Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F.W. Kent (Europa Sacra) 9782503552767, 2503552765

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Studies on Florence and the I talian R enaissance in H onour of F. W. K ent

EUROPA SACRA Editorial Board under the auspices of Monash University General Editor Peter Howard, Monash University Editorial Board Megan Cassidy-Welch, Monash University David Garrioch, Monash University Thomas Izbicki, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Carolyn James, Monash University Constant J. Mews, Monash University M. Michèle Mulchahey, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto Adriano Prosperi, Scuola Normale di Pisa

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Volume 20

Studies on Florence and the I talian R enaissance in H onour of F. W. K ent

Edited by

Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2016, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2016/0095/34 ISBN: 978-2-503-55276-7 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-55822-6 DOI: 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.106021 Printed on acid-free paper

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Foreword xv Acknowledgements xvi ‘A Paradise Inhabited by Devils’: Bill Kent and his Florentine Renaissance Peter Howard

1

Part I. Power and Agency in Medicean Florence Between the Palace and the Piazza: Locating Power and Agency in Bill Kent’s Florence Alison Brown

‘La cara e buona imagine paterna di voi’: Ideal Images of Patriarchs and Patrons as Models for the Right Ordering of Renaissance Florence Dale Kent

Asserting Presence: Strategies of Medici Patronage in Renaissance Florence John T. Paoletti

The Magnificent Arbitrator: Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Patrician Families in Florence Lorenzo Fabbri

35

53 73

95

Contents

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Carried Away: Lorenzo’s Triumphs of 1491 Nerida Newbigin

‘With his authority she used to manage much business’: The Career of Signora Maria Salviati and Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici Natalie Tomas

115

133

Part II. Family, Friends, Networks Mercantile and Other Friendships in Early Renaissance Tuscany Carolyn James

Michelangelo’s Brothers ‘at my shoulders’ William E. Wallace

Transmission of Intangible Goods in Vasari: Talent, Names, Kinship Christiane Klapisch-Zuber

Protecting Dowries in Law in Renaissance Florence Thomas Kuehn

Commissioni and Commessi in Florence: A Preliminary Assessment of the Introduction, Diffusion, and Role of Annuities in Florence, c. 1400–1580 Lorenzo Polizzotto

‘Grande passatenpo honesto’: Filippo Strozzi’s Garden at Naples Amanda Lillie

Florentine Exiles and Venetian Patricians: The Soderini Family and the Forging of New Ties Ersie Burke

151 169 181 199

217 235

257

Contents

vii

Part III. Spirituality and Patronage Begging for Favours: The ‘New’ Clares of S. Chiara Novella and their Patrons Sharon T. Strocchia

’Tis Better to Give than to Receive: Client–Patronage Exchange and its Architectural Implications at Florentine Convents Saundra Weddle

Saint Peter, the Carmelites, and the Triumph of Anghiari: The Changing Context of the Brancacci Chapel in Mid-Fifteenth-Century Florence Nicholas A. Eckstein

Rural Pilgrims and Tuscan Miracle Cults Cecilia Hewlett

The Tailor’s Song: Notes from the Savonarolan Under­ground in Grand-Ducal Florence David Rosenthal

Authority and Punishment in the Letters of Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena Clare Monagle

Catherine of Siena, Florence, and Dominican Renewal: Preaching through Letters Constant J. Mews

‘With open doors’ in the Tor de’ Specchi: The Chiesa Vecchia Frescoes and the Monks of Santa Maria Nova Cynthia Troup

277

295

317 339

359

373

387

405

Contents

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Part IV. Consuming Culture Leonardo Bruni and the Rise of Official Historiography in Renaissance Florence Gary Ianziti

Interpretation and Translation: Leonardo Bruni and the Art of Translation in Quattrocento Florence Andrea Rizzi

Ser Giovanni di Francesco, Forger of Coins and Man of ‘Ingegno’ Lorenz Böninger

Curbing ‘Ambitions of the Throat’: Alimentary Sumptuary Law in Early Modern Italy Catherine Kovesi

The One about Michelangelo and the Onions: Jokes and Cultural Anxiety in the Early Sixteenth Century Jill Burke

The Publications of Francis William Kent

431

449 465

479

495

517

Illustrations

Dale Kent Figure 3.1. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Francesco Sassetti and his Son Teodoro, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, c. 1487? . . . . . . . . 55 Figure 3.2. Lorenzo Ghiberti, The Sacrifice of Isaac, bronze relief, partly gilded, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 1401. . . . . . . . . . . 58 Figure 3.3. Filippo Brunelleschi, The Sacrifice of Isaac, bronze relief, partly gilded, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 1401. . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Figure 3.4. Lorenzo Ghiberti, Story of Abraham panel, ‘Gates of Paradise’, bronze, gilded, Florence, Baptistery (San Giovanni), 1425–52. . . . . . . . . . 63 Figure 3.5. Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello, Florence, Old Sacristy, San Lorenzo, south wall. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 John T. Paoletti Figure 4.1. Reconstruction after Giuseppe Marchini of the altar area of San Marco as renovated by Cosimo de’ Medici after 1436. . . . . . . . . . . 75 Figure 4.2. Roof beams of San Marco. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Figure 4.3. Anonymous Florentine, Medal of Cosimo de’ Medici Pater Patriae, bronze, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello. . . . . . . . . . 77

x

LIST OF LLUSTRATIONS

Figure 4.4. Florence, San Marco, exterior view of convent at the corner of the Via La Pira and the Piazza San Marco with the Medici stemma. . . . . . 78 Figure 4.5. Florence, Canto degli Alberti. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Figure 4.6. Florence, corner of the Borgo la Croce and the Via dei Macci, Marker of the Red City. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Figure 4.7. Florence, Santa Croce, entrance portal to the novices’ quarters from the southern transept of the church. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Figure 4.8. Florence, Santa Croce, corridor leading from the church to the novices’ chapel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Figure 4.9. Florence, Santa Croce, novices’ chapel, Michelozzo, architect. . . 81 Figure 4.10. Florence, Santa Croce, courtyard of the novices’ wing. . . . . . . . . 82 Figure 4.11. Florence, Santa Croce, novices’ wing, exterior south-facing wall. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Figure 4.12. Florence, SS. Annunziata, tabernacle housing the miraculous image of the Annunciation, Michelozzo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Figure 4.13. Florence, San Miniato, tabernacle built to house the miraculous crucifix of St John Gaulbert, Michelozzo and Luca della Robbia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Figure 4.14. Florence Palazzo Rucellai, detail of façade showing Medici devices above the main entrance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Figure 4.15. Florence, Medici Palace, Chapel, wall of the mature Magus, detail of three young girls. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Figure 4.16. Florence, Santa Maria Novella, main portal showing variants of Medici devices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Amanda Lillie Figure 13.1. Benedetto da Maiano, Portrait bust of Filippo Strozzi (1475), terracotta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Figure 13.2. Anonymous artist (attributed to Francesco Rosselli), the Aragonese Fleet returning from the Battle of Ischia on 6 July 1465, Naples, Museo di San Martino. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Figure 13.3. Anonymous artist (attributed to Francesco Rosselli), the Aragonese Fleet returning from the Battle of Ischia on 6 July 1465, Naples, Museo di San Martino. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Figure 13.4. Viviano Codazzi and Domenico Gargiulo, Festivities at the Villa of Poggio Reale, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon, c. 1641. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 Ersie Burke Figure 14.1. The tomb of Francesco and Niccolò Soderini, Santa Maria dei Miracoli. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Figure 14.2. The Soderini coat of arms. Litta, Famiglie Celebri Italiane, ix, disp. 141. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Saundra Weddle Figure 16.1. Plan of convent of Santissima Annunziata delle Murate, Florence. Ground floor, highlighting parlour and church. . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 Figure 16.2. Plan of Santissima Annunziata delle Murate, Florence. Ground floor, highlighting circulation to refectory and chapter room. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Figure 16.3. Axonometric view of convent of Santa Caterina di San Gaggio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

xii

LIST OF LLUSTRATIONS

Figure 16.4. Detail, San Pier Maggiore, Nova pvlcherrimaae civitatis Florentiaae topographia accuratissime delineata, Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, late seventeenth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Figure 16.5. Section drawing of San Pier Maggiore, Florence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 Figure 16.6. Plan of convent of San Pier Maggiore, Florence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Figure 16.7. Loggia of convent of San Pier Maggiore, Florence. . . . . . . . . . . 312 Nicholas A. Eckstein Figure 17.1. Brancacci Chapel, general view, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318 Figure 17.2. Brancacci Chapel, view of left wall, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328 Figure 17.3. Brancacci Chapel, view of right wall, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 Figure 17.4. Masaccio, right leg of an executioner, from Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1425–26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332 Figure 17.5. Masaccio, torso of an executioner from Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1425–26. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332 Figure 17.6. Masaccio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1426, predella scene from Pisa Altarpiece, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 Cecilia Hewlett Figure 18.1. Santa Maria dell’Impruneta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 Figure 18.2. Jacques Callot, The Fair at Impruneta, 1620. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346 Figure 18.3. Madonna col bambino. Impruneta, S. Maria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 Figure 18.4. Santa Maria delle Carceri. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Figure 18.5. Miraculous image of Santa Maria delle Carceri. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Figure 18.6. Miraculous image of Santa Maria delle Carceri, detail. . . . . . . . 354 Cynthia Troup Figure 22.1. Altar wall frescoes attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his work­shop, or his circle, 1468; chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406–07 Figure 22.2. Obsequies to Francesa, fresco attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his workshop, or his circle, 1468; entry wall of the chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Figure 22.3. Oblation at Santa Maria Nova, fresco attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his workshop, or his circle, 1468; altar wall of the chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417 Figure 22.4. Oblation and communion in heaven, fresco attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his workshop, or his circle, 1468; altar wall of the chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 Jill Burke Figure 27.1. Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, and Raffaellino del Colle, Donation of Constantine, Sala di Costantino, Vatican, detail of Giulio Romano. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 504 Figure 27.2. Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, and Raffaellino del Colle, Leo X as Clement I between Comitas and Moderatio, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 506 Figure 27.3. Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, and Raffaellino del Colle, Vision of the Cross, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. . . 507 Figure 27.4. Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, and Raffaellino del Colle, Vision of the Cross, Sala di Costantino, Vatican, detail of dwarf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508

Francis William Kent Photo: Jacqueline Mitelman

Foreword

T

his volume of essays is a most fitting tribute to F. W. (Bill) Kent, a quite extraordinary individual whose scholarship made an immeasurable contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Florence. The series in which this volume appears is one of the many ways in which he contributed to this field. That the logo of the Faculty of Arts of Monash University appears beside that of Brepols on the cover of the Europa Sacra series is due in large measure to Professor Kent’s energy and commitment, both to scholarship and to that scholarship’s accessibility to a broader community, both scholarly and lay. Bill Kent initiated the 2006 agreement between the Faculty of Arts and Brepols and was the founding general editor. During a career spanning some forty years, Bill Kent established Monash University’s international reputation as a centre for the study of Renaissance history. A popular teacher, he inspired several generations of students, some of whom have contributed essays to this volume. He also established the faculty’s first overseas field study credit course, ‘The Renaissance in Florence’, a programme that is still going strong after twenty years. Towards the end of his life he was the driving force behind the establishment of the Prato Consortium for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, based at the Monash University Prato Centre, just outside of Florence. The Prato Consortium continues to promote research collaboration between Australian, European, and American scholars. Like the Renaissance humanists he often read, Professor Kent believed that libraries and their books are fundamental repositories of learning. His role as editor-in-chief of the letters of Lorenzo de’ Medici is one example of his commitment to providing resources for Renaissance scholars. So too is the Bill Kent Library at Monash’s Prato Centre, which was founded in 2010 with books he secured from the Warburg Institute, London, and the library of Nicolai and Ruth Rubinstein. This current volume, with its wide-ranging consideration of many themes that preoccupied Kent’s own research, will find a ready home there and make a most worthy, appropriate addition to the Europa Sacra series. It will be appreciated by both scholars and students of Renaissance Italy and early modern Europe more generally. Professor Raelene Frances Dean, Faculty of Arts, Monash University

Acknowledgements

V

ersions of some of the essays in this volume were first presented at the 2012 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America under the sponsorship of the Prato Consortium for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, with funding from the Centre for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University. Much of the work of coordinating the process of preparing the manuscript of the volume and following up on various administrative matters fell to Narelle McAuliffe at the Monash University Prato Centre. The editors would like to thank her in particular. Special thanks are due, too, to Guy Carney, publishing manager at Brepols, as well as to his predecessor, Simon Forde, for their support of the project. All involved owe special gratitude to the anonymous reviewer appointed by the editorial board of Europa Sacra and to Professor David Garrioch who shepherded the volume to completion. The editors would also like to acknowledge the enthusiasm with which the contributing authors responded to the invitation to participate in this project and the energy that they have maintained throughout its development. It has been our great pleasure to collaborate with them on this volume, which seeks to honour the intellectual generosity and friendship that Bill Kent extended to us all.

‘A Paradise Inhabited by Devils’: Bill Kent and his Florentine Renaissance Peter Howard

F

rancis William (‘Bill’) Kent (1942–2010) was, from the outset of his career, at the forefront of the study of the society of Renaissance Florence. In the late 1970s — ‘vintage years of renaissance studies’ — he was credited, even then, by Peter Burke, as one of those giving ‘the history of Florence a new look’.1 Kent’s first monograph argued for the continuing importance of the 1 

Burke, ‘Renaissance Studies’, p. 975. Burke’s pantheon is ‘Brucker, the Kents, Herlihy and Klapisch’. For obituaries of F. W. Kent, see Davison, ‘Obituary: Francis William Kent’, p. 23; Lack, ‘From Foot-is-cry to Firenze’; Mews, ‘Obituary: Francis William (Bill) Kent (1942– 2010)’. What follows has benefited from access to Kent’s personnel file at Monash University (the various unpublished items cited below are from this file, available through the Monash University Archive), from the transcript of Graeme Davison’s and Kate Murphy’s interview with F. W. Kent, and from the reminiscences of colleagues and friends, locally and across the globe, at the time of his death. I am grateful to Cecilia Hewlett, Graeme Davison, Jane Drakard, Richard Goldthwaite, Carolyn James, Ros Pesman, and Brepols’s peer reviewer for reading this chapter in draft, and for providing perceptive and helpful comments. Peter Howard ([email protected]) is Director of the Centre for Medi­e val and Renaissance Studies at Monash University. He teaches courses related to the history of Christianity, the Florentine Renaissance, and Europe more generally. He has published widely in the areas of Italian Renaissance history and Medi­e val sermon studies, including Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence (Toronto, 2012) and Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus (Firenze, 1995). He is currently completing Theologies of the Piazza: Religion and Experience in Renaissance Florence. He was introduced to Renaissance history by Bill Kent and went on to be supervised by him as an honours and then postgraduate student before eventually becoming a colleague.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 1–32 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109696

2 Peter Howard

clan well into the fifteenth century, against the historiographical orthodoxy of the day which favoured fragmentation and the ‘theory of the progressive nuclearization’ of the medieval extended family.2 This innovative study led to a further large-scale and ground-breaking project (begun in 1974 with Dale V. Kent) examining the continuing importance of Florentine neighbourhoods and how alliances within them served a vital political function well into the fifteenth century.3 In a series of articles, book chapters, and publication notes he further elaborated an innovative view of the social structure of Renaissance Florence through an exploration of patronage as a political and social system, along with studies which sought to provide a stronger context for explaining the precocity of art, architecture, and letters with which the term ‘Renaissance’ itself is today synonymous. More recently he became best known for his novel approach to one of Renaissance Florence’s ‘Big Men’ (gran maestri), Lorenzo de’ Medici, whom he came to characterize as ‘boss of the shop’ (maestro della bottega). As the title of this chapter suggests, the central issue in all Kent’s work was the nature and characterization of Florentine society and the interaction of its inhabitants. For Kent, the complexities of Renaissance Florence habitually evoked a compelling image: ‘[U]no paradiso habitato da diavoli’. The quotation is drawn from a letter (1465) of Agnolo Acciaiuoli — one of Cosimo de’ Medici’s earliest friends and partisans, though later disaffected — and it recurs as a leitmotif in Kent’s writings, often referring to the Medici as ‘devils’ but also more generally serving as a rhetorical counter to any idea of a golden age under Medici aegis.4 From very early on, it seems, Kent set his mind to 2 

Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence. The phrase is David Herlihy’s quoted by Kent, ‘A La Recherche du Clan Perdu’, p. 77. That same article shows just how aware Kent was of the strength of argument that he was countering, with ‘a much more sophisticated, precise, and convincing formulation’ (ibid.) in the work of Goldthwaite and Becker. For a discussion of ‘individualism’ derived from various readings of a Burckhardtian Renaissance, see Connell, ‘Introduction’, esp. pp. 1–7. See Kent, ‘Individuals and Families as Patrons of Culture in Quattrocento Florence’, p. 188, where he refers to a ‘heightened individualism’, while ‘detaching the word from its Burckhardtian roots’. 3  A study ‘breaking new ground’, see letter of Nicolai Rubinstein to A. G. L. Shaw, Head of the Department of History (Monash University), 3 February 1979; Kent, ‘Curriculum Vitae (26 February 1979)’. 4  ASF, Carte Strozziane III serie, n. 178, c. 14r: ‘Spectabilis frater honorabilis: Io ho la tua de 15 d’ottobre per la quale intendo la venuta di piero così da fare. Intendo la ragione. Io fu facto tornare da Carlo molto in fretta: e delle cose publiche non ti posso dire alcuna cosa honorevole a questa città: utile potrebbe essere. Io vorrei poter operare più ch’io non posso per il bene della città: la quale, e, uno paradiso habitato da diavoli: che habbi patientia alle tua vogle

‘A Paradise Inhabited by Devils’

3

understand the nature of what he increasingly perceived as a complex society that was still to receive adequate explanation in the historiography.5 His earliest published piece on Brunetto Latini reflects this emerging preoccupation, and it is where he began to exhibit the capacity that characterizes all his writings: the ability to weave together multiple voices to represent an understanding of complex social and political relationships. Latini, the Florentine commune’s first chancellor, was not just a ‘chronological tool with which to order our thoughts’; rather, Kent argued, his purpose was to begin to place him within a ‘thirteenthcentury panorama’. This he did in a way that would become characteristic of his work. On the basis of a reading of all available chronicles and related materials such as those by Dante, he delineated the forces at work in Florence in ‘this seminal age’ and created a firm context for understanding Latini.6 The drive to embed notable figures within their contemporary contexts became the foundation of Kent’s method. Across the span of Kent’s active career (which continued until his last days), new thinkers and researchers were emerging, and new ideas and methodologies challenged and reshaped a field which could have been consigned to oblivion as being of mere antiquarian interest. For Bill Kent, Florence in the fifteenth honeste: Tu dubiti che la venuta mia non sia più lunga per queste turbationi della città le quali mi sollecitano al partire: gravami ancora assai che le non sono cosi intese da forestieri come da noi perche sarebbono di meno nostra infamia: Caro mi sarebbe fiero haver trovato colpe così […]. Carissimi anime Florentie 9 Nouembris 1465 […] Angelus Acciarolus’. My thanks to Dott. Maurizio Masi for supplying this transcription; currently the letter does not appear in print. For Kent’s use of the phrase, see Kent and Simons, ‘Renaissance Patronage’, p. 14; Kent, ‘Individuals and Families as Patrons of Culture in Quattrocento Florence’, p. 179; Kent, ‘Palaces, Politics, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, p. 63; Kent, ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”’, p. 198 (here Kent gives the notion its most complete exposition); Kent and James, ‘Renaissance Friendships’, p. 127; Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. 12; Kent, ‘Florence, 1300–1600’, p. 7. In an appendix to his Curriculum Vitae (August 1987), p. 4: ‘To give one historian’s sense of what that context was I have begun writing a short book or “essay” — in fact several linked papers — tentatively entitled “‘A Paradise inhabited by Devils’: Florentine Society in the Renaissance”’. For a succinct account of the historical context to which the quotation relates, see D. Kent, Friendship, Love and Trust in Renaissance Florence, pp. 202–10. 5  He would later refer to André Chastel’s comment, ‘said in another context, that Florence provides the spectacle of a city “où les problèmes sont plus nombreuses que les certitudes”’; see Kent, ‘Ties of Neighbourhood and Patronage in Quattrocento Florence’, p. 82. 6  Kent, ‘Ser Brunetto Latini’, p. 25. My thanks to Natalie Tomas for alerting me to this earliest of Bill Kent’s published work. It is one which he himself did not include in his publication list.

4 Peter Howard

century was a dynamic laboratory with an enduring relevance. In his view, there was a connection between the world he sought to elucidate and the world that he inhabited, despite the chronological distance. The past, for him, was never dead — as he would remind undergraduates. It was neither finished nor finished with. This chapter aims to provide an overview of Kent’s career and contribution to the history of Renaissance Florence, thereby framing the ensuing essays by some of Kent’s friends and collaborators. It situates Kent as part of an energetic generation of Australians who, in the late 1960s, tackled the Florentine archives and engaged key issues confronting historians of that ever-fascinating city. The chapter explores his way of thinking about historical sources, and his particular way of framing issues by interpreting the minutiae gleaned from painstaking combing of archives and their rigorous contextualization. What will emerge is a broadly chronological sense of Kent’s work and the way his ideas developed in relation to his archival research. The task begins, as Kent himself would no doubt have counselled, on a biographical note, linking his intellectual interests and approaches to research and pedagogy with a disposition which thrived on personal networks and generosity.

Bees Buzzing in the Bonnet: The Making of a Renaissance Historian Bill Kent, the undergraduate lecturer and the scholar, agreed with E. H. Carr’s ‘not very abstruse’ idea: that to understand the work of a particular historian, you should study the historian herself or himself and discover ‘what sort of bees are buzzing in his [or her] bonnet’.7 For Kent, social background had an enormous influence on the type of history crafted by historians. How and why did historians light upon their areas of interest? Those reflecting on Bill Kent’s life in the months following his death help to contextualize his preoccupations. His childhood friend and fellow historian John Lack observed: Bill was fascinated by people’s background and their interconnections. His scholarly interest in family and clan, neighbourhood and patronage, originated, I can assure you, in his observations of local society in Footscray and Williamstown. He was one of the few who took seriously local social history, usually dismissed as parish pump stuff. His European friends at Footscray stimulated a fascination with languages and cultures. Bill relished particularly the hospitality of the Paoli, Kuzmcyz and Hangay families. He respected hard-working, labouring parents, 7 

Carr, What Is History?, pp. 22–23.

‘A Paradise Inhabited by Devils’

5

Australian and ‘new Australian’, people who were trying to rebuild their lives after depression and war.8

Kent himself reveals a pattern of interests which arguably underlay his work in a review published in 1985, soon after completing, with Dale Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence, a summary of which he had just prepared as ‘Ties of Neighbourhood’ for the conference on ‘Patronage, Art and Society’ and which was later to become a chapter in an influential book he edited with Patricia Simons.9 He was also in the process of laying the groundwork for his volume on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florence.10 Unusually for him, the review is of a new edition of a novel to which he was clearly drawn because of its subject matter: the neighbourhood where he grew up. As a social historian, he read ‘this bad novel [he tells us …] grateful for that precious sense of place and time’ that the author, William Dick, ‘artlessly conveys’. Kent’s critique is suggestively self-revelatory: This bad novel is impossible to put down if you spent your first twenty-one years in the square half mile of Footscray described by William Dick. His hero, Terry Cooke, lived in Errol Street, a gingshot away across the railway line. Mt Mistake, the Western Oval, the West Footscray railway yards and the rising Sun Hotel formed our shared townscape, boxing and the Scraggers were our common concerns. As it happens, I  never met William Dick-Terry Cooke (it’s inconceivable they are not one), but I recognize him instantly from his photograph; and when I first read his novel, twenty years ago, I wanted badly to ask if his one-eyed pigeon, a stray wounded at the gun club, could have been one of mine, and why Terry didn’t mention my father’s friend Ambrose Palmer, the Footscray fighter par excellence who lived in his street.11

The details here will be lost on any but local readers (so local that you would have to come from the Melbourne suburb of Footscray itself !), but the themes are recognizably those which drove Kent’s work over an entire career. It is all there — the triad of social relations: family, neighbours, and friends. Even the casual reader of selections from Kent’s oeuvre will recognize the importance of ‘shared townscape’ and ‘common concerns’, and his surprise at characters not 8 

Lack, ‘From Foot-is-cry to Firenze’, p. 251. Kent, ‘Ties of Neighbourhood and Patronage in Quattrocento Florence’. 10  His first contract for the biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici, with the University of Cali­ fornia Press, was in 1986. 11  Kent, ‘Review: William Dick, A Bunch of Ratbags’, pp. 117–18. 9 

6 Peter Howard

mentioned by the novel’s author. Kent notes approvingly ‘the evocation of a sense of place’ but laments that it is not matched by the ‘portrait of the people who lived in it’. Kent, in his own research and writing, was keen to balance both. Indeed, as I will be showing, his work was about people and their biographies which gave context and meaning to their lives and utterances. Kent’s reference in the review to working-class autobiographies — reminiscent of the chronicles and family commonplace books of Florentines which were his metier — readily connects with his insistence that there ‘existed a complex and admirable working-class culture and community’, but it was one which should have its own insider’s voice.12 Here we find a Kent who self-consciously focused on certain topics out of personal and humane concern and whose approach to history, as we shall see, meant that he sought to become an insider within the society, insofar as immersion in the private, rather than the public, utterances of the period would allow. Kent’s review of this novel also gives some indication of his focus on the role of patriarchy in the family and in Florentine society more generally.13 It may not be over-extending the evidence of the quotation given above to extract one final observation about the social context which shaped Kent’s thinking — the loss of his father. Kent’s rhetorical reference to ‘his father’s friend Ambrose Palmer’ — that is, his father’s connection to a local ‘big man’ — might seem almost gratuitous but for the fact that his father, himself a legend in Footscray, had died just two days before Kent’s eighth birthday.14 At the very end of the preface to his Household and Lineage Kent wrote: ‘Like some of the family chroniclers mentioned in this book, I was young when my father died’.15 He continues, poignantly adapting the words of the protagonist of what would be his second monographic study, ‘The Making of a Renaissance Patron’: ‘I am content to record my last and oldest debt in the words of one of them: “Puossi dire che noi non chonoscessimo nostro padre: e peró [lei] ci fu madre e ppadre” [You can say that we did not know our father: but she was both mother and

12 

Kent, of course, regarded himself as one such insider, and for many years he gave a guest lecture in Australian History courses about ‘growing up in Footscray’. 13  Cf. Dale Kent, ‘“La cara e buona imagine paterna di voi”: Ideal Images of Patriarchs and Patrons as Models for the Right Ordering of Renaissance Florence’, below. 14  As John Lack observes, ‘In 1950, Bill Kent didn’t just lose a father. He lost a legendary father’: Lack, ‘From Foot-is-cry to Firenze’, p. 248. 15  Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. x.

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father to us]’.16 The ‘one of them’ was Giovanni Rucellai. His father, Paolo, had died ‘when Giovanni was only three’.17 The ‘she’ to whom Rucellai refers is his widowed mother, ‘monna Chaterina’. In his study of Rucellai as a patron, Kent refers to the passage as ‘emotionally revealing to an unusual degree’.18 For Kent, the force of the quotation cannot be underestimated, and resonates with the importance of those who figured as paterfamilias or ‘sainted mother’ in many of his studies. In 1985 he told an interviewer that ‘having lost his father at a young age, Rucellai decided his own son would not be deprived of his experience and so he wrote a book, the Zibaldone’.19 Loss and immortality surfaced unbidden as a trope in Kent’s discourse. Kent concluded his review of William Dick’s novel with a note of retrospective appreciation about the successive waves of migrants into Footscray, and how he and his neighbourhood had been ‘transformed, Europeanised’ as part of the creative redefining of what it meant ‘to come from Footscray and to be Australian’. As John Lack observes in the lines quoted above, Kent was always fascinated with the origins of people’s surnames, where they came from, and what experiences made them.20 But the central message conveyed by his review of Dick’s novel is his conviction that neighbourhood ties and loyalties were fundamental in defining identity, a conviction of no little importance when considering Kent’s vision of Renaissance Florence against the dominant historiographies of the day: ‘Belonging to a particular area of a city conferred identity on a man’.21 Bill Kent was self-reflective, almost to the extreme, and was aware that the ‘bees buzzing in his bonnet’ as a historian, as E. H. Carr would have it, were very much linked to his own history. As his review of Dick indicates, he was 16  Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. x. Kent gives no reference or attribution, but see note 17, below. The translation of the text is mine. In Kent’s use of this quotation, Monna Caterina stands as a cipher for his own mother, Doris Kent. Again, for detail, see Lack, ‘From Foot-is-cry to Firenze’. 17  Kent, ‘The Making of a Renaissance Patron’, p. 14. 18  Kent, ‘The Making of a Renaissance Patron’, p. 14, where Kent gives the complete quotation. 19  Jane Howard, ‘Florence Study Has a Lot to Offer, Says Historian’. 20  On a personal note, I remember as a commencing undergraduate in 1975, meeting with my new tutor, Bill Kent. He asked all the questions noted in my text above, commenting how my education had resocialized me and obscured my origins. 21  Kent, ‘Ties of Neighbourhood and Patronage in Quattrocento Florence’, p. 79. For references to the dominant historiographies, see ibid.

8 Peter Howard

a perceptive and sympathetic observer of his social environment. He knew his working-class subject; he was exposed to difference occasioned by encounters with incomers; he almost revelled in cultures other than Anglophone; he knew the impact and meaning of the loss of a father for family life; he himself knew a mother who was also father and what it meant to be a clan, albeit small; he had first-hand experience of gran maestri and the myths that grew up around legendary figures of a community; he knew the ties that both bind and give leverage; and he understood especially that place and space were profoundly important. How the experiences that had made him came to be directed into the study of the Florentine Renaissance Kent recounts in his contribution to a volume in honour of his teacher at the University of Melbourne, Ian Robertson. Kent was an undergraduate ‘at a time of sea-change in Anglophone Italian Renaissance Studies, when the meeting of older and newer traditions allowed fresh ideas and energies to be released’. As he relates, he was of the generation that fell ‘greedily’ upon the essays collected in honour of Cecilia M. Ady, and (distributed in thermofax copies by Robertson) the work of younger North American historians writing about Florence and other city-states — Gene Brucker and Marvin Becker foremost among them: ‘These historians immersed themselves in the archives, often in neglected sources, thereby creating, for generations of Australians at least, a new sense of the complexity of the social and other forces informing Renaissance political, religious and intellectual history.’22 There is a palpable excitement underpinning these lines. In 1961, Robertson, newly returned from Oxford and brimming with enthusiasm, was instrumental in establishing a vibrant culture of research, especially among those whom he guided towards postgraduate studies in the UK and North America.23 Bill Kent was part of this group which was to put Australia on the map as a centre for the study of Italian Renaissance history, not only through innovative research, but also inspiring pedagogy.24 22 

Kent and Zika, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. Indeed, Kent would continue to be inspired by the work of mentors such as Brucker, picking up and extending themes, e.g. Kent, ‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive’, p. 390 n. 2. In his interview with Graeme Davison and Kate Murphy, Bill attributes his earliest interest in the Renaissance to Robert Nelson, the teacher who was a kind of father-figure to him at University High School and who encouraged him to read Machiavelli. See Davison and Murphy, ‘Transcript of Interview’, p. 4. 23  On Ian Robertson, see Howard, ‘Obituary: Ian Robertson’. Until the mid-1980s it was customary for aspiring doctoral students to go abroad. 24  For this summation, see Muir, ‘The Italian Renaissance in America’, p. 1112. The group

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‘Unheard voices from the archive’: The Making of a Method The distance between Australia and the centres in Europe or North America may perhaps help explain Kent’s innovative approach and historiographical contribution, brewed in the first instance in the comparatively isolated but nonetheless stimulating world of the relatively small Australian university where all disciplines crossed boundaries.25 ‘Having read the early work of Peter Laslett on family history (which was then a very new field)’, Kent had decided even before he left Melbourne ‘that he would try to tackle that emerging historiographical theme in the context of Florentine history’, especially to engage ‘the original and powerful contribution’ just published by Richard Goldthwaite.26 His thinking about family and neighbourhood was influenced too by Young and Wilmott’s classic Family and Kinship in East London, a book he read and discussed with his fellow student at the University of Melbourne Graeme Davison.27 While a Teaching Fellow at Monash University (1964–65), he had worked his way through Florentine family chronicles and had been accepted as a candidate for a research MA on the topic.28 The paper he delivered at a research seminar in October 1966, according to the then head of his department, rather presciently, ‘showed the qualities he possess[ed] as a research student and the value of the results which may be expected from his work’.29 Soon after, in 1967 when Kent arrived in England on a Commonwealth University Interchange Scheme, Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘the undoubted doyen of […] Florentine history’ who was to be Kent’s supervisor and mentor, must have thought so too.30 As Kent himself recounts, Rubinstein was little interested in this new branch of social history: ‘Possibly against his better judgement, he allowed me to undertake the included Dale Kent, Bill Kent, Lorenzo Polizzotto, Jaynie Anderson, and slightly afterwards, Patricia Simons. Ros Pesman, a graduate of the University of Sydney, had slightly preceded them in London. On this phenomenon, see Pesman, ‘The Italian Renaissance in Australia’. 25  Kent would often paraphrase Pia dei Tolomei in Dante’s Purgatorio and shout: ‘Monash mi fe’. 26  Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, p. 40. 27  Graeme Davison to Peter Howard, private (email) correspondence. Young and Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London. 28  Proposed title: ‘Clan Diaries (Ricordi) as a Source for the History of the Aristocratic Family in Late Medi­eval Florence’. 29  Professor A. G. L. Shaw repeats these and similar sentiments in a series of letters of recommendation from 20 October 1966 to 26 January 1967. 30  Denley and Elam, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein’, p. xiii.

10 Peter Howard

study of my choice, however, and helped me in every way to make the best I could of it’.31 Australia’s distance from Europe also implied distance from the archives which underpinned the studies of Brucker and Becker that had so excited Kent as an undergraduate. Now, under Rubinstein’s tutelage, carrying with it overtones of Ranke’s maxim about discovering what actually was in the past, Kent found himself immersed in Florence’s State Archives, perusing perhaps hitherto neglected sources and revelling in ‘the particular, almost sensual, pleasure of handling the originals’.32 Whereas Rubinstein’s predilection was for the public and formal documents that lent themselves to a Rankean political history and (after Nicola Ottokar) the mechanisms by which the ruling class maintained authority, Kent was one of those younger scholars who, in poring over ‘the private evidence produced in abundance by both the powerful and the comparatively humble’, were driven by scholarly concerns and interests that were of little concern to, or even unthought of, by Rubinstein’s generation.33 Kent described this shift of focus in questions and evidence, and the new directions they generated: ‘Unpublished and previously unread documents suggest new historical themes, novel ideas and methodologies; in effect, they create the documents their working out and elaboration demand’.34 Kent was concerned with the subtle textures of a society and showed that close attention to documents, especially letters, could reveal the tensions stirring beneath the surface and help shape a conception of Florentine society rather different to that drawn by quantitative or institutional historians. For example, through his reading of the correspondence of Bartolommeo Cederni — ‘the mediocre merchant’ — he articulated the meaning of being connected to others in Florentine society. Cederni was ‘a master of friendship’ who, over a period of forty years, accrued interlocking circles of patrons and clients and through his letters conveyed what became, for Kent, one of the increasingly important of several underlying structures organizing this society: friendship. In his introductory essay to his edition (with Gino Corti) of Cederni’s letters, Kent very effectively invoked 31 

Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, p. 40. The quotation is from Kent, ‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive’, p. 389. On Rubinstein and Ranke, see Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein’, p. 384. Ranke’s celebrated dictum of the historian’s task was to uncover ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist’ (how it actually was). For Kent’s own adoption of it, see Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. xi. 33  See Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein’, p. 390. 34  Kent and Zika, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 32 

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Virginia Woolf ’s observation that ‘with correspondence “the bare landscape becomes full of stir and quiver” and we can hear the voices of people talking’.35 Such a reading of sources required a variety of skills, including sensitivity to the nuances of the fifteenth-century Tuscan and the facility to render their meaning into idiomatic English. A reviewer interpreted Kent’s felicity with language as ‘a reflection not only of a nice literary touch, but a knowledgeable and graceful mind’.36 His own keen eye for the fifteenth-century meaning of a text — the ‘abundance of quick, idiomatic Quattrocento speech’ — and its implications for interpretation can be well illustrated by a passage in one of his many book reviews.37 The author of the book in question was keen to relate the impact of the discovery of antique sculpture directly to innovative drawing, painting, and sculptural practice. To the unearthing of one remarkable piece of antique sculpture, the reaction of those present — none less than Michelangelo and the architect Giuliano da San Gallo — (in the author’s translation) was ‘[to start to] draw, all the while discoursing on ancient things’. Kent suggests that the phrase reporting their response ‘might have been more humdrum: to go back to lunch, during which the discovery monopolized the conversation’.38 Kent’s conviction was that skilled and subtle readings of letters and archival snippets could yield as valid an understanding of many aspects of Florentine society as ‘austere “harder” evidence’.39 While appreciative of the contribution of quantitative data, he nonetheless argued that any schematic constructs thereby resulting were complicated by the qualitative evidence which shows that class divisions were quite porous and even dissolved.40 It was his focus on qualitative evidence that distinguished his interpretation of the nature of the Florentine family from that of Richard Goldthwaite which stemmed from a reading of economic materials. Kent was more comfortable with letters than with the plethora of personal account books that were the grist of economic history and which entailed a framing and methodology with which he was unfamiliar.41 35 

Kent, Bartolommeo Cederni and his Friends, p. 12. For an appreciation of Kent’s approach to reading letters, see Najemy, Between Friends, pp. 21–22. 36  Molho, ‘Visions of the Florentine Family in the Renassance’, p. 306. 37  The quotation is Kent’s appraisal of Cerdini’s letter collection, Kent, Bartolommeo Ced­ erni and his Friends, p. 11. 38  Kent, ‘Review: Unearthing the Past’. 39  Kent, Bartolommeo Cederni and his Friends, p. 11. 40  Kent, ‘“Be rather loved than feared”’, pp. 17–23. 41  Goldthwaite integrates what ‘Kent calls the household of “the grand family”’ into his

12 Peter Howard

This said, Kent was among those stimulated by the ‘Goldthwaite thesis’ and his ‘redefinition of the Renaissance in economic terms’.42 In the context of larger debates originating in the 1970s, however, when the social sciences were having sway, Kent’s attunement to the voices of the ‘unheard’ subverted many fashionable understandings of the vertical and horizontal structures of Florentine society. For instance, writing about the district of Leon Rosso, he could conclude: ‘At every point and in all sorts of ways (as emerged from tax reports, letters, diaries, and other papers from the district), the lives of the citizens of the Red Lion, rich and poor, powerful and humble, intersected’.43 The voices emerging from the archives convinced him that Florentines were still identifying with neighbourhood and parish at a time when cliometric inclined historians were arguing that local identity had given way to one that was city-wide.44 Reviewers of Kent’s work have been generally univocal in their praise of the wealth and the range of evidence that he commanded when reconstructing a particular issue or context, not only combing vast collections of the Florentine State Archives and elsewhere, but also the precision of detail and his discriminating, deft expertise in squeezing ‘suggestive information from letters, notarial cartularies, and fiscal records’.45 The myriad, scattered, separate bits of information demanded discernment and knowledge in order to recognize their significance and value for constructing the large picture — what Kent would refer to as petites perceptions.46 He was adept at understanding the circumstances that had brought often stilted lines into being, before going on ‘to squeeze, tease and press them for wider significance’.47 In an early article he sums up this approach to the ‘archival snippets’ once published by art historical journals. He talks about how ‘on a bad day one can enjoy their delicious irrelevance, or take guilty pleasure in the illusion later work; see The Economy of Renaissance Florence, p. 73. I am grateful to Richard Goldthwaite for his reflections on conversations with Kent regarding his interest in economic history and Kent’s acknowledged difficulties in dealing with economic history in general. 42  Kent and others, ‘An Editorial Comment to Richard Goldthwaite’s The Economy of Renaissance Italy’, p. 13. 43  Kent, ‘Ties of Neighbourhood in Florence’, pp. 84–85. 44  Kent was, however, deeply admiring of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (along with David Herlihy), who ‘almost uniquely combining a mastery of the statistical data with a command of the literary evidence’. See Kent, ‘Review: La Maison et le nom’, p. 353. 45  See e.g. Molho, ‘Review: Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone’, pp. 39–43. 46  Kent, ‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive’, p. 390. 47  Cf. Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, p. 42.

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that here are the “pure” facts of the past, awaiting only the historian’s kiss of life; at other times, there is the excitement of unexpectedly finding a place for one of these homeless facts, or of discovering a promising lead where one had least thought to look for it’.48 Twenty years later, at a conference at the Archivio di Stato, Florence, he would reiterate his approach with ‘a gentle exhortation to scholars to spend some time reading letters not by gran maestri but by people whose names one does not recognize, often women and men low on the quattrocento social scale’.49 An exemplar of his own advice, an important instance of how Kent’s petites perceptions could suggest new historical themes is his contribution to women’s history and a deeper understanding of the intricacies of the way gender forces worked in Florence. As he observes at the end of one of his important, early research notes, ‘A Proposal by Savonarola for the Self-Reform of Florentine Women’: ‘This almost forgotten incident, […] reminds us that the Florentine archives, especially letter collections, invite a deeper look than has yet been taken into the extent and intricacies of women’s role in communal politics’.50 Kent’s various studies went on to elaborate the patronage role of Medici women and how they acquired favours and influenced events. His patient archival work, and perspicacious reading of letters, established the existence of an informal sotto governo in which women acted as intercessors, ‘like the Virgin’, using and facilitating the processes and powers of a male hierarchy and thus giving them more access to an unrelentingly masculine polity than historians hitherto had thought possible.51 The cumulative result was a vivid and convincing portrayal of aspects of Florentine society at every level, contextualized within a profound synthesis of current scholarship. It was Kent’s painstaking perusal of sometimes almost indecipherable ‘hands’ that generated his sense of the complexity of the social forces that should be written into a reappraisal of Florentine society. But this required immense patience and perseverance. In an aside relating to the plea of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s correspondents — ‘Have patience to read this’ — Kent referred to what for him had become a maxim in relation to the struggle required to decipher texts, and confides in a confessional moment: ‘perhaps 48 

Kent, ‘Art Historical Gleanings from the Florentine Archives’, p. 47. Kent, ‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive’, p. 395. 50  Kent, ‘A Proposal by Savonarola for the Self-Reform of Florentine Women’, p. 340. 51  Kent, ‘Sainted Mother, Magnificent Son’ and ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Love of Women’. 49 

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more students than one would care to admit found their dedication to the task faltering at times’.52 This patient, dedicated reading of texts dated back to Kent’s days as a student at the University of Melbourne, and Marion (Molly) Gibb’s Medi­eval Seminar where he and fellow student Dale Kent (then Butler) were schooled in the ‘Gibb’s method of demonstrating just how much information can be “squeezed, teased and pressed” out of a few lines of text, letting the sources speak for themselves’.53 Reflecting recently on her first published paper, Dale Kent was ‘struck by how far [her] now characteristic patterns of thought and their expressions are apparent even in this very earliest work’ — a distinguishing trait of Bill Kent’s first published paper too, as we noticed above.54 That the Kents shared a method is attested by an observation made by Craig Hugh Smyth who, as director of Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 1973–85), was in a unique position to appraise the Kents’ approach to research early on in their careers: ‘Dale Kent has shared with F. W. Kent in the making of the method they both use’.55 Bill Kent himself wrote, in 1979, about his collaboration with Dale Kent going ‘back to the mid-1960s [… since which time] our research concerns have increasingly converged and the legal marriage of our research activities has been in a sense inevitable, [and] might seem indeed to lend a certain respectability to the long cohabitation of our ideas and conclusions’.56 A few years later, after their parting, he wrote of Dale’s and his work ‘informed by the common methods and assumptions […] developed over many years of collaboration, and by a continued exchange of information, manuscripts, etc’.57 The method that the Kents had made in their shared approach to archival research exemplified a historiographical shift: a move away from structure and norm towards an emphasis on interaction and performance.58

52 

Kent, ‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive’, pp. 389–90. D. Kent, ‘Fifty Years On’, p. 60. 54  D. Kent, ‘Fifty Years On’, p. 59. 55  For this appraisal, see Craig Hugh Smyth, director of Villa i Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, to Prof. Merle Ricklefs, then head of Monash University’s Department of History, 10 October 1989. 56  Kent, ‘Curriculum Vitae (26 February 1979)’. 57  Kent, ‘Report on Outside Studies Programme July 1982–December 1982, 22 March 1983’. 58  Cf. Kent and Zika, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 53 

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Both their work has continued to be informed by what they developed in their decades together.59 How archival documents themselves can generate ideas, theories, and language for a perceptive and knowledgeable historian is revealed by a chronological reading of Kent’s own works. From his earliest petites perceptions, digressions which were later to become significant organizing themes — documents in and of themselves, as Kent would have it — appear in asides and footnotes of his first book. ‘Parenti, amici, and vicini’ — that useful trilogy of terms for his understanding of the patterns structuring Florentine life, derived from a quotation from Giovanni Rucellai’s Zibaldone — appears in a footnote.60 Kent notices the ‘vigorous use’ of such ‘traditional language’ later on in the volume and sees it as signifying the ‘continuing importance of local groupings in politics and social life’, with a further footnote referring to the forthcoming study on neighbourhood that he was undertaking with Dale Kent.61 The significance of the term ‘amici’ he begins to probe in a way that presages the meaning that he attributes to it in later studies — ‘“colleagues” or “allies”, as we might say’.62 F.  W. Kent’s part in ‘making a method’ demands some further elaboration. With his proposition that previously unread documents can suggest new themes, ideas, and methodologies (quoted above), and so effectively generate ‘the documents their working out and elaboration demands’, Kent is claiming that the documents themselves create the world of their interpretation.63 Like his mentor, Nicolai Rubinstein, he shared, to a degree, ‘skepticism for abstract theories and models’.64 But he had no hesitation when it came to delving into other disciplines in order to sharpen his thinking, especially in such areas as the developmental cycle of the family (sociology) or patronage (anthropology).65 In an extended review article, published in the same year as Household and 59 

Dale Kent has recently noted her ‘continued scholarly debt to the work of the first friend with whom I shared my interest in Renaissance Florence, Bill (F. W.) Kent’, Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence, p. xv. 60  Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. 125, n. 14; cf. p. 263, n. 132. 61  Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. 173, n. 28. 62  Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. 219. 63  See above, note 34; Kent and Zika, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 64  Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein’, p. 389; but see Kent’s praise of Trexler’s vision in Kent, ‘Review: Public Life in Renaissance Florence’. 65  See e.g. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. 29, nn. 27 and 28; p. 39, n. 63; p. 44, n. 80. Criticism of Kent’s use of such theory, in my view, seems to be misplaced and to overreach; see Molho, ‘Visions of the Florentine Family in the Renaissance’, p. 307.

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Lineage, Kent discusses at length conceptual and terminological issues. The book in question was Jacques Heers’s Le Clan Familial au Moyen Âge. Kent’s bibliography is revealing. Kent drew stimulus from historians and from writers of humane letters. If pressed, it is more than likely that he would have inclined to the view that history is akin to literature and art rather than science. This said, he was always uncompromising that it should be grounded in firm evidence. His own concern was with his subject’s perception, activity, and motive, even capturing the inner lives of ordinary people, as revealed through their utterances.66 As he remarked elsewhere: ‘we still lack a refined vocabulary, derived initially from an analysis of how Florentines used words describing their own, and others’, social relationships, with which to express their and our perceptions of a very complex society’.67 Here his method was perhaps reminiscent of approaches proposed by Collingwood, approaches which purportedly had greatly influenced Rubinstein, and perhaps, one may wonder, Kent himself.68

The Key Ideas Attentiveness to the ‘voices from the archive’ meant that Kent inevitably engaged with key historiographical issues facing historians of Renaissance Florence, and Renaissance Italy more generally, but also generated new ones, often not without controversy. His long-term project was to give an account of ‘the social structure of Renaissance Florence’.69 How daunting he found the project can be gleaned from asides. In a piece published in 1994 he observes that ‘still the whole story of class relations in that century, and of contemporary perceptions of social mobility and “class” awaits its historian’.70 He was still of the same view nearly ten years later. Rather, as he pointed out, a full study of the social structure of Florence will be predicated on the efforts of ‘some brave scholar [who] analyzes in detail the contemporary language of social hierarchy’.71 This 66 

See e.g. Kent’s development of Creighton Gilbert’s notion of ‘the history of aesthetic psychology’ by delineating ‘taste’ and ‘preference’ in relation to architecture. See Kent, ‘Florentine Quattrocento Taste in Palaces’. 67  Kent, ‘Review: Public Life in Renaissance Florence’, p. 386. 68  Kent on Rubinstein, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein’, p. 389; Collingwood, The Idea of History. 69  Announced in an ‘Application for Study Leave, 11 November 1976’, and reiterated 3 March 1977. 70  Kent, ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”’, p. 200. 71  Kent, ‘“Be rather loved than feared”’, p. 19.

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contemporary language of social hierarchy was to be found in documents other than those Kent had mastered — the letters where working people appeared obliquely through the eyes of others — but rather, in the ledgers that registered their work and the court documents that recorded their involvement in legal disputes.72 That said, Kent was gradually developing his ‘history of Florence with a new look’ as he pursued themes that were ‘invoked incessantly in their writings’ by his contemporary witnesses, and which were taking shape as his own dynamic, archivally based discourse about the city. Like many of his generation, he was inoculated against reductionist views of Marxism then current, as is reflected in his commitment to the local and horizontal, rather than the civic and vertical aspects of society, features more apparent in the work of John Najemy.73 Kent’s emerging vision of Renaissance Florence devolved into a range of themes which became familiar in his writings — parenti, amici, vicini — and which gained depth as he added more refinement and reflection over the years. The key is to recall how intertwined were those relationships for which the words were and are abstractions. Surprisingly, compagnie — business associates — are not explicitly included and tend to enter into Kent’s analysis only under other guises, not so much in their professional capacity per se. Kent’s first monograph, Household and Lineage, is now a classic in the field and represents his early work on the ways in which patricians were embedded in Florentine society.74 Here, amongst the three clans studied by Kent, Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai (1403–81) figures as an example of the complexity of the relationship between individuals and households. His diary reveals that he lived in a nuclear family centred on his young, widowed mother; later, according to the 1427 Catasto, he joined a fraternal household with his three brothers; by 1446 he himself headed a nuclear family, and when his elder son eventually married and had a child he headed a ‘grand-family’.75

72  Seemingly aware of this, Kent turned to the work of such scholars as Francesco Franceschi and his work on the gradations of skill and status existing in the woollen industry, as well as Richard Goldthwaite and Margaret Haines on skilled artists and artisans. See Kent, ‘“Be rather loved than feared”’, pp. 17–18. My awareness of this historiographical issue in Kent’s view of Florentine society has been sharpened as a result of email correspondence with Richard Goldthwaite, for which I am thankful. 73  I am grateful to Graeme Davison for this reflection in a private email exchange on his and Kent’s resistance to Marxist formulations. On Najemy, see below at note 92. 74  See Strocchia, Florence. 75  Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, pp. 39–40.

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Rucellai became the hinge which swung open the door to Kent’s developing interest in architecture and space. In the early 1970s, parallel to his work on patrician family structure and, in a way, spinning off from and exemplifying it, Kent began work on Ruccellai as a patron of the ‘revolutionary architecture’ of such thinkers and practitioners as Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, long regarded as central to understanding that complex artistic and intellectual movement. By way of preparation for a monographic study, he published several short, technical studies on Rucellai’s patronage of the arts.76 Kent accumulated detail which depicted Rucellai as a much more complex figure than previously had been the case in the historiography and found new evidence on his role as leader of his clan, as a merchant, as a citizen in his gonfalone, and, centrally, as a builder and patron. Not only did Kent’s gleanings on Rucellai’s relations with Palla Strozzi and later with the Medici shed further light on social and political organization in Florence, he also showed just how responsive Rucellai was to humanist currents of thought that were then developing. Moreover, as a biographer, Kent showed himself to be sensitive not just to Rucellai’s milieu, but also to his personality, temperament, motivation, and goals. In his ‘daring’ (as Anthony Molho characterized it) essay on the subject, Kent established the fundamental importance of ambitious building projects in the fifteenth century as activities by which honour, status, and prestige could be acquired and maintained.77 Very quickly he extended this interest in architectural patronage and palaces as centres of sociability and brokerage, with articles on the Strozzi Palace78 and Lorenzo de’ Medici’s villa at Poggio a Caiano.79 In all these Kent reconstructs the webs of social networks and exchanges that situated and defined patrician activity in the period and expresses his developing interest in the social context of Renaissance art. These studies, and Household and Lineage in particular, exemplify how Kent eschewed easy answers to the complex social and political realities of the Florence of the fifteenth century. He identified himself as one of a group of

76 

Kent, ‘The Letters Genuine and Spurious of Giovanni Rucellai’; ‘Due Lettere Inedite di Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai’; ‘The Rucellai Family and its Loggia’. 77  Kent, ‘The Making of a Renaissance Patron’; Kent’s affection for Rucellai is noted in ‘Giovanni Rucellai: An Epitaph’. Molho, ‘Review: Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone’, p. 39. Molho found ‘charming and disconcerting’ the ‘affinity […] between the author and the subject’ (p. 41). 78  Kent, ‘“Più superba de quella de Lorenzo”’. 79  Kent, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s acquisition of Poggio a Caiano’.

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scholars transforming conventional, Burkhardtian views about a ‘precociously modern’ Florence where tribal and religious controls had broken down.80 I went to Florence and I didn’t see that from the way the city was organised; I couldn’t see from the frescoes that this was a society of nuclear families. When I read their letters they talked about neighbours, they talked of kinsmen and third and fourth cousins […] a lot of people lived in nuclear families, but about one third of the time they lived in larger domestic units run by mature brothers or clans ruled by grandfathers.81

Kent’s view has gradually gained acceptance: the households that were the building stones of neighbourhood and city were neither proto-modern nuclear families nor static entities, but rather ‘living things whose size and nature changed as generations passed and as they were subjected to a complex set of pressures and circumstances’.82 These early publications opened up a debate which still resonates among younger historians today, but which for a time divided the field.83 Kent’s conclusions caused Gene Brucker, for instance, to reject the position underpinning his 1969 book Renaissance Florence where he argued that the dissolution of traditional family and corporate bonds coincided with the emergence of a proliferation of patron–client relations as the environment which sustained the individual. This revision he signalled in his Civic World (1977) where Brucker advises the critical reader to note how sharply his own views on the family had changed from those found in the earlier book as a result of reading Household and Lineage, so impressed was he by ‘the precision of definitions, the distinction [Kent] draws between household and lineage, and his sensitive treatment of the relationship between family structure and the larger community’.84 The 80 

Kent, ‘A La Recherche du Clan Perdu’, and Howard, ‘Florence Study Has a Lot to Offer, Says Historian’. 81  Kent, quoted in Howard, ‘Florence Study Has a Lot to Offer, Says Historian’. 82  See Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. 39. Kent succinctly summarizes his book in ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”’, pp. 191–92. 83  See Maxson, The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence, p. 19. See too Connell, ‘Libri di famigilia and the Family History of Florentine Patricians’, esp. pp. 281–82; Molho, ‘The Italian Renaissance, Made in the U.S.A.’; Diefendorf, ‘Family Culture, Renaissance Culture’, pp. 663–64, notes that Goldthwaite’s and Kent’s respective rhetorical stances exaggerated the distance between them. 84  Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, pp. 18–19, nn. 17–18; see also p. 6, n. 10.

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significant interpretive consequences for Brucker’s work were picked up by reviewers whose own positions were thrown into relief by Kent’s book.85 Kent’s last word on the debate is to be found in a posthumously published essay: ‘as some households and lineages declined or vanished, others maintained and often improved their position and authority’.86 In short, households and lineages were not competing forms of family organization but interdependent, cyclical ones, and were central in conditioning social and political forces in the city where Florentines sought ‘advantage, protection and comfort in a bewildering variety of groups and social bonds’.87 Here was resilience and adaptability, not a monolithic, unchanging traditional society. In establishing further precise detail about the social networks and processes that were the lifeblood of Florentine society, Kent became more and more interested in what he termed ‘the underbelly, the sotto governo of Medicean politics, in the world of political and social patronage and clientelismo that embraced proletarian as well as patrician activities’.88 This sotto governo was the private, extraconstitutional, and often illegal networks of patronage and clientele which shaped social and political life. Recognizing that there was still much to know about Renaissance patronage, even after a landmark conference which he co-organized in 1983, Kent continued to explore the way in which sociability between social classes often translated into reciprocal bonds between them.89 Several long studies — on Bartolommeo Cederni’s epistolario, the analysis (with Amanda Lillee) of the book attributed to Piovano Arlotto, and his contribution to Patronage, Art and Society in Reniassance Italy — Kent viewed as integral to his long-term project to develop a systematic account of the society of Laurentian Florence.90 The consideration of relations and interconnections between rich and poor brought to the fore the question of class: ‘for class there was in fifteenth-century Florence, though in what sense is still precisely to be defined’, and (invoking E. P. Thompson) it was not a structure or category but ‘as something which

85 

Becker, ‘Review: The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence’. Becker, unhelpfully, creates a binary opposition between family structure and patron–client relationships. 86  Kent, ‘Florence, 1300–1600’, p. 13. 87  Kent, ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”, p. 184. 88  Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, p. 40. 89  Kent and Simons, ‘Renaissance Patronage’, esp. pp. 10–11. 90  See Kent, ‘Curriculum Vitae (1990)’, p. 4.

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happens’.91 With the words from the dissident Marxist E. P. Thomson resonating with his own thinking, it has been argued that Kent was not committed to the idea of class in the conventional sense, and that by overly concentrating on patronage in itself he obfuscated the important role of other institutions in social and political life.92 A chapter he contributed to a 2002 volume in honour of Gene Brucker can be seen as an attempt to respond to his own earlier problematizing of the issue and a concern to define class more precisely. Kent did this within the framework that he had been developing since his earliest studies by working with patronage in its various senses and attending to ‘Florentine sources in all their infinite variety and richness’. His reading of such material ‘complicates, and at times contradicts’ the contention that ‘“intense class consciousness and […] class conflict” were the Florentine Quattrocento’s principal characteristics’.93 He insisted that ‘the patronal processes and feelings in quattrocento Florence operated outside, as well as inside the […] ruling élite, and the broader political class’.94 He draws on a wealth of archival snippets to explore the ties of interdependence by which those not of the elite were included in the public arena and political process. His concern was with ‘reciprocal bonds’, both emotional and ‘instrumental’, and his accumulated evidence pointed to a society where ‘class relations’ were porous rather than easily schematized. ‘The layers of society were’, in an image appropriated by Kent, ‘more like those of a trifle cake — a lot of blurred, rich, deep layers through which “the sherry of accepted values soaked”’.95 Several of the essays Kent wrote in the last decade of his life argue convincingly that ‘Renaissance discourse of patron–client friendships did embrace the 91  Kent, ‘Ties of Neighbourhood and Patronage in Quattrocento Florence’, p. 97, where in fact he implies his approval of Thompson’s understanding and extends it as a way of also ‘seeing neighbourhood’. 92  Kent, ‘“Be rather loved than feared”’, p. 19. For a critique of the Kents’ approach, viz. that too exclusive a concern with patronage tends to obscure the way in which other institutions framed social life and ‘how quickly a valuable hypothesis about the behavior of the elite can become an allegedly exclusive truth about the nature of Florentine politics […] orthodoxies, even new ones, usually limit vision’, see Najemy, ‘The Dialogue of Power in Florentine Politics’, esp. pp. 272–74, and his ‘Politics: Class and Patronage’. For his own more class-conscious approach, see his A History of Florence. 93  Kent, ‘“Be rather loved than feared”’, p. 17. 94  Kent, ‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive’, p. 397, and more generally Kent, ‘“Be loved rather than feared”’. 95  Kent, ‘“Be rather loved than feared”’, p. 19.

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possibility of close ties of mutual obligation, even affection, between people of very different social status’.96 ‘Amici’ — friends — became a loaded term to which accrued many layers of resonance. How it operated in Italy he summarizes in an essay co-authored with Carolyn James: The factional friendships endemic to Italian city and other city cultures; both drew their inspiration from traditional, lived notions of familial and neighbourly solidarity as much as from classical and Christian sources. In the name of these older values, rural affinities and urban factions offered their adherents in the new prevailing circumstances a precious sense of group togetherness and the tangible leadership of a man of family they knew and respected, even revered.97

How this argument might be developed further he outlined in his contribution on ‘patronage’ to the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance.98 Kent was extremely interested in the classical sources on friendship (Aristotle, Cicero, Sallust) and how they fed into Italian (and by extension European) discourse by way of Brunetto Latini’s Trésor. Kent favours L. B. Alberti’s vernacular version as better characterizing ‘the ambiguous nature of Florentine friendship’ rather than ‘the Latinate current established by Petrarch. […] No ancient writer’, Alberti argues (by way of Adovardo Alberti, the protagonist in his dialogue on the subject), ‘has ever been able to give me’ a definition of friendship that accommodates ‘the actual ways and habits of men’ in a world — even the relatively stable environment of mid-fifteenth-century Italy — where ‘everything […] is profoundly unsure’.99

Towards Laurentian Florence The second part of Kent’s career was focused on a subject ‘at the centre of Renaissance studies’.100 He did not, alas, live to complete his two-volume biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici, for the writing of which he had been, effectively, preparing himself since his first ventures into the archives. We are fortunate, 96 

See Kent and James, ‘Renaissance Friendship’, p. 144. This essay, like several of his other studies on friendship, he wrote in collaboration with Carolyn James. 97  See Kent and James, ‘Renaissance Friendships’, p. 128. 98  Kent, ‘Patronage’. 99  Kent and James, ‘Renaissance Friendships’, pp. 137, 152. 100  Cf. Rubinstein, Letter to Professor Merle Ricklefs, head of History (Monash University), 5 October 1989.

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therefore, that the impetus provided by the invitation to deliver the James S. Schouler Lectures at Johns Hopkins University in 1999 — published in 2004 as Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence — gave him the opportunity to summarize four decades of research, with a particular focus on Lorenzo’s relationship with the visual arts, as ‘the pendant’ to what would have been the two-volume life.101 Kent’s engagement with Lorenzo’s correspondence began during his years of doctoral research, when he analysed the letters between Lorenzo and his brother-in-law Bernardo Rucellai. This was almost thirty-five years before he took over the role as general editor of the multivolume national edition of the letters of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 2002, on the death of its founding editor, Nicolai Rubinstein.102 In the year before Kent’s own death, when it became clear that the two-volume work would not eventuate, Kent, with the assistance of Carolyn James, began organizing his many articles, papers, and essays on Lorenzo, most of which ‘were written in preparation for, and to complement’ the biography. As James points out in her acknowledgements, and then makes abundantly clear in her perspicacious introduction, ‘Bill Kent’s interpretation of Lorenzo de’ Medici emerges forcefully and convincingly from the large and small studies collected here in one volume [… which] provide an important basis for future research’.103 For ‘a biography of Lorenzo still heads the list of important subjects to be tackled in Italian Renaissance studies’.104 As Kent often pointed out, especially when seeking funds for his project, Lorenzo was at the very centre of Florentine culture in his day — art, music, literature — but also politics and diplomacy with contemporaries decisively writing him into the history of Florence and indeed Italy.105 101 

Scholars of Laurentian Florence are forever indebted to Richard Goldthwaite for occasioning the invitation and for encouraging Kent ‘at every stage’; Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. xii. 102  See Kent, ‘Ottimati Families in Florentine Politics and Society’, pp. 201–15, and for intermediary letters more generally pp. 180–223, 335–46, 507–38; see also Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, pp. 57, 72, 80–83, 94, 96, 97–99, 154–55, 173, 174, 184, 189, 191, 201–02, 204–05, 212, 213, 217, 219, 296–97. 103  Kent, Princely Citizen, ed. by James, pp. vii and 11. Professor James intends to publish Kent’s The Young Lorenzo in due course. 104  Richard Goldthwaite, private (email) correspondence. 105  Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, pp. 4–5; Kent, ‘Heinrich Isaac’s Music in Laurentian Florence’. My thanks to Richard Goldthwaite for helpful observations here.

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Kent was therefore well aware of the challenges facing him when setting out to write a scholarly biography and, according to Richard Goldthwaite, ‘in doing so he was, in his intellectual courage, asserting what I do not hesitate to call his greatness as a historian’.106 He had already engaged with Laurentian materials in the course of his research, and by the late 1970s had published studies which indicate that Lorenzo was moving to the centre of his attentions, but his guiding understanding had always been within the framework of a broader Medicean Florence in cooperation with Dale Kent.107 By late 1982 circumstances dictated that the future direction of his research would encompass the social structure of Florence in the period of Lorenzo de’ Medici only.108 Kent’s ‘intention was always, however, to write a systematic account of the society of Renaissance Florence, focussing on the period of Lorenzo de’ Medici’.109 But as he himself observed, it was only in this year too, while a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Centre in Florence, that ‘the precise definition’ of his projects ‘and how they were to be handled […] gradually emerged as work progressed’.110 Kent’s subsequent applications for study leave revolved around a monograph on Laurentian Florence. In August 1986, an invitation from the University of California Press ‘to write a scholarly and readable life of Lorenzo de’ Medici […] decided [him] on how to organize [his] growing mass of material’.111 Kent’s declared aim was not to write ‘a biography in the conventional sense but rather an account of Lorenzo’s special place in the politics and society of his day’.112 How this ‘life’ was to consume Kent over the next twenty or more years can be traced back to his early grappling with his project and with what had developed as ‘his method’. In late 1989 he wrote: In consultation with friends, above all Nicolai Rubinstein […], [I] have established my line of approach, which will not be (cannot be) that of a biographer concerned to chronicle his famous subject’s every movement. Rather  I am seeking to place Lorenzo more firmly in a Florentine context, our knowledge of which has been 106 

Richard Goldthwaite to Peter Howard, private (email) correspondence. See Kent, ‘Report on Outside Studies Programme, July 1982 – December 1982’, p. 1. 108  He and Dale Kent had parted in that year. In his report on his sabbatical (‘Outside Studies Programme, July 1982 – December 1982’) Kent wrote that ‘this separation of interests we have now successfully completed’ (p. 1). 109  Kent, ‘Curriculum Vitae (August 1987)’, p. 3. 110  Kent, ‘Curriculum Vitae (August 1987)’, p. 3. 111  Kent, ‘Curriculum Vitae (August 1987)’, p. 3. 112  Kent, ‘Australia Research Grants Scheme Application, 12 March 1987’. 107 

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growing and changing rapidly in recent years. We are accustomed to Lorenzo as brilliant diplomat, Lorenzo as leader of (a still) republican Florence, Lorenzo as an indifferent banker, Lorenzo as arbiter of artistic elegance. ‘My’ Lorenzo must of course be all or most of these things, but he will also be the patron and party leader contemporaries called ‘maestro della bottega’. He was at once more manipulative of his city than many of us have wanted to think, and more shaped by its institutions and experiences than his hagiographers would allow.113

The phrase ‘will not be (cannot be)’, taken with ‘and not a biography in the conventional sense’, surely reflects Kent’s discussions with his mentor, Nicolai Rubinstein.114 According to Kent, Rubinstein ‘must have wished privately that he [himself ] could live long enough to tackle a life of Lorenzo’, but that he did not begin the task was due to his ‘almost fierce insistence that no one should try to do so before the publication of the entire Laurentian correspondence’.115 Though Kent may not have known this, Rubinstein himself wrote approvingly of Kent’s project: ‘The wide-ranging work on patronage under Lorenzo de’ Medici, on which [Kent] is at present engaged, promises greatly to broaden and deepen our knowledge of a subject which is at the centre of Renaissance studies’.116 Kent himself recalls, however, that Rubinstein, on his deathbed, gave him as his last gift Adam Sisman’s Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: Writing the Life of Dr Johnson, ‘and I have since wondered if Nicolai, sick as he was, was not in his gentle and amused way teaching me a last lesson by letting me know what he thought of my presumptuous attempt to write about his beloved Lorenzo de’ Medici’.117 That ‘his’ approach was avowedly not that of a biographer as such, but rather that of ‘an historian interested in placing Lorenzo more firmly in a Florentine context’ is consistent with what Kent had, in essence, done previously with his study of Giovanni Rucellai where he embraced, in this circumscribed sense, ‘the biographer’s point of view, of the chronological development of ideas and of the various personal and public aspirations which they expressed’.118 Examining 113 

Kent, ‘Curriculum Vitae (December 1989)’. Kent notes that Rubinstein ‘encouraged the writing of biographies’; see Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, pp. 39–40. 115  Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein’, p. 391. 116  Nicolai Rubinstein, Letter to Professor Merle Ricklefs, head of History (Monash University), 5 October 1989. 117  Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, p. 44. 118  Kent, ‘The Making of a Renaissance Patron’, p. 53. Cf. Molho, ‘Review: Giovanni Rucel­ lai ed il suo Zibaldone’, p. 41. 114 

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the relationship between a particular individual and his social and political ambience allowed Kent to advance themes of personality and temperament, motivation and goals.119 Certainly, the focus on milieu as much as on the historical figure, through attending to the voices from the archive, was in keeping with the method that Kent had been developing over the decades. He makes this point rather tellingly in his discussion of the virtues of the digitized, online version of the Medici Family Archive (Archivio Mediceo avanti il Principato): The more we diligently seek out the obscure and unheard voices in MaP, the more we are likely to encounter — indeed, dare one say it, better understand — Lorenzo de’  Medici himself  […]. This indefatigable letter-writer took very seriously petitions from the humblest of people […]. The Medici were in a social and political sense online — at the centre of a patronal internet partly of their own making.120

The argument underpinning Kent’s approach was that the Medici were constantly inserting and manipulating corporate and constitutional forms, exploiting its clientelist culture, and from prominent ‘gran maestri’ they mutated into undisputed ‘maestri della bottega’ under Lorenzo; then even into sainted rulers.121 Kent’s apt analogy of the Medici ‘at the centre of a patronal internet’ suggests the almost overwhelming volume of now readily available material. To this Kent assiduously applied himself. Yet at times he himself must have wondered, in view of the immensity of the task and the volume of materials, whether undertaking a biography of Lorenzo was indeed presumptuous. With Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, by addressing himself directly to art historians, Kent confronted an issue that he had articulated in earlier essays, namely the need for historians ‘to build bridges’ between our understanding of society and of culture,122 thereby responding to neo-Burckhardtian arguments concerning the springs of Florentine creativity. Bridges rather than ‘grappling hooks’ is the exemplum that his study on Lorenzo holds up.123 For Lorenzo, Kent sought to provide a firm historical context, including a precise chronology for those of his activities that related to material culture, 119 

Cf. Molho, ‘Review: Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone’, p. 41. Kent, ‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive’, pp. 396–97. 121  Kent, ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”’, p. 200. 122  E.g. Kent, ‘Art Historical Gleanings from the Florentine Archives’; Kent, ‘Individuals and Families as Patrons of Culture in Quattrocento Florence’, p. 175; Kent and Simons, ‘Renaissance Patronage’, pp. 20–21. 123  Kent, ‘Individuals and Families as Patrons of Culture in Quattrocento Florence’, pp. 173, 175. 120 

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as well as a framework for explaining his ‘taste and aesthetic formation’. Here, as with Rucellai in his ‘making of a Renaissance patron of the arts’, Kent sought to frame Lorenzo as a product of his origins and his family. Kent also showed in great detail not only that Lorenzo sustained and manipulated corporate structures, but also that he enjoyed close, collaborative, even creative relationships with artisans — no trickle-down theory of patronage here! Cross-class friendships were a cohesive force and conducive to artistic creativity.124 Kent, with exquisite and elaborate detail, shows how Lorenzo used artistic and architectural ‘sign language […] to communicate his future political and dynastic ambitions in the city and in princely Italy at large’, and how Lorenzo ‘sought to express [his magnificence] in myriad ways’.125 Kent’s achievement, therefore, has been to revive Lorenzo’s reputation as an active patron of the arts, which in twentieth-century historiography has tended to be dismissed as the hagiographical myth generated by humanist exaggeration or partisan deference. More generally, as Kent wrote in one of his last and posthumously published essays: ‘Our more modest, if still ambitious, task is to show in as much detail and with as much clarity as possible the full circumstances in which works of art were created and to inquire about what purpose art served and what impact it had in this small, intimate, and self-conscious society, in which divisions and tensions — sometimes exaggerated — could be a source of creative vitality’.126 This last quotation highlights a further distinctive characteristic of Kent’s approach to Lorenzo. Whereas the ‘Lorenzo’ of Rubinstein’s studies can be taken as just one example of the effect of the general historiographical tendency — articulated by John Najemy — to idealize Renaissance elites and to more or less ignore ‘the use of force in the preservation of Medicean power in Florence’, Kent, on the other hand, mindful of the critique, did not hesitate to devote pages to the undiplomatic act of violence against rebellious Volterra that consolidated Lorenzo’s ‘position within the regime and the city’.127 More than that, Kent links the conflict directly to a further sharpening of Lorenzo’s ‘interest in disegno and architecture’ by way of the patronal acquaintances occasioned by the Volterran war of 1472.128 124 

See too, Kent, ‘Florence, 1300–1600’, pp. 29–30. See Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. 145 and p. xi. 126  Kent, ‘Florence, 1300–1600’, p. 10. 127  Najemy, ‘Politics: Class and Patronage’, p. 121; Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, pp. 48, 80, 124. Also Kent, ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, p. 38. 128  Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, pp. 49, 52–53. 125 

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The creation and significance of works of art, including architecture and buildings, was continuous with a social context for which Kent’s scholarship provides a rich humus of understanding. His Laurentian Florence was therefore one with a new look. On the question of whether or not it was a paradise where devils dwelt, his answer was consistently nuanced and equivocal. It ‘was neither paradise nor entirely inhabited by devils’.129 Kent’s Lorenzo was certainly ‘maestro della bottega’, ruthless when serving family and dynastic needs, but also responsive to thousands of petitions from the lowly as well as the great. But Kent’s subtle understandings of the networks of forces in the city, articulated not just through elite but also artisanal voices heard for the first time, yields a portrait of a Lorenzo who was at once manipulative of his city and yet also profoundly shaped by its institutions and experiences. He was also a learned Lorenzo of refined taste who collected codices (as well as antiquities), planned a library, and increasingly read the classic authors of ancient Rome in order to grapple with his own identity and role in history. To this end, Lorenzo perhaps commissioned, but certainly in the end owned and no doubt read a history of the late Roman emperors, the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, now held in Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria. In one of his last essays, Kent interprets the meaning of this codex for Lorenzo as signifying his magnificentia and identification with the golden age of classical Rome.130 Kent speculated that the text ‘played some role in maintaining and strengthening Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sense of himself as an Italian lord-in-the-making, as the would-be Augustan ruler of still republican Florence who was seeking to establish a Medici dynasty […] in conception and as a precious object the codex belonged […] to the exclusive imagination of a proto-prince and his family’.131 Whether or not one has studied, or visited, Florence, the city figures in the imagination as a symbol of a particularly creative moment in western history. Kent’s forty years of labour do justice to the complexities of its culture and community. He artlessly evokes in the reader of ‘his’ depiction of Renaissance Florence what he himself appreciated in William Dick’s account of the neighbourhood where he grew up: that precious sense of time and place and a new 129 

Kent, ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”’, p. 200; Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Mag­ nificencei, pp. 10–12. 130  Kent, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Scriptores Historiae Augustae’, p. 138. See also Kent, Lor­ enzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. 85. 131  Kent, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Scriptores Historiae Augustae’, p. 142. Also see Kent, Lor­ enzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. 85.

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way of seeing. In Renaissance Florence there were so many signs of precocity, of munificence and magnificence. ‘With these aesthetic and polemical resources to hand, Lorenzo de’ Medici, it is well-known, engaged in artistic diplomacy with a world deeply impressed by what Lodovico Sforza acknowledged in 1492 to be “Florentine ingenuity”’.132 Kent’s portrayal is of self-consciously proud Florentines at home, with a reputation abroad. In all, through the prism of a nuanced understanding of patronage networks and a thickly layered orchestration of previously unheard voices, Kent achieved a rich and subtle account of Florence and of Lorenzo, and Lorenzo’s special place in the politics and society of his day. Without constructing a mythical Bill Kent reminiscent of those deferential panegyrics of Lorenzo of which Kent himself disapproved, we ourselves can nonetheless approve Kent’s remarkable evocation of the sense of place that was Medicean Florence and applaud that his depiction of a shared townscape and common concerns is matched by his vivid ‘portrait of the people who lived in it’.133

After Kent With his name appearing on seventy or so publications, Bill Kent’s influence on our understanding of the history of Florence has been profound. But beyond his contribution to Renaissance scholarship and his immense knowledge of the Florentine archives, it was his humanity and gift for friendship that inscribed his signature not just on the research of untold numbers of colleagues and students but on their very selves. Through his many collaborations, supervisions, and friendships, he created a recognizable stable of scholarship which now spans generations. He was proud of the fact that ‘the first “native” Australian PhDs [in Renaissance Studies] were products of Monash University’ and that they were becoming ‘well known internationally’.134 He actively promoted them and did not let the opportunity of a footnote to their work pass him by. At Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), his home-away-from-home for more than three decades from 1977, Kent was at the hub of networks, intellectual and patronal, the range of which Lorenzo de’ Medici himself would have envied. ‘Billino dal Villino’ was how he was 132 

Kent, ‘Review: Public Life in Renaissance Florence’, p. 387. Refer above, at note 12. 134  Kent, ‘Curriculum Vitae (May 2010)’: Peter Howard, Nicholas Eckstein, Natalie Tomas, Cecilia Hewlett, Ersie Burke, and David Rosenthal. 133 

30 Peter Howard

affectionately known when he was in residence at I Tatti’s ‘Villino’. There — and indeed everywhere — he ‘gave the gift of true friendship’.135 Bill Kent’s gift for friendship lies at the heart of this volume. Its seeds go back to 25 April 2010 and a conversation I shared with Bill, sitting on the porch of his home. Kent had always resisted the idea of a Festschrift, but with the advent of an illness from which there was to be no recovery, he relented but with one hesitation. There were so many friends whom he wished to acknowledge and, least of all, wanted to offend. So how would he limit the number since so many would want to contribute? The criteria he settled upon were headed ‘Monash […] Australian […] Close collaborators / Associates’. He himself appointed the editors and drew up a list of possible contributors. The opportunity to honour Bill Kent has provided a forum in which the authors elucidate and examine key aspects of Medicean and Laurentian Florence in particular, and Renaissance Italy more generally. The essays, which cohere and integrate through the inspiration of Bill Kent’s work, are therefore organized under four themes with which he had profound sympathy: power and agency in Medicean Florence; family, friends, and networks; spirituality and patronage; and the consumption of culture. Towards the end of his analysis of Lorenzo de’ Medici as a patron of the arts, Bill Kent, quoting a contemporary, writes of Lorenzo’s sadness at dying ‘at an age when he might have expected to enjoy a longer life’, and himself quotes a line from T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men: ‘Between the idea And the reality, Between the notion And the act, Falls the shadow’.136 But in his last months, Bill Kent was more of a mind to ‘seize the day’. Rather than Lorenzo, perhaps it is to Rucellai that we may turn for a pithy summation of Kent’s life and achievement. To encapsulate this patron’s vigour, Kent reminds the reader that Rucellai once repeated the dictum of that quintessential humanist, Leon Battista Alberti: ‘non è l’uomo nato per vivere dormendo, ma per vivere facendo’ — ‘man was not born to pass his life half-asleep, but rather to seize life and achieve’.137

135 

I quote from an email written on behalf of all I Tatti’s staff by Alexa Mason, Deputy Director for External Relations, 6 September 2010. 136  Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. 149. 137  Kent, ‘The Making of a Renaissance Patron’, pp. 9–10.

‘A Paradise Inhabited by Devils’

31

Works Cited References to Francis William Kent’s publications are to be found below, pp. 517–22. Acciaiuoli, Agnolo, ‘Letter’, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane  III serie, n. 178, c. 14r Becker, Marvin B., ‘Review: The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence by Gene Brucker’, Speculum, 53 (1978), 790–93 Brucker, Gene, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977) —— , Renaissance Florence (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969) Burke, Peter, ‘Renaissance Studies’, The Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 975–84 Carr, E. H., What Is History?, 2nd edn, ed. by R. W. Davies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) Collingwood, R.  M., The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946; rev. edn, 1993) Connell, William J., ‘Introduction’, in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. by William J. Connell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 1–12 —— , ‘Libri di famigilia and the Family History of Florentine Patricians’, Italian Culture, 8 (1990), 277–92 Davison, Graeme (with Peter Howard and John Lack), ‘Obituary: Francis William Kent: Historian, Educator’, The Age, 3 November 2010, p. 23 Davison, Graeme, and Kate Murphy, ‘Transcript of Interview with Emeritus Professor Bill Kent’, 11 May 2010, Monash University Archives Denley, Peter, and Caroline Elam, eds, Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, Westfield Publications in Medi­eval Studies, 2 (London: Westfield College, University of London, 1988) —— , ‘Nicolai Rubinstein’, in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. by Peter Denley and Caroline Elam, Westfield Publications in Medi­ eval Studies, 2 (London: Westfield College, University of London, 1988), pp. xi–xiv Diefendorf, Barbara B., ‘Family Culture, Renaissance Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), 661–81 Goldthwaite, Richard A., The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) Howard, Jane, ‘Florence Study Has a Lot to Offer, Says Historian’, The Australian: Higher Education Supplement, 270 (12 June 1985) Howard, Peter, ‘Obituary: Ian Robertson (1935–2004)’, Renaissance Studies, 19 (2005), 229–33 Lack, John, ‘From Foot-is-cry to Firenze: Remembering Bill Kent 1942–2010’, Victorian Historical Journal, 82 (2011), 247–53 Kent, Dale V., ‘Fifty Years On’, in Written Into History: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Mel­ bourne Historical Journal, ed. by Keir Wotherspoon and Erik Ropers (Parkville: Mel­ bourne Historical Journal Collective, 2012), pp. 59–78

32 Peter Howard

—— , Friendship, Love and Trust in Renaissance Florence, The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) Maxson, Brian, The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 2014) Mews, Constant (with Nerrida Newbigin and Ros Pesman), ‘Obituary: Francis William (Bill) Kent (1942–2010)’, The Proceedings of the Australian Academy of Humanities 2010, pp. 82–87  [accessed 31 January 2015] Molho, Anthony, ‘The Italian Renaissance, Made in the U.S.A.’, in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. by A. Molho and G. S. Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 283–94 —— , ‘Review Article: Visions of the Florentine Family in the Renaissance’, Journal of Modern History, 50 (1978), 304–11 —— , ‘Review: Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 2, A Florentine Patrician and his Palace, by F. W. Kent, Alessandro Perosa, Brenda Preyer, Piero Sanpaolesi, Roberto Salvini, Nicolai Rubinstein’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 11 (1984), 37–44 Muir, Edward, ‘The Italian Renaissance in America’, American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 1095–1118 Najemy, John M., Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli– Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) —— , ‘The Dialogue of Power in Florentine Politics’, in City States in Classical Antiquity and Medi­eval Italy, ed. by Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 269–88 —— , A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) —— , ‘Politics: Class and Patronage in Twentieth-Century Italian Renaissance Historio­ graphy’, in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2000), pp. 119–36 Pesman, R. L., ‘The Italian Renaissance in Australia’, Parergon, 14 (1996), 223–39 Strocchia, Sharon T., Florence, Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Refor­ mation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010–),  Young, Michael Dunlop, and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Lon­ don: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)

Part I Power and Agency in Medicean Florence

Between the Palace and the Piazza: Locating Power and Agency in Bill Kent’s Florence Alison Brown

T

he Palazzo and the Piazza together symbolized popular power in Florence. The square in front of the Palazzo Vecchio (the government Palace of the Signoria) was where ‘the whole people’ gathered in an assembly or parlamento to give expression to their ‘full, free, total and absolute power and authority’. In Brunelleschi’s perspective panels in the early fifteenth century, the piazza is shown ‘spread out’ before the palace, as though — as John Paoletti and Roger Crum put it — it was an intermediary that ‘held the body politic at critical moments in the city’s history’.1 Initially, these assemblies 1 

Crum and Paoletti, Renaissance Florence, Introduction, p. 5; Guidi. Il Governo, i, 91–93; Najemy, A History of Florence, p. 172; Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, p. 89. Alison Brown ([email protected]) is emerita professor of Italian Renaissance history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Recent books are The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cam­bridge, MA, 2010), Ital. trans. Machiavelli e Lucrezio: Fortuna e libertà nella Firenze rinascimentale (Roma, 2013); Medicean and Savonarolan Florence: The Interplay of Politics, Humanism and Religion (Turnhout, 2011). Recent articles include ‘Piero in Power, 1492–1494: Drawing a Balance for Four Generations of Medici Control’, in The Medici: Citizens and Masters, ed. by Robert Black and John E. Law (Cam­bridge, MA, 2015), ‘Lucretian Naturalism and the Evolution of Machiavelli’s Ethics’, in Lucretius and the Early Modern, ed. by David Norbook and others (Oxford, 2016) and in The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy, and Language, ed. by F. Del Lucchese and others (Leiden, 2015), ‘Defining the Place of Academies in Florentine Politics and Culture’, in The Italian Academies, 1525– 1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, ed. by J. Everson and others (London, 2016), and ‘“Natura, idest?”: Leonardo, Lucretius and their Views of Nature’, in Leonardo da Vinci on Nature, ed. by F. Frosini and A. Nova (Venezia, 2013).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 35–51 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109697

36 Alison Brown

offered the people limited participation in political decision-making, as they did at the time of the uprising of the woolcarders (the Ciompi), in 1378; but in its aftermath, when the piazza became the centre of confrontations and disputes, the mouths, or bocche, of the streets leading into it were no longer open to the populace but were controlled by armed soldiers to protect the palazzo.2 So although the people continued to be summoned to assemblies by the great bell in the fifteenth century, it was increasingly apparent that the parlamento was serving only as a plebiscite to remutar lo stato, or ‘change the government’, in times of crisis. Abolished in 1495, it was restored when the Medici returned to power in 1512 and again in 1530, until two years later, in 1532, the Medici’s new status as dukes of Florence made these assemblies finally redundant. Their end denoted the end of popular or republican government in Florence and the beginning of princely rule. It is perhaps easy for us in retrospect to see how limited the role of the people had been and how easily their presence in the piazza could be manipulated. Even at the time there was scepticism about the extent to which the popular voice represented ‘the whole people’, as we can see from a sermon delivered there in 1437. For when asked whether the Last Judgement would be vocal or mental, the preacher replied with the analogy of the parlamento in Florence: partly one and partly the other, for when the chancellor asks if you’re all present and agree to this and that, you (the people) reply ‘yes, yes’ — but you’re not all present and yet it’s valid: ‘so it will be with the Last Judgement’.3 This was the case from 1378 until 1494, when in December the people were summoned to a parlamento after the fall of the Medici and were asked (as usual) if they were ‘two-thirds and more of the people of the city of Florence’. ‘“Yes, yes, yes”, that is, ita, ita, ita’, they confidentally replied, according to the notary, ‘with no one asserting the contrary insofar as could be heard’.4 Later, Francesco Guicciardini noted in one of his maxims that a ‘dense fog or thick wall’ separated the piazza 2 

Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, pp. 89–91; ‘Alle Bocche della Piazze’, ed. by Molho and Sznura, pp. xlvii–xlviii, 28, 43, 150, 159, 218; for 1378, see Trexler, ‘Il parlamento fiorentino’, esp. p. 475: ‘quasi una voce et una inspiratione […] altis vocibus, et primo super primo capitolo, et successive super et de omnibus aliis suprascriptis, Sì, Sì, Sì et Sia, Sia, Sia’, etc. 3  Boschetto, Società e cultura a Firenze al tempo del concilio, pp. 401–02, citing the sermon of Paolo d’Assisi: ‘parte mentale e parte vochale […] Non vi sono però tucti, e vale. Così, disse, sarà del giudicio’. 4  Law of 2 December 1494, ed. by Cadoni, Provvisioni, i, 8: ‘nemine contrarium asserente, prout potuit commode audiri’ (my italics); cf. the 1378 formula cited by Trexler, ‘Il parlamento fiorentino’, p. 442.

Between the Palace and the Piazza

37

from the palazzo, ensuring that the people knew ‘as little about what rulers do, or why, as they do about what goes on in India’.5 The image of the piazza in the historical imagination has followed a similar parabola. What had been celebrated as an enlightened secular space, carved out of former magnate enclaves and the sacral ground of ancient churches, has become an unstable and agonistic area, more like a bull ring than a place of civic harmony. Both John Najemy and Stephen Milner now describe the piazza as a contested or ‘practiced’ space where the city’s anxieties were released and controlled. It was the site for contests not only between elitist Ciceronian rhetoric and the demotic language of the people but also between dignified civic ceremonies and chivalric animal hunts, and between the no less savage bonfires of the vanities and bonfires of the friars who inveighed against them. 6 For others, the space is neither enlightened nor contested but frankly tyrannical, ‘the looming bulk’ of the Palazzo Vecchio being ‘a Panopticon’ designed by its ruling class to ‘terrorize’ Florentine men, and by its phallic thrust remind its women of their exclusion from public life.7 These are not Bill Kent’s words, but they are cited by him in his introduction to the Monash volume Street Noises that he edited, titled ‘The Piazza’s Many Voices’. This short but pithy essay raises the possibility that the people may have enjoyed more power than we have recently been led to believe. It sums up, for me, the quality that underlies all Bill Kent’s original and pathbreaking writings as a historian of Florence, that is, his success in re-evoking Florentine voices from all classes and both sexes to throw novel light on old and new structures of power — what he calls elsewhere ‘the whole rich brew of artisans, popolani and gran maestri that simmered away in this remarkable city’.8 The bocche of the piazza, he reminds us, were not only the mouths of the streets opening into its living, breathing space, space that could be shut off when it boiled, but also the mouths or voices of citizens that were less easy to shut up — as in 1497, when three thousand starving women in the piazza forced the government to give them bread. As he says, these voices were not coerced by the piazza’s threaten5 

Guicciardini, Ricordo C 141, ed. by Spongano, p. 153; Guicciardini, Dialogue, trans. by Brown, Appendix, p. 174; cf. his Considerazioni, ed. by Canestrini, p. 52 (rephrasing Discorsi I, 47): that the Florentines ‘non avendo nelle piazze quella notizia, né vedendo quegli avvisi che poi vedevano in palazzo, erano facilmente di opinione diversa dalla verità’. 6  Najemy, ‘Florentine Politics and Urban Spaces’, especially pp. 31, 34–37; Milner, ‘The Florentine Piazza’, pp. 97–99; Milner, ‘Citing the Ringhiera’. 7  Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, pp. 243, 258. 8  Kent, ‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”’, p. 238.

38 Alison Brown

ing architecture nor seduced by its beauty into believing that they lived in paradise. Rather, they were realistically acknowledging that they lived in a ‘paradise inhabited by devils’, where there were ‘many perverse spirits, not in any way delectable but horrendous’.9 Despite the scepticism of Guicciardini and others, both the people and the piazza still had a role to play in Florentine politics. Although Savonarola had succeeded in abolishing parlamenti through the force of his sermons, this was because they had been replaced (he claimed) by the Great Council, a widely based legislative council consisting of all those whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had held one of the three major offices, thereby placing government directly ‘in the hands of the people (popolo), who is the true and legitimate lord of our city and can make new laws […] through the councils without otherwise convoking the people’.10 The people’s power had moved indoors, from the piazza to the new Sala Grande — as the Medici themselves acknowledged on their return in 1512; for despite re-entering the palace by force of arms, ‘they could do nothing, because of the Great Council’.11 Even though ‘the people’ no longer meant the populace at large, the piazza still remained the place where they gathered to hear the Signoria and the sixteen gonfalonieri promise on the Gospels, ‘publicly, on the ringhiera’ (the raised performative platform outside the palace) and ‘in a lively and loud voice’, never to summon a parlamento again.12 And both piazza and populace still participated in the ritual of appointing and installing the new Signoria every two months. For although the extraction of names took place inside the palace, the statutes stated that ‘the doors of the palace were to be open to allow anyone to enter’, and afterwards the ceremony installing the new Signoria was conducted outside on the ringhiera, when all the bells were rung and the shops closed, ‘to ensure that the piazza is and should be full with an infinite number of citizens’.13 9  Kent, ‘Introduction’; Kent, ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”’, p. 198: ‘molti perversi spiriti più tosto horrendo che delectabile in alcuno modo’. On the starving women, see Tomas, ‘Did Women Have a Space?’, p. 312. 10  Laws of 23 December 1494 and 13 August 1495 (citing the latter), ed. by Cadoni, Prov­ visioni, i, 41 and 178–79; Najemy, A History of Florence, pp. 386–90. 11  Cambi, Istorie, ed. by San Luigi, ii (1785), 324: ‘che se non facievano parlamento, non facievano nulla, rispetto al Chonsiglio gienerale’. 12  Cadoni, Provvisioni, i, 179: ‘publicamente in ringhiera’, ‘con viva et alta voce’. 13  Statuta, ii (1778), bk. v, rub. 8–10, pp. 495–504: ‘portas apertis, ut cuilibet detur copia et facultas intrandi’ (p. 496), ‘ut in platea sit et esse debeat civium copiosus et infinitus numerus’ (p. 501); cf. Rubinstein, The Government of Florence, p. 39; Taddei, ‘Between Rules and Ritual’, especially pp. 51–54.

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39

So what constitutes the people’s voice and how do we discover it? This is the question raised by Bill Kent’s discussion of the voices in the piazza, and it provides the springboard for my contribution to this volume honouring his memory. It is a highly topical question nowadays, when popular uprisings repeatedly make us reflect on the people’s role in influencing events by their presence in squares — but it remains as difficult to answer now as then. To attempt to do so, I shall describe three incidents that took place in Florence in the decade between 1488 and 1498. In two of them, it is not easy to distinguish between the popolo in the piazza, who were qualified to participate in politics as middling and lower guildsmen, and the unqualified moltitudine or masses that included women and foreigners, as well as low-grade workers like the Ciompi and the unemployed. This will be a matter to return to, as well as some wider issues concerning the sources. In addition to the influence of classical models on our sources, there are methodological differences between a social or patronal approach to power and a more strictly political or ‘statist’ one that may also affect the way we interpret them.14 To some extent these differences reflect the contrast I have always seen between Bill’s Florence and mine, and it is in tribute to our long friendship that I reflect on them here. * * * The election of a new Signoria is the scenario for the first of three incidents I shall use to discuss the people’s voice in these years. The time is nearly sunset on 29 December 1488, when the piazza was ‘full of citizens’ who had waited expectantly for several hours to hear who had been drawn for the Signoria due to take up office three days later. Sortition by the Podestà had been delayed for lack of a quorum, since four members of the colleges had absented themselves without licence to join Piero de’ Medici’s Christmas hunt in the countryside. Finally, after consulting the four palace officials (the government’s administrative experts), the outgoing Gonfalonier of Justice Nero Cambi ordered the person who lived closest to Florence (in Campi) to return to complete the quorum. Eventually, on the second summons, he came galloping into the large crowd filling the piazza, wearing a black cape and heavy boots (‘as was the fashion at the time’), and the sortition took place later that evening. After consulting the Otto di Pratica (the important executive committee for external affairs) and winning the unanimous support of his colleagues in the Signoria, Nero Cambi 14 

Kent, ‘Patron–Client Networks’, pp. 201–03; Molho, ‘Patronage and the State’, esp. pp. 31–34; Brown, Medicean and Savonarolan Florence, Introduction, pp. xvi–xvii.

40 Alison Brown

then punished the four absentees by depriving them of future office (ammu­ nizione). A week later, however, the tables were turned on him when the new Gonfalonier, Francesco Valori, and his colleagues (who included some members of Piero de’ Medici’s hunting party, the Ruota) quashed the punishment of the absentees and instead deprived Cambi of future office for his affrontery.15 We are lucky to have at least five accounts of what happened, of which the fullest is that of Nero’s son Giovanni Cambi. Although Giovanni admitted that Lorenzo de’ Medici would have prevented the ‘scandal’ happening had he been in Florence, he defends his father Nero in his Istorie for adhering to constitutional electoral procedures and for upholding ‘the seat of the Signoria in honour’ (as Maso degli Albizzi put it), whereas Lorenzo, on his return, acted ‘without wanting to hear the other side, as Big Men always do’, listening instead only to his secretary ser Piero Dovizi and to a corrupt lawyer in his circle.16 Ser Piero’s account of events to Niccolò Michelozzi was somewhat different, in explaining that Cambi had been punished ‘like those of ’34’ (i.e. with loss of office, like magistrates in the Albizzi regime in 1434) for having behaved ‘so presumptuously’ and without respect for anyone — least of all for Dovizi himself — in punishing the four collegi during Lorenzo’s absence.17 And the Otto di Pratica agreed that Cambi’s crime was to have acted without conferring with the leading citizens, with whom, ‘according to the custom of our City, matters of importance are normally discussed’.18 So, subsequently, did Francesco Guicciardini in his History of Florence, where he explained that Lorenzo and the regime were ‘quite upset’ by what had happened, for if the Signoria could 15  Cambi (Istorie, ed. by San Luigi, ii, 38–47) says the sortition, scheduled for ‘la mattina […] presso a nona’, took place just before sunset (‘bene 23 hore’, pp. 39, 41), but according to the Otto (note 18, below), three hours after it. 16  Cambi, Istorie, ed. by San Luigi, ii, 40–47. On Lorenzo as a Big Man, see Kent, ‘Patron– Client Networks’, and on views of Lorenzo as a tyrant, see Najemy, A History of Florence, p. 343. 17  Dovizi to Michelozzi in Perugia, 10 January 1489, BNCF, MS GC. filza 29, no. 62, fol. 47: ‘come quelli del ’34, per havere tanto presuntuosamente et sanza conscientia di persona et con alcune circumstantie cattive contra me […], benché in absentia di Lorenzo, admonito quelli collegi’. 18  Otto to Jacobo Guicciardini, Pierfilippo Pandolfini, and Pagolantonio Soderini, orators in Livorno, 5 January 1489, ASF, MS Otto di Pratica, Missive 11, fol. 73r, the sortition, delayed ‘per non havere potuto propterea havere il numero de Collegi, si fece a hore tre di nocte in circa’. So that ‘parendo alla Signoria [corr. ex Nero Cambi Gonfalonieri] havere ricevuto vergogna, sanza conferire o consultare questa cosa con chi secondo il costume della Città nostra si sogliono conferire le cose che hanno in se qualche importantia, admoni iiij del numero de’ Collegi’.

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41

act in this way without consulting those in power, their regime would be ‘astride a whale’s back’ if only six votes (that is, a two-thirds’ majority in either the Signoria or the Otto di Guardia) were needed to chase them from the city.19 The incident illuminates the political issues at stake in Laurentian Florence: on one hand, patronal government by a Big Man, whose authority ensured stability through its unwritten code of deference; on the other, respect for the communal constitution, with its attendant demotic risks. What is unclear is the position of the people in the piazza. Their silent presence while they awaited the constitutional sortition of the next government would suggest they supported Cambi. Yet it was not only Dovizi who thought the outcome had ‘marvellously satisfied the whole city’. Alamanno Rinuccini, normally a voice upholding the constitution against Lorenzo de’ Medici’s malpractices, wrote in his diary that it was Nero’s ammunizione that had particularly pleased the people because, in addition to his other vices, he was ‘a most wicked sodomite’.20 The voice of the people is less equivocal in my next example. The occasion was the day of Piero de’ Medici’s expulsion from Florence on 9 November 1494, when he had attempted to enter the palace in the morning and had been told to return after lunch. According to the historian Jacopo Nardi, Piero’s second attempt to enter the palace in the early evening with his armed lackies was witnessed by ‘many citizens who found themselves in the piazza unarmed’. They started to create an uproar and shouted at him to get lost (or ‘get the hell out’, andar con Dio) and not to oppose the will of the Signoria, while at the same time children pursued him with stones. Nardi continues: So, although Piero was by nature feisty and bold, he suddenly — I don’t know how — became so frightened (as it pleased God) that the cries of a few disarmed men scared him more with their words, their faces, their gestures, and with the pointed hoods of their cloaks than anything else, making him leave the piazza surrounded by his lackies.

The same bystanders then disarmed the police official (the Bargello) who had come to help Piero. This emboldened the Signoria to summon the people by ringing the great bell; they ran armed to the piazza — and the rest is history.21 19 

Guicciardini, Storie fiorentine, ed. by Palmarocchi, p. 70: ‘che lo stato loro fussi a cavallo in su uno baleno’. Dovizi thought that Michelozzi would also disapprove of ‘il manimettere le .6. fave’ (letter of 10 January). 20  Dovizi, letter of 10 January; Rinuccini, Ricordi storici, ed. by Aiazzi, p. cxliv: ‘scelera­ tissimo soddomito’. On Rinuccini, see note 32, below. 21  Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, ed. by Gelli, i, 32–34.

42 Alison Brown

In Piero Parenti’s account, the people had already been called to arms when the cowardly Piero joined them by shouting ‘popolo’ himself as he was halfway across the piazza on his way home, mounting his horse only when he reached the corner where his palace stood.22 Although the key players appear to be the members of the government inside and outside the palace who encouraged Piero or refused him entry, the fortuitous presence of a few people and children in the piazza was the turning point in his overthrow according to Nardi and Parenti, the call to arms merely providing the coup de grâce. As in my first incident, there seem to be three, not two, parties to the political debate: the citizens inside the palace, the ‘Big Men’ like Piero, who on being refused entry ‘didn’t reply but bit his finger as a sign of vendetta’,23 and in the piazza the ordinary people, whose words, expressions, and gestures are represented as being as influential as the actions of the government. In contrast to these narratives, the account sent to the Marquis of Mantua later that evening by the Signoria offered a more heroic version of events in attributing the Medici’s overthrow to all the citizens and the nobility, followed by all the people, who were responding to the zeal of the leading citizens in reporting Piero’s tyranny; so despite the fact that many of the Medici’s satellites were armed, as were the soldiers of Paolo Orsini (at hand to support Piero), the Medici were forced to leave the city, ‘without the spilling of blood’.24 The voices of the people in my third incident belong to citizens within the palace and to young bravados outside, at a moment of danger for the republican regime in 1498. Six months after Savonarola’s trial and execution, Florence was once again in crisis. Threatened by events abroad and by Piero de’ Medici’s unremitting attempts to return, its four futile and expensive years of warfare to regain Pisa had created only a mountainous debt and legislative deadlock, since the Great Council refused to pass any tax bills or reappoint the Ten of War until it had won electoral concessions — leading to a general loss of respect for law and order in the city and ‘everything unstable and in flux’.25 Again, it is 22 

Parenti, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Matucci, i, 122–24: ‘a cavallo salito in sul suo canto da casa’ (p. 124). On these events, see also Najemy, A History of Florence, pp. 378–79. 23  Cerretani, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Berti, p. 206: ‘non respose Piero ma morsesi il dito in segno di vendecta’. 24  Signoria to the Marquis of Mantua, 9 November 1494, ed. by Portioli, ‘Nuovi documenti’, pp. 334–35: ‘sanza alcuna efusione di sangue’. 25  Parenti, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Matucci, ii, 212–15: ‘tutto instabile e solubile’ (p. 213); cf. Guicciardini, Storie fiorentine, ed. by Palmarocchi, pp. 167–73. On the electoral reforms of 18 March 1497 and 31 May 1499, see Brown, ‘Offices of Honour and Profit’, pp. 156–57.

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Nardi who reports the people’s vocal response to the crisis that followed their refusal to approve the tax proposals of the Gonfalonier of Justice, Guidantonio Vespucci. In the council chamber, he wrote, Vespucci told the people through clenched teeth that if they were not happy with the government, they should speak out and tell the Signoria, who would listen and do what the citizens wanted (evidently meaning, Parenti explains in his account of events, that they should support a coup d’état). At which there was such an outburst and uproar, ‘through spitting and expectoration, clapping of hands and stamping of feet on the ground’, that the Gonfalonier, seeing how displeased and angry his words had made them, went to sit down. Whereupon the meeting was closed and the Gonfalonier returned home with a fever.26 The following night young men tied bunches of rope to the grating of Vespucci’s house in Via de’ Servi, shouting out: ‘O, baldy, you’ll lose your head.’ Although not praiseworthy, Nardi continued, ‘it was as if the sound of the above voices awakened citizens from their laziness and somnulence, making them better guardians of their liberty’.27 Parenti attributes the pranks to the fact that Vespucci was opposed to Savonarola’s party, which was now back in favour, but it must also have been stimulated by the rivalry between the companies of youths who a week earlier had celebrated Christmas with many acts of sacrilege — such as driving a horse around the choir of the Duomo, bearing arms in S. Maria Novella, dressing up as women in order to mingle with them, and driving people out of SS. Annunziata by putting a stinking plant in the church.28 These events, according to Nardi, explain why the sober popolani voted at last for the unpopular tax bills and ended the disorder. The three contrasting voices in this incident are those of Guidantonio Vespucci, a former Medicean and now a leading member of the ruling elite, the popolani in the Great Council, and the youths in the street. Unusually, it allows us inside the council chamber to hear the former expressing their opposition with an extraordinary outburst of spitting, clapping, and stamping that brings their voices to life. And similarly, those of the ribald youths, ‘the sound of whose voices’ was sufficient to recall the voters to a sense of what 26 

Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, ed. by Gelli, i, 154–55: ‘per la frequenza delli spurgamenti e del battere delle mani e stropicciare per terra de’ piedi’; Parenti, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Matucci, ii, 221–22; and below at note 30. 27  Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, ed. by Gelli, i, 155: ‘O Zucchetta, e’ ti sarà tolta la forma della berretta, alludendo alla figura della testa di quello, perciò che egli era di sua natura calvo’; cf. Parenti, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Matucci, ii, 218. 28  Parenti, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Matucci, ii, 217. On the companies of ‘the King’ and ‘the Duke’, see Nerli, Commentarii, p. 134.

44 Alison Brown

Michael Lingohr calls, in an architectural context, ‘a sense of civic republican decorum’.29 Here we see the people poised between hostility to the attempted coup hinted at by Vespucci (which must refer to the proposal for a closed elite or a lifetime head of state that began to be floated among the ruling elite at this time)30 and their duty as citizens to resolve the financial crisis. So what light do these examples throw on the locus and dynamics of power in Florence? Does the populace have a political voice or is it merely a witness to the dialogue of power within the elite of leading citizens? * * * How we interpret the voices in the piazza is influenced not only by the sources that report them but also by our own approach as historians. Nearly all the sources belong to the civic republican tradition of history writing.31 Giovanni Cambi’s Istorie grew out of his listing of priorates (priorista) as evidence of a family’s role in government, and Piero Parenti’s Storia continued the family memoirs of his father Marco, whose wife was a member of the exiled Strozzi family.32 Jacopo Nardi and his family were also exiles — his second cousins had been exiled in 1466 (one of them then executed after the Prato uprising in 1470), while he himself was exiled by Duke Alessandro in 1537 after a career dedicated to conscientious administrative and civic office-holding in republican Florence.33 Although his Istoria was written at the end of his life with the help of other sources (especially Benedetto Varchi’s Florentine History and the memoirs of Biagio Buonaccorsi), it was a very private and ‘personal enterprise’ — we are told — that used his own experience of events to rectify other

29 

Lingohr, ‘The Palace and Villa’, p. 269. See Bertelli, ‘Di due profili mancati’, p. 587 (according to Lorenzo Lenzi and Neri Capponi in Giovanvettorio Soderini’s Ricordanze). 31  Branca, Mercanti scrittori, Introduction, pp. ix–lxxvii; Marchand and Zancarini, Storio­ grafia repubblicana fiorentina; and Hankins, Renaissance Civic Humanism, especially Najemy, ‘Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics’, at pp. 87–88. 32  On Cambi, see Doni Garfagnini’s ‘Introduzione’ to Parenti’s Ricordi storici, p. 31, and on Parenti, see Fubini’s ‘Premessa’ in the same volume, ‘Marco Parenti e I suoi Ricordi Storici’, stressing that despite his criticism, Marco, like Alamanno Rinuccini, remained ‘uomini del reggimento’ (pp. xv–xvi). 33  Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, ed. by Gelli, Introduction, i, pp. viii–xvii; on his cousins, see Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, bk. vii, chaps. 25–27, ed. by Bertelli, pp. 490–94; Kent, ‘Prato and Lorenzo de’ Medici’, pp. 288–89. 30 

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accounts.34 Perhaps this explains Nardi’s richness and originality. Even so, he and the others were all to some degree influenced by classical republican rhetoric and politics in their sympathy for ‘civic republican decorum’ rather than for the self-serving elite or the labouring masses. The only historian to defend the masses at this time was the contrarian Machiavelli, who famously asserted, against Livy and the ‘common opinion’, that ‘the masses are wiser and more constant than princes’ and that ‘the voice of the people is with good reason compared to that of God’, because its predictions are usually right.35 As he says, this was not the view commonly held of the masses, nor was it consistently Machiavelli’s own view — despite the equally provocative speech he put into the mouth of a lowly wool-worker in his Florentine Histories. ‘Stripped bare’, he makes the plebeian say, ‘we are the same as you, dress us in your clothes and you in ours, we’ll appear to be noble and you ignoble.’36 But instead of encouraging support for the working classes, the uprising only succeeded in transforming the words ciompi and moltitudine into spectres to haunt Florentines, as a ‘lesson for all time […] never to let political initiative or arms into the hands of the multitude’.37 Although Machiavelli gives the anonymous pleb a voice by using it as the mouthpiece for a dialectical argument, he also alerts us to the difference between it and the real mouths and voices of people in the square or the gossips on the public benches. These are the mouths that Bill Kent referred to in ‘The Piazza’s Many Voices’, which he said were less easily closed than the mouths of the piazza and more subversive than their lords or rulers would have wished. As Guicciardini wrote in his History of Florence, the city ‘was extremely free in its speech, full of the most subtle and restless minds’.38 As the third voice expressed through actions and gestures in the incidents I have described, it may 34 

De Los Santos, ‘La Vita di Giacomini e le Istorie di Jacopo Nardi’, p. 319. On his debt to Buonaccorsi, see Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, ed. by Gelli, ii, 8. 35  Machiavelli, Discorsi, i, 58 (‘La moltitudine è più savia e più costante che un principe’), ed. by Bertelli, pp. 261–66, citing pp. 261 and 264. Cf. Guicciardini’s comments in his Consid­ erazioni, ed. by Canestrini, pp. 54–59. 36  Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, iii, 13, ed. by Bertelli, p. 238. On the speech and its rhetorical function, see Pedullà, ‘Il Divieto di Platone’, especially pp. 242–47; Pedullà, ‘Una nuova fonte per il Ciompo’; Cabrini, ‘Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’, pp. 136–37; Zancarini, ‘Gli Umori del Corpo Politico’, pp. 69–70. 37  Leonardo Bruni, Historiarum florentini populi, cited by Najemy, A History of Florence, p. 18; for its impact on Machiavelli, see Najemy, ‘Arti and Ordini’, especially pp. 174–77. 38  Guicciardini, Storie fiorentine, ed. by Palmarocchi, p. 74.

46 Alison Brown

have been less susceptible to political rhetoric than those of the writers who recorded them. Even so, the way we interpret it may in turn be influenced by our own approach as historians, whether we interpret the people’s role within a social or a political context.39 When we watch the people in the piazza, are we viewing a long-standing ritual of power linking government and people, or do we see the mutation of a political process into a charade? During the years discussed here, the changing role of the piazza as the site of the parlamento shows how such a mutation could take place. Between the first incident I discuss, the people awaiting a new government in 1488, and the second, the fall of the Medici regime, the important law was passed creating the Great Council, whose sovereignty the Medici acknowledged in reviving par­ lamenti in 1512 and 1530 in order to revoke its authority.40 At the same time Cambi and others recognized the tokenism of these late revivals, the boilermaker Bartolomeo Masi noting how few people turned up in 1512, of whom less than ‘one twenty-fifth’ (instead of the statutory two-thirds) was taken to represent the sovereign people of Florence.41 And the same farce was repeated when the Signoria was forced to summon a parlamento to validate the Medici’s return in 1530: by a bell, Cambi carefully notes, that rang for only ‘two-eighths’ of an hour instead of a full hour; and when in the silence that followed the crowd was asked if it constituted two-thirds of the populace, many, ‘as ordered’, shouted ‘yes’, whereupon the parlamento went ahead.42 By then, it had become a ritual devoid of political function except as a ‘representation’, or charade, of popular republicanism. The piazza’s role as the umbilical cord uniting palazzo to piazza had been weakened when the palace became the domestic home of the life-Gonfalonier in 1502 and then of the Medici dukes, who linked it not to the piazza but instead to their fortress on the other side of the Arno.43 Without the piazza (now renamed ‘the Piazza Ducale’), the people’s link to their new rulers was through decentred festivals and shows that the Medici laid on after their return in 1512, both at carnival time and during the June celebrations for Florence’s patron saint, San Giovanni. 39 

See note 14 above. See above, at notes 10 and 11. 41  Cambi, Istorie, ed. by San Luigi, ii, 324; Butters, Governors and Government, p. 184, citing Masi, Ricordanze, p. 107; Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, p. 94. According to Cerretani, Ricordi, p. 288, ‘il popolo tutto dixe sì’. 42  Cambi, Istorie, ed. by San Luigi, iv, 73. 43  For criticism of this domestication, see Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, p. 44. 40 

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Nardi describes how the companies of the Diamante and the Broncone were created by Giuliano and Lorenzo ‘to delight and divert (ricreare) the popolo’ with shows, which Cambi consistently inveighed against, calling the Feast of San Giovanni celebrations in 1513 ‘an invention of Sodom and Gomorrah, a totally bestial feast’.44 Guicciardini, too, in acknowledging the plebs’ fondness for festivals and shows, said they were used by tyrants to ‘appeal to the lower classes’ (gente bassa).45 So when the working-class associations called potenze made a last festive display of their power by closing the bocche of the piazza in 1577 with bales of wool (on the occasion of the birth of the grand duke’s son), they were controlled not by force of arms nor by oratory but instead by bread and wine dispensed from the old ringhiera and by money thrown from the palace windows.46 Panem et circenses was the way forward. These ‘two things’, as Juvenal put it, provided solace for a populace whose vote had once created rulers.47 So although the rituals continued, they were — like the republican images of power that the earlier Medici had appropriated — little more than representations of power.48 The old link between palace and piazza was broken, as Nardi, with his usual eye for detail, noticed. Describing a note added to the public pri­ orista at the time of the 1512 parlamento — that the nobility had taken revenge by restoring liberty to Florence according to the wishes of the optimates and patricians — Nardi ‘ingenuously’ confessed that he would never have known how to make such a distinction between noble and ignoble, ‘despite being born and brought up in the same patria’.49 Thanks to chroniclers like Nardi and Cambi we can, I think, hear the voices of the populace as well as their own, and through them experience the political and social changes taking place in the square.

44 

Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, ed. by Gelli, ii, 16; Cambi, Istorie, ed. by San Luigi, iii, 24; cf. pp. 3, 44–47 on the carnival that year and the patronal festival in 1514. 45  Guicciardini, Dialogo del Reggimento, ed. by Palmarocchi, p. 165; trans. by Brown, p. 160. 46  Ricci, Cronaca, pp. 215–17, discussed by Rosenthal, ‘The Spaces of Plebeian Ritual and the Boundaries of Transgression’, pp. 176–77, as the change from ‘civic time’ to ‘dynastic time’. 47  Juvenal, Satires, X, 78–80: ‘nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses’. 48  Brown, ‘De-masking Renaissance Republicanism’, especially pp. 225–29. 49  Nardi, Istorie di Firenze, ed. by Gelli, ii, 14–15: ‘confesso io ingenuamente non aver mai saputo fare, ancora che io sia nato e allevato nella medesima patria’.

48 Alison Brown

Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, MS Otto di Pratica, Missive 11 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MS Ginori Conti, (GC), filza 29, no. 62

Primary Sources ‘Alle Bocche della Piazze’: Diario di Anonimo fiorentino (1382–1401), ed. by Anthony Molho and Franek Sznura (Firenze: Olschki, 1986) Cambi, Giovanni, Istorie, 4 vols, in Delizie degli eruditi toscani, ed. by Ildefonso di San Luigi, vols xx–xxiii (Firenze: Cambiagi, 1785–86) Cerretani, Bartolomeo, Ricordi, ed. by Giuliana Berti (Firenze: Olschki, 1993) —— , Storia fiorentina, ed. by Giuliana Berti (Firenze: Olschki, 1994) Guicciardini, Francesco, Considerazioni sui Discorsi del Machiavelli, in Opere inedite, ed. by G. Canestrini (Firenze: Barbèra, Bianchi, 1857), i, 3–79 —— , Dialogo del Reggimento, in Dialogi e discorsi del Reggimento di Firenze, ed. by Roberto Palmarocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1932); Dialogue on the Government of Florence, trans. by Alison Brown (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press,1994) —— , Ricordi, ed. by Raffaele Spongano (Firenze: Sansoni, 1951) —— , Storie fiorentine, ed. by Roberto Palmarocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1931) Machiavelli, Niccolò, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. by Sergio Bertelli, in Il Principe e Discorsi (Milano: Feltrinelli,1960), pp. 121–506 —— , Istorie fiorentine, ed. by Sergio Bertelli (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1962) Masi, Bartolomeo, Ricordanze […] dal 1478 al 1526 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1906) Nardi, Jacopo, Istorie di Firenze, ed. by Agenore Gelli, 2 vols (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1858) Nerli, Filippo de’, Commentarii dei fatti civili occorsi dentro la città di Firenze dall’anno 1215 al 1527 (Trieste: Colombo Coen, 1859) Parenti, Marco, Ricordi storici, 1464–1467, ed. by Manuela Doni Garfagnini (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2001) Parenti, Piero, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Andrea Matucci, 2  vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1994–2005) Ricci, Giuliano de’, Cronaca (1532–1606) (Milano: Ricciardi, 1972) Rinuccini, Filippo di Cino, Ricordi storici di Filippo di Cino Rinuccini dal 1282 al 1460 colla continuazione di Alamanno e Neri suoi figli fino al 1506, ed. by G. Aiazzi (Firenze: Piatti, 1840) Statuta populi et communis Florentiae: publica auctoritate, collecta, castigata et praeposita anno salutis MCCCCXV, 3 vols (Friburgi, 1778–83)

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Secondary Works Bertelli, Sergio, ‘Di due profili mancati e di un bilancino con pesi truccati’, Archivio storico italiano, 145 (1987), 579–610 Boschetto, Luca, Società e cultura a Firenze al tempo del concilio: Eugenio IV tra curiali mercanti e umanisti (1434–1443) (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2012) Branca, Vittore, ed., Mercanti scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra Mediovevo e Rinascimento (Milano: Rusconi, 1986) Brown, Alison, ‘De-masking Renaissance Republicanism’, in Brown, Medicean and Savona­rolan Florence, pp. 225–45 —— , Medicean and Savonarolan Florence: The Interplay of Politics, Humanism, and Reli­ gion (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011) —— , ‘Offices of Honour and Profit: The Crisis of Republicanism in Florence’, in Brown, Medicean and Savonarolan Florence, pp. 139–76 Butters, Humfrey, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth Century Florence, 1502– 1519 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) Cabrini, Anna Maria, ‘Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’, in The Cam­bridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. by John Najemy (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 2010), pp. 128–43 Cadoni, Giorgio, Provvisioni concernenti l’Ordinamento della Repubblica Fiorentina, 1494–1512, 2 vols (Roma: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1994–2000) Crum, Roger, and John Paoletti, eds, Renaissance Florence: A Social History (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 2006) De Los Santos, Lucie, ‘La Vita di Giacomini e le Istorie di Jacopo Nardi: Genèse de deux projects historiographiques post res perditas’, in Storiografia repubblicana fiorentina, ed. by Marchand and Zancarini, pp. 311–23 Fubini, Riccardo, ‘Marco Parenti e I suoi Ricordi Storici: Una premessa’, in Parenti, Ricordi storici, pp. xi–xviii Guidi, Guidubaldo, Il Governo della Città-repubblica di Firenze del primo Quattrocento, 3 vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1981) Hankins, James, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 2000) Kent, F. W., ‘Introduction: The Piazza’s Many Voices’, in Street Noises, ed. by Kent, pp. vii–ix —— , ‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Oligarchy’, in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo: Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Firenze, 9–13 giugno 1992), ed. by G. C. Garfagnini (Firenze: Olschki, 1994), pp. 43–60; repr. in Princely Citizen, ed. by James, pp. 227–44 —— , ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”: Ties of Loyalty and Patronage in the Society of Medicean Florence’, in Le radici cristiane di Firenze, ed. by Anna Benvenuti, Franco Cardini, and Elena Giannarelli (Firenze: Alinea, 1994), pp. 183–210 —— , ‘Patron-Client Networks in Renaissance Florence and the Emergence of Lorenzo as “Maestro di Bottega”’, in Lorenzo de’ Medici: New Perspectives, ed. by B. Toscani,

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Studies in Italian Culture, 13 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 279–313; repr. in Princely Citizen, ed. by James, pp. 199–224 —— , ‘Prato and Lorenzo de’  Medici’, in Communes and Despots: Essays in Memory of Philip Jones, ed. by J.  Law and B.  Paton (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2010); repr. in Princely Citizen, ed. by James, pp. 281–98 —— , Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence, ed. by Carolyn James (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) —— , ed., Street Noises: Civic Space and Urban Identities in Italian Renaissance Cities, Monash Publications in History, 34 (Clayton: Monash University, 2000) Lingohr, Michael, ‘The Palace and Villa as Spaces of Patrician Self-Definition’, in Renais­ sance Florence, ed. by Crum and Paoletti, pp. 240–72 Marchand, Jean-Jacques, and Jean-Claude Zancarini, eds, Storiografia repubblicana fioren­ tina (1494–1570) (Firenze: Cesati, 2003) Milner, Stephen, ‘Citing the Ringhiera: The Politics of Place and Public Address in Tre­ cento Florence’, Italian Studies, 55 (2000), 53–82 —— , ‘The Florentine Piazza della Signoria as Practiced Space’, in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Crum and Paoletti, pp. 83–103 Molho, Anthony, ‘Patronage and the State in Early Modern Italy’, in Molho, Firenze nel Quattrocento, i, Politica e fiscalità (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006), pp. 31–41 Najemy, John, ‘Arti and Ordini in Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine’, in Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, ed. by Sergio Bertelli and Floria Ramakus (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1978), pp. 161–91 —— , ‘Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics’, in Renaissance Civic Humanism, ed. by Hankins, pp. 75–104 —— , ‘Florentine Politics and Urban Spaces’, in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Crum and Paoletti, pp. 19–54 —— , A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) Pedullà, Gabriele, ‘Il Divieto di Platone: Niccolò Machiavelli e il discorso dell’Anonimo plebeo (Ist. Fior. III, 13)’, in Storiografia repubblicana fiorentina, ed. by Marchand and Zancarini, pp. 209–66 —— , ‘Una nuova fonte per il Ciompo: Niccolò Machiavelli e il De Nobilitate di Antonio de’ Ferrariis’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. by Machtels Israëls and Louis A. Waldman, 2 vols (Firenze: Villa I Tatti, 2013), ii, 73–82 Portioli, Attilio, ‘Nuovi documenti su Girolamo Savonarola’, Archivio storico lombardo, 1 (1874), 325–54 Rosenthal, David, ‘The Spaces of Plebeian Ritual and the Boundaries of Transgression’, in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Crum and Paoletti, pp. 161–81 Rubinstein, Nicolai, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434 to 1494), 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) —— , The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298–1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)

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Taddei, Ilaria, ‘Between Rules and Ritual: The Election of the Signoria in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture, ed. by Samuel Cohn and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 43–64 Tomas, Natalie, ‘Did Women Have a Space?’, in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Crum and Paoletti, pp. 311–28 Trachtenberg, Marvin, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 1997) Trexler, Richard, ‘Il parlamento fiorentino del 1 settembre 1378’, Archivio storico italiano, 143 (1985), 437–75 Zancarini, Jean-Claude, ‘Gli Umori del Corpo Politico: “popolo” e “plebe” nelle opere di Machiavelli’, in La Lingua e le lingue di Machiavelli, ed. by Alessandro Pontremoli (Firenze: Olschki, 2001), pp. 61–70

‘La cara e buona imagine paterna di voi’: Ideal Images of Patriarchs and Patrons as Models for the Right Ordering of Renaissance Florence Dale Kent

I

n the circle of Hell set aside in the Divine Comedy for the violent against nature, the sodomites, Dante was dismayed to encounter ser Brunetto Latini, the late thirteenth-century Florentine master of rhetoric and philosophy whose teaching and treatises, the Trésor and Tesoretto, helped to shape the civic ethos of the Florentine commune in its golden age.1 On seeing him, Dante exclaimed: ‘Were my desire fulfilled […] you would not yet have been banished 1 

See Rubinstein, ‘The Beginnings of Political Thought in Florence’.

Dale Kent ([email protected], [email protected]) is professor emerita of history, University of California, Riverside, and honorary professorial fellow of the University of Melbourne. Her publications include The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426–1434 (Oxford, 1978), Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (Yale, 2000), Friendship, Love and Trust in Renaissance Florence (Harvard, 2009), and, with F. W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence (Locust Valley, NY, 1982). She is a fellow of the Academy of the Humanities, Australia, and has been a fellow and visiting professor of the Harvard Center, a fellow of the Newberry Library, Chicago, the Davis Center and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center of the United States, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She was a Guest Scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanitiies and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. With the aid of a Discovery Fellowship from the Australian Research Council she is preparing a book on Fathers and Friends: Patronage and Patriarchy in Early Medicean Florence.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 53–72 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109698

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from human nature, for in my mind is fixed, and now pierces my heart, your dear and good paternal image, when in the world, hour by hour, you taught me how man makes himself eternal.’2 A good father was expected to educate and project his sons into the future not merely biologically, but socially and ethically, in relation not only to the family, but also to the city, which Latini saw in Aristotelian-Ciceronian terms, declaring that ‘if gold is superior to all sorts of metal, similarly is the science of good speaking and of governing men more noble than any art in the world’.3 Paternal, filial, and civic duties were closely related in Renaissance Florence, and their imperatives derived ultimately from the example of the Divine Father and his decrees. F. W. Kent’s authoritative 1977 study of Household and Lineage in Renais­ sance Florence demonstrated the power of patriarchal ideals in making the family Florence’s fundamental social institution and showed how the figure of the father dominated Florentine imaginations (Figure 3.1). The primary importance of family units as the basis of Florentine society was clearly established in the now venerable studies of Herlihy and Klapisch, Kent, and others.4 However, many of the myriad ways in which patriarchal concepts structured and suffused Florentine views of the right order of society in this world, and facilitated its relation to the next, through language, literature, ritual, and art, as well as the close conceptual and practical connections between patriarchs and patrons, still remain to be explored in detail. This essay will consider the implications of some visual, theatrical, and literary representations of the father–son relationship which were especially influential in the fifteenth century. Such representations are examined at length in Chapter 1 of my forthcoming book, Fathers and Friends: Patronage and Patriarchy in Early Medicean Florence. This study of society, politics, and culture shows how those phenomena were linked by focusing on the patriarchal ideals underpinning the main strands of civic culture, Christian and classical, whose confluence created the Renaissance, and the related practices of patronage that framed personal relationships between citizens and permeated political life in the Florentine Republic. 2 

Dante, Inferno xv: 79–85. ‘Car sì come li or sormonte toutes manière de metal, autresì est la sciense de bien parler et de governer gens plus noble de nul autre dou monde’: Latini, The Book of the Treasure, 1, i. Bill Kent’s first published paper was ‘Ser Brunetto Latini’, in the third issue of the Melbourne Historical Journal, 1963/64. 4  Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families; Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence. See also the essays of F. W. Kent, Roberto Bizzocchi, Thomas Kuehn, Sharon Strocchia, and Leonarda Pandimiglio in Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi, pp. 70–158. 3 

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Figure 3.1. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Francesco Sassetti and his Son Teodoro, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, c. 1487? Photo: Art Resource, New York.

55

56 Dale Kent

Patriarchy and patronage are not, as is often assumed, opposing or even alternative modes of social organization. Despite feminist and Marxistrevisionist re-evaluations of family and of societies constructed around patriarchal authority, there is still a tendency among scholars of early modern Europe to see patronage as negative, involving injustice and corruption, and — despite the contrary findings of Giorgio Chittolini and his followers — as impeding the evolution of an impartial bureaucratic ‘modern’ state.5 By contrast, views of ‘paternalistic’ institutions are often rose-coloured with approval of affections the family was supposed to enshrine. If we pay attention to the culture’s interpretation of itself, and to the language which both prescribes and describes this, it is obvious that these phenomena are fundamentally related in Renaissance language and ideology. This is most clearly apparent in the contrasting modern and contemporary images of Cosimo de’ Medici, the major patron and leading citizen of Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century. Modern historians have seen contradictions in Cosimo de’ Medici’s character between the benign patriarch and the ruthless partisan political patron, suggesting that the image of Cosimo as pater patriae, ‘father of his country’, is a false one, created by courtly sycophants exaggerating Cosimo’s ‘paternalistic’ benevolence, and that the foundation of his power in personal patronage exposes him as rather a padrino, a mafioso Godfather, than a pater.6 Such reasoning ignores fifteenth-century perceptions expressed in patriarchal metaphors used to describe and connect a whole range of values and behaviour, both appealing and unappealing, pertaining to fatherly figures and ideals. Of course actual fathers by no means always conformed to these ideals, but there is evidence that most men aspired to them and were judged or assessed by others, not only their sons but also their fellow-citizens, in accordance with them. I make no judgement as to whether or not Cosimo de’ Medici was a good father to his sons, Piero and Giovanni, or a good patron to his friends and clients (amici), but I do suggest that Cosimo owed the acceptance of his informal authority over Florence largely to the fact that he most successfully exemplified his society’s prevailing patriarchal ideals and practices. These appear to have governed his behaviour and shaped perceptions of it, as his patronage operated through his various patriarchal roles, as paterfamilias of his lineage, as padrino, or Godfather to his friends and neighbours, as pater patriae, guardian of his city.7 5 

Chittolini, ‘The “Private”, the “Public”, the State’. See, for example, Molho, ‘Cosimo de’ Medici’. 7  On these themes, see D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, espe6 

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Of particular importance, because they both influenced and reflected the attitudes of many of the men in the Florentine streets and piazzas, are father– son images in works of art and in civic and religious rituals and performances of moral and sacred plays.8 Especially significant are those that represent the story of Abraham and Isaac, the quintessential scriptural meditation on fathers, sons, and their relationship to the Divine Father in the book of Genesis. This tells how: God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him […], ‘Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains’ […]. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.

When Isaac asked his father ‘where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ […] Abraham said, ‘My son, God will provide himself a lamb’ […]. And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said […], ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him; for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.’ And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and beheld behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.9

This was the subject chosen for the competition held in 1401 by the operai of the Calimala, the Florentine guild of international merchants and woolfinishers, to select an artist for the first of the great Renaissance commissions of the fifteenth century, a new set of carved bronze doors for San Giovanni, the Florentine baptistery. The two major entries in the contest were from the goldsmiths and sculptors Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti. Ghiberti was the eventual victor and claimed in his Commentaries that ‘universally I was conceded the glory without exception’, since ‘I had surpassed all the others’.10 cially chaps 1–2; also D. Kent, ‘The Importance of Patriarchal Ideals and Patronage Practices in Establishing the autorità of Cosimo’. 8  See D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, especially chaps 5–8. 9  Genesis 22. 1–2, 6–13. 10  Ghiberti, I Commentari, ed. by Morisani, p. 42.

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Figure 3.2. Lorenzo Ghiberti, The Sacrifice of Isaac, bronze relief, partly gilded, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 1401. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

Brunelleschi’s contemporary biographer Antonio Manetti testified that Brunelleschi and Ghiberti were jointly awarded the commission but that Brunelleschi refused to accept it unless he was given entire charge of the work.11 Most art historians tend to agree with Richard Krautheimer that these very different artists ‘vividly illuminate the divergent artistic trends in Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century’.12 I suggest that they also illuminate two facets of the contemporary image of the father–son relationship, one emphasizing mutual love and the other the son’s awe of his father’s majesty, as a ‘second God’ who must be reverently obeyed.13 Ghiberti’s competition panel (Figure 3.2) is often considered technically superior, particularly in the casting of the bronze but also in design and narra11 

Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, ed. by Saalman, pp. 48–51. Krauthheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti, p. 44. 13  Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. 47, citing Ficino’s didactic ‘Epistola ad Fratres Vulgaris’ in Kristeller, Supplementum Ficinianum, i, 113. 12 

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Figure 3.3. Filippo Brunelleschi, The Sacrifice of Isaac, bronze relief, partly gilded, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 1401. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

tive; each element flows into the next with ‘melodious beauty’ and ‘merely hints at events’. It does not present them with brutal directness as does Brunelleschi’s panel (Figure 3.3). Krautheimer noted ‘the dramatic force with which the angel rushes down from a massive cloud on the left, and his left arm shoots forth to grab Abraham’s wrist, forcing it back from Isaac’s throat — one feels the resistance of the surprised patriarch’. By contrast, ‘Ghiberti’s Abraham has raised the knife, but hesitates to strike. His arm is placed lovingly around Isaac’s shoulder. The boy looks at his father, full of confidence; the angel floats down leisurely, sure to arrive in good time’.14 This view is also in harmony with the biblical testimony to God’s preceding covenant with Abraham, promising that his wife Sarah, although ninety years old, would yet bear him a son, Isaac, whose line would endure: ‘I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him […] she shall be a mother of nations: kings of people shall be of her’.15 14  15 

Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti, pp. 44, 48. Genesis 17. 19, 16.

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In this context of the elevated destiny of the patriarch’s seed, Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son may be seen as more ritualistic than real. Gerda Lerner, in her original and imaginative study of 1986, saw the origins of patriarchy as residing in this covenant, justifying male dominance in public life, institutions, and government.16 In Florence, in its day one of the most patriarchal societies of Europe, thanks to the institutions of the lineage of agnatic descent and inheritance and to the supreme importance accorded the public life of the citizen, in which women could have no part, Ghiberti’s image of this covenant made a major impression on the judges of the competition and the citizens who witnessed it. However, the bold and violent tone of Brunelleschi’s interpretation of the sacrifice of Isaac remained vivid in the city’s cultural consciousness. His plaque was preserved, allegedly presented to Cosimo de’ Medici by the artist, and certainly by 1421 installed on the altar of the Old Sacristy commissioned by Cosimo’s father Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici as his burial chapel, in the Medici parish church of San Lorenzo. It was displayed there to generations of Medici family and friends who became the leaders of the ruling group of Florence and whose patronage paid for Brunelleschi’s renovation of the church in Renaissance style.17 The dramatic force of this image was translated into verse by a close friend and associate of both Brunelleschi and the Medici, Feo Belcari, clerk of the chapter of San Lorenzo, a popular poet, and the leading playwright of the era. Belcari’s sacra rappresentazione of Abramo e Isac, first performed in 1449, the year of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s birth, was the most renowned, most often copied and performed, and the first to be published of the many didactic sacred plays that made such a powerful impression on mid-fifteenthcentury Florentine audiences.18 Belcari dedicated his play to Cosimo de’ Medici’s younger son, Giovanni, with a prefatory verse that honoured Giovanni by associating him in his father’s virtues. Cosimo was praised as the charitable father of his people: ‘Father of your country, gracious and worthy | conserver of temples and holy places, | the singular refuge of all those | who live under the standard of poverty | for 16 

Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, chap. 9. See also Kessler, Bound by the Bible. D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, pp. 191–92; D. Kent, ‘The Patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici and his Friends’. 18  On Belcari and his play, see Newbigin, Nuovo Corpus di sacre rappresentazioni fiorentine; Newbigin, ‘Il testo e il contesto dell’ Abramo e Isac di Feo Belcari’; on Belcari and the Medici, see D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, passim, especially pp. 62–67. For the text of the play, see Belcari, Abramo e Isac, ed. by D’Ancona. 17 

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your good wine slakes our thirst’, this last a reference to Cosimo’s founding of the charitable confraternity of the Goodmen of San Martino, in association with Pope Eugenius IV and with the city’s archbishop, soon to be Saint Antoninus.19 If Brunelleschi’s panel and Belcari’s play might be seen as representing the Divine or at least the ecclesiastical ratification of the patriarchal authority and patronage of which the Medici family were the chief Florentine exemplars, the images themselves tell a story of cruel conflict between love and obedience, to fathers earthly and heavenly, in which the ambivalent elements of their relations predominate. In the play, as in the plaques, the main theme is the testing of Abraham, and Belcari particularly emphasizes the cruelty of the divine edict. The script enjoins the audience to ‘consider a moment the very words of that commandment with all its meanings; it was not necessary, after “thine only son” to add “Isaac, whom thou lovest”, unless it were to give him greater pain and dolor, opening every lock of the coffer of his heart’. Isaac’s death sentence is not executed immediately: ‘God did not tell him to kill the boy at that moment, but made him undertake a journey of three days, so that his pain would last longer.’ Equally cruel is the boy’s meek obedience of his ‘revered father’ and his questions about the purpose of the journey: ‘Those words of Isaac were a knife that struck deep into the heart of holy Abraham, thinking as he was of his gentle and fine son whom with his own hand he must bring to death’, which sorely tempted him ‘not to obey a lot so harsh’.20 Nevertheless, the essential message of Belcari’s play is crystal clear: filial piety demands unquestioning obedience to fathers and to the Lord, and faith in the wisdom of their edicts. Abraham, ‘on his knees and stupefied’, is made to say: ‘Never should the servant of his good Lord | query the reason of his commandment’.21 As often in the rehearsal of Renaissance moral dilemmas, the contrary opinion is attributed to an (ineffectual) woman, who can be overridden; Isaac cries out, ‘O mother, if you were here I would not die; with so many tears and prayers and so much humility, you would pray to the Lord that I survive’. This passage would have recalled to the audience the many visual representations of the Virgin mother’s role as merciful intercessor for her devotees before the judgement of her son Christ and his heavenly Father. 19 

For the verse, see Lirici toscani, ed. by Lanza, i, 227; for the confraternity, see D. Kent, ‘The Buonomini di San Martino’. 20  Belcari, Abramo e Isac, ed. by D’Ancona, p. 45. 21  Belcari, Abramo e Isac, ed. by D’Ancona, p. 46.

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Abraham’s key address to Isaac, ‘Oh sweet, dear son, hear the words of your weeping father’, expresses the quality of paternal love. It describes the charitable acts to the poor by which Abraham and Sarah became worthy of Isaac, their gift from God: ‘With our hospitality giving lodging to platoons of poor, sharing our own food with them’; their joy at his birth, how nothing was spared in raising him, and how By the grace of God, we have brought you to this point where you are healthy, rich, virtuous and learned; Nothing has made me happier than to see you arrived at this point, To be able to leave you, as one says, ‘Heir to all my kingdom’ […] and able to sustain us in our old age. But the eternal God who never errs, having saved you from death by war or disease, now demands I sacrifice you to Him.

There was surely not a dry eye in the house as Isaac replied, comparing his father to their Heavenly Father: Oh my faithful father I want to satisfy the will of one and the other, That is of God, and of you, o sweet father: I should never have been born If I should ever wish to contradict the Lord Or if I was not always ready to want to obey you, my good father.

Abraham’s grief is assuaged by ‘Your holy response, o sweet son’; he consoles himself that his son ‘will not die of a long illness or devoured by wild beasts’ but ‘in the offering, worthy, holy and pious’ and appropriately, ‘at the hands of your own faithful father’, invoking at once a Christian martyrdom and the classical Roman patria potestas, still in force in Renaissance Florence, by which fathers could legally dispose of their sons.22 As Abraham raises his knife to strike his son, the angel of the Lord suddenly appears and stays his hand, and soon the stage instructions command the company to break into a dance to celebrate the moral of the story: He who serves God with purity of heart Lives content and then dies, having been saved 22 

Belcari, Abramo e Isac, ed. by D’Ancona, pp. 49–51. On patria potestas, see below, p. 66.

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[…] You have clearly understood you will have great fruits From observing all the Divine precepts […] If you understand this message aright, You will keep your hearts free of fault, and always enamored of holy obedience; Now you have our licence to leave.23

Figure 3.4. Lorenzo Ghiberti, Story of Abraham panel, ‘Gates of Paradise’, bronze, gilded, Florence, Baptistery (San Giovanni), 1425–52. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

Ghiberti’s harmonious 1401 image of the relation between the Heavenly Father and obedient and reverent earthly fathers and sons was not the one eventually enshrined in his second set of doors for the Baptistery, the ‘Gates of Paradise’, installed in 1452 (Figure 3.4). The artist himself describes his Abraham panel in his Commentaries of this period as showing how the patriarch ‘had undressed Isaac and was about to sacrifice him when the angel seized the hand in which he held the knife and showed him the ram’.24 Whatever his reasons, in this representation, which was part of a system of symbolic biblical parallels between 23  24 

Belcari, Abramo e Isac, ed. by D’Ancona, pp. 53–54, 56. Ghiberti, I Commentari, ed. by Morisani, p. 45.

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Old and New Testament, it seems Ghiberti too had come to favour the more dramatic interpretation of the episode and of the father–son relationship which so many in the Florentine audience had embraced in the course of the fifteenth century.25 Various facets of father–son relations were portrayed in family ricordi. This characteristic Florentine genre combined business accounts, family genealogies, and political pedigrees with personal advice, for the instruction of sons. Ricordi naturally stressed the need for solidarity between father and son, tending to emphasize their mutual affection rather than the son’s absolute obedience, and focusing on paternal duties of custodianship and education. When Dante acknowledged Brunetto Latini as a paternal model (despite consigning him to damnation for his sins) because Latini taught him ‘how man makes himself eternal’, he probably had in mind his education as a scholar and poet which would bring him undying fame and, hopefully, salvation;26 socialization of sons in this world and their proper preparation for the next were recognized as major obligations of all fathers and father-figures, which the writing of ricordi helped to fulfil. Giovanni Morelli’s ricordi, composed over an extensive period from 1393 to 1421, ‘wishing to instruct my sons or rather my descendants by means of genuine examples and situations that happened to me’,27 are a particularly complex example of the genre which reflect with unusual emotional intensity on paternal obligations, with the aid of a rich repertoire of stoic and devotional literature apparently ordered and enlivened by Morelli’s experience of the sacred play.28 The predominant themes are regret, tinged with resentment, at being ‘abandoned’ without paternal protection by his father, who died when Giovanni was only three, but whose image he idealized and idolized, and an almost paranoid guilt about failing his own son, Alberto. Giovanni saw his cross as having to make his way in the world ‘without a guide or a leader’ (‘sanza capo e sanza

25 

On this work, see Radke, The Gates of Paradise. For a brief bibliography concerning Dante’s placement of Latini in the circle of the violent against nature as a homosexual, see Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, p. 63, n. 79. 27  Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Branca, p. 85. 28  Branca’s editorial preface identifies many of Morelli’s sources. On Morelli’s intense feelings about fathers and sons, see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, chap. 5; on his use of images drawn from devotional literature and sacre rappresentazioni to express these feelings, see D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, pp. 98–100. 26 

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guida’). He enjoined his sons in the event of his own untimely death to ‘do your best to acquire a relative who will be a father to you’, in other words, a patron.29 The death of his son, Alberto, reveals Morelli’s most profound convictions about the duties of fathers, especially in mediating their childrens’ relationship with God, the ultimate Father. Confirming the commonly expressed Florentine view that ‘the greatest love there is is that of the father for his son’,30 Morelli suffered Alberto’s death as ‘the gravest possible wound’ (‘sí gravoso coltello’).31 He described in heart-wrenching detail how, although many months have passed since the hour of his death, I cannot forget this, nor can his mother; his image is constantly before us — his little ways, his sweet nature, his words and deeds, reminding us day and night, at lunch, at dinner, in the house, and out of it, sleeping, waking, in villa, in Florence […]. We feel he is holding a knife that is stabbing us in the heart […]. From the day that he departed from it dead, I have not entered his room, out of the greatest possible grief.32

This father was tormented by feeling that he had not shown his son sufficiently how much he loved him,33 and by his failure to procure extreme unction for Alberto because he was unwilling to believe he was about to die. Wracked by grief and guilt, Morelli finally found some solace in midnight prayer before an image of the Virgin and his patron saints; he was vouchsafed a redemptive vision — an image of the ideal realized — of his son complete with angels and demons and celestial images which, as Vittore Branca remarked, strongly resembled the script of a sacra rappresentazione.34 The distinguished humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote his famous treatise Della Famiglia (On the Family) from the very particular point of view of one who, like Morelli, was deprived of the social mediation of father and family, not because his father had died, but because he himself was born illegitimate, and throughout his youth the Alberti family lived in exile from their native city for political reasons. Like Morelli, Alberti emphasized how sons were excluded from civic as well as familial privileges by the loss or absence of a father. For a solicitous and diligent father rules his family and makes it ‘great 29 

Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Branca, p. 263: ‘ingegnati d’imparentarti e torre uno parente che ti sia padre’. 30  Rucellai, Zibaldone, fol. 82v. 31  Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Branca, p. 458. 32  Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Branca, pp. 458–59. 33  Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Branca, p. 501. 34  Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Branca, p. 42; for Morelli’s vision, see ibid., pp. 506–16.

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and fortunate’ by his ‘good government […] the utmost integrity of his conduct, his humanity, generosity, and civility’; fathers must be educated in these matters so their families should never ‘succumb to the unjust whims of fortune’.35 Both Alberti and Morelli suffered because their actual father–son relationships failed to conform to the ideals prescribed for the corporate preservation and defence of the family and the right ordering of society. Didactic and admonitory literature assumed the absolute identity of the interests of father and son, an assumption amply justified by the fact that the opportunities offered most Florentine males depended largely upon the patrimony, cultural, spiritual, and fiscal, that they inherited from their fathers and from the wider lineage. Hence the popular proverb: ‘The pear eaten by the father sets his son’s teeth on edge.’36 The Neoplatonic humanist Marsilio Ficino saw the son as ‘a mirror and image in which the father after his death almost remains alive for a long time’, and the widespread view that a beloved deceased father could be ‘remade’ by naming one’s own son after him is evidenced by the long strings of patronymics borne by many Florentines.37 Fathers and sons undoubtedly experienced tensions, ambiguities, and the potential for conflict such as Abraham and Isaac had felt in the face of God’s intransigence. Evidence concerning conflict between fathers and their sons is nevertheless limited; it may well have been suppressed, intentionally or otherwise, as a divergence from an ideal whose maintenance was so strongly in the interests of the family and the city. There are certain pressure points at which hints of rupture may be discerned; as Thomas Kuehn pointed out, the exercise of patria potestas is obviously one of them. This legal instrument could in practice be used either to enforce or undermine paternal will in the family interest. Although in fact patria potestas was usually employed as a social and economic strategy to the benefit of the lineage rather than as a weapon against members of one’s own family, there were fathers who disinherited their sons, took them to court, or even had them imprisoned by the force of the patria potestas they exercised. The non-Florentine jurist Bartolo da Sassoferrato argued that the father’s authority might in some cases amount to tyranny over the household.38 How did Cosimo de’ Medici, as son and father, measure up to Florentine ideals? Cosimo’s letters reveal a uxurious husband and a paterfamilias who found time from the exigencies of his business and political affairs to concern 35 

Alberti, I Libri della Famiglia, Prologue, ed. by Grayson, especially p. 10. Cavalcanti, Istorie fiorentine, ed. by Polidori, i, 533. 37  See Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, pp. 46–47. 38  See Kuehn, Law, Family and Women, chap. 4. 36 

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Figure 3.5. Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello, Florence, Old Sacristy, San Lorenzo, south wall. Photo: Art Resource/Scala, New York.

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himself with the daily activities, health, and welfare of the women and children under his care. Despite some interesting evidence of friction between Cosimo and his younger son when the adolescent Giovanni disobeyed him, Cosimo’s letters to the mature Giovanni express love and trust in his judgement, such as Cosimo had obviously felt for his own father.39 When Giovanni di Bicci died in 1429, his sons Cosimo and Lorenzo oversaw the completion of his burial chapel designed by Brunelleschi in the form of the Holy Sepulchre, and its decoration by Donatello with figures from the life of John the Evangelist, their father’s patron saint, alongside their own patron saints, Cosmas, Damian, and Lorenzo (Figure 3.5). Their filial piety is eloquently expressed in the inscription on their parents’ marble tomb: ‘If honour in his patria, if the glory of his line and of his generosity to all, were free from dark death, he would live happily in that city with his chaste wife, aiding the poor, a haven and enhancement to his friends. But since death conquers all […]’.40 Here the representation of the ideal father as patron to his friends serves to legitimize his sons’ patronage. The Old Sacristy embodies the love, cooperation, and continuity between the ideal Florentine father and son, framing these qualities in a civic context extending outward from the family to embrace the entire city. This accords with Aristotelian views, expounded by Brunetto Latini and absorbed and promulgated by his pupil, Dante, of the nature of the ideal society, which helped to shape the Florentine commune in its infancy and were reinforced by humanist teaching in the fifteenth century, seeing families as the nucleus of the organic evolution of the state. Dante’s Convivio popularized a passage from Aristotle’s Politics describing the natural need to extend the biological union of husband and wife to embrace successively the wider family, the neighbourhood, and ultimately the entire polis.41 Matteo Palmieri echoed and expanded upon this theme in his immensely influential Vita Civile: ‘Citizens are bound together in amity through the natural extension of large families who, giving and receiving in legitimate marriages, relatives and love, come to constitute a good part of the city, affectionately bound by marriage, supporting one another and among themselves renewing advice, favours and aid, which in life bring enhanced capacities and abundant fruit’.42 39  On Cosimo’s letters, see D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, chap. 2; on Cosimo’s relations with the young Giovanni, see D. Kent, ‘A Window on Cosimo de’ Medici, Paterfamilias and Politician’. 40  See D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, pp. 186–97, especially p. 190. 41  Dante, Convivio 4:4. 42  Palmieri, Vita Civile, ed. by Belloni, p. 161.

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Ficino advised the Medici and other members of the Florentine ruling class to ‘remember that in governing with the utmost diligence the family you yourselves have created, you become expert and honoured in the earthly republic and worthy of the heavenly republic’,43 and Palmieri spelled out the implications of the Abraham and Isaac story, requiring obedience to both Divine and earthly fathers: ‘I mean to relate obedience to fathers to the laws concerning all human obedience’.44 Such views underwrote the creation of the networks of patronage which modern observers tend to condemn and contrast adversely with the ideal family.45 In fact patronage in Florence was patriarchal, like the family. Individuals sought protection that a weak state could not provide from large and powerful lineages, which, seeking to supplement their resources, human and economic, attached to themselves relations by marriage, neighbourhood, and friendship, embracing these associates as honorary fathers, brothers, or sons, depending upon the relative age and status of the parties, because the bond between kin was the model for all other associations, heavenly or earthly. To many of his amici, a patron like Cosimo, or his cousin Averardo, the chief lieutenant of the Medici party in the 1420s and 1430s, was not just a beloved father, but also ‘my God on earth’.46 Representations of Abraham and Isaac may help us to understand how Cosimo’s authority in all his patriarchal roles was justified and even sanctified, not constitutionally but by commonly accepted analogies between the earthly and the Divine order, elevating the role of the lineage and its patronage network by emphasizing acts of protection and intercession common to fathers, patrons, God, and the saints. Cosimo de’ Medici took care to emphasize the patron’s role as patriarchal guardian of his friends and of the Florentine people, and occasionally to perform this role in public. He was rewarded after his death with an edict recognizing him as pater patriae (father of his country) because he conferred upon the Florentine republic innumerable benefits in times of both war and peace, and always with absolute piety preserved his patria (fatherland), aiding and augmenting it with his concern for its greatest profit and glory; up to the very last day of his life he conducted himself in all things as befitted the 43 

Ficino, Epistola ad Antonio Pelotto, cited in Morelli, Ricordi, ed. by Branca, p. 29. Palmieri, Vita Civile, ed. by Belloni, p. 55: ‘Intendo assimigilarsi all’ubbidienza del padre qualunche legge di tutte l’ubbidienzie humane’. 45  Molho, ‘Cosimo de’ Medici’, is a particularly explicit example of a general practice. 46  ‘Io vi tengho per mio Idio in terra’: Bernardo d’Alamanno de’ Medici to Averardo di Francesco di Bicci de’ Medici, 6 December 1431, ASF, MAP, 5, 133. 44 

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most excellent man and citizen [civum optimum], governing it with every care and concern and diligence as a paterfamilias does his own house, with the greatest virtue and benevolence and pietas (piety).47

An incident on the occasion of the consecration of Florence Cathedral after the completion in 1436 of Brunelleschi’s cupola, eventually to become the icon of the city, dramatizes the intersection of the heavenly and earthly models of authority and intercession in the exercise of patriarchal power through the merciful intercession of a patron. At the conclusion of the Mass, a cardinal announced the number of indulgences for attendance at this ceremony as six; then, as the clergy’s chronicler, Feo Belcari, recorded, ‘encouraged by the pleas of the noble citizen Cosimo de’ Medici, he altered that to seven’. Cosimo continued to plead for an increase in the treasury of merit upon which Florentines might draw for their salvation, and the bargaining ended with the cardinal’s agreeing to ten, ‘having already refused this to all the other cardinals and lords of Florence’.48 This public and undoubtedly staged demonstration of Cosimo’s power as an intercessor for Florentine Christians figured prominently in popular descriptions of the event. Cosimo’s intervention was seen to link him to a chain of intercessors culminating in the Virgin herself. It was this ‘marvellous charity’, the spiritual face of his secular patronage, which according to the shoemaker-poet Giovanni di Cino made him ‘worthy of immortality’ and the title of ‘father of his country’ in a higher sense than could his worldly power and patronage. The perceived analogy between God the Father and Cosimo the father of the Florentine people was clearly spelled out in a letter from a former client, Branca Brancacci, a virtuoso variation on the Beatitudes and the words spoken by Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. Brancacci exhorted Cosimo to reverse the sentences imposed by the Medicean government upon its enemies: ‘Oh Lord have mercy upon us […] blessed are the merciful, for they themselves shall have mercy […] through your piety and singular grace, my father, I pray that this cup may pass from me: nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.’49

47 

See D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, p. 376. D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, p. 127. 49  ASF, MAP, 12, 183: ‘Fiat misericordia tua Domine super nos […] Beati misericordes quam ipsi misericordiam consequentur […] Per pietà et per gratia singulare mi’ Pater, si possibile est transeat a me calix iste, verum tamen non sicut ego volo sed sicut tu’. For Giovanni di Cino’s verse, see D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, p. 127. 48 

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Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo avanti il Principato Rucellai, Giovanni, Zibaldone, Palazzo Rucellai, Florence

Primary Sources Alberti, Leon Battista, I Libri della Famiglia, in Opere volgari, ed. by Cecil Grayson, 3 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1960), i Belcari, Feo, Abramo e Isac, in Sacre Rappresentazioni dei secoli xiv, xv e xvi, ed. by Alessandro D’Ancona, 2 vols (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1872), i, 41–59 Cavalcanti, Giovanni, Istorie fiorentine, ed. by F.  Polidori, 2 vols (Firenze: Tipografia all’insegna di Dante, 1838) Ficino, Marsilio, ‘Epistola ad Fratres Vulgaris’, in Paul Oskat Kristeller, Supplementum Ficinianum, 2 vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1945), i, 113 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, I Commentari, ed. by O. Morisani (Napoli: Ricciardi, 1947) Latini, Brunetto, The Book of the Treasure: Li livres dou tresor, ed. by Spurgeon Baldwin and Paul Barrette (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2003) Lirici toscani del quattrocento, ed. by Antonio Lanza, 2 vols (Rome: Bulzoni, 1973–75) Manetti, Antonio, The Life of Brunelleschi, ed. by Howard Saalman, English and Italian Texts (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1970) Morelli, Giovanni, Ricordi, ed. by Vittore Branca (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1956) Palmieri, Matteo, Vita Civile, ed. by Gino Belloni (Firenze: Sansoni, 1982)

Secondary Works Ascoli, Albert, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (New York: Cam­bridge Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2008) Chittolini, Giorgio, ‘The “Private”, the “Public”, the State’, in The Origins of the State in Italy 1300–1600, ed. by Julius Kirshner (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 34–61 Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1985) Kent, Dale, ‘The Buonomini di San Martino: Charity for “the glory of God, the honour of the city, and the commemoration of myself ”’, in Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici, 1389–1464 Essays in Commemoration of the 600th Anniversary of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Birth, ed. by Francis Ames-Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 49–67 —— , Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) —— , ‘Patriarchal Ideals, Patronage Practices, and the Authority of Cosimo “il vecchio”’, in The Medici: Citizens and Masters, ed. by Robert Black and John Law (Cam­bridge,

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MA: Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2015), pp. 221–37 —— , ‘The Patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici and his Friends in Relation to Desiderio da Settignano and his Circle’, in Atti del convegno su Desiderio da Settignano al Kunst­ historiches Institut, Florence, May 2007, ed. by Louis Waldman and Fabio Vitucci (Firenze: Olschki, 2012), pp. 295–306 —— , ‘A Window on Cosimo de’  Medici, Paterfamilias and Politician, from within his Own Household: The Letters of his Personal Assistant, ser Alesso Pelli’, in Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy; Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy, ed. by David S. Peterson with Daniel E. Bornstein (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 355–67 Kent, F. W., Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press: 1977) —— , ‘Ser Brunetto Latini: Florence’s “Man of Great Wisdom and Authority”’, Melbourne Historical Journal, 3 (1963/64), 25–37 Kessler, Edward, Bound by the Bible: Jews, Christians and the Sacrifice of Isaac (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Krautheimer, Richard, in collaboration with Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982) Kuehn, Thomas, Law, Family and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1991) Lamberini, Daniela, ed., Palazzo Strozzi: metà millennio, 1489–1989, Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze 3–6 luglio 1989 (Roma: Instituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1991) Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1986) Molho, Anthony, ‘Cosimo de’ Medici: pater patriae or padrino?’, Stanford Italian Review, 1 (1979), 5–33 Newbigin, Nerida, ed., Nuovo Corpus di sacre rappresentazioni fiorentine del Quattrocento (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1983) —— , ‘Il testo e il contesto dell’ Abramo e Isac di Feo Belcari’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 13 (1981), 13–37 Radke, Gary, ed., The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007) Rubinstein, Nicolai, ‘The Beginnings of Political Thought in Florence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), 198–227 Trexler, Richard C., Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980)

Asserting Presence: Strategies of Medici Patronage in Renaissance Florence John T. Paoletti

C

ase studies of Medici intervention into the architectural fabric of their city reveal not only the pervasiveness of their urban presence, but also that their building projects carried with them individual back histories that unveil strategies for their patronage tied to their drive for political power. When Giovanni di Bicci brought together a group of his wealthy neighbours to build a new San Lorenzo to replace the old Romanesque structure at the site, he was acting in a time-honoured and corporate manner, much as the major guilds formed building committees to oversee structures under their care. While Giovanni’s associates in this building project each agreed to construct a family chapel in the transept of the building, Giovanni took responsibility for the sacristy as well as the double chapel at the south end of the transept, giving him considerably more space than his fellow patrons as well as titular rights to the more important sacristy. Significant — and unequal — presence demonstrated economic position within a culture where status and reputation counted a great deal.

John  T. Paoletti ([email protected]) is emeritus professor of the history of art at Wesleyan Uni­ver­sity in Middletown, Connecticut. Co-author of Art in Renaissance Italy (Upper Saddle River, 2006), co-editor of Renaissance Florence: A Social History (Cam­bridge, 2006), and author of Michelangelo’s David: Florentine History and Civic Identity (Cam­bridge, 2015), his main research is on Medici patronage in the fifteenth century. He has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, a visiting fellow at the Villa I Tatti in Florence, and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Center for Reformation Studies at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 73–94 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109699

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There are, however, other issues in the building of the Old Sacristy that extend its meaning and establish precedents that the family revisited through the course of the century. Is it accidental that Giovanni’s sacristy follows hard on the heels of the construction of a new sacristy structure at Santa Trinita built by Onofrio and Palla Strozzi also as a funerary chapel? Or that Giovanni lay behind the selection of Filippo Brunelleschi as the architect for the new San Lorenzo, an architect whose competitive relationship with Lorenzo Ghiberti, the architect of the Strozzi structure, was so antagonistic? Or that the style of the new San Lorenzo, albeit appropriate for a building whose history dates back to the late Roman period, is classicizing in all of its forms, unlike the gothic architectural forms of the Strozzi sacristy? The Strozzi and Medici sacristies could hardly be more different. Nor could the burial placements of the two patrons. Onofrio Strozzi was buried at the threshold of his sacristy’s entrance, a sign of humility as all visitors to the space stepped metaphorically on his body.1 Giovanni was buried in the centre of the Old Sacristy, beneath the symbolic light of the oculus directly above and most likely beneath the red porphyry rota now on the later table over his and his wife’s sarcophagus. There is little that is popolano about Giovanni’s chapel or his tomb, as his son and grandson must have known when they also used red porphyry — a symbol since Roman antiquity of imperial power — for their tombs. Other aspects of the history of San Lorenzo reverberate with the symbolic language of power just mentioned. When in 1442 Cosimo took responsibility for building the entire church after years of lagging progress, one of the stipulations of the agreement was that no other family stemmi appear in the nave, making it clear that he controlled the entire space. The importance of Cosimo’s plan to assert his role as the sole builder of San Lorenzo, however, is not that it is unique, but that it is not, at least not outside Florence. In fact there are numbers of buildings both in and out of Italy that were built by a singular patron, but in most cases the patron was a king or queen or a princely or ducal ruler. One need think only of the churches built by Sancia of Majorca or Mary of Hungary in Naples (Santa Chiara and Santa Maria Donnaregina), constructed before San Lorenzo, or of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, later commissioned by Ludovico Gonzaga, to see that Cosimo was communicating more than magnificence or generosity to the Florentines in this project. Obvious Medici use of 1 

For the Strozzi sacristy/burial chapel, see Saalman, ‘Strozzi Tombs in the Sacristy of Santa Trinita’, p. 152, where he suggests that Onofrio Strozzi was originally buried under the slab inside the sacristy door and later moved to the arcosolium tomb in the left altar wall; see also Gregory, ‘Palla Strozzi’s Patronage and Pre-Medicean Florence’.

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Figure 4.1. Reconstruction after Giuseppe Marchini of the altar area of San Marco as renovated by Cosimo de’ Medici after 1436 showing Medici stemmi at the apex of the arch and over the apsidal window. Not shown is the now partially obscured pilaster at the right corner of the nave also bearing the Medici palle.

princely imagery conveyed by the sole patronage of an entire church occurred towards the end of the century when Lorenzo the Magnificent built the church of San Gallo, just outside the Porta San Gallo. This church was destroyed by the Florentines in 1527 during the Medici’s attempt to regain control of the city after their expulsion, a damnatio memoriae that was an explicit recognition of contemporary understanding of the family’s claims to power manifest in the single-patron building.2 The prelude to Cosimo’s takeover at San Lorenzo, however, had begun in the late 1430s when he engaged in substantial building programmes at San 2 

Cosimo and his son Piero may have used a variant of this claim to an entire church at the Badia Fiesolana where a marble plaque bearing Piero’s name and a date of 1461 decorates the back wall of the main altar space and where Medici stemmi decorate the vault of the nave. Unfortunately damage and restoration at a later date — as well as stylistic anomalies — leave many questions about form, dating, and placement of the Medici inscriptions and stemmi in the structure. See Nuttall, ‘The Patrons of the Chapels at the Badia Fiesolana’.

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Figure 4.2. Roof beams of San Marco showing from left to right the painted stemmi from 1417 of the red cross of the Popolo, the red lily (giglio) of the City of Florence, the eagle overcoming a dragon of the Parte Guelfa, and the red and white of the Comune; now hidden by the hung ceiling; taken from La chiesa e il convento di San Marco a Firenze (Florence: Giunti, 1989), i, 229. Photo: courtesy of the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze.

Marco and Santa Croce where the traditional simplicity of the plastered stone and brick disguises messages of Medici power. It is at these two sites that Medici uses of the ordinary finds its strongest expression in the form of the family stemma, a sign so frequently seen in Florence that we tend to ignore it. The Medici stemma at San Marco is hardly unobtrusive, however. It appeared on the keystone of the arch framing the choir of the building, now obscured by the later hung wooden ceiling (Figure 4.1). There the Medici palle would have been seen in conjunction with the civic stemmi of Florence painted on the roof beams of the nave, now also hidden by the ceiling (Figure 4.2).3 Thus 3 

For a schematic reconstruction of the interior of San Marco as it appeared at the time of Cosimo, see Marchini, ‘Il San Marco di Michelozzo’, esp. fig. 10.

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Figure 4.3. Anonymous Florentine, Medal of Cosimo de’ Medici Pater Patriae, bronze, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

the Medici and the city appeared as joint partners at the site, Medici and civic imagery paired as if equal. Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, clarified such a claim in a much more direct manner in about 1470 when he became paterfamilias of his clan and sought to connect himself with the memory of Cosimo. Lorenzo coined a medal showing Cosimo on the obverse and on the reverse a personification of the city of Florence, FLORENTIA, a concrete vision of the Medici being synonymous with the state, literally two sides of the same coin (Figure 4.3).4 The visually joined Medici and civic stemmi at San Marco are part of a deeper history of the building.5 Renovations of the fabric of San Marco under the Silvestrines who had lived and served this monastic complex had been under way sporadically since about 1417 with the Arte della Seta being given the responsibility of managing the project with fiscal assistance from the state. While such corporate management was frequently employed, a civil document of 1427 explicitly states that the priors of the city ordered the work. Furthermore it connects San Marco to the Florentine alliance with Venice, whose patron saint they pointed out is St Mark, and claims this building as a sign of the health of the republic. Thus when Cosimo assumed patronage of the building project after the Dominicans formally moved into the monastery 4  5 

For a discussion of the figure of Florentia, see chap. 4 of my Michelangelo’s David. See Gatti, ‘The Comune Studio Libertatis of Florence and Venice’.

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Figure 4.4. Florence, San Marco, exterior view of convent at the corner of the Via La Pira and the Piazza San Marco with the Medici stemma just below the eaves. Photo: author.

in 1436 he inherited these already established civic connections, making his patronage activities there synonymous with the health of the state, as Lorenzo was to do in his medal commemorating the Pazzi Conspiracy where his portrait is inscribed, again somewhat blatantly, SALUS PUBLICA.6 The second use of the Medici stemma at San Marco is generally ignored because of its utterly conventional appearance. Today the most visible instance of the stemma is on the upper wall of the monastic complex at its south-east side where the Via La Pira meets the Piazza San Marco (Figure 4.4). The stemma continues to appear like a heraldic drumbeat along this wall and around to the north side of the building where it is carved over the minor portals of the monastic buildings. The Medici stemma also appeared on the exterior over the central window of the apse of the church, now hidden within later additions 6 

Cosimo lived his year in exile in 1433–34 in Venice, welcomed by the Venetian Republic; whether this played into his activities at San Marco is not clear.

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79 Figure 4.5. Florence, Canto degli Alberti. Photo: author.

Figure 4.6. Florence, corner of the Borgo la Croce and the Via dei Macci, Marker of the Red City. Photo: author.

to the monastery.7 It is certainly true that patrons of ecclesiastical structures placed their stemmi on their structures — both inside and out as witnessed, for example, in the family stemmi appearing on the exterior walls of the family chapels of Santo Spirito. Such signs of generosity and devotion make the Medici crests at San Marco seem normative, yet it is important to remember that such heraldic identifiers were used during this time as property markers, identifying ownership of a site by individual families and designating their presence within the urban environment, as evidenced by the stemmi on the buildings at the Canto degli Alberti (Figure 4.5).8 Comparable to these are the markers used by the potenze or festival brigades of the city to mark their domains, such as that of the Red City in the Piazza Sant’Ambrogio (Figure 4.6),9 placed significantly at the building’s corner like the Medici stemma at 7 

Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, i, 104, illustrates a view of the San Marco complex from the piazza before it was redecorated in the eighteenth century; in this view the Medici stemma appears at the extremities of the upper left and upper right walls of the monastic building, but there is no way to test the accuracy of this line drawing. 8  Tasso, ‘Il “Canto” degli Alberti di Firenze’. 9  See Rosenthal, ‘The Spaces of Plebian Ritual and the Boundaries of Transgression’.

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Figure 4.7. Florence, Santa Croce, entrance portal to the novices’ quarters from the southern transept of the church.

Figure 4.8. Florence, Santa Croce, corridor leading from the church to the novices’ chapel. Photos: author.

San Marco. Despite the visual implications of the Medici stemmi at San Marco, however, Cosimo did not own the structures at San Marco.10 This same Medici claim to control of urban spaces so evident at San Marco also occurred simultaneously and equally obsessively at Santa Croce completely across the city. After a fire of 1423 that apparently razed existing conventual buildings, Cosimo built a large new residence and chapel for novices to the south of the existing sacristy.11 Despite the scale of this building project, historians have more or less ignored it, perhaps because the structures built for the novices now house leather factories and sales rooms.12 Today access to the 10 

Niall Atkinson has kindly pointed out to me legislation from 1355 (ASF, Statuti 19, Statuti del Podestà (1355) III, cc) that bans the display of arms other than those of the city on any public space in Florence, a law that was obviously not honoured, but that does suggest awareness of private claims to communal urban space broadcast by familial stemmi. 11  The extent of Medici additions to the building fabric at Santa Croce has been carefully delineated in an extraordinarily detailed set of architectural plans and elevations that differentiated Medici additions from both existing and later structures: see Cabassi and Tani, ‘Il Noviziato di Michelozzo a S. Croce’. 12  See Saalman, ‘Michelozzo Studies’ and Moisé, Santa Croce di Firenze, p. 162, who claims to have seen an inscription that gives a completion date of 1445: ‘Cosimo il Vecchio fece fare

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81 Figure 4.9. Florence, Santa Croce, novices’ chapel, Michelozzo, architect. Photo: author.

novices’ quarters is through an unprepossessing door with the Medici stemma in its pediment that opens from the south (right) transept of Santa Croce into an unusually long, broad corridor leading to the novices’ chapel and the entire complex built by Cosimo (Figures 4.7 and 4.8). Once into the corridor, a visitor is bombarded by the familiar palle: over the interior of the entrance door; on the ceiling; in the tracery of the windows; and in the glass of the upper windows along the right side of the corridor. At the end of the corridor and on axis with the entrance from the church’s transept is the novices’ chapel, again marked with the Medici crest at the apex of the altar arch and on the entablature of the small door at the left, once leading directly to the novices’ quarters (Figure 4.9). The stained-glass window over the altar carries figures of Cosmas and Damian, the Medici patron saints, as did the altarpiece by Filippo Lippi of the Virgin and Child (now in the Uffizi) which pairs those saints with the Franciscan patrons SS. Francis and Anthony and also shows the Medici red palle on a gold ground across the architectural entablature behind the figures. la Cappella de’ Medici (detta anche del Noviziato) a sue spese col disegno di Michelozzo. In questa cappella conservasi tuttavia nel secolo scorso una Campana sulla quale erano queste parole sotto l’arme medicea: Cosma de’ Medicis dedicavit Sancte Crucis [sic] de Florentia Ann. 1445. Fu poi rotta e ristaurata nel 1621 con perizia del Vasari […]; dall’epoca della soppressione in poi se ne sono perdute le trace’.

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Figure 4.10. Florence, Santa Croce, courtyard of the novices’ wing, arrows showing Medici stemmi. Photo: author.

Adjacent to the novices’ dormitory is an exterior courtyard (Figure 4.10). Medici stemmi appear on three of the courtyard’s walls, notably at the boundaries between Cosimo’s building and pre-existing structures donated by other families whose stemmi do not, in fact, appear. The exterior of the novices’ dormitory, like the monastic structures at San Marco, is plainly structured, its monochromatic plaster walls revealing nothing of its interior organization. But peeking between the branches of trees and vines that now obscure them are two Medici stemmi on the short wall of the dormitory and four others on its long exterior south wall (Figure 4.11). At least the stemmi on the long south wall would have been visible from outside the monastic complex, giving the Medici a public presence in a neighbourhood not usually identified with the family.13 13 

It should be remembered, however, that Contessina de’ Bardi, Cosimo’s wife, was a member of the family that was one of the first patrons of the church. There is also a sixteenthcentury tomb slab in the right aisle of the building commemorating Giovanni di Conti who died in 1441 at the time of Cosimo’s work at the church.

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Figure 4.11. Florence, Santa Croce, novices’ wing, exterior south-facing wall after Cabassi and Tani, ‘Il Noviziato di Michelozzo a S. Croce’, fig. 11, with arrows showing Medici stemmi.

For someone beginning to assert his own role as first among equals within the political life of the city, the San Marco and Santa Croce projects must have sent out a very clear message that Cosimo was not to be contained by old ties of neighbourhood politics. Cosimo’s architectural language was rather plain spoken in its formal aspects although powerful in its assertion of control over urban spaces. His son Piero, although commissioning works of a much reduced size, was if anything more insistent on inserting his presence at critical sacral sites in the city removed from the immediate Medici neighbourhood; their back histories give some insight into his choices. One of Piero’s first patronage projects was at the church of SS. Annunziata where his building interventions were extensive.14 They included a tabernacle to house a miracle-working Annunciation painting (Figure 4.12); the reliquary chapel immediately adjacent to it with a large historiated painting by Fra Angelico and Alesso Baldovinetti to cover the silver chest containing valuable ex-votos; a decorative wooden case for a new organ immediately to the right of the tabernacle; modifications to the forecourt leading to the church, now very much transformed and restored; and, beginning in 1461, private upper rooms and spaces opening onto the chapel and tabernacle below that allowed Piero to see without being seen, just as his father had a viewing room looking out onto the main altar of San Marco.15 14 

See Paoletti, ‘“…ha fatto Piero con voluntà del padre…”’. See McKillop, ‘Dante and Lumen Christi’ for a discussion of Cosimo’s viewing space at San Marco. Bulman, ‘Artistic Patronage at SS. Annunziata, 1140–1520’, VI.1, uses the term ‘palatine chapels’ for this spatial configuration. 15 

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Figure 4.12. Florence, SS. Annunziata, tabernacle housing the miraculous image of the Annunciation, Michelozzo. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

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A document from May 1439 suggests that those responsible for the Annunziata, a major pilgrimage site in the city, were attempting to appeal to a pan-Florentine group of donors rather than simply to families living in its immediate neighbourhood. In May of that year there is an inventory that lists gifts of velvet altar frontals and other liturgical cloths as well as silver ex-votos for the altar of the Annunciation from families like the Acciaiuoli, Strozzi, Carnesecchi, Altoviti, Medici, Gambacorti, and Cavalcanti.16 But this was a contentious moment in the history of the church when traditional patronage structures were drastically modified to make way for new interests in the building. In 1441 Eugenius IV had given the church and monastery to the Observant branch of the Servites, thus removing the Conventual branch of the order from the building. On 23 December 1445, however, the Florentine Signoria acted to control elections of the four operai of the building and ultimately returned the Conventual Servites to the church, contravening the reforms intended by Eugenius and asserting civic control over what was a major pilgrimage site in the city.17 Although Piero was one of the four operai selected by the Signoria in 1445, he was prohibited from assuming office primarily because he did not own an altar space in the building.18 His displacement from the opera was also explained by noting opera rules that precluded more than one family member at a time from serving on the opera, Orlando di Guccio de’ Medici — a distant relative closely aligned to Cosimo — then being a member of the opera. In what may have been either a face-saving device for rejecting Piero’s service or a rather bald subterfuge to engage him in a substantive contribution to the church, the document states explicitly that this restriction might have been overridden had Piero had patronage rights in the church. In any event, Piero ultimately played a significant role in the renovation and expansion projects at SS. Annunziata, most notably and publicly with the tabernacle housing the image of the 16 

Brunetti, ‘Una vacchetta segnata A’, pp. 232–33, for the transcription of the inventory. See Zervas, ‘“Quos volent et eo modo quo volent”’ for the relevant documents. Zervas has documented the Signoria’s intervention in the selection of operai for the church and the early problematic history of Piero’s initial association with that building committee. She points out (p. 469) that by 1455 the opera was controlled by Medici partisans. An earlier Medici involvement with shrines that possessed thaumaturgic powers occurred in 1438 when Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo, was a benefactor of the shrine of the Cintola in Prato; see Baldanzi, Della Chiesa Cattedrale di Prato, p. 250. 18  It is tempting to see Cosimo’s loan of 1050 lire to the building projects of the church earlier that year as a pathway to Piero’s election (Zervas, ‘“Quos volent et eo modo quo volent”’, p. 467). 17 

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Annunciation, dedicated in 1452 with Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville — widely considered to be papabile — in attendance. As with Medici involvement at San Marco, however, the back history of Piero’s gifts to the Annunziata and the parallel histories of other patrons’ activities there give a much richer indication of why the Medici would invest so much money in the project.19 Quattrocento patronage activities for the church were rivalrous, involving at least five parties: the Servites and their search for donors; the Medici; the Signoria; the Falconieri family that had been associated with the church and the Servite Order since its inception; the Parte Guelfa; and ultimately the Florentine bishop Antoninus. These parties formed a complex network of competition and interaction ultimately benefiting the Servites but demonstrating a jockeying for prominence that reverberated far beyond the walls of the Annunziata and must be seen as part of the incentive behind — and the meaning of — the work there. The roots of the disputes concerning patronage at the Annunziata during the 1440s extend back to 1264 when Pope Urban IV awarded the Falconieri ius patronatus over the high altar as well as the right to place their stemma over the main door of the building.20 Falconieri attention to the building — or more specifically to the religious order of the Servites whose church it was — stemmed from the facts that one of their ancestors, Alessio Falconieri, had been one of the seven founders of the order and that his niece, Giuliana Falconieri (c. 1270–1341) a Servite religious, was revered as a saint in the city. In an action of 1373 similar to Cosimo’s interventions at San Lorenzo in 1442, the Falconieri, referring to Urban IV’s grant, claimed that they could deny burial rights in the building or ownership to a private family chapel to anyone of whom they did not approve, thus insuring that the church and its patrons would remain allied to their family. In fact, when the Signoria intervened in 1445 to establish an opera that would oversee the extensive building projects at the site, Paolo di Francesco dei Falconieri was one of the first four members of the opera on which Piero was denied membership. Competing claims on space in the building finally came to a head in 1455, a decade after Piero’s initial intervention in the patronage structures of the church, when the completion of the domed tribuna at the liturgical east end of the church begun over a decade earlier necessitated the destruction of the church’s main altar in order to allow the new building to connect to the 19 

On the back of the upper cornice an inscription reads that Piero spent 4000 florins. See Andreucci, Il Fiorentino Istruito nella Chiesa della Nunziata for the documentation of this history. 20 

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existing structure, essentially removing the Falconieri as patrons of that honorific space. The Falconieri took their case to Bishop Antoninus who decreed in January 1456 that the main chapel would be destroyed and that the Falconieri were to pay for renovations of the chapel in the right transept which they had owned since 1350, but that they would be allowed to keep their stemma over the main door of the church, although not anywhere else in the atrium of the building.21 That decision having been made, it must have been particularly galling to the Falconieri that the Medici stemmi later appeared on the east and west wall of the atrium, contrary to Antoninus’s decree.22 Although scholars have studied the various building projects at the Annunziata, there is one aspect of Medici activity there that needs further thought, especially in light of what has been said about Medici consciousness of urban spaces occupied by their benefices. Emanuela Ferretti has demonstrated that the area between the Annunziata and San Marco was a contested space throughout the time of Cosimo’s patronage at San Marco and Piero’s at the Annunziata.23 From 1429, Niccolò da Uzzano, a leader of the anti-Medici faction in the city, had supported the construction of a new studio called the Sapienza that would have occupied the area. Although the Studio was closed from 1449 to 1451, that is, while Piero was involved with SS. Annunziata, the Signoria reopened the project, using 12,500 florins that Niccolò da Uzzano had donated to the Studio at its inception. Although the history of the site is poorly documented, by 1472 the Calimala guild that had administrative responsibility for the Studio had given Lorenzo the Magnificent the right to rent out the spaces of the Sapienza to the manufacturers of luxury fabrics, this at a time just before Lorenzo began to formalize the structures and activities of the so-called Medici statue garden (1472–75) on the west side of the Piazza San Marco across from the Sapienza site. At the same time Lorenzo began to acquire land and properties on the east side of SS. Annunziata (1477–78) on 21 

See Zervas, ‘“Quos volent et eo modo quo volent”’. The stone stemmi are now erased but still visible; the inscription is modern but likely replaces an earlier erased indication of Piero’s gift. Viewers entering the church also encountered a holy water stoop carrying the Medici stemma and crowned by a figure of St John the Baptist; see Morolli, ‘“Sacella”. I Tempietti marmorei di Piero de’ Medici’, p. 164, and Casalini, ‘Una pila dell’acqua santa con nel mezzo un San Giovanni che è cosa belissima’. For another example of Medici requisitioning rights belonging to another family, see Caglioti, ‘Altari eucaristici scolpiti del primo Rinascimento’, pp. 75–79. 23  What follows benefited from conversations with Prof. Ferretti; see her groundbreaking ‘La Sapienza di Niccolò da Uzzano e le Stalle di Lorenzo de’ Medici’. 22 

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the Via Laura.24 Thus by the end of the 1470s the Medici would have controlled an area of the city stretching from the Via di San Gallo on the west to the Borgo Pinti on the east, essentially creating a wall of Medici ‘territory’ stretching across this area of the city, parallel to but within Florence’s second walls. At the same time that Piero embarked on his projects for SS. Annunziata he also initiated a smaller-scaled commission, but one equally important in terms of site. At the church of San Miniato — again distant from the Medici neighbourhood — Piero commissioned another tabernacle, this one to house the miracle-working cross of St John Gualbert, the founder of the Vallambrosan Order (Figure 4.13).25 The Arte di Calimala, the guild having responsibility for the fabric of the church, put a severe and extraordinary stipulation on Piero’s first offer of patronage when they forbade identification of the tabernacle with anyone other than the guild. As with Santissima Annunziata, Piero proved that he was not to be trifled with. On 10 June 1448 the Calimala reversed its earlier position allowing Piero to include his stemma (le sue arme), although stipulating that the guild’s heraldic eagle perched on a bale of wool should take pre-eminence on the tabernacle.26 Although it is true that a gilt form of the Calimala eagle appears atop the front arch of the tabernacle, it is also true that the Medici stemma appears on the small scrolls at the bases of the front and back arches, Piero’s impresa of the diamond ring and three feathers occurs repeatedly around the entablature, his diamond ring forms the links tying together the circles of the wrought iron grill surrounding the tabernacle, and a heraldic eagle — larger than the Calimala eagle — appears with the diamond ring and its interlaced ribbon bearing the inscription Semper on the rear tympanum of the tabernacle significantly in the form of the ancient Augustan imperial eagle.27 24 

For these two projects, see Elam, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden’; Elam, ‘Il Giardino delle sculture di Lorenzo de’ Medici’; and Elam, ‘Lorenzo’s Architecture and Urban Policies’. 25  The painting was located at San Miniato until 1671. 26  By January 1449 Maso di Bartolomeo, a bronze caster, was already at work on two bronze eagles for the tabernacle, and his work there apparently continued until 1452 when a new altar bell was installed; see Morolli, ‘“Sacella”. I Tempietti marmorei di Piero de’ Medici’, p. 139. 27  Vasari calls the bird on the back tympanum of the tabernacle a falcon, a designation that is standard in the literature in discussions of Piero’s emblem (Vasari/Milanesi, II, 444). But Piero’s falcon is not always depicted the same, slipping identification from place to place depending on the commission; and here it more closely approximates an Augustan eagle, whereas in the Medici Chapel fresco of the Old Magus it resembles a goshawk. On the imperial implications of the tabernacle, see Koch, ‘Medici Continuity, Imperial Tradition and Florentine History’.

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Figure 4.13. Florence, San Miniato, tabernacle built to house the miraculous crucifix of St John Gaulbert, Michelozzo and Luca della Robbia. Photo: ©Vanni Archive/Art Resource, New York.

Medici activity at San Marco, Santa Croce, SS.  Annunziata, and San Miniato marks their expansive presence across the city, their support of the Church, and their takeover of both urban space and important pilgrimage sites in Florence.28 These claims to space during the first half of the fifteenth century 28 

For Piero’s failed attempt to place his family at the main altar of the cathedral and for his son’s later activity at the site, see Kent, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici at the Duomo’; Paoletti, ‘“…ha fatto

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Figure 4.14. Florence Palazzo Rucellai, detail of façade showing Medici devices above the main entrance. Photo: author.

have a second act in the later fifteenth century when Medici imagery appears in the Quartiere of Santa Maria Novella, the stronghold of the Strozzi family. Lorenzo the Magnificent’s presence in the frescoes of the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita is well known. Less familiar is the extensive use of what appear to be variants of Piero’s impresa of the diamond ring, three feathers, and interlaced ribbon that appear in the commissions of Giovanni Rucellai, notably across the entablatures of his palace (Figure 4.14) and loggia, on his new façade for Santa Maria Novella, on the entablature over the entrance to the Rucellai burial chapel at San Pancrazio, and even on the Holy Sepulchre inside that building. In the instances cited, a diamond ring with neither feathers nor ribbon appears along with a ring with two feathers and a torus with three feathers rising through its centre. The latter configuration appears as headdresses for the three young figures at the far left of the wall of the mature magus in the Medici Chapel (Figure 4.15). Claims that the three represent Piero’s three daughters remain unsubstantiated,29 although their ages are approximately correct; but there is no doubt that these same theatrical headdresses appear on Rucellai architectural commissions when Bernardo di Giovanni Rucellai married Nannina de’ Medici in 1466. Piero con voluntà del padre…”’; Haines, ‘Il principio di “mirabilissime cose”’. From 1464 when Mino da Fiesole made a model of the façade until the façade competition of 1491, Lorenzo seems to have been involved with plans for completing the façade of the cathedral, but no firm evidence of his role has yet emerged. 29  Not the least problematic about such an identification is that the three appear in male clothing, hardly imaginable during this time. Bianca Maria (1445–88) and Lucrezia (known as Nannina, 1448–93) are well known. Piero’s bastard daughter, Maria, was sequestered in the Murate until her marriage to Lionetto de’ Rossi in 1466 and their move to Lyons where she died.

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The appearances of this lookalike of Piero’s impresa give the Medici a presence in a part of the city that was neighbourhood for the Strozzi family whose 1434 exile they had persisted in renewing and at a church that had been a site of Strozzi burial and artistic commissions at least from the mid-fourteenth century. Giovanni Rucellai’s blatant claims to patronage of the façade of Santa Maria Novella written in large letters across the base of its pediment — anomalous in the city — and the appearance of his impresa of the sail (vela) on the façade should not deflect attention from what appears at a glance to be Piero de’  Medici’s ring and feathers paired with the vela around the oculus window and even more tellingly over the main door of the building where Piero’s diamond ring decorates the upper left and right corners of the lintel (Figure 4.16), as if Piero himself were claiming that liminal entrance space, despite the later (c.  1510) inscription and porphyry rota of Bernardo Rucellai on the step leading to the door. 30 The modified imprese allow the implication of Piero’s presence in a disguised — yet visually 30 

Figure 4.15. Florence, Medici Palace, Chapel, wall of the mature Magus, detail of three young girls at the left, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli. Photo: Scala/Art Resource NY.

It should be mentioned that Piero’s diamond ring and feathers apparently replaced the stemma of the Baldesi family that was removed from the door probably in 1457, although the Baldesi were allowed to place their stemma on the rood screen inside; see Hatfield, ‘The Funding of the Façade of Santa Maria Novella’, pp. 85–86.

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Figure 4.16. Florence, Santa Maria Novella, main portal showing variants of Medici devices. Photo: author.

acute — manner in a neighbourhood not his own. This claim might appear farfetched were it not for a document from 1527 when the Medici were expelled from the city. An anonymous accuser then claimed that, contrary to the law demanding that Medici images be destroyed, Palla Rucellai had merely covered Piero’s imprese on the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai with fabric and plaster so that they could be revealed again were the Medici to return to power.31 Even though the imprese were not strictly speaking Piero’s, nor were they on a Medici building, their claims to Medici presence — and thus power — were clearly communicated to people who saw them and understood their intentions. Even in the few selected examples discussed here it seems clear that the Medici were using their architectural projects to claim territory, to broadcast their presence throughout the city outside the confines of their own neighbourhood, and doing so at sites where their political adversaries were or had been prominently at work, thus demonstrating their ability to overcome opposition. Lorenzo the Magnificent’s claim — ‘I am a citizen like all others but with some authority’ — had a long and practiced history in his family.32

31 

See Ridolfi, ‘Tamburazione fatta contro Palla Rucellai’. Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, p. 57, no. 174; for this recollection, see Kent, ‘Charity and Power in Renaissance Florence’, esp, p. 271. Lorenzo’s self-assessment — ‘Io non sono signore di Firenze ma un cittadino con qualche auctorità’ — echoes the second half of the opening lines of Vespasiano da Bisticci’s life of Cosimo where the biographer writes that ‘Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici fu d’onoratissimi parenti et prestantissimo cittadino, et di grande auctorità nella sua republica’ (Vespasiano, Vite di Uomini Illustri del secolo xv, p. 246), thus claiming a traditional role within a republican culture. 32 

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Works Cited Andreucci, Ottavio, Il Fiorentino Istruito nella Chiesa della Nunziata (Firenze: M. Cellini e C., 1857) Baldanzi, Ferdinando, Della Chiesa Cattedrale di Prato (Prato: Ff. Giachetti, 1846) Brunetti, Giulia, ‘Una vacchetta segnata A’, in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Ugo Procacci, ed. by Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto and Paolo Dal Poggetto (Firenze: Electa Editrice, 1977), i, 228–35 Bulman, Louise, ‘Artistic Patronage at SS.  Annunziata, 1140–1520’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Courtauld Institute, 1971) Cabassi, Sergio, and Renzo Tani, ‘Il Noviziato di Michelozzo a S. Croce’, Città di vita, 37.4–5 (1982), 277–306; repr. in Postgotico e rinascimento, ed. by Giuseppe Rocchi Coopmans de Yoldi (Firenze: Alinea, 2002), pp. 245–60 Caglioti, Francesco, ‘Altari eucaristici scolpiti del primo Rinascimento: qualche caso maggiore’, in Lo Spazio e il culto, ed. by Jörg Stabenow (Venezia: Marsilio, 2006), pp. 53–90 Casalini, Eugenio, ‘Una pila dell’acqua santa con nel mezzo un San Giovanni che è cosa belissima’, La SS. Annunziata, 10 (May–June 1990), 4ff Elam, Caroline, ‘Il Giardino delle sculture di Lorenzo de’ Medici’, in Il Giardino di San Marco, ed. by Paola Barocchi (Firenze: Silvana editoriale, 1992), pp. 157–71 —— , ‘Lorenzo de’  Medici’s Sculpture Garden’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 36 (1992), 41–84 —— , ‘Lorenzo’s Architectural and Urban Policies’, in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo Mondo, ed. by G. C. Garfagnini (Firenze: Olschki, 1994), pp. 357–84 Ferretti, Emanuela, ‘La Sapienza di Niccolò da Uzzano e le Stalle di Lorenzo de’ Medici’, in La Sapienza a Firenze: L’Università e l’Istituto Geografico Militare a San Marco [Acts of the Congress held on October 16, 2008], ed. by Amadeo Belluzzi and Emanuela Ferretti (Firenze: Istituto Geografico Militare, 2009), pp. 41–67 Gatti, Luca, ‘The Comune Studio Libertatis of Florence and Venice, and the Political Implications of the Pre-Medicean Restoration of the Convent of San Marco’, QUASAR (Quaderni di storia dell’architecttura e restauro), 13–14 (1995), 37–47 Gregory, Heather, ‘Palla Strozzi’s Patronage and Pre-Medicean Florence’, in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. by F. W. Kent and Patricia Simons (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Canberra: Humanities Research Center, 1987), pp. 201–20 Haines, Margaret, ‘Il principio di “mirabilissime cose”: I mosaici per la volta della Cappella di San Zanobi in Santa Maria del Fiore’, in La difficile eredità: Architettura a Firenze della Repubblica all’assedio, ed. by Marco Dezzi Bardeschi (Firenze: Alinea Editrice, 1994), pp. 38–55 Hatfield, Rab, ‘The Funding of the Façade of Santa Maria Novella’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 67 (2004), 81–127 Kent, Dale, ‘Charity and Power in Renaissance Florence: Surmounting Cynicism in His­ torio­graphy’, Common Knowledge, 9.2 (2003), 254–72 Koch, Linda A., ‘Medici Continuity, Imperial Tradition and Florentine History: Piero de’ Medici’s Tabernacle of the Crucifix at S. Miniato al Monte’, in A Scarlet Renaissance:

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Essays in Honor of Sarah Blake McHam, ed. by Arnold Victor Coonin (New York: Italica Press, 2013), pp. 183–211 Marchini Giuseppe, ‘Il San Marco di Michelozzo’, Palladio, 6 (1942), 102–14 McKillop, Susan, ‘Dante and Lumen Christi’, in Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici, 1389–1464: Essays in Commemoration of the 600th Anniversary of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Birth, ed. by Francis Ames-Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 243–301 Moisé, Filippo, Santa Croce di Firenze: Illustrazione storico-artistica; con note e copiosi docu­menti inediti (Firenze: Tipografia galileiana, 1845) Morolli, Gabriele, ‘“Sacella”. I  Tempietti marmorei di Piero de’  Medici: Michelozzo o Alberti?’, in Michelozzo Scultore e Architetto (1396–1472), ed. by Gabriele Morolli (Firenze: Centro Di, 1998), pp. 131–70 Nuttall, Paula, ‘The Patrons of the Chapels at the Badia Fiesolana’, Studi di Storia dell’Arte, 3 (1992), 97–112 Paoletti, John T., ‘“…ha fatto Piero con voluntà del padre…”: Piero de’  Medici and Corporate Commissions of Art’, in Piero de’ Medici ‘il Gottoso’ (1416–1469): Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer/Art in the Service of the Medici, ed. by Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), pp. 221–50 —— , Michelangelo’s David: Florentine History and Civic Identity (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2015) Poliziano, Angelo, Detti piacevoli, ed. by Mariano Fresta (Siena: Editori del Grifo, 1985) Richa, Giuseppe, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, divise ne’ suoi quartieri, 10 vols (Firenze: P. G. Viviani, 1754–62; repr. Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1972) Ridolfi, R., ‘Tamburazione fatta contro Palla Rucellai’, Rivista storica degli archivi Toscani, 1.1 (1929), 131–32 Rosenthal, David, ‘The Spaces of Plebian Ritual and the Boundaries of Transgression’, in Re­naissance Florence: A Social History, ed. by Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006), pp. 161–81 Saalman, Howard, ‘Michelozzo Studies’, Burlington Magazine, 108 (1966), 242–50 —— , ‘Strozzi Tombs in the Sacristy of Santa Trinita’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, ser. 2, 38 (1987), 149–60 Tasso, M, ‘Il “Canto” degli Alberti di Firenze’, Antichità viva, 10 (1971), 20–36 Vespasiano di Bisticci, Vite di Uomini Illustri del secolo xv, ed. by Angelo Mai and Adolfo Bartoli (Florence: Barbera, Bianchi e Comp., 1859) Zervas, Diane Finiello, ‘“Quos volent et eo modo quo volent”: Piero de’ Medici and the Operai of SS.  Annunziata, 1445–55’, in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. by Peter Denly and Caroline Elam, Westfield Pub­ lications in Medi­eval Studies, 2 (London: Westfield College, Uni­ver­sity of London, 1988), pp. 465–79

The Magnificent Arbitrator: Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Patrician Families in Florence Lorenzo Fabbri*

I

n a passage of his biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Niccolò Valori praises the special attention that the Magnificent reserved for the internal balance of the city and, in particular, on its higher class, emphasizing how he did not hesitate to intervene directly in his fellow citizens’ affairs in order to safeguard the harmony of their relationships: Lorenzo was such a great lover of public harmony that, by linking families through marriage and by using all the other skills and bonds of benevolence, he bound the citizens together, always devising new forms of friendship and compliance — saying, to use his own words, that just as the body, if it is well-ordered from within, will be little moved by cold or heat or similar accidents, so too the city, whose  

* This essay represents the culmination of research begun several years ago which was first presented in 2000 at two successive conferences, the 46th annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Florence and the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo. During these occasions the friendly suggestions of Bill Kent, whom I remember here with affection and gratitude, were valuable to me. I am also grateful to Maia Gahtan, Giuseppe Giari, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Sergio Tognetti, and Andrea Zorzi for having generously offered their assistance. Lorenzo Fabbri ([email protected]) is the archivist at the Opera di S.  Maria del Fiore, Florence. He is the author of Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ‘400: studio sulla famiglia Strozzi (Firenze, 1991) and of other essays, especially in the social, political, and cultural history of Florence and Tuscany from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. He has been a fellow at Brown Uni­ver­sity (1992), École française de Rome (1995), Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (1997–98), and Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale Uni­ver­sity (1998).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 95–113 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109700

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members are called the citizens: if they are united and of the same mind and will and are disposed toward the common good and public utility, they can easily resist any outside force and defend themselves from every adverse fortune, as experience has plainly demonstrated.1

The words of Valori attest how, right from the earliest historiographical reflections on the de facto lord of Florence, the somewhat mythicized image, which up until our day would accompany his memory, was already well defined, that of the skilled weaver of political and social networks, striving to establish or reinstate good relations at all levels: not only between Italian states or subject communities but also within the urban walls where he appears intent on orchestrating with a masterly hand vertical and horizontal relations between the different components of Florentine society. Yet, without falling into the excesses of some commentators who seem to attribute almost superhuman powers to the Magnificent, it would be difficult to deny all validity to this vision and especially not to recognize in it a deliberate strategy to gain power. It is revealed with clarity by the attitude held by Lorenzo towards the Florentine oligarchy: by means of a careful policy of mediation between illustrious families and of co-optation of new members, he knew how to conquer and consolidate a leading position in the state, which neither his father, Piero, nor his grandfather, Cosimo, pater patriae, were ever able to achieve. This, with the passage of time, would enable him to change the nature of the oligarchy itself, by creating a privileged sector inside, an internal circle of the regime which, rooted in the Council of the Seventy, became the real cornerstone of his power.2 The ability of Lorenzo de’ Medici to worm his way into the internal dynamics of the Florentine ruling class in order to gain further confirmation of his own supremacy was in turn the effect of his objective political superiority, as well as personal skill. It was the fruit of a sort of informal ordination, which allowed him to rule the state while remaining a private citizen. Yet this role 1  ‘Et in tanto fu Lorenzo amatore della publica concordia che, per coniunzione di affinità e con tutte le altre arti e vinculi di benivolenzia, collegava e’ cittadini insieme, sempre esco­g itando nuovi modi di amicizia e conformità degli animi dicendo, per usare le parole sue, che così come el corpo se drento in sé è bene disposto poco di fuora per freddo o per caldo o simili accidenti si commuove, così ancora la città, le membra delle quali si dicono e’ cittadini, se coniunte e d’uno medesimo animo e volontà al ben comune e publica utilità si dispongano, facilmente possano a qualunche estraneo impeto resistere e da ogni avversa fortuna defendersi, come apertamente ne dimostra la esperienzia’: Valori, Vita di Lorenzo de’ Medici, ed. by Niccolini, pp. 113–14. 2  Kent, ‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”’.

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of patron and peacemaker for the Florentine oligarchic families (but also for members of humbler means or for subject communities), though founded on the concrete practice of social and power relations, sporadically acquired forms of legitimacy, especially when it fell within legally recognized functions. In the pages that follow I propose to show the importance that the numerous appointments as arbitrator in civil law disputes held for the Magnificent from this perspective. Lorenzo accepted this role with remarkable continuity and with a range of action that was able to go beyond the urban area, arbitrating not only disputes between different communities of the republic,3 but also disputes which involved rulers of other Italian states.4 However, in this context we will focus our attention on his civic interventions, which placed Lorenzo in a position to insert himself in a completely legitimate manner in the private affairs of the main households of Florence, giving him decisional power on matters concerning their social status such as marriage contracts, property rights, division of assets, inheritance, merchant company budgets, etc. It was a display of Lorenzo’s leadership which had already been highlighted by historians beginning with Kent.5 It is on his insights that I intend to draw here to give greater attention to this topic than that which has been given to it until now, in order to contribute to a more circumstantial explanation of those particular power techniques which made Lorenzo the maestro della bottega (‘boss of the shop’) of the Florentine political scene.6 * * * Arbitration, as it is known, is an extrajudicial process by which two conflicting parties involved in a civil law dispute can, by means of a contract (the arbitration agreement), entrust its resolution to one or more mutually agreed private subjects, called arbitrators. By doing so, they delegate to a third party the task of delivering an arbitration award, thereby avoiding having to turn to an ordinary judge and court and in this way opting for a predictably quicker and more controlled solution to the dispute. 3 

See Connell, ‘Appunti sui rapporti dei primi Medici con le comunità del dominio fiorentino’ and Salvadori, Dominio e patronato, esp. pp. 140–51. 4  See for example the Besalù case in which the King of Naples, Ferrante d’Aragona, was involved: Böninger, ‘Politics, Trade and Toleration in Renaissance Florence’. 5  See Kent, ‘Patron–Client Networks’, pp. 215–16, and ‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”’, pp. 231–32. See also Zorzi, ‘Progetti, riforme e pratiche giudiziarie’, pp. 1328–29. 6  See Kent, ‘Patron–Client Networks’.

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As a field of research, medieval and early modern arbitration has long been reserved to historians of law.7 In Italy it has become an object of historiographical interest only in the last decade,8 but an important turning point had already been achieved in 1987 thanks to Thomas Kuehn, who shifted the debate towards the processes of conflict management in preindustrial societies and the tools used to contain the disintegrating forces present in social relations, beginning a general reconsideration of the relationship between arbitration and law on this basis.9 It is to Kuehn’s study that one owes the most methodical analysis of the arbitration institution in Renaissance Florence, where the practice of devolving the resolution of private disputes to a third party reveals itself to be not only widespread but also well integrated in the judicial system regulated by the communal statutes of 1355 and 1415. For our purposes, which are essentially about political and social history, it will be sufficient to outline a few basic elements in order to better understand the specific cases we will discuss later. At the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici the nature of arbitration was profoundly transformed with respect to the communal age and to the relevant theoretical framework defined by the juridical school of Bologna. One of the major changes which began around the turn of the fourteenth century was the conceptual acceptance of the contractual nature of the institution. It was on this legal basis that the conflicting parties agreed freely on the mandate to confer to an arbitrator by signing a notarial deed, the compromissum, and committed themselves to respect the arbitral decision, also notarized, called laudum. Arbitration adapted itself somehow to the now reigning merchant culture, which tended both to privilege negotiation processes10 and to solicit quick resolutions of the disputes, guaranteed by the authority of the members of the same group. A sort of justice among equals, in other words, which aimed at escaping from the traps of a set of values which in many cases appeared unrelated, as represented by the judicial system. 7 

See the monographs by Martone, Arbiter-Arbitrator; Meccarelli, Arbitrium; Marrella and Mozzato, Alle origini dell’arbitrato commerciale internazionale. See also Sbriccoli, Storia del diritto penale e della giustizia, i, 54–55. 8  The topic is well covered in Wickham, Legge, pratiche e conflitti. See also Guarisco, Il con­ flitto attraverso le norme, pp. 84–87, and Menziger, ‘Forme di organizzazione giudiziaria delle città comunali italiane nei secoli xii e xiii’. 9  Kuehn, ‘Law and Arbitration in Renaissance Florence’. 10  In this, arbitration is similar to the practices of negotiated justice, better known for the criminal setting; see Sbriccoli, Storia del diritto penale e della giustizia, i, 3–44; ii, 1223–45.

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In fact, the resolving intervention of the arbitrator, more than affirming justice according to the legislative norms, intended to reconstruct social peace and order, based on the principle of aequitas, rather than justitia, that is, duly considering the real situations of the two parties. For this reason legislators saw in this practice the ideal response to fights within families, in which the unanimous overcoming of the disagreement and the mutual satisfaction of the parties appeared most urgent. But the same need also arises in the relationships between members of the same group of any nature, such as property or credit relations, merchant association, guild co-membership, etc. What matters is that the arbitration decision be able to uphold the future balance in the relationships between the parties. Clearly in disputes within family groups the most qualified people to take the role of arbitrator were the most influential individuals in the clan, those who could claim an ascendancy over all the other members. But the same principle of authority is valid in the resolution of conflicts among merchants or other social categories. In a city such as Florence in the late Middle Ages these elements made arbitration in many ways consonant, if not actually assimilable, to the widespread practice of patronage.11 Whoever was called to resolve a dispute between two parties, though his responsibility would end with the awarding of the laudum, would easily assume the characteristics of guarantor of the new legal relationships which came to be created by his decision and to a certain extent would acquire power over the individuals involved. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Magnificent’s commitment to ‘binding the citizens together’ — to use the words of Niccolò Valori — would often express itself in this legally recognized, technical role. * * * The intense arbitration activity of Lorenzo de’ Medici left a vivid documentary testimony in a notarial record book kept by Niccolò Michelozzi,12 the Florentine notary who from July 1471 undertook the role of private secretary 11  The analogies between arbitration and patronal practices have been highlighted by Kent, ‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”’, p. 232. The topic of patronage has had great historiographical fortune in the last decades of the previous century, largely due to the efforts of Anglo-Saxon scholars, often inspired by insights from cultural anthropology. Kent himself made fundamental contributions to Florentine history in this field, among which it is right to cite ‘Patron–Client Networks’. For a more general treatment, see the collected essays in Kent and Simons, Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy. 12  ASF, Not. Antecos., 14099.

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to Lorenzo.13 Among the deeds recorded in it, a large majority are the appointments of the Magnificent as arbitrator and the consequent awards issued by him. Obviously, similar instruments can be found in any register of the many trusted notaries of the major Florentine families, but there is no doubt that a comparable concentration of arbitrations in a single book indicates not only the significant commitment that the chief citizen of Florence displayed in this activity but also the special value he attributed to it. The majority of these arbitramenta concern families of the city’s oligarchy, and it is worthy of note that, in their case, they are almost exclusively related to marriages. Thanks to the analysis of the manuscript conducted by Francesco Guidi Bruscoli we can get an idea of the role of Lorenzo in the conclusion of important marriage alliances: out of a total of forty-six cases of sponsalitium — the instrument with which the agreement between the betrothed parties was sanctioned — he appears as arbitrator thirty-four times, while in other cases the same task is carried out by his brother Giuliano, his wife Clarice, or his son Piero.14 But what was the role of an arbitrator on the occasion of a marriage? The instrumenta sponsalitii usually allowed for the nomination of two arbitrators, to which the families concerned assigned the task of establishing the amount and composition of the dowry. It was, in general, more of a fictitious than a real power, since similar decisions would usually derive from the earlier negotiations between the parties, bearing in mind the objective prospects of the relatives of the bride. When one reached the stage of the deed, which not by chance was also called the compromissum, the agreement between the two parties was already at a point too advanced to leave any doubts about such a delicate issue, so the award pronounced by the arbitrators very often had an almost exclusively formal meaning.15 Yet the presence of an arbitrator in marriage contracts was important. Besides sanctioning the suitability of the dowry amount, he acted as the third party in the transaction and was, therefore, the formal guarantor of the union. Thus, if such function was undertaken by an eminent person in the regime, the role of arbitrator took on a clear political message of approval directed at the entire community. This is certainly the case for the numerous arbitrations by Lorenzo the Magnificent — normally exercised, not by chance, alone — 13 

Medici, Lettere, i, ed. by Fubini, p. xxvii. Guidi Bruscoli, ‘Politica matrimoniale e matrimoni politici nella Firenze di Lorenzo de’ Medici’. 15  Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400, pp. 164–67. On spon­ salitium, see Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Zacharie, ou le père évincé’, pp. 1219–20. 14 

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which made him a sort of dominus of high-ranking marriage alliances, validating the claim by Francesco Guicciardini according to which in Florence ‘none except unimportant marriages were contracted without his participation and permission’:16 a statement which is absolutely consistent with the words of Niccolò Valori, quoted at the outset. An eloquent example is given by two marriages concluded by Filippo di Matteo Strozzi in 1486 and 1489, between his daughter Marietta and Simone Ridolfi, and between his niece Alessandra di Lorenzo Strozzi and Piero del Benino, respectively. The presence in both cases of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the role of arbitrator constitutes a sure sign of his willingness to readmit Filippo, who in the past had been exiled by Cosimo the Elder, to the highest ranks of the ruling class.17 His monopoly over the matrimonial arbitration agreements of the patriciate demonstrates the Magnificent’s ability to manipulate in the way he wanted the framework of family alliances within the close circle of the regime, in order to preserve those equilibria which were so essential to his ability to rule. It also shows the patronal approach by which Lorenzo viewed the authority connected to arbitration. * * * If in the case of marriage agreements the presence of the Magnificent as arbitrator had a largely representative and symbolic value, as far as to surpass its legal significance, the same could not be said for other matters in which his intervention was requested. The range of these disputes appears extremely varied, including issues related to outstanding debts, division of assets, restitution of dowries, inheritances, trading, etc. Sometimes an arbitration agreement would be the first and only attempt to resolve a dispute; other times it would be part of a more or less complex story of legal battles which, after having passed through previous arbitration awards or even court sentences, had left the parties unsatisfied. In certain cases it was the court itself that led to an arbitrated solution as an integral part of the legal process. This, for example, was the modus operandi of the fifteenth-century Mercanzia, the court reserved for merchant disputes, where the arbitrator was utilized to confirm or reform sentences, a further proof of how much this vehicle was appreciated by businessmen. One of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s earliest appointments as arbitrator — about a dispute 16  ‘Non si faceva parentado alcuno più che mediocre sanza participazione e licenzia sua’: Guicciardini, Storie fiorentine dal 1378 al 1509, ed. by Montevecchi, p. 181 (trans. by Domandi, pp. 75–76). 17  Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400, pp. 166–67.

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over commercial debts between Giuliano Gondi and Bernardo Corbinelli — was handled on 24 September 1472 by this court. In this case, it would seem, Lorenzo and his colleagues did not issue any arbitration award, implicitly ratifying the court’s decision.18 A few months later we find instead an example of laudum with which the Magnificent repealed two judgements of the ordinary courts. It concerned an important inheritance dispute, made particularly delicate because of the renown of the subjects involved and the money at stake. The controversy had been started at the beginning of 1472, following the death of the very wealthy merchant-banker Tommaso Spinelli.19 Having no direct male heir, he was survived by three daughters (Giana, Bice, and Lisabetta), who at the time were already married. His will had excluded them from the succession in observance of the legal principle known as exclusio propter dotem, fully adopted by the Florentine statutes, according to which a woman conveniently endowed by her father did not hold any right to his inheritance.20 His brother Niccodemo, a merchant in Venice, had been designated sole heir, with the intention, in practice, of favouring his son Guasparre, whom Tommaso had invited to live in his Florentine home, adopting him as his de facto true heir. So, although the final wishes of the testator were anything but anomalous with respect to Florentine custom, the three daughters decided to contest the will before the court of the Podestà, denouncing the lack of respect of their right to the legitime (the Roman legitima portio) that the ius commune established as being equal to one third of the paternal estate. In their view this share had not been adequately satisfied in the conferral of their dowries, which amounted to 2380 florins for each of them. The case moved by the three women took on particular significance inasmuch as it directly involved their respective husbands (Paolantonio di messer Tommaso Soderini, Niccolò di Luigi Ridolfi, and

18 

I have taken this information from an unpublished lecture by Luca Boschetto given at Villa I Tatti on 1 June 2000. I thank the author for having provided me with the typescript. Regarding the Gondi-Corbinelli case, see also Riccardo Fubini in Medici, Lettere, i, ed. by Fubini, p. 451. On the Mercanzia court in the late fifteenth century, see Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence, pp. 133–35; Astorri, ‘Note sulla Mercanzia fiorentina sotto Lorenzo dei Medici’. 19  See Caferro, ‘L’attività bancaria papale’ and ‘The Silk Business of Tommaso Spinelli’. 20  Regarding exclusio propter dotem, see Bellomo, Ricerche sui rapporti patrimoniali tra coniugi, pp. 163–85. On the Florentine inheritance system, see Kuehn, ‘Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance’ and Chabot, La dette des familles, pp. 11–41.

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Jacopo di messer Luca Pitti, all high-ranking members of the city’s oligarchy), as well as their principal relatives. The lawsuit concluded in the month of July with a sentence which upheld the petition of the daughters of Tommaso Spinelli recognizing their right to a portion of the inheritance which, added to the dowry received, would equal their lawful share. The sentence does not specify how much should have been added to the 7140 florins that Giana and her sisters had received as their combined dowries, but the trial records suggest that Tommaso’s estate was estimated at about 60,000 florins, so 20,000, being one third of it, should have been reserved as legitime. On 13 November the appellate court of the Capitano del Popolo, to which Niccodemo and Guasparre had filed a petition, confirmed the first ruling.21 The intervention of Lorenzo de’ Medici took place, therefore, at the end of a series of proceedings which had yielded a clear verdict. Despite this, just eight days after the appeal sentence, the winning party agreed to put the findings in play again by means of a compromissum which would leave the final decision to the leading man of the Florentine regime.22 There could be different explanations for such a choice, for example the predictable difficulty in claiming an amount of money not quantified by the judge, or the desire to prevent further appeals on the part of Niccodemo and Guasparre, not to forget the political advantage of high-level mediation. It is likely, however, that the main motive was a desire to resolve a family conflict and preserve good relations with close relatives. A case with such high-profile protagonists could not remain indifferent to the Magnificent. His arbitration award, pronounced on 15 February 1473, demonstrates the considerable degree of autonomy with which he interpreted the role of arbitrator. On the one hand, in fact, he overturned the two sentences, defining them as objectionable and unjust; on the other he redressed the instructions of the testator, recognizing that the dowries assigned to the daughters were insufficient with respect to Tommaso’s economic status and social position. He decided therefore to award 1200 florins from the estate to each of the three sisters.23 The Spinelli case reveals the ability of Lorenzo, right from the beginning of his de facto lordship, to propose himself as a wise and impartial judge within the Florentine patriciate. However, we cannot ignore the political intent which 21 

ASF, Capitano del Popolo e Difensore delle Arti, 4098, unfoliated (13 November 1472). ASF, Not. Antecos., 11655, fol. 398r. 23  ASF, Not. Antecos., 10187, fols 451r–453r. 22 

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seems to be concealed in the award, which was essentially unfavourable to the contenders who enjoyed greater political power and who constituted possible competitors for the leadership. * * * Undertaking a systematic survey of the arbitrations of Lorenzo de’ Medici, as for any other citizen of the time, would be a laborious task because of the lack of tools that could guide the research among the thousands of notary registers preserved in the State Archives of Florence. We limited ourselves therefore to analysing the records of two notaries who were particularly close to the Magnificent, Giovanni di Marco da Romena and Simone Grazzini da Staggia, as well as undertaking some research in other directions.24 This sample survey produced in any case a significant data set, composed of twenty-six arbitration awards by Lorenzo between 1471 and 1490, a corpus sufficiently rich and varied for our purposes.25 From the documentation it emerges how Lorenzo was often called to act as arbitrator — by himself or with others — on numerous issues concerning the interests of various families of the Florentine oligarchy, such as the Salviatis, the Pazzis, the Martellis, the Alamannis, the Alessandris, or the Strozzis. In a few cases his intervention was directed towards resolving conflicts which had developed within a single family group over which he exercised a clear patronal role. This is the case of the Marsuppinis, a family from Arezzo which had moved to Florence at the beginning of the century. The family quickly made a name for itself thanks especially to its connection with Cosimo de’ Medici, with Carlo obtaining the prestigious office of chancellor of the republic in 1444.26 In 1478 a bitter dispute began around the intestate succession of Giovanni di messer Gregorio, brother of the chancellor, who had passed away twenty-five years earlier. Giovanni had not left a direct lineage, but five nephews survived him (four were children of Carlo), to whom, by virtue of the statutory norms on intestate succession, the full right to the estate was due. His widow, Elena di Simone 24 

I am referring to several registers kept by Leonardo da Colle, Pietro Migliorelli, Fran­ cesco da Catignano, and Michele di Antonio da Santa Croce. 25  The records examined also contain about seventy compromissa (or their extensions) in which Lorenzo features as arbitrator. It was not uncommon that the compromissum and following award were not drafted by the same notary, so in many cases it was only possible to find one or the other. The register of Niccolò Michelozzi is excluded from the count because it constitutes a separate case (see above). 26  See Zippel, Storia e cultura del Rinascimento italiano, pp. 198–214; Coppini and Zaccaria, ‘Carlo Marsuppini’.

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Altoviti, was opposed to such a prospect, having claimed her legitima portio of the estate, and to this end she appealed both to the statutes of Ancona, the city in which Giovanni had died, and to the ius commune. However, Lorenzo, who was called to settle the issue, defended Florentine law by imposing the observance of his city’s statutes and rejecting every claim of the widow.27 Similarly bearing the stamp of his patronage was the arbitration award by Lorenzo in 1483, originating from a few disputes between the children of Leonardo di Bartolomeo Bartolini. Relationships such as these were characterized by a certain ambivalence inasmuch as the patron, as well as bestowing his protection on his clients, did not hesitate from imposing his own superiority on them using force to the point of acts of abuse. This is well demonstrated by the story, which has recently come to light, of the Battle of St Romano, the famous triptych by Paolo Uccello, commissioned by Leonardo Bartolini and handed down to his sons Damiano and Andrea from whom it was taken away by Lorenzo de’ Medici with considerable arrogance despite the opposition of one of them.28 However, during the same years of this abuse of power, the Magnificent was asked to resolve a dispute between the same Damiano and Andrea and three of their brothers regarding the division of their maternal inheritance. The arbitration award assigned to the first two all the properties of St Maria a Quarto, which were part of the dowry, including the villa in which they kept the painting masterpiece, which had given rise to the cupidity of their patron.29 In 1489 the Magnificent again had to settle a dispute within a family which was particularly close to him, that of his very loyal Francesco di Antonio Nori, who had lost his life together with Giuliano de’ Medici during the Pazzi Conspiracy. A decade later the two children of Francesco (with little imagination called Francesco and Francesco Antonio) decided to divide their jointly owned estate left by their father. This was certainly not a simple operation if they were constrained to turn to the judgement of Lorenzo, who was appointed as their arbitrator on 9 December 1488.30 Thanks to the relevant notarial records it is here possible to appreciate the complexity of Lorenzo’s task. The Nori estate was anything but insignificant: it included a remarkable palace in the present-day Via dei Neri, formerly belonging to the Rustici family,31 several small houses in Florence, and a few farms 27 

ASF, Not. Antecos., 10192, fols 48r–51r. Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, i, 265–81. 29  ASF, Not. Antecos., 10191, fols 109r–112v. 30  ASF, Not, Antecos., 10194, cc. 135v–136r. The agreement was extended three times. 31  See Preyer, ‘The “chasa overo palagio” of Alberto di Zanobi’. 28 

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and pieces of land in the countryside. The arbitrator’s first commitment was to assess the estate at issue, which had been managed by Francesco Nori’s widow, Gostanza di Filippo Tornabuoni. Two close collaborators of the Magnificent were delegated by Lorenzo to carefully review the account books of Gostanza’s management and issue a report, which was endorsed by Lorenzo’s first lodo on 10 April 1489.32 Afterwards, another couple of agents — Ottaviano Peruzzi and Duccio Mellini — were asked to make an estimate of every single item of the estate as well as to ascertain how much Gostanza’s was owed, the restitution of her dowry being the preliminary step of any possible division. After granting some land to Gostanza as the equivalent value of her dowry, Lorenzo undertook to split the estate into two equitable sets of possessions, each of which was assigned to one of the brothers. The palace was divided into two parts, but the most valuable share went to Francesco Antonio, the younger brother, still under age, who also obtained the possessions in Val d’Ema. The elder received the rear of the building and the remaining properties in addition to fifty florins to even things up. This resolution was taken through a second arbitration award which was issued on 30 June.33 * * * Of greater significance, especially for its impact on the business sector of the city, was the decisive intervention of the Magnificent in a long-standing dispute related to the failed wool merchant Lorenzo d’Ilarione Ilarioni. In 1464 Ilarioni ended up involved in the chain of bankruptcies which had struck many Florentine companies. According to the report by Alamanno Rinuccini, his company was by far the most seriously exposed with an almost unbelievable insolvency of 160,000 florins.34 The bankruptcy procedure, begun the year after by the Mercanzia, had led to the restitution of about half of the recognized debts, through putting the properties of Ilarioni up for sale.35 Later, however, the mother of the merchant, Gostanza di Verano Davizzi, had contested the transfers by filing a lawsuit in Rome before the Apostolic Chamber.36 This on 32 

ASF, Not. Antecos., 10195, cc. 2r–5r. The survey had been commissioned to Andrea Cambini and Francesco del Cegia, two of the best known right-hand men of Lorenzo. 33  ASF, Not. Antecos., 10195, cc. 25r–31r. 34  Rinuccini, Ricordi storici, ed. by Aiazzi, p. xcv. Regarding the wave of bankruptcies in 1464, see de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, pp. 359–60. 35  Regarding an early agreement with creditors back in 1465, under the aegis of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, there is evidence in Strozzi, Lettere, ed. by Guasti, p. 358. 36  On the role of Roman courts in Florentine litigations, see Bizzocchi, Chiesa e potere nella Toscana del Quattrocento, pp. 290–307.

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the one hand provoked a reaction from the Florentine government, which had the court of the Capitano del Popolo issue a ban against Lorenzo Ilarioni who, condemned as an insurgent, had his goods confiscated; on the other hand, it had put in serious doubt the prospects for creditors to recover their money, by making them fear that the wife of the bankrupt, Albiera dei Pazzi, would soon have followed the same path to protect her right to the restitution of her dowry, which was upward of the sum of 2000 florins. This complicated legal tangle, which involved many institutional and private subjects with strong repercussions from an economic and political point of view, was resolved many years later when Ilarioni and his creditors agreed to have Lorenzo de’ Medici settle their differences, giving him a year-long arbitration mandate (which was then renewed for another year until the arbitration award on 27 February 1478). The Magnificent had the task of making sure that the creditors were satisfied but without infringing the rights of the two women, who in exchange would have to renounce the Roman lawsuit. To this end he was given the responsibility of choosing three of the creditors who, together with the same number elected by the Merchants’ Court, would constitute a new board of statutory auditors to check the assets and liabilities of the bankrupt and proceed with the necessary transfers.37 These powers were also sanctioned by a provision of the republic, which gave Lorenzo authority over the issue equal to that of the legislative councils themselves.38 * * * Through arbitration acts Lorenzo de’ Medici strengthened his political capacity to influence the relationships within the Florentine patriciate to his own advantage, slipping deeply into the private affairs of its members. Moreover, during his later life, by which time his predominance was undisputed, he did not hesitate to give his opinion on disputes which affected him personally. It is difficult, for example, not to see some personal interest in his repeated interferences in the quarrels of the Portinari family at the end of the 1480s, particularly between Tommaso and Accerito di Folco on one side and Giovanni di Adovardo on the other, individuals who had shared the merchant and finance activities of the Medicis for a long time (indeed from the time of Cosimo’s rule) in important trading centres such as Milan and Bruges. In 1478 there was a serious rift between Lorenzo de’ Medici and Tommaso Portinari, who was accused of having brought to failure the affairs of the Medici bank in Bruges resulting in 37 

ASF, Not. Antecos., 10189, fols 222r–228v. 38  ASF, Provvisioni, Registri, 166, fols 255r–258r (23 February 1476).

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the closure of the branch,39 but this did not prevent the Magnificent from being asked a decade later to arbitrate on some disagreements between members of that family over a series of financial issues, in particular the division of debits and credits of old commercial enterprises, in which in a few cases Lorenzo himself had been involved. At the end of an accurate inquiry into the relevant account books, commissioned to Girolamo Giachinotti, Lorenzo’s lodo ordered Giovanni to pay more than 1500 florins back to Tommaso.40 Even more suspicious appears an arbitration of 1490, in which both Tommaso and Giovanni Portinari feature again, this time, however, on the same side against the brothers Antonio and Michele Bonsi. The arbitration award formulated by the Magnificent brought an end to a dispute over debts which had been dragging on for over three years. In 1487 a first arbitrated decision had been issued, and in that situation Lorenzo featured as one of the three parties involved in the dispute and was represented by a solicitor of the Portinari family. Lorenzo de’ Medici and Tommaso Portinari were allied in the case insofar as they were partners in the dissolved company in Bruges. Despite his direct involvement, in January 1490 Lorenzo managed to ensure he could resolve the dispute personally by having himself nominated as arbitrator. It was an unscrupulous act which leveraged his immense political power and network of relationships.41 * * * Not unlike his fellow citizens, Lorenzo de’ Medici participated in the administration of Florentine civil justice in the role of arbitrator, a role which, in the Italian communal world, had an important function in the resolution of conflicts within family groups and professional categories, especially between merchants. However, the ambiguity of his position in the government of the state, which allowed him to wield seigneurial powers while acting as a private citizen, and the importance that patronal networks had in this context, conferred a precise political significance on his arbitrations, in which one could recognize power objectives, whether actual or symbolic. According to the historian Giovanni di Carlo, an arbitrated settlement seems to have been used by Lorenzo even in the course of his well-known involvement in the inheritance quarrel between the Borromeis and the Pazzis in 1476–77. 39 

De Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, pp. 346–57. Lorenzo awarded the arbitration on 30  April 1489: ASF, Not.  Antecos., 9640, fols 200v–215r. 41  ASF, Not. Antecos., 13958, fols 315r–318r. See Böninger, in Medici, Lettere, xvi, ed. by Böninger, pp. 68–69 n. 18. 40 

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His meddling resulted in a new law on the rules of inheritance with retroactive effects which, by manifestly damaging the latter’s action, was considered by all observers as one of the causes of the Pazzi Conspiracy.42 Arbitration in this case would have been exploited as a political weapon for striking opponents not unlike the subsequent partisan recourse to legislative paths. The ideal of justice among equals, to which the arbitration owed most of its appeal, ended up giving way to a blueprint of princely exercise of jurisdictional power. The recourse to arbitration on the part of Lorenzo turns out to be not dissimilar, in essence, to his exploitation of typical elements of the republican system, such as offices, committees, constitutional regulations, in order to bend them to his own personal ambitions.43 Lorenzo’s aptitude for settling conflicts between his fellow citizens lent itself therefore to a twofold interpretation: if on the part of his supporters it could be hailed as a commendable commitment to guaranteeing civil harmony, for others it began to be perceived as a substantial saturation of freedom, if not indeed an unequivocal sign of latent despotism. It calls to mind, to this end, the Savonarolan passage in which he contemplates the happiness of those who, escaping tyranny, experiment its effects in their private life as well: They will be free to go to the country or anywhere they like without asking leave from a tyrant, to give their sons and daughters in marriage as they please, to celebrate weddings and rejoice and have such company as is pleasing to them, to devote themselves to virtue or to the study of the sciences or the arts, which will be earthly happiness to a certainty.44 42 

On the Borromei vs. Pazzi dispute, see Medici, Lettere, ii, ed. by Fubini, pp. 126–27. I reconstructed the case in a study to be published in a forthcoming book in honour of Alison Brown. In De temporibus suis Giovanni di Carlo uses the term sententia instead of laudum (‘in Laurentii sententiam relata res est’), but he can’t refer to anything other than arbitration, although I did not find any documentary evidence of it. The relevant passage is published in Pieraccioni, ‘Note su Machiavelli storico. I’, p. 652. 43  Examples in Brown, ‘Lorenzo, the Monte and the Seventeen Reformers’ and Rubinstein, The Government of Florence, p. 199–263. Linked to this theme is the constant presence of Lorenzo in artistic commissions, about which see Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence. 44  ‘Poteranno andare in villa, o dove vorranno, senza adomandare licenza al tiranno; e maritare le loro figliuole e figliuoli, come piacerà a loro; e fare nozze, e stare allegri, ed avere quelli compagni che a loro piaceranno; e darse alle virtù, o delli studii delle scienze o delle arti, come vorranno; e fare simili altre cose, le quali saranno una certa felicità terrena’: Savonarola, Trattato circa il reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, p. 48 (trans. by Borelli and Passaro, p. 203).

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Capitano del Popolo e Difensore delle Arti, 4098 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 9640 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 10187 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 10189 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 10191 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 10192 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 10194 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 10195 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 11655 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 13958 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 14099 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Provvisioni Registri, 166

Primary Sources Guicciardini, Francesco, Storie fiorentine dal 1378 al 1509, ed. by Alessandro Montevecchi (Milano: Rizzoli, 1998); English translation, History of Florence, trans., introd., and notes by Mario Domandi (New York: Harper and Row, 1970) Medici, Lorenzo de’, Lettere, i: 1460–1474, ed. by Riccardo Fubini (Firenze: GiuntiBarbèra, 1977) —— , Lettere, ii: 1474–1478, ed. by Riccardo Fubini (Firenze: Giunti-Barbèra, 1977) —— , Lettere, xvi: Settembre 1489–Febbraio 1490, ed. by Lorenz Böninger (Firenze: Giunti-Barbèra, 2011) Rinuccini, Filippo di Cino, Ricordi storici di Filippo di Cino Rinuccini dal 1282 al 1460 colla continuazione di Alamanno e Neri suoi figli fino al 1506, ed. by G. Aiazzi (Firenze: Piatti, 1840) Savonarola, Girolamo, Trattato circa il reggimento e governo della città di Firenze (Firenze: Baracchi, 1847); English translation in Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: Religion and Politics, 1490–1498, trans. and ed. by Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006), pp. 176–206 Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi, Lettere di una gentildonna fiorentina del secolo xv ai figliuoli esuli, ed. by Cesare Guasti (Firenze: Sansoni, 1877; repr., Firenze: Licosa, 1972) Valori, Niccolò, Vita di Lorenzo de’ Medici scritta in lingua latina da Niccolò Valori, resa in volgare dal figlio Filippo Valori, ed. by Enrico Niccolini (Vicenza: Accademia Olim­ pica, 1991)

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Secondary Works Astorri, Antonella, ‘Note sulla Mercanzia fiorentina sotto Lorenzo dei Medici: aspetti istituzionali e politici’, Archivio storico italiano, 150 (1992), 965–93 Bellomo, Manlio, Ricerche sui rapporti patrimoniali tra coniugi: contributo alla storia della famiglia medievale (Milano: Giuffrè, 1961) Bizzocchi, Roberto, Chiesa e potere nella Toscana del Quattrocento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987) Böninger, Lorenz, ‘Politics, Trade and Toleration in Renaissance Florence: Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Besalù Brothers’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, 9 (2001), 139–69 Brown, Alison, ‘Lorenzo, the Monte and the Seventeen Reformers’, in Brown, The Medici in Florence: The Exercise and Language of Power (Firenze: Olschki; Perth: Uni­ver­sity of Western Australia Press, 1992), pp. 151–211 Caferro, William, ‘L’attività bancaria papale e la Firenze del Rinascimento: il caso di Tommaso Spinelli’, Società e storia, 70 (1995), 717–53 —— , ‘The Silk Business of Tommaso Spinelli, Fifteenth-Century Florentine Merchant and Papal Banker’, Renaissance Studies, 10 (1996), 417–39 Caglioti, Francesco, Donatello e i Medici: storia del David e della Giuditta, 2 vols (Firenze: Olschki, 2000) Chabot, Isabelle, La dette des familles: femmes, lignage et patrimoine à Florence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2011) Connell, William J., ‘Appunti sui rapporti dei primi Medici con le comunità del dominio fiorentino’, in Machiavelli nel Rinascimento italiano, ed. by William I. Connell (Mi­la­ no: Franco Angeli, 2015), pp. 194–210 (originally published in La Toscana al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico: politica economia cultura arte. Convegno di studi promosso dalle Università di Firenze, Pisa e Siena, 5–8 novembre 1992, 3 vols (Pisa: Pacini, 1996), iii, 907–15) Coppini, Donatella, and Raffaella Maria Zaccaria, ‘Carlo Marsuppini’, in I cancellieri aretini della Repubblica di Firenze, ed. by Roberto Cardini and Paolo Viti (Firenze: Pagliai Polistampa, 2003), pp. 73–78 Fabbri, Lorenzo, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400: studio sulla famiglia Strozzi (Firenze: Olschki, 1991) Guarisco, Gabriele, Il conflitto attraverso le norme: gestione e risoluzione delle dispute a Parma nel xiii secolo (Bologna: Clueb, 2005) Guidi Bruscoli, Francesco, ‘Politica matrimoniale e matrimoni politici nella Firenze di Lorenzo de’  Medici: uno studio del ms. Notarile antecosimiano 14099’, Archivio storico italiano, 155 (1997), 347–98 Kent, F. W., ‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Oligarchy’, in Kent, Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence, ed. by Carolyn James (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp.  227–44 (originally published in Lorenzo il Mag­ni­fico e il suo mondo: Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Firenze, 9–13 giugno 1992), ed. by Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Firenze: Olschki, 1994), pp. 43–60)

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—— , Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2004) —— , ‘Patron-Client Networks in Renaissance Florence and the Emergence of Lorenzo as “Maestro della Bottega”’, in Kent, Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence, ed. by Carolyn James (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 199–225 (originally published in Lorenzo de’  Medici: New Perspectives. Proceedings of the International Conference Held at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City Uni­ver­sity of New York, April 30–May 2, 1992, ed. by Bernard Toscani, Studies in Italian Culture, 13 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 279–313) Kent, F.  W., and Patricia Simons, eds, with J. C. Eade, Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ‘Zacharie, ou le père évincé: Les rites nuptiaux toscans entre Giotto et le concile de Trente’, Annales E.S.C., 34 (1979), 1216–43; English translation, ‘Zacharias, or the Ousted Father: Nuptial Rites in Tuscany between Giotto and the Council of Trent’, in Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 178–212 Kuehn, Thomas, ‘Law and Arbitration in Renaissance Florence’, in Kuehn, Law, Family, & Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Chicago Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1991), pp. 19–74 (originally published in Renaissance and Reformation, n.s., 11 (1987), 289–319) —— , ‘Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance’, in Kuehn, Law, Family, & Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Chicago Uni­ver­sity Press, 1991), pp. 238–57 (originally published in Continuity and Change, 2 (1987), 11–36) Marrella, Fabrizio, and Andrea Mozzato, Alle origini dell’arbitrato commerciale interna­ zionale: l’arbitrato a Venezia tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Padua: CEDAM, 2001) Martines, Lauro, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1968) Martone, Luciano, Arbiter-Arbitrator: forme di giustizia privata nell’età del diritto comune (Napoli: Jovene, 1984) Meccarelli, Massimo, Arbitrium: un aspetto sistematico degli ordinamenti giuridici in età di diritto comune (Milano: Giuffrè, 1998) Menziger, Sara, ‘Forme di organizzazione giudiziaria delle città comunali italiane nei secoli xii e xiii: l’uso dell’arbitrato nei governi consolari e podestarili’, in Praxis der Gerichtsbarkeit in europäischen Städten des Spätmittelalters, ed. by Franz Joseph Arlinghaus and others (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2006), pp. 113–34 Pieraccioni, Gaia, ‘Note su Machiavelli storico. I: Machiavelli e Giovanni di Carlo’, Archivio storico italiano, 146 (1988), 635–63 Preyer, Brenda, ‘The “chasa overo palagio” of Alberto di Zanobi: A Florentine Palace of about 1400 and its Later Remodeling’, Art Bulletin, 65 (1983), 387–401 Roover, Raymond de, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494, 2nd edn (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 1999)

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Rubinstein, Nicolai, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434 to 1494), 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) Salvadori, Patrizia, Dominio e patronato: Lorenzo dei Medici e la Toscana nel Quattrocento (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2000) Sbriccoli, Mario, Storia del diritto penale e della giustizia: scritti editi e inediti (1972–2007), 2 vols (Milano: Giuffrè, 2009) Wickham, Chris, Legge, pratiche e conflitti: tribunali e risoluzione delle dispute nella Toscana del xii secolo (Roma: Viella, 2000); English translation, Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003) Zippel, Giuseppe, Storia e cultura del Rinascimento italiano, ed. by Gianni Zippel (Padua: Antenore, 1979) Zorzi, Andrea, ‘Progetti, riforme e pratiche giudiziarie’, in La Toscana al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico: politica economia cultura arte. Convegno di studi promosso dalle Università di Firenze, Pisa e Siena, 5–8 novembre 1992, 3 vols (Pisa: Pacini, 1996), iii, 1323–42

Carried Away: Lorenzo’s Triumphs of 1491 Nerida Newbigin Habbiti, Emilio, e tu Marcello e Scipio, e tuo trïonfi sanza invidia in Roma, o quel che librò il popolo mancipio e tolse al Campito’ sì grieve soma, perché tu fusti, o mio Läur, principio di riportar te stesso in sulla chioma, di riportar honor, vittoria e ’nsegna alla casa de’ Medici alta e degna.1

W

hen Lorenzo de’ Medici introduced Roman triumphs into the festivities of St John the Baptist in 1491, he turned his back on the popular traditions of edifici that had flourished as an expression of popular lay piety over the previous half century.2 This paper looks at the seismic 1  ‘Æmilius, Marcellus, Scipio, | I envy not your triumphs there in Rome, | nor him [Furius Camillus] who freed the Romans from their foes | and saved the Capitol from a grim fate, | because you, dearest Laurus, were the first | to wear your crown of self upon your brow, | to attain honour, victory, and prize | for the most noble house of Medici.’ Pulci, La giostra, st. 158. 2  The edifici were structures on litters borne by porters, or on wagons, as well as the plays performed on them; see Newbigin, ‘Rewriting John the Baptist’.

Nerida Newbigin ([email protected]) is an emerita professor of the Uni­ver­sity of Sydney where she taught Italian language and literature. Her interests range over theatre and spectacle, confraternities and lay devotion, philology and book history. She is the author of Feste d’Oltrarno: Plays in Churches in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Firenze, 1996) and, with Barbara Wisch, of Acting on Faith: The Confraternity of the Gonfalone in Renaissance Rome (Philadelphia, 2013), and editor of two collections of sacre rappresentazioni. She has a long-standing debt of gratitude to Bill Kent for his tireless advocacy of his colleagues and his discipline.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 115–131 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109701

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shift in Lorenzo’s festive politics, at some earlier manifestations of this classical interest, and at how Lorenzo turned from the vernacular festa to neoclassical triumphalism. The topic is not new, but previous commentary has tended to blur important distinctions between the military triumphs of antiquity, allegorical triumphs of literature (and their reappearance in art and pageantry), religious processions, and finally the consciously antiquarian reinvention of the military triumph. They have furthermore conveniently overlooked ambiguities and uncertainties of chronology in order to draw parallels that may not exist.3 I offer a rereading of some key documents, together with a new understanding of the significance of a rappresentazione performed in Lorenzo’s garden. I also look at some of the factors that may have encouraged Lorenzo to set his Fifteen Triumphs of Paulus Æmilius in counterpoint to the edifici of the history of man’s salvation. I shall begin by anticipating my point of arrival, the processions for the eve of St John the Baptist in 1491, described by Tribaldo de’ Rossi: Per la festa di San Giovanni quando fe’ fare Lorenzo de’ Medici que’ 15 trionfi di Paulo Emidia, dingnisima chosa, ma’ più si fe’ tal cosa né sì belisima. Richordo questo dì 24 el dì di San Giovanni ciò è la vilia andorono e difici la mattina e feciono molto male da quelo e la Nuziata infuori fe’ benisimo e fe’ bene el Munimento e ’ Linbo no e 3 altri difici ch’andorono fecio· male che fu 1ª gran verghongnia, ché ci era di molti forestieri; e ’l dì da le 20 ore in là, avendo fatto fare 1ª finzione naturale, Lorenzo de’ Medici fé fare a la Chonpangnia de la Stela, fu suo trovato, 15 trionfi quando Pagholo Emidia trionfò a Roma quando tornò da 1ª cità chon tanto tesoro che Roma istette da 40 o 50 anni che ’l popolo non paghò mai graveza niuna, tanto tesoro chonchuistò; e ’l primo trionfo fu che vene quela prieta di Roma la ghuglia. Non si fé mai a Firenze la più bela chosa per detto d’ongniuno. Tutti venono in piaza a ore 21. Furono 15 trionfi cho· moltisimi ornamenti chome per tal preda fecie Pagholo Emidia a tempo di Ciesere Austo. Provide Lorenzo de’ Medici ci fusi· 5 ischuadre di chavali a uso di chanpo chon detti trionfi, bene a ordine erono, feli venire da le stanze loro per fare tale onoranza. Da 40 o 50 paia di buoi tiravono [MS: tri iauono] detti trionfi, fu tenuta la più dengnia chosa andasi mai per san Giovani. [For the festa of San Giovanni, when Lorenzo de’  Medici ordered those fifteen tri­ umphs of Paulus Æmilius, the finest thing ever, never anything like it before nor any­ thing so very beautiful. I record that on 24th [ June 1491], for the feast day of St John, that is, on the eve, the edifici processed in the morning, and they did it very badly, except for the Nunziata which they did very well, and they did the Sepulchre 3 

See caveats in Ventrone, ‘Note sul carnevale fiorentino di età laurenziana’ and Ciappelli, Carnevale e Quaresima, p. 196.

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and Limbo well, and three other edifici that processed they did badly and it was a great shame, because there were lots of visitors there. And that day, from midafternoon onwards, having ordered the construction of a most realistic fiction, Lorenzo de’ Medici arranged for the Company of the Star to do — and it was his invention — fifteen triumphs of when Paulus Æmilius triumphed in Rome, when he returned from a city with so much treasure that Rome went on for forty or fifty years and the people did not have to pay any taxes because he had taken so much treasure as booty. The first triumph was when the stone obelisk came to Rome: nothing more beautiful was ever done in Florence, in everybody’s opinion. They all came into the piazza in the late afternoon. There were fifteen triumphs, all highly decorated, of how Paulus Æmilius came with all his booty in the time of Augustus Caesar. Lorenzo de’ Medici arranged for five teams of battle-horses to come with the triumphs, all in fine order; he had them brought from their stables. And forty or fifty pairs of oxen pulled the triumphs, and it was reported to be the finest thing that ever processed for San Giovanni.]4

The edifici had returned to the Piazza della Signoria in 1488, for the first time since 1478, to the delight of the citizenry. In the ten-year interval, as Lorenzo struggled to stabilize Florence both domestically and in its relations with the rest of Italy, the confraternities that had been responsible for the edifici had suffered every kind of interference, and when the time came to revive the edifici, the confraternities no longer had the desire and the resources to do so. Only three edifici met with approval: the Annunciation, which was the responsibility of the laudese confraternity in the Camaldolese church of San Felice in Piazza, and the Resurrection and the Harrowing of Hell, traditionally from the Armenian church of San Basilio at Canto alle Macine, in the heart of Medici territory. The rest brought shame on the city by being ‘done badly’. There is no indication of what lay beneath this failure to impress. Was it moth-eaten costumes? Tired edifici? Poor attendance? What we do know, however, is that the procession of edifici would never again enjoy the same prestige as it had between the 1450s and the 1470s, and that there would be increasing interest in the neoclassical triumphs that Lorenzo staged that afternoon. The trionfo was by no means new to Florentine vernacular culture, since it has a long ekphrastic tradition. In Purgatorio xxix, Dante described Beatrice’s arrival on a carro trionfale in the procession of the Church Militant, and that poetic description was in turn transcribed into the iconographical tradition associated with the Commedia that was widely diffused by the end of the four4 

Rossi, Ricordanze, ed. by Ildefonso di San Luigi, pp. 270–71. For a different reading, see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 451.

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teenth century. Boccaccio, in his Amorosa visione (1342; rev. 1351), described the wall-paintings of the triumphs of Fame, Love, and Fortune seen in his dream. Petrarch’s Trionfi of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity (1350–74) circulated widely in manuscript and were, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, frequently — almost invariably — illustrated with images in which the allegorical figure rides on a two-wheeled wagon, a triumphal car, drawn variously by horses, unicorns, oxen, and elephants, even though only the first part of the first triumph attempts to describe the scene.5 The ‘triumphant’ element of such a trionfo was that this figure riding on the car had power to triumph over all humanity. As verbal representations of triumphs increased, the iconography of manuscript illustration was soon reproduced in other media, and often by the same painters. The birth salver that Piero de’ Medici commissioned from Lo Scheggia and presented to his wife Lucrezia Tornabuoni on the birth of their first son Lorenzo in 1449 depicted the Triumph of Fame, and it remained so central to Lorenzo’s sense of self that it was still on the wall of his bedchamber at the time of his death.6 Lorenzo’s identification with this particular triumph must have been so well known that some time before 1476 Jacopo di Messer Poggio, son of Poggio Bracciolini and subsequently one of the Pazzi conspirators, would dedicate his Commento sopra il ‘Trionfo della fama’ to Lorenzo, discussing the origins of the Roman triumph and glossing each of the famous Romans who appear in Petrarch’s poem.7 The date, as we shall see, may be significant. In the meantime, Lorenzo trod lightly in the steps of Petrarch. In 1459, the fifteen-year-old Galeazzo Sforza, son of Florence’s ally Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, was the guest of Cosimo in his new palazzo. Florence was mobilized into enormous magnificence in honour of the Milanese prince, and also of Pius II who arrived at the same time on his way to Mantua. On the last night of Galeazzo’s stay (the eve of Ascension, when he had already watched the Carmine festa), the household and their guests watched from the windows as Lorenzo and eleven companions arrived in the Via Larga in the train of a ‘Triumph of Cupid’ and performed an armeggeria, a display of sword-fighting and jousting.

5 

Trapp, Studies in Petrarch and his Influence, pp. 204–05. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, [accessed 23 January 2014]. 7  Bausi argues for a date of 1469–70; see his ‘Politica e cultura’, p. 88. 6 

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Lorenzo’s triumph was modelled directly on Petrarch’s Triumphus Cupidinis (i, 10–30), the only one of the Trionfi in which Petrarch describes the scene in visual detail. Petrarch makes it clear that the Cupid of his dream rides like a victorious Roman general, drawing together historical triumphs with elements from Ovid’s Amores (i, 2, 19–32). As well as inspiring Lorenzo’s triumph, Petrarch was also the inspiration of the anonymous hack poets who turned out lengthy descriptions of the festivities. The Onoranze, conceived as a vision in which the poet is instructed by the figure of Florentia about what he is to report, describes the scene and the viewers in detail.8 This is the first documented antiquarian gesture of the young Lorenzo, conceived and paid for — in reality or, more importantly, in the fiction consolidated by the memorialists — by the boy himself.9 Just as Petrarch’s Trionfi are woven into his personal mythology of Laura and triumphant crowning with laurels on the Capitol, so the triumphant iconography of Lorenzo/Laurentius is beginning to take shape, under the guiding hand of his father and grandfather. In 1459, a triumph, Petrarchan and classical at the same time, was new for the streets of Florence. Wagons had long been part of Florentine spectacle and processions: the Carroccio, or Florentine war chariot, carried the standard of the republic into battle, as well as the palio that was awarded as the prize in the horse races that commemorated great republican victories; on Giotto’s belltower, Theatrica is represented by Thespis, driving his four-wheeled cart; and wagons and floats were central to St John the Baptist celebrations and to the celebrations of Carnival. But I do not believe that the streets of Florence had ever before seen anything quite like Lorenzo’s Triumph of Love. Outside Florence, princes had no qualms about triumphalism. Alfonso of Aragon celebrated his victory in 1442 over the native barons of his kingdom by having a classical military triumph sculpted in relief over the gate to the Castello Nuovo, drawing on the imagery of the Arch of Titus in Rome, but it would appear that the actual ‘triumph’ celebrated in February 1443 was not a military triumph but a procession of allegorical edifici — on litters and on wagons — provided by the various merchant communities in Naples, which passed in front of the King as he watched from his own carrus triumphalis. We know from the accounts of this event that Florentine merchants and bankers provided floats for the seven Virtues, which were followed by four more Virtues done by 8  ‘Le onoranze fiorentine del 1459’, ll. 4375–4419, ed. by Newbigin, pp. 109–10; Ricordi, ll. 1330–70, ed. by Volpi, p. 31. 9  ‘Le onoranze fiorentine del 1459’, ll. 1918–32 and 4549–51, ed. by Newbigin, pp. 60, 113.

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the Catalan merchants,10 but the King’s appetite to develop local expertise was whetted. A decade later Antonio Beccadelli, who made a collection of Alfonso’s memorable deeds and bon mots, wrote of Alfonso’s festive ambitions: Ludos autem christianos magnificentissimo apparatu devotissime ac solenni re­præ­ sentatione ingenti hominum frequentia ac celebritate quotannis edentem Alphonsum perspectavimus. Imo vero cum accepisset Etruscos istiusmodi ludos singulari industria commentos esse, ne hac saltem in re, quæ ad divinum cultum pertinens, a quoquam mortalium vinceretur, omnia perscrutatum atque exploratum eo mississe, explorata longe præclarius atque subtilius expressisse. [Every year we watched Alfonso celebrate Christian feast days with most magnificent sets and with devout and solemn plays attended by huge crowds. But when he heard that in Tuscany such feste were devised with singular effort, in order that he should not be outdone, in this matter, at least, which concerned the honour of God, by any mortal soul at all, he sent people there to be informed and to find out about everything. And when he had been informed, he did them with greater craftsmanship and with greater magnificence.]11

The King’s singers were sent to Florence to witness the feast of St  John the Baptist in 1451, and the Signoria paid furthermore for the festa of the Ascension to be done in the Carmine, out of season, for their benefit.12 Some time in the 1450s, a pair of cassoni was produced in Florence — or at least by Florentine craftsmen — that document the 1443 triumph.13 To some extent, this is a repatriation of Florentine magnificence: such aggrandisement of an individual would have been unthinkable for a Florentine citizen, Cosimo, or even his sons, but Florentines could rightly be proud of their contribution to Alfonso’s display, even after his son Ferrante had succeeded him. Florentines were beginning to rethink their popular festivals — particularly the festa of St John the Baptist — in terms of classical and allegorical pageantry. In 1454 the Florentine archbishop Antonino Pierozzi acted in concert with the Signoria to separate the procession of religious orders, and their cherished relics, from the procession of edifici. A committee of four festaiuoli, including the humanist Matteo Palmieri, was appointed to oversee a restructuring of the 10 

See descriptions by Beccadelli and others cited by Helas, Lebende Bilder, pp. 211–12. Beccadelli, Alphonsi Arragonum, xviii, ed. by Meuschen, p. 9. 12  Newbigin, Feste d’Oltrarno, i, 113; ii, 472–73. 13  Helas, Lebende Bilder, pp. 59–88, 209–12; and Brilliant, ‘The Siege of Naples’ and ‘The Triumphal Entry of Alfonso of Aragon into Naples, 1460s’. 11 

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procession, and as a monument to his own efforts, Palmieri included a detailed description of the result in his Historia florentina.14 Florentines were being encouraged to think differently about their edifici and the continuities between classical antiquity and the present. The great antiquarian Flavio Biondo provides an insight into these changes. Appointed to Eugenius IV’s chancery in 1444, Biondo had accompanied him into exile in Florence and must have been privy to Eugenius’s reforms to the youth confraternities. Between 1454 and 1459 when he returned to Florence with Pope Pius II, on the occasion of the visit of the young Galeazzo, Biondo was engaged in writing his Roma Triumphans, which he would present to Pius on their arrival in Mantua. Even though it was printed only c. 1472 (and not translated until 1544), it must have been discussed extensively in humanist circles. After examining the gods of the Roman religion, Biondo comes to ceremonies, to the use of objects to sanctify and protect spaces, and finally, in Book x, to triumphs. On the basis of all the ancient texts he can draw on, Biondo attempts a philological reconstruction of the Roman triumph: who was entitled to have one, how it was organized, and so on. And as a prime example, he draws on the case of Paulus Æmilius, praising him for his humility and for reducing taxes, and describing his triumph. Biondo also describes other triumphs: of Pompey, and of Titus and Vespasianus, so gloriously illustrated in the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. Next he constructs an ideal triumph, and finally — my point at last — he sees a parallel between the Roman triumph of antiquity, particularly the Triumph of Titus and Vespasianus as described in Josephus Flavius’s De Bello Judaico, vii. 139–48, and the contemporary edifici of St John the Baptist: Est celeberrimus quot annis in urbe Florentia Ioannis Baptistæ festus dies, in quo diuersi generis machinæ, diversa transferuntur spectacula ingenij subtilitate ueteribus illis nullatenus postponenda. Adhibenturque imprimis spectandæ pulchritudinis pegmata, ex illis etiam quæ in tertium nidum undequaque surrexisse hebreus noster tantopere admiratur. quin si veniam dabunt nobis doctiores, imperitos hoc loco quid ea fuerint pegmata docebimus. Decempedalis erat quaquauersum latitudinis solidum tabulatum, è cuius basis centro ligna surgebat columna uiginti pedum proceritate sublimis, ad quam trina distinctione proporcionaliter facta terni ramorum ordines ferreorum erant, quibus in ramis inauratis fronde multa aurea argentea ue densatis, tanquam auicularum nidi ex corio lorulisue uersicoloribus, puerorum bimulorum ad summumue trimulorum sedes & tanquam cubilia disponebantur. Eorumque puerorum capite [pars] solum exerto, pars toto eminens corpusculo, iucundum ridiculumue aliquid prout occultus in fronde pręceptor sug14 

On the 1454 reforms, see Newbigin, ‘Rewriting John the Baptist’, p. 12.

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gereret balbutiebat. Hancque molem robusta seruorum multitudo non centonibus ut Florentie nunc, sed purpureis aureisue indutorum perferebat. Multaque cum & uaria in triumpho essent pegmata, nequaque continuata ferebantur, sed aliæ interponebantur machinæ simili in tabulato similique seruorum ornatu delatæ. [The feast day of John the Baptist, celebrated every year in the city of Florence, is very famous. In it, machines of various kinds are carried in procession, and various spectacles are done with such subtle skill that they are in no way inferior to those of ancient times. The floats they use are of especially remarkable beauty, the sort too that our Hebrew [ Josephus] so admired, that rose three storeys high. But if the more knowledgeable will pardon me, at this point I shall explain to the inexperienced the nature of these floats. Each consisted of a solid floor made of boards and measuring ten feet on each side, and from the centre of this base there rose a straight wooden pole, twenty feet high, to which were attached wrought iron branches which branched three and three again, and were covered in a great quantity of dense gold and silver foliage. And among them were positioned birds’ nests, as it were, made of leather and strips of hide of various colours, as cribs for small children of two or three years at the most. Some of them had just their heads out, and some showed their whole bodies, and charming and funny to hear what they lisped according to the suggestion of their prompter, hidden in the foliage. This massive construction was carried about by a strong crowd of slaves, dressed, not in patchwork rags as happens in Florence now, but in crimson and gold. Though the floats in the triumph were many and varied, they were by no means carried one after the other, but other machines were interposed, borne on similar litters by slaves similarly got up.]15

Biondo’s comparison is not altogether flattering, since the porters who carry the Florentine edifici have none of the noble livery of ancient Rome.16 It is easy, however, to recognize the kind of edificio described by Agostino da Porto, before 1454: ‘Dipoi gli Umiliati, co quagli era uno mirabile edifitio alto braccia vinti di grande ornamento, pieno di fanciulli vivi che parevano angeletti con l’ali e che cantavano e sonavano gigh’e ciembali e volgevansi intorno come ballassero; e essendo tanto alti maravigliavami come non temevano’ (‘Then came the Umiliati who had with them a wonderful edificio 20 braccia [11.6 m] high with wonderful adornments, full of living children who looked like angels with their wings, and who sang and played viols and cymbals, and turned around as 15 

Biondo, Roma Triumphans, x (p. 214); I thank Frances Muecke, who is preparing an English translation of Roma Triumphans, for her assistance. 16  The Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, as early as 1417, paid for food and drink for fifty or so labourers to accompany the relic of St John’s finger in the procession on the eve of St John the Baptist: AOSMF, II 4 8, fol. 7v.

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if they were dancing; and I was amazed that they were not afraid at being so high’).17 Despite his praise of the Florentine edifici, Biondo implies that truly great processional spectacle will come not in a popular religious procession but in a great military triumph. He ends his Roma Triumphans with the hope that those who rule over the Res Publica of Christ will revive the Roman triumph.18 Florentine models continued to shape spectacle in other courts. In 1473, the marriage of Ferrante’s daughter Eleonora to the Duke of Ferrara, Ercole d’Este, who had spent his adolescence in the court of Naples, ensured that Florentine festive practices travelled also to Ferrara. In Rome Eleonora witnessed plays performed by Florentines summoned there by the newly nominated Bishop of Florence, Pietro Riario, nephew of Sixtus IV.19 After her departure, Riario celebrated the feast of St Peter and St Paul (29 June) in the manner of the Florentine festa del patrono, with plays of the Nativity and of the Resurrection, climaxing with a play of ‘the Tribute’: Un’altra rappresentazione nobilissima, e fu lo tributo, che veniva ai Romani, quando signoreggiavano lo mondo, dove stettero settanta muli carichi tutti copertati con la coperta di panno con l’arma sua […] e dinanti a questa fece certe altre rappresentatione della natività di Gesu Cristo coi Magi, e della Risurrezione di Cristo, quando spogliò l’inferno. [Another most noble representation, of the Tribute which came to the Romans, when they ruled over the world, and it had seventy fully laden mules, all decked out in caparison with his arms; […] and before that they did certain other plays of the Nativity of Christ with the Magi, and of the Resurrection of Christ when he harrowed hell.]20

In Florence, Eleonora witnessed the edifici of St John the Baptist and wrote about them to her Neapolitan mentor, Diomede Carafa. On her arrival in Ferrara, she was greeted at seven points along her route by the seven planets ‘in the form of ornate triumphal chariots, full of splendidly dressed young children who danced, sang, and played instruments’.21 The carrus triumphalis was suitable for princes of the Church and for royalty but was not yet part of the iconography of republican Florence. 17 

Delcorno Branca, ‘Un camaldolese alla festa di San Giovanni’, pp. 9–10. Biondo, Roma Triumphans, x (p. 216). 19  For date of nomination, see Borghini, Discorsi, ii, 590. 20  Infessura, Diario, ed. by Tommasini, p. 78. 21  Falletti, ‘Le feste per Eleanora d’Aragona’, p. 285. 18 

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In September 1476, the Florentine merchants in Naples again contributed to Aragonese display: on the occasion of the proxy marriage of Alfonso’s granddaughter Beatrice to Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, they staged all seven of Petrarch’s allegorical Trionfi (with fireworks) on a scale never attempted at home.22 Although I can find no reports to confirm this, word must have reached Florence because from this point there is a huge increase in Lorenzo’s interest in triumphs. For Carnival 1476/77, against the backdrop of uncertainty caused by the assassination of Galeazzo Sforza the previous Christmas Eve, Lorenzo invited or at least allowed the youth confraternity of the Purification to perform a rappresentazione of St Eustace in his garden, located at that stage across the Via Larga (now Via Cavour) from the company’s oratorio.23 A single text on this subject survives, La festa di Sant’Eustachio, printed by Antonio Miscomini around 1485, as part of a two-volume anthology of plays largely associated with the Purification company and with the Pulci family,24 and it is in this play that we find evidence of Lorenzo’s association with the first Florentine enactment of a military triumph. The play of St Eustace — a figure somewhere between Job and Candide — sees him converted by a speaking crucifix between the antlers of a stag, then losing everything: his crops, servants, and money, his wife to a treacherous sea captain, and his sons to wild animals. Despite his original name, Pacificus, he is called back to Rome in a moment of military crisis, and as well as triumphing over Rome’s enemies, he is reunited with his wife and sons, and enters Rome as triumphator before being martyred for refusing to worship Mars. The stage direction after line 784 provides details of how the triumph is to be done: Sia parato un carro trionfale in sul quale monti Eustachio e sia tirato da dua cavagli e inanzi vadino e suoni e poi e tesori acquistati, e poi i pregioni tutti legati; appresso di lui seguita giù di sotto tutti e signori e cavalieri seguitino el carro; appresso a lui e allato a lui la moglie e i figliuoli; il resto dello esercito seguiti il carro.

22 

Giacomo Della Morte, Cronica di Napoli di Notar Giacomo, ed. by Garzilli, p. 131. Polizzotto, Children of the Promise, p. 81. Since no other expenses are recorded in the Purification’s accounts, the costs of the play were probably met directly by the Medici household. On Lorenzo’s garden, see Elam, ‘Il Palazzo nel contesto della città’, pp. 48–51; and her ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden’. See also Pacciani, ‘Immagini, arti e architetture nelle feste di età laurenziana’, pp. 131, and 136 nn. 55–58. 24  For text see [accessed 24 January 2014]. 23 

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[Let a triumphal car be prepared on which Eustachio mounts, and let it be drawn by two horses, and the musicians go ahead of it and then the precious booty that has been acquired, and then the prisoners follow, all in their bonds; close by and just below him all the lords and knights follow the chariot; close by him and next to him his wife and sons; the rest of the army follows the chariot.]

Such a military triumph is not foreshadowed by the sources, the vitae of St Eustace in the Legenda Aurea and in the Vitae Patrum.25 It is an expensive interpolation into a play that already required considerable scenic resources, but the scene paid homage to the players’ hosts in the ‘giardino di Lorenzo’. Lorenzo was clearly thinking about honour, fame, and triumphs in this period. Some time before October 1476, Jacopo di Messer Poggio had addressed to him an exposition on Petrarch’s Trionfo della Fama, the same triumph that had been depicted on his birth salver. In 1477, Lorenzo would send to Federico of Aragon, son of Ferrante I of Naples, whom he had met in Pisa the previous year, a collection of lyric poems of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, meditating on honour and glory in his prefatory letter.26 Honour, that is, glory and fame, is what fires men’s souls and inspires them to excellence, in military feats, in sporting prowess, and in poetic contests. And, he (or Poliziano on his behalf ) argues, excellence is not sufficient to ensure survival; it is the honour done to excellence — like Luigi Pulci’s tribute in the epigraph to this essay — that ensures it. In September 1477, Florentines yet again performed a triumph in Naples, on this occasion for the coronation of Joanna of Aragon, second wife to Ferrante I.27 Florentines at home continued to be aware of these Neapolitan triumphs: some time in this decade (and before 1478), Jacopo di Messer Poggio translated Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a classic ‘mirror for princes’ text, for Ferrante and presented it to him decorated with a full-page image of Ferrante in triumph.28 We can only speculate on the kind of festive vocabulary Lorenzo would have developed if his authority in Florence had not been challenged by the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478. Confraternities, even those close to the Medici like 25  Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda Aurea, clvii, ed. by Maggioni, ii, 1224–33; Cavalca, Vite dei santi padri, iv, 71–76, ed. by Delcorno, ii, 1511–27. 26  Text in Prosatori volgari del Quattrocento, ed. by Varese, pp. 985–90 (p. 985). 27  Giacomo Della Morte, Cronica di Napoli di Notar Giacomo, ed. by Garzilli, p. 137. 28  Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, MS 78 c 24, fol. 1v; reproduced in De Marinis, La biblio­teca napoletana, ii, 179 and iv, pl. 293.

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the Purification, had significant membership but were limited in their activities and only returned to major theatrical events after the restoration of the Medici in 1512.29 From 1488, however, Lorenzo took renewed interest in the confraternities that were to be part of his cultural propaganda machine. He placed his men in key positions on their governing bodies and was able to command them to put their festive resources at his personal service.30 The procession of edifici for the feast day of St John the Baptist was revived, and used as an instrument of diplomacy, and Lorenzo set about transforming the personal mythology of Fame that had begun with his birth salver into a reality. By now, Lorenzo’s garden, on the corner of Piazza San Marco and Via degli Arazzieri and close to the the confraternities of the Purification and of the Magi, was the focus of creative and festive activity. The ‘military triumph’, performed inside the garden as part of the Sant’Eustachio play, must have been a relatively small affair, but now Lorenzo could call into existence a festive brigata that would bring his ideas to fruition. In Carnival 1489/90, he staged seven triumphs of the Planets,31 and called on the company of the Stella, led by the unidentified Mariottazio, to organize them.32 For the same Carnival, he composed the Trionfo di Bacco e Arianna, for which both Lorenzo’s text and a contemporary and possibly related engraving survive.33 According to Vasari, a very young Annibale Granacci (1469–1543) was employed in the preparation of the triumph of Paulus Æmilius in June 1491; an engraving survives that has long been associated with the triumph and Granacci.34 The carnival triumphs 29 

A notable exception is the 1502 performance of Castellani’s San Venanzio; description in Cambi, Istorie, ed. by Ildefonso di San Luigi, xxi, 176. Venanzio, like Eustachio, returns to Rome as triumphator. 30  Sebregondi, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici confratello illustre’; Newbigin, Feste d’Oltrarno, i, 206–08; ii, 652–53. 31  For the text, see Lorenzo de’ Medici, Opere, ed. by Zanato, pp. 366–68; and discussion in Ventrone, ‘Note sul carnevale fiorentino di età laurenziana’, pp. 335–50. 32  Martelli, ‘Una vacanza letteraria di Lorenzo’, pp. 38–39. 33  In 1473 Florentines had performed a ‘representation of Bacchus and Ariadne’ in Rome for Eleonora of Aragon; see Corio, Storia di Milano, ed. by Guerra, ii, 1392. We have no description of the performance of Bacco e Arianna, which went ‘in masked procession in 1489[/90]’ according to BMLF, MS Antinori 158, fol. 2r (see Lorenzo de’ Medici, Opere, ed. by Zanato, p. 357). The two-folio engraving of Bacchus and Ariadne by Baccio Baldini (?) from Botticelli (?), BM 1872,0511.970 (dated 1480–90), and its close relationship to Roman sarcophagus decoration, suggest that here too Lorenzo’s aim is to give voice to ancient art, to bring to life its visibile parlar and the paradox of fleeting life sculpted into a marble sarcophagus. 34  BM 1845,0825.263, now attributed to Francesco Rosselli, and to the cultural context

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had been appropriately secular and even transgressive; now, for the first time, Lorenzo used San Giovanni to stage a purely classical triumph in the streets of Florence, totally disregarding the Christian festival that framed it. Lorenzo was not a prince and could not award himself a triumph as Alfonso I had done, or surround himself with triumphal imagery like Sigismondo Malatesta, Federico da Montefeltro, and Borso d’Este.35 The fiction of republican government in which he operated precluded such self-aggrandizement. What did Lorenzo achieve with his fifteen triumphs of Paulus Æmilius? An astonishing display of wealth, but more probably of stage wealth, papier mâché decorated to look like gold; a dazzling display of erudition that impressed his peers; the opportunity to be identified with great exploits — here, military prowess and relief from taxes — distracting the viewers from the fact that he was increasingly suspected of dynastic ambitions. Where a prince like Ercole d’Este had court poets to provide them with legendary descent from the House of Troy, Lorenzo had to take a totally pragmatic mercantile approach, trading off investment and status. He provided horses and oxen to draw the wagons; presumably he dressed the Compagnia della Stella in his livery; he ‘invented’ the triumphs and a princely self. Ciappelli speculates that Lorenzo’s contacts with Rome and the court of Innocent VIII, while he was negotiating a cardinal’s hat for his son and the marriage of his daughter to Innocent’s son Francesco, influenced his choice of this particular form of festive display.36 I would suggest, however, that the seeds were sown much earlier. Florentines had already established the models for festive display, and developed them in the courts of Naples, Rome, and Ferrara, but only in the late 1480s did circumstances allow Lorenzo to act. Recent scholarship on the meanings and functions of antique Roman triumphs suggests further possible influences.37 The Roman triumphal procession was cleansing and purifying; it was a process by which the triumphator of Filippino Lippi’s frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel (c. 1489). Vasari attributes a role in Lorenzo’s feste to both Filippino Lippi (Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, ed. by Bettarini and Barocchi, iii, 568) and Granacci (ibid., ii, 94, n. 79), but there are problems with his assertion concerning Granacci, since it places the triumph of Paulus Æmilius in Carnival rather than St John the Baptist. He also implies a continuity between Lorenzo’s employment of a very youthful artist to work on the triumph of Paulus Æmilius and Granacci’s recall to decorate the city for the return of Lorenzo’s son as Leo X. 35  See Zaho, Imago Triumphalis. 36  Ciappelli, Carnevale e Quaresima, p. 208. 37  See Beard, The Roman Triumph, and Östenberg, Staging the World.

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re-entered the city and submitted to its rules, and to its peace, performing a lustration rite through the city. We know nothing about the processional route of the San Giovanni edifici, and there is no suggestion that they passed along the Via Larga, but the carri trionfali of Paulus Æmilius almost certainly did. Prepared in Lorenzo’s garden, with — as Vasari tells us — the collaboration of the young Annibale Granacci, and pulled by horses from Lorenzo’s stables, they must have processed on the afternoon of 23 June beneath Lorenzo’s window on the Via Larga, before going on to impress the crowds in Piazza della Signoria. Lorenzo’s gout was such that he was probably not among the watching dignitaries, and his principal contribution was in invenzione, funding, and space. The performance demonstrated the truth of Machiavelli’s assertion in the last chapter of his Istorie fiorentini: I fiorentini, finita la guerra di Serezana, vissono infino al 1492, che Lorenzo de’ Medici morì, una felicità grandissima: perché Lorenzo, posate l’armi d’Italia, le quali per il senno e autorità sua si erano ferme, volse l’animo a fare grande sé e la sua città. [Once the war for Sarzana was over [in 1487], the Florentines lived in the greatest happiness, until 1492, when Lorenzo de’ Medici died, because Lorenzo, once Italy had laid her arms aside, on account of his good sense and authority, turned his mind to making himself and his city great.]38

Lorenzo’s triumphs of June 1491 were close to the end of a drama that was played out on the streets of the city. With his death in 1492, and his son’s expulsion in 1494, confraternal will to do the edifici disappeared, and when theatre returned to Florence with the Medici in 1513, it created for itself a new vocabulary of theatre and performance.

38 

Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, viii, 36, ed. by Bertelli, p. 573; cf. Ciappelli, Carnevale e Quaresima, p. 208.

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Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore di Firenze, II 4 8 Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, MS 78 c 24 (formerly Hamilton 686), Historia di Xenophonte philosopho della Vita di Cyro, Re dei Persi traducta da Jacopo di messer Poggio Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze, MS Antinori 158 London, British Museum, 1845,0825.263 Triumph of Aemilius Paullus (engraving) London, British Museum, 1872,0511.970, Bacchus and Ariadne (engraving)

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Pacciani, Riccardo, ‘Immagini, arti e architetture nelle feste di età laurenziana’, in Le tems revient / ’l tempo si rinuova: feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 8 April – 30 June 1992, ed. by Paola Ventrone (Firenze: Silvana, 1992), pp. 119–37 Polizzotto, Lorenzo, Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence, 1427–1785 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Sebregondi, Ludovica, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici confratello illustre’, Archivio storico italiano, 150 (1992), 319–41 Trapp, J. B., Studies in Petrarch and his Influence (London: Pindar, 2003) Trexler, Richard C., Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980) Ventrone, Paola, ‘Note sul carnevale fiorentino di età laurenziana’, in Il carnevale: dalla tradizione arcaica alla traduzione colta del Rinascimento, ed. by Maria Chiabò and Federico Doglio (Roma: Centro Studi sul Teatro Medioevale e Rinascimentale, 1990), pp. 321–66 Zaho, Margaret Ann, Imago Triumphalis: The Function and Significance of Triumphal Imagery for Italian Renaissance Rulers (New York: Peter Lang, 2004)

‘With his authority she used to manage much business’: The Career of Signora Maria Salviati and Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici Natalie Tomas*

I

n his Storia fiorentina, Cosimo  I de’  Medici’s court historian, Benedetto Varchi, insisted that when the seventeen-year-old Cosimo unexpectedly acceded to the position of ruler of Florence after the assassination of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici on 6 January 1537, he ‘governed everything on his own’. He went on to declare that as Cosimo was Florence’s ruler, everything and everyone was subject to him, including his mother, Maria Salviati de’ Medici. According to Varchi: ‘There was Madonna Maria, his mother, who from that time [of Cosimo’s accession] was called the Lady [Signora], a prudent woman and who lived an exemplary life […] and […] whose grand status depended on that of her son’. Varchi added that Maria ‘was content with those favours that he conceded to her, most respectfully, which did not concern matters of state’.1  

* I am grateful to Nick Eckstein, Philippa Maddern, and John Paoletti for their comments on later drafts. 1  Varchi, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Sartorio, ii, 399. Natalie Tomas ([email protected]) is an adjunct senior research fellow at Monash Uni­ver­sity in Melbourne. She is the author of The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Aldershot, 2003) and several other studies. Her research focuses on women’s participation in the public arena in Florence. Her current research examines women and state formation during the reign of Duke Cosimo I. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Los Angeles in 2009. Bill Kent commented on an early version of this paper.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 133–148 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109702

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Varchi’s comment about Maria’s influence with her son should not be taken literally. As Cosimo’s historical propagandist, Varchi was promoting a narrative that emphasized the Duke’s innate suitability as the princely ruler of Florence, who required no one’s assistance and made all important decisions alone in spite of his youth and the unexpected nature of his accession. It is true that Maria, as his mother, could not have exercised power or authority in her son’s regime without his specific licence, but it is also true that everyone else also derived any influence that they had from the extent of their relationship with the Duke. Bernardo Segni, a historian and member of Cosimo’s literary Accademia fioren­ tina alongside Varchi, provided a more nuanced view of Maria Salviati’s role in her son’s regime, one that emphasized the significance of the mother–son relationship as the source of Maria’s authority. He stated that in 1538 Cosimo ‘governed the republic […] often making use of the advice of Madonna Maria, his mother, as with his authority she used to manage much business’.2 I argue that Cosimo sought his mother’s aid from his accession until her death in December 1543 in a number of ways to suit the needs of his princely regime. By doing so, Cosimo was emulating the traditional republican Florentine practice of allowing women in powerful Florentine families, particularly wives and widows, to act as intercessors with, or on behalf of, their husbands and sons. During the de facto rule of the Medici family in the fifteenth century this practice created an under-government, which enabled women in the Medici family to exercise considerable influence and power in the political sphere. This undergovernment, which ran alongside the republican governmental processes that formally excluded women, was fundamental to the way politics worked at the time in Florence.3 A notable example of this type of intercessory partnership was that of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, who was commemorated in Cosimo’s day by a surviving document which contained an account of his lineage through the maternal line beginning with Lucrezia and ending with Maria.4 By following the example of his Medici ancestors, the Duke was able to emphasize his links with traditional republican Florence to counter criticisms of his princely rule making him a usurper of them.5 2 

Segni, Storie fiorentine, ed. by Gargani, p. 371. Tomas, The Medici Women, p. 4. 4  For an account of the close relationship between Lucrezia and Lorenzo, see Kent, ‘Sainted Mother, Magnificent Son’. 5  For Cosimo’s linking of Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Maria Salviati genealogically, see Tomas, ‘Commemorating a Mortal Goddess’, p. 277. 3 

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Even though Cosimo was a princely ruler, he needed to make this link with the city’s republican past because Florence became a Medici duchy only in 1532, having been a republican city-state for over three hundred years prior to that date with an all-male elite office-holding class. Despite the city’s long-held republican traditions, the Medici family had dominated the civic, political, economic, and cultural life of Florence and its territories for much of the previous one hundred years. When Cosimo acceded to the position of duke, the Florentine state was still in transition from oligarchic republic to independent principality. It was also a vassal state of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Similar to his predecessor, Alessandro de’ Medici, Cosimo was totally dependent on Charles V to legitimate his princely rule. The Duke’s youth and inexperience made his regime’s future appear uncertain to the Emperor, who had seized control of the Florentine fortresses in the aftermath of Alessandro’s assassination. Charles V did not return the Florentine forces to Cosimo’s control until mid-1543, by which time the Duke had demonstrated to the Emperor’s satisfaction his fealty and shown his readiness to take over responsibility for ensuring the regime’s security.6 That Maria Salviati was allowed any influential role in Cosimo’s princely regime was in fact unusual in Renaissance Italy as the mothers of these new dukes were usually forced out by their sons, who were eager to demonstrate their maturity and fitness to rule independently.7 The relative infancy of Florence’s ducal history may help to explain why Maria was not forced to retreat totally from view during her son’s regime.8 Cosimo created a role for his mother during this period of transition that was flexible and multifaceted, including traditional and non-traditional aspects. The more traditional aspects of Maria’s role promoted the Duke and his family’s respect for Florence’s republican traditions within a princely regime. It included her caring for Cosimo’s children and for Alessandro’s natural children, Giulio and Giulia — whom Cosimo had promised to protect as his wards after Alessandro’s murder — and acting as an intercessor between Florentine supplicants and the Duke. But given the importance of these tasks 6 

See on this theme, Najemy, A History of Florence, pp. 461–85. An older account is Spini, Cosimo I. 7  An example of the conflict between women regents and their adult sons is that between Bianca Maria Visconti and her son, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan; see Covini, ‘Tra cure domestiche, sentimenti e politica’, pp. 14–22; Ferente, ‘Naturales Dominae’, pp. 57–58. 8  An older historiography suggested that Maria was forced out of her son’s court after Duchess Eleonora’s arrival and retreated to her villa at Castello. Galluzzi, Istoria del granducato di Toscana, i, 57; Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici, i, 474.

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to fostering and promoting the well-being, continuity, and stability of Cosimo’s regime, his mother had been given an important set of responsibilities. Maria was a popular figure amongst Florentines because of her reputation as an exemplary, traditional Florentine matron who was pious, charitable, and devoted to Cosimo and, until her death at the age of forty-four, as an intercessor on behalf of worthy Florentines with the Duke.9 At the same time, as we shall see, Maria took on non-traditional responsibilities at least until shortly after the arrival of Eleonora di Toledo, Cosimo’s Spanish-born, ‘foreign’ wife, in mid-1539. These responsibilities sometimes involved taking on a more overt political role when necessary, although not always without incurring criticism from contemporaries, who were concerned about such an overt role for women in politics.10 Even after Eleonora’s arrival, Maria’s intercessory role with Cosimo and his regime and her being responsible for the care of the ducal children and the establishment of their court at the Medici villa of Castello continued on, and these activities were highly significant to the Medici regime as they helped build and consolidate the family’s reputation as stable ducal rulers. Cosimo sought Maria’s advice and provided her with the authority, in Segni’s words, ‘to manage much business’ because Maria was single-minded in her determination to promote her son’s interests, often ahead of any interests of her own.11 Similar to many other aristocratic women in early modern Europe, Maria’s activities as a wife, mother, and widow could be considered a ‘female career’, dedicated to furthering and promoting the interests of her husband and then her son. This career was as vital to the survival and prosperity of the Medici family and its regime as were the ‘careers’ of her male relatives.12 Maria began her career promoting the interests of her son early in Cosimo’s life.13 In effect, although he was not born a prince, Cosimo was raised by his widowed mother to take his place amongst the leaders of the Medici regime such that he quickly learnt how to live like a prince.14 Maria nonetheless seized the opportunity to advocate strongly for her son’s interests in the immediate aftermath of 9 

Tomas, ‘Commemorating a Mortal Goddess’, p. 268. See the discussion on Florentine dislike of female rule in Tomas, The Medici Women, pp. 164, 166; and more recently Hurlburt, ‘Women, Gender, and Rulership’. 11  Tomas, The Medici Women, pp. 146–49. 12  On the theme of aristocratic women’s lives being viewed as careers, see Harris, English Aristocratic Women, pp. 5, 16. 13  For Cosimo’s early years, see Guasti, ‘Alcuni fatti’. 14  For a very recent discussion of Maria as an educator of Cosimo, see Paoli, ‘Di madre in figlio’, pp. 72–75 and, with reference to his knowing how to live as a prince, p. 125. 10 

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Alessandro’s assassination, suggesting that he should become the ruler in discussions with the regime’s leaders.15 Cosimo’s accession led to the next phase of Maria’s career, in which she supported him by acting as an advisor and member of his inner circle. This inner circle also included Francesco Campana, previously secretary to Duke Alessandro, as well as Cosimo’s childhood tutor, Pierfrancesco Riccio.16 After her son’s election on 9 January 1537, Maria wrote to Medici friends and supporters to advise them of Cosimo’s success and to ask for their continued backing. On 11 January, Maria wrote from Florence to Cosimo’s godfather, Don Bernardo della Tassinara in Dovadola, telling him the joyous news of Cosimo’s election, which was ‘without any contradiction, like an act of God’, and begging him besides, because of the existing military threat to her son’s rule, ‘that if it proved necessary to use men [at arms] from over there […] you would not cease to remain vigilant’.17 Somewhat disingenuously, she informed the Vicar of Pescia, Luigi Martelli, on 19  January that when Cosimo was elected by the Florentine Senate ‘because of his age, he unwillingly agreed to such a burden but was won over by the pleas of many friends and relatives’.18 Here Maria employed a familiar topos that Lorenzo de’ Medici had used when referring to his reluctance to accede to power in 1469 at the age of twenty: ‘as it was contrary to my age, and on account of the great responsibility and peril it involved’.19 It was in reference to Cosimo’s burden of rule that Girolamo Benvieni, a poet and a client of the Salviati, wrote to Maria congratulating her on her son’s election, adding that as his mother, ‘you are expected to help him carry this burden’.20 Indeed the topoi continue as Lorenzo de’ Medici had a similar view of the role that Lucrezia Tornabuoni performed during his period of de facto rule in the mid-fifteenth century. When Lucrezia died, Lorenzo wrote: ‘I have lost the instrument that used to relieve me of many of my burdens’.21 15 

For a discussion of Maria’s participation in these discussions, see Tomas, The Medici Women, pp. 149–50. 16  On Cosimo’s inner circle, see Spini, Cosimo I, p. 143. 17  Cited in Guasti, ‘Alcuni fatti’, p. 30, 11/1/1536/7 (postscript): the request is in the main body of the letter and repeated in the postscript. 18  ASF, Archivio Martelli, 1478 Int 3. Doc 494r, 19/1/1536/7: ‘p[er].la età malvolentieri s’ accomadava a tal peso, ma vinto dalli prieghi di molti amici, et parenti’. 19  Cited in Kent, ‘The Young Lorenzo’, p. 2. The translation is the author’s. 20  Pugliese, ‘Girolamo Benvieni’, p. 288. 21  Cited in Tomas, The Medici Women, p. 26.

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In ducal Florence, Maria’s continuation of this traditional advisory role was undertaken in a very different political environment than that of Lucrezia’s day. Maria, unlike Lucrezia, had no need to work as part of an under-government in a republican regime. In ducal regimes, women in ruling families could undertake an overtly political role at the behest of the male sovereign or in the absence or incapacity of an adult male ruler. As a member of Cosimo’s inner circle, Maria worked in concert with his key administrative men: Campana and Riccio as well as with his other key secretaries Lorenzo Pagni and Ugolino Grifoni.22 In December 1537 Ugolino Grifoni informed Riccio that in response to a letter from Cosimo, which directed that Maria talk to the Spanish ambassador and to another Medici secretary, Pirro Musefilo, who had direct knowledge of the matter, she was able to report the Spanish decision not to leave Florentine territory unless under direct orders from the Marquis del Vasto. Ugolino then reports to Riccio that ‘The Lady [Maria] and Campana resolved to write to Ricasoli [the commander of Cosimo’s troops] concerning the raising of these Spaniards’.23 She understood that Cosimo’s first priority as ruler was to attend to important matters of state, and this included using all available opportunities to negotiate with imperial envoys to promote the interests of the Florentine state, even when a young and pleasure-loving Cosimo preferred instead to engage in his favourite pastime of hunting.24 When asked to prepare for an ambassadorial visit, Maria wrote to Riccio advising him that she, as requested, was making preparations for the imminent arrival of the imperial envoy, Lopez de Soria. In this letter Maria also urged Riccio to convince Cosimo to return to Florence to meet de Soria: ‘considering that greater benefit would result from it than from the hunts’.25 She was anxious for Cosimo to return because Maria realized that if he did not, there was a risk that others would use Cosimo’s absence to persuade the envoy to their own point of view, which would not necessarily be in Cosimo’s or the regime’s interests.26 22  On the importance of secretaries in Cosimo’s administrative apparatus, see Angiolini, ‘Dai segretari alle “segreterie”’; Pansini, ‘Le segretarie nel principato Mediceo’, pp. ix–xxvii. 23  ASF, MDP, 1169 Ins. 2, c. 8r, 2/12/1537: ‘si è resoluto per la Signora et il Campana scrivere al Ricasoli del levare questi spagnoli’. 24  See Varchi’s description of Cosimo’s favourite recreational pastimes in his Storia fioren­ tina, ed. by Sartorio, ii, 373. 25  ASF, MDP, 1169 Ins. 2, c. 17r, 20/01/1537/8: ‘pensando che maggior frutto ne apporterebbe che le caccie’. 26  ASF, MDP, 1169 Ins. 2, c. 17r, 20/01/1537/8.

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Maria also acted as Cosimo’s representative, reading ambassadorial correspondence and acting upon its contents in her son’s name whenever necessary. In a letter of April 1539, she advised Girolamo da Cavina that ‘we have read the letter of Giovanni Bandini’ (the ambassador to the court of Charles V), stating that Girolamo should not worry ‘as the Duke does not want to let him down in as much as he has made him a promise. And I will be his procurator in this and in every other matter’.27 She continued to act in his absence, possibly as regent, when Cosimo was temporarily absent from Florence in June 1539 on his way to Livorno to meet his bride. One of Cosimo’s secretaries, Lorenzo Pagni, informed him that ‘by command of the most illustrious lady [Maria]’, he had sent a letter that arrived reporting the movements of the Florentine exiles to Francesco Guicciardini for his opinion.28 However, contemporaries had a deep mistrust of women in such positions of power, regarding them as fickle, dangerous, likely to become involved in political intrigue and, when widowed, as dominating their young sons.29 Both Cosimo and Maria were vehemently disliked by Giovanni de Luna, the Spanish castellan of the Florentine fortresses, who informed Charles V that Cosimo was a young man under the influence of Campana and Riccio, both of whom de Luna thought were not very clever.30 But de Luna was particularly vituperative towards Maria, whom he described as ‘a hellish devil’, in effect an evil and untrustworthy woman, who de Luna feared could turn Cosimo and his other advisors away from the Spanish alliance towards an alliance with her pro-republican, pro-French (and thus anti-Spanish) brother, Cardinal Giovanni Salviati. It is interesting, however, that what de Luna really seems to dislike and fear was Maria’s power of persuasion over her son — her capacity to turn him from one alliance to another. Even Maria’s enemies are forced to admit the extent of her influence. Maria earned further enmity from de Luna and her Medici relative, the decidedly pro-imperial Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo, over the custody of Giulio de’ Medici. In May 1539, Cibo took advantage of having Giulio t­ emporarily 27 

ASF, MAP, 140, c. 41r, 26/4/1539: ‘Habbiamo letto la lettera di Gio[vanni] Bandini’; ‘Che il Duca non è per mancharli di quanto se li è promesso. Et io lo sarò procuratrice in questo et in ogni altra cosa sua’. 28  Cited in Spini, Cosimo I, p. 143. 29  See the references cited in note 10 above on discussion on the distrust of women in positions of political power. 30  What follows derives from Spini, Cosimo I, pp. 143–44.

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with him to stake a claim as his natural protector rather than Cosimo.31 When after a short while, Cibo had not returned Giulio to Maria in Florence, Cosimo decided to wait the matter out. Maria became embroiled in the issue, when Cibo told Cosimo that an apothecary named Biagio del Campana had told him that he had heard that Cosimo planned to poison Giulio.32 De Luna did not want this matter to become public, and in the absence of Cosimo, he went to Maria asking her to keep the matter quiet otherwise he would tell the Emperor all about it. After consulting with Francesco Campana, Maria told de Luna that it would please both Cosimo and herself if the matter was brought to the attention of the Spanish court.33 Later on, under interrogation by de Luna, Biagio said that Maria had asked him to spy on Cibo and report back to her on Giulio’s welfare.34 A few days after this interrogation, Cibo managed to convince de Luna that Cosimo was dominated by his mother and that he had heard this from one of Cardinal Salviati’s employees.35 The dispute was a cause of gossip at the imperial court, where according to one Medici agent, there was little respect for either Cosimo or his mother; shortly thereafter de Luna had to acknowledge the falsity of Cibo’s accusations and apologize to Cosimo. But with reference to Maria Salviati, the damage to her reputation had already been done so Cosimo, probably hoping to remove his mother from the line of fire, had already sent her away to Castello. From there Maria wrote to Riccio, with some relief: I have taken comfort and consolation from your letter, because of the loving words you have had from my son. For in truth, I  thought that I was fated to have the opposite response [from him …]. Also with all these offers, I thank God that I have no need of him or anyone else. Thank him on my behalf, as I will be a good mother to him as I have always been in the past and I hope that he will [continue] to be that good son that he has been to me until now.36 31 

A full account of this incident is found in Cosimo’s letter to Giovanni Bandini in Ferrai, Cosimo I, pp. 290–301 (Documento xxxi). 32  Spini, Cosimo I, p. 144. 33  Spini, Cosimo I, p. 147. 34  Ferrai Cosimo I, pp. 279–86 (p. 284, Documento xxix). 35  The discussion below draws on Spini, Cosimo I, pp. 148–49. 36  ASF, MDP, 338, c. 136r, 18/10/1539: ‘ho preso conforto et consolatione della vostra lettera, sί delle amorevole parole avute del mio figliuolo, ché in verita, pensavo d’essermi portata di sorte d’haver in risposta tutto il contrario. […] Pur tutte queste offerte, ringratio Dio che né di lui né d’altri non ho bisogno. Ringratiatelo per mia parte, che io li sarò buona madre, come sono stata sempre per il passato, et che io spero che mi habbia essere quel buon figliuolo, come mi è

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At the same time that Maria engaged in overtly political activities as part of Cosimo’s inner circle, she also undertook the more traditional activities of a Florentine matron, namely as an intercessor with Cosimo on behalf of local Tuscans. As we have noted, this type of activity was traditional for women in the Medici family. It was also an appropriate role for pious Christian women to undertake as it emulated the intercessory relationship between the Virgin Mary and her son Jesus.37 The eponymous connection between the two Marias would not have been lost on contemporaries. They also viewed the relationship between Cosimo and Maria as a partnership, sometimes requesting that they jointly undertake the requested task. Four men from the same family wrote to Maria to ensure that in the next scrutiny one of their kin would become one of the arroti (appointed members) of the Council of 200. Their letter opened: ‘in our name and in the name of others in our house, we would like Your Excellency and your Most Illustrious and Most Christian son our duke’ and then made their request.38 Indeed, clients frequently wrote to Maria, clearly with the confident expectation that she would intercede on their behalf with Cosimo. Two ambassadors from Prato exemplified this attitude by asking Maria to ensure that the tax exemptions that Duke Alessandro had granted their city be continued by Cosimo and expressing the hope that their request would be granted ‘through the supplications and requests of Your Excellency which we know to be superior to all others’.39 The supplications (written appeals) that reached Maria were sent by Tuscans either on their own behalf or on behalf of others. Early in his reign, for example, Maria recommended to Cosimo a number of clients who had either been to see her or sent others to seek her out on their behalf. The letter began: ‘This evening S. Lorenzo Cibo was here with me and asked me to intercede with Your Excellency on behalf of Antonio Cambini’. He was one among several people who had their cases pleaded to Maria that day, all of whom wished Cosimo to facilitate their being able to remove their grain from his territory.40 Sometime stato da un anno in qua’. This text is also cited in Spini, Cosimo I, p. 149. 37  For a discussion of this theme and the literature cited there, see Tomas, The Medici Women, pp. 44–45. 38  ASF, MAP, 140, c. 229r, undated (post 9 January 1537): ‘ In nome nostro et nome delli altri di casa nostra saremo desiderosi obtenere gratia da V[ostra] E[xcellen]tia et dal suo Ill[ustrissi]mo et Ex[cellentissi]mo figliuolo Duca nostro’. 39  ASF, MDP, 330, c. 191r, 25/2/1536/7: ‘mediante le supplicationi et preghi di V[ostra]. Ex[cellen]tia quali sappiamo essere sopratucti li altri preghi’. 40  ASF, MDP, 335, c. 546r, 21/12/1538: ‘Questa sera è stato qui a me il S. Lorenzo Cibo. Et pregatomi interceda apresso V[ost]ra Ex[cellentia] per Antonio Cambini’.

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later she recommended a certain Francesco Benintendi to her son because he was involved in a legal dispute and sought justice.41 Within months of Eleonora’s arrival, Maria was no longer involved in overt political activity when necessary, as this role now properly belonged to the Duchess of Florence.42 Instead Maria took on a different, more traditional role, one that was helping to support the development of a stable efficient ducal court. She had responsibility for managing the ducal nursery, the seat of the children’s court, which was based at the Medici villa of Castello. Maria’s responsibility was considered such an important role that once she died, her job of reporting to Cosimo and Eleonora about the progress of the children fell to the Medici secretaries as they alone had the level of authority within the court to undertake the task rather than the wet nurses who cared for them or the ladies-in-waiting who monitored their care.43 Maria continued on in her intercessory role with Cosimo with local Tuscans even after her son’s marriage. Eleonora was Spanish and despised in Florence because of her ‘foreign’ ways and thus was generally not viewed as an avenue for intercession with Cosimo by local Tuscans, in contrast to Maria.44 Her customary intercessory activities and care of the ducal children and wards represented tradition and continuity within Cosimo’s regime, a symbol to the Florentines of what had not changed in Florence since the advent of his princely rule. Their ongoing partnership is in evidence in Cosimo’s letter from Pisa of early March 1540 to his mother at Castello: Most Illustrious Lady, most respected mother I have been strongly urged by Captain Giano Strozzi to arrange that Jacopo Ginori, an agent of Messer Ottaviano [de’ Medici], be content to keep company with the daughter of Daniello Strozzi, the niece of the said Captain. And because I wish to satisfy them, it seemed to me that due to my absence that it should please your most Illustrious Ladyship to take on this office and, with your authority and mine, arrange with the said Jacopo and with the aforesaid Messer Ottaviano that it will happen, showing each of them that it will please us greatly. And to your good graces with dutiful reverence I recommend myself. […] Your son, Cosimo Medici.45 41 

ASF, MDP, 335, c. 611r, 1/3/1538/9. 42  Tomas, ‘Eleonora di Toledo’. 43  Murphy, Murder of a Medici Princess, pp. 21–23. 44  Tomas, ‘Eleonora di Toledo’, pp. 69, 80, 82. 45  ASF, MAP, 140, c. 57r, 7/3/1539/40: ‘Ill[ustrissi]ma S[igno]ra madre oss[ervandissi] ma. || Io son[o] pregato strettamente dal Cap[ita]no Giano Strozzi di far[e] opera che Jacopo

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For a mature widow such as Maria Salviati to be asked to assist in arranging a suitable marriage alliance was standard practice as mature married women or widows often undertook such tasks. The Bishop of Pavia asked Maria to arrange the marriage of his younger brother, who was ‘young and suitably rich  […] I ask […] Your Ladyship to think of someone in this area who is rich to unite with him in marriage’.46 But even though Cosimo’s letter discussed quite a common request made of widows by their sons or other male relatives or friends, his letter is in fact quite remarkable. First, Cosimo clearly requested that Maria Salviati take on the said task in his stead, not as his subject, or even as his delegate, but by linking her own authority with his in a partnership to achieve the desired goal. Second, Cosimo’s closing address is familiar: he recommended himself to Maria with dutiful reverence and signed himself simply as ‘your son, Cosimo Medici’, rather than as Cosimo Medici, his usual signature at that time.47 This is a letter from a son to a respected mother requesting her assistance rather than a ruler ordering his subject to undertake a task. Supplicants wrote to Maria requesting various types of intercession during this period. Of course, Maria’s natal family could expect favourable treatment. Giuliano Salviati wrote to Maria lamenting his lack of military equipment: ‘I beg Your Excellency to act willingly as an intermediary with His Excellency [Cosimo so that] he gives me a good horse’.48 But many others who were not family members also wrote to her. A tailor by the name of Batista di Bastiano came to Maria pleading the case of a man who had been confined to the galleys by the Florentine police magistracy for destroying an orchard. Maria asked Cosimo to grant the man his freedom because he had done penance and also because the prisoner wished to dower one of Batista’s daughters, which made Ginori, agente di M. Octaviano [de’ Medici], si contenti di accompagnarsi con la nipote di esso cap[ita]no figliola di Daniello Strozzi. Et perché desidero di satisfarli, m’è parso per la mia absentia la S[ignora] V[ostra] Ill[ustrissima]che le piaccia pigliar[e] questa provincia et con l’auctorità sua et mia operare con decto Jacopo et col prefato M. Octaviano che lo effecto segua mostrando a l’uno e l’altro che ci sarà molto grato. Et alla bona gratia co[n] debita reverentia sua mi rac[omman]do. […] suo figliolo Cosimo Medici.’ 46  ASF, MAP, 140, 200r, rec’d January 1536/7: ‘egli giovane [e]t conveniente ricco […] priego […] V[ostra] S[ignora] sia contenta pensar di venirlo in matrimonio in questa terra con quella persona che sia ricca’. 47  See the reference to Cosimo’s signing himself ‘Duke of Florence’ only from 1542, in Baker, ‘For Reasons of State’, p. 467 n. 71. 48  ASF, MDP, 349, cc. 68–69, quotation at c. 68r, 20/2/1540/1: ‘supplico Vostra Excellentia vogli essere mezzo con Sua Excellentia che mi doni uno cavallo bono’.

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his liberation even more worthwhile.49 Maria sometimes also recommended men she considered worthy for election to public office. She recommended Messer Bardo Altoviti as a suitable candidate to the magistracy of the Otto di Pratica (Foreign Affairs Committee): ‘It seems to me that he is a person who because of his optimum qualities and virtue deserves it’.50 When recommending someone to fill a vacancy as an official to weigh salt, Maria reminded her son that the proposed candidate ‘was a young man of good standing who is the son-in-law of Monna Domenica, one of the women that is in my service and [the service] of your children’.51 A supplicant’s connection to the children’s court possibly made Maria more likely to support the request strongly. In the months before Eleonora’s arrival in Florence in mid-1539, Maria was involved in preparations for her arrival. They seemed to get on well together.52 A shared interest was the care and welfare of the children. It is probable that the 417 scudi that Maria was paid over three months by Cosimo in 1540 were to cover expenses for the upkeep of her young charges.53 A year later, she asked Eleonora to continue negotiating with Cosimo for an additional payment of 50 scudi to her, not for herself, she emphasized, but for the children’s expenses.54 Maria wrote to Pagni about Eleonora saying: ‘I have no other wish in this world except to satisfy her and her children’.55 Maria’s concern for the welfare of the children did lead to a disagreement with Eleonora. In early June 1543, fearful of the rumours suggesting that roaming groups of bandits from the north might be in the area, Maria took Riccio’s advice and removed the children from Castello to Florence.56 Eleonora, who 49 

ASF, MDP, 5926, c. 35r, 30/4/1543. ASF, MDP, 343, c. 513r, 5/9/1540: ‘Parendomi persona che per le sue optime qualità et virtừ il meritasse’. 51  ASF, MDP, 355, 309r, 23/9/1541: ‘un giovane da bene, genero di Ma Domenica, una delle done che stanno al mio servito et di questi S[i]g[no]ri figliuoli’. Monna Domenica monitored the care of Cosimo’s third child, Isabella. See Murphy, Murder of a Medici Princess, p. 20. 52  An older historiography suggested that Maria was jealous of Eleonora’s affection and influence with her son but provides little evidence to support this argument. Galluzzi, Istoria del granducato di Toscana, i, 57. 53  ASF, Manoscritti, 321, c. 7. 54  ASF, MDP, 350, c. 122r, 22/4/1541. This letter is published in Tosi, ‘Maria SalviatiMedici’. 55  ASF, MDP, 350, c. 122r, 22/4/1541: ‘che no[n] ho altra voglia in questo mondo che di satisfare et a llei et alli suoi figliuoli’. 56  See Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici, ii, 59. 50 

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had seen dispatches from Bologna, Venice, and Pistoia on this issue, refused a request from Riccio to come to Florence for her own safety.57 The Duchess felt that Maria had overreacted, believing that their subjects would hear of her actions and condemn the Medici for being fearful.58 Pagni had informed Riccio that Eleonora was furious to discover that he had not sent the dispatches to Maria before he had consulted with the ‘Lords of the Council’ (the Senate).59 Pagni reported Eleonora’s strongly held view on the matter to him: ‘because she [Maria] could have told you [Riccio] her opinion and that you did so after these Lords of the Council had made their resolutions seem to her blameworthy’.60 Pagni went on to say that the matter might have ended there, if Riccio himself had not informed the Duchess that: ‘he [Riccio] went to give an account of the matter to the Most Illustrious Lady Maria, because it seems to her [Eleonora] that this alters [the resolution] as the Most Illustrious Lady should have been consulted first about this matter rather than anyone else’.61 The next day Eleonora wrote to Maria, informing her that she had arrived at Poggio a Caiano and asking that she visit her there with the children, all the while assuring Maria ‘that there is no danger here […] as some have wanted to imagine’.62 Eleonora concluded the letter by indicating that she was sending the dispatches about this matter received to both the Senate members and to her, presumably so that Maria could make an informed judgement herself.63 The fact that Eleonora felt it necessary to remonstrate strongly with Riccio over his failure to consult first with Maria on significant political matters and that she then sent the relevant documents to her mother-in-law herself indicates that several years after Cosimo’s marriage Maria was considered by both Cosimo and Eleonora to be of equal status to his other key advisors. Both Duke and Duchess regarded Maria as a wise elder who should always be kept informed 57 

ASF, MAP, 140, c. 225r, 7/6/1543. ASF, MDP, 1170 Ins. 5, c. 10r, 6/6/1543 (Pagni to Riccio). 59  ASF, MDP, 1170 Ins. 5, c. 11r, 6/6/1543: ‘signori del Consiglio’. 60  ASF, MDP, 1170 Ins. 5, c. 11r, 6/6/1543: ‘perché lei harebbe potuto dirvi su il parere suo, et l’haverlo fatto doppo le resolutioni di cotesti signori del Consiglio, lo ha biasmato assai’. 61  ASF, MDP, 1170 Ins. 5, c. 11r, 6/6/1543: ‘che andava a’ dare conto della cosa alla Illustrissima Signora Maria, perché su questo si alterò, parendoli, che a’ Sua Signora Illustrissima la cosa s’havessi a conferire prima, che con alcun’altro’. 62  ASF, MAP, 140, c. 225r, 7/6/1543: ‘che non ci é pericolo alcuno […] come qualchuno ha voluto imaginare’. 63  ASF, MAP, 140, c. 225r, 7/6/1543. 58 

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about events of importance to the court, and whose opinion should always be solicited before significant decisions were made. Allowing his mother, Maria Salviati, a popular, traditional Florentine matron, ‘to manage much business’ in the ducal court gave Cosimo the flexibility he needed to navigate a difficult period of transition for his regime. His unexpected accession meant that initially, at least until shortly after his marriage, he needed his mother to fulfil the political advisory role that usually belonged to a consort as well as continuing to engage in a more usual intercessory role which reminded and reassured local Tuscans of the continuity between Cosimo’s princely rule and the practices of the Florentine Republic and its female under-government. This link to traditional Florence that Maria’s career epitomized made it easier for Cosimo and Eleonora to continue on with their task of forming a stable, princely state. Even when no longer undertaking an overtly political role, Maria’s positive relationships with Cosimo, his key administrative men, and Duchess Eleonora ensured that her contribution as an advisor, intercessor, and manager of the children’s court meant that her views were valued and respected. Maria Salviati was thereby a figure of real authority at the court of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici.

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio Martelli, 1478 Int 3 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Manoscritti, 321 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo avanti il Principato, 140 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 330 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 335 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 338 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 343 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 349 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 350 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 355 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 1169 Ins. 2 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 1170 Ins. 5 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 5926

Primary Sources Segni, Bernardo, Storie fiorentine, dall’anno mdxxvii al mdlv, ed. by G. Gargani (Firen­ ze: Barbèra, Bianchi, 1857), available at [accessed 20 February 2009] Varchi, Benedetto, Storia fiorentina, ed. by Michele Sartorio, 2 vols (Milano: Borroni e Scotti, 1846), available at [accessed 11 July 2009]

Secondary Works Angiolini, Franco, ‘Dai segretari alle “segreterie”: Uomini ed apparati di governo nella Toscana medicea (meta xvi secolo–meta xvii secolo)’, Società e storia, 58 (1992), 701–20 Baker, Nicholas S., ‘For Reasons of State: Political Executions, Republicanism, and the Medici in Florence, 1480–1560’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (2009), 444–78 Covini, Nadia, ‘Tra cure domestiche, sentimenti e politica: La corrispondenza di Bianca Maria Visconti, duchessa di Milano (1450–1468)’, Reti Medi­evali Rivista, 10 (2009), 1–35 [accessed 4 December 2009] Ferente, Serena, ‘Naturales Dominae: Female Political Authority in the Late Middle Ages’, in Women Rulers in Europe: Agency, Practice and Representation of Political Powers (XII–XVIII), ed.  by Giulia Calvi (Firenze: European Uni­ver­sity Institute, Department of History and Civilization, 2008), pp.  45–61 [accessed 2 November 2008] Ferrai, Luigi Alberto, Cosimo I, duca di Firenze (Bologna: N. Zanchelli, 1882)

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Galluzzi, Jacopo R., Istoria del granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici, 5 vols (Firenze: Cambiagi, 1781; repr. Milano: Cisalpino-Goliardica, 1974) Guasti, Cesare, ‘Alcuni fatti delle prima giovinezza di Cosimo  I de’  Medici’, Giornale storico degli archivi toscani, 2 (1858), 3–64, 295–320 Harris, Barbara J., English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) Hurlburt, Holly S., ‘Women, Gender, and Rulership in Medi­eval Italy’, History Compass, 4 (2006), 528–35 Kent, F.  W., ‘Sainted Mother, Magnificent Son: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Lorenzo de’ Medici’, Italian History and Culture, 3 (1997), 3–33; repr. in F. W. Kent, Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence, ed. by Carolyn James (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 67–104 —— , ‘The Young Lorenzo, 1449–1469’, in Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, ed.  by Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann (London: Warburg Institute, 1996), pp. 1–22; repr. in F. W. Kent, Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence, ed. by Carolyn James (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 13–39 Murphy, Caroline P., Murder of a Medici Princess (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008) Najemy, John M., A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) Pansini, Giuseppe, ‘Le segretarie nel principato Mediceo’, in Carteggio universale di Cosimo  I de’  Medici: Archivio di Stato di Firenze inventario I: (1536–1541) ( filze 329–53), ed. by A. Bellinazzi and C. Lamioni (Firenze: Giunta Regionale Toscana, 1982), pp. ix–xlix Paoli, Maria Pia, ‘Di madre in figlio: Per una storia dell’educazione alla corte dei Medici’, Annali di Storia di Firenze, 3 (2008), 65–145 Pieraccini, Gaetano, La stirpe de’  Medici di Cafaggiolo, 3  vols (Firenze: Vallechi, 1924; repr. Firenze: Nardini, 1986) Pugliese, Olga Z., ‘Girolamo Benvieni, Umanista riformatore (dalla corrispondenza inedita)’, La Bibliofilia, 72 (1970), 255–88 Spini, Giorgio, Cosimo  I e L’índipendenza del principato Mediceo, 2nd edn (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1980) Tomas, Natalie R., ‘Commemorating a Mortal Goddess: Maria Salviati de’ Medici and the Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I’, in Practices of Gender in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 261–78 —— , ‘Eleonora di Toledo, Regency, and State Formation in Tuscany’, in Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Grand Ducal Tuscany, ed. by Giovanna Benadusi and Judith C. Brown (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015), pp. 58–89 —— , The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) Tosi, C. O., ‘Maria Salviati-Medici’, Arte e Storia, 27 (1908), 74–75

Part II Family, Friends, Networks

Mercantile and Other Friendships in Early Renaissance Tuscany Carolyn James

I

n his early thirteenth-century Latin treatise on friendship, the grammarian Boncompagno da Signa evinced a realistic grasp of the challenges contemporaries faced in forming friendships and preserving amity in the factionriven communes of late medieval Italy. Distinguishing four categories of true friends from twenty-two false ones, the latter all motivated by various types of self-interest, he nevertheless took the view that friends should serve and be useful to each other. The amicable relationships described by Boncompagno, and experienced by the merchants, artisans, and lower-rung professionals who took his advice to heart, had little in common, therefore, with Cicero’s elevated prescriptions in De amicitia, or the idealized conceptions of friendship rehearsed by Petrarch in the fourteenth century and later by his humanist disciples.1 Peter 1 

Signa, Amicitia, ed. by Nathan. See also Dunne, ‘Good Friends or Bad Friends?’. The present essay developed from research on late medieval and Renaissance friendship for Kent and James, ‘Renaissance Friendships’. I am grateful to the Australian Research Council and the Cassamarca Foundation for financial support of my research. I also thank Kathleen Neal and Alan Crosier for helpful comments on an early draft. All translations are my own. Carolyn James ([email protected]) is Cassamarca Associate Professor at Monash Uni­v er­s ity. Author of two books on the fifteenth-century Bolognese writer Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, she has also analysed and translated into English Margherita Datini’s correspondence with her husband, Francesco (1384–1410). James’s areas of interest are women’s letter-writing practices from 1380 to 1580, as well as the history of marriage and family life in the early modern period. She is presently writing a monograph on Isabella d’Este and her husband, Francesco Gonzaga, to be published by Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press. She was a fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in 2001–2002.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 151–167 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109703

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Burke discussed this intellectual tradition, especially in relation to the sixteenth century, in a much quoted essay. He suggested that scholars of the early modern period had neglected the historiography of friendship, especially in its ‘narrow and distinctively modern sense of a disinterested relationship between unrelated individuals’. He called this ‘private’ rather than ‘political or instrumental’ friendship.2 By the time he wrote, however, historians of Renaissance Florence had already established that modern notions of friendship, which are intolerant of instrumentalism, could not be imposed on earlier centuries. The work of Bill and Dale Kent, and of Richard Trexler, showed how ties of kinship, neighbourhood, and friendship underpinned almost every aspect of fifteenthcentury Florentine life, producing densely interwoven social bonds that penetrated vertically to link the rich and poor and extended beyond the city, uniting urban dwellers with those in the countryside. These scholars argued that while Florentines assumed that true friends would be virtuous, loving, and loyal, they also required them to be useful.3 We see this combination at work in a collection of fifteenth-century correspondence to the humbly born Florentine Bartolommeo Cederni, edited and analysed by Bill Kent in 1991.4 Friendship was particularly important for isolated individuals such as Cederni, who became a pivotal figure in a social network dominated by wealthy Florentine families such as the Boni, Pandolfini, and Caccini. Without the ancient pedigrees and abundant kinship connections of long-established, larger lineages, individuals from these new families relied on each other and on less well-off intermediaries such as Cederni to provide favours, as well as the sociability and affection that united the group over many years. The vision of friendship that emerges from the epistolary evidence is an attractive one, the instrumental and affective elements of the men’s relationships seemingly harmonious and mutually reinforcing. We know from other sources, however, that in republican Florence and its dependent towns distrust, jealousies, and factional hatreds were as likely to thrive as amity was. The political repercussions of these perennial dark undercurrents, which occasionally erupted in spectacular civic disturbances such as the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, have been extensively explored.5 The effects of a volatile 2 

Burke, ‘Humanism and Friendship in Sixteenth-Century Europe’, p. 262. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, esp. pp. 227–92; D. Kent, The Rise of the Medici and Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence; Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 131–58. 4  Kent, Bartolommeo Cederni and his Friends. 5  For an account of the conspiracy, see Martines, April Blood. 3 

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political climate and frequent economic crises on the day-to-day dynamic of personal friendships have been less studied, although John Najemy’s introduction to his translation of the correspondence between Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Vettori provides a sensitive analysis of the tensions which emerged in this relationship as the political fortunes of these similarly brilliant friends diverged in the aftermath of the Medici restoration of 1512.6 Correspondence to and from the Tuscan merchant Francesco Datini (c. 1335–1410), which survives in the State Archive of Prato, also reveals some of the difficulties associated with urban friendships better than the Cederni letters of over half a century later.7 In this mercantile context we see an unstable and contested interpretation of amity, with the relationship between trust, love, and instrumentality prey to uncertainty and variation. Datini experienced many of the cataclysms of the fourteenth century first-hand. He was orphaned by the Black Death of 1348, experienced the challenges of emigration while still a youth, and lived constantly with the financial risks associated with his commercial ventures.8 In later life, his social milieu was one where the pragmatic concerns of Italian merchants engaged in international trade encountered the classically inspired humanist culture of early Renaissance Florence. The divisions of class and wealth traditionally regarded as impediments to true friendship were here at least partially dissolved by the bonds of Christian and civic brotherhood. Nevertheless, it is clear from letters to Datini from Lapo Mazzei, a Florentine notary who befriended the merchant in the last twenty years of his life, that the former required a good deal of mentoring before he understood how to reconcile a mercantile understanding of friendship — with its intense focus on loyalty and its down-to-earth instrumentalism — with the approaches to amicitia and caritas of Mazzei’s high-minded friends in Florence.9 These politically influential men self-consciously identified with the classicizing legacy of Petrarch and were determined to keep alive in their own generation the 6 

Najemy, Between Friends. Le lettere di Francesco Datini alla moglie Margherita, ed. by Cecchi; Le lettere di Mar­ gherita Datini a Francesco di Marco, ed. by Rosati; Per la tua Margherita, ed. by Toccafondi and Tartaglione. For the English translation of Margherita’s letters, see Datini, Letters to Francesco Datini, trans. by James and Pagliaro. See also Hayez, ‘Le rire du marchand’. 8  Cassandro, ‘Aspects of the Life and Character of Francesco di Marco Datini’. See also Luzzati, ‘Francesco Datini’. 9  Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro, ed. by Guasti. On Datini’s friendship with Mazzei, see also Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 131–58, and D. Kent, Friendship, Love and Trust in Renaissance Florence, pp. 64–67. 7 

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poet’s inspiring interpretation of Ciceronian friendship.10 The epistolary evidence preserved in the Datini archive thus provides an opportunity to examine the attitudes of a socially diverse range of individuals, equally convinced of the essential importance of friendship, but not always able to find common ground on the best ways to recognize, secure, measure, and preserve it amid the pressures and rivalries of commerce in a fractious political environment. * * * We know something of mercantile attitudes to friendship from fourteenthcentury advice books and memoirs. Datini’s contemporary Paolo da Certaldo, for example, advised in his Libro di buoni costumi, of about 1365, that friends should be tried, often and variously, to test their true worth. Even then, experience had taught him to hold back from complete frankness with friends and not to repose full faith in anyone: ‘because there are many past examples of people being sometimes tricked when they trust others completely, especially when for the sake of money those in whom they trust can or must trick them’.11 Not surprisingly, this fearful attitude towards friendship is as prevalent in mercantile letters as it is in advice books. Like other merchants, Datini tried to insulate himself from treacherous alliances by collaborating with relatives and neighbours, or at least fellow citizens.12 Extending trust only within his local community was, however, not practical for a man whose business empire — founded in Avignon in the 1360s and 1370s, and then based in Tuscany after his return to Italy in 1383 — stretched as far as Spain and other distant parts of Europe. Letters became an essential means to control the complex activities of his companies, to monitor his collaborators, and to cultivate useful friendships. Merchants took it for granted that the discourse of reciprocity and obligation should be an essential aspect of their letters; and Datini refers often in his correspondence to the moral imperatives associated with friendship, quoting snippets of ancient wisdom available to him in translated compendiums such as the Ammaestramenti degli antichi, as well as the pithy aphorisms of popular culture.13 10 

On Petrarch and friendship, see Lafleur, Pétrarque et l’amitié. ‘E ancora ti dico che tu sempre ritenga a te un poco di freno; e benché tu ti fidi, non ti fidare in tutto, ché molti assempri se ne sono già veduti che chi del tutto si fida si truova talora ingannato, e spezialmente dove per danari si possa o debba fare lo ’nganno’: Certaldo, ‘Libro di buoni costumi’, ed. by Branca, p. 91. See also Bec, Les marchands écrivains, pp. 95–111. 12  On this theme, see Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Flor­ ence and Kent and James, ‘Renaissance Friendships’, pp. 141–43. 13  San Concordia, Ammaestramenti degli Antichi, ed. by Nannucci, pp. 300–17. For a 11 

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But Datini did not always live up to his own prescriptions for cultivating amity; as we will see, a number of his closest alliances ended in bitter dispute or faded away through the failure of one friend to adhere to the other’s expectations. Paolo Nanni has offered new insights into Datini’s complex character, based on the merchant’s personal correspondence with his long-time partners — men with whom he formed close, if volatile, friendships.14 Errors of judgement or lack of diligence by associates, as well as disagreements about policy, all took their toll on mercantile collaborations. Expressions of anger and frustration are as frequent in Datini’s letters to associates as statements about his love for them. He urged his employees to regard each other as brothers, but he assumed the role of authoritative patriarch. Within the merchant’s surrogate family of clerks and factors, the disagreements caused by long hours of work and the anxieties of risky commercial transactions were interpreted as brotherly or filial squabbles to be patched up quickly. However, more serious failures of loyalty undermined the very foundations of corporate allegiance. Datini’s friendship with Stoldo di Lorenzo di ser Berizo Ormanni — long-time director of the Florentine warehouse — ended traumatically with bitter recriminations from Datini about his partner’s selfish devotion to his own interests.15 On the other hand, as Nanni has shown, Datini could be as stern with himself as with others. His furious epistolary lambasting of colleagues was balanced in other letters by confessional passages that reveal how emotionally attuned he was to his associates, and how important forgiveness and reconciliation were in the rapport with his men.16 * * * Datini’s familial conception of amity could not work with those who were outside the formal structures of his companies and were his social and commercial peers, or of higher status. Professional alliances inevitably had a strongly instrumental basis, and Datini’s efforts to balance usefulness with disinterested affection, according to conventional notions of how friendships between equals sample of aphorisms on friendship quoted by Datini in his letters, see Nanni, Ragionare tra Mercanti, pp. 315–19. 14  Nanni, Ragionare tra Mercanti. 15  ‘Tu sse’ istato in tua libertà 18 anni e sètti ghovernato chome tu ài voluto, e dàti a credere, o tu il vuoi dare a credere a me, che tu à’ fatto maraviglie ed egli nonn è chosì […] e tu non puoi istare fermo quanto una trottola pena a girare’: Francesco Datini to Stoldo di Lorenzo, 17.5.1401, as cited in Nanni, Ragionare tra Mercanti, p. 183. For the breakdown of the partnership between Stoldo and Datini, see ibid., pp. 177–84. 16  Nanni, Ragionare tra Mercanti, pp. 278–82.

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should function, were not always successful. The Tuscan merchant’s domineering temperament alienated independent operators, such as his Milanese friend Bassano da Pessina. The men first met in December 1382 when Datini stopped in Milan during his journey back to Prato after more than three decades in Provence. Da Pessina agreed, in return for a commission, to mediate trade between Lombardy, Pisa, and Avignon.17 Since the men shared a similar economic status, their alliance fulfilled the essential Ciceronian criterion of friendship: being freely entered into by equals without ties of dependence. In a letter of January 1384, which invited Datini to Milan for the baptism of his son, da Pessina emphasized the disinterestedness of their relationship, claiming that while the Tuscan’s visit would be a good opportunity to talk, theirs was more than a mere business collaboration: ‘We’ll get together and, in one way or another, we will reach an agreement and even if we ever fail to agree over mercantile matters we will never lose our love for each other’.18 However, da Pessina also had a favourite proverb: ‘Ispessa ragione, lungha amistà’ (frequent accounting, long friendship), a saying that continued to have strong currency well beyond the fourteenth century.19 In Luca Pacioli’s fifteenth-century treatise on mathematics, for example, it is quoted in connection with the idea that a well-balanced account book could be a symbol of friendship itself.20 Datini proved to be insensitive to da Pessina’s desire to bolster trust with practical forms of reassurance. There were small but ongoing financial disputes between the men’s companies which Datini neglected to resolve, despite appeals and reminders from Milan. In March 1384, da Pessina expressed his annoyance by criticizing his friend’s manipulative character: But you, who have a character that takes such pleasure in everything about a friend, are like those wise men who, with their pleasantries, sweep all before them and you act in such a way that a friend must come to you seeking indulgence. I don’t know how to write and speak in wise men’s proverbs, as you have learnt to do, and you 17 

Only da Pessina’s side of the personal correspondence between himself and Datini survives. They are edited in Frangioni, Milano Fine Trecento. It is clear from these letters that he and Datini enjoyed, at least initially, a good personal rapport. 18  ‘Saremo insieme e o d’uno o d’un altro saremo d’acordo e se d’acordo non vi fosse in atto di mercatantia no si perdarà però may l’amore da voy a me’: Bassano da Pessina to Francesco Datini, 29.1.1384, in Frangioni, Milano Fine Trecento, pp. 37–39. 19  Bassano da Pessina to Francesco Datini, 1.4.1384, in Frangioni, Milano Fine Trecento, pp. 44–46. 20  Kent and Lillie, ‘The Piovano Arlotto, New Documents’, pp. 352, 361.

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have studied the Bible with your mother-in-law, which has given you the ability to trump anyone.21

Merchants seemed to have needled each other with such ironic attacks as a matter of course, and the two men continued to do business for the next decade; but underlying tensions between them were never entirely dispelled. When Bassano da Pessina died in 1394, his son Francesco was reluctant to collaborate further, prompting Datini, in a letter of 11 March 1395, to beg the younger man ‘not to do to me what boys sometimes do when they go to drink at the fountain: once they have drunk, they throw rocks into the water and then piss in it’.22 Datini concluded his letter with an attempt to persuade the younger man by a display of superior learning on the subject of friendship: You reveal you have not read a book that I have read by a great philosopher who speaks about friendship very loftily, describing its many beautiful and fine qualities. He says only three things can come between two friends, and these three cannot be repaired: betrayal, theft, and rapacity. None of these has ever come between us, or anything else that might explain why we are in this situation, and if you could only see the damage that will follow for both you and me, truly you would not throw everything away; on the contrary, you would do the opposite.23

Behind the warning to Francesco da Pessina not to waste the investment that his father’s friendship with Datini represented, the moral capital of which should be passed on to the following generation and sustained with care, lurks 21  ‘Ma voy che avette l’animo sì fatto che agradice ongni chossa da l’amicho che si sia fatte chome i savvi uomeni che con le sue piacevolleze vi(n)cono ongni chosa e tenette i modi che l’amico choviene vengha a la vostra venia. Non so iscrivere né parllare per proverbi di savi uomeni chome sapette voy che l’avete per praticha e avette istudiato ne la Bibia con la vostra socera che ve n’à fato sì prattico che a chatuno ne dareste ischacho’: Bassano da Pessina to Francesco Datini, 16.3.1384, in Frangioni, Milano Fine Trecento, pp. 41–43. 22  ‘Francescho, io ti pregho che tue non faca a me chome fanno i fanculli quando vanno a bere alla fonte che alchune volta, quando v’anno bevoto, vi gettano dentro de’ sassi e poi vi pisciano dentro’: Francesco Datini to Francesco da Pessina, 11.3.1395, in Frangioni, Milano Fine Trecento, pp. 592–93. 23  ‘Non mostra abi letto uno libro che òe letto io d’uno grande filosofo che parlla di questa amistà tanto altamente asengnandone molte belle e buone ragioni chon dire non è niuna diferenza sie grandi, salvo tre, che vengha in tra due amici che non si deba rimetere, salvo tre: tradimenti, furti e avolterio. Or questo non fue mai tra noi né altra chosa e ’l perché noi dobiamo istare a questo modo che se vedessi il danno che nne segue e da tte e da me, veramente non ti gitteresti la chosa di drieto a questo modo anzi faresti tutto il chontradio’: Francesco Datini to Francesco da Pessina, 11.3.1395, in Frangioni, Milano Fine Trecento, pp. 592–93.

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a thinly veiled threat. A former friend could, after all, be a potent enemy. The lingering resentments created by Datini’s neglectful and occasionally insouciant behaviour suggest that mercantile relationships were fragile in the face of even minor financial disputes, especially since those who prospered often did so through a combination of luck and ruthless outwitting of their rivals. As well as ending as a result of financial disagreements, friendship could fade with a decline of mutual usefulness. Datini’s relationship with the doctor Naddino d’Aldobrandino Bovattieri (brother-in-law of Monte d’Andrea Angiolini, the manager of Datini’s warehouse in Prato) met the latter fate. Although Bovattieri’s letters to Datini suggest an amiable and even confidential rapport, the exchange of favours figured importantly in their friendship. Bovattieri gave advice to the merchant and his wife Margherita about their health, as well as guidance about medicines and diet. When the doctor took up a prestigious medical practice in Avignon, he also acted as an intermediary between Datini and Margherita’s Florentine mother, Dianora Gherardini, who had moved to Avignon with all but one of her children, probably in the 1370s, and remained there until her death in May 1388. During her final illness, Bovattieri endeavoured — unsuccessfully it turned out — to persuade Dianora to remember a long-standing debt to Datini when she made her will. In return for these various favours, Datini extended protection to Bovattieri’s wife and children in Prato.24 Bovattieri’s letters document the subtly changing dynamic of his friendship with Datini. When the former’s brother-in-law, Monte Angiolini, was murdered in Pisa in March 1390, the doctor’s own fortunes were low. He had been robbed and then thrown into jail in Genoa. In a letter of April 1390, very much the supplicant, he begged Datini, as his ‘father and brother’ and his sole source of help, to reassure his wife and other relatives in Prato.25 Only months before, on 8 January 1390, Datini had written a long farewell letter to Bovattieri, then in Pisa on the first leg of his journey back to Provence. Datini knew that the doctor had decided eventually to settle his family permanently in Avignon. The death of Monte would sever one strong link with Prato within two months; but even before that happened Datini’s letter suggests he was afraid that the relationship with Bovattieri would not survive a permanent separation: 24  For Bovattieri’s letters and an analysis of the doctor’s relationships with his relatives and friends in Prato, see Hayez, ‘“Veramente io spero farci bene…”’. 25  Naddino Bovattieri to Francesco Datini, 13.4.1390, in Hayez, ‘“Veramente io spero farci bene…”’, p. 520.

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Although my love may be inadequate and lacking in wisdom and power, in many respects, I still regard myself as a friend of God in that I very much love my friends. On the other hand, every day I see men loving each other only as one does a playful young puppy. So act in such a way towards me that I have no grounds for saying that you are among those unloving people, because I consider myself still to be your friend.26

Datini’s fears proved well founded, even if the self-congratulatory and imperious tone of his letter may have contributed to the demise of a friendship with a man who probably thought himself worthy of more sensitive treatment. After his wife and children joined him in Avignon in 1392, the doctor gradually lost regular contact with his friends in Prato and Florence. Emigration strained the bonds of amity too far, and the drying up of letters made its underlying instrumentality all too clear. Datini’s relations with Naddino d’Aldobrandino Bovattieri and Bassano da Pessina relied on regular correspondence; but in the long term, letters could not sustain friendship at a distance if its raison d’être disappeared, or if conflict destroyed its equilibrium. * * * Women were excluded from both the classical and mercantile discourses about friendship, epistolary or otherwise, by their poor levels of literacy and their supposed inherent moral inferiority. However, Margherita Datini learned the power of letters to establish and to maintain important relationships, including the bond of marriage. Although the couple’s correspondence came into being for entirely practical reasons because they were often apart, it provided a forum for communication about more than day-to-day matters.27 By its very unconventionality, letter writing freed the semi-literate Margherita to articulate feelings and attitudes that might otherwise have gone unexpressed given contemporary expectations that a wife should always defer respectfully to her spouse.28 Margherita even occasionally adopted the consolatory discourse asso26 

‘Chome che llo mio amore sia picholo e di pocho sapere e potere i’ molte cose, io mi riputo pure esere amicho di Dio in questa partte che grande bene volglo a l’amicho; e d’altra partte io vegio tutto dì che l’uomo vole bene a uno chatelino quando e’ gli fa festa; e pertanto tenete modi inverso di me ch’io non abia ragione di dire che voi siate di quelli disamorati inperò io mi riputo pure vostro amicho’: Francesco Datini to Naddino Bovattieri, 8.1.1390, in Hayez, ‘“Veramente io spero farci bene…”’, pp. 518–20. 27  For the editions of these letters, see note 7 above. 28  On this theme, see James’s introduction in Datini, Letters to Francesco Datini, trans. by James and Pagliaro, pp. 18–25.

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ciated with male friendship, writing in one of her earliest letters to Francesco that ‘great love’ prompted her chidings: In vain I remind you that you are now, like Monte, almost fifty years old, and you have always served the world. Now it is time to serve God. I don’t want you to think that I say this so I can rest too. I don’t regard a person as good who fails to cherish both the body and soul of a loved one.29

Here the idealistic classical assumption that virtue and true friendship go hand in hand, much discussed in elite discourse, has percolated down to Margherita who expressed the idea as a Christian concern for a loved one’s salvation, a familiar enough theme in contemporary sermons, which we know she listened to regularly.30 Margherita viewed many of Datini’s friendships sceptically, regarding her own shrewd ability to judge people’s sincerity and motivations as superior to her husband’s. She discouraged her spouse from confiding too much in employees and partners, pointing out that she was ‘worth all of them put together’ and was indeed his most loyal and trustworthy collaborator: ‘I remember things better than anyone else, and there is no one who knows more than I do what you like and don’t like. Having lived with you for ten years it would be a disgrace if I didn’t know your ways’.31 Datini implicitly acknowledged the truth of this claim, but there was no contemporary vocabulary for either correspondent to describe what the modern observer might recognize as a marital friendship. When articulating her views about entirely instrumental relationships, Margherita was less constrained. She dismissed her husband’s attempts to ingratiate himself with Florentine authorities in Prato, especially the Podestà — who had the power to lock up the merchant’s debtors and do other favours — as morally dubious and a waste of money. Unscrupulous officials cynically exploited her husband’s hospitality merely ‘to save the expense of their servants’.32 Attempts by Datini to persuade Margherita to be friendly to the wives of politically powerful men for financial gain caused conflict between the couple since Margherita refused to compromise her integrity by cultivating people she 29 

Margherita to Francesco Datini, 16 January 1386, in Datini, Letters to Francesco Datini, trans. by James and Pagliaro, pp. 44–46. 30  Datini, Letters to Francesco Datini, trans. by James and Pagliaro, p. 352. 31  Margherita to Francesco Datini, 31 March 1387, in Datini, Letters to Francesco Datini, trans. by James and Pagliaro, pp. 58–59. 32  Margherita to Francesco Datini, 8 February 1394, in Datini, Letters to Francesco Datini, trans. by James and Pagliaro, pp. 77–79.

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disliked, or with whom she had no genuine rapport. She sought the friendship, rather, of her neighbours in Prato: the wealthy lawyer and magistrate Piero Rinaldeschi and his wife Simona. Having observed that Rinaldeschi stood apart from factional politics and therefore had the moral authority to be a useful intermediary in both local and Florentine affairs, Margherita advised her husband not to neglect him. She herself often sought Rinaldeschi’s advice, assuring him of her husband’s loyalty and trust.33 In her efforts to combine neighbourliness with friendship, and instrumentality with genuine sentiment, she gave practical expression to what she considered to be the best kind of amity. * * * Margherita’s efforts to reform and refine her husband’s attitudes concerning friendship were bolstered by Lapo Mazzei’s interventions in a similar vein. In 1390, Datini and Mazzei formally declared themselves friends in an exchange of letters. Their relationship is well documented in subsequent correspondence (some four hundred letters from Mazzei to Datini, and a small number of the merchant’s replies which were copied before dispatch).34 This abundant and well-known collection has been studied and interpreted in various ways. Christian Bec and Iris Origo emphasized the saintly and unworldly character of the notary and his concern with the high ideals of true friendship.35 Richard Trexler, by contrast, pointed very convincingly to the instrumental aspects of the alliance. The evidence supports both idealistic and pragmatic interpretations of the relationship since, as Trexler himself points out, the ideal and the actual were in dynamic rapport with each other. The rhetoric of friendship both expressed and created genuine emotions, serving to make letters a quasi-formal contract for mutual services and reciprocal love.36 Despite similar backgrounds in Prato, the educational and temperamental gaps between Datini and Mazzei were considerable. At the beginning of their acquaintance, Datini deeply offended his new friend when in April 1392 he accused Mazzei of acting secretly on behalf of a former patron in Prato, Guelfo Pugliesi, who had sponsored his training as a notary. The absence of such partisan behaviour was the very reason Datini had sought out Mazzei’s friendship 33 

James, ‘A Woman’s Work in a Man’s World’. Datini’s letters to Mazzei are in ASPo, D.1087. For the other side of the correspondence, see Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro, ed. by Guasti. 35  Bec, Les marchands écrivains, pp. 113–30; Origo, The Merchant of Prato, pp. 217–40. 36  Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 131–58. 34 

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a year and a half before; but the merchant was slow to appreciate the need to curb his quick temper and suspicious demeanour with a man whose vision of amity had little in common with the cut and thrust of mercantile alliances.37 Although younger by fifteen years, Mazzei took on a pedagogical role in many of his letters, in effect turning the tables on Datini’s tendency to preach on the subject of friendship. With Mazzei’s guidance, Datini was gradually drawn into a learned circle of friends in Florence who shared a public-spirited and reformist religiosity that emphasized the notion that God was the essential intermediary in all human relationships. 38 The Florentine statesman Guido del Palagio (1335–99), Mazzei’s neighbour, was the most important member of this group in worldly terms, and the notary had originally introduced Datini to him in the hope that the influential political figure would help the merchant in his battles with Florentine tax officials.39 Although he described del Palagio to Datini as ‘a good fish’ to net, Mazzei took special care to brief the merchant about how he was to interact with a man whose moral sensibilities regarding friendship were finely tuned.40 Connected by marriage to the powerful Albizzi family, del Palagio sought to rise above partisan alliance, dispensing political and social favours, but embracing a vision of civic friendship that went far beyond the politics of patronage. For this reason alone he was described by one contemporary writer as ‘the foremost and most reputable (creduto) man in Florence’.41 Datini’s journey towards salvation in the last two decades of his life was inspired, at least in part, by del Palagio’s example and by spiritual genres of reading for which he had set aside little time in his younger days. An inventory of possessions in Datini’s Florentine residence, undertaken in 1400, lists a predictable small library of saints’ lives, gospels, and other pious literature. More unusually, a bound collection of the letters of the Vallombrosan hermit Giovanni dalle Celle also appears. This holy monk’s epistles were in effect spir37 

Lapo Mazzei to Francesco Datini, 5.4.1392, in Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro, ed. by Guasti, i, 22–24. 38  On the meaning of caritas in Florentine circles, see James and Kent, ‘Renaissance Friendships’, p. 121. 39  Ciappelli, ‘Il cittadino fiorentino e il fisco alla fine del Trecento e nel corso del Quattrocento’ and Kent and Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence, pp. 57–59. 40  Lapo Mazzei to Francesco Datini, 13.5.1392 and 2.3.1393, in Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro, ed. by Guasti, i, 26–27, 45–48. 41  Cronica di Buonaccorso Pitti, ed. by Bacchi della Lega, p. 76. See Allegrezza, ‘Guido del Palagio’.

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itual homilies, mostly addressed to del Palagio. Mazzei encouraged the hermit to write also to Datini, who carefully preserved the whole collection — as well as the writings of another of del Palagio’s learned spiritual mentors, the Augustinian theologian Luigi Marsili, whose Formula di confessione drew inspiration from Petrarch.42 An acknowledged friend of Marsili’s family, Petrarch had written warmly of the young canon in his Seniles.43 Marsili kept the great poet’s legacy alive, and his own epistles were eagerly read by disciples who similarly dedicated themselves to ideal friendship and brotherhood, in what scholars have acknowledged to be a proto-humanist circle linking Petrarch’s age with fifteenth-century humanism.44 Through contact with this Florentine group, Datini entered a new epistolary world of friendship: one dedicated to civic virtue and shared spirituality. Mazzei, helped by del Palagio, orchestrated a long campaign that resulted in Datini’s bequest of his very large fortune — for which he had no male heir — to the needy of Prato, an extraordinary gesture of Christian charity whose legacy endured for centuries.45 How much the merchant saw this ultimate act of friendship in instrumental terms — a ticket to forgiveness for his inevitable sins of usury committed as a banker and entrepreneur — remains moot. Mazzei (at Datini’s bedside in his friend’s final hours) wrote that when death was nigh the sick man was quite astonished, despite all his careful preparations, to discover that he, like everyone else, would die.46 In his will Datini acknowledged a number of the most significant friendships of his life, through the appointment of his executors and of the directors of the Ceppo nuovo, the charitable institution he set up to administer his bequest. The board consisted of trusted intimates: his faithful mentor in spiritual matters, Lapo Mazzei; Luca del Sera, who had directed the Catalonian company and then returned to Tuscany to replace Stoldo as the head of Florentine operations, marrying Datini’s niece Tina; Lionardo di Tommaso di Giunta, from the family of Datini’s boyhood guardian who became his son-in-law; and finally his wife Margherita, in whom he declared — in a final recognition of 42 

Piattoli, ‘In una casa borghese del secolo xiv’, pp. 119–20. See now Brambilla’s discussion of Datini’s library, ‘Libri and letture casa Datini’. See also Celle and Marsili, Lettere, ed. by Giambononi; Brambilla, ‘I mercanti lettori del Petrarca’, p. 216. 43  Petrarca, Seniles XV, Letters of Old Age, trans. by Bernardo and others, ii, 575–81. 44  Brambilla, Itinerari nella Firenze di fine trecento, pp. 107–74, and, edited by the same author, ‘Padre mio dolce’. 45  Giambonini, ‘Per Giovanni dalle Celle’. 46  See Guasti’s introduction to Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro, i, p. cxxxiii.

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her role as his efficacious collaborator — he had ‘great trust’.47 It appears, then, that Datini recognized the full extent to which true amity flourished within this small group. A man who described himself as ‘without family’ had created one through the bonds of marriage and brotherly collegiality.48 The power of friendship to provide comfort, support, and inspiration in a beleaguered postplague world ensured that this ubiquitous social bond remained both a source of fascination and the subject of spirited debate for Datini and his contemporaries. Instrumentalism was recognized as an inevitable aspect of friendship; but the epistolary evidence analysed here suggests that there was no firm consensus about exactly how it could coexist with the other vital ingredients of amity: mutual respect, trust, loyalty, and devotion to a friend’s material and spiritual welfare.

47  See the third codicil of Datini’s will in Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro, ed. by Guasti, ii, 307–10 (p. 308). 48  Nanni, Ragionare tra Mercanti, pp. 52–54.

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Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato Prato, Archivio Datini, 1087

Primary Sources Celle, Giovanni dalle, and Luigi Marsili, Lettere, ed. by Francesco Giambononi, 2  vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1991) Certaldo, Paolo da, ‘Libro di buoni costumi’, in Mercanti scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra mediovo e rinascimento, ed. by Vittore Branca (Milano: Rusconi, 1986), pp. 3–99 Cronica di Buonaccorso Pitti, ed. by Alberto Bacchi della Lega (Bologna: Romagnoli dall’Acqua, 1905) Datini, Margherita, Letters to Francesco Datini, trans. by Carolyn James and Antonio Pagliaro (Toronto: CRRS, 2012) Le lettere di Francesco Datini alla moglie Margherita (1385–1410), ed. by Elena Cecchi (Prato: Società Pratese di Storia Patria, 1990) Le lettere di Margherita Datini a Francesco di Marco (1384–1410), ed. by Valeria Rosati (Prato: Biblioteca dell’Archivio Storico Pratese, 1977) Mazzei, ser Lapo, Lettere di un notaro a un mercante del secolo xv, con altre lettere e docu­ menti, ed. by Cesare Guasti, 2 vols (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1880) ‘Padre mio dolce’: Lettere di religiosi a Francesco Datini. Antologia, ed. by Simona Brambilla (Roma: Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali. Direzione generale per gli archivi, 2010) Per la tua Margherita […] lettere di una donna del ’300 al marito mercante, ed. by Diana Toccafondi and Giovanni Tartaglione, CD-ROM (Prato: Archivio di Stato, 2002) Petrarca, Francesco, Letters of Old Age, trans. by Aldo Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992) San Concordia, Bartolommeo da, Ammaestramenti degli Antichi, ed. by Vincenzo Nan­ nucci (Firenze: Ricordi e Compagno, 1840) Signa, Boncompagno da, Amicitia, ed. by Sarina Nathan (Roma: Società Filologica Ro­ mana, 1909)

Secondary Works Allegrezza, Franca, ‘Guido del Palagio’, in Dizionario Biographico degli Italiani, xxxviii (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990) [accessed 13 May 2016] Bec, Christian, Les marchands écrivains: Affaires et humanisme à Florence 1375–1434 (Paris: Mouton, 1967)

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Brambilla, Simona, ‘I mercanti lettori del Petrarca’, Verbum, 7.1 (2005), 185–219 —— , Itinerari nella Firenze di fine trecento: Fra Giovanni dalle Celle e Luigi Marsili (Milano: Edizioni C.U.S.L., 2002) —— , ‘Libri e letture in casa Datini’, in Palazzo Datini a Prato: Una casa fatta per durare mille anni, ed. by Jérôme Hayez and Diana Toccafondi (Firenze: Edizioni Polistampa, 2012), pp. 257–59 Burke, Peter, ‘Humanism and Friendship in Sixteenth-Century Europe’, in Friendship in Medi­eval Europe, ed. by Julian Haseldine (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 1999), pp. 262–74 Caine, Barbara, ed., Friendship: A History (London: Equinox, 2009) Cassandro, Michele, ‘Aspects of the Life and Character of Francesco di Marco Datini’, in Francesco di Marco Datini: The Man, the Merchant, ed. by Giampiero Nigro (Firenze: Firenze Uni­ver­sity Press and the Fondazione Istituto Internationale di Storia Eco­ nomica ‘F. Datini’, 2010), pp. 3–51 Ciappelli, Giovanni, ‘Il cittadino fiorentino e il fisco alla fine del Trecento e nel corso del Quattrocento: uno studio di due casi’, Società e storia, 46 (1989), 823–72 Dunne, Michael, ‘Good Friends or Bad Friends? The Amicitia of Boncompagno da Signa’, in Amor amicitiae: On the Love That Is Friendship, ed. by Thomas Kelly and Philippe Rosemann (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 147–66 Frangioni, Luciana, Milano Fine Trecento: Il carteggio milanese dell’Archivio Datini di Prato, 2 vols (Firenze: Opus Libri, 1994) Giambonini, Francesco, ‘Per Giovanni dalle Celle: Ascesi, notariato e mercatura di fine Trecento a Firenze’, Rinascimento, 31 (1991), 133–54 Hayez, Jérôme, ‘Le rire du marchand: Francesco di Marco Datini, sa femme Margherita et les “gran maestri” florentins’, in La famille, les femmes et le quotidien (xive–xviiie siè­ cle): Textes offerts à Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed. by Isabelle Chabot, Jérôme Hayez, and Didier Lett (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006), pp. 407–58 —— , ‘“Veramente io spero farci bene…”: Expérience de migrant et pratique de l’amitié dans la correspondance de maestro Naddino d’Aldobrandino Bovattieri médecin toscan d’Avignon (1385–1407)’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 159 (2001), 413–539 James, Carolyn, ‘A Woman’s Work in a Man’s World’, in Francesco di Marco Datini: The Man, the Merchant, ed. by Giampiero Nigro (Firenze: Firenze Uni­ver­sity Press and the Fondazione Istituto Internationale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’, 2010), pp. 65–69 Kent, Dale V., Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence, The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) —— , The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence 1426–1434 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1978) Kent, Dale, and F. W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century (Locust Valley, NY: Harvard Uni­ver­ sity Center for Renaissance Studies, J. J. Augustin, 1982) Kent, F. W., Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1977)

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Kent, F. W., with Gino Corti, Bartolommeo Cederni and his Friends: Letters to an Obscure Florentine, Quaderni di Rinascimento (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rina­ scimento, 1991) Kent, F. W., and Carolyn James, ‘Renaissance Friendships: Traditional Truths, New and Dissenting Voices’, in Friendship: A History, ed. by B. Caine (London: Equinox Press, 2009), pp. 111–62 Kent, F. W., and Amanda Lillie, ‘The Piovano Arlotto, New Documents’, in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. by Peter Denley and Caroline Elam, Westfield Publications in Medi­eval Studies, 2 (London: Westfield College, Uni­ver­sity of London, 1988), pp. 347–67 Lafleur, Claude, Pétrarque et l’amitié (Paris: Vrin, 2001) Luzzati, Michele, ‘Francesco Datini’, in Dizionario biographico degli Italiani, xxxiii (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987) [accessed 13 May 2016] Martines, Lauro, April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici (London: Random House, 2004) Najemy, John, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli–Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Nanni, Paolo, Ragionare tra Mercanti: Per una rilettura della personalità di Francesco di Marco Datini (1335ca–1410) (Pisa: Pacini, 2010) Origo, Iris, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini 1335–1410 (New York: Knopf, 1957; republished with a foreword by Barbara Tuchman; Jaffrey, NH: David Godine, 1986) Piattoli, Renato, ‘In una casa borghese del secolo xiv’, Archivio storico pratese, 6.4 (1926), 112–23 Trexler, Richard C., Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980)

Michelangelo’s Brothers ‘at my shoulders’ William E. Wallace

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ichelangelo was one of five brothers; there were no sisters. With the death of his mother when he was just six years old and his stepmother when he was twenty-two, Michelangelo’s life revolved around his curmudgeonly father and a bevy of brothers. Despite an extensive family correspondence, the artist’s siblings remain shadowy figures.1 We know about them largely because of Michelangelo’s frequent complaints. For example, he worried about Gismondo who, like a peasant, ‘trudges after oxen’.2 He called 1  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, and Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others. English translations are from Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, otherwise they are mine. Fundamental information on Michelangelo’s family and brothers is found in Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, pp. ix–lix, and Anthony Molho’s appreciative review of the latter. See also Wallace, Michelangelo; Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing; and Pampaloni, ‘La famiglia di Michelangelo e il suo carteggio’. Regarding the extant correspondence and problems faced in utilizing this as a primary source, see Smyth, ‘Osservazioni intorno a “Il Carteggio di Michelangelo”’; Parker, “The Role of Letters”; Najemy, Between Friends; and Brown, Medicean and Savonarolan Florence. 2  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iv, 249.

William E. Wallace ([email protected].) is the Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington Uni­ver­sity in St Louis. Author of Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur (Cam­bridge, 1994), Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times (Cam­bridge, 2010), and many other studies, his main area of research is Italian Renaissance art, Michelangelo, and his contemporaries. He was a fellow (1990–91) and a visiting professor (2014) at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, and a visiting fellow at the American Academy in Rome (1996–97).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 169–180 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109704

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Giovansimone a ‘brute’ and a ‘wicked wretch’ who would do well to keep ‘his ass in his hand’.3 Another time, he refused a visit from Giovansimone, ‘because I don’t want to have the obligation of brothers at my shoulders’.4 In Italy and throughout European civilization, the family was fundamental to self-definition; a family’s status established an individual’s status. Despite petty concerns and frequent bickering, Michelangelo was devoted to his father and four brothers. Moreover, as Michelangelo often reminded them, he had worked all his life ‘to raise up the family’.5 He helped set up his brothers in the woolen cloth trade, regularly wrote and sent them money, dispensed advice, and, outliving every one of them, lamented their deaths and provided for the family’s few descendants. In honour of Bill Kent, who did so much to emphasize the central importance of the Renaissance family, I would like to restore Michelangelo’s brothers to their rightful place in the great artist’s life and affections.6 Of the approximately 500 extant letters that Michelangelo wrote, no less than 350 were directed to members of his immediate family.7 Michelangelo was preoccupied with ensuring the perpetuation of the family and guaranteeing the financial security of this tight-knit, if imperfect, brood of brothers. The firstborn Buonarroti child was Leonardo who in 1491, at age eighteen, entered the Dominican Order, probably due to the influence of Savonarola.8 Thus, did Michelangelo (b. 1475) — the second male child — become the de facto breadwinner of the family. No wonder that his father objected to Michelangelo’s artistic inclinations. Patriarch of a noble but impoverished family, the father would naturally wish for his son to pursue a more lucrative profession, marry well, and aspire to political office. Michelangelo did none of these, but thanks to his next younger brother, Buonarroto, these aspirations eventually were fulfilled. 3 

Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, i, 94. ‘io non voglio avere obrigo di frategli alle spalle’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, i, 27. 5  ‘Mi son sempre ingegniato di risuscitar la casa nostra’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iv, 249. 6  I fully credit F. William Kent for my interest; his Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, and Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence, co-authored with Dale V. Kent, were important inspirations for my own study of parenti, amici, vicini — the extensive personal and patronage networks essential for Michelangelo to realize his multiple commissions; see Wallace, Michelangelo at San Lorenzo. 7  Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing, p. 4, n. 8. 8  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, pp. xxviii–xxix. 4 

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Buonarroto Buonarroti was born in 1477, just two years after his famous artist-brother. Especially in the disruptive decade of the 1490s — when Michelangelo’s future remained highly uncertain — it was the artist’s brother who pursued a steadier, more lucrative, and socially respectable career. Following in the footsteps of his family forbears, Buonarroto became a merchant and entered the wool business — the engine of the Florentine economy. Buonarroto’s merchant training and early career are not well documented, but by 1502, when he was twenty-five, he had secured a highly desirable position in the Strozzi family household. There he lived and was employed as something of a business manager to Filippo Strozzi’s widow and two orphaned sons. 9 Buonarroto remained a business associate of the Strozzi for more than fifteen years — first as a ‘gharzone’, then as a manager, and finally as a joint investor in a wool shop located on Via Porta Rossa, in the heart of the Strozzi district of Florence.10 Thanks to the active support of his Strozzi patrons, Buonarroto was elected a prior of the Florentine Signoria in 1515, thereby attaining high political office and providing his family with their proudest achievement.11 In 1516, again thanks to Strozzi patronage, Buonarroto secured an advantageous marriage with the socially superior Della Casa family. Michelangelo was enormously proud of his brother who, in just a few short years, had achieved success in a public career and secured a prestigious marriage, both of which 9 

Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, pp. xxxiii. In 1504, for example, Buonarroto is documented assisting in the wedding of Lorenzo Strozzi to Lucrezia di Bernardo Rucellai — a family to whom the Buonarroti were closely related. In the record of expenses for the wedding, Buonarroto is recorded making a number of purchases on behalf of Lorenzo Strozzi and his mother, Selvaggia; see, for example, ‘spese per le nozze mia’ (Lorenzo Strozzi), and paid by Buonarroto ‘per tanti spese fatti per me in dette nozze’ (ASF, Carte Strozziane ser. V, 87, fol. 15v; see other notices of Buonarroto in the Strozzi household in ASF, Carte Strozziane, ser. V, 87, fols 7r, 11r, 17r, 20r, and 26r). According to the contemporary diarist Luca Landucci, the wedding was ‘celebrated with great pomp’ (Landucci, A Florentine Diary, trans. by de Rosen Jervis, p. 214). 10  ASF, Carte Strozziane, ser. V, 89, fol. 186r; see also fols 10r, 34r, 46r, 53r, and Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, pp. xxxiii–xxxv. From 1514, Buonarroto formed a joint company with Jacopo Gianfigliazzi, a kinsman of Selvaggia Strozzi, that was finally dissolved on the death of Buonarroto in 1528 (ASP, 750, fol. 376r, and ASP, 749, fol. 1v). For Buonarroto’s long-time relationship with his Strozzi patrons including the disappointment he caused Michelangelo for selling rather than gifting them a bronze dagger, see Wallace, ‘Manoeuvering for Patronage’. 11  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, pp. xxix–xxx.

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greatly enhanced the social standing of the entire Buonarroti family. It was during Buonarroto’s tenure as a Florentine prior that the family was granted the privilege of adding the Medici crest — or palle — to the Buonarroti coat of arms. This was the family’s finest hour, ‘especially given that it has been a long time since our house has enjoyed similar honours’, wrote a proud Buonarroto.12 It should be noted that the honour was granted not because of Michelangelo, who was already famous for carving the David and painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but because the artist’s younger brother was a high government official during the heady moment that Pope Leo X made his triumphal entry into Florence in 1515.13 We gain a vivid sense of Buonarroto from the direct and colourful letters he wrote to his family. Buonarroto once assuaged Michelangelo’s anger over the loss of an expensive marble column which, because of faulty tackle, fell while being lowered from the quarry and shattered into hundreds of useless pieces. Expressing his usual common sense in idiomatic fashion, Buonarroto wrote: ‘It seems to me that you must value your person more than a column, the whole quarry, the pope, and all the world […]. Come home by all means, and let everything else go to the bordello’.14 When Buonarroto was appointed a provincial governor in the remote Casentino, he regularly wrote of the citizens as a ‘disobedient and impossible bunch’ whom he further characterized as ‘scribes and Pharisees’ (‘scribe e Far[i]sei’) and, less politely, as ‘untamed’ bumpkins who ‘cotto il culo ne’ ceci’, that is, ‘cooked their ass in beans’.15 With an ear for colourful phrasing, Buonarroto wrote that he had to be immensely cautious, ‘because here they kill hares with their hands’.16 Since Buonarroto warned that it was a ‘place of brigands’, he advised his new wife to remain in Florence. Moreover, she was pregnant, and daily growing larger; indeed, the young man’s father reported that ‘her ass is so fat that she needs a barber’s chair’.17 12 

Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, 43. For which, see Shearman, ‘The Florentine Entrata of Leo X’. 14  ‘Parmi, sechondo me, che tu deba stimare più la persona tua che una colona e che tuta la chava e che il Papa e ttutto il mondo […] venga a ogni modo, e lacia andare ogni cosa al bordello’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, ii, 85. 15  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, 59, 167. 16  ‘perché qua le lepre si piglio[n] con le mani’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, 89–90. 17  ‘una seggiola da barbiere, perché ànno fatto sì grassi e chuli che non chapiono in su quelle lasciasti’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, 107. 13 

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It was thanks to Buonarroto’s marriage — the only one of the five Buonarroti brothers to marry — that the family gained a male heir. For Michelangelo, there was nothing more important than the entwined aspirations to ‘raise up the family’ and to perpetuate the patrician bloodline.18 Michelangelo could claim credit for the family’s financial security, but it was his younger brother who did the most to achieve the social and political success central to the aspirations of Florentine patrician families. Michelangelo’s other brothers are a different story. Giovansimone (b. 1479), the fourth brother, was four years younger than Michelangelo. Despite his study of Latin — the only one of the family to do so with any attention — and his dedication to writing poetry, he was a feckless and undisciplined character. Unlike Buonarroto, Giovansimone had little success in business or political life. Michelangelo made repeated efforts to assist Giovansimone in various business ventures, but was decidedly lukewarm to a proposed investment scheme that would have sent his younger brother to Lisbon and then to India.19 None of the brothers ever left Italy. No one inspired Michelangelo’s wrath more readily than Giovansimone. When the artist learned that his brother had abused their father, a furious Michelangelo wrote: ‘I have not, in these ten years, worse news’. He threatened to cut off his brother’s financial support, leaving the ‘wicked wretch with his ass in his hand’.20 To the miscreant, Michelangelo further fulminated: I have tried for some years now, by deeds and by kind words, to induce you to live virtuously and at peace with your father and with the rest of us; and yet you continually become worse […]. To be brief, I can tell you one thing for certain — that you possess nothing in this world; both your expenses and the roof over your head I provide for you, and have provided for some time now, for the love of God, believing you to be my brother like the others. Now I’m certain that you are not my brother, because if you were, you would not threaten my father. On the contrary, you are a brute, and as a brute I shall treat you.21 18  Michelangelo firmly believed in the antiquity of his family, which claimed descent from the medieval counts of Canossa. Moreover, Florentine families measured status by the number of years they had paid taxes to the Commune and the year of their citizenship which signaled their eligibility to hold public office. Michelangelo proudly declared that his family had paid taxes in Florence for three hundred years, thereby placing them among an elite group of ‘good families’. See Wallace, Michelangelo, pp. 36–39. 19  See Wallace, Michelangelo, pp. 97–98. 20  ‘Non ebi, è già dieci anni, la più chactiva novella’ and ‘tristo chol culo i’ mano’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, i, 93, 94. 21  ‘Io ò provato già più anni sono, con buone parole e chon facti, di ridurti al viver bene e

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But like many heated arguments in Italian families, Michelangelo’s anger quickly dissipated, even in the course of writing this letter: ‘I tell you once again’, Michelangelo concluded, ‘that if you mean to behave and to honour and revere your father, I will help you like the others, and in a little while will arrange for you to set up a good shop’.22 The fracas with Giovansimone was soon smoothed over; Michelangelo’s threats appear to have had their desired effect. However, Giovansimone never amounted to much. Despite their differences, Michelangelo was profoundly moved when he learned of his brother’s death in 1548. To his nephew, Michelangelo wrote: ‘The news of Giovansimone’s death reached me in your last letter. It has been a very great grief to me, because, old though I am, I had hoped to see him before he died and before I die myself.’ He added: ‘I should be glad to hear in detail how he died and whether he died having made confession and having received the Sacrament, together with all those things ordained by the Church; because if he received them and I knew of it, I should be less grieved.’23 As a profoundly religious person, such things mattered to Michelangelo. At age seventy-three, he was constantly thinking of his own impending death. Michelangelo’s mother, having survived four boys, died in 1481 giving birth to her fifth and final son, Gismondo.24 Francesca was likely still in her early twenties; Michelangelo was just six years old. Gismondo grew up to become the artist’s favourite brother after Buonarroto. In contrast to Giovansimone, Gismondo was of decent character, diligent, and conscientious. He did not have — as did Buonarroto and Michelangelo — influential friends or a sucim pace con tuo padre e con noi altri, e ctu peggiori tuctavia […] per abreviare, ti so dire per chosa cierta che tu non ài nulla al mondo, e lle spese e lla tornado di casa ti do io e òcti dato da qualche tempo in qua per l’amor de Dio, credendo che tu fussi mio fratello chome gli altri. Ora io son cierto che tu non se’ mio fratello, perché, se ctu fussi, tu non minacceresti mio padre; anzi se una bestia, e io come bestia ti tracterò’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, i, 95; Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, i, 52. 22  ‘Io t’ò a dir questo anchor di nuovo, che se·ctu voi actendere a far bene e a onorare e·rriverir tuo padre, che io t’aiuterò chome gli altri, e farovi infra pocho tempo fare una buona boctega’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, i, 96; Michelangelo, The Let­ ters, trans. by Ramsden, i, 52. 23  ‘Arei caro intendere particularmente che morte à facta e se è morto confessato e comunicato con tucte le cose ordinate dalla Chiesa; perché, quando l’abbia avute e che io il sappi, n’arò manco passione’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iv, 289; Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, ii, 86–87. 24  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, pp. xviii–xix. We know when Francesca di Miniato del Sera was married to Lodovico Buonarroti (1472), but not when she was born.

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cessful public career, but he did help Michelangelo in a business capacity by occasionally keeping records and accounts.25 Gismondo also played a part during the historic years of Florence’s Last Republic, 1527–30. As the combined forces of the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor descended upon Florence to lay siege to the city, the family prepared for the worst. Michelangelo was director of fortifications, and Gismondo, recently returned from a term as provincial governor in the Florentine hinterland, also contributed to the defense effort. To his father, Gismondo bravely declared himself ready ‘to die on these walls’ — a remark which prompted nineteenth-century historians to incorrectly assume he was a professional soldier, despite his advanced age of forty-eight.26 The siege was accompanied by rampant fear and inundating rains which prompted the family members to view the mounting misery as ‘the universal judgement of God’. But the crudest of the brothers, Giovansimone, resorted to more colourful language: ‘There is nothing in abundance here except mud and shit’; in fact, he added, ‘They are drowning in the shit’ (‘afoghiàno nella merda’).27 After the fall of Florence in 1530 and especially after Michelangelo moved to Rome in 1534, the youngest brother lived a modest and quiet life taking care of the family properties. While Michelangelo appreciated Gismondo’s attention to the family patrimony, he also worried that his brother did the family little credit by ‘making a peasant of himself ’ (‘essersi facto un contadino’).28 Conscious of gossip in Rome, Michelangelo advised his brother to leave off farming and live in Florence, ‘so that it should no longer be said here, to my great shame, that I have a brother at Settignano who trudges after oxen’.29 25  Michelangelo, I Ricordi, ed. by Ciulich and Barocchi, pp. 11–12, 30–33, 52–53, 76, 92–94, 104. Michelangelo’s confidant, Giovanni Francesco Fattucci, recommended that Gismondo ‘keep the books’ during Michelangelo’s work at San Lorenzo (Michelangelo, Il Carteg­ gio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iii, 22, 24). 26  ‘Io, per me, ò fatto buon quore, e se ci verrà ell chanpo volere morire in su queste mura’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, 323. 27  ‘Non ci è dovizzia se non di fangho e di merda’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio indiretto, ed. by Barocchi and others, i, 255 and 258. 28  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iv, 11. 29  ‘acciò che con tanta mia vergognia non si dica più qua che io ò un fratello che a Sectigniano va dietro a’ buoi’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iv, 249; Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, ii, 64. Lauro Martines describes the ‘vivacity of the city’s oral and gossipy life’ and the widespread concern with being mistaken as country peasants; see Martines, ‘The Italian Renaissance Tale as History’.

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For Michelangelo — as for most Florentines — nothing mattered so much as preserving honour and avoiding shame (‘vergognia’).30 The artist’s firm belief in the noble origins of the Buonarroti family (‘di nobilissima stirpe’) led him to admonish his brothers, and subsequently his nephew, to behave in a manner commensurate with their aristocratic pretensions.31 Michelangelo accepted Gismondo’s death — as he did those of his other brothers — with Christian resignation. To his nephew, he wrote: ‘I had the news of the death of Gismondo, my brother, but not without great sorrow. We must be resigned; and since he died fully conscious and with all the sacraments ordained by the Church, we must thank God for it’. 32 Having outlived his father and all four of his brothers, and having just turned eighty, Michelangelo was supremely conscious of his own mortality and the tenuous state of the family’s future. All hopes for perpetuating the lineage now depended entirely on a single male heir: Michelangelo’s nephew, Lionardo di Buonarroto Simone. Lionardo was the only surviving male child of Michelangelo’s favourite brother Buonarroto. Following Buonarroto’s death in 1528 — when Lionardo was just six years old — Michelangelo became a surrogate father for the young man.33 Michelangelo bought clothes for the boy and provided for his education. Michelangelo’s relationship with his only surviving nephew is one of the more affecting subplots of the great artist’s life. It developed over the course of more than forty years: Michelangelo grew old, Lionardo grew to manhood, and the two grew together. It is superficial to judge their relationship from a few oft-quoted letters that expose the artist at his querulous worst. Rather, it 30  On the importance of these terms, see Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writ­ ing, chap. 4. 31  On Michelangelo’s claim to patrician status, see Wallace, ‘Michel Angelus Bonarotus Patritius Florentinus’ and Wallace, Michelangelo, esp. chap. 2. In a letter to his nephew Lionardo, Michelangelo emphasized the noble origins of the family (‘di nobilissima stirpe’), and three times in the same short missive described the Buonarroti as ‘una casa onorevole’ (Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iv, 249–50). 32  ‘Lionardo, io ò per la tua la morte di Gismondo mio fratello e non senza grandissimo dolore. Bisognia aver patienza: e poi ch’è morto con buon conoscimento e con tucti e’ sacramenti che ordina la Chiesa, è da ringratiarne Idio’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, v, 50; Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, ii, 159. 33  For Michelangelo’s relationship with Lionardo, see Wallace, ‘“The Greatest Ass in the World”’ and Wallace, ‘Zio Michelangelo’. A drawing of a child in the Tylers Museum, Haarlem, may be a portrait of Lionardo, or alternatively, of his younger brother Simone who died before the age of three; see Wallace, ‘Michelangelo’s Baby’ and Chapman, Michelangelo Draw­ ings, p. 209.

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is the longue-durée that reveals Michelangelo becoming a doting patriarch, and Lionardo becoming the ever more solicitous, considerate, and loving nephew — a responsible young man on whom the future of the Buonarroti lineage depended. Michelangelo provided Lionardo with financial security and paternal advice. In turn, Lionardo, perhaps unwittingly but no less importantly, helped to focus and shape Michelangelo’s family ambitions. With Michelangelo in Rome and Lionardo living on the family farm in Settignano, the two maintained a regular correspondence throughout the final twenty-five years of the artist’s life. There are still extant more than two hundred letters that Michelangelo wrote to Lionardo, and he received approximately an equal number in return, although many fewer of these survive. The letters amply demonstrate just how important family and domestic affairs were to Michelangelo, and how crucial Lionardo was to the artist’s hopes for the family’s future. Thus, many of the letters are preoccupied with the nephew’s efforts to secure a good marriage, since, as Michelangelo reminded him, Lionardo was the only male heir and it was incumbent upon him ‘to remake and perpetuate our house’ (‘rifare et acrescere la casa’).34 It would require eight years and the consideration of more than a dozen potential spouses before Lionardo finally settled upon a suitable bride, Cassandra di Donato Ridolfi. Lionardo was thirty-one; she was, as was common, approximately half his age. Obviously relieved, Michelangelo expressed avuncular satisfaction and pride, and even some tender feelings: ‘I have derived the greatest pleasure from your satisfaction’; and he continued in the same generous vein: ‘thank her [Cassandra] and make her those offers on my behalf which you will know how to do by word of mouth better than I by writing’.35 Cassandra offered the family the most valuable gift of all by becoming pregnant and giving birth to ‘a beautiful son’, named Buonarroto after his grandfather, in April 1554. ‘All this has afforded me the greatest delight’, Michelangelo wrote, ‘God be thanked for it, and may He make him a good man, so that he may do honour to the family and uphold it’.36 In perpetuating the family and its 34 

Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iv, 210. On the importance of perpetuating a family name, see Klapisch-Zuber, ‘The Name “Remade”’. 35  ‘Della sodisfatione che n’ài n’ò grandissimo piacere […] Circa il salutarmi da sua parte, ringratiala e fagli quelle oferte da mia parte, che meglio saperrai fare a bocha che io non saperrei scrivere’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, v, 4; Michelangelo, The Let­ ters, trans. by Ramsden, ii, 143. 36  ‘di tucto n’ò avuto grandissima allegrezza. Idio ne sia ringratiato, e lo facci buono, acciò ci facci onore e mantenga la casa’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, v, 15;

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all-important honour, Lionardo had succeeded where every other Buonarroti male, except his own father, had failed. Contrary to his usual pessimism, Michelangelo occasionally indulged in expressions of tenderness and family pride: ‘As to all of you I assume you are well and Cassandra likewise. Commend me to her and tell her I pray God that she may have another fine son’.37 Unfortunately, however, infant mortality was a fact of life in early modern Europe. In the following five years, his nephew and wife lost an infant boy and three girls. Michelangelo always expressed his sorrow but was never surprised, repeating after each death some variant of his pessimistic reflection that ‘it is not our lot to multiply in Florence’. Lionardo and Cassandra ended up bearing a half dozen more children, but all these children except one were born after the artist’s death. In Michelangelo’s mind, the survival of his family — that for which he had worked his entire life — still depended on the slender thread of a single male child. Although gloomy, Michelangelo acknowledged Lionardo’s role in ensuring that ‘our family not come to an end’.38 * * * While we admire Michelangelo’s prodigious artistic accomplishments, it is well to recall that towards the end of his life, he looked upon art making as false and futile, even, as he wrote, a ‘great peril to my soul’.39 What mattered most was ‘raising up’ the family (‘una casa onorevole’) and ensuring the continuity of a noble lineage (‘di nobilissima stirpe’) which, thanks to his brother and nephew, continued until the mid-nineteenth century. Michelangelo surely was the outstanding member of the motley group of Buonarroti males, but it was his favourite younger brother and his brother’s son who ultimately accomplished what Michelangelo cherished most: a proud family name with an honoured position in Florentine society.

Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, ii, 146. Thanks to Buonarroto (1554–1628), the family line continued to the nineteenth century before dying out with Cosimo Buonarroti (d. 1858), who bequeathed the Casa Buonarroti and its contents to the city of Florence. 37  ‘e così della Cassandra. Rachomandami a lei e digli ch’i’ prego Iddio che la facci un altro bel figl[l]uolo mastio’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, v, 23; Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, ii, 147. 38  ‘acciò che l’esser nostro non finisca qui’: Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Barocchi and Ristori, iv, 376. 39  Michelangelo, The Poetry, ed. and trans. by Saslow, no. 282.

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Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane, ser. V, 87 (Giornale e ricordanze personali di Lorenzo e Filippo Strozzi) Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane, ser. V, 89 Archivio Salviati di Pisa, 749, Quaderno di Cassa 1525–27 Archivio Salviati di Pisa, 750, Entrata e Uscita 1525–28

Primary Sources Landucci, Luca, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, trans. by Alice de Rosen Jervis (London: Dent, 1927; repr. Freeport, NY: New World Book, 1971) Michelangelo, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. by Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori, 5 vols (Firenze, S.P.E.S.,1965–83) —— , Il Carteggio indiretto di Michelangelo, ed. by Paola Barocchi, Kathleen Bramanti, and Renzo Ristori, 2 vols (Firenze: S.P.E.S., 1988–95) —— , The Letters of Michelangelo, trans. by E.  H. Ramsden, 2  vols (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1963) —— , The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, ed. and trans. by James M. Saslow (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1991) —— , I Ricordi di Michelangelo, ed. by Lucilla  B. Ciulich and Paola Barocchi (Firenze: Sansoni, 1970)

Secondary Works Brown, Alison, Medicean and Savonarolan Florence: The Interplay of Politics, Humanism, and Religion (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011) Chapman, Hugo, Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2005) Kent, F. W., Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1977) Kent, F. W., and Dale V. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century (Locust Valley, NY: Harvard Uni­ ver­sity Center for Renaissance Studies, J. J. Augustin, 1982) Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ‘The Name “Remade”: The Transmission of Given Names in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. by L. G. Cochrane (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 283–309 Martines, Lauro, ‘The Italian Renaissance Tale as History’, in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. by A. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 313–30

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Molho, Anthony, Review of Il Carteggio indiretto, in Journal of Modern History, 62 (1990), 57–77 Najemy, John, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli–Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Pampaloni, Guido, ‘La famiglia di Michelangelo e il suo carteggio’, Archivio storico italiano, 148 (1990), 893–915 Parker, Deborah, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) —— , ‘The Role of Letters in Biographies of Michelangelo’, Renaissance Quarterly, 58 (2005), 91–126 Shearman, John, ‘The Florentine Entrata of Leo  X, 1515’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 38 (1975), 136–54 Smyth, Craig Hugh, ‘Osservazioni intorno a “Il Carteggio di Michelangelo”’, Rinascimento, 25 (1985), 3–17 Wallace, William E., ‘“The Greatest Ass in the World”: Michelangelo as Writer’, The Nor­man and Jane Geske Lecture, Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts (Lincoln: Uni­ver­sity of Nebraska Press, 2006) —— , ‘Manoeuvering for Patronage: Michelangelo’s Dagger’, Renaissance Studies, 11 (1997), 20–26 —— , ‘Michel Angelus Bonarotus Patritius Florentinus’, in Innovation and Tradition: Essays on Renaissance Art and Culture, ed. by D. T. Andersson and R. Eriksen (Roma: Edizioni Kappa, 2000), pp. 60–74 —— , Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2010) —— , Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994) —— , ‘Michelangelo’s Baby’, Master Drawings, 44 (2006), 358–61 —— , ‘Zio Michelangelo’, in Watching Art: Writings in Honor of James Beck / Studi di sto­ ria dell’arte in onore di James Beck, ed. by L. Catterson and M. Zucker (Todi: Ediart, 2006), pp. 263–70

Transmission of Intangible Goods in Vasari: Talent, Names, Kinship Christiane Klapisch-Zuber

Translated from the French by Jo Ann Cahn

W

hile historians have looked at many aspects of apprenticeship, it seems to me that they have paid less attention to the bond of affection and emotions that developed between master and apprentice rather than to the bond itself, to the forms that expressed it and described its nature. These forms and the words used for them were borrowed from the vast panoply of the language of kinship. They referred to ordinary social relationships and tried to approach what successful transmission kept most hidden. The verbal dressing of the relationship between master and apprentice deserves scrutiny, which I am going to do about an extreme, or particular, type of apprentice, the young artists in Florence. Dynasties of artists did certainly exist during the Renaissance. Historians of art have revealed how they were bound together by their work in common in a bottega, by the transmission from one generation to the next of model-books, tools, technical secrets, iconographic traditions, and esthetic sensibilities, as well as by their shared name.1 Here other lines of artistic ‘dynasty’ or lineage 1  See chaps 2, ‘Il tirocinio dell’artista’, and 3, ‘Dinastie di pittori’, in Gregori and others, Maestri e botteghe, pp. 91–146. Thomas, The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany.

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber ([email protected]) is Directrice d’études honoraire at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her most recent publications are Retour à la cité: Les magnats florentins, 1340–1440 (Paris, 2006) and Le voleur de paradis: Le Bon larron dans l’art et la société, 1300–1600 (Paris, 2015); she also coedited (with Myriam Cottias and Laura Downs) Le corps, la famille et l’Etat: Hommage à André Burguière (Rennes, 2010).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 181–198 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109705

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will be examined, cemented by bonds that were spiritual or at least elective and fictitious, that is, not based on blood or marriage. Let us follow the map sketched by Vasari, who dedicated his monumental Lives of the Artists to transmission from artist to artist, the foundation of the progress of art in the Renaissance. As Paul Barolsky pointed out so convincingly, Vasari’s Lives are organized around a dual idea: that artists constitute a vast family connected by concordia, friendship and mutual assistance, and that art, Florentine art in particular, is structured like a family tree, whose branches can each be traced back to a founding father.2 This, of course, was Giotto (1266–1337) who, with Arnolfo di Cambio (c. 1240–1302), was the source of the revival that began at the end of the thirteenth century. These are weighty considerations, for the history of art has relied ever since upon the artistic filiations recognized by Vasari — from Giotto through Michelangelo — in considering questions of imitation, transmission, and original creation, that is, of the genius of a particular artist in his relationships with his predecessors.3 In order to consider the nature of these bonds of filiation that connected artists, I will use their names and their naming as the narrative thread of my survey. Name here means the entire set of designations attached to an individual, some referring to his unique position as a baptizee or autonomous individual in society (nome, baptismal or given name, nickname), others to his place in a direct family line (patronymic), and others finally to his membership in a descent group or casa (cognome, family name). Vasari worked with various written sources and built a number of the Lives around the artist’s name or at least leaned heavily on it.4 He repeatedly examined artists’ names, subjecting them to sometimes embarrassed analyses that bear witness to the importance in his eyes of naming in the transmission of talents and in the construction of the lineages he intended to identify. In his Life of Brunelleschi, for instance, Vasari claims to know the old customs, those that prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for designating people.5 As proof, he provides us with a rather 2 

See the trilogy by Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose; Why Mona Lisa Smiles; Giotto’s Father. On Vasari’s methods of inquiry and sources, see Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, pp. 169–74. 4  For some of his documentary evidence, see notes 38 and 39 below, when Vasari cites his sources; and Murray, An Index of Attributions. 5  The main editions of the 1568 version of Le Vite are Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. by Milanesi; and Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e arthitettori, ed. by Bettarini and Barocchi (with the texts of both editions, 1550 and 1568) which I quote as Vasari, Le Vite. The ‘Vita d’Arnolfo di Lapo’ is in ii, 47–57. Gaetano Milanesi published many documents on the life and work of various artists: Nuovi documenti. 3 

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far-fetched demonstration aimed at illustrating the blood ties that, according to him, link Filippo di ser Brunellesco di Lippo (1377–1446) to a Lapi family, one of whose ancestors is supposed to have been Arnolfo, called there ‘Arnolfo di Lapo’ rather than ‘Arnolfo di Cambio’.6 This change is intended to reveal the relation of blood as well as talent between these two artists separated by more than a century. As Paul Barolsky perceptively noted, the continuity between the model of the Duomo of Florence attributed to Arnolfo and the Dome Brunelleschi built to complete it called for a transcription in terms of blood kinship. An observation of another aspect of the filiations Vasari established between artists, concerning patronymics and the relationship between masters and their pupils, enables us to extend this model. More generally but also more enigmatically, given Tuscan custom, it may illuminate the nature of the bonds that tie together the great family of artists.7 A revealing example is Vasari’s designation of the artistic descendants of Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521) and of Cosimo Rosselli (1439–1507). Piero was Cosimo Rosselli’s pupil and followed him to Rome when Cosimo was commissioned to paint four of the frescoes to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel. He was a valued and cherished assistant whom Cosimo ‘had with him and who was always called Piero di Cosimo’; Piero was according to Vasari the son of a goldsmith, Lorenzo di Antonio, ‘but he was never called anything but Piero di Cosimo’.8 Vasari sheds light on this statement by adding that ‘in truth we have no fewer obligations towards [a master] and we should consider as our true father he who teaches us virtù and enables us to behave well and thus ensures our welfare rather than he who engendered us and simply gave us life’.9 If Piero was thus called ‘di Cosimo’ and not ‘di Lorenzo’, if the public knew him only under this 6 

In his edition of Vasari’s Vite, p. 558, Karl Frey rejected most of the reconstruction of Arnolfo’s Life by Vasari. See Gardner, ‘Arnolfo di Cambio’, p. 141. On Arnolfo, see Franchetti Pardo, Arnolfo di Cambio e la sua epoca. 7  On artisans’ and artists’ families, see Haines, ‘Artisan Family Strategies’. 8  ‘e fra molti discepoli ch’egli [Cosimo] aveva, vedendolo [Piero] crescere con gli anni e con la virtù, gli portò amore come a figliuolo, e per tale lo tenne sempre’: Vasari, Le Vite, iv, 59–71 (Vita di Piero di Cosimo) (p. 60). 9  ‘poiché invero non meno si ha obligo e si debbe riputare per vero padre quel che c’insegna la virtù e ci dà il bene essere, che quello che ci genera e dà l’essere semplicemente’: Vasari, Le Vite, iv, 59; ‘Piero, figluolo d’un Lorenzo orafo et allievo di Cosimo Rosselli, e però chiamato sempre e non altrimenti che Piero di Cosimo’: ibid., p. 60. See Bacci, Piero di Cosimo, pp. 61–62.

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patronymic and transmitted it to posterity, it was because two types of fatherhood disputed, and Cosimo’s paternity, created by the pupil’s debt towards his master, prevailed over Lorenzo’s paternity of the flesh, rapidly left behind. Through Piero di Cosimo, Cosimo’s artistic line continued until the end of the fifteenth century. Piero had as pupil Andrea del Sarto and briefly Pontormo, who also worked in Andrea del Sarto’s studio, and this ‘line’ of artists continued through Bronzino, for two generations of the Allori. About the connections between Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Allori, Elizabeth Pilliod showed that a filial-type relationship developed very early between Bronzino and the Allori orphans, his de facto wards.10 After living long years with Bronzino, the Allori were his heirs; they built a joint tomb for the ‘Allori di Bronzino’, which might be called a ‘family patronymic’. It is inscribed in the coat of arms that they created for themselves, and it renewed, a century after Cosimo Rosselli and his followers, the fictitious line created by education and by ‘love’ between successive generations of painters. Piero di Cosimo’s biological father, an artisan, was a ‘good father’ in that he recognized his son’s vocation and placed him with a painter, just as Giotto’s father was able to surrender his son and his paternal function to Cimabue. Like Cimabue towards Giotto, his creato, Cosimo took this ‘gift’ of a child and united the paternal functions of material nurture and education: not only did he love Piero ‘like a son and always treated him as such’, but he taught him all that he could and enabled him to develop his talent and choose his own path in art and, very quickly, to surpass him. Vasari’s Lives are full of portraits, complementary or more often contrasted, of good and bad fathers, patrons, and masters: men in three different roles sharing, unequally and successively, the responsibilities that, in the reality of that time, should have fallen to the biological father. I mention patrons here because they worked in relay with the father, taking over the young man’s support and upkeep and finding him the master who would uncover his virtù. The Lives include a good number of patrons, starting with those of Vasari and of his friend Francesco Salviati (1510–63) who, we note, was known by the family name of his protector, Cardinal Salviati, and not by his birth name, Rossi: ‘And now, as Francesco was in the service of cardinal Salviati, as we have said, and was known to be his creature, he began to be called Cecchino Salviati; and being soon known by no other name, he retained that appellation to the day of his death’; moreover, his pupil Giuseppe Porta also, ‘from respect to his master, was called Salviati’.11 10  11 

Pilliod, ‘Bronzino’s Household’ and Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori. ‘E perché Francesco stava, come s’é detto, col cardinale Salviati et era conosciuto per

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The vocabulary of patronage is very close to that of the spiritual kinship attributed at christening: Poliziano, a protégé of the Medici, saw himself as ‘born of my father, but reborn of Cosimo de’ Medici’.12 Following Paul Oskar Kristeller and Gerhardt Ladner, we must certainly read this as an indicator of the ideology of the ‘Renaissance’, the rebirth and resurrection of the arts by great men.13 But I think that such an affirmation refers first of all to the language of spiritual kinship: he who permits this renaissance, this rebirth, the patron, is a ‘go-between’ as essential for the youth’s entry into the family of artists as the godfather is for the baptism, when he introduces the newborn into the spiritual family of Christians.14 In cases where Vasari’s biographies do not mention a ‘middle-man’ patron, we should perhaps see the master himself as the gobetween who introduces his pupil into the higher community of artists. Let me briefly consider the concepts that the society of that time had of the respective roles of the biological father, the foster or adoptive father, and the godfather. This will enable us to see the specificity of artistic filiations. The components of names play a revelatory role here, perhaps even beyond what Vasari has already let us glimpse. * * * Society in the Middle Ages thought of itself as a kinship network. Kinship was omnipresent, and social relationships of every order were expressed in its terms. All men were sons of God and thus brothers, in what Jérôme Baschet has described as ‘generalized brotherhood’.15 This relation of spiritual kinship between men, which came from their common kinship with God, was nonetheless also thought of ‘in the same ways as carnal kinship’, in terms of descent, affinity, brotherhood, at the same time as the absence of any carnal ties was demanded. It circulated a spiritual principle that opened up the right to spiritual goods — personal salvation, heavenly bliss. Carnal relationships, on the suo creato, cominciando a essere chiamato e non conosciuto per altro che Cecchino Salviati, ha avuto insino alla morte questo cognomen’: Vasari, Le Vite, v, 511–36 (Vita di Francesco detto de’ Salviati) (p. 516). 12  Kristeller, Il pensiero filosofico di Marsilio Ficino, p. 12 n. 30, quoting Poliziano. 13  Ladner, ‘Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance’. 14  Filippo Villani described the physician Taddeo as ‘a child reborn’ (‘come un fanciullo rinato’) when at the age of thirty years he began to educate himself. Villani, De origine civitatis, ed. by Tanturli, p. 127. 15  Baschet, Le sein du Père, pp. 30–62.

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other hand, led to the transmission of material goods and the symbolic property or signs of social identity associated with them. Baptism, the principal channel of spiritual kinship, marked the social birth of the individual, who thus received his name and entered into the community of Christians under the supervision of a godfather. In that regard, spiritual kinship manifested its unquestionable supremacy over carnal kinship, which was excluded from the rites of baptism. Spiritual kinship nonetheless interfered with its carnal counterpart, for it created taboos that obviously affected social life: the bonds that it tied between spiritual and carnal kin were useful in the conduct of daily business, but entailed as their corollary the limitation of marriage between these two groups. Similarly, the generalized brotherhood of the baptized, to function fully, had to rely on institutions such as confraternities to implement in daily life the mutual assistance and love it supposed. Each Christian society has adapted this hierarchical relationship between carnal and spiritual kinship to its own problems and given a particular colour to the social effects it anticipated from it. Tuscan society at the end of the Middle Ages and in the early Renaissance was no exception: Florence, for example, recognized, with Dino Compagni, the pre-eminence and ideal of the generalized fraternity forged by the rite of baptism in the Communal Baptistery, San Giovanni.16 But the bonds of comparatico it created between the infant’s carnal and spiritual kin were twisted by insisting on their ‘utility’ and on the worldly friendships that the ritual might induce more than on the spiritual bonds between godfather and godchild.17 In Tuscany, the ideology of lineage, of the casa (that is, the kinship group that bestowed on the individual a large portion of his social identity), and the pre-eminence of patrilineal structures had several consequences: on inheritance, first, and next on the place of women, but also on the bonds that linked the child’s carnal family to his spiritual kin and on the limited role allocated to the godfather. According to the Church, the godfather’s role, which is first to introduce the child into the Christian community, continues in the godchild’s religious education. For Thomas Aquinas, nonetheless, this is an eminent rather than an actual responsibility. In this sense, the Florentines shared Aquinas’s concept of the godfather’s (and even more the godmother’s) role. The available evidence shows that it was extremely rare for 16 

‘Dear citizens, who received the sacred baptism from this font, you are by this reason forced to love each other as beloved brothers’ (‘Cari e valenti cittadini, i quali comunemente tutti prendesti il sacro baptesmo di questo fonte, la ragione vi sforza e strigne ad amarvi come cari frategli’): Compagni, Cronica, ed. by Luzzatto, p. 77. 17  See Alfani, Padri, padrini, patroni and Alfani with Gourdon, Spiritual Kinship in Europe.

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godfathers to show any pedagogical interest at all in their godchildren after the baptism, even when they carefully maintained a friendship with the father and provided the reciprocal services implied in this spiritual kinship. The education of heirs and of the girls who were given in marriage to other case was the responsibility of their patrilineal kin, or, in the worst of cases, of their other blood relatives. That is, spiritual kinship, for the godchild at least, had a very transient role; for his parents, it was reduced to its social utility and is thus comparable to the relationship that linked a patron to his clientele.18 The marginality of spiritual kinship in relation to the imperatives of the earthly perpetuation of the lineage is perfectly expressed in the attribution of a given name to the child.19 Unlike many societies in contemporary Europe, the Italians in the centre and north of the peninsula of the late medieval period were loath to give the godfather the honour of transmitting his own first name to his godson.20 At baptism, he gave to the child the first name or names the family had chosen. And it was of course in the casa’s stock of first names that the parents, especially the father, chose the names for their child. What mattered to the family was to bestow a given name that first of all placed the child in the paternal or maternal lineage and then, in second and third position, put him under the protection of a saint or rendered homage to the saints to whom the family had a special devotion. Before 1500 it was rare for one of these two or three given names to be replaced by that of a prestigious godfather. An individual’s personal given names had little to do with the spiritual kinship entered into at baptism. Like education, naming was within the nearly exclusive province of his carnal kin. The individual, in Tuscany, was generally designated by a patronymic, or a series of patronymics — his father’s and perhaps his grandfather’s given names attached to his own, as Filippo di ser Brunellesco di Lippo (Lapi). 21 When there was (and it existed only in the urban ruling class) a cognome, or collective family name, it was used mainly in politics, in commerce, and in litigation. Each man was therefore in the public’s eyes most especially his father’s son and perhaps also the descendant of a string of male forebears in a direct paternal line. Inclusion of a woman among these male references was exceptional and generally a sign of illegitimacy or, perhaps, of a father’s loss that the mother compensated — as Vasari said in explaining Piero della Francesca’s matronym18 

Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Compérage et clientélisme’. Klapisch-Zuber, ‘The Name “Remade”’. 20  Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Parrains et filleuls’. 21  Vasari, Le Vite, iii, 137–98 (Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi) (p. 139). 19 

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ic.22 In Florence, kinship was established and expressed by patrilineal filiation. Working on these chains of given names, any contemporary or amateur genealogist could reconstruct an entire lineage or the paternal kinship between two persons by climbing up lines of individual filiation through men and then climbing back down others from the node where they met in the given name of a shared ancestor. Accordingly, when Vasari mentioned a patronymic substitution affecting an artist, he was breaking the line of natural filiation, isolating that artist from his carnal ancestry and causing him to be doubly ‘reborn’: within the vast spiritual fraternity of artists and in a particular ideal lineage. Other practices in Italy could engender these ‘fictive’ or putative kinships, and one must look at them if one wants to understand better the kinship created by the bond between master and pupil among artists.23 The first type was adoption, or rather the practices that substituted for adoption, which no longer existed as a pure legal form inherited from Roman law in the communal societies of the end of the Middle Ages. Classical adoption responded to the need for legitimate heirs. That Florentine testators preferred heirs of their own blood, even distant, was all the more reason for the desuetude of legal adoption.24 Even legitimated natural children and bastards (born in adulterous relationships) could, if their father bequeathed them anything, expect a vigorous counteroffensive, often successful, from his blood kin, who would take any steps to prevent the fulfillment of his last wishes.25 The principal source of ‘adoptive sons’ in Florence was the orphanage, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, which placed abandoned children in families that sought affection, or an insurance of support in their old age, or simply domestic servants.26 This placement of trovatelli, sometimes designated by the person into whose care the child was given as filius adoptivus, in no way made the child a legal heir. At the very most, it promised some job training for boys taken into a family, a dowry for girls, a final bequest in the very best of cases, but without transmitting to the child either the name or the ‘social status’ of the ‘adopter’. The temporary shifts of paternal responsibility towards a patron or master were often presented by Giotto’s or Rosselli’s contemporaries in terms of adoption. ‘Adoption’ in Tuscany was similar to spiritual kinship, to the extent 22 

Vasari, Le Vite, iii, 257–67 (Vita di Piero della Francesca) (p. 258). See Jussen, Patenschaft und Adoption im frühen Mittelalter. 24  Klapisch-Zuber, ‘L’adoption impossible’. 25  Kuehn, ‘L’adoption à Florence à la fin du Moyen Âge’. 26  Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence, pp. 243–59. 23 

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that, based on charity or at least claimed to be, it was separate from and unattached to concerns about the transmission of material property. Evidence for this comes from a note that the painter Neri di Bicci included in his book of ricordanze: he mentioned there in 1473 receiving a child whose father had died and whose mother ‘gave him freely as a son’ to Neri. He said he wanted to raise the boy as his ‘spiritual son’.27 Neri di Bicci (1419–91) did not claim in this case to take this seven-year-old child as an apprentice or pupil, and nothing in the rest of the ricordanze indicates that the miller’s orphan became his pupil. But the case shows that the various forms of kinship in Florence were highly interconnected: they intertwined in particular in the concepts arising from the placement of children taken in as charity. The godfather relationship did not create filiation any more than these local forms of ‘adoption’: it did not involve a name change and did not make the godchild the heir of his godfather. Unlike these forms of adoption, the godfather– godchild relationship did not involve the transfer or placement of the child and created no obligation of support. All of these, nonetheless, created symbolic kinship, overt and highly controlled by the Church for godparents, more hesitant, irregular, and always revocable for children placed for ‘charity’. Providing nurture to a child or youth sufficed to create rights, obligations, and bonds of affection similar to those linking parents and children in biological families. We see these ambivalences and intersections again when we look at the status of apprentices and the transmission of skills related to apprenticeship.28 It transmitted intangible goods, that is to say, the skills required for the practice of a craft, and sometimes material goods as well, when the master gave or bequeathed to the apprentice his work tools and, especially, a social position and identity. The master’s educational responsibility towards the apprentice did not presuppose that the biological father had abandoned his patria potestas; in daily life, nonetheless, the master was delegated explicitly or implicitly with the power to educate the young apprentice as well as the duty to nurture, maintain, and shelter him under his roof. Artisan apprenticeship contracts preserved from the end of the fourteenth through the beginning of the sixteenth century show a change in this institution over time: the master acquired more clearly the position of an employer, renting the youth’s labour power and augmenting his remuneration as his work became profitable. In this sense, the status of an artisan’s apprentice grew progressively closer to that of a salaried worker; it thus 27  ‘mi donò e concedette liberamente per figliuolo’, ‘per mio ispirituale figlio’: Neri di Bicci, Le Ricordanze, ed. by Santi, p. 419. 28  Gregori and others, Maestri e botteghe, pp. 91–124.

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excluded a more disinterested type of relationship, as a spiritual bond between master and apprentice might be supposed to be. One cannot rule out the possibility that an artisan’s apprentice might have inherited the name or cognome of his master when he took over the bottega, and one finds some examples of this, among merchants at least. In that setting it was not rare for an agent (fattore) of a trading company who received testamentary gifts from his employer’s will to be required in return to maintain the company under its original name, that is, the deceased’s name.29 The apprenticeship of young artists became ever closer to that of young artisans. As the pupil improved and became a source of profit on the art market, the master might start to pay him while continuing to keep the net profit from his work. Nonetheless, Piero di Cosimo’s natural father, Lorenzo di Antonio, reported on his 1480 tax form that his eighteen-year-old son Piero received no salary from Cosimo.30 In any case, the idyllic vision of artistic apprenticeship that Vasari offers must not deceive us. Although sometimes masked by a deceptive adoption and a sort of ideal paternity, an apprentice’s condition could be hard indeed. In Padua, Francesco Squarcione (1397–1468), Andrea Mantegna’s master — from whom Andrea had so much trouble extricating himself — repeatedly ‘adopted’ (so he called it) apprentices, including Mantegna. The two surviving contracts tying apprentices to him under colour of adoption, from 1455 and 1466, promised to give the apprentice his property on condition that the youth not commit any peccadilloes before he was established. Neither of those pupils held out until the end. Mantegna himself, considered by Squarcione and by the painters’ corporation (in 1441 and 1445) as his ‘son’ and by Vasari as his ‘adoptive son’, was probably adopted under similar conditions (the contract has not been found) and had to go to court to obtain his freedom.31 The master thus obtained perfect submission from the pupil who, totally bound, was not remunerated at all for his work and lost everything if he left the master before his death.32 * * * 29 

Personal communication of Jérôme Hayez. ‘Piero suo figlio ista al dipintoro e non à salaro. Riparasi in bottegha di Cosimo a Santa Maria in Campo’: cited by Jouffroy, Piero di Cosimo, p. 6. 31  Walter, ‘Andrea Mantegnas “Darbringung Jesu im Tempel”’. On Mantegna’s life in Mantua, see Agosti, Storia di Mantegna, in Su Mantegna, i, 11–23. 32  On the relations between Andrea Mantegna and his adoptive father, Jacopo Squarcione, see Vasari, Le Vite, iii, 547–56 (Vita d’Andrea Mantegna) (pp. 548 and 549). 30 

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There were thus many paths by which a form of kinship could be created, and it could sometimes be transcribed and made visible in the younger man’s name. None of these forms of kinship created by any of the practices I have described here seems to affect the patronymic in a way as clearly as in the case of artists. Let us go back to Vasari then to understand what the inclusion of the master’s name as a patronymic in the pupil’s name reveals of his understanding of the bonds that link the world of artists. Vasari, we know, established his artistic filiations according to attributions and datings not accepted today. It seems absurd, for example, that he could make Jacopo di Casentino (1299–1349 or 1358?) (inserted among the direct descendants of Giotto because he was the pupil of Taddeo Gaddi (known 1332–6633) or, as he says later, of Agnolo Gaddi (after 1369–96)) Spinello Aretino’s master, when Jacopo died in 1349 or 1358 and Spinello (c. 1350–1410) was born around the same time. Vasari continues his chronological confusion by giving to Spinello as a pupil Bernardo Daddi, who died in 1348.34 When he constructed his lineages of artists, Vasari relied very often on clues that disregarded — even scorned — chronology and that he inferred from stylistic affinities and from names. (As I said in the introduction, name here means the entire set of designations attached to an individual — given name, patronymic, nickname, and cognome.) The presence of the same given name or patronymic led him to create composite artists or to link by blood people unrelated to one another, such as the Bartoli family, where he put together Taddeo di Bartolo (1362?–1422), Bartolo di Fredi, and Domenico di Bartolo.35 Consciously or not, Vasari manipulated names in order to manifest the kinship of aesthetic aspirations and the affinity of artistic traditions, by gliding from the domain of the transmission of technique and style to the field of blood kinship. Thus Simone Martini (1284?–1344) was by a perhaps intentional misreading called Memmi, like Lippo Memmi his brother-in-law (known 1317–47); this enabled Vasari to establish a biological brotherhood between two painters whose style he thought close.36 On the other hand, he did not report the real sibling relationship between Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his 33 

On Taddeo Gaddi, see Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi. ‘Iacopo di Casentino […] fu acconcio con Taddeo Gaddi’, ‘mostrò a Spinello Aretino i principii di quell’arte, che a lui fu insegnata da Agnolo e che Spinello insegnò poi a Bernardo Daddi’: Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 271–75 (Vita di Jacopo di Casentino) (pp. 271 and 273). 35  Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 309–12 (Vita di Taddeo Bartoli). 36  Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 191–200 (Vita di Simone sanese) (p. 192). 34 

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brother Pietro (1280?–1348?), whom he renamed ‘Laurati’.37 He knew that the patronymic indicated paternal filiation: for example, Andrea Tafi had a pupil, Antonio d’Andrea Tafi, ‘probably his son’.38 Nonetheless he often cast doubt on real filiations, to make a son into a simple pupil, thereby making clear that for him the patronymic indicated the ideal lineage of artists as well as carnal filiation. Accordingly, he dethroned ‘Francesco nicknamed son of maestro Giotto’ from his true position as Giotto’s son by taking the patronymic as a clue to the artistic heritage: he saw only the pupil in this painter.39 His discussion of the personality of the artist called Giottino (known 1324–69) is particularly enlightening.40 Contrary to the opinion of most of his sources, Vasari — correctly — did not think that this Giottino was Giotto’s son; he thought instead that his real identity was ‘Maso (Tommaso) di Stefano’, the son of Stefano, a follower of Giotto high in his affections.41 He created a real continuity between Giotto and Giottino based upon teaching and transmission; but Giottino was a composite, largely fictitious artist made up of three different artists: ‘Maso di Banco, Giotto [son] of maestro Stefano — the true Giottino presented [by Vasari] as the father of Giottino — and Tommaso di Stefano, a sculptor’.42 This Giottino, reinvented by Vasari, ‘after he learned from his father [Stefano] the elements of painting, still very young, decided to imitate to the maximum and with great zeal Giotto’s manner rather than that of his father’.43 37 

Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 143–47 (Vita di Pietro Laurati [Lorenzetti]); pp. 179–83 (Vita d’Am­ brogio Lorenzetti). 38  ‘Fu discepolo, e forse figliuolo del medesimo, Antonio d’Andrea Tafi, il quale fu ragionevole dipintore’: Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 73–78 (Vita d’Andrea Tafi) (p. 77). 39  ‘Nel vecchio libro della Compagnia de’ Dipintori, si truova essere stato discepolo del medesimo un Francesco detto di maestro Giotto, del quale non so altro ragionare’: Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 95–122 (Vita di Giotto) (pp. 119–20). 40  Bellosi, ‘Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca’. 41  ‘Stimasi che Maso detto Giottino, del quale si parlerà di sotto, fusse figliuolo di questo Stefano; e se bene molti per l’allusione del nome lo tengono figliuolo di Giotto, io, per alcuni stratti ch’ò veduti e per certi ricordi di buona fede scritti da Lorenzo Ghiberti e da Domenico del Grillandaio, tengo per fermo ch’ e’ fosse più tosto figliuolo di Stefano che di Giotto’: Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 133–40 (Vita di Stefano pittore fiorentino e d’Ugolino sanese) (p. 137). On ‘Giottino’, see Parenti, ‘Aspetti della pittura fiorentina alla metà del Trecento’. 42  See André Chastel in his edition and translation of Vasari, Les Vies des meilleurs peintres, ii, 253. 43  ‘dopo l’avere imparato da suo padre i primi principii della pittura, si resolvé, essendo ancor giovanetto, volere, in quanto potesse con assiduo studio, essere immitatore della maniera di Giotto più tosto che di quella di Stefano suo padre’: Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 229–50 (Vita di Tommaso fiorentino pittore detto Giottino) (pp. 229–30).

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The nickname, ‘Giottino’, that this Tommaso received and which superseded his true name thus makes explicit that in the eyes of Giottino’s contemporaries who believed him to be Giotto’s son he perpetuated and even surpassed Giotto’s maniera, as he did in the eyes of Vasari, who restored to him his role of disciple.44 Because Giottino imitated Giotto so zealously, ‘it was said that Giotto’s spirit was in him’.45 This is the lesson that underlies Vasari’s erroneous reconstructions. If patronymics taken from father and master are rival or even interchangeable for artists, it is because the master combines with the father’s nurturing qualities those of a transmitter of ‘spirit’. In his Life of Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455), Vasari did not dare commit himself about the designation of the artist when he wrote ‘Lorenzo di Cione or di Bartoluccio Ghiberti’.46 Ghiberti was in fact a son of a Cione Ghiberti, but after Cione’s death in 1406 his mother married Bartolo di Michele who raised Lorenzo. The artist, recognized or not, seems to have expressed his debt towards his stepfather by adopting his names, as both patronymic and cognome, but after a condemnation had to refer to himself as ‘Lorenzo di Cione Ghiberti’.47 His master, however, was the silversmith Bartolo di Michele. Thus his own descendants, and Vasari with them, were often confused, mixing up the natural father, the adoptive father, and the master in a Bartoluccio who, according to the Vita devoted to him by Vasari, long watched over the professional destiny of his pupil and so-called son. This tells us the extent to which the nurturing and protective, educational and instructional functions were inextricably blended in the master. Vasari’s recurrent use of the term creato to designate the pupil of an artist underlines strongly the material and pedagogical dependence of the youth nurtured and educated by a master: the good Bartoluccio was simultaneously father and 44 

‘ne cavò, oltre alla maniera, che fu molto più bella di quella del suo maestro, il sopranome di Giottino, che non gli cascò mai: anzi fu parere de molti, et per la maniera e per lo nome, i quali però furono in grandissimo errore, che fusse figliuolo di Giotto; ma in vero non è così, essendo cosa certa, o per dir meglio credenza (non potendosi così fatte cose affermare da ognuno), che fu figliuolo di Stefano pittore fiorentino’: Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 230. 45  ‘Mediante queste opere, avendosi acquistato tanto buon nome Giottino, imitanto nel disegno, e nelle invenzione, come si è detto, il suo maestro, si diceva essere in lui lo spirito d’esso Giotto’: Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 232. 46  ‘Lorenzo di Cione Ghiberti, altrimenti di Bartoluccio […] Fu dunque Lorenzo figliuolo di Bartoluccio Ghiberti’: Vasari, Le Vite, iii, 75–104 (Vita di Lorenzo Ghiberti) (p. 76). On Ghiberti’s life and work, see Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti. 47  On the case and the fines about his possible illegitimacy and his changing of name, see Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti, i, 3; ii, 360, 417–18.

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master, and Vasari’s ‘Lorenzo di Bartoluccio Ghiberti’ was yet another sign to posterity of this composite filiation and complex heritage, even more explicit than the displacement of the father’s name by the patronymic ‘di Cosimo’ for Piero di Cosimo. But in Vasari’s eyes, the values born from the transmission of artistic aptitude and the awakening of talent prevail over those, material and worldly, of carnal or adoptive kinship. When Vasari attributed to Agnolo Gaddi an adventurous commercial career by confusing him with his brother, it was to blame the rupture that Agnolo introduced into Giotto’s line on his making a fortune rather than cultivating his gifts and those of his sons. For Vasari, Agnolo sank blandly back into the reality of a merchant society.48 He had gone back over the wall between the worldly and the spiritual that he had crossed first — in the good direction — during his apprenticeship. Like godfathers in Florence, artists do not seem to have really transmitted their own name to pupils (except for the case of the nickname Giottino); but the surrounding society credited them with a paternity of a higher order by attaching the pupil, via the patronymic, to the master who had made him be ‘reborn’ into art. In that, Vasari placed himself in a Christian perspective. The ‘spiritual’ filiations that were created by the master–pupil relationship made of the master a ‘giver of grace’, analogous to a godfather. As the godfather intervened to cause divine grace to shine upon the baptized child and open the path of salvation to him, so the master brought to light the ‘grazia’ of the genius that slept in the helpless child. The master was indeed a ‘spiritual father’ who made the pupil ‘come to art’ (‘venire all’arte’), who enabled him, according to Cennino Cennini’s expression, to combine manual skill with the fantasia that is peculiar to the true artist, capable of ‘finding the unseen things […] and enabling others to see what it is not, as though it were’.49 The kinship of artists is a chosen, an elected kinship. What differentiates it from baptismal kinship is that the disciple chooses his master as much as the master chooses his disciple, as in the elective fraternities or comparatico called ‘of Saint John’, a relationship forged in many societies by the exchange of blood between two friends.50 On the contrary, while the father chose his compare, the 48 

‘nel dominio [veneziano] si riconoscono molte delle sue opere, le quali furono lavorate da lui con molto suo utile se bene lavorava più per fare come i suoi maggiori fatto avevano che per voglia che ne avessi, avendo egli indiritto l’animo alla mercanzia che gli era di migliore utile’: Vasari, Le Vite, ii, 243–50 (Vita d’Agnolo Gaddi) (p. 247). 49  ‘e quest’é un’arte che si chiama dipignere, che conviene avere fantasia e operazione di mano, di trovare cose non vedute, cacciandosi sotto ombra di naturali, e fermarle con la mano, dando a dimonstrare quello che non è, sia’: Cennini, Libro dell’arte, ed. by Brunelli, pp. 3–4. 50  Fine, Parrains, marraines, pp. 139–55.

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godfather of his child, neither the godfather nor especially the godchild chose the other. In the elective relationship of master and pupil, the latter, contravening all of the local rules of naming, thus appropriated a bit of his master’s identity in receiving it sometimes as his patronymic. When Vasari and the society of his time defined the bond of paternity/godfatherhood/patronage between the master and pupil as true paternity, they refused to allow this bond to become bogged down in material life as carnal paternity and patronage had, and they denied that it was transient, as godfatherhood was. Accordingly, the anthroponymic displacement is a superficial sign of a deeper and much more durable flow. Between these partners, techniques and tools circulated, and so did workshop tips and know-how, as well as ideas, con­ cetti, moral ideals, attitudes towards Nature, and models of behaviour towards other artists. This circulation was the promise of a much more powerful current that would continue over time in this ‘lineage’51 and which was enlarged in the social space to the entire community of artists, when they shared these same concetti in friendship and discussion. According to Vasari, each artist, in taking pupils, thus became the guarantor of the continuity and the development of art; by the transmission of what he knew, he created his own ideal genealogy. Cennino Cennini transmitted by his writing his own knowledge ‘in honour of Giotto of Taddeo of Agnolo [his] master’.52 While this curious ‘genealogy’, simultaneously descending and ascending, may show that Cennino placed himself at the bottom of a hierarchical series of artists, every artist nurtures the hope of surpassing his master. And Vasari’s Lives aim to be the history of a continuous progress in the arts. * * * Bernard Berenson wrote somewhere: ‘I dream of a History of art, in which the name of an artist would never be mentioned’. But ‘Berenson is Berenson’, as Fernand Braudel commented when he quoted the statement. I must say as a historian with a passion for the problems of social transmission and reproduction that Berenson’s dream is not mine. It is rather by dreaming about the names and the meaning that their contemporaries gave them that, I hope, we can illuminate the history of art as its founder, Vasari, conceived it. 51  ‘Di costui [Giotto] uscirno mirabili pittori’, as is written in the Libro di Antonio Billi, ed. by Benedettucci, p. 113. 52  It is written unpunctuated, ‘a riverenza di Giotto di Taddeo d’Agnolo maestro di Cennino’: Cennini, Libro dell’arte, ed. by Brunelli, p. 3.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Cennini, Cennino, Libro dell’arte, ed. by Franco Brunelli (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Ed., 1982) Compagni, Dino, Cronica, ed. by Gino Luzzatto (Torino: Einaudi, 1968) Libro di Antonio Billi, ed. by Fabio Benedettucci (Roma: De Rubeis, 1991) Neri di Bicci, Le Ricordanze (10 marzo 1453–24 aprile 1475), ed. by Bruno Santi (Pisa: Marlin, 1976) Vasari, Giorgio, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, con nuove annotazioni e commenti, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols (Firenze, 1878–85) —— , Les Vies des meilleurs peintres, sculpteurs et architectes, ed. and trans. under the direction of André Chastel, 11 vols (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1981–87) —— , Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e arthitettori, nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 6 vols (Firenze: Sansoni, 1966–87) —— , Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori scritte da M. Giorgio Vasari, with critical apparatus ed. by Karl Frey (München: G. Müller, 1911) Villani, Filippo, De origine civitatis et de eiusdem famosis civibus, ed. by Giuliano Tanturli (Pavia: Antenor, 1997)

Secondary Works Agosti, Giovanni, Su Mantegna, i, La storia dell’arte libera la testa (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2006) Alfani, Guido, Padri, padrini, patroni: La parentela spirituale nella storia (Venezia: Marsilio, 2007) Alfani, Guido, with Vincent Gourdon, Spiritual Kinship in Europe, 1500–1900 (London: Palgrave, 2012) Bacci, Mina, Piero di Cosimo (Milano, Bramante Ed., 1966) Barolsky, Paul, Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s ‘Lives’ (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992) —— , Michelangelo’s Nose: A  Myth and its Maker (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990) —— , Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1991) Baschet, Jérôme, Le sein du Père: Abraham et la paternité dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 2000) Bellosi, Luciano, ‘Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca intorno alla metà del Trecento’, Prospettiva, 101 (2001), 19–40 Fine, Agnès, Parrains, marraines: La parenté spirituelle en Europe (Paris: Fayard, 1994) Franchetti Pardo, Vittorio, Arnolfo di Cambio e la sua epoca: costruire, scolpire, dipingere, decorare, Atti del Convegno internazionale di storia, Firenze-Colle Val d’Elsa 2006 (Roma: Viella, 2006)

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Gardner, Julian, ‘Arnolfo di Cambio: From Rome to Florence’, in Arnolfo’s Moment, ed. by David Friedman, Julian Gardner, and Margaret Haines (Firenze: Olschki, 2009), pp. 141–57 Gavitt, Philip, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536 (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michigan Press, 1990) Gregori, Mina, Antonio Paolucci, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat, eds, Maestri e bot­ teghe: Pittura a Firenze alla fine del Quattrocento (Firenze: Silvana Editoriale, 1992), pp. 91–146 Haines, Margaret, ‘Artisan Family Strategies: Proposals for Research on the Families of Florentine Artists’, in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000), pp. 163–75 Jouffroy, Alain, Piero di Cosimo ou la forêt sacrilège (Paris: R. Laffont, 1982) Jussen, Bernhard, Patenschaft und Adoption im frühen Mittelalter: künstliche Verwandschaft als soziale Praxis, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, 98 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1991) Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ‘L’adoption impossible dans l’Italie de la fin du Moyen Âge’, in Adoption et ‘fosterage’, ed. by Mireille Corbier (Paris: Vrin, 1999 [2000]), pp. 321–37 —— , ‘Compérage et clientélisme’, in Klapisch-Zuber, La maison et le nom: Stratégies et rituels dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Paris: Ed. de l’EHESS, 1990), pp. 123–33 —— , ‘The Name “Remade”: The Transmission of Given Names in Florence in the Four­ teenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Re­ nais­sance Italy (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 283–309 —— , ‘Parrains et filleuls: Une approche comparée de la France, l’Angleterre et l’Italie médiévales’, Medi­eval Prosopography, 6 (1985), 51–77 Krautheimer, Richard, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1970) Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Il pensiero filosofico di Marsilio Ficino (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1953) Kuehn, Thomas, ‘L’adoption à Florence à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Médiévales, 35 (1998), 69–81 Ladis, Andrew, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogo raisonné (Columbia: Uni­ver­sity of Missouri Press, 1982) Ladner, G., ‘Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance’, in De Artibus opus­ cula XL: Essays in Honor of E. Panofsky, ed. by Millard Meiss (New York: New York Uni­ver­sity Press, 1961), i, 303–23 Murray, Peter, An Index of Attributions Made in Tuscan Sources before Vasari, Pocket Library of Studies in Art, 12 (Firenze: Olschki, 1959) Parenti, Daniela, ‘Aspetti della pittura fiorentina alla metà del Trecento’, in Da Puccio di Simone a Giottino: restauri e conferme, ed. by Angelo Tartuferi and Daniela Parenti (Firenze: Giunti, Firenze Musei, 2005), pp. 25–32 Pilliod, Elizabeth, ‘Bronzino’s Household’, Burlington Magazine, 134 (1992), 92–100 —— , Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori, a Genealogy of Florentine Art (New Haven: Yale Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2001) Rubin, Patricia L., Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995)

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Thomas, Anabel, The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995) Walter, Ingeborg, ‘Andrea Mantegnas “Darbringung Jesu im Tempel”: Ein Bild der Befrei­ ung und des Aufbruchs’, Städel Jahrbuch, n.s., 12 (1989), 59–70

Protecting Dowries in Law in Renaissance Florence Thomas Kuehn

A

s Bill Kent said, ‘marriage was unthinkable without a dowry’.1 Indeed, in Renaissance societies there were few more complex and ambiguous forms of family property than dowry. To say that dowry was material wealth from a wife’s family to support household burdens is only to begin to talk about it. Dowry was also symbolic, denoting the honourable linkage of two families.2 Historians have become well aware of the material burden dowries placed on prospective brides’ families, mainly on fathers, as dowry values escalated.3 Monetized dowry values have long served as a prime indicator of the value of the social alliance between two families being struck by a marriage of their children. More specifically for Florence, Anthony Molho, relying on records of a public dowry fund, demonstrated how marriage was largely class endogamous and served to perpetuate elite lineages across generations.4 John Padgett and Paul McLean have also pointed to the importance of marriage alliances in defin1 

Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, p. 92. Cf. Hanlon, Human Nature in Rural Tuscany, pp. 114–15; Kirshner, Pursuing Honor While Avoiding Sin. 3  See Cavallar and Kirshner, ‘Making and Breaking Betrothal Contracts’. 4  Molho, Marriage Alliance in Late Medi­eval Florence; Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, esp. pp. 132–52. 2 

Thomas Kuehn ([email protected]) is professor of history at Clemson Uni­ver­sity in South Carolina. His main research area has been social and legal history, especially involving family. His most recent book is Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence (Cam­bridge, 2008).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 199–216 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109706

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ing and perpetuating the Florentine elite, as it consolidated its hold on political and economic prominence in the city.5 Other historians, notably Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, have explored how dowry practices helped perpetuate men’s control over dowered women.6 Research has made us aware how multisided and multidirectional marital exchanges were.7 Dowry was further complicated in that it was generally the inheritance women could expect from their families. Isabelle Chabot has recently explored the implications of dowry and succession for the perpetuation of patrilineages.8 Yet, at its heart, dowry was a legal obligation. It was incumbent on fathers (or others in their place) to provide dowries for their daughters. Once furnished, the dowry gave rise to a contractual obligation. When a husband received his wife’s dowry, he pledged, often with other kin as guarantors, to return it on the dissolution of the marriage. During the marriage, while real management of the dowry rested with the husband, it continued to be a legally distinct asset whose ultimate ownership lay with the wife.9 The dowry was a separate fund not liable for the husband’s debts and obligations, unless his wife were to pledge it specifically for a particular obligation. At a husband’s death, it fell on his heirs or the guarantors to return the dowry to his widow.10 To avoid that possibility (a likely one, as men tended to be several years older than their wives), husbands drew up testaments leaving their chaste widows life rights of use and habitation. Such widows, if also mothers, thus might be encouraged to stay and see to the children.11 The social and economic dynamics of marriage worked themselves out through such legal obligations. The law in question was both the learned law, the ius commune, and local law, the ius proprium. Historians are very aware of the widespread employment of statutes, contrary to the rules of Roman law, to exclude dowered women 5 

Padgett and McLean, ‘Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation’ and Padgett, ‘Open Elite?’. 6  Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, pp. 117–31, 213–36. 7  Bestor, ‘Marriage Transactions in Renaissance Italy’; Pene Vidari, ‘Dote, famiglia e patrimonio’. 8  Chabot, La dette des familles. 9  Kirshner, ‘Materials for a Gilded Cage’. 10  Kirshner, ‘Maritus Lucretur Dotem Uxori Sue Premortue’; Kirschner, ‘Donne maritate altrove’; Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, pp. 95–111; Bellavitis, ‘La famiglia “cittadina” veneziana nel xvi secolo’; Braccia, ‘“Uxor gaudet de morte mariti”’. 11  Chabot, ‘Widowhood and Property in Late Medi­eval Florence’; Chabot, ‘“La sposa in nero”’; Chabot, ‘Seconde nozze e identità materna’; Calvi, ‘Reconstructing the Family’.

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from inheriting from close male relatives, notably their fathers and brothers.12 But the academic law was also in formation and packed plenty of transformative power to alter a legal landscape. The great jurists of the fourteenth century — Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1313–57), Angelo (1323–1400) and Baldo (1327–1400) degli Ubaldi, and others — elaborated seminal and influential ideas about dowry, especially through their own active intervention in legislative and forensic arenas. In fact, the early fifteenth century — immediately following on the work of these jurisprudents and the spread of their students through Italy — was a turning point, at least in Florence, for dowry in law. At that point legal guarantees, imported into local laws from the common font of jurisprudence, solidified the role of dowry in society. To cast these developments in another context, the carefully controlled use of marriage by Florentine elite families was facilitated, if not simply made possible, by some correlative legal changes. These tied dowry more firmly to the household it helped form, less so to the household (bride’s natal family) that helped form it, by erecting or enhancing certain protections for dowries. Whatever else dowry did to maintain gender distinctions and to serve as a marker of family prestige, it also came to function as a sort of insurance, a fall-back position in the face of economic misfortunes. As an asset controlled by husbands but also legally distinct from their property, it became something whose nominal value, at least, could usefully be high. For one thing, women’s dowries, which passed by statute to their children (in Florence, to sons to the exclusion of daughters), also served as a means for these children to avoid paternal financial failures. Heirs could refuse to inherit debt-riddled estates from their fathers, but they could accept those of their mothers and thus retain a portion of family property equal to the stated amount of the dowry. Dowry thus did more than sustain the burdens of matrimony. It established within the household a separate fund, legally insulated from the husband’s legal and financial misadventures. The dowry would pass to his children and/or stay with his wife, even if all else fell into creditors’ hands. Once Florentine law fully recognized that dotal guarantee, which it did in 1415, there was subsequent incentive for Florentines to assemble larger dowries as insurance policies of sorts for the patrimony.13

12  The foremost legal historical study of dowry and statutes remains that of Bellomo, Ricerche sui rapporti patrimoniali tra coniugi. 13  Kuehn, Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence, pp. 59–61, 149, 158, 183–85.

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For another thing, when a wife predeceased her husband, the dowry could stay with him if there were children, who were the heirs to it, though he had active use (usufruct) of it. When there were no children, the dowry was to return to the wife’s kin as her heirs (on intestacy), but in ius proprium in many communities at least part of the dowry of a predeceased wife stayed with the husband.14 Florentine statutory law of 1415 decreed that husbands kept the entire dowries of predeceased wives. Dowry may have been a separate fund, but it also came to be embedded in a household, and local laws recognized and honoured that in the provisions in which children and husbands were privileged as heirs to dowries. In effect, usually only on the husband’s predecease without surviving children would there be real need for heirs to reassemble and return a woman’s entire dowry. The obligation to return dowry has been less explored and less appreciated than the problems consequent on establishing a dowry in the first place.15 Julius Kirshner, in a paper integral to this essay, examined the problem of return of dowry by a husband verging on insolvency. Ius commune and some civic statutes guaranteed a wife’s dowry right to the point of allowing her the extraordinary capacity of suing for its recovery while still married, if her husband was falling into debt. As dowry was intended to ‘sustain the burdens of matrimony’, it had to persist in some sense for the marriage to carry on, and marriage did not cease because of spousal financial failure. The law allowed that a wife could extract her dowry from her husband’s property before and in preference to his other creditors. This was the third dotal guarantee to enter Florence’s statutes in 1415.16 It was the intervention of learned jurists that set in clear contrast the difference between local statutes and the learned law and opened the way to acceptance of the latter within the statutory framework.17 The same was true with retrieval of dowry in the face of insolvency. The powerful legal arguments of learned jurists encouraged statutory changes that in turn encouraged dowry inflation, fraud at times, and the agency of women, when men had signally failed to be effective managers. 14 

See Kirshner, ‘Maritus Lucretur Dotem Uxoris Sue Premortue’, pp. 112–18; Chabot, ‘Seconde nozze e identità materna’, pp. 495–503. 15  Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, pp.  95–111; Chabot, ‘Seconde nozze e identità materna’. 16  Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, pp. 293–94. 17  Kuehn, Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence, pp. 183–85. Also on protection of dowries from husbands, see Eisenach, Husbands, Wives, and Concubines, pp. 68–75.

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The Legal Background Three key texts of civil law — the lex Si constante, Soluto matrimonio of the Digest (D. 24.3.24); Ubi adhuc, De iure dotium of the Codex (C. 5.12.29); and the authentica Illud quoque sancire, De equalitate dotis of the Novels (N. 97.6) — came to be interpreted in tandem by late medieval jurists. They expanded these Roman openings into a privilege for wives to act against insolvent husbands. Bartolo da Sassoferrato insisted that the three laws were complementary, that they provided a remedy even when sufficient assets remained to satisfy creditors and the wife but the husband was mismanaging his assets and verging on bankruptcy.18 Proof of the husband’s financial condition rested merely on local repute (fama).19 If the wife had to wait for actual insolvency and demonstrate it, in all likelihood she would have no real remedy. Making that protection effective in fact, however, also required its acceptance into local statutes, where it could be taken into account by courts and truly used by women. Statutory silence on the matter left it in the hands of the common legal rules and thus generally available. Left in that state, however, it could remain residual and little known or used. As Kirshner found, some communities drafted statutes expressly sanctioning a wife’s right to sue her bankrupt spouse to claim goods to the equivalent of her dowry.20 Florence did not. In 1325 and again in 1355, the statutes of the Podestà in Florence made restitution of dowry contingent on the dissolution of the marriage at the natural death of the husband.21 Florence also had a statute forbidding wives to defend the property of husbands still alive against his creditors and another that forbade wives of bankrupts (cessantes) to seek their dowries.22 That part of Florence’s legislative protection of creditors and markets withstood jurispru-

18 

Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, pp. 268, 269–70. Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, pp. 269–73. 20  Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, p. 291. These included Arezzo and Pisa in Tuscany, as well as Bologna, Ravenna, and Vicenza. 21  Statuti della repubblica fiorentina, ii, Statuto del Podestà dell’anno 1325, Book ii, rubric 17: De dote et donatione restituenda, pp. 91–93 (p. 93). 22  Statuti della repubblica fiorentina, ii, Statuto del Podestà dell’anno 1325, Book ii, rubric 18: Quod nulla mulier vivente viro possit defendere bona viri, p. 93; and i, Statuto del Capitano del Popolo degli anni 1322–25, Book ii, rubric 35: Quod mulieres talium debitorum non audiantur pro iure dotis, p. 104. For 1355, see ASF, Statuti del comune di Firenze 16 (Statuto del Podestà), Book ii, rubrics 21 and 22, fol. 77r–v. 19 

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dential assaults.23 Even the respected jurist Jacopo Bottrigari (d. 1347), who penned a consilium defending the right of a Florentine wife to sue her insolvent husband’s partners to get her dowry back, was seemingly unable to shake this legislative edifice. It was only with the redaction of 1415 that a wife’s right to seek her dowry when her husband was verging on insolvency was finally conceded in Florentine law.24 Certainly a great deal changed for Florence in the ninety years between 1325 and 1415. There had been wars, plagues, internal strife, wild economic fluctuations. The growing sophistication, doctrinal and intellectual coherence, and practical impact of learned law also had effects in Florence. The Trecento was ‘the century that saw the perfecting of the system of common law and the definitive entry of urban statutes, if not in education, at least in legal argumentation’.25 Bartolo and Baldo and Angelo degli Ubaldi were Perugian, but they came to Florence and in some instances stayed and taught for a while. Their work gained respect in the city, evidently so by the end of the Trecento. Jurists active in Florence relied on their work and canons of statute interpretation to insert rules of ius commune into the discussion, if not always the practice, of law in Florence. That respect for ius commune also rested on another factor — the imperialistic growth of Florence. From the era of the statute redaction of 1355 to that of 1415, Florence expanded her domain to take in San Gimignano (1353), Volterra (1361), San Miniato al Tedesco (1370), Arezzo (1384), Montepulciano (1390), Pisa (1406), Cortona (1411), and Livorno (1421).26 The more places she brought under her sway, the more Florence was forced to take into account the common legal heritage against which all the variant local laws played. Trained jurists, as Lauro Martines has shown, became more involved in legal disputes between Florence and its subject cities.27 Florentines became more aware in the process how much the city’s statutes differed from those of other places and were not necessarily extendable elsewhere. It was in the aftermath of acquiring Pisa that Florentine government moved for revision of the statutes along very new lines. The task was ultimately handed to

23 

On this aspect of Florentine law, see Kuehn, ‘Debt and Bankruptcy in Florence’. Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, p. 293. 25  Ascheri, ‘Il “dottore” e lo statuto’, pp. 102, 112. 26  Najemy, A History of Florence, pp. 194–97. 27  Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaisance Florence, pp. 220–44. 24 

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Bartolomeo Vulpi (c. 1359–1435), aided by Paolo di Castro (c. 1359–1441), who also taught law in Florence.28 The climate was right for some types of statutory change, taking greater cognizance of divergences between ius commune and ius proprium. And it was precisely in the early Quattrocento that a number of newcomers to Florence stood out in the local legal profession, in contrast to native-born Florentines.29 They had the opportunity to shape a Florentine law more in keeping with their legal training yet also more amenable to the needs of the elite among their new fellow citizens.

Case Facts In the aftermath of these developments in the early fifteenth century a case arose in Florence that raised powerful implications about dowry in the face of a husband’s economic problems. It was put to several local lawyers to craft a learned opinion (consilium) addressing these issues. Their consilium in sealed original survives. It was prefaced by an extensive presentation of facts in the case and the resulting legal issues that were transmitted to the jurists, and it is our source of information on the litigants and the events behind the case.30 What we learn is that in 1398 a woman named Lisa married Sandro di Nello, bringing him a dowry of 300 florins. Her husband and father-in-law both acknowledged receipt of the dowry in the usual notarial instrument of confessio dotis.31 By 1402 husband and father ‘verserunt evidentissime ad inopiam’ (were evidently verging on insolvency), and all their property was in the hands of creditors. The following year Nello and Sandro petitioned the government for appointment of receivers who would oversee liquidation of their assets. Anyone whose claim was harmed by the sale of property could lodge an appeal (recursum) to the court of the Mercanzia within four months. The receivers for Nello and Sandro quickly sold their main asset, ‘quoddam casamentum’ (a certain house), to a modest banker named Vanni. Within the allowed four months both Lisa and her mother-in-law Giovanna (through a notary as their attorney) complained to the Mercanzia that the 28  On these statutes, see Tanzini, Statuti e legislazione and Biscione, Statuti del comune di Firenze. 29  Cf. Kuehn, ‘Lawyers and Housecraft in Renaissance Florence’. 30  BNCF, MS Landau Finaly 98, fols 28r–37r (hereafter Consilium). 31  See my ‘Contracting Marriage in Renaissance Florence’.

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property thus sold was obligated for their dowries. As their petition put it, ‘contrary to all reason and justice they find themselves deprived and despoiled of their dowries, and the children of their inheritance’.32 Their claim rested on the assertion that this situation in fact amounted to ‘il caso delle restitutioni’ (an instance of restitution). Their plea was successful. There the case sat for at least two years. Nello, the father, passed away in 1406. Following that Lisa sought judicial return (consignatio) of her dowry, which was granted her, and then she moved to get the property from Vanni. He responded with three legal arguments against her claim. First, that she had right against the sale only in restitution of dowry, not in consignatio. Second, that Sandro had ceased to meet his obligations back in 1401 and was ‘in consequence a defaulting and fugitive merchant [cessans]’. Lisa could not act to retrieve her property, then, in view of Florence’s statute of the Capitano forbidding wives of bankrupts to seek their dowries.33 Third, that Vanni had not been summoned to hear the sentence of the Mercanzia, which could not be pronounced in his absence, so it was not valid. Objections were raised to each of Vanni’s points. First, that by favor dotis Lisa’s right to seek the property applied both in the general instance of resti­ tutio on a spouse’s death and the specific one of consignatio on his bankruptcy. Restitution, occurring at the dissolution of marriage by the husband’s death, left the widow in full control of her property and able to manage it and to dispose of it as she saw fit. With consignation, as the marriage still existed and the dowry was bound for marital expenses, the wife could manage its assets but she could not freely dispose of them in accord with her desires (as, say, to make a charitable donation or help a female relative get her own dowry). Clearly Lisa’s point was that she gained management of dotal assets and revenues in either case. Second, that Nello, the father, was the cessans, not her husband, Sandro. Cessatio was a criminal offense that could not be extended to others than the principal. Nonetheless, it also seems that cases of defaulting debtors who had fled to avoid payment were being more seriously and harshly treated.34 And while proof of bankruptcy might rest on fama alone, that was true only as it applied to the cessans himself, not to the prejudice of a third party — in this case Lisa. Third, the narrative of the Mercanzia’s sentence showed that Vanni 32 

Consilium, fol. 29v: ‘contro ogni ragione et iustitia si troverrebbono private e spogliate delle loro dote, et i figliuoli et le loro rede’. 33  Consilium, fols 30r–v, 32r–v. 34  Stern, The Criminal Law System, pp. 79–86.

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had been present during the process, as it reported that the judges had heard from both parties. There was no appeal from that court’s judgement, which was now res iudicata.35 The court formulated three succinct legal problems. Was action against the sale allowed only in restitutio dotis and not in consignatio? Was there an exception to cessatio as a crime and was it provable merely by fama? Was summons of the defendant required and, thus, did the judgement of the Mercanzia stand? These questions, accompanied by the facts of the case and the texts of three statutes, were transmitted to three jurists.

Juristic Opinion The three jurists included the foremost native Florentine jurist of the era, Filippo di Tommaso Corsini (1334–1421). Joining him were Paolo di Castro and a native Perugian of an illustrious lineage, Ruggiero di Niccolò d’Antignalla (fl. 1380s–1410s). The latter two only came to Florence in 1413 and 1412 respectively to teach.36 It would seem, then, that the date of the case was not 1406 but some seven years later. During the interval Vanni would presumably have continued to hold and enjoy the fruits or use of the casamentum he had bought in 1403. In other words, he would have realized some value towards the debts of Lisa’s father-in-law. This roster of jurists presents an interesting contrast to that of another Florentine case involving consignatio dotis that arose a few years earlier and was discussed by Kirshner.37 That case involved Rosello dei Roselli (fl. 1380s–1390s), Rosso Orlandi (fl. 1400–1420s), Ricciardo del Bene (1369–1411), and Giovanni dei Ricci (1342–1402).38 Three were from old Florentine families; only Roselli was not a native Florentine. Their case dealt with a man in political exile for failure to meet civic fiscal obligations, whose wife sought return of her dowry. The earlier consilium backed the wife’s recovery of her dowry, and in practice Florentine officials fairly routinely returned dowries of wives of exiles, so the practical result of that consilium held up.39 35 

Consilium, fols 30v–31r. 36  On these men, see Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaisance Florence, pp. 487, 499–500, 500–501. 37  Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, pp. 276–78. 38  On these men, see Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaisance Florence, pp. 498, 482, 483. 39  Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, p. 278; Kuehn, ‘Family Solidarity in Exile and in Law’.

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There were differences in how these lawyers advanced arguments to allow consignatio in Florence. In the earlier case Roselli had noted that Florence’s statutes worked against the wife, but he then argued that ius commune’s greater equity outweighed local law. Orlandi similarly argued that ius commune trumped ius municipale.40 It is not clear how that was received in Florence, whose statutes also contained clear rules that consilia rendered against local law were not to be followed.41 The three jurists in our case were more subtle in their support of ius commune, proceeding in a seemingly less oppositional fashion. Antignalla relied on Bartolo to conclude that consignatio was equivalent to restitutio because both tranferred active ownership of dotal goods to the wife. Still, he had to confront the statute that permitted restitutio only in the case of natural death. He declared that statute was contrary to ius commune, ‘because in ius commune civil death too occasioned restitution’. The statute was to be controlled by the special law (in ius commune) allowing recovery from a husband sliding towards insolvency. In other words, the general rule was that a woman could not recover her dowry until her husband died, but there was a special exception in the instance he was vergens ad inopiam.42 The second and third points he dispatched more briefly. In the case before him neither father nor son had been pronounced a cessans. It was also apparent in the language of the Mercanzia’s sentence in Lisa’s favour that the other party had been heard, and it was in fact the traditional procedure of the Mercanzia to summon both parties as soon as it was ready to hear the case. All this Antignalla was prepared to state ‘si causa esset michi consulenda’ (if the case were committed for my opinion), indicating it had not been.43 Antignalla’s major effort had been to read away Florence’s statute allowing recovery of dowry only on natural death. What is singularly revealing in his opinion is how he put the provisions of ius commune allowing recovery con­ stante matrimonio and the Florentine statute together as if operating within a single set of legal texts — one as old, the other as new; one as special, the other as general. Filippo Corsini threw his effort at the first point, not even touching on the second about cessantes and repeating Antignalla’s argument about Vanni’s pres40 

Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, pp. 277–78. Kirshner, ‘Consilia as Authority in Late Medi­eval Italy’, pp. 130–33, 139. 42  Consilium, fol. 34r: ‘omnia remedia dotis repetende soluto matrimonio habent locum constante matrimonio’. 43  Consilium, fol. 34v. 41 

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ence at proceedings. What is interesting is how Corsini operated rhetorically. He began by putting his Florentine heritage out front,44 but he also quickly invoked a legal professional heritage, as he argued against his native city’s statute: it is not forbidden that a wife or spouse can seek her dowry on account of her husband’s indebtedness, as the husband heads towards poverty […]. Messer Jacopo Bottrigari thus advised in a question pending here in the city of Florence […] and I have the consilium, which I will show to anyone wanting to see it, for as my teacher Messer Bartolo said in this case there is not a true restitution of dowry, as it still serves the burdens of marriage, whence we can say that it is a sort of consignment of dowry.45

Corsini thus named two great jurists, noting that one had already spoken to Florence’s statute and that he had a ready copy of the opinion. Further, truth and equity showed that the Mercanzia officials were aware ‘that the ones seeking recourse are women and they do not understand this difference between restitution proper and the improper restitution of consignment, but they needed the property, and such a difference does not affect an ignoramus’.46 He thus blew right past picky complexities of law to general matters of equity and gender. Women did not understand legal distinctions; they understood their material needs. Paolo di Castro gave sophisticated treatment to all three issues and added arguments beyond those of the first two. He began with the affirmation that Lisa’s right to recover sold property comprehended both proper and improper (i.e. con­ signatio) restitution of dowry. His treatment was more semantic and logical, as he did not cite a jurist until he invoked Bartolo at the point he shifted his attention 44 

Consilium, fol. 35r: ‘Ego Philippus domini Thome de Corsinis de Florentia legum doctor puto verum esse quod supra conclusum, subscriptum et sigillatum est’ (I, Filippo di messer Tommaso de’ Corsini of Florence, doctor of laws, think that what is above concluded, signed, and sealed is true). 45  Consilium, fol. 35r: ‘non impeditur quod mulier sive uxor possit petere dotem propter inopiam viri, viro vergente ad inopiam per l. si constante ff so. ma. et l. ubi adhuc C. de iure dotium et in cor. aut. de equali. dotis illud, consuluit dominus Ja Bu in questione vertente hic in civitate Florentie, et incipit consilium Questio proponitur ex facto qui­ dem Fenze, et habeo consilium quod ostendam videre volentibus, nam ut dicit dominus meus dominus Bartolus in dicto casu non est vera restitutio dotis, cum adhuc deserviat oneribus matrimonii, unde possumus dicere quod sit quedam dotis consignatio’. 46  Consilium, fol. 35v: ‘quod petentes recursum sunt femine et non intelligunt istam differentiam inter restitutionem propriam et impropriam consignationis, sed egerunt bona, tunc et talis differentia non cadit in ydeotem’.

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to the notion of dowry’s function to sustain these women. Further, it was a matter of publica utilitas that children be fed, even if their father was bankrupt.47 He put aside an objection that the promises of those who received a dowry to return it applied only in the case of real restitution on dissolution of marriage. If that promise did not apply during marriage, it would result in the absurd situation that a married woman would be indotata when bankruptcy struck.48 Paolo di Castro threw himself heartily at the statute forbidding wives of ces­ santes from seeking their dowries. The statute applied, he said, to wives, not to daughters-in-law. Further, the statute clearly ran contrary to ius commune’s rule that wives not be held liable for or harmed by actions of their husbands. Surely the statute could not be extended to fathers-in-law. Paolo di Castro even claimed that the reason for the statutory rule preventing the wife of a cessans from retrieving her dowry was to place a preventive threat before the husband: for the rationale of this statute had to lie in the person of the husband, because the husband, thinking that until his death the wife could not seek consignment [of her dowry], from which he might realize also a measure of support, will leave and take steps to run off, unless he feel this loss and lest he see his wife, whom he loves, go begging with the children, so that very frightened by that fear he will not cease [to meet his obligations], at least not maliciously, which reasons do not hold with a father-in-law, as he is not fed by the consigned dowry and does not love his daughter-in-law as much as a husband does his wife.49

The cessatio was the father’s, and in this case it had also not been proven, even by fama.

The Statutes of 1415 In the statutes issued a couple years later and in whose revision Paolo di Castro played a prominent role, the requirement of the husband’s death for dowry restitution was finally modified to include provision for restitution from a hus47 

Consilium, fol. 35v. Consilium, fol. 36v. 49  Consilium, fol. 37r: ‘nam ratio huius statuti in persona viri potuit etc. quia vir cogitans quod ipso defuncto uxor non poterit petere consignationem, per quam etiam ipse consequeretur emolumentum victus, desistit et cavebit deficere ne hoc dapnum sentiat et hoc ne videat uxorem quam diligit cum liberis mendicare quod timore perterritus forte non cessabit saltim malitiose, que rationes non habet locum in socero cum ipse non alatur ex dote consignata nec tantum diligat nurum quantum maritus uxorem’. 48 

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band vergens ad inopiam.50 At the same time, extensive revision and reorganization of the statutes on fugitive bankrupts tightened up the restrictions on their wives seeking their dowries. Now they were explicitly forbidden to seek consignatio during marriage.51 Wives, it must be pointed out, did not lose their dowry rights by their husbands’ bankruptcies, but they could not retrieve them until they had died. The combination of the two statutes meant that Florentines would have to use consignatio as a preventive measure, a safety valve as things began to go bad. Formal designation of a husband as cessans would be disastrous if that was when a wife first came to realize how bad things were. The standard for proof of verging insolvency was not high and remained vague.52 At most it might demand some resonance in common opinion among neighbours. That was little more than the personal judgement expressed by an heir who repudiated an estate as damnosa.53 And like repudiation, consignatio dotis was thus open to fraudulent use. It could be easy for a husband to conceal valuable assets in his wife’s name. Statutory allowance for consignatio meant it appeared not just as an extraordinary judicial remedy, but it became a more ordinary notarized transaction. In March 1421, for example, Bastiano di Paolo, a smith, and Antonia, his wife, came to a Florentine notary, who first saw to appointment of a legal guardian (mundualdus) for her. Then the husband entered in the record that they had wed in November 1411, at which time Antonia had brought him a dowry of 50 florins. But for more than the past two years he ‘began badly to use his substance and property and fell into want’, so that the time had arrived for return of the dowry. He consigned to his wife a pair of tongs and an anvil in his smith’s shop at Porta San Piero and all other furnishings of the shop and house.54 The financial concerns may have been real, but the result was that this couple’s home and means of livelihood were thus protected by assigning these assets to 50 

Statuta populi et communis Florentiae, i, Book ii, rubric 64: Quod nulla mulier vivente viro possit defendere bona viri, nisi in certis casibus, p. 161. 51  Statuta populi et communis Florentiae, i, Tractatus de cessantibus et fugitivis, rubric 10: De creditoribus cessantium et fugitivorum, ut interesse sunt pares, et de quibusdam eos concernentibus, pp. 535–36: ‘Nec etiam possint uxores praedictae viventibus viris suis cessantibus vel fugitivis occasione suae dotis aliquod ius acquirere super bonis eorum tam mariti quam aliorum obligatorum ad dictam dotem et donationem ex eo quod diceretur viros suos ad inopiam vergere, nec petere sibi dotem consignari’. 52  Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, pp. 270–72. 53  Kuehn, Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence, p. 32. 54  ASF, Notarile antecosimiano 9040, fols 278v–279r (21 March 1421).

212 Thomas Kuehn

the wife. It is also interesting that the narrative structure of the notarial text established the husband as the active party. It was not the wife who came to protect herself; it was he who declared a state of financial exigency and moved to protect her dowry, and thus their household. How were creditors even to learn of this manoeuvre? There was no guarantee that notarially inscribed contracts would come to the attention of those whose interests were implicated in them, leave alone in a timely manner. From 1435 Florence began to use for consignatio dotis the same remedy it used for emancipations of children and repudiations of inheritances. They were registered in official books centrally available in the government’s hands. Four hundred sixty consignationes were enrolled to the end of the republic, and they continued to be kept under the Medici and Habsburgs until the late eighteenth century.55 As many of these involved Florentines of much more elevated wealth and social prestige than our smith, the potential for consignatio to mask the economic difficulties for some households was clearly important.

Conclusion Was the consilium we have examined directly or even indirectly responsible for these statutory emendations? In the end we cannot be sure. The statute commentaries of Alessandro Bencivenni (1385–1423) on the second book of the 1415 statutes are replete with references to Florentine consilia, but nowhere does he mention the one we looked at above.56 His reading of consignatio was that the statute about wives of cessantes overruled the more general rubric that women could not act to defend their husbands’ property.57 He also affirmed that the statute applied to wives but not to their heirs, who could always seek what they inherited. And he agreed with the assertions that consignatio lay in the realm of ius commune and was an exception to the statutory rule requiring the husband’s death.58 From Bottrigari in the first half of the Trecento through the 1399 case argued by Rosello Roselli and others to the 1412 case we have looked at, jurists trained in academic law spoke to its greater equity in protecting a dowry. No single consilium could dismantle the Florentine statutory 55  Kirshner, ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands’, p. 299. The ducal records in ASF, Consiglio dei Dugento, 175–223, labeled ‘Ripudie d’eredità, emancipazioni, piati di inopia’. 56  On him, see Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaisance Florence, p. 492. 57  BNCF, Fondo principale, II, iv, 435, fols 47v–48v. 58  BNCF, Fondo principale, II, iv, 435, fol. 48v.

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restrictions, but the continual assault weakened the statutes, leading up to their revision. Within the limits allowed by Florentine law’s concern with markets, credit, and trust, jurists moved to protect dowry as a vital material and symbolic element of marriage and household. The complementary position of the wife and the wealth she brought to the marriage served important roles, even more so when the husband and his wealth were deficient. There are undoubted paradoxes to be explored in the use of female property to maintain patriarchy and in the ever-present legal distinction between his property and hers. It is also evident that in protecting a dowry from spousal insolvency, in holding onto one even after otherwise repudiating a paternal estate, or in retaining one on the predecease of a wife, there was an interest in maximizing the dowry’s stated value. And it is important to remember that the stated value of a dowry was set in the confessio, though that need not have been what actually changed hands. The evident dowry inflation, especially among the elite in the course of the fifteenth century, and even the founding of an important engine to that inflation, the Monte delle doti, rested in part on these new legal assurances. Dowry inflation clearly was not due to law alone, and it certainly was a phenomenon whose extent went well beyond Florence; but legal guarantees can also serve to raise prices. The protection of dowries and thus of families was an integral part of that inflation.

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Consiglio dei Dugento, 175–223 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano 9040 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Statuti del comune di Firenze 16 (Statuto del Podestà 1355) Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Fondo principale, II, iv, 435 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MS Landau Finaly 98

Primary Sources Statuta populi et communis Florentiae: publica auctoritate, collecta, castigata et praeposita anno salutis MCCCCXV, 3 vols (Fribourg, 1778–83) Statuti della repubblica fiorentina, ed. by Romolo Caggese, 2 vols, new edn ed. by Giuliano Pinto, Francesco Salvestrinni, and Andrea Zorzi, ii, Statuto del Podestà dell’anno 1325 (Firenze: Olschki, 1999)

Secondary Works Ascheri, Mario, ‘Il “dottore” e lo statuto: una difesa interessata’, Rivista di storia del diritto italiano, 69 (1996), 95–113 Bellavitis, Anna, ‘La famiglia “cittadina” veneziana nel xvi secolo: Dote e successione, le leggi e le fonti’, Studi veneziani, n.s. 30 (1995), 55–68 Bellomo, Manlio, Ricerche sui rapporti patrimoniali tra coniugi: Contributo alla storia della famiglia medievale (Milano: Giuffrè, 1961) Bestor, Jane Fair, ‘Marriage Transactions in Renaissance Italy and Mauss’s Essay on the Gift’, Past and Present, no. 164 (1999), 6–46 Biscione, Giuseppe, Statuti del comune di Firenze nell’Archivio di Stato: Tradizione archi­ vistica e ordinamenti (Roma: Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Culturali, 2009) Braccia, Roberta, ‘“Uxor gaudet de morte mariti”: La donatio propter nuptias tra dirit­to comune e diritti locali’, Annali della Facoltà di Giurisprudenza di Genova, 30 (2000– 2001), 76–128 Calvi, Giulia, ‘Reconstructing the Family: Widowhood and Remarriage in Tuscany in the Early Modern Period’, in Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650, ed. by Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998), pp. 275–96 Cavallar, Osvaldo, and Julius Kirshner, ‘Making and Breaking Betrothal Contracts (“Spon­ salia”) in Late Trecento Florence’, in ‘Panta rei’: Studi dedicati a Manlio Bellomo, ed. by Orzaio Condorelli, 3 vols (Roma: Il Cigno, 2004), i, 395–452 Chabot, Isabelle, La dette des familles: Femmes, lignage et patrimoine à Florence aux xive et xve siècles (Roma: École Française de Rome, 2011)

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—— , ‘Seconde nozze e identità materna nella Firenze del tardo medioevo’, in Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Silvana Seidel Menchi, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Thomas Kuehn (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), pp. 493–523 —— , ‘“La sposa in nero”: La ritualizzazione del lutto delle vedove fiorentine (secoli xiv– xv)’, Quaderni storici, 86 (1994), 421–62 —— , ‘Widowhood and Property in Late Medi­eval Florence’, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988), 291–311 Chojnacki, Stanley, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Eisenach, Emlyn, Husbands, Wives, and Concubines: Marriage, Family, and Social Order in Sixteenth-Century Verona (Kirksville: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Hanlon, Gregory, Human Nature in Rural Tuscany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Kent, F. W., Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1977) Kirshner, Julius, ‘Consilia as Authority in Late Medi­eval Italy’, in Legal Consulting in the Civil Law Tradition, ed. by Mario Ascheri, Ingrid Baumgärtner, and Julius Kirshner (Berkeley: Robbins Collection, 1999), pp. 107–39 —— , ‘Donne maritate altrove: Genere e cittadinanza in Italia’, in Tempi e spazi di vita femminile tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Silvana Seidel Menchi, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Thomas Kuehn (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), pp. 377–429 —— , ‘Maritus Lucretur Dotem Uxoris Sue Premortue in Late Medi­eval Florence’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteiling, 108 (1991), 111–55 —— , ‘Materials for a Gilded Cage: Non-Dotal Assets in Florence, 1300–1500’, in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, ed. by David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1991), pp. 184–207 —— , Pursuing Honor While Avoiding Sin: The ‘Monte delle doti’ of Florence (Milano: Giuffrè, 1978) —— , ‘Wives’ Claims against Insolvent Husbands in Late Medi­eval Italy’, in Women of the Medi­eval World, ed. by Julius Kirshner and Suzanne F. Wemple (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 256–303 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1985) Kuehn, Thomas, ‘Contracting Marriage in Renaissance Florence’, in To Have and To Hold: Marrying and its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600, ed. by Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte Jr. (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007), pp. 390–420 —— , ‘Debt and Bankruptcy in Florence’, Quaderni storici, 137 (2011), 355–90 —— , ‘Family Solidarity in Exile and in Law: Alberti Lawsuits of the Early Quattrocento’, Speculum, 78 (2003), 421–39 —— , Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2008) —— , ‘Lawyers and Housecraft in Renaissance Florence: Politics of Private Consilia’, in The Politics of Law in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Florence: Essays in Honour of

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Lauro Martines, ed. by Lawrin Armstrong and Julius Kirshner (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 124–40 Martines, Lauro, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaisance Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1968) Molho, Anthony, Marriage Alliance in Late Medi­eval Florence (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994) Najemy, John, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) Padgett, John F., ‘Open Elite? Social Mobility, Marriage, and Family in Florence, 1282–1494’, Renaissance Quarterly, 63 (2010), 357–411 Padgett, John F., and Paul D. McLean, ‘Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence’, American Journal of Sociology, 111 (2006), 1463–1568 Pene Vidari, Gian Savino, ‘Dote, famiglia e patrimonio fra dottrina e pratica in Piemonte’, in La famigilia e la vita quotidiana in Europa dal 400 al 600: Fonti e problemi (Roma: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1986), pp. 109–21 Stern, Laura, The Criminal Law System of Medi­eval and Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994) Tanzini, Lorenzo, Statuti e legislazione e Firenze dal 1355 al 1415: lo statuto cittadino del 1409 (Firenze: Olschki, 2004)

Commissioni and Commessi in Florence: A Preliminary Assessment of the Introduction, Diffusion, and Role of Annuities in Florence, c. 1400–1580 Lorenzo Polizzotto

T

he Florentine economy of the late medieval and early modern period has received more attention than that of any other comparable urban centre. Generations of historians of international repute have analysed almost all the aspects of the city’s economy to account both for its rise to European prominence and for its gradual but ultimate decline. Understandably, pride of place in these enquiries has been given to the government initiatives on which the city’s progress was built. Economic innovations, it has been demonstrated, as well as banking and commercial activities contributed to enhancing and maintaining the city’s prosperity and prominence for a long period of time, despite recurring epidemics, bankruptcies, political unrest, and wars. In addition, numerous important studies have addressed the gradual decline of Florentine industry, banking, and commerce, and the working and living conditions of the Florentine labouring classes. The importance of these studies cannot be overestimated. Directly and indirectly, they have also influenced the research on other European economic centres of the time. Lorenzo Polizzotto ([email protected]), Winthrop Professor at the Uni­ver­sity of Western Australia, is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Socio of the Deputazione di Storia Patria per la Toscana. To date his major area of research has been the religious and political history of Florence from the late Quattrocento to the mid-Cinquecento. He is at present engaged in a wide-ranging study, sponsored by the Australian Research Council, on the introduction and spread of financial instruments, in particular annuities and censi, in Tuscany, from c. 1400 to 1800.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 217–233 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109707

218 Lorenzo Polizzotto

Understandably, however, most historians, rather than analysing the whole economic activity of the city, have chosen to concentrate on the more advanced, influential, and innovative of the Florentine contributions to the fields of economy and finance. In consequence, we know much about the Florentine innovation in banking, industry, and commerce. We are also exceedingly well informed on the government’s economic, fiscal, and credit policies. Yet very little has been written on other, very popular financial instruments, of great importance to the well-being of large sections of the population, that were circulating in all strata of Florentine society. Particularly inexplicable is the neglect of a type of annuity known in Florence as commissione (commis­ sioni in the plural), the investment staple of a large section of the city’s population, which is the subject of this paper.1 Similarly incomprehensible is the total neglect of another annuity instrument, the censo (censi in the plural, known as rente/s in France), introduced after the ban of commissioni, undoubtedly more financially demanding but nonetheless accessible to a large section of the population of Florence and Tuscany. The almost total absence of these financial instruments from the large number of books on the Florentine economy is difficult to explain. This is not the place in which to provide reasons for the neglect of censi, an issue which I have already discussed elsewhere,2 and which I intend to treat in greater depth in a forthcoming study. As for commissioni — or commessi as they were also originally called — their neglect is attributable to various causes: their humble status, perhaps, or the mistaken belief that they played only a very minor role in Florentine economic life and were, therefore, not worthy of attention. Fortunately, over the last few years, two historians of Florentine hospitals, Professor John Henderson and Professor Philip Gavitt, have drawn our attention to the commessi, providing valuable information on their contribution to the operations of the hospitals which sold them. Professor Henderson has also provided useful analyses of the social composition of the purchasers of these instruments in Santa Maria Nuova, as well as other statistical information.3 1 

There have been brief mentions of them by two past historians of hospitals: Passerini, Storia degli stabilimenti di beneficenza e d’istruzione elementare gratuita della città di Firenze, pp. 341–43; and Bruscoli, Lo spedale di Santa Maria degli Innocenti di Firenze dalla sua fon­ dazione ai giorni nostri, p. 72. The term commissione occurs in a variety of spellings, most commonly commessione or comissione. 2  Polizzotto, ‘I censi consegnativi bollari nella Firenze Granducale’. 3  See, in particular, Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital, especially pp. 210–21. Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence, pp. 115 and following; Gavitt, Gender, Honor, and Charity in Late Renaissance Florence, p. 55.

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Both historians seem to have assumed, however, that the instruments were confined to specific hospital settings, did not evolve further, and did not have a wide circulation in society at large, since they were purchased primarily by people wishing to work in hospitals and to live there. There are strong indications that commissioni were first introduced in Florence by hospitals with the underlying purpose of attracting assistants, commonly referred to at the time as commessi. It is also indisputable that the term commesso, in the early stages of the commercialization of the instrument, designated both an employee of a hospital and also the sum paid to a hospital, or similar charitable institution, for the purchase of an annuity. It also designated, of course, the annuity itself. In the circumstances, and in the light of the specificity (and ambiguity) of the term, historians understandably assumed that commessi were of limited circulation, having little significance for the history of Florence.4 As we will see, however, this was far from the case. Commessi (and, later, commissioni) had very important roles in Florentine economic, social, and philanthropic life. They were commercialized on a large scale primarily, but not exclusively, by hospitals and were purchased by Florentines from all walks of life. Only a small number of purchasers, however, acquired them to obtain lodging in hospitals. For more than 150 years, commessi or commissioni contributed to the welfare of the city and to its harmony. Their ultimate demise, decreed by the government for fiscal reasons, removed an instrument that had contributed to enhancing the lives of some of the most disadvantaged inhabitants of Florence, permitting them to have a dignified, largely self-sufficient, and, if required, also a sheltered old age in the very hospitals from which they had purchased the instruments. * * * The Florentine recourse to commissioni occurred during a particularly difficult period of the city’s history. We do not know when exactly these instruments were first released on the market. By the second decade of the fifteenth century, however, they were a major presence in Florence: so much so, in fact, as to enable us to deduce that they must have made their appearance earlier, by the late fourteenth century at least, when the government, too, marketed an annu4 

Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital, p. 212, in discussing a register of Santa Maria Nuova listing 183 commessi states, ‘Despite the presence of impressive family names, the majority of the people represented in this register were from humbler backgrounds, and lived in and worked for the hospital’.

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ity instrument, eagerly taken up by ecclesiastical institutions.5 Their appearance and expansion in that period is quite understandable and, one could even argue, inevitable. The Florentines’ prosperity and confidence in the future had been severely tested by the plague of 1348, which caused the loss of at least one-third of the city’s population, and a consequent steep decline in its industrial output, and by the disastrous, almost contemporaneous banking crises, which led to the collapse of some of the most important bankers of the city. These, in turn, were followed by the War of the Eight Saints against the papacy, by the Ciompi revolt, by the long, difficult war against the Visconti of Milan, and by the ensuing internal political upheaval that was to last until the Medici finally emerged victorious in 1434. In this climate of uncertainty, marked also by higher taxation and greater government scrutiny of citizens’ wealth, it was inevitable that many Florentines sought some security for the future by purchasing annuities in the form of commissioni. While the wages and living conditions of the lower orders of society had improved as a result of the decline of the population, other segments of the city’s inhabitants were alarmed by these developments and feared for the future. How, in those radically changed circumstances, could they cope financially in sickness or old age, in widowhood and spinsterhood, or when no longer able to work? Unless provisions were made to deal with these contingencies, all too common for a large proportion of the population, life for the people affected could be extremely difficult. A range of other somewhat unique social customs common in central and northern Italy, but particularly prevalent in Florence, aggravated the situation and the anxiety. There, as a result of the practice adopted by young men in both the high and the middling ranks of the population to delay marriage until they had achieved financial security, there were considerable gaps in age between husbands and wives. As a result, it was quite common for women to become widows at a comparatively young age.6 In need of financial protection were also the numerous young women who, for a variety of reasons, mostly connected to the ruinous escalation of the costs of dowries, could not marry. As a result, a large number of them were destined either to languish at home as spinsters or, if some money for the provision of a conventual dowry was available, to enter a convent either as a nun or as a 5 

Trexler and Klapisch, ‘Une table Florentine d’espérance de vie’, p. 138, and nn. 3 and 4 in which the issue of the government annuity is dated to 24 November 1371, and an example of the scale of the investment by the Cistercian Monastery of Settimo is provided. 6  Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles, chap. 14, esp. pp. 394–404; see also Herlihy, ‘Growing Old in the Quattrocento’.

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conversa. Similar financial provisions were also needed by men who received regular salaries while working, but who on reaching the end of their professional or working lives could soon find themselves destitute, unless they had prepared themselves for retirement: priests, clerks, government employees of various kinds, and so on.7 Commissioni were developed and commercialized to tackle these very problems. These instruments had some affinity with censi or rentes, extensively used elsewhere in Europe, but were undoubtedly less sophisticated, though far more flexible than they were. The massive and widespread purchase of commissioni by Florentines began at the beginning of the fifteenth century. They were sold, or commercialized, almost exclusively by religious or semi-religious institutions. Hospitals — a generic term which at the time included not only hospitals as we know them today, but also hostels for pilgrims and asylums for elderly people, widows, and vagabonds — were the most active providers of commissioni. Particularly active in this regard were the hospitals of Santa Maria Nuova, San Matteo, San Paolo, and the Innocenti, on whose records the findings of this paper are based. It should be remembered, however, that there were no fewer than thirty-five hospitals in Florence and at least double that number of hostels and asylums, each of which issued commissioni.8 In addition, most of the religious or quasi-religious institutions in the city (that is, male and female convents) as well as kindred institutions, did the same for more than 150 years, until, that is, the introduction of censi in Florence in the late sixteenth century.9 7  Only a small number of government employees in Palazzo Vecchio had been awarded pensions in retirement: Trexler, ‘Charity and the Defense of Urban Elites in the Italian Communes’, p. 82. 8  Passerini, Storia degli stabilimenti di beneficenza e d’istruzione elementare gratuita della città di Firenze, provides the best inventory and description of most of them. 9  See, for an example of non–hospital issued commissioni, the agreement of 22 February 1576/77 between the convent of San Marco of Florence and Antonio di Zanobi Lanzi, in which the friars, outlining the needs of the convent and the lack of means to meet them, held a chapter in which the Prior proposed ‘di doversi fare una comessione fra il convento et Antonio di Zanobi Landi in questo modo, cioè che detto Antonio ci dovessi dare f[iorini] dugento di moneta di lire sette per fiorino, et che detto convento et frati successivamente durante la vita sua e di Ma Costanza sua donna fussino tenuti et ubligati ogni anno pagarli f. 20 di lire sette per fiorino’: Convento di San Marco, Firenze, Archivio del Convento, III. 9, Miscellanea 3. Similar agreements occur frequently in the convent’s records; see for instance, Convento di San Marco, Firenze, Archivio del Convento, 69a (Quadernuccio di lasciti perpetui e temporali, 1572–1582), fols 39, 44, 46, 47, 52, 56, 63, 67, 70 (foliation by opening). Annuities, variously defined, occur also in the records of other convents and monasteries.

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It needs to be made clear at the outset that the purchasers of commissioni came from all strata of society, though in terms of numbers and size of investments the most prominent were Florentines from the middling classes: men and women of substance, many of whom owned their own homes, and had reserves of cash which they could use to buy commissioni. Surprisingly well represented, also, were the self-employed investors from the lower classes. In a sixteenth-century register of commessi in Santa Maria Nuova, for example, we find a number of such individuals representing a range of the trades and professions then practised in Florence. Apart from a priest, a friar, and a pinzochera, men pursuing the following professions and trades are identified as investors: a doctor, three goldsmiths, three barbers, two gardeners, one saddler, a knife-maker, a shoemaker, a woodworker, a slipper-maker, a spinner, a wood-carver, a carder, a bookbinder, and a weighing machine operator.10 The surprising involvement in commissioni by members of the lower working classes — a presence which, after the demise of commissioni, disappeared altogether in the records of subsequent Florentine investment instruments11 — can be attributed to two factors. One was the fact that commissioni were the first instruments to cater for the financial needs and aspirations not only of the wealthy, highly placed Florentines, but also of the middling and working classes, two sections of the population which, hitherto, did not have access to safe and profitable outlets for their savings. Equally important in attracting these segments of the population to invest in commissioni were the salary increases which they had won and enjoyed from the years immediately after the end of the black plague in 1348 to the early sixteenth century, a period in which there also occurred a decline in the costs of some of the essential food staples on which the population depended.12 Very surprising is the fact that in the thousands of contracts I have consulted — contracts drawn up between the early 1400s and the late 1580s — there occur also the names of a substantial number of individuals, males and, above all, females, belonging to families of the Florentine elite.13 Why should such 10 

ASF, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5792, passim. It should be emphasized that a similar mix of trades and professions occurs in the registers of all the other hospitals. 11  I am referring in particular to censi and vitalizi commercialized in Florence in the late 1580s and 1680s respectively. 12  On this whole issue, see Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence, pp. 437–38; Pinto, Toscana Medi­evale, pp. 113–49; Pinto, ‘I livelli di vita dei salariati cittadini nel periodo successivo al tumulto dei Ciompi’, especially pp. 182–84. 13  For example, in Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, 4314, covering the years 1528–49, there are investors with such famous names as Ma Camilla donna fu di Francesco di

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individuals invest in commissioni when more profitable and more accommodating private and government investment opportunities were available? They may have been moved by altruistic reasons, to help finance charitable institutions of great importance to the city and its inhabitants. Or they may have done so as a precaution, viewing the instrument as a safe and regular source of income and supplies of both food and of other essential commodities in fairly difficult and uncertain times, times in which neither government nor private banking companies could always be relied upon to fulfil their obligations. Not to be discounted, however, are other, more intangible reasons, connected, as we will see, to the way in which these instruments were presented and ‘sold’ to the population. In short, regardless of the class to which these investors belonged, there was a general desire by people, particularly in late middle or in old age, either accustomed to a comfortable tenor of life and desirous of retaining it or seeking some security in periods of political and economic upheaval, to flock to the sole instrument, the commissione, a trustworthy, reliable instrument within everyone’s reach, through which they could fulfil their objectives and aspirations. For many of these people, moreover, there were no viable alternative investment possibilities since neither private banks nor the government provided similar accessible and secure investment opportunities, especially to tradesmen and small shopkeepers. As far as one can tell, moreover, there were no high or low limits imposed: the investor would decide the amount of money or the value of the property to invest for their purchase. The invested sum and the actuarial assessments of the investors would in turn determine the returns they could expect from the investment. Another important and attractive feature of commissioni was their ductility. Unlike all other instruments circulating at the time, they could be modified, transferred to another institution, and in certain circumstances, at times but not always, with the agreement of the parties involved, even cancelled or withdrawn without penalties.14 The monetary range of investments was surprisingly wide. For example, Martino di Piero Albanese and his wife, Mona Lena, invested two florins in Niccolò Capponi, Ma Lena Strozzi, Ma Francesca di Francesco de’ Pazzi, Ma Nannina donna fu di Pierfrancesco Rucellai, Ma Selvaggia, vedova, donna fu di Iacopo de’ Bardi; in ASF, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5792, covering the years 1541–79, the following names occur: Ma Bartolomea del fu Giovanni Pandolfini, Ma Bartolomea di Maso degli Albizi, Dionigi di Tieri Tornaquinci, Francesco di Tommaso Portinari, Giovanni e Giuliano Rucellai, Marietta figliola di Niccolò di Mariotto Segni, and so on. 14  ASF, Ospedale di S. Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 192, fol. 156r.

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the hospital of San Matteo in order to receive for the terms of their natural lives two types of wood for heating and baking.15 On the other end of the scale, Messer Matteo di Antonio Adimari invested 1000 florins larghi di grossi with Santa Maria Nuova and received in return 100 florins per year for the term of his natural life;16 while Francesco Calderini invested 1200 florins in a com­ missione which was employed by San Matteo to buy luoghi di monte.17 These are extremes that seldom occur in the registers consulted. The overwhelming majority of investments, in fact, were in the range of 50 to 350 florins. Even so, there were a consistent number of investors, almost invariably women, most of whom had been employed as servants, who like Martino di Piero Albanese and his wife, Mona Lena, did invest their meagre savings of a few florins in commis­ sioni.18 Despite the fact that the returns from them in either money or victuals would have been very low, and insufficient to sustain them for a whole year, such investments were of great assistance, since they provided a secure and continuous supply of money and goods on which commessi could rely and build. It should also be stressed that such low-cost commissioni were uneconomic, and a burden for the hospitals or for the other institutions which accepted them. To refuse them, however, would have undermined the goodwill of the population and would also have reduced, however slightly, the flow of money the hospitals needed to continue their operations. The hospitals continued to accept such investments in the full knowledge that they could always rely on the government’s financial intervention to ensure their continuing activities. For the whole period of the commissioni’s commercialization, the money or properties provided to obtain annuities were referred to by the various issuing hospitals and by the other religious institutions as alms, charitable donations to the sick and the poor cared for by the institutions, made in honour of God and for the salvation of the investors’ souls.19 It was not a mere play 15 

ASF, Ospedale di S. Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 190, fol. 136r. 16  ASF, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5794, fol. 258r. 17  ASF, Ospedale di S. Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 191, fol. 141r. The monetary value of a property would, of course, be assessed by the hospital to determine the size of the commissione. 18  For example, ASF, Ospedale di S. Paolo detto dei convalescenti, 923, fol. 10, fol. 12, fols 30–XXX, fols 31–XXXI, fols 67–LXVII (foliation: Arabic left, Roman right). The annual returns received by these commesse, all servants, seldom exceeded 12 lire per annum. 19  A typical example of the wording of such agreements is here provided: ‘Ricordanza chome oggi questo dì 29 di lugl[i]o [1493] noi abiamo acceptati […] per nostri commessi et del nostro spedale Iacopo di Matteo di Matteo et Mona Gian[n]a sua donna e’ quali danno et

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on words but a formula which added a powerful spiritual dimension — and indeed a promise of salvation for the investors — to an act which was primarily a commercial transaction. The wording was also designed to encourage investment in commissioni by assuring investors that, like all charitable acts, the donation would be handsomely rewarded by God. Finally, the formula removed all doubts regarding the legitimacy of the instrument, whereas strong suspicions were still held regarding censi and other forms of investment, including those issued by the governments. There may also have been a further more mundane reason for this stress on the commissioni’s charitable nature. Their classification as a spiritual donation could also have had the effect of preventing them, for a considerable period of time, from incurring a government tax or gabelle, as was generally the case with all normal contracts.20 As commercialized in Florence, there were four major types of commissioni. All of them required the payment of a sum of money or the donation of land and other real property to the institution which was to provide the annuity. The simplest and undoubtedly the most common type commercialized were annuities in which for the term of their natural lives investors received an annual percentage — 6 per cent to 11 per cent — of the sum, or of the value of the property, which they had provided to the chosen institution.21 Apart from the purely monetary version, investors could choose to have an annuity in kind, which entitled them to obtain, again for the rest of their lives, provisions of food, invariably wheat or flour and cured meat, as well as wine and two kinds of wood, logs for heating and frasconi (leafy branches) for bread baking. These were to be made available at precise, well-defined times of the year. Investors had also the choice of mixing the two types of annuities, choosing to receive donano a’ poveri del nostro spedale et a Mr. Piero spedalingo […] per detti poveri f.[iorini] 100 d’oro di sugello, con conditione […] che durante la loro vita et di c[i]ascuno di loro et non più, il nostro ospedale e nostri successori sieno tenuti e debino ogni anno durante la loro vita dare a’ sopradetti Iacopo e Mona Gian[n]a: grano staia dodici; vino barili undici; olio barili uno; legna catasta 1; frasconi some due, posti a chasa lor’: ASF, Ospedale di S. Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 192, fol. 155r. Of the hospitals under examination, only the scribes of the Innocenti did not always refer to the investments as alms. 20  This is a moot point since some commissioni contracts drawn up by notaries did incorporate a government tax. In any case, by 1566, at least, commissioni were taxed like all the other contracts; see ‘Statuti della Gabella de’ Contratti del dì 29 Aprile 1566 ab incarnatione’, in Cantini, Legislazione Toscana, pp. 82–83. 21  The percentage was meant to be determined by the actuarial assessments of the ages of the investors; in reality, other factors, such as the value of the investment, seem also to have been taken into account.

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an annual sum of money and a reduced amount of provisions. The final choice, and perhaps also the cheapest to obtain, consisted of providing the hospital with a certain sum of money and receiving in return accommodation in the hospital itself or in one of the many houses owned by it, as well as food and care during life and, eventually, burial at death. In many cases, individuals taking this option were required to provide some assistance in looking after patients or in undertaking other chores such as cleaning, distributing food, and so on. Such was the hospitals’ need for investments and for the ready cash they would provide, however, that their spedalinghi would tend to agree to any proposal made by the investors, as long as it involved some form of immediate payment. Only later, and in very few cases, when the glaring deficiencies of the agreement became apparent, would spedalinghi seek to annul the agreements.22 The four hospitals of Santa Maria Nuova, San Matteo, San Paolo, and the Innocenti were the institutions most eager to sell annuities in kind and most successful at doing so. This is not surprising, since they had the largest landholdings in the Florentine contado, as well as a considerable stock of houses in Florence itself, all the result of endowments by benefactors. It is not possible to know how the hospitals and the investors in annuities came to agreement regarding choices and conditions. The contracts drawn up by the investors and by the hospitals’ spedalinghi are very sketchy, merely outlining the amount of money paid and the returns in money or in kind the investors were to receive from the institutions. We lack information regarding the actuarial principles or methods on which the contracts were founded. That such charts existed, and were employed in the negotiations for annuities, is beyond dispute.23 What we lack, however, is information on how the charts were interpreted and applied. Who were these investors? Why did they invest in commissioni, and to what end? The majority of investors lived in Florence, often in the very neighbourhood of the hospital or institution from which they were to purchase the 22 

ASF, Ospedale di S. Paolo detto dei convalescenti, 922, fol. CXXXV, the scribe writes that ‘detta chomessione pareva fusse troppo disonesta’ and the spedalingo, ‘veduto el danno all’ospedale’, and in agreement with the investor returned the money to her so that the hospital ‘rimanesse libero da detta chomessione’, undated, but c. 1498. 23  Trexler and Klapisch, ‘Une table Florentine d’espérance de vie’. The two charts there mentioned are held in ASF, Provvisioni 122, fols 336 and following, and in Archivio Diocesano di Firenze, AFF, PCR 9 (Processi e atti criminali), 8, Bastardelli di Atti criminali (1502–1624), 6. I  am most grateful to Monsignor Gilberto Aranci, Archivist of the Florence Diocesan Archives, and Dr Alessio Assonitis, Director of the Medici Archives Project, for kindly providing me with copies of these two documents.

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commissione. It cannot be said, however, that proximity decided the choice of providers, since investors came from all areas of the city. Indeed, a substantial number of them hailed from areas outside Florence, from the suburbs and from even more distant localities. This suggests that the choice of which institution to invest in was determined by its reputation and by the attractiveness of the financial terms offered, not by proximity. One of the largest groups of investors was composed of married couples, a very small proportion of whom also nominated their young children as beneficiaries of the annuity. The ages of the adults is hardly ever provided in the first hundred years of the commissioni’s commercialization. The fact that some couples had young children suggests that not only the elderly but also young and middle-aged persons sought the security of an annuity. On the whole, however, women — both single women and also women who were married but who often acted independently when they purchased commissioni — made up the most numerous group. Once again, little information is provided about them. Three different categories can, however, be identified. The largest of these consisted of widows, most of them still living in their own homes and planning to remain there. They opted to receive either money or provisions secured through the annuities they had purchased or which had been purchased on their behalf. A small number of them had children or other relatives to care for. In the circumstances, it is not surprising to note that the majority of them had chosen to receive provisions rather than money. Many of them lived under the obligation or threat — very common in Florence — that they could enjoy both the accommodation in the family home and the yearly fruits of the annuities established by their husbands for the duration of their lives, but only as long as they did not remarry.24 Other widows sought to be accommodated in one of the houses owned by the hospitals, while a very small minority asked to be received into the hospitals, sharing the lives and duties of the other commesse. Another fairly numerous category comprised young women unable to marry because the family could not afford the marriage dowry and destined, therefore, either to remain at home or to enter a convent. Whatever the choice, it was essential for them to have the financial means to lead a decorous life either in the world or in the convent. Small annuities were purchased for both cat24  See, for example, ASF, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5793, fol. II (Roman numeration on right folio), agreement made in 1402; and ASF, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5794, fol. 150r, dated 1504; in both cases the husbands leave clear instructions to the hospital to stop the yearly annuity payments to their wives should they remarry. Should that occur and were children involved, then the annuity reverted to them.

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egories: for some of the young women destined to remain at home — perhaps to compensate them for the family’s inability to marry them off, and to give them some independence within the family — but also for those destined for the convent, since, despite having to provide the monastic dowry to gain entry, they in addition had to pay for many of the essentials of daily living not supplied by the convent.25 Most surprising is the composition of the last group of single women endowed with annuities. These were servants coming from the lower strata of Florentine society, but employed by well-off Florentines. Some of them served a particular family for years and, in old age and on the eve of retirement, were rewarded for their labour and affection with the endowment of an annuity. The majority of servants so endowed had cared for elderly members of the employing family until their death. The evidence suggests, further, that the overwhelming majority of them had lived in the house of the persons they cared for and had assisted day and night. At the death of their charges, a notarized attestation vouching to the servants’ care and faithfulness was usually provided to the hospital before the annuity could be activated. Quite remarkable is the origin of some of the servants thus employed. The majority of them were, of course, Florentines, from the city itself. Well represented, too, were servants from the contado. A surprising number of them, however, hailed from North Africa, from the Middle East, from Turkey, and from as far away as Russia.26 These were, undoubtedly, emancipated slaves who, because of their devotion and trustworthiness, had become fully integrated into the families to whom they had belonged. A proportion of these servants, moreover, had planned for their retirement by investing in commissioni while still employed.27 That they 25 

ASF, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5794, fol. 283r, not dated but 1507; ASF, Ospedale di S. Paolo detto dei convalescenti, 923, fols XII, 12, 16, 17, IIIL (foliated by opening: Arabic foliation on the left, Roman on the right), datings range from 1480s to the late 1490s. 26  See, for example, ASF, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5794, fol. 204 (Lucia di nazione Turca), fol. 250r (Zita Circhassa), both dating in the early 1500s; ASF, Ospedale di S. Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 193, fol. 14v (Mona Rosa Unghera), and fol. 112v (Lena Circassa), dated 1495–96. For a discussion of servants in Florence, of their provenance and treatment both personal and financial, see the exemplary study by Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Women Servants in Florence during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’. 27  Most interesting is the commissione of Ma Ginevra, daughter of Antonio del pescatore, servant of Ma Gostanza widow of Baroncino Baroncini, who at the age of thirty-three and with the assistance of Ma Gostanza’s son, deposited 17 florins and 1 lira in the hospital of San Matteo with the promise of adding to it over the years, presumably on the expectation that at her retirement, she would live on the returns from the commissione. She went on to say, however,

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had the money and the initiative to do so cannot but confirm the fact that they were fully integrated within the family that employed them and were properly rewarded for their work. The overwhelming impression conveyed by these documents is the cohesion of the Florentine family in this period, as argued by F. W. Kent in his Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: a cohesion and solidarity both emotional and economic which, we can now add, extended also to their faithful servants.28 Single men do not figure as largely as women in the hospitals’ registers of annuities. This is particularly true for the fifteenth century. The number of men increases steadily throughout that century and the next, however, perhaps as a result of their growing appreciation of the benefits obtainable from the instrument. Nevertheless, only on very rare occasions did their number match or exceed that of women. Whether lay or ecclesiastic, they give the impression of being less adaptable than women and of having difficulty settling down, even when endowed with a sizeable commissione. Interestingly, the majority of defaulters mentioned in the registers consulted to date were in fact males. The registers of the four hospitals under discussion are organized in such a way as to render it difficult to assess the total number of individuals — men and women — who had invested in commissioni over the years of their issue. Changes in recording practices, the duplication of names, and the loss of many registers make it impossible to obtain a clear understanding of the progression, fluctuations, and extent of the trade in commissioni. Some comprehension of the scale of the market for annuities in Florence at the peak of their expansion can be obtained, however, by analysing certain of the extant registers. Three contiguous registers from the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova are particularly useful. The first, covering the years 1504–09, lists approximately 340 commis­ sioni; the next, for the years 1510–18, lists 300; while the third, for the years 1519–25, lists approximately 400.29 For the Innocenti, the register covering the years 1541–83 records about 200 commissioni.30 For the Ospedale di San that were she to reach sixty years of age and be unable to work, she had then to be accepted as one of the commesse of the hospital and enjoy all their privileges. Should she die before then, the hospital was to have all the money she had deposited and all her goods but had to celebrate the Masses of Saint Gregory and an Office for the repose of her soul: ASF, Ospedale di S. Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 198, fol. 258r–v, dated 1520. 28  Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, especially chap. 3 and Conclusion. 29  The information is drawn from the following registers: ASF, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5794, 5795, 5796. 30  Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, 4314.

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Paolo two registers have been chosen. One register, now held in the archives of the convent of the Fanciulle di Santa Caterina, covers the years 1460–95, and records 97 commissioni,31 while the other for the years 1498–1525, still held in the archives of the Ospedale, records 139.32 The registers of the Ospedale di San Matteo present difficulties. This hospital does not always follow the registration patterns of the other three. The register for the years 1518–27, like most of its preceding registers, records the complex interchange of goods and money between the hospital and its commessi, and then the establishment of new com­ missioni, nineteen in all.33 Preliminary soundings conducted on the registers of other providers reveal a similar pattern of investments. Given the number of institutions trading in the instrument, and the number of commissioni marketed by each of them, as shown in the records of the four hospitals analysed, the following estimate may be made. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a significant number of Florentines from all strata of society, including the working classes, had the means to avail themselves of an instrument which made it possible for them to obtain a more comfortable and dignified future. At the same time, their purchase of commissioni contributed to the welfare of their beloved city and of its less fortunate inhabitants. This continued to be the case for as long as commis­ sioni were traded — that is, until the end of the sixteenth century, when censi were introduced in Florence. * * * It has been argued that annuities were a ‘steady and reliable source of income’ for the hospitals and for the numerous other religious institutions which sold them.34 To some extent this is correct: there was a great deal of money coming in to these institutions — but a great deal was also going out to pay for the annuities and to fulfil their conditions. Examination of the agreements between investors and the providing institutions and a comparison between the money offered for the annuity and the returns promised by the institutions — which could of course be in money or goods or a combination of both — suggests that, overall, commissioni were not economically viable in the longer

31 

ASF, Fanciulle di Santa Caterina, 49. ASF, Ospedale di S. Paolo detto dei convalescent, 923. 33  ASF, Ospedale di S. Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 198. 34  Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence, p. 116. 32 

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term. It would appear that complete fulfilment of the obligations undertaken was probably unsustainable. The financial problems regularly incurred by the two major Florentine hospitals supports this conjecture. Government subsidies made it possible for the hospitals to proceed with their activities, including the selling of commissioni. There were occasions, however, in which it had to intervene and stop their sale, despite the unpopularity of the decision. It did so in 1533 when it forbade Santa Maria Nuova — and other hospitals, I suspect — from selling commis­ sioni. As reported by Varchi the decision to do so was motivated primarily by the indebtedness of the hospital incurred by the selling of annuities.35 The ban was meant to be permanent, but in fact, such must have been the outcry and the consequent hardships that within four or five years Santa Maria Nuova had resumed its trade in annuities. And it continued to do so until the late 1580s. The bankruptcy of the Innocenti forced the government, once again, to ban the hospital from selling commissioni.36 On this occasion, too, the ban may have been extended to all other hospitals. Whatever the case, the ban and the almost concurrent introduction of censi led to the final demise of commissioni. With their passing there disappeared an important instrument, which, defective as it might have been in application, had for close to two centuries cushioned a large, vulnerable segment of the Florentine population against hardship and even indigence. It was an instrument, moreover, which had accustomed Florentines to rely on annuities and which, in the long term, conditioned many of them from the middle and the higher segments of society to accept the previously spurned censi, which were to play such an important role in the subsequent economic history of the city.

35 

Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, ii, 375–76. Bruscoli, Lo spedale di Santa Maria degli Innocenti di Firenze dalla sua fondazione ai giorni nostri, p. 72. 36 

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Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, 4314 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Fanciulle di Santa Caterina, 49 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova, 5792, 5793, 5794, 5795, 5796 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ospedale di S. Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 190, 191, 192, 193, 198 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ospedale di S. Paolo detto dei convalescenti, 922, 923 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Provvisioni 122 Archivio Diocesano di Firenze, AFF, PCR 9 (Processi e atti criminali), 8, Bastardelli di Atti criminali (1502–1624), 6 Convento di San Marco, Firenze, Archivio del Convento, III. 9, Miscellanea 3 Convento di San Marco, Firenze, Archivio del Convento, 69a (Quadernuccio di lasciti perpetui e temporali, 1572–82)

Primary Sources Cantini, Lorenzo, Legislazione Toscana, vol. vi (Firenze: Stamperia Albizziniana, 1800) Varchi, Benedetto, Storia Fiorentina, 2 vols (Firenze: Salani Editore, 1963)

Secondary Works Bruscoli, Gaetano, Lo spedale di Santa Maria degli Innocenti di Firenze dalla sua fondazi­ one ai giorni nostri (Firenze: Enrico Ariani, 1900) Gavitt, Philip, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536 (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michigan Press, 1990) —— , Gender, Honor, and Charity in Late Renaissance Florence (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) Goldthwaite, Richard A., The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1980) Henderson, John, The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006) Herlihy, D., ‘Growing Old in the Quattrocento’, in Old Age in Preindustrial Societies, ed. by Peter N. Stearns (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1982), pp. 104–18 Herlihy, D., and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles: Un etude du catasto florentin de 1427 (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1978) Kent, F. W., Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1977) Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ‘Women Servants in Florence during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. by Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ver­sity Press, 1986), pp. 56–80

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Passerini, Luigi, Storia degli stabilimenti di beneficenza e d’istruzione elementare gratuita della città di Firenze (Firenze: Le Monnier), 1853 Pinto, Giuliano,‘I livelli di vita dei salariati cittadini nel periodo successivo al tumulto dei Ciompi (1380–1430)’, in Il tumulto dei Ciompi: Un momento di storia Fiorentina ed Europea (Firenze: Olschki, 1981), pp. 161–98 —— , Toscana Medi­evale: Paesaggi e realtà sociali (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1993) Polizzotto, Lorenzo, ‘I censi consegnativi bollari nella Firenze Granducale: Storia di uno strumento di credito trascurato’, Archivio storico italiano, 168 (2010), 263–323 Trexler, Richard C., ‘Charity and the Defense of Urban Elites in the Italian Communes’, in The Rich, the Well Born, and the Powerful, ed. by F. C. Jaher (Urbana: Uni­ver­sity of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 64–109 Trexler, Richard C., and C. Klapisch, ‘Une table Florentine d’espérance de vie’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 26 (1971), 137–39

Figure 13.1. Benedetto da Maiano, Portrait bust of Filippo Strozzi (1475), terracotta, Skulpturensammlung, Bode Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photograph: Antje Voigt.

‘Grande passatenpo honesto’: Filippo Strozzi’s Garden at Naples Amanda Lillie

T

his article explores Filippo Strozzi’s garden at Naples and a no-longerextant building commissioned for that site, focusing on the motives behind this apparently minor, incongruous, and epicurean project. Given the void at the centre of this investigation, a range of documents — financial accounts, letters, and household inventories — are deployed as necessary substitutes for the garden itself. Around 1537 Lorenzo Strozzi wrote a biography of his father, Filippo di Matteo Strozzi (Figure 13.1).1 This source has been widely cited by historians and art historians concerned with all aspects of Filippo Strozzi’s life, from the 1 

L. Strozzi, Vita di Filippo Strozzi, ed. by Bini and Bigazzi; L. Strozzi, Le vite degli uomini illustri della casa Strozzi, ed. by Zeffi, pp. 61–76. Amanda Lillie ([email protected]) is a professor in the History of Art Department at the Uni­ver­sity of York. Her publications include Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century: An Architectural and Social History (Cam­bridge, 2005, rev. paperback edn 2011); ‘Sculpting the Air: Donatello’s Narratives of the Environment’, in Depth of Field: The Place of Relief in the Time of Donatello, ed. by Donal Cooper and Marika Leino (Oxford, 2007); ‘Fiesole: locus amoenus or Penitential Landscape?’, I Tatti Studies, 11 (2008); ‘Artists Interpreting Water in Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century Tuscany’, in Le civiltà delle acque dal Medioevo al Rinascimento, ed. by Arturo Calzona, Francesco Paolo Fiore, and Daniela Lamberini (Florence, 2010); ‘Building the Picture’, online publication for the National Gallery, London (2014); ‘The Politics of Castellation’, in The Medici in the Fifteenth Century: Signori of Florence, ed. by Robert Black and John Law (Cam­bridge, MA, 2015). She was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (1987–88), and an Arts and Humanities Research Council UK Fellow (2013–14).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 234–256 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109708

236 Amanda Lillie

building of his great palace in Florence and the decoration of his burial chapel by Filippino Lippi, to his spectacular success as a banker (booming while the Medici went under), and his role as an intermediary between the Medici regime in Florence and the Aragonese Kingdom of Naples.2 Nevertheless, one passage in Lorenzo Strozzi’s Vita, describing his father’s Neapolitan farm, has received comparatively little attention: He had, near the city of Naples, a garden called The Farm [‘Masseria’] which surpassed all others in its nature and abundance, where he would often go for his own refreshment and to the delight of his friends. He took such pleasure in its cultivation that he did many things with his own hands there, gathering the rarest and first fruits of the season as they ripened in Naples. From that source he was then able to adorn his own homeland with noble plants, transporting there cultivated figs and artichokes, which had not previously been imported into our region [i.e. Tuscany].3

This statement is set within a rhetorical framework describing Filippo’s hospitality and generosity towards visitors and relations, so that the garden is presented as an instrument of his magnanimity. Lorenzo Strozzi’s text explains that, because of Filippo’s activities, such as creating the garden, and because of his ‘grateful and affable manner’, he became close to King Ferrante and his son Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, and all the barons of the Kingdom of Naples, with most of whom he did business.4 This passage therefore creates a courtly context for the creation of Filippo’s garden and implies its strategic deployment for political, social, and economic advancement.5 Already in the nineteenth century, research in the Strozzi family archives demonstrated that Lorenzo’s Vita (written more than forty years after his father’s death) was inaccurate in a number of details,6 yet its main themes have more recently been upheld by Heather Gregory and Lorenzo Fabbri whose 2 

Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, pp. 31–73; Goldthwaite, ‘The Building of the Strozzi Palace’; Del Treppo, ‘Il re e il banchiere’; Sale, The Strozzi Chapel; Borsook, ‘Documenti relativi’; Borsook, ‘Ritratto di Filippo Strozzi’; Gregory, ‘The Return of the Native’; Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, i, 137–39. 3  L. Strozzi, Vita di Filippo Strozzi, ed. by Bini and Bigazzi, p. 16; all translations are my own. 4  L. Strozzi, Vita di Filippo Strozzi, ed. by Bini and Bigazzi, pp. 16–17. 5  Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, p. 164; A. Strozzi, Lettere, ed. by Guasti, p. xxxii; Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, p. 11; Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, pp. 55–56. 6  Gregory, ‘A Florentine Family in Crisis’, p. 186; Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, pp. 105–06, 113; Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400, pp. 20–21, n. 42.

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Figure 13.2. Anonymous artist (attributed to Francesco Rosselli), the Aragonese Fleet returning from the Battle of Ischia on 6 July 1465 (Tavola Strozzi), Naples, Museo di San Martino. Detail of hill of Sant’Elmo showing the area below the gardens of San Martino.

work on Filippo Strozzi’s political manipulation of his position as banker to King Ferrante in order to convince the Medici to end his exile fleshes out the description of this episode in the Vita.7 Documents from Filippo Strozzi’s account books and ricordanze likewise support Lorenzo Strozzi’s text, providing evidence for his father’s Neapolitan garden and extending our knowledge of it in several crucial respects. The first records concern Filippo’s purchase on 18 July 1480 from ‘notar Giovanni di Santo pater di Napoli’ of ‘una maseria di 7 grotte chon iii pezi di terra, ii vingniati e uno lavoratia con cierti albori posta nel Monte di Sant’Ermo a meza chosta’, and only two days later, on 20 July 1480, of an adjoining piece of land from Paris di Scozia, ‘nel Pogio di Santo Ermo, dove si dicie a Cappa Santa, 7 

Gregory, ‘The Return of the Native’; Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400; Del Treppo, ‘Il re e il banchiere’.

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a piè del’orto di Santo Martino’ (Figure 13.2).8 Further details were added when the transactions were transferred to other pages in the account book, clarifying that these were Filippo Strozzi’s own properties in the Kingdom of Naples, that the second farm bought from Paris di Scozia included various cisterns, and that the unified estate created from the two farms was known as Bella Vista.9 The total cost was slightly over 38 Neapolitan ducats (210 florins), the price of a small property with no residence, since the only structures mentioned were the cisterns and seven caves or tunnels (‘grotte’).10 These accounts are significant in a number of ways. Firstly, while one farm was bought from a Neapolitan notary, Giovanni di Santo Pater, the other was acquired from Paris di Scozia, a member of Ferrante’s court circle. Paris di Scozia’s brother Girolamo was in charge of the kingdom’s customs and excise (‘dogana e gabelle’) and was one of the wealthiest Neapolitan merchants, while another brother, Guglielmo, was Master of the Horse to Alfonso of Calabria.11 Secondly, we learn about the land itself, that it was originally referred to as a ‘masseria’, the term used in southern Italy to refer to a country estate or farm, and that vines, arable crops, and trees were already cultivated there. Thirdly, we are informed of its exact position, ‘half way up the hill of Sant’Elmo, also called Capa Santa, just below the gardens of the charterhouse of San Martino’. This site overlooks the whole Bay of Naples and is one of the most spectacular locations in a city offering many panoramic views. That the property was selected for its view is confirmed by accounts in 1481, 1484, and 1488 referring to it as ‘Bella Vista’, a name it seems to have assumed after it was acquired by Filippo Strozzi.12 Furthermore, the site was strategic as it 8 

ASF, CS V, 22, cc. 168 sin–des; Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, pp. 16, 59, nn. 40–41, mistakenly dates one purchase in 1482. See also ASF, CS V, 42, c. 3 sin; Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, p. 72. 9  ASF, CS V, 22, c. 169 sin (1480), ‘Beni inmobili nel reame di Napoli mia propri deono dare adì xx di luglio Ducati xviii per uno pezo di terra lavorata e alborata chon alquanta muraglia di citerne posti nel Pogio di Santo Ermo dove si dicie a Cappa Santa a pie del’orto del munistero di San Martino […] Ducati 18 –, Fiorini 100 – […] E adì ditto Ducati xx per una masseria chon 7 grotte e iii pezi di terra, ii vingniati e uno lavoratio e arborato posti a meza chosta della Montangnia di Santo Ermo […] Ducati 20 – , Fiorini 110 –’; c. 180 sin (1481 modern style), ‘la maseria apellata Bella Vista posta nela chosta della montagnia di Santo Ermo che furono dua chonprate 1° da notar Giovanni di Santo pater e una da Paris di Schozia’. 10  Compare this with Pascasio Diaz Garlon’s splendid masseria; see Del Treppo, ‘Il re e il banchiere’, p. 251; Il giornale del Banco Strozzi, ed. by Leone, pp. 18–19, 128. 11  Il giornale del Banco Strozzi, ed. by Leone, nn. 185, 585; Abulafia, ‘The Crown and the Economy’, pp. 141, 144. 12  ASF, CS V, 22, c. 180 sin (April 1481 modern style); CS V, 42, cc. 3 sin (1484), 7 sin

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was positioned immediately above the king’s residence of Castel Novo and lay directly between the castle and the Carthusian monastery of San Martino. The final piece of information, and the most surprising, is its date of acquisition: July 1480. Filippo di Matteo Strozzi had first gone to Naples to work in the bank of his cousin Niccolò di Lionardo Strozzi in 1447.13 For his first twelve years in Naples Filippo was free to return to Florence, but in 1458 the ban originally placed on his father was extended to his sons for another eight years.14 Filippo therefore remained in Naples for almost twenty years, first deputizing for his cousin, then managing the bank when Niccolò moved to Rome in the mid1450s, and finally receiving concessions from King Ferrante to conduct business on his own account in the Kingdom of Naples by January 1463.15 During this time he lived in a rented town house in the seggio of Portanova, near the church of the Florentine community, S. Maria di Portanuova. 16 Inventories of the Strozzi brothers’ rented town palace in 1470 show a patrician level of comfort and elegance, sufficient in any case to provide suitable lodging for visitors to the city, such as Leon Battista Alberti, who stayed with them in Naples between the end of May and the beginning of June 1465.17 In September 1466 the ban on Filippo was lifted.18 He returned to Florence on 30 November, married Fiammetta Adimari and, as Richard Goldthwaite demonstrated, expanded his bank with a new Florentine branch.19 Whereas (1484), 17 sin (1488). 13  ASF, CS V, 14, cc. 1–4, 111 sin; Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, pp. 53–54; Gregory, ‘The Return of the Native’, p. 4; Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400, pp. 21–22; Borsook, ‘Ritratto di Filippo Strozzi’, p. 2. 14  Rubinstein, Government of Florence, pp. 88–135 (p. 110); Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoni­ ale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400, p. 22; Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, pp. 149–77. 15  Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, p. 55, n. 52. 16  Del Treppo, ‘Il re e il banchiere’, pp.  233–34; A.  Strozzi, Lettere, ed. by Guasti, pp. 191–92; Il giornale del Banco Strozzi, ed. by Leone, pp. 150, 124–25, 724–27. See also ASF, CS V, 18, c. 130 des. 17  Il giornale del Banco Strozzi, ed. by Leone, Appendix XXVIII, No. 8, pp. 727–33; Boschetto, ‘Nuove ricerche sulla biografia e sugli scritti volgari di Leon Battista Alberti’, pp. 186, 188; Del Treppo, ‘Il re e il banchiere’, pp. 233–34. 18  ASF, CS V, 22, c. 93 des. (1471); Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, p. 14, nn. 29 and 30; Gregory, ‘The Return of the Native’, p. 13. 19  ASF, CS V, 22, c. 22; Rubinstein, Government of Florence, p. 165; Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, p. 57; Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze

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his wife and family remained in Florence, Filippo himself returned to Naples for long periods, staying eighteen months from September 1468 to April 1470, six months from November 1472 to June 1473, and another seventeen months from November 1479 to April 1481, with further visits in 1484 and 1488. 20 This could almost be described as dual residency. His brother Lorenzo, on the other hand, after returning to Florence in 1470 to select a wife and marry Antonia Baroncelli, took her with him to Naples and continued to live there, managing what was to remain the central office of the Strozzi bank, until his death on 4 October 1479.21 Although Ferrante encouraged foreign merchants to settle in the kingdom by granting citizenship to those who bought houses and took wives in Naples,22 it is unlikely that Filippo or Lorenzo would have wanted to buy their own property in Naples in the 1450s or early to mid-1460s when they were establishing their business and hoping to end their exile. Even after 1466 during the fourteen post-exile years, neither Filippo nor Lorenzo bought a house or land in the kingdom, perhaps with the knowledge that such a move would have weakened their position as loyal Florentine patriots. The distinction between residency and citizenship was a crucial one in fifteenthcentury Italy, as their self-definition as ‘merchatanti fiorentini dimoranti in Napoli’ suggests. Why then did Filippo invest in Neapolitan land in 1480? His brother who lived there had just died, he no longer needed the support of the King of Naples to exert pressure on the Medici to end his exile, and he was apparently financially, politically, and personally committed to his life in Florence, having already launched his campaign to acquire the site for his huge new Florentine palace.23 Moreover, Filippo’s patronage schemes in Florence and its surrounding countryside demonstrate a consistent desire to embed himself in the territory of his

del ’400, p. 23; Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, p. 198. 20  See archival volumes listed below, note 58. See also Del Treppo, ‘Il re e il banchiere’, p. 234, n. 14, and Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400, p. 23. 21  ASF, CS IV, 357 cc. 1 des–2 sin; A. Strozzi, Lettere, ed. by Guasti, p. xxxix; Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, p. 57; Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, pp. 14, 16; Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, pp. 203–04; Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400, pp. 23, 205. 22  Leone, Il commercio a Napoli, p. 10, this regulation was dated 4 June 1469. 23  Pampaloni, Palazzo Strozzi, pp. 48–50, n. 54.

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ancestors and relations and to extend and embellish the lands, houses, churches, and convents of Strozzi places.24 The Naples farm does not fit this strategy. One motive for Filippo’s acquisition of the masseria was probably his keen interest in plants, and several documents make it clear this was no ordinary agricultural estate. In November 1480, within four months of the purchase, Filippo hired a factor or gardener, Giuliano d’Antonio from Quarantola in the Val di Pesa, and sent him specially from Tuscany to Naples to take care of the masseria. Four letters referring to the hire and dispatch of this employee convey a sense of urgency in Filippo’s desire to put him to work as soon as possible. The speed with which this was achieved is impressive. Filippo wrote from Naples on 8 November 1480 asking for a factor to be sent from Florence, and the man had travelled to Naples and begun his job at the masseria by 27 November.25 Although he is mostly referred to as a factor or farm manager (fattore), the additional, unusual labelling of his role as an ortolano suggests that gardening was a key aspect of the project.26 The compelling attraction of Naples as a site for gardening scarcely needs to be spelled out. The combination of a frost-free climate and volcanic soil allowed the outdoor cultivation of many varieties of fruit and vegetable that needed winter protection and never really flourished in Tuscany. Naples seems already to have been regarded as a horticultural paradise in the fifteenth century. As Bill Kent suggested, the young Lorenzo de’ Medici fleetingly refers to the ‘verdi giardini ornate e colti | dello aprico e dolce aere pestano’ (green gardens, ornamental and carefully cultivated, bathed in the sweet, sun-warmed air of Paestum), perhaps inspired by his first visit to Naples in 1466.27 A Neapolitan, Loise de Rosa wrote in praise of his local fruit and the fertility of 24 

Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 9–10, 22–23, 40–41, 103–04, 132. ASF, CS V, 22, c. 110 des., 8 November 1480, transcription of a letter from Filippo Strozzi in Naples to Giovacchino Guasconi in Florence: ‘Disideravo me menassi uno fattore per la maseria alla quale se ora vi fussi uno poco distanza ci sarebbe troppo a propoxito’; c. 111 sin., 18 November 1480, Giovacchino Guasconi in Florence to Filippo Strozzi in Naples: ‘Il fattore ’a messo mano alla maseria la quale in quello modo che achoncierete e giudicherete sarò contentissimo’; c. 111 des., 27 November 1480, Filippo Strozzi in Naples to Giovacchino Guasconi in Florence: ‘Tedeschino [Filippo’s manservant] venne e menò il fattore, il quale sino a questa prima guata mi sodisfa. ’O llo misso di già in hopera lassù; e a febraio fo conto chominciare a murare’. 26  ASF, CS V, 44, c. 165 sin., ‘Giuliano d’Antonio da Quarantola fattore e ortolano alla masseria di Napoli’. 27  Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. 29; Medici, Tutte le opere, ed. by Orvieto, i, 239; Medici, Lettere, i, 18–20. 25 

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the land; while Francesco Bandini, a Florentine humanist living in Naples in the 1470s, described the city as being ‘full of the most lovely gardens’ (‘giardini amenissimi’).28 Both Piero de’ Crecenzi (in the early fourteenth century) and Michelangelo Tanaglia (in the 1480s) dedicated their agricultural treatises to rulers of Naples.29 The humanist poet Giovanni Pontano, who was a friend of Filippo Strozzi, declared in his treatise on social virtues that villa gardens were an essential accessory of the ‘splendid man’. Pontano emphasizes entertaining in the garden, providing hospitality to local and foreign visitors, and offering suitable food, served splendidly and eaten without excess.30 Since Pontano’s treatise was not written until the 1490s, his villa at Antignano bought in 1473 was more likely to have influenced Filippo Strozzi, being on the same Vomero hill just the other side of the Castel Sant’Elmo.31 By this date Naples was established as the main centre for the cultivation of citrus fruit and its export to the rest of Italy.32 Evidence of Filippo Strozzi’s activity as a plant collector comes in the form of a letter from his Ferrarese cousin Roberto di Nanne Strozzi in 1489 requesting ‘some little fig plants with roots’. These are probably the type of fig mentioned in Lorenzo Strozzi’s Vita being exported from Naples for the first time by Filippo Strozzi. Having brought them to Florence, Filippo then sent them on to Ferrara, as relatives and friends operated a network for disseminating different species of plant.33 A Strozzi account in 1483 documents the transport by sea of two cart loads of almonds and oranges from Naples to the family villa of Le Selve near Florence, while in 28 

Del Treppo, ‘Il re e il banchiere’, p. 239; Kristeller, ‘An Unpublished Description of Naples by Francesco Bandini’, p. 408; for Loise de Rosa’s encomium, probably written in the 1460s, see de Blasiis, ‘Tre scritture napoletane del secolo xv’, p. 430. 29  Piero de’ Crescenzi, Trattato della agricoltura (c. 1304–09) dedicated to Charles II of Anjou; Michelangelo Tanaglia, De agricultura (c. 1480–89) dedicated to King Ferrante’s son Alfonso. 30  Pontano, I libri delle virtù sociali, ‘De splendore, De hortis ac villis’, ed. by Tateo, pp. 240–43; drafted before 1493, published 1498, ibid., pp. 9, 35–36. Pontano’s poem on citrus cultivation, De hortis Hesperidum, was written in 1501/02. On Filippo Strozzi’s friendship with Pontano, see Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, pp. 13, 36, 73, n. 138; Del Treppo, ‘Le avventure storiografiche della Tavola Strozzi’, p. 511. 31  Kidwell, Pontano, pp. 130–38; Monti Sabia and Monti, Studi su Giovanni Pontano, ii, 21–22, 502–03, 514, 516, 520, 527, 529–30. 32  Lillie, ‘Giovanni di Cosimo and the Villa Medici at Fiesole’, p. 198 and n. 68; and Galletti, ‘Una committenza medicea poco nota’, pp. 75, 80–81. 33  Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 72, 303, n. 77.

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the same year prunes were exported, and in 1489 two hundred oranges were dispatched to Filippo’s mother-in-law Mona Antonia de’ Bardi da Vernio.34 It is tempting to assume these were the produce of the masseria. Another important aspect of the masseria project is revealed in documents referring to construction on the site within a few months of buying the land. In the late autumn of 1480 Filippo Strozzi transcribed into his personal ricordanze an exchange of six letters between himself and his business partner Giovacchino Guasconi.35 These letters are crucial for outlining Filippo’s intentions concerning the masseria and for establishing dates. By October 1480 Filippo was planning to build a house and walls (probably retaining walls for terracing the steep slope), intending to start construction in February 1481 (modern style).36 On 8 November he wrote again from Naples informing Giovacchino in Florence of his building scheme at the masseria and persuading him to accept the idea and the expenditure. Although the Strozzi Company was to pay for the factor’s salary and the equipment or furnishings (‘maserizie’), and the walls and land (‘le mura e terreno’) would be owned in common by the company, Filippo stated that he personally would pay for the construction project (‘la muraglia’). Filippo reassured Giovacchino that when he is happy with the house (‘casa’) and everything is to the satisfaction of the company, Filippo will be pleased, but in the meantime he didn’t want Giovacchino to disapprove of the expense which is why he planned to divide the costs in this way. He ended by saying that the masseria is very convenient for the family and household (‘molto chomoda alla brighata di casa’), the air is good, and he thinks it will turn out to be a beautiful scheme (‘riuscirà bella impresa’).37 Giovacchino replied on 18 November from Florence saying that he particularly liked Filippo’s plan to look after the masseria land and building project himself. He added: ‘if God does not disturb 34 

ASF, CS V, 36, c. 263 (1483); V, 22, c. 205 des (1483); V, 41, c. 93 sin (1489). ASF, CS V, 22, cc. 110–11. Giovacchino Guasconi was Filippo’s business partner from 1478 and worked for his sons until Guasconi’s death in 1503: Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, pp. 77, 86–87; Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, p. 130. 36  ASF, CS V, 22, c. 111 des, 27 November 1480, from Filippo Strozzi in Naples to Giovacchino in Florence, ‘e a febraio fo conto chominciare a murare’. 37  ASF, CS V, 22, c. 110 des: 8 November 1480, Filippo Strozzi in Naples to Giovacchino in Florence: ‘E perché non ti possa gravare la conpagnia e muraglia disengnio sia per mio conto proprio: e fattore e maserizie per la conpagnia, e che dalle mura e terreno in fuori il resto sia a chomune per la conpagnia. E quando ti chontentassi la chasa e tutto fussi per la conpagnia alla buonora più mi piacierebbe; ma perché non ti possa dolere delo spendervi avevo fatto tale disengnio. E’ molto chomoda alla brighata di chasa, e di buona aria. Credo riuscirà bella impresa’. 35 

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Figure 13.3. Anonymous artist (attributed to Francesco Rosselli), the Aragonese Fleet returning from the Battle of Ischia on 6 July 1465 (Tavola Strozzi), Naples, Museo di San Martino, wooden panel, 82 × 245 cm.

our plans in the form of a Turkish invasion, then it [the masseria] will be a great pastime and an honest one. May God give us the opportunity to enjoy it!’38 On 27 November 1480 Filippo wrote another eloquent letter about the masseria to Giovacchino, in which he reveals his underlying motive to persuade Giovacchino to move to Naples with his wife and live at least six months of the year there. Although his argument is partly financial, he ends by couching it in more personal and emotional terms concerning the quality and length of their lives. Again he refers to the brigata, saying that everything is being done to get the place ready for the family, so they can spend time there without ‘getting their hands dirty’. While Giovacchino had praised the garden project to 38 

ASF, CS V, 22, c. 111 sin, 18 November 1480, from Giovacchino Guasconi in Florence to Filippo Strozzi in Naples (received 26 November), ‘il disengnio fate che il terreno e muraglia sia per voi proprio mi piacie più […]. Credo se iddio non ci disturba per mezzo de’ Turchi, che sarà grande passatenpo honesto. Iddio cielo lasci ghodere’.

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his boss as a ‘grande passatenpo honesto’, Filippo redirects praise of the mas­ seria towards Giovacchino, replying that he would like to ‘create a place exactly to Giovacchino’s taste’ and that whoever is lucky enough to live in the benign climate of Naples ‘will prolong their life by twenty years’.39 Each writer seeks to entice the other to stay in Naples, because of a deeper, unarticulated desire 39 

ASF, CS V, 22, c. 111 des, 27 November 1480, from Filippo Strozzi in Naples to Giovacchino in Florence, ‘Benche da ora ongni dì si va rasetando e faciendovi qualche chosa per avere chagione di tenervi la brichata a fine non si vadino mescholando per la terra. In me si rimetti il modo di pigliare il terreno e mura per me proprio e’l resto per la conpagnia; ’o su veramente tutto per la conpagnia. ’O ci di nuovo ripensato e masime hora che vi si chomincia a spendere in achonciare la pocision e chasa e fattori che vene hora uno, e uno che chava pietre e fa che altro bisognia, e avendo a dividere le spese pare chonfusione e potrebbe essere chagione di qualche onbreza in tra di noi, il che desidero levare. E quanto più ci penso più mi pare necessario vada per la conpagnia, avendola a ghodere quella, e chi ci starà, ho tu ho io, arà quello ghodimento. Fia sanità e sicurtà se chaxo di pesta in chaxa si apichassi diche iddio ghuardi. Avengha che io non abbia il chapo a starci tocherà a ghodere piu a tte; e se ci arai la donna ho in animo d’achonciare una stanza troppo a tuo ghusto e per loro da abitare 6 mesi del’anno che fia uno prolunghamento di vita di 20 anni a chi v’abiterà, che non vi si sente verno. Rispondime di tuo animo; nonistante che in me l’abia rimessa e a me tochi a spendere più.’

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to remain in Florence. Such responses offer a glimpse of the transnational or expatriate’s eternal dilemma. Filippo’s transcription of this correspondence into his ricordanze signals the significance and delicacy of these negotiations, ostensibly concerning the use of company funds on what might be regarded as an extravagant private project — a garden which would not generate any profit — but revealing his strategy to convince his trusted partner Giovacchino to take the place of his deceased brother Lorenzo and move to Naples to run the head office. The masseria was bound up with this strategy. No visual record of the garden or the building on it has yet been identified. Although the masseria’s approximate location can be deduced from the representation of the hill of Sant’ Elmo in the Tavola Strozzi, we now know that the masseria project was carried out between February 1481 and January 1488 and almost certainly post-dates the painting (Figure 13.3). Most scholars agree that the Tavola Strozzi was executed after the naval triumph on 12 July 1465 and probably before the installation of the lantern on the wharf in late 1487.40 The absence of Strozzi’s garden and new house from the hill of Sant’ Elmo in the painting could be used as another piece of evidence to support the dating of the Tavola Strozzi to well before 1488. Strozzi accounts from 1484, 1486, and 1488 show that considerable sums were spent on the masseria in those years, more than all other household expenses in Naples, and seem to document a peak in building activity.41 Other prints, drawings, and paintings representing this hillside post-date the siege of 1527 when the gardens and buildings around the fortress of Sant’ Elmo were destroyed or altered beyond recognition. Moreover, Filippo’s eldest son Alfonso sold the property soon after his father’s death.42 Some idea of the type of structure built on the Strozzi masseria can be gathered from an inventory of January 1488 listing the rooms and their contents. This shows that the building was not large, its indoor accommodation restricted to five rooms: three camere, an anticamera with a lavatory (necies­ sario), and a small reception or dining hall (saletta). In addition three service 40 

Spinazzola, ‘Di Napoli antica’; Sricchia Santoro, ‘Tra Napoli e Firenze’; Lillie, Floren­ tine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 140, 313, n. 51; Palmieri, ‘La “Tavola di Casa Strozzi”’; Pane, La Tavola Strozzi tra Napoli e Firenze. 41  ASF, CS V, 42 c. 3 sin: 155.11.5 ducats; c. 7 sin: 161.29.9 ducats; c. 17 sin: 172.10.13 ducats. 42  L. Strozzi, Vita di Filippo Strozzi, ed. by Bini and Bigazzi, p. 16.

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rooms are mentioned: a kitchen and cellar (chucina e ciellaro) and a store room (maghazino di doana).43 It is striking that all three camere and the saletta are listed in relation to a loggia and appear to have opened onto it, one of these probably onto an upper or superimposed loggia (la camera alta dela logia). As far as it is possible to extrapolate the design of a lost building from a brief list of rooms in an inventory, we can surmise that, rather than a house, this could best be described as a loggia with rooms attached. It is likely to have been a long superimposed loggia with a single row of rooms behind, designed as a type of viewing platform to look over the garden, the city, and the Gulf of Naples. The naming of the place supports the idea that the landscape was dominant. Apart from four references to the name ‘Bella Vista’, there are only two mentions of a house, and the property is consistently referred to as ‘la masseria’, its buildings being subsumed within the land. The furnishings and objects in the bedchambers also suggest this was never intended as a long-term residence for more than one or two people, but was a place for day trips or short improvised stays. The main ground-floor bedchamber was the only grandly furnished room, with good quality bed covers, benches, a small table, a chess set, a Madonna on panel (the only painting in the house), three carpets, a small tapestry, and a Tunisian table cloth which was the most expensive single item, valued at six ducats.44 The bedchamber opening onto the upper loggia merely contained a bedstead and a wooden chest, while the second bedchamber on the ground floor was slightly more comfortable with a full set of bedclothes and two chests, one of them painted. Yet the loggia was fully prepared to host large gatherings, furnished with two trestle tables, five benches, a chair and stools, a large brass basin on a wooden pedestal, and equipment to provide water from the cistern — buckets, chains, and a half barrel. Interestingly, the saletta opening off the loggia seems to have been used to store tableware or perhaps as a serving area, rather than to eat in, with only a desco (a small table or stool), a wooden chest, some table linen, candle sticks, oil, vinegar, and salt containers, and six maiolica jugs and jars. The most notable aspect of this double-page inventory is the disproportionately long 43 

ASF, CS V, 46, c. 111 sin., ‘Nota dele masserizie e ferramenti che sono al prexente ala nostra masseria, consegniati ala ragione nuova di Filippo Strozzi questo dì xx di gennaio 1487 [1488 modern style] per li prezzi apresso, e prima: nela camera alta dela logia […] nel’anticamera del neciessario […] nela seconda camera dela logia […] nela prima camera dela logia […] nela logia […] nela saletta dela logia […] nela chucina e ciellaro […] nel maghazino di doana’. 44  ASF, CS V, 46, c. 111 sin. The prices are low compared with those paid for carpets in Naples in 1473 documented by Spallanzani, Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence, p. 43, n. 3.

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Figure 13.4. Viviano Codazzi and Domenico Gargiulo, Festivities at the Villa of Poggio Reale, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie [No.843.3.4], Besançon, c. 1641.

list of objects in the kitchen and cellar. There was a generous supply of tableware, including a large set of maiolica bowls (thirty-seven) and plates (thirtyone) as well as cooking equipment, confirming that one of the building’s main functions was to provide food and refreshments. The other main categories of object in the kitchen and cellar were gardening and building tools, including hoes, spades, and rakes, as well as builder’s rules (‘2 righe da muratori’), saws, walnut boards, and small oak beams. Here again, the priorities of the inhabitants can be inferred, focused on entertaining on the one hand, and on land cultivation and maintenance of buildings on the other. This seems, therefore, not to have been a villa in the usual fifteenth-century sense of a country estate with a residence at its heart, but land with a building that had been designed to serve it, enhancing enjoyment of the landscape. As much as a house, this was a garden pavilion or dining loggia for entertaining visitors to the garden. An interesting link can be made between the lost garden and a more famous project. Since the Strozzi masseria was acquired in July 1480, plans for a build-

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ing were being made by November 1480, and construction probably began in February 1481, it certainly predated Giuliano da Maiano’s design for Duke Alfonso of Calabria’s villa and gardens at Poggioreale begun in 1487, and the Villa La Duchesca project which he took up in 1488.45 Although neither Poggioreale nor La Duchesca survives, prints and a painting by Codazzi and Gargiulo record the appearance of Poggioreale, and parallels can be drawn between the two-storey garden loggia overlooking the fishpond at Poggioreale and the house with superimposed loggias at the Strozzi masseria (Figure 13.4).46 Likewise the series of camere opening onto a terrace and the large garden loggia at La Duchesca may have been inspired by the Strozzi precedent.47 Giuliano da Maiano was almost certainly introduced to the Aragonese court by Filippo Strozzi, who had been commissioning furniture and sculpture from the two da Maiano brothers from as early as 1466.48 It is likely that one of them was consulted over the masseria building. Benedetto da Maiano was sculpting the tomb for Filippo Strozzi’s brother Lorenzo in 1480 and may have gone to Naples himself to supervise its installation in S. Maria di Portanuova in February 1481.49 Such a visit would have coincided exactly with Filippo’s plans for the masseria, at the planning stage by November 1480 with building starting in February 1481, although plans could have been drawn up in Florence without expecting the architect to visit the site or supervise construction. Giuliano da Maiano had, in any case, a predilection for loggias.50 Filippo Strozzi’s loggia in the Neapolitan landscape was designed to maintain his presence during his absence. Overlooking the whole city, on a key axis between the Castel Nuovo and San Martino, the loggia would ensure that Strozzi’s masseria was always visible. The date of his brother’s death on 45  De Divitiis, ‘Giuliano da Sangallo in the Kingdom of Naples’; Modesti, Le Delizie Ritro­ vate; Quinterio, Giuliano da Maiano, pp. 428–30, 438–41, 452 reconstruction plan with garden loggia numbered 6. Quinterio’s suggestion, p. 461, n. 18, that Filippo Strozzi was probably present at Duke Alfonso’s housewarming banquet for Poggioreale on 2 June 1488 is based on Eve Borsook’s assumption, ‘Documents for Filippo Strozzi’s Chapel, I’, p. 741, n. 27, that the account books introduced with the phrase ‘dimoranti a Napoli’ can be taken to mean that Filippo Strozzi was resident in Naples for the whole period of each account book. 46  Marshall, ‘A View of Poggioreale’; Quinterio, Giuliano da Maiano, p. 454. 47  Quinterio, Giuliano da Maiano, pp. 430–31, 437. 48  Borsook, ‘Documenti relativi’, p. 14, doc. 1; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, i, 395. 49  Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, pp. 19, 525–26, docs. 40–42; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, I, 314, 397, 524, Appendix C doc 10. 50  Quinterio, Giuliano da Maiano, pp. 112, 323, 353, 436, 488–95.

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4 October 1479,51 just nine months before Filippo bought the farm, supports this interpretation, for once Lorenzo was no longer on hand to pay court and attend directly to business, a substitute strategy was needed. The garden could have helped to sustain (or was at least a sign of ) his close relationship with King Ferrante of Naples, both as his banker and as a high-level intermediary between the Medici regime in Florence and the Neapolitan court. During the earlier war between Florence and Naples (1447–54) the Strozzi had managed to successfully maintain their banking business in Naples while other Florentines were expelled.52 They may have been able to use their precarious Florentine status to their own advantage in Naples since they were less likely to have been suspected of being Medici partisans or spies. After the end of his exile Filippo Strozzi signalled his special relationship with the King of Naples in 1467, when he named his first-born son Alfonso after Ferrante’s eldest son Alfonso, Duke of Calabria. Filippo’s diary entry recording the baptism draws attention to the role of the primogenito and to the dangerous conditions pertaining at the time, since Florence and Naples were again at war.53 To make this choice at this moment might seem a great political risk for a newly returned exile anxious to re-establish himself in Florence, but Filippo manipulated this baptism in a bold but supremely diplomatic fashion. Since Alfonso of Calabria could not be present, by choosing Lorenzo de’ Medici to stand in for the absent godfather, the first-born Strozzi baby symbolically became the linking instrument that drew together the houses of Medici and Aragon, as the eldest Medici son and heir played the role of the Neapolitan prince, also an eldest son and heir. Rather than downplaying his connection with the kingdom, Filippo clearly recognized that Naples was his strongest card. Likewise, ten years after what Filippo termed the ‘caxo horribile’ of the Pazzi Conspiracy, instead of being damaged by the war between Florence and Naples, he was able to turn it to his advantage and became a highly valued facilitator in the peace process and one of the signatories of the treaty.54 His value to Lorenzo 51 

ASF, CS IV, 357, fol. 2 sin (1479), ‘Questo libro è delle Eredi del quondam Lorenzo di Matteo di Simone Strozzi defunto a Napoli adì viiii d’otobre anno sopra detto’. See also A. Strozzi, Lettere, ed. by Guasti, p. xxxix; Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, p. 525, docs 40–42; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, p. 314, Appendix C doc. 10, p. 524. 52  Del Treppo, I mercanti catalani, pp. 310–37; Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, pp. 113, 121. 53  Borsook, ‘Documenti relativi’, p. 3, citing ASF, CS V, 17 fol. 189v; Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, p. 29; Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence, p. 214; see also ASF, CS V, 22, c. 90 des. 54  For Filippo Strozzi’s first-hand account of the Pazzi Conspiracy, see ASF, CS V, 22, c. 106 sin. Abulafia, ‘The Crown and the Economy’, pp. 135–36, 144, notes it was business as

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de’ Medici seems partly to have been that he was not an official diplomat. Ferrante’s relations with the Strozzi had been built up during decades of financial interdependency, and Filippo would be more trusted than a puppet of the Florentine state could be. Filippo’s anxiety about the peace mission to Naples is revealed in his ricordo where he describes drawing up his testament and ultima volontà on 19 November and the morning of 20 November 1479, hours or even minutes before departing for Naples with an escort of seventeen horsemen.55 Lorenzo de’ Medici departed just over a fortnight later on 5 December 1479, only returning to Florence in March 1480.56 King Ferrante asked Strozzi to prepare the Medici lodgings in Naples, selecting furnishings from the royal palaces.57 Thus Strozzi literally smoothed Lorenzo de’ Medici’s entry into Naples and his residence there on this dangerous and delicate mission. The year 1480 was when peace was re-established and a closer political and economic relationship developed between Naples and Florence. The masseria can be seen as the fruit of this peace, a symbol of the Florentine nation perched above the city of Naples. Moreover, as an ex-exile Strozzi is an interesting case in that, having been permitted to return to the patria and regain his rights as a Florentine citizen, he freely continued to return to the site of his confinement, exploiting the advantages of a transnational existence. Rather than assuming that Florence became the absolutely dominant focus of Filippo’s life after his initial return there in 1466, and particularly after his second marriage in 1477, it is important to remember that the centre of his banking and business operations remained in Naples, with the title pages of twenty volumes of ricordanze and account books referring to Filippo and his banking partners as ‘dimoranti a Napoli’ for the years between 1466 and 1489.58

usual for Florentine merchants in Naples from 1478 to 1480. On the peace treaty, see Medici, Lettere, iv, ed. by Rubinstein, pp. 377–89 (p. 389). 55  ASF, CS V, 22, c. 110 sin, gives a detailed description of the physical form of the will with its seven seals witnessed by seven friars at San Marco. 56  Medici, Lettere, iv, ed. by Rubinstein, pp. 249–50, 273; Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ’400, p. 24. 57  Medici, Lettere, iv, ed. by Rubinstein, p. 274. 58  ASF, CS V, 17 (1466–71); V, 18 (1466–67); V, 19 (1469–70); V, 20 (1470); V, 24; V, 25; V, 27 (1472–73); V, 28 (1473); V, 29 (1474–75); V, 31 (1475–76); V, 32 (1475–76); V, 33 (1476–77); V, 34 (1478–79); V, 35 (1479); V, 37 (1480–81); V, 38 (1481–82); V, 43 (1484–86); V, 46 (1486–87); V, 47 (1487–88); V, 48 (1488–89). See Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence, p. 57; Fabbri, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze

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The Strozzi diaries and account books include a continual exchange in objects and skills, such as the branches of coral sent from Naples to be set by goldsmiths in Florence,59 or the two portraits on panel sent from Florence to Antonio Sperandio,60 or the large quantities of Neapolitan linen sent north.61 The garden can be interpreted as a fusion of Neapolitan materials and conditions — the plants for the garden, the quarried stone, the site itself with its land and its view, the air and weather, the social, courtly and intellectual environment of the kingdom, and the favourable economic situation — combined with the financial power, political finesse, and aesthetic ambitions of Filippo Strozzi who acted as a conduit for the importation of Tuscan design and horticultural expertise. This was an extension of the mercantile and financial exchange activities of Filippo Strozzi, a middleman linking two cultures, two governments, and two economies. The garden could also be seen as functioning like Filippo’s lavish gifts to the Neapolitan court, presented on returning to Naples on the first two occasions after the end of his exile (in 1467–68 and 1473). The gifts were not bribes or enticements since Filippo’s exile had already come to an end, or even thank-you presents in gratitude for their support after he had been reinstated in Florence, so much as they were part of a nurturing process that kept the Florence–Naples connection alive.62 Although the garden and any buildings on the site are lost, and from the surviving documents the project appears modest in scale, the masseria reveals the tight control and astute manipulation of a project evident in Filippo Strozzi’s Florentine palace. The masseria shows a similar awareness of scenographic effect, of how to make a visual impact on a city by occupying terrain and building on it. Such an interpretation fits what we know of Filippo Strozzi’s patronage in Florence where he proved himself expert in making strategic use of an architectural project as a political tool. Not only did he intend the splendid new Palazzo Strozzi to rebuild his own reputation and that of the whole Strozzi clan and to reinstate his family to their pre-Medicean position in Florentine del ’400, p. 23; Del Treppo, ‘Il re e il banchiere’, p. 234; Il giornale del Banco Strozzi, ed. by Leone, p. 653. 59  ASF, CS V, 41, c. 48 des. 60  ASF, CS V, 40, c. 85 sin; V, 41 c. 155 sin (1484). 61  ASF, CS V, 22, cc. 96 sin, 182 sin, 183 sin, 183 des, 185 sin, 195 sin, 205 des (1481–85). 62  Borsook, ‘Documenti relativi’, p. 14, docs. 2–8; Sale, The Strozzi Chapel, pp. 12–13, 514–16, Appendix A doc. 4; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, i, 137, Appendix C, docs. 3, 7; Del Treppo, ‘Le avventure storiografiche della Tavola Strozzi’, p. 511.

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society, but he managed to do it with Medici approval. That approval was largely acquired and sustained by the Naples connection. The masseria shows us how, fourteen years after returning to Florence, Filippo still could not allow his Neapolitan connections to loosen. A rather different interpretation and another layer of motives emerge from the correspondence between Filippo Strozzi and his business partner Giovacchino Guasconi. The acquisition and development of the masseria and the letters concerning the project reveal choices motivated by aesthetic enjoyment and emotional needs: the desire to give pleasure to his family and his business partner and the wish to lead a long and healthy life. These were the motives Filippo Strozzi recorded for posterity in his ricordanze.

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Works Cited Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane, IV, 357; V, 24; V,25; V, 27; V, 28; V, 29; V, 31; V, 32; V, 33; V, 34; V, 35; V, 36; V, 37; V, 38; V, 40; V, 41; V, 42; V, 43; V, 44; V, 46; V, 47; V, 48

Primary Sources Crescenzi, Piero de’, Trattato della agricoltura, trans. by Bastiano de’ Rossi, 3 vols (Milano: Società tipografica de’ Classici italiani, 1805) Il giornale del Banco Strozzi di Napoli (1473), ed. by Alfonso Leone (Napoli: Guida Editore, 1981) Medici, Lorenzo de’, Lettere, i:  1460–1474, ed.  by Riccardo Fubini (Firenze: GiuntiBarbèra, 1977) —— , Lettere, iv: 1479–1480, ed. by Nicolai Rubinstein (Firenze: Giunti-Barbèra, 1981) —— , Tutte le opere, ed. by Paolo Orvieto, 2 vols (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1992) Pontano, Giovanni, I libri delle virtù sociali, ed. by Francesco Tateo (Roma: Bulzoni Edi­ tore, 1999) Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi, Lettere di una gentildonna fiorentina del secolo xv ai figliuoli esuli, ed. by Cesare Guasti (Firenze: Sansoni, 1877; repr., Firenze: Licosa, 1972) Strozzi, Lorenzo, Vita di Filippo Strozzi il Vecchio scritta da Lorenzo suo figlio con docu­ menti ed illustrazioni, ed. by Giuseppe Bini and Pietro Bigazzi (Firenze: Tip. Della Casa di Correzione, 1851) —— , Le vite degli uomini illustri della casa Strozzi commentario di Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi ora intieramente pubblicato con un ragionamento di Francesco Zeffi sopra la vita dell’autore, ed. by Francesco Zeffi (Firenze: Tip. S. Landi, 1892) Tanaglia, Michelangelo, De agricultura, ed. by Aurelio Roncaglia (Bologna: Palma­ verde,1953)

Secondary Works Abulafia, David, ‘The Crown and the Economy under Ferrante I of Naples’, in City and Countryside in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones, ed. by Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), pp. 125–46 Borsook, Eve, ‘Documenti relativi alla Cappelle di Lecceto e della Selve di Filippp Strozzi’, Antichità viva, 9 (1970), 3–20 —— , ‘Documents for Filippo Strozzi’s Chapel in S. Maria Novella and other Related Papers, I’, Burlington Magazine, 112 (1970), 737–55 ——  , ‘Ritratto di Filippo Strozzi il Vecchio’, in Palazzo Strozzi: metà millennio, 1489–1989, Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze 3–6 luglio 1989, ed. by Daniela Lamberini (Roma: Instituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1991), pp. 1–14

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Boschetto, Luca, ‘Nuove ricerche sulla biografia e sugli scritti volgari di Leon Battista Alberti dal viaggio a Napoli alla nascita del “De iciarchia” (maggio–settenbre 1465)’, Interpres: Rivista di studi quattrocenteschi, 20 [n.s. 5] (2001 [2003]), 180–211 Carl, Doris, Benedetto da Maiano: A  Florentine Sculptor at the Threshold of the High Renaissance, 2 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) Crabb, Ann, The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michigan Press, 2000) De Blasiis, Giuseppe, ‘Tre scritture napoletane del secolo xv’, Archivio storico per le prov­ ince napoletane, 4 (1879), 411–67 De Divitiis, Bianca, ‘Giuliano da Sangallo in the Kingdom of Naples: Architecture and Cultural Exchange’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 74 (2015), 152–78 Del Treppo, Mario, ‘Le avventure storiografiche della Tavola Strozzi’, in Fra storia e storio­ grafia: Scritti in onore di Pasquale Villani, ed. by P. Macry and A. Massafra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), pp. 483–515 —— , I mercanti catalani e l’espansione della corona d’Aragona nel secolo xv (Napoli: L’Arte Tipografica, 1972) —— , ‘Il re e il banchiere: Strumenti e processi di razionalizzazione dello stato aragonese di Napoli’ in Spazio, società, potere nell’Italia dei Comuni, ed. by Gabriella Rossetti (Napoli: GISEM Liguori Editore, 1986), pp. 229–304 Fabbri, Lorenzo, Alleanza matrimoniale e patriziato nella Firenze del ‘400: studio sulla famiglia Strozzi (Firenze: Olschki, 1991) Galletti, Giorgio, ‘Una committenza medicea poco nota: Giovani di Cosimo e il giardino di villa Medici a Fiesole’, in Giardini Medicei: Giardini di palazzo e di villa nella Firenze del Quattrocento, ed. by Cristina Acidini Luchinat (Milano: Federico Motta, 1996), pp. 60–89 Goldthwaite, Richard A., ‘The Building of the Strozzi Palace: The Construction Industry in Renaissance Florence’, Studies in Medi­eval and Renaissance History, 10 (1973), 99–174 —— , Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A  Study of Four Families (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1968) Gregory, Heather J., ‘A Florentine Family in Crisis: The Strozzi in the Fifteenth Century’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Uni­ver­sity of London, 1981) —— , ‘The Return of the Native: Filippo Strozzi and Medicean Politics’, Renaissance Quar­terly, 38 (1985), 1–21 Kent, F. W., Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Kidwell, Carol, Pontano: Poet and Prime Minister (London: Duckworth, 1991) Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘An Unpublished Description of Naples by Francesco Bandini’, in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956), pp. 395–410 Leone, Alfonso, ed., Il commercio a Napoli e nell’Italia meridionale nel xv secolo: Fonti e problemi (Napoli: Edizioni Athena, 2003)

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Lillie, Amanda, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century: An Architectural and Social History (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005) —— , ‘Giovanni di Cosimo and the Villa Medici at Fiesole’, in Piero de’ Medici ‘il Gottoso’ (1416–1469): Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer/Art in the Service of the Medici, ed. by Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), pp. 189–205 Marshall, David, ‘A View of Poggioreale by Viviano Codazzi and Domenico Gargiulo’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 45 (1986), 32–46 Modesti, Paola, Le Delizie Ritrovate: Poggioreale e la villa del rinscimento nella Napoli aragonese (Firenze: Olschki, 2014) Monti Sabia, Liliana, and Salvadore Monti, Studi su Giovanni Pontano, 2 vols (Messina: Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Umanistici, 2010) Palmieri, Stefano, ‘La “Tavola di Casa Strozzi”: Variazioni sul Tema’, Napoli Nobilissima, 5th ser., 8 (2007), 171–82 Pampaloni, Guido, Palazzo Strozzi (Roma: Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni, 1982; 1st edn, 1963) Pane, Giulio, La Tavola Strozzi tra Napoli e Firenze: Un’immagine della città nel Quattro­ cento (Napoli: Grimaldi, 2009) Quinterio, Francesco, Giuliano da Maiano: ‘Grandissimo domestico’ (Roma: Officina, 1996) Rubinstein, Nicolai, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434 to 1494) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) Sale, John Russell, The Strozzi Chapel by Filippino Lippi in Santa Maria Novella (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity Microfilms, 1976) Spallanzani, Marco, Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence (Firenze: S.P.E.S., 2007) Spinazzola, Vittorio, ‘Di Napoli antica e della sua topografia in una tavola del xv secolo rappresentante il trionfo navale di Ferrante d’Aragona dopo la battaglia di Ischia’, Bollettino d’arte, 4 (1910), 125–45 Sricchia Santoro, Fiorella, ‘Tra Napoli e Firenze: Diomede Carafa, gli Strozzi e un celebre “lettuccio”’, Prospettiva, 100 (2000 [2001]), 41–54

Florentine Exiles and Venetian Patricians: The Soderini Family and the Forging of New Ties Ersie Burke

B

ill Kent’s work had a great influence on my own as a social historian, especially the ways family, kin, marriage, friends, and neighbourhood defined people. I have taken Bill’s ideas and shown how they are equally applicable to a different city and people, in this case sixteenth-century Venice and its large Greek community. This essay examines how an exiled family of Florentine origin reinvented itself, first in Cyprus and, after 1571, in Venice. The Soderini family was one of the oldest in Florence. They were Guelph supporters and after the establishment of the Priorate in 1282 were frequently elected to serve on that magistracy. In the same period they began building a strong economic and mercantile base through international trade in textiles and banking, and later with the acquisition of property in Florence and its con­ tado. Theirs was a large family with multiple branches. The focus here is on the lives of the descendants of Niccolò di Lorenzo di Tommaso Soderini. Niccolò held a number of elected offices and was ambassador to important posts such as Genoa. However, his fortunes changed dramatically when in 1466 he joined the faction opposed to the ascendancy of Piero de’ Medici. Consequently he Ersie Burke ([email protected]) earned her PhD from Monash Uni­ver­sity where she is now adjunct research associate in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies. Her areas of research are immigration, settlement, and integration with a focus on the Greek community of early modern Venice. She has published on a range of topics including Byzantine exiles in Venice, Graeco-Venetian marriages, and immigrant perceptions of the Serenissima. She is a fellow of the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini di Venezia.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 257–273 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109709

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and his sons were banished from Florence, declared exiles and outlaws, and had their properties confiscated. Niccolò died in exile, but eventually his sons were allowed to return to Florence. Half a century after his banishment one of his grandsons, Antonio di Bernardo, went to Cyprus, then part of the Venetian sea empire, the Stato da Mar, to seek his fortune and coincidentally to establish a Soderini branch on that island. After the fall of Cyprus to the Ottomans in 1570–71 Antonio’s surviving sons, daughters, in-laws, and grandchildren made their way to Venice. Finally, in the middle of the seventeenth century the Soderini became patricians and joined the ranks of the ruling class and in this way added another layer of identity to their already colourful Florentine, Graeco-Cypriot one.1 Their story is supported by a wealth of primary material, most of which has yet to be fully examined. The family’s history of dislocation, settlement, and integration raises questions about mobility and identity and, on a broader scale, whether the Soderini path of exile, loss of homeland, and immigration was any different from the experiences of so many other immigrants and refugees in the early modern period. These are some of the main issues that are addressed here. This essay is divided into three parts. The first is a brief history of the family, Niccolò Soderini’s career, his anti-Medicean stance, and the consequences of his exile. The second, longer section focuses on the Veneto-Cypriot family, their immigration to Venice, the social, commercial, and civic worlds they inhabited, and their rise to the patriciate. The third analyses the Soderini experience of immigration, integration, community, and identity in the broader Venetian and early modern context.

Florence and Exile Niccolò Soderini and his younger brother Tommaso were prominent members of the Florentine patriciate, despite the family’s rather unhappy beginnings. Their father Lorenzo was the illegitimate son of Tommaso di Guccio Soderini. In an effort to claim legitimacy and the right to his father’s estate, Lorenzo committed fraud, but was found out and executed in 1405.2 At the time of 1 

Venetian society was divided into three groups: patricians (the ruling class), citizens (the administrative class), and commoners, the majority. The elevation of the Soderini to citizens and then to the patrician class is discussed below. 2  Lorenzo’s duplicity is recounted in Clarke, The Soderini and the Medici, pp. 15–18. An abbreviated account of his trial and execution is in The Society of Renaissance Florence, ed. by Brucker, pp. 162–66.

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their father’s trial and execution the boys and their siblings were very young, and it was left to their mother and her family to contend with the opprobrium of Lorenzo’s actions. Despite these difficulties, the brothers got along well with the legitimate side of the family, especially their uncle Francesco di Tommaso. They prospered commercially and found spouses from prominent Florentine families. Niccolò’s wife, Ginevra Macinghi, was the half sister of Alessandra Strozzi. There is little information about the couple’s relationship, but we know from Strozzi’s correspondence with her sons and son-in-law, Marco Parenti, that there was no love lost between herself and Niccolò. Alessandra was critical of her brother-in-law’s politics, his character, and his efforts to challenge her ownership of a farm in the Florentine contado; in fact, she said she much preferred Tommaso’s company.3 Tommaso too married well. His second wife (he was to have four) was Dianora Tornabuoni, the sister of Lucrezia, Piero de’ Medici’s wife. Irrespective of their origins, the brothers found themselves well connected politically and commercially because of their talents and their Medici connections. It appeared they were destined to enjoy long years of political and commercial advantage. In 1466 Niccolò was elected Gonfalonier of Justice, thus continuing the tradition of public service that the family had cultivated since the late 1200s. Soon after, however, his world came crashing down. Even before his tenure ended, Niccolò had become disillusioned with the Medicean stranglehold over political life. After his term of office expired he joined the anti-Medicean faction led by Dietisalvi Neroni, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, and Luca Pitti. By early 1467 that faction was destroyed and its leaders exiled. The Medici and their supporters quickly moved to consolidate their hold on political power.4 Niccolò and his eldest (illegitimate) son, Geri (Ruggiero), were exiled to Provenza in the Kingdom of Naples but evaded the authorities and made their way to Venice instead. From there Niccolò continued to plot the overthrow of the Medici by encouraging the Venetians to mount a military campaign against them. This ended in utter failure in late 1467, and with it Soderini’s dreams of returning to Florence. In 1468 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III awarded Niccolò a knighthood and permission to include the imperial two-headed eagle on the Soderini coat of arms. The following year, on 24 March 1469, the Venetian Senate awarded Niccolò a pension of 100 ducats a year, and he retired to Ravenna: 3 

Strozzi, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. by Gregory, pp. 66–67. Strozzi, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. by Gregory, pp.  179, 193, 195; Phillips, The Memoir of Marco Parenti, pp. 202–03; Clarke, The Soderini and the Medici, pp. 65–94. 4 

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Niccolò Soderini Florentine citizen lives in our city [and] it is agreed that he is in need having lost all his goods through flight and exile when he was sent away from his homeland. And this is understood by all. Be it decided to the same Niccolò we ought to give as charity 100 ducats of our money from our treasury for once only so that he can sustain [himself ] under our shadow because he cannot live safely anywhere else outside our jurisdiction.5

His two legitimate sons, Bernardo and Lorenzo, were exiled when they turned eighteen, in 1469 and 1471 respectively, and joined their father and half brother. Niccolò died in Ravenna in 1474 and was buried in the church of San Francesco, the same place as Dante. With the lifting of the ban of exile in 1484, his three sons returned to Florence, but their movements and their participation in the city’s political life were severely limited; in fact, they did not win any public office until after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1494.6 Both Bernardo and Lorenzo married well, and along with Geri resumed the family’s mercantile activities, eventually building up a considerable portfolio in local and international trade and property investments.

Cyprus and the Return to Venice Sometime between 1505 and 1510, that is, between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, Antonio, a son of Bernardo di Niccolò, went to Cyprus. It is not yet clear if he went on his own, with one of his father’s factors, or as a merchantapprentice. Cyprus was a melting pot of nationalities, and among these were many Italian families, all long-term residents of the island.7 Antonio settled permanently in Nicosia, became a successful merchant, married, and had at least three sons. Two examples indicate that he was an established and respected 5  ASV, Senato Terra Deliberazioni, reg. VI, fol 54v: ‘Est in hac urbe nostra Nicolaus Soderinus civis Florentinus existente constitutu in multa necesitate nam bona quecumque ei per fugam et exilium a patria amisus. Et consideratis multis que optime intelligentur. Vidit pars Quod eidem Nicolao dari per elimosinam debeant ducati centum de pecuniis nostri datii pro hac vice tantum ut se valeat sustentare sub umbra nostra qua. extra nostram qua nullibi extra nostram ditionem secure vivit’. 6  Piero di Tommaso Soderini became Gonfalonier for life after the Medici expulsion. He was first cousin to Geri, Bernardo, and Lorenzo. 7  On Venetian control of Cyprus (1489–1571), see Arbel, ‘Greek Magnates in Venetian Cyprus’; Balletto, ‘Ethnic Groups, Cross-Social and Cross-Cultural Contacts on FifteenthCen­tury Cyprus’; Hill, A History of Cyprus, vols iii–iv; Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, vols iii–iv.

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person of means. The first was the generous size (for the period) of the dowry, 2000 ducats, provided by a daughter-in-law, Cecilia da Negroponte, when she married his son Francesco. The second was the acquisition of Venetian citizenship in 1521 when Antonio was granted the highest form of naturalized citizenship, cittadino de intus et extra.8 The Senate entry is short and to the point: ‘A similar deed of privilege [citizenship] was granted [on this day] to Antonio Soderini now for a long time of Cyprus on 23 November 1521’.9 This meant Soderini and eventually his sons could apply for high administrative offices in Venice and its subject territories and engage in international luxury trade in goods like perfumes, oils, jewels, high quality textiles, and spices. Little else is known of Antonio, his immediate family, or his life in Nicosia. One account has him dying at the siege of Nicosia alongside Federico and Niccolò, two of his sons, while his third son, Francesco, one of the key players in this essay, was taken prisoner and enslaved. For the Soderini the Ottoman conquest meant the end of the Cyprus part of their lives. What happened after Nicosia is unclear.10 Certainly some members of the family, like Cecilia and the children and some of Cecilia’s people, made their way to Venice and eventually raised the ransom to buy Francesco’s freedom. The family, or what remained of it, was certainly together in Venice by the late 1570s by which time Francesco had resumed his mercantile activities. The Venetian family was this one branch: Francesco and Cecilia, their four sons (Zuanantonio, Niccolò, Giulio, and Epiphanio, a Capuchin monk), and two daughters (Prudentia and Isabetta). Several members of Cecilia’s family, the Negroponte, also settled in the city. Francesco and his sons also acquired cittadino status, and this opened up further opportunities for them. Father and sons were soon engaged in trade, both in staples and luxury goods and in real estate. They invested heavily in property in Venice and on the Terraferma 8 

There were two kinds of Venetian citizens: native born (cittadini originarii) and naturalized citizens (cittadini de intus et extra). The naturalization process was long and required applicants to fulfill residency, taxation, and other requirements. Subject people and foreigners could become citizens if their permanent home was Venice or one of its territories. Ell, ‘Citizenship and Immigration to Venice’, pp. 10–11, 27–30, 120–23. 9  ASV, Senato Deliberazioni Privilegi, reg. II, fol 98v: ‘Simile Privilegium factum fuit Antonio Sedarinus olim de Cypro Die xxiii Nob 1521’. Also at , p. 197. 10  Immigrants, exiles, and refugees faced considerable problems in a new place. The Venetian experience of some well-to-do families is recounted in Burke, ‘Surviving Exile’; de Maria, Becoming Venetian, chaps 1 and 2.

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and held a number of well-paid public offices reserved for men of their station. Zuanantonio, Giulio, and Niccolò had their own commercial ventures to occupy them, and as their father grew older, they took over the management of the family estates. Initially the entire family lived in what must have been a very large palazzo in the parish of Sant’ Antonin, but towards the end of the century Francesco, Cecilia, and Zuanantonio and his wife and children moved to a larger palazzo in San Giovanni in Bragora parish while the Sant’ Antonin house became rental property. Giulio, Niccolò, and their families had homes in Sant’ Antonin and San Giovanni in Bragora respectively. These parishes had large Greek populations, and Sant’ Antonin was home to the Greek rite church, San Giorgio dei Greci, and the Greek confraternity, the Scuola di San Niccolò dei Greci.11 The family and its Venetian properties were in the heart of the Greek community. The Soderini lost no time in re-establishing themselves commercially.12 Given the ferocity of the war in Cyprus, they probably did not bring many personal belongings with them when they left the island. But they had good heads for business and well-established mercantile contacts which they quickly recreated among their fellow Cypriots and with Venice’s commercial elites. By 1597 when he wrote his final will, Francesco di Antonio Soderini was a respected merchant, holder of lucrative sinecures, property owner, and patron. As a survivor from a former territory, he had been awarded two offices in the Proprio, the magistracy that dealt with issues concerning the dowries of widows and all property disputes relating to real estate in Venice and its territories. Like most well-to-do recipients of public positions, he rented these offices to others and collected a portion of the rental income. As well, he and an associate owned half of a cabinet-making venture. But his main focus was on trade, especially with the Levant. Despite the loss of homeland, as soon as he could do so he reestablished commercial ties with Cyprus and the major port cities of the eastern Mediterranean.13 In early September 1597, for example, he urged his sons to invest in several mercantile ventures in Smyrna (Izmir) and Cyprus as both of 11 

According to the first post-Tridentine census conducted between 1592 and 1594, Greeks were 19 per cent of the population of Sant’ Antonin parish. ACPV, status animarum, b. 3, filza 1, unfoliated. 12  On the Venetian economy in the latter part of the sixteenth century, see Pullan, ‘The Occupations and Investments of the Venetian Nobility’; Tucci, ‘The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant’. 13  In the middle of the seventeenth century a Soderini was Venetian consul in Larnaca, Cyprus. Rothman, Brokering Empire, p. 177, n. 46.

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these promised good returns. Francesco also acquired a great deal of property, an interest he shared with his paternal great-grandfather, Niccolò di Lorenzo. He owned the family home in San Giovanni in Bragora which he left to Cecilia but stipulated that after her death it remain in the family through Zuanantonio and his sons. His other Venetian properties were in Sant’ Antonin parish and included the original family home and two smaller houses in the Calle Furlani. The mainland properties were a large house and several smaller ones (he did not specify the exact number) in Mestre, and three country properties.14 Cecilia (Celia) da Negroponte came from an old Graeco-Cypriot family of wealth. Francesco returned her dowry and appointed her and their three sons trustees of his estate, but declared her the head of the house, its inhabitants, and its contents. He also instructed his sons to obey her every command.15 The sons did so, although Niccolò was a little late in handing over to his mother her share of the income from the Proprio sinecure he had inherited from Francesco; for ten years Niccolò had held onto the monies from this office, finally confessing to his mother in 1616 that half of it had been hers all along. Cecilia also inherited one of Francesco’s country properties, and after his death she purchased two more rural properties in her own right. She also invested in the Bizenzone (Besançon) fairs, one of the most important trade fairs in the early modern period. According to her account books, she earned 1100 ducats interest in the ten years she had been investing in the currency markets held at the fairs.16 Two of the couple’s three sons married very well indeed. Zuanantonio and Niccolò both took Greek wives. Niccolò appears to have been the wealthiest of the three sons given that he provided each of his three daughters with dowries valued at 7000 ducats each.17 Cecilia and Francesco distributed their wealth only among family. Their sons and then their grandsons inherited the properties and their share of the Proprio offices. Although their daughter Isabetta was already married and in her own home when her parents made their wills, Francesco instructed Zuanantonio to give her half of his share of the income from the Proprio office. He also made arrangements for each of his seven granddaughters 14 

ASV, NT, b. 343, Niccolò Doglioni, 246, 10 September 1597. With the will are two codicils, one dated 14 October 1600 and the other 26 January 1606. 15  Venetian women had more control over their families and dowries than Tuscan women. Favourable inheritance regulations, like the return of the dowry, were common in Venice. Bellavitis, Famille, genre, transmission, pp. 55–72; Burke, ‘Our Daughters and Our Future’. 16  Her involvement in the fairs and Niccolò’s confession are in Cecilia’s will. ASV, NT, b. 343, Niccolò Doglioni, 177, 25 September 1616. 17  ASV, NT, b. 344, Niccolò Doglioni, 518, 7 June 1608.

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to receive 1000 ducats towards their dowries while his first-born grandson and namesake, Francesco di Zuanantonio, received 500 ducats. No other grandchild received a monetary gift from either grandparent. It was in their private lives, social circles, and patronage that one can appreciate the extent to which the Soderini blended their Florentine, Cypriot, and Greek traditions to create, like so many immigrants, a new, uniquely Venetian identity.18 Everyone in that first generation was born in Cyprus, and the language at home was definitely Greek given that Cecilia did not speak Italian.19 In the early years their immediate social circle was made up almost exclusively of Cypriot refugees like themselves. All the household servants were Cypriots, too, whereas the managers of their country properties were local Italians. Both Cecilia and Francesco spoke of a niece, Christina Nassin, whose son Francesco lived with them, the only relation they mentioned. Theirs was a single-generation family with tenuous links to Venice, but in this they were no different from other immigrant and refugee families. Through their children’s marriages the Soderini incorporated in-laws and new friends into their circle. The first post-Cyprus generation did not vigorously pursue out marriage as a way of integrating into the larger Venetian community, even though their cittadini status allowed them access to marriage partners from that class. Out marriages came later, with the grandchildren, but even then the mix was half Greek and half Venetian in-laws. Two of Zuanantonio’s daughters married Greek men, though only one of them was Cypriot; his son Giulio married Giulia Franceschi whose people were cittadini originarii. After Zuanantonio’s sons became patricians, Soderini men and women from his branch chose spouses only from that social class. Up till then, however, Soderini relations, friends, and acquaintances came from the large Cypriot refugee community, other wealthy Greeks, and some Venetians. Naturally their closest friends were successful merchant families that had been active in Cypriot political, social, and commercial life. Among these were the Flangini who became marriage kin when Tommaso Flangini became comparo to two of Zuantantonio’s daughters, Polonia and Cecilia.20 18 

Like all families of means, wealthy Greek immigrants used marriage as a way of furthering their incorporation into their new environment: Bellavitis, Identité, mariage, mobilité sociale; Chabot, La dette des familles; Cowan, Marriage, Manners and Mobility. 19  Cecilia dictated her will in Greek and asked a family friend, Theofilo Coredallio, to translate it into Italian because she did not speak Italian (‘non sapevo la lingua italiana’). ASV, NT, b. 343, Niccolò Doglioni, 177, 25 September 1616 20  I Libri di Stato Civile, ed. by Manoussacas and Scoulas, no. 179, p. 45 (Polonia) and no. 634, p. 161 (Cecilia).

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Religiously the Soderini were truly a mixed bag, and in this they were no different from other Greek and Graeco-Venetian families. Francesco and Niccolò and the latter’s family followed the Latin rite, while Cecilia, Giulio, and Zuanantonio and his wife and children followed the Greek. This was not a problem because the differences between the two rites had not yet been strictly defined, so Greeks and non-Greeks could (and did) move from one rite to the other as circumstances dictated. The family enrolled in both the Greek and Venetian scuole and together participated in the rituals of both churches. Membership in the Greek scuola was based on place of origin, not religious rite, and sometimes not even on ethnicity; for example Dalmatian, Albanian, and Venetian men and women married to Greeks, or following the Greek rite, also joined San Niccolò dei Greci. One of the most notable non-Greek members was the patrician Pietro Manolesso, who was born in Crete, grew up speaking Greek, and had a Greek wife.21 Francesco and Giulio were compari to several Greek couples, just as their friends, the Flangini, had been to Francesco’s daughters and granddaughters.22 Giulio and Zuanantonio served on the Greek scuola’s governing board, including several terms as guardiani (chairs).23 Zuanantonio and Cecilia were buried in the cemetery behind the Greek church, but in her will Cecilia set aside 600 ducats for the construction of a Soderini sarcophagus inside San Giorgio dei Greci. She left precise details about the tomb: it should be of sandstone, with the family names and crest sculpted on its surface. This would then become the final resting place of all Greek-rite Soderini.24 She also made a generous cash gift to the church’s building fund and left money for Greek priests to say Masses for the souls of the family and its kin.25 21  Pietro Manolesso’s enrolment is in AAIEV, Scuola di San Niccolò dei Greci, reg. 134, fol 167v; Soderini enrolments are in the same, fols 66r, 81v, 135v, 260v, 280v. On the history of the Greek scuola and church, see Fedalto, ‘La Comunità Greca, la Chiesa di Venezia, la Chiesa di Roma’ and Tsirpanlis, ‘La Posizione della Comunità Greco-Ortodossa’. 22  I Libri di Stato Civile, ed. by Manoussacas and Scoulas, no. 11, p. 5, nos 282 and 290, pp. 71, 73–74. 23  Giulio Soderini served four terms as guardian: 1603, 1607, 1618, and 1631. Zuanantonio was elected guardian in 1611 but died while in office and Giulio served out the remainder of his term. AAIEV, Catasto, reg. 33, fols 309r–v. 24  ASV, NT, b. 343, Niccolò Doglioni, 171, 25 September 1616. Cecilia did not specify where the tomb should be. 25  The construction of the Greek church began in 1537 and was completed by the mid1570s. The scuola, as the overseer of the building project, encouraged Greeks to give. Because most Greeks were not wealthy and could only give small amounts, the scuola took out loans and

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The fact that Francesco and Niccolò were Latin rite did not stop them from taking part in Greek rituals and ceremonies. Niccolò was a scuola member, but Francesco never joined. However, he was comparo to at least one Greek couple, and he included the scuola and church in his bequests. In 1586 he commissioned the construction of a family tomb in the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli; it is a large tomb, located in the middle of the centre aisle (Figure 14.1). He is buried there, dressed in the habit of the brothers of the Scuola di San Teodoro where he was a member. Niccolò di Francesco is also buried there with him. Their wealth allowed the Soderini to finance the construction of two large sarcophagi in two different churches to satisfy the religious needs of their family. However, Cecilia went one better than Francesco. For reasons best known to her, she instructed her trustees to make sure the Greeks did the right thing by her. If they did not respect the conditions she set out regarding the design of the tomb and the distribution of monies, then she wanted her own and other Soderini remains dug up and reburied in the other tomb at Santa Maria dei Miracoli. That church would also receive the 600 ducats she had set aside for San Giorgio dei Greci: And should the confraternity of the aforesaid church and scuola not wish to build all the tombs  […] then I want that my body and bones and those of my other deceased [ones] who are found there [on the grounds of the Greek church], that they be transported to the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in the tomb of the late Signor Francesco Soderini my husband, and the above said capital of the aforementioned 600 ducats go to this church.26

Cecilia was neither the first nor the last among Greek elites to take such precautions or make such demands. In 1586 Giacomo Samariari, then the wealthiest man in the Greek community, set out similar conditions concerning his burial and legacy.27 encouraged those who could afford to do so to leave monetary bequests to the building fund to meet construction and other expenses. 26  ASV, NT, b. 343, Niccolò Doglioni, 177, 25 September 1616. ‘Et se per caso che detta confraternità de predetta chiesa et schola, non volessero di far tute le arche […] voglio che mio corpo et ossi et questi del altri mei defonti che in essa li attrovenno, siano trasportati alla chiesa di Santa Maria di Miracoli nell’arca del quond. Sigr. Francesco Soderini mio marito, et il predetto cavidal degli sudetti ducati 600 vadino in essa chiesa’. 27  ASV, NT, b. 11, Gianpietro Anzelieri, 204, 9 April 1580. Samariari’s other choice was the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. He left 2000 ducats for the construction of the campanile, a sum for which the building committee was most grateful.

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Figure 14.1. The tomb of Francesco and Niccolò Soderini, Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Photo courtesy of John Burke.

Despite these differences, the Soderini easily blended the two rites; they were not a family divided. They observed both Latin and Greek rituals and fulfilled their religious and social obligations to the Venetian, Cypriot, and the greater Greek communities. Their patronage reflected this. Cecilia da Negroponte provided for her children and the household servants, but also left money to the priests at San Giorgio, the small community of Greek nuns, and the Greek metropolitan (archbishop), Gabriel Severo, and asked them all to pray for the souls of her and Francesco’s families.28 Francesco was generous to the church and convent of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. He commissioned a silversmith to make a silver cross for that church and set aside 60 ducats for this. He also gave 10 ducats to the abbess of the convent to say two Masses a day for his 28 

Gabriel Severo was a Cretan monk who became the first metropolitan (archbishop) of the Greek church of Venice. Officially he was the Metropolitan of Philadelphia, an episcopal seat in Asia Minor. Severo was metropolitan from 1577 till his death in 1616. Venice remains the seat of the Metropolitan of Philadelphia.

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soul. He endowed the Capuchin monastery where Epiphanio was a monk with an annual income of 50 ducats. Initially he left 25 ducats to the Greek scuola to commission an artist to paint an icon for San Giorgio dei Greci, but he later changed that to 50 ducats and asked his executors to give the money directly to an artist of their choice. Like Cecilia, he gave to the Greek metropolitan, in his case 30 ducats (she only gave 15) to say prayers for the family. At the same time, Francesco did not forget his Cypriot compatriots and obliged Cecilia to distribute among the Cypriot poor half the income she received from the cabinet-making business he left to her.29 Niccolò di Francesco’s patronage went beyond his parents’ mainly Cypriot and Greek worlds. Besides Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Niccolò gave to the major civic institutions that dispensed welfare to those in need: the hospitals of Santi Giovanni e Paolo and the Incurabili, the orphanages at the Pietà and the Mendicanti, and the Catacumeni, Soccorso, Convertiti, and Zitelle, institutions that looked after young girls, converts, and retired prostitutes. In 1656 two of Francesco and Cecilia’s grandsons brought the family its greatest honour, its elevation to the patriciate. The significance of this act cannot be overstated. The patriciate was a closed, hereditary class, and entry was difficult if not almost impossible; the most recent intake of new families was 1380 as a result of the Chioggia War. Nearly three hundred years later, when the state needed money to finance another war, it opened the patriciate to newcomers. In the early 1640s Venice was desperate to hold on to Crete, its last possession in the Mediterranean and the jewel in its imperial crown. In the early 1630s the Ottomans had begun a slow, piecemeal conquest of the great island, and in 1645 they captured the cities of Cania and Rethymno. The end came in 1669 when they took the capital, Candia (today’s Heraklion). The war, waged over thirty years, was expensive, and the state encouraged those who could to give generously. And it offered an inducement: entry into the patriciate to those who contributed 100,000 ducats to the war chest.30 Two Soderini, the brothers Francesco and Giulio di Zuanantonio, stepped up. Why? Perhaps their grandparents’ and parents’ first-hand experience of war, conquest, and dislocation resonated with them. As the first generation born and raised in Venice, the brothers may have had a strong sense of civic duty. They probably had several other motives as well: identification with the plight of Venetian Crete, loyalty to Venice and its empire, 29 

ASV, NT, b. 343, Niccolò Doglioni, 246, 10 September 1597. The oldest patrician category was the case vecchie, families that elected the first doge in 697. A summary of patrician status is in da Mosto, L’ Archivio di Stato di Venezia, i, 68–73. 30 

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fear of the Ottomans’ westward advance, and more importantly, the desire to enter the patriciate. Accordingly, they gave 100,000 ducats; 60,000 was the family’s ‘gift’ and 40,000 was invested in the state treasury: ‘Francesco and Giulio di Giovanni Antonio [Zuanantonio] Soderini made a donation to that republic of 100,000 ducats […] and another 40,000 in loans to make up for the scarcity in the empty treasury because of the Candia war’.31 In 1656 they were rewarded when their branch of the family entered the patriciate. With this exalted status came new duties and responsibilities Figure 14.2. The Soderini coat of arms. Litta, in the political arena and expanded Famiglie Celebri Italiane, ix, disp. 141. Photo courtesy of State Library mercantile and social privileges. They of Victoria, Melbourne. and their heirs would now sit on the Great Council and be eligible to stand for the most important offices of state, including ambassadorships and heads of powerful bodies like the Council of Ten. The brothers formally adopted the coat of arms of the Florentine Soderini, a crest with three silver deer heads, but distinguished themselves from their Florentine relations, as if to emphasize their permanent separation from that city (Figure 14.2). The Venetian branch kept the deer heads that identified them as Soderini and added the imperial two-headed eagle in recognition of the knighthood conferred on Niccolò di Lorenzo Soderini by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1468.32 And so, what had begun as a life of exile led to a new life in Cyprus, and finally a permanent place at the highest levels of Venetian society and government. The exiled family was now accepted, recognized, and privileged. In just under two hundred years the Soderini had come full circle, from exiles and outlaws to elite Venetians. 31 

Litta, Famiglie Celebri Italiane, ix, disp. 141, table VIII: ‘Francesco e Giulio di Giovanni Antonio Soderini fecero dono a quella repubblica di 100,000 ducati […] ed altri 40,000 in prestanza per supplire alle scarsezze del erario esausto per la guerra di Candia’. 32  Litta, Famiglie Celebri Italiane, ix, disp. 141, table I. At some stage the Florentine family also incorporated the two-headed eagle into their crest.

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Immigration and Identity From the moment Antonio Soderini left Florence for Cyprus he assumed a new identity: no longer a fully fledged Florentine, he was now an immigrant, a newcomer to a place of blended cultures. Early modern Cyprus was worlds apart from his native Florence. The small island, culturally closer to the Levant than to the West, had a long history of Greek, Arab, Byzantine, Crusader, and Venetian occupation. It was a microcosm of the multicultural world of many maritime cities and islands in the early modern period, except in Cyprus the presence of the other was more intense. The Soderini became a part of a society of fused customs, traditions, languages, and faiths. They were now Venetian subjects, familiar with colonial Venetian manners, though not Venetians themselves. That came after they settled in Venice. If they were asked what they were, what would they have answered? Ethnically some were Italian and others Greek, some followed the Latin rite while others the Greek, not everyone spoke Italian, but all of them spoke Greek. Were they at all conscious of their Florentine background? They made no references to a Florentine past, and there is no evidence that Francesco di Antonio knew he had a large number of Florentine first cousins, children of his father’s brothers and sisters; none of his children referred to Florentine kin either. Like many immigrants, the Soderini would have had trouble ticking identity boxes marked ethnic background, faith, and language. They knew they were Soderini from Cyprus, and to reinforce this they continued to use da Cipro after their name well into the seventeenth century. They were just as difficult to peg in other ways. They remained happily divided in religious terms and did not let this interfere with their participation in both churches. They resembled the wealthy men and women of the period (and the not so wealthy ones too) in using their position and good name to win concessions from the state, to give generously, to marry well, and to look after their family, kin, friends, and compatriots. These were the things that mattered. Not surprisingly, the Cypriot connection became less prominent over time, until a new generation with no physical or memory links to Cyprus assumed the leadership of the family. Patronage patterns reflected this gradual shift from Cypriot to Venetian. Francesco and Cecilia had made small gifts to individuals outside the family, but the bulk of their patronage went to their churches, to institutions, artisans, and artists associated with these, and to struggling Cypriots. One son, Niccolò, and a grandson, the future patrician Francesco di Zuanantonio, expanded their patronage networks to include Venetian civic and religious institutions as well as Greek ones. The history of the post-1656 generations is beyond the scope of this essay, but it would not be surprising if

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the Greek world of Venice ceased to occupy them. The entry into the patriciate added the last significant layer of identity, one that defined them as elite Venetians whose first duty was now to the republic. All immigrants eventually become locals and in the process lose much of their original identity markers, and in this the Soderini were no different. Up to a point they retained their Cypriot links through the church and scuola and friends and kin. But Cecilia was the last Soderini who spoke only Greek, and her children and grandchildren were probably the last to speak both Greek and Italian. To date, I have found no evidence that the Florentine and Venetian branches had any contacts with each other. However, it seems unlikely that an important family like the Soderini was unaware of its widespread kin network. At some point, the Venetian family’s story became known because in 1739 the Florentine academician Domenico Maria Manni dedicated the second volume of his work on seals to the Venetian patrician Ruggiero Soderini. The dedication was preceded by the usual effusive praise of the patron, his strong qualities, and his love of the noble arts and letters. Manni then went further, reminding Ruggiero of the Soderini family’s long history of leadership in Florence and Venice. He praised Ruggiero’s ancestor, the knight Niccolò di Lorenzo Soderini, brother of the famous Tommaso and uncle of Cardinal Francesco Soderini and Piero Soderini, who he described as ‘The most illustrious Gonfaloniere for life of the Florentine Republic’.33 He skipped over the matter of Niccolò’s banishment and focused on his sons, particularly Bernardo, who was not only the father of Carlo, Bishop of Narni and good friend of Catherine de’ Medici, but also of Antonio who ‘gave birth to Francesco, from whom sprung Giovanni Antonio Soderini Senior, father of Giulio, and grandfather of Giovanni Antonio the younger, from whom was born Your Excellency’.34 Interestingly, Manni said nothing about the Cypriot connection that played such a significant part in the family’s history. It is unlikely he was unaware of the Cyprus years since these were well documented in Venetian genealogies. However, Manni’s aim was to acknowledge Ruggiero’s support, not to recite his family’s history, and in this he succeeded. The patronage networks of Ruggiero Soderini, patrician of Venice, now included a scholar from the city of his ancestors. 33 

Manni, Osservazione istorische, ii, p. vii: ‘Gonfaloniere gloriosamente perpetuo della Repubblica Fiorentina’. 34  Manni, Osservazione istorische, ii, p. vii: ‘Il quale Niccolò ebbe tra gli altri figliuoli Bernardo, padre non solo di Carlo Vescovo di Narni ma ancora d’Antonio, che procreò Francesco, donde trasse suo nascimento Gio: Antonio Soderini Seniore padre di Giulio, ed avo di Gio: Antonio il giovane, dal quale nasce VOSTRA ECCELLENZA’. The capitals are Manni’s.

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Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio Antico del Istituto Ellenico di Venezia, Catasto, reg. 33 Archivio Antico del Istituto Ellenico di Venezia, Scuola di San Niccolò dei Greci, registri 134, 223 Archivio Curia Patriarcale di Venezia, status animarum, busta 3 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Notarile Testamenti, buste 11, 343, 344 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato Deliberazioni Privilegi, registro II Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato Terra Deliberazioni, registro VI

Primary Sources I Libri di Stato Civile della Confraternità Greca di Venezia: Atti dei Matrimoni 1599–1815, ed. by Manoussos Manoussacas and Giovanni Scoulas (Venezia: Biblioteca dell’ istituto ellenico di Venezia, 1993) Litta, Pompeo, Famiglie Celebri Italiane, 10  vols (Milano: Tipografia delle Famiglie Celebri Italiane, 1868) Manni, Domenico Maria, Osservazione istorische di Domenico Maria Manni, academico Fio­rentino sopra i sigilli antichi, 30 vols (Firenze: Stamperia d’ Anton-Maria Albizzini, 1739–84) The Society of Renaissance Florence: A  Documentary Study, ed. by Gene Brucker (New York: Harper Books, 1971) Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi, Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi, ed. and trans. by Heather Gregory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987)

Secondary Works Arbel, Benjamin, ‘Greek Magnates in Venetian Cyprus: The Case of the Synglitico Family’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49 (1995), 325–37 Balletto, Laura, ‘Ethnic Groups, Cross-Social and Cross-Cultural Contacts on FifteenthCentury Cyprus’, in Intercultural Contacts in the Medi­eval Mediterranean, ed. by Benjamin Arbel (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1996), pp. 35–48 Bellavitis, Anna, Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au xvi siécle (Roma: École Française de Rome, 2008) —— , Identité, mariage, mobilité sociale: Citoyennes et citoyens à Venise au xvi siécle (Roma: École Française de Rome, 2001) Burke, Ersie, ‘Our Daughters and Our Future: Greco-Venetian Marriages, 1520–1610’, in Marriage in Premodern Europe: Italy and Beyond, ed. by Jacqueline Murray (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012), pp. 169–99 —— , ‘Surviving Exile: Byzantine Families and the Serenissima 1453–1600’, in Wanted: Byzantium. The Desire for a Lost Empire, ed. by Ingela Nilsson and Paul Stephenson, Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, 15 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2014), pp. 109–32

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Chabot, Isabelle, La dette des familles: Femmes, lignage et patrimoine à Florence aux xiv et xv siécles (Roma: École Française de Rome, 2011) Clarke, Paula, The Soderini and the Medici: Power and Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) Cowan, Alexander, Marriage, Manners and Mobility in Early Moderin Venice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Ell, Stephen, ‘Citizenship and Immigration to Venice, 1305–1500’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, 1976) Fedalto, Giorgio, ‘La Comunità Greca, la Chiesa di Venezia, la Chiesa di Roma’, in I Greci a Venezia, ed. by Maria Francesca Tiepolo and Eurigio Tonetti (Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2002), pp. 83–102 Hill, George, A  History of Cyprus, 4  vols (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1949–72) Maria, Blake de, Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) Mosto, Andrea da, L’Archivio di Stato di Venezia, 2 vols (Roma: Biblioteca d’ Arte Editrice, 1937) Phillips, Mark, The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987) Pullan, Brian, ‘The Occupations and Investments of the Venetian Nobility in the Middle and Late Sixteenth Century’, in Renaissance Venice, ed. by J. R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), pp. 379–407 Rothman, E.  Natalie, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012) Setton, Kenneth, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571, 4 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984) Tsirpanlis, Zacharias, ‘La Posizione della Comunità Greco-Ortodossa Rispetto al Patri­ arcato Ecumenico di Costantinopoli (xv–xviii Secoli)’, in I Greci a Venezia, ed. by Maria Francesca Tiepolo and Eurigio Tonetti (Venezia: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2002), pp. 123–49 Tucci, Ugo, ‘The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century’, in Re­naissance Venice, ed. by J. R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), pp. 346–77

Part III Spirituality and Patronage

Begging for Favours: The ‘New’ Clares of S. Chiara Novella and their Patrons Sharon T. Strocchia

T

he Florentine convent of S.  Chiara Novella was reportedly born in a dramatic search for redemption. Legend has it that the young widow Maria di Maso degli Albizzi killed a servant who accosted her by stabbing him with a spindle. To atone for this murderous act, Maria became a Franciscan tertiary at S.  Girolamo in the early fifteenth century.1 During the 1450 Jubilee, she made a pilgrimage to Rome with the approval of her spiritual director, the saintly Archbishop Antoninus; there she obtained permission from Pope Nicholas  V to found a new convent in her native city under Franciscan supervision.2 Returning to Florence, Maria learned that the convent of S. Giovanni Battista was destitute of personnel. Its patrons from the Biliotti family agreed to transfer the site on Via de’ Serragli out of ‘great devotion’ to her, despite resistance from the remaining nuns, who were finally persuaded 1 

ASF, CRSGI, Parte Prima, vol. 388, unfoliated. Little is known about Maria’s identity. The eighteenth-century antiquarian Gaetano Martini speculated that her father was Maso di Luca degli Albizzi; if so, her mother was Bartolomea Baldesi and her husband Neri di Lapo del Palagio. BNCF, MS Panciatichi, vol. 119, tomo 2, pp. 146–48. 2  ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 388, unfol. The bull, dated 4 October 1450, is published in Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, ix, 87–88. Sharon T. Strocchia ([email protected]) is professor of history at Emory Uni­ ver­sity. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 1992) and the prize-winning Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 2009), as well as numerous articles on women, religion, and society.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 277–294 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109710

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to leave by a miraculous vision.3 On 30  May 1452, Maria and four companions took possession of the property and started remodeling it with her dowry funds.4 The community’s name — S. Chiara Novella — emphasized its role as an agent of spiritual renewal, part of the mid-century Observant movement aimed at revitalizing monastic ideals. The project found a ready audience: over the next half-century, S. Chiara grew from a cluster of dilapidated buildings housing a handful of women into an impressive physical complex sheltering 110 nuns in 1515.5 This story encapsulates both the profound passions and messy contradictions that animated Italian Renaissance piety. Religious practices across the peninsula spanned a wide spectrum anchored at one end by a Renaissance culture of display and, at the other, by radical gestures of renunciation. These extremes formed an interdependent spiritual economy in which the austerities and intercessory prayers of religious women helped to compensate for the sins and worldly excesses of the laity, upon whom they relied for material support. Although these tensions had marked Italian religiosity since the days of Francis and Clare, they gained renewed traction in the mid-fifteenth century for two main reasons. First, the Observant movement stressing foundational ideals, simplicity of life, and spiritual rejuvenation reached its peak of fervour in Tuscany at mid-century. The prolonged presence of the reforming Pope Eugenius IV in Florence throughout the 1430s gave this European-wide movement added local punch; moreover, Eugenius’s successor, Nicholas V, used the reform of Florentine female religious houses as a tool to renew monastic discipline more generally and to showcase papal resurgence after the Great Schism.6 Second, the patronage process itself was becoming a dominant force in Florentine politics and society in the second half of the Quattrocento. Not only did the Medici build a robust network of clients and allies that exercised governance behind the scenes; artistic patronage concurrently changed the physical face of Renaissance Florence, as patrons used the visual arts to jockey for position and status. 3 

ASF, CRSGI, Parte Prima, vol. 388, unfol. Other details in ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 389, fol. 1. 4  ASF, NA, 13501, fols 142r–143r, dated 22 July 1452; additional details in ASF, Manoscritti, vol. 183, insert 26, and ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 388, unfol. According to a fifteenth-century convent record, Maria took the Franciscan habit 8 June 1451 and professed on 1 January 1453 (modern style); ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fol. 1r. 5  ASF, Balie, vol. 40, fols 75r–77r. 6  Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, pp. 21–23.

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These twin developments put Maria Albizzi and her spiritual followers in a new bind. Their pursuit of complete evangelical poverty did not simply mean rejecting standard sources of monastic income such as rents and properties; it also forced these female spiritual aspirants to court a wide range of patrons simply to survive. As the nuns sought to detach themselves from worldly goods, they paradoxically became more dependent on individual and familial patrons, who had their own spiritual and social objectives in patronizing the convent. The question soon arose as to whether it was possible for the nuns of S. Chiara to simultaneously be both beggars and choosers when soliciting support. Even more pressing was the issue of what happened when patronal ambitions clashed with nuns’ spiritual ideals. Tapping new archival sources, this essay examines the nuns’ search for patronage in the second half of the Quattrocento, including the vexed familial and institutional relationships into which it drew them. The first part of the essay traces the establishment of Observance at S. Chiara — a murky chapter in the convent’s history — and situates it in the broader quest for women’s spiritual self-determination then underway. The second part probes questions of institutional allegiance, especially the relationship between the nuns’ staunch Clarissan identity and the Savonarolan leanings of their principal patron, Jacopo Bongianni, in the 1490s. The convent as a whole, and the Bongianni nuns in particular, were not only receptive to Bongianni’s ambitious building programme but actively facilitated its completion. They did so in part due to common spiritual aims that transcended traditional monastic divides, in addition to practical pressures and family ambitions. Set against a dramatic backdrop, this case study illuminates the complex intersection of piety and patronage in Renaissance Florence and sheds new light on the process by which Florentine convent spaces became increasingly privatized. * * * In its early years, S.  Chiara was absorbed in a prolonged battle between Franciscan Observants and Conventuals — two factions within the same order separated by radically different interpretations of founding ideals. From the outset, Maria Albizzi and her companions yearned for the austerities embodied in Clare’s first rule (1253), such as daily fasts, rigorous asceticism, and complete evangelical poverty (privilegium paupertatis) that renounced property of all sorts.7 However, when approving S. Chiara’s foundation, Nicholas V had placed 7 

Sensi, Storie di bizzocche tra Umbria e Marche, p. 361.

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it under the supervision of Conventual Franciscans following the Urbanist rule (1263), which did not permit the same degree of austerity and also required the nuns to hold communal property. Throughout the 1450s, Maria petitioned unsuccessfully to transfer the house to Observant supervision in order to fulfill her spiritual dreams. Supporting her in these endeavours was Archbishop Antoninus, who worried that more relaxed Conventual standards would not advance her spiritual progress; the Archbishop visited the convent frequently in order to ‘excite’ continued fervour among the more zealous nuns.8 During Maria’s uninterrupted tenure as abbess, from 1454 until her death on 8 March 1470, the community grew rapidly from its original cluster of five nuns to about fifty members.9 Inspired by the spiritual authenticity of Observance, mature widows from neighbouring Tuscan towns poured into the budding community, where they rubbed shoulders with young girls from prominent Florentine families like the Acciaiuoli, Bardi, Medici, and Strozzi. A handful of women transferred from other local Clarissan communities, capitalizing on the complex institutional and spiritual networks that linked Franciscan convents in north-central Italy. Their compatriots in this shared spiritual project included the daughters of linen weavers, barrel makers, second-hand dealers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, physicians, notaries, and spinners.10 Typically, girls from lower-tier artisan families joined convents as servant nuns, but at S. Chiara they became full-fledged choir nuns exercising both voice and vote in chapter, at least until a firm pattern of aristocratization took hold c. 1520. Facilitating this rich mix were unusually small dowry requirements of 30 to 40 florins, about one-third the norm. Only the fast-growing Benedictine house of Le Murate matched S. Chiara in its social inclusivity. Among the newcomers entering S. Chiara in the 1460s and 1470s were three sisters of Jacopo di Bongianni di Mino Bongianni (1442–1508), the wealthy wool merchant who later built the convent church and its main chapel, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.11 The story of the Bongianni household is a familiar one in Italian convent history. When the 1458 tax survey was taken, then fifteen-year-old Jacopo had five sisters, with a sixth yet unborn; marrying 8 

ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 388, unfol. ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fol. 1r; vol. 388, loose sheet, reports her death date as 10 March. Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, ix, 82, mistakenly places Maria’s death in 1496. For the convent population, see ASF, MAP, LXXXV, 87, dated 1 May 1473. 10  ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fols 2r–9r. For mid-century monastic recruitment patterns, see Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, pp. 19–28. 11  See Cardini, ‘Iacopo di Bongianni di Mino Bongianni’. 9 

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all of them well would have invited financial ruin. Only one of the five girls was reported as having a dowry at that time.12 Consequently, three of Jacopo’s sisters became nuns at S. Chiara, where their strict life of prayer and abstinence helped to sanctify the city and compensate for ill-gotten gains by others. The first Bongianni nun, Gostanza, entered the house around age sixteen in 1463; she built a distinguished monastic career lasting almost sixty years, serving two critical terms as abbess before her death in 1522. Gostanza’s younger sister Filippa followed her into the convent in 1465, when she was about twelve years old. Unfortunately, Filippa’s tenure in the house was cut short by her premature death in 1479. The life course of the third Bongianni nun echoed that of her eldest sister. Francesca, who had not yet been born when the tax survey was taken, joined S. Chiara in 1475, took vows a year later, and served four terms as abbess before her death in 1528. Strengthening the complement of Bongianni nuns in the late Quattrocento was their niece Cherubina, the daughter of Jacopo’s brother Francesco, who entered the house in 1486; she too enjoyed an illustrious career, including four terms as abbess and multiple turns as second-incommand.13 Although local prelates frowned on the practice of clustering kin in the same convent, which might create voting blocks and incite factionalism, the Bongianni group was not unusual in view of the convent’s open-door policy. The main practical question facing the growing community was how to live out Clarissan ideals while still supporting everyday expenses, cult life, and major construction projects. Most Florentine religious women lived off the mixed income from rents, yields, and personal annuities, supplemented by monastic dowries, gifts, and their own handiwork.14 As a Conventual foundation, the convent possessed communal property; by 1495 its endowment consisted of eight small, heavily encumbered rental properties yielding little revenue.15 Nevertheless, Observants abhorred this kind of secure income. Seeking evangelical poverty as far as the Urbanist rule allowed, the S. Chiara nuns relied heavily on their own labour to make ends meet. Among the first spaces they built when refitting their complex was a workroom, where they ran an active textile workshop producing gold thread.16 The community felt mount12 

ASF, Catasto, vol. 805, fols 939r–941r. 13  ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fols 5r, 6r, 9v, 12r, 117r–118v. 14  Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, pp. 72–92. 15  ASF, Decima, vol. 70, fol. 66v. 16  No business records from S. Chiara survive, but the workshop is mentioned in civic records; see ASF, Ufficiali di Notte, vol. 14, fol. 78r.

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ing financial pressure as its numbers blossomed. Citing urgent needs to repair and expand their complex ‘for their greater utility’, the nuns won approval from Sixtus IV in 1471 to sell one of their inalienable properties — an act that also moved them closer to their spiritual ideals.17 With the proceeds, they began repair work immediately; the following year (1472), they hired the local painter Filippo di Giuliano di Matteo to undertake decorative work inside the complex.18 Apparently the community had enough funds to commission the processional cross attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, containing fragments of the True Cross, a favourite feature of Franciscan devotional art.19 These projects confirm scholarly claims that, prior to the Council of Trent, Renaissance nuns exercised considerable control over their visual environment.20 By the 1470s, the gritty realities of evangelical poverty propelled the nuns on a quest for patronage that quickly became entwined with questions of governance still plaguing the house. The lack of centralized Franciscan reform left the S. Chiara nuns suspended between two worlds. Although they voluntarily practiced Observance in their devotional life, they remained tethered to Conventual jurisdiction, making it difficult to secure appropriate spiritual guidance. In 1443 the Franciscan Vicar General John of Capistrano directed Observant friars to refuse pastoral care to Clarissan houses not professing the primary rule, thus depriving numerous convents in north-central Italy of spiritual ministry. Although dedicated confessors were crucial to reform efforts, the early sixteenth-century Franciscan chronicler Mariano of Florence acknowledged that many Clarissan communities feared their Observant confessors might abandon them due to shifting ecclesiastical positions.21 Nuns navigated these obstacles by utilizing epistolary networks as well as widespread personal connections. As the S. Chiara nuns courted patrons throughout the 1470s, their letters contributed to the rapid flow of news and information across the peninsula, helping to construct circuits of exchange within an evolving information economy. The nuns had successfully secured an 17 

Bullarium Franciscanum, iii, ed. by Pou y Marti, pp. 8–9. ASF, Ufficiali di Notte, vol. 16, fol. 5v. 19  The object, dated 1460–80, is described at [accessed 15 January 2014]. 20  Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, p.  129; Lowe, ‘Nuns and Choice’, esp. p. 145. 21  Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, pp. 134–55. 18 

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Observant Franciscan friar, Fra Niccolò da Pisa, as their confessor and governor ‘by apostolic authority’ in 1466. His departure seven years later ‘to return to the quiet of his observance’ jeopardized their well-being. Recognizing that outside assistance was necessary to obtain a sympathetic replacement, Abbess Chiara Peri wrote to young Lorenzo de’ Medici on 1 May 1473. Still in his early twenties, Lorenzo was just beginning to develop the political self-confidence that would eventually advance Medicean dynastic interests along with a Florentine civic agenda.22 ‘We have reached the decision that it is not possible to try to find a spiritual governor without the greatest mental anxiety on a daily basis’, the Abbess wrote. ‘Considering that our desire will not be attained without your help, it surely occurs to us to ask you a favour, like one asks a father for the love of God.’ Continuing her plea, the Abbess laid out a clear plan resting on a firm grasp of Franciscan affairs. She hoped ‘that it would not be too troublesome’ for Lorenzo to write ‘one line to ask Master Pagolo da Lucca, vicar of the Observant Franciscans, who will be at the general chapter meeting at Poggibonsi on 5 May, to exhort those friars while he is there to take up the same spiritual care among us that they also give to [the nuns of ] S. Giorgio, Foligno, and S. Orsola. Hopefully, with the help of God, this won’t cause them much trouble.’ Abbess Chiara assured Lorenzo of their continued gratitude: ‘if we were to obtain this favour, we would pray for you always, though we are already most obligated to you’.23 What distinguished this letter from similar petitions by religious women is the fact that the Abbess sent two virtually identical missives on the same day — one to Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni; the other to Lorenzo’s wife,

22 

Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, esp. pp. 44–49. ASF, MAP, XXIX, 313, dated 1 May 1473. ‘Essendo noi rimase sanza spirituale governo perché frate Niccholò da Pisa, el quale è suto nostro confessoro circa d’anni 7 ed era frate di San Francescho della observanza, el quale è stato al nostro governo per auctorità apostolica, gli è paruto di ritornarsi nella sua quieta della observanza. E non gli potendo noi con buona conscientia impedire questa sua sancta volontà, habbiamo maturamente deliberato per ogni dì non avere a provedere di ghoverno spirituale che in vero non passa sanza grandissimo affanno mentale […]. Considerando questo nostro desiderio non potere havere effecto sanza vostro adiuto, ci è paruto con sicurtà e come padre per lo amore di Dio richiedervi di favore che non vi sia fatica con uno vostro verso richiedere Maestro Pagolo dal Lucca vicar[io] de’ frati della observanza che sarà a dì 5 di maggio a capitolo a Poggibonsi che lui quando sarà a decto capitolo con forti esorti questi frati qui al pigliare di noi quella cura che lloro fanno di San Giorgio, Fuligno [e] Sancta Orsola che abbiamo speranza collo adiuto di Dio essere loro non di molta molesta ecc. esse questo obterremo sareno benchè già siamo obligatissime sempre per voi orare.’ 23 

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Clarice Orsini — asking them to intercede with Lorenzo for the same purpose.24 Justine Heazlewood notes that this is the only known example of Florentine nuns sending multiple letters to multiple Medici recipients simultaneously urging the same course of action.25 The S. Chiara nuns likely already had Lorenzo’s ear, since their backer Jacopo Bongianni was il Magnifico’s personal agent in Bologna; in this important matter, however, they left nothing to chance.26 All three letters explained the situation in much the same way, giving comparable factual information and reiterating the same clear request. Despite using a common template, the Abbess struck a personalized note for each recipient. The letters to the Medici women stressed the great number of vulnerable young nuns needing pastoral guidance, highlighting concerns for female honour and the potential dangers of life without a spiritual director. The Abbess added a special intimate touch by addressing Lucrezia as a ‘most singular mother’ to the nuns. Subtle differences in language, however, recognized the slightly different roles these two women played as intercessors in Medici patronage processes. Abbess Chiara enjoined Clarice to ‘persuade’ her husband to intervene, while inviting the elder Lucrezia to ‘discuss’ the matter with her son. Three years later (1476) Abbess Chiara’s successor, Agnesa Barducci, wrote to Lucrezia Tornabuoni again, using a similar mix of intimacy and savvy. Gently reminding her ‘not to forget the twelve lire which you, in your great charity, have sent us the past several years’ on the feast of St Clare, the Abbess affirmed her continued confidence in Lucrezia’s ‘inestimable mercy’. Still, she humbly asked Lucrezia ‘to send a clerk to the [Medici] bank, which says that it won’t release the money without a note from your own hand or your approval’.27 A few years later (1479), the S. Chiara nuns turned again to Lorenzo, this time to renew relief of their civic salt taxes. Lorenzo had since come into his own as a political force, and his ability to pull strings with civic officials, many of whom were Medici clients, was key to his influence. In return for this favour, Abbess Domitilla Strozzi assured Lorenzo that she would be ‘forever most obliged to 24 

ASF, MAP, LXXXV, 86 and 87. Heazlewood, ‘“Letters Are the Leaves, Prayers Are the Fruit”’, pp. 151–53. 26  Ristori, ‘Religione e politica nei savonaroliani fiorentini’, p. 829. 27  ASF, MAP, LXXXV, 171, dated 13 August 1476. ‘vi priego che se gli è possibile che voi non ci dimentichate in nella piatosissima e uxata vostra charità di quelle dodici lire che per essa vostra magnia charità già per più anni continui senpre ci avete date. […] Et spero grandemente in nella sua inestimabile misericordia e alla reverentia e charità vostra […] priegovi che sse voi volete facciate un poco di fede e diate comessione al bancho che dicono che sanza un verso di vostra mano o per vostra chonmissione non ce gli darebbono.’ 25 

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make and have made special prayers for the conservation of your happy state every single day’.28 The nuns continued this flurry of supplication to other well-placed Floren­ tines in order to activate a chain of influence. Writing in a beautiful monastic book hand, former abbess Domitilla Strozzi begged her wealthy kinsman Filippo for financial assistance in 1489, the year he began construction on his massive family palace. ‘Honoured like a father’, she began, tugging on the heartstrings of kinship, ‘it’s been a while since I’ve written to your charitable self, since little has befallen me. Now I’m moved to write to your reverence for two reasons.’ The first was to rejoice at a family event, accompanied by wishes for Filippo’s continued prosperity. ‘The second reason that I and the other nuns run to your reverend, charitable self with the greatest faith’, claimed Domitilla, ‘is that I know you are among the civic officials empowered to distribute quantities of alms. For which I heartily pray that it would please you, for the love of God and St Francis, to keep our poor convent in mind. Truly we are in need of everything because you know that our order can’t possess anything. Everything will be appreciated, although at the moment we find ourselves in great need of oil and wood, because one cannot do without these things.’29 The 1480s marked a watershed in the nuns’ quest for Observance, although there is conflicting evidence about how and when it was finally realized. Perhaps eager to celebrate the triumph of Observance under Maria’s inspiration, an eighteenth-century chronicle narrates a dramatic showdown that reportedly took place c. 1460 between partisans of Observance, led by Maria Albizzi, and a faction inclined towards the Conventuals, headed by the novice Daniela Biliotti.30 Elements of this account are corroborated by the sixteenth-century 28 

ASF, MAP, XXXVII, 348, dated 21 May 1479. ‘Rendendomi sempre ubrigatissima fare e far fare spetiale prece per la conservatione del vostro felice stato come cotidianamente ogni giorno.’ 29  ASF, Carte Strozziane, ser. 3, vol. 134, c. 82, dated 27 February 1488/89. ‘Honorando quanto padre […] Più tempo è non n’ho scritto a vostra carità per non m’essere molto a caduto. Ora per dua rispetti mi son mossa a scrivere alla reverenda vostra. […] El sicondo per quello ricorro alla reverenda e carità vostra io con tutte con grandissima fiducia sie perché io so voi esser de consoli et per voi averssi a dispensare al quanto di limoxina, della quale vivo preghare via piaccia per l’amor di Dio et di San Francesco ricordarvi in parte della nostra povera casa che veramente siamo a bisognate d’ogni cosa perché sapete la nostra religione non posseder nulla e ogni cosa ci sarà grato, benchè in gran necessità ci troviamo per ora d’olio e di lengne, perché sanza questo non si può fare.’ 30  ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 388, which forms the basis of Thomas’s undated account, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy, pp. 48–52. Martini

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chronicler Fra Dionisio Pulinari, but internal evidence suggests that this episode most likely occurred in late May 1487.31 Divisions between nuns over preferred spiritual pathways were hardened by the intervention of their relatives, who supposedly ‘conspired’ with them in order to gain control over this new ecclesiastical resource. To avoid additional ‘confusion and disturbance’, Florentine civic officials stepped into the breach, ready to extend their own jurisdictional claims. A notary and several deputies were dispatched to the house, where they asked each nun: ‘do you wish to side with the Observants or Conventuals?’ Shortly afterward, the minority Conventual group was transferred to the convent of SS. Jacopo e Lorenzo on Via Ghibellina. However, Observant friars balked at accepting governance of S. Chiara until Innocent VIII officially placed the house under their direction on 4 September 1487.32 Innocent also showered the nuns with special favours, bestowing on them the same indulgences attached to the Roman pilgrimage itinerary ‘by visiting three altars in their convent and reciting certain prayers’. Ironically, the nuns had to moderate their austerities the following year (1488) because rigorous fasting and allnight prayer vigils caused them to ‘incur various infirmities daily’.33 Hence by 1490, S.  Chiara possessed unimpeachable credentials as an Obser­vant Clarissan community. Its exemplary standing had been recognized the previous year, when the nuns were tapped to reform the old Conventual convent of SS. Jacopo e Lorenzo on Via Ghibellina — a process that literally shattered that community.34 The contents of S. Chiara’s library also reflected a strong Clarissan identity focused on the figure of Clare, attesting to the nuns’ interest in their spiritual origins. Among the convent’s holdings was a rare vernacular copy of Clare’s original Latin rule, which was difficult to find anywhere on the Italian peninsula in the Quattrocento.35 The nuns also owned a devoidentified the author as Luca Cerracchini, writing in 1732; BNCF, MS Panciatichi, vol. 119, tomo 2, p. 123. 31  Pulinari, Croniche dei Frati Minori, ed. by Mencherini, pp. 242–45, speculates that these events occurred around 1480; the editor suggests 1487 as a more probable date. Daniela Biliotti entered S. Chiara in August 1480, took the habit in October 1481, and died there in December 1534. ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fol. 10v. 32  Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, ix, 82–83. Wood, Women, Art, and Spiritu­ ality, p. 148, erroneously states that S. Chiara was placed under the direction of S. Croce in 1487. 33  Bullarium Franciscanum, iv, ed. by Cenci, pp. 326, 496. 34  The 1489 episode, in which the abbess and several nuns were forcibly ejected, is described in Bullarium Franciscanum, iv, ed. by Cenci, pp. 516–17, 646–47, 686. 35  Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, p. 155. The manuscript is BNCF, MS Landau Finlay,

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tional miscellany containing the primary rule, Clare’s testament, and related commentaries copied in the 1480s.36 Another late fifteenth-century compendium featured the vernacular life of Clare written by the Perugian nun Battista Alfani specifically for other Clarisses — a text that inserted the saint ‘into the center of debates about the nature of Franciscan life’ — bound together with her canonization proceedings.37 These robust associations problematize the patronage activities of the avowed Savonarolan, Jacopo Bongianni, given vigorous Franciscan opposition to the preacher and his movement. A man of great sincerity who blended conventional faith in miracles and prophecies with hard-headed merchant practicality, Bongianni persisted in his ambition to build a new convent church at S. Chiara, possibly designed by Giuliano da Sangallo.38 Bill Kent was the first scholar to link this building project with the presence of Jacopo’s kinswomen in the convent.39 Bongianni probably conceived the project before 1485 as an expression of long-standing Franciscan devotion but ran into obstacles with the Observant friars of Ognissanti, then serving as the convent’s provisional governors. In these years, the nuns were in jurisdictional limbo, with the Observants awaiting full control. Bongianni procured a papal brief with the assistance of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Florentine Signoria, without gaining approval to begin construction.40 In early May 1487, Pandolfo (later Fra Santi) Rucellai wrote to his dear friend Bongianni in Avignon, advising him of problems in securing the site for the proposed church, which lay between S. Chiara and the Dominican tertiaries of Annalena. To advance negotiations, one of their mutual friends ‘had been licensed to speak with the nuns at length’.41 The transfer of S. Chiara to Observant jurisdiction in September 1487 removed the first obstacle, allowing construction to begin by the time Bongianni made his first vol. 40, fols 1–24v. 36  Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, pp.  155–56, 173, 175n. This document is BNCF, MS  Landau Finaly, vol.  251. Processo di canonizzazione di S. Chiara d’Assisi, ed. by Boccali, pp. 32–33, dates the miscellany 1480–90. Ugolino Verino’s vernacular life of Clare was appended later. 37  BNCF, MS Magliabechiano, XXXVIII, 135. Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, pp. 171–84 (p. 183). 38  Ristori, ‘Religione e politica nei savonaroliani fiorentini’, p. 835. 39  Kent, ‘Lorenzo di Credi’. 40  Ristori, ‘Religione e politica nei savonaroliani fiorentini’, p. 832. 41  Epistolario di Fra Santi Rucellai, ed. by Verde and Giaconi, pp. 5–7.

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will 26 September 1490, in which he left 500 florins to the convent. Doris Carl argues that Bongianni’s instructions for his tomb imply that he and the nuns had discussed the new building well before this date.42 What has escaped notice thus far is the extent to which the Bongianni nuns helped bring their brother’s wishes to fruition. Jacopo was not a lone patron working independently of his clients; rather, his kinswomen and the other nuns were active, willing partners in realizing this project. While much of the evidence for their involvement is indirect, taken together it paints a convincing picture of engaged collaboration. Scholars have noted that Bongianni made three wills (1490, 1497, 1506) in keeping with Savonarolan admonitions to frequently don these ‘eyeglasses of death’. Each of these wills, in which Bongianni refined his plans for building the chapel, was redacted while one of his two sisters was serving as abbess. Abbesses exercised real suasion over corporate decisionmaking: they set priorities for chapter meetings, controlled the flow of debate, mediated between nuns and male procurators, and spoke to the wider world on the community’s behalf. Gostanza, the elder sister, had been elected by her peers in May 1489 to be the first abbess under formal Observance.43 Most of the initial building and decorative activity for the new church occurred during her two terms in office (May 1489 – August 1492, July 1495 – August 1498). Jacopo’s tomb in front of the high altar, sporting the coats-of-arms of his maternal and paternal kin and bearing the date 1492, was almost certainly completed under her supervision. Both of the side altarpieces — Perugino’s Lamentation, dated 1495, and Lorenzo di Credi’s Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1497 — were executed during her second term. Gostanza had necessarily rotated out of office when her brother formally donated the still-incomplete structure to the nuns on 21 March 1494. In this notarial act, Bongianni described the architecture of the church and stipulated that no family emblems other than his own could be displayed there, thereby sealing the privatization of convent space.44 Gostanza was back at the helm when her brother made his second testament on 1 July 1497, in which he promised to complete Lorenzo di Credi’s altar42 

Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, i, 385, 517. Pulinari, Croniche dei Frati Minori, ed. by Mencherini, p. 243; ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fol. 117r. 44  ASF, NA, 13962, fols 282r–284v. The main chapel remained incomplete because Bongianni had been unable to acquire a house on the site, but he promised that he or his heirs would complete the high altar once the property was secured; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, i, 517. Callahan and Cooper, ‘Sacred Space in the Modern Museum’ and ‘Set in Stone’ provide an admirable overview of the convent’s art and architecture. 43 

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piece.45 It is tempting to see his testamentary directive that the entire church be completed within two years not only as an incentive to finish a lengthy project, but also as an attempt to capitalize on the remainder of Gostanza’s threeyear term. Bongianni made his third and final will 17 November 1506, when his other sister Francesca held the reins of office. In that testament, Jacopo requested burial at S. Chiara in a Franciscan habit, arranged Masses at the convent, and bequeathed another 100 florins to build an upper gallery in the church for the nuns’ use.46 These provisions embodying Bongianni family interests were protected well into the seventeenth century; in addition to his niece Cherubina, four-time abbess between 1529 and 1550, two other nieces and three great-nieces joined the chapter, the last in 1609.47 While Bongianni’s Savonarolan sympathies are well known, evidence suggests that Abbess Gostanza herself fostered relations between S. Chiara and the Savonarolan movement by means of personal friendships, social networks, and institutional affiliations. The preacher and his followers assiduously cultivated relationships with local religious women as part of an all-out campaign to win their loyalty; it was not uncommon for Savonarola’s message of purity, simplicity, and reform to transcend monastic allegiances, with different audiences inflecting and appropriating his platform in slightly different ways. 48 Both Savonarola and Bongianni advocated a serious if informal consultative role for devout lay women as well as female religious, although the merchant rejected Savonarola’s astonishing proposal for women’s self-reform of their dress.49 Like her brother, Gostanza enjoyed a warm relationship with Fra Santi Rucellai both before and after he became a friar at S. Marco (1495); after his conversion, Rucellai brokered various goods through S. Marco on her behalf. The Savonarolan art patron Francesco del Pugliese also formed part of their common circle.50 It is not unreasonable to think that Abbess Gostanza facilitated negotiations with the Annalena regarding the projected chapel site; in 45 

ASF, NA, 13963, fols 205r–206v; Carl, Benedetto da Maiano, i, 520. ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fol. 117r/v; vol. 389, fols 5r–6r. The 1506 testament is published in Epistolario di Fra Santi Rucellai, ed. by Verde and Giaconi, pp. 321–30. 47  ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fols 32v, 34v, 35r, 118r/v; BNCF, MS Panciatichi, vol. 119, tomo 2, pp. 167, 169. 48  Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, pp. 33, 159. 49  Kent, ‘A Proposal by Savonarola for the Self-Reform of Florentine Women’. 50  Epistolario di Fra Santi Rucellai, ed. by Verde and Giaconi, pp. 5–7, 63, 188–90. On Pugliese’s patronage, see Burke, Changing Patrons. 46 

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fifteenth-century Florence, abbesses of neighbouring convents frequently discussed matters of mutual interest via proxies, intermediaries, or letters. Maria Malatesta had become Abbess of the Annalena in March 1490 after the death of her aunt and convent founder Annalena Malatesta. Under her leadership, this Dominican community evinced great interest in Savonarola’s message, obtaining from him a long letter about the proper way to read religious texts, until the community parted ways with the friars c. 1500.51 Given their overlapping networks and shared interest in reform, both Gostanza Bongianni and Maria Malatesta must have been intimately involved in conversations concerning the chapel, despite the lack of firm documentation on this point. It also appears that the S. Chiara chapter as a whole was receptive to the Savonarolan programme, perhaps influenced by the Bongianni circle. Between 1493 and 1495 the chapter admitted at least three novices whose fathers were ardent Piagnoni at the core of the movement.52 Furthermore, when internecine warfare ripped the Savonarolan movement apart in the early sixteenth century, some Piagnoni sympathizers, like Michele Rosselli, Niccolò Sacchetti, and the apothecary Luca Landucci, enrolled their daughters in S. Chiara instead of a Dominican house; Bongianni’s relatives from the Mini family followed a similar course.53 These Piagnoni nuns never formed a majority of the chapter, but their admission indicates the extent to which it was sympathetic to Savonarolan reform. In fact, S. Chiara probably became more attractive to some Piagnoni after 1500 because it embodied Savonarolan values while remaining exempt from what many considered to be repressive oversight by S.  Marco. These combined factors help to explain why two ‘possessed’ Dominican nuns from S. Lucia were transferred to S. Chiara following the rupture of that Savonarolan stronghold in 1498. The sisters Vangelista and Battista Balducci took the Franciscan habit at S. Chiara, where Sister Battista eventually served as abbess three times in the 1530s and 1540s.54 51  Zippel, ‘Le monache d’Annalena e il Savonarola’. Savonarola’s letter to the Annalena nuns, dated 17 October 1497, is translated in Savonarola, A Guide to Righteous Living, trans. by Eisenbichler, pp. 54–58. 52  ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fols 15v, 16v, 17v. The fathers of Giovanna Brunacci and Teodosia and Daria Strozzi signed the 1497 petition circulated on the preacher’s behalf; Polizzotto, The Elect Nation, pp. 446–60. 53  ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol. 390, fols 20r, 24r, 25r. 54  ASF, CRSGI, Parte prima, vol.  390, fols  18r, 118 r/v. On this episode of supposed demonic possession, see Polizzotto, ‘When Saints Fall Out’; Zippel, ‘Le monache d’Annalena e il Savonarola’, pp. 247–48.

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Despite the deep rancor between Franciscan friars and Savonarolans at S. Marco, other Piagnoni saw greater commonality among reform-minded institutions, leading them to bridge ecclesiastical divides. The humanist religious poet Ugolino Verino, a fervent Savonarolan, composed a rare vernacular life of Clare (Vita di Santa Chiara vergine) for the S. Chiara chapter, which was completed in January 1497.55 Best known for his poetic history of Florence and his tutelage of the future pope Leo X, Verino’s religiosity led him to Savonarola at an early date. He dedicated a poem to the preacher in 1491 and corresponded often with him, but Verino disavowed Savonarola as the situation reached a crisis point in spring 1498.56 While Verino still remained fiercely committed to the Piagnoni cause, however, he personally copied out his biography of Clare expressly for the S. Chiara nuns. Moreover, other members of Santi Rucellai’s pious circle were major benefactors at the Franciscan sanctuary of La Verna.57 These kinds of overlapping allegiances proved viable even as the Savonarolan movement waned. In 1527, shortly after the last Florentine Republic was restored, Abbess Prudenzia Rosati wrote to Niccolò Capponi, the moderate republican and Savonarolan sympathizer who headed the Signoria. In prayerful cadences, the Abbess thanked Capponi for the alms that had brought the community ‘from death to life’ before requesting additional assistance in its founder’s name. ‘Here in the convent there is neither grain, nor wine, nor any other goods’, she wrote. ‘I offer this convent with its daughters to the Lord […] and I want this house to be the first to suffer, because St Clare elected poverty. But, our father who art father to the whole city, without this bread one cannot do.’58 The prevalence of hybridized loyalties among laity may explain how the S. Chiara nuns successfully straddled competing claims: historic Franciscan

55 

The manuscript is now owned by the Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist Uni­ver­sity; [accessed 15 January 2014]. The colophon states that it was written in January 1496 (stile fiorentino), which indicates 1497 in the modern calendar. 56  Seton, ‘The Italian Version of the Legend of Saint Clare’. Verino later reaffirmed his Piagnone loyalties; Polizzotto, The Elect Nation, pp. 95, 140. 57  Kent, ‘A Proposal by Savonarola for the Self-Reform of Florentine Women’, p. 338n. 58  ASF, Acquisti e Doni, vol. 293, unfoliated. ‘Qui nel monastero non è ne grano, nè vino nè bene nessuno. Io oferisco al Signore questo monastero con le sue figliuole […] et voglio questo monastero sia el primo a patire perché S. Chiara elesse la povertà. Ma, padre nostro che siate padre di tutta la città, sanza questo pane non si può fare.’ On Capponi, see Dall’Aglio, Savonarola and Savonarolism, pp. 108–10.

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ones, in which their very identity was rooted; and newer Savonarolan ones, laden with social advantages and political risks. This case study permits several observations on important issues in Italian social and religious history. The quest for spiritual authenticity and self-determination paradoxically led the S. Chiara nuns to immerse themselves in worldly affairs in order to develop artful strategies for engaging benefactors. Using letters to advance their pleas, these and other female religious helped constitute larger information networks that in turn facilitated social exchange. Kinship obviously plays a key role in the story of Bongianni patronage at S. Chiara, especially in the privatization of convent space; equally striking, however, is the chapter’s ability to reconcile Savonarolan leanings with its Clarissan roots, which sheds new light on the cross-over appeal of Savonarolism. Finally, as scholars move away from the lionized figure of the lone patron, there is much to be learned about how female agency shaped the internal dynamics of patronage.

Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Acquisti e Doni, vol. 293 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Balie, vol. 40 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane, ser. 3, vol. 134 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Catasto, vol. 805 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Italiano, Parte Prima, vols. 388, 389, 390 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Decima, vol. 70 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Manoscritti, vol. 183, insert 26 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo Avanti il Principato, XXIX, 313; XXXVII, 348; LXXXV, 86, 87, 171 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 13501, 13962, 13963 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ufficiali di Notte, vols. 14, 16 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MS Landau Finlay, vols. 40, 251 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MS Magliabechiano, XXXVIII, 135 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MS Panciatichi, vol. 119, tomo 2

Primary Sources Bullarium Franciscanum, vol.  iii, ed. by Joseph Pou y Marti (Quaracchi: Typographia Collegii S.  Bonaventura, 1949); vol.  iv, ed. by Caesar Cenci (Grottaferrata: Typo­ graphia Collegii S. Bonaventura, 1989)

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Epistolario di Fra Santi Rucellai, ed. by Armando Verde and Elettra Giaconi (Pistoia: Provincia Romana dei Frati Predicatori, 2004) Processo di canonizzazione di S. Chiara d’Assisi, ed. by Giovanni Boccali (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 2003) Pulinari, Fra Dionisio da Firenze, Croniche dei Frati Minori della Provincia di Toscana, ed. by Saturnino Mencherini (Arezzo: Cooperativa Tipografica, 1913) Savonarola, Girolamo, A Guide to Righteous Living and Other Works, trans. by Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2003)

Secondary Works Burke, Jill, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Callahan, Meghan, and Donal Cooper, ‘Sacred Space in the Modern Museum: Researching and Redisplaying the Santa Chiara Chapel in the V&A’s Medi­eval & Renaissance Galleries’, V&A Online Journal 5 (2013) [accessed 14 January 2014] —— , ‘Set in Stone: Monumental Altar Frames in Renaissance Florence’, Renaissance Studies, 24 (2010), 33–55 Cardini, Franco, ‘Iacopo di Bongianni di Mino Bongianni’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, xii (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970), pp. 743–44 Carl, Doris, Benedetto da Maiano: A  Florentine Sculptor on the Threshold of the High Renaissance, 2 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) Dall’Aglio, Stefano, Savonarola and Savonarolism, trans. by John Gagné (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010) Heazlewood, Justine, ‘“Letters Are the Leaves, Prayers Are the Fruit”: Florentine Nuns in the City’ (unpublished masters thesis, Monash Uni­ver­sity, 1999) Kent, F. W., Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) —— , ‘Lorenzo di Credi, his Patron Iacopo Bongianni and Savonarola’, Burlington Magazine, 125 (1983), 539–41 —— , ‘A Proposal by Savonarola for the Self-Reform of Florentine Women (March 1496)’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 14 (1983), 335–41 Knox, Lezlie, Creating Clare of Assisi: Female Franciscan Identities in Later Medi­eval Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2008) Lowe, Kate, ‘Nuns and Choice: Artistic Decision-Making in Medicean Florence’, in With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage, 1434–1530, ed. by Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 129–53 Polizzotto, Lorenzo, The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence, 1494–1545 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)

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—— , ‘When Saints Fall Out: Women and the Savonarolan Reform in Early SixteenthCentury Florence’, Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993), 486–525 Richa, Giuseppe, Notizie istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, divise ne’ suoi quartieri, 10 vols (Florence: P. G. Viviani, 1754–62) Ristori, Renzo, ‘Religione e politica nei savonaroliani fiorentini: Jacopo Bongianni e le sue missioni diplomatiche a Bologna del 1496 e del 1497’, in Studi in onore di Arnaldo d’Addario, ed. by Luigi Borgia and others (Lecce: Conte, 1995), pp. 827–42 Sensi, Mario, Storie di bizzocche tra Umbria e Marche (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Lette­ ratura, 1995) Seton, Walter, ‘The Italian Version of the Legend of Saint Clare by the Florentine Ugolino Verini’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 12 (1919), 595–99 Strocchia, Sharon, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hop­ kins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) Thomas, Anabel, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman’s Perspective (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003) Wood, Jeryldene, Women, Art, and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1996) Zippel, Giuseppe, ‘Le monache d’Annalena e il Savonarola’, Rivista d’Italia, 4 (1901), 231–49

’Tis Better to Give than to Receive: Client–Patronage Exchange and its Architectural Implications at Florentine Convents Saundra Weddle

A

lthough early modern Church authorities attempted to restrict nuns’ contact with the world outside their enclosures, Bill Kent demonstrated in his excellent work on Scolastica Rondinelli, abbess of the convent of Le Murate, that nuns participated actively in Florentine public life, operating as resourceful and creative cultivators of connections that served their convent’s needs.1 Abbess Scolastica exploited family connections established before she entered the convent, making personal appeals through correspondence and consultation with her patrons. Another means convents used to solidify associations and alliances was offering hospitality — either by hosting receptions within the convent enclosure or by sending gifts outside — creating or maintaining relationships between donors and recipients through the performative medium. These donations’ spatial dimensions contributed to the acts’ significance, changing with the convent and the occasion. As examples from the convents of Santissima Annunziata delle Murate, Santa Caterina di San Gaggio, and San Pier Maggiore show, the spatial prac1 

Kent, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici, Madonna Scolastica Rondinelli’.

Saundra Weddle ([email protected]) is professor of architecture and art history at Drury Uni­ver­sity. She translated and edited Sister Giustina Niccolini, The Chronicle of Le Murate 1598 (Toronto, 2011). She has also authored several articles on convent architecture in Florence and Venice. Research contributing to this chapter was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and a Graham Foundation Grant, for which I am very grateful.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 295–315 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109711

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tices associated with convent hospitality shed light on how convents nurtured patronage connections and how the form and function of convent architecture supported their efforts. The massive walls surrounding convents were visual reminders that maintaining enclosure was critical to the community’s devotional life and its reputation, but gave the misleading impression that convent architecture followed a normative typology. Behind most of those walls, nuns inhabited irregular networks of interconnecting spaces that served multiple functions. This flexible approach to programming resulted, at least in part, from the unplanned way in which most Florentine convents developed, through an additive process that responded to changing needs. The refectory is of particular interest for the study of convent receptions because it was a multifunctional room; it was where the community gathered to eat, sometimes accompanied by the reading of religious lessons, but it sometimes also accommodated a lay audience: a refectory could and did accommodate a modest meal for nuns one day and a lavish banquet for dignitaries the next. And, as Elissa Weaver has noted, convent refectories were occasionally mentioned in stage directions and often served as the setting for convent performances, which were attended by laywomen, even after the Council of Trent decreed the enforcement of convent enclosure.2 The location and scale of the refectory varied from convent to convent, but evidence survives to allow some conclusions to be made about norms of refectory architecture and use. An especially useful source in this regard is the Trattato sul governo dei monasteri, written in 1601 by Archbishop Alessandro de’ Medici of Florence. This document guided the Vicar General’s inspection of all Florentine convents to evaluate their quotidian and devotional practices.3 The Archbishop ordered his Vicar to take care that the nuns did not ‘dine with lay persons’ and that they did not ‘eat outside the refectory’, suggesting that these practices were at least familiar, if not common.4 According to the Archbishop, the refectory was to be a place where punishments, such as requiring an offending sister to eat while seated on the floor, were meted out to set an example for all.5 2  Weaver, Convent Theater in Early Modern Italy, p. 79. Weaver notes that attendance by men was rare, and usually relegated to another space that doubled as a setting for performances — the parlour. Ibid., p. 90. 3  BNCF, Codice Panciatichi, 119, tomo II, fols 85–110. 4  BNCF, Codice Panciatichi, 119, tomo II, fol. 105. 5  BNCF, Codice Panciatichi, 119, tomo II, fol. 102. Le Murate’s refectory functioned

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At the Benedictine convent of Le Murate, the refectory and the chapter room were both sites of receptions of various sorts. The most common of these occurred after consecration ceremonies in which the nun became a full member of the convent, an event marked by her spiritual marriage to her spouse, the Bridegroom Christ. Kate Lowe has demonstrated that a number of similarities existed between secular wedding ceremonies and religious ones. However, one of these similarities that has received little attention is the wedding banquet.6 Le Murate’s chronicle, written by Sister Giustina Niccolini in 1598, reveals that nuns’ families were often extravagant in their support of the consecration and reception. One example is found in the description of Sister Angela Caterina Cibo’s consecration in 1587. The Cardinal of Florence performed the ceremony, which was followed by a Mass with music commissioned by the Grand Duke and performed by the cathedral’s organist. Afterward there was a magnificent feast: They returned to the convent accompanied by the cardinal, the clergy and all of the above-mentioned signori. The mothers were there below on the pavement across from the main door, in two groups. They received the guests in order, wearing the habit, giving them the kiss of peace […]. [Sister Angela Caterina] made a donation to the monastery of 300 scudi di moneta in addition to the other presents and signs of affection that she gave for common benefit for the feast of that day, for which a very large sum was spent for the infinite number of people who came.7

in this way more than a century and a half before the Archbishop issued his orders. See Le Murate’s chronicle, BNCF, II II, 509, fols 47r–49r, and Niccolini, The Chronicle of Le Murate, pp. 117–19. After the Council of Trent, convents were required to have prisons within their complexes for the punishment of serious misdeeds; this is mentioned in BNCF, Codice Panciatichi, 119, tomo II, fol. 107. 6  On the relationship between secular and religious marriage, see Lowe, ‘Secular Brides and Convent Brides’ and Lehfeldt, ‘Uneven Conversions’. On the secular wedding banquet during the Renaissance, see also Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, pp. 17–19. 7  ‘sene ritornò al monastero accompagnata dall’Ill[ustrissi]mo Sig[no]r Cardinale, il clero, e tutti li sopradetti Sig[no]ri, stando le Madri a riceverla in ordine et in habito a dua cori sotto il lastrico rincontro la porta principale, dandoli l’osculo della pace […]. Fece poi quella donativo al monastero di [scudi] trecento di moneta oltre alli altri presenti et amorevolezze, che dette per benefitio comune la festa di quel giorno, che fu di spesa grandiss[im]a per l’infinità di gente che concorsono in questi dì’: BNCF, II II, 509, fols 137v, and Niccolini, The Chronicle of Le Murate, pp. 258–62. See also Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture, pp. 234–35. Le Murate’s chronicle reports that the practice of admitting outsiders to the refectory ended after the decrees of the Council of Trent were announced. BNCF, II II, 509, fol. 52r. The consecration of Sister Angela Caterina demonstrates that this was not the case.

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The Cibo family paid to feed the monastery community — nuns and famiglia — for the entire week. They also gave a gold bucket and aspergillum, and a gold urn for storing the host valued at 80 scudi. Sister Angela Caterina donated white fabric for altar linens and 10 scudi to the dispensary and the pantry, and gave to each nun 10 braccie of wide twill to make a new habit, an expense valued at 960 scudi. Consecration ceremonies and the celebrations that followed them could be events of great importance for a nun’s family. The service itself marked the change of the new nun’s status: no longer was she available for marriage to a secular spouse; instead she vowed to be a bride of Christ. In doing so, she could no longer provide influential social connections to a groom’s family but, in a socially prominent convent like Le Murate, her association with the women of other elite families was not inconsequential. Such family associations were well documented at Le Murate. Although it was sometimes the case that nuns relinquished their surname when they took the veil, at Le Murate family names remained an important part of a nun’s identity.8 It seems that the convent’s chronicler failed to connect a nun with her surname only when she did not possess one, a circumstance that commonly occurred during the convent’s earliest years, but later was practically unheard of. Sister Angela Caterina’s case exemplifies the sorts of family connections that pervaded convent communities. Her aunt, Leonora Cibo, had connected her to Le Murate. Leonora had boarded at the convent before and after her two marriages, for periods totaling about twenty-seven years. During her time at Le Murate she facilitated important ties to the Cibo family, of which Sister Angela Caterina’s consecration was just one example. Leonora also served as a sort of guardian within the convent for two women from her second husband’s family, the Vitelli; one of those women went on to be a professed nun and one of the convent’s most significant patrons of the sixteenth century, Sister Faustina.9 Despite commands to the contrary, nuns did not sever ties with the secular world, and convent alliances could mirror and reinforce alliances formed outside the enclosure.10 Through consecration ceremonies and 8 

On the expectation that nuns would forfeit their surnames, see Lowe, ‘Secular Brides and Convent Brides’, p. 47. 9  See Brown, ‘Everyday Life, Longevity and Nuns in Early Modern Florence’, p. 121, which states that for the period between 1629 and 1800, 119 out of 194 nuns had family members in the convent. The Malaspina, the family of Leonora Cibo’s mother, had sixteen women in the convent, including ‘two sets of sisters, three sets of half-sisters, and several cousins and aunts’ (ibid.). 10  Weddle, ‘Identity and Alliance’.

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the receptions that followed them, the convent became a place to celebrate the network of relationships between the convent and its patrons, and amongst the patrons themselves. Recognition of the broader audience that occupied the refectory has important implications not only for our understanding of convent architecture but also for the decorations in the room.11 For example, patrons’ arms must have appeared regularly in convent complexes. Alessandro de’ Medici’s Trattato specifically advised the Vicar General to ensure that convents ‘not place [inscriptions of ] names or arms inside [the enclosure]’. He warned, ‘You must take care that this is not done too frequently, because sometimes they can be excessive’.12 Nevertheless, coats of arms made manifest alliances that remained even after the lay persons associated with the convent departed. In the context of convent receptions, the presence in the refectory of coats of arms takes on another meaning as well. At least four examples of Benci family arms were hung within Le Murate’s complex; one was placed in the refectory by Giovanni Benci, who financed the room’s construction in the mid-fifteenth century.13 This stemma served as a reminder of Benci patronage not only to the nuns but also to the Benci family’s peers who gathered there. The chapter room was another place where associations were reinforced at Le Murate. Although primarily used as a place where nuns gathered to conduct the convent’s business, it was also the setting for receptions of both religious and laypersons. For example, it was the site of the late quattrocento consecration ceremony of Sister Elena Orsini, attended by her family and its friends.14 There they also received Ercole d’Este and his entourage when they visited in 1492, Pope Leo X in 1516, and Archbishop Antonio Altoviti with the canons 11 

The history of Last Supper frescoes in Florentine refectories has received much attention, but the presence of laypersons in these spaces has not been fully explored. An example is Giorgio Vasari’s Last Supper painting at the Murate, painted in 1546, seriously damaged in the 1557 flood, and recently restored. BNCF, II II, 509, fol. 139v; Niccolini, The Chronicle of Le Murate, p. 264; Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture, pp. 362–63; and Kennedy, ‘After the Deluge’. See also Clark, Dark Water; Vertova, I Cenacoli Fiorentini; Walker, ‘Florentine Painted Refectories’; and especially, with regard to perceptions of Last Supper frescoes in convent spaces, Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes. 12  BNCF, Codice Panciatichi, 119, tomo II, fols 93–94: ‘ma a questo bisogna aver cura che non si essendino troppo, che fanno talvolta eccessivi.’ 13  On Benci patronage, see BNCF, II II, 509, fols 25v–28v, and Niccolini, The Chronicle of Le Murate, pp. 86–91. 14  BNCF, II II, 509, fol. 65r, and Niccolini, The Chronicle of Le Murate, pp. 145–50.

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Figure 16.1. Plan of convent of Santissima Annunziata delle Murate, Florence. Ground floor, highlighting parlour (A) and church (B).

and operai of the convent in 1567 when they came to announce the Council of Trent’s decrees.15 That the refectory and chapter room functioned as part of a negotiable territory, a network of sometimes public, sometimes private spaces, is borne out by the ways in which the spaces framed various kinds of exchanges between nuns and their patrons. Le Murate’s church and parlour communicated with the street, thus accommodating direct access by the lay public without the need to penetrate the convent enclosure (Figure 16.1). But these patently public rooms gave onto circulation spaces — a corridor and a courtyard — that led to the refectory (E) and chapter room (D), arranged next to one another in a single building volume. The result was a conduit of spaces that directed circulation from public spaces to those normally private spaces that were made available to special guests on exceptional occasions, keeping the traffic from penetrating further into the complex (Figure 16.2).16 15  BNCF, II II, 509, fols 75v and 111v; Niccolini, The Chronicle of Le Murate, pp. 161–67 and 213–18. The correspondence in which Ercole mentions his visit to the convent is cited by Kent, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici, Madonna Scolastica Rondinelli’, pp. 358 and 375, n. 28. Regarding Ercole’s connection to Le Murate, see ASF, Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese 81, n. 100, fols 190–94. For Ercole’s correspondence with Le Murate, see ibid., fols 288–97. Following his visit, the Duke exchanged letters and gifts with the convent. 16  Similar connections between refectories and the street can also be found at Sant’Apollonia and Sant’Onofrio. See Hayum, ‘A Renaissance Audience Considered’ and Hiller, Gendered Perspectives of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes.

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Figure 16.2. Plan of Santissima Annunziata delle Murate, Florence. Ground floor, highlighting circulation to refectory (E) and chapter room (D). Plans drawn by Robert Weddle.

Different architectural configurations could be seen at the Augustinian convent of Santa Caterina di San Gaggio, whose location about a kilometre outside the Porta Romana made it an ideal staging point for ritual processions to and from Florence.17 All of the popes who visited Florence during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — Pope Martin V in 1420, Pope Pius II in 1449, and Pope Leo X in 1515 — stopped at San Gaggio, either on their way into the city or on their way out. On these occasions, the nuns offered feasts for the pontiff, his retinue, and the Florentine authorities, who escorted them to or from the city. The convent complex acted as part of the extended ritualized urban space, a distinction that found expression on the street with San Gaggio’s imposing and broad façade; when the popes were visiting, the nuns had the outside door of the convent decorated with the papal arms, signalling that their distinguished visitor was present inside and communicating their special status as the first stopping point along the entry route. Before discussing the architectural accommodation of these events, it must be noted that San Gaggio’s complex was severely damaged in the Siege of Florence in 1529 and 1530. Indeed, convent documents state that the soldiers who occupied the site for almost a year left nothing untouched with the noteworthy exception of the walls.18 From this special mention of the walls, we 17  For a useful summary of the convent’s history, see Repetti, Dizionario geografico, ii, 369–70. 18  Fantozzi Micali and Rosselli, Il monastero di San Gaggio a Firenze, p. 25. The authors

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Figure 16.3. Axonometric view of convent of Santa Caterina di San Gaggio. Model produced by Yanel de Angel and Alejandro Fernandez.

can conclude that the massing and foundations of the early buildings, which provide a sense of the complex’s footprint, were retained, although the internal spatial organization of those buildings changed later. Even if the core of the schematic site plan did not change dramatically after the siege, site reconstruction can only be hypothetical because the building fabric and surviving documentation are fragmentary. The public spaces in the heart of the San Gaggio complex were more compactly clustered than those at Le Murate. Records documenting construction through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggest that they were situated within the complex, but outside the enclosed area assigned to the nuns (Figure 16.3). Although the wall dividing these two zones was punctured with a door, the wall itself emphasized the distinction between the individuals who occupied the spaces on either side. The public area, occupied by the priest’s rooms, the church, and the sacristy, was accessed through a noteworthy circulation sequence anchored by a large open space referred to in seventeenth-century documents as the piazza.19 This space was scaled not only to accommodate the cite the convent’s libro di ricordo, supposedly preserved in the Archivio del Monastero di San Gaggio, Registro, fol. 42. I have been unable to locate this archive. 19  The scale and location of the large wing in the public area, shown here to the right of the piazza, make it suitable for accommodating large receptions of the sort associated with papal entries. However, the fragmented nature of the convent’s building history inspires caution. Sharon Strocchia has shown that in 1450, the convent built a room expressly for silk work in order to keep the material from being contaminated by fibers from linen used in its other textile

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Figure 16.4. Detail, San Pier Maggiore, Nova pvlcherrimaae civitatis Florentiaae topographia accuratissime delineata, Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, late seventeenth century. Courtesy of Harvard Map Collection, Harvard College Library, Cam­bridge, Massachusetts.

size of the papal entourage welcomed there, but also to provide space for display of the pontiff, who first donned his ritual vestments within the convent’s church following the meal. The public zone was, therefore, one independent area, defined by a kind of enclosure of its own. work. Around the same time, the nuns began to spin gold thread, and set up a room for that express purpose, improving ‘its lighting conditions by covering the windows with sheer white linen, a tactic that served to admit maximum light into a room’. Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, pp. 126–28. These details suggest that the so-called sala dell’oro might have been sited in that large wing for maximum sun exposure, but it might also have been on the complex’s opposite side with south-facing windows. It is not known whether these rooms were west or east of the church.

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Figure 16.5. Section drawing of San Pier Maggiore, Florence. Reproduced with the permission of the Národní archiv, Prague.

The third convent, San Pier Maggiore, presents different spatial practices related to its use of hospitality to nurture patronage relationships. Reconstruction of this convent’s plan is hardly less speculative than is the case for the other houses discussed here, but the convent’s connection to civic events and corporate institutions produced a richer cache of archival evidence to document the activities that occupied convent spaces, allowing a closer study of how individual activities conveyed status and expressed the nature of relationships between convents and those associated with them. Because its foundation dates from before 1000, when it was still well outside the city walls and not surrounded by densely built fabric, San Pier Maggiore had the luxury of establishing a fairly predictable convent footprint, a rarity in Florence. From the sixteenth-century Buonsignori view of Florence, we can hazard a guess as to how the convent complex was configured: the church dominated the site, with a cloister just beyond its southern flank; between the church and the cloister are two long building volumes (Figure 16.4). An eighteenth-century section and plan show the location of the parlour, accessible directly from the piazza, but the precise locations of the other rooms are not yet known (Figures 16.5 and 16.6). Nevertheless, the spaces’ arrangement

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Figure 16.6. Plan of convent of San Pier Maggiore, Florence. Reproduced with the permission of the Národní archiv, Prague.

is perhaps less significant than the ways in which they were appropriated to reinforce connections between the convent and its patrons. The most well known of events at San Pier Maggiore dates at least to 1286, when documents first record the convent’s role as the first religious institution to welcome the new Bishop of Florence as part of his ritual entry into the city, the act through which he took possession of his see.20 The convent’s role was to serve as the setting for a variety of ritual acts, including a spiritual marriage between the bishop and the convent’s abbess. This ritual has received considerable attention from historians who have reached different conclusions about the rite’s various episodes, demonstrating that it serves as a polysemous manifestation of a range of interests, players, and audiences. Maureen Miller considers the adventus, and the bishop’s marriage to the abbess in particular, as legitimizing acts that strengthened the bishop’s ties to the local ruling elite by means of the binding alliance.21 Sharon Strocchia argues that the ritual served 20 

The ritual is described in ASF, Manoscritti, vol. 167, insert 2, fols 39r–55v. 21  Miller, ‘Why the Bishop of Florence Had to Get Married’.

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to communicate the exercise of masculine episcopal authority over the abbess and nuns of San Pier Maggiore.22 More recently, Lorenzo Fabbri has examined the social and political meanings of a part of the ritual that took place on the piazza in front of the convent — the donation of the horse’s tack to members of the Strozzi family.23 Each of these studies indicates how the settings and actions associated with this carefully choreographed ritual communicated the shifting status of the bishop and the abbess. As the ritual action moved from San Pier Maggiore’s church interior to the private cloister, then back to the church, and into the cloister once again, the abbess’s autonomy diminished by degrees. The significance of setting is best demonstrated by the decision, taken in 1473, to move the ritual’s climactic moment — the bishop’s marriage to the abbess — from the privacy of the chapter room, a space identified with and by the convent community, where the abbess’s authority was most distilled, to the more neutral public territory of the convent church. Perhaps the change of venue was meant to alleviate anxieties about the abbess’s apparent authority, or about the mysterious nature of a marriage of the bishop to a nun who had already promised herself to Christ.24 In any event, the move to the church gave the marriage a new inflection, further emphasizing the abbess’s subjugation, which had always been made manifest when the bishop placed the ring on her finger, but which was then publicized by its transfer to a location whose associations and audience were more popular and public than when performed in the privacy of the convent’s administrative centre, the chapter room. The concurrent rise of episcopal authority and fall of convent influence was amplified in 1508, when Archbishop Cosimo Pazzi invited the nuns into the church to kiss his hand, a display of their deference to his office, following which he accompanied them into the cloister for the celebratory meal. Although much has been made of this act’s public nature, Joanne Allen argues that San Pier Maggiore’s church was divided by a choir screen, beyond which was a coro degli uomini where laymen could attend services until 1569, when Duke Cosimo de’ Medici ordered the removal of the screens.25 The 22 

Strocchia, ‘When the Bishop Married the Abbess’. Fabbri, ‘La sella e il freno del Vescovo’. 24  Of particular interest here is the case of Abbess Benedetta who ‘married’ at least four different bishops during her forty-five-year tenure. Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renais­ sance Florence, p. 9. 25  I am grateful to Joanne Allen for generously sharing with me the text of her paper, ‘Sacred Space and Gender in Renaissance Florence: The Case of San Pier Maggiore’, which she presented at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore on 13 December 2013. 23 

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presence of these furnishings calls into question exactly how public the ritual, which took place at the main chapel, was. Perhaps the area beyond the choir screen was reserved for members of the Archbishop’s retinue; at the very least, the men’s choir and the screen would have created distinctions between the lay public inside the church, and would have shielded the nuns from the view of those who had not passed beyond the screen. What is certain is that the space that framed the nuns’ demonstration of respect was sited outside the enclosure, the zone of the abbess’s control, making it a kind of reaffirmation of the vow of obedience taken by every nun. The abbess was not completely without influence, however. In 1304, following disputes over how many and which of the bishop’s attendants would be included in the celebratory banquet presented in San Pier Maggiore’s cloister by the nuns, Abbess Filippa effectively took advantage of her privileged position, acquiring episcopal permission for her and her sisters to leave the enclosure to conduct the convent’s business, a practice Sharon Strocchia refers to as ‘open reclusion’.26 Episcopal investiture rituals were not the only occasions when status and patronage relationships functioned as economies in which parties exchanged tangible goods, intangible favours, or both. An important example of how religious and civic interests overlapped at San Pier Maggiore occurred on the feast of Saint Peter, with the cathedral canons and the magistrates of the Guelf Party in attendance. While the convent always celebrated its patron’s feast, the holiday took on new meaning in 1440 when it coincided with the defeat of Milan at the Battle of Anghiari. Days after the victory, the Florentine government determined to make annual offerings to the churches of San Pier Maggiore and San Paolo on the feast day, commemorating the event by paying 70 florins to clothe twenty poor persons who marched with the magistrates in a procession from the civic centre at Piazza della Signoria to the convent church.27 Account books show that the event was a spectacle, with flag bearers and horn and flute players hired by San Pier Maggiore.28 It ended with an enormous banquet at the convent. The 1496 records account for the purchase of large quantities of 26  Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, p. 156. ASF, Diplomatico San Pier Maggiore, 24 September 1304. Other abbesses followed suit. Abbess Benedetta Macci (r. 1350 until 1395) asked Bishop Angelo Acciaiuoli (installed 6 January 1384) for financial privileges, including exemption from taxes and other financial obligations. See Lami, Sanctae ecclesiae florentinae monumenta, iii, 1724–25. 27  ASF, Provvisioni registri 131, fols 126r–127r (6 July 1440). 28  ASF, San Pier Maggiore 78, fols 64r–65v.

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veal and cheese, five hundred eggs, seventy-five oranges, and one hundred wafer cones for the meal.29 For the meal service, the nuns bought one hundred glasses and twelve carafes, and rented seven coolers, and twenty flasks.30 Precisely who attended the banquet is not known, nor do we know where in the convent it was held. The most likely place would have been in the large room that flanks the church, because of both its scale and its proximity to the convent’s distinctly public spaces. This may have been the refectory. If this was the case, San Pier Maggiore contrasted with Le Murate’s extended network of semi-public and semi-private spaces and with San Gaggio’s zoned accommodation of public activities, taking instead a more conservative and straightforward approach that did not extend public functions too far into the complex. Such an approach might be explained in part by the fact that the convent’s site was eventually much more constricted by a denser surrounding urban fabric that prevented the site from sprawling as much as the other two convents did. Given that it was, strictly speaking, a republican holiday, it may come as a surprise that the celebrations continued at least until 1598, so after the Medici were installed as dukes. 31 It seems that the event’s civic meaning extended beyond connection with the government, and perhaps had as much to do with its association with the Florentine Carmelite Andrea Corsini, who predicted the Florentine victory in a series of visions. After decades of campaigning by his family, Corsini was finally canonized in 1629; the Saint Peter’s Day celebrations surely had the benefit of keeping Corsini’s prophecy in the minds of his fellow citizens and Church authorities while efforts to see him sainted continued. The nuns at San Pier Maggiore understood the political shifts that attended the celebration, as well. Their 1529 record for this feast hints that they sensed that the Medici would soon claim political authority; the family was mentioned for the first time in the accounts with a note about the purchase of ‘21 flasks of Trebbiano wine for the Medici […] and other friends of the convent’.32 The commemoration of the Anghiari victory placed San Pier Maggiore at the public centre of the civic ritual narrative. The feast celebrated a more inti29 

ASF, San Pier Maggiore 78, fols 64r–65v. The nuns themselves did not share in the feast: they dined modestly that day on fish from the Arno. ASF, San Pier Maggiore 78, fol. 64v. 31  I would like to thank Nicholas Eckstein for sharing with me his transcription of BNCF, II I, 313, fol. 64v, which confirms that this ritual continued at least through the writing of this anonymous chronicle, dated November 1598. 32  ASF, San Pier Maggiore 84, 28 June 1529. 30 

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mate and yet more abstract connection between the city and the convent, reinforcing bonds within the privacy of the enclosure through the physical qualities and experience of the banquet. The convent received no direct tangible reward through this exchange, but recognition of its status and its privileged associations was priceless, a kind of currency of privilege. Identification with families of the highest social status marked San Pier Maggiore’s entire history. The convent celebrated these bonds through more conventional sorts of exchanges: they centred on recognition of tangible gifts given to San Pier Maggiore. One had the benefit of multiplying the convent’s connections, expanding them from an individual patron to a corporate one. The other bond was so strong it persisted for over four hundred years. The first example dates to at least 1436, for the feast of the Immaculate Conception. However, the feast is not recorded in the account books as the Immaculate Conception, but as the Festa di Messer Bernardo. The Bernardo in question was Bernardo di Giovanni Benvenuti, the convent’s prior at the time, who, in 1427, commissioned a chapel in the sacristy (in the left transept) dedicated to the Immaculate Conception.33 In his testament, he made the convent his universal heir and ordered that, after his death, the counselors of the Wool Guild should take over patronage of the altar and offer 10 florins to supplement the dowries of four poor girls.34 In exchange, on the feast day, the nuns were required to provide a meal for the officiating priests and two counselors from the guild. It sounds like a simple enough affair, but the account books tell a different story. The 1496 records for this feast show that the convent purchased one hundred glasses and twelve carafes, along with two crystal glasses for the abbess. The grocery list corresponds in scale, including vast quantities of veal, ox meat, sausage, capons, fish, cheese, macaroni, rolls, spices, and sweets.35 Compared with meals organized to celebrate most feast days, the Festa di Messer Bernardo was lavish. It served to reinforce and recall the bonds between the client (the convent) and the initial patron (Benvenuti), and to establish and maintain bonds with the new corporate patron — the Wool Guild.36 33 

The foundation date is surmised from the inscription in the chapel, recorded by Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, i, 143. See also ASF, San Pier Maggiore 37, entry number 9 (unpaginated). 34  The testament was made in 1436. ASF, San Pier Maggiore 37, entry number 9. Benvenuti died on 27 October 1443. Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, i, 143. 35  ASF, San Pier Maggiore 78, fol. 78r–v. 36  The ties between the Wool Guild and the Albizzi family, discussed below, should not be overlooked. In the early fourteenth century, twenty-one Albizzi men were inscribed in the

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A final example engages what is perhaps the most familiar patronage strategy in Renaissance Florence: a prominent family steadily amasses wealth and power and assumes its position as de facto leader of the city’s government. As part of a programme meant to broadcast not only prosperity and influence, but also piety, the family establishes itself as the most significant patron of an ancient church, which happens to be within the family’s parish. However, the family and the church in question are not the Medici at San Lorenzo during the fifteenth century, but the Albizzi at San Pier Maggiore during the fourteenth. Indeed, the most consistent thread that runs through the convent’s history is Albizzi patronage, which persisted from at least 1300 until the convent was suppressed and demolished in 1786. By the time it was destroyed, the convent church contained twenty-two altars, and Albizzi dominance there was obvious to all; five chapels were founded and supported by members of the family, most of whom had lived within the parish. San Pier Maggiore’s first chapel was founded in 1300 by Lando degli Albizzi and dedicated to Saint Nicholas, with a fresco (no longer extant) representing the Adoration of the Magi, accompanied by members of the Albizzi family.37 The dedication to Saint Nicholas, the saint known for gift-giving, can perhaps be explained by the connection between the chapel’s foundation and a most advantageous donation: the relic of seven thorns from Christ’s crown, which some sources say were brought from Jerusalem by Lando himself. This particular gift might have been evidence of more than the patron’s generosity and piety; neighbourhood ambition might also have been in play. In the hierarchy of relics, those associated directly with Christ himself had most value, so thorns from the crown were highly desirable. They should be understood in relation to another prominent relic, brought to Florence in 1101 by the patriarch of the Pazzi family, who lived among his kin in the same gonfalone as the Albizzi: Pazzino de’ Pazzi, said to be one of the first soldiers over the walls in the Siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, brought back stones from the Holy Sepulchre, which were used to light the Easter flame on Holy Saturday.38 By supplying a relic of equal (or perhaps even greater) value, Lando not only distinguished himself and his family within the neighbourhood and the city, guild, and they remained active throughout the Trecento and into the Quattrocento. Atwell, ‘Ritual Trading at the Florentine Wool-Cloth Botteghe’, p. 202. 37  Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, i, 137. 38  The stones were originally kept by the Pazzi family, but were later entrusted to the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Porta (formerly dedicated to San Biagio). When that church was suppressed in 1785, the stones were transferred to Santi Apostoli.

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but also established the local parish and convent of San Pier Maggiore as a pilgrimage site. This approach contrasted with that of the Pazzi, who, it is said, kept the sepulchre stones in their own palazzo (and thus, unavailable except when the patrons chose to display them).39 The Pazzi only later transferred custodianship to the Parte Guelfa, and housed them in the church of Santa Maria sopra Porta, some distance from the family’s parish, but prominently located beside the Parte Guelfa’s palace. On Saint Nicholas’s feast day, the nuns of San Pier Maggiore recognized the gift of thorns and their tie to the Albizzi, but not by hosting a feast within the enclosure. Instead, they sent a gift to the oldest family member: a platter of two fish, presented in gelatin, surrounded by seven almonds, along with two white wax candles.40 Obviously, this example departs from the theme of reception within convent spaces, but its spatial dimensions underscore how the subtle language of ritualized gesture communicated status and alliance. Instead of the patron being displaced and inconvenienced by the necessity of coming to the convent for a tribute, the nuns sent the tribute to him, a sign of respect and deference. As for the gift’s fixed form — the fish and the almonds — the fish might have recalled Saint Peter, the fisherman-apostle who was the convent’s patron, or they could be explained because the feast of Saint Nicholas, celebrated on 6 December, always falls during the Advent fast. The almonds were a reference to the seven thorns, and the cost of acquiring the nuts at the time would have signalled the value of the convent’s relationship with the patrons. In addition, the almonds may have conveyed a wish for the patron’s good health, since they were believed to have significant medical benefits. It is especially noteworthy that accounts dating from the period corresponding to the Siege of Florence (1529–30) show that the nuns continued this tradition even during the occupation of the Spanish and Imperial army. In fact, the ledgers show that in November 1529, one week before the Saint Nicholas holiday, the church had been hit by artillery bombardment; the

39 

Raveggi, ‘Storia di una legenda’. When, exactly, this transfer occurred I have not confirmed, although Saalman notes that members of the Pazzi family were prominent Parte members in the 1360s and 1370s; they were implicated in conspiracies in 1350 and again in 1360. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, pp. 211–12. The Capitani del Parte Guelfa commissioned the portafuoco around the 1450s, so the transfer of custodianship must have happened before then. Artusi and Gabrielli, Feste e Giochi a Firenze, p. 100. 40  Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, i, 135.

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Figure 16.7. Loggia of convent of San Pier Maggiore, Florence. Photo reproduced from Wikipedia.

scribe estimated the shot’s weight at 58 libbre, or almost 20 kilos.41 The damage must have been considerable. Accounts document significant expenditures for repairs to the roof, while also noting those for the ingredients necessary for the gift to the Albizzi family. The regularity of this tribute — both in terms of its form and the consistency of its observance — marks it as a ritual, an event that occurs with consistency in order to reinforce associations between the convent and its principal patron. The Albizzi connection with San Pier Maggiore endured. In 1784, the convent of San Pier Maggiore was suppressed, its nuns dispersed among other Florentine convents, and its church demolished. The only surviving built reminder of the convent is the Albizzi loggia, a testimony to the significance and persistence of the sustaining client–patron relationship (Figure 16.7). 41 

ASF, San Pier Maggiore 84, fols 243–45.

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The rituals discussed here allow for a nuanced understanding of convent architecture through what Henri Lefebvre described as a horizon of meaning where ‘now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of — and for the sake of — a particular action’.42 Convent hospitality both extended into and retreated from the city’s ritualized spaces. While convent walls projected an ideal of separation, nuns understood that patronage demanded recognition, perhaps even reciprocity, and that this response had spatial dimensions: when assessing the scale and type of response to make to their patrons, convents certainly considered the implications of the architectural setting. These examples demonstrate that convent spaces’ forms and functions were mutable rather normative, and so was their potential to project meanings onto individuals, corporate bodies, and their actions.

42 

Leach, Rethinking Architecture, p. 140.

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Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese 81, n. 100 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Diplomatico San Pier Maggiore Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Manoscritti, vol. 167, insert 2 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Provvisioni Registri 131 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, San Pier Maggiore 37 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, San Pier Maggiore 78 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, San Pier Maggiore 84 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, II I, 313 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, II II, 509 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Codice Panciatichi 119, tomo II

Primary Source Niccolini, Sister Giustina, The Chronicle of Le Murate 1598, ed. by Saundra Weddle, The Other Voice Series (Toronto: The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011)

Secondary Works Artusi, Luciano, and Silvano Gabrielli, Feste e Giochi a Firenze (Firenze: Becocci Editore, 1976) Atwell, Adrienne, ‘Ritual Trading at the Florentine Wool-Cloth Botteghe’, in Renaissance Florence: A  Social History, ed. by Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006), pp. 182–215 Brown, Judith C., ‘Everyday Life, Longevity and Nuns in Early Modern Florence’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 115–38 Clark, Robert, Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence (New York: Anchor Books, 2008) Fabbri, Lorenzo, ‘La sella e il freno del Vescovo: privilegi familiari e saccheggio rituale nell’ingresso episcopale a Firenze fra xiii e xvi secolo’, in Uomini Paesaggi Storie: studi di storia medievale per Giovanni Cherubini, ed. by Duccio Balestracci and others (Siena: Salvietti e Barabuffi Editori, 2012), pp. 895–909 Fantozzi Micali, Osanna, and Piero Rosselli, Il monastero di San Gaggio a Firenze: la storia — il piano di ricupero, ed. by Franco Lombardi (Firenze: Alinea editore, 1996) Hayum, Andrée, ‘A Renaissance Audience Considered: The Nuns at S. Apollonia and Castagno’s “Last Supper”’, Art Bulletin, 88 (2006), 243–66 Hiller, Diana, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, c. 1350–1490 (Alder­ shot: Ashgate, 2014)

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Kennedy, Randy, ‘After the Deluge: Bringing Vasari’s Last Supper back to Life’, New York Times, 22 December 1013, p. C1 Kent, F. W., ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici, Madonna Scolastica Rondinelli e la politica di mece­ natismo architettonico nel convento delle Murate a Firenze (1471–1472)’, in Arte, committenza ed economia a Roma e nelle corte del Rinascimento, 1420–1530, ed. by Arnold Esch and Christoph L. Frommel (Torino: Einaudi, 1995), pp. 353–82 Lami, Giovanni, Sanctae ecclesiae florentinae monumenta, 4 vols (Firenze, 1758) Leach, Neil, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York: Rout­ ledge, 1997) Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A., ‘Uneven Conversions: How Did Laywomen Become Nuns in the Early Modern World’, in Gender and Conversion in the Early Modern World, ed. by Helen Smith and Simon Ditchfield, AHRC project, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe, Uni­ver­sity of York, England (forthcoming) Lowe, K.  J.  P., Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and CounterReformation Italy (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003) —— , ‘Secular Brides and Convent Brides: Wedding Ceremonies in Italy during the Re­ naissance and Counter-Reformation’, in Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650, ed. by Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998), pp. 41–64 Miller, Maureen C., ‘Why the Bishop of Florence Had to Get Married’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 1055–91 Musacchio, Jacqueline, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999) Raveggi, Sergio, ‘Storia di una legenda: Pazzo de’ Pazzi e le pietre del Santo Sepolcro’, in Toscana e Terrasanta nel Medioevo, ed. by Franco Cardini (Firenze: Alinea, 1982), pp. 299–315 Repetti, Emanuele, Dizionario geografico, fisico, storico della Toscana contenante la descri­ zione di tutti i luoghi del Granducato, 6 vols (Firenze: Presso l’autore e editore, 1833) Richa, Giuseppe, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine, divise ne’ suoi quartieri, 10 vols (Florence: P. G. Viviani, 1754–62) Saalman, Howard, Filippo Brunelleschi: The Buildings (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Strocchia, Sharon, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hop­ kins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) —— , ‘When the Bishop Married the Abbess: Masculinity and Power in Florentine Epis­ copal Entry Rites, 1300–1600’, Gender and History, 19 (2007), 346–68 Vertova, Luisa, I Cenacoli Fiorentini (Torino: Edizioni Rai, 1965) Walker, R.  Scott, ‘Florentine Painted Refectories: 1350–1500’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Indiana, 1979) Weaver, Elissa, Convent Theater in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) Weddle, Saundra, ‘Identity and Alliance: Urban Presence, Spatial Privilege and Florentine Renaissance Convents’, in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. by Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006), pp. 394–414

Saint Peter, the Carmelites, and the Triumph of Anghiari: The Changing Context of the Brancacci Chapel in Mid-Fifteenth-Century Florence Nicholas A. Eckstein

T

hroughout the late Middle Ages, Carmelite friars were extremely touchy on the subject of their order’s history. Shadowy origins in the Holy Land, a comparatively late arrival on the European scene in the first half of the thirteenth century, the absence of a charismatic founder like Saint Francis of Assisi or Saint Dominic de Guzmán — these and other factors conspired to produce what one may fairly call an institutional inferiority complex. The Carmelites compensated by building a mythical history on the audacious and entirely spurious claim that they were the most ancient of all the mendicant, or begging, orders of friars. Indeed, they declared themselves the first monks in human history. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Carmelite tracts cited Elijah founder, asserting that the order’s first hermits lived with the prophet and witnessed his ascent into Heaven in a fiery chariot. Carmelite Nicholas A. Eckstein ([email protected]) is associate professor of Italian history at the Uni­ver­sity of Sydney, and former fellow and visiting professor of the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti (1998–99, 2003, 2006). His principal area of research is the social and cultural history of Renaissance and early modern Florence. His articles and books on this and related areas include a new study, Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence (New Haven, 2014). The present essay adumbrates themes that receive more detailed treatment in Painted Glories. In both places my approach owes much to the inspiration of Bill Kent’s own scholarship, and to happy years spent under Bill’s supervision as a PhD candidate at Monash Uni­ver­sity.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 317–337 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109712

318 Nicholas A. Eckstein

Figure 17.1. Brancacci Chapel, general view, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. © Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto — Min. dell’Interno. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

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friars, it was written, later lived in Jerusalem near the house occupied by the family of the Virgin Mary. They heard the noises emanating from the upper room when the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ’s disciples at Pentecost. In subsequent decades they stood amongst the crowds who listened as Saint Peter preached the sermons that are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.1 The Carmelites had been elaborating and publicizing these associations with Saint Peter for decades by 1367. That was the year in which Piero — that is, Peter — di Piuvichese Brancacci, head of an increasingly powerful and wellconnected Florentine lineage, provided in his will for the foundation of a family burial chapel in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria del Carmine, which stood in the heart of the Brancacci’s ancestral neighbourhood, the marginal parish of San Frediano (Figure 17.1).2 Following contemporary practice, Piero dedicated the chapel to Peter, his name-saint. To the Carmelites, Piero’s patronage would have represented a golden opportunity to satisfy the ambitions of everyone concerned. Acquisition of the chapel afforded Piero the opportunity to promote his own and his family’s spiritual and secular interests. The friars, meanwhile, advanced construction of their church while proclaiming the intimacy of their allegedly ancient association with the Prince of the Apostles, Christianity’s first pope. Here also was another occasion to underline the Carmelite Order’s traditional, unswerving, loyalty to the papacy. Facts on the history of the Brancacci Chapel are notoriously scarce. Vir­ tually nothing is known about its early history, save that by the 1420s the chapel still lacked the decorative programme on which the friars must have insisted as a condition of the family’s status as secular patrons.3 Its blank walls would have contrasted embarrassingly with the richly decorated interiors of the Carmine’s other family chapels, and the forest of glittering altarpieces, shrines, 1  On Carmelite historical identity in this period, see Koch, ‘Elijah the Prophet, Founder of the Carmelite Order’; Smet, The Carmelites, i (1975), Ca. 1200 ad until the Council of Trent; Cicconetti , La regola del Carmelo; Cannon, ‘Pietro Lorenzetti and the History of the Carmelite Order’; Chandler and Egan, The Land of Carmel; Jotischky, The Perfection of Solitude; Jotischky, The Carmelites and Antiquity. 2  Piero’s will has not been discovered. The date of the will and of the chapel’s foundation emerge in the will left by his son, Antonio, in 1383. ASF, Notarile Antecosimiano, 13521 (1370–1401), fol. 116r. On Santa Maria del Carmine in the history of San Frediano, see Eckstein, The District of the Green Dragon. On the Brancacci, see Pandimiglio, Felice di Michele vir clarissimus e una consorteria. 3  See now Eckstein, Painted Glories. Amongst the many works on the subject, see the history of the chapel in Joannides, Masaccio and Masolino, pp. 313–16.

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and votive objects with which citizens had filled the cavernous nave and choir of the church. By this time the head of the family was Piero’s nephew, Felice di Michele Brancacci, one of the most powerful and respected moderate-conservative statesmen in Florence. At some point prior to 1425 — we do not know exactly when — Felice acted to salvage his family’s honour by commissioning the cycle of episodes from the life of Saint Peter that we see in the chapel today.4 As specialists and the thousands of rapturous tourists who now flock annually to the Carmine to view the frescoes know very well, the artists selected for this task were Tommaso di Cristofano di Fino and the young Tommaso di ser Giovanni di Mone, better known by their respective contemporary nicknames: Masolino (Little or Thin Tom) and Masaccio (Big, Fat, or Ugly Tom). Masolino and Masaccio were responsible for the artistic design and executed the greater part of the programme, most likely between the middle of 1425 and early 1426.5 In stylistic terms the frescoes caused an immediate sensation which has not died down in the nearly six hundred years that have elapsed since their creation. But for reasons that we are unlikely ever to understand, Masolino and Masaccio left their work unfinished and moved on to other commissions shortly afterwards. No further progress had been made by September 1434, when Cosimo de’ Medici returned to Florence from a year’s exile in Venice to take over as the city’s unofficial first citizen. An opponent of the new regime, Felice was exiled from Florence in 1435. He never returned. The frescoes remained unfinished until after 1480 when, for reasons that have never come to light, Filippino Lippi was called to complete the programme.6 According to one widely aired hypothesis, Felice’s opposition to the Medici so worried the Carmelite friars that they did not simply leave the frescoes unfinished but attempted a complete obliteration of Brancaccian memory. It has been argued that this damnatio memoriae was to be achieved by suppressing the Petrine association and rededicating the chapel to the Virgin. Allegedly, the friars destroyed a great fresco of Peter’s Crucifixion (which had acted as a kind of altarpiece on the end wall), substituting the ancient miracle-working panel of the Madonna del Popolo that stands today on the altar. It has also been sug4 

Joannides, Masaccio and Masolino, pp. 313–14. The dating, which is contentious, is discussed in my Painted Glories. See also Strehlke, ‘The Brancacci Style and the Carmine Style’, pp. 106–07; also Berti, ‘Masaccio 1422’, pp. 40–42. 6  See the recent discussion of Filippino’s involvement in Zambrano, ‘Filippino Lippi’, pp. 181–223. 5 

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gested that the friars destroyed the likenesses of several Brancacci in the chapel. Until Filippino Lippi was employed to replace these with other portraits and complete the other abandoned scenes, the chapel was left in ruins.7 As I argue in detail elsewhere, the damnatio memoriae hypothesis is unconvincing and without foundation.8 My purpose in the present essay, however, is neither to address this topic nor to explain the abandonment of the frescoes by Masolino and Masaccio. Instead I wish to outline the major contours of an explanation as to why, after so many years, the Carmelites felt compelled to finish the programme. It is my contention that in the more than fifty-five years between the departure of Masolino and Masaccio and the arrival of Filippino, the Florentine population as a whole re-visioned Saint Peter in ways that profoundly affected contemporary perception and understanding of the frescoes and the Brancacci Chapel itself. Saint Peter as depicted by Masolino and Masaccio in 1425–26 remained, as he always had been, a recognizably human saint whose status as rock of the Church was balanced by the crises of faith, courage, anguish, and guilt that were experienced by every Christian who followed the sinner’s journey through the present life. As the decades passed these associations did not fall away. But in 1440 the Petrine cult exploded in Florence as a concatenation of extraordinary historical events transformed Peter into a civic hero who had saved Florence from invasion by a tyrant. One effect of these developments was to turn the Brancacci Chapel into something more than a private family chapel, albeit one that boasted an extraordinary decorative programme. * * * Explaining the preceding contention can only be done by telling the story. It begins amid the convoluted military situation of the early 1430s, which was further complicated by the conciliar debate then raging within the Church. On one side of the controversy were supporters of the so-called ‘conciliarist’ position — theologians and canon lawyers who argued that the full spiritual authority of the Church could not be wielded by the pope himself. This pleni­ tudo potestatis could only be expressed in properly constituted assemblies such as the Council of Constance, which had ended the Great Schism in 1417 by appointing Pope Martin  V, or the new council in Basel convoked in 1431.

7  The fullest statement of the thesis occurs in Casazza, ‘The Brancacci Chapel from its Origins to the Present’, pp. 306–07. 8  Eckstein, Painted Glories, chaps 4, 5.

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At Basel the conciliarists were directly opposed by the recently elected Pope Eugenius IV, who was a stern advocate of papal supremacy.9 This controversy is linked to the present argument by its close relationship to the long-running military rivalry between Florence and Milan. By the 1430s the Milanese duke, Filippo Maria Visconti, had been at war with Florence for many years. Visconti, who saw a political advantage in siding with the conciliarists of Basel, helped foment an insurrection against Eugenius IV in Rome in May 1434. Eugenius escaped and was granted asylum by the anti-Medicean regime then in power in Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici, himself a papal ally, allowed Eugenius to remain in the city after his return from Venice in November 1434. After fleeing Rome the Pope’s fortunes gradually improved. While he did not immediately prevail over his enemies at Basel, he eventually outflanked them by means of an audacious strategy to unify the Latin and Greek Churches, which had split more than four hundred years before. Eugenius planned to realize this extraordinarily ambitious objective by presiding in person over a rival council to be attended by the Byzantine emperor and leaders of the Greek Church. When he proposed this idea at Basel in 1431 the conciliarists were opposed, realizing that it would enormously enhance the papal position at their expense. Eugenius went ahead regardless and finally succeeded in opening the council in Ferrara in January 1438. The conciliarists responded by suspending his temporal and spiritual powers. In June they formally deposed him. All of these measures failed, however, and the council of union went ahead.10 On the military front Eugenius still faced a serious challenge. Duke Filippo Maria’s armies, commanded by the condottiere Niccolò Piccinino, made advances in the Romagna during 1438 which threatened both the papacy of Eugenius and the survival of his council. To escape the danger, Eugenius moved the council to Florence in January 1439 at the invitation of Cosimo de’ Medici, who provided financial support and arranged an ostentatious welcome. By June the council had resolved a number of important doctrinal differences as well as achieving its principal aim of uniting the Latin and Greek Churches. These achievements did not outlast the next generation, but at the time they represented a symbolic triumph for Eugenius and his Medicean supporters, which also helped unite the forces opposed to Filippo Maria’s imperialistic threat. It was against this back9  On the conciliar debate, see Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition. For a recent bibliography, see Watanabe, Nicholas of Cusa, pp. 26–29. 10  Gill, The Council of Florence, pp. 94–96 and passim; Black, Council and Commune, pp. 49–50.

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ground that Piccinino’s Milanese armies, aided by exiled Florentine enemies of the Medici, made a final assault on Florence on 29 June 1440.11 Piccinino entered Tuscany in April 1440. In following weeks he laid waste to many villages and territories in the Florentine contado without encountering serious opposition. By June the Florentine government and its terrified population faced the virtual certainty of Milanese invasion, a disaster which would signify the demise of both the Florentine Republic and its de facto leading family. At almost the last moment, however, Duke Filippo Maria was forced to recall Piccinino’s forces to defend Milan, which was now being threatened by the condottiere Francesco Sforza, a former employee of the Duke who had recently reconciled with Florence and Eugenius IV. Knowing that Florentine morale was low and its military leadership disunited, Piccinino could not resist one final attack before he left Tuscany. On the journey north to assist the Duke he paused at the town of Borgo San Sepolcro in the eastern Tiber valley, not far from where a coalition of Florentine, papal, and Venetian troops had gathered near the small town of Anghiari. On 29 June, the feast-day of Saints Peter and Paul, Piccinino launched a powerful assault on the Florentine coalition in the heat of early afternoon. Instead of registering a famous victory, however, Piccinino was ignominiously defeated. He lost between sixty and seventy soldiers killed, as many as six hundred wounded, and 1540 prisoners, including twenty-six squadron commanders. Further humiliated by the loss of his own standard and that of Filippo Maria, Piccinino fled north.12 In Florence, where despair had reigned for weeks, the population reacted to the news of victory with a mixture of amazement and patriotic jubilation. In the present context, however, the most striking element is not the exultation of the citizenry. It is the fact that within hours of the victory the Florentine field commanders, Neri Capponi and Bernadetto de’ Medici, wrote a dispatch to the government from their camp in which they unhesitatingly ascribed the triumph to the miraculous intervention of Saints Peter and Paul.13 In Florence, meanwhile, word of a second miracle was spreading. A long-dead Carmelite bishop, the blessed (beato) Andrea Corsini, had risen from his tomb on 21 April 1440 to speak with a young patrician, Giovanni d’Andrea, who had gone to pray 11 

Gill, The Council of Florence, chap. 7; Crum, ‘Roberto Martelli, the Council of Florence, and the Medici Palace Chapel’. 12  The events and their political context are described in Capponi, La battaglia di Anghi­ ari. See also Bayley, War and Society in Renaissance Florence, chap. 2, esp. pp. 162–70. 13  Masetti-Bencini, ‘La Battaglia d’Anghiari’, p. 181, n. 82.

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in the Carmine. The beato Andrea had predicted the victory and instructed Giovanni to take bring the news to the Florentine war council, the Ten of War. Afraid of being mocked, Giovanni at first kept the prophecy secret. However, after subsequent visits to the Carmine, more visions, and conversations with the beato Andrea, he reported the prophecy and other predictions by Andrea to the Ten in the weeks before the battle.14 Andrea’s story of the miraculous prophecy spread like wildfire after the battle. On 3 July, just four days later, the Florentine Signoria and other leading members of the government, prominent clerics, and a large crowd of citizens marched through the streets to visit Andrea’s tomb in Santa Maria del Carmine. With burning torches in hand, the priors stood before the tomb and offered thanks for the victory on behalf of the city. One month later the government legislated to turn this ritual, referred to simply as the ‘offerta’, into an annual ritual of state to be performed on the second Sunday of June.15 Anghiari was a godsend for the Carmelites. Their man, Andrea Corsini, was now officially recognized by the government alongside Saints Peter and Paul as a co-architect of the victory, while the Carmelites themselves became leading players in an officially sanctioned narrative that fashioned Anghiari as the moment when the Florentine Republic was delivered from the Milanese tyrant. Andrea’s posthumous role put the Carmine on the map by enhancing its status as a destination for pilgrims and prominent guests, such as the Carmelite provincial of Bologna, his entourage, and a large delegation of friars from Mantua, all of whom attended the official celebrations on the first anniversary of the victory in 1441.16 In the years that followed the Carmine became so busy with organization and preparation that the celebrations created a seasonal spike in the district’s economy. The friars purchased copious quantities of food and wine from local suppliers, both to feed its many guests and to sustain the musicians, ushers (donzelli), and assorted functionaries who participated in the actual commemorative rituals.17

14 

Our account of Giovanni’s visions takes the form of a personal diary, which Giovanni appears indeed to have written shortly after the events it describes. The diary has recently appeared in a critical edition as ‘La visione di Giovanni di Andrea’, ed. by Ciappelli, pp. 165–70. See in the same volume Ciappelli’s attestation of the diary’s reliability, pp. 102–05. 15  Del Castagno, ‘Vita del beato Andrea Corsini’, p. 149; ASF, Provv. Reg. 131, fols 147r–v. 16  ASF, Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese 113, Convento del Carmine (hereafter Carmine), 86, fol. 37r. 17  For example, ASF, Carmine, 86, fols 52r, 116r, 155v.

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As for Saints Peter and Paul, public celebration of their miraculous intervention had been instituted in 1440 just as quickly as the offerta for Andrea Corsini. Within days of the battle, the government legislated a programme of anniversary celebrations on a grand scale. Every year on 29 June, the priors, their advisory colleges, and foreign officials (ufficiali stranieri) would march first to the church of San Paolo, then to the church of San Pier Maggiore by way of the Piazza della Signoria. In each church they offered tributes in the form of burning torches, as was done at the Carmine for Andrea Corsini. From start to finish, the official cortege was to be accompanied through the streets by twenty paupers over the age of twenty, selected by the administrators of Florence’s major hospitals.18 The paupers were dressed in pure white tunics and cowls, specially created for the occasion at the order of the organizers, who had been authorized to spend as much as 70 gold florins on material and manufacture. Already a visual focal point in their brand new vestments, the paupers would have drawn further attention with the burning torches they were ordered to carry. Their progress was announced by trumpets, and once they had arrived at San Pier Maggiore with the government officials they were to remain in the church until after the celebration of High Mass.19 The processions in Florence were complemented by a ceremony in Anghiari itself, where an additional pair of white vestments was sent, to be worn by two local paupers who would make their own offerta on 29 June at the church of Santo Stefano.20 The Florentine celebrations described here, meanwhile, became a fixture in the Florentine civic calendar and were still running in the seventeenth century.21 The offerta at the beato Andrea’s tomb at the Carmine ran until 1452, and then lapsed for unknown reasons. Far from petering out, however, the fame and popularity of Andrea’s cult continued to increase. A law was passed by the priors in June 1466 to guarantee that future generations would forever associate Andrea Corsini’s name with Saints Peter and Paul and their miraculous intervention at the battle of Anghiari. Describing Andrea’s prophecy as ‘a most worthy event that should, indeed must, not ever be forgotten’, the priors now dispensed with ten of the twenty white-robed paupers and replaced them with ‘up to ten professed novices of the convent of the […] church of Santa Maria del Carmine’, their vestments manufactured at government expense in the 18 

Santa Maria Nuova, San Matteo, and San Giovanni Battista. ASF, Provv. Reg. 131, fols 126r–127r. 20  ASF, Provv. Reg. 146, fols 133v–134v. 21  Descrizione delle feste di S. Andrea Corsini, p. 67. 19 

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style of the order. Henceforth the novices would march in the procession with the ten remaining ‘needy paupers and beggars’.22 The priors had brought the Carmelites to centre stage in the celebrations of 29 June, and in doing so they irrevocably fused the reputation of Andrea Corsini and the Carmelite Order with the miraculous numen of Saints Peter and Paul and their role in producing the victory of Anghiari. To sceptical twenty-first-century eyes, the story of the beato Andrea’s prophecy may seem just too good to be true. Certainly it should be acknowledged that although the Florentine Carmelites were a very successful community by the fifteenth century, they were as preoccupied as ever about their order’s legitimacy and did all they could to propel themselves into the mainstream of the city’s religious and civic life. In these circumstances, using the word ‘convenient’ to describe the appearance of a Carmelite hero who used his miraculous powers to save Florence from a traditional enemy would lay one open to the charge of understatement. Furthermore, in the years after the battle the Carmelites made a concerted attempt to canonize Andrea Corsini, a local boy born near the Carmine in about 1301, who pursued a distinguished career in the order that culminated with his appointment as Bishop of Fiesole.23 Evidence of the campaign to turn him into a saint emerges in a hagiographical Vita written between 29 June 1440 and 1457 by Fra Pietro del Castagno, a friar at the Carmine. This very detailed biography includes a catalogue of posthumous miracles performed by Andrea in 1439 and narrates the story of the beato’s prophecy of the victory at Anghiari.24 Despite these facts, however, several intriguing factors prevent one from dismissing the miracles of 1439–40 as elements in a retrospective narrative dreamed up by the Carmelites to bolster the case for Andrea’s canonization. It is important to be clear on this point: there is no doubt that the Vita was written with canonization in mind. However, that does not mean that it should be treated as a cynically contrived fiction. Arguing the case for sainthood in this period worked according to well-understood conventions, one of which was that the candidate should have performed a number of verifiable — that is, genuine — miracles. In this case, Fra Pietro could point to a series of miracu22 

ASF, Provv. Reg. 157, fol. 64v. 23  Caioli, Andrea Corsini, carmelitano Vescovo di Fiesole, p. 10. 24  29 June 1440 is the terminus post quem for the Vita, which discusses the battle. The latest possible year of authorship is 1457, when Fra Pietro died. Ciappelli, Un santo alla battaglia di Anghiari, p. 14.

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lous cures effected by Andrea in 1439, the veracity of which was attested by the men and women who were cured. At least one miracle was confirmed by a notary who claimed to have witnessed himself the event that he now legally validated in writing. As for the prophesies of victory at the Carmine in the weeks before the battle, there is evidence that Giovanni d’Andrea’s diary is a sincere account of the events it describes and that he really did report his news to the Ten of War when he said he did, that is, before the battle. Framing the law in which they introduced the Carmelite novices to the annual procession, the priors stated that the Ten of War were informed of the coming victory ‘approximately eight days before it occurred’, that the news came in the form of a prophecy (rivelatione) which was said at that time to have been made by the blessed Andrea de’ Corsini to ‘one of his devotees’. The priors also emphasized: ‘It was being said everywhere that we were certain of having this victory before it happened. And word of this reached as far as the camp of the enemy. And as it was prophesied, so did it happen, by the grace of God and by the intercession of the blessed Andrea.’ Writing fifteen years after the battle, the priors were at pains to stress not only that their account was true in every detail, but that the facts were corroborated by the unimpeachable authority of elite politicians — including none other than the city’s unofficial first citizen — who had been involved in the events described: Amongst the others who could speak more fully of these things are those who are still alive of the number of the Ten of War who at that time found themselves in office, who are the following, namely: Messer Lorenzo di Antonio Ridolfi, Neri di Gino Capponi, Giovanni di Piero di Bartolomeo the bowl-maker [scodellaio], Messer Lionardo di Francesco Bruni, Antonio di Salvestro di ser Ristoro, Messer Agnolo di Iacopo Acciaiuoli, Filippo di Giovanni Carducci, Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici, Alessandro di Ugo degli Alessandri, Niccolò di Zanobi Bonvanni.25

The direct involvement of prominent citizens including Cosimo de’ Medici himself increases the likelihood that rumours of Andrea Corsini’s prognostications had spread in the city before 29 June 1440. This would help to explain why the government gave him credit immediately after the battle was fought. To sum up: the circumstances of the Florentine victory at Anghiari may represent a serendipitous convergence of actual events with the desired outcomes of the Carmelite Order, the Medici, and the government of Florence. And that possibility allows the rare liberty of a counterfactual: that if Florence had lost at Anghiari there would have been no purpose in writing down the stories that 25 

ASF, Provv. Reg. 157, fol. 64r.

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Figure 17.2. Brancacci Chapel, view of left wall, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. © Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto — Min. dell’Interno. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

were circulating about Andrea in the weeks prior to the battle. In such a scenario the beato’s miracles would have been quietly forgotten, and later generations would never have heard of them. For a victorious Florence, however, victory transformed the story of the beato Andrea Corsini’s miracles into a useable history that the governors of Florence could fashion as patriotic myth and which the Carmelites could turn to their own advantage. In other words, we only know of Andrea’s prophecy today because Florence won at Anghiari. The anniversary celebrations of Anghiari continued in the years after the legislative revisions of 1466. In 1477 the organizers introduced a literally theatrical element. As part of the festivities of that year a play comprising scenes from the lives and martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul was staged on the Piazza della Signoria in the Loggia de’ Lanzi before what one contemporary chronicler described as a ‘great multitude’ of citizens.26 The text of the play draws from 26 

‘Domenica a dì 29 giugno [1477] in Firenze fu la festa di San Piero. Fecesi in su la loggia de’ Signori la festa della Rappresentazione della morte di San Piero e di San Pagolo. Fucci gran moltitudine di popolo a vederla; e la sera si diede fuoco alla girandola che non s’era fatto

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Figure 17.3. Brancacci Chapel, view of right wall, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. © Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto — Min. dell’Interno. Photo: Antonio Quattrone.

a number of the sources that also informed the Golden Legend, the popular thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives that was the basis of several scenes in the Brancacci Chapel.27 There is no space here for detailed analysis of the play. What I wish to emphasize in the present context is the resemblance of the drama’s treatment of Peter’s martyrdom to that in the Brancacci Chapel. For anyone familiar with the latter it is impossible to miss. The play opens with a story that formed part of the original fresco programme, but was lost when the lunettes and vaulting of the chapel were destroyed in the eighteenth century. This was Christ’s invocation to Peter to become, in the play’s words, ‘a shepherd of souls and a true fisherman’ (Masolino, Calling of Peter, 1425). Other episodes still visible in the chapel correspond with action in the play: Peter’s fulfilment of Christ’s desire that he should ‘go all around the world […] il dì di San Giovanni. E fece bene e gran dimostrazione d’ingegno di chi l’aveva fatta’: Giusti d’Anghiari, ‘I giornali’, ed. by Newbigin, p. 194. 27  Newbigin, ‘Dieci sacre rappresentazioni inedite fra Quattro e Cinquecento’, p. 32.

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preaching everywhere’ (Masolino, Peter Preaching, 1425); ‘cure bodies of all their ills’ (Masolino, Healing of the Cripple, 1425; Masaccio, Peter Healing with his Shadow, 1425/26); ‘even to bring back the dead to this world’ (Masolino, Raising of Tabitha, 1425; Lippi, Raising the Son of Theophilus, after 1480) (Figures 17.2 and 17.3).28 In its latter stages the play moves to Rome, where Peter is forced to confront the Emperor Nero and his champion, the charlatan Simon Magus, who arrogantly challenges the Prince of the Apostles to a public contest of their respective powers. Peter, it goes without saying, humiliates Simon at every turn, until the desperate Simon announces that he will prove once and for all that he is the son of God by flying through the air. Simon does indeed fly, but he is borne aloft by demons, and when Peter dispels them with a prayer, Simon plunges to his death. The fall of Simon Magus also formed part of the chapel’s original vision. To explain how, we need to understand that the scenes now visible in the lowest tier of the Brancacci Chapel do not exactly match the design of 1425/26. On the right wall of this level, which is entirely the work of Filippino Lippi, we see today the composite scene of the Crucifixion of Saint Peter and Saint Peter Disputing with Simon Magus before the Emperor Nero (Figure 17.3, lower register). The adjacent entrance pilaster shows The Liberation of Saint Peter from Prison (Figure 17.3, lower register, far right). In the present context the important fact is that the Crucifixion of Saint Peter is not the scene originally intended for the left half of the right wall (Figure 17.3, lower register, left). We know this because restoration and cleaning conducted in the 1980s necessitated the detachment from the rear wall of the altar that had for centuries contained the Madonna del Popolo (Figure 17.1, centre). In bringing the altar forward, the restorers exposed fragmentary remains of a previously unknown Crucifixion of Saint Peter (referred to above), which was confidently attributed to Masaccio.29 This very large scene was destroyed at some time between 1425/26 and the intervention of Filippino. The reason for the obliteration 28  Newbigin, ‘La rappresentazione di San Piero e San Pagolo Apostoli’, pp. 99, 100. The episodes appear as follows: Preaching, Figure 17.2, upper register far right; Healing of the Crip­ ple, Figure 17.3, upper register left; Healing with Shadow, Figure 17.2, lower register far right; Raising of Tabitha, Figure 17.3, upper register right; Raising the Son of Theophilus, Figure 17.2, lower register centre. 29  Baldini, ‘Nuovi affreschi nella Cappella Brancacci, Masaccio e Masolino’, p. 71. The blank space once occupied by Masaccio’s Crucifixion, now exposed by the detachment of the Marian altar, can be seen behind the Madonna del Popolo in Figure 17.1.

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of Masaccio’s Crucifixion has never been established, but its presence on the chapel’s rear wall proves that a Crucifixion on the right wall was not part of the original design. In other words, the planners of 1425/26 envisioned a different scene for the space now occupied by Filippino’s Crucifixion. There is little doubt as to the originally intended scene. The Golden Legend, the sole source for the story of the contest between Peter and Simon Magus, emphasizes Simon’s pride, dishonesty, and arrogance and his outrageously blasphemous claim to Godlike status. The story opposes these qualities to Peter’s authentic thaumaturgic power, which came directly from God. It also emphasizes Peter’s selfless obedience to God, and his willingness to face martyrdom. Paul, who is standing next to Peter as the demons carry Simon through the air, urges Peter to make the charlatan fall, as the two have so little time left on earth: ‘Finish what you have started, because the Lord is already calling us.’30 Given the presence of Masaccio’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter on the altar wall, there can be only one candidate for the space to the left of Saint Peter Disputing with Simon Magus: it was the scene in which Simon receives his punishment at the hands of Peter, whom the Brancacci Chapel’s visual sermon fashions as the model all Christians should fear and emulate in their daily lives. Another feature was shared by the play and the fresco cycle. The play is by turns cruel, violent, and coarse, as Herod, Nero, Simon Magus, and their minions insult, mock, and mistreat Peter and Paul. In the script are many passages whose deliberate crudity served two didactic functions. For the ‘great multitude’ of the popolo who watched in 1477, the vindictiveness of the Apostles’ persecutors threw the dignity and religious orthodoxy of the two protagonists into sharp relief and deepened the pathos of their respective martyrdoms. This device draws attention to a theme overlooked by scholars: the didactically motivated violence that suffused the original fresco programme. Although we cannot see Masaccio’s Fall of Simon Magus, Benozzo Gozzoli, who may have used the Brancacci Chapel as a model, executed two treatments of the same scene that suggest its likely appearance. Both are predella panels. Benozzo completed the earlier example prior to 1444 for the Alessandri Chapel in the church of San Piero Maggiore, the destination of the Anghiari procession. He executed the later panel in 1461–62 for the boys’ confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin and Saint Zenobius, a Medicean society based at the Dominican convent of San Marco. In both, Simon Magus’s copiously bleeding corpse lies prominently in the foreground, a confronting allegory of the fate awaiting the prideful, the blasphemous, the heterodox. By positioning the freshly killed 30 

De Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. by Ryan, i, Saint Peter, Apostle, pp. 340–50 (p. 344).

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Figure 17.4. Masaccio, right leg of an executioner, from Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1425–26.

Figure 17.5. Masaccio, torso of an executioner from Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1425–26.

Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. © Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto — Min. dell’Interno. Photos: Antonio Quattrone.

Simon in the same position in the Brancacci Chapel, Masaccio would have set up a grim thematic resonance with the dead Ananias, whose cadaver occupies the foreground of Saint Peter Distributing the Goods of the Community, to the right of the altar and literally around the corner from the space where the Fall of Simon Magus once was. Ananias, mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, was punished with death by Saint Peter for withholding the portion of his private fortune he was supposed to share with the community. Unpleasant as these images were, however, the corpses of these two pitiable failures would in every sense have been dwarfed by Masaccio’s titanic Crucifixion of Saint Peter behind the altar. Where Simon Magus and Ananias were punished with death for their sins, Peter, like Christ himself, was martyred for doing the right thing. As Peter himself had said elsewhere in the Bible, suffering brought about by one’s own wrongdoing was devoid of redemptive value. One earned merit only when, in the face of punishment, one continued

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Figure 17.6. Masaccio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1426, predella scene from Pisa Altarpiece, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. © Photo Scala, Florence/BPK, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin.

to follow a righteous path: ‘if doing well you suffer patiently: this is thankworthy before God. For unto this are you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving an example that you should follow his steps’.31 We are fortunate that the remnants of Masaccio’s Crucifixion allow us confidently to infer the composition of the entire scene. In the fragment on the left we see the flexed thigh and calf of a kneeling man; on the right the back and haunches of a second man, who leans forwards so that his pink tunic and aqua hose part company, exposing his buttocks (Figures 17.4 and 17.5). These two details are all that we need to associate this fresco with an iconographical tradition in which the upside-down Peter appears frontally to the viewer as his executioners bend over to drive nails into his hands. In 1426, just months after he had completed this fresco, Masaccio created a similar image for the predella of his Pisa altarpiece: in it two hulking men, their clothes the same pink and 31 

i Peter 2. 18–25.

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blue that we see in the Brancacci Chapel fragments, hammer spikes into the victim’s palms, as Peter, his eyes wide with shock, gasps in pain (Figure 17.6). Masaccio’s predella scene, notwithstanding its small size, is a brutally affecting distillation of violence. The power of the Brancacci Crucifixion would have been exponentially greater, and not simply because it was so much larger. The frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel are utterly consistent in portraying Peter as the first and most loyal of Christ’s followers, as rock of the Church, and ultimately as alter Christus. At the same time, he is the Apostle most like the ordinary Florentine devotee, who suffers moments of weakness and doubt, who gives way to anger, who hesitates before finally committing to his inevitable martyrdom. In Masaccio’s great Crucifixion, this towering yet very human figure was put to death by at least one functionary so ignorant and uninterested that he cannot even be bothered to cover his bare arse. Finished or not in 1425–26, this was a distressing, troubling image. After 1440, as already seen, the battle of Anghiari was rapidly incorporated into the official historical myth of the pro-papal Medicean Florentine Republic. Every year, Florentine citizens and visitors from outside the city flocked to the Carmine to visit the tomb of the beato Andrea Corsini, to obtain a cure or simply to pray at the tomb of the prophet of victory. But Saint Peter, not Andrea, was the principal hero of this drama. The public performance of the Saint Peter and Paul play suggests in fact that by 1477 the political significance of 29 June as the anniversary of Florentine victory over Milanese aggression had merged with the date’s traditional liturgical status as the co-feast of Saints Peter and Paul. In Florence, Saint Peter was not just the rock of the Church: he had become the saviour of the republic. The Carmelites would certainly have understood that the civic discourse surrounding Anghiari offered a new way of looking at the Petrine frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Indeed, given the high profile of the victory and the role played by Saint Peter, many lay women and men outside the order probably made this connection by themselves. In such a scenario we may imagine that, having concluded their devotions at the tomb of the blessed Andrea, at least some of the pilgrims who visited the Carmine every year made an additional request. Having been drawn by the prophet of Anghiari, they may have asked also to be shown the celebrated images — the ones painted by Masolino and his dazzling young partner, Masaccio — of the apostle who had brought victory for the Florentine people in 1440. If they asked this question at any time in the four decades or so between 29 June 1440 and Filippino’s intervention after 1480, they may well have received an embarrassed or apologetic response. This may have included an elaborate explanation that the images certainly existed

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but that for many reasons (only one of which was a lack of funds that was only resolved in the 1470s), some had never been finished, that quite a lot of the wall space was completely bare, and that the great scene intended as the climax of the entire cycle, the Crucifixion of the Prince of the Apostles, was itself incomplete. We cannot know if such a conversation ever took place. But the discomfiture felt by the Carmelite friars at the failure to finish their, and the city’s, premier Petrine fresco cycle would have been very real. This pressure must have mounted with the passing decades, as the miracle of Anghiari was woven more firmly into the historical myth of the Florentine Republic, and as the Carmelites’ own role in that story became more central. By the late 1470s, that pressure could no longer be ignored. The frescoes had now to be finished.

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese 113, Convento del Carmine, 86 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano, 13521 (1370–1401) Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Provvisioni Registri 131 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Provvisioni Registri 146 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Provvisioni Registri 157

Primary Sources Del Castagno, Andrea, ‘Vita del beato Andrea Corsini’, in Un santo alla battaglia di Anghiari: La ‘Vita’ e il culto di Andrea Corsini nella Firenze del rinascimento, ed. by Giovanni Ciappelli (Firenze: SISMEL, 2007), pp. 109–63 Descrizione delle feste di S. Andrea Corsini (Firenze: Stamperia di Zanobi Pignoni, 1672) Giovanni d’Andrea, ‘La visione di Giovanni di Andrea’, in Un santo alla battaglia di Anghiari: La ‘Vita’ e il culto di Andrea Corsini nella Firenze del rinascimento, ed. by Giovanni Ciappelli (Firenze: SISMEL, 2007), pp. 165–70 Giusti d’Anghiari, Ser Giusto, ‘I giornali di ser Giusto Giusti d’Anghiari (1437–1482)’, ed. by Nerida Newbigin, Letteratura italiana antica, 3 (2002), 41–246 Voragine, Jacobus de, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. by William G. Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993)

Secondary Works Baldini, Umberto, ‘Nuovi affreschi nella Cappella Brancacci, Masaccio e Masolino’, Critica d’Arte, 49.1 (1984), 65–72 Bayley, C. C., War and Society in Renaissance Florence: The ‘De Militia’ of Leonardo Bruni (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1961) Berti, Luciano, ‘Masaccio 1422’, Commentari, 12 (1961), 84–107 Black, Antony, Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and the Council of Basle (London: Burns and Oates, 1979), pp. 49–50 Caioli, Paolo, Andrea Corsini, carmelitano Vescovo di Fiesole 1301–1374 (Firenze: Tipo­ grafia Fiorenza, 1929) Cannon, Joanna, ‘Pietro Lorenzetti and the History of the Carmelite Order’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50 (1987), 18–28 Capponi, Niccolò, La battaglia di Anghiari: Il giorno che salvò il Rinascimento (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2012) Casazza, Ornella, ‘The Brancacci Chapel from its Origins to the Present’, in The Brancacci Chapel Frescoes, ed. by Umberto Baldini and Ornella Casazza (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), pp. 306–18

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Chandler, Paul, O. Carm., and Keith J. Egan, eds, The Land of Carmel: Essays in Honor of Joachim Smet, O. Carm. (Roma: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1991) Cicconetti, Carlo, O. Carm., La regola del Carmelo: Origine — Natura — Significato (Roma: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1973) Crum, Roger J., ‘Roberto Martelli, the Council of Florence, and the Medici Palace Chapel’, Zeit­schrift für Kunstgeschichte, 59 (1996), 403–17 Eckstein, Nicholas A., The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1995) —— , Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2014) Gill, Joseph, The Council of Florence (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1959) Joannides, Paul, Masaccio and Masolino: A Complete Catalogue (London: Phaidon, 1993) Jotischky, Andrew, The Carmelites and Antiquity: Mendicants and their Pasts in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) —— , The Perfection of Solitude: Hermits and Monks in the Crusader States (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995) Koch, Robert. A., ‘Elijah the Prophet, Founder of the Carmelite Order’, Speculum, 34 (1959), 457–60 Masetti-Bencini, Ida, ‘La Battaglia d’Anghiari’, Rivista delle biblioteche e degli archivi, 28 (1907), 106–27 Newbigin, Nerida, ed., ‘Dieci sacre rappresentazioni inedite fra Quattro e Cinquecento’, Letteratura italiana antica, 10 (2009), 21–394 —— , ed., ‘La rappresentazione di San Piero e San Pagolo Apostoli’, Letteratura italiana antica, 10 (2009), 99–131 Oakley, Francis, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003) Pandimiglio, Leonida, Felice di Michele vir clarissimus e una consorteria: i Brancacci di Firenze (Milano: Skira, 1989) Smet, Joachim, The Carmelites: A History of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 4 vols (Darien, IL: Carmelite Spiritual Center, 1975–88), i (1975), c. 1200 ad until the Council of Trent Strehlke, Carl B., ‘The Brancacci Style and the Carmine Style’, in The Brancacci Chapel: Form, Function and Setting, ed. by Nicholas A. Eckstein (Firenze: Olschki, 2007), pp. 87–113 Watanabe, Morimichi, Nicholas of Cusa — A Companion to his Life and Times, ed. by Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) Zambrano, Patrizia, ‘Filippino Lippi: la formazione e la prima maturità (circa 1457–1488)’, in Filippino Lippi, ed. by Patrizia Zambrano and Jonathan K. Nelson (Milano: Electa, 2004), pp. 72–363

Rural Pilgrims and Tuscan Miracle Cults Cecilia Hewlett

L

arge groups of shabbily clothed rural pilgrims processing through the countryside would have been a familiar sight for Tuscans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Miracle sites were scattered throughout the territory and attracted thousands of devotees from all levels of society. Devotional sites rolled in and out of fashion, leading the Florentine writer Franco Sacchetti to comment somewhat critically: How many transformations have taken place in my city, even to Our Lady! There was a time when everyone ran to Santa Maria da Cigoli; and then they went to Santa Maria delle Selva; then everyone was talking about Santa Maria di Impruneta; then in Fiesole it was Santa Maria Primerana; and then our lady of Orsanmichele, then everyone abandoned these and converged on the Annunziata de’Servi with great pomp and ceremony.1 1 

Franco Sacchetti to Jacomo di Conte da Perugia, La Battaglia delle belle donne, p. 103: ‘Quanti mutamenti sono stati ne’la mia citta pure ne la figura di Nostra Donna! E fu tempo che a Santa Maria da Cigoli ciascuno correa; poi si andava a Santa Maria della Selva; poi amplio la fama di Santa Maria In Pruneta; poi a Fiesole a Santa Maria Primerana e poi a nostra Donna Cecilia Hewlett ([email protected]) is Director of the Monash Uni­ver­sity Prato Centre and Associate Dean (International) of the Faculty of Arts, Monash Uni­ver­s ity. Author of Rural Communities in Renaissance Tuscany (Turnhout, 2008), her research focuses on community identity and the relationship between urban and rural communities in early modern Tuscany. She is currently undertaking a study of the Florentine rural militia in the sixteenth century. She has been a postgraduate fellow of the European Uni­ver­sity Institute (1998) and a fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2011–12).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 339–358 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109713

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This band of fickle devotees had a wide range of sites to choose from, and a recent article by Megan Holmes has identified over forty such miracle cults in the city of Florence alone.2 Moving outside of the city walls this number becomes even more startling with over one hundred active Marian sites in operation in Tuscany during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.3 Confraternities provided a natural focus for the organization of community pilgrimages, and this was particularly true for rural confraternities, where individuals may not have had the same immediate access to miracle sites enjoyed by their urban counterparts. As a result, rural confraternities developed an annual programme of community pilgrimages and were always ready to mobilize should a new miraculous image be discovered or a natural disaster require their special intercession.4 This type of mass pilgrimage was a very different kind of devotional act than that undertaken by individual pilgrims — an expression of community identity just as much as piety.5 The journeys undertaken by rural confraternities tended to have a more local focus, and could incorporate moments of community recreation in addition to the more formal devotional

d’Orto San Michele; poi s’abbandonarono tutte e a la Nunziata de’Servi ogni persona ha concorso con gran ceremonia’. 2  Holmes, ‘Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence’ and her new monograph, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence, p. 1. 3  This is not taking into account Christological sites or those devoted to the cult of saints. For a survey of sites in Tuscany, see Benvenuti and Gagliardi, ‘Santuari in Toscana’. Megan Holmes argues that the Renaissance saw an upsurge in miracle cults, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence, pp. 5–6. 4  For an account of community pilgrimage from the Pistoian mountain community, see the diary of Piovano Girolamo Magni, who describes his community’s response to the discovery of a miraculous image on the bridge of Pescia. In this account, he describes a pilgrimage of more than seven hundred villagers, who processed to Pescia and spent the night there before returning home the next day. Magni, Il Diario, ed. by Falletti, p. 124. In preparing this article I have undertaken a survey of fifty-eight sets of surviving rural confraternal statutes located in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (see bibliography at the end of this essay). Of these, thirty-eight make specific reference to one or more community pilgrimages as part of their annual liturgical cycle, and many refer to four or more pilgrimages per year. Occasionally the choice of destination would be left to the govenor of the confraternity, but more frequently the destination is specified along with the feast day on which the pilgrimage was to be made. See ASF, Capitoli delle Compagnie Religiose Soppresse. For popular Tuscan pilgrimage routes, see Stopani, Le Vie di pellegrinaggio del Medioevo. 5  For a recent discussion of pilgrimage as a mass phenomenon, see Oefelein, ‘The Signs — and Bells — of Mass Pilgrimage’, pp. 231–49.

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rituals, often taking the form of a community meal at the conclusion of the pilgrimage.6 The role of ritual in the creation and expression of identity is one that has been well rehearsed by social and cultural historians. In recent decades, dozens of scholarly books and articles have been published on the place and function of public ritual as a key to understanding of early modern cities. Aside from a couple of notable examples, less has been written about the role of ritual in rural communities, and yet it is in this very context, when there is often a lack of surviving written sources, that ritual can provide valuable insights. Rural pilgrimage is a powerful example of this, and we can learn a great deal about these marginal groups from the ways in which they participated in and were sometimes able to shape public ritual. This essay will consider two of the most wellknown devotional sites in fifteenth-century Tuscany — Santa Maria Impruneta and Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato — in order to explore the contribution of rural communities to the creation and continued shaping of the devotional cults associated with these miraculous images.7

Santa Maria in Impruneta The cult of the miraculous image of Santa Maria Impruneta (Figure 18.1) was one of the best known and popular of the dozens of miraculous image cults active across Tuscany during this period. Every Florentine citizen would have been aware of the image’s power to control the weather, and most were likely to have been present on one or more occasions that the image was brought to the city.8 In addition to its ability to control the weather, the image was regu6 

Later revisions to confraternal statutes occasionally refer to the reduction of budget for these social events and the need for them to be moderate in terms of the type of food consumed. For example, concerned about excessive spending related to their pilgrimages to Gambassi and Poggibonsi, the confraternity of the Annunciation in Certaldo decided that they would no longer provide meat and fish but only cheese and eggs. Anyone that wanted other food could pay for it themselves. ASF, Capitoli, 324, fol. 13r. Confraternal pilgrimages would cover much shorter distances than traditional pilgrimages; usually no further than the distance that could be comfortably travelled on foot in one day. There are some very obvious reasons for this. Firstly rural hospitals, the traditional lodging place for pilgrims, could only provide lodging for a handful of people at a time, and secondly, shorter pilgrimages would not interfere with the agricultural calendar and thus did not pose a risk to the livelihood of the community. 7  The popularity and longevity of both sites is witnessed by the fact that they continue to attract a significant following to the present day. 8  The Florentine diarist and apothecary Luca Landucci recorded seventeen separate occa-

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Figure 18.1. Santa Maria dell’Impruneta. Photo: Cecilia Hewlett.

larly called upon to protect the city against plague, famine, and war. When summoned the Madonna was brought in solemn procession from Impruneta, gathering the faithful as it moved through the countryside, and by the time it entered Florence, both the city and countryside would be swept up in the devotions. In those days [1433] there was a lot of rain and the Tavola of Our Lady of Santa Maria Impruneta came to us with many other relics and devotions, and every morning the people joined behind the procession, men and women in great numbers, crying peace and mercy, singing psalms and prayers, and the most prominent citizens were present, and every morning the numbers of citizens and women grew until on the ninth day it was estimated that more than 36,000 people were involved, and it was a great and devout occasion.9 sions during his lifetime when the image was processed into the city. Landucci, A Florentine Diary, trans. by de Rosen Jervis, p. 37. 9  A number of contemporary chroniclers describe these occasions and are cited in Casotti, Memorie istoriche, for example, p. 116: ‘Ne detti tempi [1432] […] fù grande aqquazone e vennici la Tavola della Nostra Donna da S. Maria Impruneta con molte reliquie, e divozioni andando ogni mattina il Popolo di drieto la Procissione uomini e Femmine in grande numero, gridando pace, e misericordia, cantando salmi, e orazioni assai, e migliori Cittadini della Città et ogni

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The process by which this image became arguably the most popular of all the miraculous images in Tuscany is easy to interpret as yet another example of a dominant political regime appropriating the symbols of its less powerful neighbours. According to this reading, the religious and political leaders of Florence gradually appropriated not only the spiritual power of this miraculous image, but also its social and cultural identity. In his seminal article on the sacred image in Florentine religious experience, Richard Trexler proposed just that when he argued that the Madonna of Impruneta was only active once she left her home in Impruneta and entered the city walls of Florence. Trexler writes, ‘No rooted tradition of miracles was attached to her temple. This was expressed iconographically by her being veiled while there. Her potential was stored, that is, until her help was needed in Florence’.10 This interpretation is one that clearly sits so comfortably with the predominant narrative that it has overshadowed any notion of the extent to which the miraculous image of Impruneta was embedded in its own local culture.11 Contrary to Trexler’s claims, there was a powerful local tradition of miracles associated with this image, a tradition that predated any links with the city and was well established in the local community. The tavola of Santa Maria in Impruneta was active at home long before it was first processed into the city of Florence, and it was regularly unveiled for the benefit of the local communities and those that had travelled to Impruneta, otherwise it would never have been brought into the city in the first place.12 The first written account of the discovery of the image is recorded in the fourteenth-century capitoli of the confraternity of the Madonna dell’Impruneta. According to this account, the image was stumbled upon three centuries earlier, when the local community had decided to build a new parish church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.13 It seems that the matttina crebbe el Numero di Cittadini e di Donne di andare a questo modo per tanto che il di nono si stimò che più di 36000 persone vi fussi che fù ima gran cosa e molto divota’. 10  Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience’, p. 11. 11  The only exception I have come across is an acknowledgement by Megan Holmes of the existance of a local cult, in her new monograph which I came across after completing this article: The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence, pp. 126–28. 12  1375 Confraternal capitoli record that the image was unveiled for devotion once a month and on the second Sunday in May. Capitoli della Compagnia della Madonna dell’Impruneta, ed. by Guasti. 13  The extensive alterations to the image undertaken over the centuries have made it all but impossible to date the image stylistically. Franco Cardini argues that the cult of Impruneta may well have taken the place of an even more ancient Etruscan cult. See Cardini, ‘L’immagine, il culto, la leggenda’, pp. 83–85.

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chosen site did not meet with divine approval, and every night the construction progress that had been made during the preceding day collapsed and building would have to begin from scratch. Their efforts frustrated, the community decided to put the decision into divine hands by roping two oxen to a cart that contained building materials. The oxen were left to wander freely, and the place that they chose to stop would be the location for the new church. When they began digging at this new site, a cry was heard from below the ground, and the image of the Virgin was discovered buried beneath the earth.14 This was the sign they were looking for, and divine approval for the new location of the parish church was confirmed. The rather haphazard discovery of the image was typical of contemporary miracle stories — miraculous images were nearly always discovered by commoners, often by children or youths, who were inspired by God to take the path that led them to the discovery of the image. The local tradition affirms that immediately after the image’s discovery, the healing miracles began. Those who were present at the moment when the tavola was unearthed were transformed in spirit: the proud became humble, the quicktempered benign, the arrogant consultative, and those full of hate became willing to forgive.15 Then, as word spread of her powers, the sick in body and mind began to flock to the image, and all were healed by her grace.16 Local devotion to the cult grew steadily, and by the late fourteenth century Santa Maria in Impruneta was attracting a significant number of pilgrims from the surrounding area. While a lack of surviving sources has meant that historians have not been able to reconstruct in any detail the development of the cult during this period, David Herlihy has argued that the extraordinary wealth of the collegiate church at this time (only the Archbishop of Florence had a greater income) was compelling evidence of the early popularity of this miracle site.17 14 

Franco del Grosso argues that the fact that the image was found underground in the dirt is a significant association for a town that was famous for the production of terracotta, i.e. that it sacralized the primary industry of the region. See del Grosso, ‘Origine del culto e rapporti con Firenze’. The church that was subsequently built on this site was consecrated in 1060. See Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, i, 322. 15  Capitoli della Compagnia della Madonna dell’Impruneta, ed. by Guasti, p. 11: ‘I superbi divenenero umili, e li iracundi begnini, e le protervi si concertriono, e li odiosi divennono perdonatori’. For a discussion of an alternative foundation story associated with the cult, see Nardi, ‘La “Leggenda riccardiana” di Santa Maria all’Impruneta’. 16  Capitoli della Compagnia della Madonna dell’Impruneta, ed. by Guasti, pp. 11–12. ‘Ove quivi furono menati e condotti infermi et imbecelli, zoppi et attrati, mutoli e sordi e d’ogni generazione infertadi; I quali tutti quivi reverentamente raccomandati, e fedelmente raccomandati, ricevevano sanitade’. 17  Herlihy, ‘Santa Maria Impruneta’, p. 244.

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The image began its rise to fame in earnest, however, only during the early decades of the fourteenth century. It was then that we find the first written reference to the Virgin’s ability to influence the weather, miraculously stopping the rain when it was processed around the piazza of Impruneta.18 In recognition of this miracle, the governors of the confraternity immediately ordered that all surrounding parishes come in procession to Santa Maria di Impruneta to pay homage to the image.19 The implicit message of the parish’s pre-eminence in the district would not have been lost on contemporaries, nor was there any attempt to mask it. The capitoli of the confraternity explicitly state that the income generated from these visits from surrounding parishes was to be used to safeguard and protect the emerging cult and to ensure that the church was decorated in a manner that was fitting for the honour of God and Our Lady.20 This was taken even further when later in the same capitoli the confraternity declared (with the approval of their parish priest) that all the gifts left to the parish were to be managed by that same confraternity, and funds were to be spent according to the following priorities.21 In the first place, funds were to be used to decorate the chapel housing the image and then to be spent on the beautification of the church more generally. Next money was to be given to the poor of the community, but not before they were selected under careful criteria, audited for their worthiness, and meticulously recorded in confraternal registers. Third on the list was the feast day of the Annunciation of Mary in May, a festival that attracted thousands of pilgrims to the town from throughout the territory and was the most important feast day of their calendar. In addition to devotional processions, preaching, Masses, and feasting, the gathering of such a large number of people in one place no doubt led to less honourable occupations as well (Figure 18.2).22 The parish in particular, but also the whole town, would have profited handsomely from this influx of people requiring hospitality. Through the careful management of their funds, the confraternity was able to dramatically increase the reputation of the cult and subsequently its num18 

Cited in Bianchini, L’Impruneta Paese e Santuario, p. 85. Bianchini, L’Impruneta Paese e Santuario, p. 85. 20  Capitoli della Compagnia della Madonna dell’Impruneta, ed. by Guasti, pp. 25–26: ‘Acciò che la incominciata devozione avesse perseveranzia et acciò che la detta pieve fosse proveduta di molti ornamenti, a onore e reverenzia di Dio e di sua Madre, e della detta tavola’. 21  Including wax, cloth, and monetary gifts. Capitoli della Compagnia della Madonna dell’Impruneta, ed. by Guasti, p. 27. 22  Jacques Callot’s engraving The Fair at Impruneta, 1620, gives a powerful sense of the capacity of the main piazza of Impruneta. 19 

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Figure 18.2. Jacques Callot, The Fair at Impruneta, 1620, Etching, Harvard Museums/ Fogg Museum, Gift of William Bentinck Smith, M 19877. Photo: Imagine Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

bers of followers. It is significant that they chose to do so in such a consolidated and determined way during a particularly delicate moment for Impruneta. In fact the timing for the dramatic increase in the public profile of the image has been linked by historian Franco del Grosso to the fact that the town of Impruneta had been recently bypassed by an upgrade of the road systems in the region. Impruneta had previously been on one of the main routes between Rome and Florence, but the new route saw the Via Cassia Imperiale turning towards Val d’Ema after Cintoia, effectively cutting Impruneta off from its previous access to the passing trade of merchants and traders.23 In this context it is easy to understand the pressing need of the town to find an alternative source of income to avoid its complete demise into obscurity.24

23 

Del Grosso, ‘Origine del culto e rapporti con Firenze’, pp. 38–39. There is little doubt that contemporaries were well aware of the financial benefits that came with the discovery of miraculous images, and both church and government went to considerable lengths to establish the legitimacy of such claims — including the tradition of notarizing miracles. 24 

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The local fame of the cult continued to grow in profile until, in 1354, the image was called upon for the first time by the city of Florence (Figure 18.3). 25 At the time of the summons, the city of Florence was suffering from an extreme drought and had already attempted to call upon two urban relics to intercede on their behalf: the arm of San Filippo and the head of San Zanobi. The Madonna del Impruneta might never have risen to fame in the city at all if Florence’s usual protectors had not already failed in the task. On this occasion the Madonna was able to succeed where San Zanobi Figure 18.3. Madonna col bambino. and San Filippo had not, bringImpruneta, S. Maria. ing with her the much-anticipated © 2015 Foto Scala Firenze. rain, which led her to be called upon repeatedly over the coming decades.26 The impact of her rising fame in both the city and territory meant that by the second half of the fourteenth century, popular devotion to the cult of this miraculous image had grown so great that a new church had to be built in Impruneta to accommodate the visiting pilgrims.27 A survey of the Tuscan confraternal statutes reveals just how popular Santa Maria di Impruneta was as a pilgrimage destination, with the tavola of Impruneta being named more times than any other site in the Florentine territory.28 In addition to rural pilgrimages, many urban pilgrims made the journey 25 

This event is recounted by Villani and cited in Casotti, Memorie istoriche, p. 71, and del Grosso, ‘Origine del culto e rapporti con Firenze’, p. 58. 26  Over the next two centuries the image was brought within the city walls on seventyone separate occasions between 1354 and 1540. Del Grosso, ‘Origine del culto e rapporti con Firenze’, p. 54. 27  In the wake of the Black Death, this new construction was certainly not needed for the devotion of the town’s local population. 28  In my survey of rural confraternal statutes, Santa Maria del Impruneta was by far the most often cited destination for rural communities undertaking pilgrimages.

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to visit the Madonna in situ, rather than waiting for her next visit to Florence.29 This was true for individual pilgrims, as well as a number of urban confraternities and festive brigades or potenze.30 The cult was given an extra boost when Pope Sixtus IV issued a papal bull granting forty years indulgence to anyone who contributed to the construction and maintenance of the new church building, as well as to those visiting the miraculous image on the festivals of the Assumption and the Nativity of Mary.31 Every translation of the image to Florence meant additional income for the confraternity. The offerings of the community to the image would be collected along the processional path and be given pride of place in the associated ceremonies. This public display of gifts would have been an added motivation for generosity on the part of the faithful.32 With journeys being made on average every two and a half years between 1354 and 1540, these gifts added up to no trifling sum. Casotti records that when the image was brought to Florence in 1547 gifts were made to the confraternity of precious cloth brocaded in gold, large quantities of wax, and coins: ‘I won’t tell you the amount of money that was given because I don’t know, but there were seventy chests to receive the offerings of the people and all of them were full’.33 Two years later, referring to the account books of the confraternity of Impruneta, Casotti recounts that as a result of the most recent journey to Florence, 3000 libre of wax were donated.34 Hand in hand with the material benefits associated with the extreme popularity of the miraculous image were the less tangible advantages of status and legitimacy that flowed to the town.35 The presence of such a powerful image in their midst sanctified the very ground that Impruneta had been built on and 29 

For example, Ronald Weissman notes that on the occasion of the feast of Impruneta, parish confraternies in Florence did a neighbourhood door knock to collect gifts. See Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence, p. 215. 30  For a discussion of potenze pilgrimages, see Rosenthal, Kings of the Street, pp. 187–206. 31  Casotti, Memorie istoriche, p. 144. 32  For references to these pilgrimages and gifts, see Bianchini, L’Impruneta Paese e Santu­ ario. The most precious and valuable of these gifts are preserved in the museum of Santa Maria Impruneta. 33  Casotti, Memorie istoriche, p. 168: ‘De’danari non dico il numero perchè non lo so, benchè 70 casette erano quelle che accattavano et erano tutte piene’. 34  Casotti, Memorie istoriche, p. 169. 35  The procession began with the most humble participants, the orphans and children’s confraternities, and moved through the ranks of the religious orders, priests, guilds, and government. For a detailed description of the procession, see Casotti, Memorie istoriche, pp. 197–200.

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awarded the town, her communal council, parish, and confraternity, a visible authority they would otherwise not have possessed. This authority was recognized in a very public way during the processions that brought the image into Florence, which saw the confraternity and the clergy of Impruneta taking pride of place immediately after the Archbishop of Florence and just before the priors. We know that decisions regarding the processional order for public events were taken very seriously indeed — this was a highly contested space. To occupy pride of place in such a significant urban ritual was an extremely important statement about the position of Impruneta in the hierarchy of the territory. But this was more than just a statement about social hierarchy. As Charles Zika has argued in the context of Germany, processional routes marked out territories and defined political power in a very active sense.36 By processing to Florence with the image, Impruneta was linking itself powerfully with the city and by doing so also strengthened its political and economic ties. The rise to prominence of the Madonna di Impruneta and its ability to attract large numbers of pilgrims over a period spanning more than two centuries was due in large measure to the vibrancy of the local cult and the good offices of its parish. The image may have served an important spiritual and political role for the city of Florence, but this should not invalidate or obscure its place at the centre of a powerful local cult — with all the material and political advantages that went along with this. Shrewd local management saw the insertion of a strong rural tradition into an already crowded urban religious landscape. The success of the parish and the community in achieving this goal was to guarantee the financial and political security of the region for many years to come, and notably it is the local cult, not its association with Florence, which persists to this day.37

Santa Maria delle Carceri, Prato Just as rural miracle sites such as the Madonna of Impruneta had the potential to attract urban pilgrims in their thousands, the success of urban miracle sites was often closely linked to their ability to inspire the devotion of those liv36 

See Zika, ‘Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages’. pp. 40–44. Casotti, Memorie istoriche, p. 169: ‘Ma non cessarono per questo i Fiorentini di ricorrere a lei ne’loro bisogni, non solo privatamente visitandola nel suo Santuario, ma facendola solennemente portare su i Monti circonvicini, ed allora concorrendo quasi tutta la città a corteggiarla ed onorarla’. 37 

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Figure 18.4. Santa Maria delle Carceri. Photo: Cecilia Hewlett.

ing outside of the city walls. The mobilization of rural pilgrims could make or break a cultic site, temporarily bringing thousands of devotees into the city thus legitimating it in the eyes of the local populace, and spreading the news of its miracles throughout the territory. With dozens of devotional sites competing for the attention of the faithful, public displays of devotion by rural communities could play an important role in shaping the devotional landscape of early modern Tuscany. This was powerfully demonstrated during the Bianchi processions at the end of the fourteenth century, and it was played out time and time again with each new discovery of a miraculous image.38 While the church of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato (Figure 18.4) is more commonly associated with the interference of Lorenzo de’ Medici in its architectural programme than its faithful following of rural devotees, the church owes an equal or greater debt to the thousands of rural pilgrims who responded to the 38 

For example, see Luca Domenici’s list of rural communities processing 8 September 1399 cited in Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399, p. 101.

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Figure 18.5. Miraculous image of Santa Maria delle Carceri. Photo: Fototeca Ufficio Beni Culturali Diocesi di Prato.

call of the miraculous image housed within its walls. Without their spontaneous outpouring of devotion for the miraculous image, the church may never have been built at all. Details surrounding the construction of the church of Santa Maria delle Carceri are well known, largely due to the involvement of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the selection of its architect, Guiliano da San Gallo.39 Built to house a Marian miracle that first appeared in 1484, the church is now widely considered to be a masterpiece of fifteenth-century centralized churches.40 Yet little has been written about the early years of the cult’s development, and what led the image to become such a well-known and popular site in the first place. Like many other contemporary miracle cults, the miraculous properties of the image of Santa Maria delle Carceri (Figure 18.5) were first revealed to a per39  Many of the archival sources concerning the commissioning of the architects and the subsequent details of the works carried out have been published in Morselli and Corti, La Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato. For a detailed discussion of Lorenzo de Medici’s involvement in Prato, see Kent, ‘Prato and Lorenzo de’Medici’. Bill Kent first alerted me to the existence of the accounts of the miracles and processions associated with the image. 40  See Davies, ‘The Madonna delle Carceri in Prato’ and ‘The Early History of S. Maria delle Carceri in Prato’. Megan Holmes also discusses the emergence of centralized churches in Florentine subject territories, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence, pp. 115–17.

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son of modest birth.41 A young boy of eight, Jacopino, was playing in the ruins of the prison chasing a cricket when the image of the Madonna detached herself from the fresco on the wall, placed her son on the ground, and descended underground into the prison vaults. The most detailed account we have of this foundation story is that written by the Pratese lawyer Giuliano di Francesco Guizzelmi, in which we read that Jacopino reacted to his vision by running straight to his mother and recounting what had occurred.42 Responding as you would expect a mother to do, she gave him something to eat, told him to stop making up stories, and sent him back to school. Instead of obeying her, Jacopino returned to the site and this time the Madonna was surrounded by lights, so he returned to his mother who once again tried to send him back to school. Running away again, Jacopino returned a third time to the image and stood transfixed until a crowd gathered around him to see what was going on. The account goes on to tell us that others in the crowd began to see transformations and visions. On the very next morning the first healing miracle had occurred: Ridolfo Melanesi from Prato who suffered from crippling sciatica pain and couldn’t walk without crutches had visited the image the night before and by morning was completely cured.43 Momentum built up quickly. After the initial foundation story in Guizzelmi’s account, he describes a further ninety-three miracles performed by the image, miracles that span the first three years of the life of the cult. Robert Maniura has written a number of articles examining these stories in terms of what they reveal about the nature of the relationship between cult image and devotee, but I believe there is an even more fundamental question to be asked about the relationship between the city and devotee.44 When we look at who the protagonists of the miracle stories were it is immediately striking that only nine of the ninety-four involve individuals from Prato; eleven miracles involve citizens of Florence, two citizens of Pistoia, and the remaining seventy-two miracles occur to individuals living in small settlements in the countryside surrounding Prato, 41 

Megan Holmes argues that the images associated with miracle cults share a number of important characteristics: they are located in easily accessible positions, are made of less expensive materials by lesser known artists, and were often discovered by the most humble — children, women, and peasants. All these factors contributed to miraculous images being accessible in a way that other sites of spiritual significance were not. They spoke to the people in intimate and compelling ways. 42  Guizzelmi, ‘Historia della apparitione’. 43  Guizzelmi, ‘Historia della apparitione’, p. 138. 44  See Maniura, ‘Image and Relic in the Cult of Our Lady of Prato’, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, and ‘The Images and Miracles of Santa Maria delle Carceri’.

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Florence, Pistoia, and in the Sienese Maremma. For a cult that was, and continues to be, so strongly associated with the city, it is more than a little unexpected that the Madonna of Santa Maria delle Carceri appears to have looked more favourably on her rural petitioners than on citizens of Prato. News of the image apparently travelled quickly through the countryside, and on day two of the cult a man from Coiano was healed.45 Five days after that a man from Abetone, whose leg had been crushed when a carriage fell on him, was cured, and two days after that a girl from Pescia was freed from a urinary tract infection.46 If Guizzelmi’s account gives the impression that Santa Maria delle Carceri spoke to the rural populace in a particular way, this picture is further reinforced if we look at a separate but related account of the miracle. This second account is believed to precede that of Guizzelmi and was written by an anonymous scribe who appears to have copied out the records of the candle seller of the oratory. It also begins with an account of the discovery of the site by Jacopino and then moves on to miracles stories, in this case 180 of them.47 There is some overlap between the two accounts, and about half the stories in Guizzelmi’s account also appear here. This second version covers a more limited time frame, and this time only fifteen of the 180 miracles recorded involved inhabitants of Prato. And once again, the overwhelming majority of miracles involved individuals from rural communities, some as far away as the contado of Bologna. Where Guizzelmi’s version ended with the miracle stories, this account goes on to describe a series of processions made to venerate the miraculous image (Figure 18.6).48 While we obviously cannot verify the author’s account of the miracles that took place, we do know that the pilgrimages of the kind described were more than just a rhetorical invention of its author because their coming was also faithfully recorded in the giornali kept by the church’s opera. These pilgrimages were also predominately rural in composition, and between 1484 and 1487 fifty-four rural communities made processions to the site of the miraculous image.49 The large number of communities involved is extremely important for our understanding of the emergence of the cult, because over half of these pilgrimages occurred well before work on the construction of the church itself had begun.50 45 

Guizzelmi, ‘Historia della apparitione’, p. 138. Guizzelmi, ‘Historia della apparitione’, p. 138. 47  See ‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti. 48  ‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti, pp. 126–32. 49  See ASPo, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico Carceri, 2279 for records spanning 1497–1514. 50  Guiliano da Sangallo signed a contract with the comune to build the church on 9 October 1485. Davies, ‘The Madonna delle Carceri in Prato’, p. 3. 46 

354 Cecilia Hewlett Figure 18.6. Miraculous image of Santa Maria delle Carceri, detail. Photo: Fototeca Ufficio Beni Culturali Diocesi di Prato.

Community pilgrimages took considerable planning and would have made for quite a spectacle as they wound their way through the Florentine countryside. The largest were from the nearby communities of Campi, Sesto, and Castello, and each of these numbered over two thousand participants.51 The majority of communities coming in pilgrimage were able to make the journey there and back in one day, but some had to find lodgings for the night before returning home.52 The processions themselves were highly theatrical affairs — usually beginning with the young unmarried girls of the community, who are described in the account as coming barefoot, walking in pairs, and dressed in white, with garlands of olive leaves on their head.53 Then the confraternities of the community would follow, sometimes accompanied by a homemade float that might hold painted depictions of biblical figures.54 More often than not, these floats had real people dressed 51 

‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti, pp. 127, 129, and 131. The pilgrimage group coming from Scarperia stayed the night on the property of Lorenzino di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, just outside of Prato in the parish of San Michele a Castello. Scarperia had ancient and abiding ties with the Medici family, and Lorenzino also had significant landholdings in the Mugello. ‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti, p. 131. 53  ‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti, p. 127. 54  Homemade floats were used in seven of the rural processions described in the second account of the miracle; see ‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti. The communities processing 52 

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as saints and angels singing laude to the Madonna.55 The rest of the men and women of the community would follow, carrying candles and their votive offerings for the Madonna. These processions were usually undertaken on feast days and confined to the warmer months of the year when the weather was favourable, and we know from the surviving sources that any one Sunday may have seen three or more communities arriving at the gates of Prato. The arrival of hundreds and often thousands of contadini at any one time would have made a significant impression on the consciousness of the Pratesi and could not have helped but had an impact on how seriously the cult was taken by local authorities. These processions continued for many decades after the emergence of the cult, and while there was some loss of momentum with the passing of time, there were still an average of six processions a year making their way into Prato from the surrounding rural communities well into the sixteenth century.56 Rural pilgrimages such as these were a significant source of income for the parish; as we saw in the case of Santa Maria d’Impruneta no pilgrims ever made the journey empty handed. The most common gifts were wax and coins, but some of the wealthier communities left candlesticks, chalices, vestments, and altar cloths. The parish of Valdibura brought the more unusual gift of a bird in an iron cage.57 Others gave more traditional offerings, such as the community of Carmignano who processed to Prato carrying three life-sized wax images of a father and two sons who had been beneficiaries of one of the Madonna’s healing miracles.58 In addition to these community pilgrimages, Santa Maria delle Carceri attracted thousands of acts of individual devotion. Volume after volume of giornali kept by the opera of the church, and now housed in Archivio di Stato di Prato, meticulously recorded even the most humble of these gifts. A staggering 271 volumes provide an extremely moving picture of the thousands of men — and even greater numbers of women — who came to venerate the with floats were Aiuolo, Campi, Carmignano, Sesto, Mezzana, San Giusto, and Signa. 55  Figures represented included Saint Peter, Jacopino (the boy who discovered the miracle), Saint Stefano, San Martino, San Giusto, and numerous singing angels. ‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti. 56  See ASPo, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico Carceri, 2279. 57  No doubt a reference to the bird held in the hand of the Christ child, this particular bird became the stuff of legends when, after escaping, it refused to leave the side of the Madonna. After eight days of freedom, it allowed itself to be recaptured and put back into the cage. ‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti, p. 129. 58  ‘Miracoli et gratie’, ed. by Benvenuti, p. 132.

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image of the Madonna delle Carceri offering her whatever they had to give: food, animals, cloth, and even their own clothes.59 For decades after the birth of the cult, hardly a day went by without a gift being left at the altar. The opera quickly developed its own systems for processing such large numbers of gifts, quantities that far outweighed their capacity to use them. A separate cassone for bread was placed in the church, and the bread sold on by a local citizen under a prearranged agreement. Other perishable items were treated in much the same way, being sold on to private citizens who were usually named in the giornali. Non-food items were handed over to the sagrestano, and a decision was made whether to preserve the gift in the sacristy or sell it. Excess cloth was sold at the market or to itinerant saleswomen and the money given to the spedale di misericordia.60 The overwhelming quantity of evidence regarding the devotion of rural and urban poor to Santa Maria delle Carceri stands testament to the pivotal role played by the popolo in the creation of this cult. The immediate mobilization of whole rural communities in pilgrimage to the site made it impossible for local authorities not to acknowledge the cult’s legitimacy. The people’s continued and fervent devotion to the miraculous Madonna in Prato reflected their sense of ownership of it, and the pride of place held by contadini in the miracle accounts associated with the image recognized their strong identification with the image. The cult of Santa Maria delle Carceri did not only speak to the rural populace in a particular way, but it was a product of the people in the most fundamental sense. With over one hundred separate Marian sites competing for the hearts and minds of the people, the success and longevity of the cults of Santa Maria delle Carceri and Santa Maria di Impruneta owed a great deal to the rural communities that supported them. In turn, the ways in which these communities expressed their devotion through pilgrimage provides a powerful insight into their ability to shape and influence what has predominately been understood as an urban devotional landscape.

59 

Records of gifts are scattered through these giornali, which also contain records of the entrate e uscite of the parish: ASPo, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico Carceri, 2004–2275. An additional two volumes have survived that are dedicated exclusively to listing gifts left at the altar: ASPo, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico Carceri, 2279 and 2280. The first volume covers the period 1497–1505 and the second 1525–45. 60  ASPo, Comune, Opere di Chiese, conventi, compagnie, 57, fol. 6r.

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Capitoli delle Compagnie Religiose Soppresse, 24, 48, 54, 70, 71, 77, 111, 131, 136, 157, 182, 198, 207, 223, 269, 270, 307, 318, 324, 328, 356, 357, 358, 393, 395, 419, 444, 451, 465, 475, 477, 511, 512, 520, 523, 527, 540, 548, 576, 601, 628, 629, 646, 667, 671, 714, 734, 736, 744, 755, 795, 803, 818, 830, 831, 844, 858, 901 Archivio di Stato Prato, Comune, Opere di Chiese, conventi, compagnie, 57 Archivio di Stato Prato, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico Carceri, 2004–2275, 2279, 2280

Primary Sources Capitoli della Compagnia della Madonna dell’Impruneta, ed. by Cesare Guasti (Firenze: Cecchi, 1866) Giuliano di Francesco Guizzelmi, ‘Historia della apparitione et altri miracoli di madonna Sancta Maria del Carcere di Prato’, Prato, Biblioteca Roncioniana, MS 87, fols 65v–67r; reprinted in Santa Maria delle Carceri a Prato, Miracoli e devozione in un santuario tos­ cano del Rinascimento, ed. by Anna Benvenuti (Firenze: Mandragora, 2005), pp. 135–53 Landucci, Luca, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, trans. by Alice de Rosen Jervis (London: Dent, 1927) Magni, Girolamo, Il Diario del Pievano Girolamo Magni: Vita, devozione e arte sulla mon­ tagna pistoiese nel Cinquecento, ed. by Franca Falletti (Pisa: Pacini, 1999) ‘Miracoli et gratie della gloriosa Madre Vergine Maria delle Charceri di Prato, l’anno 1484’, Prato, Biblioteca Roncioniana, MS 86; reprinted in Santa Maria Carceri a Prato, Miracoli e devozione in un santuario toscano del Rinascimento, ed. by Anna Benvenuti (Firenze: Mandragora, 2005), pp. 104–34 Sacchetti, Franco, La Battaglia delle belle donne; Le Lettere; Le sposizione di Vangeli (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1938)

Secondary Works Benvenuti, Anna, and Isabella Gagliardi, ‘Santuari in Toscana’, in Per una storia dei san­ tuari cristiani d’Italia: approcci regionali, ed. by Giorgio Cracco (Bologna: il Mulino, 2002), pp. 265–310 Bianchini, Rafaello, L’Impruneta Paese e Santuario (Firenze: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1932) Bornstein, Daniel, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medi­eval Italy (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Cardini, Franco, ‘L’immagine, il culto, la leggenda’, in Impruneta una pieve, un paese: Cultura parrochia e società nella campagna toscana, atti del convegno di studi, Impruneta, 20–22 maggio 1982 (Firenze: Salimbeni, 1983), pp. 79–88 Casotti, Giovanni Battista, Memorie istoriche della miracolosa immagine di Maria vergine dell’Impruneta, raccolte da Giovambatista Casotti (Firenze, 1714)

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Davidsohn, Roberto, Storia di Firenze, vol. i (Firenze: Sansoni, 1956) Davies, Paul, ‘The Early History of S. Maria delle Carceri in Prato’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 54 (1995), 326–35 —— , ‘The Madonna delle Carceri in Prato and Italian Renaissance Pilgrimage Archi­ tecture’, Architectural History, 36 (1993), 1–18 del Grosso, Franco, ‘Origine del culto e rapporti con Firenze’, in Impruneta una pieve, un paese: cultura parocchia e società nella campagna toscana, atti del convegno di studi, Impruneta, 20–22 maggio 1982 (Firenze: Salimbeni, 1983), pp. 33–77 Herlihy, David, ‘Santa Maria Impruneta: A Rural Commune in the late Middle Ages’ in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Nicolai Rubinstein (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), pp. 242–75 Holmes, Megan, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2013) —— , ‘Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence’, Art History, 34 (2011), 432–65 Kent, F.  W., ‘Prato and Lorenzo de’Medici’, in Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’Medici and Renaissance Florence, ed. by Carolyn James (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 281–98 Maniura, Robert, ‘Image and Relic in the Cult of Our Lady of Prato’, in Images, Relics and Devotional Practices in Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by Sally J. Cornelison and Scott B. Montgomery (Tempe: Arizona Centre for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), pp. 193–212 —— , ‘The Images and Miracles of Santa Maria delle Carceri’, in The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2004), pp. 81–95 —— , ‘Persuading the Absent Saint: Image and Performance in Marian Devotion’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (Spring 2009), 629–54 Morselli, Piero, and Gino Corti, La Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato: contrib­ uto fi Lorenzo de’Medici e Giuliano da San Gallo alla progettazione (Firenze: Società Pratese di Storia Patria, 1982) Nardi, Carlo ‘La “Leggenda riccardiana” di Santa Maria all’Impruneta: un anonimo oppo­ si­tore del piovano Stefano alla fine del Trecento?’, Archivio storico italiano, 149 (1991), 503–51 Oefelein, Cornelia, ‘The Signs — and Bells — of Mass Pilgrimage’, in Mobs: An Inter­ disciplinary Inquiry, ed. by Nancy van Deusen and Leonard Michael Koff (Leiden, Brill, 2011) pp. 231–49 Rosenthal, David, Kings of the Street: Power, Community, and Ritual in Renaissance Flor­ ence (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015) Stopani, Renato, Le Vie di pellegrinaggio del Medioevo: gli itinerari per Roma, Gerusalemme, Compostella (Firenze: Le Lettere Editore, 1991) Trexler, Richard, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image’, Studies in the Re­ naissance, 19 (1972), 7–41 Weissman, Ronald, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982) Zika, Charles, ‘Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth Century Germany?’, Past and Present, no. 118 (February 1988), 25–64

The Tailor’s Song: Notes from the ­ round Savonarolan Underg in Grand-Ducal Florence David Rosenthal

I

am moved by zeal for the honour of my poor fatherland, the city of Florence, which has fallen into such misery that one hears nothing except grievances, about the vileness of men and every kind of evil-doer’, declared Bastiano Arditi in July 1575. Florence, Arditi continued, had become a wood full of birds of prey. It was teeming with pimps and spies. Corruption was rife. The justice system was ruled by kickbacks to the duke’s wicked secretaries. Artisans could not afford basic grain with their meagre earnings, and outside the city gates the contado was starving. Poor women were forced to become whores, while their wealthy counterparts paraded around shamelessly in coaches and debauched male youth gave themselves over to the abominable sin of sodomy. ‘If the people of Florence keep going like this,’ he warned, ‘then you would imagine that the scourge has to come soon.’1 With jeremiads such as this, it is in some ways surprising that neither Arditi nor his ‘Diary of Florence and other parts of Christendom’, first published 1 

Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 50.

David Rosenthal ([email protected]) is the author of Kings of the Street: Power, Ritual and Community in Renaissance Florence (Turnhout, 2015). His research deals with artisan culture, class and gender relations, public festivity, and more recently taverns and drinking in early modern Italy. He is also the co-creator of a walking app for Renaissance Florence (http://hiddenflorence.org). He is currently a teaching fellow in early modern Italian history at the University of Edinburgh.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 359–372 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109714

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in 1970, have been subject to much analysis.2 Arditi, a tailor from the quarter of Santo Spirito, is a rare artisan voice from grand-ducal Florence, and a remarkable one at that. Aged seventy-one, he started writing on 1 June 1574, weeks after the death of Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, and for the next five years he kept what in effect was a secret chronicle of Florence under Cosimo’s successor, Francesco, at whose door he laid much of the blame for the city’s moral implosion. Intriguing as that is, however, it has been hard to know how to locate Arditi. Smacking of a past informed by the Savonarolan movement, though he never mentions the friar himself, his millenarian yearnings seem to turn him into a rather isolated figure, an old man nursing a bygone era’s hunger for the apocalypse in the privacy, and relative safety, of his home. The aim of this chapter is to reconnect Arditi to the Florence of his time: to link his critical voice to a Savonarola-inspired underground and to suggest that listening carefully to that voice deepens our understanding of the politics of the Tridentine city. I have Bill Kent to thank for the crucial piece of new evidence here. Many years ago, when I first looked at this diary, Bill alerted me to a passing reference to a certain Bastiano di Tomasso Arditi he had spotted in Blake Wilson’s pioneering Music and Merchants. Arditi, it turned out, was not only a tailor, but a singer, and one who could be tied to those who were still carrying a torch for the radical Dominican friar decades after the demise of the republic. Sparked off as it is by Bill’s typically generous sharing of leads and sources, Arditi seems like a good subject for a collection that exists to carry forward the scholarship he fostered. What Wilson noted in his study of lay devotional singing in Renaissance Florence was that Arditi was active in two confraternities. Most importantly here, he was the central figure in a liturgical choir that met in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella, possibly in the sacristy. This was the choir of the ancient and prestigious laudesi company of St Peter Martyr, which had been run by the convent’s friars since the early sixteenth century. Arditi made his first appearance in St Peter Martyr in 1545, as part of small group of salaried singers. In 1549 he became the company’s choirmaster, a position he held until 1580, after he stopped writing his diary and probably not long before he died.3 In short, at the time he was keeping his chronicle, Arditi had a relationship with Santa 2 

The diary has been used numerous times as evidence of the privations of the 1570s, but it has almost never been the focus of research itself. The only examination of the text or the diarist is by Roberto Cantagalli in his introduction to his critical edition of the diary: Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, pp. v–xxx. 3  Wilson, Music and Merchants, pp. 109–18.

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Maria Novella and its friars that had been ongoing for decades. In fact, in one of only two instances when he named a personal contact as a source for events in the city it was a friar from the convent, who told him about a case of diabolical possession at the foundling hospital of the Innocenti. ‘I, Bastiano, heard this from Bother Zanobi, a friar at Santa Maria Novella, who went there with the relics of St Vincent to see if he could draw those spirits from their bodies.’4 This link with Santa Maria Novella places Arditi on the inside of Savonarolan networks that existed throughout the sixteenth century in Florence. Of course, Santa Maria Novella was never the primary locus of the movement, that was the Observant Dominican convent of San Marco. Nonetheless the Conventuals loom large in the history of the Piagnoni. At the start of the Last Republic in 1527, when Arditi was a giovane in his twenties, Santa Maria Novella was hosting a group called the Capi Rossi, Piagnoni artisans who, in order to cover up their activities, had insinuated themselves into two lay confraternities that met there. Their leader, a linen carder, claimed the gift of prophecy and started to go public with his millennial message, gaining recognition from the newly restored popular government — which, having named Christ king of Florence, was itself becoming ever more convinced of its divine mission. The Capi Rossi survived the fall of the republic in 1530, again meeting in secret at Santa Maria Novella and indeed drawing several friars into their commemoration of the ‘sainted’ Savonarola. Following the murder of Florence’s first duke, Alessandro de’ Medici, in 1537, they once again became more open about the imminent scourge and its connection to a revitalized popular government. This led to their discovery and suppression by Cosimo I in 1538.5 Though we still know too little about it, the veneration of Savonarola in Florence did not die out in the early duchy. The leaders of the Capi Rossi were punished in 1538, but Cosimo dealt with the entire episode gingerly; they were vilified as madmen and imprisoned, rather than executed, and trials against them avoided references to Savonarola. Furthermore, Santa Maria Novella’s friars successfully stonewalled attempts by Cosimo I to widen his investigations into the convent and its confraternities. Seven years later, when Arditi is first recorded as a lauds singer at Santa Maria Novella, Cosimo I ousted all the friars at San Marco after one of them was discovered to have written a book predict4  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 124. The second occasion, information from his brother-in-law, is noted below. 5  Polizzotto, ‘Confraternities, Conventicles and Political Dissent’; Polizzotto, The Elect Nation, pp. 334–50, 420–30.

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ing God’s wrath on a duke who had no right to rule. But Cosimo was resisted by Pope Paul III and forced to readmit the Dominicans.6 Despite renewed condemnation of Savonarola himself by Pope Paul IV in 1559, and the placing of some of his works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the friar continued to be both a divisive and revered figure in the decades that followed.7 Florentine archbishop Alessandro de’ Medici — who spearheaded a fresh campaign of repression — offers some indication of the residual strength of the movement at the time Arditi was writing. In a letter he fired off to Grand Duke Francesco in 1583, he indicated that, with San Marco, Santa Maria Novella remained one of the hubs of the Piagnone underground. ‘Through the obstinacy of the friars at San Marco, the memory of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, extinct ten or twelve years ago, now resurges, teems and flourishes more than ever’, Alessandro warned. ‘His follies are disseminated among the friars, among the nuns and among the laity […]. Secretly they celebrate his office, as if for a martyr, and they conserve his relics as if he were a saint, even the instruments with which he was hung, the irons which suspended him, the habits, the cowls, the bones that were left after the fire, the ashes, the hairshirt.’ The Archbishop told Grand Duke Francesco that he had had the printing plates used to churn out summaries of Savonarola’s life destroyed and ‘prevented his image being painted in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella among the saints of the order’.8 All of this begins to build a sense of community around Bastiano Arditi and his diary. When Arditi threw down passages such as the one that opened this essay he did so as if they were sermons, and the cadences of the preached word were something he would have heard often enough. But it starts to look possible that his rhetorical positions, if not necessarily his precise words, may have had an actual audience, or echoed the kinds of private conversations taking place in the networks around Florence’s Dominican convents. In a second letter to Duke Francesco in 1583, Archbishop Alessandro goes on to say: They conceive a certain intrinsic hatred for the state of Your Highness, although fear keeps them dutiful. I remember that one morning Pandolfo Pucci, not long before his treachery was discovered, praised Savonarola to the skies to me. His devotees are always complaining, and because they fear to talk about the prince, they 6 

Polizzotto, The Elect Nation, pp. 432–37. On support for Savonarola, often among senior clergy, and the debates around censorship of his works, see Fragnito, ‘Ecclesiastical Censorship and Girolamo Savonarola’. In general, see Dall’Aglio, Savonarola and Savonarolism, chap. 12. 8  Quoted in Macey, Bonfire Songs, p. 123. 7 

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talk about his officials and rules. They make conventicles through the [religious] houses, and when I know religion is just pretext for this I proscribe them. These sort of men […] are not of the first rank of the city, but of the middle orders (mez­ zani), more weak than anything else.9

Pandolfo Pucci had been executed in 1560 for conspiring to murder Cosimo I and re-establish an oligarchical republic. Fifteen years later, in 1575, his son Orazio Pucci was the leader of a group of about twenty young and noble Florentines who were discovered plotting to assassinate Francesco. As Arditi tracked across his chronicle, these men were relentlessly hunted down and publicly executed.10 Moreover, as a devotional singer Arditi was involved in an activity that was close to the heart of the Savonarolan project. As Savonarola himself had understood perfectly, lauds singing, which emerged in the thirteenth century in response to heresy, was a fundamental form of what Wilson has called ‘lay religious activism’, a civic evangelism that filled public spaces with the sound of piety.11 Indeed, the other confraternity we know Arditi was involved with was at the guild and civic church of Orsanmichele. Here he was one of a group of six singers, a tenor, for the confraternity that ran the church.12 Apart from singing in front of the celebrated miraculous Madonna inside the oratory, Arditi and his companions raised their voices in the street in front of the statue of the Madonna della Rosa, which was in one of the niches on the church’s exterior. It was the ‘ancient custom’ of the company to perform lauds in front of this popular Marian shrine, the confraternity said in 1585, and ‘many gather there to hear them’.13 For the Piagnoni, as Patrick Macey has argued, ‘music functioned as a powerful symbol of both social and religious unity, and as a force to subvert the established order’.14 The hymn most deeply associated with the Savonarolans 9 

Quoted in D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze, p. 264. On the Pucci plots, see Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana, pp. 231–33. 11  Wilson, Music and Merchants, p. 2. 12  Wilson, Music and Merchants, pp. 87–88. 13  ‘E antichissima usanza che nell oratorio dinansi al tabernacolo di nostra donna si cantinano le laude […] e similmente fuori di detto oratario davanti il statua di nostra donna fatta dall’Arte degli Speziali, dove concorrono molti a udirele’. Quoted in Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, i, 236. The Madonna was in the niche of the Guild of Apothecaries and Doctors; it was taken inside the oratory in 1628 and a copy remains in the niche today. 14  Macey, Bonfire Songs, p. 118. 10 

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was Psalm 133, Ecce quam bonum — ‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity’ — the opening verse of which the friar’s followers sang regularly in the late 1490s and, despite attempts to ban it, after he was hanged and burned in 1498. The composition of lauds in veneration of Savonarola continued deep into the duchy, primarily through the agency of Serafino Razzi, a Dominican friar who studied at Santa Maria Novella in the 1550s — when Arditi was already choirmaster for St Peter Martyr — and published a collection of musical settings for lauds in 1563. By far the majority of the lauds in Razzi’s collection were written by Dominicans, mainly from San Marco, and most of these were written by Razzi himself. As for laude penned by Savonorala, Razzi didn’t dare publish any of these texts, with the single exception of the popular ‘Iesu sommo conforto’ ( Jesus greatest solace).15 While it is reasonable to assume that Arditi and his choir sang some of the songs found in Razzi, we can perhaps be a little more specific about their repertoire. There survives a book of lauds from Santa Maria Novella, datable to the second half of the sixteenth century and plausibly in use by the company of St Peter Martyr.16 Apart from songs by Razzi and other Piagnoni poets such as Niccolo Fabroni, the collection contains two songs by Savonarola, the aforementioned ‘Iesu sommo conforto’ and ‘Che fai qui cuore’ (What are you doing here heart), as well as one titled ‘Laudiamo ’l predicatore’ (Let us praise the preacher), to be sung on the feast day of St Peter Martyr.17 Furthermore, the first page of the collection, stamped ‘Santa Maria Novella’, carries a drawing of an Ark, a powerful and apparently enduring motif for Savonarola and his followers. As Savonarola had preached in 1494 — with French king Charles VIII’s army billeted in Florence, Piero de’ Medici about to head into exile, and debate about the future of the republic in full flow — the Ark was the ship of the Florentine elect. It would save the repentant from the Flood in order that they could transform the city into a New Jerusalem and rebuild Christ’s Church.18 15 

Macey, Bonfire Songs, p. 53. Razzi, Libro Primo Delle Laudi Sprituali. As noted in Wilson, Singing Poetry in Renaissance Florence, p. 147. My warmest thanks to the author for providing me with his inventory of this source, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Conventi soppresse, 161, as well as his view that it is datable to the period in which Arditi was choirmaster of St Peter Martyr and that it was likely to have had a direct bearing on the company’s activities. 17  The collection also contains the unattributed ‘O anima accecata’, which Macey suggests was a Piagnone response to the dark days after the friar’s execution. Macey, Bonfire Songs, pp. 138–39. 18  See, most recently, Weinstein, Savonarola, chap. 10. 16 

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* * * Arditi’s choral activities, and arguably his sense that he was engaged in a civic mission, were an important part of what drove him to set pen to paper. Indeed, his decision to chronicle the plight of his ‘poor fatherland’ may have represented a redirection of these pious impulses, since this part of his life was slipping away. By the 1570s the long laudesi tradition was on its last legs; lay singers were gradually being replaced by clerics or boys training for the clergy. At Orsanmichele this process was well in train by the 1560s, and Arditi stopped singing there in 1574, the same year he started writing. Meanwhile at Santa Maria Novella, St Peter Martyr, which in Arditi’s lifetime had always been governed by the friars, was officially suppressed in 1568 — and although Arditi and his choir were not dismissed until the company’s final dissolution in 1580, by the time the old tailor began his diary the writing was on the wall.19 At the same time, and perhaps more critical, was that his millenarianism, his belief that day-to-day events could be sifted and read as signifiers in an eschatological narrative, appear to have been re-energized by a deeper sense that the times were changing. To begin with, the urban economy of the 1570s was heading south. For the Florentine wool industry, the city’s biggest employer, the boom years of the 1560s were over, and decline, ultimately a terminal decline, was starting to set in.20 More immediately, a financial crisis that had been brewing for several years went critical at the start of 1574, claiming a number of small banks over the following two years and forcing the rest to pay with increasing regularity in useless promissory notes. Textile merchants were badly struck, and so immediately were artisans and labourers. ‘Much shouting and lamenting could be heard across the city of Florence concerning the banks, which were only paying in ink’, Arditi wrote. ‘And since the supervisors of the workshops were unable to get money to pay the masters, nothing was heard except lamenting among the artisans’.21 All of this only served to exacerbate the underlying, and long-term, issue of wages not keeping pace with prices.22 19 

Wilson, Music and Merchants, p. 118. Arditi was on the books of Orsanmichele from 1568 to 1574, though given the absence of earlier documentation he was probably singing with this choir for years, perhaps decades, beforehand. 20  Malanima, La decadenza di un’economia cittadina, pp. 295, 302–14; Litchfield, Florence Ducal Capital, pars. 223–24, 255–58. 21  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 123 (22 September 1576). Arditi first notes that banks were failing in October 1574: ibid., p. 26, see also p. 143. For the banking crisis, see Cipolla, Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence, chap. 6. 22  Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, pp. 366–67.

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For Arditi, the bellwether of growing impoverishment and inequality was the price of grain, which was on the rise in the 1570s.23 He first took up the issue on the second page of his diary, blaming it not on agricultural misfortune but on ‘the evil of men who were in the business of afflicting the poor by keeping the price of food beyond their power to buy’.24 Thus he began as he meant to go on, cataloguing civic ills and connecting them to moral failures — and more specifically to the avarice of the powerful, of the ‘petty despots and secretaries’ that packed the ducal administration, and beyond this to the new prince himself.25 From the day Cosimo I had died, he said in July 1575, there had been 186 killings or woundings, ‘and seeing so many extreme cases in such a short time under the government of Duke Francesco Maria caused great fear’.26 A year later he said the city was so sick with murder, assassination, and robbery ‘it seems that Florence has become a Babylon’.27 This infamy had been brought upon it by Duke Francesco, ‘the one who should rather look after it with his example of decency and Christian life’.28 Instead the prince had scandalized the city with his affair with, then marriage to, the Venetian noblewoman Bianca Cappello, turning his palace ‘into a public brothel without fear of God’.29 He neglected his subjects and had ‘no other purpose except gathering treasure, not caring for either his popoli, plebe or peasants’.30 For this Francesco had provoked God’s ire. On 9 January 1576, the anniversary of Cosimo I’s election as duke in 1537 and a foundational event of the new Medici dynasty, the weather was turbulent, ‘in contrast with all the other preceding years’.31 When severe thunderstorms hit the contado in July 1578, including a tempest at the ducal villa at Poggio a Caiano, not even these signs of divine wrath moved princes or prelates to appeal to God. ‘The bosses (capi) of the cities only give any mind to their sensual pleasures, not caring if they give scandal, and the people follow in the footsteps of the Boss.’32 Francesco’s example had infected the entire body social. 23 

Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy, pp. 245–47. Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 3 (2 in the original manuscript) — and see pp. 18, 51. 25  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 50. 26  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, pp. 57–58. 27  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 93. 28  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 83. 29  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 187. 30  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 182. 31  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 135. 32  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 185. See also p. 29. 24 

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Yet what kind of position on the Medicean state did Arditi’s invective stake out? Socially, he was too far down the pecking order to belong to what Archbishop Alessandro intended by the middle orders of citizens or ‘mezzani’. Nonetheless he aligned himself with the idea of a broad middle order, a popolo that was seen to be represented by the republican Great Council of his youth and which had indeed contained a significant proportion of minor guildsmen such as tailors.33 Arditi lived in the solidly artisan Via San Giovanni off the Via Chiara (Via del Campuccio off the Via dei Serragli). He owned his house, fairly uncommon among artisans, and although he was no citizen himself his family was upwardly mobile. His brother-in-law, whom he said had informed him that Bianca Cappello was afflicted by syphilitic scabs, was a doctor.34 Two of his three sons became wool brokers; one owned a couple of houses and a small plot of farming land and in 1583 was granted citizenship, and thus eligibility for minor office-holding, by the ducal Council of 200.35 Perhaps more importantly, Arditi believed himself to possess a degree of cultural capital. Here was a choirmaster and lauds singer at two of the city’s most prestigious institutions; a man who, in a society where perhaps a majority of artisans were illiterate, was able to write, including a book he said he had penned about Habsburg emperor Charles V.36 Arditi tended to divide the world into nobili, popolo, and plebe. And while tailors such as himself were more or less automatically relegated by their social superiors to the ranks of the plebe, for him the plebe were the mass of cloth workers who lived ‘near the walls’ in places such as Santo Spirito’s 33 

Roughly one-sixth of about 3500 members of the Great Council were minor guildmen; see Pesman-Cooper, ‘The Florentine Ruling Group under the “Governo Popolare”’. 34  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 34. 35  Arditi is listed in the ducal state’s ‘Ricerche di Case e Botteghe’ of 1561 as the homeowner with eight probably family members living with him. The house next door belonged to a bridle-maker but was rented by Arditi’s son, Antonio, who went on to become a citizen. On the other side was a house owned by a clothes mender. ASF, Decima granducale, 3780, fol. 50v; Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. xx. 36  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 46. Charles V was the most popular subject of historical biographies during Arditi’s lifetime; Grendler, ‘Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History’. It is usually estimated that at best 30 per cent of men could write. See, among others, Brucker, ‘Florentine Voices from the Catasto’. For similar estimates for north Italian towns more widely, see Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 45–46, 71–74. Robert Black’s analysis of the 1427 Florentine Catasto does not yield clear numbers for artisan literacy as a whole, but he points out that textile workers were among the least literate in society, followed by occupations such as servants, shoemakers, builders, bakers, carpenters, and cleaners. Black, ‘Literacy in Florence, 1427’, pp. 195–212.

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Camaldoli district. Arditi sympathized with their poverty, indeed he shared many of their economic anxieties, but he unequivocally distinguished himself from them.37 By his own lights he belonged to the popolo. However, despite his vilification of the Medici regime, Arditi did not, like Savonarolans of a previous generation, marry the millennium to the renewal of a republic of the popolo. Rather he was conflicted and inconsistent. On one hand, he clearly identified himself with the Savonarolan republicanism of the past. For example, when Piero Capponi was declared a rebel after being implicated in the Pucci plot of 1575, this was God making good on his ‘vendetta’ against the Last Republic’s original Gonfalonier of Justice Niccolò Capponi, who had tried to strike a peace deal with the Medici. Or as Arditi put it, ‘he held hands in secret with Pope Clement in order to reinstall the house of the Medici as absolute masters in Florence’.38 Yet in the same breath he said that the rebellion of the Capponi, then and now, were the only times the family had ever ‘acted against the authority elected by God’. In other words, both the republic and the duchy that replaced it were divinely ordained. Arditi elaborated his thinking on this a little later, when a member of the Ridolfi clan was arrested for his alleged part in the Pucci plot. He recalled that, after the sack of Prato in 1512, the Medici re-entered Florence with the help of their allies in the city — who included the Ridolfi and many others. But now, he said, these families were bereft of power or status. How had this come about? Because just as God had sent the Ottoman ‘Grand Turk’ — God’s ‘bargello’ or chief of police — to punish Christendom for its collective sins, so had he sent Cosimo I to punish Florentines for the sins of the republic.39 ‘From the creation of Duke Cosimo, in that blessed hour, God promised that he would scatter and ruin all of those houses, depriving men of goods and friends […] and all this arose because of their injustices in the time that the magistracies were in charge’. Cosimo, followed by his son Francesco, was ‘elected to castigate the gentlemen citizens, artisans, and peasants, as you can manifestly see for yourself today, since he was the scourge of God’.40 In short, Grand Duke Francesco, who had brought Florence to its knees and had provoked God’s ire, had been appointed by the same God precisely in order to afflict the city. In effect two millenarian trains of thought rumbled through 37 

Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, pp. 62, 98. Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, pp. 52–53. 39  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 24. See also p. 97. 40  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, pp. 146–47. 38 

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Arditi’s diary. One was highly specific yet quite abstract. It took the grand narrative of Florentine political history and packaged it as a story of sin and punishment, one that to all intents and purposes had reached a terminus. The other was more general, and more open-ended. Here the day-to-day signs of moral chaos in a city ruled by a corrupted prince were assembled to suggest that some great scourge may still be to come. Was it that, despite the divine appointment of the Medici, Francesco’s sinfulness had precipitated a new cycle of vendetta? Arditi never said; he never attempted to reconcile the different metahistorical registers in his writing. As a result, the question of what kind of state he thought Florence should be, or whether some new scourge should bring about paradigmatic political change, went begging. In that omission was perhaps an implicit acceptance that the republic belonged to the past. In this respect, Arditi’s diary hardly overturns what we already know of Savonarolan circles in the later sixteenth century. While the hubs of spirituality and charity inspired by the friar’s legacy have been more fully unearthed in recent years, they belonged to a movement stripped of revolutionary political agendas. Serafino Razzi, who also wrote an unpublished biography of Savonarola and pushed in vain for his canonization, belonged to a generation that aimed to rehabilitate the friar by turning him into a beacon of Catholic Reform.41 However, we should be wary of eliding the clerically sanitized image of Savanorola with the spectrum of positions of ‘Savonarolans’ themselves. Arditi, the most sustained — and unguarded — lay voice with links to the later movement we possess, suggests that the underground critique of Medicean Florence was, in some quarters, at least as robust as Archbishop Alessandro de’ Medici feared. Besides, Tridentine reform was only in certain respects a conservative force. Arguably, it was the tantalizing promise of Christian renewal that, along with the factors set out above, galvanized Arditi to set pen to paper, feeding his sense that a struggle for the soul of the city was, once again, underway. The decrees of the Council of Trent were elaborated locally by the Florentine synod of 1573, shortly before Arditi started writing. On the second page of his diary, he noted that artisans had been banned from plying their trade on feast days, ‘and this was due to the synod that had just taken place’.42 A couple of weeks later he praised Archbishop Alessandro, then just appointed, for 41 

Polizzotto, The Elect Nation, p. 438–45; also Dall’Aglio, Savonarola and Savonarolism, pp. 44–46; Herzig, Savonarola’s Women, pp. 184–87. For these hubs, particularly monastic and lay female groups, see Herzig, Savonarola’s Women; Strocchia, ‘Savonarolan Witnesses’; Terpstra, Lost Girls. 42  Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 2.

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forcing through the synod’s decrees about clerical residency: ‘A great quantity of prelates left, moving like serpents to a charm, to take up residency, since it was with great displeasure that they gave up the luxuries, both of greed and lust, that they enjoyed in the city of Florence.’43 Moreover, Arditi believed that reformers might start to tackle princely states on precisely the kinds of injustices he set out in his diary. In October 1574, when Pope Gregory XIII’s ambassador to Spain passed through Florence, Arditi thought he must be on his way to discuss the problems of Christendom ‘and particularly those of Italy, which they saw was in ruins, because the Italian princes […] worried only about themselves and above all making money by taxing their subjects, placing their faith in this and allowing their people to lapse into error and dissolute sin, both public and unspeakable’.44 Catholic reformers did indeed urge princes to adhere more closely to a framework of Christian ethics and act as models of justice, charity, and piety.45 Rather than a voice in the wilderness, Arditi might be seen as reflecting a small but not insignificant hinterland of Savonarolan civic opinion, a hunger for transformation that could not be entirely ignored, and which arguably bolstered more official efforts to create righteous princes and reformed cities.

43 

Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 7. See also p. 47 on visitations to churches. Arditi, Diario di Firenze, ed. by Cantagalli, p. 29. 45  See Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State, chap. 6; Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince, chap. 3; Albertini, Firenze della repubblica al principato, chap. 4. 44 

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Works Cited Manuscript and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Decima granducale, 3780 (‘Ricerche di Case e Botteghe’)

Primary Sources Arditi, Bastiano, Diario di Firenze e di altre parti della cristianità (1574–1579), ed. by Roberto Cantagalli (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1970)

Secondary Works Albertini, Rudolf von, Firenze della repubblica al principato: Storia e conscienza politica (To­ rino: Einaudi, 1970) Bireley, Robert, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic State­ craft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill: Uni­ver­sity of North Carolina Press, 1990) Black, Robert, ‘Literacy in Florence, 1427’, in Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy; Essays in Honour of John  M. Najemy, ed. by David  S. Peterson with Daniel E. Bornstein (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 195–212 Brucker, Gene, ‘Florentine Voices from the Catasto, 1427–1480’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, 5 (1993), 11–32 Cipolla, Carlo M., Money in Sixteenth-Century Firenze (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1989) D’Addario, Arnaldo, Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze (Roma: [n.pub.], 1972) Dall’Aglio, Stefano, Savonarola and Savonarolism, trans. by John Gagné (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010) Diaz, Furio, Il Granducato di Toscana (Torino: UTET, 1987) Fragnito, Gigliola, ‘Ecclesiastical Censorship and Girolamo Savonarola’, in The World of Savonarola: Italian Elites and Perceptions of Crisis, ed. by Stella Fletcher and Christine Shaw (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 90–111 Goldthwaite, Richard, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) Grendler, Paul F., ‘Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History, 1560–1600’, Studies in the Renaissance, 16 (1969), 139–80 —— , Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1991) Herzig, Tamar, Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2008) Litchfield, R.  Burr, Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790 (Prince­ton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1986)

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—— , Firenze Ducal Capital, 1530–1630 (New York: ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2008),

Macey, Patrick, Bonfire Songs: Savonarola’s Musical Legacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Malanima, Paolo, La decadenza di un’economia cittadina (Firenze: Il Mulino, 1982) Pesman-Cooper, Roslyn, ‘The Florentine Ruling Group under the “Governo Popolare”, 1494–1512’, Studies in Medi­eval and Renaissance History, 7 (1985), 71–181 Polizzotto, Lorenzo, ‘Confraternities, Conventicles and Political Dissent: The Case of the Savonarolan “Capi Rossi”’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 16 (1985), 235–83 —— , The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence, 1494–1545 (Oxford: Claren­don Press, 1994) Razzi, Serafino, Libro Primo Delle Laudi Sprituali (Venezia, 1563) Strocchia, Sharon, ‘Savonarolan Witnesses: The Nuns of San Jacopo and the Piagnone Move­ment in Sixteenth-Century Florence’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 38 (2007), 393–418 Terpstra, Nicholas, Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) Viroli, Maurizio, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics, 1250–1600 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992) Weinstein, Donald, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) Wilson, Blake, Music and Merchants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) —— , Singing Poetry in Renaissance Florence: The ‘Cantasi Come’ Tradition (1375–1550) (Firenze: Olschki, 2009) Zervas, Diane, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 2 vols (Panini: Modena, 1996)

Authority and Punishment in the Letters of Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena Clare Monagle

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his essay offers a comparative reading of two letters, one written by Hildegard of Bingen around 1178, and the other by Catherine of Siena around 1375. Both letters concern an intervention made by the holy woman in the death and burial of a young man charged with crimes. In Hildegard’s case, she had allowed the body of a young nobleman, who had once been excommunicated, to be buried in consecrated ground at Mount St Rupert.1 While Hildegard believed that his excommunication had been lifted, and that he had received extreme unction, Hildegard’s immediate superiors, the prelates of Mainz, disagreed and ordered the exhumation of his body so that it could be cast out of holy ground. Hildegard refused to do so and was placed, with her community, under interdict for her disobedience. Hildegard’s letter was a defiant response to the prelates, a letter of confident justification. Catherine’s letter, 1 

This is Letter 23, ‘Hildegard to the prelates at Mainz’, in Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters, trans. by Baird and Erhman, pp. 76–80. The Latin text is found in Hildegard of Bingen, Episto­ larium, ed. by Van Acker, pp. 61–66. Clare Monagle ([email protected]) received her doctorate from the Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity in 2007. She is currently senior lecturer in modern history at Macquarie Uni­ver­ sity. Clare published Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s Sentences and the Development of Theology (Turnhout, 2013). She has published articles in Parergon, Viator, postmedieval, Culture, Theory, and Critique, the Journal of Religious History, and Medioevo. With Dr Juanita Ruys, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Middle Ages, 350–1300.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 373–386 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109715

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coming two hundred years later, was the account of an execution of a young man. Catherine counsels him prior to his execution and accompanies him to his death. She narrates a story in which she identifies strongly with the young man and experiences his execution as a moment of mystical union.2 In both stories, the self-authorized holy woman constructs her own sanctity and proximity to God through her embrace and protection of a criminal masculine body. I am moved to this comparison between Hildegard and Catherine by a line from F. Thomas Luongo’s 2006 monograph The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena. In this work, Luongo expressed his reservations about scholarly identifications of a feminized religious culture in the late Middle Ages. While respecting in particular the groundbreaking work of Carolyn Bynum, and those that have followed in her wake, Luongo suggested that we should still seek to place the writings and careers of religious women in their particular historical contexts, rather than delineating a consistent line of feminine practice.3 He wrote, ‘Gender categories are not fixed, but change according to time, place and circumstance; what it meant to be a “woman”, even a “religious”, woman in the Middle Ages was different for Catherine of Siena, than it was for Hildegard of Bingen’.4 Therefore, Luongo suggests that we read the writings of medieval mystical women within the political and social frame of their production, as well as in the tradition of devotion that they represent in the larger context. This paper attempts to take seriously, and literally, Luongo’s injunction to read Hildegard and Catherine within their local contexts. That is, he asks that we do not assume a monolithic sameness in these women’s stories, that we seek to understand their very individual relationships to their worlds. Hildegard and Catherine are an apposite duo for this purpose because at first glance they share so many similarities as historical actors. They were both active in church politics, making scathing interventions into schisms. Each was a prolific writer, in the broadest definition of the word in as much as they actively composed large screeds of material. In particular, both are celebrated for their contributions to epistolarity, leaving extensive letter collections. And finally, and most importantly, both are emblematic of female religiosity in the Middle Ages. They both authorize themselves through a declaration of their human fraility and wom2 

This is Catherine’s Letter 31, in Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, pp. 107–11. The Italian text is found in Letter 273: Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, ed. by Misciatelli, pp. 173–81. 3  The classic study by Bynum, to which Luongo refers, is Holy Feast and Holy Fast. 4  Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena, p. 16.

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anly infirmity. In declaring themselves small and timorous, they make the argument that they are well placed to appreciate the crucified and suffering Christ. Yet, of course, they are from vastly different worlds. Hildegard was a twelfth-century cloistered Benedictine nun who composed in Latin. Catherine was a fourteenth-century Dominican tertiary whose writings are considered classics of the Italian language. The former lived a rural life in the Rhineland; the latter traversed the urbanized spaces of fourteenth-century Tuscany. How are we to think of their similarities and differences? In the crudest of historical chronologies, we might say that Hildegard belongs to the High Middle Ages, and Catherine to the advent of the Renaissance. Is it possible to isolate consistencies in their gendered expressions of religiosity, without derogating their particularity? Hence with this comparative approach, in drawing on two letters that share genre and contain similar themes, we can consider how things changed and how they stayed the same. For Hildegard and Catherine, as for many other women in the Middle Ages, the letter was a form that enabled a performance of selfhood, without necessitating the assertion of scholarly auctoritas that enabled one to be an auctor proper, an author.5 Scholarly auctoritas, loosely put, was the form of dignity and validation that accompanied a pedigree in the liberal arts, and in the formative texts of the Christian tradition. Most self-styled intellectual writing in Latin in the Middle Ages was informed by a sense of auctoritas that was both produced by and exemplified in their use of quotation and citation. Very few women had the training, or the means, to manifest this auctoritas in writing. Letters, however, as social instruments were a more expansive genre than the treatise or the summa. That is, the letter as form enabled the sender to embed herself in sets of social and spiritual relations and to place her words within the frame of necessary communication. So many of the most illuminating texts that give us glimpses of diverse women’s voices from the Middle Ages — from Heloise to Hildegard to Margherita Datini, Catherine of Siena, and the Paston women — come in the form of letters. The letter also obtained as a genre, for holy men and women, due to its apostolic functions in the New Testament. As a form, then, that was socially embedded and yet also spiritually sanctioned, the letter was the perfect site to perform the type of humbled, yet exalted, religiosity that we find in the writings of holy women. As Katherine Kong has recently written, ‘Letter writers observed social classifications for positioning themselves in relation to their correspondents, but they also transgressed them, com5 

On authorship in the Middle Ages, see Minnis, Medi­eval Theory of Authorship.

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plicating the humility and authority they were meant to confer, and producing in the process new, distinct ways of thinking about the self ’.6 This is not to say, of course, that medieval women’s letters offer some essentialist access to the selves of real women. As Gilroy and Verhoeven have offered about the letter in general, but it obtains equally for the Middle Ages, ‘The most historically powerful fiction of the letter has been that which figures it as the trope of authenticity and intimacy, which elides questions of linguistic, historical, and political mediation’.7 As tempting as it may be to privilege the letter as a more personally revealing form of writing, given as it is to the expression of interiority, we must also acknowledge each letter as emerging out of a particular combination of genre and context which is different and specific in every case. That is, if we are to read medieval women’s letters, and deploy them as historical sources, we need to understand them in terms of their relationship to generic convention and social worlds. Letters, then, offer a performance of selfhood, enabled by a range of structural conditions. The comparison below, then, will consider a letter each of Hildegard and Catherine in a manner which takes them seriously within their generic frame, as well as in their performance of female sanctity. In her letter to the prelates of Mainz, her superiors who had ordered the disinterment of the young man, Hildegard declared that she was compelled to write ‘By a vision, which was implanted in my soul by God the Great Artisan before I was born’.8 The message of this was very clear; ‘Weighed down by this burden, therefore, I heard these words in a vision: It is improper for you to obey human words ordering you to abandon the sacraments of the Garment of the Word of God.’9 This was an assertion both self-effacing and self-aggrandizing: the vision precedes her and yet is hers alone. In this vision, she wrote, ‘I saw in my spirit that if this man were disinterred in accordance with their [the prelates’] commands, a terrible and lamentable danger would come upon us a like 6  Kong, Lettering the Self in Medi­e val and Early Modern France, p.  10. On medieval women’s letters, see Cherewatuk and Wiethaus, Dear Sister. 7  Gilroy and Verhoeven, ‘Introduction’, p. i. 8  Hildegard of Bingen, Epistola XXIII, ed. by Van Acker, p. 61: ‘In uisione que anime mee, antequam nata procederem, a Deo opifice infixa est, coacta sum ad scribendum ista’. Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters, trans. by Baird and Ehrman, p. 76. 9  Hildegard of Bingen, Epistola XXIII, ed. by Van Acker, p. 62: ‘magno tandem pondere compressa, verba ista in uisione audiui: Propter uerba humana sacramenta indumenta Verbi Dei, quod salus uestra est et quod in uirginea natura ex Maria Virgine natum est, dimittere uobis non expedit’. Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters, trans. by Baird and Ehrman, p. 77.

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a dark cloud before a threatening thunderstorm’.10 In this letter it is the power and truth of this vision that Hildegard used as the ultimate justification for her refusal to disinter the body. She declared, ‘Not, certainly, that we take the counsel of upright men or the orders of our superiors lightly, but we would not have it appear that, out of feminine harshness we did injustice to the sacraments of Christ, with which this man had been fortified while he was still alive’.11 For Hildegard, the counsel of upright men could compete with the adequacy of the sacraments. Hildegard forged here an important conceptual separation between the sacraments themselves and the men that administer them. The sacrament of extreme unction, which Hildegard maintained was performed legitimately, must prevail over those that seek to abuse it in their insistence that the body be exhumed. The adequacy of the sacraments was of crucial importance to Hildegard in this letter, as her community had been similarly placed under interdict for their refusal to disinter the young man. Hildegard implored that her community, just like the young man had done on his deathbed, must also access the saving work of the sacraments, even though they had been forbidden from doing so. She declared that her conscience permitted her to take the sacraments, in spite of the interdict. She wrote, ‘a person who is aware that he has incurred such a restriction not as a result of anything he has done, either consciously or deliberately, may be present at the service of the life-giving sacrament, to be cleansed by the lamb without sin’.12 Hildegard’s letter, then, claimed a transcendent orthodoxy. Her superiors had erred in their execution of God’s law. Hildegard can see their failures, and in their breach authorizes herself to speak truth to power, and to insist on her own righteous access to the saving work of the sacraments. She declared, famously, at the end of her letter, ‘This time is a womanish time, because the dispensation of 10  Hildegard of Bingen, Epistola XXIII, ed. by Van Acker, p. 61: ‘si iuxta preceptum ipsorum corpus eiusdem mortui efferretur, eiectio illa in modum magne nigredinis ingens periculum loco nostro minaretur et in similitudine atre nubis’. Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters, trans. by Baird and Ehrman, p. 76. 11  Hildegard of Bingen, Epistola XXIII, ed. by Van Acker, p. 61: ‘non consilium proborum hominum aut preceptum prelatorum nostrorum omnino paruipendentes, sed ne sacramentis Christi, quibus ille uiuens adhuc munitus fuerat, iniuriam seuitate feminea facere uideremur’. Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters, trans. by Baird and Ehrman, p. 76. 12  Hildegard of Bingen, Epistola XXIII, ed. by Van Acker, p. 62: ‘Qui uero in tali ligature se esse nec conscientia nec uoluntate cognouerit, secures ad perceptionem uiuifici sacramenti accedat, mundandus sanguine Agni immaculati’. Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters, trans. by Baird and Ehrman, p. 77.

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God’s justice is weak. But the strength of God’s justice is exerting itself, a female warrior battling against injustice, so that it might fall defeated.’13 The muliebre tempus, of chaos and inconstancy, can only be conquered by the proud belletrix that is Hildegard’s self-styled visionary. The men of this letter, be they upright or interred in the ground, are but the backstory of Hildegard’s prophetic account of her own ultimate righteousness. The erroneous punishment of the young man’s corpse and the likewise erroneous punishment of Hildegard’s community serve to highlight Hildegard’s piercing feminine vision. Finally, the larger frame of the letter also enabled Hildegard to construct herself in the context of transcendent biblical history, in opposition to the local ecclesiastical politics that surround her. The letter, as we have seen, concerned the fate of the body of a young man. Hildegard sought to give this body, thought criminal by some, sanctuary in sacred ground. The prelates wanted him declared a spiritual outlaw, undeserving of the protections of the sacraments. Hildegard, however, deployed the visionary mode to insist on the primacy of the protections that she could offer this vilified young masculine body. In this, surely, was a Christological frame. The young un-named man at the centre of the letter, whose sacred claims were unrecognized by masculine authority, could only be protected by Hildegard, the belletrix. In that sense she was figuring the prelates of Mainz as the authorities who refused to recognize the saviour in their midst and sent him to his criminal’s death. She, on the other hand, in the living apostolic tradition offered succour to this criminalized and broken body. In Hildegard’s spiritual context, where infirmity, stigma, and despair are modes to visionary truth, the body of her excluded young man, unjustly accused, brokered her access to larger Christological identification. Catherine of Siena’s very famous letter concerning the execution of Niccolo di Toldo told a story more gory and visceral than that of Hildegard. In this letter Catherine was beseeched by a young man, just prior to his execution, to accompany him to his death, ‘Stay with me; don’t leave me alone. That way I can’t help but be all right, and I’ll die happy!’14 Catherine was overwhelmed and moved by his request: ‘I sensed an intense joy, a fragrance of his blood — and 13 

Hildegard of Bingen, Epistola XXIII, ed. by Van Acker, pp. 65–66. ‘Istud tempus tempus muliebre est, quia iustitia Dei debilis est. Sed fortitude iustitie Dei exsudat, et belletrix contra iniustitiam exsistit, quatenus deuicta dadat.’ Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters, trans. by Baird and Ehrman, p. 79. 14  Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, CCLXXIII, ed. by Misciatelli, p. 175: ‘Stà meco, e non mi abandonare. E così non starò altro che bene; e muoio contento’. Catherine of Siena, The Let­ ters, trans. by Noffke, p. 109.

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it wasn’t separate from the fragrance of my own, which I am waiting to shed for my gentle spouse Jesus.’15 As Catherine narrated the young man’s journey to his execution, she figures the relationship between them as a marriage: ‘Courage, my dear brother, for soon we shall reach the wedding feast.’16 The execution itself became an ecstatic experience of divine union: ‘His mouth said nothing but “Gesú” and “Caterina” and as he said this I received his head into my hands, saying, “I will!” with my eyes fixed on divine Goodness.’17 The account was eroticized and sacramentalized at the same time; Catherine pledges ‘I will’ at the moment of death and is then permitted a powerful vision of Christ with an open side wound within which he can absorb the blood, desire, and soul of the condemned man. Catherine’s vision then recorded that ‘He [the executed man] turned as does a bride when, having reached her husband’s threshold, she turns her head and looks back, nods to those who have attended her, and so expresses her thanks’.18 The young man was made a bride, made pure, gendered female in his blissful surrender to Christ’s open wound. Catherine then lamented, ‘poor wretch that I am, I don’t want to say anymore. With the greatest envy I remained on earth!’19 After this extraordinary account of the execution and vision, which ended with Catherine’s statement of her own wretchedness, there was a further extraordinary statement. Catherine declared that ‘It seems to me that the first

15 

Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, CCLXXIII, ed. by Misciatelli, p. 175: ‘E teneva il capo suo in sul petto mio. Io allora sentiva uno giubilo e un odore del sangue suo; e non era senza l’odere del mio, il quale io desidero di spandere per lo dolce sposo Gesù.’ Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, p. 109. 16  Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, CCLXXIII, ed. by Misciatelli, p. 175: ‘Confòrtati, fratello mio dolce; perocchè tosto giungeremo alle nozze’. Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, p. 109. 17  Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, CCLXXIII, ed. by Misciatelli, pp. 176–77: ‘La bocca sua non diceva se non Gesù, e, Caterina. E, così dicendo, rivevetti il capo nelle mani mie, fermando l’occhio nella divina bontà, e dicendo “Io voglio”’. Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, p. 110. 18  Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, CCLXXIII, ed. by Misciatelli, p. 178: ‘Volsesi come fala sposa quando è giunta, all’uscio dello sposo suo, che volge l’occhio e il capo a dietro, inchinando chi l’ha accompagnata, e con l’atto dimostra segni di ringraziamento’. Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, p. 111. 19  Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, CCLXXIII, ed. by Misciatelli, p. 178: ‘Oimè misera miserabile! non voglio dire più. Rimasi nella terra con grandissima invidia’. Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, p. 111.

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stone is already laid’.20 This was a reference to the Petrine dispensation that founded the Church. Here, Catherine figured herself again anew, as someone laying the foundation of a new movement or institution. From wretched to Simon Peter, the blood of the martyred man mixed with the wound of Christ as the maker of a new dispensation. Catherine here merged herself with the Church, but only in its purest and most mystical form. Thomas Luongo has written that the epistolary form enables a ‘mixing of the mystical and the mundane’.21 The letters of Hildegard and Catherine that we considered here artfully combine their very local political contexts with larger Christological frames. For each woman, the local was quickly universalized into a larger frame. Once again, however, it remains important to also recognize their differences. Catherine’s letter is surely mystical in as much normal temporalities are dissolved in her account of ecstasy on the scaffold. Hildegard’s letter is best considered in the visionary mode; her vision was not a mode to affective excess, but rather a source for her critical analysis. This being said, however, the writing of each saint did indeed combine the political and the sacred. Hildegard’s letter to the prelates was concerned on one level with minutiae of day-to-day life at her monastery, and whether or not the sacraments might be practised. Her prophetic response, however, indicated a much larger set of stakes. Hildegard had long been in bitter conflict with the Cathedral of Mainz, as each party had taken different sides in the recent clash between the Emperor and the Pope.22 Her furious appeal to the prelates of Mainz offered a deeper and unspoken rebuke to them about their failure to support the Pope during the papal schism of recent history. Similarly, Catherine’s letter was embedded in local Sienese politics. The young Perugian Niccolo di Toldo had been accused of sowing discord in Siena. Di Toldo was supported by Gérard du Puy, the papal legate with whom Catherine had corresponded offering counsel to the Pope during schism. In articulating a mystical union with the young Perugian rebel, Catherine was perhaps making a much larger point about her overall loyalties to the papacy over the Sienese leadership.23 These letters share then, although separated by three hundred years, a great deal that can be placed into a larger 20  Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere, CCLXXIII, ed. by Misciatelli, p. 178: ‘E parmi che la prima pietra sia già posta’. Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, p. 111. 21  Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena, p. 90. 22  On this incident, see Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 13–15. For further information on Hildegard’s involvement in politics, see Mews, ‘From Scivias to the Liber Divinorum Operum’. 23  On this, see Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena, p. 95.

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story of gendered piety and self-authorization in the Middle Ages. Each woman used the language of spiritual access to God, either through prophecy or mystic union, to couch an argument that was deeply local and embedded in place and time. Each woman offered an account of herself as wretched or, indeed, merely female as a form of abnegation. This abnegation, however, for Hildegard and Catherine produced proximity to the human suffering Christ and unleashed sacred visions. Each writer deployed a young sinful male, figured as Christ-like, as a narrative pivot around which they can elaborate their own status as transgressive. That is, in their capacity to love, forgive, and nurture the sinner they transgressed the punitive and masculine institutions of Church and proto-state that have condemned these men. In so doing, they reminded the reader that Christ himself was punished within the rule of law. Hildegard and Catherine both produced powerful dialectics between masculinity, legalism, and authority as against femininity, the spirit, and transgressive love. These shared dialectics reflected and reified dualisms embedded in Christian theology itself, and do enable us to make the case for a tradition of feminized piety in the Middle Ages that has continuity and constancy over a long period of time. Where they differ, I think, is in the viscera. Hildegard’s buried man remains just that, obscured from view. He does not feature in her vision. Hildegard’s vision was vivified, rather, by her description of the role that music customarily played in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God in the life of her convent, a pleasure from which the interdict was depriving them. Hildegard’s letter described the loss of the celestial harmony that music enables them to experience. She wrote that ‘The body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God’.24 Catherine’s young man, on the other hand, is utterly flesh and blood, sweet, fragrant, and drenching. And he is subsumed into Christ’s vulva-like wound, in an inverse of birthing. The real and the spiritualized body both loom much larger in the latter letter. How are we to understand this shift, to the blood and to the heart? There are many ways we can try to understand this. As we have seen, Luongo reads this letter as an exploration of the erotics of political engagement, seeing Catherine’s deployment of mystical and bodily excess as a mode to a feminine sacralization of earthly Sienese politics. Antonio Volpato has argued that Catherine’s 24 

Hildegard of Bingen, Epistola XXIII, ed. by Van Acker, p. 64: ‘Corpus uero indumentum est anime, que uiuam uocem habet, ideoque decet ut corpus cum anima per uocem Deo laudes decantet’. Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters, trans. by Baird and Ehrman, p. 79.

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use of bodily image can be understood in terms of ideas found in Dominican encyclopedias.25 Heather Webb has followed this line as well, performing a close reading of the way her letters reflect contemporary scientific knowledge of the body.26 G. J. McAleer has read her focus on the wound as embodying a Thomist sense of the ‘ontological priority of charity’.27 And Carolyn Bynum reads Catherine’s focus on blood alongside what she sees as a larger movement of metonymy in late medieval religious culture. That is, she argues that in both elite and popular theological understandings, parts were thought to stand in for the whole, so one drop of Christ’s blood contains all of Christ, or one beating heart contains all of life.28 This is the period of an increasingly intense celebration of the Eucharist, which is the example par excellence, in which the wafer is held to contain Christ human and divine and to contain past, present, and future. Each of these scholars argues that Catherine’s mystical prose must be understood in terms of her particular intellectual, social, and religious contexts, and that it does constitute something novel in its time. Could that novelty also be understood to be the result of Catherine’s immersion in late fourteenth-century Tuscany, a place and a time that might be called ‘Renaissance’ for our purposes? As Carol Lansing has pointed out, a woman such as Catherine is precisely the type of historical actor that tends to get written out of the narration of the Renaissance as belonging to an earlier, medieval world.29 Drawing on the foundational work of Thomas Luongo, whose question frames this essay, Lansing suggests that Catherine’s letter about Niccolo di Toldo could be reframed, and in fact its novelty and seeming strangeness be better understood, by thinking of Catherine as an early Renaissance woman. Quoting Kenneth Gouwens, Lansing argues that Catherine’s writings fit easily into a notion of the Renaissance as a cultural project driven by ‘the moral interrogation and improvement of the self and of society, built on an effective encounter with figures from the past, refined through dialogue with contemporaries and applied in their own value and actions’.30 Lansing reads Catherine in this vein, as a woman communing with the patristic past in order to develop 25 

Volpato, ‘Le conoscenze scientifiche di S. Caterina’. Webb, ‘Catherine of Siena’s Heart’. 27  McAleer, Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics, p. 88. 28  Bynum, ‘Violent Imagery in Late Medi­eval Piety’. 29  Lansing, ‘Religion in the Renaissance’. I am indebted to Peter Howard for suggesting this reading to me. 30  Lansing, ‘Religion in the Renaissance’, p. 144. 26 

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ethical frameworks for action and contemplation in her world. And to do this, Lansing points out, Catherine was an early adopter of the institution of a chancery with expertise in the vernacular. Raymond of Capua reported that Catherine had a team of scribes working for her at any one time, sending an extraordinarily rich collection of missives to a number of the most powerful and influential members of her world. In this sense, following Lansing, Catherine can, and should, be inserted into the canon of Renaissance writers who deployed the past to craft a self-conscious present devoted to the definition and performance of ethical praxis in the world. In that sense, the distinction between Hildegard’s cloistered environment and Catherine’s urban life must be understood to be a very real one, and one that could crudely be understood as embodying something of the difference between medieval and Renaissance culture. In addition, Catherine’s performance as Niccolo di Toldo’s comforter was a public one that depended on the display of the scaffold in the urban environment and upon an audience capable of receiving the multiple meanings of Catherine’s performance. That is, as Kathleen Falvey and Adriano Prosperi have both recently explored, public comforting of the condemned seems to have been a practice particular to Italy, and one which emerged during the period of Catherine’s lifetime.31 In the tightly knit society of Renaissance towns, places where secular and religious themes were repeatedly interwoven within the myriad forms that constituted those cities’ cultural lives, the execution was an important site of public performance which brought the sacred into communion with the political. Prisoners were executed for crimes within the secular jurisdictions of their city, yet these events were sacralized and publicized through the display of love performed by the comforter. In this, the execution transcends punishment and becomes a holy performance of expiation and forgiveness. Catherine’s work as comforter, then, is indebted to much more than a long tradition of feminized affective piety. It must also be understood in the context of these novel practices of public piety emerging out of her Tuscan situation. Having said that, however, the comparison between Hildegard and Catherine does also remind of some profound continuities between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Most importantly, both letters show how discourses around the criminal and feminine bodies enabled the expression of one of the paradoxes within Christian doctrine and biblical history, that of the sacredness and spiritual authority of the outsider. That is, the model of Christ 31 

See Falvey, ‘Scaffold and Stage’ and Prosperi, Dare I’anima.

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as creaturely, humbled, and criminalized, and oppressed by authorities, consistently enabled assertions of mystical authority on the part of those who considered themselves to be outside normative masculine power. Recently, Megan Cassidy-Welch and Robert Mills have both made cases for the centrality that the threat of imprisonment and torture, respectively, held within the medieval religious imagination.32 Both have found that tropes of imprisonment and suspended violence provided a means for the negotiation of the very paradoxical, and yet psychologically awesome, conceptual challenges of Christology. That is, the difficulty of reconciling majesty with abjection, purity with debasement, and exaltation with torture. When we come to the letters considered above, in spite of the differences between them, we must acknowledge their self-authorizing similarity. The letters of Hildegard and Catherine do indeed speak time and place. They also, however, I would argue, speak to the enduring recourse to the authorization of abnegation, driven by Christological identification, that we can see throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance. And this is a mode of writing, and a manner of identification, that found particular purchase with holy women, as we have seen above.

32 

Cassidy-Welch, Imprisonment in the Medi­eval Religious Imagination and Mills, Sus­ pended Animation.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Catherine of Siena, Le Lettere di S. Caterina da Siena, vol.  iv, ed. by Piero Misciatelli (Firenze: Giunti, 1940) —— , The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. with introduction and notes by Suzanne Noffke, vol. i (Binghampton: Medi­eval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1988) Hildegard of Bingen, Hildegardis Bingensis Epistolarium, vol. i, ed. by L. Van Acker, Cor­ pus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis, 91 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991) —— , The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. by Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, vol. i (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994)

Secondary Works Bynum, Carolyn Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medi­eval Women (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 2007) —— , ‘Violent Imagery in Late Medi­eval Piety’, German Historical Institute Bulletin, 30 (2002), 3–36 Cassidy-Welch, Megan, Imprisonment in the Medi­eval Religious Imagination, c. 1150–1400 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Cherewatuk, Karen, and Ulrike Wiethaus, eds, Dear Sister: Medi­eval Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) Gilroy, Amanda, and W.  M. Verhoeven, ‘Introduction’, in Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed. by Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville: Uni­ ver­sity Press of Virginia, 2000) Falvey, Kathleen, ‘Scaffold and Stage: Comforting Rituals and Dramatic Traditions’, in The Art of Executing Well, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 13–30 Kong, Katherine, Lettering the Self in Medi­eval and Early Modern France (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010) Lansing, Carol, ‘Religion in the Renaissance’, in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Allen  J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1999), pp. 137–52 Luongo, F. Thomas, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006) McAleer, G.  J., Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics: A  Catholic and Anti-Totalitarian Theory of the Body (New York: Fordham Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005) Mews, Constant J., ‘From Scivias to the Liber Divinorum Operum: Hildegard’s Apocalyptic Imagination and the Call to Reform’, Journal of Religious History, 24 (2000), 44–56 Mills, Robert, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medi­eval Culture (London: Reaktion, 2005)

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Minnis, Alastair, Medi­eval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Late Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984) Newman, Barbara, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1989) Prosperi, Adriano, Dare I’anima: Storia di un infanticidio (Torino: Einaudi, 2005) Webb, Heather, ‘Catherine of Siena’s Heart’, Speculum, 80 (2005), 802–17 Volpato, Antonio, ‘Le conoscenze scientifiche di S. Caterina’, in Con l’occhio e col lume: Atti del corso seminariale di studi su S. Caterina da Siena (25 settembre – 7 ottobre), ed. by Luigi Trenti and Bente Klange Addabo (Siena: Università per stranieri di Siena, Dipartimento di scienze umane, 1999), pp. 191–202

Catherine of Siena, Florence, and Dominican Renewal: Preaching through Letters Constant J. Mews

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ometime in May 1374, Catherine of Siena (1347–80), a spiritual young woman already with her own band of disciples, went to Florence, just as Elias Raymundus (d. 1389), Master of the Order of Preachers, was convening a General Chapter of the order at Santa Maria Novella.1 Whether Catherine was able to see the cycle of frescoes in its chapter house (now the so-called Spanish Chapel), produced by Andrea di Bonaiuto between 1367 and 1369, celebrating the holiness and intellectual vision of Thomas Aquinas, is doubtful.2 The Constitutions of the Order forbad women from entering Dominican cloisters or oratories, except on the feast of their consecration.3 Whether she was summoned to Florence by Elias to answer accusations made against her is uncertain.4 Unfortunately, no formal record of that General Chapter, held on 1 

This paper follows an earlier study, Mews, ‘Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena’. On the fresco cycle in the so-called Spanish Chapel, see Gardner, ‘Andrea di Bonaiuto and the Chapterhouse Frescoes in Santa Maria Novella’, esp. pp. 108, 113, and 126, and Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, pp. 142–44. 3  Constitutions  II.1, ed.  and trans. by Simon Tugwell, in Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, pp. 284, 295. 4  Catherine’s visit to Florence at the time of the General Chapter is mentioned at the opening of I miracoli di Caterina di Iacopo di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. by Valli, pp. 1–25; trans. by 2 

Constant J. Mews ([email protected]) is Director of the Centre for Religious Studies at Monash Uni­ver­sity. He is author of The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France, 2nd edn (New York, 2008) among other works relating to religious thought between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 387–403 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109716

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21 May, survives, other than ratification of a decision to extend the powers of the Master.5 Yet sometime during its proceedings, Elias decided that Raymond of Capua (1330–90) should become Catherine’s confessor, a decision that would have profound implications not just for her future, but for the cause of renewal within the Order. Between 1374 and her premature death on 29  April 1380, she would become intensely involved in creating a network of relationships through a prodigious output of dictated letters. While Catherine has attracted much recent attention in relation to her Sienese background, this paper situates her career within the context of wider tensions within the Dominican Order as a whole.6 In particular, it looks at Catherine’s debt to the relatively neglected figure of Elias Raymundus, whom Raymond of Capua would seek to depose as Master of the order in June 1380, just six weeks after Catherine’s death, for supporting the cause of Clement VII rather than of Urban VI. How could the Order of Preachers, so heavily invested in the memory of a learned scholastic, turn its devotional attention to a young woman, without apparently any formal theological education, but committed to preaching through the letters she dictated? Raymond of Capua recalls that as a child, Catherine had thought of imitating St Eufrosina in disguising herself as a man so that she could become fully part of the order.7 She was keen to join her cousin and first confessor, Tommaso dalla Fonte, who had been raised by Catherine’s parents since 1348, but then entered the order in Siena. In 1364, at the age of sixteen, Catherine had attached herself to a group of devout women (mantellate) connected to San Domenico, Siena, where she committed herself to fasting and personal asceticism. The first major turning point of her career occurred in 1367, when she reportedly had a mystical experience of the baby Jesus, in the presence of Mary, John the Evangelist, St Paul, St Dominic, and David, taking Catherine’s hand, placing a ring on her finger, and saying: ‘I espouse you to me in faith. […] From now on you must never falter about accepting any task my providence may lay upon your shoulders’.8 This experience initiated a much greater degree Lehmijoki-Gardner as ‘The Miracoli of Catherine of Siena’, pp. 87–104. Lehmijoki-Gardner (p. 268) notes that it implies she was summoned by Elias, while Centi doubts this, ‘Un processo inventato di sana pianta’. 5  Acta capitulorum generalium ordinis Praedicatorum [hereafter ACGOP], ed.  by Reichert, MOPH iv, 426–27. 6  See, for example, the excellent study of Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena. 7  Raymond of Capua, Die Legenda maior, esp. i.3.38, ed. by Jungmayr, p. 54. 8  Raymond of Capua, Die Legenda maior i.12, ed. by Jungmayr, p. 160; Brophy, Cath­ erine of Siena, pp. 53 and 263–64 on the date.

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of involvement in public life in Siena. She started to acquire followers of her own, even though she lacked any formal theological education. Catherine found her own way of becoming a preacher through dictating letters that would have been read aloud by their recipients. In what may be her earliest known letter, from the early 1370s, addressed to Monna Agnesa Malavolti and other mantellate at Siena, Catherine offers what is a little sermon on the Magdalen as an apostle, so on fire with love for Jesus and ‘drunk with love’ that she preached in the city of Marseilles. Catherine was inspired in particular by the vernacular Life of Mary Magdalene composed by the Pisan friar Domenico Cavalca (1270–1342), author of a vast number of saints’ Lives in Italian.9 Catherine outlines what would become a consistent theme of her writing, the experience of being transformed by love for Jesus and by recognition of the redemptive power of his blood. Even before she met Raymond of Capua, this young woman, from a politically active family of wool-dyers in Siena, was dictating letters to establish a network, which included her close friends Tomasso della Fonte and the more learned Bartolomeo Dominici, made subprior of the convent in Siena in 1373, before rising to high office in the order. It also counted significant Sienese nobles, like Neri di Landoccio Pagliaresi, whom she was addressing even in 1372 as ‘her son’. She urged Neri to focus his attention on Christ, to reject wealth and honour, so that he might ‘fall in love with true virtue’.10 Three of Catherine’s brothers had moved to Florence in 1369, after economic difficulties and political crisis in Siena led them to quit the city and seek to find opportunity in Florence. In a letter that she sent them late in 1373, she emphasized the need to maintain perfect charity. Through such letters, dictated to an unknown scribe or scribes, she effectively became a preacher, even if she lacked the theological education of those Dominican brothers whom she wished to emulate. Although Raymond of Capua claimed that he did not know Catherine of Siena before being appointed her confessor, she could have heard him preach before 1374, or had at least been indirectly shaped by his influence. Descended from an influential family in the court of Frederick II, Raymond had abandoned study of law at Bologna to join the order in around 1350. He rose to become rector of a community of nuns at Montepulciano 1363–66, where he 9  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 4 (T61/G183/DT2). Noffke discusses (i, pp. xxxii–xxxix) the various incomplete editions of her letters by Niccolò Tommasèo (1860), Gigli (1721), and Dupré Theseider (1940), to which she makes reference. 10  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 14 (T99/G272/DT7).

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wrote the Life of their founder, Agnes (1268–1317), a figure whom Catherine venerated from an early age. In 1367, Raymond was elected Prior of the Order’s Roman convent at Santa Maria sopra Minerva — just as Urban V was planning to leave Avignon for Rome. He remained close to the Pope until Urban decided to return to Avignon in August 1370, when he may have returned to Montepulciano and thus have heard about Catherine’s reputation.11 Raymond would also have been familiar with Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73), resident in Rome since 1351 and celebrated for delivering revelations that excoriated the material corruption of the Church. In March 1374, Catherine reported to fellow friars in Pisa that she had received a visit from a representative of Pope Gregory XI, in fact Alfonso di Vadaterra, Birgitta’s confessor.12 Raymond of Capua was well placed to have been the figure who suggested sounding her out as a potential successor to Birgitta.

Elias Raymundus and the Translation of the Relics of Thomas Aquinas Studies of Catherine of Siena rarely give much attention to the head of the order, Elias Raymundus. Yet Catherine’s career as preaching through letters dictated in the vernacular developed in the wake of the massive devotional focus he placed on the figure of Thomas Aquinas, through his efforts in translating his relics from Italy to France. Elias was perceived by his critics (most importantly Raymond of Capua) as out of touch with a wider public. This criticism is evident from comments made by a Dominican chronicler in the fifteenth century, who laments his support (in 1380) for Clement VII as leading to division within the Order and duplication of General Chapters.13 The chronicler described Elias respectfully, but without great enthusiasm, as a master in theology, a man of great faith and fervent zeal, whose major achievement was to transfer the relics of Thomas Aquinas from Fossanova to Toulouse.14 By contrast, he praised Raymond of Capua as ‘a man of complete sanctity and religion, who devoted himself with all his effort to making the souls not just of the

11  For a summary of Raymond’s life, see Jungmayr’s introduction to Raymond of Capua, Die Legenda maior, p. xxiii, and van Ree, ‘Raymond de Capoue’. 12  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 40 (T127/G117/DT20). 13  Chronica Ordinis, in Chronica et Chronicorum Excerpta, ed. by Reichert, MOPH vii.1, 26–27; on Elias, see Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum, i, 365–66. 14  Chronica Ordinis, p. 27.

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brothers and sisters entrusted to him, but of all people worthy of the Creator’.15 He attributed the genesis of the Observant reform to Raymond’s zeal for strict observance among both women and men and to his inspiring Giovanni Dominici.16 The chronicler does not mention the debt of either Raymond or Giovanni Dominici to Catherine of Siena. The involvement of Elias Raymundus in translating the relics of Thomas Aquinas from the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, south of Rome (where he had died on 7 March 1274), to Toulouse on 29 January 1369 nonetheless deserves attention as an effort to reform the Order after the devastation wrought by plague. According to a narrative composed by his secretary, Raymundus Hugonis, Elias had originally heard that Count Onorato of Fondi had secretly stolen the relics of Thomas from Fossanova in the 1350s but was willing to make them available to the Dominican Order to further his own political career.17 This took place just as Pope Urban V was thinking of returning to Rome. Through a complex process of negotiation, Elias, who accompanied Urban V back to Rome in 1367, obtained papal approval for his taking to Toulouse the entire relics of the saint (including the head, which Count Onorato had not been able to obtain, as it had been kept by the Abbot of Fossanova separately, under lock and key at the neighbouring town of Privegno). Of particular interest in the narrative is the detail that as part of his campaign to persuade Urban V to approve the translation, Elias sent Raymond of Capua to request the prayers of the sisters of Montepulciano, as also to a certain ‘Catherine of Rome’, possibly a confused reference to Birgitta of Sweden, then living in Rome with her daughter, Catherine.18 This policy of using Raymond of Capua to solicit religious women to the cause of restoring Thomas’s relics reveals much about the status in which these women were held by Elias. Whatever Raymond thought about removing Thomas’s relics from Italy, Elias 15  Chronica Ordinis, p. 27: ‘vir totius sanctitatis et religionis, qui toto nisi satagebat ut non solum animas fratrum et sororum sue cure commissorum, sed et omnium hominum suo lucri­ faceret creatori’. 16  Chronica Ordinis, pp. 27–28. 17  The documents relating to the translation are edited by Douais, Les reliques de Saint Thomas d’Aquin; for further detail, see Mews, ‘Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena’ and ‘The Historia translationis sacri corporis Thome Aquinatis of Raymundus Hugonis’. 18  Historia translationis, ed. by Douais, Les reliques de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, p. 101; in a draft version of this text preserved in a legendary now in Bologna, she is described as ‘quadam antiqua virgine Romana valde sancta et devota que vocabatur Katherina nostra vicina’; see Mews, ‘The Historia translationis sacri corporis Thome Aquinatis of Raymundus Hugonis’.

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needed to show that there was a unified commitment in the Order for the project. After Urban V granted Elias’s request to obtain the relics on the feast of Corpus Christi (8 June) 1368, Elias had the relics smuggled in secret through Italy on a donkey. The narrative recalls that even though they were taken through Florence, news of the transit of these relics was never publicized. Elias announced that there would be a liturgical feast to celebrate the translation at the General Chapter held at Valence in 1370.19 He also declared that every provincial had to pay one florin on behalf of each Dominican convent for the building of a new tomb for St Thomas at Toulouse, ‘as sumptuous as possible in matter and form’, and declaring that the Pope had decreed an indulgence of one hundred days for all those who contributed to the project, and that this should be paid before the next General Chapter.20 While little is known of the General Chapter of 1372, held in Toulouse, it seems likely that the liturgical office celebrating the translation had been completed by then.21 The decoration of the chapter house at Santa Maria Novella, with its celebration of Thomas Aquinas, reflected the triumphalist theological vision of Elias Raymundus. The opening line of the Office celebrating the translation of his relics expressed a pious ideal of harmony within the order: ‘Oh how happy is mother Italy, from where the ray of a new sun has shone out; Oh how rich Gaul has become, having acquired the mantle of this sun’.22 In reality, tensions between French and Italian parts of the order continued to occupy Elias throughout the 1370s, until it officially went into schism in 1380, mirroring the broader papal schism. When Elias first took charge of the order he was committed to ideals of reform. In his first encyclical, issued from Rome in February 1368, Elias lamented a tendency for numerous permissions and privileges to be given that served to break down general discipline. Individual brothers were being allowed their own rooms outside the dormitory and were sometimes in possession of manuscripts more embellished than any owned by the community as a whole. He complained about some Dominicans making excessive visits to places outside their convent, especially to communities of religious women and to the

19 

ACGOP 1370, ed. by Reichert, MOPH iv, 412. ACGOP 1370, ed. by Reichert, MOPH iv, 421. 21  Only the barest details on the meeting are preserved in ACGOP 1372, ed. by Reichert, MOPH iv, 426. 22  Analecta Hymnica, ed. by Dreves, v, 233: ‘O quam felix mater Italia | Novi solis enixa radium, | O quam dives effecta Gallia | Solis hujus adepta pallium’. 20 

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Roman Curia, perhaps a veiled criticism of the activity of Raymond of Capua.23 Elias was determined to wipe out what he saw as the vice of private possession within the order, by returning to its original Constitutions.24 While he sought to unite the order around devotion to Thomas Aquinas and correctness of liturgical worship, there is no evidence that he himself had close association with religious women.25 The fact that Elias never publicized that he was smuggling the relics of Thomas through Florence in 1368 would not have impressed those who felt that he was excessively concerned to promote the authority of Toulouse, a city with which Thomas Aquinas never had any personal association. A further cause for dissatisfaction with Elias may have been his style of government of the Order. After the General Chapter at Avignon in 1367, Elias decided to break with the ancient tradition of annual meetings of the order. He convened the next General Chapter at Bruges in 1369, and then at Valence in 1370, and at Toulouse in 1372. Only in 1374, did he gain official approval from Gregory XI for allowing a General Chapter to be deferred to a maximum of three years, effectively expanding his freedom of action in a ruling that he included in a revised version of the Constitutions of the Order, drawn up in 1375.26 The General Chapter at Florence in 1374 was the first such meeting of the Order as a whole that Elias had convened in Italy.27 Edicts issued at the subsequent Chapter at Bourges (1376) insisted that the liturgical office celebrating the translation be copied ‘within the year’, and then repeated at Carcassone (1378) that it be copied ‘without any excuse’.28 Although only part of Elias’s larger concern with promoting theological education in the Order, these rulings reflect his concern that not everyone seemed to share his enthusiasm for having translated Thomas’s relics to Toulouse. 23 

ACGOP, ed. by Reichert, MOPH v, 307. ACGOP, ed. by Reichert, MOPH v, 310. 25  ACGOP, ed. by Reichert, MOPH v, 312. 26  The ruling is reported in ACGOP, ed. by Reichert, MOPH iv, 426–27, as well as at the end of the 1375 Constitutiones, ed. by Panella. A version of the Dominican Constitutions, without the 1375 addition, is provided in Latin and English translation by Tugwell in Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, pp. 279–301. 27  The ACGOP reveal that the only previous meetings in Italy in the fourteenth century had been in 1321 (Florence), 1347 (Bologna), 1355 (Florence again), 1357 (Venice), and 1362 (Ferrara). 28  ACGOP 1376 and 1378, ed. by Reichert, MOPH iv, 430 and 466. On slowness to implement the feast, see Mews, ‘Remembering St. Thomas in the Fourteenth Century’. 24 

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Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, and Raymond of Capua Even if Catherine of Siena could never study the writings of Thomas Aquinas at first-hand, she would certainly have been aware of his image, promoted in a number of Dominican churches in the fourteenth century. She would have seen the earliest visual representation of St Thomas in an altarpiece painted by Simone Martini in Pisa for the convent of Santa Caterina around 1320, as also Lippo Memmi’s The Triumph of Saint Thomas altarpiece, commissioned some years later for the same church. In Florence, she would have seen Thomas Aquinas occupying the place of privilege on Christ’s right (opposite St Peter) in Orcagna’s polptych painted c. 1354–57 for the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Maria Novella.29 Whether or not she ever saw Di Bonaiuto’s visual presentation of Thomas Aquinas in the chapter house of Santa Maria Novella, she was certainly exposed to this Dominican move to promote the image of Thomas Aquinas not just as a theologian, but as a saint. Not all Dominicans were equally enthusiastic about the propensity of some religious women to involve themselves in extreme asceticism. Raymond of Capua counters in his Legenda Maiora the views of certain murmuratores, who thought Catherine’s physical asceticism excessive. One of these was Bianco da Siena (1350–c. 1412), author of mystical poetic laude that included warnings against excessive fasting.30 Raymond himself never reports what happened at the General Chapter in relation to Catherine, only that he was entrusted with being her confessor. Two eighteenth-century chronicles from Santa Maria Novella, relying on unknown sources, report that there were attempts to discredit Catherine, while also mentioning that one of her best defenders was Angilo Admiari, a Dominican from Siena charged with her care.31 While it is unlikely that there was any formal case made against her, there was clearly a division of opinion within the Order about the place of such ascetic women within the Order.

29 

Polzer, ‘The “Triumph of Thomas” Panel in Santa Caterina, Pisa’; see also Gardner, ‘The Cult of a Fourteenth-Century Saint’, pp. 185 and 189–90 (see figs. 11, 12, 13), and Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, pp. 59–60, on the Pisan Triumph of Saint Thomas and the Orcagna Christ in Majesty that he dates to 1357. 30  Raymond of Capua, Die Legenda maior, ii.3.169, ed. by Jungmayr, p. 244; see the commentary of Jungmayr, ibid., pp. 767–68, for extensive quotation from the laude of Bianco da Siena. 31  See Raymond of Capua, Die Legenda maior, ed. by Jungmayr, p. 769.

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A distinctive element of Catherine’s devotional piety is her emphasis not just on devotion to the crucified Christ, which led to her receiving stigmata on 1 April 1375 in Pisa, but rejection of worldly honour. Implicit in many of her letters is awareness that not all ecclesiastical authorities were sympathetic to her. In a letter to an unnamed religious living in Florence, perhaps between summer 1375 and early 1376, she politely responds to his suspicions by declaring: ‘I’m sure it is only your zeal for God’s honour and my welfare that prompts you to fear that the devil’s deception is at work’. To his concern that she ask God for the ability to eat, she protests that she forces herself to eat once or twice a day and that she continues to struggle with this issue.32 This is a rare admission in her letters. Although Raymond of Capua attaches much importance to the spiritual significance of her fasting, to counter the concerns of her critics, Catherine herself never focuses on physical asceticism in her writing apart from occasional instruction to a disciple not to fast beyond the normal days specified by the Church.33 Her problem was that she had developed a physical incapacity to digest food, a condition aggravated by excessive fasting when she first joined the mantellate.34 Raymond’s representation of her as voluntarily depriving herself of all food apart from the Eucharist does not do justice to her physical difficulty with eating and her disregard for physical asceticism in her letters. Here, her major concern was to promote the virtue of carità through developing an intensely personal relationship to Jesus, mediated through reflection on his blood. Another sign of the criticism that Catherine was facing emerges in a letter to a Franciscan friar, Lazzarino da Pisa, who had been criticizing Catherine in public in Florence, perhaps soon after Pentecost 1375. Her response to him, that he should emulate the model of Saint Francis, is revealing: ‘To keep the world from stuffing his belly he chose true and strict holy poverty, and I want us to do the same’.35 Catherine’s piety was shaped not by a specifically Dominican liturgy, but by the example of saints like Francis whom she saw as defined by an intensely personal devotion to Jesus. It expressed a vision radically different to the official measures of Elias to promote reform in the order through closer attention to reverence for Thomas Aquinas and correct implementation of liturgical form. 32 

Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 160–61 (T92/G30/DT19). Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, iii, 181–82 (T174/G361). 34  On the issue of her eating disorder, see Brophy, Catherine of Siena, pp. 48–53. 35  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 93 (T225/G121). 33 

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A clear sign of her voicing criticism of those in positions of authority is evident in her first letter to Pope Gregory XI, written in January 1376, when he was still in Avignon. She begins by lamenting the self-centredness of those, whether rulers or ruled, who are dominated by pride and desire to please rather than by charity: ‘Those who are in authority, I say, do evil when holy justice dies in them, because of their selfish self-centredness and their fear of incurring the displeasure of others’.36 Without naming her target, she laments that ‘This is why those in their care are all rotten, full of uncleanness and evil! Oimé! (I say it weeping!) […] A shepherd such as this is really a hireling! […] Imitate that gentle Gregory, for it will be possible for you as it was for him’.37 She keeps up her theme that he should imitate Pope Gregory the Great in focusing on the Word of God rather than being swayed by ‘those rotten members who have rebelled against you’. His need was to appoint ‘good pastors and administrators in your cities, for you have experienced rebellion because of bad pastors and administrators’.38 The climax of her letter is discrete in that she raises the possibility that, if Elias were to be given a cardinal’s hat, a new vicar would be appointed to the Order of Preachers. She reveals in parallel letters to Nicola da Osimo, a papal secretary, and to Iacopo da Itri, Archbishop of Otranto, that she hoped that position would go to Stefano da Cumba, procurator of the order (1367–74) and provincial of the Roman Province (1368–70) while Raymond of Capua was in Rome and Urban V was in Rome.39 As it happened, Elias never became a cardinal. At the General Chapter of 1376, it was decreed that Stefano da Cumba should become a lector at Bourges, as if Elias did not want such a significant figure to continue to exercise influence in Rome.40 The way she concludes her letter to the Pope by urging him to write to Raymond suggests that she wrote that letter with Raymond’s full support: ‘He will always be obedient to you. I’ll say no more.’41 By having Catherine write to the Pope, Raymond was able to pursue his vision of reform within the Order without being seen as excessively ambitious on his part.

36 

Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 245 (T185/G1/DT54). Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 246–47. 38  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 248. 39  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 252–63 (T181/G40/DT55 and T183/G33/DT56). 40  ACGOP 1376, ed. by Reichert, MOPH iv, 436. 41  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 257. 37 

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Catherine of Siena and Thomas Aquinas Catherine developed close contact with her disciples in Florence. This was despite the fact the city formally joined an anti-papal league in July 1375, resulting in its being put under an edict on 31 March 1376 and Gregory XI sending an army led by Cardinal Robert of Geneva (subsequently Clement VII). Through her close friend Frate Bartolomeo Dominici, she befriended Giovanni Dominici, who had entered Santa Maria Novella in 1372/73. She kept close contact with Niccolò di Ruggero Soderini, a prominent figure in the city, to whom she often wrote for assistance, even though his house would be destroyed during the uprising of the Ciompi in June 1378.42 She also wrote three letters to the Bishop of Florence, Angelo Ricasoli, urging him to live up to his vocation. Again, she seems to be a mouthpiece for Raymond of Capua, explaining that he ‘has not carried out your orders because he has been very busy and has not been able to get away’.43 In another (from January 1376), she dwells on her theme of the importance of true charity, ‘that gentlest of mothers who has deep humility as her nurse, and she in turn nourishes all her children, the virtues’ as an introduction to urging his support for the nuns at Sant’Agnesa.44 She stayed in Florence in 1376, befriending Monna Agnese, wife of the tailor Francesco di Pipino, subsequently sending her many letters.45 Catherine’s commitment to the cause of reform intensified in the course of 1377, after the return of Gregory XI to Rome in January of that year, precipitating a marked deterioration in the relationship between Florence and the papacy. In a long reflective letter to Raymond, sent in October 1377, she speaks out without hesitation about contemporary churchmen: ‘These people have descended to the level of the fly, such an ugly insect that it alights on something sweet and fragrant, and then, after leaving it, thinks nothing of landing on disgusting and filthy things.’46 Catherine proudly concludes this letter by 42 

Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, i, 95 (T146/G115/DT27), 127 (T131/G216/DT33); see also ibid., ii, 22–29 (T196/G4/DT64) and in July 1378, immediately after the destruction of his house, ibid., iii, 156–59 (T297/G218); her letter to Ristori di Piero Canigiani, another prominent Guelf, seems to be from this time; ibid., iii, 160–66 (T299/G231). 43  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, ii, 141–42 (T136/G36/DT37). 44  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, ii, 227–32 (T88/G35/DT28). 45  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, iii, 145–46 (T288/G365); see also ibid., iii, 175–76 (T179/G291), 181–82 (T174/G361), 207–08 (T251/G362). 46  Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, ii, 495–506 (T272/G90), esp. p. 501.

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thanking God for a newly developed skill, namely that she had written it with her own hand: He provided for my refreshment by giving me the ability to write — a consolation I’ve never known because of my ignorance — so that when I come down from the heights I might have a little something to vent my heart, lest it burst. Because he didn’t want to take me yet from this dark life, he fixed it in my mind in a marvellous manner, the way a teacher does when he gives his pupil a model. Shortly after you left me, I began to learn in my sleep, with the glorious evangelist John and Thomas Aquinas.47

While positivist historiography has sometimes doubted her claim that she did learn to write, its importance lies in what this reveals about her evolving selfunderstanding.48 Her claim that she had been taught by John and Thomas Aquinas itself reflects her sense of self-identification with the beloved disciple. In moving from someone who had to dictate her letters to becoming an author, she saw herself as having benefited directly from Thomas Aquinas, the figure in whom the Dominican Order expressed such confidence as a teacher and saint. Catherine wrote this letter to Raymond shortly after he had left for Rome, probably to prepare the ground for his being re-elected a Prior at Santa Maria sopra Minerva.49 She would then embark on writing her only major treatise, the Dialogue on Divine Providence, completed in Florence during 1378. It declared her great themes of love and discernment, while rebuking corruption among the clergy and reflecting on the demands of Providence for obedience to the divine will. Within the work, she situates herself, not in relation to the Order of Preachers as such, but to all the great saints of the Church: Benedict, who imposed order on the Church; Francis who was committed to the principle of poverty through love; Dominic who bequeathed a testament to his disciples, laying a curse on those who would impose possessions of any kind, whether individually or communally, in such a way ‘that he chose as his queen, Poverty’.50 Catherine would have known the Testament of Dominic, with its 47 

Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, ii, 505. For telling criticism of positivist scepticism, see Tylus, Reclaiming Catherine of Siena. 49  Noffke argues that Raymond was already in Rome by October 1377, having succeeded to an unnamed prior at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in Catherine of Siena, The Letters, trans. by Noffke, iii, 41. 50  Catherine of Siena, Il Dialogo della divina provvidenza c. 158, ed. by Puccetti and Centi, p. 374: ‘Anzi, lébbe; ed in segno che egil l’aveva e gli dispiaceva il contrario, lascia per testamento ai suoi figliuoli, come eredità, la sua maledizione e la mia, se essi posseggono e tengoni 48 

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injunction that his disciples should ‘have charity, keep humility, and possess voluntary poverty’, from its being reported by his thirteenth-century biographers.51 Although Jordan of Saxony does not mention the Testament, he does say that Dominic insisted on a change in the practice of the early friars in rejecting all property, at the order’s first General Chapter held in 1220.52 Catherine’s claim that Dominic had embraced Poverty as his ‘Queen’ was an innovative gesture, connecting his memory to that of Francis. Earlier in the Dialogue, Catherine had declared that she had seen with the eye of the intellect Thomas Aquinas, ‘from whom she acquired the light of much learning’, as well as Augustine, Jerome, and other doctors and saints.53 Her claim positioned her within a spiritual lineage that no one in the Order of Preachers could question. Given that Elias Raymundus had placed such great emphasis on celebrating the translation of Thomas’s relics from Italy to France, it is not surprising that Catherine’s admirers would celebrate their saint as someone of equal stature, but with a different kind of wisdom. Her vision of Christian teaching did not rely on organization and great knowledge of the philosophy of Aristotle. Rather, she sought to focus attention on an interior relationship with Christ and the moral demands imposed by the divine love that he manifested for humanity. After her death in 1380, Raymond of Capua proudly celebrated this visionary intimacy of Catherine with Aquinas and other great saints because it embodied a religious renewal that he felt could not rely simply on venerating a great theologian in the past.

Conclusion Rather than preaching solely through dictating letters, to be read aloud to others, Catherine sought to present herself as author of a treatise, her Dialogue, that crystallized her key ideas. Paradoxically, her devotion to Thomas Aquinas, whom she credited (along with John the Evangelist) with teaching her to write, beni in particolare o in commune, in segno che egli aveva eletta per sua sposa questa regina, la povertà.’ 51  The Testament is first reported by Ferrand, Vita Sancti Dominici 92, ed. by Scheeben, MOPH xvi, 247–49, esp. p. 248: ‘Caritatem habete, humilitatem servate, paupertatem voluntariam possidete’. See Creytens, ‘Le Testament de S. Dominique’. 52  Jordan of Saxony, Libellus de principiis ordinis praedicatorum 87, ed.  by Scheeben, MOPH xvi, 67. 53  Catherine of Siena, Il Dialogo della divina provvidenza c. 85, ed. by Puccetti and Centi, p. 179.

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indirectly owed much to Elias Raymundus, through his focus on the cult of the saint’s relics. Catherine was much closer, however, to Raymond of Capua, who preferred to have her as a living saint rather than to focus on relics now transferred to Toulouse. Just as she was engaged on her Dialogue, Gregory XI died on 27 March 1378 and Urban VI, an Italian Pope, was elected, creating a misleading expectation that corruption could be quickly swept away with a new regime. For Raymond, Catherine was ultimately more effective as a preacher than St Thomas. In practice, there were so many vested interests that the behaviour of Urban VI soon alarmed many of the cardinals who had elected him. At the General Chapter held at Carcassone at Pentecost 1378, Elias Raymundus dispatched to Rome a senior Dominican, Aldobrandino da Ferrara (who had composed the liturgical office celebrating the translation of the relics of St Thomas), inquisitor of Ferrara and diffinitor of lower Lombardy, to negotiate relationships with the new Pope.54 On 20 September 1378, the French speaking cardinals met at the cathedral of Fondi in the Kingdom of Naples, under the patronage of Count Onorato (who had originally taken the relics of Thomas Aquinas, before offering them to Elias Raymundus) and Queen Joanna of Naples. There they elected Robert of Geneva as Pope Clement VII. Elias Raymundus, bound by ties of political debt to Count Onorato and Joanna of Naples, considered that the only correct course of action was to follow the cardinals in supporting the choice of Robert of Geneva. At the General Chapter that he convened at Lausanne in 1380, he lamented the calling of a rival General Chapter at Bologna, convened by Raymond of Capua, that refused to recognize Elias as Master.55 This was the first of a series of rival General Chapters held within the order until 1417. 56 Between 1380 and his death in 1399, Raymond of Capua sought to maintain control over the Dominican Order, or at least that section which recognized Urban VI (1378–89) and Boniface IX (1389–1404). In the meantime, Elias — who died in the same year as Urban VI — sought to preserve a more traditional vision of the order, founded on respect for the political authority of the French crown and the intellectual authority of Thomas Aquinas. The story of how Catherine’s disciple Giovanni Dominici, a friar of modest background, rose to become Subprior of Santa Maria Novella in 1381 and 54 

ACGOP 1378, ed. by Reichert, MOPH iv, 455. ACGOP 1380, ed. by Reichert, MOPH viii, 10–11. 56  Reichert lists these rival General Chapters in ACGOP, MOPH viii, 2–3. 55 

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its Prior 1385–87, and was then sent by Raymond of Capua to reform various Dominican communities in Venice, falls outside the scope of this study.57 Suffice it to observe that when Dominici returned in 1403, at the invitation of Coluccio Salutati, and established a reformed community at Fiesole in 1406, he was bringing back to Florence, through his preaching, ideas that he had initially absorbed through his early contact with Catherine of Siena, who reportedly gave him the gift of speech. Through Dominici’s influence, Catherine’s vision of renewal within the Order of Preachers would be put into practice within the city of Florence — above all through the foundation of San Marco in Florence by Dominicans of Fiesole in 1435. Here Fra Angelico would give particular visual prominence to the Testament of Dominic, with its curse against the introduction of property into the Order, reflecting a line of interpretation that Catherine had reasserted in her Dialogue.58 Recognition of Catherine’s own sanctity would evolve only slowly, through the efforts not just of Raymond of Capua but of Tommaso of Siena and of Stefano Maconi, who joined the Carthusan Order.59 Giovanni Dominici would have first heard about Catherine at that General Chapter held at Santa Maria Novella in 1374. The decision made at that event by Elias Raymundus, master of the Order of Preachers and a great devotee of Thomas Aquinas, to allow Raymond of Capua to become Catherine’s confessor had far-reaching consequences. Raymond certainly used Catherine to promote his own desire for reform within the order, ultimately turning against Elias in that process. At the same time, Catherine benefited from Raymond of Capua to find her own voice as a preacher committed to the cause of spiritual renewal, not just in Florence, but throughout Tuscany and beyond.

57 

On his preaching, see Debby, ‘Political Views in the Preaching of Giovanni Dominici in Renaissance Florence’ and Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers. On the process of this reform, see Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, pp. 22–25. 58  Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, pp. 258–60. 59  On this process, see the papers edited by Hamburger and Signori, Catherine of Siena.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Acta capitulorum generalium ordinis Praedicatorum, ed. by Benedictus Maria Reichert, Monu­­ menta Ordinis Praedicatorum Historica, iv, v, viii (Roma: Santa Sabina, 1899–1900) Analecta Hymnica, ed. by Guido Dreves, 55 vols (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1961) Catherine of Siena, Il Dialogo della divina provvidenza, ed. by Angiolo Puccetti amd Tito S. Centi (Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 2006) —— , The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. with introduction and notes by Suzanne Noff­k e, 4 vols (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2000–08) Chronica et Chronicorum Excerpta, ed. by Benedictus Maria Reichert, Monumenta Ordi­ nis Praedicatorum Historica, vii.1 (Roma: Santa Sabina, 1904) Constitutiones, ed. by Aemilia Panella, OP, from Bibl. Vaticana, Vat. lat. 7658 (xiv2), fols 139r–184v at [accessed 4 June 2016] Ferrand, Pierre, Vita Sancti Dominici, ed. by Ch. H. Scheeben, in Monumenta Ordinis Prae­dicatorum Historica, xvi (Roma: Institutum historicum FF. Praedicatorum, 1935) Jordan of Saxony, Libellus de principiis ordinis praedicatorum, ed. by Ch. H. Scheeben, in Monumenta Ordinis Praedicatorum Historica, xvi (Roma: Institutum historicum FF. Praedicatorum, 1935) I miracoli di Caterina di Iacopo di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. by Francesco Valli, Fontes S. Catharinae Senensis Historici, 4 (Siena: Università di Siena, 1936); ‘The Miracoli of Catherine of Siena’, trans. by Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, in Dominican Penitent Women, ed. and trans. by Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner (New York: Paulist Press, 2005), pp. 87–104 Raymond of Capua, Die Legenda maior (Vita Catharinae Senensis) des Raimund von Capua: Edition nach der Nürnberger Handschrift Cent. IV, 75: Übersetzung und Kom­ mentar, ed. by Jörg Jungmayr, 2 vols (Berlin: Weidler, 2004) Les reliques de Saint Thomas d’Aquin: Textes originaux, ed. by Céléstin Douais (Paris: Librairie Vve Ch Poussielgue, 1903)

Secondary Works Brophy, Don, Catherine of Siena: A Passionate Life (New York: Bluebridge, 2010) Centi, Timoteo, ‘Un processo inventato di sana pianta’, Rassegna di Ascetica e Mistica, 4 (1970), 325–42 Creytens, Raymond, ‘Le Testament de S. Dominique dans la littérature Dominicaine ancienne et moderne’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 43 (1973), 29–72 Debby, Nirit Ben-Aryeh, ‘Political Views in the Preaching of Giovanni Dominici in Renaissance Florence, 1400–1406’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002), 19–48

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—— , Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001) Gardner, Julian, ‘Andrea di Bonaiuto and the Chapterhouse Frescoes in Santa Maria Novella’, Art History, 2 (1979), 107–38; repr. in Gardner, Patrons, Painters and Saints, no. X —— , ‘The Cult of a Fourteenth-Century Saint: The Iconography of Louis of Toulouse’, in Atti del XIV Convegno Internazionale di Studi Francescani (Assisi, 1986): I Franciscani nel Trecento (Perugia: Società Internazionale di Studi Francescani, 1988), pp. 169–93; repr. in Gardner, Patrons, Painters and Saints, no. IX —— , Patrons, Painters and Saints: Studies in Medi­eval Italian Painting (Aldershot: Vari­ o­rum, 1993) Hamburger, Jeffrey, and Gabriela Signori, eds, Catherine of Siena: The Creation of a Cult (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) Hood, William, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Kaeppeli, Thomas, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum, 4 vols (Roma: St Sabina, 1970–93) Luongo, F. Thomas, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2006) Mews, Constant J. ‘The Historia translationis sacri corporis Thome Aquinatis of Raymundus Hugonis: An Eyewitness Account and its Significance’, in Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medi­eval Europe, ed. by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016) —— , ‘Remembering St. Thomas in the Fourteenth Century: Between Theory and Prac­ tice’, Prezgląd Tomistyczny, 15 (2009), 77–91 —— , ‘Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena: Emotion, Devotion and Mendicant Spiritualties in the Late Fourteenth Century’, Digital Philology: A Journal of Medi­eval Cultures, 1.2 (2012), 235–52 Polzer, Joseph, ‘The “Triumph of Thomas” Panel in Santa Caterina, Pisa: Meaning and Date’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 37 (1993), 29–70 Ree, A. W. van, ‘Raymond de Capoue: Elements biographiques’, Archivum Fratrum Prae­ dicatorum, 33 (1963), 159–241 Tylus, Jane, Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2009)

‘With open doors’ in the Tor de’ Specchi: The Chiesa Vecchia Frescoes and the Monks of Santa Maria Nova Cynthia Troup A Monk’s Hand? Nowadays Rome’s Tor de’ Specchi is synonymous with the monastery of the Oblates of Francesca Romana, named for Francesca Bussa de’ Ponziani (1384–1440), who was eventually canonized in 1608. The brightly coloured frescoes upstairs are the most well known of the artistic treasures concealed behind the monastery exterior, on Via del Teatro di Marcello in Campitelli. Comprised of an altarpiece and twenty-six episodes from the life, miracles, and visions of Francesca, the fresco programme is arrayed in two tiers on each wall of a room known as the oratorio vecchio, or the chiesa vecchia (Figure 22.1). The attribution of the frescoes remained erratically at issue throughout the twentieth century, displacing or deferring articulation of the gendered and institutional rhetoric that structures the images.1 1  In literature on the Tor de’ Specchi, ‘l’antica casa’ refers to the oldest rooms of the monastery complex, which are also known for a second, later series of frescoes. The ten scenes of this second series show Francesca subject to demonic temptations. Bearing the date 1485, they have been little studied.

Cynthia Troup ([email protected]) is a writer, art historian, and editor whose publications include articles in Italian Studies — several on the cult of Santa Francesca Romana — as well as essays and interviews in the fields of contemporary art and music; she also writes for performance (see ).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 405–427 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109717

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Figure 22.1. Altar wall frescoes attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his workshop, or his circle, 1468; chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. Fotocolor B. N. Marconi, Genova.

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This chapter considers the space of the chiesa vecchia in light of the Oblates’ documented relations with the Olivetan Benedictine monks of Santa Maria Nova before and after Francesca’s death. The women of the new community at the Tor de’ Specchi struggled to avoid strict enclosure and to limit the control of the monks, whose spiritual authority in Rome was indivisible from the hierarchy associated with the order’s mother-house, the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore in Tuscany. This spiritual authority — with its potential for equivocal expression — is a theme of the chiesa vecchia programme, seen particularly across the upper tier of the altar wall. Detailed analysis of several of the fresco compositions suggests that they were shaped by an assertion of monkish control over the Oblates, and over the salient themes of the biography of their foundress. As is now well recognized, in their narrative range and unusual details, the frescoes refer directly to material collected as part of proceedings seeking Francesca’s canonization, and to the tractati written down and compiled by Giovanni Mattiotti, likewise begun in 1440. Mattiotti was confessor to Francesca for eleven years until her death, becoming confessor to the Oblates once Francesca resided with her fledgling community in 1436. From the early twentieth century deliberations on the frescoes’ ‘paternity’ centred on the name of Antoniazzo Romano: on his autograph hand, his workshop, or his ambito — the array of influences characterizing artistic production in mid-fifteenth-century Rome, which Antoniazzo Romano’s well-documented career can convincingly reconcile.2 ‘FINIS MCCCCLXVIII’, thus the date 1468, is inscribed as part of the caption below the widest image, a scene of obsequies to Francesca (see Figure 22.2, below). In the chronology of archival sources for Antoniazzo Romano’s career, there is a lacuna for 1468. By default this inscription becomes a ‘signature’ which can corroborate theses of his absence or presence in the production of the chiesa vecchia programme.3 In the archive of literature on the attribution of the frescoes, Ottorino Montenovesi’s 1941 contribution might be described as peculiar. His article sought the artist amongst the Olivetan Benedictine monks; it proposed the painter to have been an illuminator from this Congregation, noting that the border framing the scenes and their vernacular captions seemed better suited to

2 

Galletti, ‘Alcune precisazioni’, p.  150; Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano, pp.  211–16; Paolucci, Antoniazzo Romano, pp. 11, 36. Troup, ‘Art History and the Resistant Presence of a Saint’, examines the archive of literature on the frescoes. 3  For the lacuna of 1468, see Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano, pp. 169–72; Paolucci, Anto­ niazzo Romano, pp. 153–55.

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a book than a wall painting.4 When cited, Montenovesi’s view has been considered a quaint aberration in surveys of the images.5 Yet Montenovesi’s proposition is worth acknowledging because it concedes two interpretive contexts for the frescoes largely neglected by the art historical literature. Firstly, it recognizes something of the Olivetan Benedictines’ continued stake in the enhancement of Francesca’s cult after her death on 9 March 1440. This stake, or investment, followed from the decisive role played by the monks in the formation and patronage of the Tor de’ Specchi community identified with Francesca Bussa de’ Ponziani during her lifetime. Subsequently the monks’ efforts to achieve her official canonization were vigorous, beginning with their appeal to Pope Eugenius IV just months after her burial in their monastery church in Rome, the basilica of Santa Maria Nova, situated at the east end of the Roman Forum.6 The monks gave crucial impetus to all three of the canonization proceedings undertaken in the fifteenth century; depositions for the proceedings of 1451 took place in the lower choir at Santa Maria Nova, which helped to promote their significance beyond Rome.7 Notable in the processi are the figures of friar Antonello di Monte Savello and friar Ippolito di Paolo di Nuccio da Roma. Until his death in 1425, Fra Antonello preceded Mattiotti as Francesca’s confessor. Fra Ippolito was intermittently Prior of Santa Maria Nova during the years 1435–52, and also Francesca’s spiritual intimate. Over 1452–53, he composed a concise Latin Vita of Francesca, which became a widely circulated addition to the dossier of hagiographical materials in manuscript.8 Secondly, Montenovesi’s idea of a monk ‘illuminating’ the walls of the old oratory proposes a liturgical significance for the frescoes. It draws into relevance the nature and structure of the space in which the frescoes are found, and the traditions of devotion at once monumentalized and mediated by the scenes and their captions.

4 

Montenovesi, ‘Romanità gloriosa’, p. 7. Galletti, ‘Alcune precisazioni’, p. 155, n. 1. 6  I processi inediti, ed. by Lugano, pp.  xiii–xxvii; Cattana, ‘Santa Francesca Romana’, p. 424; Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana, p. 142. 7  I processi inediti, ed. by Lugano, p. xvi; Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana, p. 51. 8  Cattana, ‘Santa Francesca Romana’, pp. 406–23; on Fra Ippolito’s Vita, see Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana, pp. 9–10, 52–55, based on Mazzuconi, ‘Pauca quedam extracta de vita et miraculis beate Francisce de Pontianis’. 5 

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The Oblates’ ‘Open Monastery’ By all accounts, a formative role for the Olivetans was officially inaugurated on the occasion of Francesca’s oblation, which took place on 15 August (the feast of the Assumption) 1425. The oblation represented a pledge of spiritual affiliation with the monastery of Santa Maria Nova, as part of a commitment to active piety. It was made with nine other women and received by the Prior of the monastery ‘in the name and by the authority of ’ the Abbot-General of the Olivetan Benedictines, before Santa Maria Nova’s community of twenty-three monks assembled in their church. According to a seventeenth-century transcription, the spoken ‘formula’ for this oblation commenced, ‘I sister Francisca, daughter of Paolo Bussa, offer myself to the Almighty God, the Glorious Virgin Mary, our Blessed Father Benedict in this venerable monastery of Santa Maria Nova of Rome of the Order of Mount Olivet’.9 This simple, private pledge inaugurated a group of pious laywomen of high social standing who, while continuing to live with their families, nurtured a shared commitment to regular confession and communion, prayer (especially Marian devotion), penance, and charitable deeds — as far as possible in accord with the precepts of the Benedictine Rule.10 Their oblation marked their particular adherences within a flourishing, participatory ‘practice of bizzocaggio’ amongst women across Rome’s social spectrum and throughout the city.11 Dedicated to the Assumption, and home to a venerated icon of the Virgin, under the Olivetan Benedictines the ancient basilica of Santa Maria Nova on the Palatine had become a vibrant centre in the movement for monastic reform.12 In July 1433, Eugenius  IV sanctioned the Oblates’ plea to co-reside in Campitelli; however, with respect to enclosure, ‘apostolic constitutions and statutes’, he recognized the community without approving ‘the status of the women’.13 For, despite a focus on the values of Benedictine monastic spirituality, 9 

Lugano, ‘L’istituzione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi secondo i documenti’, at pp. 274–76, excerpts the formal declaration of oblation from Biblioteca Alessandrina, Codex 92, fol. 96r, a collection of transcriptions made by Benedictine Abbot Costantino Caetani. 10  Lunardi, ‘L’istituzione di Tor de’ Specchi’, pp. 72–74; Vecchi, ‘La Congregazione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi’, p. 457. 11  ‘The practice of bizzocaggio’ is Esposito’s phrase, in ‘Men and Women in Roman Confraternities’, pp. 95–96; see also Esposito, ‘Female Religious Communities in Fifteenth-Century Rome’. 12  Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana, pp. 131–33. 13  ‘Non ostanti le Constituzioni apostoliche […]. Ma per questa concessione noi non

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from 1433 the Oblates who lived as a community refused the veil of clausura, seeking to consolidate a presence in Rome as an ‘open monastery’ on the basis of simple rather than public vows. Comparable women’s communities were not uncommon in fifteenth-century Rome, but traditional monastic enclosure was the standard set by men, a consequence of the unequal, dependent functionality accorded to women. Katherine Gill has observed that variants and alternatives to the enclosed convent were more than usually susceptible to ‘contradictory attitudes [… of ] admiration and suspicion’, deference and interference: ‘the challenge of the uncloistered religious woman was to navigate a difficult border zone, tacking between boundaries of gender and status, in societies whose hearts were passionate and inconsistent about just those boundaries’.14 From its beginnings the Tor de’ Specchi community enjoyed a singular prestige for the reputed sanctity of Francesca as foundress, the noble origins and devoutness of the Oblates, and the close local ties cultivated by their charitable works.15 Even so, as with any all-female religious institution, the Oblates were always subject to male superintendence.16 In their case, a need to achieve legal recognition and protection for their distinctive community brought to the fore ambiguities that, from a practical point of view, inhered in their spiritual affiliation with the Olivetan Benedictines at Santa Maria Nova. As Gill and others have briefly noted, documents from the first thirty-five years of the Tor de’ Specchi community, 1433–68, suggest a preoccupation on the part of the women to circumscribe a jurisdictional role for the monks.17 Permitting various increments in the Oblates’ relative autonomy around matters of organization and membership, these sources consistently nest jurisdictional issues with expression of the spiritual authority of the Prior and monks of Santa Maria intendiamo di approvare lo stato delle dette donne’: Lugano, ‘L’istituzione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi secondo i documenti’, pp. 281–84. On this clause as a matter of granting an exception, see Vecchi, ‘La Congregazione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi’, p. 459; Gill, ‘Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Italy’, p. 44, n. 44; Sensi, ‘Mulieres in ecclesia’, pp. 816–17. 14  Gill, ‘Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Italy’, pp. 19–20. 15  Esposito, ‘Female Religious Communities in Fifteenth-Century Rome’, pp. 201–09; Lirosi, ‘I monasteri femminili a Roma nell’età della Controriforma’, pp. 163–65. 16  Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture, p. 9. 17  Gill, ‘Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medi­e val and Early Modern Italy’, p. 27, and p. 44, n. 43, n. 44; Ranft, Women and the Religious Life in Premodern Europe, p. 99; see the editors’ remarks under ‘Other Ecclesiastical Relations’ in ‘S. Francesca Romana a Tor de’ Specchi’, ed. by Gill and Bitel; also Sensi, ‘Mulieres in ecclesia’.

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Nova — while they differ in their tone of deference to the Oblates. The same documents, therefore, imply that legally defined limitations upon the dictates of the monks were in practice irreducibly exceeded. Aspects of the chiesa vec­ chia frescoes carry the same implication, reinforcing a sense that in their conventual space the Oblates negotiated that ‘difficult border zone’ between institutionalized constraints upon their gender and status as religiosae mulieres. The residence or casa where Francesca was received in 1436 is understood to have had the medieval Torre degli Specchi as its landmark, and the tower and adjoining rooms at its centre, though all the component properties were not owned by the community until several years after Francesca’s death.18 Thus occupied and adapted rather than purpose-built, Richard Krautheimer has called it a fifteenth-century ‘maze […] typical of a late medieval mansion’.19 By 1436 the community was delineated legally and liturgically, as well as spatially; by mid-1440, soon after Francesca’s death, the women had managed to achieve considerable scope for self-direction, including a declaration from the Abbot-General of the Olivetan Benedictines that comprehensively prohibited the monks of Santa Maria Nova from assuming any entitlement concerning the Oblates, and from any interference with their communal affairs.20 With respect to liturgical provision, Eugenius IV had consented in 1433 to the Oblates electing their own confessor. In May 1444, following from their entreaties, with the bull ‘Vitae honestas’ Eugenius IV specified permission to elect a priest as both chaplain and confessor. By pontifical authority, ‘as many times as it is suitable’ the chaplain-confessor could ‘celebrate Mass with open doors in the Oratory of the aforesaid house, without seeking, over that, license from anyone’.21 Apparently, little more than a decade after the Oblates had obtained papal recognition of their community, a room in their casa had been functionally consecrated as an oratory; a place for private and shared liturgy, for the administering of communion and the performance of Mass, if not also the hearing of confession by their own chaplain. In a narrow sense, liturgi18 

Marchetti, La Casa delle Oblate di Santa Francesca Romana a Tor de’ Specchi, pp. 9–10, 12. See also Lugano, ‘La Casa delle Oblate’. 19  Krautheimer, Rome, Profile of a City, p. 299. 20  Lugano, ‘L’istituzione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi secondo i documenti’, pp. 286–87, 293–300. 21  ‘alcun prete sacerdote […] per vostro cappellano e confessore, il quale tante volte quante sarà opportuno celebri la Messa con le porte aperte nell’Oratorio della predetta casa, senza ricercare sopra di ciò licenza da veruno’: Lugano, ‘L’istituzione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi secondo i documenti’, p. 301.

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cal propriety was the reason for the bull’s stipulation that Mass be celebrated ‘with open doors in the Oratory’. But while evoking the everyday space of the chiesa vecchia, the image of ‘open doors’ can vividly communicate the Oblates’ refusal of strict enclosure, and the reward of their efforts to strengthen collective agency and fulfill practical needs through direct petition to the pope. The same image also conveys the unchanging circumstance shared by the Oblates with other religiosae mulieres and sanctimoniales — that of the primacy of clerical authority and discretion. In March 1468, the unpredictability of this discretion surfaced in a communiqué from the Abbot-General of the Olivetan Benedictines to Gregorio Amatisco, Abbot of Santa Maria Nova. In place of the Prior of Santa Maria Nova who was otherwise occupied, Amatisco was commissioned to ‘instruct, examine, visit […, to] correct, punish, and reform’ as he deigned ‘our sisters which Oblates we call of our Rule’ at the Tor de’ Specchi.22 This document rings with an attitude of suspicion, presuming a regime over the Oblates that permits intervention and imposition of punishment.23 At what point, then, did the Oblates’ continuing spiritual affiliation with the Olivetan Benedictines reliably exclude the latter’s right to prescriptive scrutiny of life inside the casa delle Oblate?

A Monk’s Gaze The scene of obsequies to Francesca is the chiesa vecchia’s widest image (Figure 22.2), situated on the north wall — an interior wall pierced by the space’s single doorway and reached by a staircase now designated a scala santa.24 As mentioned above, the date 1468 in roman numerals completes the caption below this scene, neither confirming nor denying the presence of Antoniazzo Romano in the production of the Tor de’ Specchi programme. A Roman-born painter and prolific artist-entrepreneur, Antoniazzo Romano is considered to have been capable, at his best, of synthesizing innovations from further north with 22 

‘sorores nostras quas oblatas dicimus nostro iuri […] te esse censentes rogamus et obsecramus ut eas instituere regere visitare et si qua iusta pena punienda reppereris corrigere punire ac reformare digneris’: Lugano, ‘L’istituzione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi secondo i documenti’, pp. 304–05. The document was issued from Monte Oliveto Maggiore, 12 March 1468. 23  Gill, ‘Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medi­e val and Early Modern Italy’, p. 27; p. 44, n. 43, n. 44. This document is not mentioned in Sensi’s survey of relations between the Oblates and the Olivetan Benedictines in the fifteenth century. 24  Marchetti, La casa delle Oblate di Santa Francesca Romana a Tor de’ Specchi, pp. 8–12.

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a steady commitment to well-recognized traditions in religious art.25 The narrative scenes in the chiesa vecchia cannot entirely substantiate such a view of his talent: through the literature interested in attribution there has long been agreement on the frescoes’ varied quality, a matter of artistic skill, but one typically bracketed with observations about uneven treatment of depth, volume, and scale; mixed success in the delivery of convincing illusionism; patchy relations between inventiveness and methodical schema. Three traits in particular have repeatedly challenged straightforward characterization of these frescoes, necessitating a mixed identification with ‘medieval’ or ‘archaic’ and ‘Renaissance’ art: the repetitive arrangement of most miracle scenes into vignettes of ‘before’ and ‘after’; inconsistencies in style and ‘realism’ of the architecture; and some striking disparities of scale. Such a disparity is exemplified in the scene of the obsequies by disproportion between the figures of attending Oblates and citizens and that of the solitary, white-habited monk.26 A geometrical assemblage renders the weighty façade which frames the monk’s outward bearing and his firmly outlined attitude of prayer. However, the vernacular text underpinning this image fixes the setting as local, naming the monastery church located across the Campidoglio, in words that read as both chronicle and acclamation: ‘the sacred holy body of the blessed Francesca being some days above ground in the church of Santa Maria Nova, where, there flocking innumerable people on account of the odour of her most holy life, the eternal God, for the merits of the blessed one, deigned to manifest many and wondrous miracles concerning various and old infirmities’.27 While ‘innumerable people’ ‘flocking’ registers pageantry and community, the naming of Santa Maria Nova invokes the authority of its witness to Francesca’s saintly presence. At once spatial and institutional, this authority is literally figured in the specially modulated creases and contours of the monk’s hooded face. Its importance is gauged in the figure’s compositional function as the tallest vertical axis joining foreground with background and stabilizing the middle ground. In 25 

Paolucci, Antoniazzo Romano, pp. 5–23. Galletti set forth a poor view of the frescoes’ style in exactly these terms, ‘Alcune precisazioni’, p. 151. See also, for example, Rossi, ‘Le opere d’arte’, pp. 18–22; Cavallaro, Antoni­ azzo Romano, pp. 44–49; Paolucci, Antoniazzo Romano, pp. 12, 36; and the short account of the frescoes given in Paoletti and Radke, Art in Renaissance Italy, given under the subeading ‘A Roman School of Painting’, pp. 300–01. 27  Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano, p. 214; punctuation has been added in the above translation. The transcriptions given by Cavallaro correspond in their detail to the inscriptions as they now appear. 26 

Figure 22.2. Obsequies to Francesa, fresco attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his workshop, or his circle, 1468; entry wall of the chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. Fotocolor B. N. Marconi, Genova.

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other words, the distinctive monk serves as an additional ‘pillar’ connecting bier and exhibited body to the stone pediment of Santa Maria Nova, anchoring the recumbent corpse to the basilica as the locus of popular devotion. By 1468, the Oblates were by no juridical means reliant upon the monks of Santa Maria Nova, nor upon the hierarchy of their order. Nonetheless, their association with both was inalienable, and in terms of ecclesiastic power, the women were, of course, essentially unequal. So despite the liberal tenor of dispensations achieved by mid-1440, the Oblates’ community at the Tor de’ Specchi was vulnerable to visits and exactions of obedience from the Olivetan Benedictines, who were their male, monastic superiors. Beyond discourses of artistic attribution, the logic structuring this commanding image becomes plainer; the larger proportions of the central figure cannot be dismissed as a lack of artistic sophistication, a painter’s stylistic reflex. They affirm to the point of overstatement the Oblates’ reliance upon male, monastic benefaction and support. When noted, the focal standing figure in this scene has tended to be presumed the Abbot or Prior of Santa Maria Nova, his exaggerated proportions observed, in passing, to signify religious authority — without an attempt to consider their implications for the context of the Tor de’ Specchi.28 In the devotional space of the chiesa vecchia, this sign of ‘rigorous respect for religious hierarchy’ is also an expression of the Oblates’ contingent freedoms — connoting male solicitude and condescension, benevolence and intrusive control.29 The civic scene of obsequies shows the visibility of Francesca’s ‘holy body’ and its thaumaturgical effects pre-empted by the monk. He presides too over the tidy cluster of Oblates kneeling in prayer at the bier, a group in part counterbalanced on the viewer’s right by a colourful assortment of male citizens seeking miracles. If this image implicitly celebrates the Olivetan Benedictines’ custodianship of Francesca’s tomb at Santa Maria Nova, it also emphasizes the monks’ spiritual superintendence of the Oblates and their foundress. With great efficacy the fresco programme manifestly reconstructs a sacred setting from a pre-existing domestic environment; from a small, uneven chamber under thick beams described above as occupied rather than purpose-built. There is no altar sanctuary. Instead, an ornately decorative Marian altarpiece serves as the room’s devotional focus, distinguished overall by its central position, height, and the monumentality of the enthroned Virgin (Figure 22.1). 28  See, for instance, Rossi, ‘Le opere d’arte’, p. 13; Galletti, ‘Alcune precisazioni’, p. 152; Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano, p. 214. 29  The phrase ‘il rigoroso rispetto delle gerarchie religiose’ is Cavallaro’s, Antoniazzo Romano, p. 49.

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Figure 22.3. Oblation at Santa Maria Nova, fresco attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his workshop, or his circle, 1468; altar wall of the chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. Fotocolor B. N. Marconi, Genova.

She is flanked by Saint Benedict, featured as patriarch of Western monasticism with attributes of white habit, pastoral or disciplinary staff, and Rule, and Francesca, her main attribute a haloed angel dressed in a dalmatic liturgical vestment, as seen in five of the frescoed scenes. The two uppermost images on either side of the altarpiece are scenes of devotional ceremony, reinforcing the distinction of this wall. Moreover, by including images of altars, they pictorially concretize the orientation of the oratory space, while anticipating or extending the narrative theme encountered in the scene of obsequies on the entry wall: the theme of Francesca explicitly authorized as a catalyst to piety and heavenly worship. Like the altarpiece itself, and like the scene (diagonally opposite, on the rear wall) in which Francesca envisions a gold-rayed Host when receiving communion, the upper scenes on either side of the altarpiece broadly com-

418 Cynthia Troup

memorate the Oblates’ procurement of the right to choose their own chaplainconfessor. They signify a certain agency with regard to the Oblates’ devotional practices at the Tor de’ Specchi, and their relationships of spiritual cura, while pointing up the sacramental office of priesthood. At the same time, such an appreciable concern to portray male authorization of Francesca suggests that some content of the fresco programme could have been occasioned, even necessitated, by a perceived need to stress the propriety of the Oblates’ vocation and uncloistered way of life, perhaps above all to the Olivetan Benedictines. Had Abbot Amatisco’s prescribed visit taken place after the completion of the frescoes in 1468, the Olivetan Benedictine charged to ‘instruct, examine, visit […, to] correct, punish, and reform’ would have encountered here only images of the most deliberate spiritual and ecclesio-political decorum — thus, unavoidably, a decorum of male prerogative. The scene of obsequies is usually considered the last in the fresco programme’s narrative trajectory, the first being the scene on the upper left corner of the altar wall (Figure 22.3).30 Beyond question this is a scene of originary ecclesiastical authorization, citing the institutional source of the Oblates’ foundation. By the text beneath, this source is pronounced historical and perpetual, which also imparts contemporaneity: ‘How the blessed Francesca with all her present and future daughters in Christ offered herself to the Monastery of Santa Maria Nova of the Order of Monte Oliveto under the Rule of Saint Benedict’.31 Liturgical solemnity is embedded in the condensed architectural detail: the wooden choir stalls, and the altar with its crucifix lodged into the curve of an apse. Again, the caption forecloses generalities, ritual authenticity acquiring specific location and embodiment in the church and monks of Santa Maria Nova. Assuredly the monks were legally bound to receive the oblation of each new member of the Tor de’ Specchi community, but this scene produces no sense that the Oblates of 1468 enjoyed equal participation in the spiritual privileges pertaining to the Olivetan Benedictines. Compositionally, like the scene of obsequies, it clearly pays tribute to the male-ordered world of Santa Maria Nova — here to the monks’ austere interior domain, sign of the discipline of their modus vivendi ‘under the Rule of Saint Benedict’. The monastic community is represented as a discrete, intelligible group, its timeless composure contrasting with the kneeling Oblates, who are, by comparison, schematically jumbled, and truncated by the right frame. Despite the promise of stability read in the words 30  Pope-Hennessy, The Robert Lehman Collection, p. 204; they are reproduced in this order, for example, in Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana, pp. 899–921. 31  Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano, p. 212.

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Figure 22.4. Oblation and communion in heaven, fresco attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, his workshop, or his circle, 1468; altar wall of the chiesa vecchia, Tor de’ Specchi, Rome. Fotocolor B. N. Marconi, Genova.

‘all her present and future daughters’, by being regularly massed and spaced, the monks articulate the scene’s prevailing pattern, which is mapped geometrically by windows, architrave, and columns. Francesca’s companions are included in the scene through her act of leadership. While her bowed head with its halo forms the visual centre of the composition, her oblation is being received and legitimated through the witness of the singular monk’s pre-eminence at the altar.32 Understandably presumed to represent the Prior of Santa Maria Nova, 32 

Brizzi, ‘Contributo all’iconografia di Francesca Romana’, pinpoints the figure in this scene more generally as ‘il priore del monastero olivetano’ (p. 284), but names the central figure in the scene of obsequies as ‘[il] priore, fra Ippolito da Roma’ (p. 290). Cavallaro, Antoniazzo

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his bold profile is individualized with the same high forehead, prominent nose, and pronounced creases around the mouth seen in the scene of obsequies. In the chiesa vecchia the Oblates and their foundress are subject to this figure — to the paternalism of his benediction and overbearing gaze. On the other side of the frescoed altarpiece, at the upper right corner, this earliest, local, monastic endorsement of Francesca’s vocation is elaborated as a heavenly, sacramental, and Roman apostolic one, in a double scene of communion and oblation (Figure 22.4). These acts take place before an altar replete with liturgical objects: ampolle or cruets for wine and water and, the principal ornament, a crucifix between candlesticks. The vernacular caption reads, ‘How the glorious Virgin Mother of God received the blessed Francesca as her offering and had her given communion and consecrated in heaven by the hand of Saint Peter Apostle’ — worded as a direct response to the inscription below the corresponding image set in Santa Maria Nova, where ‘the blessed Francesca […] offered herself ’.33 In direct accord with Giovanni Mattiotti’s texts of Francesca’s visions, ‘the glorious Virgin Mother of God’ is depicted as regina celestis, seated on high in solemn majesty, and crowned with the three intersecting crowns of virginity, humility, and glory.34 This iconography is aggrandized in the frescoed altarpiece. Also in direct accord with Mattiotti’s devotional literature are the saints seen officiating, three preponderant amongst those of the Roman tradition: on the left, dressed as a deacon, Saint Paul with sword and candle; on the right, Saints Mary Magdalene and Benedict, also robed as a deacon and swinging a thurible. There are five additional scenes of Francesca’s mystic visions in the chiesa vecchia programme (not including the composite scene of her visions of hell in an arched recess on the entry wall). In three of these images, across the upper tier of the rear wall — Francesca and the Oblates protected by the cloak of the Virgin, Francesca holding the Christ Child, and Francesca’s right hand held by Christ — the triple-crowned Virgin and the same trio of saints recur. They recur, however, with an important difference. Also set in the heavenly realm, abstracted in its flat blue field, these scenes show Francesca in the capacity of Romano, p. 212, names for the oblation scene ‘fra’ Ippolito, abate del monastero benedettino annesso alla chiesa’. Through study of Cattana’s article, Romagnoli has discussed afresh the archival evidence that Fra Ippolito was absent from the 1425 ritual of Francesca de’ Ponziani’s oblation at Santa Maria Nova, and absent from Rome at the time of her death; see Santa Franc­ esca Romana, pp. 4, 52, 134. 33  Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano, p. 212. 34  On the imagery of the crowns, and Francesca’s Marian devotion, see Romagnoli, Santa Fran­ cesca Romana, pp. 196–98, 231–34, and for a vision in which the crowns are glossed, pp. 456–59.

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spiritual mother, looked upon and shepherded by the triumvirate of saints while in tactile communication with Holy Mother and Son. The captions for two of these images mark Francesca’s contemplative state in a ‘beatific’ or ‘divine’ vision; Mattiotti’s tractati exalt this state as the frequent, piously informative result of her habits of holy meditation and receiving the Eucharist.35 By distinct contrast, the scene of communion and oblation exalts Francesca’s mystical spirituality without the display of affective contact. Pictorially, it is the most rigidly structured of the celestial visions in the chiesa vecchia programme, and the most rigidly structured in its address to Francesca’s Eucharistic piety, a topos intrinsic to that of her mystical experience.36 Here Francesca’s reception by the Madonna is spatially mediated by the sloping volume of the altar on its dais and by the figure of Saint Peter, whose position before the altar, in full priestly capacities, entirely precludes such tangible intimacy with the Madonna’s divine realm. In this representation of heaven, Francesca’s pledge to a life of piety must be sanctioned through male sacerdotal prerogative and a Roman institutional power, the latter dictated by the papal robes of Peter and by the tiara, worn or placed on the altar amongst the objects of sacramental use. With reference to the documented history of the Tor de’ Specchi, the precise content of this altar wall image resonates with the papal bulls discussed earlier, which in 1433 conceded to the Oblates the Campitelli house for their habitation and use and, in 1444, the license to choose their chaplain-confessor to minister to them ‘in the Oratory of the said house’. This image dramatizes for the viewer — inhabitant or visitor — a perfect precedent for liturgical propriety inside the Tor de’ Specchi; the altar wall acquires its own ‘open doors’, permitting and satisfying the most infallible scrutiny. At the apex of the composition, surrounded by scarlet seraphim, the ‘glorious Virgin’ is remote in her golden mandorla, though not overbearing. Further, because of the relative consistency of scale in this image, its reiteration of the figure of Francesca, and her leftward kneeling in the heavenly episode of 35  Cavallaro, Antoniazzo Romano, p. 213: the caption for the scene of Francesca holding the Christ Child begins, ‘Como spesse fiate essendo la beata Francesca nella beatifica visione’; that for the scene of Francesca’s right hand held by Christ begins, ‘Como la beata Francesca essendo nella visione divina’. According to Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana, p. 217, Francesca seems to have privileged the liturgical and sacramental means to ecstasy — certainly Mattiotti’s accounts of her mystic visions produce this impression. 36  Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana, pp.  217–34, concerns Francesca’s Eucharistic piety; see also Leclercq, ‘Pour un portrait spirituel de St. Françoise Romaine’, pp. 21–23. On the rear and entry walls of the chiesa vecchia five scenes take a Christological or Eucharistic theme.

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oblation, the stern regard of the Olivetan Benedictine Prior in the left corner obtrudes across the frescoed frames and extends across the altar wall — conceivably a mnemonic to the terms of approval set forth in the executorial letters of July 1433, conceding the first Oblates permission to live under the obedience of the Prior and monks of the monastery of Santa Maria Nova, whose consent had been sought and confirmed.37 As such, in the ritual space of the chiesa vecchia, the monastic performance of Francesca’s oblation at Santa Maria Nova is actualized as paramount to the Oblates. * * * Mattiotti’s vernacular tractati feature obedience as ‘the supreme virtue’ in Francesca’s visions.38 Even so, textual analysis of the three canonization processes, successive versions of Mattiotti’s tractati, and the Vita by the Olivetan Benedictine Fra Ippolito demonstrates that, ‘by the time the frescoes were completed, many of Francesca’s visions had ceased to play a major part in written documentation’, ‘reflecting the need to show Francesca in the most orthodox light possible’.39 Close visual analysis of the scene of heavenly communion and oblation also evinces a concentration on liturgical orthodoxy. This image was lastingly appropriate ‘for bringing the popes, whose patron saints were Peter and Paul, into sympathy with the process of canonisation’.40 By helping to define a liturgical design for the space of the chiesa vecchia, it also solemnized the Oblates’ achievement of choice regarding a chaplain-confessor for the performance of Mass inside their domicile. The scene of obsequies and the scene of oblation are arguably compositions original to the chiesa vecchia, comprising an ideological framework for the fresco programme.41 Analysis of these scenes likewise evinces a prudent concern for orthodoxy, inseparable from their conspicuous treatment of the Prior and monks of Santa Maria Nova. They correspond with Annabel Thomas’s description of ‘outer’ decorations in conventual spaces, ‘which tended […] to reflect the significance of the community in terms of contemporary and past male benefactors’.42 Thus Ottorino Montenovesi’s 37 

Lugano, ‘L’istituzione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi secondo i documenti’, pp. 282–83. Barone, ‘L’immagine di Santa Francesca Romana’, p. 67. 39  Warr, Dressing for Heaven, p. 172; Barone, ‘L’immagine di Santa Francesca Romana’, p. 63. 40  Paoletti and Radke, Art in Renaissance Italy, p. 301. 41  Pope-Hennessy, The Robert Lehman Collection, cites the scene of obsequies to Francesca as one with ‘the character of an original composition by the author of the fresco cycle’ (p. 204). 42  Thomas, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy, p. 330. 38 

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conjecture about an Olivetan Benedictine fresco artist countenanced a strong possibility, noted by Cordelia Warr, that the Olivetan Benedictines ‘may have been involved in commissioning the 1468 frescoes of scenes from Francesca’s life in the chiesa vecchia’.43 At a distance of more than five hundred years, it is difficult but not impossible to imagine that in 1468, when there still resided at the Tor de’ Specchi three women who had known Francesca, the chiesa vecchia frescoes constituted a new embellishment of the casa delle Oblate.44 To bring the 1468 letter from the Abbot-General of the Olivetan Benedictines into coincidence with the date of the fresco programme enriches a sense of the programme’s topicality. Not only was it completed just over a generation after Francesca’s death, it was completed in a year when the Olivetan Benedictines peremptorily asserted the Oblates’ spiritual accountability to their order — a recourse to their male, monastic authority unpredicted by the document of July 1440, with its strict prohibition of interference in the internal life of the Tor de’ Specchi. Perhaps in anticipation of the dictates of the Olivetan Benedictines, or in response to them, all three of the images analysed above make clear the gendered and institutional limits of Francesca’s spiritual authority, highlighting an orthodoxy ‘of the most basic kind of (political) relations between men and women’.45 The chiesa vecchia frescoes would be the penultimate addition to the hagiographical and iconographical corpus for Francesca Romana generated during the fifteenth century.46 As with the hagiographical literature that was consolidated over some fifteen years after 1440, the frescoes had purposes at once dedicatory and hortatory. Through selective reference to the Oblates’ unique heritage, and the sensorium of Francesca’s saintly experience, they addressed the women’s salvific expectations; their earnest, ongoing commitment to the ideals embodied by their foundress. These were ideals for their own attitudes and behaviour, to be regularly contemplated at close range. It follows that the scenes of miracle-working recollect Francesca’s public visibility and dynamism — the participatory nature of her vocation, which her eschewal of monastic enclosure, and the Oblates’ defence of their ‘open monastery’, sought to safeguard. Indeed, on the walls of the chiesa vecchia, the Oblates’ unique heritage is apprehended, above all, as relational. Together the images create a kaleido43 

Warr, Dressing for Heaven, p. 169. Böse, Gemalte Heiligkeit, p. 40. 45  Gill, ‘Scandala’, p. 200. 46  Romagnoli, Santa Francesca Romana, p. 4. 44 

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scopic impression of crowdedness. Pictorial varietas has its origins in figurative means: the inclusion and repetition of male and female citizens and children; the Virgin and Christ; angels and saints — and, in the scenes of obsequies and oblation at Santa Maria Nova, monks. Creating and recreating the sacred persona of the Oblates’ foundress, the fresco programme introduces into the Oblates’ devotional space the omniscient eye of the Prior of Santa Maria Nova, the supervisory role of the Olivetan Benedictines literally looming large. Over the longer history of Francesca’s cult, to her canonization in 1608, devotional literature would gradually distil domestic servility from the variety of virtues and qualities that distinguished her holiness.47 With this in mind, the monks in buon fresco draw a prescient attention to the impossibility of insulating male advocacy from the controlling effects of paternalistic power and vigilance.

47 

For context, see Zarri, Le sante vive; more directly, see Barone, ‘La canonizzazione di Francesca Romana’, pp. 272–73, and Troup, ‘“Cities and Signs”’.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Lugano, Placido, ‘L’istituzione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi secondo i documenti’, Rivista Storica Benedettina, 14 (1923), 272–308 I processi inediti per Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (Santa Francesca Romana), 1440–1453, ed. by Placido Lugano (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1945) Romagnoli, Alessandra Bartolomei, Santa Francesca Romana: Edizione critica dei trattati latini di Giovanni Mattiotti (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994)

Secondary Works Barone, Giulia, ‘La canonizzazione di Francesca Romana (1608): La riproposta di un modello agiografico medievale’, in Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Gabriella Zarri (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991), pp. 264–79 —— , ‘L’immagine di Santa Francesca Romana nei processi di canonizzazione e nella “Vita” in volgare’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1484), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Monte Oliveto Maggiore: Edizioni ‘L’Ulivo’, 1984), pp. 57–69 Böse, Kristin, Gemalte Heiligkeit: Bilderzählungen neuer Heiliger in der italienischen Kunst des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2008) Brizzi, Giovanni, ‘Contributo all’iconografia di Francesca Romana’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1484), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Monte Oliveto Maggiore: Edizioni ‘L’Ulivo’, 1984), pp. 265–354 Cattana, Valerio, ‘Santa Francesca Romana e i monaci di Monte Oliveto’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Pon­ziani (1384–1484), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Monte Oliveto Maggiore: Edizioni ‘L’Ulivo’, 1984), pp. 403–43 Cavallaro, Anna, Antoniazzo Romano e gli antoniazzeschi, una generazione di pittori nella Roma del Quattrocento (Udine: Campanotto Editore, 1992) Esposito, Anna, ‘Female Religious Communities in Fifteenth-Century Rome’, in Women and Religion in Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. by Margery Schneider (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 197–218 —— , ‘Men and Women in Roman Confraternities: Roles, Functions, Expectations’, in The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000), pp. 82–97 Galletti, Fulvia Spesso, ‘Alcune precisazioni sugli affreschi della “chiesa vecchia” del Monastero di Tor de’ Specchi’, Commentari, 28 (1977), 150–55 Gill, Katherine, ‘Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples’, in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion and the Arts in Early

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Modern Europe, ed. by Craig Monson (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 15–47 —— , ‘Scandala: Controversies Concerning Clausura and Women’s Religious Com­mun­ ities in Late Medi­eval Italy’, in Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Per­secution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500, ed. by Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1996), pp. 177–203 Krautheimer, Richard, Rome, Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1980) Leclercq, Jean, ‘Pour un portrait spirituel de St. Françoise Romaine’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1484), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Monte Oliveto Maggiore: Edizioni ‘L’Ulivo’, 1984), pp. 13–23 Lirosi, Alessia, ‘I monasteri femminili a Roma nell’età della Controriforma: Insediamenti urbani e reti di potere (secc. xvi–xvii)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Sapienza-Uni­ versità di Roma, 2010) Lowe, Kate, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Refor­ma­ tion Italy (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003) Lugano, Placido, ‘La Casa delle Oblate’, in La nobil Casa delle Oblate di S. Francesca Romana in Tor’ de Specchi nel v centenario dalla fondazione (1433–1933) (Vatican City: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1933), pp. 7–56 Lunardi, Giovanni, ‘L’istituzione di Tor de’ Specchi’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1484), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Monte Oliveto Maggiore: Edizioni ‘L’Ulivo’, 1984), pp. 71–93 Marchetti, Patrizia, La Casa delle Oblate di Santa Francesca Romana a Tor de’ Specchi (Viterbo: BetaGamma Editrice, 1996) Mazzuconi, Daniela, ‘Pauca quedam extracta de vita et miraculis beate Francisce de Pon­ tianis: Tre biografie quattrocentesche di Santa Francesca Romana’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1484), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Monte Oliveto Maggiore: Edizioni ‘L’Ulivo’, 1984), pp. 95–197 Montenovesi, Ottorino, ‘Romanità gloriosa — S. Francesca dei Ponziani e il mistero degli affreschi della sua anticha casa’, Turismo d’Italia, 19.3 (1941), 4–8 Paoletti, John, and Gary Radke, Art in Renaissance Italy, 3rd edn (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2006) Paolucci, Antonio, Antoniazzo Romano: Catalogo completo dei dipinti (Firenze: Cantini, 1992) Pope-Hennessy, John, The Robert Lehman Collection: Italian Paintings (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987) Ranft, Patricia, Women and the Religious Life in Premodern Europe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996) Rossi, Attilio, ‘Le opere d’arte del monastero di Tor de’ Specchi in Roma’, Bollettino d’arte del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1.8 (1907), 4–22 ‘S. Francesca Romana a Tor de’ Specchi’, in Monastic Matrix: A Scholarly Resource for the Study of Women’s Religious Communities from 400 to 1600 ce, ed. by Katherine Gill and

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Lisa M. Bitel (Los Angeles: Department of History, Uni­ver­sity of Southern California, 2000),  [accessed 7 August 2012] Sensi, Mario, ‘Mulieres in ecclesia’: Storie di monache e bizzoche, 2 vols (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2010) Thomas, Annabel, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman’s Perspective (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003) Troup, Cynthia, ‘Art History and the Resistant Presence of a Saint: The chiesa vecchia Frescoes at Rome’s Tor de’ Specchi’, in Rituals, Images and Words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by F. W. Kent and Charles Zika (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 119–45 —— , ‘“Cities and Signs”: Seicento Roma Sancta and the Cult of Francesca Romana’, in Street Noises, Civic Spaces and Urban Identities in Italian Renaissance Cities, ed. by F. W. Kent (Melbourne: Monash Publications in History, 2000), pp. 37–56 Vecchi, Paola, ‘La Congregazione delle Oblate di Tor de’ Specchi nella sua origine e nella sua storia’, in Una santa tutta romana: Saggi e ricerche nel VI centenario della nascita di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani (1384–1484), ed. by Giorgio Picasso (Monte Oliveto Maggiore: Edizioni ‘L’Ulivo’, 1984), pp. 457–69 Warr, Cordelia, Dressing for Heaven: Religious Clothing in Italy, 1215–1545 (Manchester: Manchester Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) Zarri, Gabriella, Le sante vive: Cultura e religiosità femminile nella prima età moderna (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990)

Part IV Consuming Culture

Leonardo Bruni and the Rise of Official Historiography in Renaissance Florence Gary Ianziti

L

eonardo Bruni (1370–1444) is widely recognized today as the first, and perhaps the greatest, of the humanist historians who flourished during the fifteen-century Italian Renaissance. His contribution to the field of history writing has been variously defined. To some his importance lies in having revived the ancient Roman authors as viable models for constructing new historical narratives.1 To others, he is the initiator of a modern, ‘scientific’ approach to the study of the past, a scholar who pioneered new methods of research based on the critical investigation of primary, as opposed to secondary, sources.2 Still others have emphasized the novelty of Bruni’s vision of civil histories, in particular his presentation of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and his celebration of the rise of Italian cities like Florence as new centres of political vitality in his own day.3 These and other interpretations all have a degree of validity. Yet when placed together side by side they add up to a picture that is in the end confusing and disjointed. It is not clear, for example, how 1 

Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture, p. 25. Fryde, Humanism and Renaissance Historiography, pp. 3–31. 3  Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, i, 43–67. 2 

Gary Ianziti ([email protected]) is honorary senior research fellow in the Centre for the History of European Discourses (CHED) at the Uni­ver­sity of Queensland. He is a specialist in Italian Renaissance humanism with a particular focus on the humanist contribution to the development of modern historiography. His latest book is Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past (Cam­bridge, MA, 2012).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 431–448 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109718

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Bruni’s devotion to classical models can be squared with his supposed commitment to the highest standards of scholarship. Nor is it easy to see how either of these might be reconciled with the patriotic fervour that animates his account of the origins and growth of the Florentine state. A further problem concerns the identification of the forces that gave rise to such fundamental changes in the way of practicing history. Modern commentators have noted that Bruni was the first to bring history writing back down to earth and to adopt it as a tool with which to explore and evaluate the workings of politics.4 It is commonly recognized that this approach differed markedly from the characteristic manner of the Italian city chroniclers, whose primary task was to record, rather than to explain, the course of human events. 5 But how do we account for such an important transformation? Traditional explanations have tended to rely on the juxtaposition of abstract meta-categories like medieval and modern, or more recently have posited Renaissance republicanism as a prime mover.6 In what follows I want to essay a fresh approach, based on exploring the connections that link Bruni’s writing of history to the immediate needs of the Florentine political elite. Briefly, my argument is that the mainsprings of Bruni’s chief historical work, the History of the Florentine People, lie in its being an official history, commissioned by the Florentine ruling group to serve a specific set of purposes, and that once we grasp this central fact, we hold the key to obtaining a better explanation than we currently possess of the genesis and character of Bruni’s historiography. Recognition of Bruni’s status as an official historian is a relatively recent addition to the literature. Throughout most of the twentieth century the prevailing view was that of Hans Baron, who consistently claimed that Bruni had not written his History of the Florentine People on commission from the Florentine government. Baron contrasted Bruni’s work in this sense with the histories produced in other Italian city-states. The latter, according to Baron, were ‘written in the pay of governments and princes’ and could thus be safely dismissed as propaganda. Bruni’s History, on the other hand, was to be seen as ‘the independent creation of a humanist and citizen’.7 As far as I am aware, the 4 

Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography, p. 34. Guenée, ‘Histoires, annales, chroniques’. 6  Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, iii, 153–78. 7  Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, i, 43–44. See also Baron’s earlier study, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, p. 496, as well as Wilcox, The Development of Floren­ tine Humanist Historiography, p. 3. 5 

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first challenge to this view came from the Italian scholar Riccardo Fubini. In an important study first published in 1980 Fubini detailed the many ties that bound Bruni to the leading members of the oligarchy that ruled Florence from the last decades of the fourteenth century down to the seizure of power by the Medici in 1434. He also outlined the close relationship that linked Bruni’s various literary projects to the aspirations and values of the oligarchs. In particular he presented convincing evidence to suggest that Bruni wrote his History of the Florentine People on commission from the Florentine authorities.8 There is no absolute, irrefutable proof of this latter point, but the arguments in its favour are overwhelming and have now gained wide acceptance.9 As Fubini rightly notes, Bruni first floated the idea of writing a history of Florence in his Laudatio florentine urbis, written most probably in the summer of 1404. There we find Bruni declaring that he will not be describing in detail Florence’s military exploits, for that would require a full-blown history — and quite a large one — a work that he hopes to tackle at some future date.10 And indeed not long after the publication of the Laudatio we find signs of a growing interest in certain quarters for a project of just the kind Bruni appears to have had in mind. One clear indication is contained in Bruni’s letter to Niccolò Niccoli of 23 December 1406. The wealthy and influential Niccoli (1364–1437) had written to Bruni requesting that he add a section to the Laudatio describing the recent Florentine conquest of Pisa. Bruni, who by this time was established as a papal secretary in the Roman Curia, wrote back to decline the offer, yet he did so gracefully, acknowledging that the acquisition of Pisa was likely to lead to further and even more spectacular manifestations of Florentine power. He then rather coyly suggested that the group of citizens on whose behalf Niccoli had written should consider engaging someone learned to produce a full-scale history, for that, rather than a mere addendum to the Laudatio, was what the situation now called for.11 8  Fubini, ‘Osservazioni sugli Historiarum florentini populi libri XII di Leonardo Bruni’, now in the same author’s Storiografia dell’umanesimo in Italia, pp. 93–130. 9  E.g. Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, i, 13. 10  Bruni, Laudatio florentine urbis, ed. by Baldassarri, p. 26: ‘Sed non est presentis temporis tot varias bellorum contentiones tantasque res gestas posse referre; proprium illa desiderant opus, et quidem magnum, quod nos, ut spero, aliquando aggrediemur’. See Fubini, Storiografia dell’umanesimo in Italia, pp. 115–16. 11  Bruni, Epistolarum libri VIII, ed. by Mehus, i, 36: ‘Quod vero flagitas, ut laudationi Florentinae urbis, quam nuper edidi, nunc parta victoria Pisisque in ditione adactis, hanc partem adjungam, ego quoque faciendum censerem, si cursum victoriarum non longius proces-

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In the event, of course, it was to be Bruni himself who would be engaged to produce the history, but the terms of his engagement were of an informal, rather than of a formal kind. It should be remembered that there was no position of official historiographer in Florence at this time, and no machinery in place to secure any such appointment. Yet certain facts suggest that some sort of agreement was reached not long after Bruni took up permanent residence in Florence early in 1415. By the beginning of the following year Bruni had written the first book of his history, a laborious and time-consuming task as he complained in a letter to Poggio Bracciolini.12 He then petitioned the Florentine authorities to grant him citizenship and tax exemptions, presumably as an incentive to continue his work. Both requests were granted, on 26 June 1416, and while the documents conferring these privileges make no mention of the history, they do refer to the desirability of facilitating Bruni’s literary labours (‘ut […] salubrius et liberius etiam suis studiis vacare possit’). More pointedly still, later documents confirming and extending these privileges, dated 7 February 1439, note that Bruni is deserving of a reward, insofar as he has now completed nine books of his history and consigned them to the government authorities (‘qui historiam florentini populi scribere aggressus novem iam libros huius operis eleganti stilo composuit quos florentino dominio presentavit’).13 The logical inference to be drawn from this second conferral is that it clarifies the motivations behind the first, to which it explicitly alludes. In other words it made sense, with the history now close to completion, to reward the historian by renewing the earlier concessions. Bruni therefore received no actual monetary payment for his labours. Nevertheless, the value of the concessions made over to him should not be underestimated. In particular it should not be forgotten that Bruni first came to Florence in the latter part of the fourteenth century as a penniless young student from Arezzo. His gradual ascent in his adopted city was due in large part to his literary talents, hard work, and assiduous cultivation of influential surum existimarem. At ego majora expecto, ni frustra augurium vani docuere parentes. Quare historia opus erit, et si sapiunt cives tui, docto alicui demandabunt’. For the date of this letter, see Luiso, Studi su l’epistolario di Leonardo Bruni, pp. 26–27. 12  Bruni, Epistolarum libri VIII, ed. by Mehus, i, 110–11: ‘Exegi librum unum, eumque pergrandem, in quo longo discursu multa, quae ad historiae nostrae cognitionem pertinent, explicavi […]. Sed tantus est labor in quaerendis investigandisque rebus, ut iam plane me poenitat incoepisse’. See Luiso, Studi su l’epistolario di Leonardo Bruni, pp. 82–83. 13  Santini, ‘Leonardo Bruni Aretino e i suoi Historiarum florentini populi libri XII’, pp. 134, 139. I follow here the interpretation first put forward by Fubini, Storiografia dell’umanesimo in Italia, pp. 115–16.

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members of the ruling elite, including key power brokers like Palla di Nofri Strozzi.14 If Bruni left Florence temporarily in 1405 to pursue a more lucrative career in the papal service, he never completely severed his ties with his Florentine friends. He even returned to serve as chancellor for a few months in 1410–11. In February 1412 he married, in Florence, Tommasa della Fioraia, daughter of Simone della Fioraia, yet another important member of the oligarchy. Bruni’s decision to settle in Florence early in 1415, after the debacle that befell his last pope, John XXIII, should therefore come as no great surprise, nor should his turning almost immediately to write the first book of the History of the Florentine People. The project was a long-standing one and had presumably been assigned to him, at least informally, at the instigation of friends and supporters. The agreed compensation, from Bruni’s point of view, was extremely attractive: the granting of Florentine citizenship would mean that he could establish himself in the city and reside there permanently with all the attendant privileges; the exemption from taxes would allow him to enjoy undisturbed the considerable wealth he had amassed during his years of service in the Curia, particularly under John XXIII. Just how valuable the tax concessions were can be seen in the data compiled for the Catasto of 1427. By this time Bruni had risen to become one of the wealthiest men in Florence, yet he was levied to pay only one-fifth of what his tax bill would have been had his liability not been limited by the concessions of 1416.15 If Bruni stood therefore to gain handsomely by writing the history of Florence, so too did the city and its leaders. The document of 1439 underlines the advantages from the city’s point of view, for it recognizes ‘the eternal fame and glory that a well-crafted history confers on peoples and cities’.16 Behind such a statement lies the recognition that Bruni had achieved something remarkable: he had written the first history of a modern state, casting it in a form sanctioned by classical historians. This was a conviction that was shared even by those whose proclivities placed them well outside the realm of officialdom. Giovanni Cavalcanti, for example, writing in the mid- to late 1440s, noted how 14 

For more details on Bruni’s relationship with the Strozzi family, and with Palla Strozzi in particular, see Hankins, ‘Rhetoric, History, and Ideology’, p. 156, and especially Field, ‘Leonardo Bruni’, pp. 1112–15. 15  Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, pp. 117–23; and Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography, p. 4. 16  Santini, ‘Leonardo Bruni Aretino e i suoi Historiarum florentini populi libri XII’, p. 139: ‘Quantam perpetuitatem fame et glorie populis ac civitatibus afferat historiarum perita descriptio […] considerantes magnifici et potentes domini priores artium’.

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effectively Bruni’s History elevated the deeds of the Florentines and made them as illustrious as those of the ancient Greeks and Romans.17 Indeed Bruni himself acknowledged as a primary purpose of his History the procurement of eternal glory for Florence and its people. If Vespasiano da Bisticci’s account is to be believed, Bruni was conscious of the inferiority of Florence’s accomplishments, compared to those of the Romans, but he nevertheless felt he had done his best to bring them as close as possible to the ancient standards of excellence.18 In the preface to the History, probably written together with Book i in 1415, Bruni was understandably less forthcoming. Here he claimed to have been inspired to write by the sheer greatness of Florentine deeds, which were in themselves eminently comparable to those of the ancients. He even singled out the conquest of Pisa for special emphasis, billing it as the modern equivalent to the Roman conquest of Carthage. ‘In the final conquest and siege of Pisa’, he asserts, ‘deeds were performed that were every bit as memorable and important as those great events we read about and admire so much in antiquity’.19 From the point of view of the ruling oligarchy, then, Bruni’s history had definite value as an instrument that would contribute significantly to the power and prestige of the city and its government. The celebratory character of the work was something that appealed not only to the oligarchs who originally supported its composition, but also to the Medici regime that inherited the project after 1434. As early as 1442 public funds were being set aside to finance a translation of the History from the original Latin into the vernacular, a fact that indicates both the official character of the work and the intention to make its contents more widely available.20 When the translation was finally completed, in 1473, the translator, Donato Acciaiuoli, did not fail to acknowledge in his prefatory remarks that he had carried out his task on commission from the Medici-backed Signoria (‘per ubbidire alla vostra excelsa Signoria’).21 17 

Cavalcanti, Nuova opera, ed. by Monti, p. 126: ‘Lionardo d’Arezzo, il quale col suo ornato stile le cose vile e basse à fatte magnifiche e’ scelse colla sua eloquenzia — i’ dico “vili” e “basse”, non tanto per loro stessi, ma pe’ rispetto alle magnianime e altissime opere non meno de’ Greci che de’ Romani: ha aequate le opere della nostra Fiorenza a quelle’. 18  Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. by Greco, i, 476, reports Bruni speaking of his His­ tory as follows: ‘Et bene che e’ gesti de’ Fiorentini non si possono asimigliare a quegli de’ Romani, mi sono ingegnato, non uscendo dalla verità, lodargli quanto ho potuto’. 19  Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. by Hankins, i, 2–3. Further citations of Bruni’s History will refer to this edition by book (Roman numeral) and paragraph (Arabic numeral), and will be placed in parenthesis in the text where possible. 20  Fubini, Storiografia dell’umanesimo in Italia, p. 113. 21  Bruni, Historia fiorentina, trans. by Acciaiuoli, p. 1r: ‘Prohemio di Donato Acciaioli

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It is nevertheless primarily with the pre-Medicean oligarchy that we will be concerned in the remainder of this chapter, for it was the men belonging to this select circle who originally commissioned Bruni’s History. Among the chief aspirations of this group was an aggressive foreign policy aimed at exploiting the opportunities presented by the sudden collapse of the Visconti hegemony in Italy in 1402. Efforts in this direction were crowned with success by the acquisition of Pisa in 1406. According to Gene Brucker, however, the oligarchy’s policy of territorial expansion also brought in its wake considerable risks.22 It increased the likelihood of conflict with rival powers and made the business of day-to-day government at once more complex and more urgent. New responsibilities emerged which made the traditional, corporate structure of Florentine institutions appear cumbersome and inadequate. The demands of governing a territorial state required both streamlined procedures and higher levels of expertise. The oligarchy’s programme of territorial aggrandizement therefore led to the elaboration of mechanisms that would guarantee expeditious decision-making and smoother policy implementation, while at the same time maintaining an outward show of respect for the traditional institutional order. The development of this more restrictive system of governance naturally created tensions between the disenfranchised families loyal to local traditions, and the narrowing circle of those few who wielded real power. Beyond these two groups moreover lay the wider citizenry, increasingly alarmed at rising taxes, the dangers of military adventurism, and the looming prospect of defeat. Even the most cursory reading of Bruni’s History of the Florentine People suggests how strongly its key themes are linked to the oligarchy’s political programme. The preface to the work stresses the fact that Florence has risen to great power status through military conquest, becoming thereby a worthy subject for a history in the ancient manner. ‘What attracted me’, writes Bruni, ‘was the greatness of the actions this People performed: first its various internal struggles, then its admirable exploits against its immediate neighbours, and finally, in our own time, its struggle as a great power against the all-powerful duke of Milan and the aggressive King Ladislas’.23 A statement of this kind might on nella Historia fiorentina tradocta per lui in vulgare alli excellentissimi Signori Priori di Libertà e Gonfaloniere di Giustizia del Popolo fiorentino: Molte sono le cagioni […] che m’hannno indocto a tradurre […] la historia di Firenze […] composta da Leonardo Aretino. La prima et principale si è per ubbidire alla vostra excelsa Signoria’. Acciaiuoli completed his translation on 17 August 1473: see Bessi, ‘Un traduttore al lavoro’, p. 323. 22  Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence. 23  Bruni, History, i, 2–3.

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the surface appear to be a mere imitation of classical derivation, designed with rhetorical effect in mind.24 Yet further inspection reveals how closely Bruni’s words echo concepts that were to be found on the lips of the leading oligarchs around the very time he was writing. The records of the policy debates known as the Consulte e pratiche contain numerous speeches stressing how Florence had recently emerged victorious from a series of contests with aggressors such as Duke Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan (1351–1402), and later King Ladislas of Naples (1377–1414). It was a frequent ploy in such speeches to compare these Florentine victories over mighty adversaries with those of ancient Rome.25 The implication, of course, was of an imperialist sort: Florence was destined to follow in the footsteps of an ancient, but now defunct military power. Brucker makes the point that such talk was a new development, sparked by the heady atmosphere created by an unbroken string of successful ventures.26 Within a very short space of time Florence had grown from a city ruling over a surrounding district of subject towns into the capital of a vast territorial dominion. Bruni’s preface appropriately opens with an acknowledgment of this fact, couched in terms that the oligarchs would recognize as representing their own views. If we move on to Book i of the History, written, like the preface, in 1415, we find further confirmation of the convergence between its contents and what might loosely be termed the ideology of the oligarchy. Bruni is famous today for having swept away the debris of legend surrounding the origins and early history of Florence. But his achievements here are frequently presented in an abstract manner, as if prompted by a sudden awakening of the critical faculty. In fact the picture he draws of the city’s beginnings closely reflects the outlook of the Florentine ruling elite. Briefly, Bruni desacralizes the Roman Empire, presenting it as a human institution that at a certain point began to decay and finally died off completely (i, 70: ‘Occupantibus deinde Italiam barbaris 24 

Such, for example, is the perspective adopted by Klee, Beiträge zur Thukydides-Rezep­ tion, pp. 36–37. 25  See the examples cited by Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, p. 301: ‘Potentie ecclesie, ducis Mediolani et Regis Ladislai potenter resistentiam fecimus’ (Ubaldino Guasconi, 29 May 1412); ‘Recitans miserias servitutis et gesta nostra tam in factis Sancti Miniatis, Pisanorum, ducis Mediolani et Regis Ladislai […] memorans etiam que Romani fecerunt post conflictum Canne’ (Filippo Corsini, 18 August 1413). 26  Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, p. 289. On Florentine territorial expansion in this period, with a special focus on the administrative problems it posed, see now the studies collected in Zorzi and Connell, Lo stato territoriale fiorentino, as well as the somewhat different English language version, Connell and Zorzi, Florentine Tuscany.

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occidentale cessavit imperium’). He represents Tuscan cities like Florence not as mere offshoots of Rome, but as far more ancient in their origins, deriving their energies ultimately from the pre-Roman Etruscan civilization. Etruria, he writes, once comprised a vast federation of vibrant and creative cities spread across central Italy, reaching as far north as Mantua and eastwards as far as the Adriatic Sea (i, 12–14). Rome then challenged and conquered the Etruscan cities, it is true, but now — in the aftermath of Rome’s demise — those same cities, with Florence naturally in the lead, have risen from their ashes and reasserted their predominance (i, 78). My point here is not to belittle Bruni’s accomplishments as a scholar, but rather to stress the degree to which his revised version of the Florentine past corresponds to the political culture of the oligarchy. Rather than seeing itself as a city framed within the larger structure of the Roman Empire, Florence was now being conceived as a territorial power in its own right, a power whose historical identity could be construed as something independent of Roman history. But Bruni’s revisionism was neither a product of pure scholarship nor even a manifestation of republican ideology. It was rather a projection into the past of the oligarchy’s programme for imperialist expansion, bolstered as it was by the emerging notion of Florentine sovereignty.27 The remapped, Etruscan version of the city’s remote past was meant to justify its current mission, linking it to a much older story of regional dominance. Looking further now into Bruni’s History, we can see that along with its tendency to provide historical justifications for territorial expansion, it also offers readings of the past that support the oligarchy’s more professionalized approach to governance. An example can be found in Bruni’s account of the events leading up to the battle of Montaperti in 1260. As elsewhere in the narrative portions of his History, Bruni uses the chronicle of Giovanni Villani here as his main source of information.28 But a comparison of his account with that of Villani shows the extent to which Bruni has re-elaborated the earlier material to bring it into line with oligarchical ideas. Bruni stresses first of all that Florence in 1260 was being run by ‘plebeian men, ignorant in the art of war’, and he adds that such men are just the sort ‘who often tend to hold office in the city’ (ii, 37). Faced with a difficult decision in 1260 — in effect whether or not to rush to the defence of an ally under siege by enemy Siena — these men are easily persuaded to opt for a military solution, despite the evident risks. Over 27  28 

On these points, see especially Fubini, Storiografia, dell’umanesimo in Italia, pp. 131–35. Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. by Porta, i, 372–76.

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and against these incompetent magistrates, Bruni pits the wise counsel of men of experience, who see the proposed intervention as ‘dangerous and useless’ (ii, 38). The centrepiece of Bruni’s narrative is a lengthy speech of his own invention, supposedly delivered by Tegghiaio d’Aldobrando Adimari (ii, 39–47). The point of the speech is to drive home a clear message about the importance of making the right policy decisions. Tegghiaio conveys the views of men who possess a superior understanding of affairs, which is that in this particular case the policy of war is ‘more audacious than prudent’ (ii, 41) and that therefore the best course of action is one of cautious wait and see. But once the speech has been delivered, Bruni introduces us to Expeditus, ‘a wild and impudent man, of the sort unrestrained liberty can sometimes produce’ (ii, 48). Expeditus ‘had barely been able to contain himself ’, writes Bruni, while listening to Tegghiaio’s ‘good advice’. Now Bruni has him shout Tegghiaio down with taunts of cowardice and lack of patriotic spirit. The best course of action is thus abandoned, debate is shut down, and war declared. Bruni’s subsequent narrative is designed to confirm the wisdom of the rejected advice of the experts: the Florentine army is disastrously defeated, and as a result the leading Guelf families are forced to abandon the city to the victorious Ghibellines. On this latter point, Bruni takes issue quite explicitly with the version of events given by Giovanni Villani. For Villani the decision to abandon Florence was a sort of divine punishment visited upon the Guelfs in just payment for all their wicked ways.29 Bruni openly dissents, listing instead the reasons why the Guelfs had no choice, after Montaperti, but to leave the city (ii, 63). Bruni presents the Guelf decision as the logical consequence of the defeat in the field, which in turn of course was the logical consequence of the poor decision to resort to war in the first place, when other options were available. Bruni, in other words, establishes a chain of causation that has its roots in an initial policy error, whose ultimate cause is the presence of incompetent men in the highest councils of state. Even so brief a summary as this suggests how Bruni reconstructs the entire episode, or series of episodes, in order to highlight the importance of professionalism in government. Elsewhere in the History he observes that ‘many political mistakes are committed by officials who lack experience, and though small in the beginning, such errors later give birth to massive harms’ (vii, 101). 29 

Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. by Porta, i, 381: ‘E della partita molto furono da riprendere i Guelfi, imperciò che lla città di Firenze era molto forte di mura e di fossi pieni d’acqua, e da poterla difendere e tenere; ma il giudicio di Dio per punire le peccata conviene che faccia suo corso sanza riparo; e a cui Idio vuole male gli toglie il senno e l’accorgimento’.

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The use of the present tense here tells us that the issue is not merely a feature of Florence’s communal past, but that it is still highly relevant in Bruni’s own time. Bruni in fact seems to be pitching his message about sound governance at the very moment when the oligarchs he was serving were devising ever more sophisticated ways of bypassing the traditional forms of communal representation.30 This may explain Bruni’s boldness in recurring so frequently to instances of negative exemplarity, in a work supposedly designed to further the greater glory of Florence. The strategy fit very neatly indeed with the patterns of oligarchical thinking, impatient as it was with the old ways of the commune and eager to upgrade the Florentine institutional framework. Thus Bruni does not even hesitate to assume a critical attitude before local institutions that the old guard considered sacred. In one of his longer digressions he criticizes the practice of sortition, or filling of offices by drawing lots (v, 80–81). The practice was originally introduced, as he states, in order to provide fairer access to high office. But Bruni’s view is that sortition is to be condemned as harmful, because it leads to unworthy persons assuming political responsibilities for which they are ill prepared. This view was certainly shared by Bruni’s patrons. Indeed the oligarchy’s system for regulating access to office was based on establishing control over the scrutinies, or selection of candidates eligible to be drawn by lot, in this way (as in so many others) prefiguring the techniques of the later and more famous Medici system.31 If our reconstruction is correct then, Bruni began writing his History in 1415 with the support of the ruling oligarchy, a number of whose members, beginning with Palla Strozzi, were his close friends and sponsors. The original purpose behind the project was to furnish the oligarchs with a new account of the Florentine past, one that more closely mirrored the dominant ethos of the group. The best estimates we have are that the first six books of the work were completed by 1428, when Bruni presented them to the Signoria.32 By this time Bruni had risen to become chancellor of Florence and had thus publicly assumed the mantle of official spokesman for government policy. But in fact all throughout the 1420s Bruni had been busy producing a steady stream of works designed to further the aims of those in power. The list of titles in this vein would be a long one and would include, for example, the treatise On Civic Knighthood (De militia), which Bruni addressed to the leader of the oligarchy, 30 

Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, p. 283. Fubini, Storiografia dell’umanesimo in Italia, pp. 106–07. 32  Hankins, ‘Rhetoric, History, and Ideology’, p. 159. 31 

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Rinaldo degli Albizzi, in 1421.33 In this work Bruni attempted, in response to Rinaldo’s queries, to redefine knighthood in civic terms. At the centre of the treatise he placed the Roman ideal of citizenship, conceived as service to one’s country. This appeal to an ancient code of civic virtue had a definite resonance in Bruni’s Florence, as the government stood poised in 1421 to embark on a new contest for hegemony against the old enemy, Visconti Milan. The successful pursuit of war required inculcating a spirit of sacrifice and devotion to the fatherland, though without necessarily broadening participation in the political process.34 Bruni’s tailoring of the De militia to the propaganda requirements of the Florentine leadership is underscored not only by the themes treated, and by name of the addressee, but by still other features as well. In enumerating the virtues of the good citizen, for example, Bruni cites a living exemplar: Filippo Corsini who, like Rinaldo degli Albizzi himself, was one of the two or three men at the very top of the oligarchical register.35 The connection seems clear linking much of Bruni’s literary production of the 1420s to the ideological programme of the Florentine ruling group. James Hankins has highlighted such a connection in relation to Bruni’s Funeral Oration for Nanni Strozzi, written on commission in 1428 as part of a propaganda campaign orchestrated by the government at a particularly critical juncture in the war effort. As Hankins notes, this Oration, in developing the ideal of the citizen-soldier who has fallen in the service of his country, ‘mirrors precisely the views of Rinaldo degli Albizzi and other members of the regime as reported in the Consulte e pratiche’.36 One of Bruni’s functions, then, both before and after he assumed the office of chancellor at the end of 1427, was to give literary expression to the policy directions mapped out by the masters of Florence. Here we can perhaps ask the difficult question concerning the intended readership of works like the De militia and the Funeral Oration for Nanni Strozzi. Were they directed primarily, as John Najemy has suggested, at an internal audience, perhaps composed of those located on the fringes of power, and who might be tempted to waver in 33 

For the Latin text, see Bayley, War and Society in Renaissance Florence, pp. 369–89, and now Bruni, Opere letterarie e politiche, ed. by Viti, pp. 654–701. An English translation can be found in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, trans. by Griffiths and others, pp. 127–45. 34  On the latter point, see Najemy, ‘Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics’. 35  Bruni, Opere letterarie e politiche, ed. by Viti, p. 690: ‘Is enim et miles est et eques et iurisconsultus et advocatus et civis et vir […] bonus’. For Filippo Corsini’s position within the oligarchy, see Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, p. 265. 36  Hankins, ‘Rhetoric, History, and Ideology’, p. 157.

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their support for a costly series of wars, especially if, as it turned out, those wars proved to be unsuccessful?37 Or did the primary target readership lie beyond the frontiers of Florence itself, in the chanceries and courts of enemy states like Milan and its allies? A famous letter of the governor of Genoa Bartolomeo Capra, written in 1429 and pointing out how badly Bruni’s Funeral Oration had damaged the reputation of the Milanese leadership, suggests the latter solution, though it does not necessarily exclude the former.38 Indeed it seems likely that Bruni’s works in support of the regime were capable of servicing multiple purposes at one and the same time and were thus adaptable to various circumstances and audiences. Returning now to the History of the Florentine People, I wish to suggest that at one level at least — perhaps the primary one — Bruni meant to address the oligarchy itself, providing it with an updated past in which it would find a ringing endorsement of its own values. One of the best examples that can be cited in support of this point comes in Book vi, where Bruni has Pino della Tosa deliver a lengthy speech in favour of seizing Lucca when an opportunity arises in 1329 (vi, 3–7). The argument for action presented here is quite simply utilitarian. The speech begins with strategic considerations but soon swings into high gear, becoming in effect a blatant apology for Florentine imperialism. The reason why Florence should grab Lucca has to do with the very purpose of political life, which is about using every opportunity that comes to hand to enlarge the confines of one’s own state. ‘Just think’, Bruni has Pino say before the Florentine authorities, ‘how much your power (potentia) will increase when you get control of this most beautiful and well-fortified city […]. Think how much the glory (gloria), fame (amplitudo nominis), and majesty (maiestas) of the Florentine People will grow’ (vi, 5). Pino openly states his belief that the best way to secure the future of a political community is to absorb as much new territory as possible. ‘I admit I am motivated’, he says, ‘by those things that are commonly held to be good among men: extending one’s borders, enlarging empire, raising on high the glory and splendor of the state, assuring our own security and advantage’.39 To adopt any other course, he says, would be to undermine the whole idea behind politics and the art of government, which 37 

Najemy, ‘Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics’, pp. 94–95. Sabbadini, ‘Come il Panormita diventò poeta aulico’, pp. 26–28. See Hankins, ‘Rhetoric, History, and Ideology’, pp. 157–59. 39  Bruni, History, vi, 5: ‘illis me moveri fateor quae bona apud homines putantur: extendere fines, imperium augere, civitatis gloriam splendoremque extollere, securitatem utilitatemque asciscere’. 38 

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postulate as their primary goals the security, wealth, and well-being of the community. Renunciation of these goals would in fact spell disaster, for it would jeopardize the very existence of the state itself. ‘If we say that these are not desirable things’, warns Pino, ‘then the welfare of our republic, patriotism, and practically our whole way of life will be overthrown’.40 Pino’s speech repeats ideas that reverberate throughout Bruni’s History, beginning with a famous passage in Book i (i, 10). Bruni himself chimes in when the speech is finished to say that the rejection of Pino’s advice constituted ‘an extremely bad decision on the city’s part’ (vi, 8). And as if to underline his full identification with what has gone before, Bruni organizes the rest of Book vi in such a way as to underscore how Pino’s dire predictions of disaster, should Florence fail to occupy Lucca, actually come to pass (vi, 24, 54), ending in the shambles of the dictatorship of the Duke of Athens in 1342–43 (vi, 110–28). There is, of course, nothing like the Pino della Tosa speech in Bruni’s source, the chronicle of Giovanni Villani.41 Bruni develops the whole episode more or less from scratch, inventing a kind of parable of negative exemplarity that neatly encapsulates the political ideals dear to the Albizzi-led oligarchy. These ideals find perhaps their highest expression in the plea for action that Bruni places in Pino’s mouth at this strategic point in the narrative. The plea is based not on justice, nor on any legal or moral argument, but strictly and exclusively on grounds of political expediency. The key concepts are anachronistically drawn from a range of policy goals that were the guideposts of oligarchical policy during the 1420s: power (potentia), glory (gloria), majesty (maiestas), utility (utilitas), and security (securitas). Bruni’s infusion of such radical ideas into an obscure incident of 1329 reveals his capacity to identify and articulate concerns that were of vital interest to his primary readership, which in this instance must surely have included the oligarchy itself. At the same time, of course, the Pino speech and Book vi as a whole provided the regime with a policy statement that could be mobilized to convince the faint-hearted, and might even be used to justify more immediate objectives. It is in fact not to be forgotten that in 1428, when Book vi was presumably completed, the oligarchy was on the verge of launching a controversial, and in the end ruinous, war to conquer Lucca by military means, a venture that eventually brought down the regime itself and opened the way to the Medici era. 40  Bruni, History, vi, 5: ‘quae nisi expetenda dicamus, et cura reipublicae et pietas in patriam et tota paene haec vita nobis fuerit pervertenda’. 41  Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. by Porta, ii, 682–83.

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Bruni’s History can thus be properly described as official, in the sense that it derives much of its initial power and direction from its close association with the oligarchy that ruled Florence in the crucial half-century running from 1382 to 1434. It is this connection to officialdom that ultimately determines the character of the work, distinguishing it from the preceding and indeed contemporaneous tradition of city chronicles and memoirs. These latter works can be seen as typical products of the merchant culture of the medieval commune. They address an audience of peers on concerns of general interest, recording in year-to-year fashion the outstanding events marking the passage of time.42 Bruni’s History by way of contrast is a highly specific product, developed in close contact with a political elite in search of a new identity, an identity that could best be supplied — in accordance with the prejudices of the times — through a revamped and revitalized account of the city’s remote and more recent past. As we have seen, the task assigned to Bruni involved considerably narrowing the range of events to be covered, in effect reducing the field of history to the sphere of politics, war, and diplomacy. It entailed developing, in the manner of classical historians, incidents like those we have singled out above and investing them with significance within an agreed frame of reference. Such a history, by virtue of its very provenance, was bound to convey values and ideas that were antithetical to previous historiographical traditions, even while it performed the required homage to an array of ancient models. It was also inevitable that such a history should break new ground for its time, both in its use of the classical idiom and in its elaboration of causal explanations rooted in human agency. In the end these and other innovations, far from being the by-products of republicanism, stemmed from Bruni’s original decision to adhere to a political culture — that of the Florentine oligarchy — based on the violation of established norms and practices. His aim from the beginning was to provide a group of classically learned and politically astute patrons with a usable past, one he hoped would both justify and promote the principle of government by an elite cadre of worldly-wise statesmen. As it turned out, of course, the wise statesmen for whom Bruni had undertaken to write his History had little or no time to profit from its lessons in good governance. Bruni published the first six books of the work in 1428 at a high point of the regime’s fortunes, but in the following year the oligarchy launched its ill-conceived attack on Lucca, setting off a chain of events that would bring its power to an end. In 1434 the Medici party took control, banishing as it did 42 

See most recently Clarke, ‘The Villani Chronicles’.

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so the leading oligarchs and their supporters. Those sent into exile included many of Bruni’s chief sponsors, men like Palla Strozzi and Rinaldo degli Albizzi among others.43 Bruni himself managed to survive the initial cull. He retained his position as chancellor and eventually became something of a Medici apologist.44 He also continued work on his History, publishing three more books in 1439 and leaving behind three more which were published after his death. A copy of all twelve books of the History of the Florentine People was subsequently enshrined in the chapel of the Palazzo della Signoria as a kind of official record of the city’s history.45 Another copy was kept handy, apparently as an indexed reference tool for consultation by members of the government.46 It became customary for officials to cite from the History in speeches made on ceremonial occasions.47 All of which shows that the Medici regime came to value Bruni’s work for many of the same reasons that had prompted the preceding oligarchy to commission its composition in the first place. Donato Acciaiuoli nicely summed up the key point in presenting his translation of Bruni’s History to the Florentine Signoria: ‘There can be no doubt’, he wrote in his preface, that a knowledge of history is the most useful of all things, especially for those who rule and govern. Because by examining the past statesmen attain a better understanding of what is happening in the present and what is likely to happen in the future; and thus when the time comes they are able to make wiser decisions on behalf of their political community.48

43 

A fuller list of the casualties in Bruni’s immediate circle can be found in Field, ‘Leonardo Bruni’, pp. 1134–35. 44  Ianziti, ‘Bruni, the Medici, and the Florentine Histories’, now in the same author’s Writ­ ing History in Renaissance Italy, pp. 186–203. 45  Fubini, Storiografia dell’umanesimo in Italia, pp. 113–14 and 159–60; Hankins, ‘Notes on the Composition’, p. 91. 46  Hankins, ‘Notes on the Composition’, p. 101. 47  Santini, ‘La fortuna della Storia fiorentina di Leonardo Bruni’, pp. 180–82. 48  Bruni, Historia fiorentina, trans. by Acciaiuoli, p. 1r: ‘Et non è dubbio che la notitia della historia è utilissima, et maximamente a chi regge et governa. Peroché riguardando le cose passate possono meglio giudicare le presenti et le future: et ne’bisogni della città più saviamente consigliare la loro repubblica’.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Bruni, Leonardo, Epistolarum libri VIII, ed. by Lorenzo Mehus, 2 vols (Firenze: Bernardo Paperini, 1741) —— , Historia fiorentina, trans. by Donato Acciaiuoli (Venezia: Jacques Le Rouge, 1476) —— , History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. by James Hankins, 3 vols (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2001–07) —— , Laudatio florentine urbis, ed. by Stefano U. Baldassarri (Firenze: SISMEL, 2000) —— , Opere letterarie e politiche, ed. by Paolo Viti (Torino: Unione Tipografica-Editrice Torinese, 1996) Cavalcanti, Giovanni, Nuova opera, ed. by Antoine Monti (Paris: Université de la Sor­ bonne Nouvelle, 1989) The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, trans. and intro. by Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, State Uni­ver­sity of New York at Binghamton, 1987) Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. by Aulo Greco, 2 vols (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1970–76) Villani, Giovanni, Nuova cronica, ed. by Giuseppe Porta, 3  vols (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1990–91)

Secondary Works Baron, Hans, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, rev. edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1966) —— , In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988) Bayley, C. C., War and Society in Renaissance Florence: The ‘De militia’ of Leonardo Bruni (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1961) Bessi, Rosella, ‘Un traduttore al lavoro: Donato Acciaiuoli’, in Leonardo Bruni cancelliere della Repubblica di Firenze, ed. by Paolo Viti (Firenze: Olschki, 1990), pp. 321–38 Brucker, Gene, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1977) Clarke, Paula, ‘The Villani Chronicles’, in Chronicling History: Chroniclers and Historians in Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by Sharon Dale, Alison Williams Lewin, and Duane  J. Osheim (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007), pp. 113–43 Connell, William J., and Andrea Zorzi, eds, Florentine Tuscany (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Field, Arthur, ‘Leonardo Bruni: Florentine Traitor?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998), 1109–50 Fryde, E. B., Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (London: Hambledon Press, 1983)

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Fubini, Riccardo, ‘Osservazioni sugli Historiarum florentini populi libri XII di Leonardo Bruni’, in Studi di storia medievale e moderna per Ernesto Sestan, 2  vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1980), i, 403–48 —— , Storiografia dell’umanesimo in Italia da Leonardo Bruni ad Annio da Viterbo (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003) Guenée, Bernard, ‘Histoires, annales, chroniques: Essai sur les genres historiques au Moyen Âge,’ Annales E.S.C., 28 (1973), 997–1016 Hankins, James, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2  vols (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003–04) —— , ‘Notes on the Composition and Textual Tradition of Leonardo Bruni’s Historiarum florentini populi libri XII’, in Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, ed. by F. T. Coulson and A. A. Grotans (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 87–109 —— , ‘Rhetoric, History, and Ideology: The Civic Panegyrics of Leonardo Bruni,’ in Re­ naissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. by James Hankins (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Hicks, Philip, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (Basing­ stoke: Macmillan, 1996) Ianziti, Gary, ‘Bruni, the Medici, and the Florentine Histories’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 61 (2008), 39–58 —— , Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012) Klee, Udo, Beiträge zur Thukydides-Rezeption während des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990) Luiso, Francesco Paolo, Studi su l’epistolario di Leonardo Bruni, ed. by Lucia Gualdo Rosa (Roma: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1980) Martines, Lauro, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1963) Najemy, John M., ‘Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics,’ in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. by James Hankins (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000), pp. 75–104 Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999–2015) Sabbadini, Remigio, ‘Come il Panormita diventò poeta aulico’, Archivio storico lombardo, 43 (1916), 5–28 Santini, Emilio, ‘La fortuna della Storia fiorentina di Leonardo Bruni’, Studi storici, 20 (1911), 177–95 —— , ‘Leonardo Bruni Aretino e i suoi Historiarum florentini populi libri XII’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 22 (1910), 1–173 Wilcox, Donald J., The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1969) Zorzi, Andrea, and William J. Connell, eds, Lo stato territoriale fiorentino (Pisa: Pacini, 2001)

Interpretation and Translation: Leonardo Bruni and the Art of Translation in Quattrocento Florence Andrea Rizzi

T

he Latin translations of Leonardo Bruni, one of the first and foremost humanists of quattrocento Italy, were not only extremely successful but, I contend, also paved the way for the aggressive modernization of historical texts in both Latin and the Italian vernaculars of the same century. In the preface to his version of Plutarch’s Vita Ciceronis, dedicated to Niccolò Niccoli (1413), Leonardo Bruni makes the following points: So I started to salvage the text from the deformities of the Latin language, and, as soon as I got hold of the Greek text, begun to translate the whole work into Latin. As I was progressing with my work and examining every single aspect of the text diligently and thoroughly, I realized that also Plutarch’s text did not please me. […] As a result, I put Plutarch’s text and its Latin translation aside and gathered information on Cicero from various Greek and Latin texts, and wrote Cicero’s life not as interpretes, but following my judgement and will.1 1 

‘Huic ergo deformitati latine lingue pro virili mea succurrere aggressus, confestim greco

Andrea Rizzi ([email protected]) is Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2014– 18) at the Uni­ver­sity of Melbourne. He has published on vernacular translation at the court of Ercole I of Ferrara (see his The ‘Historia imperiale’ by Riccobaldo Ferrarese, Translated by Matteo Maria Boiardo, 1471–1473 (Roma, 2008)) and translation history in Renaissance Italy. He has been a Deborah Loeb Brice Fellow (2011) at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, and honorary fellow at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, Uni­ver­sity of London (2008).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 449–464 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109719

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This statement, Ianziti argues, marks a key moment in Bruni’s career, for it shaped his style and approach to history writing and divides Bruni’s versions of Greek histories into two analogous but always distinct and separate practices: history writing and translation.2 Such a view, however, hinges on a specific interpretation of the Latin word ‘interpretes’ — a word which was used extensively throughout the fifteenth century (and beyond) and normally denotes simply ‘translator’.3 A closer examination of the source and context of Bruni’s phrase (non ut interpretes) reveals, however, that Bruni is not primarily interested in establishing a fundamental opposition between translation and history writing, but rather in distancing himself from a certain type of translation. This chapter will demonstrate that Bruni understood translation as a complex process of paraphrasing, rewording, and, where necessary, displacement of the source text. Bruni’s views on translation relied heavily on Cicero, Quintilian, and Chrysoloras. This is hardly surprising given that some of the most influential works by Cicero — which Bruni refers to in some of his prefaces to translations — were discovered during the period the Aretine was practising translation. Further, a complete version of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria was made and sent to Bruni by Poggio Bracciolini soon after it was unearthed in 1416, thus influencing his understanding of the teaching and learning of rhetoric and translation. For Cicero, Quintilian, and Chrysoloras there was no dichotomy between translation and original composition, but different and gradual stages of learning, imitation, translation, and displacement of the source culture and text. One did not preclude the other. Furthermore, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian did not see literal and free translations as equivalent options.

volumine requisito traductionem ex integro inchoavi. Et opus sane ab initio satis luculenter procedere videbatur: mox vero ut progredior, et ob convertendi diligentiam singula queque magis considero, ne ipse quidem Plutarchus desiderium mei animi penitus adimplevit. […] Nos igitur et Plutarcho et eius interpretatione omissis, ex iis que vel apud nostros vel apud Grecos de Cicerone scripta legeramus, ab alio exorsi principio vitam et mores et res gestas eius maturiore digestione et pleniore notitia, non ut interpretes sed pro nostro arbitrio voluntateque, descripsi­ mus.’ The Latin text is taken from Bruni, La perfetta traduzione, ed. by Viti, pp. 249–50. The translation and italics are mine. On Bruni’s Cicero, see also Ianziti, ‘A Life in Politics’ and Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy, pp. 44–60. 2  Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy, p. 15. 3  For a history of the terms ‘translator’ and ‘translation’, see Folena, Volgarizzare e tra­ durre. For the use of the word ‘interpres’ in quattrocento Florence, see Giannozzo Manetti’s preface to his Apologia, book v in Manetti, Apologeticus, ed. by De Petris. See also Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance and Baldassarri, Umanesimo e traduzione.

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Rather, they agreed on the educational and rhetorical use of translation as being separate stages and practices, as will be discussed below. The freedom these ancient Roman authors bestowed upon the translator is bewildering from the perspective of the present day, where authorship and translatorship are defined and perceived as two discrete practices.4 This kind of separation did not exist in classical and early modern Europe, as demonstrated by recent scholarship.5 This chapter will reveal that for Bruni translation and history writing cannot be separated for they are two concurrent stages of the rewriting of past narratives. This chapter is divided into four parts. The first contextualizes translation in quattrocento Italy and outlines some of the interpretive issues around translation. The second investigates translation and learning in Cicero and Quintilian, and the final two discuss Bruni’s prefaces to his translations of Greek histories.

Translation in Quattrocento Italy The Italian Quattrocento was a period in which the appreciation of languages was at the centre of cultural and political activities. Out of this interest came a substantial and compelling programme of renewal for Latin, while the vernacular languages permeated a growing number of cultural practices, such as oratory, preaching, political deliberations, and everyday communication.6 The renewal of Latin and the progressive dignification of the vernacular languages were enacted through translation. Indeed, fifteenth-century Italy was the age of translation par excellence.7 Much research has been carried out on fifteenth-century translations from Greek, and there is a growing interest in vernacular translations.8 However, few works address translation in quattro4 

See Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages and Copeland, ‘The Fortunes of “Non Verbum Pro Verbo”’; Chiesa, ‘Ad verbum o ad sensum?’; Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance; and Hankins, ‘Translation Practice in the Renaissance’. 6  For general appraisals of humanists’ passion for and dedication to Latin, see Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’; Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance; and Anselmi, Umanisti, storici e traduttori. Humanists also engaged in passionate debates about the history and uses of languages: see Mazzocco, Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists; Rizzo, Ricerche sul latino umanistico; Tavoni, Latino, grammatica, volgare; Tanturli, ‘La Cultura fiorentina volgare del Quattrocento davanti ai nuovi testi greci’; and Bianca, Coluccio Salutati e l’invenzione dell’umanesimo. 7  Hankins, ‘Translation Practice in the Renaissance’, p. 162. 8  The most recent scholarship on Latin humanism and translation is Baldassarri, ‘Ampli5 

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cento Italy beyond the study of specific authorships (e.g. Artistotle and Plato), translators (e.g. Leonardo Bruni or Giovanni Brancati), or disciplines (histories, philosophy, oratory, etc.). In this respect, the works by Alison Cornish on trecento translators and Glyn Norton’s appraisal of French Renaissance translators are pioneering, for they look at translation as a rich and all-encompassing medium used by diverse cultural agents: scholars, officials, professional translators, politicians, and rulers. Further, recent studies of medieval literature and language have advanced our knowledge of translation in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as a pedagogical, hermeneutical, rhetorical, and colonizing tool.9 It is unfortunate that the relatively recent discipline of translation studies has devoted little attention to classical and early modern translations, which usually occupy only the first few pages of recent histories of translation or translation studies readers. Horace’s verses from the Ars Poetica and Cicero’s passing statements on translation are the only premodern landmarks in these chronological and positivistic anthologies of translation theories.10 Such a cursory glance over the classical and medieval theories and practices of translation has endorsed a binary perception of premodern translation as either literal or free (ad verbum or ad sensum). In order to understand the meaning and practices behind some of Bruni’s prefatory statements about the translations, our discussion will have to look back at Cicero, Quintilian, and (briefly) Manuel Chrysoloras, Bruni’s teacher of Greek.11 ficazioni retoriche nelle versioni di un best-seller umanistico’; Baldassarri, Umanesimo e tra­ duzione; Bausi, ‘Le due redazioni del “Dialogus consolatorius” di Giannozzo Manetti’; Valla, Valla’s Translation of Thucydides in Vat. Lat. 1801 with the Reproduction of the Codex, ed. by Chambers; and Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in Fifteenth-Century Italy. The literature on vernacular translation is growing. Here is a short list of some of the most recent works: Merisalo, ‘Translations and Politics in Fifteenth Century Florence’; Tanturli, ‘Marsilio Ficino e il volgare’; Acocella, L’asino d’oro nel rinascimento; Aprile, Giovanni Brancati traduttore di Vegezio; Bertolini, I volgarizzamenti italiani degli apocrifi; Bessi, Umanesimo volgare; Hankins, ‘Humanism in the Vernacular’. Several editions of vernacular translations have appeared in the last ten years or so, and the ongoing SALVIt project will assist with the deepening of our understanding of Renaissance volgarizzamenti: see . 9  See the works of Copeland and Botley mentioned above and also Rankovic, Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages and Ellis, The Medi­eval Translator. 10  See for instance Amos, Early Theories of Translation; Bassnett, Translation Studies; Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader; and Munday, Introducing Translation Studies. A notable exception is Robinson, Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche. 11  On Cicero I have followed closely the works of Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and

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Translation and Imitation Histories of translation sweep through classical and medieval translation theories with little attention to the contexts and practices that influence such statements. An example: ‘For Ancient Rome, translation was strict, slavish literalism […]. Thus in his Ars Poetica (c. 20 ce, The Arts of Poetry, 133–4), Horace encourages the poet not to be like “the faithful translator” who sticks too closely to the original’.12 Indeed, Horace does call for the abandonment of slavish imitation (‘a debased form of imitation’) when composing poetry,13 but this does not imply that literal translation was common practice in ancient Rome. There is little evidence that ancient Roman authors translated any work literally. The only known example of word-for-word translation from Greek to Latin is Attius Labeo’s one-line rendering of Homer’s Iliad (1 ce).14 Thus, Horace is advising a poet to discern between imitation and paraphrase, where the latter is a first step towards understanding the source text (through paraphrase and grammatical exercise) and the former is the technique used to displace the Greek text.15 Imitation is what Cicero refers to when, in the De Officiis, he draws the material for the discussion ‘non ut interpretes, sed, ut solemus, e fontibus eorum iudicio arbitrioque nostro’ (‘not as an interpreter, but, as it was customary, from the sources I deemed useful’).16 Paraphrase, rewording, and imitation were sequential and necessary stages of the exegesis and rhetorical production of texts. As Quintilian (1 ce) explains,

Translation in the Middle Ages and Cox and Ward, The Rhetoric of Cicero. On Quintilian and the tradition of his Institutio, see M. Fabii Quintiliani Institutionis Oratoriae, ed. by Colson. The key works that have informed the present discussion on Bruni are Baron, Leonardo Bruni Aretino; Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance; Bruni, Opere letterarie e politiche, ed. by Viti; Bruni, La perfetta traduzione, ed. by Viti; Hankins, ‘Translation Practice in the Renaissance’; Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance; Bruni, Epistolarum Libri VII, ed. by Hankins; Hankins, ‘Humanism in the Vernacular’; Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy; O’Rourke and Holcroft, ‘Latin and the Vernacular’. 12  France, The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, pp. 15–16. 13  Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages, pp. 28–29. 14  Dominik and Wehrle, Roman Verse Satire, p. 157. 15  See Rener, Interpretatio, pp. 306–17; McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Re­ naissance; Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric; and Botley, Latin Translation in the Renais­ sance. 16  I follow here the text and discussion in Rener, Interpretatio, pp. 90–91.

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Their pupils should learn to paraphrase Aesop’s fables, the natural successors of the fairy stories of the nursery, in simple and restrained language and subsequently to set down this paraphrase in writing with the same simplicity of style: they should begin by analysing each verse, then give its meaning in different language, and finally proceed to a freer paraphrase in which they will be permitted now to abridge and now to embellish the original, so far as this may be done without losing the poet’s meaning.17

Pupils were asked to turn verses into prose (versus solvere) texts, to paraphrase the text by using different wording (interpretari), and finally to translate freely (paraphrasi audacius vertere). Quintilian’s precepts entail the intersection of grammar and rhetoric, for both paraphrase and translation are functional to the learning of grammar, but they also resemble the rhetorical exercises of abbre­ viatio and amplificatio. Quintilian suggests that translation should yield two distinct outcomes: on the one hand give pupils the necessary knowledge and understanding of the lexical, semantic, and morphological characteristics of the texts under examination (grammatical skills), and on the other prepare the students for the acquisition of the rhetorical tools needed for oratory and writing. Ultimately, both Horace and Cicero consider the third stage in the rhetorical translation of a translated text as an active displacement of the Greek cultural prestige. Copeland explains this process as follows: ‘literary translation seeks to erase the cultural gap from which it emerges by contesting and displacing the source and substituting itself: it forges no synthetic links with its source. Thus in terms of an interior anatomy, translation can be distinguished from imitation’.18 It is in these terms that Cicero’s statement about his now lost translations of Demosthenes’ and Aeschines’ Greek speeches should be framed: ‘And I did not translate them as an interpreter, but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and the forms, or as one might say, the “figures” of thought, but in language which conforms to our usage’.19 Cicero’s cultural programme is to cre17 

‘Igitur Aesopi fabellas, quae fabulis nutricularum proxime succedunt, narrare sermone puro et nihil se supra modum extollente, deinde eandem gracilitatem stilo exigere condiscant; versus primo solvere, mox mutatis verbis interpretari, tum paraphrasi audacius vertere, qua et breviare quaedam et exornare salvo modo poetae sensu permittitur’ (Institutio Oratoria, i.9.2). Text and translation are taken from Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages, p. 23. 18  Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages, p. 30. 19  ‘Ne converti ut interpres, sed ut orator, sententiis isdem et earum formis tamquam figuris, verbis ad nostram consuetudinem aptis. In quibus non verbum pro verbo necesse habui reddere, sed genus omne verborum vimque servavi’: Cicero, De Inventione, De Optimo Genere

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ate a Latin model for oratory that builds on and surpasses the Greek authorities. The emphasis is on the rhetorical function of translation, not the reception and understanding of the Greek text. When compared with Quintilian’s three stages of translative processes, Cicero’s statement becomes even clearer. Quintilian explains that there are at least two stages in the interpretation of the source text. The first is the grammatical paraphrase, which requires a thorough understanding of the text and its lexical and syntactical features. This is the process Cicero refers to when stating that he is not translating as an interpreter. In the second stage, translation becomes an active process of displacement of the Greek source in which ‘the language of the original is expected to inform, to shape the target language’.20 Cicero’s supposed critique of the ad verbum and verbum de verbo translations should not be seen as proof that this kind of translation was commonly practiced, for it is most likely that Cicero is exaggerating the tendency during his time to produce close renderings of Greek plays. Here Cicero is comparing his interpretations of Greek philosophical works, ‘which were neither translations nor adaptations of particular Greek works’, 21 with close renderings of Greek theatre. Seen through the lens of Quintilian’s instructions on exegesis and production of oratory, Cicero’s preference for an oratorical translation does not exclude the necessity for a first, literal translation that allows a thorough understanding of the translated text. The exegetical and heuristic functions of translation are therefore two different moments of the ancient Roman cultural programme of learning and cultural appropriation. This hermeneutical process of learning and upskilling of language competence is what Cicero refers to in the passage quoted above. He does not wish to be a grammaticus in the sense of an expert of lanOratorum, Topica, ed. by Hubbell, 5.14–15. The De Optimo Genere Oratore, from which this passage is taken, is now believed to be spurious, but Bruni and his fellow humanists certainly considered it to be Cicero’s. Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance, p. 20, believes that possibly by 1412 and certainly before the Life of Cicero was finished Bruni knew this work, which is an important detail for the discussion that follows. A similar statement is in Cicero, De Officiis, i, 2.6. The topic is ethics and duties: ‘Sequimur igitur hoc quidem tempore et hac in quaestione potissimum Stoicos non ut interpres, sed, ut solemus, e fontibus eorum iudicio arbitrioque nostro, quantum quoque modo videbitur, hauriemus’ (‘I shall, therefore, at this time and in this investigation follow chiefly the Stoics, not as an interpreter, but, as is my custom, I shall at my own option and discretion draw from those sources in such measure and in such manner as shall suit my purpose’). Both the text and the translation are from Cicero, De Officiis, ed. and trans. by Miller, p. 9. 20  Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages, p. 34. 21  Powell, ‘Cicero’s Translations from Greek’, p. 277.

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guage, but a creative and eloquent interpreter of Greek sources. He sought to displace, surpass, and appropriate the translated culture and had little interest in just interpretation and criticism. Cicero’s statement affirms the classical understanding of grammar as a passive acquisition of knowledge as opposed to the active practice and production of eloquence. More to the point, Cicero is accentuating the boundary between classical grammar and rhetoric: grammar is restricted in its competences, rhetoric is not. The latter can interpret the text aggressively and colonize the source culture, whereas the former extols the stylistic virtues of the target text and trains the learner to learn and apply those qualities.

Not an ‘Interpres’ but a Translator Thirteen hundred years after Quintilian, Manuel Chrysoloras (d.  1415), imparted some useful suggestions to his students, including Bruni. Cencio de’ Rustici (c. 1416) describes them in a letter addressed to Bartolomeo Aragazzi.22 From this document it emerges that Chrysoloras considered translation ad ver­ bum to be absurd and stressed the importance of the target culture and the active role of the translator: Manuel used to say about translation that to translate ad verbum into Latin was wholly ineffective. It was not only absurd, he averred, but even, sometimes, perverted the sense of the Greek. One must translate according to the sense, he said; those who took pains with matters of this sort would in this way make it a rule for themselves not to alter in any way the propriety of Greek usage. For if anyone alter some [part] of Greek propriety with the object of speaking more clearly and brilliantly to his own people [i.e. to those who spoke his own language], he is playing the part of a commentator rather than of an interpreter.23

From this passage it is clear that Chrysoloras followed Cicero’s statements on his versions of Demosthenes’ and Aeschines’ speeches: the translator who 22 

On Chrysoloras’s theory of translation, see Berti, ‘Manuele Crisolora, Plutarco e l’avviamento delle traduzioni umanistiche’. 23  ‘Ferebat Manuel conversionem in latinum ad verbum minime valere, nam non modo absurdam esse asseverabat, verum etiam interdum graecam sententiam omnino pervertere. Sed ad sententiam transferre opus esse aiebat hoc pacto ut ii qui huiusmodi rebus operam darent, legem sibi ipsis indicerent, ut nullo modo proprietas greca immutaretur; nam si quispiam, quo luculentius apertiusque suis hominibus loquatur, aliquid grece proprietatis immutarit, eum non interpretis sed exponentis officio uti’. Both the Latin text and translation are taken from Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, i, 44–45. I have modified Hankins’s translation of the word ‘intepretis’ from ‘translator’ to ‘interpreter’ for reasons that become clear below.

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embellishes and challenges the propriety of the source text is not an interpres but, Chrysoloras tells us, a commentator. Chrysoloras’s advice is interesting, for it provides a further clue to what Cicero meant in the passages from De Optimo and De Officiis. The work of the interpres is the one of the grammarian who needs to explain and highlight the linguistic and stylistic features of the text and the lexical treasury (proprietas) of the translated language.24 It is a technical and, in the case of literary writing, preparatory work before the translated text can be turned into Latin or vernacular. Thus, both Cicero and Chrysoloras point towards the distinction between the learning and the creative phases of translation. Chrysoloras’s teaching makes another important connection with Cicero, who in one passage from the De Finibus criticizes what he calls the ‘ineloquent interpreters’.25 Why is Cicero so harsh on these interpreters? McElduff recently suggested that the adjective ‘indisertus’ used by Cicero reveals that the target is the grammaticus, that is, the student who did not go beyond the second stage of ancient Roman education. This stage, called the schola grammatici, entailed hours and hours of work on the grammar and ‘line-by-line and word-by-word progress through the text’.26 Chrysoloras, and Bruni as we shall see below, criticizes the word-for-word translation which in ancient Rome was merely a pedagogical tool and became a dominant translative practice only with the dissemination of Christian texts.27 Chrysoloras’s precepts reject the word-for-word translation of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages and call for the teaching and learning of Greek in which the focus is on both the accurate study of the qualities of the source language (interpres) and the rhetorical translation of the source text (the work of the commentator and translator). 24 

See Chiesa, ‘Ad verbum o ad sensum?’, pp. 20–51. On the meaning of proprietas, see Rener, Interpretatio, pp. 38–41. 25  Cicero, De Finibus, 3.15.10: ‘nec tamen exprimi verbum e verbo necesse erit, ut interpretes indiserti solent, cum sit verbum, quod idem declaret, magis usitatum. equidem soleo etiam quod uno Graeci, si aliter non possum, idem pluribus verbis exponere’ (‘Nor is it necessary to render word for word, as ineloquent interpreters usually do, when there is a more familiar word which signifies the same thing. Indeed, I usually use many words to expose what is expressed by one word of Greek if I am unable to do anything else’). Both text and translation are taken from McElduff, ‘Living at the Level of the Word’, p. 138. 26  McElduff, ‘Living at the Level of the Word’, p. 139. 27  There is no room here to dwell on Jerome’s ambiguous interpretation of Cicero’s theory of translation and the development of the literal versus free translation paradigm. On this, see Copeland, ‘The Fortunes of “Non Verbum Pro Verbo”’.

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Bruni takes both Cicero’s and Chrysoloras’s precepts on board. The need to distance his translations from a strictly grammatical or scholastic production induces Bruni, it is suggested here, to look for different ways to describe exactly what he is doing. In a letter to Niccolò Niccoli, Bruni reveals that in his translations he does not wish to chase syllables and tropes. Instead, he will adhere to Plato’s narrative by offering Niccoli great pleasure without annoyance (summa voluptate sine molestia) and ‘I follow Plato closely, and pretend that he knows Latin so he can decide for himself; and I will call him as a witness to his own translation; and I translate (traduco) the way he would appreciate the most’.28 Traduco is a neologism aimed at capturing Bruni’s own work as a translator of Greek texts. Following from Cicero, Quintilian, and Chrysoloras, Bruni’s prefaces to his translations reveal the function behind these works: sometimes mere exercises and at other times aggressive and creative rewritings of the source texts. Some of Bruni’s early translations describe his efforts as conver­ sio or interpretatio.29 Instead, when engaging with historical texts demanding modernization and substantial changes, Bruni calls upon Cicero’s statements about the interpres and orator or Chrysoloras to impress upon the reader that these works are active displacements of the translated texts. This is precisely what Bruni does with the three historical works translated from Plutarch and Polybius. As soon as he realizes that the content of the source text needs modifications, Bruni declares emphatically and Cicero-style that this time he is not going to translate as a student or grammarian would but will actively displace the Greek text by bringing in other sources. This heavy-handed rewriting of the source text is, however, still a translation for Bruni, as much as it was for Cicero. Cicero’s ‘not as interpreters’ adage is repeated by the Aretine literally this time both to distinguish his work from the source-based translations of medieval scholars such as Grosseteste,30 and also to claim his and Cicero’s right to embellish and improve the content of the source text in order to fit the new culture and context. Therefore the grammarian becomes the translator-author and translator-commentator of different sources.31 28 

Bruni, Epistolarum libri VII, I, VIII, ed. by Hankins. The letter was probably written on 5 September 1404. Here is the Latin text: ‘ego autem Platoni adhaereo, quem ego ipse michi effinxi, & quidem latine scientem, ut judicare possit, testemque eum adhibebo traductioni suae, atque ita traduco, ut illi maxime placere intelligo’. 29  See the prefaces to Bruni’s Phaedon (Bruni, La perfetta traduzione, ed. by Viti, p. 237) and Gorgias (ibid., p. 247). 30  See Hankins, ‘Translation Practice in the Renaissance’, p. 155, and the relevant biblio­ graphy listed there. 31  Chrysoloras’s distinction between the interpres and expositor recalls John Scotus’s

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It is time now to look at the other texts in which Bruni used the ‘non ut interpretes’ adage: As a result, I followed — as much as I could — the narrative of Polybius and other Greek authors, and offered as a substitute a commentary of this war for the public interest, with the rule that I would not add anything to the narrative that was not confirmed by these sources, and yet I related the History not by using only one source, as an interpreter, but several, based on my own judgement.32

The Life of Marc Antony, Life of Cicero, First Punic War, and the Italian War (the last will be discussed below) are textual montages and aggressive rewritings of the Greek sources, as Ianziti remarks.33 For instance, for the De primo bello Punico Bruni uses not only and mostly Polybius but also Thucydides and Strabo.34 In these texts, Bruni does not wish to be seen as an interpres but as more than that. It is not a coincidence that in the Life of Cicero and the Punic Wars the Aretine makes an explicit reference to Cicero’s repeated statements about not being an interpres in De Finibus 3.15, which he knew before 1412 and, possibly, also De Optimo genere oratorum.35 Bruni’s knowledge of Cicero’s criticism against the indiserti interpretes and grammatical translation suggests that he is reinstating the Ciceronian and classical translative practice of aggressive and rhetorical translation and at the same time putting the scholastic and learning-based translation where it should belong: the classroom.36 This prac(815–77 ce) passage in his preface to the Corpus: ‘see me as an interpreter of the text, not commentator’ (‘videat me interpretem huius operis esse, non expositorem’). See Chiesa, ‘Ad verbum o ad sensum?’, pp. 36–37. 32  Preface to Bruni’s version of Polybius’s Punic Wars (1418–22). My translation. ‘Quantum solerti lectione Polybii ceterorumque Graecorum consequi potui, commentaria huius belli pro communi utilitate suffeci, illa moderatione adhibita, ut nihil, quod non probatum a superioribus esset, huic operi insererem, et tamen non ab uno sumere, ut interpres’ (Baron, Leonardo Bruni Aretino, p. 123). 33  Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy, p. 15. 34  See Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance, p. 30. 35  Bruni certainly knew this work by Cicero as he sent for a copy before translating Aristotle’s Ethics (1412). See Bruni, Epistolarum libri VII, IV, xiii, ed. by Hankins. It is also likely that Bruni was also familiar with Cicero’s De Optimo genere oratorum, which spurred several humanists to practice their language skills on Demosthenes’ masterpiece (see Monfasani, George of Trebizond, pp. 61–62, and McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance, p. 86. 36  Bruni is probably concurring with Coluccio Salutati’s 1390s criticism of medieval translation, which is seen as unattractive and unrefined. See Botley, Latin Translation in the Renais­ sance, p. 7.

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tice, which is directly taken from Chrysoloras and Cicero, does not exclude literal, paraphrastic, and grammatical translation. Interestingly, when more concerned with the language, style, and rhythm of the Greek prose, Bruni is at ease with describing himself as interpres and his work as interpretatus sum. See for instance the preface to Demosthenes’ Pro Ctesiphonte, where the text is presented to Francesco Pizolpalsso as a ‘close rendering’ (fideliter interpretatus sum),37 or his version of Xenophon’s Hiero whose task he describes as useful ‘to train my ability’.38 The last two examples show that Bruni, as most of his fellow humanists, used translation as a rhetorical and grammatical practice and therefore performed it as an interpres before taking the step further and becoming a free translator, that is, both a translator and author.

Conclusion Towards the end of his career, Bruni tried to convince his readership that the De Bello Italico (1441)39 was his own and original work.40 However, following hard-pressed criticism from Biondo Flavio, who publicly exposed the work as a close translation from Procopius, Bruni retraced his steps and reiterated his ‘non ut interpretes’ position. This confirms Bruni’s eagerness to convince the readers and his fellow humanists of the power and superiority of his rhetorical, 37 

Bruni, La perfetta traduzione, ed. by Viti, p. 242. ‘ingenii excercendi gratia’: quote from Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance, p. 9. 39  See Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy, pp. 278–300, and Botley, Latin Trans­ lation in the Renaissance, pp. 33–41. 40  See Bruni’s letter to Ciriaco d’Ancona (31 August 1444) regarding his version of Procopius’s De Bello Italico: ‘Est autem haec non translatio, sed opus a me compositum, quemadmodum Livius a Valerio Antiate, vel a Polybio Megalopolitano sumpsit, et arbitratu suo disposuit’ (‘This is, however, not a translation but a work composed by myself, in the same way Livy drew upon Valerius Antias, or Polybius, and then arranged the material according to his judgment’). Again, in 1442 Bruni wrote to Giovanni Tortelli repeating the same concept: ‘Scripsi vero illos non ut interpres, sed ut genitor, & auctor: quemadmodum enim, si de praesenti bello scriberem, noticia quidem rerum gestarum ex auditu foret, ordo vero, ac dispositio, & verba mea essent, ac meo arbitratu excogitata, & posita; eodem item modo ipse noticiam tantum rerum gestarum de illo sumens, in ceteris omnibus ab eo recessi’ (‘I wrote it not as an interpreter, but as an author and father; in the same way as if I were writing about a present war, the news would arrive from hearsay, the order, structure and words would be mine and the words thought of and put on paper following my own decision; similarly, while I took several facts of this war from him, I also departed from his work in several cases’). Finally, in a letter written to Francesco Barbaro on 23 August 1443 Bruni admits that the work is Procopius’s and returns to the same position 38 

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not grammatical, translation. The translator is not just the grammaticus or student giving voice to the author of the source text but a translator who has the freedom to change, restructure, and improve the text as he sees fit. Bruni’s statements on translation are confirmed in his De recta interpreta­ tione (1424).41 The translator needs to understand and know intimately the style and lexis of the author, which is the work of the grammarian, before the translator can adopt and adapt this style. In sum, the translator needs to be an extraordinary person, an artist, and most importantly an inspired author who ‘can take liberties with the text’. 42 These are the qualities Cicero and Chrysoloras demand of the translators once they have learned the style and propriety of the Greek author through the process of rhetorical practice and analysis described by Quintilian. In other words, the interpres is just the interpreter of the Greek author, whereas the translator Bruni, like Cicero before him, wishes to be recognized equally as author, commentator, and parent of the new Latin texts. There is no conflict between these roles, for they all share the same purpose: to colonize and adapt the translated text to the sensibilities and interests of the humanistic culture of fifteenth-century Italy.

he asserted with his versions of Polybius and Plutarch: ‘Scripsit enim hanc historiam, ut te non ignorare puto, Procopius Cesariensis grecus scriptor, sed admodum ineptus et eloquentie hostis ut apparet maxime in contionibus suis, quamquam Thucydidem imitari vult. […] Ab hoc ego scriptore sumpsi non ut interpres, sed ita ut notitiam rerum ab illo susceptam meo arbitratu disponerem meisque verbis non illius referrem’ (‘I am sure that you know that the Greek author Procopius of Caesarea wrote this History. However, his style is lacking and inelegant, even if he tries to follow Thucydides. […] I sourced material from this author not as an interpreter, but, following my judgment, I rearranged the narrative of the historical events and wrote it with my own words, not his’). All of these texts and translations are taken from Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy, p. 279. 41  The most recent edition of this text is in Bruni, La perfetta traduzione, ed. by Viti. There is also an excellent Italian translation in Baldassarri, Umanesimo e traduzione, pp. 193–218. 42  Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance, p. 53.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Bruni, Leonardo, Epistolarum libri VII: Recensente Laurentio Mehus (1741), ed. by James Hankins (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007) —— , Opere letterarie e politiche, ed. by Paolo Viti (Torino: Unione Tipografica-Editrice Torinese, 1996) —— , La perfetta traduzione, ed. by Paolo Viti (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2004) Cicero, De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica, ed. by Harry Mortimer Hubbell (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1976) —— , De Officiis, ed. and trans. by Walter Miller (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1913) M. Fabii Quintiliani Institutionis Oratoriae: liber I, ed. by F. H. Colson (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1924) Manetti, Giannozzo, Apologeticus, ed. by Alfonso De Petris (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1981) Valla, Lorenzo, Valla’s Translation of Thucydides in Vat. Lat. 1801 with the Reproduction of the Codex, ed. by Mortimer Chambers (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2008)

Secondary Works Acocella, Mariantonietta, L’asino d’oro nel rinascimento: Dai volgarizzamenti alle raffigu­ razioni pittoriche (Ravenna: Longo, 2001) Amos, Flora Ross, Early Theories of Translation (Ithaca, NY: Canonymous Press, 1998) Anselmi, Gian Mario, Umanisti, storici e traduttori (Bologna: CLUEB, 1981) Aprile, Marcello, Giovanni Brancati traduttore di Vegezio (Galatina: Congedo Editore, 2001) Baldassarri, Stefano U., ‘Amplificazioni retoriche nelle versioni di un best-seller umanistico: Il De nobilitate di Buonaccorso da Montemagno’, Journal of Italian Translation, 2 (2007), 9–35 —— , Umanesimo e traduzione: Da Petrarca a Manetti (Cassino: Università di Cassino, 2003) Baron, Hans, Leonardo Bruni Aretino: Humanistich-Philosophische schriften mit einer chronologie seiner werke und briefe (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1928) Bassnett, Susan, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 1988) Bausi, Francesco, ‘Le due redazioni del “Dialogus consolatorius” di Giannozzo Manetti: Appunti sul testo e sulle fonti’, in Dignitas et excellentia hominis: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi su Giannozzo Manetti: Georgetown Uni­ver­sity — Kent State Uni­ver­sity, Fiesole — Firenze, 18–20 giugno 2007, ed. by Stefano Ugo Baldassarri (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2008), pp. 77–104 Berti, Ernesto, ‘Manuele Crisolora, Plutarco e l’avviamento delle traduzioni umanistiche’, Fontes, 1 (1998), 81–99

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Bertolini, Lucia, I  volgarizzamenti italiani degli apocrifi (secc. xiii–xv): un sondaggio (Firenze: Mandragora, 2004) Bessi, Rossella, Umanesimo volgare: Studi di letteratura fra Tre e Quattrocento (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2004) Bianca, Concetta, ed., Coluccio Salutati e l’invenzione dell’umanesimo (Firenze: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010) Botley, Paul, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, Erasmus (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Celenza, Christopher, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Chiesa, Paolo, ‘Ad verbum o ad sensum? Modelli e coscienza metodologica della traduzione tra tarda antichità e lato medioevo’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 1 (1987), 1–51 Copeland, Rita, ‘The Fortunes of “Non Verbum Pro Verbo”: Or, Why Jerome Is Not a Ciceronian’, in The Medi­eval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. by Roger Ellis (Cam­bridge: Brewer, 1989), pp. 15–35 —— , Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Tradition and Vernacular Texts (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1991) Cox, Virginia, and John O. Ward, eds, The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medi­eval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2006) Dominik, William J., and William Thomas Wehrle, Roman Verse Satire: Lucilius to Juvenal: A Selection with an Introduction, Text, Translations, and Notes (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1999) Ellis, Roger, The Medi­eval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages (Cam­bridge: Brewer, 1989) Folena, Gianfranco, Volgarizzare e tradurre (Torino: Einaudi, 1994) France, Peter, ed., The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Hankins, James, ‘Humanism in the Vernacular: The Case of Leonardo Bruni’, in Hum­ anism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald  G. Witt, ed. by Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 11–29 —— , Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1994) —— , ‘Translation Practice in the Renaissance: The Case of Leonardo Bruni’, in Metho­ dologie de la traduction: De l’antiquité à la Renaissance. Théorie et praxis, ed. by Charles Marie Ternes and Monique Mund-Dopchie (Luxemburg: Centre Universitaire Lux­ em­bourg, 1994), pp. 154–75 Ianziti, Gary, ‘A Life in Politics: Leonardo Bruni’s Cicero’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 61 (2000), 39–58 —— , Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012) Mack, Peter, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) Mazzocco, Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists: Studies of Language and Intellectual History in Late Medi­eval and Early Renaissance Italy (Leiden: Brill, 1993)

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McElduff, Siobhán, ‘Living at the Level of the Word: Cicero’s Rejection of the Interpreter as Translator’, Translation Studies, 2 (2009), 133–46 McLaughlin, Martin L., Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Merisalo, Outi, ‘Translations and Politics in Fifteenth Century Florence: Jacopo di Poggio Bracciolini and Domenico da Brisighella’, in Etymologie, Entlehnungen und Entwicklungen: Festschrift für Jorma Koivulehto zum 70. Geburtstag., ed. by I. Hyvärinen and others (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 2004), pp. 181–91 Monfasani, John, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of his Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden: Brill, 1976) Munday, Jeremy, Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications (New York: Routledge, 2001) O’Rourke, Siobhan, and Alison Holcroft, ‘Latin and the Vernacular: The Silence at the Beginning of Bruni’s “Dialogi Ad Petrum Paulum Histrum”’, in Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Yasmin Haskell and Juanita Feros Ruys (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), pp. 35–51 Pade, Marianne, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007) Powell, Jonathan G. F., ‘Cicero’s Translations from Greek’, in Cicero the Philosopher, ed. by Jonathan G. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 273–300 Rankovic, Slavica, ed., Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012) Rener, Frederick M., Interpretatio: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989) Rizzo, Silvia, Ricerche sul latino umanistico (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2002) Robinson, Douglas, Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2002) Tanturli, Giuliano, ‘La Cultura fiorentina volgare del Quattrocento davanti ai nuovi testi greci’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 2 (1988), 217–43 —— , ‘Marsilio Ficino e il volgare’, in Marsilio Ficino: fonti, testi, fortuna. Atti del convegno internazionale, Firenze, 1–3 ottobre 1999, ed. by Sebastiano Gentile and Stéphane Toussaint (Roma: Edizioni Storia e Letteratura, 2006), pp. 183–213 Tavoni, Mirko, Latino, grammatica, volgare: Storia di una questione umanistica (Padua: Antenore, 1984) Venuti, Lawrence, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2004) —— , The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995) Witt, Ronald G., ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Boston: Brill, 2000)

Ser Giovanni di Francesco, Forger of Coins and Man of ‘Ingegno’ Lorenz Böninger*

F

ew scholars have shown such a constant interest in the biographies of overlooked and seemingly secondary artisans of Laurentian Florence as Bill Kent. In his book on Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, for example, he presented some of the closest associates of the ‘Magnifico’, among whom were Francesco orafo and the sculptor and medal maker Bertoldo di Giovanni.1 What united these two was their common professional background as metalworkers. Whereas Bertoldo has been shown to have collaborated with Donatello,2 Francesco orafo (Francesco di Matteo di Neri) owed his training to his work in the Florentine mint long before becoming a Medici factotum; one of his first nominations in a notarial act in Palazzo Medici actually identified him as a ‘provvisore della Zecca’ (1465).3 The presence of men with a  

* My thanks to Ms Philippa Jackson for the first critical reading of this text. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, pp. 56–59. 2  Böninger and Boschetto, ‘Bertoldo di Giovanni’. 3  ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 2601, ad diem 29 maii 1465 (for his house, see ASF, Ospe­ dale di San Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 257, fols 38r, 56v); he is not mentioned in Bernocchi, Le monete della Repubblica fiorentina. When together with the painter Alessio Baldovinetti in 1482 he acted as arbiter in the quarrel between Gherardo Giandonati and the painter Neri di Bicci, Francesco’s expertise presumably lay in his ability to evaluate the gold employed 1 

Lorenz Böninger ([email protected]) is an independent scholar. Among his recent publications are two volumes of the critical edition of the ‘Lettere’ of Lorenzo de’ Medici (Firenze, 2010 and 2011), and that of the ‘Ricordanze’ of Lorenzo di Francesco Guidetti (Roma, 2014).

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 465–478 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109720

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similar background in the Medici entourage can hardly be overlooked and may have begun with the architect Michelozzo di Bartolomeo who had worked as a cutter of coins in the mint before 1448.4 Here one may also mention the far less famous Cino della Zecca (Niccolaio di Bartolomeo Cini) who was a friend of Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni.5 Their common technical abilities predestined these men for the estimation and evaluation — if not the production — of coins and medals; for both the Medici household and the bank this must have been an indispensable skill.6 In this context it must be recorded that in 1497 the exiled son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Piero, was absolutely determined to produce counterfeit coins to resolve his personal financial problems.7 Apart from their similar professional background, these artisans shared a cultural heritage in which the tendency to express themselves in the popular, vivid, and often quite abstruse jargon so fashionable before the political and cultural crisis of the Pazzi Conspiracy stood side by side with the cult of ‘ingegno’ cherished by all Florentine Renaissance artists. The very minor case presented in the following ‘vignette’ is little but an echo of this tradition. Its main source is the lengthy autograph confession of a poor Florentine priest by Neri di Bicci for his altarpiece of the church of San Giovanni in Sugana; the archival references for the case can be found in Medici, Lettere, xvi, ed. by Böninger, p. 102, n. 1. Together with Lorenzo’s secretary, ser Niccolò Michelozzi, Francesco acted in 1485/86 as an arbiter in another quarrel between a Jewish moneylender and two doctors (ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 9985, fols 29r, 85v, 94v, 100r). 4  Liscia Bemporad, ‘I punzoni per il fiorino sulla Porta del Paradiso’, pp. 232–33. 5  Martelli, ‘Nelle stalle di Lorenzo’, pp. 269–70, n. 6; Tornabuoni, Lettere, ed. by Salvadori, pp. 25, n. 91, 41, n. 158, 143–44. ‘Nicholaus Bartholomei Cini facit zechinos seu coniat monetas in zecha’ was also named in a notarial act of 1465 (ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 234, fol 32v; cf. ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 2308, fol 250r; 20496, fol. 154v; 20497, fols 4r–5r; and ASF, Mercanzia, 7261, ad 25 septembris 1480). 6  For an episode in 1462 when 7500 coins of French écus arrived at the Medici bank and had to be valued, cf. Bergier, ‘Lettres genevoises des Medici’, p. 305. Cases are known in which the foreign coins were melted down in Italy and sent back to Geneva as bars of gold (Il Libro giallo, ed. by Cassandro, p. 95). For the Medici collection of ‘medaglie’ (including ancient coins) and modern ‘monete’, see Eredità del Magnifico, pp. 60–104, 126–30. 7  ‘E un’altra bella cosa. Ancora lo richiese, che voleva ch’e’ facessino le monete false et d’archimie. M. Alexandro [dell’Antella] gli disse che sapeva fare uno ariento che era a 4 leghe et a ogni paragone si mostrava a 7, e reggeva el martello et al fuoco et al dorare et a ogni altra cosa, excetto che al cimento. E’ v’entrò su, e per ogni modo voleva fare monete false. M. Alexandro transtullò tanto che gli uscì quella fantasia. Vedete che uomo da governare una città come questa!’ (no. 46 of the confession of Lamberto dell’Antella in Villari, La storia di Girolamo Savonarola, ii, p. xxii).

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named ser Giovanni di Francesco who, in autumn 1495, was imprisoned in the archbishop’s jail with the fundamentally correct accusation of being a forger of coins; his confession (hereafter ‘Confession’) was the first recorded part of an inquisitorial process which started on 15 August and finished on 25 September with the sentence of Archbishop Rinaldo Orsini’s vicar-general, Filippo di Francesco degli Alamanni.8 What makes this text rather special is the apparent immediacy and freshness of ser Giovanni’s memories as he strived to depict himself as the victim of his own bonhomie and intended to convince the court that he had committed his errors only out of friendship for his companion, an innkeeper of the name of Domenico di Masino.9 The second element which makes the Confession noteworthy is ser Giovanni’s naming of friars, artists, and citizens whom he had met. This strategy of ‘name dropping’ obviously served to re-enforce the idea that he was much more an inventor, a man of genius, than a common criminal. At the very end of his text, for example, he claimed to have collaborated with ‘virtuous men’ such as the two brothers Domenico and Davide del Ghirlandaio when the former was living with the citizen Benozzo di Domenico Federighi.10 Ser Giovanni 8 

The documentation is preserved in the Archivio dell’Arcidiocesi di Firenze, Cause Criminali, 44, inserto 2 (Deposizioni in cause criminali, ser Giovanbattista Paganucci), fols 1r–5v and some folios without pagination. 9  Domenico’s inn was situated outside the city gate of San Niccolò at Ricorboli and was owned by the ‘Arte di Calamala’ as mentioned in the sentence of his condemnation, cited at the end of his confession. 10  On the Ghirlandaios’ first workshop in 1490, see  Aquino, ‘I Ghirlandaio, Baccio d’Agnolo e le loro botteghe “in sulla piazza di San Michele Berteldi”’. Benozzo Federighi’s earlier link with Domenico Ghirlandaio was hitherto unknown; born around 1451, in 1480 he was living with his two brothers in his family palace on the corner of Via della Vigna and Via degli Orafi (later Via de’ Federighi: ASF, Catasto, 1012, fols 286r–287r), and before 1498 became its only inhabitant (ASF, Decima Repubblicana, 22, fol 189r/v); underneath the palace, there was a workshop which in 1480 was rented out to a shoemaker. As a young man, Benozzo was a member of the confraternity of Sts Matteo and Pancrazio in the church of San Pancrazio (ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 1515, fols 52r–56v; cf. ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 16117, fols 14v–15r). In 1484/85 he served for an entire year as Captain of Bagno di Romagna (where he also left his coat of arms); in 1493 he was a member of the ‘Gonfalonieri delle società del popolo’ (ASF, Signori e Collegi. Duplicati delle deliberazioni in forza di ordinaria autorità, 26, fol. 260r); in early 1494 he was one of the ‘Dodici Buonuomini’ (ibid., fols 391r, 299r); in May and June 1495 he was one the priors in the Signoria (ASF, Signori e Collegi, Deliberazioni in forza di ordinaria autorità, 97, fol. 48r); in the summer of 1497 he was the ‘provisore’ of the Otto di Guardia e Balìa (ibid., 99, fol. 80v); in 1501 he was Podestà of Fiesole and in 1512 Vicario of San Miniato. He must have been a fierce anti-Savonarolan; according to one source it was due to his influence that in May 1498 Girolamo Savonarola was tortured and burnt (Vil-

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also mentioned the carpenters Giovanni Nannucci and Piero di Guido11 and the noble citizen Giovanni Morelli with whom he had tried to develop a mechanism to lift water to the upper floors of his palace in Piazza Santa Croce: If you want to know with whom I have worked for a longer time, I have worked only with virtuous men: I  worked with Domenico Ghirlandaio and his brother David whilst the said Domenico was staying for more than eight years with Benozzo Federighi. For more than twelve years I collaborated with the woodworker Giovanni Nannucci and a certain Piero di Guido in his workshop for maybe just as long; I did so because he has a very subtle spirit and is an inventor (‘trovatore d’ingegni’); furthermore with nearly all miniaturists, painters, and sculptors in this city. Amongst the booksellers you will not find one who does not know exactly how much I am worth. I  always exercised my ‘ingegno’ together with Giovanni Morelli who lives in Piazza Santa Croce, to lift water up as high as 25 or 30 ‘braccia’, pulled up by rocks or some other kind of invention. But I never found anyone else who talked to me about similar things except him [Domenico di Masino]: it would have been much better if I had continued with my copying of manuscripts because in that case I would now have some money instead of being poor, practically a mendicant. I don’t know what else I could write about me except that if you ask around in Florence, people will inform you about me.12 lari and Casanuova, Scelta di prediche e scritti di fra Girolamo Savonarola, p. 508). Although he remained a bachelor until 1498, he was later reported to have married a Lena di Bartolomeo dal Borgo (BNCF, Carte Passerini, cassetta 187, n. 51, fol 25v). 11  Nannucci can almost certainly be identified with Giovanni di Luca di Paolo di Benincasa Mannucci who descended from a dynasty of woodworkers and shared his workshop in Via San Martino with a well-known miniaturist, Felice di Michele di Feo (ASF, Decima Repubblicana, 3, fol. 24r; I owe this reference to the kindness of Doris Carl; on Felice, see ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 3471, fol. 50r, and Levi d’Ancona, Miniatura e miniatori a Firenze dal xiv al xvi secolo, pp. 94–97). 12  ‘Se voi volete intendere con chi io ò pratichato già fa un lungho tempo, io non ò pratichato se non con huomini virtuosi: pratichai con Domenicho del Grillandaio e con Davit suo fratello, in mentre che’l detto Domenicho visse con Benozzo Federighi più d’otto anni, con Giovanni Nannucci legnaiuolo più di 12 anni, con uno Piero di Ghuido che suole stare in bottegha del detto Giovanni forse altretanto, usavo cho·llui perchè gli è di sottile spirito e trovatore d’ingegni, con quanti miniatori, dipintori, schultori sono in questa terra; infra chartolai non v’è veruno che non sappia quello che io peso a una dragma; con Giovanni Moregli che sta in sulla piazza di Santa Croce ò sempre afatichato lo ‘ngegno in trovare modi di tirare acqua 25 o 30 braccia alta tirati di pietre o in qualche altra cosa d’ingegno, né mai trovai nessuno che mi ragionassi di simile cosa se none chostui [Domenico di Masino]: sarebbe stato molto el meglio che io avessi ateso a scrivere, che io mi troverrei qualche danaio dove io sono poverissimo anzi mendicho, non so più che mivi scrivere se none che dove voi dimanderete in Firenze di me, ve ne sarà dato informatione’ (Confession, no pagination).

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One must therefore presume that his original profession was that of a scribe of manuscripts.13 The institution for which ser Giovanni worked was the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce where he had a place to sleep and where he was in close contact with certain friars who — probably in the year 1491 — used his services to hide some of their own work tools from prying eyes: To begin with, some time ago, I believe in the year when friar Alessandro di Luca Mannucci of Santa Croce (who was on the side of master Giorgio [Dragisic alias Benigno Salviati]) gave me a big new melting pot, in which there were things he had tried out with a certain friar Iacopo da Montepulciano or maybe da Foiano; he gave me these things because he was afraid that the new general of his order [Francesco Sansone da Brescia] would find them; and I handed it all over to the innkeeper Domenico at Ricorboli because that morning we were together and I remained for lunch at Santa Croce.14

It is certainly no coincidence that among his teachers, ser Giovanni mentioned a famous painter like Domenico Ghirlandaio. Unfortunately nothing is known about the earliest workshop of this artist. On another ‘bottega’, however, that of Andrea del Verrocchio, it has recently been written that, in addition to turning out paintings and sculptures on commission, the more generic activities of metal casting and carpentry were conducted in Verrocchio’s atelier, and he put his assistants and apprentices to work preparing the pigments, glues, varnishes and solvents necessary for his paints, waxes, acids and soldering material. Leonardo [da Vinci]’s later work on chemical and metallurgical apparatuses, such as furnaces for casting, alembics for distillation, and boiler for the dying of cloth, must be considered in the same light.15

13 

In one of the initial passages, ser Giovanni states furthermore that in the months he ‘collaborated’ with Domenico di Masino, he could have earned up to sixteen ducats copying manuscripts: ‘et apicha’mi cho·llui, la qual compagnia è stata la ruina mia, ché in questo tempo arei ghuadagnato a scrivere 12 o 16 duchati’ (Confession, fol. 2v). 14  ‘E prima come già fa più tempo e credo sia l’anno che fratre Alexandro di Lucha Mannucci frate in Santa Croce, essendo lui della parte di maestro Giorgio [Dragisic alias Benigno Salviati], mi dette uno choreggiuolo grande nuovo, nel quale erano cose che lui aveva fatte e provate con uno frate Iacopo da Montepulciano o vero da Foiano, dettemelo per sospetto che ’l suo generale [Francesco Sansone da Brescia] non glele trovassi, el quale detti a Domenicho oste da Richorboli, perché eravamo la mattina insieme e io restai la mattina a desinare in Santa Croce’ (Confession, fol. 1r). On fol. 2r ser Giovanni claims that Domenico ‘veniva in Santa Croce a ogni hora a sollecitare che io la [!] seguitassi’. 15  Bernardoni, ‘Leonardo and the “Chemical Arts”’, p. 18 (in the essay one can also find a more extensive bibliography on the argument). Although Verrocchio was himself a cannon

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Ser Giovanni based his activities on both written sources and his own practical, experimental expertise. The first comprised the books known today as ricettari (and which he himself did not trust too much),16 and also more obscure alchemical or magical treatises such as the ‘Liber Almandal’, ascribed to King Solomon: Then I told him: ‘Domenico, I want you to forget about these fairy tales of enchantments’, and lent him a little booklet which is said to have been written by King Solomon on the twelve ‘altitudes’ designated to govern the world, and he kept this booklet until recently. After he had handed it back, I gave it to a certain Baccio Guelfi. After approximately three or four months, one morning I met him on the Rubaconte Bridge and on this occasion he asked me when we would try out one of these ‘altitudes’ and on this matter we then discussed for a while.17

It is likely that he used an Italian translation of this text, but from the Confession it is also clear that ser Giovanni knew Latin. The ‘Liber Almandal’ was considered a classical text of necromancy that widely circulated in the ‘clerical underworld’ from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, as described by Richard Kieckhefer.18 No less uncertain, however, were the technical secrets that ser Giovanni had tried to pick up from well-known artisans and intellectuals of Renaissance Florence: One day I was in the workshop of the cannon maker Lorenzo Cavaloro and there were many bystanders, among whom there was one from Antonio Pollaiuolo’s workshop. He reported to have once seen a German in the same workshop who with a certain paste had softened the iron of a hammer in such a way that when he maker, Leonardo’s expertise on casting has been judged to have been quite poor; see Lein, Ars aeria, pp. 210–15. 16  Cf. Confession, fol 2r: ‘io tolsi un mio libricciuolo che v’è schriptto su più bugie che non si dissono mai, e queste sono di sofistichi d’ariento e d’oro, e leggevo una ricepta che v’è di sapone molle’ (the term ‘sofistico’ also had an alchemical sense). On the ‘recipe books’, see I ricettari del Fondo Palatino, ed. by Pomaro; Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature. 17  Confession, fol. 2r: ‘Dipoi gli dissi: ‘Domenicho, io voglio che voi lasciate andare queste favole d’inchantesimo’ e dettigli in prestanza uno trattatello che si dice essere composto per Salomone delle 12 altitudini deputatate al ghoverno al mondo, e quello tenne per insino a pochi dì fa, presta’lo quando me lo rende’ a uno che à nome Baccio Ghuelfi. Dipoi sono tre mesi o pocho più o pocho meno, forse quattro de’ mesi, che una mattina io trovai el decto Domenicho in sul ponte Rubachonte e domandomi quando noi volavamo provare una di queste altitudine e in su questa cosa stemo un pezzo in ragionamento’. 18  Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, chap. 5; cf. Federici Vescovini, Medioevo magico, pp. 123–24; Gehr, ‘“Gaudent brevitatem moderni”’.

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put a ducat on the anvil and knocked it, the ducat remained stuck inside the hammer. When Domenico proclaimed that ‘this could be done’, I responded to him that it had to be tried out and that a friend of mine called Bartolomeo Bernardini had many of these things. Domenico and I went to meet this Bartolomeo who gave us certain recipes to soften (metal), of which we tried one that instead hardened it. In this way I kept him busy for a while in order to make him forget the whole matter, but the further I took him away the more he got obsessed and he could never stop talking about it. I believe that it must be manifest to all of you that what I did at the very end could have been done right from the beginning if I had been in good faith with him, and many times I asked him: ‘If we produce these false coins, where will we go? To hell or where?’, because the quantity would always be to small to satisfy him and because the offense of the Comune is a much more serious crime than that of a private person. And he replied with certain reasons he may have told you, adding that he trusted thoroughly that God would forgive him seeing his good faith, and that all I had to fabricate was the support and that he would do all the rest. At the end gutta cavat lapidem, and I burst out: ‘maybe we could try with the stamp of a ducat from Genoa (a genovino)’, because on this very day he had showed one to me and I had examined it closely and noted that it would be easy.19

19 

‘Dipoi un di trovandomi io in bottegha di Lorenzo detto Chavaloro che fa bonbarde e qui era molta gente infa quali v’era uno che sta in bottegha d’Antonio del Pollaiuolo, dove e’ disse che aveva veduto che uno tedescho con una mistura aveva indolcito in modo uno martello in quella medesima bottegha che poi pose uno duchato in sulla anchudine e dettevi su un cholpo che’l duchato si ficchò nel decto martello, dove Domenicho disse “potrebbesegli fare”; io gli risposi che si voleva provare e che io avevo uno mio amicho che si chiama Bartolomeo Bernardini e che lui aveva molte di queste cose. Andamo Domenico e io, e trovamo questo Bartholomeo e lui ci dette certe ricette che dicevano per indolcire, ch’è una che noi ne provamo, lo fece diventare più duro, e a questo modo lo menavo a sollazzo acciò ché questa fantasia gli uscissi, ma quanto piú mi dischostavo dal vero, più gli cresceva la voglia, né mai finiva di dirmi di questa cosa. Credo questo che manifestamente ciascheduno di voi può chiaramente comprehendere che quello che io feci da ultimo lo potevo fare la prima volta se io vi fussi andato di buona voglia, e più volte gli dissi: “se noi facciamo queste monete false, dove n’andreno noi? Nello Inferno e in che luogho?”, perché se ne faceva quantità che non era possibile mai a potere satisfare, ché si fa molto maggio peccato a offendere uno comune che una persona propria, e lui asegnava certe sua ragione che forse ve le può avere dette, e oltre a quelle diceva che aveva tanta fidanza in messer Domenedio che gliene perdonerebbe ché sapeva la sua buona voluntà, e che io vedessi che se di questo io lo potevo contentare che io gli facessi i puntegli e che io lasciassi fare el resto a·llui. Infine gutta cavat lapidem, e m’uscì di boccha: “la stampa genovina mi darebbe el quore di fare”, e questo era perché me n’aveva in que’ dì mostro uno e io l’avevo bene examinato e vidi chell’era facile cosa’ (Confession, fol. 3r). On Lorenzo di Giovanni Cavaloro, ‘maestro di getto’ of cannons and church bells, see Melani, L’arte nell’industria, ii, 111; Isolani, ‘Le campane di Valdelsa’, pp. 114, 116, n. 3.

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Among the sources of his experiments, ser Giovanni even quoted the Dominican master Niccolò Mirabili d’Ungheria: Furthermore  I, ser Giovanni di Francesco, confess that some time ago I told Domenico di Masino da Ricorboli that I had seen — not very well, though — how the then regent of Santa Maria Novella master Niccolò d’Ungheria made a certain golden paste and applied it to good quality silver (24 ounces per ‘libbra’): unfortunately I could not watch closely because master Niccolò was quite suspicious of me; nevertheless he gave me the recipe which I never tried out; and this must be the recipe of which Domenico says ‘Probably this is just another lie like all the other sophisms’.20

In his discussions with the innkeeper ser Giovanni frequently referred to being afraid of his punishment in the afterlife; he was also aware that offending the commune of Florence was a much more serious crime than damaging a private person (see note 19). As every Florentine knew, Dante in his Divine Commedy had reserved a very prominent place in hell for the counterfeiters of coins such as a certain Adamo da Brescia who had falsified Florentine gold florins for the Conti Guidi in the Casentino (Inferno, canto XXX, 58–78). In the late fifteenth century, the humanist Cristoforo Landino reported that the local peasants still claimed to be able to indicate a landmark on the road between Borgo alla Collina and Romena where maestro Adamo had been burned alive.21 There can be little doubt that ser Giovanni had some practical knowledge on casting coins, dating from a probably informal collaboration with the medal maker Niccolò di Forzore Spinelli.22 Ser Giovanni recalled this at the end of an episode from around 1493/94 when a certain Manetto Migliorotti had invited him to his house to produce unspecified medals which only in the course of the events turned out to be false coins from Naples and Siena (‘uno charlino de’ reame e uno grosso sanese’). Manetto had then proposed to work on a certain 20  ‘Anchora confesso io ser Giovanni di Francesco chome io ragionai già più tempo fa a Domenicho di Masino da Richorboli chome io vidi fare, non però a perfectione, a maestro Nicholò d’Ungheria che allora era regente in Sancta Maria Novella, una tintura d’oro sopra l’ariento di 24 leghe: no·lla vidi fare a perfectione, perché el decto maestro Nicholo si ghuardò da me, dettemi el modo per iscripta, nientedimancho io no·lla provai mai, e questa è quella che Domenicho dice: “Credo che anche quella sia bugie chome gli altri sofistichi”’ (Confession, no pagination). This record must be dated before the end of 1489 when Mirabili returned to Hungary; see Verde, Lo Studio fiorentino, iv.2, 829–31. 21  Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia, ed. by Procaccioli, ii, 961. On the falsifiers of coins in general, see Martucci, L’incisore di monete mestiere d’arte, pp. 95–111 (with further references). 22  Cf. Bode, ‘Der Florentiner Medailleur Niccolò di Forzore Spinelli’; Ciardi-Dupré dal Poggetto, ‘Un’ipotesi su Niccolò Spinelli fiorentino’.

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formula to change some of the characteristics of pewter that caused it to make a characteristic shrill sound when bent (‘tôrre lo stridore dallo stagno’) and to cast other coins which he intended to spend in Turkey; their cooperation had ended when the priest had refused to construct for Manetto an instrument needed to produce salt: He asked me if I could eliminate that jarring sound [of the coins]; he showed me two of them and told me that he wanted to take them with him to Turkey, together with a Turk he had formerly brought here; there he would buy merchandise for which the Turk would pay [with these coins]; I tried to dissuade him telling him that he would lose his life. I do not know what else happened because shortly after he got upset with me because I did not want to show him how to construct a water extractor which he needed to produce salt at Ragusa. I believe that he also tried to involve [the pharmacist] Antonio [da San Giovanni] to show him how to cast. I  myself learnt it from Niccolò di Forzore who casts these [medals with] heads which he portrays every day.23

The much closer collaboration with the innkeeper Domenico di Masino lasted for about three or four months and was far more productive. Having originated with their common interest in magic spells and ‘sofistici’, their work soon concentrated on the casting of coins (which in any case were always foreign coins, among them even a French ‘corona’ and a ‘charlino papale’ of Pope Alexander VI). But even religious services were part of the strange connubium between the innkeeper and our priest: In the same period when he was working on the casts he made a vote to the Santis­ sima Annunziata, asking me to say seven Masses for him, and we started one morning and then I said all the other Masses; each morning he left some money in the sacristy’s alms box: probably he did so like the thief who was praying to God ut bene prosperetur in furto.24 23 

‘Dissemi che se gli toglieva questro stridore che ne farebbe asprie, mostromene dua e che andrebbe con essi in Turchia e menerebbe secho un Turcho che lui menò di qua e comprebbe merchatantie e conducerebbele di qua e farebbe fare el paghamento a quel Turcho, dove io me lo sconfortai, dicedogli che vi sarebbe morto. Hora io non so quello si seghuissi perché e’ s’adirò mecho infra pochi dì, perché io non gli volsi insegnare fare una tromba da tirare acqua, ché voleva far sale a Raugia. Credo che quello Antonio [da San Giovanni speziale] e’ ve lo conducessi chome me, ch’egli insegniassi formare se sapeva el modo di formare. Imparai io da Nicholò da Forzore formando di quelle teste che lui ritrae tutto el dì’ (Confession, no pagination). 24  ‘In questo tempo che lavorava le stampe e’ fece un vuoto alla Nunziata e dissemi che voleva che io vi dicessi sette messe e incominciamo una mattina e successivamente le dissi, e ogni mattina lui metteva non so che danari per limosina nella chasetta della sacrestia: credo che faceva chome que’ ladro che preghava Dio ut bene prosperetur in furto’ (Confession, fol. 4r). The Latin quotation comes from John Chrysostom.

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The two men’s workplaces were not only the inn at Ricorboli but also included a workshop at Ponte Vecchio of a relative of ser Giovanni, a brass worker, where they secretly met on holidays when all the other shops were closed. In the course of the priest’s detailed account he often inserted not only the exact wording of his conversations with Domenico, but also described the technical difficulties they encountered. These problems all too often resulted in comical effects. The cutting of the letters, the casting, and the gilding of the finished coins presented infinite problems. In the end, the production concentrated on gold ducats from Genova (‘ducati genovini’), of which they produced fourteen in silver, with a slim golden surface. Although the circulation of foreign coins was prohibited on Florentine territory,25 six of these ducats were spent in the Casentino to buy cheese (‘chacio’). As might have been foreseen, once the vendor of the cheese had discovered the deceit, he arrived in Florence to complain, triggering off the inquisition. Apart from his confession to the vicar general of Archbishop Rinaldo Orsini begun on 21/22 August, on 24 August ser Giovanni di Francesco also wrote a short memorandum for the Florentine ‘Signori della Zecca’ (who were obviously informed of his full confession), in which he revealed some details previously omitted and asked for their clemency: I ask you for God’s mercy and for the Passion of Jesus Christ that I entrust myself to you and that you will not torture me to pieces. I believe that you have seen how many came to testify in my favour, but if you do not have mercy with me, I don’t know where to turn. You will not want to do with me what you could. If it had not been for the clemency of the reverend vicar [of the Archbishop] who fed me, I would have died of famine. This is why I plead you Masters of the Mint to have mercy with this poor and abandoned, too.26

Despite these pleas for mercy, the punishment could not be anything but exemplary. On 22 September, after a lawsuit in the court of the Podestà, the layman Domenico di Masino di Iacopo da Ricorboli was condemned to be led, 25 

Cf. the decision of the Zecca of 6 September 1488 against the ‘black coins’ in ASF, Notarile antecosimiano, 21068, II, fols 313r–314v; furthermore: ‘A dì 28 d’Agosto [1490] li uficiali di Monte mandarono bando delle monete forestiere, che da dì 8 di Settembre in là non si potessino spendere, come altra volta si era comandato e non osservato; così non si osservò per allora’ (Rinuccini, Ricordi storici, ed. by Aiazzi, p. cxlv). 26  ‘Prieghovi per l’amor di Dio et per la passione di Giesù Christo che io vi sia rachomandato e che voi non mi vogliate stratiare in su’ martori. Credo che voi avete veduto quanti si sono levati per me: se voi non m’usate misericordia voi, nonnò a chi ricorrere. Non vogliate fare di me quello che voi potresti. Se non fussi stato la benignità del reverendo messer lo Vichario che m’à proveduto, io sarei hora morto di fame, sicché anche voi Signori di Zecha abbiate misericordia di questo povero abbandonato’ (Confession, no pagination).

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whilst being whipped and with a mitre on his head, around the ‘usual places’ of Florence and out of the Porta of San Niccolò; there he was to be banned for two years from Florentine territory, under the threat of the amputation of his right hand.27 Three days later the Vicar-General Filippo Alamanni also condemned ser Giovanni di Francesco, in his case to ‘perpetual’ jail (‘ad perpetuos carceres condemnamus ac ibidem penitentiam peragendum’, Confession, no pagination). It may be noted that life sentences were almost always at some point converted and reduced as soon as new facts or considerations were brought in — most frequently after the intervention of some powerful citizen. In other cases a Christian act of clemency could end the period of imprisonment. This was probably the case of ser Giovanni di Francesco who remained in jail for only eight months before being released by the same Filippo Alamanni who had convicted him.28 One can only guess that in the prison, the Stinche, ser Giovanni was confined in the room that was called the ‘cage of the priests’ (‘in camera nuncupata “la gabbia de’ preti”’),29 and that there he earned his living copying religious texts, as he had done before his association with Domenico di Masino.30 After that, however, nothing more was heard of the two protagonists of this story. Still more could be learned from the text of the Confession, especially on the technical aspects of casting. If on the one hand the individual case of ser Giovanni di Francesco was in no way exceptional, as numerous court cases in Florence and other towns prove,31 on the other, his lengthy evidence describes better than many other sources the animated and playful atmosphere of the artisans’ milieu of Renaissance Florence in which magic, true experimental spirit, and even counterfeiting all lived together in a seemingly perfect harmony. 27 

ASF, Podestà, 5447, fols 145r–146v. ASF, Soprastanti alle Stinche, 116, fol. 8r: ‘Die XXV septembris 1495. Ser Iohannes Francisci presbiter florentinus ad petitionem domini Filippi de Alamannis vicarii reverendissimi archiepiscopi florentini. Die XX maii 1496 fuit relapsatus prefatus ser Iohannes vigore bullettini reverendi domini vicarii archiepiscopi florentini et prout in filza’. 29  See ASF, Soprastanti alle Stinche, 117, fol. 24r (cf. Landucci, Diario fiorentino, ed. by Del Badia, p. 155). 30  On the copyists’ activity in the Florentine prison, see Cursi, ‘“Con molte sue fatiche”’. 31  The most severe sentences were often given against foreigners; for cases from 1433 and 1452, see ASF, Giudice degli Appelli e Nullità, 102, II, fols 104r–105v; ASF, Giudice degli Appelli e Nullità, 106, fols 56r–65r. In 1454 a German was beheaded for possessing false coins (‘14 grossi’); only afterwards it turned out that he had unknowingly received them from somebody else (BNCF, II, I, 138, no pagination, under the date; for similar death sentences see under the years 1464 and 1465). For the details of the latter cases, see ASF, Podestà, 5095, fols 26r–29r; 5098, fols 9v–10r, 103r–104v (sentence against ‘Salomon Samuelli ebreus dictus de Ferraria monetarum et numerorum aureorum falsator’), 169r–170v. 28 

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Archivio dell’Arcidiocesi di Firenze, Cause Criminali, 44, inserto 2 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Catasto, 1012 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Decima Repubblicana, 3 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Decima Repubblicana, 22 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Giudice degli Appelli e Nullità, 102, II Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Giudice degli Appelli e Nullità, 106 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mercanzia, 7261 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 234 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 1515 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 2308 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 2601 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 3471 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 9985 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 16117 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 20496 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 20497 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile antecosimiano, 21068 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ospedale di San Matteo detto di Lemmo Balducci, 257 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Podestà, 5095 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Podestà, 5098 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Podestà, 5447 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Signori e Collegi, Deliberazioni in forza di ordinaria autorità, 97 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Signori e Collegi, Deliberazioni in forza di ordinaria autorità, 99 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Soprastanti delle Stinche, 116 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Soprastanti delle Stinche, 117 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, II, I, 138 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Carte Passerini, cassetta 187, n. 51

Primary Sources Landino, Cristoforo, Comento sopra la Comedia, ed. by Paolo Procaccioli, 4 vols, Edizione nazionale dei commenti danteschi, 28 (Roma: Salerno, 2001) Landucci, Luca, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1515, continuato da un anonimo fino al 1452, ed. by Iodoco Del Badia (Firenze: Sansoni, 1883; repr. with an introduction by Antonio Lanza, 1985) Il Libro giallo di Ginevra della compagnia fiorentina di Antonio della Casa e Simone Guadagni 1453–1454, ed. by Michele Cassandro (Prato: Istituto Internazionale di Storia economica ‘F. Datini’, 1976)

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Medici, Lorenzo de’, Lettere, xvi, Settembre 1489 — febbraio 1490), ed. by Lorenz Böninger (Firenze: Giunti-Barbèra, 2011) I ricettari del Fondo Palatino della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, ed. by Gab­ riella Pomaro, Inventari e cataloghi toscani, 35 (Firenze: Giunta regionale toscana and Editrice Bibliografica, 1991) Rinuccini, Filippo di Cino, Ricordi storici di Filippo di Cino Rinuccini dal 1282 al 1460 colla continuazione di Alamanno e Neri suoi figli fino al 1506, ed. by G. Aiazzi (Firenze: Piatti, 1840) Tornabuoni, Lucrezia, Lettere, ed. by Patrizia Salvadori (Firenze: Olschki, 1993)

Secondary Works Aquino, Lucia, ‘I Ghirlandaio, Baccio d’Agnolo e le loro botteghe “in sulla piazza di San Michele Berteldi”’, in Invisibile agli occhi: Atti della Giornata di studio in ricordo di Lisa Venturini. Firenze, Fondazione Roberto Longhi, 15 dicembre 2005, ed. by Nicoletta Baldini (Firenze: Fondazione Roberto Longhi, 2007), pp. 64–76 Bergier, Jean-François, ‘Lettres genevoises des Medici, 1425–1475’, in Studi in memoria di Federigo Melis. Raccolta dei saggi di autori italiani e stranieri, ed. by L. De Rosa, 5 vols (Firenze: Giannini, 1978), iii, 279–310 Bernardoni, Andrea, ‘Leonardo and the “Chemical Arts”’, Nuncius, 27 (2012), 11–55 Bernocchi, Mario, Le monete della Repubblica fiorentina, 6 vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1974–85), ii, Corpus nummorum florentinorum (1975) Bode, Wilhelm, ‘Der Florentiner Medailleur Niccolò di Forzore Spinelli’, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 25 (1904), 1–14 Böninger, Lorenz, and Luca Boschetto, ‘Bertoldo di Giovanni: Nuovi documenti sulla sua famiglia e i primi suoi anni fiorentini’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 49 (2005), 233–68 Ciardi-Dupré dal Poggetto, Maria Grazia, ‘Un’ipotesi su Niccolò Spinelli fiorentino’, Antichità viva, 6 (1967), 22–34 Cursi, Mario, ‘“Con molte sue fatiche”: copisti in carcere alle Stinche alla fine del Medio­ evo (secoli xiv–xv)’, in In uno volumine: Studi in onore di Cesare Scalon, ed. by Laura Pani (Udine: Editrice Universitaria Udinese, 2009), pp. 151–92 Eamon, William, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medi­eval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994) Eredità del Magnifico, 1492–1992: Firenze, Museo Nazionale del Bargello 19 giugno – 30 dicembre (Firenze: S.P.E.S, 1992) Federici Vescovini, Graziella, Medioevo magico: La magia tra religione e scienza nei secoli xiii e xiv (Torino: UTET, 2008) Gehr, Damaris, ‘“Gaudent brevitatem moderni”: rielaborazioni della teoria magica nel tardo Medioevo sull’esempio dell’Almandal di Salomone’, Società e storia, 139 (2013), 1–36 Isolani, Socrate, ‘Le campane di Valdelsa’, Miscellanea storica della Valdelsa, 113–14 (1931), 106–19

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Kent, F. W., Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Lein, Edgar, Ars aeria: Die Kunst des Bronzegiessens und die Bedeutung von Bronze in der florentinischen Renaissance (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2004) Levi d’Ancona, Mirella, Miniatura e miniatori a Firenze dal xiv al xvi secolo: Documenti per la storia della miniatura, con una premessa di Mario Salmi (Firenze: Olschki, 1962) Liscia Bemporad, Dora, ‘I punzoni per il fiorino sulla Porta del Paradiso: Michelozzi e Bernardo Cennini’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 20, n.s. 17 (2006), 227–43 Martelli, Mario, ‘Nelle stalle di Lorenzo’, Archivio storico italiano, 150 (1992), 267–302 Martucci, Roberto, L’incisore di monete mestiere d’arte, with the contribution of Laura Cretara, Mariangela Johnson, and Rosa Maria Villani (Verderio Inferiore: Il Saggia­ tore, 2000) Melani, Alfredo, L’arte nell’industria […] (Milano: [n.pub.], 1907) Verde, Armando F., Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503: Ricerche e documenti, 6 vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1973–2010) Villari, Pasquale, La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Fi­ renze: Felice Le Monnier, 1930) Villari, Pasquale, and Eugenio Casanuova, Scelta di prediche e scritti di fra Girolamo Savon­ a­rola, con nuovi documenti intorno alla sua vita (Firenze: Sansoni, 1898)

Curbing ‘Ambitions of the Throat’: Alimentary Sumptuary Law in Early Modern Italy Catherine Kovesi

T

he economic revolution in Italy, which gained pace from the fourteenth century onwards, witnessed consumption of non-essential items by the broader population on a scale unparalleled in Europe.1 Expensive dyes, textiles, spices, ceramics, books, art works, precious metals, pearls, gems, and a myriad other items were produced, imported, consumed, imitated, and admired by an increasingly large segment of the population and were incorporated into the ritual and social life of the cities. The new culture of desire, however, evoked in moralists, preachers, and governments a complex ambivalence and a developing enunciation of certain regulatory principles. The competing claims of desire and regulation are perhaps most keenly witnessed by the hundreds of sumptuary laws passed by the city states of Italy in this period. This chapter focuses on the regulatory principles governing one of the most elemental desires, that of 1 

Amongst many others, see in particular the seminal work of Goldthwaite, ‘The Empire of Things’; Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Catherine Kovesi ([email protected]) is a senior lecturer in history at the Uni­ver­sity of Melbourne. Author of Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2002) and of several other studies, her main research areas are the discourses surrounding luxury consumption in early modern Italy, and the familial, political, and religious history of Florence and Venice. She has been a senior scholar and a visiting fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, a visiting fellow at the Villa I Tatti in Florence, and a network partner of the Leverhulme International Luxury Network. This chapter grew out of conversations with Bill Kent’s long-time friend Allen Grieco, and I am indebted to him for his careful reading and suggestions.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 479–494 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109721

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food, or what a Florentine commentator called ‘ambitions of the throat’.2 Apart from a couple of short studies, no one to date has focused specifically on these food laws.3 And yet the eating of food (beyond that required for survival) is the very emblem of consumption. Whilst literally consumed, and hence ephemeral and often emblematic of waste and excess, its ingestion brings it a form of permanence; it becomes part of one’s very being. And if, as the saying goes, one is what one eats, then moralists and dieticians of the period were understandably preoccupied with who was consuming what, and especially with the quantities and types of food consumed by an increasingly broad and non-elite section of the population not seen since ancient times. On the most obvious level, alimentary sumptuary laws were concerned with expense and with maintenance of social boundaries. However, a more detailed examination of the kinds of food proscribed, to whom, and on which occasions reveals that these laws were also highly charged moralizing tools animated by contemporary beliefs about the properties of food. The categories of food mentioned in these laws, whilst both seemingly random and ridiculously specific, are in fact reflective of classificatory concerns that were current among dieticians, moralists, authors of literary texts, and more generally in large strata of society, as well as by beliefs that the kind of food you consumed had a direct and even measurable impact on the consumer. Of the many studies of sumptuary law, by far the greater number have focused on laws restricting and regulating clothing. This is understandable given that overwhelmingly sumptuary laws targeted clothing and that, as Carole Frick has demonstrated, many elite households could spend an astonishing 40 per cent of their income on clothing.4 Moreover clothing, as I have argued previously, is mobile and hence provides an excellent means of demonstrating one’s wealth outside the home in a variety of contexts and to many people.5 However, part of the reason for the great number of sumptuary laws concerned with clothing was not just an obsession with clothing per se, but with the problems of legis2  ‘l’ambizione della gola’. The phrase is that of Scipione Ammirato, Istorie fiorentine, Part 1, vol. ii, 368, discussing the Florentine sumptuary statute of 1 April 1330. See also Rainey, ‘Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence’, p. 648. 3  Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Les noces Florentines et leurs cuisineurs’ and Redon ‘La réglementation des banquets par les lois somptuaires dans les villes d’italie’. See also Jacques Le Goff, ‘Vestimentary and Alimentary Codes in Erec et Enide’, especially pp. 144–50. 4  Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, p. 180. For a graphic demonstration of the number of sumptuary laws regulating clothing compared to other items, see Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, p. 38, fig. 2.1. 5  Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, p. 112.

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lating in a calibrated way against the display of excessive wealth expressed in this particular way. Such laws had to be endlessly fashion specific and therein lay a key flaw. Such precision of detail meant that they could be flouted in the smallest of these details, which then required further legislative response in a never-ending circus of fashion catch-up.6 By contrast, items such as furniture or food, or occasions such as weddings and funerals, had fewer variants and parameters involved than clothing, and hence were easier to circumscribe by law. Indeed alimentary laws dealt almost exclusively with the raw materials used in cooking and practically never with the dishes that were produced with these ingredients.7 So, simply because there are far fewer laws directed against food, we should not assume that legislators were not just as concerned with the regulation of this type of consumption. Sumptuary laws of all types are of course concerned with expense and consumption, but more specifically they are most concerned with the public display of wealth. Many of the Italian clothing laws do not forbid possession or consumption of sumptuous items, merely their public display, and indeed the relatively regular lifting of sumptuary restrictions on specific occasions presupposes that people still owned items normally forbidden for public use. Similarly, laws restricting food do not target the eating of certain foods in and of themselves removed from the context of their consumption. Indeed what you chose to put on your private table on a daily basis was never of concern to legislators in any of the more than three hundred sumptuary laws passed in over thirty-five Italian cities from 1200 to 1500 and beyond. It was occasions when such consumption would be on public display that legislators moved into action. Such occasions were usually those of weddings, funerals, and births — the great family milestones — and, from time to time, public feasting in general. These events were often held in an open, public space so that the uninvited might nonetheless be able to witness the event. The private table, as opposed to the public one, was regulated by a diffuse moral code, which was, if anything, self-imposed. Petrarch, for example, writing in 1370, wished us to remember him as a man known for savouring guests rather than foods: 6 

For a more detailed explication of this argument, see Kovesi Killerby, ‘The Enforcement of Italian Sumptuary Legislation’; and also Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, pp. 133–63. 7  The rare exceptions to this rule are some mentions of two very well-known dishes that often accompanied the food served at banquets and festive occasions: ‘biancomangiare’ (blancmange) and ‘geladina’ (aspic). See, for example, the Florentine Pragmatica of 1356 cited in Rainey, ‘Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence’, p. 163.

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I certainly do not long to be able to give gorgeous banquets. I have, on the contrary, led a happier existence with plain living and ordinary fare than all the followers of Apicius, with their elaborate dainties. So-called convivia, which are but vulgar bouts, sinning against sobriety and good manners, have always been repugnant to me. I have ever felt that it was irksome and profitless to invite others to such affairs, and not less so to be bidden to them myself. On the other hand, the pleasure of dining with one’s friends is so great that nothing has ever given me more delight than their unexpected arrival, nor have I ever willingly sat down to table without a companion. Nothing displeases me more than display, for not only is it bad in itself, and opposed to humility, but it is troublesome and distracting.8

Leon Battista Alberti provides a more detailed instance of this self-imposed moderation, befitting men of learning and culture, when he speaks of the appropriate food to be served to such men’s families. In his Libri della famiglia (1433–41), he has Lionardo ask Giannozzo about the quality of various foods that should be put on the table. Gianozzo replies: ‘Good things [should be provided], my dear Lionardo, and even in abundance. Not peacocks, capons and partridges, nor other such overly refined things which are served to the sick, but rather serve a citizen’s meal.’9 Alberti clearly distinguishes ‘normal’ food from food reserved for the sick, whilst implying that the normal citizen’s table, the mensa cittadinesca, does not usually include such fine fare. Significantly the food excluded from this normal table is precisely the kind of food targeted by the sumptuary laws. These laws were aimed at public banquets and, most fre-

8 

Petrarca, Seniles, XVIII, 1, Posteritati, ed. by Stoppelli: ‘Divitiarum contemptor eximius: non quod divitias non optarem, sed labores curasque oderam, opum comites inseparabiles. Non , ut ista cura esset, lautarum facultas epularum: ego autem tenui victu et cibis vulgaribus vitam egi letius, quam cum exquisitissimis dapibus omnes Apicii successores. Convivia que dicuntur — cum sint comessationes modestie et bonis moribus inimice — semper michi displicuerunt. Laboriosum et inutile ratus sum ad hunc finem vocare alios, nec minus ab aliis vocari; convivere autem cum amicis adeo iocundum, ut eorum superventu nil gratius habuerim, nec unquam volens sine sotio cibum sumpserim. Nichil michi magis quam pompa displicuit, non solum quia mala et humilitati contraria, sed quia difficilis et quieti adversa est.’ Translation from Robinson, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, p. 61. 9  Lionardo: ‘Cenare bene, posso intendere pascersi di buone cose?’; Giannozzo: ‘Buone, Lionardo mio, ancora e abundanti. Non paoni, capponi e starne, né simili altri cibi elettissimi, quali s’apparecchiano agl’infermi, ma pongasi mensa cittadinesca’. Alberti, I libri della famiglia, bk iii, ed. by Romano and Tenenti, p. 234. I have used the translation of this passage as discussed by Allen Grieco in ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, p. 115.

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quently of all, at the banquets occasioned by marriages, of the sort depicted in a wealth of Renaissance paintings.10 Petrarch and Alberti articulate a dietary code of propriety and due measure. However, men with a more exalted status, whether by birth or through election, were expected to eat rich foods, not only as indicative of their virile natures but to render due honour to their positions in society. Petrarch himself attended the 1368 marriage festivities held in Milan to celebrate the marriage of Violante Visconti to Lionel, Duke of Clarence, at which fifty guests were served eighteen courses, sixteen of which consisted of meat and fish.11 The notion of honour is also emphasized in the Florentine law of April 1473 which allowed private citizens to entertain foreign visitors to banquets serving foods that exceeded the law’s restrictions, provided that they requested permission from the priors and swore an oath that their desire to exceed the regulations was for ‘the honour of the city of Florence’.12 Those same priors, according to this law, were able to feast on whatever and however many foods they pleased at their communal dinner table (mensa della Signoria).13 And indeed there was a long tradition that expected the priors to eat large quantities of partridge and fowl (categories of bird that were otherwise subject to the restrictions of sumptuary laws), as this was an outward sign of the power that they wielded and would nourish them for the arduous task of governance. A century earlier, in the single month of December 1398, for instance, the twelve priors of Florence ate more than sixty-five birds each day.14 Of primary concern to legislators was instead the public exposure of feasting by those whose status did not allow them exemptions based on notions of honour. This helps to explain why several of the alimentary sumptuary laws are only concerned with who should be exposed to food on public occasions and with the numbers of guests at a feast, not with what was consumed. A law from l’Aquila in the Abruzzo from about 1375 which targeted the feasting or gifting of food at each stage of marriage celebrations, at births, 10  See amongst many examples, Fra Filippo Lippi, Herod’s Banquet (c. 1454), Duomo, Prato; Sandro Botticelli, The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti – the Wedding Banquet (1482–83), Private collection, Florence; Marco del Buono Giamberti and Apollonio di Giovanni di Tomaso, The Story of Esther (1460–70), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Jacopo del Sellaio, The Banquet of Ahasuerus (c. 1490), Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. 11  For a discussion of this, see Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, pp. 211–13. 12  Rainey, ‘Sumptuary Law in Renaissance Florence’, p. 535. 13  Rainey, ‘Sumptuary Law in Renaissance Florence’, p. 533. 14  See Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, pp. 115–16, and n. 111.

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and at funerals is typical of these laws which focus on numbers of consumers rather than food specifics.15 In this law, at the feast held to celebrate a couple’s engagement (l’affidamento) the future bride’s family was not to invite anyone to the feast other than the groom and two of his associates.16 Then on the day of the marriage ceremony, when the bride was led to her husband’s house, the groom was not to invite more than thirty-two people to the feast (not counting his own domestics and members of his household), with an additional eight servants allowed on the part of both bride and groom. Of these guests there could only be six women on the groom’s part and four women on the part of the bride, excluding her two regular female companions.17 On the day of the wedding and the days leading up to it, the relatives of the bride were not to send to her house any gift of food at all.18 When a woman gave birth, she was only allowed two other women to be present apart from her female relatives, and she could not invite these women to a meal in her house unless they were related either to her or to her husband within the second degree.19 And for funerals, this law continues, the sons of the deceased or his or her nearest relatives were not allowed to receive any gifts of food.20 That there should be no more than a total of ten women invited to a wedding feast out of a possible thirty-two guests in this law from l’Aquila points to a further concern of banqueting laws, namely that inviting large numbers to one’s home, in the evening, might become the occasion for more inappropriate or immoral activities, or possibly erupt into violence. This is stated quite explicitly in a Venetian law of 1336, which focused on the calendar months in which most celebratory feasting was likely to occur: ‘Since many follies are committed at wedding feasts and elsewhere, no person is allowed to ask ladies to supper between Michaelmas and Easter, except his near kinswomen.’21 This is similar to the 1366 Perugian law which prohibited banquets at night: ‘Because it is written that the evildoer hates light, and many scheme, as they may be able, to offer banquets late at night to ladies to provide opportunities 15 

Piacentino, ‘Gli statuti in Abruzzo’. Piacentino posits that this law is from c. 1375. Capitolo 491, in Piacentino, ‘Gli statuti in Abruzzo’, p. 73. 17  Capitolo 497, in Piacentino, ‘Gli statuti in Abruzzo’, p. 75. 18  Capitolo 499, in Piacentino, ‘Gli statuti in Abruzzo’, p. 75. 19  Capitolo 504, in Piacentino, ‘Gli statuti in Abruzzo’, p. 76. 20  Capitolo 512, in Piacentino, ‘Gli statuti in Abruzzo’, p. 77. 21  Newett, ‘The Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, pp. 265–66, and Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, p. 66. 16 

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for malefaction’.22 Similarly, the 1322–25 Florentine statutes’ complaint that popolani were behaving like magnati appeared in the context of proscriptions against wedding celebrations and against a background in which the origins of the feud between the Guelfs and Ghibellines was narrated in terms of a quarrel that began at a wedding banquet, compounded by a murder during a wedding procession.23 Fourteenth-century laws such as these are clearly concerned with food on public occasions, but not with the specifics; more with limiting its quantity and limiting its exposure. Some fourteenth-century laws, however, not only restricted the numbers of guests but also the numbers of courses at a feast and the contents of each course. A particularly detailed example of this type of law is that from Lucca of 22 January 1362.24 Beginning with rubric 19, headed ‘Concerning the number of people one can have at lunch and at dinner on the day of the wedding, and of the kind and order of the foods, and other things’,25 the rubrics in this law are all targeted at the feasts held to celebrate the various stages of a marriage. What is clear through all these Lucchese rubrics is that every stage of a marriage — from the betrothal, the exchange of rings, the day a bride is led to her husband’s home, to the day she returns to her father’s home as a married woman — was marked by feasting, and that hence legislators felt the need to intervene. The sliding scale of numbers of guests and foods served at each of these occasions indirectly shows the relative importance of each of these stages to the participating families as opportunities for display. The greatest attention in this law is paid to the day on which the groom was to lead his new bride to his home, in a rubric that precedes all the others. 22  Fabretti, ‘Statuti e ordinamenti suntuari intorno al vestire degli uomini e delle donne in Perugia’, p. 170, and Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, p. 66: ‘Quia scriptum est qui male agit odit lucem, et multi ut possint volentibus male facere dare tempus student convivia de sero facere dominarum’. 23  Rainey, ‘Sumptuary Law in Renaissance Florence’, pp.  143–44, and p.  180, n.  54. See also Schevill, Medi­eval and Renaissance Florence, i, 104–07, whose account is based on the Pseudo–Brunetto Latini chronicle as published by Hartwig, Quellen und Forschungen zur ältesten Geschichte der Stadt Florenz, ii, 221–37. For a detailed analysis of this event, see Faini, ‘Il convito del 1216’. 24  ‘Frammento di statuto suntuario’ (Archivio di Stato, Lucca, serie A, Armario 3, no. 70), document 36 in Tommasi, ‘Sommario della storia di Lucca dall’anno MIV all’anno MDCC’. The relevant rubrics are 19–28, pp. 96–101. 25  ‘Del nomero delle persone che possone essere al desnare e alla cena lo dì delle nozze, e del modo e ordine delle viande, e d’altre cose.’, in Tommasi, ‘Sommario della storia di Lucca dall’anno MIV all’anno MDCC’, p. 96.

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On this day, the groom was not to invite to lunch more than forty men and women. Of this number, it is worth noting that the bride was not allowed to ask more than four men and women, probably emblematic of the diminished role of her natal family as she enters her new married life. In addition, it was permissible for there to be fourteen cooks and kitchen hands all of whom had to be above the age of fourteen. These forty guests could then be served only two types of cooked foods (vivande cotte). If a course consisted of only one kind of meat, then one piece of this meat was permitted between every two guests. If poultry was served instead, then one bird was permitted for every two guests. The second course could consist of roast meat, again with one platter for every two guests. Whilst the meat was not specified, great detail was provided for the kinds of roast bird allowed and this, as will be discussed in a moment, will be seen to be quite important. A variety of options of birds were enumerated per platter, with size seeming to be an additional factor in allowable combinations: one large chicken (pollo) was allowed per platter, or two cockerels (pollastri), or two squabs (pipioni), or one squab and one cockerel, or two starlings (starne), or one starling and one squab, or one squab and one cockerel, or two turtle doves (tortore) and one cockerel, or two turtle doves and one squab, or two turtle doves and one quail (quaglia), or two quails and one turtle dove, or a quarter of a small goat (cavretto), or half a gosling (paparo). Thrush (tordo), however, could be served over and above these quantities for the second course. If cooked fish was served, then it was to count as one of the meat courses. No restrictions were placed on the following foods, all of which could be served at the discretion of the host: ravioli, tordelletti, pies (torte) and other pasta, milk, cheese (cacio), sausages (salsiccie), other cured meats, and dressed tongue (lingue investite).26 Second in importance for the legislators was the day of the wedding itself. On this day, no groom was to invite more than twenty guests between men and women, and again no more than four of these could be from the bride’s family. This number did not include, however, the household and family of the groom, and he could have an additional eight servants aged fourteen and above, as well as the necessary cooks and other kitchen hands (guattali). All the women, on both days’ feasting, had to be aged ten and above.27 At this meal no more than two types of courses could be served, but once again this is more generous than it sounds, as this restriction did not apply to courses of herbs or cheeses or sausages or cured meats or dressed tongue. At neither meal was one allowed to 26  27 

A further foodstuff, inductali, was also unrestricted, but it is unclear what this may refer to. Tommasi, ‘Sommario della storia di Lucca dall’anno MIV all’anno MDCC’, p. 97.

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serve confetti. Permissible, however, was one serving, on one dish only, of sugarcoated fruit or nuts referred to as ‘trazea’.28 Trazea of cooked pears, for example, were permissible in this one dish as were sugared almonds. Further rubrics then follow concerning the feasting for the second day of the wedding celebrations. In the main these rubrics specify a declining number of guests allowed and a repetition of the proscribed foods from the previous days of the celebrations. For example, on the second day of the wedding celebrations, now no more than twelve men and women could be invited to the luncheon on the part of the groom, and only four additional servants were allowed. At the dinner of the same day the groom was not to invite more than eight guests. At neither of these meals on this second day could the groom serve any courses that contravened the detailed proscriptions of rubric 19 above and, again, no confetti other than ‘trazeaor zucchero’ was to be served. The proscriptions regarding servants did not include the servants belonging to any of the invited guests, but no servants were allowed to eat at any of the meals. If any did so, then a fine of five lire di denari was to be paid by the servant’s master.29 Rubric 22 of this law concerns meals held for a ring ceremony (annella­ mento). At any such feast held on this day, or up to a month afterwards, one was not to invite more than four guests on behalf of the fiancée other than the family of her household, and her fiancé with two companions, and all courses had to be served in line with the earlier proscriptions regarding wedding feasts. Further regulations in rubric 24 concern the day that the bride returned to her father’s house as a married woman (the ricorteo). On this day there were to be no more than twelve guests other than her family, the cooks, and kitchen hands.30 In rubric 25 the legislators forbade anyone present at the feasts for the ring ceremony, the wedding, or the day of return to send food out of the house. It was, however, permissible to send food that was left over from the feasting to the poor and needy so that it would not go to waste.31 Various proscriptions then follow regarding gifts to the couple, one of which, rubric 28, specifies that the fiancé/groom/husband is not to send his fiancée/bride/wife, or her family or her household, any gifts of food, whether cooked or raw.32 28 

More commonly referred to as ‘tragea’, or in the Crusca as ‘treggea’. Tommasi, ‘Sommario della storia di Lucca dall’anno MIV all’anno MDCC’, p. 98. 30  Tommasi, ‘Sommario della storia di Lucca dall’anno MIV all’anno MDCC’, p. 99. 31  Tommasi, ‘Sommario della storia di Lucca dall’anno MIV all’anno MDCC’, p. 100: ‘Salvo che possa senza pena dare a’ poveri bisognosi caritativamente quel che rimane dipo ’l desnare o di po’ la cena facta veramente che sia rotto e talliato in più pessi senza fraude’. 32  Tommasi, ‘Sommario della storia di Lucca dall’anno MIV all’anno MDCC’, p. 101. 29 

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By the mid-fifteenth century, alimentary sumptuary laws, in line with their clothing counterparts, became much more detailed. Presumably reflective of greater and more widespread levels of wealth, the detail in these laws allows for a more focused examination of the kinds of foods served at celebratory occasions, and of the categories of people deemed appropriate to consume them. One of the most illuminating of these later laws is that from Brescia of 1495. In the preamble to this law, which targeted nuptial banquets, the legislators specifically stated that they were not simply concerned with the damage done to their citizens’ wealth (sostanze) through excessive feasting, but with the great damage done also to their health.33 That enormous quantities of food must have been traditional at such feasts becomes clear from the generous quantities still permissible in this law. Excluding the serving of cheese and other dairy products, chestnuts, grapes, olives and other fruit, which one could place without impunity on the table, it was now forbidden to serve anything at a nuptial banquet other than the following: –– one course of salad of only one type; –– one course of meat fried in a pan (fritto de padela); –– one course of spit-roasted meat in which the meat could only be pork, lamb, or kid, or another quadruped, or poultry, together with no more than two types of the following kinds of bird, whether domestic or wild, namely peacock, quail, pheasant, red-legged partridge, grey-legged partridge, thrush, turtle dove, pigeon, and ducklings; –– one course of boiled meat in which one could have pork, as in the previous course, poultry, and one type of salami; –– one course of pies (torta/tortara) of one sort and one colour only; –– one type only of sugared confetti, with the specification that if one served sugared almonds then one could not also serve marzipan, and vice versa; –– two types of small confetti such as sugar-coated coriander seeds (corian­ doli), or anise, or pine nuts (ranceti), and almonds (mandorle), or other small confections. However the costly spice cinnamon was not allowed to be added to any of these confections, nor was one to use green ginger or any sort of sugared syrup in them other than siropado.34 Unsurprisingly, gold and silver leaf were not to be used in any of the courses, and for washing one’s hands both before and after the meal, only pure water was to be used. 33 

Cassa, Funerali, pompe e conviti, p. 84. ‘Sia etiam prohibido poter dar ad alguno pasto zenzero verde ne alguna altra sorte de confeto liquido sive siropado’. 34 

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In a similar Florentine law of 1473, which applied to banquets in general, no more than two main courses were to be served. The first was to consist of boiled meats in which up to three types of meat could be served, and the second of roasted meats in which up to four kinds of meat or four kinds of fish could be served. In order to ensure that hosts did not try to evade the specifics of the law by claiming that a variety of birds counted as one type of meat, the law specified that each particular variety of poultry, for instance capons, cockerels, and so on, was to count as a separate animal. Similarly, freshwater fish were to be considered one variety of fish, saltwater fish another, eels and lampreys each a separate kind, and sturgeon, carp, and ‘fish from the Arno’ another again. Eggs, cheese, milk products, pies, stews, puddings, and sauces could be served in unlimited quantities alongside the main courses. Sweetbreads, pork, and salted meat or fish did not have to be counted as main courses. Legs, testicles, and viscera of veal could be served alongside the more select cuts of meat. All kinds of wine and bread could be served in any quantity. If the banquet was held for a wedding, then the law specified that one could also serve confections before and after the banquet, provided each piece did not weigh more than two ounces; sugared almonds and sugared pineseeds (pinocchi) could be served together and counted as a single confection, whilst candies of anise or cinnamon were to be counted as separate treats.35 Sifting through the varieties of food in these laws a few general rules would seem to apply: fruits, vegetables, pasta, milk products, bread, and wine, together with the undesirable parts of an animal such as sweetbreads, testicles, and viscera, were not viewed as problematic. Unsurprisingly, sugar and expensive spices such as cinnamon and ginger were tightly regulated as were gold and silver leaf. Meat and fish were regulated in terms of numbers of platters, but above all it is birds that dominate the legislation. How might one explain the numerous and detailed categories? The specificity of breeds allowed or disallowed? The prevalence of birds in these laws could partly be explained by the increasing role of fowl in general in late medieval and Renaissance diets, especially in upper-class diets and on festive occasions. Archaeological evidence points to increased consumption of birds in this period which has been explained by some in relation to the increased supply of birds once lands were cleared allowing a suitable habitat for them.36 Fowl was also an expensive form of meat, much more expensive than other butcher’s meat, and for this reason too, it might 35  36 

See Rainey, ‘Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence’, pp. 534–35. See Grieco’s discussion of this in ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, p. 110.

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have attracted the attention of legislators.37 But more than this, a hierarchy of consumption is clearly operating in these laws, one that is reflective of longheld beliefs about the nature of eating foods as they related to the humours, to animals’ position in the Great Chain of Being, and to a hierarchy that was often articulated in a new genre of dietary advice books (consilia) which became increasingly common after the plague of 1348.38 A superimposition of food categories onto the Great Chain of Being is revelatory as to the quantity and categories of bird in the sumptuary laws.39 If birds took their humoural constitution from the element that they belonged to (namely air, which was hot and humid), then, it was believed, this constitution was transferred to its consumer. Aldobrandino of Siena, for example, whose mid-thirteenth-century treatise was translated into Italian after 1310, indicates that most edible birds were hot and dry (doves and pigeons) or hot and moist (red-legged partridge, grey partridge, pheasant, thrush, and sparrow). Ducks and geese are the only birds categorized instead as cold and dry, which Grieco suggests is due to the fact that they swam in water and so imbibed its ‘coldness’.40 For Michele Savonarola, writing between 1450 and 1452, birds are given more nuanced categorizations of degree. Pigeons, for example, are hot and dry in the second degree, warblers hot and moist in the first degree, thrush up to the second degree, and so on. Significantly, no bird in Savonarola’s classification is cold.41 Because all food was held to communicate its qualities to its consumer, the heat-giving nature of birds required special consideration. The ‘hotter’ a bird, the more heat it generated in its consumer, leading to the stimulation of carnal appetites.42 The volatile nature of capon and other birds is taken for granted in the summary chapter heading of Maestro Martino de’ Rossi’s Libro de arte coquinaria (The Art of Cooking, c. 1460), which reads: ‘Per cocer capponi, fasani

37 

I am indebted to Allen Grieco for sharing with me the results of his unpublished research on the relative prices of fowl and butcher’s meat. 38  See the discussion of this in Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, pp. 110–11, and for an exhaustive discussion and bibliography, see also Nicoud, Les régimes de santé au moyen âge. 39  For a useful diagrammatic summary of this, see Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, p. 112, figure, and for more detail his ‘Food and Social Classes in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy’ and also his ‘The Social Politics of Pre-Linnaean Botanical Classification’. 40  Aldobrandino da Siena, Le Régime du corps, ed. by Landouzy and Pépin, p. 113. 41  Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, pp. 113–14. 42  Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, pp. 114–15.

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et altri volatili’.43 Here there is a suggestive linguistic connection with flying (‘volare’), the animals that do so (birds), and their subsequent categorization as causing volatility in those who consume them. Illness and the rigours of childbirth depleted a body of its heat. On such occasions, as the quote from Alberti’s Della famiglia referred to earlier indicates, the consumption of heat-giving birds was recommended.44 It could also be that a wedding banquet might have been considered an appropriate forum in which birds, with such otherwise dangerous heat-giving properties, could be consumed, to give the marital couple the best constitutional chance of success in their first coital endeavours. Weddings were also, of course, occasions in which the demonstration of family honour was central. Legislators recognized that these occasions therefore required some level of the consumption of the most prestigious, heat-giving foods. If they had been concerned simply with expense, such detailed categories of foods would not have been necessary in the law; a simple figure limiting total cost would be all that was required. There was here, though, a clear recognition that the consumption of birds in particular needed regulation; that their heat-giving properties, appropriate for virile men of power, should not be consumed without proper measure. Whilst clothing is an obvious surface signifier, food is also a surface signifier, but its ingestion means that it goes deeper still; it becomes part of your very being, and its public ingestion should not, therefore, be left to the unrestrained, unregulated ambitions of a city’s subjects.

43 

Maestro Martino de’ Rossi, Libro de arte coquinario (c. 1460), capitolo 1.1, ed. by Faccioli, i, 120 (this book incorporates much of the Anonimo Veneziano’s, Libro di cucina/Libro per cuoco, c. 1430, and the Anonimo Toscano’s Libro della cocina c. 1380). Emphasis mine. 44  For the use of chickens in food given to post-partum mothers, see in particular Musacchio, ‘Pregnancy and Poultry in Renaissance Italy’ and The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy, pp. 40–41. See also Grieco, ‘What’s in a Detail?’.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Alberti, Leon Battista, I libri della famiglia, ed. by Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti (Torino: Einaudi, 1969) Aldobrandino da Siena, Le Régime du corps, ed. by Louis Landouzy and Rogier Pépin (1st edn, Paris: Champion, 1911; anastatic repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1978) Ammirato, Scipione, Istorie fiorentine di Scipione Ammirato […] Con l’aggiunte di Scipione Ammirato il giovane […] (Firenze: Amador Massi, Giovanni Battista Landini, Lorenzo Landi, 1641–47) Anonimo Toscano, Libro della cocina, in Arte della cucina: libri di ricette, testi sopra lo scalco, il trinciante e i vini dal xiv al xix secolo, ed. by Emilio Faccioli, 2 vols (Milano: Il Polifilo, 1966), i, 21–57 Anonimo Veneziano, Libro di cucina/Libro per cuoco, in Arte della cucina: libri di ricette, testi sopra lo scalco, il trinciante e i vini dal xiv al xix secolo, ed. by Emilio Faccioli, 2 vols (Milano: Il Polifilo, 1966), i, 59–105 Fabretti, A., ‘Statuti e ordinamenti suntuari intorno al vestire degli uomini e delle donne in Perugia dall’anno 1206 al 1536 (raccolti ed annotati)’, Memorie della Reale acca­ demia delle scienze di Torino, ser. 2b, 38 (1888), 137–232 Maestro Martino de’ Rossi, Libro de arte coquinaria, in Arte della cucina: libri di ricette, testi sopra lo scalco, il trinciante e i vini dal xiv al xix secolo, ed. by Emilio Faccioli, 2 vols (Milano: Il Polifilo, 1966), i, 115–204 Petrarca, Francesco, Seniles, in Opera omnia, ed. by Pasquale Stoppelli, CD-ROM (Roma: Lexis progetti editoriali, 1997) Piacentino, Maria, ‘Gli statuti in Abruzzo’, Bullettino della deputazione abruzzese di storia patria anni xxxviii-xxxix-xl, 5th ser., 9–11 (1947–49), 5–89 Tommasi, Girolamo, ‘Sommario della storia di Lucca dall’anno MIV all’anno MDCC’, with documents ed. by Carlo Minutoli, Archivio storico italiano, 10 (1847), 89–103

Secondary Works Cassa, A, Funerali, pompe e conviti: excursion nel vecchio archivio municipale [di Brescia] (Brescia: Stab. Unione Tip. Bresciana, 1887) Collier Frick, Carole, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) Faini, Enrico, ‘Il convito del 1216: La vendetta all’origine del fazionalismo fiorentino’, Annali di Storia di Firenze, 1 (2006), 9–36 Goldthwaite, Richard, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) —— , ‘The Empire of Things: Consumer Demand in Renaissance Italy’, in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. by F. W. Kent and Patricia Simons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 155–75

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Grieco, Allen, ‘Food and Social Classes in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy’, in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. by Jean-Louis Flandrin, Massimo Montanari, and Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999), pp. 302–12 —— , ‘From Roosters to Cocks: Italian Renaissance Fowl and Sexuality’, in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. by Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 89–140 —— , ‘The Social Politics of Pre-Linnaean Botanical Classification’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, 4 (1991), 131–49 —— ,‘ What’s in a Detail? More Chicken in Renaissance Birth Scenes’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. by Machtelt Israëls and Louis A. Waldman, 2 vols (Firenze: Villa I Tatti, 2013), ii, 150–54, with illustrations on pp. 699–700 Hartwig, Otto, Quellen und Forschungen zur ältesten Geschichte der Stadt Florenz, 2 vols (Marburg: Elwert, 1875) Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ‘Les noces Florentines et leurs cuisineurs’, in La sociabilité à table: Commensalité et convivialité à travers les âges: actes du Colloque de Rouen, avec la participation de Jacques Le Goff, 14–17 novembre 1990, ed. by Martin Aurell, Olivier Dumoulin, and Françoise Thelamon (Mont Saint Aignan: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 1992), pp. 193–99 Kovesi Killerby, Catherine, ‘The Enforcement of Italian Sumptuary Legislation, 1299– 1500: Conflict between Ideal and Practice’, in Crime, Society and the Law in Re­ naissance Italy, ed. by Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1993), pp. 99–120 —— , Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002) Larner, John, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216–1380 (London: Longman, 1980) Le Goff, Jacques, ‘Vestimentary and Alimentary Codes in Erec et Enide’, in Le Goff, The Medi­eval Imagination, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 132–50 Musacchio, Jacqueline, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999) —— , ‘Pregnancy and Poultry in Renaissance Italy’, Source, 16.2 (1997), 3–9 Newett, Mary Margaret, ‘The Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Historical Essays by Members of the Owens College, Manchester, ed. by Thomas Frederick Tout and James Tait (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), pp. 245–78 Nicoud, Marilyn, Les régimes de santé au moyen âge: Naissance et diffusion d’une écriture médicale, xiiie–xve siècle, 2 vols (Roma: École française de Rome, 2007) Rainey, Ronald E.,‘Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Columbia Uni­ver­sity, 1985) Redon, Odile, ‘La réglementation des banquets par les lois somptuaires dans les villes d’italie (xiii–xv siècles)’, in Du manuscrit à la table: Essais sur la cuisine au Moyen Âge et répertoire des manuscrits médiévaux contenant des recettes culinaires, ed. by Carole Lambert (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1992), pp. 109–19

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Robinson, James Harvey, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters: A Selection from his Correspondence with Boccaccio and Other Friends, Designed to Illustrate the Beginnings of the Renaissance (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909) Schevill, Ferdinand, Medi­eval and Renaissance Florence, 2 vols (New York: Harper, 1961)

The One about Michelangelo and the Onions: Jokes and Cultural Anxiety in the Early Sixteenth Century Jill Burke

W

hen Raphael died on 7  April 1520, much of Rome was devastated by the loss of such a talented young man.1 The Rome-based Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo, however, saw a job opportunity. Less than a week after Raphael’s death, Sebastiano wrote to his friend in Florence, Michelangelo, to ask him for a recommendation to take over some of Raphael’s work in the Vatican.2 Michelangelo sat down to compose a letter some time near the end of June. He wrote to Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, the Cardinal of Santa Maria in Portico: Monsignore. I beg your most reverend Lordship, not as a friend or as a servant — for I am not worthy to be neither one nor the other — but as a vile, poor, and crazy man, that you will cause Bastiano the Venetian painter to be given some part of the work at the [Vatican] Palace now that Raphael is dead. And if it seems to your 1  2 

Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, pp. 572–90 and 639–65. Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 227.

Jill Burke ([email protected]) is a senior lecturer in the history of art at the Uni­ver­sity of Edinburgh. Her first book, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence, was published in 2004, and her most recent monograph, The Renaissance Nude: Nakedness in Art and Life in Italy 1400–1530, is forthcoming with Yale Uni­ver­sity Press. Since then she has published widely on artistic culture in Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including two edited books on Rome.

Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, ES 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 495–515 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109722

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Lordship that kindness to people like me would be thrown away, I think that even in helping the crazy you can occasionally find a certain sweetness, like the kind you get in onions when you change diet, for those who are tired of capons. You are served by men of account every day; perhaps your lordship should try me out. The service you give us would be very great; and if your kind offices are thrown away on me, they will not be thrown away on Bastiano, for I am certain that he will bring honour to your Lordship; Bastiano is a worthy man, and I know he will do you honour.3

On 3 July, Sebastiano reports that Dovizi asked me if I had read your letter. I said no; he laughed a lot, almost as if it were a practical joke, and left me with good words. Afterwards I understood from [Baccio Bandinelli …] that the Cardinal had shown him your letter, and had shown it to the Pope, that there was almost no other subject to talk about in the palace but your letter, and it made everyone laugh.4

Why was this letter so funny — and why did Michelangelo write a comedic letter in the first place? The correspondence between Michelangelo and Sebastiano in 1520 is an extraordinarily rich source of information about artistic personality, patronage processes, and social mores. Not surprisingly, these letters have been discussed before by art historians, most recently by Rona Goffen.5 This article takes Michelangelo’s joke letter as a central starting point to investigate the texture of relationships within elite circles in Rome and Florence in the early sixteenth century, and in particular, to show how visual and verbal humour at this time acted as a means through which to express anxieties about the pace of social change.

The Sender 1520 had not been a good year for Michelangelo. He had spent the last three years designing the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence, then making the herculean effort of finding, excavating, and transporting enormous slabs of marble from Carrara to Florence to bring about his ambitious plans.6 Suddenly, 3 

Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 232. Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 233. Discussed in Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, pp. 273–74; Goffen, Renaissance Rivals, pp. 259–62; and Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, pp. 587–88. 5  Goffen, Renaissance Rivals, pp. 259–62. 6  Wallace, Michelangelo, pp. 113–20. 4 

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around the end of February, for no discernable reason, the contract was ended. In Michelangelo’s words, ‘the Cardinal [Giulio de’ Medici], on behalf of the Pope, informed me to stop doing this work, because they said they wanted to relieve me of this bother of transporting the marble’.7 Michelangelo, not surprisingly, was furious, and deeply frustrated that his efforts should come to nothing. In a letter of early March 1520, after giving an account of the money he had received and spent during the last three years, he vented his spleen: And I won’t charge to his account the wooden model of the façade that I had sent to Rome; I won’t charge to his account the time of three years that I have lost in this project; I won’t charge to his account the fact that I have been ruined by this work at San Lorenzo; I won’t charge to his account the huge ignominy of having brought me here to do this work and then seize it from me — and I don’t yet know why; I won’t charge to his account the house in Rome that I have left, and the things that have gone to the bad there, both marbles both my belongings, and the work I was doing, which cost more than five hundred ducats.8

Michelangelo had already built up a reputation for being a tricky person to work with — there are several letters of the early 1500s that refer to Michelangelo as needing special treatment; making excuses for his late completion of work, agents refer to the ‘brains of such people’ or ‘the nature of men of this type’: ‘you need to show [Michelangelo] love and grant him favours, and then you will see him do marvellous things’.9 Later in 1520, however, Michelangelo starts to be distinguished by a particular quality, ‘terribilità’. In October that year Sebastiano reports that Leo X described the sculptor as ‘terribile’. Taken by Vasari to convey a sense of awe and grandeur, most art historians see this term as complimentary, but its origins were profoundly ambivalent.10 Suggesting that Raphael learnt all his art from Michelangelo, Leo adds, ‘But he is terrible (ter­ ribile), as you know; you cannot have a conversation with him’ — thus explaining why he patronized Raphael in Rome so extensively instead of the older Florentine master.11 Sebastiano reports that he replied that Michelangelo was harmless, and only terribile because of his obsessive love for his art. In a later letter, he backpedals further, as he has clearly offended his friend: ‘for me, you 7 

Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 219. Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 220. 9  Burke, ‘Missed Deadlines and Creative Excuses’, pp. 135–36. 10  See Emison, Creating the ‘Divine’ Artist, pp.  41–44; Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose, pp. 119–22; and Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, pp. 234–42. 11  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 246–47. 8 

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are not terribile […] you don’t seem to me to be terribile apart from in skill, and you are the best master that ever was’.12 Michelangelo’s response to the San Lorenzo façade commission being terminated, plus his comic letter to Dovizi, no doubt confirmed Leo’s opinion that he was a man who was difficult to work with; better off to have him at a comfortable distance in Florence rather than at hand in the Vatican. It is in this context that we ought to understand the reasons for Michelangelo writing a parodic letter. Sebastiano asked him to recommend him for the commission only a month after he had been let down by these same fickle patrons. It is not surprising, therefore, that there was some hesitation on Michelangelo’s part about responding. Rather than going out of character by writing a conventional letter of supplication, he sought to gain patronage by playing on his reputation as a difficult person, a mad man. Rona Goffen has suggested that the reason why a satirical letter was sent was in order to ‘end any hope’ for Sebastiano and that the choice of Dovizi as recipient was ‘pernicious’, as he was known to be close to Raphael. This seems to me incorrect on both counts.13 It is true that Sebastiano had not seen the contents of the letter before he delivered it to Dovizi, but clearly he knew what was in it soon afterwards. He tells Michelangelo that he needs not suspect his friendship: ‘you will always have me’, he says, ‘boiled or roasted’ — the reference to capons and onions is surely intended.14 The discussions over the Sala di Costantino went on until December of that year, and there do seem to have been worries over the abilities of Raphael’s workshop to complete the room to a sufficiently high standard. Sebastiano reported in October 1520 that the Pope told him he was giving Raphael’s young men four or five days to prove themselves — and then ‘if they have not done anything better than what they started, I don’t want them to do anything else’.15 The verdict from one of Michelangelo’s friends, Leonardo Sellaio, writing from Rome on 15 December, was that the room was ‘laughable, my hunchback would do better’.16

12 

Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 256. Goffen, Renaissance Rivals, p. 256; Ramsden in Michelangelo, The Letters, trans. by Ramsden, p. 274, also suggests that Dovizi was a poor choice of recipient. 14  For this phrase, see Landucci, A Florentine Diary, trans. by de Rosen Jervis, p. 77. 15  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 246–47. 16  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 266. 13 

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The Recipient Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena was in fact a shrewd choice of addressee. Five years older than Michelangelo, both men had been close to the Medici circle in Florence in the early 1490s, and most probably had met each other then. Dovizi was from a family of notaries based in a small Tuscan town: like Michelangelo, his family was not an established Florentine consortoria; like Michelangelo, his father had held relatively lowly provincial office; and, like Michelangelo, his early rise in fortune was due to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s eye for talent.17 Both men, in their different ways, were prodigies. Dovizi was sent by Lorenzo as an ambassador to Pope Innocent VIII in 1488, when only eighteen, approximately the same age as Michelangelo when he was working in the Medici sculpture garden on works such as the Battle of the Centaurs. Dovizi, then, was one of the ‘new men’ who, alongside his brother, Piero, found his fortune through the consistent support of the Medici family, staying with his patrons throughout their exile, and suffering expulsion himself in 1494.18 Michelangelo also felt compelled to flee Florence because of his close connection to the family.19 It may be because Michelangelo had known Dovizi since his youth that he asked him to help him secure his 2000 ducats payment for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which Dovizi managed to do. In a letter of 1523, Michelangelo explains that he was so grateful for his help, he gave him a gift of 100 ducats.20 When Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope Leo X, Dovizi was raised to the cardinalate. He immediately became the Pope’s right-hand man, receiving his own apartments in the Vatican, and being the treasurer for the papal accounts up until 1517.21 Dovizi had many qualities that recommended him to the Medici family, but he was chiefly renowned for his sense of humour. In The Courtier Castiglione explained that ‘for his keen and playful readiness of wit [Dovizi] was most delightful to all that knew him’. 22 For these reasons Castiglione tasked his 17 

Moncallero, Il Cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, pp. 21–42. Brown, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s New Men and their Mores’. 19  For Michelangelo in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s household, see Elam, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden’. 20  Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, iii, 7–9. 21  Pediconi, ‘Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena’. 22  Castiglione, The Courtier, trans. by Bull, p. 2. See also the contemporary poems and descriptions in Moncallero, Il Cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, pp. 182–97. 18 

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character of Bernardo Dovizi to discuss how courtiers should use humour, ‘to refresh and charm the minds of his listeners and move them to merriment and laughter with his agreeable pleasantries and witticisms’.23 Castiglione also encouraged Dovizi to write his own comedy, The Calandra, which put him at the vanguard of writers adopting antique comedy forms for a modern vernacular audience, alongside writers such as Machiavelli and Ariosto. A distinctive feature of this new comedy, and others in this emerging new genre, was the way that the actors were expected to occupy their parts, rather than the more familiar swapping between acted and ‘real’ identities. The audience were expected to suspend disbelief and to be swept along by the urgency of the narrative that was unfolding before their eyes.24 These plays often tend to find their humour in the switching of identities. The Calandra, set in contemporary Rome, plays on the mix-up between two identical twins of different gender. Their similarities in appearance allow them to cuckold and trick the doltish old man Calandro. Described by Richard Andrews as an ‘anarchic fantasy of sex and one-upmanship’, the play is full of ‘doublings’ and people pretending to be other than they are.25 Anthony Ellis has recently interpreted The Calandra as a veiled commentary on the triumph of Medicean courtly youth in the face of traditional republican mores: the old man Calandro is representative of the fast-disappearing values of the old republican oligarchy. This shift, which was observed from at least the 1480s, may have rested on a notion of republican selfless honour that never really existed, yet there is a widespread perception of a new age where performance and behaviour becomes more important than birth and inherited status, to paraphrase Alison Brown.26 For many Florentines of Michelangelo and Dovizi’s generation, the new type of court culture being established in Rome and Florence was anathema. Although the Medici returned to Florence as private citizens, many suspected that they intended to transform the republic into a hereditary duchy, and they were closely watched for potential courtly behaviour. Thus the chronicler Bartolommeo Cerretani noted with some relief that the day after the senior lay member of the family, Giuliano de’ Medici, entered Florence in 1512, he shaved off his beard, which Florentines associated with courtly leaders, put 23 

Castiglione, The Courtier, trans. by Bull, p. 151. Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, pp. 23–24; Ellis, Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Mod­ ern Drama, pp. 44–56. For The Calandra itself, see Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance, trans. and ed. by Giannetti and Ruggiero, pp. 1–70. 25  Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios, pp. 48–49; Guidotti, ‘Il doppio gioco della Calandria’. 26  Brown, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s New Men and their Mores’, p. 142. 24 

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on a lucco (the long robe associated with the republican government), and went around without an escort.27 This did not last, however. Soon after, Piero Parenti noted the cose signorile, ‘lordly things’, that entered into Giuliano’s life. He spent vastly on clothes, accepted the epithet ‘magnifico’ from other citizens, and, worst of all, even the noblest Florentines started to doff their caps to him.28 Another diarist, Giovanni Cambi, noticed the same phenomenon and later revealed how all the leading citizens had started to wear black, instead of the traditional red, so that the ceremonial entry of office holders into the Palazzo della Signoria now seemed like a mortuary.29 The Medici’s ambitions for the city were revealed when Giuliano’s nephew, Lorenzo, received the bas­ tone, the symbol of military office, from the Signoria, in a special ceremony in 1515.30 Because of the importance of separating military from governmental power, the bastone had never previously been given to a Florentine citizen also eligible for government. Cerretani explains the feeling of shock: Lorenzo being made condottiere ‘greatly displeased everyone because it seemed to everyone that he had been made lord, and everyone said “Yes sir and no sir”, every kind of man doffing their berets and caps’. Many of Lorenzo’s followers from noble houses who ‘had previously taken little account of civic life, both took off their cappucci [the Florentine hat-scarf associated with republican government] and let their beards grow, dressing like soldiers’.31 The unease with these new mores was precisely because the Medici’s special genius lay in being at the vanguard of cultural change that made any ensuing political change seem inevitable or natural. Both Michelangelo and Bernardo Dovizi were observers and participants in this silent struggle between republican and courtly manners.

Capons and Onions One of the ways that the courtly ethos made itself felt was in the language of letters. From the later fifteenth century onwards, letters of supplication to the Medici had become increasingly ‘courtly and even obsequious’. 32 Compare 27 

Cerretani, Dialogo della mutazione di Firenze, trans. and ed. by Berti, p. 32. Piero Parenti, ‘Diario fiorentino, 1507–1518’, BNCF, Fondo Principale I.IV.171, fols 86v, 89v, and 90v. 29  Cambi, Istorie, ed. by San Luigi, xxii, 49–50 and 154. 30  Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 502–04. 31  Cerretani, Dialogo della mutazione di Firenze, trans. and ed. by Berti, p. 68. 32  Kent, ‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”’, p. 50. 28 

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Michelangelo’s letter with another (heartfelt) missive written five years previously by Luigi de’ Rossi, the Pope’s cousin. He addresses Leo’s nephew, Lorenzo de’ Medici: My dearest magnificent patron. Early today I received your letter all written in your own hand, and how much pleasure and contentment I took from it […]. I desire to serve you in some thing — I don’t say in great things because you have better means, but in the mediocre, in which I will use all my industry to satisfy you.33

This ritual self-debasement is typical of the genre. It is not — as Dale Kent has pointed out — that these conventions mean nothing, but that it is not always easy to tell from the letters themselves whether they betray genuine feelings of friendship or simple self-interest.34 Thus through taking on an exaggeratedly debased persona, describing himself as ‘vile’ and ‘crazy’, Michelangelo plays on the necessary posturing and fake role-playing that had such a key part in the recommendation system of the court. Rather than undermining Sebastiano’s chances, Michelangelo’s letter simultaneously played the patronage game, whilst distancing himself from the subservient role associated with this type of request, and thus implicitly asserted his position as external and implicitly superior to other courtiers. The satirical elements of the letter are brought home by the analogy to capons and onions. The contrast between the elite practice of eating birds and the peasant earthiness of onions was drawn previously by Platina in his De Honesta Voluptate — first published in Rome in 1470.35 Platina explains that edible birds are more suitable to the tables of kings and princes than the lowly and men of little property. The common people, therefore, and ordinary citizens […] should beware of tasting such fare, much less eating it. These will be the dishes of distinguished people, and especially of those whom not virtue and hard work but fortune and the rashness of men have raised, by luck alone from the depths, namely from cook shops, brothels and cheap eateries, not only to riches, which would have to be tolerated but even to the highest ranks of dignities  […]. Let my friend Pomponius 33  ASF, Mediceo avanti il Principato, 123, 64, May 1515: ‘Mag. Patrone mio carissimo. Questo primo giorno ho havuto una vostra lettera tutta scripta di vostra mano quanto piacere et contento ne ho preso […] desidero servivi in qualche cosa, non dico nella grande, perche havete miglor mezo, ma nella mediocre nella quale usero ogni mia industria per satisfarvi’. 34  D. Kent, Friendship, Love and Trust in Renaissance Florence, pp. 57–58. 35  See Milham’s introduction to Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, trans. and ed. by Milham, pp. 66–79.

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munch onion and garlic with me […]. And so that Callimachus will not be angry with me, let Demetrius invite him to a vegetarian meal whenever it is pleasing to fortune, which, as the tragic poet says, is hostile to the brave and good and smiles on scoundrels and the lazy.36

There is no guarantee that Dovizi or Michelangelo knew this text — but, as Allen Grieco has shown, that eating birds could lead to gluttonous and lustful behaviour was a commonplace in early modern Italy.37 Because of their ‘hot and dry’ nature, they could imbalance the humours of middling folk and should be avoided unless in ill health. The capon was one of the most expensive types of edible bird, and it was one that was made by art (castration) as opposed to being left to nature, and thus was increasingly highly esteemed courtly fare.38 Eating capons in novelle was often a prelude to sexual incontinence.39 Onions, on the other hand, were the food of people at the bottom of the social ladder; growing in the ground they were furthest from God’s creation. Shunned at court because of their ‘stink’ which might suggest the diners are ‘rustics’, they were the preserve of peasants, whose hard physical labour produced the necessary digestive heat.40 A vegetarian diet was also sometimes espoused by humanists such as Pomponio Leto, and could be used to stigmatize, as in Platina’s passage above, parvenus or flatterers. Onions could also send vapours to the brain and cause madness, suitable for a crazy fellow like Michelangelo.41 Eating onions, then, was an act of someone who disregarded social niceties and perhaps defined the artist as melancholic by nature.42 The ‘diet of capons’ that Dovizi has been experiencing was the foppish and feminized courtly etiquette of Raphael’s school, with their attention to dress and courtly manners, indicated in the presumed self-portrait of Giulio Romano in the Donation of Constantine fresco in the Sala di Costantino (Figure 27.1). Michelangelo on 36 

Platina, On Right Pleasure, trans. and ed. by Milham, p. 243. Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’. 38  Laurioux, Gastronomie, humanisme et société à Rome au milieu du xve siècle, p. 460; Albala, The Banquet, p. 33. 39  Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, pp. 116–17; Albala, The Banquet, p. 9. 40  Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, p. 131; Albala, The Banquet, p. 11; for food and class generally, see Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy’. 41  Laurioux, Gastronomie, humanisme et société à Rome au milieu du xve siècle, pp. 313 and 319. 42  For Michelangelo’s self-definition as melancholic, see Britton, ‘“Mio malinchonico, o vero … mio pazzo”’. 37 

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Figure 27.1. Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, and Raffaellino del Colle, Donation of Constantine, Sala di Costantino, Vatican, detail of Giulio Romano. Source: Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur.

the other hand, according to his biographer, Ascanio Condivi, was so little preoccupied with clothes that he used to sleep without removing his footwear; his boots stayed on so long that when he eventually removed them his ‘skin came away like a snake’s’.43 The joyous reception of this letter by the Florentine-dominated Roman court suggests that it struck a chord. Its undermining of pretensions and ‘salty’ humour is perhaps a deliberate attempt to remind Dovizi of his and Michelangelo’s common roots, born in the Tuscan countryside, a humour that could be traced back to Boccaccio and of which the Florentines were very proud. One of the complaints made by Alessandro Cortesi, for example, who 43 

Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, trans. by Sedgwick Wohl and Wohl, p. 106.

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often went between Rome and Florence in the 1480s, was of the dullness of the Roman sense of humour, full of tiresome Latin puns designed to demonstrate the education of the speaker so he could look good before what Cortesi called the ‘eyes of the court’.44

The Commission Michelangelo sent his letter just as the garzoni of Raphael had finished their trial figure on the wall of the hall. In the same meeting where Dovizi explained that everyone was laughing at Michelangelo’s joke, the cardinal told Sebastiano that the garzoni had executed ‘a figure in oils […] such a beautiful thing, that noone will look any more at the rooms that Raphael did’.45 The figure of Comitas is almost certainly the figure that Dovizi is referring to.46 This personification has normally been identified as an allegory of ‘courtesy’, but this is not correct.47 Flanking Leo X in the guise of Clement I opposite her sister personification, Moderatio, the pairing of these two virtues would have had a specific meaning for the educated audiences that used the room, most of whom would likely have been familiar with the Latin version of Aristotle’s works (Figure 27.2).48 Three chapters of the fourth book of the Nicomachean Ethics discuss conversational virtues. The three virtues that should be shown in conversation are ‘moderatio’, the mean between obsequiousness and churlishness or fair treatment of all; ‘veritas’, the mean between boastfulness and self-deprecation, a love for the truth even when truth is not necessary; and ‘comitas’, the mean between buffoonery and boorishness, often translated as ‘humour’.49 Raphael’s students were first given the commission on 4 May, so Comitas had been under way for a few weeks before Michelangelo composed his note.50 It is impossible to know whether Michelangelo understood that their first task 44 

Brown, ‘Between Curial Rome and Convivial Florence’. Michelangelo, Il Carteggio, ed. by Poggi and others, ii, 233. 46  See Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, p. 607, and Quednau, Die Sala di Cos­ tantino im Vatikanischen Palast, p. 88. 47  For the interpretation of comitas as ‘courtesy’ or ‘sociability’, see Rohlmann, ‘Leoninische Siegverheissung und clementinische Heilserfüllung in der Sala di Costantino’, p. 154. 48  For the teaching of Aristotle’s Ethics at schools, see Black, Humanism and Education in Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy. 49  See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. by Crisp, pp. 76–79. 50  Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, p. 592. 45 

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Figure 27.2. Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, and Raffaellino del Colle, Leo X as Clement I between Comitas and Moderatio, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Photo: © 2014, Scala, Florence.

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Figure 27.3. Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, and Raffaellino del Colle, Vision of the Cross, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Source: Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur.

was a personification of humour. If he did, his letter may have been intended as a kind of verbal paragone of their personification of wit, addressed to a man who himself had been held up as a personification of virtuous humour in Castiglione’s Courtier. Jokes continue elsewhere on the east wall of the hall, painted in 1520–21 with the fresco of the Vision of the Cross (Figure 27.3).51 This painting depicts the moment when Constantine addressed his troops before the battle of the Milvian Bridge. A  vision of the cross revealed to him that he would conquer under the sign of Christianity, and thus led to his conversion and the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The historical importance of the subject matter is matched by a meticulous use of classical sources: the recon51  The most thorough examination of this fresco, and the rest of the decorations of the Sala di Costantino, is Quednau, Die Sala di Costantino im Vatikanischen Palast. See also Fehl, ‘Raphael as a Historian’; Rohlmann, ‘Leoninische Siegverheissung und clementinische Heilserfüllung in der Sala di Costantino’; Shearman, ‘The Vatican Stanze’; Chastel, ‘The Hall of Constantine’.

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struction of ancient Rome in the background, where the viewer could see the Mausoleum of Hadrian and the pyramid of the Meta Romuli, amongst other monuments, is a topographically accurate depiction of Rome as it could have been seen from the Vatican at the time of Constantine.52 The dress, gestures, and weapons of the soldiers are also meticulously sourced from classical remains. 53 Placed between the figures of what were then believed to be the first and second popes — Peter and Clement — the importance of Constantine’s vision for a continuation and eventual domination of the Roman Church are made clear. This is reinforced by the interaction between the action of the narrative and the figure of the Pope, seated in a fictive niche to the right. Here Clement  I, who was painted with the features of the then current Pope, Leo X, also seems to be receiving the vision. As Michael Rohlmann has pointed out, the shaft of light with the Figure 27.4. Giulio Romano, Giovanni Francesco Penni, and Raffaellino del Colle, Greek injunction ‘By this sign, you shall Vision of the Cross, Sala di Costantino, conquer’ is directed towards the Pope’s Vatican, detail of dwarf. Source: Bildeyes, and the oratorical gesture used by index der Kunst und Architektur. Leo suggests that he, like Constantine, is about to address people in the room.54 As one might expect, in many ways this fresco fits in well with a tradition of papal iconography at the Vatican that had become familiar from the earlier decorative schemes of popes from Nicholas V onwards. Like these, it suggests a forensic interest in accurately representing the detail of classical antiquity, 52 

Quednau, Die Sala di Costantino im Vatikanischen Palast, pp. 332–34. Quednau, Die Sala di Costantino im Vatikanischen Palast, pp. 336–40. 54  Rohlmann, ‘Leoninische Siegverheissung und clementinische Heilserfüllung in der Sala di Costantino’, p. 157. 53 

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giving weight to the insistence that the legitimacy of the Pope’s secular and sacred power was historically grounded. Also like previous decorations, it presents a sense of times acting in parallel — Constantine addressing his troops as Clement I/Leo X exhorted Christians to fight for the Church. One suspects, however, given other elements in this frescoed ensemble, that Leo’s address would be a humourous one. Despite the seriousness of the subject, the way the Oration of Constantine is presented here is fundamentally playful. We are reminded that what we are seeing, however skilfully mimetic of the natural world, is in fact a fiction. The popes and their flanking virtues mix ‘real’ painted bodies within an architectural framework that looks like a sculptural niche (perhaps a deliberate visual reference to Botticelli’s more extensive series of popes on the Sistine Chapel walls). The painted scenes are represented as if on cloths, suspended on hooks from the frieze and curling at the corners; there is a sense that they could be stripped away to reveal something quite different below. The emphasis on showing the visual tricks behind naturalistic illusion makes it clear to the viewer that they are seeing a painted representation of a tapestry of an oration. There is also a seemingly startling detail in the main narrative. Prominently placed next to Leo/Clement at the bottom right of the scene is a dwarf, who looks out at the viewer and smiles as he struggles to put on an overlarge helmet (Figure 27.4). For a modern audience, these lighthearted touches seem incongruous when compared to the weighty message of the frescos. Some commentators have even suggested that the dwarf is not intended to be funny, but to be a rather more serious spur to taking up arms in the name of virtue. Surely if even a dwarf can fight for the papacy, so can the painting’s audience.55 Whilst humour is to some extent in the eyes of the viewer, the fact that the dwarf ’s exertions shift his hose to reveal his right testicle and carefully rendered pubic hair would suggest that laughter is an expected and appropriate reaction. The allegorical figure of Moderatio forms a visual bridge between the dwarf and Leo X/Clement I.

Humour and the Medici Leo X’s love for humour was something well known by contemporaries and almost universally derided by posthumous biographers. Pietro Aretino, for example, observed critically that ‘Leo had a nature that went from extreme to 55 

Rohlmann, ‘Leoninische Siegverheissung und clementinische Heilserfüllung in der Sala di Costantino’, p. 157; Fehl, ‘Raphael as a Historian’, p. 49.

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extreme; it was hard for anyone to judge which delighted him more — either the virtue of the learned or the tittle-tattle of buffoons’.56 Paolo Giovio, too, commentated critically on Leo’s love of buffoons. 57 These criticisms were taken up by posterity when historians sought to account for the success of the Protestant Reformation. Ludwig von Pastor, in particular, was damning of Leo: ‘there is something in the highest degree incongruous in a prince as capable as he was of the most refined intellectual enjoyment, taking pleasure in coarse and foolish buffoonery’.58 This joining of the humorous and serious was something of a family tradition. Leo’s father, Lorenzo de’ Medici, was criticized in notably similar terms. In Niccolò Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories (1520–25), it is claimed that Lorenzo ‘delighted in facetious and pungent men and in childish games, more than would appear fitting in such a man. Many times he was seen among his sons and daughters, mixing in their amusements […]. One might see in him two different persons, joined in an almost impossible conjunction’. 59 When Lorenzo advised his son as a young cardinal on how to act when he first went to Rome in 1490 he warned him to ‘avoid […] the imputation of hypocrisy; guard against all ostentation […] affect not austerity, nor ever appear too serious’.60 Leo’s great-grandfather, Cosimo de’ Medici, too, was renowned for his sense of humour. His name frequently appears in joke compilations of the fifteenth century such as those by Lodovico Carbone and the Detti piacevoli sometimes attributed to Poliziano.61 For Antonio Aglio, writing to his son Piero on the occasion of Cosimo’s death in 1434, the deceased was celebrated for his ability to bring together the serious and the light-hearted: ‘he conducted himself with grave wit and witty gravity’.62 There was a well-established tradition of humour based around men of the Church, and not merely as a facet of anticlericalism. As Barbara Bowen has shown, many clerics were celebrated for their humour in the joke collections that 56 

Von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, viii, 156. Giovio, Opera, vi, ed. by Cataudela, p. 95. 58  Von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, viii, 156. 59  Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. by Banfield and Mansfield, p. 362. 60  Published in translation in Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici called the Magnifi­ cent, p. 286. 61  Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici called the Magnificent, pp. 12–13, and Poliziano, Tagebuch, ed. by Wesselski. 62  Brown, ‘The Humanist Portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici, Pater Patriae’, p. 214. 57 

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became a distinctive literary form in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.63 The ability to make people laugh was not necessarily deemed to be indecorous, even for prelates. Paolo Cortesi in his behaviour manual for cardinals of 1510, De Cardinalatu, recommends this use of jokes and humour (significantly for us, he too uses the term ‘comitas’) for cardinals to gain relief from daily cares.64 These discussions about the nature of joking were informed by a number of classical authorities who asserted that laughter was a necessary part of elite sociability, useful for both lively oratorical presentation and good leadership. Cicero discussed the proper use of wit in his De Oratore and included several examples of jokes. Like Aristotle, he was keen to assert a proper decorum of joking that should not be tantamount to buffoonery, nor too vicious an attack against the person.65 Another key model for the Renaissance prince, Augustus, was well known to be witty. This is recorded both in Suetonius’s life of Augustus and also in Macrobius’s Saturnalia, which reveals that ‘Augustus Caesar […] was fond of a joke, but he did not forget the respect due to his high rank, and he showed a proper regard for decency — he never stooped to buffoonery’.66 Indeed, several of Augustus’s jokes were repeated many times in Renaissance joke collections, including those by Petrarch and the Europe-wide bestseller, the Mensa philosophica, of c. 1470.67 Many of the handbooks of Renaissance facezie justified their light-hearted subjects through the need for men of power to have some diversions, and several, taking their lead from Macrobius, presumed that during or after dinner was a particularly suitable time for witty speech. Thus Leo’s self-presentation in the Sala di Costantino made sense for a room that was almost certainly intended to be used for dinners, receptions, and perhaps even theatrical performances.68 In this way the Pope was nodding to Florentine and Medicean humorous tradition. The concentration on visual trickery in the imagery of the Vision of the Cross wall speaks to a generation imbued with the experience of looking at perspectival painting, but is also an indication of this era’s obsession with the relationship between ‘real’ meaning and exterior appearance. It is exactly this type of humour that is suggested by the Vision of Constantine fresco, the 63 

Bowen, ‘Paolo Cortesi’s Laughing Cardinal’. See Cortese, De Cardinalatu and Bowen, ‘Paolo Cortesi’s Laughing Cardinal’, pp. 252–53. 65  Bowen, ‘A Neglected Renaissance Art of Joking’. 66  Macrobius, The Saturnalia, trans. and ed. by Davis, pp. 170–75. 67  Bowen, ‘Renaissance Collections of facetiae’, pp. 3–4, 9–11. 68  Quednau, Die Sala di Costantino im Vatikanischen Palast, pp. 44–69. 64 

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visual trickery of the representation of ancient Rome being exposed through the device of a fictive tapestry (or even stage cloth?) suggesting that the real surface is hidden below. Just as stylistically we cannot be sure whether this story is painting or tapestry, the presence of the dwarf makes the scene oscillate between the genres of historical epic and farce. Could he have acted for some onlookers as a reminder of the chimerical nature of identity? The dwarf is, perhaps, a visual translation of the stark juxtapositions implied by Castiglione’s injunction to ‘dress oneself in another persona’69 — the dwarf putting on his battle helmet reminiscent of a cardinal hailing from a small Tuscan town who, through donning his red hat, hides his lowly rural roots. Humour, as Castiglione’s character of Bernardo Dovizi said, can be ambiguous: ‘the same sources which give us humorous witticisms, can at the same time provide us with serious phrases to praise and to blame, sometimes with the same words’.70 The value of the Renaissance fool, like Erasmus’s Folly, was as a revealer of truths in a society where the ability to take on apt and decorous courtly personae was key to professional and social advancement. Humour could be a way in which those who had to operate within a system of increasingly obsequious personal relationships could voice their concerns about changes in social mores without risking their livelihood. The comedy discussed here — Michelangelo’s letter, Dovizi’s play, and the walls of the Sala di Costantino — is all rooted in an uneasy sense of shifting identities and distrust of appearances. It is a profoundly anxious laughter.

69  70 

Castiglione, The Courtier, trans. by Bull, p. 127. Castiglione, The Courtier, trans. by Bull, p. 156.

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo avanti il Principato, 123, 64 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Fondo Principale I.IV.171: Piero Parenti, ‘Diario fiorentino, 1507–1518’

Primary Sources Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. by Roger Crisp (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Cambi, Giovanni, Istorie, 4 vols, in Delizie degli eruditi toscani, ed. by Ilfonso de San Luigi, vols xx–xxiii (Firenze: Cambiagi, 1785–86) Castiglione, Baldassare, The Courtier, trans. by George Bull (London: Penguin, 1967) Cerretani, Bartolommeo, Dialogo della mutazione di Firenze, trans. and ed. by Giuliana Berti (Firenze: Olschki, 1993) Condivi, Ascanio, Life of Michelangelo, trans. by Alice Sedgwick Wohl and Hellmut Wohl (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999) Cortese, Paolo, De Cardinalatu (Castro Cortesi, 1510) Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance, trans. and ed. by Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press 2003) Giovio, Paolo, Pauli Iovii Opera, vi, Vitarum, ed. by Michele Cataudela (Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1987) Landucci, Luca, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, trans. by Alice de Rosen Jervis (New York: Arno Press, 1969) Machiavelli, Niccolò, Florentine Histories, trans. by Laura F. Banfield and Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990) Macrobius, The Saturnalia, trans. and ed. by Percival Vaughan Davis (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1969) Michelangelo, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. by Giovanni Poggi and others (Firenze: Sansoni, 1965–83) —— , The Letters of Michelangelo, trans. by E. H. Ramsden (London: Owen, 1963) Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, trans. and ed. by Mary Ella Milham (Tempe: Medi­eval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998) Poliziano, Angelo, Angelo Polizianos Tagebuch (1477–1479) mit 400 Schwänken und Schnurren aus den Tagen Lorenzos des Grossmachtigen und seiner Vorfahren, ed. by Albert Wesselski ( Jena: Dierichs, 1929)

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Secondary Works Albala, Ken, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (Urbana: Uni­ver­sity of Illinois Press, 2007) —— , Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 2002) Andrews, Richard, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Barolsky, Paul, Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and its Maker (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990) Black, Robert, Humanism and Education in Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2001) Bowen, Barbera C., ‘A Neglected Renaissance Art of Joking’, Rhetorica, 21 (2003), 137–48 —— , ‘Paolo Cortesi’s Laughing Cardinal’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, ed. by Andrew Morrogh and others (Firenze: Giunti Barbera, 1985), i, 251–59 —— , ‘Renaissance Collections of facetiae, 1344–1490: A  New Listing’, Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1986), 1–15 Britton, Piers ‘“Mio malinchonico, o vero … mio pazzo”: Michelangelo, Vasari and the Problem of Artists’ Melancholy in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 24 (2003), 653–75 Brown, Alison, ‘Between Curial Rome and Convivial Florence: Literary Patronage in the 1480s’, Renaissance Studies, 2 (1988), 208–21 —— , ‘The Humanist Portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici, Pater Patriae’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 24 (1961), 186–221 —— , ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s New Men and their Mores: The Changing Lifestyle of Quat­ tro­cento Florence’, Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002), 113–42 Burke, Jill, ‘Missed Deadlines and Creative Excuses: Fashioning Eccentricity for Leonardo and Michelangelo’, in Una insalata di più erbe: A Festschrift for Patricia Lee Rubin, ed. by Jim Harris and others (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2011), pp. 157–69 Chastel, André, ‘The Hall of Constantine’, in The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. by Beth Archer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1983), pp. 50–66 Elam, Caroline, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 36 (1992), 41–84 Ellis, Anthony, Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama: Comic Elders on the Italian and Shakespearean Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) Emison, Patricia, Creating the ‘Divine’ Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden: Brill, 2004) Fehl, Philip P., ‘Raphael as a Historian: Poetry and Historical Accuarcy in the Sala di Costantino’, Artibus et Historiae, 14 (1993), 9–76 Goffen, Rona, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Titian (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) Grieco, Allen, ‘Food and Social Classes in Late Medival and Renaissance Italy’, in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. by Jean-Louis Flandrin, Massimo

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Montanari, and Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999), pp. 302–12 —— , ‘From Roosters to Cocks: Italian Renaissance Fowl and Sexuality’, in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. by Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 89–140 Guidotti, Angela ‘Il doppio gioco della Calandria’, Modern Language Notes, 104 (1989), 98–116 Kent, F. W., ‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Oligarchy’, in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo: Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Firenze, 9–13 giugno 1992), ed. by Gian Carlo Garfagnani (Firenze: Olschki, 1994), pp. 43–60 Kent, Dale, Friendship, Love and Trust in Renaissance Florence, The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance (Cambrige, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) Laurioux, Bruno, Gastronomie, humanisme et société à Rome au milieu du xve siècle: Autor du De honesta voluptate de Platina (Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006) Moncallero, C.  L. Il Cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena: Umanista e diplomatico (1470–1520) (Firenze: Olshcki, 1953) Pastor, Ludwig von, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, trans. and ed. by Ralph Francis Kerr (London: Kegan Paul, 1908) Pediconi, Angelica, ‘Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena (1470–1520): A  Palatine Cardinal’, The Possessions of a Cardinal: Art, Piety, and Politics, 1450–1700, ed. by Mary Hollingsworth and Carol  M. Richardson (Uni­ver­sity Park: Penn State Press, 2010), pp. 92–112 Quednau, Rolf, Die Sala di Costantino im Vatikanischen Palast: Zur Dekoration der beiden Medici-Päpste Leo X. und Clemens VII (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1979) Rohlmann, Michael ‘Leoninische Siegverheissung und clementinische Heilserfüllung in der Sala di Costantino’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 57 (1994), 153–69 Roscoe, William, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici called the Magnificent (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846) Shearman, John, ed., Raphael in Early Modern Sources (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003) —— , ‘The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decoration’, Procedings of the British Academy, 57 (1971), 369–429 Summers, David, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1981) Trexler, Richard C., Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 1991) Wallace, William E., Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010)

The Publications of Francis William Kent Books and Monographs The Young Lorenzo (Cam­bridge MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, forthcoming) Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’  Medici and Renaissance Florence, ed. by Carolyn James (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2013) (Items marked with an asterisk below are republished in this volume.) Lorenzo de’  Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004; published in paperback, 2007) ‘The Making of a Renaissance Patron’, in Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol.  2, A Florentine Patrician and his Palace: Studies by F. W. Kent, A. Perosa, B. Preyer, Piero Sanpaolesi, and Roberto Salvini (London: Warburg Institute, 1981), pp. 9–95 Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1977) ‘Ottimati Families in Florentine Politics and Society, 1427–1530: The Rucellai, Capponi, and Ginori’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of London, 1971) (with Gino Corti) Bartolommeo Cederni and his Friends: Letters to an Obscure Florentine, Quaderni di Rinascimento (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1991) (with Dale V. Kent) Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century (Locust Valley, NY: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Renaissance Studies, J. J. Augustin,1982)

Edited Volumes Australians in Italy: Contemporary Lives and Impressions, ed. by B. Kent, R. Pesman, and C. Troup (Clayton: Monash Uni­ver­sity ePress, 2008) General Editor of the critical edition of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s correspondence: Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lettere, vol. xii, Febbraio–luglio 1488, ed. by M. Pellegrini, with preface by F. W. Kent (Firenze: Giunti-Barbera, 2007) Rituals, Images, and Words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by F. W. Kent and C. Zika (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005)

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The Publications of Francis William Kent

Nicolai Rubinstein: In Memoriam, ed. by F. W. Kent (Firenze: Villa I Tatti/Olschki, 2005) Street Noises: Civic Spaces and Urban Identities in Italian Renaissance Cities, ed. by F. W. Kent, Monash Publications in History, 34 (Clayton: Monash Uni­ver­sity, 2000) Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. by F. W. Kent and P. Simons, with J. C. Eade (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)

Articles, Book Chapters, and Research Notes ‘The Death of Lorenzo: “The World Turned Upside Down”’, in Princely Citizen: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Renaissance Florence, ed. by Carolyn James (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 299–320 ‘Florence, 1300–1600’, in The Cam­bridge Companion to Florentine Renaissance Art, ed. by F. Ames-Lewis (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012), pp. 7–34 *‘Prato and Lorenzo de’ Medici’, in Communes and Despots: Essays in Memory of Philip Jones, ed. by J. Law and B. Paton (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2010), pp. 193–208 ‘La committenza di Giovanni Rucellai rivisitata’, in Leon Battista Alberti: Architettura e Committenti, ed. by F. P. Fiore and others (Firenze: Olschki, 2009), pp. 73–93 ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Scriptores historiae Augustae’, in Imagination, Books and Community, ed. by G. Kratzmann (Melbourne: Macmillan and State Library of Victoria, 2009), pp. 137–43 ‘Margherita Cantelmo and Agostino Strozzi: Friendship’s Gifts and a Portrait-Medal by Costanzo da Ferrara’, I Tatti Studies, 12 (2009), 85–115 ‘Gaining a Foothold: Australian Cultural Institutions in Italy’, in Australians in Italy: Contemporary Lives and Impressions, ed. by B.  Kent, R.  Pesman, and C. Troup (Clayton: Monash Uni­ver­sity ePress, 2008), pp. 04.1–04.10 *‘Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Love of Women’, Spunti e Ricerche, 22 (2008), 28–49 ‘Christiane Klapisch-Zuber et l’histoire de la famille à la Renaissance’, in La famille, les femmes, et le quotidian (xiv–xviiie siècle): Textes offerts à Christiane Klapisch- Zuber, ed. by I. Chabot and others (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, 2006), pp. 69–78 ‘Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici’, in Women and Gender in Medi­eval Europe: An Encylo­ pedia, ed. by M. Schaus (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 796–97 ‘Nicolai Rubinstein (1911–2002); Ruth Olitsky Rubinstein (1924–2002)’, Renaissance Studies, 20 (2006), 383–98 ‘Nicolai Rubinstein, Teacher’, in Nicolai Rubinstein: In Memoriam, ed. by F.  W. Kent (Firenze: Villa I Tatti/Olschki, 2005), pp. 35–45 *‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive in the Time of Lorenzo de’ Medici’, in Rituals, Images and Words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by F.  W. Kent and C.  Zika (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 389–404 *‘Heinrich Isaac’s Music in Laurentian Florence’, in Die Lekture der Welt: Zur Theorie, Geschichte und Soziolologie kultureller Praxis, ed. by H. Heinze and C. Weller (Frank­ furt: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 367–71

The Publications of Francis William Kent 519 ‘Il Mediceo avanti il Principato al Tempo di Lorenzo de’ Medici’, in I Medici in Rete, ed. by I. Cotta and F. Klein (Firenze: Olschki, 2003), pp. 123–41 ‘“Be rather loved than feared”: Class Relations in Quattrocento Florence’, in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed. by W.  J. Connell (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 2002), pp. 13–50 ‘Medici, Lorenzo de’’, ‘Motti e facezie del piovano Arlotto’, ‘Patronage’, ‘Rucellai, Giovanni’, and ‘Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi’, The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature, ed. by P. Hainsworth and D. Robey (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002), pp. 374–75, 395–96, 446, 527–28, 569, respectively ‘Review: Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture by Leonard Barkan’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002), 689–90 *‘Lorenzo de’  Medici at the Duomo’, in La Cattedrale e la Città, ed. by T.  Verdon and A. Innocenti, 3 vols (Florence: Edifir, 2001), i, 341–68 ‘Patronage’, in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. by P.  Grendler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999), iv, 422–24 *‘Sainted Mother, Magnificent Son: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Lorenzo de’ Medici’, Italian History and Culture, 3 (1997), 3–33 ‘Giovanni and Bernardo Rucellai’, in The Dictionary of Art, xxvii (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 306–07 *‘The Young Lorenzo, 1449–1469’, in Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, ed. by M. Mallett and N. Mann (London: Warburg Institute, 1996), pp. 1–22 ‘Individuals and Families as Patrons of Culture in Quattrocento Florence’, in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. by A. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 171–92 *‘Lorenzo de’ Medici, Madonna Scolastica Rondinelli e la politica di mecenatismo archi­ tettonico nel convento delle Murate a Firenze (1471–1472)’, in Arte, committenze ed economia a Roma e nelle corte del Rinascimento, 1420–1530, ed. by A. Esch and C. L. Frommel (Torino: Einaudi, 1995), pp. 353–82 *‘“Lorenzo … amico degli uomini da bene”: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Oligarchy’, in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo: Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Firenze, 9–13 giugno 1992), ed. by G. C. Garfagnini (Firenze: Olschki, 1994), pp. 43–60 ‘“Un paradiso habitato da diavoli”: Ties of Loyalty and Patronage in the Society of Medi­ cean Florence’, in Le radici cristiane di Firenze, ed. by A. Benvenuti, F. Cardini, and E. Giannarelli (Firenze: Alinea 1994), pp. 183–210 ‘Bertoldo “sculptore”, again’, The Burlington Magazine, 135 (1993), 629–30 ‘An Early Reference to Luigi Pulci’s Morgante (August 1478)’, Rinascimento, ser. 2, 33 (1993), 209–11 *‘Patron-Client Networks in Renaissance Florence and the Emergence of Lorenzo as “Maestro della Bottega”’, in Lorenzo de’  Medici: New Perspectives; Proceedings of the International Conference Held at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City Uni­ver­sity of New York, April 30–May 2, 1992, ed. by B. Toscani, Studies in Italian Culture, 13 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 279–313 ‘Bardi’, in Die Grossen Familien Italiens, ed. by V. Reinhardt (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992), pp. 54–56

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*‘Bertoldo “sculptore” and Lorenzo de’  Medici’, The Burlington Magazine, 134 (1992), pp. 248–49 ‘Review: La Maison et le nom: stratégies et rituels dans l’Italie de la Renaissance by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’, Renaissance Quarterly, 45 (1992), 352–54 ‘Rucellai/Pitti’, in Die Grossen Familien Italiens, ed. by V. Reinhardt (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992), pp. 451–62 ‘La famiglia patrizia fiorentina nel Quattrocento: Nuovi orientamenti nella storiografia recente’ in Palazzo Strozzi: metà millennio 1489–1989, Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze 3–6 luglio 1989, ed. by D. Lamberini (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1991), pp. 70–91 ‘Palaces, Politics and Society in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, 2 (1987), 41–70 [also published in Italian, ‘Il palazzo, la famiglia, il contesto politico’, Annali di Architettura, 2 (1990), 59–72] ‘The Cederni Altar-Piece by Neri di Bicci in Parma’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 33 (1989), 378–79 ‘Florentine Quattrocento Taste in Palaces: Two Notes’, Australian Journal of Art, 6 (1987), 17–24 ‘Ties of Neighbourhood and Patronage in Quattrocento Florence’, in Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. by P. Simons and F. W. Kent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp.  79–98 [also published in Italian, ‘II ceto dirigente fiorentino e i vincoli di vicinanza nel Quattrocento’, in Atti del VI Convegno sul Ceto Dirigente in Toscana (Firenze: Papafava, 1987), pp. 63–78] ‘The Black Death of 1348 in Florence: A New Contemporary Account?’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of C. H. Smyth, ed. by A. Morrogh and others (Firenze: Giunti Barbéra, 1985), i, 117–28 ‘Review: William Dick, A Bunch of Ratbags’, Labour History, 49 (1985), 117–18 ‘Giovanni Rucellai: An Epitaph’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 46 (1983), 207 ‘Lorenzo di Credi, his Patron Iacopo Bongianni and Savonarola’, Burlington Magazine, 125 (1983), 539–41 ‘A Proposal by Savonarola for the Self-Reform of Florentine Women (March 1496)’, Memorie Domenicane, n.s., 14 (1983), 335–41 *‘New Light on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Convent at Porta San Gallo’, The Burlington Maga­ zine, 124 (1982), 292–94 ‘Review: Public Life in Renaissance Florence by Richard C. Trexler’, Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982), 382–88 ‘A Self Disciplining Pact made by the Peruzzi Family of Florence ( June 1433)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 34 (1981), 337–55 ‘Art Historical Gleanings from the Florentine Archives’, Australian Journal of Art, 2 (1980), 47–49 ‘A Letter of 1476 from Antonio di Tuccio Manetti Mentioning Brunelleschi’, The Burling­ ton Magazine, 121 (1979), 648–49

The Publications of Francis William Kent 521 *‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Acquisition of Poggio a Caiano in 1474, and an Early Reference to his Architectural Expertise’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 42 (1979), 250–57 ‘Two Comments of March 1445 on the Medici Palace’, The Burlington Magazine, 121 (1979), 795–96 ‘A La Recherche du Clan Perdu: Jacques Heers and “Family Clans” in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Family History, 2 (1977), 77–86 ‘“Più superba de quella de Lorenzo”: Courtly and Family Interest in the Building of Filippo Strozzi’s Palace’, Renaissance Quarterly, 30 (1977), 311–23 ‘The Letters Genuine and Spurious of Giovanni Rucellai’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974), 342–49 ‘Due Lettere Inedite di Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai’, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 149 (1972), 565–69 ‘Francesco Busini’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, xiv (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1972), pp. 785–87 ‘The Rucellai Family and its Loggia’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 35 (1972), 397–401 ‘Ser Brunetto Latini: Florence’s “Man of Great Wisdom and Authority”’, Melbourne Historical Journal, 3 (1963/64), 25–37 (with Caroline Elam) ‘Piero Del Massaio: Painter, Mapmaker and Military Surveyor’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen institutes in Florenz, 57 (2015), 64–89 (with C. James) ‘Renaissance Friendships: Traditional Truths, New and Dissenting Voices’, in Friendship: A History, ed. by B. Caine (London: Equinox Press, 2009), pp. 111–62 (with Christine Meek) ‘Obituary of Louis Ferdinand Green’, Renaissance Studies, 23 (2009), 758–62 (with Bronwyn C. Stocks) ‘89. Scriptores historiae Augustae’, in The Medi­eval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cam­bridge, Australia, and New Zealand, ed. by B. Stocks and N.  Morgan, exhibition catalogue, SLV, Melbourne, 28  March–15  June 2008 (Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2008), p. 258 (with Charles Zika), ‘Introduction’, in Rituals, Images and Words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by F. W. Kent and C. Zika (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 1–5 (with Amanda Lillie) ‘The Piovano Arlotto, New Documents’, in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. by P. Denley and C. Elam, Westfield Publications in Medi­eval History, 2 (London: Westfield College, Uni­ver­sity of London, 1989), pp. 347–67 (with Louise George Clubb, Riccardo Bruscagli, Salvatore Camporeale, Elizabeth Cropper, Caroline Elam) ‘An Editorial Comment to Richard Goldthwaite’s The Economy of Renaissance Italy’, I Tatti Studies, 2 (1987), 11–13 (with Patricia Simons) ‘Renaissance Patronage: An Introductory Essay’, in Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. by P. Simons and F. W. Kent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 1–21 *(with Dale  V. Kent) ‘Two Vignettes of Florentine Society in the Fifteenth Century’, Rinascimento, 33 (1983), 237–60

522

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Other Publications Making Monash: A  Twenty-Five Year History, ed. by F.  W. Kent and D.  D. Cuthbert (Clayton: Monash Uni­ver­sity, 1986) Under the Shadow of One Will, the printed text of four talks given for the ABC, Melbourne, 1972, p. 14 Kent played a prominent advisory role in the making of, and appeared in, the documentary film ‘Botticelli’s Primavera: Myths and Fingerprints’, directed by Agnieska Piotrowska for Channel Four in the UK in 1997

Please note: This bibliography does not include F. W. Kent’s prolific list of book reviews, apart from those cited in the introductory chapter.

Europa Sacra All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000-1400: Interaction, Negotiation, and Power, ed. by Emilia Jamroziak and Janet E. Burton (2007) Anna Ysabel d’Abrera, The Tribunal of Zaragoza and Crypto-Judaism: 1484–1515 (2008) Cecilia Hewlett, Rural Communities in Renaissance Tuscany: Religious Identities and Local Loyalties (2009) Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500, ed. by Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin (2010) Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100-1500, ed. by Constant J. Mews and John N. Crossley (2011) Alison Brown, Medicean and Savonarolan Florence: The Interplay of Politics, Humanism, and Religion (2012) Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore (2013) Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture, ed. by Samuel Cohn Jr., Marcello Fantoni, Franco Franceschi, and Fabrizio Ricciardelli Thomas A. Fudge, The Memory and Motivation of Jan Hus, Medieval Priest and Martyr (2013) Clare Monagle, Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’ and the Development of Theology (2013)

Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński, Poland, Holy War, and the Piast Monarchy, 1100–1230 (2014) Tomas Zahora, Nature, Virtue, and the Boundaries of Encyclopaedic Knowledge: The Tropo­ logical Universe of Alexander Neckam (1157–1217) (2014) Line Cecilie Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs (2014) Mulieres religiosae: Shaping Female Spiritual Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. by Veerle Fraeters and Imke de Gier (2014) Bruno the Carthusian and his Mortuary Roll: Studies, Text, and Translation, ed. by Hartmut Beyer, Gabriela Signori, and Sita Steckel (2014) David Rosenthal, Kings of the Street: Power, Community, and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (2015) Fabrizio Conti, Witchcraft, Superstition, and Observant Franciscan Preachers: Pastoral Approach and Intellectual Debate in Renaissance Milan (2015) Mendicant Cultures in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Word, Deed, and Image, ed. by Sally J. Cornelison, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, and Peter Howard (2016) Adriano Prosperi, The Giving of the Soul: The History of an Infanticide (2016) Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medieval Europe, ed by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards (2016)

In Preparation Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman, ed. by Thomas W. Barton, Susan McDonough, Sara McDougall, and Matthew Wranovix