Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe 9780271091143

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Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe

Habent sua fata libelli Early Modern Studies Series General Editor Michael Wolfe St. John’s University Editorial Board of Early Modern Studies Elaine Beilin Framingham State College Christopher Celenza Johns Hopkins University Barbara B. Diefendorf Boston University Paula Findlen Stanford University Scott H. Hendrix Princeton Theological Seminary Jane Campbell Hutchison University of Wisconsin–Madison Mary B. McKinley University of Virginia

Raymond A. Mentzer University of Iowa Charles G. Nauert University of Missouri, Emeritus Robert V. Schnucker Truman State University, Emeritus Nicholas Terpstra University of Toronto Margo Todd University of Pennsylvania James Tracy University of Minnesota Merry Wiesner-Hanks University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Cultures Visual Secrecy OF

IN

Early Modern Europe

ED ITE D BY

Timothy McCall, Sean Roberts, and Giancarlo Fiorenza

Early Modern Studies 11 Truman State University Press Kirksville, Missouri

Copyright © 2013 Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri, 63501 All rights reserved tsup.truman.edu Cover art by Andrea Mantegna, Ludovico Gonzaga Confers with a Trusted Secretary, detail from the Camera Picta, 1465–74, fresco, Mantua, Castello di San Giorgio. Scala / Art Resource, NY. Cover design: Teresa Wheeler Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visual cultures of secrecy in early modern Europe / edited by Timothy McCall, Sean Roberts, and Giancarlo Fiorenza. pages cmm. —  (Early modern studies ; vol. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61248-092-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61248-093-0 (ebook) 1. Secrecy in art. 2. Arts, European—Themes, motives. 3. Arts and society—Europe.  I. McCall, Timothy, editor of compilation. II. Roberts, Sean E., editor of compilation. III. Fiorenza, Giancarlo, 1970–, editor of compilation. NX650.S435V57 2013 709.4—dc23 2013001818 No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from the publisher. The paper in this publication meets or exceeds the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Contents Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction Revealing Early Modern Secrecy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts 1 The Visual Dynamics of (Un)veiling in Early Modern Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Patricia Simons 2 On the Skins of Goats and Sheep (Un)masking the Secrets of Nature in Early Modern Popular Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 William Eamon 3 Secrecy and the Production of Seignorial Space The Coretto of Torrechiara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Timothy McCall 4 Michelangelo’s Open Secrets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Maria Ruvoldt 5 Hebrew, Hieroglyphs, and the Secrets of Divine Wisdom in Ludovico Mazzolino’s Devotional Paintings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Giancarlo Fiorenza 6 A Secret Space for a Secret Keeper Cardinal Bibbiena at the Vatican Palace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Henry Dietrich Fernández 7 Networks of Urban Secrecy Tamburi, Anonymous Denunciations, and the Production of the Gaze in Fifteenth-Century Florence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Allie Terry-Fritsch 8 Tricks of the Trade The Technical Secrets of Early Engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Sean Roberts 9 The Alchemical Womb Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 Lyle Massey About the Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

Illustrations Introduction: Revealing Early Modern Secrecy Fig. 1 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Fig. 2 Andrea Mantegna, Footmen Regulate Access to Ludovico Gonzaga, detail from the Camera Picta, 1465–74, fresco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Fig. 3 Andrea Mantegna, Ludovico Gonzaga Confers with a Trusted Secretary, detail from the Camera Picta, 1465–74, fresco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Fig. 4 Unknown Emilian or Lombard Artist, Gualtieri Reading Fake Papal Bull to Griselda and Subjects, detail from the Camera di Griselda, originally from Roccabianca castle (Parma), ca. 1470, fresco. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Fig. 5 Domenico Fetti, Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music, ca. 1614–1620, oil on canvas. . . . . . . . . . 12 Fig. 6 Agostino Carracci, Satyr and Sleeping Nymph, late 1580s, engraving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Fig. 7 Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533, oil on canvas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Chapter 1: The Visual Dynamics of (Un)veiling in Early Modern Culture Fig. 1.1 Sandro Botticelli, Venus, 1480s, oil on canvas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Fig. 1.2 Giovanni Antonio di Brescia (after), Two Lovers, engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Fig. 1.3 Giovanni Antonio di Brescia (attr.), The Passionate Embrace, engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Fig. 1.4 Master BXG, The Lovers, ca. 1480, engraving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Fig. 1.5 Titian (attr.), Lovers, ca. 1510–25, oil on canvas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Fig. 1.6 Raphael, La Fornarina, ca. 1518–19, oil on wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Fig. 1.7 Titian, The Triumph of Love, ca. 1545–50, oil on canvas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Fig. 1.8 Gabriel Metsu, Woman Reading a Letter, ca. 1665–67, oil on wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Fig. 1.9 Raphael, Study for the Fainting Virgin of the Baglione Entombment, pen and ink over black chalk underdrawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Chapter 2: On the Skins of Goats and Sheep Fig. 2.1 Snake Handler Catching Vipers, woodcut from Pietro Andrea Mattioli, I discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli (Venice, 1557). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Fig. 2.2 Charlatans in the Piazza San Marco, engraving from Giacomo Franco, Habiti d’huomini e donne (Venice, 1609). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Fig. 2.3 Snake Handler in a Bologna Piazza, engraving from Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Le arte per via (Bologna, 1660). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Fig. 2.4 Nicolo Nelli, Portrait of Leonardo Fioravanti, woodcut from Leonardo Fioravanti, Tesoro della vita humana (Venice, 1582). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Fig. 2.5 Title page from Benedetto (called il Persiano), I maravigliosi, et occulti secreti naturali (Rome, 1613). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Fig. 2.6 Title page from Dottor Gratiano Pagliarizzo, Secreti nuovi e rari (Bologna, Milan, n.d.). . . . . . . . . 67 Fig. 2.7 Bernardino Mei, Il Ciarlatano, 1656, oil on canvas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Illustrations vii

Chapter 3: Secrecy and the Production of Seignorial Space Fig. 3.1 Coretto of Torrechiara, ca. 1460s, Milan, Castello Sforzesco, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Applicata. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Fig. 3.2 Torrechiara, built 1450s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Fig. 3.3 Bembo workshop, Camera d’oro, Torrechiara, late-1450s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Fig. 3.4 Bembo workshop, Ceiling of camera d’oro, Torrechiara, late-1450s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Fig. 3.5 Chapel of San Nicomede, Torrechiara. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Fig. 3.6 Benedetto Bembo, Polyptych of San Nicomede (Madonna and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot, Nicomede, Catherine of Alexandria, and Peter Martyr), signed and dated 1462, oil and gold on wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Fig. 3.7 Edgardo Minozzi, Coretto, ca. 1912 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Fig. 3.8 Albrecht Dürer, Saint Eustace, detail from Paumgartner Altarpiece, ca. 1503, oil on wood. . . . . . . 90 Fig. 3.9 Rossi heart emblem, detail of Coretto of Torrechiara (fig. 3.1), 1460s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Fig 3.10 Rossi heart emblem, tomb of Pietro Rossi, 1430s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Fig. 3.11 Interior, Coretto of Torrechiara (fig. 3.1), 1460s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Chapter 4: Michelangelo’s Open Secrets Fig. 4.1 Copy after Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Rape of Ganymede (detail), ca. 1533, black chalk on paper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Fig. 4.2 Michelangelo, The Punishment of Tityus, ca. 1533, black chalk on paper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Fig. 4.3 Michelangelo, The Fall of Phaeton, ca. 1533, black chalk on paper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Fig. 4.4 Michelangelo, The Fall of Phaeton, ca. 1533, black chalk on paper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Chapter 5: Hebrew, Hieroglyphs, and the Secrets of Divine Wisdom in Ludovico Mazzolino’s Devotional Paintings Fig. 5.1 Dosso Dossi, Jupiter, Painting Butterflies, ca. 1524, oil on canvas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Fig. 5.2 Ludovico Mazzolino, Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet, ca. 1527, oil on wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Fig. 5.3 Ludovico Mazzolino, Christ Disputing with the Doctors, ca. 1522, oil on wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Fig. 5.4 Ludovico Mazzolino, Dispute in the Temple, oil on wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Fig. 5.5 Ludovico Mazzolino, Christ and the Adulterous Woman, ca. 1519, oil on wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Fig. 5.6 Ludovico Mazzolino, The Tribute Money, oil on wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Fig. 5.7 Titian, The Tribute Money, ca. 1524, oil on wood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Chapter 6: A Secret Space for a Secret Keeper Fig. 6.1 Raphael and workshop, Stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 1516–17. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Fig. 6.2 Raphael and workshop, Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 1516–17. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Fig. 6.3 Marco Dente, Venus Pulling a Thorn from her Foot. ca. 1516, engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Fig. 6.4 Raphael, The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, ca. 1518, oil on panel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Fig. 6.5 Temple of Vesta, early first century bce, Tivoli. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Chapter 7: Networks of Urban Secrecy Fig. 7.1 Map of Renaissance Florence, with locations of tamburi marked by black boxes. . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Fig. 7.2 Exterior of the Palazzo del Podestà (Museo Nazionale del Bargello), Florence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Fig. 7.3 Interior courtyard and loggia of the of the Palazzo del Podestà . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Fig. 7.4 Nicholas Beatrizet, Pasquino, engraving. Collected and published by Antoine Lafrery in Speculum Romanae Magnificientiae (Rome, 1550) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

viii Illustrations

Chapter 8: Tricks of the Trade Fig. 8.1 Albrecht Dürer, Sudarium with Two Angels, 1513, engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Fig. 8.2 Albrecht Dürer, The Sudarium Spread out by an Angel, 1516, etching on iron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Fig. 8.3 Attributed to Baccio Baldini, The Samian Sibyl, ca. 1470, engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Fig. 8.4 Francesco Rosselli. Annunciation, after 1482, engraving from the series The Mysteries of the Rosary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Fig. 8.5 Third Map of Africa (detail), engraving from Ptolemy, Geography (Rome: Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, 1478). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Fig. 8.6 Map of the Holy Land (detail), engraving from Francesco Berlinghieri, Septe giornate della geographia (Florence: Niccolò Tedesco, 1482). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Fig. 8.7 Map of “Modern” Italy, engraving from Francesco Berlinghieri, Septe giornate della geographia (Florence: Niccolò Tedesco, 1482). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 Fig. 8.8 Attributed to Baccio Baldini, illustration for the third canto, engraving from Cristoforo Landino, Commento sopra la commedia (Florence: Niccolò Tedesco, 1481). . . . . . . 197 Fig. 8.9 The Holy Mountain (frontispiece), engraving from Antonio Bettini, Monte santo di Dio (Florence: Niccolò Tedesco, 1477). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Fig. 8.10 Andrea Mantegna, Battle of the Sea Gods (left half), ca. 1470–1480, engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 Chapter 9: The Alchemical Womb Fig. 9.1 Title page from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augustae Vindelicorum: Typis Davidis Francki, 1619), engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Fig. 9.2 Visio prima from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1639), engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Fig. 9.3 Visio secunda from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1619), engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Fig. 9.4 Visio tertia from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1619), engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 Fig. 9.5 Plate 3 from Stefan Michelspacher, Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst un Natur, in Alchymia (Augsburg, 1616), engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Fig. 9.6 Plate 4 from Stefan Michelspacher, Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst un Natur, in Alchymia (Augsburg, 1616), engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Fig. 9.7 Adam and Eve from Thomas Geminus, Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio (London, 1545), engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Fig. 9.8 Detail of devil’s head in Visio prima, from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augustae Vindelicorum: Typis Davidis Francki, 1619), engraving . . . . . . . . . . 222 Fig. 9.9 Roundel with flaps in Visio prima, from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1619), engraving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Acknowledgments The intellectual spark for this volume came from events organized by the editors in the spring of 2009 on the theme of “the secret spaces of early modern Europe.” The first of these was a symposium held at the University of Southern California under the auspices of the USC-Huntington Library Early Modern Studies Institute, the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Program, and the Art History Department. The second was a panel at the College Art Association’s annual meeting. We would like to thank the speakers, discussants, and audiences of these events for the vibrant exchange of ideas fostered on these occasions. Bruce Smith especially provided a response to the papers presented at USC, which helped to determine the shape of this volume. We are particularly grateful to Peter Mancall for supporting the symposium with funding from EMSI and to Amy Braden for her hard work ensuring that everything ran smoothly. The editors would like to thank Stephen Campbell for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript, and additionally Jo Joslyn, Sheryl Reiss, and Rebecca Zorach for assistance and advice along the way. Carolyn Murphy deserves our gratitude for helping to ensure that the contribution of Henry Dietrich Fernández saw publication here. Michael Wolfe and the anonymous readers for Truman State University Press provided numerous invaluable suggestions. We thank as well Nancy Rediger for her enthusiasm for the project and Barbara Smith-Mandell for her careful and attentive work in bringing this book to print. We thank, above all, each of the contributors to this volume, without whose hard work and generosity of ideas this book would most surely not exist. ————— Sean Roberts is grateful for the support of USC’s Art History Department, and especially to Nancy Troy for her encouragement of this project. The Provost’s Office provided financial support for publication through the Advancing Scholarship in the Social Sciences and Humanities program. The students of several graduate seminars, including Jeremy Glatstein, Ellen Dooley, Sean Nelson, and Rachel Amato provided thoughtful responses to both the introduction and Dr. Roberts’s essay. Alexander Marr and Vera Keller provided the opportunity to present material related to this book at the EMSI symposium, Ingenious Acts, in 2011. Likewise, Lilliana Leopardi and students at Chapman University offered a valuable occasion to discuss early modern secrecy. Along with those already mentioned, thanks are due to Eunice Howe, Naoko Tahatake, and the anonymous readers of a related article published in Renaissance Studies. The British Museum, National Gallery London, Getty Museum, and Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense generously granted permission to reproduce works in their collections. For assistance and suggestions for both the introduction and his essay, Tim McCall would like to thank the faculty forum of the History Department of Villanova University, in addition to audiences at Rider University, Bowling Green State University, the University of Southern California, and the Penn Humanities Forum of the University of Pennsylvania. In particular—and in addition to the coeditors, contributors, and others named above—gratitude goes to Jennifer Borland, ix

x Acknowledgments

Adriano Duque, Campbell Grey, Margaret Haines, Jennie Hirsh, Marc Gallicchio, Marco Gentile, Adele Lindenmeyr, Cara Rachele, Sindhu Revuluri, Ingrid Rowland, Paul Steege, Wendy Steiner, and Alessandra Talignani. For important assistance with images, thanks are due as well to Peta Motture, Nick Humphreys, Laura Basso, Chiara Burgio, Francesca Tasso, and Annarita Ziveri. Financial support was provided by the History Department and the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects of Villanova University. Giancarlo Fiorenza is indebted to Linda Halisky and Susan Opava, two former deans at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, for their generous support of his research. A State Faculty Support Grant provided financial assistance for his contribution to the volume. Charles Dempsey, Paul Manoguerra, and Alexander Nagel kindly read earlier versions of the essay, while colleagues in the Department of Art and Design lent a patient ear and offered encouragement and sound advice. For the images, Sheryl Frisch was always quick to help. Henry Dietrich Fernández passed away in September 2009. The editors wish to dedicate this volume to Henry in memory of his scholarship, intellectual curiosity, and collegiality.

Introduction Revealing Early Modern Secrecy Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts

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ecrets in all their variety permeated early modern Europe. From the whispers of ambassadors at court to the emphatically publicized books of home remedies that flew from presses and booksellers’ shops, women and men were bound in a web of arcane and privileged knowledge. Secrecy, of course, is hardly an early modern invention. The notion, most expansively construed, that knowledge must be revealed or unveiled, that signs and symbols stand at a threshold to be peeled back by probing eyes and minds, is an integral part of an intellectual tradition that stretches back at least as far as Egyptian and pre-Socratic Greek thought and encompasses medieval exegetes and humanist poets alike. This volume, however, examines characteristics of secrecy rooted in the particular intellectual, visual, and social conditions of European cultures between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Novel forms of erudition (humanism foremost among these), a certain fluidity between conceptions of public and private spheres while rigid stratification of class and rank remained entrenched, and a rapidly changing fashioning of selves spurred by unprecedented religious upheaval all might be seen as separating an early modern culture of secrecy from its predecessors and successors. Perhaps what most characterized early modern secrets, however, was the sheer quantity and vibrancy of the material and visual culture that inspired and sustained performances of secrecy. Arcane, erudite, and sometimes perplexing images and symbols were frescoed on the walls of princely palaces, woven in the threads of lavish tapestries, and emblazoned in ink and paint on the printed and manuscript pages that filled the studioli and cabinets of scholars. Art historians, literary scholars, and historians have long labored to decipher the hidden contents of Renaissance words and images. More recently, scholars of medieval and early modern Europe have begun the crucial work of anatomizing secrecy, of disarticulating secrets to understand how they work. They have focused increasing attention on secrecy as a driving cultural force, pointing to its centrality in milieus ranging from alchemy to statecraft, medicine to theater.1 A broad range of disciplinary concerns has motivated these reinvestigations in fields from the history of science to anthropology and literary studies. While approaches have been as variegated as the objects of their inquiries, these reconsiderations of the clandestine have been united by a 1. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature; Cope, Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy; Lochrie, Covert Operations; Rasmussen, “Introduction”; Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship; Engel et al., Das Geheimnis; Park, Secrets of Women; Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit; Kavey, Books of Secrets; Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy; Long and Rankin, Secrets and Knowledge.

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commitment to look beyond the “contents” of secrets to shed light on the act and means of their disguise and revelation. In some cases, the secret itself gained meaning by the act of being hidden and excluded from certain audiences. In other cases, the very public presentation of information as having been previously occluded served to augment its significance. A unifying principle of much recent scholarship investigating secrecy is that the revelation of secrets was as significant and efficacious as their initial invisibility or hiddenness. Among the best-known early examples, though hardly a unique starting point for Renaissance conceptions of secrecy, is Petrarch’s enigmatically named Secretum (The Secret). This text, comprised of three dialogues between the fourteenth-century Italian poet and the Latin church father Augustine, can tell us a great deal about how such secrets work. Petrarch explained the title of his work with a command directed to the text itself: “So, little book, I bid you to flee from public places. Be content to stay with me, true to the title that I have given you. For you are my secret, and thus you are titled. And when I think about profound subjects, speak to me in secret what has been in secret spoken to you.”2 The lessons proffered in the conversations that follow were not usefully secret in the way that battle plans, libelous rumors, or alchemical recipes might have been. Yet Petrarch’s invocation of secrecy was nonetheless tremendously significant in the clever way he emphasized moral reflection and exercised the faculty of personal judgment. The poet designated his text as a secret and thereby established a privileged community of readers, distinguished by their virtuosic erudition, their discretion, and their ability to comprehend spiritual truths best hidden from the prying eyes of the uninitiated. The revelation and withholding of secrets, as Petrarch’s Secretum demonstrates, have often served as techniques not only of community building but, equally, of exclusion.3 A seventeenthcentury Londoner coming home from the bookshop, eager to learn the carefully guarded secrets of fish, or a print collector in Nuremberg probing the enigmatic polygons and arcane glyphs of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (fig. 1) each could have imagined him or herself as possessing information hidden from others.4 If we say, “you, dear reader, we have a secret to tell you, something that no one else knows,” what information we might have for you could very well be less significant than the sense of importance you no doubt feel at being included in our intimate group, and less efficacious than the distinction and privilege granted to you at the expense of everyone else not fortunate enough to have picked up this volume. In the early modern period, no less than today, the keeping and telling of secrets were communicative acts, and the sharing, offering, and hiding of such secrets acted as a means of distinguishing between, excluding, and producing publics along an axis of criteria ranging from education and social status to gender and age.5 As Karma Lochrie has shown in her groundbreaking study Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (1999), the “act of secrecy…is a social one that draws boundaries between ‘those who

2. Petrarca, The Secret, 47. See also Simonetta, Rinascimento Segreto, 25–28. For further on the intimacy between reader and author activated by secrecy, see Campbell, Commonwealth of Nature, 21–59. 3. See, for example, Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet; Lochrie, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” 4. Art history’s tradition of probing the Melencolia I for its secrets may be traced to Panofsky, Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. Michael Camille characterized the engraving as “almost a paradigm of the problem of meaning itself ”; Camille, “Walter Benjamin and Dürer’s Melencolia I,” 59. 5. Bok, Secrets. See also de Luca, “Notion of Secretum.”

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FIGURE 1. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, engraving, London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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ought to know but do not’ and those who know and distributes power between them.”6 William Eamon’s landmark Science and the Secrets of Nature (1996) has called needed attention to the ways in which information available to any literate European of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could be effectively framed as “hidden” knowledge in books like Alessio Piemontese’s Secreti (1555).7 Allison Kavey has argued that these only nominally arcane tomes moved rapidly beyond the continent, spawning a veritable industry in England as well.8 The seeming paradox of such open secrets is announced to all, boldly proclaimed in printed books like Thomas Johnson’s Cornucopiae (1596).9 The first folio of Johnson’s book promises to reveal to readers the “rare secrets in man, beasts, foules, fishes, plantes, stones, and such like.” Commonplace and often hopelessly outdated descriptions of plants and animals are presented to inquisitive readers as privileged arcana. The cultural or artistic currency of secrets often existed in their disclosure, and the keeping and sharing of secrets forged social bonds and ultimately engendered exclusive (or more usually semi-exclusive) communities of the knowledgeable. Secrecy was and remains not simply a matter of differentiating public from private information. Secrets, of course, require disparate publics that are socially demarcated; they also require the construction of boundaries that can only be actualized by their crossing. Exclusion, distinction, and privilege are amplified through boundaries that many recognize but that few can pass through, or by boundaries that themselves suggest a plausible fiction of mediated traversal.10 One such boundary—or better, a visualized policing of a barrier that is conspicuously difficult to cross—can be found in the cadre of guards standing atop the steps leading into the court scene of Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta, as Evelyn Welch has perceptively suggested. “Swaggering footmen” dressed in expensive brocades mediate access to the marquis of Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga, by blocking the stairs and reaching toward (either gesturing while speaking with or perhaps aggressively pushing back against) would-be visitors (fig. 2).11 Courtiers pleading their case seem visibly anxious to surmount the stairs, while an armed sentinel nonchalantly turns his head to keep an eye on the negotiations. Those who viewed these frescoes would have traversed actual boundaries and barriers (closed doors and similar guards at gates and stairways) and, “admiring the images of those refused imagery, their own sense of access would have been reinforced.”12 Visitors to the room would have enjoyed this pointed representation of exclusion and admission, gaining pleasure from the recognition of their own exceptional access, akin to the satisfaction experienced today by those who move quickly—and appreciate that they themselves are being seen moving— past the velvet rope. Such pleasure is heightened by the knowledge that others, whether less fortunate, esteemed, or fashionable, were left behind to wait in line and watch this conspicuous exercise of privilege, not unlike those at the bottom of the steps in Mantegna’s fresco. Other courtly frescoes might have similarly visualized exclusion in fifteenth-century Italy; particular courtiers 6. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 93. 7. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature. Additionally, see Eamon, Professor of Secrets. 8. Kavey, Books of Secrets. 9. Johnson, Cornucopiae or divers secrets. 10. Massumi, “Everywhere You Want to Be,” 27; Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 65. 11. Welch, “Painting as Performance,” 22. Additionally, for the room and for secrets, see Signorini, Opus hoc tenue; Arasse, “Il programma politico,” 49; Starn, “Places of the Image.” 12. Welch, “Painting as Performance,” 22.

Introduction 5

FIGURE 2. Andrea Mantegna, Footmen Regulate Access to Ludovico Gonzaga, detail from the Camera Picta, 1465–74, fresco, Mantua, Castello di San Giorgio. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

(camerieri non da camera) who were by definition not admitted into Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s interior rooms in Pavia without special permission were to be depicted in frescoes significantly located in an antechamber. These images thus would have articulated, simultaneously, these courtiers’ distinction and their “status of exclusion.”13 The secret whispered into the ear of Ludovico Gonzaga by a trusted segretario (secret keeper) would have aroused interest among those not privy to the exchange (fig. 3).14 A number of questions might have followed. What could the secret be, one so consequential that it must be kept from the rest of the otherwise exclusive company of the Gonzaga and their courtiers? Who is this man flaunting his influence and access in front of audiences fictive and real, obtrusively communicating to us that he possesses sought-after information? The proximity to the prince enjoyed by this fellow—sometimes identified as Marsilio Andreasi—signified prestige and favor in early modern courts, whether in idealized representations of hierarchy such as Mantegna’s frescoes or in 13. Welch, “Galeazzo Maria Sforza,” 361. 14. For these secretaries and connections with secrecy in early modern Italy, see Leverotti, “‘Diligentia, obedientia, fides, taciturnitas’”; Simonetta, Rinascimento Segreto, and specifically Simonetta, Rinascimento Segreto, 127, for the etymological association with secret keeping.

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FIGURE 3. Andrea Mantegna, Ludovico Gonzaga Confers with a Trusted Secretary, detail from the Camera Picta, 1465–74, fresco, Mantua, Castello di San Giorgio. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Introduction 7

the performance of court rituals as varied as hunting excursions, the distribution of alms, or the prince’s morning routine of dressing.15 Just as near to Ludovico is the canine courtier Rubino, no doubt the most relaxed soul in this image of the Gonzaga court and allowed a physical vicinity to his prince that would make even the most confident courtier jealous.16 Beloved animals often were rewarded with remarkably unfettered access within the closed and guarded doors of aristocratic palaces; apertures were sawed into the doors of Ercole d’Este’s rooms in Ferrara’s Palazzo del Corte, for example, so that his cats could come and go as they pleased.17 The diverse case studies in this volume are united by a shared attention to the performance of secrecy and the rules that governed such performances in early modern Europe—what we identify as secrecy’s rhetorics. Karma Lochrie characterized secrecy as “a manner of rhetoric,” and it is this tantalizing observation that, in part, suggested the shape this book has taken.18 Like Lochrie, we are determined not to ask what in particular early modern Europeans kept secret, but rather to investigate the communicability of these acts and the peculiarly similar means by which staggeringly diverse sorts of secrets were kept and told. For this reason, the plural “rhetorics” seems best suited to signify practices governed by rules whose operations were circumscribed and conventional, yet hardly mechanistic or monolithic.19 We treat the secrets reliant on these rhetorics as operations, performances, and processes, as well as objects. Structurally, we understand secrecy to function dialectically, to hold in solution the indissoluble terms of binaries including keeper/ teller, hidden/revealed, and excluded/included. Rather than tell secrets, we aim to elucidate secrecy, and we intend this difference to be clearly more than semantic. In calling attention to the conventional nature of many early modern secrets, we must, however, be vigilant that we do not fall into a false dichotomy. In designating secrets as rhetorical we do not intend to signal that they were in any sense meaningless. There is a danger in associating “rhetoric” with its frequent companion “mere.” Michel de Certeau defined the secret as a particular sort of “utterance.” Like any speech act, a secret is “addressed to someone and acts upon” that person.20 Even the most conventional of written forms is capable of inciting social action and exerting literary influence. This lesson has been aptly demonstrated by Ronald Weissman’s studies of “merely” rhetorical Renaissance confraternal sermons. Once dismissed on account of their strict adherence to convention, such sermons serve in Weissman’s analysis both as dynamic agents in their own right and as rich sources for fifteenth-century Florentine attitudes on a wide array of topics.21 Likewise, the conventional nature of secrecy hardly rendered secrets hollow. Lorenzo Lotto’s esoteric, hieroglyphic intarsia panels covering scenes from Jewish scripture at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, by both concealing and revealing essential sacred truths, manifest and 15. Other suggestions for this man’s identity have included Ludovico Gonzaga’s brother Alessandro, as well as Raimondo de’ Lupi di Soragna; Signorini, Opus hoc tenue, 178, 367–70n. 16. For Rubino, a beast unlikely to reveal any secrets, see Signorini, “Dog Named Rubino”; Signorini, Opus hoc tenue, 254–65; Calzona, “L’abito alla corte dei Gonzaga,” 227–31. 17. Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 84: “segare 4 bussette in 4 ussi in le camere del N.S. perche le gatte ge possono andare.” 18. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 93. 19. See Valesio, Novantiqua, 16–17. 20. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 97. For early modern rhetorics, moreover, see Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, 42–71. 21. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, esp. 98–101.

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heighten the viewer’s obligation to uncover biblical secrets through exegetical erudition and mental effort.22 When the papal secretary Paolo Cortesi recommended that rooms should be decorated with “riddles” and “fables,” it was because he believed that the mental labor of uncovering and interpreting secrets “sharpens the intelligence and [inspection of] their learned representation fosters the cultivation of the mind.”23 Even carefully guarded state secrets made use of these conventions, while apparently meaningless secrets could be used to erect very real barriers to social access for those situated at the edges and margins of society. The rules that governed secrecy were thus emphatically social. Perhaps most importantly our contributors ask who is included and who excluded when things are secreted. De Certeau observes that a secret “repels, attracts, or binds the interlocutors.”24 We investigate who these bound, ensnared, and curious interlocutors might have been in early modern Europe. That is, whom is the secret kept from and with whom is it shared? In place of seeking knowledge of secrets, the authors of these essays begin by examining to whose benefit (and just as importantly to whose detriment) secrets function. We consider asking “cui malo?” to be as productive as inquiring “cui bono?” A fifteenth-century example will perhaps help to give some solid ground to these observations. The cartographic information found on early modern maps was often largely derivative and was frequently copied directly from previous examples. Nonetheless, under certain circumstances, even evidently conventional maps took on the status of valuable and dangerous secrets. A poignant illustration is provided by a map supposedly carried by the sculptor and medalist Matteo de’ Pasti, dispatched to Constantinople in 1461 from Italy’s Adriatic coast by Sigismondo Malatesta, lord of Rimini. Sigismondo had entered into diplomatic correspondence with the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the previous year and agreed to send Matteo in response to the sultan’s request for an artist to paint and sculpt his likeness. The sculptor’s ship, however, was detained en route when it stopped off in Crete and Venetian authorities on the island arrested Matteo. According to a contemporary report they confiscated a map he carried, along with a manuscript of Roberto Valturio’s De Re Militari, intended as gifts to Mehmed, deeming these to be strategically valuable.25 Possession of this map apparently rendered Matteo a spy in the eyes of the Venetians, yet there can be little question that the image—never identified by modern scholars—was of a wholly familiar sort to cartographically savvy Venetian and Ottoman viewers alike. Mehmed’s library included several Italian maps, a fact well known to the Venetians who had themselves provided him with several as diplomatic gifts in previous decades.26 Maps thus functioned as secrets by mutual agreement and recognition. Such an arrangement allowed Sigismondo to communicate his desire for access and intimacy with the sultan, and it allowed Venetian officials to take that arrangement seriously, flexing their muscle as arbiters of diplomatic relations in the eastern Mediterranean. De Certeau called 22. Galis, “Concealed Wisdom.” 23. Cortesi, De Cardinalatu, II.2: “Eodemque modo in hoc genere aenigmatum apologorumque descriptio probatur qua ingenium interpretando acuitur fitque mens litterata descriptione eruditior.” See, additionally, Weil-Garris and d’Amico, “Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace,” 97. The authors want to thank the anonymous reviewers for this and other references. 24. de Certeau, Mystic Fable, 98. 25. Raby, “Sultan of Paradox,” 4; Raby, “East and West”; Brotton, Trading Territories, 92, 102–3. For a reevaluation of the complicated circumstances of Matteo’s aborted diplomatic mission see McCall and Roberts, “Art and the Material Culture of Diplomacy.” 26. On Mehmed’s interest in European maps, see Babinger, “Italian Map of the Balkans”; Raby, “East and West,” 305–6; Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, 20–21.

Introduction 9

secrecy “a play between actors,” and this performative aspect is laid bare in the case of these cartographic secrets.27 Yet if secrecy was a kind of play, it remained one whose consequences were felt long after the curtain had fallen, particularly by those like Matteo de’ Pasti caught in the margins that such boundaries between inclusion and exclusion created. In calling attention to how secret keepers and sharers employed these valuable commodities, we are not recognizing something that our simpler early modern cousins accepted without comment. John Florio, author of the popular bilingual English-Italian vocabulary of 1598, defined secreto as “secret, close, hid, concealed, privy, separate, solitarie, all alone, privitie.”28 This combination of the close, solitary, and separate makes explicit the simultaneous invocation of distance and proximity, occult and clandestine, that is at work in early modern visual productions and built environments. Whether in explications of statecraft, natural philosophy, or commerce, moreover, early modern Europeans openly avowed the role that the visible control of access could play in constructing value.29 Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il Principe is only the best known of numerous period musings on statecraft that recommend secrecy (or the appearance thereof) as effective strategies of rule. Crucially, such masquerade serves the prince not by concealing dangerous truths but by heightening the charismatic pomp of dissimulation.30 The widespread reliance of playwrights on dramatic irony—the narrative conceit by which information known to the audience is concealed from characters on stage—serves as another salient example of secrecy’s performative manifestation in early modern European culture. Though such devices were far from uniquely early modern constructions, their prevalence increased markedly in the period. Peter Hyland, for example, has recently explored the rising prominence of characters recognized as dissimulative on the early English stage.31 The rapidly developing comedies of early modern Italy likewise laid bare the performative function of secrets through the figures that Jackson Cope called “secret sharers” in his foundational treatment of the plays of Machiavelli and his successors.32 Many readers will be familiar with this mechanism at work in some of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies. The narrative action of Twelfth Night, for example, hinges on a triple occlusion whereby Viola’s identity is hidden from Olivia, Sebastian’s from the duke, and the siblings’ from one another. These deceptions—“most wonderful” to the astonished Olivia—will be unveiled only in the play’s final act. Yet the audience holds this privileged knowledge from the outset and serves as secret keeper and confidant for the shipwrecked twins.33 Such dramatic irony proved ubiquitous too in early modern visual culture. This narrative form of secrecy operates in a key scene from the frescoes of the camera di Griselda from Roccabianca castle, north of Parma, depicting the heartbreaking tale of patient Griselda, familiar to European audiences through versions by, among others, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer.34 Gualtieri, the 27. de Certeau, Mystic Fable, 97. 28. Florio, Worlde of Wordes. 29. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, esp. 38–90. 30. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 14–15; Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy, esp. 106–58. See also de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice, esp. 40–46. 31. Hyland, Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage, 15–16. 32. Cope, Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy, esp. 1–16, 185–90. 33. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, act V, scene 1, line 218. 34. Boccaccio and Petrarca, Griselda. For these frescoes now in the Museo d’Arti Applicate of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and

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marquis of Saluzzo, reads aloud to his court and to his wife, Griselda, a papal missive ostensibly granting permission to annul their marriage (fig. 4). That the letter is a forgery, however, is a secret shared between Gualtieri and the viewers of the frescoes, one cruelly kept from both his wife and subjects, and one deployed to advance the narrative by presenting yet another of the vicious trials patiently suffered by Griselda.35 The forged document enacting this secret is conspicuously displayed by the seated prince, its abusive impact answered by Griselda’s docile expression and downcast eyes. Gualtieri’s subjects and courtiers, moreover, crowd the corner of the room and pointedly remind the frescoes’ viewers of the many from whom the secret is kept. Secrets transparently drive the Griselda tale, and ultimately, to reach narrative closure, these secrets must be revealed. The narrative potential of secrecy found ready expression in early modern art theory, as in the second book of the Latin version of Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise On Painting: I like there to be someone in the historia who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look, or with ferocious and forbidding glance challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them.36

Alberti described here what Michael Baxandall identified as choric figures (festaiuoli).37 Such figures function as intermediaries between the fictive spaces of the painting and the ground occupied by putative viewers, and they were recommended not only by Alberti, but by Leonardo da Vinci and others who proffered advice for artists.38 These painted commentators introduce worshipers to saints, serve as witnesses to narrative action, and provide emotional cues to viewers’ reactions to such events. They serve a range of functions in early modern compositions, but Alberti specifies one use with direct bearing on secrecy. This commentator wards us off with gestures and glances because he wants his “business to be secret” (“negotium secretum”). The rhetorical function of such commentators to designate as secret the thing seen is plain in Alberti’s text. These gestures attract our attention not because any great secret is actually concealed on such canvases but because many viewers understood the value of secrets and recognized the gestures and countenances that gave away their keepers. Painted invocations of secrecy served subjects ranging from dignified portraits to jocular genre scenes and erotic fantasies. One complicated yet especially rich example of the way in which artists drew on the visual operations of secrecy is Domenico Fetti’s Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of

for other early modern visual representations of the tale, see Baskins, “Griselda, or the Renaissance Bride Stripped Bare”; McCall, “Networks of Power,” 272–306. 35. For an insightful consideration of what can and cannot be revealed by a comparable fictive letter in Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta, see Starn, “Places of the Image.” For a rather different example of the rhetorical ways in which conspicuous envelopes both conceal and reveal tantalizing secrets, see Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 3–5. 36. Alberti, On Painting, 77–78; Alberti, Della pittura, 75: “Tum placet in historia adesse quempiam qui earum quae gerantur rerum spectators admoneat, aut manu ad visendum advocet, aut quasi id negotium secretum esse velit, vultu ne eo profiscare truci et torvis oculis minitetur, aut periculum remve aliquam illic admirandam demonstret, aut ut una adrideas aut ut simul deplores suis te gestibus invitet. Denique et quae illi cum spectantibus et quae inter se picti exequentur, omnia ad agendam et docendam historiam congruent necesse est.” 37. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 134; Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 71–73. 38. For Leonardo’s proposed treatise on painting, see Kemp, Leonardo on Painting, 150.

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FIGURE 4. Unknown Emilian or Lombard Artist, Gualtieri Reading Fake Papal Bull to Griselda and Subjects, detail from the Camera di Griselda, originally from Roccabianca castle (Parma), ca. 1470, fresco, Milan, Castello Sforzesco, Pinacoteca del Castello. Photo by author, © Comune di Milano, all rights reserved.

Music (ca. 1614–20) (fig. 5). In the foreground, the nearly life-size subject sits on a block of stone, outdoors among classical ruins overgrown with vegetation.39 Clothed in the dapper threads of a courtier and sporting a neatly trimmed beard and mustache, the sitter occupies the vast bulk of the painting’s foreground and is a presence nearly as solid as the masonry wall against which he is set. He holds a sheet of music in his hand and turns over his right shoulder to face the viewer. His lips are slightly parted, perhaps having been arrested by the painter either in the act of singing or opening his mouth to greet the recently arrived viewer. At the lower right corner of this canvas, two men emerge onto a set of stairs. Framed against a decaying marble arch in the deep background, the pair huddle close, one behind the other. The man in the rear points to the sitter. His companion in the lead holds a leather hat or purse in his left hand while with his right brings a single finger to his lips, his head turned to address an unseen presence beyond the frame. The intrusion of these unidentified figures confronts the viewer of 39. Safarik, Fetti, 296–99; Safarik, Domenico Fetti, 1588/89–1623, 28–30; Waldman, “Domenico Fetti’s Philosophers”; Seydl, “Domenico Fetti: Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music,” 217; Roberts, “Silence and Secrets.”

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FIGURE 5. Domenico Fetti, Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music, ca. 1614–1620, oil on canvas, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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Fetti’s work with any number of possible scenarios, leaving more questions than answers. Are these men quietly sneaking up on the unsuspecting sitter? Does the one man seek to hush the putative viewer, some yet concealed observer, or his coconspirator within the painting? Have we, and these interlopers, wandered into a performance or have we stumbled upon the quiet contemplation of an unfamiliar composition? Perhaps there is no secret, no code, to be discovered in Fetti’s canvas. Yet, if this furtive onlooker does not quite challenge the viewer with a “ferocious and forbidding glance,” the finger placed before his lips nonetheless convinces us that something has been held back. This withholding of what is not there piques the viewer’s interest and focuses visual attention on this musician. Fetti frames our access as a kind of privilege, whether because we share a secret with these marginal interlopers or, conversely, because we, unlike them, need not approach surreptitiously. These festaiuoli erect a boundary that the viewer cannot help but cross in the very act of looking. Agostino Carracci’s Satyr and Sleeping Nymph (late 1580s) (fig. 6) provides an example of such choric figures transposed into a rather different register.40 As the satyr approaches from the shadows at the scene’s left edge, he turns to shush viewers, challenging them “not to come near,” or at least admonishing them to tread softly if they must.41 Here, the conceit of the audience as secret keeper is staged visually, and the bestial satyr’s surreptitious approach to his slumbering prey is safeguarded by a plea to the viewer’s silence. Clearly he wishes his “business,” as Alberti might say, to be secret. A young nymph lies sleeping against a thicket of brush, unaware of the dual presence of lustful satyr and viewer alike. Her nakedness and vulnerability are emphasized by a conveniently discarded bit of drapery. This sheet, surely of sufficient size to cover her nude body, is in Carracci’s image cast aside and serves instead as makeshift bedding separating her body from the rough leaves and hard ground.42 In keeping the satyr’s secret, Carracci’s viewer—one situated by the image sharing the satyr’s sexual interest in the nymph’s body—is rendered a complicit voyeur of the sexual violence enacted by the image. Here the network produced is not so much one of the knowledgeable as of the spectacularly privileged, able to avail themselves, if only visually, of the nude female flesh on display. This volume emerged out of a shared interest in examining how early modern image makers designated material as secret and how these visual secrets fashioned audiences and their responses. Our contributors explore how secrets were performed and enacted and what functions they and their revelations served. The objects of these inquiries range from staircases to narrative paintings, printed books to artists’ drawings, ecclesiastical furnishings to engravers’ tools. Visual and material insinuations of secrecy invite inspection, arouse suspicion, and arrest the viewer’s attention. These procedures are insistently social acts of discrimination as much as inclusion, and indeed, the contributors to this volume are interested not only in the networks and connections created by the revelation of secrets, but equally in the exclusions generated by that process.

40. DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and Related Drawings, 298 no. 184. For this image, see also the essay by Patricia Simons in the present volume. 41. For more on this gesture, see de Luca, “Notion of Secretum”; Mancini, La lingua degli dei. 42. This sort of conspicuous unveiling “offers a critique or parody of a shaming culture by seeming to cover, yet inviting voyeuristic focus and tactile fantasies”; Simons, “Anatomical Secrets,” 327.

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FIGURE 6. Agostino Carracci, Satyr and Sleeping Nymph, late 1580s, engraving, London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Introduction 15

One prevalent line along which early modern secrets worked to divide their keepers and tellers was that of gender. Unfettered access to information was often presented as the prerogative of men, too complicated or too dangerous to fall into the hands (or under the eyes) of women.43 As Katharine Park has shown this was true even, or particularly, when that secret knowledge was itself centered on women’s own bodies and on the workings of sexuality and generation.44 In her essay for this volume, Lyle Massey examines the occlusions and revelations activated by Johann Remmelin’s flap-anatomy sheet first printed in Augsburg in 1613. Massey investigates how male viewing of this highly interactive object depended on a voyeuristic gaze that situated bodies, and especially women’s bodies, as harboring secrets. In particular, she explores Remmelin’s account of the uterus as a site of alchemical experimentation, kabbalistic magic, and demonic transformation. Remmelin’s flap anatomy, Massey shows, reinforces misogynistic conceptions of the secrets harbored by the female body while simultaneously privileging the reader-anatomist as one with the power to reveal and comprehend those secrets. As Petrarch suggested by designating a philosophical dialogue as secret, erudition and education also proved powerful criteria for distinction. For Bernardo Bellincioni, a poet at Ludovico Sforza’s court in Milan, it was precisely secret knowledge that separated apt rulers from ignorant subjects. In his sonnet “Against those who presume to judge the deeds of lords” of circa 1490, Bellincioni quipped that “Certain men, witty and blithe with words, though they know not the secrets of lords, judge like a blind man choosing colors saying ‘they should do it like this, this is the best way.’”45 Over a century later, Thomas Johnson advertised the origins of his “secret” knowledge of the natural world in the works of “divers Latine Authors.”46 Of course, this strategy was effective for establishing authorial privilege in a vernacular work. But it also served to offer those who could not read Latin access to a supposedly exclusive company of cognoscenti, and it likewise reinforced the sense that the knowledge at their fingertips was both powerful and previously available to only a select few. William Eamon’s contribution to this collection focuses on the sellers of secret cures in early modern Venice, examining the ways in which they visually enhanced the tantalizing power of their wares. Eamon particularly draws our attention to the differentiated audiences addressed by these charlatans, ranging from the learned magistrates who approved their remedies to the unlettered craftsmen who constituted both the market for their products and the public for their displays. Looking to the prevalence of the “secret” languages of Hebrew and hieroglyphics in Ferrarese painting, Giancarlo Fiorenza similarly demonstrates the way in which secrets could mark the boundary between the learned and unlearned. Inscriptions in these sacred and ancient languages appear throughout Ludovico Mazzolino’s paintings of Christ’s ministry. Fiorenza argues that these inscriptions at once reveal and conceal Christian teaching as divine wisdom, establishing and maintaining a learned and discerning audience at court. A critical exploration of early modern secrecy also provides one perspective from which to resist the dichotomy of public and private—a binary that remains fundamental to a host of frameworks 43. Lochrie, Covert Operations, esp. 93–134. See, additionally, Rasmussen, “Introduction,” and the entirety of that special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 44. Park, Secrets of Women. 45. Bellincioni, Le Rime, 1:51: “Certi savj e gagliardi con parole / Che non sanno e segreti de’ signori / Giudian come il cieco de’ colori / A dir: Faccian così; così si vole.” 46. Johnson, Cornucopiae or divers secrets.

16 Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts

through which we understand early modern visual culture. This overdetermined division is especially pronounced in considerations of Renaissance studies or studioli and in many recent and otherwise valuable studies of domestic art.47 To be sure, distinctions between public and private were invoked and deployed in early modern Europe, and often for violently coercive ends in patriarchy’s service. Yet as Alan Stewart, Patricia Fumerton, and Mary Thomas Crane have shown, ostensibly occluded and secluded spaces like studies and closets often enacted a kind of “public privacy,” placing activities including study and prayer on display.48 For much of the period here under discussion, power and even sovereignty were constituted by forces that might today seem unequivocally private, and the Habermasian divide between public and private spheres was only just developing, and irregularly.49 The contributors to this volume thus situate and historicize utterances and images within the dynamics of specific early modern power relations.50 The porous nature of early modern public and private spheres serves as fertile ground for several of our contributors. Timothy McCall examines a novel architectural furnishing from fifteenth-century Parma, the coretto of count Pier Maria Rossi. Prominently visible within a chapel in one of Rossi’s castles, this wooden box might be seen as a private sanctuary that concealed the count’s presence from prying eyes. As McCall demonstrates, however, the coretto generated multiple levels and plays of access, secrecy, and display for visitors to Torrechiara by calling attention to Rossi’s presence (or potential presence) within and hiding Rossi, only ultimately to reveal his presence to all. Henry Dietrich Fernández likewise considers an ostensibly private space that enacted its own public display, the “secret” apartments of Cardinal Bibbiena, trusted segretario (secret keeper) to Pope Leo X. Like most personal apartments, the interior of Bibbiena’s suite was closed to casual visitors. Yet, visible high atop the façade of the papal palace, of which they comprised a small component, these rooms beckoned and tantalized viewers. Fernández explores the ways in which this emphatic display of a secret space to those not privileged to gain access intensified the revelation of that same space to a community of invited guests, including Bibbiena’s protégé Giulio Sadoleto. Likewise, while the secret of Michelangelo’s infatuation with the young Tommaso de’ Cavalieri remains very much an open one, it is not its hiding to which Maria Ruvoldt productively calls attention in her essay. Rather than asking from whom Michelangelo’s letters and gift drawings were hidden, Ruvoldt instead invites us to consider to whom they were entrusted and suggests that these precious traces of the artist created hierarchical networks of intimates. By investigating the mechanics of their exchange, Ruvoldt elucidates the ways in which Michelangelo used these letters to assert his social and artistic autonomy. The veiling of panels and canvases with curtains and covers and the concealment of precious and rare objects within cabinets and boxes were common early modern practices that made evident the power of secrecy to distinguish and exclude. Such objects have frequently been studied 47. Usefully, see Stewart, “Early Modern Closet Discovered”; Campbell, Cosmè Tura of Ferrara, 29–62; Rambuss, Closet Devotions; Campbell, “Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius”; Campbell, Cabinet of Eros. 48. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, esp. 67–76; Stewart, “Early Modern Closet Discovered,” 168; Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces,” 5. 49. Habermas, Structural Transformation; Chittolini, “The ‘Private,’ the ‘Public,’ the State.” 50. For the early modern interplay between public and private and for valuable critiques of scholars’ overdetermined reliance on the dichotomy, see Baskins, “(In)famous Men,” 109; Welch, “Public Magnificence and Private Display”; Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 8–12; Wilson and Yachnin, “Introduction”; Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces.”

Introduction 17

under the rubric of curiosity or the umbrella of the history of collecting, yet the rationale for their hiddenness and the grammar of their cloistering also invite sustained attention. In her essay here, Patricia Simons calls our attention to the inseparable bond between veiling and unveiling in early modern visual culture. Simons examines the covering of erotic paintings and engravings as well as the partial veiling of nude figures within those works. While such practices are often understood as censorial acts that mitigate indecorous content, Simons instead argues that these veils constructed bodies, paintings, and prints as open secrets that not only beckoned and titillated their viewers, but also united their audiences as secret keepers. The inherent difficulties posed by interpreting the signs and symbols of a visually erudite culture (and one in which the visual arts embraced a naturalistic approach to a vibrant material culture) have long motivated the art historical quest to decode the secrets of Renaissance painting and sculpture.51 Traditional iconographic studies have revealed secrets, but they have often told us little about secrecy and even less about why paintings should hide secrets in the first place. The anamorphic death’s head at the center of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) (fig. 7), has cried out to countless scholars as a tantalizing secret beckoning to be deciphered.52 Holbein’s interlocutors have often probed what this skull means, but they have only tangentially sought to understand how it means. The painter’s brush twists, refracts, and conceals the grim souvenir, yet these very acts constitute a performance that calls Holbein’s viewers to inspect the painted surface closely and to change their perception. Anamorphosis here erects a boundary that viewers cross, once alerted to the skull’s presence, through the work of active looking, experiencing the fruits of their labor as revelation.53 This process of engaged viewing is further heightened by the conceit of the fictive curtain, pulled back at the top left corner of the canvas to unveil a grisaille crucifix. Nearly as frequently as art historians have probed the hidden symbols on the surface of paintings, they have sought the secret rules lying unseen beneath. Perspectively complex paintings with their grids of paving stones, scattered lances, and ceiling beams have often stood as emblematic of Renaissance art practices. Art historians, for their part, have often sought, even obsessively, hidden or esoteric geometric schemes underlying these paintings. Pioneered by Charles Bouleau and evaluated, ridiculed, and even rejected by scholars including Daniel Arasse and James Elkins, the notion of the “painter’s secret geometry” has remained a stubborn art historical presence.54 Nor is it only modern art historians who have framed the techniques of Renaissance art-making as esoteric or mysterious. Early modern writers often designated the technical elements of art practice as secrets, akin to those of astrologers, necromancers, and alchemists. Artists were only too eager to benefit from such beguiling mysteries. The Ferrarese painter Ercole de’ Roberti, for example, collaborated with Pandolfo Colenuccio to establish himself as an expert on the properties of the

51. For art history’s engagement with excavating hidden meaning from visual culture, see especially Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity; Panofsky, Studies in Iconology. 52. One recent and extensive treatment of the work is framed as “an attempt to discover what lies behind Hans Holbein’s most famous and most enigmatic painting”: North, Ambassadors’ Secret, xvii. See also Kenaan, “The ‘Unusual Character’ of Holbein’s Ambassadors.” For the extensive bibliography on Holbein’s painting, see Foister, Holbein and England. The classic study of the interpretive possibilities of Holbein’s anamorphosis is Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 17–26. 53. Only recently have the workings of such anamorphic displays been subject to structural analysis: Massey, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, esp. 37–70. 54. Bouleau, Painter’s Secret Geometry; Elkins, Poetics of Perspective; Arasse, On n’y voit rien, esp. chapter 2, “Le regard de l’escargot.”

18 Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts

FIGURE 7. Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533, oil on canvas, London, National Gallery of Art. © The Trustees, The National Gallery, London.

pigment cinnabar, which Pliny held to be derived from a mixture of dragon and Indian elephant blood.55 Pamela Long has traced trade secrets from late antiquity, through the workshops of medieval craftspeople, and into those of Renaissance painters.56 Historians of painting, sculpture, and architecture have often privileged narratives of influence and described an effortless dissemination of invention and style in early modern Europe. A focus on trade and technical secrecy, however, can reveal the difficulties and even risks that attended to the frequently personal and intimate transmission of intellectual property and proprietary technologies. Further, art historians might productively revisit the introduction and development of technologies whose origins and operations were shrouded in mystery—the printing press and its products foremost among these. Sean Roberts’s contribution to this volume 55. Campbell, Cabinet of Eros, 134. 56. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship. See, additionally, Wheeler, Renaissance Secrets.

Introduction 19

investigates frequently overlooked techniques of the earliest Italian engravers of book illustrations, maps, and single-sheet prints. He examines the lengths to which engravers, including Mantegna, went to keep technical know-how secret. Printers, engravers, and woodcutters, of course, diligently guarded the tricks of the trade, including novel tools like burins and burnishers, from the prying eyes of competitors. Yet, Roberts shows that these craftspeople also designated relatively simple processes as secrets in order to discourage imitation or reverse engineering. The period examined by these essays was also one of unprecedented change in the ways that individuals fashioned selves, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s enduring formulation.57 Historians have long identified numerous factors that contributed to this shift. Foremost among these was the reorientation of early modern subjectivity along an axis of confessional identity, culminating in the Reformation and its responses. The development of individuals defined, to a great degree, through belief rather than social performance, through orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy, also provided unprecedented opportunity both for the keeping of secrets and for the suspicion that others were doing likewise.58 Early modern visual and material culture not only reflected but also anticipated and contributed to this monumental shift. Allie Terry-Fritsch’s essay here treats the material culture of civic denunciation in fifteenth-century Florence and its environs by examining drop-boxes (tamburi) and the secret accusations they contained. She argues that these tamburi and their (potential) contents constituted communities of accusers and accused: real, potential, and imagined. These acts of surveillance and denunciation undoubtedly served to strengthen some communal bonds. Yet Terry-Fritsch also calls our attention to a culture of secrecy in flux, one in which sealed and anonymous denunciations also threatened each member of that community by replacing the social act of confession with a hidden and pervasive surveillance. These drop-boxes, as the most visible component of the process of denunciation, served as lightning rods for those who saw in these operations a dangerous breach of social cohesion. Terry-Fritsch examines the destruction and vandalism of the tamburi as indications of secrecy’s potential to disrupt the social bonds between early modern individuals. By their very performative nature, early modern secrets called out for, even demanded, revelation. Indeed many secrets acquired meaning primarily through the possibility that they would be disclosed. Above all, then, this volume investigates why secrets were hidden and from whom, through what mechanisms they were performed and enacted, and by what means and to whom they were divulged. While acknowledging that the task at hand is an emphatically interdisciplinary one, historians of artistic, visual, and material cultures have especially important roles to play in elucidating the operations of these early modern secrets and their keepers.59 Because secrets often functioned visually, the skills of art historical intervention attuned to the sensory and intellectual experience of secrets can expose the construction and reception of classified information. The disciplinary tools now associated with visual culture studies, and the recent turn toward the study of vision, are likewise valuable. The emphasis on the process of occlusion and revelation central to early modern secrecy suggests that access to and exclusion from in-groups, networks, and communities were 57. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 1–9. 58. See, for instance, Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics; Stewart, “Early Modern Closet Discovered”; Rambuss, Closet Devotions; Jager, Book of the Heart. 59. Rasmussen, “Introduction,” 4.

20 Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts

often controlled visually, spatially, and materially. Though secrecy relies on tropes of the invisible and hidden, it is precisely their opposites, the visible and uncovered, that must alert the viewer to the secret’s presence and operation within painting, sculpture, and architectural spaces. The thing secreted must by necessity present itself by unfolding in plain sight.

Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista. Della pittura. Edited by Luigi Mallè. Florence: Sansoni, 1950. ———. On Painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson and edited by Martin Kemp. New York: Penguin, 1991. Arasse, Daniel. “Il programma politico della Camera degli Sposi, ovvero il segreto dell’immortalità.” Quaderni di Palazzo Te 6 (1987): 45–64. ———. On n’y voit rien: Descriptions. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 2005. Babinger, Franz. “An Italian Map of the Balkans, presumably owned by Mehmed II, the Conqueror (1452–53).” Imago Mundi 8 (1951): 8–15. Baskins, Cristelle. “Griselda, or the Renaissance Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor in Tuscan Cassone Painting.” Stanford Italian Review 10 (1991): 153–75. ———. “(In)famous Men: The Continence of Scipio and Formations of Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Domestic Painting.” Studies in Iconography 23 (2002): 109–36. Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971. ———. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988. Bellincioni, Bernardo. Le Rime. Edited by Pietro Fanfani. 2 vols. Bologna: Romagnoli, 1876–78. Biagioli, Mario. Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Boccaccio, Giovanni, and Francesco Petrarca. Griselda. Edited by Luca Carlo Rossi. Palermo: Sallerio editore, 1991. Bok, Sissela. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Bouleau, Charles. The Painter’s Secret Geometry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. Brotton, Jerry. Trading Territories. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Calzona, Arturo. “L’abito alla corte dei Gonzaga.” In Il costume nell’età del Rinascimento, edited by Dora Liscia Bemporad, 225–52. Florence: Edifir, 1988. Camille, Michael. “Walter Benjamin and Dürer’s Melencolia I: The Dialectics of Allegory and the Limits of Iconology.” Ideas and Production: A Journal in the History of Ideas 5 (1986): 58–79. Campbell, C. Jean. The Commonwealth of Nature: Art and Poetic Community in the Age of Dante. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Campbell, Stephen. The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. ———. Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics and the Renaissance City, 1450–1495. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. ———. “Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius.” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 299–332. Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010. Chittolini, Giorgio. “The ‘Private,’ the ‘Public,’ the State.” In The Origins of the State in Italy 1300–1600, edited by Julius Kirshner, 34–61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Cope, Jackson. Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy from Machiavelli to Goldoni. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Cortesi, Paolo. De Cardinalatu. San Gimignano: Symeon Nicolai Nardi, 1510. Crane, Mary Thomas. “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural

Introduction 21 Studies 9 (2009): 4–22. de Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable. Volume 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by Michael Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. DeGrazia Bohlin, Diane. Prints and Related Drawings by the Carracci Family: A Catalogue Raisonné. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1979. de Luca, Elena. “The Notion of Secretum in Renaissance Bologna: Toward a Sociology of Secrecy in Italian Culture.” In Raising the Eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies, edited by Lauren Golden, 189–207. Oxford, UK: Archaeopress, 2001. de Vivo, Filippo. Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Eamon, William. The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010. ———. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Elkins, James. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Engel, Gisela, Brita Rang, Klaus Reichert, and Heide Wunder, eds. Das Geheimnis am Beginn der europäischen Moderne. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002. Florio, John. Worlde of Wordes. London, 1598 and 1611. Foister, Susan. Holbein and England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Galis, Diana. “Concealed Wisdom: Renaissance Hieroglyphic and Lorenzo Lotto’s Bergamo Intarsie.” Art Bulletin 62 (1980): 363–75. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hyland, Peter. Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Jager, Eric. The Book of the Heart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Johnson, Thomas. Cornucopiae or divers secrets... London: Barley, 1596. Kavey, Allison. Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England 1550–1600. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Kemp, Martin, ed. Leonardo on Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Kenaan, Hagi. “The ‘Unusual Character’ of Holbein’s Ambassadors.” Artibus et Historiae 23 (2002): 61–75. Leverotti, Franca. “‘Diligentia, obedientia, fides, taciturnitas…cum modestia’: La cancelleria segreta nel Ducato sforzesco.” Ricerche Storiche 24 (1994): 305–35. Levy, Evonne. Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Lochrie, Karma. Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. ———. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Murderous Plots and Medieval Secrets.” In Premodern Sexualities, edited by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, 137–52. New York: Routledge, 1996. Long, Elaine, and Alisha Rankin, eds. Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Long, Pamela O. Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Mancini, Roberto. La lingua degli dei: Il silenzio dall’antichità al Rinascimento. Vicenza: Angelo Colla Editore, 2008.

22 Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts Massey, Lyle. Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Massumi, Brian. “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear.” In The Politics of Everyday Fear, edited by Brian Massumi, 3–38. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. McCall, Timothy. “Networks of Power: The Art Patronage of Pier Maria Rossi of Parma.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2005. McCall, Timothy, and Sean Roberts, “Art and the Material Culture of Diplomacy.” In Italian Renaissance Diplomacy: Texts and Translations (1350–1520), edited by Monica Azzolini and Isabella Lazzarini. Durham, UK: University of Durham Press, forthcoming. Meyer, Richard. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002. North, John. The Ambassadors’ Secret: Hans Holbein and the World of the Renaissance. London: Hambledon and London, 2002. Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1939. ———. The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Petrarca, Francesco. The Secret. Edited by Carol Quillen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003. Raby, Julian. “East and West in Mehmed the Conqueror’s Library.” Bulletin du bibliophile 3 (1987): 297–321. ———. “A Sultan of Paradox: Mehmed the Conqueror as Patron of the Arts.” Oxford Art Journal 5 (1982): 3–8. Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Randolph, Adrian. Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Rasmussen, Ann Marie. “Introduction.” In “Gender and Secrecy,” special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 1–4. Roberts, Sean. “Silence and Secrets in Domenico Fetti’s Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music.” Renaissance Studies 26 (forthcoming, 2013). Safarik, Eduard. Fetti. Milan: Electa, 1990. ———, ed. Domenico Fetti, 1588/89–1623. Mantua: Palazzo Te, 1996. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Seydl, Jon. “Domenico Fetti: Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music.” In Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, edited by Andrea Bacchi, 216–17. Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2008. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night or What You Will. Edited by Elizabeth Story Dunno. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Signorini, Rodolfo. “A Dog Named Rubino.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 317–20. ———. Opus hoc tenue: La “archetipita” Camera Dipinta detta “degli Sposi” di Andrea Mantegna; lettura storica iconografica iconologica della “più bella camera del mondo.” 2nd ed., rev. Mantova: MP Marketing, 2007. Simonetta, Marcello. Rinascimento Segreto: Il mondo del Segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Simons, Patricia. “Anatomical Secrets: Pudenda and the Pudica Gesture.” In Das Geheimnis am Beginn, edited by Gisela Engel, Brita Rang, Klaus Reichert, and Heide Wunder, 101–17. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002. Snyder, Jon. Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Starn, Randolph. “Places of the Image in Italian Renaissance Art: Clues, Symbols, and Signatures in Mantegna’s Camera Picta.” In Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, edited by Alvin Vos, 207–30. Binghamton, UK: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995.

Introduction 23 Stewart, Alan. “The Early Modern Closet Discovered.” Representations 50 (1995): 76–100. Tuohy, Thomas. Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d’Este, 1471–1505, and the Invention of a Ducal Capital. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Valesio, Paolo. Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Waldman, Louis. “Domenico Fetti’s Philosophers.” Source 24 (2004): 26–35. 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, 1999. Weil-Garris, Kathleen, and John d’Amico. “The Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace: A Chapter from Cortesi’s De Cardinalatu.” In Studies in Italian Art and Architecture, 15th through 18th centuries, edited by Henry Million, 45–123. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. Weissman, Ronald. Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1982. Welch, Evelyn. “Galeazzo Maria Sforza and the Castello di Pavia, 1469.” Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 352–75. ———. “Painting as Performance in the Italian Renaissance Court.” In Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300–1550, edited by Stephen Campbell, 9–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. “Public Magnificence and Private Display: Giovanni Pontano’s De splendore (1498) and the Domestic Arts.” Journal of Design History 15 (2002): 211–27. Wheeler, Jo. Renaissance Secrets: Recipes and Formulas. London: V&A Publishing, 2009. Wilson, Bronwen, and Paul Yachnin. “Introduction.” In Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, edited by Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, 1–21. New York: Routledge, 2009.

–1–

The Visual Dynamics of (Un)veiling in Early Modern Culture Patricia Simons

J

ust as secrecy has been understood as a process of hiding or obscuring, unveiling is conventionally regarded as revelatory. That supposed opposite of secrecy is conceptualized as sometimes intrusive but always uncovering visual or allegorical knowledge, often embodied in the naked human form. It seems to be the quintessential act of penetrating to an inner secret. Time thus unveils Truth in an iconographic pattern typified by aged Father Time grasping or exposing a virginal, alluring personification in female form.1 Art historical scholarship has often interpreted the nude female figure as a sign for Neoplatonic, abstract truth and divine beauty, or at the opposite Aristotelian extreme, as it were, as merely sensual and material.2 Poetic veils are understood by the literati (of any period) as deliberate masks to hide meaning from all but themselves, that is, those construed as the initiated elite who grasp underlying principles rather than being deluded by superficial charms. So too, the lifting of veils could be a metaphor for the selfconscious perspicacity of metapainting that reveals its creator’s ingenuity and virtuosity. Notably, in such aesthetic and intellectual scenarios, access to the underlying, hidden “truth” is posited as difficult and, like many other kinds of secretive knowledge, is restricted to an echelon distinguished by factors like gender, education, and status. What is often left out, but will be broadly reviewed here, is a consideration of the dynamics of power and privilege, chiefly in relation to reception. In terms of gender, it will be argued, not all acts of exposure can be explained as merely prurient or voyeuristic. Furthermore, acts of unveiling coexist with and imply a reciprocal covering; hence the orthographic duality of “(un)veiling” better captures the layered, allusive nature of the visual and performative history of secrecy. Many revealed secrets are touched on in this volume, and here the construction and dynamics of the A version of this essay was delivered at a conference I organized, “The Rhetorics and Rituals of (Un)Veiling in Early Modern Europe,” held at the University of Michigan in October 1997. I am grateful to Tim McCall and Sean Roberts for the opportunity to unearth and reflesh that paper for this volume. I am indebted, too, for their comments, as I am also to Louise Marshall and Monika Schmitter. 1. Saxl, “Veritas Filia Temporis”; Panofsky, “Father Time” (first published in 1939, adapting work published in 1923). 2. Hence, “to deny a Renaissance picture of a nude woman her mythological garb is indeed to turn her out into the streets,” according to Rosand, “Venereal Hermeneutics,” 273; repeated in Rosand, “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” 110 (1997 reprint, p. 50).

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open secret is outlined. To be a meaningful participant in a community of secrecy (that is, any group that shared secrets and invested in the importance of secrets), one had to send visible signals about that advantage while simultaneously maintaining concealment. During the Renaissance, the interplay of secrecy and revelation, hiding and discovering, was presented by such means as words, images, rituals, physical framing of cultural objects, and metaphors for artistic practice, each of which is investigated here. The hierarchy between the philosophical and the particular, cast in the form of the classically ideal opposed to the shamefully excessive, was influentially applied to the unclothed body in Kenneth Clark’s lectures on The Nude of 1953, which expanded the pronouncement of his mentor Bernard Berenson that “the nude is not the naked.”3 Bared human bodies can apparently be readily distinguished by way of a dichotomy that contrasts the naked with the nude, the obscene with the seductive, the embarrassed with the confident, the view that should remain private with the sight that ennobles the public realm. Almost like clothing, thought Clark, “the formula of the classical ideal had been more protective than any drapery; whereas the shape of the Gothic body, which suggested that it was normally clothed, gave it the impropriety of a secret.”4 Clark’s anachronistic assumptions about shame, privacy, and indecency were common at his time but they still inform judgments made today about objects that are said to belong to what is positioned as a clandestine, illicit, and furtive culture of early modern courtesans and mistresses. The titillated, almost wistful closeting by some modern commentators of an urban subculture of sexual commerce and of the long-standing, chiefly aristocratic habit of keeping mistresses and begetting bastards neglects the degree to which such practices were open secrets, even well-known possibilities available to elite men but also some women and which often aided their political advancement or cultural reputation.5 Commenting on Freud’s claim to unveil truth in dream analysis, Derrida observed, “Exhibiting, baring, stripping down, unveiling—this is an old routine: the metaphor of truth, which is as much as to say the metaphor of metaphor, the truth of truth, the truth of metaphor.”6 The standard metaphor of unveiling truth posits delving beyond the surface to reveal pure truth, but that too is a metaphor, one founded on privilege and insight assumed by the unveilers. My point here is to avoid the “old routine” of claims to an end point of ultimate, universal, moral, or aesthetic truth, and instead examine the entwined processes and rhetoric of secrecy and unveiling in the historical and political context of early modern Europe, primarily Italy. Pervasive and meaningful in practices and texts, the displaying of secrets accrued varying degrees of power to producer, teller, and audience alike.7 So too did their covering, acts that often left a residue in visual culture and the language of artistic praxis. The modern antithetical conditions of the clothed and undressed, the

3. Berenson, Aesthetics and History, 86 (finished in 1941); Clark, Nude (first published in 1956). 4. Clark, Nude, 314. 5. For a useful recent study of Roman prostitutes and courtesans, see Storey, Carnal Commerce. A straightforward similarity between the private, illicit, hidden, furtive, secret, shameful, and erotic was assumed in the foreword and certain essays and entries in Bayer, Art and Love. In contrast to the romantic, personalized, and modern notion of secretive mistresses and jealous wives (for example, Musacchio, “Wives, Lovers, and Art,” and her entry on Bianca Cappello’s portrait with reverse, in Bayer, Art and Love, 29–41, 272–74), see McCall, “Visual Imagery and Historical Invisibility.” 6. Derrida, “Purveyor of Truth,” 34; for an alternative translation, see Derrida, Postcard, 415. 7. For an illuminating focus on one painter, see Hills, “Titian’s Veils.”

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overtly pictured and the ambiguously intimated, were instead constituted as layered, variously veiled states. In a semi-Derridean vein, here intertwined with sociohistorical inquiry, the diametrical opposition between the secret and the known can be collapsed or undone because the terms rely on each other and even become one another in the field of visualization, where a secret paradoxically only exists if it is seen to matter and have being.

Layers

In early modern culture, barriers between secret and explicit knowledge were permeable and interactive more than dichotomous or static. Clear separation between the public and private spheres, crucial to modern assumptions about secrecy, subjectivity, and intimacy, was in many ways a development of later centuries. Spaces tended to be porous and multipurpose, sometimes of equal measure semipublic and pseudoprivate. The Dutch soldertje (a raised platform placed near a window, seen in figure 1.8 below) or window embrasures in the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino, for example, demarcated a quieter, withdrawn space but were laminated between the street on one side and the larger, sometimes bustling room on the other. Spaces supposedly inaccessible to all but an elite few, in the pope’s Vatican Palace or Sistine Chapel or the French king’s château at Fontainebleau, were nevertheless seen more broadly through the medium of reproductive prints that were either actual or more often putative souvenirs of visits. The prints disseminated views of varying accuracy that relied precisely on the confidentiality of the original works in order to be marketable commodities while also publicizing the renown and cultivation of their owners. Boundaries circumscribing public and private zones of the body were also strategically deployed and subtly charged. Many people bathed in special garments rather than baring their bodies, and fifteenth-century advice on marital conduct reiterated medieval church doctrine that husbands should never see their wives naked.8 Given these proprieties, Florentines might have been especially impressed in the last decades of that century by Botticelli’s life-sized paintings of naked women derived from his depiction of Venus at Her Birth (fig. 1.1).9 Variants by his hand or workshop point to the popularity of the scheme, a glowing form standing on a narrow ledge against a dark background, distinctly bereft of narrative particularities. The type engendered similar figures from other artists but also probably suffered during Savonarolan “bonfires of the vanities,” for the destroyed objects included “painted figures of women” according to an eyewitness in February 1497, and a year later the “dishonest and lust-inciting paintings and statues” explicitly included works by Botticelli.10 Still recorded in the sixteenth century by Vasari and others in numerous households, the overt views of female nudes are instances of what could be called “public privacy” in that they intermingle

8. The 1483 inventory of the Sienese physician Maestro Bartolo di Tura listed “uno camiciotto da bagno”; Herald, Renaissance Dress, 248. It was instead bathing barbarians (Northerners) who hid their genitals with “brache” (breeches) according to Luigini, Il libro della bella donna, 254 (1554). On marital decorum, see Payer, Sex and the Penitentials, 61, 103, 165n56; McNeill and Garner, Medieval Handbooks of Penance, 211, 336; Viglione, “Giovanni Dominici,” 120–21 (the Regola del governo di cura familiare of ca. 1405); Barbaro, “On Wifely Duties,” 213. 9. Lightbown, Botticelli, 2:120–22, nos. C10–12; Sframeli, Myth of Venus, 70–71, no. 2 (Lorenzo di Credi’s panel in the Uffizi); Negro and Roio, Lorenzo Costa, 124–25, 130–31, nos. 54, 61. 10. Klaniczay, “‘Bonfires of the Vanities,’” 34–36 and nn20–21, 26.

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FIGURE 1.1. Sandro Botticelli, Venus, 1480s, oil on canvas, Turin, Galleria Sabauda. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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the showy with the not-to-be-seen. Ostensibly concealing hair at the genitals instead makes a morphological reference to the vulva. Apparently modest gestures taken from the ancient pudica type instead draw attention to the breasts and burrow between her thighs. A light veil in the Sabauda example is so transparent and floating that it conceals nothing and animates the whole. Similarly, the use by other artists like Lorenzo Costa of scanty draperies does little to dampen sexual allusion. The pictorial format achieved international success into the sixteenth century, particularly in the output of many standing Venus figures from Cranach and his workshop, some displaying diaphanous veils and isolated against dark backdrops. Both popular and condemned, less secluded than the reclining, naked figures on the underside of cassone lids and visible on palace walls to at least some visitors as well as known by reputation, the paintings were neither entirely public nor exclusively private images. Marmoreal against featureless darkness like a cult statue, the painted bodies capitalize on the titillation of well-known tales of masturbation inspired by Praxiteles’s statue of Aphrodite (famous exemplar of the pudica type) and thus they might be understood as intensely private and intimate objects. But they also work in defiant dialogue with censorship, displayed despite the strictures, and attaining all the greater fame and allurement precisely due to efforts to keep them secret and unknown. As suggested by the addition of veils and cloths to otherwise exposed figures, median states between transparency and idealization, between zones of skin and fabric, could be as meaningful and often as erotically laden and exhibitionist as the fully bare body, no matter how much the latter was classicized as “nude.” In the language of piety or the vocabulary of classical and everyday sights, early modern artists dared to visualize tactile sensation, made all the sweeter for its visually oblique or ambiguous suggestion. The gesture of a male hand slipping between layers of female flesh and cloth, in successive moments or in a single gesture, was pictured in both religious and secular registers. The infant savior sometimes engages in playful intimacy with his mother, clasping her bodice or sliding his hand under that clothing in an attempt to assuage his charmingly human hunger, yet at the same time foreshadowing his erotic relationship with her as the mystic Bride of Christ.11 That the Christ child’s gesture was an eroticized one is indicated by several prints attributed to Giovanni Antonio di Brescia (formerly identified as Zoan Andrea), probably datable to the 1510s, in addition to numerous paintings based on a Venetian composition. An anonymous copy in reverse of one of Giovanni Antonio’s engravings (fig. 1.2) pays witness to the gesture’s enticing attraction.12 With a little less modeling, the variant print nevertheless captures the buxom, sleeping woman resting against a cushion and supported by the bent arm of a male youth who takes the opportunity to slip his fingers surreptitiously beneath her bodice. Giovanni Antonio explored the crucial feature of tactile sensation felt between layers in another composition too, in which a grinning fool clasps a simpering maiden by placing one arm around her back and inserting his right arm between her dress and outer cloak under her left armpit (fig. 1.3).13 In the Ambrosiana collection’s sheet of the woman 11. Examples include Antonello da Messina’s Virgin and Child (ca. 1475) and Raphael’s Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (1508), each in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. For erotic embraces between Virgin and Child, see Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 110–18 and passim. 12. Zucker, Illustrated Bartsch 25 (Commentary), 276–79. For the reidentification of the artist, see Boorsch, “Mantegna and His Printmakers,” 57–61. 13. Zucker, Illustrated Bartsch 25 (Commentary), 279–81 (Hind, V, p. 67 no. 16). Studies of the Titianesque trio (see below) often refer to the influence of a print by Zoan Andrea, but they seem to mean the sheet in the Ambrosiana, rather than the composition I reproduce as figure 3, and hence scholars now dismiss his relevance. See, for instance, Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, 70. As far as I know, the print in the Louvre has not previously been brought to bear on the Venetian paintings.

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FIGURE 1.2. Giovanni Antonio di Brescia (after), Two Lovers, engraving, London, British Museum 1876,1014.177. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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FIGURE 1.3. Giovanni Antonio di Brescia (attr.), The Passionate Embrace, engraving, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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asleep, by means of either pen and ink or intervention on the plate (probably the former), someone awkwardly continued the man’s fingers over the still-visible patterning of the dress’s neckline in order to make the gesture appear more decorous. But the copyist (see fig. 1.2) aimed at buyers interested in the subtle yet undeniable sensuality of the hidden fingers. Unlike either Clark’s nude or naked figures, these two North Italian compositions simultaneously acknowledge secret spaces and hidden layers while at the same time pictorially pronouncing their thrilling contravention. Notwithstanding the frequent attribution of Giovanni Antonio’s figures or compositions to Leonardo and his Milanese circle, the engraver’s fascination with intimate gestures probably derives, at least in part, from Northern prints. Around 1480, the German engraver known as Master bxg had already depicted a man’s incursion within a woman’s costume, cupping her clothed breast with one hand while sliding the other beneath that outer layering (fig. 1.4).14 Like the Italian image of the fool’s embrace (see fig. 1.3), the German engraver concentrates on two half-length, conscious lovers standing close together, though in the earlier case the female figure looks out at the viewer and lifts the man’s sleeve, suggesting that she is more sexually knowledgeable and active than Giovanni Antonio’s later allegedly coy performer. Central to the works of both printmakers is erotic evocation and satisfaction brought about by the combination of feminine acquiescence with masculine initiative and physical daring to cross the boundaries of what should ostensibly remain hidden and secret. Similar gender differences inform the eroticism of a Venetian composition much debated in origin but often attributed to Titian. It was popular enough to survive in at least ten variants, of which the damaged canvas in the Royal Collection is considered the prototype due to pentimenti (fig. 1.5).15 Scholars date the invention anywhere between 1510 and 1525, so its relationship to Giovanni Antonio’s engravings cannot be fixed in a causal chain. His two prints and the paintings share a gesture of intimate intrusion; in particular, much of the arrangement of the fool’s embrace (including the left hand at the woman’s back, the right slipping between breast and dress) appears in the canvases. However, the Venetian painter bares more flesh and invents a trio by adding a male figure at the upper right, thereby introducing a crucial homoerotic element. The composition also presents a somber, enigmatic mood rather than the print’s sly parody. The coloristic, tonal, and textural possibilities of oil paint are exploited to sensual effect, especially when, as x-rays show, an initial cloth covering was replaced by a more visible right breast, the nipple just escaping its confines to rub exquisitely against the physically raised edge of the white, disordered chemise. The woman’s left breast is cupped in the man’s hand, her nipple resting in the sensitive crook of the V formed between his thumb and index finger, while his fingers and palm are nestled beneath her golden-green dress.16 14. Boorsch and Orenstein, The Print in the North, 18. To my knowledge, this engraving has not previously been associated with the later Italian images. 15. For painted copies or variants, especially versions in the Royal Collection and Casa Buonarotti, and a drawing by Van Dyck, see Cust and Cook, “Notes on Pictures in the Royal Collections,” 71–79; Procacci, Casa Buonarroti, 191; Wethey, Paintings of Titian, 214–15, no. X-23; Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, 69–72, no. 65; Joannides, Titian to 1518, 216, 253–54; Whitaker, Clayton, and Loconte, Art of Italy, 191–93. 16. Presumably because it was considered indecorous, the thumb in the Casa Buonarroti version (then probably in the Vendramin collection) was painted over by the time Van Dyck sketched it in pen and ink sometime between 1621 and 1627 (and attributed it to Titian): Jaffé, Devonshire Collection, 123, no. 1119 (115 recto). But the thumb is visible in a copy by Figino (d. 1608): Ciardi, Giovan Ambrogio Figino, 38–39, 45n26, 122, 211; Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, 71. For its restoration, see the reproduction in Ragionieri,

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FIGURE 1.4. Master bxg, The Lovers, ca. 1480, engraving, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY.

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FIGURE 1.5. Titian (attr.), Lovers, ca. 1510–25, oil on canvas, Hampton Court, Royal Collection. Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II, 2012.

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Like Master bxg’s female figure or Giovanni Antonio’s male fool, each on the left of the composition, the chief Venetian protagonist looks out, forcing viewers’ direct engagement with his confidential actions. Insertion of the third figure on the right stresses that witnessing is part of the fantasy, and of the multiple erotic stories that could be spun. Its presence further makes the tenderness and familiarity of the embrace a communal, knowable event rather than a private secret kept solely between a single couple. Since the amusing, sexual closeness of the pairs in the prints is related to the pictorial type of “unequal lovers” or “ill-matched couples” popular in Germany and the Netherlands, so too the painted Venetian onlooker may be reminiscent of the third figure who sometimes appears in that scenario. In those cases, the third character can be a fool, a pimp, or a procuress in collusion with the central figure’s underhand appropriation of the dupe’s resources; alternatively, it is a male husband or suitor contrasted in age to the other man receiving favors from a temptress. For instance, while a siren chucks the chin of a leering old man in Quinten Massys’s painting of ca. 1520–25 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, her other hand surreptitiously passes his money bag to the greedy fool hiding at her back.17 Of special interest in this instance is the suitor’s thumb pressing against the flesh of her chest whereas the rest of his hand is concealed behind her clothed elbow, a variant on the telling thumb in the Venetian paintings— which are not, however, satirical or condemnatory in tone. In both cases, the viewer is granted the privilege of knowing and seeing more than each of the represented figures. Rather than trying to pin a single profession or iconographic identity on the third character in the Venetian pictures, it is more fruitful to concentrate on visual effect. The figure introduces complex narrative and triangulated interaction within the frame, and ensures that a simple title like “Amorous Couple” does not satisfy because his presence cannot be neglected.18 The suggestion, first made in passing in 1871, that the painted narrative bears some similarity to tales in Matteo Bandello’s Novelle is worthy of reconsideration, albeit in a modulated form.19 In the interests of brevity, I can only point to his version of the famous thirteenth-century story about the châtelaine of Vergi, which Bandello first wrote for a courtly wedding in 1518.20 At the end, the divulging of a man’s “segreto amore” leads him to commit suicide after his lady has expired from grief over that betrayal. The duke, who had leaked the secret to his jealous wife, arrives on the scene too late to prevent the tragic death of his especially favored, beloved courtier. Many of the painting’s details do not correspond closely, but the important point is that early sixteenth-century viewers were Casa Buonarroti, 25–26. 17. See the classic study of the type, Stewart, Unequal Lovers; and Silver, Paintings of Quinten Massys, 143–145, 223–224, no. 35. 18. The first recorded attempt to fix the story may have been Carlo Ridolfi’s description in 1648 of what could be this work, listing amongst Titian’s oeuvre a half-length “Cornelia isvenuta in braccio à Pompeo”: Le maraviglie dell’arte, ed. von Hadeln, 1:170 (first published in 1914). That title, Cornelia Fainting in the Arms of Pompey, proposed for the surviving painting by von Hadeln, has been revived by Joannides, Titian to 1518, 253, although the subject is too recondite and different in its details, including the absence of a meaningful third figure, to match the tone and scene plausibly. A search through the work of poets like Bembo and Sannazzaro may prove fruitful, though I suspect the most likely allusion is to romances and novelle. 19. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in North Italy, 149; elaborated in Borinski, “Novellenbilde.” Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, 72, thought inspiration from Bandello was “probably nearer the truth” than other suggestions. Most of Bandello’s stories were first published as a collection in 1554, including his version of Romeo and Juliet, which is sometimes connected with the painting. Objections to the association on the grounds of the late date have overlooked two crucial facts: first, many tales had earlier iterations (for example, Shakespeare’s plot first began to take shape in Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino of 1476), and second, some of Bandello’s stories circulated before their printing, as was the case with his version of the Châtelaine of Vergi. 20. Bandello, Quarta parte de la novella, 55–74 (tale 6) (first printed in 1573).

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familiar with accounts of misplaced trust, undeserved loyalty, lost honor, obstructed desire, clandestine affairs, separated lovers, and secret marriages. While couples unequal in age were the butt of visual jokes and noisy charivari, disparities in wealth, social status, familial accord, dynastic ambition, or sexual norms gave somber piquancy to tales about star-crossed lovers. Stories about amorous obstacles always had the potential to provoke homoerotic subtexts, and the tension between different kinds of desire is central to the painting’s appeal. More allusive than the prints, the Venetian composition intensifies and enriches the erotic possibilities of unresolved, suggestive longing. In the fictional world, obstacles to romance stoked desire to yet more anticipatory heights. Betrayal, of the “secret love” of Bandello’s ill-fated couple and of the bonds of male friendship, is a plot scenario that entertained and moved viewers while reinforcing societal norms. The tragic consequences of dishonorable publicity are paradoxically conveyed in visible terms and viewers are implicated in the telling of tales while remaining themselves safe from innuendo and free to continue savoring secrets. The viewer is an active witness as the secret becomes open, but it is not disclosed to all because it is enigmatic and evocative besides being displayed to a relatively small circle. The depicted gestures of sensual insinuation encapsulate the delicate nature of boundaries and layers of access to restricted knowledge and bodies. Visceral delight at such complexity is similarly prompted by Venetian prints of a courtesan, standing near the water’s edge, whose masculine breeches are revealed when a paper flap representing her skirt is lifted.21 It is not only the two separate images, of unusually public femininity and tantalizing ambiguity, that delight, but also the kinesthetic involvement necessary to enact a transition back and forth, as though the paper were cloth and the manipulator had control over fictive and actual material alike. Earlier in that region Vesalius pioneered cut-and-paste education, enabling students of anatomy to assemble their own layered illustrations. Around the same time, multilayered, often vernacular flap anatomies provided voyeuristic, vicarious access to organs and what were called “secret” parts, that is, the genitals and a woman’s reproductive system.22 Acquisition of knowledge was constructed like a narrative sequence, as complex, multilayered, moral yet prurient. Farthest away, neither the story nor the secret had much impact or effect, but through a serial process of approach and withdrawal, exposure and concealment, seekers of knowledge were able to manipulate systems of signification and increase their power. The dialectic between a body’s flesh and its costumed parts interested Giovanni Antonio di Brescia in a third print too, depicting a servant girl, her own skirt partly raised, lifting high the dress of her large mistress to reveal a great deal of bare flesh. The concept may rely on the case of a woman “of high rank, a Venetian” (probably a courtesan), executed in Rome in July 1501 for “having molested [pedicato] a girl of eleven or twelve years, whom she kept in her house.”23 The forbidden was vividly imagined by way of playing on one character’s access beneath the garments of another, a clearly evident power differential adding to the frisson. Other representations of physical relations with servants, especially pages attending to their masters, also concentrate on the

21. Linda Wolk-Simon’s entry in Bayer, Art and Love, 210–11, no. 103, also illustrating the 1578 view of a gondola whose lifted cover reveals two lovers. On the type, see Karr Schmidt, “Art, a User’s Guide.” 22. Carlino, Paper Bodies; Simons, “Anatomical Secrets.” 23. For the engraving and a copy in reverse see Zucker, Illustrated Bartsch 25 (Commentary), 281. The quotation is from Agostino Vespucci’s letter from Rome to Machiavelli, dated 16 July 1501, Machiavelli, Opere, vol. 6, Lettere, 61–62.

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process of dressing/undressing, often ambiguous as to what the future result will be so that a viewer can imagine a variety of sexual partners as well as fantasize either draped or exposed splendor or, rather, delight in the play of both possibilities and in the sensual pleasure of textures and anticipation. Is, for instance, Titian’s reclining figure in the Venus of Urbino about to dress or has she finished her disrobing? The standing attendant in the background may be waiting for another item to emerge from the chest, since she makes no attempt to hand the kneeling maid the sumptuous dress hanging over her shoulder. In the process of rolling up a sleeve as though she still has much work to do, the senior woman may be waiting for night attire, or further items of day wear, or she will soon hand the maid the last costume needing storage. Does the light at the window indicate the magic hour of dusk, when the lady might receive her nocturnal visitor, or is dawn breaking as she bids him farewell? If a definitive closure is sought to the narrative possibilities, an important part of the painting’s affect and evocative indeterminacy is missed. It displays the transitional moment between states of dress/undress. Therein lies some of the erotic charge, as it does in Botticelli’s lightly veiled Venus in Turin (see fig. 1.1), Raphael’s cascading linens and transparent chemise in Donna Velata, Giorgione’s tension between soft fur and flesh in Laura, Palma Vecchio’s courtesan in the Poldi Pezzoli museum with her heated nipples flaring near soft, golden tresses and pure white chemise, and many other paintings that celebrate teasing, imprecise boundaries between skin and cloth. Most often, either the Madonna exhibiting her naked and often sleeping infant or a satyr or Cupid is represented in the act of lifting a veil. The latter characters reveal the body of a naked female figure that can be variously identified as Natura, Terra, Venus, or a nymph, sometimes asleep. These images offer concrete metaphors for the artist’s capacity to reveal and arouse, granting permission to the presumably male audience to enjoy the spectacle while nevertheless feeling superior to the antics of lusty satyrs or the cheeky infant Amor. Viewing engagement is sometimes heightened by means of acknowledgment, with a figure gazing out at viewers or signaling them to discretion through the gesture of silence. Agostino Carracci’s smiling satyr calling for quiet in one of his engravings in the Lascivie series of the late 1580s thus creates a pact with the viewer to keep a shared secret (see fig. 6 in this volume’s introduction).24 The subject of that conspiracy is the overt view of the naked body of a sleeping woman, and what she does not know but will soon happen. Carracci’s satyr is a parodic intruder, superficially miming the prohibition against disturbing the sleep of a nymph that had characterized earlier images inspired by a pseudo-antique inscription.25 However, his smile and satiric nature involve viewers in jocular complicity, for he will ignore propriety and pastoral etiquette, instead rudely awakening her. The plot of artist and viewer sharing in a pact of secrecy is also central to the implied narrative of many images of Diana or nymphs bathing, especially but not only if interrupted by Actaeon. As she splashed that young hunter with water that turned him into a stag, Diana’s vengeful, foreboding words threatened, “Now you are free to tell that you have seen me all unrobed—if you can tell” (which, of course, he cannot, being rendered mute as an animal).26 On the other hand, artists making the images and viewers enjoying them can tell tales, freely seeing the forbidden sight of bathing 24. DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and Related Drawings by the Carracci Family, 298, no. 184. 25. Kurz, “HUIUS NYMPHA LOCI.” 26. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Miller, 1:137 (3.192–93).

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beauties, their pleasure heightened by their triumphant escape from punishment. Although the normative model of viewing heavily gendered such imagery, a female artist like Artemisia Gentileschi parlayed her own sex and her decorous access to female models into a trade secret, as it were. She often specialized in producing images of naked female bodies, reclining or bathing, like Susannah or Bathsheba, and these could be marketed as distinctive not merely because they were produced by a woman but because they made manifest her expertise in the knowledge of women’s bodies.27 In many images, as in the theorization of art as concealment, the artist was constructed as the creator and purveyor of secrets, and viewers benefited too, postulated as worthy of sharing such confidences because they were endowed with sufficient wit and cultural knowledge.

Covers

(Un)veiling was not primarily about obscuring and revealing that which was considered prurient, for it strategically controlled access and enticed viewers of many kinds of images, activating rather than restricting interest. Physical interactions and common circumstances of display ensured that the layering of secrecy and power was embedded in cultural memory. Familiarity with ritualized (un)veiling was especially due to liturgical practices. On a regular basis, from the humblest parish church or nunnery to the highest chapel in Christendom, priests were privileged to reveal and curtain objects of veneration including the tabernacle and ciborium housing the Eucharist, use the humeral veil so as not to touch the Body of Christ directly during mass, place then remove veils over crosses, pictures, and statues during the Lenten cycle, and bestow garments of grace at baptism and monastic investiture. On feast days and other special occasions, the imagery of an altarpiece was disclosed by the pulling aside of curtains or the raising of hangings (each often decorated).28 The most basic of Catholic rituals in early modern Europe was the sight of the Eucharist during the Elevation of the Host. Removal from a tabernacle and exposure of Christ’s symbolic body to the congregation before it was again stored out of direct sight was particularly meaningful since actual ingestion of the Host was restricted. What replaced it was oft-repeated liturgical theater, the spectacle of a Host (sometimes large) visible from far down the nave to an avid populace who rushed into the church at the ringing of the bell simply to see the bared Corpus Christi. In this core moment of the observance of faith, the population was absorbed in the process of unveiling, then withdrawal of access. Potent pictures like the Florentine Madonna housed in a special tabernacle within SS. Annunziata were uncovered at moments of crisis or worship. So emotive could be the response that crowd control necessitated a reveiling, and usually she was shown only to “the greatest personages.”29 Esteem was also due the cult image itself: a Florentine regulation of 1435 restricted the number of appearances by a miracle image from Impruneta because “sacred objects…are

27. See Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, figs. 4, 28, 38–39, 72, 98, 101, 115, 118, 120–23, 126. I draw this conclusion both from Gentileschi’s oeuvre and its context, and from the way in which she drew attention to her use of female models in several letters to patrons, for which see the translations in ibid., 392, 393, 397, 398. On trade secrets, see the essay by Sean Roberts in this volume. 28. See Nova, “Hangings, Curtains, and Shutters,” and, more generally, for the religious iconography of unveiling and “discovery” see Hills, Renaissance Image Unveiled. 29. Trexler, Public Life, 98, 355.

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normally respected and held in greater reverence if they are rarely seen.”30 Noting that “pictures representing the divine beings [are] constantly kept under coverlets of the greatest price,” Leonardo linked this veneration for the rarely seen with the unique nature of painting because it stimulated devotion and made the multitudes react “exactly as if this goddess were there as a living presence.”31 Immediately before that, Leonardo recalled the habit of “the greatest kings of the Orient going out veiled and concealed, believing their fame to be diminished by showing themselves publicly and divulging their presence.” Thrill at the sight of secreted king, goddess, holy figure, or other esteemed representation was in part about the privilege that ensued for both viewer and viewed, and the benefits were shared amongst others involved in the nexus too, such as priest, patron, or go-between. The combination of devotional and visual practice is central to Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto of the 1450s in Monterchi, in which a stately mother dressed in a pregnancy gown draws attention to her gravid tabernacle with a hand placed over the spreading seams that reveal her shimmering white undergarment. Angels pulling aside brocaded curtains further stress the metaphorical motif of revealing the timeless mysteries of incarnation, advent, and transubstantiation. Incorporating the manipulation of curtains within the pictorial composition was perhaps first ventured on a large scale in Fra Angelico’s innovative altarpiece for S. Marco of 1443. Fictive curtains gathered at either side accentuate the central opening-out to a bedazzling vision of the courtly audience in heaven. Thereafter, the scenario of revelation and thus implicit mystery was oft repeated in religious imagery, including the green curtain on its brass rings and sagging rod represented at the top of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1512–13). Layers of unveiling and ceremonial approach are accentuated in such paintings just as they are for viewers observing the Elevation of the Host or crowding to see one of Leonardo’s unveiled “goddesses.” Liturgy was also remembered in paintings of the Virgin delicately fingering and sometimes lifting a veil that is usually placed near the genitals of her babe.32 The drama of concealment and revelation further accentuates the human, masculine reality of the Incarnation, foreshadows the reuse of the Virgin’s veil when she girds his naked loins at the Crucifixion, prefigures Christ’s winding sheet, alludes to the clerical privilege of manipulating liturgical veils, and embodies the disclosure of theological truths. It was common to cover by cloth or panel not only ecclesiastical objects but also devotional and secular paintings in the home, and neither erotic subjects nor female figures were the only ones thus secluded.33 In the inventory of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s property drawn up after his death in 1492, sportelli (hinged shutters or doors) served on several cupboards, including one with figures for a little cabinet (armadietto) that contained an anonymous female portrait, as doors for a framed portrait of a woman by Domenico Veneziano, and as the single bronze portal for the Eucharist.34 30. Trexler, Public Life, 98. 31. Leonardo, Leonardo on Painting, 19–20. 32. See Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 33–45, 157–61, and passim. For the influential example of Raphael’s Madonna di Loreto of ca. 1511–12, in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, which spurred over one hundred replicas or variants, as well as the workshop Madonna of the Diadem of ca. 1512, see Meyer zur Capellen, Raphael, 2:43, 89–97, 251–54, nos. 51, A9. 33. Lorenzo Lotto, for example, referred to several covers, including an inscribed silk cloth for a Venus but also a “velo” for a Virgin Mary, a cover for St. Andrew, covers for five men’s portraits and one family portrait, and a “timpano” with the “impresa” of Jerome’s lion over a painting of that saint; Lotto, “Libro di spese diverse,” 6, 26, 42, 45, 78, 98, 102, 122, 148, 186, 211, 215, 229, 233; Dülberg, Privatporträts, 33, 37–39, 45–47, 281–82 nos. 288–94. For domestic religious objects see Cooper, “Devotion,” 192. 34. Spallanzani and Gaeta Bertelà, Inventario, 27, 53, 72, 107, 133. For saints on the sportelli flanking a standard fifteenth-century domestic painting, of an Annunciation, see Dülberg, Privatporträts, pl. 701.

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From what is known of his oeuvre and the visual conventions of the time, Domenico’s portrait was likely to have been as demure as the tabernacle door. In northern Italy, including Venice, the timpano or cloth cover fitted into a painting’s frame was used for a variety of subjects, including religious figures and portraits, of male as well as female figures.35 Yet it has been said of sportelli recorded in the seventeenth century protecting Raphael’s portrait of a seminaked woman called La Fornarina (fig. 1.6) that they indicate “concealment” and “its private and therefore implicitly erotic nature.”36 Similar comments emerged after the cleaning in 2009 of Titian’s canvas dated to the mid-1540s and later cut down into a roundel (fig. 1.7). Cupid stands triumphantly atop a lion and this picture, thought to have been the cover for a woman’s portrait once in Gabriel Vendramin’s collection, is occasionally assumed to indicate that the sitter was a courtesan or mistress simply because her visage was initially concealed and, presumably, because the exterior theme was amorous.37 The evidence, however, points to a more nuanced and multivalent, less personalized, privatized, or lewd meaning and function for such covers. Titian’s conquering Cupid, for instance, can be interpreted as signifying that “love triumphs over every great ferocity and cruelty in people,” the theme adduced of an ancient sculpture in Vendramin’s collection showing Cupid atop a lion, according to Doni’s report published in 1552.38 The idea applies equally as well to political or marital circumstances, or allegorical morality, as to illicit affairs. Newly remarried marquis of Ferrara, Leonello d’Este, is presented on a medal of 1444 as both king of beasts (his namesake, Leo) and lord of love, conveyed in the reverse image of Cupid teaching a lion to sing.39 Attentive to his instructor, that lion has been tamed by amorous devotion within marriage. If music brings harmony in Ferrara, the associated art of poetry may be key among the elite of Venice. Whereas the medal of the Venetian poet Sperone Speroni showed a putto playfully engaged with a recumbent lion, a theme reiterated on the lost cover of his portrait painted by Titian ca. 1544, in the slightly later roundel that beast has been overcome by the more powerful passion of desire.40 Amorous poetry has grown more triumphant, and the female sitter may be muselike, a manifestation of Beauty that inspires the pen.41 Vendramin was a patrician bachelor, whose family collection contained at least nine anonymous portraits (five female, four male) by 35. Dülberg, Privatporträts, 45–58 and passim; Penny, Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, vol. 1, Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona, 99–101. 36. Wolk-Simon, “Rapture,” 45. This author several times assumes that “mistress portraits … were often covered by shutters or curtains” and that voyeuristic unveiling was a key thrill for male (only) observers (185, and see similar comments about “concealment… of forbidden, carnal love” scattered throughout, for instance on 211, 219, 226). On the shutters, anachronistically deemed “surely another earmark of a rather private picture,” see Brown and Oberhuber, “Monna Vanna and Fornarina,” 48, 78–79n144. 37. Jones, “Great Renaissance art cover-up”: “apparently a cover for a portrait of a woman—but was she a mistress, a courtesan? What made her portrait illicit?” For other possible portrait covers by Titian and his school, but without mention of the roundel, see Dülberg, Privatporträts, 51–56, 241, 280–81, 295–96, nos. 192, 287, 335–38. On Titian’s roundel, see Whistler, “Titian’s Triumph of Love”; Whistler, “Uncovering Beauty.” 38. Doni, Marmi, pt. III, 40: “un Leone con un Cupido sopra … l’Amore doma ogni gran ferocità e terribilità di persone.” An ancient bronze of Cupid trampling on a lion was inventoried in the Vendramin collection in 1567–69; Anderson, “Further Inventory,” 641; Dülberg, Privatporträts, 37–38, 282, no. 297. 39. Syson and Gordon, Pisanello, 123. 40. On Speroni’s portrait and its cover, see Dülberg, Privatporträts, 51–52, 241, no. 192. Pace Whistler, “Uncovering Beauty,” 220, 221, the Ashmolean lion appears to me neither “angry” nor “enraged,” for it has tears in its eyes, frowns, and pants or roars in despair at its loss of command. 41. For portrayals of women that are neither strict portraits nor entirely generic, see Simons, “Portraiture, Portrayal, and Idealization.”

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FIGURE 1.6. Raphael, La Fornarina, ca. 1518–19, oil on wood, Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.

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FIGURE 1.7. Titian, The Triumph of Love, ca. 1545–50, oil on canvas, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. Ashmolean Museum / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

the time it was inventoried in 1601, a half century after his death.42 So it is likely that the portrait cover first recorded at that time, “con un Dio d’amor sopra un Lion,” represented not only his virtual impresa but was also an echo of his antiquities; the female figure depicted beneath was probably of symbolic and artistic significance more than of merely personal sentiment.43 It is also possible that there are political implications, as there were in the public affirmation of Leonello’s dynastic alliance. Titian’s cowed lion refers on one level to the Venetian emblem the lion 42. Anderson, “Further Inventory,” 648. 43. A conclusion that agrees with the sitter’s identification suggested in Whistler, “Uncovering Beauty.”

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of St. Mark, its wings amusingly appropriated by Cupid. Such a reading makes a wry comment on the state of civic affairs, implying that amorous diversions weakened and distracted the city’s aristocratic ruling class. That theme might suit an unmarried patriarch who worried about the luxurious ways of his nephews and whose civic offices included censor late in his life.44 Positioned in a landscape with buildings to the left, distant mountains to the right, all opposite a watery expanse, perhaps the emblematic figures instead wittily suggest that amorous dalliance in the countryside need not extend to urban environs. By generating several potential meanings, the cover functions as a conversation piece, attracting attention and raising the stakes regarding who will be granted the favor of viewing the image beneath. In general, the favor was accentuated because the ornamentation of covers was usually of a more summary, preparatory kind, executed in thinner paint and quicker brushstrokes, and often of less challenging visual interest.45 To see the exterior was honor enough for many, no matter its degree of elaboration, but especially if it was a work by a renowned master like Titian; to be able to delve further was a mark of even greater status. Whether an image is erotic or not does not depend on the existence of a physical cover, a hidden space, a solitary or leering viewer, or a strict divide between public and private spheres. The allegorical or emblematic type of cover foreshadowed the persona below, requiring viewers to engage in the imaginative play of interpretation. The secretive practice of covering portraits, male and female, did not so much create a complete separation between layers as invite inquisitiveness and awaken a desire to see and know more about both the owner and the depicted personage, and to share in various intellectual conversations and particular reveries. Paintings were exhibited in a variety of ways beyond straightforward fixing to a wall, for they were often curtained or covered with hinged, fitted, or sliding fixtures; some folded as diptychs or triptychs and in certain instances they then formed self-contained, portable boxes or display cases. Little is known about the presentation circumstances of reverses, common especially on portraits and deschi da parto (polygonal birth trays). While some covers and backs focus on coats of arms, which proclaim ownership and familial identity, others carry inscriptions, emblems, mottos, or allegorical scenes, such as Titian’s Cupid or the memento mori object of a skull. Rather than secrete the inner or obverse scene, they brand, decorate, foreshadow, or amplify it. Those not able to examine the entire assemblage were given clear indications that they were missing out on the full picture. Like sacred objects or important rulers, access to the sight of them had to be managed carefully in order to foster and maintain their potency and honor. Furthermore, opening the shutters of a painting like La Fornarina was just one stage in a sequential viewing experience, starting far back when one noticed the object set apart by its framing arrangement and continuing through to a view that may have been as close as that of the painter. The female figure’s pudica pose at breasts and lap refers to classical ideals and modesty, but the red cloth over her thighs is countered by the thin, loosely painted veil that fails to conceal the differently painted compact, highly polished flesh underneath, while her breasts and upper torso

44. For the biographical details see Anderson, “Further Inventory,” 641; Anderson, Giorgione, 162, 164–65. He died in 1552. 45. For instance, one of Titian’s assistants decorated a timpano: Penny, Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, vol. 1, Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona, 100, and see also 101; and Dülberg, Privatporträts, 49, 56 on the execution of covers. Wooden covers painted by Lorenzo Lotto and Pontormo are among the exceptions, which are also rare because they are documented and have survived: Dülberg, Privatporträts, 238–39, 241, 293, nos. 187, 191, 329.

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are entirely bare.46 Her evasive acknowledgment of the viewer’s presence and the highlighted body set against dark foliage and night sky are other double-sided features that reinforce the innate ambiguity of the pudica gesture, pure yet provocative, genteel but exhibitionist. The shutters help to establish drama and anticipate longing (by which I mean more than blatant sexual desire), which carry on within the painting itself. The modern sense of lascivious, shameful secrecy does little to get at the ensemble’s enticing subtlety. Shutters and other covers also functioned as shields protecting works valued for their subject and/or their artist. Imitated porphyry or marble surfaces surviving on the backs of some paintings assert their overall object’s prestige, and the theme of preciousness seems to me of more import than rather bourgeois notions of personal privacy. Around 1686, La Fornarina, for instance, was valued four times higher than Titian’s Venus and Adonis in the same collection.47 Raphael’s market and connoisseurial value is also central to Poussin’s seemingly self-effacing homage to the master. Poussin’s Ecstasy of St. Paul was commissioned by Paul Fréart de Chantelou in order to accompany what was thought to be Raphael’s Vision of Ezekiel in the French secretary’s collection. On 2 July 1643 Poussin wrote to the patron that he undertook the task with trepidation and asked that his work serve merely as the cover (“couverture”) to Raphael’s esteemed painting rather than be hung nearby, for the latter arrangement might provoke detrimental comparisons.48 In actuality, the envisaged display would hide Raphael’s picture from all but an elite circle of visitors and only Poussin’s work would be on overt show. Poussin constructs his “cover” as a seeming protection of Raphael’s work and a deflection from his own (which would supposedly follow in the tradition of exterior paintings often being of lesser quality), but it is a rhetorical ruse this strategy, a “cover” of another kind, upstaging his predecessor. To work sufficiently as a mode of courtly modesty, his notion that a painting’s cover protected Chantelou’s prized possession had to be plausible. The cover is presented as preliminary and subservient to the famed master’s work but, like painted covers themselves, the game played with the rhetoric is layered. By means of Poussin’s veiling, the precious antecedent becomes even more valuable, like a secret, existing in a codependent arrangement that works to his advantage and reputation. Far from being secretive, covers advertise themselves as well as what lies beneath. Or rather, their success depends not only on their outward appearance but also upon their appeal to curiosity. Shown only the silk bundle or wrapping (“invoglio di seta”) within which the Spanish ambassador to Venice kept a woman’s portrait as though it were a precious reliquary (“a guisa di reliquia”), in 1542 Aretino found that almost allegorical encasement a spur to poetic invention.49 His sonnet imagines a contest between Cupid’s arrows and Titian’s brush, and trumps both with his own pen, speaking openly of the man’s “secreto che s’asconde in lui,” the secret that hides within 46. For a report on its recent cleaning, with commentaries, see Mochi Onori, Raffaello. Bibliography and a succinct overview are available in Meyer zur Capellen, Raphael, 3:144–49 no. 78. 47. Lavin, Barberini Documents and Inventories, 421 nos. 2, 6; see other descriptions, 170 no. 311 (1644), 301 no. 199 (1671), 347 no. 275 (1672), 380 no. 423 (after 1672), 399 no. 109, and 408 no. 329 (1686). Titian’s larger painting was in an ornamented, gilded frame but without a cover (264 no. 6, 390 no. 682, 399 no. 125). 48. Félibien, Entretiens 4:50–52; Blunt, Paintings of Nicolas Poussin, 60–61 no. 88. 49. Aretino, Lettere, 433–34 no. 441 (to Don Diego Mendozza, 15 August 1542). Wolk-Simon, “Rapture,” 45, and 185, mistakes “invoglio” for a curtain. Mendozza’s presentation of the encased portrait follows elite habits. For a velvet pouch containing the portrait diptych of the King of Naples, René of Anjou, and his second wife, Jeanne de Laval (1476), see Dülberg, Privatporträts, 230, no. 174, pl. 114.

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both his heart and his apartment. In Aretino’s poetic conceit, the actual viewing of the portrait becomes less important than the owner’s courtly reverie about it alongside Aretino’s own clever self-promotion. Pictures of outstanding seventeenth-century collections, such as Willem van Haecht’s fictive Studio of Apelles (ca. 1630) in the Mauritshuis or several views of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s actual collection by David Teniers, but also images and inventories of more ordinary households, indicate that curtains (placed over individual pictures with the aid of a thin rail attached at the frame’s top) signaled the location of some of the most valued rather than necessarily erotic paintings, protecting them but also announcing their presence.50 For visitors to ask to have a curtain pushed aside made them especially beholden, to the owner and the guides. Notably, Aretino found a way around such an obligation, instead indebting the ambassador by giving him the sonnet and then benefiting them both by printing the verse about a secret that same year. It appeared in his second volume of letters, which began with letters addressed to Henry VIII of England and the king of Portugal, thereby enmeshing himself, his friend Titian, and the ambassador in an international world of culture and power. They all understood that a secret only carries weight and endows power if it is known to exist. In the case of Metsu’s maid lifting the curtain from an ebony-framed seascape in Woman Reading a Letter of ca. 1665–57 (fig. 1.8), her deceptively incidental action functions as an analogue for traversing a series of layers.51 Unlike visitors to aristocratic collections, the maid takes the charming initiative of lifting a curtain without permission, to reveal a subject that, far from indecorous or secret, alludes to the distance and transportation necessarily involved in the exchange of letters. The yearning of the absorbed letter reader seated on a soldertje at the window to the left is echoed in the maid’s imaginary travel to a storm-tossed sea; each woman is separately intent on her close reading of graphic marks and the visionary crossing of limits so that the divide between intimacy and solitude is both reinforced and suggestively overcome.

Veils in Poetry and Artistic Praxis

Ideas about layering, covering, and revealing imbued both the theoretical language and the material practice of artists. Along with the patron class, artists were familiar with thinking in terms of the exegetical tradition of creating meaning through the layers of allegory, for it was widely applied. When expounding on the unveiling of drunken Noah’s genital shame, St. Augustine explained that “the garment stands for a mystery” but also that “all the…events recorded in this story were laden with prophetic meanings and covered with prophetic veils.”52 Dante’s reference in the early fourteenth century to doctrine “hidden under the veil of the strange verses” was later developed in a Neoplatonic vein, but in the meantime it resonated in poetic theory.53 According to Boccaccio’s influential study written from ca. 1360 on, poetry “covers truth with a comely veil of fable.”54 The 50. See Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, figs. 2, 29, 34, 37, 65–66; Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp, fig. 91, pls. 21–22; Loughman and Montias, Public and Private Spaces, 119–24. 51. For the painting in the National Gallery of Ireland, see Sutton, Love Letters, 129, 132–33, no. 19. The seascape is usually read only in terms of the letter reader’s inner state. 52. Augustine, City of God, 649, 651. 53. Inferno 9.63: “la dottrina che s’asconde / sotto il velame de li versi strani.” 54. Pardo, “Savoldo’s Magdalene,” 85.

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FIGURE 1.8. Gabriel Metsu, Woman Reading a Letter, ca. 1665–67, oil on wood, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

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allegorical mode of uncovering matched the metaphors Michelangelo used in his poetry to describe his sculptural process of removing the bodily veil from the concetto hidden within the stone block.55 Around the same time as Boccaccio, Petrarch also presented poetry as a “veil of delightful fictions,” understanding that “truth uncovered is all the more pleasant, the more difficult its quest has been.”56 Hence, truths were to be wrested from beneath their fictional covers, which functioned like secrets to filter access and understanding. Power was bestowed on those who could represent themselves as more astute and discerning, like Michelangelo, or imaginative in the case of an artist like Lorenzo Lotto. Responding in 1528 to his Bergamesque patrons who were puzzled by his hieroglyphic intarsia covers for choir stalls, Lotto would only assert visual primacy: “know that these are things which are not written: imagination is needed to bring them to light.”57 Coverings conversely enabled the theater of revelation, and in the field of the visual arts the process was especially ambiguous and teasing because a two-way dialectic was necessarily set up between secretive veils and equally fictive revelations. Alberti’s deployment of a thinly woven velo “so that the visual pyramid [of rays of light] may pass through the translucency of the veil” was not just a copying device for concentrating the eye but, as Pardo has elucidated, it represented the artfully woven textus of the painting itself (both text and textile).58 Translucent on the one hand and allegorical on the other, it was also opaque material, a surface to be drawn on. More than high-flown rhetoric is engaged, for Alberti’s metaphor was partly based in the materiality of studio practice at his time. The ground of a panel painting was prepared with sizing or glue, layers of gesso or plaster, and strips of what the painter Cennini referred to as “old thin linen cloth, white threaded.”59 Working on that plane, artists were conceptualized not only as revealers but also as clothiers or tailors. They applied flesh in a Promethean manner to the bones, producing the finished object in a series of additive materials, in the fine, layered, blended strokes of tempera or, as more oily substance was added to the pigments, in increasingly more flowing, visible marks. Even when using oil paint, artists such as Titian could mimic tempera technique and add a light veil or skin of egg white before applying the varnish, cohering their art with final, nearly invisible layers.60 Alberti recommended that the painter “first…sketch in the bones.… Then add the sinews and muscles, and finally clothe the bones and muscles with flesh and skin.”61 To the objection that these things were not visible, he responded by emphasizing the order of superimposed layers: “just as for a clothed figure we first have to draw the naked body beneath and then cover it with clothes, so in painting a nude the bones and muscles must be arranged first, and then covered with appropriate flesh and skin.” Theoretically, the discerning viewer worked back to the innermost structure, judging the skill with which an artist had begun the veiling at the skeletal level and thus demonstrated adequate anatomical knowledge. Practically, the painter applied the covert armature of

55. Saslow, Poetry of Michelangelo, 238, 305, 464, with other examples on 317, 348, 371, 377, 389. 56. Pardo, “Savoldo’s Magdalene,” 86. 57. Lotto, Il ‘Libro di spese,’ 286. 58. Pardo, “Veiling the Venus of Urbino,” 112–19. 59. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, 70 (ca. 1400). See also Vasari, Vite, 1:183, on first covering panels with linen. 60. del Serra, “Conversation on Painting Techniques,” 8. 61. Alberti, On Painting, 75.

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disegno (in preparatory drawings, underdrawings, and in the artist’s mind). The many drawings executed by Raphael for his Baglioni Entombment (1507)include a study for the Virgin’s swooning body (fig. 1.9), which makes it clear that the realization of flaccid and draped flesh in the final painting nevertheless depended upon an investigation of skeletal engineering.62 The literature of medical learning and natural philosophy had long reinforced the use of corporeal metaphors for art-making. Aristotle, for example, likened embryo formation to the way in which “painters…first of all sketch in the figure of the animal in outline, and after that go on to apply the colors,” a parallel also drawn in Alessandro Benedetti’s anatomical text published in Venice in 1502.63 Secrecy, I would argue, was a fundamental dynamic that informed the very basis of artistic illusion. When discussing communicative body language and facial expressions, Alberti’s De Pictura of 1435 advised artists to always imitate expressive movements, “and those [are] preferred in a painting which leave more for the mind to imagine than is seen by the eye.”64 In other words, the painter kept some things secret and unseen, in order for the viewer to join in the projects of fiction-making and naturalistic deception. Realistic details were moderated through the governance of abstract, idealizing principles, for the sake of engaging the viewer’s memory, imagination, and aspiration. Erotic traces heightened what was a more fundamental pleasure in the repression of the real and the strategy of secrecy. In the sixteenth century, Vasari valued “that sweet and facile grace which hovers midway between the seen and the unseen [fra’l vedi e non vedi], as is the case with the flesh of living figures.”65 The limbs should be “true to nature…but veiled [ricoperte] with a plumpness and fleshiness that should not be awkward, as they are in nature, but refined by draftsmanship and judgment.” He adapts the fundamental understanding that the intellectual and poetic enterprise of allegory operated according to veiled meaning. Art, in its rivalry with Nature, was about improving merely superficial naturalism with layers of graceful material and purifying it through the application of skillful disegno and elite discrimination. Members of art’s elite audience practiced their own form of hiding in plain sight, learning from Castiglione’s manual for courtiers that sprezzatura was the wellspring of art. One should “practice in all things a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought.… True art… does not seem to be art; nor must one be more careful of anything than of concealing it.”66 Facilità, appearing uncontrived, was paramount according to Aretino too, as voiced by Dolce in 1557, for “Art is the hiding of art’s presence,” a virtual maxim that echoes Ovid’s praise of Pygmalion’s deceptively real statue.67 The choice of the myth of Pygmalion for a man’s portrait cover, which Bronzino executed ca. 1530–32, was particularly apposite for it cleverly concealed the art of the lifelike Halberdier 62. For an overview of the drawings, see Ames-Lewis, Draftsman Raphael, 42, 50–59; also Meyer zur Capellen, Raphael, 1:88–89, 233–41, and 3:33, 220. 63. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, 225 (743b20); Benedetti, Anatomice, 86, 172 (1.2, 2.23). The analogy between paint, cloth, and flesh was often reiterated in art theory, for instance, in Pino, Dialogo di Pittura, 124 (first published 1548); Vasari, Vite, 1:180; Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino,’ 142, 174, 190. 64. Alberti, On Painting, 81; discussed, in relation to Timanthes’s veiling of the face of a grieving man, by Pardo, “Savoldo’s Magdalene,” 87–89 (which also quotes a similar passage of 1582 by Cardinal Paleotti). 65. Vasari, Vite, 4:8; trans. in Lives, trans. de Vere, 772 (proemio to pt. 3). 66. Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, 32 (1.26) (first published in 1528). 67. Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino,’ 91 (“è arte a nasconder l’arte”); Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.252 (“ars adeo latet arte sua,” so does his art conceal his art).

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FIGURE 1.9. Raphael, Study for the Fainting Virgin of the Baglione Entombment, pen and ink over black chalk underdrawing, London, British Museum 1895,0915.617. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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produced by Pontormo.68 Literally and figuratively, the viewer shifted the cover to penetrate Bronzino’s tiers of art, becoming seduced by the artist as well as by the delusion of both images, captivated like Pygmalion. Art was about concealment, revelation, and the layers in between. Naturalism itself, seemingly the most transparent and unmediated of pictorial strategies, was represented as an astute unveiling. At the turn into the fifteenth century, Cennini was not interested in naive replication of external superfluities. Instead, his manual taught that a painting “calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects,…presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.”69 About a quarter of a century later, the architect credited with devising perspectival illusion was criticized for thinking that “uncertain things can be made visible,” but Brunelleschi insisted that his kind of vision was, like Cennini’s, of a sophisticated, less literal kind. As he put it in a sonnet, “We rise above corruptible matter / And gain the strength of clearest sight.… / For wise men nothing that exists / Remains unseen;… / Only the artist, not the fool / Discovers that which nature hides [natura invola].”70 The artist worked at balance, improving any one model by selecting the best from several in the oft-cited case of the ancient painter Zeuxis, correcting Nature’s deficiencies and uncovering general principles. Discerning judgment was considered the core of art, penetrating beyond surfaces to find underlying secrets. In a sense, naturalism trumped Nature, stripping her to find a fabricated truth. In 1548, the Venetian painter Pino succinctly expressed a common idea already evident in the writings of Cennini and Alberti, amongst others, and thus of no particular Neoplatonic valence. He defined painting as “truly poetry, that is, invention, which makes that which is not seem to be.”71 Art hid its own artificiality through sprezzatura, yet it also brought forth what Nature had hidden, thus being simultaneously secretive and revelatory. Optical hints about secrets lured viewers and intensified their power and prestige. By coming close to or crossing boundaries of knowledge, they increased their erotic pleasure but even more their understanding and judgment of artistic skill or of instructive fields like anatomy. In turn, they helped maintain secrets, engaged in the superimposition of layers and enmeshed in the reciprocal process of visual concealment and display.

Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting and On Sculpture. Edited by Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon, 1972. Ames-Lewis, Francis. The Draftsman Raphael. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Anderson, Jaynie. “A Further Inventory of Gabriel Vendramin’s Collection.” Burlington Magazine 121 (1979): 639–48. ———. Giorgione. Paris: Flammarion, 1997. Aretino, Pietro. Lettere. Edited by Paolo Procaccioli. Vol. 2. Rome: Salerno, 1998. Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942. Augustine. Concerning the City of God against the Pagans. Translated by Henry Bettenson. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984. Bandello, Matteo. La quarta parte de la novella. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1996.

68. Cropper, Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier. 69. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, 1–2. 70. Prager and Scaglia, Brunelleschi, 118, 143–44. 71. Pino, Dialogo di Pittura, 109.

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Barbaro, Francesco. “On Wifely Duties.” In The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, edited by Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt with Elizabeth Welles, 189–228. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1978. Bayer, Andrea, ed. Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. Exhibit catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. Benedetti, Alessandro. Historia corporis humani sive Anatomice. Edited by Giovanna Ferrari. Florence: Giunti, 1998. Berenson, Bernard. Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts. New York: Pantheon, 1948. Blunt, Anthony. The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue. London: Phaidon, 1966. Boorsch, Suzanne. “Mantegna and His Printmakers.” In Andrea Mantegna, edited by Jane Martineau, 56–66. Exhibit catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. ———, and Nadine M. Orenstein. The Print in the North: The Age of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden. Exhibit catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997. Borinski, Karl. “Das Novellenbilde in der Casa Buonarroti.” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 1 (1908): 906–9. Brown, David Alan, and Konrad Oberhuber. “Monna Vanna and Fornarina: Leonardo and Raphael in Rome.” In Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, edited by Sergio Bertelli and Gloria Ramakus, 2:25–86. Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1978. Carlino, Andrea. Paper Bodies: A Catalogue of Anatomical Fugitive Sheets 1538–1687. Translated by Noga Arikha. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1999. Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation. Edited by Daniel Javitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Cennini, Cennino d’Andrea. The Craftsman’s Handbook: ‘Il Libro dell’Arte.’ Translated by Daniel V. Thompson Jr. New York: Dover, 1960. Ciardi, Roberto Paolo. Giovan Ambrogio Figino. Florence: Marchi and Bertolli, 1968. Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1960. Cooper, Donal. “Devotion.” In At Home in Renaissance Italy, edited by Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, 190–202. London: V&A Publications, 2006. Cropper, Elizabeth. Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier. Los Angeles: Getty Museum Studies on Art, 1997. Crowe, J. A., and G. B. Cavalcaselle. A History of Painting in North Italy. London: J. Murray, 1871. Cust, Lionel, and Herbert Frederick Cook. “Notes on Pictures in the Royal Collections IX—‘The Lovers,’ at Buckingham Palace.” Burlington Magazine 9 (1906): 71–79. DeGrazia Bohlin, Diane. Prints and Related Drawings by the Carracci Family: A Catalogue Raisonné. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1979. del Serra, Alfio. “A Conversation on Painting Techniques.” Burlington Magazine 127 (1985): 4–16. Derrida, Jacques. Postcard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. “The Purveyor of Truth.” Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 31–113. Doni, Anton Francesco. I marmi. Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1552. Dülberg, Angelica. Privatporträts: Geschichte und Ikonologie einer Gattung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Geb. Mann Verlag, 1990. Félibien, André. Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes. Trévoux: S.A.S., 1725. Filipczak, Zirka Zaremba. Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550–1700. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Garrard, Mary D. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Herald, Jacqueline. Renaissance Dress in Italy, 1400–1500. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982. Hills, Paul. The Renaissance Image Unveiled: From Madonna to Venus. The Watson Gordon Lecture 2009. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland in association with The University of Edinburgh and Varie, 2010. ———. “Titian’s Veils.” Art History 29 (2006): 771–95.

The Visual Dynamics of (Un)veiling in Early Modern Culture 51 Honig, Elizabeth Alice. Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Jaffé, Michael. The Devonshire Collection of Northern European Drawings. Vol. 1. Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2002. Joannides, Paul. Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Jones, Jonathan. “The great Renaissance art cover-up.” Jonathan Jones On Art blog, The Guardian, posted 27 July 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jul/27/renaissance-art-cover-up (accessed 26 June 2011). Karr Schmidt, Suzanne Kathleen. “Art, a User’s Guide: Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2006. Klaniczay, Gábor. “The ‘Bonfires of the Vanities’ and the Mendicants.” In Emotions and Material Culture, edited by Gerhard Jaritz, 31–59. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003. Kurz, Otto. “HUIUS NYMPHA LOCI: A pseudo-classical inscription and a drawing by Dürer.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 171–77. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art. New York: New York University Press, 1975. Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo on Painting. Edited by Martin Kemp. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Lightbown, Ronald. Sandro Botticelli. 2 vols. London: Paul Elek, 1978. Lotto, Lorenzo. Il ‘Libro di spese diverse.’ Edited by Pietro Zampetti. Venice: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1969. Loughman, John, and John Michael Montias. Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000. Luigini, Federico. Il libro della bella donna. In Trattati del Cinquecento sulla donna, edited by Giuseppe Zonta. Bari: Laterza, 1913. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Opere. Vol. 6, Lettere. Edited by Franco Gaeta. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. McCall, Timothy. “Visual Imagery and Historical Invisibility: Antonia Torelli, Her Husband, and His Mistress in Fifteenth-Century Parma.” Renaissance Studies 23 (2009): 269–87. McNeill, John, and Helena Gamer, ed. Medieval Handbooks of Penance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Meyer zur Capellen, Jurg. Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of His Paintings. 3 vols. Translated by S. B. Polter. Landshut: Arcos, 2001–. Mochi Onori, Lorenza, ed. Raffaello “La Fornarina.” Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 2000. Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie. “Wives, Lovers, and Art in Italian Renaissance Courts.” In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, edited by Andrea Bayer, 29–41. Exhibit catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. Negro, Emilio, and Nicosetta Roio. Lorenzo Costa 1460–1535. Modena: Artiolii Editore, 2001. Nova, Alessandro. “Hangings, Curtains, and Shutters of Sixteenth-Century Lombard Altarpieces.” In Italian Altarpieces 1250–1550: Function and Design, edited by Eve Borsook and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi, 177–99. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Panofsky, Erwin. “Father Time.” In E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 83–91. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962. Pardo, Mary. “The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene.” Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 67–91. ———. “Veiling the Venus of Urbino.”In Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” edited by Rona Goffen, 108–28. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Payer, Pierre. Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code 550–1150. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Penny, Nicholas. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings. Vol. 1, Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona. National Gallery Catalogues. London: National Gallery Company, 2004. Pino, Paolo. Dialogo di Pittura. Edited by Susanna Falabella. Rome: Lithos, 2000. Prager, Frank D., and Gustina Scaglia. Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.

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Procacci, Ugo. La Casa Buonarroti a Firenze. Milan: Electa, 1965. Ragionieri, Pina. Casa Buonarroti. Milan: Electa, 1997. Ridolfi, Carlo. Le maraviglie dell’arte. Edited by Detlev Freiherrn von Hadeln. Rome: Società multigrafica editrice SOMU, 1965. Rosand, David. “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch.” In Titian 500, edited by Joseph Manca, 101–19. Studies in the History of Art 45. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1993. Reprinted in Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” edited by Rona Goffen, 37–62. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. “Venereal Hermeneutics: Reading Titian’s Venus of Urbino.” In Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice Jr., edited by John Monfasani and Ronald Musto, 263–80. New York: Italica Press, 1991. Roskill, Mark W. Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento. 1968. Reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Saslow, James M. The Poetry of Michelangelo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Saxl, Fritz. “Veritas Filia Temporis.” In Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, 197–222. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Sframeli, Maria, ed. The Myth of Venus: Il mito di Venere. Milan: Silvana, 2003. Shearman, John. The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Silver, Larry. The Paintings of Quinten Massys. Montclair: Allanheld and Schram, 1984. Simons, Patricia. “Anatomical Secrets: Pudenda and the Pudica Gesture.” In Das Geheimnis am Beginn der Moderne, edited by Gisela Engel, Brita Rang, Klaus Reichert, and Heide Wunder, 101–17. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002. ———. “Portraiture, Portrayal, and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women.” In Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, edited by Alison Brown, 263–311. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Spallanzani, Marco, and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, ed. Libro d’inventario dei beni di Lorenzo de’ Medici. Florence: Associazione “Amici del Bargello,” 1992. Steinberg, Leo. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Stewart, Alison G. Unequal Lovers: A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art. New York: Abaris Books, 1977. Storey, Tessa. Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Sutton, Peter, et al., Love Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of Vermeer. London: Frances Lincoln, 2003. Syson, Luke, and Dillian Gordon. Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court. London: National Gallery Company, 2001. Trexler, Richard C. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1980. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters and Sculptors and Architects. Translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. ———. Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: Sansoni, 1906. Viglione, August. “Giovanni Dominici and the Reformation of Christian Society.” PhD diss., New York University, 1972. Wethey, Harold E. The Paintings of Titian: Complete Edition. Vol. 3, The Mythological and Historical Paintings. London: Phaidon, 1975. Whistler, Catherine. “Titian’s Triumph of Love.” Burlington Magazine 151 (2009): 536–42. With a technical appendix by Jill Dunkerton. ———. “Uncovering Beauty: Titian’s Triumph of Love in the Vendramin Collection.” Renaissance Studies 26 (2012): 218–42. Whitaker, Lucy, Martin Clayton, and Aislinn Loconte. The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque. London: Royal Collection Publications, 2007.

The Visual Dynamics of (Un)veiling in Early Modern Culture 53 Wolk-Simon, Linda. “‘Rapture to the Greedy Eyes’: Profane Love in the Renaissance.” In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, edited by Andrea Bayer, 43–58. Exhibit catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. Zucker, Mark J. The Illustrated Bartsch 25 (Commentary), formerly volume 13 (part 2): Early Italian Masters. New York: Abaris Books, 1984.

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On the Skins of Goats and Sheep (Un)masking the Secrets of Nature in Early Modern Popular Culture William Eamon

I

n March 1580, a healer by the name of Bartolomeo Riccio appeared before the Venetian Provveditori alla Sanità, or Public Health Board, to apply for a license to sell his secret remedy to cure poisonous snake bites.1 Riccio was from Lecce, a city in the southern Italian region of Puglia, which gave rise to a host of empirical healers who fanned out across Italy in the sixteenth century, plying their trade in cities large and small. A snake handler who collected vipers to sell to pharmacists to make theriac (vipers being the active ingredient in that exotic preparation), he could catch poisonous snakes with his bare hands and could kill them barehanded without causing any danger to himself. He did this, the archival record states, “to the marvel and stupor of everyone” (fig. 2.1). Under ordinary circumstances, obtaining permission to sell drugs in the public squares was a routine procedure. In order to sell their remedies in Venice, empirics like Riccio had to obtain a license from the Public Health Board. Usually this was a fairly simple matter of submitting the recipe for the medicament to the physicians so that they might make a judgment about whether it was safe. The Public Health Board was more concerned about whether the remedies might be harmful than with whether or not they were efficacious.2 Riccio already had a license from the Public Health Board to sell his antidote. But a prior of the Venetian College of Physicians had observed him at work in the Piazza San Marco, and was so impressed by the snake charmer’s skill that he recommended him to the Sanità. With the prior’s recommendation in hand, Riccio went to the Health Board and applied to have his license turned into a ten-year privilege. In order to prove the worth of his antidotes, Riccio appeared before the committee with his box of serpents and proceeded with a “demonstration” of the drug’s effectiveness. Under the watchful eyes of the provveditori, Riccio caused himself to be bitten on the torso by his snakes. Bare-chested, he stood resolutely as the bites swelled up and turned black. The physicians began to worry, but then Riccio calmly reached into his medicine chest and took out a vial of his secret ointment and applied it to the bites. Immediately and seemingly miraculously, the 1. The relevant documents are in ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 734, c. 177v (1580) and Reg. 735, c. 135v (1583). Montinaro, San Paolo dei serpenti, 69–70. 2. On the regulation of medicine in sixteenth-century Venice, see Vanzan Marchini, I mali e I rimedi.

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FIGURE 2.1. Snake Handler Catching Vipers, woodcut from Pietro Andrea Mattioli, I discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli (Venice, 1557). Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD.

swelling subsided. The examiners were so impressed that they ruled that for ten years no one other than Riccio be allowed to mount a bank and sell the remedy. Now let us imagine Riccio as he leaves the office of the Public Health Board, license in hand, and follow him as he walks the short distance from the Salt Office, where the Health Board met, to the Piazza San Marco, where he practiced his trade. The scene on the piazza might have looked something like the one in an image from Giacomo Franco’s famous costume book, Habiti d’huomini et donne Venetiane (Venice, 1609), depicting charlatans performing their theatrical routines to attract crowds in order to vend their nostrums (fig. 2.2).3 In performances ranging from full-length shows to theatrical displays of themselves as wonder-working healers, the charlatans flaunted their supposed therapeutic prowess. In the foreground of Franco’s picture, we see a snake handler, just like Riccio. Riccio must have been quite a sight on the Piazza San Marco. We might imagine him appearing something like the character in an image from Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s book of etchings, Le arte per via (1660), a portfolio of drawings on the humble trades (fig. 2.3). Of course, the picture

3. Katritzky, “Marketing Medicine.”

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FIGURE 2.2. Charlatans in the Piazza San Marco, engraving from Giacomo Franco, Habiti d’huomini e donne (Venice, 1609). London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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FIGURE 2.3. Snake Handler in a Bologna Piazza, engraving from Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Le arte per via (Bologna, 1660). London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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does not really portray Riccio; instead, Mitelli’s drawing illustrates a charlatan performing on a portable stage in a Bologna piazza. Mitelli’s stout, bearded figure wears thick eyeglasses and points to a serpent that he daringly holds aloft. The table beside him displays neatly arranged jars containing his remedies. Although Mitelli’s figure is not Riccio, imagining it to be so would not be too far off the mark; for Mitelli’s charlatan is a sanpaolaro, one of the so-called Men of Saint Paul, snake handlers who sold an antidote for poisonous bites under the trade name St. Paul’s Grace (Gratia di S. Paolo). One of his snakes menacingly slithers out of a basket onto the stage floor as a fascinated audience looks on. Like many others who plied his trade—the profession of the ciarlatano, or charlatan— Bartolomeo Riccio had to play on two radically different stages: the open, public space of the piazza and the closed, official space of established medicine. In order to sell his remedies, he had to perform in the public square; but to get a license to sell his wares, he had to prove himself in the private space of the doctors. This microcosmic snapshot of the relationship of popular culture versus official culture will be my point of departure for exploring two contrasting spaces for veiling and unveiling secrets: one public, the other private; one popular, the other official. To begin that exploration, let us go back a few centuries and look briefly at the medieval ethic governing transmission of knowledge. That excursion will help us understand the answers given to the leading question regarding the dissemination of natural knowledge: who gets to know? The thirteenth-century Franciscan friar and philosopher Roger Bacon articulated the standard medieval view toward the dissemination of natural knowledge. In the Opus Majus, Bacon wrote, The wise have always been divided from the multitude, and have veiled the secrets of wisdom not only from the world at large but also from ordinary philosophers. Aristotle says in his book of secrets that he would break the celestial seal if he made public the secrets of nature. For this reason the wise, although giving in their writings the roots of the mysteries of science, have not given the branches, flowers, and fruits to the rank and file of philosophers. For they have either omitted these topics from their writings or have veiled them in figurative language. Hence, according to Aristotle, the secrets of the sciences are not written on the skins of goats and sheep so that they may be discovered by the multitude.4

The text that Bacon refers to in this passage—he calls it “Aristotle’s Book of Secrets”—was, in fact, a tenth-century Arabic work attributed to Aristotle and translated into Latin in the twelfth century under the title Secretum secretorum, or “Secret of Secrets.” This pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, one of countless medieval texts attributed to Aristotle that entered the West with the wave of translations, was said to comprise the letters that Aristotle sent to Alexander the Great while the young king was on his Persian campaign.5In contrast to Aristotle’s public doctrine contained in the works on logic and natural science, the Secretum supposedly revealed the philosopher’s esoteric teachings, which he reserved for a few intimate disciples.6 The Secretum secretorum was a kind of manifesto of the medieval doctrine of esotericism. Central to the doctrine was the idea that nature is inherently

4. Bacon, Opus Majus, 1:11–12. 5. Bacon, Secretum secretorum, 176–77. In addition, see Manzaloui, “Pseudo-Aristotelian Kitāb Sirr al-Asrār.” 6. On the scholarly reception of the Secretum, see Williams, Secret of Secrets.

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arcane; the veil of nature’s outer appearances conceals hidden qualities and virtues—the “secrets of nature”—that lie within.7 The doctrine of esotericism implied in the idea of arcana naturae gave rise to a peculiarly medieval view about intellectual curiosity, specifically with respect to curiosity about the secrets of nature. In the Middle Ages the word curiosity (curiositas) had a far more pejorative meaning than it has today.8 To be curious about something was neither innocent nor virtuous. Instead, it implied being a meddlesome intellectual busybody who pries into things that are none of his business. Nor, according to patristic opinion, could scientific curiosity be considered fully legitimate, because God intended nature to be a mystery and had so fashioned the world as to make its secrets occult and unintelligible. The popular image of the goddess Natura, usually depicted covering herself with a veil in order to hide her secrets from mortals, reinforced this theological view.9 The twin themes of arcana naturae and forbidden knowledge carried a warning that was continually repeated in the medieval and early modern periods: the secrets of nature were hidden from the vulgus with good reason; be not curious about them.10 The admonition not to cast the pearls of knowledge before swine was a key component of the moral economy of medieval science.11 The widespread currency of the “secrets of nature” metaphor testifies to a firm partition between learned and popular cultures. In the Middle Ages, literacy was the principal criterion that determined on which side of the boundary one fell. Since “literacy” almost invariably meant knowing how to read and write Latin, knowledge of the Latin language became the norm that separated the learned elite from the rest of society. The identification of literacy with rationality, and of illiteracy with credulity and superstition, solidified the barrier between insiders (academics) and outsiders (others).12 As long as literate culture was the exclusive property of academics, that boundary was relatively secure and the “secrets of nature” remained hidden within the cloak of Latin Scholasticism. Two events occurred in the early modern period to create conditions that threatened to remove the veil surrounding nature’s secrets: the first was the advent of printing, which made the written word more widely available to a broad spectrum of society, and the second was the commercialization of culture, which turned “secrets” into commodities. With the emergence of popular culture in the sixteenth century, the secrets of nature could not only be read about in books, but could also be purchased or viewed in the marketplaces and piazzas. Whether in popular “books of secrets” or on the mountebank’s stage, revealing and vending nature’s secrets subverted the academic monopoly over medicine and natural knowledge. As we will see, in the domain of popular culture, attempts to break down the barrier of esotericism in scientific discourse were at the same time either burlesques or travesties of high culture, depending only upon how seriously the audience was expected to take them. The “professors of secrets” who flooded the marketplace with their

7. Eamon, Science Secrets, chap. 2. On esotericism, see Bagley, “On the Practice of Esotericism.” 8. On curiosity in the Middle Ages, see Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 269–360. 9. Economou, Goddess Natura. 10. Ginzburg, “High and Low.” 11. Eamon, “Secrets of Nature.” 12. Grundmann, “Litteratus—illiteratus”; Stock, Implications of Literacy, 27.

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books of secrets denounced in high moral terms the pretensions of academics, and in turn saw themselves caricatured by mountebanks in the piazza. The year 1555 may be said to mark, symbolically, a watershed year in the history of the treatment of the secrets of nature. It was in that year that the last Renaissance edition of the Latin Secretum secretorum was published in Naples.13 By the time the edition appeared, practically all scholars knew that the work was spurious. Sixteenth-century editors of the Aristotelian corpus rarely bothered to mention the work. Quite coincidentally, that same year the Venetian bookstalls displayed a book of secrets whose content and intended audience were entirely different from that of the Secretum secretorum. The book, The Secrets of Alessio Piemontese, contained the expression of the new attitude toward the “secrets of nature.” Confidently advertising itself as “a most useful and universally necessary work,” the Secrets opened up to readers a new world of exotic secrets and practical recipes. Alessio’s secrets included remedies unknown to the doctors, recipes for cosmetics used by the Turks, exotic perfumes and oils, dyeing techniques, tricks of the metalworking trades, alchemical secrets supposedly tried out by Alessio himself, and many more.14 Alessio’s Secreti was an instant best seller. The first edition sold out within a year and was reprinted by three different publishers. More than seventy editions of the book were published in Italian, French, German, Dutch, English, Spanish, Polish, and Latin. The work unleashed a torrent of books of secrets. So sensational were these works in their day that the social critic Tommaso Garzoni, writing in 1585, identified their authors as making up an entirely new profession. Garzoni called the writers on secrets the “professors of secrets.” He described them as intrepid seekers of hidden knowledge and rare experiments who devoted themselves so zealously to their calling that they often forsook the necessities of life.15 The Secreti was largely responsible for creating the familiar topos of the wandering empiric, the tireless explorer who, forsaking fame and fortune, travels the world over in search of the secrets of nature. Alessio, the prototypical professor of secrets, collected secrets from scholars, clerics, empirics, artisans, and even peasants. There can be little doubt that Garzoni’s inspiration was the Secreti’s famous preface, in which Alessio portrayed himself as a wealthy intellectual who had turned away from the books of the authorities in order to devote his life and fortune to searching for secrets of nature, trusting only experience to reveal the truth. But Alessio also suffered from the disease that afflicted all seekers of the rare and exotic: vanity. So possessive was he of his secrets that he refused to reveal them out of fear that they might be vulgarized and hence lose their rarity. He was persuaded to renounce secrecy when, in Milan, a surgeon approached him asking for a remedy to cure an artisan who was tormented with a painful bladder stone. The old professor of secrets—Alessio was eighty-two at the time—refused, perceiving that the surgeon would use the secret for his own profit and glory. The poor artisan paid the price of Alessio’s vanity, for by the time he arrived at the patient’s bedside, “I found [him] so nigh his end, that after lifting up his eyes, casting them pitifully toward me, he passed from this into a better life, not having

13. Schmitt, “Francesco Storella.” 14. On this work, see Eamon, Science and Secrets, chap. 4. 15. Garzoni, La piazza universale, 324. On this work, see Martin, “Imaginary Piazza.”

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any need of my secret nor any other to recover his health.”16 Gripped by remorse over the incident, Alessio relinquished all of his wealth and retired to a secluded villa, there to live the life of a solitary monk. Renouncing secrecy, he resolved to publish his secrets to the world. The morality play acted out in Alessio’s dramatic conversion to the ethic of openness rings, frankly, of fiction. And, as it turns out, it was; for “Alessio Piemontese” was no wandering empiric at all, but was the invention of the Venetian popular writer Girolamo Ruscelli, who published the Secreti under the pseudonym of Alessio.17 But now the story becomes even more interesting, because according to Ruscelli, Alessio’s secrets were in fact the experimental results of a secret academy that he and several others had founded in Naples. The academy, which Ruscelli called the Accademia Segreta, devoted itself to making “a true anatomy of things, and of the operations of Nature.” They set up a laboratory and furnished it with alchemical equipment, which they used to try out the recipes they collected. They had an herb garden that supplied the materials for their experiments and gathered in a meeting room to discuss them. All this was done in secret, Ruscelli claims, despite the fact that the meeting house (called La Filosofia) was built in the central plaza of a “prominent city” in the Kingdom of Naples.18 A “secret” was supposedly a unique recipe or technique. Often would it bear the name or trademark of its inventor to distinguish it from other, “common” recipes. The famous Bolognese professor of secrets Leonardo Fioravanti (fig. 2.4) gave his remedies catchy trade names like Angelic Oil (Olio angelico) and Fragrant Goddess (Dia aromatica).19 Ironically, however, by flooding the marketplace with secrets, the professors of secrets made their recipes anything but unique, anything but secret. Even Garzoni, who identified the professors of secrets as a “profession,” never imagined such an outpouring of rare, exotic, and pretentious secrets that he had seen paraded in the piazzas: When has there ever been such an abundance of those looking for new secrets? Why, in Bergamo there’s even one who brags about having a secret to convert the Turk, and would have sold it to a physician friend of mine for a forty-piece if he so pleased—something to have made Fioravanti of Bologna, had he known of it, despair of himself for not having included it among his medical caprices under the title of Fioravanti’s Angelical and Divine Elixir.20

Alessio Piemontese’s worst fears had come true: secrets, once rare and precious, had become “public and common,” hence no longer secrets. But if all secrets were equivalent, what was to prevent anyone from making up his own or peddling those he lifted from a printed book? In fact, that is precisely what did happen. Not only did early modern European readers witness an explosion of books of secrets in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but the piazzas themselves became spaces—or rather, stages—for the trade in secrets. Theatrical elements were essential in the marketplace defined by the piazza. In order to attract the throngs of people that became the buyers of their nostrums, mountebanks performed a sort of slapstick comedy,

16. Piemontese, Secretes, preface (spelling modernized). 17. Eamon, Science and Secrets, 143. 18. Ruscelli, Secreti nuovi, fol. 1r. See Eamon and Paheau, “Accademia Segreta.” 19. On Fioravanti, see Eamon, Professor of Secrets. 20. Garzoni, L’Hospidale, 246.

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FIGURE 2.4. Nicolo Nelli, Portrait of Leonardo Fioravanti, woodcut from Leonardo Fioravanti, Tesoro della vita humana (Venice, 1582). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin Libraries.

using the characters and tricks of what would later be called (in politer circles) commedia dell’arte.21 Indeed, contemporary descriptions of the charlatans are practically indistinguishable from those of the more sophisticated commedia troupes, suggesting that the commedia dell’arte was born in the piazza, not in the court, as often argued.22 Giovan Domenico Ottonelli gave this account of one of these troupes in the mid-seventeenth century: From time to time a company of these gallant men comes into a city with their women (without whom they are given little applause), and spread the word that they will serve the public by selling excellent secrets and presenting a free comedy. They choose a place in the public square, where they put up a scaffold.… Every day at an appropriate hour a Zanni or similar character begins strumming an instrument or singing to attract an audience. In a moment another actor appears, then another, and often a woman joins the show. They all perform tricks and mix it up with one another and with the audience. Then comes the head charlatan [Archiciarlatano], the seller of secrets, and with a fine manner introduces the great and incomparable glory of his marvelous remedies.… Finally the head charlatan cries, “Bring on the comedy! Let the comedy begin!” The boxes and trunks are packed, the bench changed into a scene, every charlatan becomes a comedian, and there begins a comic performance that will last around two hours, filling the people with laughter and delight.23

21. The most authoritative study of Italian charlatans is Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism. On charlatans and commedia dell’arte, see Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, esp. 17–128; Katritsky, “Was commedia dell’arte performed by mountebanks?”; Henke, “Italian Mountebank.” 22. Henke, Performance and Literature. 23. Ottonelli, Della Cristiana, 489–90.

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Thomas Coryat, an Englishman who visited Venice in 1608, left a similar account. Each day, he reported, the mountebanks set up their portable stages in the Piazza San Marco: Twice a day, that is, in the morning and in the afternoon, you may see five or six stages erected for them.… These mountebanks at one end of their stage place their trunk, which is replenished with a world of new-fangled trumperies. After the whole rabble of them is gotten up to the stage, whereof some wear visards, being disguised like fools in a play, some that are women (for there are diverse women also amongst them) are attired with habits according to the person that they sustain. After they are all upon the stage, the music begins, sometimes vocal, sometimes instrumental, and sometimes both together. This music is a preamble and introduction to the ensuing matter. In the meantime, while the music plays, the principal mountebank, which is the Captain and ringleader of all the rest, opens his trunk and sets abroach his wares. After the music has ceased, he makes an oration to the audience of half an hour long, or almost an hour. Wherein he doth most hyperbolically extol the virtue of his drugs and confections.… After the chief mountebank’s first speech is ended, he delivers out his commodities by little and little, the jester still playing his part, and the musicians singing and playing upon their instruments. The principal things that they sell are oils, sovereign waters, amorous songs printed, apothecary drugs, and a commonweale of other trifles. The head mountebank at every time that he delivers out any thing, makes an extemporal speech, which he presently intermingles with such savory jests (but spiced now and then with singular scurrility) that they minister passing mirth and laughter to the whole company, which perhaps may consist of a thousand people that flock together about their stages.24

Fynes Moryson, another sixteenth-century English traveler, was equally fascinated by the charlatans that he observed in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, although he wasn’t too impressed by their wares. “Many of them have some very good secrets,” he reported, “but generally they are all cheaters.”25 Cheats or not, the ciarlatani attracted large crowds. No visit to Venice would have been considered complete without a walk through the Piazza San Marco to watch their performances. We can get a closer look at the charlatans’ secrets by examining the medical chapbooks they sold, along with their nostrums, in the public squares.26 They are little tracts, most just a single signature folded into a quarto, or eight pages, printed on cheap paper and containing about twenty or thirty recipes. Sold in the piazzas for a few pennies, they represent the books of secrets tradition at its commonest level. Though popular in their day, they are now extremely rare. In my research, I was able to identify more than eighty of these pamphlets, although doubtless many others were lost or worn out by use.27 The authors of these tracts—let’s call them the professorini di secreti, or “little professors of secrets”—identified themselves by their stage names, all stock commedia dell’arte characters. Tommaso Maiorini, for example, played the character Pulcinella on the mountebank’s stage and sold a pamphlet titled Frutti soavi colti nel giardino (Delicate Fruits Cultivated in the Garden). A certain Francesco, who took the part of Biscottino, published a tract called Giardino di varii secreti (Garden of Various Secrets). Pietro Maria Mutii, “il Zanni bolognese,” sold a tract called Nuovo

24. Coryat, Crudities, 1:410–11 (spelling and punctuation modernized). 25. Moryson, Itinerary, 424–25 (spelling and punctuation modernized). 26. For a discussion of these pamphlets, see Eamon, Science and Secrets, chap. 7. 27. A census of the pamphlets is contained in Eamon, Science and Secrets, appendix.

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lucidario di secreti (New Illumination of Secrets). Another charlatan, who styled himself “il Marchesino d’Este” (Little Marquis of Este), wrote Il Medico de’ poveri, o sia il gran stupere de’ medici (The Poor Man’s Physician, or The Amazement of the Physicians).28 The title pages of these pamphlets fairly ring with the cries of the mountebanks extolling the virtues of their remedies. Some boasted exotic secrets from distant lands. Benedetto “il Persiano” (Persian) claimed that he translated his “marvelous occult secrets of nature” from the Persian language (fig. 2.5), while another charlatan, nicknamed “Americano,” wrote about “A True and Natural Fountain, from which flows forth a living water fountain of miracles and health-giving secrets.”29 Despite the pretension of the author’s name, this little chapbook was hardly exotic, being a reprinting of a pamphlet by the Brescia charlatan Andrea Fontana, Fontana dove n’esce fuori acque di secreti (Fountain Spouting Water Full of Secrets).30 Fontana, who also practiced as a surgeon and distiller, made cosmetics and facial waters for “honored ladies” and offered to teach the art of distillation to anyone interested. Another charlatan, Guglielmo Germerio advertised a cabinet of curiosities that included “ten very stupendous monsters, marvelous to see, among which there are seven newborn animals, six alive and one dead, and three embalmed female infants.”31 The professors of secrets themselves became stock characters in the comic performances on the piazza, as a chapbook by the Venetian charlatan Lorenzo Leandro, titled Tesorodi varii secreti, suggests. “Fioravanti Cortese,” the pseudonym used by the author of the Giardino et fioretto di secreti (Garden and Bouquet of Secrets), was a play on the names of Leonardo Fioravanti and Isabella Cortese, two famous professors of secrets. Similarly, Il gran Piemontese, the author of another medical tract, may have been a takeoff on Alessio Piemontese. Biagio, Il Figadet, wrote a booklet of secrets “collected from various clever men,” while Giovanni Cosson, a French mountebank who called himself “Il Bontempo Francese” (The Good-Time Frenchman) wrote a booklet of practical jokes that “have greatly delighted the French, Spanish, and Italian princes and gentlemen who experimented upon them.” All of these pretensions were comic parodies of the book of secrets, from which the professorini di secreti appropriated their recipes and cures. Obviously, the charlatans’ impersonations of the professors of secrets were calculated both to entertain and to win audiences in order to sell “secrets.” In these little chapbooks, we see the charlatans at their most jocular and disrespectful, mocking physicians, professors of secrets, and societal norms. The play on secrets—including the mountebank’s sham reluctance turned into willingness to reveal secrets to the public, as well as the obvious fact that once published in a chapbook intended for the crowd they are anything but secret—was part of the joke. In burlesquing the professor of secrets onstage, the mountebank pretended to have rare secret remedies that, just like those of the real professors of secrets, he discovered by long experience in the ways of nature. But he would give them up for the public good. Thus Domenico Fedele “il Mantoianino” (Little Mantuan), in his little chapbook of secrets, copied out verbatim the dedication from Timotheo Rossello’s more serious Summa de’ secreti universali (1561), extolling humanity’s natural desire to search for secrets, and used it as a preface for his booklet, Con il Poco farete assai (With a Little You’ll Do a Lot). But he left off at the point 28. Complete bibliographical information may be found in Eamon, Science and Secrets, appendix, 361–65. 29. Benedetto, I Maravigliosi, et occulti secreti; Americano, Il Vero, e natural fonte. 30. Fontana, Fontana. 31. Tolosano, Gioia preciosa.

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FIGURE 2.5. Title page from Benedetto (called il Persiano), I maravigliosi, et occulti secreti naturali (Rome, 1613). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin Libraries.

where Rossello began addressing his exalted patron, the archdeacon of Ragusa, and concluded with the words, “I am compelled to present to you—O people!—this little garden of lovely flowers, in their variety pretty to look at, but in substance beneficial to the human body.”32 Mountebanks on every corner of the piazza making similar claims to be revealing rare and precious secrets obviously heightened the ludicrousness of the situation. If the professors of secrets were mimicked in the piazza, the official doctors were positively lampooned. Dottor Gratiano Pagliarizzo da Bologna, the author of a chapbook on Secreti nuovi et rari (New and Rare Secrets)—almost exactly the same title as a treatise on secrets by Girolamo Ruscelli—was undoubtedly modeled on the commedia mask of Graziano, the quack doctor and astrologer (fig. 2.6). One can imagine him in his tight knee breeches, ruffled doublet, and cloak, holding forth with his learned platitudes and his ridiculous malapropisms. “He who is sick cannot be said to be well,” he would expound in a mock-serious tone, parodying the physicians, and he would prove it on the analogy that he who walks cannot be said to stand still.33 32. Fedele, Con il Poco farete assai, 1. 33. Pagliarizzo, Secreti nuovi. Cf. Scatalone, Il vero et pretioso thesoro. On Graziano, see Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 25–41.

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The thought of a charlatan parodying a quack doctor in a comedy, then peddling his own quack nostrums to the audience, may at first glance seem ludicrously ironic. Doubtless, the irony was intended. But the stark contrast between the physician’s complex regimens and the charlatan’s instant, surefire remedies struck a responsive chord in the audience gathered around the mountebank. The charlatan was more deeply connected to the social realities of the people than the official Galenic physician, whose humoral theories were far removed from the rules and beliefs by which most of his patients lived.34 Whether or not his remedies worked, because they often relied on purges and chemical skin treatments, at least they had the merit of producing visible results. Purges that purge can be said to be efficacious; whether or not they cure is another matter. Then as now, the people wanted results, not an intellectual understanding of the causes of their ailments. Regimens that produced no physiological changes were easy targets for unorthodox healers. In these little chapbooks, we see the charlatans at their most jocular and disrespectful, mocking physicians, professors of secrets, and societal norms. In the culture of the piazza, the popular healer doubled as an entertainer and a salesman. The mountebank’s portable stage was his storefront, his medical theater a form of advertising that was well suited to a society that was becoming more and more commercialized. The assault on the learned professions’ monopoly over the “secrets of nature” reveals much about the dynamics of cultural change in early modern Europe. First of all, it shows that popular culture was not a mere imitation of elite culture. Rather, it often involved aggressive appropriation and creative adaptation of elements of both literate and folk cultures.35 It also underscores the importance of the comic in early modern popular culture and illustrates Bakhtin’s claim about the insurrectionary import of laughter. To paraphrase Bakhtin, early modern laughter was directed at precisely the same objects as early modern seriousness.36 However, the connection between healing and dramatic performances was also a traditional one. That is how shamans operate.37 The power and charisma of the charlatan is vividly captured in a painting by the Sienese artist Bernardino Mei (fig. 2.7).38 The painting, titled The Charlatan, depicts an aged, bearded charlatan seated on a wooden platform and surrounded by an astonished and wondering crowd of onlookers. The scene takes place in the Piazza del Campo in Siena, with the Torre del Mangia clearly visible in the background. The view of the charlatan from below accentuates his imposing figure, while the dark, foreboding sky above him heightens the drama of the scene. On the floor of the stage is an assortment of glass bottles and vials containing his remedies. Next to the healer’s cane is a handbill bearing the title, “L’Olio de’ filosofi di Straccione” (Straccione’s Philosophers’ Oil), identifying both the charlatan and his remedy. Most dramatically, on the back of his tightly fisted hand, thrust out to the crowd, Straccione (Ragamuffin) balances a vial of his miraculous elixir. His penetrating gaze and authoritative gestures arouse expressions of wonder and fear in the crowd

34. Lingo, “Empirics and Charlatans.” 35. Burke, Popular Culture; Ginzburg, Cheese and Worms. 36. Bakhtin, Rabelais. 37. Burke, “Rituals of Healing,” 207–20. 38. The picture, painted in 1656, is now in the Banca Monte dei Paschi in Siena. For further discussion, see Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism, 28–29.

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FIGURE 2.6. Title page from Dottor Gratiano Pagliarizzo, Secreti nuovi e rari (Bologna, Milan, n.d.). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin Libraries.

below, which listens in rapt attention as the charlatan proclaims that its very health and well-being is contained in the powerful contents of that little vial. Now let us return to Bartolomeo Riccio in the Piazza San Marco. Unfortunately, we have no contemporary description of him at work. However, we do have the testimony of the sixteenthcentury English traveler Thomas Coryat, who reported seeing a charlatan just like him: I saw one of them hold a viper in his hand and play with his sting for a quarter of an hour altogether, and yet receive no hurt—although another man should have been presently stung to death with it. He made us all believe that the same viper was lineally descended from the generation of that viper that leapt out of the fire upon Saint Paul’s hand, in the Island of Malta, and did him no harm; and told us moreover that it would sting some, and not others.39

Tommaso Garzoni observed similar performances, including one by Master Paolo da Arezzo, who “appears on the piazza with a long standard unfurled, on which you can see St. Paul with a sword in one hand and in the other a swarm of hissing snakes.” Master Paolo was one of the wandering 39. Coryat, Crudities, 1:411–12 (spelling and punctuation modernized).

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FIGURE 2.7. Bernardino Mei, Il Ciarlatano, 1656, oil on canvas. Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

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“Men of Saint Paul” (Uomini di San Paolo), or sanpaolari, healers who claimed descent from St. Paul, in reference to Paul’s experience in Malta. As the apostle warmed himself before a fire, according to the Acts of the Apostle, “there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his hand…and he shook off the beast into the fire and felt no harm” (Acts 28.3–5).40 This passage gave rise to the folk belief that Maltese earth was an antidote against snake venom. The sanpaolari sold it under the trade name “St. Paul’s grace” (Gratia di S. Paolo). Yet it was certainly not the folk tradition alone that convinced people of the efficacy of Maltese earth. The theatrical part of Paolo da Arezzo’s profession was equally if not more important. “He struck such fear in the crowd,” Garzoni related, “that the people trembled, and did not want to leave the city gates without taking some of the powder with them.”41 The boundary between public performances, advertising stunts, and traditional healing rituals is not easy to draw in the context of early modern culture. Certainly snake-handling was a good stunt; but it was also a tradition associated with local healing traditions.42 When the sanpalari brought their methods to the urban marketplaces, the quasi-religious elements of folk medicine gradually became commercialized and transformed into advertising gimmicks. In the charlatan, the folk healer emerged as a sort of “commercialized shaman.”43 As control over unauthorized medical practice tightened in the late sixteenth century, the balance between pretense and reality in the professional life of the charlatan became ever more precarious.44 For the mountebank’s relation to the physician had two conflicting sides. On the one hand, he played upon the image of the physician as a pretentious fool in order to maximize the economic value of ridicule. On the other hand, the physician’s authority could, and often necessarily had to, authorize his nostrums. Thus the empiric and distiller Zuanne Veronese, in registering his “artificial philosophical oil” with the Venetian Health Board, attested that the recipe was the same as that prescribed by Mesue and was “made according to the description of Dioscorides.”45 Moreover, in order to obtain the assent of the medical colleges, which authorized their practice, empirics had to enter into a doubly risky form of deception: the game of fooling the physicians. In the sixteenth century, virtually all Italian cities required empirics to obtain licenses from the local health boards before being able to dispense their medical secrets in the piazza.46 In Venice, the licensing procedures required that itinerant healers display their recipes and in some cases demonstrate the efficacy of their remedies. As the case of Bartolomeo Riccio suggests, the sanpaolaro did this by appearing before the Health Board and essentially doing the same stunts they performed before the crowds gathered in the piazza—although, doubtless, in a more sober and serious manner. In fact, such appearances 40. Buhagiar, “St. Paul’s Shipwreck.” 41. Garzoni, Piazza universale, 747. Mario Galasso, one of the professorini di secreti, appears to have been a sanpaolaro. His chapbook, Thesoro de poveri, begins with a section on “The true method you should follow if you want to use St. Paul’s grace…for the benefit of the human body.” 42. See Turchini, Morso. 43. Burke, “Rituals of Healing,” 220. In addition, see Park, “Country Medicine.” 44. On the control of medical practice, see Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism, 118–51. 45. ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 731 (1563–1573) c. 15v.: “Questo et e quell’oglio philosophico artificiale et latoribus, Il qual descrive Zuanne Mesue et molti lo chiama oglio benedetto, divino et santo, bono alle sottoscritte virtu distilado per me Zuanne Veronese distilattor.…[et] sicondo descrive dioscorides…a cap.li 251.” 46. Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism, chap. 4.

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occur with some regularity in the archive of the Venetian Provveditori alla Sanità. In 1563, Maffeo Bertolani, a Brescia empiric, when applying for a license to sell his antidote for poisonous animal bites, made a demonstration before the Health Board to the one that Riccio did when applying for his privilege. He and a member of his traveling “company” brought their boxes of poisonous animals to the Health Board offices and had themselves bitten in order to demonstrate the efficacy of Maffeo’s poison antidote.47 The descriptions of these rather extraordinary-sounding events, like most archival records, are bare, factual, and perfunctory. Yet when given the chance, such as in their petitions, the charlatans who did these astonishing “experiments” before the amazed provveditori did not hold back, and their applications enable us to imagine a more lively scenario. In his supplica to the Health Board for a ten-year license to sell his remedy, Riccio reminded the provveditori of the “many exhibitions” (“molte experientie”) that he had made on the piazza, including demonstrating how “with my own hands, without using a knife, I capture vipers and kill them without any harm to me, to the marvel and stupor of all.”48 He furthermore reminded the examiners, “I also did a very excellent experiment before the esteemed provveditori, causing myself to be bitten in their presence by a poisonous viper, whence they saw me swell up, and with my remedy I immediately cured myself.”49 In these incidents of performative experimental science, our attention is drawn to the locked boxes filled with remedies and, in some cases, vipers that charlatans took with them to the open spaces of the piazza and the closed spaces of official medicine. The charlatan’s locked chest was one of the symbols of his craft, and the presence of a trunk or similar container of remedies was one of the most characteristic aspects of mountebank iconography (see figs. 2.2 and 2.3). In his diary, the Swiss physician Thomas Platter noted that a troupe that he observed in 1598 used a “large locked chest” to transport their tins of ointment and envelopes of medicinal powders.50 In opening their trunks and revealing secrets that astonished the physicians, the charlatans imitated the performance of unlocking their chests and revealing secrets to the people on the piazza. Experimental “demonstrations” of the sort that Riccio made before the Venetian Health Board elicited a variety of reactions from literate culture. On the one hand, the rise of the ciarlatani coincided with and perhaps reinforced the idea that the common people possessed “secrets” making up a body of knowledge unknown to the savants. Leonardo Fioravanti, for example, insisted that the common people’s empirical knowledge about the “rules of life” was superior to the medical learning of the schools.51 The Neapolitan magus Giambattista Della Porta thought that popular “superstitions” concealed profound truths about nature, while the Danish Paracelsian Peter Severinus urged natural philosophers to study the “astronomy and terrestrial philosophy of the peasantry.”52 47. ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 731, c. 1v, 8v. 48. ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 735, c. 135v: “ch’io con le proprie mani senza pigliarle con ferro alcuno, hò pigliate le vipere, e fatte morire senza alcun detrimento mio, con maraviglia, et stupore di tutti.” 49. ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 735, c. 135v: “[F]eci anco un esperienza ecce[le]ntissima inanzi li predetti Cl[arissi]mi S[igno]ri Proveditori faccendomi in presentia loro morsicar da una vippera velenosa, dove esse viddero gonfiarmi, et con il mio rimedio subito risanarmi il tutto.” 50. Katritzky, “Marketing Medicine,” 127. 51. Similarly, Giovanni Battista Zapata reported that the poor people had simple remedies they learned from experience, for which they spent only a few pennies, yet received the same medicinal benefits as rich men who spent hundreds of ducats for their exotic cures. Zapata, Li Maravigliosi secreti, 1–2. 52. Idea medicinae philosophicae, quoted in Debus, English Paracelsians, 20.

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The physicians, on the other hand, understandably refused to remain silent in the face of the ridicule aimed at them by empirical healers. Alongside works extolling the people’s wisdom emerged an equally large body of literature on “popular errors.” Physicians rallied to the defense of medicine and lashed out against popular superstitions, folklore, and what they termed the “errors of the people.”53 Interestingly, the academic physicians did not contest the efficacy of St. Paul’s earth as a poison antidote. Instead, they attacked the sanpaolari for their dissimulation, for counterfeiting Maltese earth and for deceiving the people with various tricks to protect themselves against venomous bites.54 Above all, they attacked the empirics for intruding into the territory of the physician. The secrets of medicine, they insisted, would remain locked behind the closed door of the learned professions. The main problem, concluded Laurent Joubert, the chancellor of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier, was that “everybody makes medicine his business.” There were just too many “meddlers” out there trying to cut in on a portion of the profession with their quack remedies and panaceas. He reserved special contempt for midwives, who made extravagant but foolish claims for secrets they alone supposedly knew. “What disgusts me,” wrote Joubert indignantly, “is how these women share among themselves a few small remedies, which, after all, are not even of their own invention but were taken at some time or other from physicians and later passed around among themselves. For women have never invented a single remedy; they all come from our domain or from that of our predecessors.”55 Similar attacks followed. In 1603, the Roman physician Scipione Mercurio lashed out against “errors committed in the piazza” by empirics and charlatans, who endangered the public with their ridiculous and often poisonous drugs.56 He was amazed that people could be so foolish as to credit such remedies as those “made of useless junk and sold in the piazza to the imprudent public, authorized by the presence of a vagabond dressed in velvet and wearing a gold tricorne, approved by a clown, registered by the doctrine of Dr. Graziano, proved by an unbridled whore, sealed by Burattino’s jokes, confirmed by a thousand false testimonies, and accompanied by as many lies.” Besides being vagabonds, he continued, the charlatans have absolutely no understanding of the causes of diseases. They imagine that practically all ailments are caused by worms, which they claim their potions will quickly eradicate. In reality, Mercurio observed, diseases have complex causes relating to humoral imbalances. “Since a medication cannot take into account all these things unless it is composed by a very learned physician,” he pronounced, “the charlatans, who are very ignorant, cannot compose them safely.”57 Guarding the secrets of the doctors was essential to preserving the superiority of official medicine. The declaration of total war against popular superstitions makes it clear that the ridicule of official medicine was more than just harmless tomfoolery in the piazza. Mercurio noted that the 53. Eamon, “Physicians and Reform.” 54. To prevent the counterfeiting of Maltese earth, some physicians recommended that the Order of Malta certify the authenticity of the earth with a seal. 55. Joubert, Popular Errors, 69 (italics mine). 56. Mercurio, Errori populari. Like Joubert, Mercurio was especially alarmed about errors committed by women healers and midwives, “because most errors are committed by women, who intrude too much in medical matters,” 1. In addition, see Gentilcore, “Was there a ‘Popular Medicine’?” 57. Mercurio, Errori populari, 265–68.

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common people even played tricks on the physicians, for example by bringing the urine of an ass or a horse for diagnosis, pretending it came from a patient.58 Clearly, there was an economic issue at stake in the moral crusade against popular culture. The nostrums vended in the marketplace competed with conventional remedies and cut into the physicians’ monopoly over the medical marketplace. Mercurio regarded “secrets” as charlatanism’s greatest fraud, because they deceived the public and endangered patients.59 But it was not just the credulous common people who fell for their frauds. The English physician James Primrose knew a gentleman who paid twenty pounds for a secret he could have bought from an apothecary for a fraction of that amount.60 Primrose observed that the empirics often represented common remedies as “great secrets, which they will reveal to no one.” In reality, Primrose pronounced, “they have nothing that is worthy the name of a secret.”61 Primrose did not deny the value of secrets; instead, he appropriated them, claiming they were invented by physicians in the first place. With Primrose, we seem to have come full circle. Initially, official culture had a monopoly over the “secrets of nature.” Secrets were valuable because of their rarity. But when empirics appropriated them, published them in books of secrets, and sold them in the piazza, academics turned around and declared that science abolished the need for secrets. “Those remedies are the best which are no secrets,” Primrose contended, “but best known, as being confirmed with more certain experience.”62 Yet even after being incorporated into the “new philosophy,” secrets did not lose their ambiguous status. If anything, they became more problematic than ever. On the one hand, demonstrations of rarities and wonders were important resources in expanding the public culture for science.63 But the danger that experiments might simply bedazzle onlookers instead of enlightening them persisted into the eighteenth century. The English virtuoso John Evelyn’s account of an experiment with phosphorus performed before the Royal Society in 1641 illustrates this danger. The experiment reminded Evelyn of having witnessed a mountebank in the Piazza Navona in Rome performing tricks with a phosphorescent ring, “and having by this surprising trick, gotten Company about him, he fell to prating for the vending of his pretended Remedies.”64 The concern about confusing charlatans and experimental philosophers was the underlying theme of Thomas Shadwell’s satirical attack on the Royal Society of London, The Virtuoso (1676).65 In the form of Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, Shadwell’s caricature of the new philosopher, the charlatan gained entrance to the parlor in order to fool an upscale audience with his secrets and experiments. In order to ensure that the virtuosi would not be mistaken for mountebanks, the early Royal Society restricted its experimental spaces to sober, reliable, and friendly witnesses.66As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer pointed out, the virtuosi had to observe certain social conventions about how 58. Mercurio, Errori populari, 175. 59. Ibid., 267. 60. Primrose, Popular Errours, 18. 61. Ibid., 42–43. 62. Ibid., 44–46. 63. Golinski, “Noble Spectacle.” 64. Evelyn, Diary, 4:253. 65. Shadwell, Virtuoso. 66. On the development of experimental conventions, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

On the Skins of Goats and Sheep 73

knowledge was produced, about what may be questioned and what may not, and about what counts as evidence. The result was “a public space with restricted access,” that is, a space “restricted to those who gave their assent to the legitimacy of the game being played within its confines.”67 Another means by which the Royal Society attempted to reduce the “wonder” of experiments was to insist that experiments be replicated. Replication, the virtuosi believed, would make experimental “facts” out of what were commonly perceived as wonders. It would also reinforce the distinction between the true experimental scientist and the dilettante or charlatan whose concern was merely to exhibit novelties. As one Fellow of the Royal Society warned, an experimenter “is not to be taken for a maker of gimbals, nor an observer of Nature for a wonder-monger.”68 Although the new philosophers loudly rejected the tradition of esotericism and upheld the virtues of open disclosure of scientific knowledge, experimental knowledge in the Royal Society was never completely open. Nor is it in modern science. Although nature’s secrets are no longer arcana, they are no less esoteric and privileged. If anything, the secrets of nature are more the monopoly of an autonomous corporation of specialists now than ever before. In the modern setting, the social function of esotericism has been increasingly performed by the construction of disciplinary boundaries. Institutionalization may have replaced esotericism in science, but sociologically its goals are the same: it is a mechanism for protecting the discipline from external criticism and from pollution by outsiders. The paradox is that a form of knowledge that is the most open in principle has become the most closed in practice.

Bibliography Archival Sources Archivio di Stato (Venice) Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 731. Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 734. Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 735.

Printed Sources Americano. Il Vero, e natural fonte, dal quale n’esce fuori un fonte d’acqua viva di mirabili, e salutiferi secreti. Rome, Brescia, Bologna, 1608. Bacon, Roger. Opus Majus. Translated by Robert Belle Burke. 2 vols. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. Bacon, Roger. Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis. Edited by Robert Steele, in Opera hactenus inedita, vol. 5. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1920. Bagley, Paul J. “On the Practice of Esotericism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 231–47. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Benedetto, detto il Persiano. I Maravigliosi, et occulti secreti naturali. Rome, Venice, Bologna, Milan, 1613. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by R. M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Buhagiar, Mario. “St. Paul’s Shipwreck and Early Christianity in Malta.” Catholic Historical Review 93 (2007): 1–16. Burke, Peter. “Rituals of Healing in Early Modern Italy.” In The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on

67. Ibid., 336. 68. Hunter and Wood, “Toward Solomon’s House,” 81.

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———. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Coryat, Thomas. Coryat’s Crudities. Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1905. Debus, Allen G. The English Paracelsians. New York: Franklin Watts, 1965. Eamon, William. “Physicians and the Reform of Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe.” Acta Historiae 17 (2009): 615–26. ———. The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Magic, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy. Washington, DC: National Geographic Books, 2010. ———. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. “The Secrets of Nature and the Moral Economy of Early Modern Science.” In Il Segreto / The Secret, edited by A. Paravacini Bagliani, 215–35. Micrologus 14. Florence: SISMEL, 2006. Eamon, William, and Françoise Paheau. “The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli: A Sixteenth-Century Italian Scientific Society.” Isis 75 (1984): 327–42. Economou, George D. The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn. Edited by E. S. De Beer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Fedele, D., detto il Mantoianino. Con il poco farete assai. Rome, n.d. Fontana, Andrea. Fontana dove n’esce fuori acque di secreti. Venice, Bologna, Parma, Pavia, Modena, n.d. Garzoni, Tomaso. L’Hospidale de’ pazzi incurabili. Venice, 1586. In Opere, edited by Paolo Cherchi. Naples: Fulvio Rossi, 1972. ———. La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo. Edited by Paolo Cherchi. 2 vols. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Gentilcore, David. Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. “Was There a ‘Popular Medicine’ in Early Modern Europe?” Folklore: Journal of the Folklore Society 115 (2004): 151–166. Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. ———. “High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Past and Present 73 (1976): 28–41. Golinski, Jan. “A Noble Spectacle: Phosphorus and the Public Culture of Science in the Early Royal Society.” Isis 80 (1989): 24–26. Grundmann, Herbert. “Litteratus—illiteratus. Der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm von Altertum zum Mittelalter.” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 40 (1958): 1–65. Henke, Robert. “The Italian Mountebank and the Commedia dell’arte.” Theatre Survey 38 (1997): 1–29. ———. Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hunter, Michael, and Paul B. Wood. “Toward Solomon’s House: Rival Strategies for Reforming the Early Royal Society.” History of Science 24 (1986): 49–108. Joubert, Laurent. Popular Errors. Translated by Gregory David de Rocher. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. Katritzky, M. A. “Marketing Medicine: The Image of the Early Modern Mountebank.” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 121–153. ———. “Was commedia dell’arte performed by mountebanks? Album amicorum illustrations and Thomas Platter’s description of 1598.” Theatre Research International 23 (1998): 104–126 Lea, K. M. Italian Popular Comedy. A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Lingo, Alison. “Empirics and Charlatans in Early Modern France: The Genesis of the Classification of the ‘Other’ in Medical Practice.” Journal of Social History 19 (1986): 588. Manzaloui, Mahmoud. “The Pseudo-Aristotelian Kitāb Sirr al-Asrār: Facts and Problems.” Oriens 23/24 (1974): 147–257.

On the Skins of Goats and Sheep 75 Martin, John J. “The Imaginary Piazza: Tommaso Garzoni and the Late Italian Renaissance.” In Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David Herlihy, edited by Samuel K. Cohn Jr. and Steven A. Epstein, 439–54. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Mercurio, Scipione. De gli errori populari d’Italia. Verona, 1645. Montinaro, Brizio. San Paolo dei serpenti: Analisi di una tradizione. Palermo: Sellerio, 1996. Moryson, Fynes. Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary. Edited by Charles Hughes. London: Sheratt and Hughes, 1903. Ottonelli, Giovan Domenico. Della Cristiana moderazione del teatro (1646). In La commedia dell’arte e la società barocca: La fascinazione del teatro, edited by Fernando Taviani, 489–90. La Commedia dell’arte: Storia e testi documenti 1. Rome: Bulzoni, 1970. Pagliarizzo, Dottor Gratiano. Secreti nuovi e rari. Bologna, n.d. Park, Katharine. “Country Medicine in the City Marketplace: Snakehandlers as Itinerant Healers.” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 104–20. Piemontese, Alessio. The Secretes of the reverende maister Alexis of Piemount. Translated by William Warde. London, 1558. Primrose, James. Popular Errours, Or the Errours of the People in Physick. Translated by Robert Wittie. London, 1651. Ruscelli, Girolamo. Secreti nuovi. Venice, 1560. Scatalone, Dottor Graziono. Il vero et pretioso thesoro di Sanità. Milan, 1610. Schmitt, Charles B. “Francesco Storella and the Secretum secretorum.” In Pseudo-Aristotle the ‘Secret of Secrets’: Sources and Influences, edited by W. F. Ryan and C. B. Schmitt, 124–31. London: Warburg Institute, 1982. Shadwell, Thomas. The Virtuoso. Edited by M. J. Nicholson and D. S. Rodes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Tolosano, Giulielmo Germerio. Gioia preciosa…Opera à chi brama la sanità utilissima & necessaria. Venice, 1604. Turchini, Angelo. Morso, morbo morte: La tarantola fra cultura medica e terapia popolare. Milano: F. Angeli, 1987. Vanzan Marchini, Nelli-Elena. I mali e I rimedi della Serenissima. Venice: Neri Pozza, 1995. Williams, Steven. The Secret of Secrets. The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Zapata, Giovanni Battista. Li Maravigliosi secreti di medicina e chirurgia, nuovamente ritrovati per guarire ogni sorte d’infermità. Venice, 1577.

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Secrecy and the Production of Seignorial Space The Coretto of Torrechiara Timothy McCall

T

hrough mechanisms of secrecy, hiddenness, and revelation, the coretto of Torrechiara castle (fig. 3.1) conspicuously generated the impression of privilege and piety for its seignorial patron, Pier Maria Rossi of Parma.1 Displayed today in the Museo d’Arti Applicate of Milan’s Castello Sforzesco, this remarkably dynamic, even charismatic structure—dating to the 1450s or ’60s and attributed to Arduino da Baiso or, more convincingly, the brothers Lorenzo and Cristoforo Canozzi da Lendinara—seems originally to have been located in the ground floor chapel of San Nicomede within Torrechiara just south of Parma.2 The eleven-foot-tall edifice of intarsiated wood is comprised of polychrome panels bearing Rossi emblems and geometric carvings and is surmounted by a hexagonal pyramid decorated with intarsia floral designs (see figs. 3.1, 3.9, 3.11). Occupying the coretto, Pier Maria and perhaps others participated in masses and court rituals from an honored position. The imposing coretto would have drawn the immediate attention of viewers and would have For her generosity and wisdom, I dedicate this essay to Margaret Haines. 1. The coretto (Castello Sforzesco, Museo d’Arti Applicate, Inv. Mobili 926) measures 360 cm x 163 cm x 164 cm. Some scholars have wondered if the coretto might be a pastiche: Tinti, Il mobilio fiorentino, 71; Colle and Zanuso, Museo d’Arti Applicate, 470. Recent studies have argued persuasively that the woodwork and metal fastenings date to the fifteenth century, and in the late nineteenth century Corrado Ricci thought even the polychrome to be original: Ricci, “Il Castello di Torchiara: Cappella di S. Nicomede,” 24; Bagatin, Le pitture lignee, 122; Salsi, Il mobile italiano, 34. Similarly sophisticated spaces and contraptions in Ferrara and for Torrechiara’s studiolo (discussed below) provide further evidence of a local, creative team of woodworkers and additional grounds to consider the coretto genuine. Though Colle and Zanuso (Museo d’Arti Applicate, 467) asserted that the coretto was first published by Corrado Ricci in the 1890s, a previous reference dates from the 1830s and would seem early for the art market for reconstituted furnishings, which, as Ellen Callmann has shown, first flourished in the late nineteenth century, and primarily in Florence: Molossi, Vocabolario topografico, 550–51; Callmann, “William Blundell Spence.” The possibility remains, however, that the coretto has been reconfigured or reconstructed (potentially using components of the studiolo’s portoni, discussed below), or that it has been repainted or heavily restored. 2. Arduino da Baiso (d. 1454) trained the Canozzi brothers and headed the workshop responsible for the Este studioli. For these workshops, see Quintavalle, Cristoforo da Lendinara; Franceschini, Artisti a Ferrara, passim; Bagatin, Le pitture lignee; Toffanello, Le Arti a Ferrara, 337–41, 346–48. For the most thorough discussion of the coretto, see Colle and Zanuso, Museo d’Arti Applicate, 467–71. Additionally, and for wide-ranging attributions, see Tinti, Il mobilio fiorentino, 71; Ragghianti Collobi, La casa italiana, 40; Podestà, “La casa italiana,” 174; Terni de Gregory, Vecchi mobili italiani, 54–56; Pignatti, Mobili italiani del rinascimento, 73; Camorali, “Gli arredi della cappella”; Ferrazza, Palazzo Davanzati, 56; Roettgen, Italian Frescoes, 359; Bertelli, King’s Body, 145–47; Bagatin, Le pitture lignee, 122–25; Salsi, Il mobile italiano, 32–34.

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Secrecy and the Production of Seignorial Space 77

FIGURE 3.1. Coretto of Torrechiara, ca. 1460s, Milan, Castello Sforzesco, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Applicata. Photo by author, © Comune di Milano, all rights reserved.

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encouraged active and determined looking within. The structure framed its occupants and magnified their status, and consequently, those located inside the coretto would have been made increasingly aware of their own privilege and of their separation from the other visitors to the chapel. This essay situates the coretto within Torrechiara’s built and experienced environment, investigating the mechanics of the coretto’s portals—its door and window—and courtly actors’ movements in and through these spaces, to account for the ways that it facilitated both connections and exclusions. Considering potential views and sounds from and into the coretto recognizes the significance of embodied, multisensory phenomena—what Bruce Smith has recently called “historical phenomenology”—activated by the structure for the few who inhabited it and for the many who beheld it.3 As scholars have suggested, occupants could have listened to religious functions while hidden within. The coretto, however, animated much more energetic mechanisms of power and revelation through its spatial activations of secrecy. As my discussion of the coretto’s operations will establish, those located inside were never completely hidden, but were rather hidden to be revealed. Ultimately, this essay interprets the ways that social identities and networks were constructed through distinction and exclusion and argues that Torrechiara’s dynamic coretto amplified power, status, and piety through a rhetoric of secrecy.

The Count and His Mistress

Constructed in the 1450s, Torrechiara (fig. 3.2) was one of over thirty castles subject to the Sforzaallied Pier Maria Rossi who controlled much of the Parmense, and at times Parma itself, from the late 1440s until his death in 1482. The historiography of Rossi’s substantial art patronage has been dominated by and filtered through the prevailing interpretation of his most stunning commission, Torrechiara’s camera d’oro (golden chamber) (figs. 3.3–3.4), a lavish multimedia room with gold and azurite frescoes depicting Rossi’s aristocratic mistress, Bianca Pellegrini, wandering through her signore’s territory and performing rituals of courtly love.4 Corrado Ricci’s formative studies (1894) of the camera d’oro established the amorous relationship between Pier Maria and his mistress as the prevailing interpretive mode for these frescoes and indeed for the entirety of the lord’s artistic and architectural patronage.5 Largely sharing Ricci’s sentimental, bourgeois notions of family and individual subjectivity, scholars have followed his lead and have idealized the imagery as reflecting Pier Maria and Bianca’s ostensibly private, authentic, and monogamous love for each other. The construction of Torrechiara, called an “eternal, ideal nest of peace and love,” has consistently been connected to a period of utopian peace—a “happy interval of peace and prosperity…dedicated exclusively to love and its diverse phenomenologies”—and Rossi’s commissions for the castle, including the coretto, have been interpreted in predominantly private and personal terms, as art solely for his mistress or 3. Smith, Key of Green, 257. 4. For the camera d’oro, see Woods-Marsden, “Pictorial Legitimation”; Roettgen, Italian Frescoes, 358–73; Coerver, “Donna/ Dono”; Campbell, “Pier Maria Rossi’s Treasure”; McCall, “Networks of Power.” 5. Ricci claimed that Bianca “era Dea del luogo. Tutto era stato fatto per lei”; Ricci, “Il Castello di Torchiara: Cappella di S. Nicomede,” 24. See also Ricci, “Il Castello di Torchiara: La Sala d’Oro.” The two studies were reprinted together in Ricci, Eroi, Santi, ed Artisti, 65–81.

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FIGURE 3.2. Torrechiara, built 1450s. Photo by author.

merely celebrating their love.6 These interpretations have been characterized by a concomitant, and at times moralizing, emphasis on the secret nature of this love, from the early-nineteenthcentury assertion by Lorenzo Molossi—reading quite literally the oxidized silver face of the pilgrims frescoed on the camera’s ceiling—that Bianca furtively visited her lover in the disguise of a Christian pilgrim having colored her face to appear as a Moor (see fig. 3.4), to more recent claims that the camera d’oro celebrated a secret marriage or that Torrechiara was Bianca’s “secret refuge” or a “secret love nest.”7 Rossi’s chivalric devotion to this aristocratic mistress was hardly a secret intended to be kept from his subjects or peers, however. Imagery relating to Bianca Pellegrini was insistently publicized and was deployed to construct a multivalent Bianca: as mistress within regional political networks, as devout pilgrim, as chivalric damsel, and as watchful peregrine falcon. This imagery, moreover, was represented in a wide variety of media, including fresco, manuscript illumination, medals, and painted and sculpted images on the exterior and throughout the interior of castles.8 Pier Maria and Bianca’s love was nothing if not an open secret, though perhaps here the phrase itself might be considered essentially redundant. 6. Mulazzani, “La pittura,” 140; Ghirardini, Presente e passato a Torrechiara, 11. For Torrechiara as “nido d’amore,” see Ceruti Burgio, Parma rinascimentale, 51; Mendogni, Torrechiara, 8. 7. “Parrebbe che allora l’amata Bianca sotto le vesti di pellegrina, e tinta il volto siccome mora, venisse a ritrovarlo nel castello di Torchiara”: Molossi, Vocabolario topografico, 550. For the more recent claims, see Quintavalle, “Arte a Torrechiara,” 114; Ciavarella, “Jacopo Caviceo,” 208–9; Holthaus, “La camera d’oro,” 10–11. 8. For these arguments, see McCall, “Networks of Power,” 120–36. See, additionally, Jean Campbell’s sophisticated discussion of

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FIGURE 3.3. Bembo workshop, Camera d’oro, Torrechiara, late-1450s. Photo by author with permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

Falling back on the dominant narrative explaining Rossi’s art patronage, scholars have approached the coretto with suspicion. Many claim that Rossi commissioned the structure to provide a secret or hidden place to pray, assuming that the coretto straightforwardly maintained Pier Maria’s privacy by separating himself “poco cristianamente” from other worshipers and by providing a place from which the two lovers could attend mass in “total isolation.”9 This analysis, it should be said, reveals an awareness of the plays of privilege performed by the coretto, even if these interpreters have tended to moralize such a “scarcely Christian detachment from lesser worshipers,” or Pier Maria and Bianca’s “guilty love,” made even more reprehensible as it played out under “the view of the saints and of the Virgin.”10 Following Corrado Ricci’s interpretation of the coretto as a place where Pier Maria (whose only faith was love for his mistress) and Bianca “substituted kisses for prayers,” art historians have rhetorics of address and (un)covering in the camera d’oro and her more recent investigations of secrecy: Campbell, “Pier Maria Rossi’s Treasure”; Campbell, Commonwealth of Nature, 21–59. 9. Tinti, Il mobilio fiorentino, 71; Pignatti, Mobili italiani del rinascimento, 73; Camorali, “Gli arredi della cappella,” 54; Battisti, Cicli pittorici, storie profane, 78; Cortesi, I castelli dell’Emilia Romagna, 157. 10. Tylney, “An Oratory from Italy”; Ricci, “Il Castello di Torchiara: Cappella di S. Nicomede,” 24.

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FIGURE 3.4. Bembo workshop, Ceiling of camera d’oro, Torrechiara, late-1450s. Photo by author with permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

suggested that the coretto was constructed to provide a space for Rossi’s unholy seduction of Bianca and that it was “probably (used) for love” and was “rather than a secret place for prayer, a refuge of love.”11 The scandalized superintendent for Lombard artistic monuments, for instance, worried in a letter to Ricci in 1933 that the hundreds of drinking, singing, and dancing revelers at a recent banquet “con grande buffet” held at Torrechiara would have assuredly utilized the structure for lascivious ends and would have “played at Pier Maria Rossi and Bianca Pellegrini” (“giocano al Piermaria Rossi e alla Bianca Pellegrini”) had the coretto not by that time been sold from the castle.12 Recent publications assert that Torrechiara was an amorous “refuge” and, presuming that mistresses must necessarily be shameful, that the coretto was used to hide Rossi and his mistress from the rest of the faithful.13 A monograph on the brothers Lorenzo and Cristoforo Canozzi da Lendinara, a 11. Ricci, “Il Castello di Torchiara: Cappella di S. Nicomede,” 24; Ragghianti Collobi, La casa italiana, 40; Podestà, “La casa italiana,” 174. 12. Balestri, Il colore di Milano, 284. Within a few years of the letter, the superintendent Ettore Modigliani would be transferred to L’Aquila and shortly thereafter lose his post altogether as Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws were intensified; Haskell, “Botticelli, Fascism and Burlington House,” 471. For the eventual sale of the coretto and the castle’s other furnishings, see below note 45. 13. Bagatin, Le pitture lignee, 125; Salsi, Il mobile italiano, 32.

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thorough and authoritative evaluation of the woodworkers and their oeuvre, stumbles over the conviction that imagery relating to Bianca Pellegrini indicates that the coretto must have been produced after the death of Pier Maria’s wife, Antonia Torelli, in 1468, a date the authors have great trouble reconciling with stylistic evidence.14 The assumption that any visual celebration of Bianca Pellegrini must postdate Antonia’s death, however, reveals more about modern, bourgeois conventions of morality than it does about courtly representations of mistresses in fifteenth-century Italy.15 Mistresses were commonly celebrated in visual and literary productions. Many court rulers deployed representations of mistresses to advertise virile authority and amplify networks of political power.16 Some scholars have written off or apologized for the secret within Rossi’s coretto as essentially shameful and thus having to remain hidden; this study, however, explores the coretto’s secrets through its operations of invisibility and hiddenness, not in terms of disgrace or embarrassment, but in terms of power and authority and the meanings generated by acts of revelation.

Spatial Operations of Secrecy

To reframe and better understand the coretto’s functions and operations, it is necessary to avoid naturalizing the divide between public and private as an inevitable binary. As resilient as the Habermasian public and private spheres have been for modern definitions of family and love, for quattrocento aristocracy the dichotomized construction of a private or familial sphere and a public and political one seems much less tenable.17 The “private,” of course, was largely constitutive of political power in early modern Italy. Power was generative and proliferating rather than proceeding straightforwardly from the top down. Authority was organized and exercised by robust nuclei of powers assembled horizontally, diagonally, and vertically.18 The palaces, castles, and other spaces of these clans, factions, and regimes must not be equated with the enclosed, private dwellings of modern, bourgeois nuclear families; they are, rather, extensions, symbols, and arenas of rule. Access to these political, factional spaces (indeed, contact with the prince) was continually and vigilantly mediated. Space is, of course, not a static container, but rather the relations between things that reproduce and embody culturally contingent modes of power and social relations and interactions. Spaces are produced through their uses, and allowing or prohibiting access was a potent tool.19 Admittance established boundaries separating insiders and outsiders, constructed social identities based on access and exclusion, and solidified networks and communities through the formation and affirmation of power structures.20 The appearance of privacy, secrecy, and privilege is created, as Brian Massumi and Elizabeth Grosz have argued, by the construction of boundaries that can only be

14. Bagatin, Le pitture lignee, 122–25. Cristoforo da Lendinara was active not far from Torrechiara (in both Modena and Parma) through the 1460s and into the early ’70s; Toffanello, Le Arti a Ferrara, 346. 15. McCall, “Visual Imagery and Historical Invisibility.” 16. Ettlinger, “Visibilis et Invisibilis”; Coerver, “Donna/Dono”; McCall, “‘Traffic in Mistresses.’” 17. Habermas, Structural Transformation. See now Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 8–12; Wilson and Yachnin, “Introduction”; Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces.” 18. Chittolini, “The ‘Private,’ the ‘Public,’ the State.” 19. Lefebvre, Production of Space. 20. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 61, 96.

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actualized by their crossing.21 Thus, the more access, connections, and networks could be mediated or layered, the greater would be their efficacy.22 As valuable as an audience with the prince no doubt was, just as important could be the act of making known that one was received. The most ostensibly intimate spaces of fifteenth-century Italian courts—Rossi’s coretto among them—were never truly personal or absolutely private or hidden. To be known, they had to be entered into or displayed. Recent interrogations of secrecy and its operations, moreover, underscore the essential function of revelation.23 The effectiveness of secrets often exists in their disclosure. It is not the content of the secret that is most significant, but the process of its revelation. Secrets, of course, require publics that are differentiated and socially structured. As Karma Lochrie argues, secrecy is “less a function of individual secrets than of social networks” and of power; secrecy’s efficacy “lies less in what is kept hidden than in the dynamic between the ‘knows’ and the ‘know-nots.’”24 Exclusion and distinction are only made possible through boundaries that many recognize but that few are permitted to cross (or through barriers that create, at minimum, a plausible fiction of restricted traversal). The coretto was one such boundary, indeed an efficacious and productive one. More than just hiding the occupants from the chapel’s other worshipers, the coretto of the chapel of San Nicomede displayed and fashioned piety and social hierarchy by activating mechanics of hiddenness, secrecy, and revelation.

Torrechiara and the Chapel of San Nicomede

The interiors of Renaissance castles and palaces were dynamic social arenas in which movement was assiduously scrutinized. Ground floors, particularly near entrances, courtyards, and porticos, were relatively, yet emphatically, open to and traversed by multiple, well-regulated publics.25 As Evelyn Welch has shown through a perceptive reading of Andrea Mantegna’s contemporary depiction of the armed guards mediating access to Ludovico Gonzaga and his court in the Camera Picta in Mantua (see figs. 2–3 in “Introduction”), visitors to fifteenth-century seignorial spaces were visibly watched and their progress and access were conspicuously mediated.26 Guards and uscieri were strategically positioned for surveillance at stairways and gates and controlled the flow of visitors and subjects, and indeed Rossi’s contemporaries would have had to pass through no fewer than five gates to reach Torrechiara’s courtyard. In the late quattrocento, the Rossi ambassador Jacopo Caviceo described the circuitous route into Torrechiara, writing of a journey through six porte and at least five walls, through gardens, past fountains, fishing ponds, deep moats, cisterns, stables, and the castle’s armory before reaching the seventh door marked with the inscription of

21. Massumi, “Everywhere You Want to Be,” 27; Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 65. 22. For access and intimacy structured through the revelation of English portrait miniatures, see Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 67–77. Also useful is Michael Warner’s investigation of the interplay between modern public and private discourses; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 23. See this volume’s introduction, in addition to Bok, Secrets; Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature; Lochrie, Covert Operations; Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship. 24. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 93. 25. Kent, “Palaces, Politics and Society”; Welch, Art and Authority, 203–20; Preyer, “Planning for Visitors.” 26. Welch, “Painting as Performance,” 22.

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foundation and a marble statue of Pier Maria Rossi.27 Though Caviceo may have exaggerated his description, Torrechiara retains a remarkable sense of this zigzagging, circuitous route through three imposing porte: the rivellino, the long, covered passage adjacent to the parish church of San Lorenzo, and the final gate bearing the castle’s inscription. Once through this entrance (perhaps the seventh then, but the third today due to the destruction of walls), one reaches the castle’s courtyard and the chapel of San Nicomede (fig. 3.5), but only after surmounting an additional ramp and set of stairs and passing through yet another door. Moving into the courtyard, a visitor might enter or look into San Nicomede through the chapel’s massive wooden doors.28 Saint Nicomede, who appears in Benedetto Bembo’s altarpiece for the chapel (fig. 3.6), had been venerated in and around Parma for centuries. Believed to be a first-century priest, Nicomede was put to death for renouncing idols and ministering to Saint Peter’s apocryphal daughter Petronilla. The cult of Saint Nicomede seems to have been particularly fervent in the region, and by the tenth century a church at Fontanabroccola and an altar in Parma Cathedral were dedicated to the saint.29 The importance of the chapel to Pier Maria Rossi is suggested by the fact that his will of 1464 prescribed perpetual masses to be said there for the sake of his soul and for that of Bianca Pellegrini by the Franciscans of nearby Felino. Because numerous period sources record that Pier Maria died at Torrechiara and one fifteenth-century voice specifically claims that he was buried in the chapel of San Nicomede, it seems likely that Rossi and perhaps his wife, Antonia Torelli, and/or his mistress, Bianca Pellegrini, were indeed buried there.30 As I have suggested, the many guarded gates, walls, courtyards, and doors of early modern castles and palaces created a carefully controlled and layered arena of access and privilege, producing and visualizing distinction through insiders and outsiders whose traffic was constantly watched and judged. But these surveyed subjects did indeed move through the outer and lower spaces of Rossi’s castles, which functioned as centers of administration, trade, justice, protection, and in the case of the chapel of San Nicomede, religious devotion. Documents demonstrate that this groundfloor chapel served the community of the borgo or town of Torrechiara located within the castle’s outermost wall. The Rossi were obliged to provide the chapel with the liturgical garments and furnishings necessary for the “decent and honorable celebration of the mass” and were granted, from the bishop of Parma, rights of patronage (ius patronatus) over the chapel, including the nomination of priests, who would then have to be approved by the bishop.31 Because two churches associated with Pier Maria Rossi stood in the immediate vicinity of Torrechiara but beyond the castle’s inner walls (the Badia of Santa Maria della Neve along the nearby Parma River and the borgo’s church of San Lorenzo), some scholars have assumed that the chapel of San Nicomede 27. Caviceo, Vita Petrimariae de Rubeis, 4v. For the lost marble statue, see McCall, “Networks of Power,” 88–89. 28. The chapel is a square room surmounted by a tall, vaulted ceiling; the frescoes of the ceiling and upper walls of the chapel date to the seventeenth century, after the chapel had been divided into two floors. This later ceiling has since been removed, and today’s visitor experiences the chapel’s original height; di Giovanni Madruzza, “L’architettura,” 107. 29. Affò, Storia, 1:188; Pettorelli, “La chiesa di San Nicomede.” For Petronilla, see Steinberg, “Guercino’s Saint Petronilla.” 30. Cronica gestorum, 114; Pezzana, Storia, 4:300. One sixteenth-century source claimed that Antonia Torelli was buried in San Nicomede; Sansovino, Della origine. Rossi’s will of January 1464 (Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, Fondo Casapini, Cass. 28, fasc. 12, cart. 6) stipulated that Bianca and her son Ottaviano would be buried in the chapel, though scholars disagree about who was eventually buried there. 31. Pelicelli and Testi, Memorie intorno all’oratorio, 6–9. For the legal concept of ius patronatus, see Burke, Changing Patrons, 101–38.

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FIGURE 3.5. Chapel of San Nicomede, Torrechiara. Photo by author with permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

FIGURE 3.6. Benedetto Bembo, Polyptych of San Nicomede (Madonna and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot, Nicomede, Catherine of Alexandria, and Peter Martyr), signed and dated 1462, oil and gold on wood, Milan, Castello Sforzesco, Pinacoteca del Castello. Photo by author, © Comune di Milano, all rights reserved.

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served only the Rossi family.32 However, Laudedeo Testi and Nestore Pelicelli convincingly demonstrated that the cortile was not a domestic, private space and that citizens of Torrechiara’s borgo would have regularly visited the chapel of San Nicomede.33 Masses were performed, in fact, for Torrechiara’s community until the early twentieth century, and Testi and Pelicelli rightly pointed out that no more than one door would have been necessary if this castle was a private and enclosed residence and the chapel was a private ecclesiastical space for the Rossi.34 San Nicomede, even located as it was five walls and seven doors within Torrechiara, was founded with the authority of the bishop and remained the shared jurisdiction of the bishop of Parma and the Rossi.35 These spaces were sites of struggle between powerful dynasties and institutions, and of course even the labels “private” and “domestic” often given to chapels in seignorial palaces and villas hardly align with modern conceptions of those terms. Pier Maria Rossi, moreover, had fraught relationships with a number of Parma’s bishops and many disputes over access to cults, benefices, and, in particular, the town’s episcopal palace, which Rossi argued that his fourteenth-century bishop ancestor Ugolino had left to the dynasty, at least in times of episcopal vacancy. Disputes with Delfino della Pergola, who sued Rossi over control of castles and canals, escalated to the point that Rossi had one of the bishop’s messengers assaulted and left for dead after leaving Torrechiara.36 Pier Maria additionally arranged for the monastery of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma, controlled by Rossi family members and partisans, to refuse to allow the bishop’s representatives to perform their pastoral visit in 1452, even though the church is located immediately behind Parma’s Duomo.37 The bishop, for his part, threatened the rights of Rossi partisan priests and eventually took his case to Rome, where it was decided in Rossi’s favor.38 Authority over lucrative ecclesiastical benefices, even those located within ostensibly familial residences, was always mediated and contingent. Not only do the many walls and gates of Torrechiara betray the penetrated and layered access within the castle, but the coretto within the chapel of San Nicomede reveals multiple, overlapping publics. Rossi’s familiari, parenti, clienti, and sudditi would have encountered numerous lavish, expensive furnishings within the chapel of San Nicomede. Benedetto Bembo’s Madonna and Child polyptych (see fig. 3.6), still enclosed within the original frame possibly produced by the same artisans who crafted the coretto, manifests Rossi’s magnificent piety and dynastic devotions.39 The 32. Additionally, the chapel of Santa Caterina, located above the passage leading from the rivellino, probably served Torrechiara’s castellan and soldiers. For Santa Caterina and San Lorenzo, see McCall, “Networks of Power,” 97–99. For the Badia (which was built in the early 1470s and likely after the coretto was in place), see Galletti, “Erezione dell’abbazia”; Tonelli and Zilocchi, L’Abbazia Benedettina. 33. The recent sale of the furnishings spurred the scholars who argued that the sale by the private owners of the castle had been illegal since the chapel remained under the jurisdiction of Parma’s bishop. 34. Pelicelli and Testi, Memorie intorno all’oratorio, 9; Galletti, “Chiesa e religione,” 190. 35. Pelicelli and Testi, Memorie intorno all’oratorio, 6–9, 22–26. 36. For the dispute over Parma’s episcopal palace, see Pezzana, Storia, 2:643; 3:239; Allodi, Serie cronologica dei vescovi, 1:660, 768–70. For the structure more generally, see Marina, Italian Piazza Transformed, 26, 41–44, 49. For Rossi’s discord with Parma’s bishops, see McCall, “Networks of Power,” 18, 231–33. 37. Pezzana, Storia, 2:643; 3:83, 90; Allodi, Serie cronologica dei vescovi, 1:702–67; Battioni, “La diocesi parmense,” 150. 38. For the bishop’s threats, see Gentile, Terra e poteri, 118–19. The importance to the Rossi family of the decision in 1452 by the jurist Martino Garati da Lodi in Pier Maria’s favor is attested to by its many copies—both contemporary manuscript documents and later printed sheets with woodcut images of warriors on horseback—surviving today in Parma’s archives; Archivio di Stato di Parma, Feudi e comunità, Rossi, 206. 39. The altarpiece is now in the Castello Sforzesco’s Pinacoteca; Tanzi, “Benedetto Bembo.” For a photograph in situ, see Capelli,

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terracotta niche to the right of the main altar (see fig. 3.5) could have encouraged individual piety or served in the chapel’s liturgy. The niche may well have contained a frescoed imago pietatis, an iconography to which Rossi seems to have been particularly devoted, similar to those surviving in the Valeri chapel at Parma Cathedral or the parish church of Sant’Ilario Baganza.40 Even with Bembo’s gilded polyptych dominating the altar, however, for many viewers the most conspicuous of Rossi’s commissions within the chapel of San Nicomede would have been the massive coretto.

The Coretto and Similar Structures

The coretto’s lack of a precise, immediately discernible function is betrayed by the fact that it has been variously labeled by scholars, typically as coretto (small choir), though alternatively as tribuna, tribunetta, inginocchiatoio, cabina, garitta, and bussola.41 The closest surviving parallel, chronologically and geographically at least, may be Federico da Montefeltro’s alcove in Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale, though exactly what form that reassembled object originally took is far from clear.42 Other potentially analogous spaces include prince’s boxes from which royalty participated in masses; raised, enclosed, and often grilled viewing spaces such as that constructed in Roger II’s Palatine Chapel in Palermo or the many deployed throughout Europe to separate nuns or noble women from the presence of men; the space of the Lateran Sancta Santorum or that built for Piero de’ Medici at Santissima Annunziata; or Islamic maqsuras. To my mind none of these putative parallels can be considered direct sources for the coretto. What they share with Rossi’s coretto, however, is that many operate in comparable ways, by enacting spatial rhetorics of secrecy, hiddenness, and revelation to frame and enhance the status and power of their occupants visually. The coretto has been considered very much sui generis, at least in fifteenth-century Italy.43 The closest extant derivation of this coretto is, in fact, an early-twentieth-century fake crafted by the Paduan artisan and restorer Edgardo Minozzi, active in Parma from 1910 (fig. 3.7).44 The production of this counterfeit coretto in 1912 was encouraged by the profitable sale of the genuine item from Torrechiara two years prior and was likewise inspired by the celebrated reimagination of the camera d’oro by a group of Parmense artisans and scholars for Emilia-Romagna’s pavilion in the Roman Ethnographic Exhibition of 1911. This reconstruction patriotically celebrated the fiftieth

“Vicende storiche e architettoniche,” 88. For the frame, see Colle and Zanuso, Museo d’Arti Applicate, 414. 40. The studiolo of Torrechiara contained a similar image. For devotion to the imago pietatis and the fresco at Sant’Ilario Baganza, see Zanichelli, I conti e il minio, 68; McCall, “Networks of Power,” 77–79. 41. These terms can be translated, more or less, as tribune, small tribune, kneeler, kiosk, sentry-box, and cabin. For “tribuna,” see Camorali, “Gli arredi della cappella.” For “tribunetta,” see Roettgen, Italian Frescoes, 359. For “bussola,” see Ragghianti Collobi, La casa italiana, 44. For “inginocchiatoio,” see Molossi, Vocabolario topografico, 550–51. For “cabina privata,” see Terni de Gregory, Vecchi mobili italiani, 54. For “garitta,” see Balestri, Il colore di Milano, 357. 42. Like the coretto, the Urbino alcove seems to have been set in place so that the room’s wall served as one of the structure’s walls; dal Poggetto, La Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 60–61; Binaghi, “I Mobili della Corte Milanese,” 167. Sergio Bertelli suggested that the coretto might be a holdover from a category of imperial Byzantine tribune (prokypsis), such as that represented on Theodosius’s base for the obelisk of Thutmosis III in the Hippodrome of Constantinople; Bertelli, King’s Body, 145–47. The differences between the uses and locations of the respective structures are immense, however. 43. The amount of intarsia work that has been lost over time, particularly in studioli, and even the fact that the Urbino alcove also has been called recently “esempio assolutamente unico nel suo genere” (dal Poggetto, La Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 60), might suggest caution with definitive declarations regarding any structure’s uniqueness. 44. Althöfer, Fälschung und Forschung, 86–87; Colle, “Un coretto parmense.”

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FIGURE 3.7. Edgardo Minozzi, Coretto, ca. 1912. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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anniversary of Italian Unification and, following the Italian press’s effusive praise for the reconstituted room, brought Torrechiara to the attention of all of Italy.45 Though Minozzi based his coretto on Torrechiara’s, the artisan utilized a rather free mix and match of imagery, with a large figure of St. George adapted from St. Eustace of Albrecht Dürer’s early-sixteenth-century Paumgartner altarpiece (fig. 3.8). For decades this geographically and chronologically inconsistent imagery confused scholars.46 Minozzi’s coretto was sold to an English collector in 1913, passed to the London antiquarians Crowther and Son, and finally entered the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum where it was eventually recognized as a modern fabrication.47 As singular as the coretto seems at first glance, however, documentary evidence from Milan and Ferrara and the remnants of additional intarsia at Torrechiara suggest that mid-fifteenth-century artisans produced similar structures for Northern Italian courts. In the late 1460s, Galeazzo Maria Sforza ordered from the Cremonese woodworker Bartolomeo Stramiti a “camera de asse” (“room of planks”) that could be dismantled and transported between the lord’s various residences.48 Possibly enclosing a bed of some sort, this moveable and versatile furnishing would have served multiple purposes potentially analogous to those of the coretto. The Canozzi intarsia workers, “Christofori et Laurentii fratrum intaliatorum lignaminis”—to whom the coretto has been most recently attributed—were employed at both Ferrara and Parma, moreover, and perhaps should be considered responsible for a number of sophisticated wooden constructions that functioned through dynamics of the concealment and revelation of interior inhabitants and spaces.49 A wooden “oratorio,” for instance, was constructed for duchess Eleanora of Aragon within the choir of the Augustinian convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, though the document, like that referring to Stramiti’s camera delle asse, is unsurprisingly vague about the structure’s precise configuration.50 A potential parallel to Rossi’s coretto might have been the “busolla” for the chapel of Ferrara’s Palazzo del Corte located, much like Torrechiara’s San Nicomede, immediately adjacent to a major courtyard. In 1471, the painter Gerardo Costa was commissioned by Ercole d’Este to paint the interior of this bussola green. Though “busolla” in this case has been translated as the chapel’s “inner door,” documentary evidence seems to suggest that the duke conspicuously listened to the

45. Objects produced for the exhibition were inspired by the coretto: Romagnoli, “Romanticismo, medievalismo, e castelli rossiani,” 188. For the sale of the coretto, polyptych, and the chapel’s cassapanca, see Pelicelli and Testi, Memorie intorno all’oratorio, 27–29, 36; Camorali, “Gli arredi della cappella”; Ciavarella, “L’espropriazione del castello di Torrechiara”; Ferrazza, Palazzo Davanzati, 114, 139; Colle and Zanuso, Museo d’Arti Applicate, 468–70. I will explore these issues in greater depth in a forthcoming article investigating Parma’s entry in the exhibition (“The New Nation’s Neo Renaissance: The camera d’oro of the Roman Exhibition of 1911 and the Sale of Torrechiara’s Quattrocento Furnishings”). See, additionally, Romagnoli, “Romanticismo, medievalismo, e castelli rossiani.” 46. For the coretto in London considered Renaissance, see Tylney, “Oratory from Italy”; Thorpe, “Oratory in Intarsia”; Terni de Gregory, Vecchi mobili italiani, 54; Pignatti, Mobili italiani del rinascimento, 73; Battisti, Cicli pittorici, storie profane, 78. 47. Commissioned by the Brasi brothers—prominent antiquarians in Parma with a shop in Piazza Duomo—the coretto was executed by Minozzi in 1912 and sold the following year to Lady Aberconway; it then passed to the London antiquarians Crowther and Son and from there to the Victoria and Albert Museum: Baker, “Noble Works or Base Deceptions?,” 385; Colle, “Un coretto parmense.” 48. For this structure and other potentially mobile Milanese sale delle asse (antecedents to Leonardo da Vinci’s fixed sala for Ludovico Sforza and Beatrice d’Este), see Binaghi, “I Mobili della Corte Milanese,” 166–67. For contemporary intarsiated structures for Milan’s Duomo, see Albertario, “Marmo, legno e terracotta,” 27–28. 49. See above note 2 for the Canozzi; they are identified thus in a Ferrarese document of 1454 regarding work in the studiolo of Belfiore and published in Franceschini, Artisti a Ferrara, 2:431. 50. Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 373.

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FIGURE 3.8. Albrecht Dürer, Saint Eustace, detail from Paumgartner Altarpiece, ca. 1503, oil on wood, Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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mass from within the structure.51 Bussola today indicates the wooden boxlike constructions at the entrances to Italian churches that protect the interior from outside noise and weather, but that also serve to prepare the visitor to enter a sacred space; of course, Torrechiara’s coretto would have served as a transitional structure and would have protected the body in similar ways, from the perspective of anyone entering San Nicomede through it.52 That bussola refers to an enclosed space in fifteenth-century courts, moreover, is further suggested by the fact that the Sforza chancellor Cicco Simonetta, guarded by dozens of armed and mounted men, was transported from Milan to Pavia in a “carretta da bussola” shortly before being executed on Ludovico il Moro’s order.53 It is additionally worth pointing out that the green interior of Ercole d’Este’s bussola would have been considered by the prince and his contemporaries a particularly appropriate or decorous place for prayer and contemplation, as green (terra verde) commonly decorated studies and libraries in fifteenth-century Italy.54 The built environment of Ercole’s chapel constructed within the ducal stables indicates that the Este and their artisans had a sophisticated understanding of the rhetorics of secrecy, space, and privilege deployed by this manner of structure. This chapel was built in the early 1470s to enshrine a Madonna on paper that had been placed on a post by a stable hand and had attracted a lively cult soon after exercising its power and volition by performing miracles. Ercole’s transformation of a portion of the stables into a lavishly decorated chapel can be read as one facet of the duke’s consciously Herculean self-fashioning in which he is here presented as a Christian Hercules cleaning up the Augean stables, though in this case to honor Mary and Christ rather than appease Hera and Eurystheus.55 The dukes and important guests would have viewed the mass separated from the Madonna’s other devotees within this chapel, however, from behind the grilled windows of a balcony. This space was suggestively referred to as a “via segreta,” and documents reveal that it was outfitted with furnishings from the court’s tapestry workshop on special occasions.56 From this “secret” though by necessity only partially covered space, plays of access, (in)visibility, piety, and distinction would have engaged visitors to the chapel, as they did at Torrechiara. Indeed, the space was located immediately above a wall of ex-votos, which of course manifested devotion to the image and amplified both Mary’s prestige and that of the aristocratic sponsors potentially seated above and hidden within. Even within the context of works commissioned by Pier Maria Rossi to outfit Torrechiara, the coretto of San Nicomede seems not to have been entirely unique. Inventive woodworkers and carvers produced a second ingenious intarsiated structure for the castle, one that likewise imaginatively played on rhetorics of secrecy and revelation: the studiolo (study) in the southeast corner of the camera d’oro, originally covered by large, fold-out, intarsiated wings (portoni) that survived well into the eighteenth century (studiolo visible in fig. 3.3). All that remains of this sophisticated 51. Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 90: “Gerardo Costa. Item, per avere dà de verde a una busolla nova in la Gisiolla del N. S. ala Fontana, donde sta a oldire messa sua Ex.” It is not entirely clear if this suggests that Ercole heard the mass within the bussola or merely within this particular chapel, though the former seems more likely. 52. For further on bussole, see Haines, “Sacrestia delle Messe,” 220–21; Frugoni, Medioevo sul naso, 142. 53. Simonetta, Rinascimento Segreto, 161. 54. Scudieri and Ciliberto, “Un’ipotesi per il verde”; McCall, “Networks of Power,” 69–70; Smith, Key of Green. 55. For Ercole’s Herculean imagery, see Ferrari, “La corte degli dei”; Matarrese, “Il mito di Ercole a Ferrara.” 56. Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 92–94.

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construction, however, are four uomini famosi (illustrious men), intarsia panels adjacent to the exposed frescoes, and a broken hinge from what once was a fold-down wooden platform fit within a rectangular recess and used for writing, reading, and display.57 When the original portoni were swung open, the study would have revealed numerous terra verde uomini on both the wall and wings, a devotional image (apparently an imago pietatis), a Christological inscription, and the studiolo’s reading surface.58 Though the quattrocento studiolo, epitomized by Federico da Montefeltro’s example at Urbino, has come to exemplify the quintessential location for courtly cultivation of secular, Renaissance knowledge, the devotional inscription and image of Torrechiara’s studiolo, together with a documentary reference to this space as a “studiolo oratorio,” suggests that this terra verde study was intended for both sacred and profane contemplation.59 The space’s original structure and its operations, moreover, dramatically activated secrecy and revelation. The studiolo could be opened and revealed to Rossi’s visitors or, because intarsia paneling set the space out from the rest of the room’s walls covered with (originally polychrome) terracotta tiles, it could be closed, flat against the wall, and conspicuously unavailable to them. Through the deployment of each of these intarsia constructions, the built environment was carefully crafted to manage admittance and revelation and thus to amplify prestige and authority. A closer examination of the coretto’s original placement within the chapel of San Nicomede— ropes are hung on the walls in the chapel today to suggest this position—demonstrates the ways that Rossi’s coretto both reveals and generates distinct publics (see fig. 3.5). Though most photographic reproductions of the coretto (as in fig. 3.1) might lead one to believe that the structure is entirely enclosed, only two of its sides, those intended to face outward into the chapel, are built, wooden constructions, which clearly suggests that the coretto was intended for the corner of a room. The two sides placed against the chapel’s east and north walls are open or nonexistent. Perhaps it is most accurate to describe the coretto as essentially two surfaces set at a ninety-degree angle to form an enclosed space when set into the chapel’s corner. Similarly, only the three frontfacing surfaces of the hexagonal structure above are decorated with intarsia floral vases; the three sides not facing outward are unarticulated planks of wood. A door through the chapel’s north wall (visible to the left in fig. 3.5) directly connected the coretto to an adjacent room (and the groundfloor rooms of one of the castle’s corner towers) and allowed the structure’s occupants to enter and exit without being seen by visitors to the chapel. This door, significantly, was entirely occluded behind the taller and wider coretto. The coretto is ornamented with registers and borders of assorted patterns of intarsia toppi, blocks of wood prefabricated and sliced to create varying decorative motifs.60 The most prominent decorative components of the coretto, however, are the twenty-four panels—twelve on each of the two façades originally displayed to worshipers—comprised of carved tracery placed over backgrounds of painted wood (see figs. 3.1, 3.9). The foreground patterns are in some cases gilded or 57. Affò, “Descrizione della celebre stanza di Torchiara”; Holthaus, “La camera d’oro”; McCall, “Networks of Power,” 64–85. For the studiolo in Renaissance Italy more generally, see Liebenwein, Studiolo; Campbell, Cabinet of Eros. 58. Ireneo Affò in the late eighteenth century described “dipinto a colori al naturale in picciolo quadretto a fresco un Ecce Homo”; Affò, “Descrizione della celebre stanza di Torchiara,” 61. 59. Milan, Archivio di Stato, Autografi 102, Pittori S-Z, Francesco Tacconi, 7 November, 1475. I develop this argument in greater detail in a forthcoming article on Torrechiara’s “studiolo oratorio.” 60. For toppi, see Haines, “Sacrestia delle Messe,” 56, 86–87.

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FIGURE 3.9. Rossi heart emblem, detail of Coretto of Torrechiara (fig. 3.1), 1460s, Milan, Castello Sforzesco, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Applicata. Photo by author, © Comune di Milano, all rights reserved.

painted (vibrant polychrome primarily of blue, green, and red), and they alternate between geometric patterns and Rossi emblems. Indeed, fifteenth-century intarsia seems to have been more brightly colored than it often seems today. Arduino da Baiso, for instance, in 1443 received payment for pigments for testing azurite on the intarsia armadio for the sacristy of Ferrara Cathedral, and wood, either naturally cultivated with green fungus or stained or painted, might also appear green in studioli and similar spaces.61 The tracery and bright colors of Torrechiara’s coretto might have invoked the vibrancy of stained glass for some viewers, and the red and blues certainly enriched the magnificent structure. These intense colors align with the rich decoration associated with Arduino da Baiso’s production, while the geometric designs recall the style of the early Lendinara. Stylistically, the late gothic geometric tracery of the wooden square panels also closely resembles midcentury Lombard woodwork, notably that of a door originally from the church of San Maurizio at Ponte in Valtellina.62 Two emblems of the Rossi are displayed within the coretto’s panels: a crowned heart (accompanied by the inscription “digne et in eternum”) and the rampant lion, in two instances supported by putti.63 The heart imaginatively and poetically figures Pier Maria’s love for Bianca Pellegrini, who was portrayed publicly and multivalently for numerous, overlapping audiences throughout Rossi’s realm. These insignia, however, were not simple, static indices or reflections of Pier Maria’s authentic feel61. For Ferrara Cathedral: “Item die 8 mensis octobris expendi in media uncia azuri causa videndi experientiam quadrorum armariorum”; Franceschini, Artisti a Ferrara, 1:233. For Arduino’s ornate and brilliantly colored blue and gold wooden canopies commissioned by Palla Strozzi for the vestry of Santa Trinita in Florence, see Haines, “Sacrestia delle Messe,” 29. For green wood and studioli, see above note 54 and Blanchette, Wilmering, and Baumeister, “Use of Green-Stained Wood.” 62. Legni Sacri e Preziosi, 108–9. 63. The west-facing side displays two panels depicting putti supporting the Rossi rampant lion, an additional shield with this heraldic device without putti, three panels with crowned hearts bearing the inscription “digne et in eternum,” and six with unique geometric designs. The south façade is also comprised of six distinct decorative panels: three crowned hearts and three rampant lions.

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FIGURE 3.10. Rossi heart emblem, tomb of Pietro Rossi, now on the exterior of Sant’Antonio Abate, Parma, 1430s. Photo by author.

ings for his mistress, but were, rather, dynamic images manifesting Rossi dynastic authority.64 These emblems were adapted in various contexts, were visualized in a wide variety of media and in an expansive geographical venue, and were deployed by several generations of Rossi patrons. While the heart (see fig. 3.9), for instance, has been interpreted exclusively in relation to Pier Maria’s private love for Bianca, this device decorated Rossi ecclesiastical spaces as far away as Ravenna and Berceto (in the Apennines, towards Genoa and Lucca), was frescoed on the exterior of Rossi castles, and had ostentatiously marked Pier Maria’s father’s burial monument as a grim relic celebrating the death of his most bitter enemy, Ottobuono Terzi, whose heart had been interred in the elder Rossi’s tomb (fig. 3.10).65 The intarsia panels of the coretto can thus be interpreted as veils scarcely covering secrets, drawing attention to and overtly revealing Pier Maria Rossi’s ostensibly hidden love for his mistress.66 Visitors to the chapel, in fact, would have derived satisfaction and pleasure from being in the know, from being able to understand these emblems (which were, after all, omnipresent for Rossi’s subjects), and from being let in on their lord’s most intimate secrets. Moving from the conspicuous dynastic imagery on the exterior to the coretto’s less immediately visible portals and fastenings reveals the ways that operations of visibility and hiddenness 64. McCall, “Networks of Power,” 120–36. 65. Maddalena Rossi, tradition holds, ate a portion of Terzi’s heart and fed the rest to dogs; Gentile, “Alla Periferia di uno Stato,” 225; McCall, “Networks of Power,” 129–32. Inscriptions from Pietro Rossi’s tomb are located on the exterior of Sant’Antonio Abate in Parma, though the tomb and lavishly decorated chapel were later destroyed; Mendogni, Sant’Antonio Abate, 26; McCall, “Networks of Power,” 129–32. Ottobuono’s head, moreover, seems to have been displayed at the Rossi castle of Felino for decades; Somaini, “Una storia spezzata,” 126. 66. Similarly, Lorenzo Lotto’s intarsia panels both concealed and revealed (exegetical) meaning and knowledge within the choir of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo; Galis, “Concealed Wisdom.” For veiling and unveiling, see also the essay by Patricia Simons in the present volume.

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could be manipulated from the inside, and the ways that secrecy could be made to function. Both outward-facing façades were constructed with apertures that could be locked only from within (see figs. 3.1, 3.11). The west side has a large door—nearly as tall as the main body of the entire coretto and comprised of eight of the side’s twelve intarsia panels—with an interior handle, sliding bolt, and three long, metal hinges artfully decorated at each end (fig. 3.11). When closed, this door disappears into the surface of the coretto, from the exterior at least. Unless one had already seen the door put to use or had inspected it quite closely, the average visitor to the chapel might not realize that the coretto could open thus. The south side of the coretto faced the chapel’s altar and was outfitted with a folding window equipped with a small ledge (mensola). The mensola is decorated with borders of intarsia toppi patterns on its narrow sides and upward-facing surface, both inside and outside the coretto. The pilgrim staff with hanging wallets associated with the peregrine imagery of Rossi’s mistress, Bianca Pellegrini, and the abbreviation of Rossi’s most commonly advertised noble title, CO[MES] B[ERCETI] (Count of Berceto), are intricately carved on the top surface of the ledge.67 From the exterior, this side of the coretto would also most likely seem, at first glance, to be a solid wall. Its inhabitant, however, would know that the folding window is outfitted with strong and sturdy bolts and with fanciful hinges (see fig. 3.11). Two sections of the window fold outwards, together, while a third opens by turning away from those two. When entirely agape, most of the width of this side of the coretto would be revealed above the ledge. The panels could be easily maneuvered to manipulate the width of the opening, however, and the widow could be securely closed by two different bolts, one latching together the window’s flexible components and another securing the window panels to the coretto’s solid and stable framework.

The Coretto’s Operations of Secrecy

A less cynical or moralizing view than that typically offered to account for the coretto’s use (that this was a secret space for lovemaking or the hidden—almost sacrilegious—confines of an arrogant lord), better frames an understanding of the object’s historical function and effects and is more closely attuned to the mechanisms of secrecy and revelation enacted by it. The passage into the structure from unseen ground-floor rooms just beyond the chapel facilitated movement to and from the castle’s piano nobile through the adjoining tower’s embedded staircase. As this volume’s contribution from the late Henry Dietrich Fernández discusses, hidden staircases and secret passages were common features of Renaissance palaces and castles that permitted princes to operate unseen and to observe others unnoticed. Indeed, the staircase beyond the coretto was just one aspect of Torrechiara’s system of hidden passages; the studiolo had its own secret staircase, deceptively hidden behind the study’s intarsia paneling, but no doubt on occasion revealed, and utilized, to accentuate privileged access.68 The coretto thus allowed for unseen and dramatic entrances and appearances and alerted the chapel’s visitors to the prominence of its occupants. 67. The initials PM, moreover, are carved into the base of one of the vases represented on the upper part of the coretto. For Rossi peregrine traditions and imagery, see Gentile, “Un itinerario devozionale”; McCall, “Networks of Power,” 109–51. 68. The stairway is now enclosed, though it may have functioned as late as the eighteenth century because Ireneo Affò twice referred to this door and stairway: “una picciola scala a chiocciola” and “scaletta a chiocciola”; Affò, “Descrizione della celebre stanza di Torchiara,” fols. 188–90. See also, Quintavalle, I castelli del Parmense, 169; Roettgen, Italian Frescoes, 362. Oratories were placed between a room and

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FIGURE 3.11. Interior, Coretto of Torrechiara (fig. 3.1), 1460s, Milan, Castello Sforzesco, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Applicata. Photo by author, © Comune di Milano, all rights reserved.

The hidden door and staircase behind the coretto, moreover, allowed opportune escapes, for both convenience and protection. Such a barrier providing a potential escape route would have been exceptionally valuable in a time when assassinations took place inside churches, as the violent fates met by Pier Maria’s allies Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Giuliano de’ Medici, less than a year and a half apart in the late 1470s, both demonstrate.69 Though the coretto’s thin wood is hardly impenetrable, even a short delay against conspirators coming at the prince with weapons or brute narrow staircase in palaces owned by the Medici and Sassetti; Lillie, “Patronage of Villa Chapels and Oratories,” 29. 69. For violent threats against Pier Maria, from his own sons, see McCall, “Pier Maria’s Legacy,” 36–38. For assassinations in fifteenth-century Italy, see Villard, Du Bien Commun au Mal Nécessaire.

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force would have allowed Rossi to abscond to Torrechiara’s more secure environs. Strategic staircases like the one immediately behind San Nicomede and accessible from the coretto, moreover, usefully served signori in critical situations. Holed up in the Sacrestia delle Messe with Lorenzo de’ Medici and men loyal to the Medici following the violent attack on il Magnifico and his brother Giuliano, Sigismondo della Stuffa scaled a spiral staircase to reach a vantage from which to look out into the Duomo and determine whether it was safe to open the sacristy’s large bronze doors and to hurry the wounded Lorenzo to the nearby Palazzo Medici.70 As mentioned above, both the door and window of the coretto were outfitted with metal hinges and bolts, allowing the structure to be secured from within and further heightening the sense of enclosure and safety (see fig. 3.11). These two openings, by their very existence, indicate that the coretto was utilized not just to conceal, but to display and reveal. Likewise, the fact that the coretto’s door and window could only be maneuvered from the interior clearly demonstrates that appearances were intended to be manipulated principally from within. The ledge of the window facing the altar was undoubtedly used to assist the performance of the liturgy for the coretto’s inhabitants, standing or perhaps kneeling on a portable kneeler (prie-dieu or inginocchiatoio) or upon luxurious cushions (if by some means raised), as Rossi does in a portrait from a book of hours.71 Little visible evidence, in the form of remnants of textiles, hooks, or other fastenings, suggests how the coretto might have been outfitted, though it is probable that furnishings or expensive fabrics would have adorned the interior, as they did within the via segreta of Ercole d’Este’s stable cum chapel mentioned above. Such furnishings would have made this rather stark, undecorated space more comfortable for its occupants and more decorously lavish in the minds of Rossi’s subjects gazing within. Depending on the size of (possibly moveable) furnishings, those ensconced within could have knelt, stood, or sat. The thick interior plank a few inches above the ground on the south side may have served to support such an accessory set up near the window and ledge. Though the structure’s present wooden floor is not the original, a similar barrier separating the inhabitants from the chapel’s floor would have additionally provided comfort and warmth. When the prince remained within, the ledge with its window above allowed Rossi to participate in ecclesiastical functions while on display. The coretto—perhaps not coincidentally located to the side of the altar that early modern Christians associated with the elect—efficaciously framed a pious image of the signore for his subjects. Renaissance lords were keen to publicize their piety, a fundamental seignorial virtue that Rossi’s visibility within the coretto both advertised and amplified.72 The coretto’s door and window suggest that Rossi would have been seen, perhaps only glimpsed at an oblique angle or viewed by those closest to the altar, and indeed the insignia would have made the lord’s presence all the more emphatic. If original, the surmounting pyramid may have even served as something of a baldacchino or honorific canopy, further framing and highlighting the prince’s distinction, as would have splendid decoration within. Entrance or exit through the wooden door facing into the chapel, additionally, would have provided the opportunity for ritual processions into or from the coretto. As ecclesiastical spaces were both religious and social 70. Haines, Intarsias of the North Sacristy, 51–54; Martines, April Blood, 118. 71. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Smith Lesouëf 22, fol. 285v: Zanichelli, “Tra Devozione e Studio,” 110–18. 72. For a treatise celebrating and indeed publicizing the seignorial piety of one of Rossi’s contemporaries, Ercole d’Este, see Gundersheimer, Art and Life at the Court of Ercole.

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arenas in fifteenth-century Italy, moreover, it is not inconceivable that the coretto could have facilitated audiences with Rossi or other officials before or after religious ceremonies. Because the structure was at once separated from the chapel and the center of attention within it, further distinction would have been conferred upon those granted access to or perhaps the permission to approach the coretto. As I suggested above, the benefits of being seen conversing with the prince could be substantial. San Nicomede served the religious needs of various audiences, including but not limited to subjects, courtiers, clients, relatives, and prominent visitors. Thus, for Rossi, occupying the coretto located within the larger chapel might not be considered merely a private withdrawal, but rather a public or conspicuously visible exercise of status, sovereignty, and piety.73 As important and efficacious as the views into and framed by the coretto were, Pier Maria Rossi’s own position must also be considered. Situated within, Rossi could have heard and observed his subjects in the chapel, and the structure’s very presence in the room would have reminded them to be on their best behavior, that at any moment they may be watched by the prince or one of his representatives.74 A suggestive early modern parallel might be found in a fascinating eighteenth-century proposal for a network of interior cabinets and loges allowing a German ruler to surveil his fiscal officials surreptitiously and thus “instill great fear in the prince’s servants.”75 Closer to Rossi, an early-sixteenth-century Italian treatise recommended that the ideal cardinal’s palace be equipped with “concealed places [that] provide the opportunity to examine visitors with care,” whether through listening or viewing tubes or the grilled windows with which Rossi’s ally Pope Paul II had outfitted his audience chamber.76 Pier Maria too would have been the object of his subjects’ gazes, particularly when the coretto’s window was opened. Perhaps the Rossi, like the Gonzaga just across the Po, had in their library Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars). If so, Pier Maria might have been mindful of Augustus’s lesson to avoid Julius Caesar’s bad reputation among the Romans for being seen by them answering correspondence and appearing disinterested rather than visibly enjoying public games.77 On display, Rossi would have had to be cognizant of his subjects’ expectations of their lord and the need to present them with an image of a suitably seignorial ruler, magnificent and pious, courtly and commanding. From within, moreover, the coretto provided Pier Maria a privileged perspective from which to behold the adjacent altar and participate in the mass. Fifteenth-century signori sponsored Corpus Christi confraternities and processions as a means to associate their power and even person with the charisma of the Eucharist, and such a correlation or comparison may have been at least suggested here for Rossi’s subjects.78 This honored and immediate point of view for the liturgy and Eucharistic ritual would have bolstered Rossi’s prestige

73. Particularly useful for me, in wider contexts, have been Stewart, “Early Modern Closet”; and Campbell, Cabinet of Eros. 74. Ettore Modigliani referred to the coretto as a “specie di garitta” (“a type of sentry-box”) in a letter to Corrado Ricci of 7 January 1931; Balestri, Il colore di Milano, 357. 75. Wakefield, Disordered Police State, 12–16. 76. Weil-Garris and D’Amico, “Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace,” 82–83. For Rossi and Paul II, see Somaini, “Una storia spezzata,” 170–83. 77. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, 1:221–23. For the Gonzaga and Suetonius, see Signorini, Opus hoc tenue, 308–13; Campbell, “Mantegna’s Triumph,” 92–95. Much work remains to be done to reconstruct the library of Pier Maria Rossi, though by far the most useful source is Tissoni Benvenuti, “Libri e letterati nelle piccole corti padane.” 78. See, for example, Rubin, Corpus Christi; Manca, Art of Ercole de’ Roberti, 64–72; Moffitt, Painterly Perspective and Piety.

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and piety. Because visual access to the elevation was a culminating moment of Christian sacred experience in early modern Europe, this exceptional position provided a direct and privileged view of the revelation of one of Christianity’s fundamental mysteries. In yet another way, secrets were enacted by the coretto. Operations of vision and visibility were crucial to the production of secrecy and the function of Torrechiara’s coretto, though other sensations and phenomena, sound for instance, would have been equally efficacious. Space is produced not only by architectural frames and boundaries, but by words, movements, and actions, and by the energies, bodies, gestures, and sounds deployed within it.79 Not only views into, but also sounds from within the coretto reinforced the sense of a secret, somewhat hidden or occluded interior presence and may have called attention to the fact that visitors here, as ever within a Renaissance court, were potentially surveilled.80 Traces of the prince inside could certainly be heard in the relatively small chapel, perhaps surprising visitors, further piquing their curiosity about this strange assemblage, and drawing worshipers and subjects to it, thus amplifying the charisma of the coretto and its (real or imagined) inhabitants. Indeed, it is not difficult to envision the ways such a structure could produce astonishment and wonder, particularly for uninitiated viewers who witnessed the window or door dramatically swing open for the first time, emerging from the expertly crafted and only seemingly integral façade, and spectacularly revealing their lord within. Other sounds—singing, for example—emerging from the enclosed space may have likewise surprised or delighted worshipers in the chapel. Whispers and other noises muffled by the structure itself or by interior textiles intimated a presence and perpetuated the sense that Rossi was present. One could even imagine something like a body double deployed here, producing sounds to be heard by the count’s subjects and palpably intensifying the ever-present sense of seignorial surveillance. Secrecy and seignorial presence, thus, could have been performed as a means to direct (or misdirect) the imagination of Rossi’s subjects, including those from whom the revelation of the secret was delayed or entirely denied. The coretto of Torrechiara served as a carefully designed social framing device; it bolstered and visualized the authority of its occupants. To be sure, the coretto could have encouraged pious concentration, yet by proclaiming that certain individuals were permitted to listen to religious functions without being seen, if they so desired, the structure simultaneously distinguished one class of devotee from another. Arousing the sense that the signore might be within, the coretto resolutely marked Rossi’s presence when he was hidden or even absent. More than just hiding and separating its residents from the chapel’s other worshipers, the imposing yet intimate coretto powerfully displayed and fashioned piety and social hierarchy. The occupants themselves, moreover, would have been made emphatically aware of their own status and privilege by the coretto. They would have no doubt derived pleasure from increased recognition, and from the many visitors who craned their necks and positioned themselves for better views into the coretto and, more importantly, for better views of its inhabitants. Meanings and insinuations proliferated through the coretto. The effects produced by this space undermine any search for a singular reading of the furnishing and instead encourage the imagination of an array of meanings for both Rossi and his court. The coretto allowed, indeed generated, multiple 79. Lefebvre, Production of Space; Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 7; Smith, Key of Green. 80. For a recent interpretation of seignorial surveillance in contemporary Urbino, see Webb, “All is not fun and games.”

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levels and plays of access, secrecy, and display for visitors to Torrechiara, to help fashion Rossi’s magnificent piety. These plays, however, required revelation. In many ways Torrechiara’s coretto seems emblematic of the economies of access of fifteenth-century seignorial space in general: both were assiduously structured to mediate admittance and passage for various classes of subjects or viewers. The coretto and its decoration were not inherently private or personal, but rather intricately manufactured and made intimate through the activation of a rhetoric of secrecy, thus creating a dynastic, social, and charismatic space that bolstered Rossi’s seignorial authority.

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102 Timothy McCall Gentile, Marco. “Un itinerario devozionale e i suoi orizzonti politici: Pietro Rossi pellegrino a Compostella.” Compostella: Rivista del centro italiano di studi compostellani 26 (1999): 5–13. ———. “Alla Periferia di uno Stato: Il Quattrocento.” In Storia di Parma. Vol. 3, Parma medievale: Poteri e istituzioni, edited by Roberto Greci, 213–59. Parma: Monte Università Parma Editore, 2010. ———. Terra e poteri: Parma e il Parmense nel ducato visconteo all’inizio del quattrocento. Milan: Unicopli, 2001. Ghirardini, Lino Lionello. Presente e passato a Torrechiara. Parma: UGESO, 1983. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Gundersheimer, Werner, ed. Art and Life at the court of Ercole I d’Este: The De triumphis religionis of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1972. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Haines, Margaret. “The Intarsias of the North Sacristy of the Duomo in Florence.” PhD thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute, 1975. ———. The “Sacrestia delle Messe” of the Florentine Cathedral. Florence: Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, 1983. Haskell, Francis. “Botticelli, Fascism and Burlington House—The ‘Italian Exhibition’ of 1930.” Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 462–72. Holthaus, Bettina. “La camera d’oro del castello di Torrechiara: Gli affreschi delle pareti e la ricostruzione dello studio.” Aurea Parma 1 (1991): 3–17. Kent, F. W. “Palaces, Politics and Society in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” I Tatti Studies 2 (1987): 41–70. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991. Legni Sacri e Preziosi: Scultura Lignea in Valtellina e Valchiavenna tra Gotico e Rinascimento. Milan: Silvana, 2005. Liebenwein, Wolfgang. Studiolo: Storia e tipologia di uno spazio culturale. Translated by Alessandro Califano. Modena: Panini, 1988. Lillie, Amanda. “The Patronage of Villa Chapels and Oratories near Florence: A Typology of Private Religion.” In With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage1434–1530, edited by Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright, 19–46. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1998. Lochrie, Karma. Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Long, Pamela O. Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Manca, Joseph. The Art of Ercole de’ Roberti. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Marina, Areli. The Italian Piazza Transformed: Parma in the Communal Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. Martines, Lauro. April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Massumi, Brian. “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear.” In The Politics of Everyday Fear, edited by Brian Massumi, 3–38. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Matarrese, Tina. “Il mito di Ercole a Ferrara nel Quattrocento tra letteratura e arti figurative.” In L’ideale classico a Ferrara e in Italia nel Rinascimento, edited Patrizia Castelli, 191–202. Florence: Olschki, 1998. McCall, Timothy. “Networks of Power: The Art Patronage of Pier Maria Rossi of Parma.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2005. ———. “Pier Maria’s Legacy: (Il)legitimacy, Inheritance, and Rule of Parma’s Rossi Dynasty.” In Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage, edited by Katherine McIver, 33–54. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. ———. “‘Traffic in Mistresses’: Sexualized Bodies and Systems of Exchange in the Early Modern Court.” In Sex Acts: Practice, Performance, Perversion, and Punishment in Early Modern Italy, edited by Allison Levy, 193–212. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. ———. “Visual Imagery and Historical Invisibility: Antonia Torelli, Her Husband, and His Mistress in FifteenthCentury Parma.” Renaissance Studies 23 (2009): 269–87.

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Michelangelo’s Open Secrets Maria Ruvoldt

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ichelangelo’s infatuation with the young Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, was no secret. In December of 1532, the fifty-seven-year-old artist found himself besotted with the young man, who was probably in his teens, and quite possibly as young as twelve.1 A flurry of letters passed between them, quickly followed by the gift of a series of highly finished drawings (figs. 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3), including the Rape of Ganymede, in which the god Zeus, in the form of an eagle, abducts the young man whose physical beauty he cannot resist, the Punishment of Tityus, showing the lustful Titan eternally punished for his attempted rape of Latona, and the Fall of Phaeton, the tragic story of Apollo’s son who overreached—daring to drive his father’s chariot, he lost control and lost his life.2 Stories of divine lust and the consequences of human hubris, the drawings are narrative reflections on the attractions and dangers of desire. They were the vivid visual expression of an attachment articulated in equally effusive terms in the letters and poems that date from the same period. The creative results of Michelangelo’s relationship with Cavalieri have long been subjects of study in art history and literature. This essay seeks to explore the mechanics of their exchange, the methods that Michelangelo employed to protect the secrecy of his infatuation from some while simultaneously advertising it to a select group of friends and confidants. It will demonstrate that Michelangelo’s methods, although motivated by practical concerns, served several functions: they defined the relationship as respectable, reinforced bonds of friendship and intimacy within Michelangelo’s own circle, and allowed Michelangelo control over his inventions and communications at a time when he himself had become a desirable commodity. When Michelangelo met Cavalieri, he was at an exceptionally low period in his life, both professionally and personally. Between 1532 and 1534, he was not quite settled in either Florence or Rome, moving between both cities as a consequence of his professional obligations and, more significantly, 1. For Michelangelo and Cavalieri, see Kirschenbaum, “Reflections on Michelangelo’s Drawings”; Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso de’ Cavalieri; Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study; and Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance, 17–62. Precisely how young Cavalieri was when the two met is a matter of some debate, but he was surely no older than nineteen and quite possibly as young as twelve. For Cavalieri’s birthdate, see Panofsky-Soergel, “Postscriptum to Tommaso Cavalieri.” 2. Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo, 1:118. A letter from Cavalieri demonstrates that he was in possession of the Phaeton, Tityus, and Ganymede compositions in September 1533. See Carteggio, 4:49. The literature on Michelangelo’s “gift” or “presentation drawings” is vast. Wallace, “Studies in Michelangelo’s Finished Drawings,” offers the term “gift drawing” as an alternative to the conventional “presentation drawing” coined by Johannes Wilde. See Popham and Wilde, Italian Drawings, nos. 423–24, 428–31. See also Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings, chap. 10, “The Making of Presents”; Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence; Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna”; and Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream.

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FIGURE 4.1: Copy after Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Rape of Ganymede (detail), ca. 1533, black chalk on paper, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Art Museum, Gifts for Special Uses Fund, 1955.75. Photo: Alan Macintyre/Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

of his political choices during the failed Florentine Republic of 1527 to 1530.3 His pressing artistic commitments included the unfinished tomb of Julius II in Rome, commissioned by the della Rovere pope in 1505 and practically stalled from its inception. Under pressure from Julius’s heirs, who accused him of embezzlement, and after much negotiation, he had signed a fourth contract for the project in April 1532, reducing the size and scope of the monument and moving its location from St. Peter’s to the less prominent site of San Pietro in Vincoli.4 His honor insulted, his ambitions for the project thwarted, Michelangelo longed to be “free of this obligation,” complaining that he had “aged twenty years and lost twenty pounds.”5 In Florence, he was responsible for two concurrent projects at the Medici church of San Lorenzo: the Laurentian Library and the family funerary chapel in the 3. For Michelangelo’s movements between 1532 and 1534, see Wallace, “‘Nothing Else Happening.’” For a thorough analysis of Michelangelo’s political beliefs, see Spini, “Politicità di Michelangelo.” 4. For a summary of the history of the Julius tomb project, see De Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 4: The Tomb of Julius II. 5. In a letter to Sebastiano, Michelangelo uses the word “disobbrigarsi” as he searches for a solution to the tomb problem; Carteggio, 3:323. For the language of enslavement and obligation in Michelangelo’s letters, especially as relates to the tomb project, see Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing. For “son venti anni e venti libbre invechiato e diminuito,” see Carteggio, 4:14–15, translation in Ramsden, Letters, 1:195.

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FIGURE 4.2: Michelangelo, The Punishment of Tityus, ca. 1533, black chalk on paper, Windsor, The Royal Collection. Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012.

New Sacristy.6 He had ceased his work at San Lorenzo in the wake of the Medici expulsion from Florence in 1527, incurring the ire of Pope Clement VII and his nephew Alessandro de’ Medici, who was installed as duke of Florence in 1532. Perhaps due to his political sympathies, Michelangelo never recovered his enthusiasm for this dynastic complex, returning to work reluctantly in 1532, and finally abandoning San Lorenzo altogether when he quit Florence for good in 1534. In addition to these professional challenges, Michelangelo had suffered the deaths of his beloved brother, Buonarroto, in 1528, his nephew, Buonarroto’s young son Simone, in 1529, and his father, Lodovico, in 1531. Michelangelo found himself responsible for the care of Buonarroto’s two surviving children and the maintenance of the extended Buonarroti clan as its new patriarch. It was on a visit to Rome in the winter of 1532 that Michelangelo met Cavalieri. Despite the fame their relationship now enjoys, its origins are somewhat obscure. Michelangelo was likely introduced to Cavalieri by Pier Antonio Cecchini, a fellow Florentine sculptor who was attached to the household of Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi.7 Ridolfi, the grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent through his mother, Contessina de’ Medici, and thus a cousin of Clement VII, was a pillar of the 6. Michelangelo had won the contract for the façade of San Lorenzo in 1516, but the commission was canceled in 1520 after the untimely deaths of Giuliano de’ Medici Duke of Nemours and Lorenzo de’ Medici Duke of Urbino. From 1520, Michelangelo’s focus at San Lorenzo was the family funerary chapel in the New Sacristy and the Laurentian Library, commissioned in 1520 and 1523, respectively. For Michelangelo’s work at San Lorenzo, see Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo. 7. For Cecchini as the likely catalyst of the introduction, see Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, 14. Analyzing the admittedly sparse evidence, Frommel concludes that “Everything points to Michelangelo and Cavalieri meeting in the Ridolfi circle”; ibid., 72. In the first surviving letter between Cecchini and Michelangelo, Cecchini signs himself “Vostro minor servitore Pietrantonio, familiar di monsignor reverendissimo de’ Ridolfi”; Carteggio, 3:414. For the alternative theory that Bartolomeo Angelini introduced Michelangelo to Cavalieri, see Ramsden, Letters, 1:298–99. See also Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream, 76.

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FIGURE 4.3: Michelangelo, The Fall of Phaeton, ca. 1533, black chalk on paper, Windsor, The Royal Collection. Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012.

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Florentine community in Rome, a patron of artists and scholars, and a passionate collector of books and manuscripts.8 In spite of his Medicean lineage, he became an ardent Republican after the Medici expulsion in 1527 and gathered a community of sympathizers around him.9 Michelangelo was drawn to Ridolfi’s circle by familial connection and political inclination, and found three of his closest associates in Rome—Cecchini, the political theorist and writer Donato Giannotti, and Ascanio Condivi, his future biographer—in Ridolfi’s household.10 In an undated letter, Cecchini regaled Michelangelo with stories of the delightful time he had been having with a group of young men (“quantità di giovani”).11 Cecchini reported that he had inquired after the health of “the magnificent Tommaso” de’ Cavalieri, who had apparently been ill, and had learned that he was much improved.12 He urged Michelangelo to come out for “a few laughs,” assuring him that “no one needs to know about it.”13 Cecchini’s affectionate invitation to Michelangelo is one example of many in which the artist’s friends suggested social gatherings to lift his spirits, and implies that Cecchini was aiming to broaden Michelangelo’s acquaintance in Rome.14 Cecchini promised that Michelangelo would be able “to see in fact that which I’ve told you so many times in words.”15 Dating the letter to late 1532 or early 1533, Christoph Frommel interprets it as Cecchini’s attempt to arrange the first meeting between Michelangelo and Cavalieri; Cecchini wished to let Michelangelo see for himself the magnificent young man he had already told him so much about.16 Frommel’s reading is supported by the first documented letter that Cavalieri sent to the artist on 1 January 1533, in which he acknowledges that Cecchini had praised him to Michelangelo before they met, and refers to a recent illness.17 Reportedly an “incomparable beauty,” cultivated, and charming, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri belonged to a noble Roman family whose origins in the city can be traced to the eleventh century.18 His family palazzo was located not far from Michelangelo’s Roman residence in Macel de’

8. For Niccolò Ridolfi, see Ridolfi, “La Biblioteca del Cardinale Niccolò Ridolfi”; Starn, Donato Giannotti, 48–56; Byatt, “‘Una suprema magnificenza’”; Costa, Michelangelo alle Corti, 13–60; and Muratore, La biblioteca del cardinale Niccolò Ridolfi. 9. For the complicated familial and political connections linking Ridolfi, Cardinal Salviati, Filippo Strozzi, and the other leading Florentine aristocratic fuorusciti in Rome, see Costa, Michelangelo alle corti, 15–19. For Ridolfi’s political alliances, both pro- and antiMedicean, see Starn, Donato Giannotti, 48–52; and Costa, Michelangelo alle corti, 13–23. 10. For Donato Giannotti, see Giannotti, Dialogi; Starn, Donato Giannotti; and Costa, Michelangelo alle corti, 61–110. For Ascanio Condivi, see Hirst, “Michelangelo and His First Biographers,” esp. 70–71; and Hirst, “Introduction,” in Condivi, Vita, I–XX, esp. II–V. 11. Carteggio, 4:69. The letter itself is undated, but Frey, Dichtungen, 527, dates it to 1535, long after Michelangelo’s first documented contact with Cavalieri, based on his identification of “quello de’ Peruschi” as Baldassare Peruzzi. Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, 4:69, accept Frey’s dating without comment. Frommel instead proposes a date in late 1532/early 1533, reasoning that someone as prominent as Baldassare Peruzzi would not be referred to in this fashion, and observing that Sebastiano had referred to Peruzzi in a letter to Michelangelo of 1520 as “Baldassare.” Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso de’Cavalieri, 15 and 113n21. 12. “magnificho meser Tomao”; Carteggio, 4:69. 13. Ibid. 14. See for example Carteggio, 3:157 and 4:142. 15. Carteggio, 4:69. 16. Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, 15–18. 17. Carteggio, 3:445. 18. Varchi describes Cavalieri as an “incomparable beauty” in his discourse to the Accademia Fiorentina on the sonnets in 1547; Varchi, Due Lezzioni, 47. This is a notable instance of the more public reception of the “private” relationship between Michelangelo and Cavalieri, but it is, significantly, some dozen years or more after they first met. For the Cavalieri family and their history in Rome, see Kirkendale, Emilio de’ Cavalieri, 13–27; and Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream, 76–77.

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Corvi, and was a short distance from the palace of Cardinal Ridolfi near the northern edge of Piazza Navona.19 Later in life, Cavalieri would fulfill the promise of his noble roots, occupying significant public offices in Rome, including that responsible for construction on the Campidoglio. He assembled a collection of ancient sculpture that attracted the attention of Ulisse Aldrovandi as early as 1549 and continued to grace the Cavalieri palazzo at least until the eighteenth century.20 Perhaps with Michelangelo’s guidance, Cavalieri also formed an important collection of contemporary drawings and prints, of which drawings by Michelangelo were the crowning glory.21 Cavalieri’s artistic inclinations and aristocratic pedigree surely appealed to Michelangelo as much as his physical beauty, and the two men remained close until the very end of Michelangelo’s life, when Cavalieri stood vigil at his deathbed.22 The earliest secure communications between the two are the letters at the end of December 1532 and the very beginning of January 1533. Michelangelo wrote first, a letter that does not survive, and then wrote again, apologizing for his audacity at being the “first to move.”23 Unlike other letter writers of his day, Michelangelo did not prepare his extensive correspondence with the aim of future publication. Although a remarkable number of letters both from and to him survive, they are, as William E. Wallace has pointed out, often simply about the mundane details of everyday life, concerns about negotiating contracts, payment of workers, managing his household finances, and family matters, offering little insight into Michelangelo’s interior life or philosophical reflections on his practice as an artist.24 But his letters to Cavalieri are exceptional in his correspondence, elevated in tone and filled with emotional language such as Michelangelo’s declaration that Cavalieri was “the light of our century, unique in the world,” and his pledge that he could sooner “forget the food…that nourishes my body than forget the name [of Tommaso] who nourishes body and soul.”25 With all that was on Michelangelo’s mind in late 1532, it is somewhat surprising to read the effusive language of his letters to Cavalieri. The tone of the letters speaks not only to an intense emotional connection, a state of infatuation, but also to an almost desperate desire to find meaning in bleak times. Michelangelo closes the first draft of his letter to Cavalieri by marveling: “there is no more cause for wonder that Rome should produce men who are divine, than that God should perform miracles,” and later declares that Cavalieri fills his body and soul “with such sweetness, that I feel neither sorrow nor fear of death.”26 Cavalieri appears to have been a promise of hope in the middle of a very dark season in Michelangelo’s life. 19. For the location of the Cavalieri family palazzo, no longer extant, see Kirkendale, Emilio de’ Cavalieri, 16. For Cardinal Ridolfi’s palace adjacent to the church of Sant’Apollinare, which he inhabited from 1529, see Byatt, “‘Una suprema magnificenza.’” 20. For Cavalieri’s public service, see Kirkendale, Emilio de’ Cavalieri, 52. For Aldrovandi’s response to the collection see ibid., 46. See also Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream, 78, with further references. 21. See Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream, 78, with further references, and also Sickel, “Die Sammlung des Tommaso de’ Cavalieri.” 22. For Michelangelo’s aristocratic aspirations, see Wallace, “Michael Angelus.” For Cavalieri at Michelangelo’s deathbed, see Carteggio Indiretto, 2:172. See also Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo, 4:1834. 23. Carteggio, 3:443–44. In this undated letter, presumably composed at the end of December 1532, Michelangelo refers to “my first letter” (“la prima mia”), which does not survive. In his letter of 1 January 1533 to Michelangelo, Cavalieri refers to “one of your letters” (“una delle vostre lettere”), which he had already received; Carteggio, 3:445. 24. Wallace, “Greatest Ass in the World.” See also Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing, 4. 25. Carteggio, 3:443, 4:26. 26. Carteggio, 3:444, 4:26.

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Despite Michelangelo’s passionate language and copious artistic output for Cavalieri, his sixteenth-century biographers insisted on the purely spiritual nature of the attachment. Giorgio Vasari declared that Michelangelo’s love for human beauty was never tainted by “lascivious or disgraceful thoughts,” and Ascanio Condivi likewise reported that the artist was free of “any unseemly or unbridled desire.”27 Modern scholars including James Saslow have pointed out that there was much at stake in defining Michelangelo’s sexuality, in drawing a clear line between passionate but chaste male friendship and illegal sexual activity.28 Michelangelo likewise insisted on the chasteness of his love in his poetry, and condemned the “evil, cruel, and stupid rabble” that failed to understand his “virtuous desire.”29 Whether or not we accept the notion that the attraction was purely spiritual, it must be said that Michelangelo’s love for Cavalieri, however deeply felt, was nevertheless conventional within the context of Petrarchan-infused Neoplatonism, which identified human beauty as a reflection of divine beauty and theorized that physical desire could initiate spiritual transcendence. As formulated by Marsilio Ficino, this theory of ideal love could be enacted through male friendship, often between an older, more experienced man and a beautiful youth who inspired his devotion. This model of eroticized friendship not only mirrored ancient practices, but also replicated the pattern of typical male homosexual relations in Florentine society.30 In 1527, for example, a few years before Michelangelo’s first encounter with Cavalieri, Benedetto Varchi, the Tuscan poet and future academician—and future commentator on Michelangelo’s poems for Cavalieri—met and promptly fell in love with the ten-year-old Lorenzo Lenzi, the son of a Florentine patrician and nephew of Cardinal Niccolò Gaddi.31 Varchi’s infatuation endured for at least sixteen years, and generated a series of Petrarchan love poems inspired by Lenzi. Their relationship is memorialized in a portrait by Bronzino of the young Lenzi holding an open book with poems by Petrarch and Varchi on facing pages.32 Cavalieri likewise served as a youthful muse to the much older Michelangelo, inspiring both visual and verbal expressions of devotion in the drawings and poems that Michelangelo produced for him. The attachment to Cavalieri was not the first such that Michelangelo experienced, although it would become by far the most significant of his life. In the early 1520s, he became close to Gherardo Perini, with whom he exchanged letters and to whom he gave a group of drawings of ideal heads, which Vasari christened the teste divine.33 Around the time he met Cavalieri, Michelangelo also developed friendships with several young Florentine men, including Febo di Poggio, for whom he composed verses and whom he promised to serve “with faith and with love, more than any other friend you have in this world,” a certain “Simone,” who addressed him as “my most beloved Michelangelo,” and, apologizing for unknown offenses, confessed to be “tormented 27. Vasari, Le vite di Michelangelo, 7:271–72; Condivi, Vita, 62. 28. Saslow, “‘Veil of Ice between My Heart and the Fire.’” 29. Poetry of Michelangelo, 195. 30. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships. See also Barkan, Transuming Passion; and Saslow, “‘Veil of Ice between My Heart and the Fire.’” 31. Busini, La vita di Benedetto Varchi; Pirotti, Benedetto Varchi; Cecchi, “‘Famosi Frondi du cui santi honori…’”; and Strehlke, Pontormo, 100–103. 32. See Strehlke, Pontormo, 100–103. 33. For the letters, see Carteggio, 2:342–43, 352–53. For the drawings, see Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings, 107–9. See also Schumacher, Michelangelos Teste Divine.

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by having lost you,” and Andrea Quaratesi, almost thirty years his junior.34 Quaratesi and the artist exchanged affectionate letters and gifts of food, and the young man repeatedly professed to love Michelangelo “like a father.”35 But Quaratesi’s promise that “I will come to dine tonight, even if I have to crawl to you on all fours,” suggests something more than filial devotion.36 More telling than these hints at a connection is the fact that Quaratesi is the subject of a portrait by the artist, a spectacular drawing in the British Museum.37 It is the only surviving portrait by Michelangelo, one of only two documented portraits by the artist. The other was a portrait of Cavalieri, now lost, described by Vasari as a half-length depiction of the young man in antique dress, holding a medal or a portrait in his hand.38 Michelangelo’s first, lost letter to Cavalieri was apparently accompanied by the gift of two drawings, generally identified as Ganymede and Tityus.39 In his reply, Cavalieri refers to two drawings (“doi vostri desegni”) that had been delivered to him by Pier Antonio Cecchini and had occupied him for hours.40 Both the subject matter and the extremely fine execution of the drawings account for Cavalieri’s absorption in them. Michelangelo chose a pair of mythological subjects as his first offering to Cavalieri, the well-known story of Ganymede and the more obscure myth of Tityus. Ganymede, variously identified as a prince of Troy or as a simple shepherd, was an exceptionally beautiful young man who caught the eye of Zeus.41 Overcome by desire, the god, in the form of an eagle, swept Ganymede away to Olympus to be his cupbearer and, according to some, his lover. Frequently represented since antiquity and allegorized in medieval sources as a Christian metaphor for divine love, Ganymede would have been instantly recognizable to Cavalieri. Tityus, on the other hand, would have presented more of a challenge. Although his story is told in a number of familiar sources including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tityus, the son of Zeus and Gaia, rarely appears in the visual arts.42 Having attempted to rape Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, Tityus was sentenced to have his perpetually regenerating liver devoured by a vulture. In Michelangelo’s rendering, the predatory bird is the twin of Ganymede’s eagle, making it possible to read Tityus as Prometheus, the Titan who brought fire to humans and who endured the same punishment as Tityus, but administered by an eagle.43 Whether Cavalieri identified Tityus on his

34. For the letters between Michelangelo and Febo di Poggio, see Carteggio, 4:66–68. For the letter signed “Simoni suo carissimo,” see Carteggio, 4:65. For the basic outlines of the relationship between Michelangelo and Andrea Quaratesi (1512–1585), see Wilde, Italian Drawings, 96–97. See also Barkan, Michelangelo, 197–99. 35. Carteggio, 3:292, 314, 431. 36. Carteggio, 3:431. 37. See Chapman, Michelangelo Drawings, 211. 38. Vasari, Le vite di Michelangelo, 3:775. A seventeenth-century artist viewed the Cavalieri portrait in the Farnese collection and described it as “vestito all’antica, e in mano tiene un ritratto, o medaglia, che si sia/sbarbato, e in somma da spaurire ogni gagliardo ingegno”; see Wilde, Italian Drawings, 97. 39. Scholarly consensus identifies the two first drawings as Ganymede and Tityus. Cavalieri records his receipt of the Phaeton in a letter of 6 September 1533, and reports that a number of people have requested to see it, the Ganymede, and the Tityus; Carteggio, 4:49. 40. Carteggio, 3:445. 41. For the literary history of Ganymede from antiquity to the Renaissance, see Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance; and Marongiu, Il Mito di Ganimede, 9–17. 42. See Panofsky, “Neoplatonic Movement.” 43. For the story of Prometheus and its history, see Raggio, “Myth of Prometheus.”

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own or with Michelangelo’s help is impossible to know, but some months after receiving the drawings, he referred to them in a letter as “Tityus and Ganymede.”44 Together, these two subjects can be read as a Neoplatonic commentary on the alternate paths of desire, as Erwin Panofsky concluded; Ganymede’s transport on the wings of Zeus signifies the transformative power of divine love, in which the soul is released from the body to commune with the divine, while Tityus’s physical torment, brought on by his uncontrollable lust, represents both the agony of love and the dangers inherent in pursuing the satisfaction of physical desire.45 Having spent part of his youth in the company of Marsilio Ficino, Michelangelo continued to embrace a Ficinian model of Neoplatonic love, which posited that sexual desire was the necessary catalyst of love, but must be suppressed for the lover to progress to his true goal—a transcendent experience of the divine. In his poetry, Michelangelo endorsed the doctrine of ascent through love and emphasized the incompatibility of spiritual elevation and the fulfillment of physical desire—themes that are articulated in the pairing of Ganymede and Tityus. The pairing of these subjects to elicit a Neoplatonic interpretation may have been intended to temper a purely homoerotic reading of Ganymede. Despite its potential as an allegory of spiritual transcendence, the myth nevertheless is the story of an older man’s desire for a beautiful youth, a model of male homosexual relations that was as pertinent in sixteenth-century Italy as it was in ancient Greece, and was particularly pointed as an analogue for Michelangelo and Cavalieri. Even Plato, who proposed a spiritual interpretation of the myth in his Phaedrus, had suggested that the tale had been invented by the men of Crete as license for the practice of pederasty.46 The figure of Ganymede as an object of homosexual desire had popular currency in the Renaissance as well, as James Saslow has amply demonstrated.47 Michelangelo’s choice of subjects was surely meant to appeal to Cavalieri on several levels. They are tales of passion, both fulfilled and thwarted, and as such send a clear message about the nature of Michelangelo’s feelings for Cavalieri. But they admit many interpretations. As Leonard Barkan has argued, the Neoplatonic theory of the paths of amor sacro and amor profano implied by the pairing assimilates the drawings to the moralizing traditions of Hercules at the Crossroads and the Judgment of Paris, presenting Cavalieri with a lesson about virtue and vice appropriate for a young man of his age and social position.48 Cavalieri may have been responding to that aspect of the drawings when he suggested that Michelangelo’s affection for him sprung from Cavalieri’s own love of virtue: “I think, in fact I am certain that the affection you bear me is because of this, that you, being extremely virtuous, or rather virtue itself, are compelled to love those who follow and love virtue, among whom I, according to my abilities, yield to few.”49 The mythological subjects must also relate to Cavalieri’s taste for classical antiquity; Henry Thode and Johannes Wilde each identified possible visual sources for the figure of Tityus in engraved gems and monumental

44. Carteggio, 4:49. 45. Panofsky, “Neoplatonic Movement.” For the Neoplatonic theory of love as a form of furor, and the alternate paths of amor sacro and amor profano, see Ficino, El libro dell’amore. 46. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance, 28. 47. Ibid. 48. Barkan, Transuming Passion, 84. 49. Carteggio, 3:445.

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sculpture, respectively.50 Both the moralizing interpretation and the erudite classical references would have provoked the “hours [of] contemplation” Cavalieri devoted to the drawings, and would have been flattering references to his intellect and education. The multiple levels of reading that the drawings invite provide a veil of respectability to conceal what might otherwise be too explicit an expression of desire. For his third subject, Michelangelo chose another familiar Ovidian tale that would provide a thematic complement to his prior gifts: the Fall of Phaeton.51 Informed by his mother, Clymene, that he was the son of Apollo, Phaeton sought proof of his paternity by requesting a favor of the god. Told he could have anything he wished, the daring youth asked to drive the sun god’s chariot across the sky. Apollo feared disaster and begged the boy to choose another prize, but Phaeton would not be dissuaded and boldly took the reins. His weaker hand could not control his father’s horses and he soon scorched the earth, trailing fire and havoc in his wake. Zeus was forced to act, hurling a thunderbolt to strike Phaeton and his chariot from the sky, whence they fell into the river Eridanus. Phaeton’s sisters the Heliades, inconsolable in their grief, were transformed into poplars. His kinsman Cygnus was likewise overcome and was turned into a swan. Michelangelo collapsed this complicated narrative into a single vertically oriented scene, commencing at the top where Zeus unleashes his thunderbolt, and moving through the fatal fall of Phaeton and his chariot to the group of mourners and the river god below.52 The Phaeton is unique among the drawings for Cavalieri because three autograph versions survive, two of which include inscriptions in Michelangelo’s hand. The version now in London (fig. 4.4) bears a brief message from the artist to Cavalieri: “Messer Tommaso, if this sketch does not please you, tell Urbino so that I may have time to do another tomorrow evening, as I promised you, and if it pleases you and you want me to finish it send it back to me.”53 Although the sequence of the drawings is not documented, the version at Windsor (see fig. 4.3) would seem to be the final composition, indicating that Cavalieri indeed wished to see something different.54 It is the most finished of the group and the only drawing that has no accompanying text. Like the Phaeton itself, Michelangelo’s first surviving letter to Cavalieri exists in no fewer than three drafts, as the artist reworked his language and perfected his “presumptuous” approach to the young nobleman.55 It reflects the pains that Michelangelo went to in order to express himself, wary of overreaching, but eager to convey the depth of his feelings. Both Michelangelo’s language and his orthography are painstaking in the letters to Cavalieri, testifying to his anxiety about making a suitable presentation.56 50. Thode, Michelangelo, 2:357; Popham and Wilde, Italian Drawings, 253. For the suggestion that the Tityus was inspired by the Fallen Giant, found in Rome in 1514 and part of the Farnese Collection, presently in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, see Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream, 114. 51. Precisely when Cavalieri received the Phaeton drawings is unknown, although his letter of 6 September 1533 provides a terminus ante quem for their reception. The inscription on the London sheet indicates that it was executed when Michelangelo was still in Rome, while Cavalieri’s letter suggests that the Windsor sheet was sent to him from Florence. 52. For the Phaeton myth, see Marongiu, Currus auriga paterni. 53. Carteggio, 4:12. 54. See Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream, 131–35, with further bibliography. 55. Carteggio, 3:443–44; 4:1–2, 3. 56. For Michelangelo’s penmanship, see Bardeschi Ciulich, Costanza ed evoluzione nella scrittura di Michelangelo, 48. See also Bardeschi Ciulich and Ragionieri, Michelangelo: Grafia e biografia.

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FIGURE 4.4: Michelangelo, The Fall of Phaeton, ca. 1533, black chalk on paper, London, The British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

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Michelangelo’s first draft of the letter urges Cavalieri to “read the heart and not the letter, since ‘the pen cannot keep pace with my true will.’”57 The quote is from Petrarch’s Canzone XXIII, “Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade,” a poem that describes the transformative effects of the poet’s first encounter with his beloved, Laura.58 Throughout the poem, Petrarch uses imagery drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, invoking the myths of Phaeton and Ganymede, among others, to cast his experience of love as a personal metamorphosis, alternately painful and exalting. Using the quote, Michelangelo simultaneously references the Ovidian themes of the drawings and signals that Cavalieri has wrought the same changes in him that Laura provoked in Petrarch. But Michelangelo omitted the Petrarchan reference in his subsequent drafts of the letter, substituting an enigmatic postscript: “it would be permissible to name to the one receiving them the things that a man gives, but out of respect, it will not be done here.”59 Characteristic of Michelangelo’s indirect and allusive manner—what his biographer Giorgio Vasari called his “masked and ambiguous” speech—this much-interpreted passage cannot refer, as is so often assumed, to the first two drawings, which Cavalieri had already received and acknowledged.60 It may relate to another drawing or drawings sent with this letter, perhaps the first version of the Phaeton, or to some of Michelangelo’s many poems for Cavalieri.61 In his written communications with Cavalieri, Michelangelo was particularly careful, producing multiple drafts of his letters, making poetic allusions and indirect statements. The drawings offered a more immediate means of expression. Having initially presented Cavalieri with two finished drawings, Michelangelo expanded their connection by inviting Cavalieri to participate in the creation of Phaeton. On a purely formal level, Michelangelo seems to have been working out a compositional problem in the sequence of Phaeton drawings. The inscription on the London sheet indicates that Michelangelo included Cavalieri in his creative process, either as a collaborator or merely as a witness. The simple gesture of asking Cavalieri to approve the drawing transforms the nature of Michelangelo’s gifts to him. It suggests another way of thinking about the drawings, as a form of communication not only in their finished state, as messages from the artist to his beloved, but as they are in the process of being made, as a means of developing and deepening the bond through a reciprocal act of creation. Vasari reports that Michelangelo gave the drawings to Cavalieri “because he was learning to draw,” a claim that is often dismissed as an effort to conceal Michelangelo’s more private motives.62 But it is a claim that deserves to be taken seriously. Such instruction would have been an appropriate part of Cavalieri’s education, and his earliest letter to Michelangelo indicates that Cavalieri had already produced some works, likely drawings, which had earned Michelangelo’s praise.63 Referring to “those works of mine which you have seen with your own eyes,” Cavalieri opined that Michelangelo 57. Carteggio, 3:444. 58. For the poem and its meaning, see Rivero, “Petrarch’s ‘Nel Dolce Tempo de la Prima Etade.’” See also Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing, 116. 59. Carteggio, 4:3. The phrase first appears on the revised draft of the letter, written after Michelangelo received Cavalieri’s response to his first missive; Carteggio, 4:2. 60. Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo, 1:125. 61. Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream, 90. 62. Vasari, Le vite di Michelangelo, 7:271. 63. Buck, Michelangelo’s Dream, 81.

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had been moved to write to him because of them, and expressed his hope that he would soon be able to see more of Michelangelo’s work.64 The letter suggests the beginning of a mutual exchange of drawings and ideas; despite the fact that Cavalieri was a young amateur rather than a practicing artist, Michelangelo apparently recognized a kindred spirit. This dynamic of collaboration helps explain Michelangelo’s deference to Cavalieri’s judgment, asking Cavalieri to either approve the “sketch” of Phaeton or send it back so that he may produce another. Their exchange was surely enhanced by the fact that both Michelangelo and Cavalieri were familiar with the visual source for the image. The central group of Phaeton and his team was inspired by an antique sarcophagus on view outside the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, where the Cavalieri family chapel was located adjacent to the high altar.65 William E. Wallace has proposed that Michelangelo and Cavalieri may have visited the site together, on a pilgrimage to the family chapel, and to view the church’s treasures, including the Phaeton sarcophagus and a tomb signed by Donatello.66 In that case, the Phaeton would be a sort of souvenir of that visit, binding the two men together in a shared memory. It would have been a particularly poignant gift, for while the men would have visited the church together in the early days of their acquaintance, by the time Michelangelo produced the final version of the drawing, he had left Rome, forced to return to Florence to meet his obligations to the Medici. In a letter sent to the artist in Florence, Cavalieri records his receipt of the drawing with a teasing remark that may reflect the collaborative nature of their exchange: “Perhaps three days ago I received my Phaeton, well enough done.”67 But if the Phaeton records an intimate, creative exchange between the two men, it also documents the presence of other witnesses to the process. As Leonard Barkan has observed, the great paradox of the gift drawings and poems for Cavalieri is their double nature as both private and public communications.68 Michelangelo’s missives to Cavalieri, both visual and literary, were sent through intermediaries, passing through the hands of friends and servants before reaching their final destination. This mode of transmission underscores the secret, private nature of the relationship. But it also expands the circle of its participants beyond the artist and his beloved. The message on the London Phaeton is one trace of this method of exchange. Michelangelo instructs Cavalieri, “if this sketch doesn’t please you, tell Urbino.” Urbino was the nickname of Francesco d’Amadore, Michelangelo’s trusted manservant and assistant, who had evidently been charged with bringing the drawing from Michelangelo’s residence in Rome to Cavalieri’s and returning with Cavalieri’s response.69 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about such a mundane event—letters frequently passed among friends in precisely this way, carried by a servant from one home to another—but the message is evidence of a larger mechanism of exchange that I wish to explore here.

64. Carteggio, 3:445. In a letter sent to Michelangelo in Florence, Cavalieri alludes to his need for Michelangelo’s guidance to keep him away from “bad practices,” perhaps referring to his artistic instruction; Carteggio, 4:30. 65. See Kirkendale, Emilio de’ Cavalieri, 19. 66. Wallace, “Studies in Michelangelo’s Finished Drawings,” 190–92; and Wallace, Michelangelo, 179. 67. Carteggio, 4:49. 68. Barkan, Transuming Passion, 81. 69. Urbino joined Michelangelo’s household in Rome sometime before the artist’s return to Florence in 1533, to replace Antonio Mini, who had gone to France. He remained in Michelangelo’s employ until his death on 3 December 1555. See Wallace, Michelangelo, 259–60.

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While in Rome, Michelangelo not only entrusted drawings to Urbino’s care, but also depended on Pier Antonio Cecchini to carry drawings, letters, and private messages to Cavalieri. In the first draft of his letter to Cavalieri, Michelangelo quoted Petrarch to signal his emotional state, but omitted the quote from subsequent drafts. Rather than rely on Cavalieri’s ability to recognize the quotation and its meaning, Michelangelo apparently decided to send an ambassador to help Cavalieri read the contents of his heart. All three drafts of the letter refer to Cecchini, the mutual friend who may have been the instrument of Michelangelo’s introduction to Cavalieri. In each draft, in slightly different form, Michelangelo promises that “our friend” Pier Antonio—“Pier Antonio amico nostro”—will tell Cavalieri in person all those things that remain unsaid in the letter.70 In his final draft, Michelangelo writes: “So as not to bore you, I won’t write any more…our friend Pier Antonio will finish it in person”—the precise phrase is “a bocha,” by mouth.71 By sending the letter and its unwritten messages through Cecchini, Michelangelo was introducing a friend into his private relationship with Cavalieri. Nor was Cecchini the only person to play such a role. From the beginning, Michelangelo’s feelings for Cavalieri had the status of an open secret, shared among a trusted circle of intimates, who delivered not only Michelangelo’s written messages, but also, and arguably more significantly, those unrecoverable sentiments he did not wish to trust to pen and paper. Once Michelangelo returned to Florence in the summer of 1533 to resume his work at San Lorenzo under pressure from Pope Clement VII, it was no longer possible to dispatch Urbino with drawings or to pass private messages along verbally through Cecchini. Instead, the distance separating Michelangelo and Cavalieri activated a larger network of agents that included, among others, Cecchini, the poet Bartolommeo Angelini, and Sebastiano del Piombo. They oversaw Michelangelo’s affairs in Rome, providing practical assistance to maintain his household, kept him apprised of the gossip surrounding the papal court, and assisted in keeping the flame of his love for Cavalieri alive. Beginning in the summer of 1533 and continuing during Michelangelo’s absences in Florence until his final return to Rome in September 1534, Michelangelo’s relationship with Cavalieri was filtered through and managed by friends who acted as his intermediaries. Cavalieri fretted about Michelangelo’s extended absence in Florence, fearful that the artist would forget him. Michelangelo hastened to reassure him, expressing surprise that Cavalieri could doubt the “very great, in fact immeasurable love” that Michelangelo had demonstrated in Rome.72 He teased the young man, suggesting that perhaps his worry was calculated to increase Michelangelo’s ardor. Michelangelo’s confident tone with Cavalieri is in stark contrast with his palpable anxiety in communications with others. In a letter to Sebastiano, he begged for some news of Cavalieri, to help keep his memory fresh. “For if I were to forget him,” he writes, “I believe I would immediately fall down dead.”73 He expresses a similar sentiment to Angelini, telling him that he wishes to return to Rome in order “to return to life,” for although his body is in Florence, his soul is in Cavalieri’s hands in Rome.74 Privy to Michelangelo’s anxieties about the relationship, Michelangelo’s friends served as his “ambassadors” to Cavalieri, as Angelini described himself, 70. Carteggio, 4:1–2, 3. 71. Ibid., 4:3. 72. Ibid., 4:26–29. 73. Ibid., 4:36. 74. Ibid., 4:14.

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taking the measure of Cavalieri’s devotion and reassuring the artist that he could “live happily because your desire and Tommaso’s are equal.”75 In another letter, Angelini reports that Michelangelo’s eagerness to come back to Rome is exceeded only by Cavalieri’s desire to see him: “If you are consumed with returning, he burns with desire for your return.”76 Part of Michelangelo’s motivation for the use of intermediaries was practical. In communicating from Florence with friends in Rome, he relied on courier services, and typically sent letters together in packets under a single cover.77 Michelangelo seems to have used private couriers and the services of banks that had branches in both Rome and Florence and provided postal service for a fee, and, when the opportunity presented itself, he relied on acquaintances who were traveling between the two cities to carry letters as well.78 It was more economical to send multiple letters in a single packet, and Michelangelo was notoriously stingy. Many letters to him reflect this arrangement, such as Angelini’s assurance in July 1533 that “I’ve received your letter, together with one for Sebastiano, which I’ve put directly into his hands…and last Saturday I sent you one of his together with one from your messer Tommaso.”79 Bartolommeo Angelini appears to have been the person through whose hands most letters passed, both from Michelangelo and to him. He faithfully reports that he has delivered letters to Cavalieri, has agreed to send Cavalieri’s letters on to Michelangelo, and has waited into the evening for a letter from Sebastiano to send along as well.80 As early as 1521, Angelini was helping Michelangelo manage his affairs in Rome, serving as Michelangelo’s agent for a commission from Cardinal Domenico Grimani and passing along correspondence from Sebastiano and other friends.81 While Michelangelo was absent in Florence, Angelini supervised the upkeep of his house in Rome, and reported on the state of Michelangelo’s garden and the conduct of Michelangelo’s cats and rooster, in much the same way, albeit more playfully, that he chronicled Cavalieri’s emotional states. By 1531, Michelangelo was sending most of his correspondence through Angelini. This arrangement had been reached in response to a crisis. On 29 April 1531, Sebastiano wrote in alarm that his letters from Michelangelo were being intercepted: “Your letter was given to me opened, which caused me great distress…and I have not yet found a way to be able to write and send letters to you, or you to me, in such a way that they will not be opened first.”82 But having consulted with Angelini, whom Sebastiano calls “a good man,” Sebastiano proposed a solution. In order to protect the privacy of their correspondence, Sebastiano

75. Ibid., 4:25. 76. Ibid., 4:32–33. 77. Ramsden, Letters, 1:226. 78. In a letter dated 23 August 1533, Angelini reports that he has received two letters from Michelangelo, one “per mano delli nostri Bastagi e l’altra per il bamcho”; Carteggio, 4:42–43. “Bastagi” were porters responsible for transporting merchandise; “il bamcho” refers to the bank. For the history of the postal system in Italy, see Caizzi, Dalla posta dei re alla posta di tutti. For the period in question see Melillo, Le poste italiane; and Chieppi, I servizi postali dei Medici. 79. Carteggio, 4:25. 80. Ibid., 4:13, 32–33, 40, 42–43. 81. Angelini’s first surviving letter to Michelangelo is dated 7 September 1521, in which he passes along letters from Sebastiano and Giovanni da Reggio to Michelangelo and offers his services should Michelangelo need any assistance in Rome; Carteggio, 2:316. By 23 June 1523, he was assisting Michelangelo to negotiate the terms of a commission from Cardinal Domenico Grimani; Carteggio, 2:376, 381. During the 1520s, however, Michelangelo’s primary advocate in Rome was Gian Francesco Fattucci, see Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo; and Wallace, “Clement VII and Michelangelo.” 82. Carteggio, 3:303.

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suggested that Michelangelo send all of his letters indirectly—through Angelini—and instructed the artist to have someone else address them “so that they will not be recognized as by your hand.”83 This need for secrecy and misdirection in the early 1530s likely relates to the role that Sebastiano was playing at the time as Michelangelo’s advocate at the papal court, helping to negotiate with the heirs of Julius II over his still unfinished tomb, and attempting to reinstate the artist in the good graces of Pope Clement VII. It was crucial that Sebastiano’s dealings with the artist remain confidential as he attempted to sway both Clement and the della Rovere heirs in Michelangelo’s favor.84 Sebastiano recognized that sending anything between Florence and Rome was risky due to unscrupulous couriers, bandits, and the poor conditions of the roads.85 In May 1532, he wrote of his concerns about Michelangelo’s plan to send him some drawings, worried that they might “disappear, or…fall into hands other than my own.”86 Concluding that the risks were too great, he warned Michelangelo that if he didn’t have a trustworthy means of sending them, he should “wait until your return and you can bring them here yourself.”87 But Michelangelo’s circle of friends provided more than the practical assistance of a secure post; they actively participated in Michelangelo’s relationship with Cavalieri. Sebastiano engaged prominent musicians from the papal court to set Michelangelo’s poems to music and shared the compositions with Cavalieri.88 He then sent the music to Michelangelo in Florence, where another friend, Gianfrancesco Fattucci, arranged for it to be performed for the artist’s pleasure.89 When the grapes in Michelangelo’s Roman garden ripened in August, Angelini sent some to Cavalieri as a gift.90 In October, he harvested pomegranates from the garden and presented them to Cavalieri, making another offering on Michelangelo’s behalf.91 These gestures were duly reported to Michelangelo. When Michelangelo sent poems for Cavalieri, Angelini felt free to read and comment on them. At least twice, Angelini reports unapologetically that he has made copies of Michelangelo’s “beautiful sonnets” for himself before delivering them to Cavalieri.92 In another instance, Angelini criticizes a sonnet destined for Cavalieri in which Michelangelo describes the restlessness that love induces in him and counters with a poem of his own as a corrective.93 Michelangelo’s drawings and poems in their explicit, if ambiguous imagery, directed their messages to Cavalieri, but their means of exchange created a larger circle of initiates who partook of the experience as well. In communicating with Cecchini, Angelini, and Sebastiano about his feelings for Cavalieri, his desire to be reunited with him, his sense that without him his body was lacking his soul, and whatever other private messages that were passed along “a bocha,” Michelangelo invited these 83. Carteggio, 3:304. Sebastiano instructed Michelangelo to address his letters to Angelini and to give them to Lorenzo Mannucci in Florence to send along. Angelini confirms the arrangement on the same date; ibid., 3:307; 320. 84. Sebastiano even suggested that Michelangelo send along a “littera fictiva” that he could show to the Duke of Urbino to mislead him about Michelangelo’s intentions; ibid., 3:318. 85. Melillo, Le poste italiane, 91. 86. Carteggio, 3:406. 87. Ibid., 3:306. 88. Ibid., 4:22. 89. Ibid., 4:36. 90. Ibid., 4:32–33. 91. Ibid., 4:56–57. 92. Ibid., 4:50, 56–57. 93. Ibid., 4:53–54.

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friends to participate in a relationship that reinforced their sense of intimacy, of shared knowledge among a select few. Perhaps paradoxically, Michelangelo’s passionate affection for Cavalieri was not an impediment to intimacy in his other friendships, but rather a means of strengthening those bonds of trust and affection as well. The promotion and facilitation of their relationship became a common cause that knit Michelangelo’s circle closer together. Ulrich Pfisterer describes a similar dynamic in his study of the Roman milieu of the fifteenth-century medalist known as the Pseudo-Lysippus, in which an intense emotional attachment between two men could be the axis on which a much larger circle of friends revolved.94 Relating these social dynamics to the humanist revival of antique culture and describing the role of medals and other forms of portraiture in the promotion and publication of such relationships, Pfisterer posits what he terms a “Socratic mantle,” a system of visual codes that function publicly as erudite references to classical philosophy, but privately invoke homosexual love to those “in the know.”95 Such images depend on a “performative context” of looking, designed to elicit shared emotional response and discussion among a group of viewers, allowing an ostensibly private experience of love between two individuals to bind a larger group of friends together. Michelangelo’s drawings for Cavalieri, which can be viewed as straightforward visualizations of ancient myths or as complex allegories layered with meaning, seem to encourage precisely such a context of viewing and reception. Michelangelo’s letters produced a kind of social currency for those who received them. Angelini reports that Pope Clement continually asks Sebastiano if he has had any letters from the artist, and Sebastiano acknowledges that he has allowed the pontiff access to Michelangelo’s letters.96 Both Angelini and Sebastiano peppered their letters with gossip from Rome, and Michelangelo’s responses themselves became fodder for gossip. Sebastiano writes that he has passed one of Michelangelo’s more amusing letters around the Vatican, where “everyone in the palace talks of nothing else.”97 Michelangelo was clearly aware of and sensitive to the fact that his “private” correspondence had a public function. In a letter to Sebastiano in August 1533, Michelangelo discusses both his feelings for Cavalieri and his current work at San Lorenzo, mixing matters both personal and professional, and closes with the explicit, perhaps exasperated, direction: “Don’t show this letter to anyone.”98 The line between the private and the public communication was not always clear, and had to be marked accordingly. By making his private feelings for Cavalieri semipublic, sharing them openly within an exclusive circle of friends, Michelangelo signaled that his motives were above reproach—Cavalieri was the source of inspiration and elevating love, not the object of immoral or illegal desire. He was particularly sensitive to the rumors of homosexuality or, more specifically, pederasty that were encouraged by his intense relationships with young men like Gherardo Perini and Cavalieri. In an angry letter to a friend, Michelangelo recounts an episode in which an importunate man encouraged him to hire his son as an apprentice, “saying that if I were but to see him I should pursue him not only into the house, but into bed. With his typical caustic wit, Michelangelo concluded, “I assure you that I’ll deny myself 94. Pfisterer, Lysippus und seine Freunde. 95. Ibid. 96. Carteggio, 4:17. 97. Ibid., 2:233. 98. Ibid., 4:36.

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that consolation, which I have no wish to filch from him.”99 Michelangelo’s supporters declared his total chastity, but his enemies were quick to assert the opposite and could point to the gift drawings as evidence. Pietro Aretino hinted as much when, frustrated in his own attempts to obtain a drawing from Michelangelo, he resorted to thinly veiled threats. If Michelangelo refused to give him a drawing, he warned, it would prove true the rumor “that only certain Gherardos and Tommasos are able to get them.”100 At a time when acts of sodomy were punishable by fines, public whipping, and imprisonment, such rumors were dangerous, to say the least. By framing his relationship with Cavalieri within a Neoplatonic model of ideal love, and encouraging his friends and associates to promote that model, Michelangelo was able to deflect potential criticism about it as an impropriety that truly needed to be concealed. Michelangelo’s methods of communication about Cavalieri mirror and expand the functions of his gifts to him. Made by the artists as tokens of love for an intimate friend, the drawings were exceptional in that they circulated outside the bounds of the traditional artist/patron exchange. They could not be bought at any price. They were available only to those—as Aretino knowingly hinted—who had earned Michelangelo’s particular affection. But beyond the question of personal esteem, the drawings also represented a truly rare commodity. By the 1530s, access to an original work by the hand of Michelangelo was extremely limited—only the fortunate few like Cavalieri were favored with gift drawings as tokens of love. By the 1530s, Michelangelo was so overwhelmed with obligations that even the pope had trouble getting his wishes satisfied, while a young man like Cavalieri received unsolicited gifts of the artist’s latest inventions. Being in possession of the drawings clearly granted Cavalieri considerable social capital, allowing Michelangelo to function as the young man’s social patron. Through his network of friends, Michelangelo had folded Cavalieri into a private circle of artists and literati; through the gift of the drawings, he brought Cavalieri to the attention of some of the most powerful men in Rome, who were hungry for Michelangelo’s latest inventions. Generated by desire, the drawings quickly became objects of desire themselves, attracting the covetous attention of such exalted viewers as the Medici Pope Clement VII and his nephew Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici. On 6 September 1533, Cavalieri wrote to Michelangelo to report that a group of visitors had descended upon him, including Pope Clement VII, his nephew Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, and “everyone” eager to see all of Michelangelo’s drawings.101 The cardinal, Cavalieri tells us, was so taken with them that “he wanted to have the Tityus and Ganymede made in crystal, and I didn’t know how to speak well enough to prevent him [from taking the Tityus]…and now maestro Giovanni is doing it.”102 Ippolito de’ Medici commissioned the first copies after Michelangelo’s gift drawings from the gem-engraver Giovanni Bernardi, initiating a series of copies in various media that transmitted Michelangelo’s private images to a much wider audience, whose long and complicated afterlife is the focus of my current book project.103 It is important to note that Bartolommeo Angelini did not hesitate to copy and comment on Michelangelo’s poems for Cavalieri, because his 99. Ibid., 1:150; translation in Ramsden, Letters, 1:186. 100. Carteggio, 4:216. 101. Ibid., 4:49. 102. Ibid. 103. See Ruvoldt, “Responding to the Renaissance.”

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access to them was privileged and permissible. In contrast, Ippolito de’ Medici coerced a loan of the drawings from Cavalieri, who struggled to find the words to prevent him, and wrote to Michelangelo to apologize, because the cardinal was not entitled to them. The exchange was not limited to the artist and his beloved, but it was still exclusive. Michelangelo’s gift drawings, poems, letters, and the network of their exchange created a hierarchy of viewers that inverted the expected social hierarchy. Included in a select circle of Michelangelo’s intimates who had privileged access to his literary and artistic inventions and to news from the artist himself, those who participated in the circulation of the drawings and the letters were elevated above other men who were arguably their social superiors. Among the most powerful men in Rome, and important patrons of Michelangelo, the Medici and men like them could not compel gift drawings or other expressions of affection and esteem from the artist himself. The traditional artist/patron relationship failed them in the face of the private exchange, and they found themselves relying on artists like Sebastiano and young men like Cavalieri to achieve access. In conclusion, Michelangelo’s methods of communication were indirect and complex. At a time when he was under considerable pressure from the Medici pope and other patrons to complete unfinished projects and embark on new ones, Michelangelo cultivated a carefully controlled means of access not only to his private feelings for Cavalieri, but also to the artistic and literary output generated by them. The open secret asserted Michelangelo’s artistic and social autonomy at the very moment that he likely felt it most threatened.

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De Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo. 5 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943–60. Ficino, Marsilio. El libro dell’amore. Edited by Sandra Niccoli. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1987. Frey, Karl. Die Dichtungen des Michelagniolo Buonarroti. Berlin: G. Grote, 1897. Frommel, Christoph. Michelangelo und Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini, 1979. Giannotti, Donato. Dialogi di Donato Giannotti de’ giorni che Danto consumò nel cercare L’Inferno e ’L Purgatorio. Edited by Deoclecio Redig de Campos. Florence: Sansoni, 1939. Hirst, Michael. Michelangelo and His Drawings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. ———. “Michelangelo and His First Biographers.” Proceedings of the British Academy 94 (1997): 63–84. Joannides, Paul. Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1996. Kirkendale, Warren. Emilio de’ Cavalieri “Gentiluomo Romano”: His Life and Letters, His Role as Superintendent of All the Arts at the Medici Court and His Musical Compositions. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001. Kirschenbaum, Baruch D. “Reflections on Michelangelo’s Drawings for Cavaliere.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser. 38 (1951): 99–110. Liebert, Robert. Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Marongiu, Marcella. Currus auriga paterni: Il mito di Fetonte nel Rinascimento. Lugano: Lumières Internationales, 2008. ———. Il mito di Ganimede prima e dopo Michelangelo. Florence: Casa Buonarroti, 2002. Melillo, Enrico. Le poste italiane nel medioevo alta e media Italia (c. 475–1600). Rome: Desclée, Lefebvre e C. Editori, 1904. Muratore, Davide. La biblioteca del cardinale Niccolò Ridolfi. 2 vols. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2009. Nagel, Alexander. “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna.” Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 647–68. Panofsky, Erwin. “The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo.” In Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 212–18. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1939. Panofsky-Soergel, Gerda. “Postscriptum to Tommaso Cavalieri.” In Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Roberto Salvini, 399–405. Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Parker, Deborah. Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pfisterer, Ulrich. Lysippus und seine Freunde: Liebesgaben und Gedächtnis im Rom der Renaissance, oder Das erste Jahrhundert der Medaille. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008. Pirotti, Umberto. Benedetto Varchi e la cultura del suo tempo. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1971. The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation. Edited and translated by James M. Saslow. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Popham, A. E., and Johannes Wilde. The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle. London: Phaidon Press, 1949. Raggio, Olga. “The Myth of Prometheus: Its Survival and Metamorphoses up to the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958): 44–62. Ramsden, E. H. The Letters of Michelangelo. 2 vols. London: Peter Owen, 1963. Ridolfi, Roberto. “La Biblioteca del Cardinale Niccolò Ridolfi (1501–1550).” La Bibliofilia 31 (1929): 173–93. Rivero, Albert J. “Petrarch’s ‘Nel Dolce Tempo de la Prima Etade.’” MLN 94 (1979): 92–112. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ruvoldt, Maria. “Responding to the Renaissance.” In Renaissance Theory, edited by James Elkins and Robert Williams, 360–76. London: Routledge, 2008. Saslow, James M. Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. ———. “‘A Veil of Ice between My Heart and the Fire’: Michelangelo’s Sexual Identity and Early Modern Constructs of Homosexuality.” Genders 2 (1988): 77–90.

Michelangelo’s Open Secrets 125 Schumacher, Andreas. Michelangelos Teste Divine: Idealbildnisse als Exempla der Zeichenkunst. Münster: Rhema Verlag, 2007. Sickel, Lothar. “Die Sammlung des Tommaso de’ Cavalieri und die Provenienz der Zeichnungen Michelangelos.” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 37 (2008): 163–221. Spini, Giorgio. “Politicità di Michelangelo.” Rivista storica italiana 76 (1964): 556–600. Starn, Randolph. Donato Giannotti and His Epistolae. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1968. Strehlke, Carl, et al. Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art in Association with Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Thode, Henry. Michelangelo: Kritische Untersuchungen über seiner Werke. 3 vols. Berlin: G. Grote, 1908–13. Varchi, Benedetto. Due Lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi. Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1549. Vasari, Giorgio. La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568. Edited by Paola Barocchi. 4 vols. Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1962. ———. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (1568). Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. 9 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1878–1885. Wallace, William E. “Clement VII and Michelangelo: An Anatomy of Patronage.” In The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture, edited by Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl E. Reiss, 189–98. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. ———. “The Greatest Ass in the World”: Michelangelo as Writer. Lincoln: Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2006. ———. “Michael Angelvs Bonarotvs Patritivs Florentinvs.” In Innovation and Tradition: Essays on Renaissance Art and Culture, edited by Dag T. Andersson and Roy Eriksen, 60–74. Rome: Kappa, 2000. ———. Michelangelo: The Artist, The Man, and His Times. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. “‘Nothing Else Happening’: Michelangelo between Rome and Florence.” In Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, edited by Marcia B. Hall, 51–75. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “Studies in Michelangelo’s Finished Drawings.” PhD diss. Columbia University, 1983. Wilde, Johannes. Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Michelangelo and His Studio. London: British Museum Publications, 1953.

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Hebrew, Hieroglyphs, and the Secrets of Divine Wisdom in Ludovico Mazzolino’s Devotional Paintings Giancarlo Fiorenza

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ecrecy operated on many levels within Renaissance court society. At Ferrara, the mechanisms of secrecy helped shape and define the rule of Alfonso I d’Este (1476–1534; duke from 1505). His biographer, Paolo Giovio, observed that the duke frequently retreated to a secret room (“stanza secreta”) in the Ferrarese castle, which was set up like a workshop (“bottega”), in order to create a variety of decorative and sculpted objects, activities he performed to relax his spirit and escape idleness (“per fuggire l’otio”).1 Within these private chambers—rooms not so much hidden as separated from the common areas and reserved for the duke—Alfonso combined solitude with industry, and leisure with sprezzatura, leaving his subjects to marvel at the virtuosity fueling princely performance.2 Visitors granted access to these spaces bore witness to the practice of seclusion as an agent of production and authority, an ideology that informs other works of art celebrating the duke: from the inscriptions invoking quies and solus on Antonio Lombardo’s marble reliefs (ca. 1508), once displayed in the private suite of rooms in the ducal residence known as the camerini d’alabastro (possibly near the stanza secreta mentioned above),3 to Mercury’s gesture of silence in Dosso Dossi’s Jupiter Painting Butterflies (ca. 1524; National Art Collection, Wawel Royal Castle, Kraków) (fig. 5.1), executed most likely for the Villa Belvedere, a 1. Giovio, Liber de vita, 7; Italian translation by Gelli, La Vita di Alfonso da Este, 15–16. Giovio’s observation is corroborated by a letter dated 26 November 1523, in which the duke writes to his sister Isabella d’Este of Mantua, stating that he was sending her a gift of ceramic dishes that he had made and decorated in his secret spaces (“nostri loghi secreti”); see Magnani, La ceramica ferrarese, 1:15. 2. For a study of these “secret” rooms and studioli, see Folin, “Studioli, vie coperte, gallerie,” 97–109; and Liebenwein, Studiolo. Campbell, Cosmè Tura, 29, observes, “The symbolic force of the private study in figuring the ‘contemplative life’ was not itself new; what distinguished the princely studio was its redirection of humanist ideals of privacy (otium) towards the political ends of display.… In essence the studio was a backdrop against which the prince could stage the appearance of industrious solitude, thereby affirming the humanist ideology of personal culture as an entitlement to rule.” 3. For Lombardo’s reliefs and their inscriptions, see the entries in the exhibition catalogue Il Camerino di alabastro: Sheard, “Antonio Lombardo’s Reliefs,” and Goodgal, “Camerino of Alfonso I d’Este.” The precise location of the camerini d’alabastro in the Via Coperta, a narrow stretch of residential quarters connecting the ducal castle to the palace quarters, remains unresolved. Certain rooms in the Via Coperta display Alfonso’s name (ALFONSVS.DVX.III) carved on the architrave of the marble door frames, such as the one leading into the Camera del Poggiolo; see Borella, “Lo ‘Studio de preda Marmora fina,’” 117; and Hope, “I Camerini d’alabastro.”

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FIGURE 5.1. Dosso Dossi, Jupiter Painting Butterflies, ca. 1524, oil on canvas, Kraków National Art Collection, Wawel Royal Castle. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

private estate situated just outside the walls of the city and in the middle of the river Po.4 In Dosso’s painting, Jupiter figures as an idealized image of a ruler, one who mandates privacy and silence so as not to be distracted from his tranquil but nonetheless official duties of ordering nature, a metaphor frequently aligned by Ferrarese humanists with prudent statecraft.5 Alfonso sponsored a court culture heavily invested in secrecy, dissimulation, silence, and visual and verbal ciphers, thereby perpetuating the recurring theme within Renaissance humanist thought that “noble matters” are the possession of the elite.6 Celio Calcagnini (1479–1541), who served as apostolic protonotary, Este court historian, and chair of the Faculty of Rhetoric at the University of Ferrara, appreciated the paradoxical nature of secrets. He argued in various letters and treatises that mysteries, whether verbal or visual, pagan or divine, are like treasures, being

4. For an interpretation of Dosso’s Jupiter Painting Butterflies, especially in relation to Lombardo’s reliefs, see Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi, 21–77. 5. Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi, 56–63. 6. See, more broadly, Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy, who also discusses such practices at Ferrara (51).

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valuable only when prudently unearthed, and not buried forever: “Mysteries are always mysteries, so long as they are not conveyed to profane ears.”7 Secrecy was not exclusively elitist, but also very practical for Este rule. By advocating solitude and silence in the making and meaning of works of art, Alfonso demonstrated his understanding of the dual nature of secrecy: that it implies its own revelation and structures identity and subjectivity through a body of knowledge. As Karma Lochrie explains, secrecy is never as solitary an activity as it purports to be.8 Instead, secrecy operates in distinct social contexts, configuring power relations, with reticence, prudence, and the dissimulation of effort in brilliant production lending the Este duke a special veneer to his identity. It is from the complementary perspectives of dissimulation and disclosure, of revelation and performance of what has been mystified that this essay will investigate specific examples of Este artistic patronage, specifically small-scale, personal devotional paintings, and how they served not only as instruments of piety for a Christian prince, but moreover, as exoteric rhetorical devices.9 In the year 1527, the Ferrarese artist Ludovico Mazzolino (ca. 1480–after 1528) painted two works for the duke: Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet (Philadelphia Museum of Art) (fig. 5.2) and Christ and the Money Changers (Alnwick Castle, Northumberland).10 While not strictly pendants owing to their different sizes, these two works present Christ as an exemplar of humility and as an enforcer of justice, kneeling modestly before his disciples in one panel and driving the defilers out of the temple of Jerusalem in the other. Christ’s deeds and actions constitute models of imitation for Alfonso, who needed to rule his subjects benignly but with uncompromised authority. The scene of the sacrifice of Isaac in the architectural roundel of the Philadelphia panel reinforces the theme of obedience, from the unquestioning compliance to God’s command to gestures of communal respect and service among Christ and his apostles. In the Renaissance, Christ’s words were valued for their veiled wisdom. For Erasmus of Rotterdam, Christ appears as a great teacher, with scripture as the book containing hidden spiritual meaning.11 He explains in his adage Sileni Alcibiades (1515) that the intentional obscurity of the biblical parables and the veils of figurative language employed by Christ exercised one’s cognitive skills: “The parables of the Gospel, if you take them at face value—who would not think that they came from a simple ignorant man? And yet if you crack the nut, you find inside that profound wisdom, truly divine, a touch of something which is clearly like Christ himself.”12 Christ’s deeds and sayings were not only moral but at the same time practical and adaptable to personal and political contexts, witnessed, for example, by Christ’s statement of unity, “The servant is not greater than his lord” ( John 13:16; KJV), spoken to his apostles after he washed their feet. 7. Calcagnini, Opera aliquot, 27, cited and translated in Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 11. On Calcagnini’s career, see Tiraboschi, Storia della letturatura italiana, 7.3:870–73; Piana, Ricerche ed osservazioni; and Lazzari, “Un enciclopedico del sec. XVI.” 8. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 1–4. See also Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature. 9. On the importance of “small forms” for Renaissance rhetoric, see Colie, Resources of Kind, esp. 32–75. 10. See Zamboni, Ludovico Mazzolino, 26–27, 50n51 (Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet), and 25–26, 35n1 (Christ and the Money Changers); and Ballarin, Dosso Dossi, 1:257 (Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet); 259–-60 (Christ and the Money Changers). I agree with Zamboni (33) with regard to the patronage of these two panels and the corresponding documents cited. 11. See O’Malley, “Content and Rhetorical Forms,” 243–44, for Erasmus’s view of Christ as a great teacher and scripture as the book containing his “philosophy.” 12. Mann Phillips, “Adages” of Erasmus, 276. Erasmus goes on to say that “when it is a matter of knowledge, the real truth always lies deeply hidden, not to be understood easily or by many people.”

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FIGURE 5.2. Ludovico Mazzolino, Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet, 1527, oil on wood, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

Mazzolino’s images coincide with the development of a humanist theology in sixteenth-century Italy, or what John O’Malley and Salvatore Camporeale, among others, define as sacred oratory infused with classical rhetorical precepts, whereby the art of praise and blame concerning the events of Christ’s life and his teachings (his beneficial ministry) overshadowed the focus on abstract doctrines and dogma in preachers’ sermons.13 The image of Christ in the duke’s pictures is one of an exemplary individual who combines wisdom, eloquence, and action to affect the moral fabric of society. Through his artistic patronage Alfonso publicized his piety while structuring his role as a caretaker and distributor of divine wisdom in the service of effective leadership. 13. See the essays by O’Malley, Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century; and Camporeale, “Renaissance Humanism.” See further Trinkhaus, “Religious Thought”; and O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language.

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Mazzolino specialized in small-scale paintings emphasizing Christ’s ministry, exemplified by his frequent renditions of Christ’s disputations. Certain works depict episodes of Christ’s teachings within elaborate portrayals of Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem, ornamented with hieroglyphic and Hebrew inscriptions, two ancient languages that were valued in the Renaissance for their ability to simultaneously conceal and reveal the secrets of divine wisdom.14 The various forms of ancient and arcane media in Mazzolino’s paintings did not merely target, but more readily helped produce, shape, and maintain an exclusive audience, one able to decipher, deliberate on, and judiciously explicate and apply the sacred mysteries of Christ’s teachings that are (at least notionally) safeguarded by hieroglyphic and Hebraic veils. My emphasis will be on the humanistic nature of Mazzolino’s imagery: how he shows Christ as subsuming, supplanting, and ultimately translating into the sphere of action the secrets of divine wisdom embodied in the ancient paraphernalia. Not only did Christ’s teachings and his miracles prove his divinity and fulfill God’s covenant, but they also established a testimony to authority—an ultimate referent for the unveiling of sacred enigmas—for Christian princes and their courtiers. Mazzolino worked extensively for the Este family, from decorating the private apartments of Duchess Lucrezia Borgia to executing small-scale, personal devotional paintings for Alfonso and his brothers Ippolito and Sigismondo.15 Relatively few documents survive that can be securely connected to his existing works. Nevertheless, there was a long tradition in Ferrara of artists collaborating with the Este and their humanist advisers.16 While not all of the images discussed below have a clearly documented Este provenance, Mazzolino’s use of Hebrew and hieroglyphs helped construct a reconciliatory, catholic knowledge regarding divine wisdom for his courtly audience. This form of participatory yet privileged viewing experience facilitated the diplomacy operating within the Ferrarese court in the early sixteenth century, especially in light of the city’s well established and growing Jewish community—a community tolerated and protected by the Este, often in the face of opposition. Mazzolino’s work for the Ferrarese court also received attention by elite patrons in nearby Bologna, resulting in paintings equally layered with meaning and containing hidden treasures of divine wisdom. The early provenance of Mazzolino’s Christ Disputing with the Doctors (fig. 5.3), completed around 1522, and now in the National Gallery, London, is undocumented, but the painting serves as a prime example of how the artist structures various media of varying origin and type to celebrate Christ’s sacred and secret wisdom.17 At the tender age of twelve, during the Passover feast, Christ abandoned his parents and visited the temple of Jerusalem, where he debated with the learned doctors and scribes on undisclosed topics. According to the Gospel of Luke (2:41–51), this was the first occasion on which Christ taught, and the elders were amazed at his understanding

14. See Haitovsky, “Hebrew Inscriptions.” See also Busi, Enigma dell’ebraico, 73–97, for Hebrew inscriptions in Ferrarese paintings (including those by Mazzolino) in relation to Ferrarese humanism. 15. On Mazzolino’s art and career, see Borsetti, Historiae almi ferrariae gymnasia, 2:451–52; Cittadella, Catalogo istorico de’ pittori, 1:96–101; Baruffaldi, Vita di Lodovico Mazzolino; Zamboni, Ludovico Mazzolino; Ballarin, Dosso Dossi, 1:232–61; and the various documents transcribed by Franceschini, Artisti a Ferrara. 16. For specific case studies, see Gundersheimer, “Patronage of Ercole I d’Este”; Schwarzenberg, “Die Lunetten” (Italian translation edited by Bargellesi, “Le lunette”); and Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae.” On a broader level, see Rosenberg, Este Monuments; Campbell, Cosmè Tura; and Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi. 17. Zamboni, Ludovico Mazzolino, 21, 44–45; Ballarin, Dosso Dossi, 1:250.

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FIGURE 5.3. Ludovico Mazzolino, Christ Disputing with the Doctors, ca. 1522, oil on wood, London, National Gallery. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY.

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of scripture. The Hebrew inscription in the architectural lunette behind Christ reads, “The House which Solomon built for the Lord” (1 Kings 6:2).18 This quotation is a conscious anachronism by Mazzolino in an attempt to locate the event within the original temple of Jerusalem, the archetypical house of worship, constructed by Solomon under divine supervision in order to house the ark of the covenant containing the Ten Commandments. Solomon’s temple, which was sacked by the Babylonians in 587 bce, was subsequently rebuilt and later expanded by Herod in 20 bce. It was in the so-called Second Temple that Christ held his disputations. Appropriately, Mazzolino depicts Moses giving the Ten Commandments to his people in a monochrome relief just under the inscription, thereby complementing the theme of the preservation and dissemination of God’s laws. The first book of Kings equates Solomon with wisdom, namely the wisdom to execute justice within the temple.19 As the inventor of parables and spiritual songs, Solomon used his divinely inspired wisdom to preserve and dispense the laws of God. In Mazzolino’s composition, Christ appears as Solomon’s successor, seated on an elaborate throne with sphinxes at its base, further corroborating the belief that God masked his wisdom.20 Whereas the biblical identities of Solomon and Moses are regulated by the written word and monochrome images, Christ springs forth in vivid colors and spirited gestures: he represents the renewal and revelation of divine wisdom that challenges and confounds the Pharisees and their laws.21 Mazzolino portrays Christ in the role of a public orator, whose eloquence reaches a broad audience. His verbal performance stands in marked contrast to the ancient battle scenes shown in monochrome relief, visual examples of how the breakdown of rational communication leads to conflict. In essence, the painting seeks to move and delight viewers, promoting the peaceful ministries of Christ, beginning with his first public address, equivalent to the revelation of Mosaic law.22 But it would be a mistake to claim that the Hebrew inscription and characters in Mazzolino’s London panel produce a set of associations that are exclusively negative or obsolete, merely intended to be overshadowed. On the contrary, by the late fifteenth century, Hebrew was being studied as a philological tool for elucidating scripture.23 Although only a handful of Renaissance

18. Translations of the Hebrew inscriptions in Mazzolino’s paintings derive from Haitovsky, “Hebrew Inscriptions.” The author, 138, observes that the quotation from 1 Kings 6:2 appears in other paintings of the same subject by Mazzolino, as well as in his Ecce Homo (Musée Condé, Chantilly). 19. See especially 1 Kings 3–4. 20. According to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), who adapts a theory originally formulated by Plutarch, the Egyptians adorned their temples with sphinxes “to indicate that divine knowledge, if it is committed to writing at all, must be covered with enigmatic veils and poetic dissimulation”; quoted in Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 17. 21. See Kessler, “Medieval Art as Argument,” for medieval exegeses concerning the pictorial metaphor from the Epistle to Hebrews (10:1), that the law is but a “shadow” to Christ’s “true image.” Notably, Barrufaldi, Vita di Lodovico Mazzolino, 14n1, observes that Mazzolino painted with “hot and lively” colors, together with interesting portrayals of elders and saints in a manner all his own: “Il colorito di lui è assai caldo e vivace, i suoi vecchi interessanti, e ogni cosa finitissima. Soleva coronare il capo de’ suoi santi d’una particular luce a tante aureole concentriche; modo tutto proprio di questo artista.” 22. See O’Malley, “Egidio da Viterbo and Renaissance Rome,” 80, for the affective dimension of sacred oratory to produce the desired effect of moral betterment. 23. See Resnick, “Lingua dei, lingua hominis”; Friedman, Most Ancient Testimony; and Ruderman, “Italian Renaissance and Jewish Thought.” Ruderman observes that while many Christian missionaries and polemicists mined Jewish texts, from rabbinic homilies to the kabbalah, to legitimate the Christian faith and point out the errors, shortcomings, and perversity of Judaism, the intellectual pursuit of Christian humanists, chief among them Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, passionately sought to underwrite the essential and catholic divine truths that were common possession of all humanity and all cultures, “a unity and harmony of religious insight, a basic core of universal truth” (397).

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Christians could read Hebrew, there was a strong theological tradition commending Hebrew as a privileged language, original to mankind and preserving the hidden order of nature as designed by God.24 One Christian scholar claimed, “For when reading Hebrew I seem to see God Himself speaking when I think that this is the language in which God and the angels have told their minds to man from on high.”25 Because its script was largely “alien” and illegible, Hebrew was seen to embody a talismanic quality in Renaissance painting.26 In this light, the presentation of Christ in debate below the Hebrew inscription in Mazzolino’s London Christ Disputing with the Doctors can be seen to offer his patron a more immediate and profound experience with the divine—a dazzling revelation of God’s secrets through Christ’s oratory. How might Mazzolino’s paintings function at the Este court? Ferrara was an important refuge for Jews expelled or fleeing persecution from other states throughout Europe, and the Este developed close ties with the Jewish community.27 On account of its politics of tolerance, the court benefited greatly from Jewish money-lending practices. Under Duke Ercole I d’Este (1431–1505; duke from 1471), Alfonso’s father, Ferrara had become an important center for the printing of Hebrew texts. Jews enjoyed exemption from paying taxes by ducal order in 1473, and they established a synagogue in the early 1480s. Ferrarese Christians also took a strong interest in Jewish customs and rituals. In 1498, the Jewish scholar Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol (1452–ca. 1528) performed a ritual circumcision in the Ferrarese house of Pellegrino Prisciani, the astrologer and ducal librarian, who served as a witness in the company of other Christians.28 Farissol was highly active in the Italian humanist arena and may have even taught Hebrew to Christians, among them Prisciani, who knew Hebrew well. These events are characteristic of what Jerome Friedman sees as a peculiar trend in the Renaissance of a Judaizing of the Christian religion, of a return to Hebraic sources and practices to determine the meaning of God’s words and strengthen the faith.29 Farissol, who originated from Avignon and lived for a time in Mantua before settling in Ferrara by 1472, perhaps viewed the religious climate in Italy with a mixture of appreciation and criticism, noting in his Magen Avraham (The Shield of Abraham) of 1500–1512, an anti-Christian treatise, that Judaizing Christians abided by the following: One of the sages described their faith in the following manner…one should take heed to keep all the practices enjoined…in the Mosaic law…while remaining faithful to the mystery and prefiguration that is alluded to or ordained in the new teaching of Jesus.… And he believed and affirmed that it was

24. Resnick, “Lingua dei, lingua hominis,” 51–74, has assembled a wide range of authorities from St. Jerome to St. Augustine to Dante Alighieri who affirm that Hebrew was the language of Adam, with Hebrew scriptures, because they antedate all other ancient writings, being “more reliable records both of the early history of man and of primordial divine truths” (56). See further Eco, Search for the Perfect Language, 7–33. 25. Quoted in Friedman, Most Ancient Testimony, 73. The quotation is from the German lawyer Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), who pioneered the study of Hebrew for Christians, and who argued that “God wished his secrets to be known to man through Hebrew.” 26. See Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 278–79. 27. See above all Ruderman, World of a Renaissance Jew. Also informative are Campbell, Cosmè Tura, 99–129; Franceschini, Presenza ebraica a Ferrara; and Robert Bonfil, “Judeo-Christian Cultural Relations,” with further bibliography. 28. On Prisciani, see Rotondo, “Pellegrino Prisciani.” Prisciani’s connection with Farissol is discussed by Ruderman, World of a Renaissance Jew, 28, and moreover offers a comprehensive biography of Farissol. On Farissol’s connection with artists and humanists at the Ferrarese court, see further Busi, Enigma dell ebraico, 73–97. 29. Friedman, Most Ancient Testimony, 182–94

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necessary to be circumscribed and baptized, to wear a prayer shawl and phylacteries and observe all the practical precepts [of the law] and at the same time to remember the Christian concept of God.30

Such a convergence between Christian and Jewish cultures continued in Ferrara under the rule of Alfonso I. The duke protected the city’s Jewish population, permitting their businesses to prosper and allowing the establishment of a Jewish confraternity, a voluntary pious association known as a Gemilut Hasadim, in 1515.31 Ultimately, however, the Este’s relationship with the Jews was utilitarian, and the court at times buckled under the pressure of the papacy and other religious institutions. In 1508, for example, Alfonso acquiesced to a combination of thundering sermons, political advice, and public pressure, establishing the Monte di Pietà in Ferrara, which curtailed Jewish money lending.32 Tensions between Christians and Jews in Ferrara also manifested themselves in the compulsory theological debates sponsored by the Este. Sometime between 1487 and 1490, at the request of Duke Ercole I and his wife, Eleanora, Farissol engaged in a series of public debates with Ludovico Valena, a Dominican, and Petrus Malfetta, a Franciscan.33 Farissol was also compelled to write down his arguments in order to further defend his answers, all of which he records in his Magen Avraham. The topics of the disputations focused on the legitimacy and relative superiority of Judaism or Christianity, and the participants each deliberated on such issues as prophecy, miracles, divine intervention, Mosaic law, usury, the Incarnation, and the Trinity. Public disputations occurred elsewhere in Italy, at Rimini and Milan, for instance, and while peaceful, they nevertheless served to display the inherent prejudice of the Christian population against the Jews. As has been noted, the spirited tenor of the Ferrarese debates corresponds closely to the liveliness and emotional intensity of Mazzolino’s paintings.34 Given Farissol’s connection with the inner circles of the Este court, in which he cultivated personal friendships with Prisciani and Calcagnini, it is tempting to speculate that he served as an advisor to Mazzolino, spelling out the Hebrew inscriptions in his paintings, and in turn supplying the translation to the artist’s patrons.35 Whether or not Mazzolino and his courtly patrons actually knew Hebrew is a moot point, because his paintings give the appearance of literacy in the language that God supposedly spoke to Adam. Possession of the painting implies knowledge of its mysterious content. A patron could in turn let the painting “speak” for him without entering into debate, allowing silence to act as a means of dissimulation and circumventing heated encounters.36 The use of Jewish imagery and Hebrew inscriptions played both a theological and a political role in Ferrarese art since the fifteenth century. For example, Cosmè Tura’s Roverella altarpiece (ca. 1474) and Garofalo’s extraordinary fresco of the Crucifix with Ecclesia and Synagoga of 1523, express 30. Friedman, Most Ancient Testimony, 188. 31. Ruderman, “Founding of a Gemilut Hasadim”; Horowitz, “Jewish Confraternal Piety.” 32. Ruderman, World of a Renaissance Jew, 85–97. 33. The dispute is analyzed by Ruderman, World of a Renaissance Jew, 57–84. 34. See the observation by Haitovsky, “Hebrew Inscriptions,” 141. Haitovsky fails to cite Ruderman’s essential study of Farissol and his Magen Avraham, which clarifies the dating of the Ferrarese debates and Farissol’s proper life dates. 35. Busi, Enigma dell ebraico, 95–97, notes the connection between Calcagnini and Farissol, and also suggests Farissol as the possible adviser for Mazzolino. As Haitovsky, “Hebrew Inscriptions,” 134–35, notes, Mazzolino must have had a Jewish adviser because that name of God is abbreviated in his Hebrew inscriptions, complying with the customs of observant Jews that forbid the spelling out or voicing of God’s name. 36. In Calcagnini’s dialogue Descriptio silentii, 491–94, he analyzes in detail the practical, rhetorical, and philosophical merits of silence as exemplified by classical authors like Plutarch, Pindar, Xenocrates, and Aesop.

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anti-Jewish ideologies and the politics of toleration respectively.37 It follows that there is a political currency to Mazzolino’s art as well, one that brokers the Este’s relationship with the city’s Jewish community. Christ and the Money Changers, noted above, presents a rhetorical enticement in support of the Monte di Pietà established in Ferrara, especially given Farissol’s outspoken defense of Jewish money lending. Yet one can also see a more diplomatic and reconciliatory theme operating in Mazzolino’s works, which, like Garofalo’s fresco, are also cast in antiquity. Ancient customs and writings are brought under the umbrella of Christ’s ministry to strengthen Christian leadership. Further evidence that the Este valued Hebraic learning and ancient Jewish rituals and customs comes from another version of Mazzolino’s Christ Disputing with the Doctors, now in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome (fig. 5.4).38 Although Mazzolino painted several versions of this subject, the Doria Pamphilj panel is here identified with the one commissioned by Sigismondo d’Este (1480– 1524), the brother of Alfonso, and paid for on 26 January 1520. This provenance is based on the dating of the panel on stylistic grounds, the overall high quality of the work in terms of technique and composition, and the complexity of the Hebrew inscription. As in his other works of the same subject, Mazzolino stages an opposition between the Pharisees who, clutching their texts, are bent on enumerating proofs, and Christ, who stands as a model classical orator, stirring his audience and commanding admiration through his speech.39 The young Christ rests his arms on a lectern, confident in his debate with the Pharisees, who appear lost in their texts as they attempt a rebuttal. The Hebrew inscription in the architectural roundel contains a unique command from God to Moses and his people, recorded in Leviticus 23:42: “In the sukkah you will dwell seven days every citizen in Israel.”40 The inscription makes reference to the holiday of Sukkot, or the Feast of Booths. This holiday comes five days after Yom Kippur and commemorates the Jews who fled Egypt and lived in makeshift booths (sukkot) in the desert. Notably, the dedication of the temple of Solomon coincided with the holiday of Sukkot.41 As Dalia Haitovsky observes, the inscription aligns the Jewish festival with the consecration of Jerusalem’s original temple; subsequently, at the precocious age of twelve, Christ inaugurates his reign of wisdom within that very temple.42 Reading the Hebrew permits the patron to make the connection for his audience between the time of the dedication of Solomon’s temple and the time of Christ’s maturity: the public demonstration of his divine nature and the translation of sacred mysteries through his learning. Sigismondo d’Este’s ability to translate and interpret the Hebrew message (even if it was provided 37. On the Roverella Altarpiece, see Campbell, Cosmè Tura, 99–129; and Busi, Enigma dell ebraico, 83–90. On Garofalo’s fresco, see Katz, Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance, 69–98. Following the relaxation of the laws requiring Jews to wear earrings and yellow badges, Hebrew script was one of the most “distinguishing signs” of Jewish identity for Christians; see Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs.” 38. Zamboni, Ludovico Mazzolino, 32, 54–55; Ballarin, Dosso Dossi, 1:244. 39. See O’Malley, “Content and Rhetorical Forms,” 240, for the emphasis on movere and delectare in sermons. 40. Haitovsky, “Hebrew Inscriptions,” 135–41, also notes the significance of this inscription in relation to Christ’s salvation. The translation in the King James Version reads, “Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths.” 41. On representations of the sukkot in Ferrara, see Manca, “Renaissance Theater and Hebraic Ritual.” See further Haitovsky, “Hebrew Inscriptions,” 138–39. According to 1 Kings 6:38, the dedication of the temple was postponed for eleven months after its completion. In addition, 1 Kings 8:2 reads, “All the people of Israel assembled to King Solomon at the festival in the month Ethanim, which is the seventh month.” 42. The dedication of Solomon’s temple thus begins with the Sukkot, and conceptually ends with Ecce Homo, when Christ is presented to the Jews in the temple just before his crucifixion, as noted by Haitovsky, “Hebrew Inscriptions,” 138–39. Mazzolino’s Ecce Homo, now in Dresden, features the same inscription: “In the sukkah you will dwell seven days every citizen in Israel.”

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FIGURE 5.4. Ludovico Mazzolino, Christ Disputing with the Doctors, ca. 1520, oil on wood, Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilj. Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

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for him) helped shape and affirm his power and superior learning in the face of Ferrara’s substantial Jewish community, who might appeal to their own laws and customs as more ancient and therefore more authoritative. Through strategic pairings, Mazzolino’s Doria Pamphilj panel merges the sacred laws and festivals of the ancient Hebrews with the public oratory of Christ, who figures as a terminus for divine and benign authority. Mazzolino’s ability to provide his courtly audience with a visual formula that conceals yet reveals sacred wisdom extends to his Christ and the Adulterous Woman, painted around 1519, and now in Florence’s Galleria Palatina (fig. 5.5).43 This small-scale panel confronts the viewer with the convergence of Hebrew and hieroglyphic inscriptions in the context of Christ’s ministry. The original patron is unknown, but the painting expands on the symbolism of the sphinxes found in his London panel mentioned above, implying that Christ provides the doorway to the repositories of ancient mysteries. Although Mazzolino incorporated hieroglyphs in other works, his Christ and the Adulterous Woman is exemplary for staging boundaries of restriction and distinction through a viewing experience. Numerous Renaissance commentators defined hieroglyphics as a sacred language, seeing the enigmatic ideograms and pictograms used by the ancient Egyptians as encoded with divine truth at the time of God’s creation.44 A well-known example comes from Erasmus in his adage Festina lente (1508), which states that hieroglyphs were used by priests and theologians in Egypt, “who thought it wrong to exhibit the mysteries of wisdom to the vulgar in open writing, as we do; but they expressed what they thought worthy to be known by various symbols, things or animals, so that not everyone could readily interpret them. But if anyone deeply studied the qualities of each object, and the special nature and power of each creature, he would at length…understand the meaning of the riddle.”45 The language of images comprising hieroglyphics represented the language of God, “because God,” in the words of the Marsilio Ficino, “has knowledge of things not through a multiplicity of processes, but rather as a simple and firm form of the thing.”46 As a timeless language, hieroglyphs enabled an immediate and all-encompassing comprehension of the essence (or nature) of the things pictured, combining wisdom and knowledge in the design of images. It should also come as no surprise that hieroglyphs were studied in conjunction with Hebrew in the Renaissance, as both were employed as methods of exegesis, capable of expressing a broad and continually expanding spiritual meaning.47

43. Zamboni, Ludovico Mazzoino, 25, 41; Ballarin, Dosso Dossi, 1:245–46. 44. Among the more recent studies on hieroglyphs and Egyptology in the Renaissance are Curran, Egyptian Renaissance; Curran, “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Renaissance Egyptology”; Eco, Search for the Perfect Language, 144–77; Wittkower, “Hieroglyphics in the Early Renaissance”; Dempsey, “Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies”; Galis, “Concealed Wisdom,” 363–75; and Iversen, Myth of Egypt. 45. Mann Phillips, “Adages” of Erasmus, 175; and Greene, “Erasmus’s Festina lente.” In his 1517 translation of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, the Bolognese humanist Filippo Fasanini also values the symbolic nature of hieroglyphic characters (“hieroglypha grammatica”) because of their ability to conceal the most secret doctrines and the most worthy pieces of knowledge of Egyptian religion, yet reveal this information to the learned, who could grasp “the enigma of meaning” (“aenigma sententiae”) through informed deliberation, and subsequently obtain the highest honors; see Curran, Egyptian Renaissance, 156–58, 181–82. 46. Quoted in Wittkower, “Hieroglyphics in the Early Renaissance,” 116. 47. Dempsey, “Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies,” 345, observes that hieroglyphic was not seen as the exclusive domain of Egyptian culture, but was promoted “as a universal symbolic means of communication among the educated, a means, moreover, inextricably intertwined with speculation about the origins of language and the language of God himself.”

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FIGURE 5.5. Ludovico Mazzolino, Christ and the Adulterous Woman, ca. 1519, oil on wood, Florence, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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In 1556 Pierio Valeriano (1477–ca. 1560) published his Hieroglyphica, a text that represented at that time the sum of knowledge on hieroglyphs and Egyptian culture. The Hieroglyphica claims that Christ and his apostles, following in the footsteps of Moses, David, and the prophets, used a hieroglyphic method in veiling the primordial mysteries and sacred truths of their words through parables and other forms of figurative speech.48 Valeriano’s appreciation of Christ’s hieroglyphic method adds another layer of meaning to interpreting Mazzolino’s Christ and the Adulterous Woman. The composition shows Christ disputing with the scribes and Pharisees over the fate of a woman caught committing adultery. According to the Gospel of John (8:3–11), the Pharisees, in their attempt to trap Jesus in a legal conundrum, believing him to be a false Messiah, appeal to Mosaic law, which prescribes stoning any woman who has committed adultery. Appropriately enough, Mazzolino depicts a scene in monochrome of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. The gospel relates that Jesus scrawled undisclosed words on ground with his finger, and one sees in the painting a scribe bending down and straining to read those words in the shadows. When the Pharisees continued to question him, Jesus replied, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” ( John 8:7). Christ’s retort caused the elders to disperse, and the woman’s life was spared. In Mazzolino’s painting, Christ’s posture conveys superiority, whereas the Pharisee kneels down to read Christ’s writing as if in supplication.49 At left, one elder walks away, visibly stupefied. While the message is one of tolerance and Christian mercy, the artist presents the subject in such a way that Christ’s words are fundamentally civil and humane. The painting contrasts the Pharisees, whose strict adherence to ancient law can only reach a fatal conclusion, with Christ, whose response avoids proof in favor of moral and ethical reasoning. The hieroglyphs on the temple are adapted from a famous and often-copied series of antique reliefs that once adorned the early Christian church of S. Lorenzo fuori le Muri in Rome. These same naval symbols also served as the basis for the fictive relief in Sebastiano del Piombo’s emblematic portrait of Andrea Doria, the great naval admiral, of 1526 (Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome).50 Like the hieroglyphs in the portrait, which both conceal and reveal the inner character of Andrea Doria, the hieroglyphic frieze in Mazzolino’s Christ and the Adulterous Woman veils the deeper spiritual message of Christ’s words. Conventional aids, such as the eyeglasses or literary compendia used by the scribes in this and in other paintings by Mazzolino, fail to unravel the primordial truths underlying his teachings. This reading is reinforced by the Hebrew inscription in the roundel, which again reads, “The House which Solomon built for the Lord.” As in his other paintings, this citation is paired with a monochrome scene of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, highlighting the role of the Hebrews as protectors and bearers of God’s law. Mazzolino enables the viewer to follow how the sacred mysteries and divine laws encoded in the ancient symbols of the 48. Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, fols. 3v–4r; quoted by Galis, “Concealed Wisdom,” 365n10: “Sed ne in conquirendis multis laborare videar, cum hac hieroglyphica instituendi ratione similitudinem habere comperio divinas nostrorum literas, ita omnia mystico quodam sensu scripta quaecunque Moses, quae David, quae Prophetae reliqui coelesti spiritu afflati protulerunt. In nova vero lege novoque instrumento cum Assertor noster ait, Aperiam in parabolis os meum, et in aenigmate antiqua loquar, quid aliud sibi voluit, quam, hieroglyphice sermonem faciam, et allegorice vetusta rerum proferam monumenta. Et illud, Iesus in Parabolis loquebat ad turbas, nonne sermones suos arcano quasi velamine quodam contegebat. Pari modo videmus Apostolos ab usitato loquendi more recessisse, ut sacra de Deo dicta e ceteris scriptis, sicut merita dignitate, ita et forma quadam discernerentur, ne coelestium mysteriorum maiestas passim et indiscrete patesceret, sanctumque canibus, et margarita porcis exponerent.” 49. For an informative reading of Pieter Bruegel’s treatment of the same subject, see Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, 13–20. 50. See Leoncini, “Deduzioni iconografiche”; and Gorse, “Augustan Mediterranean Iconography,” with further bibliography.

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Egyptians and in the writings of the Hebrews are subsumed and renewed through the public teachings of Christ, the divine successor to Moses and Solomon. If there is a secret message encoded in the series of hieroglyphs in the Galleria Palatina panel, it would have been up to the artist or humanist adviser to reveal the meaning to the patron. In Filarete’s Trattato di Architettura, written in Milan around 1460 to 1464, the ideal prince commissions his architect to devise a monument with an original and covert hieroglyphic inscription, desiring that its cipher be disclosed to him only at a later date.51 Ultimately, Mazzolino’s courtly patrons could be seen to preserve and perpetuate the dynamic process of spiritual thought through the ownership, display, and discussion of the ancient inscriptions and aenigmata. Leon Battista Alberti, in a discussion on ornament from his fifteenth-century De Re Aedificatoria (8:4), suggests that hieroglyphs should replace ordinary letters and conventional inscriptions on monuments, which would otherwise be forgotten and fade into oblivion. Alberti insists that hieroglyphs, just like Greek and Roman narrative relief sculptures honoring famous men, would always be accessible to later generations, but only by “expert men…to whom alone noble matters should be communicated.”52 The hieroglyphs that appear on Solomon’s temple in Mazzolino’s painting therefore provide a symbolic gloss on divine secrecy inherent in the scriptural episode. Christ’s words combine universality and exclusivity, sacredness and permanence in their hieroglyphic mode of address, accessible to privileged minds for all eternity.53 Following Alberti’s lead, it is possible to read the entire imagery of Mazzolino’s Christ and the Adulteress Woman as a hieroglyph, connected with the invention of the figurative arts.54 It is significant that Calcagnini, who also wrote a translation of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo sometime between 1505 and 1517, draws parallels between pictorial design and hieroglyphs.55 In the dedication letter to his cousin Tommaso, Calcagnini states that his translation was like a preparatory drawing for a large painting, which served as a preview, putting before the viewer’s eye the difficulties that needed to be addressed by his intellectual faculties.56 Accordingly, with his exuberant display of Hebrew and hieroglyphs, Mazzolino exercises the intuitive and interpretive faculties of his viewers regarding Christ’s actions and sayings.

51. “He also wanted an obelisk erected in the middle of these two theaters with the letters that I have mentioned in the forms of animals and other things, almost like the Egyptian ones [quasi come quelle egiziache]. He wanted me to write his name and the date, that is, the year. He said he wanted this done before he understood them, although, as he said, he wanted them explained to him later”; quoted and translated in Curran, Egyptian Renaissance, 85–86. Burroughs, “Hieroglyphs in the Street,” 61, 77n29, also cites the relevant example of Bramante’s invented hieroglyph for the Vatican Palace, a proposal rejected by Julius II because the rebus was not unique. 52. Alberti, On the Art of Building, 256. See also Burroughs, “Hieroglyphs in the Street,” 57–81. Burroughs (60) notes that Paolo Cortesi’s De Cardinalatu (ca. 1510) recommends the use of aenigmata and apologi be reserved for the private arenas of a palace. 53. The mystical writings attributed to Dionysius the Aeropagite effectively confirmed for Renaissance humanists and theologians that the sacred scriptures functioned allegorically by preserving “the holy and secret truth” through “unutterable and sacred enigmas”; cited in Curran, Egyptian Renaissance, 74; and see Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 20. 54. Curran, “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Renaissance Egyptology,” 160, observes that “Alberti appears to place the invention of hieroglyphs at the beginning of the history of the figurative arts, ceding, in the process, the invention of this art to the Egyptians.” In addition, Galis, “Concealed Wisdom,” interprets Lorenzo Lotto’s designs for the intarsia covers in the choir of S. Maria Maggiore, Bergamo (1524) as functionally hieroglyphic. 55. Celio Calcagnini, Opera aliquot, 18–20, reprinted with an Italian translation in Savarese and Gareffi, La letteratura delle immagini nel Cinquecento, 57–68. 56. Calcagnini, Opera aliquot, 18; Savarese and Gareffi, La letteratura delle immagini, 60: “Et profecto, qui sunt maiorem quampiam picturam aggressuri, solent eius vestigia, quod ichonographiae beneficium est, praenotare, tum ut aliorum iudicia eliciant, tum ut habeant prae oculis in quibus periclitetur ingenium.”

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Mazzolino’s use of ancient and arcane paraphernalia also draws attention to the temple as a work of art in and of itself. Mazzolino’s highly ornamental style and portrayal of exotic oriental costumes, colors, and inscriptions bypasses Greek and Roman cultures to offer a different kind of antiquity and classicism from that of his contemporary Raphael, to whom he is so often negatively compared. The first book of Kings, chapter 6, describes in great detail Solomon’s temple, with its precious materials and elaborate figurative carvings. Mazzolino’s imaginative conception of the temple of Jerusalem in his paintings emerges as a palimpsest of King Solomon’s divinely inspired artifice. The Hebrew inscription celebrating Solomon’s role as architect effectively doubles as a Solomonic identity for the artist. In other words, the Hebrew serves as type of emblematic selfpresentation of artistic wit, ingenuity, and the bizarre so admired by the Ferrarese court.57 Notably, Lorenzo Costa (1460–1535), Mazzolino’s teacher, signed his Saint Sebastian in Hebrew.58 In this way Costa deliberately concealed his identity from the masses and emphatically rewarded the cognoscenti at court by honoring their noble minds.59 We can conclude our study by investigating Mazzolino’s patronage outside of his native Ferrara, in nearby Bologna. Although documents regarding Mazzolino early career are scarce, he most likely assisted Costa in Bologna, where he retained long-term personal and professional ties. In 1524, Mazzolino painted his Christ Disputing with the Doctors, an extraordinary large-scale work for the physician Francesco Caprara, which was designed for his family chapel in San Francesco in Bologna (now in Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin).60 This altarpiece, one of his most celebrated works, is filled with Hebrew inscriptions, curious ornaments, and exotically dressed characters.61 It is no coincidence that Bolognese humanists, including Filippo Beroaldo the Elder and Giovanni Filoteo Achillini, took a keen interest in the bizarre and the arcane in their own writings.62 Caprara was close friends with the Bolognese poet, courtier, and diplomat Girolamo Casio (1464/67–1533).63 In 1524, Mazzolino painted a small-scale, private devotional painting representing The Tribute Money (Poznań, Muzeum Narodowe; fig. 5.6) for Casio, and it is this work that merits closer attention.64 As an ambassador for the Bolognese state, Casio was on close terms with the courts of Ferrara and Mantua, and the Medici family of Florence bestowed on him many honors, including the privilege of using their last name, and he is sometimes referred to as Girolamo Casio de’ Medici. A highly reputed antiquarian, he was also a significant patron of the arts, serving as an artistic broker and writing numerous poems honoring contemporary artists and their works, including those of

57. See the relevant discussion by Campbell, Cosmè Tura, 126–27, as it relates to Ferrarese artists like Mazzolino. 58. Negro and Roio, Lorenzo Costa, 10, 81–82; and Campbell, Cosmè Tura, 26. For Costa’s use of Hebrew in his paintings, see further Haitovsky, “New Look at a Lost Painting.” 59. See Campbell, Cosmè Tura, 26–27. 60. Zamboni, Ludovico Mazzolino, 36–37; Ballarin, Dosso Dossi, 1:252–53. 61. Lamo, Graticola di Bologna, 80–81, states that while Baldassarre Peruzzi praised this altarpiece as rivaling the works of Raphael on account of its pictorial refinement (“molto diligentisima”), he nonetheless finds its ornament unsightly (“ma con bruto ornamento”). For a translation of the Hebrew inscriptions in this altarpiece, see Haitovsky, “Hebrew Inscriptions,” 135–40. 62. See D’Amico, “Progress of Renaissance Latin Prose.” 63. On Casio’s life and career, see Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, 3:130–40; Cavicchi, Girolamo Casio; and Berselli, “Un committente e un pittore” (see 127n10 for the discrepancies of Casio’s date of birth). 64. Zamboni, Ludovico Mazzolino, 24, 51; and Ballarin, Dosso Dossi, 1:254. Mazzolino produced several versions of this subject, another elegant example being housed in Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford.

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FIGURE 5.6. Ludovico Mazzolino, The Tribute Money, 1524, oil on wood, Poznań, Muzeum Narodowe. Courtesy of Muzium Narodowe, Pozna´n, Poland.

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Leonardo da Vinci and Francesco Francia.65 In 1500, he commissioned from the Milanese artist Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio the famous altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Donors for his family chapel in Santa Maria della Misericordia in Bologna (now in Musée du Louvre, Paris).66 Mazzolino’s Tribute Money would have had personal meaning for Casio, who was an avid collector of rare coins and gems. According to the gospels (Matthew 22:15–21, Luke 20:20–26, and Mark 12:13–17), the Pharisees sought Christ in the temple where he was teaching with parables. They plotted to entrap him by tempting him to speak out on the question of whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. If Jesus approved of paying taxes he would offend the Jews; if he denounced payment he could be reported as disloyal to the empire. Aware of their ploy, Jesus demands to be shown a coin and asks whose image it bears. When they respond that it is Caesar’s image, Jesus silences them with a retort: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Hearing this, the Pharisees departed from the temple in amazement. In Mazzolino’s painting one Pharisee shows Christ the coin and another inspects it while the crowd reacts in wonder to the divine answer. The Tribute Money privileges Christ’s intuition over the religious and political power of the Pharisees and the secular laws of the Romans. His maxim offers a new solution to an age-old problem regarding the power struggle between church and state. By evading potential conflict, Christ’s actions would have been highly instructive and useful to the patron’s role as courtier and diplomat. Not only did the subject have personal meaning for Casio, but it also emulates courtly patronage. In Ferrara, Alfonso I d’Este commissioned Titian to paint The Tribute Money (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden) (fig. 5.7), datable to ca. 1516, possibly to adorn one of his camerini that housed his collection of rare coins and medals.67 The biblical subject was highly relevant to the duke, who had recently ended his role in bloody and prolonged Cambrai Wars against the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, losing the important territories of Modena and Reggio to Julius II, but nevertheless retaining the sovereignty of the Ferrarese state. Ferrara was traditionally a papal territory with the Este serving as vicars, with the family owed their investitures to the Holy Roman Emperor. For Alfonso, Titian’s Tribute Money could address his delicate political position between the opposing forces of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire at the conclusion of the Cambrai Wars.68 In contrast to Titian’s dramatic close-up and psychologically intense image, Mazzolino’s painting for Casio extols Christ’s rhetorical skills, his confidence and divine conviction in the face of opposition. The scene of the Sacrifice of Isaac in the roundel of Mazzolino’s painting also stresses obedience to God and is related to his Philadelphia Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet. Both Titian and Mazzolino adapt a form of humanist theology for their 65. For Casio’s writings on art, see Pedretti, Documenti e memorie riguardanti Leonardo da Vinci. Highlights include Casio’s poem dedicated to Francesco Francia’s Adoration of the Child of 1499, commissioned by Anton Galeazzo Bentivoglio for the high altar of Santa Maria della Misericordia in Bologna, in his Vita de’ Santi, 55v; and his poem dedicated to Leonardo’s St. Anne cartoon in his Cronica, 126r, a volume which also contains epitaphs on artists, including Francia, Boltraffio, Leonardo, Mantegna, and Raphael (46r–46v). 66. On Casio’s patronage of Boltraffio, see Berselli, “Un committente e un pittore,” 123–43; and Caprara, “Girolamo Casio e il ritratto a Bologna.” 67. Weber, “La collezione di pittore ferrarese,” 39. 68. Alfonso’s delicate balance of power between pope and emperor is expressed by the inscription on his own double ducat, “Que sunt Deo Dei,” which quotes Christ’s retort to the Pharisees regarding the payment of taxes (Matthew 22:21; Luke 20:25; and Mark 12:17). On the political currency of Alfonso’s coin, see Shepherd, “A Letter Concerning Coins”; and Rosenberg, “Money Talks,” 38–39.

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FIGURE 5.7. Titian, The Tribute Money, ca. 1516, oil on wood, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

private devotional paintings, which enable their respective patrons to rethink Christ’s divine message as a means to overcome various historical or social predicaments. Casio, who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Santiago de Campostela, was deeply religious and wrote extensively on the life of Christ, including a poem focusing on Christ disputing in the temple.69 Mazzolino’s paintings for his Bolognese patrons complement Casio’s vernacular meditational poetry in praise of Christ’s actions. Casio dedicated his La Clementina to Clement VII when he ascended to the papal throne in 1523, and the Medici pope crowned Casio poet laureate for his religious verses, which were published in that year. The Latin inscription recorded on 69. Casio, Vita de’ Santi, 13v.

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the entablature in his Tribute Money recognizes Casio as knight and poet laureate, honors and titles awarded to him by the Medici: “ANNO DNI HIERO CASIVS DE MEDICIS EQVES ET LAVREATVS MDXXIV.” Instead of a Hebrew citation acknowledging Solomon’s construction, the Latin proclaims Casio as the temple’s patron. Casio’s name appears in the nominative, as if in the title page of a book. In the sixteenth century, the parallel between book and building grew increasingly familiar, testified by the emergence of architectural frontispieces in publications.70 Mazzolino transforms the biblical temple into a metaphoric storehouse of Casio’s intellectual treasures, suggesting that he has committed to memory Christ’s teachings in order to assist his professional role as a prudent diplomat. For Casio, knowledge equals power over the uncertainties of the political climate in Italy, and power comes in the form of divine revelation of sacred mysteries.71 Through the contemplation of such a congratulatory image of Christ, the painting was designed to awaken in Casio his poetic and deliberative faculties: to enrich the temple of his mind with the secret treasures of divine wisdom.72

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70. Burroughs, “Hieroglyphs in the Street,” 59. 71. See Lochrie, Covert Operations, 99. 72. See Campbell, “Pier Maria Rossi’s Treasure,” 81, who defines Pier Maria Rossi’s camera d’oro at Torrechiara, painted with scenes of ritual courtship, as a poetic and transformative space, arguing that “the architectural container of Pier Maria’s worldly wealth—a potential prison—is to be gradually discovered in the process of contemplation, as his living body, the repository and seat of real treasures, his God-given poetic faculty and fully realized soul.”

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Campbell, Stephen. Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics and the Renaissance City, 1450–1495. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Camporeale, Salvatore I. “Renaissance Humanism and the Origins of Humanist Theology.” In Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkhaus, edited by John W. O’Malley, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson, 101–24. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993. Caprara, Francesco. “Girolamo Casio e il ritratto a Bologna, fra religione, moda e letteratura.” Il Carrobbio 26 (2000): 61–82. Casio, Girolamo. Cronica. Bologna, 1525 [1528]. ———. Vita de’ Santi. Bologna, 1524. Cavicchi, Filippo. Girolamo Casio (1464–1533). Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1915. Cittadella, Cesare. Catalogo istorico de’ pittori e scultori ferraresi. Vol. 1. Ferrara: Francesco Pomatelli, 1782. Colantuono, Anthony. “Dies Alcyoniae: The Invention of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods.” Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 237–56. Colie, Rosalie. The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance. Edited by Barbara Lewalski. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Curran, Brian. The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ———. “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Renaissance Egyptology.” Word and Image 14 (1998): 156–85. D’Amico, John. “The Progress of Renaissance Latin Prose: The Case of Apuleianism.” Renaissance Quarterly 37 (1984): 351–92. Dempsey, Charles. “Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies and Gentile Bellini’s Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria.” In Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, edited by Indrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus, 342–65. Washington, DC: Folger Books; London and Toronto: Associated Presses, 1988. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval Modern Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Translated by James Fentress. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997. Fantuzzi, Giovanni. Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi. Vol. 3. Bologna: San Tommaso D’Aquino, 1783. Fiorenza, Giancarlo. Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Folin, Marco. “Studioli, vie coperte, gallerie: Genealogia di uno spazio del potere.” In Il Camerino di alabastro: Antonio Lombardo e la scultura all’antica, edited by Matteo Ceriana, 97–109. Milan: Silvana, 2004. Franceschini, Adriano. Artisti a Ferrara in età umanistica e rinascimentale: Testimonianze archivistiche. Pt. 2, vol. 2. Ferrara: Corbo, 1997. ———. Presenza ebraica a Ferrara: Testimonianze archivistiche fino al 1492. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007. Friedman, Jerome. The Most Ancient Testimony: Sixteenth-Century Christian-Hebraica in the Age of Renaissance Nostalgia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983. Galis, Diana. “Concealed Wisdom: Renaissance Hieroglyphic and Lorenzo Lotto’s Bergamo Intarsia.” Art Bulletin 62 (1980): 363–75 Gelli, Giovambattista. La Vita di Alfonso da Este Duca di Ferrara. Venice: Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Bernardo Sessa, 1597. Giovio, Paolo. Liber de vita et rebus gestis Alfonsi Atestini Ferrariae Principis. Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1551. Goodgal, Dana. “The Camerino of Alfonso I d’Este.” Art History 1 (1978): 162–90. Gorse, George L. “Augustan Mediterranean Iconography and Renaissance Hieroglyphics at the Court of Clement VII: Sebastiano del Piombo’s Portrait of Andrea Doria.” In The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture, edited by Kenneth Gouwens and Sheryl Reiss, 313–37. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Greene, Thomas. “Erasmus’s Festina lente: Vulnerabilities of the Humanist Text.” In “Mimesis” from Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, edited by John Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols Jr., 132–48. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982.

Hebrew, Hieroglyphs, and the Secrets of Divine Wisdom in Ludovico Mazzolino’s Devotional Paintings 147 Gundersheimer, Werner. “The Patronage of Ercole I d’Este.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976): 1–18. Haitovsky, Dalia. “The Hebrew Inscriptions in Ludovico Mazzolino’s Paintings.” In Jewish Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, edited by Judit Targarona Borrás and Angel Sáenz-Badillos, 133–45. Leiden: Brill, 1999. ———. “A New Look at a Lost Painting: The Hebrew Inscription in Lorenzo Costa’s Presentation in the Temple.” Artibus et historiae 15 (1994): 111–20. Hope, Charles. “I Camerini d’alabastro: A collocazione e la decorazione pittorica.” In Il camerino d’alabastro: Antonio Lombardo e la scultura all’antica, edited by Matteo Ceriana, 83–95. Silvana: Milan, 2004. Horowitz, Elliott. “Jewish Confraternal Piety in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara: Continuity and Change.” In The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Europe, edited by Nicholas Terpstra, 150–71. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Iversen, Erik. The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Reprint, 1991. Katz, Dana E. The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Kavaler, Ethan Matt. Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kessler, Herbert. “Medieval Art as Argument.” In Iconography at the Crossroads, edited by Brendan Cassidy, 59–73. Princeton, NJ: Trustees of Princeton University, 1993. Lamo, Pietro. Graticola di Bologna (1560). Edited by Marinella Pigozzi. Bologna: Coopertiva Libraria Universitaria, 1996. Lazzari, Alfonso. “Un enciclopedico del sec. XVI: Celio Calcagnini.” Atti e Memorie della Deputazione Ferrarese di Storia Patria 30 (1936): 83–164. Leoncini, Luca. “Deduzioni iconografiche, linguaggio geroglifico e uso dell’antico: Il caso del Ritratto Doria.” In Il Ritratto e la memoria, edited by Augusto Gentili, Philippe Morel, and Claudia Cieri Via, 249–61. Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Liebenwein, Wolfgang. Studiolo: Storia e tipologia di uno spazio culturale, edited by Claudia Ceri Via and translated by Alessandro Califano. Ferrara: Panini, 2005. Lochrie, Karma. Covert Operations: The Medieval Use of Secrecy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Magnani, Romolo. La ceramica ferrarese tra Medioevo e Rinascimento. 2 vols. Ferrara: Belriguardo, 1981–82. Manca, Joseph. “Renaissance Theater and Hebraic Ritual in Ercole de’ Roberti’s Gathering of Manna.” Artibus et historiae 9 (1988): 137–47. Mann Phillips, Margaret. The Adages of Erasmus: A Study with Translations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Negro, Emilio, and Nicosetta Roio. Lorenzo Costa 1460–1535. Modena: Artioli, 2001. O’Malley, John W. “Content and Rhetorical Forms in Sixteenth-Century Treatises on Preaching.” In Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality, and Reform, 238–52. Aldershot, UK; Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993. ———. “Egidio da Viterbo and Renaissance Rome.” In Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality, and Reform, 67–84. Aldershot, UK; Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993. ———. Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality, and Reform. Aldershot, UK; Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993. O’Rourke Boyle, Marjorie. Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Owen Hughes, Diana. “Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City.” Past and Present 112 (1986): 3–59. Pedretti, Carlo, ed. Documenti e memorie riguardanti Leonardo da Vinci a Bologna e in Emilia. Bologna: Fiammenghi, 1953. Piana, Ernesto. Ricerche ed osservazioni sulla vita e sugli scritti di Celio Calcagnini umanista ferrarese del secolo XVI. Rovigo: A. Conzatti, 1899. Resnick, Irven. “Lingua dei, lingua hominis: Sacred Language and Medieval Texts.” Viator 21 (1990): 51–74. Rosenberg, Charles. The Este Monuments and Urban Development in Renaissance Ferrara. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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———. “Money Talks: Numismatic Propaganda under Alfonso I d’Este.” In L’Età di Alfonso I e la pittura del Dosso, 145–64. Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2004. Rotondo, A. “Pellegrino Prisciani.” Rinascimento 9 (1960): 69–110. Ruderman, David B. “The Founding of a Gemilut Hasadim Society in Ferrara in 1515.” Association of Jewish Studies Review 1 (1976): 233–67. ———. “The Italian Renaissance and Jewish Thought.” In Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, edited by Albert Rabil Jr., 1:382–433. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. ———. The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union Press, 1981. Savarese, Gennaro, and Andrea Gareffi, ed. La letteratura delle immagini nel Cinquecento. Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Schwarzenberg, Erkinger. “Die Lunetten der ‘stanza del Tesoro’ im Palast des Ludovico il Moro zu Ferrara.” Arte Antica e Moderna 26 (1964): 131–50 [Italian translation edited by Giacomo Bargellesi, “Le lunette della Stanza del Tesoro nel Palazzo di Ludovico Il Moro a Ferrara.” Atti e Memorie Deputazione Province Ferrarese di Storia Patria 6 (1967): 45–96]. Shepherd, Rupert. “A Letter Concerning Coins in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara.” Apollo 149 (1999): 40–43. Snyder, Jon R. Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Steadman Sheard, Wendy. “Antonio Lombardo’s Reliefs for Alfonso d’Este’s Studio di Marmi: Their Significance and Impact on Titian.” Studies in the History of Art 45 (1993): 315–57. Tiraboschi, Girolamo. Storia della letturatura italiana. Vol. 7. Modena: La Società Tipografica, 1792. Trinkhaus, Charles. “The Religious Thought of the Italian Humanists, and the Reformers: Anticipation or Autonomy?” In The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, 339–66. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. Valeriano, G. Pierio. Hieroglyphica. Basel, 1556. Weber, Gregor J. M. “La collezione di pittore ferrarese a Dresda.” In Il Trionfo di Bacco: Capolavori della scuola ferrarese a Dresda, edited by Gregor J. M. Weber, 37–48. Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2002. Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1958; revised, 1968. Wittkower, Rudolph. “Hieroglyphics in the Early Renaissance.” In Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, 113–28. Boulder: Westview Press, 1977. Wood, Christopher S. Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008. Zamboni, Silla. Ludovico Mazzolino. Milan: Silvana, 1968.

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A Secret Space for a Secret Keeper Cardinal Bibbiena at the Vatican Palace Henry Dietrich Fernández

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ecrecy played a key role within the apartment belonging to Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena at the Vatican Palace, created by Raphael around 1516 at Pope Leo X’s behest to supply Bibbiena, his boyhood tutor, with living quarters of exceptional quality. Bibbiena was Leo’s segretario domestico, his confidential secretary, his “secret keeper,” as the early modern world understood segretario to mean.1 The cardinal’s rooms included the stufetta with erotic grotesques (fig. 6.1), the loggetta (fig. 6.2), and the chapel, and they were situated above the pope’s own camerae secretae, connected to the pope’s chambers by a small, secret spiral staircase. Courtly ritual at the Vatican Palace hindered private exchange, and the secret staircase thereby gave Leo and Bibbiena the means to interact undisturbed and with discretion. This essay explores the spatial operations and architecture that enabled this singular relationship between pope and secretary to function.2 Numerous sources underscore the extent to which the notion of secrecy was embedded into the role of the secretary in the Italian Renaissance. For example, the Venetian writer Francesco Sansovino, in his 1564 Del Secretario noted that “the Secretary is named from the secrecy that one presupposes must be in him, he must have eyes and mind, but not a tongue outside of counsel.”3 Forty years later, Sansovino’s words were largely echoed by the Vicentian historian Giacomo Marzari, who in 1593 wrote that “Secretaries are now called a secretis presumably because they must have a constant and solid secrecy in them, that they will never speak freely, for any reason whatsoever about the affairs of their prince, but the secretary must keep these affairs to himself, as if he were mute.”4 For John Florio, the secretario was plainly and unambiguously a “secret keeper.”5 This essay remained incomplete at the time of Dr. Fernández’s death in 2009. The notes that appear here have been added by the editors. The editors want to thank Caroline P. Murphy for her assistance and support in publishing the essay and hope that it serves as a fitting tribute to Henry, his scholarship, and the warm friendship he extended to us in Los Angeles. 1. For the etymological association with secret keeping, see Simonetta, Rinascimento Segreto, 127. See the book more generally for the Italian Renaissance secretary/segretario and 230–32 for Bibbiena in particular. 2. On Bibbiena’s apartment, see most recently Pediconi, “Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena.” 3. Sansovino, Del secretario, 2v. 4. Marzari, La prattica, 1r, translated in Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 164. 5. Florio, Worlde of Wordes.

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FIGURE 6.1. Raphael and workshop, Stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 1516–17, Vatican Palace. Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY.

Of equal importance to this essay on Cardinal Bibbiena’s Vatican apartments are source materials that demonstrate that “secret keepers” should work within a “spazio segreto,” meaning secret, segregated, and apart. For example, in 1594, Angelo Ingegneri, secretary to Cardinal Aldobrandini, stipulated in his Del buon segretario that the secretary should have a room of his own within his master’s palace, “separated but luminous and airy…where he could avoid having to let certain inappropriate people enter.”6 The cardinal and segretario domestico Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena was to secure much more than just a “separate” room of his own in the palace occupied by his master, Pope Leo X (1513–21), on the Vatican Hill. But Bibbiena was no ordinary “secret keeper.” He had been tutor to Leo when he was the boy cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and had even accompanied his pupil into exile when the Medici were banished from Florence in 1494. On Leo X’s election to the papacy in 1513, Bibbiena received the title of cardinal deacon and became the chief administrator and writer of papal correspondence. More importantly, until about 1517, Cardinal Bibbiena enjoyed the special position of segretario domestico (confidential secretary) that elevated him above the pope’s own family member Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. Consequently, as the pope’s

6. Ingegneri, Del buon segretario, 106. These “secret” rooms facilitated the privacy of secretaries and princes alike, for which see Folin, “Studioli.”

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FIGURE 6.2. Raphael and workshop, Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 1516–17, Vatican Palace. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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tesoriere generale (treasurer), as well as chief advisor and confidant, Cardinal Bibbiena resided within the safely guarded confines of the Vatican Palace.7 While other cardinals built palaces in the city, Bibbiena’s relatively modest background meant that he was to live in the palace itself, which is perhaps not surprising given his important role at the Vatican court.8 The importance of secrecy and the mechanics of spatial secrecy were well appreciated by the builders and inhabitants of these palaces; according to one early-sixteenthcentury treatise, the ideal cardinal’s palace would be furnished with private spiral staircases, secret doors, peepholes, listening tubes, and spy-windows.9 Nonetheless, there is an astonishingly prescient, arguably intentional relationship between the secret nature of Bibbiena’s profession and the secret nature of the space that was to be custom built and decorated for him by Raphael directly above his employer’s own apartments within the Vatican Palace.10 Cardinal Bibbiena’s rooms were situated above the pope’s own camerae secretae and connected to the pope’s chambers by a small private lumaca, spiral staircase. As such, the staircase is critical in understanding the spatial and psychological conception of both sets of apartments. From morning until night, the pope was accompanied by a retinue—he was rarely alone—and the secret staircase gave Leo and Bibbiena the means to interact undisturbed, to allow the segretario domestico to fulfill his duties to the letter. Unfettered access to Bibbiena was equally difficult: the Ferrarese poet Ludovico Ariosto observed that the cardinal was “always surrounded by a great circle of people whom one cannot get past, and one must fight through ten doorways to get to where he is.”11 This strategically positioned secret staircase gave Bibbiena and the pope access to one another at all hours. In this favored part of the fourth level of the Vatican Palace, above the sala prima del papa, Raphael designed parts of Bibbiena’s private apartment, one that might be described as a “palace within a palace.” The desire to appear and disappear at will, to have a means of escape unknown to others, is undoubtedly at the foundation of the invention of secret passages, cabinets, stairs, and other architectural devices that conceal and reveal. Secret stairs provided the need for private, secure communication and movement within already highly protected and ostensibly secure environments. Within the physical spaces of the Renaissance court, secret stairs constructed power relations by means of privileged access, but at the same time their function could also be quite practical. For instance, the “service stairs” at Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale were designed by the Sienese Francesco di Giorgio Martini as part of the palace’s third building program from 1474 to 1482, for the purpose of hauling water up from the well. The well is located deep within the walls of the palace—protecting the water and ensuring a continuous, safe water supply. Such a staircase could be described as an open secret; it could not be seen from outside the palace walls, but everyone that lived in the palace certainly knew about it and its location. In addition to these substantial service stairs, there were several minor secret stairs connecting living quarters to different parts of the palace. Pope Julius II’s architect, Donato Bramante, was from Urbino, and perhaps had some knowledge of Francesco di Giorgio’s stair designs. Around 1507, he incorporated a secret staircase within the “guarded area” of Julius II’s cubiculum 7. Moncallero, Il cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena. 8. On cardinals and their place at court in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, see Lowe, Church and Politics, esp. 46–52. 9. Weil-Garris and d’Amico, “Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace,” 78–79, 82–83. 10. For Raphael’s relationship with Bibbiena, see Jones and Penny, Raphael, 190–94; Talvacchia, Raphael, 106–7, 230–31. 11. Quoted and translated in Pediconi, “Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena,” 95.

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(bedroom), which was later used by Leo X. One of these stairs is located to the north of the cubiculum adjoining a small audience room (perhaps the same room in which Julius II is portrayed in Raphael’s painting of the pontiff in the National Gallery, London); this staircase led all the way down to the Cortile del Pappagallo and offered the pope a quick and expeditious entry and escape route. The second secret stair located within the pope’s apartment is probably the design of Bramante’s legatee, Raphael, just south of the cubiculum. From 1514 to 1516, under Leo X’s papacy, Leonardo da Vinci lived in Rome at the Palazzo Belvedere at the Vatican. Residing in this northernmost part of the Vatican complex, Leonardo would certainly have known Bramante’s spiral stair (ca. 1507), which was designed to give access to Julius II’s Secret (secluded or segregated) Sculpture Garden, the Giardino Segreto.12 In 1516 Leonardo traveled to France where he entered the service of Francis I. While there is no documentary proof that Leonardo designed the famous double spiral stair built within the core of Francis I’s château at Chambord, it is reasonable to suggest that his then-current experimentation with secret stair designs may have at least informed the Chambord stairs.13 The centrally placed Chambord stairs are hardly secret. Nonetheless they offer a simultaneous means of ambulating up and down to the palace’s inner precincts, ensuring the regulation and maneuvering of communication to protect and suggest privacy and secrecy. The spiral staircase leading up to Bibbiena’s rooms offered the cardinal and the pope a different type of escape and sense of seclusion, one based on classical notions of privacy and leisure (otium), pleasure and delectation (voluptas), humanist virtues promoted in the Renaissance that correspond not with excessive luxury, but with the vita contemplativa.14 The new rooms designed and decorated in fresco by Raphael and his workshop between 1515 and 1517 included a stufetta (or stufa) facing the Cortile del Pappagallo and a loggetta facing the Cortile de Maresciallo, and other improvements. The earliest documentation for Raphael’s related work in this part of the palace is an agreement of 15 January 1515 between Giuliano Leno and a master mason Jacomo, among others, for a cornice required by Raphael for Cardinal Bibbiena’s specially positioned apartment.15 Even prior to the documented involvement of Raphael, construction is recorded in this segregated part of the palace, as early as six months after Leo X’s election. New construction is documented again on 19 June 1514, in which Francesco dello Guelfo stipulated he had produced measurements on behalf of Giuliano Leno for Cardinal Bibbiena’s apartments located above those of Pope Leo X.16 The noise and inconvenience of such construction directly above Leo’s private apartment explains why the pope vacated his rooms while the renovation of Bibbiena’s special space took place, but Leo must have felt that this temporary displacement was worth the effort. After all, its locus would soon provide expeditious and secret access to Bibbiena, his new palatine

12. For staircases at the Vatican, see Fernández and Shapiro, “La Scala di Bramante.” 13. It is also worth noting the series of staircases in the fifteenth-century Castello di Pavia, which enabled restricted access to the chambers of the duke, his secretaries, and visiting dignitaries. When François I entered Pavia in 1515, for example, a wooden staircase was added to the piano nobile on the park side of the castle so that the king could go to his “rooms and hall without having to return through the galleries”; Welch, “Galeazzo Maria Sforza,” 359. 14. Vickers, “Leisure and Idleness,” 129–30. 15. Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 2:197. See also Pediconi, “Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena,” 99. 16. Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 2:198–99.

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count. As we shall see, this architectural program would also ensure that this access was visually marked for all, evident to the wandering eyes of those assembled in the piazza below.17 The dating of Bibbiena’s new rooms, which include the stufetta and the loggetta, has been deduced by Deoclecio Redig de Campos on the basis of correspondence from Pietro Bembo to Cardinal Bibbiena. The first letter dated 6 May 1516 from Bembo in Rome, while Bibbiena was in Florence, comments on the current state of the work: his new rooms and loggia were finished and the stufetta nearly so.18 In another letter, dated 20 June 1516 and cited by Redig de Campos and John Shearman, Bembo writes again to Cardinal Bibbiena to say that his apartment, which includes his loggetta and stufetta, is finished, complete with leather wall hangings.19 About a year later, in a letter dated 19 July 1517, Bembo comments on the loggetta: “Once more your Lordship’s [Bibbiena] loggia is being built and is turning out most beautifully.”20 The decoration of Bibbiena’s apartment by the highly esteemed Raphael would itself have been indicative of the new cardinal deacon’s special status within Leo X’s inner circle, despite the modest size of the loggetta and the stufetta. The dimensions of the plan of the loggetta measure 3.12 x 15.74 meters with a height of 4.64 meters, while the plan of the stufetta measures only 2.5 x 2.5 meters and is 4.34 meters high. Nonetheless, the scale of these small additions to Bibbiena’s apartment was enhanced by their decorative splendor, albeit scandalous by contemporary sixteenth-century taste, which in turn embellished Bibbiena’s privileged position at Leo X’s court.21 In particular, the decorations in the stufetta were distinguished by Raphael’s use of erotically laden grotesques, “secret pictures” both in terms of subject matter, and also in the circumstance of their discovery, within “secret” places such as the ruins of Nero’s Domus Aurea within what were likened to “underground grottoes.”22 These mythologies do not survive, save in damaged fragments, but an engraving usually attributed to Marco Dente—an associate of Raphael, Marcantonio Raimondi, and Giulio Romano—probably records one of these compositions, Venus Pulling a Thorn from Her Foot (fig. 6.3).23 These erotically charged mythological scenes with their sexually explicit ornamentation of flora and fauna parallel those designed by Raphael for the Psyche Loggia of the Villa Farnesina (ca. 1511–13) owned by Agostino Chigi.24 While the Farnesina provided the stage for elaborate banquets and the convivial cultivation of the arts, Bibbiena’s stufetta offered a more intimate deliberation on amorous experiences that are the source of art (figurative and poetic) and inspired thought. On 4 June 1517 Bibbiena wrote a letter to his young clerical protégé Giulio Sadoleto, having just arranged for Sadoleto to be accommodated during his own absence from Rome in his Vatican 17. On these renovations, see also Fernández, Bramante and Raphael in Renaissance Rome. 18. Redig de Campos, I Palazzi Vaticani, 109–10. 19. Ibid., 110; Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 2:241–42. 20. Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 2:291. 21. For an important study of the stufetta within the context of the sexual culture of Leo X’s court, see Wyatt, “Bibbiena’s Closet.” These decorations, while putatively private, were made popular by the engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi and his assistants, for which see Thompson, Poets, Lovers, and Heroes, 5, 36. 22. For the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea, see Weege, “Das Goldene Haus des Nero”; Dacos, La decouverte de la Domus Aurea. On Raphael’s engagement with the paintings of that complex, see Dacos, Le Logge di Raffaello; Dacos, “La Loggetta du Cardinal Bibbiena”; Joyce, “Grasping at Shadows.” 23. Thompson, Poets, Lovers, and Heroes, 36; Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions, 270. 24. On Agostino Chigi’s patronage and the Farnesina, see Rowland, “Render unto Caesar”; Jones and Penny, Raphael, 92–111; Rowland, Culture of the High Renaissance, 179–82.

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FIGURE 6.3. Marco Dente. Venus Pulling a Thorn from Her Foot. ca. 1516, engraving, London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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rooms, with various instructions regarding his property. “The bathroom may be used and praised by you, now and then,” Bibbiena instructed Sadoleto, though he was not otherwise to touch the cardinal’s things.25 He fully anticipated the appeal to the young cleric of the erotic grotesques, whose salacious and sensational nature immediately denoted them as sights to be viewed only by a select group of cognoscenti. Indeed the proscription not to touch anything else served to jokingly activate the play between the forbidden and the revealed. The inner circle of men like Sadoleto who could be permitted access to the stufetta also constituted the sanctioned audience for Giulio Romano’s now lost drawings of I Modi, sights emphatically barred to a wider viewing public through the censure of Raimondi’s prints based on those drawings.26 The cardinal went further than most in claiming ownership of this most secret space; where it was customary for only the papal coat of arms to be recorded in papal sponsored spaces, Bibbiena actually had his own coat of arms, two cornucopias filled with flowers in the form of a cross, permanently inscribed into the fabric of his private stufetta. Collectively these new spaces, along with the restoration of some preexisting rooms, his cubiculum (a bedroom) and sale (reception halls), shaped the identity of Cardinal Bibbiena’s very private palatine living quarters within the papal famiglia.27 As stated previously, this suite of rooms was more than just an apartment; it was, for all intents and purposes, a “palace within a palace,” one secretly lodged within the greater fabric of the palace. As such, it was fitting that this “secret palace” should also contain a palatine chapel; indeed no true palace would have been complete without such accommodations for prayer. This sacred space would offer the cardinal deacon more than just a place for prayer or a locus for the ritual of the mass. A chapel strategically positioned above Bibbiena’s rooms, one that was accessible exclusively through his apartment and therefore viewed from the public side as emphatically his, visibly positioned Cardinal Bibbiena within the public realm populated by his ecclesiastical colleagues and Rome’s popolo.28 From the steps of St. Peter’s below, the excitement and anticipation of identifying a seemingly important chapel—but one mysteriously private, at the very top of the Vatican Palace in clear public view—was undercut by the realization that it was in fact a small chapel with a plan measuring just 7.75 meters wide, east to west, and 4.45 meters deep, north to south. As is the case with many revealed secrets, it was the semblance of something grander and more monumental, rather than its actual appearance, which set up an aesthetic dissonance that must have resulted in its owner occupant’s visual pleasure and delight. A similar paradox between scale and grandeur is expressed in Raphael’s painting, Vision of Ezekiel (fig. 6.4) of circa 1517, measuring only 40 x 30 centimeters, but endowed with a magnificence and gravitas more commonly associated with much larger pictures.29 Raphael challenged the expectations of viewers by conveying a moment of visionary revelation, an image even of divinity, in a precious handheld object. In so doing, the painter espoused the pictorial equivalent of a device familiar to Renaissance poets and writers as multo in parvo. The fables of Aesop or the

25. Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 2:287. 26. For I Modi, see Talvacchia, Taking Positions; Turner, “Marcantonio’s Lost Modi.” 27. For the terminology of domestic architecture see Thornton, Italian Renaissance Interior, esp. 26–27. 28. On this chapel see also Fernández, “Raphael’s Bibbiena Chapel.” 29. Jones and Penny, Raphael, 189–92. On “small forms,” see Colie, Resources of Kind, 32–75; Struever, “Proverbial Signs.” See also Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi, 127–60.

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FIGURE 6.4. Raphael, The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, ca. 1518, oil on panel, Florence, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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adages of Erasmus were understood to present an elegant contrast between brevity of form and depth of erudition. Similarly Raphael’s audience delighted in witnessing this vast landscape and the sculptural monumentality of the Ezekiel’s “four living creatures” in a remarkably compact physical space. Likewise, privileged visitors to Bibbiena’s apartments would have experienced the revelation of the chapel’s small scale as a surprising and marvelous contrast to the impression of grandiosity that the structure conveyed to the pointedly excluded onlookers in the piazza. For the few who knew the chapel up close and intimately, the ambiguity of this perceptual difference was clearly evident. From forty meters below, at the entrance to the Old Basilica where a much greater number of people were able to admire the clarity of Raphael’s novel design, however, the means by which he achieved such an effect were not so readily apparent. Only upon thoughtful reflection could one discern how Raphael’s calculated design effects sustained the chapel’s sharp optical legibility over such a long distance, from the basilica entrance porch up to Bibbiena’s terrace, or from the Janiculum Hill as seen in Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawing of 1534.30 In part, this effect was accomplished by Raphael’s use of architectural chiaroscuro, the balance of light and shadow, which was achieved through his dimensional exaggeration of the cornice. The overhang of the cornice creates a deep shadow all along the frieze of the western elevation of the chapel and continues around the corner of the façade over the pilasters that define the corners. Consequently, the central bay of the façade is given greater visual emphasis when viewed from afar, an optical illusion that heightened its mystery, secrecy, and special status. The visibility of Bibbiena’s chapel was enhanced when viewed by the pope and the public alike from the steep sight line down below. In this manner, one can recognize yet another example of Raphael’s courtly sprezzatura; the optical effects appear both clear and effortless yet were the result of a highly complex demonstration of architectural ingegno.31 The visual model from the ancient Roman world that may have had the greatest aesthetic resonance for Raphael was the so-called Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, of the early first century bce (fig. 6.5).32 Just as Bibbiena’s chapel would perch atop the façade of the Vatican Palace, this circular temple was situated high above the banks of the Aniene River. A heavy, overhanging cornice casts a dramatic shadow on the columns below, imparting a sense of the monumental on this structure of rather modest scale. In a letter from Pietro Bembo to Cardinal Bibbiena, dated 3 April 1516, Bembo describes a private excursion to Tivoli that included Raphael among its participants.33 Raphael’s personal appropriation of the dramatic chiaroscuro activated by that temple’s cornice allowed him to establish a parity with ancient architects and ultimately to invest Bibbiena’s secret apartment with all’antica resonance.34 Raphael’s sophisticated composition endowed upon Bibbiena’s chapel a monumentality usually reserved for larger buildings and even greater patrons. “Stay safe in your sweet little rooms,” Bibbiena encouraged Sadoleto, his words suggesting occupancy of a bijoux pied à terre, albeit one

30. Van Hamskeerck, Die römischen Skizzenbücher. 31. On Raphael’s sprezzatura, see Louden, “Sprezzatura in Raphael and Castiglione”; Shearman, “Castiglione’s Portrait of Raphael.” For Raphael’s architectural ingegno, see Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders.” 32. On the Temple of Vesta, see Stamper, Architecture of Roman Temples, 75–79. 33. Bembo, Lettere, 83–84. 34. Gombrich, “Style all’antica”; Barkan, Unearthing the Past.

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FIGURE 6.5. Temple of Vesta, early first century bce, Tivoli. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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closer to the sky.35 At the same time, he admonished Sadoleto “don’t touch anything from the guardaroba.”36 For those few intimates of the papal court who knew that the private chapel led to Cardinal Bibbiena’s suite of rooms in the palace, the façade functioned as the public front to his “secret palace within the palace of a pope.” Yet the splendid modesty of Raphael’s design allowed Cardinal Bibbiena to maintain an appropriate level of public decorum without upstaging his friend, employer, former pupil, and now benefactor, Pope Leo X. Thus the chapel within the secluded apartment, its occupant, and its patron encapsulate the paradoxes of papal culture— indeed early modern court culture more generally—in which visibility and prominence, rank and decorum all had to be carefully managed and negotiated. It is these architectural underpinnings that enabled and supported this very singular relationship between pope and secretary, and simultaneously allowed them to function equally well in public and in secrecy.

Bibliography Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Bembo, Pietro. Lettere. Rome: Valerio Dorico, 1548. Biow, Douglas. Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Colie, Rosalie. The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance. Edited by Barbara Lewalski. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Dacos, Nicole. La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1969. ———. Le Logge di Raffaello. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico, 1977. ———. “La Loggetta du Cardinal Bibbiena: Décor à l’antique et rôle de l’atelier.” In Raffaello a Roma: Il convego del 1983, 225–36. Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1986. Fernández, Henry Dietrich. Bramante and Raphael in Renaissance Rome . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, forthcoming. ———. “Raphael’s Bibbiena Chapel in the Vatican Palace.” In Functions and Decorations: Art and Ritual at the Vatican Palace in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Tristan Weddigen, Sible De Blaauw, and Bram Kempers, 115–30. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2003. Fernández, Henry Dietrich, and Barbara E. Shapiro. “La Scala di Bramante e Raffaello nei Palazzi Vaticani.” In Raffaello in Vaticano, edited by Fabrizio Mancinelli et al., 136–41. Milan: Electa, 1984. Fiorenza, Giancarlo. Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes. London, 1598. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972. Folin, Marco. “Studioli, vie coperte, gallerie: Genealogia di uno spazio del potere.” In Il Camerino di alabastro: Antonio Lombardo e la scultura all’antica, edited by Matteo Ceriana, 97–109. Milan: Silvana, 2004. Gombrich, Ernst. “The Style all’antica: Imitation and Assimilation.” In Gombrich on the Renaissance: Norm and Form, 122–28. London: Phaidon, 1966. Ingegneri, Angelo. Del buon segretario libri tre. Rome: Guglielmo Faciotto, 1594. Jones, Roger, and Nicholas Penny. Raphael. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.

35. Moncallero, Il cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, 228. 36. See Pediconi, “Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena,” 100.

A Secret Space for a Secret Keeper 161 Joyce, Hetty. “Grasping at Shadows: Ancient Paintings in Renaissance and Baroque Rome.” Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 219–46. Louden, Lynn M. “Sprezzatura in Raphael and Castiglione.” Art Journal 28 (1968): 43–53. Lowe, K. J. P. Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy: The Life and Career of Cardinal Francesco Soderini, 1453–1524. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Marzari, Giacomo. La pratica e theorica del cancelliere. Vicenza: Giorgio Greco, 1593. Moncallero, Giuseppe Lorenzo. Il cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, umanista e diplomatico, 1470–1520. Florence: Olschki, 1953. Pediconi, Angelica. “Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena (1470–1520): A Palatine Cardinal.” In The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700, edited by Mary Hollingsworth and Carol Richardson, 92–112. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Redig de Campos, Deoclecio. I Palazzi Vaticani. Bologna: Cappelli, 1967. Rowland, Ingrid. The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. “Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders.” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 81–104. ———. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s: Humanism and the Arts in the Patronage of Agostino Chigi.” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986), 673–730. Sansovino, Francesco. Del secretario. Venice: Francesco Rampazetto, 1564. Shearman, John. “Castiglione’s Portrait of Raphael.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 38 (1994): 69–97. ———. Raphael in Early Modern Sources: 1483–1602. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Simonetta, Marcello. Rinascimento Segreto: Il mondo del Segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Stamper, John. The Architecture of Roman Temples: The Republic to the Middle Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Struever, Nancy. “Proverbial Signs: Formal Strategies in Guicciardini’s Ricordi.” Annali d’Italianistica 2 (1984): 94–109. Talvacchia, Bette. Raphael. London: Phaidon, 2007. ———. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Thompson, Wendy. Poets, Lovers, and Heroes in Italian Mythological Prints. Exhibit catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. Thornton, Peter. The Italian Renaissance Interior, 1400–1600. New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1991. Turner, James Grantham. “Marcantonio’s Lost Modi and Their Copies.” Print Quarterly 21 (2004): 363–84. Van Hamskeerck, Martin. Die römischen Skizzenbücher. Soest, Holland: Davaco, 1975. Vickers, Brian. “Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: The Ambivalence of otium.” Renaissance Studies 4 (1990): 107–54. Weege, Fritz. “Das Goldene Haus des Nero.” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 28 (1913): 127–244. Weil-Garris, Kathleen, and John d’Amico. “The Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace: A Chapter from Cortesi’s De Cardinalatu.” In Studies in Italian Art and Architecture 15th through 18th Centuries, edited by Henry Millon, 45–119. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. Welch, Evelyn Samuels. “Galeazzo Maria Sforza and the Castello di Pavia, 1469.” Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 352–74. Wyatt, Michael. “Bibbiena’s Closet: Interpretation and the Sexual Culture of a Renaissance Papal Court.” In Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, edited by Gary Cestaro, 35–53. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

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Networks of Urban Secrecy Tamburi, Anonymous Denunciations, and the Production of the Gaze in Fifteenth-Century Florence Allie Terry-Fritsch

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his essay examines the phenomenon of secret denunciation in fifteenth-century Florence. It traces the material history of tamburi, special containers that were used to collect anonymous denunciations, and investigates how their insertion into the physical and ritual center of the city altered its symbolic content and impacted modes of sociability. Although tamburi have been largely forgotten in art historical investigations of the material and visual culture of Renaissance Florence, they were in common use throughout the fifteenth century (fig. 7.1). Erected in strategic architectural locations such as the cathedral and governmental palace, these denunciation boxes were easily accessible to a wide Florentine public, who were encouraged by authoritative agencies to use them actively. Anyone who witnessed deviant behavior in the city could use a tamburo to transmit an anonymous denunciation against the malefactor; the witness would write down information regarding the identity or identities of the deviant(s) along with a description of the incident, then place it into one of the tamburi without signature. Once the denunciation was inserted into the box, it remained locked inside for up to a month, the whole time shielded from public view. Eventually an administrator of the authoritative agency opened the tamburo and its contents—the written denunciations—were transported to the judicial courts and entered into an official registry.1 Each denunciation was evaluated and investigated, and, ultimately, the individual implicated in the denunciation was judged and forced to accept the appropriate consequences.2 An early version of this essay was presented at the Annual Conference of the College Art Association in Los Angeles in 2009, and I thank Tim McCall and Sean Roberts for their key insights on the project, as well as the audience for their feedback. I am also grateful for the critical discussion of the essay by my colleagues in the Division of Art History at Bowling Green State University, as well as members of the Visual and Cultural Studies Faculty Group at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at BGSU, especially Scott Magelssen, Jolie Sheffer, Bill Albertini, Emily Lutenski, and Clayton Rosati. Special thanks also go to Michael Rocke and Nicholas Terpstra, who read and commented on earlier drafts. Lastly, I thank Stefan Fritsch, Chriscinda Henry, Fabian Lange, and Matthew Shoaf for their assistance in locating and photographing extant denunciation boxes in Florence and Venice, and Rebecca Zorach for sharing her photograph of Pasquino. 1. These registers, known as tamburagioni, survive in the Archivio di Stato, Florence (e.g., Esecutore degli ordinamenti di giustizia). See also Dorini, Il diritto penale e la delinquenza; Zorzi, “Judicial System in Florence,” 44; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 49. 2. In order to verify an accusation of sodomy in Florence, for example, the Ufficiali di notte “needed the confession of at least one

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FIGURE 7.1. Map of Renaissance Florence, with locations of tamburi marked by black boxes. Map by Allie Terry-Fritsch.

The practice of secret denunciation in Florence began at the beginning of the fourteenth century as a means of encouraging members of the popolani to speak out against powerful magnates.3 It was believed that the anonymity of the denunciation process would protect informers from vendetta or social backlash, while at the same time, allowing for a form of resistance against the abuses by those who had disproportionate power in the city. Yet, in the fifteenth century, the denunciations took on a new form—moralized tattling—that exposed the secrets of fellow citizens’ sexual, social, or religious behaviors. The boxes used to collect the denunciations were controlled by several branches of a Florentine moral task force, including the Conservatori delle leggi, Ufficiali di notte, Conservatori dell’onestà dei monasteri, Ufficiali dell’onestà, and the Otto di guardia, who worked together to channel communication between the society and the judicial authority.4 Other cities, including Venice, Lucca, and Genoa, also had task forces and methods for policing deviance, yet the city of Florence was, as Michael Rocke and others have discussed, a central focus of this campaign due to its widespread reputation as a sodomitic city that was filled with deviant activities.5 As such, the Florentine officers of all branches of the task force had much of the partners (but not both) or two eyewitnesses or one eyewitness and two persons who attested to public knowledge of the fact or four persons who confirmed public knowledge”; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 50. 3. Zorzi, “Judicial System in Florence,” 44. 4. See ibid.,” 44–45. 5. The group of Florentine officers known as the Ufficiali di notte, or Officers of the Night, were given the singular task in the

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greater autonomy than the other “public morals” commissions and were encouraged to use creative means to locate offenders.6 These included the use of spies and monetary incentives for informants to come forward, but, most importantly, the officers relied on the secret denunciations collected from the tamburi located throughout the city center.7 The task forces sought information, above all, about immoral and illegal activities performed by Florentines, from sexual crimes to gambling to blasphemy, that were largely unknowable to a general public and therefore difficult to enforce. To gain access to knowledge on the ground, they imposed certain framing devices on the denunciation process itself that encouraged individuals to offer this information about family members or neighbors freely despite the disruption of sociability that often arises from interfering with and policing others. By formulating the denunciation process as a civic duty imperative to perform, the moral task forces, assisted by religious and political figures, urged citizens to place the integrity of the city above the social bonds of family and neighborhood.8 Telling the secrets of others was portrayed as the ultimate act of contributing to the good of the community, since the revelation of hidden deviance within the city would effect its removal and contribute to the purity of the city.9 In this way, the denunciations were used to bridge the space occupied by those on the ground with those above and thereby negotiated the dynamic of power perceived and experienced by both. This essay considers the strategies and tactics of the denunciation system in fifteenth-century Florence to examine how the placement and use of tamburi within key ritual sites impacted communal interaction in the Renaissance city. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s use of the terms “strategies” and “tactics,” the essay designates strategies as the various methods used by those in control of spaces to police and manipulate behaviors within them and tactics as the methods employed by the actual users of those spaces. These users were not in possession of the space, but nonetheless they occupied it and maneuvered through it according to either preestablished rules or by alternative routes.10 The tamburi may be approached as strategies that fostered heightened awareness of visibility within the Renaissance city, both the visibility of individuals to others and fifteenth century to expose and convict sodomites in Florence and her surrounding territories. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Florentine administrative focus on the containment and punishment of sodomitic practices had dissipated; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 7. 6. Labalme, “Sodomy and Venetian Justice in the Renaissance”; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 134; Zazzu, “Prostituzione e moralità pubblica”; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 46. 7. While the Ufficiali di notte verified denunciations with eyewitness reports, the Conservatori delle leggi, Conservatori dell’onestà dei monasteri, Ufficiali dell’onestà, and the Otto di Guardi almost exclusively used the information gleaned from anonymous and secret denunciations to move forward with criminal cases against corruption, blasphemy, gambling, and sexual trafficking; Zorzi, “Judicial System in Florence,” 44–47; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 45–84. On the visual aspects of punishment of sodomy in Florence, see Terry, “Craft of Torture.” 8. See, for example, Gellately, “Denunciations in Twentieth-Century Germany.” 9. Although, as has been widely discussed in the scholarship of the Stalinist, Nazi, and GDR’s use of denunciations, communities who were complicit in this demand produced dire situations of violence and corruption through their tattling. For several poignant modern examples, see the special issue dedicated to the denunciation process in modern Europe in The Journal of Modern History 68 (1996). On the US Army’s use of “snitch boxes” in their war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan and the perceived ineffectuality of them, see Magelssen, “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos,’” 62. 10. de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xix. 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. In this sense, the historian’s task is to endeavor for a “thick description” of space; Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30.

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of others to the individual. Their physical placement within select architectural spaces impacted the perceived layers of control already implied in these buildings’ function and use, and the moral agencies in charge of their erection and upkeep anticipated how the symbolic meaning and social value of these spaces would underscore the moral imperative to use them both to reveal information about others and to avoid the behaviors that would lead to denunciation. Nonetheless, the tactics employed by individuals and groups within the city—those time-based interactions within the spaces themselves—were unpredictable and therefore never fully visible. Ultimately, these tactics counteracted the power of the tamburi, and in certain cases, caused their failure. ————— For at least the last three decades, from Richard Trexler’s groundbreaking work on public life and ritual to Roger Crum and John Paoletti’s insightful anthology on the social history of Florence, scholars of the medieval and early modern periods have increasingly acknowledged that the space of the Renaissance city cannot be disengaged from the bodily presence of those who inhabited it.11 Urban spaces were theaters of performative activities and, like the saint represented in the holy image, only came alive in the presence of the beholder.12 The center of the Renaissance city was the key zone of the social drama of everyday and festal life.13 The diverse publics who were given access to it generated a collective, or shared, gaze of the spectacle of the everyday; these visual interactions were operations of seeing and being seen with the urban theater.14 As though performing on a circular stage, the populace on the streets and in the collective spaces of civic and religious buildings participated in a continuous interchange of gazes that bound them together. As John Najemy has discussed, the inner city was purposefully redesigned in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to reveal its openness to the Florentine community and, through ritual engagement, its spaces became “loci of political action [and] performance” that were accessible to the populace as a whole.15 Urban planning in the fifteenth century further defined this space through the focused attention of public works projects, which visually connected the city’s buildings and monuments to the political rhetoric of the Republic and represented the Florentine populace as part of a community defined by its libertas.16 At the same time, newly constructed, large private homes within the center of the city oriented their palace façades toward the public on the street and in the piazze.17

11. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence; Crum and Paoletti, Renaissance Florence. 12. Trexler has argued that “the image was born of devotion and dead in its absence”; Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 70. This can be extended to the notion of space as well. In a sermon of 1424, San Bernardino of Siena claimed that people brought with them guardian angels inside the church. When the people were absent, so too were their saints; ibid., 53. 13. For an excellent analysis of the spatial and performative aspects of the urban theater in Florence, see Strocchia, “Theaters of Everyday Life.” 14. This form of interchange operates in a Bahktinian conception of the shared gaze; Bahktin, Rabelais and His World. On the semantic range of labels that marked the center of Florence, see Muir and Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places,” 93. 15. Najemy, “Florentine Politics and Urban Spaces,” 33. 16. Hartt, “Art and Freedom in Renaissance Florence.” However, see important challenge to Hartt, especially in consideration of his definition of republicanism; Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics”; McCall, “Gendering of Libertas and the International Gothic.” 17. In political terms, however, the construction of these new palaces initiated a displacement of the working class toward the periphery and increasingly shifted political activities to the palaces; Najemy, “Florentine Politics and Urban Spaces,” 38–45.

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The tamburi were concentrated in this most public arena of everyday life. Indeed, their positioning created a focused inner ring of surveillance within the most highly trafficked area of the city center in the fifteenth century (see fig. 7.1).18 Situated within Florentine churches and courts of law, the tamburi were placed in “open spaces”; that is, spaces that fostered public access and interaction and thereby opened this public to mutual inspection and visibility.19 Sites included the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Palazzo della Signoria, San Piero Scheraggio, Orsanmichele, and the Palazzo del Podestà. These spaces were socially significant to every Florentine, not just to individuals or communities on the neighborhood or parish level.20 As key ritual sites in the city, these locations were connected to Florentine identity through their real and symbolic associations to the church, government, and labor guilds. Each site was framed by its collective purpose, and the users of these spaces generally were guided into them by collectively recognized behavior. The selection of these particular architectural sites to house the tamburi was contingent on the buildings’ function as symbolic frames for the staging of institutional and individual performances of civic duties and the upholding of civic virtues in Florence. For example, in addition to the heavy symbolic weight of Santa Maria del Fiore as the religious anchor of the city, visualized by its massive dome that embraced the entire city under its shadow, the cathedral also increasingly became a showcase for the celebration of famosi cives throughout the fifteenth century.21 Leon Battista Alberti claimed that the placement “in sacred and easily visible places the portraits of those who have been benefactors of humanity, or whose memory…deserves to be venerated as a divinity, in order that, through this worship, future generations in their thirst for glory strive to imitate their virtues.”22 Monuments and painted cenotaphs dedicated to men who brought honor to the city were commissioned and erected inside the Florence Cathedral from 1395 and continued through the end of the fifteenth century, including monuments to famous condottieri, theologians, poets and artists.23 In such a holy and respected space, the images of famous citizens of Florence ideally inspired their spectators to emulate their behavior and to contribute also to the good of the city. On the other hand, the tamburo that was erected within the sacred space drew attention to infamous deeds that were occurring outside the church walls. The contrast between the honorific setting of the cathedral and the disgrace of being named in a denunciation drew attention to the moral performance at play in the use of the tamburo: an individual asked to denounce a citizen-deviant did so within the symbolic frame of the performance of civic, as well as divine, duty.

18. On the notion of the city center as a site of “truth,” see Barthes, Empire of Signs, 30. 19. Strocchia, “Theaters of Everyday Life,” 56. On the politics of public inclusion in such open spaces, see Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. 20. Zorzi has noted a general trend away from the local or parish level toward more centralized administrative agencies in the fifteenth century in Florence; Zorzi, “Judicial System in Florence,” 47. 21. Alberti, On Painting, 35; Frosinini, “Paintings and Church Furnishings.” 22. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, 658. 23. In 1395, designs for the tomb monuments for Piero da Farnese and John Hawkwood were raised (although the Hawkwood monument was completed only in 1436). By 1396, the monuments to Accursio, Dante, Petrarch, Zanobi da Strada, and Boccaccio were planned (although not completed in the manner originally discussed); the painted cenotaph for Pietro Corsini was completed by 1422, Luigi Marsili’s by 1439, and the monument to Niccolò Tolentino was finished by 1456. A sculptural monument to Brunelleschi was erected in 1447, with others, including that for Giotto and the musician Antonio Squarcialupi, completed in the last decade of the fifteenth century.

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The placement of a tamburo within the Palazzo della Signoria, the government headquarters of Florence, likewise built upon the rhetoric of civic participation and authority inspired by both the material structure of the actual palace and the reverent actions that it housed. The soaring tower of the fortified edifice projected the image of the political strength of the Republic onto its citizens in the piazza below, and the co-sacredness of the site and the institution it housed were augmented through the addition of altars and ceremony.24 A tamburo placed in this highly charged space would have communicated a civic imperative to the users of the building to uphold the values embedded in its history. Another tamburo was placed within the Palazzo del Podestà, located between the cathedral and the governmental palace to the east, which served as the judicial headquarters and residence of the chief magistrate of the city (fig. 7.2). Its monumental structure and crenellated bell tower, like that of the governmental palace, visually conveyed the impression of the authority and strength of the city and its administration.25 The palace and its civic function were critical to the collective perception of security in the city, and this was reiterated at times with spectacles of justice performed within its spaces. A tamburo placed here held particular significance as an active agent in the rituals of civic cleansing performed by the building’s inhabitants and seen both inside its walls and throughout the urban landscape.26 The remaining locations of tamburi in fifteenth-century Florence were all spaces attributed with sacred and civic weight, and their geographical positions in the city were located on the major thoroughfares connecting the Piazza del Duomo with the Piazza della Signoria, forming a pedestrian ring in the very center of the city. In addition to their symbolism, the popularity and accessibility of these locations to the Florentine community at large would have ensured that the tamburi at least were seen, if not used. For example, Orsanmichele, positioned in the highly trafficked zone of the guilds and the market, drew in a large and diverse audience of devotees to its miracle-working icon of the Virgin,27 and the church of San Piero Scheraggio, located next to the Palazzo della Signoria to its south, was highly visible within the urban landscape.28 The task force in charge of administering the tamburi strategically selected these spaces for their usefulness in publicizing their cause. 24. Bruni, “Panegyric to the City of Florence.” For the creation and sustainment of sacredness at the palace, see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 49–51. On its history, see Rubenstein, Palazzo Vecchio. On the palace as a “public icon,” see Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, 87–147. 25. On the shifting symbolic identity of the Bargello from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, see Terry, “Criminals and Tourists.” 26. On the visual culture of civic cleansing, see Terry, “Criminal Vision in Early Modern Florence.” 27. Orsanmichele functioned as a grain market before its enclosure and transformation around the sacred altar. Its strong connection to the guilds ensured the popular use of the building. As investigated by Frederick Hartt and others, the decorative program of Orsanmichele contributed to a growing visual rhetoric of civic humanism in the first decades of the fifteenth century that emphasized the collective unity of the Republic. However, as Najemy has argued, the positive assertion of civic humanism may have functioned on the level of myth as opposed to reality, since the political arena was largely controlled by an oligarchic elite class; Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics.” 28. The church housed the ceremony of the election of priors to government, and also served as a site of political refuge or asylum for members of the government during times of disturbance; Villani, Nuova cronica. The church is no longer extant. During the fifteenth century, the church was altered significantly when the left nave was destroyed in order to enlarge Via della Ninna, which had become too narrow as a result of construction on the Palazzo dei Priori; Rinaldi, Favini, and Naldi, Firenze Romanica, 90. The right side of the nave then became the seat of the Compagnia degli Stipendiati; Busignani and Bencini, Le Chiese di Firenze, 113. Recent studies have promoted the hypothesis that the interior of the church was similar to that of San Miniato al Monte. That is, it was configured on three interconnected levels: the nave led to an exposed crypt below and a presbytery above. This spatial configuration would have allowed for

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FIGURE 7.2. Exterior of the Palazzo del Podestà (Museo Nazionale del Bargello), Florence. Photo by author.

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For the denunciation process to have functioned according to the design of the moral task force, individuals had to first witness deviant behavior, then take the initiative to communicate this deviance to the authorities. This entailed the writing down of the denouncement, travel to one of the sites featuring a tamburo in the center of the city, and the deposit of the note in the box. The denouncer in Florence was not obliged to reveal his or her identity, although those who did so were offered an award for information.29 Most extant denouncement records are left unsigned, which suggests that there were heavy social consequences that accompanied the open transmission of the secrets of members in the community.30 The anonymous transmission of these secrets, however, was widely practiced. Thousands of unsigned denunciations are recorded in registers— called tamburagioni—throughout the period under discussion, indicating that the strategies used by the task force to convince members of the Florentine populace to tell on their fellow citizens were effective. To this end, the agencies were assisted greatly by the mendicant preachers, who advertised the locations of the boxes and gave instructions on how to use them. Sermons delivered from the pulpits of churches throughout the city urged citizens to consider the spiritual welfare of both the offending individuals and the civic body as a whole.31 It was presented as the moral imperative of every Florentine to alert the authorities of wrongdoings so that the city could be purified and protected. Yet one obstacle to complete anonymity in the Florentine denunciation process was the highly visible localities of the tamburi themselves. As mentioned above, each building that housed a tamburo in Florence was a ritually significant and well-frequented site within the city center. If the social pressure against openly telling on other members in the community was so great as to force a denouncer to remain anonymous and thus to forgo a financial reward, then how did the identity of the denouncer remain a secret when he or she had to transmit it in plain sight of the community? The introduction of the tamburi into such openly accessible and highly visible spaces suggests that a cycle of surveillance was placed into effect in these ritual zones of the city. The watching for and telling on the immoral behavior of others inspired a new kind of watching out for those who informed. More information on the specific locations of the boxes within each of the buildings would enable a deeper analysis of how space, place, and the gaze functioned within each site, yet the recovered documentation is silent in this regard. It is unknown, for example, if the tamburi were located in private or secluded zones within the churches and courts or whether they were placed at entrances or other highly trafficked areas. Furthermore, the physical fabric of these buildings was altered, sometimes considerably, over the course of the fifteenth century; thus it is also unclear whether the boxes moved and adapted to these architectural and decorative changes. For example,

multiple fields of observation in the context of the placement and use of a tamburo. 29. Zorzi noted that, for this reason, some anonymous denunciations actually bore personal markers of identity; Zorzi, “Judicial System in Florence,” 47. 30. Of course, anonymous denouncers could not claim the cash rewards for the information that they revealed, so certain denouncers, albeit few, included marks of their personal identity. In these cases, however, the task force protected the informant’s identity and did not share it with the public at large. 31. San Bernardino’s famous Lenten sermon of 1424 in Florence is but one example of this phenomenon. For the larger context of preaching and its impact on the community, see Mormando, Preacher’s Demons. For an interpretation of this vigilance and complicity to the government as a response to homophobic propaganda, see Micheler and Szobar, “Homophobic Propaganda and Denunciation.”

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until the consecration of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore by Pope Eugenius IV in 1436, masses were only performed in the nave and aisles since work on Brunelleschi’s cupola prevented any congregating in the tribunal areas.32 Throughout the fifteenth century, altars were situated along the walls of the aisles and the interior wall of the façade, and paintings were erected on the pilasters throughout the church.33 Certain areas within the cathedral received particular attention due to popular devotional practices, such as the veneration of the so-called Madonna della Pila that was located near a basin of holy water in a corner of the church, or the gathering of the people around the altars of the Trinity and Madonna gratiarum plenissima that were located on the inner façade wall.34 Perhaps the tamburo in the cathedral was placed in proximity to one of these, in order to capitalize on the traffic of the congregation? The most detailed information on the position of a tamburo within Florence is that once located within the Palazzo del Podestà, placed in the loggia on the primo piano of the inner courtyard (fig. 7.3).35 The tamburo’s position illustrates how the identity of a secret denouncer could become public through the delivery of the written note, for the loggia was exposed visually to the community, who gathered in the adjacent courtroom as well as in the open courtyard below. In this spatial configuration, the one who performed the denunciation had the potential to be under the visual scrutiny of the attending members of the community. That is, the watcher became the watched. Even individuals who were not denouncing, but who stood in close proximity to the box, could be associated with the act, and this too could produce damaging consequences to reputation and social ties.36 Thus the spatial placement of the tamburo in visually accessible locations extended the notion of policing others to include self-regulation as well. Individuals needed to be mindful of how they acted and where they moved lest others misinterpret their behavior. Self-regulation within the Renaissance city was not a new phenomenon introduced by the presence and use of the tamburi. Each space that housed one already functioned within collectively understood layers of control and the users of these spaces behaved accordingly.37 Yet each building also was designed to accentuate the powerful control of a top-down gaze, with God, of course, at the top of the ultimate panopticon in heaven.38 The invisible surveillance of the all-seeing eye of God created a permanent visibility of the public whether inside or out. To enhance visually the presence 32. Frosinini, “Paintings and Church Furnishings,” 201. 33. These altars were all removed by Gaetano Baccani in the nineteenth century. See Fantozzi, Nuova guida della città di Firenze, 775–77. 34. The popularity of this painting of the Madonna della pila (Madonna and Child) was so great that crowds would gather around it, thereby causing traffic flow problems within the cathedral. It was later moved into the tribunal, and then, in the nineteenth century, into the Museo del Duomo. For the Trinity Altar before its dismemberment by Baccani and eventual placement in The Cloisters in New York, see Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, 115–17. For the Madonna “gratiarum plenissima,” see Poggi, Il Duomo di Firenze, 201–2. 35. As early as 18 January 1293, a tamburo was set up in the loggia of the Palazzo del Podestà for secret denunciations; Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Statuti del Comune, 1, c.11r. The use of the tamburo increased during the principate of Cosimo I; Uccelli, Il Palazzo del Podestà, 53–54. 36. For a discussion of the different problematics bound to denouncing and snitching, see Fitzpatrick and Gallately, “Introduction to the Practices of Denunciation.” 37. As Trexler and others have emphasized, frames provided guidelines for behavior although they cannot be taken as fixed prescriptions. The multipurpose use of the space gave complexity to its meaning. Bad behavior did, however, occur within churches despite regulations against it (one can easily think of urinating dogs, spitting parishioners, begging, even murder). For San Bernardino of Siena’s sermon on crimes committed within churches, see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 53. 38. Bentham, Panopticon Writings; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195–228.

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FIGURE 7.3. Interior courtyard and loggia of the of the Palazzo del Podestà (Museo Nazionale del Bargello), Florence. Photo by author.

of the divine gaze, the architecture and decoration of both church and court emphasized God’s continual presence as a judge of actions on earth. Religious structures within the city were considered to be, in the words of San Bernardino of Siena, “the place and hotel of God.”39 In the courts of law too, God’s penetrating gaze was once visualized in frescoed Judgment imagery in the courtroom and confession chapel, and in the deliberation chambers of the chief magistrate, stars filled the ceilings to indicate the open channels of communication between heaven and earth.40 Thus the surveillance inspired by the tamburi built on the visual rhetoric of divine regulation and the subsequent behavioral practices of self-regulation already inspired by the frames of the buildings. Yet several documented instances of tactics employed by individuals on the ground indicate that the sacral weight and authority of the heavenly panopticon was not easily translated 39. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 53. 40. Although the frescoes of Sala dell’Udienza (courtroom) in the Bargello are no longer extant, Giorgio Vasari recorded a description in his Life of Giotto; see Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 51. For a discussion of Last Judgment scenes within juridical spaces, see Edgerton, “Icons of Justice.”

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to the modes of surveillance instigated by the tamburi. In the nearby town of Prato, governed during the fifteenth century by the same moral agencies as Florence, an individual or group of individuals tore down the tamburo that was affixed inside the local parish church in 1482.41 The vandal, or vandals, then escaped back into the night, never to be identified by the local authorities. The Prato tamburo became a repeated target: less than a year before, another tamburo had been anonymously destroyed within the church, and two more boxes would suffer the same fate within the next few years.42 Other churches in Pisa, Empoli, and Arezzo also recorded incidents of vandalism against the boxes, and thus similarly point to the ways in which the denunciation process caused unwanted social disruption.43 Whether the individual or individuals who destroyed these boxes were part of a communal effort is unknown, although their actions may be read as a critique of the religio-political system. Through tactics of resistance in the form of destruction of the inanimate agent of this system, the box itself, these individuals rejected the moralized tattling put into play by the denunciation process.44 The denunciation system was flawed both in terms of the corrupt practices it inspired and in the way the tamburi significantly changed the mode in which transgressions were revealed within Florentine society. Since accusers were not required to identify themselves, spurious denunciations found their way into the tamburi. It is difficult to pin down what the motivations were for the creation of false accusations. They could, in part, represent the response of an overly watchful and morally righteous citizenry within the hypervigilant environment of moral policing.45 The fullscale campaign by the Florentine government to impose control on deviant practices in the fifteenth century extended from official revisions of the law and increased regulations imposed on taverns and other sites associated with male sociability to the unofficial, but in many ways much more powerful, sermons on the moral imperative to expose the deviance of neighbors and family. In this light, the false denunciations may be read as zealous attempts to benefit the community. However, the anonymity of the denunciation process also allowed for the purposeful falsification of information for political or social reasons.46 Indeed, as Andrea Zorzi has demonstrated, the

41. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 296n98. 42. Ibid., 203. 43. Ibid., 203. These incidents of vandalism also give insight into the physical characteristics of tamburi, which were most likely three-dimensional boxes affixed to the wall or atop a pole or column. They therefore are unlike the better known and still extant examples of Venetian denunciation boxes—called bocche del leone—at the Palazzo Ducale that were integrated into the physical fabric of the wall of the loggia of the palace. These denunciation boxes offered a permanent opening, much like an open mail slot on a door, for the insertion of notes. The denunciations were deposited and stored in a box that opened on the interior wall of the palace and was thus inaccessible to the depositor or the public at large. Also unlike Florence, the authors of Venetian denunciations had to identify themselves and vouch for the accuracy of the information transmitted; if the denunciation was discovered to be false, then the individual who had generated it was forced to suffer the penalty of the accused crime. Thus, the transmission of information in the Venetian denunciation process was guided by internal verification methods. 44. According to San Bernardino, the destruction of sacred property was considered to be one of the sins most offensive to God. Sins against non-sacred things in a sacred place, however, were least sinful; Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 53. Within the discussion of vandalism and destruction of the tamburi, this notion holds parallels to the destruction of postal boxes in the United States. Despite strict laws forbidding the tampering or destruction of these postal boxes (Title 18, USC Section 1705), “mailbox baseball” (i.e., hitting and damaging the postal box with a baseball bat while driving in a car) still remains a favorite pastime of teenagers. The mailboxes’ “sacral” character is not emphasized apparently enough to demand their preservation. 45. For example, Michael Rocke has traced thousands of denunciations regarding same-sex activity in Florence that were never sustained by concrete evidence in the archives of the Ufficiali di note; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 47. 46. Zorzi, “Judicial System in Florence,” 48.

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defamation of political rivals or personal enemies through the exposure of their real or falsified deviant behavior was a consistent feature of the denunciations that were retrieved by the Conservatori delle leggi.47 The damage to political or social reputation that the denunciations, even if unsupported by evidence, could bring upon an individual was potentially quite significant and often led to partisan attempts to discredit officeholders in the city.48 Tamburi provided the concrete means for social disruption and damage. The erection and use of the tamburo also challenged the social fabric of the community through its production of non-negotiated acts of confession for others. In fifteenth-century Florence, the efficacious revelation of particular secrets—including confessions of sin and confessions of crimes—depended on the embodied presence of the informer. As a form of ritualized telling and listening, the confession of the sinner in church or the criminal in court was a social performance ideally instigated by the offending individual. The verbal utterance of the confession, coupled with appropriate bodily gestures, served to open the secret to the public, and created new social bonds between the teller, listener, and other witnesses to the secret’s revelation. The denunciation box, on the other hand, denied the critical social function of confession by eliminating the social negotiation of the secret and its revelation. It substituted the sociability of the secret with an invisible field of surveillance. Since the Lateran Council of 1216, all Christians were required to confess their sins to a priest at least one time per year.49 These confessions were socially negotiated through their openness— confessions occurred on the altar and in front of members of the parish—and, as a consequence, they provided a direct verbal and visual connection of the past deed to the confessant. Choreographed movements of the body, such as lowered eyes, kneeling to the side of a confessor, and tears, were visible signals of a penitent’s shame and humility. Fra Jacopo Passavanti, the Dominican prior of Santa Maria Novella, preached to Florentines in the trecento, “To be the person who wants to confess well, one has to go to the feet of the priest sorrowfully and repentant of every sin.… What the malefactor must do before the judge who has to judge him, is to throw himself humbly at his feet, either sitting or kneeling, in such a manner that he is at his side rather than before him.”50 The performative nature of confessions—both the verbal ownership of the transgression through the utterance of the sinful act and the gestural performance of kneeling, bowing the head, and so on—created a visual spectacle of penitence for the community, who, along with the priest, witnessed the embodied confession as a part of the healing process.51 Furthermore, unlike the aftermath of the denunciation process, confessions within the church could be followed by the negation of the sin through absolution by the priest. Confessions were also stressed as premeditated acts that were the result of self-reflection and preparation. In his confessional manual, Lo specchio de’ peccati, Domenico Cavalca told his readers that confessions “should be simple…humble, pure, faithful, true, frequent, naked, tearful, rapid,

47. Ibid., 48. 48. For a modern example of how the denunciation process was manipulated for political ends, see Alexopoulos, “Victim Talk.” 49. C. Lateran. IV. Ann. 1216, cap. 21; Watkins, History of Penance, 748–49. Pope Martin V reiterated this obligation for all Christians in 1418; Lea, History of Confession and Indulgences, 37, 214. 50. Jansen, Making of the Magdalen, 213. 51. On performative utterances, see Austin, How to Do Things with Words.

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whole, and prepared beforehand.”52 Likewise, San Bernardino of Siena, urged the laity to “prepare yourself beforehand, and so you will begin to recollect your misdeeds.”53 Passavanti even went so far as to encourage the laity to write down their transgressions and bring these written notes to confession.54 In exchange for a confession performed well, an individual could expect absolution of sin and full confidence that the confessor would keep what had been confessed by the confessant a secret.55 Confessions within the context of the criminal justice system likewise insisted on the bodily presence of the confessant. Indeed, the perception of efficacy within the Florentine justice system depended on the connection of the criminal with the crime through the choreographed display of the convicted body during rituals of execution.56 The confession of a crime needed to be embodied in order to legitimate the judicial process and to underscore the righteousness of the community at large. As a revelation of “truth” by the criminal, the confession was the proof of both justice and the criminal’s willingness to accept responsibility for his or her actions.57 The subsequent exposure of the criminal to the community, often upon a raised cart, during the procession to the gallows was a recognized indication that the confession had been uttered and witnessed, so that the process of justice could be fulfilled. In both the confession of sin within the church and the confession of crime within the justice system, the community had the opportunity to bear witness to what Foucault has described as the “production of truth.”58 The confessant “was authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged to pronounce concerning himself.”59 The introduction of tamburi into the spaces of the church and courts of law in Florence, however, denied that self-authenticating function of confession. It ruptured the ritual of discourse “in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement” by introducing a third, invisible or anonymous party into the power relationship of the confession process.60 In other words, it upturned the confessional discourse by making it an involuntary process, as opposed, ideally, to a self-obligation to confess. The tamburo literally encased secret denunciations within its hidden interior and thus concealed them from public consumption either in verbal or visual form. The truth produced through this process, therefore, denied the critical function of confession to outwardly display the signs of shame felt by the confessant at the sin or crime committed.61 The community was excluded from 52. “Sit simplex, humilis confessio, pura, fidelis, vera, frequens, nuda, lacrimabilis, accelerata, integra, et sit patere parata”; Cavalca, Lo specchio de’ peccati, fol. 25r. 53. Bernardino of Siena, Prediche volgari inedited, 470. 54. Passavanti, Lo Specchio di vera penitenza, 178; Zimmermann, “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance,” 124. 55. According to the Lateran Council of 1216, the priest “must be careful not by word or sign in any way to betray the sinner, and if in need of wiser counsel he shall cautiously seek it without mentioning the sinner, for we decree that he who shall venture to reveal a sin known to him in the pentitential judgment shall not only be deposed from the priestly office but shall be thrust into a rigid monastery to perform perpetual penance”; translated in Lea, History of Confession and Indulgences, 229. 56. This notion of the spectacular punitive theater is emphasized in Foucault’s analysis of the premodern judicial system; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 32–69. 57. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 38. 58. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 58. 59. Ibid., 58. 60. Ibid., 61. 61. The development of the confessional box was a means to encourage the full transmission of the secret (sin) without the social implications of shame that may have previously been experienced through the public/collective act of confession. For theoretical

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both the staging of the actual denunciation (i.e., one party verbally accusing another while at the same time providing a visual spectacle of the accusation), and the socially negotiated reaction to the denunciation as well (i.e., the coproduced communal response to the spectacle of accusation). In this context, the anonymous denunciations within the tamburi must be seen in contrast to the transmission of disgruntled voices of Rome in the sixteenth century on so-called speaking statues like Pasquino (fig. 7.4). Through verbal witticisms and satirical verses attached to the base of the statue, the ancient statue became animated as a transmitter of resistance against the institutional powers of Rome. The statue was thus a site of staged confrontation. Yet, Pasquino’s allure then (and now) was precisely due to the public platform for words that were transmitted. As Verity Platt has discussed, visitors to the statue are there not simply to look, but to read.62 The openness of the anonymous words—both their physical accessibility and their often carefully crafted content— explicitly signaled that they were created for a public audience who would gather to either concur with or refute their claims. Through the accumulation of voices in the form of anonymously written words, and their subsequent public revelation in the form of crowds arranged around the statue, the community united and affirmed its agency as participants in the production of knowledge and their community at large. The denunciations, on the other hand, were not designed for communal view, and their authors were not praised for eloquence or wit. Because the author’s words were never revealed publicly, they were not performed, even through a “speaking” figurehead like a statue or institutional figure. Thus the community did not physically gather around the site of the tamburo in a collective act. Rather, the various moral agencies in the city would take the denunciations as points of departure for privately rooting out networks of deviancy in the city through a process on the ground, even though administered by those above. When a denounced individual was brought in for questioning, he or she was expected to repeat the denunciation process, since an individual in front of the moral agency was required to further reveal the secrets of others as part of his or her admission of guilt.63 Indeed, individuals who snitched on others were given financial benefit in the form of a reduced penalty for deviancy. This hoped-for leniency ultimately compromised the authenticity of the confession and privileged the self or individual over the good of the community.64 ————— This essay has examined the space of the urban theater of Florence and reconstructed the ways in which tamburi produced new modes of seeing and being seen in the city. Central to this discussion is the concept of surveillance, most closely associated with Michel Foucault’s analysis of modern policing, but here used to describe an early form of panopticism inspired by the denunciation process from the ground up.65 The material presence of tamburi in fifteenth-century Florence insight on the impact of the confessional box on secrecy, see Lochrie, Covert Operations, 12–13. 62. Platt, “‘Shattered Visages.’” 63. In the case of sodomitic interrogations, the officials generally questioned the passive, usually younger and more socially vulnerable, partner first so as to pressure him to reveal the name of the active, and presumably more dominant and connected, partner; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 50. 64. Ibid., 52. 65. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, esp. 195–228. Foucault used panopticism to discuss the development in modern Europe of a surveillance society that featured “a permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance” that “transformed the whole social body into a

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FIGURE 7.4. Nicholas Beatrizet, Pasquino, engraving. Collected and published by Antoine Lafrery in Speculum Romanae Magnificientiae, Rome, 1550. London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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served as a powerful tool for the control of behavior, and their placement within key sites in the city center fostered a new form of policing that arguably impacted the way in which the community gathered. While the contents of the box were unknown, its open slot for the insertion of denunciations signaled the constant presence of surveillance—a controlling gaze that functioned through its potentiality. The tamburo served to remind every individual that he or she was under continual watch by his or her neighbor, and, conversely, that each member of the community was to be vigilant in his or her own gaze. The box—and the administrative agencies that maintained it—asked each individual to police and be policed. In addition to the physical presence and use of the boxes, the simultaneous rise of particular preaching strategies called for collective moral vigilance that justified and perpetuated the increasing layers of surveillance in the city. Renaissance sociability was challenged by the institution of the tamburi, particularly in the disruption of embodied rituals of confession by the invisibility of the informant in the Florentine denunciation process. The anonymity of the informant negated what Michel de Certeau has called the “terrain of strategic relations” between actors of secrecy; that is, it disrupted the social play that occurs between an individual who tries to conceal a secret and another who attempts to reveal it.66 While there were still at least two actors involved in the denunciation process, the doer and the teller, the tamburo fostered non-negotiated transmissions of secret information. Through the fullscale adoption of strategies of secrecy to collect information about deviant individuals, the various moral police agencies in Florence eliminated the perceived authenticating function of self-disclosure of information, such as one finds in the face-to-face encounters of accusations in ordinary courts and confessions on the altars of churches.67 Instead, it provided a means for denouncers to avoid the social ramifications of their actions. Ultimately, the urban space of Florence functioned as a network of secrecy in the fifteenth century. The insertion of a tamburo into the most sacred Florentine buildings of the city center impacted what Edward Muir and Ronald Weissman have called the “networks of space-based sociability and symbolic geography” that made up the practice of everyday life during the Renaissance period.68 The public’s inability to access the secrets within the tamburi turned their interiors into spaces of political and psychological monumentality. The denunciations gathered within them had very real potential to defame character and destroy familial or neighborhood ties; their restricted access only increased their perceived influence. Indeed, as is so often recognized with strategies of rule or the creation of sacred objects, sites, and individuals, that which remains hidden augments in power.69 As the mechanisms by which these powerful secrets were transmitted, the tamburi altered the symbolic unity of the city center and challenged the social bonds of the city. They functioned through the frames imposed upon them by the buildings’ civic meaning and communal character, and yet, the vigilance inspired by these boxes disrupted the sociability of the very sites that were supposed to reinforce the collective interests of the community.70 field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere.” 66. de Certeau, Mystic Fable, 97. 67. Face-to-face rituals of insulting were also common; Cohen and Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome, 159–87. 68. Muir and Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places.” 69. On the construction of the “powerful” image, see Freedberg, Power of Images, esp. 82–98; Belting, Likeness and Presence. 70. Emile Durkheim’s observations on the imperative for collective behavior in religious and social life may be seen in poignant contrast to the ways in which the tamburi undermined the community; Durkheim, “Ritual, Magic, and the Sacred.”

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Various real or imagined communities that were constituted through the implementation of the tamburi could have been served by the secrecy of the denunciations. Since the accusation process was hidden, it implicated each member of the community as a potential author of denunciations, and thereby augmented the agency of the individual as a potential participant in the containment of deviancy in the city. In these terms, the secret that was transmitted through the placement of notice in the drop-box could represent the individual expression of complicity with the government but also a shared social desire to make sure that the city was a safe, morally pure space. This shared social desire manifested itself at times throughout the fifteenth century in neighborhood collectives, which jointly denounced the bad behavior of another neighbor either in face-to-face confrontations or in communally written denunciations.71 Certain denunciations, written by familiars of the accused, indicate that some individuals drew upon the power and authority of the moral agency to “put a little fear in” the deviant to force him to change his ways.72 As such, the boxes may be understood to reinforce communal bonds through the active engagement of the community in the judicial process. Yet, the hidden words also functioned to divide the community and deter open sociability, since, by means of their enclosure within the sealed tamburo, the secret denunciations represented a potential threat to every individual in the community. The material presence of the box and its implied secrets pointed to the increasing controls placed on the communal body through the development of new administrative and judicial offices as well as the policing gaze of the community from the inside.73 The threat of denunciation was communicated through the exchange of real and imagined gazes of members of the community within the systems of surveillance fostered by the church, government, and community itself. Perhaps this is why the boxes were ultimately deemed ineffectual. Taken down or left abandoned, their presence no longer impacts the day-to-day practices of the inhabitants of their spaces. Their history, however, through its record here, no longer remains a secret.

Bibliography Archival Sources Cavalca, Domenico. Lo specchio de’ peccati, Biblioteca Nazionale, Firenze, MS Pal. 91, fol. 25r. Statuti del Comune, Archivio di Stato, Firenze, 1, c.11r.

Printed Sources Alberti, Leon Battista. De re aedificatoria. Vol. 6. Edited by Giovanni Orlandi. Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1966. ———. On Painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon Press, 1972. Alexopoulos, Golfo. “Victim Talk: Testimony and Denunciation under Stalin.” Law and Social Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1999): 637–54.

71. On collective denunciations, see Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 83. 72. Quoted in ibid., 81. 73. On the increase in “forces of law and order,” see Zorzi, “Judicial System in Florence,” 48–51.

Networks of Urban Secrecy 179 Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by James Opie Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Noonday, 1992. Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995 Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon Writings. Edited by Miran Bozovic. London: Verso, 1995. Bernardino of Siena. Prediche volgari inedite. Siena: E. Cantagalli, 1935. Bruni, Leonardo. “Panegyric to the City of Florence.” In The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, edited by Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt, 135–75. Translated by Benjamin Kohl. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Busignani, Alberto, and Raffaello Bencini, Le Chiese di Firenze. Florence: Sansoni, 1982. Cohen, Thomas, and Elizabeth Cohen. Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal Magistrates. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Crum, Roger, and John Paoletti, ed. Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. de Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Vol. 1. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Dorini, Umberto. Il diritto penale e la delinquenza in Firenze nel secolo XIV. Lucca: Domenico Corsi, 1923. Durkheim, Emile. “Ritual, Magic, and the Sacred.” In Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by R. L. Grimes, 188–93. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. Edgerton, Samuel, Jr. “Icons of Justice.” Past and Present 89, no. 1 (1980): 23–38. ———. Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Fantozzi, Federico. Nuova guida della città di Firenze. Florence: Gius. e Fratelli Ducci, 1844. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Robert Gallately. “Introduction to the Practices of Denunciation in Modern European History.” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 4 (1996): 763–67. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. ———. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Frosinini, Cecilia. “Paintings and Church Furnishings Between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Century.” In The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, vol. 2, edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat and translated by Anthony Brierly, 194–201. Florence: Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, 1995. Gallately, Robert. “Denunciations in Twentieth-Century Germany: Aspects of Self-Policing in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic.” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 931–67. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Hartt, Frederick. “Art and Freedom in Renaissance Florence.” In Essays in Honor of Karl Lehmann, edited by Lucy Freeman Sandler, 114–31. New York: New York University, 1971. Jansen, Katherine Ludwig. The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Labalme, Patricia. “Sodomy and Venetian Justice in the Renaissance.” Legal History Review 52 (1984): 217–54. Lea, Henry Charles. A History of Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church. London: Swan Sonnenshein, 1896. Lochrie, Karma. Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

180 Allie Terry-Fritsch Magelssen, Scott. “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos’: ‘Theatre Immersion’ and the Simulation of Theatres of War.” TDR: The Drama Review 53 (2009): 47–72. McCall, Timothy. “The Gendering of Libertas and the International Gothic: Carlo Crivelli’s Ascoli Annunciation.” Studies in Iconography 30 (2009): 168–97. Micheler, Stefan, and Patricia Szobar. “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring Men under National Socialism.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1 (2002): 95–130. Mormando, Franco. The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Muir, Edward, and Ronald Weissman, “Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence.” In The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations, edited by John Agnew and James Duncan, 81–103. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Najemy, John. “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics.” In Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, edited by James Hankins, 75–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. “Florentine Politics and Urban Spaces.” In Renaissance Florence: A Social History, edited by Roger Crum and John Paoletti, 19–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Passavanti, Jacopo. Lo Specchio di vera penitenza. Florence: Libreria Editrice Florentina, 1925. Platt, Verity. “‘Shattered Visages’: Speaking Statues from the Ancient World.” Apollo (2003): 9–14. Poggi, Giovanni. Il Duomo di Firenze. 2 vols. Edited by Margaret Haines. Florence: Medicea, 1988. Richa, Giuseppe. Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine. Vol. 6. Florence, 1758. Rinaldi, Sara, Aldo Favini, and Alessandro Naldi. Firenze Romanica: Le più antiche chiese della città, di Fiesole e del contado circostante a nord dell’Arno. Empoli: Editori dell’Acero, 2005. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Rubenstein, Nicolai. The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298–1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Strocchia, Sharon. “Theaters of Everyday Life.” In Renaissance Florence: A Social History, edited by Roger Crum and John Paoletti, 55–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Terry, Allie. “The Craft of Torture: Bronze Sculpture and the Punishment of Sexual Offense in Early Modern Italy.” In Sex Acts: Practice, Performance, Perversion and Punishment in Early Modern Italy, edited by Allison Levy, 272–96. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. ———. “Criminals and Tourists: Prison History and Museum Politics at the Bargello in Florence.” Art History 33, no. 5 (2010): 836–55. ———. “Criminal Vision in Early Modern Florence: Fra Angelico’s Altarpiece for ‘Il Tempio’ and the Magdalenian Gaze.” In Renaissance Theories of Vision, edited by John Hendrix and Charles Carmen, 45–62. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2010. Trachtenberg, Marvin. Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Trexler, Richard. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Uccelli, Giovanni Battista. Il Palazzo del Podestà: Illustrazione storica. Florence: Tipografia delle Murate, 1865. Villani, Giovanni. Nuova cronica. 3 vols. Edited by Giuseppe Porta. Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo and Ugo Guanda, 1990–91. Watkins, Oscar D. A History of Penance. New York: Burt Franklin, 1961. Zazzu, Guido Nathan. “Prostituzione e moralità pubblica nella Genova del ’400.” Studi genuensi 5 (1987): 45–67. Zimmerman, T. Price. “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance.” In Renaissance Studies in Honor of

Networks of Urban Secrecy 181 Hans Baron, edited by Anthony Mohlo and John A. Tedeschi, 121–40. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971. Zorzi, Andrea. “The Judicial System in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” In Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, edited by Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, 40–58. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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Tricks of the Trade The Technical Secrets of Early Engraving Sean Roberts

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n essay on engravings and secrets might be expected to start from a print like Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514) (see fig. 1 in “Introduction”), representative of a new class of objects produced for often solitary, if not wholly private, contemplation, enjoyment, and even deciphering.1 Indeed, the very foundations of the iconological hermeneutic might be traced through precisely such an image, in which symbols and ciphers yield their meanings through the painstaking and deliberate work of scholarly decoding. This essay, however, treats the technical secrets of engraving and will begin instead with another of Dürer’s prints from the previous year, the Sudarium with Two Angels (fig. 8.1).2 The legend of the veronica, or sudarium, a miraculous imprint of Christ’s visage on cloth, served as the inspiration for countless devotional paintings and prints throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.3 The sacrality of this relic was tied not only, or even principally, to the fact that it preserved a record of Christ’s features, but rather to the miraculous means by which that image was transferred to cloth without the intermediary of a human craftsperson. Joseph Koerner has provocatively connected the miraculous record of the holy face on the veil to the processes of Renaissance printmaking, observing that “Dürer thus fashions the Christian non manufactum to mythicize the process and the product of printing.”4 Though Koerner’s likening of the angels in Dürer’s later etched Sudarium (fig. 8.2) to printmakers hanging their fresh pages to dry has aroused skepticism, the comparison is hardly inapt.5 Like the veronica, engravings were themselves composed of marks imprinted without the direct intervention of human hands. Indeed it is a commonplace of scholarship on early modern printing to observe that the first products of the press (both texts and images) were sometimes seen as miraculous.6 Engraving, like the sudarium, could be understood as having unknown, mysterious, and for some even “mythic” origins. 1. See esp. Emison, “Prolegomena to the Study of Renaissance Prints.” 2. On this image see Talbot, Dürer in America, 142–43. 3. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 49–57, 215–25; Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 80–105. 4. Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 222–23. 5. Emison, review of Moment of Self-Portraiture, by Koerner. 6. Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Cultural Change, 1:27–31.

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FIGURE 8.1. Albrecht Dürer, Sudarium with Two Angels, 1513, engraving, London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

It could be argued that the mysterious nature of engraving was an inevitable response to the introduction of new and unfamiliar technologies and processes. A lack of familiarity with the workings of this labor-saving technology gave the impression of a supernatural force at work for viewers and readers steeped in a scribal culture. This is a common narrative of the introduction of technology and a familiar one for historians of science. Surely the burgeoning early modern obsession with marvels, wonders, and curiosities also suggested such rubrics as frameworks for understanding technical novelty.7 Further, as Pamela Smith has shown, artisanal forms of knowledge were often de facto secrets to the uninitiated and uninterested alike.8 Within the history of printing, a sense of mystery was frequently included as one of a handful of emergent properties inherent to print culture, most influentially by Elizabeth Eisenstein in her landmark study The Printing Press as an Agent of Cultural Change (1978).9 Over the past two decades, however, historians of printing, following the lead of Adrian Johns, have launched a sustained reevaluation of Eisenstein’s paradigm. These revisionist scholars have argued that qualities long associated with print culture—the authority of print foremost—were, at least in part, built slowly through the 7. See esp. Marr and Evans, Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. 8. Smith, Body of the Artisan, esp. 142–49. 9. Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Cultural Change, 1:1–31.

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FIGURE 8.2. Albrecht Dürer, The Sudarium Spread out by an Angel, 1516, etching on iron, London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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efforts of printers, authors, engravers, and all of the sundry individuals involved in the production of these texts and images.10 Following on these valuable studies, I will argue here that the apparently mysterious origins of engraving were another of these intentional rather than accidental or inherent qualities of print. This essay posits that a rhetoric of secrecy was erected around the techniques by which fifteenth-century engraved images came into being. The technical operations of engravers were, in some of the earliest cases, actively effaced in being designated as secrets by their makers. Many of the tools and techniques that early engraving depended upon were adapted from other, longstanding craft practices, especially silver- and goldsmithing. Derived from familiar techniques performed with familiar tools, engraving was, nonetheless, far from universally understood. In his early fifteenth-century Libro dell’arte, Cennino Cennini for example displays familiarity with metalworking processes, describing a variety of burnishers and punches as well as methods for using these.11 These are the very tools that would be retrofitted, only a couple of decades later in Florence, to serve as part of the basic technologies of engraving on copperplates. Yet despite the prevalence and familiarity of such tools, their utility for engraving was anything but common knowledge in the quattrocento. Engraving produced remarkable images, and in the fifteenth century comparatively few individuals, even among artists, understood precisely how. This essay considers how that secrecy worked and what conditions made that secrecy a possibility, and most importantly, suggests who might have been the beneficiary of these secrets. As Pamela Long has shown, technical skills were often jealously guarded as trade secrets from antiquity into early modernity. This was true even of processes that we have come to understand as rudimentary. Craftspeople protected techniques for activities including glassmaking, metallurgy, mining, and masonry. Painters and sculptors kept a watchful eye on every component of their trade, ranging from specialized chisels and hammers to recipes for paint, ink, and plaster.12 The Venetian glass industry provides perhaps the best-studied example of the careful, intentional, and unyielding protection of early modern technical knowledge from outsiders through clever obfuscation, controlled access, and custom-tailored juridical practices.13 Established practitioners of long-valued trades such as the Serenissima’s glassmakers prospered under the watchful eye of state guardianship. Many less established industries, however, had recourse to few such legal protections in early modern Europe. The issuing of privileges for technical processes was commonplace; indeed that system had developed to protect technical innovation and was certainly better-suited to the preservation of technological invention than to artistic composition. Ugo da Carpi (1455–ca. 1523) famously obtained privileges for his supposed invention of the chiaroscuro woodcut process. Certainly Ugo had good reason to seek such protections. His collaboration with Ludovico Arrighi to produce woodcuts for Arrighi’s writing manual, the Operina (1524), soured and Ugo’s name was completely effaced on the title page of the first edition of that work.14 Still, such

10. Johns, Nature of the Book, 28–40. 11. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, 82–85, 127–31. 12. On the status of trade techniques as secrets in the medieval and early modern world, see Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship. See also Butters, Triumph of Vulcan, 1:176, 238, 345; and Wheeler, Renaissance Secrets: Recipes and Formulas. 13. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, 89–96. 14. On this disagreement see Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, 43–47, 73–77.

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privileges were local in their scope and notoriously difficult to enforce. More usually, craft techniques were carefully protected by other means, not least through watchful attention to equipment, the regulation of guild membership, and the oral transmission of techniques from master to apprentice. The very designation of these techniques as secret, however, was another means by which their proprietary character was controlled. The secrecy of early engraving was far from rhetorical in the colloquial sense. It served the business interests of book printers and authors, craftspeople and artists. Such interests stretched beyond the discretely commercial motivation of greater profits to include the aspirations of many connected with print production to establish themselves as pioneers in a rapidly evolving field and to stake a claim for their authority over texts, images, techniques, and processes. Secrecy functioned to construct a patina of what Pierre Bordieu has designated “distinction,” the visible mark of symbolic capital. Practitioners found it expedient to designate techniques as secret until the technologies were so diffuse that it was no longer plausible to build an aura of sanctity and mystery around them. For engraving, this shift was taking place by the early sixteenth century. Even so, such secrecy attended each new printing process introduced, up to and including competing modes of photography in the nineteenth century. An early modern case in point is provided by the apparent invention of the soft-ground etching process by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609– 64) in seventeenth-century Rome.15 The secrets of that process were not discovered by another printmaker until more than a century had passed. Like Castiglione’s invention, one that only came to the attention of scholars in 1971, some of these technical secrets have remained hidden up to the present day. In part, this is due to the fact that art historians have routinely attributed technical differences between engravings to the skill or lack thereof of individual engravers. These engravers and their works have then been slotted into a chronology of stylistic development that parallels those of painting and sculpture. The subdiscipline of print history, traditionally tied closely to the concerns of collectors and connoisseurs, has been partially to blame. Following on the evaluation of Adam Von Bartsch, painter-engravers have served as the focal point of art historical attention while so-called reproductive engravers have been consigned to the field’s margins. This is undoubtedly a false dichotomy, as Lisa Pon has eloquently argued in her study of the collaborative relationship between Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael.16 More importantly, the assignment of the most technically accomplished early engravings to talented painters, rather than skilled professionals, derived in part from the attitudes of Franz Wickhoff, has ingrained a counterintuitive and problematic conflation of technical and compositional skills.17 What art historians often refer to by the shorthand moniker of skill, or worse, intrinsic talent, is usually a more complex set of aptitudes requiring not only innate ability and diligent practice but certain kinds of technical know-how. One high-profile example of a trade secret long unrecognized by print historians is demonstrated by the long-standing lack of consensus regarding the two prominent techniques—usually called “manners”—used by engravers active in fifteenth-century Florence. The earliest Florentine 15. Blunt, “Inventor of Soft-Ground Etching: Castiglione.” Castiglione was also the first printmaker to produce monotypes; Reed, “Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s ‘God Creating Adam,’” 66–73. 16. Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, 27–32. 17. Wickhoff, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Reproduzierenden Künst.”

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engravings, those produced in the fine manner, employ shallow, gray lines and usually produce depth and tone through dense cross-hatching.18 These qualities are evident in prophets and sibyls usually attributed to Baccio Baldini. The engraver of the Samian Sibyl from this group develops a compelling sense of volume with short, intersecting hatches, especially in describing the peaks and ravines of the figure’s mountainous garment (fig. 8.3). Prints of the later Florentine broad manner, such as those of the Mysteries of the Rosary series, instead utilize regularly spaced, deeply gouged lines. In the Annunciation from this series (fig. 8.4) the engraver—almost certainly Francesco Rosselli (1445–before 1513)—creates networks of parallel hatching, emulating the graphic qualities of drawing. Broad manner engravings, particularly in their pictorial sense of modeling, differ significantly from the earlier, Florentine fine manner prints, usually thought to have been derived from goldsmiths’ intaglio techniques for producing nielli. The transition between these techniques has often been presented as a kind of natural progression from objects conceived in the botteghe of goldsmiths to the more expressive engravings produced through collaboration with artists familiar both with innovations in Florentine painting and with the graphically accomplished works of Northern printmakers like Martin Schongauer.19 The free flow of artistic ideas and the involvement of artists in a previous craft practice have been credited with providing the spark for this compelling new mode of printmaking. David Landau, however, has convincingly shown that a technical shift was instead principally responsible.20 Florentine broad manner prints were once believed to represent the work of dozens of anonymous craftspeople, though most print scholars now attribute nearly all of these images to the hand of Rosselli. Before adopting the broad manner, Rosselli produced several engravings that are technically quite close to fine manner prints.21 These engravings display a silvery tone and are composed of shallowly gouged lines. However, unlike most fine manner examples, Rosselli’s prints make use of parallel rather than cross-hatching. The broad manner engravings differ from these not in their graphic style but rather in the depth and shape of their incised lines. Drawing on this seemingly pedestrian observation, Landau astutely recognized that Rosselli’s broad manner plates were engraved with a different tool than those used to create the fine manner prints—a burin with a lozenge-shaped section. Unlike the round-section burin and drypoint tool used in Florence, this instrument was capable of cutting the deep lines associated with broad manner prints.22 This tool was in wide use north of the Alps and Rosselli might have had the opportunity to acquire one while working for King Matthias Corvinus in Buda during the late 1470s. The new engraving technology with which Rosselli returned to Florence provided him with a steady source of income and remained the province of, at most, a handful of artists. Landau and Peter Parshall, for their part, posit that “Rosselli was the only printmaker in Florence to be affected by the introduction of the burin.”23 This was not a coincidence and, judging by the sheer number of engravings Rosselli produced, it was not on account of the engraver’s lack of success. Instead, it 18. Levenson, Oberhuber, and Sheehan, Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art, 528–49; Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 65–66; Zucker, Illustrated Bartsch, 24, commentary, pt. 1, 1–4; and Zucker “Fine Manner vs. Broad Manner,” 21–26. 19. Zucker, Illustrated Bartsch, 24, commentary, pt. 1, 1–7. 20. Landau, “Printmaking in the Age of Lorenzo.” 21. Zucker, Illustrated Bartsch, 24, commentary, pt. 2, 75–78. 22. Landau, “Printmaking in the Age of Lorenzo”; Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 108–12. 23. Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 73.

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FIGURE 8.3. Attributed to Baccio Baldini, The Samian Sibyl, ca. 1470, engraving, London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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FIGURE 8.4. Francesco Rosselli, Annunciation, after 1482, engraving from the series The Mysteries of the Rosary, London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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would stand to reason that Rosselli protected not only his plates, about which we know a great deal since he handed these on to his son Alessandro at the time of his death, but also the tricks of his trade.24 These prized tools and techniques undoubtedly included the lozenge-section burin that he probably acquired somewhere between the Alps and Buda, a secret that resisted revelation for nearly five centuries. The implications of such mobile tools and practitioners are only now being evaluated. I have argued elsewhere that Rosselli’s burin disrupts our notion of “early Florentine engraving” by inflecting it through German and Hungarian training and technology.25 The changes wrought by such trade secrets complicate not only the categories long relied upon by connoisseurs, but more importantly, long-standing nationalistic histories of craft and technology.

The Secrets of Engraved Maps

The earliest engraved maps have frequently been discussed in terms of secrecy and even its rhetoric. J. B. Harley, above all, pointed to the role that even conventional maps played in activating fantasies of early modern territorial control through their designation as privileged knowledge.26 Certainly few cartographic historians are unaware of the role engraved maps might play in sensitive situations like the arrest of Sigismondo’s agent, Matteo de’ Pasti, recounted in the introduction to this volume.27 The technical secrecy of these maps, however, has often gone unremarked upon, or has been assumed to be a self-evident phenomenon attendant to commercial or diplomatic interests. Their techniques have never been treated in terms of an intentional secrecy or analyzed in terms of who benefited from such secrets. Fifteenth-century engraved maps serve as ideal case studies of technical secrecy because, unlike figurative engravings, they do not rely closely on differences between their designers in terms of pictorial “invention” or “style.” Instead the vast majority of early engraved maps were based on those associated with the second-century Greek Geography of Ptolemy. Despite their reliance on relatively standardized models, startling visual differences are evident in even closely contemporary projects. Two such parallel programs of engraving are the maps for Francesco Berlinghieri’s Septe giornate della geographia, printed by the Florentine printer known as Niccolò Tedesco in 1482, and the 1478 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography produced by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz in Rome. Both books include twenty-seven double folio maps of the known world’s principal regions derived from those in fifteenth-century manuscripts of Ptolemy’s work. The Florentine tome augments these with “modern” maps of France, Spain, Italy, and the Holy Land. Though based on cartographically identical maps, the engravings for these two editions diverge starkly in fundamental ways. Sweynheym’s pages present carefully aligned labels composed of identical Roman capitals designating topographic features including mountains and rivers that stand in vibrant relief against the white page (fig. 8.5). In contrast, the world presented by Berlinghieri and Tedesco is littered with toponymic mistakes, employs dozens of divergent letterforms, and is marred by a 24. The inventory was first published by Badia, “La bottega di Alessandro di Francesco Rosselli mericaio e stampatore,” 24–30. See Zucker, Illustrated Bartsch, 24, commentary, pt. 2, 3. 25. Roberts, “Francesco Rosselli Berlinghieri’s Geographia Revisited,” 17–18. 26. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 57–76. See also Smail, Imaginary Cartographies; and Black, Maps and Politics. 27. Raby, “East and West in Mehmed the Conqueror’s Library,” 297–321; Raby, “A Sultan of Paradox,” 4; Brotton, Trading Territories, 92, 102–3.

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sometimes image-obscuring plate tone and dense webs of scratches. These are technical problems with technological solutions, yet they have, more often than not, been attributed to different levels of skill on the part of engravers. Probably the greatest impediment to appreciating fully these distinctions has been a failure on the part of modern viewers to recognize proprietary technical achievements. Familiar as we are with uniformly printed texts and images, we tend to underestimate how difficult, complicated, and novel early prints might have seemed. Access to implements like burnishers and specialized burins, tools often assumed to be indispensable to the engraving process, could be surprisingly well regulated.28 The seemingly miraculous appearance of the printed maps of the Roman Geography of 1478, when compared to those of the Florentine Geographia, demonstrates visually the gap between printers and printmakers who were privy to such technology and those who were kept in the dark. One carefully controlled set of tools was the metal punches employed to incise letters for map labels quickly and accurately.29 Punches also came to be used for towns and cities, political borders, and less frequently even for topographical features like mountains. They appear throughout maps of Sweynheym’s Geography (see fig. 8.5) and gave that project a distinct graphic advantage not only over Berlinghieri’s book but also over the Geography printed in Bologna in 1477.30 For the engravers of the Florentine and Bolognese maps, the lack of punches meant that each letter, for thousands of individual labels, had to be formed by hand. This led, of course, to a variety of divergent letterforms in and of itself, which hardly presented a serious problem. Nonetheless, it must have represented an extraordinary and unnecessary investment of labor, especially since the act of pushing the burin is so different from the scribal practice of copying letters. However, the lack of letter punches led to far more serious errors when coupled with another technological lacuna unique to Berlinghieri’s maps. The engravers of these massive maps lacked a suitable means to correct errors. A prominent example is provided by the Geographia’s ninth Ptolemaic map of Europe, which was mistakenly engraved with the title “TABULA NONA D’ASIA” “The Ninth Map of Asia.” Recognizing this error, or perhaps having had it pointed out, the cutter then interposed the letters “EUROPA” between those of “ASIA,” leaving the viewer with a nearly illegible jumble of Roman capitals. When the label for Giaffo ( Jaffa, today a part of Tel Aviv) on the map of the Holy Land was incorrectly placed on an island directly to the west, the engraver’s only choice was to incise the label again, this time on the peninsula (fig. 8.6). The original misleading inscription, however, was not removed, leaving viewers puzzling over which of the two plots was the impostor. Elsewhere, on the book’s Ptolemaic map of Italy, the engraver apparently lost her or his bearings and continued the Adriatic Sea deep into the Italian peninsula. Again this craftsperson simply left these errant contours in place. Confronted with these glaring errors, the modern scholar of printed images only slowly reaches the astonishing conclusion that the producers of the largest and most expensive engraving project attempted in Renaissance Florence lacked not only letter punches but also a proper burnisher (or the knowledge to use it). Even this most fundamental tool

28. See Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance; and Woodward, “Techniques of Map Engraving, Printing, and Coloring in the European Renaissance.” 29. Campbell, “Letter Punches,” 111–15. 30. Skelton, Cosmographia: Rome, 1478; and see Hinks, “Lettering of the Rome Ptolemy of 1478,” 189.

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FIGURE 8.5. Third Map of Africa (detail), engraving from Ptolemy, Geography (Rome: Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, 1478). Photo by author with permission of the Biblioteca Nazionale Palatina, Parma.

FIGURE 8.6. Map of the Holy Land (detail), engraving from Francesco Berlinghieri, Septe giornate della geographia (Florence: Niccolò Tedesco, 1482). Photo by author with permission of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan.

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for correcting misplaced engraved lines seems to have been safely guarded by established practitioners as a secret of their trade. A final problem presents itself to viewers in the form of the apparent compositional disorganization of several of the Geographia’s maps, including most notably that of modern Italy (fig. 8.7). Here, the engraving seems to have been based on a model somewhat larger than its plate could accommodate. The map significantly overlaps the border, engraved on the plate first, particularly at the image’s top edge. As a result, no space was left for a title inscription in the usual place above the map, forcing the engraver to intersperse the letters amidst a dense network of mountains. This toponymic disarray adds to an already graphically perplexing image in which figure and ground, mountains and lakes, even ocean and terra firma are not adequately distinguished from one another by the engraver’s burin. Visual confusion results, in large part, from the substantial plate tone and large number of unburnished scratches that render the entire surface of this image in varying shades of gray. Manuscript maps relied to a significant degree on color to distinguish land from water and various types of terrain from one another. The Geographia’s engraver substituted patterns for these colors and had access to only a limited range of these patterns in his or her repertoire; for instance, both the Mediterranean Sea and the Apennines are rendered with similar systems of short horizontal dashes. The result is a map whose hundreds of locations and general topography can only be discerned after great visual effort, a challenge exacerbated by the overwhelming grayness of the ground and heavy scratches. Here too technical secrets may be at play. The excessive plate tone is likely the result of a printer inexperienced in the delicate, even volatile, process of printing engraved images. Plate tone results from the adherence of ink to the unengraved plate surface and has several possible sources. Principal among these are insufficient wiping of the plate prior to printing or the mixing and application of unnecessarily greasy ink. Another source of distracting marks on many of Berlinghieri’s maps were fine cracks in the copperplates, into which ink settled. Such problems usually occur when impressions are pulled from plates that are too thin.31 The recipes and ratios necessary to mix printing ink or to choose plates of the right thickness were relatively simple ones, yet the printer and engraver of the Florentine Geographia lacked not only the tools, but also the training and experience, that would have compensated for these problems.32 Clearly some engraving techniques were understood as trade secrets in the fifteenth century. This observation need hardly suggest the rhetorical operations of secrecy. Yet we must ask what prevented Berlinghieri’s engravers (or those of other maps) from discovering these simple solutions on their own? Punches were, after all, widely used in both gold- and silver-work. Smiths had used them for decorative motifs and personal marks for decades at least. Burnishers, likewise, were common tools, described in some detail even by Cennino Cennini at least a half-century prior.33 It would seem particularly surprising that these Florentine engravers failed to recognize the utility of these metalworking tools, given the intimacy that has usually been assumed between engravers

31. See Ivins, How Prints Look. 32. On who the engravers for this project might have been, see Boorsch, “Case for Francesco Rosselli as the Engraver of Berlinghieri’s Geographia.” But see also Roberts, “Francesco Rosselli, Berlinghieri”s Geographia, and the Origins of Florentine Engraving.” 33. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. Thompson, 81–82.

FIGURE 8.7. Map of “Modern” Italy, engraving from Francesco Berlinghieri, Septe giornate della geographia (Florence: Niccolò Tedesco, 1482). Photo by author with permission of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan.

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and goldsmiths in that city. What, for that matter, prevented Francesco Rosselli’s rivals from understanding that his successful prints hinged on a differently shaped burin? I propose that because they were constructed as trade secrets, many printers and engravers assumed that tools and techniques were more specialized and complicated than they actually were. This rhetoric of secrecy, at least sometimes, discouraged reverse-engineering from printing’s finished products. It might be argued that the Geographia’s author lacked the resources or motivation to secure the best-possible engravers for this project. We can be reasonably certain, however, that Francesco Berlinghieri spared little expense in bringing the Geographia, a project that represented over a decade of labor on the poet’s part, into print.34 He further possessed significant experience with the costs and demands of book printing, having financed the first edition of Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato’s works.35 Berlinghieri also understood that engraving depended on the personal knowledge and skills of its practitioners. In a letter (now unfortunately lost) to Bartolomeo Scala, the geographer expressed his intention to travel to Rome to speak with Conrad Sweynheym about the maps for his Geographia.36 Perhaps Berlinghieri had seen an example of the Roman edition. If so, he might have read the book’s preface describing how “calling on the help of mathematicians, he [Sweynheym] gave instructions in the method of printing from copper plates, spending three years in this up to the day of his death.”37 Aware that Florentine engravers were incapable of achieving the level of graphic complexity and clarity that these maps would require, the poet sought to learn these secrets from Sweynheym and his already experienced pool of engravers. Berlinghieri, a prolific writer of letters, evidently believed that engraving was the kind of business one discussed in person, a conversation that required discretion and diplomatic negotiation.38

Invention, Revelation, and the Control of Technical Secrets

The Geographia’s printer, Niccolò Tedesco, built his reputation on the production of technically experimental engraved books.39 While Berlinghieri’s book revealed the extent to which its printer and his engravers were excluded from some of fifteenth-century engraving’s most important technical secrets, other projects revealed that Niccolò had a few tricks up his own sleeve. Nearly simultaneously with the Geographia, Niccolò was in the process of printing Cristoforo Landino’s massive commentary on Dante’s Commedia (1481).40 The Commento was the first printed book to combine letterpress text and engraved illustrations on a single folio (fig. 8.8). Each of these pages was designed to accommodate Dante’s verse, Landino’s gloss, and illustrations probably designed by Sandro Botticelli and engraved by Baccio Baldini. This edition has been characterized by one scholar as “one 34. On the composition of the Geographia see Roberts, “Poet and World Painter: Francesco Berlinghieri”s Geographia of 1482,” 145–60. 35. Kristeller, “The First Printed Edition of Plato’s Works and the Date of Its Publication,” 25–35. 36. The letter is referred to in Fillon, Inventaire des autographes, 6: 37, cat. no. 818. See also Anliker and Bonacker, “Francesco di Niccolò Berlinghieri und seine Ptolemäus,” 1–10. 37. Skelton, Cosmographia: Rome, 1478, v. 38. See Ficino, Letters, 4:3. For Berlinghieri’s correspondence with Lorenzo de’ Medici see Florence, Archivio di Stato, MAP, filza 21, nos. 8, 30, 75, and 82, and filza 34, no. 287. 39. On Niccolò’s practice see Ridolfi “Contributi sopra Niccolò Todesco”; and Ridolfi “Le Ultime imprese tipografiche di Niccolò Todesco.” 40. Dreyer, “Botticelli’s Series of Engravings ‘of 1481’”; and Keller, “Engravings in the 1481 Edition of the Divine Comedy.”

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of the most beautiful Florentine editions of the quattrocento.”41 In many ways, however, the Commento offers close parallels to some of the technical problems that Niccolò and his assistants faced in printing the Geographia. Like Berlinghieri’s book, Landino’s commentary presented its printer with an ambitious scheme combining text and image, in this case on the same page. The Commento demonstrates the gap between the ambition of authors and financiers and the technical skills and experience necessary for printers and engravers to realize these lofty goals. Indeed, Berlinghieri’s and Landino’s books were only the second and third attempts, respectively, to illustrate a book using engraving. The first, Antonio Bettini’s Monte Santo di Dio (1477), like the Geographia, was plagued by errant burin marks and distracting plate tone despite the small size of its images (fig. 8.9).42 When the work was printed again in 1491, the new printer abandoned engraving entirely, employing a woodcutter to translate the illustrations of the problematic first edition into that medium.43 Each of these projects was printed by Niccolò suggesting that, when it came to combining letterpress with engraved images, his was the only game in town. This fact goes some way toward confirming that such engraving techniques indeed represented trade secrets at this moment. Landino’s commentary was planned to include one of Botticelli’s illustrations for each of Dante’s hundred cantos. Even the most complete extant examples, however, bear only twenty-one engravings, and of these only the first three are actually printed on the same page as their accompanying text. The rest were printed on separate sheets, cut out, and affixed on the page in the space left for them, the process of aligning the sheets to be run through the press a second time having proved an apparently Herculean labor.44 In the majority of surviving copies, the frustrated printer and his assistants simply conceded defeat, leaving blank the spaces left for the engravings after the third canto.45 If the task proved beyond their technical means, Landino and Niccolò nonetheless produced a book whose pages would have born the immediate imprint of technological experimentation, suggesting that its printer and possibly even author possessed secret knowledge of these processes. How else, quattrocento readers and viewers might ask, could they have achieved (if on a limited scale) what no other printer or author had? The very appearance of illustrated books like the Commento amounted to a tantalizing display of technical knowledge and revealed that Niccolò possessed valuable secrets indeed. The Mantuan Andrea Mantegna, and those working with him, pioneered an equally recognizable graphic feat—an expressive engraved line characterized by fluid parallel hatching largely unknown on the peninsula previously.46 The tonal system of these prints, remarkably, did not spread to neighboring Ferrara, where instead a technique closer to that of the Florentine fine manner took 41. Veneziani, “Vicende tipografiche della Geografia di Francesco Berlinghieri,” 200. 42. On Bettini’s book and its engravings see Hind, Early Italian Engravings, 1:97–99. And see the forthcoming doctoral thesis of Emily Gray, “Origins, Forms, and Function of Early Florentine Devotional Engravings, 1460–90.” 43. My observations are drawn from the Huntington Library’s copy, Rare Books, #89909. 44. See Dreyer, “Botticelli’s Series of Engravings ‘of 1481,’” 111–15; and Keller, “Engravings in the 1481 edition of the Divine Comedy.” 45. In those copies I have examined (Florence, Bib. Riccardiana Ed. R. 691 and Ed. R. 626; Parma Bib. Palatina Inc. Parm. 628; and Rome, BAV, Inc. Ross. 1491), it is evident that the engravings were printed on a different paper stock than the text pages to which they are affixed. The prints have yellowed quite noticeably and are more brittle than the text pages, suggesting that the printing of the text had exhausted the allotted paper supply for the project and that less suitable paper had to be used when the images could not be printed on the same page as their accompanying verse. 46. Lincoln, “Mantegna’s Culture of Line.”

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FIGURE 8.8. Attributed to Baccio Baldini, illustration for the third canto, engraving from Cristoforo Landino, Commento sopra la commedia (Florence: Niccolò Tedesco, 1481), London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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FIGURE 8.9. The Holy Mountain (frontispiece), engraving from Antonio Bettini, Monte santo di Dio (Florence: Niccolò Tedesco, 1477), London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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hold. A gray tonality, built up through shallow parallel marks, predominates in works like the Ferrarese painter Taddeo Crivelli’s engravings for the Bologna Ptolemy of 1477.47 Contrary to the assumptions of traditional art history, prints did not always spread easily or rapidly. Art historians have long recognized that Mantegna’s engravings served as precious objects exchanged among a small network of friends and cognoscenti.48 We know that in late 1491, Marchese Francesco Gonzaga sent an engraving associated with Mantegna, called a quadretino—“a little picture”—as a gift to a recipient at the Sforza court in Milan.49 This intimate exchange of an engraving as a courtly gift suggests the extent to which assumptions about “print culture” can prove misleading for scholars of early and significant examples in this medium. Art history’s emphasis on influence has been especially pronounced in such scholarship on prints since they have often been assumed to serve principally to distribute the artistic ideas of their makers to geographically dispersed and impersonal audiences. Nothing could be further from the situation on the ground in late fifteenth-century Mantua, an environment in which print technology and artistic invention were vigorously protected and vigilantly surveilled. Mantegna apparently went to thuggish lengths to protect the tricks of his trade. The plaque bearing the word INVID(IA), meaning “envy,” held by the withered crone of Battle of the Sea Gods (ca. 1470–80) (fig. 8.10), has seemed to many art historians an apt rubric for understanding the Mantuan painter’s territorial attitudes. Though the subject of the two-part engraving has been frequently contested, it is generally understood as a comment on specifically artistic envy and has been connected to the story of the Telchini, the mythic sculptors of Rhodes.50 The invidia between painters, centered on invention and skill, influence and plagiarism, have taken center stage in explanations of Mantegna’s alleged assault on an upstart printmaker in Mantuan lands. Simone Ardizzoni of Reggio, a man who described himself as a painter and engraver, submitted a complaint to Ludovico Gonzaga, Marchese of Mantua and Mantegna’s employer, on 15 September 1475. In this legal brief, Simone recounted how he and the painter Zoan Andrea were viciously assaulted by a gang of about ten armed men. Later, Simone was denounced to Mantuan authorities for sodomy. The artist blamed both of these misfortunes on Mantegna, who had previously approached Simone to work with him. According to Simone, the painter had become enraged when he chose instead to “remake” some plates that had, along with drawings and medals, been stolen from Zoan.51 Some among Mantegna’s biographers, including Arthur Hind, Paul Kristeller, and most recently David Landau, made an interpretive leap, asserting that Zoan’s stolen plates must have been copies of designs by Mantegna.52 As Ronald Lightbown first observed, such excuses seem a “gratuitous attempt to palliate Mantegna’s conduct.”53 Others including Lightbown and most recently Suzanne Boorsch have argued that, in assaulting Simone, Mantegna was exerting a degree of control

47. Sighinolfi, “I mappamondi di Taddeo Crivelli”; and Skelton, introduction to Cosmographia: Bologna,1477, vi–vii. 48. Campbell, Cabinet of Eros, 157–62. 49. Lightbown, Andrea Mantegna, 237. 50. Jacobsen, “Meaning of Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods”; Emison, “Raucousness of Mantegna’s Mythological Engravings,” 159–76; and Campbell, Cabinet of Eros, 163–68. 51. Lightbown, Andrea Mantegna, 234; Boorsch, “Mantegna and His Printmakers”; Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, 71; and Christiansen, “Case for Mantegna as Printmaker.” 52. Kristeller, Andrea Mantegna, 530–31; Hind, Early Italian Engraving; Landau, “Mantegna as Printmaker,” 44–54. 53. Lightbown, Andrea Mantegna, 236–37.

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FIGURE 8.10. Andrea Mantegna, Battle of the Sea Gods (left half), ca. 1470–1480, engraving, London, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

over all cultural production in Mantua as part of his purview.54 Boorsch speculated that Mantegna’s rage was prompted by “the fact that Simone, without his knowledge, had been working for Zoan Andrea” and that Mantegna, as court artist, “was supposed to be in charge of all artistic matters in Mantuan territory.”55 Such dominion would have been practically impossible to achieve and clearly exaggerates Mantegna’s sovereignty as an employee of the Gonzaga. It may even go beyond what a motivated and prolific self-promoter like Mantegna would have dared to imagine. More importantly, it surely underestimates the range of artistic production in Mantua not connected to the court or its designated artistic supervisor. For many art historians, Mantegna has fully eclipsed all other artists at work in quattrocento Mantua. In fact, a great many painters are documented at work in Mantua during Mantegna’s time there, and we have no documents of similar confrontations.56 If the painter was really driven to rage by the artistic production of others, he must have raged a great deal over the course of his nearly half-century tenure at the court. It is of tremendous importance that this 54. Lightbown, Andrea Mantegna, 237; Boorsch, “Mantegna and His Printmakers,” 58. This basic position is also supported in Lincoln, Invention of the Renaissance Printmaker, 38–39. 55. Boorsch, “Mantegna and His Printmakers,” 58. On Mantegna and the status of court artists, see Warnke, Court Artist, 124–42; and esp. Campbell, Artists at Court, 9–18. 56. Furlotti and Rebecchini, Art of Mantua, 56–91.

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dispute hinged on the relatively novel and technically opaque process of engraving. The protection of an artist’s “invention” in the sense usually intended by art theory has been the subject of productive reevaluation by scholars interested in the origins of modern notions of intellectual property.57 Lisa Pon, for example, has examined the clash between Albrecht Dürer and Marcantonio Raimondi on account of the latter’s unauthorized use of the famous “AD” monogram.58 Seldom overtly acknowledged in such discussions, however, are questions of the protection of technological invention. The violent clash between Simone and Mantegna makes a great deal more sense when we understand it as a question of guarded proprietary technology. Precisely what that technology might have been, however, will likely remain a mystery without further documentation. The established painter may have been responding to Simone’s introduction of a particular piece of technology that had helped make Mantegna’s prints so graphically distinctive in Northern Italy. Something like the lozenge-section burin may be one possibility. More likely, Simone’s skill in wielding such tricks of the trade brought him to Mantegna’s attention. At the very least, something akin to industrial espionage was afoot in 1475, as is demonstrated by the episode that initiated this chain of events, the theft of Zoan Andrea’s plates. Despite some scholars’ speculations, there is no reason to believe that Mantegna was involved in the theft or that these plates had any relationship to Mantegna’s “inventions” in a compositional or intellectual sense. Only two facts are indisputable. These plates were worth stealing and Zoan lacked the ability to recreate them on his own. Zoan Andrea was not a painter whose reputation would have warranted such a theft if its principal aim had been the acquisition of his designs—his intellectual property in an artistic sense. Rather the plates themselves were stolen either to sabotage Zoan’s operations, to print from these plates at a profit, or perhaps to glean from them the technical secrets of their creation. Engraving in later fifteenth-century Mantua was as closely linked to technical secrets as it was to the rising status of artists and their poetic, pictorial inventions. The art historical focus on influence and the wide distribution of prints, rather than on their often careful and selective circulation within exclusive networks, has also obscured the extent to which engravers, rather than simply engravings, were on the move in early modern Europe. A lack of art historical attention to itinerate artists generally has contributed to this problem.59 Rosselli, of course, worked in Hungary.60 Martin Schongauer may have visited Spain.61 The craftsman tradition of the wanderjahre allowed Dürer to travel not only through Germany and Switzerland but probably also the Netherlands, years before his much-touted sojourn in Venice.62 Mantegna’s hapless rival Simone Ardizzoni claimed to have plied his trade in some forty Italian cities.63 Some fifteenth-century engravers may have worked even farther afield. An Ottoman embassy to Florence of 1480 requested from Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Signoria, on behalf of Sultan Mehmed II not 57. See esp. Lincoln, “Invention and Authorship in Early Modern Italian Visual Culture.” 58. Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, esp. 137–42. 59. Da Costa Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, 107–53. 60. Levi d’Ancona, “Francesco Rosselli”; Gabrielli, Cosimo Rosselli, 112–14, 120–23; and Bansi, Gli Arbori della cartografia in Ungheria. 61. Anzelewsky, “Schongauers Spanienreise.” 62. On the wanderjahre and Dürer’s prints, see most recently Talbot, “Dürer and the High Art of Printmaking.” 63. Lightbown, Andrea Mantegna, 238.

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only maestri “di legname, e di tarsio…e di squlture bronzo” but also “maestri d’intaglio,” according to the chronicler Benedetto Dei.64 This might be a request for engravers of precious metal or armor. It is equally possible, however, that it refers to engravers. A letter of 1482 from the Francesco Berlinghieri to Mehmed’s successor, Bayezid II, refers to the engravers of the Geographia’s maps as “intagliatori.”65 These and other examples are well known to historians of print, yet their implications have seldom been recognized. Early modern artisans were on the move and their luggage included not only examples of their craft but also the know-how, and often the tools, to produce new works in their new homes. The “Roman” Ptolemy of 1478 may have been engraved and printed in the eternal city, but its makers were provided with German tools and trained by Sweynheym, a German craftsman.66 Engraving techniques were jealously guarded trade secrets that did not spread rapidly but rather, like so many other technologies, through the slow and personal transmission of their practitioners’ knowledge.67 Berlinghieri’s own attempts to secure engravers from Sweynheym might have foundered on such concerns.

The Rewards of Secrecy

To return here to a question raised in the introduction to this volume, who benefited from the web of secrets woven around quattrocento engraving? Our first impulse might be to follow the money, to point to printers and financiers with vested interests in the success of luxury book projects replete with engraved images or the vendors of single-sheet prints who might reap substantial profits from their sale. The printing of texts and images was a competitive business in which individuals, partnerships, and firms fought to stay solvent.68 Despite universally admired projects like the Ptolemy of 1478, the operations of Conrad Sweynheym and his partner, Arnold Pannartz, were only saved from bankruptcy by a gift of funds from Pope Sixtus IV.69 Certainly printers like Niccolò Tedesco and Sweynheym sought ways to distinguish their own projects and to discourage competition. Indeed both men traveled far from their homes to do exactly that. There can be little question that a desire to ply their valuable secrets among the uninitiated encouraged their emigration from Ulm and Breslau to Rome and Florence. Nor should we harbor any doubt that, after these long journeys, after what must have represented substantial investment in tools and materials, these men aggressively protected their livelihoods by all means at their disposal. Greater profits, however, were only one part of the advantages that successful printers, authors, and engravers could hope to accrue by keeping their tools and techniques under wraps. Early books illustrated with engravings were, like single-sheet prints, often manufactured for the benefit of small groups of like-minded intellectuals and patrons, both real and potential. The projects of Florentine printers like Niccolò were often funded by their authors, friends, and colleagues.70 The 64. Quoted in Babinger, “Lorenzo de’ Medici e la corte ottomana,” 319. On this embassy, see also Raby, “Sultan of Paradox,” 3–8. 65. This letter accompanied a gift copy of the Geographia sent to Bayezid. The letter was first published in Marinelli, “Una dedica della Geographia del Berlinghieri.” 66. Skelton, Cosmographia: Rome, 1478, vi–vii. 67. On the personal transmission of craft knowledge, see Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, 88–96. 68. Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, 48–52. 69. Skelton, Cosmographia: Rome, 1478, v. 70. On this phenomenon, see Richardson, Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy, 49–57, 81.

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collaboration between Niccolò and Landino to produce the Commento probably did not generate significant revenue, nor was this likely the intention of its producers. For Niccolò, who came to style himself with the Latin moniker of Nicolaus Laurentii, participation allowed him to align himself with some of the city’s most important humanist scholars. Likewise, for writers like Landino and Berlinghieri (many of whom served as their own financiers) short-term economic profits were not their principal goal. Rather, through the technical and visual novelty of having their works printed with innovative engravings, such authors hoped to distinguish their efforts from those of friends, rivals, and predecessors. Landino’s Commento is extant in several precious examples with manuscript additions intended as gifts for wealthy and influential owners.71 The most fully luxuriated copy was presented to the Signoria and featured a hand-illuminated frontispiece and historiated initials throughout. It was housed in an elaborate leather binding inlaid with narrative medals.72 Clearly Landino intended for Florence’s preeminent citizens and its very government to recognize, and be astonished by, what he and Niccolò had accomplished. Florentine readers and viewers were expected to open these novel books and ask, “How did they do that?” Of course, the appearance of secrecy served to benefit artists and craftspeople, those who could be credited with a little-understood and even miraculous technique. As Michael Cole has recently reminded us in his study of sixteenth-century Florentine sculptors, recognized mastery of specialized and conspicuously difficult techniques, such as casting and chasing, served as powerful marks of distinction, animating artisanal rivalries.73 Francesco Rosselli made a handsome living off of the broad manner technique, which he kept out of the hands of upstart Florentine competitors until his death. When Francesco left the city of his birth for Hungary, he was deeply in debt and financially responsible for an extended household. Within two years of his return to Florence—with both the lozenge-section burin and the training to use it—he was not only solvent but also wealthy.74 The advantages engraving provided for Rosselli, moreover, were not limited to the monetary. Thanks to his later involvement in cartographic engraving in Venice, Francesco was able to fashion himself as “Franciscus Rosellus florentinus Cosmographus,” the title under which he is recorded as an attendee of Luca Pacioli’s lectures on cosmology.75 Rosselli began his career as a book illuminator, a Florentine craftsman of modest means. By 1508, the engraver was enmeshed in one of the most important circles of humanist mathematicians and geographers of the Renaissance. The impulses behind engraving’s secrecy were, like those driving so many shifts in early modern artistic practice, integrally linked to the shifting social ground occupied by artists and viewers, craftspeople and patrons. The ability to amaze and inspire wonder by wielding apparently complicated and misunderstood technologies played a significant part in such transformations. In the long run, the technical secrecy of engraving also had far-reaching consequences that its immediate practitioners could not have foreseen. The careful protection of information regarding those who made early engravings certainly served to benefit painters like Mantegna who created

71. See Alexander, Painted Page, 28–29. 72. This copy is today in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 341. On the binding and hand illumination of this example, see Gentile, Sandro Botticelli, 252–53. 73. Cole, Ambitious Form, esp. 58–69. 74. On the engraver’s finances see Boorsch, “Case for Francesco Rosselli as the Engraver of Berlinghieri’s Geographia.” 75. Almagià, “On the Cartographic Work of Francesco Rosselli”; Boorsch, “Francesco Rosselli.”

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remarkable and innovative objects in collaboration with artisans possessing unique technologies and skills. We now know that Mantegna contracted the engraver Gian Marco Cavalli to produce prints related to his drawings. One stipulation of their collaboration was that Cavalli could not provide any third party with access to the designs the painter provided. While the unauthorized dissemination of these inventions for profit was probably one of Mantegna’s concerns, he was probably also invested in assuring that the details of such a partnership, and the collaborative origins of his engravings, would not be known.76 Such conduct ensured that Mantegna alone would be credited with the production of these prints, valued as precious tokens and gifts. Mantegna’s success in these efforts can be measured in the complicity of modern art historians who have kept such secrets thanks to the field’s long-standing lack of attention to artistic collaboration, especially in cases involving canonically significant artists.77 Only recently have we begun to consider in earnest the role that a host of artisans, including not only Cavalli but also Giovanni Antonio da Brescia and the still-mysterious “Premier Engraver,” played in the production of “Mantegna” engravings.78 Artists, printers, and humanist writers alike drew on the relative secrecy of engraved image for social advantage. And so it was that Giorgio Vasari, when he turned his attention to the origins of engraving, proffered two different foundation myths for the process in the Vite. In the first edition of 1550, Vasari assigned the invention of engraving to Andrea Mantegna.79 Vasari had changed his mind by 1568, and the revised edition of that year attributes this remarkable discovery to the Florentine Maso Finiguerra.80 Both claims have long been regarded as fantastic foundation myths. The production of engraved images certainly originated beyond the Alps. Much might be said of Vasari’s motives for spinning these tall tales, especially of the ways in which these stories served to benefit the Aretine and his (often Florentine) patrons, and readers.81 Here, however, I want to conclude with a simple observation. That Vasari, a man trained as a goldsmith, did not fully understand the techniques of engraving or their history is remarkable. That these fabrications were, for a time and for some readers, believable is equally striking. Many of the earliest European engravings were seen as founded on trade secrets, secrets that were successfully kept by their practitioners, yet which advertised their novelty and invention through the graphic effects they made possible whether in single-sheet prints, illustrated book pages, or maps of the world. Vasari and his readers were not particularly well informed, not principally because they were unconcerned with prints but rather because early practitioners had a vested interest in protecting the secrets of their trade and in convincing outsiders of the complicated and technical qualities of even commonplace technologies.

76. Canova, “Gian Marco Incisore per Andrea Mantegna.” See also Campbell, “Antico and Mantegna.” 77. On the importance of collaboration and the difficulties it presents for art historians see especially Radke, “Lorenzo Ghiberti: Master Collaborator.” 78. For this collaboration see Boorsch, “Mantegna and His Printmakers.” 79. Vasari, Le vite (1550), 1:512–13 and (1568), 1:492. 80. Vasari, Le vite (1568), 1:64. 81. See Rubin, Giorgio Vasari; Gregory, Vasari and the Renaissance Print; and Roberts, “Inventing Engraving in Vasari’s Florence.”

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Bibliography Alexander, Jonathan J. G., ed. The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination, 1450–1550. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1994. Almagià, Roberto. “On the Cartographic Work of Francesco Rosselli.” Imago Mundi 8 (1951): 27–34. Anliker, Ernest, and Wilhelm Bonacker. “Francesco di Niccolò Berlinghieri und seine Ptolemäus—Ausgabe Jahre 1482.” Schweiz Sammler 2–3 (1932): 1–10. Anzelewsky, Fedja. “Schongauers Spanienreise.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 58 (1995): 1–21. Babinger, Franz. “Lorenzo de’ Medici e la corte ottomana.” Archivio Storico Italiano 121 (1963): 325–47. Badia, Jacopo del. “La bottega di Alessandro di Francesco Rosselli mericaio e stampatore.” Miscellanea fiorentina di erudizione e di storia 2 (1894): 24–30. Bansi, Florio. Gli Arbori della cartografia in Ungheria: Francesco Rosselli alla corte di Mattia Corvino. Rome: Biblioteca dell’Academia d’Ungheria, 1947. Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Black, Jeremy. Maps and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Blunt, Anthony. “The Inventor of Soft-Ground Etching: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.” Burlington Magazine 113 (1971): 474–75. Boorsch, Suzanne. “The Case for Francesco Rosselli as the Engraver of Berlinghieri’s Geographia.” Imago Mundi 56 (2004): 152–69. ———. “Francesco Rosselli.” In Cosimo Rosselli, Painter of the Sistine Chapel, edited by Arthur R. Blumenthal, 208–44. Winter Park, FL: Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, 2001. ———. “Mantegna and His Printmakers.” In Andrea Mantegna, edited by Jane Martineau et al., 56–66. London: Royal Academy of Arts; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. Brotton, Jerry. Trading Territories. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Butters, Suzanne. The Triumph of Vulcan: Sculptors’ Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence. 2 vols. Florence: Olschki, 1996. Campbell, Stephen J. “Antico and Mantegna: Humanist Art and the Fortune of the Art Object.” In Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes, edited by Eleanora Luciano, 27–44. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2011. ———, ed. Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300–1550. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Campbell, Tony. “Letter Punches: A Little-Known Feature of Early Engraved Maps.” Print Quarterly 1 (1987): 111–15. Canova, Andrea. “Gian Marco Incisore per Andrea Mantegnae altre notizie sull’oreficeria e la tipografia a Mantova nel XV secolo.” Italia medioevale e umanistica 42 (2001): 149–79. Cennini, Cennino d’Andrea. The Craftsman’s Handbook. Translated by Daniel V. Thompson Jr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1933. Christiansen, Keith. “The Case for Mantegna as Printmaker.” Burlington Magazine 135 (1993): 604–12. Cole, Michael W. Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Da Costa Kaufmann, Thomas. Toward a Geography of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Dreyer, Peter. “Botticelli’s Series of Engravings ‘of 1481.’” Print Quarterly 2 (1984): 111–15. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Cultural Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Emison, Patricia. “Prolegomena to the Study of Renaissance Prints.” Word and Image 11 (1995): 1–15. ———. “The Raucousness of Mantegna’s Mythological Engravings.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 124 (1994): 159–76. ———. Review of The Moment of Self-Portraiture, by Joseph Leo Koerner. Burlington Magazine 136 (1994): 765. Ficino, Marsilio. The Letters of Marsilio Ficino. Translated by members of the language department of the School of

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Fillon, Benjamin. Inventaire des autographes et des documents historiques composant la collection. Paris and London, 1877. Furlotti, Barbara, and Guido Rebecchini. The Art of Mantua: Power and Patronage in the Renaissance. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. Gabrielli, Edith. Cosimo Rosselli. Turin: Alemandi, 2007. Gentile, Sebastiano, ed. Sandro Botticelli: Pittore della Divina Commedia. 2 vols. Rome: Skira, 2000. Gray, Emily. “Origins, Forms, and Function of Early Florentine Devotional Engravings, 1460–90.” PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, forthcoming. Gregory, Sharon. Vasari and the Renaissance Print. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Harley, J. B. “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe.” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57–76. Hind, Arthur M. Early Italian Engravings. 6 vols. London: Bernard Quaritch Ltd., 1938. Hinks, R. “The Lettering of the Rome Ptolemy of 1478.” Geographical Journal 101 (1943): 189. Ivins, William M. How Prints Look. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943. Reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Jacobsen, Michael. “The Meaning of Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods.” Art Bulletin 64 (1982): 623–28. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Keller, Peter. “The Engravings in the 1481 Edition of the Divine Comedy.” In Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, edited by Hein-Th Schulze Altcappenber, 326–33. Exhibit catalogue. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000. Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Kristeller, Paul. Andrea Mantegna. London: Longmans, 1901. ———. “The First Printed Edition of Plato’s Works and the Date of Its Publication.” In Science and History: Studies in Honor of Edward Rosen, 25–35. Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1978. Landau, David. “Printmaking in the Age of Lorenzo.” In Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, edited by Elizabeth Cropper, 175–81. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. ———, and Peter Parshall. The Renaissance Print: 1470–1550. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Levenson, Jay A., Konrad Oberhuber, and J. L. Sheehan, eds. Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1973. Levi d’Ancona, Mirella. “Francesco Rosselli.” Commentari: Rivista di critica e storia dell’arte 16 (1965): 56–76. Lightbown, Ronald. Andrea Mantegna. Oxford: Phaidon, 1986. Lincoln, Evelyn. “Invention and Authorship in Early Modern Italian Visual Culture.” De Paul Law Review 52 (2003): 1093–119. ———. The Invention of the Renaissance Printmaker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. “Mantegna’s Culture of Line.” Art History 16 (1993): 33–59. Long, Pamela O. Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Marinelli, Giovanni. “Una dedica della Geographia del Berlinghieri.” Bolletino della Società Geografica Italiana 5 (1892): 305–10. Marr, Alexander, and R. J. W. Evans, eds. Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Pon, Lisa. Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Raby, Julian. “East and West in Mehmed the Conqueror’s Library.” Bulletin du bibliophile 3 (1987): 297–321. ———. “A Sultan of Paradox: Mehmed the Conqueror as Patron of the Arts.” Oxford Art Journal 5 (1982): 3–8.

Tricks of the Trade 207 Radke, Gary. “Lorenzo Ghiberti: Master Collaborator.” In The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece, edited by Gary Radke, 50–71. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Reed, Sue Welsh. “Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s ‘God Creating Adam’: The First Masterpiece of the Monotype Medium.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 17 (1991): 66–73, 94–95. Richardson, Brian. Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ridolfi, Roberto. “Contributi sopra Niccolò Todesco.” La Bibliofilia 58 (1956): 1–14. ———. “Le Ultime imprese tipografiche di Nicolò Todesco.” La Bibliofilia 68 (1966): 140–51. Roberts, Sean. “Francesco Rosselli and Berlinghieri’s Geographia Revisited.” Print Quarterly 28 (2011): 4–18. ———. “Inventing Engraving in Vasari’s Florence.” Intellectual History Review 24, no. 1 (2014), forthcoming. ———. “Poet and World Painter: Francesco Berlinghieri’s Geographia of 1482.” Imago Mundi 62 (2010): 145–60. Rubin, Patricia Lee. Giorgio Vasari: Art and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Sighinolfi, Luigi. “I mappamondi di Taddeo Crivelli e la stampa bolognese della Cosmografia di Tolomeo.” La Bibliofilia 10 (1908): 241–69. Skelton, R. A. Cosmographia, Bologna: 1477. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1963. ———. Cosmographia, Rome: 1478. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1966. Smail, Daniel Lord. Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Talbot, Charles, ed. Dürer in America: His Graphic Works. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1971. ———. “Dürer and the High Art of Printmaking.” In The Essential Dürer, edited by Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, 35–61. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (1550 and 1568). 7 vols. Translated by Gaetano Milanesi. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1906. Veneziani, Paolo. “Vicende tipografiche della Geografia di Francesco Berlinghieri.” La Bibliofilia 84 (1982): 195–208. Warnke, Martin. The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist. Translated by David McLintock. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Wheeler, Jo. Renaissance Secrets: Recipes and Formulas. London: V & A Publishing, 2009. Wickhoff, Franz. “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Reproduzierenden Künst: Marcantons Eintritt in den Kreis Römicher Künstler.” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 20 (1899): 181–94. Woodward, David. Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance. London: British Library Press, 1996. ———. “Techniques of Map Engraving, Printing, and Coloring in the European Renaissance.” In The History of Cartography, edited by David Woodward, 3.1:591–610. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Zucker, Mark. “Fine Manner vs. Broad Manner in Two Fifteenth-Century Florentine Engravings.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 25 (1990): 21–26. ———. The Illustrated Bartsch, 24, commentary, 3 parts. New York: Abaris Books, 1994.

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The Alchemical Womb Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum Lyle Massey

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arly modern anatomical flap sheets have a special kind of status in the history of science and print culture. Both figuratively and literally they embody the intertwining of secret knowledge with the newly penetrating gaze of Renaissance and baroque medicine. With their tactile invitation to peel back paper layers and peek inside, flap sheets trade on the ludic possibilities embedded in the act of dissection and emphasize the idea that the physical body harbors hidden revelations. These revelations are frequently shrouded in the academic language of anatomy (Latin rather than the vernacular) and often hinge on the authority of various university physicians and surgeons who invented and augmented early modern practices of dissection. However, while authors of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century flap sheets borrowed extensively from academic sources, the hybrid visual objects they produced often circulated in and appealed to a nebulous realm of popular tastes and appetites. With few exceptions, flap sheets neither drove forward nor contributed to the anatomical corpus. The knowledge they presented to the viewer was frequently meant to appear abstruse and available only to those with a requisite vision and understanding. That is, they appeared to fashion an exclusive community of secret holders of the sort alluded to in Tim McCall and Sean Robert’s introduction to this volume. But flap sheets were also meant to appeal to a wide cross section of consumers and readers. Straddling a line between high learning and folk wisdom, flap sheets translated the difficult and puzzling aspects of anatomy into a set of images that were both enticingly talismanic and deceivingly accessible. In short, anatomical flap sheets embodied a peculiar form of secret sharing, one that was at once social in the sense of defining an exclusive public, and scientific, in the sense of defining an arcane, yet seemingly universal body of knowledge. One of the most avidly sought-after flap sheet compilations was produced at the very end of the period in which they were most prevalent. This is Johann Remmelin’s elaborate, multiflap, multipage work, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Microcosmic Mirror). Lavishly illustrated by Lucas Kilian, a German engraver who probably designed as well as cut the plates, the Catoptrum presents anatomical information that was already out of date when it was printed.1 Nevertheless, the folio

I am grateful to Jesse Weiner for his assistance in translating the longer Latin passages and Shaina Trapedo for locating the source of the Hebrew phrases. In addition, my thanks go to Maria Pantelia, director of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (an extraordinary online

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engravings are not only unusually complex due to the sheer number and elaborateness of flaps (some images can be superimposed with up to nine consecutive flaps, many of them doublesided), but they are also distinguished from other flap sheets for the way they fabricate recondite associations between dissection and alchemy, and for their multiple inscriptions in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek.2 The eccentric nature of Remmelin’s Catoptrum and its presumed costliness would seem to have relegated it to a highly select and elite audience, and yet its print history reveals prodigious editions in many languages. Published initially in Latin, it was quickly translated into German, Dutch, French, and English.3 Each edition was probably limited because of the size and intricacy of the work, factors that also make it all the more surprising that the demand for translations and reproductions continued well into the eighteenth century. However, the Catoptrum also has a strange and convoluted print history involving early, possibly unauthorized editions in 1613, 1614, and 1615. The first edition that can be associated directly with Remmelin was printed in Augsburg in 1619.4 The title page of this edition identifies Remmelin as the author, Kilian as the artist, and Stephan Michelspacher as the printer, and it is dedicated to Philipp Hainhofer, duke of Parnerania (fig. 9.1). Both the earlier 1613 and the later 1619 editions were subsequently used as the basis for most translations and reprints.5 In almost all editions, the Catoptrum contains four to five printed plates: a title page, an author portrait (in some editions), and then three large plates referred to as resource based at the University of California, Irvine) for her help in tracking down the origins of the Greek inscriptions. 1. Remmelin took credit as the “inventor” of the images, but given Kilian’s talents and comparisons to his other work, it seems likely that he was the source of the design as well as execution of the plates. See Cazort et al., Ingenious Machine of Nature, 171. 2. Each edition varies, due to the vagaries of how it was put together. But the sheer accumulation of flaps makes the sheets unprecedented in the history of fugitive flap prints; ibid., 173. 3. Latin editions were published in 1613, 1614, 1615, 1619, 1639, 1660, and 1754; German editions in 1632, 1661, 1727, 1720, and 1744; Dutch editions in 1634 (with Latin), 1645, and 1667; French edition in 1630s (undated); and English editions in 1670, 1675, 1691, 1695, 1702, and 1738. See Russell, Bibliography of Johann Remmelin the Anatomist, 55–90, for description of editions. Ludwig Choulant says that while the work seems intended for a lay audience, it contains too much specific information on anatomy for nonspecialists, even though it is also clearly out of date and therefore not of great efficacy for anatomists; Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration, 232. 4. This edition was preceded by three others printed by Stephan Michelspacher, an Augsburg printer and physician, who also produced the 1619 version. In 1613, Michelspacher printed three plates with flaps under the title Catoptrum microcosmicum without any explanatory text or elucidation of the lettering on the figures. On the Visio Prima or first printed page, there were two sets of initials, “I. R. Inventor” and “L. K. Sculptor” and “Stephan Michelspacher Excudit.” The initials are now understood to refer to Johannes Remmelin and Lucas Kilian, but they played a secondary role to Michelspacher’s more prominent name. The text was published separately in two subsequent editions also featuring Michelspacher’s name, the Elucidarius of 1614 and the Pinax microcosmographicus of 1615. In the nineteenth century, scholars suggested that Michelspacher had proceeded without Remmelin’s consent, going so far as to steal the plates Remmelin had prepared with Kilian. Remmelin’s introduction to the 1619 edition seems to underscore this point by stating that the earlier edition had been printed without his knowledge and that he tried himself to suppress it. However, this version of the story was challenged convincingly by W. B. McDaniel who showed that Michelspacher and Remmelin continued a fruitful working relationship during the period between the 1613 printing and the 1619 printing. See McDaniel “Affair of the ‘1613’ Printing of Johannes Rümelin’s Catoptron,” 60–72. It seems more likely that Remmelin provided the plates to the printer, but for unknown reasons decided not to have his name attached to the earlier editions. However, he does appear to have contributed to the epilogue of the Pinax microcosmographicus, identifying the devil’s head that appears as a flap in the Visio Prima. See Cazort et al., Ingenious Machine of Nature, 171. In any case, by 1619 Remmelin authorized an edition under his name, stating in an apologia on the verso of the title page, that there were “intolerable errors committed in the engraving and printing” of the earlier publication, and thus he has taken on the task of seeing the 1619 edition through to print in order to correct the infelicity of the earlier work; Russell, Bibliography of Johann Remmelin the Anatomist, 1–4. 5. For a detailed account of the fortunes of the original plates and an analysis of the 1754 uncut plates attributed to Arcangelo Piccolomini that exist in several libraries, see Schmidt, “Printed Bodies and the Materiality of Early Modern Prints.” Schmidt also suggests that the prints were preassembled for buyers, rather than bought and then assembled at home.

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FIGURE 9.1. Title page from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum… (Augustae Vindelicorum: Typis Davidis Francki, 1619), engraving. Galter Health Sciences Library: Rare Books (Medical) 611 R28 1619. Courtesy of the Galter Health Sciences Library Special Collections, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago.

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the Visio Prima (fig. 9.2) depicting male and female figures together standing on plinths on either side of a truncated, pregnant torso; the Visio Secunda (fig. 9.3) depicting a single male figure; and the Visio Tertia (fig. 9.4) depicting a single female figure. Some of the Catoptrum’s images and text draw from the authority of sixteenth-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who continued to cast a long shadow over anatomical practice in seventeenth-century European centers of learning. In his De humani corporis fabrica (often referred to simply as Fabrica), first printed in 1543, Vesalius challenged the centuries-old reliance on medieval, Galenic medical texts on anatomy, insisting that knowledge of the human body could only be arrived at through prolonged and consistent contact with it through dissection. In addition, Vesalius’s atlas constructed a new and wholly influential model for how to represent human anatomy in pictures. Many of Vesalius’s images were copied and reframed in subsequent works in order to substantiate the professional claims of later anatomists. Remmelin was no different in this respect. He too used the Fabrica to confer legitimacy on the Catoptrum. Four of the small, detailed illustrations included in the Visio Secunda and eight in the Visio Tertia are engraved after Vesalius. These include the genito-urinary tracts for both male and female figures as well as a separate image of the uterus after an image that appears in book 5 of Vesalius’s Fabrica. However, in spite of these obvious references to Vesalius and to prevailing anatomical trends and knowledge (and the clear sense that they are meant to be recognized as such by readers/viewers), the myriad other visual and textual references that appear in the Catoptrum threaten to overwhelm any sense that the work is heir to Vesalius’s “modern” anatomy. Instead, the Catoptrum speaks to a hermetically inclined readership, one familiar with alchemical and kabbalistic references. While these aspects have often been remarked upon, what they mean in the context of the flap sheets, or what they are drawn from, has never been fully explored. While the Catoptrum offered cryptic knowledge to baroque readers who assumedly understood the context of its mysteries, the content and even intent of that knowledge remains opaque to modern historians. One reason for this is that the varied references appear haphazard, arranged less to tell a discernible story or overarching allegory, than to provide evidence of general erudition. The only clear principle underlying the Catoptrum is that anatomy and medicine need to be understood through a framework of magic rather than through post-Vesalian inquiry. Remmelin’s Catoptrum exploits a promiscuous seventeenth-century fascination with alchemy, and overlays it on to what was known of human anatomy. With their tactile and interactive character and stitching together of high academic learning with alchemical knowledge, Remmelin’s prints exemplify what Natalie Zemon Davis calls the “blurring of cultural typologies.” As she points out, in moments of cultural transformation, “older habits enter into fresh alliance or tension with new modes of communication, old arguments are carried on in a new key, and new stakes emerge only through a process of struggle and negotiation” leading to the production of new cultural forms.6 Remmelin’s flap sheets present the human body as a battleground for discordant understandings of medicine and anatomy, but also for newly articulated distinctions between male and female bodies. On one level, the Remmelin plates exhibit a predictable moralizing theme. It has been noted by some that there is a strong eschatological current running through the prints, one tied to a

6. Davis, “Toward Mixtures and Margins,” 1410.

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FIGURE 9.2. Visio prima, from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum… (Aubsburg, 1639), engraving. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

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FIGURE 9.3. Visio secunda, from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1619), engraving. Galter Health Sciences Library, Special Collections, Northwestern University, Chicago. Courtesy of the Galter Health Sciences Library Special Collections, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago.

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FIGURE 9.4. Visio tertia, from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1619), engraving. Galter Health Sciences Library, Special Collections, Northwestern University, Chicago. Courtesy of the Galter Health Sciences Library Special Collections, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago.

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long-standing tradition of treating anatomical images in terms of vanitas and memento mori themes.7 As with many preceding atlases of the human body, the Catoptrum presents its images and text under the dictum “Nosce te ipsum,” or “Know thyself,” which appears at the bottom of the frontispiece (see fig. 9.1). Vesalius was not the first to invoke this Latin version of the ancient Greek dictum associated with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, but he explains most fully how the phrase relates to the study of anatomy. In 1543, Vesalius offers a critical reflection on “nosce te ipsum,” suggesting that the study of the human body amounts to the study of the human soul: Yet I surmise that out of the entire Apolline discipline of medicine, and indeed all natural philosophy, nothing could be produced more pleasing or welcome to your Majesty [Charles V to whom the book is dedicated] than research in which we recognize the body and the spirit, as well as a certain divinity that issues from a harmony of the two, and finally our own selves (which is the true study of mankind) [nosmetipsos denique (quod vere hominis est) cognoscimus].8

As Peter Mitchell notes, Remmelin’s prints reiterate this theme of self-reflection, but add a soteriological element by contrasting death to the promise of salvation offered by Christ. In Remmelin’s frontispiece, “Nosce te ipsum” appears directly under a skull, above which is another inscription, which admonishes the reader to “Memento mori.” In the Visio Secunda (see fig. 9.2), which shows a single male figure, the phrase “Nascentes morimus” (Being born, we die) appears above a line from Psalm 144, verse 4, “Homo vanitati[.] Similis factus est, dies eig [sic (suae?)]. Sicut umbra, praetereunt”(Man is like to vanity: / His days are as a shadow that passeth away), while below, to the right, is a microchristus emblem that crushes a serpent’s head next to the male figure’s foot, which itself rests on a skull through which the serpent is entwined. The layered meanings point to a connection between death and Christian resurrection and to the double nature of Christ’s anatomy as both human (corruptible) and divine (uncorruptible). Anatomy, as an investigatory aspect of natural philosophy, takes on soteriological and eschatological significance in this set of contrasting images and ideas. While this is certainly an explicit aspect of Remmelin’s prints, it by no means fully explains the significance of either the Christian iconography and multiple biblical inscriptions, or the varied alchemical and kabbalistic elements that appear throughout the prints. The presence of kabbala and alchemy in the Catoptrum may have much to do with Remmelin’s relationship with Stefan Michelspacher, the printer. That these men were connected is clear not simply through the complex and perplexing history of the Catoptrum’s publication (see note 4), but also, significantly, by the fact that Michelspacher dedicated to Remmelin his own Cabala: Spiegel der Kunst un Natur, in Alchymia (Augsburg, 1616).9 A lavishly illustrated book, Michelspacher’s Cabala also reveals his adherence to Paracelsian spiritual alchemy.10 There is, therefore, good reason to believe that these two men shared an interest in Paracelsian, alchemical medicine, an interest that is borne out in Remmelin’s Catoptrum.

7. This is, for instance, the view in Mitchell, Purple Island and Anatomy, 133–37. 8. Vesalius seems to be combining the dictum of Apollo with Protagoras’s “man is the measure of all things”; see Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, trans. Garrison, preface, p. 4r and n63. 9. See Cazort et al., Ingenious Machine of Nature, 171; Klossowski de Rola, Golden Game, 52. 10. Szulakowska, “Apocalyptic Eucharist and Religious Dissidence,” 208–9.

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Michelspacher was a physician who was part of a group of Tyrolese, Protestant Paracelsians who fashioned themselves as spiritual alchemists. He ended up in Augsburg, a city known for its religious tolerance, possibly to escape the fate that met Adam Haslmayr, who was accused of heresy by Jesuits in 1618 and then executed in 1623 by Archduke Maximilian in re-Catholicized Tyrol.11 In his Cabala, Michelspacher embraces a form of Paracelsian alchemy associated with figures like Heinrich Khunrath, the German hermeticist. Drawing inspiration from Hermes Trismegistus, the mythical Egyptian founder of the arts of alchemy, Khunrath, in his most influential work, the Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae of 1602, explains the central mystery of Trismegistus’s meditation on the oneness of being. In Khunrath’s view, the goal of alchemy is to return man to his original state and find a path to oneness with nature. This oneness is then imbued with Christian connotations. The outcome of true hermeticism in Khunrath’s terms is to achieve a “oneing” with Christ.12 Skirting the fine edge of heresy, Khunrath and the spiritual alchemists who followed him, refigured Christ as the Philosopher’s Stone, embracing the notion of alchemical transubstantiation in which the philosopher transforms himself into the very substance of Redeemer.13 This is vividly illustrated in Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum in which Christ appears in the center of concentric circles, enclosed in a nucleus referred to by Khunrath as the “En Soph,” the kabbalistic term for God in his manifestation as the Infinite or Endless.14 The figure of Christ is posed above a phoenix, a critical emblem in alchemical writing that signified the primordial transformations enacted by fire and, like the Philosopher’s Stone, embodied the “mysterious substance by which the Great Work of transmutation is achieved.”15 If the phoenix stands for the prospect of resurrection in traditional alchemical terms, then the salvation and resurrection promised by Christ stands for the ultimate possibilities of transformation according to the logic of the Protestant spiritual alchemists and Christian kabbalism. Michelspacher’s treatise trades on similar ideas. As Ursula Szulowkowska points out, while responding to reformulated Protestant ideas about the sacraments, the Paracelsian spiritual alchemists began to see the Eucharistic transformation as a kind of “metaphysical chemistry” in which the goal was to attain the perfect form of man as ordained by nature.16 Both Khunrath’s and Michelspacher’s images put Christ at the center of this “metaphysical” transformation. For instance, the third engraved plate of Michelspacher’s Cabala depicts a phoenix enclosed in a mountain surmounted by the signs of the seven planets of the zodiac (fig. 9.5). With the phoenix are the figures of a naked king and queen who appear in Revelations and are martyrs who witness the Resurrection.17 While this plate ascribes the powers of resurrection to the phoenix, in the end these powers are claimed only by Christ himself, as shown in Michelspacher’s fourth and final engraved plate that accompanies the text

11. Ibid., 203. 12. See Healy, “Making the Quadrangle Round,’” 409. 13. These ideas reached their heretical apogee in the writings of German spiritual alchemists like Abraham von Frankenberg and Jacob Boehme; Szulakowska, “Apocalyptic Eucharist and Religious Dissidence,” 211–12. 14. Klossowski de Rola, Golden Game, 43. 15. Principe, Chymists and Chymistry, 105. 16. As Szulakowska points out, “Certainly it is clear that by the late sixteenth century certain Paracelsians had come to understand the Eucharist in terms of a metaphysical chemistry aided by the astral virtues of Nature, not by the Holy Spirit alone”; Szulakowska, “Apocalyptic Eucharist and Religious Dissidence,” 211. 17. Ibid., 219.

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FIGURE 9.5. Plate 3 from Stefan Michelspacher, Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst un Natur, in Alchymia (Augsburg, 1616), engraving. Photo by author.

of Cabala (fig. 9.6). Here Christ is the ultimate magi, seated in a fountain that is filling with his own blood as it spills from his wounds. He holds out two chalices to figures representing the sun and moon, while below, the seven metals await transfiguration. Remmelin’s Catoptrum images reveal similar elements to those found in Khunrath’s and Michelspacher’s prints. The microchristus figure that appears in the Visio Secunda (see fig. 9.3) stands in contrast to the phoenix that appears in the Visio Tertia (see fig. 9.4). The resurrection of Christ and his promise of salvation (correlated to the Philosopher’s Stone) is associated with the male figure, whereas the phoenix of traditional alchemy is associated with the female figure. An inscription that appears over the phoenix in the Visio Tertia reads, “ut Phoenix vivit combustas: sic

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FIGURE 9.6. Plate 4 from Stefan Michelspacher, Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst un Natur, in Alchymia (Augsburg, 1616), engraving. Photo by author.

Homo & qui fumi instar, Cinis” (As the Phoenix lives even after it has been consumed by fire: thus man who is the likeness of smoke is also ash).18 An inscription on the underside of the phoenix (it lifts up to reveal the female pudenda) is a variation of Psalm 101:4: “Quia defecerunt sicut fumus dies mei et ossa mea sicut gremium aruerunt” (For my days are vanished like smoke: and my bones

18. The soteriological significance of the Visio Tertia is underscored by several other inscriptions. One example is the cartouche, in the print’s upper left, surmounted by a small skeleton, that encloses the inscription, “Dies nostri quasi umbra superterram, ti nulla est mora. i. Paraliq.Cap” (Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is nothing abiding” [I Paralipomenon 29:15]), while above the skeleton is the inscription, “finis ab origine pendet” (the end depends upon the beginning).

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are grown dry like fuel for the fire).19 These inscriptions point to the phoenix as both a reminder of death and a sign of alchemical resurrection and transformation. However, what is different about Remmelin’s engravings is that the relationship between Christ and the phoenix is reformulated in the context of the Catoptrum’s aggressive sexual antithesis. Remmelin’s male and female anatomical figures are posed as Adam and Eve, following a convention that Vesalius himself initiated in his Epitome, a highly truncated and inexpensive redaction of the Fabrica that was probably sold to medical students. In the Epitome, a male, normative nude is shown holding a skull, posed with a female nude who covers herself in a pudica gesture. The implications of Vesalius’s image were taken further by Thomas Geminus, an English physician who produced a plagiarized edition of Vesalius in 1545 that also included the Adam and Eve figures. In Geminus’s version, Adam now holds an apple and the skull appears at his feet, entwined with a serpent that is pointed toward Eve (fig. 9.7). In Remmelin’s Catoptrum, a skull and serpent similarly appear in both the Visio Secunda (see fig. 9.3) and the Visio Tertia (see fig. 9.4). But there is a clear difference in how the skull and serpents are employed in relation to the male and female figures in the two plates. In the Visio Secunda (dedicated to male anatomy), the serpent is being stamped out by Christianity. In the Visio Tertia (dedicated to female anatomy), the serpent holds an apple in its mouth, representing the moment prior to the fall of man. In some ways this type of juxtaposition is not surprising and can be said to rehearse long-standing late medieval and Renaissance moralistic divisions between the sexes based on interpretations of the fall of Adam and Eve (i.e., Bernardino of Siena’s statement that “through woman, the entire human race was lost” is one of the clearer articulations of how Eve was understood to stand for all women).20 But in the context of Remmelin’s flap sheets, that moral difference is explicitly conferred on anatomical features of the human body. For instance, a long, nonbiblical, Latin inscription that appears at the bottom of the Visio Prima invokes Adam and Eve and makes clear the principle on which men and women are distinguished. THE LAMENTATION OF THE HUMAN RACE O God, you alone remained before chaos, before all bodies of things, you, who do not have a limit. Illustrate [these things]. With the light land, the image of your divine mind came into being, from your immeasurable goodness. Nevertheless, the better spouse, having been taken by the trick of an evil demon, was soon led astray by his stupid wife. Behold! He neglected your divine precept, and the deplorable man bore the pernicious loss forever. Clearly, having been mocked you immediately lost the human race of Adam by the seductive speech of a serpent. Although God forbade it, eating the sorrowful fruit you caused pale death to come into the empty world. Our life fleeing just like the grass, like the smoke of fire—changes that you cause to be suddenly undone.21 19. In the Catoptrum, this particular phrase it is identified as coming from Psalm 102:4, but it seems to more likely be a variation of Psalm 101:4. This and all following English translations from the Latin Vulgate come from the Douay-Rheims Bible. 20. Mormando, “Bernardino of Siena, ‘Great Defender’ or ‘Merciless Betrayer’ of Women?” 21. “GENERIS HUMANI GEMITUS: O Deus ante chaos, ante omnia corpora rerum, Solus qui, finem non habiture, manes. Clara. levi terra, divinae Mentis imago, Gignitur, immensa de bonitare tua. Attamen a stulta praestans mox coniuge coniunx Inducta, captus daemonis arte mali, Praeceptum ecce divinum neglegit, atque Damnosum damnum flebilis usque tulit. Blando felicet illusus sermone colubri Humanum primum perdis Adame genus, Pallida causas ut vacuum mors intret in orbum, Invito commedens tristia poma Deo [, or .] Gramen vita sic ut fugiens nostra efficis, ignis Fumus, quae subito deperiere vices.” Unless otherwise noted, all

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FIGURE 9.7. Adam and Eve, from Thomas Geminus, Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio… (London, 1545), engraving. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

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Throughout the Catoptrum this moral distinction is also explicitly connected to the operations of human generation. For instance, it is starkly demonstrated in the devil’s head that is frequently flapped over the female pudenda in the pregnant torso of the Visio Prima (fig. 9.8).22 Secreting a woman’s reproductive organs behind a devil’s head, the Catoptrum regressively underlines Eve’s/woman’s association with initiating and participating in sin. At the same time, however, the devil’s head acts as an apotropaic medical warning for the viewer. It can be understood as a device to ward off the risky contingencies associated with conception, a topic that was frequently discussed in the Renaissance discourse on monstrous births. For example, there was a widespread belief that a woman could cause deformity in her fetus by simply looking at disturbing images or even thinking impure thoughts during both conception and pregnancy. Ambroise Paré’s De monstres et prodiges of 1573 was one of the primary sixteenth-century medical tracts that warned of the results of just such an unchanneled maternal imagination.23 Beyond these references to the fall of man and the sins of Eve, the images and inscriptions in the Catoptrum also invoke a discourse concerning the relationship between alchemy and secrets of women. This becomes evident upon consideration of some other unique representational and textual elements in the flap sheets. The first is the roundel at the top of the Visio Prima (fig. 9.9). It typically has three flaps and four images. In some versions and editions, the first image in the roundel is a sun inscribed with the Hebrew word for Yahweh, the second is an angel, the third depicts a bearded man in a peaked hat, and the last bears a Latin inscription.24 The image of the bearded man seems likely to be Hermes Trismegistus, and it is consistent with other contemporaneous representations such as that found in Michael Maier’s Symbola aureae mensae, printed in Frankfurt in 1617, as well as earlier representations such as that found on the floor of Siena’s cathedral. The reference to Trismegistus clearly serves to remind Remmelin’s audience of the text’s alchemical authority. The Latin inscription suggests further allusions to mysterious knowledge. “A Deo est omnis MEDELA. Syr: 38. Cap.V. 2” appears to come from the Book of Sirach in the Hebrew bible, or Ecclesiasticus. Chapter 38 verse 2 reads, “A Deo est enim omnis medela, et a rege accipiet donationem” (For all healing is from God, and so he will receive gifts from the King). Ecclesiasticus is associated with Ben Sira in Jewish Talmudic tradition and the inscription seems to refer simply to the divine source of the physician’s arts. But Ben Sira was a figure also associated with kabbala. The flaps thus refer both directly and indirectly to sources on kabbala and magic. Jewish mystical and magical thought was particularly prominent in Basel, where Remmelin was trained as a physician. Basel was also a center for Paracelsian medicine and was a primary site for publications of Paracelsian texts.25 While perhaps influenced by an early exposure to Paracelsian thought and by

translations from nonbiblical Latin inscriptions are the author’s. 22. This is sometimes referred to as a Medusa head. See, for instance, Hillman and Mazzio, Body in Parts, xvii. Remmelin himself, however, refers to it as a devil’s head in his epilogue to the 1615 edition. See Cazort et al., Ingenious Machine of Nature, 171. The devil’s head appears only in some of the extant copies of the Catoptrum. 23. Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 13–16. 24. There are divergent configurations of this roundel in different extant editions. While it is beyond the scope of the present essay to explore these variations, they point to an interesting question of the agency of purchasers and users of the Catoptrum. Assembled according to taste and the availability of images, each version of the Catoptrum represents a truly interactive work of art, in which each iteration is unique, pegged to the interests and desires of specific viewers. 25. Forshaw, “‘Paradoxes, Absurdities, and Madness,’” 58.

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FIGURE 9.8. Detail of devil’s head in Visio prima, from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum… (Augustae Vindelicorum: Typis Davidis Francki, 1619), engraving. Galter Health Sciences Library: Rare Books (Medical) 611 R28 1619. Courtesy of the Galter Health Sciences Library Special Collections, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago.

his connection to Michelspacher, Remmelin nevertheless gives clear indications in the Catoptrum of his own unique formulation of medical alchemy based on exposure to kabbala. The layering of sources in the flaps advertises the magical, kabbalistic, and alchemical aspirations of the text. But it also alludes to demonic aspects of medicine in respect to gender. Paracelsus developed a concept of disease in which the creation of demons from semen used for improper purposes was one critical source of illness. He connected this demonic ability specifically to Lilith, the witch of Jewish folklore who could make “from every drop of such semen the bodies of demons and spirits.”26 The story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, is given one of its most comprehensive treatments in another text circulated in the Renaissance: the Alphabet of Ben-Sira (Alphabetum Siracidis, Othijoth ben Sira), a tenth-century compilation of Aramaic and Hebrew proverbs. In Jewish folklore and the Talmudic tradition, God is believed to have created a woman prior to Eve named Lilith, a female figure who ultimately becomes associated with witchcraft, promiscuity, and demonic possession and whose mission is to corrupt men and kill all children.27 Other accounts of 26. Pagel, Paracelsus, 217. 27. Tuttle, “Lilith in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights,” 123–24. While not many representations of Lilith exist in the Renaissance,

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FIGURE 9.9. Roundel with flaps in Visio prima, from Johann Remmelin, Catoptrum microcosmicum (Augsburg, 1619), engraving. University of Iowa, John Martin Rare Book Room, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.

Lilith come from esoteric Jewish texts like the Zohar and Book of Raziel, books associated with kabbala and magic in the seventeenth century. In the Zohar, Lilith is represented not just as a temptress and evil demon, but also as a carrier of disease. Extrapolating from these characterizations of Lilith, Paracelsus thus represents her as the evil that medicine must overcome, the female genius whose machinations and ability to mold and transform semen can cause disease and contaminate conception. While Remmelin’s Catoptrum does not explicitly refer to Lilith, it does underscore the power women might have over conception and birth, a power that could have either positive or negative consequences. In the Visio Tertia (see fig. 9.4), for instance, the female figure stands over a phoenix on fire, a plume of smoke rising between her legs. The phoenix was a recognizable emblem for the Philosopher’s Stone, but in the context of the Catoptrum its magical properties of death and resurrection are also transferred by proximity to the female figure’s uterus. In other words, the printed plate visually transforms the womb itself into the Philosopher’s Stone. This visual transformation mirrors similar ideas found in Paracelsus. For Paracelsus, the womb embodies the fundamental Tuttle argues that Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights may be a representation of the creation of Lilith and the lust she initiates into the world.

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principle of transmutation or metamorphosis: it is the matrix of the microcosma (the gendered “small world” of women). In fact, Paracelsus’s identification of the womb with the microcosma may be intentionally invoked by Remmelin in the title of his flap sheet. For Paracelsus, the womb’s power is such that it is the only safe place for the generation of men to occur.28 However, the womb was also “Heimlich,” or secret, for Paracelsus, and it could involuntarily stamp on the matrix not a perfect version of man, but a monstrous product of the imagination.29 In an inversion of the medical discourse on maternal imagination and the breeding of monsters, Paracelsus and his followers were preoccupied with the question of whether the womb could be a laboratory for producing a homunculus, an experimental form of magical being.30 Thus, the power of womb was two-sided: it was both a benign haven and unpredictable laboratory. In Remmelin’s representation, the womb’s dangerous aspects are thwarted by the phoenix, the bird who, according to Jewish midrash, was allowed to stay in paradise after the fall, because alone of all the animals, he had refused Eve’s offer to eat from the Tree of Wisdom.31 The visual configuration thus suggests that the uterus is a powerful alchemical element of the female body, but it is only the male alchemist, represented by the phoenix, who can control the transformations of generation, while simultaneously resisting the demonic forces associated with Lilith/Eve. The density of meanings carried by the phoenix in the Visio Tertia is mirrored by the allusions associated with the image covering the male genitals in the Visio Secunda (see fig. 9.3). Here we see a flowering plant rise between the male figure’s legs. The plant referred to in the inscription is colchicum, a plant of ancient lineage used to treat podagra. More commonly known now as gout, this is a disease caused by excess uric acid accumulating in the extremities of the legs, particularly the toes, causing an excruciatingly painful condition leading to death. Connected to the consumption of rich food and wine, the disease was associated primarily with patrician men. Roy Porter, for instance, has suggested that a century later, gout was recognized as “rich and nobleman’s disease,” and was often seen as a sign of social distinction or aristocratic luxury.32 In earlier centuries, gout was also an illness associated with scholarly rumination, and it was thought to inspire religious faith and noble virtues in the sufferer. This is, for instance, the view taken by the sixteenth-century Italian physician Girolamo Cardano. He characterized the disease accordingly: “What a man gout makes! Devout, morally pure, temperate, circumspect, wakeful. No one is so mindful of God as the man is in the clutches of the pains of gout. He who suffers gout cannot forget that he is mortal, because it affects him in every part of his being.”33 Remmelin’s allusion to colchicum is ambiguous however. The inscription that identifies the plant refers not to its use in treating gout, but to the unique character of the plant: “As the withered colchicum blooms: thus, too, Man, in the likeness of grass, rots [and is resurrected].”34 Referred to sometimes as autumn crocus, the plant is distinctive in that the blooms appear late in fall, when the

28. Keller, “Seeing ‘Microcosma,’” 107–8. 29. Ibid., 104. 30. Newman, “Homunculus and His Forebears.” 31. Kessler, “Solitary bird in van der Goes’ Garden of Eden,” 327. 32. Porter and Rousseau, Gout, 20. 33. Ibid., 32. 34. “Ut colchicum florescit marcidum: Sic & HOMO, graminis instar, putris.”

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plant itself has largely shriveled. Reference to this aspect of the plant is reiterated in the long Latin inscription that appears at the bottom of the plate, where colchicum is compared to the phoenix with soteriological consequences: “Consider—just as the herb of colchis springs forth with flower from the dead vine, and the phoenix bird is born from its own ashes; thus, man, you will live happily by my [Christ’s] death, and you will be seen blooming forever.”35 Added to this is an inscription from Isaiah 40:6 that exhorts the reader to once again consider the vanitas theme: “Omnis caro foenum et omnis gloria Hominis [eius] quasi flos agri” (All flesh is grass and all the glory of it is as the flower of the field). Remmelin’s choice of colchicum seems to bring together medicine with salvation. On the one hand, the plant invokes a disease that carries noble associations and inspires religious reflection while alluding to the therapeutic value of medical knowledge. On the other hand, it also demonstrates the correlation between resurrection in nature and resurrection in religion. Treated distinctly from the phoenix in the Visio Tertia, colchicum stands for the alliance between medicine and alchemy, and associates the resulting productive knowledge with the male body and nobility. In contrast, female reproductive power both draws analogously from and is controlled by the phoenix, and the female figure’s lack of trustworthiness is a constant refrain. For instance, in the Visio Prima, Remmelin invokes book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as an oddity from Pindar. Inscribed in a cartouche underneath the truncated female torso there is first a Latin inscription: “Pallor in ore sedet, macies in corpore toto” (Pallor spreads over her face, and all her body shrivels). This comes from Ovid’s story of Hermes and the sisters Herse and Aglauros in Metamorphoses. The phrase alludes to Aglauros, who is catastrophically consumed by Envy when she realizes that the god Hermes is enamored of her sister Herse.36 The second inscription is in Greek and comes from Pindar’s Nemean Ode 8 (For Deinias of Aegina Double Footrace ?459 bc), line 21: “o[yon de; lovgoi fqoneroi'sin a{ptetai d j ejslw'n ajeiv, ceirovnessi d j oujk ejrivzei” (Words are a dainty morsel for the envious; and envy always clings to the noble, and has no quarrel with worse men).37 These two references to envy are clearly meant to characterize the female temperament as one prone to and driven by excess and lack of control, a set of conditions that also govern the female body. The images and inscriptions echo Paracelsus’s projection of evil female influence over wounds: wounds can be poisoned and contaminated by the looks and influence of “jealous, hateful, and perfidious women.”38 Control over the female uterus cannot be entrusted entirely to women because they themselves tend toward dissolution and can corrupt the process of healing as well as generation. That is, in women’s hands, medicine can potentially degenerate or deviate from its intended, noble purpose. While extreme in its negative representation of female character and anatomy, even by seventeenth-century standards, Remmelin’s Catoptrum nevertheless embodies certain ideas specific to the history of medicine and anatomy. As Katharine Park has argued, Vesalius staked part of his 35. “Respice, mortua flore ut Colchidos herba vite. Propria avis Phoenix nacitur & cincere; [( scit], Sic Homo morte mea vives feliciter, atque Floridus aeternum conspiciendus eris.” 36. Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 2 “Minerva Calls on Envy,” line 775. The line refers to Envy’s countenance upon seeing Minerva who calls on her to punish Aglauros for her greed. 37. Translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien for the Perseus Digital Library Project, editor-in-chief, Gregory R. Crane. Pindar section last updated 1990. Tufts University. Accessed on August 21, 2012. 38. Pagel, Paracelsus, 148.

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reputation as an anatomist on the idea that he had definitively unveiled the “secrets of women.”39 As she points out, anatomical inquiry from the late Middle Ages to the end of the Renaissance emphasized the idea that a woman was defined anatomically by her interior. While the male figure stood for normative anatomy in every other sense, the female figure was of interest for what she held inside: the secrets of generation itself. Thus, in anatomical images from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries, a female figure was included in atlases of the body chiefly to demonstrate female reproductive organs. This tradition of representation coincided with the development in the late Middle Ages of the “secrets of women,” a phrase that referred initially to women’s medicine administered by women and the systematic compilation of women’s complaints and treatments for them in textual forms like the medieval Trotula. But, as Monica Green has shown, the emphasis on what was defined as “secret” began to change in the Renaissance, and compendia of “women’s secrets” began to refer to those aspects of gynecology and generation that drew prurient and incriminating attention from male writers.40 In the Fabrica, Vesalius shows himself dissecting a female cadaver in the frontispiece, describing the woman herself as a criminal who tried to fake a pregnancy, only to have her ruse unveiled. Park argues that Vesalius intentionally shows himself dissecting this female cadaver to demonstrate that anatomy trumps secrets through dissection: the anatomist sees and knows everything about the body and there can be no secrets that remain under the knife. In this way, a woman’s anatomy took on “emblematic status as the exemplary object of dissection: representations of the female body came to stand both for the interior of the human body and for the powers of dissection-based anatomy to reveal its hidden truths.”41 However, as Park goes on to note, the uterus nevertheless retained special power as an “enigmatic space” where conception, generation, and knowledge itself originated and where the “male seed was mysteriously transmuted into a human child.”42 The idea that the uterus maintains special powers to transmute substances into the stuff that generates life dovetails directly with the alchemical principles alluded to by Remmelin. The uterus is refashioned in the Catoptrum as an alchemical laboratory in which magical effects and the risk of demonic transformations can occur. In contrast to Vesalius, who insists that all secrets have been or will be discovered by simply uncovering the uterus and shining the light of direct observation on it, Remmelin reinscribes the uterus in a dialectic of Paracelsian secrets, kabbalistic magic, and alchemical transmutations, while simultaneously emphasizing the demonic and unpredictable aspects of female anatomy. Thus, while the visual pairing of male and female figures in the Catoptrum mirrors the convention of Adam and Eve that was a prominent trope in anatomical works since Vesalius, Remmelin’s juxtaposition also calls up associations with the occult powers of Lilith that have been transferred to the womb. The idea of generation as an ultimate transformation, of the uterus as a Philosopher’s Stone akin to the phoenix, is conveyed in the inscription that weaves around the unborn fetus that floats in the Visio Prima near the truncated female torso. The banner around the fetus is inscribed with “Quasi morientes & ecce vivimus,” a phrase from 2 Corinthians 6:9 (KJV)

39. Park, Secrets of Women, 256. 40. Green, “From ‘Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women,’” 539. 41. Park, Secrets of Women, 33–35. 42. Ibid., 35.

The Alchemical Womb 227

meaning “As dying and behold we live.” This emphasizes the idea that human life is resurrected from mute matter in the same way that the phoenix rises from ashes. The Catoptrum microcosmicum is in many ways an unclassifiable work of visual culture. The form of the flap sheet itself invites the viewer/reader to participate in the illusion of dissecting the body, putting the viewer into the place of the anatomist. In this sense, the facture of the flap sheet is calculated to reflect the most up-to-date forms of anatomical discovery and practice. At the same time, however, the flap sheet’s alliance between alchemy and anatomy reinforces the idea that the bodies under view are hiding secrets, rather than divulging them. Representing the uterus as a space of alchemical experimentation, Remmelin produces an image that articulates the worst fears engendered by the female body’s interior inaccessibility, while also countering Vesalius’s claim that all questions have been answered. As such, the Catoptrum leaves open the question as to what it is really intended to “mirror” microcosmically. Like Vesalius, however, Remmelin also ultimately invokes the power of the male physician/anatomist to both understand and control secrets. Added to the 1619 edition is a Hippocratic aphorism in Greek, around the roundel in the Visio Prima: “For a physician who is a lover of wisdom is the equal of a god.”43

Bibliography Cazort, Mimi, Monique Kornell, and K. B. Roberts. The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy. Exhibit catalogue. Ottawa: National Gallery of Art, 1996. Choulant, Ludwig. History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration. Translated and edited by Mortimer Frank. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920. Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Toward Mixtures and Margins.” American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (1992): 1409–16. Forshaw, Peter. “‘Paradoxes, Absurdities, and Madness’: Conflict over Alchemy, Magic and Medicine in the Works of Andreas Libavius and Heinrich Khunrath.” Early Science and Medicine 13, no. 1 (2008): 53–81. Green, Monica. “From ‘Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women’: The Transformation of Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 1 (2000): 5–39. Healy, Margaret. “‘Making the Quadrangle Round’: Alchemy’s Protean Forms in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint.” In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Michael Schoenfeldt, 405–25. London: Blackwell, 2007. Hillman, David, and Carla Mazzio, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hippocrates (attr.). Of Decorum. In Hippocrates, Works, vol. 2. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library 148. 1923. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Huet, Marie Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Keller, Hildegard Elisabeth. “Seeing ‘Microcosma’: Paracelsus’s Gendered Epistemology.” In Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine and Astrology in Early Modern Europe, edited by Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe Jr., 93–115. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002. Kessler, Herbert Leon. “The Solitary Bird in van der Goes’ Garden of Eden.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 326–29. Klossowski de Rola, Stanislas. The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Braziller, 1988. McDaniel, W. B. “The Affair of the ‘1613’ Printing of Johannes Rümelin’s Catoptron.” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 4th ser., 6 (1938): 60–72. 43. Hippocrates (attr.), Of Decorum, trans. Jones, 287.

228 Lyle Massey Mitchell, Peter. The Purple Island and Anatomy in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature, Philosophy and Theology. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991. Mormando, Franco. “Bernardino of Siena, ‘Great Defender’ or ‘Merciless Betrayer’ of Women?” Italica 75, no. 1 (1998): 22–40. Newman, William. “The Homunculus and His Forebears: Wonders of Art and Nature.” In Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, edited by Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi, 321–45. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Anthony S. Kline. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, 2004. Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. 2nd ed. Basel: Karger, 1982. Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Pindar. Pindari carmina: Cum fragmentis. Edited by Herwig Maehler. Pt. 1, 5th ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1971. Porter, Roy, and G. S. Rousseau. Gout: The Patrician Malady. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Principe, Lawrence M. Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry. Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 2007. Russell, Kenneth F. A Bibliography of Johann Remmelin the Anatomist. St. Kilda East, Australia: J. F. Russell, 1991. Schmidt, Suzanne Karr. “Printed Bodies and the Materiality of Early Modern Prints.” Art in Print [online journal] 1 (2011): 24–31. Szulakowska, Ursula. “The Apocalyptic Eucharist and Religious Dissidence in Stefan Michelspacher’s Cabala: Spiegel der Kunst und Natur, in Alchymia (1616).” Aries 3, no. 1 (2003): 200–223. Tuttle, Virginia. “Lilith in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 15, no. 2 (1985): 119–30. Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric of the Human Body. An annotated translation of the 1543 and 1555 Latin editions of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, by Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2003.

About the Contributors William Eamon is Regents Professor of History, Distinguished Achievement Professor, and Dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University. He is the author of Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Europe; The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy; and over fifty articles and book chapters on various aspects of early modern science and medicine. He is also the coeditor of Más allá de la Leyenda Negra: España y la Revolución Científica. He is currently at work on two book projects: “Science and Everyday Life in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1750”; and “Discovery and the Origins of Science.” Henry Dietrich Fernández was a senior lecturer in the Departments of Architecture and Interior Architecture for the Rhode Island School of Design. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978, his M.Arch. from Harvard University in 1982, and his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2005, with a dissertation entitled “Bramante’s Architectural Legacy in the Vatican Palace: A Study in Papal Routes.” He published several articles on this subject, including “The Patrimony of St. Peter: The Papal Court at Rome, c. 1450–1700” (in John Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe, 1999), “Raphael’s Bibbiena Chapel in the Vatican Palace” (in Tristan Weddigen et al., Functions and Decoration in the Vatican Palace, 2003), “Avignon to Rome: The Making of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere as a Patron of Architecture” (in Ian Verstegen, ed., Patronage and Dynasty: The Rise of the Della Rovere in Renaissance Italy, 2007), “A Temporary Home: Bramante’s Conclave Hall for Julius II” (in Silvia Evangelisti and Sandra Cavallo, eds., Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe, 2010). His last published essay will be “Le Corbusier: Towards the Origins of Architecture” in Konrad Buhagiar, ed., “The Founding Myths of Architecture” (Artifice, forthcoming). His fellowships and awards included a Scott Opler Foundation grant and a Kress Fellowship at the Warburg Institute. Shortly before his death in 2009 he received a contract from Yale University Press for a volume entitled “Bramante and Raphael in Renaissance Rome,” which was to have been the first English language full-length study of Raphael as architect. Many of his ideas concerning the understanding of the topography and culture of early sixteenth-century Rome were synthesized by his wife, Caroline P. Murphy, in The Pope’s Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (2005). He died of complications relating to Diabetes Type 2 on September 2, 2009. Giancarlo Fiorenza is associate professor in the Department of Art and Design at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His book, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique, was published by the Pennsylvania State University Press in 2008. He has also published essays on such artists as Primaticcio, Piero di Cosimo, and Giuseppe Cades. He is currently working on the lively cross-fertilization of the arts and humanist culture in Renaissance Bologna, and has essays forthcoming on the early mythological engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi. Lyle Massey is associate professor of art history and visual studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories 229

230 About the Contributors

of Perspective (2007) and editor of The Treatise on Perspective (2003). She has also published several articles on early modern anatomical images and gender. Timothy McCall is assistant professor of art history in the Department of History at Villanova University, Pennsylvania. His research primarily investigates gender, power, and visual culture in fifteenth-century Italian courts. He has published in journals including Renaissance Studies and Studies in Iconography and was recently a fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Forthcoming studies investigate clothing, bodies, and masculinity in fifteenth-century Italy; a related book project is entitled “Brilliant Bodies: Men at Court in Early Renaissance Italy.” Sean Roberts is assistant professor in the Art History Department at the University of Southern California. His research interests span the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries across Europe and the Mediterranean world and include the relationship between the histories of art, technology, and ideology. He has published in journals including Imago Mundi, Print Quarterly and Renaissance Studies and is the author of Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography (2013). Maria Ruvoldt received her PhD from Columbia University and has been assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Music at Fordham University since 2006. Her publications include The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep and Dreams (2004); “Michelangelo’s Dream” (Art Bulletin, 2003); and “Michelangelo’s Slaves and the Gift of Liberty” (Renaissance Quarterly, 2012). Patricia Simons is professor in history of art at the University of Michigan, author of The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (2011), and coeditor of Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (1987). Her numerous essays analyzing the visual and material culture of Renaissance Europe focus on the representation of gender and sexuality in such modes as portraiture, mythology, medical discourse, and humor. Allie Terry-Fritsch is associate professor of Italian art history at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of several articles and book chapters on Renaissance viewership, including the humanist reception of Fra Angelico at San Marco, the Medici political context for Donatello’s David, and the transformation of the Bargello from prison to museum, and is the editor of Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2012). She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Somaesthetics and the Renaissance: Viewing Bodies at Work in Early Modern Italy.”

Index Bold indicates an illustration on that page; “n” following a page number indicates a note on that page.

A

Academia Segreta, 61 Accursio, 166n23 Achillini, Giovanni Filoteo, 141 Adam (biblical), 133n24, 134, 219–20, 226 advent, 38 Aesop, 134n36 Alberti, Leon Battista, 10, 46, 47, 49, 140, 166 alchemy, 211, 215, 216, 217–19, 221–22 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 110 Alphabet of Ben-Sira, 222 altarpieces Paumgartner, 89, 90 revealing imagery of, 37 Roverella, 134–35 San Francesco, 141, 143 San Marco, 38 Amadore, Francesco d’ (Urbino), 117, 118 The Ambassadors (Holbein), 17, 18 Amphitheatrum (Khunrath), 216 anamorphosis, 17 Andrea, Zoan, 28, 28n13, 199–200, 201 Andreasi, Marsilio, 5 Angelini, Bartolommeo, 118–23, 119n78, 119n81 animals, access allowed to favored, 7 Arasse, Daniel, 17 arcana naturae, 59 Ardizzoni, Simone, 199–201 Aretino, Pietro, 43–44, 48, 122 Arezzo, Paolo da, 67–68 Ariosto, Ludovico, 152 Aristotle, 47, 58 Le arte per via (Mitelli), 55 assassinations, 96 Augustine (saint), 2, 44

B

Bacon, Roger, 58 Baiso, Arduino da, 76, 93 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 66 Baldini, Baccio Commento sopra la commedia, 195–96, 197 The Samian Sibyl, 187, 188 Bandello, Matteo, 34, 34n19, 35 Barkan, Leonard, 113, 117 Bartsch, Adam Von, 186 Baxandall, Michael, 10

Bayezid II (Ottoman Empire), 202 Beatrizet, Nicholas Pasquino, 175, 176 Bellincioni, Bernardo, 15 Bembo, Benedetto Polyptych of San Nicomede, 84, 85, 86, 87 Bembo, Pietro, 154, 158 Bembo workshop Camera d’oro, Torrechiara, 78, 80, 81 Benedetti, Alessandro, 47 Benedetto (called il Persiano), 64, 65 Berenson, Bernard, 25 Berlinghieri, Francesco, 190–91, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 202, 203 Bernardi, Giovanni, 122 Beroaldo, Filippo (the Elder), 141 Bertolani, Maffeo, 70 Bettini, Antonio The Holy Mountain (frontispiece), 198 Monte Santo di Dio, 196 Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da positions held by, 150, 152 See also Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da, apartment of Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da (cardinal), apartment of chapel in, 149 forbidden and revealed in, 156, 158, 160 loggetta in, 149, 151, 154 open secrets in, 152 paradox of scale and grandeur of, 156 secret spiral staircase in, 149, 152 stufetta with erotic grotesques in, 149, 150, 154, 156 use of architectural chiaroscuro in, 158 biblical secrets, 8 binaries, 7, 15–16, 82 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 9, 44, 166n23 Boltraffio, Giovanni Antonio, 143 Book of Raziel, 223 books, engraved, 195–202, 197, 198 technical problems with, 196 tonal systems for, 196, 199 and trade secrets, 196, 199–201 Boorsch, Suzanne, 199–200 Bordieu, Pierre, 186 Borgia, Lucrezia, 130 Botticelli, Sandro, 195, 196 Venus, 26, 27, 36 Bouleau, Charles, 17 boundaries, 4–5 literacy as boundary, 59 and political access, 82–83 Bramante, Donato, 152

231

232 Index Brescia, Giovanni Antonio di, 35, 204 The Passionate Embrace (attr.), 28, 30 Two Lovers (after), 28, 29, 31 Bronzino, 47–48, 49, 111 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 49, 166n23 burins, 187, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 201, 203 burnishers, 185, 191, 193 busolla (enclosed space), 89, 91

C

Calcagnini, Celio, 127–28, 134n35, 134n36 Camera di Griselda (unknown), 9–10, 11 Camera d’oro, Torrechiara (Bembo workshop), 78, 80, 81 Camera Picta (Mantegna), 4, 5 Camporeale, Salvatore, 129 Caprara, Francesco, 141 Capri, Ugo da, 185 Cardano, Girolamo, 224 Carracci, Agostino Satyr and Sleeping Nymph, 13, 14, 36 cartographic secrets, 8–9 See also maps, engraved Casio, Girolamo, 141, 143, 144–45 Castiglione, Giovanni Benedetto, 47, 186 Cavalca, Domenico, 173–74 Cavalieri, Tommaso de’ background of, 109–10 exchange of drawings and ideas with Michelangelo, 116–17 initial meeting with Michelangelo, 109 personal tastes of, 113–14 Cavalli, Gian Marco, 204 Caviceo, Jacopo, 83–84 Cecchini, Antonio, 108, 109, 112, 118 Cennini, Cennino, 46, 49, 185, 194 censorship, 28 Certeau, Michel de, 7, 8–9, 164, 177 Chantelou, Paul Fréart de, 43 Charlatans in the Piazza San Marco (Franco), 55, 56 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 9 chiaroscuro, 158, 185 Chigi, Agostino, 154 choric figures (festaiuoli), 10, 13 Christ, veiled wisdom of, 128–29 Christ child’s gesture, eroticization of, 28 Il Ciarlatano (Mei), 66, 68 cinnabar, 18 civic humanism, 167n27 Clark, Kenneth, 25 Clement VII (pope), 107, 118, 120, 121, 122, 144 La Clementina (Casio), 144 Cole, Michael, 203 Colenuccio, Pandolfo, 17–18 collected/shared gaze, 165 Commedia (Dante), 195 commedia dell’arte, 62 Commento, 196, 203 Condivi, Ascanio, 109 confessional box, development of, 175–76n61

confessional identity, 19 confraternal sermons, 7 Con il Poco farete assai (With a little you’ll do a lot) (Rossello), 64–65 Cope, Jackson, 9 coretto of Torrechiara, 16, 76–78, 76n1, 77 furnishings of, 97 interior of, 96 original placement of, 92 ornamentation of, 92–93 reconstruction of, 87–89, 88 role of sound in production of secrecy in, 99 Rossi heart emblem in, 93–94 safety of, 97 as social framing device, 99 structures similar to, 89, 91 use as amorous refuge, 81–82, 95 visibility and hiddenness of, 94–95, 97–99 Cornucopiae ( Johnson), 4 corporeal metaphors, 47 Corsini, Pietro, 166n23 Cortese, Isabella, 64 Cortesi, Paolo, 8 Coryat, Thomas, 63, 67 Cosson, Giovani, 64 Costa, Gerardo, 89 Costa, Lorenzo, 28, 141 covers, 16–17 functions of, 37–49 portrait, 39–42, 40, 47–48 rhetoric of, 43 as shields, 43–44 Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Lochrie), 2, 4 Cranach, Lucas, 28 Crivelli, Taddeo, 199 Crum, Roger, 165 curiosity, meaning of in Middle Ages, 59 curtains, 16–17 manipulation of, 38–39

D

Dante, 44, 166n23, 195, 196 da Vinci, Leonardo, 143 on choric figures, 10 on veneration of the rarely seen, 36 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 211 death’s head, 17 De humani corporis fabrica (Vesalius), 211 Dei, Benedetto, 202 Del buon segretario (Ingegneri), 150 Della Porta, Giambattista, 70 della Stuffa, Sigismondo, 97 De monstres et prodiges (Paré), 221 Dente, Marco Venus Pulling a Thorn from Her Foot, 154, 155 denunciations. See tamburi De Re Militari (Valturio), 8 Derrida, Jacques, 25

Index 233 disgeno (preparatory drawings/understandings), 47, 48 divine gaze, 171 divine love, 112, 113 divine wisdom, 15, 129, 130–31, 132 Doni, Anton Francesco, 39 Doria, Andrea, 139 Dossi, Dosso Jupiter Painting Butterflies, 126–27 draperies, 13, 25, 28 drop-boxes. See tamburi (containers to collect anonymous denunciations) dual nature of secrecy, 127–28 Dürer, Albrecht clash over intellectual property, 201 Melencolia I, 2, 3, 182 Saint Eustace, detail from Paumgartner Altarpiece, 89, 90 Sudarium with Two Angels, 182, 183 travels of, 201 Durkheim, Emile, 177n70

E

Eamon, William, 4 Ecstasy of St. Paul (Poussin), 43 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 183 Eleanora of Aragon, 89 Elkins, James, 17 empirical healers, permission to sell drugs, 54–55 engraving, technical secrets of broad manner engraving, 187 burins, 187, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 201, 203 burnishers, 185, 191, 193 engraved books, 195–202, 197, 198 engraved maps, 190–95, 192, 194 fine manner engraving, 187 goldsmithing effect on, 187 greater profits from, 202 guarding of secrets, 185–88 “manners,” 186–87, 196, 199 metal punches, 191 of rewards of secrets, 202–4 social advantage of, 202–3 soft-ground etching process, 186 woodworking secrets, 185–86 envy, 199, 225 Epitome (Vesalius), 219 Erasmus, 128, 137, 158 erudition, 1, 2, 8, 15, 17, 114, 121, 158, 211 esotericism, 7–8, 17, 58–60, 73, 223 Este, Alfonso d’ artistic patronage of, 129, 143 protection of Jews by, 134 and statesmanship, 126, 128 Este, Ercole d’, 7, 89, 91, 134 Este, Leonello d’, 39, 41–42 Este, Sigismondo d’, 135, 137 Eugenius IV (pope), 170 Eve (biblical), 219–20, 221, 224, 226 Evelyn, John, 72

exclusion secrecy as, 2, 4 visualization of, in fifteenth-century Italy, 4–5, 5

F

Fabrica (Vesalius), 211, 219, 226 The Fall of Phaeton (Michelangelo), 105, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117 Farissol, Abraham ben Mordecai, 133–34, 134n35, 135 Farnese, Piero de, 166n23 Fasanini, Filippo, 137n45 Fattucci, Gianfrancesco, 119n81, 120 Fedele, Domenico, 64 female artists, 37 female nudes, as instances of public privacy, 26, 28 festaiuoli (choric figures), 10, 13 Festina lente (Erasmus), 137 Fetti, Domenico Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music, 10–13, 12 Ficino, Marsilio, 113, 132n23, 137, 195 figurative arts, 140 figurative language/speech, 58, 128, 139 Finiguerra, Maso, 204 Fioravanti, Leonardo, 61, 62, 64, 70 flap-anatomy sheets, 15, 35 alchemy and kabbala in, 211, 215, 217–19, 221–22 Catoptrum Microcosmicum, 208–15, 210, 212–13, 217–27 gender distinctions in, 219, 221, 222–25, 226–27 influence of Fabrica on, 211 layered meanings in, 215 moralizing theme of, 211, 215 symbolism of colchicum in, 224–25 symbolism of phoenix in, 223, 224, 225, 226–27 Florence use of space in, 165 See also tamburi (containers to collect anonymous denunciations) Florio, John, 9 Fontana, Andrea, 64 Fontana dove n’esce fuori acque di secreti (Fountain Spouting Water Full of Secrets) (Fontana), 64 forged documents, 10 Foucault, Michel, 175 Fra Angelico, 38 Francia, Francesco, 143 Franco, Giacomo Charlatans in the Piazza San Marco, 55, 56 François I (France), 153n13 frescoes by Garofalo, 134–35 by Mantegna, 4, 5, 6, 83 by Raphael, 153 in Torrechiara, 78, 79, 85n20, 87, 92 by unknown artist, 9–10, 11 Friedman, Jerome, 133–34 Frommel, Christoph, 109 Frutti soavi colti nel giardino (Delicate Fruits Cultivated in the Garden) (Maiorini), 63

234 Index

G

Galasso, Mario, 69n41 Garofalo Curcifix with Eccelsia and Synagoga, 134–35 Garzoni, Tommaso, 60, 61, 67, 69 Geminus, Thomas Adam and Eve from Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio, 219, 220 gender, 15 differences, and tactile sensations, 28–31, 29–30 distinctions in flap-anatomy sheets, 219, 221, 222–25, 226–27 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 37 Geography (Ptolemy), 190 Giannotti, Donato, 109 Giardino di varii secreti (Garden of Various Secrets) (Francesco), 63 Giotto, 166n23 Giovo, Paolo, 126 glassmaking, 185 goldsmiths, 185, 187, 195 Gonzaga, Francesco, 199 Gonzaga, Ludovico, 4, 5–7, 6, 83, 199 gout (podagra), 224 Green, Monica, 226 Greenblatt, Stephen, 19 Grimani, Domenico, 119, 119n81 Grosz, Elizabeth, 82–83 Gualtieri Reading Fake Papal Bull to Griselda and Subjects (unknown), 9–10, 11

H

Habiti d’huomini et donne Venetian (Franco), 55, 56 Hainhofer, Philipp, 209 Haitovsky, Dalia, 135 Halberdier (Pontormo), 48–49 Harley, J. B., 190 Haslmayr, Adam, 216 Hawkwood, John, 166n23 Hebrew as language of biblical Adam, 133n24 as secret language, 130, 132–33, 135–40, 141 hierarchy, 5, 7, 25, 83, 99, 123 Hieroglyphica (Valeriano), 139 hieroglyphs, 7–8, 46, 130, 137, 137n45, 137n47, 139–40 Hind, Arthur, 199 historical phenomenology, 78 Holbein, Hans The Ambassadors, 17, 18 homoerotic subtexts, 31, 35, 113 humanism, 1, 121, 129, 130 civic, 167n27 on privacy, 126n2, 127 on vita contemplative, 153 humanist theology, 130, 143–44 Hyland, Peter, 9

I

ideal love, 111, 122

Incarnation, 38, 134 Ingegneri, Angelo, 150 intarsia, 89 at coretto of Torrechiara, 76, 91–93, 94, 95 hieroglyphic covering panels, 7–8 at Santa Maria Maggiore (Bergamo), 7–8, 94n66, 140n54 irony, dramatic, 9–10, 11

J

Jewish folklore on Lilith, 222–23 Jewish mysticism, 221 Jews, 130, 133–35, 134n35, 135n7, 137, 143 Johns, Adrian, 183 Johnson, Thomas, 4, 15 Joubert, Laurent, 71 Judaism, 132n23, 224 Julius II (pope), 120, 152

K

kabbala, 212, 216, 217, 222, 223–24, 227 Kavey, Allison, 4 Khunrath, Heinrich, 216 Kilian, Lucas, 208, 209 Koerner, Joseph, 182 Kristeller, Paul, 199

L

Landau, David, 187, 199 Landino, Cristoforo, 195–96, 197, 203 Leandro, Lorenzo, 64 Lendinara, Cristoforo Canozzi da, 76, 81–82 Lendinara, Lorenzo Canozzi da, 76, 81–82 Lenzi, Lorenzo, 111 Leo X (pope), 16, 149, 150, 153, 154, 160 Lightbown, Ronald, 199–200 Lilith, 222–23, 224, 226 literacy, as boundary, 59 Lochrie, Karma, 2, 4, 7, 83, 128 Lombardo, Antonio, 126 Long, Pamela, 18, 185 Lotto, Lorenzo, 7–8, 38n33, 42n45, 46, 94n66, 140n54 love, ideal, 111, 122

M

Madonna della Pila, 170, 170n34 Madonna del Parto (della Francesca), 38 Magen Avraham (Farissol), 133–34 Maier, Michael, 221 Maiorini, Tommaso, 63 Malatesta, Sigismondo, 8 Mantegna, Andrea Battle of the Sea Gods, 199, 200 Footmen Regulate Access to Ludovico Gonzaga, detail from Camera Picta, 4, 5, 83 intimate exchange of prints of, 199 Ludovico Gonzaga Confers with a Trusted Secretary, detail from Camera Picta, 5–7, 6 pioneering printing techniques of, 196

Index 235 protection of trade secrets, 199–201 maps, engraved of Africa from Ptolemy’s Geography, 191, 192 burins used on, 191, 193, 195 burnishers to correct errors on, 191, 193–94 of Holy Land, 191, 192 ink mixing ratios for, 193 metal punches to incise letters on, 191, 193 and plate tone, 193 and technical secrets, 193 I maravigliosi, et occulti secreti naturali (Benedetto), 65 Marisli, Luigi, 166n23 Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, 152 Mary (mother of Christ), 91 Massumi, Brian, 82–83 master and servant power differential, 35–36 Master bxg The Lovers, 31, 32 Mattioli, Pietro Andrea Snake Handler Catching Vipers, 55 Snake Handler in a Bologna Plaza, 55, 57–58 Mazzolino, Ludovico, 15 artistic style of, 132n21 Christ and the Adulterous Woman, 137–38 Christ and the Money Changers, 128, 135 Christ Disputing with the Doctors, 130–32, 131, 136, 141 Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet, 128, 129, 143 functions of paintings of, in Este court, 133–34 humanistic nature of imagery of, 130 humanist theology of, 143–44 patronage in Bologna, 141, 143–45 The Tribute Money, 141, 142, 145 use of Hebrew by, 130, 132–33, 135–40, 141 medical chapbooks, 63–64 Medici, Alessandro de’, 107 Medici, Giuliano de’, 96, 97, 150 Medici, Ippolito de’, 122, 123 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 38, 97, 201–2 medicine flap-anatomy sheet, 15, 35, 208–9 medical chapbooks, 63–64 See also nature, secrets of Il Medico de’ poveri, o sia il gran stupere de’medici (The Poor Man’s Physician, or The Amazement of the Physicians), 64 Mehmed II (Ottoman Empire), 8, 201–2 Mei, Bernardino Il Ciarlatano, 66–67, 68 Melencolia I (Dürer), 2, 3 memento mori, 42, 215 Men of Saint Paul (sanpaolaro), 58, 69–70, 71 Mercurio, Scipione, 71–72 metalworking, 185 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 112, 116, 225 Metsu, Gabriel Woman Reading a Letter, 44, 45 Michelangelo artistic commitments of, 106–7, 122 careful drafting of letters to Cavalieri, 114, 116

controlled access to works of, 122–23 exchange of drawings and ideas with Cavalieri, 116–17 The Fall of Phaeton, 105, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117 feelings for Cavalieri as open secret, 16, 118 first surviving letter to Cavalieri, 114, 116 friendships strengthened through relationship with Cavalieri, 121 gifts of artwork to Cavalieri, 112–14, 116–17 initial meeting with Cavalieri, 107–8 metaphors of sculptural process of, 46 portraits by, 112 The Punishment of Tityus, 105, 107, 112–14 The Rape of Ganymede, 105, 106, 112 relationships with young men, 110–11 response to accusations of pederasty, 121–22 tone of letters to Cavalieri, 110 use of intermediaries by, 117–21 Michelspacher, Stefan, 209, 209n4, 215–17, 222 Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst un Natur, 215, 217, 218 Minozzi, Edgardo, 87–89, 88 misogyny, 15 Mitchell, Peter, 215 Mitelli, Giuseppe Maria Snake Handler in a Bologna Piazza, 55, 57–58 I Modi (Romano), 156 Modigliani, Ettore, 81n12 Molossi, Lorenzo, 79 Montefeltro, Federico da, 92 Monte Santo di Dio (Bettini), 196 Moryson, Fynes, 63 Moses, 132, 135, 139 Muir, Edward, 177 Mutii, Pietro Maria, 63–64 Mysteries of the Rosary, 187

N

Najemy, John, 165 naturalism, 47, 49 nature, secrets of, 15 assaults by charlatans, on physician monopoly over, 63–66 assaults by charlatans, physician reactions to, 71–73 commercialization of culture as threat to, 59–60, 67, 69 licensing of empirics, 54–55, 58, 69–70 printing press as threat to, 59 proliferation of books on, 60, 61 revelation, refusal of, 60–61 Nelli, Nicolo, 62 Neoplatonism, 24, 44, 111, 113, 122 nielli, technique for producing, 187 Novelle (Bandello), 34 The Nude (Clark), 25 Nuovo lucidario di secreti (New Illumination of Secrets) (Mutii), 63–64

O

O’Malley, John, 129

236 Index On Painting (De Pictura) (Alberti), 10, 47 Ontonelli, Giovan Domenico, 62 open secrets, 4, 17, 25, 79, 118, 123, 152 Opus Majus (Bacon), 58 Orsanmichele, 167, 167n27 Ovid, 47, 116, 225

P

Pagliarizzo, Gratiano, 65, 67 Palazzo del Podestà, 166, 168, 170, 171 Palazzo del Signoria, 167 Pamphilj, Doria, 137 Pannartz, Arnold, 190, 202 Panofsky, Erwin, 113 Paoletti, John, 165 parables, 128, 132, 139, 143 Paracelsus, 222, 223–24 Paracelsian thought, 221–22, 226 Pardo, Mary, 46 Paré, Ambroise, 221 Park, Katharine, 15, 225–26 Parshall, Peter, 187 Pasquino (Beatrizet), 175, 176 Passavanti, Jacopo, 173 Pasti, Matteo de’, 8, 9, 190 Paul II (pope), 98 Pellegrini, Bianca, 78, 79, 82, 84, 95 pentimenti, 31 performativity, 9–10, 11 Perini, Gherardo, 111, 121 Petrarch, 9, 15, 46, 111, 116, 166n23 Secretum (The Secret), 2 Pfisterer, Ulrich, 121 Phaedrus (Plato), 113 Philosopher’s Stone, 223, 226 phoenix, 223, 224, 225, 226–27 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 132n20 Piemontese, Alessio, 4, 60–61 Piero Della Francesca Madonna del Parto, 38 piety, 28, 76, 78, 83, 86–87, 91, 97, 99, 129 Pindar, 134n36, 225 Pino, Paolo, 49 Piombo, Sebastiano del, 118, 119–20, 121, 139 Plato, 113, 195 Platt, Verity, 175 Platter, Thomas, 70 Pliny, 18 Plutarch, 132n20, 134n36 Poggio, Febo di, 111 political spaces, access to, 4–7, 5, 6, 82–83 Pon, Lisa, 186, 201 Pontormo, 42n45 Halberdier, 47, 49 Porter, Roy, 224 portrait covers, 39–42, 40, 47–48 Portrait of Leonardo Fioravanti (Nelli), 62 Poussin Ecstasy of St. Paul, 43

Praxiteles, 28 Primrose, James, 72 Il Principe (Machiavelli), 9 The Printing Press as an Agent of Cultural Change (Eisenstein), 183 privacy, humanism on, 126n2, 127 Pseudo-Lysippus, 121 Ptolemy, 190, 192, 202 public/private binary, 15–16, 82 porosity of, 26 pudica type, 28, 39, 40, 42–43 The Punishment of Tityus (Michelangelo), 105, 107, 112–14 Pygmalion, 47–48

Q

Quaratesi, Andrea, 112

R

Raimondi, Marcantonio, 154, 186 The Rape of Ganymede (Michelangelo), 105, 106, 112 Raphael and apartment of Bibbiena at Vatican Palace, 149 Entombment, 47, 48 La Fornarina, 39, 40, 42–43 relationship with Raimondi, 186 Sistine Madonna, 38 Study for the Fainting Virgin of the Baglione Entombment, 48 use of chiaroscuro by, 158 The Vision of the Prophet Ezekiel, 43, 156–58, 157 Raphael and workshop loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 149, 151 stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 149, 150 Redig de Campos, Deoclecio, 154 Remmelin, Johann, 15 Catoptrum Microcosmicum, 208–15, 210, 212–13, 217–27 title page, Catoptrum microcosmicum, 209, 210 Visio Prima, Catoptrum microcosmicum, 211, 212, 219, 221, 222, 223 Visio Secundum, Catoptrum microcosmicum, 211, 213, 217, 219, 224 Visio Tertia, Catoptrum microcosmicum, 211, 214, 217–18, 219, 223, 224 revelation, essential function of, 2, 13, 19–20, 83 reverses of paintings, 42 rhetoric of covers, 43 rhetorics of secrecy, 7, 10 Ricci, Corrado, 78, 80–81 Riccio, Bartolomeo, 54–55, 58, 67, 69, 70 Ridolfi, Carlo, 34n18 Ridolfi, Niccolò, 107–8 Roberti, Ercole de’, 17–18 Rocke, Michael, 163 Romano, Giulio, 154, 156 Rosselli, Francesco, 187–88, 195, 201, 203 Annunciation, 187, 189 Rossello, Timotheo, 64–65

Index 237 Rossi, Pier Maria, 76–100 See also coretto of Torrechiara Royal Society, 72–73 Ruscelli, Girolamo, 61, 65

S

Sadoleto, Giulio, 16, 154, 156, 158, 160 Saint Sebastian (Costa), 141 San Francesco altarpiece, 141, 143 sanpaolaro (Men of Saint Paul), 58, 69–70, 71 San Piero Scheraggio, 167, 167n28–168n28 Santa Maria Maggiore (Bergamo), intarsia at, 7–8, 94n66, 140n54 Saslow, James, 113 Satyr and Sleeping Nymph (Carracci), 13, 14, 36 Scala, Bartolomeo, 195 scale and grandeur, paradox of, 156, 158 Schaffer, Simon, 72–73 Schongauer, Martin, 187, 201 Science and the Secrets of Nature (Eamon), 4 secretary, secrecy as embedded in role of, 5, 150 secret geometry, of paintings, 17–18 Secreti (Piemontese), 4 secret medical cures, 15 The Secrets of Alessio Piemontese (Piemontese), 60 secrets of nature metaphor, 59 Secretum (The Secret; Petrarch), 2 Secretum secretorum (“Secret of Secrets”), 58–59, 60 self-reflection, 215 self-regulation, 170–72 Septe giornate della geographia (Berlinghieri), 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195 sevants, personal relations with, 35–36 Severinus, Peter, 70 Sforza, Galeazzo Maria, 5, 89, 96 Shadwell, Thomas, 72 Shakespeare, William, 9, 34n19 shamans, 66 Shapiro, Steven, 72–73 Shearman, John, 154 shutters, 39n36, 42–43 sportelli, 38, 39 Sileni Alcibiades (Erasmus), 128 Simonetta, Cicco, 91 Sistine Madonna (Raphael), 38 Sixtus IV (pope), 202 Smith, Bruce, 78 Smith, Pamela, 183 Snake Handler Catching Vipers (Mattioli), 55 Snake Handler in a Bologna Plaza (Mattioli), 55, 57–58 soldertje (raised platform near window), 26, 45 Solomon, 132 Solomon’s temple, 130, 132, 135, 135n42, 139, 141, 145 spatial field, of Renaissance city, 164n10 spatial operations of secrecy, 82–83 speaking statues, 175, 176 Speroni, Sperone, 39 sphinx, symbolism of, 132, 132n20, 137 sportelli (hinged shutters or doors), 38, 39, 95

Squarcialupi, Antonio, 166n23 staircases, secret, 95, 149, 152–53 Strada, Zanobi da, 166n23 Stramiti, Bartolomeo, 89 Studio of Apelles, 44 Summa de’ secreti universali (Rossello), 64 Sweynheym, Conrad, 190, 191, 195, 202 Symbola aureae mensae (Maier), 221 Szulowkowska, Ursula, 216

T

tactility, 211 tactile sensations, 28–31, 29–30 tamburi (containers to collect anonymous denunciations), 19 denunciation as civic and divine duty, 166–67 false accusations, 172–73 flaws in system, 172, 178 how to use, 162, 169 inception of, 163 locations in Florence, 163 obstacles to anonymity, 169, 170 physical characteristics of, 172n43 placement, and symbolic meaning and social value of spaces, 165, 166 placement, effect on communal interaction, 164–65 placement, in “open spaces,” 166–67 placement of, 169–70 in Prato, 172 and self-regulation, 170–72 and social function of confession, 173–75, 177 uses of, 164, 164n7 vandalism of, 172 Tedesco, Niccolò, 190–91, 195, 196, 202–3 telling thumb, 34 Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, 158, 159 Teniers, David, 44 Terzi, Ottobuono, 94 texts, hidden secrets in, 4 theater, 9–10, 11 third character, 31, 33–34 Thode, Henry, 113–14 timpano (cloth cover fitted into frame of painting), 39 Titian Cornelia Fainting in the Arms of Pompey, 34n18 humanist theology of, 143–44 Lovers (attr.), 31, 33, 34–35 political implications in works of, 41–42 The Tribute Money, 143, 144 The Triumph of Love, 39, 40, 41–42 Venus and Adonis, 43 Tolentino, Niccolò, 166n23 tomb monuments, 166n23 Torelli, Antonia, 82, 84 Torrechiara, 16, 78–80, 79 camera d’oro of, 78, 80, 81, 91–92 circuitous route into, 83–84 hidden staircases and passages of, 95–97 San Nicomede chapel at, 84–86, 85

238 Index Torrechiara, continued studiolo of, 91–92 trade and technical secrecy, 18–19 See also engraving, technical secrets of transubstantiation, 38, 216 Trexler, Richard, 165 Trismegistus, Hermes, 216, 221 truth, metaphor of, 25 Tura, Cosmè, Roverella altarpiece of, 134–35 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 9

U

unequal lovers/ill-matched couple type, 34 Urbino (Amadore, Francesco d’), 117, 118 utterances, secrets as, 7

V

Valeriano, Pierio, 139 Valturio, Roberto, 8 van Haecht, Willem, 44 van Heemskerck, Maarten, 158 Varchi, Benedetto, 109n18, 111 Vasari, Giorgio, 26, 28, 47, 111, 112, 116, 204 veiling and unveiling functions of covers, 37–49 functions of layers, 28–37 manipulation of curtains, 38 portrait covers, 39–42, 40 ritualized unveiling, 37–38 veils in artistic praxis, 46–49 veils in poetry, 44, 46

Vendramin, Gabriel, 39, 41 Venetian glass industry, 185 Veneziano, Domenico, 38–39 Venus and Adonis (Titian), 43 Veronese, Zuanne, 69 Vesalius, Andreas, 35, 211, 214, 219, 225–26 Virgin and Child with Donors (Boltraffio), 143 The Virtuoso (Shadwell), 72 voyeuristic gaze, 15

W

Wallace, William E., 110, 117 wandering empirics, 60–61 Weissman, Ronald, 7, 177 Welch, Evelyn, 4, 83 Wickhoff, Franz, 186 Wilde, Johannes, 113–14 Wilhelm, Leopold, 44

X

Xenocrates, 134n36

Z

Zeuxis, 49 Zohar, 223 Zorzi, Andrea, 166n20, 172–73