpa, Venice.

3.

John Payne’s reconstruction of the six figures in the painting of The Garden of Love, following his restoration in 1994.

4.

Detail of the protagonists on the right-hand side of The Garden of Love (fig. 1 above).

5.

Detail of the protagonists on the left-hand side of The Garden of Love (fig. 1 above).

6.

Detail of the allegorical female figure of Fortune upon the fountain in The Garden of Love (fig. 1 above).

7.

X-ray of the right-hand side of The Garden of Love (fig. 1 above).

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Figures

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8.

Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini (attributed in Baltimore to the Master of the Stories of Helen), The Meeting and Elopement of Paris and Helen (currently titled The Embarkation of Helen for Cythera), in The Legend of Paris and Helen. Panel painting, c. 1440–70. By permission of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

9.

Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini (attributed in Baltimore to the Master of the Stories of Helen), Reception of Helen at Troy by Priam and Hecuba (currently titled The Abduction of Helen and Companions) in The Legend of Paris and Helen. Panel painting, c. 1440–70. By permission of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

10. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini (attributed in Baltimore to the Master of the Stories of Helen), The Departure of the Trojan Women from Troy (currently titled Reception of Helen at Troy by Priam etc.) in The Legend of Paris and Helen. Panel painting, c. 1440–70. By permission of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 11. Attributed to Baccio Baldini, Garden of Love. Engraving, c. 1460. By permission of the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. 12. Unknown artist, Lovers in a Garden. French ivory comb, fourteenth century. By permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 13. Unknown artist, The Lover Asks to Enter the Garden of Deduit. Manuscript illumination from a Parisian Le Roman de la Rose, c. 1400. British Library, London, MS Egerton 1069, fol. 1r. 14. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, St. Apollonia Destroys an Idol. Wood, c. 1460. By permission of the Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. 15. Hans Sebald Beham, Fountain of Youth-Bathhouse. Woodcut from four blocks, first state, c. 1531. By permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 16. Hans Sebald Beham, The Bath. Octagonal engraving, c. 1531. By permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 17. Unknown artist, The Emperor Jahangir Celebrating the Festival of Holi with the Ladies of the Zenana. Miniature in watercolour and gold, c. 1800. By permission of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. 18. Antonio da Negroponte (the lunette being an addition in the style of Benedetto Diana). Altarpiece, c. 1460. Church of San Francesco della Vigna, Venice.

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19. Attributed to Liberale da Verona, The Abduction of Helen, c. 1470. By permission of the Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon. 20. Florentine School, The Abduction of Helen. Dodecagonal, c. 1440. Private collection. 21. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, Susanna and the Elders. By permission of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. 22. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, Ancient Hero identified as Julius Caesar. Oil on wood panel, c. 1465. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Alpheus Hyatt Fund. 23. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, Lady with Unicorn. Tempera on panel, c. 1465. Keresztény Múzeum, Arnold Ipolyi Collection, Esztergom. 24. Giacomo Jaquerio, The Garden of Love. Fresco, c. 1420. Castello della Manta, near Saluzzo (Piemonte).

Zika, The Witch of Endor 1.

The Witch of Endor Conjures the Ghost of Samuel for King Saul. Manuscript illumination in The Tickhill Psalter, early fourteenth century. New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, MS 26, fol. 43r.

2.

Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder, The Witch of Endor Conjures Samuel from the Tomb. Woodcut in Die gantz Bibel Alt unnd Neüw Testament (Strasbourg: Wolfgang Köpfl, 1530), fol. 49r. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek [Bibel S 4˚ 7].

3.

Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, Saul and the Witch of Endor. Oil on wood, 1526. By permission of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

4.

Master I. T. [Johann Teufel?], Conjured by the Witch of Endor, Samuel Addresses King Saul. Woodcut in Biblia Das ist: die gantze heilige Schrifft Deudsch. D. Mart. Luth. (Wittenberg: Hans Krafft, 1572), vol. 1, fol. 197r. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek [Bibel-S 2º 42:1]

5.

Christoph Murer, The Witch of Endor, her Familiar Spirit and Saul. Woodcut in Novae Sacrorum Bibliorum figurae versibus Latinis et Germanicis expositae…Durch M. Samuelem Glonerum Poëtam Laureatum (Strasbourg: Christoph von der Heyden, 1625), p. 102. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek [B graph. 1625 03].

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Figures

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6.

Joachim Sandrart, The Witch of Endor Conjures Samuel. Woodcut in Ganz neue Biblische Bilder-Ergötzung Dem Alter und Der Jugend Zur Beschauung und Erbauung (Nuremberg: Johann Andreae Endter and Sons, 1710), p. 254. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek [B graph. 1710 01].

7.

Monogrammist VW, The Witch of Endor Conjures up Samuel for Saul with the Assistance of the Devil. Woodcut in Biblia, Das ist Die gantze Schrifft, Altes und Neues Testaments Teutsch Herrn D. Martin Luthers S. (Nuremberg: Wolfgang Endter, 1656), p. 276. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek [Bb deutsch 1656 01].

8.

Johann Heinrich Schönfeldt, Saul and the Witch of Endor. Engraving with additions in pen, ink, and grey wash, c. 1670. By permission of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung, Stuttgart.

9.

Melchior Küsel, The Witch of Endor Conjures up Evil Spirits. Engraving in Icones Biblicae Veteris et Novi Testmenti (Augsburg: [n. pub.], 1679). Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek [Ba graph 1679 01].

10. William Faithorne, King Saul Bows before Samuel. Frontispiece engraving in Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus; or Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions. In Two Parts. The First Treating of their Possibility, The Second of their Real Existence (London: [n. pub.] 1681). London, British Library [719.h.4]. By permission of the British Library. 11. Unknown artist, The Witch of Endor Conjures Samuel from the Tomb. Frontispiece engraving in Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus: Oder Vollkommener und klarer Beweiss Von Hexen und Gespenstern Oder Geister-Erscheinungen; in zween Theilen verfasset (Hamburg: Gottfried Libernickel, 1701). Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek.

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Acknowledgements

T

here are a number of people to acknowledge and thank for their involvement and assistance with this collection. Two who were very supportive in the early planning stages, but could not ultimately contribute to the book, were Bernadette Paton and Adrienne Cameron. Editorial assistance was provided at different stages by Katharina Weiss, Nick Baker, Cynthia Troup and especially by Katie Oppel. Without Katie’s editorial and administrative skills, the volume was unlikely to have made it to production, and certainly not in as good a shape as it did. We are thankful for her discerning judgement and keen eye. Generous financial subsidies for publication of the book came from the Publication Sub-Committee, from the Research and Graduate Studies Committee of the Faculty of Arts, and from the Department of History at the University of Melbourne, as well as from Monash University Publications Grants Committee. We are grateful for their generosity. Finally we thank the individual contributors to the volume, not only for their scholarly essays but also for their patience; and Brepols for taking on the book in the first place.

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Introduction F. W. KENT AND CHARLES ZIKA

T

he present collection of essays is a tribute by ex-students and colleagues to the late Ian Robertson, who taught in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne from 1961 until 1997, when he took early retirement. A very fastidious and even reticent scholar, Robertson neither published profusely nor networked assiduously. Melbourne and Rome remained the twin axes of both his personal life and his academic career, and as he grew older he seldom strayed from either; whether to visit friends in Sydney or Adelaide or to see exhibitions and attend conferences in Florence or Bologna. Abroad, however, he enjoyed a sure reputation among specialists as a learned student of the fifteenthcentury papacy and papal states — his recent Tyranny under the Mantle of St Peter: Pope Paul II and Bologna will bring his name to a wider audience — while at home in Australia he was much admired as a teacher who inspired generations of Melbourne University students to undertake research in Italian Renaissance studies in particular, and late medieval and early modern European history more generally. Ian Robertson did this, in part, by arousing among his undergraduates a certain awe at his grave and almost priestly ministration of the rites of high Renaissance scholarship, an awe that, if it perhaps discouraged the faint-hearted, nurtured in a surprisingly large number of disciples a desire to spend the rest of their lives seeking to penetrate the mysteries to which his teaching had introduced them: hence the present volume. And, what is more impressive, it was as an undergraduate teacher that he had this fateful impact. During his entire career, Robertson supervised only a handful of master’s theses, preferring, in the older Australian way, to send research students overseas, above all to the United Kingdom, to undertake their doctoral studies. This modesty about his own capacities as a supervisor, for such it was, meant that only indirectly was he able to reap and enjoy the fruits whose seeds he had sown. He did not live to see the present book, but it is some consolation to its

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2

F. W. KENT AND CHARLES ZIKA

authors that before his death in January 2004 he was shown the list of contributors and a pre-publication advertisement mentioning him by name.1 Ian Robertson began his distinguished teaching career at a time of sea-change in Anglophone Italian Renaissance studies, when the meeting of older and newer traditions allowed fresh ideas and energies to be released. He himself had just completed a B. Phil. at Oxford under the supervision of John Hale, and therefore belonged to a venerable tradition of British scholarship; despite himself, in a sense, for it has to be said he remained ambivalent about Oxford and his English years. His own life-long engagement with papal and ecclesiastical history, and with the institutional politics of the Italian principalities, reflected some of the main concerns of this illustrious school, the interim achievements of which were, as it happens, in effect summed up in the year before he took up his Melbourne appointment in a volume that quickly became a classic, and as such is still required reading: Italian Renaissance Studies: A Tribute to the Late Cecilia M. Ady, edited by E. F. Jacob, with a biographical note on that doyenne of Oxford Italianists by John Hale.2 Those in Robertson’s first classes in the early sixties, some of them contributors to this volume, needed little encouragement to fall greedily upon this collection of essays. But there was a tempting, in some respects more varied, menu becoming available, of which he also invited us to partake. Younger North American historians — among the favourites were Gene Brucker and Marvin Becker — were publishing memorable studies on Florence and other (mainly republican) city-states, and by the end of the decade these had become part of the staple diet. Trained or inspired by a celebrated generation of émigré scholars such as Hans Baron, whose early essays in English we devoured avidly if somewhat bemusedly in those waxen pre-Xerox copies, these historians immersed themselves in the archives, often in neglected sources, thereby creating, for a generation of Australians at least, a new sense of the complexity of the social and other forces informing Italian Renaissance political, religious and intellectual history. With Ian Robertson, and in a state of high excitement, we read as much of both this new and the more traditional work as we could, perforce scrambling to brush up on, or learn from scratch, the requisite languages; for Ian quite took it for granted that an intellectually ambitious undergraduate read Italian as well as the French usually learned in Australian high schools, and that anyone who had not had the linguistic good fortune to attend a Roman Catholic secondary college was busily rehearsing the conjugations of Latin verbs rather than listening to records of the Beatles or Bob Dylan. Just as his teaching recognized, indeed encouraged, this confluence of scholarly traditions and concerns in Renaissance studies in the 1960s, so this volume of essays by his

1

For an obituary by Charles Zika and Ian Britain, see The Age (Melbourne), 12 April 2004.

2

Italian Renaissance Studies: A Tribute to the Late Cecilia M. Ady, ed. by E. F. Jacob (London: Faber and Faber, 1960).

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Introduction

3

students and colleagues, young and old, reflects continuities and changes in the field over the forty-odd years of Ian Robertson’s pedagogic life. The continuing prominence of themes and approaches important to the contributors to Cecilia Ady’s festschrift would have pleased the recipient of this one, for he loved good and enduring traditions, whether they were scholarly, culinary, musical or liturgical. Although the particular fascination with Florentine and Venetian republican history from the 1960s onwards is appropriately represented here by some eight essays on the former and two on the latter city, Robertson would have approved the persistence of academic interest in other Italian centres as well — his beloved Rome, Lucca, Ferrara and Bologna —with their distinctive institutional and cultural histories; and would have appreciated, too, the continuing engagement of one ex-student with the philosophy of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, with which we had struggled in his classes. The long-standing British concern with the reception of the Italian Renaissance at home (the young Robertson had written his honours thesis on an aspect of the English Renaissance) lives on, too, in the present volume, although in E. F. Jacob’s phrase it remains ‘a corolla perhaps rather than a catena’.3 Jacob pointed out that Cecilia Ady’s combining ‘archival scholarship and artistic interpretation’ demonstrated ‘the breadth of her historical outlook’.4 This catholic approach to evidence and its many uses, what we now call inter- or multidisciplinarity, above all a disinclination to draw sharp distinctions between history and art history, flourishes still in a number of the present essays, as it does in Renaissance and early modern studies at large. There is, furthermore, perhaps even more reliance here than in 1960 on archival scholarship. In particular, one finds a new willingness to explore more personal and informal documentary sources as well as the public documents that were the staple of traditional historiography. Unpublished and previously unread documents suggest new historical themes, novel ideas and methodologies; in effect, they create the documents their working out and elaboration demand. The present volume is replete with scholarly concerns that would not and could not have mattered to the generation of Cecilia Ady, her colleagues and students. There is, for example, the desire to define and understand Renaissance religiosity and spirituality rather than to concentrate on ecclesiastical organization and official ideas, an impulse Ian Robertson, who for his whole life was absorbed in both subjects, fostered enthusiastically. If Renaissance civilization appeared rather secular in character in the interpretations of some scholars in the middle of last century, Robertson was never of this persuasion and welcomed the inevitable reaction that followed, when in the 1970s historians such as Richard Trexler so to speak reconsecrated the Renaissance. One finds in this volume, too, a sharp interest in questions of gender and cultural production, such as properly preoccupy contemporary scholarship, and a commitment to exploring the lives and 3

Italian Renaissance Studies, p. 17.

4

Italian Renaissance Studies, p. 16.

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mentalities of the popular classes, including those people marginalized by Renaissance institutions by reason of gender or religion. There is a sophisticated self-consciousness about their field of study displayed by several contributors, who tackle the issues that concern them by way of rigorous historiographical analyses. For better or for worse, however, Jacob’s conscientious determination, so typical of the period in which he wrote, to explore the conceptual question, ‘What was the Renaissance?’,5 in particular to ask, ‘What was its relationship to the medieval period?’, finds no historiographical counterpart almost half a century on. There is tacit agreement that Renaissance achievements (and dilemmas) cannot be at all easily disentangled from their late medieval precursors; and many contemporary scholars, including the editors of this volume, have banished the adjective ‘Renaissance’ altogether, even as a convenient term of periodization, substituting for it ‘late medieval’ and ‘early modern’. Robertson paved the way here too, always at pains to insert apostrophes around ‘Renaissance’, in order to signal his use of it as a semantic construction. As the term ‘early modern’ implies, the chronological borders of the traditional ‘Renaissance’ period have been expanded to colonize large tracts of the seventeenth century. Much of the best work by younger scholars, indeed, is now concentrated on the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, on northern Europe as well as Italy, rather than on the old Renaissance heartland of the Italian quattrocento, a trend reflected in the present book. This is, then, like the shifting fields of study with which it is concerned, to some extent a disparate collection of essays. However, the editors believe that one can discern a unifying focus in this ‘salad of many herbs’, to quote one of the canonical figures of the Italian quattrocento:6 an emphasis on cultural communication within different European societies over the period c. 1400–1650 that reflects a recent historiographical shift in the understanding of past societies in general. It is an understanding that emphasizes interaction and performance over structure and norm; that concentrates more on the instruments and processes by which social and cultural meanings and values are communicated and enacted than on the institutions and organizations which gave them voice. The tripartite organization of the volume seeks to make manifest this focus on the processes of cultural communication in late medieval and early modern European societies. The first part identifies different ways in which religious rituals could communicate the most intense and deeply held values of certain communities and individuals, while the second explores the rhetoric of the image, in particular the disparate functions images might have as they served to mediate particular attitudes and beliefs and to legitimize certain social and religious groups. Part 3 considers some different ways in which words, either in 5

Italian Renaissance Studies, pp. 15–47.

6

Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, ‘Il Zibaldone Quaresimale’, ed. by A. Perosa (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1960), p. 2.

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written or oral form, were employed rhetorically by various groups in Italian society to communicate ideals and values, establish relationships or define enmities, and consolidate power. It goes without saying that all of this is research in progress, for the lot of historians is a happy one precisely because their work is never done. We approach the past in a humble and provisional spirit of docta ignorantia, that learned ignorance that Robertson, devoted to Nicholas of Cusa both in his spiritual life and his academic career, enjoined his students to emulate.

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Part One Religious Rituals

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The Religious Confraternities of High Renaissance Florence: Crisis or Continuity? NICHOLAS ECKSTEIN

T

he religious confraternities of Florence were voluntary associations of men and women who met regularly to worship, pray for the souls of deceased members, bury their dead, administer testamentary bequests, and to educate and edify the populace in matters pertaining to the good Christian life. A great part of the population belonged to one or more of these societies, but the lives of all citizens — whether or not they belonged — were influenced by the confraternities’ activities. Like all Western contemporaries, Italians of this period operated within a religious frame of reference that subsumed the secular within the sacred. The confraternities of Florence played a central role in expressing the religious values of the age, and in particular in promoting to member and non-member alike the ideal of a unified Christian ethos which laid particular emphasis on charitable works. Indeed, the vital importance of the confraternities in creating and transforming the city’s culture of lay piety and devotion, and in sacralizing everyday experience, provides an essential context for understanding the social relations that linked contemporary Florentines of every social rank. Despite the enormous amount of work carried out in the field of Italian confraternity studies, there is no thoroughgoing treatment of this theme for Florence in the period after 1500, and no methodologically up-to-date analysis that would occupy the place that Brian Pullan’s magisterial study of organized charity filled in Venetian historiography at the time of its publication in 1971.1 Indeed, despite the

I would like to thank Michèle Mulchahey for her valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay. 1 Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

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existence of rich collections of manuscript sources in the Florentine State Archives and other of the city’s great manuscript collections, historians have paid relatively less attention to sixteenth-century Florentine confraternities than to their antecedents in earlier phases of the city’s history.2 The combination of historical continuity and cataclysmic change that characterizes the sixteenth century means that the historian can take very little for granted on the basis of evidence drawn from the trecento and quattrocento. The lack of emphasis on the cinquecento is therefore serious. The social context in which the confraternities operated was often so different from that of the quattrocento that we must continuously guard against the temptation to second-guess the meaning of sources that are apparently identical to those from the previous century. On the other hand, the historian needs to be particularly vigilant in not assuming that all areas of life were necessarily and suddenly transformed.3 The theological imperatives that underpinned so much of the confraternities’ institutional life remained in many respects the same. One can, for instance, point to continuity in the process by which the voluntarist programme of corporate charity typical of the late medieval confraternity was turned into a state-run programme of philanthropy. This was not a sudden development, nor was it a betrayal of the ‘classic’ corporate spirit of late medieval piety. It is a trend whose beginnings are discernible at least as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century, and in many ways its realization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have pleased rather than dismayed the late medieval membership, whose fondest wish was to create a society which institutionalized at the highest level the Franciscan charity which was the motivating spirit of their confraternities.4

2

Though see now Lorenzo Polizzotto, Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence, 1427–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The most important analysis of the Florentine confraternities written in the last generation is that by Ronald Weissman: Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982). Weissman devotes his last two chapters to the changes that affected Florentine confraternities from the end of the fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The centre of gravity of this study is before 1500, however, and as I argue below, there are problems with his interpretation which have remained unaddressed. 3

On changes in confraternal devotion in Florence around 1500, see my ‘Words and Deeds, Stasis and Change: New Directions in Florentine Devotion around 1500’, Journal of Religious History, 28 (2004), 1–18. 4

See my ‘“Con buona affetione”: Confraternities, Charity and the Poor in Early Cinquecento Florence’, in The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Sacred in Early Modern Poor Relief, ed. by Thomas Max Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 47–62. See also the article on Tuscan hospitals and their relationship to the Medicean ducal state by Nicholas Terpstra: ‘Competing Visions of the State and Social Welfare: The Medici Dukes, the Bigallo Magistrates, and Local Hospitals in Sixteenth-Century Tuscany’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (2001), 1319–55.

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The desire to identify universal and revolutionary change lies at the root of a widely accepted but analytically rather fruitless hypothesis which implies, rather than directly argues, that social instability in the early sixteenth century created a general climate of crisis in the Florentine confraternities that undermined their institutional structures and simultaneously drained members’ willingness to participate in the city’s lay devotional culture. On the surface the proposition seems reasonable and uncontroversial: it rests upon the existence of a great deal of apparently incontrovertible factual evidence, and is attractively plausible and simple. It is true, after all, that the Italian peninsula was ravaged by incessant wars for more than a generation after the turn of the century and that Florence itself was afflicted by repeated political upheaval and crisis, to the point that in 1529 the very physical survival of the city was threatened. The ‘crisis’ hypothesis holds that in these decades the confraternities of Florence faced a threat no less serious than that menacing the city itself, and that while the companies recovered later in the century, the earlier crisis had transformed them almost beyond recognition.5 A strictly institutional survey of the confraternities, and of the complaints made by confraternal brothers themselves, might incline one to accept this analysis. In fact, however, there is a much deeper problem with the argument, because it says almost nothing about the quality and significance — as opposed to the ‘amount’ — of confraternal devotion at this time. The reasoning that underpins the interpretation stems from a sociological approach to the sources, which, despite the great contribution it has made to the field of Florentine social history in the last two generations, has encouraged Anglophone scholars in particular to adopt an overly functionalist view of the confraternities. Interpretation of this kind tends to emphasize, for instance, the tendency for confraternities to reproduce the structures and procedures of Florentine government; as well as their potential to subvert the political life of the commune.6 The emphasis is understandable because in the field relevant to the present discussion the social-historical approach arose to some extent as a reaction to an earlier historiographical tradition that overemphasized the purely religious and theological aspect of confraternal life and downplayed or ignored the social reality in which the companies operated.7 But if this earlier tradition idealized the confraternities and their members, the sociological paradigm has perhaps 5 This position appears in the last two chapters of Ritual Brotherhood. A comparable view of the changes in attitudes to charity that affected sixteenth-century Europe is articulated in Ole Peter Grell, ‘The Protestant Imperative of Christian Care and Neighbourly Love’, in Health Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe, 1500–1700, ed. by Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham and Jon Arrizabalaga (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 43–65. I comment on Grell’s thesis in ‘“Con buona affetione”’, pp. 49–50, n. 5. 6

Weissman, pp. 58–66.

7

On the wider, European, historiographical context of this kind of Catholic interpretation, see now John O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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overcompensated, encouraging an overly secularized reading of practices that need to be treated as part of a broad culture of lay devotion.8 In the field of Florentine confraternity studies, the most influential, indeed, seminal, analysis of the Florentine confraternities is that published by Ronald Weissman nearly twenty years ago. Weissman portrayed Florentine society as a dense thicket of ‘agonistic’ social relationships that were animated by a combination of self-interest and suspicion that prevented the realization of genuinely Christian ideals in the context of everyday life. The confraternities functioned as a ritualized haven in which members, physically and ritualistically distanced from the outside world, could engage in devotional activities that allowed them to shed their individual identities and unite in God’s sight. In carrying out a range of charitable and penitential practices, which in the case of the so-called companies of disciplinati (the disciplined) emphasized periodic participation in public demonstrations of penitence and humility, members achieved a suspension of the distinctions, divisions and hostilities that fractured their everyday lives. Temporarily at least, members stepped symbolically outside society, and in this ‘liminal moment’ social relations amongst members and throughout the wider society were healed.9 This interpretation does not ignore the religious dimension of ritual practices within confraternities, but it does subordinate religious impulses to the social benefits that accrued from confraternal activity. Moreover, by representing confraternities as a religious safety-valve whose primary purpose was to lower the temperature of secular social relations, the argument implies a separation of sacred and secular realms that, while it might have been applicable to Western society at the end of the second millennium, seriously undervalues the religious tenor of all social experience in the pre-modern age.10 The terms of this analysis make it very difficult 8 The analysis and interpretation of this culture, and the specific themes of this essay, are central to the book on early sixteenth-century Florentine lay devotion and confraternities that I am currently writing. Recently there has been a vigorous discussion concerning the best methodology for approaching issues that until the 1980s would have fallen under the general rubric of ‘popular culture’. Discussing medieval hagiographical literature, Patrick Geary has identified issues comparable to those confronting the student of confraternities. See the first chapter of his Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Inspired by the work of Carlo Ginzburg and other authors connected with the journal, Quaderni storici, Florike Egmond and Peter Mason have recently published a wide-ranging and extremely stimulating critical discussion of the usefulness of microhistory for historians and social anthropologists whose first task is to create a valid historical context for documentary analysis. See these two authors’ The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 9

See Weissman, esp. ch. 2.

10

The idea of Florentine confraternities as a refuge from, or an exception to, the social relations of Florence’s neighbourhoods appears at many junctures in Weissman’s otherwise illuminating discussion of the nature and significance of confraternal ritual. As has already

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KATERN 2

13

to explain the culture of Florentine lay devotion in other than secular terms. If, on the other hand, the artificial separation between the ‘sacred realm’ of the confraternity and the outside world is dropped, it becomes clear that the chief significance of the Florentine confraternities was never their existence as a vital alternative to Florentine social relations. On the contrary, the confraternities were intended to provide a setting for the distillation and dynamic expression of the religious and ethical ideals upon which all urban life was founded. Accurate understanding of the confraternities’ significance cannot therefore be gained by subjecting them to an analysis that separates them from the rest of society or seeks to explain their activity purely in the light of what one can only call a ‘secular’ agenda. Even where it is clear that deliberate manipulation for ulterior motives occurred — as in the case of the Medicean infiltration of a number of religious companies under Lorenzo the Magnificent — the confraternities need to be treated first and foremost as laydevotional and not secular institutions.11 These issues are of direct relevance to the confraternities of sixteenth-century Florence. The idea that the confraternal movement as a whole entered a period of crisis after 1500 is one of those assumptions that seem so evident as to go unquestioned; 12 indeed, as suggested earlier, the ‘crisis’ label is in the most obvious sense quite apt. Although ‘crisis’ is difficult to measure, and contemporary perception of crisis is an even less quantifiable essence, it is certainly true that early sixteenth-century confraternal scribes editorialize quite frequently about many kinds of problems and irregularities. In the confraternal records for the period after 1500 one finds numerous references to institutional chaos or disorder. Typical is one

been intimated, the most recent works treating Florentine confraternities in the early sixteenth century have not directly tackled the methodological issues relevant to the period after 1500. Christopher Black’s survey of the general Italian scene reaches a number of different conclusions from those of Weissman: Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), see, for instance, pp. 7 and 21. But the absence of a major study on Florence prevented him from referring to the city in all but the most general terms. Konrad Eisenbichler’s recent institutional history of a single confraternity over several centuries has not changed the situation because no documents on his subject survive for the period between 1494 and 1530, and the author is prevented from analysing the period discussed in the present essay. See The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411–1785 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 39–40. 11

Failure to do so creates the same tendency to anachronism just discussed, as it pre-judges the motives of the figures manipulating the confraternities, and categorizes their presumed intentions according to the same misleading, modern sacred/secular dichotomy. 12

It was first proposed explicitly by Weissman, who argued that in the decades following the fall of the Medici in 1494, Florence’s confraternities entered a period of chaos and decay. Weissman, indeed, characterized the eve of the Medicean principate as ‘The Crisis of Late Renaissance Confraternities’ (p. 173).

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example of 1508, in which the scribe of the company of San Frediano, called the Brucciata, described a state of disordine in the ranks that the officials deemed serious enough to justify the drafting of a completely new capitolo (statute) to fix the problem: The esteemed captains of the company of San Frediano of Florence, in consort with their officials, having achieved a quorum in their customary meeting place, considering in how much disorder the company and its possessions find themselves because of the incapacity either to make use of its income or to collect money owed by its debtors, and how the provisions in the capitoli have been ignored, [conclude that] this situation arises from a lack of order in the meetings. When the captains and officials are asked to attend the company to see to its needs they do not come to carry out their offices as is their duty, so that the said company is abandoned without anyone to provide for it or to see to its needs.13

Four years later, in his record of the first meeting held since a general closure brought on by the political tensions of 1512, the provveditore (provisioner) of the nearby company of the Archangel Raphael, called Il Raffa, recorded that no new officials were to be elected because it had proved impossible to raise a quorum.14 In the following years the company was seriously disabled by government prohibition, and this had a deleterious effect on the participation of the membership after the official ban was lifted. To restore the health of the company it was decided in 1520 that two special officials should be elected to attend to ‘the inobservatione (flouting) of our statutes caused by the poor attendance at our house by the greater number of our brothers, whom no one forces to attend’.15 Similar examples, which include complaints of non-attendance and instances of members’ unwillingness to discharge the duties required by the offices to which they have been elected, could be multiplied many times. In the decades preceding the Tridentine reforms, many companies stood on the brink because of falling attendance, and to all this must be 13

‘Gli spectabili capitani della compagnia di San Friano di Firenze in sieme colli loro uficiali i’ sufficiente numero ragunati nel luogho della loro solita residentia, considerato in quanto disordine si truovi la prefata compagnia et sustantie d’essa per non si potere valere delle entrate sue né riscuotere dagli debitori et havere tanscorso [sic] le observantie de’ capitoli et tutto nasce per non avere fermo ordine nelle tornate e capitani e uficiali quando sono richiesti di venire alla compagnia per fare e bisogni di quella non venghono a exercitare l’uficio loro come sarebbe loro debito di fare in modo detta compagnia resta abandonata et non ha chi la procuri né provegha a’ bisogni di quella’: Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASF), Compagnie Religiose Soppresse incamerate nel Bigallo (hereafter CRS/Bigallo), Compagnia di San Frediano, detta la Brucciata 1, fol. 18r. This confraternity is identified hereafter as Brucciata. 14

ASF, Compagnie Religiose Soppresse da Pietro Leopoldo (hereafter CRS) 141, Compagnia del Arcangelo Raffaello, detta il Raffa, fol. 10v. It should be noted that the Il Raffa is not the confraternity that Eisenbichler analyses in his Boys of the Archangel Raphael. 15

ASF, CRS 141, fol. 165r.

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added the unavoidable fact that between the early 1520s and 1540, the doors of many of Florence’s confraternities were, because of repeated suppression, more frequently closed than open.16 Quite clearly, there really was a kind of institutional crisis, but we need to be very careful about the conclusions that we draw from this observation. Any argument that begins with the a priori assumption that structural problems within the confraternities, or official suppression of these institutions, necessarily lessened the commitment of Florentine men and women to the religious ideals that the confraternities embodied conflates two very different issues. The crisis analysis is conceived overwhelmingly in relation to political, military and epidemiological factors, and assumes a long-term decline of civic values that are in turn related to the undermining of the religious companies.17 To summarize, the argument proposes that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Florentine confraternities had sought to alleviate the agonistic character of the city’s neighbourhood culture by subverting it: confraternities overwhelmingly recruited their membership from the city as a whole, thereby providing members with the ritualized refuge from the hot-house culture of Florence’s medieval neighbourhoods alluded to earlier. In the sixteenth century, by contrast, the old, city-wide, laudesi (laud-singing) confraternities were replaced by new confraternities centred within parishes and neighbourhoods and dedicated to the cult of the Holy Sacrament. These new structures are interpreted as evidence that an ever-more aristocratic élite was utilizing the neighbourhoods in an attempt to stratify lay devotion along class lines. There is no longer any space for autonomous devotional activity for men and women outside the élite. Once contained in the parish, the Church’s primary unit of social control, the non-élite would be anaesthetized with stupefying draughts of CounterReformation dogma.18 The possibility of independent action for the upper classes was meanwhile preserved by the revival of older laudesi companies as courtly societies.19 But notwithstanding the copious evidence of upheaval and institutional decline, are we justified in concluding that there was a sudden and irrevocable transformation in the laity’s belief in and commitment to the kind of devotional experience provided by the confraternities? And did the disasters and shocks of the generation on either side of the Reformation really secularize society so thoroughly that the principle media for the expression of lay piety were turned into gentlemen’s clubs or instruments for keeping the poor in their place? The easy affirmative answer to these questions ignores too many factors. We do not fully understand, and probably cannot 16

See the catalogue of closures in Weissman, pp. 178–80.

17

Weissman identifies nothing less than ‘the suppression and collapse of traditional Florentine confraternal life’ (p. 206). 18

See Weissman, chs 4 and 5.

19

In Weissman’s words, ‘social clubs for the Florentine elite’, whose ritual life he describes as ‘superfluous’ (pp. 206–07).

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know, the precise motives that lay behind government suppression, either in the fifteenth century or the sixteenth, and neither can we always be sure that it achieved its aims. Dwindling attendance at meetings in the decades after 1500 certainly represented a serious threat to confraternal life, but statistical analysis in the end tells us very little about the quality of lay devotion, and firm conclusions about the state of lay piety and devotion after 1500 await detailed analysis of the large amount of surviving confraternal evidence. One of the first challenges in analysing sixteenth-century Florentine confraternities is to integrate interpretation of the period after 1500 with consideration of the longue durée. When this is done, many phenomena that at first appear as the result of short-term factors begin to appear less violent and more evolutionary. The concept of ‘disorder’ is one example. Weissman finds numerous references to disordine in the records of a number of confraternities, and treats them as powerful indicators of institutional emergency.20 It is worth reproducing one example from 1520 that he quotes at length: How great is the disorder in which this company finds itself and its properties, not being able to make good on its accounts, nor to collect from its debtors, and the proper observance of the statutes has been neglected, and all this occurred because our meetings have no order. The captains and other officials, when requested to come to the company to take care of business, do not come to exercise the duties that they ought to perform. The company, on account of this, remains abandoned and there is no one who looks after its affairs.21

As in the case cited earlier in this chapter, this passage comes from the company of the Brucciata, and on the evidence presented by Weissman himself, it alludes to a state of affairs stretching back at least as early as 1495.22 Taken in a much wider context, however, one finds that references to disorder were nothing new in the sixteenth century, and when they are compared to similar complaints that appear earlier and later in the historical record, they seem less exclusively a response to present circumstances. My own study of Florentine neighbourhood life, which made extensive use of fifteenth-century confraternal sources,23 turned up many complaints about administrative inefficiency, declining standards and the institutional damage produced by laxity and, on occasion, the bloody-mindedness of individual members. The presence of such conflict over a generation before the emergence of the High Renaissance ‘crisis’, and the fact that it is described in terms identical to those of the early sixteenth century, suggests at least that the explanation for their appearance in the sixteenth century should not rest exclusively on short-term factors. 20

Weissman, pp. 174–75.

21

Weissman, pp. 174–75.

22

Weissman, p. 174.

23 Nicholas A. Eckstein, The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence (Florence: Olschki, 1995).

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In the first and most general sense, it needs to be remembered that while confraternities were associations of lay people, they were the offspring of the mendicant orders and grandchildren of the monastic communities whose dress they appropriated and whose liturgy they mimicked and adapted. Confraternities met overwhelmingly in oratories in the great religious houses of the mendicant orders, and much of their activity needs to be understood as an attempt by those orders to translate their own rules into a simplified form that could be experienced by ordinary people in the confraternal meeting place and which, by extension, could provide a model for everyday life in the temporal sphere. In this context the word ‘order’ had particular echoes for contemporaries that had as much to do with correct observance of the theological requirements of the mendicant ordo to which they were attached through their confraternity as with ‘orderly’ procedure in our modern, secular, sense of that word. For men and women of the Renaissance, participation in a confraternity also served to remind them of their membership in the ordo laicorum, one of the two orders into which medieval society had for centuries been divided.24 Use of the word ordine and its opposite, disordine arguably reveals more about the extent to which the laity’s reality was filtered by the values of the mendicant orders than about the actual extent of contemporary social crisis. This helps in part to explain why the term disordine was frequently applied to situations whose practical consequences were rather less than disastrous. In four successive constitutional reforms enacted by the company of the Brucciata in the half-century between 1492 and 1545, the reason cited for modification of old provisions or the addition of new ones was the existence of disordine, yet despite the supposedly catastrophic state of affairs, the company did not collapse.25 The most remarkable thing about the company called Il Raffa, in fact, is that despite genuine difficulties caused by repeated suppressions, the company’s officials continued to recruit new members in the years after 1512. More than once, the fratelli resumed their normal business the minute official permission was granted, raising the further suspicion that they might very well have continued to operate in a clandestine fashion throughout such periods of closure. Neither had the zeal of the membership been blunted by the company’s years of tribulation. In 1526, the fratelli proposed the major initiative — subsequently realized — of a new confraternity for the religious edification of young boys.26 In the same period, one finds other companies using disordine to describe situations, which, while not grave if regarded from a secular point of view, were important to the religious integrity of the membership in terms of their existence as 24

For a treatment of the ordo laicorum in the eleventh century, which raises relevant issues for the current discussion, see Gilles Gérard Meersseman, Ordo fraternitatis: Confraternite e pieta’ dei laici nel medioevo, 3 vols (Rome: Herder, 1977), I, 217–45. 25

ASF, CRS/Bigallo, Brucciata 1, fols 12v, 14r–15r, 18 r–v, 24r–v.

26

ASF, CRS 141, fol. 68r.

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an order of lay people. This helps to explain uses of the word that from a secularizing perspective might appear unjustified, such as the instance in which, in 1527, the officials of the celebrated confraternity dedicated to San Zanobi and the Purification of the Virgin used the word describe a routine, though important, disagreement about the most appropriate use of alms left by benefactors.27 The linkage of the word to the specific context of the early sixteenth century is qualified further by its appearance in much later periods. In 1631, the scribe of the company of San Giovanni Battista, known as the Scalzo, observed that things ‘were going in a disorderly manner’ and that the parlous situation called for one more reform of the capitoli.28 The capitoli regulated all aspects of confraternal life, and were the primary medium through which the order with responsibility for the company communicated its message to the membership. Changing any of these ordinances was a serious matter and would usually have required the approval of a priest from the order. Arguing that such change was occasioned by the need to restore ‘order’ within the membership is thus completely appropriate and comprehensible. Understood as ordo, the concept of order has a significance that transcends the idea of proper procedure and due process, though this is not to say that the word was never applied in this more prosaic sense. The opposite of order, disordine, was most certainly used in relation to crisis, and the word’s theological echo actually gave it added weight as a sacred co-efficient of the strong leadership that all Florentines associated with good government. Thus, in a statute of the company of Sant’ Agostino drafted in 1511, and entitled: ‘In what way and order, and by which officials and ministers our company is to be run’, we read that: In the Holy Scriptures one reads that where there is no order, there dwells error. Which is to say that where there is no order, there dwell error and confusion. Therefore, wishing not to emulate the example of Job, about whom these words are proposed, that is, to direct our company with good and perfect order so that error and confusion do not dwell among us, we order that our company and fraternity have always a padre governatore (father-governor), two counsellors, a provveditore, an apuntatore (officer 27

ASF, CRS 1646, Compagnia della Purificazione di Maria e S. Zanobi, Ricordi, reg. 8, 1518–1575, fol. 279r. 28

The relevant passage reads as follows: ‘Con ciò sia cosa che sino sotto li 20 di Luglio prosimo pasato 1631 per ordine del nostro Padre Governatore fusi fatto una invitata Generale di tutti li nostri Fratelli, delli quali in detta mattina si trovorno ragunati nella nostra Compagnia il numero di settantasei di detti, li quali havendo per innanzi hauto riguardo come più non si oservavano li nostri Capitoli, e che ogn’ affare di nostra Compagnia disordinatamente camminava, et havendone prima hauti sopra di ciò vari e diversi discorsi, e fatte le solite diligenze d’attaccare prima la poliza alla tavoletta, fu dunque resoluto, che fusero eletti sei Huomini di nostra Compagnia con libera et absoluta facultà e autorità di riformare particolarmente, e ridurre a più perfetta e più moderna forma tutti li vecchi Capitoli con altre autorità più amplie come distintamente si vede al nostro libro de’ ricordi’: Capitoli delle CRS 152, Compagnia di San Giovanni Battista detta lo Scalzo 1631 reform, pp. 1–2.

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of discipline), a scribe, a treasurer, three novice-masters, infermieri (nurses), three provveditori for the sick, three sacristans in the company and two for the crucifix in the church, with a provveditore, two correctors, a doctor and a servant.29

This is a deliberate attempt to add the weight of biblical authority to a practical reminder of the need for a properly constituted and ordered hierarchy of officials. The point is further reinforced in a rather ironic way, however, for in his eagerness to appeal to scripture the author has, whether by accident or design, misquoted the Bible. The Book of Job contains no passage remotely similar to the one quoted in the capitolo. Several years after the officials of Sant’ Agostino wrote their statutes, the members of a confraternity of wool purgers and carders dedicated to Sant’ Andrea divided their membership into two tiers comprising the maestri (owners of workshops) and lavoranti (workers). The stratification of Sant’ Andrea’s membership reveals once again the association of institutional order with strong leadership, but such concerns were far from new in the early sixteenth century. In writing that ‘without order and a guide, università and companies like this one cannot be governed’, the reforming officials of Sant’ Andrea were manifesting the same fear of anarchy that had been voiced by reformers of the Brucciata’s statutes in the first half of the fifteenth century.30 In the new capitoli that they drafted in 1439, these officials had consciously tied the smooth functioning of their company to the requirement that everyone obey the elected officials, declaring, ‘No government can endure for long, nor be well directed and regulated, without leaders and superiors’.31 The Brucciata’s reformers were, in their turn, echoing the language used by their founding fathers a generation before the Black Death. Setting out the duties of the new company’s paramount officials in 1323, they had ordered that: ‘The office of the captains must be the head and guide of every good work and give every good example in accordance with the word of our Lord’.32 When confraternal scribes of the early cinquecento wrote about disorder, they were applying a conventional term to contemporary events, and it follows that the convention and the current reality must be taken into account if we are to understand precisely what they meant. Both are apparent in a late sixteenth-century report made by the members of the company of the Holy Sacrament of Santa Lucia to the Vicar of the Archbishopric about the plight of the poor in their parish: 29

ASF, CRS 3, A.viii, no. 1, Sant’ Agostino in Santo Spirito, Capitoli (reform of 1511), fols 3v–4r. 30

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 843, Compagnia di Sant’ Andrea de’ Purgatori in Borgo la Croce 1515–1524, fol. 4r. 31

ASF, CRS/Bigallo, Brucciata 1, fol. 2r.

32 ‘L’uficio de’ capitani de[v]e essere capo e guide d’ogni ben fare e d’ogni buono exemplo dare secondo che disse il nostro Signore’: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (hereafter BNCF), Fondo Palatino 154, fol. 5r.

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There are in the said parish four thousand souls or more, and it is not possible [for one priest] to go out once or twice every day with the Most Holy Sacrament, nor at the proper times, whence there have arisen many complaints. And moreover one reports to You how in the parish of Santa Lucia there are very poor people, and the wives of these popolani are meschine (very wretched) and badly dressed, and when they go to the church of Ognissanti they have great difficulty in confessing, whence are born many disorders for these poor people, who therefore place themselves at Your feet, that you might be moved to pity for the love of God, and put this situation to rights. 33

The account is suffused by the sense of a paternalistic moral imperative to assist the less fortunate, an obligation in which the authors of this appeal included the Most Reverend Vicar himself. The poor are identified as a group threatened no less by spiritual than by material privation; indeed, in this passage, poverty is identified as an obstacle to confession and, therefore, to the women’s spiritual as well as their physical welfare. ‘Disorder’, meanwhile, carries all the meanings ascribed to it in the preceding argument. Here, however, the sense of history and inherited tradition is overt, because the salvation of the poor of the area is related to a long-running dispute concerning the lay community itself and the traditional custodians local church of Santa Lucia sul Prato.34 Early sixteenth-century Italy was in many senses a new world, but it was not an island. It was a product of its past, and many fundamental aspects of confraternal life at this time can be explained in terms of evolutionary factors. As Lorenzo Polizzotto and others have argued, from the second decade of the fifteenth century Florentine governments of all persuasions regarded all confraternities with intense suspicion because, as secret societies, they were ideal settings for the fomentation of sedition and rebellion.35 Between 1415 and the early principate the state legislated repeatedly36 to 33 ‘Sono i’ detto popolo quatromila anime o più e ungni giorno una volta o dua [sic] andare fuora col santisimo sagramento e di moltisime volte no’ si può avere a’ tenpi debiti tale è nato di molte ocosione [sic]. E più si nara a quella come nel popolo di Santa Lucia sono persone poverisime e le done di detti popolani sono meschine e mal vestite e quando vano ala chiesa d’ugnisanti con grandisima dificuta si posono co[n]fesare tale nacie di molti disordini a le povere persone e per tanto ricorono a piedi di quella si muovi a pietà per l’amore de dio e rimediare a tal case’. 34

The details of this dispute, which continued throughout the second half of the sixteenth, and into the seventeenth century, are discussed by Gilberto Aranci in his Formazione religiosa e santità laicale a Firenze tra cinque e seicento (Florence: Giampiero Pagnini, 1997), pp. 137–39. 35 See Lorenzo Polizzotto, ‘Confraternities, Conventicles and Political Dissent: The Case of the Florentine Capi Rossi’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 16 (1985), 258–82. 36 Polizzotto, ‘Confraternities’; and also, ‘Confraternities, Conventicles and Political Dissent: The Case of the Florentine Capi Rossi’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 17 (1986), 285–300.

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prevent confraternities from meddling in non-religious affairs and attempted to restrict their focus to their traditional charitable function. In the 1420s the government intensified its drive to limit the independent actions of the confraternities, and appears to have enlisted the support of the Florentine archbishopric in achieving its aims. Legislative measures emanating from the state were accompanied by a requirement that new religious companies submit their statutes to the archiepiscopal curia for approval, and existing companies wishing to reform their regulations had to do the same.37 To be sure, this bipartite approach by Church and state marked the beginning of a long-term weakening of the autonomy of Florentine confraternities.38 Throughout the remainder of the fifteenth century one notes an increasing preoccupation with disciplinary measures and procedures in both new and reformed statutes. This change is in part attributable to the government’s campaign to stamp out political activity in the confraternities, but there are clear signs that the increasingly authoritarian tone of the statutes owes at least as much, and perhaps more, to a contemporaneous programme of spiritual renovation. This development was intimately associated with the city’s political life, but its origin was religious, not secular, and analysis of the nature of its progress will shed more light on the origin and the precise nature of lay piety in the following century.39 Much of the archbishopric’s increased involvement in the city’s culture of organized lay devotion at this time can be explained in terms that are far from purely political, were not restricted to Florence, and which reveal a prevailing concern to enforce Catholic orthodoxy in both the religious and lay communities. Nicholas Terpstra has recently identified the Observant movement as the most powerful influence on Bolognese confraternities in the first decades of the fifteenth century.40 Peter Howard, meanwhile, has pointed to the maintenance of orthodoxy and the eradication of superstition and ignorance as important aspects of the preaching of Saint Antoninus, the strict Dominican Observant who was Archbishop of Florence from 1446 until his death in 1459.41 In both cities, the spiritual values of the Observant movement filtered directly into the life of the confraternities, giving rise to trends that gathered pace throughout the remainder of the century and culminated 37

Polizzotto, ‘Confraternities’ (1985), p. 244.

38

Polizzotto, ‘Confraternities’ (1985), pp. 244–45.

39

On the relationship between the renovation in the confraternities and Medicean politics and patronage, see Lorenzo Polizzotto, ‘The Medici and the Youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin, 1434–1506’, in The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 98–113. See also Polizzotto, Children of the Promise. 40

Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 18–19. 41

Peter Francis Howard, Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus, 1427–1459 (Florence: Olschki, 1995), p. 16.

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much later at the Council of Trent. In Florence, the influence of the Observant movement is clear in the appearance of several ‘companies of the night’. These were flagellant societies that followed an especially harsh regime of penitential devotions and which had formal links with societies of youth, whose juvenile members they worked to attract when they had attained the required minimum age. Saint Antoninus was himself responsible for spreading the Observant spirit of charity in the city, a fact most clearly illustrated by the instrumental role that he played in the foundation of the prominent charitable society of the Buonomini di San Martino in 1442.42 Qualities that the Observant movement encouraged within the religious orders — charity, penitence, obedience — were being emphasized more generally through the Florentine confraternities at this time. In this regard the reformed capitoli that the company of San Sebastiano, called the Freccione (the Arrow), approved in 1451 mark a new departure for a very old company intimately associated with the Servite community at the Santissima Annunziata.43 The new set of capitoli is distinguished by the overtly stated desire to create a model of behaviour that enshrined obedience not simply as a means to facilitate proper observance of the thirty-two governing statutes, but as an ideal to be sought as an end in itself. The tone and form, as much as the content, of the opening passages of the capitoli reinforce this impression. Much of the proem appears as a sermon delivered to the membership of the Freccione by the company’s Father Corrector, an officer always chosen from amongst the Servite religious who oversaw the welfare of the members’ souls. In 1451 the incumbent was one Frate Mariano, whose ‘sermon’ consists of a passage delivered in the first person singular. The address very likely originated in a real oration intended to reinforce the significance and purpose of membership in the minds of the lay brothers: Whence I, Brother Mariano, lector in theology, friar of the order of Servants of the Virgin Mary, seeing you devoted persons who wish to exercitare (pursue) the life of this holy company, drawn and moved by the holy spirit, wishing to live according to the two aforesaid constituents of justice, for the health of your souls and to provide a good example to others as to how it is possible to live by divine grace as people placed in the world in secular habit, we order and teach a perfect form of life, which is contained in and founded upon three most excellent levels that are confirmed by divine 42

On both points, see the summary in John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 41–44. On the Buonomini in particular, see Amleto Spicciani, ‘The “Poveri Vergognosi” in Fifteenth-Century Florence: The First 30 Years’ Activity of the Buonomini di San Martino’, in Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Thomas Riis (Florence: Le Monnier, 1981), pp. 119–82. Also, see Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 47. 43 The company had been founded in 1263 and was initially dedicated to the Virgin, San Filippo Benizzi and San Gherardo. See ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 6, Compagnia di San Sebastiano (Bastiano), ‘Il Freccione’, fol. 4r.

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scripture and praised by the doctrine of the holy doctors [of the Church] and enacted in the lives of many holy men who founded their own lives in these same three levels, which are these: the first level is the contemplative life, which consists in raising the mind to God with divine prayers and with perfect and holy meditation and contemplation; the second level is the active life, which consists in serving one’s neighbour, showing charity in his every necessity; the third level is the moral life, which consists in ordering oneself through honest life and in conversing with everyone by virtuous conversation.44

The likelihood that Frate Mariano really spoke these words to the membership is heightened by the nature of the document in which they are preserved. Every confraternity owned such a book of rules, and at every confraternal meeting a designated official read aloud a section from the capitoli to the membership. The capitoli were designed to be heard and absorbed in the company of one’s fellow members rather than read privately, and they belong, therefore, to a genre that blends the written and spoken word.45 Like all capitoli, the reformed statutes of the Freccione are replete with formulaic phrases intended, by dint of regular repetition, to imprint themselves on the memories of an audience comprising members of quite various social backgrounds and differing levels of literacy.46 The distance between the textualized speech, or verbalized text, of the reformed capitoli and the enactment of the ideal embodied therein is so minute as almost to disappear, and they are not therefore to be taken as dry administrative or procedural documents. The capitoli are at the convergence of three elements vital to the understanding of the significance of Florentine confraternal life: the corpus of inherited ideas and attitudes that one may call popular religious culture; the group of behaviours and practices by which this culture was realized and activated in society; and the members’ self-conscious thinking about the first two elements. The capitoli were a dynamic component of the Freccione’s corporate activity. Their importance as an historical source lies in the fact that they are simultaneously a representative model of lay devotion and charity

44

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 6, fol. 3r–v.

45

Making sure that this occurred was one of the captains’ official responsibilities. The relevant section of the statute which discusses the office of captain reads as follows: ‘Et con qualche buono et divoto exempro et rischaldagli in carità perfecta et fare leggere i capitoli della compagnia in tutto ciò che si contiene’: ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 6, fol. 5r. 46

Roger Chartier’s comments on the later Bibliothèque bleue make for instructive comparisons with the confraternal statutes. See his ‘Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France’, in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 1985), p. 234.

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and a prescriptive model for the directing and regulating of group behaviour in relation to perceptions about the sacred in society.47 What the capitoli of 1451 tell us, particularly when understood in this latter ‘prescriptive’ sense, is that the moralizing, sternness and evangelical fervour so often associated with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation have earlier origins. The same qualities are visible, in utero as it were, by the middle of the quattrocento, at which point they already influenced the life of the confraternities in important ways. The reformed capitoli of the Freccione respect the classic ‘late medieval’ ideal of placing the spiritual welfare of the group ahead of that of the individual, but they have changed in that they are less concerned to submerge the identity of the single member, and there is a sense that the salvation of all relies as much on the inner purification of each individual soul as on the collective devotion of an undifferentiated group of anonymous devotees.48 Accordingly, the persona of the lay brother and his position in relation to the company and the rest of society emerge with particular force in the capitoli of 1451. This is not to say that confraternal statutes had not always provided information on the behaviour to which individual members were supposed to conform; this after all was their primary purpose. What differs here is the attempt to frame the activity described in the statutes as a deliberate and conscious representation of ideal behaviour, so that members would perceive their own devotions and charitable conduct as inherently virtuous and, therefore, as personally redemptive. Speaking through the medium of the statutes, as we have seen, Frate Mariano reminded the members that they, as individuals, had joined the company in order to ‘provide a good example to others as to how it is possible to live by divine grace as people placed in the world in secular habit’. For this reason they were required to follow ‘a perfect form of life’. It is quite clear, however, that the spiritual benefits of this exemplary behaviour were not intended to flow just in one direction — that is, outwards — into the community. The relationship between the membership and the wider public was reciprocal: members instructed and edified the larger community through their behaviour, but in so doing they achieved a heightened awareness of their status as personifications of Christian charity. This self-awareness encouraged further reflection on the significance of their actions and deeper examination of their own individual souls. As emerges in the description of the company’s visitations to the sick, which is soon to be discussed, fulfilment of the members’ charitable duties was objectified as a performance and hence projected outside everyday experience; 47

In using the analogy of the ‘model’ here, I am following Clifford Geertz. See ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 91–94. 48

Anonymity is a central feature of Florentine devotional activity between the late thirteenth and the mid-fifteenth centuries. See in particular Weissman’s interpretation of this activity as ‘liminal’ social action (ch. 2), and my own District of the Green Dragon, which has a different emphasis: see pp. xx–xxi and chs 3 and 4.

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thus objectified, the didactic purpose of the performance and its actual execution fortified and reinforced each other. Both the description of this performance that was embedded in the statutes and the performance itself, therefore, functioned in much the same homiletic way as Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio’s depiction of the burial of a pauper before a procession of black-robed members of the confraternity of the Misericordia.49 The attention to the souls of individual members within the group, and to the redemption of individual souls as a prerequisite for the purification of the whole community, anticipates a central feature of Savonarola’s apostolate in the late quattrocento. It is also a distinguishing characteristic of confraternal charity in the following century.50 Indeed, comparison of the capitoli of 1451 with those produced by yet another reform of the Freccione in 1520 shows two things. In the first place, it establishes the continuity of concern for the individual and the soul of the individual member as distinct entities within the overall group. Second, the two reforms reveal the evolution of that concern and confirm the impression of a long-term change to the corporate ethic in Florentine confraternal life between the first half of the quattrocento and the middle of the cinquecento. The statutes of 1451 required Frate Mariano and his successors to accompany the Freccione’s visitatori (visitors to the sick) whenever the latter asked for the Father Corrector’s presence.51 The Father Corrector played an active role in these visitations, but he was also an authoritative witness, and his presence heightened the significance of an otherwise private moment. Already visible in 1451, the importance of bearing witness as a vehicle for redeeming the souls of the fratelli who performed the visitation emerges more powerfully in the reform of 1520. The capitolo dealing with the role of the Freccione’s limosinieri (almoners) includes a stipulation that when attending the home of a sick brother to ascertain what help he required, at least two officials had to be present. The limosinieri identified the malady, examined the patient’s condition and assessed the financial need of his family, all tasks of a practical nature. Then, their souls filled with the spirit, they decided according to their own individual consciences what assistance was to be given. Here the statutes left nothing to chance: the capitoli insisted not only that the limosinieri use their own judgement in deciding the amount of help to be given, but that they ‘not wait to be asked, because in this there is greater charity, and [it] is 49

The image appears on a predella panel executed by the artist in 1515: see Henderson, p. 363. 50

Analysis of this latter phenomenon is at the heart of my current study of Florentine confraternities after 1500, in preparation. 51

The Father Corrector was ‘to accompany them whenever they go to visit any of our sick brothers, and to remind the said brother of the confession and all the sacraments of holy mother church, for the welfare of his soul, and patiently to comfort him in a patient, sweet and charitable way’: ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 6, fol. 12v.

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more acceptable to God’.52 While the visitation was quite tightly choreographed, room was deliberately left for the limosinieri to make an independent decision according to the particular circumstances. In this way, it was obviously hoped that the ritual would not become stale or perfunctory, and would retain its capacity to instruct and inspire all of the actors. Such visitations required the official sanction of the company, hence the corporate presence of the Father Corrector with the visitatori, and the requirement that the limosinieri farne fede (bear witness) of their missions to the company’s treasurer.53 Significantly, however, while the limosinieri were required to testify to the company, they were not to seek personal credit for the company’s charity by boasting of their work outside official confines. The statute contained a warning to this effect: ‘You should not trumpet [news of the visitation] in public, because the merito (benefit) of the charity will be lost’.54 In a prosaic sense this requirement safeguarded the privacy of the beneficiary, and it would have had the additional benefit of functioning as a lesson in humility for the limosinieri. More importantly, the warning recalled Jesus’s admonition in Matthew to perform charity in secret, and to avoid being like those hypocrites who advertise their deeds in public so as to gain earthly fame (Matthew 6. 1–4). Such ostentation was redundant: the good would have their reward come what may because, as the Gospel stated, God saw everything, and there was therefore no need for a public display.55 Charitable works were not like earthly chattels, subject to physical decay and at risk of theft; they were the treasures that one laid up for oneself in heaven.56 There was, however, another, larger, reason not to speak of the visitation in public that lay in the nature of the visitation itself, and was implicit in the same passage of the Bible. Members understood God to be present in the ritual, both as ultimate witness and active participant. As the statute put it: ‘Your brother who is receiving the alms represents the person of Christ, who sees everything’.57 Such a formulation needs to be understood in terms of the late medieval tradition of invoking the sacred through the medium of the profane, and of perceiving the sacred as immanent in the visible world. The sick brother did not, in our modern sense, merely represent Christ like an actor in a play. As a particle of God’s creation his body was a physical 52

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 364, fol. 30v.

53

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 364, fol. 30v.

54

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 364, fol. 30v.

55 ‘Thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly’: Matthew 6. 4. 56 ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal’: Matthew 6. 19–20. 57

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 364, fol. 30v.

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manifestation of the sacred order. By playing their designated role in this little drama, the actors did not merely imitate Christ’s mercy, they participated in what Robert Scribner has called a late medieval ‘economy of the sacred’.58 The significance of a gesture as apparently trivial as the assistance of a sick fellow went far beyond the obvious practical benefit that it conferred upon the recipient. In that Christ witnessed the actions of the limosinieri, the ritual achieved the status of direct contact with the sacred realm, hence the simultaneous insistence on official sanction and private performance. No less than the sacred plays that the Florentine confraternities staged for the public, the limosinieri’s visitation was a dramatic sacred representation, the performance of which signified and revealed the charitable bond upon which the union of heaven and earth ultimately depended as reducible to the personal contact between individuals. Accordingly, just as contemporaries believed implicitly that the universe could be understood in terms of temporal relationships and events that partook of the whole, so too did they believe that universal consequences — specifically, the salvation of all mankind — would flow from activities like the limosinieri’s assistance of the poor and from the redemption of individual souls. The statute concerning the overseers of the Freccione’s infirmary is evidence of the immediacy of the relationship between the particular and the universal. It begins with a quotation from Saint Matthew’s description of the Last Judgement: ‘I was sick, and ye visited me’.59 The lesson for the confraternal brethren could not be starker or more direct. The statute invoked the subsequent passage in Matthew, which makes it very clear that the individual and collective salvation of San Sebastiano’s members depended on the recognition of their lay brethren as the manifestation of Christ’s humanity: According to the Holy Scripture, our Saviour Jesus Christ will speak these words to his elect in the terrible judgment, and to the reprobates and the damned he will say, ‘I was sick, and you did not visit me’. Whence we can fully see that the sick man represents the pure humanity and the person of the blessed Christ. And therefore to you visitors of our sick, that is, you who accept the charitable office of the infermieri and novice-masters, one admonishes and states that in carrying out and administering your office, you fulfil those works of spiritual and temporal mercy, by whose fulfilment only will we be called, as is said, in the final judgement.60

58

See Bob Scribner, ‘Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-Industrial German Society’, in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. by Kaspar von Greyerz (London: Unwin Hyman, 1984), pp. 17–32. 59 ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 364, fol. 16r. This is taken from the longer passage in Matthew, 25. 35–36: ‘For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me’. 60

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 364, fol. 16r–v.

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It is abundantly clear that the salvation of all will be directly consequent upon the actions of San Sebastiano’s members, and will ultimately depend upon the virtue of the individual. The section of Matthew on which the statute draws lay at the heart of European lay spirituality. The statute, therefore, deliberately encouraged the fratelli to meditate on lines with which they would already have been familiar, in which Christ spoke of his condemnation of the wicked, and of the reward awaiting the righteous: ‘And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal’ (Matthew 25. 46). This, of course, was an ancient message, but it has particular significance for the confraternal movement of late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Florence. In respect of the numerous social challenges that the confraternities faced in this period, organized lay religion is perhaps better characterized by a desire for spiritual renewal and a return to first principles than by panic and despair in the face of temporal adversity. Renewal and reform, both of which involved recourse to the institutional purity of earlier models, were the central ideas of the Observant movement. The same concepts also explain the preoccupation with order and disorder, which in part represents an attempt to revivify and instil in the Florentine laity the rules and customs of the medieval monasteries. Seen in the specific context of Florence in this tumultuous period, the desire to return to old ideas, or to continue them, can itself be seen as evidence that the confraternities were adapting to current circumstances, rather than collapsing in the face of crisis. The concern with the fate of the individual soul discussed above is a specific example of an old idea that may be read in contemporary terms. The records of Florentine confraternities after 1500 are in general characterized by a fixation on proper procedure, the punishment of recalcitrant fratelli, and an almost obsessive concern with the possibility of refractory behaviour. The most common punishments discussed in statutes involve standard procedural breaches or infringements that were likely to interrupt the smooth running of a confraternity or compromise the integrity of its charitable mission. In the first place, while these types of infractions often appear in fifteenth-century statutes, they occupy more space in capitoli from the latter decades of the quattrocento. Even more striking is the readiness to apply severe punishments. As had always been the case, minor irregularities could result in fines or the withholding of an office-bearer’s customary payment, but in the early sixteenth century officials seem to have been prepared to apply the ultimate sanction of expulsion even for offences that did not involve criminal behaviour or moral turpitude. Having written new statutes in 1511, the reformers of the company of Sant’ Agostino issued a blanket warning that the perpetrator of any contravention of the new regulations would automatically be raso (struck off).61 At one meeting of the company of the Purification in 1534 it was proposed that any boy elected to the office of councillor who refused to serve his term should immediately be raso, an 61

ASF, CRS 3, A.viii, no. 1, fol. 34v.

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idea that was immediately extended to giovani who failed to attend three consecutive meetings.62 The numerous expulsions of lay brothers that feature in the records of Florentine confraternities after 1500 leave no doubt that these statutes were in fact applied, though we do not always know why these members were expelled, as scribes did not without fail record the reasons for punishment. The reasons seem to have varied, while the emotional range of the language used to record such events runs from bureaucratic detachment to incandescent rage. The company of Saint John the Baptist removed two members in 1539/40, recording only their names and the fact that they were never to be readmitted.63 By contrast, the vituperation that accompanied the expulsion of one Francesco Maringhi from the company of San Sebastiano suggests a genuinely serious offence. Although Francesco was the official messenger of the company of San Sebastiano, the Father Governor proposed in open session that he be: Struck out, expelled and cut off from our fraternity and congregation as a filthy malcontent and sower of scandals and specifically for having insulted our Father Governor, and for many other reasons about which it is best to remain silent.64

Such vilification was in itself far from new — throughout the entire communal period, judges of criminal cases routinely recreated the moral and religious framework in which their decisions were made by drawing attention to the baseness and evil condition of the defendants they sentenced.65 But if the need to locate malefactors outside the moral pale was born of long tradition, vitriolic passages such as the one quoted above, and the punishments meted out in Florentine confraternities after 1500, were nevertheless conditioned by contemporary factors. In this case, the evidence raises some unexpected nuances. While official language in this period was frequently harsh and discipline severe, justice was not synonymous with retribution: again and again, in the practical application of the statutes, punishment was tempered by the possibility of mercy. In February 1533/4, a member of the company of San Giovanni Battista — the famous sculptor and architect, Francesco da Sangallo — was expelled for having committed several serious offences, including that of conspiring with a group of brothers to keep his own secret, and therefore illegal,

62

ASF, CRS 1646, reg. 8, fol. 284v.

63 ASF, CRS 1195, reg. 1, fol. 31r. The Florentine New Year was 25 March. Dates between 1 January and 24 March are written to recognize this difference from the modern calendar. The event cited here, if recorded in modern style, would have occurred on 29 February 1540. 64

ASF, CRS 1869, fol. 5v.

65 Many examples of this kind of language are translated in The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study, ed. by Gene Brucker (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). See in particular Parts 5 and 6.

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volume of minutes and partiti (decisions).66 Despite the very real threat to the company’s confidentiality and, therefore, its institutional integrity, Francesco was readmitted to the company in February 1538/9.67 Wherever a transgression occurred, be it serious or minor, the administration of justice appears in the larger framework of the confraternities’ charitable mission and was conceived of as an instrument applied in the process of redemption. This principle remained a constant regardless of the seriousness of the offence. Even sodomites were given the opportunity to reform themselves by the terms of the Freccione’s statutes. Perpetrators of this most heinous of vices were given three opportunities to mend their ways before being suspended from membership for a year, and even then could be allowed to return if they attained a two-thirds majority from the membership.68 Behind the concern with discipline lay the same focus on individual members that was observed in relation to the performance of the members’ charitable obligations. Recognition of the importance of the individual helps to explain the (to our minds) oppressively pedantic itemization of transgressions and punishments with which the statutes are filled; also the need to humiliate a member publicly before his rehabilitation and subsequent reincorporation within the membership corpo (body) could take place. Because forgiveness and mercy were means designed to effect the purification of the member’s soul, both were usually contingent upon a public attestation of remorse. It was for this reason that Bartolomeo di Zanobi, who, ‘having created such a great scandal and given such a bad example to the [other] brothers’ by his failure to attend on Holy Thursday of 1517, was ordered ‘to come to the oratory [of the Freccione] and, once the office is said, to throw himself on his knees in front of the membership, and plead forgiveness of all the brothers’.69 This punishment merely throws into relief the didactic intent already present in the protocol governing the way that fratelli were supposed to begin normal meetings. The way members entered the oratory was strictly controlled and was designed to emphasize their obedience and subordination to the authority of the officials: When a brother arrives in the company, having announced the peace of God to the other brothers, he is to kneel at the altar, greeting the glorious God and his holy mother and our glorious father and advocate, and having made them the sign, he is to go to the desk of the appuntatore and add his name with the appropriate sign. Afterwards he is to go to his place, maintaining his silence and speaking when he is asked.70 66

ASF, CRS 1197, fasc. 21, fols 6v–7r. See the entry on Francesco in the Encyclopedia of Italian Renaissance & Mannerist Art, ed. by Jane Turner (London: MacMillan, 2000), pp. 1454–55. 67

ASF, CRS 1195, fasc. 21, fol. 27r.

68

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 364, fol. 14r.

69

ASF, CRS 1869, fol. 6r.

70

ASF, Capitoli delle CRS 364, fol. 45r.

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The form and tone of such a ritual only strengthens the contention that the spiritual directors of the confraternity were seeking to reproduce the discipline of the cloister in the confines of the confraternal meeting place, an idea perfectly consonant with contemporary perceptions of hierarchy and the spiritual discipline of the laity as the prerequisites of a harmonious and decent society. This objective had been crystallized by Savonarola, who preached the utopian vision of a society whose people, guided by the moral example of a reformed class of priests, would be motivated by an interior need for prayer, a need that could be intensified, not diminished, by crisis.71 In 1496, when Florence faced the possibility of invasion by the Lombard League, Savonarola assigned the job of praying for the city’s protection to religious, and to nuns and lay women in particular. Women were to follow the virtuous example of the Virgin Mary, who was also praying for Florence; in doing so they simultaneously preserved the city and purified themselves through their emulation of Christ’s mother.72 In short, after 1500, responsibility for the spiritual — not to say social — well-being of the Florentine community was to rest on the shoulders of the totality of its individual citizens. As institutions subject to the authority of an unstable and increasingly authoritarian state, Florence’s early sixteenth-century confraternities faced numerous threats and challenges. As in Bologna, they frequently — though not universally — became more rigid and hierarchical. But while participation for ordinary members might in many ways have become difficult in practical terms, and while the character of lay devotion changed, the level of commitment did not spontaneously combust. There is strong evidence, indeed, that the identification of the single member within the group as a starting point for the salvation of the entire city is the symptom of a more intense spiritual experience for individual members. The men and women who participated in the Florentine confraternities in the sixteenth century were more assiduously directed than they had been in the past, but to observe that the official Church kept a more watchful eye on what was going on in the religious companies is very different from saying that the pious involvement of the laity was less intense or more passive. As one of the Church’s favoured means of enforcing orthodox Christian behaviour, the sixteenth-century Florentine confraternities simultaneously retained their status as a principal avenue for the autonomous expression of ordinary Florentines’ devotional impulses. As institutions, the confraternities were already very old in the sixteenth century; the mendicant and regular models that they sought to emulate were even more ancient. Despite their age, however, they were peculiarly resilient and, indeed, adaptable to changing circumstances. In large part this was due to the simplicity of their structure and to the easily assimilated ethic that they 71

Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 473–74. 72

Natalie Tomas, ‘A Positive Novelty’: Women and Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Clayton, Vic.: Monash Publications in History, 1992), pp. 45–46.

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embodied, features immediately obvious in the books of statutes that have formed the subject of much of the discussion in this essay. This institutional simplicity allowed the confraternities to evolve in various directions after the end of the fifteenth century, as oratories of divine love, companies dedicated to the Holy Sacrament, occupational societies and festive associations of various kinds, and as agencies in the state’s increasing control of organized charity. The observations in this essay are the early findings of a much larger work in progress, and need to be developed by further work on sources so far only sampled. It is very clear, however, that despite the many challenges they faced, the confraternities did not simply capitulate in the face of great social transformations, and that while they underwent major changes, they maintained their identity as a principal forum for the expression of the religious impulses of the Florentine laity.

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The Death of a Heretic, Florence 1389 NICHOLAS SCOTT BAKER

‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me’. Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies

A

bout the hour of midday, on Friday, 30 April 1389, a macabre procession wound through the streets of Florence. At its focus, surrounded by armed guards, walked a young man, his shaven head bowed. He wore only a partially fastened undershirt and a paper mitre painted with images of devils. This parade of infamy completed a broad loop through the city, passing all the civic keystones: the incomplete cathedral, the Baptistery of San Giovanni and the Palazzo della Signoria. Finally it passed beneath the grim gate at the end of the Via de’ Malcontenti, which opened only on such occasions, to the small field beyond.1 There stood a stake surrounded by a construction of wood and oil-soaked hay, to which the young man was bound. He was asked one final time to repent of his crimes and live, but he ignored the plea, replying: ‘This is a truth, which I have harboured within me, of which one cannot give testimony, if not dead’.2 Accordingly, he was then burned alive.

I am grateful to the late Ian Robertson, and also to Charles Zika and Anne Gilmour Bryson. 1

Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 141. 2

Scelta di Curiosità Letterarie Inedite o Rare, 100 vols (Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1862– 99; repr. Bologna: Commisione per I Testi di Lingua, 1968–69), VII, dispensa L: Storia di Fra Michele Minorita come fu arso in Firenze nel 1389, ed. by Francesco Zambrini (1968), 54. Further references to the Storia are given in the text. All translations from this and from the Sentence of Condemnation of Fra Michele (see n. 7 below) are my own.

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The real name of this young man was Giovanni di Berti, but he was called Fra Michele. He came from Calci, in the vicinity of Pisa, and he claimed to be a priest and a Franciscan friar. We do not know when he was born. However, it is clear that he was still a young man when he died. In fact we know very little about Fra Michele da Calci, beyond the grim events of early 1389 which led to his execution on the last day of April. He appears very briefly in the historical record before death draws him again into obscurity. At first glance, his was a flicker of life seemingly disconnected from any personal past as well as from the milieu of fourteenth-century Tuscany. What we do know of Fra Michele is largely thanks to the passionate and evocative chronicle, written anonymously shortly after his death, the Storia di Fra Michele Minorita come fu arso in Firenze nel 1389. This chronicle languished in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence until Francesco Zambrini published the manuscript in 1864. In his preface he made no mention of the Storia’s provenance before the Biblioteca acquired it — due I suspect to ignorance, not oversight. With simple yet effective language the anonymous author draws a portrait of the friar from Calci which has proved so compelling that it is difficult to distinguish the historical Giovanni di Berti from the Storia’s construction of ‘Fra Michele’. Written in a hagiographic manner, the Storia is obviously and blatantly sympathetic to Michele. The recurrent theme of the text invokes comparison between the sufferings of the friar and the passion of Christ. The author claims to have both first and secondhand knowledge of the events that he narrates.3 Describing the gloomy Carnival of 30 April, he writes: ‘All these things, which I shall say beneath, I who am writing, saw and heard them’ (3). While recounting Michele’s imprisonment and trial, the author states, on one occasion, ‘according to what his companion told me’ (13, 33). We can reconstruct only tantalizing fragments of the identity of the Storia’s author. He was presumably an inhabitant of Florence, since at the chronicle’s commencement he notes that Michele and his companion were ‘sent here to Florence [...] and they reached here on the twenty-sixth day of January 1389’ (1).4 We can also surmise that he was a member of the Fraticelli congregation, not only by the chronicle’s sympathetic voice, but also because the author records that the two preachers ‘satisfied each one of the needs of our souls’ (1).5 The authorship of the second extant source concerning Fra Michele is beyond doubt: ‘[The] corporal condemnation and sentence of corporal condemnation [...] 3

It is possible that the Storia was written by a woman. However, in the absence of any suggestion within the text to the contrary, it is more probable that the anonymous author was a man. I will refer to the author, therefore, as ‘he’ to avoid the awkward repetition of ‘he or she’ throughout this essay. 4

All dates are in modern format.

5

See also Zambrini’s preface, Storia, pp. xxviii–xxix.

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pronounced and promulgated by the magnificent and powerful man Niccolò Gentili [...] honourable Captain of the People and Commune of the city of Florence’.6 This official document, read publicly on the morning of the friar’s execution, provides a foil to the Storia. The Sentence paints a portrait of Michele as he was seen by the ecclesiastical and civic authorities. The conflict between these two views lies at the crux of the story of the poor friar from Calci. In black and white they represent two opposing ‘truths’: the official, authorized, signed-and-sealed ‘truth’ of the Sentence of Condemnation; and the vulgar, anonymous ‘truth’ of the Storia. In other words, the ‘truth’ of the Church and of the Commune of Florence (represented by the Bishop of Florence, Bartolommeo degli Uliari, and the Capitano del popolo, Niccolò Gentili), and the ‘truth’ of Fra Michele. In this essay I attempt to negotiate the conflict between these two competing documents; to draw out the meanings and beliefs that the central protagonists communicated to contemporaries. In the struggle over the body and soul of the poor friar from Calci three protagonists — the Bishop, the Commune of Florence, and Fra Michele himself — offer independent, differing fictions of the same events. I hope that in doing so I will also elucidate some of the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the study of late medieval heresy. According to the Sentence of Niccolò Gentili, Fra Michele, ‘this Giovanni’, was condemned to be burned for heresy, ‘so that he shall wholly die and his soul shall be separated from his body’.7 He was ‘a man of evil condition, and the worst conduct, life and fame, a heretic polluted by heretical stain, and who believes and affirms against the Catholic faith’.8 Throughout the Storia, however, Fra Michele is referred to as il santo, meaning either ‘saint’ or ‘holy man’, in the sense of blessed, while the Florentine Bishop, Bartolommeo, is bitterly described as ‘the Prince of the Pharisees’.9 The gulf separating these two views is more than a difference of opinion over the character of the friar from Calci. The same actions and beliefs which conferred sainthood upon Michele in the eyes of his supporters, condemned him as a ‘heretic and schismatic’ in the view of the Church and the state of Florence.10 In this conflict of words lies the essence of the problem of heresy. Throughout the late Middle Ages ‘heresy’ was a subjective term, based upon the opinions and prejudices of those who were using it. Heresy arose out of a conflict of belief over what constituted the Truth, the doctrine of the Church. Fra Michele was accused of preaching to ‘very many [...] persons [...] with false words and erroneous reasons

6 Sentence of Condemnation of Fra Michele, in Alessandro D’Ancona, Varietà storiche e letterarie, 2 vols (Milan: Treves, 1883–85), I (1883), 345. See n. 2 above. 7

Sentence of Condemnation, in D’Ancona, 353.

8

Sentence of Condemnation, in D’Ancona, 346.

9

See for example, Storia, p. 9.

10

Sentence of Condemnation, in D’Ancona, I, 353.

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that the sect was the true religion’.11 However, Michele himself maintained that his teachings were ‘not errors, but Catholic truths’ (24). In application, ‘heresy’ proved to be a fluid and dual-sided concept. It was created by both the ‘heretic’, in developing and obstinately holding certain beliefs and practices, and the Church, in defining what constituted orthodox religious behaviour and condemning the individual’s activities for falling outside this definition.12 The decision on what constituted orthodox Christianity and what did not, however, was highly dependant upon the particular circumstances and individuals involved. The process of labelling Fra Michele a ‘heretic’, the first step on his path to the stake, began on Tuesday, 20 April. The friar and his anonymous companion had been arrested at dawn that morning at a house in the city. On the evening of Monday, 19 April, the two men had been persuaded to remain overnight by the five women resident in the house, two of whom were Franciscan tertiaries, because they ‘sought to confess to him wishing the health of their souls’. The women, venomously described by the Storia’s author as ‘certain daughters of Judas [...] incited by the devil’ (3), were, it would seem, disappointed by Michele’s zealous and stern teachings. For the Storia notes that to the women ‘it did not seem that he could speak of anything, except things to frighten them’ (5–6). Once the two Fraticelli were asleep the women denounced them to the authorities. Thus on the morning of 20 April Michele and his companion were rushed out the door into an ambush of several ‘brigands and rogues [...] all armed’ accompanied by ‘raven friars’ (7), a name evocative not only of the black robes worn by conventual Franciscans but also of carrion birds circling a dying man. During the hour of vespers the two Fraticelli were examined at length by Bishop Bartolommeo on their past and their beliefs. Fra Antonio Bindi, the episcopal vicar, drew up a summary of eighteen articles of accusation based upon Michele’s answers. These were to be the basis of further investigation. The vicar then read this summary back to Michele, asking, ‘What do you say to this?’ (10). Despite complaining that his statements had been embellished, protesting ‘many times, that he [the notary] should not write other than that which he said’, Michele must have genuinely accepted them as a summary of his beliefs. He declared, with humble self-doubt: ‘If ever I say the contrary of this, it shall be for fear of death, but not because this is not the truth’ (11). These articles remained unaltered throughout the trial, and we can assume they are the same as the eighteen chapters of the Sentence of Condemnation.

11

Sentence of Condemnation, in D’Ancona, 349–50.

12

Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Hetrodoxy to Dissent c.1250–c.1450, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), I, 1–3; Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 4.

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The font from which these accusations sprang was the Bishop’s ability to identify and label Fra Michele. Sometime before his arrival in Florence on 26 January, so Bartolommeo and his vicar believed, Michele had, ‘knowingly, studiously, wretchedly and with the spirit and intent of practising heretical depravity’ become a member of the Fraticelli della povera vita.13 These Fraticelli had been identified and condemned by Pope John XXII in the decretal Gloriosam ecclesiam, some seventy years earlier as, ‘sons of […] rashness and impiety’.14 The heirs of the spiritual Franciscans, they had emerged from the ruins of the protracted and bitter dual conflict over poverty fought at a practical level within the Order of Friars Minor, and at a theoretical level between John XXII and the entire Order. They had refused to accept the Pope’s attempt to end the dispute with his 1323 declaration that the ‘persistent assertion’ that Christ and his apostles had lived in absolute poverty ‘shall henceforth be designated erroneous and heretical’.15 Instead they had rejected both their own order and the Church, declaring themselves true brethren of Saint Francis.16 When, on the morning of his execution, the notary, Jacopo Edificati, read the assertion that Fra Michele ‘was of the heretical opinion of the FRATICELLI DELLA POVERA VITA’, the friar vehemently denied such a conclusion. ‘I do not know these Fraticelli’, he protested, ‘[only] the friars minor of Saint F[rancis], who observe the rule!’ (40–41). This cry was a refusal to accept the label of Fraticello and heretic. Michele denied the conclusion that his beliefs were heretical and that the so-called Fraticelli were anything other than the true Franciscans. This position was unaltered from that which he had assumed on 20 April. In answer to Bartolommeo’s initial questions about his identity, the friar had replied that: ‘He was a sinner [who] kept the laws of Jesus Christ, and did not spread any doctrine other than that of Christ and his Church’ (9). Bartolommeo did not have to decide whether Michele’s beliefs constituted heresy or not. John XXII had declared as much earlier in the century. All the Bishop of Florence had to do was satisfy himself that this itinerant friar really was a Fraticello,

13

Sentence of Condemnation, in D’Ancona, 346–47.

14

John XXII, ‘Errores Fraticellorum (de Ecclesia et sacramentis): Damnati in Constit. “Gloriosam Ecclesiam”, 23 Ian. 1318’, in Enchiridion symbolorum: Definitorum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. by Heinrich Denziger (Barcelona: Herder, 1957), p. 223. 15

John XXII, ‘De puapertate Christi: Ex Constit. “Cum inter nonnullos”, 13 Nov. 1323’, in Enchiridion, p. 225. 16

For the most comprehensive studies of the century-long dispute within the Friars Minor which resulted in the erosion of their founder’s ideal, see Decima Douie, The Nature and Effect of the Heresy of the Fraticelli (New York: AMS Press, 1978); and Duncan Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Medieval Franciscan Order from Saint Francis to the Foundation of the Capuchins (Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 1987).

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and then apply the Pope’s ruling. This perhaps explains why the accusations against Michele sound so familiar to the author of the Storia (10), and why the friar himself continually protests that the notary has embellished his statements. The ecclesiastical authorities probably did not pay close attention to what Michele said before them. Once they had decided he was a member of the Fraticelli, they accused him of all the crimes associated with the apostate Franciscans, whether he had confessed to them or not.17 The issue for Bartolommeo, as it had been for John XXII in 1323, was not literally whether Christ and his apostles had possessions or not. In contention were practical concerns about papal authority and the nature of the Church. The culture of the established Church, of John and Bartolommeo, was based on property and the written word. Its foundations were an organized literate hierarchy and physical institutions: churches, libraries and convents.18 The Church was both physically and metaphorically an edifice of bricks and mortar. The mortar that held together the metaphorical bricks of secular and regular clergy, supporting the soaring steeple of the papacy, was the vow of obedience. The experience of poverty demanded by Fra Michele and his predecessors was in direct confrontation with this culture of organization and control. The realization of this experience lay in the rejection not only of property, but also of institutions and organizations. This was a religious life that had to be experienced and demonstrated on the streets and squares of cities and towns.19 It was not written down to be stored in libraries. It did not take place surrounded by four walls and a roof. Above all, this experience dissolved the mortar of obedience by holding Christ alone as ‘the exemplar and form’ of religious life and perfection. 20 That Fra Michele believed this himself was bad enough, but it did not actually make him a heretic. Heresy had to be brought out of the realm of subjective 17 On the construction of stereotypes by Church authorities, see R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 18–20. 18 Gordon Leff, ‘The Bible and Rights in Franciscan Disputes over Poverty’, in The Bible in the Medieval World, ed. by Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 225–26; Rob Foot, ‘The Poverty of Francis of Assisi: Historical Actions and Mythologised Meanings’, in No Gods Except Me: Orthodoxy and Religious Practice in Europe, 1200–1600, ed. by Charles Zika (Parkville: History Department, The University of Melbourne, 1991), p. 47. 19

Foot, pp. 38, 43–44.

20

Bonaventure, Apologia pauperum, in Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe: Documents in Translation, ed. by Edward Peters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), p. 243; compare Peter Olivi’s statement that ‘Francis, after Christ and under Christ, is the first and chief founder, initiator and exemplar of the sixth status and its evangelical rule’: Commentary on Revelation, in Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, ed. by Bernard McGinn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 209.

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experience and become an objective relationship with the Church.21 To be heresy a belief had to be preached, performed, taught or spoken. Fra Michele, the Bishop maintained, ‘not content’ with believing such errors himself: But as if he were a devil desiring and procuring the damnation and perdition of others [...] in the present month of April and the month of March just past persuaded [...] very many persons [...] of the city of Florence [...] to believe and enter the said sect of the said Fraticelli.22

The friar from Calci not only denied the redemptive power of the Church, but presented himself to the people as a source of true grace and salvation. Michele, the final accusation continued, had preached ‘that sect was the true religion, and the true observance, rule and life of the blessed Francis, and that he himself and his confederates [...] were true and Catholic Friars Minor and that [...] they are in a state of salvation’.23 No matter how humbly Fra Michele protested that he and his companion submitted their beliefs ‘to the correction of the holy Church’ (22), he did not believe that the papacy — or any other ecclesiastical authority — was legitimate. Since 1323, in his schema, only the Fraticelli had true teaching authority and redemptive power. Both Bartolommeo and Michele perceived the other as a subverter of the Truth, as a ‘false prophet’. It was Bartolommeo’s duty and obligation, as Bishop of Florence, to inquire into Fra Michele’s teachings and beliefs, for the spiritual well-being of both the friar and the community of the city.24 At its heart the inquisitorial process was concerned with salvation. Bernard Gui (whose reputation has been somewhat unfairly blackened by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose) wrote that an inquisitor of heresy had to be ‘a prudent physician of souls [...] that, with the help of God and the skill of a midwife, he may draw the writhing serpent from the sink and abyss of errors’.25 It was, in Bartolommeo’s view, to the benefit of all involved that Michele repent of his former beliefs and return to the Church. During the preliminary process of 21 April, after the friar’s confession had been read, he was asked ‘if he wished to believe that which so many masters and the whole population of Florence held’ (12). A conscientious 21

Talal Asad, ‘Medieval Heresy: An Anthropological View’, Social History, 11 (1986), 345–62 (p. 356). 22

Sentence of Condemnation, in D’Ancona, 349.

23

Sentence of Condemnation, in D’Ancona, 350.

24

See Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988; repr. 1989), p. 48; Leff, pp. 36–37, 43; Moore, pp. 9–18; and specifically, Richard C. Trexler, Synodal Law in Florence and Fiesole 1306–1518 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1971), pp. 60, 274–75. 25

Bernard Gui, Manuel de l’inquisteur, ed. and trans. by G. Mollat (Paris: Champion, 1926), pp. 8–9.

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Franciscan angrily pleaded with Michele: ‘I pray you realize the error of your faults; and pray to God that he may give you true knowledge’ (14). Following the preliminary session the friar was returned to the episcopal prison, beneath the Bishop’s palace. Three days later, on Saturday, 24 April, he was brought to face a further process at San Salvatore.26 This small church, contained within the structure of the palace, was the most important seat of the Florentine episcopal court.27 If the previous hearing had represented the pursuit of ‘truth’, of the facts of the case, then this ordinary trial represented the defence of the Truth. In the presence of the council of church masters and a ‘multitude of laity’(18), Michele’s crimes were publicly denounced, and he was called upon respond.28 The second trial, on 24 April, was open to the people for their edification, although it was likely that many of the lay people present were there simply out of curiosity.29 The Bishop hoped firstly to expose the errors and faults of Fra Michele’s teachings to the public. The author of the Storia accused the ecclesiastical notaries of extending both the Church’s accusations and the friar’s confession ‘with false consequences and errors [...] in order to incite the people against them [Michele and his companion]’(19). The process of popular edification was not only negative: as well as attempting to deter popular sympathy for the friar, Bartolommeo was hoping to convince the people of Florence of the Church’s compassion and wisdom. Fra Antonio, on the morning of 30 April, would state that the friar should repent ‘in order that people see that the Church is merciful’ (36). More importantly, the Bishop hoped to convince Fra Michele of the same. Hence, the anger of Bartolommeo and the other clergy on 24 April when, far from abjuring his beliefs and bowing to the will of the Bishop, the friar publicly embarrassed them by ‘citing in his defence approved rules, especially that of Saint Francis, and the decretal of Pope N[icholas] III’ (19–20).30 Michele had demonstrated that justification for his teachings could be 26

The Storia at this point, simply states ‘venendo il quarto dì’ (when the fourth day came) (18), posing the question, the fourth day from when? If it was the fourth day from the twentyfirst, then the second trial would have occurred on Sunday, 25 April. Gene Brucker, however, notes that the diocesan court did not operate on Sundays or on major feast days, for San Salvatore also served as a parochial church during the fourteenth century. See Gene Brucker, ‘Ecclesiastical Courts in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, Mediaeval Studies, 53 (1991), 229–57 (p. 231). I have therefore dated the second process as being held on the fourth day of Michele’s imprisonment, 24 April. 27

Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, trans. by Eugenio Dupré-Theseider, 8 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1956–68), V (1962), 627–28. See also Storia, p. 18. 28

This could also mean secular clergy, but I believe it refers to laity.

29

Brucker notes that large crowds would attend to hear significant or notorious cases: ‘Ecclesiastical Courts’, p. 231. 30 Nicholas III’s bull, Exiit qui seminat, forbade further debate on the poverty of Christ. The Fraticelli maintained that John XXII had illegally abrogated this when he re-opened the issue.

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found within the bounds of the Church, thereby successfully countering Bartolommeo’s depiction of the Church as a unified receptacle of wisdom and Truth. The Bishop could not correct the friar without admitting flaws into his edifice of orthodoxy. Instead, Michele was once more returned to the episcopal prison in chains. That evening, the imprisoned friar was brought, by a notary, ‘an ink-pot and pen and paper’, and a copy of the accusations against him and his companion. Michele was informed that: He should write that which they had said [...] chapter by chapter within three days; and if they wished, at the end of the three days, to admit the error of that which they were saying, then they would be pardoned (21).31

The friar was being given a chance to examine and understand the fears and accusations of the Church, in writing, the medium of the learned and powerful, and to respond in kind. This moment in the episcopal prison is also significant because it was the first explicit description of the choice the Church was offering to Michele and his companion. On the one hand, the notary was proffering absolution and forgiveness: the embrace of the loving mother described by Saint Augustine. On the other, the notary continued, if they chose not to realize their errors and heresies ‘then they would be given to the secular power, and they would be burned’ (21); and the flames of their execution would merely presage the eternal flames of hell. Michele refused to abandon his position. He responded only by refuting the ‘false consequences’ that had been drawn from his beliefs. At the bottom of the document listing the Church’s accusations he wrote: ‘We say with Saint Augustine: We may err, but heretics we cannot be’ (22). Despite this obstinacy, Bartolommeo still persevered. ‘I wish your acts to be excused before God; do you yet wish to repent of those errors of yours?’ (24), he demanded on 27 April, the last of the three days of grace. Finally, ‘about the third hour of the night’, a certain ‘proselyte’, descended to the prison to plead with the friar: Alas! Let it please you to repent, and know that the Bishop sends you word that tomorrow morning about ten o’clock, you shall be given to the Capitano and you shall go to the fire [...] the mitres and capes have been made, with Fraticelli accompanied by devils painted on them (26).

This constituted the last real effort to reclaim Michele for the Church. The following morning a brief, formal appeal was made to the friar before the Bishop’s sentence was passed upon him, and he was ritually degraded from the priesthood. 31

One of the difficulties in reading and working with the Storia is its necessary focus upon the figure of Fra Michele. The anonymous figure of his companion slides further and further into the background as the story of Michele’s passion advances. The author still uses the plural form, ‘they’, but sheds no light upon the role of the companion. His part remains a silent unobtrusive cameo to Fra Michele’s compelling leading man.

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Bartolommeo had lost. Fra Michele had been claimed by the devils depicted upon the paper mitres as one of their own. The process of inquisition against the friar from Calci was not, however, as simple as it appears in the pages of the Storia. There is another story untold by, perhaps unknown to, the anonymous author. For, like all bureaucratic processes, the inquisition did not easily conform to the simple, ideal model framed by papal legislation. Each individual process was moulded by external currents and subjective opinions. That against Fra Michele was no different. The major influence over inquisitors came from secular powers, as a result of the dependence upon local authorities to provide coercive force. This resulted in a surrender of independence.32 Beyond the sectional interests of local potentates there were other forces that played upon the fabric of each process; such as personal feuds or petty jealousies that could result in denunciations, or even simply the character of the inquisitor in charge.33 Fra Michele’s story is not immune from this undercurrent of forces. While it is difficult to determine exactly the events that led to his trial, it is possible to reconstruct a suggestion of the socio-political context. The most distinctive and curious feature of the process against Fra Michele is its isolation. The inquisition in Florence, based at the Franciscan convent at Santa Croce, had been reinstated in 1378 following the War of the Eight Saints. For the first time since 1345 it was permitted to operate with the full cooperation of the Commune.34 Yet neither the Franciscan inquisitor nor the episcopal court appear to have been especially active in the prosecution of deviance during the 1380s. There had been an attempt in 1383 by Fra Antonio di Lando, vicar of the Tuscan inquisitor, 32

Alexander Murray, ‘The Medieval Inquisition: An Instrument of Secular Politics?’, Peritia, 5 (1986), 161–200 (pp. 163–65, 174); Peters, pp. 56–57. 33

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou provides, perhaps, the classic example of the rich myriad of currents that determined the course of an inquisition: Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324, trans. by Barbara Bray (London: Scolar Press, 1978). 34 For details of the conflict between the Florentine Signoria and the Franciscan inquisitors, see Murray, pp. 166–172; Marvin B. Becker, ‘Florentine Politics and the Diffusion of Heresy in the Trecento: A Socioeconomic Enquiry’, Speculum, 34 (1959), 60–75; Vanna Antichi, ‘L’inquisizione a Firenze nel XIV secolo’, in Eretici e ribelli del XIII e XIV secoli: Saggi sullo spiritualismo Francescano in Toscana, ed. by Domenico Maselli (Pistoia: Tellini, 1974). Diana Webb has also written broadly on the topic of hatred and mistrust of the inquisition in late medieval Italy in ‘The Possibility of Toleration: Marsiglio and the City States of Italy’, in Persecution and Toleration (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 99–113; as has Peter Diehl in ‘Overcoming the Reluctance to Prosecute Heresy in Thirteenth-Century Italy’, in Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution and Rebellion, 1000–1500, ed. by Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 47–66.

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to arrest a Fraticelli sympathizer, Lorenzo Puccini. Puccini’s son, Angelo, had violently resisted the arresting officers and provoked a riot by shouting, ‘Let us stone those buggering friars and the police!’. The friars and the secular officers were forced to flee. Gene Brucker records that two rioters were fined by the podestà, but Puccini apparently escaped punishment for his heretical sympathies.35 Significantly the trial of Fra Michele doesn’t appear to have been part of a concerted campaign against the Fraticelli, despite the sect’s undeniable presence in the city. The Storia details that it was ‘customary’ for the Fraticelli of the Marche to send friars to the city on the Arno. According to the text there appears to have been a well-established network of Fraticelli faithful in Florence. The friar from Calci even appears to have preached in a church on Easter Sunday, 18 April (1–2, 44, 45, 48, 52). In 1381 Giacomo dei Tolomei, Bishop of Narni and special papal commissioner against heretics, had been so disturbed by the number of apostate Franciscans in Florence that he had ordered preachers to denounce their errors in every church.36 In 1424 the Fraticelli were still so numerous in Florence that Martin V felt it necessary specifically to order Leonardo Dati, the Florentine Minister-General of the Dominicans, to prosecute three of their number caught in the city.37 There was, then, an apparently unhindered continuum of Fraticelli activity in the city throughout the period. Yet, despite their seeming reluctance to control the problem, the governing circles of Florence were concerned about heresy, and the Fraticelli in particular, during this period. No longer would the Signoria tolerate and protect the disciples of absolute poverty, as they had done in 1348, when they shielded the preacher Fra Simone Fidati da Cascia from his Dominican pursuers. The swift succession of the disastrous war against the papacy in the 1370s and the ciompi revolt in 1378 resulted in a sea change from toleration to a desire for orthodoxy.38 How far this desire was translated into persecution is not clear. In 1382 specific laws were posted against the Fraticelli, but only after they had apparently failed to be approved in December 1381.39 This legislation appears to be more a reaction to Tolomei’s findings than an 35 The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study, ed. by Gene Brucker (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 252–53; see also Marvin B. Becker, ‘Heresy in Medieval and Renaissance Florence: A Comment’, Past and Present, 62 (1974), 153–61 (pp. 154–55). 36

Sandra Poggi, ‘I Fraticelli in Toscana’, in Eretici e ribelli, p. 263.

37

Poggi, p. 265; see also, John N. Stephens, ‘Heresy in Medieval and Renaissance Florence’, Past and Present, 54 (1972), 25–60, (pp. 42–45). 38

For detail on the conflict between Florence and the Church, and the ideological role of the Fraticelli, see Becker, ‘Diffusion of Heresy’; Richard C. Trexler, The Spiritual Power: Republican Florence Under Interdict, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1974), pp. 113–15, 138–39; and Donald Weinstein, ‘The Myth of Florence’, in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Nicolai Rubinstein (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 26. 39 Poggi, pp. 263–64; compare with Niccolò Rodolico, La democrazia Fiorentina nel suo tramonto (1378–1382) (Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1970), pp. 82–83.

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indication of governmental zeal. It certainly does not seem to have been applied until the trial of Fra Michele.40 Indeed the records of the advisory councils of 13 March 1389 appear, between the lines, to contain a reprimand to the Signoria, in the form of a reminder to support the Bishop and the inquisitor against the heretics in accordance with the 1381 law. The same records also clearly suggest, however, that it was the duty of the Bishop to take the initiative against the Fraticelli.41 Bartolommeo, apparently, decided to do so. The trial of Fra Michele did not occur by accident, nor was it part of a larger campaign of persecution. I would suggest that it was a specific case, which the Bishop hoped to use as an example. Bartolommeo degli Uliari had become Bishop of Florence in 1385, when his predecessor, Agnolo degli Acciauoli, became a cardinal. Bartolommeo does not appear to have been an impressive figure, barely making an impact on the popular consciousness of his flock. Only one of the extant chronicles records his entry into the city, and even then the author mistakenly records his name as Messer Donato.42 Nor did the new Bishop make much impact upon the government of Florence. In January 1388, Urban VI issued an interdict upon the city, presumably for its flirtation with Clement VII and support of Ladislas of Hungary’s claim to the throne of Naples. Upon receiving it, Bartolommeo approached the Signoria ‘with fear’, only to be abruptly ordered to return to his palace and not to publish the excommunication.43 I am not suggesting that Fra Michele’s trial was an attention-seeking exercise by a disgruntled prelate, but these events, particularly those of January 1388, do suggest the reason why the friar’s trial occurred. The determining factor is to be found in the accusations against Fra Michele, which outline Bartolommeo’s primary concerns in the prosecution of the case. The majority of the charges, fourteen of the eighteen, deal with authority and obedience. These were particularly fraught issues in Florence, and personally for Bartolommeo, in 1389. Since September 1378, the Church, and effectively western Europe, had been divided by two claimants to the throne of Saint Peter: Urban VI in Rome and Clement VII in Avignon. Although nominally allied to the Roman pontiff, Florence

40

See, however, Poggi, p. 264.

41

‘De Fraticellis dixit quod episcopus qui habet baliam provideat […]. De Fraticellis autem dixit quod mandentur rectores ut dent bracchium epicopo et inquisitori prout dixit lex nova, et episcopum foverent’: Consulte e Pratiche, cited in Gene Brucker, ‘Sorcery in Early Renaissance Florence’, Studies in the Renaissance, 10 (1963), 7–24 (p. 21). 42

Diario d’anonimo Fiorentino dall’anno 1358 al 1389, in Cronache dei secoli XIII e XIV, Documenti di storia Italiana (Florence: R. Deputazione sugli studi di storia patria, 1876), VI, 463. For a brief summation of Bartolommeo’s episcopate, see Ferdinando Ughello, Italia Sacra, 10 vols (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1972–74), III (1973), 159–60. 43 Rerum Italicarum Scriptores: Raccolta degli storici Italiani dal cinquecento al millecinquecento, ed. by L.A. Muratori; new edn. rev. by G. Carducci and V. Fiorini, 34 vols (Castello: Lapi, 1900–17), XVIII, Pt 3: Cronica prima d’anonimo (1915), 102.

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represented a microcosm in which the divisions and tensions besetting the Latin Church were played out. The aggressive, interventionist and erratic policies of Urban threatened the Republic’s hegemony in central Italy. While the memories of the War of the Eight Saints were still too fresh to permit military action, the traditional Guelf sympathies of Florence were strained beyond recognition. Alberto degli Albizzi went so far as to denounce the Pope as ‘the greatest enemy of this community and the Guelfs of this city’.44 Not only the Albizzi, but many other prominent families in the governing circles of the city were openly allied to Clement VII: the Corsini, Guasconi and Alessandri among others. This division of the city into Urbanist and Clementine factions also exacerbated existing domestic tensions over authority. For while not exclusively aristocratic, the Avignonese party was largely drawn from the oligarchic patricians who had staged the coup d’état of January 1382. Correspondingly, the Urbanist partisans were largely drawn from the lower guildsmen and from the populist patricians associated with the ciompi revolt and the guild regime of 1378. It has been suggested that the household of Marco di Francesco degli Alberti was spared from political punishment during the May 1387 purge of the Alberti and other populists because of his support for Clement VII.45 Bartolommeo was staunchly loyal to the Roman pontiff. He considered supporters of Clement VII to be heretics, and was sufficiently disturbed by the Signoria’s overtures to Avignon to plan a sermon against them. This attempt at preaching on 12 December 1387 was to coincide with the visit of an Avignonese delegation, and was hurriedly prevented by the civic authorities.46 So instead of preaching, the Bishop’s concerns about obedience to legitimate authority were played out on the body and soul of Fra Michele. The trial was to be a demonstration of the spiritual authority vested in Bartolommeo and, therefore, in Urban VI: a manifestation of obedience directed at those wavering towards the ‘heresy’ of Avignonese allegiance. In Bartolommeo’s ideal, the friar from Calci would submit to his episcopal authority, a powerful symbol and example of true obedience for the Clementine partisans.47 The 44 Cited in Gene Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 115. 45

Brucker, Civic World, pp. 81, 117–18; Susannah Kerr Foster, ‘The Ties That Bind: Kinship Association and Marriage in the Alberti Family, 1378–1428’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1985), pp. 566–67. 46 ‘Alle bocche della piazza’: Diario di Anonimo Fiorentino (1382–1401), ed. by A. Molho and F. Sznura (Florence: Olschki, 1986), pp. 77–78. 47 One can very easily speculate, and it would be interesting to investigate properly, links between the Fraticelli and various families of the ruling circle of Florence. Certainly in the middle of the trecento a group of ‘Fraticelli’ met at the villa of Tommaso Corsini, including the preachers Fra Simone da Cascia and Fra Silvestro. However the actual nature of this congregation’s beliefs is unclear: the term Fraticelli was applied widely beyond Franciscan sectarians, and its usage in this case was apparently popular, not ecclesiastical. See Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, VII, 155; and Weinstein, p. 26. Also see Stephens on fifteenth-

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Bishop was supported in this endeavour by a degree of conciliatory feeling among the ruling circles of Florence. The discussion noted in the Consulte e Pratiche from 13 March 1389, records a sense that the Signoria had been walking too close to the edge of rebellion. Painful echoes from 1375 could be heard. A diplomatic gesture towards Urban was necessary. The civic cooperation in the trial of Fra Michele constituted this gesture. The spring of 1389, and especially the month of March, apparently saw a new spirit of conciliation enter even the most ardent imperialists in Florentine governmental circles. Attempts were made to achieve peace and reconciliation with both Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, and with the Commune of Siena.48 This spirit presumably extended to the papacy also, especially given the continuing distrust of Visconti, and the Signoria’s hopes of papal support if a war against the Milanese Duke was to eventuate.49 From the position of the Bishop of Florence the inquisition against Fra Michele was a failure. Bartolommeo had sought to manifest his spiritual authority upon the soul of the friar. He had hoped both to save Michele from damnation as a heretic, and to demonstrate the importance of obedience. He failed. The agenda of the friar, however, was only just coming to fore as he was marched from the episcopal palace to the secular prisons of the Bargello on 28 April. Its endgame was played out in the competing ‘truths’ active upon the body and soul of Michele on May Day eve. The central statement of the Storia is that Fra Michele died for ‘truth’. This claim in no way attempts to account for or illuminate the friar’s actions — behaviour that was extremely difficult for his contemporaries to comprehend, judging from the anguished chorus of: ‘Repent! Repent! Do not wish to die!’ (45; see also pp. 44–54), which accompanied him to his pyre. The author of the Storia provides no explicit explanation, for it does not suit the purpose or the tone of the work, which is more akin to a devotional tract than an analytical chronicle. It presents Michele as il santo, as a martyr to inspire others to follow his example of steadfast faith despite confrontations with the ‘heretical’ forces of the Bishop and the Capitano. The Storia is a visual text, intended to be read only upon the surface.50 It offers no explanation of the motives of its holy subject. If we are to understand ‘the truth’ which Fra

century links between the Acciauoli, the Pitti and Fraticelli (pp. 43, 45, 50–52). How much, if any, these links may have motivated the trial of Fra Michele remains in the realm of speculation. 48

Brucker, Civic World, pp. 131–32.

49

Anthony Molho, ‘The Florentine Oligarchy of the Late Trecento, 1393–1402’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1965), p. 177. 50

Cynthia Troup, ‘S. Francesca Romana: Reading Surfaces: Imagery and Devotion in Giovanni’s Fifteenth-Century Vernacular tractati’, (unpublished paper delivered at International Medieval Conference, Leeds, 1996). Thanks to Cynthia Troup for her permission to use this piece.

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Michele felt he could only justify in death, then we need to look beyond the surface of the text. Michele wished to become a martyr to his beliefs. That much is clear from the evidence concerning his arrest. Immediately upon being imprisoned in the Bishop’s palace, on 20 April, the friar fell to his knees to give thanks: ‘Oh, how much grace God has given us! And to such people! [...] Oh, how many of the poor [friars] have desired this for years!’ (8). Throughout the days of his imprisonment Michele remained astounded that he and his companion — ‘So condemned! Worthy of a thousand hells!’ (17) — had been so honoured. There is even a suggestion that Michele came to Florence to die. It is possible that, carried away by youthful zeal and exuberance, he gave a particularly provocative sermon on Easter Sunday, daring the authorities to respond. He was reluctant to leave the city, declaring on Monday, 19 April, ‘that he could not find the heart to go’. When the friar decided to remain one more night, and received the fateful invitation from the five women, the author wrote: ‘It should nevertheless be this way’ (3). In the devotional landscape of the Storia it is necessary, almost pre-ordained, that Michele should be executed — just as it was necessary for Christ to die for the salvation of humanity. This wish to die was not unique to the friar, who recited to his companion the ‘perfections and ardent desires to become martyred’ (8) of many other more worthy Fraticelli. In 1376 the Catalan inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich had cautioned against releasing obstinate or relapsed heretics to the secular powers too quickly. It was better to imprison them, he believed, because they viewed execution as a glorious death.51 Not all heretics, however, felt this way. Indeed, among the Fraticelli, abjuring one’s beliefs before an ecclesiastical court in order to escape death appears to have been an acceptable and common ploy. Michele’s companion appears to have confessed his sins and recanted his heresies. Following the friar’s ritual degradation from the clergy on 28 April the two Fraticelli had been separated. The friar was surrendered to the Capitano, Niccolò Gentili, while at this point the vague figure of his companion disappears from the Storia altogether. We can assume that he did in fact recant his heretical beliefs, and was granted absolution, because, as Michele was led to his execution, one onlooker demanded: ‘Why do you not do what your companion did?’. It is important to note that the companion was neither condemned nor vilified for his actions. Michele responded to this interjection with concern. ‘God give him grace’, he said, ‘that he not despair’ (50–51). Nor did the author of the Storia, whose propensity for vicious pejoratives has been noted, treat him harshly. It is obvious that the companion was a valuable source for the Storia (13, 33).52 Like

51

James Given, ‘The Inquisitors of Languedoc and the Medieval Technology of Power’, American Historical Review, 94 (1989), 345. 52

See n. 3 above.

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many others before him Michele’s companion escaped death by abjuring his beliefs only to return to the Fraticelli fold as soon as he was free.53 Michele believed that his death would be more than simply a praiseworthy act among his fellow Fraticelli. He confided to his companion on the evening of 21 April: I think that all the holy fathers of the Old Testament and of the New are praying for us; I think that our father Saint F[rancis] prays for us; and so, I believe, these holy martyrs: Bartolommeo Greco and Bartolommeo da Buggiano and Antonio da Aqua Canina (17).54

As the day of his inevitable execution drew closer, the friar became even more fervent. After receiving the Bishop’s last plea that he repent and the warning that the mitre for his burning had been prepared, Michele fell to his knees and, ‘with words which seemed to consume him totally’, informed his companion: I think that our father Saint F[rancis] will be beside the capannuccio,55 and yet I say more, that I believe the apostles of Christ will be there, and these glorious martyrs, the two brothers Bartolommeo and brother Antonio [...] I tell you even more that I believe that Jesus Christ will be there (27).

This, however, is little more than a continuation of the friar’s belief, and argument to Bartolommeo degli Uliari, that Fraticelli teachings were not ‘errors, but Catholic truths’ (24). In this scenario, Michele was simply the latest of the chorus of Christian martyrs to die for their faith. The friar was not, however, ‘amongst pagans’, as one onlooker at his execution observed (50). The people who convicted and executed him also believed themselves to be true Christians. Death represented more to Michele than simply a glorious exaltation of faith. It was the ultimate victory over the Bishop and the Church. It was the ultimate demonstration and justification that the friar’s beliefs were the Truth. As one of the Fraticelli, Fra Michele viewed himself as a true spiritual heir of Saint Francis. With regard to the regular Franciscan Order, Michele stated: ‘They are not observing the rule which they swore’ (41). They did not maintain Francis’s legacy or ideals, and therefore were not worthy of his name. The central tenet of the Franciscan religious experience was a performance: the imitation of Christ. Piety and spirituality were manifested through action and presence, not written words. 53

See Poggi, pp. 260–61; see also the reference to Fra Francesco da Camerino, the leader of the Fraticelli in the Marche: Storia, p. 51. For details refer to Trexler, Spiritual Power, pp. 135–36. 54

Nothing, unfortunately, is yet known about these three Fraticelli martyrs.

55

Literally capannuccio translates as ‘little hut’, referring to the edifice of oil-soaked wood and straw which was built around the stake to house the prisoner. A workable translation would be ‘stake’, but this does not convey the entire meaning — just as ‘little hut’ appears somewhat innocuous in the circumstances. I have therefore opted to retain the original.

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Through the physical act of renouncing all possessions, and through their outward appearance and behaviour, the friars expressed their inner faith and belief in Christ.56 ‘All the friars’, wrote Saint Francis, ‘should preach by their example’.57 Franciscan spirituality was physical. Thomas of Spalato noted, in 1222, that Francis did not preach to crowds. Rather he harangued them in the manner of a concionatore. These political orators sought to persuade people not merely with words, but with suitable and vigorous gestures and provocative acts to stimulate their imagination.58 This untutored, vigorous method of preaching, which abandoned the traditional tripartite model of auctoritates, rationes and exempla, was the basis of the Franciscan sermo humilis. This mode of preaching focussed upon stirring the audience into action, upon igniting their emotions and imaginations. The Friars Minor utilized a narrative method, which gave pride of place to the immediacy of exempla, supported by auctoritates. They completely disregarded, however, the use of rationes, the abstract, logical, scholastic argument that coloured Dominican preaching.59 It was not the words that were essential but the actions and emotions that they inspired. The Franciscan sermon was a performance designed to engender new behaviour in its audience, by provoking deeper understanding and faith. The primary and most important exemplum was the life of Christ, and therefore, the greatest of all authorities were the Gospels. The Bible, to Francis, was not a text to be extrapolated, but an actual living presence.60 The ultimate achievement of the Franciscan religious experience was to attain ‘that evangelical perfection by which we are conformed to Christ’.61 It was to engage imaginatively in sacred history by visualizing the events, sympathizing with the actors, and ultimately participating in the story.62 Francis, wrote Peter Olivi, ‘bore the perfect image of Christ’.63 Behaviour 56 Foot, pp. 38, 41–42; Barbara H. Rosenwein and Lester K. Little, ‘Social Meaning in the Monastic and Mendicant Spiritualities’, Past and Present, 63 (1974), 4–32 (pp. 17–18, 22); Jeanette Jones Hurst, ‘Franciscan Preaching, Communal Politics and the Struggle Between Papacy and Empire in Northern Italy, 1230–1268’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1987), p. 30. 57 Saint Francis, ‘Rule of 1221’, in St Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies, ed. by Marion A. Habig (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), p. 45. 58 Hurst, p. 31; Daniel R. Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence: The Social World of Franciscan and Dominican Spirituality (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 137. 59

Lesnick, pp. 94, 139.

60

Lesnick, p. 139.

61

Saint Bonaventure, Apologia pauperum, in Heresy and Authority, p. 241.

62

Lesnick, pp. 177–78. The Franciscans who had exercised custodia terrae sanctae in the Holy Land had apparently encouraged pilgrims to experience and relive Christ’s sufferings while visiting the sites of the passion. See Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 228.

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and appearance were paramount, rather than interpretation or the logical argument of traditional Church thought. Salvation was achieved through an understanding and a knowledge that came only from experience: through participation, not words. Fra Michele protested to Fra Antonio on the morning of 30 April: ‘You want to deceive the simple with writings and words’ (42). The friar, in opposition, sought to impress the Truth upon the people of Florence by his actions. The events of 30 April constituted Fra Michele’s final ‘sermon’, his final performance. In it he moved suddenly and dramatically from outward imitation of the apostolic life, to actual, fatal participation in sacred history. The procession through the streets from the Bargello became the Way of the Cross. The place of execution became Calvary. The audience of this ultimate act were the people lining the streets, ‘so many [...] that one could scarcely see’ (44), despite the pouring rain. Richard Trexler has argued the opposite: that the Florentine crowd were in fact the players in this drama, and that Fra Michele was simply the passive image on to which they projected their fears.64 While this was certainly true from the cultural perspective of the Commune, as an entity, it is only one side of the drama. The friar’s apparent passivity, walking towards his death ‘with long strides and with his head bowed, saying the office’, was a focussed performance. It was a deliberate imitation of Christ. As the author of the Storia noted: ‘Truly he seemed one of the martyrs’ (3–44). Through his personal act of dying the friar hoped to articulate the Truth, just like any Franciscan sermon, and to lead the people of Florence to true knowledge and salvation. From the Bargello, where the Capitano del Popolo had unknowingly fulfilled the role of Pilate, Fra Michele was escorted by the magistrate’s guards through the civic centre of Florence. It was a parade grimly reminiscent of the regular public circulation of holy objects. This similarity is more than a coincidence. For the friar’s actions were not the only manifestation of ‘truth’ active on that last day of April. The passage of a holy object in a public procession was intended to focus reverence upon, and obeisance to, the sacred. Such a procession delineated between the sacred 63

Peter Olivi, Commentary on Revelation, in Visions of the End, pp. 208–09.

64

Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), p. 207. See also, Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 137. Like Trexler, Merback leaves the narrative of the condemned untouched in his discussion, stating that the only active participants in execution dramas were ‘secular authorities, the people and the Church’. I hope my article provides a small step towards rectifying this lacuna in academic studies of late medieval punishment. See also Brad Gregory’s study of Christian martyrdom during the confessional conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a detailed and compelling analysis of the motivations and mentalities of condemned religious criminals in the early modern period: Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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and the profane. Passing through the drab and cramped streets, the procession manifested the radically different reality of the sacred and reinforced the holy dignity and power of Church and Commune as custodians of the object.65 The procession of the friar was intended to have the opposite effect, by utilizing the same technique. It was intended to de-mystify Michele and disinfect the city that he had contaminated. The procession would focus attention upon the body of the condemned man, and demonstrate the truth and justice of communal rule and universal Christian society.66 The Sentence of Condemnation stated: So that his punishment may pass as an example to others; therefore, we condemn the said Giovanni called Fra Michele, heretic and schismatic, to be led to the customary place of justice, and there with fire and flames of fire to be burned [...] so that he shall wholly die.67

However, the friar’s final ‘sermon’, his very public and very real participation in sacred history, appeared to disturb many of the onlookers: While the people were returning home, to the greater part it [Michele’s execution] seemed evil [...] And one said: He is a martyr; another: He is a saint; another the contrary. And thus of this there was a greater noise in Florence than there had ever been (56–57).68

Even if we discount this statement as including partisan exaggeration, it is obvious that there was still a significant resonance from the friar’s final performance. The author of the Storia appears to recount the cries of the crowd through the streets almost verbatim. At one point he admits to being unable to hear: ‘I do not know if he replied to her’ (52). The curses, pleas and retorts of the crowd, and the friar’s everdemanding replies record the popular reaction to his breathtaking act of faith. From the moment he was consigned to the secular cells of the Bargello, Michele was subjected to a barrage of frightened pleas and demands. In prison he was denied a bed and attacked ‘day and night with many insults, because he did not wish to 65 Richard C. Trexler, Church and Community 1200–1600: Studies in the History of Florence and New Spain (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1987), pp. 13–14, 16–17. See also, Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 209–11; and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 247. 66

See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979; repr. 1991), pp. 43–44; Muir, p. 245; Merback, pp. 138–39; and Talal Asad, ‘Notes on Body Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual’, Economy and Society, 12 (1983), 287–327 (p. 292). 67

Sentence of Condemnation, in D’Ancona, 353.

68

For comparison with the details in the following paragraphs, see Merback on popular attitudes towards repentant and obstinate criminals, and the communal need for the condemned to make a ‘good death’ (pp. 142–50).

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believe in the pope’ (32). As he was paraded through the streets the cries intensified. Outside the Bargello the crowd shouted: ‘Alas! Do not wish to die’. At the Baptistery they cried: ‘Repent, repent! Do not wish to die!’. Along the Calimala people urged the friar: ‘Save yourself! Save yourself!’. In the Piazza della Signoria, they wailed: ‘Repent of error! Do not wish to die!’ (44–46). The crowd did not so much want Michele to live, as to admit that he was wrong, thus saving his soul if not his body. Michele gave them no respite, however, carefully maintaining that he was dying for Christ and the Truth, retorting: ‘Save yourselves from hell!’, ‘Repent of your sins! Repent of your usury, of your false dealings!’. He claimed that he was condemned for ‘the truth, to which every Christian is bound’ (46). Outside Santa Croce, where the Franciscan community had assembled on the stairs, he shouted: ‘The Rule of Saint F[rancis], which you swore, has been condemned!’. In response, ‘some shook their shoulders, and some drew their cowls over their faces’ (49). Michele also strongly impressed upon the crowd his imitation of Christ and the apostles. When a man in the Piazza del Grano began to chant: ‘Voice of the people, voice of God’, in an effort to sway the friar, he retorted: ‘The voice of the people had Christ crucified, and Saint Peter killed’ (48). Michele made certain that the responsibility for his death was clear: ‘I am not killing myself, they are killing me’ (50). His was the broken and bleeding body of Christ and Michele was seeking to evoke this identification in the memory of the onlookers.69 He was seeking to imitate the passion of the Saviour. There were indeed isolated voices of comfort and support for the friar. One such was the woman before the gate, who shouted: ‘Be strong, martyr of Christ, that immediately you shall receive your crown!’ (52). Michele’s performance clearly did not go totally unheeded, his testimony to the Truth, his death, was not in vain. The friar from Calci went boldly and calmly to his death. He recited the credo and the Te Deum as the fire was lit: He sang perhaps eight verses, and then made an action, as if sneezing [...] then the bonds having burned, he fell to the ground on his knees, with his face towards heaven and his mouth round, dead (55–56).

Michele’s body was not burned to ash; instead permission was given for it to be buried in a pit nearby. It is not surprising that the cadaver was removed by Fraticelli faithful during the night, and was never seen again, much to the consternation of the populace. Like Christ, Fra Michele was buried only to vanish from his grave. With this midnight disappearance, Michele also slips out of the historical record as silently and suddenly as he had appeared. The Fraticelli, however, continued to preach apostolic poverty and schism with the papal Church for nearly eighty more years. The last recorded trial occurred at Rome in 1466, some ten years after their final appearance in Florence. Bartolommeo degli Uliari renounced the bishopric of Florence on 27 or 28 December 1389, to receive a cardinal’s hat. He died seven 69

See Constable, pp. 181, 211, 222; and Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), ch. 1.

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years later at Gaeta on April 16. In Florence the so-called ‘oligarchic regime’ instituted in 1382 continued, increasingly influenced by the Albizzi family, until the triumphant return of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1434. In the spring of 1390 the Commune went to war with Milan. The contest of wills, the battle over Truth, between Michele and Bartolommeo is only one small moment in history, embracing but ten days. Yet thanks to the surviving documentation we can extrapolate a wealth of inference and information from this intense moment of conflict. I have attempted in this article to draw from these texts three portraits. That of Bartolommeo, the Bishop who attempted to communicate crucial ideas about obedience and authority by the public trial, and later by the execution, of the friar from Calci. That of Fra Michele, the poor friar, the ‘heretic’, who dramatically preached through his actions that the beliefs of the Fraticelli were the Truth, and tried to convince the city of their veracity, by actively consenting to die. The third portrait is that of the Commune of Florence, represented variously throughout this story. Divided by schism and internal politics, threatened by war from the north, the Commune united in what it believed was a self-assuring demonstration of justice and strength in the death of a heretic.

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Cultivating Charisma: Elisabeth de Ranfaing and the Médailliste Cult in Seventeenth-Century Lorraine SARAH FERBER

We shall conduct ourselves as spiritual money-changers or merchants, wisely and accurately examining the precious and unfamiliar coin of divine revelation lest the demons who are occupied in counterfeiting any divine or good coin may substitute the spurious and worthless for the true and genuine. This would be no small loss to the ecclesiastical purse or treasury, that is, to the Imperial Treasury of God. […] Since this is a very suitable metaphor for explaining tangibly what we have in mind, we shall continue to use it. Jean Gerson, De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis.1 They distribute like currency certain medals that they proclaim to be endowed with a divine virtue to chase illnesses of body and soul, to win legal cases, to conceive

I wish to thank Leigh Dale for many insightful editorial suggestions, and the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland for a period of teaching relief which provided time to work on this essay. 1 Jean Gerson, The Concept of ‘Discretio Spirituum’ in John Gerson’s ‘De Probatione Spirituum’ and ‘De Distinctione Verarum Visionum A Falsis’, ed. and trans. by Pascal Boland (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), p. 80. Ian Robertson’s University of Melbourne undergraduate course ‘The Great Schism: 1378–1417’ — a course of such specialism that it would be unlikely to be taught now — was a magnificent introduction to the intellectual scope, political and polemical strategies, and convictions of the first generation of those Conciliar reformers whose influence, for good or ill, reverberated well into the seventeenth century. Ian’s fascination with these scholar activists, notably Gerson, was imprinted on me then and remains, decades later.

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children [...] and they say that these graces and indulgences come from the merits of this possessed woman, that even the sovereign Pontiff cannot revoke. Excerpt from Jesuit provincial Dominique Dinet’s accusations against Jesuit followers of Elisabeth de Ranfaing, 1644–47.2

I

n 1648 an anonymous Jesuit in Lorraine wrote a letter in defence of devotional activities that he and a group of brother-Jesuits practised under the guidance of a woman whom he referred to only by the rather aromatic codename ‘Symphorose’.3 ‘Symphorose’ was the moniker of Mother Marie-Elisabeth de la Croix de Jésus, who had been in secular life the demonically possessed widow Elisabeth de Ranfaing (1592–1649). Ranfaing was the only ‘career’ demoniac to become the founder and superior of a successful religious order, Notre Dame du Refuge in Nancy, an order founded for the reclamation of prostitutes. Before its decline in the revolutionary era the Order had fifteen houses across Lorraine and France, as well as one in Sicily.4 The group to which the Jesuit’s letter referred was a devotional confraternity associated with this order, called by its enemies the Médaillistes for the religious medals they produced, and by members the 2 ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 10 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 824–25), in Etienne Delcambre and Jean Lhermitte, Un cas énigmatique de possession diabolique en Lorraine au XVIIe siècle: Elisabeth de Ranfaing, l’énergumène de Nancy, fondatrice de l’Ordre du Refuge (Nancy: Société d’Archaeologie Lorraine, 1956), p. 135. This text originates in a manuscript collection which is the largest resource for the history of the Médaillistes: ‘Recueil de diverses pièces concernants l’affaire que les Pères Nicolas Javelle, Charles Seiglière, René de Trans et Jean d’Argombat Profès de la Compagnie de Jésus ont eu contre les PP Jésuites au Tribunal de l’Inquisition à Rome’, 829ff, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Manuscrits fonds français, 494 (hereafter BN MSS fds fs 494). In Delcambre and Lhermitte’s books, a selection of extracts from a number of sources, including from this MS collection, is reproduced as ‘Pièces Justificatives’. In the present essay, citations from Delcambre and Lhermitte’s book referring to BN MSS fds fs 494 are indicated by the use of parentheses; those which I have taken directly from BN MSS fds fs 494 (i.e., not included by Delcambre and Lhermitte) are given without parentheses. 3

‘Coppie d’une lettre escritte à Monsieur l’Abbé de Beaupré, touchant les plaintes que l’on fait de trois religieux de mesme ordre’: BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 299–318 (fol. 299v). It is difficult to ascertain the identity of the author of this letter, however, internal evidence suggests the author was most likely the Jesuit Father René de Trans. 4

Louis du Bois de Cendrecourt, ‘Elisabeth de Ranfaing (1592–1649), Fondatrice de l’ordre de ND du Refuge’, Le pays lorrain (1993), 1–12 (pp. 9–10). See also Louis du Bois de Cendrecourt and Véronique Hallaert, L’Ordre de Notre-Dame du Refuge: Sa fondatrice et ses monastères: Quatrième centenaire de la naissance de Mère Elisabeth de Ranfaing, 1592– 1992 (Paris: Louis du Bois de Cendrecourt, 1992); and du Bois de Cendrecourt, ‘Mère Elisabeth de Ranfaing, un centenaire de sa naissance, 1592–1992’, Le pays de Remiremont, 11 (1992), 111–50 and ‘Elisabeth de Ranfaing et sa famille’, Généalogie Lorraine, 12 (1992), 3–16.

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Congrégation du Salut asseuré. The Lorraine historian Etienne Delcambre described the group as ‘a clandestine and dissident sect, in revolt against the Catholic hierarchy, of which Elisabeth de Ranfaing was the animating force and head’.5 There seems little doubt that the activities of Ranfaing and her small group of intimates were, for those involved, deeply compelling, even all-consuming. The commitment of members to the group and to Ranfaing herself were expressed in the form of an oath to the Order and to her, and in a number of activities which sought to demarcate the group from society in general, and from the Society of Jesus in particular. The group came to use enforced secrecy and ritual, notably exorcisms, to protect themselves from what they saw as diabolically inspired threats to their capacity to devote themselves entirely to the divine aims they served. But the Jesuit’s letter denied that the group had formed ‘a cabal whose chief is a possessed woman’ and he rejected the notion that through this attachment ‘one was tacitly given to the devil’.6 He defended the group’s use of exorcism in their devotions by saying they only used it against people who tried to stop them making confession properly and not specifically against their superiors, as had been alleged.7 How did the woman at the head of this group come to attain such potent mystique as to retain the loyalty of followers in the face of hostility, first from the Capuchin Order, and later from the Jesuit and secular hierarchies, who hounded them for channelling spiritual vigour into a rival hierarchy under her influence? And how did the core membership of the cult come to be dismantled in the late 1640s? This essay considers Ranfaing’s life story in light of the changing value of her cult: for just as the money offered by devils to witches was said to turn into dung and leaves, the ‘coin of divine revelation’ was capable of becoming the subject of close scrutiny, and undergoing rapid changes in value. Gerson’s numismatic metaphor apportions to the devil the power and freedom to manufacture counterfeit spiritual coins, and for Gerson, the question of how value shall be ascertained was a theological problem, not a social one. In a historical analysis, the question of discernment of authenticity from fraud can only be addressed institutionally, socially and discursively. The changing fortunes of Ranfaing and her followers trace the jagged line dividing authenticity from fraud in the Catholic sacramental system, that system in which ‘the sacred is manifest in and through the profane’ through the elevation of objects, rites, times and holy people to a sacred status.8 This line was rendered even more uncertain in this case by the 5

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 5.

6

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 313r.

7

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 315r.

8 Robert W. Scribner, ‘Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-Industrial German Society’, in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), p. 13. On discernment of spirits, see also: ‘Discernement des esprits’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique: doctrine et histoire, ed. by

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complexities and varied functions of demonology in Catholicism, and it is a line which also shifted according to the competing claims of patrons and enemies. Patronage was the force that endowed value and took it away: for, crucially, the system of value described by Gerson is always potentially inflationary. There is no absolute value, even though the Catholic theological system posits that there is and must be. Gerson’s argument sustains the view that holiness will only be found in a limited number of places, yet the system of sacramentals allows for indeterminate expansion in unpredictable directions. Nothing, therefore, should lead us to imagine that this cult could not potentially have flourished unfettered. Nothing was foregone, and a good Catholic might have participated in it with a reasonable expectation that it would survive. Resistance to Ranfaing’s cult did not come about as a ‘natural’ response from groups consistently historically opposed to female religiosity; rather it arose in specific interpersonal, local, political and social circumstances, having no necessary plotline, and it bears witness to the political and polemical struggles within and between religious orders in the era of counter-reformation revival. Specifically, this study will explore how spiritual value was accrued to Ranfaing’s experience of demonic possession, through the idea of her suffering for chastity, and the consequent transfer of her spiritual merit into the life of her order and her personal cult. We shall see the ways in which Ranfaing’s and later the group’s identities were built around an attitude of desperate retreat into the world of the spirit: shown by the rejection of family, by an attack on allegedly sexually motivated witchcraft, and by the use of exorcisms against the perceived diabolical activities of outsiders. The group’s isolationism was reinforced by fears of the imminent end of time and the urgent need to establish their own moral ascendancy, expressed in a sense of suffering, sacrifice and martyrdom. And while their behaviour was intensified by reference to alleged demonic torments inflicted by witchcraft — by this time a familiar theme, especially in francophone Europe — we shall also see how recurring claims by enemies that Ranfaing herself trumped up her holiness, possibly with the help of devils, served to undermine the value of her cult. For this is a story which not only shows the traditional ways in which elements within the Catholic Church contested claims of worldly manifestations of sacred power, but also displays features specific to this era: the multiple deployment of fears of the Marcel Viller and others (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–95), III (1957), cols 1222–91; Jean-Michel Sallmann, ‘Théorie et pratiques du discernement des esprits’, in Visions indiennes, visions baroques: Les métissages de l’inconscient (Paris: PUF, 1992), pp. 91–116; Christian Renoux, ‘Discerner la sainteté des mystiques: Quelques exemples italiens de l’âge baroque’, Rives nord-méditerranéennes, 3 (1999), 19–28; Alison Weber, ‘Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 31 (2000), 123–46; Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), esp. chs 3, 6, 7; Nancy Caciola, Discernment of Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 274–319.

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devil (both by supporters and opponents of the cult) and intense fear of feminine sexuality and immorality, evident in the views of both opponents and supporters of Ranfaing.9 In this way, the case shows the particular delicacy of the membrane separating sacred from profane in this period, which allowed for the close proximity of physical and spiritual worlds, and equally for the relatively rapid rise and fall of a cult.10

‘A Horror of the World’ Elisabeth de Ranfaing was born in 1592 in Remiremont, the only child of a lesser noble, Jean-Liénard Ranfaing, and his wife Claude de Magnières. The only biography — or better, hagiography — of Ranfaing to be commenced in her lifetime was written by a Jesuit member of Ranfaing’s inner circle, Jean d’Argombat.11 In 9

On the intensification of fears of sexuality, see James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy, 1550–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 10 See Scribner, p. 14, referring in turn to Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), trans. by F. Hopman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), ch. 12. On the destruction of a burgeoning host cult in fifteenth-century Germany, see Charles Zika, ‘Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany’, in Exorcising our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 156–96 (pp. 158–59). 11

Jean d’Argombat had begun writing a biography of Ranfaing when he died in 1654: ‘Biographie manuscrite de Mère Marie-Elisabeth de la Croix de Jésus’ (1653), Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Manuscrits fonds français, 1783 (hereafter BN MSS fds fs 1783). The manuscript by Argombat ends with the beginning of Ranfaing’s possession. A small amount of additional material on the life of Ranfaing is located at BN MSS fds latin 14645, ‘Notes sur la vie de Mère Elizabeth de la Croix de Jésus religieuse de Nancy’. Two hagiographical accounts of her life were written in later decades, during the life of the Order: Henri-Marie Boudon, Le triomphe de la Croix en la possession de la vénérable Mère Marie-Elisabeth de la Croix de Jésus fondatrice de l’institut de N.D. du Refuge des vierges et filles pénitentes (Liège: H. G. Streel, 1686); Nicolas Frison, La vie de la vénérable Mère Marie-Elisabeth de la Croix de Jésus dite dans le monde Elisabeth de Ranfaing, fondatrice de l’ordre de NotreDame du Refuge en 1631 (Avignon: F. Girard, 1735). The study of Ranfaing written by Etienne Delcambre in 1956, in collaboration with the neurologist Jean Lhermitte (see n. 2), remains the most complete modern scholarly overview of her career. Principally concerned to interpret her possession in psychological terms, their book remains an excellent account of her story and digest of sources. See also: Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle: Une analyse de psychologie historique (1968) (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 246–51; and Christian Pfister, L’énergumène de Nancy: Elisabeth de Ranfaing et le couvent du Refuge (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1901). Michel de Certeau referred to several of the Jesuits involved in this case as being among those most taken with the wider spiritual innovation in the Order in this period: Michel de Certeau, ‘Crise sociale et réformisme spirituel au début du XVIIe

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this work, which was based on conversations with Ranfaing and which remained incomplete at the time of Argombat’s death, he summed up Ranfaing’s spiritual life as inspired by a ‘horror of the world, a horror of marriage and a horror of beauty’.12 This saintly aversion to the world first emerged in a family life from which we are told she sought to distance herself at an early age. Food, which was to play a significant part in her adult fall into possession, features early. As a child, Ranfaing felt a loathing for meat and she made herself eat huge pieces because she was revolted by them. We are told (a little enigmatically) that ‘sometimes she mortified her taste so much that she left the table not knowing what she had eaten’.13 We are told that her parents were violent towards each other and towards Elisabeth. Even when young she chose to mortify her flesh: she used the hair shirt three times per week and sometimes ‘took the discipline’ with iron chains — which could only mean self-flagellation — until she reached the point of collapse.14 When her mother tucked little Elisabeth into her bed, and covered the window with drapes, the child would climb out of bed to sleep on the floor. Balking at her daughter’s precocious religious sentiments her mother burned Elisabeth’s books of devotion, forcing her to read instead the popular romances of Amadis of Gaul.15 She also threw the girl’s clothes away and humiliated her in public by making her wear rags and calling her mad. Ranfaing’s own spiritual aspirations and struggles were set against the plans that her family made for her and the problems presented by her own physical beauty. When her family arranged a marriage in 1608 to François Dubois — a noble receveur, nearly forty years her senior — she resisted, but we are told that they threatened to kill her if she did not comply. Ranfaing had six children in the eight years she was married to Dubois, three dying in infancy, and three girls surviving to adulthood. For his part Dubois was unfaithful and brutal, on one occasion nearly letting her drown. Even his daughter from a previous marriage tried to poison her, but, we are told: ‘This was not the only time she was poisoned, but an effect of providence peculiar to her protected her from illness’.16 Yet, as one source puts it: ‘These ill treatments only served to stiffen her resolve’.17 siècle: Une “nouvelle spiritualité” chez les Jésuites français’, in Le mépris du monde: La notion de mépris du monde dans la tradition spirituelle occidentale, ed. by Michel de Certeau and Louis Cognet (Paris: Cerf, 1965), pp. 107–54. I thank Albrecht Burkhardt for this reference. Certeau also identifies among other ‘new spiritual’ French Jesuits a tendency to see themselves as martyrs (p. 137). 12

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 14v.

13 Pierre Helyot, Histoire des ordres monastiques, religieux et militaires, 8 vols (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1715), IV, ch. 47, 344–61 (p. 346). 14

Helyot, p. 346.

15

Helyot, pp. 346–47.

16

Helyot, pp. 349–51.

17

Helyot pp. 350–51.

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Coming as they do from uncritical and largely hagiographical accounts, these stories may appear to be merely expressions of the customarily sour attitude of the Catholic Church to all worldly attachments, including, in this era, attachment to family.18 For our purposes however they tell us where spiritual value came from, and of a life story in which conflict, suffering and resistance to the assaults of the world (whether real or imagined) are depicted as the flint against which spiritual power ignites. Such an analysis should not exclude the possibility that real parental or spousal abuse occurred in Ranfaing’s life — it may well have, and the replication of violence is often an outcome of its earlier occurrence — but her own interpretation of these in a hagiographical light is what made them relevant in Ranfaing’s later life. After her husband’s death Ranfaing increased her mortifications, both in isolation and while with a group of female devotees with whom she also prayed.19 Within a few months of widowhood, and following an inrush of holy sentiment when she was praying in a church in Remiremont, Ranfaing took a vow of perpetual chastity. Friends, family and religious advised her to reconsider her decision.20 According to Argombat, she went to Verdun to a Recollette convent to ask permission to enter the Order. Having been questioned by the mother superior and by all the sisters there, she was told she would be notified of the result of her application soon.21 Here Argombat’s chronology becomes slightly ambiguous. Ranfaing was accepted by the convent, he records, shortly after applying, but by this time, she had already begun to experience the torments which would ultimately be diagnosed as possession. Thus it would appear that between applying to the Recollettes and being accepted by them, Ranfaing’s alleged bewitchment by a Remiremont doctor, Charles Poirot, had taken place. This affliction made it ‘impossible for her to enter religious life’ at that time.22 The devil’s capacity and desire to perturb those who sought to devote themselves to God was also a standard hagiographical theme, heightened in this era by a sense of the devil’s forces being on the rampage. To compound this demonic menace, the possibility of witchcraft used for the purposes of seduction and resulting in possession sharpened this traditional tension of spiritual life. For Elisabeth de Ranfaing, the fateful encounter occurred, unsurprisingly, on a day set aside for religious devotion. One day in February 1618, Ranfaing went with a group of friends on a brief pilgrimage to Saint-Mont, near Remiremont.23 At the evening meal the 18

Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 235–36; compare Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook, ed. by Emilie Amt (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 90–94. 19

BN MSS 1783 fds fs 1783, fol. 156r.

20

BN MSS 1783 fds fs 1783, fols 157v–160v.

21

BN MSS 1783 fds fs 1783, fols 167r–169r.

22

BN MSS 1783 fds fs fols 168v–169r.

23

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 175bis r–v.

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physician Charles Poirot, who she knew had an interest in furthering their acquaintance, offered her food and drink, which she refused. Finally, however, she accepted from him un petit salé (a little piece of salt pork).24 Argombat wrote: ‘She knew straight away that she had eaten something other than salt pork. Oh, detestable monster from hell, under this morsel of salt pork, you have hidden a charm’.25 Following this signal event, Ranfaing began to experience convulsions, paralysis and uncontrollable fits of weeping and laughter, and most importantly, sexual desires in relation to Poirot.26 For seventeen months after the encounter she was treated exclusively for natural illnesses, a diagnosis later interpreted by her allies as the result of devils successfully disguising their presence as mal de mère (hysteria) and as lovesickness.27 Ranfaing was treated in fact by Poirot himself, who also courted her and proposed marriage, but she later believed he had used his medicine to prolong her illness.28 The fact that Ranfaing continued to be in regular contact with Poirot as her physician suggests that she might not have abandoned the idea of her suffering being physical. Or perhaps she just could not tear herself away from him. The vehemence with which we are told Ranfaing refused Poirot’s advances was paralleled only by the strength of her attraction to him. She took to curling her hair and pinching her cheeks to heighten their colour.29 Her ambivalence was rehearsed in an intense internal dialogue over the source of and responsibility for her conflicting desires. Argombat narrated: “It is I, then”, [Elisabeth] concluded, “acting of my own free will”. In these movements and in these forced actions she felt extreme repugnance. “Then it is not I”, she said, “who acted thus” remaining as if suspended between the “yes” and the “no”. “It is I and it is not I”. She endured inconceivable distress.30 24

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 178r–v.

25

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 178v.

26 BN MSS fds fs 1783, fols 180–200; Rémy Pichard, Admirable Vertu des Saints Exorcismes sur les Princes d’enfer possédant réellement Vertueuse Demoiselle Elisabeth de Ranfaing avec Ses justifications contre les ignorances et les calomnies de F. Claude Pithoys Minime (Nancy: Sébastien Philippe, 1622), p. 71. Pichard’s title underlines the value of exorcisms in a manner similar to that of another layman, Jean le Normant, who was actively promoting exorcism in exactly the same era. Jean Le Normant, De l’Exorcisme au Roy Treschrestien Louis Le Juste ([n.p.]: [n. pub.], 1619); Histoire veritable et memorable de ce qui c’est passé sous l’exorcisme de trois filles possedées és païs de Flandre (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1623); Remonstrances du Sieur de Chiremont à Messieurs de Sorbonne ([n.p]: [n. pub.], [1623]). 27

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 229v.

28

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fols 188r, 193v.

29

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 200r.

30

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 200v.

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Thus, Ranfaing portrayed herself as metaphorically crucified on her own mixed feelings, experiencing a desire to be in the world, symbolized by the passions of the flesh and by marriage, and the equal but incompatible desire to participate in the religious renewal of her times, the tension manifesting (by whatever means, conscious, half-conscious or unconscious) as possession. We have no way of knowing if Elisabeth de Ranfaing anticipated she would be exorcized in public: no would-be saint in an account of her own life could let slip any such ambitions, yet the exorcism stories of Nicole Obry, Marthe Brossier, the nuns at Aix en Provence, and the 1618 possessions at Agen would have likely reached the circles she mixed in.31 And notwithstanding that the era of ‘positive possession’ was well underway by this time, the parallel tradition which saw possession as a sign of sin would not have made it an automatic choice for a woman seeking to devote herself to God, or indeed one seeking certain fame, rather than risking infamy. Ranfaing searched for religious men who would support her in her afflictions: in June 1619 she went to Father Léon, a Capuchin in Remiremont, and told him she believed her afflictions were the result of something other than a natural ailment. He was sympathetic but appears not to have taken any further action, before Ranfaing left for Nancy to consult priests there. Poirot tried to stop her going and promised to heal her.32 She discussed her illness with the Nancy Capuchins and other religious, and Argombat recorded that they promised to help her if she ‘opened herself only to them’, to which she would not agree.33 This small detail gives an interesting glimpse of how Ranfaing may have been viewed by ecclesiastical sponsors: as a young widowed aristocrat whose successful treatment they wanted to ‘patent’, but of whom they may have been suspicious. And we have an impression of Ranfaing as she evaluated what different male religious had to offer. The Canon of Saint-Georges in Nancy, Father Juillet, decided to exorcize her, which he did over a month: this made her feel better, although it is recorded that devils did not at this

31 See, Denis Crouzet, ‘A Woman and the Devil: Possession and Exorcism in SixteenthCentury France’, trans. by Michael Wolfe, in Changing Identities in Early Modern France, ed. by Michael Wolfe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 191–215; Gregory Hanlon and Geoffrey Snow, ‘Exorcisme et cosmologie tridentine: Trois cas agenais en 1619’, Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 28 (1988); Summer, pp. 12–27; Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004), Pt 1. It’s also quite likely that Ranfaing took inspiration from her friend Mother Alix Le Clerc (d. 1622), who was not possessed in the same way as Ranfaing, but nonetheless defined much of her spiritual life by reference to intense and lifelong struggles with demonic forces. See Albert Gandelet, La vie de la M. Alix Le Clerc, fondatrice de l’Ordre de la Congrégation de NotreDame, contenant la relation d’icelle écrite et signée de la même Mère (Brussels: Polleunis, Ceuterick et Lefebvre, 1882). 32

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fols 223r, 224v–225v.

33

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 226r.

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time give any visible signs of their presence.34 Feeling sufficiently improved in health to again attempt to enter a religious order, she went to an Annunciation convent in Nancy. Here (according to the triumphalist narrative of events) she was again impeded, this time by another doctor who refused to give her a medical certificate to allow her to enter the Order and who harangued her about the fate of her affairs and of her children were she to enter.35 At this, she returned home to Remiremont. Shortly after her return she encountered Poirot again and went straight away into a convulsion.36 Another Capuchin, Father Albert, whom she had known when she was married, prescribed that she be exorcized again.37 On Saint Bernard’s Day, 20 August 1619, Ranfaing’s devils were finally constrained to reveal themselves (presumably by speaking) by the power of the Virgin Mary.38 According to Argombat, there was by now a rumour abroad that Poirot was the cause of Ranfaing’s affliction. Following pleas to ecclesiastical authorities by friends of Poirot, Ranfaing was obliged to go to Nancy from Remiremont in early October 1619, to have her claim of possession tested.39 Rémy Pichard, a doctor who supported the possession and whose book about the case provides much of our knowledge of its early stages and of Ranfaing’s exorcisms, emphasized the rigour with which she was examined. He noted that Ranfaing was tested by physicians, interrogated in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and several modern languages. Her past was examined in detail and she was checked on at all hours of the day and night to make sure she was not hiding any fraudulence.40 She was warned that if it were found that she had ‘any pact at all with the devil, however small or secret, explicit or implicit, she would be dealt with, with the utmost rigour and punished exemplarily, so people would talk about it ever after’.41 Satisfied that she was authentic, the senior ecclesiastics who had sought confirmation now put their weight behind her cause. Within a seemingly short space of time, exorcists and churchmen from all quarters took an interest in the case and the possession of Ranfaing began to become a major public event in Nancy. The Bishop of Toul, Jean Porcelets de Maillane, 34

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 226r.

35

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 226v.

36

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 229r.

37

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 229r.

38

BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 229v.

39

Argombat referred to a prince and a bishop being involved in this move: BN MSS fds fs 1783, fol. 230v. 40

Pichard, pp. 82–88, 90, 106.

41

Pichard, p. 85. Ranfaing’s devils also averred that she was not possessed as a consequence of her own sin. Pichard, p. 334. Pierre Coton himself told Ranfaing not to become too attached to her own devils: BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 6r.

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ordered the Jesuit Nicolas Viardin, écolâtre and canon of the primatial church in Nancy and the Capuchin guardian Father Albert, to be Ranfaing’s exorcists, with Father Jean Guéret, another Jesuit, to support them. A number of visiting prelates also performed exorcisms, and two doctors of theology from the Sorbonne, Mince and Garnier, also officiated.42 Their presence is notable as other faculty members later expressed reservations about the possession, especially concerning Ranfaing’s accusations of witchcraft.43 The range of religious who flocked to the exorcisms reads like a roll-call of the influential Catholic reformation orders: Capuchins, Cordeliers, Jesuits, Benedictines, Discalced Carmelites, Augustinians and Oratorians were all in attendance.44 The Jesuits came to predominate: Ranfaing had a Jesuit confessor and many of the exorcisms were carried out in the Jesuit Noviciate in Nancy.45 Three dukes of Lorraine, Henri II (the former Bishop of Verdun), Charles IV (Bishop of Verdun) and Nicholas François, as well as the Bishop of Toul, vouched for the possession and helped propel Ranfaing into the public religious life of Lorraine.46 The exorcisms also took place before lay audiences, whose high social standing was noted by the physician Rémy Pichard. He observed at one exorcism ‘une grande compagnie de Seigneurs & Dames’, who could vouch for the reality of the possession as eye-witnesses, and whose presence in turn endowed it with credibility.47

42

Pichard, pp. 90–91.

43

An intervention of the Paris Faculty of Theology on 16 February 1620 condemned the use of ‘diabolical’ testimony and seems to have referred to accusations against Poirot: Advis de Messievrs Dv Val, Gamache & Ysambert Docteurs de Sorbonne, donné en l’annee 1620: Sur vn faict auenu en Lorraine, ([n. p.]: [n. pub.], [1620]), held at BN col. Dupuy 641, fols 171r–172r. Compare Frison who mentions published support of Poirot by a theologian (pp. 197–98). The text affirms: ‘On ne doit jamais admettre les demons à accuser autruy, moins encore employer les exorcismes pour cognoistre les fautes de quelqu’un’. This may have also served as a rebuke to the two Sorbonne theologians, Mince and Garnier, who had participated in the exorcisms of Ranfaing. 44

Pichard, p. 89.

45

Pichard, p. 87; Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 65. Senior religious figures and medical doctors certified the possession on 12 and 31 December 1620: Delcambre and Lhermitte, ‘Pièces justificatives’, I, II, pp. 123–25. 46 Duke Henry of Lorraine ceded his bishopric of Verdun to Charles of Lorraine, his nephew, in 1610. However, Henri (also referred to as ‘Erric’) signed a certificate endorsing the possession, referring to himself as evêque dans l’Eglise Universelle; both dukes are referred to as ‘Bishop of Verdun’ during the same period: Delcambre and Lhermitte, ‘Pièces justificatives’, I, p. 123. 47

Pichard, p. 160.

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Ranfaing was exorcized for periods of seven or eight hours at a time.48 She writhed, convulsed and twisted her body into grotesque positions.49 On one occasion she went outside and climbed among the branches of a tree ‘like a squirrel’.50 Exorcists applied relics to her stomach, when it seemed to them that that was where the devil was at work; the result was, we are told, that a sound could be heard from within her ‘like the sound of fish frying’, signalling the devil’s flight on contact with the relics.51 Pichard noted that she did not use obscene language, nor did she display any part of her body, even when she assumed strange or contorted postures.52 However, she, or her ‘devil’, did attack people physically as they sang psalms; she also ran at her father and attempted to strangle him, and grabbed her stepmother by the hair.53 Sources give us few quotes of Ranfaing’s words when under exorcism, but within a matter of weeks after her arrival in Nancy she (or her ‘devils’ under exorcism) had accused Charles Poirot of bewitching her. Some division arose among the exorcists about the wisdom of encouraging these accusations, and on two occasions at least Canon Viardin tried to stop her making accusations; another exorcist, Father Dominique, was keen to learn more details. In the end, the accusations against Poirot took hold. Details of the legal case against him are sketchy, an alarming indication of the relative lack of interest in this central issue for those who recorded Ranfaing’s story: Poirot was arrested on behalf of Duke Henri II in March 1621, and on 7 April 1622 was sentenced and executed.54 This followed a period in which Poirot had first fled Lorraine, then apparently been betrayed and obliged to return. He is said to have tried to impugn Ranfaing as a liar and a magicienne herself, and at one point her defenders reminded him that it was the devil and not she who had made the accusation. The testimony that condemned Poirot came not from Ranfaing but from a young woman named Anne Bouley, who claimed that he had seduced her and taken her to the witches’ Sabbath. The efforts of powerful protectors who did all they could to save him proved futile, and Delcambre observes that Ranfaing, while becoming less explicit as time went by, also did nothing to prevent his execution. We must assume that her own patrons, who

48

Pichard, p. 140.

49

Pichard, pp. 138–39.

50

Pichard, p. 138.

51

Pichard, p. 103.

52

Pichard, pp. 96–97.

53 Pichard, pp. 143–44. Ranfaing’s father had re-married following the death of her mother. During this period Ranfaing’s daughters were housed by friends and family, including Mother Alix le Clerc: Cendrecourt, ‘Elisabeth de Ranfaing (1592–1649), Fondatrice’, p. 2. 54

Both Poirot and Pichard were in the employ of the Abbesse of Remiremont: Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 76.

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included Henri II, had prevailed. Anne Bouley, who had been accused of witchcraft by a neighbour, was executed with Poirot.55 Ranfaing accused a second man, Cyprian Rouyer, the Minim provincial of Champagne, although she did not say he had bewitched her personally.56 She began by hinting about a superior of the Minim Order without naming names, but when a group of Minims exorcized Ranfaing with the aim of making her retract her accusations, her ‘demon’ upped the ante dramatically by saying that the Virgin Mary was constraining him ‘to name Rouyer as a magician’.57 The Minim priest Claude Pithoys attempted during exorcisms to make her retract her accusation of Rouyer, later coming closer than anyone to turning a claim of possession into an accusation of witchcraft, by using demonological reasoning to cite an alternative demonic explanation of Ranfaing’s behaviour to that of possession.58 The investigation of Rouyer in the spring of 1621 moved Pithoys to write a ‘theoretical’ tract, La Descovvertvre des favx possedez, in which he outlined the means of finding out if a possession were true or false. The book reiterates in large part the standard tests of 55 Frison, pp. 185–202; Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 64–65, 76. Additionally, Bouley said she had seen at the Sabbath a member of the court of Duke Henri II, André des Bordes, who Delcambre surmises was the anonymous suitor of Ranfaing during her husband’s lifetime, was the anonymous who features in the account of her early attempts to resist diabolical seducers. Des Bordes was saved, thanks to the patronage of Henri II, but when Henri died, his successor Charles IV had des Bordes convicted for a number of politically-related crimes of witchcraft. Delcambre suggests that Ranfaing may have had a hand in this outcome as well: Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 24–26; Pfister, p. 39. 56 The accusation against Rouyer appears not to have related to Ranfaing’s possession, although there was mention of ‘magiciens’ having caused it: Pichard, p. 342. 57

Pichard, p. 359. Ranfaing’s devil’s vengeful response to unbelievers was also a characteristic of the Ursuline Louise Capeau at Aix-en-Provence in 1610, whose ‘devil’ Verrine accused a sceptical friar — also a Minim, as it happens — saying he deserved to be burnt alive for not believing the devil’s words under exorcism: Sébastien Michaelis, The Admirable Historie of the Possession and Conversion of a Penitent woman, trans. by W. B. (London: William Aspley, 1613), p. 94. 58 Pithoys’ work, La Descovvertvre des favx possedez (Châlons: Germain Nobily, 1621) is published in a modern edition as, A Seventeenth-Century Exposure of Superstition: Select texts of Claude Pithoys (1587–1676), introduction and notes by Patrick James S. Whitmore, International Archives of the History of Ideas, 49 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972). Page references here are from that work. The editor’s commentary is of limited value, however, in the light of later interpretative refinements in witchcraft studies. Pithoys expressed views similar to the thesis of Johan Weyer when he argued: ‘Cest une chose bien difficile & des plus ardues de pouvoir asseurement recognoistre & discerner une possession vraye & reêlle d’avec les ruses, prestiges & illusions diaboliques’: La Descovvertvre des favx possedez, p. 15. Compare Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyer, ‘De praestigiis daemonum’, ed. by George Mora, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 73 (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991).

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possession, and Pithoys had it approved by two Cordelier theologians, Le Petit and Grandin. By the time he came to publish it, however, he had appended transcripts of three fiery interviews he had had with the Bishop of Toul earlier in 1621. This led Le Petit and Grandin to write to the Bishop retracting their approbation.59 In the book, Pithoys reproduced a letter he had written to the Bishop of Toul in which he reiterated a prior claim he had made that he could, with divine assistance, render Ranfaing ‘exempt of all diablery within forty days at most’, if the Bishop would allow him to exorcize her, using ecclesiastics of his own choosing to assist him.60 The implicit charge of corruption among her clerical backers was clear. There ensued a series of meetings after this letter was sent, in which Pithoys continued to make his claim that Ranfaing may be suffering ‘a diabolical illusion caused by means of some demon in attendance (assistant present), but not possessing’ — potentially, we might infer, a devil who served her aims.61 The meetings were impassioned confrontations in which Pithoys also veered close to accusing those who supported Ranfaing of themselves being potentially guilty of magic, and one of the chief patrons of Ranfaing was the Bishop of Toul himself.62 Pithoys was in the end ordered to leave (‘Sortez! Allez, retirez-vous’, said the Bishop) and was refused a copy of the minutes of the meetings.63 This encounter may have been one influence on Pithoys’s decision in later life to convert to Protestantism.64 Pithoys was at this time one of very few people wholly sceptical of Ranfaing’s possession and of her holiness. Rouyer himself was forced to flee, although later investigations by officials of the Minim Order appear not to have generated further actions against him.65 It seems clear that a cult around Ranfaing began to develop even while she was possessed: one of her supporters gathered foam from her mouth as a relic while she was in a state of possession, clearly indicating she was seen as a holy woman while possessed, and apparently seeing no need to make a distinction between her status as 59

The letter is reproduced in Pichard, pp. 10–17.

60

Letter of 20 November 1620; La Descovvertvre des favx possedez, p. 49. Pithoys referred to a response given by a commissioner, Jacques Boonen, in the case of possessions at Lille in 1613–14. Boonen, who by the time of Pithoys’ writing had become Bishop of Ghent, had rejected attempts to implicate the écolâtre of Lille, Canon Leduc, in the witchcraft associated with the possessions of the Brigidines: La Descovvertvre des favx possedez, pp. 43– 44. See Alain Lottin, Lille: Citadelle de la Contre-Réforme? (1598–1668) (Dunkerque: Westhoek-Edition, 1984), pp. 176–77. 61

Pithoys, p. 53. Rémy Pichard inferred precisely this from Pithoys’s claims, writing: ‘This is not a female magician and wicked enchantress, helped by some devil […] to charm everyone’ (p. 95). 62

Pithoys, p. 59.

63

Pithoys, p. 48.

64

Mandrou, p. 249.

65

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 2.

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possessed and that of more traditional ecstatic figure.66 Later, however, when the cult attracted opposition, the need for such a distinction became critical. Ranfaing also came to enjoy the support not only of local clergy and nobility of the highest order, but of the French champions of possession from the era: the founder of the Oratorians and later cardinal, Pierre de Bérulle; and the highly influential Jesuit, Pierre Coton.67 Thus it seems Ranfaing was able to make a smooth progression from possession to saintliness in the mid–1620s. She was exorcized for over four years and her possession only ended when she went on a series of pilgrimages in 1625 and 1626.68 After being delivered of her demons, Ranfaing vowed to open a refuge for prostitutes, in that way taking into her religious life the theme of rejection of illicit sexuality which had shaped her own possession.69 Starting as a single house behind the Jesuit Noviciate in Nancy, Notre Dame du Refuge had the protection of Duke Charles IV from 1627.70 It was confirmed in 1629 by the Bishop of Toul, who also permitted Ranfaing to build a chapel. In January 1631, Rainfaing took the name Mother Marie-Elisabeth de La Croix de Jésus and she, her three daughters, and nine other young women took the veil. Urban VIII approved the Constitutions of the Order in March 1634. Within a few years there were houses in Avignon, Arles, Toulouse, Le Puy and Dijon, with Ranfaing as the superior-general.71 The first male superior of the Order was the Jesuit Canon Nicolas Viardin, who had been one of Ranfaing’s exorcists and became her principal spiritual director. The Order had a reputation for fierce mortifications of the flesh, and it was recorded that the walls of the convent were often sprayed 66

Letter from Father Polycarpe to the Procurator of the Capuchin Order in Rome, 31 March 1628, ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 9 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 12); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 132. 67

BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 302r, 304r, 306r.

68

Interrogation of Ranfaing, ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 11 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 49–52); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 136. It was also said that Ranfaing was finally dispossessed after dressing the wounds of an orphan girl while on one of her pilgrimages: Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 72. 69 This occurred in the context of crackdowns on prostitution by the rulers of Lorraine, which had been occurring since the late sixteenth century (Cendrecourt and Hallaert, p. 18). Marie des Vallées similarly vowed much of her devotional life to the protection of women from the sexual aspects of witchcraft. See Sarah Ferber, ‘Possession Sanctified: The Case of Marie des Vallées’, in Confessional Sanctity (c. 1500–c. 1800), ed. by Jürgen Beyer and others, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte, 51 (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2003), pp. 259–70. 70

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 3.

71

See Louis du Bois de Cendrecourt, ‘Elisabeth de Ranfaing et Notre Dame du Refuge, le point des recherches’, Le pays lorrain (1995), 68–74; Louis du Bois de Cendrecourt, ‘Elisabeth de Ranfaing (1592–1649), Fondatrice de l’ordre de ND du Refuge’, Le pays lorrain (1993), 1–12.

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with the sisters’ blood.72 Ranfaing’s eldest daughter, who later became Mother Marie-Paule de l’Incarnation and the mother superior of the house in Avignon, recalled an incident which suggests the extent of psychic violence considered necessary by her mother in the pursuit of renunciation of the world. One day Ranfaing approached her daughter with her hands behind her back, saying that they had to make the sacrifice of Abraham. Marie-Paule wrote that she took this to mean Ranfaing was going to kill her. She wrote that when she realized she was ‘only’ going to have to kill with her own hands a beloved pet bird, to which Viardin said she had become too attached, she felt great relief and killed it straight away.73 An admiring Henri-Marie Boudon writing in the late seventeenth century described Ranfaing as ‘the great sufferer of her age’, and this was the model she imposed on those she ruled.74

The Médaillistes As well as establishing her order, Ranfaing gathered around her a group of followers with whom to cultivate the spirit, as she had done when first widowed. Together they used a variety of rituals and devotional techniques to generate and reinforce a sense of group solidarity, creating their own spiritual world within the everyday world of Lorraine. The group, confidently calling itself the Congrégation de salut asseuré, became identified pejoratively as the Médaillistes because members manufactured, wore and sold religious medals. It is important to note that none of these practices was especially unusual in Catholicism. Stitching badges and medals on one’s clothing was a relatively common devotional practice, but it was vulnerable to charges that such insignia placed too great an emphasis on the externals of religion.75 The use of objects blessed by priests for the purposes of domestic consumption was a vital foundation of Catholic life. However, the fact that opponents of the group singled out these practices also indicates the historical counter-tendency in the Church, increasingly evident from the fifteenth century, to see such devotional aids

72

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 29.

73

Nancy, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 963 (442), fols 20–21. My thanks are due to the library staff at Nancy for their assistance in locating this text. 74

Henry Marie Boudon, Le Triomphe de la Croix, en la personne de la venerable Marie Elisabeth de la Croix de Jesus (Liege: Henry Guillaume Streel, 1686), p. 17. 75

The 1630s Capuchin opponent of illuminist tendencies in Paris, Archange Ripaut, chastised the nuns of early Port-Royal convent for ostentatiously wearing ribbons on their habits which displayed ‘leur nom, leur lieu, & leur signification’: Abomination des abominations des favsses devotions de ce tems (Paris: Claude Cramoisy, 1632), p. 790.

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as signs of a suspect materialism.76 Holy images used by the group depicted Jesus and Mary and bore names of God written in Hebrew, marked with a cross above and below and ‘other gimmicks, to cast aside scruples, heal headaches, excite passion and appease quarrels, producing most often very pernicious effects’.77 Ranfaing had given Father Nicholas Javel a medal which showed Christ in the Garden of Olives, and this image was surrounded by those of toads and other animals.78 The Médailliste priests blessed the medals according to the Roman Ritual and, strikingly, Ranfaing herself prayed over these medals before they were sold, in order to endow them with their powers.79 (It seems that for a living saint to bless objects in this way them may have been relatively novel. To a later charge that the group believed the medals to have been taken materially to heaven and blessed there by the Holy Trinity, members replied that this needed to be understood as having taken place mystically.80) Proceeds went to Notre Dame du Refuge, it was claimed, and members of the Médaillistes attached the medals to their left sleeves.81 The sales of the medals and a policy of recruitment among the wealthy later led the group to be accused of accumulating an unacceptably large sum of money.82 Members also took an oath to Ranfaing and to the Order, which read: I, moved by the desire to please God and his Holy Mother and to bring upon myself their holy benedictions in the presence of the adorable sacrament of the Altar, of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of God, of the Glorious Fathers and patrons Saint Augustin and Saint Ignatius and of all the heavenly court make a vow to the Divine Majesty of perpetual constancy in the service of Reverend Mother Marie Elisabeth de la Croix de Jésus and of the Congregation of Our Lady of Refuge, and I promise to help the Order according to my powers all my life and never to consent that it be altered in its form of government, nor in any of the principal points of its institution, especially in regard to the care of girls and women who have wandered from their duty, nor that the number of similar persons indicated in the constitutions ever be

76 Scribner refers to Huizinga saying that the religious materialism of this era represented a decline in interiority: Scribner, p. 14, on Huizinga, p. 166. The present case clearly complicates such an interpretation. However, accusers said the group also used exorcisms to fix clocks and make chooks lay: Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 39. 77

Accusations by Father Dinet, ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 12 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 824– 25); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 135. 78

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 41.

79

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 41.

80

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 40.

81

The Jesuit author suggested legalistically that this practice was followed in order to avoid losing the medals. He invoked the fact that the medals were displayed, in order to counter accusations of secrecy: BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 300v. 82

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 42.

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reduced. And I supplicate Her Infinite Bounty to accord me the grace to accomplish this vow as she gives me her grace to do so. In faith, which I undersign, etc.83

As striking as the mention of personal allegiance to Ranfaing may seem, the oath, too, need not be seen as too unusual. The Médaillistes were associated with a licit and indeed very successful, religious order, Notre Dame du Refuge, and the fact that it is to this order that the oath is ostensibly given brings their oath close to a religious vow.84 Thus if it seems too easy to say that nothing the group did was objectionable until outsiders objected, it is still important to understand the group as having been in many ways a typical religious association of the period. Most of Ranfaing’s principal followers were Jesuits, and while not a confraternity in the traditional sense, the Médaillistes resembled in many ways the other sodalities, the so-called Aas, that emerged around the Jesuit Order in the post-Tridentine era.85 The Aas were a common feature of religious life in Lorraine (as in many other regions) in the seventeenth century. Characterized by secrecy, they comprised lay and religious members who practised communal mortifications and intensive prayer, as well as frequent participation in the Eucharist.86 Just as these sodalities clustered around Jesuit colleges, so did the Médaillistes find one of their principal loci of support in the Jesuit college at Bar-Le-Duc.87 The group’s activities also recalled those of the illuminists in Picardy — the groups of devotees whose leading figures were priests, but in which women were also prominent.88 Within the group of Médaillistes was an élite coterie known as the holocaustes, whose members were two seculars (whose identities cannot be confirmed) and four Jesuits: Nicolas Javel, 83

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 38. The claim to authenticity of the oath seems strong, as Delcambre noted, given that it surfaced in a number of different contexts and that one of Ranfaing’s Jesuit supporters admitted to the existence of the vow: BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 305r. 84 Indeed, this ambiguity later worked for Ranfaing: asked what she understood by the word ‘congrégation’ in relation to her affiliations, she was able to reply: ‘Our house is called the Congregation of Notre Dame du Refuge. I know of none other than that’: Interrogation of Ranfaing, ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 11 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 49–52); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 137. 85 The word sodalité was used by Dinet, the Jesuit provincial, to describe the Médaillistes: ‘Pièces justificatives’, 10 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 824–25); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 134. 86 Louis Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. by Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 20, 70–74. Members of sodalities also made acts of self-consecration to the Virgin Mary, described by Châtellier as chivalric, pp. 6–8. 87

Châtellier, p. 14.

88

Jean Mauzaize, Le Rôle et l’action des capucins de la Province de Paris dans la France religieuse du XVIIème siècle, 3 vols (Paris: Librairie H. Champion, 1978), pp. 902–34.

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René de Trans, Jean d’Argombat and Charles Séglière. The term ‘holocaust’ identified its members as sacrificial victims, stressing the acquisition of merit through suffering and, in the words of one member, the ‘consecration of the self to God’.89 It was this core group which referred to Ranfaing as Symphorose, and each member also had his own codename: the four priests were Anastase, Théodule, Théodore and Chrysanthe.90 The group used what they referred to as ‘exorcisms’ as the central feature of their devotional repertoire. The term in this context does not refer to exorcism of the possessed — ‘exorcism’ can potentially include most Catholic blessings of a protective nature — but what is distinctive about the group is that they used the word ‘exorcism’ to describe what they were doing, and that these exorcisms were aimed at outsiders whom they believed were using witchcraft to impede their religious devotions.91 This practice indicates that they saw a continuum between the suffering caused by the demonic possession of Ranfaing and the particular virtue they saw in their association with her and their collective devotions. They perceived external threats to the group as an ongoing manifestation of the witchcraft from which Ranfaing had been delivered, in short, further signs of the devil’s work. Group solidarity was underpinned by theological certainty that the path to salvation lay in devotion to Mother Elisabeth, and an equal certainty about the imminence of the end of the world.92 Stuart Clark has heightened our sensitivities to the presence of such stories of the end of the world in early modern possession 89

(BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 313v); Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 37–38. One of the secular members of the holocaustes appears to have been a Monsieur Berbis, a conseiller in the Parlement of Dijon, whose many communications on the group’s activities may be found in the collection BN MSS fds fs 494. His name was also mentioned during the interrogation of Ranfaing as a party to the alleged ‘complot ou intelligence secret’ involving herself and the Jesuit priests: ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 11 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 49–52); Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 38, 141. Pierre Coton used the word ‘holocaust’ in speaking of the sacrifice of his heart to God in his Occupation intérieure d’une âme dévote (Paris: C. Chappelet, 1609), fol. 190rv. 90

A comparable use of an evocative codename may be found in letters by Saint Jean Eudes, concerning Marie des Vallées: writing to another admirer of Vallées, Eudes referred to her as ‘l’Aigle’: Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Librairie Bloud et Gay, 1933), III, 593–94. 91 Yet there is evidence that members of this group were not the only Catholics to use church rituals aggressively: Scribner identified one case for sixteenth-century Germany of priestly conjuration against someone ‘from whom one fears harm’ (p. 11) and John Bossy has identified as almost inevitable the use of the Mass against enemies: John Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700’, Past and Present, 100 (1983), 29–61 (pp. 40–42). 92 List of accusations prepared by Father Dinet, Provincial of the Jesuits, in Champagne, ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 10 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 824–25); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 134.

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cases.93 The times looked for signs of direct divine intervention, underpinned by fear of the devil: a sense of the impending end of the world could focus, indeed beset, the minds of the possessed and their friends. Eschatology is both a statement about the moral universe — positing a final radical division of good and evil — and a claim to special knowledge about the end of time. It gave those who foresaw it, and lived in accordance with their anticipation of it, a central place in an unfinished narrative: in looking towards the end of time, eschatology generated a sense of urgency, which in turn enhanced and gave significance to spiritual elitism and moral segregation. In this story, the pressure to resist and oppose outsiders derived for this group partly from the sense of having pride of place in a narrative of the end of time, and partly because the intensity of these fears gave a momentous quality to all actions.94 Against this, for her Jesuit followers, the hierarchy of their order, looking for all the world like a bureaucracy, was unlikely to hold any attraction. Time was too short.

Moves against the Cult The group seems to have flourished through the 1620s until 1628, when conflicts arose between them and the Capuchins. A series of annoyances appears to have induced Father Polycarpe, the Capuchin provincial in Nancy, to write two letters to the procurator of his order in Rome on 31 March, describing his suspicions about the validity of the group’s actions and the claimed sanctity of Ranfaing. In his first letter Polycarpe maintained that the proposed construction of a Refuge convent building adjacent to the Capuchin house was going to deprive the brothers’ house of light and air. Additionally, Polycarpe feared that the proximity of former prostitutes might prove to be a source of temptation to the Capuchins.95 In the second letter, Polycarpe referred to specific activities of the group. Making a significant (and one might imagine unnecessary) admission, he stated at the outset that he himself had once believed in the sanctity of Ranfaing and that he had read a manuscript written and circulated by another senior Jesuit follower, François Poiré, which described Ranfaing as having visions akin to those of the saints Catherine of Genoa, Brigid of Sweden and Angela of Foligno.96 However, as an apparent consequence of a 93

Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 403–44. 94 This is some of the work that eschatology has done traditionally, for example in the spiritual elitism of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Franciscan spirituals. 95 ‘Pièces justificatives’, 8; Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 128–33 (original held in Capuchin Archives, Rome, G. 58, no. 13, Lotharingia). 96 Letter from Father Polycarpe to the Procurator of the Capuchin Order in Rome, 31 March 1628, ‘Pièces justificatives’, 9 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fol 12r–v); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 131.

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directive of two senior Capuchins instructing members of the order to keep away from Ranfaing, Ranfaing was reported to have had what amounted to anti-Capuchin visions. These included seeing these two Capuchins (the Capuchin general, Clément, and Father Honoré de Paris), as ‘blacker than coal, surrounded by dark clouds and hated by God’, while Clément also had two horns on his forehead. God had also told Ranfaing that the injustice against her would be punished.97 These events, Polycarpe said, had caused him to re-examine his views. He identified as abusive the group’s use of holy medals, the agnus Dei and chaplets, saying they were used to ward off dangers, maladies and malefices — implicitly not spurs to correct Catholic devotion, but serving purely personal aims. Further, he objected to the use as a relic of a handkerchief which carried foam from the mouth of Ranfaing, writing that it was employed by one follower, a member of the court of Saint-Mihiel, to heal the sick and to make criminals confess.98 Like the Minim Claude Pithoys six years before, Polycarpe’s was a story rewritten to reorient the role of the devil, in order to make the group seem potentially diabolical themselves, rather than the devil’s victims, and thereby to undercut the spiritual (and worldly) value of their rites and medals. Polycarpe also addressed the implications of the cult’s activities for the church hierarchy. He said that Ranfaing’s followers believed the great suffering she had endured for the sake of her chastity had given her an ‘abundance of marvellous sanctity’; he affirmed that it was held that the merit of Ranfaing was so great that her prayers had redeemed all the souls in purgatory three times already and that no one came close to her in sanctity except the Virgin Mary.99 Making a crucial reference to the separation of the group as the beginnings of a rival and insubordinate hierarchy, he said that Ranfaing’s followers believed themselves to be above ecclesiastical law to such an extent that even the Pope could not override the divine instructions they received, not even such instructions as would allow inferiors to disobey superiors.100 Critically, Polycarpe referred to Ranfaing throughout as ‘this possessed woman’, notwithstanding that her possession was said to have ended two years previously. Nothing further seems to have come of these accusations; however, when a concerted campaign against the group developed in the 1640s, this time initiated by the Jesuits, Polycarpe stood by his initial claims, suggesting that the antipathy of the Capuchins remained alive over many years.101

97

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 131.

98

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 132.

99

Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 131–32.

100

Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 132–33. The Spanish illuminists were accused of something very similar: of trying to do things that undermined the obligations of religious to Church hierarchy. 101

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 36.

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In 1643, the provincial of the Jesuits in Champagne, Father Barthélemy Jacquinot, passed on rumours about the group to his successor Father Dominique Dinet. In May 1644, Dinet ordered a surprise raid on the house of Father Jean d’Argombat. The raid secured a number of papers concerning the Order of Notre Dame du Refuge and Ranfaing’s inner circle of followers.102 Dinet also adopted a strategy of dividing the group to undermine their cohesion, ordering the separate interrogations of Argombat in Dijon, in the presence of seven other Jesuits; of René de Trans in Châlons, before eight members of the company; and of Nicolas Javel in Nancy, by a Jesuit Father Jean Halay. Charles Séglière was also interrogated and reportedly ‘confessed everything’.103 Father Halay questioned Ranfaing herself after obtaining a commission from Father Midot, the Vicar-General of the Bishop of Toul.104 Dinet confronted the group with accusations of excessive deference to the authority of Ranfaing; secrecy; constrictive vows; contempt for other clergy (including their superiors); using exorcisms and magic to hurt others; selling medals, chaplets and the agnus Dei; accumulating too much money; using images and other objects in healing and divination; and sexual ‘corruptions and turpitude’.105 As the epigraph at the beginning of this essay shows, Dinet objected to the debasement of Catholic sacramental objects by their use in service of material and private preoccupations, something represented as objectionable in itself, but rendered profoundly so because Ranfaing in effect blessed the medals, and her cult posed a threat to papal authority.106 It is not clear what triggered the Jesuit attack, but as events opened out, it emerged that the primary motivation was fear of a new local religious hierarchy to rival the Order, and sponsored by its own members. In effect, Dinet was claiming to have exposed a sect of magician priests, serving a woman whose original possession by demons had left her in a state of continuous moral and spiritual ambiguity. And here the idea of possession as an ongoing state — the same idea that allowed exorcists to conduct sustained periods of public exorcism — made Ranfaing and her followers vulnerable. For it was a fairly simple task in this era of witchcraft beliefs to depict the possessed as themselves suspect, too close to the devil for comfort.107 102

Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 36–37.

103

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 58v; Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 37.

104

Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 136–42.

105

Dinet’s list of accusations is reproduced in ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 10 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 42–43 [Latin] and 824–25 [French]); Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 133–35. Dinet charged that the group defended their ‘corruptions et turpitudes’, by reference to a claim that Saint Paul had suffered desires of the flesh in the manner of a possessed person, which they now also suffered (p. 135). See also BN MSS fds 494, fol. 58. 106

‘Father Dinet’s accusations’; Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 135.

107

Jeanne des Anges and Marie des Vallées were the target of similar claims, and Madeleine Demandols at Aix-en-Provence was arraigned for witchcraft forty years after her initial possession: Anita M. Walker and Edmund H. Dickerman, ‘A Notorious Woman:

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Claude Pithoys had suggested as much, and the Capuchin Polycarpe had implied it when he pointedly referred to Ranfaing as possessed. Indeed, it seems almost surprising that accusations against Ranfaing and her supporters never became outright accusations of witchcraft. It might be suggested that any direct accusations of devil-worship among Jesuit fathers might — for their Jesuit critics at least — have proved counter-productive in the company’s attempt to preserve its good name. Nonetheless Ranfaing and the friends who had seen in her possession the arresting signs of meritorious suffering had to establish their profoundly debatable claim that she was no longer possessed. The first question Jean Halay asked Ranfaing concerned her possession: ‘[Y]ou are ordered before God to judge if you believe yourself to be delivered of the malign possession for which you were formerly exorcized so many times’. Ranfaing responded: ‘I believe so, by the mercy of God’. He then asked her how long it was since she had been delivered of her possession, to which she replied that since her return from pilgrimages around twenty years previously she ‘had not felt troubled in her spirit’.108 The Jesuit who wrote in support of Ranfaing to the male superior of her order also refuted the charge that she was still possessed, noting that this was ‘the centre of all the other complaints, [which go] back as lines to a single centre’.109 And in passing he mentioned that, during Ranfaing’s possession, the moments of release when she was blessed with ‘lights and extraordinary favours’ were as easy to distinguish from the possession ‘as black is from white’. In this formulation, the author of the letter appealed to the notion that the ‘lights’ of an ecstatic spiritual were indeed distinctive and also more legitimate than those of a possessed person, thereby constructing Ranfaing as spiritually

Possession, Witchcraft and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century Provence’, Historical Reflections, 27 (2001), 1–26. 108

Interrogation of Ranfaing, ‘Pièces justificatives’, 11 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 49–52); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 136. 109

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 299v. The author argued that the only reason critics gave for their suspicion that Ranfaing (who is referred to throughout this defence by her codename, Symphorose) was still possessed was that no-one saw the devil leave her, and that it had given no sign of leaving (fol. 309r). He reported that when one of his fellow-accused, ‘Théodule’, was challenged on this point, he had replied: ‘Who saw it enter?’. The author added that the devil would have made a sign of leaving if it had been commanded to do so, but it had not been. (fol. 309r). (The emphasis here on seeing signs of the devil’s departure may have been a result of the publicity surrounding the departure of the devils from Jeanne des Anges, in the late 1630s.) Even a former admirer, he said, (possibly Charles Séglière), who now rejected Ranfaing, had seen a ‘sweetness and tranquillity’ in her ‘very different from what is found in a possessed person’ (fol. 300r). The Jesuit did not attempt to deny the possession, but rather emphasised the suffering which it had entailed (fol. 305r–v). It is difficult to ascertain the identity of the author of this letter, however, internal evidence suggests the author was most likely René de Trans.

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endowed, notwithstanding her possession, rather than because of it.110 Yet the fact that followers collected spittle from her lips when she was possessed, and the foundation of her possession in her own resistance to the devil’s temptations and torments, shows that possession had been indeed in their eyes the height of holiness, not its poor relation. Thus even while maintaining — problematically — that Ranfaing was not herself possessed, thereby distancing themselves from the possession, the group’s use of exorcism as its core devotional activity is an indication of the intensity with which the devil’s presence had entered into their comprehension of religiosity and routine devotional life. The devil, as Gerson argued two hundred years before, is always at the back of anxieties about the authenticity of cult behaviour. What was distinguishing about this period — arguably from Gerson’s time and indeed under his influence — is the devil’s presence in the foreground. Fear of the devil’s incursions, deployed by Ranfaing in her possession, and invigorating followers in their fixation both on her and with the power of ritual exorcism, is also what underpinned the suspicions of the cult’s opponents. Thus while martyrological thinking allowed for the rewriting of Ranfaing’s story to reinscribe her possession as innocent, the more traditional view of demoniacs as people deserving of punishment allowed her opponents to say she was still stuck in the demonic groove.

Exorcisms A number of Dinet’s accusations concerned the use of exorcisms to ward off ‘malefices’ allegedly visited upon the group by hostile members of the Jesuit Order. Group members would not confide in anyone not of their own number, Dinet claimed, and used exorcisms against their superiors and confessors, whose witchcraft they believed would impede their devotions. He bemoaned that even theological knowledge was dispensed with, in the face of their claims to direct spiritual enlightenment: no room was left, in the view of this exasperated Jesuit, ‘even to dispute them in scholastic terms’.111 In countering, the group’s anonymous Jesuit defender argued that their exorcisms were used not against superiors or confessors but in accordance with the prescriptions of the Church, in order to protect all the parties involved in the sacrament of penance.112 He nonetheless conveyed a sense of the group as a besieged band of holy people, enduring a plight similar to that of ‘the 110

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 305v.

111 ‘Pièces Justificatives’, 10 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 824–25); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 134. It is not entirely clear if Dinet is referring here to the holocaustes or to the Médaillistes. Nicolas Javel had also expelled members of the Jesuit noviciate on suspicion of witchcraft and lust: Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 39. 112

BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 314v–315r.

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poor hermit whose cell was all surrounded by devils working ceaselessly for his ruin’. And he recalled the tormented life of Saint Anthony, whose prayers were troubled by the ‘malefices’ of three ‘magician philosophers’, a seemingly unambiguous and possibly unwise expression of the view that the Jesuit Order might be populated by the devil’s pawns.113 De Trans and Ranfaing each identified ways in which the group used exorcism. De Trans said that one of the members of the group, code-named Anastase, had sought from the member known as Théodule ‘some remedy to confess himself with more devotion’. He had been given a ‘general remedy’ in the form of exorcisms against possible impediments from the devil, a remedy whose good effects had been seen ‘on a number of other occasions’.114 Elisabeth de Ranfaing also admitted to having recommended that Father de Trans ‘exorcize himself’ when he felt constricted prior to preaching, in case he was suffering from witchcraft.115 The Jesuit defended the use of exorcism in its different forms in other aspects of para-liturgy, such as aspersing with holy water at masses, which, ‘as Saint Teresa says’ destroys the operations of the devil.116 But were exorcisms routine devotional activities, approved and uncontroversial, or did they show the group to be magicians? This question takes us to the conceptual and political line where the categories of magic and religion divide, the line between a material or diabolical rite, and a spiritual and divinely instituted one.117 The invocation of Saint Teresa was intended to provide the imprimatur of a recently canonized and very popular holy woman, by implication one similar to Ranfaing, and also sought to blend exorcism into the routine devotional apparatus of the Church, no more controversial than a splash of holy water. Yet even while the Jesuit tried to show that what the group did was vouched for by tradition and saintly authority, they used exorcism in the first place precisely because of the exceptional nature of the challenges to Ranfaing’s chastity posed by demons and witches, and the colossal torment they had worked within her. Merging these activities back into the landscape of mundane religiosity, while theologically allowable, was in this context, possibly a tall order.

113

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 315v.

114

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 314v.

115

‘Pièces Justificatives’, 11 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 49–52); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 139. 116

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 315r.

117 Scribner says exactly that: ‘Churchmen and theologians attempted to label certain practices as “superstitious”, but the church’s commitment to a sacramental view of religion made any hard and fast distinction between “religion” and “magic” almost impossible’ (p. 15).

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The Spiritual Mother In the course of the investigation it emerged that Ranfaing was seen by her followers as a spiritual director, or ‘spiritual mother’, as the official Jean Halay put it, who prescribed mortifications and gave advice on forms of meditation. Here the group’s accusers displayed the same concern voiced about female ‘illuminists’ in quasisacerdotal roles, enunciated in the list of ‘errors’ of the illuminists published in the Le Mercure françois in 1623: ‘That they owe obedience to women who they take to be mistresses of spirit and doctrine’.118 Ranfaing was asked: ‘Do you know if there is some sort of liaison with, attachment to, or dependence on your person on the part of the Fathers Javel, Séglière, de Trans and Argombat, which holds you as their spiritual mother, or source of grace, consulting you and receiving your advice and depending upon you?’. She replied: ‘They are too wise to recognize any source of grace other than Jesus Christ and his precious blood. I have taken their advice and have not given advice to them. If I am their support, they are badly supported’.119 Followers also believed she had regular communications from God — so many that she had asked God to slow them down — and it was also said that she had a direct line of communication to the Virgin Mary.120 Ranfaing said she did not claim to have had revelations and that the things she had said, which people might have taken for revelations, were said ‘without illusion, and in simplicity’.121 Ranfaing’s Jesuit supporter rejected the idea that her role as a guide was contentious: ‘To hear these officials talk you would say that Symphorose ran an advice shop catering to all comers, but they are quite mistaken’.122 He attempted to re-inscribe the advice of Ranfaing within an appropriate feminine sphere, rather than giving it a theological significance, saying it was ‘not at all a question of revelations, but of domestic affairs’.123 Ranfaing was an exemplary member of her sex, he wrote, yet she is blamed ‘as if she were an oracle of satanic errors’, like Priscilla of Montanus, and as 118 The error in question was: ‘Qu’ils doivent l’obedience à des femmes, lesquelles ils tiennent pour Maistresses d’esprit & de doctrine’: Le Mercure françois, 9 (1622–24), p. 359. 119 ‘Pièces justificatives’, 11 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 49–52); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 138. 120

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 40.

121

‘Pièces Justificatives’, 11 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 49–52); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 137. 122

‘A entendre parler ces controlleurs, vous diriés que Symphorose a dressé boutique d’advis, pour en faire distribution à tous allans, & venans: mais ils s’abusent fort’: BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 307v. This complaint can be compared to a comment made by the Jesuit JeanJoseph Surin, the great ally of Jeanne des Anges at Loudun: Surin warned Jeanne not to ‘tenir comme un boutique’: cited in Michel de Certeau, ‘Jeanne des Anges’, in Jeanne des Anges, Autobiographie (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990), p. 339. 123

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 312v.

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if her friends were Montanists, who ‘received through her the advice of the demon as though they were the lights of the Paraclet and the Holy Spirit’.124 Dinet said members of the holocausts had a commitment so deeply binding that it deprived them even of the power to undo it — a critical loss of free will — and would make them keep from their superiors, and even from the Pope, any information which could affect their activities. They were held to this commitment, he claimed, on pain of sudden death.125 In defence, the Jesuit supporter did not deny an element of secrecy in their activities, but argued that secrecy was enjoined only ‘when it was appropriate to keep it’,126 and used the analogy of the secrecy of the confessional to legitimate this claim, again attempting to normalize their actions.127 Beyond their more to-be-expected anxieties about the abuse of sacramentals, those pursuing Ranfaing saw a direct threat to the sacraments, because they were performed in a way which channelled the superior spiritual capacities of the priesthood into a resolutely private and self-serving group. Ranfaing’s coterie was an explosive combination of the spiritual power of ordained priests and the influence of a charismatic woman. It appears that the group performed re-baptisms on each other and even re-consecrated hosts blessed by non-group members.128 One of them was also said to have expressed concern about the validity of the sacrament received from an unworthy prelate.129 These expressions of dissent echoed major heresies whose exclusion had helped define the Catholic Church: the heresy of the Donatists, and the more recent heresy of the Anabaptists. Given that Dinet was preparing his dossier for examination in Rome, it seems apt that he would mention the threat posed by Ranfaing to papal authority, recalling the Capuchin Polycarpe’s similar fears. Referring to the Jesuit group’s practice of blessing their medals according to the Roman Ritual, then having Ranfaing pray over them, Dinet (as we have seen in the epigraph) maintained that the group believed that the Pope himself could not revoke the power bestowed on these objects by Ranfaing.130 Father Javel was accused of using a medal to examine the souls of his charges, recalling the divinatory 124 BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 307v, 311r. Priscilla was one of two leading female members of the second-century Phrygian sect whose founder, Montanus, sought the restoration of the Church to its primitive state and promoted spiritual elitism. Priscilla experienced raptures, spoke in tongues and prophesied. 125

‘Pièces Justificatives’, 10 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 824–25); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 134. 126

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 316v. The use by the group of code names and secret codes for communicating was also seen as suspect: Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 39. 127

BN MSS fds fs 494, fol. 316v.

128 ‘Pièces justificatives’, 10 (BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 824–825); Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 134. 129

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 39.

130

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 135.

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use of the cloth containing the spit of Ranfaing.131 The antagonism expressed by the Jesuits also reflects a sense of the Order’s own activities being undermined by competition, as in an incident where the priests in Ranfaing’s circle were found to be performing Masses for her health, instead of Masses commissioned by the Order, to which they were also bound by a vow.132 The exhaustible nature of the treasury of merit — implicitly squandered in this telling example — underlines Gerson’s case, for it is the limits on this treasury, however they are imposed, which make it valuable. Methodically, the provincial Dinet assembled a dossier against the group, then presented his case to the general of the Jesuits in Rome. As a consequence, in December 1644, Nicolas Javel and René de Trans were removed from their respective positions as superior of the Nancy Noviciate and rector of the College of Bar. De Trans, Argombat, Javel and Séglière were prohibited from carrying out priestly duties, forbidden to have contact with seculars and dispersed to different provinces. Another Jesuit was jailed for four months and then expelled from the Order for having supported the other four. Notice of these punishments was published throughout France. But even before these measures were announced, supporters began to rally for Ranfaing and her Jesuit followers. In August 1644 the Vicar-General of Toul, Midot, claimed he had been tricked into giving to Jean Halay the commission allowing Halay to question Ranfaing. The four Jesuits appealed to the Holy Office, seemingly with the support of a number of French bishops.133 Over the next four years, a series of manoeuvres took place between the court of Rome, the Jesuits in Rome, and members of the French episcopacy, ultimately involving clergy in Paris and the Paris Parlement. As a result, in 1648, Innocent X absolved de Trans, Argombat and Séglière, saying they had been the victims of illusions — implicitly victims of Ranfaing herself. They were expelled from the Jesuit Order, but were permitted to join the Dominicans.134 They were made to sever all ties with Ranfaing and the other members of the congregation, and were forbidden to use ‘exorcisms, vows, medals [...] prayers, imprecations and other spiritual exercises invented and propagated by sister Elisabeth and her associates’.135 They were also forbidden to go to Nancy. Ranfaing died a few months after the sentence was passed, in January 1649. Notwithstanding the dissolution of the core group in 1648, her reputation for holiness and her personal cult continued: her death was regarded in Nancy as the death of a saint, and in 1653 Jean d’Argombat began to write her biography, apparently flouting the papal 131

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 41.

132

BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 313v–14r.

133

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 44.

134

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 44. Nicolas Javel is not mentioned in this sentence: BN MSS fds fs 494, fols 220v–221v. 135

Delcambre and Lhermitte, p. 45.

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ban. In 1656 there was sufficient enthusiasm among her followers for her cult to be taken to Rome in an attempt to have her beatified, an attempt which was, however, abandoned.136 The Order of Notre Dame du Refuge continued to exist and two other life stories of Ranfaing were written after the one by Argombat. The fall of the cult, while concerted and dramatic, was thus also partial and contested.

Concluding Remarks To read the accusations against the group, and the legalistic defensive moves of scholar-priests and an equally astute woman, gives us an insight into the deeply uncertain nature of the Catholic Church’s sacramentals and the fathomless question of their interpretation: this is aggressive magic/no, it is a protective exorcism; this is a witch/no, this is a female martyr to devils; these are abuses/no, they are routine devotions; this is a drain on the treasury of merit/no, it is work for the salvation of all. To imagine that the disablement of the cult was the only possible outcome of the case would therefore be to misapprehend the flexibility of this system. Essentially this was a struggle between competing patrons, and indeed much of the vulnerability of the group can be explained by the fact of the cult’s very longevity and the negative effects of this on its patronage networks. By the time Ranfaing came under attack in the 1640s many of her prominent supporters and patrons, including several significant Jesuits, had died: Bishop Jean Porcelets de Maillane in 1624; Father Pierre Coton in 1626; the Bishop of Toul, Charles de Gournay, in 1636; Father François Poiré, an early witness to her miraculous powers, by 1644; Canon Nicholas Viardin in 1631 and Pierre de Bérulle, who had consulted Ranfaing in the 1620s, in 1629. The overlap in time of the Ranfaing cult with that of the possessed Mother Jeanne des Anges at Loudun in the mid–1630s, may have also had some bearing on the fate of Ranfaing’s group: comparatively weaker than Jeanne in terms of patronage, Ranfaing may have become the victim of a tide of antipathy among elements in the Jesuit Order in the wake of Jeanne’s successes and the controversial activism of the Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin in promoting her cult. This may be related to the role of the provincial Barthélemy Jacquinot, who initiated the pursuit against Ranfaing, but who had nonetheless supported Jeanne des Anges. It’s also true, though, that the group was to some extent inherently vulnerable because it had ‘selfselected’ as a morally superior élite. By definition it was a relatively easy target and, notwithstanding its secrecy, easily identified by its badges. Nor can we set aside the importance of simple territorial warfare: the physical crowding out of the Capuchins in 1628 is a literal instance of the metaphorical jostling for territory in the new spiritual landscape of counter reform. Just as the treasury of merit is by definition

136

Delcambre and Lhermitte, pp. 20–21.

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limited, there was arguably an optimum range for this group’s capacity to have influence, at least within the territory of Lorraine. Thus this is a case which is both a textbook ‘rise and fall’ story of Catholic cult history, but also a distinctive exemplar of its times. The case typified the traditional preoccupations of Catholicism in relation to cult behaviours, which ask: what is their relation to authority? Are these people the devil’s servants? And what about these scary women? But the case also bore features distinctive for this period which drew on and intensified traditional anxieties: preoccupation with the power of the devil (on the part of the group primarily, but something also expressed and mobilized by critics); the cultivation of the theme of martyrdom in pursuit of holiness; and an extreme preoccupation with sexual morality and female sexuality (again, something mobilized by Ranfaing and her group, as well as by critics). Finally, though, it was a case extreme even for this period of extremes: extraordinary in that a woman was able not only to draw secular authorities into the execution of her suitor, but for her to then be endorsed by these authorities and other patrons as a virtual saint. It is perhaps especially arresting to modern eyes as a cult of martyrdom built not around the suffering of a man executed for causing a woman to experience sexual temptation, but around the suffering of the woman herself as a result of these feelings, a cult so blind and self-absorbed as to run from this troubling fact. Yet even this might not seem so surprising if the cult is understood as an extreme variant — or at least a recognisable distortion — within a religion itself built around a central act of human sacrifice.

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Part Two The Rhetoric of the Image

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Affective Devotion and the Early Dominicans: The Case of Fra Angelico ROBERT W. GASTON

T

he remarkable love affair between twentieth-century art history and early Franciscan spirituality will doubtless become one of the leitmotifs of twentyfirst-century historiography. Vasari had set the stage by installing Giotto, whom he considered the most eloquent early visual interpreter of the legends of Saint Francis, as the founding master of an Italian art reborn. The floodgates of scholarship opened wide after the 1940s, when Friedrich Antal posed the question of the influence of the mendicant orders on the patronage, style and iconography of Florentine art in the trecento and quattrocento.1 As connoisseurship began to sketch in the oeuvres for artists working between about 1250 and 1400, the period least known to Vasari, patronage studies emerged as an approach to art history which could bring together the artist’s and patron’s biographies, including their spiritual experiences, with connoisseurship and iconography.

I offer this study as a token of my admiration for Ian Robertson, whose exemplary dedication to scholarship on the Italian Renaissance inspired many of us to take up research in the field, and whose untimely death has deprived the university community in Melbourne of one of its finest intellects. I wish to thank Fr Benedict Hensley O.P., of St Dominic’s Priory, Melbourne, for his kind assistance in making the library of the Studium available to me, and Dr Helen Frank for more recent help at the library. A preliminary conversation on the topic with Dr Michèle Mulchahey was invaluable to my preparation of this study, and I am deeply grateful to her for a critical reading of a draft. The opinions expressed in what follows are, of course, my own. 1 Friedrich Antal, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background: The Bourgeois Republic before Cosimo de’ Medici’s Advent to Power, XIV and Early XV Centuries (London: Kegan Paul, 1948; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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It was the publication in 1961 of an English translation of the Meditations on the Life of Christ, long attributed to Saint Bonaventure, and almost certainly composed in around 1300 by the Franciscan Johannes de Caulibus of San Geminiano, that had a measurable effect on art historians’ interest in early Franciscan spirituality.2 There was a felicitous confluence of the needs of Anglo-American art historians and the aspirations of the Order seeking to clarify its traditions of scholarship and devotion while strengthening its position in an increasingly secular world.3 In an authoritative 2 Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. Ital. 115, trans. and ed. by Isa Ragusa and Rosalie Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis (Turnhout: Brepols, 1966–), CLIII: Iohannis de Caulibus Meditaciones Vite Christi olim S. Bonaventuro attributae, ed. by M. Stallings-Taney (1997). Franciscan spirituality has a vast literature. Of historiographic interest are: Grado G. Merlo, ‘La storiografia francescana dal dopoguerra ad oggi’, Studi Storici, 2 (1991), 287–306; Francesco d’Assisi fra storia, letteratura e iconografia: atti del Seminario: Rende, 8–9 maggio 1995, ed. by Franca Ela Consolino (Soveria Mannelli [Italy]: Rubbettino, 1996); Leone Veuthey, OFM Conv., Scuola francescana: Filosofia Teologia Spiritualità, ed. by Lorenzo di Fonzo (Rome: Miscellanea francescana, 1996). See also: Dieter Blume, Wandmalerei als Ordenspropaganda: Bildprogramme in Chorbereich franziskanischer Kirchen Italiens bis zum Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Worms: Werner, 1983); Wolfgang Schenkluhn, ‘Ordines studentes’: Aspekte zur Kirchenarchitektur der Dominikaner und Franziskaner im 13. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Mann, 1985); Giovanni Miccoli, Francesco d’Assisi: Realtà e memoria di un’ esperienza cristiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1991); Klaus Krüger, Der frühe Bildkult des Franziskus in Italien (Berlin: Mann, 1992); Corrado Bologna, ‘L’Ordine francescano e la letteratura nell’Italia pretridentina’, Letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), I: Il letterato e le istituzion, 729– 98; Timothy Johnson, ‘Iste Pauper Clamavit’: Saint Bonaventure’s Mendicant Theology of Prayer (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1990); Chiara Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate (Turin: Einaudi, 1993). A thoughtful approach to Franciscan passion narratives is found in Bert Roest, ‘A Meditative Spectacle: Christ’s Bodily Passion in the Satirica Ystoria’, in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. by Alasdair A. MacDonald, Herman B. Ridderbos and R. M. Schlusemann (Groningen: Forsten, 1998), pp. 31–54. 3

Rona Goffen’s work exemplifies the recent study of Franciscan spirituality and theology in relation to major Renaissance artworks: see her Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian, and the Franciscans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). Millard Meiss went against the mainstream in putting so much weight on Dominican spiritual thought in his influential Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). A highly selective listing of significant contributions to early Dominican art patronage and spirituality (apart from that of Fra Angelico) might include: Gilles Gérard Meersseman O.P., ‘L’architecture dominicain au XIIIe siècle: Legislation et pratique’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 16 (1946), 136–90; Henk W. van Os, ‘The Discovery of an Early Man of Sorrows on a Dominican Triptych’, Journal of

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volume, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages, first published in 1961, the chapter on the Franciscans closed with an account of the Meditations that asserted their paradigmatic role in late medieval spirituality: They reflect all that was most characteristic of Franciscan piety; tender and affective meditation on Christ and especially on those mysteries of his life that are most apt to touch the heart — his birth, childhood, passion and death. 4

This work brings out once again how much the spirituality we call Franciscan, at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, was a bridge between the spirituality of the twelfth century, which was still almost exclusively the monopoly of the cloister, and the spirituality that began to flourish at the end of the fourteenth, the Devotio moderna, which was for long to set its mark on the spiritual life of the Church. ‘Bernardine’ and ‘Franciscan’ devotion were still anchored, so to speak, to the ‘objective’ contemplation of Christ’s mysteries. The drift in the direction of ‘subjective’ devotion was to take place during the fourteenth century. The Franciscan chapter of the volume was entitled ‘The Franciscan Spring’. That devoted to the Dominicans was called ‘The Dominican Crusade’, and the early Dominicans were characterized as preaching theologians with a ‘zeal for souls’, as intellectuals and scholars whose devotional practices could be subsumed under a brief description of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology of contemplation.5 Saint the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 41 (1978), 65–75; Gert Kreytenberg, ‘Das “capitulum studentium” im Konvent von Santa Maria Novella’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 23 (1979), 225–38; Julian Gardner, ‘Andrea di Bonaiuto and the Chapterhouse Frescoes in S. Maria Novella’, Art History, 2 (1979), 107–38; Gosbert A. Schüssler, ‘Zum Thomasfresko des Andrea Bonaiuti in der Spanischen Kapelle’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 24 (1980), 251–74; Joanna Cannon, ‘Dominican Patronage of the Arts in Central Italy: The Provincia Romana c. 1220–1300’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1980); and, among the publications that followed, her ‘Simone Martini, the Dominicans, and the Early Sienese Polyptych’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 45 (1982), 69–93; Paul F. Watson, ‘The Spanish Chapel: Portraits of Poets or a Portrait of Christian Order’, Memorie Domenicane, 11 (1980), 471–87; Joseph Polzer, ‘Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Via veritatis and Dominican Thought in Late Medieval Italy’, The Art Bulletin, 77 (1995), 262–89; numerous studies by Eugenio Marino O.P., including ‘Il Diluvio’ di Paolo Uccello in S. Maria Novella ed il Concilio di Firenze (1439–1443): Saggio di iconoteologia storica (Pistoia: Centro riviste della Provincia Romana, 1992); Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages, trans. by Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle: Caratzas, 1990), especially on affective devotion to the crucified Christ image; and his Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 380, 393, 396, 401, 404. 4

The English version, translated by the Benedictines of Holme Eden Abbey, Carlisle, appeared in 1968 as Dom Jean Leclercq, Dom François Vandenbroucke and Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages (London: Burns and Oates, 1968), 314. 5

Leclercq, Vandenbroucke and Bouyer, pp. 315–43.

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Francis’s brand of affective devotion was certainly new and influential, but one remains perplexed by the notion that Franciscan spirituality differed so fundamentally from that of the Dominicans.6 To identify the early history of Dominican spirituality with Thomas’s theology of devotion and contemplation may seem, to a historian located outside the Order, an exceptionally restrictive view. Saint Thomas’s writings were ‘formally introduced’ into the conventual curriculum of the Order in 1313, but there was considerable resistance in trecento Tuscany, as elsewhere, to incorporating his Summa theologiae as a textbook, and the work became the friars’ ‘standard textbook of theology’ only in the sixteenth century.7 The intellectualism of Thomism casts a shadow, or a ray of light if one prefers, over the Dominican Order’s interpretation of its own early spiritual history. A convenient focus for an investigation of this issue is the volume on Dominican spirituality edited in 1961 by Fr Innocenzo Colosio O.P. Colosio contributed a lucid essay on the methodology of research into early Dominican spirituality, as well as a fine piece on the role of prayer.8 It was his opinion that the 6

Massimo Petrocchi makes a hyperbolic claim for the uniqueness of Saint Francis’s conception of prayer: ‘Mai nessun santo intese con più intensità la preghiera non solo come un mezzo, ma sopratutto come una finalità che subordina ogni attività della vita dello spirito. Nessuno più di Francesco intese la preghiera — in quanto adesione alla Grazia — quale l’amore stesso’: Storia della spiritualità italiana (Turin: Società editrice internazionale, 1996), p. 4. But he does rightly signal that many significant early Dominican writers on spirituality deserve closer scrutiny (pp. 20–23, 285–87). Louis-Jacques Batillon O.P. reminds us that Thomas admired the affective quality of Francis’s spirituality, and said so in his sermons, as did other early Dominican preachers: ‘Les stigmates de saint François vus par Thomas d’Aquin et quelques autres prédicateurs dominicains’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 90 (1997), 341–48. 7

I draw these details from M. Michèle Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent in Study [...]’: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998), pp. 141–67. Professor Mulchahey does not necessarily share my views on Thomas and Dominican spirituality. 8 Fr Innocenzo Colosio O.P., Saggi sulla spiritualità domenicana: Opera in collaborazione diretta dal P. Innocenzo Colosio O.P. (Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1961), p. 12 and following. See also Mayemba Mbaki O.P., De saint Dominique à saint Thomas d’Aquin: Comment parler de la spiritualité de l’Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs au XIIIe siècle (Freiberg: Rotex, 1988). I have not been able to see Courants dominicains de spiritualité (Paris, 1993). The scant presence of Dominicans in Robert N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe c. 1215–c. 1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) is perhaps indicative of the current low recognition of their role in the development of spirituality. Swanson’s fine synoptic essay ‘Passion and Practice: The Social and Ecclesiastical Implications of Passion Devotion in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Broken Body, pp. 1–30, includes some Dominican authors. William R. Bonniwell, A History of the Dominican Liturgy (New York: Wagner, 1945) remains an important study, but is now in many respects superceded by the masterly work of Antolin Gonzalez Fuente O.P., La vida liturgica en la Orden de Predicadores:

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best work on the subject was by an Italian Dominican, Pietro Lippini, whose La Spiritualità domenicana of 1958 was an historical essay in Thomist systematic theology. Lippini’s argument was that Dominican spirituality draws its structure from its end, ‘which is contemplation infused as the source of preaching and the diffusion, also written, of divine Truth’.9 Its leading characteristics are ‘theocentrism’ and ‘intellectualism’. The spiritual life of the Dominican is oriented towards God and open to His truth through contemplation and preaching, whose fruits are confided by the Grace of God. Saint Thomas’s Summa theologiae is ‘the poem of the Grace of God’, where this theocentric attitude is theorized. The intellectualism of Dominican spirituality is a corollary of its theocentrism, and consists in conceiving faith — an intellectual virtue, as the foundation of supernatural order and the gift of wisdom, an intellectual gift, as the apex of the mystical life — and prudence as the regulatory virtue of the whole spiritual organism. In the life of the Dominican community, intellectualism manifests itself in study, in preaching of a doctrinal character, and in the worship of God as Supreme Truth. Lippini suggests that this ‘solid theological base’ renders Dominican spirituality ‘supremely objective and secure, that is, far from the dangers of sentimentalism’. Colosio poses the definition of a spirituality in terms of the group’s attitude to prayer: In the final analysis, a spirituality is identified by its respective conception of prayer in its psychological, dogmatic, ascetic presuppositions, in its preferential content, in its more or less methodical structuring, in its accentuation of an affective or intellectualistic tendency, in its bearing on liturgy, in its more or less mystical tendency.10

Estudio en su legislacion: 1216–1980 (Rome: Institutum Historicum FF. Praedicatorum Romae ad S. Sabinae, 1981), and his pathbreaking studies: ‘La teologia nella liturgia e la liturgia nella teologia in San Tommaso d’Aquino’, Angelicum, 74 (1997), 551–601 and 75 (1998), 359–417. On early Dominican devotion to Mary, see Bartolomeo da Breganze O.P., I Sermones de beata Virgine (1266), ed. by Laura Gaffuri (Padua: Antenore, 1996); Fra Nicola da Milano, Collationes de beata virgine: A Cycle of Preaching in the Dominican Congregation of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Imola, 1286–1287, ed. by M. Michèle Mulchahey, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts, 24 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997); also Noel Molloy, ‘Early Dominican Devotion to Mary’, Dominican Ashram, 20 (2001), 56–72. 9

I summarize Lippini from the précis of his argument given by Colosio, pp. 225–27.

10

‘In ultima analisi, una spiritualità s’identifica con la rispettiva concezione della orazione nei suoi presupposti psicologici, dogmatici, ascetici, nel suo contenuto preferenziale, nella sua strutturazione più o meno metodica, nell’accentuare la tendenza affetiva o intelletualistica, nell’appoggiarsi più o meno alla liturgia, nella tendenza più o meno spiccatamente mistica’: Colosio, p. 18.

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Colosio’s assumption that Dominican contemplation must conform to Saint Thomas’s theological model leads him to an essentialist definition of Dominican spirituality. ‘Not every Dominican writer on spiritual matters’, he asserts, ‘is truly a representative of Dominican spirituality’.11 He cites as an example Blessed Heinrich Seuse (Henry Suso), who, we are told, ‘cannot be considered a typical and authentic champion of our spirituality. Too many have been drawn into deception by his marvellous idylls with “Eternal Wisdom”’. At the heart of Colosio’s objection is the Rhenish Dominican’s preoccupation with lyrically affective prayer, which is ‘not of a genuine Dominican brand’. Which early writings do qualify for Colosio as ‘authentic’ Dominican formulations? His list is remarkably short: the first Constitutions of the Order, the Summa of Saint Thomas, Dante’s Divina Commedia, and the Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena.12 Thus, an attitude regarding affective prayer as risky, as being a practice open to the charge of ‘sentimentality’, is deeply entrenched in twentieth-century Dominican writing on the history of the Order’s spirituality.13 11

Colosio, p. 20.

12

A more generously inclusive view of the devotional history was given by William Hinnebusch O.P. who quotes Henry Suso, Caterina de’ Ricci, Meister Eckhart and others with approval as illustrating the order’s devotion to Christ. Dominican Spirituality: Principles and Practice (Washington D. C.: Thomist Press, 1965), p. 8. Compare Valentino Ferrari, ‘Sulla spiritualità domenicana’, Rivista ascetica e mistica, 69 (2000), 549–67, and the more popular theological approaches of Richard Woods O.P., Mysticism and Prophecy: The Dominican Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1998); and Erik Borgman, Dominican Spirituality: An Exploration, trans. by John Bowden (London: Continuum, 2001). 13

Carl Dehne S.J., s.v. suggests that ‘Devotion is authentic when it prompts and sustains Christian behaviour, and religious feelings which do not eventuate in Christian behaviour are not true devotion but some form of religious sentimentality’: ‘Devotion and Devotions’, in The New Dictionary of Theology, ed. by Joseph A. Komonchak, Mary Collins and Dermot A. Lane (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), pp. 283–88. Dehne’s definition ties authenticity to a self-evident notion of ‘Christian behaviour’ which I suspect seeks to exclude religious movements strong on affective devotion but which he would judge not ‘truly’ Christian. Philip F. Mulhern identified what he saw as the particular danger entailed in sentimentality: ‘Every devotion, of its nature, involves an affective complex made up, not only of practices such as prayers and resolutions, but also of ideas, preferences, and sentiments having a source that is at least partly emotional. This affective complex may easily be vitiated by sentimentality and thus endanger the truly religious values of a devotion, because it subtly makes selfgratification, rather than the service of God, the object of the devotion’: ‘Devotions, Religious’, New Catholic Encyclopedia (San Francisco: Catholic University of America, 1967), IV, 833–34. For an American Catholic view markedly sympathetic to affective devotion, see Elizabeth Dreyer, s.v., ‘Affective Prayer’, The Harper Collins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (San Francisco: Harper, 1989), p. 19. For a brief, strictly theological account of Franciscan and Dominican teaching on emotion, see Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, s.v., ‘Affekt II’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), pp. 599–612.

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Dominican opinion that affective devotion was marginal in the early spirituality of the Order was shaped by the developments in liturgical theology that inspired Vatican II, and has to be viewed in light of the consequences of that Council’s liturgical reforms. It is significant that devotional writings, with the notable exception of the Legenda aurea, were omitted from the texts listed by Pierre Mandonnet in his article on the history of Dominican theology for the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique in 1947.14 This meant excluding from the ‘premier plan’ Dominican texts instructing the clergy and pious laity on modes of meditation and contemplation of the mysteries of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. The early Dominican devotional texts are also pressured from the liturgical direction. The assumption that medieval prayer was ‘always intimately linked to liturgical prayer, to the celebration of the Eucharist and to the chanting of the Psalms which constitute Christian prayer par excellence’, is reasonable only if one takes a monastic model of spirituality as holding good for all orders, and if one believes that the Eucharist was really at the centre of religious life.15 Before the 1920s it was widely believed that ‘mental’ prayer had been introduced into mendicant spirituality under Jesuit influence. In 1920 Raymond Devas O.P. documented the use of mental prayer among the Dominicans back in the time of Humbert of Romans (d. 1277).16 In 1951 Ignatius Brady O.F.M. argued that while there was no legislation on mental prayer in the first centuries of the Franciscan Order, Francis had posed the problem of striking a balance between a life of deep prayer and an apostolacy of action. He documented Francis himself engaging in prayer constantly, ‘Sitting and standing, in and out of doors, working and contemplating’.17 Blessed Giles of Assisi reported that Francis advised his brethren to engage in prayer after compline ‘in a quiet and remote place’, and several other early accounts refer to friars spending much of the night in their cells in prayer, a practice formally prescribed first in the Constitutions 14 Pierre Mandonnet, ‘Frères prêcheurs (la théologie dans l’Ordre des)’, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (Paris: Libraire Letouzey et Ané, 1947), VI, cols 863–924 (esp. 902–06). 15 As, for example, Jean Chatillon, s.v.: ‘La prière antique et la prière médiévale ont toujours été étroitement liées à la prière liturgique, à la célébration de l’eucharistie et au chant des psaumes qui constituent la prière chrétienne par excellence. La prière privée, notamment dans la tradition monastique, est toujours comprise comme un prolonguement de la prière liturgique’: ‘Devotio’, Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–), III (1957), cols 702–16 (col. 710). For an expression of scepticism about the centrality of the Eucharist in late medieval religious life, see my review of Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 47.1 (1996), 157–59. 16 Raymond Devas O.P., ‘On the History of Mental Prayer in the Order of Saint Dominic’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, s. 5.16 (1920), 177–93. 17 ‘Ambulans et sedens, intus et foris, laborans et vacans, orationi adeo erat intentus’: Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 10. 1, quoted by Ignatius Brady O.F.M., ‘The History of Mental Prayer in the Order of Friars Minor’, Franciscan Studies, 11 (1951), 317–45 (p. 320, n. 12).

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of the Chapter of Perpignan (1331). A Constitution speaks of this prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, as consisting of ‘making known their petitions to God’. Fra Egidio’s ‘Sayings’ put a remarkably strong emphasis on petitionary modes of prayer, and this approach was common among the early Franciscan theorists of prayer, including David of Augsburg and Bonaventure.18 Clearly, the earliest Franciscan prayer was not exclusively attached to liturgical observance. Indeed, the mendicant orders prided themselves on discovering the ‘mixed life’, thus ‘restabilizing’, as a modern Dominican scholar claims, ‘the psychological and theological inseparability of the love of God and one’s neighbour and recalling the priesthood to its original evangelical and apostolic fullness’.19 Saint Dominic was initially a canon who founded a canonical order, yet it is improbable that a canon’s existence was then considered ‘a life of pure prayer’.20 Dominican eye-witnesses testifying at the hearings for his canonization report that Dominic’s liturgical observance was highly emotional: he wept during the chanting of psalms of the divine office in the choir; he wept when saying Mass, particularly during the canon and specifically at the reciting of the paternoster.21 He remained in church alone after his brethren had left, praying there often through the entire night, weeping copiously. Fr Paul of Venice testified that when Dominic prayed, he cried out so that those on all sides could hear him. He spent sleepless nights in prayer punctuated with groans and lamentations, imploring God’s divine mercy for the sins of others.22 And Jordan of Saxony, Dominic’s immediate successor as head of the Order, recounts:

18

Egidio d’ Assisi, I detti, trans. by Nello Dan, in Dizionario Francescano: I Mistici, Parte prima (Assisi: Editrici Francescane, 1995), esp. p. 132. On the petition aspect, see my study ‘Attention in Court: Visual Decorum in Medieval Prayer Theory and Early Italian art’, in Visions of Holiness: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Andrew Ladis and Shelley Zuraw, Studies in the History of Art, 4 (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2001), 137–62. 19

D. Arbrescia O.P., ‘La Preghiera nella prima generazione domenicana’, in Saggi, pp. 55– 85. See also Angelus Maria Walz O.P., Compendium Historiae Ordinis Praedicatorum (Rome: Herder, 1930), p. 98. 20

As Arbrescia argues. Professor Mulchahey has noted privately that Arbrescia’s generalization does not apply to Spain, where ‘the life of the canons regular had become much more pastorally oriented’ than elsewhere in Europe. 21 Humbert of Romans, who became the fifth Master-General of the Order in 1254, reminded friars in his Expositio Regulae B. Augustini (ch. 46) that the canonical hours signify opera bearing on their redemption by the Saviour, some, of course, referring to the passion: ‘Circa nonam mortuus est in cruce, circa undecimam, id est vespere, corpus suum et sanguinem in sacramentum tradidit in coena, circa duodecimam sepultus est’: B. Humberti de Romanis [...] Opera de vita Regulari, ed. by Joachim Joseph Berthier O.P. (Turin: Marietti, 1956) I, 157. 22

The Latin text is quoted in Fuente, p. 187, n. 60.

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He used to weep plenteously and frequently, and his tears were his bread by day and by night, by day especially when he celebrated his daily Mass, and by night especially when he kept watch in his uniquely unwearying vigils.23

Dominic’s prayer vigils may have arisen from reflection on liturgical observances, but strictly speaking should be regarded as extra-liturgical practices. The earliest Dominican Constitutions indicate a strong preference for communal liturgical prayer, but dispensation was given for legitimate reasons for celebrating the daily office and Mass privately. There was an interaction of secret prayer and meditation with the ritual of liturgical observance.24 Humbert of Romans, in his influential commentary on Saint Augustine’s rule, explained the several advantages of prayer in a church or oratory (in loco sacro). Among these is the observation that there the corpus Domini (Eucharist) and the relics of saints are most frequently located; there, too, one frequently finds images of the crucifix, of the Blessed Virgin, and of the saints and angels, which introduce into the mind through the senses recollections of them which, having been introduced, are frequently very efficacious in exciting devotion. Humbert adds, quoting Saint Augustine and 1 Corinthians: ‘Moreover, the affectus of devotion greatly facilitates the efficacy of prayer’.25 There is evidence for Dominic’s affective devotion centred on the crucified Christ in an early Dominican illuminated text that became available in a modern critical edition only in 1985, De modo orandi corporaliter sancti Dominici (The Nine Ways of Prayer of Saint Dominic) dated around 1280.26 Two years later, Richard Trexler 23

Libellus de principiis Ordinis Praedicatorum, ch. 105. Jordan of Saxony, On the Beginnings of the Order of Preachers, ed. and trans. by Simon Tugwell O.P. (Chicago: Parable; Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1982), p. 26. On the date and composition of the Libellus, see Simon Tugwell O.P., ‘Notes on the Life of St Dominic’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 68 (1998), 5–116 (esp. p. 5 and following). Bernard Gui also comments on Dominic’s tears: ‘Sane de suis oculis quasi quendam fontem effecerat lacrimarum et fuerunt ei lacrime eius panes die ac nocte’: Legenda, ch. 78, in Scripta de Sancto Dominico, ed. by Simon Tugwell O.P. (Rome: Institutum Historicum Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1998), p. 279. 24

Fuente, pp. 68, 74–87.

25

‘Hae autem sensibiliter in mentem introducunt horum memorias, quae introductae multum valent frequenter ad excitandam devotionem. [...] Devotionis autem affectus summe facit orationem efficacem. Augustinus Ad Probam de orando Deum, ait: Dignior sequitur effectus, quando ferventior praecedit affectus, iuxta illud, 1 Cor. 4: Ad affectum cordis respicit Deus’: Expositio regulae B. Augustini; Berthier, I, 174–75. On Humbert’s place in the development of Dominican intellectual training, see Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent’, pp. 229–32. 26 Simon Tugwell O.P., ‘The Nine Ways of Prayer of St Dominic: A Textual Study and Critical Edition’, Mediaeval Studies, 47 (1985), 1–124. Compare the critical comments of Leonard E. Boyle, ‘The Ways of Prayer of St Dominic: Notes on MS Rossi 3 in the Vatican Library’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 64 (1994), 5–17. See Jean-Claude Schmitt,

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published an edition of Peter the Chanter’s late twelfth-century illustrated treatise, De oratione et speciebus illius.27 There are affective dimensions to Peter’s notion of vocal prayer, which is divided into modes of the heart, mind, and body. An ‘effusion of tears’ is sometimes appropriate, for example when making frequent genuflections in a state of mental devotion while adoring the Holy Trinity.28 De modo orandi is explicit in giving affective prayer a place in its methodology. The author describes: The way of praying in which the soul uses the members of the body in order to rise more devotedly to God, so that the soul, as it causes the body to move, is in turn moved by the body, until sometimes it comes to be in ecstasy like Paul, sometimes in agony like our Saviour, and sometimes in rapture like the prophet David. The blessed Dominic used often to pray like this. The holy men of the Old and New Testaments sometimes prayed like this. The manner of praying stirs up devotion, the soul stirring the body and the body stirring the soul. Praying this way used to make Saint Dominic dissolve utterly into weeping, and it so kindled the fervour of his good will that his mind could not prevent his bodily members from showing unmistakeable signs of his devotion. So, by the sheer force of his mind at prayer, he sometimes rose up in petitions and entreaties and thanksgiving.

In the first mode of prayer, bowing humbly before the altar is linked with Dominic teaching the brethren to do this whenever they passed before a crucifix showing the humiliation of Christ-crucified. In the second mode Dominic prays ‘by throwing himself down on the ground, flat on his face’. The text alludes to feelings of ‘compunction’, the reaction of blushing, actions of weeping and groaning, tied both to a sense of personal sinfulness and to imitation of Jesus and the apostles. The third mode, taking discipline with an iron chain while saying, ‘Your discipline has set me straight towards my goal,’ is interpreted as precedent for the friars later taking discipline ‘on their bare backs with sticks’ every ferial day after compline, saying the Miserere or the De Profundis. While these texts may be intrinsically affective, Dominic’s experience is not interpreted in this way. The fourth mode entailed ‘Between Text and Image: The Prayer Gestures of Saint Dominic’, History and Anthropology, 1 (1984), 127–62; and his ‘Entre le texte et l’image: Les gestes de la prière de saint Dominique’, in Persons in Groups: Social Behaviour as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. by Richard C. Trexler (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), pp. 195–220. Schmitt’s articles culminated in his La raison des gestes dans l’occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). See also his ‘Rationale of Gestures in the West: Third to Thirteenth Centuries’, in A Cultural History of Gesture from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. by Jan Bremmer and Hermann Roodenberg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 59–70. 27

Richard C. Trexler, The Christian at Prayer: An Illustrated Prayer Manual Attributed to Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 1987). 28

Trexler, The Christian, p. 228.

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Dominic standing before the altar or in the chapter room, where he would ‘fix his gaze on the crucifix, looking intently at Christ on the cross and kneeling down over and over again, a hundred times perhaps’. The text refers to New Testament precedents for kneeling before Christ in expectation of healing and forgiveness. The fifth mode describes Dominic striking a standing pose before the altar, holding his hands ‘out, open, before his breast, like an open book’. The sixth mode seems especially adapted to an affective interpretation, describing Dominic ‘with his hands and arms spread out like a cross, stretching himself to the limit and standing as upright as he possibly could’, like Christ-crucified; but the author offers no affective emphasis. The seventh mode represents a rapturous state of petitionary prayer and the eighth, in which Dominic sat privately reading or praying, includes his ‘laughing and weeping all at once’, but affective behaviour is not dominant. The author associates the ninth mode with Dominic’s powers of exorcism. Overall, Dominic’s modes of prayer, as recorded by this author, are not consistently affective in character. The published illustrations of the oldest surviving manuscript, of De modo orandi, the Vatican Library’s MS Rossi 3, indicate that they might make visually explicit affective aspects of the modes of prayer that are differently interpreted in the written text.29 For example, the emphasis given to blood spouting from the wounds of Christ-crucified generates an affective aspect in the visual sphere that is not stressed in the text, unless one assumes that the crucifix referred to presupposes such a sanguinary form of representation. The text makes no direct reference to Christ’s blood. The images of Dominic at prayer in Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 418, an anonymous Libellus for instructing and consoling Dominican novices, studied afresh by Michèle Mulchahey in a remarkable book on early Dominican education, should be drawn into such an inquiry.30 The text, submitted to and approved by the General Chapter of Montpellier in 1283, offers precious insights into the affective character of certain aspects of Dominican spiritual training in these years. The second part of the Libellus deals with the construction of a ‘spiritual order’ in the novice’s mind through adopting Hugh of Fouilloy’s notion of the cloister of the soul, transposed to the buildings and rooms of the novice’s convent. Among these is the refectory, here figured as the place of devotion: In which Christ the heavenly refectorius serves to the penitent soul the life-giving food of devotion, that is, tears. Contemplation of the pains of hell is the sauce which gives savour to this food, and the special dish, the pitantia, which crowns the meal,

29

See n. 26, above.

30

Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent’, p. 114. See also Raimond Creytens, ‘L’instruction des novices dominicains au XIIIe siècle’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 20 (1950), 114– 93, and p. 120, n. 22 for a list of the illustrations.

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represents the heavenly banquet which awaits those who pour out the heartfelt tears of compunction.

The chapterhouse, which has been of particular interest to art historians studying early Dominican art programmes, naturally has its place in this account: The soul’s chapterhouse is self-correction. The prior who presides at chapter and listens to the confession of the heart is Christ himself, whose likeness as the crucified should be present in the anguished soul as it is, physically, in the convent’s chapterhouse.

A sermon on prayer written before 1250 by Guillaume Peyraut (Peraldus), the Dominican whose Summa de vitiis et virtutibus (c. 1236) was widely used in Dominican convents as a sourcebook on moral theology pertinent to the composing of sermons, also has significant things to say about the role of tears in the preparation of the mind for prayer. The sermon, whose audience, to judge by the exempla used, is not specified but is perhaps laymen, adapts some elements of the lengthy account of prayer integrated into Peraldus’s treatment of the virtue of justice in his Summa.31 Peraldus uses the Lord’s Prayer as a propaedeutic text, like Jesus in Matthew 6. 9. In this process of learning how to pray, tears are first given a place as a response to the fears in life and carnal sins that provoke one to prayer.32 The first part of the Lord’s Prayer is said to move us to tears for two reasons: consciousness of one’s sins against our Father, and because of our absence from him. Tears are also said to be effective in winning what one prays for, as demonstrated by Saint Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 38. 13: ‘Turn your ears to my weeping’.33 Given that early Dominicans were profoundly interested in affective modes of prayer, it is of concern that Dominican writings on how to meditate on the passion tend to have their importance underestimated in recent surveys of this genre. Exempt from this generalization are the studies on German and Netherlandish devotional writings and mysticism, where the Dominicans, especially Suso, and Ludolph of Saxony, who was trained as a Dominican before transferring to the Carthusians, are recognized as being central to developing ‘a comprehensive theology of affective devotion’. James Marrow, whose comment this is, justly observes that Suso was alone among the northern mystics in making ‘Christ and the passion the focus of his devotional life’. But even he, Marrow notes, did not compose ‘a narrative passion 31

The sermon is translated in Early Dominicans: Selected Writings, ed. by Simon Tugwell O.P. (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 165–77. I also cite from the Summa virtutum ac vitiorum, Venice, Paganinis de Paganinis, 20 December 1497. On the Summa’s role in sermon composition, see Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent’, pp. 540–41, and the still valuable study by Antoine Dondaine, ‘Guillaume Peyraut: Vie et oeuvres’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 18 (1948), 162–236 (esp. 184–87 on the Summa and its influence). 32

Summa, 8, ch. 3, fol. 122r; Early Dominicans, p. 168.

33

Summa, 8, ch. 14, fols 125v–126r; Early Dominicans, pp. 170–71.

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tract’ like the Franciscan Meditaciones and the numerous Netherlandish passion tracts that expatiate upon the details of Christ’s suffering.34 In keeping with this approach a recent account of late medieval Latin passion tracts leaves the Dominicans out of the story altogether.35 Perhaps this is fair. After all, where is the Dominican Latin passion narrative that could rival the widely diffused Meditaciones, unless one considers Ludolph a Dominican in Carthusian garb?36 The only Dominican work potentially related to the field of devotion that could match the Franciscan Meditaciones in influence was Jacopo da Varazze’s Legenda aurea, composed between around 1253 and 1273, as a Latin handbook of ‘readings’ on liturgical hagiography. It brimmed with historical sources and analytical materials presented in the formal manner of scholastic theology familiar to Dominicans from their learned treatises and in-house learned sermons.37 Michèle Mulchahey has observed of the Legenda: 34

James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrojk: Van Ghemment, 1979). On Suso and on the initial Dominican resistance to accepting spiritual responsibility for Rhineland convents, their eventual assumption of that, and ‘the productive union of Dominican intellectualism with fervid conventual spirituality’ that ensued, see pp. 13 and 253, n. 48. An excellent account of Suso’s affective devotional writings studied in relation to their illustrations is given by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), p. 197 and following. On early Dominican passion devotion in Germany see the excellent study by Michael Camille, ‘Mimetic Identification and Passion Devotion in the Later Middle Ages: A Double-Sided Panel by Meister Francke’, in The Broken Body, pp. 183–210. 35

Ulrich Köpf, ‘Die Passion Christi in der lateinischen religiosen und theologischen Literatur des Spätmittelalters’, in Die Passion Christi in Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters, ed. by Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemayer, 1993), pp. 21–41. 36 Jacques Quetif and Jacques Echard include Ludolph in their Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum recensiti, notis historicis criticis illustrati, ed. by Thomas Kaeppeli, 2 vols (Turin: Istituto storico Dominicano, 1961) I, 568. See Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Jesu Christi, ed. by L. M. Rigollot, 4 vols (Paris, 1878). 37

See Maria von Nagy and Niclas Christoph de Nagy, Die ‘Legenda Aurea’ und ihr Verfasser Jacobus de Voragine (Bern: Francke, 1971); David D’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 70. The internal textual evidence on the lector is gathered by Alain Boureau, La légende dorée: Le système narratif de Jacques de Voragine (d. 1298) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984), pp. 22–24. See also Sherry L. Reames, The ‘Legenda Aurea’: A Reexamination of Its Paradoxical History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Peter Francis Howard, Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus, 1427–1459 (Florence: Olschki, 1995), p. 57; Reglinde Rhein, Die ‘Legenda aurea’ des Jacobus de Voragine: Die Einfaltung von Heiligkeit in ‘Historia’ und ‘Doctrina’ (Cologne: Böhlau, 1995); Letizia Pellegrini, ‘Predicazione, catechesi e “sermo corporeus”: Una raccolta

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While there is no specific indication in the text itself that Fra Jacopo intended the Legenda as a handbook of preachable hagiographic material, such thoughts could not have been far from his mind. The overall layout of the Legenda aurea, its marked similarities to a de sanctis cycle, and its digressions into material pertinent to related liturgical events, afford the strong impression that Jacopo da Varazze designed his text to meet the needs of his fellow preachers and priests, first and foremost.38

Its existence, she suggests, facilitated the considerable popularity of Jacopo’s own collections of model sermons throughout Europe.39 Yet there is support — in the absence in early manuscripts of the usual signs of the text being arranged for practical, that is, liturgical use — for the Bollandists’ view that the Legenda was also employed by the Dominicans for private reading,40 and hence, one might think, for private devotion. In 1243 Jean de Mailly compiled an Abbreviatio of the Legenda for the use of parish priests, to encourage them ‘to excite devotion towards the saints’ in their sermons.41 Close study of the earliest laude texts and rappresentazioni (sacred plays) reveals the Latin Legenda as one of the principal sources. The vernacular versions were used initially by the third orders of the mendicants and by lay confraternities, the text affording materials adaptable for prayers and devotions arising from the liturgical calendar.42 As Emile Mâle demonstrated, the Legenda turned out, in its vernacular reincarnations, to be a book of inestimable value to artists who sought there the details of saints’ lives for their narrative pictures.43 But in what sense, if any, was the Legenda a ‘narrative’ text? Although the book’s text was eminently adaptable, the author noticeably limited its narrative dimension. Boureau argues that Jacopo had ‘little taste for the literal meaning, for the narrative force and freshness of the Scriptures’. He was more inclined, like most of his contemporaries, to allegorical readings. In the two chapters of the work ‘that should be’ the most ‘narrative’, those dealing with the passion and resurrection of Christ, he offers instead ‘a didactic composition whose articulations reveal theology; they only allusively refer to the events certainly well known (or supposedly known, at any rate) by the faithful, and readers’.44 Nevertheless, there are present undeniably vivid narrative elements which may have had devotional implications. domenicana di “exempla” della fine del XIII secolo’, in I frati predicatori nel Duecento, special no. of Quaderni di Storia Religiosa, 3 (1996), 203–42. 38

Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent’, p. 465.

39

Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent’, p. 429.

40

See Boureau, pp. 24–25.

41

Boureau, p. 21 and Reames, p. 165.

42

See the introduction by Valerio Marucci to the Legenda aurea, in Racconti esemplari di predicatori del Due e Trecento, ed. by Giorgio Varanini and Guido Baldassari, 3 vols (Rome: Salerno, 1993), I, 3–25 (p. 17). 43

Emile Mâle, L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen-Age en France (Paris: Colin, 1922).

44

Boureau, pp. 43, 207.

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The passion chapter is interesting in this regard. The text presupposes the reader’s familiarity with the events of the passion.45 It begins thus: ‘The passion of Christ was bitter in its pains, scornful in the mockery it laid upon him, and fruitful in its manifold benefits. The pain of the passion was of five kinds’. The author proceeds to his systematic analysis, but interweaves narrative fragments from the Gospel accounts and the apocryphal gospels with Old Testament prefigurations and patristic texts, ranging from Cyprian to Bernard of Clairvaux.46 The medieval selections are often of noteworthy vividness, as, for example the text describing the crucified Christ, cited as from Bernard and now given to Etienne de Bourbon: Fifthly, he suffered pain through the sense of touch. In every part of his body, from the soles of his feet to the top of his head there was no soundness.47 Bernard says that he suffered in all his senses: ‘The head that angels trembled to look upon is stabbed with clustered thorns; the face, more beautiful than the faces of the children of men, is befouled by the spittle of the Jews; the eyes that outshine the sun are clouded over in death; the ears that hear the angels sing the taunts of sinners; the mouth that teaches angels is given gall and vinegar to drink; the feet whose footstool is adored because it is holy are fixed to the cross with a nail; the hands that shaped the heavens are spread open and nailed to the cross; the body is scourged, the side is pierced with a lance, and what more is there? Nothing is left in him except the tongue, so that he could pray for sinners and commend his mother to a disciple’.

If we overstress the doctrinal capacity of the Legenda’s text, in keeping with the paradigm that Dominican writings have to be about dogma and truth, we risk failing to notice how it could have been used in relation to the meditation of Dominican 45

I use the newly established text, Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, ed. by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, 2 vols (Tavarnuzze: Sismel, 1998), and the translation by William Granger Ryan: The Golden Legend : Readings on the Saints, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 46

On affective meditation in Bernard, see Ulrich Köpf, Religiöse Erfahrung in der Theologie Bernhards von Clairvaux (Tübingen: Mohr, 1980), pp. 136–43; Dom Jean Lecercq, ‘Le Moi, la Compassion et la Contemplation’, Bulletin de Littérature Ecclésiastique, 93 (1992), 39–48; Sr Béatrice, ‘Le thème de la compassion chez S. Bernard’, Liturgie, 91 (1994), 318–32; Dorette Sabersky, ‘Affectum Confessus sum, et non Negavi: Reflections on the Expression of Affect in the 26th Sermon on the Song of Songs of Bernard of Clairvaux’, in The Joy of Learning and the Love of God: Studies in Honor of Jean Leclercq, ed. by E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995), pp. 187–216. Another earlier patristic work of importance in the affective sphere was John Climacus’s Ladder of Paradise, which, in its account of petitionary prayer, had a long exposition of the role of tears in meditation. The Dominicans showed some interest in the vernacular translations. See La Scala del paradiso di Giovanni Climaco, ed. by Antonio Ceruti (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1874), pp. xliii, 164. 47

Maggioni does not place this sentence at Isaiah, 1. 6 (p. 340). Marrow shows the extensive influence of this passage in northern devotional writing and visual art (p. 44).

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religious images. The ekphrastic component of Jacopo’s texts lent itself admirably to this function. William Hood’s remarkably original book on Fra Angelico’s paintings at San Marco, which interprets the frescoes in the parts of the convent in close relation to the religious and educational functions of those places, uses the Legenda in an interesting way in his account of the frescoes in the clerics’ dormitory.48 Hood states that the Legenda aurea was ‘originally intended to provide meditations on the feasts of the year for reading aloud in the chapter rooms or refectories of Dominican convents’.49 This is an attractive suggestion, but I am not sure where one finds specific evidence of such use. We know that images of Christ-crucified, of the Virgin and Saint Dominic were the only ones permitted for the friars’ cells by the early Constitutions. A couple of these small devotional panels survive: a crucified Christ with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist with angels, and a kneeling Saint Dominic who embraces the cross and kisses Christ’s feet, attributed to the circle of Andrea di Bonaiuto, now in the Vatican Pinacoteca; and Fra Angelico’s Fogg Museum panel (fig. 1), probably representing Cardinal Juan de Torquemada kneeling in the foreground, without the mourning angels. Hood rightly notes how the ‘pair of mourning angels and copious amounts of blood spurting from Christ’s hands and side’, in the Vatican picture, ‘augment the sorrow demonstrated by the gestures and facial expressions of the Virgin and St John’. It is curious that Hood, despite the visual accuracy of his description of the affective qualities of the Vatican panel, which are more prominent than in the Fogg image, draws no conclusion regarding the nature of the meditation that might have been directed at such pictures. For Hood, these images possess minimal narrativity, which will be taken to even more extreme negation in the ‘crucifix’ frescoes in the novices dormitory.50 Here one might have introduced evidence of early Dominican affective devotion to crucifixes and images of the crucified Christ.51 Gerald of Frachet’s history of the 48 William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). See now Christa Gardner Von Teuffel, ‘Clerics and Contracts: Fra Angelico, Neroccio, Ghirlandaio, and Others: Legal Procedures and the Renaissance High Altarpiece in Central Italy’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 62 (1999), 190–208. 49

Hood, p. 216.

50

Hood, p. 203.

51

Hamburger gives the best account: ‘Echoing Cistercian precedents, early legislation condemned most decoration as an unnecessary “curiosity”, but in later modifications to the Constitutions the term refers only to excessive decoration, not to decoration per se. If in 1239, the General Chapter ordained that Dominican convents should contain no images (except those that were painted), nor glass (except grisaille panels of the crucifix), in 1254 and again in 1256, the General Chapter stipulated in more positive language that each Dominican church should possess images of Sts. Dominic and Peter Martyr. An “admonition” in the

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Fig. 1. Fra Angelico, Christ on the Cross between the Virgin and Cardinal Torquemada and Saint John the Evangelist. Tempera on wood panel, c. 1446. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, The Hervey E. Wetzel Bequest Fund. Dominicans (1256–59) records: ‘In their cells they had before their eyes images of her [the Virgin] and of her crucified Son so that while reading, praying, and sleeping, they might look upon them and be regarded by them [the images], with the eyes of

Constitutions from the very same period dictates that “the brothers should have but one simple cell, without ornament or profane images”, a prescription that suggests that such imagery needed to be banned, yet, at the same time, in fact in the very same sentence, insists that each cell contain “images of the crucified Christ, the Blessed Virgin and our father Dominic”’ (p. 205).

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compassion (oculis pietatis)’.52 This compassionate attentiveness predicated on the reciprocality of gazes has an affective dimension which cannot simply be ignored.53 To understand why Hood may not have been interested in adducing such evidence we must return to the De modo orandi. Hood’s reading of this text is as follows: Saint Dominic’s prayer as described in De modo orandi was cast in a metahistorical framework. That is, it was not concerned to lead Saint Dominic or the other friars into a vividly imagined recollection of events from Christ’s life. By comparison with their Franciscan contemporaries, Dominicans tended towards a rather cerebral or abstract topology of mystical consciousness. [...] the Franciscans developed a pious literature with an eye-witness character. This emotive style of piety [...] seeks to precipitate the reader into an imagined re-living of the specific events of Christ’s life. When he was observed in prayer, however, Saint Dominic was not meditating on historical events but on texts of scripture. The reader is not told just what these texts were, but it is clear that an idea and not an action stimulated the saint’s meditation and consequent prayer. This is wholly in keeping with the content of Dominican private meditation recommended by Humbert, who suggested that the friar think about theological abstractions like God’s grace or parts of the Nicene Creed.54

Hood cites here, without quoting any text, the final chapter in Humbert’s De instructione novitiorum entitled ‘De modo orandi eorum’. This chapter is more informative and flexible than Hood would have us believe, and his description of its subject-matter is curiously at variance with the text.55 Humbert begins by saying that his advice on how to pray privately and to spend the day that follows is to be used on the understanding that the novice himself does not find a better [way] (‘si tamen ipse 52 For the original text’s versions, see Hamburger, p. 205 and p. 527, n. 56. He translates oculis pietatis as ‘with a loving glance’. The text is cited also by Belting (pp. 57, 194). Belting introduces more evidence about early Dominican devotion to the crucified Christ image than I can record here (see pp. 22, 146–47, 162, 173). 53

Compare with Marguerite of Ypres’s extreme ascetic practices, cited by Gilles Meersseman, ‘Les frères prêcheurs et le mouvement dévot en Flandre au XIIIe s.’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 18 (1948), 69–130 (p. 108); and Gerald of Frachet’s Vitae Fratrum (ch. 203) regarding a German friar of holy life and great fame who had been accustomed from infancy to have great devotion for the Passion of Christ and for his five wounds, from which he drank: Vitae Fratrum Storie e leggende medievali: Le “Vitae Fratrum” di Geraldo di Frachet O.P., trans. and ed. by Pietro Lippini O.P. (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 1988), p. 230. 54

Hood, p. 201 and p. 318, n. 36.

55

Humbert, De instructione novitiorum; Berthier, II, 543–44. The text is too long to reproduce here. There is a chapter devoted to Humbert’s role in the formation of the Dominican liturgy in Edward Tracy Brett, Humbert of Romans: His Life and Views of Thirteenth-Century Society (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), p. 80. On Dominican emphasis on matins, prime and compline, see pp. 123–24. Brett does not explore the particular texts we are examining here.

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novitius non inveniat meliorem’). After Matins of the Blessed Virgin the novice might think about and reflect on with eagerness the favours or beneficia Dei. These he lists as the incarnation, the nativity, the passion, and general matters of this kind. The novice should also reflect on things that particularly relate to himself, such as his entry into such a sacred order. This should lead him to think about the ways that others, meaning secular persons, take in the world, to contemplate unexpected death, the consolations available to him, and things of this kind. Having reflected on these things, he should conclude his prayers with saying: ‘Agimus tibi gratias omnipotens Deus pro universis beneficiis tuis etc.’, and after that say a paternoster and an Ave Maria. Humbert also recommends recitation of the hymn from the first vespers at Pentecost, Veni Creator Spiritus, and the verse ‘Emitte[s] spiritum tuum’ (Psalm 103. 30) that follows the epistle for Pentecost, from Psalm 142, ‘Domine, exaudi orationem meam’, sung at lauds for the Good Friday office, together with the prayers ‘Deus qui corda fidelium’ and ‘Ure igne renes meos’. Next, the novice should pray for those with whom he dwells, reflecting first by praying in corde (privately), and vocally, if it is agreeable, employing the verse that is said for the dead, at vespers, after the Magnificat: ‘A porta inferi’. Again, Psalm 142, ‘Domine exaudi’ may be said for one’s father, mother, brothers and sisters, and for those buried in the convent cemetery, and for other souls in purgatory recommended to God, and for the novice’s special recipients of prayer, perhaps meaning his preferred saints. Then he might pray for the living, first for those related to him secundum carnem (by birth), then for the prelates of the Order, for the provincials, benefactors, those existing in grace, and for the whole status ecclesiae (institution of the Church). He may also pray privately for many others. Humbert offers a list of psalms and verses suitable for private prayer, and suggests that after prime the Seven Penitential Psalms be said. And after the offertory of the Mass the novice could pray again for those for whom he prayed after matins. When the novice stands in special obligation to the dead he may say daily three readings from the Vigil of the Dead, totalling nine readings for the week, and is at liberty to do so when these are not said in choir. Humbert lists psalms which may be said daily, suggesting that the novice may wish to recite the entire psalter, which he should learn by heart, over a week if he can do it without grave inconvenience for the remission of his own sins, for his benefactors, and for other needy persons. He adds a selection of prayers to be recited after the psalter. After compline the novice should reflect on how he has spent his entire day, on his sins of thought, speech, works and omission, on the good deeds he has done, and give he should thanks to God for his beneficence. When the novice leaves the choir and church after compline, he should retire to bed, saying there the fifteen gradual psalms,56 in the 56

On the introduction of these as an addition to the daily office, see Pierre Batiffol, History of the Roman Breviary, trans. by Atwell Baylay (London: Longman, Green, 1912), p. 153.

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same manner in which the Office of the Blessed Virgin is said in choir, with specified antiphons. Of particular interest here is Humbert’s suggestion of reflection on general beneficia of God, the incarnation, nativity, and passion. There is no need to restrict this practice to its purely theological and doctrinal dimensions. It could just as easily entail meditation on the descriptions of these events in the Gospels. A novice praying privately for the deceased members of his family may have read the image of the crucified Christ with his mourners in a different light from when he was lying in bed after compline, meditating on the Office of the Virgin. Mulchahey has shown how the Frater Anonymus who wrote the Toulouse MS in the last quarter of the duecento composed his work to draw away and separate the hearts of students and clerics from the love of earthly and carnal friends and to elevate their hearts to the love and desire of eternal things.57 Yet, Humbert’s teachings on prayer indicate that he viewed this as being a gentle and gradual process. Since Hood brings Humbert’s work on the instruction of novices into the Fra Angelico question, one is justified in citing what Humbert writes about the conduct of novices in their special dormitory.58 In his cell the novice will be able to pray beside his bed by day and by night, and kneeling he will at any time be able to read, and to repeat the Psalms; and he will at times be able to write, although with the permission of the master of novices. This emphasis on the reading of the Psalms beside the bed, and especially the Seven Penitential Psalms, appears again in Humbert’s summer schedule for the novices after choir duties, and they are to repeat the Psalms in their silent post-prandial prayer, in which additional subjects are eternal life, the punishments of purgatory or hell, and death. When the novice says the Hours of the Blessed Virgin in the dormitory, or elsewhere, he should not recite it so loudly that it would interfere with another’s recitation. Thus, any novice trained according to Humbert’s model of prayer might have read Fra Angelico’s novice dormitory images through the Psalms, as it were. The affective and petitionary cast of these,59 and the primacy given to the Penitential Psalms, may have predetermined that representations of the crucified Christ with Saint Dominic and other figures at the foot of the cross would have been read in terms of those general beneficia of God referred to by Humbert in his prescriptions on prayer.

57

Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent’, p. 116.

58

Humbert, Tractatus de instructione novitiorum, ch. 7; Berthier, II, 536–37.

59

See Robert W. Gaston, ‘Attention and Decorum in Early Christian Prayer’, in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, ed. by Pauline Allen, Raymond Canning and Lawrence Cross 2 vols (Everton Park, Qld: Institute for Early Christian Studies, Australian Catholic University, 1998), I, 81–96; also ‘Attention in Court: Visual Decorum in Medieval Prayer Theory and Early Italian Art’, in Visions of Holiness: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Andrew Ladis and Shelley Zuraw, Issues in the History of Art, 4 (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2001), pp. 137–62.

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Juan de Torquemada, whose writings are of considerable interest to Hood because of his documented contact with Fra Angelico, composed a commentary on the Psalms, dedicated to Pope Pius II.60 Its proemium is a learned but simply expounded dissertation on the patristic justifications for regarding the Psalms as comprising the incomprehensible height of wisdom, a register of the whole of sacred scripture, and the consummation of the whole of theology. The Psalms are said to predict the incarnation, the annunciation and the resurrection of Christ, the latter attained through his sufferings. As Saint Augustine claimed, the Psalms set demons to flight, call angels into one’s hearing, excite devotions, please God, and greatly console the person who recites them. The commentary is not in-house Dominican scholarship, but is composed for the Christian literate public at large. Yet it may accurately reflect Cardinal Juan’s training in the Dominican recitation of psalmody according to a conventual educational philosophy of prayer similar to Humbert’s. Of notable interest, in view of the Cardinal’s likely identification in the Fogg panel, is his reading of the Psalms most closely identified with Christ’s passion and resurrection. Torquemada, in keeping with traditional exegesis, identifies Psalms 21 and 27, ‘in quo agitur de passione & resurrectione christi’, as the most pertinent. He argues that Psalm 21 predicts in detail both the series and ordo of Christ’s passion, and briefly but pointedly emphasizes the sense of natural horror experienced by Christ in anticipation of his sufferings, and the cruelty of his nailing to the cross.61 There is no avoidance of narrative and affective meditation in this reading. It is clear from Humbert’s commentary on the Rule of Saint Augustine that Dominican prayer did not differ substantially from Franciscan prayer, in that it was either private or liturgical, and conceived in the petitionary mode. Private prayer was petitionary more than laudatory (‘secretae vero orationes sunt petitiones magis quam laudes’). Prayer in the church setting was in Humbert’s view connected with memoriae induced by images of the crucified Christ, the Virgin, saints, and angels. It does not seem reasonable that the term memoriae should be taken as excluding narrative passages from the New Testament bearing on the passion.62 Domenico Cavalca, writing in the vernacular for the laity about prayer in his I frutti della lingua,63 projected a Dominican teaching on prayer: ‘Orazione è un divoto affetto verso Iddio’ (Prayer is a devout affection towards God), preparation for it, its usefulness and means of transmission to God through saints and angels, that seems

60 Expositio in psalterium Reverendissimi Domini Joannis hispani de Turre Cremata (Venice: [n. pub.], 1510), quoting from fols iir–v, xxvr–xxvir. On Torquemada, see Vincente Beltrán de Heredia O.P., ‘Noticias y documentos para la biografia del cardinal Juan de Torquemada’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 7 (1937), 210–45; and 30 (1960), 53–148. 61

Especially fol. xxvir.

62

See also Torquemada, Expositio in psalterium, fol. xxviv.

63

Mistici del Duecento e del Trecento, ed. by A. Levasti (Milan: Rizzoli, 1935), p. 546.

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identical to the prayer theory of an early Franciscan like David of Augsburg.64 Prayer was about provoking men to compassion for their sins, and provoking the mercy of God towards us, in view of the gravezza del futuro iudicio, much as it was for the Franciscans. Hood would insist that what Humbert wrote in Latin for his Dominican novices and friars was of a different spiritual and intellectual order from what Cavalca wrote for his lay audience: The structure of Fra Angelico at San Marco both conceptually and narrationally rests on the belief that (a) the paintings were not intended for a lay audience and, consequently, that (b) methods of popularizing religious attitudes, like sermons or pious tracts, are not very helpful in understanding the relationship between Fra Angelico’s paintings and his audience, composed almost exclusively of Dominican friars in the privacy of their convents. The distinction between monastic and lay art is nicely maintained in the essays collected as Christianity and the Renaissance, edited by T. Verdon and J. Henderson.65

And indeed it is. But in early Dominican writings on spirituality much of the supposedly private material flows in all directions at once, including to the laity. What one finds in the learned Latin sermons and theological treatises reappears with regularity in the vernacular sermons and pious treatises composed in the volgare for the unlearned.66 What appears in the sermons is re-used in the treatises, and viceversa. There surely were texts developed for use in the studium which were not usable elsewhere. But Hood’s distinction between the documents he adduces to establish the meanings of Fra Angelico’s pictures (the Constitutions, the De modo orandi, and the Legenda aurea), and sermons or pious tracts is overstated.67 64

On David, see my ‘Attention in Court’.

65

Hood, p. 302.

66

A good instance can be seen in the close parallelism between the lengthy account of the acerbitas of Christ’s passion given in the learned Latin sermon for feria VI, ‘In parasceves’, by the Dominican Gabriele Barletta, Sermones Quadragesimales (Brescia: [n. pub.], 1498), fol. 104r, and 121v; and Cavalca’s account in his ‘popular’ Specchio di croce (Florence: [n. pub.], 1490), fol. vv. Barletta cites some recondite Dominican sources omitted by Cavalca, but the material presented is almost identical. 67

For an approach to Fra Angelico’s art that takes as its departure point his Dominican education, see especially Venturino Alce O.P., Angelicus Pictor: Vite, opere et teologia del Beato Angelico (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 1993), p. 35. On the painter’s formation in the studio of the convent see Eugenio Marino O.P., ‘Il Beato Angelico: Saggio sul: Rapporto persona-opere visive ed opere visive-persona’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 31 (2000), 135–336, esp. p. 162 and following, and pp. 231–43. See also Boskovits, n. 72, below. I have not seen Domingo Iturgaiz, El Angelico: Pintor de San Domingo de Guzmån’ (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 2000). Michael Baxandall’s subtle study deserves a separate study in response: ‘Pictorially Enforced Signification: St Antoninus, Fra Angelico and the Annunciation’, in Hülle und Fülle: Festschrift für Tilman Buddensieg, ed. by Andreas Beyey, Vittorio Lampugnani and Günter Schweikhart (Alfter: VDG, 1993), pp. 31–39. He

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Fra Jacopo Passavanti (c. 1302–57), who was for a year praedicator in conventu at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and who is plausibly held responsible for the programme of the trecento chapterhouse frescoes there, employed a markedly affective reading of the crucified Christ in his treatise composed for lay persons, Lo specchio di vera penitenzia. His vividly rhetorical appeal to the penitent reader to take instruction from the caratativa compassione of the image of Christ on the cross is not in any respect at variance with what any Dominican master of novices was teaching at the time: Who will be so cruel and pitiless in his very self that he will not surrender to Christ’s kindliness, and who will not allow himself to be drawn to the charity of Christ the Redeemer? O you sinners, you hardened ones, you careless and sleepy ones: awake, feel again, open your eyes, repent! For you Jesus is called the crucified one. His blood shrieks out, and offers mercy and pity; his open side shows you his heart wounded by love and full of charity; his open arms, his bowed head lead you to his peace and friendship; his fastened hands and feet invite you with forbearance and tranquillity; the cross is placed before your eyes as an example of endurance and as a mirror of virtue and soundness, like a ladder by which one may ascend to the glory of God and to eternal happiness.68

argues that ‘Antoninus cannot be used as a dictionary to Fra Angelico’s significations because it is a dictionary to a different language and to a systematically different mode of conceptualization’ (p. 33). Baxandall acknowledges that there surely was ‘reciprocal intervention between discourses’, given that ‘one mind, the same person, could both write Dominican theology and look critically at pictures, as Antoninus certainly did; and another one person could both paint pictures and reflect on the theology of the Annunciation, as Fra Angelico certainly did’ (p. 34). But, following his linguistic theoretical model, he argues that Fra Angelico’s representation of the annunciation with Saint Peter Martyr at San Marco must be read as taking account of ‘what sorts of thing an artistic medium must, is forced to, represent’. Baxandall makes a cogent, and well-supported point, but chooses not to explore the historical issue of the artist’s Dominican education, and how that might have shaped his visual understanding. 68 ‘Chi sarà sí crudele e dispietato di sè medesimo, che non s’arrendà alla benignitate di Iesù, che non si lasci trarre alla caritade di Cristo Redentore? O peccatori, o indurati o trascurati, o addormentati, isvegliatevi, risentitevi, aprite gli occhi, ravvedetevi! Iesù per voi crocefisso vi chiama. Il sangue suo grida, e proffera misericordia e pietade; il lato aperto vi mostra il cuore d’amore ferito e pieno di caritade; le braccia aperte, il capo chino vi trae a pace e a sua amistade; le mani e i piedi confitti v’invitano con pazienza e con tranquillitade; la croce è posta davanti agli occhi vostri essemplo di pazienza e specchio di virtude e di sanitade, a come scala per quale si sale alla gloria di Dio e alla eterna felicitade’: Jacopo Passavanti, Lo specchio di vera penitenzia, ed. by Maria Lenardon (Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1925), p. 70; my translation. On caratativa compassione, see p. 96. The Dominican Giordano da Pisa focuses, in a sermon preached in 1305, on Christ’s weeping at finding his friend Lazarus dead, as a sign of his compassione spirituale: Giordano da Pisa, Quaresimale fiorentino, ed. by Carlo Delcorno (Florence: Sansoni, 1974), p. 293. Compare also the

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Passavanti’s speaking of the cross being before the eyes of the meditating person reminds us that the visualizing technique employed in the Franciscan Meditaciones was not unknown to the Dominican authors of devotional tracts. They were also familiar to Cardinal Torquemada. The Cardinal is crucial to Hood’s account of the Observants’ takeover of San Marco in 1436, and he probably commissioned Fra Angelico to decorate the cloister at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, late in the artist’s life. Hood wants Torquemada’s Meditationes, published in 1467, to be quintessentially Dominican in their devotional theory and to mirror the Christocentric emphasis he finds in Fra Angelico’s work. He admits that the text occupies a midpoint between the mystical pedagogy of the Meditationes vitae Christi and the exhortatory theology of the Legenda aurea, but argues that Torquemada, unlike the Franciscan author, does not focus on the meditating soul but on Christ himself. The proemium and almost every chapter of Torquemada’s Meditationes do, however, contain an exhortation to the meditating soul, using the very terms — attende, cogita, ecce, stude, considera, respice — by which the Franciscan author had sought to manage the attention of the reader, and to assist her in using the illustrations to the text.69 If, as Hood asserts, Torquemada’s meditations

affective tone adopted by Giovanni Dominici, in an undated letter to an unidentified woman: ‘Christus passus est pro nobis, dice san Piero, lasciando a noi el esemplo di seguitare le vestigie sue, nella cui passione dalla pianta del piè insino al capo non fu i llui sanità, ma ogni membro ebbe el suo tormento acerbissimo. Non è conveniente che il servo stia dilicato e sanza affanno quando è ‘l suo signore stato per lui in sulla croce. ha el misericordioso Iddio preordinato che gli [el]etti suoi figliuoli adottivi per grazia e poi per gloria siano conformi al suo figliuolo dilettissimo unigenito di qua per pene, stenti, fame, sete, infermità, obbrobii, povertà, tentazioni’: Giovanni Dominici O.P., Lettere spirituali, ed. by Maria-Teresa Casella and Giovanni Pozzi (Fribourg: Edizioni Universitarie, 1969), esp. letter 59, p. 240. Cavalca’s Vite dei Santi Padri and Specchio di croce are justly described by Roberto Antonelli as ‘opere legate alle predicazione, ma acquistano progessivamente anche una dimensione autonoma di genere narrativo’, but their affective component is not alluded to: ‘L’Ordine domenicano e la letteratura nell’Italia pretridentina’, in Letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), I: Il letterato e le istituzioni, 681–728, (p. 705). Mulchahey comments: ‘Tracts such as the Specchio [...] were not model sermon collections, they were not sermonaries, and neither were they utilized by preachers in the same way. With them we have transcended one genre and entered the borders of another, which was not really designed for predicatio at all, but for meditatio. What this goes to show, however, is the on-going dialectic between the elemental work of the friars as preachers and the wider interpretation which could be placed on the preacher’s office in the service of the souls of others’: ‘First the Bow is Bent’, p. 447. 69 ‘Bonum est igitur tibi fidelis anima assidue contemplari & admirari opera divinitatis [...] Considera ergo quanta sint mirabilia dei opera [...]’. (Christ before Caiphas): ‘Deducant oculi tui fidelis anima fletum liquescat spiritus tuus compassionis igne, considerans quam turpiter, quam crudeliter deductus sit salvator tuus ad Caipham & seniores iudeorum’: Meditationes: Faksimile-Ausgabe des Erstdrucks von 1467 nach dem Exemplar der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, ed. by Heinz Zirnbauer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968), the text is unpaginated.

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provide the closest correlation of text and image ever likely to be found in the immediate circle of Fra Angelico, then he is an author who writes about meditation very much like the Franciscan Johannes de Caulibus.70 Torquemada’s text treating the crucified Christ lists a grim catalogue of sufferings, humiliations and wounds, to which the mind’s eye is directed, these presumably represented for the reader to some measure at least in the simple woodcut (fig. 2) accompanying the text: Regard, faithful soul, with your mental eye, how much indebted recompense you contract the suffering Lord to. Consider his bloody sweat, the scornful blows, the force of the whips, the thorny crown, the burden of the cross. See him hanging from the gibbet with head bowed, weary eyes and hands transfixed, his feet pierced through. His side is penetrated, his food steeped in gall, his goblet the bitter sponge, he is obedient to the gall and vinegar, mocked with spittle and beaten with rods. There are thieves on both sides, scornful genuflections, the celebrated inscription, lots cast for his clothes, and distribution of his vestments. Could there be a viler death through torture and more execrable ignominy? Oh, how hard and sharp is the suffering of good Jesus for mankind: hard words and even harder scourgings, and the cruel and horrifying torments of the cross. Accordingly they praise you, and all the faithful adore him who through his passion and death drew them out of the shadows into the light, from death to life: from corruption to incorruptibility; from exile to the home land. From the light to joy are they called.71

The reader would have had to supply some of the details from the text alone, and there is no Dominican kneeling reverently at the foot of the cross. This Latin text’s reader can substitute his or her self in that role. If this is how Torquemada contemplated his own picture of the crucified Christ, as in the Fogg painting, then he paid as much attention to the meditating soul as he did to Christ, and his account of Christ-crucified is typically affective in emphasis. Torquemada’s meditation of the crucified Christ is close to the affective devotional procedure recommended in a letter written by Archbishop Antonino Pierozzi to Dianora Tornabuoni, and Miklós 70

Hood, p. 228.

71

‘Respice fidelis anima oculo mentali. quanto remunerationis debito astringaris domino patienti. recoli sudorem sanguineum. alaparum contumeliam. flagellorum instantiam: spinea serta. crucis angariam. suspendium patibuli. caput inclinatum. oculos languentes manus transfixas. pedes confossos: latus perforatum: escam fellitam: acida pocula spongie: talam & hisopi obsequium sputi ludibria ictus arundinis: latrones altrinsecos: geniculationes irrisorias. titulum famosum sortes vestis. divisiones vestimentorum. Quid plura vilissimum mortis supplitium & probra nephandissima. O quam dura & aspra pro hominibus passus es bone ihesu. dura verba duriora verbera. & durissima & horrenda crucis tormenta. Laudent ergo te & adoret cuncti fideles qui per passionem & mortem tuam de tenebris ad lucem. de morte ad vitam. de corruptione ad incorruptionem. de exilio ad patriam. de luce ad gaudium vocati sunt’. My translation. Torquemada’s chapter on the crucifixion and lamentation is lifted almost verbatim from the emotive Liber de passione Christi then attributed to Bernard, now to Ogero, Bishop of Locedio. I have compared the text in Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris, 1844–64), CLXXXII (1862), cols 1134–38.

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Fig. 2. Unknown artist, The Crucified Christ, Woodcut from Johannes de Turrecremata, Meditationes, 1467. Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Inc. 4. 2. By permission of the Stadtbibliothek, Nuremberg. Boskovits is correct in adducing this text in relation to Angelico’s representations of the passion, regardless of the fact that it is addressed to a lay person.72 Nothing of the specificness to the Dominican calling stressed by Hood would be lost by extending Fra Angelico’s probable range of sources and related readings to manuscripts that were composed, collected and studied by the Florentine Dominicans. Fr Gabriella Pomaro’s precious listing of the early manuscripts of Santa

72

‘Conforto anco la carità vostra che ogni dì pigliate una poca di meditazione della passione del nostro Gesù Cristo [...] inginocchiateve dinanzi ad un Crocefisso cogli occhi della mente, più che con quelli del corpo, considerate la faccia sua. Prima, alla corone delle spine, fittegliele in testa, insino ad célabro; poi gli occhi, pieni di lacrime e di sangue; la bocca, piena di fiele e di bava e di sangue; la barba, similmente piena di bava e di sangue e di fiele, essendo tutta sputacchiata, e spelazzata; poi la faccia, tutta oscurata, e sputacchiata, e livida per le percosse delle gotate e delle coma, e tutta sanguinosa. E a reverenzia di tutte queste cose direte un pater nostro con avemaria’: Miklós Boskovits, ‘Arte e formazione religiose: il caso del Beato Angelico’, in L’uomo di fronte all’arte: Valori estetici e valori etico-religiosi: Atti del 55o corso di aggiornamento culturale dell’Università Cattolica, La Spezia, 8–13 settembre, 1985 (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1986), pp. 153–64 (p. 158).

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Maria Novella would be a reliable departure point.73 This would bring into consideration, for example, the sermons of the Dominicans Remigio de’ Girolami, Giordano da Pisa, Leonardo de Utino, Peraldus, Jacopo da Varazze, and Giovanni di San Gimignano.74 To these may be added Torquemada’s Quaestiones super evangeliis totius anni, which furnishes a good idea of how the lectiones, with their narrative implications for pictures, were integrated into liturgical theology.75 And there is no need to limit the probabilities to those two texts. The quattrocento libraries of San Marco and Santa Maria Novella also possessed manuscripts of the German Dominican Henry Suso’s dramatically affective Horologium Sapientiae (The Clock of Wisdom), completed in 1334.76 To raise but one context for Suso’s relevance, Fra Angelico’s famous Mocking of Christ fresco in the clerics’ dormitory (fig. 3) is a work of a markedly affective tenor. Suso offers a reading of the event 73 Gabriella Pomaro, ‘Censimento dei manoscritti della biblioteca di S. Maria Novella, Parte I, Origini e Trecento’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 11 (1980), 325–470, ‘Parte II’, n.s. 13 (1982), 203–353. Also Berthold A. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Library of San Marco (Padua: Antenore, 1972). 74 See now Giordano da Pisa, Prediche sul secondo capitolo del Genesi, ed. by Serena Grattarola (Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 1999). Giovanni’s Summa de exemplis ac similitudinibus rerum is, of course, also important, as already indicated by Georges DidiHuberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance & Figuration, trans. by Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). From an affective devotion viewpoint, one might employ sections of Giovanni’s chapter 43 on the multiple significations of tears. On Giovanni see A. Dondaine O.P., ‘La vie et les oeuvres de Jean de San Gimignano’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 9 (1939), 128–183; also, Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent’, p. 429. 75

I have consulted the edition, Quaestiones [...] Edite per Reverendum d. Joannem de Turre Cremata: ordinis predicatorum: episcopum Sabinensem sancte Ro. ecclesie Cardinale.S. Sixti (Venice: [n. pub.], [n.d.]). 76 On the Florentine manuscripts see Heinrich Seuses Horologium Sapientiae, ed. by Pius Künzle O.P. (Freiburg: Schweiz Universitätsverlag, 1977), pp. 134–35 and 264; Bl. Henry Suso: Wisdom’s Watch Upon the Hours, trans. by Edmund Colledge O.S.A. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994). For the Italian diffusion of Suso’s work, see Giovanna della Croce, Enrico Suso: La sua vita la sua fortuna in Italia (Milan: Editrice Àncora, 1971), p. 95. She cites Venturino da Bergamo (d. 1346), who had personal contact with Suso, as his earliest Italian propagator, but the account is not thorough. See also Livario Oliger, ‘Una nuova versione latina delle cento meditazioni sulla passione del b. Enrico Susone O.P.’, in Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, 2 (1959), 207–30. On Suso’s mystical theory of suffering, see Alois M. Hass, Kunst rechter Gelassenheit: Themen und Schwerpunkte von Heinrich Seuses Mystik (Bern: Lang, 1995), p. 125. For the development of female Dominican devotion in Germany see Peter Ochsenbein, ‘Leidenmystik in dominikanischen Frauenklöstern des 14. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel der Elsbeth von Oye’, in Religiöse Frauenbewegung und mystische Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter, ed. by Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (Cologne: Böhlau, 1988), pp. 353–72; see also, Hamburger.

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that includes some of the vital aspects of Fra Angelico’s image, namely the spitting in Christ’s face, the veiling of his eyes, and the smiting of his neck, the latter eliciting the emotive verse applied to Mary, from Tobit 10. 4.77 Indeed, this passage achieves exactly what Hood perceives as happening in Fra Angelico’s fresco, namely, the rapid compression of a number of narrative episodes into an unusual non-dramatic image. However, if we take a different view from Hood, and consider that ostentatiously affective texts like that of Suso might have been used in meditation of Fra Angelico’s fresco — and were probably available to the Dominican painter when he executed the fresco — then a different comprehension of the work’s function and reception opens up for us.78 The extreme restraint exhibited in Fra Angelico’s image need not mean that he invented it from such a limited textual base as Hood suggests. Not if it was understood that the convent frescoes could project the quite rigorous decorum of gesture and expression favoured by the artist, yet still be read through Dominican devotional texts in a variety of ways. Suso’s mystical notion of Christ’s ‘True Lover’ seeking to conform himself compassionately to Christ’s sufferings in his passion seems a long way from the cool logical theology of Thomas Aquinas on which many of the Dominicans of Fra Angelico’s day were nourished. But the fact remains that Suso was being read at San Marco and Santa Maria Novella, and could well be 77 ‘Noctem illam sacrilegi diversis suppliciorum generibus in me expenderunt, et se poenis meis satiantes, ludibriis et verberibus, inuriis et opprobriis innumeris me afflixerunt. Faciam meam amabilem turpiter conspuebant, oculos velabant, collum cum subsannatione percutiebant. Mane facto in atrio Caiphae veritatem confitendo, reum mortis me esse conclamabant. Maternis quoque visceribus ipsa, quae me genuit, super me doluit et irremediabilibus lacrimis flevit, cum me in tantis opprobiis et angustiis positum vidit. Deinde ante praesidem Pilatum fui adductus, accusatus, condemnatus. Inimici mei terribilibus oculis me intuebantur, et tamquam gigantes steterunt contra me. Ego autem mansuete tamquam agnus mansuetus, qui portatur ad victimam, stabam demisso capite, patientissimo corde. Post haec ab Herode alba veste indutus, tamquam fatuus illusus fui. Corpus meum formosum flagellis acerrimis verberaverunt; caput delicatum spinis pungentibus perforaverunt. Facies mea amabilis sputis et sanguine defluente sordebat, et sic tandem condemnatum miserabiliter cruce humeris propriis superposita, ad locum supplicii eduxerunt, clamantes valenter: Tolle, tolle, crucifige maleficum’: Horologium Sapientiae, 1.3; Künzle, pp. 387–88; trans. by Colledge, pp. 80–81. 78 Fra Angelico himself perhaps represented Suso on one of the pier predella panels of the high altar he painted for S. Domenico at Fiesole, now in the National Gallery, London. Giovanna della Croce cites this work (p. 97). The problem is that although the figure represented has written the monogram of Jesus on his heart, an attribute that would historically identify him with Suso, who promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart, the artist has inscribed the name ‘b. Iacobus’ on his chest. See Martin Davies, National Gallery Catalogues: The Earlier Italian Schools, 2nd edn rev. (London: National Gallery, 1961), pp. 12–24; and John Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, 2nd edn (London: Phaidon, 1974), p. 190, pl. 5.

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Fig. 3. Fra Angelico, The Mocking of Christ, Fresco. Convento di San Marco, Florence. Photograph courtesy of Alinari, Florence. adapted to the reading of the Dominican artworks there. John Spike may be right in suggesting that the larger programme in the three dormitories was created according to readings drawn from the principles of Dionysius the Areopagite, perhaps under the guidance of a lay humanist ‘in the employ of Cosimo de’ Medici’.79 Yet it would have little or no bearing on my suggestion that Dominican approaches to affective prayer, absorbed through many of the leading scholars, preachers, and authors of devotional tracts for the brethren and laypersons alike, would have influenced the ways in which the novices and friars used the frescoes for their private prayer. In the devotional literature composed between around 1250 and Fra Angelico’s years, the same ‘classic’ sources are given slightly new emphases, regardless of the author’s religious affiliation. Suso’s inspiration, like everyone else’s, was drawn partly from the Bible and Dominican liturgical texts, but as Künzle and Mulchahey observe, Humbert of Romans had drawn up a reading list for novices in 1275 that included such texts as the Claustrum animae of Hugh of Fouilloy, the Meditationes attributed to Bernard, and Anselm of Canterbury’s Meditationes, all to be directed towards the acquisition of ‘divine science’ and edification, but nonetheless

79

John T. Spike, Fra Angelico (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996), p. 64.

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encapsulating affective approaches to devotion.80 Suso doubtless knew his Albert and Thomas, but Künzle is correct in thinking that Suso’s extreme form of affektiver Beschauung (affective contemplation) could derive just as well from Saint Dominic’s ascetic example of imitatio Christi propagated by Humbert and others, as from an adaptation of Franciscan affective teachings. Suso certainly did use genuine works of Bonaventure as well as the Meditationes vitae Christi of Johannes de Caulibus, but he probably drew more from the original sources widely explored by the Dominicans in developing their own spirituality, including the tracts of Anselm, Bernard and Jean de Fécamp. The vivid chapters in Suso’s Horologium devoted to the meditation of the crucified Christ and of the Virgin’s lamentation for him, writings drenched in compassionate emotion, are deserving of a separate study in relation to Fra Angelico’s images of the crucified Christ at San Marco. And the Dominicans who wrote devotional tracts for the laity, like Passavanti, mentioned above, Domenico Cavalca (d. 1342), and Saint Catherine of Siena (the Dialogo and certain letters)81 ought not be neglected: they were of course represented in the Florentine Dominican libraries.82 Cavalca’s Specchio di Croce, composed by the Pisan-trained but Florentine-based Dominican in around 1330, is a treatise designed to provide materials ‘for the study of prayer’ among devoti seculari who were unacquainted with Latin. It certainly presents its subject-matter in a ‘briefer and lighter’ manner than would be done in the Dominican convent, but does not water down the doctrine in the transposition.83 80

Künzle, pp. 84–104, for what follows on Suso’s sources. Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent’, p. 109 and following. 81

A convenient guide to recent work on Cavalca is found in Marcello Ciccuto’s introduction to his edition of Cavalca’s Esempi, in Racconti esemplari di predicatori del Due e Trecento, novellieri italiani, 4, 3 vols (Rome: Salerno 1993), III, 3–23. Of importance for Catherine of Siena, in addition to the editions of the Dialogo, are: S. Caterina da Siena: Le lettere, ed. by Umberto Meattini and Oscar L. Scalfaro (Milan: Edizioni Paoline, 1987); and Thomas Antonii de Senis “Caffarini”, Libellus de Supplemento: Legende prolixe Virginis Beate Catherine de Senis, ed. by Iuliana Cavallini and Imelda Foralosso (Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1974). 82 On the San Marco holdings of the sermons, see Ullman and Statdter (p. 179) where manuscripts of the sermons of Peraldus and Giovanni da San Gimignano are also recorded, all three writers’ works being presented to the convent by Cosimo and bound by Vespasiano da Bisticci between 1446 and 1453. 83

‘Uno libro nel quale brevemente, e legiermente degnamo e legiamo ogni perfectione & in croce quasi come maestro in chatedra chi insegna a qualunche vi pone lamente ogni perfecta doctrina’: I cite the edition printed at Florence by Francesco di Dino di Iacopo Fiorentino, 26 March 1490, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Magliabecchiani Stampati. B.6.13, fol. a iiv. A more recent edition is Domenico Cavalca, Lo specchio della croce: Testo originale e versione italiana, ed. by Tito Sante Centi (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 1992).

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The Specchio bristles with affective approaches to Christ’s passion, emphasizing, with many passages from Saint Bernard, the necessity of compassion for his suffering, the meaning of Christ’s caritative tears, of his being stripped for the crucifixion ‘come pazzo ignudo’ (like a nude crazy man), and treated like a leper — all of which is to be stored in the memory, as bitter health-giving medicine for the soul.84 ‘If we reduce the passion of Christ to the memory’, he writes, ‘nothing would be so hard that we could not bear it humbly’.85 Cavalca stresses the bloodiness of Christ’s entire passion, and how, through compassion, the healing medicina sanativa of that effusion flows to the sinner seeking forgiveness.86 Yet, there is no attempt to eliminate the importance of the ‘intellect’ in this process of compassionate reflection. Cavalca argues that Christ on the cross ‘illuminates our intellect so that we can know his power, wisdom, bounty and justice’.87 What I have offered here, with the tentativeness of an explorer lacking a good map, is just a preliminary sketch of a field that warrants more profound investigation. If these observations spark some fresh interest in Dominican spirituality and its interaction with Renaissance art they will have achieved their purpose.

84

‘Con vilissime latroni crocefisso è come pazzo ignudo spogliato e schernito e come in modo è leproso cacciato, e conculcato’ (fol. b iiir). Compare fol. g iv. 85

Fol. i viir. Saint Vincent Ferrer also put strong emphasis on the role of memory in meditation of the passion, in his second sermon for feria IV post ramos palmarum: Sermones Sancti Vincentius fratris Ordinis Praedicatorum [...] Pars Hyemalis (Venice: [n.pub.], 1496), fols 182v–83v. Jill Bennett makes yet another contribution to the supposed primacy of the Franciscan Meditationes. In keeping with the deep-seated paradigm privileging Franciscan affective devotion, she uses texts favouring the mnemonic function of images from Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus as though they were from ‘thirteenth century theologians’ unattached to the Dominican Order. Saint Catherine of Siena is also cited without reference to her status as a Dominican tertiary: ‘Stigmata and Sense Memory: St Francis and the Affective Image’, Art History, 24 (2001), 1–16 (pp. 3, 11). For a helpful study on Saint Catherine, see Barbara Pike Gordley, ‘A Dominican Saint for the Benedictines: Beccafumi’s Stigmatization of St Catherine’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 55 (1992), 394–412. Peter Parshall treats Albertus and others as contributors to the history of ideas rather than as theologians and philosophers working within particular orders: ‘The Art of Memory and the Passion’, Art Bulletin, 81 (1999), 456–72. Amy Neff seems more attuned to her sources having their origins in authors from different religious orders: ‘The Pain of a Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross’, Art Bulletin, 80 (1998), 254–73. Giordana Mariani Canova is exemplary in her attention to Dominican sources: ‘Lorenzo Lotto e la spiritualità domenicana’, in Lorenzo Lotto: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di studi per il V centenario della nascità: Asolo 18– 22 settembre 1980, ed. by Pietro Zampetti and Vittorio Sgarbi (Venice: Comitato per le celebrazioni lottesche, 1981), pp. 337–45. 86

Fol. l viir.

87

‘Come nella croce si illumina el nostro intellecto a conoscere Iddio’: Specchio, ch. 29; fol. i iv. Compare fol. k vr.

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Art History and the Resistant Presence of a Saint — The chiesa vecchia Frescoes at Rome’s Tor de’ Specchi CYNTHIA TROUP

I

n Rome’s Casa delle Oblate di Santa Francesca Romana, a monastery complex familiarly called the Tor de’ Specchi, an upstairs room is enveloped by brightly coloured fifteenth-century frescoes, striking for their intimacy of scale. Directly beneath a wooden ceiling, and arranged in two tiers, there are twenty-seven images, separated by a schematic border decoration of foliage and flowers. The lower border of twenty-six scenes consists of a vernacular inscription, in two lines of gothic script. With three small windows facing south-east onto the present Via Montanara, this frescoed space belongs to the cluster of dwellings in the Campitelli district first associated with the Oblates of Francesca Romana. It is known as the oratorio vecchio, or chiesa vecchia, a designation used at least from the early seventeenth century. In time for the Jubilee of 1600, the crumbling parish church of Santa Maria de Curte was annexed to the Tor de’ Specchi, and rebuilt, creating two impressive liturgical spaces for the Oblates’ use: a vaulted church below, and a separate, upper choir, richly furnished and embellished.1 Shortly afterwards, the Relatio presented to Paul V by the Auditors of the Rota indicated the frescoes’ location rather

1

See Patrizia Marchetti, La casa delle Oblate di Santa Francesca Romana a Tor de Specchi (Viterbo: BetaGamma Editrice, 1996), pp. 13–23. There remains some uncertainty as to whether the older, parish church of Santa Maria de Curte was fully or partially reconstructed. See Carlo Cecchelli, Studi e documenti sulla Roma sacra, 2 vols (Rome: Biblioteca Vallicelliana, 1938, 1951), II (1951), 8–12.

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Fig. 1. Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Virgin and Child with Saints Benedict and Francesca Romana, Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome.

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circumspectly, as ‘a certain room, which perhaps served as a church’.2 The ‘perhaps’ here concedes a kind of discontinuity between the form of the space in question and its function, surely a circumstance of some importance for an understanding of the role and status of the fresco programme. However, in modern accounts of the frescoes, the Auditors’ scrupulous distinction has not been put to use. Rather, the programme in the chiesa vecchia has been conceived as natural to the site, one amongst the great profusion of monuments and attractions that has long been ordinary to the Campidoglio zone — this singularly prestigious and symbolically charged part of Rome.3 Like the question of their place in the history of the Casa delle Oblate, the state of the frescoes’ preservation is more complex than generally admitted. The chiesa vecchia has persistently taken on significance as a ‘pure’ space, its contents apparently immune to processes of change and human intervention. This solemn immunity has been linked especially with the frescoed images, while paradoxically their meanings have been assumed to be largely self-evident. Within the field of linguistics, the vernacular inscriptions have been more readily analysed and endowed with historical context. Consequently, the most detailed review of the fresco programme’s conservation record appears in Paolo D’Achille’s philological study, ‘Le didascalie degli affreschi di santa Francesca Romana’.4 D’Achille’s scholarship extends also to the later, monochrome fresco cycle of the Tor de’ Specchi, which also includes vernacular inscriptions.5 His object is the reconstruction of all the 2

‘In quadam camera, quae fortasse pro ecclesia serviebat’. Presenting the case for Francesca Romana’s canonization, the Relatio was delivered to Paul V in 1606; the canonization took place in 1608. Parts of the Relatio are published in Acta Sanctorum (Antwerp: Apud Joannem Meursium, 1643–1867), 2 March (1668), cols 215–219; see col. 219 for the section ‘De continuatione famae et miraculorum attestantium Sanctitatem B. Franciscae’. In the archive of the Tor de’ Specchi, an early seventeenth-century manuscript of eight unbound folios, marked Canc. IV, n. 15, contains the phrase ‘in chiesa vecchia hoggi detto parlatorio’. This suggests that chiesa vecchia was an older reference for the space, and that while the spaces created from Santa Maria de Curte were new to the Monastery, the liturgical role of the chiesa vecchia declined. On this manuscript, see Paolo D’Achille, ‘Le didascalie degli affreschi di Santa Francesca Romana (con un documento inedito del 1463)’, in Il volgare nelle chiese di Roma: Messaggi graffiti, dipinti e incisi dal IX al XVI secolo, ed. by Francesco Sabatini and others, I volgari d’Italia: Testi e studi di storia linguistica italiana, 1 (Rome: Bonacci, 1987), pp. 109–83 (pp. 130–32). 3 On the accrued symbolism of the Capitol, see for example Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 69–95. 4

D’Achille, pp. 111–12, and in greater depth, pp. 129–38.

5

An independent bibliography for these frescoes is given in Giovanni Brizzi, ‘Repertorio’, part of his ‘Contributo all’iconografia di Francesca Romana’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384– 1984), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Siena: Monte Oliveto Maggiore, 1984), pp. 265–354 (p. 294).

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quattrocento captions, nonetheless his background material on the chiesa vecchia programme remains by far the richest available. Today the appearance of the chiesa vecchia remains conditioned by a restoration project undertaken during 1939–40, under the supervision of Antonio Muñoz.6 As acknowledged by an epigraph on the upper right wall, this was occasioned by the five-hundredth anniversary of Francesca Romana’s death.7 At that time, restoring the frescoes’ former ‘splendour’ involved renovating the colours, the over-painting of outlines, and the rewriting of some text in the inscriptions. This work alone has been judged fairly invasive by more than one writer. Yet D’Achille’s study indicates that it represents only the best documented of a long succession of interventions.8 Set apart in a recess at the far corner of the east wall, and dissimilar in its smaller figurative scale, the dim visione dell’inferno contrasts with the other frescoes’ clarity of colour and line. Most likely, its comparatively poor appearance today is the direct result of structural modifications made to this area, calling for a considerable amount of repainting. A long, arched window was re-opened in the alcove: the resultant loss of wall space required the compression of the inferno scene into the left side of the recess, achieved by extensive over-painting. Based mainly on the comparison of photographs, D’Achille has proposed that this transformation was planned as part of the fifth centenary renovations, with work on this corner continuing beyond 1939– 40. Furthermore, in D’Achille’s opinion, the disjointed layout of the caption below the visione dell’inferno followed from the building or re-opening of a much smaller, square window, in the lower right corner. This alteration cannot be dated with confidence, but appears to have ‘restored’ the vernacular inscription to view after a period of concealment or illegibility, which began perhaps as far back as the early seventeenth century. 6 The project was probably by private arrangement with Muñoz, who had been Sovraintendente ai monumenti del Lazio in 1914–28. Muñoz’s name is now above all associated with the Fascist regime, which supported a period of significant development for the resources and professional status of art restoration, with the inauguration of Rome’s Istituto Centrale di Restauro in 1941. See the Dizionario Enciclopedico Italiano, 14 vols (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1970–74), VIII, 170; and Cesare Brandi, Il restauro: Teoria e pratica 1939–1986, ed. by M. Cordaro, I Testi, 76 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1994), pp. 63–71. 7

NEL V CENTENARIO DELLA MORTE DELLA / SANTA MADRE FRANCESCA ROMANA / QVESTE PITTVRE FVRONO RESTITVITE AL LORO ANTICO SPLENDORE / A D MCMXXXX. 8 See D’Achille: ‘[Gli affreschi] vennero restaurati alquanto “energicamente”’ (p. 136). Fulvia Spesso Galetti refers to ‘la pulitura effettuata — forse troppo drasticamente — dal Muñoz allo scorcio degli anni trenta’, in ‘Alcune precisazioni sugli affreschi della “Chiesa Vecchia”’, Commentari, 28 (1977), 150–55 (p. 152). One of few contemporary references to the restauro of 1939–40 is found in Ceccarius [pseudonym of G. Ceccarelli], ‘Santa Francesca Romana nel sentimento e nella tradizione della sua città’, L’Urbe, 5.3 (1940), 9–17 (p. 14).

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D’Achille’s meticulous inquiry can only infer considerable losses and alterations to the chiesa vecchia walls prior to the twentieth century, by focussing on manuscript sources for the vernacular texts. Still, his confidence in an ‘animated history’ for the frescoes seems consistent with the Oblates’ continuous residence on the western slope of the Capitoline Hill and their active engagement in maintaining, adapting and renewing the spaces of their habitation over time. At stake in the recognition of this ‘animated history’ is the idealization of the Oblates themselves: the propriety of their vocation, and the stability of their domicile, have been generalized as an invulnerability to all that might be analogous to disorder. In the historiography of the frescoes, this idealization is a tendency within a remarkably narrow variety of responses, conditioned by a deep sense of the community’s prestige. A restricted horizon of explanation is actually anticipated in the style and content of the images and inscriptions, yet throughout the twentieth century this horizon has not been substantially developed, expanded or challenged. Indeed in art-historical and other writing, a strongly reverential attitude to the frescoes has persisted.

Attilio Rossi and the chiesa vecchia To the extent to which the cult value of the painting is secularised the ideas of its fundamental uniqueness lose distinctness. In the imagination of the beholder the uniqueness of the phenomena which hold sway in the cult image is more and more displaced by the empirical uniqueness of the creator or of his creative achievement. To be sure, never completely so. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Images from the chiesa vecchia of the Tor de’ Specchi first entered the public domain in 1907, with black-and-white reproductions presented in the Bollettino d’Arte, using photographs taken under the aegis of Rome’s Gabinetto Nazionale Fotografico.9 Published by the Ministry of Public Education, the Bollettino was in its first year, and Attilio Rossi undertook a survey of the Monastery’s artistic heritage, in a long article across two successive issues. The fifteen reproductions, including four, full-page plates, were the exclusive pictorial content of the first part, denoting the writer’s focus.10 With these reproductions amidst a combination of narrative, evocation, and aesthetic evaluation, Rossi’s work invested the chiesa vecchia images 9 See D’Achille’s review of the reproduction history of the two fresco programmes in the Tor de’ Specchi, up to 1983–84 (pp. 134–35). 10 Attilio Rossi, ‘Le opere d’arte del monastero di Tor de’ Specchi in Roma’, Bollettino d’arte del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1.8 (1907), pp. 4–22 and 1.9 (1907), 1–12. Subsequent references are to vol. 1.8.

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as a subject suitable to the discourses of art history. It profoundly influenced the arthistorical and other accounts that followed. Constantly cited throughout the twentieth century, in 1953 Rossi’s article was substantially paraphrased for republication in Rome.11 His writing therefore occupies a critical place in the archive of literature on the fresco programme. Shortly after its publication in the Bollettino d’Arte, the first part of Rossi’s article was taken up by the Olivetan Bendictine Placido Lugano, for his Rivista Storica Benedettina: there it appeared under a different title, in the volume dedicated to Francesca Romana for the third centenary of her canonization.12 While the frescoes had long been mentioned in the context of sacred history, there were precise ways in which the inaugural ‘art history’ of the chiesa vecchia could simultaneously serve Lugano’s explicitly hagiographical project. In this sense, Rossi’s work discreetly connected a traditional mode of historical writing with another, much more recent and specialist mode, which in the early 1900s was still securing a distinctive, dedicated readership in Italy and beyond.13 Amongst the new art history periodicals of its day, the Bollettino d’arte’s specific commitment was the tutelage and conservation of Italy’s artistic patrimony.14 Rossi duly approached the Tor de’ Specchi as an undiscovered, private ‘museum’; one that preserved in its ‘every aspect’ indices to the transformations of style and taste distinguishing artistic culture in Rome through the centuries.15 Although presupposing such transformations, Rossi’s study is framed by the notion of an indeterminate, tranquil past decorously concealed in the Monastery complex. Inhabited by the nuns residing there, ‘across the threshold’ this past is seemingly 11

Emma Amadei, ‘Gli affreschi quattrocenteschi del convento delle Oblate di S. Francesca Romana a Tor de’ Specchi’, Capitolium, 28 (1953), 253–56. 12

Attilio Rossi, ‘Gli affreschi di Tor de’ Specchi relativi alla vita di santa Francesca Romana’, Rivista Storica Benedettina: Pubblicazione illustrata di storia e letteratura monastica, 3 (1908), 19–39. On this commemorative issue of the Rivista, see Mauro Tagliabue, ‘Francesca Romana nella storiografia: Fonti, studi, biografie’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1984), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Siena: Monte Oliveto Maggiore, 1984), pp. 199–261 (pp. 205, 216). 13 See Gianni Carlo Sciolla, ‘Tendenze formalistiche e filologiche nella critica d’arte europea del primo Novecento’, in his Materiali per la storia della critica d’arte del Novecento (Torino: Tirrenia-Stampatori, 1980), pp. 33–57. On the kinds of narratives for works of art being consolidated at this time, see also Philip Fisher, ‘Local Meanings and Portable Objects: National Collections, Literatures, Music, and Architecture’, in The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology, ed. by Gwendolyn Wright, Studies in the History of Art, 47 (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), pp. 15–27. 14

Sciolla, p. 37.

15

‘Così ogni aspetto del luogo, l’architettura delle sue parti, le decorazioni, i mobili, i minuti arredi ricordano gusti artistici e usanze lontane da noi’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 4.

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recoverable to the visitor’s experience.16 From the opening of his article, which contrasts a volatile, degraded present with the Tor de’ Specchi’s arrest of time, Rossi’s interest in the ‘collection’ is clearly indebted to a wider discourse on the modern city, shaped by nostalgia. The nostalgia delivered in Rossi’s introduction is for a generalized, ‘premodern’ Rome of firm and serene religious purpose: Thus the tenor of life that takes place within the confines of that small world, with its peaceful and slow succession of religious ceremonies, simple daily concerns, and uniform recurrence of the same deeds, contrasts with the rapid and impetuous course of life that bustles beyond the compact monastic enclosure.17

This contradistinction is repeated in the historiography, the secluded interior of the Tor de’ Specchi epitomizing that which has been lost or eroded in the larger city sphere: implicitly ‘nature’ to the ‘culture’ of the outside.18 In due course, the same ‘small world’ points to a loss that is expressly moral — ‘a small world, that of the Tor de’ Specchi. Silent and closed to the false appeals of a society increasingly dominated by the material, by egoism and violence; a world open instead to man’s authentic needs’.19 Some eighty years after Rossi’s article, the opposition figured by the Monastery walls is still, also, an opposition of time. In the latter passage, the deteriorating grace of the ‘world’ outside corresponds to accelerated and arrhythmical secular time, while the phrase ‘man’s authentic needs’ denotes an

16

‘Varcata la soglia del monastero, par uscire dall’età nostra e risalire per un lungo tratto nel corso degli anni’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 4. 17

‘Così il tenore della vita che svolgesi entro i confini di quel piccolo mondo, nella pacifica e lenta successione delle cerimonie religiose, delle semplici cure quotidiane, e nel ricorso uniforme degli stessi fatti, contrasta con l’andamento rapido ed impetuoso della vita che si agita oltre il breve recinto monastico’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 4. 18

For example, Frances Parkinson Keyes links the Tor de’ Specchi with the rustic traditions of Trastevere. See the itinerary that introduces her Part 2 on Francesca Romana, in Three Ways of Love (London: Peter Davies, 1964), pp. 41–51. For Luciano Zeppengo, whereas the Tor de’ Specchi itself suggests richness, the sweep of Via del Teatro di Marcello outside calls forth Fascist depletion and pretension. See I Rioni di Roma (Rome: Newton Compton, 1978), pp. 643–50. Francesco Zurli summarizes a visit to the Tor de’ Specchi as a separation from the ‘caotico contesto cittadino’ and ‘un tuffo nella cultura e tradizione del Seicento Romano’. See his ‘Presentazione’, in Marchetti, p. 4. A useful account of nostalgia as a discursive paradigm is John Frow, ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’, October, 57 (1991), 123–51 (pp. 135–37). 19

‘Un piccolo mondo, quello di Tor de’ Specchi. Silenzioso e chiuso ai falsi richiami di una società sempre più dominata dalla materia, dall’egoismo e dalla violenza; un mondo aperto invece ai bisogni autentici dell’uomo’: Teresa Marci, ‘Un’isola dello spirito sotto il Campidoglio’, in Ieri e oggi: Francesca Romana segno dei tempi (Rome: Monastero Oblate di S. Francesca Romana, 1984) pp. 97–105 (p. 105).

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ahistorical, ungendered, consecrated time premised on ‘the Gospel’: the imperturbable time occupied and served by the women within the Tor de’ Specchi.20 However, the origins recovered in this ‘world apart’ never remain mythical. They always rapidly acquire a historical and embodied limit, the pure context of the Tor de’ Specchi ineluctably proceeding from the ‘life-time’ of Francesca Romana — from the fifteenth-century past that witnessed her advent as foundress and saint. As Rossi avers, ‘The people that live today in that place are still, by their habits of life, by temperament, by their style of clothing, close to the era in which S. Francesca Romana founded, in the first half of the quattrocento, the Congregation of the Tor de’ Specchi’.21 The clear proximity of the saint’s time in quel luogo persists as commonplace for the Tor de’ Specchi, indivisible from a confidence in her transcendent presence there. Therefore in Rossi’s writing, the plenitude congruent with the chiesa vecchia programme is the abiding presence of the saint herself, and, in keeping with the guise of his nostalgia, the ‘otherwhere’ of quattrocento Rome. Unusually, there is reference to the frescoes’ condition: ‘modern and unsuccessful restorations’ are, predictably, a regrettable encroachment.22 Yet the writer swells the definition of the frescoes’ palpable origins, to include for the first time the concept of the artist’s identity. Thenceforth, while never relinquishing the idea of Francesca Romana’s immanence, literature on the frescoes becomes largely preoccupied with that more secular originator, the artist. It was by ascribing to the frescoes an ‘artist function’ that Rossi produced the images as a source for art history, or more precisely, as an event in the development of Italian painting. Satisfied that the year inscribed on the east wall, 1468, ‘determines’ the date of the paintings, Rossi’s essay raises the question of a definitive attribution, adopting the deductive approach of connoisseurship in order to assign to the chiesa vecchia a set of artistic traits and merits.23 Thus the frescoes are 20

Marci, p. 105. Marci’s notion of undifferentiated time is established in an introduction that also closely resembles Rossi’s (see p. 97). 21

‘Le persone che oggi vivono in quel luogo sono ancora prossime per consuetudini di vita, per temperamento, per foggia di vesti, all’epoca in cui S. Francesca Romana istituiva, nella prima metà del quattrocento, la Congregazione di Tor de’ Specchi’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 4. 22 ‘Moderni ed infelici restauri’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 7. This is the first reference to the matter of the frescoes’ condition; there is another that also explicitly links the disruptive effect of repainting with a modern ‘hand’ on p. 11. 23

‘Il tempo in cui le pitture della chiesa vecchia [...] vennero eseguite è determinato dalla data apposta dall’artista sotto la rappresentazione dell’esequie di S. Francesca, ed è l’anno 1468. Non si ha invece alcuna notizia del pittore, o meglio, dei pittori che la eseguirono. [...] In difetto di notizie storiche, conviene quindi trarre le ragioni della determinazione stilistica degli affreschi esclusivamente dall’esame di essi’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 17. Rossi’s approach is aligned with that of Bernard Berenson, whose connoisseurship emphasized ‘authorship’ as

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made pertinent to a number of formal, evolutionary narratives of style, filiation, and quality. Specifically, they are drawn into patterns of meaning which in great part take their logic from an Italian Renaissance ‘knowledge’ of art and its study.24 As such, the frescoes become discursively qualified to enter the ‘museum without walls’ — that expansive catalogue of photographic reproductions which had secured the material and methods of art history as a modern, professional, academic discipline, since the last quarter of the nineteenth century.25 It is the co-incidence of a language characterizing the frescoes with their first appearance as reproductions, that arguably explains the lasting influence of Rossi’s article. Seeking ‘the artist’ as a ‘unity of conception’, Rossi promptly isolates the Virgin and child with Sts Benedict and Francesca Romana at the centre of the altar wall as the work of a second, superior ‘hand’, which better approximates certain standards of design and form, of modelling, colour, depth, and chiaroscuro. The ‘obvious’ disparity between the two chiesa vecchia painters he stresses by suggesting a later date for the more ‘skilful’ frescoed altarpiece. Over the ensuing century of debate on the frescoes’ ‘paternity’, this two-part resolution to the ‘problem’ recurs, hinging on the same image.26 As deliberations centre on the name of Antoniazzo Romano, the difference is equated with that between the master’s autograph or guiding hand, and the contributions of his workshop or local school.27

an ‘expression’ of a painter’s ‘own intention and emotions’, the ‘author function’ of literary discourses appropriated as an ‘artist function’. See ‘Rudiments of Connoisseurship’, in Bernard Berenson, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art Second Series (London: Bell, 1902), pp. 111–47. 24

Donald Preziosi, ‘The Question of Art History’, in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. by James Chandler and others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 203–26 (p. 210). See also Svetlana Alpers’s introduction to The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. xix–xxi. 25 Donald Preziosi, ‘The Anamorphic Archive’, in his Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 72–79. ‘Museum without walls’ is André Malraux’s term for the vast archive of standardized photographic reproductions from which ‘our [modern] intellectualisation of art’ has taken its values. See Part 1 of André Malraux, The Voices of Silence (1953) trans. by Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 13–127. 26

Fulvia Spesso Galetti introduces her contribution to the attribution debate with reference to ‘il problema della paternità degli affreschi della “chiesa vecchia”’ (p. 150). 27

Adolfo Venturi ascribes the frescoes to a follower of Piero della Francesca, but also singles out the Madonna col Bambino, seduta sul trono con Santa Francesca e San Benedetto ai lati as ‘opera certamente dell’autore del ciclo’: Storia dell’arte Italiana, 27 vols (Milano: Ulrico Hoepli, 1901–40; repr. 1967), VII, Pt 2, 223. Gregory Scott Hedberg comments that ‘on the altar wall, Antoniazzo himself painted the Madonna and Child Flanked by Saints Benedict, Francesca Romana and an Angel’. Hedberg catalogues the frescoes as Antoniazzo

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The standards by which Rossi ranks the technical accomplishments of the Tor de’ Specchi artists are unmistakably those prescribed by the fifteenth-century Albertian ideal: pictures by ‘learned’ artists, geometrically organized, and graduated as illusionistic spaces, staging ‘lifelike’ human figures.28 Accordingly, the main artist ‘revealed’ in the twenty-five images surrounding the altarpiece could not have had a cosmopolitan and intellectual formation (such as that advocated by Leon Battista Alberti) but surely emerged ‘far from [those] major Italian social centres of the first half of the quattrocento’ exemplified by Florence.29 Even so, the comparative shortcomings of this artist’s style — its conservatism, repetitions, and lack of embellishment — are commended to Rossi’s readers, for, according to customary reasoning, such weaknesses signal a purity of religious feeling.30 To this unnamed painter of very ‘independent artistic individuality’, Rossi’s lengthy discussion imputes a genuine modesty and profound piety. An integrity of person is the ultimate cause of his simple style, and it guarantees the salutary impact of the narratives represented, for the style also emerges as ‘sometimes also humble, but rich in realistic features and touching for the sincerity of the sentiments expressed’.31 In terms of interpretation, toccante per la sincerità becomes a kind of art-historical refrain for the chiesa vecchia frescoes, endorsing the talent of their creator as one to be held in respectful and fond regard, not awe; marking off the possibility of those proliferative, more intellectual meanings pertaining to a ‘higher’ art. This dual bias is distilled as the conclusions of Vincenzo Golzio and Giuseppe Romano’s autograph works ‘with some assistance from lesser hands’: ‘Antoniazzo Romano and His School’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University, 1980), pp. 29, 202. More recently, for Antonio Paolucci, the altarpiece and some scenes pertain to Antoniazzo Romano, who otherwise coordinated the work in the chiesa vecchia. See his Antoniazzo Romano, Catalogo completo dei dipinti (Florence: Cantini, 1992), p. 12. By contrast, Anna Cavallaro asserts that the altarpiece ‘reveals the hand of a pupil’ of Antoniazzo Romano, as distinct from the remaining scenes attributable to the ‘circle of Antoniazzo’. See her Antoniazzo Romano e gli antoniazzeschi, una generazione di pittori nella Roma del Quattrocento (Udine: Campanotto, 1992), pp. 44–49. 28

Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura, paragraph 52; on the ideal of lifelikeness, see for example, paragraphs 35–37; ‘On Painting’ and ‘On Sculpture’: The Latin Texts of ‘De pictura’ and ‘De statua’, ed. and trans. by Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 94–95, 72–77. See also Thomas Puttfarken’s chapter on ‘Alberti and the Composition of Bodies’, in his Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 45–68. 29

‘Lontano dai maggiori centri sociali italiani della prima metà del quattrocento’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 22. See also the direct comparison with fifteenth-century Florentine art (p. 19). 30

Frances Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 127. 31

‘Talvolta anche dimesso, ma ricco di tratti realistici e toccante per la sincerità dei sentimenti espressi’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 6.

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Zander in L’arte in Roma nel secolo XV of 1968: ‘It is a matter here of a local artist who eclectically gathers his best [influences] wherever he can and nevertheless demonstrates a notable personality, which confers upon his work that seductive character of sincere immediacy, which above all attracts us in these paintings and forms their greatest merit’.32 The idea of the chiesa vecchia artist’s observable personal piety becomes a significant theme in arguments for the distinctive role of Antoniazzo Romano there. In an essay of 1927, Roberto Longhi made a persuasive case for Antoniazzo Romano as an artist of some independence and influence in fifteenth-century Rome, crediting him with the entire chiesa vecchia programme.33 Where more than a decade earlier Adolfo Venturi had noted ‘almost a new sincerity in the representation of surroundings’,34 Longhi has this captivating quality of the chiesa vecchia settings spring from the sincerity, the così schietta personalità of Antoniazzo Romano. This is the painter who ‘purifies’ the linearity associated with the Florentine Benozzo Gozzoli, and at the Tor de’ Specchi creates frescoes that are ‘devoted and monumental, of an ineffable rustic urbanity’.35 As Antoniazzo Romano’s identity has been developed through the monographic approach of scholarly art history, the image of an earnest, staunchly religious individual became an important key to understanding his oeuvre, particularly its ‘traditionalist’ aspects.36 More recently, the 32

‘Ritengo che si tratti qui d’un artista locale che ecletticamente prende il suo bene dove lo trova e mostra tuttavia una notevole personalità, la quale conferisce alla sua opera quel seducente carattere di sincera immediatezza, che sopratutto ci attrae in questi dipinti e ne forma il miglior pregio’: Vincenzo Golzio and Giuseppe Zander, L’arte in Roma nel secolo XV (Bologna: Licinio Cappelli, 1968), p. 288. 33

Roberto Longhi, ‘In favore di Antoniazzo Romano’, in Roberto Longhi: Saggi e ricerche 1925–1928, 2 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1967), II, 245–56. This influential article first appeared in Vita artistica: Studi di storia dell’Arte diretti da Roberto Longhi ed Emilio Cecchi, 2 (1927), 226–32. 34 ‘[...] quasi una sincerità nuova nella rappresentazione dell’ambiente’: Venturi, VII, Pt 2, 224. Ascribing the chiesa vecchia programme to ‘a timid follower of Piero della Francesca’, Venturi was nevertheless amongst the first to associate the programme with the name of Antoniazzo Romano. Published in the same year as Venturi’s volume seven was Umberto Gnoli’s article, in which the frescoes were associated with the circle of Antoniazzo Romano by reference to a follower: ‘Un pittore romano del XV secolo, Antonio de Calvis’, Bollettino d’Arte, 7 (1913), 107–11. 35

‘Divoti e monumentali, di una ineffabile urbanità rusticale’: Longhi, II, 248. Longhi’s essay is habitually cited as formative for the modern art-historical discernment and standing of Antoniazzo Romano. More than twenty years on, Emma Gerlini replicated Longhi’s characterization of the chiesa vecchia frescoes in ‘Gli affreschi di Antoniazzo nella Chiesa della Consolazione in Roma’, Bollettino d’Arte, 34.1 (1949), 34–37. 36

As for Hedberg: ‘In the final analysis, however, it was not Antoniazzo’s patrons who prevented him from completely adopting the new Renaissance style and iconography, but the

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very specific devotional adherences and requirements of patrons have been foregrounded as a justification, even as a stimulus, for the stylistic conservatism connected with his practice.37 For Rossi, the unnamed artist’s personal engagement with his holy subject sees him depositing an impressive variety of emotions in the scenes of the chiesa vecchia. Here, saluting the Albertian principle of bodies in the praiseworthy istoria showing forth ‘movements of the soul’,38 Rossi infers from the arrangement and attitude of bodies feelings appropriate to a Christian moral outlook: The easy, simple and expressive manner of representing actions is one of the most notable characteristics of our painter. [...] [In restrained and balanced compositions, the paragraph continues] the relations between the various persons are interpreted with great clarity, and the able distribution of figures and their poses concur to the same end. The expression of internal movements of the spirit is rendered very well in the attitude of the figures. The sentiments of compassion, of love, of sorrow, wonderment, the anxiety of waiting, the fervent absorption of ecstasy, are expressed in the features of the face and in the gestures of the person with a vivacious colourful language, rich in dramatic effects. In this regard the figure of Francesca in the scene of the apparition of the sign of Jesus above her head (Fig. 1), the group of the Saint’s companions praying around her, [while she is] rapt in ecstasy in the stream of her vineyard (Plate II), the figure of the sick man Giovanni and his wife in the moment when the Saint enters their home (Plate I), that of the mother crying over the body of her dead son and of the same mother who kneels before Francesca to offer her the son saved by her (Fig. 5), the final moments of the Saint (Fig. 8), Francesca’s meeting with the injured wood39 cutter (Plate III), are all episodes of a rare expressive eloquence.

fact that his conception of God was still medieval. One suspects that Antoniazzo’s personal religious beliefs were closer to the fundamentalism of Savonarola than the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Antoniazzo appears to have felt very much in awe of the religious personages he painted and hence, particularly in his late works, wanted to exhalt them’ (pp. 51–52). 37

Anna Cavallaro, ‘Antoniazzo Romano e le confraternite del Quattrocento a Roma’, in Le Confraternite Romane: Esperienza religiosa, società, committenza artistica, ed. by Luigi Fiorani, Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma, 5 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), pp. 335–65. See also Meredith J. Gill, ‘Antoniazzo Romano and the Recovery of Jerusalem in Late Fifteenth-Century Rome’, Storia dell’Arte, 83 (1995), 28–47. Cavallaro brings together the two themes of patronage and the artist’s ‘sincerity’ in ‘Antoniazzo Romano ritrattista della Roma curiale’, in Le due Rome del Quattrocento. Melozzo, Antoniazzo e la cultura artistica del ’400 romano, ed. by Sergio Rossi and Stefano Valeri (Rome: Lithos Editrice, 1997), pp. 40–47. 38 Alberti, ‘On Painting’ and ‘On Sculpture’, pp. 72–73, 80–81. See also Svetlana Alpers, ‘Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation’, New Literary History, 8 (1976– 77), 15–41 (p. 17 and n. 7). 39

‘La maniera facile, semplice ed espressiva di rappresentare le azioni è una delle caratteristiche più notevoli nel nostro pittore. [...] I rapporti fra i vari personaggi sono interpretati con grande evidenza, e l’abile distribuzione delle figure ed i loro atteggiamenti

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Though appreciating the formal means used to obtain such dramatic address (pictorial style, organization, et cetera), Rossi freely transposes his defence of the artist’s skill and achievement into a synopsis of the frescoes’ narrative content. Therefore, in the above paragraph, the dominant verbal frame furnished for consulting the numbered reproductions is that of Francesca Romana’s deeds, rather than the story of the painter’s talents, or the story of the frescoes’ making.40 In this way, recognition of the artist repeatedly cedes to acclamation of the Saint, and so of the spiritual mores signified authoritatively by Francesca Romana — for finally, it is her presence that Rossi’s article contemplates most fully. This is the prevailing rhetorical effect of Rossi’s article on the frescoes, because he construes each scene first and foremost as a unified space for figurative action. That is, the greater part of his treatment is given over to ekphrasis, the traditional mode of verbal reconstruction which was a focus of Renaissance writing on painting. Indeed, Rossi pursues all but the central altar wall image as istorie on the basic Albertian model.41 Because of the model’s narrative rationale and aspiration, the chiesa vecchia images become, therefore, eminently conducive, or ‘susceptible’, to the dramatic elaborations of ekphrasis.42 And so by means of the frescoes, Rossi can expound to his readers tales of the triumph of Christian values. concorrono felicemente allo stesso fine. L’espressione dei moti interni dello spirito è resa assai bene nel carattere delle figure. I sentimenti di pietà, di amore, di cordoglio, la maraviglia, l’ansia dell’attesa, il fervido raccoglimento dell’estasi, sono espressi nei tratti del volto e nei gesti della persona con un linguaggio vivace, colorito, ricco di effetti drammatici. Per questo riguardo la figura di Francesca delle scena dell’apparizione del segno di Gesù sopra il suo capo (Fig. 1), il gruppo delle compagne della Santa oranti intorno a lei, rapita in estasi nel rivo della sua vigna (Tav. II), la figura dell’infermo Giovanni e della moglie di lui nell’atto in cui la Santa entra nella loro casa (Tav. I), quella della madre piangente sul corpo del figlio defunto e della madre stessa che s’inginocchia innanzi a Francesca per offrirle il fanciullo da lei salvato (Fig. 5), gli ultimi momenti della Santa (Fig. 8), l’incontro di Francesca con il legnaiuolo ferito (Tav. III), sono episodi di una rara eloquenza espressiva’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 21. 40

James A.W. Heffernan, ‘Speaking for Pictures: The Rhetoric of Art Criticism’, Word and Image, 15 (1999), 19–33. 41

See Svetlana Alpers’s compact definition of the Albertian istoria in Art of Describing where it is outlined as ‘a general and lasting model’ (pp. xvii–xviii). 42

Svetlana Leontief Alpers, ‘Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 23 (1960), 190–215, and also her article ‘Describe or Narrate?’, where she summarizes the latter as follows: ‘One would not be far wrong to say that what distinguishes the achievement of Renaissance picture-making from medieval art, what bound it, in [the artists’] own view, to the art of antiquity, was its susceptibility to […] the rhetorical device known by the name of ekphrasis’ (p. 17). David Rosand’s reading of De pictura intersects directly with Alpers’s discussion in his ‘Ekphrasis and the Renaissance of Painting: Observations on Alberti’s Third Book’, in Florilegium Columbianum: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. by Karl-Ludwig Selig and Robert Somerville (New York:

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As a literary exercise, ekphrasis aims to recreate the content of a visual image, by its accumulation of words competing with that image for persuasive impact.43 Such a rivalry is recognizably at play when the image itself is available in reproduction. Yet Rossi’s ekphraseis do not vie only with those photographic plates included in the article, but consistently with another device: with transcriptions of the vernacular captions. For each fresco surrounding the altarpiece, Rossi conscientiously copied that which could be read from the lower border.44 Over eight or so pages, he organized his paragraphs on the basis of these texts, embedding the passages of romanesco with his own evocations. Like the captions themselves, Rossi’s ekphraseis identify iconographical elements, and supply a temporal sequence for the human gestures — gestures that the images ‘petrify’, as Yves Bonnefoy writes for fifteenth-century istorie.45 The competitive advantage of Rossi’s prose over the romanesco lies especially in the use of adjectives, detailing states of being, and qualifying movements. Santa Francesca, followed by her faithful companion and sister-in-law Vannozza, rushes to the bed of an invalid, and touching him with her hand she heals him, while the wife of the sick man bows moved and reverent before the healer. In the other part of the painting the same person is represented, who, after having obtained the healing, goes to thank the Saint, who receives him, with a blessing. To one called Ianni, says the inscription, having by reason of a long illness for a year nearly lost a leg including his thigh, was recommended to the blessed Francesca, straight away was fully healed (Plate 1).46

Italica Press, 1987), pp. 147–65. See also Norman E. Land, ‘Titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter Martyr and the “Limitations” of Ekphrastic Art Criticism’, Art History, 13 (1990), 293–317, and Land’s monograph, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 43

W.J.T. Mitchell, in the chapter ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 157. 44 D’Achille refers to Rossi’s transcriptions as l’editio princeps. They were determined by the condition of the frescoes in 1907; by numerous accretions and losses to the wall surface, which, as indicated above, in some places significantly altered the vocabulary, grammar and spellings of the romanesco, if not its basic legibility. As they appeared in the 1907 article, these transcriptions stimulated the interest of philologists, and were taken up, for example, by Placido Lugano. See ‘Le didascalie’, p. 112 and pp. 132–33. 45

Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Time and the Timeless in Quattrocento Painting’, in The Lure and the Truth of Painting: Selected Essays on Art, ed. by Richard Stamelman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 51. See also Mieczyslaw Wallis, ‘Inscriptions in Paintings’, Semiotica, 9 (1973), 1–28 (pp. 9–10). 46 ‘S. Francesca, seguita dalla sua fida compagna e cognata Vannozza, accorre al letto di un infermo, e toccandolo con la mano lo guarisce, mentre la sposa del malato s’inchina commossa e reverente innanzi alla taumaturga. Nell’altra parte del quadro è rappresentato lo stesso personaggio, che, dopo aver ottenuta la guarigione, si reca a ringraziare la Santa, che lo

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Fig. 2. Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Francesca Romana Heals Ianni, Injured in the Leg. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. In this paragraph, both the modern Italian and the romanesco reply ‘to the question: what is it?’, deciphering the image as a brief, but closed narrative.47 Each ‘reply’ can independently corroborate the same symbolic message for the scene, that of the saint’s spiritual gift of healing, her favour with God. Though this symbolic message remains implicit, Rossi’s text adds ‘decorum’ to the image’s

accoglie benedicendolo. Ad uno chiamato Ianni, dice l’iscrizione, avendo per longa infirmità quasi perduta la gamma colla cossa da un anno, fu raccomandato alla beata Francesca, subito fu liberamente sanato (Tav. I)’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 7. The romanesco transcribed by Rossi amounts to a grammatically and syntactically ‘unstable’ vernacular, further complicated by continuous repainting — often rewriting. Hence the oddity of the English translations. See above n. 44. 47

Roland Barthes, the essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 38–40.

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connotations, by including words that call attention to the worshipful conduct of those around Francesca — fida [...] commossa e reverente. But Rossi’s version does not make the romanesco redundant. In the paragraph quoted above, both ‘replies’ are selective, and in this literal sense they are complementary: for example, the first line names Francesca’s companion, while the romanesco names ‘the sick man’. But besides such particulars, the transcriptions in Rossi’s article serve an evidentiary role, akin to the role taken by the captions in their place on the chiesa vecchia walls. There, each inscription ensures that the narrative subject of the painting above is always recuperable, and always demonstrable, at once eliminating any threat of the story’s ambiguity, and delivering ‘plot’ as the chief purpose of the image. Now in this prescriptive capacity, the inscriptions dispose the images to an ekphrastic mode of writing, but ekphraseis with drastically limited scope for variety or invention. Fixing the saint’s dynamic presence as the central motif and end of the paintings, the frescoed text takes a repressive turn: beginning with Rossi’s publication, it has produced an art-historical literature apt to substitute corroboration for close visual analysis. Positioned so that it completes the paragraph about ‘Plate 1’, the transcription quoted above literally marks off the meaning that Rossi assigns to the scene. With its language declaring chronological precedence, the romanesco establishes the validity of Rossi’s response to the image, at once proving its adequacy and its orthodoxy. This kind of discursive deference to transcriptions of the vernacular captions has persisted in literature on the chiesa vecchia frescoes, such that the romanesco has held forth as an injunction against closely studying the images for their pictorial rhetorics.48 Demonstrating the authority that Rossi accords the captions, for four of the corniced scenes, the transcription constitutes a paragraph — an adequate interpretation — by itself. The investigative task cued by the inscriptions is the confined one of locating and quoting richer narrative texts, as supplementary or substitute ‘explanations’.49 In his commentary on the visione dell’inferno, Rossi also initiates this strategy, unable to refer to the painted text. In the following example, the italicised caption is not positioned as the ‘last word’ on the image, but narrative elaboration returns in Rossi’s concluding sentence. The issue of ‘composition’ is drawn directly into a summary of emotions and appearances suitable to a parable of il bene morire:

48

See, for example, Brizzi’s ‘Repertorio’, pp. 283–89; also Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano e gli Antoniazzeschi, pp. 212–14. 49

George Kaftal skilfully adapted the methodology of citing richer textual sources for the frescoed inscriptions, using it to ‘place’ and discuss three panel paintings now in U.S. collections. See his article ‘Three Scenes from the Legend of Santa Francesca Romana’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 11 (1948), 51–56, 86.

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The Saint is praying on her death bed, surrounded by her beloved companions. Her soul, in the form of a small and white young girl, made of light, separates itself from her mortal remains and by a path strewn with most various white and vermilion flowers, illuminated by little lanterns, it rises to heaven, where Jesus receives her amidst a circle of musical angels. Says the inscription: ‘How the eternal God deigned to come for the soul of the blessed Francesca when it parted from her most holy body (Fig. 8).’ Also in this scene the artist’s ability successfully overcame the difficulties of the composition. The fervent absorption of the dying one, the compassion and sorrow of the sisters that attend the passing of their beloved mother, give to the episode of 50 death a grand and solemn character.

Once more, however, Rossi avoids explicitly abstracting la morente and la madre diletta into an emblem for a spiritual and social ideal. Having first likened the chiesa vecchia programme to ‘an illustrated biography of this most popular Roman saint’, the descriptions that follow invariably stop short of reducing Francesca Romana’s historical density by stating her to be an exemplar.51 Instead, woven around the romanesco, the indicative mood of the ekphraseis posits the saint as both irresistibly present and coming-to-fruition, conveying also her having been present in fifteenth-century Rome. For governing the grammar of Rossi’s ekphraseis is a conviction that the chiesa vecchia frescoes present much less an imagery than a complete knowledge of the saint, a knowledge ideally recuperated in a single, definitive text — a ‘biography’. Of course, the conceit of such a biography, one saturated with the human circumstance and context of a ‘lived life’, is crucial to the hortative function and authority of a saintly figure.52 Overall, the same conceit brings remarkable thrift to Rossi’s writing on the frescoes. It conditions his characterization of the fresco painter, and instantly projects the chiesa vecchia as an ‘artistic monument’ of civic importance.

50 ‘La Santa sta orando nel letto di morte, circondata dalle dilette compagne. La sua anima, in forma di piccola e bianca fanciulla, materiata di luce, si distacca dalle spoglie mortali e per una via sparsa di svariatissimi fiori bianchi e vermigli, illuminata, da piccole lucerne, sale al cielo, dove Gesù la raccoglie fra una corona di angeli musicanti. Dice l’iscrizione: “Como lo eterno dio se degnavo de venire per l’anima soa della beata Francesca quando se partivo dallo suo sacratissimo corpo” (Fig. 8). Anche in questa scena l’abilità dell’artista seppe vincere felicemente le difficoltà della composizione. Il fervido raccoglimento della morente, la pietà ed il dolore delle suore che assistono allo spegnersi della madre diletta, dànno all’episodio della morte un carattere grandioso e solenne’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 12. 51 ‘I soggetti delle ventisei composizioni che formano la serie sono tolti dalla vita di S. Francesca e formano insieme come una biografia illustrata della popolarissima Santa romana’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, pp. 5–6. 52

Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 5–29.

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Fig. 3. Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Death of Francesca Romana. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. In due course, Rossi has direct recourse to a text outside the captions: when faced with the visione dell’inferno, he introduces ‘the biography of the Saint, written by her confessor Giovanni Mattiotti, from material in great part supplied to him by Francesca herself, in her frequent confessions’. Well within Tor de’ Specchi tradition, a gathering of treatises on the saint’s visions and miracles is here defined and invoked as that perfect ‘biography’. The relation between the Saint’s candid speech-acts and Mattiotti’s writing is resolved as one of immediacy and directness, such that this ‘biography’ even bears a resemblance to autobiography.53 Rossi based his citation on a published edition of Mattiotti’s vernacular treatises: by registering a textual source so apparently unassailable, he stabilized a conceptual space for

53

‘[La] biografia della Santa, scritta dal confessore di lei Giovanni Mattiotti, sopra elementi in gran parte fornitigli dalla stessa Francesca, nelle sue frequenti confessioni’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 14. For insistence again on the intimacy of Mattiotti’s text with the Saint’s life, see also p. 15.

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subsequent art-historical surveys of the frescoes, with their commitment to attribution.54 The straightforward truth of the Mattiotti ‘biography’ makes it the ultimate gauge of the artist’s achievement in the chiesa vecchia. And yet another proof of the artist’s integrity is his ‘manifest’ adherence to the substance of Mattiotti’s text. Francesca Romana’s vision of hell is ‘reproduced by the artist in the last fresco of the series’, its figurative groups reproducing ‘in a vivid synthesis the long and colourful narration that the priest Mattiotti left of the frightening vision’.55 Rossi then enumerates further ‘motifs and subjects’ ‘reproduced exactly according to the narration’.56 Hence through the good confessor, but like the confessor, the painter unobtrusively reflects Francesca Romana’s experience: that ‘simple’ style which follows from the artist’s character implies also, inseparably, a content that is ‘innocent’ — just well brought forth, without intellectual or imaginative ‘deceits’. Faithful to the saint’s own words in the inferno and other visionary scenes, the artist is presumed unavoidably faithful to her life-world, too. So, in the ‘certain aspects of roman life that they reproduce and illustrate’, other scenes obtain an archaeological value, a value as evidence of external appearances that Rossi advances in his article.57 From a study of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, Svetlana Alpers has noticed Vasari and the Renaissance ‘heirs of ancient ekphrasis’ casually dividing their focus between 54 Rossi cites the tractati as they were published from a manuscript in the Vatican archive by Mariano Armellini, under the title Vita di Santa Francesca Romana scritta nell’idioma volgare di Roma del secolo XV con appendice di tre laudi (Rome: Monaldi, 1882). An important critique of Armellini’s edition had already appeared in Mario Pelaez, ‘Visioni di s. Francesca Romana: Testo romanesco del secolo XV riveduto sul codice originale, con appunti grammaticali e glossario’, in Archivio della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria, 14 (1891), 365–409 (pp. 365–68). In art-historical literature, the complex issue of textual sources for the chiesa vecchia frescoes, and relationships between texts and images has been largely postponed, deflected into the procedure of reconciling the iconography with the romanesco captions. The entry in George Kaftal’s Saints in Italian Art is a striking exception to this tendency: Saints in Italian Art: Iconography of the Saints in Central and South Italian Schools of Painting, 4 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1952–85), II, cols 448–69. 55 ‘Riprodotta dall’artista nell’ultimo affresco della serie’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 14. Discussion of the inferno scene concludes: ‘[i gruppi] riproducono in una vivace sintesi la lunga e colorita narrazione che il sacerdote Mattiotti lasciò della paurosa visione’ (p. 15). Also: ‘E l’artista che eseguì le pitture di Tor de’ Specchi si attenne evidentemente e con molta fedeltà alla narrazione del Mattiotti, così manifesta [...] è la corrispondenza fra il testo e la rappresentazione pittorica’ (p. 14). 56

Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 17.

57

Such an emphasis begins with introductory remarks on the merits of the frescoes, mentioning: ‘[i] certi caratteri della vita romana che esse riproducono ed illustrano’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 5.

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narration and exclamation, between story-telling and praise for naturalistic or realistic details. Concerned especially with the expressive status and impact of human figures, their ekphrasis takes for granted an artist’s basic competence in imitative techniques.58 Conforming with this model, wherever he ascribes emotions to figures in the chiesa vecchia programme, Rossi assumes and certifies that the figures have a naturalism sufficient to produce drammaticità; to make obvious the action and psychological weight of a scene. And remarks on the ‘realism’ of a gesture or combination of elements are mostly brief, saluting a basic verisimilitude that renders the surrounding pictorial worlds intelligible. But Rossi claims more than this basic appeal for two categories of pictorial detail in the frescoes: the realism of clothing, and particularly architecture, has historical weight.59 In a later passage reviewing ‘the realistic style of the architectures’, he eventually defines this as a general correspondence to the material appearance of buildings in quattrocento Rome, not an exact or ‘decisive’ one.60 While first presenting the separate episodes and reproductions to his readers, however, such a definition has been kept at bay. Indeed the paragraph concerning a miracle scene on the altar wall focuses on the architecture’s transparency, drawing attention to what the depictions can plainly show of Rome’s past cityscape. The transcribed romanesco sets the paragraph in motion, and it names lo Ponte S. Maria as the place of Francesca Romana’s encounter with a wounded man. Dovetailing with the caption, Rossi continues: The representation of the Santa Maria bridge, formerly called Senatorio or Palatino, extant today only in its central section and called Ponte rotto, is a historical curiosity of some interest. The other reproductions that we have today of the same bridge demonstrate that the author of these paintings took care to reproduce its architectural parts with sufficient respect for the truth. This induces one to believe that the group of buildings represented in this scene on the right bank of the river was probably taken from life. It is to be observed that amongst these buildings, the one made most conspicuous and in front of which the Saint, followed by the faithful Vannozza, heals the injured man, is found repeated with the same architectural forms in almost all the scenes and in such a relation to the episodes represented that we may firmly believe that the artist intended to reproduce the house of Francesca and the Ponziani family, to which she belonged. But the house of the Ponziani, which still exists today in the via

58

Alpers, ‘Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives’, p. 194, and also her ‘Describe or Narrate?’, p. 17. See also Ernst H. Gombrich, Means and Ends: Reflections on the History of Fresco Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), pp. 13–16. 59 Rossi lists ‘le particolarità del costume e dei motivi architettonici’ amongst the introductory comments as to why the frescoes are ‘notable’, as indeed ‘uno dei più notevoli saggi della pittura romana del rinascimento’: ‘Le opere’, p. 5. 60

‘Egli si contenta invece di offrirci nelle sue architetture i tipi comuni degli edifici romani della sua età’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 20.

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di Ponte Rotto, in Trastevere, has undergone such profound change as to make 61 impossible now a comparison with the representation given us by our painter.

Though not an ekphrasis, this commentary is also clearly motivated and confined by the scene’s narrative content, subject matter which eclipses ‘the artist’. To credit the painter’s ability and aspiration as reconstructive justifies this procedure. Rossi’s emphasis on the authenticity of the bridge, the buildings, and the house ‘in almost all the scenes’, proposes wider questions about the thematics of space in the chiesa vecchia programme. Yet these are foreclosed by his insistent return to that ‘biographical’ mode of interpretation, which is also iconic. As a result, the writing works above all to confirm a familiarity and precision of site for Francesca Romana’s active patronage. It points to a unique past ‘of epiphany [...] miracles and conversions’; a time taken for granted in hagiography.62 Implicitly strengthening the evocative authority of ‘almost all’ the photographic prints, it sentimentalizes ‘Plate IV’, an isolated, full-page reproduction of the scene addressed, as an accurate topographical ‘snapshot’ that can prove and compensate for that ‘depleted’ reality of modern Rome outside the Tor de’ Specchi.63 Without the nostalgic tenor, Anna Cavallaro’s much more recent, more compact treatment of the image centred on the bridge is structured in the same way as Rossi’s, reinforcing locality whilst deferring to the narrative caption:

61

‘La rappresentazione del ponte di S. Maria, detto già Senatorio o Palatino, oggi esistente solo nella sua parte centrale e chiamato Ponte rotto, è una curiosità storica di qualche interesse. Le altre riproduzioni che oggi abbiamo dello stesso ponte dimostrano che l’autore di queste pitture ebbe cura di riprodurre le parti architettoniche di esso con sufficiente rispetto del vero. Ciò induce a credere che il gruppo di edifici rappresentati in questa scena sulla sponda destra del fiume sia stato probabilmente tratto dal vero. È da osservare che fra questi edifici, quello messo in maggiore evidenza ed innanzi al quale la Santa, seguita dalla fida Vannozza, risana il ferito, trovasi ripetuto nelle stesse forme architettoniche quasi in tutte le storie ed in tale relazione con gli episodi rappresentati, da farci ritenere con molto fondamento che in esso l’artista abbia voluto riprodurre l’abitazione di Francesca e della famiglia Ponziani, alla quale essa apparteneva. Se non che la casa dei Ponziani, che ancora oggi esiste nella via di Ponte Rotto, in Trastevere, ebbe a subire tale profonda trasformazione, da non rendere possibile ormai il confronto con la rappresentazione datane dal nostro pittore’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, p. 10. 62

Michel de Certeau in the chapter ‘A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification’, The Writing of History, trans. by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 281–82. 63

The garments in the frescoes similarly attest to the saint’s past and its assured recovery through the monastery: ‘Tratte evidentement dai costumi romani contemporanei’; the clothing of Santa Francesca and her companions ‘è affatto simile a quello indossato dagli altri personaggi muliebri rappresentati in queste scene e corrisponde con grande precisione a quello che ancora oggi vestono le Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi’. See Rossi, ‘Le opere’, pp. 21–22.

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Fig. 4. Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Francesca Romana Heals the Injured Arm of a Poor Man. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. In the following scene S. Francesca Romana meets a young man with a severed arm on the ponte di S. Maria (today ponte Rotto) and presently she reattaches it in front of a house, perhaps the home of the Ponziani family (fig. 76); the inscription says: [...].64

Following Rossi, the strong ‘reality effect’ of the architecture emerges as an ostensible trait of the chiesa vecchia programme, carried over into art-historical literature as a complement to the idea of the artist’s sincerity.65 Adolfo Venturi, for 64 ‘Nella scena seguente S. Francesca Romana incontra un giovane con il braccio mozzato sul ponte di S. Maria (oggi ponte Rotto) e successivamente, glielo riattacca davanti ad una casa, forse l’abitazione della famiglia Ponziani (fig. 76); l’iscrizione dice: [...]’: Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano e gli antoniazzeschi, p. 212. 65

‘Reality effect’, or l’effet du reél, is Roland Barthes’s important designation, formulated in ‘The Reality Effect’ (1968), in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. by Tzvetan

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example, summed up the architectures as ‘solid and definite […], portraying in a few strokes the Roman buildings of the day’.66 Reified, this trait has helped to preserve and privilege literal meanings for the frescoes. Moreover it has made them amenable to the much larger discursive domain of cultural history. In the claim ‘still today they render with great effectiveness city life of the time in its various civil, religious, monastic, sacred and profane aspects’, for instance, the paintings are safely encompassed as objects of broadest, documentary interest. They retain the worldly prestige of art, without the ‘complications’ of artifice; they are discharged from closer analysis and questioning, and so quietly converted into colourful ‘testimony’.67 The scene of healing on the bridge can be found serving as such on the front cover of Una Santa tutta Romana, a predictable choice for a collection that has the study of Francesca Romana converge powerfully with the more general sociopolitical history of Rome.68 By selective interpretation of ‘the architectures’, Rossi sustains an attitude of reverent assent to the frescoes’ narrative content. He does so while making use of a distinction conventional to Renaissance thinking about painting — that between prevailing foregrounds of figurative expression, and background interest or variety.69 While ‘the architectures’ obtain an elevated status as information, without exception Todorov, trans. by R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 11–17. Specifically on its usefulness to art-history see Keith Moxey’s chapter ‘The Paradox of Mimesis’, in The Practice of Theory: Post-structuralism, Cultural Politics and Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 79–98; and the survey by Mieke Bal, ‘Seeing Signs: The Use of Semiotics for the Understanding of Visual Art’, in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Mark A. Cheetham and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 74–91. 66

VII,

‘Architetture salde e definite, ritraenti con brevi tratti quelle romane del tempo’: Venturi, Pt 2, 225.

67

‘Rendono con tanta efficacia ancor oggi la vita cittadina del tempo, nei vari aspetti civili, religiosi, monacali, sacri e profani’: Ceccarius [G. Ceccarelli], p. 14. In Richard Krautheimer’s Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae one of the chiesa vecchia scenes is adduced as proof for ‘the archaeological findings’ on the pre-seventeenth-century interior of the Basilica of Santa Francesca Romana (Santa Maria Nova), reproduced with the caption ‘View of interior, 1468’: Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae: The Early Christian Basilicas of Rome (IV – IX Century), 5 vols (Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1937–77), I, 235–37. Such a function for selected images is clearly first countenanced by Rossi’s writing. 68

Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1984), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Siena: Monte Oliveto Maggiore, 1984). On this influential volume, and the combined effect of the contributions, see Paolo Golinelli’s review, reprinted in Città e culto dei santi nel Medioevo italiano, 2nd edn (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice, 1996), pp. 251–57. 69

See Puttfarken, pp. 99–112.

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background landscapes receive attention in Rossi’s account for their ability to give pleasure, that is, as piacevoli. Remarks on the landscapes represent another opportunity to include an enhanced description of place for the action, but one free of that indication of historical time carried by ‘the architectures’. Certainly within the framework of the Albertian ideal, landscape is important amongst the appropriate sources of diversity and richness in the istoria, and it is readily associated with the capacity to delight the viewer.70 Suggesting that subject-matter taken from the natural world is itself inherently pleasurable, Rossi’s enthusiasm for ‘the little hill planted with rows of vines laden with grapes’, or for ‘the silvan landscape in which the action takes place, the mules harnessed and tied to the trees’ conveys a sense that such easily ‘legible’ touches make a significant contribution to the expressive impact of a miracle scene.71 Mature grapevines form the setting for just one of eight different episodes on the chiesa vecchia’s rear wall, facing the altar. Another scene on the entry wall contains a similar background view of leafless vines. With Roberto Longhi’s confident essay ‘in favour of Antoniazzo Romano’, the pleasure of recognizing the grapevines becomes that of recognizing this artist, in all his sincerity: Which painter […] painted a more candid vineyard of young vines than that which occupies the background of one of the miracles of the holy lady? And who gave such savour, between severely worshipful and endearingly popular, to the lanes and small squares of fifteenth-century Rome?72

By the flourish of these rhetorical questions, the landscapes are validated too as a corollary to the artist’s candid dialogue with the saint’s world, equivalent to the urban settings; to ‘the bridges, the houses, the gothic churches of the city, the miracles in the countryside or the convent’ depicted in the programme.73 Rossi’s subtle distinction between background architectures and landscapes has fallen away.

70

See Puttfarken with particular reference to Alberti on landscape in his Ten Books on Architecture (pp. 105–07). 71

‘La piccola collina piantata a filari di viti cariche d’uva’, and ‘il paesaggio silvestre in cui l’azione si svolge, i muli bardati e legati agli alberi’: Rossi, ‘Le opere’, pp. 7–8, 10. See also p. 21 for a reiteration of these details. 72

‘Qual pittore […] dipinse una vigna di magliuoli più schietti di quella che occupa il fondo d’uno dei miracoli della santa donna? E chi diede altrettanto sapore tra severamente basilicale e caramente popolano ai vicoli e alle piazzette della Roma quattrocentesca?’ : Longhi, II, 245. 73

‘I ponti, le case, le chiese gotiche dell’urbe, i miracoli di campagna o di convento’: Longhi, II, 249. Here I have adapted the words of Nicholas Green on the interpretive logic of nineteenth-century ‘nature biographies’. See Green’s article ‘Dealing in Temperaments: Economic Transformation of the Artistic Field in France During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Art History, 10 (1987), 59–78 (p. 70).

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Fig. 5. Attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his Workshop, or his Circle, Francesca Romana’s Ecstasy in the Vineyard. Fresco, c. 1468. Chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. Everything that can be named and described in the chiesa vecchia programme is reserved as a sign of Antoniazzo Romano’s moral authenticity, which, importantly, proves him worthy of his subject. At the Tor de’ Specchi, his moral authenticity necessarily reflects and complements that of Francesca Romana: ‘those miraculous deeds of a modern Saint (deceased twenty-eight years before) have no need of learned findings’.74 Roberto Longhi has been called ‘the unchallenged master of the art of historical ekphrasis’.75 A review of the literature leaves no question that his writing furthered 74

‘[...] quei fatti miracolosi di una Santa moderna (morta ventotto anni prima) non hanno bisogno di reperimenti eruditi’: Longhi, II, 249. 75

Per Jonas Nordhagen, ‘Roberto Longhi (1890–1970) and His Method: Connoisseurship as a Science’, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 68 (1999), 99–107 (p. 102). See also André Chastel, ‘Roberto Longhi: il genio dell’ “ekphrasis”’, in L’arte di scrivere sull’arte: Roberto Longhi

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Rossi’s in securing the evocative power of the chiesa vecchia frescoes for the twentieth century. Rossi’s diligent study constructed the chiesa vecchia programme above all as a poignant trace of Francesca Romana’s holy life, a trace to be viewed and experienced as a manifestation, outside historical time. In a few exuberant passages, Longhi gave the images power to evoke Antoniazzo Romano, yet posited this artistic presence as one ‘by nature’ always inclined to retreat in favour of the Saint’s. From the wide array of naturalistic details in the frescoes, later writers have also singled out the grapevines, and the ‘vineyard’ images have been preferred choices for reproduction.76 Aside from habitual referencing and quotation, these repetitions recollect Rossi and Longhi’s formative influence on discursive possibilities for the fresco programme. There has been no sustained attempt to undo or subvert the interpretive effect of their accounts, an effect of upholding, for the reader’s benefit, the edifying truth of Francesca Romana. The images were painted to serve this truth and the collection of narratives believed to ‘reveal’ it. And this truth has been continually respected and renewed for modern reproductions of the images. Still sufficiently transfixed by their figurative content and the romanesco captions, arthistorical writing on the frescoes has helped to invest photographs of the images as portable, accessible traces of the saint’s holy life, ‘a short-cut’ in Susan Sontag’s words, to and for the suspended ‘other world’ of the Tor de’ Specchi.77 Graciously permitted by the Oblates to study and reproduce the Tor de Specchi’s ‘best works of art’, in the chiesa vecchia Rossi was confronted with a silent room of fifteenth-century frescoes.78 To begin to ‘speak for’ them, he drew upon descriptive and analytic strategies customary to the definition and study of painting in Italy, reiterating Renaissance assumptions about good painting’s narrative ends and imitative means. By approaching the images using ekphrasis, Rossi was able to attach a unified meaning to them, one that could claim local and national nella cultura del nostro tempo, ed. by Giovanni Previtali (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982), pp. 56–65. 76

See for example Paolucci, pp. 12, 36–41.

77

Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 68. On the role of photographic reproductions in fostering the idea of the easy accessibility of the past, see also Haskell, pp. 3–4. In this sense, too, reproductions can share in the ‘quality of presence’ — and, as Haskell notes, they are co-opted to do so where they are made into ‘brightly illustrated dust-jackets’ for publications in history. This is the role of the reproduction used for the dust-cover of Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli’s edition of Latin hagiography, Santa Francesca Romana: Edizione critica dei trattati latini di Giovanni Mattiotti (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994). The image reproduced is the ‘vineyard’ scene from the chiesa vecchia’s rear wall. 78

Rossi’s first footnote is an acknowledgement of these privileges granted by the ‘Signore Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi’ and ‘la signora Maria Costanza Magnalbò’: ‘Le opere’, p. 1.

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significance; even, from Rome, a ‘universal’ significance, on the basis of Catholic humanist values. His steady evocation of Francesca Romana as a transcendent and historical figure took on the force of an accomplished explanation for the frescoes. This explanation at once supported and exceeded consideration of ‘the artist’ in his own writing; it retained its expediency and a great deal of its force through the discourse on attribution that followed. Thus the frescoes have been permitted to seem still ‘natural’ to the Monastery site, and still ‘natural’ to Francesca Romana’s ‘dossier for veneration’ permanently safeguarded by the Oblates.79 Attilio Rossi must always be credited with opening up the chiesa vecchia to interpretation, and especially to the now vast array of modern cultural history’s procedures and possibilities. Yet his article was perhaps most successful in demonstrating the pertinence of hagiography and ekphrasis to the then much newer discursive field of art history. Undoubtedly it demonstrated the resilience of hagiography as a rhetorical frame, and ekphrasis as a rhetorical device, and ways in which these two received forms of persuasion can smoothly concur.

79 Patrick Geary, ‘Saints, Scholars and Society: The Elusive Goal’, in Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. by Sandro Sticca (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996), 1–22 (p. 14).

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Separating the Men from the Boys: Masculinities in Early Quattrocento Florence and Donatello’s Saint George PATRICIA SIMONS

I

n a volume paying fond homage to a teacher who had a powerful impact on several generations of students, it is especially pertinent to ask how future generations can be captivated by the Italian Renaissance. My concern is with visual culture. In 1987, an overview of the state of the field warned that an ‘enthusiasm for hard facts may hide the danger of confusing the means with the ends [...]. The questions that we may legitimately ask of works of art are not always answerable positivistically [...] small problems prompt small questions with small answers’.1 Nearly two decades later, there is even more urgency to escape the restriction and boredom of ‘small answers’, and to ask fresh, adventurous questions. My approach is to look askance at Renaissance rhetoric and visual culture, being sceptical rather than celebratory, especially about Renaissance representations of gender. This essay will combine an examination of Leonardo Bruni’s language about Florentine citizenship, texts I first encountered in Ian Robertson’s classroom, with consideration of Donatello’s sculpture of a military, sainted hero produced for Bruni’s civic environment. Art historians have naturalized patriarchy and masculinity when discussing the first few decades of the fifteenth century in Florence, the birth years of the Renaissance. The influential art historian and German émigré, Erwin Panofsky, was one of many academics who idealized the Renaissance in mid-twentieth-century debates. Whilst some were interested in the comforting image of culture and learning flourishing during a ‘true’ renaissance, for others this offered a more overt political lesson, especially for refugees from Nazi Europe and for post World War II 1

William Hood, ‘The State of Research in Italian Renaissance Art’, Art Bulletin, 69 (1987), 176–86 (p. 185).

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Fig. 1. Donatello, St George. Statue, with base relief of ‘St George Killing the Dragon’ and gable relief of ‘God the Father Blessing’. Marble, c. 1415–17. Or San Michele, Florence.

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inhabitants of a Cold War world. History was taken to be the study of masculine, public and grand events, and the Renaissance in the Florentine Republic was posited as the development of a virile, moral, uplifting moment in the face of decadent, tyrannical excess. Panofsky’s ‘Florentine Fathers’ were masculine, truly classical producers of solemn writings and epic art, contrasted to the ‘pictorial succulence’ and ‘feminized’ texts originating in Venice and northern Italy. ‘The Florentine ideal of beauty has found its exemplary expression in statues of proudly erect Davids, the Venetian in paintings of recumbent Venuses’.2 For others, this contrast between Florentine centrality and perverse margins extended to a wider sweep on the European map. ‘The Renaissance individual could be mustered in defence of a liberalism threatened by Hitler, Stalin, and the regimentation of the war’.3 An American heritage of the ‘founding fathers’, who looked to European republicanism exemplified in ancient Greece or Renaissance Florence, was revivified during the Cold War. The Florentine city-state became for German exiles like Hans Baron the epitome of modern, progressive politics. His magisterial Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance argued that around the year 1402 a threat of invasion from Milan evoked a new, noble self-consciousness in Florence about order, identity, classicism and learning which sparked the Renaissance. Baron explicitly drew a parallel with recent events in European history: In a like fashion, Napoleon and Hitler, poised on the coast of the English Channel and made confident by their victories over every relevant power but one, waited for the propitious time for their final leap — until the historic moment had passed and unforeseen developments had upset the apparently inevitable course of fate. This is the only perspective from which one can adequately reconstruct the crisis of the summer of 1402 and grasp its material and psychological significance for the political history of the Renaissance, and in particular for the growth of the Florentine civic spirit.4

2

Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939) (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 147–48. The very settings of Florentine dialogues on ‘solemn’ subjects were abstract, academic and ‘stately’ rooms, whereas northern writings addressed merely dialogues on love in ‘the fragrant gardens of distinguished ladies or even in the boudoirs of erudite courtesans’. 3

Carl Landauer, ‘Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1994), 255–88 (p. 268). See also Anthony Molho, ‘American Historians and the Italian Renaissance: An Overview’, Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies, 9.1 (1991), 10–23. 4

Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955; repr. 1966), p. 40. His later study has more sense of tension between civic humanism and realpolitik: In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

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The Florentine Republic was saved by divine intervention when plague struck the looming tyrant Giangaleazzo Visconti, and the city then endured other struggles to consolidate its newfound identity. Early humanists like Coluccio Salutati and Bruni, lauding their Florentine political structure as one of republican liberty against Milanese tyranny, were heroic citizens shaping what Baron termed ‘civic humanism’.5 More recently, historians have concentrated on the growing exclusions forming the basis of this idealized polis. The composition of the participatory citizenry of this early ‘democracy’ was determined by a host of limitations, including gender, class, wealth, influence, race, age, descent, legitimacy, and status.6 Furthermore, Florence was not a static city viciously assaulted by exterior force. From the late fourteenth century, the city pursued its own ambitious expansionist agenda, one opposed by periodic uprisings in which Florentine taxation and domination were called tyrannical by the locals.7 Like Jacob Burckhardt’s renowned overview of the period, published in 1860, Baron too painted his Renaissance in nostalgic hues: the ‘commercial republic’ of the city-state of Basle in the earlier case, and in the latter, the Weimar Republic, were transposed to Italian soil in the influential work of these Germanic scholars.8 5

He used the term Bürgerhumanismus as early as 1925: Riccardo Fubini, ‘Renaissance Historian: The Career of Hans Baron’, Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992), 541–74 (pp. 543, 558–60, 564, 568). 6

Denys Hay and John Law offer a convenient summary in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1380–1530 (New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 251–53. Amongst criticisms of Baron’s thesis, see especially Jerrold E. Seigel, ‘“Civic Humanism” or Ciceronian Rhetoric? The Culture of Petrarch and Bruni’, Past and Present, 34 (1966), 3–48; Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence (New York: Wiley, 1969), pp. 234–40; and ‘Humanism, Politics and the Social Order in Early Renaissance Florence’, in Florence and Venice: Comparisons and Relations, ed. by Nicolai Rubinstein and others, 2 vols (Florence: Nuova Italia Editrice, 1979), I, 3–11. Dale Kent finds that sixty-one citizens were ‘the core of the regime’ in the years 1429–34: ‘The Florentine Reggimento in the Fifteenth Century’, Renaissance Quarterly, 28 (1975), 575–638. In a recent book review, John Najemy notes a continuing ‘reluctance to read the history of fifteenth-century Florentine politics and political thought in the light of class interests and antagonisms’: Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 883–86 (p. 885). 7

Samuel K. Cohn, Women in the Streets: Essays on Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 121–36. 8

Landauer commented in general on ‘German humanists who sought refuge from Nazi Germany’ that ‘their reconstructions of past cultures can thus be read as attempts at selfreconstruction’ (p. 255). On Burckhardt’s relationship to Basle, see Hayden White, ‘Burckhardt: Historical Realism as Satire’, in his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Lionel Gossman, ‘Cultural History and Crisis: Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy’, in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. by Michael S. Roth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 404–27. On Baron and his influence, see Fubini, pp. 541–74; Benjamin G. Kohl, ‘Obituary: Hans Baron (1900–1988)’, Renaissance Studies, 4

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Baron’s sense of adversity, which laid emphasis on nationalistic heroism, an identification with republican classicism, and artistic innovation, influenced art historians keen to champion a golden age of artistic production, great genius, strong support for the arts, and an alliance between intellectual and visual cultures. The impact is most evident in the publications of Frederick Hartt, whose experience in World War II as a thirty-year-old American soldier assisting in the salvage and recuperation of Tuscan art fundamentally shaped his outlook on Florentine opposition to tyranny, whether in the Renaissance or against the Nazis. For his protection of Tuscan art during the War, Hartt was named an honorary citizen of Florence. His nostalgia constituted Florence as the site of heroic defence against tyranny, an idealized battle he transposed in the late 1950s and 1960s to the larger landscape of Cold War politics against the Kremlin, so that Florence became the motherlode of Americanized liberty.9 Even before Baron’s Crisis appeared in 1955, Hartt’s romance with Tuscan art imagined it as seemingly ‘inviolable’ yet ‘despoiled’ by a ‘concerted Nazi program’ against which he, the American army and Florentine citizens valiantly toiled in 1944–45.10 ‘Never in modern history had there been such a sack as this’, a ‘robbery [...] on a scale to dwarf the depredations of Napoleon’. A particular ‘tragedy’, according to Hartt, was the German mining which ‘eviscerated the medieval city’ and destroyed, on Hitler’s personal order, the Ponte Santa Trinita. ‘The wonderful city, the birthplace and nucleus of the Renaissance, lay a victim of the conflict’ and ‘the destruction of Florence seemed the end of all civilization’. But out of the ruins appeared the superintendent of art, ‘grave and self-contained, like a figure from a Masaccio fresco, whose true nobility was disclosed by the events of this terrible period’. Against ‘Dantesque scenes of destruction and horror’, Hartt positioned ‘the love of the Florentines for their wonderful city’ and the efficiency and integrity of the Allies assisting their restitution. Citing Churchill, Hartt would later say that in the first decades of the fifteenth century Florentines faced their ‘finest hour’.11

(1990), 242–44; and John Najemy, ‘Review Essay’ [on Baron], Renaissance Quarterly, 45 (1992), 340–50 (p. 348). 9

His key essay ‘Art and Freedom in Quattrocento Florence’ (1964) was reprinted in Modern Perspectives in Western Art History, ed. by W. Eugene Kleinbauer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 293–311. For Hartt’s indebtedness to Baron, dating from 1957, see especially his ‘Art and Freedom’, p. 307, n. 1. In 1964, Hartt mentioned ‘the enduring structure of classical humanistic values on which subsequent cultural achievements have largely been based, including those of our early republic’ (p. 114). On Hartt, see Modern Perspectives, p. 293; and Roger J. Crum, ‘Kohl on Baron: An Addendum’, Renaissance Studies, 6 (1992), 244–45. 10

Frederick Hartt, Florentine Art under Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 3. For the following, see pp. 20, 26, 37, 38, 44, 46, 76. 11

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, p. 306.

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The same admiration occurs in Hartt’s textbook on Italian Renaissance art, long the single most-sold book about its subject on American campuses. The 1994 edition again evokes Masaccio’s figures to praise the Florentine character, in terms that are about masculine fortitude and courageous republican patriotism: The celebration of individual responsibility joins with the individual point of view in Masaccio’s fresco [of the Tribute Money], which depicts the apostles not as the officials of the oligarchy but as ‘men in the street’, like the artisans and peasants on whose support the Republic depended. They are presented with conviction and sympathy — sturdy youths and bearded older men, rough-featured, each an induplicable human personality, each endowed with the fortitude that can still be counted on, as modern events like the bombing of the city’s bridges in World War II and the 1966 Arno flood have shown, when the Florentine people face adversity.12

Noble sentiments are cast in a mould of ethnic genius, but since this city characterized ‘civilization’ itself, Hartt also universalizes a particular kind of masculine valour at the core of Western culture. Gravity and resolution are represented as central to the Renaissance, a culture which is seen as instilling all the burgher values of moderate, restrained, steadfast manliness. For the prominent connoisseur Bernhard Berenson, the same frescoes bespoke a more rugged masculinity. Like Panofsky, Berenson saw Venetian art in terms of ‘placid development’, whereas the Florentine artist was an assertive creative force who ‘tended to mould [his art] rather than let it shape him’.13 ‘Grappling with problems of the highest interest’, Florentine artists produced work that could ‘appeal to our tactile imagination’ rather than just to a pleasing interest in colour, so Florentine art was of abstract ‘significance’ akin to the seemingly universal appeal of figurative classicism. Masaccio ‘keeps us on a high plane of reality and significance’ by producing ‘types, in themselves of the manliest’ which make us ‘realise to the utmost their power and dignity’. Viscerally engaged in a sense of touching the Brancacci figures, he admired their implacable monumentality: What strength to his young men, and what gravity and power to his old! How quickly a race like this would possess itself of the earth, and brook no rivals but the forces of nature! Whatever they do — simply because it is they — is impressive and important, and every movement, every gesture, is world-changing.14 12

Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (1969) 4th edn, rev. by David Wilkins (New York: Abrams, 1994), p. 197. The passage is little changed in the fifth edition of 2003, p. 232. Hereafter, references are to the edition of 1994, unless otherwise indicated. 13

Bernhard Berenson, ‘The Florentine Painters’, in his Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1896) (London: Fontana, 1960). The following quotations are selected from pp. 51–53, 55, 65–66. 14

This last sentence is quoted by Bonnie A. Bennett and David G. Wilkins after the following: ‘The St Mark and St George are among the earliest expressions of new Renaissance attitudes; embodying the potential for greatness and the capacity to accomplish significant

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In less hyperbolic terms, these notions are still central to our conceptualization of the early Renaissance. For Hartt too, Florentine art declared masculine values of soldierly mettle, although by the end of World War II his model was more that of a member of the officer-class fighting against Romantic visions of racial conquest or apocalyptic change. Against bullyboys, Hartt posited an art produced by ‘real men’ who enact a ‘new equation of citizen-hero-philosopher-saint’.15 Having made Baron’s vision his own, Hartt’s textbook declares that ‘it was in this atmosphere of crisis that some of the important works of Early Renaissance art were created’, such as the civic projects of the Cathedral dome and the Or San Michele statues. Works of art could also function as soldiers in the continuing struggle against absorption and dictatorship by galvanising popular support for the life-and-death struggle of Florence through their profoundly felt, yet easily recognizable, symbolic content. These new public works were unusual in that they were meant for the person in the street, not for the pious in the churches.16

Hartt earlier described the idealized Everyman, more accurately, as the ‘man in the street’, but without recognizing that oligarchic women had far less access to such streets.17 Florentine women of all socio-economic registers did not participate in government, had little legal independence and did not figure in discourses about ideal citizenship. Hartt’s man in the street was literally male, and the kind of messages Hartt discerned in such public art were addresses relevant primarily to the middle and upper ranks of privilege. An essential point, however, is that this art not only declaratively populated the city with idealized propaganda, but that in an important sense the art itself made such grand citizens. Whether Florentine or foreign, male viewers could be stirred by representations of an adorned, virtuous race of Tuscan heroes. Foreign visitors could be impressed by a city of such apparent wealth that it expended huge sums on decoration; the lower ranks could be involved but also pacified by images of reassurance and noble humanity commissioned by the governing oligarchy; members of the ruling class could be inspired to civic duty and deeds, they are of the same race as the men in Masaccio’s Tribute Money’: Donatello (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984), p. 211. Many of Hartt’s ideas are echoed here too. 15

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, p. 304.

16

Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, p. 154. The sentences recur in the fifth edition framed by the observation that they were written by Hartt in the 1960s (2003, p. 182). One of the few statements critiquing Hartt comes from an historian, Lauro Martines. Hartt’s argument is called idealistic, ‘astonishing’ and ‘far-fetched’, unless we substitute ‘ideology for the more idealistic notion of ideals’: Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (London: Allen Lane, 1980), pp. 349–53. 17

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, p. 297; see Cohn for an indication that even women of lower status had less presence in fifteenth-century streets (pp. 16–38).

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persuaded to accept heavy taxes and levies necessary for the defence and aggrandisement of a city of giants. The art was not passively reflective, but centrally constitutive of a patriarchal ideology. This is particularly so in Donatello’s marble sculpture of Saint George (figs 1–3), produced for the niche of the Arte dei Spadai e Corazzi or Guild of Swordsmiths and Armourers, on the facade of Or San Michele around 1415–17.18 During the late months of the war, Germans carried this statue off from its storage place at the Medici villa of Poggio a Caiano. Hartt responded to the event with these words: ‘Donatello’s Saint George! What loss could Florence have felt more keenly? The ideal hero, the saintly warrior, represented for the Florentines the very incarnation of the martial vigour of their lost Republic’.19 This statement, published in 1949, anticipated Baron’s citation of the sculpture, one of the few artworks he mentioned. To Baron, the statue proved that ‘even the arts did not remain untouched by the climate of the time of the Florentine-Milanese struggle’.20 Hartt and Baron readily associated a martial saint with struggles of the Florentine Republic against external threat, whether from Milan, and later Naples, or Nazi Germany. It requires a post Cold War distance from political optimism, and scepticism about demonized totalitarianism, to begin a discussion of political and gender assumptions in these earlier interpretations. In a world under a shadow of tyrannical occupation, and operating on a naturalized belief in masculinist values and an ideology of Cold War democracy, any representation of an heroic soldier would seem straightforwardly inspirational. In general, Hartt saw all the statues commissioned in the early years of the fifteenth century for Or San Michele as a ‘race of heroes’ who were: The saints of God, chosen to do His work, to carry His banner or His sword. They are also the guardians of the guilds in the maintenance of the Republic, and its spiritual defenders in the battle for the survival of free institutions.21

18

H. W. Janson, The Sculpture of Donatello (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 23–32; Silvana Macchioni, ‘Il San Giorgio di Donatello: Storia di un processo di musealizzazione’, Storia dell’Arte, 36–37 (1979), 135–56; Bennett and Wilkins, pp. 199–200; Donatello: San Giorgio, ed. by Giovanna Gaeta Bertela (Florence: Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 1986); Joachim Poeschke, Donatello and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance (1990) (New York: Abrams, 1993), pp. 21, 380–81; John Pope-Hennessy, Donatello Sculptor (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), pp. 46–48. 19

Hartt, Florentine Art Under Fire, p. 69.

20

Baron, p. 205. At the end of this statement a footnote in the 1966 edition refers to Hartt’s ‘Art and Freedom’ (p. 505, n. 20c). 21

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, pp. 300, 304, cited hereafter from pp. 301–04. The same interpretation is offered in his History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp. 176–78, largely unchanged in the fifth edition (2003, pp. 209–11).

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Figs 2 and 3. Donatello, St George. Marble, c. 1415–17. Their nobility was also associated by Hartt with classical values, especially those espoused by Bruni, Baron’s ‘civic humanist’ par excellence. The statues heralded the birth of ‘the new classic style’ with ‘its commitment to a new conception of the freedom and dignity of the human person’. To then claim the statue as an exemplary instance of the Renaissance was a logical step. For Hartt, the work was ‘a Renaissance statue in the completeness of its individuality, the forthrightness of its stance, the magnificence of its forms’. But this Renaissance ‘individuality’ consists of what kind of masculinity? Perhaps remembering his own World War II experience, Hartt noted that Saint George looks out ‘on a hostile world with the supreme bravery of a man born a coward’. He discerned a Christian psychomachia at work, with the Saint donning ‘the whole armour of the spirit’ and summoning ‘all his inner forces to confront the enemy’. This state is matched with the Republic itself: ‘Acutely conscious of the threat to its liberties, and quite as deeply of its own inadequacy to meet the challenge.’ A republican Saint George offers assurance akin to Niccolò da Uzzano’s advice at the time, that ‘virtue reveals itself in adversity’.22 Asking different questions, this 22

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, p. 302.

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reading can be made far less straightforward or natural. A delicate balance between positive and negative forces is what makes the Saint George such a subtle, appealing work, for it performs the very production of adult masculinity in process. Donatello visualized a coming of age, the birth of a particular kind of ‘Renaissance man’ growing into his manhood. Masquerade is a negotiated strategy for performing gender identity, and what is rendered visible in the Saint George is that negotiation at work, creating the illusion that it can succeed. The Saint George centres on a complex series of oppositions held in careful balance. We see becoming not being, transition not stasis. The Saint’s body language subtly suggests a psychomachia between fear and courage. Earlier representations of the standing, iconic Saint George position him in a frontal pose, often holding a long lance to the side, as though he was on parade.23 Donatello’s version is more animated, taking full advantage of three-dimensionality. The Saint’s left leg stands staunchly, a little further forward than the other leg, supporting his weight in a subtle, armour-bound contrapposto. On that side, the engaged leg, weight-bearing hip, and thrusting shoulder all suggest an oblique orientation towards the danger considered by his turned head and focussed gaze. The shield, however, follows a bodily counter-move into the niche, so that the vulnerability of the exposed left side is emphasized by a hint of instinctive turn away from risk. Or, he could be swivelling from the direction faced by the shield towards the immanent danger only just entering his consciousness. Either way, the body is quietly turning on a pivot. As a sixteenth-century Florentine observed about a work that may, at first sight, seem rigid and static, ‘The statue appears continually in motion’.24 Depending upon the direction from which a viewer first encountered the sculpture, the statue’s suggestion of a psychic moment of transformation differs in its narrative import, but the fundamental sense of an emerging consciousness about confrontation and masculine heroics is to the fore. Determination is offset by a tentative sense that the subjugation of feelings is still being summoned rather than fully achieved. A youthful countenance — with the skin pulled back over the skull as though blood drains from the face — and a taut body encapsulates a watchful process of readiness coming into being. The sculpture combines a fear of physical trauma with dawning rationality and self-possession; a literal rigidity accompanied by movement and softer surfaces; a shielded body (especially at the edges and lower half) yet a fleshly and more open torso; a taut arm gripping a (now lost) weapon on the side further from danger yet a softly cloaked shoulder and resting arm on the side closer to the object of his gaze; an ambivalent motion poised between firm action and wary repose; a mixture of vulnerability and 23

Otto Freiherrn von Taube surveys the style and iconography of Saint George on foot, up to the time of Donatello’s statue: ‘Zur Ikonographie St Georgs in der italienischen Kunst’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 6 (1911), 199–203. 24

Gelli, quoted in Macchioni, p. 135.

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implacability. Tense anticipation of what may come with the passing of time is emphasized by the ensemble’s combination of different moments: the threedimensional Saint prepares, while in the carved relief below is placed a narrative of one deed achieved when he slays the dragon. This young man in his twenties is becoming an adult, through the summoning of internal resources in the face of adversity.25 As Alberti would soon recommend, ‘movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body’.26 Latent and mental factors are made physically visible. Against Donatello’s other marble statue for Or San Michele, the Saint Mark, commentators contrast that evangelist’s intellectual contemplation with Saint George’s youthful, militant energy. But this is too simple a dichotomy. He could move into a more confident, relaxed pose akin to Saint Mark’s and, if he aged, develop the large, veined hands of gentle authority. Saint George may lack the seniority and authority of a venerable elder, but he too experiences an active internal life. In the Christian lexicon, Saint George symbolizes the heroic triumph of virtue over evil. Donatello’s enlivening of the legend stresses the Saint’s exemplary inspiration for both physical and mental action. Vasari noted such a combination, praising the presentation of ‘courage and valour in arms’ and ‘a marvellous sense of movement within the stone’.27 Saint George’s alertness, a quality of mental awareness as well as physical boldness, was lauded by the near contemporary Filarete.28 Rather than rugged brawn, extreme aggression, imperialistic and ‘world-changing’ strength, or other characteristics of modern kinds of masculinity as were praised by Berenson, the character represented by Donatello’s 25

On conceptions of age in the Renaissance, when a man married and obtained economic independence as late as his thirties, see chapter 1 of Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (London: Cape, 1962); Creighton Gilbert, ‘When Did a Man in the Renaissance Grow Old?’, Studies in the Renaissance, 14 (1967), 7–32; and Thomas Kuehn, Emancipation in Late Medieval Florence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982). 26

Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura, 2.41; On Painting, trans. by John R. Spencer, rev. edn (London: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 77. 27

Giorgio Vasari, Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori, in Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols (Florence: Casa Editrice le Lettere, 1998), II, 403. Francesco Bocchi’s treatise on the statue, written in 1571, stressed its affective power: ‘The magnanimous costume [roughly, character] of St George removes and drives away mean and vile thoughts from the mind [of the spectator], replacing them by magnificent and high ones. [...] by this vigour [such statues] show in some way a kind of movement and a kind of life, and create in the beholder noble thoughts’: quoted in Moshe Barasch, ‘Character and Physiognomy: Bocchi on Donatello’s St George: A Renaissance Text on Expression in Art’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975), 413–30 (p. 415). 28

‘If you have to make St Anthony, he should not be timid, but bold like the St George that Donatello did, which is truly an excellent and perfect figure’: Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, trans. by John R. Spencer (London: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 306. For similar comments in the sixteenth century, see Janson, p. 24; and Macchioni, p. 135.

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Saint George comes to his manhood by keeping passion in check and exercising his superior capacities for reason and morality. Saint George comes to terms with emotions by refusing overt passion, by processing them through an alert dispassion, by ratiocination about strategy concerning both inner morality and outward militancy. He suits Voragine’s picture in the popular Golden Legend of this ‘light of truth […] heavy with the weight of his virtues, small by humility, and dry of the lusts of the flesh’.29 In the 1320s Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi called him a ‘blessed athlete’, associating him with rigorous, victorious Christian men whose spiritual battles were as important as their bodily acts.30 A ‘holy fighter’ defeating the dragon and other enemies by ‘arming himself with the sign of the cross’, Saint George triumphed over evil through his employment of virtue, as did an unarmoured David defeating Goliath or a Christianized Hercules conquering bestial Antaeus.31 The virtù in Donatello’s Saint George consists of both spiritual valour and mental fortitude. To Hartt, humanist virtus was ‘defined not so much as virtue but as the kind of courage, resolution, character in short, that makes a man a man, [and] which flashes from the eyes’ of the Or San Michele heroes.32 In his conception of virtus as the exercise of reason and self-control against intemperate passion, Hartt is more akin to Bruni than is Berenson’s vision of Masaccio’s giants, although Bruni was more self-aware in his exclusive masculinization of the trait. For Bruni, ‘all moral virtues by definition require effort. It is, for instance, a difficult matter to bridle lust, hold your temper, and keep in check your avarice’.33 It is precisely the difficulty of attaining virtue that gives rise to moral authority through the masculine, effort-filled facing of challenges and inner surveillance. When addressing ‘that marvellous virtue fortitude’, so esteemed ‘that we commonly see the statues of the dead dressed in military garb’ (even when they had never seen battle), Bruni draws support for his argument from etymology: 29

Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. by William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), I, 241, 238. 30

The opening to the Cardinal’s life of the Saint in the Codex of Saint George decorated in the 1320s is quoted in Laurence B. Kanter and others, Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300–1450 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), p. 92. See Colin Eisler, ‘The Athlete of Virtue: The Iconography of Asceticism’, in De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. by Millard Meiss, 2 vols (New York: New York University Press, 1961), I, 82–97. 31

The quotations are from Golden Legend, pp. 238, 239.

32

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, p. 299 (my emphasis).

33

Leonardo Bruni, ‘An Isagogue of Moral Philosophy’, translated in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, ed. by Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins and David Thompson (Binghamton: MRTS, 1987), pp. 274–75. The text, dated between December 1424 and May 1426, was dedicated to a former commander of the Florentine militia (p. 380).

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The word ‘virtue’ is [...] derived from vir (man), and ‘man’ seems to designate something steadfast and martial. [...] The Greeks put it more clearly than we do: they call fortitude andreia, which means, literally, ‘manliness’. Now fortitude is proper only to men, but temperance applies both to men and women.

Temperance is concerned with controlling lust, and other ‘servile and brutish’ pleasures. Virtue consists primarily in a masculine exertion of self-control, an argument stressed by a contrast between reason and anger. ‘Right reason, which is required for virtue’, is disturbed by the ‘excitation’ of wrath which is ‘inimical to the tranquillity required for rational activity’ because it ‘not only warps and perverts the mind’s judgement, but also the proper condition of the body. Blazing eyes, trembling lips, words choked and broken, insane tossing about of the limbs, increasingly wild statements: these, I submit, are more the marks of raving madness than of virtue’.34 The Saint George superbly visualizes a Bruni-like standard of virtue coming into being, for both mind and body are undergoing the ‘effort’ of containing disturbance, exercising a constant, masculine vigilance over feminine or bestial passions like fear or selfishness. But the strain of denial betrays a fragility and reliance upon social constructions of masculine and feminine roles. In his rite of initiation, this Saint George appears to be coming to terms with contradictions and, in that very process, continually marks the thing he most tries to face down. ‘Calm and mature judgement’ begins as the young Saint’s body does not indulge in wild, extreme movements but avoids the formation of evil habits. Bruni wrote of the strain: ‘Reason and the passions struggle together, now this one, now that one, having the victory. In my opinion, there are certain mediate dispositions between virtue and vice which are not yet sufficiently stabilised, so that they vacillate now in one direction, now in another’.35 Unlike the weakness and changeability, both physical and mental, of women and others drawn to vice, the carved Saint is arriving at a virile, virtuous resolution. The sculpture embodies rationalization, that is, the appearance of order and legibility which was idealized in a host of realms, whether perspective, or double-entry bookkeeping, or an increase in governmental bureaucracy.

34

Bruni, ‘Isagogue’; Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, p. 277. Arguing that women should ‘leave the rough-and-tumble of the forum entirely to men’, Bruni thought women were especially apt to contravene the bounds of bodily restraint. ‘If she should gesture energetically with her arms as she spoke and shout with violent emphasis, she would probably be thought mad and put under restraint’ (p. 244). Similarly, Francesco Barbaro’s ‘On Wifely Duties’ opined that ‘the speech of women [must] never be made public; for the speech of a noble woman can be no less dangerous than the nakedness of her limbs’: translated in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. by Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt with Elizabeth B. Welles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), p. 205. 35

Bruni, ‘Isagogue’; Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, p. 280.

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Saint George’s body is restrained and in a delicate balance of Bruni-like vacillation, while his mind works at the application of reason and prudence, establishing self-control before he moves outward to act out that power in the material world. As Bruni indicates, such control and action were constructed as purely masculine. In the Western tradition, the very notion of objective, neutral, transcendent Reason, to Bruni the central requirement for virtue, involved ‘an exclusion of the feminine’, and Genevieve Lloyd points out that ‘femininity itself has been partly constituted through such processes of exclusion’.36 So too, however, has masculinity been produced through exclusion, the valorization of purely virile skills exhibited in the Saint George. The carved figure excludes womanish attributes in both his external appearance and an internal life of reasoning and self-control. He takes on the role of a universal hero and an active citizen. A particular kind of masculinity is embodied in the very handling of the marble, with the clarity of the silhouette, the precision of the carving especially delineating the armour, the assertive intrusion into a viewer’s space with a once jutting lance (or sword) as well as the protrusion of marble beyond the shallow niche, the focussed gaze on a grand and distant object, the impression of tight control over the chisel akin to the Saint’s delicate tremor around a pivot, the overall air of regularity and order, all suggesting the determinate, definitive, dynamic form basic to a particular notion of manhood. Donatello came to terms with obdurate marble, and manfully overcame artisanal challenges. In general, the European tradition represents masculinity as a facing of such ‘crises’, whether in labour, war, moral battles or other heroic struggles. What varies is the particular construction at any historical moment of the precise adversities. At the time of the Saint George, Florentine masculinity was forged in opposition to psychic threats of irrationality and vice and public ones of discord and war. To truly appear a man, Saint George had to be paired with a dragon. Besides concentrating on a danger like an approaching dragon, the Saint’s alertness recalls another hagiographic challenge to his resolve.37 He stands taut as though listening to what the Golden Legend called the tempting ‘soft speech’ of a ‘cruel, bloodthirsty tyrant’. After ‘threats and torments’ had no effect on Saint George, Dacian then tried to lure him with a ‘flattering promise of earthly power’ but this ‘most loyal soldier of Christ, alone and intrepid’ was blessed by God with ‘such fortitude that he could scorn the commands of tyrants and face the pain of innumerable torments’. Repelling a challenge to his soul and reason, the Saint 36

The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. xix. For a convenient summary of rationality and calculation, and for self-control as valorized Renaissance attributes, see Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), pp. 198– 200; see also Victor J. Seidler, Unreasonable Men: Theories of Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 7–12 and ch. 3. 37

For the following, see Golden Legend, p. 241.

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attends to a speech but then replies with the very discourse of virtuous athleticism. Donatello’s George is also harkening to the words of God the Father who oversees from the gable above. According to Greek versions of the story, from which the Latinate world took over this Byzantine legend, God speaks in a manner both assuring and challenging, saying to the youth facing a dragon: ‘Be a man, George, for I am with thee’.38 In 1403 Salutati had tried to produce, by way of words and threats, manly virtue of the sort the Saint George displays, by claiming that Florence was: Conscious that in war courage is as good as walls, conscious that victory lies not in a multitude of soldiers but in the hands of God, conscious that justice is fighting for us. We remember what you deny, that we are of Roman race (genus). We read that our ancestors have often resisted against overwhelming enemy forces, and with small bands have not only defended their possessions, but have also obtained unhoped-forvictory.39

Saint George represents just such a Christian hero with classicized ancestors. The statue presents an upright youth reaching his full potential as he acquires the final elements of composure and resolve. He is awakening to Salutati’s and Bruni’s sense of ideal citizenship. He eschews vice, avoids temptation and fights for the common good. Protecting a princess from a dragon and thence also saving a city, caring about the distribution of alms amongst the poor, and being ‘the captain of the Christian host’, this patron saint of knights is made by Donatello into a defender of Bruni’s patriarchal Republic.40 Whilst adulterers, pederasts, rapists and other ‘diseased minds’ work with tyrants, citizens engaged in a Bruni-like ‘active, civic life’ ascend instead to happiness ‘through virtue and moderation’.41 Perhaps the text most relevant to Saint George is Bruni’s De militia, finished in 1421, which addresses the institution of knighthood and calls for ‘acceptance of the Roman ideal of universal obligation to the civil authority’.42 Bruni’s contribution to reconceptualizing a knight, in the context of the Florentine Guelf Party redefining itself for a new 38

Martin Davies, ‘Uccello’s St George in London’, Burlington Magazine, 101 (1959), 310. Davies notes, however, that the closest Latin version of the Greek tale omits this episode of speech. 39 Coluccio Salutati, ‘Invectiva in Antonium Luschum Vicentinum’, in Prosatori Latini del Quattrocento, ed. by Eugenio Garin (Milan: Ricciardi, 1952), p. 34. The translation is from one of those many, meticulous handouts of primary sources provided to his classes by the late Ian Robertson. 40

Golden Legend, pp. 238–42.

41

Bruni, ‘Isagogue’; Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, p. 282.

42

Griffiths, Introduction to Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, p. 108. The Latin text is in C. C. Bayley, War and Society in Renaissance Florence: The ‘De Militia’ of Leonardo Bruni (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961), pp. 369–89; and translated in Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, pp. 127–45. The following quotations are from pp. 142–45.

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century, occurred a few years after Donatello’s completion of the Saint George, so his text did not have a causal influence; indeed, his views may have been shaped by Donatello’s visualization. Both sculpture and text were part of the same cultural matrix and constructed an emerging discourse about civic manhood. Bruni sees Fortitude as the core virtue exercised by a citizen-soldier who, in peacetime, still acts with courage, ‘strength and muscle’, to be the ‘citizens’ guardian’ as he ‘protects the weak’, such as widows and orphans, and ‘resists the injury with the force of his body’. Watchful against the disturbance of civil peace, a miles enacts ‘respectable’ deeds like all proper citizens, each of whom is an ‘actor [...] performing’ civic duties. But the miles must ‘escape the crowd’ and be above the ‘sordid and unnatural’ realm of commerce, since he attends to ‘greater matters’ and ‘higher things’ which accord with his quintessential ‘dignity’. The dignity and the bold alertness embodied by the Saint George is appropriate to Bruni’s rule that ‘the miles should know himself and keep in mind what his duty and profession require; he should not live a casual life as so many do, but conduct himself according to a definite and constant standard’. The duty of this knight is heavy, to uphold ‘the dignity of the office that made me what I was not before’ (my emphasis). As a result, he will refuse, like Donatello’s Saint George, ‘folly and cowardice’ and the ‘sordid pursuit of profit’. Rather than individualism, he is guided by ancestral dignity and civic duty; rather than only repelling threats from external empires, he must struggle more with moral demons. Instead of a pre-existing worth innate to himself, the citizen-soldier is made by honourable standards, and is constructed by his very office.43 As Bruni had noted, each citizen was an actor, whose virtue was brought into being through performance. The Saint George is engaged in just such a drama, donning responsibilities and the honour of adult, oligarchic manhood. De militia closes with an indignant patria challenging a knight who has fallen into degeneration. An allegory, which is feminine in grammatical gender, this patria is, at the same time, in its very meaning a ‘fatherland’. Definition mixes with grammar, so that fatherly authority is combined with a lady’s call for protection. The patria challenges the knight’s manhood by asking, ‘What […] are you now doing as a vir (man)?’ And it speaks as a ‘common parent’ who expects the offspring to ‘guard and defend me against enemy injury’. Called to duty, the knight is reminded that his conduct should be ‘characterized by fortitude rather than by cowardice’, by motivation for ‘glory rather than the accumulation of money’. Refusing to be deceived by ‘a false flourishing of medals’ or, rather, insignia, this stern parent insists that the knight ‘drop the falsam personam (false mask)’ of pretence and observes the honourable duties of his rank. The dramatization of a noble 43

Bruni himself was a product of self-fashioning, for his pen aided his social rise to a position as a ‘member of the Florentine patriciate’: Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 176.

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performance of this duty is visualized in the marble relief at Saint George’s feet.44 A feminized patria is defended against ‘enemy injury’ by a citizen-soldier who protects his civic lady from a dragon threatening at the edge of city walls.45 Gender ambiguity is here eradicated by a stereotypical, hagiographically venerable tradition of chivalric knights rescuing damsels. Donatello is turning to volgare literature of Romance and Christian legend, as well as Bruni’s interest in championing a more Latinate, nationalistic kind of knight who is a member of the Guelf Party opposing the Holy Roman Emperor and supporting an Italian papacy. The classicizing rhetoric of Salutati and Bruni is melded in the statue, but especially in the relief, with vernacular narrative. The princess/nymph and the civic architecture defended by Saint George combine stylistic elements of the ‘Gothic’ with the newly classicizing. Local festivals are probably commemorated too, for later religious plays and processions of Saint George and the Dragon are recorded in Florence.46 Numerous jousting helmets decorated with a dragon suggest that jousters regarded themselves as warriors sporting the trophy of Saint George’s opponent. Donning armour that made them fierce and daunting, these performers of chivalric honour and patriotic fervour were clients of the very guild that took Saint George as their patron saint. Furthermore, jousts and militaristic exhibitions were sometimes conducted on the Saint’s feast day, and so were ceremonials when captains were presented with the banner and bastone or staff of office.47 Benedetto Dei’s chronicle recorded such an event occurring in 1406, when Florence was at war with Pisa. Celebrations after victory in October of that year included a joust, at which the two chief honorees were appropriately drawn from the Florentines and their forces under the leadership of Muzio Attendolo Sforza, condottiere from Milan. According to the wine merchant Bartolomeo del Corazza, the unnamed ‘solider of Sforza’ who was awarded a prize ‘carried himself like a Saint George’.48 Chivalric and Christian modes of exemplarity 44

Janson, pp. 29–32; Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, pp. 302–03; Macchioni, p. 142; M. Godby, ‘A Note on Schiacciato’, Art Bulletin, 62 (1980), 635–37; Bennett and Wilkins, pp. 141–45; Pope-Hennessy, Donatello Sculptor, pp. 116, 118, and pp. 331–32, n. 5. On hagiography and the dragon legend, see Davies, pp. 309–10. For the style and iconography of narratives before Donatello see Taube, pp. 186–99. 45

Golden Legend, pp. 238–39.

46

Davies, p. 309, n. 9; Nerida Newbigin, Nuovo Corpus di Sacre Rappresentazioni fiorentine del Quattrocento (Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1983), pp. xxv, xxvii, lv. A mixture of classical and Gothic suggestions in the figures, especially the princess, is noted by Janson, p. 30; Pope-Hennessy, Donatello Sculptor, p. 118. 47

Benedetto Dei, La Cronica dall’anno 1400 all’anno 1500, ed. by Roberto Barducci (Florence: Papafava, 1984), pp. 41, 45, 46, 54, 68. 48

Bartolomeo del Corazza, Diario fiorentino (1405–1439), ed. by Roberta Gentile (Rome: De Rubeis, 1991), p. 21. However, another manuscript of the chronicle has ‘si portò come uno signore’ (p. 42).

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also combine in Donatello’s statue, completed a little more than a decade later. So too does Bruni’s interest in militarism and patriotism. Where the conventions of Latin and volgare, prose and poetry and drama, most converge is in the agreement about the performance of protective masculinity. After a suspenseful opening, where the statue shows the Saint preparing for his supreme challenge, the relief represents a successful denouement. Most discussion about Donatello’s relief concentrates on its innovations in carving technique and the representation of perspective. The significance Hartt finds in the perspective again suits his ‘Free World’ reading.49 From the focus on a scene ‘only as it appears to one pair of eyes at a single moment, from a single point of view’, he then discerns a concept of ‘the supremacy of the individual’. One could instead see this supposed singleness as an assertion of centralized, patriarchal authority and of mathematical calculation instilling a rational, masculinized way of seeing the world. However, such a counter-reading accepts many of Hartt’s assumptions. Rather than singularity, this three-dimensional sculpture on a building’s corner and approachable from several angles offers multiple viewpoints. We need to think about metaphors for actual bodily movement through space, such as processions or dancing. Whether coming across an outdoor relief or a domestic object like a cassone of similar shape, or entering chapels and rooms, Renaissance viewers were accustomed to view a field of vision from a greater number of potential and often oblique directions than is assumed by traditional interpretations of perspective which are usually based on photographs. Such viewers were also more differentiated by categories such as nationality, gender and socio-economic rank. To limit discussion to the scientific methods and ideological effects of perspective is to concentrate on the directive, controlling web trapping viewers in a frontal nexus, rather than considering what is performatively a wider context for optic experience. Each is important. Hartt believed that ‘if the Saint George statue can stand as a symbol of the Republic at war, this relief may count as an allegorical re-enactment of the battle’.50 Beyond this, he follows common practice in describing the components and offering little more in the way of interpretation of a narrative about menace conquered. An obvious point has not been made: that no matter what social impulse gave the story evocative meaning at the time, it was readily imagined in terms of violent action by a masculine hero watched in adoration by a helpless feminine figure. Here excessive bestiality is reined in by Christianized ‘civilization’ in the spectacle of a showdown. 49

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, p. 303.

50

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, p. 302. He sees aptness in ‘the supremacy of the individual’ making ‘its first appearance in a work of art celebrating the heroic encounter of a single armed knight against the forces of evil at a moment when the Florentine Republic had just won so striking a battle for individual freedom’. The view is not amended in his History of Italian Renaissance Art (pp. 177–78), nor in the 2003 edition (p. 211).

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In bulging relief at the centre of the panel, whose centrality is further emphasized by receding orthogonals behind the climax, Saint George is quickly the focus not only for the praying princess but also for all viewers approaching from any angle. Viewers are cast in the role of admirers who seek the Saint’s intercession. Optic, religious and gendered ideologies converge. Saint George energetically thrusts at the dragon at the same time as his upper body pushes closer to the viewer’s space so that he assertively performs a very public act of salvation. Blessed by God the Father, who gazes down in acknowledgement from the gable above, this loyal son is also saving himself. In overt, masculinized action, he purges himself of both passivity and excess. Donatello’s exceptional interest in the vigour of the tale can be seen if it is compared with painted representations, especially those associated with Uccello.51 With colour and more detail, and dating anywhere from the early 1430s up to around 1470, these later pictorial depictions seem tame and anecdotal. Their function and social context have altered considerably since Donatello’s address in a guild niche during the century’s second decade. At an earlier moment of civic formation, Donatello subtly produced a particular kind of masculinity for a guild of armourers and its largely male audience. The domestic paintings, which encompass a female audience, are suited to chivalric protection and recall women’s spectatorship at tournaments or pageants. As the Golden Legend stressed that the king mourned the immanent death of his daughter most because he would never see her wedding or ‘sons nursing at your royal breast’, an alternative between death and marriage underpins these paintings commissioned by fathers or grooms.52 On a carved object displayed in a public arena, this threat to marriage and reproduction had import also, as a reference to the naturalized acts interrupted, mismanaged and usurped by a tyrant. Salutati had asked of enslaving tyranny: ‘What sweetness can be derived from [wife and children] by him who sees his own marriage under the power of someone else’s caprice, and his children begotten through someone else’s licentiousness?’.53 51

Literature on the panels associated with Uccello, in London, Melbourne, and Paris, includes: Davies, pp. 309–14; John Pope-Hennessy, Paolo Uccello, 2nd edn (London: Phaidon, 1969), pp. 21–22, 154; Ursula Hoff, European Paintings before 1800 in the National Gallery of Victoria, 4th edn (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1995), pp. 165–66; James Beck, ‘Paolo Uccello and the Paris St George, 1465: Unpublished documents: 1452, 1465, 1474’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, 93 (1979), 1–5; and Franco Borsi and Stefano Borsi, Paolo Uccello (1992), English edn (New York: Abrams, 1994), pp. 156, 256–59, 315–17, 331–33, 346–47. 52

Golden Legend, p. 239. The dragon symbolized another kind of danger too, since it was a ‘plague-bearing’ monster that poisoned ‘everyone who came within reach of his breath’ (p. 238). 53

Salutati, ‘Invectiva’; Garin, p. 30. Similarly, Bruni contrasted republicanism with the degeneration of savagery, cruelty, the ‘emperor’s lovers and gigolos’, and sexual vice including adultery and, implicitly, sodomy. Florence instead ‘imitated its [republican]

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As republican liberty enabled fathers and husbands to control their wives and daughters without interference, so young Saint George chastely saves the princess for the exercise of patriarchy unfettered by tyranny. Donatello’s Saint George ensemble constructs a Florentine and masculine identity through introspection and contrast much more than through any awareness of a particularized, external, international threat from Milan or Naples. The audience for Donatello’s work was indeed ‘men in the streets’ rather than young brides. These ‘men’ included guild members, and their betters, members of the higher guilds and oligarchy, who were meant to be impressed with an expensive, declarative statement about the craft of armoury.54 Although Donatello’s patrons were members of one of the fourteen Lesser Guilds, the armourer’s guild was one of only six minor guilds to be granted niches at Or San Michele; its status as provisioners for knights seems to have granted them this privilege, albeit for a niche that was very shallow and awkward. Ironically, the guild’s patron saint was also the patron of all Christian knights, and this personification of chivalric ideals would have pleased the officers of Or San Michele and the guild’s potential customers. The armourers could take pride in the accurate representation of their products and the nobility of the enterprise they served. They may also have adored a patron saint who was a legendary protector of the poor and they could recall the story that the dragon’s victims were ‘drawn by lot, and no one was exempt’, not even a princess whose father had to sacrifice her or suffer a mob’s destructive violence.55 Against such potentially subversive thoughts, Donatello, himself a member of the middling classes, represented a ‘brave knight’ appealing to his more lucrative clientele, the oligarchs of the powerful Major Guilds.56 Those men are flattered, but also challenged to face Bruni’s call to act as civic guardians for all through both military might and virtuous behaviour. Bruni was careful to distinguish between his new kind of militant citizen and those, like mercenaries and less noble men, who were engaged in commerce that was ‘sordid and unnatural in a miles’.57 Dedicated to the commonweal, and with sufficient means and rank to avoid the ‘sordid pursuit of founders in every kind of virtue’, such as ‘military prowess’: ‘Panegyric to the City of Florence’; translated in Earthly Republic, pp. 152–54. 54 Pope-Hennessy suggests the guild of armourers ‘must have played a significant role in planning the image’, especially because the armour ‘must result from careful replication of a model [...]. For the guild, the merit of the statue may have lain in its exaltation of technique’: Donatello Sculptor, p. 47. For the guild, see Janson’s note that the guild was not permitted a statue in more expensive bronze (p. 26, n. 4); Macchioni, pp. 138–40. 55

The populace threatened: ‘Carry out for your daughter what you ordained for the rest, or we will burn you alive with your whole household!’: Golden Legend, pp. 238–39, 240. 56

The quotation is from Golden Legend, p. 239. For Donatello’s socio-economic position, see Pope-Hennessy, Donatello Sculptor, pp. 11–12. 57

Bruni, ‘De militia’; Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, pp. 143–45.

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profit’ or ‘opulence’, the superior citizen aimed at ‘glory, greatness and beneficence’ which was not proper to all classes. Just at a time when the city was anxious about its employment of mercenaries, and when debates about what constituted true nobility began to heat up as social mobility increased, the Saint George entered such public discourses as a proud statement of patrician honour standing above base lucre and feminizing ornamentation.58 Later, in the 1430s, Bruni carefully admitted to erudite readers of Greek that Florence was not a true democracy, but an oligarchy.59 While Baron and Hartt believed rhetorical praises of Florentine ‘liberty’ by Salutati and Bruni, and many art historians have continued their legacy, historians are now aware of exclusivity in pre-Medicean Florentine politics. As one ruling citizen put it in those decades, ‘public affairs are properly directed by the few with the authority of the many’.60 Rather than motivated by a single ‘crisis’ leading to an ideological birth of ‘modern democracy’, early Renaissance Florentine art arose in a social context of the formation of an urban identity serving a privileged group. A rhetoric of visual, urban and civic order, combined with a practice of imperialist, patriarchal power, was linked to a city changing from a corporate to an elitist polity. The period was a time of crisis, but of a gradual and multifaceted kind. During the later fourteenth century and the early decades of the fifteenth, the city was shifting from dependence on agrarian production to a more fully mercantile economy. It was becoming an expanding urban entity and territorial state, contrasting its upright republicanism with the conscious construction of an oppositional, licentious ‘tyranny’. Cultural perspectives were altering, from a picture of factionalized citizenry to one bonded by the rhetoric of an interest in the ‘common good’, from an inward focus to a concern for foreign visitors and international status, from older religious values to newer ones justifying nascent capitalism and the outward display of wealth, from a traditional urban fabric to a city vigorously remade in the image of a classical heritage. A new visual language emerged in this 58

Leonardo Bruni’s ‘On Knighthood’ (c. 1421–22) states that gold ‘is a sign [...] commonly worn by pedlars of quack medicines, by prostitutes, and boy-actors. How, they ask, can a substance which is so indiscriminately displayed confer any distinction on a miles? Iron and arms are suitable to a miles; gold and jewelry belong rather to a woman’s attire’: Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, p. 136. On mercenaries, see Bayley, War and Society; and Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, ‘Representing War in the Renaissance: The Shield of Paolo Uccello’, Representations, 5 (Spring 1984), 32–65 (p. 53). On nobility, see Knowledge, Goodness, and Power: The Debate over Nobility among Quattrocento Italian Humanists, ed. and trans. by Albert Rabil (Binghamton: MRTS, 1991). 59 In his Greek treatise ‘On the Florentine Polity’ published in Athanasios Moulakis, ‘Leonardo Bruni’s Constitution of Florence’, Rinascimento, 26 (1986), pp. 141–90; translated in University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization, ed. by Eric Cochrane and Julius Kirshner, 5 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), V: The Renaissance, 139–44. 60

Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi cited in Brucker, Renaissance Florence, p. 238.

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productive moment, one which presented monumental, masculine and heroic figures of public significance by reconceiving the body’s movements and proportions, and by placing grand actors on an innovative stage formulated according to ordering rules of centralizing perspective. An appearance of ‘liberty’ was a carefully stagemanaged affair which idealized the ruling-class ideology so that it had the authoritative appeal of paternal regard for all. That an idealization of élite values was commissioned by a Lesser Guild suggests an internalization of those values across class lines. Baron and Hartt, however, preferred to universalize from an intellectual or heroicized class to all groups, assuming that ‘a dominant social class [...] expresses the values and ideals of the whole society’.61 The Saint George also indicates the newness of such debates about status, the anxiety around the slipperiness of categories, the need for such an idealization in the face of opposition. The ‘restlessness of Florentine politics is more striking than its harmony’ write Denys Hay and John Law, and for this reason maintenance of public order became more important.62 Donatello’s sculpture was primarily produced for its actual audience, the citizenry inside Florentine city walls who were experiencing their own political and psychic battles. The statue reassured members of the old aristocracy that hierarchy remained, while those of the mercantile nouveau riche and gente nuova could envisage themselves metaphorically ennobled through adoption of Bruni’s values. Against worries about usury and debasing materialism, Christian men in the rising mercantile class could be assuaged by the representation of a young man coming into his own through the exercise of reasoning, moderation and self-control. A particular kind of sexualized economy was imbricated in this justification of profit and acquisition. Boccaccio had railed against Florentine ‘luxuries’ in commerce and the arts as ‘a thing effeminate and reprehensible’;. Petrarch had praised Roman emperors loftily removed from ‘effeminate elegance’, and other fourteenth-century men bemoaned an inattention to military deeds for the sake of ‘avarice and luxury’ which ‘made the man feminine’.63 These men worried about 61

Brucker, Renaissance Florence, p. 235 (my emphasis).

62

Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 253.

63

Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante (c. 1355, revised c. 1364); translated in The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance: A Source Book, ed. by Kenneth R. Bartlett (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1992), pp. 57–58; Francesco Petrarch, Rerum familiarum libri I–VIII, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975), p. 240. The last quotation is from Guido da Pisa, around 1330 (‘far l’uomo in femine’). In the 1370s Baldo da Perugia worried about mercantile interests weakening the militarism of Tuscany and especially Florence. For both texts see Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘The Beginnings of Political Thought in Florence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), 198–227 (p. 214, n. 1). In his ‘History of Florence’, Bruni contrasted liberty’s reliance upon law to impose government for the ‘common good’ with what was termed ‘degenerate passivity’: translated in Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. and trans. by Renée Neu

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material goods as effeminizing distractions to truly masculine virility, nobility and mental excellence, and so did Bruni. Donatello’s Christian knight faces such weakening threats, not only in the external figuration of the dragon but also in his internalized battle with himself. Yet, on a more subtle level, the Saint is in the process of denial rather than having reached a final attainment of his goal. He wavers a little, still caught in the lingering threads of a temptation to flee. The figure’s beautified youthfulness has traces of feminine smoothness and delicate bones, for he is a beardless youth shedding femininity rather than an already fully adult man. Liminal, he is caught in the process of maturing, growing the sheath of masculine masquerade, hovering close to a reconciliation between effeminizing materiality and masculinizing spirit. Male viewers were instructed in the denial of effeminacy and yet attracted to an ideal of male beauty. That youth and valour could also seduce any women able to look at the sculptural ensemble. In the sixteenth century, at least, a Florentine poet explicitly viewed the Saint George in homoerotic terms, praising it as ‘my beautiful Ganymede’.64 Antonfrancesco Grazzini, nicknamed ‘Lasca’, defiantly ‘praises its physical charms, and proclaims that he has found this fanciuletto tanto bello an ideal substitute for a live boyfriend; what matter if his amoroso piacere be confined to looking — he is glad to be rid of the inconstancy, the fits of temper, and the jealousy of his former companions’. Narrowminded pedants with no sense of humour, who were Lasca’s bitter enemies from the mid-1540s, might try to deprive him of actual homoerotic delights, but his poetry celebrated ‘Saint George’s beautiful limbs’ and blessed ‘Donatello for having created such a beautiful lad who will never change’. Virtually the only discussion about ‘amorous pleasure’ between male viewers and masculine objects of art for this period concentrates on Donatello’s later bronze David.65 But it is quite possible that men could also get an erotic charge from works that to a modern and often homophobic eye appear straightforwardly masculine, and which are therefore mistakenly and anachronistically assumed to be exclusively heterosexual in appeal.

Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 69–73. An implicit distinction was drawn between selfish pleasure and selfless restraint, degeneration and decorum, and effeminate passivity was contrasted with patriarchal and legal virility. 64

Janson, pp. 24–25, whose paraphrase is then quoted here. The subsequent quotation is from an extract in Robert J. Rodini, Antonfrancesco Grazzini: Poet, Dramatist, and Novelliere 1503–1584 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), p. 92. 65

For a sophisticated treatment of the bronze David, with useful summaries of past debates and a consideration of feminine viewing positions at the time of a wedding in 1469, see Cristelle Baskins, ‘Donatello’s Bronze David: Grillanda, Goliath, Groom?’ Studies in Iconography, 15 (1993), 113–34. More generally, see Patricia Simons, ‘Donatello’ and ‘European Art: Renaissance’, in The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts, ed. by Claude J. Summers (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004), pp. 97–99, 134–36.

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During the first three decades of the fifteenth century, various demographic, economic, political and international crises experienced by Florence engendered a rash of communal attempts to institutionalize the control of sexuality and reproduction.66 Legislation facilitated the funding of dowries through the formation of a special fund, organized the containment of ‘brides of Christ’ in their nunneries, disapproved of expenditures on female costume and jewellery because they were seen as a dissipation of patrimonial wealth and a deterrent to marriage, introduced a new taxation system which allowed deductions for bocche or dependent ‘mouths’ so that the notion of capital was implicated with reproductivity, regulated prostitution and established a brothel system, and founded an office ‘to root out of its city the abominable vice of sodomy’.67 Oligarchic rule depended upon the acquisition and exchange of wealth through dowries, and upon political alliances forged by marriage bonds; so the élite was protecting not only the city’s demographic profile after the Black Death but also instilling central mechanisms to preserve their privilege. Few Florentine men, especially the wealthy, married before the age of thirty, and this ‘heightened what we might call the erotic tension within the city’.68 Fathers didactically directed their sons away from usurping patriarchal power, and away from threatening reproductive masculine authority through what was the relatively common practice of sodomy. On the other hand, some of those fathers resisted legislative measures against sodomy, possibly fearing consequent punishment falling on themselves, their friends, and/or their sons.69 The Saint George would speak to 66

An overview is provided in Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 26–36, 46. For extracts from documents, see Gene Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), pp. 180–81, 190–209. 67

Legislation of April 1432, quoted in Rocke, p. 45. For more details and a discussion of such material as ‘an unprecedented wave of popular poetry against sodomy’ in the early fifteenth century, see his chapters 1 and 2. The civic ideology for heterosexism was put thus by Bruni in his ‘Life of Dante’ (1436): ‘Man is a social animal [...]. His first joining, from the multiplication of which is born the city, is husband and wife, and nothing can be perfect where this is lacking, for only this love is natural, legitimate and permissible’: Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, p. 87. The linkage between marriage, patrimonial preservation and expenditure on feminine adornments was often made at the time, for example in Francesco Barbaro’s ‘On Wifely Duties’, written in 1415–16 for a Medici marriage: translated in Earthly Republic, pp. 206–09. 68

David Herlihy, ‘Some Psychological and Social Roots of Violence in the Tuscan Cities’, in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities 1200–1500, ed. by Lauro Martines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 143–49 and throughout. 69

For example, in December 1421 an attempt was made to exclude unmarried men aged between thirty and fifty from public office, but it was strongly opposed: Rocke, pp. 29–30, and p. 263, n. 45. Efforts by Florentine authorities to control sodomy during the early fifteenth century were often marked by irresolution and ambivalence, as though men in power, or their

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such ambivalent fears and desires, instructive in the heroics of rescuing a damsel and donning the armour of virility, but in that very process also attracting to itself the male eyes of the Florentine populace. Various responses can be imagined for a range of male viewers standing before the latest addition to the exterior of a public building in the heart of the city. Looking upon their idealized alter ego and exemplar, younger Florentines were aroused and instructed; older men could nostalgically admire this image as though it were either their earlier selves, their sons, or their current boyfriend or fantasy figure. Donatello himself, a single man aged around thirty when Saint George was produced, would have been caught up in the same nexus of admiration and desire. The majority of his fellow citizens, but especially the richest, were his age or younger.70 In a Florence so demographically young, yet ruled by a much older élite, its art was not only predominantly peopled by male figures but was also interested in themes of youth, including narratives structured around a relationship with a father-figure. Patriarchal fatherhood is central to the Sacrifice of Isaac, the theme of the competition reliefs for the Baptistery doors by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, which are canonically placed at the origin of the Renaissance style.71 God the Father directs his earthly agent to sacrifice a beloved, beautiful son; Abraham’s obedient violence is justified as the assertion of patriarchal command over a young, unaware youth, who also does not revolt. David, the traditional prophet and ruler, is instead made the young hero who has slain the older, hirsute giant in Donatello’s marble David of 1408.72 Here too, in a statue installed in the town hall, a heavenly paternity orders human events so that nationalistic patriarchy is victorious. Venerable elders to be obeyed or tyrannical ogres to be slain, older men were fraught figures in early Renaissance art. Rather than simply celebrating ‘the burgeoning of youthful vigour in Florentine art’ as does Baron, or sentimentally describing a city devoted to children, we could instead think about the generational rivalries and idealizations at work socially and psychically in this city finding its self-conscious identity as a reinvigorated state.73 Vasari emphasized Saint George’s beauty of youth and for

friends and sons, sought to keep the issue beyond governmental regulation. See Rocke, Forbidden Friendships. 70

As David Herlihy notes: ‘In 1427 [...] fully one-half the entire population was 22 years of age or younger. [...] one-half the male population older than 14 was also younger than 35. [...] Florence and all the Renaissance cities remained remarkably young communities. [The rich were] the youngest group within the city’: ‘Some Psychological and Social Roots’. See also David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (London: Yale University Press, 1985). 71

Hartt, ‘Art and Freedom’, pp. 300–01.

72

Janson, pp. 3–7.

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others too he represents the very ‘essence of youth’.74 In a society of such youths who often lacked fathers, the symbolic laws of paternal authority were constantly being asserted through an internalization of Bruni’s kind of ‘effort’. Alberti’s ideal image of fatherly duty was one of constant surveillance, protection, improvement and inspiration. The father had to: Watch over and guard the family from all sides, to check over and consider the whole company, to examine all the practices of every member, inside and outside the house, and to correct and improve every bad habit. He ought preferably to use reasonable rather than indignant words, authority rather than power. [...] The good father never departs from the pilot of reason and the careful conduct of life. […] at the same time doing honour to oneself and glorifying one’s country and one’s house. […] children whose character is excellent are a proof of the diligence of their father, and an honour to him.

Citing an example of ‘moral discipline’ from antiquity, which then produced civic peace, Alberti dreamt in the 1430s of a classical age where ‘there was but a single will among the citizens, and that directed to making the country virtuous and disciplined [...]. The old offered their counsel, their memories, and their good example, while the young gave their obedience and imitation’.75 Father-figures in art, upper-class, paternal care in governing both the household and the city, institutionalized fathering in loco parentis at the orphanage of the Ospedale degli Innocenti designed by Brunelleschi around 1419, nationalistic fervour for the defence of a patria or fatherland, all sought the inculcation of patriarchal authority. In that very seeking, such actions and images betray the necessity for constant reiteration and rhetorical display. Anxieties about father-son relations, in both a social and psychic sense, underpin the ‘flowering’ of the Renaissance. Men and boys both played parts; Berenson, Baron and Hartt continue the staging of masculine identity, insisting on an undifferentiated essentialism that Bruni had instead recognized as a series of maskings. Donatello’s sculptural ensemble had further dramatized the tensions between the various roles by concentrating on the liminal point between being a son and acting a father. Shedding the last vestiges of femininity, entering a rite of passage into manhood, but still young adulthood, the Saint George enables a multifaceted, ambivalent range of responses from its audience. Many would have been struck by the homoerotically 73

Baron, p. 205; Richard Goldthwaite, ‘The Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture’, American Historical Review, 77 (1972), 977–1012; Phillip Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 74

‘[...] the essence of youth — his face is open and unlined, his body is slim and taut’: Vasari, Vite; Milanesi, II, 403; Bennett and Wilkins, p. 199. 75

Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. by Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 36–39, 58.

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attractive figure. Some identified with his virile composure, some with his trepidation as he dons the mantle of gravity. Identifying with a heroic man at one moment, at others they may have simply aspired to those ideals, or instead dreamt about a feminized safety when someone else performed the hard ‘effort’ of rescue. Some may have stood in a distant relationship, finding the idealization so grand and noble that they displace any fears about ambiguity or anxiety into a process of masochistic hero-worship. Some could have egotistically seen themselves mirrored in a younger image of themselves, some instead imagining their procreation by proxy as it were, seeing before them a metaphorical, obedient son made in the image of the father. Others could dream of heroic exploits waged not only with dragons and tyrants but against their own real and metaphorical fathers as they acquired the authority to replace them. Saint George battles with the strain of masculinity, the ‘effort’ of denial and self-control against a host of dragons. All viewers could take on one or more of these positions over time, as a series of fractured or variable identifications and responses. Donatello’s staging of the figure’s gaze establishes a charged set of interactions between the statue and its spectators. Saint George’s gaze, over the heads of puny viewers on mundane street level and focussed on some distant threat, sets up a mechanism of seeming denial of being an object to-be-looked-at because the Saint so insistently enacts looking himself. Yet that gaze of dawning awareness precisely does not avert the viewer’s look upon a warrior who has left himself open to close regard. Like the adoring princess in the relief below, a viewer can worship the saviour and admire his beauty. Subtle angling of his shoulders and feet is accompanied by a more overt differentiation between the Saint’s two chief pieces of armour. On our right, the shoulder is wrapped in a cloak and the elbow is bent in order to rest the hand against a large shield that is also angled back into the niche. On the left, a thickly armoured arm is further back but more tensely ready; it once held a weapon that projected over the viewer’s head. Whether sword or lance, that weapon was consciously understood to be phallic. ‘Jousting’ with a lance was a common euphemism for male sexual activity, and Boccaccio’s popular Decameron had familiarized generations of readers with the notion that Saint George utilized a phallus. Satirically defending his stories against charges of impropriety from ‘prudish ladies’, Boccaccio’s epilogue to the Decameron claimed that his language was merely that of common speech. ‘Besides, no less latitude should be granted to my pen than to the brush of the painter, who without incurring censure, […] depicts Saint Michael striking the serpent with his sword or his lance, and Saint George transfixing the dragon wherever he pleases’.76 Viewers understood that what hovered above their heads was the symbolic phallus of a young man preparing himself for action against a fearsome foe. 76

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. by G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 829–30.

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The shield, on the other hand, prevented full optical access to the heroic body. What lies behind that shield, and a relatively relaxed hand, is left ambiguous: the presence of phallic might, or the absence of manly courage are each possible conjectures. The very presence of the shield suggests absence, for protective armour only signals the encasement of a fleshly, vulnerable body. While the projecting lance indicates virility, the armour plating of masculine display hides the physical locus of fears about inadequacy. The shield of the cross goes before him, a right arm wrapped in a phallic sheath that is stiff all the way to the fingertips, and the other hand resting less vigilantly in front of his pubic area. Between a godly Father he must heed in the gable overhead and a dragon he must slay in the relief below, Saint George stands in a median position, between the extremes of phallic assertion, finding a path away from bestiality but unable to attain the patriarchal command of the one and only Father. The ‘man in the street’ is not the locus of the Saint’s fear or threat but can look on forever without deterrence. The viewer becomes masculinized in this spectatorial performance, yet is rendered less important, an onlooker or attending groom rather than a central player. Identification, however, can counteract the debasement of passive viewing so that he too becomes George-like. Then he becomes caught up in the drama of a dragon-like spectre advancing through the streets of Florence, and he must engage in the act of masquerade, becoming Bruni’s active citizen and reasoning adult struggling with his psychomachia. The temptations a viewer must try to refuse include a dilemma set up by the viewing process itself. Eroticism energizes the engagement of male object and male viewer, for ‘there is always a constant oscillation between that image as a source of identification, and as an other, a source of contemplation’.77 Like the sculpted Saint himself, the viewer too must forever perform a Bruni-like ‘effort’ at impossible stasis and idealization. A viewer subservient to God the Father, to the knightly class, to an object of adoration and intercession — and all Florentines would have been lowly according to at least some of these criteria — is involved in a process not only of identification but also of obeisance. The viewing self, as enlarged by Saint George’s nobility and beauty, is also demeaned by reminders of cultural authority above him. Integration vies with resistance, duty pulls against temptation, adult responsibility argues with youthful dependence, masculine virility oscillates with sodomitic worship, a son’s obedience wars with a rebel’s pride, phallic grandeur contrasts with penile ordinariness, civic identity struggles with psychic formation. As a symbol of guild and civic authority, the Saint George can stand not only for an individual male citizen, but for the city itself or at least its burgeoning identity as an upstart on the international stage whose opposition to Milanese and imperial expansion was only partly the cause for a sense of alterity. Rather than obey certain traditions or observe 77

Steve Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema’ (1983), in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 13.

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old conventions, Florence was entering its Oedipal struggle with history. Turning to its ‘grandfathers’ as it were, Florentine publicists like Salutati and Bruni were appealing to archaeological fragments of classical ‘form’ as proof of Florentine greatness in former times. Classicism itself could be read as a kind of psychic and historical masquerade for Renaissance society. Classical values were highly charged in terms of an inheritance, not only nationalistic but also familial. The patria was peopled by citizens who were sons reclaiming the heritage of the Fathers. In 1403 Salutati proclaimed that the Florentines ‘are of Roman race [...] sons, flesh of their flesh, bones of their bones’.78 As though the city were a feminized body to be kept virginal and intact by its male soldiers, he declared that: All the Florentines have in their minds the firm resolve to defend [the patria’s liberty] like life itself, even more than life, with their wealth and with their swords, so as to leave to their sons this supreme legacy left to us by our fathers; so as to leave it, with the help of God, entire and undefiled.

Saint George represents a dutiful son whose reference to classical values as well as the presence of ‘Gothic’ traits relates to his position as a defender of a patria that was making a new history for itself. A classical lineage is cast in familial and patrimonial terms, a matter between fathers and sons. Bruni’s Panegyric to Florence resorted to the same grand scheme and increased the gravity of what was at stake: ‘Your race and forebears [...] your founder is the Roman people’ and ‘to you, also, men of Florence, belongs by hereditary right dominion over the entire world and possession of your parental legacy’.79 Those progenitors had been republican Romans, free of the ‘unspeakable types of sexual behaviour’ and ‘perversions’ practised by a tyrannical emperor. ‘The same dignity and grandeur of the parent also illuminates its sons, since the offspring strive for their own virtue’ and ‘the expectation that the virtues of the parent will be reduplicated in the son focuses all eyes on the offspring’. From the macrocosmic to the domestic, Bruni saw Florentine perfection residing in patriarchal governance: enacted ‘with such diligence and competence’ by the magistracies, so too ‘one could not find better discipline even in a household ruled by a solicitous father’. Through such parallels, paternal rule demanded respect. A yearning for the psychic order and social stability of a mythic classical age increasingly drove a Renaissance ‘rebirth’ of idealization. In psychoanalytic terms, the ‘fatherly penis must remain a dream-object so that it can remain a signifier’.80 78

Salutati, ‘Invectiva’; Garin, p. 16, hereafter quoted from p. 14.

79

Bruni, ‘Panegyric to the City of Florence’, in Earthly Republic, pp. 149–50, hereafter quoted from pp. 153–55, 173 and throughout. 80

Ernst van Alphen, ‘Strategies of Identification’, in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 268–69; Susan Bordo, ‘Reading the Male Body’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 32 (1993), 696–737.

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That is, the reality of patriarchal arbitrariness and mundane-ness must be disguised by the power of a symbolic, phallic order. Whether or not one adopts a psychoanalytic approach to history and social analysis, the apparent invisibility and naturalness of ideological processes is vital to those exercising power. Classicism signified obedience to the fathers, both ancient founders and more recent elders reaching back to reconstruct an archaeology and genealogy of overt political significance. Any trace of classical heroism or form in Donatello’s statue of a young man striving towards virtue resonated with this patriarchal rhetoric. One of the chief characteristics of the Renaissance was indeed the revitalization of a classical heritage, but not simply because this returned culture to transhistorical, inspiring values. It had political, patriarchal and psychic import. Pretending masculinity into existence, the Saint George mimes social forms endowed by oligarchic ‘fathers’ so that the ever-elusive phallus seems to be raising itself up from youthful dormancy to virile assertion. He stands forever enacting the attempt at an impossible ideal. He tries to impersonate one of Bruni’s masks, but what we see is indeed the mask, the surface, the masquerade.81 The artificiality of masculinity, its character as a ‘display’ or ‘parade’ is evident not only in the hyperbolic action of a duel in the relief but also by the dilemma the Saint George cannot completely hide. ‘The trappings of authority, hierarchy, order, position [rather than innate distinction] make the man’. Although Bruni insisted that external trappings like gold ornaments and medallions were superfluities unnecessary to true masculinity, he was producing a new kind of masculinity which relied on more subtle insignia, the signs of rank, privilege, mental rationalization and patriarchal order. Donatello carved a Saint George whose external trappings and cogitative processes engaged in the same discursive formation of early Renaissance masculinity. A refashioning of civic identity in the early fifteenth century resulted in art and discourses that controlled sexuality, gender roles, reproductive strategies and family management. The ideal citizen was a man of duty and virtù whose marriage and fertility were microcosmic versions of an ideally governed patria or ‘fatherland’. Increasingly, citizens were cast as virile, reproductive sons defending a patriarchal, classical legacy, living in a city of archaeological remains that provided evidence of its classical foundations. Word and deed remade Florence as a polis of abstract statehood, urban order, rhetorical polish, bureaucratic efficiency, paternal protection, magnificent display, and classical grandeur. Neither the Renaissance nor masculine heroics need be taken for granted as timeless verities.

81

Most psychoanalytic work on masquerade focuses on femininity. See Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929), in Formations of Fantasy, ed. by Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 35–44, with commentary in Stephen Heath, ‘Joan Riviere and the Masquerade’, in Formations of Fantasy, pp. 45–61 (hereafter quoted from p. 56).

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Henry VII’s ‘miraculum orbis’: Royal Commemoration at Westminster Abbey 1500–1700 PETER SHERLOCK

How sodenly worldly welth dothe dekay; How wysdom thorowe wantonesse vanysshyth away; How none estate lyvynge of hymselfe can be sure, For the welthe of this worlde can not indure John Skelton, Magnyfycence1

J

ohn Skelton’s theory of magnificence affirmed orthodox Christian belief in the transience of earthly glory. This principle encouraged the exercise of restraint in the design of palaces, churches, and other commemorative objects such as tombs. In the same period, humanist scholars advocated the use of wealth and display for the building up of artists and academics, so that patrons would be famed for their contribution to the public realm in building up knowledge and beauty. Yet this ideal did not work out in practice when Skelton’s masters and their successors, the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, sought to commemorate themselves in life and death. Henry VII, England’s first Tudor sovereign, made preparations for his death, salvation, and remembrance from the moment he came to the throne in 1485. When he died some twenty-four years later he was interred in a chapel of his own creation at the easternmost end of Westminster Abbey in what is arguably England’s finest chantry chapel and one of the most successful examples of Tudor and Stuart dynastic propaganda. Not only did it situate Henry as the unquestioned representative of the

1

John Skelton, Magnyfycence, ed. by Paula Neuss (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), lines 2555–58.

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English royal line, but its appropriation by his successors enabled them also to assert their legitimacy and proclaim their achievements. The building was soon praised by a never-ending chorus of artists, antiquaries, and tourists: John Leland named it a ‘miraculum orbis universali’, and Francis Bacon thought it to be ‘one of the stateliest and daintiest monuments of Europe, both for the chapel and for the sepulchre’.2 Today the chapel remains one of the most popular features of the Abbey, visited by millions each year. Henry VII’s Chapel and its furnishings have long been studied by students of English architectural and artistic history, and those interested in Tudor images of power. This essay focuses on the funeral monuments within the chapel, exploring their form, function and meaning, and how these changed over time. In his seminal work on monuments, Nigel Llewellyn argues that these artefacts were ‘intended to register continuity and order and the honour and virtue earned in civil society by the subject’s deliberate obedience to and service of a political order sanctioned by God’.3 In the case of royal tombs, this was particularly important as new monarchs sought to legitimate their authority by locating themselves in succession to earlier sovereigns. Yet the Westminster monuments present a major problem for this theory: the only Tudor monarchs for whom tombs were completed were Henry VII and Elizabeth, and there are no monuments in Britain for any of the Stuart rulers. It was not until the nineteenth century that royal tomb building resumed, when Victoria built her mausoleum at Frognall after the death of Prince Albert.4 Employing the anthropologically informed ideas of Kantorowicz and Gieser, Llewellyn concludes from the limited evidence available that this remarkable absence of monumental commemoration was the result of a ‘negative tension’ between the need for royal monuments to be the most magnificent of all tombs, and the technical, artistic, and financial resources available to the Crown in the centuries after 1600.5 David Howarth, working from the premise that we need to understand why the extant monuments were built instead of explaining the absence of others, has compared the commemorative activities of Henry VII and his great-great-grandson 2

John Leland, Commentarii in Cygneum Cantionem (London: [n. pub.], 1545); Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1621), ed. by Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 205. 3

Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 311. 4

James II’s grave in France is marked by a modest monumental tablet: James C. Wall, The Tombs of the Kings of England (London, 1891), p. 416. 5

Nigel Llewellyn, ‘The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, For the Living’, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660, ed. by Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), pp. 218–240; and his Funeral Monuments, p. 313.

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James VI and I. Both used the chapel to authenticate new dynasties, the first asserting his right to burial near earlier monarchs, the second acknowledging his predecessor Elizabeth and rehabilitating his mother Mary Queen of Scots.6 What follows expands on these arguments, using two novel strategies. First, I am as much interested in the words used in monumental commemoration as the images, and in the relationship between the two. Epitaphs are arguably the most understudied aspect of early modern English tombs.7 Yet inscriptions, I hope to show, act as the hermeneutical key for unlocking the messages conveyed by the images, heraldry, forms and locations amongst which they are situated. Moreover, the Tudor and Stuart antiquaries who studied and recorded royal tombs tended to be far more interested in recording words than images, going so far as to supply poems and epitaphs hung on temporary banners or inscribed on coffins where no more permanent monuments existed. These men, like most Protestants convinced of the power of words, followed ancient writers such as Horace in conceiving of epitaphs as more enduring than stone or brass because they could be easily copied and widely disseminated.8 Second, in addition to the questions of politics and visual culture addressed by Howarth and Llewellyn, we need to consider more thoroughly the impact of religious beliefs and practices (both pre- and post-Reformation) on royal funeral monuments. The rationale for a chantry chapel was the offering of prayers for the souls of the dead. Owing to its royal content and the Tudor need for self-legitimation, Henry VII’s chantry had to be the finest in England. It might thus ensure immortality for its inhabitants through the princely magnificence, sacred intercession, and humanist learning displayed in its fabric, liturgies, and words. Consequently, Henry spent in the region of twenty thousand pounds upon the chapel alone.9 Even this was not 6

David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 153–90. 7

See Brian Kemp, English Church Monuments (London: Batsford, 1980), p. 11. There is an excellent survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epitaphs: Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Scodel integrates literary epitaphs with those actually inscribed on tombs, but is less concerned with understanding inscriptions in the context of monumental commemoration more broadly. For a preliminary discussion of epitaphs in this sense, see Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments, pp. 116–28. 8 The most prominent examples of this are: William Camden, Reges, reginae, nobiles et alii in ecclesia S. Petri Westmonasterii sepulti (London: [n. pub.], 1600), published in second and third editions in 1603 and 1606; John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), esp. pp. 476–78; and Francis Sandford, A Genealogical History of the Kings of England and Monarchs of Great Britain (London: [n. pub.], 1677). The first publication to include multiple illustrations of monuments was William Dugdale, The History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (London: [n. pub.], 1658), although the author makes no commentary on the imagery. 9

Howarth, p. 156.

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enough, for his son and heir Henry VIII was left with the burden of providing the actual monument for his parents, and another for his grandmother, adding several thousands more to the cost. The edifice and tombs, completed by 1520, made use of spatial, visual, and verbal elements that created a distinct representation of religious belief and royal power. The chapel’s location at Westminster Abbey had both sacred and secular significance. In the 1490s Henry VII had begun preparing a burial site at St George’s Windsor, where his Yorkist predecessor and father-in-law Edward IV lay. In 1494 he began rebuilding the Lady Chapel at Windsor as his chantry, for he planned to lie here near the relics of his uncle Henry VI, the Lancastrian king who was the subject of canonization proceedings. When in 1498 Westminster Abbey successfully petitioned for the translation of Henry VI’s remains to their church, Henry VII shifted his attention there as well. Westminster provided a better site than Windsor for Henry VII’s purposes. His infant daughter Elizabeth had been buried here in 1495, next to the shrine of Edward the Confessor in the heart of the Abbey. The entrance to the Lady Chapel passed under the chantry of Henry V, where were laid the remains of Henry VII’s grandmother Queen Katherine. There was more room for a magnificent, entirely new chapel at Westminster, and a far longer tradition of royal burial than at Windsor. Located next to the legal and administrative hub of government and close to the city of London, the Abbey was better placed for public displays of power. The King’s lengthy and detailed will is worth quoting at length, for it shows that he was fully conscious of these and other factors: And forasmoche as we haue receved oure solempe coronacion, and holie Inunccion, within our manstery of Westm’, and that within the same monasterie is the com’en sepulture of the Kings of this Reame; and sp’ially bicause that within the same, and among the same Kings, resteth the holie bodie and reliquies of the glorious King and Confessour Sainct Edward, and diuse other of our noble progenitors and blood, and sp’ially the body of our graunt Dame of right noble memorie Quene Kateryne, wif to King henry the Vth, and doughter to king Charles of ffraunce; and that we by the grace of God, p’opose right shortely to translate into the same, the bodie and reliques of our Vncle of blissed memorie King Henry the VIth ffor theis, and diuse other causes and consideracions vs sp’ially moevyng in that behalf, we Wol that whensoever it shall please our Salviour J’hu Crist to calle vs oute of this transitorie lif, be it within the same monastery; That is to saie, in the Chapell were our said graunt Dame laye buried; the which Chapell we have begoune to buylde of newe, in the honour of our blessed Lady.10

10

Will of Henry VII, begun 31 March 1509 at Richmond and finished 10 April 1509 at Canterbury, as printed from the Westminster Abbey Library copy in John P. Neale and E. W. Brayley, The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St Peter Westminster (London, 1818), I, Appendix, pp. 6–8.

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If Henry VI’s canonization had been completed and his remains actually transferred to Westminster, then the chapel would have represented the closest possible combination of religious piety and royal power. The building’s design did not seek only to link the first Tudor to England’s royal past, for it incorporated ample room for future burials. The chapel was put to its use almost as soon as it was begun. Henry demolished Westminster’s existing Lady Chapel to make room for his own, the foundation stone of which was laid on 24 January 1502/3. By tragic coincidence Henry’s queen, Elizabeth of York, died in childbirth a mere eighteen days later and was buried at the Abbey. Thomas More immediately penned a ‘ruful lamentacion’, possibly intended to be hung on a banner at her grave until the projected chapel and monument were completed. More’s verses were a farewell from the dead queen to her sisters, husband and children, thereby recounting her royal lineage. In passing More emphasized the need in the earthly realm for the King’s magnificent work at Westminster and his creation of a dynasty to be underpinned by piety so that he might attain a place after death in the mansions of heaven: Wher ar ower castellis now & owr towers? Goodly Richemond son art [th]ou gon from me. At Westmynster [th]at goodly werk of yours, Myne owne dere lord, now shall I neuer se. Almyghty god witsave to grante [th]at ye, & your children well may edyfye. My place bilded ys, for lo here I lye.11

Much of the impetus for the chapel’s construction came from Henry’s pious mother Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, who was buried there not long after her son in 1509. The King and his mother made substantial liturgical provision for their spiritual health after death. In 1490 Henry had obtained from Pope Innocent VIII the highest indulgence available for her place of burial, that of the scala coeli.12 The Countess funded several chantry chapels across the next twenty years and she and her son left money for thousands of masses in their wills.13

11 The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 15 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963–97), I: English Poems (1963), 9–13. 12 Letter of Henry VII to Innocent VIII, 21 July 1490, in Calendar of State Papers (Venetian) 1202–1509 (London: HMSO, 1864), p. 193. The King’s letter does not specify where the chapel in which his mother desired to be buried was situated. On the indulgence, see Nigel Morgan, ‘The Scala Coeli Indulgence and the Royal Chapels’, in The Reign of Henry VII: Proceedings of the 1993 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by Benjamin Thompson (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), pp. 82–103. 13

Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Consequently the chapel at Westminster had no shortage of priests to say Mass daily in the finest vestments. Symbols of temporal and spiritual power were potently intermingled in the chapel fabric. The walls, windows and roof were built in the most spectacular Perpendicular style and dressed in the new royal livery, the Tudor rose and the Beaufort portcullis. Richard Marks has suggested that no other ecclesiastical building is so strongly marked with the founder’s imprint.14 Amidst these reminders of royal power over one hundred statues of saints were erected on the chapel walls.15 The chapel and its furnishings thus represented the Tudors’ status at the apex of English society and politics while its liturgies sought the smoothest transition from the earthly to the heavenly life that the Western Church could offer. Henry VII did not live to complete his own monument, though he left directions for one in his will which mixed elements of power and piety in the same fashion as the chapel. The tomb was to include effigies of the King and Queen, and images of his six avouries or favourite saints: We Wol, that for the said Sepulture of vs and our derest late wif the Quene, whose sould God p’donne, be made a Towmbe of Stone called touche, sufficient in largieur for vs booth: And upon the same, oon ymage of our figure, and an other of hers, either of them of copure and gilte [...]. And in the sides, and booth ends of our said towmbe, in the said touche vnder the said bordure, wee Wol tabernacles bee graven, and the same to be filled with Ymages, sp’cially of our said avouries [Saints Michael, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, George, Anthony, Edward, Vincent, Anne, Mary Magdalene, and Barbara], of coper and gilte.16

Like her son, Margaret Richmond requested burial in the chapel in her will. Although her tomb was ornamented with heraldry and not her avouries, she was interred in front of the altar in the south aisle where stood a statue of her namesake Saint Margaret. In the 1510s Henry VIII went about the business of erecting the tombs of his parents and grandmother, ensuring that they would be as magnificent as the chapel by employing the Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano. The resulting effigies and tombchests could be favourably compared with continental contemporaries such as the papal tombs of Rome, while remaining intelligible to the English viewer.17 Yet the words used on these monuments did not mix elements of status and salvation like the spatial and visual elements of the chapel. 14 Richard Marks, ‘The Glazing of Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey’, in Reign of Henry VII, pp. 157–74. 15

Helen J. Dow, The Sculptural Decoration of the Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1992). 16

Will of Henry VII.

17

Alan P. Darr, ‘The Sculptures of Torrigiano: The Westminster Abbey Tombs’, Connoiseur, 200 (1979), 177–84.

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The Latin epitaphs on the tombs of Henry VII, Elizabeth of York, and Margaret Richmond make no reference whatsoever to God, religion, or the afterlife. The traditional ‘orate pro anima’ or ‘cujus anime propicietur deus’ petitions for the reader’s prayers and divine mercy on the deceased are omitted. Instead, two small tablets on the edge of the tombchest list the King’s and Queen’s respective lineages and dates of death. These plaques were in accordance with Henry’s will, which ordered that ‘in the borders of the same towmbe, bee made a conuenient scripture, conteignyng the yeres of our reigne, and the daie and yere of our decesse’.18 A more prominent inscription running around the upper edge of the tombchest claims that Henry was the greatest of all kings of his age because of his deeds and intellect, to which were added ‘the gifts of bountiful nature: a dignified brow, a majestic face, an heroic figure’.19 Queen Elizabeth was ‘beautiful, virtuous, and fruitful’.20 The text culminates by naming the greatest virtue of Henry VII and Elizabeth his wife — ‘To them, land of England, you owe Henry the Eighth’ — unsurprising given the latter Henry’s role in commissioning the monument.21 The inscription on the iron grille enclosing the tomb is arguably of greatest significance, being the most accessible to the passerby. Moreover the grille and its text were erected during Henry VII’s own lifetime, a fact partly reflected in the use of a blackletter script instead of the humanist capitals that adorn the tomb. These verses named Henry VII ‘the splendour and light of kings and the world’.22 His character was presented as that of an ideal Renaissance prince, he being ‘a watchful and wise king, a courteous lover of virtue, an illustrious, vigorous and powerful figure, one who brought forth peace’.23 Dynastic success was represented not in the production of a male heir but through the alliances forged by his daughters’ marriages to the Scottish and French kings. The final line drove home the overall message of this epitaph, which contradicted the later text on the tombchest itself: ‘Before no centuries gave you so great a king, O England, scarcely will later centuries give you a similar one’.24

18

Will of Henry VII.

19

‘Naturae dona benigna: frontis honos, facies augusta, heroica forma’. This and all subsequent citations of epitaphs are drawn from the tombs themselves, and the typescript inventory of Westminster Abbey monuments by John Physick held at the Abbey Library. Translations are my own. The best published transcriptions of the epitaphs can be found in Brayley and Neale, Westminster Abbey. 20

‘Perpulcra, pudica et foecunda’.

21

‘Henricum quib: octavum terra anglia debes’.

22

‘Regum splendor lumen et orbis’.

23

‘Rex vigil et sapiens comis virtutis amator, egregi’ forma strenu’ atq’ potens, qui pep’it pace’. 24

‘Nulla dedere prius tantu’ tibi secula regem, Anglia vix similem posteriora dabunt’.

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This combination of humanist ideals and dynastic success also appeared in the epitaph inscribed around the border of Margaret Beaufort’s tomb, composed by Erasmus about 1511.25 This text identifies her as mother of Henry VII, grandmother of Henry VIII, and a great patron of religion and learning: To Margaret Richmond, mother of the seventh Henry, grandmother of the eighth, who provided stipends for three monks of this monastery, for a grammar teacher at Wimborne, for a preacher of the holy word throughout all England, for two interpreters of sacred letters one at Oxford the other at Cambridge where she also erected two colleges for Christ and John his disciple; she died in the year of the Lord 1509, the third kalends of July [29 June].26

Neither her royal ancestry nor her four marriages were mentioned, even though her lineage provided Henry VII’s descent from Edward III and therefore his claim to the throne. These Latin inscriptions, apart from that on the grille engraved in humanist capitals, were entirely concerned with recent achievements, noble learning, and the establishment of the dynasty for future generations. The more difficult subject of past lineage was avoided, apart from the epitaphs for Elizabeth of York who could be named safely as daughter, sister, husband and mother of kings. Most surprisingly, the epitaphs spoke solely about the deeds of their subjects on earth, not the prospects of their souls in the afterlife. The resulting disparity between the content of the epitaphs and the more religiously inclined images, rituals and spaces of the chapel can be explained in two ways. First, the words were written in the most up-to-date style available in the 1510s, commissioned by Henry VII’s executors in the context of Henry VIII’s court. In contrast, the chapel’s fabric and rituals, and most likely the blackletter epitaph on the grille, were determined in the 1500s by Henry VII himself. Second, words were the most accurate means available for the expression of humanist learning and a precise statement of the legitimacy of Tudor rule. Rituals and spaces were largely shaped by the requirements of liturgy. Images, which worked via a less precise if more powerful impact than words, could combine sacred and secular concerns more readily. Moreover, the written word was not a necessary component of the funeral monument: the subject’s identity could be established through heraldry, and the provision of a chantry priest ensured that prayers would be

25 A receipt dated 27 December 1511 for twenty shillings paid to Erasmus for the text is preserved at St John’s College Cambridge: R.F. Scott, ‘On the Contracts for the Tomb of the Lady Margaret Beaufort’, Archaeologia, 66 (1915), 365–76. 26

‘Margaretae Richemomdiae [sic] septimi Henrici matri octavi aviae quae stipendia constituit trib: hoc coenobio monachis et doctori grammatices apud Wymborn perq: Angliam totam divini verbi praeconi duob: item inter praetib: litterar’ sacrar’ alteri Oxoniis alteri Cantabrigiae ubi et collegia duo Christo et Ioani discipulo eius struxit moritur an Domini M D IX III kal. Iulii’.

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offered. Nevertheless words were judged to be the best means for spelling out the power and authority of those interred in the chapel, and their successors. Henry VII’s Chapel remained the focus of royal burials from its construction until well into the eighteenth century. In joining their progenitor in death, Henry’s successors appropriated the building for themselves. Some, however, fashioned tombs elsewhere, while many adjusted their predecessors’ tombs for their own ends. As the sixteenth century passed major shifts in the relationships of rituals, images and words were registered in the royal burial projects at Westminster Abbey and elsewhere. Representations of religious belief were undoubtedly altered by the Reformation, but the deployment of princely magnificence also changed. As already noted, Henry VIII inscribed himself and his authority within Westminster Abbey by finishing his father’s commemorative projects. Plans for his own monument ultimately failed. In 1519 he contracted Torrigiano to provide a monument for himself and Queen Catherine in the Abbey, specifying that it should be at least a fourth larger than his father’s tomb, a plan which bore no fruit. In 1530 Henry appropriated Cardinal Wolsey’s half-built tomb for his own use, employing the Italian architects Benedetto da Rovezzano and Giovanni da Maiano to finish it. Work on the King’s monument continued throughout the 1530s, but it was never completed and was largely dismantled by Parliamentarians in 1645.27 Henry VIII’s tomb remained unfinished partly because of the unprecedented scale of its magnificence, designed to outdo even his father’s in size and cost. Wolsey, in preparing his monument, sought to utilize all the techniques and images available to contemporary Italian sculptors in order to display the great learning, refined classical taste, and largesse in patronage appropriate to a humanist prince. The finances and long-term commitment needed to finish such an undertaking were not forthcoming from Henry VIII or his successors. Moreover, the instability created by the King’s reformation of religion did not encourage the completion of monumental projects. The tomb of his own sister Mary, sometime Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk, was destroyed in the ransack of the Abbey of St Edmondsbury within a few years of her death in 1533.28 Henry was able to justify his monument by the ideal of magnificence, the belief that his position as the most powerful man in the realm should be reflected at his final resting-place. Nevertheless, he simultaneously made provision for extensive 27

The best accounts of the monumental projects of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey can be found in Alfred Higgins, ‘On the Work of Florentine Sculptors in England in the Early Part of the Sixteenth Century; With Special Reference to the Tombs of Cardinal Wolsey and King Henry VIII’, Archaeological Journal, 51 (1894), 129–220, 367–70; and Peter G. Lindley, ‘Playing Check-Mate with Royal Majesty? Wolsey’s Patronage of Italian Renaissance Sculpture’, in Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art, ed. by Steven J. Gunn and Phillip G. Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 261–85. 28

Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Tudor Princesses (London: Longman Green, 1868), pp. 90–92.

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traditional religious observances at his grave. His will, dated 30 December 1546 at Westminster Palace, held together these diverse concerns. The King made the usual, pious plea for a simple unmarked burial in consecrated ground, a plea, he acknowledged in typical style, which would have to be ignored. There were two reasons: first, ‘We woold not be noted an Infringer of honest worldly Policies and Custumes whenne they be not contrary to Gods Laws’ and second, ‘we woold be lothe in the Reputation of the People to do Injury to the Dignite which We unworthely are callid unto’.29 Henry was buried according to his desire at St George’s Windsor next to his third wife Jane, favoured as the mother of his male heir. Queen Jane had been buried at Windsor in November 1537 in a funeral modelled on that of Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York.30 Also buried at St George’s was Charles Brandon (d. 1545), Henry’s brother-in-law, whose preferred place of interment had been ignored in favour of the King’s wish to have his friend lie near him in death. We may deduce that by 1537 the King had settled on Windsor instead of Westminster as the location for his tomb. There is no direct evidence explaining this choice, but it may be inferred that Henry, desirous of out-doing his father’s monument, realized he could only do so in an entirely different location. At Windsor the best spaces were not yet taken, allowing room for the massive tomb appropriated from Wolsey which according to the King’s will was to be erected ‘in the Quere of our College of Windesour midway betwen the Stattes and the High Aultar’, the most prestigious position. Moreover, Henry’s tomb would position itself at the centre of the ceremonies for the Order of the Garter, providing a chivalric as well as a sacred context. Henry’s will charged his executors with finishing and setting up his monument ‘if it be not done by Us in our Lief time’, for his tomb was ‘well onward and almost made therfor alredy’. At the site of burial an altar was to be erected, ‘apparailled with all manner of thinges requisite and necessary for dayly Masses there to be sayd perpetuelly while the Woorld shall endure’. Two priests were employed to say daily Mass and to celebrate ‘four solempne Obites’ annually, while in a traditional act of charity a college of thirteen poor knights was to be founded at Windsor. As it happened the final dissolution of the chantries in the reign of Edward VI made these requests redundant and they were left unfinished along with the monument. After providing for his own grave Henry turned to the improvement of St George’s Windsor more generally, creating a royal mausoleum not unlike his father’s at Westminster. Henry VIII was fully conscious of his predecessors’ preference for Windsor as a place of burial, for he willed that ‘the Tombes and 29

Quotations from the will of King Henry VIII are taken from the will as printed in Thomas Rymer, Foedera, 20 vols (London, 1704–35), XV (1713), 110–17. 30

The heralds’ record of Queen Jane’s funeral is abstracted in Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII (London: HMSO, 1862–1932), XII (1891), Pt 2, 372–74.

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Aultars of King Henry the Sixt and also of King Edward the Fourth, our great Uncle and Grauntfather, be made more Princely in the same place where they now be at our Charges’. Edward IV had begun a princely monument at Windsor that was never completed, originally intended to include a cadaver below a silver gilt effigy.31 Despite Henry VII’s initial plans for Westminster, Henry VI had never been properly commemorated. Had Henry VIII’s instructions been followed a careful renovation of his ancestors’ tombs might have added to the magnificence and munificence of both his own tomb and reputation and cemented the transfer of power to the Tudor dynasty through the occupation of the two most important sites of English royal burial. Like those of his ancestors buried at Windsor, Henry VIII’s monument was left incomplete. This was not necessarily neglect on the part of Edward or Mary, for neither reigned for long enough or had sufficient revenue to contemplate the erection of magnificent tombs for themselves or their predecessors. The completion of Henry VII’s chapel and tomb had required the dedication of two sovereigns over a period of twenty-five years, and Henry VIII had been unable to finish his own monument despite thirty years of planning. The choice of Windsor may have been part of the problem, as royal attention and finances seemed unable to extend to both Westminster and Windsor — not one of the monumental projects conceived by fifteenth- or sixteenth-century kings buried at Windsor was completed. In contrast to the tombs of Henry VII and Henry VIII, the graves of Edward and Mary were primarily expressions of contemporary religious dilemmas not royal magnificence. In 1553 Mary Tudor allowed her brother to be buried according to the Protestant rites still in force by act of Parliament, although she herself did not attend the ceremony.32 Edward’s body, however, was interred in that most traditionalist of locations under the high altar of his grandfather’s chapel at Westminster, the first burial in Henry VII’s Chapel since his great-grandmother in 1509. This altar, one of Torrigiano’s masterpieces, sat directly in front of Henry VII’s tomb and was used for intercessory masses.33 Edward VI left no will. The documents that expressed his deathbed wishes sought the completion of his father’s tomb at Windsor and of the monuments to Edward IV and Henry VI. It is likely then that Edward himself would have preferred to be buried at Windsor with his father and mother. Mary’s choice of Westminster for her brother’s interment could be interpreted as an attempt to align herself with her Tudor grandfather while distancing herself from her father. The

31

History of the King’s Works, ed. by Howard Colvin, 6 vols (London: HMSO, 1963–82), 887–88.

II (1963), 32

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 547. 33

Jocelyn Perkins, The Chapel of King Henry VII and Its High Altar (London, 1935).

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Abbey certainly benefited from her attentions, as she restored both its monastic status and the Confessor’s shrine.34 In her own will, dated 30 April 1558, Queen Mary requested burial at Westminster Abbey, and desired that the body of her mother should be translated from Peterborough to lie beside her.35 Elizabeth did indeed bury her sister in Henry VII’s Chapel, using the Catholic Mass which was still in force, but made no move to translate the remains of Catherine of Aragon for in doing so she would have cast doubt on her own legitimacy. Mary’s grave, in the north aisle opposite Margaret Beaufort’s in the south aisle, remained without a permanent monument until after Elizabeth’s death forty-five years later. According to diarist Henry Machyn the altar stones of Westminster Abbey were taken down in April 1561 and ‘cared wher quen Mare was bered’.36 At the most material of levels, then, the relics of Mary’s revival of traditionalist religion comprised her monument. Burial and commemoration by a royal successor in the sixteenth century meant the imposition of the beliefs of the living upon the dead as well as the possession of a predecessor’s physical remains. However contradictory it may seem, Edward VI was buried under an altar used to pray for the dead and Mary’s grave was marked by redundant altarstones. These monarchs had also manipulated the remembrance of Henry VII himself. Henry VIII had maintained an annual commemoration of his father in the chapel throughout the religious changes of the 1530s and 1540s.37 In May 1548 Edward VI celebrated his grandfather’s anniversary using the new English communion service. No further such commemoration occurred until Mary’s reign, when once again the full Catholic Mass was offered for Henry VII at Torrigiano’s altar ‘accordinge to his last will and testament’ in the presence of the ‘Lord Mayre and the sheriffs with the Lordes of the Councell’.38 The service would cease forever upon Elizabeth’s accession. 34

Arthur P. Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 3rd edn (London: John Murray, 1869), pp. 171, 471–72. For the minutes of Edward’s projected will, see The Chronicle of Queen Jane and Two Years of Queen Mary, ed. by John G. Nichols, Camden Society, 48 (London: Camden Society, 1850), pp. 101–02. 35

The original of Mary’s will does not survive; a copy exists at London, British Library, Harley MS 6949. 36 The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from AD 1550 to AD 1563, ed. by John G. Nichols, Camden Society, 42 (London: Camden Society, 1848), p. 256. 37

In 1543 forty pounds were spent ‘on the observation of kyng Henry the vij dirige, beside the waxe’: noted in Acts of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster 1543–1609: Part One 1543– 1560, ed. by C.S. Knighton, Westminster Abbey Record Series, 1 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), pp. 10–11, no. 7. 38 Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors 1485– 1559 Part Two, ed. by William D. Hamilton, Camden Society, 126 (London: Camden Society, 1877), pp. 2, 116.

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Although the chapel today is often thought of as the burial ground of Henry VII’s Tudor and Stuart descendants, very few of them were in fact interred here. Prior to the reign of James VI and I, burial was almost exclusively reserved to monarchs themselves. The interaction of location, imagery, heraldry and inscriptions in royal tombs within and without the chapel produced statements about the subject’s place in the realm. Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, for example, was a potential heir to Elizabeth’s throne under the will of Henry VIII as the daughter of his younger sister Mary. Upon her death in 1559 the Duchess was buried at the Abbey, in the chapel of St Edmund and not Henry VII’s Chapel, despite her royal descent. Her tomb was placed against the eastern wall of the chapel, the first of many in the Abbey that would replace the space lately occupied by an altar.39. One might read her exclusion from the royal chapel as the result of her dubious reputation. The Duchess was mother of the unfortunate Queen Jane, whose claim to the throne was made at Elizabeth’s expense. Moreover she was notorious for her second marriage to a groom, Adrian Stokes, immediately after her first husband’s execution. Nevertheless the tomb’s location may symbolize not so much exclusion from the royal chapel (which to that date was occupied solely by kings and queens) but her exalted status as a royal princess worthy of burial in the eastern chapels of the Abbey. The imagery presented a woman of great birth and dignity. The monument’s form followed humanist taste, much like Margaret Beaufort’s, in its use of Tuscan columns and pilasters. The single effigy was robed and endowed with a coronet. As expected the Duchess’s tomb displayed the arms of her father Brandon and her husband Stokes. Most unusually, by order of the Queen herself, the Brandon arms were modified to include the royal arms in the first quarter on the Duchess’s funeral escutcheons and monument.40 The unusual nature of this heraldic statement was strangely missing from the epitaph which made no reference to her Tudor blood, stating only that she was ‘doughter to Charles Brandon Duke of Southfolke and Marie the Frenche Quene’. A Latin ‘epicedion’ expressed a different kind of doubt about the Duchess’s rank: ‘Neither decorum nor splendour nor royal names are of any avail: neither does an ample house splendid with riches assist, all flowed away, only the glory of virtue persisted’.41 The location, imagery and epitaph therefore argued that the Duchess was a princess of exceptional birth, an adherent of reformed religion, and a believer in the power of virtuous living. Aside from Queen Mary, only one recorded burial took place in Henry VII’s Chapel in Elizabeth’s reign, that of her cousin Margaret, Countess of Lennox, granddaughter of Henry VII and grandmother of James VI of Scotland. The Lennox 39

Stanley, Westminster Abbey, p. 216

40

Order of the Queen to Garter and Clarenceux dated 3 December 1559, Calendar of State Papers Domestic (1547–80) (London: HMSO, 1856), I, p. 143. 41

‘Nil decus aut splendor nil regia no’i’a prosunt: splendida divitiis nil iuvat ampla domus, omnia fluxerunt, virtutis sola remansit gloria’.

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tomb stands out as the only monument erected in Henry VII’s Chapel during Elizabeth’s reign, and the first to a person below the rank of king or queen. The Countess’s will, dated 26 February 1578, requested burial ‘in the greate churche of Westminster in the monument, sepulchre or tombe, alreadie bargeyned for, and appointed to be made and sett uppe in the sade Churche’.42 In addition, the Countess left twelve hundred pounds from the proceeds of her estate towards her funeral expenses. This was an extravagant and unrealistic bequest for in the end the costs of her burial came out of the royal coffers.43 Like many of the Queen’s royal relations the Countess of Lennox had moved in and out of favour with Elizabeth. In the 1560s she successfully plotted the marriage of her son Henry to her niece Mary Queen of Scots, then in the 1570s created another worrisome alliance by marrying her remaining son Charles to the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter. She remained Catholic and, due to her interference in Anglo-Scots relations, was often under house arrest at Sheen or imprisoned in the Tower. Yet the Queen acknowledged that in confiscating the Lennoxes’ northern estates she had deprived them of financial support, and occasionally made amends as in 1571 when she gave the Countess a present of eight hundred pounds.44 The presence of the Countess’s grave in Henry VII’s Chapel is difficult to explain and was perhaps the result of careful negotiation between Lennox and the Queen. It is clear from the epitaph that the actual tomb was commissioned and paid for by Lennox’s executor, Thomas Fowler, immediately after her death.45 Fowler had been servant and secretary to Lennox since at least 1562, and the Countess evidently had great faith in him as she gave him her jewels in keeping for her only granddaughter, 42 The remains of Charles, Earl of Lennox, the Countess’s third son, were exhumed and reinterred in the chapel in his mother’s grave according to the wish expressed in her will: London, Public Record Office, PROB 11/60, PCC 12 Langley. 43

Two copies of the account survived at London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 25. The first is entitled ‘The Charge of the buriall of the right honorable Lady Lennox in Westm. Churche’ and dated March 22 1578, the total charge ‘besyde blacks’ amounting to £54.3.4. The second list, consisting of similar entries, totals £37.3.4 ‘beside the gownes’. The Abbey was to receive the black drapery and the hearse. An account of the Countess’s funeral hearse and procession is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ashmole MS 836, pp. 245–48. 44

On the Countess of Lennox, see Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses Connected with the Royal Succession of Great Britain, 8 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1850–59), II, 271–453; Kim Schutte, A Biography of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, 1515–1578: Niece of Henry VIII and Mother-in-Law of Mary Queen of Scots (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2002). 45

‘Absolutu: cura Thomae Fowleri, huius d’nae executoris: Octobr. 24, 1578’. This inscription is no longer visible as it was obscured when the monument was repaired in the 1960s. Contrary to the statement of a number of writers on Lennox, her monument was not erected by her grandson James VI and I in the 1600s, nor is there any evidence that he paid for it. See, for example, Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments, p. 155.

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Arbella Stuart, until she should turn fourteen. He had also been involved in espionage, reporting to Cecil on the doings of the Queen of Scots in Edinburgh during the 1560s, and travelling from Scotland to London regularly in the 1570s, occasionally in disguise. After the Countess’s death, the Queen of Scots attempted unsuccessfully to command Fowler to deliver the Lennox jewels into her hands; in the end, they came to James VI in Scotland when Fowler died intestate in Edinburgh in April 1590. Fowler’s desire to pay tribute to his mistress, as well as his connections with both the English and Scottish courts, explain something of the tomb’s contents as well as its prestigious location.46 As has been shown to be the case with the chapel itself, the Lennox tomb communicated the Countess’s place in the world through its location, imagery and words. The monument was placed in the west end of the south aisle, as far away from the central focus as possible, but nevertheless within the chapel. The site emphasized Lennox’s place in the royal family, even if only on the fringes, not least because she inherited her name from the south aisle’s premier occupant, Margaret Beaufort. Perhaps the Countess or her servant Fowler were also aware of the continuing presence of the statue of Saint Margaret on the east wall. Lennox’s tomb was built in a similar style to the Beaufort monument, consisting of a full-length effigy dressed in the robes and coronet of an earl’s wife, resting on a chest surrounded by heraldry and miniature kneeling figures of her eight children. Its much greater size meant that the Countess lay above eye-level, reinforcing that she was a woman of the highest status. A notable feature was the crown placed above the head of her son Henry, depicted kneeling at the east end of the south side of the tomb. This represented his status as the King of Scots by virtue of his marriage to Mary Stuart and descent from James IV, instead of leaving him to posterity as mere Lord Darnley. The epitaphs also presented the Countess as a woman of great birth. The several inscriptions were written in capitals, and, uniquely in the chapel, in both Latin and English. The Latin epitaph consisted of a descriptive paragraph and six lines in verse. The former stated her most significant genealogical relationships — granddaughter of Henry VII, grandmother of James VI — and declared her ‘most holy character, invincible spirit and matchless patience’.47 Remarkably, the verses valued her genealogy over her character, describing her as ‘Margaret, powerful by

46

For Fowler’s career, see Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland (Edinburgh: HM General Register Office, 1900–36), II–X. Fowler should not be confused with the man of the same name who died in St Martin in the Fields in 1595, having been Comptroller of the Queen’s Works from 1556, Paymaster of the Queen’s Works from 1578, and Surveyor to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey from 1566 until his death, for whom see King’s Works, III, 87–90; and Acts, II, 32–33, no. 234, 17 November 1567. 47

‘Sanctissimis morib: et invicta animi patientia incomparabili’.

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virtue, more powerful by birth’.48 The English texts supported this claim, ignoring her personal qualities in favour of lengthy lists of her royal relations, justifying her presence in the chapel: her grandfather, uncle, cousin, brother, son and grandson were kings, while her grandmother, mother, aunt, cousins and niece were queens. The Latin verses did include reference to religion, heaven and the afterlife, for ‘those things that had been of death, she returned to death most joyfully, and sought God, for she been of God before’.49 What Elizabeth thought of her cousin’s tomb remains unknown, yet the Queen did take an active interest in other royal monuments, most notably in her Proclamation of 1560 prohibiting the defacement of tombs.50 During the 1560s and 70s there were repeated moves to complete Henry VIII’s tomb, the monument as it stood being moved from the Westminster workshops to Windsor in 1565.51 In 1573 Elizabeth restored the tombs of her grandmother’s ancestors Edward Duke of York (d. 1415) and his nephew Richard Duke of York (d. 1460) at Fotheringhay where the collegiate church was in disrepair. William Camden later complained that the tombs ‘are look’d upon as very mean’ for royal princes, since the restoration involved the demolition of the eastern end of the church and sale of its materials. Nevertheless, the Queen had asserted the importance of claiming and preserving the memory of one’s ancestors, much as her great-grandfather Edward IV had done when he erected the Fotheringay monuments to his father and uncle in the first place.52 Elizabeth’s actions must have been partly motivated by the renaissance in monumental construction which occurred as her reign progressed and the threat of iconoclasm diminished. Not only were the gentry and nobility erecting increasingly larger and more expensive tombs, but there was also a growing band of historians and antiquaries using monuments as sources for their writings and urging their preservation as significant documents in English history. At the end of her reign the increase in tourism at Westminster Abbey caused William Camden to transcribe and publish the epitaphs. By 1600 the Abbey’s dean and chapter had appointed both a keeper of Henry VII’s Chapel, as well as a keeper of the monuments who had

48

‘Margaret potens virtvte potentior ortu’.

49

‘Quae mortis fuerant soluit laetissima morti, atque deum petiit, nam fuit ante dei’.

50

Proclamation against Breakinge or Defacing of Monumentes of Antiquitie (London: [n. pub.], 1560), reprinted in Tudor Royal Proclamations ed. by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964–69), II (1969), 146–47. 51

King’s Works, III, 320–22. An undated full report to Lord Burghley detailing precisely what was needed to finish the monument from particular components to the tools and accommodation for workers survives at London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 116, piece 13. 52

King’s Works, III, 251; Howarth, p. 164; William Camden, Britannia (London: [n. pub.], 1695), p. 435.

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‘liberty at all time to show the monuments’.53 As Llewellyn has pointed out, such positions were not exclusive to the Abbey though the Westminster keepers received somewhat more attention, including that of John Donne who wrote of ‘the man that keeps the Abbey tombs / And for his price doth with whoever comes / Of all our Harrys and our Edwards talk’.54 With the accession of James VI and I in 1603, Henry VII’s Chapel entered a new phase of building. In the first four years of his reign, James commissioned expensive tombs for his predecessor Elizabeth, his rehabilitated mother Mary, and two infant daughters, Sophia and Maria. This change highlights the relative lack of monuments to sovereigns between 1509 and 1603. Howarth has suggested that, throughout her long reign, Elizabeth did not wish to dwell on her own mortality by preparing a tomb, and spent her limited finances instead on clothing her living body. Llewellyn has argued, somewhat more convincingly, that royal monuments were only of pressing importance to the founders of new dynasties, hence the major works at Westminster occurred under Henry VII and James VI and I.55 There are further explanations for Elizabeth’s reluctance to build expensive tombs. Her precarious balancing of Catholic and Puritan forces might have been upset had she built tombs for Mary and Edward. Instead, like her kingdom’s religion, she chose to preserve the chapel as it stood in 1559 with all its statues and Torrigiano’s un-Protestant altar, intermingled with signs of Tudor royal power. The tombs for the Duchess of Suffolk and Countess of Lennox, carefully placed and inscribed both to show and to circumscribe their royal rank, suggest how dangerous monuments could be in the long-running disputes about the succession. As it happened the placement of Lennox’s tomb assisted King James in demonstrating his authoritative claim to the Kingdom of England. Like Elizabeth, but for different reasons, Edward and Mary were unable to give priority to the commemoration of their ancestors. Under Edward, the abolition of purgatory meant that tombs had lost one of their principal functions, that of eliciting prayers for the dead. Moreover, Edward was a minor, and his government had more pressing concerns than the commemoration of his father and ancestors which might wait until he reached maturity. As a female monarch, once declared illegitimate and subsequently married to a foreign prince, Mary Tudor had far more cause to construct monuments to authorize what might have been the beginning of a new 53

Camden, Reges; Acts, II, 191–92, act 512 (18) dated 21 April 1600; and pp. 222–25, act 541 (7) dated 3 December 1607; London, Westminster Abbey Muniments, Register X, fols 137v–138r. Both keepers appeared to have also undertaken duties related to bell-ringing. A David Roberts, ‘one of the keepers of the monuments’ was buried in the cloisters of the Abbey on 20 March 1614/15. Stanley gives an unsourced chronology of the Abbey history which dates the appointment of a keeper of the monuments to 1593: Westminster Abbey, p. xli. 54

Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments, p. 345.

55

Howarth, p. 163; Llewellyn, ‘Royal Body’, pp. 218–40.

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dynasty in England. Translating her mother’s remains from Peterborough to Westminster was one way in which she might have asserted both her legitimacy and Elizabeth’s illegitimacy. Yet security for Mary lay first and foremost in the future, not the past, through marriage and the production of an heir. In contrast, when James Stuart became England’s king, he already had two lawfully begotten sons. James’s problem was his background — he was a Scotsman, his father had been murdered and his mother executed. One way of shoring up his authority was the transferral of his mother’s remains from Peterborough to Westminster.56 The monuments of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart erected by James are well documented. Almost as soon as he ascended the English throne, he commissioned Elizabeth’s monument, which was fashioned by Maximilian Colt from 1605 to 1607 at a cost of nine hundred sixty-five pounds. Following the death of his two young daughters in 1607, two small monuments were commissioned representing Princess Sophia in a cot and Princess Maria reclining on a tombchest with epitaphs expressing their royal parents’ sorrow. Meanwhile, Mary’s rather larger tomb was begun in 1606 by Cornelius Cure and completed by William Cure in 1613.57 As his ancestors had done, James manipulated the space of the chapel and the visual and verbal components of the tombs to his and his successors’ advantage. Recent research by Julia Walker has proved that Queen Elizabeth was initially buried in Henry VII’s own tomb in the centre of the royal chapel. James, however, removed her to a less prestigious position in the north aisle where Mary Tudor lay.58 He placed the remains of his mother the Queen of Scots in the south aisle, between the graves of the two Margarets, her aunt and mother-in-law Lennox and her Beaufort great-great-grandmother. Maurice Howard has suggested that James used these burials to reconcile the differences of the past which threatened his inheritance of the throne. He points out that the north and south aisles came to resemble the two distinct branches of Henry VII’s descendants, the Tudors and Stuarts.59 Yet in 1607 James’s infant daughters were interred in the north aisle just east of Elizabeth’s 56

A copy of the letter from James to the Dean of Peterborough (dated 28 September 1613) ordering the remains’ removal is at Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 836, fol. 277r. 57

For an extended treatment of these tombs and their documentation, see Adam White, ‘A Biographical Dictionary of London Tomb Sculptors c. 1560–c. 1660’, Walpole Society, 61 (1999), 1–162 (pp. 30, 34, 36, 43–44); and for further details Adam White, ‘Church Monuments in Britain c. 1560–c. 1660’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1991), pp. 122, 132. 58

Julia Walker, ‘Bones of Contention: Posthumous Images of Elizabeth and Stuart Politics’, in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. by Julia Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 252–76. For a further defence of this claim, see Julia Walker, The Elizabethan Icon 1603–2003 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 25–27. 59

Maurice Howard, ‘“The holie companie of heven” Henry VII’s Chapel’, History Today, 36 (1986), 36–41.

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grave, where distinctive monuments were erected. In 1612 his son and heir, Henry Prince of Wales, was buried with his grandmother Mary in the south aisle. Next James’s consort Anne was buried in the south aisle near their daughters in 1619, although neither she nor Prince Henry had permanent monuments. James did not establish separate Tudor and Stuart aisles, for his immediate family represented the union of England and Scotland, of Tudor and Stuart, and were thus buried throughout the chapel. In separating his predecessor and mother in death, he bestowed upon them an equality they did not enjoy in life. Finally at his death James was exalted above them all, for he was buried not with his wife, mother or son but beside Henry VII himself in the chapel’s centre, where Elizabeth had briefly lain before him.60 The monuments to Elizabeth and Mary were marble versions of the furniture of contemporary funerals, consisting of an effigy on a hearse under a great canopy, all surrounded with heraldry and inscriptions. Both projected magnificent images of powerful women, although Mary’s tomb was slightly larger than Elizabeth’s. Howarth has observed the ‘nun-like purity’ of Mary’s effigy, transforming her from a disastrous monarch into an innocent victim. Elizabeth was depicted as she was in death, an elderly queen, if a far more powerful one than Mary had ever been.61 As with the chapel’s other monuments, it was the numerous epitaphs to Elizabeth and Mary which fully revealed the tombs’ meanings and the purposes of their patron James. Almost every panel on the monuments bore inscriptions, entirely unstudied. The epitaphs to Elizabeth included two short identifying texts, one giving her date of death, age, and length of reign, and the other noting that her sister Mary was buried beside her. The longer text at the east end of the monument elaborated the achievements of the Queen. She restored religion to its ‘primitive purity’, gave peace to the realm, and increased the country’s wealth, but above all she was ‘Queen, conqueror, triumpher’.62 The major text on Elizabeth’s tomb was placed at the west end of the canopy, and is the first visible inscription as one enters the north aisle. It proclaimed her to be an incomparable prince, through her titles as Queen of England, France and Ireland, her descent from Henry VIII, Henry VII, and Edward IV, and her dual status as ‘mother of her country’ and ‘nurse of religion and learning’.63 This panegyric was followed by a prominently positioned statement that ‘James, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, heir of her virtues and kingdoms, to her so welldeserving, piously erected this’.64 The monument, even as it achieved its primary

60

Howarth, pp. 170–71; Stanley, Westminster Abbey, pp. 651–88.

61

Howarth, pp. 166–69; Llewellyn, ‘Royal Body’, pp. 227–28.

62

‘Religione ad primaevam sinceritatem restaurata’; ‘regina victrix, triumphatrix’.

63

‘Patriae parenti’; ‘religionis et bonarvm artivm altrici’.

64

‘Iacobus, magnae Brittaniae, Franciae, et Hiberniae Rex, virtutum et regnorum haeres, bene merenti pie posuit’.

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purpose of commemorating Elizabeth, confirmed James as her successor in every way. James enriched his mother’s tomb with a similar set of inscriptions, yet due to her troubled history these had a sharper edge. Just as Mary’s tomb was physically larger than Elizabeth’s, so there was twice the amount of writing. Mary’s titles were given as might be expected — Queen of Scots and Dowager Queen of France — but she was also proclaimed to be the ‘sole heir’ of Henry VII, a claim sustainable in her lifetime only if one overlooked Elizabeth herself.65 The apparent veracity of this assertion was established by a comprehensive listing of her ancestry, emphasizing that her grandmother Margaret Tudor was ‘the elder born daughter’ of Henry VII.66 Like Elizabeth’s, Mary’s epitaph established her son’s claim to the British throne through her own: ‘[She was] sure and undoubted heiress to the Crown of England while she lived and mother of James, most powerful sovereign of Great Britain’.67 The tomb did not mince its words when it came to Mary’s execution. In what now reads like a warning to her unfortunate grandson Charles, the epitaph stated that ‘she was struck down by the axe, a dangerous example to kings’.68 Once again James featured prominently amidst the memory of Mary’s forbearance in death: ‘With her son James the hope of the kingdom and of the future […] she exchanged the lot of a transitory life for the eternity of a heavenly kingdom’.69 As if these lengthy texts were not enough to rehabilitate an executed queen, James added some twenty elegiac couplets on the north side of the tomb. They emphasized the abhorrent nature of Mary’s execution, passing a heavy judgment upon Elizabeth and her government in stark contradiction to the noble message of Elizabeth’s own monument just a few metres away. The abhorrence of regicide was again represented, this time transformed by the glorious future of the Stuart dynasty. The closing couplets reworked the well-known epitaph of the Empress Matilda, ‘great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring’, to pronounce that Mary was ‘great by marriage, greater by her birth, but greatest by her offspring’.70 To banish the last doubts as to Mary’s right to the English throne and her quasi-divine sanctity, her monument was surmounted by the texts from 1 Peter 2: ‘Christ suffered for us, leaving an example so that you should follow his footsteps. He did not abuse as he 65

‘Haeredis unicae’.

66

‘Maiori natu filiae’.

67

‘Coronae Angl’ du’ vixit certae, & indubitatae haeredis, et Iacobi Magnae Brittaniae Monarchae potentissimi matris’. 68

‘Infesto regibus exemplo, securi percutitur’.

69

‘Iacobo filio spem regni, & posteritatis […] vitae caducae sortem, cum coelestis regni perennitate comutavit’. 70 ‘Magna viro, maior natu, sed maxima partu’. Matilda’s epitaph on her tomb at BecHellouin abbey church reads ‘ortu magna, viro major, sed maxima partu, hic jacet Henrici filia, sponsa, parens’. I am grateful to Judith Richards for drawing my attention to this text.

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was abused; he did not lie when he was questioned; but he surrendered to the one who judges justly’.71 After Mary’s tomb was completed, no other monuments for Tudor descendants were built in the chapel. James I showed no interest in providing a tomb for himself. In any case his name was already inscribed on the grandiose tombs of the many royal women relegated to the aisles. These epitaphs were sufficient to emphasize his pivotal patriarchal position as the first adult male monarch of England and Scotland since the 1540s. His commemorative practices in Henry VII’s Chapel demonstrated that he had the power to determine who was and who was not remembered, and how past events would be represented. Subsequently in 1624 he allowed his Stuart cousin Ludovick, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Steward of the Royal Household, to be buried in a large tomb immediately south of Henry VII’s monument. James thus asserted that the chapel was now a Stuart and British foundation, not merely Tudor and English. Ludovick, who possessed not a drop of Tudor blood, was a Prince of Scotland alone.72 In the Stuart period different forms of royal commemoration took precedence over funeral monuments. Elaborate funeral processions and hearses were provided for James, Anne and their son Henry Prince of Wales, the ruinous expense leading Howarth to suggest that the royal coffers simply could not support both funerals and monuments.73 Epitaphs were not inscribed in stone but on brasses affixed to coffins and hidden away in the chapel’s vaults, or they were inscribed on banners which were publicly displayed until they decayed with time. When the religious function of monuments was removed, when they ceased to operate as focal points for chantries, other forms such as Van Dyck’s paintings or Inigo Jones’s buildings might prove to be better vehicles to ensure that the memory of the patron’s magnificence endured. James’s use of the chapel to bestow royal favour was continued by his descendants. Charles I wished to provide a monument to his friend and father’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, but he was warned by his Privy Council that this would reflect badly upon him as he had not done so for his own father.74 The King subsequently allowed Buckingham’s widow to pay for a tomb bearing an epitaph which rivals that of the Queen of Scots for its audacity in lamenting the unpopular Duke. Charles would suffer his father’s fate at the hands of Charles II, who after the 71

‘Christus pro nobis passus est relinquens exemplum, ut sequamini vestigia eius. Qui cum malediceretur non maledicebat, cum pateretur non comminabatur, tradebat autem iudicanti iuste’. 72

On the Richmond and Lennox monument, and that of the Duke of Buckingham discussed below, see Charles Avery, ‘Hubert Le Sueur, the “Unworthy Praxiteles” of King Charles I’, Walpole Society, 48 (London: 1982), 135–209; White, ‘Dictionary’, pp. 80, 82. 73

Howarth, p. 177.

74

Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 457–58.

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Restoration built no tomb for his father but provided a lavish funeral and burial in the chapel for the Duke of Albemarle, who as plain George Monck had engineered his triumphant return to England.75 In the interregnum the chapel’s space provided a site for similar manipulations of power and representations of authority. In 1643 the Parliament ordered the demolition of the ‘monuments of superstition and idolatry’ within the Abbey. The only funeral monument actually taken down was that of Edward VI, removed in 1644 by Sir Robert Harley because it formed part of Torrigiano’s altar.76 In 1659 Oliver Cromwell was buried in the chapel at the easternmost end, only to be disinterred along with twenty associates in 1661. The consecration of bishops to provide for the restoration of episcopacy in 1660 also took place in the chapel.77 Through all these changes the chapel remained the chief place of royal burial and the centre of dynastic identity. In 1674 what were believed to be the bones of the fifteenth-century Princes in the Tower, Edward V and Richard of York, were found by stonemasons working on one of the Tower’s staircases. Charles II had the remains interred next to his infant aunts Sophia and Mary Stuart, and erected a tablet telling the story of their discovery. In a style emulating the chapel’s other tombs, he emphasized his own nobility in the inscription which concluded ‘Charles II, a most compassionate King, pitying their cruel fate, paid in full for the funeral observances for these unhappy princes among their ancestral monuments’.78 The King’s action suggested a seamless continuity between his own house and that of York, overlooking two hundred years of dynastic juggling, declaring both Edward V and himself to be the true Kings of England in opposition to those like Richard III whom the monument described as ‘a treacherous usurper of the kingdom’.79 Charles’s commemorative act also completed the division of the chapel into two halves representing the barren and fertile members of the royal family. The queens, princes and princesses buried in the north aisle died childless, while their counterparts in the south aisle were responsible for giving birth to Britain’s rulers. From its foundation in 1500s through to its re-appropriation in the 1600s, Henry VII’s Chapel and its tombs balanced displays of princely magnificence with 75

The publication of Francis Sandford’s Genealogical History was intended to encourage Charles to rectify this oversight, and plans for a tomb at Windsor were projected but never begun: Howarth, pp. 183–89. Albemarle’s funeral monument in the Chapel was not, however, erected until the 1740s. 76 Jodocus Crull, Antiquities of St Peter’s or the Abbey Church of Westminster, 3rd edn (London, 1722), II, Appendix 2, p. 14. 77

Stanley, Westminster Abbey, pp. 522, 633; Laura L. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 78

‘Carolus II. Rex clementissimus, acerbam sortem miseratus, inter avita monumenta, principibus infelicissimis iusta persolvit’. 79

‘Perfidus regni praedo’.

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expressions of religious belief. The early Tudors’ desire for magnificence caused religious concerns to be largely subordinated to humanist and dynastic themes in their monuments, some two decades before the break with Rome or the dissolution of the monasteries threatened traditionalist modes of commemoration. This relationship between splendour and piety continued to change with later monarchs, for during the sixteenth century burial became a means of defying a previous sovereign’s religious convictions. Meanwhile magnificence became more difficult to achieve as rulers found themselves unable to fund projects equal to Henry VII’s efforts or sufficiently grander than the monuments erected by their subjects. In the seventeenth century, James VI and I’s massive programme of monumental commemoration rewrote the Tudor past and appropriated the chapel for the new Stuart dynasty. The status of each person buried there, in his or her past life on earth and future in heaven, was represented through the location, images and epitaphs chosen for their tombs. Techniques for expressing royal authority in commemorating the dead at Westminster (and beyond) included the translation of ancestral remains to more prestigious locations, the renovation and improvement of earlier royal monuments, and the commemoration of the preceding monarch or of favourite courtiers. Throughout, the need to maintain public belief in the sovereign’s power and legitimacy frequently overrode humanist concerns about the proper deployment of magnificence. The commemorative practices of England’s early modern rulers both supported and undermined the rhetoric of Skelton and his ilk. Henry VIII’s grandiose tomb came to nothing, but the ‘worldly wealth’ of Henry VII’s Chapel did not ‘sodenly dekay’ and has kept the Tudor and Stuart dynasties in the forefront of English collective memory for almost four centuries.

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Gardens of Love in Venetian Painting of the Quattrocento JAYNIE ANDERSON

I

n October 1947 Sir Daryl Lindsay described to the Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, a recent Felton acquisition:

The Fountain of Love [see figs 1, 3–7] attributed to the School of Pisanello, and certainly from North Italy (£5625) was obtained as the result of a sustained and successful search for a good primitive. It is not a masterpiece, but it has something of the scale and decorative richness of a fine tapestry. It is in the style known as International Gothic — the common artistic language of courtly society of Catholic Europe. The lady filling her syringe from the mystic waters belongs to mediaeval allegory; but at the same time, she and her companions in their gorgeous attire, forecast the new personal and worldly consciousness of the Renaissance.1

This article was written while I was a visiting professor at the Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, in the first half of 2001. There I have profited from conversations with many scholars, especially Eve Borsook, Patrizia and Francesco Fachin, Jerzy Miziolek and Catherine Park. The text has gained from critical comments made by Hugh Hudson, Luke Morgan, Paul Paffen, John Payne, Carl Villis, Charles Zika and most of all Richard Pau. Tatiana and Pietro Scarpa have generously allowed me to study their painting. 1

Felton file, 1945–1948, Melbourne, archive of the National Gallery of Victoria. It is first mentioned in Roberto Longhi’s Viatico per Cinque Secoli di Pittura Veneziana (Florence: Sansoni, 1946), p. 51, illus. 28. There it is described as a ‘Fragment of a cassone depicting a subject from a novel’, and attributed to a follower of the Vivarini, Antonio Rosso da Cadore. This was shortly followed by Daryl Lindsay’s note in the Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria, 3.2 (1948), 1–3. The panel is discussed in successive editions of Ursula Hoff’s catalogue of European Paintings before 1800 in the National Gallery of Victoria, 1st edn (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1961), pp. 135–37, until the most recent 4th edn (1995), pp. 306–08 (hereafter the 4th edn will be cited). It was reproduced by Michael

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The painting was acquired, on the advice of Sir Kenneth Clark, from a private English collection at Burton Pynsent, Somerset, through a London dealer, Tomás Harris.2 How it arrived in Somerset is unclear, but numerous collectors had lived there, from the eighteenth century, including Sir William Pitt. Within the context of Venetian art the painting was even rarer than Lindsay supposed, for it belongs to a very small group of secular panels to survive from the Venetian quattrocento, all from the same workshop. For historians of Venetian painting, the Melbourne Garden of Love is as important a picture as Bottticelli’s Primavera is for the Florentine Renaissance. Both works emerge from a similar secular context and are furniture paintings that adorned settings of aristocratic leisure. About a decade earlier, when he had been Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Kenneth Clark was looking for amusing pictures by Renaissance artists for the gallery. On 2 August 1933, he wrote to his mentor, Bernard Berenson, to say that he had just bought the Forest Fire, by Piero di Cosimo for Oxford. Clark explained to Berenson: ‘It will make a good pendant to the Uccello Hunt, and will amuse the young. With those two pictures they can’t complain that the Old Masters are dull’.3 Clark’s acquisition for Melbourne was an equally lively picture, and just like the Uccello and the Piero di Cosimo in Oxford, the interpretation of such an engaging scene has proved perplexing. Like some major acquisitions made by the Felton Trustees for the National Gallery of Victoria, the panel has been neglected in recent international literature, a

Levey, and discussed briefly by Rodolfo Pallucchini in his monograph on the Vivarini family: Early Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 127; Pallucchini, I Vivarini: Antonio, Bartolomeo, Alvise (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1960), p. 86. Pallucchini believed that the panel must have originated directly from the circle of Antonio, in the sixth and seventh decades of the quattrocento. The deliberations about acquisition are in the archive of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. A letter from Daryl Lindsay to A.J.L. Mcdonnell, on 7 November 1947 records: ‘You will have heard by cable the approval of the Pisanello School picture […] the picture, on account of the lower parts of the figures being cut off, is a little unsatisfactory in composition, and the central formation rather overbearing, but as a period picture its other good qualities outweigh these, and I plumped hard for it’. Letter from the Felton buyer, A.J.L. McDonnell to the Felton Committee, 6 October 1947: ‘Sir Kenneth has further agreed to recommend to the Felton Committee for purchase, a large panel of the School of Pisanello, the Garden of Love. One of the comparatively few profane pictures of this period that is likely to be available, it exemplifies very well the life of the period, and would fill most adequately a gap in the Gallery’s collection. This picture, to my mind, is a most attractive one’. 2 It is reproduced in the dining room at Burton Pynsent, in John Payne, ‘Exploring a Fifteenth-Century Garden: A Restoration Uncovers the Past’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, 35 (1994), 7–20. For more on the house see, Country Life, 6 October 1934, pp. 360–66. 3

From the archive of Bernard Berenson’s letters, Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Florence, Settignano.

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Fig. 1. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, The Garden of Love. Oil, tempera and gold on panel, c. 1465–70. By permission of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

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neglect compounded by the fact that it was not on display between 1981 and 1995, when it was in conservation. From 1995, again on display following John Payne’s restoration, the panel initiated discussion about its authorship and meaning.4 The complex condition had not been previously understood, except that it had been cut along the bottom edge. Radiographic evidence revealed that there was in all likelihood a sixth male figure situated on the extreme right-hand side, creating gender balance in the composition (figs 3 and 7). The figures were originally disposed as three couples, each intent on playing their parts in an amorous game. Payne also publishes a reconstruction where he argues that the figures were originally conceived as full length. How much was removed from the base of the Melbourne panel is a matter of conjecture, and Payne may be incorrect in his reconstruction. The dimensions of the Melbourne panel are close to those of a related panel in Venice (fig. 2), which suggests that less has been removed along the base than Payne supposes. Both panels measure 152.5 cm in height, the one in Venice being 233.5 cm in length and the Melbourne panel 239 cm. Payne also argues that the Melbourne panel was once in the same architectural setting together with a set of five large panels from the same Vivarini workshop, three of which represent the legend of Paris and Helen and are now in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore (figs 8–10). The dimensions of the figures reveal that they were not conceived together.5 As Payne explains, on the lower left-hand side of the Baltimore panel of the Reception of Helen at Troy by Priam and Hecuba (fig. 9), an area contains renewed timber. Renewed timber also occurs in the lower right-hand corner of the Melbourne panel, in the space that the missing sixth figure of a man would have occupied (fig. 3). Only traces of the missing man’s hat are shown in the X-radiograph. This might suggest that both panels were formerly placed side by side, or back to back, at an early stage in their existence. At that time they were altered to allow for some architectural element. The deletion of the man on the right destroyed the original symmetry of the Melbourne composition. Such symmetry was never banal in the quattrocento, so that the alteration, if it did occur early as Payne supposes, this would have amounted to a censoring of the image. Although the subject-matter of the Paris and Helen cycle in Baltimore does not relate conceptually to the Melbourne panel, Roberto Longhi proposed that the Baltimore panels belonged together stylistically with the Melbourne/Venice spallieri, an argument that prevails.6 4 I am grateful to John Payne for showing me the panel when it was in conservation, and have enjoyed our discussions of the painting. 5 For the best account, see Federico Zeri, Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1976), pp. 237–42. 6 First argued by Longhi (p. 51), and followed by Luigi Coletti, Pittura veneta del ‘400 (Novara: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 1953), p. 44 and p. 81, n. 55. Pallucchini doubts that the two groups were ever together (pp. 81, 86). Hoff, pp. 306–08.

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Fig. 2. Studio of Antonio Vivarini, A Trellis of Roses in the Garden of Love. Tempera on panel, c. 1465–70. Collection of Pietro and Tatiana Scarpa, Venice.

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The other panel of a rose trellis in Venice (fig. 2) is closer to the Melbourne panel in every detail of its execution and subject-matter than to the three in Baltimore. 7 So similar are the Melbourne and Venice panels that they must have been conceived as part of the same decorative ensemble. One is a picture in which a fountain is the main protagonist, while the Venetian panel is about a rose garden, the two together forming a hortus conclusus. The painting of the rose trellis has no figures, and appears to twenty-first century eyes as a magical garden, conceived by a fifteenthcentury ancestor of Magritte.8 Unlike the Melbourne panel the rose bower in Venice is in excellent condition, and has not been cut. Along the lower edge of the Venetian panel there is an architectural border of white marble arches with polychrome insets. There is a similar polychrome marble construction in the Melbourne panel. The marble polychrome is predictive of later Venetian architecture by Mauro Coducci. Yet it may be more directly informed by the marble on Alberti’s exquisite reproduction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Edicola di Santo Sepolcro), made for Giovanni Rucellai, for his chapel in Florence (1467) annexed to the church of San Pancrazio. Alberti decorated the Sepulchre with marble panels in white, green and porphyry. In the Venetian panel the half-moon marble arches contain polychrome insets of simulated blue and green marble. The marble decoration was probably designed for the room for which the panels were made, and may have echoed the architecture of the room itself. A drawing by Jacopo Bellini in the album in the British Museum shows a similar combination of a foreground fountain, and a background with Venetians at table in a rose bower.9 If so, the Melbourne panel was part of the same room decoration, as the Baltimore panels have similar marble polychrome insets. Tiny leaves of paler green-fringed grass are painted at the top edge of the marble between the landscape and the architecture, along the entire edge of the composition. This important detail means that we are standing in the sunken enclosure with respect to the garden. The marble enclosure is to be read as sunken beneath a landscape, located sotto terra. Could the panels have once decorated a bathroom, or pool, or fountain, such as represented in the hexagonal structure, where Poliphilo encounters the sculpture of Venus suckling Cupid on the tomb of Adonis in that famous romance, published in Venice, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499)? Such a geometrical bath structure is to be found for example in the Florentine panel of Diana and Actaeon, in the Uwe Opper collection at Kronberg, outside 7 This panel was formerly in the collection of Tomás Harris, London, together with the Melbourne panel. It was then in the collection of Maximilian Etchecopar, Buenos Aires, and sold at Sotheby’s, New York, 10 January 1991, Lot 9. It was bought by Pietro Scarpa, Venice, in 1992. 8

At some earlier stage in the painting’s history figures were added, and then subsequently removed. 9

Jacopo Bellini, Album of Drawings; London, British Museum, fol. 97.

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Fig. 3. John Payne’s reconstruction of the six figures in the painting of The Garden of Love, following his restoration in 1994.

Fig. 4. Detail of the protagonists on the right-hand side of The Garden of Love (fig. 1 above).

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Fig. 5. Detail of the protagonists on the left-hand side of The Garden of Love (fig. 1 above).

Fig. 6. Detail of the allegorical female figure of Fortune upon the fountain in The Garden of Love (fig. 1 above).

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Fig. 7. X-ray of the right-hand side of The Garden of Love (fig. 1 above).

Fig. 8. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini (attrib. in Baltimore to the Master of the Stories of Helen), The Meeting and Elopement of Paris and Helen (currently titled The Embarkation of Helen for Cythera), in The Legend of Paris and Helen. Panel painting, c. 1440–70. By permission of the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.

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Fig. 9. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini (attrib. in Baltimore to the Master of the Stories of Helen), Reception of Helen at Troy by Priam and Hecuba (currently titled The Abduction of Helen and Companions), in The Legend of Paris and Helen. Panel painting, c. 1440–70. By permission of the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.

Fig. 10. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini (attrib. in Baltimore to the Master of the Stories of Helen), The Departure of the Trojan Women from Troy (currently titled Reception of Helen at Troy by Priam etc.), in the Legend of Paris and Helen. Panel painting, c. 1440–70. By permission of the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.

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Frankfurt am Main.10 Could the function of the room have been similar to that of the frescoes by Benedetto Bembo in the Stanza votiva, at the Castello di Torrechiara, Langhirano, near Parma, a cycle dedicated to the marriage of Pier Maria Rossi for Bianca Pellegrini di Arluno in 1463? These parallels suggest that the Melbourne and Venice panels were once in a similar room, perhaps opposite one another. The painting of the trellis in Venice is composed of three large boards, and two smaller panels on either side. An inscription from an underlying layer of the painting is just visible in the area of the sky on the left side of the panel. It could be a working annotation, an instruction to the painter. It reads: ‘Amores No 2’, suggesting that the artist indicated that this was the second panel in a series about love. An X-radiograph of the painting shows that the artist originally left in reserve the composition of the arbour sky in the form of regular triangular peaks. He later refashioned them with leaves, just as in Antonio Vivarini’s panels of the Life of Christ in the Ca d’Oro Museum, Venice, where trees form points behind the architectural elements.11 The roses and leaves in the Venetian panel are a motif that emerges in the workshop of the Vivarini, first in the Santa Sabina Polyptych in the chapel of San Tarsio, in the church of San Zaccaria, in the panels of Santa Sabina and Saint Achilles. There is a striking similarity of the leaves with their pointed fringes in a lighter green. In the Venice panel there is a strong structure of nine pruned vertical stakes, which order and contain the flourishing arbour of roses. The infinite number of roses are represented as buds, as buds opening, and as full flowers, both red and white, but never dying, never decaying. On the right-hand side of the panel the roses are all red, perhaps to denote that they are in the shade, as the light comes from the right-hand side and shines on the white roses on the left. The roses are an affirmation of life. As Boccaccio reveals in the opening sections of the Decameron (c. 1349), and elsewhere in his writings, a garden was a place to flee from the plague, to tell stories about life itself as an escape from death. The Venetian panel represents such a setting for the pursuit of storytelling in a garden, known as ‘ragionare nel giardino’, an alternative to storytelling in churches, or in the cycles of the Triumph of Death.12 In such a reading the Venice panel becomes a metaphor for Eden, a significant theatrical backdrop for the affirmation of life that is presented in the Australian companion piece. That the Melbourne Garden of Love, together with the companion piece in Venice, originally formed part of a larger decorative ensemble with the Baltimore 10

Reproduced in Hellmut Wohl, The Paintings of Domenico Veneziano ca. 1410–1461: A Study in Florentine Art of the Early Renaissance (New York: New York University Press, 1980), pp. 157–58, pl. 29. 11

Pallucchini, p. 56.

12

See the stimulating arguments proposed by L. Battaglia Ricci, Ragionare nel Giardino: Boccaccio e i cicli pittorici del Trionfo della Morte (Rome: Salerno, 1987); also E. M. Beck, Singing in the Garden: Music and Culture in the Tuscan Trecento (Lucca: LIM Editrice, 1998).

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panels seems unlikely. The condition of the panels in Baltimore is complex. Their conservation history has not been researched to the same degree as the Melbourne panel, but it is evident that there is considerable repainting. What cannot be doubted is that the same artist was responsible for the entire group of paintings. To make sense of Payne’s hypothesis, they could have been executed for adjoining rooms of the same palace, which were later cut for an architectural aperture between the different rooms. Everything about the Melbourne panel (like the companion pieces in Baltimore) is problematic, from its authorship to its interpretation. It has been attributed to no less than nine artists, and the haunting subject-matter has eluded explanation.13 It is now described as The Garden of Love from the workshop of Antonio Vivarini, and this is still the most plausible attribution to date. For, as we shall see, the Vivarini workshop was a complex organization with major artistic personalities involved in the production of altarpieces, always in partnership with one another. At no point did a single artist sign an individual work alone. These are the only secular works to survive from the Vivarini bottega. The style is such a cocktail of Venetian and Florentine components that one supposes this painter must have been a Florentine artist working in the Vivarini studio, or a Venetian who had emigrated to Florence. The Melbourne panel has been usually interpreted, following Ursula Hoff, as an allegory of chastity, the female figure on the fountain being compared in Hoff’s interpretation to allegorical figures of chastity in Florentine prints.14 Yet the allegorical figure has the characteristic forelock of the goddess of fortune, whom she more closely resembles, as in Dürer’s famous print of Nemesis. For other scholars the protagonists in The Garden of Love, seemingly disposed as three couples (once it is realized that a figure on the extreme left has been eliminated in an early restoration), seem less chaste. As Paul Watson has observed: The tradition to which this Venetian Garden of Love belongs indicates that Antonio Vivarini did not really have chastity foremost in his thoughts […] at the left a lady strokes a bright-eyed dog, a familiar erotic symbol; by no stretch of the imagination should this beast be seen as an ermine, the traditional emblem of Chastity from Petrarch’s Trionfi onwards’15

It is more plausibly a lapdog, a creature susceptible to amorous play, or an emblem of fidelity in love, as the motif occurs at the feet of Illaria del Carretto in her tomb by Jacopo della Quercia at Lucca. The interpretation of the motif of a woman holding a little dog has been much discussed in recent literature on gardens. A widely circulated French poem from the 13 The artists include Carlo Crivelli, Antonio Rosso da Cadore, Pisanello, Benedetto Bembo, Dario da Pordenone, Master of the Stories of Helen, Negroponte and the studio of Antonio Vivarini. For a chronological history of proposed attributions, see Payne, p. 18. 14

As argued by Hoff in the most recent edition of European Paintings, pp. 306–08.

15

Paul Watson, The Garden of Love in Tuscan Art of the Early Renaissance (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1979), p. 123.

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trecento, entitled La Chastelaine du Vergier, or La Dama del Verziero, relates that a knight was in love with a lady, and came every day to her garden. He did not move from a corner in her garden, until he saw her little dog walk across the garden. Then he went without fear into her room.16 The story enjoyed considerable success for centuries, and is reflected in many ivories, everyday household objects, like combs and mirrors, as well as in later literature, like Tristan and Isolde. In Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem Tristan meets a little dog, called Petitcrieu, who wears a bell. The sound of the bell makes him forget his obsession with Isolde. Yet Tristan abducts the dog and gives it to her as a present, a memento of their passion.17 The popularity of such stories, and their reflection in numerous quotidian objects, suggests that the representation of a woman holding a dog could be perceived as a citation of the tradition, and that she is here represented as a woman dreaming of her lover. The Melbourne panel painting depicts a narrative about love in an enclosed Venetian garden. On the one hand it is a depiction of aristocratic lovemaking within a courtly setting, one that was meaningful to the patron, but which is difficult to reconstruct. On the other hand, the panel belongs to a genre subject, known as the Garden of Love, a symbolic universal representation of love.18 The subject of the Garden of Love became fashionable for the first time in the late fourteenth century in Germany and Italy. It occurs first on birth plates (deschi da parti), on which food and sweets were presented to a newborn child, as in a birth plate at the Musée de la Chartreuse at Tours.19 It is memorably represented in a fifteenth-century secular context on panel paintings for domestic rooms, as in Melbourne’s picture, and sometimes in fresco decorations like those in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, or in the Palazzo Davanzati, Florence. Or, alternatively, the Garden of Love is chosen as an appropriate subject for tapestries that decorated bedchambers and reception rooms. It was also circulated on engravings that covered sweet boxes (fig. 11), or were exchanged as presents between lovers; it was depicted on ivory combs (fig. 12), on wedding chests (cassoni) in which a dowry was deposited, and on majolica plates.20

16

The motif is discussed by Ricci, pp. 144–50.

17

For further discussion of this motif, see Beck, pp. 121–22.

18

There is extensive literature on the subject, with full bibliography and discussion of the Melbourne painting in Watson, pp. 61–64. For a more recent overview, see Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London: King, 1998), esp. pp. 73–81. 19 For an in-depth study, see D. Pagliai and A. Uguccioni, ‘Un desco fiorentino della fine del Trecento: Temi di iconografia profana’, Notizie da Palazzo Albani, 15 (1986), 9–18. 20 For two early representations of the Garden of Love on cassoni, see Jerzy Miziolek, ‘Tuscan Domestic Paintings from the Count Karol Lanckorónski Collection at the Royal Castle in Cracow’, Studia Waweliana, 6–7 (1997–98), 89–155.

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Fig. 11. Attributed to Baccio Baldini, Garden of Love. Engraving, c. 1460. By permission of the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. It disappeared from Italian art in the cinquecento, with the notable exceptions of Giorgione’s Concert Champêtre (Louvre, Paris) and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (Borghese Gallery, Rome), the last Venetian representation. A century later the motif was revived by Rubens, who executed several versions with unparalleled abandon. I refer here to the painting, entitled The Garden of Love in the Prado, Madrid, and the drawing in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool. With Rubens, voluptuous aristocratic men and women meet before a fountain decorated with satyrs, while cupids carry wedding torches, the symbols of a forthcoming marriage in the Garden of Love. In the early quattrocento examples, the terms ‘Le Jardin d’amour’ or ‘Liebesgarten’, have been used to describe a landscape, the setting for a dream of love, with couples who rendezvous near a fountain. Traditionally these encounters occur in May at mid-spring, as in the famous fresco in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara. Several French and Italian texts are generically related to the imagery, but no surviving work of art literally illustrates a known text. Chapter 38 of Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione (1342–43) describes a fictive palace, with a decorated fountain of some sophistication. One of the chapters of the Amorosa visione is set in the everlasting spring of a love garden, which the protagonists enter to escape from the weariness experienced at watching a lengthy triumphal procession of ancient heroic

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Fig. 12. Unknown artist, Lovers in a Garden. French ivory comb, fourteenth century. By permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. men. Boccaccio’s verdant flowering garden contains a central fountain of such elegance and complexity that it is unlikely to have been realized by an Italian sculptor in the trecento. It is made of scarlet crimson marble and supported by four polychrome female sculptures as multi-coloured as love. It is teasingly suggested that they may be allegories of the four cardinal virtues, Love, Prudence, Fortitude/Justice, and Temperance. On top of the fountain are three female figures, a white marble figure denoting ‘honest love’, a red figure standing for a love of carnal delights, and a third black figure signifying venal love. The black sculpture pours forth many tears, while the fiery one ejects water from her breasts, and the white one spurts water over herself. The most famous illustrated thirteenth-century text about courtly love was the Roman de la Rose. It was begun by Guillaume de Loris, who believed in traditions of courtly love, as idealized and tender in conception. Yet the text of the romance was completed by Jean de Meun, who thought that love was merely procreative, to perpetuate the human race. Such contradictory views about the nature of love within a single text bred diverse kinds of imagery. The opening miniature in a manuscript in the British Library (Egerton 1069) represents a dream in which two lovers discover their garden of love, a key section in the allegory (fig. 13). The illuminator envisaged

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Fig. 13. Unknown artist, The Lover Asks to Enter the Garden of Deduit. Manuscript illumination from a Parisian Le Roman de la Rose, Paris, c. 1400. British Library, London, MS Egerton 1069, fol. 1r.

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paradise as round, pierced by a door, where Dame Oiseuse and the lovers meet. In the centre is the fountain of love, where Narcissus became a victim of his own selflove.21 Other quattrocento illustrations of the Roman de la Rose also resemble the Melbourne panel, as in the representation of the Garden of Deduit, a miniature from Harley Manuscript 4425, in the British Museum.22 In the romance the rose is the symbol of love, as in these panels. Many precedents for such gardens are also to be found in classical and biblical literature. In antiquity the fountain was not only the source of youth, but also of life and love. Classical sources relate how Jupiter ravished the nymph Juturna (Virgil, Aeneid, 12.140; Ovid, Fasti, 2.585, 606), and rewarded her with immortality and rule over the waters. She then metamorphosed into a well in Latium that contained waters with the property of healing anyone who bathed there. Lutatius Catulus dedicated a sacred site to Juturna on the Campus Martius, and a pond in the forum between the temples of Castor and Vesta was named Lacus Juturnae. The belief that sacred waters could endow those who bathed in them with eternal life is an ancient one, which continued to enjoy great popularity in the Italian Renaissance. Pausanias described a natural spring called Canathus at Nauplia, where Hera bathed in preparation for her marriage to Zeus. ‘Here’, said Pausanias in a rather off-hand manner, ‘Hera bathes every year and recovers her maidenhood’ (Description of Greece, 2.38.2).23 Pausanias may have been referring to a statue of Hera, from a local shrine, immersed each year in the Cathanos spring, in preparation for the cult rituals celebrating Hera’s marriage to Zeus and the renewal of her virginity. In medieval literature, heroes such as Huon de Bordeaux and Wigamur bathe in miraculous fountains, where they are rejuvenated and refreshed to undertake new adventures in love and battle. A plurality of texts creates a visual culture for the representation of adventures in gardens. The Bible, too, contained many descriptions of enclosed gardens, furnished with fountains and baths. For example, in the paradise garden of Genesis, or in the Song of Solomon 4. 12, a hortus conclusus is referred to as: ‘A garden locked is my sister, my bride; a garden locked, a fountain sealed’.24 There were of course many real fountains and wells in Venice, and such scenes reflect an actual practice and reality. 21 On the fountain of Narcissus as a site of death, see Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 126–36. 22

Reproduced in Ricci, pl. 33.

23

For a near contemporary manuscript of Pausanias (c. 1485), in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 56.11, see Angela Dillon Bussi, Miniature laurenziane rinascimentali: Nuove proposte attributive (Florence: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 1999), pp. 22–23. For an overview, see Aubrey Diller, ‘The Manuscripts of Pausanias’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 88 (1957), 169–88. 24

The translation is from The Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, ed. by Herbert Gordon May and Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 818.

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For despite the urban nature of the city many palaces had small contained gardens, and towards the back of the island, near the church of the Madonna dell’Orto, there were even spacious gardens in the fourteenth century, as shown on Jacopo dei Barbari’s famous map. On outer islands like Murano, the Venetians had second homes, to which they escaped from the heat of the summer. But above all it was in the Veneto, where patricians began to build villas along the Brenta, and in the Padovano, that the dolce vita of a garden existence became a reality. Many Renaissance Italian writers, such as Pietro Bembo in the opening section of Gli Asolani (1505), describe such idyllic locations. Frequently in Renaissance literature, dialogues are set in villas in the countryside, and the protagonists gather around a fountain. Extraordinary fountains, made of precious materials, brilliantly coloured marbles and precious stones, occur ubiquitously in such Venetian classics as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). Though published in 1499, the second story is said to have taken place in Treviso in about 1467, a time close to the conception of the Melbourne panel. The most famous fountain that Poliphilo encounters in his erotic dream is that of the sleeping Venus, but there were many other extraordinary fountains, with perfumed water and gaudy sculptures, including one with ‘lion heads with manes that stood out from the convex part of the basin’.25 In the Melbourne panel the protagonists entertain themselves within a closed garden, a hortus conclusus, which sets the boundaries for an aristocratic and fashionable game about love. There may well be a narrative source for the composition, so far unidentified, in a novella. The figures enact their ritual around an ornate white marble fountain, surmounted by an allegorical female figure whose attributes, especially the round ball describing the contours of the world, and most importantly her forelock, reveal that she is a personification of fortune. She stands on a globe surrounded by two eagles, and is supported by an elaborate carved marble base with dragons and other decorations. A lion’s head at the centre of the fountain is prominently featured almost at the centre of the painting. Unlike other statues, she has coloured attributes in the form of golden wings, and holds a golden bowl containing green leaves. Coloured sculpture is more often described in literature, such as in the Dream of Poliphilo, or is visible in painting; it is usually absent from three-dimensional pieces that survive. The green leaves may be read as the contours of a crown, or a fragrant wreath. Pliny the Elder describes such crowns on statues. An ancient painter Pausius copied the garlands made by his lover, the garland-maker Glycera, in his paintings a metaphor of the constant dual between Art and Nature (Natural History, 21.2.3–4). The painted sculpture of the fountain resembles sculptures in a set of religious pictures by Antonio Vivarini, all of which were made in collaboration with Giovanni 25

Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), p. 91.

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Fig. 14. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, St Apollonia Destroys an Idol. Wood, c. 1460. By permission of the Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

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d’Allemagna, and depicted the life and martyrdom of Saint Apollonia. The small panels are now divided between Bassano (a panel of the Saint’s death in the Museo Civico), Bergamo (two panels of the Saint being tortured by her father, in the Accademia Carrara and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.). In the Washington panel of Saint Apollonia Destroys a Pagan Idol (fig. 14), the life-like sculpture, also holding a crown of green leaves, is similar in conception to that represented in the Melbourne Garden of Love.26 Both paintings are by the same hand. The invention of painted sculpture was an important part of the Vivarini workshop. As in the Apollonia panels the men and women in the Melbourne panel are richly dressed in silks and elaborate brocades, in which considerable use is made of the characteristic Vivarini ‘rose red’. The pastiglia belt on the male figure uses an original technique, characteristic of the Vivarini workshop. It is the only original bit of pastiglia to survive in the composition. The brocades, as we see them now in The Garden of Love, are a product of a restoration in 1939, when the panel was completely reworked, as can be shown in the photograph of the painting in the drawing room at Burton Pynsent.27 The evidence of the detailed photographs taken in 1934 suggest that originally the brocades were made in a technique known as presse brocarde, which again links the Baltimore panels with the Melbourne one. The raised surface of the brocades, or presse brocarde, is made from thin sheets of tin (stagno), that are then reworked with gesso and paint. The same German technique has recently been found in the restoration of the much earlier triptych altarpiece, by Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Allemagna, of the Four Fathers from the Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Carità (1446), in the Accademia Gallery, Venice, one of the earliest works of the Venetian Renaissance on canvas.28 This technique of creating brocade is German, and may have been imported to the Veneto by Antonio Vivarini’s brother-in-law, Giovanni d’Allemagna, about whose early career we know little. The later works by Antonio Vivarini do not use this technique, and the interesting point here is that the Vivarini studio artist, responsible for the

26

I am grateful to Miklós Boskovits for showing me his catalogue entry on the Washington panel before publication. These panels of the life of Saint Apollonia have been the subject of a controversial series of attributions, but Boskovits argues for an attribution to the Murano workshop of the two brothers-in-law, Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Allemagna, in the fifth decade of the quattrocento. In his forthcoming catalogue of the early Italian painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Boskovits suggests that these four panels were once grouped together at either side of a central image, either painted or sculpted, of Saint Apollonia. 27

Reproduced in Payne’s article.

28

This recent restoration has been briefly discussed in the catalogue, Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Dürer, Bellini and Titian, ed. by Bernard A. Aikema and Beverley L. Brown (Milan: Bompiani, 1999), p. 172.

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Baltimore/Melbourne group, is old-fashioned in reviving a technique to make brocades that was fashionable in mid-quattrocento Venice. Stylistically the Melbourne panel is intriguing and not easy to place. The women’s foreheads and eyebrows are plucked, their faces are framed by wings of elaborately braided blonde hair, sometimes adorned with costly pearls. On the right, a woman touches the curls on the head of her male companion with her right hand, in a remarkably sensual gesture for a quattrocento painting. At the same time she holds a handkerchief before his face, perhaps with the intention of blindfolding him, for a game of blind-man’s-buff. She may have removed the cloth from the back of her elaborate coiffure, that is if she wore a matching white veil at the back of her head, like her counterpart on the other side of the panel. Once a blindfold is applied, Cupid’s arrows may be sent willy nilly, the target unknown. Or to put it in other words, sight may become blindfolded, always a hedonistic or disorienting experience.29 The young man holds a flamboyant red-pink feathered hat, held to limit his field of vision. The form of the hat, a cappello del pellegrino, suggests that he is a traveller, a lover, indeed someone very special within the picture, different from the other two men, who have less flamboyant headgear. It is the younger blade who will engage with the woman on the other side of the fountain, who may squirt him, in one way or another, with the waters of the fountain. The man on the left-hand side wears a soft rotund hat, parallel to the missing man on the right, the shape of whose similar hat is readable in the X-radiograph. The figures closest to the fountain appear destined for one another, assisted by their companions, experienced travellers in the art of love. The man and woman on the left are a couple, and would once have been paralleled on the right by another couple, thereby making the central figures more conspicuously bound for each other. The refinement of the dress suggests a panel that was made for a sophisticated court culture, rather than for the republican city of Venice itself. All the details of the composition suggest a particular commission. The role of the gaze is complex. On the left the woman holding her dog has dreamy eyes that do not relate to her companion, while he looks at the woman holding the syringe, and taps her while pointing upwards. On the other side of the fountain, a woman assists a young man in his rite, and she should have been accompanied by another man, who has been censored. The interaction of the gazes suggests that the couples may reform or reconstitute themselves. The arbour is adorned with innumerable roses of a kind known as the rosa alba, a luxuriant trellis rose, and the only white rose available to European gardeners in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.30 It has a delicious perfume. The rosa alba has 29

See Erwin Panofsky, ‘Blind Cupid’, in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 95–128. 30

The identification of the rose was first made by Edgar Anderson, a geneticist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, in St Louis, Missouri. He wrote letters about his discovery to Edward S. King, the curator of the Walters Art Gallery, after the appearance of King’s classic

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bluish-green leaves, strong arching stems and can be tied to a trellis. It has circular flat blooms, white, pale pink, or deep pink, and is double or semi-double petalled. It flowers in a particular way, with the blooms dispersed over the plant with almost mathematical precision, as is shown in the Melbourne panel. Details such as the rose suggest an allegory of the senses, though delineated in an unconventional manner. The play of hands suggests touch, the roses represent the sense of smell, the playfulness of the gaze between the figures denotes sight, and hearing may also be indicated in the play of water from the dragons’ heads on the fountain. As Daryl Lindsay noted when the panel first came to Melbourne, one of the most significant iconographic details is the syringe. At least three interpretations are possible, but each in turn poses difficulties in this hortus conclusus. Syringes, tubes with a piston plunger, were used from the 1430s in a variety of medical ways, as douches for contraception, for injections, for enemas, or in the treatment of venereal disease.31 The large phallic syringe might be interpreted as a douche, a contraceptive device intended to enhance the pleasure of lovemaking. Or an alternative less attractive explanation might be to define the syringe as urethral for treating gonorrhoea with mercury.32 Yet in a painting about the celebration of love, why should the darker risks of courtly love be emphasized, as thorns in the garden, when the alternative seems more in keeping with the mood of the picture? A third possibility is that the syringe may be used as a ‘remedy’ for a uterine disorder, a cure that would eventuate in a woman regaining her fertility. The administration of clysters has a long history in the visual arts.33 Apothecaries were represented carrying clysters, as was ‘Lo Speziale’ in the Commedia dell’Arte. The best-known examples of this subject are in paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch artists like Jan Steen (The Doctor’s Visit, Museum Boymans van-Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1660) and in a drawing (private collection, Paris) by the eighteenthcentury French artist Antoine Watteau.34 article on the subject matter of the Baltimore panels, ‘The Legend of Paris and Helen’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 2 (1939), 55–72. Copies of the letters, dated 8 and 23 November 1949, are in the dossier on the painting at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. 31

I am grateful to my colleagues Warwick Anderson and Mark Veitch for their help in the analysis of the syringe. 32

A comparable syringe was found on the Tudor flagship, the Mary Rose, wrecked during Henry VIII’s reign, now on display at HM Naval Base, Portsmouth, in the barber-surgeon’s quarters in an oak chest of tools, together with bleeding bowls, knives and saws. A representation of the treatment of gonorrhoea seems the less likely, as there is no symbolic reference to mercury in the painting. 33 For an account of the relief, and other objects, see L. S. Dixon, ‘Some Penetrating Insights: The Imagery of Enemas in Art’, Art Journal, 52.3 (1993), 28–35. 34 See Donald Posner, ‘Watteau’s Reclining Nude and the “Remedy” Theme’, Art Bulletin, 54 (1972), 383–89.

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Fig. 15. Hans Sebald Beham, Fountain of Youth-Bathhouse. Woodcut from four blocks, first state, c.1531. By permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Fig 16. Hans Sebald Beham, The Bath. Octagonal engraving, c. 1531. By permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

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The spirit of the painting, the playfulness of the syringe, suggests erotic water games, rather than medical references. In Sebald Beham’s large erotic print, the Fountain of Youth (fig. 15), which depicts an extraordinary bathhouse, combined with a fountain of love, one of the central figures shoots water from a large syringe at the rear of a nude figure, so that it just touches the genitalia. The prankster is deliberately pointing at her bottom, projecting over the balustrade above a huge bath. It is the central motif that joins the bathhouse with the fountain, and the water frolic is prominently placed in the middle of the composition. The fool is a clear visual marker, inserted by Beham to underline the sexual frolics depicted below, as well as the follies of those seeking rejuvenation.35 A lengthy inscription beneath the print promises fertility to those who wish to become pregnant: All who would like to get pregnant can try a root that grows freely in the Netherlands, under many names, and serves both rich and poor. Remember which root is the best when you take it in your hand. It moves like a worm, has a form like a liverwurst, is pointed like a carrot, and is by nature damp and hot. Remember sweet girls and young women, that cold streams serve the root well, and whoever gives it to you should tell you how and when to take it.36

An octagonal Beham print (fig. 16), a template for a birth plate, shows a similar scene, with a man blindfolded on the extreme right, and on the left another man holds a huge syringe, triumphantly pointed upwards. A syringe resembling a cornucopia of fertility occurs in a fascinating engraving by Hendrik Goltzius, known as ‘The Cave of Eternity’, or ‘The Magician’ (c. 1594), based on Claudian’s De consulatu stilichonis (2.5.424–48). In the cave a multibreasted Dame Nature nursing humanity shoots from her syringe a blast containing a rabbit, rose petals, cherries, a frog and a dog. The cave represents a complex allegory of time, or the inhospitable mother of centuries, bounded by the snake of eternity who bites his tail, the ouroboros, one of the attributes of Saturn, who writes down laws. Dame Nature rushes to meet the sun as he enters the cave, firing off her syringe.37 Of all the comparisons that might be made with Vivarini’s painting it is the Indian spring festival of Holi, a fertility rite where everyone celebrates the festival by squirting one another with water from syringes and throwing coloured powder that is 35

The most extensive study of this print is by A. Stewart, ‘Sebald Beham’s Fountain of Youth — Bathhouse Woodcut: Popular Entertainment and Large Prints by the Little Masters’, The Register of the Spencer Museum of Art, 6 (1989), 64–88. It is also discussed in Peter Parshall and David Landau, The Renaissance Print 1470–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 232–34; also H. Diane Russell, Eva-Ave: Woman in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), pp. 182–83. 36

Translated by Stewart, p. 83.

37

Reproduced in Walter Strauss, Hendrik Goltzius, 1558–1617: The Complete Engravings and Woodcuts (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), pp. 740–42, pl. 418.

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Fig. 17. Unknown artist, The Emperor Jahangir Celebrating the Festival of Holi with the Ladies of the Zenana. Miniature in watercolour and gold, c. 1800. By permission of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. the most rewarding. Holi is an ancient and important Hindu rite, frequently depicted in both sculpture and painting from an early period. An example is reproduced here of a Mughal painting representing the Emperor Jahangir celebrating the festival of Holi with the ladies of the Zenana, from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (fig. 17). Antonio Vivarini was born about 1420 and died between 1476 and 1481. He is one of the great narrative artists of the Venetian Renaissance, although no monograph has been published on him since 1960, and there is little literature about him in English.38 The style of the painting is characteristic of Antonio Vivarini, consistent with his graceful mannered poses, faces that are rotund, yet elongated, sweetly placid, a little boneless, with delicate skin, rouged cheeks, light bleached 38 A recent exception is Ian Holgate, ‘The Early History of Antonio Vivarini’s St Jerome Altarpiece and the Beginnings of the Renaissance Style in Venice’, Burlington Magazine, 143 (2001), 19–22.

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Fig. 18. Antonio da Negroponte (the lunette being an addition in the style of Benedetto Diana). Altarpiece, c. 1460. Church of San Francesco della Vigna, Venice.

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hair, triangular ears, and eyebrows subtly arched as if to indicate perpetual astonishment.39 Vivarini’s style was derived indirectly from the court art of Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano, neither of whom he could have known personally, but who had executed large paintings for the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. Antonio often worked in collaboration, first with his brother-in-law Giovanni d’Allemagna, from 1441 to his death in 1452, and thereafter with his brother Bartolomeo Vivarini until the late 1460s. Works were signed jointly in these partnerships, and it may be presumed that the Vivarini workshop was a large enterprise like the Bellini family workshop. The Melbourne painting has been attributed by Mauro Lucco to another artist associated with the Vivarini workshop.40 Antonio da Negroponte, a Greek friar, who was born on an island near Athens, and whose only signed and dated altarpiece of the Virgin Enthroned, represents a religious hortus conclusus in the church of San Francesco della Vigna, Venice (fig. 18).41 Although Negroponte’s composition reveals that it is certainly related to the same cultural ambiance as the Melbourne painting, it is very different in fact in the overly elaborate and spindly details of its execution and this attribution fails to convince. Sculpture is again important, as in The Garden of Love. The Madonna is seated on a huge elaborate marble throne, decorated in relief, that suggests the impact of the Paduan workshops of Donatello and Squarcione. But the sculpture is not freestanding as in the Melbourne and Washington panels. If only one knew more about the activities of all those involved in the Vivarini studio. Scholars are unanimous in their belief that the Melbourne painting is by the same hand or hands as a series of panels about the story of Helen of Troy in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore (figs 8–10). These Baltimore panels have a different provenance from the Melbourne picture. They are first mentioned in a sale of the collection of the Cavaliere Marcello Galli-Dunn, of Castello di Badia, Poggibonsi, Tuscany, held at the Galleria Sangiorgi at Florence on 26 April 1905, where they are attributed to Carpaccio.42 It is unlikely that these panels were made for the Castello di Badia, as it was either a monastery or a nunnery from the eleventh century until

39 These Morellian characteristics were defined by Laudedeo Testi in his account of Vivarini, La Storia della pittura veneziana, 2 vols (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1909), II, 321–22. 40

Mauro Lucco, ‘Venezia, 1400–1430’, in La Pittura nel Veneto: Il Quattrocento, ed. by Mauro Lucco, 2 vols (Milan: Electa, 1990), II, 400. 41

For Negroponte, see E. Merkel, ‘Una ricerca per Frate Antonio Falier da Negroponte, pittore girovago’, Quaderni della Soprintendenza ai beni artistici della Soprintendenza, 8 (1979), 45–56. 42

See Adolfo Venturi’s account of the sale in a note in L’Arte, 8 (1905), 225–26. The sale catalogue gives no indication of an earlier provenance, but states that the subject is the history of the saint Flaminia.

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Fig. 19. Attributed to Liberale da Verona, The Abduction of Helen, c. 1470. By permission of the Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon.

Fig. 20. Florentine School, The Abduction of Helen. Dodecagonal, c. 1440. Private collection.

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Fig. 21. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, Susanna and the Elders. By permission of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. 1774.43 The collector Galli-Dunn acquired the castle only late in its history. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that there is an impressive trecento fountain, the Fonte delle Fate, made by Balugano da Crema, near to the castle. The story of the love of Paris and Helen is related in the Baltimore panels as though it had taken place in a recent Gothic past. There are a number of immediate precedents in less monumental furniture painting which tell the story with a similar set of three episodes. They are: the anonymous cassone panel, known as The Story of Helen of Troy, in the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; another attributed to Liberale da Verona, in the Musée du Petit Palais des Papes, Avignon (fig. 19); as well as a Florentine desco da parte (fig. 20), of around 1440, in the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. In each of these, a similar triad of episodes is represented

43

The Castello di Badia, Poggibonsì, is in origin a huge fortification from the tenth century, which was converted into a monastery in 983. The Benedictines remained there more or less continuously until 1445, when Pope Eugenius IV gave the building to the nuns of Santa Brigida, from the Convent of the Paradiso, Florence. They remained there until 1734, when their order was suppressed.

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contiguously: Paris and Helen meet at the Temple of Venus on Cythera, then Paris elopes with her, while a waiting boat will take them to Troy. At Baltimore the scenes are larger, more complex, with more protagonists. The first depicts the fatal meeting between Paris and Helen at the Temple, the Greeks sacking the city, raping the women, and Helen’s elopement with Paris (fig. 8). The second represents Paris introducing Helen to King Priam and his consort at home in Troy (fig. 9). The third scene (fig. 10), the largest of them all, is more difficult to interpret.44 It may represent the Trojan women being sent back to the princes, away from Troy, as described in Euripides’ play, The Trojan Women. Euripides’ tragedy opens shortly after the capture of Troy, when all the Trojan men have been killed, leaving only women and children. The man on the left could be Helen’s husband Menelaus, accompanied by friends, who comes to claim the women. The woman with her back turned could be Helen herself, who in Euripides’ play was present when the captive women departed. Many artists are daunted by the idea of representing the most beautiful woman in the world since in Greek literature there is a notable absence of description of the beauty of someone who sank a thousand ships. The advantage of this interpretation is that it completes Helen’s story. It also makes sense of the ermine, an emblem of purity, which is held by one of the women in the retinue, which would not make emotional sense in any of the other episodes of the Troy story. Moreover, near the left edge of the painting, a rabbit, an emblem of lasciviousness, is scuttling down a hole.45 All of these panels are large, measuring 152 x 238 cm, and are among the largest spalliere to survive. They were clearly destined for a large room, either a reception room or a bedroom, to be set into the wainscot (spalliera). Ellen Callmann, who has studied the career of one cassone painter, Apollonio di Giovanni, has discovered a workshop book about his bottega that shows that rooms were usually redecorated as a visual unit, where ceilings, spallieri, and furniture — not just the cassoni, but other painted objects as well — were all part of a single design.46 There is a related furniture painting, which although not a secular picture, is I believe by the hand of the same master from Antonio Vivarini’s studio. The panel, a representation of Susanna and the Elders (fig. 21), was a gift of Robert Lehman to the collections of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. It has no earlier provenance. A photograph of the 44

All commentators have realized that this scene is problematic. King, for example, suggests that it represents the moment before Helen’s embarkation for Cythera, the island where she meets Paris (p. 57). Zeri follows King, but also mentions another equally problematic interpretation, that it could depict Paris and Helen landing at the island of Tenedos (pp. 237–38). 45

I am grateful to my colleague Dr Chrisopher Mackie for this suggestion.

46

Ellen Callmann, ‘Apollonio di Giovanni and Painting for the Early Renaissance Room’, Antichità Viva, 28 (1988), 5–18.

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Fig. 22. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, Ancient Hero identified as Julius Caesar. Oil on wood panel, c. 1465. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Alpheus Hyatt Fund.

Fig. 23. Attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini, Lady with a Unicorn. Tempera on panel, c. 1465. Keresztény Múzeum, Arnold Ipolyi Collection, Esztergom.

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fragment, sent to Berenson, was included in the section of the Berenson Fototeca on Antonio Vivarini, to whom the attribution may be credited.47 The panel has been described as central Italian, and attributed to Apollonia di Giovanni and Domenico di Michelino, without carrying conviction.48 If Susanna is located in Vivarini’s workshop, she is the earliest nude in the history of Venetian Renaissance painting, and the earliest Venetian Renaissance representation of a subject that was to become popular in the sixteenth century. Chaste Susanna is bathing in a magic fountain similar to the one in The Garden of Love. In the background is an enchanting, sweetsmelling grove of roses. The fragment represents the two lascivious old men making propositions to Susanna. They are depicted violating her body, physically laying their hands upon her, as she cries out in vehement protest. The panel has been associated with a fragment also in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, depicting the two elders in a loggia, the first episode in the Susanna story; and with another fragment in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, showing Susanna being charged with dishonesty. There is also another related Susanna cassone, in the Musée du Petit Palais at Avignon, with similar episodes.49 This discovery of related panels suggests that the master had a furniture workshop, one of the few whose products have survived from the Venetian Renaissance. A group of panel paintings of famous men, which survive in fragments, are also by the same master as the Baltimore and Melbourne panels. One representing Julius Caesar is in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (fig. 22), another is in the National Gallery, Prague. A further panel of a Lady with a Unicorn, also by the same hand, is in the Esztergom Museum of Christian Art, Hungary (fig. 23).50 One hypothesis would be that the cycle of famous men was once part of the same decorative cycle as the Baltimore panels and the Melbourne panel, as suggested by Federico Zeri, followed by Christiane Joost-Gaugier.51 Nevertheless, unless we can identify the original palace, there also remains the other hypothesis that we have remnants of various cycles, of Helen and Paris, and of Famous Men, all by the same artist, who worked with Antonio Vivarini, and appropriated some of his imagery and style.

47

See the Fototeca, Villa I Tatti, Florence, Biblioteca Berenson, where an annotated photograph of the Susanna fragment contains much of this information. 48

See Ellen Callmann, Beyond Nobility: Art for the Private Citizen in the Early Renaissance (Allentown, PA: Allentown Art Museum, 1981), pp. 2–3. 49

Michel Laclotte and Élisabeth Mognetti, Avignon, Musée du Petit Palais: Peinture italienne (Paris: Éditions du musées nationaux, 1976), no. 65. 50

See the catalogue of the Christian Museum, ed. by Pál Cséfalvay (Budapest: Corvina, 1993), p. 231; Zeri, pp. 237, 240. 51

Zeri, p. 238; Christian L. Joost-Gaugier, ‘A Rediscovered Series of Uomini famosi from Quattrocento Venice’, Art Bulletin, 58 (1976), 184–95.

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Fig. 24. Giacomo Jaquerio, The Garden of Love. Fresco, c. 1420. Castello della Manta, near Saluzzo (Piemonte). Some confirmation that a single large cycle could have once existed is shown by another secular north Italian cycle. A cycle of frescoes by Giacomo Jaquerio in the Baronial Room of the Castello della Manta, near Saluzzo in Piedmont, made around 1420, contains some of the subjects that occur in the group of works attributed to the Master of Helen stories, including a Garden of Love (fig. 24).52 There is a cycle of Famous Men, but no Paris and Helen series. This may suggest that all these Venetian panels once belonged together in a similar decorative cycle to that of the Castello della Manta. The patron, Valeriano di Saluzzo was portrayed in the Castello della Manta, as Hector of Troy, among a cycle of nine worthies. His father Tommaso III, was the author of a romance, written in French, entitled the Chevalier errant, which recounts the travels of a knight with his page, the transition from childhood to adulthood, with encounters of rich allegorical significance. It is written as a celebration of the ideals of knighthood. The romance, written between 1395 and 1396, exists only in a few manuscripts, one in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS Fr. 12559, with miniatures by a French artist. The book in turn was based on the Roman de Fauvel. One of the most important parts of the Chevalier errant is the encounter between the nine worthies (Hector, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, 52

See La Sala Baronale del Castello della Manta, ed. by G. Romano (Milan: Olivetti, [1992]).

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Joshua, David, Judas Macabaeus, Arthur, Charles the Great and Godfrey of Buglione) and the nine heroines (Delfile, Sinope, Ippolita, Menalippe, Semiramide, Lampeto, Tamiri, Teuca and Pentesilea, Queen of the Amazons). Were the cycles of famous men and women conceived in relation to the fountain of youth? Does the fountain of youth promise an eternal miracle in this context? Much of my speculation about secular furniture painting invites debate about wider ranging questions about the nature of such imagery in the Renaissance. The reconstruction of cycles and programmes from fragments, however hypothetical, helps us to understand quotidian Renaissance imagery. From the late nineteenth century, furniture painting was always shown in museums of the ‘decorative arts’. The most important are at Berlin (Kunstgewerbemuseum), Ecouen (Musée National de la Renaissance), Hamburg (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe), London (Victoria and Albert Museum), New York (Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum) and Paris (Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Palais du Louvre). These institutions were founded to provide good examples of design in ceramics and furniture for manufacturing industry in the late nineteenth century. By accident they became the repositories of the material artefacts of Renaissance culture. In recent decades, objects such as cassone have been re-evaluated as objects of material culture, for the precious insights they convey about the historical perception of everyday life in the Renaissance. Unlike masterpieces, they have not been studied in the context of exhibitions, partly because they have been undervalued, and partly because the very material with which they are made, heavy wooden panels with complex paint structures, precludes loans to other museums.53 Such an essay as this is the only means whereby the activities of a single Venetian furniture painter working in the context of Antonio Vivarini’s studio may be evaluated.

53

The literature on wedding chests stems from Paul Schubring’s magisterial study Cassoni: Truhen und Truhenbilder der italienischen Frührenaissance: Ein Beitrag zur Profanmalerei im Quattrocento (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1923). The title reveals that cassoni were of interest because it is in this way that classical subject-matter is introduced into the Italian Renaissance interior. Schubring’s volume was dedicated to the Florentine dealer, Bardini, who refashioned bits and pieces of Renaissance furniture to make them more attractive to the art market. Historians, whether art historians, musicologists, or historians of science, urgently need a revised and expanded edition of Schubring’s work. This should be conceived as a complete catalogue of all known furniture painting, prepared according to the highest standards of modern scientific connoisseurship, in order to make accessible a reliable account of these previously undervalued objects that have so much to tell us about the Renaissance past.

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The Witch of Endor: Transformations of a Biblical Necromancer in Early Modern Europe CHARLES ZIKA

T

he figure of the woman of Endor represented the one concrete example of a witch in the Bible that theologians, judges and political authorities could use to sanction their campaigns against the threat of witchcraft in Europe between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. During a period in which biblical precedent had acquired newfound authority in legitimating the contemporary practice and belief of Christian rulers and communities, the witch of Endor was a potent example. But specific features of this biblical story were especially fortuitous at a time when the figure of the witch was still being shaped. For here was a village woman, described as using techniques of necromancy to invoke the dead and divine the future. She fitted well that identikit for the witch that began to be drawn up from the early fifteenth century, which combined the traditional, everyday practices of village sorcery by old women with the ritual invocation of demons or spirits by learned male magicians. The witch of Endor was therefore an excellent resource — one that helped not only to define and recognize the fundamental nature of witchcraft, but also to support the need for its prosecution and elimination. This article is an attempt to show how the witch of Endor — and more especially the visual representations of her produced by northern artists and printers through to the seventeenth century — contributed to the dissemination of witch beliefs and to the growing credibility such beliefs elicited amongst a literate readership. I want to explore the range of meanings associated with this particular witch figure and how

I write this paper with gratitude to the man who first taught me the significance of rhetoric. For assistance with different aspects of the study, I thank Katharina Weiss, Sarah Ferber, Ian Maclean, Jenny Spinks and Catherine Oppel, as well as audiences in Oxford and Melbourne where I delivered earlier versions of it as a paper.

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she provided artists with an opportunity to investigate ambiguities in the gender and ritual status of witchcraft, as elements critical to its imagined transgressive nature. Who, firstly, was the witch of Endor? The biblical account of her story is found in 1 Samuel 28. 3–20. It tells of King Saul’s visit to a female necromancer1 at the settlement at Endor when he found himself facing a large Philistine army and was unable to receive any answer from God as to the outcome of the imminent battle. Since Saul himself had been responsible for expelling all necromancers and wizards at an earlier time, he decided he would have to disguise himself and travel at night with two of his men, if he was to make successful contact with a woman known to practise necromancy. Indeed, when he first approached the woman to ask her to reveal his future by conjuring a ghost, she demurred, fearing that a trap was being set to catch her transgressing the King’s prohibition. But when Saul swore by God that she would suffer no harm, the woman agreed. As she conjured, the woman of Endor saw that the ghost rising up was that of the prophet Samuel and she realized that the man who commissioned her could be none other than King Saul himself.2 As she described her vision — a ghost in the shape of an old man wrapped in a cloak and rising from the earth — Saul realized that this had to be the spirit of Samuel, and he bowed down to the ground before him in homage. Samuel’s message to Saul, however, was far from comforting. He firstly rebuked Saul for disturbing his rest and, when Saul explained that he had only done so because God had failed to answer him, Samuel countered with the frightening 1

This woman is described in the Vulgate as a ‘mulier pythonem habens’ (1 Samuel 28. 7), a woman possessing a ‘python’, or demonic spirit, and as a ‘pythonissa’ (1 Chronicles 10. 13). Pytho is the former name for the place of Delphi. Thus words derived from Pytho are associated with the prophetic powers and divination of the Delphic Oracle. The word python refers to the legendary giant serpent slain at Delphi by Apollo. By association, pythonissa or pitonissa referred to the spirit that gave one power to divine the future. Acts 16. 16–18 tells the story of a girl possessed with a ‘pythonist spirit’ (Vulgate: ‘puellam [...] habentem spiritum pythonem’) until she was liberated by Saint Paul. In German Bibles, the woman of Endor was usually called a Wahrsagerin (female diviner, teller of the future). All these terms had a very negative connotation related to pagan divination and diabolical possession. By the late fifteenth century, some writers used the term mulieres pythonicae or mulieres phitonicae synonymously with Unholden (witches). See Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Le spectre de Samuel et la sorcière d’En Dor: Avatars historiques d’un récit biblique: I Rois 28’, Etudes Rurales, 105–06 (1987), 37–54, (pp. 41–42); and Siegfried Leutenbauer, Hexerei- und Zaubereidlikt in der Literatur von 1450 bis 1550 (Berlin: Schweitzer, 1972), pp. 4–5. 2

Pamela Tamarkin Reis explains that a prophet of God such as Samuel would have only allowed himself to be raised by someone with whom he had strong affective ties: ‘Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 73 (1997), 3–23, (pp. 9–10). The twelfth-century commentary of Peter Comestor and the Jewish exegetical tradition it drew on, however, argued that the recognition was based on a belief that the conjured dead appeared feet first, with the exception of those invoked at the wish of a king: Schmitt, ‘Le spectre’, pp. 47–48.

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The Witch of Endor

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Fig. 1. The Witch of Endor Conjures the Ghost of Samuel for King Saul, Manuscript illumination in The Tickhill Psalter, early fourteenth century. New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, MS 26, fol. 43r. revelation that Saul had indeed been abandoned by God and, because of his disobedience in his treatment of the Amalekites, his sovereignty had been taken away and given to David. Furthermore, he revealed that on the coming day the Israelite army would be defeated and Saul and his three sons would all die. Saul was understandably terrified to hear Samuel’s prophecy and, partly also because he had eaten nothing that day, he fell to the ground in shock. The woman of Endor attempted to comfort him: she slaughtered her fattened calf, made some cakes and, despite Saul’s initial reluctance, successfully encouraged him to have some food. On the next day, the Israelites were defeated at the Battle of Gilboa, as Samuel had prophesied. Saul’s sons were killed, and Saul himself committed suicide on his own sword.3

3 These events are also referred to in 1 Chronicles 10. 13–14, which tells of Saul’s consultation of a necromancer and his subsequent punishment by death, and in Ecclesiasticus 46. 23, which claims that the dead Samuel prophesied the King’s death.

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In the late Middle Ages, visual representations of this story are not found nearly as often as the many textual commentaries which discuss and debate the nature of Samuel’s appearance and Saul’s vision. The ten known sets of illustrations from before the sixteenth century are all found in manuscripts, the earliest of them from the twelfth century.4 A clear contrast between these images and those from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the earlier ones do not focus on the figure of the witch and her act of conjuration. This difference can clearly be seen in the illuminations to the Tickhill Psalter from the early fourteenth century, in which we find the most detailed cycle of manuscript illustrations of this story.5 The series begins by depicting Saul in disguise, asking the woman of Endor to invoke the dead. This is followed by a scene in which the woman points out to Saul and his men the shrouded ghost of Samuel, which is beginning to rise from its sarcophagus, and a further scene in which the ghost of Samuel (labelled ‘anima’) addresses the kneeling figure of Saul (fig. 1). On the next folio, Saul seeks out the future from Samuel, who reveals Saul’s abandonment by God, whereupon Saul falls unconscious to the ground. The last two illustrations depict Saul initially rejecting the bread offered him by the woman, and then eating at her table. The act of necromancy receives no particular emphasis in the series, and the central figures in the conjuration are clearly Saul and Samuel. In other late medieval illustrations the witch of Endor is also simply shown gesturing towards the figure or ghost of Samuel whom she has invoked, and the principal focus is the relationship between Saul and Samuel. This is the case with the Bible historiale of Guyart des Moulins, a French manuscript translation from the 1290s of Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, in which Samuel, dressed in priestly garb, resembles more a body than a soul or phantasm; or with the Bavarian Kaiserchronik, written in German verse in the late 1370s, in which Samuel is wrapped in a shroud.6 A similar emphasis on the centrality of Saul’s relationship to Samuel is found in a World Chronicle of around 1340 from south-east Germany. In the text there is talk of magical arts, but absolutely no indication of them appears in

4

Schmitt, ‘Le spectre’, pp. 37–50; and Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 15–17. Of the ten pre-sixteenth century sets of illustrations Schmitt has identified all but the Pommersfelden Schlossbibliothek manuscript referred to below: ‘Le spectre’, pp. 51–53. 5

New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, MS 26, fol. 42v–44r; see Donald Drew Egbert, The Tickhill Psalter and Related Manuscripts: A School of Manuscript Illustration in England during the Early Fourteenth Century (New York: New York Public Library; Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University, 1940), pp. 39–40, pls 30–31. The inscriptions draw both on the biblical text and Peter Comestor’s commentary in his Historia scholastica. 6

These two images are reproduced in colour in Schmitt, Ghosts, figs 3, 4.

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the accompanying illustration.7 The same emphasis is found in the Vienna Soudenbalch Bible and in a copy from around 1460 of the very popular north Netherlands First History Bible, which depicts Saul on his knees before the priestly Samuel, his crown removed from his head and his hands covering his face in terror.8 It is only in what may be the earliest west European depiction of this biblical scene, a medallion from the German Gumpertusbibel of before 1195, that the woman of Endor is more closely identified with Samuel, her hands positioned on his shroud and seeming to lift him physically from the sarcophagus.9 Yet even here the dynamic interaction represented is between Saul and Samuel, and no visual commentary is made on the nature or source of the necromancer’s magical power. The one exception to these late medieval images is a miniature in Guyart des Moulins’s Bible historiale, produced by the Parisian Boucicaut workshop and dated the first quarter of the fifteenth century.10 Here the witch of Endor, rather than Saul, is positioned in the centre of the image. She is on her knees before him, and it is their dialogue which is the centre of attention. This may even be meant to depict a financial deal, given the woman’s purse prominently displayed hanging from her waist. Moreover, the flying devil with crossed limbs above clearly suggests that the conversation or compact is a diabolical one.11 This image marks a dramatic change in the visual discourse of the woman of Endor. As Jean-Claude Schmitt has argued, it reflects the shift in the literary discourse of the fifteenth century, which constructs Samuel’s apparition as the product of diabolical power.12 By the same token it serves to concentrate the viewer’s attention on the relationship between Saul and the woman, rather than that between Saul and Samuel.

7

This manuscript is in the Pommersfelden Schlossbibliothek, Marburg Index, 2698 B 13.

8

The Bible is named after a canon of Utrecht Cathedral, Evert van Soudenbalch. See Sandra Hindman, Text and Image in Fifteenth-Century Illustrated Dutch Bibles (Leiden: Brill, 1977), pp. 1, 3–4, 83–90; Otto Pächt and Ulrike Jenni, Die Illuminierten Handschriften und Inkunabeln der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1974–), III: Holländische Schule (1975): Textband, 43–49, 52; Tafelband, fig. 97; and A.W. Byvanck, ‘Noord-Nederlandse Miniaturen’, Bulletin en Nieuws — Bulletin van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige, 6 (1953), 38–50, fig. 4. 9

An image which may be older is an illumination in a late twelfth-century manuscript of Peter Lombard’s Expositiones in Psalmos, in which Samuel is again shown appearing to Saul, with the woman of Endor behind Saul, gesturing with one arm in an act of conjuring or presentation: Schmitt, ‘Le spectre’, fig. 1. 10

Schmitt, Ghosts, fig. 1; ‘Le spectre’, pp. 52–53, p. 60, n. 66, fig. 6.

11

It is reproduced in colour in Schmitt, Ghosts, fig. 1.

12 Schmitt, ‘Le Spectre’, pp. 48–50. A medallion found in a thirteenth-century Oxford manuscript of the Bible moraliseé hints at the diabolical nature of the woman’s activity by linking it to the devil’s temptation of Christ (p. 52).

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Fig. 2. Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder, The Witch of Endor Conjures Samuel from the Tomb. Woodcut, in Die gantz Bibel Alt unnd Neüw Testament (Strasbourg: Wolfgang Köpfl, 1530), fol. 49r. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek [Bibel S 4˚ 7]. In the first half of the sixteenth century few images of the witch of Endor story seem to have been created. Artists and printers were far more interested in the suicide of Saul than in his meeting with a necromancer. Saul’s suicide became a graphic warning to rulers of the consequences of not paying heed to God’s laws — a potent message in the context of the struggles of the Reformation and the CounterReformation.13 I have found only one illustration of the Endor story in a Bible before the 1570s — in the so-called Combined Bible published in Strasbourg in 1530 (fig. 2).14 The iconography in this woodcut, designed by Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder, is 13

This important theme seems not to have received examination. For the exemplary nature of Saul and Samuel in medieval political ideology, see Josef Funkenstein, ‘Samuel and Saul in der Staatslehre des Mittelalters’, Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, 40 (1952–53), 129–40. 14 The illustration was included in at least two editions of the Combined Bible published in Strasbourg in 1530 by Wolfgang Köpfl and by Petrus Renner, and in a 1532 Strasbourg edition published by Köpfl. The 1530 Köpfl and Renner editions are at Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek (hereafter HAB), Bibel S 4˚ 7; Bibel S 4˚ 6. For the 1532 edition, see Philip Schmidt, Die Illustration der Lutherbibel 1522–1700 (Basel: Reinhardt, 1962), p. 436. For the Combined Bible, which included translations of certain books by Luther, the Prophets translated by Zürich preachers and the Apocrypha by Leo Jud, see Horst Kunze, Geschichte der Buchillustration in Deutschland: Das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1993), pp. 606–07.

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rather similar to late medieval illustrations, in which the woman is shown pointing to the figure of Samuel wrapped in a shroud and rising from his tomb. The woman is also beginning to resemble the fashion of some early sixteenth-century witch figures: an old woman with a large bag hanging from her waist, as portrayed, for instance, by Hans Burgkmaier in the illustration he created for the Weißkunig around 1514.15 It is unclear whether the bag is a reference to avarice as the root of magical dealing, or whether it is similar to the basket which holds the women’s magical paraphernalia in the illustrations of sorcery found in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man.16 The most radical break in the witch of Endor iconography, however, occurred a few years before, in an image which gave expression to the new sixteenth-century exegesis of this story by appropriating the new iconography of witchcraft, created a decade or so earlier by Hans Baldung Grien and his fellow artists in southern Germany. This was a 1526 painting by Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, which now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (fig. 3).17 In this extraordinary painting Jacob Cornelisz. combines the image of a powerful female necromancer — seated within her magic circle and invoking the spirit of the dead with her magical instruments, while also exposing the power of her female body — with a scene of four women around a grill, two seated on goats, cooking sausages and drinking, a group clearly modelled on the compositions of Hans Baldung Grien and his copiers.18 The witch of Endor is no longer the individual necromancer of the biblical story; she is now clearly identified with the new group activity of sixteenth-century witchcraft.

15

Weißkunig, Pt 2, ch. 23; see Charles Zika, ‘“Magie” — “Zauberei” — “Hexerei”: Bildmedien und kulturelle Wandel’, in Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400–1600, ed. by Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999), pp. 317–82 (pp. 377–79, fig. 48). 16

Zika, ‘“Magie” — “Zauberei”, pp. 339–41, fig. 29.

17

Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum, ed. by Henk van Os and others, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2000), I: Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum 1400–1600, 126. For a colour reproduction and commentary, see Kunst voor de beeldenstorm: Catalogus, ed. by J.P. Filedt Kok, W. Halsema-Kubes and W. Th. Kloek (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1986), p. 133; and (in black-and-white reproduction), Art before the Iconoclasm: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1525–1580, ed. by W. Th. Kloek, W. Halsema-Kubes and R.J. Baarsen (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1986), pp. 13–14; Department of Paintings of the Rijksmuseum, All the Paintings of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: A Completely Illustrated Catalogue (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976), p. 176; Schmitt, ‘Le Spectre’, p. 53; and Jane Louise Carroll, ‘The Paintings of Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen (1472?–1533)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987), pp. 90–104. 18

Charles Zika, Exorcising our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 271–92.

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Fig. 3. Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, Saul and the Witch of Endor. Oil on wood, 1526. By permission of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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The narrative elements of the painting are depicted in the left and centre backgrounds, and a textual reference to the biblical account is given in the banderoles at upper left.19 The meeting between Saul and the witch of Endor takes place on the left, where Saul negotiates a deal with the witch, identifiable by her red cap and red-and-blue garment. Behind this group one can see the military camp of the Israelites. In the centre of the painting, beneath the arch, the invoked figure of Samuel, in a loose-fitting shift, rises from his sarcophagus, the lid of which is inscribed ‘Sepulcrum Samuelis’. And further in the background Samuel confronts a terrified Saul who has both hands raised before him. The scene probably represents the announcement of Samuel’s prophecy to Saul, for in the distant background one can see the Battle of Gilboa in which Saul and his three sons meet their death (1 Samuel 31), and Saul is clearly recognizable falling on his sword.20 The painter’s interest in the details of the biblical narrative, however, was clearly a secondary consideration. The subject of necromantic witchcraft dominates the foreground, and this is briefly referred to in the upper banderole, written in the vernacular Dutch: ‘Saul gave himself up to witchcraft (tovery). By disturbing Samuel in his death he himself came to die’.21 The necromantic seer is depicted as a ritual magician, seated on two owls within a magic circle, which is meant to protect her from the demonic spirits she is invoking. Her bared upper body is remarkably muscular and masculine, as she lights a torch from the brazier below and thrusts another high above her. The lighted tapers with their host-like attachments and phylactery-type scrolls, the brazier, the candlestick, the book of invocations and the mirror, even the young satyr acting as necromancer’s acolyte, all emphasize the highly ritualized character of the necromancer’s magic. The necromancer is also linked to the witch figures developed by artists over the previous two decades. She is naked to the waist, quite unlike any medieval examples; she is depicted with legs crossed, a common sign of sexual transgression used by Baldung Grien and others in their representation of witches; her hair and that of her female assistant is shown flying out behind, another visual cue recently developed to identify the sexual disorder of witchcraft; and she is accompanied by a 19

The inscriptions are reproduced in the original language in Kunst voor de beeldenstorm, p. 133, and also in translation in Carroll, p. 90. 20

The difficulty is to identify the four other figures, since one would expect no more than two of Saul’s men. There are clearly three males depicted, and the fourth could be the witch’s female assistant. This runs contrary to the biblical text, but more importantly to the inscription above. Are the three men therefore meant to represent Saul’s three sons referred to in the inscription? Saul’s suicide is a very common illustration in illustrated Bibles from at least the late fifteenth century. 21

‘Saul tot tovery heeft ghegeu Samuel te verwrecke qua hi te sneven’. Though this banderole clearly refers to sorcery or witchcraft by its use of the word tovery, Carroll’s translation of ‘iussu numinis’ in the lower banderole as ‘through magic’ seems unwarranted, and could just as well refer to divine permission.

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group of women who are drinking and grilling sausages, one with a large vessel positioned between her legs and a curious red, inverted dagger nearby, another holding the horn of a goat and looking out at the viewer in a coquettish fashion. The witches are also cooking pancakes, which Jane Carroll relates to a Dutch adage: ‘When it rains and the sun shines, witches are making pancakes’.22 The central scene of the painting bears little resemblance to the biblical account and, apart from this local reference, it draws heavily on the recent iconography of witchcraft and its relationship to sexual disorder, developed primarily by south German artists. The scene of group witchcraft may well be a play on a counter-Eucharist, as Carroll has suggested.23 The cup elevated by the central woman is inscribed with the word, ‘Mal’, and is surmounted by a platter of bread. Yet the offering of food and drink also alludes to sexual gratification. The bread is delivered by a naked woman whose legs are clasped tightly around a horse’s skull, while the cup is offered to a bearded satyr on the right, originally a representation of the figure Pan. For while this figure now holds a hurdy-gurdy, an instrument closely associated with the devil, recent restoration reveals that this was originally a double flute, the attribute of Pan.24 Pan, the satyr closely associated with carnal lusts, would have helped establish the meaning of the female group for those unfamiliar with recent witchcraft iconography, yet literate in classical mythology; and it would have also accentuated the links between this biblical case of necromancy and the sexualized understanding of witchcraft created by Baldung and his contemporaries. This is echoed in the wild and naked female figures riding through the sky in the top right corner, one with unkempt hair flying out behind her, the other on a goat which belches flames from mouth and arse, as she holds aloft her cooking stick. In a way that is similar to Hans Schäufelein’s well-known 1511 woodcut, which depicts various forms of sorcery and witchcraft, Jacob Cornelisz. has integrated the ritual magic of the necromancer’s craft, an essentially male and clerical domain, with the vernacular rites of female sorcery or witchcraft which operate through the instruments of food and sex.25 The strange beasts that accompany this ritual act of necromancy are another element Cornelisz. has used to communicate the presence of the unnatural and the demonic. The witch of Endor sits on a throne of owls, birds of the night that were 22

Carroll, p. 100.

23

Carroll, p. 100.

24 Kahren Jones Hellerstedt, ‘Hurdy-Gurdies from Hieronymus Bosch to Rembrandt’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1980). Major restoration during 1976– 80 also revealed that the chickens were added in the seventeenth century: Carroll, p. 93, n. 9. The male figure may have been inspired by a popular woodcut image, possibly produced by Baldung’s workshop, which first appeared in Johann Geiler of Kaysersberg’s Die Emeis (The Ants) of 1516: Zika, Exorcising our Demons, pp. 262–65, fig. 18. 25

Zika, Exorcising our Demons, pp. 245, 248, fig. 13; ‘“Magie” — “Zauberei”’, pp. 318– 21, fig. 20.

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Fig. 4. Master I. T. [Johann Teufel?], Conjured by the Witch of Endor, Samuel Addresses King Saul. Woodcut, in Biblia Das ist: die gantze heilige Schrifft Deudsch. D. Mart. Luth. (Wittenberg: Hans Krafft, 1572), vol. 1, fol. 197r. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek [Bibel –S 2˚ 42:1]. widely used in sixteenth-century iconography as symbols of evil seduction, black magic, lust and perfidy.26 A curious creature with a vulture-like head in the left foreground carries a mirror to be used in divining; while a smaller flying beast hovers above and further bird metamorphs clamber along the ledge of an arch. One of these has the lower body of a human; while another, which is making its way down the arch, has a goat’s head for a posterior. Together with the flying beasts in the top right-hand corner, all communicate an overwhelming sense of demonic presence. They also serve to emphasize the diabolic nature of the witch of Endor’s necromancy and dramatically change the story’s traditional iconography. We have no idea, however, about any influence the painting might have exerted on other contemporary and later commentators and artists.27 It has survived as a wonderfully 26

Carroll, pp. 98–99; Zika, Exorcising our Demons, pp. 518–20.

27

Cornelisz.’s inclusion of a group of witches may have influenced at least one late sixteenth-century Flemish anamorphic painting which depicts the events at Endor. See Fred Leeman, Hidden Images: Games of Perception, Anamorphic Art, Illusion, from the

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graphic example of the dramatic change in attitude towards the magical arts in the early sixteenth century, how those arts became homogenized under the label of witchcraft, and how, in the early sixteenth century at least, artists created a strong link between witchcraft and sexual disorder. Another sixteenth-century image of the witch of Endor story which certainly did exert considerable influence on the work of contemporaries was a woodcut, most probably designed by Johann Teufel, in the 1572 Wittenberg edition of the so-called Luther Bible, the German vernacular Bible translated by Luther between the 1520s and 1540s (fig. 4).28 Teufel’s woodcut would have become familiar to many thousands, not only through the 1572 edition, but also through copies of the woodcut included in at least six editions published between 1572 and 1610.29 The emphases on ritual magic found in Cornelisz.’s painting, also find expression here, even if in a more understated fashion. Located within a room of the woman of Endor’s house, the necromancy scene includes the paraphernalia of ritual magic: an altar and a large candle, as well as a magical circle with three burning candles and crosses ringing the perimeter. The artist is careful to communicate that the action takes place at night by including the moon and stars. The woman holds a long staff, which would surely have been understood by viewers as a magician’s ritual wand, and much more surprisingly perhaps, prayer beads are depicted hanging from her left arm. Directing his message to a Lutheran readership, Teufel has used this detail to link the necromantic practices of the biblical witch to an object pious Lutherans would have regarded as an abominable symbol of Catholic magic.30 And his reference was very topical. In 1569, the year Teufel dates his print, Pope Pius V issued a bull granting indulgences for praying and meditating on the rosary mysteries.31 In March 1572, Renaissance to the Present (New York: Abrams, 1976), pp. 52, 57, fig. 44. Another closely related version may have been cut down, with the result that the scene of witchcraft is now lost. See Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. by W.J. Strachan (Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey, 1977), pp. 24–25, p. 172, n. 16, fig. 16. 28 Although the Master I.T. is generally identified as Johann Teufel, uncertainties remain. See Stefan Strohm and others, Die Bibelsammlung der württembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1984–93), I: Deutsche Bibeldrucke 1466– 1600 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1987), 292–95 (E 483). 29

See Schmidt, Die Illustration, pp. 431–32, 436, fig. 349. Schmidt only refers, however, to the 1572 and 1584 editions. 30

The rosary quickly became an object by which adherents to the Roman Church were identified. See Gabriel Meier, ‘Der Rosenkranz in der Reformationszeit’, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Kirchengeschichte, 8 (1913), 296–303. 31

Bull of Pius V, September 17 1569, in Bullarum, Diplomatum et Privilegiorum Sanctorum Romanorum Pontificum, ed. by Franco and Henrico Dalmazzo (Turin, 1857–72), VII (Naples, 1882), 774–77; Franz Michel William, The Rosary: Its History and Its Meaning, trans. by Edwin Kaiser (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1952), pp. 79, 105. See also Charles Zika, ‘Reformation, Scriptural Precedent and Witchcraft: Johann Teufel’s Woodcut of The

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Pius established the feast of Our Lady of Victory, in memory of the victory of the Catholic alliance against the Turks at Lepanto in October of the previous year, a victory attributed to the rosary, which then provided a new basis for the cult’s reinvigoration as one of the core devotional practices of Counter-Reformation religiosity.32 As with many of Teufel’s other biblical illustrations, images of a biblical past were endowed with strong contemporary relevance.33 Curiously, however, Teufel’s woodcut displays either a deep ignorance of the practices of invocatory magic or, more probably, a concern to subordinate such issues to the communication of fundamental theological concerns. Instead of locating the woman and Saul within a magic circle, as an instrument to ensure protection from any evil spirits who might respond to invocations, Teufel has placed the woman within the circle together with the invoked spirit of Samuel. The woman and Samuel are now linked, as though by a magical bond. This accurately reflects one of the main theological points that Luther’s biblical commentary emphasizes. Following a line of biblical exegesis which gained considerable weight in the sixteenth century, Luther declares that the apparition is not Samuel, but a ghost produced by the devil. The marginal commentary explains that the apparition is none other than the evil spirit himself, who has assumed Samuel’s person and name. It is the devil, a Teufels gespenst (diabolical ghost), who addresses Saul and the witch under the appearance and name of Samuel.34

Witch of Endor’, in Reforming the Reformation, ed. by Ian Breward (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2004). 32

Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, 5 vols (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1966– 91), IV: Maria (1980), Pt 1, 112; Pt 2, 174–75; Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto 1571 (London: Cassell, 2003), pp. 125–28; Louis Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. by Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, 1989), pp. 3–9; André Duval, ‘Rosaire’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–), XIII (1988), Pt 2, col. 960. On the iconography of the rosary, see Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. by Engelbert Kirschbaum and others, 8 vols (Rome: Herder, 1968–1976), III (1971), cols 568–72. 33

See, for instance, his illustration of 1 Kings 15. 12–13, in which King Asa of Judah is depicted overseeing the destruction and burning of idols in the company of Luther, Elector Frederick the Wise, and Duke Augustus of Saxony. See Heimo Reinitzer, Biblia deutsch: Luthers Bibelübersetzung und ihre Tradition (Wolfenbüttel: HAB, 1983), pp. 259–60, fig. 169. 34

‘Das erzelet die Schrifft darumb/ auff das sie warne jederman/ das er das nachfolgende Gespenst von Samuel recht verstehe und wisse/ das Samuel tod sey/ und solchs der böse Geist mit der Zeuberinnen und Saul redet und thut/ in Samuelis person und namen’: Biblia Das ist: die gantze heilige Schrifft Deudsch. D. Mart. Luth. (Wittenberg: Hans Krafft, 1572), I, fol. 197r; HAB, Bibel S 2˚ 42:1.

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Along with this marginal commentary, the 1572 Luther Bible also included substantial summaries at the beginning of each chapter, written by the preacher of St Sebald’s in Nuremberg, Veit Dietrich.35 Complementing and developing Luther’s exegesis, Dietrich’s summary provided a further reason for inserting an illustration of the witch of Endor story in a Luther Bible for the very first time. For it claims that the story offers an example to secular authorities of how they are to punish and root out public idolatry and superstition. Such a lesson was certainly topical in Wittenberg in 1572. For it was in that year that a new Electoral Saxon Criminal Constitution was promulgated. This was the first territorial legal ordinance in the Empire to punish with death those who made a pact with the devil. It decreed that even when no injury resulted from witchcraft it was nonetheless a capital crime, as were divining, soothsaying and crystal-gazing.36 We do not know the impact of Teufel’s print in this process, but given the critical role of both Luther’s and Dietrich’s commentaries in providing the scriptural legitimacy for rulers to remove witches from their territories in fulfilment of their Christian office, the print might have constituted a powerful visual summary and reminder of that message. The witch of Endor story certainly featured in many Luther Bibles from this time on and, as in Teufel’s print, the primary emphasis was on the figure of the female necromancer and the techniques she employed to invoke Samuel. Literary treatises continued to debate the nature of Samuel’s appearance. The Lutheran physician, Johann Weyer, for instance, drawing on support from Augustine’s exegesis, insisted that Samuel was a devil-spectre, ‘clad in a [demon’s] likeness’, and that the woman of Endor was therefore a demonic familiar and servant of the devil.37 And although the Catholic lawyer, Jean Bodin, argued against Weyer and others that the apparition was of Samuel himself, there was a consensus that the source of the apparition was the wicked necromancy of the witch of Endor in league with the devil.38 35

The Summarien were added to the Old Testament of the Luther Bible in 1541 and to the New in 1544: Reinitzer, p. 259. For an extremely useful list of the Luther Bible editions and contents between 1522 and 1546, see Reinitzer, pp. 109–27. 36

See the extract from the legal opinion in Hexen und Hexenprozesse in Deutschland, ed. by Wolfgang Behringer (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1988), p. 157; also Jürgen Michael Schmidt, ‘Das Hexereidelikt in den kursächsischen Konstitutionen von 1572’, in Benedict Carpzov: Neue Perspektiven zu einem umstrittenenen sächsischen Juristen, ed. by Günter Jerouschek, Wolfgang Schild and Walter Gropp (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 2000), pp. 111– 36; and Manfred Wilde, Die Zauberei- und Hexenprozesse in Kursachsen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), pp. 28–32. 37 Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, Bk 2, chs 9–10, in Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyer, ‘De praestigiis daemonum’, ed. by George Mora (Binghamton: SUNY Binghamton, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), pp. 127–33. Weyer also claimed that Saul adored the devil in the likeness of Samuel (p. 131). 38

Jean Bodin, On the Demon-Mania of Witches (1580), ed. by Jonathan Pearl (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995), p. 105; and Vom aussgelasnen

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Fig. 5. Christoph Murer, The Witch of Endor, her Familiar Spirit and Saul. Woodcut in Novae Sacrorum Bibliorum figurae versibus Latinis et Germanicis expositae…Durch M. Samuelem Glonerum Poëtam Laureatum (Strasbourg: Christoph von der Heyden, 1625), p. 102. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek [B graph. 1625 03]. This diabolical reading of the story created the theological basis for the representation of the woman of Endor as a witch in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-

wütigen Teuffelsheer, Ubersetzt von Johann Fischart, ed. by Hans Biedermann (Graz: Akademische Druck, 1973), p. 90. Bodin’s argument concerning the apparition rests on Ecclesiasticus 46.23. For the broader context of the early modern debate on apparitions, see Stuart Clark, ‘The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe’, Journal of Religious History, 27 (June 2003), 143–60; and ‘Demons, Natural Magic, and the Virtually Real: Visual Paradox in Early Modern Europe’, in Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), pp. 223–46; also Bruce Gordon, ‘Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation’, in The Place of the Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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Fig. 6. Joachim Sandrart, The Witch of Endor Conjures Samuel. Woodcut in Ganz neue Biblische Bilder-Ergötzung Dem Alter und Der Jugend Zur Beschauung und Erbauung (Nuremberg: Johann Andreae Endter and Sons, 1710), p. 254. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek [B graph. 1710 01]. century illustration and, in particular, for the widespread popularity of Teufel’s own composition. That basic composition became popular through different versions. The Lyon engraver, Thomas Arande, was possibly its originator, for the woodcut that first appears in French and Italian editions of Quadrins historiques de la Bible published in Lyon by Guillaume Roville in 1564 is attributed to him.39 But in this 39

The very popular Quadrins, a series of biblical illustrations accompanied by verses written by Gabriel Symeoni, were first published in Lyon in 1553 with illustrations by Bernard Solomon — amongst which, however, there is no illustration of the Endor story. Arande is generally identified with the artist ‘le maître à la capeline’. See Catherine Dumant, Francesco Salviati au Palais Sacchetti de Rome et la décoration murale italienne (1520–

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engraving the ritual emphasis is played down and Teufel’s anti-Catholic polemic has yet to be given expression: there are no candles within the circle, and a rosary has not been included. In a compositionally similar version by Christoffel van Sichem in a 1646 Amsterdam Bible, even the magical circle has been removed.40 But in the Luther Bible published by Balthasar Christoph Wust in Frankfurt in 1686, Teufel’s influence is pronounced, with the same strong emphasis given to the relationship between the witch and the devil-spectre in the shape of Samuel.41 A more active role for the woman of Endor, together with an emphatic interest in the paraphernalia of witchcraft, is conspicuous from the turn of the seventeenth century. The Swiss artist, Christoph Murer, for instance, created a woodcut published in a 1625 Strasbourg picture Bible, which interpreted the ‘spirit’ by which the woman of Endor divined (1 Samuel 28. 8) as a diabolic spirit similar to the ‘familiars’ of English witchcraft cases (fig. 5). Here it takes the form of the so-called Glasteufel, the spirit kept at home in a bottle, that the witch, dressed in a transparent magical garment on which are sown salamanders, shows to her client Saul. A magic circle with various signs and talismans, as well as a wand, are arrayed on a table in front of her. The relationship between the witch and Saul, linked by the demonic spirit and circle, is the focus of the image. As though off-stage, on the left, the figure of the aged Samuel appears in a vaulted room. This woodcut became a popular image which was reproduced in various editions, including a Luther Bible of 1680.42 A similar emphasis on the witch’s necromantic techniques and paraphernalia is found in a woodcut by Joachim Sandrart, which appeared in the so-called Kürfürsten-Bibel, published in Nuremberg from 1641 by Wolfgang Endter and his heirs (fig. 6).43 Here the witch is almost a Circe-like figure with a wand — possibly influenced by the Circes of Castiglione and others that Sandrart would have encountered

1560) (Rome: Institut Suisse de Rome, 1973), pp. 172, n. 122; 214, n. 35. The illustration appears again in Roville’s 1577 Lyon edition: Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, (hereafter WLB), B graph. 1577 01. The WLB holdings are described in detail in Strohm, Bibelsammlung. 40

WLB, Ba graph. 1646 01.

41

The image is reversed and is clearly a copy, even if somewhat modernized: WLB, Bb deutsch 1686 01. An illustration by Johann Theodore de Bry in a Vulgate Bible published in Mainz in 1609, also emphasizes the relationship between the woman and Samuel, although it is only Samuel who stands in the magic circle. 42

WLB, Bb deutsch 1680 01. For Murer’s biblical illustrations and the Glasteufel, see Schmidt, Die Illustration, pp. 360–62, 432–34. 43

Philip Schmidt dates the woodcut 1641 but I have not as yet located the image in a 1641 Bible, and certainly not in the first Kürfürsten-Bibel: Die Illustration, p. 438, fig. 353. The ‘E. P.’ at bottom right refers to the cutter, Elias Porzelius. For the Kürfürsten-Bibel, initiated by the Saxon Elector (Kürfürst), see Horst Kunze, Geschichte der Buchillustration in Deutschland: Das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983), pp. 611–13.

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Fig. 7. Monogrammist VW, The Witch of Endor Conjures up Samuel for Saul with the Assistance of the Devil. Woodcut in Biblia, Das ist Die gantze Schrifft, Altes und Neues Testaments Teutsch Herrn D. Martin Luthers S. (Nuremberg: Wolfgang Endter, 1656), p. 276. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek [Bb deutsch 1656 01]. on his travels in Italy in the late 1620s and early 30s.44 Not only do we have the necromancer’s book and candles, there are also vials, a skull, bones and a belching cauldron. There is also a kind of priestly stole, on which magical figures are painted or sown. The focus is again on the necromancer, and the artist is at pains to gender her by revealing her lower leg and introducing a cauldron. In a woodcut of the Monogrammist VW from a 1656 Kürfürsten-Bibel (fig. 7), the dynamic interplay is that between a terrified and turbaned Saul and a figure of Samuel clothed in priestly garb. The woman assumes more the role of broker and mediator, yet she is depicted very much as a witch, located within a magic circle, her body bared to the waist, holding a candle, with a skull at her feet, and even accompanied by a figure of the devil. She is diabolical consort, witch, and also magical practitioner, situated

44

For Castiglione and others, see Bertina Suida Manning, ‘The Transformation of Circe: The Significance of the Sorceress Subject in Seventeenth-Century Genoese Painting’, in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Federico Zeri, 2 vols (Los Angeles: Paul Getty Trust, 1984), II, 689–708.

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Fig. 8. Johann Heinrich Schönfeldt, Saul and the Witch of Endor. Engraving with additions in pen, ink and grey wash, c. 1670. By permission of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung, Stuttgart.

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Fig. 9. Melchior Küsel, The Witch of Endor Conjures up Evil Spirits. Engraving in Icones Biblicae Veteris et Novi Testmenti (Augsburg: [n. pub.], 1679). Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek [Ba graph 1679 01]. within a domestic environment, with rows of bottles and flasks visible on a shelf behind her.45 In other images a setting considered more appropriate to the arts of necromancy has been chosen. One of the most dramatic is an outdoor location in proximity to the graves of the dead, as in Johann Heinrich Schönfeldt’s well-known etching of around 1670, executed by Gabriel Ehinger (fig. 8).46 The focus is again on the witch and her necromancy. She is now a priestess, her body exposed as though to emphasize its elemental powers, a conjuror of the restless dead who are awakened by her priestly rituals, almost a shade herself who can cross to the other side. As in Jacob 45

The woodcut also appears in a 1702 Luther Bible: WLB, Bb deutsch 1702 02. Schmidt dates it 1670: Die Illustration, p. 438, fig. 352. The use of bottles and flasks is similar to sixteenth-century illustrations of the witch Palaestra from Lucian’s Golden Ass. 46 Salvator Rosa, ed. by Michael Kitson (London: Arts Council, 1973), p. 73; Herbert Pée, Johann Heinrich Schönfeld: Die Gemälde (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1971), p. 233. Similar settings are found in copperplate engravings by Johann Ulrich Krauss, in Augsburg picture Bibles of 1700 and 1702, in engravings by Caspar Luykens in picture Bibles of 1708 and 1711; and in drawings by John Michael Rysbrack: WLB, Bb graph. 1700 03; Ba graph. 1702 01; Bb graph. 1708 01; Bb graph. 1711 01 1.

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Fig. 10. William Faithorne, King Saul Bows before Samuel. Frontispiece engraving, in Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus; or Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions. In Two Parts. The First Treating of their Possibility, The Second of their Real Existence (London: [n. pub.], 1681). London, British Library [719.h.4]. By permission of The British Library. Cornelisz’s painting of a century and a half earlier, the witch of Endor seems to straddle the gender and ritual status of magician and witch. Likewise, in an engraving by Melchior Küsel, which seems to have been first published in an Augsburg picture Bible of 1679, Saul and Samuel are barely visible (fig. 9).47 It is the witch with her flying hair, wand, powders and cauldron who is mistress of the wild forces and weird demons which surround her. Küsel’s image was in fact a reverse copy of a sorcerer shown with the devils of drinking and smoking by Jan van der Velde II from half a century earlier. Küsel simply included three tiny figures of Saul and his assistants as well as a house in the background to create an illustration of the witch of Endor story.48 Similar beasts as well as flying demons accompany the 47

The engraving also appears in Nuremberg Luther Bibles of 1695 and 1702: Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 8˚ Lö. 225; WLB, Ba deutsch 1702 01. It is reproduced in Schmidt, Die Illustration, p. 396, fig. 308; ‘Le spectre’, fig. 9. 48

Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts c. 1450–1700, ed. by F. W. H. Hollstein (Amsterdam: Hertzberger, 1949–), XXXIII: Jan van de Velde II to Dirk Vellert, compiled by Ger Luijten and Christiaan Schuckman, ed. by D. de Hoop Scheffer (Roosendaal: Koninklijke van Poll, 1989), 53, no. 152; XXXIV: Jan van de Velde II: Plates, 81, fig. 152.

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scene of witchcraft depicted in Andreas Fröhlich’s titlepage engraving to a collection of sermons by the Lutheran preacher Bernhard Waldschmitt and published in Frankfurt in 1660.49 An emphasis on necromancy as witchcraft is certainly not the only message to be transmitted through this biblical iconography, even if it is the dominant one. From the mid-seventeenth century the question of Samuel’s nature is raised more insistently. This is certainly so in a number of Italian images — in a fresco by Francesco Salviati in the Palazzo Sacchetti in Rome, and in paintings by Pietro Testa and Salvator Rosa, in which Samuel commands an extraordinary presence by virtue of the brilliant light surrounding him.50 Samuel radiates a similar aura, which would seem to refer to Samuel’s apparition as a heavenly body or soul, in a large number of Dutch images — as in works by artists such as Pieter Schuts and Benjamin Gerritsz Cuyp.51 Even though in some of these works the artist gives prominent exposure to the magical activities and paraphernalia of the witch, it is among German artists in particular that the Endor iconography focuses insistently on the woman as a necromancer and witch in league with the forces of the devil. The particular emphasis of a German artistic tradition is quite demonstrable if one examines the images used to illustrate Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus, a title that might be translated as ‘Sadducism Defeated!’, referring to the teaching that denied the reality of spirits.52 Glanvill, a chaplain to Charles II from 1672, died in 1680, and his work was published posthumously by the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, in 1681, with three more editions appearing over the next decade. An engraving by the English artist, William Faithorne, was included as a frontispiece (fig. 10). In Faithorne’s engraving the woman of Endor becomes little more than an 49

Pythonissa Endorea, Das ist: Acht und zwantzig Hexen- und Gespenstpredigten (Frankfurt am Main, 1660). 50

Dumant, pl. 56, fig. 116; pl. 70, fig. 149; Luisa Vertova, ‘Florence: The Biennale Internazionale dell’Antiquariato’, Burlington Magazine, 127 (1985), pp. 928–29, fig. 112; Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 181–82. 51

For Schuts, see the picture Bibles published in 1700 in Amsterdam and in 1749 in Rotterdam: WLB, Ba graph. 1700 01; B graph. 1749 02. For Cuyp, see Ildikó Ember, ‘Benjamin Gerritsz. Cuyp’, Acta Historiae Artium, 25, 89–141, (p. 136, cat. no. 2). For the image, see Amsterdam, Rijksbureau voor kunsthistorische documentatie, 71 H31 52. Also see a painting by a Rembrandt student, in Im Lichte Rembrandts: Das Alte Testament im Goldenen Zeitalter der niederländischen Kunst, ed. by Christian Tümpel (Munich: Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1994), pp. 90, 102, fig. 62. And see a painting by Gerbrandt van den Eeckhou: photograph in the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection, University of London, taken from the Netherlands Art Institute Library, no. 4705. 52 Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus: or Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions. In Two Parts. The First Treating of their Possibility, The Second of their Real Existence (London: [n. pub.], 1681).

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artist, The Witch of Samuel from the engraving in Joseph Triumphatus: Oder klarer Beweiss Von Gespenstern Oder Erscheinungen; in verfasset (Hamburg: 1701). Wolfenbüttel, Bibliothek.

Fig. 11. Unknown Endor Conjures Tomb. Frontispiece Glanvill, Saducismus Vollkommener und Hexen und Geisterzween Theilen Gottfried Libernickel, Herzog August

observer of the action. No magical paraphernalia are visible and the candles seem to have a practical function, given that it is night. The focus is Samuel, who is surrounded by a brilliant aureole and, as indicated by the caption, duly recognized by Saul. This is meant to illustrate Glanvill’s fundamental argument that the apparition was not an act of trickery on the part of the woman, an illusion created by the devil, nor indeed the devil himself, it was none other than the blessed soul of Samuel, clothed not in his terrestrial body, but ‘in this his more pure Aerial or Aetherial Body, which he could form into such an appearance and habit as he had in the Terrestial’.53 Glanvill’s work went through many English editions and all continued to feature this engraving.54 But in 1701 Glanvill was translated into German and published in Hamburg. This brought with it a dramatic change to the frontispiece. Faithorne’s frontispiece was replaced with an engraving by an unknown artist (fig. 11), which was a copy of a woodcut by Georg Eimart, originally included in an Augsburg picture Bible of 1695.55 The action takes place in a large vault or tomb, complete with skulls, bats 53

Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Appartions, ed. by Coleman E. Parsons (Gainesville: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), p. 310. 54 The engraving is a frontispiece in both 1681 editions. In the second edition of 1682, it is accompanied by a second engraving with six scenes from Glanvill’s text, which was used as the frontispiece to Part 2 in the 1681 edition. The 1689 and 1700 editions follow that of 1682. The 1727 edition returned to the format of 1681. 55

The 1701 Hamburg frontispiece has been reproduced in Witchcraft in Europe 1100– 1700: A Documentary History, ed. by Alan Kors and Edward Peters (London: Dent, 1973), p.

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and smoke-effects. The centrepoint of the very theatrical scene is the witch of Endor, who, armed with her magic circle, skulls, bats and billowing smoke, orchestrates Samuel’s appearance from the grave. The magic circle has become little more than a decorative device and all stand outside it. The key figure is the witch, who is much more than just a medium; she is the master of ceremonies, choreographer and producer. This depiction is wholly at odds with Glanvill’s text, which argues against earlier English writers on witchcraft such as Reginald Scot and John Webster, who claimed that the apparition was simply an act of illusion and deceit perpetrated by a cunning trickster and conjuror.56 The Hamburg frontispiece illustrates very effectively the fact that a particular iconography of the witch of Endor story had become dominant among German artists of the later sixteenth and seventeenth century. Under the impact of increased demonological speculation, an intensification of ecclesiastical and secular policies deployed to eradicate sorcery practices and superstitious beliefs, and the widespread support of courts in the vigorous prosecution of witchcraft charges throughout German-speaking territories from the 1580s through to at least the 1670s, the representation of the biblical story shifted away from a concern with the nature of Samuel’s appearance and prophecy to focus on the woman of Endor as necromancer and witch, and the magical techniques and instruments she used to conjure Samuel. Interest shifted from a simple wonder at the apparitions from the spirit world, to the rituals, techniques and persons through which such apparently wondrous contact could occur. The woman of Endor, therefore, needed to be depicted through the visual language of witchcraft to make clear her compact with the devil. But her role as a necromancer in communication with the dead also linked her to a magical tradition commonly identified with a male and clerical class,57 and so it is not surprising that her representation also included references to that tradition.58 323, fig. 68. The Augsburg picture Bible is edited by Christoph Weigel, and was reprinted in 1730: WLB, Bb graph. 1695 01; Bb graph. 1730 01. It is also very similar to an illustration included in a Basel Brandmüller (Luther) Bible of 1699, which Schmidt attributed to the Monogrammist CM and to an engraving by R. Shephard in a 1730 London Bible: WLB, Bb graph. 1735 01 1; Schmidt, Die Illustration, p. 437, fig. 351. 56 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), ed. by Montague Summers (New York: Dover, 1972); John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London: J. M., 1677). 57

For necromancy and ritual magic, see Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. by Claire Fanger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); and Frank Klaassen, The Monk and the Apothecary: Illicit Learned Magic in England 1300–1550 (Stroud and Philadelphia: Sutton and Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming). 58

For necromancy and ritual magic, see Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. by Claire Fanger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University

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Although such different identities tended to create a somewhat unstable figure, her sexual and ritual ambiguity also served to accentuate her primary role as a medium, a figure who had the capacity to cross boundaries and make contact with the other side. And given the critical debate about priestly mediation in Counter-Reformation culture, it is hardly surprising that a biblical story of mediation with the spirit world would have received a new and heightened level of attention.

Press, 1998); Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); and Frank Klaassen, The Monk and the Apothecary: Illicit Learned Magic in England 1300–1550 (Stroud and Philadelphia: Sutton and Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming).

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Part Three The Written and Oral Word

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Iustus ut palma florebit: Pier Soderini and Florentine Justice LORENZO POLIZZOTTO

M

ay I begin with an anecdote, first recounted by Vasari in his Life of Michelangelo. This is the story of Pier Soderini’s examination of Michelangelo’s David once the colossal statue had been transported to its allotted place in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of government in Florence and also Soderini’s new residence. As Vasari tells it, Michelangelo was up on the scaffold putting the final touches to the David, when Soderini, the highest magistrate in the Florentine Republic, the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia appointed to the office for life in 1502, came to inspect the statue which, since its commission in 1501, had become the talk of the city. Soderini, so we are told, examined the David at length and was mightily pleased by it; he thought, nonetheless, that the nose was too large and told Michelangelo as much. Michelangelo climbed higher upon the scaffolding and pretended to retouch the nose with the chisel while letting some marble dust, which he had purposely picked up, slip through his fingers. Seeing the dust fall, Soderini was convinced that Michelangelo had bowed to his, Soderini’s judgement, and had acted upon it. So, when Michelangelo called down and asked him to look at it again, Soderini replied: ‘I am far more pleased with it; you have given it life’.1 An apocryphal story, perhaps, but all the more telling for that; art historians can afford to disregard it, as almost all of them have, but not so historians of Florentine politics and society. It is too easy to dismiss it for its naivety and for Vasari’s casting of Soderini in the role of stooge, and to neglect to consider what else the anecdote was originally meant to convey in terms of the statue’s political significance. Proper

1

Giorgio Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo, ed. by Paola Barocchi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1972), p. 22. The translation is mine.

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consideration of these factors will enable us to understand also the reasons for Soderini’s interest in the David and even his concern for its artistic perfection. So much has been written about the David, and so ingenious and attractive have been the opinions advanced regarding its meaning and significance, that it may seem foolhardy to add even some refinements to an already comprehensive list.2 And yet, there is no doubt that the end effect of all this ingenuity has tended to make us lose sight of the work’s primary significance. Whatever else the David might have been meant to convey, it is obvious that its primary function was as a symbol of justice. The statue was commissioned, or rather recommissioned, in August 1501, in the very midst, that is, of two important political debates.3 The first of these debates focussed on ways and means of reforming the Florentine judicial system in order to ensure that justice was administered fairly and impartially; the second, on the necessity of halting the Republic’s slide into factionalism, impotence and ruin by reforming some essential elements of its constitution to ensure internal cohesion and therefore stability, strength and permanence.4 Both debates were to have positive outcomes in the following year with the wholesale reform of the judicial system and with the transformation of the office of the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, which was also the highest judicial office in the state, into a post to be held for life and not for two months as had been the case previously. In commissioning the David, the republican government was sending a powerful message to the Florentines. By this time, David, the king and legislator who ensured Israel’s survival and prosperity by defending it against its enemies and by dispensing good laws and just government, was one of the most frequently cited figures in the innumerable protesti di giustizia delivered in Florence throughout the fifteenth century.5 The protesti, to whose 2

See, for instance, Charles Seymour, Michelangelo’s David (New York: Norton, 1974); S. Levine, ‘The Location of Michelangelo’s David: The Meeting of January 25, 1504’, Art Bulletin, 56 (1984), 31–49. Very useful, too, on the symbolic meanings of David and Judith for the Florentines is Francesco Caglioti, ‘Donatello, i Medici e Gentile de’ Becchi: Un po’ d’ordine intorno alla Giuditta (e al “David”) di Via Larga I, II, III’, Prospettiva, 75–76 (1994), 14–49; 78 (1995), 22–55; 80 (1995), 15–58; and by the same author, Donatello e i Medici: Storia del David e della Giuditta, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 2000). 3 Gaetano Milanesi, Le lettere di Michelangelo Buonarroti pubblicate coi ricordi ed i contratti artistici (Florence: Le Monnier, 1875), pp. 620–23; Michael Hirst, ‘Michelangelo in Florence: “David” in 1503 and “Hercules” in 1506’, Burlington Magazine, 142 (2000), 487– 92 (p. 487). 4

Andrea Zorzi, L’amministrazione della giustizia penale nella Repubblica Fiorentina: Aspetti e problemi (Florence, 1988), pp. 100–04; Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 66–75. 5

The number of surviving protesti is considerable, but only a few collections of them have been published to date. David is not only the figure most often presented as the example of just ruler, but in addition, the psalms attributed to him are among the speakers’ most popular

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content I shall return shortly, were public orations delivered in Italian by one of the gonfaloniers of the companies in the audience chamber of the Palazzo della Signoria before all the members of the newly elected Signoria, fifteen days after they had been sworn into office. A protesto was also commonly delivered, but in a more public place, usually in front of the Palazzo, to domestic and foreign officials, such as the Sei di Mercanzia, the Podestà, the Capitano del Popolo and so on, upon their assumption of office. In this case, it was customary for the officials to deliver a reply in similarly lofty language.6 As the term itself implies, the institution of the protestatio, as outlined by legislation, had a twofold function. It was designed to encourage newly elected magistrates to uphold justice during their term of office while at the same time assuring these magistrates that the polity would lend them all required assistance in the proper execution of their duties. The statue of David as executed by Michelangelo embodied the two attributes which had been assigned to him in the protesti. Vasari confirms as much when he states that David was represented as a young man with a sling in his hand so that ‘in the same way that he had defended his people and governed them with justice so those who governed that city should defend it courageously and govern it justly’.7 Here is the explanation for Soderini’s interest in the David. Whether this interest manifested itself in the way described by Vasari or whether it was expressed in a manner more suitable to a head of state, is irrelevant. What counts is that Vasari, writing sixty and more years after the event, was aware of how concerned Soderini, as Gonfaloniere a vita, had been with the David’s appearance. It could not have been otherwise, given the correlation between the statue’s symbolic meaning and the perceived duties of his office. Because of the conflation of Soderini’s two terms of office as Gonfaloniere di Giustizia — he was first appointed to the office in March 1501 for two months — we tend to dismiss too lightly Vasari’s assertion that Soderini, together with the operai of Santa Maria del Fiore, was instrumental in granting to Michelangelo the block of marble in which he modelled the David.8 If that was indeed the case, then Soderini may well have had some say in determining

sources of citations. See, for example, Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze (hereafter BNF), Fondo Principale II. I. 71, fols 43v, 44r, 48r, 52v; BNF, Magliabechiano VIII 1437, fols 11r, 58v, 59v, 60r, 61r; see also, Matteo Palmieri, Una prosa inedita (Prato: Guasti, 1850), p. 22. 6

Emilio Santini, ‘Le protestatio de iustitia nella Firenze medicea del sec. XV’, Rinascimento, 10 (1959), 33–106 (pp. 34–36). 7

‘Un Davit giovane con una frombola in mano, acciò che, sì come egli aveva difeso il suo popolo e governatolo con giustizia, così chi governava quella città dovesse animosamente difenderla e giustamente governarla’: Vasari, p. 20. To my knowledge, only Charles Seymour has discussed Vasari’s statement at length, though he places upon it an interpretation with which I am not in agreement (p. 58). 8

Vasari, p. 20. For Soderini’s term of office see Giovanni Cambi, Istorie, II, in Delizie degli eruditi toscani, ed. by Ildefonso di San Luigi (Florence: Cambiagi, 1785), XXI, 159.

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how the statue should be executed and what values it should symbolize. This is not as far fetched a notion as it may seem, bearing in mind the close relationship which existed between him and Michelangelo, the latter’s deference to him and most importantly, the capital which Soderini was to make out of the statue’s symbols. In so doing, Soderini was following precedents established by the Medici and the republican government which succeeded them after their overthrow in 1494. There is no need to dwell upon the notorious, and perhaps illegal, appropriation by the republican government in 1495 of the Medici owned and commissioned statues of Donatello’s David and Judith Slaying Holofernes, another popular image of justice in the protesti.9 Both statues were removed from the courtyard of the Medici palace and placed in the Piazza della Signoria: the David in the courtyard of the Palazzo della Signoria, the Judith and Holofernes in the very place which would later be assigned to Michelangelo’s David, the ringhiera of the Palazzo.10 As Giuliano da Sangallo, one of the speakers assembled by the Signoria to discuss the placement of Michelangelo’s David, pointedly remarked when he argued that it should be placed close to the seat of political power in Florence, the figure of David was a cosa pubblica.11 As such David had very precise connotations which, though evolving over time, remained nonetheless firmly tied to the theme of political justice. Thus the concern of successive governments, or heads of government, to be identified with it and even, if possible, to take control of its artistic representations. Very little work has been done on the concept of justice in the Renaissance.12 As a concept it constituted the link between popular ideology and advanced political speculation. Political debate at all levels was dominated by it, while political activity was always punctuated by appeals to it. For these reasons it was the most exploited of political concepts, appealed to, manipulated, and claimed by the most disparate of regimes: its meaning and applicability enhanced by the imaginative way in which it was defined and redefined throughout the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. So concerned are we with the evolution of new political ideas in the period that we have neglected to study older concepts which contributed to shape the new thought. Thus, to give but one example, we make a great deal of the fact that justice is not specifically dealt with in Machiavelli’s Il Principe and fail to mention not only that he too wrote a protesto di giustizia but also that the concept is extensively treated in

9

On both see Caglioti.

10

Nicolai Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio 1298–1532 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 136–73, and bibliography cited therein. 11 The debates over the placement of the David are most conveniently available in Seymour, pp. 136–55. For Sangallo’s comments, see p. 146. 12 The only exception is the old but still very useful work primarily concerned with artistic representation by Lodovico Zdekauer, ‘Iustitia: Immagine e idea’, Bullettino senese di storia patria, 20 (1913), 382–425.

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his other works.13 By ignoring the concept of justice, we have failed to appreciate both its vitality and its influence on contemporary society. Indeed, I am convinced that justice as a political concept was at its most influential not in the late Middle Ages, as claimed, but in the quattrocento and cinquecento, at the very height of the Italian Renaissance. Before the quattrocento, before that is, humanistic intervention in the political debate, justice was invested with specific legal meanings. It was generally accepted that justice was the ultimate bond of human society. Without justice, so it was argued by Florentines of the duecento and trecento, there could not be any prospect of living together in peace and concord, the prerequisites of a stable and prosperous society. The common good of any society could best be promoted and ensured, therefore, by rulers who were themselves lovers of justice. Primarily, justice involved the distribution of punishment and reward. Similarly, the just ruler was almost invariably seen as a judge or described as performing judge-like functions and decisions. Not surprisingly, the most common pictorial depiction of justice was to represent her as a dignified, usually enthroned, female figure holding a pair of scales, whereas the good ruler or magistrate was represented as a judge: typical here were the lost fresco by Giotto in the Palazzo del Podestà in which the Commune was represented as a judge and the cycle in the audience chamber of the Palazzo dell’Arte della Lana in which the good ruler is represented as Brutus il buon giudice aided by justice.14 By and large, this legalistic conception of justice remained unaltered until the early fifteenth century when, as a result partly of the war against Milan and above all of the humanists’ treatment of the subject, far more complex and politicized notions of justice evolved. Within a remarkably short period of time, and partly through the agency of the protestatio de iustitia, these notions became common property. Two 13

Niccolò Machiavelli’s protesto has been given the title, ‘Allocuzione fatta ad un magistrato’, in Arte della guerra, ed. by Sergio Bertelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), pp. 133–37. 14

On both see Salomone Morpurgo, ‘Bruto, “il buon giudice”, nell’udienza dell’Arte della lana in Firenze’, in Miscellanea di storia dell’arte in onore di Iginio Benvenuto Supino (Florence: Olschki, 1933), pp. 141–63; and Un affresco perduto di Giotto nel Palazzo del Podestà di Firenze (Florence: Carnesecchi, 1897). Though this paper concentrates on Florence, similar trends can be observed throughout north and central Italy, see for instance, Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), 179–207; Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Jonathan B. Reiss, ‘Justice and Common Good in Giotto’s Arena Chapel Frescoes’, Arte cristiana, 42 (1984), pp. 69–80. Indeed, so widespread was the practice of painting justice in public buildings that it was felt necessary to write a book on how best artists should represent the concept: Baptista Fiera, De Iusticia pingenda: On the Painting of Justice: A Dialogue between Mantegna and Momus (London: Lion and Unicorn Press, 1957).

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major trends can be discerned. In the first place, while justice retained its earlier legal meaning, more and more emphasis was now placed on its role as a civic virtue. Justice, so it was maintained, was the essential prerequisite for liberty. Where there was justice, there was equality before the law, unfettered participation in public life, and therefore concord amongst the citizens. Respect by the citizens for each other’s rights — a respect guaranteed by the proper administration of justice — engendered patriotism which in turn manifested itself through the citizens’ liberality towards one another and also towards the patria. For citizens living in such a well-regulated polity, no sacrifice was too great, not even the laying down of one’s life, if it ensured the survival of the city and of its institutions. All the more so since the preservation of justice was essential if Florence were to enjoy continued prosperity and, above all, its present intellectual and creative primacy. Thus, in an argument which, as far as I know, has no equivalent elsewhere in Italy, the Florentines traced the origins of their city’s beauty and wealth as well as of their own intellectual and artistic supremacy to justice or, to be more specific, to the favourable conditions fostered by justice in their city.15 Hand in hand with these notions based on contractual theories of association, which held that man as a rational being must work towards the establishment of institutions perceived to be of common utility, another and contrasting interpretation was being offered and elaborated. According to this interpretation, the attainment of justice was not the result of men’s collective efforts towards the common good, but the freely bestowed gift of an outstanding, heroic individual on society. The list of law-givers given by the various protesti and by other documents — humanist orations, treatises and eulogies — is fairly restricted and comprises biblical figures, Moses, David and Solomon and Judith in particular, classical ones, Numa Pompilius, Solon, Lycurgus and a mythological one, Hercules.16 Apart from the contrasting view on the ‘historical evolution’ of justice which it offered, this interpretation carried with it the strong suggestion that an outstanding law-giver was necessary not only at the outset, at the time of institution of a given political system, but thereafter: to arbitrate, to regulate, to dispense justice. While it cannot be argued that one interpretation was more influential than the other, it was the second which found greater favour amongst the city’s governors, the Medici and later Soderini, if one is to judge from their eagerness to be identified with the lawgivers of old and from the eulogies dedicated to them.

15

See especially, BNF, Fondo Principale II. I. 71, fols 19v–20r; and BNF, Magliabechiano v VIII 1437, fol. 12 , where, in a protesto by Piero Guicciardini of 15 January 1484/5, justice is referred to as ‘madre et regina del secolo aureo’. 16 See, for example, BNF, Magliabechiano VIII 1437, fols 42v–43v, 44r. See also the protesti by Francesco da Castiglione e Carlo del Benino, in BNF, Magliabechiano VIII 1437, fols 58v– 59r and 123v respectively.

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Even so, there is little doubt that the protestatio, as an institution, contributed to undermine in the long run the stability of the Medici’s rule over Florence. Individual protesti may have been hackneyed, repetitive and — to be perfectly frank — boring: one should not disregard, however, their cumulative effect in large number delivered continually, in public, and also circulating in written form. Even the most trite or naive of these protesti posited idealized views of justice and of a just polity which could not but be perceived to contrast with reality. Some of them, moreover, alluded to the discrepancy between the idealized version of Florentine justice posited in the protesti and the arbitrariness of its administration under the Medici. Ser Filippo Pandolfini for one, in his protesto of 1474, did not hesitate to highlight this fact and to point to the inevitable ruin which would follow.17 The Medici’s disregard for justice was also stressed by their opponents. The chronicler Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, for instance, remarked on the regime’s lack of justice, on its tyrannical policies, and on the reign of terror instituted in Florence upon Cosimo’s return from exile.18 Others, like Alamanno Rinuccini, stressed the arbitrariness of the administration of justice under Lorenzo, and the factionalism, the greed, and the inequality this engendered.19 The opponents of the regime refused to be taken in by the special pleading of the protesti but rather relied on it for the terms of the condemnation they levelled against the regime. Instead of the Florentia florentissima of the protesti, the opponents emphasized the economic ruin caused by the self-serving, unjust, policies pursued by the Medici.20 The very survival of the city, they maintained, was in jeopardy, because without justice there could not be concord and therefore no commitment to the patria’s welfare and preservation.

17

‘Quante rep[ubliche] che prima erano florentissime sono per la iniustitia ad extrema et calamitosa ruina pervenute?’: Santini, pp. 67, 73. The superlative removes any doubt regarding the specific republic he had in mind, see n. 20 below. 18

The Trattato Politico-Morale of Giovanni Cavalcanti (1381–1451), ed. by Marcella T. Grendler, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 135 (Geneva: Droz, 1973). See also Dale Kent, ‘The Importance of Being Eccentric: Giovanni Cavalcanti’s View of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Florence’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 9 (1979), 101–32 (pp. 128– 29). 19

For Alamanno Rinuccini, see his Dialogus de libertate, ed. by Francesco Adorno, Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Toscana di scienze e lettere La Colombaria, 22 (1957), 270–303 (pp. 282–84). An English translation is available in Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence, ed. and trans. by Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 204–05. 20

The florentissima is a recurrent conceit, see, for example, BNF, Magliabechiano VIII 1437, fols 18r, 20r. See also Scelta di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare dal secolo xiii al xix, 249 vols (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1887; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1968–69), CXLI: Prose del Giovane Buonaccorso da Montemagno (1887, 1968), 1, 3. As pointed out by the editor, the protesti in this collection are also attributed in some manuscript collections to Stefano Porcari.

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The most concerted attack against the Medicean system of government’s lack of justice and its consequent arbitrariness and ungodliness was launched by Savonarola. Indeed, the Savonarolan reform in the civic sphere was launched and consummated with the cry, ‘Fate giustizia! Fate giustizia!’.21 His attack on the Medicean regime for its transgressions against justice was, if anything, even more polemical than that of its lay opponents. With an oblique reference to the protesti, he maintained that since 1434 — that is, since Cosimo’s return from exile — Florence had cloaked itself in justice and yet had become worse than ever. He also showed himself to be well informed on past Florentine artistic practice, on their readiness to forgo substance for the artistic statement. He berated them for having caused a figure of justice to be painted in the Palazzo della Signoria, without then bothering to follow its dictates. As he contemptuously told them, alluding to the various representations of justice scattered throughout the city in its public and private buildings, far fewer artistic representations were needed but far more acts of justice, or, as he put it: ‘Io non vorrei tante dipinture, ma che voi facessi iustitia’.22 Savonarola had a primarily utilitarian conception of justice. For his theoretical framework he was indebted to Saint Thomas Aquinas. In his sermon on justice preached before the Signoria in 1491, as well as in the lectures on the law delivered to the Friars of San Marco at about the same time, and later incorporated in his Compendium Philosophiae Moralis, Savonarola presented scholastic and contractarian views taken wholesale from Aquinas’s Summa.23 Even then, it is possible to detect a more practical bent in his thought. He was more concerned, in other words, with the administration of justice, with questions of procedure, of punishment of wrongdoers and of the syndication of officials, rather than with theories and philosophical concepts. He was never to abandon this utilitarian approach, even though, with his conversion to millenarianism after 1494, he was forced to pay greater attention to the theoretical and ideological questions. While still retaining Thomistic positions, he now argued that the Florentine millennium, which he had prophesied on God’s behalf, was dependent upon the attainment of justice in Florence. It was beholden on the Florentines to prepare the way for God’s advent to Florence so that he could bestow His Grace and His promised blessings upon the city, by seeing to it that justice was done.

21

See, for example, Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra i Salmi, ed. by Vincenzo Romano (Rome: Belardetti, 1974), II, 147–48, 168–69; and Prediche sopra Ezechiele, ed. by Roberto Ridolfi (Rome: Belardetti, 1955), I, 99–102, 114–15. 22 Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra Ruth e Michea, ed. by Vincenzo Romano (Rome: Belardetti, 1962), II, 144. 23 Girolamo Savonarola, Compendium Philosophiae Moralis, in Scritti filosofici, ed. by Giancarlo Garfagnini (Rome: Belardetti, 1988), II, 305–477. The sixth book of the Compendium is dedicated wholly to justice (pp. 391–415).

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As Savonarola never ceased to repeat from the pulpit, the new republican government, introduced in December 1494 partly at his behest, provided the proper foundations for the attainment of justice. Even so, he admitted that modifications to and refinements of the constitution were still needed, partly to prevent arbitrary decisions, partly to ensure that existing laws against wrongdoers were applied or strengthened if necessary. Those seeking to undermine the constitution, or resisting the amendments advocated by Savonarola were condemned not only as unpatriotic, but also as ungodly, because they stopped Florence coming into her spiritual and material inheritance. To declare one’s support for justice, as Savonarola conceived it, and for the government which underpinned it, denoted the person’s godliness as well as his or her election; to oppose it, on the other hand, betrayed the person’s sinfulness and unworthiness to partake of the blessings promised to Florence. This deeply divisive view colours the many discussions on issues of law, order and justice conducted in the consulte throughout these years.24 These discussions also help to explain the bitterness of the political debate. The final polarization occurred in 1497, and, given the precedents, it was inevitable that it should occur over an issue of law and justice. In that year there was discovered a Medicean plot to overthrow the republican constitution and to restore Piero de’ Medici to power. Once they recovered from the shock, Savonarola’s followers demanded that the five leading conspirators be executed, as already decreed by the government, and also that they should be denied the right of appeal to the Great Council: a right which, ironically, had originally been incorporated in the constitution at Savonarola’s insistence.25 After bitter debates, the Savonarolans won the day, and the five conspirators were summarily executed.26 The executions opened a chasm between the Savonarolans and the Mediceans, thus aggravating the Florentine political crisis until its final resolution in 1530 with the capitulation of the Florentine Republic. Most importantly, for our purposes, the executions marked the beginning of a new phase in the debate over justice. On the one hand, as expected, the debate became indissolubly linked with the bitter political disputes of the time. On the other, there ensued an escalation of the practice, ever present in Florentine society, of destroying one’s political enemies through the manipulation of justice, or, to be more precise, through the manipulation of the judicial process. The denial of the right of appeal to the five conspirators had been justified by the Savonarolans on the grounds that to observe the letter of the law would in this case destroy its substance. They argued in the consulte that the law of appeal had been 24

See in particular, Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASF), Consulte e Pratiche, Registro 61, fols 3r–4v; Registro 63, fols 56r–61v, 70r–v. 25

On this whole episode see Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Girolamo Savonarola, 2 vols (Rome: Belardetti, 1952), II, 314–16. 26

For the debate see ASF, Consulte e Pratiche, Registro 63, fols 83r–87v.

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introduced to reduce the incidence of arbitrary decision in order to ensure justice and therefore the concord, equality and liberality essential if the Republic was to prosper and thrive. To allow the appeal when the citizens were already so divided over the issue would have prolonged and hardened existing divisions, rendering the Republic more vulnerable to internal collapse and external conquest. In the circumstances to be just was a form of injustice. The preservation of the Republic, so they argued, would allow of no alternative but the blocking of the appeal. To the Medicean opponents of Savonarola, these arguments were mere casuistry which aimed to justify a decision notable for its cruelty and partiality. Here was proof, they maintained, that the much vaunted Savonarolan system of government, far from fostering justice and godliness, engendered passion and violence and therefore injustice and evil.27 Isolated and ostracized, there was little the Mediceans could do to retaliate in kind. Whenever possible, however, they joined forces with other antiSavonarolans to harass their common enemy. This anti-Savonarolan coalition was most successful in exploiting the popular revulsion occasioned by the executions of 1497. Indeed, one could argue that the execution of the five conspirators in 1497 prepared the way for the burning of Savonarola and of his two companions in 1498. All this bloodletting was symptomatic of the bitter political fragmentation of the Florentine Republic, of the factional intolerance and, above all, of the readiness of all contending parties to invoke justice to destroy their enemies. The list of victims is long; the charges under which they were tried and sentenced were varied and ingenious. Only in 1501 was there a letup in the struggle brought about by a major realignment of the Florentine political factions. In that year, the republican antiMedicean forces, divided until then over the figure of Savonarola, agreed first to a truce and then joined together in an alliance designed to prevent the return of the Medici to Florence. Thereafter, the lines of the political struggle were far more clearly drawn: on the one side the republicans, Savonarolans and anti-Savonarolans alike; on the other the Mediceans within and without the walls.28 While this realignment was taking place, the already mentioned commissioning of the David, the reform of the judicial system, and the transformation of the office of the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia into a lifetime office, with Soderini’s appointment as Gonfalonier, took place. The political realignment, the reform of the judicial system and the creation of Soderini as Gonfaloniere a vita were followed by a further refinement of the concept of justice. Available evidence suggests that these new concepts originated in circles close to Soderini. By combining the more aggressive attributes allocated to justice by humanist and Savonarolan theorists, justice was now presented in two guises. First, as an exclusively republican virtue with specific antiMedicean connotations; secondly, as a militant virtue, requiring from the citizens a 27

ASF, Consulte e Pratiche, Registro 63, fols 83r–87v.

28

Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence 1494– 1545 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 212–38.

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commitment to defend the Republic, even with arms if necessary, against those forces that wanted to destroy it. Its traditional functions as a civilizing, bonding and stabilizing force in society were now even more strongly emphasized. They were also closely associated with its more militant attributes, as demanded by the extraordinary dangers which the Republic was facing and which were threatening its survival. There seems to be little doubt that Soderini contributed to the formulation of these new notions of justice and that he even saw to it that they were incorporated in the David or at the very least became associated with the statue. They were also employed by him to justify the policies which he pursued in his new office, an office which had given rise to such diverse and contrasting expectations. An early statement on this close relationship between new, militant ideas of justice, Soderini’s consequential interpretation of his office and the David’s significance is provided by a letter from Matteo Bigazzi da Cascia, a canon of San Lorenzo, to Marco Strozzi, a canon of Santa Maria del Fiore. The letter, undated, but written shortly after Soderini’s election as Gonfaloniere a vita, casts Soderini as the Florentine David. Like the Lion of Judah, Bigazzi writes, Soderini had united his lost and leaderless people;29 he was both their commander and priest who would lead them against the powers of darkness. Like David he ruled with justice, and the just, therefore, flocked to his cause. The rich and the poor, the powerful and the defenceless would all be equally protected by him through his equitable distribution of justice. On the other hand, all disruptive elements in society, the evildoers as well as those who plotted for the overthrow of the Republic, would feel the full force of his wrath and would be exterminated. Biblical quotation upon biblical quotation, attribute upon attribute, the hyperbolic parallel was created, with Soderini emerging as the alter David who alone would save Florence and assure for it the glorious destiny long prophesied.30 Though more moderately put and without the reference to David, this view of Soderini was conveyed by most eulogies composed during his period of office as Gonfaloniere.31 There was nothing Soderini liked more than being cast in the role of the Davidic, just ruler. He stepped into the role eagerly. As Gonfaloniere di Giustizia a vita, he acquired new judicial powers which enabled him to initiate proceedings and to intervene at any stage in the judicial process of any magistracy in the Republic.32 He 29

ASF, Carte Strozziane, Serie III, 138, fol. 59r.

30

ASF, Carte Strozziane, Serie III, 138, fols 59r–62r.

31

See, for example, the poems in Soderini’s praise written by Paolo Orlandini, in ‘Epythome super universam Bibliam’, MS BNF, Conventi soppressi, D.5.827, fols 339r–343v. See also Humfrey Butters, ‘Piero Soderini and the Golden Age’, Italian Studies, 33 (1978), 56–71 (esp. pp. 62–63). 32

The text of the legislation is to be found in Giorgio Cadoni, Provvisioni concernenti l’ordinamento della Repubblica Fiorentina (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 2000), pp. 229–41. See also Zorzi, p. 103.

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also oversaw the implementation of the reform proposals passed in 1501/2. By all accounts he performed his duties impartially; he was never overbearing in his actions and seldom intervened in the judicial process. When he did, he argued that he was compelled to intervene for the preservation of the Republic.33 Soderini’s identification of his rule with that of David was taken even further. Early in his gonfaloniership he abandoned the family seal which he has used till then and adopted an official seal, two versions of which are known, both with the motto drawn from David’s Psalm 92. 12, ‘Iustus ut palma florebit’, depicting a youthful, naked David with the sling in his left hand and the staff of command in his right.34 Soderini’s appropriation of the David tells us more than his concern with his image as the political leader of the Republic. It is my contention that it reveals, above all, his understanding of the role he wished to play in Florentine government. More than that, it may also have foreshadowed his ultimate intentions regarding his office. Like the Medici before him, he identified himself with the most widely recognized popular symbol of just rule in order to enhance his authority over a deeply divided polity. In addition, he associated this powerful symbol exclusively with his person and with his residence, which was also the city’s seat of power. In this, he was following the precedents set by the Medici who had commissioned from Donatello the David as well as the Judith and Holofernes for the most public areas of their palace. While head of state, through the identification of himself with David, Soderini set out to change the nature of the office he held. The Gonfalonierato di Giustizia, which till 1502 had been viewed primarily as the magistracy overseeing the administration of justice, began to be transformed by Soderini into the very embodiment of justice, and thus of good government. As the holder of the office for life, he therefore personified justice and all it stood for. The official seal he adopted left no doubts as to the conception he had of his office.35 It is significant that during Soderini’s rule, and undoubtedly as a result of his efforts to have justice identified 33

The most notorious occasion was his attempt to block the marriage of Filippo Strozzi and Clarice de’ Medici. On which see Melissa Meriam Bullard, ‘Marriage, Politics and Family in Florence: The Strozzi-Medici Alliance of 1508’, American Historical Review, 84 (1979), 668–87. 34 An illustration of one of the seals in Silvano Razzi, Vita di Piero Soderini, Gonfaloniere perpetuo della Repubblica Fiorentina (Padua: Stamperia del Seminario, 1736), p. [44]. The composition owes more to Donatello’s ‘David Mediceo’ than to Michelangelo’s David; it also has elements — the staff in particular as well as the shape of the hat — that recall some of the representations of Hermes/Mercury. The inscription, however, removes all doubts as to the personage depicted. For the variety of interpretations on Donatello’s bronze David and on its intended purposes, see Francis Ames-Lewis, ‘Donatello’s Bronze David and the Palazzo Medici Courtyard’, Renaissance Studies, 3 (1989), 235–51. 35 Not to leave any doubts as to the meaning of the seal and of the image there depicted, the central angel supporting the seal holds the scales of justice in one hand and points to them with the other: see Razzi, Vita, p. [44].

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with his office and person, the tradition of the protesti di giustizia began to wane. This does not necessarily mean that Soderini was aspiring to princely authority by stealth, though the possibility cannot be excluded. Some of his decisions in government as well as the activities of his ambitious brother, Cardinal Francesco, might suggest that he was covertly working to seize control of Florence.36 On the other hand, till his overthrow in 1512, he kept the loyalty of all anti-Medicean Florentines committed to republican government who praised him for his defence of the city against the tyrannical pretensions of the Medici. As things stand, there is not sufficient evidence to demonstrate that he was attempting to subvert the republican system of government in order to establish his own dynastic rule over Florence. Nonetheless, it is clear that by appropriating the symbols of justice Soderini sought, at the very least, to strengthen the authority of his office which was constantly challenged because it did not fulfil the expectations members of the Florentine ruling group had placed on it. Particularly telling is the fact that opposition to his government was strongest on matters of justice.37 His opponents, no doubt aware of his efforts to consolidate his power, undermined them by challenging him on the very issue he employed to achieve his end. Whatever of Soderini’s ultimate intentions, there is no doubt that he established precedents which the Medici were all too eager to follow once they were restored to Florence in 1512. They tried to reclaim the symbols of justice which had been removed from their palace after their expulsion in 1494. They first requested the return of Donatello’s David and Judith and Holofernes, though they eventually decided for unspecified reasons not to pursue their claim.38 Next they tried to discredit their republican opponents’ record in matter of justice while advancing their own claims of impartiality and efficiency. Not surprisingly, this met with stern resistance.39 What threatened to become a destabilizing campaign of claims and 36

This is the view held primarily by Sergio Bertelli who has presented it in various works. See for instance, ‘Un magistrato per a tempo lungo o uno dogie’, in Studi di storia medievale e moderna per Ernesto Sestan, II Età moderna (Florence: Olschki, 1980), pp. 451–94. For opposing views, see Roslyn Pesman Cooper, especially, ‘Pier Soderini: Aspiring Prince or Civic Leader?’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 13 (1979), 71–126. 37 Giorgio Cadoni, Lotte politiche e riforme istituzionali a Firenze tra il 1494 e il 1502 (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1999), pp. 237–45; Sergio Bertelli, ‘Pier Soderini “Vexillifer Perpetuus Reipublicae Florentinae” 1502–1512’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. by Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence: Sansoni, 1970), 334–59 (pp. 354–55). 38 Luca Gatti, ‘Displacing Images and Devotion in Renaissance Florence: The Return of the Medici and an Order of 1513 for the David and the Judith’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, s. 3, vol. 23 (1993), 349–73 (pp. 355–57). 39

The campaign was fought also at the popular level with sacre rappresentazioni. The Mediceans reissued Lorenzo de’ Medici’s La rappresentazione di Santo Giovanni & Paulo (Florence: Tubini e Gherardi, 1514) with an appended poem criticizing the preceding

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counter-claims was cut short by the Pistoiese Goro Gheri, who had none of the Florentines’ regards for conventions. On assuming control of the Florentine government on behalf of Lorenzo de’ Medici, he embarked on a policy of judicial persecution and interference so blatant that it scandalized even some members of the Medici family. He made light of three centuries of Florentine preoccupation with justice by gleefully planning the judicial ruin of an opponent with the ironic remark: ‘Con la iustitia si fa ogni bene’.40 But he too knew that the regime could not hope to establish itself by these means. Relying on the precedents set by Soderini, he and the other Medici deputies who followed him oversaw all matters of justice and justified their policy to the Florentines with the arguments that the administration of justice would thus be speedier and more efficient.41 The short-lived republican regime of 1527–30 pursued equally centralizing, exclusive and excluding notions of justice. The effects of this by now ‘bipartisan’ policy were seen after the Medici final restoration in 1530. Thereafter, the judicial system came to be orchestrated by the Medici Dukes. All popular discussions on justice were discouraged. The protesti di giustizia disappeared from the Florentine scene. Justice was no longer to be a subject of popular concern and debate, with the unsettling effects this entailed. The people ceased to have a say on the principles that were to govern its administration. Justice was now exclusively in the ruler’s keeping and he, from above, administered it as he saw fit to the quiescent population. The process which Soderini had set in train now came to full fruition: the ruler was the embodiment of justice, he personified it and had thus total control over it. So that the point was not lost on the Florentines, a monument was erected in Piazza Santa Trinita in which justice, represented as a blindfolded goddess with scales, is placed high above the crowd upon a column, distant, all-powerful, unreachable.42

administration of justice. Their opponents retorted with the staging of Devota rappresentazione di Iudith Hebrea (Florence: Francesco Benvenuto, 1519) with its antityrannical, divinely ordained message of justice. This latter rappresentazione, however, was staged by the confraternity of the Purificazione della Vergine e di S. Zanobi some time before 1519. 40

ASF, Copialettere di Goro Gheri, Registro 1, fol. 209v. The whole Copialettere is full of such dismissive references to justice, but Gheri argues, nonetheless, for the need to act ‘col color della giustizia’ (fol. 168r). 41 See, for instance, ASF, Copialettere di Goro Gheri, Registro 1, fols 228r–230r; Registro 2, fols 137r–138r, 150r–v. 42 This point was first made by Zdekauer, p. 414. The message was also communicated with the same image of justice in Piazza Santa Trinita in the frescoes executed in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, by then the seat of government and the Medici residence.

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‘O

h you who read me, please don’t mislay me, for I am the guide and companion of him who copied me’. This inscription appears on the flyleaf of a notebook belonging to Giuliano di Giovanni de’ Bardi, a personal anthology compiled by its owner and comprising a selection of texts, Christian, classical, and popular, that he particularly prized and wanted to have handy for reference as he went about his daily business.1 There are more than a thousand such informal books made in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century, conserved still in three major libraries of Florence — the Biblioteca Nazionale, the Riccardiana, and the Laurenziana. Many hundreds of manuscripts have been identified and inventoried as belonging to this distinctive genre which, like the family ricordo, is particular, if not exclusive, to Florence.2 But many more remain to be distinguished from the great mass of genealogical and literary material that over the centuries found its way into various now public collections, particularly those of the Florentine National Library. These zibaldoni or quadernucci (notebooks), as their owners often called them, once belonged to men (and even a few women) on every rung of the social ladder of literate citizens, from Cosimo and Piero de’ Medici to soapmakers and saddle1

Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana 1577, fol. 50r.

2

See particularly S. Morpurgo, I manoscritti della R. Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze: Manoscritti italiani (Rome: I Principali Librai, 1893), I. For some non-Florentine ricordi, see James Grubb, Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), esp. pp. xi–xii.

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wrights. They are fascinating because they tell us what Florentines were reading and drawing upon for their ideas about how the world should function, and how they personally should operate in it. Their books passed from hand to hand and down the generations, as we may see from the lists of names of successive owners inscribed on the flyleaves, and they were regarded as part of a family’s moral and spiritual patrimony. The first entry on the titlepage of one, for example, reads: ‘This book belongs to me, Simone d’Alessandro di Iacopo Arrighi, and I wrote it in my own hand in the year 1451 and 1452’. At the bottom of the page we learn that eventually it became the property of: Simon Girolamo di Giovambatista di Simone di Bartolomeo, who is the heir of the aforesaid Simone di Alessandro di Iacopo Arrighi, who wrote these stories in his own hand in the year 1451; and today as I write this we are in the year of our Lord 1584; and the said Simone di Girolamo was born in the year 1583, on the 15th of June, at 19 1/2 hours or thereabouts, a Wednesday. God grant him the grace to be nourished, grow, and live in fear of Him and of the most glorious ever Virgin mother Mary.3

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time of growing interest in the ‘folkloric’ aspects of popular culture, many zibaldoni were acquired by literary antiquarians, among them members of the Accademia della Crusca. One, Simone di Giovanni Berti, who styled himself Lo Smunto (the disreputable), was the proud owner of several of the more interesting examples of this genre.4 Most books contained large numbers of poems, not only the ubiquitous selections from Petrarch, who by the fifteenth century was revered as one of the literary ‘three crowns of Florence’ (the other two were Dante and Boccaccio), but also verses composed by the anthologists themselves, who were often poets, frequently writing in the admired Petrarchan vein. Consequently, the main zibaldoni were intensively mined by literary historians from the late nineteenth century onward as a major source of the quattrocento lyric. However, the chief of such scholars, Francesco Flamini, in his still definitive work on La lirica toscana, written in 1891, dismissed much of the corpus of popular poetry as being of little literary value, and frankly expressed his post-Risorgimento distaste for the social and political attitudes of many of its authors. For example, he condemned one of a group of poets who clustered around the Medici and formed part of their large literary circle as Cosimo de’ Medici’s ‘gutless lackey’.5 Such 3

Riccardiana 1556.

4

The most striking of these was Riccardiana 1591, with illustrations from the workshop of Verrocchio. It had previously belonged to ‘Pierfrancesco, detto l’annebbiato (the frostbitten) nell’ Accademia della Crusca’. Florence, Laurenziana, Redi 184, was described as ‘Smunto’s book’. On this intellectual interest in popular culture, see particularly Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Smith, 1978). 5

‘Suo sviscerato servo’: Francesco Flamini, La lirica toscana del Rinascimento anteriore ai tempi del Magnifico (Pisa: Nistri, 1891), p. 287.

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routine denigration, coupled with the high value accorded literary originality and the rarity of a text in modern times, by contrast with the Renaissance reverence for ‘authorities’, to be preserved and revisited by each new generation seeking the benefit of their time-tested wisdom, may help to explain why these commonplace books have been astonishingly little exploited by recent historians, despite the wealth of information they contain for the student of Renaissance social and cultural attitudes. These attitudes appear most clearly in the functional and didactic aims of many compilations. Anthologists intended their books, designed for the ‘utility and delight’ of themselves and others, to serve as practical moral guides concerning issues of urgent importance to Florentines, particularly the salvation of their souls and the welfare of their city.6 These twin goals were related by the belief that a just society is the essential context of personal virtue, a view most persuasively articulated in a specifically Florentine idiom by Dante in his Divine Comedy, and by the conviction that one component of personal virtue was civic virtue, expressed in the conduct of government and political life, including the prosecution of just wars against the enemies of Florence and her liberty. Such moral concerns emerge from the selection of devotional, patriotic, historical and philosophical texts combined by anthologists to create and conserve a shared popular culture, and they are spelled out even more explicitly in the rubrics and comments with which choices were introduced and justified. Chapter 6 of my book entitled Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance contains an extensive account of the variety of fifteenth-century zibaldoni, of those who made them, and of the texts transcribed.7 This essay will focus on the way in which the compilers of two especially interesting collections dealt with current affairs, locating and interpreting their accounts of noteworthy contemporary events within a general cultural framework constituted in part by other texts drawn from the popular repertoire of literature defining accepted religious and political wisdom and morality. This process displays in sharper relief a major theme of my book: how Renaissance Florentines sought to reconcile action and ideals in a moral universe in which friendship, patronage, politics, civic and religious commitment, elements of past lives often scrupulously separated by modern historians, were seen as closely and naturally related. A subsidiary theme of the present essay is how anthologists’ careful documentation of current events reveals the Florentine propensity, not incompatible with the impulse to religious and moral instruction, to think ‘historically’, 6 These were the aims of Lionardo di Giovanni Carnesecchi in compiling ‘this little book of mine’: Riccardiana 1185B, fol. 52v. Compare Antonio Pucci, ‘This work strives to combine pleasure with profit’: Riccardiana 1185, flyleaf. 7

Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

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establishing a tradition that culminated in the next century in the writings of Francesco Guicciardini.8 By ‘thinking historically’ I mean primarily a particular desire, which crucially transforms chronicle into history, to come to grips in a narrative with issues of origins and explanations, associated with a serious concern for establishable facts, expressed in the attempt to verify one’s sources.9 These impulses have already been remarked in relation to another characteristically Florentine literary form, the domestic ricordo. However, while the ricordo expands outward from individual and family interests — domestic, business, and political — into a wider civic world by virtue of the fact that Florentine politics are based in the elite family,10 the zibaldone or chapbook enshrines a culture shared by patricians and artisans which encouraged them to interpret historical events in terms of values common to the entire citizenry of Florence — a city, as Cosimo de’ Medici once observed in a council debate, of ‘commerce, literature and leisure’.11 The careers of both our anthologists, one a patrician and the other a man of what Florentines called ‘the middling sort’, an accountant whose social status was roughly equivalent to that of wealthier artisans like butchers and goldsmiths, are also representative of the way in which Medici patronage in Cosimo’s lifetime (1389– 1464) could shape Florentine culture without necessary resort to coercion or even propaganda.12 Neither of these men was a political operative of the Medici party, but both considered themselves Medici friends and supporters. They were close to the city’s dominant family because they were members of the cultural and charitable circles that flourished under Medici patronage, fostering the civic and devotional ideals that Cosimo sought to identify with the Medici regime.13 The first of our two compilations was one of many made by the poet/accountant Michele del Giogante. He might be seen as a sort of cultural factotum to the Medici 8

On this see particularly Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘The Storie fiorentine and the Memorie di famiglia by Francesco Guicciardini’, Rinascimento, 4 (1953), 171–225; and Randolph Starn, ‘Francesco Guicciardini and His Brothers’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. by Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (De Kalb: Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 412–16. 9

See Louis Green, Chronicle into History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 10

See, for example, William J. Connell, ‘Libri di Famiglia and the Family History of Florentine Patricians’, Italian Culture, 8 (1990), 279–92. 11 Cited Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Cosimo optimus civis’, in Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici, 1389–1464, ed. by Francis Ames-Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 5–20 (pp. 16–17). 12

See Piero Guicciardini’s 1484 analysis of the layers of Florentine society published by Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence under the Medici, 1434–1494 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 320. 13

See Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, esp. pp. 367–70.

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and their influential friends, an important conduit linking them with the world of popular culture. He was one of the leading entrepreneurs of popular entertainment, of which the Medici were patrons, and an assiduous codifier of its major texts, transcribing into his numerous anthologies of poetry and prose original pieces he heard performed at popular venues, as well as traditional favourites that formed the basis of entertainers’ repertoires.14 The book to be discussed here is a slim volume of some forty folios. Half of these are covered with entries in an informal, occasionally untidy hand; the rest are left blank. The quires are encased in the original rough leather binding, which is tied with softer laces. In large letters on the cover is the legend, a light-hearted play on the Medici motto semper, with its connotations of reliability and fidelity, Semper Felix (forever happy). On the flyleaf, from the upper edge of which a long sliver has been torn away, Michele wrote: ‘On the 27th day of April [...], the day he left, [...] I made this quadernuccio; that is, wrote rather than made it, at the behest of my more than superior Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici’.15 Below is the table of contents of what Michele disparaged as his libricciuolo (rough little book), liberally adorned with manicules pointing out particular highlights. The volume is dedicated to the celebration of the ‘victories and great deeds done by the illustrious Francesco Sforza in 1439, and thenceforth up to the acquisition of Milan and his assumption of the title of Duke of Milan and its territory by universal acclaim, which was a very fine thing, on the 25th day of February, 1449’ (1450 by the Roman calendar; the Florentines began the new year only on the feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin, 25 March). True to the functional and didactic purpose of the zibaldone, Michele’s compilation, like Machiavelli’s Prince, is a sort of handbook, a pièce d’occasion. The occasion in this case was the edification of Piero de’ Medici, one of a group of ambassadors sent by the Florentine Signoria, the city’s governing magistracy, in acknowledgement of the importance to their strategic interests of Sforza’s accession to the lordship of Milan. The selections Michele included in his book for Piero add up to a briefing on the salient facts of Sforza’s career. The many blank spaces for dates and facts omitted, and the numerous passages crossed out, by contrast with the painstaking and perfect transcription of most collections for admired patrons, suggest that this handbook was assembled in some haste to meet the deadline of Piero’s departure date.

14

On his life, anthologies, cultural entrepreneurship, and relations with the Medici, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, throughout. For Michele’s memory treatise, which enumerates the contents of both his house and his mind, see also Dale Kent, ‘Michele del Giogante’s House of Memory’, in Society and the Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. by William J. Connell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 110–36. 15

Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale XXV, 650 (hereafter, BNF XXV, 650).

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Francesco Sforza, one of the most brilliant condottieri of his age, had served the Florentine state on and off during the 1430s and 1440s as captain of its mercenary forces, although in this period he also fought for the Visconti Duke of Milan, Florence’s traditional enemy, and waged a number of battles to increase the Lombard territories under his own authority. Before him his father, Muzio Attendolo, had gained Florentines’ favour by his renowned conquest of Pisa on their behalf in 1406. In the 1440s, and particularly after Filippo Maria Visconti’s death in 1447, Sforza became Cosimo de’ Medici’s chief partner in the establishment of the Italic League of Florence, Milan, Naples and Venice, which finally brought decades of war between the states of northern Italy to an end in 1454 with the peace of Lodi.16 Sforza was a personal friend of Cosimo, whose bank had helped to finance the consolidation of the condottiere’s territorial acquisitions. He was also a familiar and favourite hero of Florentine audiences who gathered in the piazza outside the church of San Martino al Vescovo to hear entertainers perform various popular songs and recitations, including the latest news of war and politics, of military and diplomatic coups. Sforza’s impressive exploits were described in numerous laudatory poems and prose accounts. The Florentine herald, Antonio di Meglio, once conjured a vivid popular image of the condottiere when he declared in verse that ‘I then applied myself so well in bed/that not even Sforza ever performed better in the saddle than I’.17 And the concluding lines of a poem attributed to Cosimo himself avow: Sooner shall the sea be ploughed and sown and fish be seen to swim on the mountain and the plain than I be separate from that to which I am bound: to defend your noble stance that brings to Lombardy peace or war. And sooner will nature change its course than I should cease to love you with art, ingenuity, order and measure.18

The Milanese embassy was one of Piero de’ Medici’s first important missions on behalf of his native city, and served as well as an opportunity to signal his inclusion in the close personal alliance between Sforza and the Medici forged by his father 16 See particularly Vincent Ilardi, ‘The Banker-Statesman and the Condottiere-Prince: Cosimo de’ Medici and Francesco Sforza (1450–1464)’, in Florence and Milan: Comparisons and Relations, ed. by C. H. Smyth and G. Garfagnini, 2 vols (Florence: La Nuova Italia editrice, 1989), I, 217–42. 17

For this and other poems about Sforza, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 53.

18

For this poem see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 20. On Cosimo’s response to Sforza’s recognition as Duke of Milan in a letter to his son, Giovanni, see p. 53.

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Cosimo; this friendship proved crucial to Piero’s political survival when his ascendancy over other prominent statesmen in the Medici party was challenged in 1466, in the aftermath of Cosimo’s death.19 Piero’s companions on his journey northward sixteen years earlier, as recorded by Michele in a note on the reverse of the flyleaf, were, in addition to Neri di Gino Capponi, who predeceased Cosimo in 1457, Luca di Buonacorso Pitti and Dietisalvi di Nerone di Nigi Dietisalvi-Neroni. Luca Pitti and Dietisalvi’s father Nerone were leaders of the Medici party after 1434, and ironically, but unsurprisingly, of the anti-Medicean conspiracy of 1466.20 Notably, among the first intimations that in the last years of Cosimo’s life Medici authority may have been losing ground to that of the chief lieutenants of their party was the growing influence of Pitti and particularly Dietisalvi-Neroni over the Duke of Milan. While Cosimo was alive, the latter’s special personal relationship with the Medici was unlikely to be superseded by associations with other Florentine statesmen. Sforza relied upon Cosimo’s financial and strategic support, and his deference to the older man, dating from his early service to the Florentine Commune after 1434, is expressed in the address of his letters to Cosimo as ‘revered [...] as a father’. Nicodemo da Pontremoli, Sforza’s foreign minister, became a familiar of the Medici household, further cementing the bonds of patriarchal patronage between Medici and Sforza.21 In 1466, Piero was able to defeat the party putsch led by Pitti and Dietisalvi, along with Niccolò Soderini and Agnolo Acciaiuoli, with the threat of Milanese intervention by force. Sforza had offered military support to protect Cosimo against his partisan rivals a decade or so earlier, but Cosimo had refused it; confident that he was still in control, he assured his Milanese friend that reports of Florentine unrest were much exaggerated.22 19

See Rubinstein, Government of Florence, Pt 2; also Lorenz Böninger, ‘Diplomatie in Dienste der Kontinuität: Piero de’ Medici zwischen Rom und Mailand (1447–1454)’, in Piero de’ Medici, ‘il Gottoso’ (1416–1469): Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer, ed. by Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), pp. 39–54. 20 Rubinstein, Government of Florence, pp. 136–73. On the dynamic by which the chief power-brokers of a party are always liable to challenge its leader, see Dale Kent, ‘The Dynamic of Power in Cosimo de’ Medici’s Florence’, in Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. by F. W. Kent and Patricia Simons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 63–77. 21

See Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 485, n. 19; also Sforza’s letter to Cosimo in Michele’s book for Piero, fol. 53, which began: ‘Magnifice tanquam pater carissime’. For Nicodemo’s observation that the Duke ‘infinite fiate me habiate comandato che sempre e in omne caso obedisca Cosimo non altramente che vostro padre’, see Rubinstein, Government of Florence, p. 132. And for Nicodemo’s position in the Medici household see pp. 102–04. On Nicodemo in general see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, pp. 75, 235, 272, 286, 319, 376; also Ferdinando Massai, ‘Nicodemo da Pontremoli, ambasciatore di Francesco Sforza a Firenze al tempo di Cosimo il Vecchio’, in Atti della Società Colombaria Fiorentina, 12 (1934), 133–62. 22

Rubinstein, Government of Florence, p. 90.

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Michele’s entry concerning the embassy to Milan appears to be a digest of the Signoria’s instructions to the ambassadors, who were elected on 7 April 1450, ‘to the most illustrious Prince Sforza of Cotignola and Duke of Milan’.23 Although in fact Sforza acquired his title through a combination of territorial conquest and diplomatic marriage to Bianca, daughter of the former duke, Michele reframed the event in terms of Florentine constitutional principles and ideals when he described how Sforza was made Duke of Milan ‘with one accord [...] by the will and consent of every leading gentleman, merchant and the whole of the people’.24 The representatives of ‘the entirety of this glorious city of Florence’ were enjoined to beg the Duke: That always and for ever he should consider it under his special patronage, of which he has always given clear indication, reminding him that our entire people have written in their hearts, or not so much written as carved there, the gracious offers and promises which he made in the letter he wrote to our magnificent Signoria [featured prominently in Michele’s anthology] [...] concerning the conservation and augmentation of our city.25

While Michele’s compilation was intended to answer the immediate practical needs of Cosimo de’ Medici’s putative heir and the family’s leading partisans in their initial encounter with the newly constituted Duke of Milan, the accountant clearly wanted it also to serve as an accurate record of contemporary events. Whether it was or not, it certainly serves the historian as evidence of the significance of this moment for the Florentine people, including the man in the street, or rather the piazza, an important part of the audience for poems and songs in celebration of current events. It also indicates how anxious Florentine citizens were to envision Sforza’s conquests and his alliance with Florence as not merely expedient, but as representing the highest ideals of Florentine civic and political morality, particularly as prescribed by the example of the histories of the res gestae of the admired ancients, as well as the customs of their own ancestors which this patriarchal society so revered. Michele addressed the provenance of his texts and the reliability of his sources in the first lines of the dedicatory poem that preceded his opening account of Sforza’s achievements: O famed Piero mine, son of Cosimo, this little book of mine I call yours, because ‘il Forte’ [his own nickname] made it with your advice, dreaming, as you know, of serving you in some small way, with certain additions which you will see that I found

23

BNF XXV, 650, flyleaf, reverse.

24

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 3v.

25

BNF XXV, 650, flyleaf, reverse.

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over time, and we know where; from that source from which these things always spring, and known to all the crowd’.

Michele seems to allude here to San Martino, where most of the selections he included in his book were performed. However, he may also have been referring to Cosimo de’ Medici, who passed on to Michele several letters from his private correspondence relating to the Duke’s activities, and whom the anthologist acknowledged as a key source of the information he presented. The embassy was announced on 7 April, and Michele lost no time in consulting expert informants, referring to various details that: ‘I Michele di Nofri del Giogante received today, the 7th day of April 1450, [...] having obtained them from somebody word for word’.26 By comparison with the consensus stressed in Michele’s digest of the government’s instruction to her ambassadors, the accountant’s own more lively and complex introductory narrative of the highlights of the takeover of Milan emphasizes contrary interests in the Ambrosian Republic, and the force of arms and God’s will in overcoming them: On the 25th day of February 1449/50, then, after so many various and happy successes, the illustrious Count, having obtained almost all the lands and territories of the Milanese by the 20th day of January 1448, besieged the city of Milan itself, tightening his hold on it day by day; and despite the help and favour that the Milanese expected from the Venetians because on the 4th day of September 1449, the latter had abandoned the Count and realigned themselves with the community of Milan, their efforts were in vain. For our Lord God, rewarder of all that is good, and augmenter of right, permitted that the Milanese, after long siege constrained not less by fear of the yoke of the Venetians than by the great hunger they were suffering, all united — gentlemen, merchants and people — should elect as their lord, and Duke of Milan, the most illustrious Count Francesco Sforza; and thus in peace and in universal union he took control.27

The incident of the death of the Venetian commissioner, whom Sforza himself in his letter to the Florentine Signoria described as being cut to pieces by the mob,28 was played down in Michele’s initial account of Sforza’s victory by recourse to the familiar topos of the uncontrollable masses: ‘It was a marvellous thing [...] that not one drop of blood was shed, except that of Messer Lionardo Venier, commissioner and quartermaster of the Signoria of Venice, and his death occurred more because of the frenzy of the popolo than for any other reason’. The accountant appealed rather to the authority of the Marsilian pars melior of the Commune of Florence and its ideal Roman models in order to sanction the siege:

26

BNF XXV, flyleaf.

27

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 3r.

28

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 4r.

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This was considered by distinguished and talented men of today to be [...] the most glorious victory that could be remembered for a long time, and equal to the great and worthy deeds of those ancient and famous Romans; and in our city, because of the intimate and indissoluble friendship which has always existed between our community and the present Duke of Milan, to be a happier occurrence than any other could be in our time, with respect to our desires and needs.29

There follows the famous letter sent by Sforza — of which Michele observed that ‘a jewel set in gold would not sit better here’ — to make formal announcement of his confirmation as duke to the Signoria of Florence. It arrived, carried by an envoy with trumpet and bearing an olive branch, on 6 March, and was later read to the crowd at San Martino. In it Sforza confirmed his allies’ interpretation of his victory, stressing the transformation of Milan from the bitterest enemy of the Florentine people to their truest friend: For as I have been until now a good son and servant of that admirable Signoria, so I intend to be at the present time and even more in the future. I will always be ready and prepared and swift to use my government, men at arms, people, money, and person to the benefit and conservation and amplification of their state as you will see.30

According to Michele, the sonnet he transcribed next, by Feo Belcari, ‘our citizen and a most worthy man’, was written in response to this message from Sforza to the Florentine people. It ‘demonstrated most effectively’ how Sforza’s victory redounded to ‘our benefit’ and ‘how obliged we are to God’ on that account.31 Belcari was a cleric whose counsel on issues of doctrine and devotion was sought by pious Florentines from both the patrician and artisan classes; he was also the author of the most popular sacred plays of the period. His poem celebrating Sforza was performed at San Martino, and soon became a staple of compilations.32 Michele underlined Belcari’s moral point about Sforza’s victory in his preamble to this work, lest Piero should miss it. There were two reasons for Sforza’s ‘marvellous acquisition’ of Milan: That is, reason and force [the dual principles on which Florentines considered the exemplary Roman civilization and its justice to be founded]; and these he calls two good spirits, declaring Madonna Bianca to be reason, and deservedly and necessarily

29

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 3v. For some interesting recent reflections on Marsilius of Padua’s conceptions of social health, see John Najemy, ‘The Republic’s Two Bodies: Body Metaphors in Italian Renaissance Political Thought’, in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. by Alison Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 247–48. 30

BNF XXV, 650, fols 3v–4r. For the extreme hostility of the Florentines to the Visconti, see Antonio Lanza, Firenze contro Milano: Gli intellettuali fiorentini nella guerra con I Visconti (Anzio, Rome: De Rubeis, 1991); also Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, p. 89. 31

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 4v.

32

On Feo Belcari see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, throughout, especially ch. 7.

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to be repatriated; and force, without which reason of itself, not augmented by necessity, is not worth very much, and that force is the count. Now see how nicely he says what he wants to: Two noble spirits sail always to windward against whoever is lacking in justice. One is reason, beautiful, honest and BIANCA, the other is the power to enforce it, SFORZA. He who is accompanied by these two vanquishes and erodes the wrong, so that honest rectitude returns to its own throne, and never tires of offering up the highest praise to the lord of all forces. These have made the magnificent Count the lofty Duke of admirable Milan and allowed him to subjugate innumerable territories. Thus whoever wishes to adorn his brow with such glory that he towers over all others should seek to acquire honour through just wars.

Not content with pointing out this moral lesson, Michele determined further to instruct his friend and patron in literary wordplay and the games of figured poetry, observing that the first letters of Belcari’s lines formed the pattern DCCCDC, signifying the exchange of the title ‘Count’ for the more worthy one of ‘Duke’.33 Having ‘resolved that this should not go unremarked’, Michele sketched a manicule, the index finger of a small gloved hand, with the words ‘Note, my Piero’.34 Warming to his literary theme, the accountant then added two more poems celebrating Sforza’s victory, the second enumerating the blessings it conferred upon Florence and her leading citizen, Cosimo de’ Medici: Now it seems to me appropriate in relation to this subject to bring out two stanzas from a repertoire of many written by the author, which were eventually performed at San Martino on the 8th day of March 1499/50, by a young boy with a beautiful [voice...] from which can be seen that when God wishes, he knows how to show us our

33

‘Duo spiriti gientil van sempre ad orza/Contra ciascun che di giustizia manca:/l’una è la ragion pulcra onesta e BIANCA,/l’altra è il poter ch’al far dovere SFORZA./Chi va con questi duo vincie et amorza/ el torto sì, che rettitudin franca/ torna nel proprio seggio, et non si stanca/dar somme laude al signor d’ogni forza./ Costor son que’ ch’an fatto el magno Conte/ del mirabil Milano excielso ducha/e subgiogare in Numerabil terre./Dunque chi vuole addornar la sua fronte/ di gloria tal che sopraglaltri Lucha/Cierchi acquistare honor con giusste guerre’. 34

‘Nota piermio, perch’ egliè pure bello, che quel nome conte sia circuscritto da quel maggior titolo del ducha, et che in ognimodo si conservi; vedi le 4 lettere di fuori cioè el C, e C D dicie Feo non la fe’ ad’altro fine senon che’l senso loro s’intendesse pel duca Conte, et pel Conte ducha; questo anche diliberai non rimanesse in dietro, cominciando et finendo in D, cioè in duca come titol più degno’: BNF XXV, 650, fol. 4v.

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obligation to him, incurred on the 26th day February 1499/50, by means of the Count’s acquisition of the dukedom that day, binding our well-being to his, and through the goodwill toward him which our glorious regime has always demonstrated, now added to, much to my pleasure, and deservedly, as I show in the last verse of this stanza: O King of Heaven, such is your power, so great is your ineffable mercy, that the count has assumed by your grace such a lordship that will be of great benefit to our city. Gloria in excelsis deo we may sing for such a glorious event, that the heavens and the earth and the sea should celebrate for the health and happiness of you Florence, which will cause you to triumph again, since you have the will and the means; writing to you he rejoices. And further we should sing in great praise of Cosimo, for his deserved happiness.35

Filling out the picture of the new duke’s noteworthy res gestae are several more documents tracing the history of Sforza’s previous territorial acquisitions, all with the impeccable provenance of the archives of Cosimo de’ Medici as guarantee of their genuineness and worth. All are framed by Michele in his preambles in the same moral terms, stressing the divine sanction and promotion of the intertwined destinies of Florence and Milan, and the just combination of force and reason as exhibited in the exemplary deeds of famous figures of classical history, while at the same time advancing the characteristic Renaissance claim that the new Romans, Florence and her allies, have succeeded in outdoing their admired ancestors, both within living memory and in the remotest past. A letter that Sforza had written from Radignani in 1441, when he was Captain General of the League, ‘to that distinguished man Cosimo de’ Medici’ was copied by Michele ‘exactly word for word’, because in it Sforza described ‘his great boldness, [...] impossible to imagine’, in recapturing Verona. Indeed the condottiere plied his chief ally, with whom he was obviously in constant correspondence, with the infinite details of war — of battle strategies, spoils of victory, and even the nature of the terrain — that help to explain why Cosimo the banker and statesman was such an expert in these matters.36 Michele’s comment on this document pushed the theme of the operation of divine providence in Florentine and Milanese politics to its absolute limits:

35

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 5r.

36

BNF XXV, 650, fols 5v–7v. On Cosimo’s interest and expertise in military affairs, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, pp. 264–80.

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Reading it you will see and note the greatest and most splendid feats of arms, also the boldest and most terrible, that perhaps have been heard of in all Italy for a very long time. And you will see how these were described without ambition for false and unnatural worldly glory, being based on the truth, and knowing God to be on our side, having for our preservation created and sent the count as a new Messiah for our earthly salvation to live down here on earth.37

This prophetic Petrarchan rhetoric is matched in Michele’s preamble to the next selection by his presentation of Sforza in neo-classical guise: ‘Being ordained in life and after his death a new god Mars’. There follows a copy of the treaty that the Visconti Duke of Milan thought it prudent to make with the Count Francesco Sforza in July 1441, after his spectacular defeat of Visconti’s leading general, Niccolò Piccinino, at Verona. This agreement included the offer of his daughter Bianca in marriage, with the town of Chermonte as dowry, and Michele noted the provisions ‘word for word as I had them from that most famous man Cosimo de’ Medici, who in giving this to me demonstrated his usual kindness to me’.38 Cosimo’s archive was also the source of ‘a magnificent letter’ of 3 August 1441 to the governor of Verona from the commissioner of the Venetians at the camp, describing the recapture of the city and subsequent peace negotiations between the captains and condottieri of the warring powers; a scene ‘worthy of commitment to eternal memory’, as ‘all our captains and condottieri with all the leaders of infantry and cavalry, about four hundred from one side and the other, disarmed’.39 Michele pondered the moral significance of this moment: Two extremely powerful armies, inveterate in their hatred and warfare, could remain only a mile apart, and rack their brains to put an end to all their past injuries, with all the death and inestimable bloodshed, and in the space of two days become friendly and well-disposed and mingle with one another in such a way that one might say that their two armies had become one, with the greatest sincerity and trust, so that there is no doubt that there will be peace [...] not only in Lombardy but throughout Italy [...] for which we should all thank God [...] You should be happy, my reader, on account of the love you bear your patria, obliging you to taste the flavour of this letter, [...] this being considered the most glorious reconquest within the memory not only of our fathers, but of our distant forefathers, who surely in order to increase their glory and fame would have wished to describe such an incident as this among the other impossible deeds and victories such as were never recorded even in Plutarch’s Life of forty-eight famous men.40

Perhaps ‘that famous man Messer Lionardo d’Arezzo’ (Bruni, Chancellor of Florence) had Plutarch’s work in mind when in 1450 he wrote to Sforza on behalf of 37

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 5v.

38

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 7v.

39

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 10r.

40

BNF XXV, 650 fols 11r–v.

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the Signoria, congratulating him upon becoming Lord of Milan, and describing his triumph in ideal classicizing terms. This formal letter, which appears next in Michele’s compilation, observes that Sforza first reconquered the city from armed men by force, but that after the death of the Visconti Duke, Sforza overcame the continuing resistance of the civilian citizens by his prudence and hard work. Hence the city of Milan, having recovered its liberty from the Venetians, elected Sforza as its Captain General. After covering both classical bases of legitimate authority, ‘togas’ as well as ‘arms’, Bruni continued in a Christian idiom, recapitulating the highlights of Sforza’s career to characterize the reconquest of Verona as ‘no less a task than raising the dead’, and attributable entirely to the Count’s ‘almost divine intellect’.41 Michele concluded his compilation with a long letter of Petrarch’s intended for the edification of King Uberto of Naples and addressed to the Florentine Nicola Acciaiuoli, Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom of Naples in the later fourteenth century.42 The accountant justified this entry as ‘anticipating in its reference to Uberto’s lordship the similarly well-deserved assumption by the Duke of his new authority’, arguing that Petrarch’s letter might just as well have been addressed to ‘our excellent Duke’ concerning his similarly just war against invidious enemies. Clearly Michele intended to legitimize with unimpeachable Petrarchan authority avant la lettre the virtuous and patriotic interests served by the Duke’s conquests, in much the same manner as Machiavelli was later to conclude his Prince with an inspiring citation of Petrarch’s Italia mia.43 Before declaring ‘This is finished, thanks be to God, and one sees here how it profits a man that God should have granted him true mercy’, Michele observed that ‘many things remain to me which undoubtedly you, a distinguished and famous man, already know and consider it your duty to weigh, but [...] nothing remains to such a man that is really of weight except not being loved’. 44 At the foot of this final page he added one last injunction to ‘note’ in a concluding verse: I don’t know how I can begin to say in prose or in verse what I want, except that I am yours in flesh and bone. And with great love I have made you this notebook, and graciously I give it to you; may our glorious God 41

BNF XXV, 650, fols 14v–15r. On the Florentine adoption of the classical topos of ‘togas or arms’, ‘Mars or Apollo’ as the alternative paths to power and fame, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, esp. pp. 268–69. 42

BNF XXV, 650, fols 15v–21r.

43

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 15v. Compare Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Portable Machiavelli, trans. and ed. by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1979), p. 59. 44

BNF XXV, 650, fol. 21v.

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grant you a happy return and with a worthy title you may add to your gracious name Piero.

By contrast, the compilation of Iacopo di Niccolò di Cocco Donati ‘Florentine’, one of four quite large and various anthologies either signed or attributable to him by his distinctive handwriting, was essentially a compendium for its owner’s reference of Christian and classical moral exempla.45 Iacopo was the son of Niccolò di Cocco Donati, who was Gonfalonier of Justice of the pro-Medicean Signoria that recalled Cosimo de’ Medici and his kinsmen from exile in September 1434. Niccolò had the distinction of being denounced by the doyen of plebeian popular poets, Burchiello, in a satirical sonnet that led to the poet’s own expulsion from Florence as an enemy of the regime. However, Burchiello was soon reconciled with the Medici, who became his enthusiastic fans and patrons, and Niccolò’s son Iacopo became one of his city’s foremost popular poets from the patrician class.46 Apart from a period in prison, apparently for debt, he had an active political career, characterized not so much by partisanship for the Medici as by civic service. He enjoyed sufficient favour with the regime to serve four times in the governing magistracy of the Signoria, three times as Prior and once as Gonfalonier of Justice. But he spent most of his considerable time in politics administering the affairs of various Florentine dependencies, as Podestà of Pistoia and Arezzo, and as vicar of Anghiari, Poppi and the Valdarno.47 Iacopo, like dozens of other patriotic citizens of various social levels, included in his book several of the key texts transcribed by Michele del Giogante for Piero de’ Medici. Among them were Bruni’s laudatory letter to Sforza and Petrarch’s admonitory letter to Nicola Acciauoli. From this last Iacopo drew a moral lesson very like the one Michele had discerned there, and he similarly signalled it with a manicule, sketched alongside a passage dealing with Machiavellian themes from a moral perspective: The patria should serve Justice, without which a kingdom, however wealthy and strong, cannot stand. You should learn that nothing founded on violence can last, and that it is much safer to be loved than feared; you should adopt the habit within yourself

45 The compilation discussed here is Riccardiana 1133; among the others by Iacopo are Riccardiana 1080; Biblioteca Nazionale, Palatino 214; Laurenziana, Pluteo 90, infra 47. 46 On Burchiello’s poetry and his relations with the Medici, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, esp. pp. 49, 82; on Niccolò and Iacopo Cocco-Donati, pp. 71, 80; on the patrician popular poets, esp. p. 78. 47

For biographical details, and his poems, see Antonio Lanza, Lirici toscani del quattrocento, 2 vols (Rome: Bulzoni, 1973–75), I, 585–89.

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of not desiring anything on this earth but a good state of mind, and hoping for nothing but a good reputation, and fearing nothing but shame.48

Iacopo also invoked the moral authority of Cicero’s and Virgil’s testimonies to the virtue and justice of Roman rule, to be emulated in Renaissance Florence.49 This is the major theme of a verse of his own, one of the many addressed to Sforza on his accession to the lordship of Milan. Saluting him as ‘a gracious warrior superior to all others, with apologies to Caesar’, Iacopo concluded with this reminder: Lordships, O Duke, as you know better than anyone else, are obtained with the sword but once acquired, they are exalted by justice.50

Most of Iacopo’s surviving poems, all included in this anthology, are moral and devotional. The ‘admirable duke’ to whom he refers in one verse is not Francesco Sforza, but Saint Francis of Assisi.51 On the reverse of the flyleaf there are prayers addressed to ‘the blessed martyr Saint Sebastian’, whom he believed to have saved him from contracting the plague in Lombardy, and to Saint Christopher, also associated with protection from the plague; Iacopo prayed to God that ‘from all enemies visible and invisible [...] we may be freed through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit [...] world without end’. There is also a prayer ‘to Jesus Christ the just judge’. Iacopo was one of a few devout Christians who included in their compilations the Maledictiones Iudeorum, a strongly anti-Semitic piece savagely denouncing Jews as the murderers of Christ.52 His powerful sense of God as the arbiter of justice in civic life, and as judge, especially of those who do not accept Christ as their saviour, perhaps inspired the inclusion in his compilation of an unusual account of some events reported to have occurred in Turkey in 1444, a decade before the Turkish conquest of Constantinople. The persecution of Christian merchants and Turks whom the Christians had converted was described at length and offered in explanation of the subsequent destruction of a number of Turkish cities, which may well have been the result of fires following earthquakes in this seismically active region.53 As Michele del Giogante had done with reference to Sforza’s conquests, Iacopo framed his narrative of these events in terms of the moral lessons they demonstrated, of divine intervention and even miracles. Like Michele, Iacopo felt impelled at the 48

Riccardiana 1133, fol. 41r. See also 37v, 39r.

49

See, for example, Riccardiana 1133, fol. 37r.

50

Riccardiana 1133, fol. 70r; Lanza, Lirici toscani, I, 589.

51

Lanza, Lirici toscani, I, 587.

52

Riccardiana 1133, fol. 70r.

53

Riccardiana 1133, fols 66r–68v.

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same time to verify the facts of his account by consulting appropriate experts, in order to assure his readers that he was presenting a historically accurate record. But by contrast with Michele del Giogante’s relatively simple quest for a multiple truth in the description of secular events within a sacred framework, Iacopo’s attempt to verify a contemporary miracle by invoking, in the long medieval tradition of such attempts, the good character of his witnesses, involves him in nothing less than the absolute reconciliation of secular history with Christian mysteries. Iacopo recounted how in the town of Bursia, ‘where a lot of Pisans lived’, there was also ‘a great multitude of Persian Moors’ who ‘on account of their learning and knowledge found the law of Mahomet to be defective’. So they investigated the Christian faith, which ‘pleased them so much that secretly many began to believe in Christ, and condemned the law of Mahomet’. When denounced by the Muslim governor of Andrinopolis, they went into hiding, but eventually were hunted down and tortured. Most were impelled ‘to affirm the law of Mahomet’, though ‘more with their tongues than in their souls’. A few, however, held out, and welcomed the blows of their tormentors, abusing the law of Mahomet and admitting that ‘Mahomet had ordered his law to be defended by force because he knew it could not be defended with reason’. Iacopo thus underlined the implicit contrast with rulers in the Western classical and Christian tradition who, like Francesco Sforza as portrayed in Michele del Giogante’s anthology for Piero de’ Medici, based their authority on a judicious combination of force and reason underwritten by God. He then launched into lengthy detail of the torments of the martyrs. Their tongues were cut out to prevent their testifying to the truth of Christianity, but at the last moment before being cast into the fire, one had time to prophesy that after they were dead, ‘God will ignite three great fires’. Iacopo then recorded how on the second night after his martyrs were burned, ‘God, wishing to show the sanctity of the martyrs and the perfection of the faith of the Christians, set fire to the city of Andrinopolis where the martyrs were buried, and two thousand five hundred houses and seven or eight thousand shops were burned’. On the third night, a city of Greece called Filopolis caught fire, entailing similarly extensive destruction of the houses and shops of the Turks, and on the fourth night Bursia, where the martyrs were originally apprehended, also caught fire, destroying more shops and houses and four of the main Turkish ‘churches’. As Iacopo concluded, ‘all this greatly alarmed the Turks, or rather their prince, and no one dared speak ill of Christians. Glory to God’. This utterly matter-of-fact account of a miracle in a distant land from a seasoned Florentine statesman is interesting; even more interesting are his efforts to establish the truth of this tale by solemnly verifying in the presence of witnesses the credibility of its source. Having promised his readers in the preamble ‘an additional confirmation by Iacopo Donati’ of his report of ‘certain miracles performed in Turkey in confirmation and augmentation of the true faith and religion’, in conclusion he appended a research note:

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Note that I the writer, Iacopo di Niccolò di Coccho Donati, had heard what the abovementioned Iacopo de’ Parmentorio of the Genoese camp told to several distinguished persons from our city, and especially the most reverend father Messer Giovanni Spinellini, provost of the major church of Florence. Messer Giovanni wanted this recorded just as it was told, so that it would always be remembered in Florence as a thing worthy of admiration and in augmentation of the true faith of Christ. I decided to speak with him to ascertain if I had narrated it correctly [...] And so I arranged a meeting with him on Tuesday, the 25th day of January 1451/2, in the piazza de’ Signori where there were present Niccolò d’Andrea de’ Greci, Branca di Constantino da Perugia, and Guglelmo di Messer Salustio [...] He graciously told it over again from the beginning, and punctiliously; [...] like a prudent, discreet and honest merchant, he recounted it all in a very orderly fashion.

Although he had satisfied the contemporary criteria for credibility, based heavily on the mercantile values on which Florentine prosperity was founded, it still seemed to Iacopo hard to believe a thing that had never before been heard of: But then the aforementioned Branca told me that I should not say that [...] because at a time when I was staying in Pisa, I had a letter from Giovanfrancesco di Messer Palla degli Strozzi written from Venice, in which he told me about these miracles, but more briefly.

Thus in the end the fede (trustworthiness) of the God-fearing merchant with direct experience of foreign lands, and the inscrutable justice of the Lord God himself, seemed to Iacopo and his listeners sufficient guarantee of the truth of this apparently incredible tale.54 Like Michele del Giogante, Iacopo Donati was inspired to conclude his compendium of moral exempla and tales with a few lines of verse above his signature. But by contrast with the accountant’s reaffirmation of human loyalty and friendship after demonstrating the working of divine providence in human affairs, Donati ultimately repudiated such lesser allegiances in favour of his faith in the supreme Lord: O Eternal Father and Supreme Creator, O Son, our benign redeemer, although your holy faith is constant, always clear and true, and he who serves you will never err, still you have deemed this era worthy of peace among the great people who follow your path, making clear their partisanship is misguided. O good and true Jesus, 54

Compare the notary Ser Baldovino Baldovini’s compilation for Giovanni or Pandolfo Rucellai in which he observed to his friend and patron: ‘You have many times asked me [...] to write something for you about the marvellous works of God manifested in our time’: Riccardiana 1333, fols 1r–v.

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grant me so to do in this life, for eternal glory is at stake.55

The hitherto little-remarked genre of personal literary anthologies offers the historian of Renaissance Florence a unique insight into the way in which individual Florentines received and processed information from popular texts and tracts circulating in their society, and applied what they learned to the consideration of moral issues arising from contemporary political and civic events. The texts assembled in these anthologies served their owners as repositories of moral precepts and exempla designed to foster a just society and to facilitate personal salvation. Insofar as their books were borrowed by or bequeathed or presented to others, they also functioned as a means to communicate, not only the ideals of a shared and integrated civic and spiritual culture, but also quite specific views and attitudes. Pedestrian accounts of battles and persecutions could be re-framed by their positioning amidst classical and Christian texts, and additional interpretive comments enabled anthologists to convey clear messages about the appropriate moral terms in which to construe these events. The strenuous efforts of anthologists to verify the sources and accuracy of their accounts confirm their reverence for history as the foundation of society, and as a fount of experience with practical relevance to the present and the future. Their strong regard for truth was clearly closely related to the respect of citizens of this mercantile republic for fede, the reliability or trustworthiness upon which a business or a state depended for its reputation and effectiveness. Truth, however, could be ascertained as much by revelation as by research, and these ways of knowing were regarded not merely as compatible, but as mutually reinforcing well into the Renaissance, once seen as witnessing the triumph of secularism. The predilection for personal anthologies helps to demonstrate that ordinary Florentines were not passive recipients, as is often supposed, of the propaganda of the state or its successive regimes, but rather active participants in the generation and nourishment of a distinctive civic ethos in which citizens shared and took pride. It was upon this ethos, strengthened by the belief articulated by our anthologists that the actions and imperatives of their state were justified and underwritten by divine providence, that even a regime as pragmatically crafted as that of the Medici depended ultimately for its legitimation.

55

Riccardiana 1133, fol. 70v.

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The Fear of Schism

*

PETER HOWARD

I

n 1450, the Archbishop of Florence preached that ‘the scandal of schism’ had heralded the last days, and had inaugurated the Seventh Age of the Church and the reign of the Antichrist. This essay engages the spectre of the Great Schism (1378–1417), which dominated public life in Europe for thirty years, and looks at how it continued to haunt both Florence and Rome throughout the fifteenth century, colouring later occurrences and experiences. Though the Council of Constance (1413–18) succeeded in bringing most of Europe under one pontiff, by electing a new pope and by withdrawing obedience from the three existing claimants, it left many issues unresolved. Reform was one such.1 In order to arrive at unity, it was decided that the new pope should be obliged * It was Ian Robertson who introduced me to the complexities of the Renaissance papacy in a course of that name which he taught at the University of Melbourne in 1978. I am glad that I am able to honour his memory with a contribution which touches on a theme which was part of that course. This essay had its origins in a paper I gave at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual conference at College Park, Baltimore, in 1998. My thanks to Dr Alison Lewin for inviting me to speak, and to Dr David S. Peterson, chair of the session, and Dr Daniel Bornstein, the respondent, for their valuable insights. I especially express my thanks to Dr Jane Drakard for her insightful and critical comments which have contributed so much to the development of this essay. I am grateful to Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies for providing the stimulating and congenial context within which to complete the further research and writing.

To avoid confusion, even in quotations from secondary authors I have standardized the names Korah, Dathan and Abiram according to the usage of the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible (London: Nelson, 1966). 1 Council of Constance, Session 40, 30 October 1417, and Session 43, 21 March 1418, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, ed. by Giuseppe Alberigo and others (Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 1973), pp. 444, 447–50.

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to deal with the reform issues which had emerged before and during the period of the Schism. To ensure that once elected the new pope (eventually Martin V) and his successors followed through this reform agenda, and that there were measures in place against any future schism, the Council issued a decree — Frequens — which obliged a reigning pope to call a council at prescribed intervals to ensure that the papacy was pursuing its reforming mission.2 Thus the Council transformed itself from an emergency measure to unify a divided papacy to being a permanent feature of the ecclesiastical polity, charged to reform the papacy (if required) and to temper, if necessary, the exercise of power of a reigning pope. These decrees imagined a papacy very different from that envisaged more than one hundred years previously when Boniface VIII, in his controversial bull, Unam sanctam, claimed for the office of the Vicar of Christ the fullness of plenitudo potestatis (power), including temporal power.3 In working its way to a resolution of the Schism, the Council of Constance thus left unresolved and bequeathed to the fifteenth century the issue of the locus of ecclesiastical power. Did power reside with the pope alone, or with the pope in council, or with the pope above a council, or with a pope below a council? And what was the relationship between temporal and ecclesiastical power? This essay represents an attempt to revisit these issues from a particular perspective which is at once more local and at the same time more general than previous studies.4 My prism is the writings of Fra Antonino Pierozzi (1389–1459), 2

Council of Constance, Session 38, 28 July 1417, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, pp. 438–43. 3 Beryl Smalley, ‘Church and State 1300–1377: Theory and Fact’, in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by John Hale, Roger Highfield and Beryl Smalley (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 15–43, esp. pp. 15–22. 4

Most studies of the papacy and the councils in the fifteenth century consider the political and ecclesiastical impact of the Great Schism from the point of view of nascent nation states or through the writings of theoreticians, be they papal apologists or conciliarists. Some of these studies are narrowly ecclesiological; others in more recent years have considered the growth of conciliar theory in relation to fifteenth-century thought about consensus and corporation as it derived from practice and developed in theory during the communal period (thirteenth-fifteenth centuries) in Italy especially. Antony Black, in particular, has considered the Council of Constance, the Council of Basle, and major thinkers from this last perspective: Council and Commune: The Conciliarist Movement and the Fifteenth-Century Heritage (London: Burns and Oates, 1979); and Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy 1430–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). The most recent account of the Schism, mainly political in its approach, is Howard Kaminsky, ‘The Great Schism’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, ed. by Michael Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), VI, 674–96. He has shown how important conciliar events and their apologists and opponents were for the development of political theory in the West. Eschatology and judgement in the context of preaching at the Council of Constance are treated briefly in Phillip H. Stump, The Reforms at the Council of Constance (1414–1418) (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 218–19. Councils and reform are the theme of several articles in Reform and

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the Observant Dominican friar who was archbishop (1446–59) during the period of Medici ascendancy. I have argued elsewhere about the importance of his sermons and the way in which they came to be incorporated into the work by which he is best known, his Summa theologica.5 This Summa, and many of the tracts which relate to it, were the most copied and printed texts during the first forty years of the printing press, exceeded only by the Bible.6 In other words, his opinions had currency and are therefore a good indicator of the general religious sensibilities of the period, including those relating to the papacy and the fear of what would arise if obedience were to be withdrawn from a legitimately reigning pope. Reading texts from the point of view of the mental habit of the preacher also embeds the texts under consideration in their context. This habit of mind tuned sermons to the way of life of the urban audience ad status (in particular) and de circumstantiae (to particular circumstances).7 The pulpit thus follows very closely the religious thought and sentiments of the period. As a consequence, Fra Antonino’s writings, grounded as they were in his practice as a preacher, provide the historian with a useful index of religious sensibility in Florence in the fifteenth century, and with the language and verbal images which reflected that sensibility.8 The issue of ‘verbal images’ is a key one for the historical interpretation of the use of the language of the Bible in the period. David D’Avray, in one of his stimulating studies, has developed an understanding of the way in which biblical references worked in an oral context and how the fragments of biblical quotations sparked the hearers’ imaginations ‘with transient flashes of visual and other mental imagery’.9 He contends (and I will be showing here) that the hearing of one biblical text prompted a whole sequence of associated biblical ideas and images in the hearers’ imaginations. This ties in well with the work of other scholars, in particular John

Renewal in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Louis Pascoe SJ, ed. by Thomas M. Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 5

Peter Francis Howard, Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus, 1427–1459 (Florence: Olschki, 1995). The edition cited from here is Sancti Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini Ordinis Praedicatorum Summa Theologica (Verona: Augustinus Caratonius, 1740; anastatic repr., Graz, 1959), hereafter cited as Summa. 6

Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 20–29.

7

Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 127–48.

8

For this sort of argument see David D’Avray, The Death of the Prince (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 203. The best introduction to the study of sermons is The Sermon, ed. by Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge Occidental (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). Especially valuable for Italy is the contribution by Carlo Delcorno, ‘Medieval Preaching in Italy (1200–1500)’, pp. 449–60. See also Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. by Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 9

D’Avray, p. 187.

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O’Malley, who see continuity between the ‘word painting’ of the epideictic oratory preached in the Sistine Chapel and the visual nature of Italian culture in the period.10 Rather than the neat sleight of hand which would facilitate the juxtaposition of textual (verbal) and visual evidence, it seems possible to claim that both oratory and painting were drawn together under the one rubric in the period, that of rhetoric.11 This consideration will inform the last section of the essay, where I will propose an alternative context which may have informed, on the one hand, the artists’ construction of scenes constituting the wall frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, and on the other, the thought and imagination which the contemporary viewer might have brought to the artists’ representations. In particular, I shall be suggesting that the way in which at least one of these artists, Botticelli, set about interpreting biblical texts in his frescoes may have derived from his childhood and journeyman years in Florence during the period when Fra Antonino was archbishop. The Florence-Rome axis of the discussion should need little justification. Not only was there the long residence of the popes in Florence after the Council of Constance (1418–50), but also the prorogation of the Council of Florence there (1439–40) meant that anyone present in the city had contact with a whole range of issues and discussions which were confronting Christendom, both East and West. Moreover, many of Antonino’s near contemporaries, from reform-minded clerics like Antonino’s own mentor, Cardinal Giovanni Dominici, to Florentine chancellors, like Leonardo Bruni, were part of the crowd of more than 76,000 foreigners who gathered at Constance to resolve the Great Schism, and who had influential public lives thereafter.12 Then in the last section of the essay, as we shall see, artists came to Rome from Florence in 1481 to decorate the Sistine Chapel. A consideration of the relationship between humanists, the Council of Constance and aspects of Florentine thinking in the early part of the fifteenth century begins the essay. Then follows a discussion of the impact of the Great Schism on Fra Antonino’s early career, and his interpretation of his times. A detailed analysis of an early sermon on the Schism (1427) leads into an analysis of the way the experience it encapsulated was incorporated into the mature thought of the Archbishop’s Summa theologica. A review of his ideas and his sources, especially the writings of Cyprian and Numbers 16, will lead, finally, to a suggestion about the process by which Botticelli, in particular, set about composing the complex themes and images in his 10

John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979). 11

Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 12

If we are to believe one participant, Ulrich von Richental, there were 76,460 people. See John Van Engen, ‘The Church in the Fifteenth Century’, in Handbook of European History 1400–1600, ed. by Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracy, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 305–30 (p. 314).

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Punishment of the Sons of Aaron.13 I will ague that the fresco should be understood in terms of the preaching culture of the day which would have made the ‘intended reading’ of artist and patron available to the general, even lay, viewer of the fresco.

Fra Antonino and the Impact of the Great Schism By the early 1440s when Antonino was likely to have written the prologue of his Summa theologica, the four-century-long schism between East and West had for a brief time been healed through the efforts of the ecumenical council which, by 1439, was meeting in Florence.14 At the same time, though, the West itself was technically in schism, despite the affirmation of Roman primacy in the bull Laetentur coeli.15 The conciliabulum, the ‘rump’ council (what Antonino refers to as Felix V’s ‘company of Satan’) continued to meet at Basle and had elected Duke Amadeo of Savoy ‘to the chair of Lucifer’ to become ‘Satan crowned’ — in the words of Fra Antonino — as the anti-pope, Felix V.16 This was despite its earlier dissolution by Pope Eugenius IV. 13 I follow the title given the fresco by Vasari: ‘Fece [...] quando sacrificando i figliuoli d’Aaron venne fuoco dal cielo’: Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccelenti Pittori, Scultori et Architettori, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1906; repr. 1973), III, 316–17. 14

Florence was ‘home-away-from-home’ for the papacy from soon after the conclusion of the Council of Constance until the pontificate of Nicholas V (1447–55). In late 1432 (13 December) the Signoria sent Felice Brancacci to Rome to testify to Florence’s commitment to Eugenius IV in view of the revolt of the Council of Basle and to express the readiness of Florence to welcome the papal court: Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASF), Signori Carteggi, Legazione e commissarie 9, c. 88v. Throughout the 1430s the Signoria, as well as Cosimo de’ Medici and his brother Lorenzo, who was several times engaged as an embassy, actively sought the transfer of the Council to Florence. A letter of Leonardo Bruni on behalf of the Signoria, 3 July 1436, officially confirmed Florence as a candidate to host the council: ASF, Carteggi Missive, I Cancelleria 35, c. 56r. The Signoria voted money to support the activities of the council: 3 December 1438, ASF, Carte di corredo 51, c. 28v; ASF, Provvisioni, Duplicati 137, c. 182v. The Signoria also voted to rebuild the Piazza and Convent of Santa Maria Novella to house the Pope and his curia: ASF, Provvisioni 129, c. 215r. For these and further references, see ‘Documenti sul Concilio di Firenze: Catalogo dell mostra presso la Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana’, Appendix to Firenze e il concilio del 1439, ed. by Paolo Viti, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1994), II, 933–47; also Stefano Orlandi O.P., ‘Il Concilio Fiorentino e la Residenza di Papi in S. Maria Novella’, Memorie Domenicane, 29 (1963), 69–90, 125–51 (pp. 82–87). 15

Council of Florence, Session 6, 6 July 1439, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, pp. 523–28. 16

In this passage on the Council of Basle in his Summa historialis (Chronicon), Antonino refers to the transition from a council under papal guidance and authority to one independent of the papacy as a metamorphosis from a congregatio to a conciliabolum, especially in view

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Reading the first pages of his Summa from this vantage point of the schism of the early 1440s, it would seem that Antonino, when writing his prologue, was reviewing the impact of the closing years of the Great Schism on his own education and personal development: how his novitiate (begun in 1405) was satis interrupte (oftenenough interrupted), and how he had been deprived of his praeceptor, his mentor, Giovanni Dominici, and left with teachers of less ability. He is referring to the situation existing after the Council of Pisa in 1409 when Giovanni Dominici’s Observant Dominicans had to move from their recently established home at Fiesole, first to Foligno and then to Cortona, since their adherence to the Roman line of succession of Urban VI put them at odds with Florentine policy at a time when the Florentines followed the fortunes of the pope elected at Pisa, John XXIII.17 Moreover, Dominici, who had inspired Antonino to join the Dominicans, was himself absent, caught up in the strenuous efforts of reconciling a divided Church right through the period of the Council of Constance and after, until his death in 1419. So the first fifteen or so years of Fra Antonino’s life in the Dominicans were spent under the constant shadow of the Great Schism and the strenuous efforts to resolve it. In view of the impact of the Schism on Antonino’s early years as an Observant Dominican, and his putative close contact with its issues, it is not surprising that he would have written his own account of it in Title 22 of his world history, his Summa of the precocious election of the Duke of Savoy ‘not to the chair of Peter but to the chair of Lucifer’ — ‘non in sede petri sed luciferi’: Summa historialis, Pt 3, Title 22, ch. 4; MS Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (hereafter BNCF) II.I.376, fols 272rb–272va. See also Eugenio Marino, ‘Il “Diluvio” di Paolo Ucello nel Chiostro di S. Maria Novella e Suoi (Possibili) Rapporti con il Concilio di Firenze’, in Firenze e il concilio, I, 316–87 (pp. 378–79, and n. 137). 17 For more detail, see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 36–38. On Dominican education see now the masterly study by M. Michèle Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent in Study [...]’: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998). On the role of Florence in ending the Great Schism, see Lauro Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 289–96. Gene Brucker describes and analyses the deliberations of the consulte e pratiche in his Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 295–97. George Holmes discusses the transformation of Florence’s relations with the papacy during the Schism and its ‘importance in the evolution of the Florentine mind’ in his ‘Florence and the Great Schism’, in Art and Politics in Renaissance Italy, ed. by George Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 19–40. For the background to the decision of the Dominicans to adhere to Urban VI, see Gilles Gérard Meersseman O.P., ‘Études sur l’Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs au début du Grande Schisme’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 63 (1970), 168–99, including the letter of Raymond of Capua (May 1380) announcing to his brothers his election as Master General of the Order, and his determination to defend the cause of Urban VI and to follow the regular observance (pp. 197–98). Stefano Orlandi O.P., ‘Necrologio’ di S. Maria Novella, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1955), II, 102; Pino da Prati, Giovanni Dominici e l’Umanesimo, 2nd edn (Naples: Glaux, 1974), p. 25.

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historialis, which spans the years 1371 to 1457. He contributes original passages in Chapter 5 when he chronicles the relations of Gregory XII, the anti-pope Benedict XXIII, and the Council of Pisa, material similar to that which he draws into his discussion on schism in the Summa theologica. To augment his own perspective and knowledge, he drew on the histories of Leonardo Bruni, Domenico Buoninsegni (1384–1465), Minerbetti, and Poggio Bracciolini.18 That Antonino should turn to Bruni as a source is not surprising. Antonino had profound respect for the Florentine Chancellor and humanist, and admired his writings. Moreover, Bruni knew of the situation first hand; he had moved to the papal curia at Rome in April 1405, and quickly became secretary to Innocent VII and stayed on in the court of his successor Gregory XII.19 Both he and Poggio abandoned the Roman obedience and went north with the Council of Pisa’s choice, John XXIII. Writing to Niccolò Niccolì from the Council of Constance in 1414 Bruni observed: ‘If I thought what is done here and said here interested you, I would tell you about the acts of the council and give you a commentary on everyday affairs’.20 Niccolì was not interested, but the record of the events went into Bruni’s Rerum suo tempore in Italia gestarum commentarium, Antonino’s principal source for the Council and its aftermath. Antonino was certainly aware of the confusion wrought by the Schism and the difficulties involved in sorting it out. In his own contribution to the pertinent part of the Summa historialis he points out how even his own order of Dominicans was split, with those under the Florentine Leonardo Dati following John XXIII, and those under ‘a certain other notable master’ (namely Master Jean de Puinoix) in obedience to Benedict.21 The whole dilemma posed by the dispute lies below the text, as well as does the ongoing fear, deeply inscribed in personal experience, that such schism could easily recur. Indeed, by 1450, Antoninio, normally an opponent of apocalyptic expectation,22 was willing to countenance, and preach, the idea that the 18

Schism in Antoninus, Summa historialis, Pt 3, Title 22; MS BNCF II.I.376, fols 208va– 253 . See too, Daniel Walker, The ‘Chronicles’ of St Antonino (Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1930), p. 50 for structure and p. 91 for source. vb

19

I am taking up a suggestion of George Holmes who has argued that the transformation of Florentine relations with the papacy during the Schism was of the greatest importance in the evolution of what he calls (in a very pre-postmodern way!) ‘the Florentine mind’, and, in particular, in the evolution of humanism there in the first decades of the fifteenth century: Holmes, ‘Florence and the Great Schism’. 20

Holmes, p. 33.

21

Raoul Morçay, Chroniques de Saint Antonin: Fragements originaux du titre XXII (1378– 1459) (Paris: Libraire Gabalda, 1913), pp. 23–24. 22 ‘Non sit etiam levis ad excitandum somnia ut visionis mulierum, et ad prophetandum de aliquo malo venturo, vel determinative loquendo de tempore Antichristi et die iudicii’: Summa 3.18 (‘De statu praedicatoris’) .4 (‘De defectibus praedicationis’); col. 1021. Also, Roberto Rusconi, ‘Fonti e documenti su Manfredi da Vercelli O.P.’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 47 (1977), 51–107 (p. 55).

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scandal of schism, ‘the head and scandal to end all scandals’, was the distinguishing sign of the reign of the Antichrist and had inaugurated the Seventh Age of the Church, and hence the Last Days.23 In the previous six ages the presence of Christ was redemptive. In the Seventh, the seven-headed dragon of apocalypse was reigning. The strong epithets and images — ‘synagogue of Satan’, ‘the seven-headed dragon’ — which he attaches to those who were fomenting schism as agents of the Antichrist, reflects the depth of feeling attached to his memories and his historical experience. Constantly shifting political and ecclesiastical machinations meant that the issues, and the propaganda they promoted, guaranteed that the fear generated by the Great Schism could not be laid to rest. By the 1440s and 1450s, Antonino had been facing the issues for several decades. His first recorded reflection on the Schism occurs in a sermon of his 1427 Lenten series preached in Florence during those early, fragile years of the papal restoration under Martin V.24 23

‘Extende materiam et exinde dic, quod sicut opera miraculorum exteriora sensibus hominum clamabant ipsum esse Christum, redemptorum hominum, sic septem praedicta opera intellectualiter clamavant ipsum esse dominum, salvatorem animarum. Sicut etiam priore opera concordabant eloquiis prophetarum, sic et ista multo magis et multo altius. Lex enim et prophetia fuit figuralis, obscura et implicita, et in hoc ipso per eam promictebatur veritas explicita mundum illuminatura, etc. Item per eadem verbe ostendit sanctatem vitae, quae demonstratur clarius per exempla septem temporum seu aetatum ecclesiae: Unde sub Apostalis [...] [fol. 5v] quae fundamentum habuit in vita Christi [...] In martiribus autem claduciatio .... Exemplum in Christo In Constantius vero lerposo lepra idolatriae [...] Et Christus [...] In achoritis autem conciliis patrum generalibus tarditas cordium auditum divini imperii fuit stimulata et excitate. Et Christus tamquam anachorita quadraginta dictus ieiunavit in deserto, et iterum dicitur de eo, quod agebatur in desertis locis et pernoctabat in orationibus. In quinto vero tempore multiplicatis lapsibus mortalium peccatorum vita sacerdotum vel doctorum vel sanctorum fuit necessaria ad institutiones [...] Et Christus non solum doctor veritatis sed caput verae vitae coenobitae in congregatione cum discipulis vivens etc. In sexto vero tempore paupertes evengelica praedicatur in ordinibus mendicantibus, ut pote praedicatorum, minorum et reliquorum, ad exemplum vitae Christi, qui fuit pauper et dolens, ita ut mulieres ministrabant eis de facultatibus suis etc [Luke 8. 3] Quam seguitur scandalum Antichristi, ut sic per intermediam copulam spirituali paci et felicitati septimi status et temporis inhaereamus. In primis enim sex non est posita copula, nec mentis facta de scandala, sed solum in septimo, non quin ibi fuerint scandala et scissurae, sed quia scandalum Antichristi et eius scisma est caput et finis omnium praecedentium scandalorum tamquam septem capita draconis’: Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 308, Dominica tertia in Adventu Domini, fol. 5r–v. 24

For a discussion of the dating see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 135–42.

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Antonino’s First Reflection on the Schism The weakened state of the papacy, and cynical reactions to it as a political reality, were often repeated topoi in the 1420s.25 In 1418, Martin V was elected to a papacy much weakened by the thirty years of schism, as well as by the concordats through which the new Pope had traded off reform and privileges with ‘the nations’.26 The papacy was also weakened by the Council of Constance’s decree Frequens which bequeathed a measure of control to future councils which were to be summoned at defined intervals.27 Through this decree the Council effectively had left unresolved the whole question of the locus of power in Christendom, and the ensuing tussle between nations, conciliarists and papal publicists would bedevil Europe until Christendom was stripped of its medieval unity in the wake of Luther’s protest. In the immediate aftermath of the Council of Constance, political thoughts about a united papacy were ambiguous, especially in Florence where the almost continuous presence of Martin V was a mixed blessing. Gino di Neri Capponi, in one of the most famous maxims in his Ricordi, warns his heirs to avoid meddling with priests ‘who are’, in his words, ‘the scum of the earth in matters to do with either money or the Church, except so far as concerns the sacraments or the offices of the Church’. The ricordo goes on to reflect, looking back from 1420, that: The divided Church is good for our commune and for the maintenance of liberty but it is contrary to the good of the soul and therefore one should not work for it but leave it to the course of nature. As far as it is possible to be concerned solely with spiritual matters, the unity of the Church is hallowed and useful to our commune. The friendship of the pope is useful to our commune and that should not be opposed, for nothing can be achieved without the friendship of the Church.28

In 1427, Fra Antonino had no doubt about the problems generated by social and religious instability. In a long and hard-hitting sermon which he preached in Florence on Holy Saturday 1427, directed perhaps at the ambivalence of the likes of Capponi, he summed up the individual sermons of the previous fifty or so days. There would have been few in that ‘face-to-face’ society who would have missed the message: You must die to the vice of all division (according to the apostle in I Cor. 1). There must be no ruptures among you; that is, [there must be no] divisions and discord in what is attempted in commune [in common] for the honour of God and the good of the

25 See, for example, Hubert Jedin, Storia della Chiesa, 2nd Italian edn (Milan: Jaca Books, 1975–), V, Pt 2 (1977), 225. 26

Jedin, Storia della Chiesa, V, Pt 2, 216.

27

See above, n. 1 and Jedin, Storia della Chiesa, V, Pt 2, 220, 226, 228, 231, 234 and esp. 91. 28

Quoted by Holmes, p. 19.

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republic by clashing with each other, neither by quarrelling over contradictory words about truth, or even for what is true but in a disorderly manner, nor by brawling as when one strikes or beats another, nor through sedition as when one family or some other citizen rises up against another because they belong to particular factions, nor by schism by withdrawing from obedience to the Roman church and its pontiff.29

The summary of divisio is the longest of all the précis preached on Holy Saturday, and relates to a key sermon of the series, one which was given prominence by being preached on the evening of the Sunday in the middle of Lent. The sermon, on ‘discord, conflict, strife, sedition and schism’, like its summary, specifically drew together two crucial themes for the Florence of 1427: the common good and the common faith.30 The proem of this thematic sermon for the third Sunday of Lent is atypical. It moves quickly from the statement of the theme (‘Every kingdom divided against itself is destroyed’, Luke 11. 17) to the master-theme (‘Convertimini ad Dominum Deum vestrum’) and then to a short quotation from John Chrysostom rather than from the Bible: ‘Nothing on earth is stronger than the kingdom and yet it perished through altercation’. Fra Antonino continued with the gloss: And what he is talking about is clear for Rome which had a universal dominion, and which lasted a long time, at least for as long as Romans looked to the bonum commune (common good). But when the citizens began to look for their own personal good, that city went from bad to worse, to the extent that it is now almost nothing. Therefore, turn to the Lord your God.31

29 ‘Sis mortuus vitio omnis divisionis. iuxta illud apostoli I cor.1. Non sint in vobis scismata. idest divisiones et discordie in eo quod tentatur in communi ad honorem dei et bonum rei publice discordando unum ab altero, neque contentione contradicendo verbis alterius alteri contra veritatem, vel etiam pro veritate sed inordinate, neque rixe, alter alterum percutiendo vel verberando, neque seditione una familia vel alicuius civitatis contra aliam insurgendo quod fit in partialitatibus, neque scissione ab obedientia romane ecclesie et pontificis eius recedendo’: Sermo, Sabbato sancto (a reiteration of all of Lent), MS BNCF, conv. soppr. A.8.1750 fols 57rb–59vb at fol. 58ra, Dominica 3a. post prandium. Divisio. This quotation, and the paragraph in which it is embedded, I take directly from my Beyond the Written Word, p. 136. 30

For some indications on the common good in the preaching tradition, viz. Giovanni Dominici and Bernardino da Siena, see Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, ‘Jews and Judaism in the Rhetoric of Popular Preachers: The Florentine Sermons of Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444)’, Jewish History, 14 (2000), 175–200, (pp. 181–82); and now her Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 66–68. 31 ‘Omne regnum etc. Convertimini etc. Dicit Chrysostomus, quod nil in terra fortius regno et tamen per altercationem perit. Et hoc patet in Roma quae habuit dominium universale, quod duravit tantum, quantum Romani quaerierunt bonum commune. Sed cum cives coeperunt quaerere bonum particulare, illa civitas ivit de malo in peius, ut nihil quasi modo sit. Convertimini

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The preacher moves quickly from this topos of humanist discourse — the city’s Roman forbears — and from his comment about the parlous state into which the Rome of recent times had fallen due to family factionalism (a situation which itself was in no little way connected to the papacy) to talk in the first part of the sermon about three kingdoms: the domestic, the political and civil, and the ecclesiastical and spiritual. It is his exposition of this third, ecclesiastical and spiritual kingdom, which is our concern here. This kingdom is unified ‘through’ — or ‘for the sake of’ (‘per’) — divine grace.32 Fra Antonino goes on: In this kingdom one finds division, which is called schism, which is, according to Raymundus, the unlawful withdrawal from the unity of faith, not simply from that unity which is joined in God and neighbour by the bond of love, since that is found in the Quodlibet on mortal sin, but from the unity of the Universal Church [in] which, manifestly, all members are joined in order of rank to Christ the head, so that they subsist in him. This head is Christ, says the apostle, whose place on earth the Pope holds. Nevertheless, it is held together by divine grace. For Jesus Christ for the sake of the unity of his kingdom endured death on the cross —‘So that the children of God who were scattered might be gathered into one’ [John 11. 52].33

Then follows the key phrase establishing the pope, unassailably at least in this theological framework as the one appointed by Christ, as the guarantor of unity and the one from whom authority devolved: ‘Christ wanted to preserve the unity of his kingdom, because there is one supreme pastor, as when he first appointed Peter, and no one has authority of absolving or like [authority] except from him indirectly or directly’.34 The phrase auctoritatem absolvendi is a direct, if implicit, reference to the power of the keys — the power to remit or to bind — and is here perceived to ad Dominum Deum vestrum’: in MS BNCF, conv. soppr. A.8.1750, 3a Dominica XLme, fol. 26rb. A century earlier, Giordano da Pisa had similarly denounced Florentines for putting their own personal good before that of the community: see Carlo Delcorno, Giordano da Pisa e l’antica predicazione volgare (Florence: Olschki, 1975), p. 47. 32 ‘Tertium regnum est ecclesiasticum et spirituale et hoc est unitum per divinam gratiam’: MS BNCF, conv. soppr. A.8.1750, fol. 27ra. 33 ‘In hoc regno invenitur divino que dicitur scisma, quod est secundum ray [Raimundum] illicitus discessus ab unitate fidei, non quidem ab ea unitate qua unitur quis Deo vel proximo in vinculo caritatis, quia hoc reperitur in quolibet mortali peccato, sed ab unitate universalis Ecclesiae qua scil. uniuntur omnia membra in ordine ad unum caput, ut subsint ei. Hoc autem caput est Christus secundum apostolum, cuius vices in terris tenet Papa. Unitur autem per divinam gratiam. Nam Iesus Christus ad huius regni [fol. 27rb] unionem voluit mori in cruce — ‘ut filios Dei qui erant dispersi congregarat in unum’ [John 11. 52]: MS BNCF, conv. soppr. A.8.1750, fol. 27ra–27rb. 34 ‘Voluit etiam Christus ad conservandam huius regni unionem, quod esset unus pastor summus, quem primum constituit Petrum, et nullus habet auctoritatem absolvendi vel similem nisi ab eo mediate vel immediate’: MS BNCF, conv. soppr. A.8.1750, fol. 27rb.

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derive from a single, papal, source.35 Antonino’s exhortation, extracted from Augustine, which follows on from this, is rhetorically strong: ‘Let us hold ourselves in unity, brothers, since he who is outside the Church, even if he were to work a miracle, is nothing’. Antonino continues to pile on the images, drawing on Jerome: ‘The Emperor is one, the Governor of a province is one, the Prince among the bees is one, cranes follow one [crane] in a balanced formation’. ‘Rome was not able to have two [emperors]’, Antonino presses on, referring obliquely to the theme which opened his sermon, ‘and was given to parricide’.36 For Antonino there was no doubt about the locus of power: it resided in a single, unified papacy. There was no room for a divided head, as in conciliar thinking. His stance was grounded in a train of theological thinking that took account of theological consequences which impinged on the salvation of all. This exposition of the nature of the papacy and its role in unity becomes the background against which Fra Antonino considers the effects of schism and the signs of how much it displeases God. His first example, Greece, is for him an obvious one: it ‘went from bad to worse after the schism’. It is an issue which he will rehearse at length twenty-five years later when writing his Summa historialis, then with the 35

Antonino develops this in his treatment of schism in the Summa: ‘“Tibi dabo claves regni caelorum”, Matth. 16 [v. 19] ad commendandum unitatis sacramentum: et quod a papa in alios esset jurisdictio derivanda, ut ait Cyprianus 24. quaest. 1. can. Loquitur, quum duo capita esse non possint; alioquin esset monstrum in ecclesia; oportet quod ab uno vero, vel praesumpto derivetur potestas in alios. Si ergo quum est in terris obedientiae unius, illi adhaeret ut summo capiti, a quo aestimat habere potestatem, ut a prima origine, et sic absolvit, et absolutionem ab alio pro se quaerit: quando accedit ad terras obedientiae alterius, quis dabit auctoritatem absolvendi eos, qui sunt de illa obedientia, vel ut possit ipse absolvi ab illis? Non ille primus, quum habeat istos ut praecisos; non secumdus, quum jam adhaeserit primo, et sic a secundo habeatur schismaticus; non uterque, quia tunc essent duo capita. Convenientius videtur dicendum, quod uni eroum adhaerendo, secundum quod magis dictat conscientia, non ad quem magis temporalitas trahat, illius auctoritate fungatur absolvens illos, et absolutionem quaerens ab illis, qui sunt de obedientia ipsius, cui adhaeret. De hominibus autem alterius obedientiae non se intromittat, nisi ad obedientiam reversos ejus, cui ipse adhaeret: illos tamen non propter hoc condemnet. Et siquidem contingeret illum non esse verum, cui cum pura conscientia adhaesit, in absolutionie supplebit defectum summus sacerdos Dominus Jesus, qui habet claves, et cui aperit nemo claudit: ignorantia autem probabilis excusat eum’: Summa, 2.3.11; col. 537B. 36

‘Dicit ergo Agustusintus 1. qu. Teneamus unitatem, fratres, quia is qui extra unitatem est Ecclesiae, etiam si faceret miracula, nihil est. Et ierous [Hieronymus] dicit, quod imperator est unus, praeses provinciae unus est, in apibus princeps unus est, grues unam secuntur [sequuntur] ordine librato. Roma duos habere non potuit et paricido dedicatur. Quantam autem scisma displiceat Deo, patet in Graecis, qui semper iverunt de malo in peius post scisma; patet etiam in pluribus regnis, quae numquam bene se habuerunt post scisma, ut regnum Siciliae post scisma inter Urbanum et Clementem etc. “Convertimini” ergo. etc’: MS BNCF, conv. soppr. A.8.1750, fol. 27rb.

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hindsight of the fall of the second Rome, Constantinople, to the Ottoman Turk in 1453. Prompted by this calamitous event, he will write of the twelve divisions which followed on from the first withdrawal of obedience from Rome by the patriarch in 335.37 Antonino says that ‘it is also clear in other kingdoms which never went well after schism, for example the Kingdom of Sicily after the schism between Urban and Clement’ — an assertion which concludes ‘et cetera’, and one wonders about the direction in which the preacher might have taken his extemporization. Most likely he would have filled it out with an account of the descent of Charles of Durazzo into Italy and his coronation by Urban, and how Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily, because of the different alliances amongst city-states according to whether they followed the Urban or Clementine obediences, was left unaided by the likes of Florence, and ended up incarcerated and died by suffocation.38 Or perhaps he went on to narrate instead, or indeed as well, how in 1390 and 1391 each of the papal obediences crowned their own kings of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and Sicily, the Roman Ladislaus and the Avignonese Ludovicus. Each had their own rival adherents in the Kingdom, and so, lamented Antonino, hostility and contention waged and escalated badly there for many years.39 37

His Summa historialis, Title 22, Chapter 13 treats the Greek schism from 335 down to the Council of Florence, and then to the fall of Constantinople (1453): MS BNCF, II.I.376, fols 287ra–291ra. 38

Summa historialis, Tit. 22; MS BNCF, II.I.376, fols 212rb–212va. Similarly, he will write of events in Sicily during the period when in 1380 Charles of Durazzo (‘Carolus’) entered Italy with Hungarian soldiers, the pact he signed with Florence: ‘Et ipsi Florentini non prestarent adiutorium regine Johanne contra eum vel urbanum papam’ (212rb). He tells of the capture of Johanna and the coronation of Carolus by Urban: ‘Carolus postque fuit coronatus ab Urbano profectus est cum copiis suis versus neapolim ubi tunc erat regina Johanna in castro novo’ (212va). He goes on: ‘Lord Otto her husband was outside of Naples with an armed crowd to fight against Charles. ‘Cum autem propriquassem civitati nobiles introduxerunt eum in neapolim clamantes: Viva rex. Receptus Gregorio in urbe honorifice ut rex obsedit castrum novum in quo era Johanna cum baronibus suis et ita circumdedit ut nullus aditus peteret ingrediendi vel egrediendi nisi ex parte maris. Octo autem coniux euis civitatem obsidebat ab extra’. Defeat of Otto and Joanna — loss of kingdom, imprisonment and eventual death by suffocation: ‘Multique barones eius capti et duo cardinales antipape. Totumque regnum sub domino huius Caroli tertii fuit operate deo magis quam virtute humana. Et aretium civitas finittima in miserandas et calamitates prolapsa’ (212va). For a brief synthetic account, see David Abulafia, ‘Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch: The Italian South’, New Cambridge Medieval History, VI, 488–514 (pp. 511–14). 39

‘Anno autem Mccclxl bonifacius papa destinavit neapolim dominum agnelum de acciaiolis cardinalem florentinum in legatum ad coronadum ladislaum flilium caroli in regem ierosalema et siciliae. Qui rex duxit in uxorem filiam manfredi de claramonte de sicilia recepta ab eo maxima quibus satis indigebat propter bella et immencia. Sed eodem anno loysius seu ludovicus dux andeganie que anno precedenti fuerat coronatus a clemente dicto in sua

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Antonino, while distinguishing the civil and spiritual kingdoms, at the same time appears to believe that schism, which is a spiritual condition, simultaneously affects the fortunes of the civic body. Schism was taken advantage of to repudiate papal overlordship of the kingdom. Schism, in Antonino’s view, always has an enduring aftermath, and infects every area of life. Schism, then, was seen to be disruptive to both the common good and the common faith, and threatened the unity of grace and jeopardized salvation. Even if the discourse used language which distinguished the political and civil kingdom from the ecclesiastical and the spiritual, the examples used by the preacher show just how permeable, in the period, the two kingdoms were. The pope was ‘authored’ by Christ as the legitimate guarantor of grace in his stead. To threaten this unity of access, as it were, was to act in an unthinkable, proud way. Following the pattern of this particular series of Antonino’s sermons, the second part of the sermon considers ‘divine severity’, in this case, severity against those who cause schism. The consequences are spelled out in terms of biblical exempla. The first two, taken from the second book of Samuel (Kings 4), need not detain us; one concerns de rixa (disputes — David and Ishbosheth) and the other de seditione (sedition — David and Absalom). For his exemplum of de schisma Antonino lights on Numbers 16: ‘For Korah was consumed by fire descending from heaven and Dathan and Abiram were swallowed by the earth which opened up and devoured them on account of the schism perpetrated by them’.40 The image of the earth swallowing the usurpers of the authority of Aaron and Moses is little mitigated in Fra Antonino’s sermon of 1427 by the second section on ‘divine goodness’ which illustrates the union of opposites by referring to Christ’s two natures in one person, and the unity of humanity in the woman being produced from the rib of Adam. For Part 3 of the sermon goes on (programmatically) to urge the faithful to confession, that is, attendance at the sacrament, but in this instance in the Lenten series there is a twist. The faithful are to have the fear of little children, not of slaves. One ought not to confess from fear of hell, which is not, preaches Antonino, sufficient for salvation; obedientia avinioni ad instanciam et requisitionem regis francie in regem siciliae, apulie et ierusalem magna classe cum matre sua pervenit neapolim cum navibus vel videlicet octo et galeis xiiii et octo brigantines multis baronibus militibus et gentibus armorum associates. Qui receptus fuit cum magno gaudio et honorificiencia a populo et nobilibus sue partis. Multi tamen ex principibus regni non obedienbant ei sed ladislao. Ingressus autem neapolim que prius tenebatur pro eo cepit post breve tempus arcem sancti salvatoris et castrum ovi et omnia fortilicia. Regibus igitur bellantibus ad invicem et contendentibus de principatu per plures annos multiplicate sunt mala super terram illam’: Summa historialis, 220ra. 40

‘De schisma est exemplum nums 16. de chore dathan et abiron. Quia chore conbustus est per ignem descendentem de celo et dathan et abiron fuerunt absorti a terra que apperuit se et deglutivit eos propter scisma conmissum ab eis’ : MS BNCF, conv. soppr. A.8.1750, fol. 27rb. In choosing Numbers 16, Antonino is perhaps following an extract in Gratian’s Decretum from Cyprian’s De unitate, see below.

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he goes on to give extensive treatment to being not simply sorry, but to avoiding evil, for this is what is pleasing to God. It is perhaps difficult today to appreciate the impact of a sermon such as this — and more importantly, the exemplum — on the religious imagination of the fifteenth century. Such biblical quotations as these lines from Numbers illuminated the sermon’s message and left it open, on the part of the hearer, to the perception and interpretation of contemporary events, even when these were not specifically articulated in the preacher’s discourse. The reference to ‘schism and the withdrawal of obedience from the Roman pontiff’ was latent with many possibilities for the hearer. Controversy between the Florentine state and the papacy, like civic strife (which was itself at fever pitch in 1427), could be dismissed as yet another traditional commonplace, especially in consideration of such questions as ‘clerical immunity’, and filling the coffers of the papal treasury; such conflicts pepper the chronicles of Florentine-papal relations over a long period.41 Yet, more specifically, by 1427 Martin V, the first universally accepted pope of the period following the Great Schism, was embroiled on three fronts: the diplomatic, the military, and the ecclesio-political. In the years 1423–28 his relations with Florence were delicate as he sought to mediate in the Florentine-Milanese war in the Romagna.42 The desire of the Florentine Commune to impose a subsidy of 100,000 florins on the clergy of Florence and the Tuscan raccomandati (suffragan territories) led to a threat of excommunication by the Pope in the January of 1427.43 The memory of the Great Schism loomed over the universal Church throughout the fifteenth century, but particularly in the mid-1420s when already threats of appeals to future councils were being made to thwart papal initiatives,44 as is shown by Antonino’s reference in the

41

See generally Roberto Bizzocchi, Chiesa e potere nella Toscana del Quattrocento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), pp. 61–69. See also David Spencer Peterson, ‘Archbishop Antoninus: Florence and the Church in the Earlier Fifteenth Century’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1985), ch. 3. 42 Peter Partner, ‘Florence and the Papacy in the Earlier Fifteenth Century’, in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Nicolai Rubinstein (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), pp. 381–402 (pp. 390–91). 43 Partner, p. 401, n. 1. For a very detailed discussion on the issue of the corporatism of the Florentine clergy and the fiscal situation vis-à-vis the Commune, the Archbishop and the papacy, see David Peterson, ‘Conciliarism, Republicanism and Corporatism: The 1415–1429 Constitution of the Florentine Clergy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 183–226. 44

See Denys Hay, The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 33. On the political use of the idea of a council, see Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. by Ernest Graf O.S.B. (London: Nelson, 1957), ch. 2, esp. pp. 54–61. In particular, on Sixtus IV’s fear of having a council forced upon him, as well as his offensive stance, see Jedin, p. 72. Jedin cites Sixtus IV’s marginal notes to the Acts of the Council of Constance, as evidence of his personal attitude to the idea of a council (p. 73, n. 1).

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body of the sermon to the Urban and Clementine obediences.45 Anxiety over schism seemed to Fra Antonino, the preacher of civic and ecclesiastical stability, to be an everpresent reality. Conflict with the papacy could have profound civic implications: things could go from bad to worse as historical experience, be it biblical, Roman, or near contemporary, seemed to show.46

Schism in the ‘Summa theologica’ For a member of a mendicant order which, in its essence, was committed to the care of souls, the spiritual implications of schism were deeply troubling. The way in which Fra Antonino introduced his discussion of the spiritual kingdom in his 1427 sermon is telling. The phrase ‘hoc est unitum per divinam gratiam’ can be taken to mean that the spiritual and ecclesiastical kingdom is one by divine grace. Yet the meaning of ‘per’, in the context we have been discussing, is more subtle, and carries the subsidiary meaning, ‘for the sake of divine grace’. As we shall see in more detail in Antonino’s later articulations of the problems surrounding the advent of schism, access to the grace of God is frustrated by a divided papacy. For a Florentine with Antonino’s experience of the Great Schism and the instabilities of the 1420s, not only did the ecclesio-political developments of the 1430s and 1440s re-awaken old fears, they also served to focus even more acutely the central ecclesiological question of the century, namely the locus of ecclesiastical authority: council or pope, pope above council, council above pope, or pope with council.47 This contested issue, along with the age-old resentment of kings, princes and magistrates towards the papal claim to plenitudo potestatis, threatened, in Antonino’s view, the fundamental value of ecclesiastical charity. The image of Korah, Dathan and Abiram rising up against Moses and Aaron continued to illuminate Antonino’s reflection on this central issue, as is revealed in his theological reflections as set down in his Summa theologica in the early 1440s in the wake of the Council of Florence. The key to Antonino’s mature thinking (and hence his later preaching) on the subject of schism is revealed by the way in which the material and concerns of the 1427 sermon on schism are incorporated into his Summa theologica in the 1440s.48 The sermon is fragmented into its component parts, and amplified, very likely in

45

MS BNCF, conv. soppr. A.8.1750, fol. 27rb. See above n. 38.

46

Brucker has argued that by the second decade of the fifteenth century Florentine history had become the way of demonstrating the validity of propositions in political discourse and policy formation (esp. p. 291). 47

Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, ch. 1 and p. 62.

48

On schism see Summa, 2.3.11, ‘De Schismate’; on sedition see Summa, 2.4.8, ‘De discordia per modum predicationis’.

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view of his own experience of the Council.49 The material on faction and civic unrest is put into a chapter on discord, under the heading of the vice of ‘vainglory’.50 The section on schism is positioned so as to end the section ‘de superbia’ (on pride), but it is amplified into some nineteen folio columns, and draws historical experience into a theological and moral framework, as is shown by the pithy definition with which Antonino begins. This definition, a synoptic gloss on the Dectretum Gratiani and Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of schism in his Summa theologiae, reveals the way Antonino had come to evaluate schism’s operation in the politico-ecclesiastical world: ‘Schism is generally derived from pride and ambition, and is contrary to ecclesiastical charity’.51 Historical experience is here drawn into the moral world of human foible and vice. Schism is a vice — ‘a division of the soul’, he says.52 It is a vice which is ever present and threatens the ordered, hierarchical world which the young Fra Antonino so clearly articulated in one of the sermons of the 1427 series. ‘Every creature is content with his condition in life’, preached Antonino on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, ‘except for miserable man who is never happy with his state or condition, whatever it happens to be: if he is sick, he wants to be well, if he is well he wants to be rich, if he is rich he wants to be wise, and so forth’.53 Antonino’s developed thought some fifteen years later on how schism threatens such an ordered world, and how offenders are to be treated canonically, and what it means in terms of excommunication and the validity of sacraments received by the faithful, and the relation of the pope to a council, again shows Antonino’s wellrecognized capacity to create a dialogue between general principles and the particulars of historical experience.54 49 All Saint Antonino’s major biographers argue for his involvement in the Council, in preparatory discussions if not the official deliberations (and according to Orlandi as Auditor General). See Morçay, pp. 71–72; Calzolai, Frate Antonino Pierozzi, pp. 75–76; and Stefano Orlandi O.P., ‘Il concilio fiorentino e la Residenza di Papi in S. Maria Novella’, Memorie Domenicane, 29 (1963), 69–90, 125–51 (p. 130 and p. 131, n. 20). 50

Summa, 2.4.8.

51

‘Schisma ex superbia et ambitione communiter derivatur, et caritati ecclesiasticae unitatis contrariatur’: Summa, 2.3.11; col 525C; Decretum Gratiani, 23, especially the section: ‘Ubi caritas non est ibi fides ut iustitia locum non habet’: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2.2 q. 39 art. 1. 52

See below n. 64.

53

‘Sed solum miser homo non est contentus statu suo et conditione sua in quocumque statu sit. Si enim est infirmus sanus vult effici, si sani est vult effici dives, si dives sapiens etcetera’: Sermo 3, Quinquagesima; MS BNCF, Conv. soppr. A.8.1750, fol. 3vb. 54 Summa, 2.3.11, no. 10; col. 539C. On the recognition, by Francesco da Castiglione, of Antonino’s capacity to move from the general to the particular, see Howard, Beyond the Written Word, p. 52.

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For Antonino, at the time of writing, the ecclesiastical and political world of fifteenth-century papal-civic relations was again unstable: ‘The schism, however, which now reigns, was made by [the Council of] Basle in the year of the Lord 1440 or thereabouts under Eugenius IV [...]’.55 Antonino argues that schism is a special kind of sin, to be distinguished from heresy and deserving of its own category insofar as it is fundamentally against charity, not simply that between persons, but also against the unity held in the Holy Spirit, and therefore is totally against the bonum commune.56 The weight of Antonino’s discussion is on the gravity of schism. He follows Cyprian on the subject, and returns to the key exemplum of the 1427 sermon, Dathan, Abiram and Korah and the schism they created amongst the Hebrew people through their attempt to usurp the leadership of Moses and the high priesthood of Aaron. He dwells on the terrible punishment meted out by God, and, using the ploy of the preacher, he juxtaposes Numbers 16 with the poetry of Psalm 105. 17: ‘When the men in the camp were jealous of Moses and Aaron, the holy one of the Lord, the earth opened up and swallowed up Dathan, and covered the company of Abiram. Fire also broke out in their company; the flame burned up the wicked’, which Antonino goes onto gloss (drawing again on Cyprian) as being Korah ‘because priests were his accomplices’. 57 Informed by the mental habit of the good preacher that he was, Antonino then extends the exemplum with a biblical concordance (or by simply moving on to Psalm 105. 19) and, to highlight its gravity, draws schism into the world of idolatry, as when Moses descended from the mountain to find his people worshipping the golden calf.58 Further still does Antonino push the issue to emphasize how heinous schism is and the degree of punishment it deserves, for it is more like uxoricide than matricide because people are more likely to commit the former than the latter. That is to say, Antonino here reveals his fear: schism is always

55 ‘Schisma autem, quod nunc regnat, factum Basiliae anno Domini 1440 vel circa sub Eugenio IV […]’: Summa, 2.3.11, no. 10; col. 538E. 56

Summa, 2.3.11, Introduction and no. 1, throughout.

57

‘[...] scilicet Chore cum sacerdotibus complicitibus suis, ut habetur Numer. 16. haec Cyprianus’: Summa, 2.3.11, no. 1; col. 527. The word used for ‘company’ is ‘synagoga’, which is again used by Antonino to characterize the schismatic Council of Basle as the ‘company of Satan’ (‘synagoga sathane’) in his Summa historialis, Pt 3, Tit. 22, ch. 4; MS BNCF II.I.376, fol. 272rb. In the Summa historialis account, Antonino goes on to talk about enthroning an idol and crowning a serpent (with a clever play on the word ‘basilisco’) (fol. 272ra), thus paralleling the transition in the Summa theologica from company consumed by fire to the worshipping of the idol of Exodus 32. 58

Psalm 105. 19–23. This, interestingly, is a scene depicted by Luca Signorelli in the Moses cycle in the Sistine Chapel, along with Botticelli’s Punishment.

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likely to recur. The parallel which he goes on to draw would not have been lost on his reader (or hearer): ‘This people was always prone to schism and rebellion.’59 Several columns of the discussion at this point Antonino gives over to the consideration of jurisdiction and the efficacy of the sacramental life of the Church, so central to salvation, when there is schism.60 In general, Antonino takes the conservative line (one against which Jean Gerson had argued at the Council of Constance) that sacraments enacted by schismatics are void. Here he is consistent with the notion expressed in his sermon of 1427: unity for the sake of grace. For sacraments are acts of those who are instruments of God, as well as being acts of the Church, and, by definition, schismatics are cut off from the Body of Christ, that is, the Church. He does, though, introduce room for doubt by adding his own gloss, on the authority of Thomas Aquinas, that sacramental grace is not effective when the recipients take sacraments knowingly from heretics and schismatics, so defined in the full and strict sense.61 It is the acknowledgement in recent history of the problem of uncertainty in determining schismatic popes which leads Antonino to fill out the scant details of canon law by rehearsing, and reviewing at length the history of schism from the time of Cornelius of Rome in the mid-third century right down to the events surrounding the Council of Constance, giving emphasis, especially in the concluding lines, to the efforts of his mentor Giovanni Dominici.62 At this point of his text Antonino interrupts his historical framework to pursue an excursus to outline the proposals of the Chancellor of the University of Paris (Jean Gerson) which facilitated, finally, the resolution of the Schism. Five columns later he returns to his narrative and the schism provoked by the conciliabulum of Basle. Antonino rehearses and dismisses 59

‘Ille populus erat pronus ad schismata et rebelliones’: Summa, 2.3.11, no. 1; col. 527E. See my arguments about the incorporation of sermon material into the Summa in my Beyond the Written Word, ch. 7. 60

Summa, 2.3.11, nos 2–5; cols 528–38.

61

‘Ideo autem recipients sacramenta scienter ab haereticis et schismaticis proprie et stricte dictis, non recipiunt effectum gratiae, etsi characterem quoad imprimentia ipsum, secundum Thomam, quia ficti accedunt, quum in hoc faciant contra praeceptum ecclesiae hoc prohibentis, excepto baptismo in casu necessitates’: Summa, 2.3.11, no. 3; col. 529B. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a q. 68 art. 8. 62 For example, while the third-order Dominican, Saint Catherine of Siena, as well as Saint Brigid of Sweden, backed the Roman line, Blessed Peter of Luxembourg followed the Avignonese obedience. Nor were Vincent of Ferrer and Giovanni Dominici in agreement. Summa 2.3.11, no. 6; cols. 533–34. This is about ten years before he wrote the parallel section of the Summa historialis where we find an instructive, if cynical, quip: ‘Non videtur saluti necessarium credere istum esse vel illum, sed alterum eorum’ (‘It does not seem necessary for our salvation to believe this or that particular one to be pope, but rather one or other of them’): Tit. 22, ch. 11. See Ludwig von Pastor, History of the Popes, ed. and trans. by F. I. Antrobus, 40 vols (London: John Hodges, 1891), I, 139.

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the arguments put by those still gathered at Basle against the legitimacy of Eugenius IV’s actions in transferring the Council to Ferrara and then Florence. He accuses Amadeo, Duke of Savoy, of being ambitious, greedy and deceitful, and contrasts Eugenius IV’s generosity to the poor and proven devotion to the Church and religion. With astute insight into human nature, Antonino concludes his account by pointing out that many, while believing that Eugenius was the true pope, nonetheless to avoid sharing his humiliation — losing their goods, exile, incarceration, deprivation of benefices, danger of death — gave external acknowledgement to his rival, but at the same time detested him in their hearts as the Antichrist: ‘Tamen corde ut Antichristum detestantur’.63 This last point leads the discussion into the realm of the apocalyptic and eschatological imagination which was to become so prevalent as the century drew towards 1500. The exordium of the historical section of this title on the schism serves as a hinge into its final chapter which is clearly meant to be a sermon, and most probably was preached as such. Even if the column note ‘detestatio schismatis per modum sermonis’ (the detestation of schism by way of preaching) is an addition of the eighteenth-century editor of the readily available edition utilized for this study, in form and structure the section follows the pattern of Antonino’s favoured sermon style, one which is reflected in material he habitually incorporated from his sermons into the Summa.64 There can be little doubt that it was one preached by Antonino in Florence during this tense, apocalyptic period after 1440. The theological, scriptural and canonical language and allusions are given meaning and specificity by immediate historical circumstances and by the memory of recent events. For instance, a reference to the Book of the Apocalypse and the seven churches of Asia with their diverse customs, and cloaked in the one faith, hope and devotion serves as a telling exemplum in the context of the attempt by the Council of Florence to bring a number of the Eastern churches into the one fold: the Armenians, the Copts, the Syrians, the Chaldeans and the Maronites. Indeed, by placing this version of his sermon at the very end of a chapter which is quite specific in chronicling past and present schism, Antonino has articulated the context and associations assumed by the preacher when delivering the sermon live to the assembled populace.

63

‘Quod autem aliqui dicant se credere, et mente tenere Eugenium ut verum papam, et illum reputare antipapam, sed tamen ad vitandum scandalum suum, scilicet amissionis rerum, exilii, incarcerationis, privationis beneficiorum, periculi mortis, illum infelicem ab extra venerantur, ut papam nominant, et huiusmodi, tamen corde ut Antichristum detestantur; non videntur magis excusari a mortali, quam Marcellinus papa, quum in veneratione idoli posuit grana incensi super prunas timore mortis compulsus, Dist. 21. Nunc: aut quam Solomon, quum ob amorem mulierum indolis flectebat ad complacendum eis, quae tamen corde non adorabat’: Summa, 2.3.11, no. 10; col. 540C. 64

See Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 149–56.

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The sermon is constructed around a verse from Psalm 22 (Vulgate 21. 18): ‘They divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots’.65 Predictably enough, Antonino quickly ties this meaning to Christ’s being crucified spiritually by schismatic heretics and his divided clothing to signify the divided faithful. The enormity of this Antonino goes on to develop in the three sections of his sermon, concluding with an exordium on the garment of Christ, charity, which should clothe the Church in unity.66 In all, the images of the scriptural quotations, and the exhortations of the canons would have created more than transient flashes of recognition of contemporary affairs amongst his hearers, and what these matters might mean. Salvation and damnation were at stake. Antonino could conclude his sermon, as he did, on a positive note: that people could put on the raiment of God, charity, if they freely listened to the Word of God, and if they were prompted to the good, and were sorry for things past. His final sentences show that he had not been fully overtaken by a humanist historiography, and that human history was in the end a moral stage. For God could divide his garments among those whom he pleased, and those who were disposed to receive them and sought them most fervently had a distinctive sign, the humility which was the opposite of the destabilizing and divisive vice of pride, the very root of schism.

Botticelli’s ‘Sons of Aaron’ and Sermon Culture Antonino’s potent appropriation of the image of schism as the seamless garment of the Church rent asunder articulated the way in which schism was seen to strike at the very heart of the life of the Church.67 Without a single universally recognised pope to act as the authorized instrument of God there was doubt about the spiritual effectiveness of the sacraments that animated the Body of Christ.68 The spiritual consequences of withdrawal of obedience, the agony of decision-making about whom to adhere to as the authentic pope when there were competing claimants to the Chair of Peter, and the mammoth efforts required to restore unity, all constituted the full horror of the historical experience which had been visited upon Fra Antonino’s 65 This is very similar to the notion which begins his treatment of schism in the Summa where, taking up a suggestion of Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2.2 q. 39 art. 1, he identifies schism, etymologically, with ‘scissura’ and calls schism ‘a division [scissura] of the soul’, following Isidor of Seville. See above, n. 51. 66

‘Primo enormitas schismatic ibi, “Diviserumt sibi vestimenta mea”./ Secundo unitas regiminis ibi, “et super vestem meam”./ Tertio parvitas regiminis ibi, vel gratuitas charismatis ibi, “miserunt sortem”’ (col. 521). 67

This subject I discuss more fully in a forthcoming article. Here I summarize its main conclusions. 68

See Summa, 2.3.11, no. 3; col. 528E–529A.

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generation. In an age which still saw God as the ‘author’, the ultimate authority behind history and its interpretation, the papacy was the guarantor of the salvation which was the goal of life, both individual and communal. Thus the material in Antonino’s sermons and Summa, material destined to inform the sermons of other preachers, has broad implications for understanding the way in which many people of the generation felt about the issue of the papacy and the possibility of the historian’s entering into the religious sentiments of the period. For Antonino’s contemporaries it was the existential issue of salvation.69 Indeed it was the Council of Florence, in establishing itself under Eugenius IV over and against the Council of Basle, that re-affirmed in 1439 that ‘those souls who die in the state of Deadly Sin will go down into Hell, there to be punished with differing penalties’.70 To move against the papacy, no matter how politically expeditious, was to put at risk the salvation of a generation, for it was to move against the one appointed by God, and was thus a crime deserving of the punishment meted out to those who challenged the priestly authority of Aaron and Moses in Numbers 16.71 As we have seen, from the earliest of his sermons which are available to us, Antonino referred frequently to this evocative text. It was a text which is found in subsequent authors on the schism, if only because their desire to restore unity recommended them to the pages of the Decretum Gratiani on schism where the exemplum was cited in the long extracts incorporated there from Cyprian’s De unitate.72 Numbers 16 would become a key text at the Council of Florence where it 69

David D’Avray has argued that the preacher’s words ‘distilled one of the current attitudes between this world and the next’, and indeed, distilled thereby attitudes to thisworldly happenings, and presented them in concentrated form. See his Death of the Prince, pp. 203–04. I would extend this sort of argument to include such paintings as Botticelli’s Punishment of Korah, Dathan and Abiram. 70

‘Illorum autem animas, qui in actuali mortali peccati vel solo originali decendunt mox in infernum descendere, penis tamen disparibus puniendus’: Session 6, 6 July 1439, Definitio sanctae oecumenicae synodi Florentinae, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, p. 528. Peter Howard, ‘Entrepreneurial Ne’er-do-wells: Sin and Fear in Renaissance Florence’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 25 (1994), 245–58. More generally, see Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990). 71

This last sentence purposefully echoes a key scriptural proof text of the period — Hebrews 5. 4: ‘NEMO SIBI ASSUMAT HONOREM NISI VOCATUS A DEO TANQUAM ARON’ — emblazoned on the Arch of Constantine in the Botticelli fresco as the interpretive key of the cycle of wall-frescoes. 72

For instance, Korah, Dathan and Abiram are mentioned in Decretum Gratiani, 7 and 24. I consulted BNCF, MS Conventi soppressi, A.II.403, Decretum Gratiani, fol. 111ra (Provenance: Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1483) in a section to do with the nature of the papacy; fol. 188va comes in the long section on schism (24), and Cyprian is incorporated without specific reference of De unitate. It is Fra Antonino who makes the connection.

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was cited repeatedly in its decree against the conciliabulum at Basle and again in Eugenius VI’s monitum against the anti-pope Felix V.73 Then, in the 1440s, it again was used by Antonino in both his Summa and his preaching. In 1447 Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pius II, introduced his renunciation of his conciliarist ways with the same text, expressing his fear of God’s judgement and not wanting ‘to go to hell alive like Korah, Dathan and Abiram’.74 Moreover, the humanist, Piero da Monte referred to it in his treatise, Contra impugnantes sedis apostolicae auctoritatem, addressed to Nicholas V, and Sixtus IV quoted Numbers 16 when lifting his bull of excommunication from Florence in 1480.75 Arguably, however, the most striking treatment of Numbers 16 came in the early 1480s, when it was fixed into monumental form by Botticelli in the fresco he contributed to the newly renovated palatine chapel. This fresco, one of a cycle of seventeen (originally) painted by him and other, mainly Tuscan, artists for Sixtus IV, has been described as ‘one of the most impressive scenes in the Sistine Chapel’ with ‘all the finest characteristics of late quattrocento painting’.76 Indeed, it is this fresco, along with its counterpart by the Umbrian artist Perugino (The Giving of the Keys, Matthew 16. 18–20), that constitutes the key to the cycle. What was intended in its composition and what contexts were brought to its readings remain open questions. Invariably and helpfully scholars advert to the humanist culture and preoccupations of the papal court, and propose the possible directing hand of both Sixtus IV, as one of the most educated popes of the fifteenth century, or alternatively or as well the Master of the Papal Palace, always a Dominican theologian.77 These explanations focus on the peculiarities of the patron and elements of his court in an attempt to unravel the various distinguishing elements of Botticelli’s argument in his fresco, in particular. This has led to a search for circumstantial matter, generally humanist texts, which may have served to interpret and hence mediate the biblical text, Numbers 16, and which may now give 73

Numbers 16. 26 appears twice in the Decree of Council of Florence Against the Synod of Basle; Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, p. 529. The Monitum of the Council of Florence against Felix V Anti-Pope, Moyses vir Dei, echoes Numbers 16. 31–35 in referring to Korah, Dathan and Abiram (p. 561). Numbers 16. 26 is quoted on p. 563 and Numbers 16 on p. 564. These decrees also draw heavily on Cyprian’s De unitate. 74

Leopold D. Ettlinger, The Sistine Chapel Before Michelangelo: Religious Imagery and Papal Primacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 105–06. 75 On Piero da Monte, see Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 203–10. On Sixtus, see Enrico Carusi, ‘L’Istrumento di Assoluzione dei Fiorentini dalle Censure di Sisto IV’, Archivio Muratoriano, 2.16, 288–92 (p. 289); Ettlinger, p. 109. 76

Ettlinger, p. 53.

77

Marco Maroldi O.P. was Master of the Sacred Palace during this period and preached on the feast of the Assumption in 1481 for Sixtus IV. See O’Malley, p. 14, n. 24.

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the modern viewer access to the rationale of the pictorial arrangement and the range of possible messages it could have then communicated. Such readings neglect the more obvious resources available within the culture that could provide an accessible context for the fresco.78 It seems possible to propose a simpler iconographical reading which does not involve reference to such external — perhaps remote — circumstances, or complex renderings of the text from Numbers, by turning to the culture of preaching. Even granting that during the last part of the fifteenth century, the nature, structure and meaning of the biblical text had become more and more a concern for humanists, the handling of the Bible was still the province of the preacher. The Bible was the source of his inspiration in composing sermons and furnished his examples. I argue that the art of preaching is as relevant to the way in which the artists of the Chapel went about their task as the advice of humanists. In proposing the importance of a culture of preaching I take as my example Botticelli’s fresco of the Conturbatio and link it to the Florence of Archbishop Antonino and to the preacher’s art. Schism was a fifteenth-century preoccupation, as I have been arguing. Indeed, a preacher like Fra Antonino built up sermons and texts around the issue using resources readily to hand.79 Like the good preacher he was, he 78

The important studies on the Chapel and its decoration are: Ettlinger, Sistine Chapel; Ernst Steinmann, Die Sixtinische Kapelle, 2 vols (Munich: Bruckmann, 1901), I: Der Bau und Schmuck der Kapelle unter Sixtus IV, 262–73, 496–512; John Shearman, ‘The Chapel of Sixtus IV: The Fresco Decoration of Sixtus IV’, in The Sistine Chapel: The Art, the History, and the Restoration, ed. by Massimo Giacometi (New York: Harmony Books, 1986), pp. 22– 87. Though my essay here is not meant to be an encompassing critique of the scholarship on the Chapel and its frescoes, it bears noting that of all the studies, Shearman’s contributions are the most balanced and enlightening, although I do think that his dismissal of Steinmann’s and Ettlinger’s links to contemporary ecclesiological events (p. 68) is a little peremptory, especially in view of the sort of reading which I am proposing. The studies by Lewine and Goffin are interesting in their overall arguments, but are rather contrived in their emphases and application: C.F. Lewine, The Sistine Chapel Walls and the Roman Liturgy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Rona Goffen, ‘Friar Sixtus IV and the Sistine Chapel’, Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1986), 218–62. For a corrective critique see Charles Rosenberg’s review of Lewine, ‘The web of allusive reference and symbols is often contrived’: Renaissance Quarterly, 48 (1995), 898–900 (p. 900). The most recent critique and revision is Andrew Charles Bloom, ‘Studies in the Religious Paintings of Sandro Botticelli’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1995), ch. 4 (esp. pp. 228–30, 238– 42). Bloom takes up and develops a suggestion by Herbert Horne (1908) that the Sistine Chapel project was related to the peace between Florence and Rome after the turmoil following the Pazzi Conspiracy and argues for the involvement of Lorenzo de’Medici in the procurement of Florentine artists to assist Perugino; he further argues that ‘an historical understanding of the world lay at the heart of Sistine Rome’ (p. 210) and by extension, the papal chapel. 79

See Howard, Beyond the Written Word, pp. 47–49.

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strung together texts by turning to the key preaching tools, concordances, collections of distinctions, and, as was often the case relating to sensitive issues of conscience and jurisdiction in the period, the Decretum Gratiani. On the sensitive issue of schism he turned to Cyprian’s gloss on Numbers 16, and was provided with its concordance, Psalm 105, which, as we have seen above, separates the punishment of Dathan and Abiram from that of Korah and his priestly accomplices. Indeed, the verse from Psalm 105 which distinguishes Dathan and Abiran from Korah corresponds directly with the scene of punishment in the left of Botticelli’s fresco where two figures are being swallowed by the earth. Moreover, in an earlier, more general part of this section of the Summa on pride (from which schism derives) Antonino cites twelve of the many biblical examples of God humbling the proud. High on the list is Numbers 16: ‘The third is Dathan and Abiram, who rebelled against Moses, and out of pride were condemning his leadership. The earth opened and swallowed these men’.80 So it would seem that in Antonino’s view the punishment of Dathan and Abiram was to be separated from that of Korah and his priestly associates. This disposition of the elements of Numbers 16 accords perfectly with the depiction by Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel in the central and left part of the composition. Now it could be that Botticelli knew of Fra Antonino’s text or had heard one of his sermons on the subject of schism since he grew up and became a journeyman in the Florence over which Fra Antonino presided as archbishop (Botticelli would have been fifteen when Antonino died). Whether this was the case or not, it seems more convincing and simpler to look to sources readily at hand for preacher and painter alike for the narrative detail of the fresco. This is even more convincing when one considers that the recently appointed Master of the Sacred Palace, Marco Maroldi O.P., the most likely supervisor of the project, was himself a Dominican inquisitor, theologian and preacher, and would have turned naturally to these sources.81 For instance, Botticelli (or the Master of the Sacred Palace, or both) could have taken up first the Decretum Gratiani, which would have supplied the reference to Korah, Dathan and Abiram. Indeed, given the exemplum’s common currency, as I noted above, it was quite likely known, but its utility in the context would have been easily reinforced by a glance at the sections on either the papacy or the schism, in both of which cases the text is quoted. What is interesting is the visual possibilities of the Gratian text in causa VII. It recounts the story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram 80

Summa, col. 441.

81

As Eugenio Garin has argued, even humanists used such resources, even though they decried the scholastic theological enterprise as such, since their own encylopaedic tools were not produced or complete until the sixteenth century: ‘Gli umanisti e le scienze’, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, s. 6, 11.3 (1991), 341–56 (p. 353). My thanks to Dr Stefano Ugo Baldassarri for bringing this article to my attention. For a brief biography of Maroldi, see Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi, 3 vols (Rome: Santa Sabina, 1970–80), III, 104.

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as transgressing against Aaron and Moses on the occasion of the test: the legitimate oblation of censing by Aaron and the illegitimate oblation and censing of the company of Korah. This text from Gratian stands as the central scene in Botticelli’s fresco. Then ad dilatandam materiam (‘to dilate’ the text in preaching theory), and so to fill out the pictorial composition by identifying associated images for visualization, the readily available tool for Botticelli, as for anyone who was working with the Bible in the period, was the biblical concordance. And indeed, a concordance had been newly prepared and illuminated for Sixtus IV’s library.82 The first folio page and its leading entry ‘Aaron’ would have provided Hebrews 5, Botticelli’s inscription on the Arch of Constantine: ‘heb.v.a: vocatus a domino tamquam aaron’.83 Moreover, the scenes would have been readily identifiable to any member of the congregation who had been subjected to sermons on schism and its consequences, and my discussion of Antonino’s sermons and Summa suggests that most Florentines and Romans (at least) would have been well acquainted with the issue of schism and the sources related to its discussion.84 The culture of the preacher provided a language on the threat and consequences of schism accessible to both artist and viewer.

Conclusion Archbishop Antonino’s approach to the issues of the Schism emphasizes the unity of faith, sacraments and charity. Yet, his language and themes express the instability of his context: there must be no ruptures, for they threaten a stable, hierarchical world. When he writes, he appropriates the standard authorities, some quite contemporary, to dilate his theme, to open out his thinking, and to provide telling examples. Thus, though a contemporary of the conciliarists and quoting parts of Gerson, his thinking is grounded in the standard collection of authorities, the Decretum of Gratian, from which he drew his citations from Cyprian’s De unitate and was alerted to biblical 82

Bibloteca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter BAV) MS Vat.lat. 4238. Fol. 1r is decorated at the foot of the page by the stemma of Sixtus IV: the triple tiara, the acorn tree, the blue and gold. For a discussion of the development of the concordance and its use by preachers see Richard and Mary Rouse, ‘The Verbal Concordance to the Scripture’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 44 (1974), 5–30; the manuscript is noted as belonging to the library of Sixtus IV on p. 30. For Sixtus IV as the founder of the Vatican Library see José Ruysschaert, ‘Sixte IV, fondateur de la Bibliothèque vaticane’, Archivum Historiae Pontificiae , 7 (1969), 513–24. 83

BAV, MS Vat.lat 4238, fol. 1r.

84

Michael Baxandall noted perceptively some decades ago how sermons were very much a part of the painter’s circumstances and how preacher and picture both took notice of each other: Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 48–50.

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examples, among them Numbers 16, of how God dealt with usurpers.85 Though as a Florentine Antonino was a staunch defender of the city’s republican constitution, as a Dominican he was a papal apologist.86 The keys had been given to the papacy.87 Those who in their pride rose against the papacy, withdrew their allegiance or appealed to a future council threatened the salvation of all by rending Christ’s seamless garment, the Church, and leaving it in the uncertainty of schism. The fate of those who rise up against the one anointed by God had, therefore, a verbal and imaginative history in fifteenth-century Italy, long before the publicist painters of the court of Sixtus IV. No great theological sophistication was required on the part of the visitor to the papal court to understand the message portrayed by the typology displayed by the two key frescoes, Perugino’s Conturbatio Iesu Christi Legislatoris (The Giving of the Keys) and its counterpart Botticelli’s Conturbatio Moysi Legis Scripte Latoris (The Punishment of the Sons of Korah), both articulated and emphasized by the layout of the Chapel before the interventions under Julius II.88 The language of the artist was grounded in the language of the preacher. The notion of conturbatio — which can mean ‘confusion’ as well as ‘opposition’ — is common to both. The frescoes commissioned by Sixtus IV for his chapel enshrined Nicholas V’s permeating vision for the function of art in the papal city ‘to testify to the dignity and authority of the Roman Church’.89 Botticelli’s contribution, in particular, was, by intent, supposed to consign to the bowels of the earth the spectre of the Great Schism which had lain long over the century, threatening earthly and cosmic order. The sermons and writings which reflect Antonino’s own experience and world of interpretation speak for the anxieties of an entire generation. As the century neared its end and prophetic utterances abounded, it seemed that all these recent historical experiences and the anxiety which is little masked in this Florentine archbishop’s discourse bracketed an age where the fear of an anti-pope gave way to the fear of the Antichrist.90 85 For examples, see Decretum Gratiani, 2, c. 24, q. 1, c. 18–19. See J.W. Steiber, ‘Unity from the Perspectives of the Council Fathers at Basel’, in Christian Unity: The Council of Ferrara-Florence 1438/39–1989, ed. by Giuseppe Alberigo, Proceedings of an International Conference, Florence 1989 Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 97 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991), pp. 57–73 (p. 62). 86 Thomas M. Izbicki, ‘The Council of Ferrara-Florence and Dominican Papalism’, in Christian Unity, pp. 429–43. 87

Summa, col. 537B, quoting Matthew 16. 19.

88

Shearman, pp. 38–91, esp. p. 53.

89

Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 157. 90

Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. by Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). On the Schism and the Antichrist see Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), pp. 178–81.

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The Literary Career of Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653): The Constraints of Gender and the Writing Woman STEPHEN KOLSKY

L

ucrezia Marinella is principally remembered today for her tremendous battle of words with Giuseppe Passi in 1600. Passi had written a violent diatribe against women in which he accused them of all the shortcomings (and more) that had been common currency since Aristotle. For the first time in Italy a woman had entered into direct debate in print with a man who advocated the most extreme of misogynous positions. By defending herself and other women, Marinella was demonstrating that women needed no longer to depend on the rather haphazard male defences of their sex, but could speak out for themselves. By so doing in the first person, Marinella was providing an active model of a woman who negated the vices and defects generally attributed to women — she was living proof that women were not like the stereotypes presented by Passi. La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne indicates Marinella’s will to succeed in the male-dominated world of late Renaissance humanism by making a point of her self-acquired knowledge of the ancient world and of a variety of academic disciplines to challenge male authority through the deconstruction of men’s misuse of language and power.1 1

Le nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne co’diffetti e mancamenti de gli huomini (Venice: Giovan Battista Ciotti senese, 1600). The second edition had a slightly different title, La nobiltà et eccellenze delle donne co’diffetti e mancamenti de gli huomini: Discorso di Lucrezia Marinella in due parti diviso (Venice: Giovan Battista Ciotti senese all’insegna dell’Aurora, 1601). A partial translation is The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, ed. and trans. by Ann Dunhill and Letizia Panizza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For an overview of the polemic with Passi see Letizia Panizza, ‘Polemical Prose Writing, 1500–1650’, in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, ed. by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.

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Marinella’s passionate defence of women represents a unique moment in her corpus because it was the only time that she wrote so overtly in defence of women. Cristofaro Bronzini noted that Marinella acted ‘almost against her will’.2 To argue against a man and man’s view of the world in the public space of print was certainly a bold move by Marinella and decisively broke with the silent oppression of the female past. A year after the first edition Marinella published a much revised second edition which sharpened her arguments and allowed for a greater exhibition of her knowledge. However, although this edition was reprinted in 1621, Marinella did not add a preface nor make even minimal changes to the text. After that early explosion of feminist energy and emotion, she seems to have rethought her position, or perhaps to have regretted, or been made to repent, her youthful radicalism. At the time of the controversy with Passi, Marinella was not unknown in Venetian literary circles.3 Before 1600, she had already written two religious works, La colomba sacra (1595) and the Vita del serafico et glorioso San Francesco (1597), and one secular composition: the Amore innamorato ed impazzato (1598). Nothing in these forewarned the reading public of Marinella’s potential as a feminist writer. In fact, her growing reputation was as a writer of religious works. In 1602, only a year after the publication of the second edition of La nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, the Bolognese intellectual, Ascanius Persius, wrote to Marinella praising her for her ability in religious writing.4 On the basis of this reputation Persius asked her 72–74. See also Virginia Cox, ‘The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, 48 (1995), 513–81; Stephen Kolsky, ‘Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi: An Early Seventeenth-Century Feminist Controversy’, Modern Language Review, 96 (2001), 973–89; Satya Datta, Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History (London: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 155–82. 2

‘[...] e quasi contro sua voglia’: Della dignità e nobiltà delle donne. Dialogo di Christofano Bronzini d’Ancona. Diviso in quattro settimane; e cia scheduna di esse in sei Giornate […] Settimana prima e giornata quarta (Florence: Zanobi Pignoni, 1625), p. 112, my emphasis. 3 For an overview of Marinella’s career, see Patricia H. Labalme, ‘Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists’, Archivio Veneto, 112 (1981), 93–98; Prudence Allen and Filippo Salvatore, ‘Lucrezia Marinelli and Woman’s Identity in Late Italian Renaissance’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 28 (1992), 5–39; Paola Malpezzi Price, ‘Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653)’, in Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook, ed. by Rinaldina Russell (Westport: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 234– 42. Still useful is Girolamo Tiraboschi, Biblioteca modenese (Modena: Presso la Società tipografica, 1783), III, 159–63. 4 Venice, Biblioteca Marciana (hereafter BM), MSS Italiani, cl. 7, n. 351 (8385), fol. 221r. The letter is dated 12 November 1602 and written from Bologna; it is lacerated, with words and ends of lines missing.

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to contribute to a collection of poetry and prose in praise of an image of Our Lady supposedly painted by the apostle Luke.5 The invitation to contribute to an enlarged edition was in part an acknowledgment of Marinella’s skills as a poet and ignored her recent foray into the male terrain of polemical prose. Persius specifically requested ‘a little poem in octaves’ — the normal vehicle for narrative poetry in the late Renaissance — and her preferred poetic form.6 Marinella herself included the poetry written for the anthology in her Rime sacre (1603) and it does indeed contain a poem in octaves as requested by Persius.7 If Marinella had established an early reputation as a writer of religious works, she put considerable effort into other genres that explored themes of a more secular nature. Therefore, if Marinella appears to have been attuned to the religio-intellectual climate of the early seventeenth century, she nevertheless was not averse to experimenting with emerging genres and engaging with new socio-political realities.8 Her writings before 1600, the year of the publication of Le nobilità, are indicative of the dominant patterns that shape her work. Her two hagiographies of 1595 and 1597 offer stylized versions of the lives of Saint Colomba and Saint Francis, saints 5

‘Perché havendo io fatta una raccolta di diverse poesie, così volgari come latine e come anche greche, di molti begli spiriti e de’ principali in questo genere de’ nostri tempi in lode della santa imagine di nostra donna dipinta da San Luca Evangelista, la quale [si] conserva nella chiesa al detto santo dedicata sul monte della Guardia, luogo a Bologna, vicino due miglia in circa, et è da questa città havuta in grandissima divotione; di cui anche è scritta brevemente l’historia nelle sudette tre lingue, la quale si ristamperà tosto insieme le antidette compositioni, accresciuta e migliorata, come anche saranno accresciute le compositio[ni] poetiche e con rime del Marini e con altri versi’: BM, MSS Italiani, cl. 7, n. 351 (8385), fol. 221r. One finds no mention of La nobilità in the Catalogo breve de gl’illustri et famosi scrittori venetiani quale tutti hanno dato in luce qualche opera conforme alla loro professione particolare raccolto dal RPF Giacomo Alberici da Sarnico bergamasco dell’Ordine Eremit. di S. Agostino [...] (Bologna: Eredi di Giovanni Rossi, 1605). Furthermore, Marinella’s contributions to this anthology receive five mentions out of eleven. Marinella’s bibliography, as compiled by Alberici, consists solely of printed religious poems. 6 ‘E chi sa che le inspiri il Signore a farvi un poemetto in ottava rima? Faccia ella. Noi accetteremo e ‘l molto e ‘l p[oco] con animo non punto ingrato’: BM, MSS Italiani, cl. 7, n. 351 (8385), fol. 221r. 7

Rime sacre della molto illustre Sig. Lucretia Marinella. Fra le quali è un poemetto in cui si racconta l’historia della Madonna dipinta da San Luca che è su’l monte della Guardia nel tenitorio di Bologna (Venice: Ad instanza del Collosini, 1603). The relevant poems are to be found on fols 9r, 9v, 10r, 10v, 11r, 11v, 12r, 12v, and 28r–48v. I have been unable to locate the second edition of Persius’s anthology of which the first edition is Componimenti poetici volgari, latini e greci di diversi sopra la S. imagine della beata vergine [...] (Bologna: Presso Vittorio Benacci, 1601). 8 Cristoforo Bronzini points to the ‘double’ nature of her production ‘singolare nella prosa e nel verso, versatissima nelle sacre lettere e peritissima nella filosofia morale e naturale’: Della dignità e nobiltà delle donne, p. 82.

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who are central to the religiosity of the Counter-Reformation. It cannot be said that Marinella is breaking any new ground here with respect to the subject-matter. Indeed, she seems to be projecting herself as a devout, conservative writer who does not challenge the social or theological order. Perhaps, having established her credentials in this way, the third text launches Marinella in a different direction. The Amore innamorato et impazzato betrays a certain authorial anxiety, as can be seen from the brief note to the readers which defends her use of classical mythology, and, in particular, the adoption of Christian terminology to refer to the pagan gods. This may appear to be a matter of pure form, but the author seems to have felt a need to justify her incursion into ‘alien’ country: Not intending in any way imaginable to be prejudicial to the absolute certainty of our faith nor to our most holy Roman church to which I profess to be a most obedient and humble daughter, as one can clearly see from my published devout and sacred works.9

In spite of the angst, one would be hard pressed to call Amore innamorato et impazzato frivolous, titillating, immoral, or ‘dangerous’ in any way. However, it does draw attention to its Renaissance origins. The title recalls two famous Renaissance epic poems: Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. In fact, the subject-matter owes much to the narrative of Orlando’s madness since Cupid, the subject of Marinella’s poem, goes mad from love as a punishment from Jupiter. The comparison between the poems is made explicit by the author: Be silenced [...] [...] he who sang of the great Lord of Anglante’s love madness which is not superior to this one.10

Marinella is urging comparison with the Renaissance classic in favour of her invention. It is interesting to note that Marinella’s other epic poem, L’Enrico, is consciously modelled on Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Taken together, they 9

‘Sono stata sforzata dalla natura e conditione del mio poema nel qual si ragiona di Amore, posto da gli antichi poeti nel numero de’ Dei, di usar tali parole Dio, Deità, angelico, divino, paradiso sacro, celeste e altre simili, sì come anco sorte, destino e fatale, non pretendendo in alcun modo imaginabile di preiudicar alla certissima verità della nostra fede né alla nostra sanctissima chiesa romana alla qual faccio professione di esser ubbidientissima e humilissima figliuola, sì come si può benissimo conoscere dalle opere divote e sacre da me scritte e poste in stampa’ : Amore innamorato et impazzato. Poema di Lucretia Marinella con gli argomenti e allegorie a ciascun canto [...]’ (Venice: Gio. Battista Combi, 1618), fol. a6v, my emphasis. 10 ‘Ecco incomincia un furor grande a cui/Non è né fu né sarà mai simile/[...] Taccia chi cantò Oreste e gli error sui/Da le furie agitato in dotto stile,/E chi cantò del gran signor d’Anglante/Il pazzo amor che a questo non va inante’ : Amore innamorato, VIII.41. ll. 1–2, 5– 8; p. 183. Cupid’s madness brings on the same destructive elements as Ariosto’s Orlando: ‘Frange gli antichi pini, ogn’arbor spezza/Quella sua destra a fierir cori avezza/’ (IX.3. ll. 7–8; p. 198).

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demonstrate the strongly epic impulse in the Venetian writer and how she consciously manipulated Renaissance forms both to increase her prestige as a writer, and, more importantly, to lend authority to her statements about emerging cultural trends. It is no accident that Marinella’s first three works were all in verse and all in octaves, the accepted metre for narrative poetry. She does not appear to have been aiming for a popularizing form that could be adapted to either secular or religious poetry. On the contrary, she was attempting to enhance the status of religious poetry by adopting the form ‘consecrated’ by Ariosto, and more significantly by Tasso. Indeed, throughout her work there is an emphasis on the heroic, both in terms of subject-matter and of expression. Here, Marinella is close to the theories of Tasso on the poema eroico and the poetic depiction of exceptional beings or heroes.11 In this respect the Vita del serafico et glorioso San Francesco is exemplary. The opening lines echo both Virgil and Tasso in their epic resonances: ‘I sing of the great man who through supreme Love/had those sacred wounds’.12 Marinella quite pointedly contrasts Francis with classical martial heroes in order to establish a critical difference between classical and Christian heroism, and also to confirm that such heroic language can be properly employed to describe the Saint’s holy behaviour, endowing it with appropriate classical gravitas.13 Indeed, Marinella’s oeuvre can be read as an attempt to bring Tasso’s theories of the Christian epic to their logical conclusions. The term poema eroico is used to describe the hero of her first poetic composition, Saint Colomba. And the epic form in ottava rima is her genre of choice throughout her literary career, constituting one of its dominant structures. Marinella adapts Tasso’s rhetorical techniques in the Discorsi del poema eroico to the saint’s life, thus lending the prestige and literary authority of Renaissance rhetoric to Christian hagiography. If Marinella can be said to have a literary programme it is this. The basic principles are explained in the introduction to the Vita di Maria vergine, Imperatrice dell’universo.14 Marinella writes that ‘actions which partake of the great, magnificent and the divine and which go beyond normal human

11 Tasso states in the Discorso della virtù feminile e donnesca that ‘fra gli uomini sono alcuni ch’eccedendo l’umana condizione sono stimati eroi’: Discorso, ed. by Maria Luisa Doglio (Palermo: Sellerio, 1997), p. 63. 12 ‘Canto il Grand’Huom, c’hebbe dal sommo Amore/Quelle piaghe sacrate’, Vita del serafico et glorioso S. Francesco (Venice: Appresso Barezzo Barezzi, 1605), I.1. ll. 1–2. 13 There are numerous examples of this procedure throughout the Vita del serafico et glorioso San Francesco whereby military epic stilemes are adapted to exceptional saintly behaviour: ‘Invittissimo Heroe saggio e facondo’ (I.3. l.6); ‘Ma perché pensa il Capitano eletto [Francesco]/Ad essequir del Re l’alto mandato’ (I.17. ll. 1–2). 14

Published in Venice by Apresso Barezzo Barezzi in 1602.

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endeavours, require a grand and marvellous style’.15 She moves Tasso’s discourse of exceptional men and women, heroes, to another level on which she places saints and the Christian pantheon. This strategy is not without risks. For the saint who is the subject of an early biography in verse, Saint Francis, is rewritten in prose three years before the publication of her last work Essortationi alle donne in 1645. Although the shift to prose does not of necessity represent a renunciation of her previous poetics since Marinella still speaks of ‘the heroic deeds’ of Saint Francis and the following life of Chiara,16 it is not out of the question to see a rejection here of the heroic verse of her early literary forays more than forty years previously. In fact, it is her only work dedicated to a pope, Urban VIII, and as such represents an almost final attempt to ensure respectability and religious conformity for herself. However, she cannot give up the classicizing comparisons: Francis is an Atlas, ‘a formidable champion’, superior to all sorts of ancient figures.17 His superiority cannot be described without these heroes of ancient history who are regarded in a negative light, and serve to underline Francis’s difference from Roman values and from the pagan world in general. But the language of eloquence, based on Renaissance ideals of rhetoric, remains. Francis’s humility and poverty is still described in the heightened rhetoric of a classicizing prose. If Marinella’s first writings before the publication of Le nobiltà prefigure in embryonic form the pattern of her future literary production in that we have biographies of both a male and female saint followed by a secular narrative poem, an experiment which will convince Marinella that the Ariostean model is not suitable for her developing poetics. That development is rudely interrupted by the controversy with Passi which marks her first use of prose and her entry into a new area of public debate. For two full years, Marinella was preoccupied with heated discussions about the social role of women. Her stance could be seen to conflict with views on the subordinate roles of women in Christian societies and thought. In a 15

‘Le azioni che hanno del grande, del magnifico e del divino, e che trapassano le operazioni umane, ricercano un modo di dire grande e mirabile’: ‘Lucrezia Marinella a’ lettori’, Vita di Maria vergine, in Lucrezia Marinella, Arcadia felice, ed. by Françoise Lavocat (Florence: Olschki, 1998), p. 200. Tasso’s definition of the poema eroico is not far distant from Marinella’s definition of the grandiloquent style. 16

Le vittorie di Francesco il Serafico: Li passi gloriosi della diva Chiara di cui si narrano li fatti heroici, le penitenze acerbe, la vita mortificata e le fatiche insuperabili (Padua: Giulio Crivellari, 1642). 17

‘Hora dopo tante mie fatiche mi sono posta a scrivere non le astutie di Annibale o l’odio di Asdrubale, non le prodezze di Alessandro né le fortune di Cesare, né di Mida o di Crasso le superbe ricchezze, ma la sincerità, l’amore, l’humiltà, la volontaria povertà di questo nostro formidabile campione, Francesco di nome’: Le vittorie, p. 1. Then, Marinella makes the claim even more explicit: ‘Onde non solo dirò che si agguagliasse alli sopranominati capitani, ma di gran lunga loro avanzasse e superasse perché con mille accorti modi beffeggiò e deluse il tiranno infernale’ (p. 2).

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sense, this debate dominated the rest of Marinella’s literary career, even if at first sight, it appears limited to the years 1600–01 during which two editions of La nobiltà were published. The first two editions of Le nobiltà reveal a side of Marinella that was not to surface again. It was the only time before she composed her last work that she engaged with ‘non-fiction’ in an extensive and meaningful way. The prose of La nobiltà does not depend on elocutio so much as the accumulation of copia (knowledge) which will convince the reader of the rightness of her case. It argues, through the marshalling of all kinds of evidence, for the acceptance of women in society on a basis which would allow them to take on greater social roles, such as those of public intellectuals and writers. I do not believe it to have been an accident that in 1602 Marinella published the already-mentioned Vita de Maria vergine, Imperatrice dell’universo, perhaps as a kind of penance or a counter-weight to the image of herself as a combative woman who challenged the authority of men. The heated rhetoric of La nobiltà which ignores balance to score points is substituted by the sacred, ennobling, poetic language of the Vita. The introductory stanza sets out the credentials of the writer, referring only to her previous hagiographic compositions and making no mention of La nobiltà,18 presumably because it was irrelevant to these sacred verses, but also because she wished to define herself as a writer of religious themes. The version of womanhood proposed in the Vita takes up, after the rupture of La nobiltà, the theme of humility which acts as an antidote to the act of self-identification and intellectual daring that so characterized Marinella’s attacks on Giuseppe Passi. So, although Mary is represented as a writer, she is not the type of writer Marinella showed she could be in La nobiltà. In fact, the Virgin Mary is able to combine both household tasks and writing in a synthesis that emphasizes her humility and subjection.19 Her exemplary behaviour serves as a lesson to all women.20 Marinella did not give up writing nor did she continue down the path of La nobiltà after the controversy with Passi. Now she emphasized one possible direction for her writing, reducing its choices, both in terms of style and content. However, this more conservative approach did not completely exclude modest experiments 18

‘Quella son io ch’a l’aura in versi trasse/Già di sacra Colomba i gran martiri/E quella io son che ‘n rima pria cantasse/ Del serafico Heroe gli altri esiri/Hor canto, ma con note rozze e basse/ De la regina de’ stellanti giri/’: La Imperatrice dell’universo poema heroico (Venice: Appresso Barezzo Barezzi, 1610), I.1. ll. 1–6. 19

‘Né di volger talhor disdegna o nega/A feminil lavor l’altera mano/ Et hora a prose o a santi versi piega/ Pien di virtù lo spirito sovrano/’: La Imperatrice dell’universo, I.18. ll. 1–4. Marinella further states, ‘Gloria ne l’humiltà, gioie in affanni’ (II.17. l. 4). 20

‘Dunque ò del Ciel Regina in tal disagio/Producesti al gran Padre amato figlio?/O spose altere ch’al secol malvagio/L’huomo date, anzi al demon nel crudo artiglio/Quai pompe vòi? quai comodi, o qual agio/ Lasciate al parto giunte, o qual consiglio,/Qual gemme e or da voi non si raguna/Per lo letto adornasse e l’aurea cure’: La Imperatrice dell’universo, II.16. ll. 1–8.

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with developing secular genres. If scholarly attention has focussed almost exclusively on La nobiltà and its revisions, equally remarkable in the years 1602–03 is Marinella’s determination to play down the overt feminist image of herself. As if to mark a ‘fresh’ start the Vita of Saint Francis was reprinted in 1602 (and then in 1605). The publication of the Rime sacre in 1603 established her as a writer of religious verse of repute since the book included the commissioned poems on the painting of the Virgin Mary supposedly by Saint Luke. After the fallout from La nobiltà, Marinella did not retreat entirely into an ‘orthodox’ persona. It is true that between 1602 and 1606, of the approximately six texts composed (excluding La nobiltà), five have religious themes, and only one deals with a subject that eschews matters of religion, Arcadia felice (1605). Arcadia felice represents a determination by Marinella not to be pigeonholed completely as a writer of religious poetry or prose. It is Marinella’s sole pastoral romance — a popular form throughout Europe in the late Renaissance, though rare amongst Venetian writers.21 As such, it can be viewed as a bold act that challenged what the ‘ideal’ canon of a woman writer could or should be. Arcadia felice concerns the arrival of Diocletian in Arcadia after he had abdicated as Roman Emperor. The romance describes his first few days in Arcadia, following his ‘disruptive’ influence on its rustic society and an eventual conciliation between Roman values and the Arcadian-pastoral system. The choice of the genre and the treatment of the pastoral subject-matter is rather perplexing. The figure of Diocletian is highly charged with ambiguity since he was amongst the worst persecutors of the Christian sect, although this is never referred to. What does it mean that Marinella makes no overt mention of this fact? It seems to be irrelevant for Arcadia felice. She is not totally hemmed in by the forms of a purely Christian art and desires to explore areas that have political and personal resonance in a classicizing context. The land of Arcadia is a territory or space in which some of the boundaries of the Christian order can be transgressed. There are also conspicuous continuities between Arcadia felice and Marinella’s other works: in particular, the notion of love as damaging to human liberty and creativity. Love is a crucial element in the writer’s universe: its obverse side is the passionate love consecrated in the Renaissance lyric. Love as the ultimate guiding force for a Christian is celebrated in the lives of saints written throughout Marinella’s career.22 It entails a rejection of the senses and a ‘superhuman’ adhesion

21

Arcadia felice, pp. xli–xliii.

22

In De’ gesti heroici e della vita maravigliosa della serafica S. Caterina da Siena (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi, 1624) Christ speaks to Catherine, noting that ‘col fuoco di un vero amore mi servisti’ (p. 153). Her first poem on Saint Colomba made similar points about divine love: ‘[...] nel fior egregio/Di sua età sacrò a Christo l’humil core,/Sprezzò se stesso e gradì il vero amore/’: Amore innamorato, XII. ll. 6–8; fol. 7r. The programmatic intent against earthly love is made explicit in the same poem: ‘E in darno amore con la sua face errante/Tentò

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to sexual purity. In Arcadia felice such ideology is transferred onto the mythological plane. In a key scene, Entella attempts to shake Corimbo out of his lovesickness by telling his own story of finding a different set of values to rule his life.23 The critical part of Entella’s account is reached when he is on the point of committing suicide and is miraculously saved by the goddess Diana. Love is viewed by her as a hindrance to studies: ‘You will in future fight against Love and will become a glorious champion and will follow me in my chaste studies and modest behaviour’.24 The emphasis on studies seems to indicate that Diana and her followers provide a model of behaviour for a writer/intellectual. Firstly, chastity is identified as the quality which protects the female writer from the disruptive influence of love; and, secondly, study in the broadest sense is regarded as the most significant means by which the writer can develop human qualities other than love. The significance of Diana’s intervention cannot be underestimated, not only in terms of the didactic message of the pastoral romance, but in the broader terms of Marinella’s self-image. It is a defence of writing as an effective life-choice which respects the dominant ideology of female sexual purity. In this way, Diana does not enter into conflict with Christian ideology since her stance is in tune with Marinella’s own depictions of chaste/virginal Christian saints and martyrs. Furthermore, Marinella’s vision of the female writer/intellectual recalls the forceful message of the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte as expressed in The Worth of Women, published in 1600. In this dialogue, Corinna consciously makes the choice to remain unmarried and to pursue her intellectual interests.25 It is this pairing of virginity and intellectual pursuit which stands out. Corinna displays the same mistrust of love that forms a leitmotif in Marinella’s writings. Corinna may be the scaldar il generoso petto/Che la pura honestà fredda rendea/L’indegna face e l’empia voglia rea/’ (XVI. ll. 5–8; fol. 7v). 23

‘Egli per stogliere l’animo di Corimbo dall’insania del cieco Duce, e per far che egli volgesse la mente ad onorati studi’: Arcadia felice, p. 100. The madness of Orlando is deeply embedded in Marinella’s psyche and Entella displays similar characteristics to the lovelorn Orlando and her own Cupid of Amore innamorato. Entella uproots trees by the sound of his laments and ‘talora imprimeva con le taglienti punte de’ coltelli nelle corteccie dell’insensate piante la dolente istoria della mia futura morte’ (p. 104). 24

‘Tu per lo avvenire contra Amor pugnando, vincitor glorioso divenendo, seguirai di me i casti studi ed i casti diporti’: Arcadia felice, p. 106; my emphasis. The converted Entella echoes her words in stressing the importance of studies in a person’s life: ‘Beati coloro, che gli tuoi santissimi studii seguendo, lontani d’Amor si vivono; beati coloro liquali nella purità delle tue giuste leggi si compiacciono’ (p. 108; my emphasis). 25

‘By rejecting all contact with those falsest of creatures, men, you have escaped the tribulations of this world and are free to devote yourself to those glorious pursuits that will win you immortality’: Moderata Fonte [Modesta Pozzo], The Worth of Women Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. by Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 48–49.

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alter ego of the writer, Moderata Fonte, but there is major difference between them: Corinna advocates a radical ‘separatist’ mentality whereas the author was married and in fact died in childbirth just after completing The Worth of Women. Corimbo’s cure in Arcadia felice represents only one side of the story. Marinella does not forget his former object of desire, Iele, who is pictured at a possible turning point in her own personal story. Iele’s mother attempts to ‘tame’ her daughter, to turn her towards love. But she refuses, because in the classical context of the romance she is devoted to Diana: ‘She was born to serve the chaste Diana and always wanted to follow her brilliant studies in a virtuous, pious, and pure manner’.26 Although presented to the reader as an Amazon and close to nature, Iele aspires to something else, as yet not fully defined in her present state. The Arcadia felice was a bold adventure into a new genre that was fashionable all over Europe and underlined a commitment to secular writing. However, until the publication of L’Enrico in 1635 nearly thirty years later, Marinella produced few works and they are all religious in inspiration. Various hypotheses have been put forward to explain this running down of Marinella’s poetic vein, lack of inspiration and marriage being the principal ones. Little indeed is known about Marinella’s private life — the existence of a husband and children are attested to by her will.27 In the case of Moderata Fonte, a literary career that was in full flight before marriage, one that had achieved a high level of success and recognition, was suddenly cut short by the duties and responsibilities of a Venetian wife. For most of her married life Fonte was only able to produce occasional poetry in association with specific events, and it was only in the period before giving birth for the last time that she was able to concentrate and write the dialogue, The Worth of Women.28 This interpretation is based on her biography written by her guardian. There is no similar source to throw light on Marinella’s personal circumstances and explain why between 1605–35 only four works were published. We do know that L’Enrico was an epic poem years in the making. In the publisher’s preface to De’ gesti heroici e della vita maravigliosa della serafica S. Caterina da Siena, Barezzo Barezzi presents a rassegna of Marinella’s most important writings as if to remind readers of her ability and reputation as a writer. The review implicitly recalls the role of the publisher since he was involved in the publication of at least five texts, particularly in the period after 1605.29 He 26

‘Che a’ servigi della casta Diana era nata, e che sempre seguire voleva il pudico, il santo ed il puro de’ suoi chiari studi’: Arcadia felice, p. 178. 27

For biographical information see Marinella, Nobility and Excellence of Women, pp. 3–15.

28

See The Worth of Women, pp. 2–6, 31–40; and Stephen D. Kolsky, ‘Wells of Knowledge: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne’, The Italianist, 13 (1993), 57–96 (pp. 63–65). 29 For example, he underscores the importance of La Imperatrice dell’universo, for which he was responsible for the second edition in 1617 and claims it was ‘tanto stimata, letta e ammirata da tutte le genti sapute e intendenti’: De’ gesti heroici, fol. a3v.

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announces the future publication of L’Enrico ‘in a few years’, eleven to be precise!30 Since the outline of the text is so precise one can surmise that Marinella had already been working on it for some time. The extraordinary delay in publication may in part be explained by the complexity and length of the poem and perhaps by familial obligations. The choice of Saint Catherine in the De’ gesti heroici may throw some light on Marinella’s thoughts about domestic life. Marinella notes that Catherine did not spend her youth concerned with personal appearance, ‘but her life was full of mature seriousness and quite resembled the life of angels’.31 Catherine rejects earthly values, is spurred on to greater deeds by ‘those courageous women’ and ‘many of those famous heroes’, that is saints and martyrs, the first of whom is Saint Colomba.32 The psychology of Catherine’s struggles is analysed with some refinement: her temporary submission to her mother’s wishes for her to enter the world and get a husband is described in terms of outward acceptance which belies her inner fortitude and fomenting rebellion.33 It would certainly be overly reductive to interpret Marinella’s life of Saint Catherine as an idealized portrait of a woman who chooses her own destiny in spite of intense family pressures, and with whom the author wished to identify. There is another aspect to the text which leads the reader off in quite a different direction. Embedded in the hagiographic narrative is an extensive encomium of the Medici, rulers of Tuscany. This is not altogether surprising in that Marinella often dedicated her books to persons, normally women, of standing in northern court societies in the hope of gaining recognition and patronage. Her first work on Saint Colomba was dedicated to Margarita d’Este Gonzaga, Duchess of Ferrara.34 Arcadia felice was dedicated to Leonora de’ Medici, Duchess of Mantua. Marinella was definitely attracted by genres which were not in vogue in Venice, but were more in the domain of court culture. The hagiographic narrative of Saint Catherine, dedicated to a Medici, is a courtly offering by means of which the Venetian writer pays her 30

‘E tra pochi anni offerirà a gli occhi vostri un poema, almeno di venti canti, composto secondo li precetti di Aristotile e di Omero antico maestro, del quale la compositrice ne spera un lungo e sommo honore’: De’ gesti heroici, fol. a3v. The delay in publication is so long that Barezzi in the end did not publish L’Enrico! 31

‘Né come l’altre giovanette spendeva inutilmente il tempo et le opere in lisci e in far crespe le bionde chiome od in altra vana coltura, ma la sua vita era piena di gravità senile e alla vita angelica in tutto somigliante’: De’ gesti heroici, p. 41. 32

‘molti di quelle animose donne’ and ‘molti di quelli heroi famosi’: De’ gesti heroici, p. 22. Catherine is herself referred to as ‘l’heroica fanciulla senese’ (p. 80). 33

‘Così Caterina mossa da gli altrui voleri pareva attendere alle rive de’ mondani piaceri, ma l’anima sua ferma rimaneva nella sua prima volontà et spesso volgendo le care luci alli quasi abbandonati lidi del cielo seco si doleva’: De’ gesti heroici, p. 62. 34

Amore innamorato was dedicated to the Duchess of Mantua, Caterina de’ Medici.

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compliments to the religiosity of the Medici, closely allying a famous saint to their dynastic solidity. The saintly heroes are paralleled by the secular heroes, that is, the members of the Medici whom Marinella chooses to ‘canonize’. In many ways, De’ gesti heroici e della vita maravigliosa della serafica S. Caterina da Siena is a prose epic, containing those very same qualities and structures which appear in her verse works, particularly those in praise of saints.35 However, not all her works were addressed to a courtly audience. Venetian patrons were courted in the life of the Virgin Mary, and her longest work, L’Enrico, sets out to redress the balance of her literary production in favour of Venice since it chooses a Venetian theme and aims to glorify Venetian military might. L’Enrico has received scant attention from the critics and the little it has received has been generally negative.36 It is viewed as a pale imitation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, out of touch with the latest developments in the genre pioneered by Marino. While it is true that the poem bears more than a passing resemblance to its late Renaissance model, it does aim to create a tone of its own by accentuating features that were more restrained in Tasso’s creation. Marinella takes some of the basic structural features of the Gerusalemme liberata into which she weaves quite a different thread. The full title of Marinella’s poem, L’Enrico ovvero Bisanzio acquistato, seeks to focus the reader on the poetic model of the poem, the Gerusalemme liberata, both semantically and rhythmically. Both poems recount the story of a siege presided over by similar figures, Goffredo in the Gerusalemme and Enrico Dandolo, the Venetian captain, in Marinella’s epic. They have a flawed other as their opponent who is destined to be defeated by the proponent of the true religion. The infidels in both poems enlist the assistance of magicians who call upon the evil empire to aid their (lost) cause, to no avail in the end. There are some further similarities in the account of the final battles for the taking of the city in each poem. However, Marinella has made some bold choices which can be seen as throwing down the gauntlet to the Tassian version of the epic. In particular, there is no equivalent to the sexually charged Armida in L’Enrico. One of the ‘heroes’ of the L’Enrico, Venier, is shipwrecked on an isolated island and is rescued by Erina. The scenario recalls both Ariosto and Tasso (Alcina, Armida), but with a significant difference. Erina does not get sexually involved with the hero. To underline this point, Marinella introduces a major variant for the couple — they are related! This device enables a close

35

It contains amongst other elements, a hero who fights against the odds to achieve a spiritual life, successfully defeats the devil, and a dynastic encomium. 36

For a recent positive re-evaluation of L’Enrico and other epic poems by women, see Virginia Cox, ‘Women as Readers and Writers of Chivalric Poetry in Early Modern Italy’, in Sguardi sull’Italia: Miscellanea dedicata a Francesco Villari dalla Society for Italian Studies, ed. by Gino Bedani and others (Leeds: The Society for Italian Studies, 1997), pp. 134–45.

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relationship to develop without the associated baggage.37 The love that is between them is in no way illicit, but is the result of their obscure family connections. Erina also combines the functions of the Ariostean Melissa by describing the origins and foretelling the future glories of the Venetian doges, if not of a dynasty. Ironically, she foretells Venier’s own death in the final stages of the siege of Byzantium. Marinella is careful to exclude sexual desire as a driving force in the poem. Certainly, there are isolated incidents, such as Giacinto falling in love with Idalia and the spell created by Esone which transforms the walls of Byzantium into a licentious locus amoenus. However, the centre of the poem has been refocussed onto the war zone and the effects war has on individuals and civilian society in general. Such elements were left rather undeveloped in the Gerusalemme liberata where the war, quite surprisingly, does not represent the centre of the poem’s attention. In Tasso’s work the war does takes on dark colours but not to the degree that we find in L’Enrico where the siege takes its toll on Dandolo’s forces and the ‘military realism’ of Marinella’s poetry ensures a disturbing view of war, one which is not absolutely heroic or epic. It is not only pagan warriors who bear the brunt of death to give a sense of closure to the Christian victory; but Christian heroes such as Venier die in L’Enrico. There is no Tancredi nursed back to health. Indeed, the heroic ideal receives a serious jolt in Marinella’s epic. It is here that she differs most radically from Tasso. Marinella’s depiction of war is to say the least brutal. Heroism seems starkly at odds with the reality of war as shown in the poem: individual acts of daring, duels fought to the death, are overshadowed by the general chaos of the battlefield and the haphazard, uncontrolled loss of life. This vision is rendered to the reader from the first descriptions of battle in the poem: You can hear the haughty voices of the killers The groans, laments, shouts of the dying Horses neighing. You can see others falling in the midst of the dead still alive Another still in the saddle deprived of his head, in the end falling amongst the expired.38

This is just one of many such descriptions in the poem. The depiction of battle in such tellingly unheroic terms undermines the heroic virtues the poem’s ideology is meant to be celebrating. War may be fought in part by the eletti stuoli, but it does not produce the degree of glory and satisfaction its ideology suggests it should. Even the heroes’ aspirations are tinged with negatives: ‘They had a harsh desire for cruel 37 ‘E scintillò per gli occhi fuore/Gli onesti rai di consanguineo amore’: L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (Venice: Antonelli, 1844), VI. xv. ll. 7–8; p. 83. Compare Price, p. 238. 38 ‘S’odon de gli uccisor le voci altere,/E di chi spira i gemiti, i lamenti,/Gridi, annitrir cavalli, altri cadere/Si vedea vivo tra l’estinte genti./Privo altri de la testa rimanere/In sella assiso, al fin cader tra spenti’: L’Enrico, III. xxxv. ll. 1–6; p. 40.

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war’.39 Indeed, heroism is subdued in the poem to the extent that one of the Venetian soldiers attempting to scale the walls of Byzantium is killed by ‘friendly fire’, something completely unheard of in the Gerusalemme. Such an episode reinforces the view of L’Enrico as a reflection on the male glorification of war. Thus, the moment in which Dandolo’s forces are about to seize the besieged city becomes the stimulus for an anti-war discourse that undermines the prevalent ethos of gloria and the memorialization of ‘heroic’ deeds: What does it matter to Alberti if he receives Sought after praise in his excellent youth? Because from a friendly hand he gets a mighty blow.40

The intense realism of the episode is further enhanced by the attempted suicide of the perpetrator of the mistake who is prevented from so doing by his fellow soldiers. This singularly non-heroic image of war, perhaps in part due to the writer’s knowledge of the horrific siege of Mantua in 1630 — her Arcadia felice was dedicated to the Duchess of Mantua, Leonora de’ Medici Gonzaga — is constantly underlined for the reader by the depiction of the mechanics of battle. In particular, the semiotics of the dismembered body is everywhere in L’Enrico. Body parts litter the poem to emphasize the cost of heroic ideals in human, physical terms. War is seen as dehumanizing, as not respecting the integrity of the body. Descriptions of the flow of human blood are not uncommon in Tasso. However, he stops short of making more out of the physical brutality of war. Marinella makes the depersonalization of the body one of the lynchpins of her poem: A river of blood pours from atop the walls Down below to mother earth, making the ground red A horrid cloud of severed limbs descends Into the dark bosom of the deep ditch.41

A mother sees her son being brought home from the war: His hair dirty and congealed with blood An arm cut off and deprived of both feet.42

This example adds another element which forms a counterpoint to the destruction of the body. It is a dismemberment of a different kind — a breaking up of the social 39

‘Ch’avean di cruda gurerra aspro desio’: L’Enrico, II. lxxxiii. l. 2; p. 33.

40

‘A l’Alberti che giova se riceve/Bramata lode nel suo fiore egregio? Poichè da mano amica ha colpo greve’: L’Enrico, XXIII. lxxiii. ll. 3–5; p. 328. 41 ‘Piove da l’alta mura un fiume in grembo/ Di sangue a basso a far la terra rossa./Scende di tronche membra orrido nembo/ nel cuo sen de la profonda fossa/’: L’Enrico, XXIII. lxxxiv. ll. 1–4; p. 330. 42

‘Coi crin nel sangue congelati e sozzi/Reciso un braccio, ed ambo i piedi mozzi’: L’Enrico, XXV. xxvii. ll. 7–8; p. 351.

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fabric brought about by the impact of war. Marinella appears keen to introduce episodes which highlight the theme of separation for those going off to war and the permanent desolation as a result of that separation. Thus, mothers losing sons, wives husbands, the parting of lovers, are all used by the poet to underscore the ruptures and divisions caused by war. Emblematic of this type of separation and break down is the departure of Lucillo from Clelia in order to go off and fight in the war. In this episode, two ideologies come into conflict: male heroic virtues against domestic, family-centred values and conjugal love.43 The confrontation between these two sets of contrasting values and worldviews is extremely damaging of social cohesion: Thus, family affection urges him to stay. Thus, burning desire bids him leave Ambitious wishes overcome honour And the love of her who loves so much.44

The conclusion of the episode is rather melodramatic: Clelia dies over the body of her husband which has been washed up on the shore. However, the message is made clear. After Lucillo’s departure, Clelia reflects that: Never do men fully comprehend The laws that Love uses in his kingdom.45

The love that is being referred to here is married love, not a passion that rules out reason. The ironic reunion of the couple in death, from which neither can be prized apart, again underlines the central importance of love in human affairs. If their rejoining together is a miracle of love, as the text suggests, male values have contaminated that experience so that it is no longer a force for life. The union in death of the couple is perhaps a parody of the union of love in life. Lucillo and Clelia, then, signal the gradual and uneven dismemberment of the heroic ideology in the poem. Marinella rewrites Tasso’s poem and in so doing challenges some of its fundamental ideas, suggesting that it has been cut off from the integral body that was the Gerusalemme liberata. L’Enrico represents a bold foray into male territory by showing how women could talk about men’s business and, even more challengingly, how they could suggest modifications to male values. I 43

‘Onde desia lo stimolato seno/Da magnanimo ardir caldo e fervente/lasciar il padre e ‘l patrio almo terreno/Per portar guerra a la Romana gente./Nè de la sposa il dolce aere sereno/A vietarli l’andar punto è possente./ Nè i molli pianti de l’amato figlio/Benchè graditi, il fan mutar consiglio’: L’Enrico, IV. lxiii; p. 60. 44 ‘Quinci pio affetto a rimaner l’esorta,/Quindi al partir lo spingon voglie ardite/Ma più d’onor può ambiziosa brama/Che l’amor di colei, che cotant’ama’: L’Enrico, IV. lxxxv. ll. 5– 8; p. 64. 45

‘Ma non son mai da l’uomo intese a pieno/Le leggi ch’usa nel suo regno Amore’: L’Enrico, VI. xxx. ll. 5–6; p. 69.

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would, therefore, suggest that L’Enrico is a fundamental moment in the development of the epic, particularly as formulated by a woman writer. L’Enrico was the largest project undertaken by Marinella. Its long gestation, the commitment to the genre she shows in order to write such a lengthy epic, which had been the domain of male writers, demonstrate the importance it was meant to have in her canon. Yet, it does not signal a new direction for the writer — just the opposite. She returns to her own version of the Christian heroic, an implicit commentary on the heroic values of the poetic universe. Even more, her work undergoes a remarkable involution. If L’Enrico can be construed as a bid for literary success and fame on male terrain, then her last work, Essortationi alle donne, denies those values that had been central to her developing identity as a writer.46 This final literary labour is more than a mere reflection on the struggles of a woman writer in a man’s world, it is an acknowledgement of failure and despair. The Essortationi are haunted by one of Marinella’s earlier works. La nobiltà is explicitly mentioned on two occasions. The first reference is employed to demolish the foundations on which her earlier polemical defence rested. She refers to her argument in La nobiltà that men are the reason why women are locked up in their houses without contact to the outside world. In the Essortationi, retiratezza (seclusion) is considered a positive value: I also stated this in my book entitled The Nobility and Excellence of Women, but now considering the issue in a more mature fashion, I am of the view that it is not the result of conscious manipulation nor the action of an angry soul, but the will and providence of nature and God.47

The second reference is in the form of an indication to the reader (who is a female in the structure of the text) as a source of information on famous women.48 The Essortationi specifically urge women not to aspire to a literary career. The autobiographical underpinning of this palinode of an entire life devoted to literature cannot be doubted. The fact that it is a public declaration underlines the bitterness felt by the writer both personally and in more general terms (to prevent other women from falling into the same trap). Marinella polemicizes against the social pressures brought to bear on the aspiring woman writer. In spite of her satirical portrayal of male literary circles, she assumes the most conservative of stances, denying the validity of women’s efforts to enter this world. Her response is to urge a return to the 46 Essortationi alle donne et a gli altri se a loro saranno a grado di Lucretia Marinella: Parte prima (Venice: Per Francesco Valuasense, 1645). The other parts do not appear to have been published. 47

‘Questo anchor io dissi nel mio libro intitolato la Nobiltà et eccellenza delle donne, ma hora più maturamente considerando, mi sono avveduta non essere inventione nè attione di animo appassionato, ma volere e providenza della natura e di Dio’: Essortationi, p. 11. 48

Essortationi, pp. 53–54.

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traditional stereotype of women: spinning in the home is viewed as the quintessential feminine activity and literature as a suitable ‘profession’ is explicitly denigrated for women. What could have caused such a volte-face in Marinella’s view of women? We have already seen that La nobiltà held an ambiguous position in her canon. The great project of L’Enrico is not mentioned specifically in the Essortationi, although there are references to unspecified componimenti poetici it would not be difficult to hypothesize a negative reaction to the epic which broke the boundaries of female writing and challenged men to rethink genre as gendered choice. Her warning to other women about harbouring illusions of literary glory is based on the realities of male-dominated intellectual coteries.49 There is no indication that women are not capable of writing at least as well as men, but the system works against women achieving any success. The writer lays bare the strategies men use to neutralize the female writer: faint praise, open aggression and the like. She also notes the lack of support both from family and other women.50 Marinella points to the difficulties of obtaining patronage, which again hampers women trying to move into spaces outside the domestic. Society, it is implied, does everything to prevent women from achieving gloria, creating a psychological hammer which might crush a woman’s spirit. Marinella is particularly eloquent when she describes the effect of men’s comments on women’s writing as ‘not bad for a woman’.51 This is perhaps the first time in Italian literature that we have such an insider’s view of the effect of the litterati’s defence of their literary privileges: ‘You remain rather worried by such a judgement and deprived of that praise that you desire so much and that is your due, having raised yourself above the ordinary’.52 The Essortationi throw Marinella’s literary production into sharp perspective. They reveal the pain that a woman writer feels at attempting to enter the male bastion of culture. Although there is a residue of defiance combined with the possibility of unmasking male techniques of domination, in the end there is an ambiguous sense of defeat. The compromise solution of being both housewife and writer is raised defiantly only to be dismissed in favour of the traditional role.53 The text takes up an extreme position, casting doubt in any case on the value of learning 49

‘Ma però io le essorterò a fuggir questo stratiamento d’intelletto e attendere alla propria virtù per fuggir disgusti, travagli e afflittioni di animo’: Essortationi, p. 24. 50

Essortationi, p. 39.

51

‘Per donna può passare’: Essortationi , p. 27.

52

‘Da tal giuditio resti in parte travagliata e spogliata di quella laude che tanto brami e che a te si deve, havendoti innalzata sopra li termini ordinari’: Essortationi, p. 28. 53

‘Dicono molti esser cosa ardua e difficile applicarsi a due arti che ambe di tempo e d’intelletto bisognose sieno. Io dirò ch’è cosa facile servire a questa e a quella perchè il governo del tuo albergo sarà come un passatempo paragonato allo studio delle scienze’: Essortationi, p. 43.

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and literature, in order to lessen the disappointment. The desire for acceptance by the male intellectual élite leads to a situation which persuades the writer to take refuge in an alternative value system to which she attempts to lend prestige and intellectual pedigree. The Essortationi ironically highlight the courageous nature of some of Marinella’s choices. One can pinpoint two critical moments in her production. The first, the composition of La nobilità, made it clear that gender could not be separated from writing. Indeed, it was a central issue. Marinella tried to escape from La nobiltà for the rest of her career. She was intent on creating a name for herself as the author of hagiographic literature and of religious verses, perhaps in response to what the male public expected of a female writer. However, the composition of L’Enrico cannot simply be passed off as just another literary experiment. As the first woman to write an epic in the style of Tasso, she was demonstrating the possibility of women being able to ‘compete’ in all genres. She was disturbing received ideas of gender in literary form by writing a war poem in which death and mutilation are commonplace. Lucrezia Marinella was a courageous writer who confronted the male-controlled Academy, sought acceptance on its terms, but at the same time was not afraid to raise issues of gender and female oppression. The cost of being a woman writer in the seventeenth century is summarized in the Essortationi. It is in the light of this last work that we can only fully appreciate Marinella’s strength of will that enabled her to enter into the debate about women and their intellectual powers both theoretically and practically.

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Style and Substance in the Early Writings of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola W. G. CRAVEN

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he fifth centenary of the death of the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was commemorated in 1994 by an exhibition in Florence and an international congress in Mirandola. Pico had been the subject of an active and extensive scholarly literature over the previous sixty years, and the centenary observances and the publications issuing from them could be seen as an appropriate occasion to take note of recent work and to consider where significant advances might have been achieved.1 Pico has conventionally been taken as a symbol of his times and an embodiment of the interests and enthusiasms of the Italian Renaissance. In his short lifetime (1463–94) he produced a wide variety of writings. He composed a list of nine hundred propositions for debate and an oration that was to have opened the proceedings, then an apologia defending thirteen of the propositions which had been condemned by a papal commission. In the last five years of his life he wrote the Heptaplus, a seven-fold commentary on the first twenty-seven verses of Genesis, a 1

Pico, Poliziano e l’Umanesimo di fine Quattrocento, Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana 4 novembre–31 dicembre 1994, ed. by Paolo Viti, Studi Pichiani, 2 (Florence: Olschki, 1994); Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494–1994), ed. by Gian Carlo Garfagnini, Studi Pichiani, 5, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1997). For bibliographies of works on Pico, see Fernand Roulier, Jean Pic de la Mirandole (1463–1494), humaniste, philosophe et théologien (Geneva: Slatkine, 1989), pp. 19–36; Antonio Raspanti, Filosofia, teologia, religione: L’unità della visione in G. Pico della Mirandola (Palermo: Edi Oftes, 1991), pp. 323–27; Louis Valcke and Roland Gallibois, Le périple intellectuel de Jean Pic de la Mirandole (Sainte-Foy: Les presses de l’Université Laval-Sherbrooke, 1994), pp. 329–35.

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brief treatise on Being and the One, and an encyclopaedic polemic against astrology in twelve books. In addition he composed a short, early work on the Platonic doctrine of love, in the form of a commentary on a poem by his friend Girolamo Benivieni, poems in Latin and the vernacular, letters, commentaries on several psalms and brief spiritual writings. Centenary celebrations are not, perhaps, where one should expect to find the keenest edge of critical scholarship. Nevertheless, it is somewhat disappointing to note in the conference proceedings the resilience of traditional formulae and expectations, still accepted without question or comment. While several papers showed evidence of significant progress in particular areas, such as Pico’s knowledge and use of Kabbalistic sources, there were also numerous uncritical general statements about his doctrine of protean man and his pursuit of the single truth underlying all philosophies and faiths. The address by Charles Trinkaus was perhaps symptomatic of the occasion. Making no reference to his own earlier, more incisive views, he affirmed that the Heptaplus was a central work, one which revealed Pico’s vision of the universe and man within the parameters of his Christian faith, as well as his basic hypotheses and method. It exemplified his vision of concordia, and of the single truth that he believed had been disseminated by God in a great variety of philosophies. Trinkaus also emphasized the similarity and complementarity of the views of man in the Heptaplus and the Oratio. A quarter of a century earlier he had admitted that he found it difficult to regard the Heptaplus as ‘genuinely philosophical’, and had acknowledged the contrast between the dynamic view of man in the Oratio and the ‘surprisingly non-operative, extraordinarily passive, almost statuesque’ view in the Heptaplus.2 Rather than attempting to review the whole range of contributions, let alone the wider field of Pico scholarship, my intention in this paper is to examine the work of two scholars who participated in the centenary observances but whose approaches, I will suggest, do open the way to new understandings of Pico’s intellectual development. Louis Valcke delivered a paper at Mirandola in 1994, while Francesco Bausi contributed to the catalogue of the exhibition in Florence. Valcke’s interpretation of the course of Pico’s intellectual and philosophical development had been elaborated in a series of articles and in a long introductory essay which complements the French translations by Roland Gallibois of two of Pico’s works.3 2 Charles Trinkaus, ‘L’Heptaplus di Pico della Mirandola: Compendio tematico e concordanza del suo pensiero’, Convegno internazionale, I, 105–25 (esp. pp. 105, 116, 122); and ‘In Our Image and Likeness’: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1970), II, 519–20. 3

Louis Valcke, ‘Des Conclusiones aux Disputationes: Numérologie et mathematiques chez Jean Pic de la Mirandole’, Laval théologique et philosophique, 41 (1985), 43–56; and by the same author see: ‘Magie et miracle chez Jean Pic de la Mirandole’, in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler and Olga Zorzi Pugliese (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1986), pp. 155–73; ‘Entre raison et foi: Le Néoplatonisme de Pic de la Mirandole’,

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Bausi published a study of the language, style and sources used in Pico’s early works in 1996, and has since produced editions with exhaustive notes of two of Pico’s important early letters.4 Their interests converge on the question of Pico’s different stylistic registers and their possible significance for the interpretation of his works. Style and its significance was a subject of explicit interest to Giovanni Pico, and was the theme of one of his early letters. The variety of styles he employed is something that forces itself on the attention of readers. Most obvious is the contrast in style between the Conclusiones, the nine hundred propositions he proposed to defend in Rome in 1487, and the Oratio, the speech intended to introduce the disputation. In an introductory note to the Conclusiones Pico warned that they were written in the terse, unpolished style of the disputations conducted at the University of Paris, the style used by nearly all the philosophers of the time. The Oratio, in striking contrast, is an elaborate and florid rhetorical tour de force. I propose to show why I believe that the work of these two scholars is particularly valuable, but also to suggest that their approaches are complementary in quite specific ways. By examining their publications in detail, I hope to promote the kind of intensive scholarly interaction most likely to lead to fuller understanding. At the same time, the encounter between the two approaches may serve to exemplify a wider issue: the delicate interplay between style and substance in Renaissance texts, and the sensitivity required to recover their meanings.

Louis Valcke and the Significance of Neoplatonism At the heart of Valcke’s interpretation is his conviction that for a brief but significant period Pico’s thought was under the spell of Neoplatonism. He let himself succumb

Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 54 (1987), 186–237; ‘Humanisme et scolastique : Le “conflit des deux cultures” chez Jean Pic de la Mirandole’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 56 (1989), pp. 164–99; ‘Jean Pic et le retour au “style de Paris” : Portée d’une critique littéraire’, Rinascimento, 2 s. 32 (1992), 253–73; ‘Jean Pic de la Mirandole et le chant néoplatonicien’, Laval théologique et philosophique, 49 (1993), 487– 504; ‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e il ritorno ad Aristotele’, Convegno internazionale, I, 327–49. Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple. 4 Francesco Bausi, Nec rhetor neque philosophus: Fonti, lingua e stile nelle prime opere latine di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Studi Pichiani, 3 (Florence: Olschki, 1996), subsuming the author’s two earlier studies: ‘Il “dissidio” del Giovanni Pico tra umanesimo e filosofia (1484–1487)’, in Pico, Poliziano e l’Umanesimo di fine Quattrocento, ed. by Paulo Viti (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp, 31–58; and ‘Per Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Tre schede filologico-linguistiche’, Interpres, 14 (1994), 272–89. His works on Pico’s letters are: ‘L’epistola di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a Lorenzo de’Medici: Testo, traduzione e commento’, Interpres, 17 (1998), 7–57; Ermolao Barbaro and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Filosofia o eloquenza?, ed. by Francesco Bausi (Naples: Ligouri, 1998).

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to its fascination while living in Florence in 1486. It was not simply the diffused, domesticated Neoplatonism which had long since been absorbed into the scholastic tradition, nor was his enthusiasm due merely to the influence of Marsilio Ficino. The ideas he found so intoxicating came from his own direct knowledge of the Enneads of Plotinus. In the Oratio the precision of his quotations and allusions showed that he had assimilated the thought of Plotinus to the point where he adhered to it totally and had made it his own. He took up the idea of the cathartic function of philosophy, serving as the preamble for ‘holy theology’, purifying the soul for mystic union with God. Neoplatonic propositions occupied a crucial place in his lists of topics for disputation, located at the interface between familiar and esoteric material. Neoplatonism was undoubtedly the hidden bond which Pico claimed as existing between his propositions. His own Conclusiones paradoxae clearly showed the dominance of Plotinus, especially his defence of a higher knowledge which the soul attains preceding mystical ecstasy. His account of natural magic was also based on Plotinus. The Heptaplus, the seven-fold commentary on Genesis which he published in 1489, was still heavily dependent on Neoplatonic doctrines. It invoked as its basic framework the affinities between the worlds, the real foundation of analogical language and of that mystic participation which was presupposed by the vision of man the microcosm. Pico was, however, becoming increasingly uneasy about the incompatibilities between Neoplatonism and Christian theology, and De ente et uno marked the end of his fascination with it. His return to Aristotelianism was given unequivocal expression in the Disputationes, his attack on astrology. There he rejected the Orphic vision of the universe along with its magical and astrological concomitants. Whereas the monism of Plotinus had blurred or obliterated the distinction between the first cause and secondary causes, Pico now drew a clear line between what belonged directly to the first cause and what pertained to the order of secondary causes, whose autonomy, relative though it was, Pico vindicated. His intellectual development was characterized, therefore, not by one decisive turning point or conversion, but by two.5 The question of Pico’s different styles intersected with Valcke’s account of his intellectual development. One of Valcke’s articles discussed the disputes between exponents of humanism and scholasticism that constituted the background and context of Pico’s writing. In relation to this issue too Pico changed his alignment twice. In a letter to him, the humanist Ermolao Barbaro had written slightingly of the scholastic philosophers, those barbarous Germans and Teutons whose crude, unpolished style condemned them to oblivion or ignominy. He urged Pico not to waste his time and energy on them. Pico’s reply was, according to Valcke, a passionate speech in their defence, addressed, through Barbaro, to the whole 5

Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, pp. 52–53; Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, pp. 201–08, 221–23; ‘Numérologie et mathematiques’, pp. 50–56; ‘Le chant’, p. 502; ‘Il ritorno’, esp. pp. 340–49. I have adopted the convention of using the past tense when describing the views of other historians, and the present tense when proposing my own.

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humanist tradition. He affirmed that the only important consideration in philosophy was the quality of the thought, and that the philosopher’s approach was quite incompatible with that of the rhetorician. While Valcke acknowledged the use of the literary artifice of a fictional speaker, he interpreted the letter as an expression of Pico’s own convictions at the time. It was, furthermore, a blanket rejection of all the humanistic pursuits. Pico ridiculed their preoccupation with details of the myths of Niobe and Andromache, and concluded with an apparently frank expression of disgust with grammarians. He was silent about the prophetic role of poetic language, an idea with which he must have been familiar. His letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici, dated the previous year, seemed by implication to reduce poetry to a mere diversion. Valcke’s conclusion was that Pico was expressing a well-considered opinion, and was deliberately taking the side of the scholastic philosophers against the humanists.6 The Oratio represented a radically different position; so, paradoxically, did the Conclusiones. Pico the orator allowed himself liberties that as a philosopher he had denounced. Poets were treated as authorities, mythological figures were invested with profound significance, and the reasoning of the philosopher was subordinated to the intuition of the poet. In the Conclusiones, ostensibly so austere in style, Pico used the resources of scholasticism to exalt poetic theology and esoteric forms of knowledge. This reversal of alignment in the debate between humanism and scholasticism coincided with Pico’s conversion to Neoplatonism.7 Valcke used the expression ‘alternation of styles’ to describe the changes. In introducing the Conclusiones Pico noted that he had adopted the style of Paris disputants, the language used by nearly all philosophers of the time. Deliberately and with full awareness he decided to substitute scholastic for humanist style. There would be a later parallel in the dedicatory epistle for the De ente et uno, where he explained his choice of a simple style in terms of the need for clarity and precision. Pico alternated between what he himself called the splendour of Roman language and the plain style used by philosophers of his time. The alternation was further corroboration of the influence of Plotinus on him. Far from scorning rhetoric, Plotinus stated explicitly that a writer must change styles to match his purpose. The style appropriate for exposition was different from the style employed to persuade. The dominant influence of Plotinus at this period of Pico’s life largely explained why he indulged in classic oratorical style in the Oratio so soon after his virulent attack on all forms of rhetoric, and then changed back to the bare Paris style in his Conclusiones, Apologia and De ente. In those works he wanted to expound ideas with all possible clarity and rigour, whereas in the Oratio he wanted to win over his hearers.8

6

Valcke, ‘Humanisme’, pp. 164, 168–74, 179–80.

7

Valcke, ‘Humanisme’, pp. 181–82.

8

Valcke, ‘Humanisme’, pp. 187–89.

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Valcke reiterated the point and developed it further in a subsequent article. The letter to Barbaro had argued for a radical dichotomy between philosophical and rhetorical speech. That dividing line ran right through Pico’s work. All his properly doctrinal treatises were written in scholastic style, whereas his letters and the introductions to his treatises sparkled with stylistic brilliance. He often made explicit the transition from one style to the other. He practised a systematic alternation between styles. It did not match exactly the boundaries of his enthusiasm for Neoplatonism. He enlisted the plain Paris style in the service of Neoplatonic propositions in the Conclusiones, and the Heptaplus treated Neoplatonic themes in a sober style, closer to that of the Paris philosophers than to that of the humanists. On the other hand, the De ente, which announced the end of his Neoplatonic enthusiasm, was also written in the style of the philosophers. The same was true of the Disputationes, with its explicit rejection of correspondences and the whole Neoplatonic cosmology.9

Francesco Bausi: Philosophy and Eloquence The approach of Francesco Bausi has been in some respects complementary, although he has arrived at different conclusions. He set out explicitly to analyse Pico’s style, while immediately acknowledging that it could only be studied in relation to the development of his ideas. The great merit of his intensive analysis is that it demonstrates clearly the complexity of the texts and the dense web of references and assumptions that Pico shared with different groups of readers. His vocabulary, in the letters to Barbaro and to Lorenzo de’ Medici as well as in the Oratio, drew heavily on Silver Age authors such as Gellius, Pliny and Apuleius, and the reader was assumed to be thoroughly familiar with texts such as Cicero’s De oratore, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius and Seneca’s epistles. Bausi rejected Valcke’s theory of ‘alternation of styles’ as too schematic and too synchronic. Instead he proposed a development in style which paralleled the generally acknowledged evolution in the content and sources of Pico’s thought. Several historians had pointed out that Pico progressively abandoned esoteric branches of knowledge, such as prisca theologia, as well as magic and astrology.10 They had been characteristic of his thought up to the Roman incident of 1487, whereas by the Disputationes his attitude towards them had cooled to the point of hostility. His style, Bausi believed, could be shown to have followed a similar line of evolution, from the ornate, contrived style of the early letters to the stylistic severity of the Disputationes. 9

Valcke, ‘Le retour’, pp. 260–62, 264–72.

10

For example, Giovanni Di Napoli, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e la problematica dottrinale del suo tempo (Rome: Desclée, 1965), pp. 278–79.

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The two letters to Barbaro and to Lorenzo were written in an elaborate, Apuleian style, with a vocabulary drawn from Silver Age authors and a profusion of rhetorical figures. The texts in fact consisted of a mosaic of quotations and allusions. The style of the later writings was certainly different, but they could not simply be lumped together as exemplifying Pico’s ‘other’ style, his severe, philosophical style. The Heptaplus dispensed almost completely with poetic and literary references, and its quotations were overwhelmingly from Scripture. On the other hand, there were few technical scholastic terms, it avoided the stylistic characteristics of medieval Latin and it used expressions from Pico’s preferred Silver Age authors. The language of the De ente was more strongly technical in character, but had little in common with the Conclusiones and Apologia. Moreover, the passage in the dedicatory letter to Poliziano where Pico excused himself for a lack of elegance and for using terms which were not authentic Latin revived the ambiguity characteristic of the early letters. It echoed a well-known text of Manlius which had been used by Poliziano not long before. In terms of style, the De ente went further in the direction set by the Heptaplus. The Disputationes went further still, allowing no deviation from sober, abstract language other than rare invectives and a final exhortation.11 For Bausi, Pico’s position in his early letters was not a rejection of eloquence or humanistic studies but an oscillation between philosophy and eloquence. The sentiments of the fictional ‘barbarian’ philosopher could not be attributed to Pico. He denied that he agreed with them, and claimed to be acting like Glaucon, in Plato’s Republic, who spoke against justice only in order to provoke Socrates to speak in its defence. Furthermore, the speech itself was deliberately and flagrantly incongruous. The vocabulary was drawn from Silver Age authors, there were words and expressions from poetic usage, and a barrage of rhetorical figures. Pico deliberately laid himself open to Cicero’s paradox concerning Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias. In a well-known passage in De oratore, Cicero remarked that if the arguments of Socrates against oratory carried the day, it was because he was the better orator.12 In what must have been a conscious parallel, Pico composed a deliberately self-refuting speech, showing the necessity of eloquence even to reject eloquence. Barbaro and Poliziano were quite justified in taking up and exploiting the reference to De oratore in their responses. As if to increase the vulnerability of his fictional speaker, Pico misrepresented well-known texts, reversing their point, and signalling their source for good measure. Yet despite all the layers of paradox and ambiguity, at least part of the speaker’s case corresponded to Pico’s own convictions. His statement of exasperation, ‘Some grammarians make me sick’, occurred13 outside the rhetorical

11

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 187–90.

12

Cicero, De oratore, III.32.129; Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 18–19.

13

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 14–19, 30–35, 58–62; Commento, in De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, ed. by Eugenio Garin (Florence: Vallecchi, 1942), p. 548.

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framework of the letter, and the speaker’s earlier reference to true and false gold was repeated in another of Pico’s writings from the same period. From this vantage point, Bausi reassessed the letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici in which Pico compared Lorenzo’s poetry with that of Dante and Petrarch. The point of the letter was not much different from the arguments of the fictional ‘barbarian’ in the letter to Barbaro. Bausi made the point that the names of the two poets represented two ‘types’ rather than the two historical figures. Dante stood for content at the expense of style: his content was profound but his style was rough. Petrarch stood for the opposite. His content was trivial, though under an elegant exterior. Lorenzo miraculously combined wisdom and eloquence, and was therefore superior to both. Of the two types, however, Pico clearly preferred Dante, who was comparable with the ‘barbarous’ philosophers of the letter to Barbaro. (In the Heptaplus Moses would be identified as another such figure.) The terms of the comparison were taken from De oratore. Petrarch was made to exemplify the ‘Asian’ style, using excessive refinement to mask poverty of ideas. Lorenzo’s poetry was praised in the terms used by Cicero and Quintilian to characterize the ‘Attic’ style, distinguished by its sobriety. There was ambiguity here too, however. Pico praised Lorenzo’s Attic sobriety in the same contrived, far-fetched Apuleian style as he used in the letter to Barbaro. Ornate praise of Lorenzo’s stylistic restraint paralleled the incongruously rhetorical defence of the ‘barbarous’ style of the philosophers. The two letters, which Pico sent together to Beroaldo in 1491, could be considered as two panels of a diptych about the relationship between philosophy and eloquence.14 On the basis of his analysis of the letters, Bausi formulated a hypothesis. Their ambiguity was the expression of an ambivalence characteristic of Pico’s ‘first period’. He was devoting himself to a demanding programme of philosophical studies. At the same time, he was applying himself to humanistic and literary studies, composing Latin and vernacular poetry, and employing a prose style marked by extreme linguistic and stylistic refinement. The philosopher and the humanist coexisted in him, though not without discomfort. His undated letter to Poliziano, in which he described himself as trying to sit on two stools at once and missing both in the attempt, expressed the tension between the two. From the end of the 1480s, he made philosophy his definitive option. His increasingly severe style reflected this choice.15 From the perspective of Bausi’s evolutionary interpretation, the Conclusiones and Apologia constituted an anomaly. They did not fit into the line of evolutionary 14 Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 67–84. Pico sent the two letters together to Beroaldo, see Opera Omnia (Basel: Henricpetri, 1557), p. 347. More recently, Bausi has argued convincingly that the letter to Lorenzo was composed after, not before, the letter to Barbaro: ‘L’epistola’, pp. 14–21. 15

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 91–92.

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development. Their exceptional character could be explained, he believed, in terms of the particular circumstances and demands of the Roman disputation. The nature of the exercise required that the propositions be formulated in the Latin of university philosophers, and, equally, that the same style be used in defending them before the papal commission. The topics to be argued demanded a language and style that had been developed over centuries to treat just such material. Pico incorporated sections of the Oratio in the Apologia because his defence of disputation in general and of his own specific project was relevant, and because time was short. When he came to defend the theses singled out by the commission, he bridged the gap between rhetorical and scholastic styles not with an explanation or an apology, but with an insult, as if the change had been imposed on him by the linguistic deficiencies of the commission members. This kind of consideration might seem to have been leading back to something like Valcke’s theory of alternating styles. Certainly, every genre demanded particular stylistic characteristics, and Pico wrote in many different genres. Nevertheless, Bausi argued, the pattern of linear development was there to see.16 There was a comparable problem for Valcke’s interpretation. At what should have been the height of his Neoplatonic fervour, Pico was composing what was to become his Commento on the canzone of Girolamo Benivieni. Although in an earlier article Valcke insisted that it was a critique of Marsilio Ficino’s approach and methodology, not of Neoplatonism as such, he acknowledged that it did involve a rigorous analysis of fundamental concepts of Neoplatonism. Pico’s demand for rigour was reflected in his rejection of ‘facile concordism’ and his refusal to acquiesce in glossing over incompatibilities between philosophical ideas and Christian doctrine. It was this clear-sightedness which always prevented him from giving himself unreservedly to philosophy. Valcke regularly qualified his statements about Pico’s enthusiasm for Neoplatonism, acknowledging that there were always reservations.17 He saw this reserve reflected in the hypothetical character of several of the propositions. The primacy of Pico’s religious quest was one of Valcke’s themes, and the Commento showed his consciousness of fundamental incompatibilities between Christian faith and Neoplatonism.18 It would not only be presumptuous but premature as well to hazard a verdict between the two interpretations. Bausi has certainly demonstrated that there are far greater complexities in the texts than scholars had hitherto considered, and he has shown the intense scrutiny which is required before confident pronouncements can 16

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 195–98.

17

Valcke, ‘Il ritorno’, pp. 334 (‘Convinto, o quasi convinto’); and 340 (‘Quel fascino, però, non fu mai radicale e sotto un entusiasmo letterario apparentemente senza limiti, Pico nutriva le più serie riserve nei confronti del neoplatonismo’). See also Valcke, ‘Le chant’, pp. 491, 498; Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, pp. 142, 150. 18

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 198; Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, p. 144.

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be made. His work on the early letters sets a challenging standard for future scholarship. One would hope that the same kind of analysis would now be applied to the Heptaplus and the later, ‘minor’ works, especially the ascetical letters and the commentaries on the psalms. Valcke, in emphasizing the important place of Plotinus in Pico’s thinking in the 1480s, has cast welcome light on some of the more mysterious Conclusiones paradoxae, and on Pico’s attitude to magic. He has produced a plausible and satisfying theory to explain why Pico turned away from magic and astrology, making it an intellectual recognition rather than a religious or moral conversion. More generally, he has freed himself almost completely from the myths and stereotypes which have so persistently misdirected Pico scholarship. At the same time, however, he appears to have exaggerated the intensity of Pico’s commitment to Neoplatonism in the late 1480s, and in doing so to have created problems of inconsistency if not incoherence in the early writings. While his theory of ‘alternation of styles’ is vulnerable to Bausi’s objections, it has the virtue of highlighting the different genres and different intentions that characterize Pico’s works. As a contribution towards an assessment of the respective strengths of the two interpretations, it may be helpful to compare how each contributes to the understanding of Pico’s most famous work, the Oratio. Again, the views of each scholar will first be described and then assessed. Suggestions will also be offered as to how their divergences might be reconciled.

Continuity and Liberty: Valcke’s Interpretation of the ‘Oratio’ Valcke’s approach to the Oratio reveals a significant ambivalence. His position was that considering both Pico’s letter to Barbaro and his later practice, the Oratio stood apart. It was exceptional, even marginal. According to Valcke’s theory of the alternation of styles, it should not have been a doctrinal work. He affirmed that the fissure between philosophy and eloquence ran right through Pico’s output. All his properly doctrinal treatises were written in scholastic style. Valcke followed through the logic of his position, declaring that the Oratio was not properly doctrinal. It was not a treatise or an essay in conceptual elaboration. It was a preamble, giving scope for oratorical flights; it was a literary text, allowing him liberties which, as a scholastic philosopher, he had reproved. Its literary character meant that he could develop themes dear to him, without always having to employ the rigour and precision which philosophical discourse would have required. He did not try to provide justification or arguments in a strict sense. Valcke insisted that Pico was not abandoning the separation between philosophy and rhetoric. Even though Neoplatonic doctrine offered him the opportunity to integrate philosophy and

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eloquence, he did not take it up. In the Oratio he was aligning himself with humanist theses, and seemingly adopting a humanist point of view.19 Nevertheless, Valcke still wanted the content of the Oratio to be accorded recognition at a philosophical level. He wanted it to be acknowledged as something more than a rhetorical flight. In his view, it was significant evidence of Pico’s commitment to Neoplatonism. Twice, in one of his earlier writings and in his latest on the subject, he remarked that Pico was writing as a humanist, and humanists tended to identify rhetoric and philosophy.20 The implication seems to be that the Oratio was philosophy by humanist standards, even if not by those of philosophers. This would be a position not unlike the notorious doctrine of ‘Double Truth’. What might be more to the point is Valcke’s reflection that Pico was a philosopher not in the Aristotelian sense of a seeker after causes, but in the Plotinian sense of a seeker after salvation. This was certainly the kind of philosophy that Valcke found in the Oratio: philosophy as catharsis, an ascetical process purifying the soul and yielding knowledge that is a means to salvation in mystical union.21 Even at this first stage of his intellectual development, Valcke believed, Pico’s pursuit of knowledge was always a means, not an end in itself. His goal was spiritual salvation. At this time he believed that philosophy was the means by which he could attain it. It was a preparation, even if a necessary one, for ‘holy theology’. In the Oratio, moral philosophy, dialectic, and natural philosophy were presented as the stages of a catharsis leading to mystical union. In all these respects, he showed the imprint of the Enneads of Plotinus on his thinking. Plotinus had taught that philosophy was not to be pursued for its own sake, but as a means to salvation. It was an ascetical process that purified the soul, and the knowledge to which it gave access was a means towards mystical union. Valcke pointed out parallels in the Oratio. For example, there was the theme of flight from the world, the idea of mystical drunkenness, and the description of mystical absorption in God that is nevertheless not an annihilation of the soul’s identity. While conceding that Pico was drawing on recurrent themes of mystical literature, he insisted that the philosophical basis of that literature was in Neoplatonic doctrine. He also believed that Pico’s formulations were close enough to Plotinus to show that he had assimilated the doctrine from its source, to the point where at this time he adhered to it totally and had made it his own.22 19

Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, p. 86; Valcke, ‘Le retour’, pp. 264, 269; ‘Humanisme’, pp. 181, 183, 199. 20

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 201; Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, p. 86.

21

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, pp. 202–03.

22

‘Par la précision des reprises et des rappels de Plotin, Pic montre à sufficance qu’il a longuement fréquenté et qu’il a véritablement assimilé la pensée plotinienne, au point qu’à cette époque il y adhérait totalement et l’avait faite sienne’: Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 204; see also pp. 194, 202–04.

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Valcke found particular significance in Pico’s use of the symbol of Jacob’s Ladder. It was, he believed, the central symbol of the Oratio, giving unity and meaning to each of its developments. The ‘intermediaries’ of Plotinus had not succeeded in establishing a true continuity between the One and matter, because each hypostasis was homogeneous in itself and ontologically distinct from any other. Ficino, however, with his theory of primum in aliquo genere, did succeed in describing a continuity without hiatus. Pico interpreted the allegory of Jacob’s Ladder as a faithful depiction of that continuity: of procession from, and conversion to, the One, uniting our multiple, variable world to the immutable unity of its Principle. It was the unifying intuition of the Oratio.23 The other theme that Valcke chose to emphasize was the traditional one of human liberty. Under the hyperbole and the rhetorical layers the fundamental theme of the Oratio was undoubtedly human liberty, understood as liberty to reach out towards a salvation which is not of this world. It would constitute banalization to reduce it to the affirmation that man is free, for better or for worse, to choose his level of moral existence. To appreciate the significance of Pico’s ideas, it was only necessary to reread the first few pages of the text about man’s unique privilege. Taken literally, the words would even suggest that Pico placed a higher value on the freedom of choice than on the ultimate end whose attainment it allowed, an implication that he would certainly not have intended. The wording was an example of the greater freedom permitted in a literary work, as distinct from a philosophical treatise. Another traditional idea that Valcke defended was that the Oratio attributes to man a cosmic role or mission. In Pico’s story about the creation of man, God wanted someone to appreciate the plan of his work, to admire its beauty, and to wonder at its greatness. Moreover, the idea of man the microcosm, underlying the whole Oratio and expressing man’s cosmic participation, became the basis for human dignity.24 Valcke’s discussion of human liberty and the value Pico placed on it again brings out the ambivalence of his position. He wanted to find substantial philosophical content in a text which was admittedly not ‘properly’ doctrinal, the work of a philosopher who was writing as a humanist, not to be taken literally though certainly to be taken seriously. There is no question that Valcke has made a useful and enlightening contribution to the process of understanding the Oratio. He has drawn attention to the very particular regard in which Pico held Plotinus, and to ideas, themes and images that appear to derive from his reading of the Enneads. His treatment of the idea of philosophy as catharsis, or as a kind of asceticism, brings back into focus what is

23

Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, pp. 97–99. On Ficino, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. by V. Conant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943, repr. Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1964), pp. 135–58. 24

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, pp. 231–35; ‘Humanisme’, p. 194.

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certainly the main theme of the central core of the work. At the same time, it could be suggested that he has overstated his case. His analysis of the passage about Jacob’s Ladder is a good example. Valcke declared it the central, unifying symbol of the Oratio, and he emphasized its Neoplatonic credentials. Pico explicitly invokes the authority of Dionysius for his interpretation of the angelic orders and their functions. Valcke, however, saw the symbolism of the Ladder as being founded in the doctrine of Plotinus, further modified by Ficino.25 Pico first describes the figura of a ladder with many steps extending from the lowest earth to the highest heavens. The Lord is seated at the top, and angels engaged in contemplation are alternately ascending and descending. Pico has just exhorted his listeners to aspire to the angelic way of life, imitating in turn the Thrones, the Cherubim and the Seraphim. According to Dionysius the three ranks of angelic beings correspond to the ‘three ways’, and it is these three stages, of purification, illumination, and perfection, in which we are to be exercised. This same exhortation is then reiterated through a procession of figures, symbols and allegories. The meaning is first established with the authority of Saint Paul, as interpreted by Dionysius, then reinforced by Old Testament and gentile sources. The same threefold pattern is found in each case. In each case it yields the same message. Jacob’s Ladder is the first of the Old Testament references, and it presents an immediate challenge to Pico’s ingenuity. The Ladder has many rungs. How can it serve as a symbol for three stages? His third Old Testament symbol, the tabernacle of Moses, is more tractable: the three stages are outside the tabernacle, inside the Sanctuary and, finally, the inner part of the temple. Pico’s solution in the case of Jacob’s Ladder is to make the whole Ladder correspond to the second stage, with the ground as the first, and above the Ladder as the third. Valcke concentrated his attention on the Ladder and its rungs, which he saw as representing the unbroken continuity of procession and conversion between the world and its Principle. As Pico uses it, however, it could represent continuity only within the second stage. His scheme reproduces the three distinct ‘ways’ of the Pseudo-Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy, and the Ladder stands for only the second of those ways. Certainly the antecedents of the scheme were Neoplatonic, but what Pico is invoking is the domesticated Neoplatonism of the Christian mystical tradition rather than something drawn directly from Plotinus. At the same time, despite Valcke’s opinion to the contrary, it does appear to be closer to the doctrine of Plotinus, with his ontologically distinct hypostases, than it is to Ficino’s version, where differences were not of kind but only of degree.

25

Valcke, ‘Le chant’, pp. 491–92; Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, pp. 97–99. Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, pp. 114–16; ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, trans. by Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948), pp. 223–54 (pp. 229–30).

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Another idea to which Valcke attached crucial significance was the possibility of attaining the contemplation of God in this life. Pico was so drawn to Plotinus, Valcke believed, because there he found a method, an intellectual and ascetical technique for achieving this goal. The evidence is a sentence in the Oratio which takes the form of a rhetorical question: ‘Who would not desire [...] to become the guest of the gods while yet living on earth, and, made drunk by the nectar of eternity, to be endowed with the gifts of immortality though still a mortal being?’.26 Valcke interpreted these words as expressing the distinctively Plotinian promise that the soul, purified by an intellectual asceticism, could rise from the sensible to the intelligible and be united with its Principle.27 Again, however, this passage is only one in the series of descriptions of the highest, ‘theological’ stage, in this instance the first of the testimonies drawn from pagan sources. After the apostle Paul and the Old Testament references, Pico turns to the gentiles and the theology of the ancients. First the mysteries of the Greeks are invoked to show ‘the advantages for us and the dignity of these liberal arts about which I have come to dispute’. The degrees of initiation into the mysteries are again made to correspond to the three stages with their respective disciplines. The third stage affords ‘a vision of divine things by means of the light of theology’, and this is the prospect which prompts the rhapsodic rhetorical questions which follow. The passage does not occupy a climactic location in the text, as one might expect if it represented a claim or promise more specific or more significant than the other descriptions of the third stage. The imagery of pagan mythology is employed, so there is less reason to suppose that the prospect being held out is to be taken as a literal possibility in this life. Furthermore, there is specific evidence against a literal interpretation. As Valcke explicitly acknowledges, Pico flatly denies the possibility of attaining the highest state in this life in the Commento, the text he was composing at the same time as the Oratio.28

26

The full sentence reads: ‘Quis humana omnia posthabitens, fortunae contemnens bona, corporis negligens, deorum convivia adhuc degens in terris fieri non cupiat, et aeternitatis nectare madidus mortale animal immortalitatis munere donari?’: Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, p. 122; trans. by Forbes, p. 233. 27 Valcke, ‘Le chant’, pp. 494, 496, 502; see also ‘Raison et foi’, p. 194. The idea of being drunk on the nectar of the gods occurs in Plotinus, Enneads, VI.7.35; trans. by A. Hilary Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–), VII, (1988), 197. Valcke repeatedly draws a parallel with the youthful Augustine, who also found in Neoplatonism the hope of attaining beatitude in this life through the perfect knowledge of God: e.g., ‘Raison et foi’, p. 192. 28

‘Termina el suo cammino, nè gli è licito nel settimo, quasi sabbato del celeste amore, muoversi più oltre’: Commento, in De hominis dignitate, p. 569. The translation given above is from the Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, trans. by Sears Jayne (New York: Lang, 1984), p. 160. The conflict is acknowledged in Valcke, ‘Il ritorno’, p. 341; and Valcke and Gallibois, Le Périple, p. 146.

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Pico argues that progress through the first two stages is achieved through an ascetical programme consisting of philosophical disciplines. As Valcke noted, philosophy as purification or asceticism was a central theme in the doctrine of Plotinus. It is also a central theme, even the central theme, of the first part of the Oratio. For all that, the resemblance is not a close one. Plotinus deals at length with the theme in the third tractate of the first Ennead. There, however, he refers only to dialectic, even though he does so in a wide-ranging fashion, considering its essential role in other branches of philosophy.29 In Pico’s programme, moral philosophy and dialectic are proper to the first stage, while natural philosophy belongs to the second. In the case of Jacob’s Ladder, those who would climb it must be purified by moral philosophy and instructed in how to climb by dialectic before they may set foot on it. Once purified and instructed, they go up and down the rungs of the Ladder, which represents nature. Eventually they may hope for the consummation of theological bliss, in the bosom of the Father who is above the Ladder. Valcke believed that Pico’s characterization of this highest stage, mystic union, contained echoes of Plotinus. He spoke, in fact, of a ‘faithful paraphrase’. Again, however, the similarities are not as close as he seems to suggest. He referred specifically to the passage already examined, where the experience of epopteia is described as ‘being made drunk by the nectar of eternity’. The comparison with a drunken state occurs again in the next allegory, when Bacchus, as leader of the Muses, ‘will make us drunk with the abundance of the house of God’. Plotinus in the sixth Ennead compares the experience of union to being made drunk with nectar, and uses the analogy of entering the house of a god.30 Valcke also saw a similarity between Pico’s description of union, ‘We shall now be not ourselves, but Himself who made us’, and that of Plotinus, ‘There were not two, but the seer himself was one with the seen’.31 Similarities are there, understandably, but they are less than conclusive. One notable difference between the two descriptions of the highest state is that whereas for Plotinus there is ‘not even any reason or thought’, Pico’s highest state is somehow identified with ‘holy theology’.32 Just as philosophical disciplines are matched with the first two stages, theology characterizes the third, and the exercise 29

Enneads, I.3; trans. by Armstrong, I, 157–61.

30

‘Aeternitatis nectare madidus’: Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, p. 122; trans. by Forbes, pp. 233–34; Enneads, VI.7.35, trans. by Armstrong, VII, 195–97. 31

‘[...] iam non ipsi nos, sed ille erimus ipse qui fecit nos’. Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, p. 124; trans. by Forbes, p. 234; Enneads, VI.9.11; trans. by Armstrong, VII, 341. See also, however: ‘It comes to Intellect and accords itself to it, and by that accord is united to it without being destroyed, but both of them are one and also two’: Enneads IV.4.2; trans. by Armstrong, IV, 143. 32

Enneads, VI.9.11; trans. by Armstrong, VII, 341–43.

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of reason continues, however rapturous the union. In the sense in which Pico’s audience would have understood it, ‘theology’ meant the exercise of reason on the materials of biblical revelation.33 In the Oratio, theology is the culmination of a series, all three members of which demand the exercise of reason. One can only conclude that for all the ecstatic language of mystical union, what Pico is describing is something other than the experience Plotinus strove to elucidate. The Oratio, it must be said again, was intended to introduce a disputation to be conducted in the style of the University of Paris. The participants would have been professional, academic philosophers and theologians. The theses that Pico defended in the Apologia give us some idea of the severely rational style of discussion and argument. In one particularly interesting passage Valcke raised the question of whether Pico should really be called a philosopher, and concluded that he was a philosopher in the Plotinian sense rather than the Aristotelian or Thomistic sense of one who seeks causes and explanation. For Pico, philosophy was always a means to an end, and the end was salvation.34 Whatever may be said about his other works, however, the Conclusiones include a great many propositions which are philosophy in the scholastic sense, and others for which, even if their subject-matter is esoteric, the mode of discussion is scholastic. When Pico is defending his intention to debate so many theses, he says of the teaching of the Platonists, ‘Now for the first time, as far as I know, [...] it has after many centuries been brought by me to the test of public disputation’.35 Material both familiar and unfamiliar was being put into propositional form and subjected to the ordeal of disputation. Valcke saw it as using the weapons of scholasticism in the service of the Neoplatonic vision of the world. As Pico describes it, however, it is more a case of Neoplatonism and the esoteric doctrines being subjected to scholastic method and put through the scholastic sieve. When Pico spoke of ‘theology’ as the pursuit appropriate to the third and highest stage, the word would have conveyed to his hearers an activity with which they were professionally very familiar. The best evidence we have of how the disputation might have proceeded is Pico’s defence of his propositions in the Apologia. It is not the kind of activity associated with the attainment and enjoyment of mystical union. On the contrary, it seems barely compatible with any kind of mysticism. To associate scholastic theology and disputation with mystical heights was a paradoxical proposal. Interpreting the claim solemnly misses the point and blunts its rhetorical impact. Equally, scholastic philosophy, conducted in the manner of the disputants of Paris, was a very different pursuit from the philosophy of salvation 33

It is difficult to see any basis for the assertion of Raspanti that, unless specified as ‘Christian theology’, ‘theology’ in the Oratio meant all inquiry de rebus divinis, including the ancient Egyptians, Aristotle and Plato, and the Platonists (p. 186, n. 37). 34

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 202.

35

‘Sub disputandi examen est in publicum allata’: Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, p. 142; trans. by Forbes, p. 244.

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taught by Plotinus. The association becomes more understandable if we are prepared to consider that Pico might have been using the familiar Pseudo-Dionysian language of the three ways, Neoplatonic in origin, certainly, but familiar none the less to his hearers, to make extravagant claims for the practice of philosophy and theology.36 In itself, the Oratio does not provide persuasive evidence for a strictly Neoplatonic interpretation. Valcke has buttressed it, however, with evidence from other works from the same period in Pico’s life, notably the Conclusiones and the Apologia. He has singled out and analysed some distinctively Neoplatonic propositions, notably from the category identified as ‘paradoxical’ conclusions in accordance with Pico’s own opinion. They include propositions concerning a higher form of knowledge, non-Aristotelian in character, and how contradictories are resolved in intellectual nature and in the One. There are also propositions concerning Pythagorean numerology, one of them specifically criticizing Aristotle in a way which suggests that his doctrine was to be subordinated to Plato’s in Pico’s reconciliation of the two.37 Furthermore, there are the propositions concerning magic, along with Pico’s introduction to them in the Oratio and his defence of them in the Apologia. In Valcke’s judgement, Pico’s ideas about magic presupposed the cosmology of Plotinus and an Orphic vision of the universe.38 More generally, Valcke has argued that in each of the two series of propositions making up the Conclusiones, the strategic placement of the Neoplatonic propositions was of great significance. In both series, those according to the opinion of others and those according to his own opinion, they were placed to serve as the bridge or interface between conventional and esoteric philosophy. Each of the series was arranged so as to constitute an ordered progression, a scheme that was itself Neoplatonic in inspiration. The progression began with traditional and familiar sources and themes, then ascended through Arab philosophers and Greek Aristotelians to Neoplatonists. They were the gateway to the esoteric doctrines of Pythagoreanism, Orphism, Zoroastrianism, Hermetism and magic, culminating in Kabbalah. Each series reproduced the ascent of the soul, according to the doctrine of Plotinus, to union with the Principle, losing itself in ecstasy beyond comprehension. In this progressive 36

It must be acknowledged that Pico repeated these ideas in a very different (though still hortatory) context in his commentary on Psalm 17. There, the three ‘ways’ are enumerated, and the moral fruits of philosophy are emphasized, including those of natural philosophy, while theology impels and exhorts us ‘ut integram retineamus humanam dignitatem’. See Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence: Sansoni, 1961), p. 248. Garin saw it as another case where Pico reused material from the unpublished Oratio. See also Roulier, p. 446 and n. 83; Raspanti, pp. 244–45. 37 Conclusiones nongentae: Le novocento Tesi dell’anno 1486, ed. by Albano Biondi (Florence: Olschki, 1995), pp. 78, 80, 106; Valcke, ‘Numérologie et mathematiques’, pp. 45– 49; ‘Raison et foi’, p. 206; ‘Le chant’, pp. 493–95; ‘Il ritorno’, pp. 329–35. 38

Valcke, ‘Magie et miracle’, pp. 157–58; ‘Raison et foi’, pp. 210–11; ‘Il ritorno’, pp. 335–37.

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intellectual asceticism, Neoplatonic doctrines occupied the key position between natural human knowledge and hidden teachings.39 Again, however, the interpretation is questionable. We do not know whether the esoteric propositions, or how many of them, were part of the original scheme. Pico’s letter to Benivieni mentions that there had been seven hundred propositions before his friend’s visit. The letters of the previous months are brimming with enthusiasm for esoteric languages and knowledge.40 The impression from the letters is that these sources were at the forefront of his mind towards the end of 1486, and were most likely to have provided the additional theses. If this was the case, the plan of the two series of theses, those in accordance with the opinions of others and those in accordance with his own opinion, must have changed as further groups of theses were added. In the earlier version of the Oratio, he asserts the need to go back to the Hebrew, Chaldaic and Arabic sources from which the Latins derived their knowledge. When he lists the distinctive attributes of individual philosophers and schools, however, he mentions only scholastics, the Arabs, the Greek Aristotelians, and the Platonists.41 It seems quite possible that the two series of theses were arranged so that they began from the more familiar and proceeded to the less familiar, without any suggestion that they represented the Neoplatonic ascetical progression. Furthermore, there is no evident correlation between the arrangement of the series and the three-stage scheme of the Oratio. The theological propositions are the fourth group, while the magical conclusions, which Pico insists are part of natural philosophy, are the ninth of the eleven groups. Valcke’s theory is interesting but not conclusive. A more general issue that must be confronted is the status of these topics for disputation. Valcke mentioned the hypothetical character of several of the theses.42 For him it could have been a symptom of possible conflicts between philosophy and Christian doctrine. Some, certainly, are quite explicitly hypothetical, including several of those to which the commission objected. In a broader sense, however, they were all provisional, precisely because they were propositions for debate. In the Apologia, Pico appeals to the conventions followed at such occasions. Cryptic propositions, he protests, are customary in disputations. Setting up topics for debate is not the same thing as composing a treatise. The propositions are brief, ambiguous and bristling with difficulties. The ambiguities will be distinguished and the difficulties explained and resolved in the course of the exercise. As he says in the Oratio when introducing his Platonic theses, the doctrine is being brought to the test 39

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, pp. 204–08, 208–14; Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, pp. 71–

73. 40 See the letters to Ficino, 8 September, to Andrea Corneo, 15 October, and to an unknown friend, 10 November, in Opera omnia, pp. 367–68, 378, 385. 41

Garin, La cultura filosofica, pp. 238–39.

42

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 197.

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of public disputation.43 In this sense, all the theses had a provisional character, pending the outcome of the debate. Before attributing particular views to disputants, we need to keep in mind that public disputations were performances with conventions of their own. Valcke’s remark about the hypothetical character of some of the theses followed his consideration of what was to become the Commento. Without retracing the complex editorial history of this work,44 it should be remembered that at the time when he was compiling his topics for disputation and composing the Oratio, Pico was also writing the components of what was, in effect, an incisive critique of Marsilio Ficino’s interpretation of Platonic doctrine and of his philosophical method. In an early article, Valcke discussed the Commento briefly under the heading ‘Respect for the Integrity of Doctrines’. He insisted that it was not a critique of Neoplatonism as such. It showed that Pico clearly distinguished philosophical and theological orders, and that he rejected Ficino’s glossing over the doctrinal incompatibilities between Neoplatonism and Christian doctrine.45 His complaint was not that Ficino expounded Neoplatonic doctrine, but that he was insufficiently rigorous in doing so. In his more recent articles Valcke allowed that the Commento showed the beginnings of that critique of Neoplatonic doctrine which was to culminate in the De ente. In this latter work Pico argued, contrary to the Neoplatonic position, that Plato had not espoused the priority of the One over being in the Parmenides. It marked his return to Aristotle. In the Commento he had taken a more Aristotelian position on the way beauty is perceived, and, as noted earlier, he denied that the human soul can attain the contemplation of God in this life. Instead of drawing a veil over the differences between Neoplatonism and Christianity, as Ficino had done, Pico pointed out that on several essential questions the authentic Plotinian tradition was incompatible with Christianity.46 For one as committed to Christian religion as Pico was, a commitment on which Valcke has insisted, such incompatibilities must have imposed severe limitations on his adherence to Neoplatonism. The Commento is, therefore, a major stumbling block for Valcke’s interpretation. In the paper he delivered at Mirandola he did little more than restate the problem. Feverish exaltation supposedly masked Pico’s profound reservations and recurrent 43

Apologia, in Opera omnia, p. 148; Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, p. 143; trans. by Forbes, p. 244. 44 See the introduction by Sears Jayne to his English translation of the Commento, pp. 2–20. 45 Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, pp. 196–97, 199. Also: ‘C’est qu’en effet aucun texte de Pic antérieur au De ente ne contient de critique a l’égard de la doctrine de Plotin ou de néoplatonisme en general, bien au contraire’ (p. 223). 46

Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, pp. 147–48; Valcke, ‘Il ritorno’, p. 340 and ‘Le chant’, p. 497. See also Jayne, ‘Introduction’, pp. 30, 31, 39.

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doubts, yet it was in a mood of profound mistrust towards philosophical thought in general and Neoplatonism in particular that he wrote his Commento. But the ‘other’ Pico, the Pico of the Oratio, of the Florentine Academy, not yet distanced from Ficino, had hoped that the doctrine of Plotinus could bring about reconciliation between philosophy and theology, between revelation and reason.47 How did the two Picos coexist? How would he have been able to clear his mind and assume another outlook whenever he turned from one project to the other? Valcke even toyed repeatedly with the idea that Pico might have made use of the doctrine of ‘Double Truth’.48 The problem remains, nevertheless, that at the height of his supposed Neoplatonic fervour, he demonstrated a clear-headed awareness of the radical incompatibilities between Neoplatonism and Christianity. However much he may have admired Plotinus, he could not have been a committed disciple. There is enough evidence to call into question Valcke’s repeated assertion that at this stage of his intellectual development he was a committed adherent of the philosophy of Plotinus.49 If, on the other hand, the Oratio is not as distinctively Plotinian as Valcke argued, the problems diminish. If in fact its Neoplatonism belongs rather to that domesticated, assimilated variety from which Valcke wanted to set it apart,50 then it need no longer be seen as such an anomaly. It would no longer be necessary to regard it as exceptional or ‘marginal’. The impulse to classify it as in some sense a doctrinal treatise would abate, and the separation between philosophy and eloquence that Pico had proclaimed would not be infringed. The theory of alternation of styles could come into play quite naturally. The themes of the Oratio, especially philosophy as asceticism, would still be indebted to the Neoplatonic, and Platonic, tradition, but their presence would be for rhetorical impact rather than as a literal, programmatic statement. The other substantial doctrine that Valcke found in the Oratio was the one traditionally seen in its opening pages. Its fundamental theme, he believed, was human liberty. In this respect he did accept what I have characterized as the myths and stereotypes which have dominated so much scholarship about Pico. Valcke readily agreed that Pico had no intention of working out a metaphysic of liberty, and that any Promethean interpretation would be groundless. At the same time, he ridiculed the idea that the celebration of the range of human possibilities was simply the basis for a moral exhortation, where Pico exalted human liberty only to urge his listeners to strive for the heights. For Pico, he asserted, it was liberty that set 47

Valcke, ‘Il ritorno’, pp. 341, 346.

48

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, pp. 196–97; ‘Le chant’, p. 497 ; ‘Il ritorno’, p. 344; Valcke and Gallibois, Le périple, p. 148. The idea was originally suggested by Eugenio Garin in his Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Vita e dottrina (Florence: Le Monnier, 1937), p. 28. 49

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 204.

50

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 198.

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humankind in the centre of the cosmic ladder. For confirmation, it was enough to reread the opening pages of the Oratio.51 The lines about man’s ability to rise or to fall in his level of existence according to his free choice are, in fact, one of the places where Pico may have been echoing Plotinus. In the third Ennead Plotinus explained why we must strive for the heights: In man, however, the inferior parts are not dominant but they are also present; and in fact the better part does not always dominate; the other parts exist and have a certain place. [...] Therefore one must ‘escape’ to the upper world, that we may not sink to the level of sense-perception by pursuing the images of sense, or to the level of the growth-principle by following the urge for generation and the ‘gluttonous love of good eating’, but may rise to the intelligible and intellect and God. Those, then, who guarded the man in them, become men again. Those who lived by sense alone become animals [...]. But if they did not even live by sense along with their desires but coupled them with dullness of perception, they even turn into plants; for it was this, the growth-principle which worked in them, alone or predominantly, and they were taking care to turn themselves into trees. […] Who, then, becomes a spirit? He who was one here too. And who a god? Certainly he who was one here.52

It would be difficult to establish direct dependence, however, because the idea, already a commonplace in antiquity, had been taken up by so many Fathers of the Church and transmitted through them to the Middle Ages.53 While agreeing that there is no basis for the more extravagantly Promethean readings of the Oratio, Valcke sought to retain a cosmic function for man in Pico’s thought. He drew attention to the reason given for the creation of Adam in Pico’s story: that the Creator wanted someone ‘to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, to wonder at its vastness’. It was, as Valcke remarks, a cosmic role in complete accord with Christian and biblical doctrine.54 It is also the role of a contemplative observer, at the opposite pole to Eugenio Garin’s lord of the world of forms with power to hurl everything into the darkness of chaos or to transform and remake it.55 Another, more active role for man was in the exercise of magic, though Valcke was careful to point out that it was as minister of nature, not creator.56 He also perceived an essential cosmic function for man as microcosm in the Heptaplus, and went so far as to say that the concept of the microcosm, although a commonplace, underlay the whole Oratio, where it expressed man’s cosmic 51

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, pp. 231–33.

52

Enneads, III.4.2; trans. by Armstrong, have gone unremarked by Valcke. 53

III,

145–47. This particular resemblance seems to

See Henri de Lubac, Pic de la Mirandole (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1974), pp. 184–204.

54

Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, p. 104; trans. by Forbes, p. 225; Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 235. 55

Garin, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 2nd edn (Bari: Laterza, 1961), pp. 100, 156.

56

Valcke, ‘Raison et foi’, p. 236.

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participation, becoming the foundation of the dignitas hominis.57 This is a puzzling statement. The idea of man the microcosm is integral to the scheme of the Heptaplus, but Pico explicitly sets it aside at the beginning of the Oratio as insufficient for his purpose. One of the reasons traditionally given for the preeminence of human nature that he mentions specifically is that man is the bond tying the world together. This idea could be taken as equivalent to the microcosm. Pico says about it, and about others he mentions, that it is a weighty reason, but not the principal one.58 There is a significant tension between the idea of man free to choose his own nature and man whose nature collects and unites all the natures of the world. In the one case, man can become all natures; in the other, he is all natures. They are two different perspectives on human nature: a dynamic or diachronic view of man who is potentially all, and a static or synchronic view of man who is actually all.59 That man is a microcosm is certainly not the reason why he is a great miracle in the Oratio, even though that is precisely what it is in the Heptaplus. The difference reflects the contrasting themes and purposes of the two works. In the Heptaplus Pico uses the commonplace idea about man the microcosm so that what Moses said about man could be applied to the universe, and what he said about the universe would apply to man. In the Oratio he wants to dramatize the disparate possibilities open to man depending on his choices. In no sense is the microcosm the foundation of the dignitas hominis in the Oratio, nor even, more accurately, the reason why man is dignum admirationis, worthy of wonder.

Indeterminacy and Concord: Bausi on Ideas and Language in the ‘Oratio’ In Valcke’s view, there was a dramatic shift between the two early letters and the Oratio. Bausi, instead, found continuity. His scrutiny of the style of the three documents revealed that they were closely related. All three were characterized by an ornate style, a Silver Age Latinity with a particular affinity with Apuleius, a profusion of rhetorical figures, words and expressions from poetic usage and literary citations and allusions. The Oratio displayed these same attributes of Pico’s ‘first

57

Valcke, ‘Humanisme’, p. 194; Heptaplus, in De hominis dignitate, p. 192.

58

Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, p. 102. He invokes the idea of the microcosm later in the Oratio (p. 124) to validate his eccentric interpretation of ‘Know thyself’ as an exhortation to investigate nature. 59

Di Napoli noted the contrast: ‘Nella Oratio la peculiare grandezza dell’uomo è vista nella sua libertà, mentre nello Heptaplus essa è vista nella struttura dell’uomo come sintesi riassuntrice di tutti i momenti o stadi del creato’ (p. 375). See also De Lubac, who was convinced that Pico achieved a synthesis of the two, though how it was done remained unclear (p. 89).

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style’ as the letters, the only difference being that they were further accentuated. This stylistic continuity was reinforced by Bausi’s interpretation of the two letters. Pico’s own highly elaborate rhetorical style showed that he was not rejecting eloquence outright, while no disparagement of poetry was implied in his praise of Lorenzo’s ability to combine it with public life.60 It was not necessary, therefore, to propose a hypothetical conversion. From an examination of the earlier version of the Oratio discovered by Garin, Bausi proposed three phases of composition, involving prolonged editorial labour. The third phase included the addition of the whole second part, in which Pico defended his project of a public disputation against his critics. Bausi suggested that it was added when criticisms were voiced following the publication of the nine hundred Conclusiones in December 1486. He emphasized the contrast between the two parts of the final document, including stylistic changes. The second part would have been composed in a fairly short time, probably in the month between publication of the Conclusiones and the time when the Oratio might have been delivered. A sign of haste was the re-use of a page already composed for the Commento. The addition of the second part would have altered the literary coherence of the earlier text, with its tight organization and careful structure. Bausi drew attention to the articulation of the text, built on the number three, a number rich in symbolism.61 While the stylistic elegance of the Oratio had always been emphasized by scholars, it had led some to underestimate the philosophical value of the work. They saw it as a purely, or at least predominantly, literary, humanistic piece. It belonged to the genre of introductory discourses or academic ‘prolusions’, allowing Pico to present a less closely technical and more brilliantly poetic exposition of his thought. There were two key ideas in the Oratio: the indeterminacy of man, which was the basis of his uniqueness and privileged position within creation, and the concord of philosophies, or, better, the capacity of each one to reveal a different aspect of truth, contributing to more perfect knowledge. Bausi accepted these ideas from the existing literature without further demonstration or justification, although he added that the second, the concord of philosophies, was more strongly stated in the earlier version of the text.62 He then went on to develop what can only be described as a very 60

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 156–57. Valcke had found an implication that poetry was merely a diversion, and that the poet was not to be taken seriously: ‘Humanisme’, pp. 179–80 and n. 57. But Bausi disagreed (p. 69, n. 88, p. 81). 61

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 113–16. The concluding section of the Commento is repeated in the Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, pp. 156, 580–81; Commento, trans. by Jayne, pp. 169–70. 62

Nec rhetor, pp 155–56, 158–59. Bausi quoted Di Napoli (p. 400) on the indeterminatio of man; and for the concord of philosophies, see Garin, ‘Le interpretazioni del pensiero di Giovanni Pico’, in L’opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1965), I, 18. The idea was reiterated by Jeder Jacobelli, Pico della Mirandola, 3rd edn (Milan: Longanesi, 1986), ch. 13, ‘Alla ricerca della

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elegant theory about the correspondence between the two ideas and the language in which Pico proclaimed them. As has been noted, Bausi showed that the language of the Oratio shared its composite character with the two letters, including rare Silver Age words and poetic expressions. To these were now added a larger admixture of late, Christian and medieval components. The result was an extremely variegated language, a confluence of archaisms from Plautus and Christian medieval terms, poetic allusions and philosophical technicalities, Apuleian hapax and neologisms. This language, and the whole complex literary texture of the document, matched and mirrored the ideas Pico was presenting. Just as the language and expression of the letter to Barbaro communicated a message of its own, so here Pico’s language was chameleon-like and protean, in continuous transformation. The same adjectives which Pico used about the nature of man could be applied to the language in which he characterized it: indiscreta, desultoria, versipellis, se ipsum transformans; varied, manifold and inconstant, with no inborn image of its own but many assumed from outside itself. Furthermore, this language also reflected, embodied and represented the idea of the concord of philosophies and religions, cooperating in the quest for Truth. In pursuing that quest Pico invoked the most diverse authorities: Chaldeans and Greeks, Pythagorean and patristic sources, the prophets and Mohammed, Delphic sayings and medieval philosophers. The language mirrored this very diversity. Moreover, just as the concord of differing points of view consisted not in reducing them to a common denominator, but in a reciprocal integration, each retaining its own character like the pieces in a mosaic, so the language of the Oratio did not aspire to a fluid uniformity but flaunted its composite character.63 Bausi also found particular significance in the concepts of participation and analogy. Di Napoli had invoked them in explaining how Pico could marshal such an array of authorities. It was not simply a rhetorical association. Participation and analogy made it possible to express a concept under diverse figures and in diverse terms. On this point there was a convergence, noted by Bausi himself, with Valcke’s approach. The Heptaplus was to be the work most clearly inspired by the principles of analogy and participation, with man the microcosm as its pivotal idea. The work itself was also a microcosm, whose structure reflected that of creation. Bausi then concordia’, esp. pp. 128–32; and by Jacques Queron, Pic de la Mirandole (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1986), pp. 4, 50, 107–08. It was mentioned repeatedly at the Mirandola Convegno in 1994. See, for example: the introductory address by Ezio Raimondi (pp. xxxi, xxxiii); the papers by August Buck (pp. 10–12) Charles Trinkaus (pp. 106, 116), and Gian Carlo Garfagnini (p. 247); and the Conclusioni by Cesare Vasoli (pp. 650, 658, 663, 672). Fernand Roulier attempted to find a textual basis for the idea of the concord of all doctrines in his Jean Pic de la Mirandole, pp. 98–99. He claimed over a hundred instances of accorde. In contrast, the limited nature and extent of Pico’s comparisons was emphasized in W. G. Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Symbol of His Age (Geneva: Droz, 1981), pp. 94–107; and noted by Raspanti, p. 193. 63

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 159–61; n. 64 explores the parallel with Apuleius.

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transferred this idea back to the Oratio. As in the Heptaplus, there was correspondence between form and content. The language and style, and the fundamentally ternary conformation, corresponded to Pico’s conception of the world, of man and of knowledge. The work of the philosopher was of the same nature as the work of God, not by literary contrivance but by virtue of the analogical link between all the levels of the universe.64 Bausi’s theory is very appealing. He shows an impressive ability to draw themes together and connect them in satisfying patterns. He links his stylistic studies of the letters and the Oratio with ideas which have long been held to be the Oratio’s significant content, as well as finding close analogies between it and the Heptaplus. The whole pattern constitutes an impressive synthesis. It is unfortunate, however, that the scholarly tradition set up for him ideas which were so invitingly congruent with the characteristics he found in the language and style. In reality, neither the indeterminacy of man nor the concord of philosophies is incontestably central to the Oratio, and the apparent congruence may well be an illusion. On the other hand, the ternary configuration, on which Bausi touched only in passing, dominates that section of the Oratio that he identifies as the original text. The subject-matter of the repeated triadic figures is barely mentioned in his account. He considered it sufficient to quote Di Napoli, passing on without further comment to the next topic.65 The result is a serious dislocation of what is central to the Oratio. Di Napoli, in the passage quoted, recapitulated the three ascetical stages of Pseudo-Dionysius. He related them first to the passage about peace, then to the tabernacle of Moses and the Delphic oracles. He identified the triadic pattern, and the ascetical programme of philosophical disciplines and theology that constitutes its substance. The passage quoted gave no idea, however, of the rhetorical impact of the insistent repetition of that pattern, ten times in all, with its corresponding variations.66 The series begins by establishing the three stages with the authority of Saint Paul, as interpreted by Pseudo-Dionysius. The same three stages are then discovered in, or extracted from, three Old Testament figures (Jacob’s Ladder, Job as interpreted by Empedocles, and the tabernacle of Moses), and four examples from the theology of the ancients (the Greek Mysteries, Delphic precepts, Pythagoras and Zoroaster). The stages are then recapitulated in the personages of the archangels Raphael, Gabriel and Michael. This triad is the structural ‘message’ of the Oratio, and it is exactly congruent with the verbal message. Moral philosophy and dialectic, natural philosophy and finally theology are disciplines corresponding to the three stages of this ascent to the heights. The range of possibilities open to man, his ‘indeterminacy’, occupies only the opening pages. Its function is to launch the

64

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 161–63, and p. 158, n. 61; Valcke, ‘Le retour’, pp. 267–68.

65

Bausi, Nec rhetor, pp. 115–16; Di Napoli, p. 406.

66

Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, pp. 110–30; trans. by Forbes, pp. 227–37.

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rhetorical celebration of the programme by which man can achieve the highest of those possibilities. The idea of the concord of philosophies is another traditional one that appears to rest on a misunderstanding. In the second part of the Oratio, Pico defends his proposing so many topics for disputation. He affirms that he has resolved to pledge his allegiance to the doctrines of no man, but instead to range through all the masters of philosophy, to investigate all writings, to come to know every school. He does not claim that all of them are true, even in part. He does make the far more modest and quite plausible claim that there is in each school something distinctive that is not common to the others. He then goes through the litany of philosophers’ names and their distinctive attributes. He asserts that if any school attacks truer doctrines, it will serve only to strengthen truth. In other words, he is allowing for the possibility that not all will make a direct, positive contribution. His intention in bringing forward every sort of doctrine is to ensure that through the comparison of several sects and the discussion of many philosophies, the light of truth may dawn more brightly in our minds like the sun rising from the deep.67 What he is proposing is a bringingtogether and discussion, in the context of the public disputation. There is no theory of universal truth, nor even a programme for universal reconciliation. His emphasis is on the characteristics that are distinctive to each, not on what they might have in common. The only doctrines between which he promises to show concord are those of Plato and Aristotle, Thomas and Scotus, and Averroes and Avicenna. This promise was, one might think, a challenging enough task as it was. Bausi recognized analogy and participation as key concepts, especially the analogy between multiform human nature and the composite and multiple character of knowledge. It may be that he regarded the long series of parallels as a demonstration of that composite and multiple character, concordant by virtue of analogy and participation. It must be emphasized, however, that the series of authorities is used not to show some kind of concord of philosophies but to extract what was, precisely, a common denominator: three stages corresponding to purification, illumination and union. This is the hidden doctrine in which all his authorities agree. The common triadic pattern is then used to celebrate not a concord of philosophies or a mosaic of contributions to truth, but a programme of philosophical studies, culminating in theology. Pico’s extravagant encomium of philosophy and theology makes better sense when it is seen in terms of the occasion for which the Oratio was written. It belongs, as Bausi acknowledged, to the genre of academic ‘prolusions’, speeches delivered at the beginning of an academic year or to introduce a particular course. He did not, however, regard the genre and the occasion as a sufficient explanation for the style

67

‘Hac complurimum sectarum collatione ac multifariae discussione philosophiae’: Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, p. 142; trans. by Forbes, p. 244.

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Pico adopted.68 As an explanation, it would be scarcely distinguishable from Valcke’s ‘alternation of styles’, with the undesirable consequences of that theory which Bausi had already identified. What he objected to in the theory was that it was too mechanical and too synchronic. Certainly, the word ‘alternation’ would suggest that Pico had two styles, or two sets of styles, whereas Bausi has shown that his stylistic registers were both more complex and more varied. Nevertheless, the idea that Pico matched his style to each particular genre and work would not necessarily lead to a synchronic account. His style would have evolved along with his interests, as the kinds of subject-matter and the genres which he employed required a more restrained, more technical or more severe style. The genre and the occasion do help to explain much that would otherwise remain puzzling. Prolusions generally consisted of two parts, the first general and the second referring particularly to the course that was to follow.69 If the Oratio follows this pattern, it helps to explain not only the differences between the two parts but also the linkage between them. More importantly, it was customary in introductory speeches for the speaker to praise the discipline that was about to be exercised. It would not be surprising, then, that the first part of the Oratio should be devoted to exalting the disciplines of philosophy and theology, the disciplines Pico was about to exercise in his disputation. Recognizing that the main theme of the Oratio is the praise of philosophy also makes it possible to locate it in another perspective. Bausi convincingly delineated a first phase or period of Pico’s intellectual development, during which he devoted himself both to philosophy and to humanistic and literary pursuits. Philosopher and humanist, rhetor and poet coexisted in him. Bausi saw the two allegiances as alternating in a sometimes surprising and, so to speak, schizophrenic fashion.70 It was not a comfortable situation, and Pico expressed his unease in an undated letter to Poliziano. It was from this letter that Bausi took the title of his study, Nec rhetor neque philosophus. In the letter Pico complains that neither poets nor philosophers accept him as one of themselves. He refers to Poliziano’s artifice of excusing himself as a Latinist among Greek scholars and as a student of Greek among Latinists. Pico says that he attempts a similar manoeuvre, but whereas Poliziano succeeds in carrying it off, Pico does not. I employ a similar subterfuge, using my reputation for philosophizing to excuse myself among poets and rhetoricians, and among philosophers, the fact that I indulge in rhetoric and cultivate the Muses. The result, however, is far different in my case.

68

Bausi, Nec rhetor, p. 156.

69

Kristeller in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, p. 217.

70

Bausi, Nec rhetor, p. 91.

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While, as they say, I am trying to sit on two stools at once, I miss both of them, and so it is that I am neither poet nor orator, nor yet a philosopher.71

In this letter Pico expresses the frustration he feels as a consequence of trying to keep a foot in both camps. According to Bausi, the letters to Lorenzo and Barbaro and the Oratio all belonged to this first phase of Pico’s cultural development, and the tension was not resolved until the end of the 1480s, after the Roman incident. There is an alternative hypothesis, however. Garin proposed 1483 as the date of the letter to Poliziano.72 On the supposition that Pico resolved his dilemma shortly afterwards by making a definite choice, the letters and the Oratio can be read as announcing that choice. They are testimony to his chosen identity as a philosopher. Bausi has convincingly shown that the distinction between matter and form, substance and style, is pivotal to Pico’s first two letters. Ambiguous as they are, both of them raise this issue. Once the distinction was made, however, and a choice between the two was required, substance had to take priority: Dante over Petrarch, Scotus over Lucretius. In an aside in the letter to Lorenzo, Pico is careful to make his own position clear. He reads Lorenzo’s verses not so much for pleasure as for the philosophy they contain. He goes to some lengths to show how much philosophy he had found in them.73 Whereas his letters of 1482 and 1483 had contained a number of references to verses of his own and to common literary interests, the references in his later letters are quite dismissive. In a letter to Filippo Beroaldo, apparently written in 1485, he is offhanded about his verses. Beroaldo had referred to him as ‘humanitatis professor’. He should bear in mind, however, as he reads the verses, that they are the products of Pico’s few lighter moments. The philosophers are his primary concern. ‘May I make as much progress with them’, Pico says rather primly, ‘as you among the orators and poets’.74 Pico did not abandon poetry, any more than he abandoned rhetoric, but his priorities were now clearly established and firmly stated. Whatever he did in his moments of leisure, he was a philosopher first of all. On his way to Rome in 1486, Pico wrote to Andrea Corneo. It appears that Corneo had issued what amounted to a literary challenge, analogous to the one Barbaro had issued the previous year. This time the challenge was not about style and substance in philosophy but about the subsidiary theme of the letter to Lorenzo: 71

Opera omnia, p. 364.

72

Garin, La cultura filosofica, p. 258.

73

‘Non tam ad delectationem quam ad doctrinam’: Opera omnia, p. 350; ed. by Bausi, p. 30 and n. 50. 74

‘Tu haec ita leges, ut memineris in humanioribus his studiis me tumultuaria cura, et subcisivis esse temporibus, ut qui philosophis operam primariam, et ut ita dicar, seriosas addiderim lucernas. Apud quos ut id profecerim quod tu apud rhetores et poetas’: Opera omnia, p. 447. For the date, see Garin, La cultura filosofica, p. 260. Beroaldo’s letter to Pico, Opera omnia, pp. 361–63.

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the active and contemplative life. Corneo had exhorted him to leave his chosen seclusion and his life of study to play an active part in public life as counsellor to one of Italy’s great princes. He must have expected to provoke a defence of the contemplative life, and he did so. Pico rejects the suggestion indignantly. He extols the dedicated and disinterested pursuit of wisdom, the self-sufficiency of the philosopher and the values that underpin the philosopher’s way of life.75 He takes the opportunity to portray himself as a philosopher in terms recognized in antiquity: withdrawal from ordinary life, independence of the demands and the accepted standards of civil society, dedication to the pursuit of wisdom without thought for mere utility, reward or recognition. This letter has much in common with the lament over the state of contemporary philosophy that Pico inserted in the Oratio at about the same time. There he decries the low esteem in which philosophy is held and the mercenary motives of those who claim the title of philosophers. He contrasts their self-interest with his own disinterestedness and dedication, and his refusal to be deterred by the slurs of those who are personally ill-disposed towards him or who are enemies of wisdom.76 These letters provide an illuminating perspective on the Oratio. For three years he had been working to establish his identity as a philosopher. Abandoning his frustrating attempt to be both a humanist and a philosopher, he chose to be known as a philosopher, and set about making his preference known. The proposed public disputation in Rome, with participants from the universities of Italy, would be the culmination. It would establish that he was to be taken seriously as a philosopher. By convention, the first part of the prolusion that was to introduce his disputation provided an opportunity to extol his chosen discipline. He took the opportunity with enthusiasm, setting out to persuade his listeners that it was through philosophy that human beings could attain the dizzying heights of which they were capable. It would lead them through the stages of purification and illumination to the ultimate contemplative union in theological bliss. He revived the idea of philosophy as an asceticism, an idea proposed by Plotinus and by Plato before him, and applied it to the kind of philosophy he was about to debate. Valcke believed that in the Conclusiones Pico used the resources of scholasticism in the service of an essentially poetic, Orphic vision. What is clearer is that in the Oratio he used the resources provided by his humanistic education in the service of the rival educational programme, philosophy. In the letter to Barbaro, one of his more outrageous tricks had been to appropriate an incident recounted by Aulus Gellius and turn it from criticism of philosophers into praise for them at the expense of grammarians. Now he is asserting that philosophy, conducted according to the methods of the scholastics, could lead men to the highest destiny of which they were capable. Since Petrarch, humanists had been complaining, as did the grammarian in 75

Opera omnia, pp. 376–79.

76

Oratio, in De hominis dignitate, pp. 130–32; trans. by Forbes, pp. 237–38.

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Noctes Atticae, that academic philosophy was remote from human, moral concerns, wasting time on obscure questions and futile intellectual exercises, while humanistic studies dealt with human, moral concerns. Now Pico was reasserting the claim of philosophy to guide men to their highest goal. Moral philosophy and dialectic purified them, natural philosophy illuminated them, and theology brought them to perfection and mystical union with God. As has been suggested earlier in this paper, these exalted claims need to be put in perspective. Inaugural orations were occasions for grandiloquence and exaggeration. The kind of philosophy encapsulated in many of Pico’s topics for disputation was known neither as uplifting nor as pacifying. Its irrelevance to human interests and concerns is exemplified in several of Pico’s condemned theses discussed in the Apologia. Its capacity to arouse enmity rather than to pacify was demonstrated by the hostile reactions his theses aroused. The whole method of disputation was adversarial. Pico’s assertions in the Oratio were, if not outrageous, then at least paradoxical.

Complementary Approaches? The researches of Valcke and Bausi have, in different ways, contributed significantly to the understanding of Pico’s writings. Each body of work deserves careful consideration in its own right. Furthermore, their approaches can be seen as complementary. Even if, as I have argued, Pico did not embrace Plotinian Neoplatonism with the commitment Valcke attributed to him, and even if the Oratio is not a radically Neoplatonic manifesto, there remain issues concerning the paradoxical, mathematical and magical Conclusiones to which Valcke has rightly drawn attention. He has brought to light a whole series of fault lines and shifts in Pico’s philosophical development. As a result of his work, it will be less defensible than ever to present Pico’s thought schematically or synchronically. Within the early years, encompassing what Valcke saw as the period of his Neoplatonic fervour, there are bewildering crosscurrents. There is his ambivalent, even paradoxical stance with regard to humanistic rhetoric; there are propositions for debate that seem to presuppose the metaphysics of Plotinus, despite the contemporaneous warnings in the Commento about the incompatibility between Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine. By Valcke’s account, Pico’s early development was riven by inconsistencies, conversions and alternation of styles. Even if his diagnosis of extreme Neoplatonism was an exaggeration, the inconsistencies demand some explanation. It is at this point that Bausi’s approach may prove particularly helpful. His sensitivity to the pitch and tone of particular texts, based on meticulous analysis of their style and textual allusions, reminds scholars that it is no easy matter to discern the focus or the level of an author’s commitment, or the point of a literary or philosophical performance. Bausi demonstrates how essential it is to remain

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constantly alert to the conventions of different genres, conventions on which a writer may very well play. He reconstructs, with the delicacy of a textual archaeologist, the complex tissue of cultural assumptions that Pico shared with his readers. One consequence of his analysis has been the revelation of Pico’s playfulness in the early letters, a playfulness that extends, I believe, through the first part of the Oratio. In analogous ways, scholars need to deepen their awareness of the kinds of easily missed assumptions and undercurrents in the later works. Each of Pico’s disparate works needs to be subjected to its own distinctive kind of stylistic analysis. Only on this basis can investigations of the substance of these works proceed with any security. In this endeavour, the complementary approaches of Valcke and Bausi have much to offer. Both deserve the tribute of an attentive and critical reading.

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An Insatiable Appetite for News: Isabella d’Este and a Bolognese Correspondent CAROLYN JAMES

W

hen Isabella d’Este arrived in Mantua in 1490 as the sixteen-year-old bride of Francesco Gonzaga, she began, almost immediately, to cultivate a network of correspondents. She was prompted to do so not only by nostalgia for the Ferrarese court, and her perception that Mantua was too isolated, but also by the desire to enlist the help of her own clients in an ambitious struggle to achieve the sort of political influence and cultural prominence usually denied to her sex. Isabella’s correspondence with those long-suffering agents whom she commissioned to seek out the finest musical instruments and latest literary publications, and to haggle for antiques and gems on her behalf, is well known.1

This essay further develops, and in several places borrows from, the discussion of Arienti’s correspondence with Isabella d’Este in Chapter 4 of my edition of his surviving correspondence. See Carolyn James, The Letters of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (1481– 1510) (Florence: Olschki, 2002). I would like to acknowledge here my debt to the late Ian Robertson, who co-supervised my doctoral thesis, and whose book, Tyranny under the Mantle of St Peter: Pope Paul II and Bologna (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), provides the essential political context for my own work on fifteenth-century Bolognese society. 1

For some recent contributions to the literature concerning Isabella d’Este’s art collecting and patronage see Clifford M. Brown, Per dare qualche splendore a la gloriosa cità di Mantua: Documents for the Antiquarian Collection of Isabella d’Este (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002); Isabella d’Este: La prima donna del mondo, ed. by Daniele Bini (Modena: il Bulino, 2001); Rose Marie San Juan, ‘The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance’, Oxford Art Journal, 14 (1991), 67–78. For Isabella’s interest in and patronage of music at Mantua see Iain Fenlon, ‘Music and Learning in Isabella d’Este’s Studioli’, in La Corte di Mantova nell’età di Andrea Mantegna: 1450–1550, ed. by Cesare Mozzarelli and others (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997).

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However, a great many of the surviving letters to her are concerned not with art or culture but with the news and political information that she was as keen to know about as she was to pursue rare objects. Even as a very young woman Isabella was acutely aware that a detailed knowledge of the political scene was essential to establishing, extending and retaining power. To have independent sources of news was important, not only because Isabella’s access to diplomatic and other official correspondence was dependent on her husband’s willingness to share with her these sources of information, but also because news which came from her own trusted clients could offer quite different insights and perspectives to those provided by professional diplomats. Such snippets could prove very valuable indeed. To be in possession of the latest news or unique political intelligence gave Isabella significant tactical advantage and allowed her to create an image of herself as an astute political strategist. She indubitably contributed to the stability and even survival of the Mantuan state in a time which saw the demise of many of the small princely regimes of early modern Italy. Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti was an early recruit to the group of correspondents whom Isabella liked to regard as her particular clients. He had stimulated Isabella’s interest in him by sending her, in June 1492, a manuscript of his newly completed literary work, the Gynevera de le clare donne, a vernacular reworking of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and one of the earliest examples of a genre which was to become increasingly popular in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.2 Unlike two earlier collections of female biographies, Antonio Cornazzano’s De mulieribus admirandis of 1467, dedicated to Bianca Maria Visconti, and Bartolomeo Goggio’s De laudibus mulierum of 1487, presented to Eleonora d’Aragona, Arienti’s work neither engaged directly in polemical fashion with the question of the equality or superiority of women nor

2 Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, Gynevera de le clare donne, ed. by Corrado Ricci and Alberto Bacchi della Lega, Scelta di Curiosità Letterarie Inedite o Rare dal secolo XIII al XIX, 223 (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1887; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1968). For Arienti’s career and the circumstances which prompted the writing of the Gynevera de le clare donne see Carolyn James, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti: A Literary Career (Florence: Olschki, 1996), and also Stephen D. Kolsky, ‘Men Framing Women: Sabadino degli’s Arienti’s Gynevera de le clare donne Reexamined’, in Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture, ed. by Mirna Cicioni and Nicole Prunster (Providence and Oxford: Bery, 1993), pp. 27–40; and ‘Bending the Rules: Marriage in Renaissance Collections of Biographies of Famous Women’, in Marriage in Italy 1300–1650, ed. by Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 227–48. On the genre which traced its origins to Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, see Stephen D. Kolsky, The Genealogy of Women, Studies in Boccaccio’s ‘De mulieribus claris’ (New York: Lang, 2003); and Pamela J. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).

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tried to lay the theoretical framework associated with later examples of the genre.3 Its originality lay in the replacement of Boccaccio’s famous women with biographies from Arienti’s own social context and a near contemporary period. The work reflected his private and public experience of female qualities and his readiness to recognize intelligence and the considerable social and political contribution of the aristocratic women with whom he associated as secretary to Andrea Bentivoglio. Until his death in 1491, Andrea, a member of the Bolognese ruling oligarchy headed by his distant cousin, Giovanni II Bentivoglio, had been an important, if increasingly sidelined, political figure, and Arienti was in an excellent position to observe intimately the lives of the Bentivoglio women and of their female relatives and friends in nearby northern Italian courts. This informal knowledge, supplemented by assiduous research, allowed Arienti to write biographical portraits which captured the hard-working versatility, intelligence and political acumen of aristocratic women who were expected not only to guarantee the smooth running of their own households, but to attend to a wide range of duties connected to their husbands’ political careers.4 It would seem that Isabella immediately perceived the value of Arienti’s attempt in the Gynevera to broaden the traditional definition of female virtue to include those qualities actually required by women such as her maternal grandmother and namesake, Isabella di Chiaramonte, whom Arienti included among his illustrious women and praised not only for her traditionally female qualities but also for her ability to govern well and to preserve justice and peace within the state. That Isabella was susceptible to the literary advances of someone clearly sympathetic to her own political and cultural ambitions is suggested by her later employment of Mario Equicola as her personal tutor and secretary partly on the basis of a quite radical literary work which also belonged to the ‘defence of women’ genre begun by Boccaccio. Equicola’s De mulieribus, written in Latin and published in 1501, argued for the equality of the sexes and suggested that female subjection was deliberately maintained by society through upbringing and custom.5 Unlike Equicola, who quickly perceived the potential of allying himself completely with an aristocratic female patron, Arienti initially saw Isabella as a 3

Conor F. Fahy, ‘The De mulieribus admirandis of Antonio Cornazzano’, La Bibliofilia, 62 (1960), 144–74. On Goggio’s treatise see Conor F. Fahy, ‘Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women’, Italian Studies, 11 (1956), 30–55, and Werner L. Gundersheimer, ‘Bartolommeo Goggio: A Feminist in Renaissance Ferrara’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 175–200. 4

James, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, pp. 69–84.

5

De Mulieribus Delle Donne, ed. by Giuseppe Lucchesini and Pina Totaro (Pisa: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2004). On the commissioning of the De mulieribus by Isabella d’Este’s friend, Margherita Cantelmo, and the alliance between Mario Equicola and Isabella, see Stephen D. Kolsky, Mario Equicola: The Real Courtier (Geneva: Droz, 1991), pp. 67–77, 86–88, 103–17.

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stepping-stone to her husband or, rather, he was concerned to win favour from both husband and wife. In the Gynevera, the fortunate princely state is one where a husband and wife rule cooperatively; the prince, recognizing the talents and administrative contribution of his wife, regularly consults her while she, in turn, an obedient facilitator, ably assumes the reins of power when required. Although the political partnership of Francesco Gonzaga and Isabella did reflect, at least from the outside, just this sort of cooperation, what Isabella required of her clients and servants was complete loyalty to her.6 She responded warmly to Arienti’s presentation of the Gynevera, promising that she ‘would read it attentively and strive to follow the examples of those illustrious ladies’.7 She seems, however, to have neglected to recommend the author to her husband, as he had requested, since evidence of Arienti’s correspondence with Francesco only exists from August of the following year and he received little encouragement from that quarter.8 Much of Isabella’s time and energy in the decade after 1492 was taken up with the traditional requirements of the wife of a courtly ruler. Although she did not produce children with the prodigious regularity of her mother, Eleonora d’Aragona, Isabella had provided the required male heir by 1500.9 She displayed an equally dutiful approach to other aspects of dynastic reinforcement, undertaking between 1492 and 1494 a number of diplomatic missions to neighbouring states, consolidating excellent relations with her brother-in-law, Lodovico il Moro, and cooperating closely with her husband in a delicate and high-risk diplomatic balancing act which juggled allegiance to Venice, Milan, and eventually France. She also shared the administrative burden, answering dozens of written requests for intervention in domestic or financial disputes and helping to ensure the smooth functioning of the state bureaucracy. Arienti’s correspondence with Isabella in this 6

For a discussion of the co-existence of both rivalry and cooperation in Isabella’s and Francesco’s cultural patronage, see Molly H. Bourne, ‘Renaissance Husbands and Wives as Patrons of Art: The Camerini of Isabella d’Este and Francesco II Gonzaga’, in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), pp. 93–123. 7

‘Legeremola cum attenzione et sforzaremose imitare le vestigie di quelle illustre matrone’. For Isabella’s letter of thanks, see James, Letters, p. 126, n. 4; for Arienti’s letter of 29 June 1492 which accompanied the manuscript of the Gynevera, see pp. 125–26. 8

The recent publication of Floriano Dolfo’s letters to Francesco Gonzaga provides abundant evidence that the Marquis appreciated the Bolognese canon lawyer’s blend of coarse humour, daringly irreverent homilies and titbits of news and gossip. Dolfo’s epistolary success might suggest why Arienti failed to convince Francesco of his potential as a literary client or news correspondent. See Floriano Dolfi, Lettere ai Gonzaga, ed. by Marzia Minutelli (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002). 9 On Eleonora, see Werner L. Gundersheimer, ‘Women Learning and Power: Eleonora of Aragon and the Court of Ferrara’, in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. by Patricia Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), p. 48.

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period was sporadic and indicative of little more than the usual courtly attempt to remind her of his existence. To what extent Isabella chafed under the restrictions on her ability to make independent political or administrative decisions during her first decade in Mantua is not clear. However, an opportunity to display her indubitable abilities as a ruler soon presented itself. Summoned by Louis XII in mid-1502, Francesco Gonzaga had to demonstrate his allegiance by departing immediately for the French court and waiting there at the King’s pleasure. It was at exactly this time that Arienti’s correspondence with Isabella gained impetus. In October 1502 he began to serve her in the way he had done her father, Ercole d’Este, from the 1480s. He reported the news and information he heard from travellers and the various postal couriers who were continually passing through the city and described what was happening in Bologna itself. During this period, Isabella had access to the ambassadorial reports from all over Italy. Arienti was well aware of Isabella’s other, better-informed correspondents such as the highly experienced and able Mantuan ambassador in Florence, Francesco Malatesta, whom he mentions in a letter of 8 January 1503.10 Isabella, however, continued to encourage Arienti’s reports despite getting much longer and more detailed ones from her brother-in-law, Giovanni Gonzaga, who was in Bologna during this period. She also commissioned reports from Cristoforo Poggio, secretary to Giovanni II Bentivoglio and therefore a valuable correspondent with access to the Bolognese chancery. Almost three dozen of his letters to her survive, dated mostly between September and the end of 1503.11 Although it would seem that Poggio had initiated the correspondence with Isabella in February 1491 with a gift of fruit, he did not become her particular client. He wrote more to Francesco and Giovanni Gonzaga in the 1490s than to Isabella. Despite his Mantuan wife and his eventual reward of Mantuan citizenship, Poggio was indubitably almost a semi-official correspondent, representing the interests of the Bentivoglio, to whom the Gonzaga were related by marriage, and the Bolognese regime. Part of the explanation for Isabella’s keen desire for information during this period was her perception that the news within Italy was not reliable because rumour and secrecy were so artfully manipulated by Cesare Borgia: ‘In Italy, the Lord Duke of Romagna seems to be behind everything and he proceeds with such secrecy and caution that neither his plans nor the consequences of them can be understood until after they have been put into effect’.12 Arienti was a trusted client, loyal to Estense

10

Arienti to Isabella d’Este, in James, Letters, pp. 177–79.

11

These letters are in Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga, busta. 1145 (hereafter ASMn, AG, b). See Rita Lipparini, ‘Notizie di Roma spedite a Mantova da Bologna: Cristoforo Poggio’, Roma nel Rinascimento (1994), pp. 306–26 (p. 307). 12

‘In Italia non se fanno facende per alcuno se non per il Signor duca di Romagna, et lui procede cum tanta secreteza et cautela che non se intendono effecti né disigni se non doppo la

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interests, and in a political climate full of lies and trickery his information was valuable if only as a source that could be compared to and weighed against a competing babble of rumours, opinions and reports, the truth of which was difficult to determine, as Isabella reminded her husband in a letter of 1502: And because the truth about anything is difficult to extract because of the variety of rumours disseminated, as Your Excellency can well imagine, you must excuse me if you have had from me some untruth since I can only write that which is written to me, or what I hear from the mouths of others.13

Isabella skilfully sifted the information she received from all her sources, attempting to confirm what she considered important, before passing on to Francesco the most reliable versions of events. Occasionally she sent Francesco unconfirmed rumours but warned him of their dubious nature: ‘It is said that the Colonna and the Orsini, that is Signor Giangiordano, and the Savelli, are united for their mutual defence but I haven’t heard this from a reliable source’.14 Isabella was, no doubt, also shrewdly aware that Arienti offered her a particular perspective on what was happening, especially within Bologna itself, that her other Bolognese informers did not have access to. As a well-educated and intelligent citizen, whose loyalty to the Bentivoglio regime grew steadily less steadfast as Giovanni Bentivoglio became the dominant political force within the Bolognese oligarchy, Arienti’s reaction to the events he reported was perhaps what interested her. After Alexander VI issued a papal bull in September 1502 requiring the Bentivoglio to yield Bologna to him, and the French King had reneged on his promise to protect them, the Bolognese waited in dread for disaster to strike. In a letter of 21 November, with the danger of an imminent attack on the city seeming to recede with the Pope’s willingness to reach an agreement, Arienti expressed the cautious and still worried view of the citizens unconvinced of the power of diplomacy to save them from the massing armies of Cesare Borgia which surrounded them: ‘So many armed men cannot but pose a threat’.15 A week later, the miracle of the peace treaty still aroused suspicion: ‘This is regarded by people here as so exequutione’: Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 1 December 1502; ASMn, AG, b. 2993, libro 14, 56v–57r. 13 ‘Et perché mal il vero di cosa alcuna si può cavare per la tantà varietà de le voce che si spargano, como la Excellentia Vostra si può molto bene imaginare, comincio a fare scusa cum quella se da me l’havesse qualche busia, perhò che altro non gli posso scrivere se non quello che a me è scripto overo per bucca d’altri intendo’: Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 16 November 1502; ASMn, AG, b. 2993, libro 14, c. 44v. 14 ‘Dicesi che Colonesi, Ursini, cioè el Signore Zoanzordano, et Savelli, sono uniti insieme per loro diffensione ma non l’ho però di loco molto autentico’: Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 25 January 1503; ASMn, AG, b. 2993, libro 14, c. 92v. 15

‘Tanta gente d’arme non possono stare così’: Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 21 November 1502, in James, Letters, pp. 170–72.

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astonishing that it seems there must be some concealed sting’.16 This turned out to be the huge amounts of money to be paid to Cesare Borgia, and Arienti quite rightly foresaw the danger this burdensome taxation posed for the stability of the Bentivoglio regime. Apart from any particular personal insight on political developments that Arienti might be able to offer, Isabella was keen to cultivate connections in Bologna because of its position on one of the main thoroughfares of news. Bologna was a cosmopolitan city full of students from all over Italy and from beyond the Alps. Travellers and merchants were constantly passing through, bringing with them information about events in near or faraway places. In the decades before his death in August 1492, the Florentine, Benedetto Dei, had developed an elaborate commercial news network. In the 1480s he had moved constantly between Milan, Ferrara and other northern Italian cities. His lengthy stays in Bologna suggest he regarded the city as a good place to gather news, an essential listening post almost as good as the papal curia, Venice or Florence itself, where he returned in the early 1490s, relying on his friend Arienti to coordinate the flow of information from Bologna back to Florence.17 Mantua, however, was not an emporium of news, and Isabella frequently bemoaned Mantua’s isolation to her husband: ‘It upsets me at this time that Mantua is situated in such an out of the way place so that one hears absolutely no news’.18 Her sense that she lived in a backwater was perhaps more intense when she wrote this in October 1503 because she was increasingly confined to her rooms in the final stages of a difficult pregnancy. A similar feeling of stifling claustrophobia enveloped her in 1506 when she retreated to the villa of Sacchetta during an outbreak of plague and even Mantua seemed enticingly exciting in comparison. She begged Francesco for permission to return to the city: ‘I would like to repair to Mantua as I can no longer endure this bothersome country life which is contrary in every way to my nature’.19 Isabella’s correspondence with a steadily increasing number of contacts all over Italy allowed her to experience in another way the urban experience available to men, however humble, who could meet in the piazza and exchange news or swap rumours. 16

‘Questa è reputata presso questo populo cosa de sì gran maraviglia che ’l pare ne sia qualche cuperto dolo’: Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 28 November 1502,; in James, Letters, pp. 172–73. 17

For the relationship between Benedetto Dei and Arienti, and their cooperative news gathering activities, see James, Letters, pp. 39–54. 18

‘Dolme a questa volta che Mantua sii fondata in questo loco tanto fora di strata che non se intenda novella alcuna’: Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 1 October 1503; ASMn, AG, b. 2994, libro 16, c. 44r. 19 ‘Voria redurmi a Mantua, non potendo hormai più durare in questa fastidiosa stantia di villa, contraria in tutto alla natura mia’: Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 31 August 1506; ASMn, AG, b. 2994, libro 19, c. 53r.

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The confinement and exclusion inevitably associated with her gender had been brought home to Isabella at the end of 1503 when Francesco resigned his command of the French troops on the pretext of illness, just before they were defeated in Naples, and returned to Mantua. From 1504 until Francesco’s capture by the Venetians in 1509, Isabella’s opportunities for an active role in Mantuan politics were fewer. Francesco’s determination to reclaim control after his wife’s perhaps too successful interregnum, and his less frequent absences from Mantua, cut off a major avenue for the expression of her administrative ability and prodigious energy. The reduced level of political collaboration between Isabella and Francesco was perhaps, in part, a reflection of periods of strained relations between them, illustrated by their tussle over the naming of their son Alvise/Ercole, born in 1505. Isabella’s reproach in a letter of 5 October 1506 that Francesco had loved her little for some time past, and his comment in a letter of the next day that her stubbornness over the issue of their son’s name threatened to become a new source of annoyance with her, suggests some sharp disagreements about diplomatic and political issues.20 Certainly, the letters of Isabella to Francesco after 1504, although many fewer than in the previous years because they were rarely apart, are more narrowly concerned with domestic matters. During this period Isabella’s own agents and clients became even more important, and it is no coincidence that well over half of Arienti’s surviving letters were written in the four years between 1505 and Francesco’s imprisonment by the Venetians. From Isabella’s point of view the relationship with Arienti gained a new, if always formal, intimacy because of his connection with her Estense relatives. The death of her father in January 1505 and the tragedies involving her brothers that followed — the blinding of Giulio d’Este by his half brother, Cardinal Ippolito, in November of the same year and Giulio’s involvement in the conspiracy of August 1506 to kill Ippolito and Duke Alfonso — were keenly felt by Isabella. Her half sister, Lucrezia d’Este, who had married the eldest son of Giovanni Bentivoglio and lived in Bologna, sent a frantic message to Arienti begging for information. He alerted Isabella to Lucrezia’s intense distress and showed himself to be aware of the sisters’ deep attachment to their brothers and able to share their horror at the implications for Estense interests.21 Isabella’s desire for news, like that for new acquisitions for her grotta, became ever more insistent during these years and Arienti tried valiantly to satisfy her, writing letters which ranged widely in their subject-matter in an attempt to serve her

20

For Isabella’s letter of 5 October 1506, see ASMn, AG, b. 2116, cc. 262–63. Francesco’s irritable letter of 1 October 1506 insisting that their son be referred to as Alvise, in honour of the King of France, rather than Isabella’s preferred name of Ercole, after her own father, is in ASMn, AG, b. 2914, libro 193, c. 23v. 21

Arienti acknowledged all these family tragedies in letters to Isabella of 12 February 1505, 9 November 1505, and 2 August 1506. See James, Letters, pp. 202, 229–30, 245.

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many interests.22 Although not a single reply to Arienti’s letters survives from this period, he refers often to Isabella’s prompt acknowledgements that invariably encouraged him to write to her often. As Arienti put it in a letter of May 1505: ‘If I importune Your Excellency with too many letters, I pray that you blame yourself since it seems to me that your sweet missives invite me to do so’.23 Isabella was particularly gratified when, in January 1506, he sent on to her a letter from a friend in Rome who was employed by Cardinal Raffaele Riario. This was the first account she received of the discovery of the Laocoon, as she gratefully acknowledged to Arienti, and she was, no doubt, all the more pleased because it was a most lucid and detailed one.24 Seven months earlier, in June 1505, Arienti had sent a copy of another letter from a friend, possibly Bartolomeo Saliceto, the Bolognese secretary of Ascanio Sforza, which described Cardinal Ascanio’s sudden and dramatic death from plague.25 Rumours were rife that he had been poisoned and Isabella seems to have appreciated this more reliable account from Rome full of detail about the funeral and division of benefices. Apart from these particular sources, much of Arienti’s access to news from Rome seems to have come from his contacts in the Ferrarese postal service. His friendship with Bernardino di Giorgio, the senior ducal courier in Bologna, was a long-standing one. This man often stayed in Arienti’s house and, it would seem, passed on rumours and information about the Roman barons and the Pope’s preparations for his campaign to retrieve his papal patrimony in the Romagna which Arienti then passed on to Isabella. News from France came to him from Bolognese merchants in Lyons and Bruges with whom he corresponded. However, really important news became increasingly difficult for Arienti to obtain. His international news networks were no longer as elaborate as they had been in his middle years and many of Arienti’s letters to Isabella report events in Bologna itself. He sent detailed accounts of the earthquake that caused immense damage and death in Bologna in January 1505, prompting the evacuation of the Bentivoglio palace and a partial demolition of the family’s defensive tower that had begun to lean dangerously towards the apartments of Giovanni II Bentivoglio.26 Concerned no doubt for her Bolognese relatives, Isabella pressed anxiously for news of any further developments. The outbreaks of the plague from 1505 until 1508 were a constant source of worry and Arienti kept Isabella well informed about the discovery of cases within Bologna and the steps taken to contain outbreaks. The summer of 1505 was 22

See Brown, pp. 185–257.

23

‘Se troppo fusse infesto cum mie lettere a la Vostra Excellentia, quella prego a sè istessa lo imputti, che a mi pare così sia per il dolce scrivere suo che aciò me invita’: Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 27 May 1505, in James, Letters, pp. 209–10. 24

Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 31 January 1506, in James, Letters, pp. 236–37.

25

Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 3 June 1505, in James, Letters, pp. 212–13.

26

Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 4, 15 and 21 January 1505, in James, Letters, pp. 198–201.

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particularly disastrous, with famine and high temperatures combining to cause a peak in the number of deaths in July. Arienti reported on 10 July that few of the large numbers of ill people in Bologna were surviving because of the extreme heat and blighted season.27 In Ferrara fifty to seventy corpses were being buried each day.28 During a brief absence from Mantua that summer, Francesco was sent regular bulletins from Isabella about suspected and confirmed cases near or within the city.29 When the plague established itself within Mantua in the summer of 1506, Isabella withdrew with the children to the country, and, as we have seen, became very impatient about this enforced exclusion from city life. Reliable information about the plague’s deadly progress was of course essential for survival but false rumours that plague was within a city could be disastrous for business. One of Isabella’s letters to her husband in 1507 concerned measures she had taken to convince merchants from other cities that it was safe to come to the wool market in Mantua.30 Francesco Gonzaga was often in Bologna during the early summer to watch his horses run in the races associated with the feast days of San Ruffillo and San Pietro. Arienti kept Isabella informed about her husband’s movements as well as the identity of the winning horse which, because Francesco possessed the finest stable in Italy, usually belonged to him.31 In the 1506 palio, however, the horse of Antongaleazzo Bentivoglio won. These were desperate times for the embattled Bentivoglio. In a letter to Isabella of 22 June, Arienti commented rather obliquely on Antongaleazzo’s determination to maintain a show of strength, ‘He’d have done anything to win’.32 Beset by financial difficulties caused by the draining of the treasury during the years of famine and outbreaks of plague, Francesco Gonzaga was already preparing himself for the ambiguous task of collaborating with Julius II in his campaign to oust the Bentivoglio, and when he next appeared in Bologna it was 27 ‘[...] habiamo de’ molti infirmi et pochi campano per quisti excessivi caldi et mal disposti tempi’: Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 10 July 1505, in James, Letters, pp. 222–23. 28 Giovanni Maria Zerbinati, Croniche di Ferrara: Quali comenzano del anno 1500 sino al 1527, ed. by Maria G. Muzzarelli (Ferrara: Deputazione provinciale ferrarese di storia patria, 1989), pp. 58–59. 29

ASMn, AG, b. 2994, libro 18, cc. 16r, 17v, 82r, 86r.

30

‘Per levare la fama sparta de fori che la cità nostra stii male de peste, ho scritto alli rectori de Verona, Bressa et Cremona che la è falsa, anci facioli plena fede che la è sana et netta da simile contagione, aciochè securmente li mer[cat]anti possino venire al mercato de le lane’: Letter of 7 April 1507; ASMn, AG, b. 2994, libro 20, c. 28v. 31

Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 21 and 29 June 1505, in James, Letters, pp. 218–19; 221–22. For evidence of Francesco Gonzaga’s warm diplomatic relations with the Turkish sultan, who helped the Marquis source fine blood stock, as well as an interesting analysis of Francesco’s interest in Ottoman culture, see Giancarlo Malacarne, I Signori del Cielo: La falconeria a Mantova al tempo dei Gonzaga (Mantua: Artiglio editore, 2003), pp. 259–307. 32

‘Se vole far ogni cosa per vincere’: Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 22 June 1506, in James, Letters, pp. 242–43.

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at the head of the Pope’s occupying army. In February 1506, the Bentivoglio had mounted a lavish theatrical battle in the piazza in front of their palace between traditional personifications of Lent and Carnival. In a predictable attempt to lighten the atmosphere in a city gripped by foreboding about the intentions of the Pope, Carnival won the battle, as Arienti reported in his description of the event to Isabella. His wry comment in the letter that this symbolic victory would be inevitably overturned on Ash Wednesday suggests something of what he thought about the bravado displayed by the Bentivoglio in the face of their imminent demise.33 In July he described their ostentatious determination to preserve a façade of normality by leaving the city for the usual hunting excursion at their country villa. Apart from a letter of condolence about the conspiracy by Giulio d’Este to kill his brothers, this report of 22 July on the morale of the Bentivoglio — ‘here nothing is feared although, being prudent, they prepare to defend themselves from attack by their enemies’ — was to be Arienti’s last to Isabella until well after the Pope’s arrival in the city.34 Arienti knew enough of his city’s faction-ridden history to be extremely cautious about what he committed to a letter which could be intercepted and read en route to Mantua. Privately he seems to have felt no great regret at the passing of a regime from which he had been increasingly excluded. Isabella’s level of loyalty to her relatives in Bologna Arienti may not have been in a position to determine. In fact, Isabella could not but feel genuine regret about the demise of the Bentivoglio but she shared her husband’s robust approach to the inevitable. While adamantly insisting to the Bentivoglio that they had no choice but to obey the Pope, Francesco had been quietly helping Ginevra to transfer the family’s valuables to safe-keeping in Mantua.35 Isabella wrote to Francesco just days before the Bentivoglio left Bologna: I am certain that Your Excellency regrets the downfall of the Bentivoglio because of the friendship and marriage links they have with us but you cannot and must not break faith with the Supreme Pontiff and they would have done well to follow the loving promptings of Your Excellency to convert necessity into virtue.36

After his period of silence, Arienti sent a mutually trusted messenger, the brother of the well-known Carmelite theologian and literary figure, Battista Spagnoli, to 33

Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 24 February 1506, in James, Letters, pp. 238–39.

34

‘[...] quivi nulla si teme, vero che come signori prudenti sença strepido se fa necessarie provisione al difensarse accandendo ad iactura de’ loro inimici’. Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 22 July 1506; James, Letters, pp. 243–44. 35 Cecilia M. Ady, The Bentivoglio of Bologna: A Study in Despotism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 132. 36 ‘Son certa che a Vostra Excellentia rincresca la extirpatione de li Bentivolii per l’amicicia et coniunctione che hanno cum noi, ma non può, né debe, mancare del debito suo verso il Summo Pontifice et loro haveriano anche facto bene a seguire li amorevoli raccordi di Vostra Excellentia et convertire la necessità in virtù’: Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 26 October 1506; ASMn, AG, b. 2994, libro 19, c. 90r.

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report in person about the situation in Bologna.37 In the months to follow, Arienti’s letters were crucial to Isabella’s attempt to gauge to what extent she could protect Ginevra Bentivoglio and Lucrezia d’Este, the latter of whom was pregnant and unwell from the worst effects of their exile. With Francesco in Bologna as head of the occupying army, she managed to extend their stay in Mantua, stalling for time while fighting the interdict that the Pope placed on Mantua because of the Bentivoglio women’s presence in the city.38 Arienti reported on the attitude of the Bolognese population to the Pope, to the taxation measures he introduced to ensure his popularity, the rebuilding of the city’s fortifications and the progress of Michelangelo’s bronze statue of Julius II, which was to be mounted as a symbol of papal domination on the façade of the city’s cathedral.39 The Pope left Bologna on 22 February 1507.40 Exactly two months later, in a letter to her husband of 22 April, Isabella reported Ginevra Bentivoglio’s departure from Mantua.41 It would seem that, shortly afterwards, Ginevra encouraged her sons’ ill-fated attempt to recover their position in Bologna by force of arms, about which Arienti was again cautiously silent.42 However, his physical proximity to the Bentivoglio palace meant that its retaliatory razing seriously damaged his own house. His report to Isabella of the month-long destruction of the palace is as full of personal angst about his own exhaustion and worry as about his indubitable regret at the destruction of such a magnificent building.43 Arienti wrote less frequently to Isabella in the second half of 1507 and, after three letters in early 1508, there is a long gap until an apologetic letter in November, explaining that a trip to Rome and a resulting period of ill health had incapacitated 37

Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 27 December 1506, in James, Letters, pp. 245–46.

38

When she judged it expedient, Isabella used the excuse of her husband’s absence not to open letters which she knew concerned the continuing presence of Ginevra and Lucrezia Bentivoglio. ‘Per le poste de Bologna mi sono pervenute alle mani le tre alligate del Reverendissimo Monsignore Cardinale nostro, quale non ho voluto aperire existimando mo che se ha havuta risposta del interdicto che non gli sii cosa ad me spectante per celere provisione che se habbi a fare’: Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga, 16 April 1507; ASMn, AG, b. 2994, libro 20, c. 40r. 39

See Arienti’s letters of 15, 25 January, 6 February 1507 and 24 February 1508, in James, Letters, pp. 247–50; 255–56. 40

Cherubino Ghirardacci, Della Historia di Bologna, Pt 3 (1426–1509), ed. by Albano Sorbelli, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 33.1 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1933), p. 365. 41

ASMn, AG, b. 2994, libro 20, c. 44v.

42

On Ginevra, see Ady, pp. 199–200.

43

Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 6 June 1507, in James, Letters, pp. 252–53. Something of the palace’s magnificent appearance can be gleaned from Arienti’s description of it during the wedding festivities which accompanied the marriage of Annibale Bentivoglio and Lucrezia d’Este. See Carolyn James, ‘The Palazzo Bentivoglio in 1487’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 41 (1997), pp. 188–96.

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him. Arienti was feeling the decline of old age and his news gathering abilities were failing him. He acknowledged the superiority of Isabella’s other informants in a letter of 23 July 1509: ‘Your Excellency, knowing better than I do the circumstances of political developments, I won’t write about His Holiness the Pope, Their Serene Highnesses or about the misfortune of the Venetian leaders’.44 In May 1509, rallying to the task of serving her faithfully, he sent Isabella a copy of a sonnet presented by a Bolognese citizen to Lodovico Gonzaga, Bishop of Mantua. This was the last of a long series of sonnets or verses, composed mostly by his son Ercole, which Arienti had sent Isabella over the years to keep before her the notion that he acknowledged her keen interest in literary matters and unique status as a woman of learning and fine discrimination, ‘knowing that you delight in verse and prose, both vernacular and Latin, a virtue rare in princesses and therefore no small contribution to your womanly fame’.45 That Isabella was pleased by his regular acknowledgement of her self-conscious cultivation of this persona is suggested by her good-natured letter to Arienti’s son, Ercole, in August 1505 after his father had begged Isabella to encourage the young man to apply himself to the study of literature, and by her gracious reception of Ercole’s rather amateurish literary productions.46 Francesco’s capture by the Venetians was acknowledged by Arienti in a consolatory letter of 12 August 1509, one of hundreds which inundated Isabella from all over Italy.47 Although it was not his last letter to her, it is a fitting epitaph to their long epistolary relationship. Just as his illustrious women in the Gynevera had put aside their female occupations and demeanour in times of state crisis, so Arienti encouraged Isabella to grasp the opportunity to show her mettle: ‘This shall be the glorious way to exaltation because such a path was taken by all the pre-eminent military, literary and religious figures, as the Greek, Latin and Hebrew histories demonstrate’.48 Isabella did indeed grasp the reins of government firmly and for almost a year negotiated diligently for her husband’s release while attending skilfully to state diplomacy and the smooth running of the bureaucracy. Arienti attempted to resume his newsletters to her but his correspondence faltered at the end of that year and, after a final letter in March 1510 begging for her intercession on behalf of a 44

‘Sapendo meglio di me la Excellentia Vostra le occorentie de li accidenti de li stati, sì de la Santità del Papa, sì de li Serenissimi Regi et sì de la adversa fortuna de li Principi Venetiani, non scrivo’: Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 23 July 1509, in James, Letters, pp. 263–64. 45 ‘Sapendo delectarse del verso, prosa et vulgare et latino, virtù rara in principesse, onde non poca illustratione donate al muliebre nome’: Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 13 May 1509, in James, Letters, pp. 260–61. 46

See Arienti’s letters to Isabella of 3 and 17 August, in James, Letters, pp. 225–26.

47

Most of these letters can be found in ASMn, AG, b. 1890.

48

‘Questo fia glorioso modo de salire in alto come per questo calle caminarono tutti li homini in arme et in lettere excellenti et in religione, come ostendeno le hystorie grece et latine et hebree’: Arienti to Isabella d’Este, 12 August 1509, in James, Letters, pp. 265–66.

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friend incarcerated in Mantua, Arienti died in the first days of June, after several weeks of illness.49 Although Ercole Arienti tried to take his father’s place as Isabella’s Bolognese correspondent, his letters to her seem to lapse within a short time, suggesting either that he did not satisfy her in the way his father had or, more likely, that during this period Isabella had no need of information from this source.50 During Francesco’s absence, Isabella was kept well informed of political developments by the various Mantuan ambassadors and these professional channels, coupled with her own carefully cultivated sources such as her faithful correspondent in Ferrara, Bernardino de’ Prosperi, gave her a formidable range of information.51 Piero Soderini, the Florentine Gonfalonier of Justice, referred explicitly to Isabella’s access to reliable political news in his own letter of condolence on the capture of her husband: ‘And because we judge Your Excellency to be well briefed about everything we won’t go into any more detail’.52 This experience of political power, enjoyed without the constant supervisory letters of instructions or the countermanding orders of her husband, came to an abrupt end with Francesco’s release. Once again Isabella had to find oblique means to satisfy her ambition until her husband’s death in 1519 gave her another opportunity to rule Mantua in the brief period before her son’s growing confidence forced her to relinquish the political role she so relished. As a young woman learning the intricacies of her role in Mantua, Isabella’s interest in Arienti had been initially aroused by the sympathetic portrayal of aristocratic women like herself in the Gynevera de le clare donnne. However, at this early point in her life, a work which mirrored, perhaps too clearly, the importance and potential of élite female participation in the rule of princely states could have little practical function as propaganda and it was as one of her many political and cultural correspondents that Arienti proved most useful in her struggle to achieve fame and political influence. News from her carefully tended networks allowed Isabella to maintain the formidable and sophisticated grasp of the political and cultural context beyond the Mantuan court that contributed to her contemporary reputation as, if not the quite the ‘Machiavelli in skirts’ described by an admiring late nineteenth-century scholar, then certainly as a significant actor on the turbulent political scene in early modern Italy.53

49

Ercole Arienti to Isabella, 4 June 1510, in James, Letters, p. 273.

50

Ercole’s letters to Isabella from the period following his father’s death are in ASMn, AG, b. 1147. 51 Lodovico Brognolo’s reports from Rome and Bernardino de’ Prosperi’s letters from Ferrara are in ASMn, AG, b. 1892. 52 ‘Et perché noi existimiamo la Excellentia Vostra essere bene advertita del tucto, non enteremo in altri particolari’: see Soderini’s letter of 18 August 1509, ASMn, AG, b. 1890. 53

Alessandro Luzio, ‘Isabella d’Este e la Corte Sforzesca’, Archivio storico lombardo, s. 3, 15 (1901), pp. 145–76 (p. 145).

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Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive in the Time of Lorenzo de’ Medici F. W. KENT

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tudents of Florentine history in the fifteenth century have long cherished the early Medici family archive. Known formally as the Archivio Mediceo avanti il Principato, or more familiarly as MaP, it contains tens of thousands of documents, above all correspondence, embracing the period from the Medici family’s rise to political authority in the Republic in the early quattrocento to Cosimo’s becoming Grand Duke of Tuscany a century later. Thanks to the intelligent hard work of the staff of the Archivio di Stato in Florence, among the many treasures of which MaP surely glitters with particular intensity, the entire collection has now been put on line. In a sense, MaP has been miraculously restored to us after the dark age of microfilm, which lasted some twenty years. Only older scholars remember the particular, almost sensual, pleasure of reading and handling the originals in their blue folders, kept in the former state archives in the Uffizi. More recently, one has had to struggle to decipher the microfilms while locked in a darkened room, in the process becoming almost as shortsighted and bad tempered as was Lorenzo de’ Medici himself. ‘Have the patience to read this’, as one of his countless correspondents

I read an Italian version of this paper at the kind invitation of the Director of the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, at a conference held on 18–19 September 2000 to mark this signal event. I should like to thank Gino Corti for his research assistance and, as ever, Carolyn James for her scholarly advice and personal support. It was with the late Ian Robertson that I first studied the Medici and Renaissance Italy in General History I at the University of Melbourne in 1961, and it is with deep gratitude and pleasure that I acknowledge here this oldest academic debt.

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pleaded, and perhaps more students than would care to admit found their dedication to the task faltering at times.1 The Medici family archive is now easier of access, and perhaps even more legible, than ever before, from which happy situation one might hope for a renaissance of interest in the collection, a heightened awareness among the emerging generation of scholars of its bounty and depth. For it is a grave mistake to think that only political or diplomatic historians, or students of humanism, should expend much effort on reading the correspondence. Regardless of one’s scholarly concerns, MaP has something to offer. Not least among its less well-known attractions is the abundance of evocative detail and arresting snippets it offers: about great personages to be sure, but concerning numerous obscure and unknown people as well. To tell the truth, it is hard to resist this, so to speak, underworld of curious facts and engaging nobodies, and the argument of this essay is that one should not even contemplate doing so. The petites perceptions about Laurentian Florence to be found, often by serendipity, in the Medici archive are in their way as valuable and enlightening as the grand views of the Renaissance city the collection almost too easily furnishes the historian.2 Everywhere one looks, there are curiosities which delight while inviting serious attention, confirming our sense that God may indeed dwell in detail, in Aby Warburg’s much quoted phrase. Take, for example, the longest signature I have encountered, though no doubt there are others still more elaborate, in a letter to Lorenzo written by ‘Mario de Zuliano da l’Aparita, called the Piovano, constable of the Most Illustrious Signoria’s piazza, a position I received from the hand of your Magnificence, to whom I profoundly commend myself’.3 That charming passage, properly examined, is a telling source for the history of politics and of class relations in late quattrocento Florence. A soldier such as Mario, employed by Florence to protect the seat of republican government, might enjoy a personal and dependent relationship with a grand private citizen, who indeed had apparently arranged his appointment. Other snippets to be found in MaP are instructive in a more 1 ‘Pazienza a legere’: Piero di Giovanni Capponi to Lorenzo, 10 August 1472; Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASF), Archivio Mediceo avanti il Principato (hereafter MaP) XXVIII, 393. All dates are in modern style. 2

See William Sebastian Heckscher, ‘Petites perceptions: An Account of sortes Warburgianae’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 4 (1974), 101–32. This essay picks up themes to be found in Gene Brucker, ‘Florentine Voices from the Catasto, 1427– 1480’, I Tatti Studies, 5 (1993), 11–32. 3 ‘Per el vostro Mario de Zuliano da l’Aparita, dito el Pivano, el quale fo fato contestabele dela piaza dela Illustrissima Signoria et fui fato per mano dela Magnificenza Vostra, el quale a vui grandemente se richomanda’: 9 December 1471; MaP XXIII, 403. This man is surely the ‘Piovano, capo di squadra de’ provisionati’ twice mentioned in Lorenzo’s ‘calendar of letters sent’: Protocolli del Carteggio di Lorenzo il Magnifico per gli anni 1473–74, 1477–92, ed. by Marcello del Piazzo (Florence: Olschki, 1956), pp. 66, 100.

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straightforward way; one remembers the youthful pleasure a collaborator and I derived from the chance discovery of letters that established the precise date — 1445 — when construction of the Palazzo Medici began.4 Then there are unusual genres of letters, such as those to the Medici written collectively by social groups and institutions which allow the student a further privileged glimpse into the intimate corporate worlds of the Florentines, about which so much has been written. One, addressed to Lorenzo just after the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, was signed by ‘us youths and boys of the Millstone Corner, numbering 30 or more’, and constitutes an almost unique quattrocento testimony to the early vitality of the plebeian festive brigades known as potenze, the sixteenth-century history of which is now being written.5 There are more of these ‘collective’ letters in MaP than one might imagine: letters to Lorenzo from the canons of his family church of San Lorenzo, for example, or from the body responsible for the fabric of the city’s cathedral, the Opera del Duomo.6 One great Florentine lineage, in sending him an appeal for support, signed itself ‘all the men of the house of the Carnesecchi’, just as a very youthful Niccolò Machiavelli was to write a letter in 1497 on behalf of ‘Maclavellorum familia Pero, Niccolò et tutta la famiglia de’ Machiavegli Cives Florentini’.7 Students of urban neighbourhood, a much explored theme, would still find worth pursuing another letter of June 1476 to the young Lorenzo written collectively by the ‘popollo di Sa[n]ta Maria Maggiore’, an inner-city parish, requesting his intervention in its dispute with the violent ‘Francesco di Piero, known by the nickname Cicchone’, whose gambling den was ruining neighbourhood sociability and spirituality: ‘and here you hear nothing but blasphemy against God and His saints, and howling’.8 There are as many interesting stories in MaP as there are intriguing people. A Servite friar testifies to the captain of the rural city of Cortona in 1480 that much earlier, when he had confessed ‘the mother of Bernardino, called Urbana […], she told me that Bernardino was Piero di Cosimo [de’ Medici’s] son, and not her

4 Dale Vivienne and Francis William Kent, ‘Two Comments of March 1445 on the Medici Palace’, Burlington Magazine, 121 (1979), 795–96. 5 ‘Nnoi giovani et garzoni del chanto della Macina di numero 30 o più’: Dale Vivienne and Francis William Kent, ‘Two Vignettes of Florentine Society in the Fifteenth Century’, Rinascimento, 23 (1983), 237–60. David Rosenthal of Monash University is completing a richly documented PhD thesis on the sixteenth-century potenze. 6

12 July1479; MaP XXXVII, 534; 15 January 1474; MaP XXI, 332.

7

‘Tutti della chasa de’ Charnesechi’: 6 September 1476; MaP XXXIII, 743. In July 1479 two Genoese lineages (alberghi) wrote collectively to Lorenzo: MaP XXXVII, 543, 548. Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere, ed. by Corrado Viventi (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), II, 4–5. 8

‘Franciescho di Piero, vochato per sopranome Ciechone […] e quivi no’ si sentte senone bestegniare Idio e sua santi e mughiare […]’: 12 June 1476; MaP XXV, 423.

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husband Pietro’s’.9 Lorenzo de’ Medici, surrounded by kin as he was, might yet — it would seem — have had even more relations than we, or he, had imagined. These connections certainly included a man styling himself Rinaldo detto Ballerino de’ Nerli who addressed Lorenzo in a letter as ‘dearest godfather’, and bequeathed him two farms in 1490: ‘And I do this so that neither Lorenzo nor his sons should soon forget me’.10 The patrician Nerli family itself, interestingly enough, refused however to acknowledge kinship with ‘il Ballerino’.11 We sense powerful contemporary emotions embedded in this last vignette, the almost desperate desire of outsiders to attach themselves, whether by spiritual or blood kinship, to powerful lineages; the patrician disdain for people who could not prove they belonged. Other stories to be found in the Medici letters reveal the inner workings of that complex of social processes which modern scholars, for want of a better word, call ‘patronage’. Neighbourhood — grass-roots — politics in the Medici district or gonfalone of Leon d’Oro emerges vividly in the patrician Giovenco della Stufa’s letter to Lorenzo of 6 December 1478, recommending that Piero di Niccolò di Benintendi, used clothes dealer, be made a Prior: ‘I think it will be a good investment because Niccolò has performed very well in his Cortona posting, and his son Piero is an able and respectable youth […]; him aside, all the other minor guildsmen in the district have had their fair share’.12 If Lorenzo’s young artisan neighbour, Piero, expected this political recognition, a widow of the well-established Pecori family had her own expectations, which indeed were fulfilled. Her daughter, a nun, recalled to Piero de’ Medici in 1493 that ‘when it pleased God to leave us poor and fatherless orphans,

9 ‘La madre de Bernardino, chiamata Urbana […] liei me dixe Bernardino essere figliolo di Piero di Cosimo, e non de Pietro suo marito’: 20 May 1480; MaP XCIV, 164. This intriguing document may represent one of several Medicean attempts to find a male replacement for the recently murdered Giuliano di Piero. On which see Fulvio Pezzarossa, I poemetti sacri di Lucrezia Tornabuoni (Florence: Olschki, 1978), p. 32. 10

‘Charissimo chonpare’: 21 September 1489; MaP XLI, 323. ‘E questo perché Lorenzo né figluoli non mi dimentichino sti [sic] tosto’: The testament of Rinaldo detto Ballerino de’ Nerli, 27 May 1489; ASF, Notarile Antecosiminiano 1740, fol. 394v. See also MaP LXXXIX, 25. 11

See Jonathon Nelson, ‘The Place of Women in Filippino Lippi’s Nerli Altarpiece’, Italian History and Culture, 1 (1995), 65–80 (p. 74). 12

‘Credo che sarà buona spesa perché Nicolò s’è molto bene portato in questo suo uficio [at Cortona] e Piero suo figluolo è giovane dabene e virtuoso […]; da lui in fuori, tutti li altri del gonfalone per l’arte minore abbino auto il pieno loro’: MaP XXIII, 701. While Piero was not on this occasion made a Prior, his brother Lorenzo attained the office in the following May.

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my mother took us to see him [Lorenzo], commending us to him, and he told her he wanted to be a good father to us, which indeed in the event he proved to be’.13 None of these is a famous, even a well-known, person — neither in the quattrocento nor now — and it is easy to ignore such obscure voices in a letter collection created and dominated by the Medici, and full of the confident and eloquent tones of the powerful people contemporaries called the gran maestri, the ambassadors, politicians and celebrated intellectuals with whom Florence’s leading family was associated and on whom most studies of the Medici archive have inevitably concentrated. It is tempting, too, to allow Lorenzo de’ Medici to have the last word, so to speak, to concentrate on this man whom his humanist intimate Angelo Poliziano described as having a felix ingenio, by which he meant the ability to do so many different things well and at the same time.14 Just one of the things Lorenzo did often and well was to write letters: ‘I found he was closeted in his room, writing’, reported the Ferrarese ambassador on one occasion.15 The results of these labours were marvellous, as the great edition of Lorenzo’s letters begun under the general editorship of Nicolai Rubinstein makes so clear. ‘The letters he dictated’, Francesco Guicciardini wrote, and he was himself a brilliant writer, were ‘replete with more genius than one could ask’.16 High politics and diplomacy, analysed masterfully in increasingly incisive prose, are the grand themes of Lorenzo’s correspondence. The occasional Laurentian personal asides and jokes it has also preserved only serve to increase the reader’s fascination with this felix ingenio, who once contradicted Poliziano by saying that in fact he could not juggle several balls at once ‘because when my mind is fixed on one thing, it neglects the others’.17 When reading in MaP, it is hard to resist a man who, seriously ill, can joke to a friend that ‘my having been ill these days with some leg pain means I’ve not written to you; though the feet and tongue are far apart, one can still get in the way of the other’.18

13

‘Quando e’ piacque al Signiore di lasciarci poveri pupilli, sanza padre, la mia madre ci menò a llui, rachomandandocigli, et egli le disse volerci essere buon padre, et chosì lo dimostrò nel opere’: 4 July 1493; MaP XVI, 378. 14

Angelo Poliziano, Silvae, ed. by Francesco Bausi (Florence: Olschki, 1996), p. 253.

15

Letter of 19 January 1489, in Antonio Cappelli, ‘Lettere di Lorenzo de’ Medici detto il Magnifico’, Atti e Memorie delle RR Deputazioni di storia patria per le provincie modenesi e parmensi, sez. di Modena, 1 (1863), p. 305. 16

Francesco Guicciardini, Storie Fiorentine dal 1378 al 1509, ed. by Roberto Palmarocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1968), pp. 74–75. 17

‘Perchè l’animo mio, quando è molto occupato in una cosa, non fa bene le altre’: Lorenzo to Giovanni Lanfredini, 8 August 1488; MaP LIX, 59. 18

Letter of 21 August 1489, published by Gaetano Pieraccini, La Stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo, 3 vols (Florence: Vallecchi, 1986), I, 122.

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But resist one must, if the Medici archive is not to remain terra incognita in some important respects, as provocative a statement as that may seem to be. Even putting aside the necessity of not allowing Lorenzo and his friends to monopolize one’s attention, this still partially unexplored land is so vast as to be difficult to survey systematically. There are literal goldmines remaining to be found there, essential evidence for our understanding of Lorenzo himself and of the high culture he embraced; not to mention the unheard voices which are our present concern. Witness the remarkable new series of documents concerning Lorenzo’s antiquarian interests recently published by Laurie Fusco and Gino Corti, a major event for the worlds of classical and Renaissance scholarship.19 It is fair to suggest that if historians of Renaissance music subjected MaP to as careful a scrutiny as those two scholars have undertaken, the results might be as astonishing for their particular field. The Medici letters are littered with references to musicians and musical instruments, most of them apparently unpublished. By serendipity one discovers here a letter from Giuliano ‘known as Catellaccio’, who claims to have been Lorenzo’s viol-master; finds there a reference to the departure from Florence of the organist Ser Feo: ‘And it happens he’s not going to come back soon. And over there an organist is going to have to be found for the churches of San Giovanni or San Lorenzo’.20 Should one briefly desert the Medici papers to read the contemporary letters of the da Filicaia family to be found in the former Conventi Soppressi archive, one finds new information on Heinrich Isaac, a composer much favoured by Lorenzo de’ Medici and his circle, and even a precious reference to how a famous musical piece of his was received by contemporaries. It appears that Alla Battaglia, a composition still played now and composed in late 1487 and early 1488 to celebrate the successful Florentine siege of Sarzana, was ‘not very much to the taste of connoisseurs’ — in context very likely a reference to Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici if not to his celebrated father.21 As for the riches MaP still has to offer feminist historians, above all the

19

Lorenzo de’ Medici, Collector: The Pursuit of Antiquities and Other Objects in the Early Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 20

‘Et per ventura non è per tornare a questi tempi. Et che costì s’haverà a provedere di sonatore per San Giovanni o per San Lorenzo […]’: Antonio Marchetti to Lorenzo, 6 June 1477; MaP XXXV, 598. On Giuliano, see the letter of 1 December 1466; MaP XXIII, 92. I understand that Blake Wilson is now undertaking such a systematic search of MaP. 21 ‘Ma dipoi non vegho molto andare a ghusto di chi intende […]’: Ambrogio Angeni to Antonio da Filicaia, April 1488; ASF, Corporazioni religiose soppresse dal Governo Francese, 78, 319, fol. 274r–v. On this and other new passages, see my ‘Heinrich Isaac’s Music in Laurentian Florence’, in Worlds of Reading: On the Theory, History and Sociology of Cultural Practice: Festschrift für Walter Veit, ed. by Helmut Heinze and Christiane Weller (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004), pp. 367–71.

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opportunity to listen to hundreds of female voices (some of them very faint indeed), Patrizia Salvadori, Natalie Tomas and others are showing the way.22 None of this is to presume to chastise colleagues who have conducted outstanding researches in the Medici papers. One does not wish to be like the youthful Lorenzo de’ Medici who, according to his own father, needed to be told before visiting Milan in 1469 that he should ‘not step out of line in any way and be presumptuous, since he is not the ambassador, because in my view children should not teach their grandmothers to suck eggs’.23 But it is a plea to pursue the exploration of MaP in as systematic and as catholic a way as possible, an undertaking which will be much easier now that it is online; a gentle exhortation to scholars to spend some time reading letters signed not by gran maestri but by people whose names one does not recognize, often women and men low on the quattrocento social scale. There are hundreds of them, and there is space here to convey only a whiff of their strong scent. Such letters include an undated and anonymous supplication, repeating the word ‘mercy’, signed by a self-styled poor woman down on her luck, a povera isventurata, and the pathetic note by ‘Niccholuccio who worked at the gates’ which begged Lorenzo for a minor post to support his starving children.24 More pleas come from the communal jail, the Stinche, than there are leaves in Vallombrosa, letters from that ‘other universe’, those ‘dreadful prisons’, as a correspondent wrote.25 On three occasions nineteen peasants from Dovodola petitioned Lorenzo to be released after years of imprisonment.26 These moving, often roughly written and poorly expressed, letters deserve our respectful attention; they not only touch our common humanity, they often glint with historical significance, briefly illuminating lost social feelings and relationships. The ‘poor Ipichia’ who wrote to Lorenzo in October 1473 from the prison of the Arte della Lana, in which he was imprisoned for a debt of twenty-three lire, declared somewhat incoherently that ‘I’ve been abandoned, I’m dying of hunger, without a family and alone in the world’. He continued that

22 Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lettere, ed. by Patrizia Salvadori (Florence: Olschki, 1993); Natalie Tomas, ‘Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the “Problem” of a Female Ruler in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence’, Renaissance Studies, 14 (2000), 70–90; and her The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 23

Piero de’ Medici to Lucrezia Tornabuoni, 13 June 1469; published by Francis William Kent, ‘The Young Lorenzo, 1449–69’, in Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, ed. by Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann (London: Warburg Institute, 1996), pp. 1–22 (p. 12, n. 62). 24

MaP LXXXVIII, 8; ‘Niccholuccio che stava alle porte’: 1 June1478; MaP XXXVI, 687.

25

‘alttro mondo’; ‘dolorose istinche’: 9 January 1474 and Pero d’Andrea to Lorenzo, 28 January 1474; MaP XXI, 313; XXI, 369. 26

Letters of 7 November 1469, 7 March 1472 and 9 January 1473; MaP 324; XXIV, 35.

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Lorenzo’s father, Piero de’ Medici, ‘loved me, indeed together we learned to do arithmetic, together’.27 One knows no more about ‘Ipichia povero’ than that his real name was ‘Lorenzo, ottonaio’, Lawrence the brass-worker. However, apparently obscure names can upon investigation turn out to have been more significant actors on the quattrocento stage than one had suspected. A passing reference by Lorenzo in a letter of 1482 to a man nicknamed ‘il Cedernino’ — he wrote that ‘I’ve gone on too long on this holy Friday, since Cedernino has already been in the Badia for two hours and I haven’t yet set foot in church’ — refers to a fascinating quattrocento wheeler-dealer whose career we can reconstruct in generous detail from the hundreds of letters to him preserved in another collection of family letters in the Florentine State Archives.28 Lorenzo de’ Medici’s ‘Francesco, orafo’, ‘Francis, the goldsmith’, also springs to mind. His handful of interesting letters in MaP brings to vivid life a factotum whom several contemporary documents describe as ‘Francis the goldsmith, who does Lorenzo’s business’ — a land agent, major-domo, master of design, major communal office-holder — who was as close to Lorenzo as almost any familiar.29 There is a crucial irony here, important for our theme. The more we diligently seek out the obscure and unheard voices in MaP, the more we are likely to encounter — indeed, dare one say it, better understand — Lorenzo de’ Medici himself. There is no getting away from the man. It is not just that the vast majority of these letters are of course addressed to him. What is really significant is that we know from Lorenzo’s own Protocolli, the registers of his correspondence, most of it lost, that this indefatigable letter-writer took very seriously petitions from the humblest of people, despite his understandable reluctance, sometimes, to read the mountains of letters which cascaded down on him. As Poliziano tells us, when Lorenzo could not be bothered reading his correspondence, he made a joke at the expense of the lazy kinsman of his brother-in-law Bernardo Rucellai, Piero di Cardinale Rucellai, who shared the same failing.30 Any page of the Protocolli, published half a century ago but in a way still a neglected source, shows Lorenzo writing ‘for a slavewoman of 27 ‘Io sono abandonato e si mi muoio di fame Jo e samza brigata e non ò niente a mondo […]; ‘[Piero] mi voleva bene iperò stemo isieme al’abaco aparare isieme’: 6 October 1473; MaP XXIII, 552. 28 Lorenzo to Pierfilippo Pandolfini, 5 April 1482, in Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lettere, ed. by Nicholai Rubenstein, 11 vols (Florence: Giunti-Barbèra, 1977–2004), VI: 1481–1482, ed. by Michael Mallett (1990), 330–31. See Francis William Kent and Gino Corti, Bartolommeo Cederni and His Friends: Letters to an Obscure Florentine (Florence: Olschki, 1991). 29

Caroline Elam, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 36 (1992), 41–84 (pp. 48–49, 69, where his MaP letters are listed). For Francesco, see too my Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), ch. 3. 30

Angelo Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, ed. by Tiziano Zanato (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1983), p. 110.

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Ser Michele Grifoni’, ‘for Berto the barber from Colle’, ‘for Angolino the stablehand’, ‘for the miserable son of a woman’, ‘for the deaf boy who goes to Bagno, etc.’, and so on.31 Very occasionally, his letter of recommendation itself survives, such as this one of 1485: ‘The bearer of this letter, Master Michael the blacksmith, is a good friend and servant of my house, and when I can I willingly serve him’.32 The ‘Pietro de Giovanni, our family butcher’ whom Lorenzo recommended to Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, in 1482, was almost certainly Lorenzo’s neighbour in the parish of San Lorenzo whose daughter, Bartolomea, had married the Flemish musician Heinrich Isaac, very likely at Lorenzo’s prompting.33 Even so, we know from MaP letters themselves and other evidence, that Lorenzo, like most powerbrokers, more frequently pursued the causes of his humble clients by word of mouth, a bocca as contemporaries said, often through agents, than by letter. The correspondence and Protocolli, indeed, record only a small proportion of the business he did, with and on behalf of extensive social networks of friends and clients, networks which were at once broad and deep.34 The Medici were in a social and political sense online — at the centre of a patronal internet partly of their own making — long before the archivists of the Archivio di Stato in Florence put them on the Web for the benefit of future generations of scholars. There may be no better source than MaP for plumbing the social depths of these Medicean networks of friendship, or amicizia as contemporaries called them, for understanding the powerful emotions this concept evoked. Some scholars have insisted, against a certain scepticism on the part of their colleagues, that the patronal processes and feelings of quattrocento Florence operated outside, as well as inside, the ceto dirigente, or ruling élite, and the broader political class. Indeed some members of the humbler classes, both in town and country, were included in — it would be quite as accurate to say included themselves in — the public arena and the political process itself by means of these ties of interdependence, these reciprocal 31

Protocolli, pp. 206, 342, 392, 401, and throughout.

32

‘Maestro Michele fabro, portatore di questo, è amico et servitore buono di casa mia et quando me occorre, volontieri li gratifico […]’: Lorenzo to Francesco Cambini, 8 November, 1485; ASF, Spedale di S. Maria Nuova 1254, fol. 27r. For which see now Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lettere, X: 1485–1486, ed. by Humfrey Butters (2002), 42. 33

17 February 1482, in Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lettere, VI, 264. Concerning Pierbello di Giovanni, a butcher from the San Lorenzo parish, see ASF, Catasto 1017 (i), fol. 316r–v; and Frank D’Accone, ‘Heinrich Isaac in Florence: New and Unpublished Documents’, Musical Quarterly, 49 (1963), 464–83 (p. 469). 34

On this theme, and for a bibliography, see Francis William Kent, ‘Patron-Client Networks in Renaissance Florence and the Emergence of Lorenzo as Maestro della Bottega’, in Lorenzo de’ Medici: New Perspectives, ed. by Bernard Toscani (New York: Lang, 1993), pp. 279–313; and Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

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bonds both emotional and merely ‘instrumental’.35 Lorenzo de’ Medici’s need to cultivate people of all classes, including quite humble persons, his reliance on the fidelity and support they offered him, is almost as manifest in his family papers as the necessity the humble and obscure felt to secure the favour of Lorenzo and other gran maestri. There is space to single out only several clusters of examples. Lorenzo was in a sense born and remained a countryman — the humanist Cristoforo Landino was hardly exaggerating in describing him as a bonus agricola, a fine husbandman — and it was not only by writing pastoral poetry and building great villas, both of which he did with real distinction, that he revealed his affinity for the countryside, his sure knowledge that at least some of his authority was derived from landed wealth and provincial political support.36 The Medici archive bounteously documents this rural Lorenzo, and preserves, too, the voices of the factors and agents who administered his extensive estates and knew well the tenants and other peasants also to be encountered in that great collection. Even specialists know little of these rural intermediaries, who deserve a study in their own right. Take Francesco Fracassini, who was Piero de’ Medici’s factor at the villa of Caffaggiolo in the Mugello and went on to serve Lorenzo for all of the latter’s life. A Laurentian familiar, as the Medici correspondence reveals, he also helped marshal proMedicean forces at Caffaggiolo during the republican crisis of 1466 and was later accused of fomenting rebellion in independent Lucca in the Medici interest.37 Il Fracassino’s letters in the Medici archive, full of detail about crops and tenants, are at once intimate and respectful. Recommending his brother-in-law to Lorenzo in 1471, he ended: ‘I’m sure four blessed words from you will do him a world of good,

35

See my ‘“Be Rather Loved than Feared”: Class Relations in Quattrocento Florence’, in Society, Culture and the Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. by William J. Connell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 13–50, and Part 2 of Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici. 36 Landino is cited by Edmund B. Fryde, Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), p. 132, n. 78. See too my Lorenzo de’ Medici, ch. 5. On the theme of patron-client relations between Florence and the Medici and provincial centres, and reference to abundant recent literature on the subject, see Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power, ed. by William J. Connell and Andrea Zorzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Above all, see Patrizia Salvadori, Dominio e Patronato: Lorenzo de’ Medici e la Toscana nel Quattrocento (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2000). 37

Orsola Gori refers to the events of 1466: ‘La crisi del regime mediceo del 1466 in alcune lettere inedite di Piero dei Medici’, in Studi in onore di Armando d’Addario, ed. by Luigi Borgia and others (Lecce: Conte, 1995), III, 809–25 (p. 813). A letter to the Duke of Milan of 3 June 1490 written by Ser Branda da Castiglione mentions that three men had conspired with ‘uno Frachassino che sta a Pisa, factore del Magnifico Laurenzo, il quale haveva corrurpto (sic) cum dinari et gran promesse quelli tre ribaldi’: Milan, Archivio di Stato, Sforzesco 311, no foliation.

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and he’ll remain Your Magnificence’s slave for ever’.38 Other, humbler, agents also faithfully served Lorenzo in the Mugello. One Bartolomeo Nettoli reminded him early in 1479: ‘I recall that my father guarded your house for half a century, serving Cosimo and Lorenzo. Now I, too, do the same. I keep watch for you and your sons and for Lorenzo and Giovanni your second cousins’. Illegal wood cutting was destroying ‘fine hunting for pheasants, hares and other game’, Bartolomeo went on to report, concluding with congratulations to Lorenzo on the birth of a son: ‘God has provided that we should have a replacement for the late Giuliano’, Lorenzo’s brother killed during the Pazzi Conspiracy the year before.39 The countryside, especially the mountains which surrounded Florence, could be unruly, and Lorenzo relied on such rural agents to keep the peace. On one occasion he ordered Fracassini to settle a dispute among his own tenants, or failing that to send the warring parties straight to him.40 It was also in the Medici interest to keep such tough peasants and countrymen well disposed towards him and his family. Lorenzo had much correspondence, to take only one example, with Marradi, a sensitive frontier town to the north of Florence whose extended kinship groups had a reputation for violence. He appears to have had a special relationship with the brothers Mignone, Galeotto and Pierone da Marradi. Of Mignone’s son, Niccolò, a soldier at the fortress of Volterra and a familiar of Lorenzo’s palace, the citizenwriter Matteo Palmieri said to Lorenzo: ‘It’s unnecessary to tell you about the virtues of Niccolò di Minghone da Marradi’;41 another son, the notary Bartolomeo di 38

‘Son chiaro che 4 delle vostre sante parole bastano a ffargli tanto bene et senpre resterà schiavo di Vostra Magnificentia’: 18 June 1471; MaP XXIII, 352. There are a number of his letters to be found in MaP, and numerous references to him in Lorenzo’s Protocolli. 39

‘Ò richordo di 50 ani che mio padre la facieva guardare per la chasa vostra, che cci soleva atendere Chosimo e Lorenzo. Ora anche io fo il simile; v’ò chura per voi e per li vostri figluoli e per Lorenzo e Giovanni vostri sechondo chugini; […] che Idio si à proveduto aremo riauto lo schanbio dela buona memoria di Giuliano’: 18 March 1479; MaP XXIII, 703. Nettoli says he had written previously ‘by hand of your Francesco Fracassini’. 40

Protocolli, p. 40. See also Salvadori, Dominio e Patronato, pp. 145–46. On earlier conciliatory Florentine relations with the mountain peasantry, see Samuel K. Cohn, Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Cecilia Hewlett of Monash University has written a doctoral thesis examining the internal workings of several peasant communities in the Florentine countryside, and their links with the territorial state: ‘Rural Communities and Renaissance Florence; Autonomy and Interdependence (1480–1550)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Monash University, 2003). 41 Letter of 18 September 1474, published in Alberto M. Fortuna-Cristina Lunghetti, Autografi dell’Archivio Mediceo avanti il Principato (Florence: Corradino Mori, 1977), p. 54. See a letter written by the three brothers to Lorenzo on 28 August 1471, and Mignone’s of 14 August 1478; MaP XXVII, 475; XXXI, 138. Niccolò di Mignone appears several times in notarial documents drawn up in Lorenzo’s house in the early 1470s: ASF, Notarile Antecosiminiano M 530, fols 20r–v, 23r.

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Galeotto, offered Lorenzo fifty men at arms when Volterra rebelled.42 Lorenzo was also in contact with another Ser Bartolomeo da Marradi, whose troublesome relatives were very hard to placate, as one Bernardo de’ Medici reported to his distant cousin; in the matter of Nuto da Marradi, Bernardo had tried ‘by means of your letters to bring about numerous peace agreements, but many of these people go out of their way to make trouble’.43 It is no coincidence that one of Lorenzo’s bodyguards, staffieri, was named ‘Baptista da Marradi’, ‘Battista from Marradi’. Of this man Lorenzo had written in 1484 that ‘he’s among those I love, and who are completely faithful to me’.44 From such trouble spots as Marradi came these experienced and fiercely loyal retainers who protected him, especially after the Pazzi Conspiracy but also before. In 1477, Lorenzo had recommended one staffiere, Brunoro, to his maternal cousin Gualterrotto dei Bardi as ‘my own […] whom I much love’.45 From the next year onwards, Medici was always escorted in public by four crossbowmen and some ten staffieri, all of them granted special licence to bear arms. Most came from the country or provincial towns; one, probably ‘Andrea malfatto’ (‘Misshapen Andrew’), was the son of an urban working-class neighbour of Lorenzo’s, who reported to the tax officials in 1480 that his son Andrea ‘goes, armed, behind Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo’.46 Lorenzo repaid the loyalty of many of these men, as the Protocolli in particular make clear, even after they had left his service. In a typical letter, he ordered an agent in 1492 ‘that he should give fifteen florins to the sister of Paulozo, the bodyguard, and a gown and a sur-coat’, a generous gift.47 These Laurentian staffieri included two men named Margutte and Morgante — one does not know if Luigi Pulci’s art in the comic epic, the Morgante, here imitates life, or vice versa — and the horseman called Salvalaglio, who led the band, sword in hand.48 Several letters to Piero de’ Medici by ‘our Salvalaglo’, whose name means 42

Letter of 29 April 1472; MaP XXVIII, 19.

43

‘Io sono per condurre parecchi pace mediante le lettere vostre ma e’ ci son molti che s’ingegnano quanto e’ possono di disturbare’: 3 April 1484; MaP XXXIX, 125. 44 4 June 1484, in Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lettere, (1998), 411.

VII:

1482–1484, ed. by Michael Mallett

45 Orsola Gori Pasta, ‘Inediti Laurenziani’, in Consorterie Politiche e Mutamenti Istituzionali in età laurenziana, ed. by Maria Augusta Morelli Timpanaro and others (Florence: Silvana Editoriale, 1992), p. 244. 46 ‘Va drieto al Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo, armato’: ASF, Catasto 1017 (i), fol. 112v. On Lorenzo’s retinue, see Alison Brown, ‘Lorenzo and Public Opinion in Florence: The Problem of Opposition’, in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo, ed. by Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 61–85 (pp. 83–84). 47

Protocolli, p. 488.

48

See my ‘An Early Reference to Luigi Pulci’s Morgante (August 1478)’, Rinascimento, s. 2, 33 (1993), 209–11.

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something like ‘Garlicpot’, survive, one of them mentioning ‘Morgante’s business’.49 These were violent men, often in trouble with the law and yet duly protected by the Medici. When Piero de’ Medici wrote on behalf of an ex-retainer, Papino, his own Bardi kinsman replied that ‘[Papino’s] own wickedness aside, he’s behaved towards me in everything I do not as a subject and familiar but as my mortal enemy’.50 This is not the occasion to demonstrate the point, but for generations the Medici regime had relied on hundreds of such country retainers for military support during various crises in 1434, 1466 and 1478. It is in MaP above all that one can identify and get to know these rustic bravi. If Laurentian authority and control depended in part on such relationships, Lorenzo’s self-fashioning as a noble youth able to join in the pastimes of Italy’s ruling families also required a retinue of less bellicose followers. Everywhere in the Medici archive we meet members of his emerging mini-court; for example ‘master Giovanni our panteraio’, a specialist in hunting with nets whose interests Lorenzo pursued.51 To another such figure, Malerba (‘Rampant Weed’), the inaptly nicknamed chief cowherd of his model farm at Poggio a Caiano who is frequently mentioned in his correspondence, Lorenzo wrote in 1484 ‘that he should stop work on the house of the master of the hunting nets and do the sluice gate’.52 We encounter, too, Galletto and Guelfo the falconers,53 and can read the quite polished letters of Apollonio Baldovino, who was in charge of the young Lorenzo’s impressive string of racehorses. Apollonio appears, disgustingly drunk, in his master’s satirical Simposio.54 Lorenzo de’ Medici liked to laugh, not least at the expense of others, it must be said. He twice warmly commended to the Marquis of Mantua ‘our Greco, a Florentine and very much my friend’. Apparently a buffoon, who had been the 49

28 September 1494, 7 October 1494 and 11 October 1494; MaP XVIII, 297, 317; 125. See also Protocolli, p. 284 and throughout; and Brown, ‘Lorenzo and Public Opinion’, p. 83. CXXXVIII, 50

‘Oltra dette sue scelerità, s’è portato inverso di me non come sudito e familare ma in ogni mia facenda come inimico mortale’: Tomaso Gualterotti dei Bardi to Piero, 9 June 1492; ASF, Carte Strozziane, s. I, 3, fol. 146. 51

Protocolli, p. 152; also pp. 193, 199, 259, 261, 287.

52

Protocolli, p. 287. Malerba’s name was in fact Piero di Domenico di Angelo da Scarperia. 53

Protocolli, pp. 134, 136, 139, 140, 220, 225, 230, 296, 329, 344, 470. On whom see now Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lettere, IX: 1485–1486, ed. by Humfrey Butters, 132. On 8 April 1486, Clarice Orsini wrote to Francesco Cambini on behalf of ‘Gallecto fanconero de Lorenzo et castellano de Feletto nostra cosa’: ASF, Spedale di S. Maria Nuova 1254, fol. 102r. 54 21 August 1476, 13 April 1477; MaP XXXIII, 667; XXXV, 435; Lorenzo de’ Medici, Simposio, ed. by Mario Martelli (Florence: Olschki, 1966), p. 129. See Michael Mallett, ‘Horse-Racing and Politics in Lorenzo’s Florence’, in Lorenzo the Magnificent, pp. 253–62.

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familiar of Cosimo his grandfather, Greco ‘is a most pleasing and amusing man […] now famous and acknowledged throughout the world’.55 The cleric Matteo Franco also played the fool for Lorenzo’s brigata, his group of familiars, and has left some well-known and brilliant facetious letters which have been published in an exemplary edition.56 A much graver priest also close to the Medici circle was Lorenzo’s confessor, Don Guido, whose several letters in the family collection repay reading. Crucial to Lorenzo’s aura of authority towards the end of his life was not only the Medici regime’s reputation as what Benedetto Dei called a ‘governo santo’, a holy government, but his own almost saintly status.57 Supporters such as Don Guido had come sincerely to believe, as he wrote in his little known commonplace book, that ‘we owe everything both to God and his instrument, Lorenzo’.58 To listen to the voices of really obscure persons, or to those of little known people who sometimes turn out to have been important, is interesting in itself, and may tell one a good deal about Lorenzo de’ Medici and his position in Florence. One final example will serve to illustrate how the Medici archive — if squeezed, teased and pressed (others might say interrogated) — will continue not only to delight but further to surprise future generations. Among its tens of thousands of documents there is a short letter of 20 March 1476 signed ‘Chapitano, muratore al Pog[gi]o a Chaiano’ (‘The Captain, builder, at Poggio a Caiano’), concerning hydraulic works at this estate recently acquired by the young Lorenzo.59 According to the printed catalogue of MaP, the index of which is indispensable but not without flaw, this ‘Capitano’ wrote no other letters. However, on closer scrutiny, it emerges that a certain Domenico di Francesco, ‘detto Capitano’, sent four letters to Lorenzo, 55

The two passages read: ‘Il Greco nostro fiorentino et amicissimo mio’ and ‘è uno homo tanto piacevole et faceto […] notissimo et famoso horamai per tucto el mondo’: 20 May 1489 and 18 October 1489, both letters to Francesco Gonzaga; Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga 1085, fols 128r, 129r. See too Giovanni Praticò, ‘Lorenzo il Magnifico e i Gonzaga’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 107 (1949), 155–71 (pp. 170–71). 56

Matteo Franco, Lettere, ed. by Giovanna Frosini (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1990). 57

For Dei’s phrase, and in general, see my ‘Lorenzo […], amico degli uomini da bene: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Oligarchy’, in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo, pp. 43–60 (pp. 55–58). 58

‘Tandem da Dio et dallo strumento suo Laurentio ogni cosa abbiamo’: Florence, Biblioteca Moreniana, Fondo Palagi 267, fol. 5r, a remarkable source my knowledge of which I owe to the kindness of Robert Gaston. All the letters are addressed to Lorenzo unless otherwise indicated: received 10 July 1479; MaP XXII, 333; 11 July 1477, and to Piero di Lorenzo received 7 May 1490; Map XXV, 514, 620; 2 April 1477, 3 October 1477, and 13 December 1477; MaP XXXV, 357, 788, 945; 14 July 1478; MaP XXXVI, 986; 3 May 1479, MaP XXXVII, 294. 59

MaP XXXIII, 31. Philip E. Foster published the letter in La Villa di Lorenzo de’ Medici a Poggio a Caiano (Poggio a Caiano: Comune di Poggio a Caiano, 1992), p. 58.

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and a comparison shows that all five are written in the same confident and quite polished cursive hand. The four letters signed Domenico and dated between 6 June 1478 and 24 March 1479 all report to Lorenzo in a briskly professional way on the building and repair of fortresses at the provincial towns of Borgo San Sepolcro, Empoli and Valiano.60 Without a doubt, this Domenico di Francesco was the military engineer, ‘il Capitano’, whose Florentine career is largely unknown though his earlier Roman years have been amply documented by architectural historians.61 Upon his return from Rome, we know that Domenico took part in the construction of the fortress of Volterra after 1472, and he is described by none other than Giuliano da Sangallo as an ‘architect’ in that celebrated architect’s sole surviving letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici of 1486.62 In the next year ‘il Capitano’ joined the two famous military architects Francione and La Cecca in the design and building of the new fortress at Sarzana, the taking of which had inspired the composition of Isaac’s Alla Battaglia.63 During the Pazzi War, moreover, it now emerges that this experienced and sophisticated engineer-architect was working for the Florentines and reporting to Lorenzo, who at that time sat on a republican committee responsible for Florence’s defences. To come across five letters from the hand of a not undistinguished fifteenthcentury architect in a well-known archival collection is in itself gratifying, seeing how few such artists’ letters survive. But these ‘new’ letters also document with some precision Lorenzo’s intimacy with this engineer, and reinforce one’s growing sense that Lorenzo enjoyed similar close, even collaborative and creative, relationships with other artisan familiars, men such as the woodworker-engineer Francione who worked for him as an architect, and with artists such as Bertoldo, scultore, whose death in 1491 at Poggio a Caiano caused him, according to a reliable witness, ‘much … sorrow, because he loved him as much as any of his familiars’.64 60

6 June 1478, 23 July 1478, 23 December 1478, 24 March 1479; MaP XXXVI, 714, 1029, 1401, 318. See Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio Mediceo avanti il Principato: Inventario, 4 vols (Rome: Ministero dell’Interno, 1951–63). 61

Stefano Borsi, Francesco Quinterio and Corinna Vasiü Vatovec, Maestri fiorentini nei cantieri romani del Quattrocento, ed. by Silvia Danesi Squarzina (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1989), pp. 214–23. 62

Bartolomeo Valori writes in a letter to Lorenzo that he has spoken with ‘el Capitano muratore’ in Volterra ‘dove si fa la scarpa al cassero vecchio’: 5 March 1473; MaP XXIX, 141. Earlier he had been one of four master woodworkers employed as military engineers during the siege: ASF, Balìa, 35, fols 63r, 144v–45r. Sangallo’s letter is published by Gustavo Uzielli, Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli (Florence: Stabilimento Tipografico Fiorentino, 1892), pp. 123–25. 63 Daniela Lamberini, ‘Architetti e architettura militare per il Magnifico’, in Lorenzo il Magnifico, pp. 407–25 (p. 417). 64 Published by Francis William Kent, ‘Bertoldo sculptore and Lorenzo de’ Medici’, Burlington Magazine, 134 (1992), 248–49. For Francione, see my Lorenzo de’ Medici, ch. 3, and throughout; and Maestri fiorentini, pp. 176–97.

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They make it clear, indeed, that young Lorenzo’s formation as a patron and amateur of the arts was in part owed to such contacts with comparatively obscure artistartisans.65 ‘Il Capitano’s’ letter from Valiano of 23 December 1478 conveys how that process worked, how the older engineer in a sense deferred to Lorenzo’s judgement, probably sincerely since the young man knew about military architecture, while seeking, however, further to instruct him. ‘I believe I can make something of this place for you’, he concluded, ‘and if Your Magnificence would like to see a design, or model, of what’s been decided, let me know, and I’ll send it willingly because in my opinion this is a place to cherish, which only those who have seen it are in a position to judge’.66 ‘Il Capitano’s’ last phrase — his insistence that seeing is believing — might apply equally well to the Medici archive itself. Replete with its gran maestri, its big shots, and its obscure voices, it is an internet crisscrossed by personal and social threads which await our untangling, a well-surveyed territory retaining pockets, even expanses, of terra incognita that beg to be further explored. This is true of other such major collections of Renaissance letters which survive in Italian archives, above all in northern cities such as Milan, Mantua and Modena. Well known to diplomatic and political historians, and to scholars of Renaissance art, they have yet many secrets to yield. For Renaissance letters were not only the medium through which men and women exchanged information and negotiated favours. The very act of letter writing, spinning its webs of social interdependence, political authority and cultural meaning, was a means of self-fashioning for clients as much as for their masters.67

65

As I argue in my Lorenzo de’ Medici, esp. ch. 3.

66

‘Credo farvi buon frutto per questo luogho, e se paresse alla Vostra Magnificenza ch’io vi mandassi un disegno di quello s’è ordinato, o volessi modello, datemene aviso, lo farò volentieri perchè questo mi pare luogho da stimarlo assai, e chi no’ll à veduto no’llo può gudichare’: 23 December 1478; MaP XXXVI, 1401. These letters are published in Francis W. Kent, ‘Il Mediceo avanti il Principato al tempo di Lorenzo’ in I Medici in Rete, ed. by Irene Cotta and Francesca Klein (Florence: Olschki, 2003), pp. 123–41. 67

See Carolyn James, The Letters of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (1481–1510) (Florence: Olschki, 2002).

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I

f Castruccio Castracani had enjoyed singular good fortune in the twelve years of his meteoric rise from obscurity to the position of one of the leading rulers of Italy in his time, his progeny was, from the very moment of his death in September 1328, to be plagued with equally consistent bad luck. By the end of the fourteenth century, none of his descendants in a direct male line was still alive, despite the large number of his sons. And even the titles and possessions he had bequeathed to his heirs seemed to bring them nothing but misfortune. It was as though his own remarkable destiny had to be compensated for or expiated by the rapid decline of the family on which he had set such high hopes. His children were to suffer throughout their lives from the legacy of his greatness. Their efforts to regain their position in Lucca led them to violence and intrigue and eventually brought about their ruin. Lacking their father’s political skill, but imbued with his cruelty and ambition, they never forgot the loss of their dukedom (conferred on Castruccio by Ludwig of Bavaria in November 1327),1 yet in their attempts to recover it stumbled from one disastrous conspiracy to another. Scornfully described in the Lucchese chronicles of the period as the duchini, or little dukes, Castruccio’s sons remained on the fringes of their city’s history, trying to grasp every opportunity that its troubled course offered them of returning to the power they felt to be their right. In the closing months of 1328 when Ludwig, partly out of financial need2 and 1

Louis Green, Castruccio Castracani: A Study on the Origins and Character of a Fourteenth-Century Italian Despotism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 221–22. 2

According to Giovanni Villani’s Cronica, Ludwig of Bavaria levied a subsidy of 100,000 florins from the Pisans and one of 150,000 florins from Lucca and its contado in October 1328: Cronica, ed. by F. G. Dragomanni (Florence: Coen, 1844–45), X, 104. That these figures are somewhat exaggerated may be gauged from Archivio di Stato in Lucca (hereafter ASL), Diplomatico Tarpea, 30 November 1328, in which the Emperor’s financial demands on Lucca are detailed. This document is published in A. N. Cianelli, ‘Dissertazioni sopra la storia

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partly from resentment, real or feigned, at the attempts of both Castruccio and his son Arrigo to supplant imperial authority in Pisa, stripped their ducal title from them,3 the younger Castracani were still nominally under the guardianship of their mother, of Neri Saggina, of their great uncle Niccolò, of their maternal uncle Perotto dello Strego (or Streghi), of Lazzaro Saggina, Master of the Order of San Jacopo of Altopascio, of Princivalle del Veglio and of Enrico Boccadivacca.4 The first two of these, however, together with Castruccio’s last chancellor,5 Giovanni di Guido Ranieri, had been given a particular responsibility by the late Duke’s will, which they appear to have shared with Niccolò, the latter’s uncle. It was Niccolò Castracani who, in association with Ser Giovanni Ranieri, Ser Giunta Tone of Pistoia6 (another chancellery notary) and Dettoro Lieto, borrowed three thousand florins from Pagano dal Portico and Jacopo Sbarra in Pisa on 15 September 1328,7 presumably to finance the establishment of Arrigo Castracani’s government there. And in the following November, Neri Saggina was to be singled out to accompany his wards and their mother to their exile in Pontremoli (in the Magra Valley) and to incur with them the condemnation for treason meted out by the Commune of Pisa for their attempt to seize power in that city in September.8 The mistakes that lost Arrigo and his brothers both the Emperor’s favour and their patrimony appear, therefore, to have been at least partly inspired by the advice that they received from this group of guardians, differences in opinion among whom may well have explained the inconsistencies in the action of the duchini in the critical period following their father’s death.

lucchese’, in Memorie e documenti per servire all’istoria del principato lucchese (Lucca: Bertini, 1813–16), I, 259–62. For the year beginning 1 December 1328, they were: 40,000 florins to Ludwig; 36,000 florins for the maintenance of 300 knights; 7000 florins for 460 infantry; and 10,000 florins for the salary of the imperial vicar and vice-vicar (93,000 florins in all). Even so, it is clear that, by transferring three hundred of his knights to Lucchese service, Ludwig would have been 76,000 florins better off as a result of his assertion of his control over the city. By extracting comparable sums from Pisa and Pistoia, he would have met some though (as is evident from the desertion of 800 of his knights for non-payment of their salaries on 29 October 1328) not all of his financial needs. 3

On this and on subsequent developments in Lucca late in 1328 and early in 1329, see Louis Green, Lucca under Many Masters: A Fourteenth-Century Italian Commune in Crisis (1328–1342) (Florence: Olschki, 1995), pp. 17–23. 4

See the terms of Castruccio’s will in E. Lazzareschi, ‘Documenti della signoria di Castruccio Castracani conservati nel R. Archivio di Stato in Lucca’, Atti della R. Accademia lucchese, n.s. 3 (1934), 281–409 (pp. 401–02). 5

Lazzareschi, ‘Documenti’, pp. 402, 406.

6

Lazzareschi, ‘Documenti’, p. 402.

7

ASL, Diplomatico Tarpea, 15 September 1328.

8

Villani, Cronica, X, 104.

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Once out of Lucca, however, Castruccio’s widow and his sons were left more to their own devices, though presumably still influenced by their companion in banishment, Neri Saggina. Isolated in this way, they evidently appeared less threatening to Ludwig of Bavaria who, in December 1328, decided to overlook their past offences in an effort to reconcile them to the loss of their former dignities. In compensation for these, on the seventeenth of that month, he granted Pina, Arrigo, Vallerano and Giovanni Castracani the castle of Monteggiori which dominated the pass between Camaiore and the coast and lay close to the town of Pietrasanta in which their Streghi relatives had extensive property holdings. He also assigned them an annual pension of four thousand florins, to be derived from its revenues, supplemented from his own treasury if these did not reach that amount, and decreed that they should be exempt from all taxes. These concessions,9 however, do not seem to have appeased Castruccio’s heirs, who had no sooner returned to the vicinity of Lucca than they began once again to intrigue to recover their power. In March 1329, they came into conflict with the Poggio family, some of whom had been exiled by their father in 1321 but who had now returned to their native city.10 The ensuing disturbances brought the Emperor back from Pisa. On 18 March, he restored order but only after a section of Lucca, extending from the Canton Bretto to the other side of the Piazza San Michele, had been burnt down. Following the re-establishment of his authority, Ludwig expelled the Poggio and confined the duchini to their castle at Monteggiori. However, one of their relatives, Francesco Castracani, who was able to furnish the Emperor with a much needed gift of twenty-two thousand florins, was rewarded with the vicariate of Lucca.11 This previously rather obscure figure thus suddenly assumed prominence in Lucchese affairs. He was a grandson of Lutterio,12 the brother of the Castracane di Ruggero who had been Castruccio’s grandfather. Despite his kinship with the lord and Duke of Lucca, he seems to have held no important office while the latter was in power, being recorded at that time only as viscount and patron of the monastery of San Salvatore in Sesto.13 Now, however, he emerged effectively as a rival of his 9 ASL, Diplomatico Tarpea, 17 December 1328; published in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Legum Sectio IV (Hanover: Hahn, 1914–27), VI, Pt 1, 439–40. 10

On their exile, see Green, Castruccio Castracani, pp. 94–96.

11

Villani, Cronica, X, 122.

12

His father was Gualtieri or Gualtuccio, son of Lutterio: see ASL, Archivio Notarile 69, 5 August 1320. On that date, he acted, together with Castruccio, as executor of the will of his uncle, Puccino. On this, see also Green, Lucca under Many Masters, p. 23, n. 25. 13

ASL, Archivio Notarile 93, Register (ii), 20 August 1328. F.L. Laganà states that he held office under Castruccio as Podestà of Buggiano in 1327 and vicar of Val di Nievole in 1328, but these positions were in fact occupied by Franceschino di Terio degli Interminelli who was grandson of Betto degli Interminelli and not the same person as Francesco Castracani: ‘Francesco Castracani’, in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1979), XX, 210.

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distant cousins and, notwithstanding his blood relationship with them, became an obstacle to the realization of their aims. When Ludwig of Bavaria left Pisa on 11 April,14 shortly after he had pacified Lucca, the two branches of the Castracani family found themselves in conflict. Francesco, as vicar, had to sustain the Emperor’s authority while Castruccio’s sons, with an opportunism that was to become characteristic of them, made common cause with the company of Ludwig’s former mercenaries who, under the captaincy of Marco Visconti, had set up camp on the Cerruglio, in a hill-fort put up by their father during the Altopascio campaign in 1325. Encouraged by the Florentines, these knights managed to win over the garrison of the Augusta, the citadel of Lucca, also erected by Castruccio,15 so gaining access to that fortress and then, evidently to lend some kind of justification to their intended seizure of Lucca, invited Arrigo and his brothers to join them. Francesco Castracani, in the meantime, with the Emperor no longer present to back him, saw his power slip away as his fellow citizens chose to accept submission to the German mercenaries in preference to the prospect of a sack of the city which resistance might bring. For a moment, it seemed that Castruccio’s sons might regain their state through the unlikely intervention of this company of soldiers of fortune. But while Marco Visconti and his knights had a certain sympathy for the plight of the disinherited Castracani, their real aim was to make money out of their fortuitous acquisition of Lucca. True to a secret agreement they had reached with Pino della Tosa, they offered to sell the city to Florence for eighty thousand florins, stipulating only that the duchini should be restored to an honoured position in it, though not to their former lordship over the town. When, however, the terms of this proposed cession were put to the Florentine councils which had to ratify them, Pino’s kinsman Simone secured their rejection. The transaction consequently fell through and the mercenaries holding Lucca were left to search for another purchaser.16 At the same time as they had given their support to the undermining of imperial authority in their own city, the partisans of Castruccio’s sons also attempted to overthrow it in Pistoia. Led by Filippo Tedici and Lazzaro Saggina, Master of the Order of Altopascio, they broke into the town and held it for a few hours before they were expelled by its vicar, Andrea da Chiaravalle, and the opposing Panciatichi faction.17 By this attack, they in fact precipitated the agreement between the latter 14 According to Villani, he returned from Lucca on 3 April after crushing the Poggio and then, on 11 April, left Pisa for Lombardy with the intention (which was never realized) of returning: Cronica, X, 122, 126. 15

On the building of the Augusta and on his fortifications on Il Cerruglio, see Green, Castruccio Castracani, pp. 105–112, 166. 16

Villani, Cronica, X, 127. See also Green, Lucca under Many Masters, pp. 24–25.

17

Villani, Cronica, X, 123; ‘Storie Pistoresi’, ed. by S.A. Barbi, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new edn (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1907–27), XI, Pt 5, 132–33. According to the latter chronicler, Tedici, Saggina and their supporters had been invited to intervene in Pistoia by the Vergiolesi, but were opposed by the Panciatichi. Villani, however, places the

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and the Florentines which was to lead, on 29 May, to the return of Pistoia from the Ghibelline to the Guelph camp, thus ending any hope of a restoration there of Castracani rule. The events which followed Ludwig of Bavaria’s departure from Tuscany therefore failed to realize the hopes Castruccio’s sons may have entertained of profiting by his absence to regain their position in the area embraced by their former dukedom. Notwithstanding their inability to exploit what was, in fact, their last real opportunity to recover their inheritance, they continued their intrigues which were aimed now principally at the city of Lucca. After this had been bought, on 2 September 1329 by Gherardino Spinola of Genoa for a mere sixty thousand florins,18 they attempted to seize it on the morning of 27 December when their partisans and the troops they had engaged easily overran the town which had been taken unawares by their sudden assault in the aftermath of its Christmas festivities. Gherardino, however, who continued to hold the Augusta, was able to rally support and, issuing from that citadel in the afternoon, easily defeated the intruders. He then exiled those who had taken part in this uprising, enlisted a new body of mercenaries who were loyal to him and generally strengthened his hold on the city.19 After Gherardino had been compelled by a Florentine siege of Lucca to relinquish his sovereignty over it in February 1331 to King John of Bohemia,20 that ruler took care to have Castruccio’s sons taken to Parma21 (which, together with Modena, Reggio and many other cities, had also accepted his lordship) so as to keep them there as hostages to their good behaviour and that of their supporters. When, however, the Bohemian monarch was on the point of leaving Italy in September 1333, the duchini escaped from that city and, having gathered together their partisans, entered Lucca on the twenty-fifth of that month. They quickly gained control of the town but, as in December 1329, failed to secure admission to the Augusta. This enabled King John, who made the journey from Parma in forced marches in only two days, to bring his troops in through that fortress and drive out the Castracani and their faction.22 It was Vergiolesi and Panciatichi in the same faction, together with the Muli and Gualfreducci. Exactly when this incursion into Pistoia occurred is not clear. Villani vaguely describes it as having been ‘in quegli giorni’, immediately after giving the date 3 April 1329, in the previous chapter. The author of the ‘Storie Pistoresi’ places it chronologically after Ludwig of Bavaria’s departure from Tuscany. Since the date on which the Pistoians made their agreement with the Florentines was 29 May 1329 (Villani, Cronica, X, 128), it must have taken place some time before this, probably in mid to late April. 18 Green, Lucca under Many Masters, p. 29. See also ASL, Capitoli 30, pp. 73–100, Diplomatico Tarpea, 8 September 1329. 19

Villani, Cronica, X, 147.

20

Green, Lucca under Many Masters, pp. 37–38.

21

Villani, Cronica, X, 171.

22

Villani, Cronica, X, 225.

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ironic that, in 1333, the events of 1329 had so closely repeated themselves and that what had defeated the late Duke’s sons on both occasions was the citadel erected by their father. As the Lucchese chronicler Giovanni Sercambi put it, ‘Castruccio had the said castle built in order to be able to dominate Lucca, and now it was evident that this castle was the reason why his sons were excluded from the lordship of Lucca’.23 King John of Bohemia, in relinquishing Lucca, left it in the hands of his faithful supporters from Parma, Orlando, Pietro and Marsiglio Rossi.24 Their hold on the city was, however, precarious because of the efforts of that monarch’s former enemies, and particularly of Florence and Verona, to partition the territories he had conceded to them. Despite the condemnation of Arrigo Castracani for his attempt to seize power over their newly acquired city in September 1333, they therefore chose to negotiate with him to secure his acceptance of their rule. What immediately prompted their overtures to him was that, in fleeing from Lucca, he had managed to gain control of the town of Barga, to the north in the Garfagnana. In order to recover this, the Rossi, on 1 November, obtained the consent of their commune’s governing committee of Anziani, augmented by other leading citizens, to reach an agreement with the Castracani,25 which would induce them to yield this disputed place to their government. Such an agreement was, as a result of this, concluded in Pisa at the beginning of the next year.26 Following it, Castruccio’s heirs were once again to enjoy the favour of the rulers of Lucca, so much so, in fact, that on 30 October 1334, Arrigo Castracani was allowed to marry Costanza, the daughter of Orlando Rossi, in Parma where, according to the terms of his reconciliation with her family, he had undertaken to live.27 The price paid for the cancellation of their previous condemnation by King John of Bohemia was nevertheless a high one, involving a virtual exile from their native city and an abandonment, for the time being, of their claims over it. In the long term, it was a price the Castracani were unwilling to pay and it soon became clear that they saw the period in which the Rossi maintained their unsteady hold over Lucca as a mere prelude to a resumption of their schemes to regain control of the commune of which their father had been lord. By contrast, their kinsman Francesco, who lacked their overweening ambition, had elected to follow a more cautious policy of 23 ‘Castruccio fè fare lo dicto chastello per potere signoreggiare Luccha, e ora si vede che tal chastello è stato chagione che i dicti figluoli siano excluzi della signoria di Luccha’: Giovanni Sercambi, Le croniche, ed. by S. Bongi (Lucca: Giusti, 1892), I, Pt 1, ch. 123, pp. 85–86. 24

Green, Lucca under Many Masters, p. 57.

25

ASL, Anziani avanti la libertà 4, pp. 20–23.

26

See Green, Lucca under Many Masters, p. 61, n. 68.

27

‘Chronicon Parmense ab anno MXXVII usque ad annum MCCCXXXVIII’, ed. by G. Bonazzi, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new edn, IX (1902), Pt 9, 239–40.

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exploiting the instability of the situation in Lucca to secure for himself a position of influence in it and its territories. Having witnessed the collapse of the regional state created by Castruccio, the vicissitudes since 1328 of his sons, Arrigo, Vallerano and Giovanni,28 and the unfortunate end of his son-in-law, Filippo Tedici, who had failed in his attempted coup aimed at recovering Pistoia in 1329 and died fighting as a mere mercenary in the village of Popiglio in September 1331,29 he chose instead to ingratiate himself with the successive overlords of his city, intriguing against them only when their power appeared to be weakening and thus seeking to obtain the trust of those who were to substitute for them. After his quick loss of the vicariate granted to him in March 1328, he managed to recoup his fortunes by lending his support to Gherardino Spinola when the latter bought Lucca in September 1329. He accompanied that ruler to Montecatini in the summer of 1330 when that stronghold was being besieged by the Florentines, but while there quarrelled with him. In an ensuing brawl, Gherardino had been wounded by a member of the Interminelli clan, in other words by one of Francesco’s relatives who was presumably also one of his supporters. As a result, Francesco himself had been arrested and imprisoned in Lucca.30 But this had occurred when Spinola’s ability to hold that city had been waning. Once King John of Bohemia had replaced him, Francesco Castracani worked his way back into that monarch’s favour, taking advantage of the latter’s need for money before his departure for Germany by obtaining from him, on 5 October 1333, the vicariate of Coreglia.31 Possession of this in fact gave Francesco a territorial base in Garfagnana, thus laying the foundations of a policy he was to pursue henceforth, aimed not so much at gaining control over Lucca as at establishing himself as the governor of a virtually independent province in its contado. There was therefore a difference between the goals he set himself and those which Castruccio’s sons sought unsuccessfully to achieve. However, in the situation created by the decline of the capacity of the Rossi to maintain their lordship over Lucca, there was a temporary coincidence of interests between the two branches of the Castracani family, both of which saw opportunities in exploiting to their advantage what they sensed to be an imminent change of regime. King John of Bohemia, in placing the Rossi in control of both Parma and Lucca, had hoped that the combined resources of these two city-states would enable them to be more effectively defended than they could be as separate communes. However, the actual consequence of this union was that it increased the number of the enemies intent on acquiring a share of their territories. Primarily these were Mastino della Scala, the 28

For details of Castruccio’s children and their approximate age, see Green, Castruccio Castracani, pp. 190–91. 29

Villani, Cronica, X, 128, 184, 189.

30

Villani, Cronica, X, 155.

31

Cianelli, I, 285–87.

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ruler of Verona, who schemed to take Parma, and the Republic of Florence which, by the terms of a league concluded at Lerici in January 1334 between it, the Scaligeri, the Visconti of Milan, the Gonzaga of Mantua and the Este of Ferrara, was to be allowed to conquer Lucca.32 As a result of this agreement in effect to have their dominions partitioned between their neighbours, the Rossi faced a war on two fronts. By the spring of 1335, it had become clear that they could not hope to win this conflict, in the face, in particular, of a sustained Veronese offensive in the contado of Parma. In fact, in June of that year, they were compelled to yield that city to Mastino della Scala.33 This left Lucca, their remaining possession, all the more vulnerable to attack by the Florentines. But at this point the issue of what was to become of it was unexpectedly confused by the decision of Mastino to try to prevent it from falling into the hands of his ally in order to be able to acquire it for himself. While protracted negotiations proceeded in Verona between him and the Florentine ambassador, Giovanni Mori, supposedly to set the terms on which the Rossi would surrender Lucca to Florence, the groundwork was in fact being laid for a Veronese seizure of the town and its territories. That the Castracani had a part in the intrigues being conducted by Mastino to wrest Lucca from the Rossi on the pretext that it was to be ceded to Florence, is suggested by the provisions of one of the proposals submitted to Mori, which included the condition that the Florentines should agree to the vicariate of Barga and the village of Monteggiori being granted to Castruccio’s sons and the vicariate of Coreglia being retained by their kinsman, Francesco.34 Exactly when they first became involved in these negotiations is uncertain. However, it is clear that, by the beginning of October 1335 when Francesco Castracani openly rebelled against the Rossi, they had decided to throw in their lot with Mastino della Scala, perhaps at the prompting of Spinetta Malaspina, the leading member of the great landed family of Lunigiana, then a close associate of the Veronese ruler.35 It was not long after this that the Rossi, realizing that their position in Lucca was hopeless, offered lordship over it, on 26 November 1335, to Mastino.36 He then added the city to the many others he controlled. However, his betrayal of the Florentines and his conflict with Venice soon led him into a ruinous war which 32

Green, Lucca under Many Masters, p. 61.

33

Green, Lucca under Many Masters, pp. 70–71.

34

Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASF), Capitoli 41, fol. 56v. This proposal is undated. My grounds for believing it was drawn up between June and October 1335 are given in Green, Lucca under Many Masters, p. 73, esp. n. 119. 35

See ASF, Capitoli 41, fol. 55r; ASL, Anziani avanti la libertà 8, pp. 19–20. Francesco Castracani claimed the reason for breaking with the Rossi was that they were about to deprive him of his vicariate of Coreglia on the grounds that he was plotting with Spinetta Malaspina and the Guelphs. On this, and on preceding developments, see Green, Lucca under Many Masters, pp. 73–74. 36

ASL, Anziani avanti la libertà 8, p. 20.

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ended in 1339 with his previously extensive dominions much diminished and reduced, in effect, to Verona, Vicenza, Parma, Lucca and their territories.37 When Mastino had been at the height of his power on first acquiring Lucca, he had been able to satisfy the claims made on him by the Castracani with only moderate concessions to them. Francesco had been restored to his vicariate of Coreglia, and Arrigo and his brothers, on 3 May 1336, granted a pension of three hundred florins per month,38 on condition that they remained outside Lucca under Mastino’s watchful eye in Verona. They continued to nurse their ambitions, encouraged no doubt by the hope that, as Veronese domination of their city was undermined by the crumbling of the Scaligeri empire in northern Italy, new opportunities would present themselves for them to re-assert their claim to recover their inheritance. Francesco, meanwhile, also profited from the weakening of the authority of Mastino della Scala, particularly in the contado of Lucca, as war, the devastation it caused, and the high taxation it necessitated, sapped the support his regime had previously enjoyed for the protection it afforded the Commune from conquest by Florence. In the closing stages of the Scaligeri dominance over the city, its vicariates, entrusted to powerful men, such as Spinetta Malaspina and Francesco Castracani, acquired a greater independence, a circumstance from which the latter benefited by extending his political influence beyond his own immediate territories. In December 1340, he secured from the abbey of Sesto, of which he had been viscount since 1328, the right to be protector for seven years, together with his cousins, Gerio and Ciuccio del fu Puccio Castracani, of its considerable land holdings39 in the area to the south-east of Lucca where its contado met those of Florence and Pisa. Roughly at the same time, at various dates in 1339 and 1340, he also built up, through purchase, a bloc of property at Bargiglio and the neighbouring village of Cune around a hilltop fortress previously held by the Castracani.40 The creation of enclaves of this kind in the area around Lucca, over which he could assert his control, was, for Francesco, a prelude to intrigues, aimed at undermining yet again what he doubtless saw as a faltering power in order to help bring about its downfall for his own advantage. In February 1341, he plotted with the Pisans to secure the overthrow of the prevailing regime in Lucca, arranging for them to send troops to enable him to take over the city.41 When this conspiracy was discovered, he was, together with Ritrilla degli Uberti and several others, condemned as a rebel for subverting the government of the commune to place it under his

37

For an account of this, see Green, Lucca under Many Masters, pp. 82–101.

38

ASL, Camarlingo Generale 21, chs 95r–92r.

39 ASL, Diplomatico, Biblioteca San Ponziano, 12 December 1340. For more detail on the location of these lands, see Green, Lucca under Many Masters, p. 118. 40

ASL, Archivio Guinigi 3, chs 1r–129v.

41

Villani, Cronica, XI, 124.

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domination.42 His stronghold of Coreglia was attacked by Lucchese forces on 16 April and taken by them on 15 June.43 He himself then fled to Milan to seek the support of Luchino Visconti and persuaded Arrigo and Giovanni Castracani to leave Verona to join the troops which had been given him by that ruler and by the Gonzaga of Mantua. When these proved to be too few in number to enable Francesco to recover Coreglia, he and Castruccio’s sons took refuge in Pisa in the hope that this commune might be induced to intervene in Lucchese affairs on their side.44 For the time being, their pleas fell on deaf ears, though other developments, following soon after, led them eventually to receive a more positive response. On 22 May, 1341, a coup by the Correggio in Parma had deprived Mastino della Scala of his control over that city. Realizing that he would be unable to hold Lucca with that link between his Veronese dominions and his one Tuscan possession no longer in his hands, he resolved to satisfy the desire of the Florentines to acquire it by selling it to them. After a period of negotiation, the price of two hundred and fifty thousand florins for its surrender was agreed upon and the city formally handed over on 11 August 1341. Before that transfer of sovereignty could be effected, however, the Pisans, dreading the loss of their own independence if Lucca were to become a Florentine possession, decided, on 28 July, to invade the territory of the neighbouring commune, using for this purpose not only their own troops but also the forces mustered by Francesco Castracani and Castruccio’s sons.45 By 22 August, these had succeeded in encircling Lucca and they then maintained its siege until it yielded to them on 4 July of the following year. The Pisans were able to keep at bay, for this period, the armies sent to relieve them because of the support they received not only from members of the Castracani faction in the city, but also from Milan, Mantua and Parma. They prevailed in two critical battles in October 1341 and May 1342,46 and generally pursued their goal of gaining control of Lucca with more energy and resolve than the Florentines did in trying to retain it. Whilst at the beginning of this campaign, there was close collaboration between them and the Castracani, as it became clear that, even among potential Pisan allies in the besieged town there was opposition to the restoration of that family to power, a divergence of interests 42

ASL, Camarlingo Generale 18, ch. 80r.

43 ASL, Camarlingo Generale 93 (ii), 13 June 1341; and ASL, Anziani avanti la libertà 15, pp. 19–20. On this, see also T. del Carlo, ‘I’l conte Francesco Castracane e le vicende politiche nel suo tempo’, in Studi storici lucchesi (Lucca: Crocolo, 1886), pp. 80–81 and G. Lera, ‘Le fortificazioni militari di Coreglia degli Antelminelli’, in Castruccio Castracani e il suo tempo (Lucca: Istituto storico lucchese, 1986), pp. 405–19. 44

Storie Pistoresi, pp. 167–68.

45

For an account of these developments, see Green, Lucca under Many Masters, pp. 121– 25, 127, 140. 46

Green, Lucca under Many Masters, pp. 145–46, 171–74. For evidence of Arrigo Castracani’s participation in the first of these battles, see Villani, Cronica, XI, 134.

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emerged between a commune intent on retaining possession of the city for itself and the rebels whose ambitions and links with the Visconti of Milan47 it had originally exploited. The earliest evidence of this is contained in the confessions of Ser Giovanni Amati who had acted as an intermediary either at the end of November or the beginning of December 1341, between commanders of the Pisan army and two powerful Lucchese citizens, Giovanni di Poggio and Giovanni Diversi, whom they had attempted to persuade to enter into a conspiracy to betray the besieged town to them. Among the conditions which were relayed by this messenger as acceptable by the Pisans if they could take Lucca was that Francesco Castracani should be allowed to recover his vicariate of Coreglia, but that Castruccio’s sons should be compelled to reside outside Lucca, though granted whatever financial compensation they deemed fit.48 It is clear from this that, even at this relatively early stage in the siege of the city, the expectations that the Castracani would have had of the benefits they might receive in return for helping the Pisans to acquire it were unlikely to be met by its would-be conquerors. It was therefore not surprising that, soon after the surrender of Lucca in July 1342, its new masters came into conflict with Castruccio’s sons. What immediately precipitated this breach was another disagreement between the Commune of Pisa and Giovanni d’Oleggio, the member of the Visconti family who had commanded the Milanese troops in the early pact of the siege and had been captured by the Florentines in October 1341. He had demanded and had been refused compensation for his period in captivity and, drawn by his disappointment to share that of Arrigo, Giovanni and Vallerano Castracani at their treatment, entered into a conspiracy with them. When this was discovered, he fled to Milan where he complained to Luchino Visconti at the Pisans’ failure adequately to reward those who had supported them in the critical early stages of the siege of Lucca and persuaded that ruler to intercede in favour of Arrigo Castracani who had meanwhile been arrested.49 Despite the granting by the Pisan authorities of the request that he be freed, Castruccio’s sons were not appeased and, shortly afterwards, withdrew to the contado of Lucca where they raised a rebellion. By 17 December 1342 Arrigo had seized the village of Crasciana in the Val di Lima50 and then continued their armed insurrection in

47

Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 126, p. 89.

48

ASL, Curia dei Rettori 11, p. 480. The date of Ser Giovanni Amati’s arrest was 9 December. The text of his confession does not, however, indicate precisely when he met with Ciupo degli Scolari and Dino della Rocca who represented the Commune of Pisa in his discussions with them. 49

Villani, Cronica, XII, 8; ‘Cronica di Pisa’, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (Milan: Palatini, 1729), XV, col. 1012; ‘Cronica Senese’, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, XV, col. 110. 50

ASL, Anziani avanti la libertà 18, pp. 146–47.

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Garfagnana early in 1343 until, expelled from Lucchese territory, they were forced to withdraw to Milan.51 The beginning of the Pisan domination over Lucca brought with it not only a breach between Castruccio’s sons and its incoming government but also an increased tension between the two branches of the Castracani family. The new masters of the city had little difficulty in satisfying Francesco’s modest aspirations to re-establish himself in his vicariate of Coreglia over which they allowed him to rule with the title of ‘count’.52 Other members of the Castracani faction, such as Castruccio’s brotherin-law, Perotto Streghi, were also permitted to remain in Lucca.53 It was only the descendants of the former Duke whose refusal to relinquish their claim to their father’s title led them to be excluded from there. Their treatment by the Pisans and that of Giovanni d’Oleggio nevertheless led them to be heard with sympathy by Luchino Visconti who, already engaged in hostilities in Lunigiana in support of its bishop, agreed in 1344 to give them troops with which to invade Versilia, the Lucchese province along the Mediterranean coast to the north-west of the city. By the time Arrigo and Vallerano Castracani embarked on this military expedition, led by Giovanni d’Oleggio, they had lost their brother Giovanni who had died on 12 May 1343.54 Their forces were at first successful, taking Massa, Avenza, Monteggiori, Rotaia and Motrone. From there they proceeded, by way of Nozzano, Avane and Ponte a Serchio to Vico Pisano and Colle Salvetti, threatening Pisa itself. But shortage of provisions, heat and illness forced them to withdraw in the autumn, without having wrung any concessions out of the conquerors of Lucca.55 It was not until 17 May 1345 that the war between the Pisans and the Milanese was brought to a conclusion by the peace of Pietrasanta. By this, Luchino Visconti surrendered the former Lucchese territories which he had captured in return for the payment of eighty thousand florins and an assurance that the possessions confiscated from the Malaspina and from Castruccio’s sons should be given back to them.56 51

‘Cronica di Pisa’, col. 1014.

52

Del Carlo, p. 81.

53

ASL, Archivio Arnolfini 1, chs 11v–14r.

54

A. Manucci transcribes the inscription on his tombstone in the church of San Francesco in Pisa: Le azioni di Castruccio Castrancani (Lucca: Guidotti, 1843), p. 152. 55

R. Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, ed. by O. Banti (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1963), pp. 94–95; Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 127, pp. 89–91; ‘Storie Pistoresi’, pp. 200–06; Villani, Cronica, XII, 26, 29. 56 Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 128, p. 91; S. Bongi, Bandi Lucchesi del secolo decimo quarto tratti dai registi del R. Archivio di Stato in Lucca (Bologna: Progresso, 1863), pp. 362–63. The latter refers to a communal ordinance of 24 November 1347 stipulating that Arrigo and Vallerano degli Interminelli are to have their possessions restored to them. Villani states that Luchino received 100,000 florins for restoring such Lucchese territories as he held at that time: Cronica, XII, 38.

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Thus ended yet another futile effort on the part of the duchini to recover their inheritance. If we can trust Manucci’s otherwise rather fanciful account of their lives, Arrigo Castracani in 1344 retired to Milan,57 as his brother Vallerano may also have done.58 They do not reappear on the historical scene until the descent into Italy of the Emperor Charles IV whose coming had the effect of encouraging all the exiled and dispossessed factions in the country to exploit the imperial presence in order to secure their return to the cities which had expelled them. According to the Lucchese chronicler, Giovanni Sercambi, Castruccio’s sons at this point became reconciled with Francesco Castracani and conspired to regain their power in Lucca, agreeing that, if they became lords of that city, their older kinsman should rule all Garfagnana.59 Francesco, who was to pass easily from being a loyal supporter of the Pisans to becoming one of the Emperor’s favourites, had been trying for some time to extend his territories in the upper valley of the Serchio. In 1352, when the Florentines had been preoccupied with the military intervention in Tuscany of Archbishop Giovanni Visconti (who had succeeded Luchino as ruler of Milan), the Count of Coreglia attacked Barga, a Florentine possession since the peace of 1342 between Pisa and the Duke of Athens but, despite the despatch of three hundred knights to him by Archbishop Giovanni Visconti of Milan, was compelled to abandon his attempt to capture it after being defeated in October 1352 at Borgo da Mozzano by a relieving force under the command of Ramondo Lupo da Parma.60 Notwithstanding this reverse, his reputation continued to stand high with the Pisans and, after Charles IV had taken up residence in their city in January 1354,61 he lost no time in ingratiating himself with that ruler. On the first of the following month, his three sons were knighted by the Emperor62 and, when the latter left for

57

Manucci, p. 152.

58

According to Matteo Villani Castruccio’s sons, together with Francesco Castracani, met in Milan with Archbishop Giovanni Visconti and other Tuscan and Umbrian Ghibellines in July 1351 to discuss the impending Milanese offensive against Florence: Cronica (Florence: Coen, 1846), II, 4. This suggests that Arrigo and Vallerano were still together at this stage and probably being kept at the Visconti court because of their potential usefulness to Milanese diplomacy and designs against Tuscany. 59

Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 36, p. 101.

60

M. Villani, Cronica, III, 12, 35.

61

M. Villani, Cronica, IV, 44; Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, p. 101; Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 38, p. 102. The Emperor entered Pisa on 18 January, and on 21 January (according to Sardo, p. 104) or 23 January (according to M. Villani, Cronica, IV, 51) established his authority in the city. 62 Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, p. 107. Sercambi on the other hand asserts that Jacopo, Giovanni and Niccolò Castracani were knighted in Lucca on 14 January when the Emperor passed through that city on his way to Pisa: Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 38, p. 102. According to the Lucchese chronicler, Francesco had arrived in Lucca with Charles IV, suggesting that he

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Rome for his coronation, Francesco Castracani accompanied him as far as Siena and was left there as a councillor to the imperial vicar, the Archbishop of Prague.63 After Charles IV returned to Pisa, Francesco finally received from him, on 8 May 1355, the official title of Count of Coreglia and had his vicariate over its district reconfirmed as an imperial fief.64 Despite these favours to him and to at least one of Castruccio’s sons, Vallerano, who had also come back to Pisa with the Emperor and been granted by him the office of Prefect of Vico,65 the Castracani began about this time once again to intrigue in the hope of furthering their political interests. On 18 May, rumours swept Pisa to the effect that Francesco was gathering troops for the purpose of bringing them to that city and there causing some kind of disturbance. When Charles IV heard of these, he immediately ordered that Arrigo, Vallerano and Francesco Castracani should either be brought before him66 or ordered to leave Pisa. By the time the imperial officials reached their houses, all three had in fact gone. Although they seem to have slipped out of the town gates separately, that evening all three met at the village of Santa Maria del Giudice on the road to Lucca. Here they spent the night at an inn, according to Matteo Villani,67 sleeping together in the same bed. The next morning they continued their journey in company and it was then that the dramatic events occurred that brought to a squalid end the sad saga of the efforts of Castruccio’s relatives to recover or re-assemble the fragments of his former state. Two or three miles from Santa Maria del Giudice in the direction of Lucca lay the Castracani villa at Massa Pisana. Built probably by Pina, the late tyrant’s wife and duchess in the closing years of his life,68 it had remained unoccupied for some years while her sons were in exile in Lombardy.69 Recently they had received it back from had accompanied that ruler from Lombardy where we know him to have been earlier with Castruccio’s sons at the Visconti court. See n. 58 above. 63

Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, p. 117. The Emperor left Siena on 28 March 1355 according to Matteo Villani (Cronica, IV, 89) and on 29 March according to Sardo. 64

Cianelli, pp. 383–86.

65

Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, p. 123.

66

Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, pp. 124–25. According to Matteo Villani the Emperor did not call them into his presence but expelled them from Pisa: Cronica, IV, 27. 67

M. Villani, Cronica, IV, 27.

68

Louis Green, ‘Il problema dell Augusta e della villa di Castruccio Castracani a Massa Pisana’, in Castruccio Castracani e il suo tempo (Lucca: Istituto storico lucchese, 1984–85), pp. 373–75. 69

Matteo Villani says that it had not been used for seventeen years. In view of the fact that Castruccio’s sons were absent from Lucca when it was under both the Rossi and Mastino della Scala, it is difficult to see how they could have visited it in 1338. After 1333 when Arrigo Castracani seized Barga and then moved to Parma, the only time he might have been able to be in Lucca would have been between its surrender to the Pisans in July 1342 and when he once again rebelled in December of that year. The likely period for the villa to have been

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the Emperor and, as they were passing, suggested to Francesco Castracani and his retinue that they inspect the building. While they were in its main hall, presumably the room adorned by the fresco of their father and Sciarra Colonna crowning Ludwig of Bavaria,70 Arrigo and his brother Vallerano resolved to kill Francesco. What exactly it was that led them to this action is difficult to determine with certainty. But according to Giovanni Sercambi, it was that, having encouraged their hopes that he would support them in their efforts to regain power in Lucca in exchange for the establishment of his own authority in Garfagnana, he now told them that he would return to his own lands and leave them to go back to their exile in Lombardy.71 This they saw as yet another betrayal of their interests by a kinsman who, since the death of Castruccio, had sought rather to assure his own position than advance the cause of the Castracani dynasty. Their bitterness towards him was born not only of desperation but also of the realization that the Emperor’s coming had created opportunities for change from which they believed they might have benefited had Francesco supported them. Roughly at this time, according to Matteo Villani, some Lucchese merchants residing abroad had contemplated raising money to try to buy the independence of Lucca from Charles IV.72 There therefore seemed at this point to be some prospect, however delusory, of prizing the city free from subjection to Pisa. That Francesco Castracani chose this moment to abandon them must have reopened old wounds, reminding Castruccio’s sons how he had accepted a vicariate over Lucca from Ludwig of Bavaria just after they themselves had been driven from the city and later had cultivated its other rulers when these had dispossessed or banished the duchini. Whether Sercambi was right or not in his imputation to Arrigo and Vallerano of motives of revenge for a supposed betrayal, there seems little doubt that, while the immediate cause of their precipitate action might have been a sudden disagreement or quarrel, what made this flare into violence was a long nurtured, pent up resentment on the part of the younger Castracani towards their opportunist kinsman. According to the chronicle accounts of the incident, it was Arrigo who struck first at the unsuspecting Francesco, initially wounding him in the leg and then despatching him with a blow to the head. When the other members of the Count of Coreglia’s party tried to come to his aid, one of them, Giovanni della Romena, his brother-inlaw, was also killed, while his son, Jacopo, was overcome and seriously wounded. unoccupied would therefore have been thirteen (or twenty-two) years. Sardo reports Arrigo Castracani as saying that ‘it was a long time since he had seen that palace’ (‘grande tenpo era che nonn avea veduto quello palagio’), without specifying how long he had been absent from it: Cronaca di Pisa, p. 126. 70

See Green, ‘Il problema’, pp. 375–77.

71

‘[...] io me ne anderò in nelle miei terre in Garfagnana, e voi ve ne potete andare in Lombardia’: Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 145, p. 111. 72

M. Villani, Cronica, V, 19.

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Having committed these outrageous crimes which shocked the conscience even of their contemporaries, Castruccio’s sons fled, taking with them the horses of Francesco and his companions, as well as their own, to prevent effective pursuit. In due course, they returned to Lombardy and the protection of the Visconti. In the meantime, the injured Jacopo was taken back to Lucca to recover from his wounds, while his father’s body, also brought there, was solemnly buried in the church of San Francesco, being entombed in the same building as his great cousin, Castruccio, whose progeny had brought about his death.73 Arrigo and Vallerano did not long survive this murder. After one further effort in August 1355 to take Castiglione in Garfagnana which the Pisans easily frustrated,74 Castruccio’s sons resumed their service with the Visconti. It was in the course of this that Arrigo Castracani met his death. When Giovanni d’Oleggio, who had earlier commanded the forces sent to help the Pisans against the Florentines in 1341, seized Bologna from Bernabò, now head of the Visconti family, the Milanese ruler resolved to recover that city through an intricately conceived conspiracy. In this Arrigo, whose friendship with Giovanni would, it was hoped, place him above suspicion, was to play a key role. On him fell the task of going to Bologna to finalize the details of the plot and then, at a prearranged signal, of leading into the town some of the troops from the Romagna who were to surprise the city. As it happened, however, Giovanni d’Oleggio got wind of the preparations for this coup quite early, while Arrigo was still in Bologna and was able to seize him and the others in the conspiracy to place them under arrest and discover in full the plans they had made. When revealed, these secured their condemnation and, on 11 February 1356, all were executed.75 73

There is fairly close agreement in the description of this incident by the various chroniclers who recorded it. Matteo Villani says it occurred on 18 May 1355: Cronica, V, 27. I have, however, accepted the date of 19 May given for it in Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze (hereafter BNF), MS Palatino 571 (ch. 31v), which accords with the account in Sardo’s Cronaca di Pisa where 18 May is given as the day on which Arrigo, Francesco and Vallerano left Pisa (pp. 125–26). The accuracy of this date is confirmed by Sardo’s statement that the murder of Francesco took place on a Tuesday, which was 19 May in 1355. The identity of Francesco’s brother-in-law, also killed at this time, is supplied by BNF, MS Palatino 571, ch. 31v. Sercambi provides the information about the burial of Francesco Castracani: Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 146, pp. 111–12. For comments on this crime, see Villani, Cronica, V, 27; and Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 146, pp. 111–12. 74

Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 149, p. 114; M. Villani, Cronica, V, 61, 64, 69. The attack on Castiglione was the outcome of an alliance between the exiled Lucchese Guelphs and the Castracani, the eventual aim of which was an advance on Lucca which was to be liberated from Pisan domination. 75 M. Villani, Cronica, VI, 6, 7; Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 146, pp. 111–12; BNF, MS Palatino 571, ch. 31v. M. Villani gives the date 12 February for Arrigo’s execution but Sercambi and MS Palatino 571 agree on 11 February, which is also the day on which Castruccio’s eldest son’s will was drawn up: ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, p. 27.

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Vallerano Castracani continued to serve the Visconti for almost another two years before dying of natural causes on 5 December 1357 while acting as captain and governor of Brescia.76 His illegitimate brother, Altino, had lost his life earlier, in June 1355, when he was, like Arrigo, executed as a traitor. He had seized his family’s former stronghold of Monteggiori just after Charles IV had left Pisa but before that ruler had moved out of Tuscany. The Pisans had then called the Emperor back to besiege that castle and Altino had then been persuaded to surrender it on condition that he himself would be allowed to go free. This assurance was, however, repudiated once Monteggiori had admitted the imperial troops. The luckless Altino was taken to prison in Pisa where he was beheaded a few days later.77 Within a little more than two and a half years of the murder of Francesco Castracani, all of Castruccio’s surviving sons had thus followed its victim to the grave. All that remained of the family (at least of descendants in the male line) were two pairs of children, a son and a daughter, born to each of Arrigo and Vallerano. The former had left a boy, Orlando or Rolando, and a girl, Pina;78 the latter a boy, Giovanni (generally called Vallerano after his father), and a girl, Caterina.79 The sources give us no hint as to the age of Pina, other than indicating that she was old enough in February 1356 not to be placed under the care of a guardian and to be left five thousand six hundred florins for her dowry.80 As far as the other children are concerned, however, it is probable that Orlando was born about 1345, Caterina about 1350 and Giovanni about 1355.81 All three were therefore still minors at the end of 76

BNF, MS Palatino 571, ch. 31v.

77

M. Villani, Cronica, IV, 52; Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 147, pp. 112–13; Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, p. 136; BNF, MS Palatino 571, ch. 31v. There is some disagreement as to the exact date of Altino’s execution which is given as 15 June by Sardo, and as 16 June in BNF, MS Palatino 571, ch. 31v. 78

ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, p. 17.

79

ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, p. 43.

80

ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, p. 27.

81

ASL, Atti di Castruccio 5, a copy of earlier documents by Bernardino Antelminelli made at the end of the sixteenth century, includes one (on p. 1) which states that on Thursday, 26 January 1333 (first indiction) Rolando di Arrigo was seventeen, Giovanni del fu Vallerano less than eight and his sister Caterina twelve years old. Assuming that a mistake has been made in the transcription of the third digit of the year and taking into account that Vallerano died in December 1357, this can only have been 1363, which was, in fact, a first indiction year. This does present, admittedly, one further difficulty in that in 1363, 26 January was a Wednesday, not a Thursday, so that if the document recorded by Bernardino was genuine, he would have had to have made two errors in transcribing its date which should have been 27 January 1363, not 26 January 1333. Some confirmation of the approximate rightness of the ages suggested by this source is provided by ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3 (p. 43) which indicates that on 5 May 1368 Giovanni and Caterina del fu Vallerano Castracani were both still minors under the guardianship of Filippo di Vannetto Talgardi in Milan, while Orlando (who had

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1357 when their last close male relative on their father’s side died. Consequently, they no longer presented a serious threat to Lucca and, in recognition of this, the Pisan government then ruling that city, on 22 December 1358, annulled any penalties to which Rolando and Giovanni Castracani might otherwise have been subject and restored their property, with the exception of Monteggiori, on condition that they did not build fortifications on the land returned to them. It was also stipulated that they should remain outside Tuscany, in particular not coming within ten miles of Lunigiana or Garfagnana.82 They appear to have accepted these restrictions, continuing to reside in Milan almost to the end of the period of Pisan domination over Lucca.83 However, as the latter city was regaining its independence in 1369, Rolando (or Orlando as he seems at this time to have been called) joined Alderigo Interminelli (or Antelminelli), a descendant of the main branch of that house,84 in that kinsman’s attempts to fish in the now troubled waters of Lucchese politics, to his own or the Milanese government’s advantage. In May of that year, Alderigo had been instrumental in securing for Bernabò Visconti, Lord of Milan, control over the Lucchese dependency of Sarzana and had, in return, received from that tyrant the title of Viscount over the area surrounding it.85 In the following August, he appeared before Lucca, together with Orlando, leading a substantial army, with which he threatened the city.86 It is not clear whether he hoped to seize it for himself or whether he was acting simply on behalf of Bernabò Visconti, nor is it evident what role Orlando expected to play in this venture.87 All that we know is that it misfired and that Cardinal Guy de Boulogne, then acting as imperial vicar in Lucca, managed to capture and imprison

been a minor when placed under the care of Franceschino Dombellinghi in February 1356) had by this time reached maturity. 82

ASL, Capitoli 17, chs 251v–252r.

83

Rolando, Giovanni and Caterina Castracani are recorded as living in Milan on 5 May 1368: ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, p. 43. 84

Alderigo was the son of Franceschino Interminelli. See Del Carlo, pp. 92–93; ASL, Archivio Notarile 77, ch. 55r. By 1369, he appears to have assumed the position of the leading member of the Interminelli casata. He was later, together with his brother Giovanni, to be prominent in the Lucchese merchant community in Bruges, where he died in 1401. See, Libro della comunità dei mercanti lucchesi in Bruges, ed. by E. Lazzareschi (Milan: Malfasi, 1947), pp. xxv, 87. 85

Christine Meek, Lucca 1369–1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 128; Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 197, pp. 167–68. Alderigo had, in fact, the title of Viscount of Luni: Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 204, p. 176. 86

Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 197, pp. 167–68. See also Le croniche, I, Pt 1, chs 206–08, pp. 180–82; and Meek, p. 129. 87

Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 209, pp. 182–83.

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Alderigo, releasing him a few days later on the payment of a ransom.88 The Interminelli then withdrew, but returned the following May to invade Garfagnana, with troops once again provided by Milan. After much sporadic fighting, an agreement was finally reached between the Commune of Lucca and Alderigo, details of which were finalized in April 1371.89 This accommodation involved, on the Interminelli side, not merely Alderigo, but also his brother Giovanni, Castruccio’s two grandsons, Orlando and Vallerano, and the three surviving sons of Francesco Castracani, Niccolò, Giovanni and Andrea, as well as three of the Malaspina, namely Marquis Spinetta of Villafranca, and Manfredo and Luiso of the Da Dallo branch of that family. The terms of this treaty provided that all lands taken from the Commune were to be restored to it and, in return, the Interminelli were to hold Monteggiori and Argentiera but not fortify them and recover whatever other property they had in Lucca and its territories. After this agreement, Orlando and Giovanni (now called Vallerano) Castracani ceased to play a significant part in Lucchese history. Both were employed as mercenaries by Pope Gregory XI in 1373–75,90 and Orlando was captain of Cascina, in the service of Pisa, probably in 1388.91 He had been in Genoa, in March 1373 88

Meek, 131.

89

Meek, p. 131 and ASL, Capitoli 17, chs 253v–256r. Different parts of the treaty were concluded on 19 March and 9 April 1371. Ratification of it by the Commune of Lucca was, however, further delayed by the outbreak of renewed fighting with the Interminelli over Teriglio. Later the fortress of Bargiglio in Garfagnana, held by Francesco Castracani’s sons, was also surrendered to the Commune: Sercambi, Le croniche, I, Pt 1, ch. 246, pp. 209–10; and ASL, Atti di Castruccio 5, p. 130; Del Carlo, p. 94. 90

G. Mollat and others, Lettres secrètes et curiales du pape Gregoire XI (1370–1378) intéressant les pays autres que la France (Paris: Boccard, 1962–65), pp. 1032, 1146 ; Manucci, p. 156. F. L. Laganà in her article on Orlando Castracani provides the further information that he served as a mercenary in Lucca after his period as a captain of cavalry for Gregory XI: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, XX, 199. 91

There is a set of letters to and from Orlando Castracani recorded in ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, pp. 191–210. Unfortunately these are dated by day, month and indiction number rather than calendar year. Among them is one group written between 31 May and 7 June of an eleventh indiction year and either sent by or addressed to the Anziani of Pisa or Pietro or Benedetto Gambacorta. Some of these (dated between 2 and 6 June) and intended for Orlando Castracani described him as ‘capitano generali guerre terre Cascine’: ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, pp. 194, 196, 198, 200, 202, 206, 210. The two possible dates for these letters are 1373 and 1388. My reasons for preferring the latter to the former are that Benedetto Gambacorta who was clearly writing his letters to Orlando in an official capacity did not become associated with his father Pietro as captain of Pisa until 18 February 1374: P. Silva, Il governo di Pietro Gambacorta in Pisa e le sue relazioni col resto della Toscana (Pisa: Nistri, 1910), p. 96; Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, p. 207, n. 2. Furthermore, between 27 May and 7 June 1388 the Pisan contado was invaded by a mercenary company which camped between Lavaiano and Perignano, just south of Cascina, which would have explained the correspondence between

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and,92 while its Podestà in 1377, was involved between June and August of that year in negotiations in that city on behalf of the Commune of Lucca concerning reprisals against its merchants there.93 In 1380, he married Simona de’ Fensi del conte Francesco da Prato and on 25 October 1391 made his will,94 probably dying shortly afterwards. In 1399 was played out the final act of the tragedy of Castruccio’s descendants. Orlando and Vallerano had between them four sons and, in addition, the latter had a daughter, Maria Caterina. The four boys of the two families were all in Lucca in September of that year when an epidemic of the plague broke out in the city. The chronicler, Giovanni Sercambi, in describing it, related what happened: There having remained four youths, of whom the eldest was eighteen, the sons of Orlando and Vallerano, who were the sons of Arrigo and Vallerano, sons of Castruccio Interminelli who had been duke and lord of Lucca, […] the plague struck them down with the result that God called to Himself all four in less than fifteen days, several of their household also dying. And here ended the progeny in the male line of the said Castruccio, duke.95

With the death of Orlando’s eldest son, Castruccio (presumably so named because he was born a century after his great-grandfather and namesake),96 two-thirds of the the captain of that outpost and the Pisan government at that time: Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, pp. 248–50. However, by 20 September 1388, Orlando was in Massa. See G. Sforza, ‘Castruccio Castracani degli Antelminelli in Lunigiana’, Atti e memorie delle deputazioni di storia patria per le provincie modenesi e parmensi, s. 3, 4.2, p. 412. 92

ASL, Diplomatico Tarpea 8 March 1373, cited in Sforza, 405.

93

Laganà, ‘Francesco Castracani’, p. 199; ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, pp. 191–92, 203–04. The two letters from the Anziani of Lucca to Orlando Castracani in the collection described above were sent on 22 June and 18 August of a fifteenth indiction year; given Orlando’s known presence in Genoa in 1377, it seems virtually certain that this should refer to that year and not to 1392. 94 ASL, Raccolti speziali: San Frediano 252, ch. 8r; and Laganà, ‘Francesco Castracani’, p. 199. For Orlando’s land and property dealings at this period, see also Sforza, p. 405. 95 ‘Essendo rimasi quattro garzoni d’età d’anni XVIII il magiore, figluoli che funno di Orlando et Valeriano figluoli che funno di messer Arrigo et di messer Vallerano figluoli di messer Chastruccio Interminelli dugha et signore che fu di Lucca […] la morìa li percosse im forma che tucti e quatro, in meno di xv dì, Idio li chiamò a sè con morire alquanti della lor famigla. E qui finiseno li discendenti per linea, maschulina del dicto messer Castruccio dugha’: Sercambi, Le croniche, II, Pt 1, ch. 667, p. 397. See also the reference made to a notarial act drawn up on 8 October 1399 by Ser Antonio di Bartolomeo Coradi, immediately after the death of Castruccio di Orlando Castracani in ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, pp. 56–57. This suggests that the last of Castruccio’s direct male descendants had fallen ill with the plague in the last week of September and died in the first week of October. 96

I am assuming he was the eldest of the four boys and hence born in 1381, being eighteen at the time of his death in October 1399. The coincidence of the Christian name and the date

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family fortune passed to Vallerano’s daughter, Maria Caterina. After she had married the new lord of Lucca, Paolo Guinigi, in the following year and had died herself a few months later,97 it was into his hands that most of the former Castracani possessions came. The rest he received from his mother after another nine years, she having earlier acquired the share given in 1399 to other Interminelli relatives.98 Thus, by a strange irony of fate, not merely the power but also the wealth of the previous lord and tyrant of Lucca passed to the new one. Neither, however, profited Paolo Guinigi much in the long run. Expelled in 1430 from the city he had ruled when it was besieged by the Florentines, he ended his days two years later imprisoned by Filippo Maria Visconti, a victim, according to the humanist, Poggio Bracciolini, of the riches which his captor wished to extract from him. 99 The curse which had dogged Castruccio’s male descendants appeared therefore to have attached itself, after their untimely deaths, to his inheritance. To it seemed to cling its former possessors’ ill-fortune. But, when that was exhausted by the extinction of their family100 and the dissipation of their wealth,101 when all trace of of his father’s marriage strengthen the probability that there was exactly a century between his birth-year and that of his great-grandfather. 97

S. Bongi, Di Paolo Guinigi e delle sue ricchezze (Lucca: Benedini-Guidotti, 1871), p. 8. The marriage contract as drawn up on 15 May 1400. 98

Bongi, p. 9. The remaining third of Castruccio’s inheritance was donated in May 1407 by the members of the collateral branches of the Interminelli to Filippa Serpenti, widow of Francesco Guinigi and mother of Paolo. This portion of the Castracani fortune was ceded by her to her son on 23 January 1409. On this point, see also ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, p. 56. 99 ‘The tyrant of Lucca, who has so long oppressed his city and accumulated such a fortune, has been dislodged from his glory and is in prison, and is even being tortured, I hear, to make him reveal his treasure’: Letter of 3 September 1430, in Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis, trans. by Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 165, letter 83. 100

At the time of the death of Castruccio di Orlando Castracani in October 1399, the male members of the Interminelli clan then living in Lucca were Jacopo di Filippo Mugia, Freduccio di Bettuccio Mezzolombardo, Giovanni di Ludovico Bovi, Urbano di Alderigo Interminelli (his father Alderigo who was to die two years later was presumably in Flanders at this time), Barca di Matteo Savarigi, Gabriele di Nicolao Gonnella, together with his two sons, Ser Francesco and Giovannesio, and Giovanni di Francesco Parghia together with his sons Balduccio and Piero: ASL, Atti di Castruccio 3, pp. 56–57. All of these belonged to branches of the family which had no close relationship with Castruccio’s. Del Carlo refers to another line of the Castracani, the progeny of Niccolò di Francesco who moved to Fano (p. 95). These were distant kinsmen of the former Lucchese tyrant but not his descendants, having in common with him an ancestor, Castruccio’s great-grandfather Ruggiero Castracani, who had lived early in the thirteenth century. It is not clear whether any of the one-time Duke’s descendants in the female line survived beyond 1400. Of his daughters, Dialta appears to have been still alive in 1356 (Del Carlo, p. 27); but there is no record of any of her children by Filippo Tedici. Caterina, the Marquess of Malaspina, died in 1346 in Mantua (Sforza, p. 406); and although her husband did leave some sons, Sforza concludes from their exclusion from

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the material achievements of Castruccio Castracani had passed away, and when neither he, nor his beneficiary, Paolo Guinigi, threatened his city with the spectre of tyranny, the time had come for his memory to be converted into legend and history. So much so that, in 1520, Niccolò Machiavelli could write of him: And because while he lived, he was inferior neither to Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander, nor Scipio of Rome […] he would doubtless have excelled the one and the other if, instead of Lucca, he had had as his native land Macedon or Rome.102

As later biographers looked back to what they saw as the remarkable achievements of his brief period in power, reading the record of them, as Machiavelli was to do, as a contest between virtù and fortune, the later lives of his descendants and relatives came to be lost in his shadow. Yet, they too are revealing of the obverse of the medal of his success, a testimony to the price paid for a brilliant but precarious political career which could not be sustained when others who, lacking his ability, found themselves unequal to the obstacles facing them. Their story is also, in many ways, a commentary on the vicissitudes of their times. By violence and intrigue, they sought to exploit the instability of their city’s history in the age in which they lived, beset as it was by war, political change, foreign oppression and plague, and it was their destiny in turn to become its victims. Their fate was exemplary. Lacking the nobility required of tragedy and incapable of arousing the sympathy inspiring pathos, they nevertheless illustrated the obsessive force with which the burden of past greatness could corrupt and destroy men’s lives.

their inheritance that they were illegitimate (pp. 404–05). Bertecca who was married to Bonifazio Novello della Gherardesca lost her son by him in 1347 without leaving further heirs: see P. Litta, Famiglie celebri italiane (Milan: Famiglie celebri italiane, 1819–85), IX, 138, Tavola, VI. As for Castruccio’s youngest daughter, Verde, the sources remain silent as to any marriage she may have entered into, as they are concerning that of his granddaughter, Pina di Arrigo. Caterina di Vallerano, however, is almost certainly the Caterina Castracani recorded in October 1386 as the wife of Giovanni Morla and it may be that she had a family in which Castruccio’s line continued under another name: see Libro della comunità, p. 136. Castruccio’s daughter, Jacopa, who became a nun, had of course no children. According to one of the Lucchese tyrant’s sixteenth-century biographers who claims to have seen a diurnal belonging to her, she was abbess of the convent of S. Chiara at Gattaiuola between 1353 and 1358: ASL, Ms Orsucci 36, ch. 55v; and Manucci, pp. 118–19. 101

The dispersion of the Guinigi fortune which included the Castracani one is described by Salvatore Bongi in Di Paolo Guinigi e delle sue ricchezze, pp. 38–56. See also that author’s final judgment: ‘Averi e denari, forse male acquisati in principio, e male accresciuti dipoi, ebbero fine miserabile; e sfumarono in parte di mano, anche a chi da ultimo, e non rispettando in tutto la giustizia e la carità, li fece suoi, che fu il Comune di Lucca’ (p. 62). 102

‘E perchè vivendo ei non fu inferiore ne a Filippo di Macedonia padre di Alessandro ne a Scipione di Roma […] e senza dubbio avrebbe superato l’uno e l’altro se, in cambio di Lucca, egli avesse avuto per sua patria Macedonia o Roma’: Machiavelli, ‘La vita di Castruccio Castracani di Lucca’, in Opere, VII (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), pp. 9–41 (p. 41).

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Index

Aaron, Israelite priest, 310, 312, 314, 318, 322 Aas, 72 Abiram, 310, 314, 321 Acciauoli, Agnolo degli, Cardinal, Bishop of Florence, 44, 283 Acciauoli, Nicola, Grand Seneschal of Naples, 290–91 Ady, Cecilia, 3 Agen, 63 Aix en Provence, 63 Albert, Capuchin Father, 64–65 Albert, Prince Consort of England, 178 Alberti, Leon Battista, 128, 157 Alberti, Marco di Francesco degli, 45 Albizzi, Alberto degli, 45 Alexander VI, Pope, 380 Allemagna, Giovanni d’, 220, 227 Alpers, Svetlana, 137 Amadeo, Duke of Savoy, 301, 316 Amati, Ser Giovanni, 415 Amsterdam, 241 Anabaptists, 81 Anastase, 79 Andrea malfatto, 400 Andrinopolis, 293 Angela of Foligno, Saint, 74 Angelico, Fra, 102–03, 106–08, 110–16

Angolino, stablehand, 397 Anne, Queen of England, wife of James I, 197 Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury, 115–16 Antal, Friedrich, 87 Antoninus, Saint, see, Pierozzi, Antonino Aparita, Mario de Zuliano dal’, 390 Apollonia, Saint, 220 Apuleius, 348–50, 364 Aquinas, Thomas, see Thomas Aquinas, Saint Aragona, Eleonora d’, 376, 378 Arande, Thomas, 250 Argombat, Jean d’, 59–63, 73, 76, 80, 82 Arienti, Ercole, 387–88 Arienti, Giovanni Sabadino degli, 376–88 Ariosto, Ludovico, 328–30, 336–37 Aristotle, 325, 353, 358–61, 368 Arles, 69 Arluno, Bianca Pellegrini di, 211 Arrigni, Simone d’Alessandro di Iacopo, 278 Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 41, 98, 107, 248

Page 447

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Index

428 Augustinians, 65 Avane, 416 Avenza, 416 Averroes, 368 Avicenna, 368 Avignon, 44–45, 69, 232 Badia, 396 Baldini, Baccio, 214 Baldovino, Apollonio, 401 Baltimore, 204, 211–12, 220–21, 227, 230, 232 Barbari, Jacopo dei, 218 Barbaro, Ermolao, 346, 349–50, 352, 366, 370–71 Bardi, Giuliano di Giovanni de’, 277 Bardi, Gualterrotto dei, 400 Barezzi, Barezzo, 334 Barga, 410, 412, 417 Bargiglio, 413 Bar-le-Duc, 72 Baron, Hans, 2, 149, 151, 153, 155, 167–68, 171 Basle, 150 Council of, 298 n. 4, 301, 314–15, 318–19 Bassano, 220 Battle of Gilboa, 237, 243 Bausi, Francesco, 344–45, 348–52, 364–70, 372 Beaufort, Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, 181–84, 189, 191, 194 Becker, Marvin, 2 Beham, Hans Sebald, 223–24 Belcari, Feo, 286–87 Bellini, Jacopo, 206 Bembo, Benedetto, 211 Bembo, Pietro, 218 Benedict, Saint, 127, 303 Benedictines, 65 Benintendi, Piero di Niccolò di, 392 Benivieni, Girolamo, 344, 351, 360

Bentivoglio, Antongaleazzo, 384 Bentivoglio, Ginevra, 386–86 Bentivoglio, Giovanni II, 377, 379– 83, 385 Berenson, Bernhard, 152, 158, 202, 232 Bergamo, 220 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 101, 115–18 Bernardino, called Urbana, 391 Beroaldo, Filippo, 370 Berti, Giovanni di, see Michele, Fra Berti, Simone di Giovanni, 278 Berto, barber, 397 Bertoldo, sculptor, 403 Bérulle, Pierre de, Cardinal, 69, 83 Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, 284, 289 Bindi, Fra Antonio, 36, 50 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 168, 173, 211, 214–15, 278, 376–77 Boccadivacca, Enrico, 406 Bodin, Jean, 248 Boiardo, 328 Bollandists, 100 Bologna, 3, 379–81, 383, 385–88, 420 confraternities of, 21, 31 Bonaiuto, Andrea di, 102 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 149, 151 Bonaventure, Saint, 88, 94, 116 Boniface VIII, Pope, 298 Bordeaux, Huon de, 217 Borgia, Cesare, 379–81 Borgo da Mozzano, 417 Borgo San Sepolcro, 403 Boskovits, Miklós, 111–12 Botticelli, 202, 300, 317, 319–23 Boudon, Henri-Marie, 70 Bouley, Anne, 66–67 Boulogne, Guy de, Cardinal, 422 Bracciolini, Poggio, 303, 425 Brady, Ignatius, O.F.M., 93

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Index Brancacci, 152 Brandon, Charles, Duke of Suffolk, 186, 189 Brigid of Sweden, Saint, 74 Bronzini, Cristoforo, 326 Brossier, Marthe, 63 Brucker, Gene, 2, 43 Brunelleschi, 171 Bruni, Leonardo, 290–91, 300, 303 and Florentine citizenship, 147, 150, 155, 158, 160–69, 172, 174–76 Buoninsegni, Domenico, 303 Burchiello, poet, 291 Burckhardt, Jacob, 150 Burgkmaier, Hans, 241 Bursia, 293 Burton Pynsent, Somerset, 202, 220 Caffaggiolo, 398 Calci, 34–35, 39, 42–43, 45, 53 Callman, Ellen, 230 Calvacanti, Bartolomeo, 269 Camaiore, 407 Camden, William, 192 Canberra, 225 capitoli, 18–19, 22–25, 28 Capponi, Neri di Gino, 283, 305 Capuchins, 57, 63–65, 74–75, 83 Carpaccio, 227 Carretto, Illaria del, 212 Carroll, Jane, 244 Carthusians, 98–99 Casa delle Oblate di Santa Francesca Romana, see Tor de’ Specchi Cascia, Fra Simone Fidati da, 43 Cascia, Matteo Bigazzi da, 273 Castracani, Andrea, 423 Castracani, Arrigo, 406–08, 410–11, 414–21 Castracani, Castruccio, 405, 407–08, 424, 426 Castracani, Caterina, 421 Castracani, Ciuccio del fu Puccio, 413

429 Castracani, Francesco, 408, 410–11, 413–14, 417–21, 423 Castracani, Gerio, 413 Castracani, Giovanni (Vallerano), son of Vallerano, 421–24 Castracani, Giovanni, 407, 411, 414– 16, 423 Castracani, Maria Caterina, 424–25 Castracani, Niccolò, 406, 423 Castracani, Orlando (Rolando), 421–24 Castracani, Pina, 407, 421 Castracani, Vallerano, 407, 411, 415– 21, 423, 425 Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England, wife of Henry VIII, 185, 188, 194 Catherine of Genoa, Saint, 74 Catherine of Siena, Saint, 92, 116, 335–36 Caulibus, Johannes de, Franciscan, 88, 111, 116 Cavalca, Domenico, 107–08, 116–17 Cavallaro, Anna, 139 Cedernino, il, 396 Châlons, 76 Champagne, 76 Charles I, King of England, 197–98 Charles II, King of England, 197–98, 256 Charles IV, Bishop of Verdun, Duke of Lorraine, 65, 69 Charles IV, Emperor, 309, 417–19, 421 Charles de Gournay, Bishop of Toul, 83 Charles of Durazzo, 309 Charles, son of Countess Margaret of Lennox, 190 Chiaramonte, Isabella di, 377 Chiaravalle, Andrea da, 408 Christopher, Saint, 292 Chrysostom, John, 306 Churchill, Winston, 151

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Index

430 Cicero, 292, 348–50 Clark, Kenneth, Sir, 202 Clark, Stuart, 73 Clement VII, Pope, 44–45, 309, 312 Clément, Capuchin general, 75 Coducci, Mauro, 206 Colasio, Innocenzo, Fr, O.P., 90, 92 Cold War, 149, 151, 154 Colle Salvetti, 416 Colonna, Sciarra, 419 Colt, Maximilian, 194 Columba, Saint, 327, 329, 335 Combined Bible, 240 confraternities (companies), 9–32, 100 laudesi, 15 of Archangel Raphael (Il Raffa), 14, 17 of Brucciata, 14, 16–17, 19 of Buonamini di San Martino, 22 of Holy Sacrament of Santa Lucia, 19–20 of Saint John the Baptist, 29 of San Frediano, 14 of San Giovanni Battista (the Scalzo), 18, 29 of San Sebastiano (the Freccione), 22–25, 27–28 of Sant’ Agostino, 18–19, 28 of Sant’ Andrea, 19 of the Misericordia, 25 of the Purification, 28 Congrégation du Salut asseuré, 57, 70 Constance, Council of, 297–98, 300, 301 n. 14, 302–03, 305, 315 Constantinople, 292, 309 Constitutions of the Chapter of Perpignan, 93–94 Corazza, Bartolomeo del, 163 Cordeliers, 65, 68 Coreglia, 411, 414–16 Cornazzano, Antonio, 376 Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, Jacob, 241–42, 244, 246, 254–55

Cornelius of Rome, 315 Corneo, Andrea, 370–71 Corti, Gino, 394 Cortona, 302 Cosimo, Piero di, 202 Coton, Pierre, Jesuit, 69, 83 Crasciana, 415 Crema, Balugano da, 229 Cromwell, Oliver, 198 Cune, 413 Cure, Cornelius, 194 Cure, William, 194 Cuyp, Benjamin Gerritsz, 256 Cyprian, Saint, 101, 300, 314, 318, 321–22 D’Achille, Paolo, 121–23 D’Avray, David, 299 Dante Alighieri, 92, 151, 278–79, 350, 370 Darnley, Henry, Lord, husband of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 190–91 Dathan, 310, 314, 321 Dati, Leonardo, Dominican MinisterGeneral, 43, 303 David of Augsburg, Franciscan, 94, 108 David, King of Israel, 158, 171, 233, 237, 263–66, 268, 273–75, 310 Deguileville, Guillaume de, 241 Dei, Benedetto, 163, 381, 402 Delcambre, Etienne, 57 demoniac possession, 56–58, 61–69, 73–74, 76–78 Devas, Raymond, O.P., 93 Di Napoli, Giovanni, 366–67 Dietrich, Veit, 248 Dietisalvi-Neroni, Dietisalvi di Nerone di Nigi, 283 Dijon, 69, 76 Dinet, Dominique, Father, 76, 78, 81–82 Diocletian, Roman Emperor, 332

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Index Dionysius the Areopagite, see Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite Discalced Carmelites, 65 Diversi, Giovanni, 415 Dominic, Saint, 94–97, 102, 104, 106, 116 Dominicans, 43, 49, 82, 89–116 Dominici, Giovanni, Cardinal, 300, 302, 315 Dominique, Father, exorcist, 66 Donatello, 227, 266, 274–75 and Saint George sculpture, 147– 48, 154–58, 160–66, 169, 171–73, 176 Donati, Iacopo di Niccolò di Cocco, 291–94 Donatists, 81 Donato, Messer, 44 Donne, John, 193 Dovodola, 395 Dubois, François, 60–61 Duns Scotus, 368, 370 Dürer, Albrecht, 212 Eco, Umberto, 39 Edward the Confessor, King of England, 180 Edward III, King of England, 184 Edward IV, King of England, 180, 187, 192–93, 195 Edward V, King of England, 198–99 Edward VI, King of England, 186– 88, 198 Edward, Duke of York, 192 Egidio, Fra, 94 Ehinger, Gabriel, 254 Eimart, Georg, 258 ekphrasis, 131–32, 134–35, 137–39, 143–45 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 178, 180, 183, 188–90, 192–96 Elizabeth of York, Queen of England, wife of Henry VII, 181–83, 186

431 Empoli, 403 Endor, witch of, see witch, witchcraft Equicola, Mario, 377 Este, Ercole d’, Duke of Ferrara, 379, 397 Este, Giulio d’, 382, 385 Este, Isabella d’, 375–88 Etienne de Bourbon, 101 Eugenius IV, Pope, 301, 314, 316, 318–19 Euripides, 230 exorcism, 57, 63–69, 73, 77–79, 82–83 Eymerich, Nicholas, inquisitor, 47 Fabriano, Gentile da, 227 Faithorne, William, 256, 258 Felix V, antipope, 301, 319 Feo, Ser, organist, 394 Ferrara, 3, 213, 214, 381, 384 Council of, 316 Ficino, Marsilio, 346, 351, 354–55, 361–62 Fiesole, 302 Filopolis, 293 Flamini, Francesco, 278 Florence, 379, 381, 408, 410, 412–13 and conflict with Milan, 53, 149, 154, 282, 285–86 and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 343–44, 346 and heresy, 33–34, 37–53 and Pier Soderini, 263–76 and religious schism, 298–323 and the Medici, 269, 389–404 art of, 87, 128, 49, 147–76, 206, 212–13, 227, 263 Commune of, 35, 50, 53 Council of, 300, 312–13, 316, 318 literary anthologies of, 277–95 religious confraternities of, 9–32 Foligno, 302 Fonte, Moderata, 333–34 Fotheringhay, 192

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432 Fowler, Thomas, 190–91 Fracassini, Francesco, 398 Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, 189, 193 Francesco, Cardinal, 275 Francesco, Domenico di, 402–03 Francesco, goldsmith, 396 Francione, woodworker-engineer, 403 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 48–49, 87, 93, 292, 327, 329–30, 332 Franciscans, 10, 42 and art, 87–90, 93–94, 99, 108, 110, 116 Fraticelli congregation of, 34, 36– 39, 43–44, 47–48, 52–53 Franco, Matteo, 402 François, Nicholas, 65 Frankfurt am Main, 211 fratelli, 17, 25, 28, 30 frescoes, 109, 115, 119–45, 211, 300–01, 321, 419 Fröhlich, Andreas, 256 Fusco, Laurie, 394 Gaeta, 53 Galeotto, Bartolomeo di, 399–400 Galletto, falconer, 401 Gallibois, Roland, 344 Galli-Dunn, Cavaliere Marcello, 227, 229 Garin, Eugenio, 363 Gaul, Amadis of, 60 Gellius, Aulus, 348, 371 Genoa, 423 Gentili, Niccolò, 35, 47 George, Saint, 148, 154–63, 165–76 Gerald of Frachet, 102 Gerson, Jean, 55, 57–58, 82, 315, 322 Gheri, Goro, 276 Ghiberti, 171 Ghirlandaio, Ridolfo del, 25 Giles of Assisi, Blessed, 93 Giogante, Michele del, 280–81, 284–94 Giorgio, Bernardino di, 383

Giorgione, 214 Giotto, 267 Giovanni, Apollonia di, 232 Giovanni, Pietro de, butcher, 397 Girolami, Remigio de’, 113 Giuliano, known as Catellaccio, 394 Glanvill, Joseph, 256–58 Goggio, Bartolomeo, 376 Golden Legend, 158, 160, 165 Goliath, 158 Goltzius, Hendrik, 224 Golzio, Vincenzo, 128 Gonzaga, Francesco, 375, 378, 380– 2, 384–85, 388 Gonzaga, Giovanni, 379 Gonzaga, Margarita d’Este, Duchess of Ferrara, 335 Gonzaga, Lodovico, Bishop of Mantua, 387 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 129 Grandin, Cordelier, theologian, 68 Gratian, 321–22 Grazzini, Antonfrancesco, 169 Great Schism, 297–98, 300, 302–12, 322–23 Greece, 149, 308 Gregory XI, Pope, 423 Gregory XII, Pope, 303 Grien, Hans Baldung, 241, 243 Grifoni, Ser Michele, 397 Guelfo, falconer, 401 Guéret, Jean, Father, 65 Gui, Bernard, inquisitor, 39 Guicciardini, Francesco, 280, 393 Guido, Don, 402 Guinigi, Paolo, 425–26 Halay, Jean, 80, 82 Hale, John, 2 Harley, Robert, Sir, 198 Harris, Tomás, 202, 206 n. 7 Hartt, Frederick, 151–55, 158, 164, 167–68

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Index Helen of Troy, 227–30, 232–33 Henri II, Duke of Lorraine, Bishop of Verdun, 65–67 Henry VI, King of England, 180–81, 187 Henry VII, King of England, 177–85, 187–90, 192–97, 199 Henry VIII, King of England, 180, 183–89, 195, 199 Henry, Prince of Wales, son of King James I, 195, 197 Hercules, 158, 268 heresy, 35–53 Hitler, Adolf, 149, 151 Hoff, Ursula, 212 holocaustes, 72–73, 78 n. 111 Honoré de Paris, Capuchin Father, 75 Hood, William, 102, 104, 108, 110, 112, 114 Howard, Maurice, 194 Howard, Peter, 21 Howarth, David, 178–79, 193, 197 Hugh of Fouilloy, 97, 115 Humbert of Romans, 93, 104–08, 115–16 Innocent III, Pope, 303 Innocent VIII, Pope, 181 Innocent X, Pope, 82 inquisition, 39, 42–47 Interminelli (Antelminelli), Alderigo, 422–23 Ippolito, Cardinal, 382 Isaac, Heinrich, 394, 397 Jacob, E. F., 3–4 Jacob’s Ladder, 355, 357, 367 Jacquerio, Giacomo, 233 Jacquinot, Barthélemy, Father, 76 Jahangir, Emperor, 225 James IV, King of Scotland, 191 James I, King of England, (as James VI) King of Scotland, 179, 189, 191, 193–97, 199

433 Jane, Queen of England, wife of Henry VIII, 186, 189 Javel, Nicholas, Father, 71–72, 76, 80–82 Jean de Fécamp, 116 Jean de Mailly, 100 Jeanne des Anges, Mother, 83 Jesuits, 56–57, 59, 65, 69, 72, 75–76, 78, 80, 82–83 Joanna, Queen of Naples and Sicily, 309 John the Evangelist, Saint, 102 John XXII, Pope, 37–38 John XXIII, Pope, 302–03 John, King of Bohemia, 409–11 Jones, Inigo, 197 Joost-Gaugier, Christiane, 232 Jordan of Saxony, 94 Judith, Old Testament heroine, 266, 268, 274 Juillet, Father, Canon of SaintGeorges, 63 Julius II, Pope, 384–86 Katherine, Queen of England, wife of Henry V, 180 Korah, 310, 314, 321–22 Kronberg, 206 Künzle, Pius, O.P., 115–16 Kürfürsten-Bibel, 251–52 Küsel, Melchior, 254–55 La Cecca, architect, 403 Ladislas of Hungary, 44 Ladislaus, King of Jerusalem and Sicily, 309 Landino, Cristoforo, 398 Lando, Fra Antonio di, 42 Law, John, 168 Le Petit, Cordelier theologian, 68 Le Puy, 69 Lehman, Robert, 230 Leland, John, 178

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434 Léon, Capuchin Father, 63 Lepanto, 247 Lerici, 412 Lieto, Dettoro, 406 limosinieri, 25–27 Lindsay, Daryl, Sir, 201–02, 221 Lippini, Pietro, Dominican, 91 liturgy, 93–95 Liverpool, 214 Llewellyn, Nigel, 178–79, 193 Lloyd, Genevieve, 160 Lombard League, 31 Lombardy, 292, 418–19 London, 180, 191, 229, 234 Longhi, Roberto, 129, 142–44, 204 Loris, Guillaume de, 215 Lorraine, 56, 65, 72, 84 Loudun, 83 Louis XII, King of France, 379 Lucca, 3, 398, 405, 407–25 Lucretius, 370 Ludolph of Saxony, 98–99 Ludovick, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, 197 Ludovicus, King of Jerusalem and Sicily, 309 Ludwig of Bavaria, Emperor, 405, 407–09, 419 Lugano, Placido, 124 Luke, Saint, 327, 332 Lupo, Ramondo, 417 Luther Bible, 246, 248, 251 Luther, Martin, 246–48, 305 Lycurgus, 268 Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei, 266, 281, 292, 388, 391, 426 Machyn, Henry, diarist, 188 Madrid, 214 Magnières, Claude de, 59 Magritte, 206 Maiano, Giovanni da, 185 Maillane, Jean Porcelets de, Bishop

of Toul, 64–65, 83 Malaspina, Spinetta, 412–13 Malatesta, Francesco, 379 Mâle, Emile, 100 Malerba, cowherd, 401 Mandonnet, Pierre, 93 Mantua, 338, 375–76, 379, 381–82, 384–86, 388, 404, 414 Manucci, A., 417 Margaret Tudor, daughter of King Henry VII, 196 Margaret, Countess of Lennox, 189–93 Margaret, Saint, 182, 191 Margutte, 400 Maria, daughter of King James I of England, 193–94 Mariano, Frate, 22–23, 25 Marie-Elisabeth de la Croix de Jésus, see Ranfaing, Elisabeth de Marie-Paule de l’Incarnation, Mother, 70 Marinella, Lucrezia, 325–42 Maringhi, Francesco, 29 Marradi, Baptista da, 400 Marradi, Galeotto da, 399 Marradi, Mignone da, 399 Marradi, Niccolò di Mingnone da, 399 Marradi, Nuto da, 400 Marradi, Pierone da, 399 Marradi, Ser Bartolomeo de, 400 Marrow, James, 98 Martin V, Pope, 43, 298, 304–05, 311 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, Queen of France, 179, 191, 193–97 Mary Tudor, Queen of England, 187– 89, 193–94 Mary, Queen of France, Duchess of Suffolk, 185, 190 Masaccio, 151–52, 158 Massa, 416 Matilda, Empress of Germany, 196 Mattiotti, Giovanni, 136–37

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Index Médaillistes, 56, 70–79 Medici, Bernardo de’, 400 Medici, Cosimo de’, 115, 389, 399 and literary patronage, 277–80, 282–85, 288–89 return from exile, 53, 269–70, 291 Medici, Giuliano de’, 399 Medici, Leonaro de’, Duchess of Mantua, 336–38 Medici, Lorenzo (the Magnificent) de’, 347–50, 365, 370 and family archive, 389–404 and justice, 269, 276 and religious confraternities, 13 Medici, Piero di Cosimo de’, 391 Medici, Piero de’, 271, 392, 398, 400–01 and literary patronage, 277, 281– 84, 286–87, 291, 293 Medici, Piero di Lorenzo de’, 394 Melbourne, 201–04, 206, 211–13, 217–22, 227, 232 Meun, Jean de, 215 Michael, blacksmith, 397 Michelangelo, 263, 265–66, 386 Michele, Fra (Giovanni di Berti), 34– 53 Michelino, Domenico di, 232 Midot, Father, Vicar-General of Bishop of Toul, 76, 82 Milan, 163, 166, 267, 284, 287–90, 381, 395, 404, 414–17, 423 and conflict with Florence, 53, 149, 154, 282, 285–86 in Italic League, 282 Minerbetti, 303 Minim Order, 67–68 Modena, 404, 409 Monogrammist VW, 252 Montanists, 81 Monte, Piero da, 319 Montecatini, 411 Monteggiori, castle, 407, 416, 422–23

435 Montpellier, 97 More, Henry, 256 More, Thomas, 181 Morgante, 400 Mori, Giovanni, 412 Moro, Lodovico il, 378 Moses, 268, 310, 312, 314, 321–22, 350, 355, 367 Motrone, 416 Moulins, Guyart des, 239–40 Mulchahey, Michèle, 97, 99, 106, 115 Muñoz, Antonio, 122 Murer, Christoph, 249, 251 Nancy, 56, 63–64, 66, 69, 74, 76, 82 Naples, 44, 154, 166, 232 in Italic League, 282 Negroponte, Antonio da, 226 Neoplatonism, 345–48, 351–53, 355, 358–62, 372 Nerli, Rinaldo detto Ballerino de’, 392 Nettoli, Bartolomeo, 399 Niccholuccio, 395 Niccoli, Niccolò, 303 Nicholas III, Pope, 40 Nicholas V, Pope, 301 n. 14, 319, 323 Notre-Dame-du-Refuge, convent, 56, 69, 76, 83 Nozzano, 416 Numa Pompilius, 268 Nuremberg, 248 O’Malley, John, 299–300 Obry, Nicole, 63 Observant movement, 21–22, 28 Oleggio, Giovanni d’, 415–16, 420 Olivi, Peter, 49 Oratorians, 65, 69 Oxford, 202

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436 Palmieri, Matteo, 399 Pandolfini, Ser Filippo, 269 Panofsky, Erwin, 147, 149, 152 Papino, 401 Paris, 82, 234 University of, 345, 358 Parma, 211, 409–14 Passavanti, Jacopo, Fra, 109–10, 116 Passi, Giuseppe, 325–26, 330–31 Paul of Venice, Fr, 94 Paul, Saint, 367 Paulozo, Medici bodyguard, 400 Pausanias, 217 Pausias, 218 Payne, John, 204, 207, 212 Pazzi Conspiracy, 391, 399–400 Peraldus (Peyraut), Guillaume, 98, 113 Persius, Ascanius, 326–27 Perugino, 323 Peter Comestor, 238 Peter the Chanter, 96 Peterborough, 188, 194 Petrarch, Francesco, 168, 278, 289– 91, 350, 370–71 Peyrout, Guillaume, see Peraldus, Guillaume Piccinino, Niccolò, 289 Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius, see Pius II, Pope Pichard, Rémy, doctor, 64–66 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 3, 343–73 Piero, Francesco di, 391 Pierozzi, Antonino (Saint Antoninus), Archbishop of Florence, 21-22, 111, 298–323 Pietrasanta, 407, 416 Pisa, 163, 406–08, 413–16, 418–19, 421 Council of, 302–03 Pisa, Giordano da, 113 Pisanello, 227

Pistoia, 408–09, 411 Pithoys, Claude, Minim priest, 67– 68, 75, 77 Pitt, William, Sir, 202 Pitti, Luca di Buonacorso, 283 Pius II, Pope, 319 Pius V, Pope, 246–47 Plato, 349, 359, 362, 368, 371 Plautus, 366 Pliny, 348 Plotinus, 346–47, 352–59, 361–63, 371–72 Poggio a Caiano, 154, 401–03 Poggio, Cristoforo, 379 Poggio, Giovanni di, 415 Poiré, François, Jesuit, 74, 83 Poirot, Charles, doctor, 61–64, 66–67 Poliziano, Angelo, 349–50, 369–70, 393, 396 Polizzotto, Lorenzo, 20 Polycarpe, Capuchin Father, 74–75, 77 Pomaro, Gabriella, Fr, 112 Ponte a Serchio, 416 Pontremoli, 406 Pontremoli, Nicodemo da, 283 Popiglio, 411 Portico, Pagano dal, 406 Prato, Simona de’Fensi del conte Francesco da, 424 Priscilla of Montanus, 80, 81 n. 124 Prosperi, Bernardino de’, 388 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 115, 367 Puccini, Angelo, 43 Puccini, Lorenzo, 43 Puinoix, Jean de, 303 Pulci, Luigi, 400 Pullan, Brian, 9 Quercia, Jacopo della, 212 Quintilian, 350

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Index Ranfaing, Elisabeth de, 56–84 Ranfaing, Jean-Liénard, 59 Ranieri, Giovanni di Guido, 406 Reggio, 409 Remiremont, 59, 61, 63–64 Riario, Raffaele, Cardinal, 383 Richard III, King of England, 198 Richard, Duke of York, 192 Richard of York, 198 Rinuccini, Alamanno, 269 Robertson, Ian, 1–3, 5, 147 Romana, Francesca, Saint, 122, 124, 126–27, 130–45 romanesco, 132–35 Romano, Antoniazzo, 127, 129, 133, 136, 140, 142–43 Rome, 53, 82–83, 110, 182, 214, 256, 303 and Tor de’ Specchi, 119–45 Romena, Giovanni della, 419 Rosa, Salvator, 256 Rossi, Attilio, 123–28, 130–42, 144–45 Rossi, Costanza, 410 Rossi, Marsiglio, 410 Rossi, Orlando, 410 Rossi, Pier Maria, 211 Rossi, Pietro, 410 Rotaia, 416 Rouyer, Cyprian, Minim provincial of Champagne, 67 Rovezzano, Benedetto da, 185 Rubens, 214 Rubinstein, Nicolai, 393 Rucellai, Bernardo, 396 Rucellai, Giovanni, 206 Rucellai, Piero di Cardinale, 396 Ruggero, Castracane di, 407 Saggina, Lazzaro, 406, 408 Saggina, Neri, 406–07 Saint Edmonsbury, abbey, 185 Saint-Mihiel, 75 Saint-Mont, 61

437 Saliceto, Bartolomeo, 383 Salutati, Coluccio, 150, 161, 165, 167 Saluzzo, Valeriano di, 233 Salvadori, Patrizia, 395 Salvalaglio, horseman, 400 Salviati, Francesco, 256 Samuel, prophet, 236, 238–39, 243, 245, 247–48, 250–53, 255–59 San Gimignano, Giovanni di, 113 San Marco, convent, 102, 108, 113– 14, 116 Sandrart, Joachim, 250, 251 Sangallo, Francesco da, 29–30, 266 Sangallo, Giuliano da, 403 Santa Croce, convent, 42 Santa Lucia sul Prato, church, 20 Santa Maria del Giudice, 418 Santa Maria Novella, 109, 112–14 Santa Maria sopra Minerva, church, 110 Santissima Annunziata, 22 Sarzana, fortress, 394, 403 Saul, King, 236–40, 243, 245, 251–55 Savonarola, Girolamo, 25, 31, 270–72 Sbarra, Jacopo, 406 Scala, Mastino della, 411–13 Schäufelein, Hans, 244 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 239 Schönfeldt, Johann Heinrich, 253–54 Schuts, Pieter, 256 Scot, Reginald, 258 Scotus, Duns, see, Duns Scotus Scribner, Robert, 27 Sebastian, Saint, 292 Séglière, Charles, 73, 76, 80, 82 Seneca, 348 Sercambi, Giovanni, 410, 417, 419, 424 Sesto, 407, 413 Seuse, Heinrich, see Suso, Henry Sforza, Ascanio, Cardinal, 383 Sforza, Francesco, 281–93 Sforza, Muzio Attendolo, 163, 282 Sichem, Christoffel van, 251

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Index

438 Sicily, 56, 309 Siena, 46, 418 Sistine Chapel, 299–300, 319, 321 Sixtus IV, Pope, 319, 322–23 Skelton, John, 177 Socrates, 349 Soderini, Niccolò, 283 Soderini, Pier, 263, 265–66, 272–76, 388 Solomon, King of Israel, 268 Solon, 268 Sontag, Susan, 144 Sophia, daughter of King James I of England, 193–94 Spagnoli, Battista, 385 Spinellini, Giovanni, 294 Spinetta, Marquis of Villafranca, 423 Spinola, Gherardino, 409, 411 Squarcione, 227 Stalin, Joseph, 149 Steen, Jan, 222 Stefaneschi, Jacopo, 158 Stokes, Adrian, 189 Strasbourg, 240 Strassburg, Gottfried von, 213 Strego (Streghi), Perotto dello, 406, 416 Strozzi, Marco, 273 Stuart, Arbella, 191 Stufa, Giovenco della, 392 Surin, Jean-Joseph, Jesuit, 83 Suso, Henry, Blessed (Heinrich Seuse), 92, 98, 99 n. 34, 113–16 Tasso, Torquato, 328–30, 336–37, 339, 342 Tedici, Filippo, 408, 411 Teresa, Saint, 79 Terpstra, Nicholas, 21 Testa, Pietro, 256 Teufel, Johann, 245–48, 251 Théodule, 79 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 89–92, 116, 270, 313, 315, 358, 368

Thomas of Spalato, 49 Tickhill Psalter, 237–38 Titian, 214 Tolomei, Giacomo dei, Bishop of Narni, 43–44 Tomas, Natalie, 395 Tommaso III, 233 Tone, Ser Giunta, 406 Tor de’ Specchi, 119–44 Tornabuoni, Dianora, 111 Torquemada, Juan de, Cardinal, 102, 107, 110–11, 113 Torrigiano, Pietro, 181, 185, 187, 193, 198 Tosa, Pino della, 408 Toul, 65, 68–69 Toulouse, 69 Tours, 213 Trans, René de, 73, 76, 77 n. 109, 79–80, 82 Trexler, Richard, 3, 50, 95 Trinkaus, Charles, 344 Turkey, 292, 294 Tuscany, 34, 90, 168 n. 63, 335, 409, 422 art of, 151, 153, 227 Uberti, Ritrilla degli, 413 Uberto, King of Naples, 290 Uccello, Paolo, 165, 202 Uliari, Bartolommeo degli, Bishop of Florence, 35–42, 44–48, 52–53 Urban VI, Pope, 44–45, 302, 309, 312 Urban VIII, Pope, 69, 330 Utino, Leonardo de, 113 Uzzano, Niccolò da, 155 Valcke, Louis, 344–48, 351–64, 366, 369, 371–73 Valiano, 403 Vallombrosa, 395 van Dyck, Anthony, 197

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Index Vannozza, 138 Varazze, Jacopo de (Jacobus de Voragine), 99–100, 102, 113, 158 Vasari, Giorgio, 87, 137, 171, 263, 265 Vatican II, 93 Vatican, 102 Veglio, Princivalle del, 406 Venice, 3, 9, 149, 412 art of, 201–34 in Italic League, 282 Venier, Lionardo, 285 Venturi, Adolfo, 129, 140 Verdun, 61 Verona, 289–90, 410, 412–14 Verona, Liberale da, 228 Versilia, 416 Viardin, Nicolas, Jesuit, 65–66, 69, 83 Vicenza, 413 Vico Pisano, 416 Victoria, Queen of England, 178 Villani, Matteo, 418–19 Virgil, 292, 329 Visconti, Bernabò, Lord of Milan, 422 Visconti, Bianca Maria, 376 Visconti, Filippo Maria, 425 Visconti, Giangaleazzo, Duke of Milan, 46, 150 Visconti, Giovanni, Archbishop, 417 Visconti, Marco, 408 visitatori, 25–26 Vivarini, Antonio, 203, 205, 209, 211–12, 218–20, 224–25, 227, 229–32, 234 Vivarini, Bartolomeo, 227 Vogtherr, Heinrich, the Elder, 240 Volterra, fortress, 399–400, 403 Voragine, Jacobus de, see Varazze, Jacopo de

439 Walker, Julia, 194 War of the Eight Saints, 42, 45 Warburg, Aby, 390 Washington, D.C., 220, 227 Watson, Paul, 212 Watteau, Antoine, 222 Webster, John, 258 Weimar Republic, 150 Weissman, Ronald, 12, 16 Westminster Abbey, 177–99 Weyer, Johann, 248 Wigamur, 217 Windsor, 180, 186–87 witch, witchcraft, 57, 65–67, 77–79 witch of Endor, 235–59 Wittenberg, 246, 248 Wolsey, Cardinal, 185–86 World War II, 147, 151–53, 155 Zambrini, Francesco, 34 Zander, Giuseppe, 128–29 Zanobi, Bartolomeo di, 30 Zeri, Federico, 232

Waldschmitt, Bernhard, 256

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Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies Titles in series Contextualizing the Renaissance: Returns to History, ed. by Albert H. Tricomi (1999) Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and its Afterlife. Essays in Honor of John Freccero, ed. by Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish (2000) Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernadino da Siena (1380– 1444) (2001) Ian Robertson, Tyranny under the Mantle of St Peter: Pope Paul II and Bologna (2002) Stephen Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (2005) In Preparation Camilla Russell, Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies in Sixteenth Century Italy Stefan Bauer, The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s Lives of the Pope in the Sixteenth Century

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