Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580 9789048544240

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Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Dr. Allison Levy, an art historian, has written and/or edited three scholarly books, and she has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Getty Research Institute, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library of Harvard University, the Whiting Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. www.allisonlevy.com.

Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580

Allie Terry-Fritsch

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497), Procession of the Magi (detail), east wall, fresco, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Scala/Art Resource, NY Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 221 6 e-isbn 978 90 4854 424 0 doi 10.5117/9789463722216 nur 685 © A. Terry-Fritsch / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

7

Acknowledgements

15

1. Activating the Renaissance Viewer: Art and Somaesthetic Experience Somaesthetics and Political Persuasion Patronage and the Construction of the Viewer in Medicean Florence

19 30 40

2. Mobilizing Visitors: Political Persuasion and the Somaesthetics of Belonging in the Chapel of the Magi Sensory Activation and the Signaling of the Patron Somaesthetic Emplacement in Immersive Artistic Programs Staging Belonging in Bethlehem

53 59 81 95

3. Staging Gendered Authority: Donatello’s Judith, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici’s sacra storia, and the Somaesthetics of Justice Medici Garden as Theater in the Round Somaesthetic Cultivation of Audience and Narrator Collective Witnessing at the Scaffolds

115 122 138 145

4. Performing Virtual Pilgrimage: Somaesthetics and Holy Land Devotion at San Vivaldo Materializing the Holy Land Experience Somaesthetic Fashioning and Affective Devotion Possessing the New Jerusalem

161 171 178 201

5. Playing the Printed Piazza: Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino and Somaesthetic Discipline in GrandDucal Florence The Florentine Piazza as Practiced Space of Calcio Antiquity and Historical Realism in Bardi’s Discorso Battle Tactics, Vedute, and Somaesthetic Dominion Ritual Display and Restraint in the Noble Game of Calcio

217 223 232 239 253

6. Epilogue: Renaissance Somaesthetics in a Digital World

273

About the Author

291

Index

293



List of Illustrations

Plates Plate 1. Plate 2. Plate 3.

Plate 4. Plate 5. Plate 6. Plate 7. Plate 8. Plate 9.

Plate 10. Plate 11.

Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece, 1438-1442, tempera on wood, originally for high altar of Church of San Marco, today in Museo di San Marco, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) View of the Chapel of the Magi, constructed by Michelozzo and painted by Benozzo Gozzoli by 1459, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Alamy) Filippo Lippi, Adoration of the Child, c.1457, tempera with oil glazes and gold on poplar, originally located on the altar of the Chapel of Magi, Palazzo Medici, Florence; today housed in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen (Photo: Art Resource) View of the eastern wall of Benozzo Gozzoli’s painted cycle of the Procession of the Magi, 1459, mixed media, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) Detail of gold revetments on the leather straps of Cosimo de’Medici’s mule, east wall, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author) Benozzo Gozzoli, Adoration of the Magi, fresco, c.1444, fresco, Cell 39, north corridor of dormitory, Convent of San Marco, Florence (Photo: Author) View of the southern wall of Benozzo Gozzoli’s painted cycle of the Procession of the Magi, 1459, mixed media, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) View of the western wall of Benozzo Gozzoli’s painted cycle of the Procession of the Magi, 1459, mixed media, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) Detail of Medici supporters, including Francesco Sassetti (man raising hand) and Benozzo Gozzoli’s two self-portraits (in blue and white turban; in grey feather hat), west wall, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author) Detail of man in feather hat raising hand, east wall, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author) Benozzo Gozzoli, West wall of chancel, Angels of Bethlehem, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

297 298

298 299 300 301 302 303

304 304 305

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Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

Plate 12.

Benozzo Gozzoli, East wall of chancel, Angels of Bethlehem, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) 305 Plate 13. Detail of angel dressed as Star of Epiphany, east wall of chancel, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author) 306 Plate 14. Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi), Judith and Holofernes, by 1464, bronze, located between mid-1460s and 1495 in the garden of Palazzo Medici, today in the Sala dei 307 Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Plate 15. Dead Christ, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 308 Plate 16. Deposition, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 308 Plate 17. Crucifixion, Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Alexandra Korey) 309 Plate 18. Stabat Mater, with view towards Crucifixion, Mount Calvary, 309 San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Plate 19. Ecce Homo, exterior niche on the House of Pilate, San Vivaldo 310 (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Plate 20. Crucifige, exterior niche on the Carrying the Cross, San 310 Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Plate 21. Giovanni della Robbia, Madonna dello Spasimo, c. 1513, Oratory of the Madonna dello Spasimo, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)311 Plate 22. View of Giovanni de’Bardi’s treatise, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino, in the hands of a reader (Photo: Author) 312

Figures Figure 1. Tourists in the Trecento room of the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Author) Figure 2. Sergeant Ivan Frederick, “The Hooded Man,” 2003, Abu Ghraib (Source: Alamy) Figure 3. Fra Angelico, Entombment of Christ, 1438-1442, originally the central predella panel of the San Marco altarpiece, today in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin (Source: Alamy) Figure 4. Fra Angelico, Mocking of Christ, c. 1440, Cell 7, Convent of San Marco, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) Figure 5. View inside Cosimo de’Medici’s double cell at San Marco, featuring Benozzo Gozzoli’s Crucifixion with Medici Saints in Cell 38 and Adoration of the Magi in Cell 39, c.1443-1444,

20 31 31 34

List of Illustr ations 

Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8. Figure 9. Figure 10. Figure 11. Figure 12. Figure 13. Figure 14.

Figure 15.

Figure 16. Figure 17. Figure 18. Figure 19.

fresco, north corridor of dormitory, Convent of San Marco, Florence (Photo: Author) 56 Floor plan of Chapel of the Magi, including cosmati pavement (Plan: Kim Young) 58 View of Palazzo Medici from southeast, constructed by Michelozzo, mid-1440s-1460, Via Cavour (formerly Via Larga), Florence (Photo: Author) 60 Plan of ground floor of Palazzo Medici (Diagram: Kim Young, based on ASF, Guardaroba medicea 1016) 63 Plan of piano nobile of Palazzo Medici (Plan: Kim Young, based 63 on ASF, Guardaroba medicea 1016) Benozzo Gozzoli, Apocryphal Lamb, 1459, fresco, above original entrance to the Chapel of Magi, Palazzo Medici 65 Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author) View of floor tiles at entrance to the Chapel of the Magi, 67 Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author) View of floor tiles in center of main body of the Chapel of the 69 Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author) Michelozzo and Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, Ceiling of the Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)71 Detail of Medici entourage led by Piero de’Medici (center right foreground on white horse) and Cosimo de’Medici (center left foreground on brown mule), eastern wall, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Art Resource) 72 Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi (Strozzi Altarpiece), 1426, tempera and gold leaf on wood, originally for the Sacristy of Santa Trinita; today housed in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) 78 Michelozzo and Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, Tabernacle of the Annunciation, Santissima Annunziata, Florence (Photo: Author) 79 Detail of miraculous icon of the Annunciation, Tabernacle of SS. Annunziata, Santissima Annunziata, Florence (Photo: Author)80 View of Southwest corner of Chapel of the Magi, with modern entrance, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author) 89 Benozzo Gozzoli, Shepherd Before the Annunciation, West Chancel Façade, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) 96

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Somaesthe tic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

Figure 20. Benozzo Gozzoli, Shepherd Before the Annunciation, East Chancel Façade, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) 96 Figure 21. View of chancel step, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author) 98 Figure 22. Medici insignia, east wall of chancel, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author) 99 Figure 23. Detail of choir leaders, west wall of chancel, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author) 101 Figure 24. Detail of soloist, called the angelus magni consilii (in blue cassock, crossing chest) and angel dressed as the Star of Epiphany (in pink and green cassock on far-right edge), east 102 wall of chancel, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author) Figure 25. Ceiling above chancel, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author) 103 Figure 26. Michelozzo (architect)/ Donatello (relief decoration)/ Maso di Bartolomeo (sgraffito decoration), Courtyard of Medici Palace, completed c. 1454 (Photo: Author) 123 Figure 27. Donatello, David, 1430-1450, bronze, originally located in courtyard of Palazzo Medici, now housed in Museo Nazionale 125 del Bargello (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Figure 28. Donatello, David, 1408, marble, originally located in the sala grande of the Palazzo della Signoria, now housed in Museo Nazionale del Bargello (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 125 Figure 29. Judith, with granite and marble column support, Sala dei Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 131 Figure 30. View toward former interior loggia within the garden of Palazzo Medici (Photo: Author) 132 Figure 31. Aerial view of garden from northwest corner with suggestion of appearance of fifteenth-century elevated walkways (Photo: Author)133 Figure 32. View of right side of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 134 Figure 33. View of left side of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 134 Figure 34. Detail of Donatello’s signature inscribed into the bronze pillow and the bronze bas-relief of Bacchus positioned beneath the figural group in the front (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 135 Figure 35. Detail of bronze bas-relief on right side of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)136 Figure 36. Detail of bronze bas-relief on left side of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)136

List of Illustr ations 

Figure 37. Detail of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 147 Figure 38. Detail of Holofernes, Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 151 Figure 39. Sandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, c.1475-1476, tempera on panel, originally in Santa Maria Novella, today in Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) 163 Figure 40. Leon Battista Alberti, Tempietto dello Santo Sepolcro, c. 1467, San Pancrazio, Florence (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 164 Figure 41. Simone il Pollaiuolo (Cronaca), San Salvatore al Monte, Florence, completed 1504 (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 166 Figure 42. Map of the Pilgrimage Complex of the New Jerusalem at San 167 Vivaldo, 2012 (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Figure 43. Architectural structures located on “Mount Calvary” in the north-western region of the San Vivaldo campus, including the Prison of Christ (left foreground), Crucifixion (left back), Holy Sepulchre (right back) and Noli me tangere (right foreground) 167 (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Figure 44. Architectural structure representing “Mount Zion” in the south-central region of the San Vivaldo campus (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)172 Figure 45. Architectural structures located in the north-central region of the San Vivaldo campus, including the House of Pilate (center), Madonna dello Spasimo (far right) and the House of Veronica 173 (back left center) (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Figure 46. Architectural structure representing the Ascension of Christ located on the “Mount of Olives” in the north-eastern region of 174 the San Vivaldo campus (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Figure 47. Church of the Assumption of the Madonna and of Saint Francis, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 175 Figure 48. Benedetto Buglioni, Nativity, c. 1505, Chapel of the Nativity, Church of the Assumption of the Madonna and of Saint Francis, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 176 Figure 49. View of the Holy Sepulcher from Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch 179 Figure 50. Author and Franciscan guide in vestibule of the Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 181 Figure 51. View of the threshold to the Tomb of Christ, with author and Franciscan guide inside, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 182 Figure 52. Detail of Dead Christ, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: 183 Stefan Fritsch)

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Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

Figure 53. View crawling out of the inner chamber into the vestibule, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 185 Figure 54. View of Mount Calvary from the Holy Sepulchre, San Vivaldo. The stairs on the left lead to the Crucifixion, while the entrance located on the right leads to the Stabat Mater (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 185 Figure 55. Floor socket hole, Crucifixion, Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 186 Figure 56. View of Christ from floor, Crucifixion, Mount Calvary, San 187 Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Figure 57. Stabat Mater, Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 188 Figure 58. View of pilgrims encountering the Ecce Homo and Crucifige 191 reliefs, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 191 Figure 59. Detail of Christ, Ecce Homo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Figure 60. Detail of Mary and John, Crucifige (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 192 Figure 61. Pilgrim placed in judgment between the Ecce Homo and 193 Crucifige reliefs, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) Figure 62. View of the House of Annas, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 195 Figure 63. View of former Valley of Jehosophat, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 196 Figure 64. View of the Cenacolo, Mount Zion, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)197 Figure 65. Exterior view of the Oratory of the Madonna dello Spasimo, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 198 Figure 66. Interior view of the Oratory of the Madonna dello Spasimo, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 199 Figure 67. Giovanni della Robbia, Pietà, c. 1528, polychrome terracotta, San Salvatore al Monte, Florence (Photo: Stefan Fritsch) 200 Figure 68. Replica of the Holy Sepulcher, 12th century, Santo Stefano in Bologna208 Figure 69. Anonymous artist, View of a Calcio Match in Santa Croce, from Giovanni de’Bardi, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino, 1580, NENC.F.6.4.2 (Photo: By concession of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali della Repubblica Italiana/ Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze) 219 Figure 70. Giovanni Stradano, View of a Calcio Match in Piazza Santa Maria Novella, 1561-1562, fresco, Sala del Gualdrada, Palazzo Vecchio (Photo: Art Resource) 221 Figure 71. Jacques Callot, Tamburino at a Calcio Match, 1617, etching, from the series Capricci di varie figure (Photo: Art Resource) 221

List of Illustr ations 

Figure 72. Marble plaque (battipalla) marking the half line of the calcio field, 1565, inserted into the façade of Palazzo dell’Antella in Piazza Santa Croce, Florence (Photo: Author) 224 Figure 73. Giovanni Stradano, Frontispiece for Calcius Ludus Florentinorum Nobilum, c.1595, drawing (Photo: RDK- Netherlands Institute for Art History) 235 Figure 74. Historiated initial “S” with armed men, from opening page of Giovanni de’Bardi, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino, 1580, NENC.F.6.4.2 (Photo: By concession of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali della Repubblica Italiana/ 241 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze) Figure 75. Frontispiece with coat of arms of Francesco I de’ Medici and Bianca Cappello, from Giovanni de’Bardi, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino, 1580, NENC.F.6.4.2 (Photo: By concession of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali della Repubblica Italiana/ Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze)247 Figure 76. View of the Salone dei Cinqueccento, designed by Vincenzo Borghini and executed by Giorgio Vasari and his workshop between 1563-1571, Palazzo della Signoria, Florence (Photo: Author)250 Figure 77. Giorgio Vasari and assistants, The Conquest of the Fortress near Porta Camollia, 1563-1571, Salone dei Cinquecento, Palazzo della Signoria, Florence (Photo: Art Resource) 251 Figure 78. Detail of canon with insignia of Cosimo I de’Medici, The Conquest of the Fortress near Porta Camollia (Photo: Art Resource)252 Figure 79. Paris Bordone, The Chess Players, c.1550, oil on canvas, 259 Gemäldegallerie, Berlin (Photo: Art Resource) Figure 80. Alessandro Cecchini, View of a Calcio Match in Santa Croce, from Pietro Bini, Memorie del Calcio Fiorentino, 1688 (Photo: Author)262 Figure 81. Alessandro Cecchini, Diagram of Starting Positions of Athletes in a Calcio Match, from Pietro Bini, Memorie del Calcio Fiorentino, 1688 (Photo: Author) 263 Figure 82. Thomas Struth, Uffizi I, Florence, C-print, 1989, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Photo: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) 274 Figure 83. The Mona Lisa Encounter, Musée du Louvre, Paris (Photo: 277 Alicia Steels on Unsplash)

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Figure 84. Bill Viola, The Greeting, 1995, installed next to Jacopo del Pontormo, Visitation, 1529, in “Electric Renaissance” at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2017 (Photo: Palazzo Strozzi) Figure 85. Magi Chapel VR app screenshot (Photo: Author) Figure 86. Google Arts & Culture App offers the opportunity to enter into a virtual world of the Uffizi (Photo: Author)

279 281 284

Acknowledgements As the great number of individuals and institutions listed below suggests, this book has been supported by an incredible intellectual network and I thank my colleagues, friends, and family for their critical advice and support throughout the research and writing process. Much of the research that I performed in the museums and archives of Florence was made possible through grants and fellowships from the Italian Art Society, the Department of Art History at Universität Salzburg, Studio Arts College International (SACI)-Florence, and my home institution of Bowling Green State University, particularly BGSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of the Study of Society and Culture, the Faculty Research Committee, and the Division of Art History in the School of Art. My colleagues at BGSU have been enthusiastic supporters of the project since its inception and I have been fortunate to explore ideas for it during universitysponsored research trips, class seminars, and faculty writing workshops. For carefully reading portions of the manuscript and offering critical feedback, I thank especially my BGSU colleagues Bill Albertini, Candace Archer, Eileen Berry, Vibha Bhalla, Phil Dickinson, Neil Englehart, Heather Elliott-Famularo, Sandra Faulkner, Stefan Fritsch, Rebecca Skinner Green, Andrew Hershberger, Alli Hoag, Erin Labbie, Stephanie Langin-Hooper, Sean Leatherbury, Ruthy Light, Scott Magelssen, Melissa Miller, Simon Morgan-Russell, LeighAnn Pahapill, Vicki Patraka, Susana Pena, Katerina Rüedi Ray, Amy Robinson, Jolie Sheffer, Scott Magelssen, and Lori Young. I am grateful to School of Art Director, Charlie Kanwischer, and College of Arts & Sciences Dean, Raymond Craig, for helping me secure university funding to offset costs of the image permissions for the book, Jane Steinert for managing the accounts, and Kim Young for image formatting. My teaching collaboration with the performance theorist Scott Magelssen in a cross-listed Art History and Performance Studies seminar on visual culture and social justice at BGSU in Fall 2011 provided a deep exploration of the production and use of space, and I thank Scott for his tremendously helpful feedback both there and in a small faculty writing group that gathered at BGSU’s Center for Teaching and Learning for many years. A second opportunity to teach collaboratively came in Spring 2015 when LeighAnn Pahapill and I led an experimental Art History seminar/ Studio workshop on “Immersive Installation Art.” Sponsored by the Rick Valicenti Collaboration in the Arts Fund, the course provided hands-on opportunity to construct somaesthetic environments. LeighAnn’s studio practice as a site-specific installation artist and my art-historical interest in somaesthetic cultivation were placed in dialogue throughout the seminar and we engaged our studio and art history students in the creation of a series of large-scale immersive installations in

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Somaesthe tic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

Bowling Green and Toledo. I am grateful for the opportunity to materially explore installation space and critique the viewing experience together. Thank you to the BGSU students who participated in these seminars, as well as my Art History seminars on “Somaesthetics: Body, Art, Experience” and “Renaissance Somaesthetics,” in which we debated the merits of various methodologies and critical theories in their capacity to express somaesthetic inquiry. Several of my Art History graduate advisees, including Julie Kaercher Finnegan, Autumn Muir, Mirella Pardee, Viola Ratcliffe, and Grace Nelson, produced excellent M.A. theses on somaesthetics topics and it was a pleasure to work with each of them. I made public presentations of ideas for this book at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2015), the Annual Conference of the College Art Association (2009, 2012, and 2015), and the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference (2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015), and thank the organizers, chairs, co-panelists, and audience members for their tremendous attention and feedback. Talks delivered at conferences held at Bogazici University, Istanbul (2012), Musée du Louvre, Paris (2013), University of Notre Dame (2014), University of WisconsinMilwaukee (2015), Saint Bonaventure University (2017), and the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC (2018) offered even further opportunities to share ideas. Several colleagues invited me to deliver guest lectures at their academic institutions, including Kerry Boeye (Loyola), Jill Burke (Edinburgh), David Davidson (SACI), Cristina Cruz Gonzalez (Oklahoma State), Chriscinda Henry (McGill), Jodi Jamison (University of Toledo), Tim McCall (Villanova), Maureen Pelta (Moore College of the Arts), Stephanie Rozene (Hartwick), Pamela Stewart (Eastern Michigan), Galina Tirnanic (Oakland), Sabine Weber (Glasgow), and Angie Zielinksi (Idaho State). The energizing discussions that emerged during and after these encounters have enriched and propelled forward my research. As always, the staff and academic communities of many research libraries have been incredibly accommodating and I extend my gratitude to all who helped me navigate the archives and stacks at the Archivio di Stato Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze, Biblioteca Laurenziana Medicea, Archivio Storico della Provincia di San Francesco Stimmatizzato dei Frati Minori in Toscana, Kunsthistoriches Institut in Florenz, Biblioteca Berenson at Villa I Tatti, Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg, and William Jerome Library at Bowling Green State University. I especially would like to thank the administrators and curators of the following institutions for their generous permission to gain special access to their collections: Il Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo in Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Museo di San Marco, and San Vivaldo in Tuscany. The opportunity to spend multiple occasions alone inside the Chapel of the Magi gave me the space and time to reflect on the intensity of the decoration and my singular place within the room’s overall program, and I

Acknowledgements 

thank the directors of Palazzo Medici Riccardi for allowing me to take photographs and under varying light conditions. I similarly gained valuable information from my onsite exploration of San Vivaldo on several extended visits. I thank the tertiaries who accompanied me and thank the friars for allowing me to photograph the site. I am fortunate to have had multiple occasions to discuss my ideas for this book with Richard Shusterman, both at his institution and mine over the past decade. I thank Richard for his helpful advice, especially during his great visit to BGSU in 2012 as a guest scholar for my graduate seminar on “Somaesthetics.” I look forward to continuing our discussions in the future. In addition, the following colleagues, friends, and family have read portions of the manuscript and given generous feedback and support at various stages in this project: Niall Atkinson, Maria Borchi, Jennifer Borland, Stephen Campbell, Charles Cohen, Sally Cornelison, Holly Crocker, Lara Curandai, Bruce Edelstein, James Elkins, Theresa Flanigan, Holly Flora, Wolfgang Fritsch, Elina Gertsman, Jeffrey Hamburger, Cecily Hilsdale, Megan Holmes, Brigitte Jeanguiot, Sylvain Jeanguiot, Jessen Kelly, Herbert Kessler, Alexandra Korey, Aden Kumler, Sarah Kyle, Chris Lakey, Fabian Lange, Richard Leson, Nenette Luarca-Shoaf, Lia Markey, Lyle Massey, Maria Mendonca, Robert Nelson, Nerida Newbigen, Jill Pederson, Chiara Pradella, Diana Presciutti, Maria Moriani Poli, Michelle Randall, Alessandra Raspini, Sheryl Reiss, Sean Roberts, Mark Rosen, Brian Sandberg, Ortrud Sandmann, Matt Shoaf, Patricia Simons, Stephen Sims, Rosmaria Stio, Diane Terry, Walter Terry, Barbara Wisch, Kelli Wood, and Rebecca Zorach. I would like to give a special thank you to Erika Gaffney for bringing me into the Amsterdam University Press community and helping me to navigate this project. Heartfelt thanks are also extended to my anonymous reviewers and Allison Levy, who pushed me to make this a better book. My deepest gratitude is to my husband, colleague, travel partner, and photographer, Stefan Fritsch, who deserves an honorary degree in Art History, and to our son, Walter, who has made me learn to look at the world through new eyes. This book is dedicated to them.

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1.

Activating the Renaissance Viewer: Art and Somaesthetic Experience Abstract Chapter One provides an in-depth introduction to somaesthetics as a methodological practice for Renaissance Art History and outlines the aims and content of the book. The chapter defines somaesthetic inquiry in relation to Medieval and Renaissance scholarship on the body, ritual, performance, and viewership, and advocates for a performative approach to the analysis of Renaissance art. Considering the dynamics of works of art that activate and emplace their viewers, the chapter explores the theoretical implications of considering Renaissance viewers as critical technologies in the rise and sustenance of power in Medicean Florence. Keywords: somaesthetics, performativity, Renaissance viewer, patronage, political persuasion

On a sweltering July morning, I brought a small group of students to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence for a three-hour seminar on Italian Renaissance painting. As we climbed the grand staircase of the sixteenth-century building, I recounted the political maneuvers of the Medici dynasty that led to its construction and explained the framework for the display of painted artworks in the exhibition halls. After a brief pause to allow the students to control their heavy breathing after the stairs, we entered the first magnificent aula in which monumental altarpieces of Cimabue and Giotto tower over spectators with a dazzling display of gold leaf and angelic wings (Fig. 1). Here we began the seminar proper, which wove together the history of the Italian city-state of Florence with the development of three-dimensional rendering of form during the Renaissance. We slowly wound our way through the subsequent galleries looking at the paintings of Lorenzo Monaco, Gentile da Fabriano, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, and Paolo Uccello and I discussed the artistic personalities of Italian “genius” alongside tales of powerful patrons who financed their creative output. The seminar offered the gold standard

Terry-Fritsch, A., Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722216_ch01

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Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

Figure 1. Tourists in the Trecento room of the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Author)

for any Art History course: the ability for students to see the original works of art, as opposed to reproductions, and use the material cues of the works to engage in formal analysis. The galleries were packed, and it was hot, but we jostled for prime viewing positions in order to fulfill our art-historical goals. As we stood before Masolino and Masaccio’s Altarpiece of Saint Anne, one of my students fainted. Although she did not fall hard and revived quickly, the museum policy required that the young woman be brought for immediate medical attention. A dramatic onslaught of museum attendants and paramedics cleared out the gallery and stairwells to make room for her transport to the ambulance waiting in the piazza below. A harrowingly fast ride through the packed streets of the inner city eventually brought us to the ospedale, where the young woman was examined, and I acted as her translator. Thankfully, by this point she was feeling fine, only a little embarrassed. After all of the prerequisite questions were satisfactorily answered and it was established that the student was suffering from the triple problem of jet-lag, sweltering heat, and no breakfast but was otherwise in stable condition, the Florentine medical assistant looked up at me with a smile and asked, “What painting was she standing in front of?” I smiled back, nodded my head knowingly, and responded, “Masaccio.” The medical assistant’s eyes lit up and she uttered just one word: “Stendhal!”

Ac tivating the Renaissance Viewer: Art and Somaesthe tic Experience 

Stendhal, the penname for the nineteenth-century French writer Henri Beyle, had a physical reaction to the artworks of Florence, similar to the one suffered by the young woman inside of the Uffizi, when he visited the city in 1817. Described in his travelogue, Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817, Stendhal approached Florence with his heart “leaping wildly within” him.1 As he progressed closer and closer to the city gates, he found himself “grown incapable of rational thought” and, once inside, he made his way immediately to the church of Santa Croce.2 There, standing among the sepulchers of great Florentine men, a “tide of emotion” overwhelmed him and “flowed so deep that it was scarce to be distinguished from religious awe.”3 He then moved into the Niccolini Chapel and, seated with his gaze fixed upward to the ceiling, he described an experience of aesthetic transcendence: I underwent, through the medium of Volterrano’s Sibyls, the profoundest experience of ecstasy that, as far as I am aware, I ever encountered through the painter’s art. My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence, and by the proximity of those great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (the same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. 4

The nervous sensations that Stendhal felt in his body and mind were vestiges of his ecstatic aesthetic experience in Santa Croce, where the blending of sensibility with sensuality allowed for a kind of knowing that was both sublime and dangerous. That the medical assistant in the hospital was familiar with Stendhal is most likely the result of the publication, in 1989, of Graziella Magherini’s La sindrome di Stendhal, a psychoanalytic investigation of extreme tourist reactions to works of art located within the city of Florence.5 Magherini documented over 100 contemporary cases of tourists, like Stendhal, who came to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova due 1 Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817. Citations to the text here will draw from the English edition, Rome, Naples and Florence by Stendhal. 2 Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence by Stendhal, 301. 3 Ibid., 301. 4 Ibid., 302. The italics are included in the original text. 5 The first edition was published in Florence in 1989, with subsequent second and third editions published in 1995 and 2003. All references to the text cited here will draw from the third edition; Margherini, La Sindrome di Stendhal.

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to “an attack of nerves” or other physical ailments in the face of beauty.6 Including fainting episodes, panic attacks, and even pathological behavior, the outward signs of “the Stendhal syndrome” are, according to Magherini, psychosomatic indications of a viewer’s inability to control the emotional and psychological impact of cultural contact with artistic genius. The foreignness of the experience—all sufferers of the syndrome are non-Italians—and the overwhelming quantity of artworks at the tourist’s disposition contribute to the feelings of panic, identity confusion, and paranoia that the victims are said to have experienced. While Magherini’s theory is highly controversial, and largely dismissed as an inadequate explanation for tourist duress, the Stendhal syndrome nonetheless has provided fodder for writers and film makers to position works of art in Florentine museums as agents of viewers’ physical and affective transformation.7 Just recently, another tourist to the Uffizi had a heart attack—this time in front of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus—and The Guardian framed it as “illness by beauty.”8 Part of the allure of the Stendhal syndrome is its ability to make tangible the transformative potential of art. Certainly only a small fraction of the robust number of visitors to the Uffizi will claim to have experienced the Stendhal syndrome, yet the narratives that surround those that do (or are framed to have had) reveal a certain preoccupation and fascination with viewers who experience art too bodily. Framed as ill bodies and thus taken to a medical hospital for treatment, these viewers are approached as aberrations of a normative standard that privileges disinterested spectators who are untangled from their senses. Viewers with the Stendhal syndrome, so the story goes, let themselves feel to such an extent that their experiences translate materially in their bodies and minds. The extreme physical and mental responses associated with the Stendhal syndrome are considered, at least in part, as symptomatic of the viewer’s failure to contain the aesthetic experience within culturally-established boundaries, which include limiting the body’s role in aesthetic appreciation.9 In contrast, viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers 6 106 such cases were analyzed for psychiatric diagnosis and care between July 1977-Match 1986 at Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. For descriptions of these cases, see Margherini, La Sindrome di Stendhal, 93-126. 7 For one, rather comical, editorial on the syndrome, see Inturrisi, “Going to Pieces Over Masterpieces.” 8 Jones, “Stendhal Syndrome,” 9 Kant, Critique. On the dangers of the disinterested subject, see Jay, “Drifting Into Dangerous Waters,” 3-27.

Ac tivating the Renaissance Viewer: Art and Somaesthe tic Experience 

in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated in somaesthetic experience. Somaesthetics—a philosophical term derived from the combination of “soma,” or the active, sentient body, and “aesthetics,” or sensory appreciation—refers to the mindful manipulation of one’s body to enhance sensory appreciation and creative self-fashioning.10 Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic viewing in fifteenth and sixteenth century Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance. When Richard Shusterman first proposed “Somaesthetics” as a discipline in 1999, he wanted to recover “the body’s crucial and complex role in aesthetic experience” from what he called aesthetic philosophy’s “sad somatic neglect.”11 By addressing the ways in which creative self-fashioning and the cultivation of the body contributed to aesthetic appreciation, Shusterman wanted to show the “potential utility [of somaesthetics], not its radical novelty,” since the philosophical tradition always has investigated the relationship between the body and the production of knowledge.12 Indeed, as Shusterman has stressed, somaesthetics builds on extant philosophical texts addressing “bodily perceptions and practices and also of their function in our knowledge and construction of reality” and engages with “traditional ontological and epistemological issues of the body, but also […] the sort of sociopolitical inquires [Michel] Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have made central: how the body is both shaped by power and employed as an instrument to maintain it, how bodily norms of health, skill, and beauty, and even the most basic categories of sex and gender, are constructed to reflect and sustain social forces.”13 By thinking through aesthetic experience as an active and self-reflective practice, the investigation of somaesthetics draws attention to the dynamic interplay between the self, sensory stimuli, and societal conditions and aspirations.14 Unlike Shusterman’s perception of the contemporary state of philosophy, however, the study of the body and mind has always been—and continues to be—a central 10 Shusterman, “Somaesthetics,” 299-313; Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, 262-283; Shusterman, Performing Live; Shusterman, Body Consciousness. 11 Shusterman, “Somaesthetics,” 299. 12 Ibid., 304. 13 Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 15-48. Fundamental to Shusterman’s analysis is Foucault, The Care of the Self, in The History of Sexuality, 39-68. 14 Beyond analytical inquiry, Shusterman also exhorted individuals to implement pragmatic somaesthetics into the care and improvement of the self, as a means to reconnect the body and mind within contemporary living. See Shusterman, “Thinking through the Body,” 1-21; Shusterman, Performing Live, 154-181; Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 14.

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concern within Medieval and Renaissance studies. Generations of scholars, past and present, have investigated the ways in which the historical body reveals information about politics, religion, and economics through its cultural representation in texts and images, as well as in its performance in formal and informal scenarios of everyday life.15 In a relatively recent post on the Medieval blog, “In the Middle,” the historian Jeffrey Cohen responded to a question of whether he had perceived a renewed interest in the historical body with the quip, “Was there ever a time when people were not interested in bodies? It’s hard to imagine any interest in the body being new.”16 Indeed, as Caroline Walker Bynum explained in an article now more than twenty years old, the central place of the “body”—as physical matter and as ideological construct—in the discourse communities of the past and present points to its essential role in the cultural construction of subjects; the “fuss about the body” reflects both historical and contemporary desires to negotiate lived experience and anticipate what lies beyond.17 Art historians have long recognized that Renaissance viewers’ perception of and engagement with art was culturally negotiated. Thus scholars have developed myriad strategies to better understand Renaissance visuality—the social framework and practices of seeing the world and its attendant visual culture.18 As Hal Foster has described, to understand “visuality” one must “thicken” vision.19 That is, the scholar must move beyond the facts of the body and instead provide commentary on and interpretation of the cultural context in which the visual encounter occurred so as to acknowledge the physiological and psychic multivalence of vision as well as its social meaning.20 The pivotal scholarship of Michael Baxandall and Ernst Gombrich brought attention to the audience as a constructive participant in the Renaissance work of art. Baxandall’s influential method for reconstructing what he called the 15 The critical scholarship is by far too long to list in any meaningful way here, but my conception of Medieval and Renaissance embodiment has been shaped by my late professor, Michael Camille, whose graduate seminars at the University of Chicago taught us to approach the body as both a cultural object and performative subject; see Boeye, “A Bibliography,” 141-144. 16 “Medieval Bodies.” See Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines; and Cohen and Weiss, eds., Thinking the Limits of the Body. 17 Bynum, “Why all the Fuss About the Body?” 1-33. Bynum’s contribution to the body-focus of Medieval studies has been immense; for example, see Holy Feast, Holy Fast; Fragmentation and Redemption; The Resurrection of the Body; Wonderful Blood; Christian Materiality. 18 Mitchell, “What is Visual Culture?” 207-217; Herbert, “Visual Culture/Visual Studies,” 452-464; Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking. Such an approach advocates for the critical position of the audience in the reception and interpretation of art and culture. For an historical overview of reception theory, see Jauß, “Art. Rezeption, Rezeptionsästhetik,” 996–1004. 19 Foster, “Preface,” ix. 20 Ibid., ix. This is a play on Clifford Geertz’s notion of “thick description,” an explanation of not only the facts of behavior but also its context, which involves the interpretation and commentary of the ethnographer; Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 3-30.

Ac tivating the Renaissance Viewer: Art and Somaesthe tic Experience 

Renaissance “period eye” offered a way of understanding visual culture in light of the specific range of abilities possessed by a Renaissance viewer within particular socio-political, commercial, and religious contexts.21 Concerned with the “customer’s participation” in works of art, Baxandall approached Renaissance viewers—largely singing, dancing, mathematically-inclined patrons of painting in the fifteenth century—through the social transaction of patronage, and relied on extant archival documents, including patron-artist contracts, written reactions, and descriptions, to construct his Renaissance subject. Ernst Gombrich’s equally persuasive considerations on “the beholder’s share,” or what the spectator brought to the experience of art, drew attention to the social conditions and psychological framework of viewing that goes beyond documents in the archive.22 This book builds from these traditions of thickening the historical understanding of Renaissance visuality by attending to viewers’ somaesthetic experiences of art and architecture. It connects the significance and meaning of Renaissance art to the tangible performances of viewers, who activated and appreciated the works in full-bodied and mindful ways. Art-historical methods used to investigate Medieval and Renaissance bodies and embodiment are as varied as the many “turns” that the field has undergone over the last few decades, from the “anthropological turn” to the “pictorial turn” to the “performative turn.”23 This book attempts to draw attention to some of the ways that a “somaesthetic turn”—a turn that has already begun to take shape in art history—can reveal new insight on the relationship between viewers, art, and the construction of identity and power in the Renaissance. The participatory nature of viewing in the somaesthetic experiences described in this book was a way for individuals to make meaning through their bodies. As an a priori assumption of this study, when Renaissance viewers crafted themselves in relation to works of art and architecture, they were not simply passive recipients of visual content, but rather active co-producers of their experiences. That is to say, somaesthetic beholders were mindful of “doing” while “seeing.” Their combined physical and mental actions were akin to the “saying” in J.L. Austin’s famous dictum “saying is doing,” in which performative utterances both stand in for and actively shape the speaker’s social reality.24 Through participatory performance and somaesthetic 21 Baxandall, Painting and Experience. For several excellent compendia of first-hand accounts of works and spaces from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, see Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators; Gilbert, Italian Art. While these sources reveal critical information regarding the values that individuals placed on art, such convenient archival records are relatively rare and, even then, give only a partial understanding of viewers’ experiences. 22 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 193. 23 See Rampley, “Anthropology at the Origins,” 138-159; Mitchell, Picture Theory, 11-35; Nichols, “Writing the New Middle Ages,” 422-441. 24 Austin, How to Do Things with Words.

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engagement, viewers articulated the pragmatic relationships between images, their referents, themselves, and others. In this way, the book argues that the “beholder’s share” in the production of the work of art went beyond mere imaginative faculties to include the self-conscious bodily strategies of the viewer, which initiated a process by which Renaissance art “worked.”25 To explore how varying movements and sensory engagement impact the viewer experience, the book draws on scholarship from the fields of ritual and performance studies to consider embodiment as both “an act of doing” and a “way of knowing.”26 As the performance theorist Diana Taylor has argued, “we learn and transmit knowledge through embodied action, through cultural agency and by making choices. Performance […] functions as an episteme.”27 This book interrogates how viewers’ participation in the co-production of Renaissance images, objects, and spaces situated them as active agents in the narratives that shaped their social experience. To recover the forms of knowledge that were produced through somaesthetic experiences in Medicean Florence, the following chapters balance consideration of both the archive and the repertoire; that is, they examine “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e. texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e. spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”28 The aim is to draw on the extant archive—first and foremost the works themselves, and, where possible, documents—to reconstruct the “scenario” of somaesthetic experience for viewers, and then to theorize the potential ways in which the idealized “repertoire” facilitated modes of constructing or altering viewers’ perceived identities. Arguably, a wide range of Renaissance viewing practices may be called somaesthetic since viewing throughout the period was not part of a static encounter with a work, but rather was active and invested.29 Renaissance viewers believed that the physical operation of vision connected them to images and objects in ways that went beyond mere opticality, or eyesight alone. In his treatise Della pittura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti described how “the images of things impress themselves in 25 On efficacious images that “worked” for Renaissance beholders, see Trexler, Public Life; Terry-Fritsch, “Execution by Image,” 191-206. 26 For an excellent overview of recent literature on participatory performance, see Magelssen, Simming, esp. 6-9; and Alexander, “Performance and Pedagogy,” 253. 27 Taylor, Archive, xvi. 28 Taylor, Archive, 19. 29 On Medieval and Renaissance conceptions of vision and viewing, see the excellent overviews provided in Lindberg, Theories of Vision; Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance; Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment; Hahn, “Vision,” 44-64; Clark, Vanities of the Eye; Renaissance Theories of Vision. On religious vision and viewing in the Middle Ages, see especially Miles, “Vision,” 125-142; Hahn, “Seeing and Believing,” 1079-1106; Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary; Kessler, Spiritual Seeing; Caviness, Visualizing Women; Denery, Seeing and Being Seen; Hamburger, The Mind’s Eye; Peers, Sacred Shock; Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence.

Ac tivating the Renaissance Viewer: Art and Somaesthe tic Experience 

our minds” by “certain rays,” which, “like very subtle threads, are connected very directly” to the eye.30 Certain individuals, following a tradition of intromission theorized by philosophers such as Aristotle, Alhacen, and Avicenna, believed that objects emitted rays to impress their images literally within the bodies of viewers. Such penetration of the image into the physical fabric of an individual spurred Renaissance art theorists, such as Gian Paolo Lomazzo, to claim that images not only took a corporeal presence within the beholder but also had the power to transform the spirit of the viewer as well.31 For others who ascribed to extromission theory, as described by Plato and Galen, it was the viewer himself who reached out and touched images with their eyes. This mode of seeing invested the viewer with active agency to not only behold objects and pictures but to physically embrace and shape them as well.32 Whether receiving the image internally within the body or touching the image externally, the viewer was literally conjoined with the object that he or she beheld and this physical understanding of seeing contributed to the powerful affective bonds that were formed through the process.33 Many works encouraged somaesthetic interaction because of their design—those images, objects, and spaces meant to be handled, manipulated, opened, and explored.34 In recent years, scholarship dedicated to the examination of the material cues of these works of art to instigate a particular kind of viewer interaction has helped to shift art-historical attention toward the user or manipulator of art. Certain images and objects were made visible only through their revelation behind veils or covers; others were displayed after time-based journeys.35 Frescoed chapels and 30 [C]erti raggi […] per essi i simulacri de le cose s’imprimono nel senso […] A noi basti, che s’imaginiamo, che raggi a modo d’alcune fila sottilissime, siano drittissimamente legati; Alberti, La Pittura, 6r-6v. For a larger discussion of Alberti in the context of Renaissance theories of intromission and extromission, see Weststeijn, “Seeing,” 149-169. 31 “[A] picture artificially expressing the true naturall motions, will (surely) procure laughter when it laugheth […] cause the beholder to wonder, when it wondereth, […] to have an appetite when he seeth it eating of dainties, to fal a sleepe at the sight of a sweete-sleeping picture [etc]”; Lomazzo, A Tracte, II, chap. 1, 1-2. 32 As Baldassare Castiglione explains, such external touching could provide reciprocal entanglement, for example in a mutual gaze: when the eyes of a lover “send out their rays straight to the eyes of the beloved at a moment when these are doing the same […] the spirits meet, and in that sweet encounter each receives the other’s quality”; Castiglione, The Courtier, Book III, 232. 33 As Elizabeth Cropper has explored, the art of beauty was bound to affect, which was explicated in the writings of Francesco Petrarca; see her “Introduction,” 4, as well as “On Beautiful Women,” 374-394. Anne Dunlop has explored both Petrarch and Dante Alighieri in relation to vision and the desire for the beloved; see Dunlop, Painted Palaces. 34 See Bynum, Christian Materiality; Weinryb, “Living Matter,” 113-132; as well as the ongoing research and dialogue of “Material Collective” at http://thematerialcollective.org 35 For an example of a portrait with a sliding cover, see Brown, Lorenzo Lotto, 73-80. On the veiling and revealing of miraculous images, see Holmes, The Miraculous Image.

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tapestry-lined rooms depended on mobile viewers that would turn and traverse space in order to make connections between and complete the decorative narratives.36 Illuminated manuscripts and printed books required their bound pages to be held and turned by live individuals, who activated the narratives through a combination of reading, looking, and doing.37 Life-size sculptures of Christ and the saints were carried in procession and made to perform before crowds of the faithful on feast dates of the church, while small-scale sculptures, coins, medals and cameos were picked up, caressed, and examined by individual beholders within the Renaissance studio.38 The beholder’s contact with and manipulation of these works was integral to the aesthetic encounter. Other works fostered somaesthetic engagement due to their perceived boundedness with what they represented. As Richard Trexler, David Freedberg, and others have examined, certain Renaissance images were considered to be highly efficacious due to their ontological communion with their referents.39 Often, Renaissance individuals engaged in body-mind practices that they believed would contribute to their experiences of sacred and secular works and spaces. 40 Either alone or as part of a community, viewers would craft their bodies and minds to accentuate the intention of their encounters. Such physical interactions with art were underscored by cultural beliefs that fostered an expectation in the viewer that his or her interactivity with the work would produce an efficacious result.41 For example, not only did individuals pray in front of holy pictures and sculptures, that is, pray at a physical distance from images and connect to the saint or scene represented through

36 Terry-Fritsch, “Florentine Convent,” 82-123; Lakey, “From Place to Space,” 113-136. 37 The scholarship on the tactile and performative aspects of using manuscripts has grown too large to list comprehensively here, however the following have particularly influenced my understanding of the somaesthetic experience of reading late Medieval and Renaissance books: Camille, “Seeing and Reading,” 26-49; Müller, “The Body of the Book,” 32-44; The Book and the Body; Camille, “Obscenity Under Erasure,” 139-154; Connolly, “Imagined Pilgrimage,” 598-622; Marshall, “Confraternity and Community,” 20-45; Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image; Borland, “Unruly Reading,” 97-114; Hamburger and Schotheuber, “Books in Women’s Hands”; Rudy, Piety in Pieces; Kyle, Medicine and Humanism. 38 On kinetic sculptures of Christ, see Jung, “Phenomenal Lives”; Kopania, Animated Sculptures. On holding and touching sculpture in the Renaissance, see Johnson, “Touch,” 61-74; Johnson, “The Art of Touch,” 59-84; Johnson, “In the Hand of the Beholder,” 183-197; Randolph, Touching Objects; Gertsman, Worlds Within; Neilson, Verrocchio’s Factura. 39 Trexler, Public Life; Freedberg, The Power of Images. 40 As Emile Durkheim illustrated in Elementary Forms of Religious Life, rituals are particular modes of action (doing) that express the beliefs (thinking) of a unified body of members. These beliefs are states of opinion and consist of representations. On Renaissance art and ritual, see Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften; Trexler, Public Life; Muir, Civic Ritual; Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual; Strocchia, Death and Ritual; Chretien, Festival of San Giovanni; Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth. 41 See also the recent conversation around the work of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency.

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the ocular gaze, they also touched, kissed, caressed, and even sometimes ate holy images or applied them to their bodies in efforts to activate their sacred power. 42 A comprehensive study of Renaissance somaesthetic experience is beyond the scope of this book; rather, the aim here is to provide a critical analysis of a select group of works in Medicean Florence that were activated by the performative participation of the viewer to make two broad claims about Renaissance somaesthetic experience, which are borne out in the remainder of this introduction and the chapters that follow. First, the viewer’s body was equal to, if not greater than, the artist’s work as a generative locus of meaning-making. Certain viewers, like visitors to the Chapel of the Magi in Palazzo Medici (Chapter Two) or pilgrims to the Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo in Tuscany (Chapter Four), were literally immersed in multi-media artistic programs that were conceived and realized with their experience in mind. Viewers in these situations were located inside the representation itself; their bodies were integrated into the artistic program and used to produce its critical meaning. Other viewers, like readers of an illustrated treatise on calcio (Chapter Five), held the image, literally, at a distance. Through the time-based process of reading the text and learning the strategies of the game, viewers trained their vision to tactically navigate the field of play in the printed representation. Their experience, like that of visitors to the garden of Palazzo Medici (Chapter Three) and the pilgrims of San Vivaldo (Chapter Four), was framed by third-person narration, which encouraged them to look at and feel works of art in particular ways. Despite their different mediums, scales, and displays, the works discussed in this book were united in their eff icacy to instigate modes of participatory viewing that co-involved the viewer in strategic ways. Through in-depth analysis of the environments in which somaesthetic experience occurred and reconstruction of embodied scenarios of viewer engagement that took place therein, the book considers art through embodiment and suggests an art-historical “somaesthetics of style.” Second, the somaesthetic experiences described in this book were not spontaneous, but rather were carefully curated by the patron and artist. Art historians have constructed a robust socio-economic account of early modern patronage to trace the relationship between the sponsorship of buildings, objects, and images and the fashioning of patrons’ status and identity. This book examines how and why certain Renaissance patrons tapped into the performative potential of art and approaches somaesthetic experiences as a means of constructing political communities in Medicean Florence. Long recognized as leaders in Florentine art patronage in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Medici family used art as a form of political expression, both during the Republican period of oligarchic 42 Freedberg, The Power of Images; Rudy, “Kissing Images.”

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governance in the fifteenth century and later when the family assumed control as Dukes and then Grand Dukes of the city and its territories in the sixteenth century. 43 Art patronage served to visualize the family’s magnificence within the shifting political context of the city through the erection and decoration of material markers and monuments, which literally impressed the family’s name and symbols on important Florentine sacred and secular sites. After his return from exile in 1434, Cosimo de’Medici (1389-1464) funded a series of building projects that transformed the urban and ritual fabric of his neighborhood and crafted an image of the family as dedicated to the ideals of Florentine civic humanism, which was iterated in the title of “pater patriae” (“Father of the Fatherland”) given to Cosimo after his death.44 During the sixteenth-century, Cosimo I de’Medici (1519-1574), and the Medici dukes that followed his lead, systematically assumed patronage of the city’s most public spaces and symbolic monuments as a means to visualize the family’s new authority over them. This book examines the role that viewers’ bodies played in this larger narrative of Renaissance art patronage and argues that viewers were cultivated as critical technologies in the rise and sustenance of power in Medicean Florence.

Somaesthetics and Political Persuasion If it is possible to locate a generative moment for a book project, then this book essentially began the day the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses were released by the media in 2004. I was in Florence, putting the finishing touches on my Ph.D. dissertation on the political dimensions of Cosimo de’Medici’s patronage of Fra Angelico at San Marco, when I opened La Repubblica and was confronted with the macabre reality of the United States’ handling of the “war on terror” (Fig. 2).45 As an American abroad since shortly after 9/11, I already was forced to define myself in relation to the positions of the Bush administration on a nearly daily basis with my Florentine friends, as well as with just about anyone who figured out that I came from the US. When the photographs were published, we all became witness to the tactics used by the US Army at Abu Ghraib to produce truth. Positioned as a viewer looking at a victim through the eyes of a torturer, I had a visceral reaction to the photographs that conveyed my mental and bodily rejection of its content. Shortly after the photos surfaced, the visual theorist and art history professor in my graduate program at the University of Chicago, W.J.T. Mitchell, published an Op-Ed in the Chicago Tribune, a short but poignant political statement about 43 For extensive bibliographies on Medici scholarship, see Kent, Cosimo de’Medici; and The Medici. 44 Gutkind, Cosimo de’Medici. 45 Caprile, “Abu Ghraib la Città del Male.”

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Figure 2. Sergeant Ivan Frederick, “The Hooded Man,” 2003, Abu Ghraib (Source: Alamy)

Figure 3. Fra Angelico, Entombment of Christ, 1438-1442, originally the central predella panel of the San Marco altarpiece, today in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin (Source: Alamy)

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the power of the prison images. 46 He compared the most famous of them, the photograph of the “Hooded Man,” to a Fra Angelico painting from San Marco (Fig. 3). Of course, I was immediately engaged. According to Mitchell, both in the Op-Ed and in a later essay on the same topic, the Abu Ghraib photograph of the Hooded Man was a form of cloning of “the central devotional icon of Christianity […] as if through some kind of uncanny prescience, the MPs at Abu Ghraib sensed that their mission was to realize America’s Crusade against the infidels, its Holy War against Unholy Terrorists, with the staging of an Arab man as a Christ-like sacrifice.”47 Mitchell’s comparison of the photograph of the Iraqi detainee to Fra Angelico’s Entombment of Christ clearly visualized formal similarities between the tortured prisoner and Christ as the Man of Sorrows. The hooded man’s placement on the cardboard box resembles the placement of Christ before the tomb, with arms outstretched “at four and eight o’clock.” In both images, the squaring of the shoulders parallel to the surface plane of the picture provides the viewer with maximum exposure to the bodily surface of the figure, and, despite the aversion of the gaze (in the case of Christ) or the obliteration of the gaze (in the case of the Iraqi), the figure communicates directly and immediately through bodily gesture. On a formal level, the photograph reproduces Christian iconography in ways that resonate with an ideology of eradicating the infidels of terrorism after 9/11, a point that Mitchell and others have examined productively. 48 Yet, there is a fundamental disjunction between the works in the affective structure of both their making and reception that belie their formal similarities. The figure of Christ in Fra Angelico’s painting was made to inspire its viewers to devotion. The iconography stems from the Byzantine tradition, in which frontwardfacing representations of saints were considered necessary for an unmediated spiritual interaction between the viewer and the iconic figure.49 The Man of Sorrows imagery was intended for a contemplative viewing audience: the multiple wounds inflicted on the body of Christ provided a focal point for the meditation and prayer of the Christian devotee in front of it. The wounds were tangible marks offered to an audience of witnesses as proof of Christ’s incarnate state before he was raised to Heaven.50 Fra Angelico’s painting was the central panel of the predella of the San Marco altarpiece, painted in 1438-1440 and installed on the high altar of the 46 Mitchell, “Echoes of a Christian Symbol.” 47 Mitchell, “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable.” 48 Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect. 49 Tsakiridou, Tradition and Transformation. 50 As described in the Gospel of John, such tactile proof was necessary in the face of doubters. Caravaggio’s incredible rendition of the scene of encounter between the resurrected Christ and the apostle Thomas, painted in 1601, visualizes the power of bodily evidence to transform doubt into belief; see Terry-Fritsch, “Proof in Pierced Flesh,” 15-37.

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church of San Marco (Plate 1). During liturgical rites, the altarpiece served a critical function to frame the actions of the Observant Dominican friars who stood before and around it. Christ’s body in the Eucharist was held up before his dead body in Fra Angelico’s image as proof of his everlasting life and was extended in Communion as an invitation to participate in his saving grace. Within the friars’ dormitory in the convent of San Marco next to the church, the imagery of torture was used to illustrate neither abjection nor humiliation, but rather suffering as the ultimate altruistic act. Fra Angelico’s Mocking of Christ, painted around the year 1440, visualizes an account from Christ’s Passion as recorded in the Legenda aurea in which he was mocked for his presumption to be the King of the Jews (Fig. 4).51 He was brought within the House of Annas, blindfolded and dressed in a white gown, then beaten—with sticks and hands—and spat on as well. The painting is striking for its almost modern approach to composition. Christ, in all of his accoutrements of the mocked king, is seated on a bare red box and framed by a green cloth of honor placed behind him. Disembodied hands are poised as if to strike, while the floating fragment of a man spits as yet another disembodied hand raises his hat from his head. Yet, nothing touches Christ. His robe is unsullied, his flesh yet pierced. The image is sanitized. There is no correspondence to reality. This fact is emphasized by the two figures in the foreground of the painting, the Virgin Mary on the viewer’s left and St. Dominic on the right, who, although they sit on the very ledge of Christ’s platform, do not turn around, do not look, and therefore do not acknowledge the torture behind them. And in fact, one questions if this is a representation of torture at all. The Classicist Page duBois has traced the origins of torture to the ancient Greek word “basanos,” which, in its original context, refers to “a dark colored stone on which pure gold, when rubbed, leaves a peculiar mark.”52 The stone was used in ancient banking practice as a touchstone to test the value, or purity, of coins. Already by the fifth century BCE, the word basanos entered into Greek poetic texts—first as a metaphor for proof of loyalty, then as a reference to the purity of the poet himself, which could be tested and proven.53 By the time of Sophocles’ tragedies within the same century, the meaning of basanos shifted from test in a metaphorical sense to test in the physical sense of torture, as in “to test on human bodies.”54 Thus, from the very etymology of torture, we must recognize that physicality is integral to it. Just as one marks the stone basanos to test the purity of metals, one marks the body of a person to test the purity, or truthfulness, of that person. More appropriately, one should read Fra Angelico’s image as a meditational device for the Observant 51 Hood, Fra Angelico, 216. 52 DuBois, Torture and Truth, 9. 53 Ibid., 9-12. 54 Ibid., 21.

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Figure 4. Fra Angelico, Mocking of Christ, c. 1440, Cell 7, Convent of San Marco, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Dominican friar who slept and prayed within the confines of this cell day after day. As the friar meditated on Christ’s Passion while reading the Legenda aurea, he visualized Christ’s suffering and pain through texts and prayers, just as St. Dominic is visualized in his performance of meditatio in the foreground of the painting, and considered Christ’s body as an agent of salvation.

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In contrast, both the real and represented body on the cardboard box in the prison cell of Abu Ghraib were reviled by Ivan Frederick, the United States Army staff sergeant who captured his image. The photograph was not taken, as Mitchell invites his readers to consider, “as an occasion for devoted contemplation,” nor was it taken to “encourage identification with the depicted figure.”55 Rather, Sgt. Frederick photographed this body with malicious intent to injure. The prisoner already had suffered physical and mental torture and yet had failed to produce the “truth” that the sergeant was seeking. In the moments before the image was taken, the prisoner was told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box.56 Thus, the photograph represents both an act and document of violence. The audience for the photograph was United States soldiers in positions of complete dominance over the man captured in both the prison and the image. The image offered material proof—to themselves—of their power. We, the public, were never intended to see it. These examples offer conflicting accounts of the power dynamics at play in viewing an image of a tortured body. In one, the act of beholding is an act of submission; viewers before Fra Angelico’s dead Christ crafted their limited bodies and minds to access his limitless power. In the other, beholding is a form of domination, a way of enforcing power over a disenfranchised body. As I mused on the disparity in the frames of viewing torture in the past and the present, I was given an opportunity for academic engagement with torture and its representation, and the beholding of violence more broadly, when I was asked to be on a panel organized around the theme of the “The Monstrous and the Uncanny: Macabre Art Reconsidered” in 2006. In my presentation, and in a series of related publications that followed, I examined how criminal offenders in the Renaissance were cultivated to actively embrace works of art and other sensory stimuli at different moments of the punishment process as a strategy to negotiate their impending execution.57 Unlike the Abu Ghraib prisoner, whose sense of vision was deprived during his torture on the box, convicted offenders in Florence during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to use their eyes as part of the ritual of punishment. After sentencing in the Palazzo della Giustizia, prisoners were detained in the frescoed space of the Cappella della Maddalena and guided by members of a lay comfort confraternity into a series of physical and mental exercises designed to provoke penitential reflection.58 The 55 Mitchell, “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable,” 305. 56 Dodd, “Torture By The Book.” 57 The conference paper developed into Terry, “The Craft of Torture,” 272-296. 58 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment; Freedberg, The Power of Images, 5-9; Connell and Constable. “Sacrilege and Redemption,” 53-92; Connell and Constable, Sacrilege and Redemption; Feinberg, “Imagination All Compact,” 48-57; Terry-Fritsch, “Criminal Vision,” 45-62. On Bologna, see Terpstra, “Piety and Punishment,” 679-694; Terpstra, “Confraternal Prison Charity,” 217-248. For Rome, see Weisz, “Pittura e Misericordia.”

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enclosed space of the chapel was transformed into an environment of synesthesis in which the criminal’s senses were simultaneously and consistently activated.59 Candles were lit, a mattress was laid on the floor, and prayers and chants by the confraternity filled the room with verbal encouragement to repent. In addition to the aural activation provided by the confraternity chants and prayers, the offenders’ other senses were engaged with the penitential process through looking, touching, and tasting.60 Offenders’ eyes were guided toward small hand-held tavolette, altarpieces, and the frescoes adorning the chapel walls; their lips touched the painted panels during repeated kisses; their tongues tasted the Eucharistic bread and wine at the last communion. This cultivation of offenders’ bodies arguably heightened their awareness of themselves as living, breathing subjects in relation to the painted representations on the walls of the chapel, which traced the narrative of Mary Magdalen as a sinner turned saint.61 In her latter role, the Magdalen was no longer a woman who resided and took pleasure in the body; rather she moved beyond her body to connect with God in the celestial sphere. Similarly, the offender praying within the Cappella della Maddalena understood that the judicial system did not allow for a bodily redemption.62 The intense sensory environment cultivated by the confraternity brothers in the chapel, and the somaesthetic positioning of the offender within it, encouraged an identification with the Magdalen and a willing rejection of the body in favor of spiritual reward. The coercive process by which criminal offenders originally viewed works of art during these rituals of repentance and punishment was a form of political persuasion, designed to manufacture a specific ideological position. The performative display of penitence by offenders inside the Palazzo della Giustizia was a critical component of the punishment process: only after offenders crafted their bodies in particular ways to demonstrate repentance were they brought out into the space of the city for the viewing inspection of the populace. Nicholas Terpstra has demonstrated that even in cases when the accused was, indeed, innocent of the crime charged, the comforters assigned to assist in the penitential process encouraged the convicted offender to think of other sins that he or she committed for which prayers of forgiveness must be said.63 The convicted offender was then encouraged to accept the charge and to consider the benefits of gaining access to heaven by 59 I use the term synesthesis in its Greek etymological sense to refer to the full activation of the senses. For a Byzantine example of synesthesis and religious experience, see Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 631-55. 60 The bodily comportment of the criminal is described in the Libro dei Giustiziati, 167r.. 61 See Terry, “Criminal Vision.” 62 For an excellent overview of the medieval and early modern position on the soul in relation to the body, see Cohen, “Animated Pain,” 36-68. 63 Terpstra, “Piety and Punishment,” 683.

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leaving the material world now, as opposed to some unidentified moment in the future. Given the seemingly prescriptive nature of these penal rituals, I questioned to what extent an individual could be coerced into an aesthetic experience that could influence or cement a particular ideology. How was aesthetic experience in the spaces of Palazzo della Giustizia a negotiation between the individual viewer’s desires and the judicial expectations for performance? How was the authority of those in command of the punishment process legitimized through the compliance of the offender to have an aesthetic experience? These questions instigated a reflection on the intertwined nature of viewers, sensory activation, and knowledge production that ultimately led to the claims that guide this book. Although no one can ever fully know the internal affective structure of another person, historical attention to the sensory activation of viewers adds complexity to the analysis of Renaissance art. It signals potential ways in which the senses could be conditioned to facilitate and structure feelings in relation to certain images, objects, and spaces and thus position viewers as the conduit for the realization of social or political meaning of works of art.64 As Constance Classen has examined, “sensory experience is permeated with social values. Tastes and sounds and touches are imbued with meaning and carefully hierarchized and regulated so as to express and enforce the cosmic order. This system of sensory values is never entirely articulated through language, but it is practiced and experienced (and sometimes challenged), by humans as culture-bearers. The sensory order, in fact, is not just something one sees or hears about; it is something one lives.”65 Building from my initial inquiries regarding the relationship between physical manipulation and identity formation in the coercive practices of punishment rituals, I expanded my research to investigate other kinds of Medieval and Renaissance spectators who viewed while under some form of bodily duress to explore if and how the physicality of an intended visual experience may have impacted the immediate conditions of seeing and how such embodiment cultivated the identity position of the viewer in relation to the work. Christian ideological insistence on the incarnation of Christ framed Medieval and Renaissance devotion as a bodily encounter.66 Medieval and Renaissance pilgrims 64 Among the notable histories of sensory culture, see Varieties of Sensory Experience; Classen et al., Aroma; Howes, Sensual Relations; Empire of the Senses; Jutte, A History of the Senses; Smith, Sensing the Past; The City and the Senses; Classen, The Deepest Sense; Classen and Howes, Ways of Sensing; Howes, “The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies”; A Cultural History of the Senses. For the history of the senses in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Nordenfalk, “Les Cinq Sens,” 17-28, as well as the comprehensive overview in Quiviger, The Sensory World; and Sense and the Senses. On the structuring of feeling, see Siegworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 1-25. 65 Cited in Howes, “Introduction,” 3. 66 On art and incarnational devotion, see Ladner, Ad Imaginem Dei. On the importance of recognizing the framework of experience, see Goffman, Frame Analysis, 22.

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often extended great physical, mental, and economic effort to travel to and pray at a sacred shrine; the submission of pilgrims’ bodies in service of their desire for physical access to the holy framed their encounters in deeply personalized ways that were literally felt in their feet, backs, and hearts. Through engagement with relics, devotees gained a sensuous understanding of the sacred; through ingestion of the eucharist, viewers were physically and mentally transformed.67 Sufferers of disease and plague used images and objects to negotiate their pain; talismans and devotional images were attached to clothes, pictures were kissed and sometimes eaten or applied to the body as a bandage on a wound.68 Even the act of engaging with the decoration of a Medieval or Renaissance chapel could be understood as a form of somaesthetic cultivation, as the viewer was asked to enter into the immersive situation of the room and to use his or her body to navigate the space in relation to sacred markers. In these examples of somaesthetic cultivation, the crafting of the viewers’ bodies and minds in relation to art was made purposefully in hopes of spiritual and physical healing. Although these somaesthetic experiences might be considered willing performances made in earnest, they were bound to a religious ideology that compelled these viewers to instigate their performances in the first place and literally shaped the way that they did so. Viewers recognized that, despite what status they might hold in the material world, they would be judged at the hour of their death by God and an everlasting life was possible only through his saving grace. The church provided the means by which Christian believers accessed God on earth, thus it was positioned as an agent of power. The somaesthetic experiences of believers perpetuated this political narrative and provided a visualization of this power to augment the faith generally and to provide economic and political benefit locally. The nuanced aims and the multiple and overlapping social desires that were manifested in these viewers’ body-mind practices suggest, however, that “coercion,” a term laden with extensive and determined significance, does not adequately reflect the power dynamic at play here. Rather, these practices reveal the mutual benefits of the physical and affective emplacement of the viewer, both for those doing the viewing and those who sponsored their experience. Emplacement, as defined by David Howes, is the “sensuous interrelationship of body-mind environment. This environment is both physical and social […] [a] bundle of sensory and social values contained in the feeling” of belonging to a particular place, time, and community.69 To understand how Renaissance individuals and communities benefited from the 67 On Eucharistic images and ingestion, see Kumler, “The Multiplication of the Species,” 179-191; Kumler, “Manufacturing the Sacred,” 9-44. 68 See Pardee, “Beholding and Touching,” 61-84. 69 Howes, “Introduction,” 1-20.

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production of such powerful emplacing environments, I found it necessary to open up and expand the terms used to indicate the various strategies of persuasion that were once at play in somaesthetic experience. Furthermore, although the somaesthetic engagement of Renaissance criminal offenders was intensely physical, body-mind cultivation did not necessarily have to be extreme in order to be effective. Religious devotees often cultivated their bodies and minds to enhance devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The touching of “efficacious” images and objects, for example, provided powerful moments of transfer between the religious spectator and the divine; while the act of pressing one’s fingertips or lips to a surface did not require tremendous physical effort, individuals still experienced the sacred through sensuous exploration, which impressed itself into viewers bodies as a lived memory. Indeed, as Susan Stewart has argued, “the senses are a powerful source of material memories. Such memories are material in that the body carried them somatically—that is, they are registered in our consciousness, or in the case of repression, the unconscious knowledge, of our physical experiences.”70 The following chapters examine a wide range of somaesthetic experiences that were fostered in Medicean Florence. Whether visiting the powerful Medici family in their elaborately decorated chapel (Chapter Two), attending a performance of a sacred drama in their garden (Chapter Three), imitating the performative gestures of Holy Land pilgrims in a virtual Jerusalem in Tuscany (Chapter Four), or strategizing tactical play through printed game treatises (Chapter Five), individuals were invited to actively use their bodies and minds to enhance their aesthetic experiences and to co-involve them within the production of an embodied knowledge that had the potential to persuade their ideological point-of-view. The Renaissance viewers examined in the following chapters—visitors, actors, pilgrims, athletes, and their audiences—were offered scenarios for viewing and beholding. Scenarios, according to Taylor, encapsulate both setup and action; they “are formulaic structures that predispose certain outcomes and yet allow for reversal, parody, and change.”71 Scenarios are not self-fulfilling but rather depend on the embodiment of the participating social actors to succeed. Setup is designated by those who are in control of the space in which viewing occurred, and include various strategies that shape the viewer’s experience.72 Action is the time-based realization of the setup, which 70 Stewart, “Remembering the Senses,” 59. 71 Taylor, Archive, 30-31. 72 Space, considered in terms of tactics, may be understood as a shifting construct of its users, for each individual brings to it his or her own sense of behavioral propriety, spatial memory, and lived experience. And yet the spatial field of the renaissance city must also be understood in terms of strategies, which imposed decidedly collective behaviors on groups of individuals based on the terms set by those in control of the spaces. See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix. In this sense, the historian’s task is to endeavor for a “thick description” of space; Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 3-30.

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may or may not follow the intended script. The chapters reconstruct the set up and action of somaesthetic experience to consider the potential narratives that were formulated by both by those doing the doing and those seeing the doing. Somaesthetic experiences, in the Renaissance as now, fostered the production of meaning in the spectator through the self-conscious performance of body-mind engagement strategies. They enfolded the process of viewing into performative assertions of individual and collective identity that had the potential to produce powerful affective bonds between members of the community. While somaesthetic experiences were personalized and felt differently in each viewer’s physical body, they nonetheless enacted narratives that were more-or-less predetermined by patrons and their artists. While not coercive per se, the politics of both the patronage and practice of somaesthetic viewing beg interpretation. If somaesthetic experience is always negotiated—i.e. produced by someone else with a pre-determined, if idealized, goal—does it necessarily perpetuate a form of violence that I first recognized in my early studies on criminal punishment? How does the recognition of somaesthetic cultivation in these various contexts better inform us about the relationship between embodiment and power? As I suggest, the patrons of art who sponsored these somaesthetic experiences understood their particularly persuasive power to facilitate the construction of feelings of belonging and positive political identity. Thus, this book not only reinserts body-mindfulness into the historical process of viewing but also highlights the persuasive strategies by which certain Renaissance patrons framed the politics of somaesthetic experiences as mutually-beneficial.

Patronage and the Construction of the Viewer in Medicean Florence The following chapters of the book focus on four somaesthetic experiences of works of art in Renaissance Florence and are arranged chronologically to provide a broad view of patronage tactics employed in Medicean Florence between the mid-fifteenth century and the end of the sixteenth century. Chapter Two begins within the interior of the Medici family’s private residence during the period in which both Cosimo de’Medici and his son, Piero, were alive and in command of the family’s political and economic position within the city and beyond. In what has been described as the “heart” of Palazzo Medici—its richly decorated Chapel of the Magi, constructed by Michelozzo and lavishly decorated by Benozzo Gozzoli and Fra Filippo Lippi in the 1450s—viewers were placed into a performative relationship with the painted figures on the chapel walls and altar in ways akin to elaborate processional dramas of Epiphany, staged in Florence on the 6th of January. The chapter provides a thick reading of the set up and action of somaesthetic experience in the chapel in the mid-fifteenth century. Material cues in the floor, ceiling, and wall paintings signaled

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areas for visitors to engage with the narrative content in multisensory ways. Linking the mindful movements of viewers in the room to contemporary rituals of Epiphany, the analysis recasts the chapel as a virtual Florence that was practiced by the visitor in a time-based experience. By reconstructing the ways in which theater and ritual were enfolded into both the artistic program and the process of viewing itself, the chapter recovers the somaesthetic co-involvement of the visitor in the processional drama of the room and demonstrates how the somaesthetic experience of the visitor is a critical key to understanding the style and content of the chapel within its dynamic political dimensions. The next chapter moves into the garden of the Medici palace to examine female agency and the construction of community during the 1470s, after both Cosimo and Piero had died and the young Lorenzo de’Medici held de facto power under his mother’s guidance. The chapter analyzes Donatello’s bronze sculpture of Judith, placed in the garden since at least the mid-1460s, in relation to a sacred narrative of the Jewish heroine written by Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici in the early 1470s. Considering the performative interplay between the matron’s words and the sculpture’s iconographic form, the chapter investigates the strategies by which Lucrezia’s text enlivens Donatello’s Judith as the sacred heroine of her story and situates the audience as “eye-witnesses” that co-produced the event. It traces how the performative cues of the story functioned to somaesthetically connect the audience with the statue, thus prompting the opportunity for active engagement in the narrative that bound performers and audience together. Considering how the somaesthetic experience of Lucrezia’s sacred drama was narrated and conditioned, the chapter ultimately analyzes how the theatricality of viewing in the garden simulated communal rituals of justice and contributed to a reaffirmation of Florentine values. Chapter Four examines the somaesthetic experience of the “Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo,” a virtual holy land that was constructed by Franciscan friars from Florence in a forest of Tuscany in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Designed to emulate key aspects of the Renaissance experience of Jerusalem, San Vivaldo offered a performative space for pilgrims to construct personalized memories of the Holy Land without ever touching its soil. Exploring scenarios of pilgrim performance in key sites of the Franciscan campus, the chapter investigates the affective enhancement of devotion through somaesthetic conditioning and questions the Franciscan founders’ political motivations for building such an interactive and full-bodied experience of the Holy Land, particularly in the moment after the Medici were exiled from the city and Fra Girolamo Savonarola burned at the stake. As the chapter reveals, the mindful engagement with the artistic program was an effective strategy to legitimate both the place and the whose practiced it. Chapter Five illustrates the strategies of the Medici in the Grand Ducal period of the late sixteenth century and examines how public space became a site for

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hegemonic display in the athletic contests of calcio matches. While the ball game originally was conceptualized as an open practice that reflected the social body of the Florentine Republic, it was appropriated and reformulated by the Medici in the Cinquecento as an image of their ducal power. The chapter closely examines the first illustrated treatise of the sport, published and dedicated to Grand Duke Francesco I by Giovanni de’Bardi in 1580. It analyzes the imagery and text of the treatise in relation to military tactics, ceremonial culture, and the wider visual culture of leisure in the Renaissance to reconstruct the somaesthetic experience of reading and playing a virtual game. As a strategy for augmenting the authority of the Medici Grand Duke, the treatise offered a performative space for readers to act out the game and demonstrate a form of command that was otherwise reserved for duke and his inner circle. The chapter thus explores how the treatise constructs the reader as a subject in relation to the ducal family and encourages a mode of comportment that reflected the ideals of Medici governance. These chapters situate full-bodied, mindful viewer engagement of works of art within a larger conversation about the Medici and other Renaissance patrons’ use of art patronage as a political tool. Since at least Ernst Gombrich’s seminal essay on “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art,” art historians have attempted to discern patterns in their sponsorship of public and private works, as well as their collecting pursuits, so as to categorize their individual strategies in alignment with their shifting political fortunes in Florence.73 Cosimo de’Medici’s patronage of large-scale religious houses has been consistently depicted as a self-conscious strategy to “give back to God” for his good fortune and to ensure the construction of his own public image as magnificent, benevolent, and munificent.74 Cosimo’s son, Piero, however, has been cast as the aspirational prince, whose tastes tended toward the courts and were expressed in the rich materials and textures, not to mention his significant repertoire of emblems and personal devices, of his art patronage.75 Lorenzo, Piero’s son, and the last generation of the three great Medici political figures of the fifteenth century, has been investigated as a signore in all but name.76 The dynastic objectives of Cosimo I de’Medici have been connected to his large-scale projects within the Palazzo della Signoria and throughout the city and wider Tuscan territories, while Francesco I has been viewed as the humanistic hermit who delighted in the relative solitude of his painted study.77 While scholars 73 Gombrich, “The Early Medici,” 35-57. 74 Ibid. The conception of Cosimo as a patron of art has been expanded in a variety of fruitful directions, yet, in in her influential monograph on Cosimo, Kent emphatically highlighted Cosimo’s religious, as opposed to political, intentions; Kent, Cosimo de’Medici. 75 Piero de’Medici, “il Gottoso.” 76 Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo Mondo. 77 Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo.

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have challenged these traditional readings of Medici patronage and have provided numerous examples of more nuanced considerations of the relation between patronage and self-fashioning towards political ends, much of the scholarship continues to focus on particular commissions and individual family members. By turning the attention to the somaesthetic experience of Renaissance viewers, this book points to a certain level of consistency in Medici patronage over time, an acknowledgment that helps to break down some of the structural individualisms that have characterized art-historical inquiry of style and taste. For example, by looking at bodily comportment of visitors in the Chapel of the Magi, the book proposes an alternate way to consider Benozzo Gozzoli’s paintings as a consistent outgrowth of his work in Fra Angelico’s workshop at San Marco, not a rupture from it, and thus suggests a much closer alignment of Cosimo and Piero’s aims as patrons of art in the mid-fifteenth-century. Chapter Three considers the political purchase of Donatello’s Judith not in relation to Piero, who literally attached his name to it (and its Republican ideology), but rather to Lucrezia, his wife, who lived in the palace for nearly a decade and a half without him and was known as the matron behind many of her son Lorenzo’s political machinations. The analysis of San Vivaldo in Chapter Four examines how political sensibilities were cultivated through empathetic relational posturing and considers the active and invested performances of viewing at the site as an extension of certain medieval practices and a foreshadowing of the Baroque conception of meraviglia. The analysis of calcio in Chapter Five positions Francesco I in relation to a number of body practices, including military exercises, aristocratic rituals, and elite games, to tease meaning from the links that were constructed between the Grand Duke and the sport that go beyond the superficial indexing of power. The epilogue of the book returns to the scene of the Uffizi Gallery and considers the predicament of Florentine museums in the twenty-first century. It examines the live experience of Renaissance art in relation to the simulated experiences offered in new digital applications that personalize each viewer’s experience and co-involve the body in the production of knowledge. Reflecting on the irony of digital media to lead viewers back to their own embodiment, the epilogue highlights a somaesthetic turn in contemporary pedagogical tools used to teach the Renaissance and engage virtual viewers. It highlights select cases of digital humanities projects to demonstrate how researchers have provided new sensory-driven access to historical experience, and explores how the digital platform disrupts hegemonic discourse through its design, which relies on a user’s actions to generate a personalized experience. The epilogue argues that mindful interaction with these tools provides a means to come to know Renaissance works through the body and points to the constructive ways that somaesthetic cultivation can reinvigorate the first-hand experience of art in the museum and beyond.

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Works cited Alberti, Leon Battista. La pittura di Leon Battista Alberti. Translated by Lodovico Domenichi. Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1547. Alexander, Bryant Keith. “Performance and Pedagogy.” In The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies. Edited by D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, 253-260. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. Antonova, Clementa. Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Areford, David. The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Austin, J. L. How to do Things with Words. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Biernoff, Suzannah. Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Black, Robert and John Law, eds. The Medici: Citizens and Masters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Boeye, Kerry. “A Bibliography of Writings of Michael Camille,” Gesta, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2002): 141-144. The Book and the Body. Edited by Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Borland, Jennifer. “Unruly Reading: The Consuming Role of Touch in the Experience of a Medieval Manuscript.” In Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts. Edited by Jonathan Wilcox, 97-114. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Brown, David Alan, Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Lucco. Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997. Bynum, C.W. “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn, 1995):1-33. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2011. Bynum, Carol Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Urzone Publishers, 1991. Bynum, Carol Walker. Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Bynum, Carol Walker. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Bynum, Carol Walker. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2007.

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Camille, Michael. “Obscenity under erasure: Censorship in medieval illuminated manuscripts.” In Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages. Edited by J. M. Ziolkowski, 139-154. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Camille, Michael. “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy.” Art History, Vol. 8, Issue 1 (1985): 26-49. Caprile, Renato. “Abu Ghraib la città del male.” La Repubblica, May 1, 2004. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by Leonard Eckstein Opdycke. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. Caviness, Madeline. Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Chretien, Heidi. The Festival of San Giovanni: Imagery and Political Power in Renaissance Florence. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500. Edited by Alexander Coward and Jill Steward. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Classen, Constance and David Howes. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. London: Routledge 2013. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnot. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge, 1994. Cohen, Esther. “The Animated Pain of the Body.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 1. (Feb., 2000): 36-68. Cohen, Jeffrey Jeremy. Medieval Identity Machines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Cohen, Jeffrey Jeremy and Gail Weiss, eds. Thinking the Limits of the Body. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Connell, William J. and Giles Constable. “Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 61 (1998): 53-92. Connell, William J. and Giles Constable. Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Connolly, Daniel K. “Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Mathew Paris.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Dec., 1999): 598-622. Cropper, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” In Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art. Edited by Francis Ames-Lewis and Mary Rogers, 1-11. Aldershot/Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998.

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Cropper, Elizabeth. “On Beautiful Women, Parmagianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style,” Art Bulletin 58 (Sept. 1976): 374-394. A Cultural History of the Senses. Edited by Constance Classen. 4 Vol. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’Medici. Edited by Konrad Eisenbichler. Burlington: Ashgate, 2001. Denery, Dallas G. II. Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Dodd, Vikram. “Torture by the book,” The Guardian, 5 May 2004. DuBois, Page. Torture and Truth. London: Routledge, 1991. Dunlop, Anne. Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Durkheim, Emile. Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995. Edgerton, Jr., Samuel Y. Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution During the Florentine Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Eisenman, Stephen F. The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Edited by David Howes. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. Feinberg, Larry J. “Imagination All Compact: Tavoletta and Confraternity Rituals for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy.” Apollo (May 2005): 48-57. Foster, Hal. “Preface.” In Vision and Visuality. Edited by Hal Foster, ix-xiv. Seattle: Bay Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality. Translated by Richard Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Freedberg, David, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gertsman, Elina. Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Gilbert, Creighton. Italian Art, 1400-1500: Sources and Documents. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1974. Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New York: Pantheon Books, 1961. Gombrich, Ernst. H. “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art” (1960). In Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 35-57. London: Phaidon Press, 1966. Gutkind, Curt S. Cosimo de’Medici, Pater Patriae. Oxford: Calrendon Press, 1938

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Hahn, Cynthia. “Seeing and Believing: The Construction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines.” Speculum, No. 4 (1997): 1079-1106. Hahn, Cynthia. “Vision.” In A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe. Edited by Conrad Rudolph, 44-64. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Hamburger, Jeffrey. The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Hamburger, Jeffrey. The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. New York: MIT Press, 1998. Hamburger, Jeffrey and Eva Schotheuber. “Books in Women’s Hands: Liturgy, Learning and the Libraries of Dominican Nuns in Westphalia.” In Entre Stabilité et Itinérance: Livres et Culture des Ordres Mendicants, XIII-XV siècle. Edited by Nicole Bériou, Martin Morard and Donatella Nebbiai, 127-155. Tournhout: Brepols, 2014 Hendrix, John Shannon and Charles H. Carman, eds. Renaissance Theories of Vision. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Herbert, James D. “Visual Culture/Visual Studies.” In Critical Terms for Art History. Edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Schiff, 452-464. 2nd Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Holmes, Megan. The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Hood, William. Fra Angelico at San Marco. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Howes, David. “The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies.” Sensory Studies, August 2013. http://www.sensorystudies.org/sensorial-investigations/the-expanding-field-of-sensorystudies/ (accessed 11 September 2019). Howes, David. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Howes, David. “Introduction: Empires of the Senses.” In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Edited by David Howes, 1-20. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. Inturrisi, Louis, “Going to Pieces Over Masterpieces,” New York Times, Nov. 6, 1988, pg. xx43. Jauß, Hans Robert. “Art. Rezeption, Rezeptionsästhetik.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Edited by Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel, 996-1004. Basel: Schwabe, 1992. Jay, Martin. “Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art.” In Aesthetic Subjects. Edited by Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter, 3-27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Johnson, Geraldine A. “The Art of Touch in Early Modern Italy.” In Art & The Senses, Edited by Francesca Bacci and David Melcher, 59-84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Johnson, Geraldine A. “In the Hand of the Beholder: Isabella d’Este and the Sensual Allure of Sculpture.” In Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice. Edited by Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker, 183-197. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012.

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Johnson, Geraldine A. “Touch, Tactility, and the Reception of Sculpture in Early Modern Italy.” In A Companion to Art Theory. Edited by Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, 61-74. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Jones, Jonathan. “Stendhal Syndrome: Can Art Really Be So Beautiful It Makes You Ill?” The Guardian, December 18, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ shortcuts/2018/dec/18/stendhal-syndrome-botticelli-the-birth-of-venus (accessed 9 September 2019). Jung, Tanya A. “The Phenomenal Lives of Movable Christ Sculptures,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, 2006. Jutte, Robert. A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kent, Dale. Cosimo de’Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Kessler, Herbert L. Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Kumler, Aden. “Manufacturing the Sacred in the Middle Ages: The Eucharist and Other Medieval Works of Ars.” English Language Notes 53, 2 (2015): 9-44. Kumler, Aden. “The Multiplication of the Species: Eucharistic Morphology in the Middle Ages.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011): 179-191. Kopania, Kamil. Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ in the Religious Culture of the Latin Middle Ages. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2010. Kyle, Sarah R. Medicine and Humanism in Late Medieval Italy: The Carrara Herbal in Padua. New York: Routledge, 2017. Ladner, Gerhart B. Ad Imaginem Dei: The Image of Man in Medieval Art. Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Press, 1965. Lakey, Christopher. “From Place to Space: Raumkästen and the Moving Spectator in Medieval Art.” In The Public in the Picture/ Das Publikim im Bild: Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine and Western Medieval and Renaissance Art/ Beiträge aus der Kunst der Antike, des Islam, aus Byzanz und dem Western. Edited by Beate Fricke and Urte Krass, 113-136. Zurich: diaphanes, 2015. Libro dei Giustiziati, Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence, MS. II, I, 138. Lindberg, David. Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Lomazzo, Gian Paolo. A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge… Englished by R[ichard] H[aydocke]. Oxford: Ioseph Barnes, 1598.

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Mobilizing Visitors: Political Persuasion and the Somaesthetics of Belonging in the Chapel of the Magi Abstract Chapter Two provides a thick reading of the set up and action of somaesthetic experience in the Chapel of the Magi, constructed by Michelozzo inside Palazzo Medici and lavishly decorated by Benozzo Gozzoli and Fra Filippo Lippi in the 1450s. Linking the mindful movements of viewers in the room to contemporary rituals of Epiphany, the analysis recasts the chapel as a virtual Florence that was practiced by the visitor in a time-based experience. By reconstructing the ways in which theater and ritual were enfolded into the artistic program and the process of viewing itself, the chapter recovers the somaesthetic co-involvement of the visitor in the processional drama of the room and demonstrates how somaesthetic experience is a critical key to understanding the style and content of the chapel within its dynamic political dimensions. Keywords: Cosimo de’Medici, Benozzo Gozzoli, Fra Filippo Lippi, Chapel of the Magi, Epiphany, Renaissance ritual

The Chapel of the Magi, the sumptuously decorated chapel constructed by Michelozzo and decorated by Fra Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli by 1459, serves as a unique artifact of Cosimo de’ Medici’s family palace on Via Larga (Plate 2). Unlike virtually every other room that has experienced almost complete transformation since the fifteenth century, the chapel still retains much of its original architectural and decorative appearance, including its gilded wall paintings, intarsiated benches, opus sectile floors, and carved and gilded ceiling.1 Conceived in construction and 1 Examination of the objects and spaces once available to visitors to Palazzo Medici is complicated by their almost complete disappearance from the palace. Already by 1494, the palace was systematically stripped of its works of art when the family, then led by Piero di Lorenzo de’Medici, was forced out and their possessions repossessed by the government; see Landucci, Diario Fiorentino, 119. While much of

Terry-Fritsch, A., Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722216_ch02

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decoration as the highlight of Palazzo Medici, the Chapel of the Magi was used, in addition to religious functions, as a place for elite visitors to meet with the family in intimate quarters.2 The Medici were distinguished by their permission, given by Pope Martin V in 1422, to possess an altar for private liturgies within their home.3 The opportunity to build a large-scale chapel in their new palace—one of the first Renaissance examples of a consecrated liturgical room erected within the walls of a private residence—allowed for the construction of a magnificent space that set the stage for and shaped visitors’ encounters with the family. Renaissance visitors inside the chapel were dazzled by an array of colors, patterns, and precious materials brought together to enfold them within a marvelous sensory experience. The elaborate procession of the three Magi—painted by Benozzo Gozzoli across the walls of the chapel—to the newborn Christ child—in Fra Filippo Lippi’s altarpiece—was the first artistic program in Florence to isolate the journey of the wise men as an independent subject of art and represent it on monumental scale. The decoration proclaimed the Medici family’s primacy of place in the cult of the Magi in the city, by representing the rituals of its most important feast date, Epiphany. In one sense, the magnificence of the room underscored the narrative of gift-giving and a symbolic transference of wealth and power from the Magi-Kings to Christ in his legitimized status as the son of God and king of the Jews. On the altar rested the golden and gem-studded Reliquario del Libretto, which contained precious relics of Christ’s Passion in its central compartment and those of saints in the outer wings. 4 Recorded in the Medici collection since at least 1465, the folding reliquary once belonged to King Charles V of France. It was presented permanently on the altar as one of the gifts of the three kings given to the Christ child in recognition of his supreme authority. At the same time, the magnificence of the chapel constructed an image of the Medici. The material splendor of the space self-consciously referenced other private worship chapels outside Florence, associated with the princely and ducal courts of Italy and northern Europe as well as the imperial courts of the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium.5 Although Florentines, including the Medici, fiercely defended the the collection was returned when the Medici reclaimed the leadership of the city in the early sixteenth century, Cosimo I de’Medici only occupied Palazzo Medici for a short period before moving by 1540 into Palazzo della Signoria with his wife, Eleonora of Toledo, and family; see Crum, “Lessons from the Past,” 47-62. Palazzo Medici was sold to the Riccardi in 1659, and the new patrons soon initiated major architectural changes that altered the fundamental spatial patterns of the previous household. For an in-depth discussion of the floorplan, see Bulst, “Die Ursprüngliche Innere Aufteilung,” 369-394; Bulst, “Uso e Trasformazione,” 98-129. 2 Hatfield, “Cosimo de’Medici,” 225-227. 3 Saalman and Mattox. “The First Medici Palace,” 343. 4 Poggi, “Il ‘Reliquiario del Libretto,’” 238-249; Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 295. 5 See A Renaissance Architecture of Power.

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city as a free and independent Republic, visual references to courtly visual culture within the Chapel of the Magi speak of Cosimo and Piero’s desire to project the family as equals to these centers of power in sophistication and authority.6 Splendor was often the subject of discussion in letters and other descriptions of Palazzo Medici, including those made on the occasion of Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Pope Pius II’s coordinated visits in 1459 and Lorenzo de’Medici’s wedding celebrations in 1469.7 As implied by the fifteenth-century sources, only individuals of fine taste and intellect would have been able to amass such a fine collection of material objects and to appreciate their artistic value.8 The fifteenth-century architectural theorist Filarete considered the chapel to be the most ornate and dignified of all the rooms in the palace and it is known that Cosimo spent many of his hours there.9 Despite the chapel’s prominent position within the Medici oeuvre as patrons of art, and its critical role within the architectural design of the palace, its decoration does not fit neatly with art-historical accounts of Medici patronage at mid-century. The style and content of the chapel’s wall paintings, including their opulent surface qualities and explicit promotion of Medici interests, are considered to contrast with the style and content of the frescoes that Benozzo previously painted for Cosimo while in the workshop of Fra Angelico at San Marco in the late 1430s and early 1440s (Fig. 5). The alleged discrepancies between the two projects have been explained as a shift in patronage, from father to son. Among the limited archival documents pertaining to the construction and decoration of the Chapel of the Magi are letters written by Benozzo to Piero de’Medici between July and September 1459—that is, during the artist’s employment on the walls—which point to Piero’s active role in the artistic program.10 The incorporation of emblems closely connected to Piero— including the diamond ring, tri-colored feathers, and the motto “semper”—similarly bear his patronal mark on the chapel, as does his prominent position on the east wall in the procession of men behind the Magi. Thus, art historians from at least Ernst Gombrich forward have regarded Benozzo’s paintings in the Chapel of the Magi through the lens of Piero’s tastes as a patron of art, which are cast as more in 6 Ernst Gombrich claimed that “Piero had a predecessor in the north…the great Duc de Berri, one of the first men of taste to turn princely treasure into a real collection of precious objects”; Gombrich, “The Early Medici,” 51. 7 Hatfield, “Some Unknown Descriptions,” 232-249, esp. Appendix 1. 8 Even taken in context of their function as political texts, which used amplificatio as a rhetorical strategy to bestow flattery on patrons, the authors’ evocation of the material value and splendor of Palazzo Medici is an indication of the positive characterization that the Medici achieved through their collecting. 9 Averlino, Trattato di Architettura, 697. 10 Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Archivio Mediceo Avanti il Principato, filza 137, no. 36; filza 14, no. 493; filza 17, no. 259; and filza 17, no. 260. Documents first published in Gaye, Carteggio Inedito, 191-193; Grote, “A Hitherto Unpublished Letter,” 321; Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 276-277.

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Figure 5. View inside Cosimo de’Medici’s double cell at San Marco, featuring Benozzo Gozzoli’s Crucifixion with Medici Saints in Cell 38 and Adoration of the Magi in Cell 39, c.1443-1444, fresco, north corridor of dormitory, Convent of San Marco, Florence (Photo: Author)

alignment with “rich Florentines” in the second half of the fifteenth century than the more restrained aesthetic preferred by his father.11 However, as this chapter examines, to consider the visual program in Chapel of the Magi as solely “Piero’s” obscures the central role that Cosimo played both within the conceptual design of the decorative program and in the occupation of the room itself. Cosimo spent great periods of time within the chapel, by himself in meditation or with others during meetings or festive occasions.12 Visitors to the palace knew to find him there. In fact, throughout the entire fifteenth century, even after the death of the pater patriae in 1464, visitors referred to the space as “Cosimo’s chapel.”13 Given the great attention that the Medici—and above all Cosimo—have received in art historical scholarship, the relative silence on how 11 Gombrich, “The Early Medici,” 51. 12 Hatfield, “Cosimo de’Medici,” 221-244. 13 Gentile Becchi, the humanist tutor to Piero’s sons who lived in the palace, described it as “Cosimo’s” chapel in a titulus for a couplet written around 1465; the autograph text is in Cod. Lat. Misc. E81, Oxford, Bodeleian Library. See Grayson, “Poesie Latine,” 298; Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 12-14; Cagliotti, Donatello e i Medici, 73-75; and see discussion below.

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the decorative program of the chapel functioned in alignment with his goals as a patron is surprising. Beyond clear connections between the narrative subject of the chapel (i.e. Epiphany) and Cosimo’s political appropriation of the cult of the Magi in Florence, the chapter explores how the decoration bears conceptual and stylistic aff inities with other Medici works and suggests a more cohesive position of the Chapel of the Magi within the larger historical narrative of Medici patronage. The decoration of the room clearly proclaimed it as a political space on scale with the Cappella dei Signori, the chapel of Florentine governmental officers in Palazzo della Signoria that was used as the setting for governmental business and the site for legitimizing contractual agreements.14 Throughout the Chapel of the Magi, civic heraldic devices are fused with Medici devices: the Captain’s cross, Florence’s lily, the colors of the Popolo party, and the Guelph party’s eagle and dragon are integrated with wreaths of tri-colored feathers and diamond rings bearing Medici mottos on the ceiling, floors, walls, and furniture. Fra Filippo Lippi’s altarpiece, the visual and conceptual focal point of the chapel’s decoration, explicitly references the iconography of the governmental chapel, which was dedicated to Saint Bernard (Plate 3).15 The saint appears in half-length behind the rocky landscape of the upper left quadrant of the painting: dressed in a hooded white robe, Bernard casts his head and eyes downward and presses his hands together in prayer.16 Before him in the left middleground stands the figure of a young Saint John the Baptist, who holds a staff and scroll inscribed with Ecce Agnus Dei (Behold the Lamb of God). Saint Bernard and Saint John the Baptist anachronistically serve as witnesses to the newborn Christ child, who reclines on a bed of dense foliage in the center foreground of the painting. The Madonna kneels at his feet and holds her hands together as she gazes upon him. God the Father and the Holy Spirit are figured in vertical alignment with Christ at the top of the painting. The delicately-painted beams of gold emanating from this sacred Trinity enunciated Christ’s divine nature in human form. Lippi’s inclusion of the patron saint of the city and its governmental officials signaled the chapel’s connections to Florentine public life and framed the actions that were performed in front of it as under the protection of the city’s most beloved civic saints. The translatio of these saints, and the other symbols of the 14 On the use of altars as a site for signing contracts, see Trexler, “Ritual Behavior,” 125-144; Trexler, Public Life, 49, 263-270. 15 The altarpiece was installed by April 1459, when Galeazzo Maria Sforza visited the chapel; Strozzi, “The Adoration of the Child,” 29. On the altarpiece, see Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi, 218-235; Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi, 172-182. 16 On the iconography of Saint Bernard, see Lesher, “The Vision of Saint Bernard,” 64. Stephanie Solum recently has argued that the f igure traditionally identif ied as Saint Bernard is actually Romuald; see Solum, Women, Patronage, and Salvation.

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Figure 6. Floor plan of Chapel of the Magi, including cosmati pavement (Plan: Kim Young)

Florentine Republic, to the Medici family’s chapel indexed its civic uses and visually asserted the space as a legitimate place for governmental practices. The rectangular chapel is divided architecturally into two functional spaces: the small raised chancel, recessed between two narrow sacristies, features the altar on the north end of the room, while the southern portion serves as the main body of the chapel and the primary space of congregation and interaction with the Medici (Fig. 6). Art-historical interpretations of the chapel’s decoration has tended to assign sliding values to different zones of the room to account for the dual function of the sacred chapel and secular meeting space. In her groundbreaking monograph on Benozzo Gozzoli, Diane Cole Ahl described the decoration of the room as divided between earthly and heavenly realms in the main body of the chapel and chancel respectively.17 Rab Hatfield classified Benozzo’s Magi paintings as “objects of admiration” in contrast to the “object of worship” that was Filippo Lippi’s altarpiece.18 Megan Holmes interpreted the processional nature of Benozzo’s wall decoration in the main body of the chapel as a way to construct the beholder as a pilgrim toward a form of “religious asceticism” achieved before Filippo Lippi’s altarpiece in the chancel.19 Yet, this chapter suggests that decorative program of the Chapel of the Magi is much more cohesive in its subject and continuous in its form than has been previously recognized, and was designed with the somaesthetic experience of visitors in mind. 17 Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 87-88. 18 Hatfield, “Cosimo de’Medici.” 19 Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi.

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As will be discussed below, Benozzo Gozzoli’s wall paintings would have been readily recognizable to fifteenth-century viewers as images adapted from the Florentine festal celebrations of Epiphany.20 References to specif ic stagecraft traditions of Epiphany processions in Florence, including formations, costumes, performance gestures, and scenery, ground the magnificent portrayal of the Medici family and their friends within the specific religious and civic customs of Florence. The decorative program of the Chapel of the Magi brought the public rituals of the city inside the private home to self-fashion the Medici image as the first family in the Republic, bearing the three kings’ magnificence, exoticism, authority, and wisdom. However, viewers were not simply passive onlookers of the opulent spectacle. Rather, as this chapter reveals, the room was designed as an immersive installation that enfolded individuals within the space as literal presences in the artistic program. Guided through a time-based exploration of the narratives represented on the walls and altar of the chapel, visitors reproduced a condensed and idealized form of the Epiphany ritual that emplaced them as a central actor in the Medici community. The kind of somaesthetic experience fostered by the Chapel of the Magi is connected to a much larger strategy of political persuasion used by the Medici in the fifteenth-century that relied on the promotion of communitas, a central Florentine civic value. The active and invested viewing inspired by the chapel’s construction and decoration contributed to visitors’ positive conception of the space and their sense of belonging. Throughout the duration of a meeting with the Medici inside the chapel, the decoration facilitated self-conscious reflection on the role that visitors were playing in relation to members of the Medici family, who were portrayed on the walls and present in person in the room itself. The active emplacement of visitors was used as a strategy to facilitate feelings of belonging and provide a mutually-beneficial platform on which to pursue more pragmatic business. Viewing in the chapel was bound to the expression of political sentiment, and became the means by which visitors were ritually initiated into the Medici household.21

Sensory Activation and the Signaling of the Patron In 1445, a plot of land on the Via Larga in Florence was cleared for the construction of a new palace for the Medici family (Fig. 7).22 Commissioned by Cosimo de’Medici 20 For an earlier, and much less elaborate, chapel dedicated to the three kings in Florence, see Trexler, “The Magi Enter Florence,” 127-218. 21 In this way, the wall murals are analogous to installation art; see Bishop, Installation Art, 11. 22 Hyman, Fifteenth Century Florentine Studies, 126ff.; Kent and Kent, “Two Comments,” 795-796. For a disputation of the architectural involvement of Michelozzo, see Davisson, Secrets of the Medici Palace. However, most scholars, including myself, still follow the logic presented by Caroline Elam and Brenda

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Figure 7. View of Palazzo Medici from southeast, constructed by Michelozzo, mid-1440s-1460, Via Cavour (formerly Via Larga), Florence (Photo: Author)

and built by Michelozzo di Bartolomeo between 1445 and 1460, the palace was the primary residence for Cosimo and his wife, Contessina de’Bardi, their children, and their families for the second half of the fifteenth century.23 The grand scale and style of Palazzo Medici impacted the built environment of Florence and reflected the high social and political position of the family both within their gonfalone (neighborhood) of the Leon d’oro and throughout the city at large. By the 1450s, the Medici owned one of the largest banks in Europe and had established financial connections with the leading figures of its political landscape, including the pope in Rome and the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople.24 With the revenue earned Preyer in the 1990 volume on the palace; see Elam, “Il Palazzo,” 44-57; Preyer, “L’Architettura,” 65-73. For a recent overview of the scholarship on the palace, see Ferretti, “The Medici Palace,” 263-289. 23 On the likely date of the family’s move into the palace, see Hyman, “Notes and Speculations,” 99. 24 de Roover, Rise and Decline; Holmes, “How the Medici Became the Pope’s Bankers,” 357–380; Parks, Medici Money.

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from their bank, Cosimo and the other members of the family strategically invested money in the construction and maintenance of Florentine public institutions and religious houses and acquired private properties within the city and throughout the Tuscan landscape. In addition to their business and patronage, Cosimo and his sons held important roles within the Florentine Signoria, including the highest office of the Gonfolaniere di Giustizia. Even when not serving in an official capacity, the male members of the family exerted strong influence in governmental decisions through political supporters and friends, who extended the family’s voice with votes and legislation.25 Maps of Florence made in the second half of the f ifteenth century, such as Piero di Jacopo del Massaio’s illuminated view in Ptolomaei Claudii Cosmografia (Vatican, Cod. Urb. Lat. 277, c. 130v) dated to 1472, feature Palazzo Medici in exaggerated proportions to signal the authority of its owners.26 As Wolfger Bulst has demonstrated, the consistent use of the term “palagio” in the fifteenth century to describe the Medici residence—instead of the more common “casa”—is significant for its conflation of building types, particularly the Palazzo della Signoria (the headquarters of the Florentine government), with which it shared both architectural aesthetic affinity and certain functions.27 The Medici understood how civic values were expressed through the urban fabric of the city and how their architectural patronage actively shaped Florentine identity. Lorenzo de’Medici recorded that between 1434 and 1471, his grandfather Cosimo and father Piero spent 663,755 fiorini on “buildings, charities and taxes, not counting other expenses.” He remarked, “I think it gave great lustre to the state and this money seems well spent and I am very satisfied.”28 The magnificence of the architecture was connected to the concept of charity that was privileged in Christian rhetoric in fifteenth-century Florence.29 The vast amount of money spent on the palace was defended as a means to bring honor to the city through the splendor of its buildings, a concept that was deeply embedded in humanist rhetoric since Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio florentinae urbis of 1403-1404.30 Built as it was in the period of the family’s political ascendancy, Palazzo Medici was constructed to express the family’s dedication to, and prominence in, the Republic. 25 On the early f ifteenth-century networking strategies of the Medici, see Jones, “Communes and Despots,” 71-96; Rubenstein, The Government of Florence; Kent, The Rise of the Medici; as well as the more recent reevaluation of these contributions to our current understanding of f ifteenth-century Medici politics in The Medici. 26 Maier, “True Likeness,” 723-724. 27 Bulst, “Uso e Trasformazione,” 98-99. See also Preyer, “Florentine Palaces,” 176. 28 Tarchiani, “Il Palazzo del Magnifico,” 853. 29 Fraser Jenkins, “Cosimo de’Medici,” 162-170. 30 Bruni, Panegirico; for partial English translation see Bruni, “Panegyric,” 135-175.

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From its inception, Palazzo Medici served as a political space where supporters would gather for informal meetings and where clients came daily to seek advice and favor. The practice of accepting visitors to the house began in Cosimo’s lifetime and extended all the way through the 1490s, when up to forty citizens at a time would be seen in the spaces of the ground floor waiting for a turn to speak with Lorenzo de’Medici.31 Thus the palace was designed to accommodate a variety of publics who had access, of varying degrees contingent on status and occasion, to its interior.32 The architect Michelozzo incorporated pragmatic designs for spaces and furnishings to accommodate these visitors throughout the house. The loggia on the southeast corner of the palace’s exterior served as an anticamera, among other functions, as did the arcaded courtyard on the interior (Fig. 8).33 Benches were integrated with the exterior facade of the palace and installed along the interior walls of the ground floor, including both the courtyard and the garden beyond.34 Certain spaces, including the suite of rooms connected to the sala grande on each of the floors and the family’s chapel on the piano nobile, were designed as semi-public and were used during a variety of events that were hosted in the home, such as receptions, business meetings, and private entertainments (Fig. 9). Each of the public spaces was carefully curated to facilitate a particular mode of social exchange and frame visitors’ perceptions of the Medici. As Alison Brown has argued persuasively, Cosimo’s advancing age and Piero’s physical infirmities in the late 1450s and throughout the 1460s provided a legitimate excuse for the transference of certain affairs of the government from the Palazzo della Signoria to their private residence.35 For example, when Piero served as Gonfaloniere di Giustizia in 1461, he did not immediately move into the Palazzo della Signoria and sever communication with his family and all other private citizens, as was custom for elected officials. Instead, he remained in his chambers in Palazzo Medici and conducted one-on-one meetings with leading citizens until his “adverse health” abated and he was able to move into the signorial palace.36 Likewise, Piero’s gout confined him to bed for much of the period between Cosimo’s death in 1464 and his own in 1469. According to the fifteenth-century silk merchant, Marco Parenti, 31 Brown, “Piero’s Infirmity,” 15. 32 Not all visitors were equal, of course, thus access depended on the occasion for the visit and the categorization of the guest as cliento, amico, or famiglia. On the reconstruction of the interior of the palace, see Bulst, “Die Ursprüngliche Innere Aufteilung,” 369-394; and Bulst, “Die Sala Grande,” 89-127. 33 Preyer, “L’Architettura,” 64. 34 Preyer, “Planning for Visitors,” 359-364. 35 Brown, “Piero’s Infirmities,” 9-19. 36 Brown, “Piero’s Infirmities,” 10. On Cosimo receiving visitors in Piero’s suite, see Perrens, Histoire de Florence, 169.

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Figure 8. Plan of ground floor of Palazzo Medici (Diagram: Kim Young, based on ASF, Guardaroba medicea 1016)

Figure 9. Plan of piano nobile of Palazzo Medici (Plan: Kim Young, based on ASF, Guardaroba medicea 1016)

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For this reason it was necessary for all other citizens who had need of him to go to his chambers; similarly the magistrates, who did not presume to take decisions on serious matters without his consent. Likewise foreigners, ambassadors, and lords who had any business to do with our city were obliged to find him there. Thus his chambers were almost always crowded with men of every sort on various errands, and often it was difficult to speak to him.37

Piero’s bed-ridden status did not make him obsolete in Florentine public affairs. On the contrary, because of it, Palazzo Medici became the fulcrum of political life in Florence. By conducting business within their own home, the Medici were able to control and cultivate the environment in which their interaction with the public took place. The picture of Palazzo Medici that can be constructed from the archive is that of a carefully managed space that crafted the image of the Medici as princes in all but name. Contemporaries of the Medici described the palace as magnificent and a sight to behold.38 Niccolò de’ Carissimi da Parma, a counselor to Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1459, wrote of it, “To me it seems like being in a new world, and I am of the opinion that in my days I shall never see anything worthier than this which I have seen and am first seeing. And not only I hold this opinion, but all the company here, who do nothing else but discuss it.”39 The opulence of the materials integrated into the walls, floors, and ceilings of each room and the elegance of the design and craft of the objects and images displayed therein spoke to the elevated taste and refinement of the family. The subjects of the works of art displayed in these spaces were well chosen to illustrate the fundamental values of the Medici, including their dedication to the ideals of the city-state and religious piety. The theme of victory over tyranny, and subsequent liberty and security, was reiterated visually throughout the palace in many forms, including sculptures, reliefs, and paintings.40 These visual references provided a persuasive commentary on the occupants of the palace as defenders of the Republic and critical to its continued prosperity. In addition, the large number of religious works displayed throughout the palace, by artists of considerable reputation, framed the actions and behaviors of the family and their guests within the context of sacred bonds and underscored the validity of a Medici promise made under the gaze of Christ, Madonna, and the family’s patron saints. Each of these 37 Phillips, Memoir of Marco Parenti, 18. 38 Hatf ield, “Some Unknown Descriptions,” 232-249; Lindow, The Renaissance Palace. Despite the rhetorical flattery, the assertion that Palazzo Medici was f illed with splendid things is supported, in part however, by the inventories taken of the family’s possessions at distinct moments throughout the fifteenth century; see Libro d’Inventario, and the English translation in Lorenzo de’Medici at Home. 39 Mantua, Archivio di Stato, Gonzaga, 1099, fasc. 77, fol. 465v-467r; translation by Hatf ield, “Some Unknown Descriptions,” 233. 40 These themes will be explored in Chapter Three.

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Figure 10. Benozzo Gozzoli, Apocryphal Lamb, 1459, fresco, above original entrance to the Chapel of Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)

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values were placed literally on display in the palace for visitors while they waited for their appointments to meet the Medici. To reach the Chapel of the Magi from the ground floor, a visitor used the primary stairwell of the palace, which was located on the southern side of the arcaded courtyard, and then walked the length of the main corridor to the chapel’s vestibule. 41 A second path was provided through a chamber that communicated with Piero’s apartment. 42 The small rectangular vestibule was largely repainted by Jacopo Chiavistelli during his extensive work performed for the Riccardi family in the palace between 1670 and 1690; however, a painted area located above the door on the north side—the original entrance to the chapel—dates to the fifteenth-century program by Benozzo Gozzoli.43 It features the sacrificial altar of the end of days as described in the Book of Revelation (Fig. 10). By virtue of its location, the painting served as a signpost. The painting follows in the tradition of Fra Angelico, who established this visual practice in the cloister of the convent of San Marco, well-known to both Cosimo and Benozzo.44 Like Angelico’s lunette frescoes, Benozzo’s painting indexed the functional purpose of the room beyond the door and thus prepared the visitor for a particular frame of behavior. It represents a lamb on top of an altar that has been covered in linens embroidered in the Medici colors and adorned with seven red wax seals and seven golden candlesticks. 45 Set in stark contrast to the blue colorfield of the background, another artistic strategy borrowed from Angelico at San Marco, the white-wooled lamb rests its haloed head on its front limbs and gazes directly at the viewer. The altar of the chapel, centered on a raised chancel at the northern end of the small room, is in perfect alignment with the visitor’s point of view beneath the painting at the vestibule door. 46 Made of red Maremma marble carved into strigilated patterns, the altar recalls the materials and form of ancient sarcophagai and thus visually proclaims the table as a site of death and renewal. The bright red wax seals beneath the lamb in the vestibule painting are echoed in the reddish-purple porphyry discs that surround the altar in the floor and chancel walls. On top of the altar, the Christ child in Lippi’s Adoration glowed brightly in the candlelight; like the white wool of the lamb set against the blue colorfield, his white chubby flesh is given compositional prominence through placement against a dark background. Viewed together at the entrance of the chapel, the apocryphal 41 This stairwell was replaced by a spiral staircase beginning in 1660. The original stairwell was seen without obstacle from the courtyard entrance; Preyer, “L’Architettura,” 60. 42 Bulst, “Die Ursprüngliche Innere Aufteilung,” 379, 385; Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 7. 43 BNCF, Nuovi Aquisti 641, Cass I, Ins. 2, cc. 49r-49v. 44 Gilbert, “A Sign About Signing,” 65-70. 45 On the embroidered insignia, see Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 12. 46 The present altar is a reconstruction from 1929; the original was dismantled in 1494 after the Medici were expelled. See Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 9.

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Figure 11. View of floor tiles at entrance to the Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)

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lamb above the door and the Christ child on the altar announced the room’s sacred purpose: to behold the lamb of God. Just beyond the threshold inside the chapel, dark green serpentine, white marble, and porphyry floor tiles have been arranged to simulate an entrance carpet (Fig. 11).47 An octagonal porphyry stone in the center of the carpet provides a physical marker for the visitor to stand upon. Porphyry, a precious material that traditionally was reserved for the floors of sites that accommodated imperial and royal bodies, signaled authoritative privilege; its use at the entrance to the chapel immediately positioned the visitor as an honored body within an exclusive space.48 The octagonal shape of the marker reflects the architecture and symbolism of baptisteries, ritual spaces dedicated to purification and initiation. The octagonal Baptistery of San Giovanni—located in the heart of the city and which could be seen from the windows of the primo piano of Palazzo Medici—was the site where Florentines were recognized as members of the Florentine community. 49 As the primary monument dedicated to the city’s patron saint in Florence, it was invested with symbolic value and used to frame the actions of both church and state. It, too, featured precious marbles arranged into elaborate patterns on the floor.50 The visual references to San Giovanni suggested by the entrance carpet floor tiles have further significance in the context of the chapel’s iconographic focus on Epiphany, since Florentine ritual traditions fused both Saint John the Baptist and the Baptistery of San Giovanni with the festa. Florence’s patron saint was honored during the celebration of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan river on the Octave of Epiphany and, on Epiphany itself, the Baptistery of San Giovanni was one of the featured sites of dramatic action during the day-long celebration.51 Standing on the octagonal marker at the entrance to the Chapel of the Magi, a sacred space owned and occupied by the Medici family, the visitor was positioned as an initiate of their community. 47 Bartoli, “Un Pavimento Neoplatonico,” 25-28. 48 On antique precedents, see, for example, Barry, “Walking on Water,” 627-656. On the use of porphyry for Cosimo’s tomb in San Lorenzo, see Butterfield, “The Funerary Monument,” 153-168; McKillop, “Dante and Lumen Christi,” 245-291. 49 Such a focus on purification would be appropriate for such a transitional space as the entrance to a chapel that required a focusing of the visitor’s mind and a purification of the heart. Francesco Caglioti has suggested that Becchi’s couplet was displayed above the entrance to the vestibule of the chapel; Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, 73-75. The couplet’s focus on the heart, mind, and soul of the sacred figures in the chapel and the explicit command for the profane to not step foot within the holy space reinforces the notion of the intentional entry into the chapel as marked by the precious stone floor. As described below, however, it is also likely that this inscription was found in the floor of the chancel; Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 14-15. 50 Bartoli, “Un Pavimento Neoplatonico,” 25-28. The floor design also draws on important visual precedents in imperial Byzantium, including the porphyry marking within the church of Hagia Sophia as ritual indicators for the placement of the emperor during imperial ceremonies. 51 Hatfield, “Compagnia dei Magi,” 108; Hood, Fra Angelico, 97.

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Figure 12. View of floor tiles in center of main body of the Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)

A large porphyry disc centered in the floor of the main body of the chapel signaled the next standing marker for the visitor (Fig. 12). The tile design of this area—a circle-inside-a-square—articulates the chapel’s (once) perfect geometry and serves a pragmatic function to guide the movement of the visitor through its space. Fourteen small circles made of green, white, and red marble abstract designs wrap around the porphyry disc to form a circular border, the whole of which is placed within a square that features the Medici device of the diamond ring with an entwined ribbon bearing the motto “SEMPER” in each corner. The visitor positioned in this portion of the chapel had to turn three-hundred-and-sixty degrees to take in the entire decorative program, and the floor tiles were arranged to encourage this circular movement. Long bands of geometric patterns frame the central square design and align with the four walls of the room. Rectangular pieces of porphyry set into the center of each of these floor bands—emphasized by inverted triangular porphyry tiles at either end—mark the cardinal positions of the room and index the walls as separate but related points within the geographic nexus of the chapel. They are locative cues for the turn of the viewer’s body. The painted and gilded wood ceiling of the main body of the chapel similarly echoes the room’s geometry and reinforces the floor design beneath it (Fig. 13). The ceiling

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design is purposefully asymmetrical to account for the viewer’s physical position within the chapel standing on the porphyry disc. Two bands of gilded decoration line the ceiling along the edges of the eastern, southern, and western walls; the space below these double bands was occupied by intarsiated benches installed along the walls, as well as the entrance door with its floor tile entrance carpet. The northern edge of the ceiling, below which was free of furniture and directly communicated with the chancel, is decorated with only one band. The remaining space the ceiling, a perfect square, is in alignment with the square and circle below. Like the porphyry floor markers, the ceiling’s design points to each of the walls of the room and suggests their interrelation. The compositional beginning of the painted decoration of the chapel is in the upper left corner of the east wall, where a procession of men on horseback emerges into view as it crests a mountain pass and winds down a rocky path (Plate 4). Leading the cavalcade in the foreground of this wall is the young magus, Caspar, who processes southward on a white horse, surrounded by his princely entourage of eleven attendants dressed in his colors of gold, white, and red.52 Cosimo and Piero de’Medici are featured prominently in equestrian portraits directly behind Caspar (Fig. 14).53 Cosimo is shown in a three-quarter view riding on a brown mule fitted with a black and gold bridle and ceremonial breast collar. Riding to his left, Piero wears a crimson and gold brocade giornea over a gold-brocaded doublet with crimson calze.54 His white horse is elaborately adorned with ceremonial livery that bear the Medici motto “SEMPER” as well as the Medici devices of palle and diamond rings with intertwined ribbons.55 Cosimo’s other male children and grandchildren are also included within the cavalcade on this wall. Cosimo’s second son, Giovanni, is perhaps represented as the man in livery who stands just before Piero’s horse.56 He holds a fur hat in 52 The identif ication of the f igure of Caspar as Lorenzo di Piero de’Medici, a traditional claim, was rejected by Gombrich, “The Early Medici,” 49. Although no longer identified as a portrait of Lorenzo, the representation of the young magus still resonated specially for the young Lorenzo, who was born on the feast date of Caspar (January 1) and was baptized on Epiphany. 53 In the chapel, the portraits take on near life-sized proportions and are represented in the same pictorial space as the Medici. For an in-depth account of the portraits included in the procession, see Acidini Luchinat, “Medici and Citizens,” 363-370. 54 Many thanks to Tim McCall for his sage council on the Renaissance fashions displayed in the Magian entourage. 55 Ames-Lewis, “Early Medicean Devices,” 122-143. 56 Given the dynastic impulse of the overall decorative program, the identification of this figure as Giovanni, advanced by Rab Hatfield, is the only logical suggestion that has been offered thus far; see Hatfield, “Cosimo de’Medici,” 235. Benozzo’s portrait, particularly in the nose and brow, does bear some resemblance to Mino da Fiesole’s marble portrait of Giovanni, which, it should be noted, was not a faithful copy of the sitter but rather an all’antica idealized portrayal; Zuraw, “The Medici Portraits,” 317-339. Similarly, it bears resemblance to the painted portrait of Giovanni, made twenty years earlier, in Domenico Veneziano’s Adoration of the Magi, which already shows the onset of a receding hairline; see Ames-Lewis, “Art in the Service,” 207-220. For an identification of Niccolò da Pontremoli, see Acidini Luchinat, “Medici and Citizens,” 366. Crum, on

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Figure 13. Michelozzo and Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, Ceiling of the Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)

the other hand, suggests the identification of Roberto Martelli in this figure and interprets his prominent position as festaiuolo within the paintings as an indication of his control over the iconography of the room; Crum, “Roberto Martelli,” 417. However, see my identification below of Martelli on the opposite wall.

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Figure 14. Detail of Medici entourage led by Piero de’Medici (center right foreground on white horse) and Cosimo de’Medici (center left foreground on brown mule), eastern wall, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Art Resource)

his left hand and wears a blue velvet tunic underneath a giornea in the Medici colors of red, white, and green and decorated with Medici insignia, including an exaggeratedly large diamond ring and a ribbon bearing the “SEMPER” motto. The placement and heraldic costume of this figure within the processional order

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suggests that he assumes the position of the festaiuolo, or master of ceremonies, for the event, a title that Giovanni held in 1447. Cosimo’s illegitimate son, Carlo, has been identified plausibly as the figure in profile wearing a rolled white cloth head-covering between Piero and Cosimo.57 He returned to Florence in 1458/9 from a position in the papal court and went on to become the provost of the cathedral of Prato in 1460.58 Further recognizable in the second row of the procession are Piero’s sons, Lorenzo and Giuliano, and possibly their cousin, Cosimino, as well as Piero’s brother-in-law, Giovanni di Francesco Tornabuoni. By placing the leading male members of the Medici family in succession behind Caspar, Benozzo highlighted their preeminent position within Florentine public affairs since it was protocol within public ceremonies for illustrious citizens to assume positions both at the front and the rear of a procession.59 Within the context of the Epiphany celebration, their location immediately behind Caspar held particular resonance since it positioned the Medici as the first Florentine witnesses of the Christ child after the three Magi. Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Count of Pavia and son of the Milanese Duke Francesco Sforza, also is represented in the foreground next to Cosimo on a white horse.60 Galeazzo Maria was present in Florence in the spring of 1459 to sign peace treaties between Florence and Milan; he was hosted by the Medici at the family’s expense and given lodging in Piero’s suite within the Palazzo Medici.61 According to the extensive accounts of his stay, the young count was “paid every honor possible, without omitting anything at all, and sparing no expense and love and effort.”62 The Lord of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta, portrayed in a three-quarter view next to Galeazzo Maria, served as the count’s right-hand man during the Florentine sojourn and “went with him all the time during his stay.”63 Their visit was carefully constructed to present Florence through the lens of Medici patronage, with tours of San Marco and San Lorenzo, a visit to the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, a mass sung in the Baptistery 57 Acidini Luchinat, “Medici and Citizens,” 366. 58 Pieraccini, La Stirpe de’ Medici, 89-92. 59 The organization of the princely entourage has been analyzed by Cristina Acidini Luchinat as a brigata, or typical courtly formation, that was used in contemporary Florentine rituals, games, and festivities from the fourteenth century; see Acidini Luchinat, “The Procession of the Magi,” 39-40. On the significance of the placement of the most important individuals at the end of the procession, see Hatfield, “Cosimo de’Medici,” 233. 60 Mesnil, “Sigismondo Malatesta,” 74-75. 61 Galeazzo Maria Sforza had traveled to Florence in 1459 from Milan, as did Sigismondo Malatesta from Rimini, to escort Pope Pius II over the Apennines. The foreign dignitaries stayed as guests in the Medici Palace and were entertained by festivities throughout the city. On 17 April 1459, when the building and decoration of the Medici palace were almost complete, Sforza met Cosimo inside the yet-to-be-painted chapel, which he described in a letter to his father; see Hatfield, “Some Unknown Descriptions”; The Chapel of the Magi, 10. 62 For an anonymous description of the festivities, see Newbigin, “Le Onoranze Fiorentine,” 17–135; Newbigin, “The Florentine Celebrations.” 63 Newbigin, “The Florentine Celebrations,” lines 2893-2898.

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of San Giovanni, and attendance at a sacra rappresentazione, hunt, ball, and joust. The prominent placement of Galeazzo Maria and Sigismondo in the foreground of the wall painting effectively presents them as a mounted alliance with the Medici and signals a new age of politics under the auspices of the first Florentine family. Similar to the function of painted portraits displayed in meeting halls throughout the palace (including the portrait of Galeazzo Maria’s father, Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, located next door in the antecamera), they visualized the close relationship between the Medici and contemporary leading political powers and therefore underscored the critical role of the Medici in protecting the well-being of Florence.64 The privilege of inclusion in such an illustrious group was not lost on the artist Benozzo, who inserted his self-portrait in the row of men behind Lorenzo de’Medici.65 Identified by his gilded signature placed on his crimson hat, the artist was well connected to the Medici by the time of his commission in the family’s chapel and had already painted the Magi for the family in several earlier commissions. As an assistant of Fra Angelico at San Marco, Benozzo was responsible for large sections of the decorative program that was financed by Cosimo and completed between 1438-1443, including the Adoration of the Magi in Cosimo’s cell.66 He also painted a tondo of the Adoration of the Magi for the Medici palace, as well as an Adoration and other scenes on the Medici-sponsored Armadio degli Argenti for Santissima Annunziata.67 In 1447, Benozzo left Florence with Fra Angelico to work on frescoes in the Vatican Palace in Rome; most likely, he was still there when Galeazzo Maria Sforza visited the Medici in April 1459.68 By July 1459, however, Benozzo was already painting the chapel walls in Palazzo Medici and, by the new year, the decoration was finished or very near completion.69 His correspondence with Piero de’Medici about the expedient progression of the paintings indicates his desire to fulfill his patrons’ wishes.70 Given the theme of the chapel and the speed at which Benozzo 64 Paintings with allegorical ad symbolic resonance with the family’s values were displayed alongside portraits of political allies, including Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, and Erasmo di Narni, the Venetian condottiero known as Gattamelata, to reiterate the central position held by the Medici within the larger political landscape of Europe; Libro d’Inventario, 33. 65 Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 43-47; Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 96. 66 Hood, Fra Angelico, 252; Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 15-18; Terry, “Politics,” 202-222. 67 Padoa Rizzo, “The Chapel of the Magi,” 357. 68 On Benozzo’a activities between 23 May 1447, when the artist left Florence, and 10 July 1459, the date of the first documents connecting him to the Chapel of Magi, see Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 275-276. Since Benozzo was not present in Florence when Galeazzo Maria Sforza visited Palazzo Medici, he most likely worked from descriptions and shared drawings rather from life; this hypothesis is supported by the rather generic physiognomy of the Count within the overall decorative program. 69 For the technical report on Benozzo’s pictorial cycle, see “The Restoration,” 371-381; the diagrams of the giornate of each wall are on 378. 70 Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 277.

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was able to complete the wall decoration, Anna Padoa Rizzo has suggested that the artist’s deadline was Christmas.71 Such a timeline for completion would have conveniently dovetailed with the celebration of the young Lorenzo de’Medici’s birthday on the Feast of Caspar on January 1 and the Feast of Epiphany on January 6. Benozzo’s ability to execute such an elaborate program in such a short period of time to the satisfaction of his patrons indicates that the Medici must have had Benozzo in mind for the project well before he began painting in the palace. Art historians have long explained Benozzo’s portrayal of Cosimo in the chapel as a product of the statesman’s self-fashioning as an unassuming citizen who did not seek to draw attention to his status through public displays of wealth.72 According to art-historical convention, Cosimo’s dark garments are understated in comparison to those of Piero and Galeazzo Maria, who flank him in the scene, and his brown mule provides a humble contrast to Piero’s regal mount. Furthermore, the portrayal of Cosimo in three-quarters creates the illusion that Piero is first in line behind the Magi, although in reality they ride side-to-side within the procession. Yet, this is only one part of the visual story. Little discussed is how this pictorial assumption is undermined when the painting is viewed in the flickering light of candles and from the point-of-view of a live spectator in the chapel. Even in the brightest moment of the day, the chapel remained a relatively dark space. The only natural light to reach the chapel’s interior was the muted light that entered through one of the chapel’s two small oculi located on the north and south walls. The northern window admitted soft ambient light into the chancel from an inner courtyard, while the southern window above the entrance door connected to the windowless vestibule.73 There is no extant material evidence that candelabra were attached to the walls, thus one must assume that the chapel was lit primarily by freestanding candles and torches.74 Benozzo painted the walls in a mixed method, using a fresco contemporaneously with a secco in addition to tempera and oil paints and metal foils with adhesives.75 This enabled him to build a richly saturated palette and textured surface that increased the legibility of his paintings in the flickering light of the flames. In this regard, Benozzo took his cue from Lippi’s altarpiece, which already was installed in the chapel by the time 71 Padoa Rizzo, “Chapel of the Magi,” 359. 72 Gombrich, “The Early Medici.” 73 To correct the dim lighting conditions, in 1837, the paintings of the four Evangelists as well as the gilded stars on the north wall were largely destroyed in order to insert a large window on this side of the chapel; Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 19-20. 74 I am grateful to the Museo del Palazzo Medici-Riccardi for allowing me private access to the chapel to view the chapel in natural light. The conditions were close to total darkness at 9:30 a.m., which confirms that the decoration of the chapel was seen with candles and torches at all hours of the day. 75 I Restauri nel Palazzo Medici Riccardi..

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Benozzo began his work on the walls in 1459.76 Both artists set bright skin tones and golden accents against relatively dark backgrounds to contribute to their subjects’ increased legibility for a viewing audience. Similarly, both use vertically oriented rocky outcrops to delineate the landscape and provide a dynamic tonal contrast to the background.77 Seen in the context of the original lighting conditions of the chapel, the altarpiece and wall paintings bear remarkable similarities in their efforts to focus the viewer toward the protagonists of the scene through compositional and other formal strategies. Benozzo’s artistic mode of rendering the figures on the chapel walls reflects his anticipation of the dim viewing conditions of the chapel. The upper half of the walls feature no portraits, but rather figures with generic physiognomies. Given their higher position on the wall, these figures would have been relatively illegible in the candlelight viewing conditions of the chapel.78 Their purpose for inclusion was to construct the illusion that an endless number of men form the collective of citizens with the Medici and the Magi. In contrast, the figures located in the foreground are articulated in great physiognomic detail to distinguish their forms and modeled extensively in chiaroscuro to emphasize their three-dimensional volume.79 Closest to the light sources of the chapel, these figures were fully legible as identifiable personalities and would have stood out to the viewer, quite literally, as tangible presences in the room. Like Piero, Cosimo is distinguished by his position at the front of the group of citizens behind Caspar and is given prominent compositional attention through tonal framing, which sets the entire contour of his face and neck against dark objects and clothes so as to highlight his features for viewers within the dimly lit room.80 Cosimo’s fashion, a fur-lined black velvet lucco embellished with the Medici palle, actually distinguishes him as a statesman, as its (presumed) longer length was appropriate for an older man and the Florentine lucco itself was a recognizable sign 76 Benozzo already had demonstrated his ability to adapt and change his artistic style so as to create a harmonious integration of his work within a larger decorative program, as is evident in the differing aesthetic principles that underscore his frescoes made within the workshop of Fra Angelico at San Marco in Florence and those at the Chapel of Nicholas V in Rome. 77 This terrestrial organization was used in at least two previous Medici commissions that bore Magi scenes, including Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi’s tondo housed downstairs and Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco in Cosimo’s cell at San Marco down the street, and was thus part of a visual rhetoric shared by Epiphany scenes in Florentine painting. 78 The question of lighting conditions was the focus of the conservation efforts led by Giuseppe Centauro and Cristina Grandin, based on research by Elena Magazzini, to propose a new museum experience within the chapel; see La Cappella dei Magi. 79 For detailed reproductions of the modeling of these figures, see The Chapel of the Magi, 45ff. 80 The detailed description of the horses’ anatomies similarly served to emphasize their plasticity, an effect that was highlighted further by the variation of poses incorporated by Benozzo. Acidini Luchinat refers to them as based on antique imperial equestrian monuments, The Chapel of the Magi, 40, 119.

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of governmental office.81 Yet, he is most distinguished by the round golden rivets attached to the leather bridle and breast collar of his mule. Here Benozzo built up the wall surface with medallion-sized mounds of gesso that he then covered in gold. They rise three-dimensionally from the surface of the wall, catch the light of candles, and seem to glow (Plate 5). The golden rivets on Cosimo’s mount, like the other gilded sections of the wall decoration, served a pragmatic function that underscored its symbolic form.82 Gold was used to direct the visual attention of the visitor to sites of importance within the narrative. The brilliance of the shimmering surfaces of the breast plate and bridle signals Cosimo as literally the most illustrious of the citizens behind the Magi and the key to the decorative, and dynastic, program.83 Cosimo was well aware of other Florentine patrons who were signaled in works of art through the strategic application of gold. His representation as the gilded leader of the masculine collective behind Caspar was most likely a direct response to Palla Strozzi’s representation in Gentile da Fabriano’s altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, painted in 1423 for the Strozzi sacristy in Santa Trinita (Fig. 15).84 In Gentile’s version, Caspar stands in the center foreground of the painting; his golden crown and garments distinguish him from the cavalcade that follows behind, as do his golden spurs, which are in the process of being unfastened by a kneeling boy portrayed in foreshortening. Directly above the spurs and the boy stands a figure, identified as Palla Strozzi, dressed in a red, blue, and gold brocade tunic with fur-trimmed sleeves and a falcon perched on his gold glove.85 The vertical compositional alignment of the patron with Caspar’s golden spur was a visual allusion to Palla Strozzi’s title as Knight of the Golden Spur, which he earned while on an ambassadorial mission for Florence in the southern peninsula in 1416.86 While in Benozzo’s painting, the spatial orientation of the scene is expressed horizontally as opposed to straight on, the golden rivets on Cosimo’s mount’s bridle and breast collar similarly identify him as the patron of the chapel in dynamic relation to Caspar, who is represented in front of him with gleaming golden spurs.87 When 81 Elizabeth Currie, “Clothing and a Florentine Style,” 33-52. 82 Within the east wall of the chapel alone, gold has been applied to the adornment of the mounts of Cosimo, Piero, and Galeazzo Maria, as well as those of Caspar and his brigade, and on the clothing of Caspar, his attendants, Piero, and the signature on the hat of Benozzo. On the symbolism of gold in early Italian painting, see Chris Lakey, “The Materiality of Light,” 119-136. 83 On the cultural significance of material brilliance for Renaissance men, see McCall, “Brilliant Bodies,” 445-490. 84 Panczenko, “Cultura Umanistica,” 27-75; de Marchi, Gentile da Fabriano, 162-199; Christiansen, “L’Adorazione dei Magi,” 11-40. 85 de Marchi, Gentile da Fabriano, 182. 86 Hatfield, “The Three Kings,” 13. 87 Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci, also was given the right to wear golden spurs by Pope Martin V on 9 September 1420, when Giovanni accompanied him from Florence to Rome along with Lorenzo Ridolfi, Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla Strozzi.

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Figure 15. Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi (Strozzi Altarpiece), 1426, tempera and gold leaf on wood, originally for the Sacristy of Santa Trinita; today housed in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Cosimo returned to Florence from exile in 1434, Palla was exiled from the city in an act of political retribution; as a direct consequence, Cosimo became the city’s wealthiest citizen and assumed Palla’s former role as the premier patron of humanistic learning in Florence, including financing the building of the first public library at San Marco.88 Benozzo’s portrayal of Cosimo gave monumental form to 88 A visual allusion of Cosimo to Palla already appeared in the decoration of Cosimo’s private cells in the dormitory of San Marco, which has been interpreted as an architectural and iconographic appropriation of the sacristies and library commissioned by Palla Strozzi at Santa Trinita; see Terry, “Politics,” 209-222; Terry, “A Humanist Reading,” 115-131; Terry-Fritsch, “Florentine Convent,” 230-271.

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Figure 16. Michelozzo and Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, Tabernacle of the Annunciation, Santissima Annunziata, Florence (Photo: Author)

the theme begun by Strozzi at Santa Trinita and underscored his reputation as a humanist scholar and statesman. The inclusion of gold, and more broadly speaking rich materials, in the Chapel of the Magi is in alignment with the architectural and decorative principles of the elaborately decorated marble tabernacle produced by Michelozzo and Pagno di Lapo Portigiani

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Figure 17. Detail of miraculous icon of the Annunciation, Tabernacle of SS. Annunziata, Santissima Annunziata, Florence (Photo: Author)

for Piero at Santissima Annunziata between 1448-1452 (Fig. 16).89 The color and gold on the ceiling of the Chapel of the Magi repeat the vivid and varied colorism of the interior vault of the tabernacle, in which gilded coffers frame and give honor to the miraculous image displayed below. The light that glowed from abundant candles that covered the altar and hung from the ceiling of the tabernacle illuminated the gilded surfaces and bounced off of the metal votives that were appended to the image (Fig. 17).90 The shimmering splendor of the tabernacle distinguished the site, and its miracleworking Virgin, as extraordinary.91 Likewise, the material fabric of the Chapel of 89 On the tabernacle at Santissima Annunziata, see Casalini, La SS. Annunziata di Firenze; Holmes, Miraculous Image. Equally relevant to this discussion is the Cappella del Crocifisso that Michelozzo built in 1448 under Piero’s patronage at San Miniato al Monte. A secular counterpart offering this aesthetic was found in Piero’s studietto in the palace, next to the Chapel of the Magi; see Ames-Lewis, “Art in the Service,” 208; Syson, “The Medici Study,” 288-293; Lindow, The Renaissance Palace, 164. 90 The effect of the candlelight on the metallic votives at SS Annunziata was described in 1459; see Newbigin, “The Florentine Celebrations,” lines 1729-1770. 91 Bissera Pentcheva’s research on the function and meaning of gilded surfaces in Byzantine art is relevant here; see Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 631-55; Pentcheva, “Moving Eyes,” 222-234; and Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon.

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the Magi signaled its role as a container for precious things.92 Between the gilded rosettes of imposing size fastened in rhythmic pattern and the meticulously gilded egg and dart designs that line each of the coffers and decorative registers, the ceiling appears to be literally encrusted with gold. While Benozzo’s figures on the walls were understood as portraits, not sacred icons, they were framed with splendid materials that announced their authoritative power.93 The gilded clothing and accessories of the procession’s key protagonists, including Cosimo and the three kings, were illuminated in the candlelight much like the gilded plaques that were attached to the sacred images populating Florentine altars.94 Presented as activated efficacious images, or intercessors, the portraits of Cosimo and the Magi held the power to fulfill the wishes of devotees.

Somaesthetic Emplacement in Immersive Artistic Programs Feste, or religious feast celebrations, were a staple of public life in fifteenth-century Florence.95 These dates in the city’s ritual calendar were marked as special, “out of time,” and provided welcome rupture from everyday routine. Certain feast dates, such as the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March), became occasions for the communal witnessing of sacred history in the form of elaborate sacre rappresentazioni, or sacred dramas, performed inside neighborhood churches throughout the city. The number of sacred dramas produced in Florence dramatically increased in the fifteenth century, almost in direct correspondence with the rise in lay confraternities dedicated to saints and religious mysteries.96 As Nerida Newbigin has discussed, sacre rappresentazioni presented “the word made flesh” to Renaissance audiences; that is, the dramas visualized the mysteries of the Church through the incarnation of actors on stage, and thus created a corporeal vision of the divine.97 The fleshy realism of the actors was accompanied by illusionistic stage sets that were designed to present biblical events in tangible contexts.98 By introducing a human element into Scriptural narratives, sacred dramas incorporated praesentia into the distant 92 Ames-Lewis, “Art in the Service,” 208. Acidini Luchinat aptly describes the Chapel of the Magi as a “jewel box”; “Chapel of the Magi,” 7. 93 McCall, “Brilliant Bodies,” 445-490. 94 On votive offerings at SS Annunziata, see Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 190. For a recent consideration on the topic, see Ex Voto. 95 Trexler, Public Life. 96 Wisch and Ahl, “Introduction,” 1. 97 Newbigin, “The Word Made Flesh,” 361-375. 98 Molinari, Theater Through the Ages, 108. As will be discussed in further depth in Chapter Three, members of the Medici family, including Piero de’Medici’s wife and son, authored the texts for sacred dramas in the city and Palazzo Medici became a stage for certain dramas as well.

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and not easily graspable Biblical past.99 Through the simulated presence of the divine, audiences of believers were encouraged to identify with that past, albeit through counterfeit means. Other feste, such as the Feast of Epiphany (6 January), known as the Festa de’Magi, were celebrated through processional spectacles, or kinetic dramas, that temporarily transformed the urban spaces of the city into symbolic geographies that connected Florentines to distant sacred landscapes. Epiphany marks the day on which the “wise men from the East” arrived in Bethlehem to pay homage to the “Child who [was] born king of the Jews.”100 According to Matthew’s testimony, these Magi were the first Gentiles to reach Christ’s birth site; they were the first outside witnesses and thus they confirmed his authority.101 From the late fourteenth through late fifteenth centuries, Epiphany celebrations were staged in Florence for thousands of citizens and outsiders. The ritual celebrations featured the choreographed movements of up to seven hundred participants at a time who processed along the streets of the city on horses, carts, and foot, and stopped at the city’s key ritual sites, including the Baptistery of San Giovanni and Piazza della Signoria, for staged dramatic action. The sumptuous festivities and spectacles of Epiphany crafted an aspirational image of Florence as the Holy Land and its citizens as kings, if only for a day. Since at least 1390, the first known description of the Epiphany event in Florence, the ultimate destination of the Magi procession was the piazza of San Marco, where actors dressed as the Holy Family gathered upon a raised platform and received the gifts of the three kings.102 The scene of gift-giving was a symbolic transaction; the performative genuflection of the Magi before the infant Christ expressed their recognition of his divine authority. As Richard Trexler has examined, “the magi, though they had come from the outside, now serve to share [the] image of inside power. The magi are both the Other and a presence constituting the legitimate inside.”103 When the Florentine community gathered together to celebrate the feast of Epiphany, it effectively restaged this scene of legitimation to publicly display and reaffirm their collective faith. After the spectacle, the officials of the Florentine government would then replicate this act of benefaction with the gifting of wax to the church of San Marco.104 As Rab Hatfield has demonstrated, the Festa de’Magi gained increasing civic prominence in the three decades after the Medici return from exile in 1434 and the 99 Brown, The Cult of the Saints. 100 Matthew 2:1-12. 101 Trexler, Journey of the Magi, 36. 102 Diario d’Anonimo dal 1381 al 1401, BNC, Panciatichi, 158, fol. 157v; transcribed in Hatfield, “Compagnia dei Magi,” 144. 103 Trexler, Journey of the Magi, 36. 104 Hood, Fra Angelico, 97.

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male members of the family, including Cosimo, his sons, and his grandsons, were active members of the Compagnia de’Magi (the Confraternity of the Magi).105 Cosimo used his influence with the Florentine government to increase the state-sponsorship of the feast date and he and other male members of the family participated both as festaiuoli (masters of ceremonies) and as actors in the processional drama.106 Cosimo closely associated himself with Epiphany through his financial patronage of the church and convent of San Marco from 1436 until his death in 1464. Under Cosimo’s auspices, Pope Eugenius IV consecrated the new church on Epiphany in 1443, thus officially binding not only San Marco with the religious feast date but also Cosimo’s patron saints, Cosmas and Damian, who were featured in Fra Angelico’s altarpiece on the high altar (Plate 1).107 Shortly thereafter, Cosimo hired Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli to fresco a large-scale scene of the Adoration of the Magi in his private cell within the dormitory of the convent (Plate 6). By 1455, Cosimo had built a new meeting place for the Compagnia de’Magi within San Marco as well.108 By the time the Medici hired Benozzo to paint the walls of their chapel inside Palazzo Medici, Cosimo, and the Medici family in general, was firmly linked to the iconography of the Magi in the visual and popular culture of the city. Renaissance buildings, images, and objects served a critical function to frame ritual occasions and to express the value-laden significance of the event.109 By organizing and structuring participants’ and witnesses’ perceptions, Renaissance art and architecture acted as conceptual frames that guided both the “doing” and the “thinking” of ritual practice.110 Rituals seek to make the most economical use 105 The Epiphany drama was recorded in 1390, 1417, 1429, 1447, 1451, 1469, and 1498. See Hatfield, “Compagnia dei Magi,” 107-161; Eisenbichler, “Nativity and Magi Plays,” 319-333. For a transcription of the play as it was presented on the feast of St. John the Baptist in Piazza della Signoria, see Newbigin, Nuovo Corpus, 183-203. 106 The decision of the Signori e Colleghi to increase funding for the Compagnia dei Magi occurred on 12 November 1446, and the festa was reinstated in this year; Hatfield, “Compagnia dei Magi,” 114. Piero di Cosimo de’Medici served as festaiuolo in 1446 alongside the architect Michelozzo; see: ASF, Signori e Collegi, Deliberazioni fatte in forza di Ordinaria autorità, 65, (8v and 24v) for the official ratification of the 10 members selected for the job. Giovanni di Cosimo de’Medici served as the festaiuolo for the festa of 1447 festa. A letter dated 18 December 1450 from Contessina de’Bardi de’Medici, Cosimo’s wife, to their son, Giovanni, records that Cosimo would participate in the Epiphany drama of 1451, wearing a cloak of marten and sable instead of his usual gold cloth; see Ross, Lives, 54. 107 Cyril Gerbron has argued that the altarpiece played a role in the Epiphany drama; see Gerbron, “Fra Angelico,” 29-47. 108 According to the Cronaca of San Marco, “Cosimo built a meeting place for the confraternity of the Magi, which is between the back part of the church and cloister, and for the same confraternity he made an entrance between two doors of the church which face the side street”; BLF, San Marco 370, fol. 6v, trans. Hatfield, “Compagnia dei Magi,” 138. 109 Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power. 110 Goffman, Frame Analysis, 22.

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of the capacity of an event to transmit specialized information.111 By drawing attention to certain actions and individuals over others, art was used to reduce noise, or interference, in the correct transmission of information by providing a visual platform for the critical concepts that informed the occasion. It was also used to reinforce or construct the legitimacy of the ritual event as well as its sponsors and, by extension, its participants. As Richard Trexler has examined, in Renaissance ritual “the honor of the frame and the virtù of the image became indistinguishable. The devotee could not compartmentalize his experience of the image, and of the frame, and in determining whether an object could be adored, the Florentine devotee […] considered the quality of the frame.”112 Palazzo Medici must be understood as a frame for Florentine public rituals, as it served as a prominent backdrop along the primary processional route for many of the most important feasts in the Florentine church calendar, including Epiphany.113 The palace was incorporated into the collective memory of these events as crowds of Florentines would line its exterior perimeter to watch convoys of holy men and members of the Signoria from the street, while many members of the Medici family and their guests would watch from the windows on the upper floors. The insertion of the Medici residence into the geographic nexus of popular festive culture within the city was a strategy to ensure the centrality of the family in the foundational narratives that Florentines told about themselves. Already by 1428, when the Epiphany festa had gained popularity and was financially subsidized by the government to ensure its splendor, Via Larga served as the decorated processional route for the Magian retinue from the Baptistery to the Florentine “Bethlehem” at San Marco.114 Described as “an honorable and handsome celebration,” the participants in that year’s celebration included members of the government, dressed in special religious garments, who accompanied the Virgin Mary and Christ child to San Marco from the Palazzo della Signoria. According to a contemporary account, The celebration began in the morning. And it lasted till six in the afternoon… And in the morning the Twenty, dressed in monkish habits, went through the square with the persons representing our Lady and her Son. And this group went on to the platform in Piazza San Marco. And after lunch there were about seven hundred costumed men on horseback, among whom were the three Magi and their retinue, honorably dressed. And of the striking things they had with them, 111 Tambiah, “A Performative Approach to Ritual,” 116-142. 112 Trexler, Public Life, 94. 113 Elam, “Il Palazzo,” 44-56. 114 Hatfield, “Compagnia dei Magi,” 111.

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there were three giants and a wild man and, upon a car, a man impersonating David, who killed the giant with the sling. And the man playing David went fully erect and quite skillfully on the car. And on each side of the Via Larga, from the Canto di San Giovanni to Piazza San Marco, there were boxes and benches decorated with bunting and rugs and backings. And it was a fine thing to see those arrangements in that street.115

The author’s emphasis on Via Larga as a major venue for entertainment during Epiphany remained a consistent aspect of all accounts of the festa from that moment forward. At the time of the 1428 festa, the branch of the family under Giovanni di Bicci de’Medici, including Cosimo and Piero, resided in their palace on Via Larga located just a few hundred meters to the north of the future Palazzo Medici.116 Thus, when Cosimo decided to construct his family’s new palace on the corner of Via Larga and Via de’Gori in the 1440s, he was fully aware of the impact that the new edifice would have on the processional route of the popular Florentine ritual and how such a prominent location communicated the political aspirations of its residents.117 Although the background of the painted procession in the chapel is not a cityscape, as would demand a literal representation of the Florentine Epiphany rituals, the rolling verdant fields and rusticated villas evoked the landscape of Tuscany and Medici properties scattered throughout it.118 Framed by the Magian procession, the familiar land of the Medici and the space of the chapel itself was thus recast as the Holy Land. In contrast to the three-dimensional illusionism of the figures in the foreground of the wall paintings, the backgrounds stretch vertically to the ceiling akin to the aesthetic manner of tapestries, which were found lining the walls of palaces and churches throughout Renaissance Europe. The Medici used tapestries in their home, and even hung them in the chapel itself before the wall decoration was 115 Paolo di Matteo Pietrobuoni, Priorista, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conventi Soppressi C, C, 4, 895, f.123v; transcribed and published by Hatfield, “Compagnia dei Magi,” 146 (italics mine). 116 Cosimo’s brother’s family remained in the casa vecchia; see Saalman and Mattox, “The First Medici Palace,” 329-345. 117 The situation of the palace at the intersection of Via Larga and Via San Giovannino at the corner of Via de’Gori ensured that it was highly visible from a number of key locations in the Florentine urban landscape. The front of the residence was viewed easily from Piazza del Duomo and at the other end of Via Larga from Piazza San Marco. The southwestern corner of the palace anchored the piazza of San Lorenzo, the family’s neighborhood church that was built and decorated with Medici funding. The sightlines created by the placement of the palace from these vantage points fostered the beneficial association of patron and place, a concept that was further emphasized by the processional route used for the Epiphany celebration, as well as the itinerary for important visitors to the city that brought them successively to each of these Medici-sponsored sites. Elam, “Il Palazzo,” 47; Preyer, “L’Architettura,” 58. 118 See the compiled bibliography in Lillie, Florentine Villas.

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complete.119 Often made in a series so as to cover the walls of an entire room, tapestries pragmatically served to insulate rooms while at the same time provided large-scale luxury decoration that could be transported with the movements of the court. Due to the placement of tapestries in functional spaces that were arranged with furniture pushed against the lower walls, tapestry designers adjusted their compositions and elevated subject matter to the upper portions of the picture plane.120 Benozzo was familiar with tapestry design, and had painted scenes of tapestry-lined halls for Pope Nicholas V at the Vatican Palace in Rome prior to his work on the Chapel of the Magi.121 In Palazzo Medici, the artist utilized the entire height of the wall to portray mountainous peaks that lead the eye upward to blue skies filled with clouds that stretch across the upper zone. Benozzo has embedded hunting scenes, exotic animals, castles and villas, gardens, and rocky cliffs within the elaborate terrain. The detailed passages, both near and far, press the foliage and fauna forward toward the surface plane. Furthermore, golden and silver highlights draw attention to the surface of the wall as a two-dimensional surface. Leaves on the trees, for example, are highlighted with delicate silver lines made by with a single-hair brush, while the architecture of the villas and castles spread throughout the landscape are articulated similarly with slim contour lines and white highlights. Like the individually colored threads of tapestries, these delicate passages caught the light of the flickering candles and drew attention to the surface of the walls as a material site. The optical effects of Benozzo’s paintings in the Chapel of the Magi—in which the foreground portraits appear to emerge into the space of the viewer and the backgrounds draw attention to themselves as flat two-dimensional surfaces— fostered a participatory mode of interaction between the beholder and the image. As Otto Demus suggested in his work on Byzantine mosaic decoration, figurative icons that “surround the room on all sides makes the empty space in the middle seem their real domain.”122 Indeed, it is the beholder on the inside who engages in the scenarios it presents. Like the combination of glittering gold mosaic tiles and icons that come alive and thrust outward into the space of Byzantine believers, the simultaneous flattening of the background and plastic activation of the foreground achieved in Benozzo’s paintings, particularly in candlelit conditions, emphasizes the beholder’s direct communication with the represented individuals on the walls. 119 Letters regarding inquiries about and acquisitions of tapestries by the Medici are gathered in Correspondance, 6ff. 120 Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance. 121 On Angelico and Benozzo in Rome, see de Simone, Il Beato Angelico. 122 Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 13ff. For further theories on the spatial relationship of the beholder to mosaic icons, see Michelis, “Neo-Platonic Philosophy,” 38-39; and Piotrowski, “Architecture,” 101-127. On the medieval Italian painting tradition inspired by Byzantine icons, see Lakey, “The Materiality of Light,” 119-136.

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Benozzo’s strategy of painting in the Chapel of the Magi bears conceptual similarities to Fra Angelico’s fresco program for Cosimo at San Marco, which incorporated a purposeful combination of “harmonious dissimilitude” to reflect the religious and humanist activity that occurred inside its walls.123 Particularly along the pathway to the library, Fra Angelico’s frescoes combine intense three-dimensional modeling of the figures in the foreground with abstract color fields in the background to block the viewer’s entry into a so-called pictorial window and instead reverse the perspective of the image so that it enters into the space of the viewer. While Benozzo’s wall paintings in the chapel include landscape scenes for the background instead of pure color, the artistic tension between the figuration in the foreground and the abstraction in the background is similar, as is the outward thrust of the paintings into the space of the room. Such an aesthetic coalesced with the desires of visitors who gathered in the chapel to form or reaffirm political alliances with the real Cosimo and Piero, whose presence filled the room with potential. Given Cosimo’s advanced age and Piero’s infirmities, their physical position within the chapel mostly was fixed to the seating lining the walls. Indeed, when Galeazzo Maria Sforza visited the chapel in 1459, he found Cosimo seated and unable to rise to his feet to properly greet his guest.124 Yet the painted Cosimo, dressed in his lavish black cut-pile velvet lucco atop his golden-accented mount, pressed forward toward the visitor standing in the chapel.125 The visitor was encouraged to join the proxy Cosimo in the wall paintings and performatively act out the ritual procession of Epiphany. By positioning viewers as participants in and protagonists of an idealized ritual procession alongside the Medici and their most important allies, the Chapel of the Magi offered a space for visitors to enact a representation of their devotion both to God and to the Medici family. As Emile Durkheim illustrated in his foundational study of the elements of religion, rituals are particular modes of action (doing) that express the beliefs (thinking) of a unified body of members.126 Through their formalization and repetition over time, rituals help to foster individual or collective feelings of belonging, desire, and identity. Performed in public and in private, by individuals and by entire 123 See Terry, “Politics.” On the Dionysian notion of “harmonious dissimilitude” as applied to the Observant Dominican community at San Marco, see Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. 124 Newbigin, “The Florentine Celebrations,” line 2197ff. Likewise, Piero increasingly was bed-ridden during the 1460s and held audiences with business associates and political allies in his apartment rooms next to the chapel. 125 The Byzantine viewer was further connected to icons through the power of sight, which was considered to be tactile as well as visual; Nelson, “To Say and To See,” 143-168. 126 Durkheim, Elementary Forms. Trexler defines religion as “a system of reverential behavior shared by a sworn community, and group authority is rooted in the normative replication of that decorum”; Trexler, Public Life, xviii.

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communities, rituals provide a venue for the creation and definition of one’s identity, for, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has examined, rituals “provide enacted narratives that allow people to interpret their own experience. Rituals produce a story people tell themselves about themselves.”127 The ritual focus of the wall decoration of the Chapel of the Magi and the ritualized performance it inspires was designed to cultivate a narrative that the visitor told about themselves in relation to the Medici. The reenactment effectively activated the spectator as the agent of the Medici, who visualized the family’s identity and expressed its command of Florentine public life. If a visitor practiced the place according to the scenario, he or she had the potential to become part of the Medici community imagined and reified on the chapel walls. To follow the procession, the visitor had to physically turn his or her body and rotate around the marble floor design as the visual narrative continues fluidly from the east wall of the chapel to the south and west walls. A portion of the lower left side of the south wall was destroyed in the seventeenth century when a rectangular window was introduced to allow additional light into the chapel (Plate 7). Similarly, the right side of the wall suffered irreparable damage when a new entrance was made in the southwestern corner of the room (Fig. 18).128 Despite these losses, the extant scenes painted on the south and west walls clearly illustrate the fluidity of the composition across the space of the room. The light-colored rocky ground painted along the lower edge of the walls provides an uninterrupted path for the cavalcade in the foreground. Likewise, the coloring and composition of the Tuscan landscape in the background is repeated across the three walls. In addition to these pictorial cues, the circular organization of the floor pavement coalesces with the compositional directionality of the wall decoration from east to south to west and offers a schematized path for the visitor’s turning movement. The porphyry rectangle markers centered in each side of the square floor design indicated a new vantage, a launching point into the scenes on the wall. In this immersive space with its multiple points of view, visitors grasped the Magian scene that was presented on the successive walls of the chapel through the mobilization of their bodies. On the south wall, Balthasar, the second of the three Magi, processes on his white mount while surrounded by his entourage dressed in dark green doublets. The tapestry-effect of the background on this wall is emphasized through the vertical composition of the landscape, which stretches upward in a pyramid toward the round window embedded in the upper center of the wall. Balthasar is positioned beneath the oculus in the foreground; its light, as well as the light of 127 Cited in Muir, Ritual, 4. 128 This corner of the room was transformed into a new entrance to the chapel in 1688-1689 when the Riccardi family commissioned Giovan Battista Foggini to build a new staircase that leads to the chapel from the north side of the courtyard; The Chapel of the Magi, 165.

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Figure 18. View of Southwest corner of Chapel of the Magi, with modern entrance, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)

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flickering candles that were placed on free-standing holders throughout the room, illuminated his rich green and gold brocade fur-lined cloak and elaborate golden crown embellished with colored feathers. Although contested as a portrait per se, Benozzo’s representation of Balthasar traditionally has been associated with the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologus, who came to Florence in 1439 to form an ecumenical council of “wise men” during the so-called Council of Union.129 Pisanello recorded the emperor’s appearance at the time in a bronze portrait medal, which shows his “bizarre hat in the Greek style” (a tall pointed hat with a wide brim that jutted forward) and his equally pointed beard “in the Greek manner.”130 Benozzo’s figure shares neither the distinctive beard nor hat, yet the long curly locks that spill down the back of Balthasar’s neck suggest Palaiologus’ curls on the recto side of Pisanello’s portrait, and the regal pose and dress of the figure, although not in strict profile, is compositionally related to the verso of the medal.131 Regardless of whether or not Benozzo’s magus was intended as a direct allusion to a specific individual in attendance at the negotiations in Florence, art historians have acknowledged widely that the council was a key source of inspiration for the chapel. Cosimo’s success in transferring the council from Ferrara to Florence marked a critical moment in the family’s ascendancy as first leaders of the city.132 Furthermore, Cosimo’s patronage of art and architecture reflected his deep interest in Greek studies and the library of San Marco, which Cosimo built in the 1440s, held one of the best collections of Greek manuscripts in Italy. Cosimo visited the library daily and was entrusted with its maintenance and development.133 In acknowledgment of Cosimo’s humanistic efforts, Balthasar is framed as a Medici ally, wearing a crown with the distinct Medici insignia of green, white, and red feathers. 129 On the connection of the wall decoration of the chapel with the Council of Florence and Medici concerns at mid-century regarding political unity in Florence, see Padoa Rizzo, Benozzo Gozzoli, esp. 56ff; Amaducci, La Cappella di Palazzo Medici; Crum, “Roberto Martelli”; Terry, “Politics”; Terry, “Donatello’s Decapitations,” esp. 617-623. 130 Pisanello, Medal of John VIII Palaiologos, bronze, 1438/9, Münzkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. For a contemporary description of the emperor’s hat and clothes, see da Bisticci, Vite, 16. 131 Similar suggestions for the identif ication of Melchior with the Patriarch Joseph at the Council of Florence have been advanced and debated. 132 The Medici bank underwrote the expenses for the papal delegation, which was responsible for the room and board of the papal curia, the extended Latin entourage, as well as the entire Greek delegation. By December 3, Lorenzo de’Medici began a series of formal negotiations with Pope Eugenius IV to translate the council from Ferrara to Florence in exchange for financial support. The document is transcribed in Fabroni, Adnotationes et Monumenta, 135; translated in Ross, Lives, 42-44. See also the Greek opinion in Syropoulos, Les “Mémoires,” 376. 133 Cosimo was part of a collective of trustees charged with this task. The style of painting used by Benozzo in the chapel’s wall paintings may be considered as an extension of the work that he and Fra Angelico performed within the convent and in particular for those humanists who traveled the corridors of the dormitory to reach the library; Terry, “Politics”; Terry, “A Humanist Reading.”

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The composition moves from left to right, thus the visitor had to turn once again. Like the south wall, the west wall was damaged when the new entrance was built under the Riccardi, effectively removing the back half of Melchior’s horse and the entourage of attendants that trailed it. In the painted wall section that remains, Melchior rides northward with his attendants gathered in front of him in the foreground (Plate 8). The procession then continues, in reverse order than the east wall across the room, up a rocky path on the northern edge of the wall to the upper right corner. Like Caspar on the east wall, Melchior, dressed in a velvet cloak and crimson tunic, casts his steady gaze out into the space of the chapel. Cosimo’s portrait, located diagonally from Melchior and portrayed in three-quarters, connects with the magus, who appears to smile with his eyes as though expressing a personal pleasure to have Cosimo in his company.134 The redirection of the visitor’s gaze to Cosimo at this moment in the procession served as a reminder of Cosimo’s prominent placement within the chapel’s decorative narrative as well as in the real-world context of the family’s business. A group of laymen precedes Melchior and his entourage, as they would in contemporary Florentine Epiphany processions. Several of the men wearing crimson hats may be identified as clienti e amici of the Medici (Plate 9). Bernardo Giugni, a respected statesman and close friend of Cosimo, is shown in profile at the far right of the first row with Tommaso Soderini and Neri Capponi beside him.135 The two men in profile behind them have been plausibly identified as Agnolo Tani, the director of the Bruges branch of the Medici bank from 1450 to 1465, and Francesco Sassetti, the newly appointed general vice director of the bank in Florence.136 Benozzo painted himself twice into this side of the procession as well, first next to Sassetti in the second row wearing a bright blue and white headdress and again at the top left curve of the path with a red scarf tied around his ears and a black wide-brimmed traveling hat on his head.137 Roberto Martelli, the director of the Medici bank and Piero’s close advisor, has been identified as the figure located between these two self-portraits, shown dressed in a red tunic and cap and turning his head toward the viewer in a 134 Hatf ield draws attention to the parallel constructed between the f igure of Melchoir and that of Cosimo on the opposite wall of the chapel; Hatfield, “Cosimo de’Medici,” 238. 135 Acidini Luchinat, “Medici and Citizens,” 368. The comparison of Benozzo’s portrait and the portrait of Giugni found in the Victoria and Albert Museum by Mino da Fiesole, dated c. 1464-66, bears striking similarities. As political actors in Florence, Capponi was a “neutral ally” of the Medici faction while Soderini’s close friendship with the family was rewarded later with a bishopric for his son; Lowe, Church and Politics, 171. 136 The Sassetti portrait may be plausibly compared to the marble bust in the Bargello, dated to 1464-64. The Tani portrait may be compared with the portrait of him found in Hans Memling’s Last Judgment Triptych in the Pomorskie Museum; Acidini Luchinat, “Medici and Citizens,” 368. 137 Although Ahl does not acknowledge this figure as a third representation of Benozzo, I agree with Acidini Luchinat, who remarked on its similarity to the other two recognized portraits in the room; “Medici and Citizens,” 368.

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three-quarter view.138 The arrangement of the order of participants in a procession was a calculated affair in Florentine public rituals, and Benozzo distributed the portraits on the walls accordingly. Like the governmental officials and holy men who represented Florence’s political and religious authority at the beginning of the Epiphany processions that wound through Florence to San Marco, the men on the west wall represent the Medici administration and frame the Magian journey in the chapel within the social bonds of business, community, and political union. Three female figures located in the upper reaches of the west wall have been proposed as representing the Medici women, including Piero’s wife, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici, and her daughter and niece.139 Lucrezia’s presence within the chapel was certainly anticipated during its construction. She and her daughters were daily users of the space and they participated in entertainments held there on the occasion of visitors to the palace. Stefanie Solum has recently argued that Lucrezia should be seen as a silent “patron” of Lippi’s altarpiece in the chapel and has connected the iconography of the work to Lucrezia’s interest in salvational piety as fostered by the Archbishop of Florence, Antonino Pieruzzi, and others at mid-century.140 As will be discussed in Chapter Three, Lucrezia’s Christian piety was well known, both through her works of charity in Florence and her sacred verses. However, given Benozzo’s description of the women in the wall painting as generic figure types made in such diminutive size so as to make them virtually insignificant within the overall program, it is difficult to accept that they were intended to function as actual portraits. Rather the positioning of these three ladies at the beginning of the procession more likely referenced the tradition of processing belle donne on feast days as a way of visualizing the beauty and virtue of the Florentine bloodlines.141 As descriptions recount, these beautiful ladies arrived to the stage representing Bethlehem at San Marco and sat on display, along with the government officials and holy men, for the crowds of Florentines who waited for the Magi to arrive. The inclusion of such details from contemporary ritual practices into the wall paintings iterated the scene as a performance and anchored the Magian procession within the viewer’s space and time. 138 Acidini Luchinat, “Medici and Citizens,” 368. However, see also Crum’s suggestion in “Roberto Martelli,” 417. 139 Most recently, see Solum, Women, Patronage, and Salvation. 140 The influence of Lucrezia on the iconography of the chapel and its altarpiece previously were discussed by Mengin, Benozzo Gozzoli; Lavin, “Giovannino Battista,” 85-101; and Lavin, “Giovannino Battista: A Supplement,” 319-326. 141 For example, fifteenth-century descriptions of the Festa di San Giovanni make explicit reference to the symbolism of the display of beautifully dressed women. See BNCF, Conv. Sopp. G. III, 399, cart. XV, Gregorio di Stagio Dati, Storia di Firenze (written c.1410); Trexler, Public Life, 247-249; Chretien, Festival of San Giovanni, 33.

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Diane Cole Ahl has pointed to the prominent position of a raised hand among the group of men on the lower west wall and suggested convincingly that it serves as a visual representation of Benozzo’s contractual obligation to paint the chapel “by his own hand.”142 This interpretation is further supported by the configuration of portraits on this wall, which triangulates Benozzo’s two self-portraits with Roberto Martelli’s portrait. As Roger Crum has investigated, documents reveal their close working relationship during the project and record how Martelli intervened on Benozzo’s behalf to obtain artistic materials as well as Piero’s approval on certain aspects of the iconography.143 Benozzo’s portraits flank Martelli in front and behind; their contiguous placement along the ascent of the processional path creates a dynamic compositional diagonal from the raised hand (and possible reference to the artist’s hand), through Benozzo, Martelli, then Benozzo again. Whereas the artist portrayed himself in a signed crimson hat on the east wall of the chapel, located immediately behind the members of the Medici family, on the west wall, he no longer wears the crimson hat but rather the more exotic types found in the generic portraits found predominantly in the upper region of the painted composition. Technical examinations performed during the restoration of the wall paintings have revealed that in this zone of the wall certain bodies of figures were painted a fresco while the faces were added later a secco. Given the time constraints under which Benozzo was painting, it is likely that he worked ahead on certain portions of the wall decoration and then later returned to the composition to fill in portraits made from life drawings.144 For example, the face of the man immediately to the viewer’s left of Martelli was painted entirely a secco, which accounts for its overall tonal difference from the portraits surrounding it.145 Benozzo’s turbaned self-portrait also suggests this piecemeal working method. The portrait is awkwardly composed, as the face is represented as turning three-quarters to the viewer’s right while the body is positioned in a three-quarter view in the other direction. Benozzo’s insertion of self-portraits in the procession on this side of the wall may have served as a practical means to fill in blanks in the composition and at the same time make a visual pun on how quickly he was able to complete the job and fulfill his contract. In the context of the narrative of the Epiphany ritual that is evoked in the wall decoration, however, the hand gesture between the portraits of Sassetti and Benozzo holds secondary meaning as a practical communication between the members of the procession, which include the visitor in the room. The rock-lined path that 142 Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 96. 143 ASF, Archivio Mediceo Avanti il Principato, filza 137, no. 96; filza 14, no. 493. On Martelli’s larger role within the Medici bank and politics, see Crum, “Roberto Martelli.” 144 Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 105-108. 145 Acidini Luchinat, “Medici and Citizens,” 369.

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ascends the mountain on the right edge of the west wall is congested with no space for the men to move forward much less accommodate additional bodies, thus the hand could signal the need for them to slow down. Christina Luchinat-Acidini has interpreted the formation of the fingers as displaying the number five, so the raised hand potentially communicates a quantity of time (i.e. give us five minutes).146 The painted gesture also halts the viewer in the chapel and gives a directional cue to follow the procession as it winds its way upward in serpentine fashion. Directly across the room, on the east wall, a man dressed in a red cloak and grey traveling hat similarly raises his hand (Plate 10). Benozzo’s portrait on the west wall at the upper curve of the path self-consciously evokes the dress and location of this figure. Chronologically, the west wall was the last painted in the chapel and thus the artist’s repetition of both gesture and costume from the previously-completed east wall provides further evidence that he desired to communicate a message.147 The man with raised hand on the east wall, too, is positioned at a spatial turning point in the procession at the base of the steep path that descends from above and at the beginning of the horizontal path that leads from east to south to west. His hand, likewise highlighted against the red field of the cloak, provided a signal for the viewer to stop and turn so as to follow the correct path of the procession. The paintings of the east, south, and west walls presented members of the Medici family and their close associates as active participants in an idealized Epiphany celebration in Florence. Although not necessarily figured in the wall paintings through a painted portrait, visitors to the chapel were enfolded into this ritual procession through their somatic mobilization, which was mapped out in the floor tiles and fostered by the continuous composition of the paintings across three walls. As they walked the small space of the chapel and turned as the procession turned, visitors were offered a means to virtually experience the ritual and engage with its primary protagonists. The viewer became the recipient of implied gazes from select figures in the work and was physically cultivated by directional cues, such as the figures holding up halting hand gestures on either side of the room. The coordination of the movements of the viewer with the composition and narrative of the wall paintings provide a compelling counterpart to Erwin Panofksy’s characterization of the Renaissance spectator, who is given spectral dominance over a spatial continuum from a fixed position.148 Indeed, whereas the perspectival image presupposes a stable spatial reality and, as Panofsky suggests, offers a privileged vantage so as to insert the viewer into a fictive reality, Benozzo’s paintings were 146 The two-fingered “V” has been interpreted variously as communicating the number 5000 or 5; Acidini Luchinat, “Medici and Citizens,” 368. 147 On the chronology of Benozzo’s artistic progress in the chapel, see Padoa Rizzo, “Chapel of the Magi,” 359. 148 On the notion of Renaissance dominance over the spatial field of Renaissance perspective pictures, see Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form.

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designed to anticipate a mobile viewer whose movements initiated the horizontal journey of the cavalcade from the east to the south and west walls. Furthermore, the paintings were not designed to suggest the illusion of space as seen through a window, but rather to activate the space of the chapel itself as part of the perceived reality of the scene. The three-dimensionality and gestural language of the figures in the foreground connected viewers to the dynamic action on the walls, and propelled them toward their own live performance.

Staging Belonging in Bethlehem The fourth and final porphyry stone set into the floor pavement faces the visitor toward the chancel façade, which features companion shepherd scenes located on the narrow rectangular walls above the sacristies on the east and west sides (Plate 1). The left, or west, chancel façade features an ox in the foreground of the rocky mountain landscape, while the right, or east, chancel façade displays an ass (Figs. 19 and 20). A low barrier made of thick rock in each painting separates the animal from a shepherd. Wearing a red cap and brown robe, the man on the left leans on his elbows with his chin cupped in his left hand, while the man on the right, dressed in a white shirt and yellow tunic, stands with his hands clasped on a walking stick. In the middle ground of both images, a second shepherd wearing a short brown hooded cloak stands beside a dog and flock of grazing sheep.149 The landscape rises steeply upward toward a blue sky filled with white fluffy clouds and a view of distant mountain ranges. While the chancel façade paintings do not feature the material opulence or political authority of the Magian procession in the main body of the chapel, they include essential characters that would have been familiar to fifteenth-century audiences of the Epiphany festa in Florence. Christian liturgy, visual representations, and theatrical performances, including the Epiphany drama staged by the Compagnia de’ Magi, commonly fused the Biblical accounts of the Magi (Matthew 2:1-16) and the shepherds (Luke 2:8-20).150 According to the Gospel of Luke, the shepherds played a crucial role in the affirmation of Christ as savior of the world. An angel appeared to them while they were out in the fields and told of the news of Christ’s birth. A heavenly choir then joined them and proclaimed, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those whom his favor rests!”151 Inspired by what they had seen and heard, the shepherds traveled into Bethlehem to bear witness to the Messiah and spread the good news. As individuals given 149 On the relation of the shepherds to antique prototypes, see The Chapel of the Magi, 257. 150 Eisenbichler, “Nativity and Magi Plays,” 319-333. 151 Luke 2:14.

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Figure 19. Benozzo Gozzoli, Shepherd Before the Annunciation, West Chancel Façade, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Figure 20. Benozzo Gozzoli, Shepherd Before the Annunciation, East Chancel Façade, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

pre-knowledge of God’s grace through the arrival of his son, the shepherds served as humble counterparts to the extraordinary Magi. Just as the shepherds were enfolded into the Festa dei Magi in Florence, they are included in Benozzo’s ritualized recreation of the celebrations within the chapel. The shepherds in Benozzo’s paintings do not appear to have yet been enlightened of Christ’s arrival. No heavenly bodies appear in the sky, nor is any individual depicted in any particular state of urgency. Thus, the paintings situate the viewer in the narrative moment before the miraculous revelation will occur. The positioning of the visitor as co-witness to the annunciation to the shepherds was akin to the live experience of the Epiphany celebrations, where spectators eagerly awaited the arrival of the heavenly host.152 The message that was to be communicated by the angels to the shepherds underscored the signif icance of Christ’s birth as the dawn of a new era. In the context of the Medici chapel, the allusion to “peace to those on whom his favor rests” served a double meaning as an allusion to the harmony brought to Florence by the 152 As discussed in Chapter Three, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici was herself an author of sacred dramas and devotional lauds, including several that envision the shepherds and the magi coming to greet the Christ child.

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leadership of the Medici and the promise of peace to those individuals under their favor. The recessed chancel featured Lippi’s Adoration on the altar, surrounded by Benozzo’s glittering wall paintings on three sides. On the north wall of the chancel, the symbols of the Evangelists once were painted over a patterned background of gilded squares set against the ultramarine blue field.153 In the light of candles placed on and around the altar, it would have shimmered like a glittering gold mosaic behind the altarpiece. The wall paintings on either side—the east and west interior walls of the chancel—have been painted in conversation with one another across the space of the chancel and in relation to the altarpiece between them (Plates 11 and 12). Nearly compositional mirrors, the paintings are divided into four primary areas of angelic activity. A choir of angels rises in tiers along the near, or south, side of each wall. On the far, or north, side, two rows of angels kneel in adoration in the foreground. Behind them in the middle ground, four angels gather flowers, and, in the skies above, angels adore the Christ child from the air. The upper quarters of both walls are filled with blue skies, pink-tinged clouds, and angels. Tall, slim trees thrust upward into this space from verdant fields that stretch across the lower two-thirds of the pictorial field. The height and decoration of the floor changes at the step of the chancel and thus signals that the area is a distinct zone within the chapel (Fig. 21). The chancel served as the last stage for the Epiphany drama enacted by the visitor within the Chapel of the Magi. Like the raised platform for the holy family at San Marco, the chancel represented “Bethlehem” and was elevated to distinguish it from the other zones of performance within the small space. As in the floor of the main body of the chapel, the floor design of this area also reflected its function. A rectangular slab of porphyry, set into the center of the chancel floor, echoes the shape of the altar that rose just beyond it and served as the site upon which the priest would stand during liturgical services. Another stone slab, set into the chancel step, once positioned the visitor within the space. While today the step features a rectangular porphyry stone, a white marble slab once occupied the spot, as evidenced by the traces of the original marble banderole along the corners of the porphyry.154 Cristina Acidini Luchinat has suggested that the original marble bore an inscription, written by Gentile Becchi during his period of residency in Palazzo Medici as tutor to Piero’s sons, Lorenzo and Giuliano, which read, The gifts of the Magi • The prayers of the celestial spirits • The mind of the Virgin of the altar are sacred • O profane crowd, do not step foot here.155 153 The Chapel of the Magi, 353. 154 de Juliis, “Pietà Storica,” 203-226; Acidini Luchinat, “La Cappella dei Magi”; Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 14. 155 REGNVM DONA • PRECES SVPERVM • MENS VIRGINIS AR[A]E SVNT SACRA •SISTE PROCVL TVRBA PROFANA PEDEM. See Grayson, “Poesie Latine,” 298; Acidini Luchinat, “Chapel of the Magi,” 12-14; Cagliotti, Donatello e i Medici, 73-75.

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Figure 21. View of chancel step, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)

Placed as it were on the step, the inscribed marble marker iterated the elevated chancel as an especially sacred area within the overall holy space of the chapel and reminded visitors to be mindful of their movements.156 It also quite plausibly functioned as a pragmatic stage cue for visitors to the chapel. The couplet is written in dactylic hexameter and pentameter in the Latin imperative, which was understood as a future action to be completed through the will of the reader/visitor. That is to say, the couplet’s command provided a prompt for performative action at the spot. The second part of the inscription, “O profane crowd, do not step foot here,” most likely served as a cue for the visitor to physically position him- or herself on knees upon the chancel step. Even if the marble marker did not in fact feature the inscription, as Francesco Cagliotti has argued, its white marble medium and placement likens the chancel step to other contemporary forms of raised kneeling markers.157 Postured on bent knees, the viewer expressed 156 Acidini Luchinat also suggested that the inscription was highlighted in red paint; “Chapel of the Magi,” 15. Ahl provided caution in fully accepting the text as a physical inscription within the floor; Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 296, fn. 72. 157 As mentioned above, Cagliotti has suggested that the inscription was located in the corridor above the entrance to the vestibule; Cagliotti, Donatello e i Medici, 73-75. On performative gestures and prayer

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Figure 22. Medici insignia, east wall of chancel, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)

humility and reverence for the saints represented on the altar, and to the Medici, who sponsored their honorance in the chapel.158 The familial devices that saturate the decoration of the lower walls and ceiling of the chancel make clear that the privilege of visiting the space was an extension of Medici munificence (Fig. 22). The gestures and costumes of the angels in the chancel are based on contemporary staging and costuming practices used in Florentine feste. As with the preceding decoration in the chapel, these details from local public life situated the sacred space of the altar within the context of Epiphany rituals. The angels in the middle ground are depicted in various stages of gathering flowers and preparing festal garlands, crowns, and festoons. An angel on the west wall carries cut flowers in a shift-sack around his neck, while an angel on the east wall uses a basket for the blooms. Further angels help one another transport freshly made garlands. These floral decorations were used on the occasion of feste to visually signal areas of reverence in the city and demarcate the processional route and various stages of in Renaissance Florence, see Trexler, Public Life, esp. 87-107. For a study of the senses and performative prayer, see Bailey, “Raising the Mind to God,” 984-1008. 158 On the relation of kneeling and humility, see Terry-Fritsch, “Networks of Urban Secrecy,” 162-181.

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dramatic action that were erected along it. The setting is an identifiable type of garden known as a hortus coronarius, grown with the specific purpose of cutting its flowers.159 In the idealized garden presented here, flowers are cultivated in the red and white colors of the popolo. The flowers reflect the city of Florence, Fiorenza, which was transformed into the Holy Land on the Feast of the Magi. In the context of the Chapel of the Magi, the wall paintings construct and reinforce the identification the chancel with the Bethlehem that was staged at San Marco during the Epiphany drama.160 In the far north foreground of each wall, the angels that kneel in adoration frame the Christ child in the altarpiece and interact with each other, as well as the visitor’s own kneeling body, in real space and time. The poses of these painted angels are reminiscent of the gestures included in the illustrated Dominican prayer manual known as De modo orandi, which served as the basis for many of the frescoes that Benozzo painted while in Fra Angelico’s workshop at San Marco.161 Young Florentine boys who were dressed as angels for Epiphany celebrations also relied on the prayer poses for their own arrangement on the platform at San Marco around the Holy Family.162 The incorporation of the gestural vocabulary of the Observant Dominicans into the poses of the angels in the Medici chapel visually linked the chancel to San Marco, the location of Bethlehem during the Epiphany rituals and Cosimo’s most important site of patronage amongst his large oeuvre as a patron of art. The angels that adore the Christ child from the air, in the upper region of both walls, also model contemporary stagecraft found in Epiphany rituals. Their form and placement within the composition recall Giorgio Vasari’s description of the “garlands of angels” who were hoisted into the air by means of moveable iron rods during liturgical plays staged by Filippo Brunelleschi.163 Benozzo was employed by the Compagnia di Santa Maria delle laude, detto di Sant’Agnese to work on its sacred drama of the Ascension inside Santa Maria del Carmine—one of the most famous in Florence—and thus he had first-hand knowledge of contemporary stage mechanics and technology.164 Angels may have been likewise raised and lowered 159 The Chapel of the Magi, 266. 160 Ahl argues that the walls are a reference to a heavenly Jerusalem; Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 98. 161 See the illustrated fifteenth-century version of De modo orandi in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Lat. Rossianus 3. For an English translation, see Tugwell, The Nine Ways of Prayer; and Tugwell, “The Nine Ways of Prayer,” 1-124. For the art-historical consideration of De modo orandi in relation to Fra Angelico at San Marco, see Hood, “Saint Dominic’s Manners,” 195-206; and Hood, Fra Angelico, esp. 200-218. 162 Possibly the illustrated prayer manual, or perhaps the brothers themselves, helped the young participants into the proper positions on the stage; see Hood, “Saint Dominic’s Manners,” 195-206. 163 Among other mechanical devices, Brunelleschi was known to have designed for the Ascension play a hemispherical structure that was suspended from the ceiling and was large enough to support twelve children dressed as putti and a revolving iron star. See Vasari, Lives, 166-168. 164 Padoa Rizzo, “L’Attivita,” 203-210, Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli, 275; Barr, “Music and Spectacle,” 377-404.

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Figure 23. Detail of choir leaders, west wall of chancel, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author)

near the scene of the Holy Family and the Adoration of the Magi in piazza San Marco. The cloud formations painted in the sky of the chancel walls bear a strong resemblance to Vasari’s description of stage clouds, which were actually “beams… covered with cotton wool.”165 The angels are grouped in small clusters atop the clouds, as though supported by an ethereal plank. These details self-consciously signal the theatricality of the represented scene and reveal the construction of the space as holy through the performative actions of the participants. Even more pointed references to contemporary staging techniques are found in the choirs of singing angels located in closest proximity to the viewer on either side of the chancel. In the foreground of the west chancel wall, two angels lead the choir using the “harmonic hand,” a teaching method used for chorists since at least the eleventh century (Fig. 23).166 Their gestures situate their songs in the temporal context of live performance, a concept that is reinforced through the varied postures of the other 165 Vasari, Lives, 166-168. 166 The Chapel of the Magi, 265. The invention of the method of the “harmonic hand” (also known as the “Guidonian hand”) has been ascribed to Guido d’Arezzo, although his writings do not contain any diagrams illustrating its use; see Busby, A General History of Music, 272-273.

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Figure 24. Detail of soloist, called the angelus magni consilii (in blue cassock, crossing chest) and angel dressed as the Star of Epiphany (in pink and green cassock on far-right edge), east wall of chancel, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author)

angel singers and their convincing open-mouthed vocalizations.167 In the front row of the choir of angels on the opposite wall, an angel dressed in blue robes with a green cloak lined in red stands with his hands crossed in front of his diaphragm (Fig. 24). 167 On the auditory aspects of late medieval and early Italian Renaissance pictures, see Shoaf, “Voice and Wisdom,” 213-234; and Shoaf, “The Voice in Relief,” 31-45.

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Figure 25. Ceiling above chancel, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Author)

He looks across to the choir leaders on the west chancel wall and watches their rhythmic count of notes on their knuckles and fingers. The red diagonal lines crossing his chest distinguish the angel as the angelus magni consilii, the esteemed lead soloist on the Epiphany stage.168 The hem of his outer cassock is embroidered with Medici insignia, visualizing the family’s sponsorship of the Festa and perhaps their participation as well. While Giuliano de’Medici was too young in 1459 to have yet participated as an actor in the Epiphany drama, he later became a member of the Compagnia del Zampillo, which was noted for its excellence in singing.169 Regardless, the marking of the soloist as a Medici agent through his fashion illustrated the family’s close proximity to the sacred locus of the drama at San Marco and in the live recreation of the festa in the chapel. The decoration on the ceiling above the chancel features a blazing sun inscribed with YHS surrounded by the insignia of the Medici, including a tri-color wreath of feathers bound by diamond rings and further rings in each of the four corners (Fig. 25). Although art historians have noted that the sun motif functioned as the star that marks Christ’s location in Bethlehem, an angel dressed in pale pink and 168 The Chapel of the Magi, 266. 169 See Hatfield, “Compagnia,” 128.

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green on the right edge of the east chancel wall likely provided the live performance of it within the Epiphany celebration (Plate 13). Turning three-quarters, the blond-haired angel makes eye contact with the viewer at the chancel step. His close proximity and direct gaze heightened the viewer’s sensation of the real space of the chapel as an extension of the scenes on the walls. Unlike the other angels represented in the chancel, this f igure does not participate in any of the festal performances, nor opens his mouth in song. Instead, the angel points the index f inger of his right hand to a detail on his cangiante robe, a star painted in gold to heighten its legibility and thus draw attention to it as a site of visual interest. The angel’s outward look and golden star suggest his identity amongst the angel actors on the walls as the Star of Epiphany, a prominently featured role in performances of the Magi play and sermons given to the Compagnia de’Magi at San Marco.170 As an embodied form of the divine light from God, the Star guided the Magi through their long journey and aff irmed their progress toward the Christ child. 171 When the procession reached San Marco, the Star was featured at the front of the platform on which was staged the Holy Family in Bethlehem. His inclusion at the foremost edge of the chancel thereby signals the visitor’s arrival at the destination. Given the processional nature of the decorative program from the entrance to this spot, the point of view of offered to the visitor from the chancel step was the privileged position of a magus in the Epiphany drama, who extends the kiss of f idelity and thereby legitimates Christ’s authority. The compositional arrangement of the visitor, wall decoration, and altarpiece within the chancel of the Chapel of the Magi formulated a live, spatio-temporal realization of the San Marco altarpiece painted by Benozzo and Fra Angelico for Cosimo in 1438-1443 (Plate 1). The altarpiece presents the Virgin and Child on a raised throne flanked by angels and saints joined in sacred conversation. Tapestries line the garden wall behind them and curtains are pulled back to reveal a dense and varied forest. Festoons stretch from side to side, framing the holy figures in the context of a sacred performance, just as in the wall decoration of the Chapel of the Magi. In the foreground of Angelico’s altarpiece, Cosimo’s patron saints, Cosmas and Damian, kneel at the lower edge of the painting on an Anatolian carpet. Standing in for Cosimo, Cosmas turns his body and face away from the Virgin and Child and toward the viewer in an invitation to participate in his intercession with the holy family.172 Likewise, the visitor to the Chapel of 170 Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 29-59; Buhler, “Marsilio Ficino,” 348-371. 171 The Chapel of the Magi, 267. 172 If the figure of Cosmas was indeed a portrait of Cosimo de’Medici, this notion of direct intercession would have been even greater; see Gebron, “Fra Angelico,” 30.

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the Magi who knelt on the chancel step, or stood before it, became a supplicant before the Virgin and Child through the intercession of the painted figures on the walls and the actual Cosimo seated in the chapel. The crafting of the viewer into a supplicant, ultimately before the live Medici, performatively expressed the attitudes of Florentines in the real world, where Medici intervention was actively sought in every aspect of the Republic. *** This chapter has examined the Chapel of the Magi in its capacity to somaesthetically engage visitors in performative viewing. The material cues of the room selfconsciously framed the visit within the context of Florentine Epiphany celebrations and cultivated the somaesthetic experience as a strategy for political persuasion. The immersive installation of the chapel provided an idealized scenario, which, if followed, allowed visitors to unite with the Medici through ritual engagement. In this way, visitors were used as technologies within the chapel to articulate the beliefs of the collective inscribed on its walls and gathered in the intimate glittering space. Through a simulation of Medici experience in the Epiphany rituals represented on the walls and in their own use of the chapel, visitors formulated a sensuous understanding of the family and its power and authority. The decorative program guided visitors to walk the same path as the Medici and configure their bodies just as they. By layering visitors’ bodies upon the bodies of the Medici through these performative acts, the decorative program constructed a multi-dimensional portrait of the family that included them. Kneeling on the chancel step and immersed in the splendor of the decoration, visitors were given privileged access to their magnificent world. The experience of the space and the feelings it inspired persisted in the embodied memories that visitors took home with them, while new visitors continued the replication of the live performance of the procession within the chapel. The recovery of somaesthetic experience of viewers impacts the values and criteria by which art historians interpret and evaluate art. By considering the time-based experience of visitors within the Chapel of the Magi—including their movements in coordination with the decoration of the floor, ceiling, and walls—the chapter also has proposed a new way of considering the relationship between patronage and style. Beyond the expression of economic wealth and political power through material splendor, the chapel’s decoration co-involved visitors in its subject by actively mobilizing their bodies and minds. The somaesthetic emplacement of the viewer connects the artistic program to earlier works sponsored by the Medici, and, as the next chapters will explore, was incorporated into a variety of later commissions as a means of affectively enhancing a sense of belonging and fostering political communities.

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Works cited Acidini Luchinat, Cristina. “La Cappella dei Magi in Palazzo Medici Ricardi.” Sopritendenza per i Beni e Architettonici di Firenze. Notizie di Cantiere 1 (1990). Acidini Luchinat, Cristina. “The Chapel of the Magi.” In The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence. Edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat, 7-24. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993. Acidini Luchinat, Christina. “The Medici and Citizens in The Procession of the Magi: A Portrait of a Society.” In The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence. Edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat, 363-370. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993. Acidini Luchinat, Cristina. “The Procession of the Magi.” In The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi Florence. Edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat, 39-42. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Ahl, Diane Cole. Benozzo Gozzoli. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Amaducci, Alberto. La Cappella di Palazzo Medici. Florence: Arsuna, 1977. Ames-Lewis, Francis. “Art in the Service of the Family: The Taste and Patronage of Piero di Cosimo de’Medici.” In Piero de’Medici, “il Gottoso” (1416-1469). Edited by Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher, 207-220. Berlin: Verlag, 1993. Ames-Lewis, Francis. “Early Medicean Devices.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 122-143. Averlino, Antonio (Filarete). Trattato di Architettura. Edited by Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi. 2 Vol. Milan: Il Polifilo, 1972. Bailey, Elizabeth. “Raising the Mind to God: The Sensual Journey of Giovanni Morelli (1371-1444) via Devotional Images.” Speculum, Vol. 84, No. 4 (October 2009): 984-1008. Barr, Cyrilla. “Music and Spectacle in Confraternity Drama of Fifteenth-Century Florence.” In Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento. Edited by Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, 377-404. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Barry, Fabio. “Walking on Water: Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Dec., 2007): 627-656. Bartoli, Maria Teresa. “Un Pavimento Neoplatonico.” In Benozzo Gozzoli. La Cappella dei Magi. Edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat, 25-28. Milan: Electa, 1993. Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. New York: Routledge, 2005. da Bisticci, Vespasiano. Vite di Uomini Illustri del XV Secolo. Edited by Paolo d’Ancona and Erhard Aeschlimann. Milan: Hoepli, 1951. Brown, Alison. “Piero’s Infirmity and Political Power.” In Piero de’ Medici “il Gottoso” (14161469): Art in the Service of the Medici. Edited by Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher, 9-19. Berlin: Verlag, 1993.

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Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981. Bruni, Leonardo. Panegirico della Città di Firenze. Edited by Giuseppe De Toffol. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Bruni, Leonardo. “Panegyric to the City of Florence.” In The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society. Edited by Benjamin Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth B. Welles, 135-175. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Buhler, S.M. “Marsilio Ficino’s ‘De Stella Magorum’ and Renaissance Views of the Magi.” Renaissance Quarterly XLIII (1990): 348-371. Bulst, Wolfger. “Die Sala Grande des Palazzo Medici in Florenz: Rekonstruktion und Bedeutung.” In Piero de’ Medici “il Gottoso” (1416-1469): Art in the Service of the Medici. Edited by Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher, 89-127. Berlin: Verlag, 1993. Bulst, Wolfger. “Die Ursprüngliche Innere Aufteilung des Palazzo Medici in Florenz.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 14 (1970): 369-394. Bulst, Wolfger. “Uso e Trasformazione del Palazzo Mediceo Fino ai Riccardi.” In Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze. Edited by Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli, 98-129. Florence: Giunti, 1990. Busby, Thomas. A General History of Music: From the Earliest Times to the Present, Vol. 1. London: G. and W.B. Whittaker, 1819. Butterfield, Andrew. “The Funerary Monument of Cosimo de’Medici, Pater Patriae.” In The Early Medici and their Artists. Edited by Francis Ames-Lewis, 153-168. London: Birbeck College, 1995. Caglioti, Francesco. Donatello e i Medici: Storia del David e della Giuditta, 2 vol. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000. Campbell, Thomas P. Tapestry in the Renaissance. Art and Magnificence. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. La Cappella dei Magi: Il Colore per la Conservazione Museale. Edited by Giuseppe A. Centauro and Cristina N. Grandin. Florence: Lalli, 2014. Casalini, Eugenio M. La SS. Annunziata di Firenze. Studi e documenti sulla Chiesa e il convento. Florence: Convento di SS Anunziata, 1971. Chretien, Heidi. The Festival of San Giovanni: Imagery and Political Power in Renaissance Florence. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Christiansen, Keith. “L’Adorazione dei Magi di Gentile da Fabriano.” In Gentile da Fabriano agli Uffizi. Edited by Alessandro Cecchi, 11-40. Milan: Silvana, 2005. Correspondance de la Filiale de Bruges des Médicis. Edited by Armand Grünzweig. Brussels: Lamertin, 1974. Crum, Roger J. “Lessons from the Past: The Palazzo Medici as Political ‘Mentor’ in SixteenthCentury Florence.” In The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’Medici. Edited by Konrad Eisenbichler, 47-62. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.

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Crum, Roger J. “Roberto Martelli, the Council of Florence, and the Medici Palace Chapel.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschicte 59 (1996): 403-417. Currie, Elizabeth. “Clothing and a Florentine Style, 1550-1620.” Renaissance Studies 23 (2009): 33-52. Davisson, David D. Secrets of the Medici Palace and Its Private Chapel: Six Studies in the Early Italian Renaissance. North Charleston, S.C.: Createspace, 2013. Demus, Otto. Byzantine Mosaic Decoration: Aspects of Monumental Art in Byzantium. 2nd Edition. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas Brothers, 1976. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Durkheim, Emile. Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995. Elam, Caroline. “Il Palazzo nel Contesto della Città: Strategie Urbanistiche dei Medici nel Gonfalone del Leon d’Oro, 1415-1430.” In Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze. Edited by Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli, 44-57. Florence: Giunti, 1990. Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Nativity and Magi Plays in Renaissance Florence.” Comparative Drama, vol. 29, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 319-333. Fabroni, Angelo. Adnotations et Monumenta ad Magni Cosmi Medicei Vitam Pertinentia. 2 Vol. Pisa: A. Landi, 1788. Ferretti, Emanuela. “The Medici Palace, Cosimo the Elder, and Michelozzo: A Historiographic Survey.” In A Renaissance Architecture of Power: Princely Palaces in the Italian Quattrocento. Edited by Silvia Beltramo, Flavia Cantatore, and Marco Folin, 263-289. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Fraser Jenkins, A. D. “Cosimo de’Medici’s Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XXXIII (1970): 162-170. Gaye, Giovanni. Carteggio Inedito d’Artisti dei Secoli XIV.XV.XVI. 3 Vol. Florence: G. Molini, 1839-40. Gerbron, Cyril. “Fra Angelico, les Médicis, les Mages et le Concile de Florence. Une Histoire de Temps Entrecroisés.” Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 33, No. 66 (2012): 29-47. Gilbert, Creighton E. “A Sign About Signing in a Fresco by Fra Angelico.” In Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: art historian and detective. Edited by William W. Clark, 65-70. New York: Abaris Books, 1985. Gombrich, Ernst. H. “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art” (1960). In Norm and Form: Studies in the art of the Renaissance, 35-57. London: Phaidon Press, 1966. Grayson, Cecil. “Poesie Latine di Gentile Becchi in un Codice Bodleiano.” In Studi offerti a Roberto Ridolfi. Edited by B. Maracchi Biagiarelli and D.E. Rhodes, 285-303. Florence: Olschki, 1973. Grote, Andreas. “A Hitherto Unpublished Letter on Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Instititues 27 (1964): 321-322.

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Hatfield, Rab. “The Compagnia dei Magi.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 107-161. Hatf ield, Rab. “Cosimo de’Medici and the Chapel of His Palace.” In Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’Medici, 1389-1464. Essays in Commemoration of the 600 th Anniversary of Cosimo de’Medici’s Birth. Edited by Francis Ames-Lewis, 221-244. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Hatfield, Rab. “Some Unknown Descriptions of Palazzo Medici in 1459.” Art Bulletin 52 (1970): 232-249. Hatfield, Robert Allan. “The Three Kings and the Medici: A Study of Florentine Art and Culture during the Renaissance,” Ph.D. Dissertation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1966. Holmes, George. “How the Medici Became the Pope’s Bankers.” In Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence. Edited by Nicolai Rubinstein, 357-380. London: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Holmes, Megan. Fra Filippo Lippi: The Carmelite Painter. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Holmes, Megan. The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Hood, William. Fra Angelico at San Marco. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Hood, William. “Saint Dominic’s Manners of Praying: Gestures in Fra Angelico’s Cell Frescoes in San Marco.” Art Bulletin 68 (June 1986): 195-206. Hyman, Isabelle. Fifteenth Century Florentine Studies: The Palazzo Medici and a Ledger for the Church of San Lorenzo. New York and London: Garland, 1977. Hyman, Isabelle. “Notes and Speculations on S. Lorenzo, Palazzo Medici, and an Urban Project by Brunelleschi.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 34 (1975): 98-120. Jones, Philip. “Communes and Despots: the City-State in Late Medieval Italy.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 15 (1965): 71-96. de Juliis, Giuseppe “Pietà Storica e Fasto Barocco nell’Alcova di Cassandra Capponi Riccardi.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz 36 (1992): 203-226. Kent, Dale. The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426-1434. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Kent, Dale V. and Francis W. Kent. “Two Comments of March 1445 on the Medici Palace.” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 121, No. 921 (Dec., 1979): 795-796. Kertzer, David I. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Lakey, Christopher. “The Materiality of Light in Medieval Italian Painting,” English Language Notes, 53:2 (2015): 119-136. Landucci, Luca. Diario Fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516. Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1883. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. “Giovannino Battista: A Study in Renaissance Religious Symbolism.” Art Bulletin 37 (1955): 85-101. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. “Giovannino Battista: A Supplement.” Art Bulletin 43 (1961): 319-326.

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Lesher, M.K. “‘The Vision of Saint Bernard’ and the Chapel of the Priors: Private and Public Images of Bernard of Clairvaux in Renaissance Florence.” Ph.D. Dissertation. New York: Columbia University, 1979. Libro d’Inventario dei Beni di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Edited by Marco Spallanzi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà. Florence: Associazione Amici del Bargello, 1992. Lillie, Amanda. Florentine Villas in The Fifteenth Century: An Architectural and Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; revised edition 2011. Lindow, James. The Renaissance Palace in Florence: Magnificence and Splendour in FifteenthCentury Italy. London: Routledge, 2007. Lorenzo de’Medici at Home: The Inventory of the Palazzo Medici in 1492. Edited by Richard Stapleford. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013. Lowe, K.J.P. Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy: The Life and Career of Francesco Soderini, 1453-1524. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Maier, Jessica. “A ‘True Likeness’: The Renaissance City Portrait.” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 711-752. de Marchi, Andrea. Gentile da Fabriano. Un Viaggio nella Pittura Italiana Fine del Gotico. Milan: Federico Motta, 1992. McCall, Timothy. “Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy’s Quattrocento Courts.” I Tatti Studies in the Renaissance, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (September 2013): 445-490. McKillop, Susan. “Dante and Lumen Christi: A Proposal for the Meaning of the Tomb of Cosimo de’Medici.” In Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’Medici, 1389-1464: Essays in Commemoration of the 600th Anniversary of Cosimo de’Medici’s Birth. Edited by Francis Ames-Lewis, 245-291. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. The Medici: Citizens and Masters. Edited by Robert Black and John Law (Villa I Tatti, 32). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Mengin, Urbain. Benozzo Gozzoli. Paris: Plon, 1909. Mesnil, Jacques. “Sigismondo Malatesta and Galeazzo Maria Sforza in un Affresco del Gozzoli.” Rassegna d’Arte 9 (1909): 74-75. Michelis, Panayotis A. “Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Byzantine Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11 (1952): 21-45. Molinari, Cesare. Theater Through the Ages. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nelson, Robert S. “To Say and To See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium.” In Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw. Edited by Robert S. Nelson, 143-168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Newbigin, Nerida. “The Florentine Celebrations of 1459.” http://www-personal.usyd. edu.au/~nnew4107/Texts/Fifteenth-century_Florence_f iles/Florentine_Celebrations_of_1459_Newbigin.pdf (accessed 11 September 2019).

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Newbigin, Nerida. Nuovo Corpus di Sacre Rappresentazioni fiorentine del Quattrocento. Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1983. Newbigin, Nerida. “Le Onoranze Fiorentine del 1459: Poema Anonimo.” Letteratura italiana antica 12 (2011): 17–135. Newbigin, Nerida. “The Word Made Flesh: The Rappresentazioni of Mysteries and Miracles in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” In Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento. Edited by Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, 361-375. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Padoa Rizzo, Anna. “L’Attivita di Benozzo Gozzoli per la Compagnia di Santa Maria delle Laudi e Sant’Agnese.” Rivista d’Arte XLIII (1991): 203-210. Padoa Rizzo, Anna. Benozzo Gozzoli Pittore Fiorentino. Florence: Elam, 1972. Padoa Rizzo, Anna. “The Chapel of the Magi in Benozzo’s Oeuvre.” In The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence. Edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat, 357-362. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993. Panczenko, Russell. “Cultura Umanistica di Gentile da Fabriano.” Artibus et historiae 8 (1983): 27-75. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone, 1996. Parks, Tim. Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. Pentcheva, Bissera. “Moving Eyes: Surface and Shadow in the Byzantine Mixed-Media Relief Icon.” Res. Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56 (2009): 222-234. Pentcheva, Bissera. “The Performative Icon.” Art Bulletin 88 (2006): 631-655. Pentcheva, Bissera. The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium. University Park: Penn State Press, 2010. Phillips, Mark Salber. The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Pieraccini, Gaetano. La Stirpe de’ Medici di Gafaggiolo. Saggio di Ricerche sulla Trasmissione Ereditaria dei Caratteri Biologici. Vol. I. Florence: Nardini, 1986. Piotrowski, Andrzej. “Architecture and the Iconoclastic Controversy.” In Medieval Practices of Space. Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michael Kobialka, 101-127. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Poggi, Giovanni. “Il ‘Reliquario del Libretto’ nel Battistero Fiorentino.” Rivista d’Arte 3 (1916): 238-249. Preyer, Brenda. “L’Architettura del Palazzo Mediceo.” In Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze. Edited by Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli, 65-73. Florence: Giunti, 1990. Preyer, Brenda. “Florentine Palaces and Memories of the Past.” In Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence. Eds. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin, 176-194. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Preyer, Brenda. “Planning for Visitors in Florentine Palaces.” Renaissance Studies 12 (1998): 357-374. A Renaissance Architecture of Power: Princely Palaces in the Italian Quattrocento. Edited by Silvia Beltramo, Flavia Cantatore, and Marco Folin. Leiden: Brill, 2016. “The Restoration of the Pictorial Cycle.” In The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi Florence. Edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat, 371-381. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994. I Restauri nel Palazzo Medici Riccardi. Rinascimento e Barocco. Edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat. Milan: Silvana, 1992. de Roover, Raymond. The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397-1494. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Ross, Janet. Lives of the Early Medici as Told in Their Correspondence. London: Chatto & Windus, 1910. Rubenstein, Nicolai. The Government of Florence Under the Medici, 1434-1494. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Ruda, Jeffrey. Fra Filippo Lippi. New York and London: Phaidon, 1993. Saalman, Howard and Philip Mattox. “The First Medici Palace.” Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians XLIV (December 1985): 329-345. Shoaf, Matthew G. “Voice and Wisdom in Early Italian Art.” In Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe. Edited by Irit Ruth Kleiman, 213-234. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Shoaf, Matthew G. “The Voice in Relief: Sculpture and Surplus Vocality at the Rise of Naturalism.” In Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound. Edited by Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly, 31-45. Tournhout: Brepols, 2015. de Simone, Gerardo. Il Beato Angelico a Roma 1445-1455. Rinascita delle arti e Umanesimo Cristiano nell’Urbe di Niccolò V e Leon Battista Alberti. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2018. Solum, Stephanie. Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Chapel of the Medici Palace. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Strozzi, Beatrice Paolozzi. “The Adoration of the Child by the Workshop of Filippo Lippi.” In The Chapel of the Magi: Benozzo Gozzoli’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence. Edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat, 29-32. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993. Syropoulos, Silvester. Les “Mémoires” du Grand Ecclésiarque de l’Eglise de Constantinople Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438-1439). Edited by Vitalien Laurent. Paris: Centre national de la recerche scientifique, 1971. Syson, Luke. “The Medici Study.” In At Home in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Marta AjmarWollheim and Flora Dennis, 288-293. London: V & A Publications, 2006. Tambiah, S. J. “A Performative Approach to Ritual,” Proceedings of the British Academy (1979): 116-142. Tarchiani, Nello. “Il Palazzo del Magnifico Lorenzo de’Medici.” Le Vie d’Italia (1925): 853-864. Terry, Allie. “Donatello’s Decapitations and the Rhetoric of Beheading in Medicean Florence.” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 23, No. 5 (2009): 609-638.

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Terry, Allie. “A Humanist Reading of Fra Angelico’s Frescoes at San Marco.” In Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature and the Visual Arts. Edited by Liana De Girolami Cheney and John Hendrix, 115-131. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Terry, Allie. “Politics on the Cloister Walls: Fra Angelico and His Humanist Audience at San Marco.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005. Terry-Fritsch, Allie. “Florentine Convent as Practiced Place: Cosimo de’Medici, Fra Angelico and the Public Library of San Marco.” Medieval Encounters 18 (2012): 230-271. Terry-Fritsch, Allie. “Networks of Urban Secrecy: Tamburi, Anonymous Denunciations, and the Production of the Gaze in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” In Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Timothy D. McCall, Giancarlo Fiorenza, and Sean Roberts, 162-181. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2013. Trexler, Richard. Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Trexler, Richard. “The Magi Enter Florence. The Ubriachi of Florence and Venice.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 1 (1978): 127-218. Trexler, Richard. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Trexler, Richard. “Ritual Behavior in Renaissance Florence: The Setting.” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 4 (1973): 125-144. Tugwell, Simon. The Nine Ways of Prayer of Saint Dominic. Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1978. Tugwell, Simon. “The Nine Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic: A Textual Study and Critical Edition.” Mediaeval Studies, Vol. 47, No. 1 (1985): 1-124. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Vol. I. Translated by George Bull. London: Penguin, 1987. Warburg, Aby. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Translated by David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999. Wisch, Barbara and Diane Cole Ahl. “Introduction.” In Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image. Edited by Barbara Wisch and Diane Cole Ahl, 1-19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Young, Karl. The Drama of the Medieval Church. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Zuraw, Shelley. “The Medici Portraits of Mino da Fiesole.” In Piero de’Medici, “il Gottoso” (1416-1469). Edited by Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher, 317-339. Berlin: Verlag, 1993.

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Staging Gendered Authority: Donatello’s Judith, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici’s sacra storia, and the Somaesthetics of Justice Abstract Chapter Three analyzes Donatello’s bronze sculpture of Judith, located in the garden of Palazzo Medici between the mid-1460s to the early 1490s, in relation to a sacred narrative of the Jewish heroine written by Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici in the early 1470s. Considering the performative interplay between the matron’s words and the sculpture’s form, the chapter investigates the strategies by which Lucrezia’s text enlivens Donatello’s Judith as the sacred heroine of her story and somaesthetically situates her audience as “eye-witnesses” to a demonstration of justice. Ultimately, the chapter analyzes how the theatricality of viewing the sculpture in the garden simulated communal punishment rituals and contributed to a reaffirmation of Florentine values that bound the audience and author together. Keywords: Donatello, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici, sacred drama, Judith and Holofernes, justice, witnessing

Donatello’s bronze sculpture of Judith was one of the most visible works within the family’s collection of art when it was located in the garden of their palace on Via Larga (Plate 14).1 While its earliest history is unknown, by the mid-1460s the 1 Although famous in its own day and ours, the sculpture poses an art-historical challenge due to the lack of extant archival documentation regarding its original patronage and date of creation, much less its exhibition and reception in the fifteenth century. Thus, as John Shearman already has warned, any art-historical interpretation of the original intention of Donatello’s Judith must be “unemphatic”; Shearman, Only Connect, 17. The scholarship on Donatello’s sculpture is too extensive to fully cite here, however the following sources provide critical overviews of the literature and/or bibliographies: Janson, Donatello, 198-205; Greenhalgh, Donatello and His Sources, 181-192; Donatello e il Restauro; Donatello; Wohl, “Book Review,” 315-323; Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici; Petrucci, La Scultura di Donatello.

Terry-Fritsch, A., Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722216_ch03

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sculpture was installed in Palazzo Medici, where it remained for nearly thirty years until its forced removal to Palazzo della Signoria in 1495.2 Considered to be the first monumental sculpture of the Jewish heroine in the Renaissance, Donatello’s Judith was a symbol of Good Government, who maintained justice in the face of tyranny.3 In its compositional design, the sculpture emphasizes the action of beheading. Judith stands with her right arm raised in the air, poised to strike the neck of Holofernes, whose hair she holds in her left hand. Holofernes is awkwardly positioned beneath Judith, and the contortion of his head in relation to his body suggests that he has already received one blow and is prepared to suffer the second and fatal strike of the sword. Judith’s steadfast expression and erect posture above the tyrant visualizes her sacred female authority. During its installation within the garden of Palazzo Medici, the Judith was raised on a column, which had two (no longer extant) inscriptions attached to it. The first inscription proclaimed, Kingdoms fall through luxury, cities rise through virtues; behold the neck of pride severed by the hand of humility. 4

The second, presumably written by Piero de’Medici and placed on the base of the statue as a means to reiterate his political stature and beneficence in Florence, read, Public Health. Piero de’Medici, son of Cosimo, dedicated this statue of a woman to the union of liberty and fortitude, so that the citizens might be led back through their constant and invincible spirit to the defense of the republic.5

2 There is general scholarly agreement that the Judith and Holofernes dates to the late 1450s to early 1460s, with an installation date in the garden of the Medici palace in 1464, or shortly thereafter. On the differing views on date and commission, see Janson, The Donatello, 202-205; Herzner, “Die ‘Judith’ der Medici,” 159-163; Caglioti, “Donatello,” 19-49. On the terminus ante quem of 1464, see Caglioti, “Donatello,” 14-22. The sculpture was removed by Florentine governmental officials in October 1495 and was installed in its new location on the ringhiera outside the Palazzo della Signoria by December of the same year; Landucci, Diario Fiorentino, 119. 3 On the relation of Donatello’s Judith to good government, see Crum, “Severing the Neck,” 23-29; McHam, “Donatello’s Bronze,” 32-47; Terry, “Donatello’s Decapitations,” 609-638; Crum, “Judith,” 291-306. 4 “Regna cadunt luxu, surgunt virutibus urbes; Cesa vides humili colla superba manu.” The inscription was once located on the base but is preserved now only in a manuscript record. See particularly, Janson, Donatello, 198-205; Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, 1-12; Crum, “Severing the Neck,” 23-29. 5 “Salus publica. Petrus Medices Cos. fi. libertati simul et fortitudini hanc mulieris statuam, quo cives invicto constantique animo ad rem publicam tuendam redderentur, dedicavit.” My translation of “salus publica” as “public health” implies the meaning of the term as in Cicero’s maxim “salus publica suprema lex esto” (i.e. “The safety, security, and well-being of the public”). For an overview of the scholarly literature on the inscription, as well as an interpretation of the inscription as authored by Piero in 1464 with the

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The inscriptions clearly frame the sculpture as a metaphor for the Medici.6 Indeed, their most overt message—that Judith symbolizes the victory of humility (humilitas) over pride (superbia) and luxury (luxuria)—was intended to assert the family’s love of the patria and exhort the civic responsibility to defend the Republic.7 Given this apparent political framing, art historians have situated their interpretations of the form and content of the Judith within the context of efforts by Cosimo and Piero to self-fashion their political identity in the 1450s and 1460s. The bronze heroine, standing erect with sword held high above her head, is understood as the embodiment of male Medici political power.8 While such an interpretation is undoubtedly accurate, the sculpture is filled with layers of signification that resist being “read” in one particular way all the time.9 As described in Chapter Two, the ground floor spaces of the Medici residence were designed to accommodate a wide public who came to the palace as guests, business associates, and supplicants (Fig. 8). The statue’s positioning within the garden ensured its visibility to these visitors to the palace. Further, since the primary entrance to the palace from Via Larga offered a view of the garden beyond the space of the courtyard, and the walls of the garden itself were pierced by a portal, even passersby may have had the opportunity to glimpse the sculpture.10 The ability of the Judith to communicate to multiple audiences in a variety of ways enhanced its intrinsic value for the Medici family. Indeed, its flexibility of meaning perhaps is one reason why the sculpture was considered acceptable in the fifteenth-century domestic context of Palazzo Medici, despite its overt iconographic and symbolic connections with the Florentine government and its potential characterization as a conspicuous display of Medici wealth and power.11 assistance of Gentile de’Becchi, see Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici. Adrian Randolph offers a variation of the translation to support his argument; Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 242. 6 On differing views on the inscriptions, see Cagliotti, Donatello e i Medici, 1-21. 7 Kauffmann, Donatello,” 168; Wind, “Donatello’s Judith,” 62-63. 8 For example, Dale Kent has claimed that the meaning of the Judith was relatively straightforward given the political content of the inscriptions and how they self-fashioned an identity for Cosimo and Piero; Kent, Cosimo de’Medici. Crum recently pointed to the sculpture as a stand-in for the male members of the Medici household; Crum, “Judith,” 303ff. 9 On this purposeful ambiguity in Donatello’s David, see Ames-Lewis, “Donatello’s Bronze David,” 238-239. 10 The precise placement of the sculpture within the garden is also unknown and thus has somewhat divided art-historical opinion. Traditionally, scholars have assumed that it was placed on axis with Donatello’s bronze David in the center of the courtyard; see Hyman, Fifteenth Century Florentine Studies, 195. Ames-Lewis f irst problematized the placement of the sculpture within the garden; “Donatello’s Bronze David,” 235-251. Caglioti has argued that the sculpture was placed at the north end of the garden, “Donatello,” 22-55. 11 The inscription placed on the base of Donatello’s Judith identifies the figure simply as a “woman” left open the possibility of a shifting iconographic utility of the sculpture; Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 252-253.

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Although the scholarship on Donatello’s bronze sculpture in Palazzo Medici is quite extensive, very little has been written of the primary viewing audience for the Judith during the thirty years in which it was installed in the garden: those individuals who actually lived in the palace and who stood to benef it from its pro-Republican subject.12 Cosimo, the pater patriae, already was dead by 1464, the earliest documented date for the Judith’s installation within the family’s home. 13 Already Cosimo’s son, Giovanni, had passed in 1463, and his son, Cosimino, several years before him. 14 Likewise Piero, despite his direct intervention in crafting the sculpture’s meaning by adding his inscription to it, died within a few years of its arrival in the palace. Thus, despite the great number of art-historical studies dedicated to illustrating the Judith’s ability to shape a portrait of Piero’s political power, the visual resonance of it to do so with effect necessarily ebbed in the wake of his death and the decades that followed. Between 1469 and 1492, Lorenzo “il Magnif ico”—Piero’s son and the effective leader of the family after his father’s death—inhabited the spaces that had been decorated by his grandfather and father. 15 The memory of his ancestors was visualized in the architecture and art of the palace, and the way in which the palace was used and how its decoration communicated the family’s status and power persisted fluidly during Lorenzo’s lifetime. As Dale Kent has emphasized, Renaissance “sons ‘became’ their fathers at a certain point” and continued to embody and express their attitudes over the generations.16 In this line of thinking, the sculpture of Judith continued to uphold Piero de’Medici’s claims to authority and power in the city after his death, albeit transferred to his eldest son. Yet, Lorenzo was only twenty years old at the time he assumed the head position of the family, and he relied on his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici, to help manage his and the family’s affairs.17 Before her husband’s death, Lucrezia held many roles simultaneously within the Medici household, including wife, mother, hostess, intellectual, liaison to the leading male members of the family, political sounding 12 For an interpretation of the David from a female perspective, see Baskins, “Donatello’s Bronze David,” 113-134. 13 Caglioti, “Donatello,” 14-22. 14 Rossi, “L’Indole,” 149. 15 Lorenzo made few modifications to the ancestral home and preferred to live with the art collection that his father and grandfather had amassed rather than commission new paintings and works of art to replace them. On Lorenzo as a patron of art, see Elam, “Lorenzo,” 41-84; Brown, “Enthusiastic Amateur,” 1-22; Beschi, “Le Sculture Antiche,” 291-322; Bullard and Rubinstein, “Lorenzo de’Medici’s Acquisition,” 283-286; Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’Medici. 16 Kent, Cosimo de’Medici, 242. 17 Lorenzo de’Medici, Ricordi, in Roscoe, Life, 97-98. Lorenzo’s reliance on his mother has been consistently noted; see Fabroni, Laurentii Medicis magnifici Vita, 89.

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board, and diplomat.18 As Francis Kent has discussed, Lucrezia possessed active political power, and often received letters from individuals who wished her to use her influence in particular ways.19 She openly demonstrated her understanding of the economic transactions of the family business through strategic investment in properties and was a savvy entrepreneur who, among other enterprises, designed and managed a resort at the hot springs of Morba.20 Piero’s death in 1469 did not diminish Lucrezia’s authority and visibility; rather it increased as she retained the role of first matron of the household and served as a relatively overt intermediary for and advisor to Lorenzo until her death in 1482.21 At that time, Lorenzo wrote that his mother was “an instrument that took a great many hardships away from me.”22 Lucrezia built a reputation as a cultured intellectual from the first year of her marriage to Piero in 1444 and was an active participant in humanist discussions at the family’s residences both in the city and in the country. She authored several texts that were shared with, praised, and performed by some of the leading poets and writers of Florence. Her extant body of work includes several laudi spirituali (spiritual poems that were sung) and five sacre storie (sacred narratives in verse).23 Records indicate that Lucrezia also wrote a book that she shared with Bernardo Bellincioni, a “Life of the Virgin” known to Luigi Pulci, as well as further sonnets, lauds, and tercets that she shared with Angelo Poliziano and others.24 A letter from Poliziano to Lucrezia, dated 8 February 1479, suggests that he recited Lucrezia’s texts (laudi, sonnets and ternari) to friends and family at the Medici villa in Fiesole; members of the audience included Lucrezia’s granddaughter, Lucrezina, who learned to recite the poems by heart.25 18 For an account of Lucrezia’s critical role within the Medici affairs of fifteenth-century Florence, see Kent, “Sainted Mother,” 3-34. Further excellent sources of biographical information include: LevantiniPieroni, Lucrezia Tornabuoni; Maguire, Women of the Medici; Jane Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 21-53; Tomas, The Medici Women; Pernis and Adams, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. 19 Kent, “Sainted Mother,” 3-34; see also Pernis and Adams, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, x-xi, 52-64, 73; Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 30. For the letters, see Tornabuoni, Lettere. Certain letters to Lucrezia asked if she would speak to her husband on their behalf, such as Filippo Strozzi’s letter asking her to persuade Piero to let him return from exile. As is well known, Lucrezia demonstrated political acumen in arranging the children’s marriage alliances, not least of which was the successful union of her son, Lorenzo— and the Medici household— with Clarice Orsini and her Roman noble family. 20 Lucrezia purchased the land from the Florentine Commune in 1477. For a description of the project and correspondence about it, see Ross, Lives, 113-118. 21 Kent, “Sainted Mother,” esp.14-15; Tomas, The Medici Women, 26ff; Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 30-33. 22 de’Medici, Lorenzo de’Medici: Lettere, 287. 23 Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 21. 24 On Lucrezia’s close relationship with Luigi Pulci and Angelo Poliziano, see Levantini-Pieroni, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, 12ff. When they were not together, Poliziano complained of Lucrezia’s absence and lack of persons to engage with; see Tornabuoni, Lettere, 153-154; Maguire, Women of the Medici, 215. 25 The letter describes how he was “returning with [the messenger] Tommaso your lauds and sonnets and tenarii that you gave me when I was there. These gave us enormous pleasure, and Madonna Lucrezia,

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In the 1470s, Lucrezia wrote her sacred narrative, Ystoria di Iudith vedova hebrea (The Story of Judith, Hebrew Widow), one of several that she composed after Piero’s death.26 The text is cited often as an expression of Lucrezia’s piety and is seen in alignment with her impressive public charitable works in Florence and elsewhere.27 Art historians and literary critics have noted a loose connection between Lucrezia’s selection of subject and Donatello’s sculpture in the garden of her palace. In his exploration of the gendered implications of the Judith’s woman-on-top iconography, Adrian Randolph suggested compellingly that the sculpture may have inspired a “proto-feminist” gaze for the female members of the Medici family, including Lucrezia, who decided to rewrite the story of the empowered Biblical female.28 Francesco Caglioti described Lucrezia’s Ystoria di Iudith as an amplification of the epigraphs placed on Donatello’s statue and has suggested that the learned individuals who visited Palazzo Medici in the last decades of the fifteenth century would have quickly made connections between Lucrezia’s words and the visual qualities of the bronze heroine.29 Yet, this is as far as scholars have ventured to address the sculpture within the context of Lucrezia’s writings and her specific agency within the palace.30 This chapter instead situates Donatello’s sculpture in direct communication with Lucrezia’s sacred story so as to highlight another layer of signification for the Judith as an embodiment of female Medici political power and a tool for the construction of political communities through somaesthetic cultivation. Jane Tylus has suggested convincingly that Lucrezia’s texts were created specifically for an intimate group of family and friends, and the language that Lucrezia used may be understood as a self-conscious attempt to insert her works into the popular literary culture already realized in Florence by the late 1460s, which was erudite and laced with political content.31 Throughout the Judith story, Lucrezia exhorts her audience members to appreciate their immediate sensory environment through clear instructions on how and when to look, listen, or imagine.32 When she speaks of Judith, Lucrezia or better Lucrezia [Lucrezia’s granddaughter] has learned by heart all of ‘Lucrezia,’ and many sonnets”; this translation in Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 24, fn. 5. 26 The sacre storie are found Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Magliabechiano VII, 338.  Pezzarossa dated the composition of the Judith narrative to 1474; see Tornabuoni, I Poemetti Sacri, 241-242; and Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives. 27 For an assessment of Lucrezia’s “spiritual activism,” see Solum, Women, Patronage, and Salvation, 47-80. 28 Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 268. 29 Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, 227-230. 30 For example, see Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 120. For a literary assessment of the statue in relation to Medici politics from Cosimo through Lorenzo, see Stallini, “Giuditta,” 11-33. 31 Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 25-27; 40-43. 32 For example, at the close of her story of the “Devout Susanna” she calls out to “whoever hears or reads this little work,” and, in the Judith narrative, she often uses active language to directly address

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often strays from the standard narrative of the female heroine and, within these self-conscious expansions and gaps in the narrative, invites the audience to read into the subject and personalize its protagonist.33 The metatheatricality of the sacra storia—its self-conscious disruption of the biblical narrative through direct commands to the audience to act or think in particular ways—aligns Lucrezia’s performance with an emerging tendency in early modern theater to signal the limits of stagecraft and the intervention of the audience’s imagination.34 Evidence of a broad spectrum of locations and contexts for the recitation of poems and prose exist for fifteenth-century Florence, from “public” to “private,” including Palazzo Medici and other Medici villas in the region. Texts, poems, and songs were commonly performed by members of the Medici family for small gatherings of familiars or on the occasion of diplomatic visits.35 While the performance culture fostered within the fifteenth-century Medici household by itself provides a strong foundation for considering the garden as a space activated by Lucrezia’s words, this chapter investigates compelling formal and performative intersections between Lucrezia’s text and Donatello’s sculpture that further signal the garden as a setting for a recitation. It reconstructs the garden of Palazzo Medici as it once appeared in the 1470s to consider it as a theatrical space for Lucrezia’s sacred narrative of Judith.36 Expanding on Tylus’ suggestion that Lucrezia’s text was a script for performance, the chapter follows the lead of performance-centered approaches to early modern theater, which “read [dramatic texts] not as literary documents but as scripts for performance… concentrating on what would strike an audience, immediately, in the heat of performance.”37 In the context of a recitation in the garden of Palazzo Medici, or, as a text imagined in tandem with the decoration of the garden, Lucrezia’s words position audience members as the chosen people of God, who demonstrate her listeners, such as when she tells them, “as you will now hear”; Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 28; 71 (emphasis mine). 33 On the significance of gaps and the inherent meaning within the void, see Gertsman, “The Gap of Death,” 85-104; and Gertsman, Nothing is the Matter. 34 Lamb, “Corporeal Returns,” 12. 35 Lucrezia and Piero’s children and grandchildren learned how to recite Lucrezia’s sacre storie from memory and performed for intimate groups of family and friends within Palazzo Medici and elsewhere. For example, Galeazzo Maria Sforza was entertained with the recitation of poems and other verses by the young Lorenzo de’Medici within the Chapel of the Magi on the occasion of his visit to the palace in 1459. Lorenzo went on to write his own popular poetry and prose; de’Medici, Lorenzo de’ Medici: Selected Poems and Prose. I am grateful to Nerida Newbigin for sharing her unpublished suggestion that Palazzo Medici was used as a theatrical venue for confraternal rappresentazioni. 36 The performative potential of Lucrezia’s Judith narrative was fully realized later in popular sacred theater, when entire passages of her text were appropriated and used in dramatic enactments on the stage. The text was published in 1518, but, as suggested by its circulation in earlier manuscripts, must have been performed earlier; Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 24. 37 Leggatt, Jacobean Public Theater, 2; Lamb, “Corporeal Returns,” 20.

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virtue through self-control of their bodies and minds to focus on justice represented in Donatello’s sculpture. The chapter connects the somaesthetic cultivation of the audience around the figure of Judith to a form of communal witnessing around the scaffolds of criminal executions. Highlighting fifteenth-century Florentine attitudes concerning justice, virtue, and political authority, the chapter interweaves Lucrezia’s text with the lived experiences of her audience during public juridical punishments and martyrdom dramas on the early modern stage. The somaesthetic fashioning of the audience by Lucrezia’s third-person narration in front of the Judith was a means to iterate civic values, instigate pro-Medicean political sentiment, and give voice to Lucrezia’s critical role within the family and the state.38

Medici Garden as Theater in the Round Before the significant alterations to Palazzo Medici made by the Riccardi family in the seventeenth century, the residence featured a square plan with its primary façade facing Via Larga (Fig. 7).39 Three monumental arches on the ground floor once offered access to the palace. The central arch, the primary entrance to the palace, was directly aligned with an internal courtyard and a corresponding garden behind. The service entrance was accessed through the northern arch, while the arch to the south once formed part of an external loggia that occupied the corner of Via Larga and Via de’Gori. 40 Rectangular windows inserted into the rusticated façade between the entrance archways allowed light to enter into the rooms beyond, which included the guards room and Medici bank offices. 41 The first and second floors featured ten windows each on the Via Larga side of the palace and nine on the Via de’Gori, and were decorated with alternating Medici devices, including the palle, diamond rings intertwined with feathers, and rosettes. An elaborate stone 38 On the gendered frames imposed by Florentines on images and sculptures that communicated iconographic significance and social meaning to viewers, see Simons, “Women in Frames,” 18ff; Even, “The Loggia dei Lanzi,” 10-14; Even, “Some Lesser-Known Ladies,” 129-148. See also Johnson, “Idol or Ideal?” 228-231. 39 The original palace was a “perfect cube”: 140 feet long, 140 feet deep, and 140 feet high. Already abandoned by Duke Cosimo I in 1540, the palace was altered significantly by the Riccardi family, who bought the palace in 1659; Büttner, “Der Umbau,” 393-414. They nearly doubled the length of the facade on Via Larga, adding six more windows to the original ten; Tarchiani, “Il Palazzo del Magnifico,” 854. For a comprehensive overview of the changes, see Preyer, “L’Architettura,” 58-60. 40 The loggia did not offer access to the interior of the house, but rather served to frame the discreet activities that were staged within it; see Bulst, “Uso e Trasformazione,” 105. The loggia was transformed into an interior space by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century and replaced with his famous “finestre inginocchiate”; see Ruschi, Michelangelo Architetto, 55-57. 41 Bulst, “Die Ursprüngliche Innere Aufteilung,” 377; Preyer, “L’Architettura,” 59.

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Figure 26. Michelozzo (architect)/ Donatello (relief decoration)/ Maso di Bartolomeo (sgraffito decoration), Courtyard of Medici Palace, completed c. 1454 (Photo: Author)

cornice, projecting nearly two meters, crowned the entire palazzo and visually articulated its grandeur. A visitor to Palazzo Medici entered the palace through its main entrance on Via Larga and emerged from the vestibule into a colonnaded courtyard that formed the architectural core of the palace (Fig. 26). As the first space of the palace offered to guests, the courtyard provided a critical frame for the visual construction of Medici identity. Its architectural and decorative program communicated the stately sophistication of its residents and offered a visual glimpse of the splendor that lay beyond the walls. Elegant arches supported by pietra serena columns delineate the ground floor of the space in rhythmic regularity. Vegetal designs in sgraffito made by Maso di Bartolomeo fill the spandrels of the arches, and, in the continuous frieze above, sgraffito festoons frame pietra serena roundels featuring sculptural reliefs of the Medici coat of arms and imagery based on ancient objects in the Medici collection.42 The arched windows of the primo piano are placed in vertical alignment with the roundels to iterate an upward 42 Wester and Simon, “Die Reliefmedallions,” 15-91. The sgraffito is largely the product of restoration, although most likely corresponds to the original decoration made by Maso di Bartolomeo in 1452; see Preyer, “L’Architettura,” 60.

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thrust in the architectural design toward the top floor, which once featured an open loggia supported by slender Ionic columns. In addition to these elegant architectural and decorative details, sculptures by ancient and contemporary artists were installed throughout the courtyard. Ancient sculpted heads of Roman emperors were placed above doorways and framed by Medici diamond rings and feathers; their ancient authority endowed the space with gravitas and suggested a dynastic lineage between the famous men of the past with the illustrious occupants of the present palace.43 At the center of the courtyard, a bronze sculpture by Donatello of a young David was raised above eye-level on a pedestal (Fig. 27). The slender, sensuous body of the young boy is positioned in triumph above the decapitated head of Goliath.44 While the rock held in David’s left hand identifies him, the long sword held in his right hand firmly locates him in the narrative moment after the slingshot battle and beheading of the giant. An inscription placed on the base iterated the significance of the act: “The victor is whoever defends the fatherland. God crushes the wrath of an enormous foe. Conquer, o citizens!”45 Raised in the air as it was, the bronze statue was displayed like imperial statues of ancient Rome but proclaimed the Republican values of the city-state instead of the rule of one. As fifteenth-century visitors were well aware, an earlier sculpture of David by Donatello was installed in the sala grande of the Palazzo della Signoria and its pedestal also was inscribed with a political text, “To those who fight bravely for the fatherland God lends aid even against the most terrible foes” (Fig. 28).46 This inscription’s close relationship with the later inscription on the bronze David in the Medici courtyard indicates that it was self-consciously appropriated to forge a political connotation between the two and ensure its primary subject was understood to express the values of the Florentine popolo, firmly against tyranny and a defender of liberty. 47 43 On the Medici’s collection of antiquities, see Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’Medici. 44 For a discussion of the triumphal overtones of David, see Shearman, Only Connect, 22-27. On the relation of Donatello’s David to Medici politics, see Sperling, “Donatello’s Bronze ‘David,’” 218-224; Crum, “Donatello’s Bronze David,” 440-450; Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici; McHam, “Donatello’s Bronze,” 32-47; Terry, “Donatello’s Decapitations,” 609-638. 45 “Victor est quisquis patriam tuetur/ Frangit immanis Deus hostis iras/ En puer grandem domuit tiramnum/ Vincite cives.” No documentation on the commission for the David has been recovered, however the sculpture was noted in its position in the center of the courtyard by 1469, the date of Lorenzo de’Medici’s wedding reception. For the recovery of the inscription, see Sperling, “Donatello’s Bronze ‘David,’” 218-224; Crum, “Donatello’s Bronze David,” 441-444; Cagliotti, Donatello e i Medici, esp. 1-12. 46 Janson, Donatello, 3-7. 47 On the rhetoric of freedom in the visual culture of Florence in the first quarter of the Quattrocento, see the classic essay by Hartt, “Art and Freedom,” 114-131. But see the important discussion of Baron and Hartt in relation to the David in Crum, “Donatello’s Bronze David,” 444ff. McHam has discussed the placement of Donatello’s David and Judith in the courtyard and garden as an illustration of Vitruvian instructions for decorating sites of public reception within private homes; McHam, “Donatello’s Bronze,” 37-38.

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Figure 27. Donatello, David, 1430-1450, bronze, originally located in courtyard of Palazzo Medici, now housed in Museo Nazionale del Bargello (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Figure 28. Donatello, David, 1408, marble, originally located in the sala grande of the Palazzo della Signoria, now housed in Museo Nazionale del Bargello (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

The decoration of the formal reception hall on the ground floor, designated as the sala grande and accessed directly from the courtyard, also framed the family in distinct political terms and repeated the theme of victory over tyranny. Part of a suite of rooms that included, along the southern flank of the courtyard, a camera (bedchamber and living room) and antecamera (multipurpose auxiliary room), the sala grande has been completely altered from its fifteenth century appearance, although a partial picture of its splendor may be gleaned from contemporary descriptions and the inventories that were taken of the palace.48 The ground floor apartment was largely used in the summer months, as well as when illustrious guests were given the apartments on the floor above.49 The reception hall once was lined with intarsiated Cyprus-wood paneling and built-in pine benches with walnut moldings.50 Portraits of political allies, paintings of saints, and the greatly valued tondo of the Adoration of the Magi, 48 ASF, Inventory of the Goods of Lorenzo il Magnifico: The Medici Palace, Medici Avanti Principato, filza 165. The suite of rooms on the piano nobile flanking Via Larga was the counterpart to the public rooms on the ground floor and contained works that illustrated each of the themes found there, thus suggesting that these zones of public interaction were related in both form and content. 49 For example, Galeazzo Maria Sforza was given Piero’s suite of rooms on the piano nobile during his visit in 1459. 50 Lorenzo de’Medici at Home, 70ff.

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painted by Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, were displayed in the room.51 By the 1480s, Lorenzo de’Medici acquired six large paintings by Paolo Uccello measuring forty-two braccia (80 feet) long and three and a half braccia (7 feet) high to display additionally within the room, including the impressive battle scenes of the Florentine army against the Sienese that are today dispersed between the Uffizi, Louvre, and National Gallery.52 The collected works on the walls advertised Medici allegiances and framed the transactions that occurred in the room in pro-Republican terms. In the garden that lay just beyond the courtyard, the Medici continued to self-fashion their familial identity as sophisticated and patriotic. Although the garden and its surrounding architecture were completely transformed under the Riccardi family after 1680, it is possible to reconstruct its original form—an irregular quadrilateral plan—in the mid- to late-fifteenth century. The garden was enclosed on four sides.53 The back of the palace, including the arcade that lined the western side of the courtyard, formed the eastern wall of the garden. The portal that connects the garden to the courtyard on this side once gave onto a direct view of the bronze David, and thus architecturally framed it as complementary to the works on display within the garden. Antiquities also were arranged above the doorway, and free-standing sculptures, including an ancient statue of a sexually-aroused sculpture of Priapus inscribed with a verse, were placed along the walls.54 The northern wall of the garden was formed by the exterior walls of the adjacent palazzo and lined with fruit trees.55 A one story high wall ran along the southern (Via de’ Gori) and western (Borgo San Lorenzo, now Via dei Ginori) sides of the garden; these walls were crenelated at the top and plastered and decorated in sgraffito to emulate stone blocks.56 The wall lining the Borgo San Lorenzo was pierced by a portal that aligned with the center of the courtyard and front entrance.57 Two antique marble statues of Marsyas flanked the door on either side.58 While Richard Goldthwaite has asserted that the walling off of the garden was an exclusionary gesture, one must consider how this same act functioned 51 In 1492, the tondo was valued at 100 florins, which made it the most expensive work of art in the Medici collection; see Lorenzo de’Medici at Home, 71 (fol. 6r). 52 Motture and Syson, “Art in the Casa,” 279-281. 53 See the plan by Maria Cristina Valenti in Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, Fig. 18. 54 On the “speaking” relationship between the Priapus and Judith, see Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 257, 264-265. 55 Looper, “Political Messages,” 256. A later view of the Medici Palace, found in the Buonsignori map of 1584, indicates a loggia on the northern wall, although there is no architectural evidence remaining to support this assumption for the fifteenth century. 56 Thiem and Thiem, Toskanische Fassaden Dekoration, 62. 57 Looper, “Political messages,” 258-259. 58 Caglioti, “Due ‘Restauratori,’” 17-42; Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, 87, 248-251, Fig. 16; Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 261-263.

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to cultivate an intimate sensory environment for those many individuals who gained access to the interior of the palace.59 The walls of the enclosed garden diminished the noise of the busy Renaissance city and created a self-contained architectural setting that was curated to elicit sensory delight.60 The garden was filled with diverse fruit trees, flowers, myrtle, and laurel, as well as topiary in the form of coats of arms, animals, and ships.61 According to a description from 1459, when Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the son of the Duke of Milan, was a houseguest for two weeks within the palace, the “garden [was] done in the f inest of polished marbles with diverse plants, which seems a thing not natural but painted.”62 Such an extensive and well-cultivated green space was a site to be coveted in the urban setting of Florence, where residents utilized every available nook for the cultivation of plants and flowers.63 The use of the garden by members of the Medici family would have ranged from individual to collective activities. Vespasiano da Bisticci recorded that Cosimo enjoyed getting his hands dirty in the garden and that his active work there brought him great pleasure.64 In the casa vecchia, Cosimo had enjoyed an orange garden in the rear of the palace; in the new palace, this garden expanded to measure approximately thirty-five meters from the north to south walls and eighteen meters between east and west.65 As described in the previous chapter, however, Cosimo’s poor physical condition in the last years of his life prevented him from fully engaging in strenuous activity within the garden. Rather, he, like other members of the family, would have retired there for relaxation and refreshment and enjoyed views of it from the westward facing apartments of the palace. As a site for collective gatherings, the garden was used for familial celebrations, gatherings of friends, and, most commonly, a space for the cultivation and enjoyment of nature.66 59 Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence. 60 For a consideration of sound in the aesthetic appreciation of the Renaissance city, see Howard and Moretti, Sound and Space; Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance. 61 While it is unknown whther Alberto Avogadro’s description of the garden matched reality or was part of a rhetorical gesture to connect it to a locus amoenus, he includes laurel, myrtle, orange, box, jasmine, violets, roses and lilies among its plants; Hatfield, “Some Unknown Descriptions,” 234. 62 For the occasion, the coat of arms of the Sforza family was cultivated in plant form alongside that of the Medici; Hatfield, “Some Unknown Descriptions,” 233. 63 Looper, “Political Messages,” 255. 64 da Bisticci, Renaissance Princes, 224-225. 65 Carl, “La Casa Vecchia,” 38-43. For a document for a new wall for the garden of the casa vecchia, see Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence, 135. On the dimensions of the fifteenth-century garden of Palazzo Medici, see Looper, “Political Messages,” 256. 66 The family frequently hosted poets and scholars in their home. For example, the poet Michele di Nofri del Gigante (called “il Forte”) was a friend from the first years of Lucrezia’s marriage to Piero; Flammini, La Lirica Toscana, 372ff. Scholars hired to tutor Lucrezia’s children, including Gentile Becchi and Cristoforo Landino, also had liberal access to the palace; Rochon, La Jeunesse, 31f.

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A marble fountain was once located in the garden, most likely on the central axis with the David and the entrance doors to the palace.67 An account of the service for the 1469 wedding festivities of Lorenzo de’Medici and Clarice Orsini held in Palazzo Medici provides a description of its relation to the David in the courtyard: No sideboards had been placed for the silver. Only tall tables in the middle of the courtyard, round that handsome column on which stands the David, covered with tablecloths, and at the four corners were four great copper basins for the glasses, and behind the tables stood men to hand wine or water to those who served the guests. The same arrangement was made in the garden round the fountain you know.68

The spatial implication of the account is that the centers of both the courtyard and the garden were transformed into drinks stations for the party. Thus, the David was the central feature of this festal display on one side, while the fountain anchored the station on the other. Traditionally, the description was interpreted to suggest that Donatello’s bronze Judith was itself part of this fountain, for it also was believed that the bronze cushion upon which Holofernes’ body is splayed was once part of a watering mechanism.69 The Judith narrative is contingent on water, for the heroic defeat of Holofernes ultimately allowed for the restoration of water to the city of Bethulia. Thus, coupling the Old Testament figure with a fountain was not iconographically illogical.70 Furthermore, by placing the Judith with the fountain in the center of the garden, the bronze figure repeated in both form and content the bronze figure in the courtyard. This would have produced a symmetrical layout of decapitation scenes in two large free-standing sculptures made by the hand of the same artist and displayed along the east-west axis of the palace. Yet, as the material evidence found by the restoration of 1998 suggests, the holes in corners of the bronze pillows were not in fact spouts (but rather once featured tassels) and no other signs of technology 67 At the center of many Renaissance narratives involving gardens was a fountain. For example, in Dante’s Commedia, the poet drinks from the two streams of water issued from the fountain at the center of Earthly Paradise in order to erase his sins and to spur his memory to perform good deeds. 68 Ross, Lives, 130; Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, 86 69 For proposals that the sculpture once was integrated into a fountain, see Hyman, Fifteenth-Century Florentine Studies, 186, fn 37; Janson, Donatello, 198ff; Pope-Hennessy, Donatello, 286; Looper, “Political Messages,” 257, 261-265. According to this line of thinking, water once flowed from the corners of the pillow upon which Holofernes’ head rests and presumably was collected in a basin. For documents relating to a granite basin that was left in the garden when the sculpture was confiscated by the Signoria, see Wiles, Fountains, 110. For a full dispute of the statue as fountain, however, see Cagliotti, Donatello e i Medici, 81-100. 70 Looper, “Political Messages,” 263.

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for water were attached to any of the internal surfaces of the sculpture.71 Thus the Judith most likely was not used as a fountain, and, as such, it was not located in the center of the garden. While there is little to no documentary evidence to suggest an alternate location, Francesco Caglioti’s proposal for the disposition of the bronze sculpture on its column in the center of the northern half of the garden is logical.72 With her gaze facing southward and her back to the northern wall, the Judith would have provided an aesthetic balance to the loggia in the southern half of the garden and, as Adrian Randolph and others have examined, would have communicated with the other sculptures that surrounded it.73 Furthermore, although it would no longer be on direct visual axis with the David, its repetition of material, subject, and political content would have been unmistakable to a fifteenth-century visitor and would have bound the sculpture to the larger themes that underscored the Medici collection of art in the last quarter of the century. Gardens held vast symbolic potential in the Italian Renaissance and artists evoked complex iconographical content within paintings through their strategic incorporation of botanical specimens.74 The garden generally was understood in Florentine culture as a gendered space that held symbolic associations with women, from Venus’s garden of love to Eve’s Eden and the Virgin Mary’s hortus conclusus.75 In fifteenth-century typology, Judith was considered the Old Testament prefiguration of the Virgin Mary.76 From at least Bonaventure, theologians described the Virgin’s acceptance of the sacrifice of her son as a heroic act, which likened her to Judith.77 In the tradition of the Speculum humanae salvationis, Judith’s striking down of the licentious Holofernes was analogous to the Virgin Mary’s striking down of the Devil.78 In f ifteenth-century Florence, Antoninus Pierozzi, the prior of San Marco with whom Cosimo had many dealings and who wrote versions of the Opera a ben vivere for Lucrezia and her sister Dianora, wrote at length in his Summa on the relation between Judith and Mary.79 Antoninus 71 See Donatello e il Restauro. 72 Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, Appendix, Illustration 18. 73 Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 261-265. 74 D’Ancona, The Garden of the Renaissance. 75 Looper, “Political Messages,” 261. 76 On the Christian interpretation of Judith, see the summary in Garrard, Artemesia Gentileschi, 282-289; Ciletti and Lähnemann, “Judith,” 41-65. 77 Bonaventura, Opera Omnia V, 486ff. 78 von Erffa, “Judith-Virtus-Virtutuum-Maria,” 460-465. 79 Antoninus, Opera a Ben Vivere. Antoninus first wrote the treatise for Dionora, and then revised it in a new edition for Lucrezia (today located in the Biblioteca Riccardiana, no. 3834). On the role of the treatise in female education, see Lenzi, Donne e Madonne, 55-63. For a discussion of the Opera in relation to Lucrezia’s unique position in Florence, see Solum, Women, Patronage, Salvation, 97-101, 155-157, 235-237,

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praised Judith in his Regola di vita cristiana as an example of Christian virtue.80 The prominent position of the Judith within the Medici garden certainly drew on these multiple gendered symbolisms.81 The emphatic designation of the sculpture as female in Piero’s inscription clearly linked the political connotations of the Judith to her gender and, as will be discussed below, Lucrezia interwove references to Venus and Mary into her narrative to emphasize the gendered implications of her female heroine. Residents and guests within the garden of Palazzo Medici in the fifteenth century were able to view the Judith from a number of different vantages. As Caglioti has argued persuasively, the granite and marble column upon which the Judith currently stands in the Sala dei Gigli in Palazzo Vecchio was most likely the original support for the sculpture in the fifteenth-century garden (Fig. 29).82 The strigilation of the white marble circular base self-consciously evokes the antique-inspired design of the altar of the Chapel of the Magi inside the palace, as well as the Tempietto of Santissima Annunziata, and bears remarkable similarity to other Donatello sculptural supports.83 An elegantly curved double banister in granite rises above the marble base and is topped by a circular white marble capital, which today bears the late fifteenth-century inscription: “EXEMPLVM · SAL[utis] · PVB[licæ] · CIVES · POS[uerunt] · MCCCCXCV.”84 In total, the marble and granite support was more than eight and a half feet high.85 At such a height, the Judith sculpture, which itself measures more than seven and half feet with its bronze triangular plinth, ensured its visual accessibility from a variety of vantages.86 Individuals seated on the benches installed along the walls between the doors and the stone paths lining the perimeter of the garden would have easily viewed the sculpture in its elevated position, as would those persons seated within the 244. For an analysis of speech in the treatise, see Flanigan, “Disciplining the Tongue,” 41-60. On Lucrezia and women’s speech, see Flanigan, “Women’s Speech,” 205-230. 80 Lenzi, Donne e Madonne, 55-57; Pernis and Adams, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, 134, n. 13. 81 On the various interpretations of the garden of Palazzo Medici as an Edenic space and/or a heavenly Paradise, see Looper, “Political Messages,” 255-268; and de Bhailís, “A Reappraisal,” 5-18. 82 Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, 89-100. Traditionally, the base was considered to be lost after the sculpture’s removal from the palace in 1495; see Weil-Garris, “On pedestals,” 377-415. Giovanni Stradano’s fresco of the Celebration for the Feast of San Giovanni in Piazza della Signoria, made in 1558 and located inside Palazzo Vecchio, clearly records the visual features of the present column. 83 See the photographic comparisons in Cagliotti, Donatello e i Medici, figs. 58-72. 84 Most likely this inscription was made after the sculpture’s removal to the Palazzo della Signoria to replace the earlier Medicean inscription, which may have been placed on a no longer extant register. 85 Caglioti measures the support as 262 cm; Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, 117. 86 The bronze triangular plinth, which features relief scenes on each of its three sides and slender double banisters at each of its corners, measures 55cm high, while the sculptural group is 181 cm; Janson, Donatello, 198.

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Figure 29. Judith, with granite and marble column support, Sala dei Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

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Figure 30. View toward former interior loggia within the garden of Palazzo Medici (Photo: Author)

three-bay loggia on the far south side of the garden.87 This loggia, today seen in the extant columns and capitals incorporated into the current Riccardi gallery, was made for the personal use of the Medici family and their guests and was decorated with several antique relief panels as well as a monumental bronze sculpture of a head of a horse (Fig. 30).88 The covered and arcaded space served as a place for relaxation, conversation, and entertainment and provided relief from the elements.89 It also was used as an architectural frame for individuals, such as Clarice Orsini on her wedding to Lorenzo in 1469, when she was seated under the loggia as she ate and enjoyed the entertainment of fifty dancers.90 The loggia faced directly on 87 The courtyard was similarly designed with benches that lined over 46 meters of the piano terrena. These benches faced their occupants toward the center of the courtyard, where the bronze David shone upon its columnar base. See Ross, Lives, 130-1; Preyer, “Planning for Visitors,” 361-364. 88 Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 264. The internal placement of this loggia within the garden contrasts with the loggia once extant on the exterior corner of the palace, which was made for public use. 89 The loggia was also used as the site of a theatrical play, staged on the occasion of Margherita d’Austria’s visit to Florence in anticipation of her marriage to Duke Alessandro de’ Medici in 1533; see Zorzi, “Il Cortile,” 139-141. 90 Parenti, Delle Nozze. For a reading of the palace from Clarice Orsini’s perspective during the wedding, see Baskins, “Donatello’s Bronze ‘David,’”113-134.

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Figure 31. Aerial view of garden from northwest corner with suggestion of appearance of fifteenth-century elevated walkways (Photo: Author)

to the garden and thus the elevation of the Judith upon its column ensured that individuals seated on the interior of the loggia could still see it beyond the fountain that occupied the center of the space.91 An even better view of the Judith, however, was gained from the roof of the loggia, which once was used as a viewing platform.92 Additional raised vantages of the garden, and of Donatello’s Judith, were offered along the entire west wall by means of a hanging walkway (Fig. 31).93 In its conception and manufacture, Donatello’s bronze statue offers visual intrigue from all sides. To properly see the figure of Judith or Holofernes, as well as each of the three relief scenes on the base, the viewer necessarily had to walk around the sculpture. At each turn, different visual information was revealed. In the position directly in front of Judith, for example, the viewer had clear view of the widow’s face, chest, and raised right arm with the sword; in this same viewing position, 91 The loggia was accessed through two different spaces: directly from the garden or through a door in its south-eastern wall, which led to the corner room of the courtyard on the piano terreno. 92 This viewing platform is signaled in the 1650 plan of the primo piano. 93 The walkway could be accessed via doors leading from the piano nobile at the back of the house as well as a small, most likely enclosed, spiral staircase in the north-west corner of the garden; see Linaker, “I Restauri,” 10-11; Looper, “Political Messages,” 257.

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Figure 32. View of right side of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Figure 33. View of left side of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

however, Holofernes is obscured (Plate 14). When the viewer moves to see the relief on Judith’s right, visual access is gained to Holofernes’ face, chest, and neck, while the widow’s face is concealed (Fig. 32). From the vantage offered in front of the third relief, the viewer does not see the face of Judith nor Holofernes; rather, the view is of the widow’s back-left side, which is covered in long, folded fabrics that extend to and cover the conquered body of Holofernes below her feet (Fig. 33). Only the general’s bare legs are visible as they emerge from beneath the hem of Judith’s dress. The three relief scenes located on each of the sides of the bronze triangular base are filled with Bacchanalian imagery that provide context for the scene of decapitation in the sculptural group above. The relief placed in the forward position features scantily dressed putti cavorting drunkenly with and around the figure of Bacchus, who holds a wine beaker in his right hand (Fig. 34). The visual allusion to wine and drunkenness in the relief situates the sculpture within the narrative moment of Judith and Holofernes’ critical encounter in his tent over dinner, as the inebriation of the general ultimately led to his physical destruction. Holofernes’ right hand slumps over the pillow and brushes the top edge of the rectangular scene as though pointing to the source of his demise. The position of the hand also draws attention to the signature of the artist, whose name is inscribed along the edge of the pillow in the space between Holofernes’ limp right hand and the corner, where Judith’s sandaled left foot firmly steps on the inside of the general’s left wrist. The interplay between relief and sculptural group functioned much like

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Figure 34. Detail of Donatello’s signature inscribed into the bronze pillow and the bronze bas-relief of Bacchus positioned beneath the figural group in the front (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

the relationship between the predella and main panel of an altarpiece, where a small narrative scene was placed below a large figure as a means to explicate the life and significance of the individual represented. On Judith’s right, the general’s slightly opened mouth anticipates the form of the slash wound that will form on his neck by the gilded sword held in silhouette above Judith’s head in her other hand. While Holofernes’ upper torso is held erect against Judith, the lower half of his body languidly drapes over the corner of the triangular base. His left leg slopes down off the edge of the bronze pillow and rests in extension before the bronze relief below. The relief scene on this side of the base features partially nude putti taking turns at either stomping grapes or drinking and sleeping off the product (Fig. 35). Likewise, Holofernes’ right leg droops over the right edge of the third and final relief, which presents a scene of dancing nude putti before the reclining figure of the wine god (Fig. 36).94 Again, the representation 94 The central putto, shown from the back in contrapposto, bears striking visual similarities to the David in the courtyard next door. This visual allusion reinforced the thematic connections between the two sculptures within the garden and courtyard, which those individuals standing on the opposite side of the garden would be able to make through lines of sight. A further visual connection is to be found in the roundel attributed to Donatello illustrating the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne in the courtyard.

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Figure 35. Detail of bronze bas-relief on right side of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Figure 36. Detail of bronze bas-relief on left side of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

of wine and intoxication in these scenes underscored the narrative content of the figural group above and thus served as a form of a sculptural predella. As opposed to offering distinct moments for an individual spectator to appreciate a continuous narrative, Donatello’s Judith was designed to communicate to many

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viewers simultaneously, each with his or her own variant of visual figural combinations contingent on his or her physical location within the garden. While the sculpture was created fully in the round and can be viewed from all angles, its triangular base suggests three primary viewing positions with which individuals in the garden would be offered ideal views: from the benches lining the eastern wall of the garden, from the loggia and its viewing platform on the southern side, and the benches and viewing platform lining the western wall. Regardless of an individual’s viewing location, however, the expressive content of the sculpture was conveyed through Judith’s rigid stance and staid expression, both a reflection of her actions and moral virtue. In each of the viewing positions that correspond to the three reliefs, Judith’s physical dominance over the general is conveyed clearly through her standing position, with gilded sword poised above her head, above and on top of the fallen man. Donatello’s compositional arrangement accentuates the figure of the widow as an embodiment of justice. The varied positions from which to view the sculpture in the garden—from standing on the ground to seating along the side walls to elevated platforms—was analogous to contemporary staging methods for theatrical productions and popular festivals wherein the audience encircled the actors on at least three sides, both from positions on the ground and in raised galleries.95 As Andrew Gurr has emphasized, this kind of viewing—i.e. seeing the “stage” from multiple angles—is associated with the collective experience of an early modern “audience,” who was activated to participate in the drama that unfolded, as opposed to an individual spectator who passively received visual content.96 In fifteenth-century Florence, theatrical productions were staged outside in public squares, gardens, and fields, and inside churches, convents, and private homes.97 Viewing was fluid in these contexts, as more often than not, no fixed seating was provided. Rather, in addition to the temporary arrangement of chairs, attendees would sit, stand, or climb up into any and all available spaces. As organizers and participants of popular dramas, as well as frequent attendees of plays and performances, the Medici were quite familiar with these fifteenth-century staging practices. In the context of Lucrezia’s sacra storia, Donatello’s sculpture, raised upon its column, played the role of Judith on the stage while the members of the Medici family and their guests, seated on one of the benches lining the walls or standing within the garden or on one of the viewing platforms, served as its audience. The destabilization of a single, ideal vantage from which to view the sculpture provided the means for a form of eye-witnessing that could be enjoyed by all in the garden theater. 95 Fotheringham, “Amphitheater Staging,” 163-176. 96 Gurr, Playgoing; Imagining the Audience; Lamb, “Corporeal Returns,” 21. 97 For an overview on popular performances in Florence in the f ifteenth century, see Kent, Cosimo de’Medici, 41-67.

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Somaesthetic Cultivation of Audience and Narrator The line-of-sight for viewers of the Judith was critical for Lucrezia’s sacred story of Judith, which is filled with concepts of vision and visual strategies. The first half of her text (86 of the 151 stanze) makes no mention Judith at all. Instead, this prolonged preamble introduces vision as an important indicator of virtue and a vehicle for justice. Those characters who were unable to see due to vices, including Nebuchadnezzar and Holofernes, suffered the consequences of their short-sightedness, while those who possessed clarity of vision, that is, the Hebrews, were rewarded with God’s grace.98 For example, Lucrezia elaborates on the ways in which Holofernes wrongly attempted to control the vision of conquered peoples through the forced worship of an image, presumably a statue of Nebuchadnezzar. She narrates, For this was the command of Lord Nabuc: all of the lands that Holofernes took through siege in these new wars through his might must honor Nabuc’s image, adorned, and so they are forced into these conditions: they must hold him in honor, as a god, in all the lands where he is lord.99

Yet the “children of Israel” refused to recognize Nebuchadnezzar’s idol. As a demonstration of their humility before God, they shielded their eyes and hearts instead channeled their prayers more forcefully to God.100 Their assertion of control over their vision was a political act; they rejected tyranny by refusing their gaze. Likewise, Lucrezia emphasizes Judith’s clarity of vision as an indicator of her moral virtue. Particularly evident during the narrative moments in which Judith must manipulate her own image to persuade Holofernes to act, Lucrezia uses vision and visual metaphors to illustrate the heroine’s divine purpose and, in so doing, clarifies the vision of her audience. For example, on the fourth and fateful night of her stay within Holofernes’ camp, Judith agreed to attend Holofernes’ banquet beside him and thus prepared her exterior self in her finest clothes and her interior 98 It is notable that Holofernes is described as “Duke,” as though invoking the courtly structure of tyranny; Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 132. 99 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 134. 100 In order to “prepare themselves, as I have said,/ in great humility and in much fear”; Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 135 (emphasis mine).

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self with great devotion to the Lord.101 Holofernes’ inability to see beyond Judith’s physical surface inevitably initiated his downfall. His blindness was a metaphor for his incomprehension of the Hebrew people, who he continued to besiege.102 Without proper vision, Holofernes was in effect blind to what was to come. At the 85th stanza, Lucrezia breaks from the narrative to speak directly to her audience and to instruct them: Now take good note of my words: see how the just Lord saw fit to exalt his people, note in what manner he sent a remedy, and see how they were liberated from that cruel siege.103

As narrator, Lucrezia urges her audience to open their eyes for the first time and to visually witness the agent of God’s grace. Within the context of the garden, Lucrezia’s audience was invited to engage with Donatello’s Judith, who stood upon her raised column and provided a visual stimulus to the entrance of the heroine into the narrative. The aural aspect of Lucrezia’s words functioned like ekphrastic text, which encourages viewers to “read in” and personalize the image.104 Facing Donatello’s sculpture and listening to Lucrezia’s words, the audience—just as audiences of popular performances—co-produced the experience through their active gaze, which initiated their imaginative insertion into the drama.105 The direct engagement of Lucrezia with her audience connects her Judith story to local theatrical traditions of sacre rappresentazioni, or sacred dramas, that were hugely popular in Florence throughout the fifteenth century. Organized by confraternities on the occasion of particular feast dates, these religious dramas were opportunities for the Florentine community to witness firsthand the events of the Bible. Artists, architects, musicians, and actors collaborated to enfold the audience into immersive environments that allowed for the temporary suspension of daily life and the imposition of sacred topographies onto Florentine soil. Filippo Brunelleschi designed elaborate stagecrafts so as to enhance the “reality effect” of 101 Judith’s beauty was recognized by all, including the Hebrews, who were said to “marvel” at her beauty; yet the Hebrew priests saw her conviction and faith in God and entrusted her with the mission; Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 148. 102 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 136. 103 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 145 (emphasis mine). 104 As Jas Elsner explains, “As we are enticed by a picture to tell its story, which is always (to some extent) our story, or at least a story plausible to us, so we identify with, allegorize, and fantasize about the image, thereby transforming its content into a narrative that suits us”; Elsner, Roman Eyes, 7. On “reading in,” see Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, 23-39. 105 On the interplay between seeing performance and conjuring works of art in Renaissance Florence, see Kent, Cosimo de’Medici, 65.

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the sacred scenes, including machines that hoisted young boys dressed as angels into the air and coordinated the simultaneous lighting of hundreds of candles for dramatic effect.106 Narrators spoke directly to the audience gathered inside the churches and often pointed to the larger significance of events before they occurred on the make-shift stages. In this way, the spectators were prompted to anticipate aspects of the drama so that they could better comprehend the dramatic action when it unfolded and thus be more affectively responsive. In the case of Lucrezia’s Judith narrative, the audience was cued to look at what Holofernes did not: his death by the hand of the virtuous woman. Lucrezia complements this cue to look at Judith with a reminder to listen. She explains, as you will now hear, their prayers were heard by God, and he rescued them from harm. You will witness his infinite grace; He reveals his power to unbelievers, And he gives victory to them who have faith.107

The last phrase connects Lucrezia’s narrative directly with the inscription on the base of Donatello’s David in the center of the courtyard.108 The wielding of such political statements within Lucrezia’s Judith narrative emplaced Lucrezia’s audience within the immediate context of Palazzo Medici and shaped the sculpture’s symbolic content in time-based performance. The sword, raised in the air and poised to strike the general’s neck, anticipated the narrative and served to foreground Lucrezia’s heroine within her inevitable victory. The political intentions of Lucrezia’s narrative are implied further through her use of ottava rima (eight-lined stanza), the structure of secular cantari that were publicly recited in Florentine piazze. These popular performances played an important role within Florentine daily life and often conveyed political sentiments couched in popular rhetoric.109 Only in this sacra storia and one other—that of St. John the Baptist—does Lucrezia adopt the cantari structure.110 As Nerrida Newbigin has explored, the structure of the ottava rima—“a structure of rhyme, rhythm, and rhetorical invention”—propelled the narrative in ways that delighted audiences and highlighted the narrator’s central role in providing not only commentary but also playing the roles of the central 106 Larson, “Vasari’s Descriptions,” 287-299. 107 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 145 (emphasis mine). 108 Sperling, “Donatello’s Bronze ‘David,’” 218-24: “Victor est quisquis patrium tuetur/ Frangit immanis Deus hostis iras/ En puer grandem domuit tiramnum/ Vincite cives” 109 Kent, Cosimo de’Medici, 41-67. 110 Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 26-27.

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characters.111 Lucrezia’s emulation of the cantari in the Judith narrative would have been recognizable to her audiences as a strategy to draw attention to her critical voice and her fluid identification with the heroine of her narrative. While art historians generally have pointed to the Judith as a stand-in for the male members of the Medici household, Lucrezia’s narrative—and her role as narrator—positions her as the political protagonist. Throughout the sacred narrative, Lucrezia emphasizes Judith’s masculine and feminine characteristics as a means to explain her active power. According to Lucrezia, Judith possessed a “manly heart,” presumably one that would not falter under the stress of the impending siege, as well as an independent spirit, for she had been widowed for three years and “did not seek another husband.”112 However, she would use her feminine beauty to position herself as Holofernes’ assassin.113 Judith’s plan was to create a false vision for Holofernes and to use his susceptibility to material beauty to her advantage, When Holofernes saw her, he was set aflame; that ferocious heart of his became human, and once he began to gaze at her lovely face he could not take his eyes away from hers.114

He was, as the Biblical passage emphasizes, literally “caught in his eyes.”115 During the scene of the decapitation of the tyrannous general, Lucrezia claimed that Judith brandished her sword like a “sturdy and strong man.”116 Although such references to masculine strength may be read as literary tropes intended to explain Judith’s augmented power through the grace of God, they also reflect on the ways in which Lucrezia self-consciously pointed to Judith’s crossing of normative gender boundaries.117 When Judith took it upon herself to take action to alleviate the suffering of her people, she brought herself before the priests of Bethulia and proclaimed, May each of you note my words! Through his grace, God has put it into my heart 111 Newbigen, “Directing the Gaze,” 71-72. 112 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 145. 113 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 150. 114 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 148. 115 Tylus draws attention to the signif icance of the Biblical phrase, “Statim captus est in suis oculis Holofernes” (Jth. 10:17); Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 148, fn. 44. On the differences from the Biblical narrative in Lucrezia’s description of Judith, particularly in her “angelic” adornment, which contrasts with the purposeful deception of her clothing and accessories “to captivate the eyes of all who gazed upon her,” see Milligan, “Unlikely Heroines,” 543. 116 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 155. 117 Butler, Gender Trouble.

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to meddle [ frammettersi] in things so your vows will be heard and thus my Lord has promised me that I might serve as the means whereby our suffering might be alleviated and ended.118

Lucrezia deliberately uses the verb “frammettersi” (“to mix oneself up in” or “to meddle”) in this stanza to transform the Judith narrative, as it does not appear in the source material.119 It served as an auditory cue to her audience to indicate that Judith recognized that she was transgressing normative performative strategies in order to achieve her purpose. Judith’s transgressions of normative gender roles were familiar to Lucrezia and she created parallels in their respective speaking lines to foster a connection between them. For example, in stanza 85, Lucrezia (as narrator) commands, “Now take good note of my words” (“Or fa’ che mie parole a punto noti”); 120 in stanza 90, Judith commands, “May each of you note my words!” (“Ciasciun di voi le mie parole noti”).121 Like Judith, Lucrezia crossed normative gender boundaries in her highly visible position as wife of Piero and mother to Lorenzo.122 Indeed, Cosimo allegedly called her “the only man in the family.”123 Lucrezia’s alignment with the “meddling” of Judith’s pious, but nonconventional actions speaks to the ways in which the matron demonstrated her agency within the masculine-dominated familial structure.124 Indeed, the very act of speech, materialized in the sacred narrative through Judith’s declarations and performed by Lucrezia—and repeated by future generations of Medici women—was itself a transgression in Renaissance Florence. As Theresa Flanigan has analyzed, Lucrezia was well aware of contemporary religious views regarding the need for women to regulate their speech.125 Antoninus Pierozzi wrote a personalized version of his Opera a ben vivere for Lucrezia, in which he urges his female reader to limit her speech so as to protect virtue and attain spiritual salvation.126 While he gives detailed instructions on the appropriate time and proper modes of speaking, Antoninus recommends that it would be best to “strengthen your 118 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 146. 119 Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 47. On meddling, see also, Martelli, “Lucrezia Tornabuoni,” 51-52. 120 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 145. 121 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 146. Tylus draws attention to the repetition of the phrases; 146, fn. 40. 122 Gender crossing is explored in a different manner by Randolph in his investigation of the woman-on-top trope; see Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 265-278. 123 Bargellini, “The Ladies,” 14. 124 On the distinction between power and authority in relation to Renaissance women, see Jordan, “Review,” 186. 125 Flanigan, “Disciplining the Tongue,” 41-60; Flanigan, “Women’s Speech,” 205-230. 126 It is relevant that Antoninus uses the metaphor of the walled garden to describe a woman’s duty to guard her soul against the conversation of men; Antoninus, Opera a Ben Vivere, 98-99.

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sensual appetite and keep silent” and “converse with people as little as you can.”127 Despite Lucrezia’s widely recognized piety and charity, she did not follow Antoninus’ advice. Indeed, she was known as a charming conversationalist who frequently mixed with men and provided not only companionship but also counsel.128 Lucrezia took liberty with Judith’s character description as a further strategy to connect her to the protagonist. For example, she has Holofernes describe Judith as that “woman, with eloquent words” and greet her directly as “flower of all beauty.”129 The emphasis on both Judith’s power of eloquence and her beauty as a “flower” were Lucrezia’s narrative additions to the Judith story, as these passages deviate from the sources and embellish the female heroine in particular ways.130 Certainly, within the context of the garden of Palazzo Medici, Lucrezia’s floral allusions to Judith’s beauty and eloquence were not lost on her audience, who were positioned among the abundant and fragrant arrangements of jasmine, violets, roses, and lilies. The treatment of Judith as an “eloquent flower” also held allegorical significance for Florence (Fiorenza), the city of the Madonna del Fiore and home to a well-established humanist literary scene. Visual similarities between Donatello’s Judith and the female personification of Florentia found on the reverse of the bronze portrait medal of Cosimo de’Medici make this point at least by the end of the century.131 Framing the heroine in such a way, Lucrezia built on familiar allegorical connections of Donatello’s statue of Judith with Florence—firmly against tyranny, faithful in God, and willing to fight for the collective good. The prominent connection of Donatello’s Judith with the seat of the Florentine government at the end of century—when the statue was removed from the Medici Palace and placed on the ringheria outside the Palazzo della Signoria—attests to the ways in which Florentines already made allegorical connections between their city’s history and the Judith story.132 On a second level, however, Lucrezia’s words shaped this reference into a more distinct commentary on her own place within Florence. The “eloquent flower” equally described Lucrezia herself, the author and voice of Judith’s words who was known throughout the city as “rarely eloquent.”133 In the years in which the text was most likely written—the early 1470s—Lucrezia, like Judith, was widowed, independent, and in a position to help shape the political scene of Florence. Her husband had 127 Antoninus, Opera a Ben Vivere, 132-134; Flanigan, “Women’s Speech,” 7. 128 Kent, “Sainted Mother,” 10. 129 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 153. 130 The flower metaphor recurs, for example, when he ordered his treasurer to “place her who is like the rose of an orchard here tonight among my treasures”; Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 150. 131 See, for example, A.284-1910 in the collection of the V&A. 132 For a recent assessment of the symbolic meanings connected to Donatello’s Judith after its appropriation by the Florentine government, see McHam, “Donatello’s Judith,” 307-324. 133 Valori, Vita, 95; Kent, “Sainted Mother,” 10, fn 31.

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previously connected himself to Judith by placing the second inscription on its base. When he died, she assumed the role of Judith and used her narrative to firmly connect herself with the symbolic content of the sculpture.134 By the time of her own death, Lucrezia was considered “the everlasting pride of the Medici.”135 Indeed, in his epistola consolatoria to Lorenzo, Francesco da Castiglione, the canon of San Lorenzo, directly compared Lucrezia with Judith and all the famous women of the past.136 The last lines of Lucrezia’s narrative are spoken in the first person and contribute to an even further layer of symbolic content within the text: May you, omnipotent Lord, be thanked, who drew me out of the sea to the shore, and I am now in harbor, where my heart offers up to you my weak and unpolished rhymes.137

The phrase “who drew me out of the sea to the shore” is a clear reference to Venus, who, according to Hesiod, was born of the sea.138 Typologically, Venus and Judith are connected, particularly in their expression of beauty, victory, and fortuna. Donatello’s sculpture iconographically alludes to Venus in the putti that adorn the neckline of Judith’s clothing and populate the relief scenes on the bronze base.139 In Lucrezia’s sacra storia, the soldiers outright call Judith a “goddess.”140 By describing her experience of writing these sacred verses in this manner, Lucrezia self-consciously asks the audience to identify her with the protagonist of the sacra storia and elevate her to a position alongside the famous women of the past. As evidenced by Morgante, Luigi Pulci’s epic poem written after Lucrezia’s death, the strategy worked: the poem imagines the Virgin Mary reading Lucrezia’s sacra storia of Judith in heaven, the most elevated of all positions.141 134 On the well-established notion of Judith as the Old Testament precursor to Mary—as most holy of all women—see the iconographical summary in Apostolos-Cappadona, “Costuming Judith,” 325-343. 135 Ugolino Verino’s Eulogium in Obitu Lucretiae Tornabonae, Laurentii Medici Matris, cited in Pernis and Adam, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, 142. 136 Pernis and Adam, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, 142. 137 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 162. 138 Hesiod’s Theogony was well known in humanist circles in Florence. In the fifteenth-century Greek library at San Marco, Hesiod was contained in a 14th century manuscript, today housed in the Biblioteca Laurenziana, Fondo Mediceo 32, 2. 139 For an interpretation of the putti and the ring as evidence of Cosimo de’Medici’s patronage, see Fader, “Sculpture in the Piazza,” 157-158. Yet, as has been demonstrated in numerous iconographical studies on the Medici, the ring motif was used across the generations of the Medici throughout the fifteenth century. 140 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 148 (stanza 98). 141 Pulci, Morgante. The poem was commissioned by Lucrezia, but only completed after her death; Tylus, “Gender and Religion,” 24, fn. 6.

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Collective Witnessing at the Scaffolds Lucrezia’s version of Holofernes’ decapitation—on paper at least—is rather unremarkable and abbreviated: Once she had said her prayer Judith rose, her heart resolved, and in one hand she grasped a sword she had found leaning against a column or the wall, and so well did the young woman brandish it it would have been fitting for a strong and sturdy man, she struck him twice, with force, and his head rolled away from his shoulders.142

Considered in the context of a performance, Lucrezia’s text bears similarity to extant fifteenth-century martyrdom scripts featuring decapitations, which do not verbalize the action in any detail since it was performed live by the actors on stage. Likewise, in her sacra storia of Saint John the Baptist, she dedicates little text to the actual action of his decapitation (stanza 143): With a wicked look, the scoundrel took his sword in hand and brandished it before him, he made the good prophet kneel down, and his head is sliced from his shoulders.143

By following dramatic convention, Lucrezia creates a gap in the narrative—a lacuna—that requires the imagination of her audience to fill. In the context of a performance in the garden, what was not heard was seen in the figure of Judith, who was positioned as the actor who carried out the violence. Early modern decapitation dramas drew on the visual language of juridical punishment in an effort to engage with the lived experiences of spectators, which included the witnessing of public executions. According to the Libro dei giustiziati (Book of the Executed) maintained by the Compagnia di Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio, between 1420 and the mid-1470s, beheading was the most common form of punishment in Florence.144 Of the 375 executions performed on criminal offenders

142 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 155. 143 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 223-263. 144 BN, II, I, 138. See also, Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 234-235.

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during this period, 232 were listed as decapitations.145 As Samuel Edgerton has discussed, the most common mode of beheading that was performed in the fifteenth century featured a standing executioner, who would wield his sword in the air and strike downward to the neck of the kneeling criminal.146 This posture was copied by Renaissance artists and used to represent the figure of Justice in paintings, such as Giotto’s allegorical figure in the Arena Chapel, who metes out punishment as a demonstration of virtue.147 Theatrical productions from the period used similar gestural language to represent beheading; the actor playing the executioner stood in a prolonged and exaggerated pose with sword held high. Like those allegorical paintings and actors on the stage, Donatello’s Judith is remarkable for its static concentration on the moment of the decapitation (Fig. 37). Indeed, in her elevated position and with her raised sword, the sculpture embodied the action of the beheading scene in iconic form.148 The set expression and stance of Judith—so different from the flesh-like treatment of David’s prepubescent body in the courtyard—communicated strength and determination. Judith’s sword is held frozen in the moment before the second, and fatal strike to his neck. Due to its position in the air away from Judith’s body, the sword is easily seen regardless of the angle at which the sculpture is viewed. Traces of the original gilding on the blade of the sword suggest how it once would have gleamed in the natural light of the day.149 Judith’s costuming, including the cuirass (neckpiece) and vambrace (bracelet), was based on ancient armor, and thus further emphasized her active distribution of justice as a warrior hero.150 By commanding her audience to look at the agent of God’s grace, Lucrezia pointed to Judith’s visual form as the eternal image of Justice.151 That Lucrezia’s activation of her audience—her invitation to imaginatively read in—occurred during a narrative moment of extreme violence was a strategy shared by playwrites during Lucrezia’s day and which defined early modern theater through the seventeenth century. As recent scholarship has emphasized, the Renaissance staging of violence was not made in simple response to the cravings of the public, but rather was a form of epistomological inquiry that sought to co-involve the public in the production of knowledge, much like as at anatomies or executions.152 The 145 Unlike other forms of punishment, beheadings largely were performed inside the walls of the city, in or just outside the Palazzo della Giustizia; Cappelli, La Compagnia dei Neri, 32. 146 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 132. 147 For an illustration and discussion of Giotto’s Iustizia (c. 1305), see Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 126-127. 148 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, esp. 5-39. 149 Janson, Donatello, 201; McHam, “Donatello’s Bronze,” 35. 150 Apostolos-Cappadona, “Costuming Judith,” 331. 151 Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 257-259; Terry, “Donatello’s Decapitations.” 152 Kiss, “The Skin and Film,” 1-12.

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Figure 37. Detail of Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

opening up of real bodies in early modern Europe—whether on the dissection table or on the scaffold—provided a means for audiences to discover their own hidden interiors through the exploration of others.153 The production of knowledge in these 153 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned.

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cases was mindfully full-bodied. Anatomies and executions were contingent on “eye-witnesses” who co-experienced and verified the event. As opposed to passive spectators, audience members were asked to actively investigate the human body through their senses and intellect. They probed the visual proof offered with each new cut into the flesh of the cadaver or criminal, and coordinated their sight with the aural cues of the official narrator. The smells of the crowd, bodily contact with others, hearing unofficial commentary and noises, etc., inevitably activated the audience members’ other senses and heightened their proprioception, or understanding of themselves in relation to their environment and others within it. In this way, although the audiences at these events were not actually performing actions as protagonists, their bodies and minds were actively engaged in a continual process of questioning and verifying, both as individuals and as part of a collective crowd of witnesses, that ultimately legitimated the occasion. Sacred dramas that featured beheadings or other forms of violent execution sometimes used the sites of actual punishments for their stages to enhance the “reality effect” of the violence.154 On the feast of St. John the Baptist’s martyrdom (29 August) in 1451, for example, Florentines staged a sacred drama of the Decollazione di San Giovanni Battista (Beheading of Saint John the Baptist) in the Pratello della Giustizia (or the “little meadow of justice”), the site for state-sponsored criminal executions in the city.155 The dramatic setting was intended to heighten sacred devotion, since the memory of real death and bloodshed at the site was used to vividly convey the injustice of the saint’s death.156 Florentines held a special devotion to St. John the Baptist as the patron saint and special defender of their city.157 According to Florentine legend, it was on John the Baptist’s birthday (24 June) in 401 that the city was liberated from the Goths, thus the saint was explicitly connected to libertas, the most important virtue of the Florentine Republic. Elaborate festivities, including processions, theatrical spectacles, mostre, and fireworks, marked the feast of John’s birth each year. Yet, a sacred drama staging his beheading on the feast of his martyrdom was unprecedented in Florentine ritual practice. Not incidentally, the Decollazione drama of 1451 was organized in the aftermath of a political treaty signed between Francesco Sforza, the Milanese duke, and the Dieci della Balià, the wartime commission led by Cosimo de’Medici.158 Since the return of the Medici 154 Owens, Stages of Dismemberment, esp. 115-143. 155 Trexler, Public Life, 119, fn 130; Newbigin, Nuovo Corpus, 109-133; Terry, “Donatello’s Decapitations,” 609-638. 156 Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 234-238. 157 Chrétien, The Festival of San Giovanni. 158 Newbigin, “I Giornali,” 103-105. The immediate celebrations for the peace treaty included a great festa in Florence with fireworks and bells ringing from the towers of the churches. However, the drama presented one month later, on the 29th of August, was the culmination of the celebration.

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from exile in 1434, the family held a special affection for the feast and thus the staging of the sacred drama at that time and in that place must be seen, at least in part, as a reflection of their successful political engagement in the treaty. When the Albizzi faction staged its famous coup against the Medici in September 1433, Cosimo, his brother Lorenzo and the other male members of the family were stripped of their right to political office and forced into a fixed period of exile from the city. However, in the days and months that followed the Medici departure, a series of political, economic, and social disturbances disrupted the equilibrium of Florence to such an extent that the Medici were invited back to the city within a year, and their political enemies were exiled in retribution. Florentines ultimately attributed the political disturbances of these years to inappropriate actions performed by elected officials of the city.159 These officials were elected to office in 1433 and 1434 on no less of an auspicious date than August 29th, the feast of San Giovanni Decollato. In his History, Francesco Guicciardini explained that the popular opinion of the Florentines was that the economic and social disturbances of these years were a result of their patron saint’s anger with them for not respecting his feast day and not protecting the Medici family.160 When Cosimo returned to the city, no further elections were held on the feast of the Baptist’s martyrdom but rather were moved to one day earlier (i.e. 28 August). This series of occurances framed the Decollazione feast in relation to the Medici and their political return to the city.161 Lucrezia certainly was familiar with the dramatic performance of the Decollazione di San Giovanni in 1451 and well understood the larger significance of the feast for her husband’s family. Her son, Lorenzo, intervened directly in its staging during his years as the head of the family, fully aware of the political potential of the festa.162 In her narrative of Judith, Lucrezia trains the attention of her audience on the decapitated head of the tyrant to demonstrate the heroine’s act of justice and inspire a form of collective witnessing that would reinforce communal values. Although she abbreviates the beheading scene, Lucrezia dedicates at least 13 subsequent stanzas to the ways in which the decapitated head was displayed to Judith’s fellow Israelites once back inside the walls of her hometown. Judith was urged to mount the “cursed head” on the wall of the city “so that by everyone it could easily be seen,” and this emboldened the Israelites to seek further justice from members of Holofernes’ army.163 Lucrezia’s emphasis on the communal need for viewing 159 Trexler, Public Life, 333 fn. 3. 160 Guicciardini, History of Florence, 4. 161 The Medici assumed a particular devotion to the cult focus of their patron saint’s martyrdom, that is, the head of the Baptist, which inspired a number of failed thefts and successful artistic commissions. See Terry, “Donatello’s Decapitations,” 609-638. 162 Newbigin, “Piety and Politics,” 19-24. 163 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 157.

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Holofernes’ decapitated head conforms to fifteenth-century Florentine attitudes about the importance of communal witnessing of criminal bodies.164 Sight was a means for civic cleansing after criminal transgressions. The body of the criminal was offered to the community as a means of visualizing the process of justice and the effective containment of crime through its retribution. Criminal bodies were elevated and processed through the city on route to their execution, and offered to citizens as the visualization of disregarded values. The collective gaze of the crowd upon the criminal body was a means by which the community of Florentines imposed their moral and civic judgment.165 Offenders convicted of particularly heinous crimes were not buried immediately after their execution, but rather were given prolonged public exposure to the populace, such as in the case of Baldassare Orlandini, who was executed for treason in 1441. According to Machiavelli’s historical account, after the traitor was beheaded, his body was dragged to the piazza and “the head, being severed, it remained the whole day exposed to the gaze of the people.”166 Likewise, in the Judith narrative, Holofernes’ decapitated head was mounted to be witnessed by all. The head was proof of justice, and as Lucrezia recounts, the sight of it was so powerful that it spurred emotional and bodily reactions toward patriotism.167 Donatello’s sculptural group materializes the concepts of Justice and Good Government in three-dimensional form, using the moment of Judith’s exposition of Holofernes’ head to her people as a tangible sign of their deliverance from his tyranny (Fig. 38). Noting the particularly awkward position of Holofernes under Judith, scholars have considered the figural group as a kind of visual psychomachia that condenses the narrative into its culminating moment.168 However, beyond its allegorical function to visualize the triumph of good over evil, the composition of the sculpture lends itself to a reading within the dramatic language of fifteenthcentury Florentine public execution and popular theater. Donatello presents the protagonist from multiple points of view and emphasizes her role as the agent and deliverer of penal justice.169 The dramatic contrast of positive and negative space in the area around the sword in her raised right hand provides a continuous reminder of her action. Yet it is the awkward position of Holofernes’ head, held in the graceful 164 On beholding the criminal body in Florence, see Terry-Fritsch, “Proof in Pierced Flesh,” 15-37. 165 Certain condemned criminals were placed on an ass in lieu of the processional cart, presumably for the enhancement of shame that was central to this part of the ritual process. 166 Machiavelli, History of Florence, VI, 266; Wolfgang, “Political Crimes,” 568. 167 Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 157. 168 Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 251-252. 169 Florentines also would have well known Lorenzo Ghiberti’s rendition of Judith on the Gates of Paradise, c. 1455, who holds her sword high above her head and, in her left hand, displays the decapitated head of Holofernes.

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Figure 38. Detail of Holofernes, Judith (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

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grasp of Judith’s slender fingers, that provides the memorable image of justice to the crowds of witnesses. His body, propped up against Judith’s legs in defeat and in alignment with their vision, was offered to them as a sign of good government. In this way, the cut neck of Holofernes offered a kind of “theatricalized dissection”—a penetrative violence performed upon an actor’s body—to expose a truth to the attending audience, much like an anatomist in the dissection theater.170 And just as the anatomist narrated the incisions that were driven into a corpse, Lucrezia’s words guide the audience to look at and attend to Holofernes’ wound.171 While specific audience members and their responses are not known for Lucrezia’s sacra storia, recent scholarship on the phenomenological conditions of early modern theater-going suggest that her narrative anticipates the metatheatricality of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playtexts that seek to link audiences to scenarios beyond the stage.172 Already the setting of the performance in the garden of Palazzo Medici situated the audience within a social contract of political power in late fifteenth-century Florence, and Lucrezia’s narrative further drew attention to the dynamics of contemporary politics by framing the Judith sculpture as an agent of civic authority. The prolonged narration of the aftermath of Holofernes’ decapitation and the attuning of the audience to the tyrant’s head as a symbol of justice connected the private garden to the public scaffolds. Although visually menacing in its prolonged concentration on the action of beheading, the violent content of the sculpture underscored its connection to justice, liberty, and community, which the audience understood as necessary components of the well-functioning state. *** When considered as a text to be performed, Lucrezia’s sacred narrative of Judith fostered a particular way of viewing Donatello’s sculpture in the temporal setting of the garden of the Palazzo Medici. The matron’s commands to look up and see at key points in the narrative served to incorporate both the viewer and the sculpture into the dramatic action of the biblical tale. Just as in Florentine punishments and sacre rappresentazioni, Donatello’s sculptural group acted out the demonstration of justice through its gestural performance. The performative cues of Lucrezia’s words functioned to somaesthetically engage her audience with the statue, thus prompting the opportunity for an active co-production of the narrative that bound performers and audience together in their embodied temporality. Furthermore, Lucrezia’s manipulation of her audience’s somaesthetic experience of the sculpture may be connected to the subtle way that the matron shaped her 170 Lamb, “Corporeal Returns,” 30. 171 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. 172 Lamb, “Corporeal Returns,” 14.

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own identity within the intimate circles of the Medici family. Such performative interplay between listening to her words and witnessing the dramatic enactment of Florentine identity politics in sculptural form is critical for understanding the full visual and symbolic potential of the statue in the garden as well as its leading lady in the 1470s.

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Bulst, Wolfger. “Uso e Trasformazione del Palazzo Mediceo Fino ai Riccardi.” In Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze. Edited by Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli, 98-129. Florence: Giunti, 1990. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Caglioti, Francesco. Donatello e i Medici: Storia del David e della Giuditta, 2 vol. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000. Caglioti, “Donatello, i Medici e Gentile de’Becchi: Un Po’ d’Ordine Intorno alla ‘Giuditta’ (e al ‘David’) di Via Larga.” pt. 1, Prospettiva 75-76 (July-Oct. 1994): 19-49. Caglioti, Francesco. “Due ‘Restauratori’ per le Antichità dei Primi Medici: Mino da Fiesole, Andrea del Verrocchio e il ‘Marsia Rosso’ degli Uffizi.” Prospettiva 72 (Oct., 1993): 17-42. Cappelli, Eugenio. La Compagnia dei Neri: l’Arciconfraternità dei Battuti di Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio. Florence: La Monnier, 1927. Carl, Doris. “La Casa Vecchia dei Medici e il suo Giardino.” In Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze. Edited by Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli, 38-43. Florence: Giunti, 1990. Ciletti, Elena and Henrike Lähnemann, “Judith in the Christian Tradition,” in The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies Across the Disciplines. Edited by Kevin R. Brine, Elena Ciletti and Henrike Lähnemann, 41-65. Cambridge: Open Book, 2010. Crum, Roger J. “Donatello’s Bronze David and the Question of Foreign Versus Domestic Tyranny.” Renaissance Studies 10, no. 4 (Dec. 1996): 440-450. Crum, Roger J. “Judith Between the Public and Private Realms in Florence.” In The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies Across the Disciplines. Edited by Kevin R. Brine, Elena Ciletti and Henrike Lähnemann, 291-306. Cambridge: Open Book, 2010. Crum, Roger J. “Severing the Neck of Pride: Donatello’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’ and the Recollection of Albizzi Shame in Medicean Florence.” Artibus et Historiae, vol. 22, no. 44 (2001): 23-29. Donatello e il Restauro della Giudita, Edited by Loretta Dolcini. Florence: Centro Di, 1988. Donatello-Studien: Italienische Forschungen Herausgegeben vom Kunstihistorisches Institut in Florenz. Munich: Bruckmann, 1989. Edgerton, Jr., Samuel Y. Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution During the Florentine Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Elam, Caroline. “Lorenzo de’Medici’s Sculptural Garden.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz, vol. 36, no. 1/2 (1992): 41-84. Elsner, Jas. Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Elsner, Jas. Roman Eyes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. von Erffa, H. Martin. “Judith-Virtus-Virtutuum-Maria,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 14 (1970): 460-465. Even, Yael. “The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,” Woman’s Art Journal 12 (1991): 10-14.

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Even, Yael. “Some Lesser-Known Ladies of Public Art: On Women and Lions,” FifteenthCentury Studies 27 (2001): 129-148. Fabroni, Agnolo. Laurentii Medicis Magnifici Vita; Adnotationes et Monumenta. Pisa: Jacobus Gratiolius, 1784. Fader, Martha Alice Agnew. “Sculpture in the Piazza della Signoria as Emblem of the Florentine Republic.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977. Flammini, Francesco. La Lirica Toscana del Rinascimento Anteriore ai Tempi del Magnifico. Pisa: Annali della scuola normale superior di Pisa, 1891. Flanigan, Theresa. “Disciplining the Tongue: Archbishop Antoninus, the Opera a Ben Vivere, and the Regulation of Women’s Speech in Renaissance Florence.” Open Arts Journal 4 (2015): 41-60. Flanigan, Theresa. “Women’s Speech in the Tornabuoni Chapel.” Artibus et Historiae 76 (2017): 205-230. Fotheringham, Richard. “Amphitheater Staging: In-the-Round or to the Front (and What About Asides)?” Comparative Drama, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer 2001): 163-176. Fusco, Laurie and Gino Corti. Lorenzo de’Medici: Collector and Antiquarian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Garrard, Mary. Artemesia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Gertsman, Elina. “The Gap of Death: Passive Violence and Visual Void in the Encounter of the Three Dead and the Three Living.” In Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Edited by Allie Terry-Fritsch and Erin Felicia Labbie, 85-104. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Gertsman, Elina. Nothing is the Matter: Empty Spaces in Late Medieval Art. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming. Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Greenhalgh, Michael. Donatello and His Sources. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. Guicciardini, Francesco. History of Florence. Translated by Mario Domandi. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hartt, Frederick. “Art and Freedom in Quattrocento Florence.” In Essays in Memory of Karl Lehmann. Edited by Lucy Freeman, 114-131. New York: Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1964. Hatfield, Rab. “Some Unknown Descriptions of Palazzo Medici in 1459.” Art Bulletin 52 (1970): 232-249. Herzner, Volkner. “Die ‘Judith’ der Medici.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschicte 43 (1980): 159-163. Howard, Deborah and Laura Moretti. Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

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Hyman, Isabelle. Fifteenth Century Florentine Studies: The Palazzo Medici and a Ledger for the Church of San Lorenzo. New York and London: Garland, 1977. Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642. Edited by Jennifer Low and Nova Myhill. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Janson, H.W. The Sculpture of Donatello. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Johnson, Geraldine A. “Idol or Ideal? The Power and Potency of Female Public Sculpture.” In Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. Edited by Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, 228-231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Jordan, Constance. “Review: Listening to ‘the Other Voice’ in Early Modern Europe.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1 (Spring, 1998): 184-192. Kauffmann, Hans. Donatello: Eine Einführung in sein Bilden und Denken. Berlin: Grote, 1935. Kent, Dale. Cosimo de’Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Kent, Francis W. “Sainted Mother, Magnificent Son: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Lorenzo de’Medici.” Italian History and Culture 3 (1997): 3-34. Kiss, Attila. “The Skin and Film on the Ulcer: Anatomy and the Performance of the Body on the Early Modern and Postmodern Stage.” New Faces Essay Collection (May 2019): 1-12. Lamb, Caroline R. “Corporeal Returns: Theatrical Embodiment and Spectator Response in Early Modern Drama.” Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Western Ontario, 2011. Landucci, Luca. Diario Fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516. Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1883. Larson, Orville K. “Vasari’s Descriptions of Stage Machinery,” Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Dec., 1957): 287-299. Leggatt, Alexander. Jacobean Public Theater. New York: Routledge, 1992. Lenzi, Maria Ludovica. Donne e Madonne. L’Educazione Femminile nel Primo Rinascimento Italiano. Turin: Loescher, 1982. Levantini-Pieroni, Giuseppe. Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Donna di Piero di Cosimo de’Medici: Studio Fatto sui Documenti dell’Archivio Mediceo ed Altri. Florence: Le Monnier, 1888. Linaker, Arturo. “I Restauri del Palazzo Medici Riccardi.” Atti della Società Colombaria di Firenze (1913/14): 1-15. Looper, Matthew G. “Political Messages in the Medici Palace Garden.” Journal of Garden History, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1992): 255-268. Lorenzo de’Medici at Home: The Inventory of the Palazzo Medici in 1492. Edited by Richard Stapleford. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013. Machiavelli, Niccolò. History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy. London: M. Walter Dunne, 1901. Maguire, Yvonne. Women of the Medici. London: Routledge, 1927. Martelli, Mario. “Lucrezia Tornabuoni.” In Les Femmes Écrevains en Italie au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance. Edited by Georges Ulysses, 51-86. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1994. McHam, Sarah Blake. “Donatello’s Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence.” Art Bulletin 83/1 (March 2001): 32-47.

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McHam, Sarah Blake. “Donatello’s Judith as the Emblem of God’s Chosen People.” In The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies Across the Disciplines. Edited by Kevin R. Brine, Elena Ciletti and Henrike Lähnemann, 307-324. Cambridge: Open Book, 2010. de’Medici, Lorenzo. Lorenzo de’Medici: Lettere VI (1481-1482). Edited by Michael Mallet. Florence: Giunti-Barbèra, 1990. de’ Medici, Lorenzo. Lorenzo de’ Medici: Selected Poems and Prose. Edited by Jon Thiem. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Milligan, Gerry. “Unlikely Heroines in Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s ‘Judith’ and ‘Esther’,” Italica, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Winter 2011): 538-564. Motture, Peta and Luke Syson. “Art in the Casa.” In At Home in Renaissance Italy. Edited by Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, 268-283. London: V&A Publications, 2006. Newbigin, Nerida. “Directing the Gaze: Expository Modes in Late Medieval Italian Plays.” In The Narrator, the Expositor, and the Prompter in European Medieval Theatre. Edited by Philip Butterworth, 69-92. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Newbigin, Nerida. “I Giornali di Ser Giusto Giusti d’Anghiari (1437-1482).” Letteratura Italiana Antica 3 (2002): 41-246. Newbigin, Nerida. “Piety and Politics in the Feste of Lorenzo’s Florence.” In Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo Mondo. Edited by Gian Carlo Garfagnini, 17-41. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994. Owens, Margaret E. Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama. Newark, DE and Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Parenti, Piero. Delle Nozze di Lorenzo de’Medici con Clarice Orsini nel 1469. Florence: Bencini, 1870. Pernis, Maria Grazia and Laurie Schneider Adams, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici and the Medici Family in the Fifteenth Century. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Petrucci, Francesca. La Scultura di Donatello: Techniche e Linguaggio. Florence: Le Lettere, 2003. Pope-Hennessy, John. Donatello: Sculptor. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993. Preyer, Brenda. “L’Architettura del Palazzo Mediceo.” In Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze. Edited by Giovanni Cherubini and Giovanni Fanelli, 65-73. Florence: Giunti, 1990. Pulci, Luigi. Morgante e Lettere. Edited by Domenico de Robertis. Florence: Sansoni, 1962. Randolph, Adrian W. B. Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in FifteenthCentury Florence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Ringbom, Sixten. Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting. Abo: Abo Akademi, 1965. Rochon, André. La Jeunesse de Laurent de Médicis (1449-1478). Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963. Roscoe, William. The Life of Lorenzo de’Medici, Called the Magnificent. 3 Vol. Philadelphia: Bronson & Chauncey, 1803. Ross, Janet. Lives of the Early Medici as Told in Their Correspondence. London: Chatto & Windus, 1910.

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Rossi, Vittorio. “L’Indole e gli Studi di Giovanni di Cosimo de’Medici.” Rendiconti dell’Accademia dei Lincei no. 5, vol. 2 (1893): 38-150. Ruschi, Pietro. Michelangelo Architetto nei Disegni della Casa Buonarroti. Milan: Silvana, 2011. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. Shearman, John. Only Connect… Art and the Italian Spectator in the Renaissance. Washington, DC/Princeton: National Gallery of Art/ Princeton University Press, 1992. Simons, Patricia. “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians 25 (Spring, 1988): 4-30. Solum, Stephanie. Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Chapel of the Medici Palace. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Sperling, Christine. “Donatello’s Bronze ‘David’ and the Demands of Medici Politics.” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 134, no. 1069 (April 1992): 218-224. Stallini, Sophie. “Giuditta sulla Scena Fiorentina del Quattrocento. Donatello, Lucrezia Tornabuoni e l’Anonimo della Devota Rapresentatione di Iudith Hebrea.” In Giuditta e le Alter Eroine Bibliche tra Rinascimento e Barocco. Orizzonti di Senso e di Genere, Variazioni, Riscritture. Edited by Luciana Borsetto, 11-33. Padua: Padova University Press, 2010. Tarchiani, Nello. “Il Palazzo del Magnifico Lorenzo de’Medici.” Le Vie d’Italia (1925): 853-864. Terry, Allie. “Donatello’s Decapitations and the Rhetoric of Beheading in Medicean Florence.” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 23, No. 5 (2009): 609-638. Terry-Fritsch, Allie. “Proof in Pierced Flesh: Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas and the Beholders of Wounds in Early Modern Europe.” In Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Allie Terry-Fritsch and Erin Felicia Labbie,15-37. Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2012. Thiem, Günther and Christel Thiem. Toskanische Fassaden Dekoration in Sgraffito und Fresko 14 bis 17 Jahrhunderts. Munich: Bruckmann, 1964 Tomas, Natalie R. The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence. London: Routledge, 2003. Tornabuoni (de’Medici), Lucrezia. Lettere. Edited by Patrizia Salvadini. Florence: Olschki, 1993. Tornabuoni (de’Medici), Lucrezia. I Poemetti Sacri di Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Edited by F. Pezzarossa. Florence: Olschki, 1978. Tornabuoni de’Medici, Lucrezia. Sacred Narratives. Edited and translated by Jane Tylus. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001. Tylus, Jane. “Gender and Religion in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” In Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici, Sacred Narratives. Edited by Jane Tylus, 21-53. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001. Valori, Niccolò. Vita di Lorenzo de’Medici. Edited by Enrico Niccolini. Vicenza: Accademia olimpica, 1991.

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Weil-Garris, Kathleen. “On Pedestals: Michelangelo’s ‘David,’ Bandinelli’s ‘Hercules and Cacus,’ and the Sculpture of the Piazza della Signoria.” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983): 377-415. Wester, Ursula and Erika Simon, “Die Reliefmedallions im Hofe des Palazzo Medici zu Florenz.” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museem 7 (1965): 15-91. Wiles, B. Harris. The Fountains of Florentine Sculptors and their Followers from Donatello to Bernini. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933. Wind, Edgar. “Donatello’s Judith: A Symbol of Sanctimonia.” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 1 (1937): 62-63. Wohl, Helmut. “Book Review: Donatello Studien.” Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 315-323. Wolfgang, Marvin E. “Political Crimes and Punishments in Renaissance Florence.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 44, Iss. 5 (1954): 555-581. Zorzi, Elvira Garbero. “Il Cortile di Palazzo Medici: Le Trasformazione in ‘Luogo Teatrale.’” In Teatro e Spettacolo nella Firenze dei Medici: Modelli dei Luoghi Teatrale. Edited by Elvira Garbero Zorzi and Mario Sperenzi, 139-141. Florence: Leo S. Olshki, 2001.

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4. Performing Virtual Pilgrimage: Somaesthetics and Holy Land Devotion at San Vivaldo Abstract Chapter Four examines the somaesthetic experience of the Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, a virtual holy land that was constructed by Franciscan friars from Florence in a Tuscan forest in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Designed to emulate key aspects of the Renaissance experience of Jerusalem, San Vivaldo offered a performative space for pilgrims to construct personalized memories of the Holy Land without ever touching its soil. The chapter investigates the affective enhancement of devotion through somaesthetic conditioning and questions the Franciscan founders’ political motivations for building such an interactive and full-bodied experience of the Holy Land, particularly in the period after the Medici were exiled from the city and Fra Girolamo Savonarola burned at the stake. As the chapter reveals, the mindful engagement with the artistic program was an effective strategy to legitimate both the place and the whose practiced it. Keywords: San Vivaldo, Benedetto Buglioni, Giovanni della Robbia, Holy Land, virtual pilgrimage, prosthetic memory

The Holy Land was deeply integrated into Florence’s performative culture and became a touchstone for political action during the Renaissance. Throughout the fifteenth century, Florence was promoted as a “New Jerusalem” in the dramatic processional celebrations of Epiphany. As discussed in Chapter Two, the city’s major monuments and ritual spaces—including the Baptistery of San Giovanni and the Palazzo della Signoria—assumed temporary status as the holy sites of Jerusalem during the all-day event in which Florentines dressed as Wise Men from the East traversed the city in a processional sacred drama alongside the city’s governors, leading citizens, confraternity members, and clerics. The day culminated with their staged tribute to the Christ child who rested in a manger in the piazza in front

Terry-Fritsch, A., Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722216_ch04

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of San Marco, which was designated as “Bethlehem” during Epiphany.1 All of the leading Medici men participated as sponsors, and sometimes even actors, in the annual events, and, through their patronage of San Marco and the confraternity, the family became synonymous with the Magi over the course of the Quattrocento.2 The decoration of the chapel in their family palace furthered the close association between the Medici and the Holy Land through its elaborate evocation of Epiphany.3 By traversing the space of the chapel together with the Magi and the Medici, visitors reenacted the festal procession and thereby brought the Holy Land within the private walls of the Medici household. The ritual’s legitimating function thus was extended to the family, and to all those who participated in the virtual Epiphany performances inside their chapel. 4 Later in the century, supporters of the Medici used the image of the Magi and the Holy Land to profess their political alliance with the first family of the city. Poets dedicated verses to Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ that lauded Florence as the New Jerusalem under his leadership and artists incorporated Medici portraits into images of the Holy Land. For example, Guaspare Del Lama commissioned Sandro Botticelli to paint a scene of the Adoration of the Magi for his family’s chapel in Santa Maria Novella that used the portraits of Cosimo, Piero, and Giovanni de’Medici as the three kings surrounded by a Florentine retinue, which included a portrait of the patron (Fig. 39). As Rab Hatfield has examined, Guaspare used the painting to self-fashion his identity within the Florentine public by portraying himself in intimate proximity to the Medici, although, in reality, he was a minor figure in Florentine society.5 In the same years, Giovanni Rucellai, business associate and in-law to the Medici, commissioned Leon Battista Alberti to create a marble replica of the Holy Sepulcher that featured Medici insignia on its exterior walls (Fig. 40). The replica asserted a spiritual and political connection between himself, the Holy Land, and the Medici family. Such overt visual linkages signaled and communicated the sanctity of Florence under the strong governance and guidance of the Medici. 1 At various points throughout the f ifteenth century, particular areas of the city were explicitly designated as sites venerated in the Holy Land. For example, in certain years the Palazzo della Signoria served as the Palace of Herod in Jerusalem, in others the Piazza of the Baptistery of San Giovanni served this function. San Marco held firm associations with Bethlehem, and as such served as the destination of the Journey of the Wise Men and their extensive entourage. 2 Cosimo de’Medici, his brother Lorenzo, his sons Piero and Giovanni, and grandson Lorenzo all took part in the organization and staging of Epiphany. Records indicate that Cosimo de’Medici was a frequent participant; see Hatfield, “Compagnia dei Magi,” 136. On the larger tradition of Medici involvement in Magian themes, see Terry, “Politics.” 3 Terry, “Donatello’s Decapitations,” 609-638. 4 Trexler, Public Life. 5 Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi ‘Adoration’.

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Figure 39. Sandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, c.1475-1476, tempera on panel, originally in Santa Maria Novella, today in Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

By 1494, however, the Medici were no longer in fashion in Florence and the Holy Land metaphor was transformed dramatically. In the wake of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s death in 1492 and the subsequent revolt against and expulsion of his son, the charismatic prior of San Marco, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, became a dominant voice in the reform of the city and the restoration of the Florentine Republic. Savonarola’s sermons explicitly drew on the image of Florence as the New Jerusalem. Yet, as opposed to a temporary symbolic state that was evoked during Epiphany rituals, Savonarola prophesied Florence as the literal site of a New Jerusalem, the chosen city of God, “the navel of Italy,” from which great riches and power were to emanate.6 It was to surpass both the real Jerusalem and its recognized counterpart in the Latin world, Rome. But first, he claimed, Florence had to rid itself of its former Medici connections and reform both its people and government. Soon he acquired a massive following, including intellectuals, artists, and politicians in addition to great numbers of the 6 Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Sermons of 10 and 15 December 1495; see Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, 142-144.

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Figure 40. Leon Battista Alberti, Tempietto dello Santo Sepolcro, c. 1467, San Pancrazio, Florence (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Florentine church-going public, and had direct influence in the political governance of the city, both in decision making and diplomacy abroad.7 7 On Savonarola in the social context of Florence at the end of the Quattrocento, see Martines, Scourge and Fire; Weinstein, Savonarola. On the impact of Savonarola on Renaissance art, see, for example, the

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Even though Savonarola’s message was widely embraced in Florence, it was also adamantly refuted both in the city and beyond, above all by the papacy, which condemned Savonarola’s views as heretical. The friar’s continued insistence on the primacy of Florence within the renewed kingdom of God resulted in the friar’s spectacular execution by fire—his punishment for heresy—on 23 May 1498.8 Since one of Savonarola’s major preaching points was the assertion that Florence was poised to assume the role of the New Jerusalem, the location of his execution, the Piazza della Signoria, was symbolically related to his crime: he was burned in the very piazza that was used as the site of Jerusalem during Epiphany celebrations.9 The papacy decreed that any who continued to follow the words of the false prophet would be excommunicated from the Church.10 The friars of San Marco were expelled from their convent and the territories of Tuscany, and the Florentine government actively suppressed any open glorification of Savonarola’s message.11 Yet, the Florentine dream of possessing the New Jerusalem was not over. Within a year, the Frati Minori at the newly built convent and church of San Salvatore al Monte promised to bring the Holy Land to Tuscany (Fig. 41).12 Their church, built by Simone il Pollaiuolo, called Cronaca, and completed in the first years of the sixteenth century, held special importance in the city both for its prominent location on the Mons Fiorentinus just beneath the Romanesque church of San Minato and, more significantly, for its status as an important sister church to the Franciscan Custodians of the Holy Land.13 By 1499, the friars of San Salvatore al Monte, led by Fra Cherubino da Firenze, began construction on a pilgrimage site in 2003 exhibition organized by the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, which traced the impact of Savonarola on Botticelli’s style; Botticelli. 8 On the use of torture to extract Savonarola’s confession, see Lupi “Nuovi documenti,” 65-66; Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, 288; Martines, Scourge and Fire, 244-264. 9 For further information on the use of judicial power to transform the urban space of the city during “cleansing rituals,” see Terry, “Criminal Vision,” 45-62. 10 On the suppression of Savonarola thought in the city, see, for example, the repeated imprisonment of “il pazzo” and the close watch of the Unti, see Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, 330ff. The Frateschi maintained positions of power in government, albeit through loose associations with the friar’s memory. 11 On the expulsion of the friars of San Marco, see Savonarola, 294. Even the bell of San Marco was “exiled,” since it was used to call Florentines to Savonarola’s sermons; Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, 318. On the notion that San Vivaldo should be seen as a response of the Franciscans to opposition to Savonarola, see Cardini, “Le Stagioni Sanvivaldine,” 20. 12 This church was destroyed in the siege of Florence of 1527. Only the first cloister of the convent was salvageable. On the building history of San Salvatore al Monte, see Najemy, “The First Observant Church,” 273-295; Trotta, San Salvatore al Monte. On the battles between Florentine Dominicans and Franciscans during the last years of the Quattrocento, see Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, 285. 13 In 1219, Francis made his own journey to the Holy Land, which ushered in the tradition of Franciscan friars as special Custodians of the Holy Land. On Francis’s relationship to the tradition of sacred mountains, see Innocenti, “Francescanesmo,” 235.

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Figure 41. Simone il Pollaiuolo (Cronaca), San Salvatore al Monte, Florence, completed 1504 (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

the dense forest of Camporena, located about thirty miles southwest of Florence, that recreated the Holy Land experience (Fig. 42).14 Called “La Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo” (the New Jersualem of San Vivaldo), the pilgrimage site featured a series of small-scale architectural buildings, called “luoghi santi” (holy places), representing key devotional locations for Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem (Fig. 43). According to the Franciscan chronicle of San Vivaldo, the buildings were arranged “a similitudine dei Luoghi della Città Santa di Gerusalemme;” that is, according to the disposition of holy places in Jerusalem.15 Pilgrims were invited to enter these luoghi santi and to pray like their Christian counterparts in the Holy Land. Both male and female pilgrims are recorded coming to the site in the early sixteenth century with “grande veneratione e spessa visitazione” (great veneration and frequent visitation).16 14 Padre Giovan Francesco da Villafranca, Cronaca (1º Libro delle Memorie di S. Vivaldo), ASPSFS San Vivaldo in Montaione 91, Archivio Provinciale 435, I, 435, fol. 1v-2v. All transcriptions are mine. Hereafter, this manuscript will be referred to as Cronaca. 15 Cronaca fol. 2r. 16 Cronaca, fol. 1v. Women were allowed access to the site only on particular feast dates. According to the papal bull of Leo X from 1516, should they attempt to visit on non-designated days, they ran the risk of excommunication from the church; Gualdo, “La Lettera,” 123-124. Presumably, such detailed instructions

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 42. Map of the Pilgrimage Complex of the New Jerusalem at San Vivaldo, 2012 (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Figure 43. Architectural structures located on “Mount Calvary” in the north-western region of the San Vivaldo campus, including the Prison of Christ (left foreground), Crucifixion (left back), Holy Sepulchre (right back) and Noli me tangere (right foreground) (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

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In return, the pilgrims received indulgences, just as they would after a visit to the real place. In a widely-read travel account of the Holy Land from the 1480s, Fra Felix Fabri, a German Dominican, described the physical and mental fatigue that Renaissance pilgrims experienced when pursuing the sacred: No one should think visiting the places to be a light task; there is the intense heat of the sun, the walking from place to place, kneeling, and prostration; above all, there is the strain that everyone puts on himself to earnest piety and comprehension of what is shown to him in the holy places, and to devout prayer and meditation, all of which cannot be done without great fatigue, because to do them fitly a man should be at rest and not rambling about. To struggle after mental abstraction whilst bodily walking from place to place is extremely toilsome.17

Bodily exertion and mental strain were integral components of the pilgrimage process, and, as Fabri emphasizes, it was hard work. From the commencement of the pilgrimage to the arrival at the holy destination, the body was the conduit by which pilgrims registered the distance and difficulty of the journey while the mind, in its willingness to endure such strain in order to reach the end goal, went through a continual process of inward and outward reflection.18 The extended body-mindfulness of the pilgrimage journey distinguished it as extraordinary, and imbued it with meaning. The attunement of each pilgrim to his or her own body—the stress and strain on limbs and feet, the rise and fall of heartbeat and breath, the accumulated sweat on skin and clothing—contributed to the sensation of an extraordinary experience. Each step forward toward the destination became a means to realize an increasingly personal desire, since the pilgrim actively constructed the means for actualization of the journey through both his body’s movements and his mind’s determination. The physical and mental duress suffered by the pilgrim was understood as a means of somatic and spiritual purification in preparation for the pilgrim’s encounter with the sacred.19 As this chapter will examine, although the New Jerusalem of San Vivaldo was constructed on ground not touched by Christ or the apostles, it adapted and expanded the genre of pilgrimage so as to substitute the traditional locus of authenticity from to and restrictions on the women resulted from their unabashed enthusiasm to access the site in the years prior to 1516, a phenomenon that disturbed the cloistered environment of the friars resident at the site; Innocenti, “Francescanesmo,” 237. 17 Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings, 299 (italics mine). 18 On the relationship between physical strain and mental awareness in pilgrimage, see Montgomery and Bauer, Casting Our Own Shadows. 19 On pilgrimage as a form of voluntary liminality, see Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 7-11.

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historical places and things to somaesthetic experiences. The Franciscan founders of San Vivaldo had first-hand knowledge of the pilgrimage itinerary at Jerusalem and comprehended the intense bodily and mental exertion that went into the experience of the real Holy Land. Their New Jerusalem could never offer the same intensity or duration of the physical and mental challenges of such a sacred journey. Instead, the Franciscans offered pilgrims a means to inhabit an idealized version of the Holy Land through participatory practices that fostered body-mindfulness and heightened sensory experiences. The Franciscan Order was instrumental in the development of virtual pilgrimage traditions across medieval and early modern Europe, including the Italian peninsula. As Katherine Rudy, Michele Bacci, and others have explored, virtual pilgrimages were highly choreographed mental journeys and physical performances that were sanctioned by the church as valid substitutes for travel to and devotional exercise before the real thing.20 Initially developed in the Middle Ages for female clerics, the ill, and the financially disadvantaged, virtual pilgrimage became universally sanctioned when travel to the Holy Land became nearly prohibitive due to Muslim occupation. As “Keepers of the Latin Quarter of Jerusalem” since 1342, Franciscans had prominent roles in facilitating pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and developed virtual pilgrimage for those who were unable.21 Franciscan virtual pilgrimage encouraged an “empathetic devotion” that bore direct relationship to the experiences of pilgrims visiting the Holy Land; by practicing similar topographies and performative gestures, virtual pilgrims were able to construct embodied memories of the practice that connected them to the larger community of pilgrims.22 At the same time, since virtual pilgrims did not perform their devotion in the terra sancta, but rather in substitute sites, they were privy to extrasensorial information that became enfolded into their experience. San Vivaldo was the second of several full-scale simulations of the Holy Land built in Italy in the last years of the Quattrocento and throughout the Cinquecento. The Sacro Monte di Varallo, the first, was begun thirteen years before in northern Italy, and, conceptually, it provides a foundation for the Tuscan Holy Land.23 The Franciscan founders of both sites most likely knew one another and may have discussed building plans. Both pilgrimage destinations featured small-scale architectural structures arranged in topomimetic relationship to the holy sites 20 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages. For an overview of the late medieval traditions of substituting the Holy Land in Italy, see Bacci, “Performed Topographies,” 101-118. 21 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages, 31. 22 The Franciscan devotional strategy was distinct from other religious orders, including the Dominicans, who organized virtual pilgrimage devotion according to chronological narrative; Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages, 33. 23 For a comparison of these two sacri monti, see Terry-Fritsch, “Franciscan Art.”

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in the Jerusalem landscape and required a Franciscan guide to navigate the route for the pilgrims and guide them in prayer. When pilgrims arrived at Varallo and San Vivaldo, they were required to stop first at the church to perform devotional exercises that focused and purified their bodies and minds.24 Following devotional practices promoted by Saint Francis himself and employed widely by his followers, the guides encouraged the active physical and emotional participation of pilgrims in their devotions and gave instructions on affective posturing. For example, weeping was encouraged as a sign of a pilgrim’s sadness of Christ’s suffering and self-flagellation was viewed as a means to access Christ’s pain.25 These body-mind cultivation techniques were then mobilized as the friar guides brought the pilgrims out of the church and onto the virtual holy land soil. At Varallo and San Vivaldo, the Franciscans used a materially-rich variation of the holy land to elicit powerful emotional engagement from the pilgrim community. While Varallo and San Vivaldo clearly are related in general conception and design, pilgrim experience at the two sites in the early sixteenth century was quite different. Each was designed and installed according to the distinct motives of their founders and connected to the sites’ geographical situation, and their capacity to facilitate pilgrim devotion through somaesthetic engagement was connected to their varying material and environmental conditions.26 San Vivaldo has received far less art-historical attention than Varallo, yet its artistic program introduced innovative strategies for the empathetic emplacement of pilgrims that went beyond its more famous northern counterpart. This chapter outlines the early history of San Vivaldo and connects the virtual pilgrimage site to local traditions and practices to materialize the Holy Land in Tuscany. The years of San Vivaldo’s early development and construction were years plagued by political instability in Florence. The exile of the Medici and subsequent execution of Savonarola had thwarted aspirations to claim the city as the New Jerusalem, and, under the New Republic, the city faced serious financial and diplomatic problems.27 The opportunity to participate in the construction of a New Jerusalem away from the city center was attractive to many of the leading families of the region and they sponsored the chapels and devotional sites across the Franciscan campus. The success of the pilgrimage site to attract pilgrims was contingent the site’s ability to negotiate its identity in relation to these Florentine and wider Tuscan concerns, while at the same time present itself as an adequate substitute for pilgrimage to the real holy places. 24 Likewise, at the near contemporary sacred mountain of Varallo, pilgrims were required to stop at the Franciscan church of Santa Maria delle Grazie; see Terry-Fritsch, “Performing,” 111-132. 25 This is inferred by the fact that such tracts were distributed at Varallo and the other sacri monti; Nova, “‘Popular’ Art,” 115. 26 Terry-Fritsch, “Franciscan Art.” 27 Butters, Governors and Government.

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By recovering the strategies by which the Franciscan friars self-consciously constructed their pilgrimage site within particular local traditions, as well as those across the Mediterranean, this chapter emphasizes how somaesthetic cultivation at San Vivaldo was connected to the construction of political communities. Through their participatory performance in the immersive artistic installations of San Vivaldo, pilgrims enacted a particularly salient form of meaning making that contributed to the authentication of the site and the production of knowledge. When the Medici returned to power in Florence and Leo X assumed the papal throne in 1513, San Vivaldo became linked to the Medici in its patronage and assumed its fully legitimated form as a Holy Land experience.

Materializing the Holy Land Experience By 1516, the first phase of the Franciscan campus was complete.28 Although only seventeen of the original thirty-four sites remain extant (and several of these have sustained significant renovations), archaeological and archival evidence allows for the reconstruction of the original program of San Vivaldo in the early sixteenth century.29 Thirty-two of the original sites were located inside of a cintura, a wall sponsored by the Salviati family of Florence and controlled by the Franciscan friars, that encompassed the area designated as “Jerusalem.”30 On the south side, Mount Zion contained chapels of the Last Supper, Pentecost, and Saint Thomas, as well as the Tomb of David (Fig. 44). Sites representing the Houses of Caiphas and Annas, as well as a Chapel to James, were also located on this side of the Franciscan campus. In the northwest corner, the Holy Sepulcher crowned Mount Calvary, which also included sites dedicated to the Crucifixion, Noli Me Tangere, and the Prison of Christ, with a chapel dedicated to Saint Veronica located along the stairs nearby (Fig. 43). Also on the north side, in the central region, were located the structures dedicated to the so-called Madonna dello Spasimo (Fainting Madonna) and the House of Pilate (Fig. 45). A small hill to the northeast designated the Mount of Olives and featured a structure dedicated to the Ascension of Christ (Fig. 46). Further devotional sites were arranged along the long slope and into the forested valley beneath this mount, although the form and function of these places is relatively unknown since little to no material remains are extant. Outside the cintura, in the far southwest region of the Franciscan campus, the church represented the holy city of Bethlehem (Fig. 47). It was designated as the “Ecclesia presepii” and contained the Chapel of the Nativity (Fig. 48). 28 Cronaca, fol. 5v; Ghilardi, “Sulle Cappelle,” 1-26; and Gualdo, “La Lettera,” 121-128. 29 Renovations on the site began as early as 1648; Cronaca, fol. 13v. 30 The remaining two sites represented non-Jerusalem sites of Bethlehem and Jericho.

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Figure 44. Architectural structure representing “Mount Zion” in the south-central region of the San Vivaldo campus (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

While later pilgrimage traditions emphasized the notion of “walking in the footsteps of Christ” by performing stations of the cross according to the Christological narrative or in alignment with meditative practices such as the Meditationes vitae Christi, early sixteenth-century pilgrims at San Vivaldo walked in the footsteps of their

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 45. Architectural structures located in the north-central region of the San Vivaldo campus, including the House of Pilate (center), Madonna dello Spasimo (far right) and the House of Veronica (back left center) (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

pilgrim counterparts in the Holy Land.31 That is to say, pilgrims visited the holy places at San Vivaldo in the same order as they did in Jersualem. As Nine Miedema has described, Holy Land pilgrimage resembled “a guided tour as known from modern mass tourism.”32 The Franciscan friars in charge of these tours designed the itineraries according to a strict topographical sequence that presented the holy sites according to their geographical configuration throughout the city, which was replete with competing architectural layers of Israelite, Roman, Christian Crusader, and Muslim histories.33 Due to the alleged dangers of visiting the Holy Land while 31 Pacciani and Vannini, La ‘Gerusalemme’, 27-32; Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, 131. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the Franciscans altered the original sequence of sites experienced along the path to more clearly articulate their Counter-Reformation aims. Through the incorporation of new architectural buildings and deletions of others, the Counter-Reformation interventions imposed a spatial, as well as narrative, order onto the experience. 32 Miedema, “Following in the Footsteps,” 79. This point was made in an earlier study by Peters, Jerusalem, 437. 33 Many pilgrims experienced “a certain disappointment at the lack of liberty and at the brevity of their stay in the Holy Land.” Miedema, “Following in the Footsteps,” 79.

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Figure 46. Architectural structure representing the Ascension of Christ located on the “Mount of Olives” in the north-eastern region of the San Vivaldo campus (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

under Muslim control, pilgrims were forbidden to deviate from the Franciscan itinerary while they were in Jerusalem and were not allowed to visit sites on their own.34 The Holy Land itinerary was retained at San Vivaldo to enable pilgrims to 34 On the perceived dangers of the Holy Land as a pilgrimage destination at the end of the fifteenth century, see Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings, 222-223; Peters, Jerusalem, 431.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 47. Church of the Assumption of the Madonna and of Saint Francis, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

experience the sacred sites in the approximate manner as their counterparts in Jerusalem.35 Yet, the founding friars did not design San Vivaldo as a slavish imitation of the Holy Land but rather as an improved version of the places there. By constructing a pilgrimage site ex novo, the Frati Minori were able to streamline the built environment and only highlight sacred sites that were essential for an exclusively Christian audience.36 Moreover, without the pervasive presence of Muslims who occupied the real Holy Land in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Franciscans at San Vivaldo were able to retain complete control over the pilgrimage site. They determined how the physical fabric of the convent and its surrounding grounds were to be constructed and who had access and when. The design of San Vivaldo offered to pilgrims simultaneous macro- and microscopic views of the Holy Land.37 On the one hand, the small scale of the Franciscan campus allowed for a comprehensive understanding of the topography of the 35 Modern pilgrims to San Vivaldo today are still subjected to these same rules: one cannot visit the sites without a Franciscan guide. The sequence of visitation, however, has changed dramatically, as has the mode of visitation. Pilgrims are no longer encouraged to “perform Jerusalem” they once did in the sixteenth century. 36 Wharton, Selling Jerusalem. 37 The reference to comprehensive-microscopic vision is a conscious play on Erwin Panofsky’s description of the visual strategy of Jan van Eyck, which he considers telescopic-microscopic; Panofsky, Early

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Figure 48. Benedetto Buglioni, Nativity, c. 1505, Chapel of the Nativity, Church of the Assumption of the Madonna and of Saint Francis, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Christian landscape. To look upon San Vivaldo was akin to looking at the Jerusalem depicted in late fifteenth-century maps, such as the Cosmographia Ptolemaei (MS Lat. 4802) located in the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, which portrayed the city as neatly encased by walls and highlighted its Christian sites as independent and prominent structures throughout the urban landscape.38 Unburdened by the physical Netherlandish Painting. Peter Cannon Brooks called San Vivaldo a “reproduction in miniature of the sacred zones of Jerusalem; Cannon Brooks, “The Sculptural Complexes,” 274. 38 The manuscript was illustrated by Pietro del Massaio in the 1480s.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

reality of the holy city, the Franciscan campus, like the map, allowed pilgrims to have clear overview of the holy places. At the same time, pilgrims at San Vivaldo engaged with the luoghi santi in intimate and multi-sensorial ways that offered microscopic views. All of the decorated holy places were constructed to foster mindful self-awareness in relation to the built environment. The physical and mental emplacement of pilgrims within the devotional scenarios at San Vivaldo ensured the personalization of their experiences of the holy past and holy places. Pilgrims replicated and, in many instances expanded upon, the movements of pilgrims at the real sites in Jerusalem. In this way, the pilgrim to the New Jersualem at San Vivaldo became a kind of avatar of the pilgrim to the Old Jerusalem. Yet, just as in today’s computing culture, in which virtual worlds allow for the introduction of streamlined experiences and idealized environments, the New Jerusalem at San Vivaldo sought to improve the pilgrimage experience. The Franciscan friars at San Vivaldo used the natural environment to enhance pilgrims’ experience of the built environment, and adapted the aesthetic and design of the holy places to heighten somatic and affective engagement. The lush forest of the Camporeana, fundamentally different than the arid climate and landscape of Jerusalem, and the sub-Alpine region of Varallo, offered a distinct contemplative frame for devotional visitations and was incorporated into the physical fabric of the pilgrim’s experience. The canopies of trees that encased the Franciscan campus acted as natural shelter for pilgrim visitors. In the warmest summer months, they cooled the air and provided relief for travelers, while in the winter they created barriers for the entry of chilling winds into the area. Throughout the entire territory, the sounds of nature filled the air with the gentle murmuring of the river and the songs of birds nesting in the trees, while the clean air of the countryside and the sparkling light of the sun filtered through the leaves of the trees overhead to the path underfoot. Making pilgrimage through such tranquil landscape fostered body-mind awareness, as noises from both within and outside of the body contributed to the cacophony of sounds of the immediate environment. Pilgrims to the real Holy Land often confronted landscapes that had been radically altered from their Biblical descriptions.39 Since dusty voids frequently inhabited the places where Christ and the Apostles once lived, the Franciscan custodians leading pilgrimage tours in the Holy Land recited histories and prayers to verbally explicate the site and to excite the pilgrim’s active imagination. As Georgia Frank has examined, pilgrims used the “eye of faith,” triggered by a glimpse of the physical place of a Biblical event, to be transformed “into a spectator at, perhaps even a participant in, an event from the Biblical past.”40 This mode of viewing inspired 39 Frank, “The Pilgrim’s Gaze,” 98-115. 40 Frank, “The Pilgrim’s Gaze,” 100.

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what Frank has called “lingering vision,” a prolonged visual engagement with the authentic space that allowed for a personalized, if imagined, recollection of the event. 41 Further engagement was offered through the strategic touching of dirt, images, or inscriptions that were attached to the physical site and could afford some form of tactile transfer of the real thing to the pilgrim. For those pilgrims who understood vision itself as a form of touching, the act of looking itself also “touched” the Biblical past through the pilgrim’s gaze. 42 Pilgrims at San Vivaldo were also encouraged to participate in a form of lingering vision, but instead of voids, the Franciscan friars designed the campus to be filled with “material stuff.”43 Sites in Jerusalem that, out of necessity, featured the absence of Christ’s body, above all at the Holy Sepulcher and Mount Calvary, were featured at San Vivaldo with life-sized sculptures that allowed pilgrims to touch and behold him in his corporeal form. The incarnational insistence of the artistic program aligned with the devotional goals of the Franciscans, who wanted to attain a physical and mental union with Christ. The material visualization of Christ’s body in the works of art at San Vivaldo provided a means by which they guided the pilgrims to somaesthetically engage with the powerful events of his life and death. Pilgrims were offered multiple sensory strategies by which to bodily and mentally occupy the space and time of Christ and the saints. The sites that marked places of encounter between Christ and his disciples after his resurrection, including luoghi santi dedicated to the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene (Noli me tangere), the three Maries (now missing), Thomas and the disciples (Doubting Thomas), the seven disciples at the Sea of Galilee (now missing), James (Chapel of James), and again to the disciples during his ascension into heaven (Ascension of Christ), were particularly designed to foster somaesthetic experiences that heightened awareness of the pilgrim as a participant in the event, not merely an observer or mental conjurer. 44

Somaesthetic Fashioning and Affective Devotion According to the early sixteenth-century program at San Vivaldo, Franciscan guides would begin their itinerary on the northwest corner of the campus at the luogo santo 41 Frank, “The Pilgrim’s Gaze,” 101. 42 Hahn, “Visio Dei,” 169-196; Camille, “Before the Gaze,” 197-223; Hahn, “Vision,” 44-64; Caviness, “Reception of Images,” 65-86. 43 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 29ff. 44 This focus on resurrected corporeality distinguishes San Vivaldo from later Counter-Reformation holy land itineraries, such as that found at Varallo, and via Crucis experiences; Göttler, “Temptation of the Senses,” 393-454.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 49. View of the Holy Sepulcher from Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch

representing the Holy Sepulcher (Fig. 49). In Jerusalem, the aedicula was located inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which also included the prison of Christ, the Chapel of the Magdalene and the chapel that held the summit of the rock of Calvary. Thus, pilgrims inside the church would visit the chapels and perform devotion

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at their altars in a sequence. Although not housed under a singular roof as at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the sites of San Vivaldo are arranged in topomimetic relationship to its disposition: the site representing the Holy Sepulcher is located adjacent to that representing the Noli me tangere, and diagonal from the Prison of Christ and across from Mount Calvary.45 The replication of the spatial praxis of Holy Land monuments was a strategy to underscore the authentic practices promoted under the Franciscan guardians at San Vivaldo. Despite the topographical similarities, the experience of the real Holy Sepulcher was vastly different than the one offered at San Vivaldo. Pilgrims could only visit the church in Jerusalem as part of an organized group and a Franciscan guide would negotiate their entrance with the Muslim guards in control of the site. It was common for pilgrims, once they paid their entrance fees, to remain locked inside the church overnight. 46 On certain feasts, pilgrims would be locked into the church for several days at a time. This prolonged visitation often proved to be a distraction from the holy experience as opposed to a benefit, since pilgrims of many different religious persuasions were locked into the relatively small confines of the church at once, including non-believers who set up bazaars on the inside of the now-locked doors. During their stay within the church, pilgrims maintained contact with their assigned Franciscan guardians, who gave them rules of behavior to follow, including warnings to not shove or push others, deface property, traffic with Eastern merchants, nor waste the evening eating or drinking. 47 That such warnings were given is an indication of the pervasiveness of such conduct. Indeed, travel writers such as Felix Fabri made a point to give detailed accounts of common bad behaviors that occurred inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to highlight the difficulties of performing spiritual devotion in the holy city in the late fifteenth century. 48 The Holy Sepulcher at San Vivaldo replicated the basic spatial layout of the Jerusalem original but was designed to improve upon the “real thing” by providing additional affective scaffolding for the pilgrim through subtle deviations in its architectural form and more explicit changes in its decoration. Located on the plateau representing the burial grounds beyond Mount Calvary, the Holy Sepulcher was designed in spatial emulation of the aedicula in Jerusalem. Two carefully constructed thresholds leading to the tomb were intended to draw attention to the pilgrim’s proprioception, that is, a heightened sense of the self in relation to the immediate environs of the luogo santo. 45 A superimposition of the plan of the Church of the Sepulcher and the northwest corner of San Vivaldo’s campus shows these sites in topomimetic relation to one another. 46 Poggibonsi, Fra Niccolo Poggibonsi, 16. 47 Peters, Jerusalem, 442-443. 48 Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings, I, 106ff.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 50. Author and Franciscan guide in vestibule of the Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

The first threshold the led the pilgrim into a relatively shallow, vaulted vestibule (Fig. 50). 49 The small room offered a quiet, cool space for the mindful focus on Christ’s sacrifice. Painted terracotta sculptures of Saint Helen and the Magdalene situated on the left and right sides of the vestibule provided points of visual foci for the entrance and exit of the pilgrim.50 The Magdalene marked the arrival of the pilgrim to the tomb. Like the pilgrim, she came to the tomb to tend to the body of Christ and thus guided the way to the next threshold of the small building. As at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the aedicula of San Vivaldo featured a second, much smaller door that led to the tomb. The door at San Vivaldo measures slightly less than three and a half feet high, thus pilgrims would have had to shuffle through the door with deeply bent knees, or even to crawl (Fig. 51). The self-conscious compression of the pilgrim inside the intimate setting of the sacred place was a performative gesture that signaled humility in the presence of sacred power. Being brought low in such a bodily manner effectively forced the pilgrim into a form of prostration before Christ’s sepulcher. 49 Matthew 28: 2-3. 50 Lorenzi, Agnolo di Polo, 45.

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Figure 51. View of the threshold to the Tomb of Christ, with author and Franciscan guide inside, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

It also created the somaesthetic conditions for the production of meraviglia, or wonder, for once pilgrims made their way over the threshold and had the space to stand again, they were positioned as eye-witnesses to the startling revelation of Christ’s presence in the tomb (Plate 15). Unlike the Biblical precedent of Mary Magdalene who was met with a vacant tomb, or the Jerusalem pilgrim who venerated a stone encased by marble slabs, the pilgrim at San Vivaldo was offered a life-sized terracotta sculpture of the Dead Christ within the tomb.51 Traces of paint on the hands and beard of the sculpture suggest that it was once veristically polychromed (Fig. 52). A wall painting of the Deposition located in a lunette above the tomb positioned the pilgrim as a witness to Christ’s burial (Plate 16). The composition of the painting echoes the terracotta curve of its frame. Christ’s followers gather around his corpse and behold his body before it is placed within the tomb below. The Virgin Mary, dressed in red robes and a black mantel, extends her hands outwards toward her 51 Lorenzi, Agnolo di Polo, 45. For a detailed description of the tomb in Jerusalem in the late fourteenth century, see von Suchem, Description of the Holy Land, 453. Pilgrims who traveled to the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem understood that what they encountered was an amalgamation of interventions; see Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings I, 412-415.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 52. Detail of Dead Christ, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

son, while the other men and women create a semi-circle around her, which the real beholder before the image completed with his or her physical presence. Bright red circles of blood mark the wounds on Christ’s hands and feet, and the wound in his side opens ever so slightly. Like the Apostle Thomas, who doubted his eyes and needed tactile confirmation of Christ’s death and resurrection, so too was the pilgrim given access to the physical proof of Christ’s bodily suffering.52 The original lighting conditions of the Holy Sepulcher at San Vivaldo required the use of wax candles and hand-held torches to properly venerate the holy images inside its spaces.53 In such flickering light, the redness of the blood issuing from the wounds on Christ’s hands, feet and side in both the painted image and on his sculpted body in the tomb itself signaled areas for the pilgrim to touch and behold. 52 See Terry-Fritsch, “Proof in Pierced Flesh,” 15-37. 53 There is a small ocular window in the side of the building that allows for some natural light to enter into the room, although it is unknown if this opening was constructed concurrently with the building. Regardless, wax candles as well as hand-held torches would have been common practice. At the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Christian pilgrims considered it imperative to have continual lamps burning over the tomb as a sign of respect; von Suchem, Description of the Holy Land, 440. Eugenio Battisti bases his analysis of the sepulcher sculpture on torch lighting conditions; see Battisti, “I Presupposti Culturali,” 13-18.

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One can infer from documented accounts of late medieval and early modern Italian interactions with similar sculptures of the Dead Christ that certain pilgrims may have approached the tomb sculpture at San Vivaldo in intimate ways.54 The crucified body of Christ was an offering to his devotees: “the head bowed to kiss, the arms outspread to embrace, the hands pierced to pour out gifts, the feet held fast to remain with us, and the body full extended to spend Himself wholly for us.”55 Christ’s docile face, once vibrantly painted to simulate the violence rendered onto him by the crown of thorns, served as a site for devotional kisses. Other accounts suggest that a full-body embrace—even crawling into the tomb with Christ—was not unheard of. By emphasizing the human element of Christ’s Passion, his literal body as grasped by a mourner at his tomb, the Holy Sepulcher at San Vivaldo incorporated “praesentia” into the pilgrim experience.56 Through devotion to the simulated presence of the divine in the form of the sculpture, pilgrims were encouraged to manipulate his material body as a means of connecting and identifying with his sacred body.57 Crawling out of the tomb and into the vestibule, the pilgrim was confronted with a sculpture of Saint Helen, who rediscovered the site of the True Cross in the Holy Land and who is honored with a chapel inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Her presence in sculpted form in the vestibule of San Vivaldo’s sepulcher both acknowledged her rightful place among the venerated sites associated with the Holy Sepulcher and signaled the next place on the pilgrim itinerary: Mount Calvary, located directly beyond the exit (Fig. 53).58 The crucifixion of Christ on Mount Calvary was commemorated at San Vivaldo in a multi-level architectural space that featured two interconnected multi-media installations (Fig. 54). Pilgrims climbed a set of stairs on the north side of the building to enter into a small square room featuring a monumental representation of the Crucifixion (Plate 17).59 Frescoes and polychromed terracotta sculpture cover the east wall from floor to ceiling, and feature life-sized sculptures of Christ and the two thieves raised upon their respective wooden crosses. Soldiers on horseback and 54 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 22-23. On the further use of Christ f igures in Passion dramas and human interaction with them, see Haastrup, “Medieval Props,” 138-146; Krause, “Imago Ascensionis,” 281-353; Sticca, “Italy,” 169-188; Jung, Phenomenal Lives; Kopania, Animated Sculptures. 55 de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 212. 56 On the notion of praesentia, see Brown, Cult of the Saints. 57 Newbigin, “The Word Made Flesh,” 361-375. Cesare Molinari has commented that the effectiveness of the dramas to form a personal connection with their audiences is in large part related to the amount of realism of the sets; Molinari, Theater Through the Ages, 108. 58 The Chapel of Saint Helen in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was popularly associated with cures of headaches and toothaches and thus inspired ritual devotions such as the stuffing of shaved beards in between the rocks and stones of the chapel as well as the defacement of architecture; see Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings I, 363. 59 Lorenzi, Agnolo di Polo, 45.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 53. View crawling out of the inner chamber into the vestibule, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Figure 54. View of Mount Calvary from the Holy Sepulchre, San Vivaldo. The stairs on the left lead to the Crucifixion, while the entrance located on the right leads to the Stabat Mater (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

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Figure 55. Floor socket hole, Crucifixion, Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

other spectators crowd into the foreground of the painted scene on the wall behind the three crosses and bring the pilgrim into the immediate scenario of Christ’s crucifixion. Polychromed to simulate real flesh, the bodies of the condemned vividly depict the agony of death upon the cross. Bright red drops of blood cover Christ’s chest and forehead, and stream from the nails pounded into his hands and feet. His head tilts gently downward to his right and gazes outward into the direct line of sight of the pilgrim. Below Christ, a small hole in the floor simulates the socket-hole that once held Christ’s cross at the site of Calvary in Jerusalem (Fig. 55). Pilgrims to the site in the real Holy Land would lie prostrate on the ground and place their entire faces inside the hole, including eyes and mouth. Accounts describe how pilgrims would breathe the scent emanating from the socket—allegedly a “sweet scent” that provided immediate refreshment—and then would extend his or her arms and hands into the hole to the bottom of it. If the pilgrim performed these actions, it was rewarded with a plenary indulgence.60 At San Vivaldo, where a physical cross is present in the massive terracotta ensemble before the pilgrim’s eyes, the socket-hole was a self-conscious duplication of the cross so as to allow the pilgrim to emulate the 60 Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings I, 365

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Figure 56. View of Christ from floor, Crucifixion, Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

actions of pilgrims to the real Calvary. Yet, once again, their experience was also enhanced: whereas pilgrims at Mount Calvary in Jerusalem were forced to conjure mental images of an absent Christ on the absent cross, pilgrims at San Vivaldo were immersed into a full media experience of the Crucifixion. From their position on the floor looking upwards, the pilgrim’s gaze directly met Christ’s and thereby fostered a prosthetic experience of bearing witness to the event (Fig. 56). The pilgrim was brought literally into the scene and was thrust into a participatory role in the historical drama of Christ’s death. Beyond the positioning of the pilgrim as a witness to Christ’s death, the artistic program at San Vivaldo also offered the opportunity to experience the suffering of the Madonna in her own role as a witness to the event. A second viewing position was offered to pilgrims at San Vivaldo’s Mount Calvary from an entrance on the opposite side of the building. Here the pilgrim entered into a constricted space that featured a relief sculpture of the Virgin Mary, John, Mary Magdalene and other women positioned beneath a crack in the floor that opens upward to the scene of the Crucifixion (Plate 18). Mary looks away from the scene and weaves her fingers together in prayer, while the other figures, depicted in extreme foreshortening, gaze upward to Christ’s body on the cross (Fig. 57). Standing in the shallow space of the niche and looking up at the scene of death hovering above, the pilgrim was offered

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Figure 57. Stabat Mater, Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

the opportunity to formulate an empathetic relationship with the Virgin Mother and Christ’s followers, seeing through their eyes the horror of the Crucifixion. Beneath the cross at Mount Cavalry, just as at the tomb of Christ at the Holy Sepulcher, the pilgrim literally was postured affectively in relation to the artistic program. Christ’s bloodied body, displayed on the cross above the pilgrim, is set at a distance from the pilgrim. His body is framed by the opening in the ceiling, and, in this space of beholding, the viewer is transformed into an empathetic beholder.61 As distinct from a passive viewer or observer, a beholder holds and is literally held by the object of his or her attention. The binding of the viewer with what is viewed is what distinguishes this form of viewing from more casual or less-intentioned acts of observing or spectating. W.J.T. Mitchell has theorized that “the beholder is the embodied spectator, but not, perhaps, simply immersed in the spectacle, carried along by it (as in cinema), but holding the image at arm’s length so as to contemplate it, and allow its impression to be retained, to be held in memory.”62 Embracing Mary’s sorrowful compassion, the pilgrim sees through her eyes the horror of Christ’s death, feeling not only his pain but that of his Virgin Mother. The mediation of this empathetic bond is the artistic program, which both guides the pilgrim’s body into a physical place with a particular point of view and provides 61 Bino, “I Feel You.” 62 Mitchell, “Foreword,” xvii.

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the material prompts for aesthetic engagement. The function is not only expository but emotive. While many scholars have noted the theatricality of pilgrim experience at San Vivaldo, and the other sacri monti, the viewing conditions and performative practices of pilgrims to the site may also be compared fruitfully with contemporary twenty-first century viewer experiences of installation art.63 As Claire Bishop has described, “installation art creates a situation into which the viewer physically enters, and… addresses the viewer directly as a literal presence in the space. Rather than imagining a viewer as a pair of disembodied eyes that survey the work from a distance, installation art presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell, and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision.”64 Like installation art, the sensory immediacy and required physical participation of San Vivaldo’s artistic program served to activate the pilgrim viewers, as they were literally enfolded into the work. As opposed to the viewer of a Renaissance perspective painting who was offered a fixed vantage point that placed him or her in spectral dominance over the world depicted, the pilgrims at San Vivaldo were offered multiple points-of-view that allowed them to formulate diverse impressions of the artistic program and his or her place within it.65 The activation and decentering of the pilgrim was “emancipatory, as it [was] analogous to the viewer’s engagement in the world.”66 It allowed for deep engagement with the artistic program by actively constructing spatial and sensory knowledge through memories that were worn on the body. Experiencing the Biblical events first-hand and from multiple points of view de-centered pilgrims in relation to the artistic program at San Vivaldo and thereby empowered them to engage in the scenarios in personalized ways. By matching the bodily configuration of Christ’s followers within environments that visualized and reconstructed the sacred past, pilgrims to San Vivaldo formulated “prosthetic memories” of events and places that they never witnessed nor experienced firsthand. As Alison Landsberg has discussed, prosthetic memories are intimate, privatized versions of past events that one has not lived through, yet which are formed through first-hand experiences.67 Prosthetic memories “are not ‘authentic’ or natural, but rather are derived from engagement with mediated representations…like an artificial limb, these memories are actually worn on the body; these are sensuous memories.”68 In the creation of prosthetic memory, neither 63 See, for example, Ventrone, “I Sacri Monti,” 145-162. Medina Lasansky has discussed the kinesthetic experience of pilgrims at the sacri monti as an “early form of performance art”; Lasansky, “Body Elision,” 249-273. 64 Bishop, Installation Art, 11. 65 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form. 66 Bishop, Installation Art, 11-13. 67 Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory,” 144-161; Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory.. 68 Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory,” 149.

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a complete nor accurate portrayal of the past is necessary. Rather, most important is the participant’s body-mind engagement with scenarios that have the potential to construct an affective relationship to the past event. By replicating the movements of both Biblical and contemporary counterparts in the Holy Land, pilgrims to San Vivaldo were offered a means to inhabit both the sacred past as well as the present.69 The duplication of behavior at San Vivaldo connected its pilgrims to the larger Christian community who traveled to and prayed in the Holy Land, binding them together in their devotional aspirations and practices. Yet the material insistence on Christ’s physical presence in these spaces—his bloodied body on the cross and in the tomb—offered the pilgrims to San Vivaldo performative possibilities that went beyond the “real thing.” On the north side of the campus, in the area designated as the House of Pilate, the pilgrim was brought into a different form of participatory engagement with the built environment and its decoration. Here the pilgrim was presented with the powerful Ecce Homo (or Behold the Man) narrative in which Pilate presents Christ to the populace and they respond with calls to “Crucify him!” The representation of the scene takes place across two sculptural groups located on the exterior of the buildings designated as the House of Pilate and that which today holds the monumental relief of the Carrying of the Cross (Fig. 58).70 A niche on the exterior of the House of Pilate contains the polychrome terracotta relief of the Ecce Homo, featuring a stripped-down Christ presented to the viewer by Roman guards (Plate 19). Located diagonally opposite, a second niche contains the relief of the Crucifige, a representation of the crowd of Jews, Romans, and followers of Christ who passed judgment on him (Plate 20). The two sculptural groups were designed to communicate across space with the assistance of the pilgrim, whose body was the dynamic conduit for the scene.71 As the Franciscan guide accompanying the pilgrim would recount, on the one side, Pilate sits in red robes and looks out in a speaking pose as he asks the crowd to “Behold the man!” The real beholder in front of the relief image was confronted with bright red blood streaming down Christ’s forehead from wounds inflicted by the crown of thorns (Fig. 59). 69 This active mode of viewing is not to be confused with the Via Crucis, a form of participatory devotion developed in the seventeenth-century that encouraged pilgrims to walk in the footsteps of Christ and to attempt to feel as he felt during the narrative sequence of the Passion. San Salvatore al Monte in Florence was one of the first Franciscan houses to develop this mode of devotion in Tuscany during the seventeenth century, and, subsequently, San Vivaldo’s decorative program and pilgrim itinerary changed to correspond to the Via Crucis model; see Pacciani and Vannini, La ‘Gerusalemme,’ 59; and Pisani, La Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, 176. 70 The Carrying of the Cross is not included in the original list of holy sites at San Vivaldo in Leo X’s bull. The Cronaca lists its patron as Giovanni Bandini; fol. 11v-13r. 71 Shearman, Only Connect, 40; Cannon Brooks, “The Sculptural Complexes,” 277; Lasansky, “Body Elision,” 269.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 58. View of pilgrims encountering the Ecce Homo and Crucifige reliefs, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Figure 59. Detail of Christ, Ecce Homo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

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Figure 60. Detail of Mary and John, Crucifige (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Christ averts his eyes and gently clasps his hands in front of him. As recorded in John 19:5, Pilate found no fault in Christ and was prepared to release him. Judgment rested with the crowd of chief priests and officers who looked upon him. Across the way, various communities in painted terracotta react to Christ’s body. While the chief priests argue points of law in the left foreground, hostile crowds of men cry out in condemnation of Christ in the background. In the lower right corner, Mary and John look on the scene in distress (Fig. 60). The pilgrim, standing between Christ and his captors on the one hand and the crowd of judgers on the other, was forced into a position of judgment (Fig. 61). The terracotta reliefs used in the Ecce Homo and Crucifige are significantly smaller than the life-sized three-dimensional sculptures featured in the previous luoghi santi of the Holy Sepulcher, Crucifixion, and Stabbat mater. Beyond size and scale, the description of physiognomy is less precise and there is little to no attempt to represent the imagined space of the relief as a continuation of the real space of the viewer. The viewer does not “read in,” as Jas Elsner has described the viewing contexts for Roman narrative painting.72 Rather, the two reliefs, set diagonally 72 Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer, 23-39.

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Figure 61. Pilgrim placed in judgment between the Ecce Homo and Crucifige reliefs, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

across space, create a dynamic four-dimensional space into which the pilgrim is immersed.73 Quite literally, the viewer “is in.” The composition of the Ecce Homo and Crucifige program encouraged physical movement back and forth between the two reliefs. Filling the spatial gap between them, pilgrims once again were decentered from a fixed position and instead were offered multiple perspectives from which to view and experience the works. By physically entering into the composition of the work, the pilgrim became somaesthetically attuned to the various potentialities of the scenario before him or her. The vantage of the pilgrim, at eye-level with the figures, enabled the close scrutiny of expressions on each of the faces, from Christ’s humility and acceptance of his fate to Pilate’s doubts, the chief priests’ rage, and Mary and John’s sadness. The immersive setup of the installation and pilgrims’ intimate access to the two reliefs encouraged a form of prolonged looking that led to empathetic emplacement. At the base of the Ecce Homo, a statue of Barabbas—the notorious prisoner who would be set free in place of Christ—once stood in an arched niche. Accounts describe how some pilgrims picked up stones and threw them at the statue in a 73 Petrucci, Luca della Robbia, 303; Lorenzi, Agnolo di Polo, 45.

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form of devotional retribution.74 This physical aggression had precedent neither in the Biblical narrative nor in contemporary pilgrimage experience in Jerusalem itself. Such deviations from the Jerusalem itinerary signal how the artistic program at San Vivaldo crafted scenarios of engagement that allowed pilgrims to supersede the original and transform the narrative. Through their spontaneous actions and purposeful gestures, they entered into sacred time and personalized it. Several of the luoghi santi at San Vivaldo completely fabricated new forms of pilgrimage experiences by offering representations of sites that were inaccessible in the real Holy Land. In a form of what Medina Lasansky has called “archaeological recovery,” the Franciscans supplied architectural sites where in Jerusalem either there were none or were inaccessible to Christian pilgrims.75 For example, the House of Annas and the House of Caiphas at San Vivaldo, located next to the cintura and in close proximity to Mount Zion, recreated sites in Jerusalem that were no longer extant (Fig. 62).76 The pilgrims’ practice of these spaces, even if only in a form of simulation, allowed for their continued existence in the memories of Christian devotees and drew attention to San Vivaldo as a site that superceded the material and political reality of the Holy Land. Along the eastern side of the Franciscan campus, the Valley of Jehosophat once featured a number of now lost luoghi santi that were marked in numerous ways, but not necessarily through independent architectural structures (Fig. 63). Referred variously in the documents as “locus” “cella,” “caverna,” “ecclesia,” and “sepulchrum,” these sites were dedicated to the Capture of Christ, the Sepulcher of the Virgin and the place where Christ left the disciples and were interspersed throughout the lush green space extending from the Chapel of the Ascension on the raised area designated as Mount Olive down the mountain and into the valley along the river. At San Vivaldo, it is unclear what materials or decoration accompanied these sites since they are no longer extant. In Jerusalem, these sites were marked primarily through natural materials, including rocks on the side of the road and other forms of road markers. If the Franciscans followed the Jerusalem precedents, these sites at San Vivaldo would have offered performative potential to connect the pilgrim to the natural landscape of Tuscany in powerful ways. Immersed in the rich sensorial environment of the Franciscan landscape, pilgrims might stop to touch a rock or runs their fingertips through the dirt in emulation of actions performed in the Holy 74 Wharton, Selling Jerusalem, 130. The niche is now empty and covered by a grate. 75 Lasansky, “Body Elision,” 267. 76 In the late fifteenth century, these sites in Jerusalem were commemorated by churches officiated by Armenian monks. While the church of SS. Angeli, located near the walls in the direction of Mount Zion, marked the site of the House of Annas, the House of Caiphas held special significance at the end of the fifteenth century in Jerusalem for its possession of part of the stone that once covered the tomb of Christ. The stone was cut into two: one part was placed in the Holy Sepulchre while the other was used as an altar in the House of Caiphas; Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings, I, 319.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 62. View of the House of Annas, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Land. The tactile connection with the materials of the landscape through guided prayer connected the sensorial imagination of the pilgrim to the sacred site. In addition, however, further material prompts—in the form of terracotta reliefs or sculptures—would have enlivened Biblical history in tangible ways.

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Figure 63. View of former Valley of Jehosophat, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

The luogo santo representing Mount Zion, located on the western edge of the Franciscan campus, was designed to recover and surpass its Jerusalem counterpart, Santa Maria del Monte Sion, a fourteenth-century Franciscan monastery that was believed to house the cenacolo in which Christ and apostles ate the Last Supper.77 Although pilgrims were allowed access to the monastery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, even during the Muslim occupation of the city, the site increasingly became a contested space in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries due to its connection to the tomb of David, believed to have been located beneath the cenacolo. By 1524, the cenacolo was converted to a mosque and therefore was no longer accessible to Christians. By 1551, the Franciscans were removed definitively from the site.78 Bearing this political reality in mind, the Franciscans at San Vivaldo designed their version of Mount Zion as an open site with liberal access to the Christian pilgrims. The mount is signified through a monumental building, which contained multiple holy sites over two floors, including areas honoring the Washing of the Feet, the Last Supper, the Pentecost, the Doubting Thomas, and the tomb of

77 Pacciani, “Un Brano,” 129-139. 78 Pacciani, “Un Brano,” 131.

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Figure 64. View of the Cenacolo, Mount Zion, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

David (Fig. 64).79 These contemplative spaces, replete with large-scale terracotta reliefs of the Biblical episodes, provided a means for pilgrims to regain control over 79 For discussions on the attribution of the terracotta sculptures, see Pacciani and Vannini, La ‘Gerusalemme,’ 49-59; Lorenzi, Agnolo di Polo, 45.

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Figure 65. Exterior view of the Oratory of the Madonna dello Spasimo, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

the Holy Land and its holy monuments by performing devotion openly, onsite, and integrated within a comprehensive itinerary. Likewise, the oratory of the Madonna dello Spasimo at San Vivaldo, which marked the place where Mary fainted after she witnessed her son bearing the cross, bore little aesthetic relation to the Holy Land site, which was in ruins by the early sixteenth-century (Fig. 65). An elegant Renaissance portico framed the entrance to the oratory at San Vivaldo and led pilgrims into an ample barrel-vaulted space configured for group meditation and liturgy.80 Pilgrims’ attention was directed immediately to the altarpiece of the Madonna dello Spasimo adorning the raised altar at the far end of the room (Fig. 66). Variously attributed to Giovanni della Robbia, his workshop, Benedetto di Giovanni Buglioni, and Agnolo di Polo, the polychrome terracotta relief is one of the most detailed and highly rendered sculptures at San Vivaldo (Plate 21). Related stylistically to Giovanni della Robbia’s Deposition relief, made around the same time for San Salvatore al Monte in Florence, as well as his later Pietà, also made for the convent, the Spasimo relief connects with the visual

80 Pacciani and Vannini, La ‘Gerusalemme,’ 41.

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

Figure 66. Interior view of the Oratory of the Madonna dello Spasimo, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

traditions of its parent convent and compositionally highlights the Franciscans’ particular devotion to the Virgin (Fig. 67). Beginning with Bernard of Clairvaux, theologians promoted Mary’s suffering during the Passion as greater than the physical pain of all of the martyrs. Her compassion (compassio) distinguished her as a co-redeemer alongside Christ.81 The figural group is arranged around the Madonna, who, dressed in a deep red cassock and purple and green robes, has collapsed in the center foreground. Supported by John on her right, the Magdalene on her left, and three women behind her, the Virgin mother’s compassio for her son is registered on her face and revealed through her body. The substitution of the dusty void of the site in Jerusalem with the multi-sensory environment at San Vivaldo for provided a means for Franciscans to foster their pilgrims’ somatic and affective relationship to the place through an embodied connection to Mary.82 Their prayers offered in her honor and memory were amplified and intensified within the echoing chambers of the oratory, filling their ears with her sorrows and glories. 81 von Simpson, “Compassio and Co-redemptio,” 11. 82 Terry-Fritsch, “Franciscan Art.”

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Figure 67. Giovanni della Robbia, Pietà, c. 1528, polychrome terracotta, San Salvatore al Monte, Florence (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

The somaesthetic experiences of pilgrims at the luoghi santi of San Vivaldo fostered powerful connections between sacred time and the contemporary present and the Holy Land and the Franciscan campus. The site replicated the spatial configuration of the primary sacred markers of the terrasancta so that pilgrims at San Vivaldo

Performing Virtual Pilgrimage 

prayed in topomimetic relation to their Christian counterparts in Jerusalem. To further activate the prosthetic body and mind of the pilgrim, viewing at San Vivaldo was constructed as a participatory performance. Pilgrims were invited to enter into architectural environments scattered throughout the “sacred” landscape and to engage their bodies and minds in the activation of the artistic program. Through full bodied sensory exploration—whether crawling through the threshold of Christ’s tomb and embracing his dead body or standing at the center of Christ’s judgment—the pilgrim viewer constructed first-hand experiences related to the Biblical narrative or its contemporary veneration in Jerusalem. In this way, the pilgrim to San Vivaldo was dually transformed into both a Biblical personage (or multiples thereof) as well as a contemporary pilgrim to the Holy Land.

Possessing the New Jerusalem In both its conception and design, the New Jerusalem at San Vivaldo asserted itself as a distinctly Tuscan version of the Holy Land. 83 Since at least the tenth century, there existed a tradition of integrating real or artificial artifacts from the Holy Land into the Tuscan landscape and, especially during the period of intense Western pilgrimage and crusade in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the material presence of Jerusalem in Tuscany increased through the proliferation of relics and replicas. In certain cases, relics from Jerusalem served as foundation stones for cult sites, such as the piece of the Holy Sepulcher brought by two pilgrims to southeastern Tuscany from the Holy Land to found Sansepolcro (trans. Holy Sepulcher). In other cases, relics were brought to extant Tuscan cities as a means of augmenting the sanctity and honor of the place, such as at Pisa where the Camposanto (trans. Holy f ield) next to the cathedral is f illed with earth from Mount Calvary.84 The co-mingling of soils created a literal amalgamation of referent and reference by which Pisa and the Holy Land became one and the same. The New Jerusalem at San Vivaldo was surrounded geographically by multiple evocations of the Old Jerusalem in the form of titular dedications of towns, churches, and monasteries. Throughout the region demarcated by Siena, Florence and Arezzo, churches dedicated to holy land monuments, such as the Holy Sepulcher, the Hospital of Saint John, and the holy city of Jerusalem itself, semantically transformed the Tuscan landscape into a virtual Holy Land. 85 83 Cardini and Vannini, “San Vivaldo,” 11-74; Vannini, “Una Gerusalemme Ricostruita,” 16-19. 84 Ahl, “Camposanto,” 95-122. 85 Other examples include the Church of San Giorsolé in Casale (near Certaldo) as Ecclesia S. Vitii de Yerusalem; Plebes S. Yersalem at San Donnino (between Barberino Val d’Elsa and Certaldo) as the pieve

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Combined with the many material artifacts and relics that were housed throughout the region, San Vivaldo’s location was framed by ground already recognized as connected to the real thing. The construction of San Vivaldo was promoted as a collaborative effort between the Franciscan community and the inhabitants of the geographical region at large. Over the course of the first decade of the sixteenth century, Florentine friars as well as secular volunteers from all the major and minor towns of Tuscany came in huge numbers to the Camporena to realize the new pilgrimage site.86 During his dynamic preaching sessions, Fra Cherubino encouraged attendees to walk to the river Evola after mass to gather stones and wood for the construction of the site.87 As recorded in the Cronaca, nobles walked alongside of commoners to fulfill this sacred duty, and officials and citizens from San Gimingnano, Castelfiorentino, Certaldo, San Miniato, Florence and elsewhere participated.88 Many prestigious families from Florence and the other major cities in surrounding Tuscany comprised the patronage of San Vivaldo. The wealthy Alamanni family from Florence financed the high altar and choir of the church and there arranged for their familial burial chamber.89 Other prominent Florentine families, including the Pitti, Nerli, Bandini, Michelozzi, Segni, Gaddi, and Manelli, and the leading families from all of the major towns of Tuscany, including the Bardi from Vernia, Leccorini from Gambassi, Lambardi from Pisa, Figlinesi from Montaione, Gello of San Miniato, and Fedi from Volterra, sponsored the side chapels of the church as well as the luoghi santi spread throughout the Franciscan campus.90 Like a neighborhood parish that survives through the patronage of its members, San Vivaldo was supported by families from all of the municipalities of the region and thereby created religious bonds between them. These patrons and the many others that followed legitimized the site through their good names and provided a devotional model for their famiglie e amici through their good works. To introduce the new pilgrimage site to the local population, the Franciscans strategically fused the ritual traditions of the new site with extant cult traditions of the area.91 The selection of the Camporena as the site of the New Jerusalem was di San Giovanni Battista in Jerusalem; monastery in Fonte Pintiaria in honor of the Holy Sepulcher and S. Marie site Cellore, and, in Poggibonsi, there was a Hospital of St. John dedicated to Jerusalem. 86 Cronaca, fol. 2v. 87 Cronaca, fol. 2v 88 Cronaca, fol. 2v. 89 On July 31, 1501, M. Piero di Bocatino Alamanni asked the friars to make the chapel (the high altar), which would become the burial place for the Alamanni; Cronaca, fol. 4r. 90 Lasansky has suggested that the Florentine patronage of San Vivaldo offered the opportunity to forge a connection to Crusader history without actual engagement in the historical event; Lasansky, “Body Elision,” 267. 91 Pacciani, “L’Architettura della Chiesa,” 50.

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motivated by the special qualities of the place, which had sacred associations and a wealth of natural splendors, that made it attractive as a pilgrimage site. Already recognized during the Etruscan and Roman periods for its sacrality, this heavily wooded region, dense with chestnut trees and isolated from all worldly developments, came to be associated during the fourteenth century with a local holy figure named Vivaldo Stricchi, a spiritual follower of the Franciscan tertiary Fra Bartolo da San Gimignano.92 While Fra Bartolo was still alive, Vivaldo dedicated himself to attending to the sick in the leper hospital of Cellole of which Fra Bartolo famously belonged.93 After Fra Bartolo’s death in 1300, Vivaldo moved into the Camporena, where he lived in isolation as a hermit using only a hollowed chestnut tree as his home and spent his days in penitential prayer.94 According to legend, locals were alerted to his death on the first of May 1320 by the spontaneous ringing of the bells of the church of San Regolo in nearby Montaione; at the same moment, a hunter found Vivaldo’s corpse within the base of a tree.95 When the Montaionesi heard the news, they processed to the forest and carried Vivaldo back to their city, where they buried him beneath the high altar of the church.96 Almost immediately, miracles were produced, including the cure of the fatally ill, restoration of sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf.97 Vivaldo became an instantaneous cult figure, and flocks of believers descended into the forest to break off bits of wood from the tree in which he died as relics.98 Already by 1325, the tree no longer existed, and thus a small chapel dedicated to “Maria Vergine Santissima e di San Vivaldo” was erected over the site to commemorate his honor. The cult of San Vivaldo expanded quickly throughout the region, and soon the bishopric of Volterra, the communes of San Gimignano and Florence, and the towns of Montaione, Castelfiorentino, and San Miniato, as well as even smaller villages 92 Pisani, La Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, 174. 93 Originally from the noble Pedoni family of San Gimignano, San Bartolo entered the Third Order of Franciscans and attended to the poor, sick and pilgrims in Picchiena, in the commune of San Gimignano. One night, he prayed for sufferance and was rewarded with leprosy for the last twenty years of his life. Buried in Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano under an altar by Benedetto da Maiano, his cult was approved by Pope Alexander VI with a papal bull of 1498. The hospital of Cellole no longer exists, but there still remains a via Cellolese in San Gimignano. See Ghilardi, San Vivaldo, 5-16 and Ghilardi, Ricordo, 12. 94 On his feast day of May 1, the Franciscans honor him as a “uomo di maraviglioso penitenza e sanità.” Ghilardi, Ricordo, 14. 95 Ghilardi, San Vivaldo, 30; Ghilardi, Ricordo, 14; Innocenti, S. Vivaldo. 96 Today the relics of San Vivaldo are held within the church of San Vivaldo itself, in a container allegedly made from the chestnut tree in which he lived and died. 97 Ghilardi, San Vivaldo, 31; Ghilardi, Ricordo, 15. 98 The religious fervor over the cult of San Vivaldo should be seen in context of the flourishing Franciscan sensibility in Tuscany at this time, which included the cult figures of Saint Peter Martyr, Santa Fina, Beato Ciardo, Beato Giovanni Cauli and San Bartolo (San Gimignano), Beata Verdiana (Castelfiorentino), Beata Giulia (Certaldo), Beat Eufrasia (Volterra), among others.

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in the surrounding area, proclaimed their churches as cult sites with relics of the holy hermit.99 In competition with one another for primacy of place within the cult, each of the territories laid claim to the forest of Camporena. As the Cronaca of San Vivaldo reveals, territorial fighting between competing governments over the land rights of the forest made expansion of the cult problematic and, eventually, the sustained hostility led to a collective decline in Vivaldo’s popularity.100 By 1499, when the communities of Montaione and Castelfiorentino—at this time both under Florentine governance—signed over their rights to the area to the Franciscan Order, the cult of San Vivaldo was largely dormant. The Franciscans quickly revived the memory of the hermit and fused it to their mission to ensure local devotion at San Vivaldo. Construction began with the building of the church, which was erected over an extant church dedicated to Santa Maria in Camporeana associated with San Vivaldo since the 1320s.101 The highlight of the groundbreaking ceremony was the translation of a small trove of Vivaldo’s relics in solemn procession from Montaione by community members to the new Franciscan occupants.102 Dedicated to the Assumption of Our Lady and of Saint Francis, the new church fused the sanctity of the forest and the holiness of the hermit’s body with the patronal blessing of the Order’s founder and the Virgin Mary. In addition to the maintaining the saint’s physical presence at the site, the Franciscans promised to sponsor a feast in honor of San Vivaldo each year on the first of May and to transfer even more of his relics when the church was completed.103 The incorporation of local cults within the visual and ritual rhetoric of the New Jerusalem of San Vivaldo was a strategy to encourage the local population to embrace the new site and support the mission of its friars. From the first year of their occupation of San Vivaldo, the Franciscans prominently displayed sacred images of the region’s patron saints, San Lorenzo, San Leonardo, and Santa Verdiana, within the church.104 Polychrome terracotta statues of Saints Lorenzo and Verdiana framed the high altar and their holy presence was also honored through ritual celebrations of their feast dates. Such visual and festal attention to these local traditions facilitated 99 Pacciani and Vannini, La ‘Gerusalemme,’ 19. In Florence, San Vivaldo’s cult was recognized at Santa Maria del Carmine, where a painting once displayed his image; see Ghilardi, Ricordo, 25-51. 100 Cronaca, fol. 2vff; Pacciani and Vannini, La ‘Gerusalemme,’ 20-21. 101 Civilini, Guida al Sacro Monte, 6. 102 Cronaca, fol. 1r. While the Cronaca of the convent gives the date of the relic transfer as 1499, Riccardo Pacciani argues that the commencement of construction was 1501; see Pacciani, “L’Architettura della Chiesa,” 49. 103 Cronaca, fol.1r. 104 On the Franciscan’s continued commitment to display holy images of these local saints, see the deliberations of the Consiglio communale di Castelfiorentino on 8 October 1514: Libro A delle Deliberazione del Comune, n. 427, f. 55r, Archivio comunale di Castelfiorentino.

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the formation of a core group of devotees, who recognized the sacred power of the saints gathered at the site and reciprocated their protection with devotion. A desire to accommodate local tastes also explains many of the aesthetic decisions regarding the architectural and decorative forms of the overall Franciscan campus of San Vivaldo. Although the Franciscans proclaimed their site as a New Jerusalem, they made no effort to strive for architectural fidelity with the structures of the Holy Land itself even though this visual information was readily accessible through their first-hand experience. Instead, local materials and designs were privileged in the construction of the buildings, thereby extending the established visual rhetoric of the larger region extending from Florence to Montaione. Like numerous churches in Castelfiorentino, San Gimignano, Certaldo, and Gambassi Terme, the small-scale architectural buildings representing the luoghi santi of the Holy Land featured terracotta columns, lintels and tiles, plastered stucco walls and simple wooden beams on the interior pitches of the roofs.105 Other architectural features, such as the form of particular capitals and corbels, are derived directly from important Franciscan sites in Florence, including San Vivaldo’s parent convent of San Salvatore al Monte and the mendicant church of Santa Croce, as well as other important cult sites such as SS. Annunziata in Florence and the cloister of the miracle-working icon of Impruneta.106 Such conscious visual linking with Franciscan convents created architectural continuity between the Order’s sacred dwellings; the architectural links to sites housing miraculous images suggested that San Vivaldo similarly offered direct conduits to the divine through its holy landscape and images. Likewise, local expectations for the aesthetic qualities of holy images seems to have guided the decorative decisions at the site and contributed to San Vivaldo’s immediate success in attracting a wide pilgrim-following by the greater Tuscan region. Polychrome terracotta reliefs comprised the majority of decoration for the interiors of the individual architectural sites. While such a humble medium visually underscored the Franciscan commitment to poverty, it also strategically engaged with the visual literacy of the local population and thus encouraged piety through accessible visual forms.107 The sculpted tableaux of San Vivaldo were largely produced onsite by a team of artists who worked in the unglazed style of the Della Robbia workshop, including Benedetto and Santi Buglione, Agnolo di Polo, and others.108 Such images were related in form and function to a large 105 Pacciani has also suggested that the architecture of San Vivaldo is reminiscent of the types of “sacelli funerali romani”; Pacciani, “L’Architettura delle Cappelle,” 301. 106 For comparative photographs, see Pacciani, “L’Architettura delle Cappelle,” 301-306. 107 On the visual recognition of holy forms, see Terry, “Meraviglia,” 38-40. 108 Archaeological excavations have uncovered evidence of a large workshop space for the production of the sculptures and kilns to fire them; see Piccaluga, “Le Immagini,” 31.

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number of sacred images across the greater Tuscan landscape, not least of which were sacred images to be found in the Franciscan churches of San Salvatore al Monte in Florence and La Verna near Arezzo.109 Thus the medium signaled that San Vivaldo was part of a larger network of sacred sites throughout Tuscany and offered the opportunity for a familiar devotional encounter, despite the newness of the pilgrimage complex. By adding a full-scale Holy Land experience to the revived local cult of San Vivaldo, the Franciscans were perfectly positioned to attract an international congregation in addition to the region’s faithful. The location of San Vivaldo was a mere five and a half miles from the cult site of Gambassi Terme located on the Via Francigena, the primary European pilgrimage causeway that connected points as far north as Canterbury to the sacred destination of Rome. Any pilgrim who wished to travel to the Holy Land was first required to acquire a special papal permit in Rome that allowed for the sacred voyage.110 The Via Francigena was (and still is) comprised of many small arteries that fed in the general direction of the papal city. Depending on a particular pilgrim’s interests and needs, deviations were made to visit local shrines or to take shelter in hospices along the way and therefore the pilgrimage route was extended in any number of directions. San Vivaldo was geographically situated in a region well-known for its unique natural landscape as a site of benessere, or wellness, and thus it was extremely attractive to pilgrims for its therapeutic and restorative benefits. In addition to a hospice and bathhouse, pilgrims gained access to the natural splendors of the region, including thermal springs, rivers, and the vast canopy of the forest, all of which provided physical and mental relief from the strains of travel and devotional exercise. The beneficial qualities of the landscape underscored the notion that the Franciscans at San Vivaldo did indeed offer the New Jerusalem, a paradise on earth. The opportunity for these pilgrims to rehearse the landscape of the Holy Land at San Vivaldo may have helped them channel their devotional determination to reach the real thing and provided a foundation for their understanding and engagement of the sacred sites. In this way, the experience at San Vivaldo may be considered a form of simming “as a way to try out an experience in situ.”111 Yet surely also for many, the connections of this New Jerusalem with the old were authentic enough to supplant pilgrimage to the real place. After the Medici regained control in Florence and a Medici was seated on the papal throne, pilgrims were offered further incentive to step off the Via Francigena 109 Cannon Brookes, “The Sculptural Complexes,” 275. 110 The cult site of Gambassi Termi is roughly a two hour walk from San Vivaldo. Other, smaller cult sites are located even closer. 111 Magelssen, Simming, 5.

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and to enter into the forest of Camporena. In 1516, Pope Leo X (de’Medici) issued a papal bull that declared that every pilgrim who visited and said a “Paternoster” and an “Ave Maria” in each of the sixteen principal devotional sites would receive 7 years indulgence.112 Those pilgrims who performed such prayers at the remaining eighteen minor sites would receive an additional year of indulgence. Even further indulgences would be awarded on the feasts of Easter, Pentecost, Good Friday, as well as all of the feast days of the Virgin Mary, San Vivaldo, and San Francesco.113 As recorded by Cardinal Niccoló Fieschi, indulgences of up to 100 days were already in effect by 1513 for the Sepulcher of Christ, Mount Calvary, the Sepulcher of the Virgin, Mount Olive, the Garden of Christ, the Unction of Christ and the Valley of Josephat.114 By extending his papal authority to the site, Pope Leo X gave legitimacy to the practices performed there and ensured a robust pilgrim attendance throughout the year. Leo X was fully aware of the performative possibilities of the site and the positive impact that it could have on pilgrims’ perceptions of the Franciscans as custodians of the Holy Land. While he served as the Commendatorio of the church complex of Santo Stefano in Bologna, he experienced virtual pilgrimage of the Holy Land first-hand. On major feast dates, pilgrims were invited to visit holy sites representing the major destinations of the Jerusalem, including a replica of the Holy Sepulcher (Fig. 68).115 While the structures were understood as reproductions, their efficacy lay in their performative capacity to enable individuals to construct bodily experiences that simulated the real thing. Pilgrims entered the sepulcher one by one on hands and knees to give reverence to the “tomb of Christ.” The pilgrims’ physical interaction with the replicated sepulcher was rewarded with indulgences, as it was accepted that the reverence given to the copy (the sepulcher in Bologna) was given to its prototype (the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem within the Church of the Holy Sepulcher).116 The Holy Land at Santo Stefano in Bologna served as a direct precedent for the New Jerusalem of San Vivaldo. The site was sponsored by the papacy, beginning with the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV in the 1470s, and continuing under his nephew Pope Julius II, and then under the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII. Each of these men held titles within Santo Stefano before they assumed the papal throne, and, 112 Ghilardi, “Sulle Cappelle di San Vivaldo,” 1-26; and Gualdo, “La Lettera,” 121-128. 113 Cronaca, fol. 5v. 114 Archivio della Provincia Toscana dei Frati Minori presso il Convento di San Francesco a Firenze; cited in Gensini, “Un Luogo,” 114. 115 Based on the Byzantine restoration of the holy monument in Jerusalem in 1048, the Bologna version is the most faithful to the original of the Romanesque replicas of the Holy Sepulchre. See Ousterhout, “The Church of Santo Stefano,” 311-321. 116 Ousterhout, “The Church of Santo Stefano,” 311-321.

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Figure 68. Replica of the Holy Sepulcher, 12th century, Santo Stefano in Bologna

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when they ascended to the papacy, they each endowed ample privileges on those pilgrims to the simulated Bolognese holy places, including indulgences equal in number to a visit to the Holy Land itself.117 For the two decades prior to his ascension to the papal throne, Giuliano della Rovere—the future Pope Julius II—served as the Bishop of Bologna (1483-1502) and Commendatario of Santo Stefano.118 Under his papal leadership (1503-1513), San Vivaldo was realized as a legitimate place of pilgrimage. Giovanni de’Medici, son of Lorenzo il Magnifico and future Pope Leo X, was appointed Legate of Bologna and Commendatario of Santo Stefano between 1511-1513, the years immediately before his papal election.119 When he assumed the throne as Pope Leo X, he placed his cousin, Giulio de’Medici (the future Pope Clement VII) as head of Santo Stefano and Legate of Bologna.120 Their intimate familiarity with virtual pilgrimage practices in Bologna certainly underscored their papal support of San Vivaldo, as their influence at the site ensured its continued growth during the first half of the sixteenth century.121 Yet the construction of a New Jerusalem at San Vivaldo in Tuscany realized the specific aspirations of Tuscan devotees to visit, and indeed possess, the Holy Land. Building a New Jerusalem on Tuscan soil meant building a sacred landscape that was at once recognizable and appealing to the Tuscan faithful and distinguished as extraordinary in order to fulfill its spiritual function. By incorporating select elements of local traditions, devotional frames, and the land itself, the Franciscans developed a site that had the potential to appeal to several communities at once, from the provincial population to the wealthy families of Florence and even the international community of pilgrims en route to and from the papal city. The endowment of sacred privileges upon the Franciscan complex by the Holy See in the form of indulgences legitimized pilgrimage to this newly built environment and ensured its distinction as an especially charged place that offered the promise of sacred transformation to those who entered into its holy spaces. *** This chapter has examined the somaesthetics of virtual pilgrimage at the New Jerusalem of San Vivaldo to help explain how a substitute site assumed authority 117 Zarri, “I Medici,” 63. 118 Zarri, “I Medici,” 61. 119 As Bishop, Giovanni de’Medici provided for the needs of the monastery through special provisions signed into law in 1511. As Pope, he would continue to support the daily needs of the monastery through renewed commitments laid out in a papal Bull of 1519. See Zarri, “I Medici,” 64. 120 Zarri, “I Medici,” 63. 121 The papal support of San Vivaldo may also be connected to the f inancial revenue expected from such pilgrimage sites, particularly during Jubilee Years; see Pisani, La Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, 174.

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to replace the Holy Land during the Renaissance. Although the holy places of the Tuscan site were understood as likenesses of the real thing, the activation and decentering principles of its artistic program—including physical immersion, multiple points of view, sensory immediacy—were combined with the active affective devotional strategies of the Franciscan guides to present the Holy Land to pilgrims in vivid, sensual, and evocative ways that allowed them to construct an extraordinary experience of a place to which they did not travel but which they nonetheless possessed. Built in the architectural style of churches throughout the region and adorned with polychrome sculptures and reliefs produced onsite with local materials, the visual rhetoric of San Vivaldo promoted the sacred places of Jerusalem in local terms to emphasize this Tuscan possession, which was made real through the performances of the pilgrims.

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Playing the Printed Piazza: Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino and Somaesthetic Discipline in Grand-Ducal Florence Abstract Chapter Five closely examines the first illustrated treatise of the Florentine ball game known as calcio, published and dedicated to Grand Duke Francesco I by Giovanni de’Bardi in 1580, to reconstruct the somaesthetic experience of reading and playing a virtual game. Analyzing the imagery and text of the treatise in relation to military tactics, ceremonial culture, and the wider visual culture of leisure in the Renaissance, the chapter argues that the treatise offered a performative space for readers to act out the game and demonstrate a form of command that was otherwise reserved for the Grand Duke and his inner circle. The chapter explores how the treatise somaesthetically constructs the reader as a subject in relation to the Medici family and encourages a mode of comportment that reflected the ideals of Florentine governance. Keywords: Francesco I de’Medici, Giovanni de’Bardi, calcio, Santa Croce, Ducal Florence, virtual games

Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino (Discourse on the game of Florentine calcio), printed in 1580 and dedicated to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco I de’Medici, provided the first comprehensive treatise on the ball game known as calcio.1 Popular in Florence since at least the Quattrocentro, when games were played spontaneously throughout the city, calcio came to be associated with the nobility after the implementation of the Medici Duchy in 1532. 1 de’Bardi, Discorso. My analysis is based primarily on the complete copy housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze: NENC.F.6.4.2. All translations are mine. Antonio Scaino had previously written a description of the game according to the practice in the Veneto (1555), however Bardi’s Discorso is considered the definitive treatise on the rules, ceremony, and history of the sport.

Terry-Fritsch, A., Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722216_ch05

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In calcio, two teams of equal size faced one another in a competition over possession of a ball in a rectangular field of play.2 The basic objective of the game was to find a way to score a caccia, which was achieved by kicking or punching the ball across the goal line of the opposing team.3 In early versions of the game, the first team to do so would be declared the winner; Bardi’s rules allowed for multiple goals and the team with the highest score within a predetermined amount of time earned the victory. As opposed to today’s version of calcio (that is, football or soccer), players were expected to use their hands to punch, catch, and hold the ball, as well as use their feet to kick and dribble, during the game. Players from the opposite team were allowed to tackle, grab, shake, and push in order to steal the ball. The game was physically rough, and players verbally abused each other throughout; yet, any animosities experienced during the course of the game had to be left on the playing field or at least saved for the rematch.4 According to Bardi, calcio was a gentleman’s sport played before an audience within a theater and thus participants had to regulate their emotions and bodies to master the game. Although ball games were ubiquitous in the Renaissance, Bardi describes calcio as “proprio giuoco nostro Fiorentino” (truly our Florentine game), emphasizing Florentines’ singular claim on this game and its practice.5 Calcio was played in a number of locations throughout the city, including Piazza Santo Spirito, Piazza Santa Maria Novella, the Prato Ognissanti, and even on the frozen Arno. Yet by 1580, Piazza Santa Croce was considered the primary arena for the game.6 Bardi’s Discorso featured a printed view of the piazza activated in this role during a match (Fig. 69).7 Wooden planks and posts erected around the perimeter of the rectangular piazza delineate the playing field, which is filled with athletes in their starting positions. In the left and right foreground corners of the field, drummers signal the beginning of the game. Along the north, east, and south sides of the piazza, spectators line up several persons deep to witness the event, while others watch from the windows and rooftops of family palaces. Like these latter spectators, the 2 Bardi regulates the number as 27 per team, although earlier accounts give varying numbers of the players; Bardi, Discorso, 9. 3 Points could also be earned through the accumulation of falli (faults), which were made when a player used an open hand to throw or strike the ball over the heads of the other team or when the ball was sent out of bounds on the side of the field designated as the “fossa” (ditch) by a player’s kick or punch. 4 Bardi, Discorso, 27. 5 Bardi, Discorso, 2. 6 In the 1673 and 1688 editions of Bardi’s Discorso Sopra il Giuoco del Calcio Fiorentino, Piazza Santa Croce is designated as the “Teatro del Calcio.” See below for a discussion of theatricality and sport. 7 In the complete version in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze [Nencini F.6.4.2], the print has been inserted after the conclusion of the treatise. The BNF has two further copies in its collection [Palat. (11).C.9.4.1/11.C and Palat. Misc. 2.B.18.9], however, each is missing the print. Most likely the prints were disengaged for separate use or sale.

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Figure 69. Anonymous artist, View of a Calcio Match in Santa Croce, from Giovanni de’Bardi, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino, 1580, NENC.F.6.4.2 (Photo: By concession of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali della Repubblica Italiana/ Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze)

reader of Bardi’s treatise was offered a privileged view of the game, elevated above the spectacle and in alignment with the central axis of the field and the façade of Santa Croce beyond. This perspective made visible the geometric regularity and distribution of the fifty-four athletes on the field, whose positions correspond to their assigned roles within each team. Their precise spacing during the initial line-up of the teams on the field is made clear by numerical notations to the number of braccia between the players.8 While calcio was conceptualized in the fifteenth century as an open practice that reflected the social body of the Florentine Republic, both the game and the space in which it was played were reframed by the Medici as an image of the Grand Duchy during the sixteenth century.9 As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the Medici understood the power of rituals to underscore and legitimize their political authority in Florence. Duke Cosimo I and his successors aggressively connected the Medici name to the city’s most important cults and rituals through 8 One braccia equals 23 inches. 9 Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino.

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strategic patronage, including the game of calcio.10 By the time Bardi dedicated his treatise to Francesco I de’Medici, the male members of the family had established themselves as primary advocates for calcio in the city and participated in both the organization and playing of the game.11 The treatise enjoyed instant popularity as the authoritative guide for calcio and was republished three times in the seventeenth century, evidence of the close association between the game and the Medici family promoted through official publications. Each successive edition of the treatise—each with a printed representation of a calcio game in Piazza Santa Croce—was dedicated to a member of the Grand Ducal household. Despite the growing body of art-historical scholarship on calcio and other games of sport and leisure, Bardi’s treatise has not been analyzed comprehensively nor its printed view given the same art-historical attention as other sixteenth-century representations of the game. For example, in his book-length study of calcio iconography and the Medici, Horst Bredekamp dedicates only a few sentences to the Bardi print, which he dismisses as a “schematic representation” of the game in contrast to works he considers rich cultural artifacts, such as a fresco painted in 1561-1562 by Giovanni Stradano in the Sala del Gualdrada of Palazzo Vecchio depicting a match of calcio a livrea at Santa Maria Novella (Fig. 70) or an etching by Jacques Callot made in 1617 of a tamburino before a calcio game at Santa Croce, made as part of a print series on the Capricci di varie figure (Fig. 71)12 In part this may be explained by the difference in what is known about the social histories of the artists, since Stradano and Callot both had well-documented artistic practices connected to the Medici court, while the creator of Bardi’s print remains unknown.13 Beyond the issue of artistic hands, however, the printed view of the calcio match in Bardi’s treatise has been cast generally as a relatively straightforward illustration, made to accompany instructions on the game, while the other representations in 10 On Cosimo I and Eleonora’s use of public festivals in the sixteenth-century to ensure continuity of their public image with the Florentine Republic, see Cultural Politics; van Veen, Cosimo I de’Medici; Plaisance, Florence. 11 From Alessandro through Cosimo II, the male members of the Medici were advocates of calcio and participated in games; Benvenuti, Quadri Storici Fiorentini (1889), 145-147. In addition to the ducal players, future Medici popes, including Giulio de’Medici (future Clement VII) and Alessandro de’Medici (future Leo XI), also played the piazza. John Webster’s revenge play, The White Devil, portrayed Francesco as threatening to play calcio with the head of his dead sister’s husband; see John Webster, The White Devil, Act 4, verse 135: “Brachiano, I am now fit for thy encounter: Like the wild Irish, I’ll ne’er think thee dead ‘Till I can play at football with your head.” 12 Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 20, 23. 13 Stradano was well-documented as an artist in Medici employ, and his calcio painting was part of a larger decoration campaign within the ducal residence; Vannucci, Jan Van der Straet. Callot’s print was realized in Florence c. 1617 in his series, Capricci di varie Figure, which he then made a second copy in Nancy in 1623; Meaume, Recherches, n. 866.

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Figure 70. Giovanni Stradano, View of a Calcio Match in Piazza Santa Maria Novella, 1561-1562, fresco, Sala del Gualdrada, Palazzo Vecchio (Photo: Art Resource)

Figure 71. Jacques Callot, Tamburino at a Calcio Match, 1617, etching, from the series Capricci di varie figure (Photo: Art Resource)

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paint and print have been mined as critical reflections of the social world of the Medici Duchy. Instead, this chapter offers, for the first time in art-historical scholarship, a deep reading of both Bardi’s treatise and its attendant printed imagery to investigate how the Florentine game was used to construct ducal authority and noble communities in the later sixteenth century. Bardi intertwines the history of calcio with the ancient Roman foundations of the city and uses the game’s august origins to justify its nobility and utility. In an effort to translate the dynamic energy of calcio to a reading audience, Bardi promises to record the game in such detail that it would become “quasi vivo davvanti gli occhi di chiunque leggerà il presente libretto” (almost alive before the eyes of whoever will read this little book).14 He employs a narrative strategy of historical realism to heighten the reader’s understanding of the stakes of the contest, connecting it to ancient military practices and a leader’s ability to command. At the same time, the treatise provides instruction in the art of being a nobleman in late sixteenth-century Florence, as it frames calcio as the exclusive purview of the elite. The chapter examines how athletes and their audiences were constructed as somaesthetic subjects through calcio, both in its live performance and in its recreation in Bardi’s discourse. As a material record of an ephemeral event, the View of the calcio match in Piazza Santa Croce provided visual evidence for readers, who may or may not have had the experience of watching a live game. Yet, like all images, the representation actively constructed the viewer’s spatial field and selectively organized visual information within it. The chapter considers the composition and design of the print as a visual reflection of the discipline imposed on athletes and audiences during the Medici Duchy in the Cinquecento. It analyzes the artistic strategies by which the print constructed an idealized practice of calcio for readers and considers the beneficial impact such framing of the sport had on successive Medici dedicatees of the treatise. Further, the chapter considers the printed view as a performative space for the reader to act out and construct prosthetic memories of calcio. By examining the somaesthetic experience of the image in relation to the wider visual culture of leisure and gaming in the Renaissance, the rendering of the piazza is revealed as a strategy to initiate a form of play that was recognized and practiced by the reader-viewer as a substitute for the real thing. While a live calcio match in the piazza was a communal event that immersed a spectator in sensory stimuli, the printed view provided an intimate scenario for the individual reader, who navigated it as an imagined place. The Bardi view often is photographed as an independent work of art (i.e. a rectangular flat sheet featuring the printed view and framed by a thin border) to accommodate art-historical illustration conventions, but this does not 14 Bardi, Discorso, 8.

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acknowledge its intended function as an integral part of a printed book (Plate 22).15 The chapter explores the reader-viewer’s point of view—located above the space of play and in command of the regular, geometric piazza and its inhabitants—in relation to elite viewing practices in Medicean Florence and suggests that the print, and its later additions and substitutions, presented an analogous scenario for viewer engagement. Designed as an interactive tool, the idealized image of the Florentine theater of calcio simultaneously sustained Medici power and offered the viewer access to it through somaesthetic experience.

The Florentine Piazza as Practiced Space of Calcio The Florentine piazza was the central stage for the performative acting out of desired social realities in Renaissance public life. The inner city of Florence purposefully was redesigned in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to reveal its openness to the Florentine community and, as John Najemy has discussed, its spaces became enlivened through ritual engagement as “loci of political action [and] performance” that were accessible to the populace as a whole.16 An integral component of this urban environment, the piazza was offered as an “open space” that fostered public access and interaction and thereby situated its users to mutual inspection and visibility.17 Indeed, the Renaissance piazza was recognized as the site where the res pubblica was visualized; those who practiced the space were, as the early fifteenth-century chronicler Giovanni Calvalcanti claimed, in control of the city itself.18 Piazza Santa Croce became the locus of this crafted public image of Florence during organized calcio matches. The game was played there annually during Carnival, although when the tradition began is unclear. By 1530, at least, the tradition was considered “antica.”19 In 1565, the piazza was configured permanently to accommodate the sport, as evidenced by a marble plaque that served as the half line marker for the field inserted into the facade of the Palazzo dell’Antella 15 Sadly, the printed view of Santa Croce actually has been cut from many of the extant copies of the treatise as well and sold as a discrete work on the market. 16 Najemy, “Florentine Politics,” 33. 17 On the policing of these open spaces, see Terry-Fritsch, “Networks of Urban Secrecy,” 162-181. On the gendering of the piazza as a masculine space, see Brown and Davis, Gender and Society, esp. 23-31. On the bodily inhabitation of the Renaissance piazza, see Atkinson, “The Italian Piazza,” 561-581. 18 Cavalcanti claimed that “Whoever holds sway over the piazza, controls the city”; see the excellent discussion of performative power in the piazza by Milner, “Florentine Piazza,” 82-83. Like Milner, I draw on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between place (lieu) and space (espace) to articulate the relationship between strategies and tactics in the Renaissance piazza; see de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 19 Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, XI, 225.

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Figure 72. Marble plaque (battipalla) marking the half line of the calcio field, 1565, inserted into the façade of Palazzo dell’Antella in Piazza Santa Croce, Florence (Photo: Author)

(Fig. 72).20 Bardi’s selection of the piazza for the printed view of the game in his treatise visualized in no uncertain terms that it was, for Florentines, the “Teatro del Calcio.”21 Yet how this theater framed the game and what community was imagined within it shifted considerably from the fifteenth-century Republic to the sixteenth-century Medici Duchy. A poem known as “La palla al calcio,” written by Giovanni Frescobaldi around 1470 just after Piero de’Medici’s death, provides context for the way in which calcio was organized and celebrated in Florence before the Medici Duchy.22 In vivid language 20 The marble disc records the installation as “10 febbraio 1566” (1565 in the Florentine use). The palazzo would expand its function as a scenographic backdrop for the game by the early years of the Seicento, when its facade was painted and its balcony was likened to a viewing box of the theater. See Paolini, Architetture Fiorentine, 281-283. 21 Architectural theorists, such as Sebastiano Serlio in 1545, considered the piazza as a theatrical stage for the city; Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio, esp. Book 2, 82-93. The title, “Teatro del Calcio,” was used explicitly to designate Santa Croce in Bardi’s text. On the activation of the piazza through performative acts, see Strocchia, “Theaters,” 55-80. 22 The poem was published as Giovanni Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” in Lirici toscani del Quattrocento, I: 601-607. My quotations are drawn from the transcription and translation in Newbigin, “Rugby.”

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typical of performance poetry, Frescobaldi recounts the details of how thirty young men, ranging in age from 20 to 25, “stripped down to their doublets” and played a match in Piazza Santo Spirito.23 One team, comprised of fifteen men from the quartiere of Santo Spirito, lined up facing the façade of the church. Among them were Anteo “the Giant,” “Champ,” “Hotskin,” Francesco Ugolini, Lorenzo, Meo, Francesco Mucini, Iacopino, Pier del Brucioli, “Hedgehog,” Gherardino, “Freckles,” Anton Sapiti, Como, and Giotto Manovegli. The other team, from the “Common…past the walls”— that is, the Prato Ognissanti across the Arno—“face[d] them off.” Players included Stoldo Altovito, “Black Peter,” “Heifer (player divine),” Matteo de’Bardi, Uliveri Sapiti, “el Morano,” “Sunshine,” Pagolino, Gerozzo de’Medici, “the Nut,” Amerigo de’Benci, “Lefty,” Luca di ser Martino, Giovanni Petrini, and “Stinger.”24 The line-up of the two squads reveals a diverse mix of Florentine men who participated as calcio players in the fifteenth century. Youth from the leading banking and mercantile families in Florence, such as the Medici and the Benci, played side by side with craftsmen from the labor guilds, some of whom are only referred to by nickname. Calcio was a discrete time-based experience, yet the honor that could be achieved through skillful athletics and sportsmanly behavior on the field had the potential to impact a player’s perceived social standing long after the game.25 As Richard Trexler has examined, the game of calcio described by Frescobaldi offered a space for the performance of “communally acceptable, neighborhood festive competition,” the first of its kind since the early fourteenth century in Florence.26 Only a few accessories were necessary to play, thus calcio was open to anyone with access to a ball, players, and a field.27 The potential for honor, which calcio players held “more dear than any prize,” was open to any Florentine man in the fifteenth century, regardless of his social class.28 Frescobaldi described how the athletes attained “lasting fame” through displays of physical “strength and daring deeds and wit” on the field. The mixed social standing of the players on the field contributed to the game’s popularity and bolstered its early reputation as a pro-republican and anti-elitist sport. Frescobaldi recounts how a noisy crowd of spectators arranged itself around the entire perimeter of the makeshift playing field as trumpeters announced the 23 Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” stanza 4. 24 Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” stanza 5 and 6. Several of the players also participated in Lorenzo de’Medici’s giostra of 7 February 1469; see Pulci, La Giostra. 25 Geertz, “Deep Play,” 1-37. 26 Trexler, Public Life, 399. 27 The simplicity of calcio in the fifteenth century was unlike other Renaissance athletic contests such as jousting, which required horses, saddles, elaborate protective armor, lances, shields and the construction of the wooden tilt (or median barrier), and thus distinguished it as a popular game. 28 Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” stanza 9.

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imminent start of the game. A band of musicians kept up the energy of the crowd by playing tunes until kick-off. Frescobaldi then provides a play-by-play account of the game, relaying details of each player’s possession of the ball and the defensive moves of the opposite team. As he describes, the players “hit, thump back and knock ’em down and some look like they’ve been knocked out; and some rush in and some limp off, there’s chest-butting and flying blows. There’s tackling high and tackling low, they play the man to knock him out, and shout and swear and threaten war.”29 The game reached its finale when a player from the local team named “Lo Sghera” (“The Champ”) gave the ball “a magnificent and solemn kick.”30 It hit the façade of the church of Santo Spirito and the crowd roared, “It’s in!”31 The close identification of the spectating audience with the calcio players is iterated throughout the poem. Frescobaldi narrates how the crowd “cried out with a single voice” passionate exhortations to “Move up! Move up!” and “Grab him! Ruck him! Hold him down!”32 The spirit with which the crowd viewed the game was connected to its collective investment in the outcome of the game: the athletes shared their victory with their home neighborhood. After “Lo Sghera” of the Santo Spirito team scored the winning goal, the band burst into music, fireworks were lit, and all of the members of the quartiere celebrated as one. Victory translated to a temporary heightening of social status, which was expressed performatively in the piazza through proud selfexhibition and strutting. As Frescobaldi took care to describe, everyone—including men, women, the infirm and children—was given the opportunity to “rizza la cresta” (literally, to “raise the crest” like a bird raises its crest of feathers when excited or making a sexual display).33 The use of the piazza as the calcio arena heightened the stakes of the game, since it was not just the topographic center of the neighborhood but also the fulcrum of its social nexus. The strutting of the winning team and their fans within the piazza demonstrated their social dominance of it. Certain sports historians have explained the emergence of Piazza Santa Croce as the primary site for calcio games due to its practical utility: the piazza was a perfect rectangle and thus ideal for the face-to-face battle of calcio teams.34 As Bardi recorded, the great scale of the calcio game required a field measuring 172 braccia long and 86 braccia wide.35 The accompanying printed view portrays Piazza Santa Croce as the ideal Teatro del Calcio, ample enough to accommodate both the field and a wide perimeter for large numbers of spectators in attendance. 29 Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” stanza 26. 30 Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” stanza 29. 31 Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” stanza 29. 32 Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” stanza 19, 21. 33 Frescobaldi, “La Palla al Calcio,” stanza 30. 34 McClelland, Body and Mind, 78. 35 Bardi, Discorso, 9.

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In addition to its ideal size, however, the built environment of the piazza and the social configuration of its neighborhood of Santa Croce were equally important factors in its use as the game’s primary arena. As was even more evident in the sixteenth century than today, the piazza’s symbolic connection with the city and its citizens was visualized through architectural framing. On the west side of the piazza, many of the city’s most important sacred and secular monuments, including the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Palazzo della Signoria, and Palazzo del Podestà, soared above the rooflines. The eastern end of the piazza was ancored by the imposing stone façade of the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, one of the most esteemed burial sites for illustrious Florentine men in the Renaissance.36 The use of Piazza Santa Croce as a scenographic backdrop for calcio framed the game as populist and honorable.37 By the fifteenth century, the neighborhood surrounding Piazza Santa Croce was home to the many carders, combers, and dyers of wool that made Florence’s cloth industry so famous, as well as carpenters and other craftsmen, including artists such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and Antonio Rossellino, who set up their workshops in the quartiere. In the northern part of the neighborhood, closer to Sant’Ambrogio, confraternities dedicated to the destitute tended to the economic fringes of the community while brothels serviced the merchant class.38 Interspersed throughout, many noble families also lived within the neighborhood and were featured in the familial chapels inside Santa Croce.39 Giovanni de’Bardi himself was an example of such nobility: he was a humanist who hosted gatherings of noblemen at his house on Via dei Benci and his family’s various branches were conspicuous patrons of the church. 40 Piazza Santa Croce anchored these diverse publics, who gathered there 36 As the government decreed, the basilica was “founded by the people of Florence” “ad utilitatem animarum et decorum civitatis expedit”; cited in Borsook, Companion Guide, 98. Tombs included Leonardo Bruni and Carlo Marsuppini, humanist chancellors of Florence, and many of the leading artists and art theorists of the city, including Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti and others. Although the notion of Santa Croce as a secular Pantheon is largely associated with the nineteenth-century, the church already was well recognized in the Renaissance as a celebrated burial site for illustrious men. The neo-Gothic marble façade, by Nicolò Matas, dates from 1857-1863. 37 The church was also used as a backdrop during processions of criminals to the execution site just outside the walls. During these punishment rituals, the façade of the church was used to contrast the infamous behavior of the condemned who stood before it; Terry, “Criminal Vision.” 38 Since 1403, the Ufficio dell’Onestà in Florence not only permitted but promoted prostitution as a means to promote heterosexual behavior; see Trexler, “La Prostitution,” 983-1015. 39 For a digital humanities database of the family tombs inside of Santa Croce, see Leader, “Digital Sepoltuario.” 40 Bardi’s gatherings, which came to be known as the “Camerata Fiorentina,” were populated by the noble gentlemen of Florence; further discussion is below. The Bardi di Vernio inherited the Bardi di Mangona Chapel dedicated to Saint Silvester and the Holy Confessors, which is located in the northern arm of the transept of Santa Croce in 1602; Carrara, “La Cappella di San Silvestro,” 63-71. On the early

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for sermons and communal celebrations, as well as the more quotidian activities of everyday life. 41 The strong working-class roots of the neighborhood were emphasized during Carnival celebrations in Piazza Santa Croce from the later fifteenth century on. Whereas earlier festal culture of Carnival offered a performative space for patrician youth to honor ladies through the chivalric rituals of armeggerie and jousts, later Carnival activities were designed to include the working class through the approval of new festive groups that celebrated the professions of manual labor in theatrical productions and parade floats. 42 In this regard, calcio was a logical part of the Carnival celebrations since the game offered the possibility for anyone, regardless of socio-economic status, to obtain victory and honor within the delineated time and space of extraordinary festal time. 43 In one revealing game that was organized for Carnival later in the century, the athletes played in drag, thereby imagining women as the strong and daring youth of the city. 44 The pushing aside of the normative boundaries that defined social identities in Renaissance Florence during Carnival—the performance of Bakhtin’s metaphor of the “world upside down”—was visualized and literally played out on the calcio field. Calcio matches in Piazza Santa Croce offered the opportunity for Florentines to perform not only allegiance to neighborhood, but also to the Republic. According to Benedetto Varchi, in the year 1530 Florentine “giovani” organized a calcio match in the midst of the Siege of Florence. 45 Fifty calcio players, divided into equal teams and dressed in white and green, played in defiance of besieging imperial and papal forces. During this sportive “spatial acting-out” of the place, the piazza articulated the pragmatic relationships between the players, spectators, and built environment. 46 The Florentines performatively demonstrated their command of the city by taking control of the piazza and using it to assert their independence.47 Bardi patronage of the chapel, see Hueck, “Stifter und Patronatsrecht,” 263-270. For its decoration, see Wilkins, Maso di Banco; Long, “Salvation through Meditation,” 77-88; Maso di Banco; Bartalini, “‘Et in Carne Mea, 58-103; Poeschke, Italian Frescoe, 266-277; Long, “Franciscan Chapel Decoration,” 72-95. 41 A sense of the great number of people who would pack the piazza during the popular sermons of Bernardino of Siena, as well as for other, less-pious activities, may be found in Bernardino of Siena, Le Prediche Volgari, 2: 87-88. 42 Trexler, Public Life, 414-418. 43 On Medici involvement in Carnival, see Plaisance, Florence, esp. 17-40. 44 del Badia, “Storia d’Etichetta,” 22, 148. According to Antonfrancesco Grazzini, cross-dressing during Carnival was common in the fifteenth century; see Plaisance, Florence, 19. 45 Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, XI: 225. 46 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 97. 47 D. Medina Lasanksy has connected this historic event to the nationalistic reconstruction of the sport during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Italy; see Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, esp. 70-73.

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Not cowered by their aggressors on the fringes of the city, the players and their spectators focused on the game. To mock the imperial besiegers, the musicians positioned themselves on the roof of the church of Santa Croce “per essere non solamente sentiti, ma veduti” (to not only be heard, but also seen). 48 During the noisy and festive calcio match, the Florentine public occupied the piazza, both on the ground and from above, to bear witness to it as a self-constructed image of the Republic and demonstrate this picture to their besiegers. Very shortly after the siege, however, calcio in Piazza Santa Croce was dramatically transformed from a popular “Republican” game to an elite performance that was governed and practiced by the nobility. Among the many entertainments arranged on the occasion of the 1532 Florentine visit of Margaret of Austria, daughter of Emperor Charles V and fiancée of Alessandro de’Medici, a calcio a livrea in Piazza Santa Croce served as the culmination of public events held in her honor. The organization and sponsoring of the game in Piazza Santa Croce by the Medici signaled the appropriation of the Republican practice for familial gain. The teams no longer represented neighborhood factions but rather configurations of noble families in celebration of the Medici alliance. Furthermore, while the game itself was played in the open space of the piazza, the victory festivities were restricted to a select few in an alternate location. At the conclusion of the game, a procession wound its way from the playing field through the city center to Palazzo Medici, where only invited guests were allowed inside for a sumptuous banquet. The move of the corteo from the open, public space of the piazza to the relatively closed, private space of the family palace visualized in no uncertain terms the social restriction of the celebration of the game. 49 After this time, the Medici instituted a systematic practice of playing calcio on the occasion of a Medici marriage alliance as well as used the game to mark the presence of prestigious political figures at their court. Thus, the ability to “rizza la cresta” became an exclusive entitlement of the Medici and their immediate circle. Bardi’s treatise made this association official. The criteria by which individuals were eligible to play eliminated social diversity from the game: only noblemen endowed with particular traits could play. As he rationalized, just as the Olympic games of ancient Greece did not include every sort of man, nor does calcio: only “honored soldiers, nobles, lords and princes” between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were worthy to play.50 No longer did these men strip down to their doublets to play; rather they were uniformed in fine fabrics of satin and silver thread with matching hats and insignia. Their actions on the field were regulated by Bardi’s 48 In retaliation, the soldiers fired a canon at the musicians; the shot went high and no one was hurt. 49 For an opposing view of the political takeover of the sport, see McClelland, Body and Mind, 110. 50 Bardi, Discorso, 7; see also Sport e Giochi, 127-162.

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extensive rules for player comportment, which span widely from the proper modes of making contact with the ball and with other players to the correct manner of entering the field and acknowledging the spectating audience.51 The bodies on display during the athletic contest were expected to be groomed and regulated. The symbolic value of many of the institutions that dominated the built environment of the calcio arena similarly was transformed under Medici rule and therefore also impacted the ways in which the game was framed and perceived. By the publication of Bardi’s treatise in 1580, the Palazzo della Signoria no longer housed the elected officials of the city but rather served as the Medici family’s residence and official seat of the ducal government.52 The Palazzo del Podestà, constructed originally as a palace of justice and residence of the chief magistrate of the commune, had been transformed into an infamous prison nicknamed Il Bargello, a reference to the head of police who resided there.53 The symbolism of Santa Croce also was altered significantly in the sixteenth century, as the interior of the church was renovated through Medici funding.54 The visual and symbolic frames of the calcio field now signaled the effective administration of the Medicean Duchy. Despite the changes that were imposed on the game in the ducal period, documents reveal that the popolo still packed the piazza as audience members. Filippo Giunti’s account of the match played in 1569 to honor Archduke Charles II of Austria emphasizes how every inch of space was occupied by crowds “without number around the piazza… At the windows of all the houses were noble ladies ornately dressed; the roofs and terraces full of other people, which very much contributed 51 As Milner has suggested, “By shifting attention to the conditions of reception, the possibility of resistance, or reappropriation, is presented on account of the manner in which symbols, with their multiple associations, permitted alternative visions of social ordering to coexist alongside the dominant form”; Milner, “Florentine Piazza,” 85. 52 By the time of Bardi’s treatise, the Medici held their primary residence at the Palazzo Pitti, but still maintained apartments, as well as their personal administrative offices, in the Palazzo Vecchio and the law courts, militia headquarters, and other offices in the Palazzo degli Uffizi. On the Medici transition between their former residence on Via Larga to the Palazzo della Signoria, see Crum, “Lessons from the Past,” 47-61. 53 For more on the naming of the Bargello, see Uccelli, Il Palazzo del Podestà, 81-87. Between 1929-1943, a Florentine weekly newspaper entitled, Il Bargello, was published under the auspices of the National Fascist Party, and explicitly drew on the notion of the Bargello as “the man of justice”; see Hainsworth, “Florentine Cultural Journalism,” 696-711. The shift in the architectural function of the building from Palazzo del Podestà to Medicean prison-house also was reflected in the ritual life of the city, as magistrates and councils used new offices and sites for civic deliberation that were erected away from the Bargello. On later transformation of Bargello into the first National Museum of Italy, see Terry, “Criminals and Tourists,” 836-855 54 Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation. As part of the Counter-Reformation interior renovation of the church, Giorgio Vasari designed Michelangelo Buonarroti’s monumental tomb. Arguably, this further increased attention to the site as a repository of illustrious Florentine men.

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to the magnificence of this party.”55 Forty thousand spectators were recorded at the match played in 1584 on the occasion of Eleonora de’Medici’s marriage to Vincenzo I Gonzaga; a century later, a Florentine guide book claimed that nearly every inhabitant of the city attended the matches (i.e. circa one hundred thousand people).56 Even if these descriptions include exaggerated numbers of attendees, apparently the spectating crowds were difficult to control.57 In 1608, Camillo Rinuccini recorded that on the occasion of the wedding of Cosimo II de’Medici, son of Grand Duke Ferdinando I, to Maria Maddelena of Austria, the groom and his brother were almost unable to make it through the throngs of people lining the spaces leading to the field.58 The printed view of Piazza Santa Croce in Bardi’s treatise illustrates how the popolo would jostle and press against the wooden fencing erected around the perimeter of the field in order to watch the calcio spectacle unfold and how other figures stood on the rooftops, terraces, and loggias or watched through open palace windows. In addition to demarcating the field for the game, the fences enforced order on the ground since they physically restrained the attending crowd, as did the armed guards standing on the edges of the field. Such measures to prevent the populace from entering into the delineated space of the calcio field were enforced further by the implementation of new laws, beginning in the rein of Ferdinando I and continuing through to Cosimo III, which punished transgressive spectators. Ferdinando’s ordinances of 1607 prohibited any crossing over the fence, or any indication of intention to do so, under the penalty of a fine; later laws passed in the eighteenth century levied the penalty of incarceration in the Bargello for a transgression of the calcio field.59 The laws and their enforcement signaled that the piazza ultimately was controlled by the ducal regime, as was the city itself.60 Like the idealized spatial nexus of the piazza proclaimed in the legislation, the printed view privileges order over disorder. In contrast to the cluttered spaces on the north, east, and south sides of the field, the west touchline, demarcated by horizontal beams in the foreground, is clear of spectators.61 The viewer of the 55 Giunti, Raccolto delle Feste, 8. 56 For the 1584 match, Deti proclaimed “…credesi, che fussero di numero più di quarantamila persone”; transcribed in Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 143. For the guidebook to Florence, see del Bruno, Ristretto. 57 On the diff iculty of controlling spectators at Renaissance tournaments, see Guttmann, “Chariot Races,” 154-156. 58 Rinuccini, Descrizione, 48. 59 The eighteenth-century enforcement of the laws included such drastic measures as public torture and humiliation rituals in Piazza Santa Croce; see Brederkamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 106-111. 60 On ludic practices that challenged the official order in early modern Florence, see Wood, “Ball on Walls,” 365-387. 61 For a discussion of the edges of the piazza, which served as sites for the populace to articulate themselves, see Wood, “The Art of Play,” 170-179.

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print therefore is offered unimpeded visual access to the vast space of the playing field. The elevated vantage point further augments the legibility of the game, as the ground is obliquely tilted toward the viewer in order to better display the actions that are represented in the piazza. The organization of the scene is akin to the larger Renaissance genre of vedute, or enhanced views of landscapes or urban spaces that privileged the legibility of the topography and its monuments over faithful description from observation.62 In this regard, the calcio scene shares a visual rhetoric with numerous painted and printed views commissioned by the Medici and in circulation within their circle in the sixteenth-century, which similarly present the landscape as an assertion of the power of the Grand Ducal regime.63 The print used the image of calcio in Piazza Santa Croce to construct a permanent record of order within one of the city’s most symbolically-charged spaces. The field’s clearly defined boundaries, disciplined spectators, and noble athletes visually articulated the game as firmly within the control of the ducal authority who regulated its performance. Piazza Santa Croce, a space once practiced by the people in service of the Republic, became a place to showcase the hegemonic authority of the Duchy.

Antiquity and Historical Realism in Bardi’s Discorso Bardi’s reputation as a humanist scholar and expert in classical literature and language contributed to his widespread authority on calcio, which he frames as an ancient practice. According to Bardi, calcio was a direct descendant of episkyros, an ancient game in which two equal teams of young men competed to pass a ball over the opposing team’s touchline.64 First developed by the Greeks and then adopted by the Romans, Bardi claims that the game was brought to Florence during the city’s foundation as a Roman colony in time of Julius Caesar and was played in ancient times in the amphitheater located on the future site of Piazza Santa Croce.65 Apparantly, “the amphitheater made by these ancient builders, imitators of the ancient Roman discipline” in Piazza Santa Croce was like the arenas “in 62 Rosen, “Vasari and Vedute,” 31-38. 63 For an analysis of the vedute in Palazzo Vecchio, see Gregg, “Panorama, Power, and History.” On Cosimo’s desire to demonstrate his rule through the visualization of terrestrial and celestial landscapes, see Rosen, The Mapping of Power. 64 Bardi cites Julius Pollux for his authoritative information on episkyros; Bardi, Discorso, 3. 65 Bardi, Discorso, 3. The notion that Florence was founded as a colony between 60 and 43 BCE was promoted by the ducal regime, as opposed to the republican argument that it was established between 80 and 70 BCE. Giorgio Vasari’s painting for Cosimo I in the Salone dei Cinquecento, the Foundation of Florence, is framed by the inscription “FLORENTIA ROM[ANORUM] COLONIA LEGE JULIA A III VIRIS DEDUCITUR.” For a discussion of the dispute in relation to the painting of the Founding of Florence, see Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, 177, 351 n. 113.

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Olympia, in the Corinthian Isthmus, in Athens, in Rome, and throughout all of Italy,” made “for the sole purpose of exercising their youth and of maintaining them fierce and strong.”66 Bardi argued that the ancient game was preserved in the contemporary version of calcio played by Florentines in his city.67 Indeed, the playing of the game in Piazza Santa Croce constituted an archaeological practice of sorts, as calcio athletes simultaneously reference both the present and the past in their movements on the field. Bardi’s historical emplacement of both the game and its Florentine arena drew on what material culture scholars have termed the “power of the real.”68 As Susan Pearce has analyzed, historical objects and sites function as signs since they “carry a true part of the past into the present” through their materiality.69 Yet they also function as symbols when they are brought into association with other objects or spaces that produce new meanings for beholders, and, as is often the case, the objects and sites of material culture undergo continual symbolic reinterpretation.70 The simultaneous function of material culture as sign and symbol is the source of its “power.” Arguing for what he considers “the double power of the real,” Kevin Moore has claimed that historic sites that also contain their original historic collections—i.e. real things are still housed within their real context—augment the power of the “real.”71 Although calcio presented live athletes instead of historical objects, this same doubling of the power of the real was effected through the performative elements of the game, which Bardi took pains to connect to ancient athletic contests and military tactics. That is to say, his claim that the playing of calcio on the site formerly used for ancient athletic contests enhanced the power of the real place with the power of real performance. Such aspirations for historical realism certainly underscored the calcio game that was staged in 1570 in Rome on the occasion of Cosimo I’s acquisition of the title of Grand Duke. To celebrate, Florentines staged a calcio match “con molto spesa” (at great expense) next to the Baths of Diocletian.72 The playing of the game in close proximity to the ancient fitness center, like the staging of calcio matches in Piazza Santa Croce, was a means to inhabit the spaces of the past and celebrate continuity to it under the Medici through sport. 66 Bardi, Discorso, 2, 3. 67 Bardi, Discorso, 2. 68 Pearce, Museums, 24. On the emphasis of the “real” in ethnographic research, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, esp. 30ff. For an analysis of “real things” in relation to questions of imitation and authenticity, see especially Orvell, The Real Thing. 69 Pearce, Museums, 27. 70 On architecture as simultaneous site, event, and sign, see Rossi, Architecture and the City. 71 Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, 135ff. 72 Avvisi di Roma, cited in Clementi, Il Carnevale Romano, I: 289; Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 47.

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Throughout the treatise, Bardi capitalizes on calcio’s connection to the ancient world to assert the nobility of the game and, by association, those who played, sponsored, and watched it. He painstakingly describes how the four different positions for athletes on the 27-person calcio roster assume the archetypes of the ancient games. The fifteen Innanzi, or forwards, must adopt the velocity of the runner, the dexterity of the fighter and the jumper, and the rapidity of the boxer in order to run the ball up the field. The five Sconciatori, or halfbacks, use fighting and boxing to break the advance of the opposing team’s Innanzi by giving them a sconcio, or check. The seven Datori—four Datori innanzi, or attacking defenders, who struck the ball forward (dare alla palla) and three Datori addietro, or full backs, who served as the team’s last defense against a caccia—were like the disc thrower.73 Bardi claims that calcio athletes rivaled, and perhaps even were even better than, the ancients, since they had to incorporate the skills of many different sports into one game: “all of the elements of all sports are found in calcio, as are the military arts, and thus calcio is above all useful.”74 This notion was proclaimed in a poem, perhaps written by Ludovico Alamanni, a humanist colleague of Bardi, that was included on a frontispiece by Giovanni Stradano titled “Calcius Ludus Florentinorum Nobilum” (Fig. 73).75 Located in the center of the page, the poem proclaims, Give in to the past, or the Greeks, that celebrate only the Olympic Games. Since now wrestling, boxing, jumping, ball games and running are reunited in just one game. When the PENTATHLETE confronts such simulated skirmishes, he exercises to win in real battle.76

The brief text is noteworthy for its insistence not only on the multiple sports that calcio athletes must master, but also on the superiority of the contemporary game to exercise men as protectors of the city. While little is known of the larger project that is signaled by the frontispiece, and no traces of its realization are extant, its connection to the Accademia degli Alterati, the Florentine literary academy to which Ludovico Alamanni and Giovanni de’Bardi both belonged, is significant.77 Bardi took pains to emphasize his membership in the academy through the prominent use of his academic pseudonym “Il Puro Accademico Alterato” on the Discorso. 73 Bardi, Discorso, 4. 74 Bardi, Discorso, 5. 75 van Ysselt, “Il Calcio Fiorentino,” 481-487. On Alammani and the Medici court, see Markey, Imagining the Americas, 126-127. I would like to thank Lia for sharing her archival notes regarding calcio from the Accademia degli Alterati as well as a high-quality image of the frontispiece. 76 The poem reads: “Cedite qui tantum celebratis Olympia Graii. Lucta, Pugillatus, Saltus, Pila, Cursus in uno Sunt Ludo: simulacra ciet dum talia belli Assuescit vero PENTATLHUS vincere Marte.” 77 On the close relation of the Alterati and the Medici, see Blocker, “Pro- and anti-Medici?” 38-52.

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Figure 73. Giovanni Stradano, Frontispiece for Calcius Ludus Florentinorum Nobilum, c.1595, drawing (Photo: RDK- Netherlands Institute for Art History)

The connection between exercise, robust health, and a well-functioning state had long been promoted by ancient authors, and Renaissance humanist writers followed their example.78 Between 1450 and 1650, more than eighty texts were published on athletics either in Italian or by Italians.79 Like his contemporaries, Bardi highlights the utility of physical exercise to rid the body and mind of toxins and inspire virtuous living. He explains how the heat generated by exercises of the body not only consumes the ill humors which are generated by superabundant or unwholesome food, but also “i cattivi pensieri” (the bad thoughts) that leisure and soft living produces.80 Moreover, physical exercise inspires a love of the patria: “waking us up and a picking us up out of our idleness, [these movements] convert the ill humors and bad thoughts into desire of virtue and of glory.”81 Ancient fitness programs and games provided the means to establish an alert and industrious base of young men from which to populate the empire’s many battle fields. According to Bardi, calcio, in particular, “makes the body healthy, dexterous, and robust and the 78 Burke, “The Invention of Leisure,” 136-150; Arcangeli, “Play and health,” 1-11. 79 See Krüger and McClelland, “Ausgewählte Bibliographie,” 132-180. 80 Bardi, Discorso, 3. 81 Bardi, Discorso, 3.

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soul alert and strong and dreamy of virtuous victory.”82 Bardi’s own experience as a soldier reinforced the authority of his words: his first-hand knowledge of military tactics on the ground was gained during his service to Duke Cosimo I in Siena (1553-1554) and in Malta (1465).83 His military valor was recognized by Emperor Maximilian II when he was selected as a captain of the Tuscan forces sent to aid in the defense of Hungary against Turkish advances.84 If the noble calcio athletes of sixteenth-century Florence were conceptualized by Bardi as the robust youth of ancient Rome, then Duke Francesco I was cast as their Augustus.85 Bardi describes the game as evidence of the city’s renaissance as one of “l’antiche cittá bene ordinate” (the well-ordered, or well-governed, ancient cities). Bardi reminds Francesco I that, in addition to the military benefits of sports, ancient leaders successfully maintained a well-ordered city by keeping “the people occupied and amused with games and various exercises.”86 Bardi’s treatise includes detailed instructions for staging the rituals surrounding the calcio match. He stressed that calcio should be played in the principle piazza of the city, since it was the best place for noble women and the population to gather to watch the game.87 He specified the time of day when calcio could be played (i.e. in the early evening just before sundown) and on which dates on the calendar (i.e. from Epiphany to the last day of Carnival). Furthermore, Bardi gave explicit directions on how the game should be presented, including instructions on how to transform the piazza into an arena through architectural additions, the order and roles of participants in the pre-match procession called the mostra, and the arrangement of the crowd in relation to the players during a match.88 The ritual mapping of the game through these detailed instructions ensured that the event would be well-ordered, worthy to behold, and, ultimately, repeatable over time. Indeed, through its repetition in 82 Bardi, Discorso, 5. 83 Cantagalli and Pannella, “Bardi.” 84 Bardi did not see action on the ground for the Hungary campaign, however, since the Turkish troops retreated before the arrival of the Tuscan forces; see Cantagalli and Pannella, “Bardi.” 85 As discussed below, the insinuation of Francesco as wise Augustus may also be viewed in light of his recent marriage to his controversial second wife, Bianca Cappello. 86 Bardi, Discorso, 4. His words recall Machiavelli’s on Lorenzo il Magnifico, which described how “During times of peace he entertained the city with festivals, at which were displayed jousts and representations of ancient deeds and triumphs. It was throughout his aim to make the city prosperous, the people united, the nobility honored”; Machivelli, Florentine History, 359. John McClelland contends that Bardi emphasized the ancient origins of the game in order to ensure the sport’s continued existence under Medici patronage, as it was very expensive to stage such an elaborate event; McClelland, “Ball Games,” 61. While this may in part be true, there was no shortage of calcio matches leading up to the 1580 publication that warrants such an anxious claim. 87 Bardi, Discorso, 6. 88 Bardi, Discorso, esp. 10ff.

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the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, calcio provided an image of the Florentine community in the piazza that reflected the central values of the Medici Duchy. Bardi’s suggestion that public spectacles like calcio helped to assuage popular anxieties and desires was already acknowledged by the Medici Grand Dukes. In response to certain unruly and distasteful performances during Carnival, Cosimo I responded that “Since the minds of the Florentine people do not know how to stay idle, it is better that sometimes they keep themselves occupied in similar intrigues rather than remain pensive.”89 The sentiment was echoed by Vincenzo Borghini, who was charged with arranging amusements that included the populace on the occasion of Francesco I’s marriage to Joanna of Austria. He advised, “whereas good princes should not make it a fundamental policy to entertain the people with such pastimes, still they should not scorn them altogether, because for the entire well-being of the city it is not enough the its citizens be occupied with trades, rich in goods, harmonious among themselves, and at peace with their neighbors, since it is necessary at times to make them happy and to gladden them; therefore, the Romans with great gravity and the Athenians with great wisdom did not disparage these delightful and popular celebrations and entertainments.”90 Indeed, it seems that calcio was an effective strategy for staving off popular protest. According to the English priest and travel writer, Richard Lassels, “The Florentines, enjoying, by the goodness and wisdome of their excellent Prince, the fruits of peace, have many recreations, where the people pass their time chearfully, and think not of rebellion by muttering in corners.”91 His lengthy description of Florentine calcio, discussed below, lauds the game for its ability to bring the community together in mutually-pleasing recreation. As Allen Guttman has analyzed, the ancient games and races of Rome and Byzantium offered a space for spectators to express themselves in spite of their lack of real political power within the empire itself.92 The acclamations that were shouted to greet the arrival of the emperor to the circus, or the jeers that were hurled to factions that he supported, served to vocalize political pleasure or displeasure. Thus, ancient sports events served as “a safety-valve for dissatisfaction and a substitute for democratic assemblies.”93 Although the calcio matches discussed here were sponsored by and performed for the Grand Ducal court and their guests, the general populace also participated as spectators and thus were given the opportunity for a sportive acting out of allegiances. Screams and cheers for athletes were made under the conditions of extra-ordinary ritual time and therefore were not subject 89 Zanre, “Ritual and Parody,” 197; Wood, “The Art of Play,” 181-182. 90 Starn and Partidge, Arts of Power, 170. 91 Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, 212. 92 Guttmann, “Chariot Races,” 143. 93 Bollinger, Theatralis Licentia, 71; cited in Guttman, “Chariot Races,” 143.

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to the same scrutiny. Furthermore, popular participation in sports as spectators allowed for the community to gather and thereby visualize itself as a polity.94 In this regard, calcio was particularly useful in bringing the populace together under the auspices of festive competition. To enhance spectators’ enjoyment of the game, and positive association of the Medici with it, food and wine was distributed to the populace at the conclusion of calcio matches. Elaborate confections on huge silver platters were brought out to the field by donzelli dressed in the colors of the Medici and served first to the athletes and the arbitrators of the game, then to the popolo.95 The wine, too, was served in flasks that were “dressed” in red and gold.96 The sharing of food—one of the central values of Florentine life—thus brought together the noble athletes and their spectators under the auspices of the Grand Dukes.97 Such a strategy similarly underscored the Medici funding of fountains that spouted red and white wine for public consumption in the civic center of Florence during the elaborate celebrations for Joanna of Austria’s entry into the city on the occasion of her marriage to Francesco I, and the distribution of delicate confections and precious wines to the people at the ceremonies for Ferdinando I’s wedding to Christina of Lorainne.98 The abundance on offer to the people was a sign of the political strength of the duchy and the Grand Duke’s efforts to foster civic contentment. While Bardi drew upon “the power of the real” to construct and legitimize the game within its historical origins, he also used it to heighten readers’ understanding of calcio through a type of perceived historical realism, a vivid awareness of the past triggered by seeing the historical game in the historical place. Early in the treatise, Bardi boasted that he will describe in such detail the various complexities of the game, move for move, that it will become “almost alive before the eyes of anyone who will read the present treatise.”99 His ability to conjure the vivid action of a game through his words—to make it “almost alive”—was a strategy to actively involve the reader in the high stakes of the game. His thorough explanations of every aspect of the two-hour event—from the selection and display of the factions to the athletes’ maneuvers on the field—are akin to what Clifford Geertz called 94 The sports arena, like the piazza, offered the space for the community to gather as one single entity and thereby produce an image of itself. On the ancient amphitheatre, circus, and stadium as a microcosm of Roman society, see McClelland, Body and Mind, 114-116. 95 The calcio match organized for the wedding of Eleonora de’Medici and Vincenzo Gonzaga in 1584 featured 62 donzelli dressed in red and yellow clothes, who served the athletes and the crowds from basins of silver and served wine from flasks decorated in the Medici colors of red and gold; for a transcription of the description by Giovanni Battista Deti from 1584, see Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 95. 96 “Le veste di fiasche eran tutted orate, e rosse”; ibid. 97 On the ritual significance of the sharing of food, see Trexler, Public Life, 85ff. 98 Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, 196. 99 Bardi, Discorso, 8.

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“thick description.”100 They move beyond the stating of facts to include commentary on and interpretation of the game in order to construct a multivalent, or “thick,” representation of calcio that also spoke to its larger cultural significance as a carrier of meaning both for the people in the piazza and the readers who gazed upon it in his treatise. Bardi’s vivid language also connects the treatise to the classical rhetorical tradition of enargeia or evidentia as a strategy to co-involve the reader in the described event.101 According to the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who taught rhetoric in the Rome of Caesar Augustus, such visualization through language allows the listener of a story to “feel that he can see the actions which are being described going on and that he is meeting face-to-face the characters.”102 As Jessica Goethals has analyzed persuasively, enargeia was employed as a political tactic in the Early Modern speculum principis tradition in in Florence. For example, Luigi Guicciardini’s Historia del Sacco di Roma, written for the young Cosimo I de’Medici shortly after his assumption of Florentine ducal leadership in 1537, placed the tragedies of Rome “before the eyes” of Cosimo as a vivid example of the consequences of bad leadership.103 Bardi draws upon the rhetoric to vividly construct an eye-witness account of the battle that occurs on the field during a game of calcio, both as a mode of underscoring the utility of the game and emphasizing the leadership and command of the Grand Duke, to whom his treatise is dedicated.

Battle Tactics, Vedute, and Somaesthetic Dominion Throughout the Discorso, calcio is referred to as a “battle” and an “illustrious war,” players as “honorable soldiers,” and teams as “battalions.” Bardi’s semantic characterization of the game builds from the longstanding tradition of conceptualizing ball games as simulations of war.104 In his treatise on ball games published in 1555, Antonio Scaino pointed to the pragmatic benefits of such activities for military preparedness.105 Describing the utility of tennis, for example, he claimed that “[o] ut of this noble and honorable game, brave Commanders can draw many insights 100 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 3-30. 101 On the classical use of enargeia, see Manieri, L’Immagie Poetica; Webb, Ekphrasis. 102 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Critical Essays, I: 7; Goethals, “Spectators of the Sack,” 180. 103 On the concept of enargeia as a political strategy in Early Modern Florence, see Goethals, “Spectators of the Sack,” 175-201; Cox, “Rhetoric and Ethics,” 184. 104 Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sources refer to the game as a “gara” (war), “battaglia” (battle), “scaramuccia” (skirmish), and “fatti d’arme” (armed deeds). On the medieval conception of sports as war, see Carter, Medieval Games, 29-37. 105 Scaino, Trattato.

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when it comes to organizing their battalions on the field, ordering a battle, seizing or defending a fortress, pushing forward or retreating at the right time and in an orderly fashion; inventing stratagems the enemy has not thought of, catching him off guard and forcing him to make a mistake, terrifying him not only by your actions, but also by gestures, shouting, and other utterances…making young men strong, full of courage, and fit for war.”106 Calcio also provided this practical experience since, as Scaino asserted, “[v]ery many times, here and there on the field, players are spectacularly knocked head over heels, and so in this game more than in all the other ball sports, you can see the strength and courage of the fast runners and of those who are agile and powerful when it comes to a struggle.”107 Indeed, he claimed that calcio, more than any other game, represented “quasi una imagine di vera battaglia” (almost an image of a real battle).108 Bardi likewise pointed to the effectiveness of calcio to present an “illustrious war” to a spectating audience and included precise directions for ensuring that the game remained rigorously tied to its military framework. The historiated initial that leads the first sentence of the first page of the treatise visually prepared the reader for Bardi’s analysis of calcio as a battle (Fig. 74). Two men dressed in armor and holding lances ride on horseback behind the letter “S,” which initiates the phrase “Se noi usiamo con ragione appellare acqua morta quella, che da se non corre, e non è da altri attinta …” (If we rightly call dead water that which does not run on its own, and is not drawn from other…).109 Bardi uses the allusion to lead to his primary claim regarding the utility of calcio for the Grand Duke: Florentines would not allow their bodies to become languid like acqua morta, but rather would train to be well-regimented soldiers through diligent exercise. The striding posture of the horses, with left foot raised and head held erect through the confident control of their armed riders, echo the visual aesthetic of imperial equestrian monuments from classical antiquity that had been translated by Renaissance artists into frescoes and statues of famous condottieri and then used in bronze monumental form to honor the Medici Grand Dukes in Piazza della Signoria and Piazza della Santissima Annunziata.110 Beneath the image of the armed horsemen 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Bardi, Discorso, 1. 110 The walls of the Duomo were whitewashed by the time of Francesco I’s wedding to Joanna of Austria in 1565. See Vasari’s “Life of Bacio Bandinelli” (1568): “…il duca Cosimo, per le nozze della reina Giovanna d’Austria sua nuora, volle che S. Maria del Fiore fusse imbiancata di dentro”; Vasari, Le Vite, 5: 243. On the spatial politics of the placement of the bronze Equestrian Monument of Cosimo I de’Medici, commissioned by Ferdinando I and created by Giambologna, in Piazza della Signoria in 1595 and the bronze Equestrian Monument of Ferndinando I de’Medici, commissioned by Cosimo II and also created by Giambologna, in Piazza della Santissima Annunziata in 1608, see Pollack, Cities at War, 265-276.

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Figure 74. Historiated initial “S” with armed men, from opening page of Giovanni de’Bardi, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino, 1580, NENC.F.6.4.2 (Photo: By concession of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali della Repubblica Italiana/ Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze)

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on this opening page of the treatise, Bardi addresses Francesco directly and asks, “Now if, according to the opinion of Guido [Cavalcanti], who in his day was a great philosopher, the exercises of the soul make the man alive, then what shall we say, Most Serene Grand Duke, of the exercises of the body?”111 As both the subsequent text and the marginal notation—“Utilità del Calcio”—clearly highlight, the exercise of calcio was to be lauded for its contribution to a well-functioning state. The spatial disposition of calcio players on the field at the start of the game simulated the organization of ancient military battalions.112 The fifteen Innanzi were spaced into three groups of five each across the midline: one quadriglia occupied the center while the other two were placed on the wings. The five Sconciatori stood twenty-three braccia behind them and sixteen braccia between each other. Then the four Datori innanzi lined up in intervals of twenty-one braccia and, behind them, the Datori addietro formed their defense line of three men spaced out at distances of thirty braccia. As Bardi explains, “This ordering of the three [defensive] lines of calcio players, in which the first of the Sconciatori is tightest, the second looser than that, and the third widest of all, was used in ancient Roman battles.”113 The mathematical precision of Bardi’s instructions for the physical arrangement of the players situated the athletes in the bodily position of their ancient ancestors, aligned for optimal tactics on the battle field. The inclusion of these precise measurements in the printed view of the calcio match that accompanied Bardi’s treatise iterates the game’s fidelity to this battle arrangement. The small “B”s lining the sidelines and placed on the field visualize the distance of braccia that separated each athlete from the next. This ideal spatial nexus was maintained only at the start of the game, before the ball was set into play, and thus determines the narrative moment illustrated in the print. It highlights the strategic arrangement of the players on the field to remind the viewer of the game’s symbolic military form. Bardi uses specific topographical terminology—mura (wall) and fossa (ditch)—to describe the parts of the calcio field. Apparently the tradition to consider one side of the field as the “wall side” and the other as the “ditch side” came from an actual field in Florence called the Prato, located on the northern bank of the Arno inside the southwest corner of the city walls, which was used before the Grand Duchy as a calcio arena.114 A letter from Stefano Sterponi (called Filipono) to Francesco Onesti, datable to around 1518, describes how one sideline of the Prato was demarcated by 111 Bardi was very familiar with the writings of Cavalcanti and his close friend Dante Alighieri, which he discussed with his colleagues in the Accademia degli Alterati. 112 Bardi, Discorso, 8-9. 113 Bardi, Discorso, 13. 114 Benvenuti, Quadri Storici Fiorentini (1887), 135.

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means of an extant mura while the other was made by the digging of a fossa.115 The configuration of the field loosely modelled the topography of Florence itself, with the mura standing in for the city walls and the fossa the river Arno, both of which were located in close proximity.116 Thus the battle that was simulated on the calcio field served as a form of mimetic exercise in the defense of Florence, should the city ever withstand attack. The placement of this symbolic battle inside the walls indicated that, despite the competition between citizens and neighborhoods inspired by the game, all of the players on the field were unified by their civic identity as free and in control of their own destiny.117 Despite the lack of an actual wall and ditch in Piazza Santa Croce, Bardi retained the terms mura and fossa in his treatise to describe the two opposing sidelines of the calcio field, thereby formalizing the symbolic reference to Florentine defenses. Bardi’s instructions on how to select the best athletes for the control of the wall and the ditch during the game further suggest the militaristic implications of these locations, since the two sides were staffed by players with very different skill sets. The players on the fossa, or ditch-side, of the field needed to employ clever and dexterous tactics, presumably to provide a first-defense of sorts from an attack, while those on the mura, or wall-side, were required to wield brute force since they represented the last bastion of Florentine defense. Bardi advised, “above all the Datori innanzi of the wall should be strong and of measureless striking power, while that of the ditch should be an experienced player and very agile.”118 Likewise, for the Sconciatori, “[e]specially should he who plays next to the wall be the biggest and heaviest man of all the team, while he who plays next to the ditch be agile and dexterous, with long experience of the game.”119 Thus while the initial formation of the players on the field was symmetrical, the kind of action that occurred on the sidelines during the match was specialized. The differences in the combat that occurred next to the fossa and the mura were implicitly acknowledged in the seating arrangements provided for the Duke and his retinue during calcio matches in Piazza Santa Croce. According to the printed views and diagrams provided in the various editions of Bardi’s treatise, the fossa was designated as the southern sideline in alignment with the Arno, which flowed 115 McClelland, Body and Mind, 78. 116 For an illustration of the walls and ditch, see, for example, the late fifteenth-century view of the city known as the “Chain Map.” 117 As John McClelland has analyzed, it thus “duplicated internally the city’s external defenses, a gesture that possessed a rich symbolism, given the fact that the game served the contradictory purposes of bringing neighborhood rivalries into the open and of celebrating Florence’s internal, republican cohesiveness vis-à-vis external enemies.” McClelland, Body and Mind, 79. 118 Bardi, Discorso, 16-22. 119 Bardi, Discorso, 22-26.

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just beyond it, while the mura was assigned to the northern side.120 Thus, the ducal viewing pavilion erected at the center of the wall-side of the field assumed symbolic form, since it was positioned just inside the “walls” of the city.121 The players on the field, therefore, battled not just for an abstract territory and ruler, but for the city of Florence and the Medici Duke. In the closing paragraph of his treatise, Bardi directly addresses Francesco I to proclaim that the bravery, endurance, and courage of the noble Florentines on the calcio field was a demonstration of their readiness to serve the Grand Duke in battle, if necessary.122 He explained, “for this they run, for this they confront each other, for this they battle one against another, and they die of fatigue, the exercise of Calcio makes champions who are brave and noble, and in that dispute it makes them courageous, and strong, and able to tackle any enterprise, and to attain every victory.”123 As Bardi makes clear, calcio matches were staged as battles for the viewing pleasure of the Grand Duke, who was affirmed of the loyalty and competency of the Florentine nobility through their performance on the field. Further performative actions occurred outside the space of the calcio arena in the days and weeks leading up to a match that extended the war simulation. Indeed, the battle on the field was preceded by a lengthy and fully immersive game of war played by the Florentine nobility throughout the city itself. In his detailed account from the reign of Grand Duke Ferdinand II de’Medici, Richard Lassels described how several weeks before the calcio battle, two young noblemen were selected as “princes” of the two factions that eventually would field the calcio teams in Piazza Santa Croce.124 Each was given the authority to establish a temporary court in a palace in the city. Over the course of several days and nights in residence, these princes and their entourage of select men engaged in an intense game of role-playing.125 They accommodated public audiences and received ambassadors of the opposing faction, made proclamations of denouncement and captured prisoners, exchanged correspondence, met with counsel, listened to their subjects, and ultimately, shortly before the last day of Carnival, they resolved on “a battle at Calcio, to be fought in the Piazza of Santa Croce, before the Great Duke and Court.”126 The extensive prelude to the match, which involved multiple communities, bound the participants together 120 The diagram and imagery of the 1688 edition will be discussed below. 121 An exception to this placement, however, is seen in a print of 1691 by the Dutch engraver Arnold van Westerhout, which records the calcio in livrea organized for the wedding of Anna Mari Luisa de’Medici and Johann Wilhelm II of Neuberg. The canopied ducal tribunal is situated in front of Palazzo dell’Antella. However, the large format print by Giuseppe Zocchi illustrating a calcio in livrea of 1739 places the tribunal back on the “wall” side of the field. 122 Bardi, Discorso, 28. 123 Bardi, Discorso, 28. 124 The following description is based on the 1670 account by Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, 212-215. 125 On immersive, simulated, performative environments, see Magelssen, Simming. 126 The italics are in the original; Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, 214.

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through shared performative acts. The opportunity to assume princely titles and leadership roles in a city that precluded ascendency to such positions offered a space for the young nobility to gain understanding of a military situation and its context as well as to demonstrate their sagacity, bravado, and cleverness. Despite the festive context for its performance, the war simulation involved high-stakes, since it was under the scrutiny of the Duke himself and thus the game had the potential to impact the status and prestige of the players involved.127 Lassels’ implication that the game was conceived for the viewing pleasure of the Duke and his court was iterated in his description of the procession of the two factions into the piazza at the start of the game: Upon the day appointed, the two Princes of the Calcio come to the place in a most stately Cavalcata, with all the young Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Town, upon the best Horses they can find, with Scarfs red, or green, about their Arms. Having made their several Cavalcataes before the Great Dukes Throne or Scaffold, they light from their Horses, and enter into the Lists with trompets sounding before them, and accompanied with a Stately Train, and with their Combatants in their several Liveries. Having rancked themselves a pretty distance one from the other, their Standard Bearers at sound of Trumpet, carry both at once, their Standards to the foot of the Great Dukes Scaffold. This done, the Ball or Ballon is thrown up in the midst between them, and to it they go with great nimbleness, sleight, and discretion.128

The “cavalcata” was a lengthy choreographed display of all of the participants involved in the calcio match, including, in addition to the players and their coaches, ceremonial figures, arbitrators, musicians, armed guards, and standard bearers. They circled the field several times to allow the spectating audience the opportunity to see their noble costumes and to enjoy the ceremonial pretext to the match. Yet the Grand Duke and his retinue, raised above the field in a special viewing pavilion, were the honored recipients of the pomp and circumstance of the ritualized procession. The deliverance of the standards—the distinctive flags of the competing military regiments—at the foot of the grand-ducal throne made clear that the battle was offered to him. The military subtext of the game provided a means to express through performative actions the Grand Duke’s command and dominion over the field of play, which was symbolic of the city and indeed the Duchy itself. Since the Medici assumption of rule in Florence in the Cinquecento, calcio matches were purposefully organized out of festal time—that is, outside of Carnival—to 127 In this regard, it may be considered a form of “deep play,” For a recent investigation of deep play in Renaissance financial risk-taking, see Baker, “Deep Play,” 259-281. 128 Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, 214-215.

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celebrate important Medici marriage alliances and political achievements. These games were held in honor of featured guests, and often were accompanied by feasts and balls. In addition to the above-mentioned game staged in 1532 for Alessandro de’Medici’s fiancée, Margaret, calcio was organized for the weddings of Lucrezia de’Medici (1558), Eleonora de’Medici (1584), Virginia de’Medici (1586), Grand Duke Ferdinand I (1589), Cosimo II de’Medici (1608), Caterina de’Medici (1617), and Anna Maria Luisa de’Medici (1691).129 The idea to stage a battle on the occasion of a marriage underscores the theme of triumph that often was visually asserted in the iconography of such occasions, such as the elaborate triumphal entry that was arranged on the occasion of Francesco I’s marriage to Joanna of Austria in 1465. Before she was crowned with the ducal mazzocchio and ushered through the triumphal Arch of Florence, a mock battle was staged at the Porta al Prato that featured over four thousand cavalry and infantrymen.130 The military subtext of the celebrations was a means to visualize the groom’s ability to “conquer” the bride.131 Although no match was recorded for Joanna in that year, calcio was played a few years later on the occasion of the visit of her brother, Archduke Charles II of Austria, to the city in 1569. Francesco was designated as the “Principe” of the “Maestri” for the high-profile match, a role that placed him in command of the performed battle on the field.132 Bardi himself was involved in the staging of Medici weddings, both as a musician and composer as well as a calcio player.133 Not coincidentally, Bardi’s calcio treatise was published in 1580, shortly after Francesco’s second wife, Bianca Cappello, was named Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Although she had been Francesco’s lover for over a decade, and his wife (secretly) since 1578, she was only legitimized with the ducal title in 1579.134 The dedication of Bardi’s treatise to Francesco implicitly connected the Duke and his bride to the tradition of calcio at Medici wedding celebrations.135 The frontispiece of the 1580 edition prominently includes Bianca’s coat of arms next to Francesco’s as a sign of her role as the official consort to the Grand Duke (Fig. 75).136 129 In addition to the use of calcio to celebrate weddings, it was also organized for ambassadorial visits and birthday celebrations throughout the seventeenth century. 130 On the gem-encrusted crown, see Mazzi, “Le Gioie,” 134-138. 131 Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, 178, 185. 132 Giunti, Raccolto delle Feste, 7; Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, II: 225. 133 Bardi’s involvement in the staging of Medici weddings will be discussed more thoroughly below. 134 Francesco and Bianca married secretly on June 5, 1578, only two months after the funeral of Joanna of Austria, Francesco’s first wife. Their public nuptials were arranged for October 1579, which prompted an outpouring of criticism. See Masi, Bianca Cappello, 201; Steegman, Bianca Cappello, 196-197. 135 In this regard, Francesco I distinguished himself from his father, Cosimo I, who was lauded for his sexual commitment to Eleonora of Toledo; see Baker, “Power and Passion,” 432-457. 136 Unlike many of the images of Bianca Cappello that were destroyed and the coats of arms that were taken down after her death, the intertwined crests on the frontispiece of Bardi’s treatise is a testament

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Figure 75. Frontispiece with coat of arms of Francesco I de’ Medici and Bianca Cappello, from Giovanni de’Bardi, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino, 1580, NENC.F.6.4.2 (Photo: By concession of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali della Repubblica Italiana/ Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze)

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Distinguished noble guests at calcio matches were included in the special seating of the Grand Duke’s pavilion, or tribunal, which elevated them above the battlefield. Michelangiolo Tenagli described how at the game organized in honor of the marriage Lucrezia de’Medici to Alfonzo d’Este in 1558, the groom and other illustrious spectators of the court were offered spaces within a raised pavilion.137 Refreshment stands were located in the shade below, as were the drummers, trumpeters, and other musicians who provided entertainment before, during, and after the match.138 The temporary architecture of the pavilion symbolically communicated the position of the newest member of the Medici Dynasty. Elevated above the crowd and with unimpeded access to the field, the groom occupied the privileged seat of authority, in the tradition of imperial viewing pavilions for games from antiquity through the present.139 The pavilion constructed for Ferdinand I de’Medici and his new bride Christina of Lorraine in 1589 was even more ostentatious. To frame the Grand Duke and his newly conquered bride, the elevated tribunal was designed as a series of stages, painted to simulate permanent stone seating, which could hold over five thousand guests of honor.140 As the “new Augustus,” Ferdinando was raised literally and symbolically with his court to visualize his dominion. The grand-ducal party’s observation of the battle from the elevated pavilion may be likened to the ways in which early modern men and women witnessed siege warfare throughout the European landscape in the same period. Although undeniably brutal in its violent destruction, siege warfare afforded a certain aesthetic pleasure to audiences through its calculated choreography of the men and women involved in its staging.141 Spectators witnessed these spectacles either firsthand through organized viewing parties on hilltops or secondhand through letters, diaries, drawings, and models that were sent from siege camps.142 These second-hand materials included detailed information not only of the violent skirmishes, but also the preparation of the armies’ camps, trench lines, and rituals of capitulation and ceremonial entries into victorious territories that allowed a distant individual to fully immerse his- or herself in the quotidian reality of war. to their marriage alliance. On the use of portraiture to legitimize Bianca in Florence, see Holian, “The Power of Association,” 13-42. 137 Michelangelo Tenagli [1538-1566], Ricordi, MS Cod. Riccard. 2131, Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, f.10r-v; transcribed in Benvenuti, Quadri Storici Fiorentini, 136. The marriage was on 3 July 1558. 138 Benvenuti, Quadri Storici Fiorentini, 136. 139 Guttmann, “Chariot Races,” 137-160. 140 Cavallino, Raccolta, 33; Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 102. 141 Sandberg, “Pleasure,” 143-162. On the pleasure of watching other forms of simulated battles, see, for example, Davies, The War of the Fists.. 142 See, for example, the detailed accounts provided to the French royalty during the French Wars of Religion in this time period; Wood, The King’s Army.

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Letters to and from the Medici, now housed in the Archivio di Stato, reveal that the Grand Dukes were particularly avid followers of the military conflicts that waged across the European landscape and that they appreciated the order and discipline of battle. For example, the letters of Giovanni de’Medici to his brother Grand Duke Ferdinando I from the frontlines of the Hapsburg-Ottoman warfare in Nagykanizsa in 1601 articulate satisfaction derived from the well-organized choreography of the soldiers; he refers to the Florentine infantry that Ferdinando had sent as “the most beautiful terzio that has ever issued forth from Italy.”143 Bardi’s treatise similarly emphasizes the pleasure of the battle of calcio and introduces order onto the violent skirmishes of the match through his detailed explanations of the strategies and tactics of the game. The legibility of the battle was enhanced further by the printed view of the field, which drew attention to itself as a military simulation and offered a way to enter into the scene from a tactical point of view.144 The disciplined aesthetics of war were used as a visual frame for the Grand Dukes in the primary audience hall of their palace in Florence, designed by Vincenzo Borghini and executed by Giorgio Vasari and his workshop between 1563-1571. The decoration of the Salone dei Cinquecento glorified the Florentine Duchy and its commander-in-chief, Cosimo I de’Medici, by including, amongst its complex iconographic program, six monumental paintings on the western and eastern walls representing victorious military campaigns over Pisa by the Florentine Republic and Siena by Cosimo I’s ducal army respectively (Fig. 76).145 The paintings feature expansive views of siege landscapes that are densely populated by soldiers on foot and horseback in active combat. Although Vasari sent the members of his workshop to perform onsite observation of the landscapes and monuments of each of the places recorded in the images, the final works are composite images taken from many different points of view so as to adequately display both the place and the event in a pleasing manner.146 Likewise, the representation of warfare in the scenes 143 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 5155, fol. 60-62; Sandberg, “Pleasure,” 150. In addition to letters, sketches, drawings, avvisi, and pamphlets of the siege were sent to the court thereby providing the Grand Duke immediate visual access to the spectacles. Ferdinando I also was gifted a relief model made by Gabbriele Ughi in 1604 of the siege of Ostend in which “accuracy and diligence” in its realism was stressed; Letter from Giovanni di Cosimo de’Medici to Ferdinando I de’Medici, Antwerp, 9 April 1604, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5157, fols 78-79. Sandberg convincingly argues that the detailed communication regarding the sieges suggests not only Ferdinando’s practical curiosity of the performance of the Florentine troops but also “an unstated desire to enjoy the delights of the siege, a pleasurable aesthetic and emotional experience that could be evoked even at a great distance”; Sandberg, “Pleasure,” 155. 144 On the relation between siege views and views of urban pageants, see Pollack, Cities at War, 278-281. 145 On conflicting interpretations of the iconographic program, see van Veen, Letteratura artistica; Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, 149-212. 146 Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, 207; Rosen, “Vasari and Vedute,” 34, 37.

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Figure 76. View of the Salone dei Cinqueccento, designed by Vincenzo Borghini and executed by Giorgio Vasari and his workshop between 1563-1571, Palazzo della Signoria, Florence (Photo: Author)

is highly stylized and often favors aesthetic concerns over accuracy regarding military tactics, weaponry, and costuming.147 From his enthroned position on the north dais of the room, Cosimo I was able to take in and appreciate the organized choreography of the siege conquests as an expression of his dominion. On his near left, for example, The Conquest of the Fortress near Porta Camollia dramatically portrayed the Florentine Imperial forces overtaking the Sienese fortification just outside the city (Fig. 77).148 Lit by a crescent moon—a reference to the coat of arms of Piero di Filippo Strozzi, Cosimo’s enemy and leader of the opposition—the attacking army marches in formation toward the gate and raises glowing lanterns in the sky, like the golden orbs of the Duke’s own coat of arms.149 A standard bearer near center of the composition proudly raises the Medici banner on top of the fortified walls while a drummer next to him exhorts his fellow soldiers toward the battle ahead. Although Cosimo is not pictured in the attack—indeed, he was not physically present at the siege but rather 147 The decoration of the entire western wall of the room, for example, portrays the military forces from Florence in the guise of ancients instead of Renaissance armor. 148 On the significance of Vasari’s portrayal of the fortress for Cosimo I, see Hupport, “Giorgio Vasari,” 162-166. 149 For an interpretation of Vasari’s manipulation of weapons and coat-of-arms to reflect on Cosimo’s animosity with Piero di Filippo Strozzi, see Arfaioli, “Inconsistent Knight,” 37-42. Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, 207

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Figure 77. Giorgio Vasari and assistants, The Conquest of the Fortress near Porta Camollia, 1563-1571, Salone dei Cinquecento, Palazzo della Signoria, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

was represented by his captain general, Gian Giacomo de’Medici—the golden canon in the lower left corner of the painting provided a means for the Duke to enter into the scene. The sculpted decoration of the breech of the canon features a ram’s head, the astrological symbol of the Duke, as well as the Medici coat of arms, which are also painted on the trail (Fig. 78). The angle and position of the canon aligned with Cosimo’s physical vantage point of the room and thus activated the image, and Cosimo’s imagination, in a personalized way.150 The Florentine representation of siege warfare in the sixteenth century provides context for both the organization and staging of calcio in Piazza Santa Croce as well as its representation in Bardi’s treatise. Just as siege views offered idealized 150 This emplacement of the Duke’s body is much like his portrayal as the literal architect of the war in a painting situated just above him and slightly to his left. As Mark Rosen has suggested, Cosimo I’s representation with a three-dimensional model of Siena positioned him self-consciously in relation to the Medici Pope Clement VII, who owned a relief map of Florence made by Tribolo and Benvenuto della Volpaia in 1529 while it was under siege. Vasari dedicated a detailed description of Tribolo’s map, likening the effort to make it to an act of defense of Florence itself; see Rosen, “Vasari and Vedute,” 34. Federico I de’Medici received a similarly detailed relief map of Ostend, made by Gabbriele Ughi in 1604, from his brother Giovanni, who hoped that it would bring pleasure to the Grand Duke due to its accuracy and beauty; Sandberg, “Pleasure,” 154-155.

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Figure 78. Detail of canon with insignia of Cosimo I de’Medici, The Conquest of the Fortress near Porta Camollia (Photo: Art Resource)

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vantages upon which to witness streamlined and contrived visual accounts of a battle, the print fabricates an idyllic view of the war of calcio. Like Vasari’s views onto the military battlefields of Pisa and Siena, the calcio print accompanying Bardi’s treatise presents the long, tactical view of the piazza. The built environment of Florence did not offer a live spectator such a vantage, and thus it does not visually profess fidelity with the real experience of a calcio match in the piazza. Rather, the compositional strategy used in the print provides the reader of the treatise with unimpeded scopic access to the piazza and its occupants that ultimately supersedes the real thing. As the dedicatee of the treatise, Duke Francesco I was offered the image of calcio in Piazza Santa Croce as a personalized veduta. The unimpeded window onto the scene reflected his implied dominion over this critical space and the battles that were waged therein.151 The extension of this point of view to the reader of Bardi’s treatise offered the prosthetic experience of this dominion.

Ritual Display and Restraint in the Noble Game of Calcio Despite its violent pretext as a battle, Bardi took particular care to frame calcio as the purview of gentlemen. According to his definition, calcio was a public game that featured “pleasant” competition between two teams of unarmed young men, whose end goal was honor.152 Played by noblemen for a noble audience, the athletes on the field had to find a balance between the potential for untamed violence and the demand for absolute gentility within the game, otherwise they would disgrace themselves and dishonor the city.153 Bardi’s insistence on the necessity of the calcio player’s restrained comportment was in alignment with contemporary humanist attitudes toward physical activities. Renaissance treatises dealing with athletic contests, including Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (1528), Camillo Agrippa’s Trattato di scienza d’arme (1553), and Antonio Scaino’s Trattato del giuoco dalla palla (1555), offered advice on the virtue of displaying physical prowess in front of an audience as a demonstration not only of noble refinement, but also an individual’s exterior physical beauty and inner moral virtue.154 As Bardi emphasized throughout 151 As the Medici ducal regime continued over the course of the seventeenth- and into the eighteenthcenturies, the mapping of the family’s authority on to the principle spaces of the city through printed views became commonplace. For example, Jacques Callot’s illustrations of the choreographed movements of performers, dancers, and horses in the Guerra d’amore and Guerra di Bellezza, organized by Cosimo II and choreographed by Giulio Parigi, represent the social body of Florence as it was shaped into the fleur-de-lis of Medici power. See Pollack, Cities at War, 279-280. 152 Bardi, Discorso, 9. 153 Bardi, Discorso, 33-34. On the replacement of violence with sport, see Elias, The Civilizing Process, 23. 154 For an overview of humanist attitudes on sport, see McClelland, Body and Mind, esp. 101.

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his treatise, calcio’s success depended on the rationality of its noble players; indeed, he specifies that the athletes must play “con ragione” (with reason).155 He urged civility at all times, even when players suffered unjust aggression or dirty play; players should never react with fists, nor with vendetta, since these are signs of the untamed passions and not of the restraint of a gentleman.156 In Bardi’s view, without this premise of peace, the game would be nothing other than an angry fight among wild beasts.157 Rather, the calcio player offered a particular kind of noble masculine ideal: strong, aesthetically pleasing, able, and under control.158 Since calcio was a spectacle organized for the viewing pleasure of an audience comprised of the principle gentlemen and women of the city, Bardi suggests specific instructions regarding the aesthetics of the event.159 He specified that calcio players must not be too young or too old, neither ugly nor thin nor have a disability—including blindness—since “they would look ridiculous in the piazza.”160 Bardi’s emphasis on the necessity for physical beauty extended to the way in which the athletes were dressed for the game. The uniform for each athlete consisted of a doublet, cap, stockings, and light shoes, all designed for unimpeded mobility and swiftness on the field while at the same time with attention to a handsome cut and good fit.161 “Above all,” Bardi claims, “each player should be adorned in beautiful and graceful clothes… because the fairest ladies of the city and the principle gentlemen of the city are there, to look upon the game; and he who appears badly dressed makes a poor show.”162 It was especially important for the athletes to wear elegant clothing during matches on solemn occasions, since, as Bardi rightly notes, on those days, “il Theatro è piu che mai pieno di genti’ (the theatre is more than ever full of people).163 The uniforms for calcio a livrea were made from expensive materials “in satin, in velvet or cloth of gold” and each side was cast in a different set of colors.164 The fashioning of the calcio players in splendid materials signaled the noble status of 155 On the supposed rationality of early modern sports, see McClelland, “The Numbers of Reason,” 53-64. 156 Bardi, Discorso, 32. 157 Bardi, Discorso, 33. This in itself is a distinguishing factor between the sixteenth-century version of the game and its present form in “Calcio Storico,” known for its brutality and bestiality; see, for example, Brogioni, “‘Il Giocatore.” 158 Bardi’s emphasis on the civility of calcio may be connected to the concepts of chivalry and magnificence displayed in the jousts and tournaments of the fifteenth-century republic; see Clough, “Chivalry and Magnificence,” 25-47. 159 Bardi, Discorso, 10. 160 Bardi, Discorso, 7; McClelland, Body and Mind, 152, fn. 53. 161 Bardi, Discorso, 10-11. 162 Bardi, Discorso, 11. 163 Bardi, Discorso, 11. 164 Apparently, the “Maestri” selected by the Grand Duke as the team leaders were in charge of organizing the costumes; Bardi, Discorso, 11.

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the athletes, and constituted the social identity of the Grand Duke who sponsored the game and controlled the city itself.165 Since at least the mid-Cinquecento, the athletic uniforms of calcio matches played in honor of the Medici were made from rich materials. The fresco of a calcio match by Giovanni Stradano in the Sala di Gualdrada in Palazzo Vecchio commemorated the calcio games that were played in in 1558 in honor of the wedding of Alfonso II d’Este and Lucrezia de’Medici, the daughter of Eleonora of Toledo and Cosimo I (Fig. 70). The f irst match played in Piazza Santa Croce consisted of two teams comprised of the most skilled players in Florence and was offered as a traditional battle spectacle that underscored the victory of the groom over the bride.166 However, the game recorded in Stradano’s painting—the second match which took place in Piazza Santa Maria Novella—was known for its aesthetics over athletics. It was organized by those men who had been excluded from the f irst match in Santa Croce; to compensate for their subpar athleticism, the players wore sumptuous satin garments, the finest ever before seen on the calcio f ield.167 As in the other paintings made by Stradano in the Sala di Gualdrada of the principle civic spaces of Florence, the image stresses the virtue of the city under Medici ducal rule as seen in the ordered beauty and scale of its public rituals and festivities.168 His rendition of the game reduces the number of athletes on the field to less than half of the required number, enabling Stradano to increase both their size and their spatial distances from one another. The resulting augmented space of play placed the players’ movements in sharp relief against the tan ground of the calcio f ield. The gold and red uniforms, designed to reveal the athletes’ noble bodies to the spectating audience, are given compositional focus in the center of the image.169 Athletes’ arms and legs gracefully extend outward toward pointed fingers and toes as they prance and leap across the field in balletic fashion.170 Even the skirmish in the middle of the 165 As Timothy McCall has examined, “Nobility was manifested somatically, moreover not only by the prince but by the entire court”; see McCall, “Brilliant Bodies,” 451. 166 Lapini, Diario Fiorentino, 121 (although n.b. that he incorrectly uses the date of 2 July for the match); Lensi, Il Gioco, 56; Magoun, “Il Gioco,” 9; Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 93. 167 As recorded by Tenagli, since they could not compete with the game, the players competed with their clothes; see Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 93. 168 For an analysis of the relationship of the iconography of Gualdrada and Eleonora in the Sala del Gualdrada, see Allegri and Cecchi, Palazzo Vecchio, 208-212; Benson, “Transformations,” 410-420; van Veen, “Florence’s Sovereignty,” 231-235; Gàldy, “Tuscan Concerns,” esp. 306-310. 169 Currie, Fashion and Masculinity, 137. 170 On the relationship between sixteenth-century Florentine rituals produced for the Medici court and the development of the ballet, see Zorzi, Il Teatro e la Città; Strong, Art and Power. For a summary of the development of ballet in Italy, see Sparti, “Breaking Down Barriers,” 255-276. On the relationship between dance and exercise for physical health, see Arcangeli, “Dance and Heath,” 3-30.

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field between several players from the opposing teams is rendered as an acrobatic exercise akin to the Venetian forze d’ercole of Carnivale, not the battle of war that was calcio fiorentino.171 The clothing of the calcio players was placed on display for the spectating audience during the Mostra del calcio a livrea, a choreographed opening ceremony that lasted one full hour before the start of matches organized for special occasions. Since the negotiations for the selection of the teams for calcio a livrea took place within the private home of one of the principle nobles of the city, the mostra, as the term indicates, was a public exhibition of all of the participants in the calcio event.172 The procession was led by trumpeters, who activated the space of the arena with their loud musical call to the ritual gathering. Drummers followed to beat out a marching rhythm for all of the subsequent participants in the procession. The thirty Innanzi came onto the field next, arranged from youngest to oldest. They processed in couples, comprised of one member of each team, and held hands as they made their way around the field. The two Alfieri followed the forward attackers, each preceded by a drummer in matching livrea. As opposed to the athletes that marched before and after them, the Alfieri served a ceremonial function within the event, as they were selected based on their social status, not their physical talents, and were responsible for carrying the team’s standard and hosting the after-party for their team after the match.173 Next marched the Sconciatori, followed by the Dattori innanzi. Bardi signaled that among these latter athletes, the halfbacks who were assigned to play next to the Wall were the most-worthy athletes on the field, thus they carried in their hands la palla della Livrea.174 Taking up the rear of the procession were the defensive Datori addietro. To ensure that everyone in the “theatre” would be able to see the athletes, the procession made a slow passeggiata around the entire perimeter of the field. The processional circling was sometimes lengthened, as was the case in the match organized for Anna Maria Luisa de’Medici’s wedding in which there were “più girate attorno la Piazza” (more turns around the piazza), in order to extend the ritual display.175 At the conclusion of the procession, each Alfiero brought his team’s standard to its designated pavilion at one of the ends of the field, and the judges took their positions on the elevated seating on the side of the field. The formal attachment of the extensive ritual procession before the game offered the opportunity for the crowd to have extended access to the athletes’ bodies, which were offered as visual evidence that the sport was 171 This same aestheticization of the game is seen in Raffaello Gualterotti’s painting of calcio in Santa Croce from 1589, now in the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, which also refers to Florentine dance. 172 On the regulations for the selection of teams for calcio al livrea, see Bardi, Discorso, 14. 173 Bardi, Discorso, 10-11. 174 Bardi, Discorso, 15. 175 Gori, Il Giuoco, 20.

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noble as was its benefactor, the Grand Duke, whose body was also on display in its elevated pavilion.176 As Bardi took care to describe, the display of the athletes during the mostra, hand-in-hand with alternating jersey colors, was akin to the “maniera che a guisa di Scacchiero” (manner of a chessboard).177 To ensure the chessboard effect, he instructs that the athletes are to be spaced out and arranged according to their complementary colored uniforms. In this manner, if the first player to process on the field wears white, then the next should follow in red, then the third in white, and so on, hand-in-hand until the entire line-up is ordered.178 On special occasions in which the Medici were especially featured, the colors of the athletes’ uniforms reflected the colors of the ducal family’s coats of arms. For example, in the calcio match played in honor of the wedding of Eleonora de’Medici to Vincenzo Gonzaga in 1584, the teams were fitted in red and gold uniforms comprised of sumptuous satin doublets, brocaded breeches, and velvet berets adorned with feathers, gold studs, medallions, and pearls.179 Their repetition, side-by-side in alternating fashion, transformed the field into the patterning of a chess board. Framed by the Medici colors of red and gold, the site of play was then activated by the palla, or ball, which was the central feature of the Medici coat of arms.180 The Medici were long familiar with the game of chess. Cosimo and his son Piero both played the game, and the late fifteenth-century inventory of Palazzo Medici taken after the death of Lorenzo records several chess boards and chess sets made of walnut and ivory.181 Giovanni de’Medici, Lorenzo il Magnifico’s son, was an avid player both before and after his ascendancy to the papal throne as Leo X; according to his datario, Baldassare Turini, the Medici pope spent the majority of his day within his apartment playing chess.182 Apparently he also had the opportunity to read and comment on Marco Girolamo Vida’s poem, Scacchia ludus, before it was published with a dedication to him.183 In the ducal period, the Medici continued 176 The extended duration of the mostra and the detailed instructions for its composition are in alignment with other forms of ritual corteo in Medicean Florence; see, for example, the reproductions and discussions in “All the world’s a stage.” 177 Bardi, Discorso, 11. 178 Bardi, Discorso, 14-15. 179 Conti, “Descrizione,” 136. 180 On the purposeful merging of the iconography of the calcio palla with the Medici palle in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century images and literature, see Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, esp. 56-72. 181 Simons, “(Check) Mating,” 59. At least four boards were in the family’s possession at the end of the fifteenth century: two boards were made entirely of walnut, one was made of walnut with ivory inlay and decoration, another took the form of an ivory gaming box that folded and featured Medici insignia in enamel; see Lorenzo de’Medici at Home, 79, 114. 182 Smeaton, The Medici, 241-242. 183 In 1514, Baldassare Turini da Pescia claimed, “Nostro Signore sta la maggiore parte del dì in la stanza ad giocare ad scacchi, ed udire sonare”; Roscoe, Vita, 11: 91.

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to actively play chess and collect and commission boards for their use at court, as did noblemen and women throughout Europe during the Early Modern period.184 Thus, the aesthetic logic that governed Bardi’s choice of arrangement of the players for the mostra signaled a form of gaming that was familiar to the Medici and the nobility in general. Bardi’s word choice in describing the presentation of the athletes on the calcio field provides a clever linguistic play between the word scacchiera (chess board) and the scacchiere (military zone or battle field).185 Since at least the thirteenth century, chess was considered a game with utility for the military arts and thus for good governance.186 In Jacopo de Cessolis’ enormously popular treatise on chess, Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo scaccorum (Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess), the chess board signified both the ideal city, based on a grid and surrounded by impenetrable walls, and a battlefield, in much the same way that Bardi alluded to the enclosed calcio field as both a representation of Florence and the site of war.187 Written as an advice book for princes, de Cessolis presented the game of chess as an allegory of benevolent rule. In order for the king to rule effectively, he had to understand the synergetic function of the state and to allow each individual to reach his or her full potential as a citizen.188 The chess pieces within the game signified the various individuals that comprised a well-ordered city, each with its own assigned role to play.189 De Cessolis argued by analogy that while the King was the most important piece on the board, signaled by his unrestricted mobility, the other pieces on the board were also able to move and thus also were crucial to the success of a particular side. When Cosimo I came to power in 1537, Luigi Guicciardini wrote and dedicated to the young ruler a Comparatione del gioco delli scacchi alla arte militare (Comparison of the Game of Chess and the Military Arts).190 Based largely 184 For example, the Medici court artist Jacopo Ligozzi designed a board made of precious stones that was executed by Giovanni Battista Sassi in 1617 and is housed today in the Tesoro dei Medici: Museo degli Argenti in Palazzo Pitti (no. 64733). 185 O’Bryan, “A Duke,” 31. 186 Murray, A History of Chess; for the particular popularity of chess with the nobility, see Earles, Chess. 187 de Cessolis, The Book of Chess. 188 As Jenny Adams has analyzed persuasively, “the symbolism of chess works to disperse political and social power among the members of the civic body” and “anyone who learns the game should be able to master his or her role in the civic body and the rules that govern his or her actions”; see Adams, Power Play, 4-5. 189 In this regard, de Cessolis is rightfully situated within the tradition of moralizing texts about chess, which explained the freedoms and restrictions of the moves of individual pieces according to their social status. 190 Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Magliabecchiano Classe XIX, 54; reproduced in Bardii, Borbone Occiso, 243-256.

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Figure 79. Paris Bordone, The Chess Players, c.1550, oil on canvas, Gemäldegallerie, Berlin (Photo: Art Resource)

on de Cessolis’s model, the treatise sought to provide a positive model of virtù from antiquity that would guide Cosimo to good leadership.191 Bardi’s reference to chess in the calcio treatise dedicated to Francesco I drew upon the game’s well-known associations with the noble class as well as the literary use of the game as a metaphor for culture itself. His characterization of the playing field as a chessboard stressed the utility of the game as a strategic site for the demonstration of leadership, as well as served as an invitation to his readers to play at the game of governance.192 The open invitation to viewers to participate in pictorial games was popular in Renaissance Italy. In a mid-sixteenth century painting by Paris Bordone, for example, two gentlemen are engaged in a game of chess (Fig. 79). Seated across from one another with the chess board between them, the two players occupy nearly the entire height of the canvas. The chess board is situated at waist-level so that each man has a clear view of it from above. The object of that game was to capture the opponent’s lead piece; this was achieved through strategic manipulation of the individual pieces, which were regulated by a set of rules that dictated the chess player’s ability to move them around the board. Yet in Bordone’s painting, the players 191 Ponsiglione, “Funzioni e Finzioni.” 192 Since at least the Gothic period, the chess pieces took human form, and were cast in chivalric roles; see Camille, The Medieval Art of Love. Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) described a game of chess that used live females as the chess pieces; see Weinberg, “Chess as a Literary Idea,” 321-335; Adams, Power Play, 160-163.

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lift their eyes away from the game and gaze out toward the viewer. The man on the viewer’s right pinches his thumb and index figure around one of his pieces, poised to move it on the board, which is tilted obliquely so as to give the viewer unimpeded access to each of the squares. The man on the viewer’s left rests one hand on the edge of the table and the other holds his chin. Like his opponent, he entreats the viewer to contemplate the game. As Patricia Simons has described eloquently, “The composition strenuously manufactures the viewer as a third party at the chessboard, captivated by the game, the players, their domain and their dominion. It is as though the two men and the painter are protagonists of a scenographic performance, stage managers, designers and actors all.”193 Frozen in the moment before the action, the two men will never complete their game; yet, they invite the viewer to complete it for them and work out the strategies and tactics to win. Several representations of calcio produced in the ambient of the Medici court presented analogous invitations to viewers to discern the strategies and tactics of the game. Giovanni Stradano’s never-printed frontispiece of “Calcius Ludus Florentinorum Nobilum” uses the perimeter of a calcio field as a graphic frame for the text on the page (Fig. 73).194 Stradano presents a birds-eye view of a calcio field bounded by wooden posts and beams, and surrounded by a tightly compressed mass of figures and instruments.195 Squeezed between the wooden posts on the near sideline and the outer edge of the frame are drummers and pipe players, while trumpeters blow their decorated instruments on the far side of the field on the upper edge of the page. A palla pierced by two spears marks the half line on either side of the field. In each of the left and right margins, a young man of dressed in calze, a short waistcoat, and beretta with feathers stands upon a raised pedestal and displays his body toward the viewer. The young men are identified by both their costumes and their positions on the field as the Alfieri, or standard bearers, who stand before their pavilions in the center of each team’s goal line during calcio games. The Alfieri and their pavilions are out of scale with the field; indeed, Stradano uses their billowing standards and elevated pedestals to draw attention to the festal frames of the game. The openness of the field—it is only populated by the thin lines comprising the titular words, poetry, and dedication of the frontispiece—is a space of play that has not yet been activated. One can only presume that the folios that were intended to follow this cover illustration would have offered the viewer strategies to engage with it. Stradano’s depiction of the calcio field as an open space that can be accessed and activated by the viewer’s eye was echoed in Jacques Callot’s etching of a match at 193 Simons, “(Check) Mating,” 61. 194 See the discussion of the humanist poem incorporated into Stradano’s frontispiece above. 195 For an analysis of the drawing, see van Ysselt, “Il Calcio Fiorentino,” 481-487.

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Santa Croce, made for Lorenzo di Ferdinando de’Medici as one of the fifty prints in the Capricci di varie Figure series from 1617 (Fig. 71). Callot presents a veduta of the piazza from a fictitious hill on the north side of the piazza.196 A drummer dressed in livrea commands the center foreground of the image, while the middle- and background of the scene is populated by diminutive figures representing athletes, drummers, and guards on the field and spectators who line the perimeter on foot, horse, and carriage. The palla is in play on the viewer’s left—the side of the field closest to the church of Santa Croce—where several players have been thrown to the ground and others are engaged in hand-to-hand combat. The defense has taken control of the palla and is represented in a moment of counter-attack. The small scale of the athletes on the field and the overall spatial relation of the viewer to them is akin to Bordone’s chess board, which was presented to the viewer as an invitation to imagine oneself into the game. Yet like Stradano’s oversized Alfieri, Callot’s tamburino draws attention to the festal aspects of the event to the point of detracting from the game itself. The drummer’s open stance blocks the viewer’s vision of the field and thereby prevents a full engagement with the tactical movements of the two teams. The view of calcio offered in Bardi’s Discorso, however, eliminates the festal distractions and actively situates the viewer as a direct agent of the game. As opposed to witnessing it from the sidelines, the viewer was positioned inside, above the field of play on the west end of the piazza and headed eastward toward the far goal line. The positioning of the reader in command of the players on the field was comparable to the live experience of many Renaissance games, such as chess, in which each player assumed command of figurines on a board. While the treatise did not offer an actual gameboard, the printed view provided a performative space for the reader to play a virtual version of calcio. The 1580 edition of the treatise, as for all three of the successive editions printed in 1615, 1673, and 1688, featured a print that was double the size of a folio and stitched into the binding on one edge, with the other folded on top. While readers followed the narrative of Bardi’s text, they could pause to return to the print and unfold the view of the game to imaginatively act out the instructions on the field. The tactile manipulation of the print, turning it first one direction and then another, allowed the reader to see multiple points of view and therefore gain a tactical sense of the game. This positioning of the viewer as an active player was enhanced in a new View of a calcio match in Piazza Santa Croce by Alessandro Cecchini that was made, together with a diagram of the calcio field, for a reprint of Bardi’s Discorso by Pietro Bini as part of a compendium of calcio texts. Like the veduta in Bardi’s original publication, the engraved folding plate by Cecchini positions the viewer above the piazza and 196 For an analysis of the print, see Bredekamp, Calcio Fiorentino, 11-14; 21-23; 108-109;129-131.

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Figure 80. Alessandro Cecchini, View of a Calcio Match in Santa Croce, from Pietro Bini, Memorie del Calcio Fiorentino, 1688 (Photo: Author)

thus provides enhanced scopic access to the spectacle that unfolds from foreground to background (Fig. 80). Once again, the field is delineated by wooden posts and beams erected around the perimeter, and men and women surround the field on foot, horse, and carriage. Yet, subtle differences distinguish the form and expressive content of Cecchini’s print from its precedent. Cecchini’s view provides a greater contrast between the magnificence of the built environment of the piazza and its human occupants. The façade of Santa Croce is stretched slightly higher and the size of the oculus is smaller. The dome of the Pazzi chapel is elevated so as to be visible over the cloister walls. The piazza itself is shown in expanded form: both the size of the field and the space around its perimeter are greater than the earlier version. The athletes are displayed in a precise formation, which was used at the start of the game. Three quadriglia formations are neatly organized on the midline, and the players designated as sconciatori and datori are evenly spaced across the field. As opposed to the athletes in the earlier print, which twist and turn in a variety of poses, the athletes of each team in Cecchini’s print are uniformly facing in one direction. Cecchini has used an economy of marks to describe each athlete, their scale has been reduced, and tonal density increased. Their dark, compact forms provide stark contrast to the field, which is bathed in light that originates from the

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Figure 81. Alessandro Cecchini, Diagram of Starting Positions of Athletes in a Calcio Match, from Pietro Bini, Memorie del Calcio Fiorentino, 1688 (Photo: Author)

viewer’s right. These adjustments to the representation increased the legibility of the athletes in relation to each other and to their respective goals, and ultimately provided a way of seeing that fostered strategic interaction between the reader of the treatise and the print. In addition to his reduction of the size of the players to schematic pieces on the field, Cecchini included a diagram that clearly delineated the relation of each player in relation to the others on the field (Fig. 81). Like the chess diagrams that were included in treatises on that noble game, the calcio diagram activated an intellectual game in the mind of the reader.197 Holding the book in the hands, the reader unfolded the page to see the plan of the field with the players in their initial line-up. Unlike Callot and Stradano, Cecchini does not place the ball in play and activate the athletes in movement, but rather emphasizes the geometric regularity of the organization of the players on the field at the beginning of the game. The bird’s eye view allows the reader to immediately comprehend the precise spacing required between the athletes, who are indicated on the map by small black dots. 197 On the chess diagrams made by Leonardo da Vinci in collaboration with Luca Pacioli in the context of the court of Milan, see Pederson, Leonardo. I am grateful to Jill for sharing her ideas with me.

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The left half of the diagram features numerical references to the amount of braccia required between each player, while the right half uses letter labels beside each dot that corresponds to a key containing the names of the athletes’ positions. In this diagram, the fossa is located closest to the reader’s body (i.e. the near side of the field), while the mura is located toward the top of the page. This spatial nexus is only temporary, however, since the reader must turn the book to align the diagram with the veduta of the piazza that is located on the previous folio.198 By moving between the images on these pages, the reader gained access to and control of the game. Depending on how well the reader has absorbed the rules and strategies laid out in the text, he or she had the potential to imagine any number of scenarios of how a game might play out. The physicality of the image and text in relation to the reader’s body—that is, the reader’s tactile manipulation of the pages, ocular reception of the images, and perhaps the marking of them in a manner akin to chess diagrams—activated a space of play that connected the reader’s experience to the Florentine practice.199 Although not physically engaged in the sport, the reader-viewer was presented with a scenario that was contingent on personalized strategies and tactics to activate the field. The viewers of the print, like Renaissance viewers of siege maps or players of chess, were thus offered the opportunity to control the practice of the piazza, and ultimately occupy a seat next to the ruling family of the city. *** This chapter has analyzed Giovanni de’Bardi’s treatise on calcio as a cultural artifact of somaesthetic experience in the later sixteenth century. The humanist self-consciously identifies the Florentine game with ancient practices to bolster its perceived usefulness and nobility, and, through historical emplacement, provides positive commentary on the power and authority of the Grand Duke. By presenting calcio as the image and function of the well-ordered state, Bardi suggests that its ritual regulation and continual practice provided the means by which the Florentine nobility staged the image of Florence for themselves and others in the open space of the city. Beyond its function as a rulebook for calcio, the treatise also may be understood as a manual of behavior for performative play in the social world of the Medici ducal court. Like the athletes on the field, who needed to be strong in body, brave in heart, and restrained in mind, the Grand Duke needed to embody his noble authority. The reader of the treatise gained access to this noble instruction and, in the printed view and diagram, was offered a space of play. 198 As mentioned earlier, not all examples are uniform in their placement of the imagery, yet regardless the diagram and veduta are printed on two separate sheets, thus the reader must toggle between them. 199 On the meaning-making that accompanies the tactile manipulation of manuscripts, see the discussion with references in Chapter One.

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6. Epilogue: Renaissance Somaesthetics in a Digital World Abstract The epilogue highlights a somaesthetic turn in contemporary pedagogical tools used to teach the Renaissance and engage virtual viewers. It highlights select cases of digital humanities projects to demonstrate how researchers have provided new sensory-driven access to historical experience, and explores how the digital platform disrupts hegemonic discourse through its design, which relies on a user’s actions to generate a personalized experience. The epilogue argues that mindful interaction with these tools provides a means to come to know Renaissance works through the body and points to the constructive ways that somaesthetic cultivation can reinvigorate the first-hand experience of art in the museum and beyond. Key words: Renaissance pedagogy, museum experience, digital humanities, somaesthetic cultivation, virtual reality

Thomas Struth’s photograph, Uffizi I, Florence (1989), presents two elderly women dressed in summer traveling clothes and standing in a vast, white-walled room of the museum (Fig. 82). One tilts her head down to read aloud from a guidebook, while her companion folds her arm behind her back and listens attentively. They face Giotto di Bondone’s monumental altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Angels (commonly known as the “Ognissanti Madonna”), which is displayed on a raised platform and placed at a right angle to another monumental altarpiece, Cimabue’s Virgin and Child with Angels. The women, in direct alignment with the corner of the room, occupy the space between Giotto and Cimabue, a compositional gesture that invites the viewer to triangulate the two paintings and the museum visitors.1 What is at play in such a triangulation is a lesson about the operation of seeing and behaving within the space of the museum.2 1 On vision and beholding as a form of triangulation, see Zorach, The Passionate Triangle. 2 See Belting, “Photography and Painting,” 5-28; Hambourg and Eklund, “The Space of History,” 156-165; and Eidt, Writing and Filming the Painting, 27-38.

Terry-Fritsch, A., Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722216_ch06

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Figure 82. Thomas Struth, Uffizi I, Florence, C-print, 1989, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Photo: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth)

The lesson that unfolds within the space of the photograph is the foundational narrative of Italian Renaissance painting, declaratively enunciated by the sixteenthcentury artist and art biographer Giorgio Vasari and reiterated over centuries of art-historical scholarship. According to Vasari, “after the many years during which the methods and outlines of good painting had been buried under the ruins caused by war it was Giotto alone who, by God’s favor, rescued and restored the art, even though he was born among incompetent artists.”3 The experience of visiting the Uffizi Gallery underscores this textual narrative, since the visitor’s physical movements through the museum’s dazzling collection begins in the very room captured in Struth’s photograph.4 The Uffizi website clearly states, “This big and important room is crucial to understand the revolution [that] occurred to the traditional figurative schemes of Tuscan and Italian painting at the end of the 13th century.”5 The quiet calm of Struth’s photograph, an effect that is amplified when 3 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 57. 4 Carrier, “Remembering the Past,” 61-65. 5 “Hall 2- Giotto & the 13th Century.”

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seen in its full dimensions of over five feet by five feet, conveys the reverence with which museum visitors are to approach Giotto.6 Light streams from windows on the upper right wall to bathe Giotto’s altarpiece in natural light and activate its golden background. The museum visitors are dwarfed by the larger-than-life Madonna. As seen by their performative gestures in the museum, they are respectful visitors, their postures erect and shoulders squared to the painting. No doubt the text on the open page of their travel guide stressed the importance of Giotto and guided their eyes to compare its “new” style with the other paintings in this room. The viewer of the photograph likewise participates in this art-historical lesson, yet is given additional information to construct further narratives. Details of the visitors’ clothes and accessories emphasize the displacement of Giotto’s painting from its original historical context—the white sandals of the white-haired woman, the shopping bag wrapped around her companion’s wrist, and the shorts worn by another museum visitor on the far-right edge in front of a Byzantine crucifix all point to viewing in an age beyond the Renaissance. Instead of placement on a sacred altar within a church, Giotto’s massive religious painting is presented in the modern environment of the museum. As Struth describes, “The idea behind the museum photographs was to retrieve masterpieces from the fate of fame, to recover them from their status as iconic paintings, to remind us that these were works which were created in a contemporary moment, by artists who had everyday lives. They can be admired but revering the artist and their work can also be an impediment. In essence, I wanted to bring together the time of the picture and the time of the viewer.”7 In capturing the moment of encounter between the beholder in the museum and the object on display, Struth collapses the distinction in time between their living histories, and, in so doing, draws attention to the anachronism of the museum itself. Furthermore, by constructing as its subject the act of viewing art, the photograph entices its viewers to recognize themselves as viewing subjects and asks them to consider the very process of beholding.8 Certainly, Struth’s photograph is not meant to illustrate the real-time conditions of visiting the Uffizi today. Unlike the quiet, contemplative space pictured in Struth’s photograph, the great hall is almost always crowded with tourists and their noisy tour guides (Fig. 1). In the conclusion of his history of people who have cried in front of paintings, James Elkins considered some of the reasons why he, and many other contemporary viewers, had not ever had a teary encounter with art.9 He attributes his inability to experience intense affect with art to museums 6 Duncan, “The Art Museum as Ritual,” 7-20. 7 Thomas Struth, “Museum Photographs 1.” 8 Mitchell, “Foreword,” xv-xxv. 9 Elkins, Pictures & Tears, 205-217.

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who “teach viewers to look without feeling too much.” As he laments, many “art museums shuttle their visitors from label to label, and tell them very little that can promote genuine encounters with the objects. The breathless press of wall labels, exhibitions catalogs, gallery guides, audio tours, and videotapes makes museums into schools.”10 These pedagogical intentions are enforced by the general disciplinary environment of museum culture, in which visitors’ bodies are carefully controlled and disciplined.11 Constant surveillance by museum guards, rules concerning the proper distance to maintain from pictures, protective glass covers and other framing devices, and even the limitation of bodily gestures and vocal utterances all serve to underscore the disjunction between the contemporary viewer and the Renaissance image.12 Often museum visitors cannot even see paintings properly much less have the psychological space in which to have an affective experience.13 Of course, Elkins is not alone in his critique of contemporary visual practices. Some philosophers, including Richard Shusterman, whose theories on somaesthetics are at the foundation of this book, argue that in the twenty-first century, a large majority of the population has forgotten how to be mindful of the everyday experiences of the world that surrounds them. The ability to witness works f irsthand is one of the central goals of an art historian. Close scrutiny often reveals valuable evidence that is embedded in the material fabric of the work and the phenomenological context of its display. For this reason, travel is part of the professional identity of the discipline of art history. Florence becomes a buzzing center every summer recess; for many scholars, it is the only time during the academic year that allows for onsite research in museums and archives. Yet, even for art historians who are trained to eliminate distraction during an analysis of a work, the conditions of viewing in Florence’s museums during the summer are difficult today. The dramatic growth in the tourism industry and study abroad programs, amongst other factors, have contributed to a robust and constant presence of visitors to the city, and by consequence, larger than ever numbers of visitors to the museums and churches of the city. While certainly good for the Florentine economy and for the ongoing appreciation of Renaissance 10 Ibid., 207. 11 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 12 On the ways in which museums traditionally shape experience, see, for example, the excellent essays in Exhibiting Cultures. The large body of performance studies scholarship on museum engagement is helpful in conceptualizing experience, particularly in embodied scenarios; see the extensive bibliography in Magelssen, Living History Museums, 179-197; and Jackson, “Engaging the Audience,” 18-19. 13 Elkins recommended several behavioral cues for museum-goers to enhance their affective relationship with the works on display, including going alone, being selective, avoiding crowds, spending quality time in front of works, and paying attention, yet, as he notes, highly emotional responses do not fit “the ironic tone of postmodernism”; Elkins, Pictures and Tears, 210.

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Figure 83. The Mona Lisa Encounter, Musée du Louvre, Paris (Photo: Alicia Steels on Unsplash)

art, the masses of individuals who gather inside the restricted spaces of museums confront serious obstacles to a reflective, prolonged engagement with works of art. The ubiquitous art-historical example of the plight of museum experience in recent years is a visit to the Mona Lisa in the Musée du Louvre in Paris (Fig. 83). To gain access to the painting, museum visitors must navigate extremely congested entrance lines, escalators, corridors, and galleries with the twenty-thousand other viewers who come each day. Sign after sign printed with a reproduction of the painting leads the visitor closer to the real thing until, finally, the destination is revealed to be a packed gallery. The visitor must wait patiently for an opening in the crowd to move forward toward the work of art and only is offered glimpses of the painting over the shoulders and heads of the others standing before him or her. In such a chaotic, crowded environment, the experience of the portrait becomes a spectacle of the spectacular. Vision is distracted away from the work itself and instead toward the others pushing against the security ropes for a glimpse. Many visitors never make it to the front of the crowd to see the painting with their own eyes, allowing the eye of their digital cameras—raised over a sea of heads!—to capture the encounter instead. Even in the foremost position in the room, the museum visitor is distanced physically from the Mona Lisa by ropes and banisters and is not given a clear view since the painting is displayed behind bulletproof glass. As many visitors to the Louvre have lamented, whether due to the conditions of the museum or the cognitive implications of mechanical reproduction, the original

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work of art often does not fulfill their expectations for “an aesthetic experience.”14 In May 2019, the security staff staged a strike to protest the “unprecedented deterioration in visiting conditions, and obviously working conditions.”15 The Sud Culture Solidaires, the guards’ union, demanded action to change the experience for both tourists and staff lest it merely become “a cultural Disneyland.”16 This year, a tourist inside the Uffizi told me to move away from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus so that she could take a picture. She literally yelled at me, “Don’t you see? Everyone is waiting for you to move!” And indeed, when I turned away from my examination of the painting to look behind me, an entire throng was standing, a good five feet away from the work, in a loose line, waiting turns to take pictures on their cell phones. I stepped back and watched the museum visitors arrange themselves for their selfies, and was quick to observe that very few of those who took photographs actually walked up to the painting to view it closely. No doubt, social pressure to move out of the way quickly for the next visitor’s selfie contributed to such lack of engagement, as did the crushing pace of their tours, but this museum behavior also reflects larger trends of contemporary cultural consumption. The taking and sharing of a digital photo of a painting or a sculpture has become, for many, the actual desired experience of the museum. Indeed, selfie stations—spaces set up in front of life-sized reproductions of works of art—have become a common feature at museums around the globe.17 Is this a glimpse into the extent of a visitor’s somaesthetic experience in the museums of the future?18 A series of recent museum exhibitions have used video and other digital technologies to bring viewers’ embodiment back into focus in relation to Renaissance works. An exhibition of Bill Viola’s videos at the Palazzo Strozzi in the summer of 2017 provided a means for contemporary viewers to slow down, engage, and become immersed in Renaissance works. Titled the “Electronic Renaissance,” and curated by Arturo Galansino and Kira Perov, the show highlighted Viola’s special relationship with Florence, both as the site of his professional origins and as his muse.19 The Greeting, a video based on Jacopo Pontormo’s vibrant Visitation of 1528-1529 housed in the parish church of Carmignano, was installed in one of the large, vaulted rooms 14 On the relation between the Mona Lisa and Walter Benjamin, see Barker, “Introduction,” 11. 15 The strike occurred on 27 May 2019; Brown, “‘The Louvre Is Suffocating.’” 16 Ibid. 17 Sayej, “‘Art Can Be For Everyone.’” 18 The digital artist, Giacomo Zaganelli, staged a video installation entitled “Grand Tourismo,” in the corridor of the Uffizi Gallery in June 2019. The videos draw attention to the selfie phenomenon in Florence and essentially make art out of the spectacle of cellphone culture in museums; see “Grand Turismo by Giacomo Zaganelli.” 19 Viola was technical director of the video production and documentation center art/tapes/22 from 1974 to 1976, and, as the exhibition highlighted, the artist drew inspiration from numerous Renaissance works, from Paolo Uccello to Pontormo; see “Bill Viola. Electric Renaissance.”

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Figure 84. Bill Viola, The Greeting, 1995, installed next to Jacopo del Pontormo, Visitation, 1529, in “Electric Renaissance” at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2017 (Photo: Palazzo Strozzi)

of the Renaissance palace at a right angle to the actual painting, reminiscent of the composition of Struth’s photograph.20 The installation invited the museum visitor to consider the contemporary video’s relationship to the Renaissance painting, and, more importantly, drew attention to the sentient experience of slowing down (Fig. 84). The video was shot from a fixed angle in a single 45-second take, and is projected in slow motion over ten minutes; the museum visitor is forced to wait for the narrative to unfold, while Pontormo’s painting captures the event in a single instant. Within the quiet space of the darkened room, viewers become attuned to the subtle nuances of Viola’s staging of an encounter between two women, and then a third, within an environment very similar to Pontormo’s urban setting. The extended length of the video provided the opportunity to perform a prolonged formal analysis of the two works, and to consider the very process of beholding, turning the analysis inward upon oneself. As Viola remarked, “It is about capturing the moment, but also stretching it.”21 In this expansion of time, the viewer is able to emplace herself within the work of art.22 The desire for proximity and access has led to the development of new digital applications in the museum. For example, from October 2019, visitors to the Louvre 20 On Pontormo’s Visitation, see Edelstein and Gasparotto, Miraculous Encounters. 21 “The Greeting, 1995.” 22 “Bill Viola: The Greeting.”

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have had the opportunity to view a Virtual Reality version of the Mona Lisa in the Hall Napoléon, beneath I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid. Created by HTC Vive Arts, “Mona Lisa: Behind the Glass” features a virtual portrait of La Gioconda to supplement the real thing or perhaps even replace it.23 While firsthand experience of works of art is always valuable, digital applications already have and will continue to offer a second vantage through which viewers may engage with and come to know Renaissance art. As opposed to the poor viewing conditions of the original in the crowded gallery, the virtual experience is tailored to the individual: the painting floats in the air directly the before the viewer, who is able to zoom in on details and click on links for historical information on the work. Ticket reservations for the digital experience opened four months ahead of its unveiling.24 That the technology was introduced in anticipation of the crushing numbers of visitors to the Leonardo da Vinci retrospective was no coincidence. The digital version may have been the only opportunity for viewers to actually see the real thing during the blockbuster event. An “extended version” of the VR experience is available through Viveport, HTC’s VR subscription service, to allow individuals to experience the enhanced digital Mona Lisa from home. A growing number of museum visitors can engage with digital technologies before, during, and after their experiences in the museum to enhance their appreciation of the history of art and their sensuous place within it. For example, in the small space of the Chapel of the Magi in Palazzo Medici, real-time viewing conditions are not always ideal. Even though the museum limits the number of visitors allowed to enter at one time, when more than three or four individuals are in the space—and usually there are more—it becomes extremely difficult to move, must less traverse it in the manner described in Chapter Two.25 A virtual reality app supported by Google Play called “Magi Chapel VR” offers an unimpeded 360-degree view of the empty room with additional capacities to engage with its artistic decoration (Fig. 85).26 When the app opens, the viewer is placed virtually on top of the circular porphyry marker in the center of the small, glittering space. Using touch screen technology, the viewer can visualize the dynamic interconnection of the artistic program by “turning” and “walking” throughout the space. Since each individual 23 Horwitz, “HTC Vive Creates a Mona Lisa VR Experience.” 24 An “extended version” of the VR experience is available through Viveport, HTC’s VR subscription service, which would allow individuals to experience the enhanced digital Mona Lisa from home. 25 I am thankful for the permission granted by the Palazzo Medici Riccardi to investigate the Chapel of the Magi privately on several different occasions. The opportunity to experiment with the lights at different moments of the day and to trace various scenarios of mobile spectatorship throughout the entire space was invaluable to my understanding of the unity and function of the artistic program. 26 “Magi Chapel VR.”

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Figure 85. Magi Chapel VR app screenshot (Photo: Author)

viewer is in command of his or her experience, the experience of the chapel is personalized. While viewers are able to follow the composition of the artistic program, they are also invited to click on certain zones of decoration on the walls, ceiling, or floor to reveal enhanced details and links to further information. The streamlined experience of the VR space offers the possibility for a kind of autoptic vision, or eye-witnessing, that, at least in some ways, supersedes the real thing. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes likewise have been reproduced in digital copies that have allowed individuals to see and experience the masterpiece virtually. The Musei Vaticani, early proponents of VR, offer digital access to the papal chapel through their website.27 Like the Chapel of the Magi, but in much larger scale, virtual viewers can click to navigate the different zones of the room and zoom in on aspects of the decorative program. In addition to the digital access provided on the internet, a traveling exhibition organized by Special Entertainment Events (SEE) and Giobeau Productions, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition,” displays high-resolution photographs of the ceiling and vault paintings at highly trafficked popular venues, such as the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, inside the World Trade 27 “Sistine Chapel Virtual Reality Tour.”

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Center in Manhattan, and within the Votivkirche in Vienna.28 The opportunity to witness Michelangelo’s masterpiece up close, in spacious settings, and at a location often much more convenient than Rome arguably provides a much less distracted viewing experience than the original. The reproduction of the famous Genesis cycle, for example, is hung only ten feet above visitor’s heads, inviting a close reading of the minute details of each scene. The monumental photographs reveal traces of the hand of the artist, such as incisions into the plaster and delicate marks of the brush, that are nearly impossible to see when standing in the real Sistine Chapel, where the vaults rise nearly seven times higher than the exhibition ceiling. Visitors to the reproduction exhibit are not fooled into believing that they have experienced the Sistine Chapel, yet they still report to have had powerful aesthetic experiences that fostered personalized connections to it. The desire to provide enhanced sensory experiences to viewers of Renaissance art has led to the staging of the “Giudizio Universale,” an immersive (and controversial) theatrical spectacle in Rome created in 2018 by Marco Balich and produced by “Artainment Worldwide Shows” and the Musei Vaticani. Located in the Auditorium Conciliazione literally a few hundred meters from St. Peter’s and the Vatican, the theatrical performance features digital projections, actors, ballerinas, and music recorded by Sting to bring Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel to life. According to Balich—who served as the artistic director for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Torino (2006) and Rio (2016)—the spectacle puts “the grammar of the big Olympics at the service of the Sistine Chapel, which is one of the milestones of humanity.”29 The official promotion video, published by the Musei Vaticani, describes how Michelangelo’s works “come alive” through the spectacle and allow “the public to enter into an inaccessible place” so that “the power of the masterpiece overwhelms the viewer.”30 Despite blatant creative liberties taken to heighten the drama of Michelangelo’s artistic process and explicate the meaning of the Sistine frescoes, the theatrical spectacle offers the auditory, visual, and olfactory sensations of “being there.”31 Early on, the audience is positioned in Michelangelo’s Florentine studio as the artist flies through the air to chisel the colossal David and then later is placed alongside the artist in the Sistine Chapel as he dramatically drags his brush along the ceiling fresco. One by one, the frescoes of the Genesis cycle are magnified to the dimensions of the entire room in digital projections, which then transform into animations that illustrate the Biblical significance of the scene, while acrobatic 28 29 30 31

Rosen, “What an Expert on Italian Art Thought.” Povoldo, “Bring the Sistine Chapel to Life.” Musei Vaticani, “Giudizio Universale.” In my own experience, I found the out-of-focus projections to be distracting to a fault!

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dancers passionately express affective states. Toward the end of the spectacle, digital projections and live actors transform the theater into the site for the deliberations by the College of Cardinals on the succession of the papal throne. Suddenly the chapel walls dissolve and audience members are soon soaring above the Piazza di San Pietro. In the moment of the announcement of the new Pope, incense-infused white smoke begins to fill the theater. Spectators do not merely watch, but rather sense the reenactment with their bodies. For all of its over-the-top stimulation, certain critics have been quick to dismiss the theatrical spectacle as smoke and mirrors. For example, after he viewed the show on opening night, the art historian Tomaso Montanari remarked “all’arte non serve il Viagra” (art doesn’t need Viagra).32 I, too, remain skeptical of certain artistic decisions in the staging of the spectacle and easily picked out historical errors in the narration. Nonetheless, the Vatican has given the project its blessing, knowing that the museum-goers’ experience inside the actual Sistine Chapel does not always produce the opportunity for aesthetic transcendence that visitors desire. Barbara Jaffa, Director of the Vatican Museums, has dismissed the idea that the theatrical spectacle could ever replace the experience of a visit to the actual Sistine Chapel; yet, she accepts that the multi-media show is “a way of communicating the Sistine Chapel in a way that many generations can understand.”33 The above examples—and a growing number of others—point to contemporary viewers’ desires for participatory and immersive experiences of Renaissance works of art that go beyond the experience of the real thing. Digital reproductions can only ever offer an approximation of the visual and material conditions of the original, and can never replace the knowledge production instigated by a firsthand encounter with a work of art. Yet, even though they are distinct from the real thing, digital experiences offer viewers a time-based, sensuous understanding of the work of art that is streamlined and personalized. Instead of rejecting them as inadequate substitutes or popular simulacra, art historians can do a much better job in helping to harness their alluring potential to provide an intimate understanding of works and spaces. Indeed, the dynamic realization of Renaissance works in these digital forms may be the way to recover somaesthetic experience in the digital age, a mode of engaging with the material past that is sensuous, albeit through counterfeit means. Virtual reality technologies already have transformed the way that educators and students approach the teaching and learning of art history.34 To mention just one poignant example, Google Arts & Culture has teamed with over one thousand 32 Festigroup, “‘Artainment.’” 33 Povoldo, “Bring the Sistine Chapel to Life.” 34 Since 2001, the Renaissance Society of America has promoted the dissemination of information on applying new technologies in research, teaching, and publications.

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Figure 86. Google Arts & Culture App offers the opportunity to enter into a virtual world of the Uffizi (Photo: Author)

art institutions across the globe to provide virtual access to the collections of works hung on the interiors of their spaces.35 A visitor to the website selects a museum or collection from an extensive menu and is transported virtually within its halls (Fig. 86). By means of a series of clicks or taps by the viewer on a device, he or she navigates its various spaces either according to a progressive itinerary based on the physical layout of the museum (i.e. from work to work as a museum visitor in the real place would) or a spatially disjointed itinerary guided by a viewer’s use of the hyperlinked floorplan presented simultaneously with the virtual view on the screen. The ability to examine a museum from multiple points of view (both on the ground and from above) destabilizes the narratives that inform the design of exhibitions and provides a means to analyze and interpret display strategies. While the Google technology does not allow for a live, sentient appreciation of the works, the simulated environment is remarkable for the possibilities it provides. It opens cultural institutions to the public and offers what was once a privileged view of the work in the museum to the unimpeded scrutiny of the masses. For example, as part of my undergraduate courses, I take all of my students, not only those who can afford to study abroad, on a virtual tour to the Uffizi. Like the seminar that I give onsite in the museum—where this book began—I use the opportunity to physically situate my students within the museum spaces to demonstrate some of the narratives that are constructed through the Uffizi’s exhibition strategies.36 In this regard, we take advantage of the streamlined experience of the Uffizi offered by the digital application: each room is free of visitors or guards and we can remain in front of any picture that we like for as long as we want (without getting yelled at!). Here again, the digital recreation of embodied experience does not pretend to 35 “Google Arts & Culture.” 36 “Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.”

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offer an exact replica of the real thing but rather is a simulation that may be enacted through the participation of the viewer. Clicks transport the viewer to enhanced or alternate positions within the space in ways that go beyond the live, embodied experience of the actual place. University departments and centers have started to share digital resources as part of larger Digital Humanities initiatives, and funding continues to increase in support of new projects.37 The early digital mapping of architectural sites, led for example by Stephen Murray at Columbia University and Andrew Tallon at Vassar, has developed into large-scale global collaborations between experts in art history, archaeology, architecture, digital communication, and art restoration. Free-access high-quality websites, like the Real Virtual website maintained by the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia, feature hundreds of digital models and virtual reality experiences of Medieval and Renaissance architecture.38 These dynamic renderings illustrate the complex visual language of sites that have been destroyed or altered from their original appearances, thus they allow for an immersive thinking through of space in ways that a visit to the original site could not.39 To recover the sentient experience of Renaissance Florence, Nicholas Terpstra and Colin Rose have led a team of early modernists in the construction of an interactive digital map of the city, the Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive (DECIMA) project, that seeks to map not only the spatial coordinates of Florence, but also its sensory and kinetic dimensions.40 The DECIMA project enfolds archival data into the map interface so that users can explore how “Florentine citizens respond[ed] to plague, where did they work, what pathways did they highlight for tourists, what sounds did they hear?”41 Hidden Florence, a digital app created by Fabrizio Nevola, David Rosenthal, Nicholas Terpstra and other collaborators and relaunched in 2019, places these scholarly inquiries regarding the city’s walkability into literal action. 42 Users choose to navigate the city with 37 The National Endowment for the Humanities celebrated the tenth anniversary of its Office of Digital Humanities in Spring 2018; see Hindley, “The Office of Digital Humanities Turns Ten.” 38 Columbia University, “Real Virtual?”; Tallon, “Laser analysis of historic buildings.” 39 In the wake of the great fire of Notre-Dame-de-Paris in April 2019, Tallon’s 3D scans of the church of have been held up as an example of the great utility of these digital projects to preserve history; Hertz, “Restoration of Notre Dame.” 40 For the online digital mapping app, see “DECIMA.” The team of scholars who have developed DECIMA have described the project and its implications in Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence. For the digital mapping of Venice, see “Visualizing Venice,” the digital humanities initiative launched by Donatella Calab and Caroline Bruzelius. 41 “DECIMA.” 42 On “walkability,” see Lo, “Walkability: What Is It?” 145-166. Although the critical attention to early modern streets and walking as a social practice is vast, see, for example, The Cultural History of Early

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one of five historical Renaissance figures, who guides them through the streets of Renaissance Florence. Each itinerary is based on the narrator’s particular socioeconomic status, ranging from the elevated world of the aristocratic widow and political statesman on the one hand to the lower fringes of the disenfranchised laborer, orphan, and police officer on the other. Technological blending of GPS tracking with Stefano Buonsignori’s map of Florence, made for Duke Francesco I de’Medici in 1585, allows users to trace their physical path across the city in real time on the early modern map. 43 In this way, the tourist moves out of the space of the museum and instead explores the cultural content of the city itself. By walking in the footsteps of Renaissance individuals, tourists gain a lived sense of their histories; they mindfully use their bodies to imagine how these figures saw the city from their different points of view. These digital technologies offer the possibility for users to engage in the kinds of somaesthetic experiences that have been explored throughout this book. Each of the chapters have described Renaissance artistic programs that re-produced an historical event, which the viewer was intended to enact through mindful engagement. The decorative program of the Chapel of the Magi staged the Florentine feast of Epiphany and transformed visitors into active participants in a festal procession to the Christ child alongside the Medici. Donatello’s sculpture and Lucrezia’s sacred story of Judith brought the Old Testament to life before the audience, who served as eye-witnesses of justice through their collective gaze. Through their bodily movements and mental configurations, pilgrims to the holy sites of San Vivaldo replicated Holy Land devotion and affirmed Franciscan authority and Tuscan identity. Giovanni de’ Bardi’s treatise vividly presented calcio before the eyes of readers to situate them as virtual players of the game. None of the Renaissance viewers of these works would have considered them as complete substitutes for experience of the real thing, yet they still valued the works for their ability to provide access to sensuous memories of these events and places through timebased exploration. The various decorative cues and user components of the works directly co-involved viewers as producers of their subjects and enhanced viewers’ opportunity for affective engagement and sensuous understaning. VR’s ability to simulate the experience of the museum or immerse the viewer in a historic architectural environment enables users to enter into scenarios with works of art that may or may not replicate the real thing, but which nonetheless involve them in the production of a time-based understanding of its form and content. Modern Streets; Experiences of the Street in Early Modern Italy; and see the essays by Niall Atkinson, Yvonne Elet, Cecelia Hewlett, and Filippo de Vivo in Shared Spaces and Knowledge Transactions in the Italian Renaissance City. 43 Nevola and Rosenthal, “Locating experience in the Renaissance city,” 187-209; Nevola, “Microstoria 2.0,” 259-282.

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Just as Renaissance viewers were positioned as eye-witnesses to the distant past or distant places through their somaesthetic engagement, so too are users of these digital technologies situated in first-person scenarios that play out in various ways depending on their decisions and movements. The general acceptance of digital technologies as a scholarly tool to help visualize the past for historians and art historians has led to a whole new range of questions about what constitutes historical evidence in the digital work, how it should be regulated for historical accuracy, and how it should be funded and distributed.44 It is critical to always question, as Steve Hendrix has recently, “is technology bringing history to life or distorting it?”45 Who serves to benefit from its digital replication and how does enhanced access to works and sites contribute to new modes of producing knowledge about cultural history? If developed responsibly through academic collaborations between historians, art historians, digital artists, curators, and others, digital technologies arguably have the potential to alleviate some of the present-day display conditions of at least some Renaissance works of art. Furthermore, they have the potential to reinvigorate viewers’ bodies and minds in their critical capacities for the viewing experience. If current-day viewers are unable to engage physically and affectively with Renaissance works in the manner in which they were designed, then their power to communicate diminishes. As this book has demonstrated, the Renaissance work of art—like the digital applications of today—was always a likeness, a similitudine; it only was made real through the somaesthetic experience of the viewer. Ironically, twenty-first century digital applications have the capacity to enable viewers to access a sensory-driven understanding of these works that more closely resembles Renaissance experience than a visit to the real thing.

Works cited Barker, Emma. “Introduction.” In Contemporary Cultures of Display. Edited by Emma Barker, 8-21. London: The Open University, 1999. Belting, Hans. “Photography and Painting: Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs.” In Thomas Struth, Museum Photographs, with texts by Hans Belting, Walter Grasskemp, Claudia Seidel. Translated by Michael Robertson, 5-28. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1998. “Bill Viola. Electric Renaissance.” Palazzo Strozzi. https://www.palazzostrozzi.org/mostre/ bill-viola/?lang=en (accessed 9 September 2019). “Bill Viola: The Greeting.” Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005. https://www.philamuseum. org/exhibitions/2005/77.html (accessed 9 September 2019). 44 For a useful summary, see Lozano, “Digital Art History at the Crossroads.” 45 Hendrix, “Is Technology Bringing History to Life or Distorting It?”

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Brown, Kate. “‘The Louvre Is Suffocating’: Staff at Paris’s Top Museum Go on Strike as Visitor Numbers Surge.” Artnet, May 28, 2019. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/louvre-strikemay-27-1557757 (accessed 9 September 2019). Carrier, David. “Remembering the Past: Art Museums as Memory Theaters.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 61, No. 1. (Winter, 2003): 61-65. Columbia University, “Real Virtual? Representing Architectural Time and Space.” http:// www.learn.columbia.edu/ha/ (accessed 9 September 2019). The Cultural History of Early Modern Streets. Edited by Riita Laitinen and Thomas Cohen. Special issue, Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008). “DECIMA. A New Way to Study Florence.” https://decima-map.net/a-new-way-to-studyflorence/ (accessed 9 September 2019). Duncan, Carol. “The Art Museum as Ritual.” In Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, 7-20. London: Routledge, 1995. Edelstein, Bruce and Davide Gasparotto. Miraculous Encounters: Pontormo from Drawing to Painting. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018. Eidt, Laura M. Sanger. Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi B.V., 2008. Elkins, James. Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1991. Experiences of the Street in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Fabrizio Nevola and Georgia Clarke. Special edition of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1/2 (Fall, 2013). Festigroup, “‘Artainment’: Un Vero Giudizio (show?) Universale.” http://www.festigroup. org/artainment-un-vero-giudizio-show-universale/ (accessed 9 September 2019). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. “Google Arts & Culture.” https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/explore (accessed 9/9/19). “Grand Turismo by Giacomo Zaganelli.” Le Gallerie degli Uffizi. https://www.uffizi.it/en/ events/grand-tourismo-di-giacomo-zaganelli (accessed 9 September 2019). “The Greeting, 1995.” Bill Viola. A Retrospective. FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 2019. https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/learn/schools/teachers-guides/the-greeting-1995 (accessed 9 September 2019). “Hall 2- Giotto & the 13th Century.” http://www.uffizi.org/halls/hall-2-of-giotto-and-the13th-century/ (accessed 9 September 2019). Hambourg, Maria Morris and Douglas Eklund. “The Space of History.” In Thomas Struth 1977-2002. Dallas Museum of Art, 156-156. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Hendrix, Steve. “Is Technology Bringing History to Life or Distorting It?” The Washington Post, May 10, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/05/10/

Epilogue: Renaissance Somaesthetics in a Digital World 

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About the Author

Allie Terry-Fritsch is Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance Art History at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her research focuses on the performative experience of art and architecture in fifteenth-century Florence, with a particular emphasis on the political significance of embodiment in the viewing process. She has published widely on audiences for Medici-sponsored works by Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, and others, and is editor of Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Ashgate/Routledge, 2012). Her next book project on Fra Angelico, Cosimo de’Medici, and the Library of San Marco recently won the National Endowment for Humanities prize for a Summer Stipend.

Index Abu Ghraib 30, 32, 35 Accademia degli Alterati 234 activation 36-37, 59, 86, 146, 189, 201, 210 affect 178 agency 26-27, 41, 120, 142 Agnolo di Polo 198 Alamanni, Ludovico 234 Albizzi 149 allegory 258 anatomies 146-148, 152, Angelico, Fra 19, 30, 32-33, 35, 43, 55, 66, 74, 83, 87, 100, 104, 126 audience 16, 24, 32, 35, 41, 76, 115, 118-122, 137-140, 142-146, 148-149, 152, 175, 218, 222, 226, 230, 240, 245, 249, 253-256, 282-283, 286 Bardi, Giovanni de’ 42, 217-220, 222, 224, 226-227, 229-240, 242-244, 246, 249, 251, 253-254, 256-259, 261, 264, 286 Becchi, Gentile 97 Beheadings see decapitations beholders 25-28, 35, 39, 58, 64, 68, 86, 116, 178, 182-183, 188, 190, 233, 236, 275, 279 belonging 38, 40, 53, 59, 87, 95, 105 Bethlehem 82, 84, 92, 95, 97, 100, 103-104, 162, 171 Bordone, Paris 259, 259 Botticelli, Sandro 22, 162, 163, 278 Brunelleschi, Filippo 100, 139 Buglioni, Benedetto 161, 198 calcio 29, 42-43, 217-249, 251, 253-264 athletes 39, 218-219, 222, 225-226, 228-229, 232-234, 236-238, 242-243, 253-257, 261-264 as battle 226, 234-235, 239-240, 242-246, 248-250, 253, 255-256, 258 field arrangement 226, 231, 242-243, 258 a livrea 220, 229, 254, 256-258 location of games 218, 223, 226-230, 233, 236 mostra 236, 245, 256 rules 218, 230, 234, 242, 264 treatises 29, 39, 42, 217, 219-220, 222, 224, 229-231, 234, 236, 238-240, 242-244, 246, 249, 251, 253-254, 259, 261, 263-264 viewing pavilions 244-245, 248, 256-257, 260 uniforms see fashion Carnival 223, 228, 236-237, 244-245, 256 Chapel of the Magi see Palazzo Medici Callot, Jacques 220, 253, 260-261, 263, 269 Cecchini, Alessandro 261-263 chess 257-261, 263-264 churches, Florentine San Marco 30, 32-33, 43, 55, 66, 73-74, 78, 82-87, 90, 92, 97, 100-101, 103-104, 129, 162-163, 165, Decoration see Angelico, Fra friars, Observant Dominican 33, 165 library 78, 87, 90

San Pancrazio 162 San Salvatore al Monte165, 198-199 Santa Croce 205, 217-220, 222-224, 226-233, 243-244, 251, 253, 255, 261-262 Santa Maria del Carmine100 Santa Maria del Croce al Tempio145 Santa Maria del Fiore 73, 227 Santa Maria Novella 162, 218, 220, 255 Santa Trinita 77, 79 Santissima Annunziata74, 80, 130, 240 Santo Spirito 218, 225-226 Compagnia de’Magi 83, 95, 104 compassio 188, 199 criminals 35-36, 39-40, 122, 145-146, 148, 150 decapitations 116, 124, 128, 134, 141, 145-146, 148-149, 152 Della Robbia, Giovanni 161, 198, 205 displays 19, 27, 29, 36, 42, 64, 66, 74-75, 80, 82, 92, 94, 95, 117, 124, 126, 128, 149, 188, 204, 225-226, 230, 232, 238, 245, 249, 253, 256-257, 260, 262, 273, 275-276, 278, 281, 284, 287 dissections see anatomies Dominicans 33-34, 100, 168 Donatello 41, 43, 115-116, 118, 120-124, 128, 130, 133, 136-137, 139, 143-144, 146, 150, 152, 286 Judith 41, 43, 115-118, 120, 122, 128-130, 133-139, 141, 143-146, 152 dramas 39-41, 53, 81, 95, 97, 100, 103-104, 115, 122, 137, 139-140, 145, 148-150, 152-153, 161, 187, 282 festal see feste processional 40-41, 53, 82-83, 161 sacred 39, 41, 81, 100, 103, 115, 122, 139, 148-149, 161, see also sacre rappresentazioni engagement, somaesthetic 26, 28, 39, 41, 170, 287 environments 15, 29, 36, 38-39, 60, 64, 120, 127, 139, 148, 170, 177, 190, 194, 199, 201, 209, 223, 227-228, 253, 262, 275-277, 279, 284, 286 Epiphany (Festa de’Magi) 40-41, 53-54, 57, 59, 68, 73, 75, 82-85, 87, 91-97, 99-100, 103-105, 161-163, 165, 236, 286 executions 35, 122, 145-146, 148, 150, 165, 170 exercises 35, 43, 169-170, 206, 234-236, 240, 242-244, 256 experience, somaesthetic 19, 23, 25-26, 29, 37-43, 53-54, 58-59, 105, 152, 161, 169, 178, 200-201, 217, 222-223, 264, 278, 282-283, 286-287 fashion 76, 105, 146, 230, 254-255, 257 Festa de’Magi see Epiphany feste 59, 68, 73, 81-85, 95-96, 99, 103-104, 128, 137, 148-149, 162, 204, 225, 228-229, 238, 245, 255, 260-261, 286 Franciscans 41, 161, 165-166, 169-171, 173-175, 177-178, 180, 190, 194, 196, 199-200, 202-207, 209-210, 227, 286 Frescobaldi, Giovanni 224-226

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games 43, 217-218, 220, 226, 229, 234-237, 239, 246, 248, 255, 256, 260-261, 282 gardens 29, 39, 41, 62, 86, 100, 104, 115-118, 120-122, 126-130, 132-133, 137, 139, 143, 145, 152-153, 207 gaze 21, 29, 32, 57, 64, 66, 91, 94, 104, 120, 129, 138-139, 141, 150, 178, 186-187, 239, 260, 286 Gentile da Fabriano 19, 77 gestures 59, 94, 99-101, 169, 194, 240, 275-276 Giotto di Bondone 19, 20, 146, 273-274 Good Government 116, 152 Gozzoli, Benozzo 40, 43, 53-55, 58-59, 66, 73-78, 81, 83, 86-87, 90-93, 96, 98, 100, 104 health 23, 62, 116, 235 Holy Land 39, 41, 82, 85, 100, 161-163, 165-166, 168-171, 173-175, 177, 184, 186, 190, 194, 196, 199, 201, 205-207, 209-210, 286 humility 99, 116-117, 138, 181, 193 incarnation 37, 81, 178 installations 59, 105, 116, 118, 171, 184, 189, 193, 279 Jerusalem 41, 161, 163, 165-166, 169-170, 174-182, 184, 186-187, 207, 210 Judith 115-117, 120-122, 128-130, 133-135, 137-146, 149-150, 152, 286 Judith sculpture see Donatello justice 41, 115-116, 122, 137-138, 146, 148-150, 152, 230, 286 kneeling 57, 77, 97-98, 100, 104-105, 145-146, 168 line of sight 138, 168, see also point of view Lippi, Fra Filippo 19, 40, 53-54, 57-58, 66, 75, 92, 97, 126 luxury 86, 116-117 Malatesta, Sigismondo73-74 martyrdoms 122, 145, 148-149, 199 Medici bank 60-61, 91, 122, 225 Grand Duchy 41, 220, 232, 237, 242 family 30, 39-40, 54, 58-59, 68, 73, 83-84, 87, 93-94, 120-121, 127, 132, 137, 149, 153, 162, 217, 220, 230 Alessandro de’ 229, 246 Anna Maria Luisa de’ 246, 256 Carlo (di Cosimo) de’ 73 Caterina de’ 246 Cosimo (di Giovanni di Bicci, called il Vecchio) de’ 30, 40-41, 43, 53, 55-57, 59-62, 66, 70, 73-78, 81-83, 85, 87, 90-91, 100, 104-105, 116-118, 127, 129, 142-143, 148-149, 162, 257 Cosimo I de’ 30, 42, 219, 233, 236-237, 239, 249-251, 255, 258-259 Cosimo II de’ 231, 246 Cosimo III de’ 231 Eleonora de’ 231, 246, 257 Ferdinando I de’ 231, 238, 246, 248-249 Ferdinando II de’ 244 Francesco I de’ 42-43, 217, 220, 236-238, 244, 246, 253, 259, 286

Bianca Cappella 246 Joanna of Austria 237-238, 246 Giovanni (di Cosimo) de’ 70-71, 73, 118, 162 Giovanni (di Lorenzo) de’, later Pope Leo X 171, 207, 209, 257 Giuliano (di Piero) de’ 73, 97, 103 Lorenzo (di Giovanni di Bicci) de’149 Lorenzo (di Piero, called Il Magnifico) de’4 1-43, 55, 61-62, 73-75, 97, 118-119, 126, 128, 132, 142, 144, 149, 163, 257 Clarice Orsini 128, 132 Lucrezia de’ 246, 248, 255 Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’4 1, 43, 92, 115, 118-122, 129-130, 137-146, 149-150, 152, 286 Piero (di Cosimo) de’ 40-43, 55-56, 61-62, 64, 66, 70, 73-76, 80, 85, 87, 91-93, 97, 116-120, 130, 142, 162, 224, 257 Virginia de’ 246 patronage 19, 29-30, 40, 42-43, 55, 57, 61, 73, 83, 90, 92, 100, 105, 129, 162, 171, 220 symbols 30, 57, 117, 230, 233 memory 39, 41, 84, 105, 118, 148, 161, 169, 188-189, 194, 199, 204, 222, 286 meraviglia 43, 182 Michelozzo 40, 53, 60, 62, 79 mindfulness 23, 25, 40-43, 53, 98, 148, 161, 168-169, 177, 181, 273, 276, 286 museums 20, 22, 43, 273, 275-280, 283-284, 286 Galleria degli Uffizi 19-20, 22, 126, 273-276, 278, 284-285 Musée du Louvre 126, 277-280 narration, third-person 23, 122, 152, 283 narratives 22, 26, 28, 40, 59, 81, 84, 88, 119, 274-275, 284 Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo 29, 41, 43, 161, 165-166, 168-178, 180-184, 186-190, 194, 196, 198-202, 204-207, 209-210, 286 Palazzo Medici (Palazzo Medici Riccardi) 29, 40, 53-55, 60-62, 64, 68, 73-74, 83-86, 89, 97, 115-116, 118, 120-123, 128, 130, 140, 143, 152, 229, 257, 280 Chapel of the Magi 29, 40, 43, 53-55, 57-59, 66, 68, 79-80, 86-88, 97, 100, 104-105, 130, 280-281, 286 garden 29, 39, 41, 62, 115-118, 120-122, 126-130, 132-133, 137, 139, 143, 145, 152-153 Palazzo del Podestà (Bargello) 227, 230-231 Palazzo della Signoria 42, 57, 61-62, 84, 116, 124, 143, 161, 227, 230 Sala del Gualdrada 220 Salone dei Cinquecento 249 patronage 19, 25, 29-30, 40, 42-43, 55, 57, 61, 73, 83, 90, 100, 105, 162, 171, 202, 220 performance 19, 24-26, 34, 37, 39-41, 59, 88, 92, 95, 97, 101, 104-105, 121, 140, 145, 149, 152, 171, 201, 222-223, 225, 228-229, 232-233, 244-245, 260, 282 performative 19, 25, 29, 36, 39-42, 82, 98, 101, 105, 115, 121, 142, 152-153, 161, 169, 181, 189-190, 194, 207, 217, 222-223, 228, 233, 244-245, 261, 264, 275

295

Index 

persuasion, political 19, 30, 39, 53, 59, 105 piazze 20, 82, 84-85, 101, 150, 161, 165, 217-218, 220, 222-233, 236-237, 239-240, 243-245, 251, 253-256, 261-262, 264 San Marco 82, 84-85, 101, 161 Santa Croce 218, 220, 222-224, 226-233, 243-244, 251, 253, 255, 261-261 Santa Maria Novella 218, 255 Santissima Annunziata 240 Santo Spirito 218, 225-226 della Signoria 82, 150, 165, 240 Pierozzi, Antoninus 129, 142-143 pilgrims 29, 37-39, 41, 161, 166, 168-175, 177-182, 184, 186-187, 189-190, 193-194, 196-201, 206-207, 209-210, 286 pilgrimage 161, 165-166, 168-173, 175, 177, 194, 201-203, 206-207, 209 point of view 104, 188, 223, 249, 253 Poliziano, Angelo 119 polychromy 182, 184, 186, 190, 198, 204-205, 210 Pontormo, Jacopo del 278-279 popes 54-55, 60, 83, 86, 207, 209, 257, 283 Clement VII see Medici, Giulio di Giuliano de’ Eugenius IV 83 Julius II 207, 209 Leo X see Medici, Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Martin V 54 Nicholas V 86 Pius II 55 Sixtus IV 207 porphyry 66, 68-70, 88, 95, 97, 280 Portigiani, Pagno di Lapo 79 power 19, 23, 25, 27, 29-30, 32, 35, 38, 40-43, 54, 81-82, 105, 117-120, 140-141, 143, 152, 171, 181, 205, 219, 223, 232, 237-238, 243, 258, 264, 282-283, 287 and embodiment 40, 105, 117, 120, 243 of images 32, 35, 237-238, 282, 287 of the real 233, 238 Medici 41-43, 81, 105, 117-120, 143, 171, 219, 223, 232, 258, 264 political 105, 117-120, 152, 237 sacred 29, 35, 38, 54, 81-82, 141, 143, 181, 205 proof 32-33, 35, 148, 150 proprioception 148, 180 punishments 35-37, 40, 115, 122, 145-146, 148, 152, 165 reality 23, 25, 30, 33, 75, 94-95, 139, 148, 162, 177, 194, 196, 248, 273, 280, 283, 285 effect 139, 148 virtual 273, 280, 283, 285 relics 38, 54, 201-204 Republic, Florentine 29, 42-43, 55, 58-59, 61, 64, 105, 116-118, 124, 126, 148, 163, 170, 219, 224-225, 228-229, 232, 249 rituals 19, 26, 30, 35-37, 41, 43, 53-54, 59, 68, 81-85, 87-88, 92-94, 96, 99-100, 105, 115, 148, 161-163, 202, 204, 219, 223, 228, 236-237, 245, 248, 253, 255-256, 264

sacre representazioni 39, 41, 74, 81, 100, 115, 139, 148-149, 152, 161 sacre storie 115, 121, 137, 140, 144-145, 152 Sacro Monte di Varallo 169-170, 177 Santo Stefano in Bologna 207, 209 Savonarola, Fra Girolamo 41, 161, 163, 165, 170 self-fashioning 23, 29, 43, 59, 75, 117, 126, 162 sensations 21, 32-33, 104 senses 22, 33, 35-37, 39, 54, 148, 189, 261 sensibilities 21, 43, 59, 105, 180 Sforza, Francesco 73-74, 148 Sforza, Galeazzo Maria 55, 64, 73-74, 87, 127 sieges 138-139, 141, 228-229, 248-251, 264 simulations 105, 169, 194, 239, 244-245, 249, 285 somaesthetics 19, 23, 25-30, 36, 38-43, 53, 58-59, 81, 105, 115, 120, 122, 138, 152, 161, 169-171, 178, 182, 200, 209, 217, 222-223, 239, 264, 273, 276, 278, 283, 286-287 definition 23 experience see experience, somaesthetic spectators 19, 22, 25, 37, 39-40, 75, 88, 94, 96, 136137, 140, 145, 148, 177, 186, 188, 218, 222, 225-226, 228-229, 231-232, 237-238, 248, 253, 261, 283 stages 54, 81, 92, 97-98, 100-101, 103-104, 122, 137, 140, 145-146, 148, 152, 223, 248 stagecraft 59, 81, 98, 100-101, 121, 139-140, 260 staging 40, 82, 95, 100, 104, 137, 148-149, 161, 233, 244, 246, 264, 278, 286 Stendhal (Henri Beyle) 20-21 Stendhal Syndrome 21-22 stimuli, sensory 23, 35, 222 Stradano, Giovanni 220, 234, 255, 260-261, 263 Strategies 24, 26, 29, 39-42, 76, 115, 138, 142, 170-171, 178, 210, 222, 249, 260, 264, 284 Strozzi, Palla 77-79 Struth, Thomas 273-275, 279 style 29, 41, 43, 53, 55, 60, 105, 205, 210, 275 theaters 41, 53, 121-122, 137, 146, 150, 152, 218, 223-224, 232, 283 theatricality 41, 101, 115, 121, 152, 189 meta 121, 152 thing, real 169, 178, 180, 190, 202, 206-207, 210, 222, 233, 277, 280-281, 283, 285-287 topographies 139, 169, 173, 175, 180, 226, 232, 242-243 topomimesis 169, 180, 201 torture 30, 32-33, 35 tyranny 64, 116, 124-125, 143, 150 values 33, 37-38, 41, 55, 58-59, 61, 64, 66, 68, 83, 105, 117, 122, 124, 149-150, 230, 237-238, 286 artistic 55, 105 Florentine 41, 59, 61, 68, 115, 122, 124, 149-150, 230, 238 Medici 64, 66, 117, 237 sensory 37-38 social 37-38 Vasari, Giorgio 100-101, 249, 253, 274

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vedute 232, 239, 253, 261, 264 Venus 22, 129-130, 144, 278 views see vedute viewers 19, 23, 25-30, 32, 37-38, 40, 42, 66, 76, 86-87, 91, 94-96, 98, 101, 104-105, 133-134, 152, 188-190, 192-193, 201, 222-223, 231-232, 242, 260-261, 263-264, 273, 275-276, 279-282, 284-287 virtue 19, 116, 122, 130, 137-138, 142, 146, 148, 235, 253 Viola, Bill 278-279 violence 35, 40, 145-146, 148, 152, 184, 253

vision 24, 29, 35, 81, 138-139, 141, 152, 178, 189, 261, 277, 281 visitors 22, 29, 39, 41, 54, 56, 58-59, 62, 66, 68-69, 77, 87-88, 91-100, 104-105, 117, 123-124, 129, 162, 177, 273-280, 282-284, 286 witnessing 30, 32, 41, 57, 73, 81-83, 95-96, 115, 122, 137, 139-140, 145, 148-150, 152-153, 182, 187, 189, 198, 218, 229, 239, 248, 253, 261, 276, 281-282, 286-287

Plate 1. Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece, 1438-1442, tempera on wood, originally for high altar of Church of San Marco, today in Museo di San Marco, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Plate 2. View of the Chapel of the Magi, constructed by Michelozzo and painted by Benozzo Gozzoli by 1459, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Alamy)

Plate 3. Filippo Lippi, Adoration of the Child, c.1457, tempera with oil glazes and gold on poplar, originally located on the altar of the Chapel of Magi, Palazzo Medici, Florence; today housed in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen (Photo: Art Resource)

Plate 4. View of the eastern wall of Benozzo Gozzoli’s painted cycle of the Procession of the Magi, 1459, mixed media, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Plate 5. Detail of gold revetments on the leather straps of Cosimo de’Medici’s mule, east wall, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author)

Plate 6. Benozzo Gozzoli, Adoration of the Magi, fresco, c.1444, fresco, Cell 39, north corridor of dormitory, Convent of San Marco, Florence (Photo: Author)

Plate 7. View of the southern wall of Benozzo Gozzoli’s painted cycle of the Procession of the Magi, 1459, mixed media, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Plate 8. View of the western wall of Benozzo Gozzoli’s painted cycle of the Procession of the Magi, 1459, mixed media, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Plate 9. Detail of Medici supporters, including Francesco Sassetti (man raising hand) and Benozzo Gozzoli’s two self-portraits (in blue and white turban; in grey feather hat), west wall, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author)

Plate 10. Detail of man in feather hat raising hand, east wall, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author)

Plate 11. Benozzo Gozzoli, West wall of chancel, Angels of Bethlehem, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Plate 12. Benozzo Gozzoli, East wall of chancel, Angels of Bethlehem, Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (Photo: Art Resource)

Plate 13. Detail of angel dressed as Star of Epiphany, east wall of chancel, Chapel of the Magi (Photo: Author)

Plate 14. Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi), Judith and Holofernes, by 1464, bronze, located between mid-1460s and 1495 in the garden of Palazzo Medici, today in the Sala dei Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Plate 15. Dead Christ, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Plate 16. Deposition, Holy Sepulcher, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Plate 17. Crucifixion, Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Alexandra Korey)

Plate 18. Stabat Mater, with view towards Crucifixion, Mount Calvary, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Plate 19. Ecce Homo, exterior niche on the House of Pilate, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Plate 20. Crucifige, exterior niche on the Carrying the Cross, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Plate 21. Giovanni della Robbia, Madonna dello Spasimo, c. 1513, Oratory of the Madonna dello Spasimo, San Vivaldo (Photo: Stefan Fritsch)

Plate 22. View of Giovanni de’Bardi’s treatise, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino, in the hands of a reader (Photo: Author)