Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture 9789463727242, 9789048552917

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Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraitureik

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Allison Levy is Director of Brown University Digital Publications. She has authored or edited five books on early modern Italian visual and material culture.

Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture

Edited by Ilaria Bernocchi, Nicolò Morelli, and Federica Pich

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Andrea del Sarto, Portrait of a Young Lady with a ‘Petrarchino’, 1528, oil on panel, 87 × 69 cm, Galleria delle Statue e delle Pitture degli Uffizi, Florence. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 724 2 e-isbn 978 90 4855 291 7 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463727242 nur 654 © All authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2024 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 7 Acknowledgements 11 1 Introduction

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2 Widows, Poetry, and Portraits: Livia Spinola and Francesca Turina on the Portraits of their Dead Husbands

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3 In Medusa’s Eyes: Petrification and Marble Portraits in Late SixteenthCentury Poetry

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4 The Portrait of the Ideal Woman: Petrarch in Conduct Literature Texts for and about Women

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Ilaria Bernocchi, Nicolò Morelli, and Federica Pich

Simone Monti

Martina Dal Cengio

Francesco Lucioli

5 Anti-Petrarchist Portraiture or a Different Petrarchist Portraiture?

A Literary Outlook on Some Non-Idealised Female Sitters in Renaissance Art Diletta Gamberini

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6 The Shadow of Petrarch: Benedetto Varchi and Agnolo Bronzino on Portraiture 129 Antonio Geremicca

7 Double Portraits of Petrarch and Laura in Print (c. 1544–1600)

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8 Sonnet ‘Diptychs’ and Double Portraits: Figurative Allusions in Sixteenth-Century Encomiastic Poetry

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9 Images of Women from Subject to Frame in Printed Portrait Books

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Gemma Cornetti

Muriel M. S. Barbero

Susan Gaylard

Bibliography 241 Index 271

Fig. 5.1

List of Illustrations

Leonardo da Vinci, Old Woman, c. 1490, pencil on paper, Codex Forster III, fol. 72r, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.108 Fig. 5.2 Leonardo, Grotesque Elderly Couple (‘A satire on aged lovers’), c. 1490, leadpoint, pen and pale ink on paper, 26.2 × 12.3 cm, RCIN 912449, Royal Collection, Windsor.109 Fig. 5.3 Giorgione, La vecchia, c. 1506, oil on canvas, 68 × 59 cm, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.114 Fig. 5.4 Giorgione, Portrait of a Woman (Laura), 1506, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 41 × 33.6 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.121 Fig. 5.5 Francesco Torbido, Portrait of a Young Man with a Rose, 1516, oil on canvas, 62 × 51.8 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.122 Fig. 6.1 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, c. 1527–1530, oil on panel, 90 × 71 cm, Civiche Raccolte Artistiche-Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan.130 Fig. 6.2 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, c. 1527–1530, detail, oil on canvas, Civiche Raccolte Artistiche-Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan.130 Fig. 6.3 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Laura Battiferri, c. 1560, oil on panel, 87.5 × 70 cm, Musei Civici Fiorentini, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Donazione Loeser, Florence.144 Fig. 6.4 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Laura Battiferri, c. 1560, detail, oil on panel, Musei Civici Fiorentini, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Donazione Loeser, Florence.144 Fig. 7.1 Portrait of Petrarch and Laura with sonnet, woodcut from Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’Alessandro Vellutello (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1544), fol. A3r, copy C. 27.e.19, The British Library, London.160 Fig. 7.2 Sonetti canzoni e triomphi di m[esser] Francesco Petrarca, con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello (Venice: Giovanni Maria Nicolini da Sabbio, Pietro Nicolini da Sabbio, Giovanni Battista Pederzano, 1549), fol. *1r, copy 638.h.4, The British Library, London.161 Fig. 7.3 Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’Alessandro Vellutello (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1544), fol. A1r, copy C. 27.e.19, The British Library, London.163

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Pe tr arch and Six teenth- Century Italian Portr aiture

Fig. 7.4

Portrait of Petrarch and Laura with quatrain, woodcut from Il Petrarca novissimamente rivisto e corretto (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1559), fol. A3v, copy SC8160A, The John Rylands Library, Manchester.167 Fig. 7.5 Anonymous, Portrait of Petrarch and Laura, 1510–1562, engraving, 23 × 32.7 cm, inv. RRP-P-H-H-263, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Image in the public domain.169 Fig. 7.6 Giacomo Franco, Portrait of Petrarch and Laura, 1575–1590, engraving and etching, 21.4 × 32.7 cm, inv. 1877.0210.117, The British Museum, London.171 Fig. 8.1 Piero della Francesca, The Duke and Duchess of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, c. 1465–1474, oil on wood, 47 × 33 cm each, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Courtesy of Scala Archive.185 Fig. 8.2 Piero della Francesca, The Triumphs of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (reverse of the portraits), c. 1465–1474, oil on wood, 47 × 33 cm each, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Courtesy of Scala Archive.185 Fig. 8.3 Title page of I Trionfi del Petrarcha, con la spositione di M. Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo da Traetto (Venice: Domenico Giglio, 1553). Courtesy of Clark Art Institute, clarkart.edu.193 Figs 8.4.1 and 8.4.2 Anonymous, Portraits of Guillaume des Autels and his Beloved, engraving, from Guillaume des Autels, Les amoureux repos (Lyon: Jean Temporal, 1553), fols. A1v–A2r, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of gallica. bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France.194 Fig. 8.5 Etienne Delaune, attr., Portraits of Catherine de’ Medicis and Henri II of France, sixteenth century, engraving, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France.195 Figs 8.6.1 and 8.6.2 Anonymous, Portraits of the King of France, Charles IX, and of the Queen of France, Elisabeth of Austria, 1571, engravings, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France.196 Fig. 9.1 Medallion portrait of Fulvia, from Andrea Fulvio, Illustrium imagines (Rome: Jacopo Mazzocchi, 1517), fol. XIIIr, Wing ZP 535.M458, Newberry Library, Chicago.217 Fig. 9.2 Medallion portraits of Melusina and her son ‘Gotfrid with the Big Tooth’, from Diethelm Keller, Kunstliche und aigendtliche Bildtnussen der rhömischen Keyseren (Zurich: Andreas

List of Illustr ations 

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 9.4

Fig. 9.5

Fig. 9.6

Fig. 9.7

Gessner, 1558), p. 525, Case E 436.463, Newberry Library, Chicago.221 Agrippina the Younger, from Enea Vico, Le imagini delle donne auguste (Venice: Vico and Valgrisi, 1557), p. 98, Z233.A43 V53im 1557, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.225 Aelia Paetina, from Enea Vico, Le imagini delle donne auguste (Venice: Vico and Valgrisi, 1557), p. 144, Z233.A43 V53im 1557, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.227 Portrait of Charles the Bold, from Francesco Terzio, Austriacae gentis imaginum (Innsbruck: Gaspar Patavinus, 1569–73), vol. 4, unpaginated, Wing oversize ZP 539.O815, Newberry Library, Chicago.230 Portrait of Philip II of Spain, from Francesco Terzio, Austriacae gentis imaginum (Innsbruck: Gaspar Patavinus, 1569–73), vol. 4, unpaginated, Wing oversize ZP 539.O815, Newberry Library, Chicago.232 Portrait of Empress Maria, from Francesco Terzio, Austriacae gentis imaginum (Innsbruck: Gaspar Patavinus, 1569–73), vol. 5, unpaginated, Wing oversize ZP 539.O815, Newberry Library, Chicago.234

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Acknowledgements We are grateful to our contributors for their incredible work conducted at a time when research and access to libraries and archives was extremely difficult. We also particularly wish to thank Erika Gaffney, AUP Senior Commissioning Editor, for nurturing this project from the beginning.

1 Introduction Ilaria Bernocchi, Nicolò Morelli, and Federica Pich This volume explores the multiple ways in which the legacy of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–1374) shaped the relationship between literary and visual portraits in the sixteenth century. Building on the extensive and diverse body of research on Petrarch and the arts produced by historians of both art and literature, this collection adopts a specif ic critical angle, focusing on different concepts and dimensions of Petrarchan and Petrarchist ‘portraiture’ in an interdisciplinary perspective. By ‘portrait’ today we commonly indicate the so-called ‘image of an individual’, which is also the title of a pivotal collection of essays edited by Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson in 1998.1 The definition of ‘individual’, however, as scholars dealing with portraiture have long known, is a treacherous terrain.2 The association between the rise of the ‘spiritual individual’ as manifested by a rich corpus of painted and sculpted portraiture, and the dawn of the Renaissance, of which Petrarch can be legitimately considered the putative intellectual father, has deep roots in Jacob Burckhardt’s influential Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).3 Burckhardt’s essay has been much debated in subsequent scholarship and reframed in the context of the author’s nineteenth-century sensitivity. On the other hand, the importance of portraiture in the late Middle Ages, when Petrarch was writing, has been advanced by an ever-growing corpus of robust scholarship.4 More recent 1 Mann and Syson 1998. 2 A review of the literature on this subject is beyond the scope of this analysis, but essential references for the sixteenth century are: Cassirer 1963; Boehm 1985; Batkin 1992; Burke 1995; Burke 1997; Martin 1997; Enenkel 1998; Baldwin 2001; and Martin 2004. Further bibliography is indicated throughout the volume. 3 Burckhardt 1951. 4 A rich overview of medieval notions of representation and identity in relation to sculpted faces can be found in the essays collected in Little 2006. The question of medieval individuality is explored in Bedos-Rezak and Iogna-Prat 2005, where of particular interest is the chapter by Étienne Anheim on Petrarch (Anheim 2005). For portraiture at the French court see Sand 2006; Perkinson 2007; and Perkinson 2009; for Romanesque portraiture see Dale 2002 and Dale 2007. The problem of premodern portraiture has been discussed in a crucial essay on likeness and presence by Hans Belting (Belting 1994), while the medieval understanding of the relationship between corporeality and individuality has been explored

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch01

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responses to the Burckhardian view of the Renaissance individuality have posited an opposite model of individuality, one consciously built ‘from the outside in’ as a result of social and cultural conditionings.5 In his nuanced essay on the ‘myths of individualism’, John Jeffries Martin tried to address this ambivalence, pointing to the Renaissance individual as being constantly negotiating the relationship between the internal and external self.6 Quoting Douglas Biow, he even hinted at the more extreme consequence of this negotiation, the modern fragmentation of the self.7 What is Petrarch’s place in this debate? In many ways, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta does not offer a single or straightforward answer to the issue of individuality: the autobiographical nature of the collection charts in unprecedented detail his spiritual and personal journey; at the same time, the ex post facto editing work on the sequence of poems indicates a conscious act of ‘self-fashioning’ aimed at conferring universal value on his individual experience; the very dialogue between the sonnets on Laura’s portrait (Rvf 77–78), moreover, paired and juxtaposed for us to read, dramatises the poet’s ambivalence and doubt, symptom of his ‘split’ response to Laura’s image. According to Thomas Mussio, who sees the Canzoniere as the key intermediary between Michelangelo’s troubled reflections in the Rime and the Augustinian conflict of the soul in the Confessions, the Petrarchan model of individuality ‘posits that the loving subject’s identity is based […] on the experience of loving’.8 This complexity should not limit, but rather enrich our understanding of how Petrarch’s writings continued to inform the dialogue with the genre of portraiture in the sixteenth century. For the purposes of this volume, then, we will adopt an expanded definition of portrait that encompasses material objects (sculpted, painted on panel or canvas, drawn, or engraved), mental images created by memory and imagination (as the figura nel cuore of medieval poetry), as well as literary ‘effigies’, either derived from paintings or sculpture, by means of description or through a series of prescriptions. This diverse yet conceptually coherent corpus by Caroline Walker Bynum (Walker Bynum 1995), whose analysis of ideas around the somatomorphic soul and the beatific vision around 1300 (ch. 7) is particularly pertinent here. 5 See Greenblatt 1980. For this model of selfhood see also Goffman 1959. 6 Martin 2004. 7 Ibid.: 5–6. In this sense, Petrarch’s Rvf 168.4–8, in which the poet reflects on trusting Love’s promise despite the passing of time, resonates powerfully: ‘Io, che talor menzogna et talor vero | ò ritrovato le parole sue, | non so s’i’ ’l creda, et vivomi intra due: | né sì né no nel cor mi sona intero’ [I, who have found his words sometimes false and sometimes true, do not know whether to believe him, and I live between the two: neither yes nor no sounds whole in my heart]. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf or Canzoniere) in this introduction are from Petrarca 1996a. English translations are from Petrarca 1976. 8 Mussio 1997: 339. Here Mussio (341–43) also draws an explicit connection between Michelangelo’s sonnet 87: ‘Vorrei voler quel ch’io non voglio’ and Petrarch’s ambivalence in Rvf 168. For further reflections on Petrarch’s poetry and subjectivity see Moevs 2009 and Zak 2010.

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of portraits coalesces around a preoccupation with ideas of resemblance, imitation, substitution, memory, praise and self-fashioning, while embodying both singularity and exemplarity, the real and the ideal. In the vast constellation of cultural practices that surround the notion of portrait in the Renaissance, Petrarch plays a key role at several levels, as a rich tradition of studies has persuasively demonstrated. In this context, the main scholarly strand—possibly the broadest in scope—has focused on Petrarch’s own attitude towards images as expressed in his prose and verse and the fortune of his oeuvre in the visual arts, with responses as diverse as illuminations and emblems, portraits, and cassoni. Petrarch’s attitude towards the arts was multifaceted: on the one hand, the philosopher and moralist; on the other, the man and lyric poet. As Michael Baxandall has observed in his Giotto and the Orators, Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortune offers the first and ‘longest discussion on art one has from the humanist Trecento’.9 Completed in 1366, De remediis stages a series of dialogues between Ratio and the four passions of the Stoic tradition (Dolor, Metus, Gaudium, Spes), where Ratio revoices an Augustinian moral perspective and Gaudium personifies human frivolity.10 The discussion on the arts is encapsulated in the chapters ‘De tabulis pictis’ and ‘De statuis’ (De remediis, I.40 and I.41). While Gaudium only pronounces standard formulas of appreciation for the vanities of the secular world (‘I like paintings’: I.40.1), Ratio advances articulated arguments against the deceitful nature of images: paintings are ‘vacuous enjoyments’, fruits of ‘vanity’ (I.40.2), ‘fictions made up of vain trick’, a corruption of God’s superior act of creation (I.40.28); statues are mere ‘seductions for eyes’ (I.41.31).11 Nevertheless, as Ratio concedes, sacred art can be instructive for the illiterate and those unable to grasp theological truths otherwise, and profane images of virtuous subjects can similarly set a positive example (I.41.42–43).12 Petrarch himself had the chance to express admiration for sacred images. In 1370, four years after completing De remediis, he wrote his last will, giving details of various bequests and gifts, including ‘a panel or icon of the blessed Virgin Mary, a work of the eminent painter Giotto’ for his 9 Baxandall 1971: 53. 10 On the De remediis, see Bettini 2002; Perucchi 2014: 23–83, 203–287; Perucchi 2021; and Löhr 2021. See also Dunlop 2008: 86–88, and the edition annotated by Bernhard Huss (Petrarca 2021 and Petrarca 2022). 11 Respectively: ‘Pictis tabulis delector’ (I.40.1); ‘Inanis delectatio’, ‘vanitas’ (I.40 2); ‘Tu autem, si hec ficta et adumbrata fucis inanibus usqueadeo delectant, atolle oculos ad Illum qui os humanum sensibus, animam intellectu, celum astris, floribus terram pinxit: spernes quos mirabaris artif ices’ (I.40.28); ‘illucebre oculorum’ (I.41.31). Cited from Perucchi 2014: 180–82, 188. 12 ‘Delectari quoque sacris imaginibus, que spectantes beneficii celestis admoneant, pium sepe excitandisque animis utile; profane autem, etsi interdum moveant atque erigant ad virtutem dum tepentes animi rerum nobilium memoria recalescunt, amande tamen aut colende equo amplius non sunt’ (I.41.42–43). Cited from Perucchi 2014: 188.

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patron Francesco Vecchio da Carrara, Signore of Padua. In praising the excellence of this work, Petrarch claims that ‘the ignorant do not understand the beauty of this panel but the masters of art are stunned by it’.13 In 1353, moreover, Petrarch had the chance to admire in Milan a statue of Saint Ambrose, which he understood as a faithful portrait, as he wrote in a letter to Francesco Nelli dating 23 August: ‘I gaze upwards at his statue, […] which it is said closely resembles him, and often venerate it as though it were alive and breathing. […] The great authority of his face, the great dignity of his eyebrows […] are inexpressible; it lacks only a voice for one to see the living Ambrose’ (Familiares, XVI.11.12–13).14 Within the same strand of studies on Petrarch and the arts, several works have been devoted more specifically to portraiture, with particular emphasis on the portrait as material object and written description. A first major line of research has concerned Petrarch’s approach to ‘the image of the individual’, be it the image of others or his own, with the latter setting a paradigm for the iconography of ‘the poet’. Positioned at the crossroad of medieval and early modern thought and culture, Petrarch embodies the troubled transition from an allegorical vision of reality—which results from a combined reading of the book of nature and the book of God—to a proto-humanistic view of the world that has the individual at its centre.15 It seems apposite, then, that Petrarch should reflect in Rvf 77 and 78 on the representationality of painted portraiture, its complicated status as a substitute for the presence of the individual and a necessarily incomplete vehicle for the far richer—and elusive—‘truth’ of the soul. The language of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century art theory is also relevant to Petrarch’s understanding of portraiture, in light of his influence on the subsequent critical discourse. Villard de Honnecourt called mimetic imitation from life contrefaire, while he used portraire to indicate a superior form of representation founded in the artist’s ingenuity, which makes visible the ineffable and is based on Geometry. Geometry, as part of the Quadrivium, was one of the disciplines associated with the knowledge of the nature of things and God’s creation. Similarly, Jean de Meun, in the continuation of the Roman de la Rose (c. 1275), writes that 13 ‘Et predicto igitur domino meo Paduano, […] dimitto tabulam meam sive iconam beate Virginis Marie, operis Iotti pictoris egregii […], cuius pulchritudinem ignorantes non intelligunt, magistri autem artis stupent’. Cited from Mommsen 1957: 78–80. See also Dunlop 2008: 77. 14 ‘Iucundissimum tamen ex omnibus spectaculum dixerim quod aram, […] scio, imaginemque eius summis parietibus extantem, quam illi viro simillimam fama fert, sepe venerabundus in saxo pene vivam spirantemquem suspicio. Id michi non leve precium adventus; dici enim non potest quanta frontis autoritas, quanta maiestas supercilii, quanta tranquillitas oculorum; vox sola defuerit vivum ut cernas Ambrosium.’ The Latin text is from Petrarca 1933–42: III (1937), 205–06. The English translation is from Petrarca 1975–85: II (1982), 319. 15 For a study of allegories and painting in Petrarch, see Dunlop 2008.

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Pygmalion engaged with portraiture whenever he wanted to show his ingenium, so that the images he produced appeared to be alive but for the lack of vital spirit.16 Cennino Cennini, the author of the Libro dell’arte (written around 1400), uses the verb ritrarre to indicate an act of skilful imitation.17 He also explains, however, that painting is an operation of the imagination ( fantasia) that makes visible what cannot be seen.18 Cennini’s advice on imitation (of nature, but also of artistic models), has been connected by Andrea Bolland with what she terms the ‘post-Petrarchan’ culture of late Trecento Padua.19 Petrarch’s reflection on portraiture and the image of Laura, therefore, intersects these complex discourses from a linguistic perspective first, and then a conceptual one. Petrarch himself is the first modern author of whom we have images that were more or less contemporaneous with his own life; and in the twenty-five years after his death in 1374, he was portrayed more often than any other writer.20 His reputation as a philosopher and poet forged the exemplary model of the man of learning: he posed for a portrait commissioned by Pandolfo Malatesta, the addressee of what is known as the Malatesta form of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta; Leonardo Bruni kept his effigy in his study as an inspiration.21 In many of his portraits, Petrarch holds a pen and a book; when open, the book frequently displays the first lines of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta; in others he wears the laurea, a reminder of the laurel coronation that took place in Rome in 1341 at the hand of Robert of Anjou. As J. B. Trapp has shown, it had long been the custom to represent Evangelists and Fathers of the Church showing the first words of their Gospel and treatises, or God himself holding the Scripture. Petrarch is the first secular writer to be pictured 16 Perkinson 2009: 54–61. 17 In the Preface, Cennini lists ‘ritrarre e contraffarre’ as alternative processes, but he includes both of them among the mechanical skills that the aspiring painter has to develop; see Cennini 1859: XIII. 18 ‘[E] questa è un’arte che si chiama dipignere, che conviene avere fantasia, con operazione di mano, di trovare cose non vedute (cacciandosi sotto ombra di naturali), e fermarle con la mano, dando a dimostrare quello che non è, sia’ [and this is called Painting, for which we must be endowed with both imagination [ fantasia] and skill in the hand, to discover unseen things concealed beneath the obscurity of natural objects, and to arrest them with the hand, presenting to the sight that which did not before appear to exist]. The Italian is from Cennini 1859: 2. The English translation is from Cennini 1899: 4. 19 Bolland 1996: 472. 20 See Trapp 1992–93: 11–32. The first extant portrait of Petrarch is a full-page coloured profile introducing his De viris illustribus in a manuscript in Paris (Bibliothèque National, MS Lat. 6069F), where the image of Petrarch features as both the author and a prominent vir illustris. This model is the predecessor of many renderings to come in the following decades. As a result of his reputation, the poet was also portrayed in monumental setting in the Paduan area, such as the figure traditionally identified as Petrarch in the frescoes by Altichiero in the Oratory of Saint George of the early 1380s; the figure, again by Altichiero or his workshop, in the Chapel of Saint Felice in Santo; the portrait in the Sala dei Vescovi in Padua and once in Petrarch’s house near the cathedral, which dates from the late 1300s. 21 See Dunlop 2008: 87.

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in such fashion, inaugurating a fortunate tradition of portraits alla petrarchesca that will be used widely, from the retrospective refashioning of the portrait of Dante to Renaissance women writers, eventually crossing the borders of the Italian peninsula.22 A second major line of research has focused on the image of Laura, considered both as a concrete depiction attributed to the painter Simone Martini and as a mental and literary effigy continuously haunting the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Medieval poets referring to the visual arts were not a novelty in Italy. In his Comedy, for example, Dante praises Giotto through the voice of illuminator Oderisi da Gubbio (Purgatorio, 11). Giacomo da Lentini’s poem ‘Meravigliosa-mente’ stages the topic of desire fuelling a ‘phantasmic’ portrait of the beloved, internalised in the lover’s mind just as she appears: ‘Avendo gran disio | dipinsi una pintura, | bella, voi simigliante’ [Fuelled by desire, I painted a beautiful portrait of your likeness] (19–21).23 In sonnets Rvf 77 and 78, however, Petrarch does not only comment on the work of a contemporary, whom he had actually met in Avignon, but also on a supposedly real portrait of Laura he himself commissioned.24 The sonnets represent arguably the first condensed theory of portraiture and introduce many of the ideas that will shape the genre and its criticism for centuries to come.25 Unlike the criticism expressed in De remediis through the point of view of Ratio, however, the two sonnets reveal a younger Petrarch, who was certainly not insensitive to the seductions of secular images. The first of the two sonnets envisages Simone travelling to heaven, where he had been able to see and translate visually the essence of Laura: Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso con gli altri ch’ebber fama di quell’arte mill’anni, non vedrian la minor parte de la beltà che m’ave il cor conquiso. 22 See Trapp 1992–93: 22–24; and Löhr 2011. For example, the image by Domenico di Michelino in the Duomo in Florence, of about 1465, displaying Dante laureate and holding his book; or the portrait of Gaspara Stampa drawn by Antonio Daniele Bertoli and engraved by Felicita Sartori in a miscellaneous edition of Rime by Stampa herself, her brother Baldassarre, Collatino di Collalto, and Vinciguerra di Collalto (Venice: Piacentini, 1738). For a recent study of the portraits and representations of Petrarch and of the manuscripts containing his works, see Brovia 2022. In her article, Brovia argues that the early fashioning of Petrarch’s public persona f irst concerned his image and later his writings, and that the cultural appropriation of Petrarch’s persona was in part due to political strategies. 23 Cited from Antonelli et al. 2008: I, 47. 24 The two sonnets were penned on MS Vaticano Latino 3196 in 1336 (fol. 7r), when Simone Martini was in Avignon, and transcribed ‘in order’ in MS Vaticano Latino 3195 in 1357. See Wilkins 1951: 89–91. The body of scholarship on Rvf 77 and 78 is extensive. See, for example, Lee 2017; Bartuschat 2007; Bertone 2008; Fenzi 1996; and Ciccuto 1991: 82–88. 25 Pommier 1998: 33–38, esp. 35.

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Ma certo il mio Simon fu in paradiso onde questa gentil donna si parte: ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte per far fede qua giù del suo bel viso. L’opra fu ben di quelle che nel cielo si ponno imaginar, non qui tra noi, ove le membra fanno a l’alma velo. Cortesia fe’; né la potea far poi che fu disceso a provar caldo et gielo, et del mortal sentiron gli occhi suoi. (Rvf 77) [Even though Polyclitus should for a thousand years compete in looking with all the others who were famous in that art, they would never see the smallest part of the beauty that has conquered my heart. || But certainly my Simon was in Paradise, whence comes this noble lady; there he saw her and portrayed her on paper, to attest down here to her lovely face. || The work is one of those which can be imagined only in Heaven, not here among us, where the body is a veil to the soul; || it was a gracious act, nor could he have done it after he came down to feel heat and cold and his eyes took on mortality.]

Within the sacred narrative of a profane love story, to put it with Gianfranco Contini, Petrarch touches upon the topic of the beloved’s truest essence and beatific power, which will be fully celebrated after Laura’s death, from the celestial perspective of eternity, in the Triumphi: ‘se fu beato chi la vide in terra, | or che fia dunque a rivederla in cielo?’ [if those who saw her on earth were blessed, what then of those who will see her again in heaven?] (Triumphus Eternitatis 144–45).26 Through a hyperbolic vortex comparing and contrasting the modern and the ancient world, Simone must have joined the blessed in the Empyrean, where he could admire the platonic idea of Laura, outdoing even Polyclitus and his contemporaries. The exceptional power of portraiture, therefore, is filled with the superior purpose of showing what mortal eyes cannot see. The image of the painter translating a heavenly vision for an earthly audience (‘Ma certo il mio Simon fu in Paradiso’), moreover, recalls the iconography of Saint Luke painting the Virgin, which recurs frequently between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.27 Byzantine accounts attributed the miraculous icon of Mary holding the Child from the Monastery of Hodegon in Constantinople (Hodegetria) to the 26 Petrarca 1996b: 538. On the vision of Laura in the Triumphus Eternitatis, see Bertolani 2001: 137–39; and Bertolani 2005: 225–27. On the metaphor of the body as a prison, see Marcozzi 2011: 13–42. 27 See Hall 1983: 90–91.

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Apostle himself, and the subsequent tradition of Saint Luke the painter made him the patron of artists’ guilds.28 Artists frequently portrayed themselves in the guise of Saint Luke painting the Virgin as a way to show their professional affiliation, entrust their work to the saint’s protection, and proudly affirm the power of art to make the ineffable visible. Petrarch’s reference to Simone’s painting appears to refer in filigree to this tradition, subtly presenting him ‘in the guise of the saint’ to celebrate his artistic ability—and presumably provide a non-pagan counterpart to Polyclitus—and attributing an almost miraculous power to the image of Laura (‘per far fede qua giù’). If Rvf 77 celebrates the illusionistic power of art, Rvf 78 expresses the lover’s frustration against the limits of this seductive illusion, its inability to come alive and speak, re-presenting Laura’s mind: Quando giunse a Simon l’alto concetto ch’a mio nome gli pose in man lo stile, s’avesse dato a l’opera gentile colla figura voce ed intellecto, di sospir’ molti mi sgombrava il petto, che ciò ch’altri à più caro, a me fan vile: però che ’n vista ella si mostra humile promettendomi pace ne l’aspetto. Ma poi ch’i’ vengo a ragionar co·llei, benignamente assai par che m’ascolte, se risponder savesse a’ detti miei. Pigmalïon, quanto lodar ti dêi de l’imagine tua, se mille volte n’avesti quel ch’i’ sol una vorrei. (Rvf 78) [When Simon received the high idea which, for my sake, put his hand to his stylus, if he had given to his noble work voice and intellect along with form || he would have lightened my breast of many sighs that make what others prize most value to me. For in appearance she seems humble, and her expression promises peace; || then, when I come to speak to her, she seems to listen most kindly: if she could only reply to my words! || Pygmalion, how glad you should be of your statue, since you received a thousand times what I yearn to have just once!]

The heavenly essence that Simone Martini is said to have captured proves to be an illusion, a fiction echoing the words of Ratio in De remediis. Unlike Pygmalion, 28 On the Hodegetria, see Pentcheva 2006: ch. 4.

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whose ivory statue of Galatea was brought to life by Venus in response to his prayers, Petrarch has not been rewarded with such a miracle. Instead of relieving the poet’s pain, the portrait exacerbates it.29 Sonnet 78 suggests an implicit parallel between Simone Martini’s stylus, which failed to give voice and intellect to the portrait of Laura, and Petrarch’s style of his ‘rime sparse’, as metonymies for their works. Just as Simone has not managed to endow the portrait with a voice, so Petrarch’s poems have not succeeded in winning the beloved’s resistance, her ‘cor di smalto’ (Rvf 70.22). Jean Campbell proposed to see a further, more conceptual link between the styluses used by Simone and Petrarch to portray Laura: Although the stylus is the instrument that informs the painting subject and brings the work into being, it is not coterminous with an accomplished object. Rather, it is explicitly identif ied with the potential in the moment between the conception of a portrait, which Petrarch attributes to Simone’s inspired vision of beauty, and the realization of a work that ultimately fails to fulf ill his desire.30

In this sense, the stylus becomes synonymous with the development of the artist’s and poet’s ingenium and is connected with their intellectual faculty, intermediary between the heavenly and the earthly sphere. However, it is precisely in the material translation of the products of ingenium (the impression of the stylus on the carte) that both Petrarch and Simone are defeated by the mimetic limitations of their respective arts. Despite this, the sighs and frustration associated with Simone’s failure and Laura’s insensitivity have eternalised the poet’s own voice through poetry. While Simone’s portrait ‘in carte’ (Rvf 77.7) of Laura has not survived, Petrarch’s poems have been a source of glory for himself and the painter.31 This is what Vasari’s words seem to prophesy in his Life of Simone Martini through a paragone that celebrates 29 In the Soliloquia, Augustine conflates the arts with the devil’s deceit: even though not deliberately intended to lead the viewer astray, painting and sculpture are ultimately false promises (Soliloquia, II.VI–X; Patrologia Latina, XXXII.889–893). In the Secretum, Augustinus will openly condemn Franciscus’s use of Laura’s portrait as an idol: ‘And what’s even crazier is that, not content with the sight of the face that had brought all this upon you, you went and had another version of it painted by a famous artist, so that you could carry it around with you everywhere and thus have a constant cause for everlasting tears’ [Quid autem insanius quam, non contentum presenti illius vultus effigie, unde hec cuncta tibi provenerant, aliam fictam illustris artificis ingenio quesivisse, quam tecum ubique circumferens haberes materiam semper immortalium lacrimarum?] (Secretum, III.7.4). Cited from Petrarca 2016: 180–81. On Petrarch and Augustine, see also Lee 2012: 63–112. 30 Jean Campbell 2009: 213. 31 On Vasari, Petrarch, and Simone Martini, and the fame resulting from poetry, see Campbell 2021, from which the expression ‘eternal ink’ that follows is borrowed.

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the triumph of honour and fame resulting from the ‘eternal ink’ of poetry over the decaying materiality of painting: Più felici di tutti […] (parlando degl’artefici) sono quelli che […] vivono al tempo di qualche famoso scrittore, da cui, per un piccolo ritratto o altra così fatta cortesia delle cose dell’arte, si riporta premio alcuna volta mediante gli loro scritti d’eterno onore e nome. La qual cosa si deve, fra coloro che attendono alle cose del disegno, particolarmente desiderare e cercare degl’eccellenti pittori, poiché l’opere loro, essendo in superficie e in campo di colore, non possono avere quell’eternità che dànno i bronzi e le cose di marmo allo scultore, o le fabbriche agl’architetti. Fu dunque quella di Simone grandissima ventura vivere al tempo di messer Francesco Petrarca, e abbattersi a trovare in Avignone alla corte questo amorosissimo poeta desideroso d’avere la imagine di madonna Laura di mano di maestro Simone; perciò che avutala bella come desiderato avea, fece di lui memoria in due sonetti […]. E invero questi sonetti […] hanno dato più fama alla povera vita di maestro Simone che non hanno fatto né faranno mai tutte l’opere sue, perché elleno hanno a venire, quando che sia, meno, dove gli scritti di tant’uomo viveranno eterni secoli. [Happiest of all […] are those (speaking of artists) who […] live in the time of some famous writer from whom, in return for a small portrait or some other kind of gift of an artistic nature, they may on occasion receive, through his writings, the reward of eternal honour and fame. Such a thing should be especially desired and sought after by those most excellent artists who work in the field of design, for their works, being executed upon surfaces within a field of colour, cannot possess the eternal duration that bronze casting and marble objects bring to sculpture or buildings to architects. It was thus Simone’s greatest good fortune to live in the time of Messer Francis Petrarch and to happen to find this most amorous poet at the court of Avignon, since he was anxious to have a picture of Madonna Laura by the hand of Maestro Simone; for that reason, when he received a painting as beautiful as he had wished, he immortalized Simone in two sonnets […]. And in truth, these sonnets […] have given the poor life of Maestro Simone greater fame than all his works did or ever will do, for the time must come, whenever it may be, when they will disappear, while the writings of such a great man will endure for all time.]32

While Rvf 77 and 78 codify some of the most lasting themes regarding the power of portraiture, they also implicitly set the theoretical premises for its failure. 32 Cited from Vasari 1966–87: II, 191–92. The English translation is from Vasari 1998: 37–38.

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Petrarch’s distinction between Laura’s physical image and her real portrait in heaven echoes the Augustinian distinction between a superior soul and an inferior body, a Platonic dichotomy that shaped his epistemological approach to images.33 This position emerges also in the Secretum, where Petrarch’s complicated—even tortured—understanding of visual representation is dramatised in Franciscus’s dialogue with Augustine: Augustinus: Your vision is correct, and yet the words of the Apostle apply to you: ‘For the corruptible body weighs down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle presses down the mind that muses upon many things’.34

When Augustine reproaches him for his admiration of Laura’s mortal image, Franciscus replies: Franciscus: Don’t you realize that you’ve referred to a woman whose heart is free of worldly concerns, and burns instead with desire for heavenly things, in whose face—if anything were ever true—the embodiment of divine beauty shines, whose character is a model of the highest integrity, whose voice and piercing gaze have nothing mortal about them, and even whose gait is not human?35 Franciscus: If the features of the love that holds me in sway were visible, they would resemble the face of the one on whom I have admittedly lavished much praise, though less than I should have.36

The image of Laura is ‘true’ and morally acceptable because it exists in Petrarch’s heart and is not of the flesh, has nothing mortal and cannot be compared to that of anyone else. Well beyond studies on the image of Laura and its visual fortune,37 Rvf 77 and 78 have instigated a rich strand of research on their poetic legacy. This has been 33 On Augustine’s epistemology and its development, see Moore 2011. On Petrarch’s Augustinian positions in the discussion of the visual arts, see Gill 2005: 95–99. 34 Secretum, I.15.4: ‘Augustinus: Rite discernis, atqui verif icatum est in vobis illud apostolicum: “Corpus, quod corrumpitur, aggravat animam, et deprimit terrena inhabitatio sensum multa cogitantem”’. Translated in Petrarca 2016: 59. 35 Secretum, III.3.2: ‘Franciscus: Ceterum scis ne de ea muliere mentionem tibi exortam, cuius mens terrenarum nescia curarum celestibus desideriis ardet; in cuius aspectu, siquid usquam veri est, divini specimen decoris effulget; cuius mores consumate honestatis exemplar sunt; cuius nec vox nec oculorum vigor mortale aliquid nec incessus hominem representat?’. Translated in Petrarca 2016: 153–54. 36 Secretum, III.4.2: ‘Franciscus: Si enim amoris in me regnantis facies cerni posset, eius vultui, quam licet multum tamen debito parcius laudavi, non absimilis videretur’. Translated in Petrarca 2016: 161. 37 See Trapp 2001.

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explored in particular through a number of critical issues f irst identif ied by Giovanni Pozzi and then taken up by Amedeo Quondam: the varying relationship between poetic and visual portrait; their biunivocal connection in terms of challenge and emulation between poetry and painting; and the self-referential autonomy of literary portraiture.38 With regard to the relationship between poetic and visual portrait, Pozzi proposed to identify three distinct categories: occasional poems that make reference to a portrait and explicitly mention pictorial elements; occasional poems that refer to a portrait but make no reference to pictorial elements; and descriptive poems that display pictorial elements but make no reference to an existing portrait.39 While helpful, such distinction tends to blur the line between two kinds of textual object that, though cognate, should not be confused with one another: on the one hand, amorous or encomiastic poems that are explicitly connected with a work of art (either extant or lost), which properly constitutes their occasion or subject matter, regardless of the presence or absence of visual elements in the text; on the other, poems that simply describe the beauty of a woman according to the rhetorical model of descriptio pulchritudinis codif ied by the Petrarchan ‘canon of beauties’, but make no reference to art except, possibly, for the mention of the act of ‘portraying’ metaphorically carried out with words and ‘style’. The latter group have been studied magisterially by Pozzi and Quondam, whereas the former initially attracted the attention of art historians, who collected them mainly as sources for dating and attributions, but later and gradually began to read them as iconographical sources. 40 Others, building on Pozzi’s legacy and on the foundational work of Elizabeth Cropper, enriched the corpus of poems on portraits and proposed new critical categories for their interpretation. 41 If more critical attention has comparatively been given to portraits of women— an attention easily explained in connection with the canon of beauties and with the tradition of ut pictura poësis—the potential for the study of male portraits in the light of Petrarch and Petrarchism was already evident in John Shearman’s ‘Portraits and Poets’, one of the best examples to date of an effective and insightful integration of literary objects into an argument on the visual arts. 42 More recently, such potential was taken up and explored in the monograph by Novella Macola on 38 Pozzi 1979; Quondam 1991: 304. 39 Pozzi 1979: 20–22. 40 The documentary approach is found, for instance, in Colasanti 1904, while the more interpretative one is reflected in studies such as Goodman-Soellner 1983; Rogers 1986; Damianaki Romano 1998; and Pericolo 2009. 41 Besides the pivotal Cropper 1976, see also Cropper 1986 and 1995; Bolzoni 2008; Pich 2010; and Zemanek 2010. For a recent and valuable contribution on Giovan Battista Marino and the arts, see Russo et al. 2019. 42 Shearman 1992. See also Cranston 2000.

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portraits with books, as well as in the work of Stephen Campbell and Marianne Koos on ‘lyric’ portraits, which contributed to undermining preconceived gender distinctions. 43 All these studies variously build on the now well-established notion of Petrarchan and Petrarchist metaphors and lexicon as a shared repertoire for the representation of both body and soul across a range of cultural practices. For instance, as Enrico Castelnuovo posited in his Ritratto e società in Italia, the use of the petrarchino in portraiture substitutes old heraldic references to draw attention to the sitter’s intellectual side and inner life. 44 While the complex structural dimension of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and its mastery of syntactic orchestration mainly escaped a deep understanding and thorough imitation, its language, tropes, and motifs were taken up extensively across different literary forms and genres, in both prose and verse, and its imagery nurtured Renaissance visual culture in major and pervasive ways. In a century dominated by the rhetorical comparison between art and poetry (ut pictura poësis) and by the debate on the superiority of one form over the other (paragone), the interplay between Petrarch’s oeuvre, ‘Petrarchisms’ (the diverse landscape of lyric poetry variously building on his model), and portraiture underpinned a variety of experiences, objects and practices, from medals to engravings, from narrative genres to dialogues on love and beauty. 45 On the one hand, then, through his De remediis utriusque fortune and Familiares, Petrarch made a crucial contribution to the development of a theoretical discourse about the visual arts; on the other, his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Triumphi offered new models for representation and self-representation, to which both Renaissance poets and artists proved to be exceptionally receptive. 46 For John Freccero, Petrarch’s greatest achievement was his creation in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta of a timeless self-portrait composed of ‘lyric instants’, sapiently combined to create a fictional persona that has escaped the ravages of time.47 In this respect, a further Petrarchan legacy can be identified in the frequent references to his canzoniere in sixteenth-century discussions about the notion of lyric poetry as imitation (and, later, expression) of affetti, as established by theoreticians such as Antonio Minturno, 43 Macola 2007; Campbell 2005; and Koos 2006. 44 Castelnuovo 2015: 78. 45 See Shearman 1992 and Trapp 2003. With a focus on portraiture as a theme and as a model between poetry and art, see Bolzoni 2010 and Pich 2010. On Petrarchan emblems, see Torre 2012. See also Bayer 2008; Lorne Campbell et al. 2009; Christiansen and Weppelman 2011; Kohl et al. 2014; Steigerwald and von Rosen 2012; Genovese and Torre 2019; Terzoli and Schütze 2021, with extensive bibliography. On ‘Petrarchisms’, see Gigliucci 2005. 46 On the former issue, see Baxandall 1971; Ciccuto 1991; Bettini 2002; and Perucchi 2014. On the latter, see Cropper 1976; Campbell 2005; and Koos 2006. 47 Freccero 1975: 34.

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Agnolo Segni, and Pomponio Torelli. 48 Such notion not only resonates with the connection between lyric utterance and portrait as performances of the self but is embodied almost literally in ‘speaking’ portraits, namely effigies bearing inscriptions cast in the first person.49 The agency of speaking portraits as acts of self-staging and self-affirmation is even more evident for images of poets and in the case of female sitters, who turn from silent objects of gaze into subjects of both gaze and voice.50 Quid tum? The relationship between mimetic resemblance and the ‘truth’ of the soul remained at the heart of the discussion on portraiture during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.51 For instance, in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni the cartellino (mockingly?) laments art’s inability to depict the character and the soul.52 Leonardo’s studies of the moti dell’animo and the primacy he attributed to sight among the other senses, as well as his dense anatomical explorations of the brain, the heart, the nerves, muscles, and bones that turn thoughts into actions, produced an intense yet ambiguous form of portraiture, tied more profoundly to his own judgement than to the reality of the sitters.53 In response to those who criticised him because the portraits of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici in San Lorenzo did not look like the models they were supposed to portray, Michelangelo famously wrote to Nicolò Martelli that he was not concerned with exact resemblance, because it would not matter a thousand years later; instead, what he wanted to portray and eternalise was their ideal image, their virtue and glory.54 This statement is not unlike Petrarch’s ultimate message in Rvf 77 and 78: we do not see Simone’s portrait, we ‘admire’ it and the likeness it depicts through Petrarch’s words, as Vasari recognised, in an implicit ‘triumph’ of poësis over pictura. It is thus more important than ever to understand how Petrarch’s intuitions and qualms were received and transformed not just by his poetic followers, but by artists and their audience. 48 An overview of the debate is offered by Frezza 2001. 49 See Bredekamp 2010. 50 See Pich 2021. For the growing emergence of women writers in the Italian Renaissance, see Cox 2008 and Cox 2013. 51 A particularly felicitous overview of this topic in art, from a philosophical as well as literary perspective, is in Zöllner 2005. 52 ‘Ars utinam mores animumque effingere posses pulchrior in terris nulla tabella foret’ [O Art, if you could depict the character and the soul, no painting on earth would be more beautiful!]. The verses are adapted from Martial, Epigrammata, X.32.5–6; see Simons 2011–12. 53 On Leonardo’s anatomical search for the soul, see Kemp 1971; on judgement as the faculty mediating between the perception of reality and its representation, see Summers 1987: 170–76; on Leonardo’s idealisation in portraiture, see Brown 1983 and Meller 1983. 54 The passage is cited in Castelnuovo 2015: 87. On the subject of resemblance and the aims of portraiture, see also Maria Loh’s discussion of ‘Renaissance faciality’, Loh 2009. A useful overview of the question of mimetic resemblance in Renaissance portraiture is presented in Woodall 1997.

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Interdisciplinary Encounters This volume investigates the multifaceted relationship between Petrarch and portraiture in a genuinely interdisciplinary framework and from a range of distinctive perspectives, displaying the complex network of material and conceptual aspects that characterise the phenomenon. We have gathered a group of early career scholars with international experience, whose main specialism lies in either art history or literature but whose research has already moved beyond their discipline of reference in significant ways. Each chapter addresses the forms and implications of the relationship between Petrarch and sixteenth-century portraiture through a close reading of texts, images, and contexts across a variety of media (painting, sculpture, and engravings), genres (lyric poetry, dialogues, and letters), and geographical areas (Florence, Venice, and Bologna). While keeping their specific focus and method, all chapters resonate with each other and, by their own interweaving, help illuminate understudied crossroads and oft-overlooked areas of interest. The volume opens with two chapters by historians of literature, whose reflections move beyond the more familiar and well-established scholarly discourse in this area. Simone Monti and Martina Dal Cengio build on the general coordinates proposed by Lina Bolzoni and Federica Pich to break new ground by focusing on understudied objects—respectively, sonnets by widows on the portrait of their dead husband, and poems on sculpted busts—which shed a different light on the well-known patterns of lyric poetry about portraiture. Monti’s chapter addresses both social and literary conventions by considering the narrow range of themes and tones deemed appropriate for female poets, and the consequent limits and constraints experienced by women in shaping their own poetic voice. By analysing two ‘in morte’ sonnets by Livia Spinola and Francesca Turina that focus on the portraits of their dead husbands, Monti shows their contrasting solutions, one taking solace in the image’s illusionary presence, while the other alert to the dangers of lifelike representation. These divergent attitudes translate into different rhetorical stances: Spinola’s sonnet is dominated by eulogy and epideixis, whereas Turina’s poem enacts the illusionary experience in the form of an amorous address. In this respect, the poems develop in different directions two of the main discursive possibilities experimented by Petrarch in his sonnets on the portrait of Laura and more generally in his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: the conative dynamic of direct address (and dialogue) and the static and epideictic statement of praise, which also implies a different approach to the visual object.55 Monti’s analysis illuminates how the codes of poetry were fundamentally modelled on the male experience, just like the strategies of observation of the sitter in portraiture presented women artists 55 On this, see Pich 2021.

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with the challenge of finding their distinctive ‘female gaze’. In John Berger’s famous words: ‘men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. […] Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.’56 Widowhood, Monti argues, offers Spinola and Turina a poetic opportunity to legitimately ‘objectify’ the image of their husbands and explore their inner selves without contravening social mores. Martina Dal Cengio proposes a pioneering overview on poems about sculpted portraits throughout the sixteenth century. The choice of a broad time frame allows her to single out consistent motifs and formulas characterising the subgenre, as well as to describe its thematic and rhetorical evolution: from poems (often sonnets) about individual women—no matter how little known or idealised—to poems (often madrigals) on undefined and generic sitters; from the centrality of the speaking viewer to that of the speaking stone portrait. In outlining these two interwoven trends, Dal Cengio emphasises the role of the epigrammatic tradition (from Greek and Latin models to their Renaissance imitators), especially for madrigals giving a voice to mythological figures. In contrast to the process examined by Monti, here Petrarch’s legacy emerges in the rich imagery of petrification derived from his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, rather than in rhetorical patterns; such imagery responds to the specific nature of the objects in question—marble portraits—and effectively plays into the paragone between painting and sculpture. Dal Cengio also shines new light on the rhetorical possibilities that were inspired by sculpted portraiture, a topic that has not received sufficient scholarly attention to date. Sculpted portrait busts were instrumental to the development of portraiture in the Quattrocento, when artists exploited their three-dimensionality to endow their subjects with a new psychological complexity. Vasari refers to the many sonnets and epigrams left on Desiderio da Settignano’s tomb after his untimely death, including one where Nature itself is baffled by his ability to ‘dar […] a’ freddi marmi vita’ [give life to the cold marble].57 The transition, in painting, from the profile to the three-quarter and frontal portrait, where the hands contribute to reveal the motions of the soul, is thus inextricably linked to sculptural models:58 the hands of Verrocchio’s Lady with Primroses—almost a Petrarchan device in the way they visually connect the flowers to the young woman’s bosom—anticipate Cecilia Gallerani’s seductive grasp of the ermine in the portrait by Leonardo. If early marble portraits were an opportunity to animate the sitter, however, the Cinquecento examples explored by Dal Cengio operate a striking rhetorical reversal, whereby life is frozen by the cold unresponsive stone. In the transition from Antonio Brocardo to Luigi Groto’s ‘Ecco il ritratto vostro’ we witness the transition from Bembismo to the more baroque theme 56 Berger 2008: 47. 57 Vasari 1966–87: III.403. 58 See Fehl 1973.

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of illusion, an illusion so convincing it is eventually preferred to reality. The structure of Groto’s verses closely juxtaposes references to the real body of the beloved with references to her stone effigy, in a play of textures where stone is like skin and skin is like stone that seems to prelude to Bernini’s virtuosity in working with marble.59 The image of the Gorgon ‘staring back’ at the reader in Groto and Marino, a device that almost removes the poet as an intermediary, cannot escape the comparison with Caravaggio’s alleged self-portrait as Medusa, in which viewer, artist, and monster become one on the illusionary surface of the shield.60 The chapters by Francesco Lucioli, Diletta Gamberini, and Antonio Geremicca move further in a cross-disciplinary direction by addressing three areas in which the verbal and visual cultures of the Renaissance coalesce and interweave to the point of being inextricable. At the same time, some of the arguments developed in the previous two chapters resurface, albeit from new angles, suggesting the pervasiveness of Petrarch’s model and the continuous connections between different contexts and discourses. For example, the issues raised by Monti about the social expectations limiting female poets reappear in the essay devoted by Lucioli to the role of Petrarch’s works in conduct literature for and about women. While some moralists considered Petrarch’s poetry a dangerous instrument of corruption of female morality, others made extensive use of quotations from Rerum vulgarium fragmenta in works addressed to a female readership and aimed at offering practical advice on women’s behaviour. By focusing on a variety of such writings, Lucioli highlights the way in which Petrarchan motifs shaped the physical and moral image of the ideal woman, creating canons that had a significant influence on visual portraiture. His discussion sheds new light on the construction and performance of the self in the early modern period. The metaphor of the mirror was at the heart of medieval and Renaissance conduct books and spurred the genre of specula principum, which invited the reader to achieve moral betterment by emulating the conduct of exemplary models.61 These themes had been amply anticipated by Petrarch in De viris illustribus—but also, as Geremicca shows, in the Familiares—and their most immediate counterpart in portraiture are the series of illustrious men and women that educated viewers from the walls of Renaissance buildings, both public and private.62 In light of the central role attributed to visual and literary mirroring in the Renaissance and the influence of Rerum vulgarium 59 Barolsky 2005. 60 On Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa and its references to antique self-portraits, see Posèq 1990: 157–58. On Caravaggio’s escutcheon and petrification, see Cropper 1991. 61 The theme of the mirror is central to Petrarch’s poetics. See Cocco 1993. 62 Mommsen 1952. On the fortunate marriage of portraiture and the tradition of famous men and women, see the example of Paolo Giovio’s portrait gallery and his printed Elogia, discussed, among others, by Minonzio 2007.

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fragmenta on the ideal canon, Lucioli’s chapter demonstrates once again how Petrarch’s reach extended far beyond the literary and visual spheres, to the very heart of early modern society. In an ideal segue to Lucioli’s chapter, Diletta Gamberini focuses on non-idealised female sitters in poetry and art and considers in what ways Renaissance depictions of old women could engage with the literary authority of the Petrarchan tradition. By comparing two stylistically divergent treatments of ageing female sitters—one of Leonardo’s ‘grotesque heads’ and Giorgione’s La vecchia—her essay shows how such images cannot be explained simply as the parodistic reversal of the anonymous belle embodying Petrarch’s canon of beauty. While the scholarly debate has interpreted these depictions almost exclusively through the lens of so-called ‘anti-Petrarchism’, with its burlesque (and anticanonical) satire of female ugliness, Gamberini argues that Petrarch’s own ‘serious’ reflection on time, physical decay, and the transience of beauty is perhaps more pertinent. The role of inscriptions in the iconotextual structure of both images points in this direction: Leonardo’s quotation from Rvf 248.8—one of his several transcriptions of Petrarchan sententiae—must be read alongside the grotesque head, while the motto ‘Col tempo’ [In time] on the banderole held by La vecchia is best understood not only in the context of fifteenth-century poesia cortigiana, but also in the light of Petrarch’s imagination of Laura in her old age (Rvf 12 and 315–17), possibly conveying a memento senescere in the form of an admonitory portrait of the beloved. Gamberini’s reading introduces a fascinating new perspective on two famous images of women by challenging rigid interpretive dichotomies, where youth equals beauty and old age ridicule. Petrarch himself subverts these canons in the Secretum, where he defends his love for Laura in spite of the threat of her physical decay: Franciscus: I call upon the lady who is present to bear witness, alongside my conscience, to the fact that (as I said earlier) I never loved her body more than her soul. The evidence is that the older she got, and her physical beauty was inevitably destroyed, the more I remained convinced of my view. Even if with the passing of time the bloom of her youth visibly declined, the beauty of her mind, which had been at the origin of my love, increased with the years, giving me cause to persevere in what I had begun. Otherwise, if I’d simply been in pursuit of her body, I’d have changed my mind long ago. Augustinus: Are you joking? If the same mind had been lodged in a gnarled and ugly body, would it have attracted you just as much? Franciscus: I cannot go as far as to say that: the mind is not visible, and physical appearance would not give any guarantee that it was beautiful. But if it were

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to become visible, then I would certainly love the beauty of the mind even if it inhabited an ugly body.63

Portraits as intermedial constructions involving poetry remain centre stage in the chapter by Antonio Geremicca, who focuses on Agnolo Bronzino’s portraits of Lorenzo Lenzi and Laura Battiferri and on the long poetic exchange between the artist and Benedetto Varchi. In particular, the essay investigates the theoretical implications of both portraits and epistolary poems with regard to the paragone between poetry and painting, and considers to what extent Bronzino and Varchi were inspired by Petrarch’s ideas on the visual arts, as expressed not only in his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Triumphi, but also in his Familiares and De remediis utriusque fortune. Geremicca shows how the visual rhetoric of the two portraits, both featuring open books inscribed with Petrarch’s verses, can be interpreted as the result of a close collaboration between Bronzino and Varchi; at the same time, his analysis of the poetic exchange highlights how the choice of motifs and rhetorical structures, far from being neutral, contributes to channelling specific stances and concepts, as suggested in the chapters by Monti and Dal Cengio. By the tenet of ut pictura poësis, portraits are silent whereas poems speak. However, poetic inscriptions can give the sitter a voice, as in Bronzino’s Laura Battiferri. If verses, sonnets or whole books can feature in portraits, portraits, too, can appear in books. Different facets and implications of this presence are explored in the chapters by Gemma Cornetti, Muriel Maria Stella Barbero, and Susan Gaylard. In the burgeoning sixteenth-century production of printed portraits, the paired portraits of Petrarch and Laura introduced novel visual schemes, at times also including segments of text that complemented their likenesses. Cornetti’s essay examines the visual formulas displayed in portraits of Petrarch and Laura included in sixteenth-century editions of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Triumphi and in independent prints, exploring the relationship between these images and Petrarch’s poetry as well as the publishing strategies to which they responded.64 The chapter thus uncovers the iconotextual mechanism at work in the interaction of a number 63 Secretum, III.5.3–4: ‘Franciscus: Hanc presentem in testimonium evoco, conscientiamque meam facio contestem, me (quod iam superius dixeram) illius non magis corpus amasse quam animam. Quod hinc percipias licebit, quoniam quo illa magis in etate progressa est, quod corporee pulcritudinis ineluctabile fulmen est, eo fimior in opinione permansi. Etsi enim visibiliter iuvente flos tractu temporis languesceret, animi decor annis augebatur, qui sicut amandi principium sic incepti perseverantiam ministravit. Alioquin si post corpus abiissem, iam pridem mutandi propositi tempus erat. || Augustinus: Me ne ludis? An si idem animus in squalido et nodoso corpore habitaret, similiter placuisset? || Franciscus: Non audeo quidem id dicere; neque enim animus cerni potest, nec imago corporis talem spopondisset; at si oculis appareret, amarem profecto pulchritudinem animi deforme licet habentis habitaculum’. Translated in Petrarca 2016: 169. 64 See Daniels 2020.

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of understudied paratexts, such as the portrait-urn of Petrarch and Laura and the anonymous sonnet on their ashes featured in several editions printed by Gabriele Giolito: the phoenix on top of the urn can be read not only in conjunction with the printer’s mark but also with the sonnet and with the apparitions of the mythical creature in Rvf 135, 185, and 321. This system of allegorical and textual references that accompany the portraits of Petrarch and Laura is closely connected with the tradition of emblems and imprese, as well as with the numismatic relation between a mimetic reverse and an allegorical obverse. As a collector of antique coins, Petrarch was familiar with these conventions and his language in Rvf, starting with the central play on Laura-lauro, is profoundly emblematic.65 In the sixteenth century, imprese were understood as being composed of a ‘body’ (the image) and a ‘soul’ (the motto), a position that echoes the debates on the paragone between poetry and painting discussed by Geremicca and is particularly relevant to portraiture.66 Despite being indebted to these models, however, the ‘packaging’ formulas discussed by Cornetti subvert the hierarchy of word and image by using the paratext not just as a commentary or embellishment, but to introduce, as in the case of the portrait-urn, unexpected references. The actual intermediality analysed by Cornetti—engraved portraits, frames, and verses from Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta or Triumphi—becomes an implicit or ‘phantasmic’ intermediality in the chapter by Muriel Maria Stella Barbero, which focuses on the encomiastic scheme of paired sonnets, verbal ‘diptychs’ celebrating rulers and their spouses, often in the context of dedication. The essay argues that this eulogistic model, employed, for instance, by Pietro Aretino and Gaspara Stampa, might have originated from the combined influence of Petrarch’s two sonnets on the portrait of Laura (Rvf 77–78) and of paired portraits of royal or princely couples. The comparison with portraiture is particularly effective because it highlights a system of references and cross-textual echoes that connect the sonnets together, just as portraits of couples were linked by symbols, backgrounds, and heraldic visual devices. Moreover, since portrait diptychs (especially devotional ones) were strongly linked with the Netherlandish tradition, Barbero’s essay introduces an alternative ‘autochtonous’ model for Italian double portraits, one rooted—as often happens in Italy—in the written word.67 Once more, the permeability of verbal rhetoric to visual rhetoric, and vice versa, is particularly exposed in paratextual 65 The use of ‘emblematic’ in reference to Petrarch is derived here from Freccero 1975: 37. The distinction between the emblematic Petrarch and the allegorical Dante originates, however, with Gianfranco Contini (1970: 189; first pub. in 1951). On Laura-lauro see Sturm-Maddox 1992 and the literature review by Falkeid 2012. 66 Giovio 1556: 6. On the paragone in impresa literature, see Caldwell 2000. 67 For a discussion of northern portrait diptychs, see Lotte Brand and Anzelewsky 1978; Hand, Metzger and Sprong 2006; and Falque 2012.

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elements, such as the rubrics preceding the sonnets addressed to Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici and their careful graphic framing in the posthumous edition of Stampa’s Rime. Similarly, layout and framing mediate textual meaning in the illustrated portrait books discussed by Susan Gaylard, who examines the evolution of women’s portraits in these printed collections, from the early sixteenth century to the 1570s. In particular, her chapter discusses how Petrarchan canons of beauty, as embodied in Quattrocento portraiture, became part of a strategy of sublimation, by which the idealised images of famous women were juxtaposed with their morally problematic biographies. After the complex mediations experimented by Jacopo da Strada (Epitome du Thresor des Antiquitez, 1553) and Enea Vico (Imagini delle donne auguste, 1557), women’s faces disappeared from illustrated portrait books, developing into framing decoration or models for regional costume. Building on these diverse yet complementary essays, the book paints a rich ‘portrait’ of Petrarch and his legacy as they continued to inspire and challenge artists and writers well into the autumn of the Renaissance. Editorial Note While quotations from Petrarch’s texts and sixteenth-century sources have largely been made uniform across the volume, the interdisciplinary nature of the contributions and the different uses they make of textual references meant that authors were encouraged to maintain a degree of autonomy and internal consistency. We hope that this volume will be enjoyed by the widest possible readership: to this end, Italian texts are first given in the original vernacular, then translated, while Latin excerpts are translated immediately and the original is provided afterwards or in footnote.

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Marcozzi, Luca. 2011. Petrarca platonico, 2nd edn (Rome: Aracne). Martin, John Jeffries. 1997. ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe’, The American Historical Review, 102.5: 1309–42. Martin, John Jeffries. 2004. Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Meller, Peter. 1983. ‘Quello che Leonardo non ha scritto sulla figura umana: dall’Uomo di Vitruvio alla Leda’, Arte Lombarda 67.4: 117–33. Minonzio, Franco. 2007. ‘Il Museo di Giovio e la galleria degli uomini illustri’, in Testi, immagini e filologia nel XVI secolo, ed. by Eliana Carrara and Silvia Ginzburg (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale), pp. 77–146. Moevs, Christian. 2009. ‘Subjectivity and Conversion in Dante and Petrarch’, in Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Theodore J. Cachey (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), pp. 226–59. Moffitt Peacock, Martha. 2015. ‘Mirrors of Skill and Renown: Women and Self-Fashioning in Early-Modern Dutch Art’, Mediaevistik, 28: 325–52. Mommsen, Theodor E. 1952. ‘Petrarch and the Decoration of the Sala Virorum Illustrium in Padua’, The Art Bulletin, 34.2: 95–116. Mommsen, Theodor E. (ed.). 1957. Petrarch’s Testament (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Moore, Dwayne. 2011. ‘Truth and Image in Augustinian Epistemology’, Augustiniana, 6.1/2: 11–48. Mussio, Thomas E. 1997. ‘The Augustinian Conflict in the Lyrics of Michelangelo: Michelangelo Reading Petrarch’, Italica, 74.3: 339–59. Panofsky, Erwin. 1960. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row). Pentcheva, Bissera V. 2006. Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University). Pericolo, Lorenzo. 2009. ‘Love in the Mirror: A Comparative Reading of Titian’s Woman at Her Toilet and Caravaggio’s Conversion of Mary Magdalene’, Villa I Tatti Studies, 12: 149–79. Perkinson, Stephen. 2007. ‘Rethinking the Origins of Portraiture’, Gesta, 46.2: 135–57. Perkinson, Stephen. 2009. The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Perucchi, Giulia. 2014. Petrarca e le arti figurative: ‘De remediis utriusque Fortune, I 37–42’ (Florence: Le Lettere). Perucchi, Giulia. 2021. ‘“In libris Apellem”. Testi sull’arte antica nella biblioteca di Petrarca’, in Petrarca und die Bildenden Künste. Dialoge—Spiegelungen—Transformationen, ed. by Maria Antonietta Terzoli and Sebastian Schütze (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter), pp. 93–109. Petrarca, Francesco. 1933–42. Le Familiari, ed. by Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, 4 vols (Florence: Sansoni).

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Petrarca, Francesco. 1975–85. Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 1976. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 1996a. Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori). Petrarca, Francesco. 1996b. Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli abbozzi, ed. by Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino (Milan: Mondadori). Petrarca, Francesco. 2016. My Secret Book, ed. and trans. by Nicholas Mann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 2021. De remediis utriusque fortune. Heilmittel gegen Glück und Unglück. I: Heilmittel gegen Glück, ed. by Bernhard Huss (Stuttgart: Hiersemann). Petrarca, Francesco. 2022. De remediis utriusque fortune. Heilmittel gegen Glück und Unglück. II: Heilmittel gegen Unglück, ed. by Bernhard Huss (Stuttgart: Hiersemann). Pich, Federica. 2010. I poeti davanti al ritratto: da Petrarca a Marino (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Pich, Federica. 2021. ‘Rvf LXXVII–LXXVIII and the Rhetoric of Painted Words’, in Petrarca und die Bildenden Künste. Dialoge—Spiegelungen—Transformationen, ed. by Maria Antonietta Terzoli and Sebastian Schütze (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter), pp. 243–64. Pommier, Édouard. 1998. Théories du portrait: de la Renaissance au Lumières (Paris: Gallimard). Posèq, Avigdor, W. G. 1990. ‘Caravaggio and the Antique’, Artibus et Historiae, 11.21: 147–67. Pozzi, Giovanni. 1979. ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d’inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, Lettere italiane, 31: 1–30. Quondam, Amedeo. 1991. ‘Il naso di Laura. Considerazioni sul ritratto poetico e la comunicazione lirica’, in Quondam, Il naso di Laura: lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del Classicismo (Modena: Panini), pp. 291–328. Rogers, Mary. 1986. ‘Sonnets on Female Portraits from Renaissance North Italy’, Word & Image, 2.4: 291–305. Roman D’Elia, Una. 2006. ‘Niccolò Liburnio and the Boundaries of Portraiture in the Early Cinquecento’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 37: 323–50. Russo, Emilio, Patrizia Tosini, and Andrea Zezza (eds). 2009. Marino e l’arte tra Cinque e Seicento (= L’Ellisse, 14.2). Sand, Alexa. 2006. ‘Vision and the Portrait of Jean Le Bon’, Yale French Studies, 110: 58–74. Shearman, John K. G. 1992. ‘Portraits and Poets’, in Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 108–148. Simons, Patricia. 2011–12. ‘Giovanna and Ginevra: Portraits for the Tornabuoni Family by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 14–15: 103–35. Steigerwald, Jörn, and Valeska von Rosen (eds). 2012. Amor sacro e profano. Modelle und Modellierungen der Liebe in Literatur und Malerei der italienischen Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz).

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Sturm-Maddox, Sara. 1992. Petrarch’s Laurels (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). Summers, David. 1987. The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Terzoli, Maria Antonietta, and Sebastian Schütze (eds). 2021. Petrarca und die Bildenden Künste. Dialoge—Spiegelungen—Transformationen (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter). Torre, Andrea. 2012. Vedere versi. Un manoscritto di emblemi petrarcheschi (Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, ms. W476) (Naples: La Stanza delle Scritture). Trapp, J. B. 1992–93. ‘The Iconography of Petrarch in the Age of Humanism’, Quaderni petrarcheschi, 9–10: 11–74. Trapp, J. B. 2001. ‘Petrarch’s Laura. The Portraiture of an Imaginary Beloved’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 64: 55–192. Trapp, J. B. 2003. Studies of Petrarch and His Influence (London: Pindar). Vasari, Giorgio. 1966–87. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori: nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 6 vols (Florence: Sansoni). Vasari, Giorgio. 1998. The Lives of the Artists, ed. by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter E. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Walker Bynum, Caroline. 1995. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press). Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. 1951. The Making of the ‘Canzoniere’ and other Petrarchan Studies (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura). Woodall, Joanna. 1997. ‘Introduction: Facing the Subject’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. by Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 1–25. Zak, Gur. 2010. Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Zemanek, Evi. 2010. Das Gesicht im Gedicht: Studien zum poetischen Porträt (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau). Zöllner, Frank. 2005. ‘The “Motions of the Mind” in Renaissance Portraits: The Spiritual Dimension of Portraiture’, Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte, 68.1: 23–40.

About the Authors Ilaria Bernocchi is a specialist in early modern portraiture and Editor at Paul Holberton Publishing. She previously held lectureships in Renaissance and Early Modern Art at the University of Warwick and the University of Manchester, and taught at the University of Cambridge, where she obtained her PhD. She has held research fellowships at the Dutch University Institute of History of Art in Florence and at the University of Bologna, and has been the recipient of several grants, including the Gladys Krieble Delmas Commonwealth Grant. She has published

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on a portrait by Bartolomeo Passerotti (2023), contributed to the catalogue of the Stephen Scher collection of portrait medals for the Frick Collection (2019), and to the translation of Agostino Scilla’s Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense (2016). She is currently completing the English translation of Giovanni Careri’s Jews and Christians in the Sistine Chapel (2023). Nicolò Morelli has been Teaching Associate in Italian in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge since 2022, having previously completed his PhD there in 2019. His research focuses on medieval and early modern Italian literature, with special emphasis on the transnational scope of Petrarch’s production, that is, his engagement with earlier vernacular poetry between Italy and Occitania and his intellectual legacy in English humanism. He has published on the issues of animal imagery in medieval Italian literature, investigating the troubled boundaries between the notions of human and non-human in love poetry. His current research explores Petrarch’s place in English early modern scholarship, particularly in the academic milieus of Oxford and Cambridge in the sixteenth century. Federica Pich is Ricercatrice (Assistant Professor) in Italian Literature at the Università di Trento, which she joined in June 2021. Previously she was Lecturer and then Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds (2012–2021), where she co-directed the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies (2018–2021). She was Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2016) and Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2019–2021). She was co-investigator, alongside Guyda Armstrong and Simon Gilson, of the project Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy (c. 1350–c.1650), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom). Her research has focused mainly on Italian Renaissance poetry, with a distinctive interest in the interactions between literary and visual culture and in the sixteenth-century reception of Dante and Petrarch. Her current book project is a study devoted to the features and functions of rubrics in printed books of poetry (c.1450–c.1650).

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Widows, Poetry, and Portraits: Livia Spinola and Francesca Turina on the Portraits of their Dead Husbands Simone Monti

Abstract This essay analyses two examples of poems dedicated to the portrait of the beloved by Livia Spinola and Francesca Turina. It begins by highlighting portraiture’s function of substituting the beloved in the Petrarchist tradition and in Renaissance culture, and by considering its implications when the person portrayed is deceased. It then explores the ways in which female lyric subjects subvert the genre’s implicit gender dynamics and how they negotiate their status as widows, examining the role of the portrait in their mourning process. Livia Spinola’s poem frames the object-portrait as positive, capable of saving her from a near-death situation caused by excessive grief. Francesca Turina’s sonnet shows quite the opposite scenario: deeply engrossed in her grieving process, the poem presents her husband’s portrait as a real threat to her recovery because of its illusionary power. Keywords: Petrarchism, women’s writing, widowhood, portraits, mourning

Poetry on Portraiture and the Function of the Image Poetry on portraiture constitutes a major intersection between the visual arts and the written word in the Italian Renaissance. This genre brought together word and image, promoting not only competition but mutual reflection; it also provided an opportunity for cultural and sentimental correspondence in verse within a landscape in which Petrarchism had progressively become a form of self-definition and communication, not just a poetic language. A favourite subject was, of course, the portrait of the poet’s beloved, inspired by Petrarch’s Rvf 77 and 78, the sonnets dedicated to the portrait of Laura painted by Simone Martini. These sonnets are

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch02

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among the first—and probably most influential—examples in the vernacular tradition of lyric poetry engaging with an external (and material) image; they initiated a genre that came to be widely practised in the Renaissance.1 Across the whole genre, however, female voices seem to be, if not entirely absent, certainly very rare. Although literature by female authors was, by and large, favourably received in the sixteenth century, there are very few poems on portraits attributed to women, particularly on the subject of the portrait of the beloved. This raises some interesting questions about the suitability of the genre for the emerging female voices in the Renaissance period. Some of the earliest examples in this sense are the poems by Livia Spinola (fl. 1587–1591) and Francesca Turina (1553–1641) on the portraits of their deceased husbands; these offer a rare opportunity to explore the cultural and ideological difficulties that the genre posed for the female poetic voice, and to understand how women writers negotiated their unique experience with new forms of expression. Petrarch’s sonnets laid down the themes that would characterise the genre: the celebration of the painter and his artistic endeavour, the relationship between the image and the real likeness of the beloved, the Pygmalionic illusion of ‘life’ in the portrait, and the poet’s reaction as a beholder. The genre, however, has been characterised by a complex relationship with the image. As Giovanni Pozzi first observed, Petrarch’s focus is not on describing the portrait, but on investigating the poet’s inner state as he engages with it.2 Contrary to the ekphrastic tradition, therefore, Petrarch’s sonnets do not try to capture and reproduce in writing the visual qualities of an image; instead, they use the image as an opportunity to focus on the poet’s inner life. These aspects were largely maintained in the tradition that stemmed from Petrarch’s model. The resistance of the Petrarchist code to the imitation of the external world applied equally to this genre, despite the presence of an extant image. Federica Pich underlines the indirect nature of the relationship with the portrait as image and concludes that the genre in fact tends to question the centrality of ekphrasis in the relationship between portrait and poetry.3 In particular, Pich highlights the strong mediation that a rigid and a priori defined code such as that found in the Petrarchist tradition exerts on the description of beauty. In addressing the image of the beloved, the text usually carefully selects the elements in the description, with barely any deviation from the traditional 1 On this tradition see the fundamental volume by Federica Pich (Pich 2010) and the anthology edited by Pich and Lina Bolzoni (Bolzoni 2008). For another brief discussion of the relationship between image and poetry within this tradition see Monti 2019. In general, on the relationship between poetry and portraiture in the Renaissance see Quondam 1991; Shearman [1992] 2019: 108–48; and Bolzoni 2010. 2 Pozzi 1979: 4. For a recent and insightful analysis of Petrarch’s sonnets, see Lee 2017. 3 Pich 2010: 9.

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canon and from the codified relations of the lyric discourse. Poems on portraits are not attempts to produce descriptions of individual objects, but rather crystallised enunciations of an already encoded reality, thereby affirming the invisibility of the work of art itself. 4 As previously observed, this codified literary depiction of female beauty found its counterpart in portraiture, which in this period also frequently de-individualised the figure in favour of an idealised beauty.5 Within the subgenre of female portraits, the purpose was not to present the image of an individual but to evoke an ideal, which manifested its own aesthetic value. This cultural tendency, combined with the kind of non-descriptive relationship with the image that characterised the literary genre, meant that reference to a real portrait was not essential. This is further confirmed by the renewed success, at this time, of poetry addressed to an imagined, yet-to-be-realised portrait.6 It seems necessary, then, to concentrate rather on the poetic situation of observing the portrait itself. This leads to the second characteristic of poems on portraits that is evident in the Petrarchan model: the genre focuses heavily on the lyric subject, their emotional reaction to the substitute image, and the imagined dialogue with it. In other words, we see the transformation of the portrait into a poetic subject: as Lina Bolzoni observes, the Petrarchist tradition uses the theme of the portrait to develop new takes on the topoi of the amorous tradition and, in the end, to celebrate the work of literary writing itself.7 In lyric poetry, portraiture generally assumes the function of substituting the absent beloved. Its illusionary quality fulf ils the need for commemoration and consolation: it reminds the lover of the beloved’s appearance and relieves their suffering. This function appears to characterise portraiture well beyond this specif ic lyric genre: in much the same way, Petrarch also alluded to the portrait’s role as substitute, for example in the Secretum. 8 This foundational concept, which originated in antiquity, also pervaded Renaissance culture beyond—and perhaps as a result of—Petrarch’s work: from Alberti’s opening of the second book of his De pictura to Castiglione’s famous metaphor to describe his own Book of the Courtier, and onwards, as we shall see.9 The portrait was 4 Pich 2010: 310. 5 Cropper 1986: 175–90, which also discusses this tendency and analyses its connection with the problem of representation within Petrarchist poetry. See also Pich 2010: 230–32; and Syson 2008. 6 On this strand of the genre, which could also refer to real commissions, see Pich 2010: 241–70 and Gamberini 2019. 7 Bolzoni 2008: 14. 8 Petrarch did so through the voice—and words of condemnation—of Augustinus; see Bartuschat 2007: 220. 9 Bettini 1992.

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meant to f ill the void created by absence and help the memory by creating an illusion of presence.10 In his analysis of Petrarch’s sonnets, Bartuschat highlights one fundamental aspect of the genre and how it reflects upon art: this Pygmalionic illusion stems from an aesthetic experience of the beholder that is not pure, but conditioned by the amorous state of the lyric subject, ‘un’esperienza estetica che nasce dalla passione’ [an aesthetic experience that grows out of passion].11 This illusion is created by the ‘miracle’ of art, as well as by the collaboration of the viewer-lover, in a sort of emotive-imaginative version of ‘the beholder’s share’.12 As Bolzoni observes, however, the dialogue with the image in Petrarch’s sonnets discovers its own illusionary nature, and the lyric subject consciously acknowledges the lack of response from the beloved’s image: the portrait ends up highlighting ‘l’assenza proprio là dove promette di rappresentare, e quindi di dar vita alla presenza’ [the absence exactly where it promises to represent, and hence to give life to the presence].13 This same substitutive nature eventually produces an impasse that cannot be bridged even by the lover’s imagination: this lyric situation is inevitably characterised by a tragic tension that ultimately leaves the poet mourning the absence of the beloved. In light of this tradition, it is worth exploring how the genre is rewritten when the absence of the beloved becomes definitive: when the sitter is deceased, the commemorative aspect of portraiture and its role as a substitute become even more important. From this perspective, the opening of the second book of Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting proves particularly interesting: Tiene in sé la pittura forza divina: non solo quanto si dice dell’amicizia, quale fa li uomini assenti essere presenti, ma più i morti dopo molti secoli essere quasi vivi; tale che con molta ammirazione de l’artefice e con molta voluttà si riconoscono. [In fact, painting certainly has in itself a truly divine power, not only because, as they say of friendship, a painting lets the absent be present, but also because 10 Rosand 1981; Cropper 1986: 188–89; Shearman [1992] 2019: 108–09; Levy 2006; and Bolzoni 2008. The confusion between representation and reality typical of the genre is also the object of analysis in the essay by Martina Dal Cengio in the present volume. 11 Bartuschat 2007: 222 (unless otherwise stated, the translations in the text are mine). This fundamental aspect of the genre is also highlighted by Pich 2010. 12 For the concept of the ‘beholder’s share’, the perceptive collaboration of the viewer to create the illusion of art, see Gombrich 1977 [1959]: 153–244. This concept has also been used more specifically for Renaissance art—with reference to the spectator’s side of the artistic experience—by Shearman [1992] 2019 (esp. 192–226), who focuses less on the sensory perception and more on the role of the imagination of the viewer. 13 Bolzoni 2008: 11–12.

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it shows [to] the living, after long centuries, the dead, so that [these] become recognized with the artist’s great admiration and the viewers’ pleasure.]14

Although the passage refers to painting in general, the author could also be suggesting that portraits in particular could be of use to the living in their experience of unbridgeable absence, memorialisation, and longing for the dead.15 The passage also speaks about a pleasure and an emotional reaction produced in the viewer: we might ask ourselves what role these will have in the lyric subject-viewer’s mourning process. The same concept is also found in a later work by the Portuguese writer Francisco de Hollanda, the Four Dialogues on Painting (1548): And what of the way in which it [painting] makes present to us men long dead, whose very bones have perished from off the face of earth […]? […] It prolongs for many years the life of one who dies, since his painted likeness remains; it consoles the widow, who sees the portrait of her dead husband daily before her.16

The pleasure described in Alberti’s passage here becomes more precisely the solace that the widow derives from seeing the likeness of her dead husband. This is one of the possible responses to the painted image, but, as we shall see, Spinola and Turina also provide different, if not opposite approaches to the portrait as part of the mourning process.

Women Writers and Poetry on Portraiture The lyric subgenre described so far was almost exclusively a male domain, so the two case studies analysed here constitute a notable exception. The work of Spinola and Turina entails a necessary subversion of the standard dynamics between poetry, portraiture, representation, and society. Poetry on portraiture was part of the general lyric discourse and thus assumed its traditional approach to gender, 14 Alberti 2011b: 247. For the English translation, see Alberti 2011a: 44. 15 On the challenge that portraiture poses to death see Rosand 1981 and Bolzoni 2008: 51–53. Since antiquity, images have been a part of funerary ceremonies with the function of remembering the dead or substituting the dead body (see Freedberg 1989), and this practice was still common in the Renaissance, for example within academic circles (see Volpi 2000: 71); in general, Renaissance homes hosted images of the dead in every available corner, as Vasari testifies (Vasari 1966–87: III, 543–54). The idea of a connection between portraiture and the dead is further supported by the revival of formulas from Roman tombs in Renaissance portraiture, for example in Giorgione and Dürer (Thomson De Grummond 1975). 16 Hollanda 1928: 25–26. For a discussion of this passage in relation to the representation of models of mourning and to the male anxiety of preemptive mourning see Levy 2003a: 7–8 and Levy 2006: 120, respectively.

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while simultaneously consolidating even more the association of women with silent images and men with the poetic voice. A woman writer who describes a ‘silent’ portrait of a man, therefore, radically challenges this dynamic, undermining the literary and ideological structure of the genre. Not only does a female voice enter the male-dominated literary arena, against the norms of modesty and decorum that required her silence,17 but it also produces a further subversion: the male figure is framed as silent and crystallised in a role that is expected to be understood and described in terms of exterior beauty. The Petrarchist tradition, which implied an almost silent object of desire often presented only in terms of outward appearance, already posed challenges for women writing of a male beloved; poems on portraits are more challenging still, as they present a lyric situation in which these roles are confirmed and even bolstered by the presence of a silent effigy. These dynamics are dependent on the interaction between two parties: the portrayed image and the lyric subject-viewer. First, we f ind that male portraits tend to generate different poetry: Mary Rogers notes that in Renaissance writing on portraits female sitters are alive and, though rarely, do sometimes speak or otherwise respond to the viewer, whereas male sitters, even if described as alive and speaking, do not interact with the viewer.18 This produces two different types of poetry on portraiture: ‘Renaissance poems on male portraits are panegyrics purporting to describe objective realities, poems on female portraits tend to be sketches of a relationship, emphasising the subjectivity of the spectator/ poet/lover’.19 According to Rogers, this difference reflects a similar situation in Renaissance portraiture, with female portraits characterised by a responsiveness to the spectator, while male portraits are not. 20 Alongside the complexity of def ining this ‘responsiveness’ in artistic terms, however, Pich observes that many male portraits are also characterised by an intimate inspiration or seem to be open to a conversation with the spectator. According to Pich, then, the difference between the lyric poems can be attributed mainly to two factors: first, to a divergence between amorous poetry (on female portraits) and eulogistic poetry (on male portraits); and second, to the (gendered) distinction inherited from the ancient and medieval precepts of eulogy and description, according to which beauty is associated with the female passive subject while the male body always signif ies something other than itself and stands for moral virtues and heroic deeds.21 17 On women’s writing and its negotiation within Renaissance literature, see Jones 1990; Smarr 2001; Cox 2008; and Cox 2011. 18 Rogers 1986: 292. 19 Rogers 1986: 293. 20 Rogers 1986: 294–99. 21 Pich 2010: 208.

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On the other side of this dynamic we find the lyric subject-viewer, which reveals other reasons for these differences while also explaining the required re-adaptation of the genre. It is in the lyric female voice and the negotiation of its own existence that we might find an explanation for this gendered difference, because the transformation of the male figure into a silent, beautiful ‘object’ is described and narrated by a new subject. The very small number of poems on male portraits written by women, however, confirms that the presentation of a female viewer-poet observing the beautiful image of a silent man constitutes dangerous ground. Castiglione adopted the voice of his wife Ippolita Torelli to write about his own image, but it is not until later that women writers themselves begin to write about portraits—at the start, they write about female portraits: Girolama Corsi Ramo’s sonnet on her own portrait, Veronica Gambara’s poem on the portrait of her sister (probably sent to Pietro Bembo), Laura Battiferri’s poem on her portrait painted by Bronzino, and Veronica Franco’s poem on her own portrait, which was gifted to King Henry III of France.22 Notably, these examples eliminate any dimension of desire between the spectator and the portrait and present almost exclusively the simple observation of the image; furthermore, they place the woman’s viewing experience in the context of gift-giving, correspondence with, or address to the painter, therefore making the experience public and socially controlled. It is only with the work of Gaspara Stampa that a female voice finally lays claim to the genre.23 Significantly, though, in her poem the object-portrait does not actually exist: the effigy of her beloved Collaltino is yet to be realised and probably never will be. By publicly inviting artists to take up the endeavour, moreover, Stampa’s poem still implies a degree of social control over the female viewing experience, which is neither private nor intimate. The portrait is treated as a dangerous object, due to its potential to arouse passion and sexual desire: this is unsurprising, if we think that portraits were gifted to express a ‘romantic’ connection between bride and groom, and even between lovers. In this difficult negotiation, the fact that both Turina’s and Spinola’s husbands were dead may have allowed them to exploit the genre despite its gendered conventions. On a social level, the husband’s death authorised and in fact actively encouraged his commemoration in portraiture, enabling female viewing as long as it ensured that the husband would continue being part of his wife’s life. This is confirmed by the practice of portraying widows holding or alongside the portrait 22 On Castiglione’s poem see Shearman [1992] 2019: 135–36; Levy 2006: 119; and Bolzoni 2010. On Corsi Ramo’s poem, see Cox 2008: 51 and Bolzoni 2008: 43–44. On Gambara’s and Franco’s, see Pich 2010: 188–90. On Battiferri’s, see Bolzoni 2008: 55–58 and Pich 2010: 305–08, with further bibliography. 23 On Stampa’s sonnet see Pich 2010: 295–96. On Stampa’s diptych of sonnets on an imaginary double portrait, see also Muriel M. S. Barbero’s essay in this volume.

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of their husband.24 On a more literary level, the death of the male beloved provided a situation in which he could honourably be silent and reduced to a beautiful image-object.

Livia Spinola: The Consolation of the Image Livia Spinola remains a very obscure figure in literary history: a member of the Genoese patriciate, married to the nobleman Alessandro Spinola, we only know that she was active between the 1580s and 1590s and that she maintained a poetic and non-poetic correspondence with Angelo Grillo and Torquato Tasso. Few of her poems survive, scattered across anthologies, and there is no evidence of any complete collection attributable to her.25 Among the very few traces of Spinola to have come down to us, however, is a remarkable poem dedicated to the portrait of her husband Alessandro made by the Genoese painter Bernardo Castello (1557–1629): Qual vite che dell’orno è sciolta unquanco cui s’avviticchia a terra, incolta langue, e calcata or dal gregge ed or dall’angue d’empio veleno aspersa, alfin vien manco; tal io giacea dal duolo oppressa, e bianco avea il volto e quasi il corpo esangue, ch’era agghiacciato tra le vene il sangue, né trar potea più molto il debil fianco, quando tu, del mio fin pietoso, desti, Castel, soccorso al viver frale e in carte formasti vivo il mio consorte amato. E tanto il valor tuo nell’opra ergesti che, col pennel ch’Amor sostenne in parte, in dar la vita a un uom, tre vite hai dato. [Just as a vine, when it has come loose from the ash tree that anchors it to earth, languishes unnourished and finally withers, trodden by the herd and spread with evil poison by snakes, || so too I was lying stricken with grief, my face white and my body almost bloodless, for the blood had frozen in my veins, and I could barely drag along my weakened limbs. || Then you, pitying my plight, Castello, 24 On which see Levy 2003b: 223; more broadly on the role of primary mourner assigned to women within a discourse of male anxiety and preemptive mourning see Levy 2006. 25 Cox 2013: 399.

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gave succor to my frail life and formed my beloved consort alive upon the page. || So high did your genius rise in this work that, with the brush Love held for you in part, in giving life to one man, you gave three lives.]26

The poem opens with a description of Spinola’s condition, first introduced through the simile of the vine. She is described as being in extreme grief, on the verge of death, before help comes in the form of a gift of her dead husband’s portrait. The painter is praised for having been able to ‘form upon the page’ her husband as if he were alive, thus also giving new life to Spinola. The ‘in morte’ occasion of the text seems to be indicated by the ending: although the previous semantic reference to the living image could indicate mere absence, the final verse is hard to explain unless the loss is permanent. Moreover, as Virginia Cox has noted, the metaphor of the vine, a topos of marital fidelity, is probably taken, in this ‘tragic version’, from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (XX.99), where it symbolises another situation of suffering and death.27 A final confirmation of the ‘in morte’ context derives from the rhyme scheme: in presenting rhyming words such as esangue and ergesti that are not in the Petrarchan corpus, the poem seems to refer to another text by Tasso, ‘Mirar due meste luci in dentro ascose’, a poem dedicated to his friend Ascanio Mori for the death of his son Africano.28 The f irst notable aspect of the poem is that Spinola directly addresses the painter, thanking as well as praising him. This choice obviously implies a strong social dimension to the poem, which is deployed as an elegant form of communication. Moreover, the way in which that praise is expressed is quite interesting: the eulogy and the gratitude are described in terms of the salvation of a dying lady. Spinola is depicted in a condition of extreme suffering, unable to console herself. This lyric situation connects Spinola’s poem with other gendered stereotypes related to grief: for instance, the idea that women’s grief, given their lack of rational control of the passions, tends to be exaggerated, always on the verge of despair, with a risk of physical deterioration and possibly even suicide. Only through the intervention of a male agent can the worst be averted. 29 If Spinola embraces this narrative, it is in order to negotiate her public image, 26 The text is published in the anthology of lyric poetry by Renaissance women writers edited by Cox 2013: 151, from which the translation given here is taken. 27 Cox 2013: 151. Cox presents the same reading of the text and attributes it to in morte verse (Cox 2013: 151). 28 Tasso 1994: n. 1328. 29 This narrative is so established throughout both classical and Christian culture that it is almost a literary genre in its own right; one need only consider the countless letters of consolation sent by male authors to grieving women. On the Renaissance consolatory tradition, see McClure 1990 and Stroppa and Volta 2019.

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especially in her newly widowed condition. She resorts to the non-threatening and reassuring image of a woman who is saved by a man, complying with the demands of society. The poem is in keeping with the eulogistic strand of the tradition, which usually places the painter as the centre of the lyric occasion: the portrait is not used to start an intimate dialogue with the beloved, but rather to praise the painter, who has won the battle against nature by breathing life into an inanimate object, and defeated death by making the deceased come to life. The portrait is thus capable of fulf illing the myth of Pygmalion, at least in lyric terms. Interestingly, Love provides essential help to the painter as he draws the image of the beloved: this hints at the collaboration mentioned above, of the viewer-lover’s imagination in the illusion of a living image, which then forms the basis for the consolatory value attributed to the portrait within the tradition of the genre. But here sorrow is not caused solely by absence, but by the death of the beloved: the portrait becomes part of a consolation strategy employed by the lyric subject in order to overcome her sorrow. Livia Spinola’s poem frames the object-portrait as positive, capable of reproducing her husband’s living image and providing consolation for his absence. The image’s powerful ability to remind the mourning widow of her beloved is a strong form of consolation, which helps her to transfer her attachment onto a substitute and cope with her grief. In addition to the dialogue by Francisco de Hollanda, which referred to a painted image, in the Italian context we find the same concept in a conduct text for widows from this period, Giulio Cesare Cabei’s Ornamenti della gentil donna vedova (1574). A widow can recognise the image of her dead husband in her sons and thus find some temporary solace, especially, as in Spinola’s case, when the haunting memories of the past push her almost to the brink of death: E non pur dal continuo apparir di quelle [tutte le cose passate] è tormentata, ma dal vedersi ogn’hor inanci i pargoletti figli, è in modo afflitta, che meraviglia non fora se lo spirito di lei, vago di seguir quello del morto marito, quel misero corpo abandonasse: e avenga che in tante miserie null’altra cosa più cara le sia, che il veder nel volto di quelli l’imagine del morto padre, non dimeno veggendosi per sempre da quello abandonata, a novo pianto a novi gridi la misera è sforzata. [And she is not only tormented by the constant appearing of those [all the past things], but by viewing in front of her at every moment the little children, she is so afflicted that it would be no wonder if her spirit, out of herself, yearning to follow that of the husband, abandoned that miserable body: and although in so many miseries no other thing is dearest to her than to see in the faces of them

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the image of the dead father, nevertheless, finding herself forever abandoned by him, the poor one is forced to new weeping and new cries.]30

The echo of the man’s image in his sons retains an ambivalent power, which recalls the contradictions of poetry on portraiture. The image comforts the lover by reminding her of the deceased, while at the same time highlighting his very absence. It takes a great artist to bridge that gap, an artist who can give life to the image: this is what is achieved, for Spinola, by the portrait of her husband, which has transformed the memory of absence into a memory of presence without (apparently) breaking the illusion.

Francesca Turina: The Dangers of the Image Francesca Turina’s poetry provides another very valuable case study for this tradition and for women’s writing more broadly. In contrast to Spinola, we know much more about Turina’s life, mainly thanks to the work of Paolo Bà.31 Born in Sansepolcro in 1553, in 1574 she married Giuliano I Bufalini, Lord of San Giustino (Umbria). Her husband died in 1583, leaving Turina with three small children and all the family inheritance to manage, which she did quite successfully. In 1595 Turina published her first collection of poetry, the Rime spirituali, containing a substantial number of texts on the Passion of Christ and an appendix of ‘in morte’ poems commemorating her husband.32 After moving to Rome as a lady-in-waiting to the noblewoman Lucrezia Tomacelli, she published a second collection of poems, the Rime, in 1628.33 This collection includes a poem on the portrait of Giuliano: Diletto mio, che ’l sol mi rassomigli e quanto bello sei, tanto fedele, ché non rispondi e stai così crudele, e qual solevi già non mi consigli? Non vedi tu con quai feroci artigli squarcia Fortuna del desio le vele? 30 Cabei 1574: 5–6. On the tradition of conduct texts for widows see Pucci 2015 (on this specific point see p. 201); and Sanson 2015b and Sanson 2016. The idea of sons as living images of fathers and then agents of remembrance is widespread in the Renaissance, as we can find it implied by Petrarch to explain his theory of imitation as well as in more specific consolatory texts, such as Giovanni Conversini’s De consolatione in obitu filii (see McClure 1990: 111). 31 For the complete list of his works see Bà 2010: 141, n. 1. 32 The modern edition is Bà 2005; see Wainwright 2022. 33 The modern edition is Bà 2010. A bilingual edition of a selection of Turina’s poems has been edited by Natalia Costa-Zalessow (Turina 2009).

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Forse tu desto al suon di mie querele a soccorrer venisti i miei perigli? Ben riconosco le sembianze e gli occhi del mio signore e la bell’aria umana: e l’ardente desio fa che ti tocchi. Lassa! ma pasco il sen d’un’ombra vana, e dico fra pensier’ torbidi e sciocchi: ‘Misera, di dolor vôi farti insana?’.34 [My darling one, you who to my eyes resemble the sun, as faithful as you are lovely, why do you not respond? Why are you so cruel, not counselling me as was once your wont? || Can you not see with what fierce claws Fortune is tearing at the veils of my desire? Perhaps you have come to help me in my peril, awakened by the sound of my laments? || I recognise very well the features and the eyes of my lord and his kindly air, and my ardent desire makes me touch you. || Alas! I am feeding my breast with a vain shadow and tell myself amid my troubled and foolish thoughts, ‘Poor wretch, will you let grief drive you mad?’]35

The difference between Turina’s and Spinola’s poems is striking. For Turina the portrait constitutes less of a social occasion than an intimate lyric situation: she does not address the painter, but turns directly to the portrait. Turina’s lyric subject begins a dialogue with the image (even if it is not immediately clear, as we shall see), transferring the subject’s emotional attachment onto the object-portrait. As Cox has noted, moreover, by using a rubrica declaring the poem’s theme, Turina can ‘dramatize the poet’s delusion’ caused by the image-portrait ‘directly within the poem, without the need for narrative contextualization’.36 It is indeed very interesting to observe how this delusion is played out in the poem in order to immerse the reader in the poet’s lyric experience. The opening ‘diletto mio’ is in itself ambiguous: the apostrophe could easily refer to the dead husband himself, not to his portrait. We are actually kept in the dark about the identity of the referent, at least at the start. As well as taking advantage of the topos of the deceased beloved appearing to the poet, Turina plays with her lyric tools, intentionally blurring the line between the beloved and the image, the letter and the metaphor, to reinforce the illusion. The ‘diletto mio’, following a traditional trope, is likened to the sun, but Turina uses the trope to feed the ambiguous illusion: does she mean that the portrait resembles the husband, or 34 Poem numbered 167, cited from Bà 2015: 214. 35 The translation is from Cox 2013: 156. Another translation can be found in Turina 2009: 143. 36 Cox 2013: 156.

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that it was the husband himself who resembled the sun? As readers, we thus find ourselves experiencing the same confusion as the lyric subject before the image, trapped in the same Pygmalionic fantasy. Turina does not simply narrate the illusory experience of the viewer, but enacts it directly in the poem and draws the reader into it. The fantasy continues in the lines that follow, as revealed by the question at the end of the quatrain: Turina expects an answer from the beloved-portrait, a piece of advice, as used to happen when he was alive. A fear emerges, then, that further complicates but also partially reveals the illusion: after having apparently found herself before her beloved once more, and having been convinced by the outward resemblance, Turina does not recognise the beloved’s interiority. The illusion is so powerful that the lyric subject almost seems to believe that her beloved has changed, his appearance before her becoming unsettling: the dead eyes look at her with cruel detachment. The poem then takes the form of a reproach, as the lyric subject laments her feeling of abandonment and the lack of any help from her dead beloved (or again from his portrait). The second quatrain does not break the illusion and further reinforces the ambiguity: we are still not permitted to know whether the lover is addressing the portrait or her husband. The desire of the lyric subject gradually changes her attitude towards the imagebeloved, and her final question at the end of the second quatrain (‘Perhaps you have come to help me in my peril, awakened by the sound of my laments?’) allows for the possibility that her husband has actually come to help her. In the first tercet, the lyric subject seems to recognise her husband’s beautiful appearance: the image of the portrait and its fascinating resemblance are still not acknowledged as such. This could be the first moment of awakening, where the lyric subject finally sees and identifies the difference between reality and illusion by acknowledging the nature of the portrait and describing it in terms of resemblance to the beloved. In fact, the power of the image is still so intense that Turina confesses that her longing for her husband makes her touch the portrait: the illusion is far from being dispelled; it is reaching its climax. The tactile and almost sensual contact with the portrait has some precedents in the genre, when the erotic potential of the portrait makes it concrete and seductive.37 As is often the case, when Turina tries to reach for her beloved, she realises her mistake. The final awakening takes place in the last tercet, marked by the exclamation ‘Alas!’: Turina finally realises the full extent of her painful illusion. This realisation constitutes another notable aspect of Turina’s reinterpretation of the genre: she links the illusion of the image to the difficult process of grieving. 37 See Pich 2010: 122–123. According to Cox, Turina is also referring to Dante’s attempt to embrace his friend Casella in Purg., II.79–81.

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The image is feared because of its illusionistic power, which, when combined with the emotional weakness caused by grief, could drive her to madness. The two main sources that Turina draws on in building her text are enlightening in this regard. The first, signalled by the rhyme occhi : sciocchi, but also by a general lexical dissemination (pensier’, vana) and the dialogic structure of the poem, is Petrarch’s Rvf 242: in Petrarch’s text, the lyric subject is described as oblivious of himself on the basis of his state of amorous alienation.38 In Turina’s work, however, the question is more serious: the very last word, insana (‘mad’) introduces a pathological dimension that evokes mental insanity. The second source for the poem is an ‘in morte’ text, Bernardo Tasso’s ‘Lasso quel vento di diletto umano’, signalled by the rhyme umano : insano, but also by other words such as diletto and lasso.39 Once again, however, in Turina’s sonnet we find something important that is missing in the source: the presence of the portrait and the desire to touch it, which make it dangerous. While the texts share the condition of bereavement, the prospect of madness originates from a prolonged contemplation of the image. In particular, the risk of insanity caused by the image is inherent to grief (‘di dolor insana’) and might be linked to the lack of rational control traditionally associated with women (although the risk was present for men too, as Bernardo Tasso’s text suggests). Here such risk is also connected to an attachment to the dead body and an unsound, continuing attraction to it. 40 In any case, the solution for Turina seems to reside precisely in interrupting the vision and rejecting the image, which is, at least temporarily, the only way to preserve a sound mind and continue grieving. Turina’s poem, then, presents her husband’s portrait as a real threat to her journey from grief to spiritual conversion. That risk appears more concrete and immediate to us because Turina draws the reader into the confusion of the lyric subject. By making us see through the eyes of her lyric subject, Turina seems to present the true ekphrastic meaning of the genre: in reading her text, we understand why the direct description of the image is not fundamental, but actually secondary. What matters in contemplating the portrait of the beloved is the lyric experience of it, not only in terms of changing the focus from the exteriority of the image to the 38 ‘—Or tu ch’ài posto te stesso in oblio | et parli al cor pur come e’ fusse or teco, | miser, et pien di pensier’ vani et sciocchi! || ch’al dipartir dal tuo sommo desio | tu te n’andasti, e’ si rimase seco, | et si nascose dentro a’ suoi belli occhi’ [Now you who have forgotten your own self | talk to your heart as if you still possessed it, | poor wretch, so full of vain and silly thoughts! || For by departing from your highest wish | you went away and your heart stayed with her | and hid inside those lovely eyes of hers (Rvf 242.9–14)]. Petrarch’s text is cited from Petrarca 2015, while the translation is from Petrarca 1996c. 39 ‘Lasso, qual vento di diletto umano | la nebbia sgombrerà de’ dolor miei | dal cor già fatto per la doglia insano, | e da quest’occhi lagrimosi e rei?’ [Alas, what wind of human delight will clear the fog of my woes from a heart already driven insane by pain, and from these tearful and guilty eyes? (Tasso 1995a: II, 159)]. 40 The dead body constitutes one of the most delicate aspects of mourning as personal process and social ritual, across different cultures. See De Martino 1958; and Favole 2003.

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interiority of the poet, but in terms of building up our visual capacity in order to return to the image and see it truly, with the interior eye, in all its significance revealed by the relationship between the subject of the portrait and the subject of the poetry. We saw above that poems on the portrait of the beloved do not present a ‘pure’ aesthetic experience, and in fact they do not aim to do so: this type of poetry on portraits is designed to make us look at the image as the lover does, to see what uninterested eyes cannot see and to be part of the fascination that the portrait of the beloved can exert.

Conclusions The case studies analysed here exemplify what appears to be a very rare instance in Renaissance literature: that of a woman writer ‘representing’ herself in front of the portrait of the beloved. Although the number of cases analysed is too small to allow us to draw any definitive conclusions, some interesting proposals could be put forward about the ways in which women’s writing reshaped the genre. The female lyric subject observing and interacting with the substitute effigy of a male beloved implies a double inversion of roles within the genre and produces a different treatment in terms of the description of the image and the type of engagement with it. In particular, the two poems by Spinola and Turina present little or no description of the beloved—at most, his exterior appearance is simply recognised in Turina’s text—not even in the codified and non-visual way that characterises the genre. As mentioned above, the difference between poetry on male and female portraits is partly attributed by Pich to the divergence between amorous and eulogistic poetry and to the gendered distinction within the precepts of eulogy and description of women and men; alongside this, Pich also notes that the subversion of traditional roles—female viewer-poet and male image—entails an attenuation of those divisions.41 In relation to this hypothesis, we could observe here that the beauty of any representation of a male figure might be recognised and declared, but it is not described. What these two texts by women writers share is a silence regarding the husband’s body, as both Spinola and Turina rather focus on the role of portrait in their own lyric and existential trajectory. Together with the traditional precepts of gender representation, the re-adaptation of the genre by women is also connected to the legitimacy of female desire and the representation of the male body in Renaissance lyric poetry. 41 Pich 2010: 208. On the other hand, throughout the century, male lyric subjects speaking on male portraits would also start to function as Rogers’s ‘sketches of a relationship’ (I would like to thank Virginia Cox for this observation).

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The analysis of the female subject’s agency as a lover also highlights the obstacles that the genre posed for women writers. The rarity of poems on portraits of the beloved by women writers is revealing in itself, but the difficult negotiation they had to undertake when entering this genre is also clear in both cases. Spinola hence chooses the eulogistic strand, thus accepting a public dimension to her observation of the portrait: no intimate communication with the portrait is represented and the existence of the portrait itself is justified by its role in snatching the poet away from death. Turina, meanwhile, does not adopt such a cautious position, and instead represents herself as caught by the desire to physically engage with the portrait; however, this desire does not only clash with reality, but is also immediately rejected. This rejection is accompanied by the realisation of the risks of that illusion and of a bodily relationship with the portrait (and, through it, with her deceased husband), which would lead to madness. The obstacles posed by this genre for women writers, however, do not hinder the creativity of their responses to it: these two examples alone illustrate very different approaches to the observation and role of the portrait. Spinola represents the positive side of the power of the image, as a source of life in the darkest moments of her bereavement. The Pygmalionic power of the portrait is not treated in terms of the opposition between reality and illusion, but is accepted for its therapeutic effects on Spinola’s near-death condition. Turina, on the other hand, chooses a more negative framing for the power of the image, decrying its illusionary quality. At the same time, she profoundly embraces the essence of the genre of poetry on portraiture and its peculiar experience of the image. She exploits that confusion, revealing the aesthetic experience unique to the genre—which is ‘impure’, in Bartuschat’s words—and using it to invite the reader into that same illusion.

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McClure, George W. 1990. Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Monti, Simone. 2019. ‘“Mostragli nel mio cor l’essempio vero”: Marino e il ritratto della sua donna nella Galeria’, in Parola all’immagine: esperienze dell’ecfrasi da Petrarca a Marino, ed. by Andrea Torre (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi), pp. 161–75. Petrarca, Francesco. 1996c. The ‘Canzoniere’ or ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’, trans. with notes and commentary by Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 2015. Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori). Pich, Federica. 2010. I poeti davanti al ritratto: da Petrarca a Marino (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Pozzi, Giovanni. 1979. ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d’inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, Lettere italiane, 31: 1–30. Pucci, Paolo. 2015. ‘Finalmente libera, ma non per molto: la vedova nella trattatistica italiana del XVI secolo’, Rivista di Studi Italiani, 33: 187–214. Quondam, Amedeo. 1991. ‘Il naso di Laura. Considerazioni sul ritratto poetico e la comunicazione lirica’, in Quondam, Il naso di Laura: lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del Classicismo (Modena: Panini), pp. 291–328. Rogers, Mary. 1986. ‘Sonnets on Female Portraits from Renaissance North Italy’, Word & Image, 2.4: 291–305. Rosand, David. 1981. ‘Alcuni pensieri sul ritratto e la morte’, in Giorgione e l’umanesimo veneziano, ed. by Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence: Olschki), pp. 293–308. Sanson, Helena. 2015b. ‘Widowhood and Conduct in Late-Sixteenth Century Italy: The Unusual Case of La vedova del Fusco (1570)’, The Italianist, 35: 1–26. Sanson, Helena. 2016b. ‘Conduct for the Real Widow: Giulio Cesare Cabei’s Ornamenti della gentildonna vedova (1574)’, in Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470–1900: Prescribing and Describing Life, ed. by Helena Sanson and Francesco Lucioli (Paris: Classiques Garnier), pp. 41–62. Shearman, John K. G. [1992] 2019. Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Smarr, Janet L. 2001. ‘Substituting for Laura: Objects of Desire for Renaissance Women Poets’, Comparative Literature Studies, 38: 1–30. Solerti, Angelo. 1895. Vita di Torquato Tasso (Roma: Loescher). Stroppa, Sabrina, and Nicole Volta (eds.). 2019. Forme della consolatoria tra Quattro e Cinquecento: Poesia e prosa del lutto tra corte, accademia e sodalitas amicale (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Syson, Luke. 2008. ‘Belle: Picturing Beautiful Women’, in Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Andrea Bayer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 246–54. Tasso, Bernardo. 1995a. Rime, ed. by Domenico Chiodo (Turin: Res). Tasso, Torquato. 1994. Rime, ed. by Bruno Basile (Rome: Salerno).

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Thomson De Grummond, Nancy. 1975. ‘VV and Related Inscriptions in Giorgione, Titian, and Dürer’, Art Bulletin, 57: 346–56. Turina, Francesca. 2009. Autobiographical Poems: A Bilingual Edition, ed. by Natalia Costa-Zalessow and trans. by Joan E. Borrelli with Natalia Costa-Zalessow (New York: Bordighiera). Vasari, Giorgio. 1966–87. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi (Florence: Sansoni). Volpi, Caterina. 2000. ‘I ritratti di illustri contemporanei della collezione di Cassiano dal Pozzo’, in I segreti di un collezionista. Le straordinarie raccolte di Cassiano dal Pozzo, ed. by Francesco Solinas (Rome: Edizioni De Luca), pp. 68–78. Wainwright, Anna. 2022. ‘Outdoing Colonna: Widowhood Poetry in the Late Cinquecento’, in Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact, ed. by Virginia Cox and Shannon McHugh (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), pp. 95–113.

About the Author Simone Monti received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently working at the Warburg Institute Library. His research interests include Renaissance women’s writing, Petrarch and lyric poetry, and book history and manuscript culture, with a particular focus on the relationship between literature and social, cultural, and art history.

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In Medusa’s Eyes: Petrification and Marble Portraits in Late Sixteenth-Century Poetry Martina Dal Cengio

Abstract This essay investigates literary ‘representations’ of marble portraits in the late sixteenth century, shedding light on the evolution of a Petrarchan theme up to the Renaissance period. By reshaping the metre, the identity of the marble subject, and the stylistic construction of these texts, such literary ‘representations’ became increasingly detached from the original Petrarchan model. Over time, moreover, the predominant poetic device became that of the talking statue that retells its own story. This latter change invites questions about the uncertain boundary between art and reality, particularly in the case of sculpture, and leads to a reconsideration of the late sixteenth-century enthusiasm for (and influence of) epigrams of classical and neo-Latin imprint. Keywords: Petrarchism, petrification, Medusa, marble portraits

In recent years, much research has been done on the theme of portraiture in literature and the visual arts, focusing primarily on the relationship between poetry and painting.1 Literary criticism has paid less attention—indeed, less than the poets themselves—to the intersection of poetry and sculpture.2 There are a number of potential approaches that could be adopted to explore this theme; the purpose of the 1 The body of scholarship on this topic includes fundamental studies such as Damianaki Romano 1998; Pommier 2003: 47–95; Dillon Wanke 2004; Galli, Piccinini, and Rossi 2007 (especially Federica Pich, ‘Il ritratto letterario nel Cinquecento. Ipotesi e prospettive per una tipologia’, pp. 137–68); Bolzoni 2008; Ellero 2009; Pich 2010. 2 For a recent contribution on portrait busts see Kohl and Müller 2007. Poems dedicated to wax portraits remain very neglected by critics and require a completely different approach to those dedicated to portraits in stone. In fact, wax portraits (predictably) tend to carry a theme of tenderness as opposed to the hardness of the beloved and suggest connections with the theme of love’s fire. One example of this: ‘Fragil vetro, vil cera, arido legno’ by Gian Battista Leoni, madrigal whose argomento reads ‘Ritratto di cosa amata in Cera’ (Leoni 1602: fol. 9r).

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch03

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current study, however, is to briefly outline the literary ‘representations’ of marble portraits3 in the late sixteenth century, 4 in order to shed light on the evolution of a theme that was important to Petrarch and to the whole of the Renaissance, but was destined to undergo significant changes. If we limit our perspective to lyrics concerning portraits in stone,5 we can identify four main trends: (i) at the beginning of the sixteenth century almost all the poems dedicated to a portrait in stone are strongly influenced by Petrarch (Rvf 77–78) and describe a lover who really existed; afterwards, they are almost all madrigals dedicated to an unidentified female portrait, probably entirely fictional; (ii) towards the end of the sixteenth century, we find increasingly bizarre poems whose formal and thematic features bear no relationship to the ekphrastic description of a bust based on the Petrarchan model; (iii) as the sixteenth century progresses, the poetic point of view shifts from being solely that of the poet-observer (as in Petrarch) to that of the talking statue telling its own story; (iv) by the end of the sixteenth century, we find an increasing number of madrigals dedicated to stone portraits of characters from classical mythology, especially Medusa, which depart decidedly from Petrarch’s model. In order to better grasp the nuance of these changes, the analysis will be limited to a small number of texts that are relatively little known and understudied, but that nonetheless provide a valuable sample of ‘stone images’ in poetry between the early sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Before analysing the poems themselves, we need to contextualise the relationship between the motif of the portrait in stone and the amorous subject matter. Starting from the ekphrasis of the bust of the beloved, re-identified in a sort of descriptio 3 During the Renaissance, in most of the poems devoted to portraiture the portrait is understood as a concrete object (whether invented or real) onto which a verbal portrait is superimposed, and thus corresponds mainly to the first category developed by Federica Pich (‘portrait as object’) (Pich 2010: 140). 4 The late sixteenth century is the period in which it became increasingly common to find canzonieri with a section dedicated specifically to portraits in their theme-based structure. Valerini’s La Celeste Galeria di Minerva (1588), with its series of poems dedicated to portraits of political personalities, and Marino’s Galeria (1619), with its series of poems dedicated to portraits and self-portraits, exemplify the culmination of this development. On the theme of the animated statue in Baroque literature, see Munari 2018. 5 For the sake of brevity, I will not analyse poems dedicated to statues of political or noble personalities, in which poets seek to eternalise these figures by combining the intrinsic solidity of marble with the eternal force of the poetic word. These poems are often almost devoid of ekphrastic elements specifically connected to the portrait itself. One example of this kind is the sonnet ‘Il gran destrero al gran Piroo sembiante’ (dedicated to the statue of Cosimo de’ Medici) by Gabriello Chiabrera (Chiabrera 2005: no. 217; see also no. 218 on the same statue). There were also several poems in praise of statues made by famous sculptors (and often friends), such as ‘Su la conca natia de l’onde fuore’ by Celio Magno (1535–1602) in praise of the famous sculptor Danese Cattaneo (Magno 1600: 17) and the sonnet ‘Quando del tuo valor l’alto concetto’ by Valerio Marcellino (1536–1602), a tribute to the bust of the poet Orsatto Giustinian (1538–1611) made by Alessandro Vittoria, now preserved in the Musei Civici in Padua (Giustinian 1998: n. CLXXII). For more details about these poems see Dal Cengio 2019.

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puellae, the sculptural subject lends itself to the expression of some crucial topoi of Petrarchan erotic lyricism.6 A common trope is the lover’s petrification before the perfection of his beloved, who is often metaphorically associated with Medusa (Rvf 179.10 and 197.6). Equally common, on the other hand, is the representation of the beloved as a beautiful but cold and insensitive stone effigy. Her hardness, relentless indifference towards the poet’s proferrings, and her total lack of pity for his suffering render the beloved as impassive and icy as a precious gemstone.7 The connection between the sculpted effigies and the effects of love’s symptoms leads to a broader reflection on the uncertain boundaries between art and reality. This ambiguity is typical of ekphrastic literature as a celebration of the artist’s skill. Nevertheless, and possibly thanks to sculpture’s three-dimensionality, the ambiguity between art and reality is even more significant in ‘marble’ poetry and is duly emphasised by poets through different lyric strategies. Many of the poems dedicated to marble portraits do not, in fact, describe a statue so perfect as to seem real, but—on the contrary—they refer to a statue which is the result of a living sitter’s petrification. Moreover, the topoi of the statue ‘coming alive’ and, vice versa, of the petrification of a living being were already recurrent in classical mythology8 and were also widely reprised in the Renaissance hermetic tradition.9 We may now turn to some exemplary lyrics on marble portraits to highlight their main features and their similarities to and departures from the Petrarchan model. I. Firstly, we shall focus on the evolution of poems that refer to female marble portraits. One significant sixteenth-century example is the sonnet that Antonio Brocardo (d. 1531) dedicated to the marble bust of the Venetian courtesan Marietta Mirtilla, a bust whose actual existence is uncertain.10 The text was composed in the 1520s but was published only posthumously in Rime di Broccardo et di altri authori (Venice 1538): 6 For the description of the beloved woman in poetry see Pozzi 1979; on the beauty of woman in Renaissance portraiture, see Cropper 1986. 7 The influence of Dante’s Rime on this imagery is essential (Alighieri 1987: n. 43–46). See, for example, Foster 1962; Suitner 1994; and Santagata 2004: 209–25, 231–32. 8 In addition to the famous myth of Pygmalion (Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.243–97), there are a number of cases of punitive petrif ication imposed by the gods, as in the famous myths of Circe, Proetus and Polydectes, Propoetides, Olenus, Lethaea, Niobe, Theagenes, and Mitys (for the latter see Aristotle, Poetics, IX.1452a.1–11). 9 For instance, the theme of the animation of the statues is recurrent in the Asclepius, a treatise describing the rites that would animate the statues and allow the use of their powers (see Trismegisto 2006). 10 Antonio Brocardo, whose date of birth is unknown, was among the greatest Venetian poets of the early sixteenth century and is today known for his literary polemics against Pietro Bembo. We have

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O pura neve, o bianco marmo eletto, ove, se ben contemplo intento e fiso, lampeggiar veggo quel celeste riso, colmo tutto di gioia e di diletto; sasso tu non sei già, ché questo è il petto e di madonna il leggiadretto viso; quest’è quell’aria pur, che un paradiso chiaro dimostra nel suo bel conspetto. Antico Fidia, se dentro a’ tuoi marmi festi un bel volto già, chi vide in quello atti, riso, guardar, moto e favella, com’io, che ’n questa pietra tutto ’l bello scorgo de la mia donna? E certo parmi ch’ella ragioni meco, ed io con ella. [O pure snow, o noble white marble, where, if I look carefully, I see that divine smile shine, full of joy and delight; || you cannot be stone, because this is the chest of my beloved and this is her beautiful face, this is the heavenly atmosphere that her presence generates. || O, ancient Pheidias, if ever in your marbles you sculpted a beautiful face, you could not have managed to give it the life, smile, gaze, movement and speech || that I can see resplendent in this stone portrait of my beloved. And it really seems to me that she is talking to me, and I to her.]11

In describing the bust, whom he addresses directly with an apostrophe, the poet claims to be impressed by the almost perfect resemblance to the original. The whiteness that distinguishes the topical purity of the feminine canon corresponds to the luminous white of the marble, which perfectly reproduces the beauty of Marietta’s smile. The similarity is such that the poet oscillates between the impression of having the real Marietta in front of him (an impression conveyed in particular at the start of the second quatrain and in the conclusion) and the constant emphasis on the material qualities of the stone, almost as if to remind himself that the portrait is an artistic fiction (reaffirmed in each part of the sonnet). This text is a perfect instead no biographical information about Marietta Mirtilla. The poet also dedicates to her the following texts: Brocardo 2017: n. 29; a letter preserved in Lettere volgari 1545: fols 50r–51v; and two letters printed in Lettere volgari 1546: fols 124r–126r. For a recent and insightful analysis of Brocardo’s lyrics, see Brocardo 2017. 11 Brocardo 2017: no. 12. It is worth noting that Brocardo appeals to the Athenian sculptor and architect Pheidias and not, as Petrarch did, to Pygmalion (Rvf 78.12). Pheidias appears in a single instance in Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Rvf 130.10) but is a very frequent reference in sixteenth-century lyric poetry. Unless otherwise stated, all the translations are mine.

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example of a double portrait of the beloved, in marble and in verse. While there is no homage to the structure of the diptych Rvf 77–78, Petrarch’s legacy is clearly evident in Brocardo’s reuse of specific phrases: O pura neve, o bianco marmo eletto (Rime 12.1) lampeggiar veggo quel celeste riso (Rime 12.3) e di madonna il leggiadretto viso (Rime 12.6) ch’ella ragioni meco, ed io con ella (Rime 12.14)

marmo bianco (Rvf 51.9) e ’l lampeggiar de l’angelico riso (Rvf 292.6) leggiadretto velo (Rvf 52.5) ragionando con meco, et io con lui (Rvf 35.14).

The primary model for the sonnet is specifically Rvf 78, which has a strong thematic affinity, the same common rhyme A (-etto) and especially the same final image: Ma poi ch’i’ vengo a ragionar co·llei, benignamente assai par che m’ascolte, se risponder savesse a’ detti miei. (Rvf 78.9–11) [Then, when I come to speak to her, she seems to listen most kindly: if she could only reply to my words!]12

The reference to a bust so perfect as to appear alive and capable of speech inevitably recalls the myth of Pygmalion evoked in Petrarch’s sonnet. Many years later, the Venetian Luigi Groto (1541–1585), known as Cieco d’Adria, also composed a series of poems inspired by the bust of the beloved.13 Groto’s poetic work perfectly exemplifies the change in lyrical sensitivity between the early sixteenth century—broadly associated with Petrarchist–Bembian orthodoxy—and the late sixteenth century, at the dawn of the baroque style. Let us begin by observing the following poem, the first in a small lyric corpus devoted to the portrait: Ecco il ritratto vostro, in cui comprendo voi stessa, se non ch’egli non inspira, questo vivo sembrando, e statua sendo inganna ogni un che ’l mira. 12 Cited from Petrarca 2015. The English translation is from Petrarca 1976: 178. 13 Blind from birth, Luigi Groto was one of the greatest exponents of Venetian literature in the second half of the sixteenth century and he was very close to the poet Domenico Venier (1517–1582) and his prestigious literary circle, known such as ‘circolo Ca’ Venier’ (on which see Taddeo 1974). Author of numerous poems, published in several volumes from 1577, Groto was also a translator, actor, and celebrated playwright. For instance, in the field of theatre, Barbara Spaggiari has recognised Groto’s influence on Shakespeare and other Elizabethan authors (see Spaggiari 2009, with further bibliographical references).

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Voi colma il sen di somma crudeltate, e dipinta la faccia di pietate, chi vi mira ingannate: questo è rigido, freddo, duro, e bianco, bianca voi, dura, fredda, e rigida anco. Sordo egli, sorda voi, muto ei, voi muta. Non si muta ei, né ’l cor vostro si muta. Sol questa differenza vi confesso esser tra voi e lui, madonna, che esso mirar si lascia, e voi no ’l consentite, esso sta sempre fermo, e voi fuggite. [Here is your portrait, in which I comprehend you, but the portrait is not breathing, though seemingly alive, and, being a statue, deceives anyone who sees it; a woman with a soul of cruelty but a face of pity, you deceive those who observe you. This [portrait] is stiff, cold, hard and white; you are white, hard, cold, and even stiff. It is deaf, as you are; it is mute, as you are. It doesn’t change as your heart never changes. There is only one difference between you and it, my lady: it lets itself be watched, while you do not. It always stands still, while you run away.]14

The marble portrait in question is probably imaginary, as is the woman, and the madrigal primarily explores the illusion of reality inherent to the bust (hence the emphasis on inganno [deceit], ll. 4 and 7). The parallel between the real woman and her portrait is not based on physical resemblance, with the exception of the chromatic reference to whiteness (ll. 8–9), since female purity is matched by the bright colour of the marble. Once again, with an apostrophe Groto likens the lady’s icy demeanour, hardness and impassiveness to her marble effigy: deaf and mute to his profferings, the statue remains as unmoved as its model. Groto then remarks on the substantial difference between the woman and her double, eventually declaring to prefer the copy because it cannot walk away from his admiring gaze.15 In the work of a renowned master of stylistic virtuosity such as Groto, it is unsurprising that the theme of the double should also inform the structure of the text, starting from a metric scheme centred on the baciata rhyme: ABABCCcDDFFGGHH, with pronounced phonic proximity between the rhyme in -ate, -uta, and -ite. The apex of the duplicatio appears in the central part of the text, where the lines ‘questo è rigido, freddo, duro, e bianco, | bianca voi, dura, fredda, e rigida anco’ (ll. 8–9) repeat 14 Groto 2014: II, no. 402. 15 The same motif can be seen in Bembo: ‘ch’almen, quand’io ti cerco, non t’ascondi’ [because at least, when I look for you, you don’t hide yourself] (Bembo 1968: n. XIX.14).

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the exact same words in a perfectly reversed order. The line ‘Sordo egli, sorda voi, muto ei, voi muta’, perfectly divided into four segments, is the triumph of dualism and introduces the reader to the next line, bipartite and arranged in chiasmus, with repetition of the key word muta [mute]. While in line 10 muta functions as an adjective, in line 11 it is used instead as a verb, producing an equivocal rhyme, which emphasises once again the repetition of a copy, or twin, which is similar but not the same, just like the woman and her marble image. In fact, Groto dedicated six other compositions from his Rime to the relationship between reality and sculptural representation:16 404. Su ’l duro sasso fortunato, e altero per serbar nel suo intaglio il bel ritratto del corpo vostro, e vero, che il giorno io tengo in man, la notte a canto, con le incessabil onde del mio pianto, ho pur macchiato tanto, che a quella pioggia molle il marmo fatto si è già cavato, e intenerito alquanto: non concedete hor voi ch’io ingiusta, e dura chiami la mia sventura, poscia che ’l pianto nostro, che ha virtù d’ammolire il cor di sasso del ritratto vostro, di poi intenerire non puote haver valore benché fatto di carne il vostro core? [[Bent] on the hard stone, fortunate and proud of hosting the beautiful carved effigy of your real body, [effigy] which I hold in my hand during the day and beside me at night, I have covered it [the stone] with my incessant tears to the point that that soft rain has hollowed the marble and made it tender: won’t you now let me call my fate hard and unjust, since my weeping—capable of softening the heart of stone of your portrait—has no power to soften your heart of flesh?] 16 Groto 2014: II, nn. 404–409.

405. Se io narro al tuo ritratto il mio cordoglio, par che ei mi guati, e ascolti; e tu, se a te crudel narrar lo voglio, gli orecchi serri, e gli occhi adietro volti. Donque servir me fa la mia sventura donna di duri marmi assai più dura. [If I tell your portrait about my pain, it seems to look at me and listen; while you, if I want to tell you about my pain, do not listen and look away. Therefore, my adverse destiny made me serve a woman harder than hard stone.]

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406. Quando dianzi al tuo ritratto io sono, Donna, movo la lingua in questo suono: —Sappi che ’l cambio è eguale, o marmo, che così dal naturale mi rappresenti la mia donna bella: tu in lei ti volgi, in te già si volse ella. [When I am in front of your portrait, woman, I speak like this:—O marble that portrays so faithfully my beautiful lady, know that there is no difference: you turn into her, as she had already turned into you.] 408. Non sei, scoltura mia, la mia scoltura, ma sei proprio me stesso, che stando della mia Medusa appresso, che di cangiare in sasso have natura, dapoi che nel suo volto il mio fermai alla sua vista in sasso mi cangiai. [You are not, my sculpture, a sculpture of myself, you are my very self, because by being close to my Medusa, which has the power to petrify, after looking at her, at her sight I turned to stone.]

407. —Sei la pittura, o pur madonna istessa, tavoletta?—Son dessa. —Le molli membra sue già ruvide non son come le tue.17 —La ruvidezza, che io dimostro fuore, nasconde ella nel cuore. [O panel, are you a painting or are you my lady herself?—I am her.—(But) her soft skin is not rough like yours—The roughness that I show outside, she hides it in her heart.] 409. Perché come tu, mia cara scoltura, sei a me tanto egual nella figura, nell’esser, nel color, nella statura, così innanzi il saper che fosse amore, nel mio giovinil fiore, eguale a te non fui io nelle parti e sentimenti tui? Pria ch’io mirassi il volto e udissi il suono, per cui me stesso scondo ed abbandono qual hora il miro e l’odo, o me ’n ricordo, perché non fui, come tu, cieco e sordo? E a gli strai, di ch’Amor per saettarmi e suo soggetto farmi volea scemar la gravida faretra, perché non fui, come tu sei, di pietra? [Why, my dear sculpture, as you are so similar to me in appearance, in nature, in colour and in height, was I not so similar to you in feelings and attitudes before I knew what love was, in the prime of my youth?

17 In the critical edition (Groto 2014), l. 4 reads ‘già ruvide non son come le tue?’.

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like you, blind and deaf? And why was I not, like you, made of stone against the arrows from his quiver with which Cupid intended to strike me and make me his slave?]

In this cycle—which should be considered as a whole and, indeed, in the light of several other connections—we find traditional poetic ideas and motifs of Petrarchist love poetry, but adapted to the mannerist taste of the second half of the sixteenth century. Almost all the poems in the series develop the theme of a deceptive appearance, because the impression of similarity between the portrait and the original always translates into its opposite: not only is there a difference behind what appears to be alike, but the poem also always hides an argument in favour of the statue, which turns out to be preferable because it is less hard, less rough and less ‘made of stone’ than the real woman.18 In contrast to a poetic tradition in which the portrait, however much praised, is never equal to the original, here the poet instead prefers the statue to the woman. For opposite but complementary reasons, this inclination extends from the beloved to the poet himself, who in the madrigal ‘Perché come tu, mia cara scoltura’ (no. 409) turns to his own stone portrait and envies its condition, ultimately wishing he were his own bust: though the portrait is blind, deaf, and immobile, at least it would have had the firmness to protect itself from the darts of love. The theme of the woman’s hardness, which was the focus of ‘Ecco il ritratto vostro, in cui comprendo’ (no. 402), returns as a key element in madrigal no. 405, which is very similar in content. In this case, too, Groto establishes a comparison between the beloved, who is insensitive to the lover’s suffering, and her marble portrait, which at least gives the impression that she is looking at him and listening to him. This shift seems to be stylistically marked by the strong chiasmus in lines 2 and 4: ‘par che ei mi guardi, e ascolti’ and ‘gli orecchi serri, e gli occhi adietro volti’. The feminine hardness, clearly expressed in the last verse, is accompanied by an expressive chain of dental alliterations and phonic trails with pivot on the vowel -u. Similarly, the madrigal ‘Su ’l duro sasso fortunato, e altero’ (no. 404) combines the topos of ambiguity between reality and fiction with the usual reference to a hardness that extends to the woman, her bust and the poet’s hostile fate. In this case, however, to further underline his predilection for portraits, Groto emphasises 18 Not to be confused, for instance, with Bembo 1968: no. LXXXVI.12–14, where Bembo indeed does not draw a parallel between the beloved and her portrait, but between the beloved and her mythological alter ego, namely Medusa: ‘Medusa, s’egli è ver, che tu di noi | facevi pietra, assai fosti men dura | di tal, che m’arde, strugge, agghiaccia e ’ndura’ [Medusa, if it is true that you turned us into stone, then you were less hard than the one that burns, melts, freezes and petrifies me].

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the fact that the marble, unlike the beloved, can be hollowed and softened by his own tears (ll. 6–7).19 The overlap between reality and artistic fiction becomes even clearer in the subsequent madrigals, nos. 406 and 407, which are addressed directly to the work of art and display a remarkable rhetorical construction. More precisely, the first addresses the lady and gives voice to the perplexity of the lover before her portrait by reporting the words he addresses to the portrait itself, despite his awareness that the marble is nothing more than a reflection of the beloved, as also suggested by the stylistic game of mirroring and repetition showcased in the final hendecasyllable ‘tu in lei ti volgi, in te già si volse ella’ (l. 6). In madrigal no. 407, however, the poet is thrown into a state of confusion, as is the reader: ‘—Sei la pittura, o pur madonna istessa, | tavoletta?—Son dessa’ (ll. 1–2). The answer with a demonstrative pronoun (‘dessa’), in the first instance, might seem confusing. Only in the continuation of the verses does it become clear that what is speaking is the painting, whose external roughness matches the internal harshness of the woman.20 The ambiguity culminates in madrigal no. 408.21 The speaker claims to be the sculpture that portrays him, having become stone due to the effect of his own woman-Medusa, a topos that was already very widespread in Petrarch’s Canzoniere and in Petrarchist literature. However, in the Rvf Petrarch does not manage to give voice to his own petrification and the boundaries between portrait and reality remain comparatively more marked. The change identified in Groto, as we will see in more detail, becomes increasingly evident in the second half of the sixteenth century, coinciding, above all, with the growing popularity of madrigals. II. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, lyrics increasingly display eccentric thematic and formal features that set them apart from Petrarch’s poetics and its ekphrastic model. Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617) provides a perfect example of this taste for extravagance, writing poems that draw attention to curious sculptural subjects, such as ‘Ha moto, od erro? Anzi ha pur moto, e volo’ and ‘Saggio [s cultor,

19 The reference to ‘occhi molli’, to mean ‘tearful eyes’, is a very frequent image in Petrarch (for instance Rvf 50, 53, 67, 125, 127, 243, 250, and 320). 20 The use of the term ruvidezza (Groto 2014: II, no. 407, l. 5), which is very rare in sixteenth-century lyric language, should not be overlooked. 21 In this madrigal, the theme of the double is emphasised by precise stylistic strategies such as chiasmus (‘scultura mia, la mia scultura’, l. 1; and ‘nel suo volto il mio [volto]’, l. 5) and etymological reuse (cangiare, l. 4; and cangiai, l. 6).

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ch’ad innestare attendi’. 22 These two sonnets are part of Baldi’s Sonetti romani (Venice 1590), a collection of sonnets on the bellezze of Rome, and refer to two statues found in the garden of Villa Medici, near Villa Borghese, which portray Mercury and a humble gardener, respectively.23 Although the way in which the artworks are described is quite conventional, the poetic concetto itself is far from traditional. With a moving homage to antiquity, Baldi imagines strolling among the ruins of Rome along a typical tourist route and paying homage to statues, palaces, bridges, roman baths, and theatres. This sublime beauty leads him to ref lect on the traditional contrast between the city’s past grandeur and far less glorious present, a usual theme for the so-called ‘poetry of ruins’, a common genre in the Renaissance. Baldi’s treatment of portraiture departs signif icantly from Petrarch’s model, as emerges most strikingly in the lyrics on the portrait of Laura: Io vidi, e forse quello sembiante fu, ch’il buon Simon dipinse, quel dì che Laura finse con celeste penello: hor’in voi, che da quella havete il nome, di lei contemplo il volto, e l’auree chiome: forse l’alma di lei di Laura in Laura passò, pur come suole fra giacinti, e vïole, dolce passar di prato in prato l’Aura. [I saw, and perhaps it was, the likeness that the talented Simone created when he painted Laura with his divine brush; now in you, who take [Laura’s] name, I see her face and golden hair: perhaps her soul has passed on from Laura to Laura, just as the breeze passes from meadow to meadow, through hyacinths and violets.]24

The text begins with a reference to the famous portrait by Simone Martini (Rvf 77–78). Petrarch’s Laura is conflated with the Laura loved by Baldi (l. 5), so that there are two Lauras and two portraits, one material and one in verse. The theme 22 Baldi 1590: 280–81. Interestingly, Baldi composed the poem ‘Novo e dolce desio caste sorelle’ in praise of sculpture (Baldi 1590: 332–37). Connected to the courtly milieu of the Gonzaga, Farnese, and Della Rovere families, Bernardino Baldi was the author of many compositions, varied in their themes and metrical forms, and is a poet who deserves attention for the originality of his writings. For more information on the poet see Nenci 2005 and Cerboni Baiardi 2006. 23 See Filograsso 2005 and Baldi 2020. The collection of poems was written by Baldi around 1586. 24 Baldi 1600: 58.

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of the double resonates throughout the composition; for example, in the repetitions of words (ll. 3, 6, 7, and 10: ‘Laura’, ‘l’auree’, ‘Laura’, ‘Laura’, ‘l’Aura’; ll. 8 and 10: ‘passò’, ‘passar’; l. 10: ‘di prato in prato’). We are not dealing with a marble portrait here, but this poetic experiment nevertheless helps to illustrate how poets were moving beyond Petrarch’s model.25 In fact, Baldi’s poem is a madrigal, whose focal point is no longer the portrait of the beloved, but the game of mirrors sparked by the comparison with Petrarch’s diptych Rvf 77–78. The difference between Baldi’s madrigal and other Petrarchist poetry is substantial: Baldi does not really imitate the model but, on closer inspection, only mentions it, thus blurring the boundary between text and reference. By the end of the century, therefore, the poetic focus moved away from Petrarch’s work and the portrait of the beloved intended almost as a substitute for her presence and an opportunity to celebrate her beauty, the painter’s skill, and ultimately the poet himself. Instead, poems increasingly explored the uncertain boundary between art and reality, between what seems to be and what is—an evolution consistent with the features of a poetic trend whose fundamental aim was to generate surprise and amazement.

III. Until the second half of the sixteenth century, and in keeping with Petrarch’s model, poems had been adopted as the privileged form for expressing the viewer’s astonishment before a portrait, which was always described as mimetically perfect. Moreover, in Petrarch and Petrarchist poetry the boundaries between portrait and reality were quite defined, and the point of view generally coincided with that of the poet-spectator who described what he saw. In poetry of the late sixteenth century, however, the point of view tends to shift and becomes that of the statue itself, which tells its own story to the spectator-reader. As a consequence, poetry and sculpture are (ideally) merged into a single voice, thus erasing the descriptive distance that had characterised previous lyrics. In Petrarch, as well as in many early sixteenth-century lyrics, we have a clear awareness that we are engaging with an extraordinarily lifelike representation of a subject. By contrast, in the fusion between sculpture and poetry, since the work of art now speaks for itself, the ambiguity between artistic fiction and reality that is typical of poems 25 There are, however, several expressions that suggest a reference to Petrarch. For example, Baldi’s ‘celeste penello’ (l. 4) brings to mind Rvf 77, ‘Ma certo il mio Simon fu in paradiso’ (l. 7); or ‘auree chiome’ (l. 6) recalls Rvf 143, ‘Le chiome a l’aura sparse, et lei conversa’ (l. 9) or Rvf 159, ‘chiome d’oro fino a l’aura sciolse?’ (l. 6).

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on marble portraits reaches an extreme: the artistic subject is the result of the petrif ication of a real person, not its mere imitation. The choice to have the marbles speak directly is particularly important for the genre: the only evidence of the inanimate nature of the bust described in the poem was almost always its silence.26 The following poem by the Venetian madrigalist Carlo Fiamma,27 a member of the Paduan Accademia degli Orditi, provides a significant example of this trend: Già fu di pietra il core e Anasarete io fui che non credendo d’Ifi il grave ardore sasso mi rese Amore a gli occhi altrui, così non cangio mai stato o natura: fredda per crudeltà, per marmo dura. [My heart was once made of stone and my name was Anaxarete; and since I ignored Iphi’s love, Cupid turned me into stone for everyone to see, so I never change my state or nature: once my cruelty made me cold, now the marble makes me hard.]28

Fiamma gives voice directly to the Cypriot maiden Anaxarete, who scorned the love of the shepherd Iphis and remained unmoved even after he killed himself. As a punishment, Aphrodite turned her into a statue, as insensitive as her heart.29 Anaxarete tells her own story by conflating reality and fiction and tasks poetry with breaking the silence of the marble. Thus, the statue comes alive by revealing its identity and specifying that it does not only represent, but is Anasserete. A second theme evident here is the petrification of a living woman, whose turning to stone is the consequence of her naturally aloof and ‘cruel’ character. These themes were not Fiamma’s invention, but they can be traced back to illustrious precedents in earlier vernacular poetry 30 and in Greek and Latin literature, 26 We can recall lines 1–3 of a madrigal by Cesare Rinaldi: ‘Da un marmo esce una voce, | ch’à gli orecchi mi suona: ‘Incauta errante, | marmo son per Amor fido, e costante’’ [From the marble comes a voice that sounds in my ears like this: ‘Unwary wanderer, I am stone because of faithful and constant Love’] (Rinaldi 1588: 239). The Italian term errante (as in ‘caught in error’ but also ‘wandering’) includes allusions to sin and restlessness. 27 Carlo Fiamma’s exact dates of birth and death are unknown. 28 Fiamma in Gareggiamento poetico 1611: III, fol. 33v. Michelangelo Angelico’s madrigal ‘Anasarete ingrata’ (Gareggiamento poetico 1611: III, fol. 33v) is along similar lines. 29 The story is told in Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIV.698–771. 30 For example, in the sonnet ‘Che guardi e pensi? Io son di spirto priva’ by Antonio Tebaldeo (Tebaldeo 1989–92: II, 1, n. 223) the bust of Beatrice de’ Notari speaks in the text. A group of authors planned to write

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which represented parallel (sometimes alternative) models to the Petrarchan canon. Moreover, Fiamma’s poem is once again a madrigal and not a sonnet. This metric choice is significant, particularly in light of its classical influence: with its concision and brevity, the sixteenth-century madrigal was considered the most suitable metre for imitating the Hellenistic epigram, a form that was particularly in vogue in literary circles of the time. For instance, the first printed edition of the Antologia Planudea (Florence 1494) was reprinted around ten times over the course of the century. The cultural rediscovery of this florilegium, which was also translated into Latin on several occasions, likely left deep traces in the lyric culture of the time, becoming an alternative model to the dominant Petrarchan example. Any analysis of the shift discussed so far, as well as of the coeval device of speaking statues almost always portraying mythological subjects, should therefore acknowledge the existence of a dialogue between early modern poets and Hellenistic precedents.31 Indeed, in the Antologia Planudea, the motif of the uncertain identity—real or fictional—of the marble appears repeatedly, and it is not unusual to find words attributed to the statue itself.32 Finally, behind this approach we must not forget the influence of the Latin epigrammatic tradition,33 which inspired neo-Latin poems dealing with the theme of the sculpted subject.34 We can advance a further strand, which deserves more investigation: the influence of classical funerary epitaphs over sixteenth-century figurative lyrics. Indeed, in Fiamma’s collection funerary statues sometimes address the traveller (the spectator-reader) with an epigram to tell the story of the deceased.35 Seen in this light, Fiamma’s text discussed above can be read as an epigraph and at the same time as an allusion to the classical funerary motif overlaid with Petrarchan amorous themes. The work of Francesco Coppetta (1509–1553) should also be shortly mentioned here: Coppetta, certainly mindful of this funerary tradition, composed an ‘ottava lirica’—a less popular form, but not absent from the literary

a poetry collection on this bust (the Beatricium, to which Jacopo Sannazaro also contributed), but the project was never completed. See Bolzoni 2008: 157–60. 31 In addition, it is useful to remember that with the rediscovery of the Laooconte sculptural group at the beginning of 1506, modern sculptors came into direct contact with the Greco-Roman statuary. The discovery was greeted with a great collective enthusiasm, which the lyrics of many poets, especially in the region of Rome, testified to (see Maffei 1999). 32 For instance: Ant. Pal. XVI.97; XVI.129; XVI.317 (Antologia palatina 1981: IV.309, 325 and 413). 33 For instance, ‘Quis te Phidiaco formatam, Iulia, caelo’ (Marziale, Epigr. VI.13), dedicated to the statue of Julia, daughter of Emperor Titus. 34 See, for example, Battista Guarino (Guarino 1496: fols I8r e K3v), Michele Marullo (Marullo 1951: 68–69), and Jacopo Sannazaro (Sannazaro 2009: I, n. 63). 35 For instance, ‘Marmora parva quidem, sed non cessura, viator’ (Martialis, Epigr. X.63), epitaph of a matron.

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scene of the time—in which he gave voice to the statue of a deceased woman, who tells her own story.36

IV. Fiamma’s Anaxarete madrigal leads us to the last point of this chapter. In the early sixteenth century, poems dedicated to statues of lovers, friends, and politicians were by far the most common, following Petrarch’s model. Starting from the second half of the sixteenth century, however, we find an increasing number of madrigals that give voice to mythological figures (Narcissus, Echo, Cupid, Venus, and others) intent on telling their own story, a phenomenon probably largely due to the period’s taste for epigrams with a classical and neo-Latin imprint. The phenomenon influenced vernacular poetry as much as neo-Latin poetry, with trends similar to Latin epitaphs.37 In some cases, the texts concern ‘speaking portraits’, both sculpted and painted. Whilst the discussion of topoi and motifs, which continue to circulate widely in this period, exceeds the scope of this chapter, the function of these texts, which differs from that of the compositions on individual portraits of Petrarchan and Petrarchist memory, deserves to be addressed specifically. Not only is the usual amorous context abandoned, but the traditional descriptive-encomiastic focus on the object of the representation and the skill of its maker are lost, in favour of letting the sculpted portrait ‘tell’ its own story. Of these texts, those dedicated to ‘speaking’ mythological figures are of particular interest, especially the poems that lend a voice to Medusa, whose myth lends itself particularly well to the theme of petrification. The myth of Medusa is recurrent in Petrarch’s Fragmenta and consistently appears in Petrarchist poetry. The poets of the late sixteenth century, however, deviated substantially from this earlier poetic tradition: they no longer evoked Medusa as a metaphorical equivalent to the beloved, nor used her image to underline the difficulties of amorous passion. Her portrait, instead, became an opportunity to tell her side of the story, sometimes drawing inspiration from 36 ‘La dotta man che in questa pietra volse | far de le mie belezze eterna fede, | quanto può l’arte in sé tutto raccolse | e mise in opra, e tanto in me si vede; | ma già non giunse a quel che morte sciolse, | ch’ogni scarpello a la natura cede: | ma, se son tal, così di sensi priva, | beati gli occhi che mi vider viva!’ [The skillful hand that wanted to leave, in this stone, eternal memory of my beauty, put all the potential of art to work, which is very visible in me. But it [the artist’s hand] could not replicate the beauty that death has extinguished, because every chisel is vanquished by Nature. But if I am so [beautiful] while inert, blessed are the eyes that saw me alive!], with a strong echo of Rvf 309.14. For an insightful analysis of the text see Crismani 2012: n. 91. 37 On this subject, we should not forget that Luigi Groto wrote thirty-one compositions in Latin, which are very little known and are placed at the end of his Rime. Some of his carmina give voice to female characters, telling their stories.

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specific visual models, sometimes simply as an exercise of the imagination. Once again, we can use Groto’s Rime: Medusa Non è scoltura di colei, che ’n sasso cangiava questa, ma Medusa stessa. Però tien, chi qua giungi, il viso basso, se di stupor non vuoi cangiarti in essa. Mentre a questa parete il corpo lasso appoggiav’ella, vi rimase impressa. Ché poi che gli occhi in uno specchio tenne, per se stessa mirar, sasso divenne. [This is not just the statue of the one who turned those who saw her into stone, but Medusa herself. So, if you come here, keep your eyes down if you do not want, astonished, to turn into a statue like her. As she leaned her tired body against this wall, she got stuck to it. For, after looking in the mirror, at the sight of herself she turned to stone.]38

Moving away from the Ovidian story, Medusa, although petrified, is not defeated but still alive and dangerous, to the point that the poet urges us not to look at the bust so as not to risk petrification. The theme of the double, however, finds its full expression in the second half of the text where the author introduces the mirror in which Medusa has seen herself reflected, causing her own petrification.39 The central theme of the composition is indeed the statue of a mythological character, but on a deeper level the poem explores the ambiguity between reality and artistic mimesis (sculptural and literary), which is a key topic also in the poems discussed above. Possibly influenced by Groto’s text, Giovan Battista Marino (1569–1625) also dedicated several compositions to the sculpture of Medusa, including the following two:40 38 Groto 2014: I, n. 222. 39 These are specific stylistic strategies that point in this direction, such as etymological repetitions, phonic assonances, rhymic consonances, and the repetition of the term stone (‘sasso’) in the opening and closing lines of the text (1 and 8). 40 Respectively, Marino 1979: nn. 4 and 4a. For an introduction to Marino’s literary production, life, and poetic influences, see Russo 2008. For Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Head of Medusa (1638–1648, Rome, Capitoline Museums) and its connection with literature, see van Eck 2015: 61–66. Marino’s madrigal ‘Hor quai nemici fian, che freddi marmi’, inspired by Caravaggio’s Medusa (1597), which he was able to see in Florence in 1601, is particularly famous. This composition inspired Gaspare Murtola’s madrigal ‘E questa di Medusa’

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Qual credi tu che fusse il vivo aspetto, se ’l volto mio, ben che di vita casso, altrui fa divenir rigido sasso, di tal veleno ha il fiero ciglio infetto? Tu, che t’affisi in sì tremendo oggetto, volgi altrove lo sguardo, o tienlo basso, se qui fermando pur stupido il passo di trasformarti in me non hai diletto. Ah fuggi, o torci i vaghi lumi indietro, ché se ben marmo io son, virtù fatale spiro da gli occhi, ond’ogni corpo impètro. Non so se mi scolpì scarpel mortale, o specchiando me stessa in chiaro vetro la propria vista mia mi fece tale.

Ancora viva si mira Medusa in viva pietra; e chi gli occhi in lei gira, pur di stupore, impètra. Saggio Scultor, tu così ’l marmo avivi, che son di marmo a lato al marmo i vivi. [When looked at, Medusa appears still alive, although in lifelike marble; and whoever looks at it becomes petrified by astonishment. Wise sculptor, you make marble so alive that the living, next to marble, are turned to marble.]

[What do you think my appearance was when I was alive, if my lifeless face still turns others into stone with the poison of (my) infected gaze? You, who set your eyes on such a terrible object, look elsewhere or lower your gaze, if you, while stopping by in amazement, do not want to become me. Run away or turn your beautiful eyes away because, although I am made of marble, I still emit a deadly power from my eyes with which I petrify every human body. I don’t know if a mortal chisel sculpted me or if, looking at myself in the mirror, it was my own sight that petrified me.]

The sonnet further develops the image already outlined by Luigi Groto, but with one important alteration: in Marino’s work it is Medusa herself who speaks. This opens up an interesting ambiguity: while realising that she is inert (‘ben marmo io son’, l. 10), Medusa also recognises that her powers remain intact. On the one hand, she invites the viewer not to stare at her so as not to be petrified; on the other hand, in the last tercet she admits that she herself does not know the cause of her condition: was she made of stone by a human hand, or did she see herself (Murtola 1604: fol. 226v). On the literary response to sculpture, see also Marino’s ‘Stanca, anelante a la paterna riva’ and Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne in the Galleria Borghese (1623).

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reflected in a mirror and fell victim to her own spell? The same idea is present in the madrigal ‘Ancora viva si mira’, but here the creature does not speak for herself. The ambiguity of the theme of Medusa and the way in which it questions the ‘truth’ of art, finds formal expression in the unresolved semantic ambiguity puzzling the reader: ‘son di marmo […] i vivi’ (l. 6). Are the living metaphorically petrified by the artist’s skill, as anticipated in line 4? Or is the statue of Medusa so lifelike and vivid that the living look inert in her presence? Or else, did they turn to stone by accidentally looking at Medusa? The conceptual virtuosity of the madrigal, built with polyptoton and artificial etymological figures, is intertwined with the traditional topical code intrinsic to the myth of Medusa, according to the genre of poetry on portraiture. But the undeniable dismay of Marino’s Medusa, so tragically victim of her own mistake, offers a portrait in verse far removed from Petrarch’s model. Harsh cruelty fades into fragile bewilderment, and the portrait, in the wake of the Latin and neo-Latin tradition, now assumes the physiognomy of the deceased, a face in stone who pronounces her own epitaph in the hope of being heard.

Bibliography Alighieri, Dante. 1987. Rime, ed. by Gianfranco Contini (Turin: Einaudi). Baldi, Bernardino. 1590. Versi e prose di Monsignor Bernardino Baldi (Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi senese). Baldi, Bernardino. 1600. Il Lauro. Scherzo giovenile del sign. Bernardino Baldi da Urbino (Pavia: Bartoli). Baldi, Bernardino. 2020. Sonetti romani, ed. by Andrea Donnini, introduction by Domenico Chiodo (Turin: Res). Bembo, Pietro. 1966. Prose e rime, ed. by Carlo Dionisotti (Turin: UTET). Bolzoni, Lina. 2008. Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, texts ed. by Federica Pich (Rome and Bari: Laterza). Brocardo, Antonio. 2017. Rime, ed. by Antonello Fabio Caterino (Rome: Aracne). Cerboni Baiardi, Giorgio (ed.). 2006. Atti del Seminario di studi su Bernardino Baldi urbinate (1553—1617) (Urbino: Accademia Raffaello). Chiabrera, Gabriello. 2005. Opere, ed. by Andrea Donnini (Turin: Res). Crismani, Andrea. 2012. Edizione critica delle Rime di Francesco Coppetta dei Beccuti (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Università degli Studi di Padova). Cropper, Elizabeth. 1986. ‘The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 175–90.

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Dal Cengio, Martina. 2019. ‘“Immagini in pietra”: la lirica di fronte allo sguardo pietrificato’, in Parola all’immagine: esperienze dell’ecfrasi da Petrarca a Marino, ed. by Andrea Torre (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi), pp. 139–58. Damianaki Romano, Chrysa. 1998. ‘“Come se fussi viva e pura”: ritrattistica e lirica cortigiana tra Quattro e Cinquecento’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 60.2: 349–94. Dillon Wanke, Matilde. 2004. ‘Riflessioni sulle tipologie del ritratto letterario e il ritratto dell’ “Inclita Nice”’, Italianistica, 33.1: 33–50. Ellero, Maria Pia. 2009. ‘Narciso e i Sileni: il ritratto mentale nella lirica da Lorenzo a Tasso’, Italianistica, 38.2: 271–83. Filograsso, Irene. 2005. ‘I Sonetti Romani di Berardino Baldi’, in Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617) studioso rinascimentale: poesia, storia, linguistica, meccanica, architettura. Atti del Convegno di studi di Milano (19–21 novembre 2003), ed. by Elio Nenci (Milan: Franco Angeli), pp. 55–80. Foster, Kenelm. 1962. ‘Beatrice or Medusa’, in Italian Studies Presented to E. R. Vincent on his Retirement from the Chair of Italian at Cambridge, ed. by Charles P. Brand, Kenelm Foster, and Umberto Limentani (Cambridge: Heffer), pp. 41–56. Galli, Aldo, Chiara Piccinini, and Massimiliano Rossi (eds.). 2007. Il ritratto nell’Europa del Cinquecento. Atti del convegno (Firenze, 7–8 novembre 2002) (Florence: Olschki). Giustinian, Orsatto. 1998. Rime, ed. by Ranieri Mercatanti (Florence: Olschki). Groto, Luigi. 2014. Le Rime di Luigi Groto, Cieco d’Adria, ed. by Barbara Spaggiari, 2 vols (Adria: Apogeo). Guarino, Gian Battista. 1496. Epigrammata (Modena: Rocociola). Il gareggiamento poetico. 1611 (Venice: Barezzo Barezzi). Kohl, Jeannette, and Rebecca Müller (eds.). 2007. Kopf / Bild. Die Büste in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Kunsthistorisches Institut, Max-Planck-Institute in Florence (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag). Leoni, Gian Battista. 1602. Madrigali di Gio. Battista Leoni Academico Venetiano (Venice: Gio. Battista Ciotti). Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini. 1545 (Venice: Manuzio). Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini. 1546 (Venice: Manuzio). Maffei, Sonia. 1999. ‘La fama di Laocoonte nei testi del Cinquecento’, in Laocoonte: fama e stile, ed. by Salvatore Settis (Rome: Donzelli), pp. 98–230. Magno, Celio. 1600. Rime, in Rime di Celio Magno et Orsatto Giustiniano (Venice: Andrea Muschio), pp. [1]–163. Marino, Gian Battista. 1979. La Galeria, ed. by Marzio Pieri (Padua: Liviana). Marullo, Michele. 1951. Carmina, ed. by Alessandro Perosa (Zurich: In Aedibus Thesauri Mundi). Munari, Alessandra. 2018. ‘La statua animata: dalla Bibbia al mito classico e ermetico, f ino alla scena barocca’, in La letteratura italiana e le arti. Atti del XX Congresso

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dell’ADI—Associazione degli Italianisti (Napoli, 7–10 settembre 2016), ed. by Lorenzo Battistini and others (Rome: ADI editore). Available online: [accessed 10 August 2022]. Murtola, Gasparo. 1604. Rime del Sig. Gasparo Murtola (Venice: Roberto Meglietti). Nenci, Elio (ed.). 2005. Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617) studioso rinascimentale: poesia, storia, linguistica, meccanica, architettura. Atti del Convegno di studi di Milano (19–21 novembre 2003) (Milan: Franco Angeli). Petrarca, Francesco. 1976. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 2015. Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori). Pich, Federica. 2010. I poeti davanti al ritratto: da Petrarca a Marino (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Pommier, Édouard. 2003. Il ritratto: storia e teorie dal Rinascimento all’Età dei Lumi (Turin: Einaudi). Pontani, Filippo Maria (ed.). 1981. Antologia palatina, 4 vols (Turin: Einaudi). Pozzi, Giovanni. 1979. ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d’inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, Lettere italiane, 31.1: 1–30. Rinaldi, Cesare. 1588. Madrigali di Cesare Rinaldi (Bologna: Alessandro Benacci). Russo, Emilio. 2008. Marino (Rome: Salerno). Sannazaro, Jacopo. 2009. Latin Poetry, ed. by Michael C. J. Putnam, I Tatti Renaissance Library (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Santagata, Marco. 2004. I frammenti dell’anima: storia e racconto nel ‘Canzoniere’ di Petrarca, 2nd edn (Bologna: Il Mulino). Spaggiari, Barbara. 2009. ‘La presenza di Luigi Groto in Shakespeare e negli autori elisabettiani’, Italique, 12: 173–98. Suitner, Franco. 1994. ‘Le rime del Petrarca e l’idea della donna “beatrice”: convenzioni letterarie e realtà psicologica’, in Beatrice nell’opera di Dante e nella memoria europea: 1290–1990, ed. by Maria Picchio Simonelli (Florence: Cadmo), pp. 261–78. Taddeo, Edoardo. 1974. Il manierismo letterario e i lirici veneziani del tardo Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni). Tebaldeo, Antonio. 1989–92. Rime, ed. by Tania Basile and Jean-Jacques Marchand, 3 vols (Modena: Panini). Trismegisto, Ermete. 2006. Corpo ermetico e Asclepio, ed. by Bianca Maria Tordini Portogalli (Milan: SE). Valerini, Adriano. 2011. Adriano Valerini: la Celeste Galeria di Minerva, ed. by Raffaella Morselli and Daniela Caracciolo (Florence: Edifir). Van Eck, Caroline. 2015. Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Boston: De Gruyter; Leiden: Leiden University Press).

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About the Author Martina Dal Cengio obtained her PhD in Italian Renaissance literature from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (2020), conducting a research project devoted to the edition of the Rime by Girolamo Molin (1573). She also carried out research periods at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Fondation Barbier Mueller in Geneva, and the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. She is currently a researcher at Sapienza University of Rome. Her interests focus mainly on sixteenth-century Italian poetry and the study of metrical experimentalism in the Renaissance period.

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The Portrait of the Ideal Woman: Petrarch in Conduct Literature Texts for and about Women Francesco Lucioli

Abstract Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Petrarch’s works in the Italian vernacular (not only his Canzoniere, but also his Triumphi) played an important role in the so-called conduct literature for and about women, that is, the rich production of treatises and dialogues aimed at both describing women’s status and roles in society, and prescribing their duties and manners. While some moralists considered Petrarch’s poetry an instrument of corruption of female morality, others made extensive use of Petrarch’s lines in works addressing a female readership and offering practical advice on behaviour. This essay discusses Petrarch’s contribution to the portrait of the ideal woman preserved in early modern conduct literature texts. Keywords: Petrarch, conduct literature, women, description, prescription

Introduction1 In his La nobiltà delle donne, first published in Venice in 1549 by Gabriele Giolito, Lodovico Domenichi (1515–1564) condemned ‘alcuni huomini tanto freddi et gelosi che non comportano che le donne loro scrivano o leggano cosa alcuna’ [those men who are so cold and possessive that do not want their women to write or read anything], and particularly those husbands who ‘hanno sospetto […] che se la moglie legge i sonetti del Petrarca, le novelle del Boccaccio o i romanzi dell’Ariosto, ella incontanente non perda la honestà sua et subito non si doni in preda agli amadori 1 Petrarch’s works are quoted as follows: Canzoniere = Rvf (from Petrarca 2004; English translations from Petrarca 1976); Triumphus Cupidinis = TC, Triumphus Pudicitiae = TP, and Triumphus Mortis = TM (from Petrarca 1996b); De remediis utriusque fortunae = DR (from Petrarca 1997); references to classical Latin authors are from the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch04

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suoi’ [are afraid […] that their wives may suddenly lose their virtues and surrender to their admirers if they read Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s short tales and Ariosto’s romances].2 This passage is a translation, from Latin into the Italian vernacular, of a sentence taken from the Ad commendationem sexus muliebris oratio by Girolamo Della Rovere (1530–1592), a text published in 1540, in which the catalogue of the readings prohibited to female readers also contained Jacopo Sannazaro’s lyrics and Serafino Aquilano’s poems.3 Both Della Rovere and Domenichi open their lists of ‘forbidden books’ with Petrarch, revealing how his sonnets were considered a means of corruption of female virtue and behaviour; this, however, is the point of view of ‘rozi et materiali ingegni’ [rough and ignorant minds], 4 rather than the perspective of the two authors, who argued in favour of women’s education and their access to different readings, Petrarch included.5 In fact, several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of the Rvf and Triumphi were dedicated to women: Alessandro Paganini dedicated his Il Petrarcha (Venice, 1515) to Isabella d’Este, and the subsequent edition (Tuscolano, 1521) to Isabella Gonzaga; Alessandro Brucioli chose Lucrezia d’Este for his edition of Petrarch’s poems (Venice, 1548); Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo addressed his spositione of Petrarch’s rhymes to Maria Cardona, and that of the Triumphi to Susanna Gonzaga (both included in Il Petrarcha, first printed in Venice in 1533); Guillaume Rouillé dedicated his Il Petrarcha, first printed in 1558, to Marguerite de Bourg, because he wanted to offer her ‘un’opera di castissimo et divinissimo amore ripiena’ [a work full of chaste and divine love].6 Rouillé’s dedication reveals a new approach to women’s access to Petrarch’s poetry: the Rvf and Triumphi are not considered texts that can pervert women’s nature or customs; rather, they can contribute to their understanding of forms of pure and even divine love. This shift in perspective also influenced the numerous academic lectures on Petrarch’s poems that were addressed to women:7 Giacoma Pallavicino is the dedicatee and one of the protagonists of the Dialogo del dolce morire di Giesù Christo (Venice: Giovann’Antonio e Pietro fratelli de Nicolini da Sabbio, 1544), a text in which friar Feliciano da Civitella gave a religious interpretation of the allegorical visions in Rvf 323; Antonio Maria Amadi addressed his Ragionamento […] intorno a quel sonetto del Petrarca che incomincia ‘Quel che infinita providentia et arte’ (Padua: Grazioso Percacino, 1563) to Emilia di 2 Domenichi 1549: 89r. 3 Della Rovere 1540: 6r. 4 Domenichi 1549: 89r. 5 On women’s readings in early modern Italy, see Tippelskirch 2011. For representations of women reading Petrarch’s poetry, see the chapter by Antonio Geremicca in this volume. 6 Petrarca 1558: 6. 7 Research on the dedicatees of the editions of and lectures on Petrarch’s works is based on the data collected in the Petrarch Exegesis in Renaissance Italy database: [last accessed 24 August 2022].

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Spilimbergo; Claudia Martinengo is the dedicatee of Bartolomeo Arnigio’s Lettura […] letta publicamente sopra ’l sonetto ‘Liete, pensose, accompagnate e sole’ (Brescia: Francesco e Pietro Maria Marchetti, 1565), and Angela Pallavicino of the Espositione dell’Inquieto Accademico Pensoso, sopra ’l sonetto di M. Francesco Petrarca ‘ Padre del Ciel, dopo i perduti giorni’ (Milan: Cesare Pozzo, 1566); Vincenzo Carrari dedicated his Espositione […] sopra quella canzone ch’è fuore del Canzoniere del Petrarca, ‘Quel c’ha nostra natura in se più degno’ (Macerata: Sebastiano Martellini, 1577) to Fulvia da Correggio; Pietro Caponsacchi sent his Discorso intorno alla canzone del Petrarca ‘Vergine bella’ (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1590) to Giovanna of Austria; Vittoria Pinella Spinola is the addressee of Alcune lezzioni on Petrarch by Giacomo Mancini (Genoa: Eredi di Girolamo Bartoli, 1591); Celso Cittadini dedicated his Partenodoxa, o vero Esposition della Canzone del Petrarca alla Vergine madre di Dio (Siena: Salvestro Marchetti, 1607) to Cristina de’ Medici; Claudia de’ Medici is the dedicatee of Accademia Colle Bellunese. De’ ragionamenti accademici, poetici, morali, astrologici, naturali et varii dilettevoli et eruditi (Venice: Evangelista Deuchino, 1621), a collection of texts that includes several lectures on Petrarch’s verses. The practice of addressing such works to women can be explained thanks to a note in Giovan Battista Gelli’s dedication of his lecture on Rvf 355 to Livia Tornielli Borromeo: since Petrarch had ‘perfettissima cognitione delle scienze che appartengono a’ costumi et alle virtù de l’animo, chiamate dai Latini virtù morali’ [a perfect knowledge of customs and virtues of souls, called by the Latins moral virtues],8 Gelli identifies him as a suitable moral and ethical authority for a woman. A similar approach also characterises the Dialogo della instituzion delle donne by Lodovico Dolce (1508/10–1568), published in Venice by Gabriele Giolito first in 1545 and, in a revised and enlarged edition, in 1547. In his analysis of women’s readings in the Italian vernacular, Dolce explained: Tra quelli [libri] che si debbono fuggire, le novelle del Boccaccio terranno il primo luogo, et tra quelli che meritano esser letti sarà uno in prima il Petrarca et Dante. Nell’uno troveranno, insieme con le bellezze della volgar poesia et de la lingua toscana, esempio d’onestissimo et castissimo amore, et nell’altro un eccellente ritratto di tutta la filosofia cristiana. [Among the books that should be avoided, the first one is Boccaccio’s collection of short stories, while Petrarch’s and Dante’s texts are among the first books that deserve to be read. In the first, women will read examples of honest and chaste love, together with the beauties of the vernacular poetry and Tuscan language, while in the second they will read an excellent portrait of Christian philosophy.]9 8 9

Gelli 1549: 7. Dolce [1545] 2015: 106–07.

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Dolce, who also published an edition of the Canzoniere with Giolito in 1547, finds in Petrarch’s poetry a model of language and style, but also an exemplary collection of ideas, thoughts, principles, and statements on virtuous love. Indeed, Petrarch’s verses are frequently quoted in works belonging, like Dolce’s Dialogo, to the genre of conduct literature for and about women—that is, the rich production aimed at both describing women’s status in society and prescribing their manners, by offering practical advice on a variety of topics, from ethics to education.10 As stressed by Helena Sanson, ‘with their overt claims to ideological authority, in their prescriptions and descriptions of the roles, duties, and behaviour of women—in relation to men—in their different ranks of life, works of conduct contribute significantly to the cultural construction of femininity’.11 Conduct literature frequently included quotes from poets like Petrarch or Ludovico Ariosto, whose authority was used to reinforce the author’s ideas and prescriptions.12 This essay discusses the references to Petrarch’s poetry in some Italian conduct books published between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and highlights the way in which they contributed to shaping the literary portrait of the ideal woman.

Beauty Between Description and Prescription From Giovanni Pozzi’s pioneering studies to Federica Pich’s most recent critical survey, scholars agree on the key role played by Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the definition of a ‘short canon’ for the poetic description of women’s beauty.13 This canon influenced not only female portraiture,14 but also how women’s appearance was described (and prescribed) in early modern conduct books. An interesting example of this use of poetic topoi in conduct literature is offered by Il libro della bella donna by Federico Luigini (fl. 1520), published in Venice in 1554.15 As the author explains in the dedication to Giovanni Manini, this dialogue among five men on a hunting trip aims to ‘farvi qui vedere una bellissima […] donna, dipinta e perfetta da cinque pennelli di cinque perfetti ed accorti signori’ [make visible here the image of a beautiful […] and perfect woman painted by five brushes of 10 For a first introduction to this literary production and the different critical approaches used in its analysis, see Sanson 2007a: 1–27; and Cox 2008: 17–28. On early modern Italian conduct literature, see Montandon 1993; and Sanson and Lucioli 2016. 11 Sanson 2016a: 9. 12 On the presence of Ariosto in texts addressed or dedicated to women, see Lucioli 2018. 13 Pozzi 1981; Quondam 1991; Pozzi 1993b; Pich 2019. 14 On the influence of Petrarch’s poetry on female portraiture, see Cropper 1976; Cropper 1986; Cropper 1995; see also the chapter by Diletta Gamberini in this volume. 15 On Luigini’s text, see Rogers 1988.

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five perfect and wise men].16 As Naomi Yavneh has argued, while Luigini created ‘a verbal portrait of the ideal lady from poetic fragments’ derived from various poets,17 he consistently took inspiration from Petrarch for the description of key female features: hair, eyes, eyebrows, forehead, cheeks, lips, teeth, neck, breasts, arms, and hands. The descriptions often move beyond the outer appearance of the ideal woman to include observations on codes of conduct and social behaviour.18 Talking about hair, for example, Luigini quotes Rvf 196: Al tempo del Petrarca […] si costumava in quelle parti della Francia ove nacque la sua famosa Laura di portare, sendo donzella, le chiome sciolte, e, sendo maritata, avolte in perle, in gemme od in altro, secondo la condizione d’ognuna. Il che, non senza qualche fondamento, pare che uno aveduto interprete di lui in quel sonetto ‘L’aura serena’ voglia mostrare, e perciò maritata essere stata la Laura. [In Petrarch’s time […] in the part of France where his famous Laura was born, loose locks were in vogue for unmarried women, while married women wore their hair in braids adorned with pearls, jewels or other things, according to their status. Therefore, and not without reason, an attentive annotator of this sonnet 196 suggested that Laura was a married woman.]19

Luigini refers here to Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano’s (fl. 1502) reading of the sonnet: in his annotated edition of the Canzoniere, first printed in Venice in 1532, he explains that ‘anch’hogidì si serva la costuma [sic] in Francia che le fanciulle portano i capei raccolti in nodo e non ponno portare le perle e le gemme se maritate non sono’ [in France young girls still maintain the custom of hair braiding, and cannot wear pearls and stones if they are not married]. 20 On the basis of the same sonnet, in the Vita di Laura that introduces his edition, Fausto concludes that ‘fermamente ella [Laura] ebbe marito e f iglioli’ [Laura undoubtedly had a husband and children].21 Luigini therefore borrows Petrarch’s description of perfect female hair and deduces from Fausto’s annotations some rules for women’s hairstyle, to be adapted according to their social and marital status. Thus Laura’s portrait becomes not only a way to describe physical beauty, but also a prescriptive model for women’s attire, frequently reproduced in real portraits: for instance, the sixteenth-century anonymous artist who portrayed a ‘maritata venetiana’ [a 16 17 18 19 20 21

Luigini [1554] 1913: 223. Yavneh 1993: 137. On this aspect, see Rogers and Tinagli 2005. Luigini [1554] 1913: 232. Fausto da Longiano 1532: 74r. Fausto da Longiano 1532: *4r–v.

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Venetian married woman], as indicated on the (today lost) painting, adorned her hair with pearls.22 In another passage of Il libro della bella donna, Luigini claims that ‘alla giovanezza, e massime a quella delle belle donne, si conviene l’andar adorna il capo di fiori’ [flower crowns are ideal for young women, particularly if they are beautiful],23 a claim he supports with references to Rvf 126 and 160, where Laura is described with her hair adorned with flowers. A similar use of the Canzoniere to suggest suitable hairdos can also be found in later conduct books: for instance in the Institutione della sposa, a short treatise dedicated by Pietro Belmonte (1537–1592) to his daughter Laudomia, published in Rome in 1587.24 Praising the custom of ancient Roman women, who thought that ‘i veli erano delle teste loro il decoro et l’ornamento’ [veils were forms of decorum and ornament of their heads], Belmonte recalls that ‘il Petrarca, commendando l’honestà della sua Laura, disse: “Lasciare il velo o per sole o per ombra, | donna, non vi vid’io”’ [Petrarch praised the honesty of his Laura by writing: ‘Lady, I have never seen you put aside your veil for sun or for shadow’ (Rvf 11.1–2)].25 In fact, in early modern Italy, young women were frequently portrayed with veils, as in the Portrait of a Lady attributed to Lorenzo di Credi and today preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.26 The lines cited by Belmonte, and others from the same ballad (ll. 8–9), are also quoted in Isabella Sori’s (b. 1613/15) Ammaestramenti e ricordi circa a’ buoni costumi che deve insegnare una ben creata madre ad una figlia. The text, published in Pavia in 1628, has been considered ‘the first example of a work of conduct composed by a woman’.27 In the fourth of the twelve letters that constitute the text, which focuses on what a good mother should teach her daughter when she is in love, Sori refers to Rvf 11, suggesting that unmarried women should always ‘mostrarsi […] di basso ciglio, […] intendendo per basso ciglio raccoglier il guardo e capeli sotto il velo’ [keep […] their eyes down, […] that means hide their eyes and hair under a veil].28 In the same letter, Sori also recalls sonnets 39 and 44 to remind women that Laura’s eyes ‘erano accompagnati con tanta modestia e gravità, quantunque legiadri, che parturivan altro tanta riverenza che amore’ [were accompanied by so much modesty and gravitas that, lovely as they were, they generated as much reverence as love].29 Once more, Petrarch’s lyrics offer not only descriptions of female beauty, but also 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

See Dal Pozzolo 1993: 266–67; on the topic, see also Rogers 1988: 62–66. Luigini [1554] 1913: 266–67. On Belmonte’s text, see Sanson 2007b and Sanson 2008. Belmonte [1587] 2008: 46. See Zeri and Gardner 1971: 154–57. Sanson 2018: 18. Sori [1628] 2018: 105. Sori [1628] 2018: 105–06.

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concrete examples of deportment, and through them Laura becomes a paragon of both outer perfection and inner virtue.30 The Canzoniere is not the only Petrarchan text quoted in books of conduct: Luigini, for instance, also refers to the Triumphi to describe red lips,31 and to the De remediis to talk about teeth and perfumes.32 These works are not used to enlarge the traditional descriptive canon; rather, they stand beside Petrarch’s poems (such as Rvf 191 and 207 for the topic of perfumes) to reaffirm it. Moreover, these citations are evidence of the deep moral value that Luigini attributed to Petrarch’s writings and, in particular, to the De remediis, a text in which Amedeo Quondam has recognised the modern foundations (or renewed foundations, based on ancient principles) of moral discourses.33 This moral appreciation of Petrarch’s works also influences Luigini’s reading of the Canzoniere. As Girolamo Ruscelli explains in his dedication of Il libro della bella donna to Lucrezia Gonzaga, Luigini’s text aims to discuss ‘la idea d’una bellissima donna e tutta perfettissima di corpo e d’animo’ [the idea of a woman beautiful and perfect in both body and soul].34 At the beginning of the third and last book of the dialogue, the protagonists realise that ‘la donna, dipinta e formata bellissima quanto spetta alla parte di fuori, si dovea da loro dipingere e formare (perché così venisse ad essere perfettissimamente bella, sì che nulla le mancasse) ancora quanto spetta alla parte di dentro’ [in order to be wholly perfect and complete, the woman they pictured and shaped as outwardly beautiful had to be so pictured and shaped internally].35 Therefore, in Luigini’s view, Petrarch’s poetry is not only a source of the physical description of an ideal woman, but also of the moral prescriptions that should guide her life: this is why lines from the Rvf are frequently included in the dialogue as proverbs, similar to the moral sentences of the De remediis. Discussing the negative consequences of beauty, for example, Luigini comments: ‘come disse il Petrarca, la beltà talora è nociva’ [as Petrarch stated, beauty sometimes is noxious],36 with reference to Rvf 254.5. Similarly, in condemning gossiping, he adds: ‘niuna parte del corpo nostro, come ben disse il Petrarca, ch’ebbe fior d’intelletto, è più pronta a nocere e più difficile a frenarsi che la lingua nostra’ [as rightly stated by Petrarch, who was very mindful, our tongue is the part of our body that is the most prone to damage and the hardest to control],37 which is instead a quotation from 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

On women’s ideal posture, interpreted as a symbol of modesty and chastity, see Pozzi 1986. TM II.41–42, in Luigini [1554] 1913: 242–43. DR I.2 in Luigini [1554] 1913: 243; DR I.22, in Luigini [1554] 1913: 259 and 268. Quondam 2010: 276. Luigini [1554] 1913: 307. Luigini [1554] 1913: 273. Luigini [1554] 1913: 277. Luigini [1554] 1913: 299.

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De remediis, II.103. In Il libro della bella donna there is no real difference between Petrarch’s lyrics and his moral observations: both contribute, in the same way, to create a literary portrait of an ideal woman, at the same time beautiful and virtuous.

Chastity Between Poetry and Ethics In Luigini’s dialogue Petrarch captures the characteristics of perfect female beauty, but also introduces some specific advice concerning, in particular, women’s continence and chastity. These are certainly the main female virtues highlighted in early modern books of conduct. A case in point is Dolce’s Dialogo della instituzion delle donne, which comprises three books respectively dedicated to the three traditional conditions of women’s life: maidenhood, marriage, and widowhood.38 Dolce’s work is a vernacular adaptation, in the form of a dialogue, of the 1538 revised edition (the princeps was printed in 1524) of the Latin treatise by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives De institutione foeminae christianae.39 Dolce frequently enriches his ‘creative’ translation with quotations from other authors, and also includes lines from Petrarch’s Triumphus Pudicitiae and Rvf to introduce examples of virtuous female behaviour and offer practical moral prescriptions. In the first of the three books, devoted to the education of unmarried women, Dolce states: Fugga sopra tutto il riso in tutti i luoghi, per esser segno di lieve animo et nelle occasioni più tosto lo accenni che ne dimostri effetto, avendo sempre con esso lei ‘timor d’infamia et sol desìo d’onore’ [TP 87] et d’esser meritamente tenuta onesta et prudente. [Always avoid laughing, because this is a sign of fickleness, and rather give only a slight smile when necessary, having ‘fear of infamy and only desire for honour’ and for being considered honest and prudent deservedly.]40

Dolce refers to the personifications that accompany Laura in her triumph over Cupid (‘Timor d’infamia e Desio sol d’onore’) as the main qualities that should shape women’s life. In the Triumphi, however, Dolce finds not only personifications of virtues, but also models of behaviour to offer to his readership: the references to ancient cases of women who killed themselves to preserve their chastity—the

38 On the representations of these different status, see Murphy 2001, and Lucioli 2015: 16–29. 39 On Dolce’s dialogue, see Chemello 1985; Sanson 2015a; Sanson 2016c. 40 Dolce [1545] 2015: 118.

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wives of the Teutons, who hang themselves, 41 and Hippo, who cast herself into the sea, also cited as an example by Luigini42—show that Dolce aims to reshape Petrarch’s poem into a practical handbook of moral examples. Dolce’s discussion of the importance of chastity also draws on the Canzoniere: Levate, adunque, alla donna la bellezza, la nobiltà del sangue, le ricchezze, la grazia, la eloquenzia, la prontezza dell’ingegno et infine ciò che più desìa, et datele in contracambio o la verginità o la castità: ogni cosa pienamente le avete data. Allo ’ncontro, concedetele con piena mano le cose predette et rimovetele l’una di queste due: il tutto le avete tolto. Et però si legge che: ‘chi lascia di suo onor privare, | né donna è più, né viva’ [Rvf 262.5–6]. [Deprive a woman of beauty, nobility of blood, richness, grace, eloquence, readiness of mind and finally whatever she most desires, and give her in return virginity or chastity: this way you would give her everything in full. On the contrary, give her all the aforementioned in full and deprive her of virginity or chastity: you would deprive her of everything. Therefore it was said: ‘whoever lets herself be deprived of honour is no longer a lady and no longer alive’.]43

These verses were indeed enormously popular in early modern conduct manuals: Luigini quotes them in Il libro della bella donna to demonstrate that it is exactly ‘nella salvezza di questa castità l’onore, e nella perdita il vituperio del sesso feminile’ [in the preservation of chastity that women’s honour stands, and their disgrace in its loss];44 and Belmonte includes them in the aforementioned Institutione della sposa to explain that ‘il principio delle virtù feminili è la pudicitia e, perduta questa, ogni altra virtù è rovinata nella donna’ [chastity is the origin of female virtues, and once it is lost, all other virtues are ruined]. 45 The same passage also appears in the Epistola […] de la vita che dee tenere una donna vedova that Giovan Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) published in Rome in 1524 and dedicated to Margherita Pio Sanseverino:46 this shows that the same ideas were used not only to portray the ideal unmarried woman, but also to convey an ideal for women of all conditions. The texts considered so far conf irm the existence a common practice among Renaissance Italian writers of female conduct manuals, a practice that was first

41 From TP 140–41, in Dolce [1545] 2015: 13. 42 From TP 143–44, in Dolce 1547: 42r; see Luigini [1554] 1913: 284. 43 Dolce [1545] 2015: 112. 44 Luigini [1554] 1913: 283. 45 Belmonte [1587] 2008: 49. 46 Trissino 1524: B1r.

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observed by Ruth Kelso, which consists in ‘using Petrarch’s poems to Laura as philosophical disquisitions and abstract portraits’. 47 In Dolce’s text, Canzoniere and Triumphi appear not only in relation to virgins. In the 1547 edition of the dialogue, the second book, discussing married women, features a new paragraph concerning the way beauty influences chastity. According to Dolce: Se essi [alcuni antichi poeti] volsero inferire che la donna che è dotata dalla natura di belle et gratiose membra accende più facilmente in altrui le amorose fiamme, et per conseguente ha maggiori stimoli d’ogn’intorno che combattono la sua honestà che non hanno le brutte, […] non perciò ne segue che se ella si rende vinta agli assalti la cagione si debba attribuire alla bellezza, ma più tosto alla poca fortezza del suo animo. Et in questo sentimento si dee intender quei versi del dolcissimo Petrarcha: ‘Due gran nemiche insieme erano aggiunte | bellezza et castità, con pace tanta, | che mai rubellion l’anima santa | non sentì, poi che a star seco fuor giunte’ [Rvf 297.1–4]; et altrove, dov’egli dice: ‘E, la concordia ch’è sì rara al mondo, | v’era con castità somma beltate’ [TP 89–90]. [Some ancient poets have stated that a naturally beautiful woman easily makes others fall in love, and by consequence she risks losing her honesty more than an ugly woman; […] however, the reason she gives in to temptation lies in her low moral strength rather than in her beauty. And in this light we should read the following lines by the sweet Petrarch: ‘Two great enemies were united, Beauty and Chastity, with so much peace that her holy soul never felt any rebellion once they had come to stay with her’; and also where he states: ‘And there was highest beauty with chastity, a harmony that is so rare in the world’.]48

Petrarch’s lines are included in the text to support Dolce’s prescriptions about the need to preserve female chastity; and once more, the personifications of the Triumphus Pudicitiae (‘Castità’ and ‘Somma beltade’) are transformed into symbols of female qualities. 49 The same verses from Petrarch’s Rvf and Triumphi used by Dolce are quoted together, in inverted order, in the second of the two Dialoghi del matrimonio e vita vedovile by Bernardo Trotti (d. 1595), first printed in Turin in 1578.50 Addressed to 47 48 49 50

Kelso [1956] 1978: 206. Dolce 1547: 46r. On this aspect, see Lucioli 2013: 35–60. Trotti 1578: 132.

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Ippolita Scaravella Castellier, remarried to Jean Castellier, envoy of the King of France Henry II, the dialogue is interesting for its exaltation of the ‘vita libera e vedovile’ as ‘cosa beatissima’ [free life of a widow as a blessed thing].51 As already mentioned with reference to Trissino’s Epistola, a widow should always be guided by the same ability to control her instincts that governs the life of a married woman, and should ‘fuggir tutte le occasioni che potrebbero indur la donna a cattivi pensieri’ [avoid every occasion that could mislead her].52 By referring to Petrarch’s Triumphus Cupidinis, in the first dialogue Trotti explains that: Se vorrà esser aveduta in questa parte, fugga prima se stessa ch’altri, cioè fugga l’ocio come quello che sarà potentissimo a persuaderli le vanità e sommergerla nella lascivia. Perché egli n’è padre vero, sì come da molti savi è stato detto, e dal nostro poeta toscano molto gentilmente; il quale, parlando dell’Amore lascivo, disse: ‘Ei nacque d’ocio e di lascivia humana, | nudrito di pensier dolci e soavi, | fatto signor e dio da gente vana’ [TC I.82–84]. [If a woman wants to be wise, she f irstly needs to spurn herself rather than others, that is, spurn idleness, that is powerful in persuading her towards vanities and submerging her in lust. Because idleness is the real source of lust, as many wise men have written, and as our Tuscan poet expressed very pleasantly, when he talked about lascivious Love: ‘He was born from idleness and human lust, nursed by sweet and pleasant thoughts, and a vain folk made him their lord and god’.]53

The first line of this quotation is also cited by Belmonte to explain that ‘colui che vive ocioso più ragionevolmente si può chiamare bruto animale che huomo rationale’ [he who lives in idleness should logically be called a beast rather than a rational human being].54 It is interesting that in Trotti’s text, as in Gelli’s lecture on Rvf 355, Petrarch is considered a moral author, as one of the ‘many wise men’ who wrote about idleness, love, lust, and women. Thus, Petrarch’s lines are frequently included, alongside quotations from the Bible and classical authors, in the books that Paolo Cherchi called ‘secret manuals’:55 collections of commonplaces and anthologies of examples on different topics, including women. Trotti, like many other sixteenth-century authors of conduct books, makes extensive use of these 51 52 53 54 55

Trotti 1578: 17; on this passage, see Sanson 2016b: 44. Trotti 1578: 94. Trotti 1578: 94. Belmonte [1587] 2008: 40. Cherchi 1998.

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kinds of compilations, to support his own prescriptions and compose the portrait of the perfect wife and widow.56 These zibaldoni also influenced the way in which Petrarch’s texts were read and adapted in works addressed to a female readership. At the end of the second of his Dialoghi, Trotti recalls the case of ‘una matrona dell’isola Zea, altre volte detta Tetrapoli’ [a matron from the isle of Cos, sometimes called Tetrapoli],57 who wanted to commit suicide. Trotti explains that it was a local custom for elderly people living on the island to request permission to poison themselves if they did not want to live any longer. Questioned by Pompey the Great as to why she wanted to die, the old woman replied that she had had a good and gratifying life and did not want to face the upheavals of fortune and pain. This tale, recounted by Valerius Maximus in his Memorable Deeds and Sayings (2.6.8)—and then frequently included in compilations of commonplaces, as well as in different literary genres, from the geographical account entitled Isolario by Benedetto Bordon (1528) to Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554)—is used by Trotti as an example of female magnificence. However, at the end of the tale, Trotti adds: e forsi dal fatto di costei venne il bellissimo concetto al nostro Petrarca, quando nel sonetto che incomincia ‘Io havrò sempre in odio la fenestra’ disse: ‘Ch’è bel morir mentre la vita è destra’; e, ragionando all’anima sua, l’esortava a partirsi dicendo: ‘Vattene trista, che non va per tempo, | chi doppo lassa i suoi dì più sereni’ [Rvf 86.4 and 13–14]. [and maybe her case is the source of one of Petrarch’s nicest concepts, when in sonnet 86 he stated: ‘For it is good to die when one’s life is fortunate’; and then, talking to his own soul, he encouraged it to leave by saying: ‘Go away, sad soul, for he who already has behind him his happiest days is not departing early!’]58

Trotti’s Dialoghi del matrimonio e vita vedovile show that Petrarch’s verses were not only included in collections of commonplaces and memorable sayings as precepts for women’s life, but could also, in turn, be interpreted through the moral prism established by these same compilations. These conduct manuals, therefore, whose composition was far removed from the poetic motives of Petrarch’s texts, could introduce critical insights into Petrarch’s lyrics by framing them within a new moral context. 56 On these collections as sourcebooks of moralities, see Quondam 2003 and Quondam 2010: 156–79; on the use of these compilations in conduct books for women, see Kelso [1956] 1978: 322, and Sanson 2016a: 19–20. 57 Trotti 1578: 235. 58 Trotti 1578: 237.

The Portr ait of the Ideal Woman 

Honesty Between Moral and Practical Advice In his Iconomica, published in Venice in 1552, the Sicilian Paolo Caggio (d. 1562) presents the dialogue between Apollonio and his son Monofilo. Among the advice that the father gives to his son, one concerns the choice of a wife: ‘L’honestà è una delle doti […] che tu dei ricercare nella tua moglie, poiché è impossibile che tu la possa amare senza honestà, che dee tenere il seggio nel core e nella fronte delle donne’ [Virtue is one of the qualities […] that you should seek in your wife, because it is impossible to love her without virtue, which should lie in the hearts and foreheads of women]. Monofilo replies: ‘Mi fate sovvenire un verso del Petrarca: […] “Non fur senza honestà mai cose belle”’ [This statement reminds me of a line of Petrarch: […] ‘There never were things lovely without virtue’ (Rvf 262.4)].59 Caggio, who also gave two academic lectures on Petrarch in 1553, uses the Canzoniere to connect female beauty to female honesty.60 Similarly, Isabella Sori, in her Ammaestramenti, stresses that Laura was not only commended for her beauty but also lodata dal suo poeta, nel sonetto “L’alma mia fiamma”, per essersi sempre mantenuta ne’ termini dell’onestà; il che anche deve servar ogni accorta donzella per anche ricever pari lodi da l’insidiatore, e per non entrar sotto l’amaro giogo d’amore per la penosa vita che vi si pate, per testimonio del medemo, nel 3° e 4° capitolo del Trionfo proprio. [praised by her poet in Rvf 289 because she kept her virtue; and every wise damsel should do the same, in order to be praised by her lover and avoid the bitter yoke of Love, for the pathetic life that she would endure under it, as Petrarch himself testifies in TC III and IV.]61

Petrarch’s poetry, therefore, becomes not only a source of moral recommendations on beauty and virtue; it also becomes a sort of practical manual to preserve women’s honesty. Sori’s Ammaestramenti presents a rich catalogue of suggestions on this issue based on the Rvf and the Triumphi. In the second letter, for example, Sori focuses on the everyday manners that a mother should teach her daughter: amongst others, she stresses the need to appear ‘un poco sdegnosetta’ [a bit disdainful]62 when dealing with lovers, with reference to Rvf 105, and to keep her fingers ‘sotto il guanto, a imitazione della citata Laura’ [under the gloves, imitating the aforementioned 59 60 61 62

Caggio 1552: 16v. For the lectures, see Santangelo 1973. Sori [1628] 2018: 106. Sori [1628] 2018: 91.

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Laura], who used her hands ‘a far scudo al viso […], e con gentil destrezza, come che volesse accomodare il velo, e non già a posta, lo facesse’ [to cover her face […], with a noble dexterity, as if she would fix her veil, and not because she wanted to do it on purpose],63 with reference to Rvf 199 and 200. In the sixth letter, instead, Sori quotes Rvf 3 to support the idea that a woman, ‘nell’andare a chiesa [è] tenuta a fuggir l’ore della moltitudine e così, per legge di onestà, di non andare per vie di molto concorso’ [to protect her honesty, should avoid going to church at the busiest times, and via crowded streets];64 while in the eleventh letter she refers to TP 118 to explain that ‘da citella, se ben quasi non è più in uso, è da vestir di bianco per dimostrar così la castità dell’animo et la pudicizia del pensiero’ [as an unmarried woman, although it is almost old-fashioned at this point, she should dress in white to show the chastity of her soul and the modesty of her thought].65 This is not the only advice on the colours that a woman should use (or avoid) in her clothing: in the same letter, specifically dedicated to clothes and colours, Sori suggests wearing white ornaments on green dresses, as indicated in TM I.19–20, but to avoid mixing green and darker colours, on the basis of Rvf 268.78.66 In the last letter of the Ammaestramenti, Sori uses Petrarch’s verses as a source of images to create women’s imprese:67 this is the case of the ‘fiamma in vaso ristretto’ [flame in a small vase] (taken from Rvf 207.66–67), the diamond (from TP 115), the air (from Rvf 149.3–4), the hand (from Rvf 257.4), and the smile (from Rvf 267.4 and 112.12).68 This specific use of Petrarchan images as symbols of female qualities is perfectly in line with the reception of the Rvf and the Triumphi as sourcebooks for the creation of emblems to be reproduced in women’s portraiture, as in the ‘double portraits’ of Battista Sforza by Piero della Francesca, with a triumph of virtue on its reverse, and of Ginevra de’ Benci by Leonardo da Vinci, with an impresa that Elizabeth Cropper has connected to Rvf 359.69 Another case in point is the success of the Petrarchan image of Cupid bound and disarmed (from the Triumphus Pudicitiae), adopted as a symbol of female chastity in books of emblems and imprese, in encomiastic poems dedicated to women of specific Italian cities, and in works written by women, such as Il merito delle donne (1600) by Moderata Fonte (1555–92) and Amore innamorato et impazzato (1618) by Lucrezia Marinelli (1595–1653).70 It is 63 Sori [1628] 2018: 108–09. 64 Sori [1628] 2018: 109. 65 Sori [1628] 2018: 132. 66 Sori [1628] 2018: 133 and 135. 67 On Italian women’s imprese and emblematic portraiture, see Innocenti 1981; Bregoli-Russo 1990; Maggi 1998; Arbizzoni 2002; and Bolzoni and Volterrani 2008. 68 Sori [1628] 2018: 138–40. 69 Cropper 1986: 185–89; on these portraits, see Bolzoni 2010: 232–307. 70 On this topic, see Lucioli 2013.

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clear that the practical nature of the advice that Sori collects in her Ammaestramenti influences her approach to Petrarch’s texts, which she transforms into manuals of good manners, in turn contributing to a precise image of the ideal young woman. Other authors of conduct manuals make a similar use of Petrarch’s poetry. By quoting Rvf 67.10–11, for instance, Trissino suggests that widows should hide the good they do, and avoid everything that ‘non possa essere a tutti senza arrossirvi palese’ [cannot be publicly revealed without them blushing].71 Luigini, instead, resorts to the Canzoniere to illustrate the activities that he considered appropriate for women. According to Il libro della bella donna, nothing is more suitable for a woman than spinning, and this is shown by numerous mythological examples (Thetys, Minerva, Circe, Penelope) taken from classical authors (Homer, Ovid, Juvenal, Propertius), and by ‘la vecchiarella appresso il Petrarca’ [the old woman in Petrarch],72 that is, the frail old woman who spins in Rvf 33.5–6. Luigini also suggests, with reference to several other sonnets from the Rvf (specifically, 108, 133, 167, 213, 220, 225, 238), ‘che le conviene il sonare, che le conviene il cantare, come ci ha mostro il Petrarca per mezzo di Laura, […] e che le conviene il danzare’ [that playing music, singing, and dancing are appropriate for a woman, as Petrarch showed us through Laura].73 Another example of this kind can be found in the later Ginipedia, the collection of Avvertimenti civili per donna nobile by Vincenzo Nolfi, first printed in 1631 and in an enlarged edition in 1662: when talking about the relationship between correct posture and female clothing, Nolfi suggests that noble women should imitate Laura’s carriage as it is portrayed in Rvf 90.9, 192.7, and TM I.22–23: ‘perché l’andar suo acquista ricchezza e pompa alla frugalità della veste’ [because her carriage gives abundance and elegance to the frugality of the dress].74 These different examples further show the way Petrarch’s poems were translated into everyday practical advice.

Conclusion In books of conduct addressed to a female readership, the portrait of Laura is trans­formed into a physical and moral portrait of the ideal woman. Petrarch’s poetry becomes a source of useful words to describe beautiful women, but also of recommendations that ought to guide their lives, manners, and habits. Petrarch’s Rvf and Triumphi are read (and used) as his De remediis utriusque fortunae, that is, 71 72 73 74

Trissino 1524: C1r. Luigini [1554] 1913: 289. Luigini [1554] 1913: 296. Nolfi 1662: 97; Nolfi’s work is discussed by Evangelisti 2016.

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as collections of moral sayings and examples that can enrich the ideal image that conduct literature authors aimed to build. These authors find in Laura’s description not only a ‘short canon’ to talk about female bodies, but also advice for appropriate hairstyles and clothing, rules regarding everyday activities, suggestions on women’s characteristics and virtues. Therefore, it is not surprising that there exists an entire conduct book based on Petrarch’s texts and on Laura as an exemplary model of behaviour. This is the Discorso della grandezza et felice fortuna d’una gentilissima et graziosissima donna qual fu M. Laura, published by Francesco de’ Vieri, called il Verino secondo, in Florence in 1581 with a dedication to Pellegrina Cappello Bentivoglio. Through the analysis of Laura’s ‘stati’ [states] before her birth, at the time of her birth, during her earthly life, at the time of her death, and after her death, de’ Vieri offers his readers the portrait of a mulier clara, similar to the classical, biblical, and mythological female exempla named and described in books of conduct. Moreover, the numerous passages from Petrarch’s poems included in the Discorso (specifically, Rvf 5, 36, 37, 39, 71, 72, 76, 134, 154, 156, 159, 187, 213, 256, 270, 314, 323, 325, 338, 341, 346, 366; TP 73–78; TM I.49–54, 67–73, 118–20, II.163–68) are interpreted and discussed through a philosophical and religious perspective that transforms Petrarch’s lines into practical advice aimed at teaching women to pay ‘tanto più cura in accrescere, con le virtù, bellezze et grazie al loro animo che al corpo’ [attention in enhancing through virtues the beauty and grace of their souls rather than their bodies].75 Therefore, Laura’s portrait shifts from a physical to a moral model, acquiring a clear ethical function. From a chronological point of view, de’ Vieri’s Discorso is not the last early modern text focused on women’s behaviour; however, it is a particularly significant example of the way Petrarch’s works contribute to the construction of an ideal femininity promoted by conduct books.

Bibliography Arbizzoni, Guido. 2002. ‘Un nodo di parole e di cose’: storia e fortuna delle ‘imprese’ (Rome: Salerno). Belmonte, Pietro. [1587] 2008. L’Instituzione della sposa, ed. by Helena Sanson, Letteratura Italiana Antica, 9: 35–76. Bolzoni, Lina. 2010. Il cuore di cristallo: ragionamenti d’amore, poesia e ritratto nel Rina­ scimento (Turin: Einaudi). Bolzoni, Lina, and Silvia Volterrani (eds). 2008. ‘Con parola brieve e con figura’: Emblemi e imprese fra antico e moderno (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale). Bregoli-Russo, Mauda. 1990. L’impresa come ritratto del Rinascimento (Naples: Loffredo). 75 De’ Vieri 1581: 7.

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Caggio, Paolo. 1552. Iconomica […], nella quale s’insegna brevemente per modo di dialogo il governo famigliare, come di se stesso, della moglie, de’ figliuoli, de’ servi, delle case, delle robbe et d’ogn’altra cosa a quella appartenente (Venice: Al segno del Pozzo). Chemello, Adriana. 1985. ‘L’“Institution delle donne” di Lodovico Dolce ossia l’“insegnar virtù et honesti costumi alla donna”’, in Trattati scientifici nel Veneto fra il XV e XVI secolo (Vicenza: Neri Pozza), pp. 103–34. Cherchi, Paolo. 1998. Polimatia di riuso: mezzo secolo di plagio (1539–1589) (Rome: Bulzoni). Cox, Virginia. 2008. Women’s Writing in Italy: 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Cropper, Elizabeth. 1976. ‘On Beautiful Women: Parmigianino, Petrarchismo and the Vernacular Style’, The Art Bulletin, 58.3: 374–94. Cropper, Elizabeth. 1986. ‘The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Female Portraiture’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Chicago University Press), pp. 175–90. Cropper, Elizabeth. 1995. ‘The Place of Beauty in the High Renaissance and its Displacement in the History of Art’, in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, ed. by Alvin Vos (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies), pp. 159–205. Dal Pozzolo, Enrico Maria. 1993. ‘Il lauro di Laura e delle “maritate venetiane”’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 37: 257–91. Della Rovere, Girolamo. 1540. Ad commendationem sexus muliebris oratio (Ticino: Giovanni Maria Simonetta). De’ Vieri, Francesco. 1581. Discorso della grandezza et felice fortuna d’una gentilissima et graziosissima donna qual fu M. Laura (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti). Dolce, Lodovico. [1545] 2015. Dialogo della instituzion delle donne, secondo li tre stati che cadono nella vita umana, ed. by Helena Sanson (Cambridge: MHRA). Dolce, Lodovico. 1547. Dialogo della institution delle donne (Venice: Gabriel Giolito). Domenichi, Lodovico. 1549. La nobiltà delle donne (Venice: Gabriel Giolito). Evangelisti, Silvia. 2016. ‘Vincenzo Nolfi’s Ginipedia (1631): Household Management and Civic Femininity in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, in Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470–1900: Prescribing and Describing Life, ed. by Helena Sanson and Francesco Lucioli (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), pp. 63–80. Fausto da Longiano, Sebastiano. 1532. Il Petrarcha col commento di M. Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano, con rimario et epiteti in ordine d’alphabeto (Venice: Alessandro Bindoni and Maffeo Pasini). Gelli, Giovan Battista. 1549. Il Gello sopra un sonetto di M. Franc. Petrarca (Florence: [n. p.]). Innocenti, Giancarlo. 1981. L’immagine significante: studio sull’emblematica cinquecentesca (Padua: Liviana). Kelso, Ruth. [1956] 1978. Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, with a foreword by Katharine M. Rogers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).

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Lucioli, Francesco. 2013. Amore punito e disarmato: parola e immagine da Petrarca all’Arcadia (Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice). Lucioli, Francesco. 2015. ‘Introduzione’, in Agostino Valier, Instituzione d’ogni stato lodevole delle donne cristiane and Ricordi […] lasciati alle monache nella sua visitazione fatta l’anno del Santissimo Giubileo 1575, ed. by Francesco Lucioli (Cambridge, MHRA), pp. 1–41. Lucioli, Francesco. 2018. ‘L’Orlando furioso nel dibattito sulla donna in Italia in età moderna’, Italianistica, 47.1: 99–129. Luigini, Federico. [1554] 1913. Il libro della bella donna, in Trattati del Cinquecento sulla donna, ed. by Giuseppe Zonta (Bari: Laterza), pp. 221–308. Maggi, Armando. 1998. Identità e impresa rinascimentale (Ravenna: Longo). Montandon, Alain (ed.). 1993. Traités de savoir-vivre italiens / I trattati di saper vivere in Italia (Clermont-Ferrand: Association des Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Clermont-Ferrand). Murphy, Caroline P. 2001. ‘Il ciclo della vita femminile: norme comportamentali e pratiche di vita’, in Monaca, Moglie, Serva, Cortigiana: vita e immagine delle donne tra Rinascimento e Controriforma, ed. by Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, with the collaboration of Sabina Brevaglieri, introduction by Cristina Acidini Luchinat (Florence: Morgana), pp. 15–47. Nolfi, Vincenzo. 1662. Ginipedia, overo avvertimenti civili per donna nobile (Bologna: Eredi del Dozza). Petrarca, Francesco. 1558. Il Petrarca con dichiarazioni non più stampate, insieme con alcune belle annotationi tratte dalle dottissime Prose di Monsignor Bembo (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé). Petrarca, Francesco. 1976. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 1996b. Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli abbozzi, ed. by Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino (Milan: Mondadori). Petrarca, Francesco. 1997. Opera omnia, ed. by Pasquale Stoppelli (Rome: Lexis Progetti Editoriali). Petrarca, Francesco. 2004. Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori). Pich, Federica. 2019. ‘La poesia e il ritratto’, in Letteratura e arti visive nel Rinascimento, ed. by Gianluca Genovese and Andrea Torre (Rome: Carocci), pp. 57–84. Pozzi, Giovanni. 1981. ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d’inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, in Giorgione e l’Umanesimo veneziano, ed. by Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence: Olschki), pp. 309–41 (reprint in Pozzi 1993a: 145–71). Pozzi, Giovanni. 1986. ‘Occhi bassi’, in Thematologie des Kleinen: petits thèmes littéraires, ed. by Edgar Marsch and Giovanni Pozzi (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag), pp. 161–211. Pozzi, Giovanni. 1993a. Sull’orlo del visibile parlare (Milan: Adelphi). Pozzi, Giovanni. 1993b. ‘Nota additiva alla “descriptio puellae”’, in Pozzi, Sull’orlo del visibile parlare (Milan: Adelphi, 1993), pp. 173–84.

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Quondam, Amedeo. 1991. ‘Il naso di Laura: considerazioni sul ritratto poetico e la comunicazione lirica’, in Quondam, Il naso di Laura: lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del Classicismo (Modena: Panini), pp. 291–328. Quondam, Amedeo. 2003. ‘Strumenti dell’officina classicistica: Polyanthea & Co.’, Modern Philology, 101.2: 316–35. Quondam, Amedeo. 2010. Forma del vivere: l’etica del gentiluomo e i moralisti italiani (Bologna: Il Mulino). Rogers, Mary. 1988. ‘The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth-Century Painting’, Renaissance Studies, 2.1: 47–88. Rogers, Mary, and Paola Tinagli (eds). 2005. Women in Italy, 1350–1650: Ideals and Realities (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press). Sanson, Helena. 2007a. Donne, precettistica e lingua nell’Italia del Cinquecento: un contributo alla storia del pensiero linguistico (Florence: Presso l’Accademia della Crusca). Sanson, Helena. 2007b. ‘Consigli di un padre alla propria figlia in occasione delle nozze: Pietro Belmonti e l’Institutione della sposa (1587)’, The Italianist, 27: 5–49. Sanson, Helena. 2008. ‘Introduction’, in Pietro Belmonte [1587], L’Instituzione della sposa, ed. by Helena Sanson, Letteratura Italiana Antica, 9: 17–76. Sanson, Helena. 2015a. ‘Introduction’, in Lodovico Dolce [1545], Dialogo della instituzion delle donne, secondo li tre stati che cadono nella vita umana, ed. by Helena Sanson (Cambridge: MHRA, 2015), pp. 1–68 Sanson, Helena. 2016a. ‘Women and Conduct in the Italian Tradition, 1470–1900: An Overview’, in Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470–1900: Prescribing and Describing Life, ed. by Helena Sanson and Francesco Lucioli (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), pp. 9–38. Sanson, Helena. 2016b. ‘Conduct for the Real Widow: Giulio Cesare Cabei’s Ornamenti della gentildonna vedova (1574)’, in Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470–1900: Prescribing and Describing Life, ed. by Helena Sanson and Francesco Lucioli (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), pp. 41–61. Sanson, Helena. 2016c. ‘Dorotea a lezione di “creanza” nel Dialogo […] della institution delle donne (1545) del Dolce’, in Per Lodovico Dolce: miscellanea di studi, ed. by Paolo Marini and Paolo Procaccioli (Manziana: Vecchiarelli), I: Passioni e competenze del letterato, pp. 245–69. Sanson, Helena. 2018. ‘Introduction’, in Isabella Sori [1628], Ammaestramenti e ricordi, ed. by Helena Sanson (Cambridge: MHRA), pp. 1–70. Sanson, Helena, and Francesco Lucioli (eds). 2016. Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470–1900: Prescribing and Describing Life (Paris: Classiques Garnier). Santangelo, Salvatore. 1973. ‘Caggio, Paolo’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana), XVI, pp. 289–92. Sori, Isabella. [1628] 2018. Ammaestramenti e ricordi, ed. by Helena Sanson (Cambridge: MHRA).

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Tippelskirch, Xenia von. 2011. Sotto controllo: letture femminili in Italia nella prima età moderna (Rome: Viella). Trissino, Gian Giorgio. 1524. Epistola […] de la vita che dee tenere una donna vedova (Rome: Lodovico Vicentino e Lautitio). Trotti, Bernardo. 1578. Dialoghi del matrimonio e vita vedovile (Turin: Francesco Dolce). Yavneh, Naomi. 1993. ‘The Ambiguity of Beauty in Tasso and Petrarch’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. by James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 133–57. Zeri, Federico, and Elizabeth E. Gardner. 1971. Italian Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Florentine School (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art).

About the Author Francesco Lucioli is Ricercatore (Assistant Professor) in Italian at Sapienza University of Rome, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Italian at University College Dublin. His main areas of interest are early modern Italian literature, in both Neo-Latin and the vernacular; the relationship between literature and visual arts; Renaissance and Baroque Rome; chivalric and epic poetry; ethics and conduct literature. He has published the following monographs: Amore punito e disarmato: parola e immagine da Petrarca all’Arcadia (2013); Jacopo Sadoleto umanista e poeta (2014); Tramutazioni dell’‘Orlando furioso’: sulla ricezione del poema ariostesco (2020). He has also edited Giuliano Dati’s poem Aedificatio Romae (2012), and Cardinal Agostino Valier’s conduct treatises for women (2015).

5

Anti-Petrarchist Portraiture or a Different Petrarchist Portraiture? A Literary Outlook on Some Non-Idealised Female Sitters in Renaissance Art Diletta Gamberini

Abstract By focusing on two stylistically divergent treatments of the motif of the old female subject that were produced by major Italian artists between the 1490s and 1500s—specifically, one of Leonardo’s ‘grotesque heads’ and Giorgione’s La vecchia—the essay considers in what ways Renaissance depictions of aged women could engage with the literary authority of the Canzoniere. Thus, the enquiry will highlight how such an engagement with Petrarch’s vernacular poetry, particularly with its recurrent meditation on the transience of the beloved’s beauty, was sometimes inscribed not only in those artworks’ visual rhetoric, but also in their early reception. Keywords: old woman; Petrarch; Leonardo; Giorgione; La vecchia; portraiture

A growing amount of research is casting light on the impact that Petrarchan ideals of beauty had on Italian Renaissance art.1 Following Elizabeth Cropper’s seminal discussion of the physical features of some of Parmigianino’s women as examples of visual Petrarchism, which centres on a limited set of features that 1 My sincere thanks go to Ilaria Bernocchi, Nicolò Morelli, Federica Pich, and Ulrich Pfisterer, who have offered most valuable feedback on different versions of this essay. I am grateful to Alessandro Polcri and Bruce Edelstein: at a time in which library access was globally difficult, they kindly provided me with some of the bibliographic materials I needed for writing this contribution. I also wish to thank Marco Pomini for discussing with me several paintings that were of importance to my study. Because of page limitations and the extent of the literature available on the problems and artists under consideration, the text only makes reference to the works that are most directly relevant to my argument.

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch05

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distinguished Madonna Laura in the Canzoniere (e.g., the blonde hair, fair and fresh countenance, rosy lips with only a hint of a smile), scholars have come to understand how Petrarch’s raref ied description of the female body shaped sixteenth-century depictions of belle donne. 2 Comparatively little attention, however, has been given to the intermedial connection between the rhetoric of that poetry and that articulated in a number of non-idealised representations of old women produced by some Italian masters in the same period.3 What is more, in dealing with images of subjects who exhibit clear signs of ageing (grey hair, wrinkled and sagging skin), scholars have typically privileged a comparative focus with the portrayals of ugliness that were popular in Tuscan comic verse. This has lent some credence to the idea that such depictions were mostly conceived in antithesis to the sublimising conventions of the lyrical discourse on beauty, and that the relation they established with the Petrarchan model was one of parody or subversion. While many sixteenth-century artists took a similarly debasing stance toward the authority of the Canzoniere, this essay contends that alternative modes of engagement with its model were also thought possible in portraiture of ageing women—ones that did not antagonise the lyrical code but were inscribed within it. By focusing on the sketch of an old woman that Leonardo associated with a quote from the Fragmenta in one of his notebooks, this essay f irst attempts to demonstrate that a visual antithesis to the Petrarchan eulogy of Laura’s comeliness could also originate from Petrarchan conceptual premises. The hyper-characterisation—tragicomic rather than burlesque—with which the artist responded to the Canzoniere’s meditation on the fuga temporis et pulchritudinis will then be compared with the different treatment of female senescence in Giorgione’s La vecchia. Taking as point of departure the recent restoration of the painting, which highlighted the stylistic gap separating its dignif ied subject from coeval grotesque renderings of old women, and following one interpretive lead by Eugenio Battisti, the paper will advance the possibility that the earliest documented reception of the work was linked to Petrarchan poetry. The analysis will also attempt to explore the relationship between the picture and the inscription that is an integral part of Giorgione’s painting. Thus, it will 2 On this see at least Cropper 1976 and Cropper 1987. Other relevant contributions in this sense are Pozzi 1979, with a discussion of the descriptive techniques that poets used to represent a canonically beautiful female body (what he called the ‘short’ or ‘long canon’ of beauties in which the descriptio pulchritudinis could be articulated); Rogers 1988; and Quondam 2022. For a recent assessment of the question, see Pich 2019: 59 and 66–71, with further references. For the role that the ‘short canon’ played in early modern conduct books see Francesco Lucioli’s essay in this volume. 3 On the limited attention that art historians have traditionally paid to representations of ageing women and on the reversal of this trend in recent years, see Campbell 2006, particularly pp. 153–54.

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be possible to cast light on the variety of interpretations that Italian Renaissance artists gave to the motif of the transience of the beloved’s beauty, which has been pervasive in poetry since classical antiquity and held an unmistakable centrality for Petrarch.

‘Cosa Bella Mortal Passa e Non Dura’: Leonardo’s Horrified Look at the Ultimate Degeneration of the Human Body Every token of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness […], above all the smell, colour and shape of dissolution, of decomposition, though it be attenuated to the point of being no more than a symbol—all this calls forth the same reaction, the value judgment, ‘ugly’. —Friedrich Nietzsche4

Penned by Leonardo at some point between 1493 and 1496 with a few hasty pencil strokes at the top margin of a sheet that, like the rest of the manuscript (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Codex Forster III),5 contains a heterogeneous collection of notes, geometric diagrams and drawings, is the face of a woman with a grim profile, mercilessly carved by time (Fig. 5.1). Her high, frowning forehead, her shiners so dark that they look like empty eye sockets, her huge, hooked nose that almost reaches over a toothless mouth to touch a chin just as disproportionate, and her neck, furrowed by deep lines, are of such stereotypical unpleasantness that they resemble the iconography of the ‘old witch’. Immediately below the figure, Leonardo transcribed a quote from Petrarch’s sonnet ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura’ (Rvf 248.8) to indicate the shared genesis of words and image: ‘Cosa bella mortal passa e non dura’ [beautiful mortal thing passes, and does not endure].6 In his pioneering essay on Leonardo’s so-called ‘grotesque heads’, Ernst Gombrich was the first to argue that the fragment is essential for a correct analysis of the drawing.7 His concise discussion of this ‘scribble of an ugly old woman’ placed it within the same genre of satirical depictions of ‘human folly’ that we find also in a sketch, now at Windsor, of an elderly couple from a few years before (Fig. 5.2). 4 Nietzsche 1979: 79. 5 The codex is a small-format notebook dating back to the years 1487–1490 but integrated several times by the artist until 1497. See Vecce 2015: 187, with bibliography. 6 On the scribble of the old woman and its dating see now Versiero 2020: 536–37. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf or Canzoniere) are from Petrarca 1996a. English translations are from Petrarca 1976. 7 Gombrich 1976 (first published in 1954): 57–75 (pp. 57–58).

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Fig. 5.1 Leonardo da Vinci, Old Woman, c. 1490, pencil on paper, Codex Forster III, fol. 72r, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Gombrich also argued that Leonardo’s choice to add the Petrarchan quote should be connected, in tone and spirit, with his transcription in the Codex Trivulziano of a tercet by an anonymous rhymester who ridiculed the Canzoniere’s mythology of the laurel: ‘Se ’l Petrarcha amò sì forte i· lauro, | fu pe〈r〉ché gli è bo〈n〉 fra·lla salsicia e tor〈do.〉 | I’ no· posso di lor gia〈n〉ce [scil. ciance] far tesauro’ [If Petrarch loved the laurel so strongly, it was because it was so good between the sausage and the thrush. I cannot make out of their rubbish a thesaurus].8 In this case, Leonardo elaborated on these burlesque lines with a series of sketches of male heads with more or less deformed features. 8 Codex Trivulziano, fol. 2v (c. 1487–90). My transcription, which introduces a separation of the words, accent marks and capitalisation, is based on the semi-diplomatic edition of the tercet in Bambach 2019: I, 459, which is also the source of the translation (see II, p. 11 for the reproduction of the sheet, and IV, p. 187, n. 599 for bibliographic references on the document).

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Fig. 5.2 Leonardo, Grotesque Elderly Couple (‘A satire on aged lovers’), c. 1490, leadpoint, pen and pale ink on paper, 26.2 ×12.3 cm, RCIN 912449, Royal Collection, Windsor.

In proposing a ‘satirical’ interpretation of the old woman from the Codex Forster, Gombrich was probably tacitly drawing on a 1908 study by Edmondo Solmi, who had claimed that Leonardo was fundamentally hostile to Petrarch’s poetry.9 According to Solmi, although Leonardo was in possession of a ‘Petrarcha’ (possibly a printed volume containing both the Canzoniere and the Trionfi), he would have had a greater intellectual affinity with other poetic traditions: on the one hand, Dante’s Commedia, with its extraordinary speculative breadth, and on the other hand, the thriving vein of Tuscan burlesque poetry that includes authors like Burchiello, Luigi Pulci, and Bernardo Bellincioni, a Florentine rhymester active at 9 See especially Solmi 1908: 130, 229, 255, and passim, which seems to have been the main point of reference for both Gombrich’s argumentation and the discussion of Leonardo’s hostility to Petrarch in Dionisotti 1962: 193.

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the court of Milan.10 In turn, the decisive role that Gombrich’s analysis played in the critical rediscovery of Leonardo’s grotesque heads has consolidated the idea that these drawings had a fundamentally comical tone and were intrinsically anti-Petrarchist. In a study that is in many ways illuminating, Martin Kemp has thus proposed to read those images as a visual translation of the deformed and exaggerated physiognomies typical of Burchiello, Luigi Pulci, and Antonio Cammelli (‘il Pistoia’), with their ‘vigorously acid brand of anti-Petrarchian burlesque’.11 However, the interpretation of the Codex Forster’s old hag as an anti-Petrarchan satire can be objected to on two main grounds.12 From a visual standpoint, the drawing does not exhibit any of the features that Leonardo used to express the subject’s moral degeneration, which characterise instead many of his other grotesque heads. Michael Kwakkelstein has pointed out that a signif icant part of Leonardo’s corpus inflects the physiognomic investigation into old age (one of his long-term interests) to achieve a comic-satirical effect, an approach that several northern Italian and northern European painters reprised and copied throughout the sixteenth century. In female f igures, this approach tended to emphasise ridiculous aspects such as the contrast between the opulence of their clothes, or their conspicuously elaborate hairdos, and their repellent deformity and physical decay.13 This certainly holds true for the female f igure in the Windsor elderly couple, which Gombrich directly equated to the old hag of the Codex Forster. In the former case, Leonardo’s satirical intent emerges from details like the extravagant and gravity-defying hairstyle, and the dress with a décolletage that is ill-suited for the woman’s age and countenance. The Codex Forster woman, on the other hand, can be more convincingly ascribed to a different subgenre of grotesque heads by the artist, which Kwakkelstein calls ‘physiognomic experiments’.14 While characterised by a degree of deformity not dissimilar from that of his satirical 10 That Leonardo owned a copy of Petrarch’s work is attested by the list of books he compiled on fol. 559r of the Codex Atlanticus (c. 1495): see now the entry by Ebe Antetomaso in Vecce 2019: 177–79. Solmi 1908: 229 maintained that Leonardo’s ‘Petrarcha’ was a copy of the incunable Sonetti e Canzoni di Messer Francesco Petrarca, which was published in Venice in 1478 with Francesco Filelfo’s commentary (the same hypothesis now in Bambach 2019: I, 458). Recent investigations into the artist’s library have proposed that such a volume might have been in manuscript form or been a copy of the incunable issued in Venice in 1470 by Vindelinus de Spira: see Ebe Antetomaso in Vecce 2019: 177–79. 11 Kemp 1985: 203. 12 See also Schuster Cordone 2009: 119. Her work discusses the figure of the Codex Forster as a satiric attack, comparable to the drawing by Francesco Melzi that represents the same subject as Quentin Massys’s Ugly Duchess (c. 1513), to the ‘tentatives désespérées de […] vieilles femmes de récuperer une jeunesse révolue évoquent le thème de la vanité’. 13 Kwakkelstein 1994: 108–12. 14 Ibid.: 113.

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drawings, these heads are devoid of any ridiculous attribute. As Carmen Bambach has recently proposed, they appear to be the product of an interest in observing the progressive corruption of the human body rather than intentionally derisive caricatures.15 From a literary standpoint, it is also possible to make an argument against the thesis that the Codex Forster woman expresses an anti-Petrarchist stance equivalent to Tuscan burlesque poetry. Firstly, nothing but a misshapen ugliness seems to liken our old hag to the myriad of portraits of old women that populate that poetic tradition. Presented as filthy, sexually insatiable, and generally corrupt in their customs—as signalled by their passion for make-up and sumptuous attire—those characters were the target of an attack imbued with moralism, in continuity with the ancient topoi of the improperia in vetulam (‘reproaches against the old woman’).16 Although this type of censorship does inform a great deal of Leonardo’s drawings of decrepit hags, it seems to be completely absent in the figurine of the Codex Forster, outfitted in a plain dress and devoid of any ornament. Secondly, an anti-Petrarchan reading of the image tends to obfuscate the fact that, among artists and literati who grew up in 1470s Florence, a strong interest in burlesque verse often coexisted with an interest in the lyrical tradition.17 The two genres were placed on different registers (low and high) and, thus, according to the premodern conventions of Stiltrennung or separation of literary styles, not in direct competition with each other inasmuch as they represented different areas of human experience. Lastly, as Carlo Vecce has pointed out, the grim figuration of physical decay in the Codex Forster woman expresses a profound consonance with the spirit of the quotation below it 18—without exhibiting, it should be added, the kind of semantic reversal that is the hallmark of parody. The sonnet ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura’, from which the quote is taken, is a eulogy of Laura’s supreme beauty stemming from a meditation on its inexorable transience: the gist of the poem is an invitation to the reader to hurry up and observe in person the miracle of beauty before time and death exert their destructive power. The way in which Leonardo approached the text seems to be more broadly indicative of his interests and how they shaped his reading of Petrarchan poetry, as emerges from the many scattered quotations or paraphrases from the 15 Bambach 2019: I, 457–59. 16 On the treatment of the motif of the old woman in medieval and renaissance comic Tuscan verse, see at least Orvieto and Brestolini 2000: 13–61 and passim; and Bettella 2005: 10–40, 66–80, 107–23, with further references. On the recurrence of the negative topos of the decrepit, drunken seductress in Latin literature (with examples in Plautus, Horace, Martial, Ovid) see Mencacci 2006: 144–48, with bibliography. 17 Giunta 2002: 306–07, with further references. 18 See Vecce 2015: 203. On the fundamental concord between Leonardo and Petrarch’s reflections on the ruinous effects of time on every terrestrial realm, see also Versiero 2019: 46.

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Canzoniere and the Triumphi that he transcribed in his manuscripts.19 As in the case here, these extracts typically concerned the sententiae that Petrarch had woven into his verses, which, taken in isolation, transcended the poet’s individual love for his muse to incisively frame universal truths about the harsh laws governing human existence.20 Leonardo’s fruition of Petrarch’s poetry privileged thus its gnomic aspect, especially when condensed into memorable aphoristic formulas. His tendency to extrapolate, memorise, and preserve the fragments of a textual reflection on the order that governs the world stemmed from a cultural mindset that regarded literature as a depositum sapientiae. Leonardo typically adopted this approach with poetic works that, unlike the Commedia or Cecco d’Ascoli’s L’Acerba, were not distinguished by encyclopaedic, cosmological, or naturalistic contents, which instead provided him with access to analyses of physical phenomena and to a ‘scientific’ knowledge about the functioning of the machine of world.21 A taste for the gnomic dimension of poetry is, for instance, what underpinned his recording on a folio of the Codex Atlanticus of a passage from Pythagoras’s speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XV.234–36) (taken from the medieval vernacular translation by Arrigo de’ Simintendi) which deplored the action of time as a consumer of all things and all beauty.22 In short, no fundamental intention to ridicule Petrarch seems to inform the Codex Forster’s ‘old hag’. Rather, the words and image offer two stylistically antithetical interpretations of the same inexorable law of transience that applies to every beautiful mortal thing: for while the poetic treatment of the motif was elegiac, the visual one was so expressionistic as to be merciless. In this regard, it seems plausible that Leonardo’s choice to emphasise that silhouette’s protrusions and recesses implemented a reflection from the second book of De Pictura, in which Leon Battista Alberti had opposed the paradigmatic ugliness 19 See Donati 1964 (particularly pp. 313–20), which was the first study to reject the simplistic interpretation of Leonardo as an anti-Petrarchan artist. 20 On this aspect of Petrarch’s poetry see Strada 2002–03. 21 Dionisotti 1962: 193–94, underscored Leonardo’s propensity to transcribe memorable sententiae from literary texts but argued that these were typically secondhand citations that the artist drew from scholastic manuscript collections of maxims. The most recent works on Leonardo’s library have instead shed light on the extent and nature of the artist’s direct dialogue with the books he owned in his own writings: see Vecce 2017: 45–170 (for Leonardo’s relation to works that were dense in scientific notions, see pp. 48–49; for his mnemonic citations of maxims from a book such as the vernacular translation of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers, see p. 55). Versiero (2020: 537) maintains that Leonardo’s quote from Rfv 248.8 was the result of the artist’s interest in Petrarch’s ‘philosophical meditation on naturalistic themes’, and discusses some other examples of Petrarchan citations among his papers. 22 For detailed discussions of the quote, which was linked to the depiction of the old and no longer attractive Helen of Troy commiserating herself in front of the mirror, see Fabrizio-Costa 1997: 90–97; Vecce 2015: 197–200; Vecce 2017: 159 and 162; Versiero 2019: 43–45, all with a bibliography on the topic.

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of old women’s angular features to the soft delicacy of those of female beauties in their prime.23 At any rate, the relationship that the drawing establishes with the quotation from the Canzoniere suggests that this representation was not conceived by Leonardo as one of those ‘buffoonish and laughable’ images that the painter, according to a passage in the Book of Painting, had the demiurgic power to create.24 On the contrary, the picture was most probably intended as one of a pitiable nature and, as such, was fundamentally in line with the letter of sonnet 248, which in its closing remarked how anyone who would be slow to contemplate Laura’s frail beauty ‘avrà da pianger sempre’ [shall have reason to weep forever].

A Petrarchan Early Fruition of Giorgione’s La vecchia? Deep within everyone’s heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. —Irène Némirovsky25

Freed from the abrasions and craquelures that the centuries had layered on the painted surface, but above all from those wrinkles that previous restorers had added to her countenance to accentuate her senility,26 Giorgione’s La vecchia emerged from restoration in 2019 with an appearance that many commentators called ‘rejuvenated’ (Fig. 5.3). 23 Alberti 1972: 72–73 (II.35): ‘From the composition of surfaces arises the elegant harmony and grace in bodies, which they call beauty. The face which has some surfaces large and others small, some very prominent and others excessively receding and hollow, such as we see in the faces of old women, will be ugly to look at. But the face in which the surfaces are so joined together that pleasing lights pass gradually into agreeable shadows and there are no very sharp angles, we may rightly call a handsome and beautiful face’. On Leonardo’s familiarity with Alberti’s treatise, see Kwakkelstein 1994: 21–26 and Vecce 2017: 98, with further references. For a related suggestion, surmising that some of Alberti’s considerations on the irregular facial features that we read in the third book of the De Pictura might have been known to Leonardo when he started drawing grotesque heads, see Gombrich 1976: 62. 24 Leonardo 1989 (c. 1490–1492): 32: ‘If the painter wishes to see beauties that would enrapture him, he is master of their production, and if he wishes to see monstrous things which might terrify or which would be buffoonish and laughable or truly pitiable, he is their lord and god’. In the final part of his essay on grotesque heads, Gombrich (1976: 74) mused over this passage in the following terms: ‘Can we wonder that we find it hard to decide whether the grotesques are meant as jokes or as monsters? Leonardo himself left the question open. His mind was so wide, that he even foresaw the possibility of feeling pity for the creations of his own cruel whim’. 25 Némirovsky 2013: 45. 26 Bono and Manieri Elia 2019 and Dal Pozzolo 2019, particularly regarding Mauro Pelliccioli’s intervention in the late 1940s.

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Fig. 5.3 Giorgione, La vecchia, c. 1506, oil on canvas, 68 × 59 cm, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Indeed, although the painting’s subject still appears fatigued and marked by years, it certainly no longer appears decrepit. In her softened features, it is therefore much less obvious to recognise the kind of memento mori that Erwin Panofsky had identified when he put the work in relation to those macabre images of decaying bodies and skeletons (the transis) that, in late medieval and early modern funeral sculpture, admonished viewers about their own finiteness.27 It has also become harder to trace the same ghastly memento senescere that led Panofsky to argue—with a thesis now almost universally discredited in scholarly literature—that its creator could not be the ‘gentle master of Castelfranco’ but only Titian, an artist capable of ‘terrifying’ his spectators with other ‘horrible’ figures of old women.28 With the work brought back to its original conditions, we can now clearly see the irreconcilable difference between its elegiac and sympathetic rendering of the old woman and the aggressive interpretations that we find, for example, in many of Leonardo’s grotesque heads. In this sense, we might say that the restoration of La vecchia provides new stylistic 27 Panofsky 1969: 91 and, for the subsequent fortune of this type of reading, Lüdemann 2016: 11. Lüdemann’s article (pp. 11–17) provides a valuable survey (with a rich bibliography in the notes) of the collecting history of the painting, of the main critical approaches towards it (on which see also Nepi Scirè in Nepi Scirè and Rossi 2003: 162–67) and of scholarly debates on its chronology, with hypotheses spanning from an early phase of the artist’s career (c. 1502/1503) to the final years of his short life (1508–1510). 28 Panofsky 1969: 91, with particular reference to the characters that Titian depicted in the Presentation of the Virgin (Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia) and in the Prado Danaë.

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arguments to a line of enquiry that seeks to establish a connection between the picture and a literary culture of a lyrical, anti-expressionistic type. Eugenio Battisti was the first to claim that it would be possible to trace a myriad of different poetic echoes in La vecchia.29 He particularly recalled the popularity that the topical motif of the beloved stricken by the years (the so-called belle vieille) enjoyed in the prose and poetry produced in France and Italy since the late Middle Ages, for instance in the pseudo-Ugo da San Vittore’s De Nuptiis and Petrarch’s Triumphi. He also underscored the recurrence that sapiential considerations on the passage of time had in the verse of poets active in northern Italy in the early sixteenth century. In particular, he singled out some passages from Cesare Nappi’s Egloga Pastorale and Panfilo Sasso’s sonnet ‘Col tempo el villanel al giogo mena’ that featured the same words (‘Col tempo’) that we read on the banderole behind the old woman’s right hand.30 The fact that the composition by Sasso, a leading exponent of the so-called ‘poesia cortigiana’, repeated this expression at the beginning of each line seems to have decisively oriented the scholarly investigations that have picked up on Battisti’s hermeneutical hints. In recent years, Jodi Cranston, Salvatore Settis, and Piermario Vescovo have thus all emphasised the importance for understanding Giorgione’s painting of the same literary tradition, which reached its apogee at the princely courts in central and northern Italy between c. 1490 and 1510.31 They highlighted the popularity within this poetic scene of sombre admonitions on the transience of everything earthly and of the theme of tempus edax rerum. Peter Lüdemann, on the other hand, has insisted on the presence of the phrase ‘col tempo’ (or other closely related expressions) in the poetry of Antonio Tebaldeo, Filenio Gallo, Marcello Filosseno, and Sasso himself as a demonstration that the theme of the passing of time could take on a positive connotation. Drawing on a number of visual sources, he has argued that La vecchia might have functioned as a tribute to the prudence that man conquers over the years, particularly for Gabriele Vendramin, the painting’s first owner and possible commissioner.32 29 See Battisti 1960: 156. For his treatment of literary works, Battisti drew on Ernst Robert Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948). 30 It is important to note that the scientific analyses conducted on the occasion of the 2019 restoration have demonstrated—as attested to by Aikema 2019—that the banderole is an original part of the painting. Although Giorgione probably added it in the final stages of his work, the element was not a posthumous addiction to it, as numerous scholars had previously argued (for a review of these positions, see Lüdemann 2016: 31, n. 42–44; a notable exception to this trend is Settis 2008: 42, which explicitly supports the thesis of Giorgione’s paternity for the banderole). 31 See Cranston 2000: 31 and 199, n. 37 (with further references to the presence of the words ‘col tempo’ in the work of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poets such as Francesco d’Altobianco Alberti and Pietro Aretino); Settis 2008: 43; Vescovo 2011: 155–56. 32 Lüdemann 2016: 17–20 (the quote is from p. 20) and 31–33, nn. 47–60.

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Admittedly, nothing certain is known about the painting’s commission, and its absence from Marcantonio Michiel’s description of the Vendramin collection in 1530 suggests that the work entered the collection only after that date.33 With this in mind, I will attempt to develop one of Battisti’s interpretive cues in a direction usually neglected in scholarly literature. Expanding on his hypothesis that the subject of La vecchia was related, among others, to the belle vieille poetic topos, my discussion will focus on the painting’s reception as it was displayed in Vendramin’s palace of Santa Fosca, more precisely in his ‘camera da notar’.34 Out of caution, I consider the period between the moment when Vendramin came into possession of the painting, after 1530, and 1552, the year of his death. The inventory of the collection drawn up at the beginning of 1602 reveals that these chronological terms circumscribe a time during which the ‘painting of an old woman’ was equipped with a timpano or coperto ‘painted with a man wearing a black leather veste’.35 Like twenty-one other pictures from the same collection, La vecchia was thus complemented by a painting that would have covered, unless opened like a book cover or removed, the old woman and the banderole.36 33 See at least Vescovo 1992: 54, and the entry on the work by Giovanna Nepi Scirè in Marani and Nepi Scirè 1992: 328–30 (p. 328), with further references. Conversely, Lauber (2009: 194) underscores that we cannot be completely sure that La vecchia was not already part of the Vendramin collection by the time Michiel visited it and described it in his Notizia d’opere del disegno. 34 Ravà 1920: 178; see also Whistler 2009: 540–41 for a survey of the main identifiable artworks (‘the cream of his paintings collection, with works by Giorgione, Raphael, Palma, Vivarini, Bonifazio, Cariani, and Dürer’: ivi, p. 540) that were preserved in this room. 35 Lauber 2008: 371: ‘uno quadro d’una dona vecchia con le sue soaze de noghera depente […] || il coperto del detto quadro depento con un huomo con una veste de pelle negre’. See also Anderson 1979. Several scholars have already pointed out (see Lüdemann 2016: 13–16) the discrepancy between this entry and the one that first records La vecchia in the inventory of the Vendramin collection compiled in March 1569, where it is listed as ‘Il retrato della madre de Zorzon de man de Zorzon con suo fornimento depento con l’arma de cha’ Vendramin’ (Ravà 1920: 178, with a mistake in the identification of the subject that was probably due to the iconographical rarity of a serious depiction of an old woman. On this, see also Vescovo 1992: 192; Cranston 2000: 18; and Aikema 2019), without any mention of a timpano or coperto. Regarding the latter element, Whistler 2009: 542, has called attention to the fact that the descriptions of paintings in the 1569 document are ‘very summary’, contain errors of transcription, and demonstrate little to no interest in the covers of the works in question, probably because these ‘were probably not regarded as important objects by the family members who were more concerned with recent or potential sales of the antiquities, drawings and medals’. For instance, the inventory did not list Titian’s Triumph of Love, which in the original set-up of the Vendramin collection was the coperto of a female portrait by the same artist. 36 On the popularity of coperti dipinti in the Vendramin collection, see Anderson 1979: 643–44. Following the publication of the second inventory of the Vendramin collection, many iconological discussions of La vecchia have placed a great emphasis on the painting’s early association with a male portrait: consider esp. Dülberg 1990: 49–51; Vescovo 1992: 58–59; Cranston 2000: 19–28; Aikema 2004: 89–93; Settis 2008: 40–42; Bolzoni 2010: 264–67; Paoli 2011: 171–85; Dal Pozzolo 2019.

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During the period under consideration, it is unlikely that the f irst literary memories that Vendramin or his guests would have associated with that serious and affectively connoted image of a woman in her late years concerned the ‘poesia cortigiana’. After the publication of Pietro Bembo’s Prose della vulgar lingua (1525) had established, especially in Venetian circles, a new normative centrality of Petrarchan poetry, the popularity of the literary current of Panfilo Sasso and the other courtesan poets had significantly decreased. More plausibly, then, those beholders’ recollections might have gone to a small constellation of texts (Rvf 12 and 315–17) in which Petrarch evoked what, with time, would have become his beloved’s appearance had death not taken her when she was about to leave her youth behind. Especially relevant would have been the author’s lingering on the dissolution of Laura’s physical splendour in the earliest among these compositions, the sonnet ‘Se la mia vita da l’aspro tormento’. In an enumeration of parts that overturned the traditional elements of the short canon of descriptio pulchritudinis, while keeping its order and structure unchanged, Petrarch had envisioned the ‘lume spento’ [the light […] dimmed] (l. 4) in Laura’s beautiful eyes, the ‘cape’ d’oro fin’ turned ‘d’argento’ [hair of fine gold made silver] (l. 5), the no-longer-rosy countenance of her ‘viso scolorir’ [face lose its hue] (l. 7), but also the clothes’ toned-down chromatic notes once the woman would have abandoned the juvenile ‘ghirlande e i verdi panni’ [garlands and clothes of green] (l. 6).37 Worthy of note is how these verses framed the motif of the dissolution of the beloved’s beauty with soft, melancholy accents and yet did so in an unusually positive light. This is because the sonnet presented the withering away of Laura’s comeliness as the necessary precondition for the poet to finally enjoy, past the turmoil of juvenile passion, an affectionate confidence and familiarity with his muse. Getting to the ‘ultimi anni’ [last years] (l. 3) of old age would have meant for both entry in a ‘tempo […] contrario ai be’ desiri’ [time […] hostile to […] sweet desires] (l. 12) of love, but that would have granted the author the comfort of confessing his past sufferings to an understanding Laura, receiving from her ‘alcun soccorso di tardi sospiri’ [some little help of tardy sighs] (l. 14).38 This characteristic way of representing the beloved’s eventual loss of beauty was closely related to meditations that we also find in Petrarch’s prose writings, and particularly in the Secretum and the epistle Posteritati, which expanded upon the themes of his muse’s physical withering and the author’s own alleged liberation 37 The observation of the sonnet’s reversal of the format of descriptio pulchritudinis was first made by Giannetto 1983: 35 (for this notion of ‘short canon’, see above, n. 1). 38 The motif of this dream of a senile dialogue between the poet and his beloved, which Rvf 12 articulates for the first time, is further developed in the sequence Rvf 315–17, in which the author mourns the loss of the chance of having that late solace. On the numerous intertextualities linking all these sonnets, centred on the theme and catchword of time, see the commentary by Rosanna Bettarini to Petrarca 2005: I, 54–57, and II, 1376–84.

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from the snares of lust at forty years old—the very precondition for the hypothesis of a different kind of love made possible by the sunset of youth.39 If the ‘mellowing’ function that the poet attributed to time’s effect on Laura’s attractiveness was consolatory, some Renaissance exegetes of the Canzoniere gave a different interpretation of its summoning of Laura’s bodily decay. According to the popular commentaries by Francesco Filelfo (Venice, 1476, integrated by Girolamo Squarciafico’s exegesis of Rvf 137–366) and Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (Venice, 1533), 40 the author’s lyrical description of old Laura in Rvf 12 aimed to induce the woman to reciprocate his feelings before the only season propitious to love was over. In their opinion, mention of the beloved’s eventual senescence served as a warning to her: ‘Ricordandoli la vechieza: quando si pentirà non havere usato il gratioso frutto di sua bellezza ne l’età giovenile’ [By reminding her of old age, when she will regret not having seized the gracious fruit of her beauty in her youth].41 Although they did not explicitly mention literary sources to shore up their interpretation, the two commentators were reading Petrarch’s sonnet through the lens of Italian and neo-Latin compositions of classical inspiration that enjoyed great popularity during the Renaissance. These texts indeed evoked—though nearly always in disparaging terms reminiscent of comic poetry—the beloved’s physical ageing as a way of exhorting her to abandon all reticence and embrace the fleeting chance to enjoy love and beauty. 42 This mode of reading Petrarch’s portrayal of Laura in her late years may cast some new light on the reception to which La vecchia and the male effigy paired 39 In the third book of the Secretum, Augustine reminds Francesco of how afraid he was when he first feared that Laura would die before him, and adds: ‘The point is that that fear of yours may return, and this becomes more likely as we move every day nearer to death: that wonderful body, worn out by illness and frequent childbirth, has already lost much of its former health and strength’. In the Posteritati, the author famously declares: ‘although the ardour of my age and temperament drove me to lust, in my mind I always cursed that vanity. Then in fact when I was approaching forty, and still passionate and vigorous, I abandoned not merely that disgusting deed but even all memory of it, as though I had never looked upon a woman’ (quotes from Petrarca 2010: 80 and 130). 40 Filelfo’s commentary was reissued several times as an incunable and was republished at least four times in Venice between 1503 and 1519; Gesualdo’s text, on the other hand, had a second, Venetian edition in 1541. 41 Quote from Filelfo and Squarciafico 1486, c. Biiv. Along the same lines, see also the lengthy commentary on the sonnet in Gesualdo 1533, fols XIIIv–XIVr. 42 In discussing the motif of the grey-haired beloved in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Giannetto 1983 provides a most valuable comparative analysis of the different treatments of the theme in this subgenre of love poetry, including compositions by such authors as Boccaccio (L’alta speranza, che li mia martiri and S’egli avvien mai che tanto gli anni miei), Agnolo Poliziano (Deh non insuperbir per tuo bellezza) and Pietro Bembo (O superba e crudele, o di bellezza). Giannetto also calls attention to the main classical archetype behind these compositions, namely, Horace’s Ode IV.10, in which the poet warned the handsome and cruel boy Ligurinus of the transience of his beauty.

Anti-Pe tr archist Portr aiture or a Different Pe tr archist Portr aiture? 

with it could lend themselves. 43 As Lina Bolzoni has suggested in her analysis of the processes of hermeneutical revelation that Cinquecento portraits established with their painted coperti and with the written words that often accompanied them, the rhetorical structure of this genre often revolved around erotic themes. 44 She has also pointed out how these pictorial themes, which engaged in a close dialogue with Petrarchan and Petrarchist lyrical traditions and the exceptional emphasis they gave to the theme of the beloved’s artistic image, were at the core of at least one other effigy with timpano of Vendramin’s ‘camera da notar’. 45 The same inventory of 1602 attests that Titian’s Triumph of Love (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum), showing a cupid armed with bow and arrow standing over a roaring lion, was originally the coperto of a ‘quadro de retratto d’una dona con la mano destra al petto vestita de negro’ [portraiture painting of a woman with her right hand to her bosom, dressed in black]. 46 Scholars today tend to identify the latter picture with one of at least three different (and now lost) versions of the portrait of Elisabetta Querini Massola that Titian painted between 1543 and 1545. 47 The last muse of an elderly Pietro Bembo, who sang of her in some sonnets and commissioned the first version of her effigy, Elisabetta was also the object of poetic celebrations by Pietro Aretino and Giovanni Della Casa, which contemplated her beauty through the filter of the pictorial likeness. 48 It appears that Vendramin deliberately chose to accompany the version of her portrait in his collection with a cover meant to echo the main thematic refrains of those erotic-encomiastic verses,49 and the centrality of love themes in his interests as an art collector finds further confirmation in the testimony of a contemporary. Recalling a visit to the ‘treasure of splendid antiquities’ and of the ‘divine drawings’ at Santa Fosca, Anton Francesco Doni recounted having a dialogue with Vendramin in front of an artefact with a ‘lion with a Cupid above it’.50 The work, which almost certainly corresponds to a small 43 Expanding on some concise remarks in Pozzi 1979 (pp. 27–28), Giannetto’s 1983 essay (p. 38) suggested that the poetic treatments of female senescence that we find in such authors as Petrarch and Boccaccio might have played a role in the genesis of Giorgione’s La vecchia. However, she linked this hypothesis to the possibility that the painting might have originally been the pendant to a portrait of a young woman, as in ‘diptychs’ on the theme of vanitas, and excluded categorically the option that it might have been linked to the motif of the old beloved. 44 Bolzoni 2010: 236, 251, and passim. 45 Bolzoni 2010: 291–93. For the collocation of the work in Vendramin’s study, see Whistler 2009: 540. 46 Lauber 2008: 371. On Titian’s Triumph of Love, see Whistler 2009 and 2012. 47 See Whistler 2012: 233–42 (with further references), to which the following considerations on Elisabetta’s portrait are also indebted. 48 Cf. Pich 2010: 172–81 and 284–85. 49 Whistler 2012: 241–42. 50 This and the following passage from the Favola del lione di marmo of I Marmi (1552) are translations from Doni 2017: II, 419. For remarks on this testimony on Vendramin’s artistic interests, see ibid. n. 127, as well as Vescovo 1992: 52; Bolzoni 2010: 291–92; and Whistler 2012: 221–22.

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ancient sculpture inventoried among the pieces of his collection,51 would have led the two to comment at length on its ‘beautiful invention’, praising its ingenious depiction of love’s ability to tame ‘every great ferocity and terribleness’. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to think that the coupling of La vecchia with a coperto inflected in a properly erotic sense, and according to a Petrarchist intonation, the generic motif of the memento senescere. Filelfo and Gesualdo’s commentaries on Rvf 12 demonstrate how that warmly empathetic literary portrait of an old woman, most atypical within a poetic tradition that usually represented female ageing with harsh and unsparing tones, was at that time commonly read as a warning not to let youth pass without enjoying love and beauty’s sweet fruits. Together with a male effigy that most art historians assume to have been of a youth,52 Giorgione’s painting might have performed a similarly admonitory function. Hypostatised in the double painting would have been the lyrical images of the lover and his beloved, the latter withered by age and caught in a time contrary to the ‘be’ desiri’, when she could only sigh in regret for not having corresponded to the feelings she had inspired when she was young and beautiful. Notably, such a reading would also explain why the inventory of 1602 recorded the male portrait as La vecchia’s cover and not La vecchia as the male portrait’s cover. In other words, this would justify a pagination that most scholars have considered inadmissible and the result of a documentary error, as a consequence of their assumption that the pair of pictures including Giorgione’s work was structurally and thematically akin to Dürer’s Portrait of a Youth (1507), which features on the reverse a hideous allegorical figure of a half-naked old hag with a sack of coins (the so-called Avarice).53 As the female effigy underneath Titian’s timpano with the 51 Ravà 1920: 163 (‘Una testa de marmoro de un zovane che crida con un cupido che pesta sopra un lion de bronzo appresso alla testa’); see also Anderson 1979: 640. 52 The idea that the painting associated with La vecchia represented a young man was first formulated as a simple possibility by Anderson (1979: 643), and has subsequently been repeated as a certainty by many scholars. In recent times, the idea has given support to the hypothesis that the ‘depento con un homo con una veste de pelle negre’ should be identified with the Portrait of a Youth (formerly known as Brocardo), alternatively attributed to Giorgione or Giovanni Cariani, which is now in the Szépművészeti Múzeum of Budapest. See, for instance, Paoli 2011: 181–85 (identifying the subject with Gabriel Vendramin himself), and, in way more cautious terms, Dal Pozzolo 2009: 327, and Lüdemann 2016: 24, 27. However, it is worth noting that the Budapest Youth does wear a black dress but one that is in fabric rather than in fur coats. 53 Taking their cue from Dülberg (1990: 49–51), who first equated La vecchia with Dürer’s ‘Avarice’, numerous scholars have assimilated these contemporary pictorial treatments of the motif of the old woman. All these readings rest on the assumption that what Giorgione painted was an expressionistic, nearly caricatural figure of old hag. The most recent example of this type of analysis is Aikema 2022, which even suggests a relation between La vecchia and ancient anecdotes about Zeuxis, who would have died of laughter after painting the portrait of an ugly old woman. Giovanna Nepi Scirè (in Marani and Nepi Scirè 1992: 328), Vescovo (1992: 58), Dal Pozzolo (2019) and Nichols (2020: 107–09), on the other hand, have—in my opinion correctly—remarked on the irreducible stylistic gulf separating La vecchia from Dürer’s grotesque figure.

Anti-Pe tr archist Portr aiture or a Different Pe tr archist Portr aiture? 

Fig. 5.4 Giorgione, Portrait of a Woman (Laura), 1506, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 41 × 33.6 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Triumph of Love also demonstrated, however, at the heart of similar associations of images of lyrical character was the beloved’s likeness. At any rate, many elements of the syntax of Giorgione’s painting would have lent themselves to its fruition as an admonitory representation of the loved woman. First, there is the image’s portrait-like characterisation, which integrates the probable moral and emblematic dimension originally inscribed into the work.54 Second, there are those easily detectable vestiges of past beauty in the subject that once led Bernard Berenson to highlight the similarity of her features with those of the Tempest’s gypsy55 (but an evocative comparison could also be drawn with the so-called Laura, now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: Fig. 5.4). Also in line with Dülberg (1990: 50–51) have been the many scholarly works that have suggested that La vecchia was indeed the cover of its associated male portrait: see, for instance, Aikema 2022 and Aikema 2004: 77. Though providing a different interpretation of the ‘diptych’, Lüdemann (2016: 24) also maintains that the relation between the painting and its coperto recorded in the 1602 inventory was the reverse of what it must have been in reality. Settis (2008: 41–43) has instead insisted that we should accept the reliability of the document as a sort of lectio difficilior, which he explains through Giorgione’s willingness to produce a ‘perceptive shock’ in the beholders, who would have seen reverse of the usual relation between a portrait and a coperto as expressing the vanitas of all human things. On these hypotheses, see also Bolzoni 2010: 265, which is open to the possibility that the male portrait was indeed the cover of La vecchia. 54 Cranston 2000: 17–18. 55 Berenson 1954: 145. Another of the earliest studies to remark on the past traces of beauty in La vecchia is Panofsky 1969: 19.

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Fig. 5.5 Francesco Torbido, Portrait of a Young Man with a Rose, 1516, oil on canvas, 62 × 51.8 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

Also important is the pronounced communicative character of the picture, a result of the gaze that La vecchia seems to direct to the beholder, of the heightened emotional tone produced by her three-quarter pose,56 and especially of her open mouth and of the banderole that unfolds behind her hand. As Cranston has elucidated, the words written on the support actually imply a performative aspect, as they seem to correspond to what the figure is ‘saying’.57 What is remarkable is that the intimate dialogue that the painting establishes with the viewer is a feature also shared by pictures that functioned as carpe diem exhortations of erotic intonation.58 A useful term of comparison comes from the softly melancholy Portrait of a Young Man with a Rose (1516), a work by the Veronese Giorgionesque painter Francesco Torbido (Fig. 5.5).

56 On La vecchia’s dialogic character, see esp. Cranston 2000: 17, 36–37, and 39. On the particularly emotional tones of three-quarter Renaissance portraits, see Bolzoni 2010: 235, and Pich 2019: 79, with references. 57 Cranston 2000: 30–37; but see also Pozzi 1979: 28 and Settis 2008: 44. For a comparable use of written words as communicative device in portraiture, with a focus on the words penned in the petrarchini exhibited by the subjects in Agnolo Bronzino’s portraits of Lorenzo Lenzi and Laura Battiferri, see Antonio Geremicca’s essay in this volume. 58 Koos 2006 provides a most valuable discussion of the broader presence of such intimately dialectic characters in the pictorial production of Giorgione and his followers.

Anti-Pe tr archist Portr aiture or a Different Pe tr archist Portr aiture? 

The subject is shown here at the height of his youthful desirability, but the flower he is holding and the inscription on the stone tablet underneath it—‘qvid stvpeas specie: paphie rosa fra | grat adempta | mane: sed occasv flacet: oletqve minvs’ [why would you be surprised by [this] beauty? The Paphian rose [i.e. the flower of Venus] has an intense perfume when picked at morning, but at sunset fades and smells less]—warn that this charm would vanish as quickly as the rose withers. In this case the message originated in the context of an affective relationship between two men.59 But what matters more here is how these words were meant as an invitation—one ascribed in the fiction of the painting to the image of the beloved—not to delay any further the enjoyment of love. In the context of Vendramin’s art collection, in which a lyrical meditation on the power of love unfolded through pictorial and sculptural media, La vecchia would have well represented the other side of the same warning. Addressed to viewers, but in the first place—according to the rhetorical strategy of display of the two pictures—to the man of the cover, would have been the nostalgic admonition of one who had understood too late how fleeting was the season of that feeling.

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Petrarca, Francesco. 2010. Secretum, trans. by J. G. Nichols (London: Oneworld Classics). Pfisterer, Ulrich. 2006. ‘Freundschaftsbilder—Liebesbilder: Zum visuellen Code männlicher Passionen in der Renaissance,’ in Freundschaft: Motive und Bedeutung, ed. by Sibylle Appuhn-Radtke and Esther Wipfler (Munich: Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte), pp. 239–59. Pich, Federica. 2010. I poeti davanti al ritratto: da Petrarca a Marino (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Pich, Federica. 2019. ‘La poesia e il ritratto’, in Letteratura e arti visive nel Rinascimento, ed. by Gianluca Genovese and Andrea Torre (Rome: Carocci), pp. 57–84. Pozzi, Giovanni. 1979. ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d’inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, Lettere Italiane, 31.1: 3–30. Quondam, Amedeo. 2022. ‘La donna nella cultura letteraria ai tempi di Tiziano’, in Tiziano e l’immagine della donna nel Cinquecento veneziano, ed. by Sylvia Ferino-Padgen, Francesca Del Torre Scheuch, and Wencke Deiters (Milan: Skira), pp. 58–71. Ravà, Aldo. 1920. ‘Il ‘camerino delle antigaglie’ di Gabriele Vendramin’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto, n.s. 39: 155–81. Rogers, Mary. 1988. ‘The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth-Century Painting’, Renaissance Studies, 2.1: 47–88. Schuster Cordone, Caroline. 2009. Le crépuscule du corps: Images de la vieillesse féminine (Gollion: Infolio). Settis, Salvatore. 2008. ‘Esercizi di stile: una Vecchia e un Bambino,’ in Giorgione Entmythisiert, ed. by Sylvia Ferino-Padgen (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 39–54. Solmi, Edmondo. 1908. ‘Le fonti dei manoscritti di Leonardo da Vinci’, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, suppl. 10–11. Strada, Elena. 2002–03. ‘“Suggelli ingegnosi”: per un avvio d’indagine sullo “stile sentenzioso” del Petrarca’, Lectura Petrarce, 22–23: 371–402. Vecce, Carlo. 2015. ‘Leonardo e il “paragone” della natura’, in Leonardo da Vinci on Nature: Knowledge and Representation, ed. by Fabio Frosini and Alessandro Nova (Venice: Marsilio), pp. 183–205, 369–73. Vecce, Carlo. 2017. La biblioteca perduta: i libri di Leonardo (Rome: Salerno). Vecce, Carlo (ed.). 2019. Leonardo e i suoi libri, exh. cat. (Rome: Bardi). Versiero, Marco. 2019. ‘La semantica del tempo (tra letteratura, storia e f ilosof ia)’, in: Leonardo e i suoi libri: la biblioteca del genio universale, ed. by Carlo Vecce (Florence: Giunti), pp. 43–49. Versiero, Marco. 2020. ‘“Cosa bella mortal passa e non dura…”: La lezione degli antichi e la modernità dei classici nella biblioteca di Leonardo’, in Antico e moderno: sincretismi, incontri e scontri culturali nel Rinascimento, ed. by Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Florence: Cesati), pp. 533–40. Vescovo, Piermario. 1992. ‘“Col tempo”: l’allegoria e l’ultima verità del ritratto’, Eidos, 6.10: 47–61.

Anti-Pe tr archist Portr aiture or a Different Pe tr archist Portr aiture? 

Vescovo, Piermario. 2011. La virtù e il tempo. Giorgione: allegorie morali, allegorie civili (Venice: Marsilio). Whistler, Catherine. 2009. ‘Titian’s Triumph of Love’, The Burlington Magazine, 151.1277: 536–42. Whistler, Catherine. 2012. ‘Uncovering Beauty: Titian’s Triumph of Love in the Vendramin Collection’, Renaissance Studies, 26.2: 218–42.

About the Author Diletta Gamberini is a researcher at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. She specialises in the intersections of literature and the visual arts in Renaissance Italy, and her work has been supported by Columbia University’s Italian Academy, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung.

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The Shadow of Petrarch: Benedetto Varchi and Agnolo Bronzino on Portraiture Antonio Geremicca

Abstract Petrarch’s two sonnets on Simone Martini’s portrait of Laura (Rvf 77 and 78) initiated a widely successful poetic genre in the sixteenth century: sonnets on portraits. Texts belonging to this genre often offered theoretical considerations on the issue of paragone between poetry and painting. Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni (1550) closely analyses this subject by building on Petrarch’s lyric poems and Triumphs. While Petrarch’s decisive impact on the Renaissance debate on ut pictura poësis has been widely emphasised, less attention has been devoted to his influence on portraiture, especially on the portraits by painter Agnolo Bronzino, a poet himself and a contributor to the paragone debate. This essay investigates the extent to which the intellectual dialogue between Varchi and Bronzino was inspired by Petrarch’s ideas on paragone, which he expressed in his vast production in Latin and in the vernacular. Keywords: portraiture, sonnet, ut pictura poësis

Agnolo Bronzino’s prolific work as a portrait painter began under the sign of Petrarch and of the poet’s cult in sixteenth-century Italy. Before his departure for the court of Guidobaldo II Della Rovere in 1530, Bronzino was commissioned by Benedetto Varchi to execute the Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, today in the collections of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan (Fig. 6.1). The painting has drawn unceasing scholarly attention since 1990, when Alessandro Cecchi revealed the identity of the sitter and the names of both the patron and the artist, thereby correcting a long-standing attribution to Jacopo Pontormo.1 1 Cecchi 1990: 8–19; and 1991: 17–28 (p. 19). On the portrait see also: Brock 2002: 108–10; Strehlke 2004a: 100–03; De Giorgi 2010a: 202–03; Geremicca 2013: 86–96.

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch06

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Fig. 6.1 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, c. Fig. 6.2 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, c. 1527–1530, 1527–1530, oil on panel, 90 × 71 cm, Civiche Raccolte detail, oil on canvas, Civiche Raccolte Artistiche-Pinacoteca del Artistiche-Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Castello Sforzesco, Milan.

In what is believed to be his first portrait, Bronzino orchestrates the combination of multiple layers of meaning resulting from a close collaboration with Varchi. The portrait includes an open book in which are transcribed two sonnets in beautifully legible handwriting (Fig. 6.2). On the left page is the sonnet ‘Famose Frondi, de’ cui santi honori’, written by Varchi himself in praise of the young Lorenzo Lenzi, the nephew of Giovanni Gaddi, with whom he had become close friends at the end of the 1520s:2 Famose Frondi, de’ cui santi honori Per non so qual del Ciel fero Pianeta Rado hoggi s’horna Cesare o Poeta Mercè del guasto Mondo, & pien d’errori Chi sarà mai, che degnamente honori Il bel che in Voi si dolcemente acqueta I Venti, & le Tempeste, e ’n Ciel i lieta Ogni Anima gentil del Volgo fuori? Et chi fia poi, che degnamente ancora Adorare possa, & quanto si conviene L’alta Vertù, ch’è nel bel vostro involta 2

For a biographical profile of Lorenzo Lenzi, see Simoncini 2005: 389–92.

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Io da che’ prima nasce l’Aurora, Fin che di nuovo a l’oriente viene, V’adoro e ’nchino humil solo Vna volta. [Famous branches, whose holy honours, because of some adverse planet, nowadays rarely adorn kings or poets, due to this wretched world filled with errors: || who shall ever be able to sing your beauty, which so sweetly calms winds and storms and which, in Heaven, delights every gentle soul who sets itself apart from the crowd? || And who will be able to properly celebrate, as it deserves, the noble virtue enwrapped in your beauty? || From the birth of Aurora to the moment when she reaches the Orient again, I never cease to adore and humbly revere you.]3

On the right page is sonnet 146 of Petrarch’s Rvf, ‘O d’ardente vertute ornata et calda’: O d’ardente vertute ornata et calda alma gentil cui tante carte vergo; o sol già d’onestate intero albergo, torre in alto valor fondata et salda; o fiamma, o rose sparse in dolce falda di viva neve, in ch’io mi specchio et tergo; o piacer onde l’ali al bel viso ergo, che luce sovra quanti il sol ne scalda: del vostro nome, se mie rime intese fossin sì lunge, avrai pien Tyle et Battro, la Tana e ’l Nilo, Athlante, Olimpo et Calpe. Poi che portar nol posso in tutte et quattro parti del mondo, udrallo il bel paese ch’Appennin parte, e ’l mar circonda et l’Alpe. [O noble soul, adorned and warmed by ardent virtue, to whom I dedicate so much of my writing; sole dwelling of uncorrupted chastity, tower founded upon mighty worth, and solid; || o flame, roses spread on a sweet fold of lively snow, in which I mirror and purify myself; o joy raising my wings to your fair face, which shines far brighter than the sun can warm: || of your own name, if my poems could be understood so far away, I’d fill the Thule and Bactria, the Don, the Nile, 3 Translation mine. Benedetto Varchi’s poems are not available in English. The sonnet is transcribed as shown in the portrait, without any modification. The same sonnet was published, with some modifications, more than twenty years later in Varchi 1555: 6, which helps the understanding of the first line, no longer completely legible.

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Atlas, Olympus, and Calpe. || But since I cannot take it [your name] to the four corners of the world, let it be heard in that fair land divided by the Apennines and surrounded by the sea and the Alps.]4

Men and women holding petrarchini or similar books had already appeared in numerous Venetian and Emilian portraits: from Giorgione’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Green Book (c. 1525, Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco) to Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Youth with a Petrarchino (c. 1525, Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan); from Correggio’s Portrait of a Man Reading (c. 1522, Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan) to Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Man Reading a Book (c. 1524–1526, York Art Gallery, York).5 Books therefore had an important place in sixteenth-century portraiture, both as signs of knowledge and cultural refinement in the portraits of princes and courtiers, but mostly as distinctive attributes of a new social group, that of poets and (actual or self-styled) men of letters, who turned increasingly to portraiture.6 The presence of an open book allowed the viewer to read the text inside, providing important information on the sitter. This device contributed to the portrait’s attempt to reconcile the depiction of the sitter’s likeness with the hint at their inner life. One example of this practice is Sebastiano del Piombo’s Portrait of a Woman (c. 1520–1525, Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona), which included until the end of the nineteenth century two poems by Vittoria Colonna that prompted the sitter’s identification with the Roman poet.7 In Florence, in the same years in which Bronzino painted the portrait of Lenzi, Andrea del Sarto included Petrarch’s sonnets Rvf 153 and 154 in the Portrait of a Young Woman with a Petrarchino (c. 1528, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence), while the woman points to sonnets 151 and 152, which are hidden from the viewer by the book’s cover.8 The first quatrain of Rvf 213 appears instead in Domenico Puligo’s Portrait of a Lady with Sheet Music and a Petrarchino (c. 1525, Firle Place, Lewes, Sussex; private collection), which is thought to depict the courtesan Barbara Fiorentina.9 Petrarch’s poetry was a rich source of images and metaphors to describe the sitter’s virtues and inner qualities, especially in female portraits. 4 The sonnet is no longer completely legible in the portrait. The Italian text is cited from Petrarca 2001: 701–03. The translation is from Petrarca 1996c: 256. 5 On the attribution of the San Francisco portrait to Giorgione, see Ballarin 1993: 293; an alternative attribution to Giovanni Cariani is advanced in Facchinetti 2016: 66–67. For Lotto, see Dal Pozzolo 2018: 256–58. For Correggio, see Ekserdjian and Fadda 2016: 188. For Parmigianino, see Vaccaro 2002: 199–200, cat. 46; and Ekserdjian 2006: 124–46. 6 On the portraits mentioned above, see Macola 2007 (especially pp. 64–69, 90–102, 107–09). About the petrarchino, see Patota 2016: 53–69. 7 This portrait was gravely damaged during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). See Macola 2007: 37–52; and Freuler 2016: 237–69 (pp. 252–60). 8 Caneva 1986: 157–60; and Macola 2007: 52–59. 9 See Capretti 2002: 122–23; and Macola 2007: 59–64.

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In the portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, nevertheless, a different operation is at play. First of all, it should be stressed that Bronzino’s work represented an absolute novelty for the early Cinquecento, because it associates Petrarch’s and Varchi’s sonnets. Consequently, the painting becomes a double portrait of Lenzi and Varchi. The verses not only draw a parallel between Laura and Lorenzo—as scholars have remarked—but establish a direct connection between Petrarch’s love poetry and that of his follower Varchi. At the heart of the two poems is the desire to celebrate the virtue of their beloved: Petrarch does it in the closing verses, where he promises to make Laura’s name resound everywhere, or at least in all the Italian peninsula if he cannot reach the whole world; Varchi in the final tercet, where he writes that he adores Lorenzo day and night, without rest. The book performs an essential function in the message that both painter and poet wish to convey through the portrait. The message plays on multiple levels and, along with Lenzi’s qualities, suggests his relation to Varchi and, through the poems, traces the representation of Varchi himself as a love poet. In a well-known letter to Giovanni dell’Incisa, Petrarch writes: ‘Gold, silver, precious stones, beautiful clothing, marbled homes, cultivated fields, painted canvases, decorated horses, and other similar things, possess silent pleasure. Books please inwardly; they speak with us, advise us and join us together with a certain living and penetrating intimacy’.10 Thus, books speak, whereas works of art, along with numerous other objects, remain silent. In the portrait of the young Lorenzo, Varchi’s aniconic presence seems to articulate a precise stance and anticipate the reflections which he would later elaborate on—decisively and through sound philosophical arguments—in the Due Lezzioni (1550).11 In particular, Bronzino’s portrait seems to echo Varchi’s well-documented skepticism about the ability of painting—and of all the arts—to portray the sitter’s physical and spiritual qualities. This skepticism seems to be confirmed by Varchi’s aversion to sitting for a portrait. A letter sent from Luca Martini to Carlo Strozzi on 20 October 1540 alludes to Varchi’s reticence. After having praised his friend Benedetto, Martini confides his desire to have a portrait of Varchi, should he give his approval: ‘Et siate certo che se mai io ho tempo un giorno, et che lui lo voglia, lo farò ritrarre et lo terrò in camera mia con una diadema’ [And know that, if one day I shall have the time and he the desire, I will have his portrait made and I shall keep it in

10 See Familiares III.18: ‘aurum, argentum, gemme, purpurea vestis, marmorea domus, cultus ager, picte tabule, phaleratus sonipes, ceteraque id genus, mutam habent et superficiariam voluptatem; libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate iunguntur’. Cited from Petrarca 1933–42: I (1933), 139. Translation in Petrarca 1975: 157–60 (p. 157). 11 Varchi 1550. See Quiviger 1987, 219–24; Mendelsohn 1982; Varchi and Borghini 1998; Varchi 2013; and Varchi 2020. On the paragone, see Preimesberger 2011; and Hendler 2013. On Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni, see also Vatteroni 2019.

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my bedroom with a crown].12 For a man of letters who for over thirty years cultivated close relationships with many artists, there are oddly few portraits of Varchi made before his death (1565), and none seems to have been directly commissioned by him.13 Besides Titian’s Portrait of a Gentleman in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (c. 1540)—whose sitter’s traditional identification with Varchi does not in fact rest on sound evidence—there are only two portraits recording his likeness.14 The first is a medal made by Domenico Poggini between 1561 and 1566, with two alternative reverses. The poetic correspondence between Poggini and Varchi reveals that the medal was made on Poggini’s own initiative and gifted to the poet.15 The second is a portrait painted by Alessandro Allori in the Montauto Chapel in the Santissima Annunziata, Florence, between 1560 and 1564, included in the episode of Christ among the Doctors; here Varchi is surrounded by a number of important figures from the Medici court, like Pier Vettori and Vincenzo Borghini.16 Another portrait, a marble relief by Vincenzo Danti, is recorded in the Giuntina edition of Vasari’s Lives, which mentions it among the works produced while the artist resided in the Monastero degli Angeli in Florence.17 As scholars have suggested, this portrait may have been the one displayed at Varchi’s funeral and which is also documented in a Latin poem by Piero Angeli da Barga.18 In what is Bronzino’s first work as a portraitist and Varchi’s first commission, Petrarch’s poetry has an important place, where it contributes to the elaboration of meaning and prompts a reflection on the nature of the depiction. If the importance of Petrarch’s poetic and intellectual experience in the study of Varchi’s work has already been underlined by scholars, the fundamental contribution of Petrarch’s thinking on the arts should be more forcefully highlighted as the basis for the whole theoretical edifice of the Due Lezzioni. These two lectures were held on 6 and 13 March 1547 (Gregorian calendar) in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella and were published by Lorenzo Torrentino three years later. In his first lecture, Varchi commented on Michelangelo’s sonnet ‘Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto’, exploring the themes of love as source of inspiration for poetry and sculpture, and 12 Florence, Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASFi), Carte Strozziane fonds, I, 137, fols 159r–160r (fol. 159r). Lo Re 2013: 62. Translation mine. 13 On Benedetto Varchi’s relationships with artists, see Collareta 2007: 173–84; Geremicca 2017a: 11–26; and Gamberini 2017: 61–69. 14 On this identification, see Carratù 2006: 132. There is no documentary or visual evidence for this identification, which is only based on the dubious resemblance with Varchi’s portrait in the medal by Domenico Poggini. 15 Gamberini 2016: 359–83. 16 Geremicca 2017b: 86–112. 17 Vasari 1911–14: X, 29. On Varchi and Vincenzo Danti, see also Davis 2008: 165–203; Davis 2012: 120–55; and Gamberini and Cole 2016: 1296–1342. 18 It is the Latin epitaph Sacravit primam primo qui flore iuvantae. See Lo Re 2013: 70.

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sculpture as an intellectual activity. In the second lecture, which is divided into three parts, Varchi provides a philosophical definition of the arts that distinguishes them from the sciences and assigns them a hierarchy (first dispute); he then confronts the theme of the paragone between painting and sculpture (second dispute); lastly, he debates the Horatian concept of ut pictura poësis (third dispute).19 Leaving aside the numerous citations of Petrarch’s verses that Varchi uses to interpret and comment on Michelangelo’s poems, the Due Lezzioni are strongly rooted in Petrarch’s idea of art as expressed in the Familiares and in De remediis utriusque fortune.20 We shall start from the notion of disegno as proposed by Varchi in the second dispute of the second lesson. This is a crucial turning point of his examination because it enables him to resolve the paragone between painting and sculpture in an ex-aequo and thus lay the groundwork for the comparison between painting and poetry. In the second dispute, after rehearsing the arguments of the auctoritates—especially Baldassar Castiglione and Leon Battista Alberti—he discusses the claims made by painters to support the superiority of their discipline. Before reaching his conclusion and launching into the confutation of the arguments advanced by painters, Varchi writes: Dico dunque, procedendo filosoficamente, che io stimo, anzi tengo per certo, che sostanzialmente la scultura e la pittura siano una arte sola, e conseguentemente tanto nobile l’una quanto l’altra, et a questo mi muove la ragione allegata da noi di sopra, cioè che l’arti si conoscono dai fini e che tutte quelle arti c’hanno il medesimo fine siano una sola e la medesima essenzialmente, se bene negli accidenti possono essere differenti. Ora ognuno confessa che solamente il fine è il medesimo, cioè una artifiziosa imitazione della natura, ma ancora il principio, cioè il disegno; né mi maraviglio che tanti grand’uomini e così peregrini ingegni non abbiano trovato infino qui, che io sappia, questa verità, perché, se bene nella sostanza o vera essenza, et in somma realmente, come dicono i filosofi e come diciamo noi, en effetto sono una medesima per lo avere un medesimo fine, sono però molto varie negli accidenti. [I say thus, proceeding philosophically, that I believe, or rather hold as certain, that essentially sculpture and painting are one and the same art, and consequently both equally noble: and this I derive from the reason indicated above, that the arts should be identified by their aims and that all the arts that have the same aim are identical in essence, even if their accidents differ. Now, everyone admits that not only the aim is the same, that is the artificial imitation of nature, but 19 See Lee 1940: 197–269. 20 On Petrarch and the arts, see Bettini 2002 and Perucchi 2014.

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also the principle, that is disegno; nor do I marvel that so many great men and such rare intellects have not found until now this truth known to me, because, even though they are the same in substance, or better in essence, for having the same aim—as philosophers and as we say—they are highly varied, however, in accidentals.]21

For Varchi, painting and sculpture are the same thing, not only because they have the same end, that is, to imitate nature—an aspect both share with poetry— but also because they have the same foundation in disegno.22 Placing disegno at the basis of artistic creation in painting and sculpture, Varchi argues that all the arts are the same in ‘essence’, even if they differ in ‘accidents’. Through these Aristotelian categories, Varchi gives theoretical grounding to what was already a well-established tradition in Florence, as evidenced by the letters on the paragone by Vasari, Pontormo, and Francesco da Sangallo that he included in the Due Lezzioni.23 By highlighting the originality of his proposal—‘né mi maraviglio che tanti grand’uomini e così peregrini ingegni non abbiano trovato infino qui’ [nor do I marvel that so many great men and such high intellects have not found this truth until now]—Varchi did not intend to overlook this tradition, but rather to stress the novelty of its philosophical justification, which rendered it universal. Even if, at that time, Varchi would have had difficulty accessing the Libro dell’arte by Cennino Cennini or the Commentarii by Lorenzo Ghiberti, given that their circulation was extremely limited and they existed only in manuscript form until the nineteenth century, there were other authors that had preceded him in indicating disegno as the shared principle of all the arts.24 Notable examples are Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, which Varchi cites as a source, and most importantly Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortune, which Varchi knew particularly well and which he cites almost verbatim.25 In the fictional dialogue between Joy and Reason, the latter—after having questioned the benefits of painting (I.40, De 21 Varchi and Borghini 1998: 42–43. Translation mine. An English edition of Due Lezzioni is not yet available. 22 Baxandall 2003, with further bibliography. 23 Ibid.: 64–65, 70–71, 75. 24 Cennini 1899: 7: ‘El fondamento dell’arte di tutti questi lavorii di mano, principio è il disegno e ’l cholorire’ [The foundation of the art and the beginning of all these labours of the end is drawing and colouring.]. If for Cennino Cennini disegno means above all drawing, Lorenzo Ghiberti intends disegno as both drawing and design, considering it the principle and origin of the arts. In the third book of his Commentarii he contends that disegno is the foundation and theory of painting and sculpture; see Bartoli 1996: II, 10: ‘tanto è perfecto lo scultore tanto quanto è perfecto disegniatore, e così è il pictore; detta teorica [disegno] è origine e fondamento di ciascuna arte’ [the sculptor is as perfect as he is a perfect draftsman, and so is the painter. This theory (disegno) is the origin and foundation of all the arts]. Translation mine. 25 Petrarca 2014: 5.

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tabulis pictis)—uses the same arguments against sculpture: ‘this because, painting and sculpture are really one art or, as I said, if different from each other, do spring from a single source, namely, the art of drawing’.26 The reference to De remediis is confirmed when Petrarch is mentioned just a few lines later, where Varchi refutes the second argument in favour of painting’s superiority over sculpture, namely the prestige that painting has always had among princes. In this respect, Varchi states: ‘E se Alessandro amò grandemente e benificò Apelle, comandando che niuno il ritraesse, eccetto lui, devemo credere che facesse il medesimo, come testifica il Petrarca, ancora di Pirgotele e di Lisippo’ [if Alexander the Great loved enormously and benefitted Apelles, ordering that he should not be portrayed by anyone else, we must believe that he also did the same, as attested by Petrarch, for Pyrgoteles and Lysippos].27 The reference to Petrarch is usually tied to the first quatrain of sonnet Rvf 232 and not without reason, because the contents are similar, but Varchi seems to refer rather to a passage from De statuis (I.41), placed immediately after the discussion of the arts’ shared origin in disegno:28 Without any doubt [sculpture and painting] are equal in age and flourished at the same time. Apelles, Pyrgoteles, and Lysippus evidently lived in the same age, since the intense pride of Alexander the Great chose all three simultaneously from many others—the first one to paint; the second to engrave; the third to carve him and to cast his statue. The edict prohibited all others, regardless of talent and artistic competence, to represent in any way the face of the king.29

The ex-aequo outcome of the paragone debate overturns the conclusions reached by Castiglione and Alberti. Varchi’s fierce defence of sculpture suggests that he privileged this medium, perhaps because he regarded its material durability as an advantage that allowed its commemorative function to be preserved over time. This preference is manifest in Varchi’s poems in praise of sculptors and their works. In the sonnets ‘Sacro santo signor, chi ben pon mente’ and in the ‘Valor del gran Cellin 26 Perucchi 2014: 184: ‘cum preterea pene ars una; vel, si plures, unus, ut diximus, fons artium (graphidem dico)’. Translation in Petrarca 1991: I, 130–34 (p. 131). 27 Varchi and Borghini 1998: 45. Translation mine. 28 Petrarca 1996c: 351–52, Rvf 232.1–4: ‘Vincitore Alessandro l’ira vinse ǀ et fe ’l minore in parte Filippo: ǀ ché li val se Pirgotile et Lisippo ǀ l’intagliar solo et Apelle il dipinse?’ [Wrath vanquished the victorious Alexander ǀ and made him less a figure than was Philip: ǀ What good that Pyrgoteles and Lysippus ǀ alone could sculpt him and Apelles paint him?]. 29 Perucchi 2014: 184: ‘atque ipse procul dubio sint coeve pariterque floruerint, si quidem una etas et Apellem et Pirgotilem et Lisippum habuit. Quod hinc patet, quia hos simul et ominibus Alexandri Magni tumor maximum delegit, quorum primus eum pingeret, secundus sculperet, tertius fingeret atque in statuam excuderet, edicto vetitis universis, qualibet ingenii artisque f iducia, faciem regis attingere’. Translation in Petrarca 1991: I, 131.

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l’alta opra visto’—respectively on the Perseus (c. 1545–1554, Piazza della Signoria, Florence) and the Crucifixion (c. 1556–1562, El Escorial, Madrid), both by Benvenuto Cellini—Varchi never underlines the limits of sculpture by comparing it to poetry.30 He focuses on the virtuosity of Cellini, whose works exceed Nature itself and bring prestige to Cosimo I de’ Medici and to Florence. This is not just an isolated case. It is possible to find the same topoi in the six poems written on Leone Leoni’s statue of Philip II of Spain (c. 1549–1564, Museo del Prado, Madrid). No work receives higher praise from Varchi, who celebrates the power of Leoni’s art by comparing him to ancient sculptors.31 Once again, Varchi’s words are nothing but celebratory. It would be easy to conclude that his praise was motivated by political and opportunistic reasons—after all, these sculptures are linked to the Duke of Florence and to the Prince of Spain and King of England—but this is not the case. In his sonnet ‘Ben potete, Bronzin, col vago, altero’,32 dedicated to Bronzino’s Portrait of Eleonora di Toledo, Varchi celebrates the Duchess of Florence, the artist, and his portrait, but more importantly, he tells Bronzino to write poems to complete the imperfection of his painted work and to show Eleonora’s inner qualities. Cellini was also a poet, but Varchi never made this sort of recommendation to him. In regard to Varchi’s predilection for sculpture, another significant convergence with Petrarch should be highlighted. If in one of the Familiares, Petrarch had argued for the superiority of the painters of his time—chiefly Giotto and Simone Martini—over sculptors,33 in De remediis (I. 41) he radically revisits his conclusions: Sculpture is nearer to nature than painting. Pictures appeal much to the eye, but sculptures can be touched, feel substantial and solid, and are of durable body. This is the reason why no paintings by the ancient survive today, but countless statues. Thus, our age, in error about so many things, would like to appear as the inventor of painting or—what is the next best thing—to have brought the art to the limits of perfection; whereas, although our age is impudent and temerarious, it does not deny that it is inferior to Antiquity in any kind of carved or cast sculpture.34 30 Varchi 1555: 123; Cellini 1568, f. S iir. 31 Varchi 1555: 262–66. See also Geremicca 2018: 161–84. 32 Varchi 1555: 122. See on this sonnet Geremicca 2013: 173–75. 33 Familiares V.17. ‘Atque ut a veteribus ad nova, ab externis ad nostra transgrediar, duos ego novi pictores egregios, nec formosos: Iottum, florentinum civem, cuius inter modernos fama ingens est, et Simonem senensem; novi et sculptores aliquot, sed minoris fame, eo enim in genere impar prorsus est nostra etas’. Petrarca 1933–42: II (1934), 39. Translation in Petrarca 1975: 272–75 (p. 273): ‘To move now from ancients to new things, and from foreign artists to our own, I know two outstanding painters who were not handsome: Giotto, a Florentine citizen whose reputation is very great among the moderns, and Simone of Siena. I also know several sculptors but of lesser fame (since our age is truly mediocre in that art form)’. See Bettini 2002: 41–59. 34 Petrarca 1991: I, 131. I modified the translation of the two last lines which, in my view, do not reproduce all the nuances of Petrarch’s Latin text (Rawski’s original was: ‘and, though clearly inferior to Antiquity

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In Varchi and Petrarch’s theories, nonetheless, if the ennoblement of sculpture raises it to the same status as painting, nothing will change with respect to its comparison to poetry. The claim of superiority of text over image, of books over works of art, and more generally of poetry over art is still present. Varchi’s admiration for Michelangelo and the immense tribute paid to him in the Due Lezzioni—particularly in the study of the sonnet ‘Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto’—do not compel him to place poets and sculptors on a par and formulate an unlikely ut sculptura poësis. In the third dispute of the second lesson, when Varchi states the superiority of poetry over painting, he does not only examine the paragone between painting and poetry but, given that all the arts are one, he also addresses that between sculpture and poetry. As Varchi clearly writes in the second dispute, in anticipation of what comes in the third: ‘ultimamente dichiararò, come saprò il meglio, quale sia la somiglianza e quale la differenza tra la poesia e l’arte del disegno, sotto il quale comprendonsi alcune altre arti’ [finally, I will state, as best I can, what the similarities and what the differences are between poetry and the arte del disegno, under which are also included other arts].35 The definition of disegno is crucial to Varchi’s theoretical system, which has significant consequences on the comparison between poetry and the visual arts— and is what truly matters to him—rather than between painting and sculpture. It is important not to understate that, in the Due Lezzioni, Varchi offers his point of view as a philosopher but also as a poet. In Varchi’s interpretation of ut pictura poësis, which he believes has been misunderstood by artists and poets alike, only poetry has the potential to express the soul and virtue of person. His observations seem to take particular aim at portraiture: Ma è da notare che il poeta l’imita colle parole et i pittori co’ colori, e, quello che è più, i poeti imitano il di dentro principalmente, cioè i concetti e le passioni dell’animo […] et i pittori imitano principalmente il di fuori, cioè i corpi e le fattezze di tutte le cose. E perché i concetti e l’azzioni de’ re sono diverse da quelle de’ privati, e quelle de’ privati sono differenti fra loro […] anzi un medesimo è in any kind of sculpture, relief work, and statues, your age in shameless arrogance does not bring itself to admit it’). As suggested in the translations by Maurizio Bettini (2002: 61–62) and by Giulia Perucchi (2014: 185), here the point is that, in Petrarch’s opinion, modern achievements in both painting and sculpture are inferior as compared to antiquity. During Petrarch’s age, while modern inferiority in sculpture was acknowledged, the same was not true for painting: ‘Accedunt haec quidem ad naturam propius quam picture, ille enim videntur tantum, he autem et tanguntur integrumque ac solidum eoque perennius corpus habent. Quam ob causam picture veterum nulle usquam, cum adhuc innumerabiles supersint statue: unde hec etas, ut in multis erronea, picture inventrix vult videri, sive, quod inventioni proximum, elegantissima consummatrix limatrixque, cum in genere quolibet sculpture cumque in omnibus signis ac statuis longe imparem se negare, temeraria quamvis impudensque non audeat’. Perucchi 2014: 186. 35 Varchi and Borghini 1998: 44. My translation.

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differente da sé stesso o per le diverse età o per gli vari accidenti: le quali tutte cose s’hanno a sapere esprimere da’ poeti; e per questa cagione si ritruovano diverse spezie di poesia. Il che non avviene nella pittura, perché tutti i corpi sono ad un modo […] il perché pare che sia tanta differenza fra la poesia e la pittura, quanta è fra l’anima e ’l corpo. [But it should be stressed that poets imitate with words and painters with colours, and, most of all, poets mainly imitate the inner reality, that is the concepts and the passions of soul […] while painters mainly imitate the outward appearance, that is the bodies and the shapes of all things. And since the concepts and actions of kings are different from those of private individuals, and these are in turn different from one another […] or rather the same person is different from himself due to his evolution through time or due to various accidents, those things have to be expressed by poets: for this reason there are many kinds of poetry. This does not happen in painting because all bodies are made in one way […]. Consequently, the difference between poetry and painting seems to be the same which exists between the soul and the body.]36

While both painters and poets aim to imitate nature, they imitate different things and with different means: painters show the exterior form, poets the inner life. Even if painters can try to show the inner life (soul) of those they represent and poets can at times describe external appearance, only poets can do both in the best of ways. The idea that the difference between body and soul is the same as that between painting and poetry was discussed by many intellectuals of the time, including Lodovico Castelvetro and Pietro Aretino.37 Indeed, ut pictura poësis was a well-established topos in the poetic discourses of the time. Varchi’s distinctive contribution is that he provides a clear and Aristotelian explanation for that difference. In Varchi’s argument we recognise once more the echo of Petrarch’s words, specifically the comparison he drew between writing and sculpture in a letter to cardinal Giovanni Colonna. Explaining that his extensive use of quotations from classical texts is due to the exemplary value of antique models, Petrarch adds: Never would Julius Caesar have ascended to the summit of glory had he not learned to imitate and admire Marius from his youth. He was even inspired by the statue of Alexander which he saw in the temple of Hercules at Cadiz and which soon not only incited him to a desire of achieving great deeds but according to Tranquillus caused him to groan. For indeed if statues of outstanding men can 36 Ibid.: 54–55. Translation mine. 37 Jossa 2008: 245–56.

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kindle noble minds with desire for imitation, as Crispus relates that Quintus Fabius Maximus and Publius Cornelius Scipio were accustomed to say, how much more should virtue itself directly bring this about since it would be reflected not from shiny marble but from direct example? To be sure, the outlines of bodies are contained more distinctly in statues while descriptions of deeds and customs as well the conditions of minds are undoubtedly expressed more fully and perfectly by words than by anvils. Therefore I feel that it would not be improper to state that statues reflect images of persons while examples reflect images of virtues.38

As in Petrarch’s discourse on statues, in Varchi’s opinion only poetry can grasp and express concepts, actions, and the passions of the soul, and can distinguish a prince from a normal citizen. What is more, only poetry can perceive and describe an individual’s inner evolution over time. For Varchi, the relationship between painting and poetry is necessarily one of conflict, given the separation between body and soul, material and spiritual life. Such conflict, as Petrarch himself argued in De remediis, can only be resolved by a victory of the soul over the body, of spirituality over materiality and therefore of poetry over painting (and all the arts in general).39 Varchi’s verses on painted portraits centre on this binary opposition between poetry/soul and painting/body, starting from the sonnet ‘Famose frondi, de’ cui santi onori’, which is represented in the portrait of Lenzi and which was published, with some variations, in the Sonetti of 1555: Famose frondi, de’ cui santi onori Per non so qual del ciel fero pianeta, Rado oggi s’orna, o Cesare, o poeta, Mercè del guasto mondo e pien d’errori; Qual sarà mai, che degnamente onori Quel bello, onde ogni ben par che si mieta? Che Giove irato e le tempeste acqueta, E rende umìli i più feroci cori? 38 Familiares VI.4: ‘Nunquam Iulius Cesar in illud glorie culmen ascenderet, nisi mirari et imitari Marium ab adolescentia didicisset; quin et Alexandri profuit imago in templo Herculis Gadibus conspecta, qua mox ad cupiditatem magnas res agendi non exarsit modo, sed, ut ait Tranquillus, “ingemuit”. Profecto autem, si statue illustrium possunt nobiles animos ad imitandi studium accendere, quod Q. Fabium Maximum et P. Cornelium Scipionem dicere solitos Crispus refert, quanto magis ipsa virtus hoc efficit, claro dum proponitur non marmore sed exemplo? corporum nempe liniamenta statuis forsan expressius continentur, rerum vero gestarum morumque notitia atque habitus animorum haud dubie plenius atque perfectius verbis quam incudibus exprimuntur; nec improprie michi videor dicturus statuas corporum imagines, exempla virtutum’. Petrarca 1933–42: II (1934), 79–80. Translation in Petrarca 1975: 314–317 (p. 316). 39 On the role of the body in Petrarch’s writings see Rigo 2016: 114–25 (pp. 117–20).

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E qual fia mai, che degnamente ancora Onorar possa, e quanto si conviene L’alta bontà, ch’è nel bel vostro involta? Io, da che prima nasce l’aurora, Fin che di nuovo all’Orïente viene, V’adoro e ’nchino umìl solo una volta. [Famous branches, whose holy honours, because of some adverse planet, nowadays rarely adorn kings or poets, due to this wretched world filled with errors: || who shall ever be able to sing that beauty, which emanates every good? Which calms the angry Jupiter and the storms, and tames the fiercest hearts? || And who will be able to properly celebrate, as it deserves, the noble virtue enwrapped in your beauty? || From the birth of Aurora to the moment when she reaches the Orient again, I never cease to adore and humbly revere you.]40

The changes made in the printed version of the sonnet allow for a more linear understanding of Varchi’s discourse, which unfolds, in the verses, around two opposing poles: the two quatrains revolve around the external beauty of the youth, while the two tercets focus on his inner goodness. The poet asks himself, first, who shall be capable of showing the beauty of the youth, and then who shall dare to describe his inner qualities. Varchi distinguishes the two abilities, probably recalling Bronzino and the painting in which the verses are inserted. This close connection between text and image suggests that Varchi might have composed the first version of the poem precisely to be represented in the portrait. By taking as model Petrarch’s famous sonnets on Simone Martini’s portrait of Laura, Varchi evokes the bond that the portrait establishes between the poet and the painter. 41 The sonnets, also cited in the Due Lezzioni—together with those composed by Pietro Bembo for Giovanni Bellini’s portrait of Maria Savorgnan and those by Giovanni Della Casa for Titian’s portrait of Elisabetta Querini42—are used by Varchi whenever he writes about portraiture. Varchi’s modelling on Petrarch, however, does not go as far as composing a diptych in praise of Lorenzo’s portrait; the painting is only mentioned again three decades later in a poetic correspondence

40 Varchi 1555: 6. Translation mine. 41 They are the famous sonnets 77 and 78 of the Canzoniere (‘Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso’ and ‘Quando giunse a Simon l’alto concetto’). See Bolzoni 2008: 10–16, 75–81; Pich 2010: 54–65. On the poetry around portraiture, see also Pozzi 1979: 1–30; Rogers 1986: 291–305; and Damianaki Romano 1998: 349–94. 42 Florence, Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze (BncF), MS II VIII 137, fols 25v and 48v. On Bembo’s sonnets (‘O imagine mia celeste e pura’ and ‘Son questi quei begli occhi, in cui mirando’), see Bolzoni 2008: 22–28, 85–91; Pich 2010: 168–72.

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with Bronzino included in the collection Sonetti contra gl’Ugonotti.43 Petrarch’s high praise of Simone Martini, who he claims went up to heaven to capture Laura’s virtue, was probably too much for Varchi as a philosopher. In Varchi’s view, perhaps, it was not sufficient that, in Rvf 78, Petrarch compared painting to a silent image, that is, an object without soul or depth. In his sonnets on portraits, Varchi celebrates the sitter, and at times the artist who made them, but above all he seizes the opportunity to discuss ut pictura poësis. This is the case in the sonnet ‘Questo è ben di Madonna il crine aurato’, addressed to a certain Bonifazio Bonsio and dedicated to the portrait of a woman whose identity remains unknown: Questo è ben di Madonna il crine aurato di ch’Amor mi legò; questi son quegli occhi, assai più che ’l sol lucenti e begli, che ’l mondo lieto e me puon far beato; queste le labbra, onde quel dolce, ornato esce e saggio parlar, che i più rubegli d’Amor, non che ’l mio core, accende e tiegli vivendo ancora in immortale stato; questa è sì di mia donna altera e santa l’immagin vera, se solo il difore si mira, e quanto puon cerussa et ostro: ma le virtuti interne e quel valore, per cui la nostra età si pregia e vanta, non cape mente, non che sprima inchiostro. [This is surely my lady’s golden hair, by which Love bound me tight; these are the eyes, much brighter and more beautiful than the sun, that can make the world joyful and me blissful; || these are the lips from which those sweet, elegant, and wise words come out, which ignite the people most recalcitrant to Love, as well as my heart, and hold them, in an immortal state, even if they are still alive; || this is indeed the true image of my noble and holy lady, if we only care about her outward appearance and how much white and red can do: || but her inner virtues and that value, pride and honour of our age, cannot be grasped by the mind, unless they are expressed in ink.]44

43 On the sonnets by Della Casa (‘Ben veggio io, Tiziano, in forme nove’ and ‘Son queste, Amor, le vaghe trecce bionde’), see Bolzoni 2008: 20–21, 92–98; Pich 2010: 172–81. 44 Varchi 1555: 42. Translation mine. See also Tanturli 2011: I, 319–32 (pp. 327–28).

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Fig. 6.3 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Laura Battiferri, c. 1560, oil on panel, 87.5 × 70 cm, Musei Civici Fiorentini, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Donazione Loeser, Florence.

Fig. 6.4 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Laura Battiferri, c. 1560, detail, oil on panel, Musei Civici Fiorentini, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Donazione Loeser, Florence.

The poem belongs to the subgenre of poetry written ‘in front of the portrait’ and reworks the sonnets ‘Son questi quei begli occhi, in cui mirando’ by Pietro Bembo and ‘Son queste, Amor, le vaghe trecce bionde’ by Giovanni Della Casa. 45 The description of the portrait offers the poet an opportunity to list the woman’s physical qualities and hint at her inner virtues: the golden hair that made him fall in love; the bright and beautiful eyes that appease the world; the lips that utter wise words. Despite declaring himself, as Della Casa does, powerless in front of the woman’s nobility, to the point that he cannot put it in words, Varchi does not reach the same conclusions. Whereas Della Casa had celebrated Titian’s ability to depict the soul of Elisabetta Querini, Varchi stresses the limits of painting, which can only represent the sitter’s physical appearance. This is a recurrent theme in Varchi’s poetic correspondence with Bronzino. Varchi eventually invited Bronzino, who also wrote verses, to dedicate himself to poetry once he finished the painting. Bronzino thus had the opportunity, as a poet, to complete an image that would have remained imperfect alone. This is the subject of Varchi’s sonnet on the Portrait of Laura Battiferri (Fig. 6.3), painted by Bronzino around 1560. Once again, an open book shows sonnets Rvf 45 On poetry ‘in front of the portrait’, see Bolzoni 2008: 55–69, 203–45.

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64 and 240 (Fig. 6.4), whose function is to reveal the inner qualities of the woman portrayed in profile. Furthermore, as noted by scholars, while the sonnets elicit a comparison to Petrarch’s Laura, the use of profile permits a visual comparison of Battiferri to Dante. 46 In the painting, Battiferri is at the same time lover and beloved, poet and venerated woman. More than many other portraits by Bronzino, this work is at the centre of the extensive exchange of poems between Bronzino, Varchi, Antonfrancesco Grazzini (called Lasca), and Gherardo Spini. Battiferri is herself the author of an elegant sonnet, ‘Così nel volto rilucente e vago’, in which she celebrates the portrait that reveals her thoughts and emotions despite her attempts to conceal them. In the second quatrain, Battiferri writes: Così nel volto rilucente, e vago la pastorella tua, chiaro Crisero, quanto Brama il tuo cor casto, e sincero ti mostri aperto, e sii contento, e pago; come la propria mia novella imago della tua dotta man lavoro altero, ogni mio affetto scuopre ogni pensiero quantunque il cor sia di celarlo vago. [Just as your shepherdess, with face shining ǀ and longing, openly shows you, bright Crisero, how ǀ much she desires your chaste and sincere heart (be ǀ you then content and satisfied) ǀǀ so thus my own new image ǀ lofty work of your learned hand ǀ my every affection and every thought discloses, ǀ albeit my heart longs to keep them hidden.]47

Bronzino’s inclusion of Petrarch’s sonnets in the portrait of Laura Battiferri has been interpreted in several ways. One possibility is that the verses allude to her longing for Rome after moving to Florence. 48 What is more relevant here, however, is that the portrait reflects Varchi’s position on ut pictura poësis, suggesting that he may have been directly involved in its creation. The book is the key for the viewer to establish a connection with Battiferri, whose profile makes her unreachable: the body remains silent without the words that express the soul. Battiferri’s portrait, 46 On this portrait, see Plazzotta 1998: 251–63; Kirkham 1998: 63–139; Macola 2007: 76–85; and De Giorgi 2010b: 218–19. 47 Battiferra degli Ammannati 2006: 296–97, sonnet 27 (Italian and English version). The meaning of the first quatrain is ambiguous and several interpretations are possible. See Federica Pich’s paraphrase and commentary in Bolzoni 2008: 213. 48 Geremicca 2013: 203–18.

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without the book, would be therefore crueller than Laura’s image, which was still more benevolent to Petrarch than the woman herself. Bronzino, who was Varchi’s close friend, does not seem to be troubled by his positions on the superiority of poetry over painting, and even if he does not openly dismiss them, neither does he fully agree. Bronzino’s double career as both painter and poet places him in a delicate position: he is divided between the desire to adhere as much as possible to the standard set by Varchi and the members of his circle—who alone could appreciate the value of his poetry—and the need to defend his activity as a painter. 49 The fact that he did not complete his letter on the paragone for the Due Lezzioni must be read in light of this conflict. Bronzino is the only artist consulted by Varchi who did not finish his letter, which had to be published incomplete.50 The different views expressed by Bronzino and Varchi in the Due Lezzioni do not concern, however, the conclusion of the paragone in an ex-aequo. That Bronzino agreed with Varchi on this aspect and on the definition of disegno as origin of all the arts is evident in his burlesque poetry, in which he often expresses his thoughts on the arts. For example, in the Capitolo in lode del dappoco, where he evokes the satisfaction and honours received thanks to painting and jokingly considers the possibility of experimenting with sculpture, Bronzino writes: E se bene io ne so piccola parte, pur quel poco d’onor, ch’ella mi dona, m’è caro o nelle lingue o nelle carte ed io la seguo e tutta la persona le dò, de’ suoi servigi conoscente, ed ella in sino a qui non m’abbandona, che ben conosce ch’alle sue parente potrei accostarmi, ove quanto all’ingegno basta leggere un libro solamente, però ch’il padre universal disegno è molto più, ch’oprar regolo e seste e delle pietre intendersi e del legno. [And even though I know just a small part of her [painting], I do cherish that little bit of honour she gives me, in words or in writing, || and I follow her and I give all of myself to her, grateful for her service, and so far she has not abandoned me, || because she knows full well that I could approach her sisters, which can 49 Geremicca 2020: 32–47. 50 Varchi and Borghini 1998: 66–69.

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be understood by reading a single book, || while the universal father disegno is much more than using rulers and compasses and knowing different types of stone and wood.]51

For Bronzino, disegno (‘padre universal disegno’) is the common root of all the arts. Even for sculpture, the essence lies in ingenuity (ingegno) and disegno, not in the mastery of technical tools or knowledge of the materials. The painter mentions that only one book (‘un libro solamente’) is useful for clarifying one’s ideas on the subject, which can most likely be identified with the Due Lezzioni.52 In the Delle scuse: capitolo primo, Bronzino is even more explicit: Eccomi tutto, omai, rivolto in verso di noi che del disegno sian seguaci tutti, se ben l’oprar nostro è diverso. [Here I am, now, almost entirely turned towards [also: turned into verse] us who are all disciples of disegno, although we operate in different ways.]53

Bronzino clearly agrees with Varchi on the paragone between painting and sculpture based on the notion of disegno—a position that also reflects Petrarch’s argument in De remediis. It follows that this could not have been the reason why he did not finish the letter for the Due Lezzioni. On the contrary, Bronzino’s position on ut pictura poësis was, surely, more nuanced than Varchi’s, since he was also a painter. In the poems he exchanged with Varchi, Bronzino always avoids confronting him directly on the issue of the superiority of poetry over painting. This is the case in the sonnets on the portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi in the collection Sonetti contra gl’Ugonotti (1562). Varchi addresses Bronzino in the sonnet ‘Voi che nel fior della sua verde etade’, and Bronzino replies in ‘Tali e tante vid’io grazie adunate’. Even though Varchi underlines that Bronzino just represents the external beauty of Lorenzo though 51 Bronzino 1988: 152, 280–91. Translation mine. On Bronzino’s considerations on the arts in his burlesque poetry, see Parker 2004: 161–74. 52 Although Giorgio Vasari used the same def inition of disegno as ‘father’ of all the arts in his Lives (Vasari 1911–14: I, 88)—as underlined by Franca Petrucci Nardelli (Bronzino 1988: 414, note 12)—and not as ‘mother’, as done in the Due Lezzioni, this book seems to me a more credible candidate. The whole of Bronzino’s poetry is built in dialogue with Benedetto Varchi. This seems like a tribute from a friend to another friend. No poem is exchanged between Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari (who composed poems, too). Moreover, no poem is dedicated to Vasari by Bronzino, whereas he wrote poems in praise of other artists: Benvenuto Cellini, Michelangelo, Jacopo Pontormo, Giovan Battista di Marco del Tasso, and Niccolò Tribolo. This does not exclude the possibility that the lexical choice to indicate disegno as ‘father’ depends on the Lives. 53 Bronzino 1988: 190–91, 361–63. Translation mine.

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his portrait, inviting him to write poems to show the sitter’s inner life, Bronzino remains evasive, shifts attention to the sitter, and declares himself incapable of rendering justice in painting or poetry to Lorenzo’s external and internal virtues.54 Varchi’s interpretation of ut pictura poësis is instead ignored by Bronzino in the three sonnets exchanged with Varchi on the portrait of Laura Battiferri: the first, ‘Se quell’honesto ardor, che ’n voi s’interna’, is sent from the painter to the poet, followed by a response that Bronzino writes to himself in Varchi’s voice, ‘Tale ha virtute in sé l’alma mia terna’, and, finally, Varchi’s own response, ‘La vostra man, chiaro Bronzino, eterna’. A messer Benedetto Varchi Se quell’honesto ardor, che ’n voi s’interna, per dare a i primi due la gloria e ’l vanto, scaldi non men la bell’alma, che, quanto voi lei, se stessa e voi con seco eterna, hor che nel volto, ov’il bel che s’interna riluce e quel cortese eletto e santo ricetto di virtute animo, tanto m’affiso e bramo ch’ogni età lo scerna, acciò che ’l mondo, c’honorarla sempre dee pel suo chiaro stil più ch’altra mai, scorga (o che spero?) ancor l’alta sembianza, pregate, o Varchi, Amor, che ’l divin tempre raggio che v’arde, ond’io, che tanto osai, cieco non caggia in mezzo alla speranza. [To Messer Benedetto Varchi If the honest ardour, which arises in you for the third time,55 to leave glory and praise to the f irst two, warms the beautiful soul no less than you warm her, eternalises herself and you as much as you eternalise her;56 || now that I stare at her face, in which the internal beauty transpires and that kind, noble, and holy soul, abode of virtues, and I desire that every age could see her, || so that the world, which has to always honour her more than any other for her 54 Florence, BncF, MS II VIII 137, fols 25v and 48v. Geremicca 2013: 239–40, 269–70, nn. 28–29. 55 The verb ‘s’interna’ can be interpreted both as a reference to being concealed inside and to be placed in third position. 56 As a poet, Battiferri is indeed able to immortalise not only herself, but also Varchi and his first two loves: Lorenzo Lenzi and Giulio Della Stufa.

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illustrious style, can also see her noble likeness (what do I hope?); || O Varchi, do pray Love to mitigate that divine ray coming from her which burns you, so that I, who so much dared to stare at her, may not be blinded in the middle of my so wished work.] Del Bronzino in nome del Varchi risposta Tale ha virtute in sé l’alma mia terna fiamma, che m’arde a le due prime accanto, che, terza ardendo, in me seco altrettanto crescer fa l’altre e nel mio cor l’interna. Grazia del terzo ciel tre volte eterna piove da gl’occhi, ond’io rinterzo il canto, e tal valore in me, ch’io già mi vanto terzo salir da chi gl’apre e governa. Da lor, Bronzino, lo stil retto e le tempre trarrete de i color, ch’i santi rai donan virtù che tutte l’altre avanza; né che ’l chiaro splendor l’occhio vi stempre temete, ancorch’il sol vinca d’assai, ché dar vita e conforto ha per usanza. [Bronzino in the name of Varchi My third and nourishing flame has such virtues that it burns me together with the other two and, by burning as third, it makes the other two grow in me and settles them in my heart. || The grace of the third heaven, three times eternal, rains down from her eyes, so that I reinforce my song [as poetry] and such value arises in me that I already pride myself on this third ascent to the one who governs it [Venus]. || From them [from the eyes], Bronzino, the right style and the colours you will draw because the holy rays give such a virtue which outdoes all the other ones; || nor should you fear that this clear splendour will blind your eye, although it may even win the sun, because its habit is to give life and comfort.] Di messer Benedetto Varchi in risposta La vostra man, chiaro Bronzino, eterna rende hor l’alta di fuor beltade e ’l canto vostro, che pari in voi puote altrettanto, eternerà l’alta virtute interna

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di lei, che terza in trino ghiaccio e ’n terna fiamma mi cuoce sì, ch’io ploro e canto, né mai più dolce e più cortese pianto hebbe o l’antica etate o la moderna. Ben pregarrò che con men chiare tempre la viva luce de’ suoi santi rai costei, che sola tutte l’altre avanza, a voi rivolga e me poi strugga e stempre, benché, se dritto rimirasse, omai da strugger poco e da stemprar l’avanza. [Varchi in response to Bronzino Illustrious Bronzino, now your hand eternalises the high external beauty, and your song [as poetry]—which can in yourself equally do the same—will eternalise the high inner virtue || of her who burns me so much in triple ice and triple flame that I cry and sing, for whom a sweeter and more gracious lament was never known by either the ancient or the modern age. || I will pray that, with less luminous force, the living light of her holy rays may the lady, who alone shines above all the others, || turn towards you, and then seize and wear me down, although, even if she looked straight at me, not much is left to destroy.]57

In order to successfully complete the portrait of Battiferri and to show her noble likeness (‘alta sembianza’), Bronzino turns to Varchi for advice so as to not be overwhelmed by the inner beauty that she transmits through her face. In the response that Bronzino writes to himself, he does not discuss the limits of his painting in representing Battiferri’s soul and inner virtues. The fictional Varchi exhorts the painter not to surrender and to challenge the divine grace emanating from the woman’s eyes, inviting him to draw inspiration from it for his style and colours. By contrast, in his real response, Varchi lowers Bronzino’s expectations. He pushes him, once the portrait is done, to turn to writing in order to eternalise the soul of the woman. In the two tercets, finally, Varchi prays that the divine grace that emanates from Battiferri’s countenance might hit him with force, and spare Bronzino. As a poet, he considers himself capable of fully understanding Battiferri’s internal and external qualities, unlike his painter friend. If the painter’s response to the poet remains evasive, starting with the Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi Bronzino seems to elaborate a concrete response against the prejudice, 57 Florence, BncF, MS II IX 10, fols 54v–55v. Geremicca 2013: 173–85 (pp. 180–83) and 233–34, 264–55, nn. 15–17. Translations mine. On these three poems, see Tanturli 2011: 319–32.

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shared by Petrarch and Varchi, concerning the painter’s mimetic abilities. He works on a depiction that enables him to make visible the virtues and the life of the sitter, thus consecrating his or her memory to eternity. Throughout the 1530s, Bronzino gradually abandons the possibility of exploring the movements of the soul through the use of a chiaroscuro that is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci, and that can still be seen in the portrait of the young Lorenzo or in the Portrait of Guidobaldo II Della Rovere (c. 1530–32, Galleria Palatina, Florence).58 In the Medici portraits, for example, he chooses a less contrasted chiaroscuro and privileges a uniform white light, which allows him to bring into focus all the elements of the picture. There is no hierarchy to the elements of the composition; Bronzino portrays with the same attention and virtuosity the sitter and the objects around them. A new visual strategy of communication is at play. All the figurative elements are accurately selected and used by Bronzino to provide the viewer with the interpretive keys to the portrait, allowing them to animate the faces of the sitters and capture their identity and story. This applies not only to the Petrarchan verses included in the portraits of Lenzi and Battiferri, or the Homeric passage in the portrait of Ugolino Martelli (c. 1537, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin),59 but also to the sculpture in the Portrait of Pierino da Vinci (c. 1548–1551, National Gallery, London),60 the lavish dress worn by Eleonora di Toledo in her portrait with her son Giovanni (c. 1545, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence),61 and the engagement ring worn by the duchess in her portrait that hangs today in the Národní Galerie in Prague (c. 1543),62 to name just a few examples. Bronzino’s decision to include writing in his painting should not, therefore, be interpreted as painting yielding to the written word. In the representation of naturalia and artificialia, through an object-centred painting, Bronzino challenges the idea that painting is mute poetry by making it speak. This is a challenge that his portraiture seems to have won: to this day, his sitters can tell their stories through their image, contrary to the many other figures of sixteenth-century European portraiture who remain silent behind the anonymous labels Portrait of a woman and Portrait of a man.

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Bartoli, Lorenzo. 1996. Arte e scrittura nella Firenze del Quattrocento: i ‘Commentarii’ di Lorenzo Ghiberti, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto). Battiferra degli Ammannati, Laura. 2006. Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle, ed. and trans. by Victoria Kirkham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Baxandall, Michael. 2003. ‘English Disegno’, in Baxandall, Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 83–87. Bettini, Maurizio. 2002. Francesco Petrarca sulle arti figurative: tra Plinio e sant’Agostino (Livorno: Sillabe). Bolzoni, Lina. 2008. Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, texts ed. by Federica Pich (Rome and Bari: Laterza). Brock, Maurice. 2002. Bronzino (Paris: Éditions du Regard). Brock, Maurice. 2011. ‘Le “Portrait d’Ugolino Martelli” par Bronzino: un Homère florentin?’, in Homère à la Renaissance: mythe et transfigurations, ed. by Luisa Capodieci and Philip Ford (Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art), pp. 323–44. Bronzino, Agnolo. 1988. Rime in burla, ed. by Franca Petrucci Nardelli (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana). Caneva, Caterina. 1986. ‘Andrea del Sarto: Ritratto di dama con petrarchino’, in Andrea del Sarto 1486–1530: dipinti e disegni a Firenze, ed. by Marco Chiarini (Florence: D’AngeliHaeusler), pp. 157–60. Capretti, Elena. 2002. ‘Domenico Puligo: Ritratto di donna con spartito di musica e petrarchino (‘Barbara Fiorentina’?), in Domenico Puligo 1492–1527, ed. by Elena Capretti and Serena Padovani (Livorno: Sillabe), pp. 122–23. Carratù, Tullia 2006. ‘Tiziano: Ritratto di Benedetto Varchi’, in Tiziano e il ritratto di corte da Raffaello ai Carracci, ed. by Nicola Spinosa (Naples: Electa), p. 132. Cecchi, Alessandro. 1990. ‘“Famose Frondi de cui santi honori…”, un sonetto del Varchi e il “Ritratto di Lorenzo Lenzi” del Bronzino’, Artista, 2: 8–19. Cecchi, Alessandro. 1991. ‘Il Bronzino, Benedetto Varchi e l’Accademia Fiorentina: ritratti di poeti, letterati e personaggi illustri della corte medicea’, Antichità viva, 30.1–2: 17–28. Cellini, Benvenuto. 1568. Due trattati uno intorno alle otto principali arti dell’oreficeria. L’altro in materia dell’arte della scultura, dove si veggono infiniti segreti nel lavorar le figure di marmo, & nel gettarle di bronzo: composti da M. Benvenuto Cellini scultore fiorentino (Florence: Panizzi and Peri). Cennini, Cennino. 1899. The Book of the Art: A Contemporary Practical Treatise on Quattrocento Painting, trans. and commentary by Christiana J. Herringham (London: George Allen). Collareta, Marco. 2007. ‘Varchi e le arti figurative’, in Benedetto Varchi 1503–1565, ed. by Vanni Bramanti (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura), pp. 173–84. Costamagna, Philippe. 2010. ‘Bronzino: Ritratto di Guidobaldo II della Rovere’, in Bronzino pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici, ed. by Antonio Natali and Carlo Falciani (Florence: Mandragora), pp. 86–87.

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Cox-Rearick, Janet. 2010. ‘Bronzino: Ritratto di Eleonora di Toledo con il figlio Giovanni’, in Bronzino pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici, ed. by Antonio Natali and Carlo Falciani (Florence: Mandragora), pp. 116–17. Dal Pozzolo, Enrico Maria. 2018. ‘Lorenzo Lotto: Portrait of a Young Man with a Book’, in Lorenzo Lotto: Portraits, ed. by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo, Miguel Falomir Faus, and Matthias Wivel (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado), pp. 256–58. Damianaki Romano, Chrysa. 1998. ‘“Come se fussi viva e pura”: ritrattistica e lirica cortigiana tra Quattro e Cinquecento’, Bibliothèque d’Hunanisme et Renaissance, 60.2: 349–94. Davis, Charles. 2008. ‘La ‘Madonna del Monasterio degl’Angeli’: Danti e l’ambiente intorno a Benedetto Varchi, tra la quiete fraterna e la stanza dei “sonetti spirituali”’, in I grandi bronzi del Battistero: l’arte di Vincenzo Danti discepolo di Michelangelo, ed. by Charles Davis and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi (Florence: Giunti), pp. 165–203. Davis, Charles. 2012. ‘Vincenzo Danti in the World of Giorgio Vasari, Benedetto Varchi, and Silvano Razzi: Drawings by, for, and after the Sculptor’, in Marks of Identity: New Perspectives on Sixteenth-Century Italian Sculpture, ed. by Dimitrios Zikos, Andrea Bacchi, and Denise Allen (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), pp. 120–55. De Giorgi, Raffaele. 2010a. ‘Bronzino: Ritratto di Lorenzo Lenzi’, in Bronzino pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici, ed. by Antonio Natali and Carlo Falciani (Florence: Mandragora), pp. 202–03. De Giorgi, Raffaele. 2010b. ‘Bronzino: Ritratto di Laura Battiferri’, in Bronzino pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici, ed. by Antonio Natali and Carlo Falciani (Florence: Mandragora), pp. 218–19. Ekserdjian, David. 2006. Parmigianino (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Ekserdjian, David, and Elisabetta Fadda. 2016. Correggio e Parmigianino: arte a Parma nel Cinquecento (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale). Facchinetti, Simone. 2016. ‘Giovanni Cariani: Portrait of a Young Man with a Green Book’, in In the Age of Giorgione, ed. by Simone Facchinetti, Arturo Galansino, and Per Rumberg (London: Royal Academy of Arts), pp. 66–67. Freuler, Gaudenz. 2016. ‘Vittoria Colonna: The Pictorial Evidence’, in A Companion to Vittoria Colonna, ed. by. Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno (Leiden and Boston: Brill), pp. 237–69. Gamberini, Diletta. 2016. ‘A Bronze Manifesto of Petrarchism: Domenico Poggini’s Portrait Medal of Benedetto Varchi’, I Tatti Studies, 19.2: 359–83. Gamberini, Diletta. 2017. ‘I colloqui poetici degli artisti della corte fiorentina con Benedetto Varchi’, LaRivista, 5: 61–9. Gamberini, Diletta, and Michael W. Cole. 2016. ‘Vincenzo Danti’s Deceits’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69.4: 1296–1342. Geremicca, Antonio. 2013. Agnolo Bronzino: ‘La dotta penna al pennel dotto pari’ (Rome: UniversItalia).

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Geremicca, Antonio. 2017a. ‘Damone per Crisero e gli altri: Benedetto Varchi e gli artisti (prima e dopo l’Accademia fiorentina)’, in Intrecci Virtuosi: Letterati, artisti e accademie tra Cinque e Seicento, ed. by Carla Chiummo, Antonio Geremicca, and Patrizia Tosini (Roma: De Luca Editore), pp. 11–26. Geremicca, Antonio. 2017b. ‘Sulla scia di Agnolo Bronzino, Alessandro Allori sodale di Benedetto Varchi: un ritratto misconosciuto del letterato e un suo sonetto inedito’, LaRivista, 5: 86–112. Geremicca, Antonio. 2018. ‘Il “Cavaliere Inesistente”: Benedetto Varchi su Leone Leoni e la statua bronzea di Filippo II di Spagna (1554–1555)’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 45: 161–84. Geremicca, Antonio. 2020. ‘Agnolo Bronzino “bifronte” al bivio tra pittura e poesie’, Letteratura & Arte, 18, 32–47. Hendler, Sefy. 2013. La guerre des arts: le Paragone peinture-sculpture en Italie XVe–XVIIe siècle, LermArt, 11 (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider). Holderbaum, James. 1995. ‘Recuperi moderni di sculture di Pierino da Vinci’, in Pierino da Vinci, ed. by Marco Ciatti (Florence: Becocci), pp. 17–23. Jossa, Stefano. 2008. ‘La penna e il pennello. Retoriche a confronto’, in Officine del nuovo: sodalizi fra letterati, artisti ed editori nella cultura italiana fra Riforma e Controriforma, ed. by Harald Hendrix and Paolo Procaccioli, Cinquecento, 28 (Manziana: Vecchiarelli), pp. 245–56. Kirkham, Victoria. 1998. ‘Dante’s Phantom, Petrarch’s Specter: Bronzino’s Portrait of the Poet Laura Battiferri’, in Visibile parlare: Dante and the Art of the Italian Renaissance, ed. by Deborah Parker (Charlottesville: University of Virginia), pp. 63–139. Lee, Rensselaer W. 1940. ‘Ut Pictura Poësis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting’, The Art Bulletin, 22.4: 197–269. Lo Re Salvatore. 2013. ‘Il volto nel marmo: caccia al Varchi perduto’, in Varchi e altro Rinascimento: studi offerti a Vanni Bramanti, ed. by Salvatore Lo Re and Franco Tomasi (Manziana: Vecchiarelli Editore), pp. 61–80. Macola, Novella. 2007. Sguardi e scritture: figure con libro nella ritrattistica italiana della prima metà del Cinquecento (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere e arti). Mendelsohn, Leatrice. 1982. Paragoni. Benedetto Varchi’s ‘Due Lezzioni’ and Cinquecento Art Theory, Studies in the Fine Arts: Art Theory, 6 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press). Parker, Deborah. 2004. ‘Bronzino and the Diligence of Art’, Artibus et historiae, 25.49: 161–74. Patota, Giuseppe. 2016. ‘Petrarchino’, Bollettino di italianistica, 13.1: 53–69. Perucchi, Giulia. 2014. Petrarca e le arti figurative: De remediis utriusque Fortune, I 37–42 (Florence: Le Lettere). Petrarca, Francesco. 1933–42. Le Familiari, ed. by Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, 4 vols (Florence: Sansoni) Petrarca, Francesco. 1975. Letters on Familiar Matters: I–VIII, trans. by Aldo S. Bernardo, (Albany: State University of New York Press).

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Petrarca, Francesco. 1991. Petrarch’s ‘Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul’, trans. with a commentary by Conrad H. Rawski, 5 vols (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 1996c. The ‘Canzoniere’ or ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’, trans. with notes and commentary by Mark Musa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 2001. Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata, 5th edn (Milan: Mondadori). Petrarca, Francesco. 2014. De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (1354–1366), trans. and. ed. by Gregor Maurach, commentary by Claudia Echinger-Maurach (= Fontes, 28). Available online . Pich, Federica. 2010. I poeti davanti al ritratto: da Petrarca a Marino (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Plazzotta, Carol. 1998. ‘Bronzino’s Laura’, The Burlington Magazine, 140: 251–63. Pozzi, Giovanni. 1979. ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d’inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, Lettere italiane, 31.1: 1–30. Preimesberger, Rudolf. 2011. Paragons and Paragone: Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute). Quiviger, François. 1987. ‘Varchi and the Visual Arts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50: 219–24. Rigo, Paolo. 2016. ‘Corpo’, in Lessico critico petrarchesco, ed. by Luca Marcozzi and Romana Brovia (Rome: Carocci), pp. 114–25. Rogers, Mary. 1986. ‘Sonnets on Female Portraits from Renaissance North Italy’, Word & Image, 2.4: 291–305. Simoncini, Stefano. 2005. ‘Lenzi, Lorenzo’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Treccani), LXIV, pp. 389–92. Strehlke, Carl Brandon. 2004a. ‘Bronzino: Lorenzo Lenzi’, in Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence, ed. by Carl Brandon Strehlke (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art), pp. 100–03. Strehlke, Carl Brandon. 2004b. ‘Bronzino: Eleonora di Toledo’, in Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence, ed. by Carl Brandon Strehlke (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art), pp. 136–38. Tanturli, Giuliano. 2011. ‘Il Bronzino poeta e il ritratto di Laura Battiferri’, in La parola e l’immagine: studi in onore di Gianni Venturi, ed. by Marco Ariani, Arnaldo Brunu, Anna Dolfi and Andrea Gareffi, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki), I, pp. 319–32. Vaccaro, Mary. 2002. Parmigianino: i dipinti (Torino: Allemandi). Varchi, Benedetto. 1550. Due Lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi, nella prima delle quali si dichiara un sonetto di M. Michelagnolo Buonarroti. Nella seconda si disputa quale sia più nobile arte la scultura, o la pittura, con una lettera d’esso Michelagnolo, & più altri eccellenti pittori et scultori sopra la quistione sopradetta (Florence: Torrentino). Varchi, Benedetto. 1555. De’ sonetti di M. Benedetto Varchi, Parte prima (Florence, Torrentino).

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Varchi, Benedetto. 2013. Paragone: Rangstreit der Künste, Italienisch und Deutsch, ed. by Oskar Bätschmann and Tristan Weddigen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft). Varchi, Benedetto. 2020. Deux leçons sur l’art, trans. and ed. by Frédérique Dubard de Gaillarbois (Paris: Classiques Garnier). Varchi, Benedetto, and Vincenzo Borghini. 1998. Pittura e Scultura nel Cinquecento, ed. by Paola Barocchi (Livorno: Sillabe). Vasari, Giorgio. 1911–14. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. by Gaston C. De Verre, 10 vols (London: Macmillan). Ebook. Vatteroni, Maria Selene. 2019. ‘Painting, Poetry, and Immortality in Benedetto Varchi’s Sonnets’, Word & Image, 35.4: 426–36. Wildmoser, Rudolf. 1989. ‘Das Bildnis des Ugolino Martelli von Agnolo Bronzino’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, 31: 181–213.

About the Author Antonio Geremicca is a researcher at the University of Calabria. His research focuses on Mannerism and the relations between art and literature in the sixteenth century. He has published extensively on these topics in journals such as Studiolo, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, and Paragone Arte, and has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, including Giulio Romano: la forza delle cose (Mantua: 2022); Florence: portrait à la cour des Médicis (Paris: 2015); Pontormo and Rosso: Diverging Paths of Mannerism (Florence: 2014). He has also co-edited the following volumes: Raphaël et la gravure: de Rome au Anciens Pays-Bas et à Liège (Liège: 2021); Intrecci virtuosi: letterati, artisti e accademie tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome: 2017); and Essere uomini di ‘lettere’: segretari e politica culturale nel Cinquecento (Florence: 2016).

7

Double Portraits of Petrarch and Laura in Print (c. 1544–1600) Gemma Cornetti

Abstract The present chapter focuses on double portraits of Petrarch and Laura in print. Most of these prints featured in sixteenth-century editions of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Triumphi, while a few were issued as independent objects. They are accompanied by poems, either autonomous or intertwined with the poet’s and Laura’s likenesses. Whilst the role of these prints in disseminating the effigies of the poet and his beloved has been investigated, their link to Petrarchan tenets has so far been overlooked. This chapter analyses the relationship between the prints and Petrarch’s poems and views on portraiture, and especially how the latter were reconciled with publishing choices, shedding new light on how Petrarch and Laura were framed in sixteenth-century prints. Keywords: Petrarch, Laura, Dante, double portrait, print, paratexts

This chapter focuses on sixteenth-century printed representations of Petrarch (1303–1374) and Laura in Italy. 1 It aims to expound the hitherto-overlooked relationship between these prints and Petrarch’s poems and ideas on portraiture, as well as the extent to which publishers, printers, and engravers ‘packaged’ (or framed) Petrarch and Laura’s reception by combining Petrarchan tenets with their own publishing strategies.2 The inclusion of several engravings that have not been 1 I would like to thank Dr Ilaria Andreoli for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. I also thank the editors of this volume for critically reading the manuscript and suggesting substantial improvements. All remaining errors are my own. For an analysis of engraved portraits of rulers, and their spouses, and encomiastic poetry, see Muriel M. S. Barbero’s essay in this volume. For a discussion on the impact of ideas of Petrarchan beauty on the representation of women in printed series of portraits, see Susan Gaylard’s essay in this volume. 2 On Petrarch’s view of art, see Bettini 2002. The expression ‘packaging’ has been borrowed from Daniel Javitch’s analysis of Gabriele Giolito’s (c. 1508–1578) publishing entrepreneurship. Javitch drew attention

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch07

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previously discussed in the literature on Petrarch’s reception in the Cinquecento, moreover, leads to new insights on the iconography of the couple. In particular, the allegorical content of the engraved portrait by Giacomo Franco (1550–1620) is interpreted here for the first time.3

Double Portraits in Books4 Throughout the sixteenth century, it became common practice to feature woodcut portraits, along with other paratexts, in vernacular editions of Petrarch’s works.5 The earliest of these editions contain likenesses of Petrarch alone, usually depicted either as poet laureate or dressed all’antica; yet, as the century progressed, portraits of the poet with Laura became more common.6 These double portraits were often followed by verses taken directly from, or inspired by, Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta or Triumphi. A few single-sheet prints published by Antonio Salamanca

to how Giolito and Venetian publishers ‘packaged’ works of vernacular poetry as modern classics; he noted that the editorial format of the text-object played a key role in such processes, for, as he comments, ‘it was not enough at the time to simply compare vernacular poetry to ancient literary texts’. See Javitch 1998: 126. On character and functions of paratextual elements in Renaissance editions of Petrarch’s poems, see Santoro 2005; Santoro, Marino, and Pacioni 2006; and more recently, Daniels 2020. 3 On Petrarch’s and Laura’s likeness, see Trapp 2001 and 2003; and more recently, Speck and Neumann 2018. On the representation of Laura in the Triumphi, see Huss 2018. 4 All the editions quoted in this chapter are available in the database Petrarch Exegesis in Renaissance Italy (PERI), which reconstructs the corpus of the Italian Petrarch commentary and exegesis between c. 1350 and c. 1650. I was able to access the records of 228 editions of Petrarch’s poems and select the seventy volumes featuring portraits, either of Petrarch alone or of Petrarch and Laura. These findings have been checked against the aforementioned extant literature on the iconography of Petrarch and Laura and repertoires such as Mortimer 1974 and 1996 and Zappella 1998, although this research does not claim to be exhaustive. In this chapter, Petrarch’s editions have been identified with their CNCE number derived from Censimento nazionale delle edizioni italiane del xvi secolo (EDIT16), available online: [accessed on multiple dates]. Listed in the bibliography are the editions discussed in the text. For those mentioned in the footnotes only, see PERI and EDIT16. 5 On the impact of this editorial decision on Petrarchan poets, see Muriel M. S. Barbero’s essay in this volume. On the editorial success of Petrarch, see Ley et al. 2002; Santoro, Marino, and Pacioni 2006: 54–55. For the fifteenth century, see Armstrong 2020. On paratexts, see Genette and Maclean 1991 and Genette 1997. On author portraits in sixteenth-century Italy, see Mortimer 1996. 6 For portrait prints of Petrarch alone, see: CNCE 24234 (1503) [Albertino da Lissona]; CNCE 41157 (1536) [Niccolò Zoppino]; CNCE 66556 (1541–1542) [Bernardino Bindoni]; CNCE 54670 (1547) [Gabriele Giolito]; CNCE 26138 (1548–1549) [Gabriele Giolito]; CNCE 47378 (1550) [Gabriele Giolito]; CNCE 54783 (1553–1554) [Gabriele Giolito]; CNCE 55016 (1557) [Gabriele Giolito]; CNCE 26305 (1560) [Gabriele Giolito]; CNCE 47376 (1575) [Domenico Nicolini da Sabbio] CNCE 9716 (1577) [Sebastiano Martellini]; CNCE 59457 (1585) and CNCE 28966 (1586) [Giorgio Angelieri].

Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

(1500–1562) and Luca Bertelli (fl. 1564–1589) depicting Petrarch and Laura were also produced, and these, too, feature Petrarch’s own poems or verses written in his style.7 Among the Venetian publishers, Gabriele Giolito (c. 1508–1578) contributed significantly to the launch of double-portrait prints of the poet and Laura, as well as to the broader editorial dissemination of Petrarch’s poetry.8 Between 1544 and 1560, Giolito produced twenty-four editions of Petrarch’s Rvf and Triumphi.9 ‘Packaging’ the editions with an array of paratexts, which included such portraits, played a key role in Giolito’s publishing enterprise.10 The first double-portrait print of Petrarch and Laura was featured in Giolito’s first edition of the Rvf and Triumphi, called Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’Alessandro Vellutello, in 1544.11 The Rvf and Triumphi with commentary of Alessandro Vellutello (b. 1473) had previously been printed with a portrait of Petrarch in a medallion by Gabriele’s father, Giovanni Giolito (fl. 1503–1539), in 1538.12 In contrast, the 1544 edition by Gabriele Giolito displayed a new element: a double portrait of Petrarch and Laura above the ‘Sonetto sopra le sacre ceneri del Petrarcha e di M. Laura’ (Fig. 7.1): Laura, ch’un Sol fu tra le Donne in terra, Hor tien del cielo il piu sublime honore: Mercé di quella penna; il cui valore, Fa, che mai non sarà spenta o sotterra Mentre facendo al tempo illustre guerra, Con dolce foco di celeste amore Accende e infiamma ogni gelato core; Le sue reliquie il piccol marmo serra: Et le ceneri elette accoglie anchora Di lui; che seco ne i stellanti seggi Fra Dante et Bice il terzo ciel congiunse. Tu, che l’un miri; e i bassi accenti leggi; A lor t’inchina; e’l sacro Vaso honora, Che le sante reliquie insieme aggiunse. 7 On Petrarchism, see Jossa 2015. 8 On Giolito, see Nuovo and Coppens 2005. On other printers named in this chapter, see Ascarelli and Menato 1989. 9 This figure is taken from Daniels 2020: 22 (table 1). 10 Daniels 2020. As shown by Daniels, these paratexts were not meant to be mutually exclusive. 11 CNCE 61912 (1544) [Gabriele Giolito]. Subsequent editions with Vellutello’s commentary by Giolito are: CNCE 26035 (1545); CNCE 47367 (1547); CNCE 27000 (1550); CNCE 27036 (1552); CNCE 26268 (1558); CNCE 26306 (1560). 12 CNCE 47365 (1538) [Alessandro Vellutello and Giovanni Giolito da Trino]. On Vellutello’s commentary of Petrarch, see Belloni 1992: 58–88.

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Fig. 7.1 Portrait of Petrarch and Laura with sonnet, woodcut from Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’Alessandro Vellutello (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1544), fol. A3r, copy C. 27.e.19, The British Library, London.

[Laura, who was a sun among earthly women, | Now is held in the highest esteem in the heavens, | Thanks to that pen, whose worth | Makes sure that she will never be extinguished or buried. || While fighting an illustrious war at the time | With the sweet fire of heavenly love, | It ignites and inflames every frozen heart. | The little (piece of) marble encloses her relics, || And also welcomes the select ashes | Of the man who joined her in the starry seats | Between Dante and Beatrice in the third sphere. || You, who look at them and read the verses below, | Bow down to them, and honour the sacred urn, | Which joined together the holy relics.]13 13 CNCE 61912: fol. A3r. Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own (I would like to thank Jill Kraye for her help with the translations). The portrait and the sonnet also featured in the edition with the commentary by Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (b. 1496): CNCE 27048 (1553a) [Gabriele Giolito]. See also

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Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

Fig. 7.2 Sonetti canzoni e triomphi di m[esser] Francesco Petrarca, con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello (Venice: Giovanni Maria Nicolini da Sabbio, Pietro Nicolini da Sabbio, Giovanni Battista Pederzano, 1549), fol. *1r, copy 638.h.4, The British Library, London.

This portrait is particularly indicative of the intertwining of Petrarch’s poems and the publishing strategy of printers, which ultimately shaped the proliferation of representations of Petrarch and Laura in print. Laura’s likeness is the vulgate image alla Laurenziana, and Petrarch is represented by his head and shoulder, in profile, wearing a clerical headdress and the laurea—these conventions remained the standard likenesses of the poet and his beloved in double-portrait prints in books. In addition, Petrarch and Laura are featured on an urn below a hovering phoenix bearing the motto ‘semper eadem’ [Always the same].

CNCE 47370 (1560) [Vincenzo Valgrisi] (the woodcut urn and the sonnet appear in separate folios). On Gesualdo’s commentary of Petrarch, see Belloni 1992: 189–225.

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It has been emphasised that the double portrait with the phoenix and motto was part of Giolito’s marketing strategy, which would have been associated with Giolito’s publishing device clearly visible at the bottom of the title page which preceded the portrait by a few folios (Fig. 7.2).14 The version of the phoenix in the 1544 edition of Petrarch’s poems was the second of twenty versions that Giolito used throughout his publishing career.15 In this variant, the phoenix is shown in front, wings open, its beak turned to the right and without the sun; underneath is an amphora with Gabriele Giolito’s initials. The presence of the marketing device on the portrait of Petrarch and Laura just mentioned was, as Rhiannon Daniels has stated, a ‘reminder of the publisher’s authority’.16 Whilst this reading is convincing, it is here proposed that the presence of the phoenix at the top of the portrait of Petrarch and Laura contributes a further layer of meaning that would have been familiar to Petrarch’s readers.17 The phoenix, a mythological creature which burns to death in a fire ignited by the sun and is reborn from its own ashes, features prominently in Petrarch’s Rvf, particularly in canzone 135 and sonnets 185 and 321.18 First, the image may be understood in close relationship with the sonnet underneath, which invites, ‘Tu, che l’un miri; e i bassi accenti leggi’ [You, who look at them and read the verses below]. In addition, words such as ‘dolce foco’ [sweet fire], ‘accende’ [ignites], ‘infiamma’ [inflames], and ‘ceneri’ [ashes], which appear in this anonymous sonnet, evoke themes of fire and love found also in the myth of the phoenix. These themes are intertwined with the portrait and the first stanza of canzone 135, where Petrarch associates the continual renewal of his love for Laura with the phoenix.19 The ‘Sonetto sopra le sacre ceneri’ also identifies Laura as a celestial figure. Petrarch further develops this theme in conjunction with the image of the phoenix in sonnets 185 and 321. To push this argument further, the first two verses of the anonymous sonnet recall that in Rvf 321, where Petrarch states, ‘sol eri in terra; or se’ nel ciel felice’ [You were unique on earth, now you are happy in Heaven].20 While Giolito might have placed his marketing device on top of the portrait of Petrarch and Laura for his own publishing gain, a closer consideration of the relationship between the anonymous sonnet, the image, and Petrarch’s poems reveals more subtly entwined references. In the wake of Giolito, other Venetian publishers quickly followed suit, producing editions of Petrarch’s Rvf and Triumphi in a spirit of emulation, if not of overt 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

For this interpretation, see Daniels 2020: 36–39. On Giolito’s market device, see Nuovo and Coppens 2005: 129–37. Daniels 2020: 38. On Petrarch and his readers, see Enenkel and Papy 2006. On Petrarch’s phoenix, see Zambon 1983 and Morelli 2018. Petrarca 1996a: 653, ll. 5–15. Petrarca 1996a: 1220, l. 8. Translation in Petrarca 1976: 500.

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Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

Fig. 7.3 Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’Alessandro Vellutello (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1544), fol. A1r, copy C. 27.e.19, The British Library, London.

competition. These editions, too, displayed double portraits of the poet and his beloved. In chronological order is the Sonetti canzoni e triomphi di m[esser] Francesco Petrarca, con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello, dated 1549 with the imprint of Nicolini da Sabbio (fl. 1549–1552) and Pederzano (fl. 1522–1555).21 In contrast 21 CNCE 32820 (1549a) [Giovanni Maria Nicolini da Sabbio, Pietro Nicolini da Sabbio, Giovanni Battista Pederzano]: fol. *1r. This title page also appeared in the editions printed by Domenico Giglio (1538–1567) and Vincenzo Valgrisi (1539–1573): CNCE 25824 (1553) [Domenico Giglio] and CNCE 47370 (1560) [Vincenzo Valgrisi], respectively. Giglio’s edition with the commentary by Gesualdo appeared the same year as that of Giolito with the same commentary (CNCE 27048, 1553a). In 1552, Giglio also edited an edition with Vellutello’s commentary as did Giolito. On the rivalry between Giolito and Giglio, see Santoro, Marino, and Pacioni 2006: 145–146. As regards the edition by Valgrisi, this seems to be an exact reprint of the 1560 Giolito’s edition. See PERI [accessed 20 September 2020]. On Daniello and Petrarch, see Belloni 1992: 226–283. 22 On the topos of the ‘vox sola deest’, see Freedman 1995 and Pich 2010. On Petrarch and portraiture, see Mann 1998. On the limits of painting and the paragone, see Cropper 1986. 23 See Petrarca 1996a: 404, ll. 1–5. ‘Quando giunse a Simon l’alto concetto | ch’a mio nome gli pose in man lo stile, | s’avesse dato a l’opera gentile | colla figura voce ed intelletto, || di sospir’ molti mi sgombrava il petto’. Translation in Petrarca 1976: 178. 24 See Petrarca 1996a: 404, ll. 9–11: ‘Ma poi ch’i’ vengo a ragionar con lei, | benignamente assai par che m’ascolte, | se risponder savesse a’ detti miei’. Translation in Petrarca 1976: 178. 25 See Petrarca 1996a: 1323, ll. 10–11. Translation in Petrarca 1976: 544. 26 CNCE 32820 (1549a): fol. EEIJv. 27 Ibid.: fol. BBIIIJv.

Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

representation was, again, Gabriele Giolito. In 1548–1549, around the same time of da Nicolini da Sabbio’s and Pederzano’s edition just discussed, Giolito published a new edition of Petrarch’s Rvf and Triumphi with no commentary. Then, sometime around 1553 and 1554, Giolito issued an edition with annotations by Giulio Camillo (1480–1544) and indexes by Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568); both of these editions featured a portrait of Petrarch on a medallion.28 However, in a subsequent edition of Il Petrarca novissimamente revisto, e corretto da messer Lodovico Dolce (1554), Giolito replaced the portrait of Petrarch with that of Petrarch and Laura in the urn, this time followed by the quatrain: Felice lui, ch’ambe le luci aperse Nel bel nero e nel bianco: E te beata, che sì chiara tromba Trovasti, e chi di te sì alto scrisse. [Happy is he who opened both eyes | To the lovely dark and the [lovely] white: | And blessed are you who | found such a clear-voiced panegyrist | Who wrote so highly of you.]29

As with the ‘Sonetto sopra le sacre ceneri’, the anonymous quatrain is indebted to Petrarch’s poems. Its verses echo canzone 29, ‘Ma l’ora, e ‘l giorno ch’io le luci apersi | nel bel nero et nel biancho’ [But the hour and the day when I opened my eyes on that lovely | black and white] and canzone 187, ‘O fortunato, che sì chiara tromba | trovasti, et chi di te sì alto scrisse!’ [Oh fortunate one, who found so clear a trumpet, | one who wrote such high things of you!].30 As previously mentioned, the variety of paratexts played an important role in Giolito’s publishing enterprise, and the portrait of Petrarch and Laura with a new quatrain might have served him well. Another portrait type proved to be successful among Venetian publishers from 1557 onwards: an image of Petrarch and Laura in a heart-shaped frame—a topos of the ‘image in the heart’ that is central to Petrarch’s poems.31 This portrait type was alternatively followed by the epitaph ‘Questi dua, che d’un cor fè amore in terra’ [These two, whom love made into one heart on earth], and the quatrain ‘Dal loro honesto, ardente, and vivo amore’ [From their virtuous, ardent, and living Love]. It was usually featured after several paratexts, just before the beginning of the Rvf. Yet this representation, as well as the epitaph and the quatrain, did 28 CNCE 26138 and CNCE 54783 (1553–1554) respectively. 29 CNCE 72600 (1554) [Gabriele Giolito and brothers], fol. A3r. See also CNCE 26293 (1558–1559) [Gabriele Giolito]. 30 Petrarca 1996a: p. 155, ll. 22–23 and p. 812, ll. 3–4. Translation in Petrarca 1976: 82 and 332. 31 On this topos, see Pich 2010.

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not have Italian origins. They were imported from Lyon, where, since the 1540s, printers such as Jean de Tournes (1505–1615) had printed editions of Petrarch’s poems, often based on Venetian models.32 Although Venetian printers borrowed from their French counterparts, some differences in the representation of Laura and Petrarch remained. The portrait of Petrarch and Laura in a heart-shaped frame had filtered into Venice by 1557, when il Petrarca novissimamente rivisto e corretto was printed by Avanzi and brothers (fl. 1556–1576; Fig. 7.4) with the epitaph: Questi dua, che d’un cor fè amore in terra, E castità di voler li disgiunse; Morte crudele insieme li congiunse: Hor d’un voler d’un cuore il ciel li serra. [These two, whom love made into one heart on earth, | And chaste longing divided them; | Cruel death joined them together: | Now the heavens enclose them in one longing, in one heart.]33

Avanzi repeated the epitaph that had been previously published in Lyon by Guillaume Rouillé (fl. 1545–1589) in Il Petrarcha con nuove e brevi dichiarationi, in 1551.34 Avanzi also modelled the woodcut portrait of Petrarch and Laura on that in Rouillé’s version, but the personifications that feature in the latter edition (Fame with a trumpet and Cupid with an arrow) were substituted with winged figures at the top and Pan on both sides at the bottom. Niccolò Bevilacqua (fl. 1554–1574) also looked at Rouillé’s version for his edition of Il Petrarca nuovamente corretto, dated 1562, as the reprints of the dedicatory letter written by Rouillé would suggest.35 However, the woodcut 32 For instance, see CNCE 59441 (1545), with a portrait of Petrarch and CNCE 52732 (1547) with a double portrait of Petrarch and Laura. On portraits of Petrarch and Laura in French editions, see Rieger 2001. On French Petrarchism and Lyonese publishers, see Duperray 1997 and Maira 2007. On the relationships between book publishing in Venice and Lyon, see Andreoli 2016. 33 CNCE 59280 (1557) [Ludovico Avanzi]: fol. A1v. See also, CNCE 74724 (1561) [Avanzi]; CNCE 35168 (1564) and CNCE 35167 (1573) [Giovanni Griffio]; CNCE 59442 (1564–1565) [Griffio]; CNCE 59443 (1564–1568) [Griffio]; CNCE 31703 (1572–1573) [Domenico Nicolini da Sabbio]; CNCE 38502 (1579) [Domenico Farri]; CNCE 47372 (1581–1582) [Alessandro Griffio] with sonnet ‘Sopra le sacre ceneri’; CNCE 50086 (1583) [Fabio and Agostino Zoppini and Francesco de’ Franceschi]. 34 Il Petrarcha (1551) [Guillaume Rouillé]. See PERI at [accessed 20 September 2020]. 35 CNCE 33480 (1562) [Niccolò Bevilacqua]. Successive editions by Bevilacqua are: CNCE 59441 (1565); CNCE 33494 (1568) CNCE 59433 (1570). For Rouillé editions, see: CNCE 30152 (1558); CNCE 71700 (1564); CNCE 30197 (1574). See also PERI for two other editions dated 1564 and 1564–1574 which are not listed in EDIT16.

Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

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Fig. 7.4 Portrait of Petrarch and Laura with quatrain, woodcut from Il Petrarca novissimamente rivisto e corretto (Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1559), fol. A3v, copy SC8160A, The John Rylands Library, Manchester.

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featured in Bevilacqua’s edition was not modelled after the representation of Petrarch all’antica and Laura in an oval, as featured in Rouillé’s. Instead, it repeated that published in Avanzi’s and brothers and it was followed by the quatrain: Da loro honesto, ardente, et vivo Amore Nacque uno stil, che mai non hebbe eguale: Onde vita n’hà l’un chiara, immortale, Dell’altra il bel fia sempre in sommo honore. [From their virtuous, ardent, and living Love | A style was born, which has never been equalled: | For one has a famous and immortal life, | And the other’s beauty will always be held in the highest esteem.]36

A further variant on this type was the edition of Il Petrarca di nuovo ristampato by Pietro Deuchino (fl. 1570–1581).37 In this edition, Petrarch and Laura were represented by an urn with a heart shape (similar to that of Giolito, but without the phoenix) above an epitaph in French purportedly written by King Frances I (1494–1547), again borrowing from Lyonnaise editions, and the usual quatrain ‘From their virtuous, ardent, and living Love’.38 In the last decade of the century, editions of Petrarch, which in their titles claimed the quality of Petrarch and Laura’s love, simply showed the portrait of the poet and his beloved in a heart shape without any accompanying verses.39

Independent prints As with the woodcuts previously discussed, a close relationship between portraits of Petrarch and Laura, the printers’ agendas, and the poet’s poems also permeated among independent engraved portraits, of which two examples can be found. The first was 36 CNCE 33480 (1562): fol. A7v. 37 CNCE 59438 (1580) [Pietro Deuchino]: fol. A9v. On the epitaph written by King Frances I, which was already circulating in previous editions, both French and Venetians, see Duperray 1997 and Maira 2003. Deuchino was of French origins and settled in Venice. On Deuchino and his connections with France, see Andreoli 2017. 38 See also CNCE 59462 (1592) [Marc’Antonio Zaltieri]; CNCE 31094 (1596) [Nicolò Misserino]. 39 CNCE 47364 (1588) [heirs of Alessandro Griffio]; CNCE 30749 (1592) [Barezzo Barezzi]; CNCE 39079 (1595) [Matteo Zanetti and Comino Presegni]; Il Petrarca nuovamente ridotto alla vera lettione (1595) [Bartolommeo Carampello]. See PERI: [accessed 18 September 2020]; CNCE 59281 (1600) [Domenico Imberti]. Portrait of Petrarch and Laura alone also featured in Annotationi breuissime, soura le rime di m. F. P. published in Padua by Lorenzo Pasquato (1561–1623), CNCE 32984 (1566) [Lorenzo Pasquato].

Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

Fig. 7.5 Anonymous, Portrait of Petrarch and Laura, 1510–1562, engraving, 23 × 32.7 cm, inv. RRP-P-H-H-263, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Image in the public domain.

made c. 1560 or earlier by an anonymous engraver and published by Antonio Salamanca, as indicated in the lettering beneath the bust of Petrarch on the print (Fig. 7.5).40 Petrarch is here represented in profile and all’antica with the laurel crown. Unlike the type that was already circulating in early sixteenth-century editions of Petrarch’s poems, he is not represented with the lorica. 41 That Petrarch is all’antica could be explained by considering Salamanca’s specialisation in antiquarian subjects; surviving records claim that learned conversations on the antiquities of Rome took place in his shop. 42 A portrait of the poet all’antica would have thus fit well in the

40 Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), inv. RP-P-H-H-263. This engraving was probably part of a series of prints, for Salamanca also published those of the poets Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) and Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530). See British Museum (London), inv. 1927,1008.153. See also McDonald 2017: II, 879–880. 41 On Petrarch’s portraits in Venetian editions, see note 5 above. 42 David Landau and Peter Parshall have argued that the contracted ‘Ant.Sal.exc’ probably refers to a relative of Antonio Salamanca, who was active in Rome around 1567 (Landau and Parshall 1994: 298 onward). Whether this was the case, it appears that the lesser-known Salamanca shared his uncle’s taste for antiquarian subjects. On Salamanca’s activity, see Pagani 2000.

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general repertoire of prints representing Roman antiquities, sculptures, and busts that Salamanca sold at his shop. Laura, too, is here portrayed differently than in the vulgate type disseminated by Venetian woodcuts mentioned earlier. Joseph Trapp noted the iconographic problem that this representation of Laura poses, for the radiant crown that she wears was an ornament of Roman emperors rather than empresses.43 The lettering underneath Laura and Petrarch contains quotations from Rvf canzone 359 (ll. 60–61 and 56–58 respectively): Spirito ignudo sono, e’n ciel mi godo: Quel che tu cerchi è terra gia molt’anni; [I am a naked spirit, and delight myself in heaven: | what you look for is dust, and for many years.] Son questi i capei biondi, e L’aureo nodo Che mi strinse? e i begli occhi che fur mio Sol? [Is this the blonde hair, and the golden knot that tied me? and those lovely eyes that were my sun?]44

As in the canzone Petrarch is addressing the ‘felice alma’ [happy soul]—Laura, who has appeared in his dreams. The print retains the dialogue by matching verses from the Rvf with the person who utters them. As with the edition by Nicolini da Sabbio and Pederzano previously discussed, voices have been given to the portraits in this print, thus overcoming the impasse lamented by Petrarch himself that although Laura appears to listen kindly, she will never come alive to reply. 45 The last portrait for consideration brings the discussion full circle, back to Venice (Fig. 7.6). 43 Trapp 2001: 124. Trapp based the analysis of this iconography of Laura not on the print published by Salamanca, of whose existence he was probably not aware, but on a red chalk drawing which features in the so-called Recueil of Arras, fols 271v and 272r. He nevertheless hypothesised that the image had been based on a printed book such as Guillaume Rouillé’s Promptuaire des medailles 1553. See Trapp 2001: 124. To support the case that the compiler(s) of the Recueil of Arras looked at Salamanca’s print is the fact that the portraits of Ariosto and Sannazaro, equally published by Salamanca, feature too in the Recueil. On the Recueil of Arras, see Châtelet 2007. 44 Cf. Petrarca 1996a: 1354: ‘Son questi i capei biondi, et l’aureo nodo |—dich’io—ch’ancor mi stringe, et quei belli occhi | che fur mio sol?’ (Rvf 359.56–58). And ibid.: ‘Spirito ignudo sono, e n’ciel mi godo: | quel che tu cerchi è terra, già molt’anni’ (Rvf 359.60–61). The English translation is from Petrarca 1976: 558, which has been adapted to render the variant readings in the portrait. 45 Petrarca 1996a: 404, ll. 10–11.

Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

Fig. 7.6 Giacomo Franco, Portrait of Petrarch and Laura, 1575–1590, engraving and etching, 21.4 × 32.7 cm, inv. 1877.0210.117, The British Museum, London.

The print carries the name of the publisher Luca Bertelli on the bottom right of the sheet and the monogram of the engraver Giacomo Franco, on the bottom right of Laura’s portrait. 46 The likeness of Laura follows the vulgate image that had circulated in editions of Petrarch’s poems. That of Petrarch closely resembles the image of the poet engraved by Enea Vico (1523–1567), who also engraved a portrait of Laura as alla Laurenziana.47 Yet neither Vico’s prints nor the woodcuts in Venetian books display such rich allegorical frames as in Franco’s interpretation. 48 46 British Museum (London), inv. 1877,0210.117. Franco’s monogram appears at the bottom right of Laura’s portrait. The engraving has been dated around 1575–1590. In the literature, Franco’s monogram is recorded as appearing first in 1581 and finally in 1596 (Stefani 1993: 270). Bertelli’s activity seemingly stopped around 1589, and it can be concluded that the print was not made after that date (Ascarelli and Menato 1989: 409). Furthermore, after 1596, Franco mainly worked as a publisher (Pasero 1935: 334). The print is not listed in the engraver’s output compiled by Carlo Pasero, which summarises previous literature, and it might have gone unnoticed when the claim was made that Franco’s monogram was first used in 1581; current dating may also be incorrect. 47 British Museum (London), inv. 1873,0809.941 and inv. 1873,0809.937. On these prints, see Thompson 2007. 48 The practice of surrounding a portrait with allegorical figures was not new to Franco, as his portrait of King Henry IV (1553–1610) shows. See British Museum (London), inv. 1848,0911.586. This portrait was allegedly made in 1584, and perhaps we could speculate that Franco made the portrait of Petrarch and

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The engraving surrounds Laura’s likeness with five female personifications. At the top is the representation of the cardinal virtue Justice; below, from left to right, are Fame, with a trumpet, and Poetry, with a branch of laurel and a book. At the bottom, from left to right, are a female figure holding a sphere and resting her hand, which holds a pen, on a book, and the personification of Urania, the muse of astronomy, astrology and the liberal arts, holding an armillary sphere and compass.49 It is likely that Franco took inspiration from the work of other engravers for this allegorical frame. For instance, the frame of Petrarch’s portrait is an almost exact copy of that in a woodcut portrait of Dante published in 1564 in Venice.50 The fact that Franco’s frame appears in reverse suggests an act of copying; that is, the composition was reversed in the process of printing. In the frame of Laura’s likeness, the fact that Justice is represented with her attributes in reverse would suggest again that Franco was working from a model which was then reversed once the printing had taken place. In Le imprese illustri of Girolamo Ruscelli (1518–1566), printed by Comin da Trino (1539–1574), we find a pair of personifications similar to those that feature at the bottom of Laura’s portrait.51 Although the frame surrounding Petrarch had been previously used for another poet and the personif ications surrounding Laura’s likeness featured in other contexts, they could have nevertheless acquired a specific set of meanings when associated with Petrarch and Laura.52 Readers of Petrarch would have been well acquainted with the signif icance of the laurel crown given to the poet in Rome on 8 April 1341, as well as with the branches of laurel and palm that feature in Petrarch’s portrait.53 For these latter two references, a reading of canzone 359 from the Rvf would have swept away any remaining doubt as to their meaning: ‘I’ volea demandar—respond’io allora: Che vogliono importar quelle due frondi?’ Et ella: ‘Tu medesmo ti rispondi, Laura around that time too. As regards the relationships between Franco and Luca Bertelli, Franco engraved at least two more prints for the publisher: a Fama and a Vero Retratto di S. M. Di Loreto (‘Luca Bertelli exc.’), which Georg Kaspar Nagler dated around 1580 (Nagler 1877–1920, I: 268–269; Pasero 1935: 334 and 355). 49 On Urania as celestial Muse and patron of Astronomy, see Giraldi 1539. This reference is in Wilson 2006: 163. 50 CNCE 1171 (1564) [Domenico Nicolini da Sabbio and Melchior Sessa]. See Zappella 1988, n. 27. 51 CNCE 24805 (1572). 52 It is also to be noted that Franco’s frames display some variations, i.e. the sphere for the personification on the left and the compass for the personif ication on the right in Laura’s portrait, and a laurel twig underneath the portrait of Petrarch. 53 Certificate of the coronation of Petrarch also featured among the paratexts of Venetian editions. For instance, see CNCE 47364 (1588) [Heirs of Alessandro Griffio].

Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

tu la cui penna tanto l’una honora: palma è victoria, et io, giovene anchora vinsi il mondo et me stessa; il lauro segna triumpho, ond’io son degna, mercé di quel Signor che mi die’ forza’. (Rvf 359.45–52) [‘I wanted to ask’, I reply then: ‘what do those two leaves | mean?’ And she: ‘Answer yourself, you whose pen so honors | one of them; the palm is victory, and I when still young conquered the | World and myself; the laurel means triumph, of which I am | worthy, thanks to that Lord who gave me strength’.]54

Moreover, the anonymous verses beneath Petrarch’s portrait reinforce the link between the image of the laurel and its meaning by referencing sonnet 269 of the Rvf—not to mention that the ‘bel lauro’ was also a pun on the name of Laura, which Petrarch employed throughout the Rvf: Questi è colui, ch’à l’ombra d’un bel lauro Visse cantando le sue amate fronde: Et, se, ben poca terra hoggi l’asconde, Chiaro intorno sen va da l’indo al Mauro. [This is the one who, in the shade of a beautiful laurel, | Lived by singing its beloved branches: | And if a very small amount of earth hides him today, | He goes, in all his fame, from the Indus to the Mauritanian Sea.]55 Rotta è l’alta colonna e ’l verde lauro Che facean ombra al mio stanco pensero; Perduto ò quel che ritrovar non spero Dal borrea a l’austro, o dal mar indo al mauro. (Rvf 269.1–4) [Broken are the high Column and the green Laurel that gave | shade to my weary cares; I have lost what I do not hope to find | Again from Boreas to Auster or from the Indian to the Moorish | Sea.]56

54 Petrarca 1996a: 1354. On their meaning, see also Valeriano 1556, fols 369v–373v. Translation in Petrarca 1976: 558. 55 Sonnet underneath Petrarch’s portrait. 56 Petrarca 1996a: 1078. My italics. Translation in Petrarca 1976: 442.

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Four lines of text also appear beneath the portrait of Laura. The verses are taken from the ‘Sonetto sopra le sacre ceneri del Petrarca e di m. Madonna Laura’, which was first featured in Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’Alessandro Vellutello (Giolito, 1544), discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In this instance as well, the interpretation of the personif ications surrounding the portrait is intertwined with the verses from the ‘Sonetto sopra le sacre ceneri’, as well as with Petrarch’s poems. Although it is also possible that the engraver’s choices had been informed by other sources, the association between Justice and Laura could be explained by referring to the commentary by Vellutello on Petrarch’s Triumphi. In the second of these Triumphi, that of Chastity, Laura is joined by a number of virtues in her battle against Love: ‘Armate eran con lei tutte le sue | Chiare virtuti; o gloriosa schiera; | Et teneansi per mano a due a due’ [All her renowned virtues, armed, were with her; o glorious host! And they were holding each other’s hands in pairs] (Triumphus Pudicitie, 76–78).57 In his commentary on this passage, Vellutello explains what these virtues were and the order in which they appeared. Among them is Justice: ‘Seguivano poi le quattro virtù morali, e prima senno e modestia, cioe prudentia e temperantia. Confine a l’altre due che sono giustizia e fortezza con tutte quelle eccellenti parti, ch’hanno da queste tali virtu dependentia’ [There followed the four moral virtues, and, first, judgment and modesty, that is, prudence and temperance. Next to them, the other two, which are justice and courage, with all those excellent parts that are dependent on these virtues].58 In addition, the personif ications of Fame and Poetry were visual expressions of the fame that Laura reached through the poetry of Petrarch, who ‘visse cantando le sue amate fronde’ [lived by singing its beloved branches (i.e. the branches of the ‘lauro’, that is, Laura)], as the verses underneath Petrarch’s portrait read. Regarding the personif ications at the bottom, it is here suggested that the f igure on the left stands for Memory and that along with Urania on the right, these figures can be understood in tandem with the verses below Laura’s portrait.59 Urania was one of the Muses ‘who were said to be the daughters of Jupiter and Memory; and the proper goddesses of poets and of music […] The eighth is Urania which is such a celestial thing, because with the selection of the best part (as was said previously) 57 CNCE 61912 (1544) [Giolito], fol. 170v. 58 CNCE 61912 (1544) [Giolito], fol. 170v. In Venice, Justice came also to signify the City itself. See Tagliaferro 2005. 59 Valeriano associates the book with antiquity, but this does not explain the rest of the iconography here discussed. See Valeriano 1556, fol. 352v. Cesare Ripa singles out the pen and the book as attributes of Memory, but there is no mention of the sphere, which featured in Franco’s engraving. Perhaps the sphere is an ink pot. See Ripa 1593: 166. Cf. the personification of Memory engraved by Cornelis Cort (1533–1578) where next to her is an ink pot: British Museum (London), inv. 1950,0520.449. I would like to thank Paul Taylor for pointing out this print to me.

Double Portr aits of Pe tr arch and L aur a in Print (c. 1544–1600) 

one acquires the name of celestial and of divine’.60 At the same time, the verses below Laura’s portrait indicate her celestial nature and immortality acquired thanks to Petrarch’s poetry, for ‘Hor tien del cielo il piu sublime honore’ [she now holds the most sublime honour in the sky] and non sarà spenta o sotterra’ [she will never be forgotten].

Conclusion By shedding light on the extent to which double-portrait prints could be related to Petrarch’s ideas on portraiture and his poetry, this chapter aimed to contribute to the ongoing scholarship on the reception of Petrarch’s works and ideas in the visual arts in sixteenth-century Italy. It has considered both woodcuts and engraved portraits destined either for the book or print market, and it has brought into the discussion the constraints that impacted upon the packaging of these prints, such as Giolito’s publishing agenda, competitiveness among publishers, ideas borrowed from France and within the city of Venice itself, publishers’ tastes, and the reuse of pre-existing iconographies. The value of the approach here adopted demonstrated that these prints maintained a constant dialogue between image and word, which was key to Petrarch; furthermore, it has unpacked the multiplicity of references to Petrarch’s ideas embedded in these prints, thus showing their enduring relevance.

Bibliography Alighieri, Dante. 1564. Dante con l’espositione di Christoforo Landino, et di Alessandro Vellutello, sopra la sua comedia dell’Inferno, del Purgatorio, et del Paradiso. Con tavole, argomenti, et allegorie, et riformato, riveduto, et ridotto alla sua vera lettura, per Francesco Sansovino fiorentino (Venice: Nicolini da Sabbio and Sessa e fratelli). Andreoli, Ilaria. 2016. ‘Livres italiens à figures et “illustration” des femmes à Lyon au XVIe siècle’, in Les femmes, la culture et les arts en Europe entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance / Women, Art and Culture in Medieval and Early Renaissance Europe, ed. by Cynthia J. Brown and Anne-Marie Lagaré (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 259–74. Andreoli, Ilaria. 2017. ‘“A Parisian in Venice”: Per Pietro Deuchino “parisiensis, impressor librorum et fusor characterum”’, Kunstexte.de, 2: 1–27. 60 Cartari 1567: 42–44: ‘dette figliuole di Gioue, & della Memoria; & propri Numi de Poeti, & della Musica […] Vrania, tanto è cosa celeste, perche con l’elegger la miglior parte (come s’ è detto) si vien acquistare il nome di celeste, & di diuino.’

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Armstrong, Guyda. 2020. ‘Re-Materialising the Incunable Petrarch: Ernest Hatch Wilkins and the Politics of Bibliographical Description’, Italian Studies, 75: 55–70. Ascarelli, Fernanda, and Marco Menato. 1989. La tipografia del ’500 in Italia (Florence: Olschki). Belloni, Gino. 1992. Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo: studi sul commento umanistico-rinascimentale al ‘Canzoniere’ (Padua: Antenore). Bettini, Maurizio. 2002. Francesco Petrarca sulle arti figurative: tra Plinio e Sant’Agostino (Livorno: Sillabe). Cartari, Vincenzo. 1567. Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi (Venice: Ziletti). Censimento nazionale delle edizioni italiane del XVI secolo, EDIT16. [accessed 20 September 2022]. Châtelet, Albert. 2007. Visages d’antan: le Recueil d’Arras (La Thuile: Éditions de Guy). Cropper, Elizabeth. 1986. ‘The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Margareth W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 175–90. Daniels, Rhiannon. 2020. ‘Printing Petrarch in the Mid-Cinquecento: Giolito, Vellutello, and Collaborative Authorship’, Italian Studies, 75: 20–40. Duperray, Eve. 1997. L’or des mots. Une lecture de Pétrarque et du mythe littéraire de Vaucluse des origines à l’orée du XXe siècle: Histoire du Pétrarquisme en France (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne). Enenkel, Karl A., and Jan Papy (eds). 2006. Petrarch and His Readers in the Renaissance (Leiden and Boston: Brill). Freedman, Luba. 1995. Titian’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Genette, Gérard, and Marie Maclean. 1991. ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, New Literary History, 22: 262–72. Giraldi, Lilius Gregorius. 1539. De Musis syntagma (Basel: [n. p.]). Huss, Bernhard. 2018. ‘Laura nei testi illustrati dei Trionfi’, in Interdisciplinarità del Petrarchismo: prospettive di ricerca fra Italia e Germania, ed. by Maiko Favaro and Bernhard Huss (Florence: Olschki), pp. 107–36. Javitch, Daniel. 1998. ‘Gabriel Giolito’s “Packaging” of Ariosto, Boccaccio and Petrarch in the Mid-Cinquecento’, in Studies for Dante: Essays in Honor of Dante Della Terza, ed. by Franco Fido (Florence: Cadmo), pp. 123–33. Jossa, Stefano. 2015. ‘Bembo and Italian Petrarchism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, ed. by Albert Russell Ascoli and Unn Falkeid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 191–200. Landau, David, and Peter Parshall. 1994. The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).

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Ley, Klaus, Christine Mundt-Espín, and Charlotte Krauss (eds). 2002. Die Drucke von Petrarcas Rime 1470–2000: synoptische Bibliographie der Editionen und Kommentare, Bibliotheksnachweise (Hildesheim: Olms). Maira, Daniel. 2003. ‘La découverte du tombeau de Laure entre mythe littéraire et diplomatie’, Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 1: 3–15. Maira, Daniel. 2007. Typosine, la dixième muse (Geneva: Droz). Mann, Nicholas. 1998. ‘Petrarch and Portraits’, in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. by Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: British Museum Press), pp. 15–21. McDonald, Mark. 2017. Ceremonies, Costumes, Portraits and Genre, 3 vols (London: Royal Collection Trust and British Library in association with Harvey Miller Publishers). Morelli, Nicolò. 2018. Aspects of Animal Imagery in Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge). Mortimer, Ruth. 1974. Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts: Part 2, Italian 16th Century Books (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Mortimer, Ruth. 1996. ‘The Author’s Image: Italian Sixteenth-Century Printed Portraits’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 7: 7−87. Nagler, G. Kaspar. 1877–1920. Die Monogrammisten, 6 vols (Munich: Hirth). Nuovo, Angela, and Christian Coppens. 2005. I Giolito e la stampa nell’Italia del XVI secolo (Geneva: Droz). Pagani, Valeria. 2000. ‘Documents on Antonio Salamanca’, Print Quarterly, 17: 148–55. Pasero, Carlo. 1935. ‘Giacomo Franco, editore, incisore, calcografo nei secoli XVI e XVII’, La Bibliofilía, 37: 332–56. Petrarch Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, PERI. [accessed 20 September 2022]. Petrarca, Francesco. 1538. Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’Alessandro Vellutello e con piu utili cose in diversi luoghi di quella novissimamente da lui aggiunte (Venice: Alessandro Vellutello e Giovanni Giolito da Trino). Petrarca, Francesco. 1544. Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’Alessandro Vellutello di novo ristampato con le figure a i Triomphi, et con piu cose utili in varii luoghi aggiunte (Venice: Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari). Petrarca, Francesco. 1549a. Sonetti canzoni e triomphi di m. Francesco Petrarca, con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello da Lucca (Venice: Pietro e Giovanni Maria Nicolini da Sabio e Giovanbattista Pederzano). Petrarca, Francesco. 1553a. Il Petrarcha con l’espositione di m. Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo, novamente ristampato, e con somma diligenza corretto, con nuova tavola di tutte le cose degne di memoria, che in essa espositione si contengono, & ornato di figure (Venice: Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari e fratelli). Petrarca, Francesco. 1554. Il Petrarca novissimamente revisto, e corretto da messer Lodovico Dolce. Con alcuni dottiss. avertimenti di m. Giulio Camillo et indici del Dolce utiliss. di tutti i concetti, e delle parole, che nel poeta si trovano, et in ultimo de gli ephiteti; et un’

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utile raccoglimento delle desinenze delle Rime di tutto il Canzoniere di esso Poeta (Venice: Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari e fratelli). Petrarca, Francesco. 1557. Il Petrarca novissimamente revisto, e corretto et alla sua integrità ridotto (Venice: Lodovico Avanzi). Petrarca, Francesco. 1562. Il Petrarca con dichiarationi non piu stampate. Insieme con alcune belle annotationi, tratte dalle dottissime prose di monsignor Bembo, cose sommamente utili, à chi di rimare leggiadramente, & senza volere i segni del Petrarca passare, si prende cura. E più una conserva di tutte le sue rime ridotte sotto le cinque lettere vocali (Venice: Niccolò Bevilacqua). Petrarca, Francesco. 1580. Il Petrarca di nuovo ristampato, et diligentemente corretto (Venice: Pietro Deuchino). Petrarca, Francesco. 1976. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Petrarca, Francesco. 1996a. Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori). Pich, Federica. 2010. I poeti davanti al ritratto: da Petrarca a Marino (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Rieger, Angelica. 2001. ‘De l’humaniste savant à l’amoureux de Laura: l’image de Pétrarque dans l’iconographie française (XVe et XVIe siècles)’, in Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle: Petrarque en Europe, XIVe au XXe siècle, ed. by Pierre Blanc (Paris: Champion), pp. 99–126. Ripa, Cesare. 1593. Iconologia overo descrittione dell’imagini universali cavate dall’antichita et da altri luoghi (Venice: Per gli Heredi di Gio. Gigliotti). Ruscelli, Girolamo. 1572. Le imprese illustri (Venice: Comin da Trino). Santoro, Marco. 2005. ‘Caratteristiche e funzioni delle componenti paratestuali nelle edizioni rinascimentali italiane petrarchesche’, Cuadernos de Filología Italiana, 4: 55–70. Santoro, Marco, Michele C. Marino, and Marco Pacioni. 2006. Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio e il paratesto: le edizioni rinascimentali delle tre corone (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo). Speck, Reiner, and Florian Neumann (eds). 2018. Klug und von hehrer Gestalt. PetrarcaBildnisse aus sieben Jahrhunderten (Cologne: Snoeck). Stefani, Chiara. 1993. ‘Giacomo Franco’, Print Quarterly, 10: 269–73. Tagliaferro, Giorgio. 2005. ‘Le forme della Vergine: la personif icazione di Venezia nel processo creativo di Paolo Veronese’, Venezia Cinquecento, 30: 5–158. Thompson, Wendy. 2007. ‘Antonfrancesco Doni’s “Medaglie”’, Print Quarterly, 24: 223–38. Trapp, J. B. 2001. ‘Petrarch’s Laura: the Portraiture of an Imaginary Beloved’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 64: 55–192. Trapp, J. B. 2003. Studies of Petrarch and His Influence (London: Pindar Press). Valeriano, Pierio. 1556. Hieroglyphica siue de sacris Aegyptiorum Literis commentarii (Basel: [n. p.]). Wilson, Jean. 2006. ‘Queen Elizabeth I as Urania’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 69: 151–73.

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Zambon, Francesco. 1983. ‘Sulla fenice del Petrarca’, in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittore Branca per il suo settantesimo compleanno, ed. by Armando Balduino and others, 5 vols (Florence: Olschki), I: Dal Medioevo al Petrarca, pp. 411–25. Zappella, Giuseppina. 1988. Il ritratto nel libro italiano del Cinquecento (Milan: Bibliografica).

About the Author Gemma Cornetti is an Integrated Researcher (PhD) at CHAM, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. She earned her PhD at the Warburg Institute. Her PhD research concerned portrait prints of rulers and military commanders and power relations in sixteenth-century Italy.

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Sonnet ‘Diptychs’ and Double Portraits: Figurative Allusions in Sixteenth-Century Encomiastic Poetry Muriel M. S. Barbero

Abstract In keeping with the Petrarchan precedent (Rvf 77–78), poems composed on the theme of the portrait of the beloved in the sixteenth century are often articulated in two interconnected parts. This bipartite structure, connected with the artistic subject, soon inspired a comparison with double portraits of spouses in the visual arts. By investigating the strategies and implications of this sophisticated process of ‘symbiosis’, this chapter attempts to demonstrate the existence of a vein of encomiastic and, in particular, dedicatory poetry that, without making explicit reference to visual counterparts, nevertheless uses the pairing of sonnets to create moral and celebratory ‘double portraits’ of sovereign couples. Keywords: double portraits, Petrarchism, dedication, diptych

Among the many forms of sixteenth-century dedicatory text, there is one in particular that shows interesting analogies with portraits in the visual arts: paired dedicatory poems to rulers and their spouses. This type of text was first brought to scholarly attention by Maria Antonietta Terzoli, who, in her study of dedications in sixteenth-century poetry books, established a preliminary corpus: 1 the pair of sonnets addressed to Henry II of France and Catherine de’ Medici, which opens the encomiastic and occasional section of Gaspara Stampa’s Rime (1554);2 the two sonnets dedicated to Duchess Eleonora de Toledo and Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici at

1 2

Terzoli 2010: 173–76. Stampa 1554: 117–18; now in Stampa 2010: 254–57, from which all citations are taken.

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch08

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the beginning of Laura Battiferri’s Primo Libro delle Opere Toscane (1560);3 the pair of sonnets dedicated by Modesta dal Pozzo de’ Zorzi (also known as Moderata Fonte) to the Grand Duke of Tuscany Francesco I de’ Medici and his wife Bianca Cappello at the opening of the Tredici canti del Floridoro (1581);4 and, finally, the dedicatory titles of the two sections of Maddalena Acciaiuoli Salvetti’s Rime toscane (1590), which are dedicated to the Grand Duchess and Grand Duke of Tuscany, Christina of Lorraine and Ferdinando I de’ Medici. This paper will be concerned exclusively with those dedicatory sonnets in Terzoli’s corpus that are conceived as pairs and which are indicated here as ‘diptychs’. Although these diptychs appear in texts belonging to different literary genres, this does not seem to influence the form of the sonnets themselves, which conform instead to the strictly rhetorical norms and conventions of dedication, so the wider issue of genre will not be addressed in the present analysis.5 The diptychs included in Terzoli’s corpus should rather be distinguished on the basis of their position within the works to which they belong: while in Laura Battiferri’s Primo libro delle opere toscane the diptych builds on the dedicatory epistle addressed to the Duchess of Florence at the beginning of the book, in the Tredici Canti del Floridoro the diptych is placed immediately after the title page and replaces the epistle itself. Gaspara Stampa’s diptych dedicated to the French royal couple offers yet another solution, introducing a section devoted to encomiastic and occasional poetry.6 In addition to those identified by Terzoli, this essay presents some further diptychs dedicated to ruling couples, which do not, however, have a strictly dedicatory function in relation to the works they introduce, nor to any of their subsections. In formal terms, these texts are very similar to dedicatory sonnets, but their position is less prominent. In the first part of Laura Battiferri’s Primo libro, for example, there are two diptychs addressed to the Spanish sovereigns, Philip II and Mary Tudor, and to the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Guidobaldo II Della Rovere and Vittoria Farnese, whose captions are identical to those used for the two dedicatory sonnets at the beginning of the book.7 Similar examples appear in other sixteenth-century 3 Battiferra degli Ammannati 1560: 9; now in Battiferra degli Ammannati 2006: 84–87, from which all citations are taken. 4 Fonte 1581: *2r–v; now in Fonte 2006: 84–87, from which all citations are drawn. 5 See Genette 1987: 110–33; Paoli 2009. 6 There are in fact two dedicatory epistles at the opening of Gaspara Stampa’s Rime: one by the poet’s sister Cassandra to Giovanni Della Casa, the other by the poet herself to Count Collaltino di Collalto (cf. Andreani 2017; Tarsi 2013; Tarsi 2018: 67–73). As Cox (2008: 109–10) has proposed, Stampa’s dedicatory sonnets may well have been composed by the poet as the dedication of an alleged ‘choral’ collection of poems (planned but never realised) on the model of other poetry collections composed by female poets, such as those of Tullia d’Aragona and Laura Terracina. The same suggestion is made by Andreani (2017: 198). 7 Battiferra degli Ammannati 1560: 11–13; now in Battiferra degli Ammannati 2006: 88–92.

Sonne t ‘Dipt ychs’ and Double Portr aits 

collections of encomiastic poetry, such as the fifth book of Bernardo Tasso’s Rime (1560), where two diptychs dedicated to the Duke and Duchess of Urbino and the king and queen of France, Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici, appear alongside other encomiastic texts,8 or in the small collection of Rime published by Angelo Grillo (1590) for the marriage of Ferdinand I de’ Medici to Christina of Lorraine, where the diptych is part of a series of occasional texts celebrating the marriage.9 What all these diptychs have in common is the visual, stylistic, and conceptual unification of the two textual units that compose them, elaborated in such a way as to form a ‘pendant’, the quintessential image of marital, amorous, and dynastic union between the dedicatees. This distinctive feature, which is the subject of the present analysis, can be traced back to the influence of the visual tradition of double portraits of husband and wife.

The Diptych in the Interplay of Art and Literature As many studies have demonstrated, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries literature and the visual arts were engaged in a rich dialogue built on exchange, negotiation, reciprocal influence, and interaction.10 The form of the diptych played an important part in this dialogue between word and image. In art, the diptych joins together two thematically related panels and is generally painted on both the front and the back, functioning almost like a book that can be opened and closed, offering alternative narrative solutions. The visual engagement with a diptych, as Bolzoni has noted, has much in common with the sequential experience of reading a book.11 Significantly, the northern tradition of devotional diptychs, which shares some of the structural features of the portrait pair, derives specifically from the illustrations of fourteenth-century breviaries and books of hours, in which the portrait of the patron and the image of the saint appear on opposite pages.12 Evidence of the association between the two formats can be gleaned from the contemporaneous descriptions of these objects as ‘book-like’ altars.13 In some 8 Tasso 1560: 11–12 and 20–21; now in Tasso 1995b: 77 and 86. 9 Grillo 1590: 2–3. 10 On the influence of literary topoi on artistic representations, see Cropper 1976; Pozzi 1979; and Shearman 1992. For the ways in which the visual arts borrow from literary forms, see Bolzoni 2010: 232–307. On the various modes of literary engagement with artistic themes, see Albrecht-Bott 1976; Lecercle 1987; Land 1994; Bolzoni 2008; Bolzoni 2010; Pich 2010; and Zemanek 2010. 11 Bolzoni 2010: XXII. 12 Gelfand 2006. See, for example, the two opening pages of the Très belles heures de Notre-Dame (1402–1409) of Duke Jean de Berry, held in the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique in Bruxelles. 13 Gelfand 2006: 49.

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instances, moreover, the outer part of the diptych was actually designed to resemble a book when closed.14 In the fifteenth century, the diptych form began to be employed more broadly in secular art, especially in portraiture. Usually, the two panels depict two spouses or, less often, two friends or close relatives.15 The genre of paired portraits, although more widespread in northern Europe, was also employed in a number of Italian fifteenth-century courts. It will suffice here to mention a few well known examples, such as Bonifazio Bembo’s portraits of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera), Ercole de’ Roberti’s portraits of Giovanni II Bentivoglio and Ginevra Sforza (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), or Piero della Francesca’s portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi; Fig. 8.1).16 Of these, however, only the last pair was conceived ‘like a book’: the two panels, painted on both sides, were originally joined by a hinge so that they could be closed.17 The outer part of this diptych features also an allegorical representation of the virtues of the couple and a Latin encomiastic inscription which provides a sort of ‘inner’ portrait complementing their likenesses (Fig. 8.2).18 We will return to this diptych in due course. For now, it will suffice to note the close interconnections between the literary encomium, the ‘book-like’ design, and the portraits of the ducal couple. In light of the connection that the diptych form appears to have had with the layout of the book since its origins, it should come as no surprise that the bipartite structure of paired portraits of spouses should in turn have been imitated in poetry. In the sixteenth century, poets began to use pairs of sonnets to ‘transpose’ these portraits in textual form. Paired sonnets were perfectly suited to this purpose, having been associated with painted portraiture since Petrarch’s Rvf 77 and 78, which are often considered the main model for poetry composed on the theme of portrait in the Renaissance. The idea of using the sonnet diptych to describe the portraits of a couple could therefore have originated in the combination of the Petrarchan format with impressions derived from 14 Ibid.; Hand, Metzger, and Spronk 2006: 78–81. 15 For an example of a diptych portraying two friends, see the portraits of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Pieter Gillis realised in 1517 by Quentin Matsys. For diptychs of family members, see the portraits (now lost) of Matteo and Michele Olivieri (1400–1410), attributed to Domenico Veneziano (Dülberg 1990: 73–74). 16 See Woods-Marsden 2000: 51; it may be no accident that all these paired portraits include members of the Sforza family. 17 Dülberg 1990: 76; Calvesi 2001: 220. 18 On the relationship between the portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino and the images and texts on their reverse side, see Dülberg 1990: 76–77; Warnke 1998; Beyer 2002: 78–82; and the recent discussion by Angelini 2011.

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Fig. 8.1 Piero della Francesca, The Duke and Duchess of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, c. 1465–1474, oil on wood, 47 × 33 cm each, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Courtesy of Scala Archive.

Fig. 8.2 Piero della Francesca, The Triumphs of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (reverse of the portraits), c. 1465–1474, oil on wood, 47 × 33 cm each, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Courtesy of Scala Archive.

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the specular and book-like format of portraits of husband and wife. Just as in painted diptychs, each of the lovers occupies a separate panel, which is joined either physically (with hinges) or ideally (for example, by means of a common background) to its other half; so, too, in literary diptychs a poem is assigned to either member of the couple, the two texts being connected to one another by rhetorical, metrical, or thematic devices.

Aretino’s Diptych of Sonnets on Titian’s Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino A notable example of the literary translation of the portrait pair is the diptych of sonnets composed by Pietro Aretino to celebrate Titian’s portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Francesco Maria Della Rovere and Eleonora Gonzaga, completed between 1537 and 1538. The two sonnets were part of a missive dispatched to the poet and aristocrat Veronica Gambara on 7 November 1537 and published in Aretino’s collection of Lettere the following year.19 At the end of the accompanying letter, which consists entirely of description and praise of the portrait of the duke, the author invites Gambara to read the two poems together: ‘Or leggetelo con un altro appresso’ [now read it with the following one].20 This comment suggests the intended continuity between the two sonnets: Se ’l chiaro Apelle con la man de l’arte Rassemplò d’Alessandro il volto e ’l petto, Non finse già di pellegrin subietto L’alto vigor che l’anima comparte. Ma Tizian, che dal cielo ha maggior parte, Fuor mostra ogni invisibile concetto; Però ’l gran Duca nel dipinto aspetto Scopre le palme entro al suo core sparte. Egli ha il terror fra l’uno e l’altro ciglio, L’animo in gli occhi, e l’altezza in fronte, nel cui spazio l’onor siede, e ’l consiglio.

19 Aretino 1538: LXXr–v, now in Aretino 1997–2002: 314–16. 20 Aretino 1997–2002: 315; my translation. For commentary on this letter and the two sonnets which accompany it, see Albrecht-Bott 1976: 76–77; Land 1986: 210–12; Land 1994: 86–90; Pich 2008: 168–74; and Pich 2010: 281–83, which gives further bibliography; for the sonnet on the portrait of the duke, see Kruse 1987: 85–89. On the relationship between the sonnets and the portraits of Titian, see Freedman 1995: 69–90; Freedman 1996.

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Nel busto armato, e ne le braccia pronte, Arde il valor, che guarda dal periglio Italia, sacra a sue virtuti conte. (Lettere, I.222, I) L’union de i colori, che lo stile Di Tiziano ha distesi, esprime fora La concordia che regge in Lionora Le ministre del spirito gentile. Seco siede modestia in atto umíle, Onestà nel suo abito dimora, Vergogna il petto, e i crin, le vela e onora, Le affigge Amore il guardo signorile. Pudicizia e beltà, nimiche eterne, Le spazian nel sembiante, e fra le ciglia Il trono de le grazie si discerne. Prudenza il valor suo guarda e consiglia Nel bel tacer, l’altre virtuti interne L’ornon la fronte d’ogni meraviglia. (Lettere, I.222, II) [If famed Apelles with his artist’s hand | portrayed Alexander’s face and torso, | he did not depict the rare subject, | the noble strength possessed by his soul. || But Titian, better endowed by heaven, | shows every inner thought on the exterior; | since the great duke in his painted appearance | reveals the victories held within his heart. || He has awesomeness between his brows, | his fiery spirit in his eyes, his loftiness on his face, | in which sits honour and good counsel. || In his breastplate and in his ready arms | courage burns, which protects from danger | Italy, sacred to his manifest virtues.] [The blending of colours that the art | of Titian has set down expresses perhaps | the harmony that reigns in Leonora, | and the good offices of her gentle spirit. || With her sits simplicity, humble in deed, | Honesty dwells in her attire, | Modesty veils and honours her bosom and her hair, | and love is displayed in her aristocratic gaze. || Chastity and beauty, eternal enemies, | are shown in her likeness, and on her brow | is seen the throne of the Graces. || Prudence protects her worth, and good counsel | her fair silence, and the other inner virtues | embellish her face with every marvel.]21

21 The texts are cited from Aretino 1997–2002: 314–16. Hereafter indicated as I and II. Translation from Rogers 1986: 303–04.

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The two sonnets are composed so as to correspond to one another at a formal, thematic, and structural level through a series of verbal allusions and internal echoes, beginning with the use of a shared rhyme scheme (ABBA ABBA CDC DCD) and a pair of nearly identical rhyming words, ciglio : consiglio (I.9, 11) and ciglia : consiglia (II.10, 12). The name of the painter, Titian, moreover, is repeated in both sonnets—a clear echo of the Petrarchan diptych, where the name of Simone Martini, the painter of Laura’s portrait, similarly functions as a connecting device (‘Ma certo il mio Simon fu in paradiso’, Rvf 77.5; ‘Quando giunse a Simon l’alto concetto’, Rvf 78.1).22 The allusion to Apelles in the first verse of the first sonnet recalls again the Petrarchan diptych, which in its turn begins with an evocation of another great artist from antiquity, Polyclitus (Rvf 77.1), whom Martini is said to surpass in skill. 23 Petrarch’s sonnets on the portrait of Laura, moreover, provide Aretino with a number of key rhyming terms (compare the rhyme arte : parte in the f irst sonnet with Rvf 77 and the rhymes petto : concetto : aspetto with Rvf 78, etc.). While the imitation of Petrarch’s diptych of sonnets through the reuse of the rhymes, themes, and rhetorical devices of the model is a common occurrence in poetry on portraiture,24 in Aretino’s case it has the additional function of enhancing the perception of the two sonnets as a pendant, in keeping with the Petrarchan tradition, despite the signif icant difference of themes (encomiastic in the case of Aretino, amatory in the case of Petrarch). The two texts are linked, moreover, by their shared content and structure. Both sonnets place special emphasis on the painter’s ability to represent the inner qualities of his sitters with similar formulas, ‘fuor mostra’ (I.6) and ‘esprime fora’ (II.2), albeit with a chiastic inversion of word-order and metrical position. Aretino also employs chiasmus as a linking device which structures his description of the appearances of the duke and duchess: while in the sonnet addressed to the duke he initially lingers on the details of his face and eyes (II.9–11) before moving on to his chest and clothing (II.12), in the poem for the duchess the poet begins by describing her dress, bust, and hair (I.5–8) and only later her face and gaze (I.9–14). Both texts mention the same physical parts of the subjects. As the poems continue, the subjects’ moral or spiritual virtues are made to correspond to each part of the body in a sort of ‘psychological reading’ of the likenesses, inspired by 22 All quotations of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf ) are taken from Petrarca 1996a. 23 The first quatrain of Aretino’s first sonnet, moreover, is modelled on the corresponding quatrain from Rvf 77 (‘Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso | con gli altri ch’ebber fama di quell’arte | mill’anni, non vedrian la minor parte | de la beltà che m’ave il cor conquiso’) in its syntactic articulation. 24 See, in particular, Pietro Bembo’s diptych on the portrait of Maria Savorgnan and Giovanni Della Casa’s diptych dedicated to the portrait of Elisabetta Querini (Bolzoni 2008: 85–98). On these diptychs and their relationship with their Petrarchan model, see Bolzoni 2008: 16–17.

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the same rhetorical and aesthetic conventions that inform Titian’s paintings.25 Titian’s original portraits, currently in the Uff izi, are indeed subtly regulated by a codified system of echoing poses, expressions, attributes, and even palette; against the background of these artistic and social signifiers, the pair emerge as ideal representations of masculinity and femininity, respectively. Aretino’s sonnets approach the representation of the couples’ inner life in a similar way, offering a complete catalogue of the desirable virtues for male and female members of the aristocracy of the period.26 To this extent, Aretino’s poetic diptych performs a complementary function to that of the portraits. Moreover, Aretino’s poems appear to play a comparable role to that of the allegorical representations painted on the outer part of certain diptychs, such as in the paintings by Piero della Francesca cited above (Fig. 8.2). The sonnets have, in any case, little to say regarding the details of the portraits themselves, aside from a few scattered allusions to the duke’s suit of armour (‘Nel busto armato’, I.9) and the duchess being seated (‘Seco siede modestia in atto umíle’, II.5). As is often the case with poetry composed in response to portraiture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the artistic object is little more than a starting point for the poet’s extended treatment of encomiastic themes and topoi.27

Gaspara Stampa’s Diptych of Sonnets on an Imaginary Double Portrait A few years after Aretino’s diptych—from which she may well have drawn inspiration—the Venetian poet Gaspara Stampa composed two sonnets on the portraits of herself and her lover, Count Collaltino di Collalto. Here, too, the articulation of the poetic discourse into two sonnets reproduces and imitates the physical separation between the paired portraits of lovers or married couples.28 Stampa’s diptych differs from Aretino’s, however, both in genre and in the relationship with its visual model: while in Aretino’s case the portraits represent little more than a pretext for the literary praise of the sitters, in Stampa’s sonnets the visual subject 25 Freedman 1995: 82–87. As Albrecht-Bott (1976: 77–78) contends, this ‘psychographic’ description represents the greatest innovation of Aretinian poetry on the theme of portraits. 26 On the visual idealisation of female portraits in the sixteenth century, and for a discussion of the problematic connection established by the physiognomic tradition between exterior appearance and inner qualities, see Susan Gaylard’s essay in this volume. 27 Bolzoni 2008: 14. 28 Schneider (2012: 295) observes that, despite the initial reference to various artistic materials and techniques (LV.1), the poems’ principal reference in the visual arts is the genre of double portraits of spouses, as the poems’ diptych structure makes clear.

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offers an opportunity to use some of the more familiar topoi of love poetry in an innovative way. Moreover, unlike Aretino’s diptych, which refers to a pair of real portraits, Stampa’s sonnets are not inspired by any existing artwork. Stampa composed her poems (no doubt as a literary device) in terms of a proposition addressed to a group of artists, preceding the realisation of the portraits to which they refer and, ultimately, replacing them:29 Voi, che ’n marmi, in colori, in bronzo, in cera Imitate, e vincete la Natura, Formando questa, e quell’altra figura, Che poi somigli à la sua forma vera, Venite tutti in gratiosa schiera A formar la più bella creatura, Che facesse giamai la prima cura, Poi che con le sue man fè la primiera. Ritraggete il mio Conte; e siavi à mente Qual’è dentro ritrarlo, e qual’è fore; Sì che à tanta opra non manchi niente. Fategli solamente doppio il core, Come vedrete, ch’egli ha veramente, Il suo, e ’l mio, che gli ha dato Amore. (Rime, LV) Ritraggete poi me da l’altra parte, Come vedrete, ch’io sono in effetto; Viva senz’alma, e senza cor nel petto, Per miracol d’Amor raro, e nov’arte. Quasi nave, che vada senza sarte, Senza timon, senza vele, e trinchetto; Mirando sempre al lume benedetto De la sua Tramontana ovunque parte. Et avertite, che sia ’l mio sembiante Da la parte sinistra afflitto e mesto; E da la destra allegro, e trionfante. Il mio stato felice vuol dir questo; Hor, che mi trovo il mio Signor davante, Quello il timor, che sarà d’altra presto. (Rime, LVI)

29 The composition of the poems already implies the realisation of the double portrait in the form of a text. Cf. Schneider 2012: 295.

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[You who with paints and marble, wax and bronze, | imitate and even defeat nature, | forming now this, now that other figure, | so they resemble their own true form, || gather together in gracious array | to make the world’s most beautiful creature—| not since First Care fashioned with his hands | the first being has anything like him been made. || Portray my count, and don’t forget to show | what lies within him, what without, | so that your work is lacking in nothing. || Just be sure to give him a double heart, | for as you’ll see, he really has two, | his own and mine—a gift Love gave him.] [There on the other side, you must portray me too, | just as you see me, as I am in truth: | alive without a soul, my breast without a heart | through a rare miracle of Love and new art, || like some ship that sails without its ropes | or rudder, without its foremast and sails, | aiming always for that blessed light | of his northern star, wherever it travels. || And make sure that from the left I convey | a countenance that’s sad and troubled, | while on the right, I’m bright and triumphant. || Such happiness shows me as I am today, | with my lord before me; such dread | speaks to the fear that he’ll soon be another’s.]30

Once again, the connections between the two sonnets are multiple and striking, beginning with the incipit of the second poem, where the adverb ‘poi’ and the spatial indication ‘da l’altra parte’ (LVI.1) leave no doubt regarding the continuity between the two compositions. These spatial terms underline the poems’ connection with the tradition of double portraits, from which the hierarchical ordering of the f igures derives, the male character being placed in the more emphatic position on the right of the composition according to principle of dextrality.31 The connection between the two texts is then reinforced on a thematic level by the conceit of the ‘stolen heart’ and on a sonic and structural level by the use of the same rhyme scheme (ABBA ABBA CDC DCD) and the consonance of the C rhyme (-ente in the f irst sonnet, -ante in the second). Also signif icant is the continuity of the imperative tone in the two poems, which can be traced back to the subgenre of the so-called ‘advice to the painter’.32 It is f inally worth noting the evident reprise of the crucial verb ritrarre at the 30 Text and translation are from Stampa 2010: 104–07. 31 The existence of a hierarchical principle which dictates the placement of the figures in the panels of diptychs and triptychs was articulated for the f irst time by Erwin Panofsky (1953: I, 479–80), who speaks of ‘laws of heraldry’, attributing the convention to mediaeval heraldry. In more recent times the phenomenon has been renamed the ‘principle of dextrality’ by Hugo van der Velden (2007: 130), who contests the idea of direct dependence on heraldry. It should be recalled that this principle, while being generally valid, is not always applied in a systematic manner (ibid.: 128). 32 On this sub-genre, see Dundas 1988 and Moncond’huy 1992.

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opening of the second sonnet (LVI.1) in the same form and position as in line 9 of the f irst sonnet. Stampa’s sonnets, like Aretino’s, show a connection with the Petrarchan tradition of poetry composed to celebrate the portrait of the beloved, as evidenced by the pairs of rhyming terms (arte : parte : parte; petto) drawn from Petrarch’s Rvf 77 and 78. Signif icantly, the borrowings in this case involve only the second sonnet, dedicated to Gaspara Stampa’s own eff igy, thus drawing a parallel between Petrarch’s Laura and Stampa herself.33 In composing her own diptych, however, Stampa also draws inspiration from examples closer to her, most notably Della Casa’s diptych on the portrait of the Venetian noblewoman Elisabetta Querini.34

From Paired Portraits to Dedicatory Poetry in the Form of Diptychs Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, then, diptychs of sonnets were beginning to be used as the literary equivalent of paired portraits of lovers or spouses in both contemporary love poetry (Stampa) and encomiastic poetry (Aretino), perhaps owing to the wide diffusion that this type of portraiture enjoyed through the printing press in this period. At the same time, paired portraits of Petrarch and Laura began to appear on the title pages of several Venetian editions of the Canzoniere, enclosed within oval frames bearing inscriptions of Petrarch’s verses (Fig. 8.3).35 This kind of representations had an immediate and profound impact on Petrarchist poets: in the 1552 edition of Les amours, Pierre de Ronsard set out paired portraits of himself and his own mistress on the f irst two pages of the collection, both (again) enclosed within oval frames bearing mottoes.36 Guillaume des Autels would do the same in the 1553 edition of L’amoureux repos (Figs 8.4.1 and 8.4.2). A similar format—no doubt inspired by portrait medals—appears in several engravings featuring paired portraits of rulers and their spouses. One example is the pair of engraved portraits of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici, enclosed in oval frames inscribed with the title henricus ii galliarum rex [Henry II King

33 For further discussion of this kind of self-fashioning, see Barbero 2021. 34 Pich 2008: 99. 35 See in particular the title pages of Petrarch (1549b and 1553b). On these title pages, cf. Trapp 2001: 112–14; Pich 2010: 78–79. See also Gemma Cornetti’s essay in this volume. 36 The two portraits are now reproduced in Ronsard 1970: XXXIV–XXXV. For these portraits, see Löhr 2003.

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Fig. 8.3 Title page of I Trionfi del Petrarcha, con la spositione di M. Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo da Traetto (Venice: Domenico Giglio, 1553). Courtesy of Clark Art Institute clarkart.edu.

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Figs 8.4.1 and 8.4.2 Anonymous, Portraits of Guillaume des Autels and his Beloved, engraving, from Guillaume des Autels, Les amoureux repos (Lyon: Jean Temporal, 1553), fols A1v–A2r, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

of France], for the king, and the motto tu decus | omne tuis [You the sole glory of your kindred], for the queen (Fig. 8.5).37 In the French emblematic tradition, this motto was associated with the image of a hand gripping a tongue, a reference to Lysimachus of Macedonia, who earned the respect and favour of Alexander the Great for tearing off the tongue of a lion. Both motto and emblem imply that a dynasty’s nobility derives from the virtuous and memorable deeds performed by its members.38 The motto thus refers not only to the queen, but also—and perhaps principally—to the king, who is represented in armour as a military commander. The inscription adds an important moral dimension to the portraits.

37 I have transcribed the text directly from the images themselves, regularising the spelling of v to u. The same criteria have been adopted for the citations that follow. 38 Paradin 1557: 149.

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Fig. 8.5 Etienne Delaune, attr., Portraits of Catherine de’ Medicis and Henri II of France, sixteenth century, engraving, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The same format was adopted, a few decades later, in the pair of portraits of the king of France, Charles IX, and his wife Isabelle of Austria (1571; Figs 8.6.1 and 8.6.2). In this case, the oval frames bear the following identifying inscriptions: carolus nonis dei gracia francorum rex christianissimus [Charles IX the very Christian King of France by the Grace of God] and isabella austriaca imp. maximiliani f. caroli noni francorum rigis uxor [Isabelle of Austria, daughter of Emperor Maximilian, wife of the King of France Charles IX]. It was perhaps with this sort of images in mind—rather than the few, less accessible, painted pairs of portraits39— that around the mid-sixteenth century poets began to use sonnet diptychs as a form of dedication to royal couples. There is indeed a distinct similarity between the Latin formulas used in inscriptions and the captions which precede the poetic diptychs. For instance, the adjective ‘cristianissimo’ (Fig. 8.6.1) appears again with reference to the French royalty in the captions of the diptych dedicated to Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici by Gaspara Stampa. The strategies used to connect the two dedicatory sonnets are 39 In fact, although in Northern Europe paired portraits of spouses were still in use during the entirety of the sixteenth century, in Italy this kind of paintings was becoming decidedly rare.

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Figs 8.6.1 and 8.6.2 Anonymous, Portraits of the King of France, Charles IX, and of the Queen of France, Elisabeth of Austria, 1571, engravings, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

much the same as those employed in the diptych on the portrait of the poet and Collaltino. The dedicatory diptych also presents the same hierarchical order of the characters, placing once more in first position the sonnet dedicated to the male figure according to the principle of dextrality: AL CRISTIANISSIMO RE DI FRANCIA, HENRICO SECONDO Sacro re, che gli antichi, e novi regi, Quanti sono, ò fur mai eccelsi, e degni, Per forza di valor propria, e d’ingegni Vinci; e te stesso, e tutto ’l mondo fregi. Et a’ più chiari spirti, et a’ più egregi, A’ più felici, e più sublimi ingegni La via d’alzarsi al ciel scrivendo insegni, Con la materia de’ tuoi tanti pregi,

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Volgi dal tron de la tua Maestade, Sereno il ciglio, onde queti, e governi Popoli, e Regni à la mia humiltade. Che, se tu aspiri a’ miei disiri interni, Spero vil Donna à la futura etade, Far con tant’altri i tuoi gran fatti eterni. (Rime, CCXLVI) ALLA CRISTIANISSIMA REINA DI FRANCIA, CATERINA DE’ MEDICI Alma reina, eterno, e vivo sole, Prodotta ad illustrar’ Imperij, e Regni, E congiunta al maggior Re, c’hoggi regni, Cara sì, che con voi vuole, e non vuole; Date à l’ingegno mio rime, e parole, Onde possa adombrar con quai può segni Quanto la vostra altezza, e i pregi degni Il mondo tutto riverisce e cole. Lasciate, ch’à la fama, e à gli scrittori, Che parleran di voi sì chiaramente Io donna da lontan possa andar dietro. Lasciate, ch’io di sì famosi allori, M’adorni il crin’à la futura gente; Ò qual gratia mi fia se questo impetro. (Rime, CCXLVII) [TO THE MOST CHRISTIAN | KING OF FRANCE, | HENRY II Sacred king, who conquers kingdoms ancient | and modern no matter how worthy they are, | or were—through the sheer force of your valor | and intellect you adorn yourself, and all the world—|| you who offer the most famous and esteemed, | the happiest and most sublime of wits | the way to heaven, inspiring them | to write of you and all of your merits, || turn that serene brow from your throne of majesty | where you subdue and govern peoples | and kingdoms, to myself in my humility: || should you heed my innermost desires, | I, lowly woman, hope with many others | to make your great deeds famous for eternity.] [TO THE MOST CHRISTIAN | QUEEN OF FRANCE, | CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI Noble queen, eternally vibrant sun, | born to make kingdoms and empires famous, | wed to the greatest king who reigns among us, | so dear to him that your desires are his own, || give to my talent rhymes and words, so I | may try to sketch with

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greater skill | how much the world honors and reveres | your worthy attributes and your nobility. || Let other writers and the voice of Fame | speak of you in illustrious ways, | while I, a woman, follow from afar; || let my hair be adorned with your | famous laurels by some future race. | Oh, what grace would be mine, my wish fulfilled!]40

The multiple strategies used by Stampa to unify the two poems range from complex and carefully articulated echoes of rhyming terms to the reprise of formulas, expressions, and terminology.41 In particular, the opening phrases of the two sonnets are ‘perfectly parallel’:42 to ‘Sacro re’ in the first corresponds ‘Alma regina’ in the second. Even the ending of the tercets is symmetrical, introducing in both texts a reference to the poet herself (‘vil Donna’, CCXLVI.13; ‘Io donna’, CCXLVII.11) and her desire to perpetuate her own memory and that of her dedicatees (expressed in turn with almost identical expressions in l. 13 of the two sonnets: ‘à la futura etade,’ CCXLVI.13; ‘à la futura gente’, CCXLVII.13). The close connection between the two texts is most likely intended to represent and celebrate the matrimonial bond, which is explicitly thematised in the sonnet dedicated to the queen: ‘congiunta al maggior Re, c’hoggi regni’ (CCXLVII.3). Even more effective and immediate than this sophisticated network of internal ties, the ornamentation and layout displayed by the two texts in the first edition present them clearly and irrevocably as a pendant.43 Preceded by perfectly parallel headings, the sonnets are among the few texts in the collection to occupy an entire page and boast ornamental friezes.44 Although not attributable to the author herself (the collection was published posthumously by the poet’s sister, Cassandra Stampa), the exquisite care paid to the book’s visual layout invites further reflection. Through being presented in this way, the diptych acquires an autonomy that enhances the similarities with the artistic tradition of paired portraits. Printed on both sides of the same page, the texts seem to replicate the layout of a particular type of double portrait derived from medals, which often bear the profiles of two spouses on the 40 Stampa 2010: 254–57; the texts (i.e. sonnets CCXXI and CCXXII) are numbered differently in this edition. I have decided to preserve the alignment and typographical features of the dedicatory heading of the texts found in the editio princeps (cf. Stampa 1554: 117–18) in order to emphasise the perfect symmetry of the two poems, which is apparent even from their similar layout. 41 On these strategies, see Terzoli 2010: 171. 42 Ibid.: 171. 43 Stampa 1554: 117–18. 44 The presence of decorative friezes highlights the fact that these texts serve to introduce the encomiastic section of the collection. The friezes which appear at the head of the subsections of the Capitoli (ibid.: 153) and Madrigali (ibid.: 168) in effect have a similar function. A comparable ornamentation is adopted for the last text of the collection, a sonnet composed by Leonardo Emo for Gaspara Stampa (ibid.: 177).

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obverse and reverse, representing by means of the shared medium the close ties that bind them. 45 This kind of visual presentation remains unmatched by further diptychs of dedicatory sonnets. The pair of sonnets that Laura Battiferri addresses to Cosimo I de’ Medici and his wife Eleonora de Toledo, for instance, do not present any particular layout setting them apart from the other texts of the collection. The reasons for this are clear: while Stampa’s diptych serves as a section marker, separating the part dedicated to occasional poetry from the preceding love poems, in Battiferri’s predominantly encomiastic collection of poetry, in which the use of dedicatory headings is extremely common, no such attention is necessary. In the first edition of the Primo libro delle opere toscane, published in 1560, the two sonnets were in fact printed one below the other on the first page, prefaced by headings identical to those of the texts which follow: ALLA DUCHESSA DI FIORENZA E DI SIENA A voi, donna real, consacro e dono, ben che vil pregio all’alto valor vostro, questa man, questa penna e questo inchiostro e se mai nulla fui, saraggio o sono così agguagliasse di mia Musa il suono il pensier c’ho di voi, ch’altrui non mostro, come a gloria ed onor del secol nostro, manderei fuor quel che entro il cor ragiono; e forse a par di lui che su la Sorga cantando alzò il bel lauro a tanto onore, n’andrei sempre volando in ogni parte, che voi qual sol, ch’al mondo cieco porga lume, col dolce vostro almo splendore chiare fareste le mie scure carte. (Primo libro delle opere toscane, 1) AL DUCA DI FIORENZA E DI SIENA Quel largo cerchio che ricinge intorno la nona spera, pien d’alto valore, e quel che seco porta i giorni e l’ore, 45 Dülberg (1990: 165) in fact def ines this kind of double portrait, painted on both back and front, a ‘private document’ (my translation), whose function is to demonstrate the ties of friendship or affection between the two figures represented.

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di tante stelle e così chiare adorno, stavan congiunti il fortunato giorno ch’esser dovea del secol nostro onore; ed ogni amico lume, ogni splendore, lucea propizio nel più bel soggiorno. Spargea dal ricco grembo arabi odori l’aura soave, e ’n questa e ’n quella parte rendea sereno il ciel, tranquille l’acque, più dolce molto verdeggiar gli allori, più fiero in vista folgorava Marte, quando il buon Cosmo invitto al mondo nacque. (Primo libro delle opere toscane, 2) [TO THE DUCHESS OF FLORENCE AND SIENA To you, royal lady, I consecrate and give | this hand, this pen, and this ink, though base reward | for your lofty valor; and if ever I was or will be or am anything, | if only the sound of my Muse could match || my thought of you (which I show not to others), | then for the glory and honor of our age, I would | send forth that which I speak within my heart; | and perhaps a peer to him who raised the || fair laurel to such honor singing beside the Sorgue, | I should go winging always everywhere, || for you, like a sun that could bring light to | the blind world, with your sweet bountiful splendor | would brighten my dark pages.] [TO THE DUKE OF FLORENCE AND SIENA That wide ring that circles round the ninth | sphere, full of lofty valor, and the one, adorned with | so many stars and so bright, that carries with it the | days and the hours, || stood conjoined on the fortunate day that | was to be the honor of our age; and every friendly | light, every splendor shone propitious in the fairest abode. || From her rich bosom the soft breeze spread | odors of Araby and rendered serene the sky | throughout, tranquil the waters; || still sweeter the laurels greened; more | fiercely Mars flashed in sight, when good Cosimo | unvanquished was born to the world.]46

Unlike Stampa’s diptych, the two sonnets which constitute the ‘wings’ of Battiferri’s diptych are not close on a thematic level: the first sonnet, which is formally dedicatory in intent, continues and amplifies the discourse introduced in the dedicatory epistle to the duchess at the beginning of the book;47 the second, dedicated to the duke, develops instead the encomiastic theme of his prodigious birth without resorting to 46 Text and translation cited from Battiferra degli Ammannati 2006: 84–87. 47 Terzoli 2010: 173–74.

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any of the typical formulas of dedicatory discourse.48 That the two texts constitute a diptych, however, is undeniable, as demonstrated by their shared patterns of rhyme—a feature shared also by the other case studies explored so far. Beside their identical rhyming scheme (ABBA ABBA CDE CDE), the two sonnets also share the rhyming terms onore : splendore (1.10, 13; 2.6–7) and parte (1.11; 2.9). The rhyme parte : carte of the first sonnet could moreover be a reference to Petrarch’s Rvf 77, where these words appear in the same order. The connection seems anything but accidental considering the explicit reference in the tercets of Battiferri’s sonnet to that same poet who ‘su la Sorga | cantando alzò il bel lauro a tanto onore’ (1.9–10). This allusion to the diptych on the portrait of Laura might constitute a subtle link between this dedicatory diptych and the genre of portraiture. Both Aretino’s and Stampa’s diptychs on the theme of paired portraits employed rhyming schemes and words derived from Rvf 77 and 78. Battiferri’s diptych seems thus indirectly linked to this poetic tradition. It is nonetheless important to note that the two sonnets dedicated by Battiferri to the Duke and Duchess of Florence are followed by a third sonnet, which is connected to them by its rhymes and dedicated to the heir of the couple, Francesco I (al prencipe di fiorenza e di siena). The three texts thus constitute a sort of dynastic ‘triptych’. 49 In Battiferri’s collection, this type of dynastic ordering of the texts can be found again in the series of sonnets dedicated respectively to the Duke, the Duchess, and the Prince of Urbino.50 The double homage afforded to a pair of sovereigns is finally replicated for a third time by a diptych in honour of Philip II of Spain and Mary Tudor: AL RE FILIPPO Invitto rege, al cui valore immenso quanto è dal nostro all’Antartico Polo diede lassù chi tutto puote solo, e qui de i saggi universal consenso, e però dianzi eterno danno e intenso dolor cadeo sovra ’l gallico stuolo, 48 On the use of rhetorical formulas and the rules of Italian dedicatory practice in the sixteenth century, see Paoli 2009: 11–33 and 49–105; and Terzoli 2010. 49 This triptych is moreover completed by a fourth text, which can be considered a part of this ‘dynastic’ sequence, being dedicated to the son-in-law of the duke and duchess, Paolo Giordano Orsini. For this and other thematic groupings in the Battiferri’s collection, see Zaffini 2014: 47. 50 Battiferra degli Ammannati 2006: 90–92. In this case, too, another text can be added to the dynastic triptych: the sonnet dedicated to Virginia Varana Della Rovere, namely the daughter from Duke Guidobaldo II’s first marriage to Giulia Varana (see Zaffini 2014: 47). On dynastic portraits north of the Alps, see Hinz 1974: 147–55.

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che visto e vinto e morto attese solo fuggir valor di giusto sdegno accenso. E non pur noi, ma chi dell’oriente nemico di Gesù l’imperio regge vedrem chinarsi a’ vostri piedi umile; e l’altra a noi lontana, ignota gente, nel nostro mondo non più scuro e vile, solo uno scettro aver, solo una legge. (Primo libro delle opere toscane, 5) ALLA REINA MARIA ‘Sacra Reina, a cui Natura e Dio per far fede quaggiù d’ogni ben loro, sangue, virtù, valor, stato, tesoro e per isposo Re, si forte, e pio, dieder, doti conformi al bel disio vostro di ritornar nell’antico oro il ferro nostro, e dare alto ristoro al secol, che fia buon, quant’ora è rio; ‘O più ch’altra ancor mai felice eletta coppia, ov’è giunto in un potere e ’ngegno, chi fia che ’n contra voi difesa faccia?’ Così dicea dal ciel pura angioletta, e poi soggiunse, ‘E non fia vostro un regno, ma quanto il sol riscalda, e ’l mare abbraccia’. (Primo libro delle opere toscane, 6) [TO KING PHILIP Unvanquished king, He who is alone all- | powerful above and the universal consensus of | wise men here below gave to your immense valor | everything that is from our pole to the Antarctic; || and hence ere now eternal harm and intense sorrow | befell the Gallic herd that, seen conquered and killed, | gave heed only to flee valor kindled with just disdain. || And we shall see not only ourselves, | but the enemy of Jesus who rules the empire of the orient, | bow humbly at your feet, || and the other distant, unknown people in our world, | no longer dark and base, | shall have only one scepter, only one law.] [TO THE QUEEN MARIA ‘Holy queen, to whom Nature and God bore | faith down here of their every good by giving | blood, virtue, valor, estate, treasure, and for spouse | a king so strong and pious, || gifts consonant with your fair desire to | restore our iron to ancient

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gold and bring a lofty | renewal to the age, | which will be as good as it now is evil; || ‘O chosen couple, happier than ever any other | before, where power and intellect are joined as one, | who is there who could oppose you?’ || Thus spoke from heaven a pure angel, and | then it added, ‘And yours will be not a kingdom, | but as much as the sun warms and the sea embraces’.]51

This time the two texts do not appear strongly connected in terms of their use of rhyme; in fact, there is only one assonance (in -olo and in -oro), but some connections are nevertheless established by the headings and by the matching terms of address which open the two sonnets: ‘Invitto Rege’ and ‘Sacra Reina’. The continuity is moreover emphasised by the allusion, in the second sonnet, to the queen’s marriage to Philip II, ‘e per isposo Re, sì forte, e pio’ (6.4), and by the reference to their couple (‘coppia’, 6.10). A certain symmetry between the two texts can also be found in the choice of themes: in the first quatrain of both poems there is an emphasis on the divine origin of the talents and fortune of the two dedicatees. The analogy is underlined by the repetition of the verb ‘dare’ in the same metrical position: ‘diede lassù chi tutto puote solo’ (5.4); ‘Sacra Reina, à cui Natura, e Dio | […] | dieder, doti conformi al bel disio’ (6.1, 5). Similarly, the periphrasis ‘ma quanto il sol riscalda, e ’l mare abbraccia’ (6.14) in the second sonnet corresponds to the geographical periphrasis ‘quanto è dal nostro all’Antartico Polo’ (5.2) in the f irst sonnet, hyperbolically indicating in both instances the extent of Philip’s territory. This diptych, like the one dedicated by Battiferri to the Duke and Duchess of Florence, has an important intertextual relationship with the two Petrarchan models: while in the tercets of the first text we find the rhyme vile : humile (corresponding to that of Rvf 78.6–7), the second verse of the second sonnet includes an entire hemistich from Rvf 77.8: ‘Per far fede qua giù’. The existence of this intertextual link supports once again the hypothesis that this form of encomium derives from the tradition of sonnet diptychs composed to accompany portraits of spouses, especially when we consider the fact that the author of what appears to be one of the first diptychs of dedicatory sonnets to a ruler and his wife, Gaspara Stampa, was also one of the first to implement that fusion between literary tradition and modern artistic creation which is the poetic diptych on the portrait of a couple.52 Laura Battiferri’s collection of encomiastic poems closes with a final pair of sonnets dedicated once again to Cosimo I and Eleonora de Toledo, which reverses the order of the opening diptych, in which the sonnet dedicated to the duchess precedes

51 Battiferra degli Ammannati 2006: 88–91. 52 Bolzoni 2008: 19.

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the one addressed to the duke.53 The praise of the ducal couple thus acquires great significance, repeated as it is both at the beginning and end of the work and framing the entire collection. In the same year (1560) in which Battiferri’s collection was first printed, Bernardo Tasso published two diptychs dedicated to two pairs of sovereigns in the fifth book of his Rime, addressed respectively to the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Guidobaldo II and Vittoria Farnese Della Rovere, and to the French sovereigns, Francis II and Mary Stuart. The first of these diptychs is particularly interesting for our purposes since it refers explicitly to the visual arts: Al Signor Duca d’Urbino O di doppio valore adorno, a paro, di quegli invitti e gloriosi Augusti che ne’ felici secoli vetusti di mille palme altieri trionfaro, sono al bel volo da Timavo a Varo del vostro nome i gran termini angusti, ché ’l bianco Scita e gli Etiopi adusti di meraviglia pien già l’inchinaro; le spoglie ostili, le corone e i pregi ch’ornan del bel Metauro ambe le sponde, de’ magni avoli vostri eterno onore, fien quasi a lato a frutto e fiori e fronde, a paragon de’ fatti alti e egregi del vostro eroico e valoroso core. (Rime, V.9) A la Duchessa d’Urbino O di candido onor illustre esempio, d’infinita prudenzia e di valore, donna ben degna che ’l Mondo v’onore con marmi, acciari, e con altare e tempio, involva pur il tempo irato et empio ne le ruine d’un perpetuo orrore l’alte memorie altrui col suo furore, e ne faccia qual suole e strazio e scempio:

53 Battiferra degli Ammannati 1560: 121–22; 2006: 100.

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ché ’l vostro nome già lieto e sicuro vive nel grembo di colei che eterno fa nel Ciel suo mal grado ogni lavoro, sì che con l’ali ognor purpuree e d’oro n’andrà Vittoria per quel aere puro che non turba già mai pioggia né verno. (Rime, V.10) [O you, who are adorned with double valour, like those undefeated and glorious emperors who in those noble times of old attained a thousand palms as token of their victories, the broad confines which extend from the Timavo to the Var are too narrow to contain the renown of your name, since already the white Scythian and the black Ethiopians have bowed their heads before you in awe; the enemies’ spoils, the crowns and the prizes of the victory which adorn both banks of the Metauro, winning eternal honour for the memory of your great predecessors, together with the fruits, flowers and leaves, will attest to the high and noble deeds of your heroic and valiant heart.] [O lady, who are an illustrious example of pure honour, of limitless prudence and worth, you richly deserve to be celebrated by the world with marble and iron, with altars and temples; let time, full of anger and cruelty, bring to ruins the memories of others with its fury and bring them to destruction, as it is accustomed to do, since your name already serene and secure now resides in the lap of her who makes every action eternal in heaven, despite [the work of] time. Thus Victory with her purple and golden wings will enter into that pure celestial sphere which is never disturbed by rain or winter.]54

As in all examples seen above, the connection between the two sonnets is once again made clear by the headings and the similarity between the incipits (‘O di doppio valore’, 9.1; ‘O di candido onor’, 10.1). The sonnet dedicated to the male f igure precedes the one dedicated to his spouse, in accordance with the hierarchy generally adopted in paired portraits of married couples. The duke is presented as an ‘eroico e valoroso’ condottiere (9.14), while typically feminine qualities are attributed to the duchess (‘candido onor’, 10.1; ‘prudenzia e valore’, 10. 2). In the first quatrain of the second sonnet, the poet makes direct reference to the visual arts (‘marmi, acciari, e con altare e tempio’, 10.4) whose task is said to consist in honouring and immortalising the reputation of the female dedicatee. To the artworks, which are subject to the effects of time, the poet opposes the power of the written word, in keeping with the traditional paragone: 54 Tasso 1560: Libro quinto, 11–12, 20–21; text quoted from Tasso 1995b: II, 77, 86; my translation.

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the dedicatee’s name, when entrusted by poetry to the remembrance of future generations—Tasso inserts the name ‘Vittoria’ in the text (10.13)—is indeed immortal. Tasso thus points out an important convergence between the two forms of artistic expression, which share the same subject (the duchess) and function (her commemoration). In this perspective, poetry takes up the role of an eff igy, a monument to the subject, while the act of naming replaces that of representing. The poet provides us with a crucial key for understanding the relationship between diptychs of encomiastic sonnets composed and paired portraits of spouses. No trace of these connections with the figurative arts, however, appears in the diptych dedicated twenty years later by Modesta Pozzo to the Grand Dukes of Tuscany at the beginning of I tredici canti del Floridoro (1581). The two texts, which are introduced by parallel headings (al serenessmo | don francesco de medici | gran duca di thoscana. | moderata fonte; alla sereness. sig. | bianca cappello de medici | gran duchessa di thoscana. | moderata fonte),55 are not closely connected in terms of rhyme or other rhetorical devices. They stand out nonetheless as a pair due to their layout and ornamentation, as was the case with Gaspara Stampa’s diptych of dedicatory sonnets.56 Moreover, as in Stampa’s and Battiferri’s poems, here, too, the dedicatees’ marital union is made explicit in the second sonnet, thus accounting for the proximity of the two texts: ‘Te scelta il fior de gli almi Heroi già scelse’ [The flower of immortal heroes has chosen you] (V.9). This same unifying strategy is also used in the Sapphic verses inscribed on the back of the celebrated diptych of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca, dated between 1465 and 1474 (Figs 8.1 and 8.2), to which we may now return.57

Closing the Circle The outer surface of the panels, which were originally joined together by a hinge,58 presents an allegorical representation of the married couple, seated on triumphal carriages and surrounded by personifications of the virtues—cardinal virtues

55 ‘TO THE MOST SERENE | DON FRANCESCO DE’ MEDICI, | GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY | [From] Moderata Fonte’; ‘TO THE MOST SERENE | LADY BIANCA CAPELLO DE’ MEDICI, | GRAND DUCHESS OF TUSCANY | Moderata Fonte’. Text and translation are cited from Fonte 2006: 49–51. 56 See Fonte 1581: *2r–v. 57 On the date of the diptych, see Calvesi 2001: 218–20. 58 Cf. Dülberg 1990: 76; and Calvesi 2001: 220.

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for the duke, theological for the duchess.59 These allegories are accompanied by Latin verses in Sapphics: CLARUS INSIGNI VEHITUR TRIUMPHO QUEM PAREM SUMMIS DUCIBUS PERHENNIS FAMA VIRTUTUM CELEBRAT DECENTER SCEPTRA TENENTEM [on the duke’s panel] QUE MODUM REBUS TENUIT SECUNDIS CONIUGIS MAGNI DECORATA RERUM LAUDE GESTARUM VOLITAT PER ORA CUNCTA VIRORUM [on the duchess’s panel] [Glorious he rides in distinguished triumph, the eternal fame of his virtues celebrates him as the equal of the greatest dukes and as a fair ruler.] [The name of her, who in prosperity has preserved due measure and is adorned with praise for the achievements of her great spouse, flies on all the tongues of men.]

The verses dedicated to the duchess refer to her marriage to the duke, who is depicted on the facing panel and whose virtues are praised in the corresponding Sapphic stanza, exactly as in the pairs of dedicatory sonnets analysed so far. As is the case with dedicatory diptychs of sonnets, moreover, the two characters are idealised: the duke is depicted as a great condottiere, while the duchess is endowed with the quintessential feminine virtue of moderation. The centrality of the theme of fame demonstrates that the paintings’ main purpose is to immortalise the reputation of the sitters, delivering to posterity a portrait that is both moral and physical. This similarity of the aims and modes of presentation invites us to think about the encomiastic verses of the famous diptych as a sort of archetype and model for sonnet diptychs dedicated to royal couples. In conclusion, the encomiastic inscriptions on paired portraits of married couples likely had a role in the development of the encomiastic diptych of sonnets; but this literary form of dedication and encomium was also likely influenced by the poetic tradition of diptychs on portrait pairs (Aretino and Stampa), which had in turn 59 For an analysis of portraits and allegorical representations painted on their reverse sides, see Bolzoni 2010: 236–41.

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been inspired by visual models. The diptych composed by Pietro Aretino on the portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in fact presents marked affinities with the allegorical imagery and inscriptions on the reverse of Piero della Francesca’s famous depictions. Given that Aretino’s sonnets refer to the portraits of another Duke and Duchess of Urbino, this thematic similarity is unlikely to be accidental. Both the reverses of Piero’s portraits and the sonnets by Aretino focus on the sitters’ inner qualities, functioning as a commentary and counterpart to their likenesses.60 Aretino’s sonnets, however, not being physically joined to the paintings themselves, have greater autonomy: the theme of encomium tends to dominate the poetic discourse, and the image itself is little more than the point of departure—a pretext hardly mentioned—for the written word.61 From here it is only a short step to the total absence of any reference to an image, so that the sonnet diptych on a double portrait can be easily reduced to a pair of sonnets celebrating a couple, without any concrete portrait as a point of departure. In Giambattista Marino’s Galeria (1619), for example, there are hardly any references to the portraits of famous men and women on which his poems are ideally based. In fact, Marino’s texts are little more than verse encomia.62 Sonnet diptychs dedicated to pairs of sovereigns could therefore be considered the result of a long and complex process of assimilation and convergence between literature and the visual arts.

Bibliography Acciaioli Salvetti, Maddalena. 1590. Rime toscane (Florence: Francesco Tosi). Albrecht-Bott, Marianne. 1976. Die bildende Kunst in der italienischen Lyrik der Renaissance und des Barock: Studie zur Beschreibung von Portraits und anderen Bildwerken unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von G.B. Marinos Galleria (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner). Andreani, Veronica. 2017. ‘Paratesto e macrostruttura nelle Rime di Gaspara Stampa’, in Il dialogo creativo: studi per Lina Bolzoni, ed. by Maria Pia Ellero, Matteo Residori, Massimiliano Rossi, and Andrea Torre (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi), pp. 187–98. 60 A parallelism between Aretino’s sonnet on the portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga and the allegory on the reverse side of the portrait of Battista Sforza has also been traced by Bolzoni (2008: 49). Beyer (2002: 82) speaks of the reverse side of the portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino as constituting a portrait of the pairs’ moral and political bodies which complements the depiction of their physical bodies on the opposite side. 61 We ought to remember here that the tendency towards the ‘elimination’ of the physical or material portrait is common to the genre of poetry on portraits in general. On this subject, see Bolzoni 2010: 152; and Pich 2010: 202–24, who notes how ‘the sonnet on the portrait tends to transform itself into a eulogy’ (p. 212), and speaks in this sense of a ‘subsidiary’ or ‘paratextual’ relationship between text and image (p. 223). 62 Paulicelli (1996: 73), Caruso (2009: 193–94), Pich (2010: 198–201).

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Angelini, Alessandro. 2011. ‘Per la cronologia del dittico dei Montefeltro di Piero della Francesca’, Prospettiva, 141–42: 59–72. Aretino, Pietro. 1538. Delle lettere di M. Pietro Aretino: libro primo (Venice: Marcolini da Forlì). Aretino, Pietro. 1997–2002. Lettere, ed. by Paolo Procaccioli, 6 vols (Rome: Salerno). Autels, Guillaume des. 1553. Amoureux repos (Lyon: Jean Temporal). Barbero, Muriel Maria Stella. 2021. ‘Tra Laura e Petrarca: uso e funzioni del paragone nei ritratti di petrarchiste’, in Petrarca und die bildenden Künste. Dialoge—Spiegelungen— Transformationen, ed. by Sebastian Schütze and Maria Antonietta Terzoli (Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 265–90. Battiferra degli Ammannati, Laura. 1560. Primo libro delle opere toscane (Florence: Giunti). Battiferra degli Ammannati, Laura. 2006. Laura Battiferra and Her Literary Circle, ed. and trans. by Victoria Kirkham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Beyer, Andreas. 2002. Das Porträt in der Malerei (Munich: Hirmer). Bolzoni, Lina. 2008. Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, texts ed. by Federica Pich (Rome and Bari: Laterza). Bolzoni, Lina. 2010. Il cuore di cristallo: ragionamenti d’amore, poesia e ritratto nel Rina­ scimento (Turin: Einaudi). Calvesi, Maurizio. 2001. Piero della Francesca (Milan: Rizzoli). Caruso, Carlo. 2009. ‘La Galeria: questioni e proposte esegetiche’, in Marino e il Barocco da Napoli a Parigi, ed. by Emilio Russo (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’orso), pp. 185–207. Cox, Virginia. 2008. Women’s Writing in Italy 1400–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Cropper, Elisabeth. 1976. ‘On Beautiful Women: Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style’, The Art Bulletin, 58.3: 374–94. Dülberg, Angelica. 1990. Privatporträts: Geschichte und Ikonologie einer Gattung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Mann). Dundas, Judith. 1988. ‘Advice-to-a-Painter Poems: Horizons of a Genre’, in Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. by Karl Josef Höltgen, Peter M. Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg), pp. 133–45. Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi). 1581. Tredici canti del Floridoro (Venice: Nella stamparia de’ Rampazetti). Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi). 2006. Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, with an introduction by Valeria Finucci, trans. by Julia Kisacky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Freedman, Luba. 1995. Titian’s Portraits through Aretino’s Lens (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). Freedman, Luba. 1996. ‘Titian’s Portraits in the Letters and Sonnets of Pietro Aretino’, in The Eye of the Poet: Studies in the Reciprocity of the Visual and Literary Arts from

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the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Amy Golahny (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press), pp. 102–27. Gelfand, Laura G. 2006. ‘The Devotional Portrait Diptych and the Manuscript Tradition’, in Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, ed. by John Olivier Hand and Ron Spronk (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 47–59. Genette, Gérard. 1987. Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil). Grillo, Angelo. 1590. Rime del molto rever. P.D. Angelo Grillo per le nozze de’ serenissimi gran Duca, e gran Duchessa di Toscana (Genoa: [n.p.]). Hand, John Oliver, Catherine A. Metzger, and Ron Spronk (eds). 2006. Prayer and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Hinz, Berthold. 1974. ‘Studien zur Geschichte des Ehepaarbildnisses’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 19: 139–218. Kruse, Margot. 1987. ‘Aretinos Sonette auf Tizian-Porträts’, Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 38: 78–98. Land, Norman E. 1986. ‘Ekphrasis and Imagination: Some Observations on Pietro Aretino’s Art Criticism’, The Art Bulletin, 68.2: 207–17. Land, Norman E. 1994. The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). Lecercle, François. 1987. La Chimère de Zeuxis: Portrait poétique et portrait peint en France et en Italie à la Renaissance (Tübingen: Gunter Narr). Löhr, Wolf-Dietrich. 2003. ‘Petrarcas neue Kleider. Eros und Epos im Frontispiz zu Pierre de Ronsards Amours von 1552’, in Der stumme Diskurs der Bilder: Reflexionsformen des Ästhetischen in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Valeska von Rosen, Klaus Krüger, and Rudolf Preimesberger (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag), pp. 85–118. Moncond’huy, Dominique. 1992. ‘Le poète commande au peintre: enjeux et effets d’un modèle poétique (de Ronsard à Scudéry)’, La Licorne, 23: 19–29. Panofsky, Erwin. 1953. Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Paoli, Marco. 2009. La dedica: storia di una strategia editoriale (Italia, secoli XVI–XIX), preface by Lina Bolzoni (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Paradin, Claude. 1557. Devises heroïques (Lyon: Jean de Tournes). Paulicelli, Eugenia. 1996. ‘La Galeria di Giambattista Marino e gli spazi percorsi dalle parole’, in Paulicelli, Parola e immagine: sentieri della scrittura in Leonardo, Marino, Foscolo, Calvino (Fiesole: Cadmo), pp. 57–81. Petrarca, Francesco. 1549b. Sonetti, Canzoni e Triomphi di m. Francesco Petrarca, con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello da Lucca (Venice: Fratelli Nicolini da Sabio). Petrarca, Francesco. 1553b. Il Petrarcha con la spositione di M. Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (Venice: Domenico Giglio). Petrarca, Francesco. 1996a. Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori).

Sonne t ‘Dipt ychs’ and Double Portr aits 

Pich, Federica. 2008. ‘I testi’, in Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, ed. by Lina Bolzoni and Federica Pich (Rome and Bari: Laterza), pp. 71–245. Pich, Federica. 2010. I poeti davanti al ritratto: da Petrarca a Marino (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi). Pozzi, Giovanni. 1979. ‘Il ritratto della donna nella poesia d’inizio Cinquecento e la pittura di Giorgione’, Lettere Italiane, 31.1: 3–30. Rogers, Mary. 1986. ‘Sonnets on Female Portraits from Renaissance North Italy’, Word & Image, 2.4: 291–305. Ronsard, Pierre de. 1970. Les amours, with commentary by Marc-Antoine de Muret, new edition based on the text of 1578 by Hugues Vaganay, preceded by a preface by Joseph Vianey (Geneva: Slatkine reprints). Schneider, Ulrike. 2012. ‘Ritraggete il mio conte—poi me da l’altra parte: Genrespezifische Modellierung der Liebe bei Gaspara Stampa’, in Amor sacro e profano: Modelle und Modellierung der Liebe in Literatur und Malerei der italienischen Renaissance, ed. by Jörn Steigerwald and Valeska von Rosen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz), pp. 281–304. Shearman, John K. G. 1992. ‘Portraits and Poets’, in Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 108–48. Stampa, Gaspara. 1554. Rime (Venice: Plinio Pietrasanta). Stampa, Gaspara. 2010. The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the ‘Rime’: A Bilingual Edition, ed. by Troy Tower and Jane Tylus, trans. and with an introduction by Jane Tylus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Tarsi, Maria Chiara. 2013. ‘Appunti per una prima lettura del “povero libretto” di Gaspara Stampa’, Studi rinascimentali, 11: 127–38. Tarsi, Maria Chiara. 2018. Studi sulla poesia femminile del Cinquecento (Bologna: I libri di Emil). Tasso, Bernardo. 1560. Rime di Messer Bernardo Tasso (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari). Tasso, Bernardo. 1995b. Rime, ed. by Vercingetorige Martignone, 2 vols (Turin: Res). Terzoli, Maria Antonietta. 2010. ‘I margini dell’opera nei libri di poesia: strategie e convenzioni dedicatorie nel Petrarchismo italiano’, Neohelicon, 37: 155–80; repr. in Maria Antonietta Terzoli, Inchiesta sul testo: esercizi di interpretazione da Dante a Marino (Roma: Carocci, 2018), pp. 127–54. Trapp, J. B. 2001. ‘Petrarch’s Laura: The Portraiture of an Imaginary Beloved’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 64: 55–192. Velden, Hugo van der. 2007. ‘Diptych Altarpieces and the Principle of Dextrality’, in Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, ed. by John Olivier Hand and Ron Spronk (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 125–55. Warnke, Martin. 1998. ‘Individuality as Argument: Piero della Francesca’s Portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino’, in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. by Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: British Museum Press), pp. 81–90. Woods-Marsden, Joanna. 2000. ‘Visual Constructions of the Art of War: Images for Machiavelli’s Prince’, in Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal, ed. by Stephen K. Scher (New York: Garland), pp. 47–73.

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Zaffini, Chiara. 2014. ‘Le Rime di Laura Battiferra Ammannati nel ms. 3229 della Biblioteca Casanatense: struttura, motivi, questioni storico-filologiche’, Accademia Raffaello: atti e studi, 1–2: 43–58. Zemanek, Evi. 2010. Das Gesicht im Gedicht: Studien zum poetischen Porträt (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau).

About the Author Muriel Barbero studied history of art and Italian literature at the Universities of Fribourg and Basel (Switzerland), where obtained her Master’s degree in 2018. She is currently an assistant PhD candidate in Italian literature at the University of Basel, where she is investigating the role and implications of visuality in Michelangelo’s Rime.

9

Images of Women from Subject to Frame in Printed Portrait Books Susan Gaylard

Abstract In the mid-sixteenth century, images of women disappeared from the popular genre of printed portrait books. Portraits in early volumes, from 1517 to around 1558, were presented both as exemplars and via physiognomic tropes that presumed character was visible in the face. Yet famous (or infamous) women’s biographies often contradicted the chaste beauty typical of these depictions. Responses by authors and printmakers across Europe suggest that portrait books staged a clash between imagined ideal women, whose images drew from Petrarchan beauty tropes, and a new taste for seductive or grotesque female bodies. By the 1570s, women appeared primarily in the frames of men’s portraits or as models for historical costumes: the specificity of their lives was elided; whether ideal or grotesque, women were all surface. Keywords: portrait book, costume book, Lucretius, Enea Vico, Jacopo da Strada, Francesco Terzio

Petrarch famously wrote of the ‘bel viso leggiadro che depinto | porto nel petto’ [lovely smiling face, which I carry painted in my breast] (Rvf 96.5–6).1 In the sixteenth century, it became possible to literalise Petrarch’s words: as Gemma Cornetti points out in this volume, printers produced images of Petrarch and Laura in heart-shaped frames. Likewise, readers could carry a ‘bel viso leggiadro’ close to the heart, as collections of printed illustrated biographies developed into the portrait-book genre. The earliest of these volumes, published in the decades 1 I thank the volume editors and Stuart Lingo for their generous feedback on an earlier version of this article. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf or Canzoniere) are from Petrarca 1996a. English translations are from Petrarca 1976.

Bernocchi, I., Morelli, N. and Pich, F. (eds), Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463727242_ch09

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between 1517 and 1560, were in fact small enough to carry around. While Petrarch’s Laura was constructed from an idea, an ideal ‘pattern’ of what a beloved should be, early sixteenth-century printmakers used traditional beauty tropes to create images of Roman empresses for books of ancient coins.2 Female portraits comprised a significant proportion of these early volumes, only to disappear by the 1560s. Portraits of women were almost entirely eliminated at the very moment that the coin-volume genre evolved into the portrait book, which typically displayed a large image of a famous person alongside their biography.3 The disappearance of women’s images has far-reaching consequences, since portrait books evolved into the biographical encyclopaedia by the seventeenth century: women were eliminated from illustrated histories just as these volumes became widely disseminated and more standardised through print. 4 This chapter will look at interactions between text and image in several sixteenthcentury portrait books from Italy, France, Switzerland, and Austria, to ask if and how Petrarchan canons contributed to the elimination of women’s images from early popular histories. How did ideas of Petrarchan beauty intersect or interact with the emergent sixteenth-century fashion for grotesques and seductive female statuary, as depicted in print? As Elizabeth Cropper has observed, the generation of late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento painters, under the sway of Petrarchism, had insisted on the unity of beauty and virtue: in painting, the virtuous beloved—always absent, as in Petrarch—was evoked and imagined as present through a very chaste kind of visual representation.5 This form of representation was reinforced by Marsilio Ficino’s popularisation of Platonic ideas, which proposed that beauty essentially indicated inner virtue.6 Women of high social status were thus visually idealised in the manner of Petrarch’s Laura, with jewel-like beauty signalling their exchange value as brides or wives, and pale skin and hair indicating their rank and purity.7 At the same time, the rediscovery and new appreciation of ancient sculpture, the works of Lucretius, and Nero’s Domus Aurea (discovered at the end of the fifteenth century) introduced seductive and monstrous female bodies into the collective visual imagination. A new generation of artists, including Agnolo Bronzino, Jacopo Pontormo, and Michelangelo, tested Lucretian ideas of representing beauty as a seductive if potentially dangerous presence. While artists adhering to 2 Nature’s creation of Laura from an ideal pattern is clear in Rvf 159.1–4. See the discussion of this passage by Feng 2017: 45. 3 See Casini 2004; Cunnally 1999; Maffei 2004; Eichel-Lojkine 2001; and Perkinson 2002. 4 On this disappearance, see Casini 2004; for earlier volumes, see Kolsky 2005 and Gaylard 2015. 5 Cropper 2010. See also Lee 2017 and Bettini 2002. 6 Perkinson 2009; Syson 1998: 10–12 7 For the complexity of visual Petrarchism, see Cropper 1976. For the visual specificity of seemingly generic portraits, see Simons 2011–12.

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Petrarchan ideals believed the image could summon—however fleetingly—the absent virtuous beloved, Lucretius and his followers considered even the present beloved as a seductive phantasm.8 Painters experimenting with the new strain of Lucretian representation thus depicted the image of the beloved as seductive and present, but still a mere surface, a simulacrum. How did these two divergent understandings of how to represent women manifest in popular printed books? This chapter argues that Petrarchan canons of female beauty both fuelled and were at odds with images of women in print. Pictures of famous and beautiful Roman empresses may originally have prompted the popularity of many biographical volumes. Most printmakers followed norms of representation aligned with Petrarchan ideals, showing chaste women in profile, or at a distinct remove from the viewer. The accompanying texts, however, often promoted the idea that these women had a seductive presence that exerted itself dangerously in politics. Portrait books typically invoked ideas of exemplarity to explain their purpose—but neither generic women’s faces nor lurid exploits lent themselves to interpretation as models for female readers. What is more, blandly beautiful female portraits were not enough of a selling point to spur book sales. While most publishers and printmakers eventually eliminated women’s images, some later printmakers used elaborate framing mechanisms around their portraits. As we shall see, the pictorial frames are often larger or more prominent than the portrait itself and include female allegories, caryatids, or personifications that nuance both portrait and biography by positing women’s bodies as present and seductive. Yet these female framing figures are mere surface: actual women’s lives were elided from the genre that became the biographical encyclopaedia. The fashion for coin volumes drew from the 1517 publication of Andrea Fulvio’s Illustrium imagines in Rome, an offshoot of the trend for collecting coins that was inspired by Petrarch. Fulvio’s publication was soon expanded upon in multiple editions by Johann Huttich (Strasbourg, 1525 and 1534), Jacopo da Strada (Lyon, 1553; Zurich 1559), Guillaume Rouillé (Lyon, 1553), and Diethelm Keller (Zurich, 1558). New publications generally used prints from previous collections as a point of reference, or simply as an authoritative source of images. In fact, many ancient empresses’ coin portraits—if they existed at all—were difficult to find or identify. Yet publishers, printmakers, and authors almost invariably claimed that their images were not only true depictions of an individual’s facial features, but also reflected their character, and would act as models for future readers. Guillaume Rouillé’s 1553 Prontuario de le medaglie, which was published simultaneously in French, Italian, and Latin, reiterated a broadly uncritical acceptance of physiognomic theory in the collection’s introduction, asserting both historical accuracy and the 8

Cropper 2010; Campbell 2003; and Campbell 2004.

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ability to read character in each image. These simultaneous claims were in tension with each other, in particular as improved print techniques allowed for a more lifelike representation of a face, and audiences began to expect some resemblance between a portrait and a person’s actual features.9 For ancient Roman empresses like Sabina Poppaea, Agrippina, and Faustina the Younger, physiognomic claims were very problematic: the visual tradition derived from propagandistic imperial coins, while the biographical tradition was usually drawn from anti-imperial writings.10 Although the longstanding Western tradition of the beautiful but wicked woman allowed for exceptions to the physiognomic rule that face reflected character, all of the women in the early volumes (except for emperors’ mothers and grandmothers) are depicted as beautiful, irrespective of their biographies. This makes sense when we consider that there were almost no visual models for depicting the beautiful but wicked female in the new autonomous portraiture. In fact, the static pose typical of portraiture did not allow for the kind of visual condemnation that was easy to achieve in the action-packed images typical of Quattrocento illustrated biographies, which show how the ‘evil’ woman meets a bad end. Worse still, it could be politically unwise to depict a woman (even from ancient history) as obviously wicked, since most rulers and noble elites claimed a sprawling ancient lineage that could include these women.

Making History Present: Beautiful Women Who Are a Little Monstrous With the very first image of a woman in Fulvio’s 1517 volume, we see tensions between complex biographies and portraiture inflected by Petrarchan ideals. The woman is Fulvia, labelled as the wife of Mark Antony (fol. XIIIr; Fig. 9.1); her coin medallion is positioned on a fictive ancient Roman funerary monument in a style that recalls the grotesques of the Domus Aurea, which had been rediscovered in the 1480s.11 While ancient monuments of this kind would have been familiar to the educated reader since they were visible all over Rome (and constituted an important training for artists, who came to sketch them), the stark black medallions on each page make present both long-lost characters from history and the imagined coins. The portrait of Fulvia shows the profile of a beautiful woman with a half-smile. While this portrait seems to be a fiction, it does accord with Petrarchan-inflected 9 Perkinson 2002; Gaylard 2013a: 160–226. 10 Gaylard 2013b. 11 On the authorship of the woodcuts in Fulvio’s volume, see Cunnally 1999: 52–87.

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Fig. 9.1 Medallion portrait of Fulvia, from Andrea Fulvio, Illustrium imagines (Rome: Jacopo Mazzocchi, 1517), fol. XIIIr, Wing ZP 535.M458, Newberry Library, Chicago.

expectations of womanly beauty: the woman’s animated face remains in profile so does not engage the viewer; her generically Roman headdress showcases a high forehead (a sign of nobility in the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento), a straight nose, flawless skin, and a wealth of fair hair that is visible but nonetheless gathered and braided in the kind of decorous display expected of young brides. The beauty we see in Andrea Fulvio’s coin image of Fulvia was typical of Quattrocento painting, in which, as Luke Syson has pointed out, even idealised and seemingly generic portraits of women could offer very specific statements about their virtue.12 Yet the biography accompanying the portrait does not describe a virtuous young bride: it introduces Fulvia in terms of her three husbands (Clodius, Curio, and Mark

12 Syson 1998: 12.

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Antony), before concluding with a mention of her unusual and unfeminine ability in the art of ruling: She was married first to Publius Clodius, from which marriage was born Claudia, the second wife of [Octavian], who was divorced without having consummated the marriage. Then Fulvia was wed to Curio, and finally to Marcus Antonius. For this woman was well educated in womanly arts, but she was [also] educated to rule magistrates and exercise command more than to listen in a woman’s position.13

The brief text omits Fulvia’s role in the civil wars following the death of Julius Caesar, and the fact that the political rhetoric of the time largely blamed her for the rift between Octavian and Mark Antony.14 The blandly flattering image in no way supports the text’s assertion of her unwomanly influence in politics. Yet, despite this disjunction between text and image, and despite Fulvia’s absence from Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, sixteenth-century readers of Plutarch, Cicero, or Cassius Dio would have been familiar with Fulvia’s notoriety as a strong politician. Cicero used Fulvia as a rhetorical tool against Mark Antony, implying that she was fatal to her two previous husbands, and condemning Mark Antony for frivolously prioritising romantic intrigue over urgent affairs of state.15 Cicero portrayed Fulvia as a corrupt power broker by comparing the illegal transaction of state business at Mark Antony’s house with the selling of sexual favours in Fulvia’s private apartments.16 According to T. Corey Brennan, Plutarch’s Fulvia was practically a negative exemplar for elite Roman women, since she ‘wished to rule a ruler and command a commander’.17 Cassius Dio’s account further associates Fulvia with the triumph of unthinking feminised violence over thoughtful manly debate: his Fulvia grotesquely spits on Cicero’s decapitated head, violently removes the tongue that had spoken of her so negatively, and uses her hairpins to pierce it.18 Fulvia’s direct involvement in military campaigns elicited condemnation by generations of historians, including Velleius Paterculus, who declared, ‘Fulvia had nothing of a woman about her, except 13 ‘Nupta prius P. Clodio ex cuius matrimonio nata est Claudia secunda Octavii coniunx intacta repudiata demu[m] Curioni postremo. M. Antonio iuncta Nam fuit hec muliebres arte edocta sed magistratus regere & i[m]pera[r]e plusq[uam] muliebri conditione aud[i]re’. This transcription and translation read imperare for imperase and audire for audre. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Special thanks to Matthew Gorey for parsing typographical errors and creating a smoother translation. 14 See Dio 1917: 229 (48.5); Brennan 2012: 358. 15 Cicero 2009: 66–67 (2.48) and 128–31 (2.77). 16 Cicero 2009: 146–47 (2.95). 17 Plutarch 1920: 161 (10.3); Brennan 2012: 258. On the negative historiography of Fulvia, see especially Cenerini 2002: 63–68. 18 Dio 1917: 133 (47.8).

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her body’.19 Yet Andrea Fulvio’s entry on Fulvia merely hints at this complex story, and offers a biography so short as to be almost telegraphic. In spite of Fulvia’s problematic history, the page dedicated to her is visually very attractive, although it prioritises the overall layout and framing decoration rather than the portrait itself. This emphasis on pleasing aesthetics, as we shall see, had a long afterlife in illustrated histories. Fulvia as negative exemplar does not appear in Jacopo da Strada’s Epitome du Thresor des Antiquitez (Lyon, 1553), even though Strada closely followed Andrea Fulvio’s model in presenting a series of coin images with expanded biographies, and included many women. It is worth asking why Strada omitted Fulvia, considering that he strongly emphasised his own archaeological and historical precision, and would have known that Fulvia was a key figure in the civil wars before the establishment of the empire. Strada’s collection runs from Julius Caesar to Charles V, suggesting an uninterrupted imperial lineage that stretches from ancient Rome to the present day. Strada’s text, however, is decidedly female-inflected: it follows the opening medallion and biography of Julius Caesar with those of his parents, and then of ten close female relatives. Then, at the point at which we might expect to find Fulvia, we see instead three coin images grouped together: Mark Antony, Octavian, and Marcus Lepidus. The accompanying text details the civil wars and triumvirate that were ultimately succeeded by Augustan rule. Although Fulvia was traditionally blamed for the power struggle between Octavian and Antony, she appears in only one sentence of Strada’s five-page narrative, where she is guilty of making and losing war.20 The long succession of women that precedes the triumvirs does not posit any kind of clear genealogical or historical arc—since, of course, women did not officially hold political leadership. The appearance of the competing triumvirs together with the series of women suggests the medieval paradigm of ‘histories’ as plural and coexistent, even if they contradict each other—rather than the modern idea of history as a single, dominant, or objective narrative.21 Strada’s coins are framed very differently from Fulvio’s antique sarcophagi: the stark black medallions (similar 19 ‘Fulvia, nihil muliebre praeter corpus gerens’. Velleius Paterculus 1924: 208 (2.74.3); see Cenerini 2002: 64. 20 Strada 1553: 10. ‘He was warned of dissension between his brother Luc and his wife Fulvia, and that they were making War on Caesar. Finally, after losing all their assets, they had been chased out of Italy; he [Mark Antony] returned with two hundred ships. However, after the death of his wife Fulvia he was reconciled with Caesar by his friends’ (‘Estant adverti qu’il y avoit dissension entre Luc son frere et sa femme Fulvia, et qu’ilz faisoient la Guerre à Cesar, et que finablement apres avoir perdu tout leur bien, ilz avoient esté chassez d’Italie, il sen retourna avec deux cens navires: mais apres la mort de sa femme Fulvia il fut reconcilié par ses amis à Cesar’). 21 On history versus histories, see Hampton 1990.

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in style to Fulvio’s) are embedded directly in the text, granting a primacy and visual immediacy to the portraits, and making the text itself into a frame. This in turn gives more importance to Strada’s textual interpretation and his authority as self-styled antiquarian.22 The visual competition represented by the three warring leaders is resolved in the next entry, which highlights Strada’s unique antiquarian expertise. A single medallion unites the three men’s images with the rubric ‘CONCORDIA IMPERATORUM’. The text emphasises the authenticity and rarity of the medallion: ‘In Rome I found a coin […] the same size that you see above, and […] few people have seen it’.23 This underscores the fact that the author travelled to Rome, found, and is now revealing a rare and precious artefact through his scientifically accurate reproduction. Yet, despite Strada’s extended description of the ‘Concordia imperatorum’ coin—both obverse and reverse—its actual existence is in doubt.24 Why did Strada’s 1553 Epitome omit Fulvia and invent a coin to unite the warring triumvirs? The oversized in-folio 1559 presentation edition (published in Zurich by Andreas Gessner) suggests that Strada realised that internal contradictions could undercut a narrative intended to promote imperial legitimacy. Without the many women and competing triumvirs, Strada’s book could offer a triumphal arc from Julius Caesar to Charles V. In fact, the 1559 presentation volume elides the warring triumvirs and the many women that populate early coin books: what remains is a succession of biographies with full-page portraits of men. This dramatic change allows for a linear narrative and a visual emphasis on the continuity of the imperial line from Julius Caesar to Charles V. These cuts to the original text suggest that both Strada and Gessner were hoping for the emperor’s favour, although the lack of dedicatee to the volume indicates that such favour did not materialise in time for the publication. Yet the experiment ultimately paid off: Strada was appointed architect to Ferdinand’s court in Vienna in 1560 and went on to work for Maximilian II, attaining some renown as an antiquarian.

Making Myth Present: A Monstrous Woman of Uncertain Character The corollary of the idea that goodness is manifested as beauty, which clearly proved problematic for women like Fulvia, was that inner evil could be seen in ugly faces. Yet print portraits seldom depict such visible wickedness. An exception to this rule 22 On Strada’s antiquarianism, see Cunnally 1999: 26–33. 23 ‘Iay trouvé à Rome une monnoye […] d’une telle grandeur comme vous voyez cy dessus, & […] peu de gens l’ont veüe’ (Strada 1553: 13). 24 I have not found any references to such a coin, either using online coin resources such as [accessed 9 April 2021], or Mattingly and Sydenham 1923.

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Fig. 9.2 Medallion portraits of Melusina and her son ‘Gotfrid with the Big Tooth’, from Diethelm Keller, Kunstliche und aigendtliche Bildtnussen der rhömischen Keyseren (Zurich: Andreas Gessner, 1558), p. 525, Case E 436.463, Newberry Library, Chicago.

is the ‘portrait’ of Melusina, the mythical half-snake (or half-dragon) woman, in Rouillé’s Prontuario de le medaglie (Lyon, 1553). Rather than imagining this print as an aberration, we should understand it as part of a successful strategy for updating an image collection in an expanding market. The medallion was included, with an edited and expanded biography, in Diethelm Keller’s German compendium of both Rouillé and Jacopo da Strada’s coin collections (Fig. 9.2).25 This was published by Andreas Gessner in 1558, during the long preparation of Strada’s huge presentation volume. The woodcuts are copied from both Rouillé and Strada’s originals; textual biographies are translated into German and printed in Gothic type. This Keller volume copied the archaeological emphasis and threedimensional, unframed medallions of Strada’s Epitome, but it also added to Strada’s 25 I thank Paul Gehl for his insights into this volume.

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text—and provided some very enticing images and biographies—by incorporating many sections copied from Rouillé’s book, including the biographies of the mythical monster Melusina and her son, Gotfredo del Gran Dente. Like Rouillé, Keller insisted (in his letter to the reader) on a close link between character, face, and visual depiction.26 The various versions of Rouillé’s Melusina epitomise the tensions inherent in imagining women as chaste wives and mothers, or as seductive and dangerous monsters. The image of a monster belies the surprisingly prosaic biography of Melusina as an aristocratic lady from Poitou who married and had several children.27 In Rouillé’s Italian edition, it is only towards the end of the biography that her fame as a half-snake is discussed, with the strong suggestion that Melusina was known as a monster simply because she used the snake as emblem on her arms.28 The French original, using the same print, likewise mentions the half-snake, half-woman on Melusina’s arms—but the central portion of the text leans more closely toward the medieval tales, asserting that Melusina used to bathe in private every Saturday. The author claims that in his opinion, she was not a half-snake but simply studied magic on Saturdays, ‘as that unfortunate art was fairly common in those times’.29 The subtle shift from the French to the less derogatory Italian version (published simultaneously) suggests some level of editing in the very first edition. This may be attributable to the fact that Italian audiences would not be familiar with the Roman de Mélusine referenced in the French text, but is likely also linked with the closer inspection of Italian books by the Catholic Church. Keller’s German version of Melusina, which closely copies the original print, offers a significantly more negative biography than either the French or the Italian versions: That people said that Melusina was a half dragon is probably not strange, even though you have to agree that it is magic, in which she was probably instructed and experienced; as in those times the black arts and magic were rather common.30

The German Melusina is half-dragon, rather than half-snake; she likely practices both magic and the black arts. As in the other versions, the German biography ultimately concedes that Melusina’s reputation may derive from the image on her arms. In all 26 Pelc 2002: 27. 27 Gaylard, 2013a: 172–75. 28 Rouillé, 1553a: 151. 29 ‘Comme ce malheureux art estoit assez commun en ce temps-là’ (Rouillé 1553b: 151). 30 ‘Dass man aber erdicht hatt die Mellusina sey ein halber tract gewesen wirdt villicht nit ungereimpt seyn ob man es gleych dem laachsnen zugibt darinn sy gar wol bericht und erfaren gewesen ist: Wie dann auch zu denselbigen zeyten die schwartz kunst und zauberey gar gemein was’ (Keller 1558: 525). I thank Kye Terrasi for help with this translation.

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three versions, the woman’s portrait is defined by public reputation rather than by any relationship with a real person’s facial features. Yet the biography is clearly modified to appeal to its particular audience. Since much of the German-speaking audience might have pro-Luther leanings, it makes sense that the French Catholic Melusina appears in a more negative light here. The monstrousness of Rouillé’s Melusina is more convincing precisely because her ‘portrait’ appears alongside that of her son, ‘Gotfredo del Gran Dente’—in German, ‘Gotfrid mit dem grossen Zan’ (Gotfrid with the Big Tooth). Melusina’s monstrous face requires some explanation in the text, but in fact appears less strange thanks to her son’s relatively minor abnormality: the enormous tooth protruding upward from his malformed mouth. Gotfrid’s physiognomy is not discussed or explained in any version of the text; and since the Melusine tradition specifies that all of her offspring had some physical deformity, the close proximity of the partially monstrous son next to his dragon-like parent tacitly confirms that the Melusina image is physiognomically accurate. Keller’s inclusion of Melusina and Gotfrid may seem coincidental: perhaps the artist wanted to experiment? Maybe the blocks had already been cut? On closer examination, however, it is clear that even if Melusina and her monstrous offspring were inserted to shock or entice viewers, their inclusion was a calculated choice. Their place in the volume reflects Keller’s precise respect for chronology: immediately preceding Keller’s Melusina/Gotfrid page are entries for the French kings Henri I and Philip I; after Melusina/Gotfrid appear the Emperor Henry III and his wife, Agnes. The text and prints for these rulers are borrowed from Rouillé’s Prontuario. The proximity of the French kings to Melusina and Gotfrid lends seriousness to the latter and makes sense in a world of frequent and ongoing hostilities between France and the Holy Roman Empire, particularly in the aftermath of the Reformation. The inclusion of Melusina and her son allows a German-speaking audience to imagine that the French aristocracy (and even French royalty) could include dragon-women who practise the black arts. Yet Melusina and Gotfrid immediately precede the Germanic emperor and empress, mingling monstrous myth with the imperial narrative of these pages, and implicitly questioning the imperial frame of the volume. This kind of heterogeneous compilation also disrupts the pose of serious antiquarian producing both ‘serious history’ and ‘true images’ that Strada’s volume had professed to offer.

Myth Versus History: Vico’s Beautiful Monsters Rouillé and Keller’s versions of Melusina beg the question, what might authors and printmakers do with women who are explicitly described as monstrous? Enea

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Vico’s Imagini delle donne auguste (Venice, 1557) is an interesting case study in this regard: it was the first publication on ancient culture to focus entirely on empresses, and Vico himself, an impoverished aristocrat and collector, produced both the text and the images. The author’s proem warns that the reader will find ‘very few good ones, some tolerable ones, and many who are more like hideous creatures and monsters of nature than women’.31 In this way, empresses are recategorised as belonging with those other ‘monsters of nature’ that were being collected in European picture books: non-Europeans.32 The dedication simultaneously insists on truth and historical precision and makes a very strong claim for physiognomic theory: ‘i volti sono messaggieri de’ cuori’ [faces are the messengers of hearts].33 For her unwomanly ruling of men, Fulvia belongs in the category of potentially monstrous women; yet although Vico, like Strada, begins his biographies in the time of Julius Caesar (with Caesar’s grandmother Martia), he too omits Fulvia. This omission allows Vico to avoid the messy details of the civil wars and create a more linear imperial history, albeit by way of mothers, aunts, wives, and daughters. Vico’s volume deploys a particular kind of Petrarchism in both image and text. In the same way that one cannot identify with any clarity a ‘Laura’ in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the reader of Vico’s Imagini struggles to pinpoint specific physiognomic details of the imperial women described; in many cases biographical information is also lacking. Yet like the Canzoniere, the Imagini is a tour de force that showcases the author’s creativity and technical expertise.34 The finely wrought engravings include intricate detail in the enormous supporting frames, which dwarf the women’s coin portraits (Fig. 9.3). Inverting the canons of portraiture, the framing statuary and grotesques appear much more lifelike than the small coin portraits. Vico’s oversized and elaborate frames render the misadventures of his Roman women more distant by setting each woman’s portrait at a series of removes from the viewer. In the biographies, the empresses are defined by the men around them: their fathers, brothers, and husbands. The text’s emphasis on archaeological accuracy also highlights Vico’s own knowledge rather than the women’s lives. The visual depiction of unchaste women seems to have posed a particular set of difficulties for the artist, even while audiences evidently hoped for exciting reading. There were no visual models for depicting an ugly and lascivious empress, and even portraits suggesting age were limited to chaste imperial grandmothers. Vico’s response to this quandary highlights both the tension between scientific history 31 ‘[P]ochissime buone, alcune tollerabili, et molte piu tosto horribili bestie, et portenti di natura, che donne’. Vico 1557: unpaginated. 32 See, for example, Wilson 2005; Jones 2006; and Gaudio 2008. 33 Vico 1557: unpaginated. 34 See the seminal work of Vickers 1981 on Petrarch’s poetry.

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Fig. 9.3 Agrippina the Younger, from Enea Vico, Le imagini delle donne auguste (Venice: Vico and Valgrisi, 1557), p. 98, Z233.A43 V53im 1557, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

and mythmaking, and the question of whether to represent beauty according to the Petrarchan tradition, as a beautiful but chaste absence—or, following the new Lucretian trend, as a seductive presence. I have discussed elsewhere Vico’s biography of Caesonia, which simultaneously emphasises historical accuracy and feminine deviance, while the accompanying print of a crumbling obelisk with indecipherable hieroglyphs suggests an exotic, mysterious and ‘effeminate’ Egyptian history.35 Perhaps the most striking print of Vico’s entire collection is that associated with Agrippina the Younger, last wife of Claudius and mother of Nero (Fig. 9.3). Agrippina’s is one of the longest biographies, stretching across sixteen pages. The text opens with an unusually extensive and self-aware discourse regarding scientific accuracy in relation to sources and dates. It is only on the third page that we start to read about 35 Gaylard 2013b.

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Agrippina’s incestuous relations with her brother Caligula and then Agrippina’s manipulation of and marriage to her uncle, the Emperor Claudius. The chapter is then interrupted by a large diagram of coin images, which refocuses the reader on archaeological precision. Yet the subsequent discussion, ostensibly of each of these coins, is largely dedicated to the more lurid anecdotes of Agrippina’s biography. Vico’s Agrippina print stages a set of tensions between sexualised and chaste beauty, between myth and history, and between absence and presence (Fig. 9.3). The central focus of this image is a statue of Diana of Ephesus, similar to the Diana that was being installed around the same time at Ippolito d’Este’s villa in Tivoli. Vincenzo Cartari described this figure as the ‘Dea Natura’, whose many ‘poppe’ (breasts) represent the fact that the universe feeds on nature’s ‘virtù occulta’ (hidden virtue).36 The grotto behind the printed Diana may refer to the grottoes at Tivoli. Vico’s statue of Diana appears stylised and sexualised when compared with the relatively lifelike but chaste coin profiles of Agrippina below. At the same time, the goddess is made present through the full-length depiction, outward gaze, and framing architecture, while the portraits of the empress are bust-length profiles at the front of the pedestal but nonetheless at a remove by being positioned on coins on either side of the goddess: the coins become frames for the mythical Diana. As the chaste goddess of nature, Vico’s Diana lends some positivity to the famously negative histories of Agrippina; as an exotic and sexualised statue, she both contrasts with the seemingly chaste profiles of the empress and also questions that chastity. This mythological presentation puts into question Vico’s repeated textual assertions of accuracy regarding Agrippina’s biography: the life of Agrippina—like our knowledge of ancient gods and goddesses—is a reconstruction based on poetry rather than scientific fact. This emphasis on mythmaking is highlighted via the biography’s opening with the Ovidian initial ‘I’ for Juno, who shares her legendary power, vengefulness, and capriciousness with Agrippina herself.37 The combination of image and biography reserved for Aelia Paetina (wife of Claudius) perhaps best epitomises the contradictions inherent in Vico’s volume (Fig. 9.4). The biography is short and fairly neutral: Vico tells us that Claudius took her as wife and then divorced her for some minor offence; after Messalina’s death Claudius nearly remarried Paetina, but she was ultimately sidelined in favour of Claudius’s niece, Agrippina. The text concludes with Vico’s assertion of philological accuracy as he condemns Josephus’s error in calling Paetina ‘Petronia’.38 Yet this rhetoric 36 Cartari 2004: 65. See also Dernie 1996: 68. 37 On print initials from this period, see Petrucci Nardelli 1991. I thank Walter Melion for drawing my attention to the significance of Vico’s initials. 38 Vico 1557: 145.

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Fig. 9.4 Aelia Paetina, from Enea Vico, Le imagini delle donne auguste, (Venice: Vico and Valgrisi, 1557), p. 144, Z233.A43 V53im 1557, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

of scientif ic authority is immediately put into question by the accompanying image. Positioned towards the bottom of the print, the small coin medallion closely resembles the coin portrait of Paetina published by Fulvio in 1517. Vico’s medallion is dwarfed by the mysterious female figure surmounting the pedestal: draped in fluttering and diaphanous clothes that accentuate her curvaceous body, she wears a laurel wreath suggesting poetry, gazes out toward an imaginary viewer and leans back, spreading out her arms along the curved parapet behind her. One knee is slightly bent, indicating relaxed contemplation as well as invitation. Her arms are disappearing behind the parapet, hinting at the philological problem mentioned in the biography, of truncated statues and partially lost texts.39 The nymph’s movement 39 I thank Stuart Lingo for this insight.

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also evokes the humanist trope of statues coming to life, presumably brought to new life through the poetic invention suggested by the laurels. 40 Whereas Vico’s decorative frames are often on a larger scale than the images they frame, dwarfing the medallion portraits, this female figure is drawn to the same scale as the portrait of Paetina, suggesting a continuity between the sedate profile and the seductive nymph above. This is a statue come to life, who like the living statue of Petrarch’s Pygmalion contrasts with the unattainable portrait (Rvf 78). The nymph’s revealing clothes, frontal gaze, and challenging stance, along with the initial ‘E’ engraved with the Ovidian myth of Europa, invite us to imagine more about Paetina’s life than the short biography or the chaste coin profile actually tell us—again privileging poetry over historical artefact, and seductive presence rather than virtuous absence. Vico’s images reflect the contemporary interest in archaeology and a growing taste for antique ornament in the wake of the Domus Aurea discoveries. The engravings highlight the contrast between Petrarchan and Lucretian ideals of depicting beauty by framing the chaste, remote profiles with alluring female bodies that are more immediately present than the subjects themselves, and who often suggest the idea of art coming to life. This was a clever response to both the new emphasis on archaeological accuracy (pioneered by Strada and then greatly refined by Vico himself) and the increasing expectation of physiognomic accuracy. These striking and original prints also demonstrate why Petrarch-inspired visual canons, which defined and limited how artists might portray women, might prompt printmakers to experiment with female figures outside of portraiture—for example, in the frame. The Imagini delle donne auguste is the last substantive printed collection to include women’s portraits: following Vico’s productive clash of history versus mythmaking, women largely disappeared from collections of illustrated biographies. Three years after Vico’s Imagini came out, he produced a series of costume studies that are almost entirely devoid of text: the image surface speaks for itself.

Present History and Remote Myth: Women as Frames The emphasis on surface beauty over visual exemplarity effectively reduced women’s images to the status of decoration, voiding the traditional notion of using portraits of exemplary women to inspire the emulation of their virtues. Women appear as decoration in a wide variety of late sixteenth-century portrait books. Thomas de Espinosa’s Heroicos hechos (Paris, 1576), a quarto-sized portrait book with fictive woodcut likenesses, is a fairly typical collection of male heroes, although there are no men depicted on its title page. Instead, we see two women, seated in a classicising 40 On the figure of the nymph, see Burroughs 2016.

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niche in the middle of the page, framed by a decorative border of fruits, garlands, and grotesques. The women’s bodies are angled outwards, but they look at each other and have their arms around each other. The banner encircling their fronds of palm and laurel reads ‘pietate et ivstitiae’ [Through Piety and Justice]. Without the label, the voluptuous and beautiful women would be difficult to read: they are clad in timeless all’antica style, and faces and hairstyles reveal little information. These are clearly not portraits. Rather, they comprise the kind of allegorical decoration that our eyes have been conditioned to glide over as we look for the title or the main content of a book. Yet these women are exceptional in that they are the only female figures in the book to appear in the centre of the page. All of the remaining feminine figures in the Heroicos hechos appear as exoticised or temporally distant bodies in surrounds for the masculine subjects. Some of these framing women refer to the discoveries of the New World, as in female busts wearing feathers; others echo the classical tradition of the Amazon, now naked and clutching a spear. Several framing figures appear vaguely allegorical (angels bearing garlands; partly clad female warriors) but without referencing anything in particular. Still others are masks, which suggests that representation is always a simulacrum and so implicitly unsettles the straightforward depiction of men in the volume. 41 These shape-shifting borders contrast with the large-scale and supposedly accurate and fixed portrait of each male subject, from mythical Greek King Theseus to the ancient Roman Emperor Otho (ruled 69 CE). The frames foreground the large and finely cut ‘portraits’ of the ancient heroes as historical and available to the reader, in contrast with the smaller-scale, shape-shifting frames of bodies, flowers, and fruit. Masculine ‘history’ is rendered present in juxtaposition with feminine ‘otherness’, which is multiple and enticing, but also mythical and remote. These frames seem to reflect the Lucretian ideal that viewing material bodies can produce a detached and composed observer. 42 This ideal might in fact apply to the reader, who could see himself in the portraits of male heroes. As print portraits and their frames became increasingly lifelike, the female grotesque or allegorical figures that accompanied these portraits point to a series of contradictions between the encomiastic intention of a ‘famous man’ portrait and the highly decorated result. These contradictions are especially clear in Francesco Terzio’s portrait collection of the Habsburgs, titled Austriacae gentis imagines, in five volumes (Innsbruck, 1569–1573). Terzio, an artist from Bergamo, was court painter to Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol; his portrait book is highly encomiastic. This oversized set comprises elaborate full-sheet engravings with the emphasis on beautiful images

41 On the grotesque, see Connelly 2012 and Hansen 2019. 42 Campbell 2004: 259.

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Fig. 9.5 Portrait of Charles the Bold, from Francesco Terzio, Austriacae gentis imaginum (Innsbruck: Gaspar Patavinus, 1569–73), vol. 4, unpaginated, Wing oversize ZP 539.O815, Newberry Library, Chicago.

rather than textual history.43 All of the plates depict male rulers, with the exception of the fifth and final volume, which is devoted to women and dedicated to Empress Maria. Many of the ‘portraits’ were based on the twenty-eight bronze statues of illustrious ancestors that accompanied the cenotaph of Maximilian I in Innsbruck’s Hofkirche.44 While the Innsbruck elite would see a close visual continuity with the Hofkirche project, a wider European audience would understand the project as a celebration of the imperial house. As we shall see, Terzio’s unusual inclusion of women as subjects conflicts with his deployment of women as decorative ornament. 43 Terzio executed the drawings; the plates were engraved by Gasparo Uccello (also called Gaspar Oselli, Caspar Osello, or Gaspar ab Avibus), from Cittadella (near Padua). See Scheicher 1983 and Radcliffe 1986. 44 On the cenotaph project, see Egg 1974.

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The plate celebrating Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, is representative of the prints depicting male figures in Terzio’s collection, in that it uses feminine allegories as subordinate decoration of the central male subject. A handsome figure in fifteenth-century armour (drawn from the Hofkirche statue) holds aloft a sword and steps tentatively forward in contrapposto, allowing us a view of a strong masculine profile beneath the helmet brim (Fig. 9.5). On either side of the duke’s niche appears a female figure in classicising dress, whose diminutive scale emphasises the centrality and power of the duke. These two women, controlling the Nemean lion and a mare of Diomedes, represent Fortitude and Temperance; their function is to please the viewer and illuminate the duke’s Herculean qualities. To ensure that this is understood, the plaque above each personification bears an explanatory Latin inscription. 45 Almost all of the men to whom Terzio dedicated whole plates appear with allegorical women on either side—with the exception of Philip II of Spain, the ‘Catholic king’, dedicatee and the first entry in the fourth volume (Fig. 9.6). The crowned Philip—whose likeness resembles that familiar from court portraits—is flanked by two smaller male figures, both identifiable as Hercules from the lion pelt. The bearded, lion-like men, posing alongside the bearded Philip, suggest the leonine nature of the king. 46 Yet the emphatic virility of these two Hercules figures contrasts strongly with the many draped female allegorical figures in the rest of the book, drawing the reader’s eye back to this unusual page. The Hercules on the left uses a firebrand to defeat a six-headed Hydra on the step below him, while the other figure holds up a set of masks (or skulls) and keeps one foot on the prone figure of Cacus, whose upper body hangs down from the niche, emphasising his defeat. This is an unusually self-conscious staging on a proscenium-like background, with Hercules’s masks suggesting that he is offering a set of personae to be inhabited. 47 At the same time, the choice of a double Hercules frame unites Philip’s military and political strength with his spiritual leadership: Hercules was often allegorised as Christ. Even if the masks highlight the theatricality of Philip’s self-presentation, both Hercules figures have triumphed in their labours and represent the victory of Christian virtue over vice. Philip’s mix of armour with contemporary courtly clothing (the collar of the Golden Fleece with crown, ruffs, doublet, and hose) makes sense in light of his supposed intellectual, military, and 45 These read: ‘Strength is equal to courage when I labor over difficult things’ (‘aeqviparant animos vbi molior ardva vires’); ‘Commanding the wretched I direct power and minds’ (‘tristibvs impervs vimq[ve] animosq[ve] rego’). All Terzio translations are courtesy of Matthew Gorey. For the Hercules references, see Scheicher 1983: 78. 46 For the religious valences of beards in the Spanish context, see Horowitz 1997. For the Italian context, see Biow 2015. I thank Matthew Gorey and Jesús Escobar for sharing their insights into these prints. 47 Special thanks to Stuart Lingo for this insight.

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Fig. 9.6 Portrait of Philip II of Spain, from Francesco Terzio, Austriacae gentis imaginum (Innsbruck: Gaspar Patavinus, 1569–73), vol. 4, unpaginated, Wing oversize ZP 539.O815, Newberry Library, Chicago.

spiritual victories. The combination of armour with clothing, besides being typical of mid-sixteenth-century portraits of leaders, also references the ancient Ciceronian trope of being ready for both kinds of battleground—the forum and the field. 48 The legends above Philip and the Hercules figures help to clarify that this is a Christlike allegorical Hercules-Philip, a holy protector and bringer of light. 49 Typically, portraits show the subject as part of the flow of history, while the framing elements are mythical or allegorical; here, however, the energetic activity of the two 48 On this visual trope, see Marchand 2004: 8. 49 ‘Yield, old demigods; here is one even more holy’ (‘CEDITE SEMIDEI VETERES, ET SANCTIOR HIC EST’); ‘He subdues even worse monsters with his hand as protector’ (‘ET PEIORA DOMAT VINDICE MONSTRA MANV’); ‘Now he will illuminate all things’ (‘IAM ILLVSTRABIT OMNIA’).

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Hercules figures brings the frame into the realm of history, while also suggesting that Philip is part of the timeless myth of Hercules.50 Philip paid great attention to his role as unifier of the spiritual and political realms, and to the mythological Habsburg genealogy on which much of his claim to power depended.51 Yet the unusual visual choices here remind us that most allegories—even of Christlike virtues like charity and chastity—were conveyed by female figures whose beautiful surface was designed to attract, rather than serve as a model for action. In fact, the frames of the two plaques on either side of Philip’s head emphasise precisely this problem, as they comprise voluptuous, naked female figures that blend into the decorative scrollwork. The seductive female body here intrudes even into the hyper-masculine allegory of Christlike Hercules for the ‘Catholic king’. Turning now to Terzio’s plates of women, the decoration around the female consorts is strikingly plain, especially when compared with the elaborate allegorical framing of many of the men’s images in the other volumes of the collection. Considering that portrait-book frames in this period (including Terzio’s) so frequently include decorative female figures, it seems that the minimal decoration of the women’s plates derives partly from the fact that the female subjects could too easily be confused with ornamental female allegories or caryatids. Moreover, the seductive presence of scantily clad allegorical women’s bodies could belie the remote chastity claimed for the female subjects. Yet as Cornetti shows in her discussion of Giacomo Franco’s engraving of Laura (in this volume), it was not unthinkable to surround a woman’s portrait with female allegories. In Terzio’s collection, the general lack of allegorical figures for the female subjects impoverishes these portraits by implying that there is nothing to allegorise: the consorts are merely women. By contrast with the major male rulers who occupy much of Terzio’s history, there is a visually simpler plate for Empress Maria, dedicatee of the final volume, which focuses on women rulers (Fig. 9.7). The empress appears crowned, in a contemporary gown with precise high-fashion detailing (ruff at neck and wrists, tight bodice, tight slashed undersleeves, braiding at shoulders and waist, embroidered decoration down the centre of the bell-shaped skirt and at the hem). For the first time in the five volumes, the subject is framed by animal rather than human allegories: on the right beneath a rainbow, the peacock, symbol of Juno (in the Tree of Life); and on the left, an eagle facing the sun, suggesting the continuity of the Spanish line that claimed Saint John’s eagle as heraldic symbol.52 This eagle has five chicks in her nest, appropriate to the encomiastic emphasis on dynasty and legitimacy. Yet both 50 I thank Stuart Lingo for this insight. 51 See Tanner 1993: 131–45. 52 I thank Suzanne Karr Schmidt for insights into the iconography. See also Scheicher 1983: 80–81.

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Fig. 9.7 Portrait of Empress Maria, from Francesco Terzio, Austriacae gentis imaginum (Innsbruck: Gaspar Patavinus, 1569–73), vol. 5, unpaginated, Wing oversize ZP 539.O815, Newberry Library, Chicago.

the peacock, often associated with evangelical chastity and Christian resurrection, and the eagle (emblematic of Christian purity and devotion, as well as the Roman empire), were somewhat multivalent signifiers: given the right context, they could also be taken as representing pride and carnal desires.53 To counteract any ambiguity, the accompanying texts spell out the meaning of the imagery: the plaque above Maria’s crowned head bears a legend reading ‘This is the honor of piety’ (‘hic pietate honos’). The motto above the eagle declares ‘With Phoebus as judge, the tawny bird of Jupiter casts out nothing from here’ (‘ivdice fvlva iovis phaebo hinc nihil eiicit ales’). The eagle who guards her chicks under the oversight of Phoebus clearly refers to Maria and her husband: the emperors 53 See Cohen 2008: 72–77 for the peacock and the eagle.

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cultivated the image of themselves as Apollo/Phoebus.54 Additionally, the eagle was traditionally held to be the only animal able to look directly at the sun, which symbolised both the Christian God and Apollo.55 The tag on the right further insists: ‘Favourable Juno blesses me with offspring and sceptres’ (‘me prole et sceptris ivno secvnda beat’). Taken together as an elegiac couplet, the lefthand-side hexameter and right-hand-side pentameter emphasise the empress’s chaste motherhood and both the Christian empire and the ancient empire that preceded and heralded it. The print for Empress Maria is the only one in Terzio’s collection to offer an allegorical frame for a woman’s portrait. The following prints group women in pairs, in an imposing classicising architectural frame but with minimal decoration. Below each standing woman is a biography in two vertically divided sections, defining the woman as consort (in verse) and as daughter (in prose)—for example, Elisabeth of Austria is labelled first as wife of Charles IX of France, and then, on the base of the pedestal on which the two women are standing, as daughter of Emperor Maximilian II. Next to her, Joan of Austria is identified first as wife of John of Portugal, and then as daughter of Charles V. These brief biographies heighten the women’s imagined virtue by situating them, twice over, within the hierarchy of male rulers across Europe. Instead of being surrounded by allegorical figures or grotesques, the women are framed by their own clothing, which represents the height of 1560s fashion: bell-shaped skirts with train, high neck with ruff, tight sleeves with voluminous and elaborate shoulder decoration, braiding, split overskirt with elaborate underskirt. The few grotesques that are visible in the pages about women are animal-like masks attached to the architectonic surface. In the case of Empress Maria (Fig. 9.7), the fictive frieze running along the pedestal includes two masks on either size of the central podium: the inner mask, closer to the female subject, has a modest downcast gaze on a calm but cheerful face, with sixteenth-century ruff and antique (vaguely Egyptian) headdress that scrolls into the garland.56 By contrast, the two outer masks appear to threaten this serene modesty: the ape-like faces appear caught between a grimace and a wide-mouthed howl. In the subsequent pages of female rulers, the architectonic friezes include a wide variety of masks, many of them animated and staring grotesques that are clownish or bestial. Since almost none of these masks is repeated, we can infer that they were carefully selected rather than repeated at random. While it is impossible to infer their precise meaning, the repeated insistence on masks highlights that this kind of volume offers a set 54 For the mythology linking the imperial line with Apollo (or Phoebus), see Tanner 1993. 55 I thank the volume editors for this insight. 56 I am grateful to Stuart Lingo for drawing my attention to these masks.

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of poses. The poses offered in each print essentially present the idea of rulership on a stage to a viewing audience. The female rulers, whose faces often appear very similar, are presented in specific costumes that differentiate them from the classicising allegories decorating the men’s portraits. While the contemporary women are dressed in high fashion, many of their ancestors’ costumes closely resemble their statues in the Innsbruck Hofkirche. For example, Bianca Maria Sforza (indicated as third wife of Maximilian I and daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza) wears clothes reminiscent of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century (especially the simple mesh cap and tight split sleeves). She is paired with Mary of Burgundy (labelled as wife of Maximilian I and daughter of Charles the Bold), whose clothes (in particular, the tall conical hat with trailing veil) recall fifteenth-century Burgundy. Both of these images are closely based on the Hofkirche bronzes, even such details as Mary’s belt and the looping of Bianca Maria’s hair into a net.57 Lacking allegorical ornament, and with their faces dwarfed by the clothing on their bodies and the architectural surrounds, these female figures are differentiated from each other by their clothes. The detailed clothing contrasts with the simple architectural surround and draws attention away from the face, in the same way that Vico’s elaborate frames draw the reader’s eye away from the portrait medallion. Yet many of Terzio’s women (including Empress Maria, Margaret of Austria, Joanna of Castile, Johanna of Austria, and Mary I of England) at various times ruled in their own right, holding legitimate political power. They are more closely aligned than one might expect with Fulvia—who dangerously ‘commanded a commander’—and with the hated English queen, Elizabeth I. It was thus technically easier and less politically fraught to focus visual attention on the women’s clothing rather than on any specific attributes of character, political power, or even lineage. In a sense, then, Terzio’s fifth volume becomes an inventory of recent royal dress and a contemporary costume book for the aspirational elite, rather than a set of visually available exemplary women.

Conclusion Print portraits of elite women from recent history, even in high-quality presentation volumes like Terzio’s, were fraught. The woman must be beautiful but not alluring; and even her beauty could be suspect if it was not presented in such a way as to promote the idea of chastity and to exclude any suspicion of public availability. Here was the crux of the problem: the Petrarchan ideal of the beautiful, unattainable 57 See images in Egg 1974: pl. 27, 32, 33.

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woman was defeated by the print medium, because these images were so widely circulated and tactile. The autonomous painted portrait, viewed primarily by the patron’s immediate circle, had helped to popularise Petrarch’s metaphor of carrying the beloved’s image in one’s heart. By contrast, women’s images in books were publicly, visibly available to be bought, sold, endlessly reproduced, and touched by the hands of any man who could hold a book. Since most book-buyers were men, printmakers must appeal to their male audience by offering beautiful women—but evidently, not too many of the same kind of beauty; and not too many beautiful women who challenged men’s political power. Yet one positive aspect of the publicly visible female figure was that she could be appreciated and analysed in terms of her surface, precisely as the Lucretian aesthetic had proposed. In this context, we can more easily understand the embrace of alluring female allegories and grotesques in frames, as well as Terzio’s emphasis on historically precise clothing for his women, Vico’s embrace of costume images, and the subsequent burgeoning of the costume book genre, which was one way of categorising humans as types frozen in time, rather than as agents of history. Unlike the portrait, which for Petrarch must strive to be an icon pointing beyond the living woman to her virtue, costume prints celebrate the surface as surface.

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About the Author Susan Gaylard is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and affiliate faculty in Art History at the University of Washington, Seattle. She studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa before completing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection of literary, material, and political culture, from Petrarch’s coin-collecting to the collections of Dolce e Gabbana. Her book, Hollow Men: Writing, Objects, and Public Image in Renaissance Italy (2013), analyses texts and artefacts from the fourteenth century to the 1590s, to show that theories of emulating classical heroes generated a deep skepticism about representation, contributing to the separation of the image from reality. She is currently completing Beautiful Monsters, a pan-European project exploring the development of images of women in sixteenth-century printed books.



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Index

Acciaiuoli Salvetti, Maddalena (Maddalena Salvetti Acciaioli) 182, 208, 241 Aelia Paetina 9, 226–27 Agnes of Poitou (Empress consort) 223 Agrippina 9, 216, 225–26 Aikema, Bernard 115–16, 120–21, 123–24, 241 Alberti, Francesco d’Altobianco 115 Alberti, Leon Battista 45–47, 58, 112–13, 123, 135–37, 241 Albizzi Tornabuoni, Giovanna degli 26 Albrecht-Bott, Marianne 183, 186, 189, 208, 241 Alexander the Great 137, 140, 187, 194 Alighieri, Dante 18, 32, 38, 41, 55, 65, 80, 82, 87, 109, 145, 154, 158–60, 172, 175–76, 178, 211, 241, 253–54, 257, 264, 266 Allegri, Antonio see Correggio Allori, Alessandro 134, 154, 252 Altichiero (Altichiero da Zevio / Altichiero da Verona) 17 Amadi, Antonio Maria 86 Ambrose, Saint 16 Amore (personification of) 75, 95, 98, 102, 104, 168, 187, 190, 256 Anderson, Jaynie 116, 120, 123, 241 Andrea del Sarto (Andrea d’Agnolo, alias) 132, 152, 245 Andreani, Veronica 182, 208, 241 Andreoli, Ilaria 157, 166, 168, 175, 241 Angeli da Barga, Piero 134 Angelico, Michelangelo 75 Angelieri, Giorgio 158 Angelini, Alessandro 184, 209, 242 Anheim, Étienne 13, 33, 242 Antetomaso, Ebe 110 Antonelli, Roberto 18, 33, 242 Apelles 125, 137, 187–88, 253 Apollo 79, 235, 239, 257 Aretino, Pietro 32, 115, 119, 140, 176, 186–90, 192, 201, 207–10, 242, 252, 254 Ariosto, Ludovico 85–86, 88, 169–70, 176, 253 Aristotle 65 Armstrong, Guyda 41, 158, 176, 242 Arnigio, Bartolomeo 87 Arrigo de’ Simintendi 112 Ascarelli, Fernanda 159, 171, 176, 242 Asclepius 65, 82, 267 Augustine, Saint 14–15, 21, 23, 30–31, 37–38, 45, 118, 252, 255 Autels, Guillaume des 8, 192, 194, 209, 242 Avanzi, Ludovico 166, 168, 178, 260 Bà, Paolo 53–54, 58, 242 Baldi, Bernardino 72–74, 80–82, 242, 246, 250, 258 Balduino, Armando 179, 269

Baldwin, Geoff 13, 33, 242 Ballarin, Alessandro 132, 151, 242 Bambach, Carmen 108, 110–11, 123, 242 Bandello, Matteo 96 Barbara Fiorentina 132, 152, 245 Barbero, Muriel Maria Stella 5, 31–32, 49, 157–58, 181, 209, 212, 242 Barezzi, Barezzo 81, 168, 251 Barolsky, Paul 29, 33, 242 Bartoli, Lorenzo 136, 152, 242 Bartuschat, Johannes 18, 34, 45–46, 58, 243 Batkin, Leonid M. 13, 34, 243 Battiferri degli Ammannati, Laura (Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati) 7, 31, 49, 122, 144–45, 148, 150–55, 182, 199–201, 203–04, 206, 209, 212, 243, 248, 254, 266, 269 Battisti, Eugenio 106, 115–16, 123, 243 Baxandall, Michael 15, 25, 34, 136, 152, 243 Bayer, Andrea 25, 34, 60, 243, 266 Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte Miriam 13, 33–34, 242–43 Bellincioni, Bernardo 109 Bellini, Giovanni 35, 142, 246 Belloni, Gino 159, 161, 164, 176, 243 Belmonte, Laudomia 90 Belmonte, Pietro 90, 93, 95, 100, 103, 243, 264 Belting, Hans 13, 34, 243 Bembo, Pietro 49, 65, 68, 71, 80, 102, 117–19, 142, 144, 176, 178, 188, 243, 254, 260 Benci, Ginevra de’ 34, 98, 244 Bentivoglio, Giovanni 184 Berenson, Bernard 121, 123, 243 Berger, John 28, 34, 243 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 29, 33, 78–79, 155, 242, 262 Bernocchi, Ilaria 3, 5, 13, 40, 105 Bertelli, Luca 159, 171–72 Bertolani, Maria Cecilia 19, 34, 243 Bertoli, Antonio Daniele 18 Bertone, Giorgio 18, 34, 243 Bettarini, Rosanna 40, 61, 117, 125, 261, 268 Bettella, Patrizia 111, 124, 243 Bettini, Maurizio 15, 25, 34, 45, 58, 135, 138–39, 152, 158, 176, 214, 237, 243 Bevilacqua, Niccolò 166, 168, 178, 260 Beyer, Andreas 184, 208–09, 243 Bigordi, Domenico see Ghirlandaio, Domenico Biow, Douglas 14, 231, 237, 243 Blanc, Pierre 178, 263 Boccaccio, Giovanni 85–87, 118–19, 124, 176, 178, 218, 239, 252–54, 264 Boehm, Gottfried 13, 34, 243 Bolland, Andrea 17, 34, 244 Bolzoni, Lina 24–25, 27, 34, 44–47, 49, 58–59, 63, 76, 80, 98, 100, 116, 119, 121–22, 124, 142–45, 152, 183, 188–89, 203, 207–11, 244, 259, 261

272 

Pe tr arch and Six teenth- Century Italian Portr aiture

Bonifazio Veronese 116 Bono, Giulio 113, 124, 244 Bonsio, Bonifazio 143 Bordon, Benedetto 96 Borghini, Vincenzo 133–34, 136–37, 139, 146, 156, 267 Bredekamp, Horst 26, 34, 244 Brennan, T. Corey 218, 237, 244 Brestolini, Lucia 111, 125, 258 Brocardo, Antonio 28, 65–67, 80, 120, 244 Brock, Maurice 129, 151–52, 244 Bronzino, Agnolo (Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, alias) 5, 7, 31, 49, 122, 129–30, 132–34, 138, 142–56, 214, 244, 246–48, 252, 254, 259, 262, 265–66, 269 Brovia, Romana 18, 34, 155, 244, 263 Brown, David A. 26, 34, 244 Brucioli, Alessandro 86 Bruni, Leonardo 17 Bufalini, Giuliano 53 Buonarroti, Michelangelo / Michelagnolo 14, 26, 37–38, 134–35, 139, 147, 153, 155, 212, 214, 248, 252, 258, 262, 267 Burchiello (Domenico di Giovanni, alias) 109–10 Burckhardt, Jacob 13–14, 34, 244 Burke, Peter 13, 34–35, 244 Burroughs, Charles 228, 237, 244 Busi, Giovanni see Cariani, Giovanni Cabei, Giulio Cesare 52–53, 59–60, 103, 244, 264 Caesonia 225 Caggio, Paolo 97, 101, 103, 245, 264 Caldwell, Dorigen 32, 35, 245 Caligula 226 Calvesi, Maurizio 184, 206, 209, 245 Camillo, Giulio 165, 178, 260 Cammelli, Antonio 110 Campbell, C. Jean 21, 35, 245 Campbell, Erin 106, 124, 245 Campbell, Lorne 25, 35, 245 Campbell, Stephen J. 25, 35, 215, 229, 237, 245 Caneva, Caterina 132, 152, 245 Caponsacchi, Pietro 87 Cappello Bentivoglio, Pellegrina 100 Cappello Bianca (Grand Duchess of Tuscany) 182, 206 Capretti, Elena 132, 152, 245 Carampello, Bartolomeo 168 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi, alias) 29, 36, 38–39, 78, 155, 247, 259, 262 Cardona, Maria 86 Cariani, Giovanni (Giovanni Busi, alias) 116, 120, 132, 153, 250 Carrari, Vincenzo 87 Carratù, Tullia 134, 152, 245 Cartari, Vincenzo 175–76, 226, 237, 245 Carucci, Jacopo see Pontormo Caruso, Carlo 208–09, 245 Casini, Tommaso 214, 237, 245

Caspar ab Avibus see Uccello, Gasparo Cassirer, Ernst 13, 35, 245 Cassius Dio 218, 238, 249 Castellier, Jean 95 Castello, Bernardo 50 Castelnuovo, Enrico 25–26, 35, 246 Castelvetro, Lodovico 140 Castiglione, Baldassare 45, 49, 135, 137 Cattaneo, Danese 64 Cecchi, Alessandro 129, 152, 246 Cecco d’Ascoli 112 Cellini, Benvenuto 138, 147, 152, 246 Cenerini, Francesca 218–19, 237, 246 Cennini, Cennino 17, 34–35, 136, 152, 244, 246 Cerboni Baiardi, Giorgio 73, 80, 246 Charles IX (King of France) 8, 195–96, 235 Charles the Bold (Duke of Burgundy) 9, 230–31, 236 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) 219–20, 235 Châtelet, Albert 170, 176, 246 Cherchi, Paolo 95, 101, 246 Chiabrera, Gabriello 64, 80, 246 Christ 53, 86, 125, 134, 231–33, 258 Christiansen, Keith 25, 35, 246 Christina of Lorraine (Grand Duchess of Tuscany) 182–83 Ciccuto, Marcello 18, 25, 35, 246 Cicero 218, 238, 246 Cittadini, Celso 87 Claudius (Roman Emperor) 225–26 Clodius 217–18 Cocco, Mia 29, 35, 246 Cohen, Simona 234, 238, 246 Colasanti, Arduino 24, 35, 246 Cole, Michael W. 134, 153, 251 Collaltino di Collalto 18 Collareta, Marco 134, 152, 247 Colonna, Giovanni 140 Colonna, Vittoria 61, 132, 153, 251, 268 Contini, Gianfranco 19, 32, 35, 80, 241, 247 Conversini, Giovanni 53 Coppens, Christian 159, 162, 177, 258 Coppetta, Francesco 76, 80, 247 Cornetti, Gemma 5, 31–32, 157, 179, 192, 213, 233 Correggio (Antonio Allegri, alias) 132, 153, 249 Correggio, Fulvia da 87 Corsi Ramo, Girolama 49 Cort, Cornelis 174 Costa-Zalessow, Natalia 53, 61, 267 Costamagna, Philippe 151–52, 247 Cox-Rearick, Janet 151, 153, 247 Cox, Virginia 26, 35, 48–51, 54–55, 57, 59, 61, 88, 101, 182, 209, 247, 268 Cranston, Jodi 24, 36, 115–16, 121–22, 124, 247 Crismani, Andrea 77, 80, 247 Crispus (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) 141 Cropper, Elisabeth 24–25, 29, 36, 45–46, 59, 65, 80, 88, 98, 101, 105–06, 124, 164, 176, 183, 209, 214–15, 238, 247

273

Index 

Cunnally, John 214, 216, 220, 238, 247 Curio 217–18 Curtius, Ernst Robert 115 Da Trino, Comin 172, 178, 263 Dal Cengio, Martina 5, 27–28, 31, 46, 63–64, 81, 83, 248 Dal Pozzolo, Enrico Maria 90, 101, 113, 116, 120, 124–25, 132, 153, 248, 255 Dale, Thomas E. A. 13, 36, 248 Daly, Peter M. 209, 249 Damianaki Romano, Chrysa 24, 36, 63, 81, 142, 153, 248 Daniello, Bernardino 7, 161, 163–64, 177, 210, 260 Daniels, Rhiannon 31, 36, 158–59, 162, 176, 248 Davis, Charles 134, 153, 248 De Franceschi, Francesco 80, 166, 242 De Martino, Ernesto 56, 59, 248 Del Tasso, Giovan Battista di Marco 147 Delaune, Etienne 8, 195 Della Casa, Giovanni 119, 142–44, 182, 188, 192 Della Rovere, Francesco Maria (Duke of Urbino) 186 Della Rovere, Girolamo 86, 101, 248 Della Rovere, Guidobaldo II (Duke of Urbino) 129, 151–52, 182, 247 Della Rovere, Virginia Varana 201 Della Stufa, Giulio 148 Dempsey, Charles 36, 249 Dernie, David 226, 238, 249 Desiderio da Settignano 28 Deuchino, Pietro 168, 175, 178, 241, 260 Diana of Ephesus 226 Dillon Wanke, Matilde 63, 81, 249 Diogenes Laertius 112 Dionisotti, Carlo 80, 109, 112, 124, 243, 249 Dolce, Lodovico 87–88, 92–94, 101, 103–04, 165, 178, 246, 249, 260, 264 Domenichi, Lodovico 85, 86, 101, 249 Domenico di Michelino 18 Domenico Veneziano 184 Donati, Lamberto 112, 124, 249 Doni, Anton Francesco 119, 124, 178, 249, 267 Dülberg, Angelica 116, 120–21, 124, 184, 199, 206, 209, 249 Dundas, Judith 191, 209, 249 Dunlop, Anne 15–17, 36, 249 Duperray, Eve 166, 168, 176, 249 Dürer, Albrecht 37, 47, 61, 116, 120, 256, 267 Egg, Erich 230, 236, 238, 249 Eichel-Lojkine, Patricia 214, 238, 249 Ekserdjian, David 132, 153, 249 Eleonora of Toledo (Duchess of Florence and Siena) 138, 151, 153, 155, 181, 199, 203, 247, 265 Elisabeth of Austria 8, 196, 235 Elizabeth I (Queen of England) 178, 236, 269 Ellero, Maria Pia 63, 81, 208, 241, 249 Emilia di Spilimbergo 87

Enenkel, Karl 13, 36, 162, 176, 249 Escobar, Jesús 231 Este, Isabella d’ 86, 237 Este, Lucrezia d’ 86 Europa (divinity) 228 Fabricius Hansen, Maria 229, 238, 253 Fabrizio-Costa, Silvia 112, 124, 250 Facchinetti, Simone 132, 153, 250 Fadda, Elisabetta 132, 153, 249 Falkeid, Unn 32, 36, 176, 250, 254 Falque, Ingrid 32, 36, 250 Fame (personification of) 166, 172, 174, 198 Farnese della Rovere, Vittoria (Duchess of Urbino) 182, 204 Farri, Domenico 166 Faustina the Younger 216 Fausto, Sebastiano 89, 101, 250 Favole, Adriano 56, 59, 250 Fehl, Philipp P. 28, 36, 250 Feliciano da Civitella 86 Feng, Aileen 214, 238, 250 Fenzi, Enrico 18, 36, 250 Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Emperor) 220 Fiamma, Carlo 75–77 Ficino, Marsilio 214 Fido, Franco 176, 253 Filelfo, Francesco 110, 118, 120, 124, 250 Filippo II (King of Macedonia) 137 Filograsso, Irene 73, 81, 250 Filosseno, Marcello 115 Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi, alias) 98, 182, 206, 209, 250 Foster, Kenelm 65, 81, 250 Francesco da Sangallo (Francesco Giamberti, alias) 136 Francesco Vecchio da Carrara 16 Franco, Giacomo 8, 158, 171–72, 174, 177–78, 233, 259, 265 Franco, Veronica 49 Francisco de Hollanda 47, 52, 59, 253 Freccero, John 25, 32, 36, 250 Freedberg, David 47, 59, 251 Freedman, Luba 164, 176, 186, 189, 209, 251 Freuler, Gaudenz 132, 153, 251 Frezza, Guglielmo 26, 36, 251 Fulvia 8, 216–20, 224, 236–37, 244 Fulvio, Andrea 8, 215–20, 227, 238, 251 Gaddi, Giovanni 130 Galansino, Arturo 153, 250 Gallerani, Cecilia 28 Galli, Aldo 63, 81, 251 Gambara, Veronica 49, 186 Gamberini, Diletta 5, 29–30, 45, 59, 88, 105, 127, 134, 153, 251 Gaspar ab Avibus see Uccello, Gasparo Gaudio, Michael 224, 238, 251 Gaylard, Susan 5, 31, 33, 157, 189, 213, 225, 238, 240, 251

274 

Pe tr arch and Six teenth- Century Italian Portr aiture

Gehl, Paul 221 Gelfand, Laura G. 183, 210, 251 Gelli, Giovan Battista 87, 95, 101, 251 Genette, Gérard 158, 176, 182, 210, 252 Genovese, Gianluca 25, 36, 102, 126, 252, 261 Geoffrey Big Tooth (Gotfredo del Gran Dente / Gotfrid mit dem grossen Zan) 8, 221–23 Geremicca, Antonio 5, 29, 31–32, 86, 122, 130, 134, 138, 145–46, 148, 150–51, 153–54, 156, 252 Gessner, Andreas 8–9, 220–21, 239, 254 Gesualdo, Giovanni Andrea 8, 86, 118, 120, 124, 160–61, 163, 177, 193, 210, 252, 260 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 136, 152, 242 Ghirlandaio, Domenico (Domenico Bigordi, alias) 26, 39, 239–40, 257, 265 Giacomo da Lentini 18 Giamberti, Francesco see Francesco da Sangallo Giannetto, Nella 117–19, 124, 252 Giglio, Domenico 8, 163, 193, 210, 260, 263 Gigliucci, Roberto 25, 37, 252 Gill, Meredith J. 23, 37, 252 Giolito, Gabriele 7–8, 32, 36–37, 85, 87–88, 101, 157–60, 162–65, 167–68, 174–78, 211, 248–49, 252–53, 258, 260, 266 Giolito, Giovanni 36, 159, 176–77, 247, 258–59 Giorgione (Giorgio Zorzi, alias) 7, 30, 37, 39, 47, 60–61, 82, 102, 105–06, 113–16, 119–27, 132, 151, 153, 155, 211, 237, 241–45, 248, 250, 254–56, 258–59, 262–63, 265, 267–68 Giotto 15, 18, 34–35, 138, 243, 246 Giovanna of Austria (Johanna of Austria) 87, 236 Giovio, Paolo 29, 32, 37–38, 239, 252, 256–57 Giraldi, Gregorius Lilius 172, 176, 252 Giunta, Claudio 111, 124, 252 Giustinian, Orsatto 64, 81, 252, 256 God (Dio) 15–17, 34, 38, 87, 195, 202–03, 235, 243, 259 Goffman, Erving 14, 37, 252 Gombrich, Ernst H. 46, 59, 107–10, 113, 125, 252–53 Gonzaga, Eleonora (Duchess of Urbino) 186, 208 Gonzaga, Isabella 86 Gonzaga, Lucrezia 91 Gonzaga, Susanna 86 Goodman-Soellner, Elise 24, 37, 253 Gorey, Matthew 218, 231 Grazzini, Antonfrancesco 145 Greenblatt, Stephen 14, 37, 253 Griffio, Alessandro 166, 168, 172 Griffio, Giovanni 166 Grillo, Angelo 50, 183, 210, 253 Groto, Luigi 28, 29, 67–72, 77–79, 81–82, 253, 265 Guarino, Gian Battista 76, 81, 253 Habsburg 229, 233, 239, 262 Hall, James 19, 37, 253 Hampton, Timothy 219, 238, 253 Hand, John Oliver 32, 37, 184, 210–11, 251, 253, 268

Hendler, Sefy 133, 154, 253 Henri I (King of France) 223 Henry II (Henri I King of France) 8, 33, 95, 181, 183, 192, 195–97 Henry III (Emperor) 49, 223 Henry IV (King of France) 171 Hercules 140, 231–33 Hinz, Berthold 201, 210, 253 Holderbaum, James 151, 154, 253 Höltgen, Karl Josef 209, 249 Homer 99, 151 Horace 111, 118 Huss, Bernhard 15, 34, 39, 158, 176, 244, 253, 261 Huttich, Johann 215 Hydra 231 Imberti, Domenico 168 Iogna-Prat, Dominique 13, 33–34, 242–43 Isabella d’Este see Este, Isabella d’ Isabelle of Austria (Queen of France) 195 Jacopo da Strada 33, 213, 215, 219–21, 223–24, 228, 240, 265 Javitch, Daniel 157–58, 176, 253 Jean de Meun 16 Jesus (Gesù) 202 Joanna of Castile 236 Johanna of Austria see Giovanna of Austria John of Portugal 235 John, Saint 233 Jones, Ann Rosalind 48, 59, 224, 239, 253–54 Jossa, Stefano 140, 154, 159, 176, 254 Julius Caesar 140, 218–20, 224 Juno 226, 233, 235 Justice (personification of) 172, 174, 229 Juvenal 99 Karr Schmidt, Suzanne 233 Keller, Diethelm 8, 215, 221–23, 239, 254 Kelso, Ruth 94, 96, 101, 254 Kemp, Martin 26, 37, 110, 125, 248, 254 Kirkham, Victoria 145, 152, 154, 209, 243, 254 Kohl, Jeannette 25, 37, 63, 81, 254 Kolsky, Stephen 214, 239, 254 Koos, Marianne 25, 37, 122, 125, 254 Krauss, Charlotte 177, 255 Krüger, Klaus 210, 255 Kruse, Margot 186, 210, 254 Kwakkelstein, Michael 110, 113, 125, 254 Land, Norman E. 183, 186, 210, 254 Landau, David 169, 177, 255 Landino, Christoforo 175, 241 Lauber, Rossella 116, 119, 125, 255 Lecercle, François 183, 210, 255 Lee, Alexander 18, 21, 37, 44, 59, 214, 239, 255 Lee, Rensselaer W. 135, 154, 255 Lenzi, Lorenzo 7, 31, 122, 129–30, 132–33, 141, 147–48, 150–53, 155, 246, 248, 265

275

Index 

Leonardo da Vinci 7, 26, 28, 30, 34, 37–38, 98, 105–14, 123–26, 151, 210, 242, 244, 248, 249–50, 254, 256–57, 259, 265, 268 Leoni, Gian Battista 63, 81, 255 Leoni, Leone 138, 154, 252 Levy, Allison 2, 46–47, 49–50, 59, 255 Ley, Klaus 158, 177, 255 Lingo, Stuart 213, 227, 231, 233, 235 Little, Charles T. 13, 37, 255 Lo Re, Salvatore 134, 154, 255 Löhr, Wolf-Dietrich 15, 18, 37, 192, 210, 255–56 Lorenzo di Credi 90 Lotte, Brand 32, 37, 256 Lottes, Wolfgang 209, 249 Lotto, Lorenzo 132, 153, 248 Luciani, Sebastiano see Sebastiano del Piombo Lucioli, Francesco 5, 29–30, 60, 85, 88, 92, 94, 98, 101–04, 106, 250, 256, 264 Lucretius 213–15, 237, 245 Lucrezia d’Este see Este, Lucrezia d’ Lüdemann, Peter 114–16, 120–21, 125, 256 Luigini, Federico 88–93, 99, 102–03, 126, 256, 263 Luke, Saint 19–20 Lysippos 137 Maclean, Marie 158, 176, 252 Macola, Novella 24, 25, 37, 132, 145, 151, 154, 256 Madonna see Mary Maffei, Sonia 76, 81, 214, 239, 256 Magno, Celio 64, 81, 256 Maiko, Favaro 176, 253 Maira, Daniel 166, 168, 177, 256 Malatesta, Pandolfo 17 Mancini, Giacomo 87 Manieri Elia, Giulio 113, 124, 244 Manini, Giovanni 88 Mann, Nicholas 13, 37, 39, 164, 177, 211, 240, 256, 261, 266, 269 Marcellino, Valerio 64 Marchand, Eckart 82, 232, 239, 257, 266 Marcozzi, Luca 19, 38, 155, 257, 263 Marcus Antonius 218 Marcus Lepidus 219 Margaret of Austria 236 Marguerite de Bourg 86 Maria of Austria (Holy Roman Empress) 9, 230, 233–36 Marietta, Mirtilla 65–66 Marinelli, Lucrezia 98 Marino, Giovan Battista (Giambattista Marino) 24, 29, 36, 39, 60, 64, 78–82, 126, 155, 178, 208–11, 241, 245, 247–48, 257–59, 261, 263–64, 266 Marino, Michele C. 158, 163, 178 Marius (Gaius Marius) 140 Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius) 216, 218–19 Mars 200 Martelli, Ugolino 26, 151–52, 156, 244 Martellini, Sebastiano 87, 158 Martia 224

Martial (Martialis) 26, 76, 111 Martin, John Jeffries 13–14, 38 Martinengo, Claudia 87 Martini, Luca 133 Martini, Simone 18, 20–21, 35, 37, 43, 59, 73, 129, 138, 142–43, 188, 239, 245–46, 255 Marullo, Michele 76, 81, 257 Mary (Virgin Mary) 15–16, 19–20, 114 Mary I of England (Mary Stuart) 204, 236 Mary of Burgundy 236 Mary Tudor (Queen of Spain) 182, 201 Massys, Quentin 110 Mattingly, Harold 220, 239, 257 Maximilian II (Holy Roman Emperor) 220, 235 Mazzola, Francesco see Parmigianino McClure, George 51, 53, 60, 257 McDonald, Mark 169, 177, 257 Medici, Catherine de’ (Queen of France) 8, 33, 181, 183, 192, 195, 197 Medici, Claudia de’ 87 Medici, Cosimo I de’ 138, 181, 199–200, 203 Medici, Cosimo II de’ 64 Medici, Cristina de’ 87 Medici, Ferdinando I de’ (Grand Duke of Tuscany) 182 Medici, Francesco de’ (Grand Duke of Tuscany) 206 Medici, Giovanni di Cosimo I de’ 247 Medici, Giuliano de’ 26 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 26 Medusa 29, 63–65, 67, 70–72, 77, 78–81 Melion, Walter 226 Meller, Peter 26, 38, 257 Melusina (Melusine) 8, 221–23 Melzi, Francesco 110 Memory (personification of) 174 Menato, Marco 159, 171, 242 Mendelsohn, Leatrice 133, 154, 257 Merisi, Michelangelo see Caravaggio Messalina 226 Metauro 204–05 Metzger, Catherine A. 32, 37, 184 Michiel, Marcantonio 116 Minonzio, Franco 29, 38 Misserino, Niccolò 168 Moevs, Christian 14, 38, 257 Moffitt Peacock, Martha 38, 257 Mommsen, Theodor E. 16, 29, 38, 257 Moncond’huy, Dominique 191, 210, 257 Montefeltro, Federico da (Duke of Urbino) 8, 184–85, 209, 242 Monti, Simone 5, 27–29, 31, 44, 60–61 Moore, Dwayne 23, 38, 258 Morelli, Nicolò 3, 5, 13, 41, 105, 162, 177, 258 Mori, Ascanio 51 Mortimer, Ruth 158, 177, 258 Müller, Rebecca 63, 81, 254 Munari, Alessandra 64, 81, 258 Mundt-Espin, Christine 177, 255

276 

Pe tr arch and Six teenth- Century Italian Portr aiture

Muret, Marc-Antoine de 211, 263 Murtola, Gaspare 78–79, 82, 258 Mussio, Thomas E. 14, 38, 258 Nagler, Georg Kaspar 172, 177, 258 Nappi, Cesare 115 Nenci, Elio 73, 81–82, 250 Nepi Scirè, Giovanna 114, 116, 120, 123, 125, 241, 256, 258 Nero (Roman Emperor) 214, 225 Neumann, Florian 158, 178, 265 Nicolini da Sabbio, Domenico 158, 166, 172 Nicolini da Sabbio, Giovanni Antonio 86, 124, 252 Nicolini da Sabbio, Giovanni Maria 7, 161, 163, 177, 260 Nicolini da Sabbio, Pietro 7, 86, 124, 161, 163, 177 Nolfi, Vincenzo 99, 101–02, 250 Notari, Beatrice de’ 75 Nuovo, Angela 159, 162, 177, 258 Octavian (Augustus, Roman Emperor) 218–19 Oderisi da Gubbio 18 Orsini, Paolo Giordano 201 Orvieto, Paolo 111, 125, 258 Oselli, Gaspar / Osello, Caspar see Uccello, Gasparo Otho (Roman Emperor) 229 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 33, 65, 99, 111–12, 242 Pacioni, Marco 158, 163, 178, 264 Pagani, Valeria 169, 177, 259 Paganini, Alessandro 86 Pallavicino, Angela 87 Pallavicino, Giacoma 86 Palma, Jacopo il Vecchio 116 Panofsky, Erwin 38, 114, 121, 125, 191, 210, 259 Paoli, Marco 116, 120, 125, 182, 201, 210, 259 Paradin, Claude 194, 210, 259 Parker, Deborah 147, 154, 254, 259 Parmigianino (Francesco Mazzola, alias) 36, 59, 101, 105, 124, 132, 153, 155, 209, 238, 247, 249, 267 Parshall, Peter 169, 177, 255 Pasero, Carlo 171–72, 177, 259 Pasquato, Lorenzo 168 Patota, Giuseppe 132, 154, 259 Paulicelli, Eugenia 208, 210, 259 Pederzano, Giovanni Battista 7, 161, 163–65, 170, 177, 260 Pelc, Milan 222, 239, 259 Pelliccioli, Mauro 113 Pentcheva, Bissera V. 20, 38, 259 Pericoli, Niccolò see Tribolo Pericolo, Lorenzo 24, 38, 259 Perkinson, Stephen 13, 17, 38, 214, 216, 239, 259 Perucchi, Giulia 15, 25, 38, 135, 137, 139, 154, 259 Petrucci Nardelli, Franca 147, 152, 226, 239, 244, 261 Pfisterer, Ulrich 105, 123, 126, 261 Pheidias 66 Philip I (King of France) 223 Philip II (King of Spain) 9, 138, 154, 182, 201–03, 231–33, 252

Phoebus 234–35 Piccinini, Chiara 63, 81, 251 Pich, Federica 3, 5, 13, 24–27, 34, 39, 41, 44–46, 48–49, 55, 57–58, 60, 63–64, 80, 82, 88, 102, 105–06, 119, 122, 126, 142–43, 145, 152, 155, 164–65, 178, 183, 186, 192, 208–09, 211, 244, 261 Piero della Francesca 8, 98, 184–85, 189, 206, 208–09, 211, 242, 245, 269 Pinella Spinola, Vittoria 87 Pio Sanseverino, Margherita 93 Plazzotta, Carol 145, 155, 262 Plutarch 218, 239, 262 Poetry (personification of) 174 Poggini, Domenico 134, 153, 251 Poliziano, Agnolo 118 Polyclitus (Policleto) 18–20, 142, 188 Pommier, Édouard 18, 39, 63, 82, 262 Pompey the Great 96 Pontani, Filippo Maria 82, 262 Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci, alias) 129, 136, 147, 155–56, 214, 265 Posèq, Avigdor W. G. 29, 39, 262 Pozzi, Giovanni 24, 39, 44, 60, 65, 82, 88, 91, 102, 106, 119, 122, 126, 142, 155, 183, 211, 262 Pozzo de’ Zorzi, Modesta see Fonte, Moderata Preimesberger, Rudolf 133, 155, 210, 255, 262 Presegni, Comino 168 Procaccioli, Paolo 103, 154, 209, 242, 254, 264 Propertius (Sextus Propertius) 99 Publius Cornelius Scipio 141 Pucci, Paolo 53, 60, 262 Pulci, Luigi 109–10 Puligo (Domenico Ubaldini, alias) 132, 152, 245 Pygmalion (Pigmalione) 17, 20, 52, 65–67, 228 Pyrgoteles 137 Querini, Elisabetta (Elisabetta Querini Massola) 119, 142, 144, 188, 192 Quintus Fabius Maximus 141 Quiviger, François 133, 155, 262 Quondam, Amedeo 24, 39, 44, 60, 88, 91, 96, 103, 106, 126, 262 Radcliffe, Anthony 230, 239, 262 Raphael 116, 155–56, 262 Ravà, Aldo 116, 120, 126, 262 Rieger, Angelica 166, 178, 263 Riley, Kathleen 239, 263 Rinaldi, Cesare 75, 82, 263 Ripa, Cesare 174, 178, 263 Robert of Anjou (King of Naples) 17 Rogers, Mary 24, 39, 48, 57, 60, 88–90, 103, 106, 126, 142, 155, 187, 211, 263 Roman D’Elia, Una 39, 263 Ronsard, Pierre de 192, 210–11, 255, 257, 263 Rosand, David 46–47, 60, 263 Rosen, Valeska von 25, 39, 210–11, 255, 264–65 Rossi, Massimiliano 63, 81, 208, 241, 251 Rossi, Niccolò d’Aristotele de’ see Zoppino, Niccolò

277

Index 

Rossi Sandra 114, 125, 258 Rouillé, Guillaume 86, 102, 166, 168, 170, 215, 221–23, 239, 260, 263 Ruscelli, Girolamo 91, 172, 178, 263 Russell Ascoli, Albert 176, 254 Russo, Emilio 24, 39, 78, 82, 209, 245, 263 Sabina Poppaea 216 Salamanca, Antonio 158, 169-70, 177, 259 Sannazaro, Jacopo 76, 82, 86, 169–70, 263 Sanson, Helena 53, 60, 88, 90, 92, 95–96, 100–01, 103, 243, 249–50, 263–65 Sansovino, Francesco 175, 241 Santagata, Marco 39, 60, 65, 82, 102, 125, 155, 178, 210, 239, 261, 264 Santoro, Marco 158, 163, 178, 264 Sartori, Felicita 18 Sasso, Panfilo 115, 117 Savorgnan, Maria 142, 188 Scaravella Castellier, Ippolita 95 Scheicher, Elisabeth 230–31, 233, 240, 264 Scher, Stephen K. 41, 211, 269 Schneider, Ulrike 189–90, 211, 264 Schuster Cordone, Caroline 110, 126, 264 Sebastiano del Piombo (Sebastiano Luciani, alias) 132 Serafino Aquilano 86 Settis, Salvatore 81, 115–16, 121–22, 126, 256, 265 Sforza, Battista (Duchess of Urbino) 8, 98, 184–85, 208 Sforza, Bianca Maria 236 Sforza, Francesco 184 Sforza, Galeazzo Maria 236 Sforza, Ginevra 184 Shearman, John K. G. 24–25, 39, 44, 46, 49, 60, 183, 211, 265 Simeoni, Gabriele 240, 265 Simoncini, Stefano 130, 155, 265 Simons, Patricia 26, 39, 214, 240, 265 Smarr, Janet L. 48, 60, 265 Solmi, Edmondo 109–10, 126, 265 Sorgue (Sorga) 199–201 Sori, Isabella 90, 97–99, 103, 264–65 Spaggiari, Barbara 67, 81–82, 253, 265 Speck, Reiner 158, 178, 265 Spini, Gherardo 145 Spinola, Alessandro 50–51 Spinola, Livia 27–28, 43–44, 47, 49–54, 57–58 Spronk, Ron 37, 184, 210–11, 251, 253, 268 Squarciafico, Girolamo 118, 124, 250 Stampa, Baldassarre 18 Stampa, Cassandra 182, 198 Stampa, Gaspara 18, 32, 49, 181–82, 189, 192, 195, 198, 203, 206, 208, 211, 241, 264–66 Stefani, Chiara 171, 178, 265 Steigerwald, Jörn 25, 39, 211, 264–65 Strehlke, Carl B. 129, 151, 155, 265 Stroppa, Sabrina 51, 60, 266 Strozzi, Carlo 133

Sturm-Maddox, Sara 32, 40, 266 Suitner, Franco 65, 82, 266 Sydenham, Edward A. 220, 239, 257 Syson, Luke 13, 35, 37, 45, 60, 177, 211, 214, 217, 240, 245, 256, 266, 269 Taddeo, Edoardo 67, 82, 266 Tagliaferro, Giorgio 174, 178, 266 Tanner, Marie 233, 235, 240, 266 Tanturli, Giuliano 143, 150, 155, 266 Tarsi, Maria Chiara 182, 211, 266 Tasso, Bernardo 56, 60, 183, 204–06, 211, 266 Tasso, Torquato 50–51, 60, 81, 104, 249, 265–66, 269 Tebaldeo, Antonio 75, 82, 115, 266 Terrasi, Kye 222 Terzio, Francesco 9, 213, 229–37, 239–40, 262, 264, 266 Terzoli, Maria Antonietta 25, 37–40, 181–82, 198, 200–01, 209, 211, 242, 256, 259, 261, 266 Theseus 229 Thomas de Espinosa 228, 238, 249 Thompson, Wendy 171, 178, 267 Thomson De Grummond, Nancy 47, 61, 267 Timavo 204–05 Titian (Vecellio, Tiziano) 35, 38, 61, 114, 116, 119–20, 123, 125–27, 134, 142–44, 152, 176, 186–89, 209, 241, 245, 251, 259, 262, 267, 269 Tomacelli, Lucrezia 53 Torbido, Francesco 7, 122 Torelli, Ippolita 49 Tornielli Borromeo, Livia 87 Torre, Andrea 25, 36, 40, 60, 81, 102, 126, 208, 248, 252, 258, 261, 267 Torrentino, Lorenzo 134, 155, 267 Tower, Troy 211, 265 Tranquillus (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus) 140–41 Trapp, J. B. 17–18, 23, 25, 40, 158, 170, 178, 192, 211, 267 Tribolo (Niccolò Pericoli, alias) 147 Trismegisto, Ermete 65, 82, 267 Trissino, Gian Giorgio 93, 95, 99, 104, 267 Trotti, Bernardo 94–96, 104, 267 Turina, Francesca 27–28, 43–44, 47, 49, 53–58, 61, 242, 267 Tylus, Jane 211, 265 Ubaldini, Domenico see Puligo Uccello, Gasparo (Caspar ab Avibus / Gaspar ab Avibus / Caspar Osello / Gaspar Oselli) 230, 240, 266 Ugo da San Vittore 115 Urania (personification of) 172, 174 Vaccaro, Mary 132, 155, 267 Vaganay, Hugues 211, 263 Valeriano, Pierio 173–74, 178, 267 Valerini, Adriano 64, 82, 267 Valerius Maximus 96 Valgrisi, Vincenzo 9, 161, 163, 225, 227, 240, 268 Van Eck, Caroline 78, 82, 267

278 

Pe tr arch and Six teenth- Century Italian Portr aiture

Var 204–05 Varana, Giulia 201 Varana, Virginia 201 Varchi, Benedetto 31, 59, 129–131, 133–56, 245–48, 251–52, 255, 257, 262, 267–68 Vasari, Giorgio 21–22, 26, 28, 35, 40, 47, 61, 134, 136, 147, 153, 156, 245, 248, 267–68 Vatteroni, Selene Maria 59, 133, 156, 251, 268 Vecce, Carlo 107, 110–13, 126, 268 Vecellio, Tiziano see Titian Velden, Hugo van der 191, 211, 268 Velleius Paterculus 218–19, 240, 268 Vellutello, Alessandro 7, 36, 159–60, 163–64, 174–77, 241, 248, 259–60 Vendramin, Gabriele (Gabriel Vendramin) 115–17, 119–20, 123, 125–27, 241, 259, 262, 269 Venier, Domenico 67 Verrocchio (Andrea di Michele di Francesco di Cione, alias) 28 Versiero, Marco 107, 111–12, 126, 268 Vescovo, Piermario 115–16, 119–20, 126–27, 268 Vettori, Pier 134 Vianey, Joseph 211, 263 Vickers, Nancy 36, 59, 80,101, 124, 176, 224, 240, 247, 268 Vico, Enea 9, 33, 171, 213, 223–28, 236–37, 240, 268 Vieri, Francesco de’ 100–01, 248 Villard de Honnecourt 16 Vinciguerra di Collalto 18 Vindelinus de Spira (Vindelino da Spira) 110

Visconti, Bianca Maria 184 Vittoria, Alessandro 64 Vivarini, Alvise 116 Vives, Juan Luis 92 Volpi, Caterina 47, 61, 268 Volta, Nicole 51, 60, 266 Walker Bynum, Caroline 14, 40, 268 Warnke, Martin 184, 211, 269 Whistler, Catherine 116, 119, 127, 269 Wildmoser, Rudolf 151, 156, 269 Wilkins, Ernest Hatch 18, 40, 176, 242, 269 Wilson, Bronwen 224, 240, 269 Wilson, Jean 172, 178, 269 Woods-Marsden, Joanna 184, 211, 269 Yavneh, Naomi 89, 104, 269 Zaffini, Chiara 201, 212, 269 Zak, Gur 14, 40, 269 Zaltieri, Marc’Antonio 168 Zambon, Francesco 162, 179, 269 Zanetti, Matteo 168 Zappella, Giuseppina 158, 172, 179, 269 Zemanek, Evi 24, 40, 183, 212, 269 Zöllner, Frank 26, 40, 269 Zoppini, Agostino 166 Zoppini, Fabio 166 Zoppino, Niccolò (Niccolò d’Aristotele de’ Rossi, alias) 158