The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy 9781501726842

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The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy

The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy

DouGLAS B1ow

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a University Cooperative Society Subvention Grant awarded by The University of Texas at Austin. Copyright© 2006 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2006 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Biow, Douglas. The culture of cleanliness in Renaissance Italy I Douglas Biow. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-o-8014-4481-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: o-8014-4481-0 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Hygiene-Italy-History-15th century. 2. Hygiene -Italy-History-16th century. 3· Hygiene in literature. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Hygiene-history-Italy. 2. Literaturehistory-Italy. 3· History, Early Modem 1451-16oo-Italy. QT 11 GIS B616C 2006] RA78o.B56 2oo6 613.0945-dc22 2oo6oo8381 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.comell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Wayne A. Rebhorn and Louis A. Waldman

Camel (whose surname fitted so perfectly his long, stiff-legged stride, humped shoulders and droll, thick-lipped countenance, that it was generally taken to be an inspired nickname) did not seem to be particularly old, but he had been doing his Ph.D. thesis as long as anyone could remember. Its title-'Sanitation in Victorian Fiction' -seemed modest enough; but, as Camel would patiently explain, the absence of references to sanitation was as significant as the presence of the same, and his work thus embraced the entire corpus of Victorian fiction. Further, the Victorian period was best understood as a period of transition in which the comic treatment of human excretion in the eighteenth century was suppressed, or sublimated in terms of social reform, until it re-emerged as a source of literary symbolism in the work ofJoyce and other moderns. Camel's preparatory reading spread out in wider and wider circles, and it often seemed that he was bent on exhausting the entire resources of the Museum library before commencing composition. Some time ago a wild rumour had swept through Bloomsbury to the effect that Camel had written his first chapter, on the hygiene of Neanderthal Man; but Camel had wistfully denied it. -DAVID

LoDGE,

The British Museum Is Falling Down

Contents

Preface Note on Translations Introduction 1. Households and Cities 2. Soap and Washerwomen 3· Latrines and Latrine-Cleaners Conclusion

Notes Bibliography Index

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1

53 95 1 44 182

187 221

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Priface

Cleanliness, which has become a topic of serious scholarly interest in American studies, has also occasionally been a topic of interest in the cultural history of the European West over the past century. It has been treated in popularizing works, such as Lawrence Wright's Clean and Decent, Reginald Reynolds's Cleanliness and Godliness, and Terence McLaughlin's Dirt, as well as in more detailed scholarly studies dedicated to specific cultures and periods, such as Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process, Alain Corbin's The Foul and the Fragrant, Georges Vigarello's Concepts of Cleanliness, Donald Reid's Paris Sewers and Sewermen, Emily Gowers's "The Anatomy of Rome from Capitol to Cloaca," and most recently, Roberta Mucciarelli's enlightening "Hygiene, Health, and Public Decorum in the Middle Ages." In one form or another, cleanliness has always occupied the minds of historians of Renaissance and early modem European culture, particularly historians of sensibilities, and some have contributed significantly to the overall picture. A case in point would be Simon Schama's stimulating pages in The Embarrassment of Riches on the fanatic pursuit of cleanliness on the part of the fastidious Dutch in the seventeenth century. Certainly, ever since Jacob Burckhardt's landmark The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, modem historical studies of the European Renaissance have taken note, if only briefly and sporadically, of the topic of cleanliness, adding in the process some local color to the grand sweep of the historical tale being told, as does John Hale, for instance, in his thematically arranged Renaissance Europe. Art historians and archeologists have had their say as well. 1 Cleanliness, however, has not occupied the attention of literary scholars in general or of literary scholars interested in the Renaissance. 2 To this effect, this book examines one of the major preoccupations defining the period: its preoccupation with dirt and cleanliness. In doing so, this book offers a new, unified interpretation of Italian Renaissance literature in terms of themes that tie it to the most important aspects of the culture that

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produced it. Since Italy, as is well known, was going through a tremendous number of boundary crises in the period-invasions from outside, wars among city-states, the actual remaking of urban topographies, an increased movement across the divides separating social classes, redefinitions of the family, revisions of what constituted linguistic purity, and the appearance of such deadly pandemics as the plague-the messiness embodied in dirt as "matter out of place," along with at times an obsessive concern with cleanliness in response to that conceptual messiness, holds a central place in works of every conceivable variety. At one level, we shall see, cleanliness was a matter of historical concern in the Renaissance: Italians cared deeply about being clean and keeping their environments clean. At another level, we shall see, cleanliness was a matter of artistic concern: Italians used the topic of cleanliness in a variety of ways to rethink such issues as the value of the "dignity of man," self-fashioning, self-respect, selfdiscipline, self-value, status, social distinction, and artistic or oratorical originality, self-expression, and innovation. In this regard, the topic of cleanliness, which is here treated as a historically determined topic, allowed writers the opportunity to express a host of thoughts and feelings about their culture-especially their thoughts and feelings about their own position within that culture. Working on this book has led me to probe a wide variety of writings from the Italian Renaissance with questions in mind that were, at least for me, initially unorthodox in nature. For instance, I found myself asking the following: Did anyone in Renaissance Italian literature talk about soap (sapone), the detergent customarily associated in our own time with bodily cleanliness? If so, in what kinds of literature and in what literary contexts did the authors mention it? Are there any purposive deviations in Italian Renaissance literature from the traditional ways in which soap is represented in the period? In the varied writings of Renaissance Italy, who in society was seen to use soap professionally as a cleaner? Were these workers mentioned much? If not, why? If only occasionally, in what ways? Did writers discuss laundry (bucato) in any detail; or was laundry just incorporated into works of imaginative literature in a manner that was more metaphoric and haphazard than realistic, descriptive, and planned ?3 In answering these types of questions, and a number of similar ones, I have tried to foreground and, in the process, thematically bundle together an array of isolated references to cleanliness-some of them extremely idiosyncratic in nature-that have been left unexamined up to now as we read the literature of the Italian Renaissance. We typically do not pause over the words sapone or bucato as we read through Italian Renaissance literature because, understandably, these words-by no means "strong words," to borrow Lauro Martines's reformulation of Kenneth Burke's notion of Ian-

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guage as performative-generally are not considered central to the complex codes within the texts under examination. However, the words sapone and bucato do figure into a larger cultural code about a widespread, and thus thoroughly disseminated, concern with cleanliness in the period. Moreover, as will become evident to readers of this book, writers did consciously think about cleanliness as they wrote, and they often liked to talk about accepted habits of cleanliness. Sometimes writers in the Italian Renaissance also loved to talk about cleanliness in order to mask or joke about unclean habits and, as such, present those habits inversely, and indeed perversely, as clean. The topic of cleanliness crops up everywhere in the Italian Renaissance. It cuts through high and low culture, just as it cuts across genre lines. In literary and historiographical terms, the topic of cleanliness is as relevant to an understanding of Burckhardt's nineteenth-century vision of the Renaissance, with its focus on elevated pageantry, refined manners, the birth of the individual, and the state as a work of art, as it is to Peter Burke's, Richard Trexler's, Edward Muir's, John Martin's, Lauro Martines's, and Piero Camporesi' slate-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century visions of the Renaissance, with its focus on folk rituals, corporate identities constructed through permeable communities, pervasive and sometimes abrasive social interactions, and the subversive, carnivalesque forces at work within the culture. The topic of cleanliness in this way brings together not just high and low culture, from humanistic letters resuscitating Ciceronian Latin to carnival songs trampling literary decorum, but also competing and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the Renaissance in the modern era, from Burckhardt's Renaissance as the moment when antiquity was systematically recovered among and by the elite to Mikhail Bakhtin's progressive Renaissance as the moment when folk culture was dismantled by an oppressive state and then recovered residually in sanctioned festival forms. Along with that it brings together a variety of other conflicting interpretations of the Renaissance, from Richard Goldthwaite's macrohistorical focus on private wealth and private palaces in a world of conspicuous consumption and circulating capital to Carlo Ginzburg's microhistorical focus on marginalized laborers in a world where ideas circulated as fluidly as letters of credit; from Thomas Greene's, Ronald Witt's, and James Hankins's focus on humanists and the revival of classical letters, philosophy, and rhetoric to Wayne Rebhorn's and Anthony Grafton's focus on the subversive uses of classical culture in both popular and elevated literary and rhetorical forms. In writing this book I have tried to cast my net wide and take into consideration a variety of verbal and visual sources, but I have also chosen to be selective rather than comprehensive. For the most part, even if many

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writings are mentioned or discussed in this book, I have concentrated in the three chapters that make it up, as well as in the introduction, on case studies of what I deem to be exemplary and compelling works of literature where the topic of cleanliness is treated in a particularly nuanced, fresh, and complex way by both canonical and noncanonical authors. With the exception of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who functions in my discussion as a transitional figure articulating a largely theologically oriented, medieval view of the cosmos in the very moment that a more secular outlook was taking shape and being espoused both in society and in Dante's own writings, virtually all the authors discussed in this book wrote during the Italian Renaissance, a period whose beginning and end points I take to be roughly 1350 and 16oo. Some of the authors whose works will be treated in one form or another include (and I list them here chronologically, according to the order of the dates of their lives, rather than according to the order in which they appear in my discussion): Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444), Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-92), Marco Foscari (1477-1551), Baldassar Castiglione (1478-1529), Pietro Aretino (14921556), Francesco Berni (ca. 1498-1535), Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), Anton Francesco Grazzini (1503-84), Giovanni della Casa (1503-56), Torquato Tasso (1544-95), Tomaso Garzoni (ca. 1549-89), and Giulio Cesare Croce (1550-1609). Many other writers are discussed, but these are among the principal ones. I should also say that in writing this book I have relied on printed primary and secondary sources, though I have made use of some unpublished archival material. Finally, four caveats for the reader. First, this is not a book that explores in depth religious cleanliness or purity, though the chapter on Dante certainly engages that topic at length. My primary concern in writing this book-perhaps in an effort to respond to Burckhardt's claim that Italy was so noticeably clean in the Renaissancehas been to focus on more secular treatments of the clean. As a result, I excluded a fair amount of material that religious writers entertained when they thought about cleanliness or, for that matter, when religious orders constructed monasteries so that they would be and remain clean, though, once again, I should emphasize that much of this material comes up in this book, in one form or another, in the discussion about the place of filth in Dante's Hell and the centrality of cleanliness and purity in both Dante's Purgatory and Paradise. Certainly the importance of purifying the body in religious burial rites is a longstanding issue that finds treatment in works as old as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Cleaning rituals were also clearly important in religious festivals in ancient Athens, and fertility cults were obsessed with purification.

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Second, this is not a book about scatology or the history of scatology in early occidental literature, even though the role of filth is important to an understanding of the clean in Renaissance Italian culture and the use of it during the period as a topic in literature. Readers interested in scatology can rush to chapter 3 where it is discussed in the writings of Dante, Boccaccio, Giovanni della Casa, and Lorenzo de' Medici. In any event, scatology aside, my focus in this book is on what I find striking about the Italian Renaissance: namely, the broad-based, varied, and growing concern in the period for cleanliness as a topic. Where scatology serves to highlight that concern for cleanliness, or let it emerge more brightly through the contrasting chiaroscuro of the putative darkness of scatology, then scatologyespecially where the authors discussed in this book explore it in a novel and interesting way-is taken into consideration and discussed in some detail; that occurs in the cases of Dante's Inferno and Boccaccio's Decameron. Otherwise, the history of scatology in the Italian Renaissance remains to be written, and this is not the book that does it. Third, this book does not unfold chronologically. Although some historians prefer to see arguments develop sequentially, much historical scholarship treats the period of the Italian Renaissance achronologically, from Burckhardt's landmark essay to Hale's more recent overview. Moreover, I am not making the case that there was historically a quantifiable increase in the concern for cleanliness in the period, though I do believe that there is some scattered evidence contained within this book that a practical concern for cleanliness did increase in the period. Consequently, I organized the book thematically, its structure serving a heuristic device that enables readers to move through a lot of material, much of which has been relegated to notes at the end of this book, in order to make for a smoother and more focused narrative. Nevertheless, this book does attempt to make a historical argument, first and foremost by demonstrating that a historical understanding of cleanliness in Renaissance Italy must take into account not only literature as evidence but also "cleanliness" as a rhetorical device. And the book draws on a host of historians, from eminent economic and social historians to political and art historians. A number of thinkers also come into play who theorize cleanliness, including Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (who have done much to revise our understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin's seminal concept of the carnivalesque) and, in particular, Mary Douglas, whose important study on purity and danger looms large in my book. Historically, the overall impression I hope to convey in the end is that cleanliness was a matter of deep cultural concern in the Italian Renaissance, and that the topic found its way into the arts in both complex and subtle ways. Cleanliness, we shall see, does not always operate in the period in a conveniently neat opposition to filth, although often cleanliness

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does naturally enough engage that topic. And closely associated with the topic of cleanliness is a constellation of issues that are germane to Italian Renaissance scholarship generally, issues that include originality, self-fashioning, artistic fantasia and creativity, distinction, decorum, linguistic purity, the hierarchy of genres, the body politic, gender relations, political and social order, and cultural status, thus making cleanliness a topic that should be of interest to a variety of scholars from different disciplines. Much of the book is dedicated to teasing out those and other associations in a broad array of select test cases. Fourth, this is not a book about the Greek and Roman classical underpinnings to the Italian Renaissance concern for cleanliness in literature and the arts. There is, from what I can tell, a fair amount of classical material that addresses cleanliness in varied literary works, a number of which never find their way into my book. In the classical epic, for instance, Homer provides an elaborate description of the cleaning of Odysseus's house of miasma after he massacres the suitors, including fumigation with sulfur. In the comic vein, Plautus in the Pseudolus has Ballio prepare for the celebrations of his birthday by ordering his slaves to make certain, upon his return from the market, that the beds are made, the silver polished and put in its proper place, and, more broadly, the house "swept, sprinkled, polished, draped, [with] everything spick and span [vorsa sparsa, tersa strata,

lautaque unctaque omnia ut sint]" (The Little Carthaginian, Pseudolus, The Rope, 164). In satire, Juvenal chides a father who demonstrates greater interest in having his house clean for outsiders than in functioning as a proper model for his own son: When you expect a guest, not one of your household will be idle. "Sweep the floor! Polish up the pillars! Down with that dusty spider, web and all! One of you clean the plain silver, another the embossed vessels!" So shouts the master, standing over them whip in hand. And so you are afraid, poor fool, that the eyes of your expected guest may be offended by the sight of dog's filth in the hall; or of a portico splashed with mud-things which one slave-boy can put right with half a peck of sawdust: and yet will you take no pains that your son may behold a stainless home, free from any stain and blemish? It is good that you have presented your country and your people with a citizen, if you make him serviceable to his country, useful for the land, useful for the things both of peace and war. For it will make all the difference in what practices, in what habits, you bring him up. (Juvenal and Persius, 14.59-74)

Given the Italian Renaissance penchant for imitating and emulating classical models, I am fairly confident that these passages, or passages very much just like them, may have-somewhere, at some time, by some au-

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thor-found their way into Italian Renaissance literature as models of imitation and emulation, especially when the issue of the importance of keeping a house clean came up in their writings. By now, we know enough about habits of imitation and emulation in the arts in Renaissance Italy to make that claim somewhat safely. And more examples of models from the classics could be adduced from a host of genres, including Martial's hilarious urging of Charidemus to wash his groin rather than his head in the public baths (Epigram 6.81); Seneca's Stoic praising of the moderate, restrained, agrarian-minded Scipio Africanus who washed himself in a bath that was simply heated and "clean" [munditias] (Ep. 86.10); Horace's aesthetic shunning of Lucilius' s sloppy, muddy river of poetry in order to embrace linguistic and formal purity in imitation of the Hellenistic poet Callimachus (Sat. 1.4);4 Catullus's presenting of his new book of poetry as "freshly smoothed off [expolitum] with dry pumice-stone" (poem 1.2); and Horace's fastidious planning of a dinner party in which "no noses are wrinkled at couch-cover stains or at dirty napkins." 5 In and of itself, a book strictly about the classical underpinnings to the Italian Renaissance approach to cleanliness, however, would not tell us anything substantially new about the later period. It would only reconfirm what we already know: Italians often worked from classical models, borrowing from them as they revised them to meet the constraints of the changing behavioral and aesthetic codes of their own culture. They did this in every genre, every art form. Hence, this book does not investigate in any depth the similarities and differences, for instance, between Xenophon's and Leon Battista Alberti's discussions of a husband's need to ensure that a wife not smear her face with makeup. Xenophon was, indeed, a model for the humanist Alberti, and there were, as scholars have already pointed out, stark differences between their approaches, most notably in the radically reduced agency of the wife in Alberti's more rigidly patriarchal revision of the topic of cleanliness. That said, this book does take into consideration classical models where they directly impinge on our understanding of the text in question. And it does so, more broadly, to make the following point: Since Italians in the Renaissance did indeed revive, rehearse, and rework classical discussions of cleanliness, we always need to bear in mind that descriptions of cleanliness by Italian Renaissance authors are not in and of themselves necessarily descriptions of what life was like, though indeed they sometimes could be. Cleanliness is a "topic," a topos, and authors could use it to describe reality, to construct a compelling work of art, or both. The Italian concern for cleanliness, I therefore argue, is twofold. It registers and often describes a concern for cleanliness borne out of a historical reality: Italians did take practical measures to ensure that their world was clean, and literature (and the arts in general from the pe-

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riod) can tell us much about it. At the same time, a concern for cleanliness bears witness to a desire on the part of Italians in the Renaissance to explore the topic in their works of art imaginatively, and they did, as we shall see, indeed incorporate it into their writings in manifold ways and in different genres. The concern for cleanliness in Renaissance Italy, then, was historically determined, I maintain, but the descriptions of it in literature (as well as the representations of it in the visual arts) are not always historically accurate. Bruni's description of Florence as the cleanest city in the world is a case in point. Any discussion of Bruni's description of cleanliness therefore needs to take into consideration what we know about the young Bruni before he left for the Curia in Rome, what we know about Florence in the Renaissance, and what we know about the genre of panegyric and rhetoric in the period. Now, given the myriad writings that can be brought to bear in a study of this kind, writings both of the period and about the period, not a few times as I wrote this book did I feel like Camel, the strange leggy individual in David Lodge's The British Museum Is Falling Down who, having entered the library with the full intention of researching the topic of sanitation in the Victorian period, gets bogged down in a labyrinth of details (details apparently as baffling and interconnected as the entire British sewage system) and thus never advances in his project because he feels the need to read virtually everything before he can possibly write down a word. Fortunately, a number of scholars and friends rescued me from Camel's plight and helped focus my energies. First and foremost, I need to thank my dear friend and colleague Wayne Rebhorn, whose mischievous interest in filth in the Renaissance (and modern American and European culture, I've grown to discover) has formed the most fruitful and engaging complement to my interest in cleanliness. As always, Wayne has been a wonderful interlocutor, in more ways than one, and I am grateful for all his time, care, affection, support, and friendship. He has been a saving grace, and this book could not have been written without him. Along with him, I cannot thank enough Louis Waldman, who has a photographic memory, a keen eye for laundry, an enviable knowledge of the Florentine archives, and a whimsical, brilliant mind. He is among the kindest and most generous of colleagues. His enthusiasm and encouragement from the kindred discipline of art history, where I have often found warning signs tacitly posted against poachers, has meant much to me, and he has furnished me with loads of material, good conversation, insights, and laughs. My thanks as well to Daniela Bini, David Birdsong, John Clarke, Alison Frazier, Connie Barbers, Michael Harney, Ann Johns, Sigrid Knudsen, Michael Larvey, Tim Moore, Antonella Olson, Virginia Portillo, Brenda Preyer, Guy Raffa, Andrew M. Riggsby, Paul Sullivan, Thomas Vessely, and Jorie Woods.

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XIX

I have also received kind help and encouragement from outside my home university. Alberti R. Ascoli and William Kennedy wrote on my behalf for a university fellowship, which allowed me a semester's leave. Encouragement, information, and help came as well from Babette Bohn, Patricia Fortini Brown, Jane Cunningham, Tom Cohen, Roberto Galasso, Margaret Haines, Bill Kennedy, Victoria Kirkham, Penny Marcus, Lucia Monad Moran, Roberto Muratore, Adriano and Elena Pignotti, Robie Rogge, Ralph Rosen, Eduardo Saccone, Jiiergen Schulz, Richard Spear, and Tom Willette. Simona Ceci, Julia Hairston, and Deanna Shemek kindly helped me get through some of the Italian translations. I am extremely grateful to Erwin Cook, who read the entire manuscript in the very last minute and made invaluable suggestions, which I have incorporated directly into my book. My thanks, above all, to John Martin, who read for the press and bravely championed the book. Two of my daughters, Simone and Erica Biow, located images with washerwomen in them, and I thank them for their keen eyes. My thanks also to Wendy Nesmith and her interlibrary loan staff for all their assistance and perseverance in tracking down books and articles for me. For financial assistance I thank The University of Texas at Austin for two semesters of research leave, which allowed me to draft the book in its entirety and revise it for publication, and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Richard Lariviere, and the chair of the Department of French and Italian, Daniela Bini, for help in covering the costs of purchasing the images in this book, along with the permission to reproduce them. My thanks as well to Bernie Kendler, who ushered this book through the press just prior to his retirement, and to John Ackerman and his staff for seeing to it that it came out in print. A small portion of chapter 1, now much revised and purged (hopefully) of errors, appeared a decade ago as "The Politics of Cleanliness in Northern Renaissance Italy" in Symposium 50 (1996): 75-86, published by Heldref Publications; I thank the press for permission to reprint. Also, thanks to Stanford University Press, for permission to quote from Lane Dunlop's translation of Francis Ponge's poem "Soap" (1998). Finally, a word of proverbial wisdom from the Italian Renaissance-this one taken from Anton Francesco Doni's Zucca-for my wife (Maura), my children (Simone, Erica, Giulia, and David), and my brother (Tom): "Chi lava il capo a 1'Asino, I perde il ranno e'l sapone." They can make of that proverb what they will.

Note on Translations

All the poetry in Italian and Latin in the body of my text appears with the original; prose in Italian and Latin is always translated in the body of my text, with words or phrases of particular relevance highlighted in the original. Titles of works in Italian are translated in the body of my text, but the original titles are used in the notes and bibliography. Titles of works in Latin are referred to in the text, notes, and bibliography in the original.

The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance !tal)

Introduction

The Italians of the day lived in the belief that they were more cleanly than other nations. There are in fact general reasons that speak rather for than against this claim. Cleanliness is indispensable to our modern notion of social perfection, which was developed in Italy earlier than elsewhere. -JACOB BuRCKHARDT,

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

In 1611, the noble Sienese Girolamo Lunadoro took the time to observe that the mathematician Giovanni Battista Raimondi was a "lovely," "affable," "sincere," "good-natured" septuagenarian who could hold his own in the highly theatrical and codified activities of the fashionable and elegant court in Rome. 1 In every way Raimondi was a brilliant courtier," a precious jewel," Lunadoro asserts, "which set in gold and so embellished, shines all the more." As a speaker with an astonishing command of many languages, the erudite Raimondi certainly explained difficult technical topics in mathematics, the professed subject of his scholarly expertise, in an "ordered" and "clear" manner, "with much care, without faltering, with an endless and deep memory, and in a felicitous style." Just as important, Lunadoro praises Raimondi for lacking the" ambition" that plagued so many courtiers and that inevitably crippled interactions at court. Far from being vain ("he is not at all centered on himself, nor, like many, in love with his own interests"), he shows respect for everyone, and he clearly does this by making sure that everyone can understand his discourse on "lofty" and "obscure" ' topics, including people of "mediocre intellect." Needless to say, this "singular gentleman" avoided the pitfall of so many courtiers seeking selfadvancement in their dealings with patrons: namely, the habit of seeking preferment through excessive "adulation." Beyond this, Raimondi was a prolific writer and printer, though he was not, given his ties to the court

2

THE CULTURE OF CLEANLINESS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

and his advanced specialized training, anything like a "polygraph," one of the multitasking, professional writers, translators, and commercial printers who churned out so many popular books in the vernacular in midCinquecento Italy. 2 The terms of Lunadoro's praise are, for the most part, much what we might expect out of someone talking about the court in early Seicento Italy. Raimondi's affability and communicability are lauded, as is his modesty, intelligence, learning, and lack of ambition. There is, however, one term of praise that might surprise us. Raimondi, we learn from Lunadoro, was not only a wise and courteous old man-modest, limpid in his discourse, and deftly communicative at a social gathering-but also one who, unlike most philosophers ("fuori dell'uso de' filosofi"), was "clean" (pulito). Why, we may pause to wonder, was Raimondi's cleanliness in habit and dress, which is to say in particular his elegance and orderliness, deemed so important that it warranted inclusion in Lunadoro' s description of such a notable and unusually talented person at court, a man who merited so lengthy and colorful a digression, and who was commonly referred to by his peers, Lunadoro approvingly informs us, as one of the supreme "delights of the Roman court"? More generally, and more important for the purposes of this book, why and how did the term pulito become such a key signaling device by the time that Lunadoro wrote, a device that would tacitly allow people reading his Report on the Roman Court to separate Raimondi out from the typical horde of university mathematicians (evidently an inelegant, unkempt, and perhaps even dirty lot, we are given to understand) and elevate him as one of their own, as a mathematician worthy of belonging to a distinguished, polished court such as the model one Lunadoro sees in Rome? What cultural factors had prepared the way for the term pulito becoming a defining mark of social honor? In Burckhardtian terms, the answer is significant: the Italian Renaissance paved the way for the term pulito becoming an important signaling device, a banner of "modem social perfection," both by foregrounding its virtues as a mark of distinction and by actively putting into practice those virtues in real ways. Lunadoro's concern for Raimondi being viewed as pulito, in Burckhardtian terms, is the product of a long cultural development that took place roughly from 1350 to 16oo in Italy. Indeed, both Lunadoro and the septuagenarian Raimondi had grown up at the end of that period, especially the elder Raimondi, who-nearing the age of eighty as Lunadoro wrote-was born in probably the 1530s, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, about midway between the time that Baldassar Castiglione wrote his seminal Courtier (printed 1528) and Giovanni della Casa his Galatea (printed posthumously in 1558).3 For Lunadoro, humans seeking to obtain or retain social status in the court should always shun filth, much as an ermine fenced

INTRODUCTION

.'3

in by a surrounding pile of "dung" (letame), the historian Paolo Giovio (1483-1552) reminds us in his discussion of courtly devices, would prefer to die before allowing its precious fur to be spotted with dirt and thereby deprived of its elegant, clean whiteness. 4 Historically, although we, like Renaissance Italians, speak of "cleanliness" (pulitezza, pulizia), our notion and theirs are not necessarily the same, since the categories of the clean and the dirty are social constructs and necessarily differ from one culture to another. To understand those differences-as well as the continuities that make us potentially, for Burckhardt, the heirs of Italians like Castiglione and della Casa-and to approach the culture of cleanliness in the Renaissance in a structured way, we will begin by examining how Italians went about keeping both their houses and their cities clean; how they saw to it that their clothes and their bodies were properly cleansed; and how they took concrete social, legal, and political measures to persuade people from all walks of life to behave in a clean manner. The first part of this introduction will thus offer an account of the cultural context to help us understand how cleanliness was treated and perceived in a different historical period than our own. However, the main focus of this book is not on the practical measures that Italians undertook to ensure that they and their environments were clean. Rather, the main focus is on the symbolic uses of cleanliness as a topic-in rhetorical terms, a "topos" -in a host of different writings of the period. Consequently, after reviewing the actual attempts of Italians to make themselves and their world cleaner, this introduction will examine the function of the ideas of the clean and the dirty in the prose and poetry of della Casa, the emblematic writer who codified etiquette in late Renaissance Italy. By considering the exemplary writings of della Casa in the introduction, we can sample from the outset the varied uses to which the topic of cleanliness was imaginatively put. The last part of this introduction then offers an unusually long and detailed summary of the three chapters that make up this book, and it does so for two reasons: the first is to enable the reader to grasp the intricacies of the entire argument, which covers a great deal of ground, as a conceptual whole; the second is to allow the three chapters themselves to unfold fluidly as independent yet integrated essays. The introduction is therefore an essential part of this book. It offers first a historical context for understanding the culture of cleanliness in Renaissance Italy; it then explores the way the topic of cleanliness is treated by an emblematic author of Renaissance Italy; and, finally, it provides a detailed explanation about how and why the chapters unfold the way they do. During the past few decades a number of scholars have touched on the topic of cleanliness in Renaissance Italy, a topic first broached by Burck-

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THE CULTURE OF CLEANLINESS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

hardt in his landmark essay. The economic and social historian Richard Goldthwaite, for instance, observed in his The Building of Renaissance Florence that the palaces of the wealthy were expected to be clean, and they were built or retrofitted with fixtures to expel the unclean. 5 To this end, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), the humanist "ingegnere" (engineer) par excellence, who used his "ingegno" (genius) to solve so many architectural problems, addresses plumbing and latrines in his influential On the Art of Building, a topic that Vitruvius, the resuscitated classical model for Alberti in this book, failed to discuss in any detail. 6 Alberti does not, however, give us precise information when he talks about this topic. Instead, he offers mostly words of wisdom as he turns from the presence of manure heaped up in the country (perfectly acceptable) to feces piled up in the city (entirely unacceptable)? Fortunately, a few authors of architectural treatises in the Italian Renaissance delved into the problem in greater detail. Where Alberti, for instance, merely tells us to be clean and, like Vitruvius, would have us know how to make houses clean, Filarete (ca. 1400-ca. 1469) in his Treatise on Architecture actually dictates how we can build the plumbing system to make certain that everyone in the building will remain clean. To the best of his ability, Filarete provides us with a concrete design, a real blueprint from which we can construct latrines. 8 In like manner, the Sienese Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1502), who offers a rudimentary drawing of a "destro" (latrine I toilet) in his Treatises on Architecture, Engineering, and Military Arts (see figure 1), waxes enthusiastic about the importance of constructing well-ventilated latrines (certainly not over cesspools or stairways or air-shafts). At all costs, the house must not become impregnated with the stench that comes from defecation, from the feces we all need to get rid of as one might the unbearable burden of our first sinful seed, "the memory," as he piously phrases it, "of human wretchedness" (2.335). 9 1t is essential that we do our business and that we do so cleanly and discreetly. According to Francesco di Giorgio, it also makes good sense medically. Consequently, he sermonizes that we need to bear in mind three things: "Three elements must be part of [the latrines]: the first that they are in a place of easy access to the inhabitants of the house; the second that they are comfortable and manageable so that a person is not ill at ease in performing that act; the third and last that, because of them, one does not smell any stench that must be avoided, either on account of the annoyance of the horrible odor or on account of the bad diseases that the smell produces" (2.335-36). Luckily, Francesco di Giorgio provides builders with some precise measurements for the bathroom windows and for the cesspool itself, which must be arched or pyramidal with a curved bottom, and filled with loads of sand placed inside to absorb the excremental matter and the uninviting stench (2.336-37).

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Figure 1 . Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare, ms. 11.1. 141, foLI4r. Florence, BNF. By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali della Repubblica ltaliana. The image cannot be reproduced by any other method.

The latrines themselves, these "destri" or "camere di agiamento" or "necessari," varied widely in function, construction, and scope. 10 On the most basic level, they could be a wooden structure that was perilously perched between houses and that emptied right out into a courtyard, the "chiasso" (see figure 2). Government regulations in cities and towns throughout Italy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance enforced when and how often these dumping grounds could or should be emptied. Some latrines, of course, were more private in nature, others more open and communal. The basic set of holes arranged in a row functioned for servants, but, as Peter Thornton observes, "the owner and the chief members of his family or entourage would usually have more private arrangements, with an individual seat." 11 In particularly crowded quarters, such as those described by the polygraph Anton Francesco Doni (1513-74) in the mid sixteenth century, everyone "has his own (0 beautiful secret!) chamberpot, because the privies are common to all"; at the same time Doni can be found, he laments, "writing, at a table, in bed, or sitting in front of the fire, not to mention in the shithouse." 12 In a more elegant vein, in the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence, built in the mid fourteenth century and with the only really intact Renaissance domestic interior, one can find reasonably wellpreserved Renaissance bathrooms, not entirely unlike the ones in the Palazzo Vecchio, though the destri in Palazzo Davanzati are a bit more upscale and pleasantly designed (see figures 3-5). Some toilets were fixed, others moveable in the form of a close-stool, which could come in a boxshaped form, occasionally covered with velvet and the like, or more richly still in the form of a seat with a serviceable hole in it (see figure 6). One

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THE CULTURE OF CLEANLINESS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

could, in short, defecate not just cleanly and efficiently but in some style. To that effect, artists were sometimes even hired to enliven the close-stools or the seats placed in the rooms of agiamento, to make the experience, if not less odorous, at least less onerous. The unpublished inventory of Piero Soderini's apartments in the Palazzo Vecchio, for example, made just after he was ousted in 1512, contains descriptions of some interesting latrines, including two which must have been veritable works of art, as they were decorated with intarsias and bore the arms of the Popolo-thus these seats gave, as it were, a quasi-official character to every one of the gonfaloniere's (standard-bearer's) defecatory performances. In one of the rooms of the gonfaloniere, we learn from the public notary, there stands "a chair of walnut, with intarsias, with the coat-of-arms of the popolo, which he can use to relieve himself," while in another there is" a large chair, of walnut and with intarsias, for the purpose of relieving himself, with the coat-of arms of the popolo." 13 Occasionally, it is worth noting, a latrine could be the result of experimental and novel engineering. Concerned about sanitation during a severe bout of plague in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), while conceptualizing an ideal city (see figure 7) in which no one would be tempted to urinate in staircases because those staircases would be round rather than square (people evidently unloaded themselves in dark secluded corners), designed an ultramodern latrine whose seat, he writes, "should be able to swivel like the turnstile in a convent and return to its initial position by the use of a counter-weight; and the ceiling should have many holes in it so that one would be able to breathe." 14 Much as Soderini could relieve himself undisturbed in the privacy of a room within the Palazzo Vecchio, so could Eleanora de' Medici in the private apartments designed for her in the refurbished granducal palace, though this seemed to create some problems for Benvenuto Cellini (15001571), who won the animosity of the duchess by making the mistake of disturbing her while she was taking a private moment. The two little spaces between the Camera Verde and the room of the Sabine women in her private quarters would seem to be the area in question, judging from the account in the second book of Cellini's Autobiography: I had now conciliated the affection of his Excellency to such an extent, that every evening when I came to him he treated me with greater kindness. About this time the new apartments were being built toward the lions; the Duke then wishing to be able to retire into a less public part of the palace, fitted up for himself a little chamber in these new lodgings, and ordered me to approach it by a private passage. I had to pass through his wardrobe, then across the stage of the great hall, and afterwards through certain little dark galleries and cabinets. The Duchess, however, after a few days, deprived me

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Figure 2. Decameron II, 5 (Andreuccio da Perugia fallen into a "chiasso"). Ms. 5070-B, fol. 54v. Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

of this means of access by having all the doors upon the path I had to traverse locked up. The consequence was that every evening when I arrived at the palace, I had to wait a long while, because the Duchess occupied the cabinets for her personal necessities. Her habit of body was unhealthy, and so I never came without incommoding her. This and other causes made her hate the very sight of me. [/a Duchessa si stava in quel/e anticamere dove io avevo da passare, a/le sue comodita; e per essere infetta, io non vi arrivavo mai volta, che io nolla scomodassi. Or per questa e per altra causa la mi s'era recata tanto a noia, che per verso nissuno /a non poteva patir di vedermi]. (434-35, 593) 15

If, as Pier Nicola Pagliara has documented, one can detect a gradual yet marked move toward ensuring privacy in the architecture of bathrooms in Renaissance Italy, with more and more attention and forethought paid to environment, ease, and comfort in the "destri" of newly constructed private palaces and refurbished old ones, 16 the privacy ensured in these buildings did not always translate into comfort for everyone living or working in the household, as Cellini laments in a narrative that has him waiting diligently outside before he can attend to his duties in another part of the palace. It is clear enough that Cellini knows what is going on inside

Figure 3· (top left) Palazzo Vecchio, destro. (By contrast, Cosimo I's personal bagno in

Palazzo Vecchio is elaborately d esigned.) Figure 4· (top right) Palazzo Davanzati,

destro. Figure 5· (left) Palazzo Davanzati, destro.

All photographs by Nicolo Orsi Battaglini. By concession of the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali. The image cannot be reproduced by any other method.

INTRODUCTION

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Figure 6. The Street of Fabric and Furniture M erchants, Italian miniature (1470). Museo Civico, Bologna. Scala/ Art Resource, NY. Detail.

the room, and it clearly bothered him that he had to wait, as it did the duchess that he was in fact waiting outside her room before he could advance from one part of the palace to another and then settle down to his assigned tasks. Much as is to be expected, a number of authors who treat economics of the Italian Renaissance, especially in the mid Cinquecento when treatises focused on household maintenance came into a vogue, take up the topic of cleanliness in one form or another. In his Regimen of the Father of the Family (1580), for instance, one of the more important and popular works on households in the period, Francesco Tommasi at one point declares that good servants should all be "clean [puliti], whence at times for the.master

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THE CULTURE OF CLEANLINESS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

Figure 7· Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Detail of Leonardo's design for a model city, which reveals his careful concern as an engineer and architect for hygiene and hydraulics in Design f or a City with a System of Canals and Quays. Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, Paris. (Ms 2173, Fol. 37V). Reunion des Musees Nationaux/ Art Resource, NY.

the cleanliness [pulitezza] [of the servants] is more pleasing than the servitude itself." 17 Similarly, Giacomo Lanteri, in his On Household Management (1560), makes the observation that "the filthiest things [le case piit lorde] ... should be hid, as well as one can, from the eyes of those who have entered into [the house]." 18 Although the ambitious Strozzi family may have stocked one of the rooms in the top floor of their massive newly constructed palace in Cinquecento Florence with live poultry,l9 thereby making a mess of that particular room-proverbial wisdom, after all, had it that anyone who wanted "to keep a house clean [monda] should not keep chickens or pigeons in it" 20 -households, both in theory and practice, were expected to be kept clean in Renaissance Italy, and so, for that matter, were the attending servants. It is also clear enough that women were supposed to do most of that cleaning in the household,21 though men would oversee it and sometimes have a hand in it. "The fantesche," as Dennis Romano points out in his Housecraft and Statecraft, were "assigned the task of doing the laundry and otherwise keeping the household neat and orderly," and they typically worked in the enclosed space of the courtyard, near the well and latrine. 22 In Renaissance Florence, for instance, some female servants, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has documented, could "negotiate with masters, especially at the beginning of the fifteenth century, for the freedom from very hard tasks such as the washing." "And she must wash small linen," one father of a household insisted of the female servant he had

INTRODUCTION

11

hired, while another declared that "she must do everything except the laundry." 23 In large households, such as Cardinal Giovanni Salviati's, which included fifty-four separate "famigliari," there would be a particular post of "launderer," just as there were posts for a secretary and a treasurer and virtually every other household functionary under the sun. 24 In Francesco Priscianese's On the Management of the Court of a Lord in Rome (1543), which describes the function of more than a hundred servants for a massive late-Cinquecento household, there was even a place for the person who tended to the cleaning of the house with a broom, the "scopatore."25 So it was as well for the pope in his elaborate Roman quarters. 26 Furthermore, as the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla has argued in Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance, the Black Death and the subsequent outbreaks of plague that ravaged the cities and countryside on average every five years contributed to fostering a more broad-based civic sense of hygiene in Italy. During the pandemic of the Black Death in 1348, for example, two temporary health boards came into being for the first time in Italy, one in Florence and the other in Venice, and both helped to ensure, among other measures, that their cities be kept clean. "Streets were to be cleaned," Ann Carmichael points out in a study of plague legislation, "garbage collected, sewers emptied, and the sale of meat and fruits strictly regulated." 27 Needless to say, public ordinances had already existed in abundance prior to the outbreak of the Black Death. However, from the vantage point of a more centralized bureaucracy and authority, these health boards, with the assistance and advice of credentialed physicians/8 could now pursue with increased vigor such preexisting legislation concerning the cleaning of streets, the disposal of garbage, the drainage of sewers, the control of food sold, the inspection of goods brought into the city. Along with the enforcement of previous legislation, came added restrictions. Within ten years of becoming a permanent institution in 1486, the Health Board of Venice began to follow through with more detailed regulations in order to clean the city. In Milan during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, broad domains of public interest increasingly fell under the jurisdiction of the Health Board; in 1590, Cipolla points out, the board finally compiled an elaborate ordinance composed of forty-six articles which had permanent validity, and aimed not at times of contagion but at "salubrious times." The ordinance was repeatedly published, at almost regular intervals, and it dealt with the cleanliness of the streets, the sanitary conditions of private dwellings, the disposal of refuse, the collection of dung, and the discharges of tanneries and butcheries, etc. etc. Special attention was generally devoted to the quality of foodstuffs and the hygienic conditions under which they were sold. 29

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THE CULTURE OF CLEANLINESS IN RENAl S SANCE ITALY

Independent of the intervention of these institutionalized health boards, cleanliness had become a matter of serious civic concern in Italy by the beginning of the Cinquecento. "Beyond the more or less grandiose widening of streets," the architectural historian Donatella Calabi observes in her The City of the Early Renaissance, "what characterizes the period between the middle of the Quattrocento and the first decades of the Cinquecento is the attention to cleanliness [pulizia], to the works of maintaining and fixing the area, as well as to institutionalize these tasks, creating people responsible for administering the fulfillment of these works on the streets and technicians dedicated to the maintenance of them." 30 Records of the Opera del Duomo, for example, reveal that numerous brooms, "granate," were bought and consumed in the early fifteenth century. In one instance, in 1432, about ninety-two "granate" were bought to "sweep the square in front of S. Liperata." 31 These sorts of concerns for cleanliness persisted throughout the Italian Renaissance. They persisted not just in theoryFrancesco di Giorgio, for instance, insists in book 3 of his Treatises that shoemakers must be distanced somewhat from urban centers because they bring all sorts of "immondizia" into them, and crafts that deal with "filth" ("spurcizia") must be completely marginalized from those central squares (2.365)-but these concerns for civic cleanliness persisted as well in practice, especially when it came to regulating the uses of central piazzas for selling products. During the reign of Cosima I and Ferdinando I, for instance, the city of Florence provided for and maintained an elaborate, if not always efficient, sewage system. 32 With the return of the papacy to Rome in 1420, hygiene began to improve in the ancient city, especially beginning with Nicholas V (1447-45), and it steadily got better over the next century and a half, though this occurred in fits and starts. 33 Ferrara during the time of Ariosto enacted rigorous reforms in its intent to control the sanitary conditions of the city. 34 Measures were likewise taken to construct sewer systems or refurbish existing ones from Roman times in Bologna, Cesena, and Rome, and cities such as Parma took action to maintain a clean urban environment.35 The Venetians, who paved large portions of the center of their city with marble and stone in the Quattrocento, had a more straightforward understanding of their sewage system: it all just flowed out with the tide, though the boundaries between districts and contested areas around bridges, the so-called "scoazeti" in Venetian dialect, became privileged as dumping grounds for unsightly refuse. 36 Large tracts of newly constructed parts of Renaissance towns, such as Pienza, could also boast more modern and structured sanitary systems. Additionally, soap-the product often associated in our own time with bodily cleanliness-was widely manufactured in Renaissance Italy as a cleansing agent, first in Genoa and then in Venice, two important ports to

INTRODUCTION

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which the materials for making soap could be easily shipped and from which soap could then be sent out and distributed for sale. 37 As early as 1303 the Venetian senate, concerned about the success of its far-flung maritime businesses, took measures to secure the soap industry and control production: 26 January 1303 As the craft of soapmaking is the greatest and most profitable for shipowners and maritime merchants, and because of the practice followed up to now, this craft is almost lost in Venice, because our Venetians have gone to the Marche and Apulia to exercise this craft, it is proposed that no Venetian, for himself or another, may in any way or form exercise or cause to be exercised, this craft within the Gulf, except in Venice, on pain of L 1,ooo .... Also, lest anyone might have the alum with which to do this work in any part of the Gulf, no Venetian may, with any ship whether Venetian or foreign, carry alum within the Gulf, or unload it anywhere except at Venice, nor may any Venetian buy this alum from any foreigner, from outside or within the Gulf, except for carrying to Venice, on pain of 25 per cent of what the alum would be worth in Venice. 38

Eventually, by the middle of the sixteenth century soap was clearly being manufactured as a detergent not just in Genoa and Venice (or for that matter the Marche and Apulia), but also throughout Italy. And by the middle of the sixteenth century, surgeons, alchemists, and polygraphs-the socalled "professors of secrets," as William Eamon has dubbed them-were offering a growing literate public in Italy, including, one imagines, penurious people overseeing the management of households, both simple and elaborate recipes for making soap. These authors, from Alessio Piemontese (a pseudonym) to Giovanventura Rosetti, Isabella Cortese, and Girolamo Ruscelli, offered recipes for all kinds of soap in practical how-to books that went through multiple editions and capitalized, as Eamon has shown, on the print culture of late Renaissance Italy. 39 Many of the soaps described in these recipes served as perfumes, but some were also meant to function as cleansers." And all the blotches [macchie]," the author of The Secrets, for instance, assures us, "will go away and it will be truly good and perfect."40 Isabella Cortese, the only female alchemist in the Italian Renaissance to find her way into print, offered in her The Secrets (1561) practical advice on using "white soap" for removing "every spot of oil and grease in cloth." 41 By the time these books of secrets appeared in print and offered to the public a variety of cost-saving measures so that individuals could make soap in the house and on their own, the process of professionally manufacturing soap as a broad-based industry throughout Italy was also greatly

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THE CULTURE OF CLEANLINESS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

improving in technique. It was considered a real craft to make good quality soap, a new modern art worthy of mention. And the production of soap included some self-conscious tactics of marketing, or what we would today call advertising. All this is evident from Tomaso Garzoni's encyclopedic The Universal Piazza, a compendium of professions, both high and low, that came out in numerous printings after the first enlarged edition of 1587.42 In the section on soapmakers, for instance, Garzoni writes: This art of soapmakers [saponari], which is itself a modem [moderna] one, is constantly being refined in the varied types of soap being made; and in our own age we can see it being brought almost to that height where perfection can possibly reach, for the great abundance of diligent master artisans that, in the cities of Venice, Naples, Rome, Milan, Gaeta, and Bologna especially, with all possible study and care attend to this most useful and helpful profession, so much so that "the Ball," "the Chains," "the Pine-Cone," "the Sun," "the Lily" and many other brands of soapmakers move through all the wide regions of Italy, with the glory and proud claim that they can clean away as many ugly blemishes and foul filth that rust, ink, wine, broth, oil, fat, dirt, mud, urine, feces, and sweat have brought about. (1319) Garzoni (ca. 1549-89) here has a teleological understanding of the art of making soap. This art is reaching its state of perfection, with perfection understood in the Aristotelian sense of matter reaching its proper state of purposive, restful completion. If soap had a soul, that soul has given form to the matter of ashes, olive oil, and lye; it has allowed soap to come fully into being in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with different alluring odors and engaging colors. Moreover, soap has real value. The Venetian nobleman Gabriele Vendramin (1484-1552), for example, perhaps best known for having commissioned Giorgione's Tempesta and as a fine collector of art, invested in the thriving Venetian soap industry,43 which had been steadily developing ever since the fourteenth century. 44 Make soap, then, and you are presumably making money, while making yourself useful to others and society at large. Indeed, "six things," Garzoni summarily insists, are "most necessary in the world: bread, wine, oil, salt, something solid to go with the bread, and"-of course-"soap [sapone]" (1321). But if this is the case, who, we might ask, used this soap professionally in their daily labors? Who did the grunt work and was hired to remove from clothing the "many ugly blemishes and foul filth that rust, ink, wine, broth, oil, fat, dirt, mud, urine, feces, and sweat have brought about"? Garzoni is explicit on this matter as he copies directly from the discussion of "laundry" (bucato) in Alessandro Citolini's encyclopedic La tipocosmia (1561) and, in the process of pilfering, immediately zeroes in on the "la-

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vandaia," the washerwoman. The lavandaia, we gather, is the person who knows all about "dirty linen, soap, ashes, the soap and water mixture for the prewash, the lye (both soft and strong), the washing boards, the washing horses, the drainers, the washtubs, the laundry basins, the cauldrons, the little furnaces, and the skimmers; and then there is the doing the laundry, the soaking the clothes, the putting them in the washtubs, throwing the clothes in with the lye, removing the lye, the washing them, the rinsing them, wringing them dry, laying them out, picking them up, folding them, and putting the laundered clothes back in place."45 Significantly, for Garzoni, as for the mnemonist Citolini, soap is not used to clean the body but to clean objects. It is principally used, according to Garzoni, to clean "panni," linen, clothes. 46 Occasionally soap could be used to wash one's hair and hands, but one typically wiped oneself and changed clothes to clean the body. 47 Hence, the need for clean linen, the attention to and concern for "biancheria." In this regard, one of the most important polygraphs of the Italian Renaissance, the great "scourge of princes," Pietro Aretina (1492-1556), gave narrative form to the customary practice in Renaissance Italy of wiping away dirt with a freshly laundered cloth when he described in his satirical and popular Dialogues (1534/ 1536) how some lascivious nuns, thrilled at the unexpected presence of a filthy muleteer in their midst, promptly sat the man down and proceeded to clean him off "with a towel straight from the wash." There is nothing better, Aretina's character also assures us in the same ribald dialogue, than the "ineffable sweetness that rises from freshly washed linen when it has just been taken from the press and unfolded." "A person who sees very white linen," we are further informed, "cannot keep from rubbing his face in it." 48 Lastly, cleanliness, as is well known, was increasingly discussed in Renaissance Italian treatises that codified habits of conversation, conduct, and social interaction in polite society, particularly, though not exclusively, with regard to the court. Along with that, as pressure in Renaissance Italy was being placed on the elite to behave with manners in such tightly controlled environments as the court, pressure was also being brought to bear legally and juridically to force people of all walks of life to adopt-or at least to try to adopt-cleaner, more decorous habits of body control in shared urban spaces. In late Renaissance Florence, for instance, public purgation in the form of urination or defecation could lead to substantive monetary penalties and even incarceration. The threat was not idle, and when enforced it managed to get some people off the street in Cosima's architecturally magnificent urban center. Hence, if in 1506 the guardians of the Duomo felt compelled to have two images of saints painted at the bottom of the tower of Giotto to keep passersby from doing their business all over the northern base of the famous bell tower,49 by the later part of the

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THE CULTURE OF CLEANLINESS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

Cinquecento some people in Florence actually had to serve jail time, wallow in the dungeons of the Stinche, if they could not abide by the Grand Duke's "stem law prohibiting urinating in the Cathedral square."50 Unfortunately, a number of out-of-towners found themselves at a distinct disadvantage in this regard in late-sixteenth-century Florence. A certain Lodovico di Vettorio da Prato, for example, "not knowing about the prohibition regarding urinating around the church of Santa Maria del Fiore," and being old and infirm, did just that: "he ended up urinating there," whereupon, having been seen by "certain citizens" and told what would happen to him, he was seized by the police and carted off to the Bargello. Eleven years later, in 1578, Pompeo da Monte Lupo, "a very poor man," as the ducal functionary tells it, "puts forth in his entreaty that, having been sent there on a chore by his master at night, and not knowing about the prohibition regarding urinating around the Duomo, where he stopped to do his business, and then, to his misfortune, some cops passed by and they hauled him off to the prison." In 1590 yet another "forestiero," this time from Ancona, unaware, as so many seemed to have been of the "laws and statutes" of the city, begs pardon from the Grand Duke "to be free from prison and his penalty, in which he finds himself, having been found to have passed water on the base of Santa Maria del Fiore." That same year Giovanni di Salvadore Battisano wound up in prison as well for a similar infraction, this time "for having urinated around the cupola where there is a warning." A Sienese likewise claimed ignorance of the law as a "forestiero"; to his later despair, he yielded to the yearnings of his bladder after having attended vespers at the Duomo and chose to succumb to his "desire to pass water" on the bell tower of Giotto, lured there by the presence of "other filth and not seeing there either a prohibition or anything other of that kind." He, too, ended up in jail, "seized by the officials," as did the fifteen-year-old Jacopo di Lionardo Buonafe, "an ignorant young man," for having urinated on the campanile, the desire overtaking him, "venendoli voglia di orinare." 51 There was, then, a real practical concern for cleanliness in Renaissance Italy, and that concern manifested itself in tangible ways. It manifested itself in the ways architects designed buildings, in the ways those buildings were built, in the ways those buildings were expected to be maintained, in the ways governments legislated cleanliness and acted on that legislation seriously, in the ways artists and engineers designed cities with channels leading refuse out of sight and out of mind, in the ways habits of social interaction were increasingly codified, in the ways that artisans and shopkeepers saw to the production of good quality soap as a detergent, in the ways that washerwomen were employed to use that soap professionally to clean clothes and linen, and in the ways that Italians cleaned themselves

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by wiping dirt off their bodies with clean linen. Having said that, this book does not take as its explicit focus of investigation the concrete, practical measures that Italians in the Renaissance took to ensure that they and their environments were actually clean. Nor does this book offer a structured history of cleanliness as a "sensibility," though one aim of this book is, in fact, to show how writers in Renaissance Italy consciously thought about cleanliness as they wrote, or else unwittingly incorporated into their writings the topic of cleanliness over and over again because it was, quite simply, natural enough for them to do so within their culture-a culture, as Burckhardt intuited, that was obsessed with cleanliness for all that it was attracted, in Bakhtinian terms, to the carnivalesque and dirt. Rather, the overall aim of this book is to examine how some writers in Renaissance Italy used the topic of cleanliness to express a variety of thoughts and feelings about their culture, in particular their thoughts and feelings about their own place within that culture. Cleanliness, I shall argue, has much to do with the Renaissance concern for the "dignity of man," self-fashioning, self-respect, self-discipline, self-value, status, social distinction, and artistic or oratorical originality, self-expression, and innovation. At the same time, cleanliness, I shall argue, has much to do with the Renaissance concern for conceptualizing systemic order in everything from politics to poetics. On the one hand, then, we can interpret references to cleanliness literally, as historical "evidence" that there was some sort of concern for cleanliness in the Italian Renaissance-enough of a concern, to be sure, that authors with extremely different sensibilities and backgrounds felt compelled to mention the topic of cleanliness over and over again. On the other hand, we can interpret references to cleanliness in Italian literature at times symbolically, as figures-at times complex, at times not-incorporated into poetic or narrative strategies. In this regard, Giovanni della Casa (1503-56) and his varied writings are a perfect place to begin. For if there ever existed an Italian who epitomized a concern for cleanliness in the cultural imagination of the Renaissance, that person would have to be della Casa, the author of the Galatea, the first great etiquette treatise of the modern world and the one from whose title Italians eventually created a famous expression used to indicate whether they deem someone is or is not civil, well-mannered, and worthy of being embraced as one of their own. 52 Conoscere il Galatea: To know one's Galatea is to know how to behave. 5 3 And part of knowing how to behave in polite society means knowing how to keep and appear clean in every imaginable way. Early on della Casa emphasized this notion in his De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores arnicas (1541), a Ciceronian treatise, as the title readily indicates, out of which the Galatea (ca. 1551-53) in part grew. In the De officiis della Casa discusses the role of superiors in office-

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holding duties and the kinds of socially imbalanced interactions that inevitably take place in life. In addressing this topic, he also commands that superiors, men of true elevated social standing, should wear clothing that is not just elegant and apt but also absolutely clean (mundus; pulito, netto e convenevole) (162-63, 290). 54 Superiors maintain a sense of their elevated presence in the world, and they also signal their right to rule literally above others, by appearing clean. However, if della Casa speaks only briefly about the need to be clean in his De officiis, he later capitalizes on the topic of cleanliness in the Galatea, transforming it into one of the centerpieces of his treatise. Thus, in the Galatea, della Casa's last major prose work, we are frankly told over and over again-in a manner consistent with etiquette treatises, though in della Casa's treatise with unprecedented verve and with a gifted narrator's attention to gritty details-to avoid contact with anything filthy, both physical and verbal, from snot and sneezes to foul breath and foul words. Moreover, by constantly talking about how we should or should not blow our nose, wipe our faces, drink our beverages, speak in public, sink our fingers into our bread, touch ourselves by rearranging our clothes after using the bathroom, or just scratch ourselves insouciantly at the dinner table while engaged in pleasant talk, della Casa reminds us not only how all these activities of seeming "little importance" can potentially harm us and others, "for even light blows," he admonishes with some exaggeration, "can kill, if there are many" (7). By highlighting the dangers of unclean habits and by setting up a dramatic reward system of fearful symmetry (clean habits preserve life; dirty ones potentially kill), della Casa also aims to remind everyone that we must at all costs appear to be clean if we are to maintain our dignity, our sense of self in the world, and our place. Whether we like it or not, the untoward filthy habits of others affect us all, della Casa would have us understand. They destabilize our social categories of decorum, the accepted propriety that passes as an uncontested, normativized given within a particular culture. Being around people with filthy habits instinctively makes us anxious about the world we live in, like coming upon a wealthy well-dressed businessman on Fifth Avenue suddenly and unexpectedly rummaging through a garbage can in search of a discarded bagel to consume. "If you saw a well-dressed noblewoman washing her dirty dishes in the gutter at the roadside," della Casa imagines, you would be disappointed with her inconsistency, even if you did not otherwise care for her. Her appearance would be that of an elegant, clean, noble lady [di monda e di nobile donna], but her behavior would be that of a low and filthy serving woman [di vile e di lorda femmina ]. Even if there were no harsh

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odor or taste from her, nor any irritating sound or color, nor anything else about her that should trouble your senses, you would still be displeased by that unpleasant, unbefitting and unsuitable act. (52, 430)

No one wants to be around people with dirty habits, according to della Casa, whether they are rich or poor, socially elevated or not, a "nobile donna" or a "vile femmina," a superior or inferior. It is alienating, noisome, threatening to the stability of the social order as we have it encoded through a process of acculturation in our minds. And it matters greatly how we imagine the social order, because any deviation from our deeply entrenched expectations and inculcated normative value judgments (all those" ought to be's" that make up behavioral codes) affects us deeply. Any deviation questions our control over and ability to maneuver smoothly within the culture to which we have grown accustomed, especially when those deviations do not take place at carnival time, the one period of the year in Renaissance Italy when it was perfectly acceptable and socially advantageous for the high and the low to get mixed up, when it was right that the clean seem dirty and the dirty clean, and when it was traditionally consistent with our understanding of the social order for everyone to act out inconsistency, as in the case of the well-dressed woman scrubbing dirty dishes by the roadside. Had the woman described by della Casa behaved that way on carnival day, it would have been readily explicable, if not desirable. As it stands, she didn't, and that makes all the difference in the world. The idea that we always need to be, seem, and remain clean if we wish to hold on to a stable view of ourselves emerges as a guiding principle elsewhere in della Casa's writings. Della Casa raises this idea in spiritual and moral terms in a letter to Carlo Gualteruzzi, one of his closest friends and longstanding correspondents. In 1546, for instance, he defends the reputation of his friend Pietro Carnesecchi, whom della Casa views, despite the serious accusations of heresy being leveled against him, as "most clean [nettissimo] of every bad opinion." As della Casa pronounced in another letter to Gualteruzzi, it is in general imperative to have "a candid-white conscience, both pure and clean [monda]." 55 What matters in both these letters is not just that a particular individual is spiritually and morally clean, but that we, as a group, recognize and include that individual within our collective imagination as spiritually and morally clean, and thus as an equal, a member of our cohort. A person finds acceptance through the communal exchange of opinions, in this case through one of the most established means for taking part in communal exchange and for constructing communities in the European Renaissance: that is to say, letter-writing. In a real way, then, recognizing the cleanliness of another person in a letter,

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and admitting that person into a friendly fold through the calculated exchange of letters, tells us much about the company we keep. And it signals to the world where we think we belong in society amid the range of possibilities that extends from the neat and clean superiors, with their welllaundered clothes, to the truly filthy inferiors, the "popolo minuto," as della Casa at one point characterizes the plebs in his Galatea, those lowlevel workers who perhaps should be clean but, as he recognizes, never are. What is more, this culturally embedded notion, which posits that shared concepts of cleanliness-both physical and spiritual cleanlinesstacitly constructs a collective body of like-minded people, extends to della Casa' s conception of political boundaries. The topic of cleanliness thus even appears in della Casa' s oratorical prose, such as his Oration to Persuade the Venetians to Enter into a League (1547-48), in which he holds out against the Venetians the threat of invasion and devastating foreign rule if they do not adhere to an alliance intended to keep the Spanish, who have thus far dominated Italy, at bay: "This, then, is the mortal danger in which your liberty and the clean/pure [munde] and immaculate beauties of your illustrious fatherland are placed." 56 Just as our proximity to unclean people and unclean acts undermines our own sense of bodily boundaries and threatens our place in the world and our sense of where, and with whom, we rightfully belong, so too the invasion of political boundaries by competing and alien forces threatens the purity of a cultural domain. An invading army is automatically and instinctively viewed as filthy, even if the people entering bring with them all sorts of clean and neat habits-an unlikely prospect, however, in the case of the soldiers in the mercenary armies that periodically devastated the cities and countryside of northern Italy. Certainly della Casa's concern for cleanliness in his Galatea reflects much about the man and his aspirations at a time when Italy was becoming increasingly aristocraticized; when place and career advancement was determined in part by manners, good writing, and proper conduct, especially in the church, where della Casa actively pursued a career and hoped to become a cardinal;57 and when new and often alien, troubling customs were being introduced into Italy through the powerful influences of France and, above all, Spain. Thus della Casa, a wealthy Florentine patrician with a high opinion of himself and his family, was concerned throughout his life, like those of the class of "superiors" described in his De officiis, with not just place but also cultural refinement as he aimed to advance in his ecclesiastical career during a time when the Holy See, in an attempt to further consolidate its authority in Europe, actively battled reformers from within and without and suffered from profound religious dislocations. Della Casa was not just a discriminating patrician with a nose for boorish habits, however. Nor was he merely an ambitious cleric with a nose for fer-

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reting out heretics and heretical writings, first when he was the pope's representative (nuncio) in Venice and put into place the Inquisition (1544-48), and then when he took on a principal role in compiling the index of prohibited books as the Vatican's secretary of state back in Rome (1548). In addition to being a discriminating patrician and an ambitious cleric, della Casa was a learned bookish man, a poet and prose writer educated in the studia humanitatis. As a young man he may have studied in Florence (before 1524) with the erudite archbishop and humanist Ubaldino Bandinelli, "a worthy man gifted with a sharp mind and profound learning" (14), as della Casa characterized him in the Galatea. 58 With Bandinelli as his teacher della Casa would have learned much about Latin verse-eventually, in fact, he wrote a commemorative poem about Bandinelli as a mentor, lamenting his death. 5 9 Later, while pursuing a degree in law, he attended in Bologna the lectures of the renowned Latinist Romolo Amaseo, professor of poetry and rhetoric at the university. In 1526, having withdrawn from public life to his family villa in the Mugello, a region just northeast of Florence, he studied with his friend Ludovico Beccadelli. Together they passed an idyllic year in a self-styled pedagogical program that involved their immersion in classical Latin studies, especially the writings of Cicero. Finally, along with being steeped in the Roman classics, della Casa, like virtually all humanists of the Cinquecento, was versed in Greek, which he studied in Padua (1527-29), the city where he also met and befriended the great Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo. Like many humanists of his generation, della Casa was concerned-as was his teacher, Amaseo, and his friend, Bembo-with the uses and abuses of language in his own time. Hence, in keeping with Renaissance humanist reflections on the development of classical languages and the vernacular, della Casa argues in his unfinished Treatise on Three Languages (ca. 1548-49), which followed the De officiis after about half a dozen years, that the "candid and purged" languages of the present and the past have lost their purity thanks to the sullying forces at play in past and present cultures. These languages-Greek, Latin, and Tuscan-have been so thoroughly "corrupted and putrefied," della Casa declares, that they present themselves to the world not unlike a deflowered virgin (come corrotta vergine). Only hard dedicated work will finally allow us to cleanse these tarnished languages and thereby permit us to "learn some of the more polished [polite] and usefullanguages." 60 Not surprisingly, shortly after embarking on this treatise, della Casa put this concept into practice in his Galatea as he warns his readers against using all sorts of troublesome manners of speech. "You must know how to choose among the words of your language those that are the purest and most appropriate," he adjures, "and those with the best sound and meaning, without any insinuation of any-

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thing ugly, dirty, or low [senza alcuna rammemorazione di cosa brutta ne laida ne bassa]" (45,421). "In fact," he assures, "one should not only refrain from indecent and filthy [lorde] words, but also from base words, especially where one speaks of high and noble matters" (42, 418). Time and again della Casa urges us to adopt both a purged language and a clean way of expressing ourselves, a decorous style that would adopt a middle register and recall the Horatian golden mean, aurea mediocritas. However, for della Casa no one had done a better job in cleaning up the Tuscan language than his friend and elder, the cardinal and papal secretary Pietro Bembo. As della Casa pronounces in his hagiographic Vita of Bembo (ca. 1550), which was composed toward the end of della Casa's life, roughly about the time that he wrote the Galatea, Bembo is praised for having taken the Tuscan language, which had become so "polluted" over the years, and cleansed it of its impurities, purging it of the ways of "quotidian and popular speech, drawn, more or less, from the dirty arts," a speech that will smell more of the "shop" and the "tavern." "But even today," della Casa avers in his Vita of Bembo, "most of us have ears that are rendered filthy from certain diseases, nor have we completely emerged from, and pulled ourselves out of, the dregs of the vulgar people [vulgi faece]." 61 Nothing so quickly estranges a person from the community of likeminded humanists, patricians, or superiors as a poorly parsed verb, a grammatical infelicity, a boorish phrase uttered at the wrong moment and in the wrong place. People who speak poorly belong to the taverns, the backrooms and dens of society, and therefore their speech, like their company, must be shunned. So it must also be with respect to the topic of chosen conversation. "In conversation," della Casa observes, "one can err in many various ways. First, the choice of topic should not be either frivolous or base, since listeners will not pay attention to such subjects nor take pleasure in them. On the contrary, they will despise both the discussions and the speaker. Also, one must not discuss subtle or arcane topics, for the majority of people can hardly understand them. Instead, one must diligently choose a topic so that no one in the group will be embarrassed or ashamed. Nor should anyone speak of filthy matters [alcuna bruttura] even if they were pleasant to hear, for honorable people should try to please others with honorable subjects" (17, 385). All this would no doubt make good sense to Bembo, along with a host of other Italian humanists. However, unlike Bembo, and indeed unlike Castiglione, who had much to say about similar sorts of issues in his Courtier, della Casa constantly displays throughout much of his Galatea a "fascination of the abomination," to borrow Joseph Conrad's memorable phrase, as della Casa talks about not just clean acts but clean speech. 62 Moreover, unlike Bembo and Castiglione, della Casa delights in telling us over and over again what we are not supposed

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to say, and this includes at times filthy words, not to mention words that have a hint of impropriety through some possible association or verbal echo. 63 Don't use many of the words and phrases of Dante, della Casa asserts, about whom "little good can be said" (39) when, for instance, Dante said, '"The thief lifted up his hands with both the figs"' (41). Don't say or write, in so many words, "fuck you," though della Casa is reproducing the very same expression in his treatise. Likewise, we must avoid "such base words as: 'and then let them scratch where it itches,' which are sullied with the filth of the common people [che sono imbrattate della feccia del volgar popolo ], as anyone can readily ascertain" (42, 418). But della Casa, once more, deliberately makes a point in repeating word for word that common, vulgar, dirty language. If we hadn't read these offensive words before, we can certainly read them now in the Galatea, as plainly and directly as if they'd issued from the horse's mouth. Along with this, della Casa often displays in his Galatea a pleasure in conjuring up dirty thoughts and habits, if only in a backhanded way, in the form of a deftly worded warning. His prohibitions against dirty acts repeatedly summon up the carnivalesque, the figure of the fat-faced piggish man, for instance, lapping up food with a turned up snout. Are we not disgusted, he wonders, when we see people who, "totally oblivious like pigs with their snouts in the swill, never raise their faces nor their eyes, let alone their hands, from the food in front of them? or to those who eat or rather gulp down their food with both their cheeks puffed out as if they were blowing a trumpet or blowing on a fire?" (9). As is so often the case in the Galatea, della Casa here gives with one hand and takes away with the other. He offers advice but belittles and humiliates in the process. He talks about clean habits yet also describes in detail the dirty ones. With what pleasure he seems to dwell on how we are not supposed to sit at the table, eating like swine! "It is unsuitable to sprawl over the table," della Casa in another instance reminds those of us who make a practice of doing so, "or to fill both sides of your mouth with food until your cheeks puff out" (57). In both these passages, as della Casa explains what we are supposed to do, he fantasizes overtly and at some length about how we are not expected to chew. In this regard, the Galatea, the classic, paradigmatic text about clean habits in Renaissance Italy, is, as Harry Berger has argued, an ambivalent text in a way that Castiglione's The Courtier, another Cinquecento treatise concerned with manners, is not. 64 The pleasure of talking about cleanliness for della Casa necessitates talking about dirty things, things that one might more readily imagine vividly described in a burlesque or carnival poem. Pigs, as celebrated animals of carnal consumption, are the stuff of carnival. And people sprawled over tables with their blubbery jaws chomping on food fit nicely into Bruegel's pictures of popular celebrations, not a digni-

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fied Renaissance Italian banquet portrayed, say, in so many idealized versions of the Last Supper. Furthermore, at the heart of della Casa's fascination with abomination lies not just the grotesque of carnival, but the genre of satire and therefore, by extension for Robert Elliott, the curse, which "is one of the most common forms by which man attempts to exercise control over the other." 65 In its filthiest form, which is the form familiar to everyone from angry drivers succumbing to road rage to deranged psychotics, the scatological curse amounts to dumping "shit" -there really is no better word for it-on people as a way of demeaning them. In scatological cursing we are attacking people we despise at that particular moment. In its most magical formulation, we are fantasizing that we have actually injured other persons through the curse and thereby punished them or forced them to submit to our will. Sometimes just the flick of a finger will do. In the classical literary tradition, scatological cursing was typically connected to not just satire but the notion of ridiculous things, and the scatological curse was often embodied in iambic poetry and couched in gross comic strategies. This particular use of scatology, however, had a different function in the classical literary tradition than the use of scatology in either the carnivalesque, where it has been seen to re-create playfully the lost communal corpus of folk culture, or the fabliaux, where it has been seen to re-create playfully the discarded communal material of an entire literary corpus.66 In both these instances, in the carnivalesque and the fabliaux, the laughter generated through scatology is democraticizing; it serves to erase distinctions. In the case of carnival the laughter elicited through scatology levels social hierarchies; in the case of the fabliaux it flattens out literary categories. By contrast, scatological cursing, especially within the genres of classical satire and comedy, typically invites hostile, corrosive, demeaning laughter. And no one in the Renaissance liked to be the target of that sort of laughter, unless one was by profession the fool and therefore paid to bear the brunt of such abuse-actually paid, as it were, to "take that sort of shit." Ridiculing others through a scatological curse thus allowed some people the pleasure of debasing others, with the accompanying fantasy that those people in authority who have hurled filth on others have distanced themselves and secured an image of themselves as pure, clean, and uncontaminated. People in authority, real or imagined, get to say dirty things, sometimes actually inverting the language of cleanliness to make it mean dirty things, but they remain, in their own minds, clean. Della Casa engaged in this sort of vitriolic scatology in two early works that touch on the topic of the clean and unclean. In his A Delightful Question: Whether One Should Wed (1537), an early antimarital treatise composed with Boccaccio' s satirical and misogynistic Corbaccio in mind, della Casa has a haughty Venetian senator argue that one should not get married. Sig-

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nificantly, one of the reasons one should not wed, among the many proffered, is that women stink and are inherently filthy. 67 "I omit certain diseases particular to women, and their periodic pains, about which there can be nothing more distasteful to witness or have dealings with," della Casa asserts through the mouthpiece of the Venetian senator: '"My wife,' says one, 'has bad breath' [foetet]. And yet you must go ahead and embrace her and kiss her, with all her stink [foetore]; you must go on living with her, spend nights with her-or else certainly, with such nauseous feelings, you will run from the house" (58-6o). "Moreover," the vexed Venetian proceeds with increasing disgust and disdain, what can there be that is more repugnant and indecent than a sick woman, if even when she is healthy she is inevitably smelly? But, young gentlemen, must I set out for you and remind you about things that we cannot even in silence think about without feeling bothered? Above all, from the moment that these things are so known, no one can ignore them. How many women, in fact, do we see every day from whose contact you consider yourself in truth contaminated as if from something repugnant and unclean [Jaede lutulentaeque rei contactu, inquinari]? . .. When you are constrained to go to bed, will you not perhaps think that you have been led to a torture? When she will want to embrace and kiss you, will you not think that you are wrapped up and entangled in the filth or in the sewer [nonne in coeno vas atque in cloaca convolvi convolutarique existimabitis]? When, then, the armpits and the other parts of the body, even more hideous to the sight and unbearable to the organ of smell, happen to emanate an odor, how will you be able, not, I say, to feel pleasure, but rather, at least, manage to sleep through those nights? (62) In both these passages, as the Venetian senator engages in the pleasures of scatology, he fancies that he has put women in their place as inherently filthy beings. And, for all that he has lowered his language, he believes he has elevated himself above the objects of his misogynistic attack and encouraged those who listen to him to feel they belong to his group as well. Don't get married, he insists, and you will stay clean. Similar issues are at play as della Casa highlights the importance of cleanliness in his poem on the "oven" (Sopra il forno). In that youthful, licentious poem, the baker's "oven," we should bear in mind, actually refers to the genitalia of a mature woman and is opposed to the constricted anal passage of young "garzonacci" (rough lads), as della Casa characterizes the boys who have tried to usurp the sexual function that belongs to "donne sole" (women alone), though women, it is important to point out, also boast a "little oven," a fornellino, that functions in much the same way as the one belonging to the boys, only better. 68 In any event, God forbid della Casa should actually be talking about a real oven in this scurrilous

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burlesque poem, which he composed toward the beginning of 1536, roughly in the period when he composed the youthful A Delightful Question, and which he modeled on the popular capitoli of Francesco Berni, his friend and bawdy companion in the Accademia de' Vignaiuoli at Rome: Questo non e mestier di farlo invano: Chi a danari, inforni quanto vuole; Dican pur ch' egli e umido e mal netto, La lo lava ben bene, e spazza tutto Sera e mattina per un ordinario; E vuol che non le puta sopra tutto. Si che con tale e si fatto apparecchio La tien quel Forno bianco di bucato, Netto come un bacin, come uno specchio. E se la pala in Forno s'imbrattassi, La ne la cava, e di sua man la netta, Cosi il mestier politamente fassi 69 [This is no job to do for nothing: if one has the money, let him bake as much as he wants; let them even say that it is wet and unclean if they want, She washes hers well and sweeps it clean, evening and morning as a rule; most of all she wants it not to stink. So that with such a tool made in such a way she keeps that oven laundry-clean, neat as a basin or a mirror And if the baking pole gets dirty,7° she pulls it out of there and cleans it with her hands, seeing that her trade is done properly/cleanly.]

The uncontested role of bakers is to bake. No one seems to question that in a poem that still has little to do with such professional expertise. But the role of the baker is also to keep things-objects both fair and foul-dry and clean, as gleaming as a polished mirror, as white as cleansed laundry, as

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spotless as an area well swept around the clock, from dawn to dusk and then back again. If cleanliness is godliness, della Casa' s deity smacks of being the fastidious, sex-starved Priapus, the arduous pagan god with an insatiable appetite to exercise-"infornar," literally stick in the oven-his long staff of fertility. And yet, as in the antimarital treatise composed at about the same time, women once more emerge in this poem as dirty (they need to be cleaned) and men, to the extent that they dirty themselves, are sullied because they have entered the woman. Worse for the woman, as it turns out, it is also her job to clean off the man, while the man-and I think it is safe to say that it is a man articulating the concepts of this poem-gets to say dirty things through the language of cleanliness. In every way, then, the man comes off clean, literally and figuratively. A significant problem arises, however, when della Casa, the proud Florentine patrician and ambitious churchman, happens to become an object of his own critique, a figure pitiful rather than foolish, yet still worthy of self-reproach, within his own field of vision. This occurs from time to time in his lyric poems, which distinguish themselves from his prose works by divulging topics of deep personal concern. 71 In some of his lyric poems, the flight from filth, already voiced in so many of della Casa's treatises and occasionally expressed in his letters, becomes the desperate struggle of the poet imagined as a "vile augello" (vile bird) that tries to lift itself up from the filth of the world and return to its divine lofty origins, much as the soul immersed in mud for Plato finally awakens to recognize its own rightful place in the stars. 72 Now, as in the youthful antimarital treatise, where women have enticed men with their ersatz seductive beauty, the false seductive bait of the world lures earthward the swanlike bird from its lofty abode, while the revolting mud the senator so abhors in the antimarital treatise becomes the "muddy marsh" of the world, the "palustre limo": Io, come vile augel scende a poca esca dal cielo in ima valle, i miei dolci anni vissi in palustre limo; or fonti e querce mi son que! che ostro fummi e vase! d' oro: cosi !'anima purgo, e cangio guerra con pace, e con digiun soverchio cibo. (LXI, 13-18) [I, like a vile bird that descends for meager bait, down from the sky into a low valley, lived my sweet years in a muddy marsh; now fountains and oaks are for me what the purple [robe] and cup of gold once were: thus I purge my soul, exchanging war for peace, and too much food for fasting.f 3

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"La spoglia il mondo mira" (the world gazes at the remains), the poet laments in another late lyric: "Or non s'arresta I spesso nel fango augel di bianche piume?" (does the white-plumed bird not often alight in mud? LII, 9-10 ). Ensnared and weighed down, the besmirched poet must cleanse his heart and mind, flee from the "fango." He mourns: Io che l'eta solea viver nel fango, oggi, mutato il cor da quel ch'i' soglio, d'ogni immondo penser mi purgo e spoglio, e 'l mio lungo fallir correggo e piango. (XVII, 1-4)

[I, who used to live my life in the mud, today, having changed my heart from that which I used to be, purge and strip myself of every unclean thought, weeping and rectifying my long failure.] Though at times this flight from filth sounds like a religious confession (XLVII, 35-46)/4 by and large the force of that confession has a secular tone, concerned as it is with ambition rather than contrition. For example, Gabrielle Trifon, della Casa's deceased friend, ascends unsullied with a candid soul to heaven while the poet, languishing behind, laments. Yet, for all its lacerating grief, the poet's lamentation is not guilt-ridden, nor selfflagellating: habit ("costume"), not sin, weighs the poet down in ''l'atro suo limo terreno" (the black earthly slime)?5 Indeed, even when the waves of Lethe momentarily appear, the very waves that had cleansed Dante's wayfarer of all his prior wrongdoings at the pinnacle of Purgatory Mountain, della Casa's purifying waters are not meant to wash away the filth of sin, but instead the fearful images that haunt the poet in his suffering, the nightmarish "dolor" (pain) of human existence. In the case of della Casa, these nightmarish pains derive in large measure, and in the long run, from his failed aspirations within the church, his dashed hopes for preferment in his ambition to become, like the model figure of Cardinal Bembo, a man who bears the "purple" and towers above all his "inferiors" -as della Casa puts it in his De officiis-in whose midst he now finds himself plunged, much as he found himself plunged in monstrous marshes: Mentre fra valli paludose e ime ritengon me larve turbate e mostri, che tra le gemme, lasso, e l'auro e gli ostri copron venen che 'l cor mi roda e lime; ov'orma di virtU raro s'imprime, per sentier novi, a nullo ancor dimostri,

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qual chi seco d' onor contenda e giostri ten vai tu sciolto a le spedite cime. Onde m'assal vergogna e duo!, qualora membrando vo com' a non degna rete col vulgo caddi, e converra ch'io mora. Felice te, che spento hai !a tua sete! Meco non Febo, rna dolor dimora, cui sola po lavar !' onda di -Lete. (XXVI) [While among marshy and low-level valleys troubled shades and monsters detain me, concealing among the jewels, alas! and the gold and purple [robes] a poison that gnaws and grates away my heart, Where trace of virtue rarely leaves its print, through new paths still unmarked by signs, like one who contends and jousts against himself for honor, you go your way unfettered toward swift heights. Whence shame and grief afflict me, whenever I go remembering how into an unworthy net with the vulgar lot I fell, and it were best if I should die. Happy you, who have quenched your thirst! With me dwells not Phoebus, but rather sorrow, which only the waves of Lethe can wash away_J76

Here as elsewhere in his Rime, della Casa-a proud, ambitious Florentine-was not about to laugh at himself in his state of mournful dejection, but he could envision himself within his own field of vision as a debased figure plunged in the mud of life, amid the inferiors, the filthy and undesirable plebs he had routinely scorned in the etiquette treatise that would posthumously win him fame. Tracing the topic of cleanliness in della Casa' s writings, beginning with his mature prose and ending with his lyric poems, allows us to see in this emblematic writer of the Italian Renaissance that the topic of cleanliness in the period is complex and varied. In della Casa' s writings alone the topic finds expression in many distinct and different forms. It appears in treatises on manners, marriage, social interactions, and language; in ludic capitoli and mannerist Petrarchan poetry; in humanist orations addressed to the last great surviving republic in Italy; in Latin poems, and in letters of casual

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concern sent off to long-standing friends and correspondents. Furthermore, we can frame the topic of cleanliness as it is expressed in della Casa' s works-or, for that matter, in myriad other works composed in the Italian Renaissance-any number of ways. Philosophically, we can frame it in terms of the Platonic notion of the fall from divine origins; the Aristotelian notion that we must avoid turpitude to behave and speak virtuously; the rich, longstanding, but always changing notion in Christian thought that associates filth and cleanliness with sin and grace respectively; the Ciceronian notion that designates certain forms of work as clean and others as sordid and that advocates using an "only elegant and polished/neat/ clean [munditia]" Latin, freed from impurities, when employing an unadorned style of oratory/7 the prevailing notion in classical medicine that noxious odors emitted from filthy putrescent places upset the regimen of individuals and therefore left everyone susceptible to such deadly diseases as the plague; or, to be sure, the standard notion in misogynist literature that women should be viewed as inherently unclean. Given this complexity, both formal and conceptual, if there is an overall message to this book, it is not that the Italians in the Renaissance in any way invented the concept of cleanliness, which anthropologists and religious historians would assure us has a history as old as ancient tribal structures, taboos, and rituals. Rather, the overall message to this book is that the Italian Renaissance witnessed a broad-based concern with the topic of cleanliness and that, above all, the Italian Renaissance contributed to a significantly varied treatment of the topic as a form of cultural and artistic expression. How, then, should we approach the topic of cleanliness as a form of cultural and artistic expression? To think about cleanliness and dirt, the anthropologist Mary Douglas pointed out in her seminal study Purity and Danger, means to think seriously about how a particular culture perceives boundaries generally, from regional frontiers to the actual boundaries of the body, and how both individuals and collectivities locate and fashion their identities in relation to other people. At the same time, focusing on cleanliness tells us much about culturally determined notions concerning private property and privacy. Humans, like animals, Michel Serres has observed in The Parasite, mark territories by means of smells and dirt, and they situate themselves in relation to others according to their attachment to or aversion from those things.78 Moreover, as the sociologist Norbert Elias argued in his classic study, The Civilizing Process, the concepts of cleanliness, civility, and centralized authority are tightly linked. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, developing Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, have argued in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression that focusing on cleanliness means coming to terms with how a particular society perceives and subverts the relations between high and low culture,

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the familiar and the foreign, home and the Other, the normative and the monstrous, the city and the country. Finally, in his iconoclastic study, the History of Shit, Dominique Laporte has argued that a given society's concern for cleanliness reveals much about the culture's view of the inherent purity of its own language, both written and spoken. At stake in any discussion about cultural cleanliness, then, is an understanding of how a given culture-in this case Renaissance Italy-tolerates various degrees of disorder; how it perceives, protects, and plays with bodily and territorial boundaries; and how it polices behavior and forms of speech. These are all topics, as we have just seen, that deeply concerned della Casa throughout his life and that periodically found expression in his writings, both in poetry and prose. In light of the political, social, and philosophical issues that are at stake in any discussion about cultural cleanliness, it is also understandable why Italians generally in the Renaissance would have focused intensely on the topic, for their concern arose at a time when Italy was experiencing enormous social and political transformations. Those transformations dramatically altered conventional attitudes toward civic involvement, opened up new avenues for social mobility, and upset traditional markers of social status. The Renaissance was a time when building booms in major Italian cities transformed the spatial and architectural configuration of civic centers, thereby pushing high and low culture apart by gradually separating the marketplace, where all walks of life communed, from rich domestic palaces, where the elite began to live in zones that were perhaps becoming more exclusively residential. In addition, it was a time when the peninsula, increasingly the site of invasions, found its boundaries violated by foreigners and its customs threatened by competing social and cultural habits imposed from without (principally from Spain and France) and competing social and cultural habits emanating from within Italy's own geographical borders. Along with this, the Italian concern for cleanliness occupied center stage when city health boards began to implement innovative sanitation methods to combat the extraordinarily contagious disease of plague, which pitted people against one another and separated even more conspicuously the wealthy from the poor. Finally, the Italian concern for cleanliness appeared when a number of powerful intellectual dislocations were taking place, not to mention extremely stressful religious dislocations that tore at the fabric of the society. Scholasticism was under attack by humanism, and debates ensued in which the one mode of thought was set vigorously against the other. The role and function of language was also keenly debated. Following Dante, many in the Italian Renaissance attempted to write major literary works in a language that was considered "vulgar" and therefore, according to many educated persons, could never confer on its authors eternal fame. However, for the first time, Italians also began to pu-

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rify that vulgar language by providing it with an authoritative lexicon and grammar. Indeed, since the beginning of the Quattrocento, Italians had been deeply concerned with purity of diction, with cleansing the vernacular and Latin of barbarisms and untoward manners of speech, so that authors seeking fame could write works that would endure in time and become models for future generations. Socially, politically, architecturally, professionally, intellectually, and linguistically, then, things were dramatically changing in Renaissance Italy, and change messes up categories, crosses boundaries-it creates dirt, the very stuff, as Douglas memorably phrased it, that is viewed culturally as "matter out of place." Hence, Italians responded by trying to tidy things up, to clean up the mess. Disorder, while productive, is also discomforting. Change, while necessary and inevitable, creates stress and anxiety. A culture experiencing such change, anxiety, and stress-as did Renaissance Italy in so many different ways-reasonably seeks to give order to the world amid its sense of dislocation. And this partly accounts, I believe, for the remarkable outpouring and proliferation of discussions about the topic of cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. For all these manifold discussions about cleanliness reveal over and over again how different writers sought to process in the realm of the imaginary so many changes going on in their culture. In this regard, talking about cleanliness allowed writers the opportunity to provide systemic order for a disordered world and thus imagine how the world should be and how they would like it to be. At the same time, talking about cleanliness allowed writers the opportunity to value at times the very opposite of cleanliness. Indeed, talking about cleanliness offered some writers the opportunity to express a deep-seated concern that things at times were getting just too oppressively ordered, too neat and clean, too systemically fixed. It is one thing to clean up a mess and provide some order to the world as we imagine it. It is quite another to impose such order to the point where productive change becomes less possible, where having everything so perfectly in place signals a rigidity bordering on death. Italians in the Renaissance may have experienced anxiety amid the disorder of the world, and they may have expressed that anxiety symbolically through the images of cleanliness. But they also valued change and thus the very untidiness that is symbolically experienced culturally as dirt, as "matter out of place." In keeping with Mary Douglas's insights, then, this book addresses cleanliness as a creative and pleasurable principle of order, a positive searching impulse to craft a vision of the world that is integral, complete, and well structured, and a powerful, dynamic rage for making sense out of chaos. By contrast, filth, directly associated with the grotesque body by Bakhtin, is viewed as alive, vigorously at odds with itself, transgressive, open-ended, endlessly renewable, equally creative,

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pleasurable, life-enhancing, and fertile, even if filth may seem, at first glance, to be nothing other than still, inert matter-the lifeless materia, in the Aristotelian terms used in the Renaissance, that appears to be in need of being spiritually informed by form. 79 This book cannot pretend to be comprehensive or exhaustive about a topic that permeates Renaissance Italian culture, from della Casa's insistence in the Gala teo that we should all dutifully wear clean clothes in order to be accepted in polite society to the advice proffered in Machiavelli's Clizia that an ignorant farmhand seeking a woman's hand in the city should fix himself up, put on a clean pair of clothes, and get a decent shave in order not to appear so dreadfully filthy-as filthy, we can glean from the calculated pun, as a pig ("porco"). 80 As a result, no all-encompassing master narrative will emerge about the topic of cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. What I offer instead is more an "anatomy," to adopt a uniquely late Renaissance genre, and I offer a partial anatomy in three interrelated chapters that unfold in largely essay form. For it would be neither possible nor productive to attempt to trace every instance when cleanliness appears in the cultural imagination of the period. The topic is simply too vast, too ever-present, too "copious," to borrow yet another Renaissance concept, this one familiar to scholars of Renaissance rhetoric. The topic of cleanliness appears in humanist panegyrics, letters, and invectives; in ideal and eyewitness descriptions of cities; in various works of imaginative literature, from lyric poems to satires to romances to novellas to Jacetiae to burlesque poems to comic theater to carnival songs to celebrated madrigals set to music. It appears in autobiographies and writings by visual artists defending their own privileged medium; in personal letters, ambassadorial reports and diaries; in chronicles, travel narratives, and histories. It appears as well in discussions about language, politics, rhetoric, architecture, medicine, emblems, civil comportment, editorial practices, banquet preparation, and professional development. Nevertheless, even if this book cannot offer a comprehensive survey, it does approach the topic with an overall design in mind, and it does so by following much of the pattern of the opening discussion of della Casa's writings, which began by exploring how della Casa distanced himself from the unclean and sought to elevate himself as he prescribed clean acts, then examined how della Casa displayed a fascination with abomination as he mixed up the clean and unclean, and finally ended by considering how della Casa envisioned himself in his plaintive personal lyrics as an object of his own critique, as a man who felt debased and thus, in his own mind, unclean. Following this overall design, this book moves from the clean to the unclean and from the elevated to the base primarily in works of literature in the Italian Renaissance. It begins in the first chapter by focusing on people

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who were truly esteemed: the father of the family who makes certain the household is clean; the aristocratic ambassador sent off to represent a government in a foreign domain; and the humanist rhetor who polices language and, as he purifies it, provides models for the proper use of that language in the household, public forum, and polite company. The second chapter then turns to people who typically occupied a liminal place in Italian society: the washerwomen who, while associated with the rank-andfile popolo minuto, both handled the cleansing product of soap and toiled to ensure that all the linen that touched the bodies of their clientele would be clean. The final chapter of this book addresses workers universally scorned by society at large: the latrine-cleaners, men of truly base social standing, whose daily labors had them in direct, unmediated contact with enormous quantities of stercoraceous filth. In passing from the elevated to the base, from the clean to the unclean, this book also passes from elevated places to base ones, from a clean household and a pristine city envisioned as the most beautiful in the world (chapter 1) to the working areas of town or the riverbed where washerwomen typically cleansed clothes and passed time chatting and socializing (chapter 2) to latrines and cesspools, which uniformly stank and were therefore universally shunned (chapter 3). At the same time, in passing from the elevated to the base, from the clean to the unclean, this book works its way through a hierarchy of genres of the Renaissance, focusing in the process primarily on literary artifacts, but also occasionally taking into account visual ones. In chapter 1, for instance, I concentrate on writings composed by esteemed humanists or men of real social standing: the humanist dialogue and panegyric that resuscitates and imitates revered classical models of ancient Rome and Greece, as well as an unusually learned ambassadorial report full of literary references and rhetorical embellishments. In chapter 2 I examine genres associated with the middle range of styles in both literature and the visual arts: mock-epics, genre paintings, drawings, preparatory sketches for paintings, and landscapes. Finally, in chapter 3 I look at gross comic material: infernal satirical curses, novellas with distinctly scatological themes to them, and a carnival song. At the same time, in moving from the elevated to the base, from the clean to the unclean, we will move from a language that is cleansed and purified in humanist set-pieces to a base, popular language that is deliberately employed to upset decorum in openly anti-elitist works of literature. Chapter 1, "Households and Cities," is divided into two parts with two sets of texts in each part. The first part examines Alberti's and Tasso's dialogues on the household, The Family and The Father of the Family, respectively. The second part examines Marco Foscari's and Leonardo Bruni's descriptions of Florence, the former in the shape of an unusually learned

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and rhetorically embellished ambassadorial report, the latter in the shape of one of the most famous humanist panegyrics of the Renaissance, the Laudatio florentinae urbis. There are, to be sure, obvious differences between the first and second set of texts, beyond the fact that the first discusses households, the second a city. Though Alberti and Tasso draw on personal experiences in the moment that they write, they are hardly in the particular household they describe as they prescribe how such a household should be run. They write about and fashion a household that exists in their minds, much as Plato wrote about the perfect Republic, Xenophon the perfect statesman, Cicero the perfect orator, and most famously in early Cinquecento Italy, Castiglione the perfect courtier. In the process of bringing together theory and practice, Alberti and Tasso also bring together classical and modern sources to create an ideal household, even as they construct that ideal household through a narrative of realism, by offering us different points of view presented by different participants, all of whom are grounded in a particular place and time. In the case of Alberti, the participants in his The Family are identified family members who have gathered together in Padua to mourn the imminent death of Alberti's father, Lorenzo, in May 1421. In the case of Tasso, the participants in his The Father of the Family are thinly veiled versions of acquaintances of Tasso, all of whom have met in a house near the Sesia River, somewhere between Novara and Turin, in 1577 or 1578. In both dialogues, the authors are also present, Alberti conspicuously in the guise of a person who actively participates in the discussions, Tasso more subtly in the guise of an unnamed guest who dutifully listens to the elder host expound on the virtues of household maintenance. By contrast, Foscari and Bruni write about an actual city they are residing in or had recently resided in: Foscari had just lived for an entire year in Florence as the Venetian resident ambassador when he first drafted his report shortly after returning home in 1528; Bruni was probably still living in Florence as a disciple of Coluccio Salutati when he composed his Laudatio in roughly 1404. Both Foscari and Bruni, however, draw on the language of impassioned praise as they write. Florence is a real place with a real constitution with real people doing real things, but Foscari's and Bruni's descriptions, like so many rhetorically involved ekphrases of the Renaissance, can, and often do, play fast and loose with the facts in order to function as more effective arguments of persuasion. Despite the differences between the texts examined in the first and second parts of this chapter, which extend to both form and function, there are still a number of unifying features to the way the four authors treat the topic of cleanliness. In Alberti's The Family, Tasso's The Father of the Family, Foscari's ambassadorial report, and Bruni's Laudatio, cleanliness consistently denotes order, and the four authors pursue that order with a

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vengeance, whether they are describing how a household should be kept clean or are praising Florence as an astonishingly clean city. In all these works, order and cleanliness are also unambiguously valued and deemed a necessary good. No discernable pleasure is therefore taken in talking about filth or, for that matter, in using filthy language. Quite the contrary. If cleaning demands pushing undesirable stuff beyond the margins, expelling-sweeping away with a purging swoosh of a conceptual broomwhat doesn't fit within an ordered, systemic whole, Alberti, Tasso, Foscari, and Bruni, all four of whom aim to push undesirable elements from their writings, delight in actively excluding filthy members, ideas, or language from their ordered discourses. Most important of all, in talking about cleanliness, all of these authors use the topic symbolically to establish or preserve their sense of their own place as elevated members of society with original thoughts and contributions to make, and they couch those thoughts and contributions in forms that were themselves regarded as elevated and that were purposely presented to others with an elevated, purified diction. The topic of cleanliness thus affords these writers the possibility of affirming their own sense of where they rightfully belong within the social order at a time when real social mobility had become possible in Italy, both in ecclesiastical and civic realms, and when many Italians struggling for position amid the elite (including some of the authors discussed in this chapter) felt threatened that they might lose their place, either because they might fall out of favor with superiors in positions of real power or because they might find themselves surpassed by members of society with whom they were directly or indirectly in competition. Alberti in his The Family, for instance, calls attention to the fact that he has single-handedly revived the classical discussion of economics, adding, in good humanist fashion, that he has both matched and surpassed his models through agonistic imitation. Though he wrote his treatise in the vernacular, and thus in a language typically deemed by Quattrocento humanists to be inferior to classical Greek and Latin, Alberti intended his The Family to be viewed as an elevated dialogue worthy of being measured against such classical works as Xenophon's Oeconomicus, along with Ciceronian dialogues generally, particularly the Orator, De oratore, Tusculanae disputationes, and De finibus. 81 In addition, Alberti maintains within the dialogue, as well as in his autobiographical sketch, De vita, that The Family served to provide Florentines with an enduring model for good Tuscan speech. 82 In doing so Alberti composed a work that was supposed to function as a clean ordered discourse with a clean ordered language. At the heart of Alberti's treatment of cleanliness, moreover, is his desire to secure for himself symbolically a place in his family, the world, and literary history. Alberti, the bastard son, had suffered from a painful loss of place

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within his own extended family with the death of his father, Lorenzo. Indeed, according to Alberti in his autobiography, he had been treated poorly by many of the surviving family members. Along with that, he belonged to a family that had long been exiled from Florence. With his The Family, Alberti aims to set things straight. He strategically reasserts his place not only within that exiled family, which he has pictured as fastidiously neat and clean and ordered, but his place in Florentine literary history as someone who has written a truly original and innovative work, a work that purges the vulgar Tuscan tongue of infelicities of speech and that vies with the classical models of antiquity. Cleanliness in The Family, whether it has to do with the purification of language or a household, is thus very much about reasserting order within a world that Alberti could have only found distinctly untidy as a bastard son from a family long exiled from Florence. By contrast, Tasso, the other humanist discussed in the first part of this chapter, writes about an aristocratic rather than wealthy mercantile family, and he is not at all thinking about one living in exile but about his own selfimposed exile. Furthermore, by the time Tasso composed his dialogue on household management at the end of the Cinquecento, the vexed questione della lingua, which had been so vital an issue of debate for Italian humanists earlier in the century, had for the most part been settled, largely, though not exclusively, in favor of Bembo's literary and linguistic project, which, as Paolo Cherchi succinctly observed, offered up an ideal language "purified of all barbarism and dialectalism and fulfilling all the requirements of control, decorum, and liveliness without a trace of vulgarity-a language, in essence, that represents the Renaissance ideal of equilibrium and classical beauty." 83 Tasso therefore does not need to address in his dialogue a broad-based cultural concern for coming up with a clean, purified vulgar tongue as he writes, though his dialogue is certainly elevated in diction and style, as one might expect from a humanist of his background and interests. Like Alberti, however, Tasso-always the elitist, though one with a paranoid's talent for undermining his own precarious status within the court-uses the topic of cleanliness in The Father of the Family to elevate himself in the very moment that he suffers from a profound sense of loss of place in Alfonso II's court in Ferrara. He writes his dialogue about an ideal household while imprisoned in Sant'Anna, having behaved, yet again, inappropriately. Tasso, the "inferior" trapped in what he openly describes as a dirty space, fantasizes about a household in which the purifying habits of cleanliness fit perfectly within a highly ordered society. And Tasso's imagined clean household is one in which everyone understands, accepts, and appreciates his or her place in not just the body politic but also the cosmos. More important, within that rigidly ordered and codified household that functions as a microcosm of the perfectly ordered world

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and universe, Tasso, a man in search of a patron and a pardon, finds a place: he is welcomed warmly and appreciated for his qualities and gifts as a man of impeccable talent and manners. The topic of cleanliness in Tasso's The Father of the Family thus reflects Tasso's fantasy of rehabilitation during a period of debasement. And he achieves this rehabilitation as an "inferior" within the court-he locates his proper place as a writer worthy of deep respect-in an innovative dialogue that is ordered and elevated in both its form and diction. Unlike Alberti or Tasso, the Venetian Marco Foscari, the author discussed at the beginning of the second part of chapter 1, already has a strong sense of place as he writes his ambassadorial report on Florence. He was a man engaged in lofty matters of state, a friend of Pope Clement VII, cousin of the great doge, Andrea Gritti, and last but not least, an aristocrat. However, precisely because he was a man of secure social and political standing, Foscari feels somewhat displaced while in Florence, a city that strikes him as at once familiar and unfamiliar. Like Venice, Florence is a remarkable city. It boasts some of the greatest monuments in Christendom and can lay claim to some of the greatest literary treasures of the Renaissance. By the time Foscari had finished revising his report and submitted it to the senate in 1533, Florence-no longer a republic with the return of the Medici in 1530-was well on its way to becoming the landmark city of the Renaissance, boasting such architectural monuments as Brunelleschi' s dome. When Foscari describes Florence, he therefore has in mind not just the real city he had lived in but ideal pictures of it, both verbal and visual. Moreover, Foscari has in mind, and deliberately cites, famous Florentine writers, from Dante to Bruni to Machiavelli. In this respect, Florence is undeniably like Venice: it is well built, elegant, beautiful, and cultured. But, unlike Florence, Venice had, and would always have, a superior form of government. Both Florence and Venice may be republics, at least for the time being for Florence while Foscari resided there in 1527, but Venice was the only republic with the truly balanced government that brought together aristocratic, oligarchic, and democratic elements to create-according to the dictates of classical political theory-a single, serene, and above all unified, orderly state. Florence, by contrast, was a republic where merchants engaged openly in "vile and dirty" work, as Foscari disdainfully puts it. For the aristocratic Foscari, who envisioned himself, in della Casa's term, as a "superior," the contact that the Florentines have with their dirty workers on a daily basis is revolting, and it accounts for the weakness of the Florentines generally. Florentines mixed up groups, made a mess of social categories, created an untidy-and hence dirty-society. True to form, Foscari the aristocrat responds to this feeling of displacement as he resides in an unkempt society by demonstrating within his ambassadorial report

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a love for his "patria," even as he praises the virtues of Florence. Florence may be architecturally clean, and thus a truly marvelous, unique city, but it is, and remains for Foscari, socially dirty. Foscari is therefore only too happy to return home and find his place once again in the harmoniously ordered, and thus conceptually and politically clean, Venetian republic. Finally, of all the authors treated in chapter 1, Bruni provides in his Laudatio the most rhetorically complex treatment of cleanliness as he offers a very different picture of Florence than the one presented about a century after him by Foscari. After tossing aside features of the city possibly worthy of discussion, Bruni insists at the outset of his Laudatio that Florence is notable because of its extraordinary cleanliness. Indeed, so clean is Florence that no other evolved urban center in the history of civilization, from ancient Greek city-states to imperial Rome, had ever been so clean, both within the individual houses and outside of them. Florence is thus the place to be, unique in its cleanliness, just as it is unique, Bruni insists, in its harmoniously ordered social structure and political governance as a republic. And Bruni, the humanist who offers up a model of linguistic purity and decorum with his panegyric, is the trained Latinist to write this ordered panegyric in praise of such a uniquely clean, ordered, and well-governed city. Indeed, Bruni wrote his panegyric in part with the aim of offering to the world a model of pure, unadulterated Latinity. But Bruni's aim creates a problem, at least for scholars attuned to the verbal strategies employed by such accomplished rhetoricians as Bruni. For in the end it is difficult to know whether it is Bruni's search for a pure Latinity that leads him to stress to an unprecedented degree the topic of cleanliness in the city of Florence and then make it the first full description we have of this highly ordered republic, or, inversely, if it is the actual cleanliness of Florence that leads Bruni to adopt cleanliness as a topos, a rhetorical device, and use it to express his concern for a pure, undefiled Latin. Either way (and it may be a matter of both, a give and take between the objective reality out there as Bruni experienced it and the subjective, critical judgment that he brought to bear on it as a trained rhetor writing a humanist set-piece), what matters most for our purposes is that Bruni does, in fact, make cleanliness the very first full topic we encounter in his panegyric, and that cleanliness does emerge from the outset as a hallmark of his highly ordered, pristine, republican city. For no other author of any stature within the classical tradition had ever started a panegyric in this way before, and there is no precedent for doing so within the classical rhetorical tradition. Bruni's search for a starting point in his Laudatio, then, does not lead to some original textual model, as one might imagine it would have for a humanist of his stature and training. Rather, Bruni's search for a starting point at the beginning of his Laudatio only leads us back to Bruni's originality, the fact

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that he has done something radically new by beginning his panegyric in this manner. In Bruni's panegyric, then, cleanliness not only signals the elevated place of Florence, both socially and politically, as a unique and original city worthy of exaggerated praise, but the elevated stature of Bruni as a unique and original orator worthy of the highest respect. The four principal authors discussed in the first chapter treat cleanliness as an unambiguous good. They therefore use the topic of cleanliness symbolically to call attention to the delight they take in seeking order and putting things in order, so that no matter is out of place politically, socially, linguistically, and aesthetically. In chapter 2, "Soap and Washerwomen," we continue to examine writings where cleanliness is deemed a necessary good. Soap, for instance, is overtly valued in the writings examined at the outset of this chapter, and so are the material objects cleansed with soap. Soap helps make laundry, "biancheria," at times literally white, "bianca," and this is good, especially when the soap is nicely scented, so that the laundry in general comes out not just clean but fragrant. Pietro Aretino sums up this concept nicely in his The Master of the Horse (1527-30; printed 1533) with the terse observation that nothing is worse than "sheets washed with cold water and without soap [senza sapone]." 84 Moreover, soap makes its appearance in works of imaginative literature not just as a cleanser and a fragrant but, from time to time, even as a cosmetic softener for hands, a soothing balsam for shaving, and, somewhat surprisingly, a lubricant for anal intercourse. Soap, a popular enough cleansing and perfuming agent, was thus envisioned as a valuable item that could assist people in truly a wide variety of ways. Along with this, soap was readily available for purchase, we learn in different works of literature of the period. So familiar was soap in the Italian Renaissance that the Florentine jokester Arlotto de' Mainardi (1396-1484) could acknowledge the appearance of a new soap shop in town as if it were nothing out of the ordinary, a real cultural commonplace: "One day Piovano was passing along via de' Martelli and he found a new shop, where a Catalan, a great master in making and in knowing about all types of musk-scented soaps [sapone moscadato], stayed .... One morning Piovano stopped while walking along and entered the shop, saying that he'd like to buy a small container of musk-scented soap [un vasetto di sapone muschiato ], he picked it up in his hands, and, after smelling it, asked the price." 85 The only thing new for the narrator of the Witticisms and Jokes of Piovano Arlotta is the shop, not the soap itself. For selling soap seems to be part and parcel of Florentine business as usual. And selling soap seems to be part and parcel of business generally in Italy, at least as the topic of the marketing of soap appears in Renaissance Italian literature. In his Dialogues, for instance, Pietro Aretino describes how an itinerant salesmen, a Fuller brushman of sorts, travels from door to door with a host

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of wares on a board supported by a strap around his neck, selling, among the objects hawked, a variety of "saponetti." Ignominious men, Aretina also tells us in his same Dialogues, are sometimes even base enough to steal, of all things, "a ball of soap" (palla di sapone) from a woman's boudoir. 86 If soap, a popular cleaning agent, was thus valued, the people who typically used soap to clean objects, the washerwomen, were not. Indeed, washerwomen, we shall see in this chapter, were viewed with real ambivalence in the cultural imagination of the period as alternatively clean or dirty people, and sometimes both at the same time. On the one hand, by cleaning clothes for other people, washerwomen contributed to that widely disseminated ideal of cleanliness that helped confer authority on people in power, the superiors whom della Casa insists must always wear clean clothing. On the other hand, though washerwomen used the cleansing product of soap to ensure that the laundry entrusted to them will come out spic-and-span, they also used that soap in a mechanical job that is deemed filthy precisely because it is so low, so base. Moreover, some washerwomen-in truth, it would seem, a great number of them in Renaissance Italy, if we can take Aretina at his word-were former prostitutes whose cleansing of clothes could function symbolically as a dramatic expression of their spiritual renewal and moral cleansing. 87 The "biancheria" they obediently whitened reflected the penitential lightening of their now bleached, but once soiled, souls through wholesome, productive work. In this respect, as ex-prostitutes working in a socially low mechanical job, washerwomen could lift themselves up by their own conceptual bootstraps and become spiritually, though never socially, clean through their labors. The soap they used served them well to clean objects for other people, while the work they performed spiritually cleansed them. In anthropological terms, then, chapter 2 examines workers who can best be described as "liminal." Washerwomen occupy a place both inside and outside a social system as figures that are at once clean and filthy, both in place and out of place. Washerwomen are associated with matter in place (clothes cleansed with soap) and matter out of place (the filth removed from that clothing thanks to soap). They are associated with clean and dirty behavior in mutually contradictory contexts: acts of penitence and acts of prostitution. And they are associated with clean and filthy work: washerwomen make things lily white and therefore participate in work that is socially necessary to ensure that people in the world appear clean, but washerwomen do not enhance their own social position in doing so, and the dirt they have removed arguably gets associated with them, not the people who dirtied the clothes to begin with. Renaissance Italian writers and artists often chose to acknowledge the importance attributed to cleanliness in their culture. But what, we might

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ask, did they choose to do with the washerwomen? Did writers and artists include the figure of the washerwoman within their verbal or visual representations? Washerwomen, after all, were allowed into, and could work within, clean, ordered domestic spaces, and they were also permitted to have close contact with the linen that was used for cleaning bodies and that directly touched and covered them. In this respect, washerwomen were seen as people associated directly with cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. Yet, even if washerwomen contributed to the ideal of cleanliness in the Renaissance, by their presence alone they potentially offended decorum: they were filthy workers, ex-prostitutes, outsiders best relegated to the margins of urban centers-"feccia" (dregs, riff-raff), as della Casa succinctly characterizes them in his Galatea (45, 421). This being the case, does a writer or an artist include such an ambivalent figure of the clean and unclean in a work of art? One solution to this problem, which a number of writers and artists adopted in Renaissance Italy, was to simply excise the washerwoman altogether from the realm of the imaginary while still emphasizing the importance of the objects cleansed by washerwomen. In this regard, washerwomen, as we shall see in chapter 2, could function as absent presences, their invisible "agency" often detectable only through visual or verbal traces encoded into artifacts. If, for instance, authors or artists wished to introduce the topic of cleanliness, they could simply mention, as anumber of writers did, that the bucato (laundry) in a house was clean, that an apron someone wore was well washed, that a shirt was particularly spicand-span. Alternatively, visual artists could reveal, as some did in their paintings and designs, a shirt pinned up to dry, a bundle of laundry poles leaning against a balcony, a set of sheets hanging over a canal, piazza, or street. Writers and artists in Renaissance Italy, in short, realized that a public can appreciate the tools needed for cleaning or the actual objects cleaned without ever having to witness or hear about the low-levellaborer who did the cleaning-the socially base washerwoman who potentially offended decorum by her very presence within the realm of the imaginary. At the same time, several writers and artists in Renaissance Italy chose to represent washerwomen openly in art forms that allowed for a mingling of the high and the low, art forms that were appropriate for such liminal figures within Italian Renaissance culture. In the visual arts, for instance, we begin to see the washerwomen represented in venues in which the artist's imagination could roam less encumbered by the constraints of decorum: drawings and preparatory sketches; genre paintings, which became fashionable toward the end of the sixteenth century; and landscapes. 88 By the same token, in literature washerwomen occasionally figure in genres that traditionally allowed for a mingling of the high and the low: informal letters, carnival songs, novellas, and burlesque poems. Renaissance Italian

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authors did not, to be sure, incorporate washerwomen into more elevated literary forms, such as epic, or even, for that matter, the highly popular transgressive genre of romance. After treating soap, much of chapter 2 is devoted to documenting the presence and status of washerwomen in the imagination of Italian culture generally during the Renaissance. To do so, we will examine, along with the occasional appearance of laundry and washerwomen in visual representations of the period, portions of Aretina's The Courtesan (or, more appropriately, The Courtiers' Play) and Dialogues; a letter by Machiavelli, composed when he was down and out in Verona; and a number of short passages from the Italian novella tradition, beginning with Boccaccio' s Decameron and extending to stories by Sacchetti and Malespini and novelistic-styled jokes (jacetiae) by Poggio Bracciolini and Leonardo da Vinci. All this material, both textual and visual, primarily serves to provide the context for the last part of this chapter, which focuses on a remarkable poem by Giulio Cesare Croce (1550-1609), a popular Bolognese cantastorie (professional storyteller). In his La Filippa da Calcara, Croce deliberately mocks the conventions of both epic and romance by talking about the awe-inspiring trials and tribulations of a washerwoman who cleanses an unending quantity of wash with her bar of soap. Even the full, lengthy bombastic title of Croce's poem-La Filippa da Calcara, La quale va cercando da far bucate. Dove s'intende le gran prove che fa una valente lavandara (La Filippa da Calcara, who goes searching to do laundry. Wherein is to be understood the great trials that a strong and capable washerwoman undergoes )-ridicules the romance penchant for amplification and the epic interest in lofty, valiant deeds that inspire not just wonder but awe. However, though Croce deliberately mocks genre expectations in his short burlesque poem, beginning with his deliberately pompous title and extending to the language and imagery contained within it, he also repeatedly emphasizes the inherent social value of the particular washerwoman, La Filippa da Calcara, who is the sole focus of his attention. Time and again Croce stresses the importance of her job and the intrinsic merit of this woman, who actually cleans so many things. Croce values this particular washerwoman, I contend, because he identifies with her. On the one hand, as a popular professional storyteller, Croce was connected both in his own mind and in the minds of his contemporaries with carnival: Croce was born, he vaunted in his autobiographical poem, on carnival day, and tradition had it that he died some fifty-nine years later on that day as well. In every way, then, Croce was linked to low, popular culture, and he deliberately chose topics that would confirm such an impression of him-topics, to be sure, such as washerwomen. On the other hand, for all that he liked to mock the authors of high culture, Croce desired fame, and so he encodes into his works a de-

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sire to be appreciated for what he has to offer as a professional storyteller of the low, the base, the marginalized. In this way, just as a lowly washerwoman can be redeemed within Croce's artistic form and valued for her ability to clean so much wash, so too Croce, the lowly carnival author, can be elevated in the minds of his readers and be valued for his originality as a poet of unusual and unconventional sensibilities. He may write about the low, but he wishes to be elevated and embraced by the high. He, too, wishes to be an object of admiration as he supplants the high with the low, the sublime with the ridiculous, and simultaneously conflates in an innovative way the filthy and the clean in a mock-heroic poem focused on a woman who inspires awe in her ability to rid an endless quantity of clothes of dirt with the help of soap and good fresh water. Finally, in the third and last chapter, "Latrines and Latrine-Cleaners," we focus on overtly low and dirty places (latrines full of shit) and low and dirty people (latrine-cleaners who remove shit) in works composed by Florentines living in the Trecento (Dante and Boccaccio) and the mid Cinquecento (della Casa and the Ps.-Lorenzo de' Medici). As it goes from Dante to the Ps.-Lorenzo, this chapter moves from the truly diabolical within a theological setting (a cosmic cesspool) to the playfully diabolical within the secular realm of the carnivalesque (latrine-cleaners saying all sorts of nasty things ostensibly in a vibrant carnival setting), from vile sinners who are ashamed to be identified because their heads are smeared with crap to vile workers who shamelessly immerse themselves in cesspools and take pleasure in doing so. Chapter 3 begins by showing how there was a developed literature and iconography in the Middle Ages that presented Hell as Satan's own massive personal privy. Dante was aware of the tradition of viewing Hell in this manner when he wrote the Divine Comedy, and he makes this evident in Inferno 18, where the flatterers are steeped in feces. In describing the otherworld, however, Dante, even if he persistently has this world in mind, offers an overriding theological perspective to the opposition of cleanliness and filth. Cleanliness in the Divine Comedy is not just good but directly associated with the ultimate, absolute, cosmic, morally centered Good, and filth, appropriately enough, is associated with sinfulness. The flatterers in Inferno 18 are therefore immersed in shit and trapped in a privy within the larger cesspool of Hell not because they are socially low and inferior, but because they have sinned, and their punishment fits their act of consciously turning away from God. They actively chose to displace themselves from God's ordered, principled city, in which everyone has a place, accepts his or her place, and feels fulfilled in his or her place. The relationship between the clean and the unclean, like the relationship between heaven and Hell, is thus in the end always vertically and theologically structured in the Divine Comedy. The latrine of Hell, which only

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seems to be ordered but is really chaotic, fits within the overall structure of God's perfect, ordered cosmos because it has a function in the grand scheme of things. Hell exists to gather matter out of place, the spiritually impure. And as a massive cesspool, Hell serves to collect the burdensome weight of peccatum, Augustine's gravity of sin, and contain it where it rightfully belongs, far from God, as distant as possible from the True and the One. It hardly matters, then, if the damned were once clean in life, or if they can still display clean habits in Hell. It only matters if people have sinned, if they are spiritually filthy. And if they have sinned, Dante's damned get cast into Satan's privy. If they're saved, they can ascend, like the wayfarer, purged and cleansed toward the stars. Chapter 3 begins, then, with the most massive eschatological dimension that would, of course, never be cleaned, as well as with the greatest poet of the Italian Middle Ages, whose treatment of cleanliness in his Divine Comedy-and its logical opposite, filth-is in the end fairly straightforward, even though Dante complicates the topic of cleanliness in extraordinarily imaginative ways by exhausting a range of linguistic possibilities at his disposal in the vernacular and by co-opting a host of genres within his all-embracing, encyclopedic poem. In the end, however, cesspools themselves aren't bad in the Divine Comedy. Only the cesspool of Hell is bad, as is any particular cesspool within Hell, and we really should avoid such filthy places, we are given to understand in the allegory of the poem, by behaving ourselves in this life: otherwise, we might just end up eternally condemned to such spiritual filth when we die. By contrast, as we turn to (more) secular writings of the Italian Renaissance, beginning with Boccaccio's Decameron and ending with a carnival song on latrine-cleaners attributed to Lorenzo de' Medici in print as early as 1559,89 we see that people dumped in shit, associated with shit, allowed to wallow in shit, or permitted to take delight in shit are not viewed as sinners, but as socially inept or shamelessly vile people. Either way, the people immersed in shit in these Renaissance works of literature are worthy of being socially debased and disgraced. It is not accidental, for instance, that Boccaccio discredits in his Decameron a pompous, dim-witted, and socially clumsy physician, Maestro Simone, by hurling him into a public privy. For all his training at the great medical school at the University of Bologna, Maestro Simone didn't even have the good sense to stay out of shit. For this reason, if Maestro Simone ends up diabolically dumped in a privy in a mock descent that echoes, as Victoria Kirkham has pointed out, the plight of Dante's flatterers on Judgment Day, 90 it is not because Maestro Simone is sinful but because his proper place in society is the cesspool, at least at the moment when he finds himself dumped there by the Buffalmacco, a jovial artist who has dressed up in satanic garb specifically for the demonic occasion.

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Just as fools deserved to be fooled in Boccaccio's Decameron, so shitty people deserve to be dumped in shit. They deserve to be disgraced, and in the Decameron fools-often people who are not flatterers but who can be too easily flattered-can, and should, be disgraced with devilish fun and good humor. However, like so many characters in Boccaccio's socially mobile world, fools can still acquire insight into themselves and the world of which they are a part. They can therefore work themselves out of the cesspool, prove themselves worthy of being welcomed back into society. It is possible, then, for socially debased people dumped in shit in the Decameron to rise up, learn from their mistakes, and, like Maestro Simone, be cleansed. By doing so, these edified characters within the Decameron can find a place back in society, though there is no guarantee that they will then continue to occupy that place permanently. In the Decameron, unlike the Divine Comedy, with the sinners and blessed fixed in their designated places in the otherworld, one always has the opportunity to fall, and ignominiously fail, over and over again. Sometimes, however, people of established dignity and rank, along with people who have a strong sense of their rightful place in society, suffer a profound sense of loss of place in society when they feel they have been unfairly placed in shit. Boccaccio certainly felt this way when he went to Naples and was treated "shittily," as he candidly describes it in a vitriolic letter sent to his friend Francesco Nelli. In real terms, Boccaccio gives us to understand in his letter that we must do everything to avoid being associated with the matter contained within a cesspool-the matter Andreuccio da Perugia and Maestro Simone tumbled into-if we wish to preserve our place in society and not end up appearing, even after we've managed to fix ourselves up, like a "cleansed toilet" (cesso ripulito), as one base servant mockingly accuses another in Machiavelli's Clizia. 91 For this reason as well, della Casa-who drew on Boccaccio's Decameron in writing his Galatea and who, like Boccaccio, was always concerned with how everyone needs to work very, very hard to maintain a particular place in society-insists that we must never call attention to the fact that we need to use a latrine when we go out to dinner. At all costs, we must avoid even hinting at the notion that we've defecated before we sit down to a meal. If we do call attention to the fact that we've used a latrine, we end up offending others, perhaps even damaged ourselves by allowing other people to think of us in the context of shit. By planting in the mind of someone else the image of us having defecated in a latrine, we effectively plant in the mind of someone else an image of us displaced from the polite, clean area where we hope to be accepted and welcomed. In this way, we not only disturb others by selfishly making them feel ill at ease, but we also disgrace ourselves, remove ourselves from the center of a clean, well-ordered society and gathering.

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We damage ourselves by inadvertently dumping shit on ourselves. It's not the fault of our companions at the dinner table, after all, if we come back from the bathroom fixing our clothes and thereby invite images of us defecating; in the final analysis, it is our own fault. 92 By contrast, finding oneself removed from a polite, ordered, well-mannered society is, in truth, what the latrine-cleaners openly desire in a carnival song attributed in mid-Cinquecento Italy to Lorenzo de' Medici. Indeed, the Ps.-Lorenzo de' Medici's latrine-cleaners are eleva ted precisely because they are so low, so dirty, so quick to dive into filth. They have not only accepted their place as marginalized filthy workers within the social order, but they take pleasure in being the butt of the scatological curse, the targets of satire, the putative villains of an ordered, polite society. Hence, the Ps.-Lorenzo de' Medici's latrine-cleaners do not at all mind being disgraced but actually seek it. On carnival day, when vile people lap up food with their mouths puffed out wide, it's fine and dandy to be associated with shit. In fact, it accrues to your credit. This is the one moment in the year when a robust fart, to put it crudely, can be legitimately transformed into jovial popular art. The last thing anyone in the carnival song on latrine-cleaners would putatively care for, then, would be to find themselves seated with della Casa and his ilk at a polite dinner table. Conversely, no one-absolutely no one-of any social standing in Renaissance Italy would care to have latrine-cleaners around, and some Renaissance Italian authors make this quite clear in their writings. 93 We can see some of these issues at play, for instance, in Garzoni's The Universal Piazza, where the author-concerned as he always is with issues of cleanliness as a mark of social and professional status-reserves for latrine-cleaners his harshest remarks among the more than four hundred occupations examined in his massive, cornucopian text." As for the latrine-cleaners [curadestri]," he insists, who come from the most fetid filth of the plebs, whose name alone stinks like crap for all the crowd [della piu fetida feccia del volga, che col nome solo putiscono da stereo per ogni banda], they must never come into this square and contaminate all the honorable people that are to be found in it. But because also in this square there are places set aside for them, we will assign them the pissing corners [i cantoni dal piscio], so very far away from the place where the nobility walks about, so as not to soil with their presence the gowns of the doctors, or the swords of the soldiers, which they willingly let splash about on the earth, and who therefore run the risk off picking up some filth [immondizia], like that of the latrine-cleaners. They are so called in Latin" cleaners of latrines," and are so vile that Plautus in one of his comedies, wanting to say that a person wasn't worth·a certain amount of money, said that he didn't even take notice

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of the fact that a handmaiden worker of his washed the basins, or the shitpot of the house [cacatoio di casa]; so this word "latrine" comes from the Latin a lavando, as Varro bears witness in the second book of his De analogia, so that the latrine-cleaners wash with a nose irritated from all that filth that in public and private places is so commonly found; and the same latrine-cleaners make use of those tubs of filth [vasi da immondizie] that the Latins called "scaphia," which Giulio Polluce mentions in the tenth book of his Onomastico, and Ulpiano in the legal work Quintus Mutius, Digestis, "De aura, et

argenta." But because the whole thing stinks to ponder too much, I leave them be with the basin on their head, or with the ugly mug of an executioner inside the latrine [col mostaccio daboia dcntro nel cesso], until I return to them. (1360)

In Garzoni's view, as far back in time as when the ancient Romans ruled their massive empire, latrine-cleaners have been around. They are the scum of the earth, about as filthy as filthy can be. They therefore appear in Garzoni's fantasy as a sinister threat, as horrifying to witness as the executioner with his axe. Yet, even as Garzoni demeans and dismisses these latrine-cleaners, even as he tries (albeit unsuccessfully) to drive them from his highly stratified piazza in which there are designated spaces for urinating, he also derives enormous pleasure in talking about them. He finds a genuine thrill in going overboard. He delights in mocking them, playing with language, twisting it around to make it condemn them. He heaps abuse on these marginalized latrine-cleaners with demonic verve, playing with etymologies as he revels in the creative, digressive, chaotic mess of filth. To be sure, these latrine-cleaners are not sinners, but they can be treated as if they were, with all the scorn heaped on them that Dante heaped on the naked, depraved flatterers in Inferno 18. Like Garzoni, all the authors discussed in this chapter, from Dante to Boccaccio to della Casa to the Ps.-Lorenzo de' Medici, reveal at every turn how much they enjoy debasing others as they debase language, though they do so in different ways and with different aims in mind. Chapter 3 therefore focuses on not just low places and low people, latrines and latrine-cleaners, but also the low, yet astonishingly creative, uses of the volgare. In Inferno 18, for instance, as Dante describes the flatterers wallowing in shit, he takes delight in symbolically flinging shit at the people he would have us scorn. Dante's language, far from flattering, is mocking and demeaning as he condemns the flatterers to eternal shame. Hence, in a canto about base acts, the poet acts out baseness himself as he uses base words, and he takes enormous pleasure in speaking this way-a devilish pleasure in purposefully and necessarily transgressing rhetorical decorum as he engages in the scatological curse. Being in shit may be bad, but talking about

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shit becomes a creatively positive and charged experience for the poet as he purges himself of both base desires and base language while indulging in both in a manner that is morally and theologically justified. Boccaccio enjoyed this strategy somewhat in his Decameron, though he shies away from offering a theological justification. Like Dante, Boccaccio revels in disorder with a sort of sardonic pleasure, privileging filth in the very moment that he indicates how all his characters-and, by extension, we, the detached but amused and edified readers-must avoid filth in every possible way. So it also was for della Casa. Indeed, behind all the proscriptions of cleanliness in the Galatea lurks not just della Casa's disgust but also, we have seen, his profound fascination with the carnivalesque, the filthbesmirched, grotesque, belching body with cheeks inflated and nose dripping and mouth gaping wide open in a contorted mask of pleasure and pain. Time and again in the Galatea, della Casa takes enormous delight in the pleasure of release from the prohibition he defends as a form of creative and emotional discharge. In this regard, no one did a better job in using low language creatively than the Ps.-Lorenzo de' Medici in his carnival song about latrine-cleaners. In that salacious poem, which is as much about men copulating with women as it is about cleaning latrines, we witness the ultimate inversion at play: even latrine-cleaners, who have emptied themselves into the "cesspool" of a woman's vagina, come off as spotless. The scatology in this carnival song consequently renders the women dirty as it allows the lusty boys within it to utter the filthiest things while remaining, at least in their own minds, clean. The three chapters of this book, which should be read sequentially as parts of a larger integrated argument, thus move us from one conceptual pole to another, from the extremely clean to the extremely unclean, from pristine households to cesspools, from clean fathers of families overseeing servants dutifully dusting furniture to degraded workers immersed in the discarded, and communally shunned, matter of shit. But since cleanliness is never a pure concept, since it is always defined by, and structurally related to, whatever is viewed culturally as unclean, these chapters also collectively reveal that the clean and the unclean function dialectically in Renaissance Italian culture. Both the clean and unclean are powerful positive shaping forces. Alive and co-present, they appear-to borrow Bakhtin's terms, shorn of nostalgia for folk culture-as classical and anti classical tendencies within Italian culture. Hence, when Alberti, Tasso, Foscari, and Bruni value cleanliness as a necessary and unambiguous good in their works about households and cities, they also ineluctably recognize not just the power of the unclean in their culture, but also the threat-in Mary Douglas's terms, the" danger" -that the unclean poses to the maintenance

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of what is for them, then and there, conceptualized in their writings as a complete, ordered, functioning system, be it linguistic, bodily, household, social, or political. Conversely, what was marginal for Alberti, Tasso, Foscari, and Bruni suddenly becomes symbolically central in an anti-elitist, anticlassical carnival poem on latrine-cleaners. Hence, all the filth expunged from households and cities, in particular all the shit expelled into latrines and cesspools, now appears in the lascivious carnival poem attributed to Lorenzo de' Medici as pleasurable, inviting stuff, while the filthy workers-the vile, universally deprecated latrine-cleaners whoremove all the excrement with joyous, fulfilling gusto-can present themselves, and indeed perversely and diabolically mask themselves on carnival day, as clean. Everything that was typically out of place within high Renaissance culture now occupies the imagination in the Ps.-Lorenzo de' Medici's poem of low culture as "in place." The unclean thus gets reconfigured as clean. With this in mind, I close with a licentious poem that deliberately toys with the conceptions of the clean and unclean through a universalizingor, more precisely, a globalizing-pun. In his capitola titled In Praise of the Urinal (ca. 1522), the colorful burlesque poet Francesco Berni (1497/981535), versed like virtually all Renaissance authors in the rhetorical art of variatio or amplificatio, had something to say about the need to keep a "orinale" -the container into which one customarily urinated-nice and neat and clean: Bisogna l'orinal tenerlo netto, E ch'egli abbia buon nerbo e buona schiena, E darvi drento poi senza rispetto; Che se '1 cristallo e di cattiva vena, Chi crepa e chi si schianta, e chi si fende, Et e proprio un fastidio et una pena. (X. 64-69) [One should keep the urinal clean, so that it has good muscle and back, and shoot in there like there's no tomorrow; For if the crystal is badly made it might crack or shatter or split in two, and that's quite a nuisance and a pain.] 94

We must not only keep the" orinale" polished and clean, however. We must also not drink out of it, Berni insists, unless we happen to be in a tavern, as he asserts elsewhere in the poem, or are beer-guzzling Germans. Beware

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of the cardinals of the church, he also lets us know in the same poem, for they are the flatterers who use the colors of rhetoric to make filthy chores seem fragrant and beautiful, not unlike the flatterers wallowing in Inferno 18. But if you have to go, go, he implores, and put everything you have into it. An "orinale" is, after all, shaped like the globe. It is a self-contained world unto itself. We can therefore unburden ourselves into an "orinale," much as the poet Berni can unburden himself of all these strange, unseemly thoughts about Germans and cardinals and urine (along with thinly veiled sexual acts) into the popularized terza rima form of his burlesque poem: E prima inanzi tratto, e da sapere Che l' orinale e a quel modo tondo Accio che possa piu cose tenere: E: fatto proprio come e fatto il mondo, Che, per aver la forma circulare, Voglion dir che non ha ne fin ne fondo. (X. 13-18)

[And first before we treat of more, it is worth knowing that the orinale is in that manner round so that it can hold more things. It is made precisely as is made the world, that, in order to have the circular form, they say has neither an end nor a bottom].

The world ("mondo") of the orinale must be kept clean ("mondo") even as it is, by nature, unclean ("immondo") once it is filled to the brim. Berni was certainly not the first poet to invert the concepts of the clean and the unclean in Renaissance Italy, lacing the capitola at the same time with sexual innuendoes. Berni's friend, della Casa, employed a similar strategy when he wrote his scurrilous poem about the "Forno," and "Lorenzo de' Medici" did the same when he wrote about latrine-cleaners in the poem once attributed to him. But if there is nothing radically new about Berni's treatment of cleanliness here, there is, I maintain in this book, much that is new about the way cleanliness was treated generally in Renaissance Italy. Simply put, what is new is that there was so much discourse about cleanliness in Renaissance Italy, and that discourse appeared within the cultural imagination of the period in so many different artistic forms. Needless to say, this was by no means the most important or novel contribution Italians made to literature or the arts. Few, for instance, will look at Michelangelo's magnificent Sistine Chapel and think about the topic of cleanliness-and if they do, they are probably thinking about

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whether the recent cleaning of it was done well or poorly. Yet, much as della Casa argued in his Galatea that the sum total of seemingly insignificant boorish habits can press itself on the imagination with immense power, so, I would argue, the sum total of all the seemingly insignificant appearances of the topic of cleanliness in Renaissance Italian culture can likewise press itself on the imagination with immense force. But this can only occur if we allow ourselves to become fully aware of the pervasiveness of the topic in Renaissance literature and the arts-if we begin, that is, to stop and notice that the laundry pole resting inconspicuously against the edge of a Venetian balcony in a painting registered obliquely the importance that Renaissance Italians attributed to cleanliness in their culture; that the laundry mentioned in a novella or a poem tacitly signaled to a host of readers that having clean clothes mattered to them; or that the rhetoric of cleanliness in a panegyric or dialogue spoke to people and touched them meaningfully. For cleanliness was integral to the culture of Renaissance Italy, so integral that it surfaced time and again as a topic in so many different literary and visual artifacts, regardless of the inherent aesthetic value of those individual artifacts. What is important in the context of this book, then, is not that Italians in the Renaissance were "more cleanly" than other nations, as Burckhardt contended in his landmark essay, but that Italians in the Renaissance addressed the topic of cleanliness in so many different literary and artistic forms of high and low culture, and in the process sought to give shape and meaning to their world, dirty or clean, untidy or tidy, as it so often seemed to them to be.

CHAPTER 1

Households and Cities

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of recurrent impurity. -ITALO CALVINO,

Invisible Cities

At the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, Francesco Petrarch (130474) complains about household servants in one of his Familiar Letters-he complains about a lot of things, as a matter of fact-but he does not focus on their need to be neat and clean. He'd just like his servants to be less objectionable, difficult, disloyal cheats. Seneca, he feels, would agree, but Seneca also insists that good masters make good servants, and this troubles Petrarch, who thinks of himself as a pretty good man. "Indeed I am not ignorant of this," he writes, "but whether the change in the times, chance, or my own impatience is the cause, I must say I have never seen a good servant. I nevertheless continue searching" (Fam, 10.3). 1 By contrast,

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toward the middle of the sixteenth century, Benvenuto Cellini, not an easy man to get along with, in at least one instance proved far more fortunate than Petrarch and, to be sure, so many others during the Italian Renaissance who sought good household help, including, as we will see in the next chapter, Machiavelli, who was led by his conniving washerwoman down into a cellar in Verona, just below the house where he was temporarily residing, and there into gross sexual mire. By contrast, the lavandara, who lived directly below Cellini in Rome and presumably did his laundry, did his cooking, he notes, "pulitissimamente" (most cleanly, which is to say, not just very "neatly" but also properly, efficiently, expediently, and in a manner that reveals the washerwoman's overall ability to police her surroundings and keep things in order)? Since Cellini was a fastidious man who paid a fair amount of attention to cleanliness and clean habits in his autobiography, it is striking that the washerwoman who lived below him comes out so well in his narrative. He obviously means to elevate her from the social trash-heap where washerwomen were conventionally dumped, much as he will enact a number of calculated inversions in his autobiography centered on the topic of cleanliness. He debases such rival artists and high-minded authorities on the development of greatness in art as the painter Giorgio Vasari, whom he deprecatingly refers to as "Giorgetto Vassellario" (Little Georgie the Potter)? and notes, mingling revulsion with malicious glee, that he had" dirty little hands [sporche manine ], whose nails he never bothered to cut" (298). Now this, Cellini seems to be saying, was a filthy way of living, not being a washerwoman, much less a washerwoman who doubled as a cook. Moreover, by insisting that he, the proud author of this novel autobiography, was "by nature a lover of cleanliness" (io mi diletto della pulitezza, 356), by taking note periodically that he made certain that his shop was well swept, by further emphasizing that one of his busts came out so clean and neat that it required absolutely no touching up or polish on his part after it had been extracted from the mold, and by taking the time to appreciate the particular cleanliness of bed linen as a sign of respect, civility, and honor rightfully due him, 4 Cellini affirms that sculptors like him are by nature and by virtue of their craft interested in cleanliness. Indeed, sculptors are just as interested in cleanliness and clean habits as painters, even though the latter-men such as Vasari with their filthy hands and long uncut nails!-were typically deemed cleaner than the former in the Italian Renaissance ever since Leonardo da Vinci's treatment of the topic in one of his famous paragoni: The sculptor undertakes his work with greater bodily exertion than the painter, and the painter undertakes his work with greater mental exertion

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[maggior fatica di mente]. The truth of this is evident in that the sculptor when making his work uses the strength of his arm in hammering, to remove the superfluous marble or other stone which surrounds the figure embedded within the stone. This is an extremely mechanical operation [essercizio meccanichissimo], generally accompanied by great sweat which mingles with dust and becomes converted into mud [da gran sudore composto di polvere e convertito in fango]. His face becomes plastered and powdered all over with marble dust [faccia impastata e tutto infarinato di polvere di marmo], which makes him look like a baker, and he becomes covered in minute chips of marble, which makes him look as if he is covered in snow. His house is filthy [imbrattata] and covered with chips and dust from the stone. The painter's position is quite contrary to this (speaking of painters and sculptors of the highest ability), because the painter sits before his work at the greatest of ease, well dressed and applying delicate colors with his light brush, and he may dress himself in whatever clothes he pleases. His residence is clean [pulita) and adorned with delightful pictures, and he often enjoys the accompaniment of music or the company of the authors of various fine works that can be heard with great pleasure without the crashing of hammers and other confused noises. 5

Cellini took on the unenviable job of trying to recuperate and legitimate the work of the sculptor as an intellectual art-an art that, like the work of the humanist ever since Petrarch's Invective contra medicum, should be viewed as clean and neat. Sculptors, Cellini means to say, therefore deserve proper dignified treatment and should be honored with cleanliness for the service they offer the world as they produce works of lasting beauty by means of their highly disciplined, intellectual labors. The art of the sculptor, too, requires a "fatica di mente" and is hardly, as it seems to be, an "esercizio meccanichissimo." Cleanliness, in this way, becomes in Cellini's Autobiography a mark of not just refinement and polish but professional legitimacy, status, and authority. To the self-avowed genius Cellini, cleanliness also becomes a mark of originality and authenticity. Significantly, his birth takes place under the sign of cleanliness, as the wet-nurse hands him over, "pulito" and wrapped in "bellissimi panni bianchi," to his father, whence, in an act that makes the arbitrary social practice of naming seem deeply motivated, inspired, and purposive, Cellini-the gift presented-is called Benvenuto: The midwife, who knew that they were expecting a girl, after she had washed the baby and wrapped it in the fairest white linen [pulito che l' ebbe Ia creatura, in volta in bellissimi panni bianchi], came softly to my father Giovanni and said: "I am bringing you a fine present, such as you did not anticipate." My father,

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who was a true philosopher, was walking up and down, and answered: "What God gives me is always dear to me"; and when he opened up the swaddling clothes, he saw with his own eyes the unexpected male child. Joining together the palms of his old hands, he raised them with his eyes to God, and said: "Lord, I thank Thee with my whole heart; this gift is very dear to me; let him be Welcome." All the persons who were there asked him joyfully what name the child should bear. Giovanni would make no other answer than "Let him be Welcome-Benvenuto"; and so they resolved, and this name was given me at Holy Baptism, and by it I still am living with the grace of God. (87) 6

Cleanliness is no longer godliness here, though God has presumably had a hand in some of this creative process. Indeed, God participated in the unanticipated birth of a boy, who is cleansed by the midwife and then named by the surprised yet appreciative father. And God always seems to oversee favorably the adventurous twists and turns that make up the startling life of Cellini, the gifted author and son, who fashions the image of himself in his autobiography as a fastidiously clean sculptor capable of constructing remarkably clean and neat artifacts of unsurpassed quality. Bodily purification and artistic construction are thus subtly associated in an autobiography that takes seriously from the outset the topic of cleanliness as an essential matter of identity, style, and form in Renaissance Italy. If you can get a bust out of a mold and do not need to clean up after it at all, if you can create works that are done "pulitissimamente" (most cleanly, 153) and "tanto pulitamente" (very cleanly, 410), then evidently you really are something of a sculptor-a creator of the highest order, an artist of true refinement and distinction. Or so it would seem. Now the topic of cleanliness, along with the handling and status of servants, also crops up, as one might expect it would, in books on economics, the good and proper ruling of the household. These books occupied a distinct and separate genre in the Italian Renaissance with the full-blown revival and rehearsal of such works as Xenophon's Oeconomicus, translated into Latin by the humanist Lapo da Castiglionchio (1405-38), and then into Italian by Alessandro Piccolomini (1508-79). Leonardo Bruni's important and widely read translation of what was thought to have been Aristotle's Oeconomica (completed sometime between 1420 and 1421) had a marked influence as well on Renaissance treatises on household economy. As Daniela Frigo has shown, these Renaissance treatises on household economics proliferated in the second half of the Cinquecento with such works as Sperone Speroni's On the Care of the Household (1542), Paolo Caggio's Economics (1552), Giacomo Lanteri's On the Household (1560), Francesco Tommasi's Regimen of the Father of the Family (1580), Torquato Tasso's The

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Father of the Family (1583), and Nicolo Vito di Gozze' s Governing the Household (1589). Furthermore, these Renaissance treatises distinguished themselves from their medieval precursors. The latter, solidly rooted in discussions about the proper training of princes, began with ethics, moved on to family and household management, and then ended with politics, understandably thebe-all and end-all of the prince's duties and concerns. The fixed teleological structure of these medieval treatises on the education of princes predetermined the place of economics as a transitional step in the ladder of developmental instruction that trained a prince to become a virtuous leader, though it was always understood that what was good for the prince was, to varying degrees, largely good for everyone else? Not everyone could be a prince, but everyone of some social standing could behave well. By contrast, rather than being addressed directly to a prince, the books on households composed in Cinquecento Italy, as Daniela Frigo meticulously details, were printed and intended for a wide audience; they had a more secular outlook to them; and they reflected, advocated, and advanced the ideology of the nobility at a time when Italy had become aristocraticized. The first great book on households in the Italian Renaissance remains Leon Battista Alberti's The Family, a four-part work that Frigo sees as the summa of all the preceding medieval positions adopted by the Scholastics, while remaining demonstrably innovative and forward-looking. Composed for a rich mercantile society, Alberti's The Family is also measurably different from the writings of the Cinquecento, which were centered on the nobility and dedicated to legitimating the aristocracy and its ideology of fixed, established hierarchy, place, and privilege. I will investigate some of those differences in this chapter. I will do so by focusing first on Alberti's innovative treatment of cleanliness in his The Family and then, as a point of comparison, on Tasso's equally innovative treatment of cleanliness in The Father of the Family, a dialogue that, though unusual in many regards, is representative of the large body of writings on the household composed in Cinquecento Italy. In the remainder of this chapter I will then examine the representation of cleanliness in two very different works that describe the social and political makeup of Florence, the premier Renaissance city of Italy. In the first instance we will discuss Marco Foscari' s ambassadorial relation (relazione) about the city. Composed in 1528 (later revised) by a wellconnected member of the Venetian patriciate and a man with a strong sense of caste and class, Foscari' s report on Florence touches on the topic of cleanliness as he describes the city in 1527, the turbulent year when Rome was sacked and Florence revived its republican government by ousting the Medici and putting Niccolo Capponi at its head. Finally, after Foscari, we will turn to Bruni's Laudatio florentinae urbis, a panegyric that voiced in an

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enduring manner the ideals of the Florentine republic during its formative period under Coluccio Salutati. Bruni's Laudatio perhaps even underpinned parts of Foscari's relazione as well, and it provides us with one of the most extensive and explicit treatments of the topic of cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. Though Bruni's Laudatio chronologically precedes all the other works examined in this chapter, it nevertheless comes last in order of discussion, for in Bruni's Laudatio the topic of cleanliness finds expression in a bold, unprecedented, and absolutely original manner. There is an overall movement to this chapter, moreover, even as it doubles back on itself in time. We begin with Alberti, an early Quattrocento humanist interested in purifying the volgare and dedicated to advocating a mercantile ethos nostalgically grounded in a republican Florence he had never actually known in his youth. We then proceed to two Cinquecento authors in the central portion of the chapter, both of whom wrote in the vernacular and both of whom advocated strong aristocratic positions as they discussed cleanliness. The first, Tasso, was a humanist poet who served aristocrats throughout his life and struggled to retain their favor. The second, Foscari, was a Venetian nobleman who sought to further restrict eligibility for entrance into the closed patriciate. We then circle back in time to Bruni, an early Quattrocento humanist who spent his life trying to purify Latin; who remains today one of the greatest representatives of the republican tradition of civic humanism in Florence and Renaissance Italy; and who provides us with perhaps the most intricate understanding of the topic of cleanliness in Renaissance Italian literature. Structurally, this chapter is thus framed by two of the most important humanists of the early Italian Renaissance, Alberti and Bruni. Both wrote at roughly the same time, both had Florence in mind as they wrote (the first implicitly in his treatise on economics, the second explicitly and triumphantly in his panegyric), but both advanced extremely different, and somewhat conflicting, positions regarding the value of the languages in which they consciously composed their works. Finally, in all these authors, we will see at play precisely the same issues that concerned Cellini as he sought to project an image of himself as clean, dignify himself and his work as clean, and demand cleanliness in relation to his immediate environment, whether he happened to be sweeping his own shop, stuck in a prison, sleeping in a guest's bedroom, or last but not least, just being washed, as was the custom, when he was born. Cleanliness for Alberti, Tasso, Foscari, and Bruni was, as it was for Cellini in his autobiography, a mark of legitimacy, status, and authority. At times, as we shall see, cleanliness also signaled for these authors, as they periodically raised the topic in their writings, their own sense of themselves as authentic and original thinkers. Last, in talking about clean-

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liness, these writers also occasionally reveal a passion not just for the act of preserving things and keeping things in place, but also, to borrow Calvina's terms, for the act of "expelling, discarding." At times, Alberti, Tasso, Foscari, and Bruni disclose a particular sort of pleasure in talking about how they would like to get rid of objects and people within households and cities themselves. Conspicuous expulsion can, in this regard, be just as pleasurable as conspicuous consumption, the kind of consumption for which the Italian Renaissance tends to be more widely known today. Alberti treats the topic of cleanliness most directly and as an integral part of his overall discussion of household management in book 3 of his The Family. 8 He composed the third book, titled Economicus, probably in 1433, while working as a secretary in the Papal Curia in Rome. He then touched up book 3 in Florence, where Eugenius IV, the pope he served, had fled in search of safety in 1434, and where Alberti also had a chance to study the Tuscan vernacular and reflect on its proper uses. In book 3, which is purposefully more colloquial than the others, Alberti attends to cleanliness often in a perfunctory way through the figure of Giannozzo, the elder man who has overseen a family of his own and now engages Lionardo, the twenty-nine-year-old bachelor, in conversation. These two men have gathered together with five other Alberti family members in one of their houses in Padua in May 1421. They have arrived to witness and grieve the death of Lorenzo Alberti, the author's father and, along with Lorenzo's brother, Ricciardo, the financial mainstay to the family and its moral center. 9 Present with Ricciardo, Giannozzo, and Lionardo are Leon Battista himself (then aged seventeen, who has lots to say about lust in book 2), Carlo Alberti (Leon Battista's older brother, then aged nineteen, who has absolutely nothing to say throughout the entire set of four books); Adovardo Alberti (a forty-five-year-old family man concerned mostly with the role of fatherhood in book 1), and Piero Alberti (an uncle who occupies the venerable role of elder statesman and has much to say about politics in book 4). No other family members are present, with perhaps the exception-at least in spirit-of Francesco d' Altobianco Alberti, a cousin to whom Alberti dedicated book 3 and with whom he worked in the papal chancery for some time. Indeed, Francesco was one of the very few family members with whomAlberti-a bastard son who never acquired legitimacy-maintained good relations, especially after he composed this description of his family as they interacted at the deathbed of the patriarch. Though Alberti as one of Lorenzo's two bastard sons probably intended The Family as a plea to gain admission into the family clan and thereby acquire acceptance (perhaps even belated financial support), the family did not receive Al-

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berti's book very well at all. Perhaps for good reasons: many in the book come off as sly, greedy, and just a little too calculating and thrifty for their own good. 10 For Giannozzo, who comes to the foreground in book 3, and for Lionardo, who has already occupied a prominent role in The Family, cleanliness is not so much godliness, salus in the sense of the safety of salvation, as health, salus in the sense of a well-ordered and maintained body and a finely tempered and medically balanced regimen. "All right," Lionardo says, summarizing Giannozzo' s main points, "Cleanliness [pulitezza ], then exercise, diet, and the avoidance of their opposites keep up our health" (171, 175). Earlier, in book 2, Lionardo had asserted much the same notion, without any prompting from an interlocutor, when he declared that "the body keeps its health by moderate and clean living [moderato e netto vivere]" (147, 148). For this reason as well, according to Giannozzo, the farm is of value, for we fare best out in the open, Lionardo further indicates, away from the city, in the fresh air: "Your farm replaces what is old and stale in your house with what is new and fresh and clean [netto] and good" (192, 199). Alberti also has all sorts of things to say through Giannozzo about cleanliness and appearance. "I keep myself neat, clean [netto, pulito], and well groomed" (170, 174), Giannozzo affirms with a great sense of punctiliousness, self-satisfaction, and self-respect. Drawing directly on Xenophon's Oeconomicus (10.2-9), but also revising in a far-reaching manner the source imitated, Alberti also has Giannozzo assert how a wife needs to keep herself clean of cosmetics and their noxious effects. He makes this point twice, resolutely, and at far greater length than on the other occasions when he dwells on varied matters that have to do with cleanliness (216, 227-28). In doing so, Giannozzo revels, albeit inversely, in the power of Pygmalion. He displays enormous self-satisfaction in his ability to exercise power-in this instance real, punitive, humiliating power 11 -over his wife so that he can shape her, by virtue of the comparison and exemplum held up, into the image of the pious saintly artifact he points to in the room, an artifact that is clean of any sort of extraneous, cosmetic covering and should therefore be valued for the artistry that brought it to light. 12 Moreover, as Giannozzo is quick to point out, just as a refined artistic force once shaped the saint into a beautiful and valuable artifact, so Giannozzo now shapes his wife according to a set of aesthetic standards with his own family traditions and values planted firmly in his mind. In the long run, Giannozzo needs to transform his wife, plucked from another family, 13 into one of "the Alberti girls" (le fanciulle . .. Alberte, 215, 226), girls, he insists, who "never anoint themselves with anything but river water" (a lora solo basta lisciarsi col flume, 215, 226). So it must be for his wife: "You will just wash

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and keep clean with water alone" (solo coll'acqua, cost tu terrai lavata tee netta, 215, 226).l 4 Giannozzo, we must remember, is a man of exceptional thrift, a man who aims to have complete control over every object under his command, get it at the lowest possible cost, and preserve its value___:even, arguably, the beauty of his wife's skin, which belongs, in the end it would seem, to him. "Beauty," as Carla Freccero observes in a gendered reading of this passage of The Family, "is a thing of value whose worth must be assessed in market terms." 15 To this effect, what particularly troubles Giannozzo as he reflects on the value of the statue and the beauty of his wife is that in adding cosmetics to an object-indeed, any object, whether it be a statue or a woman-you inevitably end up devaluing the object covered, reducing its inherent aesthetic value and, as a consequence, its underlying monetary worth: GrANNozzo: Thus I spoke to my wife. To convince her still more fully of the danger, as well as of the shame, in a woman's covering her face with the powders and poisons which the silly creatures call makeup, see, dear Lionardo, what a nice lesson I gave her. There was a saint in the room, a very lovely statue of silver, whose head and hands alone were of purest ivory [d'avorio candidissimo ]. It was set, polished [pulita] and shining, in the center of the altar, as usual. "My dear wife," I said to her, "suppose you besmirched [imbiutassi] the face of this image in the morning with chalk and calcium and other ointments. It might well gain in color and whiteness. In the course of the day the wind would carry dust to it and make it dirty [insusciderebbe], but in the evening you would wash it [lavassi], and then, the next day, cover it again with ointments, and then wash it again [rilavassi]. Tell me, after many days of this, if you wanted to sell it, all polished and painted, how much money do you think you would get for it? More than if you had never begun painting it? "Much less," she replied. "That's right," said I. (214, 225) 16 Everything for the self-consciously thrifty and mercantile Giannozzo can be reduced to fluid exchange-value in a world governed by fantasies of liquidity: how much money, he pointedly asks, do you think you would get for it? Cash, as always for Giannozzo, deeply matters. To this end, cleanliness even enters into Giannozzo's argument that people should spare themselves the tremendous expense of throwing banquets. Banquets are never worth the effort in what becomes a zero-sum game. In a banquet you end up chucking money away for no tangible positive reward, much as in the preparation of the party you find yourself laboring fruitlessly in the

Figure 8. Italian Maiolica Dish (piatto, ca. 1550-1560). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.1039). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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"throwing away of things, the washing and sweeping all over the house" (il gittare via la roba, scialacquamenti, strusciamenti per tutta la casa, 159, 161). This tedious preparation for a banquet constitutes not a cleaning up of a household but a cleaning out of the family resources, a wasteful expenditure of time and energy, just as the banquet constitutes a wasteful expenditure of hard-earned moneyP For this reason, the frugal Giannozzo insists, "any expenditure that is not particularly necessary, it seems to me, can only come from madness [pazzia]" (159, 162). Surely, whether Giannozzo is thinking about a statue, the inherent beauty of his wife, or an elaborately staged Renaissance banquet, he would have ascribed to the proverbial expression placed on a Maiolica dish that "chi lava la testa di un asino, perde il sapone" (whoever washes the head of an ass, wastes soap; see figure 8). 18 Waste not, want not. Cleanliness for Alberti, then, is clearly connected with not only natural health but also natural beauty, not only with well-being but well-done artistry, not only with nature itself (the farm with the clean fresh air) but culture, self-discipline, and self-control, the ability to fashion and be fashioned according to the authority of the responsible person in power-in this case, the father of the family, who sits in the household and maneuvers and manipulates it with absolute, calculating, mercantile control. Additionally, in all these cases cleanliness is intimately connected with preservation, both self-preservation and the preservation of objects and people. "Things bought in haste," Giannozzo chides, "are often bought out of season, unclean [mal netto], about to spoil, and expensive. Then in the end more is thrown away than ever gets used" (224, 237). People and things evidently last longer if they're clean. They will endure in time. In this respect, Alberti's use of the topic of cleanliness in his discussion about how one should value time and exploit it to one's best advantage is of critical importance: GIANNozzo: If you were in a boat and floating along with the current in the

midst of our river Arno, and if, as sometimes happens to fishermen, you had dirty hands and your face all daubed with mud [avessi le mani e il visa tinti e infangati], would all that water not be yours, if you used it to wash and purify yourself [lavarti e mondarti]? Right? And, likewise, if you did not use it? LIONARDO: Certainly then it would not be mine. GIANNozzo: That is exactly how it is with time. If a man uses it to wash off

the dirt and mud [in lavarsi il sucidume e fango ]-the ignorance and low desires and vile appetites-that cling to our mind and impure understanding, and if he makes use of time to learn, to think, and to do admirable deeds, he makes time his own. (165-66, 169)

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Cleanliness here becomes a matter of ethical concern, indirectly related to the moral philosophy that occupied the minds of so many humanists like Alberti. On the one hand, in purely mercantile terms, it's more bang for the buck to buy things that are clean, keep them clean, and sell them clean. You know what you're getting, and so does the buyer. To this end, you must keep yourself clean, your house clean, and your wife clean; and you must also take in the clean fresh air of the country. On the other hand, as one successfully controls and preserves one's environment and possessions-including one's wife-through cleanliness, so one must also learn to control the unimpeded flow of time by ridding oneself of the impurities of ethically undesirable appetites-those things, according to Giannozzo, that are "the shadow of some vile and dirty [sozzo] pleasure" (167, 171). By gradually lifting oneself up by one's conceptual and moral bootstraps, one can then also hope to do something of lasting value: think, learn, accomplish admirable deeds. This is not a carpe diem on Alberti's part, the search for immediate gratification, but the exact opposite, a way of shoring up time and possessing it through lasting productivity. Make a monument, Alberti is insisting through Giannozzo. Go and do something of value with your own time over time, something that other people will want to hold dear and, as a result, want to preserve by keeping it clean. Rhetorically, Alberti's concern for cleanliness in book 3, as well as throughout The Family, finds its formal complement in his own transparent, clear, ordered treatment of the subject of how to run a household. If virtue is consistently linked in The Family to an "ideal of aesthetic balance and harmony," as Renee Neu Watkins observes, then Alberti exercises that virtue by constructing a finely balanced and harmonious set of four books, with evenly paired groups of young and old men working out their differences in a setting unified by time and place and filled with constructive, though at times agonistic, Ciceronian-styled dialogue. 1 '~ In this way, as in so many others, Alberti creates a harmonious arrangement of parts and points of view, a modern exemplum of the classical ideal of concordia discars, in which "everything seems to have its corresponding opposite: for life, death; for light, darkness; nor can you have one without the other" (48). 20 Rhetorically, Alberti's description and definition of a clean household in a harmoniously structured treatise therefore demands as well clean writing-a clean, undefiled language. For this reason, in the preface to book 3, which focuses more than the others on cleanliness, Alberti takes the time to explain his theory of the development of the Latin and vulgar tongues, which was a matter that had been of some debate at the time in the Papal Curia and involved in 1435 Leonardo Bruni, then the most famous humanist alive, and Biondo Flavio (1392-1463). 21 According to Alberti, who shared for the most part the same historical understanding of

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the development of languages as Biondo, those who spoke and wrote in pure, unadulterated Latin in the classical period were gradually forced to communicate with various barbarians who had invaded and occupied Italy. As a result, the Latin tongue was degraded, fell more and more into disuse, and became contaminated. According to Alberti, then, the vulgar tongue grew out of Latin as a direct consequence of the influence of the barbarisms that the invaders brought with them over time with the collapse of the Roman Empire: "The foreigners, meanwhile, being newly arrived, also adapted their ways to ours, with considerable admixture, I believe, of barbarisms and corruptions [credo con molti barbarismi e corruttela del proferire]. This mixing [mistura], then, made our originally refined and polished language grow from day to day more rustic and degenerate" (152, 154). Everyone, moreover, spoke an unalloyed Latin in the classical period. The speech of women, he also insists, was in fact praised as less "contaminata" (contaminated, 152, 155) because women, ostensibly kept indoors, had less contact with foreigners and their rude and crude barbarisms. Historically, then, the vulgar tongue unfolded in time according to specific culturally determining factors. The perfection and greatness of Latin matched the perfection and greatness of Roman traditions: the two grew and lived in tandem. Linguistic perfection mirrored cultural perfection. At the same time, Alberti also takes the opportunity to explain in this prologue his strong conviction that the vulgar tongue is in its own way no less beautiful than Latin, which was a position advocated by Bruni in part and had its roots in Dante's De vulgari eloquentia. 22 The vulgar tongue may have evolved out of Latin, grown out of it illegitimately, as it were, as a sort of bastard language. But that does not mean that the volgare cannot attain the same beauty as Latin, especially, one suspects, now that Italian culture has begun to revive the greatness of classical Roman culture by returning to those original models, imitating and emulating them, perhaps even surpassing them. To make Italian beautiful, however, we need to clean it up and return to its roots, which were supremely Tuscan in origins. "Our own tongue," Alberti writes, "will have no less power as soon as learned men decide to refine and polish [polita] it by zealous and arduous labors" (153, 156). Polish means refinement, but it also means purification, a cleansing of the vernacular of the kinds of admixtures that rendered Latin impure once upon a time. Learned people-people who will want to rid themselves of "the shadow of some vile and dirty pleasure" and thereby think, learn, and do admirable deeds-should take on this task of perfecting the vulgar tongue. And that is precisely what Alberti, a learned humanist trained at the Paduan school of Gasparino Barzizza, has chosen to do here. He has come to clean up not just a household but the volgare with his treatise, make it a model for others, so that it will endure in time, become the

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standard for future generations of how to write in this language-the language of the times in Florence, where Alberti had learned, as he accompanied the Curia to his "native city," to compose with "purity of diction and elegance." 23 In this context, Alberti was remarkably successful by his own high standards. As he asserts in his Vita, before his thirtieth year, he wrote for his relatives, the first three books of The Family, written in the paternal Tuscan to help those who were ignorant of Latin. He finished this work in Rome in ninety days, but the language was rough and unpolished and could hardly be called Tuscan. For the long exile of the Albertis meant that he had not been raised in the language and it was hard for him to write it elegantly and properly when he was unaccustomed to writing it at all. Soon, however, thanks to his hard work and persistence, he achieved such mastery that some of his fellow citizens who wished to be thought eloquent in the Senate confessed that at times they had adorned their speeches by borrowing elegant turns of phrase from his writings. (8) This alleged use of The Family as a model of good writing by orators in Florence, a community that prided itself on rhetorical skill and dexterity in forensic debate during this period,Z4 is a tribute not only to a man born in exile, but also to a man who staged a competition, the Certame coronario, that was intended to elevate in stature the Tuscan volgare and that, to Alberti's chagrin, soundly flopped.Z 5 If governing a household for Alberti, finally, was an incredibly difficult, time-consuming hassle, how you coped with that hassle also reflected directly on who you were and how you fit into society at a culturally determined moment in time. A clean household bespoke a clear understanding of purpose and place. It was a mark of legitimacy: you were the right person for the right household in the right spot at the right moment. It all made sense and was fitting, socially, politically, and, as I have argued, rhetorically and aesthetically. In this regard, if cleanliness confers legitimacy, it is hardly accidental that Alberti should repeatedly discuss the trials and tribulations of his family in exile, how they ran the risk of dissolving as a family, especially now that the patriarch, Alberti's own father, lay on his death bed, with his family about him discussing how they will forge ahead in exile and in Lorenzo's absence. "Though the truth is," Giannozzo ponders sullenly in book 3, that in these terrible days fortune so cruelly opposes us Albertis-she does not give us kindly or generously of what is hers, but rather tries wickedly and spitefully to trouble even those things that are ours-that we hardly find occasion to practice wise management. We have always hoped, in this exile

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of ours, to return again to our own country, to come together again in our own house, and to rest among our kinsmen. This hope and longing have grown more fervent, indeed, as we continually suffer and decline while unable to settle our spirits or to root our lives in some kind of stable order. (173)

Alberti, the illegitimate son, has come to provide that "stable order," reshape the family at its root, conceptually provide that firm ground while the patriarch dies. By doing so, Alberti has effectively heeded Giannozzo's advice offered in his own text: he is truly using his time well. And as he cleans up the mess of his family, he aims to create a model work and fix for future generations what his own family, which he critiques as much as he admires, couldn't fix. 26 Alberti thereby gives his family form, makes an "admirable deed" out of his thrifty use of time. More important, this productive use of time will legitimate his family back in Florence and perhaps rehabilitate them-"save the family"-within the timeless form of a literary artifact. 27 Significantly, the very last words Lorenzo Alberti speaks in the entire four books that make up The Family are addressed to Leon Battista, as Lorenzo passes on the torch of family duty to his illegitimate son, the youngest member of the family present at his death bed. At this precise moment the patriarch instills in Alberti, who is alone with him at his side, the desire to accomplish" admirable deeds" for the good of the family: Our father, Lorenzo, then said: From Lionardo you can learn nothing but good. I am glad. Go, don't waste any time; here I need nothing from you for now, and if I needed it, I should still be happier to have you where you might become more learned. Go Battista, and, my son, consider all time wasted in which you are not engaged in good works. There is nothing you can do that will please me more than to become a good man. Leave behind any occupation you have in order to pursue excellence and honor. Go, don't delay. Go, my boy. So did Lorenzo speak, and so did I do. (130-31)

The quintessential Renaissance Italian maker of things, Leon Battista Alberti, is here made and fashioned by his father in the text that Alberti himself constructed for that family and, at the same time, for posterity. And as he makes a place for his exiled family, Alberti makes a place for himself, though it was a place Alberti would never actually occupy as the illegitimate son of a family that would fail him profoundly-and, incidentally, as a man who never had a family of his own. After Alberti's The Family, one of the more detailed, sophisticated, and nuanced treatments of cleanliness with regard to household maintenance occurs in Tasso's The Father of the Family (1583). Tasso composed this dia-

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logue during that period of the Italian Renaissance when books strictly focused on household management had come into vogue and when households had become even greater in size and therefore required speCialized, synchronized, and individualized labor for their management. 28 Like Alberti, Tasso dwells on the topic of cleanliness at great length, though he does so now with Aristotle and Bruni as privileged models in mind. 29 Unlike Alberti, however, Tasso does not focus on a mercantile patrician family exiled from Florence, a family in need of legitimacy and rehabilitated in part by the illegitimate son who has immortalized them and himself in timeless literary form. Rather, though Tasso does make a point of mentioning and elevating his father in his discussion (he is always fond of mentioning his father), he focuses on a household that is not his own and that has distinctly aristocratic pretensions during a period of ideological, if not economic, "refeudalization" in Italian history. The entire treatise, which is dedicated to a man of established rank, resounds with the word nobile and its variations, all of which confer real status and honor within a distinctly aristocratic setting. Consequently, it is impossible for Tasso to fail to recognize in the young man he meets on his journey "an indefinable quality of gentleness and grace [di gentile e di grazioso]" (46-47). 30 Similarly, as the young Tasso takes in the "beautiful and comfortable dwelling" that he has been brought to by the young man he meets on his journey in search of a new patron, he cannot help but notice that that the owner of the large house he has entered must surely be "a noble [nobile] lord who does not cease to desire, even among woods and in the country, the elegance and refinement [politezza] of the city" (so- 51). From the very beginning of The Father of the Family, even with the dedication, Tasso has in mind a completely different social structure than the one nostalgically resuscitated by Alberti. In The Father of the Family, Tasso describes a social structure in which nobility is an unshakeable right, structurally fixed, transparent, and evident at every turn. 31 It is a social structure in which the place of people is ontologically given. Like Alberti, however, Tasso is also in search of a place and legitimacy. He, too, is seeking admission into a family, though this time it is the enormous extended famiglia of his prince. The time and setting for this dialogue refer to the period when Tasso, as he makes plain in the dialogue, was on the loose and in search of a new patron: "I am fleeing the wrath of princes and of fortune, and seeking shelter in the territories of Savoy" (49). The period referred to is 1577-78, when Tasso had fallen out of favor with Alfonso II of Ferrara and thus, as he puts it in his dialogue, "fallen into unhappiness" (75). However, if Tasso situates this dialogue in the near past, he writes it in 1580 while imprisoned in St. Anna, where the "sordidezza e '1 succidume" (filth and grime, 61) plague him, as he laments in a letter to his friend and long-time correspondent Scipione Gonzaga. 32 While locked up

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in the filthy prison of St. Anna, out of favor and out of place, Tasso calculatingly writes about how a young man, while in flight and out of favor, witnessed the perfect management of a fine aristocratic household and there experienced, soon after having entered the dwelling, the virtuous and purifying habits of cleanliness: "the servants brought in water for our hands, and when we had washed [e poi che lavati ci fummo], we took seats at the table" (52- 55). Recuperation, rehabilitation, restoration. If, as we have seen in Alberti's The Family, cleanliness confers legitimacy and rehabilitates, then it is indeed appropriate, in light of Tasso's dire circumstances in prison, that everyone in this dialogue cleanse himself soon after entering the family dwelling. This heightened attention to cleanliness registers not just the desire on the part of the characters within the dialogue to conform to culturally accepted habits of decorum and "politezza," the refinement of the city that the young man recognizes approvingly as present even here in the country. This heightened attention to cleanliness registers as well Tasso's desire as the author of the dialogue to be cleansed and thereby find some legitimacy in the favor of a prince whose grace he has lost. Writing in a dirty prison, Tasso wants to recover his place, his dignity, his worth. He wants to get back in circulation, as he indicates to Scipione Gonzaga, to whom he dedicated and sent the dialogue: 33 "Yesterday I gave to a gentleman ... a dialogue titled The Father of the Family, and dedicated to your most illustrious lord .... Now it would seem to me time, after eighteen and more months of illness and imprisonment, that some pitying soul should come to my aid so that I can be liberated, and ... I desire above all else that this pitying soul be you ... to let me receive again [ricuperar] the service and servitude that I had with his Excellence." 34 The topic of cleanliness is integral to that aim of recuperation. It is a restorative gesture, regenerative, purifying. It is a sign of virtue, a plea for rehabilitation, a request for admission back into the fold. Nowhere does Tasso render this concept more concrete than in one of the early letters sent from prison, as he seeks forgiveness, not from Alfonso this time, but from God: And who would wish to receive the worldly princes in his house must adorn it and cleanse it neatly of all the ugly things and all the filth [pulisce e la netta di tutte le brutture e di tutte le sordidezze]; who wants to welcome the Lord God in his heart, and receive Him in the inn and temple of his faith ... will he not wash [laveril] the soul free of all the contaminating contagion of the members of the body and filthy [immonda] from the thousand carnal desires and the thousand ugly·dirty things? 35

As a servant himself, and one who viewed the role of service with a mixture of humility, reverence, and resentment, Tasso in The Father of the Family seeks to rehabilitate himself as a good servant as well by talking about

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how servants must properly behave and know their place within the reified and rigid hierarchy of a late-sixteenth-century aristocratic household, even a relatively small household by the standards of the time, a private one, much like the household described in the treatise. In the process of seeking to ingratiate himself, Tasso focuses intensely on the topic of cleanliness as he discusses how the "master" or "lord" (padrone, signore, g8-99) must oversee the governance of servants in his household. This work of paternal oversight may not be an easy task. But it is the most important and basic task that the father of the family must take on and face squarely in his capacity as supreme lord and master. "Your principal care and that of your chief steward," he writes, will be to keep each servant busy about his own special duties as well as about matters of common concern-for not every task in the household can be assigned to a single servant for his particular attention. Thus when the buyer has bought the food, the housekeeper has made the beds and cleaned the clothes [nettate le vesti], the stableman has groomed the horses, and each of the others has done what he was supposed to, the diligent chief steward should order each to undertake one of the tasks that belong to everyone. Above all he should take care that nothing ugly [bruttura] be seen in the house or courtyard or on the tables or the cupboards; the walls, floors, ceilings and all the utensils and implements of the house should be cleaned [sian politi] and, so to speak, shining like mirrors. Cleanliness [politezza] is not only pleasant to look at but also confers nobility and dignity [nobilta e dignita] on things that are base and mean by nature [vili e sordide per natura], just as, in contrast, filth [Ia lordura] takes away natural nobility and dignity [nobili e aile degne]. Besides, cleanliness [politezza] is as conducive to health as filth [sordidezza] is detrimental. Each servant should take as much care to ensure that his tools are clean [sian politi] as a soldier takes with the cleanliness [politezza] of his arms, for tools are to the servant what arms are to the soldier. (106-9)

In a well-structured and ordered household, which is as well-structured and ordered and natural as the cosmos described earlier in the dialogue36 and the body politic discussed later ("for a family is no less trouble for a private person ... than an empire for an heroic person," 77), everything has a place, purpose, and function. Nothing is superfluous. All must be clean in this household because there is no matter out of place here, and every place is naturally given. Some people are therefore made to command, Tasso insists, as he openly draws on della Casa's De officiis, and some people are made to obey. Some people are simply illuminated by the mind of the master, just as the moon is illuminated by the sun (103). They are inspired by the virtue of the lord but they reveal no internal glow of

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virtue of their own worth mentioning, for "the distinction between servant and lord is founded on nature" (101). 37 At the same time, cleanliness confers and enhances value. It gives things their proper dignity and place. That value, however, is already ontologically a given. In the cleaning of the house, the servant, who is granted just a bit more brains than a beast (103), is a sort of animated extension of the body politic of the house, a functioning yet dependent and integrated family "instrument": Just as the hand is called the instrument of instruments because it labors to feed, clothe, and clean [pulire] the other limbs, which are properly called instruments, so the servant can be called the instrument of instruments because he uses all the instruments of the house that have been invented not simply in order to live but in order to live well. He is different from other instruments because they are inanimate and he is animate, and he differs from the hand because the hand is joined to the body while he is separate from his lord. The servant differs from the craftsman, moreover, because the craftsman is an instrument of what is called, properly speaking, production, but the servant is an instrument of action, and action is distinct from production. (110-11)

Disney had it right in Beauty and the Beast when the major motion picture industry transformed the dutiful, caring servants into clocks, armoires, teacups, teapots, and, of course, a broom. But Disney, Tasso would have insisted, was dead wrong when it gave servants brains with noble spirits and quick-thinking minds of their own. For none of the servants in Tasso's dialogue will ever do anything of value other than what they are told and assigned to do. That is because the inherent value of these servants, their dignity in the highly hierarchical structure of late-sixteenth-century Italy, is fixed so that they cannot possibly fluctuate upward, as, for instance, human beings can in Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). Servants can only gravitate down the social ladder: they can misbehave and prove themselves inept. But they cannot rise up. Being clean and keeping things clean indicates that these obedient servants have finally found, accepted, and reached their proper place within that fixed order of the household, which is as fixed as the order of the cosmos and the body politic. Furthermore, in serving the father of the family's demands for cleanliness, these servants have revealed that they have understood their position. If servants dirty themselves or the things they are meant to oversee and use, they merely lose ground. No matter how clean they might be or seem to be, they can't possibly gain ground. As it is for servants, so it is for wives, as we move up the family food

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chain within the household: "The good mother ought not to disdain to set her hands to work now and then-not in the kitchen or at any other mean labor that coarsens the body [sordide che posson bruttare il corpo], for such work should not be touched by a noblewoman, but at tasks that do not involve filth or baseness [senza lordura e senza vilta possono esser trattate]" (124-25). Wives can and should pick cloth, but they should not clean it. That is the job of their fantesche, whom the chief steward oversees, as he oversees all the rest. And it is inappropriate for the woman of the house to be in the kitchen, 38 which the wife may oversee but not enter, and which should remain spotless. We are given to understand this as Tasso's reflections on the wife's distant role in the kitchen lead to a remarkable digression. "While on this subject [of order]," Tasso observes in one of his many asides, I don't want to fail to mention something which in itself seems without dignity but which acquired so much from its order and cleanliness [politezza] that I looked upon it not only without disgust but with wonder; as a result I feel confident that I can describe it, if not so as to excite wonder, at least without loss of dignity. I was returning from Paris, and as I was passing through Beaune, I visited the hospital. Every room that I saw seemed to me worthy of praise, but the kitchen seemed to me wonderful, for-although it is true that it is not the one that they use all the time-I found it as clean [polita] as marriage chambers usually are. In it I saw a great multitude of implements not only for the kitchen but for the table as well, and they were neatly arranged one on top of another or side by side. The ironware, clean of rust [netto dalla rugine], was shining in the sun that came in through very beautiful and very clear glass, and the effect reminded me of the armory of the Venetians or of other princely armories that are often shown to foreigners. (128-31)

Here is how a kitchen really ought to be kept: clean and rust-free. But significantly, Tasso's reflections, while initially centered on France, also noticeably tum to and then end with Italy. What may seem extraordinary in another nation, abroad, is extremely typical back at home, both in public places, such as armories, and intimate domains, such as marriage chambers. In fact, people apparently come to Italy to learn about cleanliness. Foreigners are "shown" (dimostrate) these clean armories, and in being shown them, they are so instructed. The verb "dimostrare," after all, means not just to show but also to demonstrate. Italian cleanliness, in this sense, is a cultural export. Tasso finds it not only in Italy but also in France, as a reflection of a value learned by foreigners who have come to visit Tasso's part of the world. Hence, when Tasso journeying homeward finds a clean

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kitchen in a hospital in Beaune, with its shimmering windows and rustfree pots and pans gleaming bright in the sun, he is finding a reflection of the cleanliness he has always experienced back in Italy. He is locating, in truth, a set of values that marks the French as brotherly doubles of Italians, making them, in the end, like Tasso and his polite and well-policed ilk. 39 In a clean household, then, everything has its place, and cleanliness assures that everything-all things that matter and are composed of matter-are naturally in their place. But Tasso goes one step further. In The Father of the Family the concept of the natural order of human households as clean and rigorously arranged extends even to the natural world itself, over which the lord of this household holds ruthless sway as a keen cultivator of not just virtue but soil. And Tasso has some basis for thinking this way. In late Renaissance Italy, nature itself was viewed as an extension of a fixed classificatory social system. As Allen Grieco has shown, "social hierarchies were projected onto the natural world" in a variety of botanical contexts (149). 40 "There existed," Grieco argues, "a series of analogies between the world of plants and the world of human beings" (135), so that "society had a 'natural' order and nature had a 'social' order" that was accepted, fixed, and changeless (136). In pre-Linnaean botany, plant life was thus not only rigidly classified but also valued according to its place on a vertical "social" axis. It was valued, in fact, according to where the plant actually grew; if it grew physically high, it was therefore "endowed with a particular nobility," or if physically low, it was therefore ignoble, "vulgar, unhealthy, or even dangerous" (141). There were, consequently, good fruits fed by the noble, upward, uplifting elements in nature (air, fire, and sun). Naturally enough, those good fruits tended to cost more, were of real value, and were taken as a "status symbol." And naturally enough those noble foods of status were appropriate for consumption only by certain people, unhealthy for others (134). This being the case, the real problem with the pre-Linnaean classificatory system arose with the hybrid fruits, the ones that fall between categories and tended to be seen "as a potential source of impurity" (143), the betwixt-and-between fruits and vegetables in the social hierarchy of plant life. A case in point, as Grieco demonstrates, is melons. On the one hand, since they grow on vines, melons can potentially rise up and cover the topmost branches of the highest trees. Like the fluctuating value of Fico's man in his Oration, the value of melons can outstrip all other things. Melons can climb up as they seem to strive for the sun. On the other hand, melons are too weak to actually sustain themselves. Unlike Fico's man, they need some sort of crutch to help lift themselves up. They have no angelic wings of their own and need a real ladder, not a conceptual one that can be kicked out from under them once they have reached a new and stable height. As a result, no matter how high mel-

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ons seek to extend themselves, they will necessarily fall to the ground without external supports and, with their weak meandering vines, lie there extending out in all directions. Melons may therefore be delicious, airy, lofty, clean, wind-washed, and sun-fed fruit, but they are also creepers and thus, in being rooted and confined to the earth, they lose their dignity. They are tricksters in the family of fruits and vegetables, seeming to be one thing (lofty, clean, and decent), but in reality another (lowly, dirty, and impure). As a result, they are enticing yet dangerous. 41 The father of the family in Tasso's dialogue, who is so attentive to cleanliness and refinement in his household, recognizes the hybrid, ambivalent status of melons. He has read not only his classical sources on agriculture and economics, but presumably also Renaissance books on diet, a number of which discuss the status of melons and warn against consumption unless certain rigorous precautions are taken. Either way, it is clear that the father of the family has-to borrow the vocabulary of modern therapy"issues" with melons: "You have divided your lands very well," I told him. "It is obvious that you have studied not only Virgil but Varro too. But what about these melons that are so full of flavor? Do they too grow in your gardens? "They do," he replied. "If you like them, eat all you want, and pay no attention to me. I have barely tasted them, not because there is any scarcity but because I believe them to be rather bad for the health. Although they are very pleasing to the taste and surpass all other melons in sweetness, nevertheless, because they are never off the ground and do not expose all their sides to the sun [non sollevandosi mai di terrane ogni lor parte scoprendo al sole] they necessarily drink, so to speak, a great deal of the excess dampness of the earth and are not ripened well or evenly by the virtue of the sun. For these reasons there are few good melons and many whose taste resembles that of squash and cucumbers, which also lie on the ground [ch'anch'essi non s'inalzan dalla terra]." (56-57)

As superlative as they may be, the melons grown by the father of this family do not fit into the orderly, perfectly divided, ruthlessly regulated world of this household, with its neatly arranged outlying grounds. These melons are, in Mary Douglas's terms, "matter out of place." One half of a melon lies in sinister shadow, absorbing the dank dark earth. For this reason, the melons in this household can be grown and seen but they should not be used or enjoyed-or rather, they can be used and enjoyed only by those of the appropriate and corresponding social order. Indeed, to eat a lowly, earthy melon would only confuse the value of who you are. For, at bottom, melons are no better than a low-brow squash or parvenu cucum-

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ber, and sometimes, we are told, they taste just like one. It is therefore a telltale sign of where you stand socially if you eat a melon: you occupy the liminal state of matter out of place-you are low, earthy. In Tasso's dialogue, and in late Renaissance Italy, you are, in truth, what you eat, and what you eat already has a predetermined place in the social hierarchy, just as every person does in this household, no matter how much they might try to disguise it. As a result, all is supremely ordered, polite, and well-policed-in a word, "pulito"-in Tasso's household, from the father to the wife to the servants to the kitchen to the food consumed. Needless to say, the young man in this dialogue wisely refuses to consume the enticing, yet dangerous, melon that sits on the well-stocked dinner table. The guest in search of a new patron knows his place and will not allow himself to be displaced by matter out of place. And so, too, we can imagine, Tasso would have his readers understand that he knows his place in the prince's palace as he writes this dialogue, for he yearns, as he finds himself in a filthy prison, to be restored to that rightful place within the ideally polite and well-ordered court of Alfonso II. If cleanliness was a key term for understanding the household in Renaissance Italy, it was just as important for imagining the city-and not just in theory, but also in practice.42 Italian ambassadors, for instance, seem to relish taking note in their reports of the cleanliness or uncleanliness of particular places they visited briefly or resided in for long periods of time. Often, many ambassadors pronounce the cities of Spain lacking in proper hygiene. "As early as 1468," Vincent Luciani points out, the ambassador Roberto Gaguin "hinted at the general wretchedness of Spain, at the housings comparable to pigsties, to the stables full of filth, to the muddy and dusty roads." 43 Not all ambassadors, however, were always so hard on the Spaniards. At one point, for instance, Andrea Navagero describes in his diary, Journey in Spain, how the Spanish have devised a way of washing away the filth accumulated in Seville, thus implying that they know how to keep at least one of their urban spaces clean. 44 Yet at about the same time that Navagero was writing, Francesco Guicciardini-always a discerning ambassador with a perspicacious eye-notices that Spain is full of buildings that are not only ugly but also full of "mud and filth" (di fango e di bruttura).45 Given these sorts of observations, there may be some truth to what so many Italian ambassadors tended to report about the mire of Spain in the Renaissance. Nevertheless, these observations may not just reflect accurately whether the place to which different Italian ambassadors have come was or was not clean. These observations may also reflect how different Italian ambassadors felt at home, in place or out of place, in that foreign domain. People mark territories by labeling their environments ac-

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cording to standards of clean and unclean, and those standards, by no means structured according to a fixed and stable binary opposition, as Stallybrass and White have pointed out, can be easily used as we move from the country to the city or from one neighborhood to another within a given territory and set of boundaries. Ambassadors, of course, would be keenly attentive to this marking of the familiar and unfamiliar, since it was their job to be both detached representatives of their home and, at the same time, immersed in the culture and place to which they had been sent. A most remarkable description about cleanliness and a specific city on the part of an ambassador in the Italian Renaissance belongs to Marco Foscari (1477-1551), a well-educated, refined, and moralizing Venetian patrician. Elite, aristocratic, haughty, and well connected (his cousin, the powerful Andrea Gritti, remained doge for a long period of time), he preferred politics to his family's lucrative mercantile affairs. Elected to the senate in 1508, Foscari revealed his skills in Venetian politics beginning in about 1516, and for a brief period of time, from roughly 1519 to 1521, he became, according to his recent biographer, Giuseppe Gullino, "almost the symbol of the hopes and the tensions associated with the renewal of the Marciano state after so many wars." 46 In 1522, already a seasoned ambassador, Foscari was dispatched as one of the orators to Rome, during the short-lived papacy of Adrian VI. He remained in Rome from April1523 to April 1526, during a particularly delicate moment for Venice and, more generally, Italy and the church. He had good, friendly working relations with Clement VII, whom he helped sway from the papacy's traditional alliance with Imperial Spain and move toward the French. By the time the anti-imperial treaty of Cognac was agreed on (on 22 May 1526), Foscari had returned home. He was soon dispatched on another mission, however, this time to Florence, perhaps because of his close ties with the Medici. 47 His connection with Clement VII certainly must have been of great value to the Venetian Republic. "It was in fact necessary," Gullino observes, "to keep the pope firmly in the league, for he appeared to be the weakest link now that the lanzichenecchi were in Italy; for this reason, in reality the new task proved to be a sort of extension of the Roman ambassadorial mission." 48 Foscari stayed in Florence for a year, at a time when not just the city but also the rest of Italy experienced enormous political turmoil. On 6 May 1527, Rome was sacked, just over three months after Foscari's arrival in Florence. This horrifying event, one of the defining traumatic events in Italian history, dramatically altered the political makeup of Florence, though it did not at all shatter the confidence of the leaders committed to reform. Republican spirit swelled and anti-Medicean anger rose. On 16 May 1527, ten days after the mercenaries of the imperial forces invaded and plundered Rome, Florence ousted the Medici and restored its repub-

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lie, fifteen years after its collapse in 1512. Foscari, in Florence from late January 1527 to early February 1528, observed these events firsthand. He also witnessed the city preparing to brace itself for the impending onslaught of the imperial forces. He viewed it like Etruria falling to ancient Rome-an inevitability. Foscari's discussion of Florentine cleanliness (or lack thereof) appears in his unusually rich and learned relazione, which is filled with all sorts of literary references to the works of not just classical but also Florentine authors.49 From the outset, Foscari is keenly aware how a city's site can, as he puts it, "attract foreigners, with those enticements and delights that draw people to come and live there, thus rendering the city so much more full of people and more populated" (7). This is important. A city can grow and flourish only if it can attract people to live, work, and do business there. Venice, by implication, does not seem to fare as well in this regard. As Foscari reminds the senate in his introduction, a good city "must not be maritime and placed right above the sea, so as to be free of contagions and pestilences that can be so easily carried there by sailors, and also the different vices that the foreigners can send out into a well-established city" (7). 50 Surely the senate could see in this offhand statement a fairly familiar image of their own Venice, a maritime republic built on marshland and highly susceptible to invasions and pestilences, so much so that it became over time a literary topos to make the serene republic the site of various invading maladies. 5 1 By contrast, Florence, we soon learn, is perfectly suited to attract people (including ambassadors, we might surmise), since it is for Foscari a beautiful city placed in a "wondrous and delightful site" (un mirabile e dilettevol sito, 7) in the most beautiful part of the entire world: I do not believe that either in Italy or in all of Europe there is a site or a region more lovely [amena] or more delightful than that where Florence is situated: because Florence is placed in a plain, completely encircled [circondato] by hills and mountains, which extend about it for approximately forty-five miles, and the city is placed to one side toward the east. The hills around it are all fertile hills, cultivated hills, most lovely hills, laden all with the most beautiful and sumptuous palaces, built with lavish expense and with all the delights that can be imagined: with gardens, with little forests, with fountains, fish-ponds, baths and all kinds of delights, and with views that seem pictures [con prospetti che pareno pitture]. Because from these hills and palaces unfold to one's view other hills around it and hillocks and valleys, all laden with farms and palaces; one sees plains, mountains, rivers, water and the city itself of Florence; and from the city one sees the hills and the palaces. In the middle of the city [per mezzo Ia citta] passes the Arno, a wondrous river, one and a half times wider than our Grand Canal, with water that is placid, clear,

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transparent, lovely [amena], and as delightful as one can possibly say, with four stone bridges crossing over it. Then the city has the most beautiful and straight streets, all paved, so that the city is all neat and clean [tutta netta], all beautiful, and happy, and the whole place laughs: so that, if the poet Dante, in speaking yet again of his "patria," calls it "il bel ovile" [the beautiful sheepfold], he has spoken most appropriately. (8-9) Like Bruni, to whom we shall soon turn, Foscari envisions Florence as an elegant city, happy, closed in on itself. Moreover, as in Bruni's Laudatio, Foscari's highly embellished, literary, and rhetoricized relazione unveils "the secret laws of optics and perspective that make the Florentine landscape appear as one great scenic structure." "We find at work," to adapt once more Hans Baron's observations about Bruni's Laudatio, "the same sensibility which is familiar to us from panoramic drawings of Florence by Quattrocento artists." And as in Bruni's Laudatio we find "the same love of geometric regularity and proportion which was to express itself throughout the Renaissance in so many diagrams of 'ideal cities."'52 The houses on the hills look out onto other hills encircling the city with "views like a picture"; the city in its turn looks back to the hills in a reciprocal relationship, creating a vision of Florence that is at once balanced, aesthetic, and calculated in its manipulation of pictorial perspectives ("prospetti"). Florence, which is "amena," is the embodiment of the trope locus amoenus. 53 But Foscari's praise of Florence then borders more conspicuously on the rhetoric of panegyric when he calls it the "center" of all Italy: "The site is in the middle of Italy [in mezzo l'Italia], so that one can say that Florence is the center [umbilicus] of Italy" (21). Here Foscari may well have been drawing directly from Bruni, who had famously described Florence in his Laudatio as "the center [umbelicus ]"of the whole ordered orbit of outlying regions, just like the "center [umbelicum]" knob of a buckle (145, 240), while Bruni in his turn may well have been echoing the classical contexts, in which various important sites, most conspicuously, for instance, Delphi, all boasted of being the navel-umbilicus/omphalos-of the universe. 5 4 For Foscari, as for Bruni, Florence is very much at the heart of things, that very navel of the world, with all the exact qualities that the wise men of the past and the present say "a wondrous and delightful site" should possess in order to be secure, attractive, and healthy (5-7). If Florence is an "excellent republic" worthy of functioning as a structural and cultural model for Venice, a problem nevertheless emerges. This problem centers on an image that may at first seem to be-but certainly is not-superfluous in a discourse that claims it will not admit any extraneous information(" omettendo io in prim is le cose superflue [omitting in the first place all things superfluous]," 5). Why, Foscari wonders, is Florence,

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though well fortified and well situated, though rich and beautiful, a weak city? The answer Foscari initially provides to his own question is significant, especially given Foscari's detailed attention to aesthetic and rhetorical aptness, order, and perfection, and since Foscari may well have been working over and against Bruni's Laudatio-or, just as likely, the Quattrocento vernacular translation of the Laudatio-when he composed this part of his relazione. "The Florentines" he insists, are therefore weak men, first by nature, and then by accident. They are weak by nature because they are timid or because that air and that sky naturally produce timid men, or because all the Florentines work in a mercantile trade and in the manual and mechanical arts and other low labors. Because in Florence all are artisans who work and labor with their own hands; and the leaders that govern the state go to their silk shops, and, throwing the hems of their cloaks over their shoulders, they work the silk or work with the bobbin to wind the silk upon, publicly, in their shops so that all can see them [che ognuno li vede]; and their own sons remain in the shop with their aprons on in front, and they carry sacks and bags to the master of the arts with the silk, and they perform other labors in the shop; and their elders are those who prepare the silk and order it and do it all; and, the same being true of the art of wool, the elders who govern the state separate out and sift through the wool and the sons look over the cloth and perform other tasks, of the most vile and filthy nature [vilissimi e sporchi], so that with all the Florentines entangled in these vile labors, they can be nothing other than timid and base. (17-18)

Readily apparent in the Venetian ambassador's relazione is the nobleman's well-bred, refined disdain for anyone who holds a vile, socially low trade. In this particular case, however, what is so shocking for Foscari is that the leaders themselves of the Florentine government actually roll up their sleeves and work with their lessers. Their children do the same. And they all do this publicly, for all to witness. Indeed, it would almost seem that the Florentine leaders make a point of flouting their free association with the workers whom they have hired. For the Venetian Foscari, this is not a wellordered state, the government of detached mercantile noblemen, but arepublic of parvenus in which all the elements are physically enmeshed in vile, base labors that are, in a word, "filthy" (sporchi). The republic has been restored in 1527, but with what and with whom in control? Nothing so aptly captures the Venetian ambassador's aristocratic disdain as the image of filth that he uses for these Florentine men engaged in mechanical and manual labors, working side by side with their hired help, performing with their own hands tasks otherwise relegated to dirty men. It is one thing to call men base (vili, vilissimi) as the Venetian ambassador

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repeatedly and emphatically does. Vile signifies low, the lesser rank of society, an accepted category in political discourse, as when Foscari refers to the "the Ciompi, who are the wool workers, exercising low [vili] jobs, and other sorts of low [vili] manner of men" (43). A city, to be sure, is inevitably-indeed, it arguably must be, according to the political theorists of the time-composed of many vile people. Someone has to do the dirty work, perform those basic menial mechanical tasks, from cleaning latrines to washing the laundry to carding the wool. But to call labors filthy, sporchi, at once raises the possibility of contamination. Filth, the social anthropologist Mary Douglas reminds us, may spread, and for Foscari the entire web of Florentine society seems to have become "entangled" in its own mire of work. Physical contact with dirty leaders thus potentially creates a society of dirty men. The leaders of Florence have gotten their hands dirty, and in so doing they have inexcusably dirtied the state. There would seem, then, to be little difference between the social makeup of Florence as a republic in 1527, with the leaders working in shops side-by-side with base and dirty men, and the social makeup of Florence as a republic in 1373, when the wool carder Michele di Lando, after rolling up his sleeves, briefly took over the government and became "Gonfaloniere of justice" (43) with "his arms naked, all covered with oil [tutto sparso da olio]" (43). For all its magnificence and perfection as the center, umbilicus, of the world, Florence, it would seem, is not a particularly socially clean city. Quite the contrary, it is not quite clean enough. And this does not bode well for a city that must defend itself as a responsible, ordered republic against the looming threat of the imperial forces. For Foscari, Florence nevertheless sometimes represents a particularly attractive alternative to Venice as the perfectly situated center, the locus amoenus, of the civilized world. Its attraction is not just physical but organizational. Florence is not only central and beautiful but, since the change in its government, the only major remaining republic in Italy other than Venice. It is also well fortified, both by nature and through careful construction of thick walls. Perhaps not least, it is also spiritually well fortified because it is a deeply religious and caring republic. The Florentines, Foscari explains, demonstrate charity in all sorts of ways, especially in the manner in which they see to the well being of the ill and needy. "There are in the city," he affirms, about forty hospitals that receive, from what I've understood, about 6o,ooo ducats every year as income; they are built most magnificently and governed in the best of all possible ways; among them is the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, which has about 15,000 to 16,ooo ducats in income. And that hospital you can say is almost like a city, in which any sick person who happens

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to come that way is accepted. And would to God that this most magnificent city of ours might be so enriched with hospitals and pious places as is the city of Florence! ... I conclude, then, that the city of Florence is a devout, Christian, and religious city. (23)

When it comes to pious charitable institutions, Florence certainly puts its money where its mouth is. In this respect, Florence is a model city. Everything the Florentines do in exercising and demonstrating their civic concern for the needy and sick is something that the Venetians should do as well. Yet there are still problems, Foscari gives us to understand, an "emulation" (emulazione, 84) that breeds envy out of fierce competition. "They are also a republic," he writes, "and they are envious when they see in our republic such greatness and power, and theirs in such lowness" (85). For Foscari, the Florentines evidently want to be Venetians. And there is something to be said about this. Venice did traditionally stand as a political model for a host of Florentines who had reflected on the proper form of governance and theorized on politics, from Machiavelli to Guicciardini. 55 "Emulazione," however, runs both ways, and much of what Foscari says about the Florentine hatred of the Venetians may be said of Foscari's own envy of Florence as the "umbilicus" of all Italy. For Foscari, Florence therefore operates as an enviable double that he must keep distant as "other" to demonstrate his deeper love for his own "patria." He consequently demonizes Florence by vividly describing a filthiness that is social rather than architectural. It is a filthiness composed not only of men who work in a dirty, manual trade, unctuous men like Michele di Lando, who take over the government as they roll up their sleeves and bare their greasy arms. Florence is also inundated-especially at the very time that Foscari writes-with a revolting filth, the "arrabbiati," who brought about the downfall of Savonarola. These sowers of discord Foscari considers "fecce" (77)-quite literally "the dregs," "the riff-raff," the kind of matter out of place that promotes political disorder and upsets the proper regulation of governmental bodies. Venice, whether in its elaborate canal systems, which cleansed the city, or in its legislation restricting participation in government, knew how to keep filth-literal and metaphoric-out of the city and its controlling institutions. Thus the Venetian senate, far from sending this experienced ambassador off to a city where some of the greatest Renaissance humanists had lived, has sent him off to a city that is clean on the outside but mire on the inside. There can be little doubt, then, that Foscari does not plan to stay in Florence. His relazione, which selectively appropriates both linguistically and conceptually the great writers of Florence, nevertheless only assures us that Venice is still superior. However beautiful and structurally central Florence may seem to be from the out-

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side, Foscari wishes to come home. He yearns to return to Venice like a son to a father who has momentarily cast him out into an impure world-or like a dog, as he puts it in his introductory remarks, that has been beaten and wants to be let back in. 56 Better to endure the pestilential winds that come off the shore of a vulnerable maritime republic than live in an architecturally clean yet socially dirty city of discord which, like Etruria succumbing to Roman dominance, is destined to fall and, as it so happened, fell only two years after Foscari returned to Venice. Indeed, just a year after his return home, the Venetians, troubled with their own aesthetics of self-presentation to foreigners, had begun to clean up their act, as Vasari reports, by hiring the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino to refurbish piazza San Marco. In the process, the Venetians removed such eyesores as the offending presence of public urinals in the main city square: Among these initiatives was the following. In the year 1529, there were between the two columns in the piazza some butchers' stalls, and also between one column and the next many wooden huts for the convenience of people's natural needs [per comodo delle persone per i /oro agi naturali], something most foul [bruttissima] and shameful for the dignity of the palace and the public square, as well as for strangers [Jorestieri], who coming to Venice by way of San Giorgio saw on their arrival all that filthiness first of all [nel prima introito cos! jatta sozzura]. 57 Foscari's frank, though unmistakably biased, report will prove a fitting point of contrast with, and introduction to, a very different and earlier description of cleanliness in Florentine culture. This description is not the work of an outsider peering in, an ambassador only too happy to return home like a dog to its master. Rather, it is a famous description composed over a century before Foscari by Leonardo Bruni, an Aretine but nonetheless an insider, a man who later occupied a central role in Florentine politics as chancellor of the Republic from 1427 to 1444 and, for Hans Baron, the great promoter of Florentine civic humanism and republican virtue. 5 8 Indeed, in his glowing panegyric to the city of Florence, Laudatio florentinae urbis, written in his youth, probably in the summer of 140459 (and thus just before Bruni would leave Florence for a career in the Curia in Rome [1405-14]), Bruni states that he does not know how to begin to talk about such a wondrous city. Only after a series of calculated rhetorical disclaimers does he at last accept the arduous chore at hand. So many features of the city are praiseworthy, he declares, it is almost impossible to choose: the power of Florence, its wealth, institutions, customs, history, beauty, sumptuous palaces, location, splendor. When Bruni, however, fi-

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nally seizes on the "most apt and logical place to begin [aptissimum et congruentissimum ... initium]" (136, 233), he places, oddly enough, an incessant, an indeed almost obsessive, emphasis on the city's unprecedented, crystalline cleanliness. For Bruni, in fact, "cleanliness" (munditia, 136, 233) earmarks Florence from the outset as a truly exceptional city: every other city is so dirty [immunda] that the filth [sardis] created during the night is seen in the early morning by the population and trampled under foot in the streets. Really can one think of anything worse than this? Even if there were a thousand palaces in such a city and inexhaustible wealth, even if it possessed an infinite population, still I would always condemn that city as a stinking [fetidissimam] place and not think highly of it. ... Hence, filthy [immunde] cities that may in other respects be very good can never be considered to be beautiful. (138, 234)

Predictably, of course, Florence is a swan of a different color: Indeed, it seems to me that Florence is so clean [mundam] and neat that no other city could be cleaner [nitidius]. Surely this city is unique and singular in all the world because you will find here nothing that is disgusting to the eye, offensive to the nose, or filthy under foot [nichil pedibus sordidum]. The great diligence of its inhabitants ensures and provides that all filth [turpitudine] is removed from the streets, so you see only what brings pleasure and joy to the senses. Therefore, in its splendor Florence probably surpasses all the cities of the world, and, moreover, in its elegance it is without doubt far ahead of all the cities that exist now and all that ever will. Indeed, such unparalleled cleanliness [munditia] must be incredible to those who have never seen Florence, for we who live here are amazed daily and will never take for granted this fine quality of Florence. Now what is more marvelous in a populous city than never to have to worry about filth in the streets? Moreover, however big a rainstorm, it cannot prevent your walking through the city with dry feet since almost before it falls the rainwater is taken away by appropriately placed gutters. Hence, the cleanliness [mundi] and dryness that you find only in the rooms of private palaces in other cities, you find in the squares and streets of Florence. (138, 234-35)

This curious glorification of Florence is not a one-time appeal in Bruni's writings either, we should bear in mind. He touches on the topic of cleanliness once more in the second part of his Ad Petrum Paulum Histrum Dialogus, which he drafted by about March 1405, and then polished not long after he had taken up his job as papal secretary in Rome. 60 In his Dialogue

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Bruni yet again sounds the very same chord. This time, however, he filters his view through the persona of the fatherly Salutati, who had taught Bruni so much and furthered his career: In magnificence, indeed, Florence perhaps surpasses those cities which are now in existence, but in cleanliness [munditia] it surpasses both those that are

now in existence and all those that ever were .... For neither Rome nor Athens nor Syracuse were, I think, so clean and well kept, but in this respect were far surpassed by our city. 61 While Bruni here alludes to Rome, Athens, Syracuse, and other cities in his comparisons, there is, interestingly enough, no recognizable classical source for his emphasis on cleanliness. Aristides' Panathenaic Oration, his landmark panegyric on Athens, which Baron and others rightly take as Bruni's underlying model for his Laudatio, makes no mention of the topic of cleanliness, and medieval descriptions of cities do not seem to treat the subject conspicuously either. 62 Significantly, the topic of cleanliness does, however, get mentioned briefly in Salutati' s list of features of Florence worthy of praise in his Invectiva in Antonium Luschum Vicentinum. Salutati's Invectiva, written in 1403 to defend Florence against Viscontian propaganda,63 probably influenced Bruni greatly, as is evident in the way Bruni voices the topic of cleanliness through the figure of Salutati in his Ad Petrum Paulam Histrum Dialogus. More important, Salutati's Invectiva "provides a summary," a topical summary, as Antonio Santosuosso has pointed out, "of most of the elements contained in the geographical section of the

Laudatio" :64 I cannot believe that my Antonio Loschi who has seen Florence, or someone else, whoever has seen her, could deny, unless he is completely a fool, that she is truly the flower and the most beautiful spot in Italy. Which city, not only in Italy but in the whole world, is safer within the ring of her walls; who has more prestigious palaces, more beautiful temples, more handsome buildings, more splendid porticoes, a larger number of public squares, larger roads, a more accomplished population, more famous citizens, a greater amount of riches, a more fertile soil? Which one has a more lively location, a more healthy climate; which one is more clean [mundior], has a greater number of wells, sweeter waters, more active crafts: who is more admirable in every thing? Which one has richer villas, more powerful towns, more villages, more skillful country workers? Which city without a harbor has a greater traffic of merchandise? Where is to be found greater commerce, a greater variety of exchanges, more ability in difficult transactions? Where would you find more illustrious persons and, without mentioning the names

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of the infinite number of such people for the sake of avoiding boredom, men who are more praiseworthy because of their actions, more courageous because of their armed endeavors, more powerful because of their dominion over others-in all more famous? Where can you find Dante, where Petrarch, where Boccaccio? Tell me, I beg, Oh terrible beast, in what place, to what men, will you give first place in Italy, if Florence is called the dregs of Italy? ... But since in this corruptible world such greatness is without a doubt impossible, you should be ashamed, Oh most filthy of filthy men, crap and excrement of the Lombards [spurcissimorum spurcissime, stercus et egeries Lombardorum], or better of the Longobards, for having called the Florentines the dregs of Italy, the Florentines who are the true and one-and-only honor of Italy! 65 As Salutati's Invectiva here breaks into the mood and mode of panegyric, and then finishes with an oratorical flourish containing some fairly stercoraceous remarks, cleanliness is openly foregrounded. But cleanliness also unfolds in Salutati's Invectiva as just merely one of the many features that mark the city and make it attractive. Cleanliness does not, in itself, really distinguish Florence as a unique city, setting it off from every city that ever existed or would exist. So why does Bruni stress this point in his panegyric? Since Bruni aims to rival and surpass his master, whose job he would probably not mind having, it probably made good sense that Bruni should mention the topic of cleanliness, just as Salutati had done only a year before Bruni composed his Laudatio. But if this is the case, it is not at all evident why Bruni should have doggedly fixed our attention on cleanliness to the exclusion of other things, and that he should do so from the start. Where, after all, are Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio? Where are the great Florentine writers? Don't they render the city unique? We might begin by noticing that Bruni's remarks on the cleanliness of Florence are connected to his repeated emphasis upon the architectural magnificence of the city. Similar connections were, in fact, made some twenty years later by Goro Dati. In his chronicle of the city, the History of Florence from 1380 to 1405, composed after 1422 and probably before April 1424, Dati praises one building after another and then succinctly remarks toward the end that "the streets are paved with smooth and even stones which always stay neater and cleaner there more than any other place [nette e pulite piu che in uno altro luogo]." 66 No doubt, when compared to Dati's, Bruni's claim about the cleanliness of Florence reaches unsealed heights, thereby making it all the more difficult to unravel the language of praise (understood here as an exaggerated assertion that flies in the face of reality) from the language of history (understood here as a widely accepted assertion that accurately reflects a consensual perception of reality). To cite Bruni's own pithy defense of his panegyric, "Aliud est enim historia, aliud

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laudatio" (For history is one thing, panegyric another, Epist. viii 4). 67 But given Goro Dati's remark it is worth noting that Bruni's description could be taken as a faithful reflection of the changing architectural appearance of the city. Several eminent Florentine scholars have, after all, called attention to the massive construction projects that began in the mid fourteenth century as a guild-funded enterprise and then flowered in and after the Laurentian age with the building of enormous private palaces. So impressive were these building ventures, both public and private, that some have spoken of a veritable "building boom." 68 Yet in 1404, roughly the time in which Bruni was composing his panegyric, the great monumental structures which were to become eventually the hallmarks of Renaissance Florence had not yet even been projected, much less begun. In the early fifteenth century the completed drum to the Duomo still awaited someone to design a way to cover the gaping octagonal hole, and many churches and hospitals were yet to be built. The groundbreaking for the huge palaces of the Strozzi, Gondi, Medici, Pith, Rucellai, and Pazzi families would not take place until the second half of the century, and many of these palaces would not be finished until the next century-if finished at all. To talk of "urban renewal" or a changing cityscape is therefore probably incorrect until the later part of the century. Even then it was not until the sixteenth century that a whole street or piazza experienced enough of an architectural shift to be justifiably dubbed "a patrician residential center." 69 In the early years of the fifteenth century, Florence was still very much a medieval city with a cluttered mass of buildings tightly packed together, twisted streets, dark alleys, and an occasional piazza allowing in some wan light. When buildings were periodically razed to make way for new structures, much of the rubble was no doubt left behind as well?0 Luca Landucci, when describing the building of the Strozzi palace in his diary, complains of the heaps of stone and rubbish scattered about and the dust constantly being raised from the work. 71 Florence was also noticeably smelly and dirty. In one of his sermons, San Bernardino of Siena observes that the holy cross, as a universal sign of reverence, when placed conspicuously in public places in Florence helps dissuade people-or at least those with some fear of God in them-from pissing on such communally shared architectural structures as the walls of the city. 72 Between 1397 and 1430 the guardians of the Duomo had to intervene twice just to try to keep people from urinating in the somewhat secluded and sheltered area between the cathedral and the bell tower, first by paving the area, which was then covered by a bridge linked between the two main religious structures, and then by destroying Brunelleschi's model of the cupola, which had evidently been transformed into a sort of public urinal. Smack in the center of the city, then, some people in early Renaissance Florence were not just

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taking a load off their minds by entering the enormous cathedral and unburdening themselves in their prayers to God. Some people were also unloading themselves of their unbearable lightness of bodily being, even in front of the Duomo in the mid Cinquecento, when a gap during construction made space for depositing such "brutture" possible. 73 In March 1434, about thirty years after Bruni wrote his panegyric, workers had to be hired to clean off the main door to the Duomo of all the urine oh it, and three or four stonecutters to deter people from doing their business around the area, both then and in the future.74 "Men, when dead," Leonardo da Vinci pondered in his notebooks, "will pass through their own bowels."75 Some evidently felt more comfortable passing off much of the matter in their bowels, certainly prior to their own demise, both onto and into religious sites in the center of the city before, during, and after the time when Bruni was praising Florence for its remarkable and unprecedented cleanliness. Rather than serving as a faithful description of the city, then, Bruni's emphasis on cleanliness is more likely serving an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy. When a city is not clean, it loses its "pulchritudo," "elegantia," "magnificentia." Indeed, as Bruni knew all too well, the adjective mundus signifies not only cleanliness but also elegance: to be clean is to be neat, and to be neat is to be elegant. In this respect, Bruni's emphasis on cleanliness, I would like to argue in the following pages, both mirrors and participates in his deep concern for uncovering and locating a pure, clean Latin language rid of imperfections. Bruni, in fact, raised this point-albeit indirectly-at the end of the Laudatio, when he discusses the uses and abuses of the vernacular in Florence: What shall I say of its polished speech and elegant language, in which its superiority is unchallenged? For in the whole of Italy only this city is considered to use the purest and most polished/ elegant speech [purissimo ac nitidissimo]. And so all who wish to speak well and correctly take this one city for their model. For there are in this city men who in the popular and common kind of speaking make all other men seem like children. As for letters, not the commercial and sordid kind [sordide], but the kind that is worthy of free men and which has always flourished among leading peoples, it is in this city alone that they now prosper most. (263?6

Here Bruni has recognized, as did Salutati, the dominance of the Florentine language as the model for vernacular letters because of its established elegance and purity. Aristides, moreover, provided Bruni with a classical model for this sort of praise. "All men have come to accept this dialect [Attic Greek], in the belief that it is as it were a mark of education," Aristides observes in his Panathenaic Oration, and "it could be said that all other di-

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alects-to say nothing about the barbarians, but I mean of the Greeks themselves-were like the words of lisping children in comparison with yours." 77 But Bruni was never really that concerned with the vernacular, however pure and clear it might be in Florence. His interest was in Latin, the pure Latin "letters, not the commercial and sordid kind, but the kind that are worthy of free men and which have always flourished among leading peoples." In this regard, Aristides, who was not a native speaker of Attic, could have possibly provided Bruni once more with an extremely helpful model to imitate here. For what is altogether striking is that Aristides as an" Atheist," whom later scholars would identify as a leader of the Second Sophistic, is engaged in the same project of purifying the language and restoring it to classical models as, we shall soon see, Bruni is doing in Latin?8 Aristides was born and lived in Asia Minor, studied in Rome under the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, and belonged to a movement that tried to revive classical Greek (Attic). Aristides' models are thus half a millennium in the past, and the effect would have been like reviving Elizabethan English. To this end, Bruni is engaged in a similar project. In his oration Bruni praises the elegance, clarity, and purity of the Latin language that he must, with the help of other humanists in Florence and elsewhere, reconstruct and refurbish, much as Aristides had to resuscitate Attic Greek. So much and so good for those who wish to write in the vernacular, we might say. But how do you proceed if you wish to communicate in the language that is not the common idiom? Moreover, unlike Alberti, Bruni was a strong believer in the division of linguistic competence according to classes. The vernacular had always existed, even in ancient Rome, he believed. Not all could speak a fine Latin, and many-including presumably the servants, the washerwomen, and the like-spoke a vulgar tongue. But what about ancient Greece? Should we be thinking of Bruni as having in mind a culture of two languages then and there too? Did ancient Greece have a formal and informal Greek? If so (and it seems to be so for Bruni),79 the model for the use of the vernacular grounded in Tuscany already existed: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as Bruni would confirm in the second part of his Dialogue, composed a year after the oration, and as Salutati had already affirmed at the end of his Invectiva, composed only a year before the Laudatio. But what about Latin? Where is the contemporary model for its revival? The attention to cleanliness in Florence, I maintain, reflects Bruni's concern for cleaning up the use of Latin, thus effectively transferring his evaluative categories from languages to the city he praises. But before turning to this notion, we need to bear in mind that Bruni's desire to police the uses of the Latin and clean it up is more broadly humanist in thrust. As Maurizio

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Vitale has shown,80 in raising the issue of the purity of Latin, Italian Renaissance humanists rehearsed, as they also revised, concepts embedded in the classical Latin literature they revered, translated, imitated, and emulated.81 Sometimes Renaissance Italian humanists made an issue of the topic of linguistic purity, accusing those who have contaminated the pure Latin of the past as having, in Silvia Rizzo's words, "sporchi costumi" (filthy habits). 82 Many of these issues about linguistic purity arose during the debate over the development of Latin and the vernacular that took place in Florence in 1435 and involved, as we have seen, Bruni and Biondo. Biondo in particular waxed both elegant and vehement as he took on this topic at the end of his De verbis romanae locutionis, which was directed to (and at) Bruni. There, as Biondo rehearsed the nature of the original debate, he insisted, for instance, that once Rome fell to the Goths and Vandals "all were polluted with barbaric speech and were dirtied through and through [inquinati ac penitus sordidati]." 83 Moreover, the issue over cleansing Latin of barbarisms and resuscitating its purity only became more intense over time, thanks to the input of Biondo and Bruni. The great humanist teacher Guarino da Verona (1370-1460), who also participated in the debate, felt that the barbarians had "dirtied" the pure Latin "like dregs" (instar faecis ). 84 The famous humanist and chancellor of Florence after Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), picks up the topic in his Disceptatio convivalis III (ca. 1450), as he belatedly joined the debate waged by Bruni and Biondo, and complains that Latin had been "polluted" (inquinarent) by the varied people of Italy long before it succumbed to the influence of conquered nations. 85 The topic of linguistic cleanliness continued to get aired long after the initial debate concerning it waned in Florence. In the late fifteenth century, for example, Raphael Regius (d. 1520) warned in his De laudibus eloquentiae panegyricus (1485) that the use of impure speech, "filthy barbarisms," on the part of contemporary bad rhetoricians would scare away students. 86 One of the greatest humanists of the late Quattrocento, the Venetian Ermolao Barbaro (1454-93), denounced the current habits of universitytrained Scholastics for having sullied "philosophy, which is a divine activity, holy and pious"; "it is appropriate," he asserted, "to approach [philosophy] piously, with hands not sullied but pure, chaste, with uncontaminated words, not dirty, not turbid [manibus non illotis, sed puris, sed nitidis, sermone casta, non spurco, non lutulento contrectari]." According to Barbaro, philosophy, for all that it must strive to move beyond language to things, is so "noble" in its essence that it "must not be corrupted, contaminated, blemished by base and ignoble words [sordidis verbis et ignobilibus inquinari, contaminari, pollui non debere]." 87 Similarly, the Udinese humanist Romola Amaseo (ca. 1489-1552), who had taught rhetoric and poetry

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at Bologna and whose lessons della Casa attended, claimed a few decades later, in an oration that dealt directly with the pure and impure uses of Latin, De latinae linguae usu retinendo (ca. 1530): "The glory of our military power long since lost, if we lose the refinement of our literature and the distinction of our humane learning, how shabby [sordida] and wretched our appearance will be, how filthy [foedus] and worn our custom." 88 At about the same time, Speroni voiced through Bembo in his Dialogue on the Languages that both Greek and Latin were originally "pure" and not "contaminated," as they had been spoken in their own time. 89 And around the same time, the Paduan Girolamo Muzio (1496-1576) encapsulated the issue succinctly when he indicated in his On the Art of Poetry (1551) that not just the "belta" (beauty) but also the "nettezza" (cleanliness) of languages must be learned and gleaned from books, not from the common folk and common usage. 9 For Muzio this would be true not just for Latin but the vernacular, which by then had acquired an accepted classical purity, in great measure-as della Casa insisted in his unfinished treatise on languages-through the efforts of Pietro Bembo. Now, if Alberti was the first to create a rudimentary grammar for the vulgar tongue, 91 Bruni, long before the authors mentioned above, was among the first to raise a concern among humanists that they must purify Latin. Even Petrarch's Latin was somewhat lackluster for Bruni, as he makes plain in the first of the Dialogues, which was composed roughly about the same time as the Laudatio, and in which he voices at one point through the arch-conservative Niccolo Niccoli a blanket condemnation of Petrarch's Latinity. Petrarch had failed as a reliable model. This being the case, Bruni has come to do the job and, as James Hankins points out, play "his leading role" in learning how to write classical Latin, so that he could give "rise to the notion of linguistic purity" and offer up a Latin purged of barbarisms and based on reliable models worthy of imitation. Of all the humanists, he was "the first," as Hankins also observes, "to discover how this could actually be done. He was the first, in other words, to master the technique of stylistic imitation, and to use it as a basis for his own artistic prose." 92 But to come up with a viable model, one had, of course, to have good clean speech. Hence, throughout his life, in his letters defending his translations, in his prefaces to his works, and in his dialogues, Bruni did everything to come up with a good clean speech, a Latinity that rivaled the writing of Cicero, who historically wrote at a time when, for Bruni, Latin had reached its height and so, too, had Roman culture. "I usually smell [olfacere] each word a thousand times," he insists in a letter in defense of his translation of Aristotle's Ethics (207-8, 2.88). In the process Bruni justifies his effort to purge the language of the noxious odors produced by bad diction and to redeem it from "the literary chaos" (chaos . .. literarum, 207,

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2.88) in which it has been plunged for so many centuries. "The purity [puritatem] of the Latin speech," he maintains in another letter, "should be preserved and not defiled with Greek and barbarous dictions" (208, 2.216). "This is the way I think that mothers and nurses assisted their children and charges to well-bred habits of speech," Bruni asserts in his letter of 1435 to Biondo on the Latin language: "They didn't inflect their cases, use variatio, or terminate their sentences in the literary fashion, but they instilled in them a pure, polished, and by no means barbarous speech" (sed quod purum et nitidum ac minime barbarum sermonem infunderent, 234, 2.68). In his letter to Alfonso, king of Castile (1435), as he describes the value of literary distinction and how to attain it, Bruni insists that the "branch of learning" that he advocates, the studia humanitatis, "possesses the finest writers, polished, neat, and graceful [omnique mundicia nitoreque perpolitos], whom to read it is sweet, and to study easy indeed" (254, 2.94). In Bakhtinian terms, Bruni's desire for pure classical speech will allow him to compose a classical corpus as smooth, complete, and integral as the works he reveres from the past. And it will allow him to re-create from the past, as he unearths Ciceronian Latin, a socially elite language, not encumbered by the grotesque barbarisms that give it an unseemly and socially inferior status. The rising culture of Renaissance Italy needs and deserves a formal, pristine speech. Moreover, as Bruni indicated in one of his early letters, composed in Rome in 15 March 1407 and sent to Niccolo Niccoli, the refurbished Latin used in translations would finally form a beautiful, clean, and neat feminine body, as clean and neat as that of a virgin girl ready to go out into the world to be betrothed: I have translated all of Demosthenes' oration Pro Ctesiphonte, but before I should let it come out, I want it to be duly cleansed [mundetur]. The road from Greece to the Latin land is long indeed, and I want to wipe off whatever dust and filth the book has picked upon along the way. Just so a girl should show herself to be neat and clean [politam se ac nitidam exhibeat] when she is about to be married. 93

Bruni's emphasis on cleaning up the Latin in his own time is here as sharp as it will ever get in the Italian Renaissance, and it finds one of its fullest formal expressions in his youthful panegyric. For a clean city deserves a panegyric that uses a clean, neat, elegant Latin and can therefore be used as a model for the revival of that type of Latin practiced in the cleanest city that ever existed in the world. In this light, Bruni's Laudatio represents his earliest formulation of this topic of linguistic cleanliness in practice rather than theory, a topic that concerned him throughout his life. The work he writes will conserve a purity of taste by being pure in form:

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it will adhere to classical models and decorous Latin. And since it will contain no barbarisms, none of the stuff, as Bruni puts it in his later debate over language, that "defiles" speech, it will be a model of linguistic purity, a model of clean speech, of undefiled Latinity. Yet, even though Bruni's treatise offers us a Latin so purified of infelicities that arguably it too, like a puella, is neat and clean as it reveals itself to the world, Bruni's specific treatment of the topic of cleanliness in his panegyric also speaks to his genius, his ingenium, and it does so in a truly remarkable way. For as we begin reading Bruni's panegyric and come upon him thinking about what will be the first thing to talk about in his Laudatio, as we see him work his way through various conventional topics of choice available to writers of panegyrics,94 we also see him laying the ground for his own originality as the first author to treat cleanliness as the first and most worthy topic of discussion in a panegyric. Bruni may have looked back to Aristides and the Greeks for inspiration. He may have imitated them and derived much from them in his art of translation. He may have consulted Cicero to understand how to write properly in Latin and what topics were suitable for an encomium. He may have drawn on Salutati's Invectiva for inspiration. But he has moved far beyond the classical Roman and Greek models he revered, as well as the model of the fatherly Salutati he also perhaps sought to surpass, by composing a panegyric that is unique and all his own. No one before Bruni had ever made cleanliness such a dominant topic in a panegyric, much less the one topic that impresses itself on the reader right away. Rhetorically, what we consequently witness as Bruni sorts through various topics to settle finally on cleanliness at the beginning of his panegyric is inventio in action, if by inventio we mean not just the finding of proper topics (loci) that must be arranged eloquently in a persuasive discourse (with inventio here meaning in Latin to "come upon" what is already there), but also the conscious bringing into being of something original on the part of a skilled rhetor, the willed discovery and creation of an entirely new topic and work in artistic form. It is at this point that Bruni, to borrow and adapt David Quint's elegant formulation, becomes the origin of his own originality, making his classicizing text the new classical model that displaces the ancient canonical works he had used as a point of departure. 95 It is not_long, however, before we realize that Bruni's aesthetics and rhetoric-his search for a pure clean Latin that he can use in the construction of an original modern model of beautiful, elegant oratorical art in the description of an ostensibly clean city-are part of a larger political strategy. In comparing Florence to other cities, for example, Bruni asserts: it is very important that in other cities a tourist should not stay too long. In those cities, what they have to show is all publicly displayed and is placed

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(as it were) on the outward bark. Whoever comes into these cities is seen as a stranger; but if these tourists leave the well-frequented places and try to examine the interiors as well as the exteriors of the buildings, there will be nothing to confirm their first impressions. Indeed, instead of houses they will find only small huts, and behind the exterior decorations only filth inside [proque externo decore interne sordes]. But the beauty of Florence cannot be appreciated unless seen from the inside [intus]. (140, 236)

Elsewhere, according to Bruni, public display serves to mask the mire within private spaces. In Florence, however, private space and public space are indistinguishable. That, of course, does not mean that private property becomes public property in Bruni's Laudatio, as it does, for example, in Thomas More's Utopia. 96 No one more than Bruni broadcasts the virtue of private wealth, a fact made explicit in the preface to his translation of "Aristotle's" Oeconomica. No one, for that matter, is more proud and boastful than Bruni about the magnificence of private palaces in Florence. What Bruni is questioning, however, is the system that contains such ornament, magnificence, and wealth, just as Engels conversely questioned the validity of capitalist society by analyzing "the planning of a city whereby the 'dirty' was made invisible to the bourgeoisie."97 A city may be as wealthy as Florence but not clean, as magnificent but not clean, as beautiful but not clean, externally praiseworthy but in the interior shamefully filthy. The notion of hiding and disclosing, the interior and exterior, is therefore pivotal in Bruni's use of cleanliness as a topic. On the surface, to be clean is to highlight a particular feature, to quite literally show off; but to be clean within signifies that one has nothing to hide. Bruni invites us to see Florence from within, and in so doing he is inviting us to inspect the system itself. Wealth may divide the Florentine world into the haves and the have-nots, but cleanliness is the common currency that fluidly and transparently penetrates all levels of society. When moving from the lush quarters of a magnificent private palace to the wide open arena of the public square, Bruni's hypothetical visitor is expected to find everywhere the same caring concern for cleanliness. Cleanliness is thus as much a civic virtue as a private one; it is as openly apparent as it is tucked away in the hidden interiors of houses; it is as much a characteristic of the poor as of the rich. Far from being the privilege of any particular social group, cleanliness is one of the great homogenizing elements in the city's physical and social structure. On the one hand, then, in shaping the idea of a perfectly clean city, Bruni's description functions as a metaphor for a political system that harmonizes all the individuals, no matter how minor or insignificant, into a unified systemic whole. No single individual, no single family, no ruling class shines out more brightly than any other just as no street is cleaner than

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any another. Despite their inferior social status, the members of the lower classes can-or so Bruni claims-say with complete confidence: "I also am a Florentine citizen" (173). Whereas despotism crushes the helpless and merely emboldens the rich and powerful, the Florentine republican system for Bruni protects the weak as it glorifies the strong: "There is no place on earth where there is greater justice open equally to everyone. Nowhere else does freedom grow so vigorously, and nowhere else are rich and poor alike treated with such equality" (173). In this clean city everyone has a place, everyone receives proper treatment according to his or her needs. Like the blessed in Dante's Empyrean, no one is relegated to the margins of society: "Everyone is of equal rank since the Florentine state itself has promised to protect the less powerful" (174). On the other hand, as we have seen, as cleanliness relates to the author of the panegyric, the topic functions much differently. Cleanliness, in that context, is all about self-presentation, linguistic purity, and oratorical originality as the youthful Bruni, far from conforming to the models of encomiastic writing, does something remarkably different. He bucks the trend as he opens his panegyric with a topic that no one had dared discuss at such length and with such bold determination before. In starting off his Laudatio the way he did, by focusing incessantly on cleanliness as a form of artistic and cultural expression, Bruni aims to stand out from, rather than conform to, the body of all the aspiring orators out there in early Renaissance Italy. He thus tries to make a name for himself as a professional rhetorician, 98 perhaps one worthy of taking over the elder Salutati's job. By doing so, he has also marked his originality in the panegyric that helped launch his career as a professional rhetor and-whether he "sincerely" aimed to fashion it or not99 -his reputation in time to come as the harbinger of Florentine civic humanism.

CHAPTER2

Soap and Washerwomen

If I rub my hands with it, soap foams, exults ... The more complaisant it makes them, supple, smooth, docile, the more it slobbers, the more its rage becomes voluminous, pearly ... Magic stone! The more it forms with air and water clusters of scented grapes, explosive ... Water, air and soap overlap, play at leapfrog, form combinations less chemical than physical, gymnastical, acrobatical ... Rhetorical? There is much to say about soap. -FRANCIS PONGE,

"Soap"

Then you get up, make a bundle of your dirty linen, and give it to the woman who fills your lamp for you and lays your fire, nor do you curse her and go from street to street complaining of the soap and wood she uses up while she is washing and bleaching your laundry. "To be sure, I spend a penny! Nevertheless you have to send it to a washerwoman." -PIETRO ARETINO,

Letters

In a carnival song about perfumers attributed by modern scholars to Lorenzo de' Medici, soap (sapone) has a double function as the participants

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in this song-that is to say, the perfumers-press their product upon the public with lascivious urgency: Noi abbiamo un buon sa pone, che fa saponata assai: frega un pezzo, ove si pone; se pili meni, pili n'arai. Evv'egli accaduto mai, donne, aver l'anella strette? Col sapon, che cavae mette, cuoce un poco: pazienza! [We have good quality soap, that makes a lot of foam: rub a piece, where you place it; if you stroke it more, more of it you will have [of the foam]. And has it ever happened to you, women, to have a tight ring [anus]? With soap, that goes out and in, it burns a bit: be patient! ]I

Soap here renders through salacious allusion the act of penetration less painful for the woman by easing the male member-itself a bar of soap that produces lots of lather the more it is rubbed-into her constricted anal "ring," much as soap conversely allows tight-fitting rings to slip off fingers. Thanks to soap, and the smooth olive oil base from which it is typically derived in Renaissance Italy, women may not necessarily enjoy but can at least rest assured that they will be relieved of the irritation of a disagreeable abrasive sensation. Thrust and counterthrust aside, it will all only now bum a bit, just un poco. Use soap, the perfumers proclaim, and have some patience. But what marks soap as so special-beyond the practical purpose for which it is here being advertised with mocking professional bravado (getting rings off things seems secondary to getting things into "rings")-is precisely what seized the imagination of Francis Ponge about half a millennium later in a series of extended, and somewhat rhapsodic, iterative reflections on soap in a book titled-need we ask?-Le savon. Rub soap, Ponge points out with astonishment, and the "more it forms with air and water." "Rub a piece," Lorenzo de' Medici's perfumers assure us, wherever you happen to put the bar of soap, and the more you do, the more you get: "se piu meni, piu n'arai." It is, as Ponge would have it, a "magic stone!" Soap is indeed "explosive," "voluminous." It yields more as it is consumed. Soap bubbles up to produce "una saponata," and the slippery virile bar of soap the perfumers here have urged upon the women is of such

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a good quality, "un buon sapone," that the teeming froth it yields is "assai," a lot indeed. Use it and abuse it. This is a thing that makes another thing in rich bubbly abundance? Needless to say, this was not the typical use of soap as it was described in Italian Renaissance literature, though sometimes soap could still function as a desirable softener and lubricant. For instance, tucked away in the second volume of the Orlando innamorato, and therefore over two thousand stanzas into a poem that would actually never end, Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441-94) provides us with the information that Dudone-a romance hero greatly angered after having been severely bludgeoned-strikes back against his assailant with such ferocity that he swipes Balisardo's beard clean from his chin without-the ironic narrator remarks with characteristic wonder-ever having used "sapone."3 This unlathered shaving, we are given to understand, is the cause of some pain for Balisardo and the measure of some skillful swordsmanship on the part of Dudone against his terrible foe. Conversely, in novella 14 of Le porretane by Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (d. 1510), Feliciano Antiquaro, an "astute" and "witty man" from Verona, runs for the hills once he sees the ancient blunt razor that is being drawn to cut his beard. 4 Understandably so! The inept barber described by degli Arienti has only applied a scarce amount of soap to Antiquam's face, and a good amount of soap could make the difference in softening up beards, rendering the morning, afternoon, or evening stubble more pliable for the shave. So the prolific writer Aretina would have us understand when he informs his friend, the Venetian printer Francesco Marcolini, that he will enjoy using the "saponetti" sent him in order to, among other things, shave his beard. Who wouldn't, he therefore wonders, enjoy the pleasures of soap? 5 Along these lines, at the very end of the Italian Renaissance, the Florentine compilers of the authoritative Dictionary of the Academy of the Crusca (1612) observed under the lemma "sapone" that "one says 'to shave without soap [rader senza sapone]' when one does something particularly mean to another, because one cannot shave someone without soap and not substantially harm the person."6 Along with functioning as a softener for a good clean shave, soap functioned as a fragrant cleanser, a sort of perfumed cleaning agent, in the literary imagination of the Italian Renaissance. This, in fact, was its primary function. Giovanni Boccaccio, for instance, has one of the brigata members describe in the tenth tale of day eight how Salabaetto, a beguiled wool merchant seduced and robbed in Palermo, is drawn into a bath by his mistress and there washed not only with water but "sapone moscoleato e con garofanato" (soap that was steeped in musk and cloves, 669, 766)? Fragrant soap was for Salabaetto, as it was for so many others, especially welcome. The greatest author of romances in the Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto

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(1474-1533), briefly discusses the use of "saponetti liquidi" (little liquid soaps) as fragrant lotions and hand-softeners combined as cleansers when, in his later verse rendition of La cassaria, he has the servant Fulcio complain about female vanity. 8 And Matteo Bandello (1485-1561), the author of a famous and voluminous collection of Cinquecento tales, has somewhat similar thoughts in mind when he mentions "saponetto" as a winning, enticing perfume applied by a woman to please her lover in anticipation of their betrothal. 9 Similarly, toward the middle of the Cinquecento, Anton Francesco Grazzini (1503-84) mentions the use of soap in a carnival song about the "stufaiuoli," the workers in the hot baths, who make certain everything is nice and clean as they go about their daily labors-labors, we always need to bear in mind when reading burlesque poetry, that also double in the poem as lascivious sexual activities: Ranni morbidi e chiari, e dolci si con maestria facciamo, che non ritrovan pari, e sapon moscadato ancor usiamo; rna sopratutto abbiamo nel maneggiar, e stropicciar tal arte, che da noi ben servito ognun si parte. Gli sciugatoi vedete come son fini e bianchi e di bucato: con questi poi sarete rasciutti dietro, dinanzi e dallato: che lo star ben lava to per tutta la persona importi assai, e stassi sano e non si pute mai. 10 [Lyes, soft and clear and sweet, we make with such skill that none like them can be found elsewhere, and we use musk-scented soap. But above all we have in handling and rubbing such talent that everyone leaves us well served. Look at those drying towels, how they are fine and white and laundered; with these then you will be dried up from behind, in front, and on the sides: because to be well washed all over the body is very important, and it helps one stay healthy, and one doesn't then ever smell.]

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Soap, it would therefore seem, was a familiar enough product in Renaissance Italy that it could appear sporadically in the works of authors of high and low literature without ever really calling attention to itself in the slightest-or by calling attention to itself only as an incidental, curious, whimsical element in their varied works of poetry and prose. Moreover, soap, it would seem, had a wide range of values to it in Renaissance Italian literature. However, if soap was valued, especially because it can give us nice, clean, and fragrant linen, "purging the clothes" of dirt, as the Dictionary of the Academy of the Crusca succinctly puts it, the laborers who routinely used soap-the "lavandaie" who washed "the clothes at a price," to cite once again from the Dictionary-were not valued at all in Renaissance Italy. It was enough to say during the Italian Renaissance that someone was born of a "lavandaia" to undercut his or her aspirations and status, and thus assure everyone else that that person was the lowest of the low, of no intrinsic value. Pietro Aretina's worldly Alvigia, for example, who plays the role of panderer in The Courtesan (1534 edition), observes that, after having contracted the French disease (she feigns that she simply doesn't know how she fell ill with syphilis), she tumbled down the social ladder and wound up destitute, shamefully "washing worn shirts" (a lavar camiscie lavorate, 3.6). The same concerns occupy the thoughts of a wanton woman in Aretina's satirical Dialogues. Antonia there describes the unhappy destiny of prostitutes in life, which takes them from the pleasures of sex to, in many instances, the disgraced trade of the washerwoman and then, finally, the suffering of the flesh in a beggar's life. 11 Furthermore, in keeping with their betwixt-and-between status as figures allied to cleanliness as they purge clothes of dirt yet also engaged in dirty habits of the lower classes, washerwomen could also appear in Renaissance literature as go-betweens, threshold creatures accompanying vulnerable men into the dark. Machiavelli seems to have had this in mind when he describes how a "vechia ribalda" (old slut) of a washerwoman plays the role of smirking panderer and leads him to a horrifying sexual tryst. Machiavelli's washerwoman may clean "camicie" (shirts) with good strong soap. But, good pimp that she is (and like many washerwomen in the Italian Renaissance, according to Aretina, perhaps an ex-prostitute herself), she also escorts the dejected, vulnerable, sex-starved Machiavelli into rank carnal mire. Frustrated for reasons of his own, Machiavelli then takes out his vengeance on his condition as an inferior at Verona by imagining himself not just discharging semen into the grotesque body of a monstrous woman with a porcine nose stuffed with snot, but by vomiting all over her as well. 12 Far from having had a blissful tryst with Circe, the voluptuous goddess in a well-scented bed, Machiavelli has been led by a washerwoman to have carnal relations with a woman who, ensconced in the cellar below his apartment, looks more like Odysseus's men transformed into swine.

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Now, while the people who typically handle soap are the washerwomen, there is not, to my knowledge, a rich literature on washerwomen in the classical tradition, though one precedent potentially exists. In book 6 of the Odyssey, Homer prepares for Odysseus's arrival at Skheria, the land of the Phaiakians, by having the young Nausikaa go down to the seashore and wash her clothes with her maids. She has been moved to do so by Athena, Odysseus's longstanding protectress, who appears to the sleeping Nausikaa disguised as one of her friends: "Let us go washing," she urges, "in the shine of morning!" (6.31). 13 In this way, the goddess inspires Nausikaa to cleanse her marriage linen in anticipation of her wedding day, for "maidenhood," she insists, "must end" (6.32). Nausikaa, however, does not offer this particular reason to her father when she asks permission to go to the seaside the next morning. Instead, she claims that she must take care of the laundry for the entire family, as if it were the custom for her to do so: "My dear Papa, could you not send the mule cart around for me-the gig with pretty wheels? I must take all our things and get them washed at the river pools; our linen is all soiled. And you should wear fresh clothing, going to council, with counselors and first men of the realm. Remember your five sons at home: though two are married, we have still three bachelor sprigs; they will have none but laundered clothes each time they go to the dancing. See what I must think of!" She had no word to say of her own wedding, though her keen father saw her blush. Said he: "No mules would I deny you, child, nor anything. Go along, now; the grooms will bring your gig with pretty wheels and the cargo box upon it." He spoke to the stableman, who soon brought round the cart, low-wheeled and nimble; harnessed the mules, and backed them in the traces. Meanwhile the girl fetched all her soiled apparel to bundle in the polished wagon box. Her mother, for their luncheon, packed a hamper with picnic fare, and filled a skin of wine, and, when the princess had been handed up, gave her a golden bottle of olive oil for softening girls' bodies, after bathing.

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Nausikaa took the reins and raised her whip, lashing the mules. What jingling! What a clatter! But off they went in a ground-covering trot, with princess, maids, and laundry drawn behind. By the lower river where the wagon came were washing pools, with water all year flowing in limpid spillways that no grime withstood. The girls unhitched the mules, and sent them down along the eddying stream to crop sweet grass. Then sliding out the cart's tail board, they took armloads of clothing to the dusky water, and trod them in the pits, making a race of it. All being drubbed, all blemish rinsed away, they spread them, piece by piece, along the beach whose pebbles had been laundered by the sea; then took a dip themselves, and, all anointed, with golden oil, ate lunch beside the river while the bright sun dried out their linen. (6.58-gg)

Nausikaa washes the clothes, and eventually folds them and places them neatly back in the cart with her maidens. But she is not, of course, a real washerwoman. She is a princess, daughter of the great Alkinoos. And her washing is above all symbolic and structurally functional within a tight, complex narrative. 14 She serves to remind the reader that Odysseus, too, is about to be cleansed, renewed. When, for example, Odysseus greets Nausikaa,looking like a beast, naked and weathered and in need of a bath, he is truly humbled as he prostrates himself. But then once Odysseus is ritually cleansed, he appears to her as a god, just as Nausikaa seemed to him a goddess. Finally, by the evening's end Odysseus is disclosed as the great Homeric hero and king of Ithaca. The washerwoman princess in search of a husband and appropriate match has thus met and greeted on the shore the king in need of a bath and in search of his own wife back home. Indeed, there is even a more pointed antithesis here: as Nausikaa-the-washerwoman-princess is matched by Odysseus-the-beggar-king, the latter's transformation from frog to prince makes him into a potential match for Nausikaa-the-in-reality-princess-all of which adds to the underlying humor of the scene. Nausikaa's interaction with Odysseus and presence on the shore consequently prefigures within the mode of comedy Odysseus's reintegration back into the social order and civility. She paves the way for his return to the wise and humble Penelope, to whom Odysseus will later present himself in precisely the same manner as he did to Nausikaa. 15

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Moreover, not only does Nausikaa prepare the way symbolically for Odysseus's return to society and ultimately home. She physically leads Odysseus back into civilization, moving ahead, guiding him, instructing him on how to greet her parents so that he will be embraced by the Phai