The Renaissance in Italy
SUBJECT READER COMPILED BY CATHERINE KOVESI
CHAPTER 3
Claiming Power in the Renaissance II: Federico da Montefeltro 3.1_DaBisticci Vespasiano da Bisticci. ‘Federigo, Duke of Urbino’. Renaissance Princes, Popes, and Prelates: The Vespasiano Memoirs, Lives of Illustrious Men of the XVth Century. Translated by William George and Emily Waters, edited by M.P. Gilmore. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963. 83-114. 3.2_Martins Martines, L. ‘The Princely Courts’. Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. 301-334. 3.3_McCall McCall, Timothy. ‘Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy’s Quattrocento Courts’. In Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, 1-2 (2013): 445-490.
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Vespasiano da Bisticci, Federigo, Duke of Urbino (1422-1482) To the Commentary on the sayings and doings of the most invincible Federigo, Duke of Urbino. To the most excellent Signor Duke Guido, his son. Most illustrious prince, I have presented in this short Commentary certain things worth remembering concerning the most excellent Duke Federigo your father, stimulated thereto by his great worth, and also by the fact that I was his contemporary. Moreover, no other united as he did, in his own person the soldier and the man of letters, or knew how to make intellect augment the force of battalions. He followed Fabius Maximus who acted thus in his struggle with Hannibal, judiciously delaying his movements and thus saving the Roman republic. Now because your illustrious father did the like, in winning new territory and in other famous deeds of arms, we may say of him as the highest praise, that he never met defeat: praise which few great captains can claim. Nevertheless, he was brought to conclusions with the chief powers of Italy and with the shrewdest fighters, as will appear in the story of his life. And over and above military affairs, he showed himself one of the best and wisest of rulers, and not only did he govern his own state prudently, but the chief rulers of Italy were guided by his good sense and council in their own task as sovereigns. You will mark these things and many others, put briefly in this Commentary. Some of them I have seen, and some I have heard from men worthy of credit, and I have despatched them to your illustrious lordship, his worthy heir and successor in all his extraordinary virtues, to let you see my loyal service. I have written them in the Tuscan tongue in order that the renown of so great a prince may be made known to those who are ignorant of Latin, as well as to those who understand it. Therefore, most illustrious Signore, accept this short Commentary from the hand of your faithful servant, Vespasiano, who, had he been able to send aught of greater value, would willingly have despatched the same to your illustrious lordship, to whom I especially commend myself. FEDERIGO, DUKE OF URBINO Concerning Messer Federigo of the house of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, though his life may have been written already, I will not refrain from recording certain matters worthy of remembrance, seeing that I have written commentaries on the most illustrious men of the age. Like Scipio Africanus he took arms early and served first under Ni123
coIo Piccinino, a distinguished captain. Messer Federigo had many praiseworthy qualities, and such another character, virtuous in every respect, the age could not produce. In arms, his first profession, he was the most active leader of his time, combining strength with the most consummate prudence, and triumphing less by his sword than by his wit. The many places he captured, both in the kingdom(1) and throughout Italy, he captured by forethought and was never worsted. All who may study his life will read of many victorious battles, much territory conquered, and all with honour. I will say nought of the battle of S. Fabrianot(2) when, the Duke being sick with fever, the fight began and lasted three hours, and all feared that the King's forces were overthrown. The Duke, seeing the danger and knowing that the peasant soldiers were the stronger, mounted his horse, fever stricken as he was, and rode into the field, and soon restored their courage which they had lost since the fight had gone against them. In this case, by his wonted skill and prudence, the battle proved a victory and not a defeat. Had it not been for his coming, they would have been irretrievably routed, in spite of the strenuous efforts of their leaders. Next I record the siege of Fano,(3) a strong well-found town, held by Robert of Rimini, son of Signor Gismondo, equipped with artillery and other defensive engines and manned with Signor Gismondo's best soldiers, which by his strategy he took by assault, as well as other lands of Signor Gismondo, who himself was a leader of renown. Nevertheless, the Duke seized the greater part of his lands, these having been granted to him by Pope Pius and King Alfonso, who were Gismondo's foes. I will note amongst his other eminent virtues his good faith, in which he never failed. All those to whom he gave his word bear witness that he never broke it. King Alfonso and King Ferdinand, in whose service he was for more than thirty-two years, and to whom he was faithful not only where he was bound by writing, but also where he had only given his word. At that time, when it seemed that the action of Bartolomeo of Bergamo must bring hurt to the Florentines, and when the Duke of Urbino had finished his term with King Ferdinand and was free to act as he wished without any question of bad faith, the Venetians, who always went straight to the point, decided to order the advance of Bartolomeo with the object of winning the leadership in Italy. They knew that everything rested with the Duke of Urbino, and that the side he supported would be the victor, wherefore they sent an envoy to the Duke, who then lay between Imola and Faenza, having with him the commissaries of His Majesty the King, of the Milanese and of the Florentines. When the envoy arrived he said he would fain speak with the Duke of Urbino, knowing that he had finished his contract and was free to bargain as he would. When he was brought into the Duke's presence, he made clear his business and sought the Duke's services on the part of the Signory of Venice. The Duke answered that everything he had to say, he would say in the presence of the commissaries of the League; that, though as a matter of fact his contract had come to an 124
end, as a matter of faith it had not, and he was still bound to His Majesty the King. The envoy, seeing he could not get what he wanted, departed to Cervia and from there sent a letter by messenger to the Duke of Urbino, offering him a hundred thousand ducats in war and sixty thousand in peace. The Duke would not read the letter, but handed it to the commissaries of the League, and then sent away the messenger without a reply, having told the commissaries, and the envoy as well, that he was fain to continue in the pay of His Majesty. Thus he showed that his faith was inviolable, whether under obligation or free.(4) During the operations of Bartolomeo against the Florentines, the Duke of Urbino, commanding the forces of the League, acted like Fabius Maximus against Hannibal ; always hanging close about him, and never letting him take up any position: keeping two or three miles distant, and occupying any post his foe might vacate. He acted thus carefully, because the Venetian army was the flower of Italy, and Faenza had deserted the League and taken Venetian pay. Thus, having lost the troops of the Signor of Faenza(5) and the city itself, it behoved the Duke to be on his guard for the present, and for the future as well. The Signor Astorre Manfredi had commanded the troops of Faenza in the Duke's pay, and he was now most solicitous that the Duke and his officers should enter Faenza. As it was March, and country quarters very uncomfortable, all desired to go there, but the Duke would not consent; and, if he had, the Venetians would have won a great stroke, because it was planned that Astorre should not disclose his adhesion to Venice till the Duke and his officers should be inside Faenza, where they would have been taken. This danger was avoided by the Duke's prudence in refusing to enter Faenza, and when it was known everyone saw that he had saved the army and rescued the States of Florence and Romanga from the Venetians. Another danger—one amongst an infinite number—was avoided by his prudence; and here again he delivered Italy from the Venetians, who never again had such a chance of success. They had prevailed upon the Lord of Imola to join them, and this he would have done if the Duke had not found a way to mend matters by sending to him some of his most trusted agents when he heard of the Lord's intention. He acted in such manner that the affair came to nothing, and to make things doubly sure he sent to Imola five hundred mercenaries of the King, who received ten ducats per mensem on account of a terrible plague which was prevalent. Now if Imola had joined Venice—Faenza having already done so—Bologna would have been in such great danger that she would have been forced to do the same; and in this case she would have had to advance into the Mugello, seeing that her camp had always been in the enemy's country. The Duke escaped many dangers and won great fame. Once when the camp of the League was pitched about four leagues from Bartolomeo's at Molinella,(6) a place between Ferrara and Bologna, he learned from spies that Bartolomeo was about to attack 125
him. Now his camp was on ground where footmen could fight far better than cavalry, and Bartolomeo had five thousand foot, and the League only fifteen hundred besides certain bands from other states. The Duke while he waited realised his danger and told the leaders under him that the fate of Italy was in their hands, and that if their army should be defeated the dominion would pass irrecoverably to the Venetians. The Duke thought over many projects by way of helping the cause of the League: he sent Piero dei Felici, his chancellor, to Bologna to ask the Sixteen for five hundred mercenaries. But the Bolognese perceived that the forces of the Venetians were stronger than those of the League; and, fearing for their state, they refused his request and sent to tell the Duke their reasons, which were that, the position of the League being so vastly inferior to that of Bartolomeo, the Duke must needs come to terms with the Venetians. When the Duke received this reply he deemed it a strange one, and sought a way out of his troubles. Having failed in his application to the Bolognese, the Duke assembled the commissaries and the leaders of the army of the League to forecast the plans of the enemy, and what they themselves ought to do; to await an assault or to attack the foe in his camp. In any case they were in pressing danger, and it was for him to determine which course might best safeguard the League. They must consider well whatever course they took ; for it might not follow that they, even as victors, would be able to disabuse the Venetians of the vain hope that they might seize upon Florence and occupy the greater part of Italy, and by their conquest hold at their discretion, not only the League, but the whole of the country. Various counsels were given; some for awaiting, and some for delivering an assault. The opinion of the Duke was that, in this case, it would be well to make a move to retrieve their fortunes, and not to stand still, that the danger of inaction was manifest, for, as it has been stated already, infantry could do much more on such ground than cavalry, and the Venetians had three thousand more footmen than the League, which had more horsemen; that the way out of the difficulty was undoubtedly to seek the foe, and not to await him. But some maintained that they ought to send to the Sixteen at Bologna for footmen, not knowing that this the Duke had done already, whereupon he told them of it, and bade Piero dei Felici, who was present, tell all that had happened. This he did, stating that this help had been refused, and how he had been told that Bologna had need of the troops for its own defence; that, considering their unfavourable position, they ought to come to terms with the Venetians, failing any better plan. Then the Duke said, "Consider well the condition of the League which is now directed by your hands; this matter is so weighty that every man ought to speak his mind fully. It must be plain to all that Bartolomeo is bound to await us in his camp; and I, for reasons given, tell you that if we wish to save the League, a matter which is in your own hands, we ought to attack him and not to await him; for, with a foe at such a strong advantage, our one hope is to assault his position. And even if it may seem to you that we 126
attack at a disadvantage, we are choosing the lesser of two evils in assaulting; and if you will second me, this is the only way to save our army, and the League of which we are soldiers. Wherefore, comrades, set yourselves now to accomplish the hopes of the League, and the fame of your valour will run throughout Italy; how you have done the work before you in the honourable and seemly fashion which has always been your wont. I have never doubted, nor ever shall doubt, of your valour, of which you have given proof, or of your strength and courage; and, with you, I am ready to risk my personal safety in this our need. I hope, with God's help, we may triumph fighting for justice and reason against those who fight against them. For all of the allied powers are content with their condition, and are striving their best to maintain it. Our adversaries, on the contrary, are dissatisfied with their government and trying to seize unjustly what is not their own. These considerations therefore ought to hearten us to attack them manfully, trusting in God who, for these reasons, will give us victory." When the leaders saw what the Duke's will was, and listened to the weighty and unanswerable arguments he advanced, they replied that they were satisfied with his reasons, that they knew they would do well in following his advice, and that they were ready, like him, to devote their lives to the saving of the army of the League. When the Duke heard this he praised them highly, adding that, from the faith he had in them, he expected no other reply, and thanked them. He next drew up the troops for the assault on the foe, posted about four miles away, and when they moved off he addressed them as was his wont, impressing on them the danger they would incur by neglecting the necessary formation, and reminding them that by victory they would win the greatest glory that any soldiers had won for many years, fighting as they did under such disadvantages as were theirs today. Again he reminded them that if they did not observe his orders, as he trusted they would, they would put the League in imminent peril and cover themselves with irremediable shame and infamy. He then let the squadrons advance towards the foe who expected no attack, deeming the conditions too disadvantageous. They neared the hostile camp about the nineteenth hour;(7) they quickly got ready their arms and the Duke let the squadrons advance to the attack, both sides fighting shrewdly, for all the distinguished men of Italy were present, and now one party prevailed and now the other. The Duke had drawn up his line wonderfully well, forbidding anyone to break it under pain of death. On both sides many were stricken, but mostly of the enemy. The Duke of Ferrara bore himself valiantly, and would have given still farther taste of his quality had he not been forced to quit the field with a gunshot wound in his heel. So many wounded were borne into Ferrara that the city was full of them. Fighting like this from the nineteenth hour to the first hour of night, that is for six hours, every man on either side was half dead through fatigue. Bartolomeo Colleone that day also gave proof of his generalship, 127
though they had come upon him unaware, with such great violence. He advanced to the front and cried out: "Valiant leaders, the hour is late and the men on either side have fought strenuously, thus it seems the time has come to stop the battle." The Duke agreed, and afterwards used to tell that the foe had begged leave to cease fighting; but no one could fight any longer; and, had it not been for shame, he himself would have done the like; it was his particular good fortune that the foe had first cried halt. Then there was the trouble of .the heat, and the quitting their own quarters to beat up the enemy's. After the fight it was settled that the League had the advantage, and that the Duke's decision had been a very wise one. After the fight the troops returned to their quarters without let, the most dangerous military movement being the quitting and regaining of quarters scatheless, and this was done with sound judgment under the eye of the Duke. The result was that the Venetians, seeing the Duke's skill, had no further wish to meet him in arms. With a greatly inferior force he always maintained himself in the enemy's country, and outside the territories of the League, manoeuvring in such wise that he kept the armies face to face.(8) Henceforth the Venetians lost courage, because, while they were stronger both in horse and foot, the Duke gained the victory. The Duke and the League reaped great renown by this feat of arms ; a proof of the value of an active chief in settling the plan of campaign, and how on him depends victory and the safety of the state. Though the history of this will be written in Latin, it has seemed good to me to make mention of it here, since I was informed thereanent by one who was present. No doubt it will be written in more elegant style, but here I have left out nothing of the truth. As to the defence of Rimini. On the death of Signor Gismondo, the Church laid claim to that state. The Magnifico Roberto(9) was then in Rome, and he prudently left unknown for Rimini. Arrived there, he took possession first of the castle and then of the country around, whereupon Pope Paul, seeing that he had been tricked, made plans to seize on the territory, and engaged a large number of soldiers for that purpose. Roberto was at that time in the favour of the King, who determined to defend Rimini with all his forces, wherefore he requested his allies to aid him in this work, and they consented. Then the Duke of Urbino was directed to go to Rimini with his forces, and the King promised to send the Duke of Calabria(10) with all the troops available. It would be necessary to be in strength, seeing that they would have to traverse the states of the Church without holding the pass. Also he requested the States of Milan and Florence to send the troops they had promised, but not all those who promised kept faith; for when the Duke of Calabria, riding day and night with his lance at his thigh through hostile country, came to Rimini and found that the troops promised had not been sent, it was necessary that he should leave more troops than had been allowed to guard his rear. This neglect in sending the promised forces came near putting the Duke 128
of Calabria in peril; and Rimini would have been lost had it not been for the prudence of the Duke of Urbino. The Duke of Calabria arrived in safety with his army, leaving a good part of his troops, as has been mentioned. His Majesty grieved much over the ill faith of certain of his allies, seeing the great peril his son incurred thereby, for he expected they would have done what they promised. The Duke of Urbino, finding himself at the head of these forces, with the army of the Church fourteen squadrons stronger in front of him, was in no way alarmed at beholding their array; and, having determined to join battle with them since there was no other way of saving Rimini, he turned to Don Alfonso and the other leaders and said to them, the day before the action, "To-morrow you shall reap the greatest honour you have ever known; what though the army of the Church be fourteen squadrons stronger than our own, we will shatter them." The next day he drew up his forces for action according to his own plan, and then he formed a great squadron of five hundred picked men-at-arms. Next he sent one company after another to begin the action, charging everyone, under pain of death, to follow his instructions, and all obeyed. When the time had come, he let advance the great squadron of picked men into action, and the enemy, seeing no other course, began to flee on all sides, and soon the field was cleared of hostile troops, indeed they could have captured as many of them as they wished, every squadron having been broken up. All this the Duke carried out with his wonted skill, winning the battle more by science than by force.(11) If I were to relate all the deeds of arms wrought by him I could show him equal to any of the captains of old. As to the acquisition of Volterra by the Signoria,(12) which was due entirely to his foresight; because, on account of the nature of the site, it could never have been effected by force of arms alone. At the time when the Duke was in the pay of the King and of the Florentines, the people of Volterra, through certain differences with the Florentines, had rebelled and taken the government into their own hands. When the King heard of this he wrote straightway to the Duke, charging him, at the request of the Florentines, to march with his own forces and those of the League; and, if the troops in Romagna would not suffice, with twelve additional squadrons of Neapolitan soldiers, to whom he had sent word that they should obey the Duke as if he were the King. When the Duke received this letter he wrote at once, telling the Florentines of the King's commission; and afterwards reminded them that it behoved them to go slowly about the business and take time; that it was easy to begin, and difficult to abandon; that failure in it might mean the ruin of the state. He got an answer that in due time they would call upon him, and after several days they determined to engage with Volterra; advising the Duke, and sending Bongianni Gianfigliazzi with money to bring him quickly to the city. When he understood from Bongianni what the Signoria willed, and saw the danger 0f his position through delay, he mounted with all the horsemen he 129
could raise; and before leaving he wrote to Piero dei Felici, who was acting for him in Florence, charging him to ask no pay from the Florentines during the war of Volterra, because he wished them to understand that he was serving them for goodwill and not for gold. The people of Volterra besought all the powers and princes of Italy for aid to keep them from falling into the hands 0f the Florentines, but they found no one to help them; even the Pope had sent several squadrons of horse to help the Signoria. Every Italian power was concerned in this dispute. When the Duke came before Volterra, he took up a position, apparently a weak one, but really strong, for it was invulnerable on all sides. He drew up his own and the papal forces in an order which gave the impression that it was vulnerable, whereas it was very difficult. From his camp he made all possible demonstrations of assault on the city, nevertheless he waited with his wonted shrewdness to come to some agreement. He often sent soldiers to talk with those of the enemy, also to see whether he might not be able to gather something from the soldiers of Volterra to help on a truce: making clear to them, that, being alone in this contest, they could not possibly withstand the Florentines. But while these negotiations went on, he prosecuted the siege without cease by all possible means by night and day. He continued his dealings with certain of the enemy's soldiers, inducing them to come over to him, and letting them see how he stood; and the people of Volterra, despairing of better terms, began to listen to his overtures and negotiations began. At Florence the opinion was that there was no other solution possible, and they begged the Duke, in God's name, to free them from the danger they were in. He bade them not to fear, for he would soon disentangle them. The menat-arms complained to the Signoria, saying that it would be a great loss for them to be kept there more than a year, that the Signoria should try to come to terms, in order to free themselves and send their soldiers to the hospital: to favour them, instead of slighting them. To the Duke every day seemed a thousand until this peace should be made. The people of Volterra, finding themselves besieged on all sides and the city blockaded, though exit and entry were not entirely stopped, began to consider terms of peace. They sent negotiators into the camp, under safe conduct, and the Duke, conscious of his danger, at once came to business and the deliberations lasted several days. Finally the place was delivered over to the Florentines,(13) property and person being respected; the privileges of electing a Podesta and a Signory were taken away, and the people placed under the rule of Florence. The Duke, in agreement with the Florentine Commissaries, Messer Bongianni Gianfigliazzi and Jacopo Guicciardini, entered the city and forbade everyone, under pain of the gallows, from touching anything ; but the Milanese mercenaries began to plunder, whereupon the Duke and the Commissaries hastened with arms in their hands to stop the pillage, but they could not prevent the mischief. Next the men-at-arms began, so that great disorders arose which could not be 130
remedied. The Duke did all he could, but he was unable to save the place and he suffered much vexation on this account and even wept. Everything would have gone well, but for this riot, as the Commissaries and all those who were present could tell. Volterra having been recovered, the Florentines recognised that he had done a deed which was almost impossible considering the difficulties of position and the evil disposition of the people; they realised the danger better after than before the fall of Volterra; also that the place had been taken by his skill and prudence. The Signoria of Volterra used to say that its five hundred footmen were enough to defend the city from the whole of Italy. After the victory the Duke entered Florence with the highest honours: all the citizens went to meet him ; he was lodged in the house of the Patriarch with all his following at free cost, and greater honour was never done to any man. They gave him two pieces of gold brocade, and two bowls belonging to the Signoria worth a thousand ducats or more. Afterwards, in memory of the victory, they gave him the Palace of Rusciano with all its appurtenances, and all the chief citizens visited him there. For several days there was feasting in all the lands round Florence, and the Duke was escorted by the leading citizens through their estates. Having written thus about Volterra and of his prudence in capturing it, I will demonstrate how he alone liberated Italy from the Venetian sway. The Duke of Ferrara had joined the League of His Majesty the King, Milan and Florence, and all of these were bound to protect him, should be he attacked by any other Italian power.(14) Now the Venetians, under the pretext of some dispute, planned war against Ferrara and persuaded Pope Sixtus to join them in attacking the Duke. When the preparati0ns necessary for this enterprise became known to Milan the Florentines and the Duke of Ferrara, they sent ambassadors to His Majesty the King, bidding him have a care that the Duke of Ferrara should not lose his dominions, because the Venetians were bent on the dominati0n of Italy, and, if Ferrara, Bologna and Mantua should be lost, they would be able to act as they pleased. At Naples the ambassadors agreed that no defence was possible without the help of the skill and strength of the Duke of Urbino. And they were met by the fact that, Roberto Malatesta, because of his quarrel with Milan, had now gone over to the Venetian(15) and taken their pay, an event which encouraged them greatly in the enterprise. When the ambassadors of the League had been several days at Naples, discussing with His Majesty what they should do, they agreed that they should go, accompanied by an envoy of the King, to Urbino in order to hear the Duke's opinion, and to engage him at the cost of the King, of Milan, and of Florence. An agreement was made, but the Pope was still set upon attacking the Duke of Ferrara and handing over his lands to the Venetians, while the Duke himself was ready to submit all the disputes he had with the Venetians to His Holiness, to be settled in the customary way, but the Pope refused this: indeed, all the allies begged him to consent, but they could not alter his decision. 131
Whereupon all the ambassadors of the League quitted Rome, to show their displeasure at the attitude of His Holiness towards their undertaking, and went to Urbino to make an agreement with the Duke as to the commando, and to arrange that all the parties should bear the charges, which at first had been laid on the King alone. When they came to Fossombrone they met the Duke, who gave them magnificent entertainment. Negotiations began and, as all the ambassadors had full powers, they came quickly to an agreement. The Venetians knew that none but the Duke of Urbino could hinder their attempt on Ferrara, wherefore they sent word to him offering him eighty thousand ducats per annum if he would stay at home : it would be enough for him to recognise that he was in their pay.(16) While the Venetian messenger was at Urbino on this business, it chanced that one of the Duke's chief officers was in his closet, and after the Venetian had left, he turned to the Duke and said," Eighty thousand ducats is a good price simply for staying at home"; whereupon the Duke replied wisely, "To keep faith is still better, and is worth more than all the gold in the world." Having settled the terms, they deliberated as to the defence of Ferrara, and the ambassadors proposed various schemes for this, and for attacking the Venetians, in order to expel them from their lands on terra firma and break up their campaign in Lombardy. Also to let the Duke of Calabria attack the Pope, and hinder him from aiding the Venetians against Ferrara, and compel them to send troops to support the Pope. There was good prospect that these plans would succeed, if the preparations at Ferrara should be carried out as proposed. With the troops of Ferrara, Mantua and some from Lombardy, Ferrara might be defended and the Duke of Urbino might interrupt the campaign of the Venetians in Lombardy. This scheme of the Duke's was the best ever devised. When he had prepared his force, and set all other things in order, the Duke, having ranged his army, opened 0ne of the finest campaigns ever made in Italy(17) He joined forces with the Florentines and took the field at CittĂ di Castello in order to make the Pope withdraw his forces to guard his own borders. His son Antonio advanced with a force to Forli, in the hope of stirring up that state, while the Florentines, under Nicoli da Castello, who kept the inner line, advanced against CittĂ di Castello. The Duke, having come to Florence with a part of his army, stayed there two days, and then begged leave for the route of Ferrara in order to see how things stood there, and then go into Lombardy, supposing that affairs were as favourable as he had been given to understand, and that the troops prepared there were sufficient for the defence of Ferrara. He moved quickly and found the whole country in such ill order that, but for his foresight, it must have fallen into the hands of the Venetians. When he arrived he was greatly angered at finding that nothing had been carried out as he had been informed, and that if he should depart for Lombardy and leave the country in this condition Ferrara must 132
be lost, seeing that Signor Roberto,(18) who knew the country, had passed the swamps by bridges of fascines and gained a good part of the Polesine, and taken Chioggia and other places near. Soon afterwards he captured the Polesine of Rovigo, which was difficult to defend, and had got well in advance of his foes and the country clear before him. When the Duke of Urbino saw this move of Signor Roberto and what he had gained thereby, he realised that Ferrara must surely fall if he did not intervene, wherefore he went to Mantua and persuaded the Marquis to occupy a certain pass and hinder the foe from passing that way. He likewise wrote to Milan, bidding them send help quickly if they did not want Ferrara to be lost. Four hundred men-at-arms were sent, and the Duke, having posted the Marquis of Mantua in the pass, went himself to a place called La Stellata and faced Signor Roberto, who had frustrated a promising scheme, for if the Duke did not reach Ferrara all would be lost. Signor Roberto made a move to capture Ficheruolo, a very important town, because it stood between the combatants. As soon as the Duke saw this he set about its defence, and threw into it all the best men he had; men he knew and trusted. Roberto had brought thither bombards and kept up a fire day and night, knowing how greatly the possession of the town would help him to capture Ferrara. The Duke of Ferrara stood on the defensive; and what with the fights that constantly took place, and the bombards and small guns which went off day and night, and the constant changes made by the Duke in the disposition of the garrison within the place, Signor Roberto was hard set to hold his ground. The assailants set about to build a bastion, and one day the Count Antonio di Marciano, the next in command to Signor Roberto, went to occupy it, but when the Duke was informed of this he sent against him the best menat-arms he had. When the enemy set about making the bastion the forces of the Duke of Urbino attacked them fiercely, and many on either side were killed and wounded. Messer Piero degli Ubaldini, one of the Duke's best men, was killed, and Count Antonio di Marciano and many men-at-arms were captured, so the bastion was not constructed. Signor Roberto still remained before Ficheruolo, having assaulted it shrewdly, but the men in the place made a brave defence. Before he delivered his attack, certain of the Venetians believed that it had succeeded and the place must be theirs that day. The Commissaries wrote off to Venice that it was taken, whereupon the Venetians made great rejoicings over the victory. But those within the town maintained their defence by the help of those without, and for that day it was saved. There was chagrin in Venice because they had celebrated the capture of the place prematurely, and every day the Duke found new means to harass the Venetians, letting the troops of the League ride free as far as Padua, pillaging and slighting the country and taking many prisoners and cattle. Signor Roberto lost heart because every day the Duke fell upon him with some 133
new and successful scheme of offence. It was regarded as a marvel that they should have held Ficheruolo so many days, as it was not a strong place. At last, contrary to the expectation of the Duke, the foe made a fierce attack and contrived at the same time to corrupt some of the garrison; so, after a long defence, the place fell ; but had there been no traitors inside, it would have resisted another fifteen days.(19) Hitherto I have written concerning some of the Duke's military exploits, leaving his greater deeds to be dealt with by those who will write his history; and now it seems meet to say something of his knowledge of the Latin tongue, taken in connection with military affairs, for it is difficult for a leader to excel in arms unless he be, like the Duke, a man of letters, seeing that the past is a mirror of the present. A military leader who knows Latin has a great advantage over one who does not. The Duke wrought the greater part of his martial deeds by ancient and modern example; from the ancients by the study of history, and from the moderns through nurture in warlike practices from early infancy under the discipline of Nicolo Piccinino, one of the worthiest captains of his age. But to return to letters, the Duke of Urbino was well versed therein, not only in history and in the Holy Scriptures, but also in philosophy, which he studied many years under a distinguished teacher, Maestro Lazzaro, afterwards for his merits made Bishop of Urbino. He was instructed by Maestro Lazzaro in the Ethics of Aristotle, with and without comments, and he would also dispute over the difficult passages. He began to study logic with the keenest understanding, and he argued with the most nimble wit that was ever seen. After he had heard the Ethics many times, comprehending them so thoroughly that his teachers found him hard to cope with in disputation, he studied the Politics assiduously, and during his stay in Florence, after the capture of Volterra, he requested Donato Acciaiuoli, who had already commented on the Ethics, to write comments also on the Politics. This he did and sent his work to the Duke who, having read these, wished next to read the Natural History and the Physics. Indeed, it may be said of him that he was the first of the Signori who took up philosophy and had knowledge of the same. He was ever careful to keep intellect and virtue to the front, and to learn some new thing every day. After philosophy he was fain to study theology; that learning on which every Christian ought to frame his life. He read the first part of S. Thomas, and certain other works of his, thus acquiring a strong predilection for S. Thomas' doctrine, which seemed to him very clear and able to defend itself. He rated S. Thomas as clearer than Scotus though less subtle. Nevertheless he wished to know the works of Scotus, and he read the first of them. He knew the Scriptures well and the early Doctors, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Gregory, whose works he desired to possess ; likewise the works of the Greek Doctors, Basil, John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen, Athanasius, Cyril and Ephrem, done into Latin, and works in poetry and history which he read and re-read; 134
also Livy, Sallust, Quintus Curtius, Justin, the Commentaries of Cæsar, which he praised beyond measure ; all the forty-eight lives of Plutarch, translated by various hands, Ælius Spartianus, together with certain other writers of the decadence of the Roman power. Æmilius Probus, Cornelius Tacitus, Suetonius, his lives of the Emperors, beginning with Cæsar and going on to other times. He read also Eusebius' De Temporius with the additions of Girolamo Prospero and Matteo Palmieri. As to architecture it may be said that no one of his age, high or low, knew it so thoroughly. We may see in the buildings he constructed, the grand style and the due measurement and proportion, especially in his palace, which has no superior amongst the buildings of the time, none so well considered, or so full of fine things. Though he had his architects about him, he always first realised the design and then explained the proportions and all else ; indeed, to hear him discourse thereanent, it would seem that his chief talent lay in this art ; so well he knew how to expound and carry out its principles. He built not only palaces and the like, but many fortresses in his dominions of construction much stronger than those of old time; for some, which were built too high, the Duke made much lower, knowing that the fire of the bombards would not then hurt them. He was a skilled geometrician and arithmetician, and a German, Master Paul,(20) a great philosopher and astrologer, with whom, just before his death, he read books on mathematics, discoursing thereon like one learned in them. He delighted greatly in music, understanding vocal and instrumental alike, and maintained a fine choir with skilled musicians and many singing boys. He had every sort of instrument in his palace and delighted in their sound, also the most skilful players. He preferred delicate to loud instruments, caring little for trombones and the like. As to sculpture he had great knowledge, and he took much thought as to the work which he had made for his palace, employing the first masters of the time. To hear him talk of sculpture you would deem it was his own art. He was much interested in painting, and because he could not find in Italy painters in oil to suit his taste he sent to Flanders and brought thence a master(21) who did at Urbino many very stately pictures, especially in Federigo's study, where were represented philosophers, poets, and doctors of the Church, rendered with wondrous art. He painted from life a portrait of the Duke which only wanted breath. He also brought in Flemish tapestry weavers who wrought a noble set for an apartment, worked with gold and silk mixed with woollen thread, in such fashion as no brush could have rendered. He also caused other decorations to be wrought by these masters, and all the doors were enriched with works as fine as those within. One of his cabinets was adorned in a fashion so wonderful that no one could say whether it was done with a brush, or in silver, or in relief. Reverting to the study of letters, from the times of Pope Nicolas and King Alfonso onward, letters and learned men were never better honoured and rewarded than by 135
the Duke of Urbino, who spared no expense. There were few literati of that age who did not receive from him generous gifts. He gave Campano, a learned man fallen into poverty, a thousand ducats or more. Many fine works were sent to him, and when he was in Florence he bestowed upon men of letters more than fifteen hundred ducats, and I can say naught of his gifts in Rome, Naples, and other places, for they are unknown to me. No one ever was such a defender of learned men, and when Pope Sixtus persecuted the Bishop of Sipontino(22) the bishop would have fared badly if the Duke had not protected him. He was always fain to have in his palace some learned man, and none ever came to Urbino who was not honoured or received at the palace. We come now to consider in what high esteem the Duke held all Greek and Latin writers, sacred as well as secular. He alone had a mind to do what no one had done for a thousand years or more; that is, to create the finest library since ancient times. He spared neither cost nor labour, and when he knew of a fine book, whether in Italy or not, he would send for it. It is now fourteen or more years ago since he began the library, and he always employed, in Urbino, in Florence and in other places, thirty or forty scribes in his service. He took the only way to make a fine library like this : by beginning with the Latin poets, with any comments on the same which might seem merited; next the orators, with the works of Tully and all Latin writers and grammarians of merit ; so that not one of the leading writers in this faculty should be wanted. He sought also all the known works on history in Latin, and not only those, but likewise the histories of Greek writers done into Latin, and the orators as well. The Duke also desired to have every work on moral and natural philosophy in Latin, or in Latin translations from Greek. As to the sacred Doctors in Latin, he had the works of all four, and what a noble set of letters and writings we have here; bought without regard of cost. After the four Doctors, he was set on having the works of S. Bernard and of all the Doctors of old, without exception, Tertullian, Hilarius, Remigius, Hugh de S. Victor, Isidore, Anselm, Rabanus and all the rest. After Latin works came Greek writings done into Latin, Dionysius the Areopagite, Basil, Cyril, Gregory Nazianzen, John of Damascus, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nicea, all the works of Eusebius, of Ephrem the monk, and of Origen, an excellent writer. Coming to the Latin Doctors in philosophy and theology, all the works of Thomas Aquinas, and of Albertus Magnus; of Alexander ab Alexandro, of Scotus, of Bonaventura, of Richard of Mediavilla, of the Archbishop of Antoninus and of all the recognised modern Doctors, down to the ConformitĂ of S. Francis: all the works on civil law in the finest text, the lectures of Bartolo written on goat-skin. He had an edition of the Bible made in two most beautiful volumes, illustrated in the finest possible manner and bound in gold brocade with rich silver fittings. It was given this rich form as the chief of all writings. With it are all the commentaries of the Master of 136
the Sentences, of Nicolao di Lira, and of all the Greek and Latin Doctors, together with the literal glossary of Nicolao di Lira. Likewise all the writers on astrology, geometry, arithmetic, architecture and De re Militari; books on painting, sculpture, music and canon law, and all the texts and lectures on the Summa of Ostiensis and other works in the same faculty. In medicine all the works of Avicenna, Hippocrates, Galen, the Continents of Almansor and the complete works of Averroes in logic and natural philosophy. A volume of all the Councils, held since ancient times, and the logical, philosophical and musical works of Boethius. There were all the works of modern writers beginning with Pope Pius; of Petrarch and Dante in Latin and in the vulgar tongue, of Boccaccio in Latin; of Coluccio and of Lionardo d' Arezzo, original and translations; of Fra Ambrogio, of Giannozzo Manetti and Guerrino; the prose and poetical works of Panormita, and Francesco Filelfo, and Campano; as well as everything written by Perrotto, Maffeo Vegio, Nicolo Secondino (who was interpreter of Greek and Latin at the Council of the Greeks in Florence), Pontano, Bartolomeo Fazi, Gasparino, Pietro Paolo Vergerio, Giovanni Argiropolo (which includes the Philosophy and Logic of Aristotle and the Politics besides), Francesco Barbaro, Lionardo Giustiniano, Donato Acciaiuoli, Alamanno, Rinuccini, Cristofano da Prato,. Vecchio, Poggio, Giovanni Tortello, Francesco d' Arezzo and Lorenzo Valla. He added to the books written by ancient and modern doctors on all the faculties all the books known in Greek, also the complete works of Aristotle and Plato (written on the finest goat-skin); of Homer in one volume, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Batrachomiomachia; of Sophocles, Pindar and Menander, and all the other Greek poets; a fine volume of Plutarch's lives and his moral works, the Cosmography of Ptolemy illustrated in Greek, and the writings of Herodotus, Pausanius, Thucydides, Polybius, Demosthenes, Æschines and Plotinus. All the Greek comments, such as those upon Aristotle, the Physica de Plantis and Theophrastus ; all the Greek vocabulists—Greek into Latin ; the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Xenophon, S. Basil, S. John Chrysostom, S. Athanasius, S. John Damascenas, S. Gregory Nazianzen, S. Gregory 0f Nicea, Origen, Dionysius the Areopagite, John Climacus, S. Ephrem the monk, Æneas the Sophist, the Collations of John Cassianus, the book of Paradise, Vito sanctorum patrum ex Ægypto, the Life of Barlaam and Josaphat, a wonderful psalter in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, verse by verse, and all the Greek works on geometry, arithmetic, and astrology. Finding that he lacked a vast number of Greekbooks by various writers, he sent to seek them so that nothing in that tongue which could be found should be lacking; also whatever books which were to be had in Hebrew, beginning with the Bible and all those dealt with by the Rabbi Moses and other commentators. And besides the Holy Scriptures, there are books in Hebrew on medicine, philosophy and the other faculties. 137
The Duke, having completed this noble work at the great cost of thirty thousand ducats, beside the many other excellent provisions that he made, determined to give every writer a worthy finish by binding his work in scarlet and silver. Beginning with the Bible, as the chief, he had it covered with gold brocade, and then he bound in scarlet and silver the Greek and Latin doctors and philosophers, the histories, the books on medicine and the modern doctors, a rich and magnificent sight. In this library all the books are superlatively good, and written with the pen, and had there been one printed volume it would have been ashamed in such company. They were beautifully illuminated and written on parchment. This library is remarkable amongst all others in that, taking the works of all writers, sacred and profane, original and translated, there will be found not a single imperfect folio. No other library can show the like, for in all of them the works of certain authors will be wanting in places. A short time before the Duke went to Ferrara it chanced' that I was in Urbino with His Lordship, and I had with me the catalogues of the principal Italian libraries: of the papal library, of those of S. Marco at Florence, of Pavia, and even of that of the University of Oxford, which I had procured from England. On comparing them with that of the Duke I remarked how they all failed in one respect ; to wit, they possessed the same work in many examples, but lacked the other writings of the author; nor had they writers in all the faculties like this library. I began by treating of his warlike deeds, then of his martial and literary merits combined; wishing to show that if anyone should be fain to produce so skilful a captain as the Duke without the aid of letters, the attempt to produce a man of such excellence must be vain without the conjunction of these two elements. I now bring forward a third quality, the faculty of wisely governing States and Lordships, a faculty rarely possessed by those endowed as richly as he was with the qualities I have already specified. In the ruling of his states and of his house, his age saw not his peer. First, in order that his rule might be conjoined with religion, he was before all things most devout and observant in his religious duties; for without this, and without a good example to others by his life, his rule would never have endured. Every morning he heard mass kneeling ; he fasted on the vigils ordered by the Church, and throughout Lent, and the year before he died the Signor Ottaviano,(23) who loved him greatly and perceived that Lenten fast was hurtful to him, got a dispensation for him from Rome. One morning during Lent this dispensation was laid before him at table, whereupon he turned towards Ottaviano, laughing, and thanked him and said: "If I am able to fast, why should you wish me to keep from so doing? What an example I should be giving to my own people!" And he continued from that day to fast as heretofore. Every morning with his household, and with whatever townsfolk might wish, he heard the sermon, and after this the mass; and on fast days he would cause to be read to him some holy book or work of S. Leo. When the reader came to a weighty passage he would bid him stop 138
in order that it might be thoroughly considered, and every day he made Maestro Lazzaro read to him some passage of Holy Writ. As to works of alms and piety he was most observant. He distributed in his house every day a good quantity of bread and wine without fail, and he gave freely to learned men and gentlefolk, to holy places, and to poor folk ashamed of their case, and he never forgot anyone of his subjects who might come to ask. Wherever he could he established Observant Friars in his dominions, allowing them alms to set the country in order at his charges. He introduced the friars of Monte Oliveto and the Jesuates(24) and the friars of Scopeto, and was as a father to all. The Duke never let a religious person approach him without doing him reverence, and taking him by the hand, and in conversation would always sit down beside him. He honoured these persons more than any man I ever saw. There was in Urbino a holy convent of nuns with some sixty inmates, and the Duke did much to the convent to make it suitable for their well-being. Once every week he would betake himself alone into the church, and sit by a grating that was therein. The Superior, a lady of years and authority, would speak to him, and he would ask if the nuns lacked anything. Indeed, he provided this convent and the Observant Friars with all they needed. As to the ruling of his own palace, it was just the same as that of a religious society; for although he was called on to feed at his own expense five hundred mouths or more, there was nothing of the barrack about his establishment, which was as well ordered as any monastery. Here there was no romping or wrangling, but everyone spoke with becoming modesty. Certain noblemen committed their sons to the Duke for instruction in military science, and they would remain with him till they were efficient. These youths were under the charge of a gentleman of Lombardy of excellent character who had been trained by the Duke long time since, and now governed these youths as if they had been his own sons. They paid him the highest respect, keeping their actions well under restraint, as pupils in a school of good manners. The Duke had a legitimate son of singular worth, Count Guido, and other legitimate children born of Madonna Battista, the daughter of Signor Alessandro of Pesaro, an illustrious lady. At her death she left her children very young, and to his son the Duke assigned, as tutors, two gentlemen of due age to teach him the course he ought to follow. Afterwards he put him under a learned young man who taught him Greek and Latin, and was expressly charged by the Duke to let him have no traffic with young folk, in order that he might at once assume the grave temperament which nature had given him. He had a marvellous memory, of which I can give numerous examples; for once, when Signor Ottaviano put Ptolemy before him, he knew how to point out all the regions of the earth so that, when he was asked for any place or district, he found it at once and knew the distance of one place from another. The Duke possessed a Bible with historical comments, the events 139
of each book being narrated, and there was no name or place which the young prince did not know, even the unfamiliar names in Hebrew. He was educated to be worthy to follow his father, and the same training is still pursued. Another son of his, Signor Antonio, born to him when he was a young unmarried man, devoted himself to arms and was of excellent carriage. His daughters, attended by many noble and worthy ladies, occupied a wing of the palace whither went no one but the Signor Ottaviano and the young prince. When the prince came to the door of their apartments, those in attendance remained outside, going to the waiting-room till he should return. In his carriage he was most observant of what was becoming. Having spoken of the governance of his house, let us now tell of that of his subjects. His treatment of them suggested that they were rather his children. He liked not that anyone should ever address him on behalf of any of them, seeing that everyone could speak to him at any hour of the day, when he would listen to all with the utmost kindness, remarking that this gave him no trouble. If there was anything he could do for them, he would see to it, so there might be no need for them to return, and there were few whose business could not be despatched on the same day, in order that no time might be lost. And should he mark that anyone amongst those who desired to address him might be shamefaced, he would call him up, and encourage him to say what he would. His subjects loved him so greatly for the kindness he showed to them that when he went through Urbino they would kneel and say, "God keep you, my Lord," and he would often go afoot through his lands, entering now one shop and now another, and asking the workmen what their calling was, and whether they were, in need of aught. So kind was he, that they all loved him as children love their parents. The country he ruled was a wondrous sight: all his subjects were well-to-do and waxed rich through labour at the works he had instituted, and a beggar was never seen. If it happened that anyone, through misbehaviour or neglect of the laws, should be condemned, the Duke in clemency would intervene and settle the matter to the content of all. For all offences he showed a merciful spirit save one, to wit: blasphemy of God, or of the Madonna, or of His saints. For this he had no grace or forgiveness. He was as benevolent to strangers as to those of his own state. Once I saw him go to the piazza on a market day, and ask of the men and women who were there, how much they wanted for the wares they were selling. Then, by way of joking, he added," I am the Lord and never carry any money: I know you will not trust me for fear you should not be paid." Thus he pleased everybody, small and great, by his good-humour. The peasants he had spoken to went away so delighted that he could have done with them whatever he wished, and when he rode out he met none who did not salute him and ask how he did. He went about with few attendants; none of them armed. In summer he would ride out from Urbino at dawn with four or six horsemen and one or two 140
servants, unarmed, at his stirrup and go forth three or four miles, returning when other folk were rising from bed. When they dismounted it would be the hour of Mass, which the Duke would hear, and afterwards go into a garden with the doors open and give audience to all who wished, till the hour of repast. When the Duke had sat down the doors would be left open, so that all might enter, and he never ate except the hall were full. Some one would always read to him; during Lent a spiritual work, and at other times the Histories of Livy, all in Latin. He ate plain food and no sweetmeats, and drank no wine save that made from such fruits as cherries, pomegranates or apples. Anyone who wished to address him might do so either between the courses or after the repasts, and a judge of appeal, a very distinguished man, would lay before him, one by one, the causes before the court which he would determine, speaking in Latin. This judge told me that the decisions of the Duke could not have been bettered if they had come before Bartolo or Baldo.(25) I saw a letter written on behalf of a physician who sought an appointment at Ancona. The Duke said, "Put in this clause: that if they want a doctor they had better take him; if they do not, let them please themselves, for I have no mind that they should do what they do not wish, because of my letter." In summer, after rising from table and giving audience to all who desired, he went into his closet to attend to his affairs and to listen to readings, according to the season. At vespers he went forth again to give audience; and then, if he had time, to visit the nuns at S. Chiara in the monastery he had built, or to the convent of S. Francis, where there was a large meadow with a very fine view. There he would sit while thirty or forty of his young men, after stripping to their doublets, would throw the lance either at the apple or at the twigs in marvellous fashion; and the Duke, when he marked a want of dexterity in running or catching, would reprove them, in order that they might do better. During these exercises anyone might address him; indeed he was there for this end as well as for any other. About the hour of supper the Duke would bid the youths put on their clothes. On returning to the palace it would be time for supper, and they would sup as I have already described. The Duke would remain for a time to see if anyone had aught to say, and if not he would go with the leading nobles and gentlemen into his closet and talk freely with them. Sometimes he would say, "To-morrow we ought all to rise early and walk in the cool. You are a set of boys and prone to lie a-bed. You say you will come, but you will do nothing of the kind, and now good night." One day he remarked to me how every man, great or small, who might be at the head of any state ought to be generous, and he censured all those who acted otherwise ; and, as to those who would apologise for their want of humanity through some defect of nature, it behoved all such persons to right themselves by strong measures, seeing that great men ought to cultivate humanity as an attribute before all others. Humanity can make foes into friends. It is long since Italy had known a prince so worthy of imita141
tion in every respect as the Duke of Urbino. He showed the greatest discretion towards those who had pleased him. Once it happened that, having had large dealings with a certain merchant, one of his household came and told him that this merchant was making vast sums out of him, and that the goods he supplied were not worth the price charged. The Duke smiled and said he was quite content that the merchant should make his profit, and that he would not have made it had he not been highly deserving. He went on to say that he was greatly obliged to this merchant who had trusted him, when he was poor and just come into his possessions, with five or six thousand florins when no one else would have lent him a single one. On this account he was glad that the merchant should win what seemed to him a just profit. He thus silenced the servant, who went away shamefaced. One day when he was at Milan, he was discussing various matters with Duke Galeazzo, who said to him, "Signor, I would fain be always at war, with you to back me, then I should never be worsted." The Duke replied, "What I know of warfare, I learned from His Excellency Duke Francesco your father." Duke Galeazzo said nothing in reply, unable apparently to find a word. Some blamed the Duke for over-much clemency, but this quality is much to be praised, and few suppliants went away unforgiven, whatever their offence. He hated cruelty of every kind. One admirable quality he possessed: to speak ill of no one. He praised rather than blamed, and he took it ill if one spoke evil of another before him, deeming such an action to be shameful. He loved not to hear those who praised their own deeds: indeed, on this score he was most modest, and he always preferred that others and not himself should speak of what he had done. Nature had given him a choleric temper, but he knew well how to moderate it, and he softened his temperament with the utmost prudence. He gave himself entirely to his state that the people might be content, and one of the greatest of his merits was that when he heard of a quarrel he would send for the parties, and give his wits no rest till peace should be made. Amongst his many kind actions in mitigating dissension was the case of one of his subjects of honest birth who chose as wife a girl of a station similar to his own with numerous kinsfolk, betwixt whom and the husband arose bad feeling, so that he was in no way inclined towards the wife whom he had taken. The affair came to the point at which he might have to defend his honour, which meant that he would probably be cut in pieces by one or other of the kinsfolk. The Duke, knowing the scandal which would follow, by way of avoiding it ordered the parties to settle their quarrel on a certain day; and when they had come before him he began with those who had the girl in charge; and, speaking in kindly eloquent words, gave them many and good reasons for what he advised them to do. As is the case with ignorant people, the more he said the more firmly they resisted. When he saw their disposition he turned to the young man and said, "If I desired you to become a relative of mine, would you not consent, having regard for my station? Would it not seem to you a desirable relationship?" The young man replied that in this 142
case it would not be fitting, between so great a man as the Duke and one like himself. Then the Duke said, "But will you not pay regard to something which satisfies me?" The young man, persuaded by the Duke, affirmed that he was content, whereupon the Duke said, "I think very highly of this young woman for her virtue and goodness, as if she were my own daughter ; so you are becoming a relative of me, and not of her family." By these words the Duke bound him, so that he was forced to consent, and he took her with the good wishes of all. The Duke took them both by the hand, wishing them good luck, and saying that their relationship with him began from that hour, that he wished them always to bear this in mind, and in all their needs to make use of him. He gave them a noble marriage-feast and they both went away highly pleased, and hereafter the husband and wife maintained an admirable carriage one towards the other. Acts like these, the bringing of peace to his subjects, are worthy of a prince. What steadfastness the Duke showed in withstanding the loss of Ferrara l He had tarried there long in order to beat off the Venetian leaguer, knowing how important this would be for the rest of Italy, and by his prudence he had hitherto held the Venetians within their bounds, but now that they had advanced their camp as far as the park, he knew that he would be in great danger if he did not keep sharp watch within the walls. His Excellency, through immense discomfort and bad air, fell sick with fever and though, by reason of his temperate habits, the fever left him after a few days, he was very weak, and all his friends and the physicians advised him to go to Bologna where the air was better. The Duke, aware of the danger threatening the land, took more heed of the general welfare than of his own particular case, perceiving that, as soon as he should be gone, Ferrara would fall for want of necessary precautions, which had been neglected by the man who had been charged to execute them. He was earnestly persuaded by those of his own house and by his friends, as well as by messengers from Signor Ottaviano and Count Guido, that he should quit that malarious air; but, though he knew his life was in danger, he was deaf to their prayers, having lost all zest for life, as is common in marsh sickness. His reply was always that, though he was conscious of his risk, he would do nothing to imperil the city, bearing in mind what this would mean for the rest of Italy, and for the faith the League had placed in him. If the Venetians should win Ferrara, the last obstacle to their power in Italy would be gone and the peril overhanging Mantua and Bologna would be obvious. Bologna taken, the state of Florence, near and conterminous therewith, would lie at the mercy of Venice. Likewise Faenza and the rest of Romagna, about which there had been no contest, save with Giovanni Galeazzo and Filippo Maria Visconti, to prevent these territories from falling under Milanese sway. It would be much worse were they to fall to Venice to-day. As to the other districts on the confines of Lucca, which they might attack by this approach, and the harassing of Pisa, all this would mean a great danger to the Florentines. 143
Now the Duke, who was one of the wisest and most pious of men, being moved by the considerations above written, resolved to consider first the public weal and refused to retire from the defence of the place, though he was putting his life in peril. Having firmly taken his stand, no one could move him to leave Ferrara. Knowing that he must die, he was fain to remain there and save the city, rather than to depart and let it be captured, merely to save his own life. Then there would be the loss of honour, for men might say that his doings brought Italy under Venetian dominion. After he had made up his mind, his distemper began to increase in the bad air of the country, which was not suited to his case. When he saw that he got worse every day he considered the welfare of his soul, and arranged the affairs of his state, that no future trouble might arise. In temporal and in spiritual things alike he directed that everything should be done down to the minutest detail, as it was provided in his testament. He ordered that the monastery of S. Donato, occupied by Franciscan Observantists, about a mile outside Urbino, should once more be made a chureh, with everything that was needful, as was afterwards done, and he wished to be buried therein beside Count Guido. There was no need for him to make any provisions in his will in the interests of Divine worship, or as to the governance of his house. Had he failed in this there might have been regrets as to his doings, but as experience has since shown, no hurt of any kind was done either to his own house or to his subjects. When he had provided for the future of his sons he began to consider his own soul and many times made confession like a good and faithful Christian, and set in order everything necessary for salvation, and took the sacraments of the Church in due seasons. And God gave him grace so that he was able to carry out all these matters with sober judgment, carefully considering everything he had to do, and omitting naught that was due. He was most pious and merciful in all his dealings, wherefore he might well claim to be called the father and protector of the wretched and afflicted. After his death his body was borne with the highest possible honours to the Church of S. Donato, served by the Franciscan Observantists, according to the directions of his will. The greater part of what he left was at the disposition of Signor Ottaviano, his nephew, who had his full confidence, by reason of the great affection which subsisted between them; to him also he trusted the management of state affairs, as far as they concerned his son, indeed he had such love for Ottaviano that he desired him to succeed to the government of the state, if the Count Guido should die without heirs. There are many things worthy of note concerning the Duke, but these will be set down by those who write his life. As far as I have gone, I have written a brief commentary, in order that the vulgar may know something of the Duke as well as those who read Latin. Of all the things written here, the greater part are from my own experience, having been at the court ; and those which I have not seen, I have heard of from men of good repute who were about His Lordship. 144
Notes 1. Naples. 2. Federigo and Alessandro Sforza defeated by the Angevin forces under Piccinino, 1460. In a tournament before the battle Federigo was disabled, and this accident may have affected the result of the fight itself. 3.1463. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of the chief free captains of the time and a lifelong foe of Federigo. 4. Vespasiano scarcely ever gives a date. This transaction seems to have happened in 1467. 5. 1449. On account of this desertion Alfonso, when asked to sign the treaty of Lodi, refused unless he should be allowed to punish Count Astorre for his treachery. 6. 1467. It was here that field artillery was first used. Bartolomeo Colleone's army was largely supported by Florentine exiles and the enemies of the Medici. The battle was indecisive. 7. i p.m. 8. It would seem that this fighting must have occurred during Federigo's last campaign, the war of Ferrara in 1482. In the next pages Vespasiano shifts the narrative back to 1469. 9. Sigismondo died 1468. Roberto was his son. 10. Son of King Ferdinand whom he succeeded as Alfonso II. He fled before Charles VIII in 1495 and abdicated without striking a blow. 11. Battle of Rimini, 1469. 12. Macchiavelli, Flor. Hist., B. VII, p. 362. The war originated through the finding of a mine of alum. 1472. 13. 1472. 14. 1474. In 1471 the Duke of Ferrara, urged by Francesco, the son of Palla Strozzi, who had died an exile in Ferrara, had attacked Florence in alliance with Venice. The Duke was disappointed with the terms of the subsequent peace and joined the League against Venice. 15. 1479. 16. 1482. 17. 1482. 18. Roberto Malatesta, in command of the papal forces. 19. Federigo died at Ferrara on September 11. The war was ended by the peace of Bagnuolo in 1484. Roberto Malatesta, his antagonist, died the same clay at Rome. Girolamo, the Pope's nephew, was suspected of having poisoned him in order to seize Rimini. Pope Sixtus, either through gratitude, or to ward off suspicion, at once erected a sumptuous tomb in S. Peter's to Roberto's memory. He broke with the Venetians by joining the League, and also excommunicated them. Vide Life of Bishop of Cologne, p. 197. 20. Vide Life of Cosimo de' Medici, also of Master Pagolo.
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21. Justus von Ghent. 22. See the bishop's Life, p. 181. 23. The son of Bernardo Ubaldini and of Federigo's sister Anna. 24. Founded by S. Jan Colombin in 1367. Montaigne in his Travels writes: "They are not priests, neither do they say mass nor preach, but they are skilful distillers of citron and other waters." 25. Two noted jurists.
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SECTION 2
L. Martines, The Princely Courts PERIMETERS The importance of the princely courts for this history is in the fact that they were centers for the union between power and privileged culture. Here, at the level of society's ruling groups, consciousness was most driven to create or seek images of itself in the world around — and had the best means to do so. In their patronage of letters and the arts, the courts made a marriage, occasionally a brilliant one, of power and imagination. After 1440, for a hundred years and more, the vigor and self-indulgence of the courts were such as to give a distinct direction to much of the peninsula's élite culture. But in other ways the course of change was infelicitous. For the political leadership of the courts, as shown in Chapter XIV, was to be catastrophic – leadership lost control – and that catastrophe had its sublimated expression in culture. Giulio Romano's braggart and fanciful Palazzo del Te (1527-34), built for the Gonzaga lord of Mantua, is a just celebration of the brassy successes of a dynasty which survived every emergency only by constantly putting itself at the service of the most powerful: the papacy, France, Spain, and the empire. The Gonzaga recognized no principle save that of power and political success. The same may be said of the Este lords of Ferrara. Appropriately, in its Italian phase, Mannerism was in part a plea for refinement against the most cynical social values; but in much greater part, it was a quest for over-idealized and strange forms in a world in which the order of perceived reality had slipped from the control of society's 'natural' leaders. Italy was overrun by foreigners. The prince - pope, duke, marquis, cardinal, tyrant; or papal vicar - was a powerful magnet: he attracted and repelled. He attracted throngs, of people in search of jobs, favors, patronage, honours, and prestige. Others, instead, he repelled in the sense that his powers generated fears and enemies. His authority could be destructive, and so people drew away, fled, seeking cover and protection; for within his domain - and at times beyond - he could crush at will. By this definition, there was something of the prince about the Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici (d. 1492), and in Florence the space around him, where he doled out favor and injury, was a magnetic field, a princely court. He had enough authority and influence to dispose of public honors and offices, and he also wielded influence abroad. Letters rained in on him from neighboring lords and states, requesting judicial posts, military commissions, and the like, for their protégés. By contrast, Agostino Chigi of Siena (d. 1520) was not a prince except in a metaphori147
cal sense. He was a rich papal banker resident in Rome, a patron to artists and literary men, but also a private citizen who disposed of no public authority, except perhaps as a tax farmer. And if Pope Leo X chose to accept any of Chigi's recommendations regarding a governmental appointment, this was Leo's doing; it did not follow from any title belonging to Chigi. The essential difference, then, lay in the contrast between public and private. Chigi was a rich favorite. Lorenzo, as Florentines used to say, ‘had a bit of the state’. He was a veiled prince in a republican oligarchy, which made his position ambiguous and difficult, especially as political Florence jealously guarded its republican trappings. The difficult was put to the test by Lorenzo's son, Piero, forced to flee from the city in 1494, after he demonstrated, in some grave political blunders, that he had lost the bourgeois touch - the readiness to play at modesty - of the early Medici. Down to 1500 the major -princely courts, in the following order; were the courts of Milan, papal Rome, Naples, Ferrara, Savoy, and Mantua. Papal Rome had resonant international standing as the capital of Western Christendom, but in Italian power politics, before about 1500, it had less clout than Milan and less than half of Milan's fiscal income. The peninsula's north-west corner had three principalities, the first of which outranked Ferrara and Mantua in revenues but not in cultural ĂŠlan: the duchy of Savoy (100,000 ducats per year) and the little marquisates of Saluzzo and Monferrato, each with its own court. These were often overrun militarily during the age of the Italian Wars (1494-1559). The fundamental changes in power as in high culture came after 1500, when papal Rome, both in ambition and resources, became the leading Italian court. Naples and Milan fell under foreign rule, first French and then Spanish; they were edged out of the picture as native Italian courts. And although the imperial governor of Milan, Ferrante Gonzaga (d. 1557), was an Italian nobleman, his entourage was a mixed, international company. After 1500, accordingly, the main line of patronage and Italian upper-class culture passed through the papal court, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and Florence tinder the Medici dukes. Of republics, Florence's brief luminosity aside, only the oligarchies, Venice, and Genoa, remained great Winters for the joining of power and imagination by means of selective patronage. But the lines between courts and oligarchies were not always sharp. One of the foremost writers of the day, the Venetian patrician Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), was more at home in the courts than in Venice, and late in life, when he was made a cardinal, he entered easily into that princely mold. Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus, held court at Asolo and Murano under the sway of the Venetian republic. At Genoa the rank of families like the Doria and Fregoso was exalted enough to surround their leading branches, as in Florence the Medici, with a courtly- aura. Such families had ties of blood with princely dynasties. The Fregoso were related to the Montefeltro lords of 148
Urbino, and two of them figure prominently in Castiglione's The Courtier, Europe's first real catechism for 'gentlemen'. They were sent to Urbino to be trained in the ways of courts. Italy was a honeycomb of princely courts. The Papal State alone had a number of lesser courts, chief among them the court of Urbino, rendered famous by Castiglione's handbook. The duchy of Ferrara was also, legally speaking, in papal territory, but the Este lords of the city enjoyed such dynastic eminence and so complete an autonomy that they ranked as independent princes. Rather more under Roman dominance were the courts of papal vicars: the Malatesta of Rimini, the Manfredi of Facnza, the Sforza of Pesaro, the Varano of Camerino, the Ordelaffi of Forli, and the Bentivoglio of Bologna. 'Court' may not be too definite a term for the space and personnel around the Baglioni of Perugia, also in the heart of papal territory. At Rome the powerful Colonna and Orsini clans had their courts, not only in the space around their cardinals — and there was one in almost every generation — but also as a function of their vast feudal estates, where they administered justice, collected taxes, enacted local laws, and raised small armies. Farther south, in the kingdom of Naples, a similar position was held by some fifteen or twenty great families in their feudal baronies. In the north, the counts of Carpi and Correggio had little states of their own, while the duchy of Milan had feudal magnates, like the Trivulzio and Borromeo, powerful enough to raise armies and rebel against the ruling Sforza. Cardinals held the rank of prince: this was the custom of the age. In all public ceremonials, they ranked with dukes and were preceded only by the pope and by kings. They were not allowed to appear in public save in state, accompanied by a train of servitors. Most of them had one or more episcopal courts of law under their jurisdiction, and all the richest ones held feudal estates. From about 1460, down to the end of the Renaissance and beyond, a strain of cardinals was recruited from princely houses: Gonzaga, Este, Sforza, Medici, Colonna, Farnese, Pallavicini, Trivulzio. They were great lords and lived to the style. Their entourage of 'familiars' might number up to 300 servitors, ranging from armed gentlemen and companions to secretaries, cooks, and stable boys. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, cardinals Ippolito d'Este, Ascanio Sforza, Giovanni de' Medici, and Sigismondo Gonzaga also retained musicians, buffoons, poets, painters, and dwarfs. To sec these princes entering or leaving a city was to see a grand cavalcade of liveried gentlemen and servants. Lovers too of the most prized of all courtly pastimes, they organized hunting parties of hundreds of horsemen and they returned from their sport to the sound of trumpets and fifes, as Roman crowds ran out to gape at them. Theirs was the world of 149
courts, intrigue, and high politics, of state marriages and royal processions. Like any prince, they distributed both hurt and preferment. At its strictest, a court was the space and personnel around a prince, as he made laws, received ambassadors, dispatched letters, gave commands, decided cases, made appointments, took his meals, entertained, and proceeded through the streets. At its most elastic, a court was — in an age of princes — the space and people around any dignitary who wielded some public authority in his own right, a feudal lord or even, in certain instances, a leading oligarch. As satiric poets noted, Italy teemed with signorotti — princelings. The doge of Venice was a prince, and recognized as such by Venetians. But of course he was hemmed in by the power of the senate, the Council of Ten, and his advisers. Toward 1500 the princely court became a main reference point in the organization of upper-class consciousness. Noblemen and aspiring bourgeois could find their different identities by means of it. A European ideal of conduct rose from it, from the social and mental world of the courtier', and a set of mystifications as well. Power and wealth collected increasingly around the courts and remaining oligarchies. Princes were thought to sit at the summit of the wheel of fortune. They held the world's prizes. Literature, art, and ideas were deeply branded by the courts. As political thinkers, Machiavelli and Guicciardini were certainly so branded. The love lyric itself carried the mark, as we shall sec in Chapter XV. THE COURTLY ESTABLISHMENT The key is power: the magnetic force radiating out from the prince, organizing people and space into relations of service and overlordship. Public authority, in part or in whole, reposed in the prince - duke of Ferrara, marquis of Mantua, or duke of Urbino. He was also the city's richest citizen, drawing income from his great landed domains and from a wealth of taxes, some of which were assigned to him personally. Drawing on a variety of indirect taxes, the Bentivoglio lords of Bologna built up a magnificent income after about 1470, until Pope Julius II ran them out of the city in 1506. The most brutal and obvious manifestation of the prince's power was his residence in the city: a fortress designed to withstand riot, revolution, or war. Whether he lived in it or near by, as did the Este dukes, there it was with its stately rooms and company of mercenaries, ready to receive the court at any time. At Milan the residence of the Sforza was the castle in the middle of the city, a walled-in fortress with moats, sixty-two drawbridges, and, in 1499, some 1,800 machines of war'. Here were lodged from 800 to 1,200 mercenaries, and many more in times of war. Arms and politics were fused together for princes like shoulders and head. Throughout the Renaissance period all the Sforza, Este, and Gonzaga lords - and most of their 150
brothers legitimate and bastard - were trained in swordsmanship and mounted combat. And if die Moro, Ludovico Sforza, showed no inclination this way, he was rejecting a preparation received. A serious effort was also made to fire the children at court with the learning of humanism; but horses, hunts, arms, and luxurious display soon overwhelmed books. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the following combined the dignity of prince with the stipends of condottieri – they captained large papal, Venetian, or other armies: Ercole and Alfonso d'Este, dukes of Ferrara; Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and Francesco Maria della Roverc, dukes of Urbino; and Francesco and Federico Gonzaga, marquises of Mantua. Thcy and their like were sent away from home to train or to be perfected in arms: to the Neapolitan court, to Milan, to a freelance condottiere, and even to Germany, France, and Spain. Leonello d'Este (d. 1450) spent several years with the mercenary Braccio da Montone; and his half-brother, Borso (d. 1471), was trained at the court of Naples. Ferrante Gonzaga, brother to Federico, marquis of Mantua, served the Emperor Charles V in Spain in 1524-7 and in 1530 was general of the imperial army that laid siege to Florence. Again, in January 1524, the author of the best-known handbook for courtiers, Castiglione, was already thinking of sword-and-buckler lessons for his eldest son, Camillo, who was not yet seven. He was looking to the boy's future service in courts. Theoretically, all Italian princes were feudal lords who owed military service: the dukes of Milan and marquises of Mantua and Monferrato to the emperor; the dukes of Ferrara and Urbino and the Aragonese kings of Naples to the pope. In cultivating military skills, they were looking to a tradition, to their states, and to their own safety. Therefore, training in arms was even more imperative for petty princes: the Malatesta of Rimini, the Manfredi of Faenza, the Baglioni in the towns around Perugia. For as the expenditures of these lords constantly exceeded their ordinary revenues, they were forced to seek outside military commissions (condotte): to put their men and arms out for hire to Florence, Venice, Milan, the papacy, or to one of the miniature republics, Lucca or Siena. Furthermore, there were demands on princes from their own captains, in addition to the pressure to keep soldiers loyal, hence to keep them in arms and money. The smaller a prince's body of troops, the less his prestige. And here we touch a question that tormented all the courts - the plangent need for money. Fiscal income derived largely from a rich and complicated as sortment of indirect taxes: gabelles on goods of all sorts, especially food staples, duties on exports and imports, and taxes on mills, salt, and contracts. In the princely states, the yield from direct taxes on direct property could rarely be satisfactory because of the tax immunities enjoyed by many noblemen and favorites. The first Sforza duke of Milan, Francesco (d. 1466), managed to build up the duchy's shattered finances by his military brilliance and condotte. But a grandiose diplomacy, costly wars, and a burst of luxurious display drove 151
his sons and grandsons into debt and still more unjust taxes. A kindred fate overtook the lords of Mantua, Ferrara, Urbino, and Romagnol, and other princelings; with the result that they were driven to scurry around for military commissions, to seek better stipends, and to keep up their military skills. The life of such a prince could be 'consumed in the details of contracts of service, differences over pay, changes of allegiance, and war.’ And if he gambled, as princes did, the cry was for more money. The Este and Gonzaga survived by means of a ruthless Realpolitik, but other princes went down: the Malatesta of Rimini, the Sforza of Pesaro, the Riario òf Imola, the Bentivoglio of Bologna, the Della Rovere of Urbino, and of course the lords of Milan and Naples: And all, as they fell, were in grave financial difficulties. In the early sixteenth century the jewels of the Marchesana of Mantua, Isabella, were continually in hock to Venetian money-lenders. Once or twice the money was needed to buy a cardinal-ship. The jewels of the Este, Ferrara's ruling house, were repeatedly pledged. In 1495, Ludovico Sforza turned to Venice for a loan of 50,000 ducats and offered-jewels in pledge for three times the value. Princes also borrowed money by farming out taxes or by simply promising one of the gabelles for a given period. They put their jewels out in pawn only as a last resort, though they were often at last resorts. Still another way to borrow was to buy items on credit; as from small-fry merchants and craftsmen, and then to take many Months to pay, sometimes even years. Pleading letters from artisans and artists are testimony to this princely practice of the Gonzaga and Este. There remained at least one other major economic resource: the varieties of obligatory labour (corvÊes) due mainly from certain classes of rustics and available to all signori. This was labor called upon for the maintenance of roads and ditches, fortifications, irrigation, or even to help put tip new palazzi and country villas, like the magnificent Sforza retreat at Vigevano, where Ludovico combined hunting lodge, villa, experimental farm, zoo, and center for animal husbandry. The least studied of all surplus values due to Renaissance princes and feudal barons, obligatory. labor was doubtless the major investment in the great Este villas outside Ferrara. In 1471, Borso d'Este ordered the building of an artificial mountain by means of such labor. Auditors and treasury officials kept separate accounts of the income due personally to the prince, such as that rendered by his lands and condotte, and that which was due the state. Yet in practice, popes, cardinals, dukes, and marquises treated all unencumbered income as their own: i.e., all monies not already assigned to specific matters, like the payment of troops and official salaries, or not already committed to tax farmers; moneylenders, court favorites, or benefactions. The prince's power over the state's purse was in some sense unlimited, but only a peculiar blindness would hold back the -pay of soldiers in order, to reward a mistress or buy a famous jewel. As Ludovico
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Sforza said in his political testament to his sons; 'the solidity and preservation of states consists in two things, soldiers and the respect for fortresses; Of the major courts, Milan and Urbino were the two extremes between rich and poor in ordinary revenue, until the papal court overtook and surpassed Milan about 1500. Naples, Savoy, Ferrara, and Mantua figured somewhere between. Romagnol and other courts had more modest establishments. Let us look at a range of expenditures. Ludovico Sforza's political testament (1500) is a memoir on critical questions of security, administration, and succession to the dukedom. In it he prescribed a salary of 500 ducats per year for the highest officers of state, the secret councilors. Money was tight and these dignitaries had other perquisites, including occasional gifts from the prince, but Ludovico was also preoccupied about the loyalty of leading officials and knew that he had to set a yearly stipend large enough to keep them in the style of one of Europe's most extravagant courts. In 1484 the cardinal-prince, Ludovico's brother, Ascanio, had a basic yearly income of 13,500 ducats from assigned ducal revenues, and this was apart from his escalating ecclesiastical income. When Francesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, died in 1519, his daughter and son-in-law, lords of Urbino, were in exile, having been driven from their court by Pope Leo X's soldiers. They had already sold or pawned much of their plate and jewels. The marquis settled 6,000 ducats a year on them for as long as they remained in exile, in addition to which they had the use of a Gonzaga palazzo in Mantua. The sum and house were large enough to keep the princely couple in a certain state. At the time, to use a suggestive comparison, realestate values show that the houses of noblemen in Mantua, generally speaking, ranged in value from 1,000 to 2,500 ducats, the latter attaching to very large structures. On the other hand, the house of a highly skilled artisan in a luxury trade, a weaver of velvet, might fetch eighty-five ducats.4 But all these figures are dwarfed by Federigo da Montefeltro's reported disbursement of 200,000 ducats, in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, for the construction of the Palace of Urbino (though we must wonder what part of this took the form of forced labor). Calculating wage labor at the rate per man of fifteen ducats per year, we find that the palace represented the wages for one year of about 13,300 men. Federigo (d. 1482), however, also had an imposing palace erected at Gubbio, one of his subject towns; and he had an accumulated investment of about 50,000 ducats in plate, furnishings, and famous tapestries, and another 30,000 in a library. These values came to something less from the 1490s, when the Italian Wars made money scarce and the cash value of objects and real property fell. Interest rates at Ferrara went up to 30 per cent and even, in some cases, 90 per cent: Already in 1490 Caterina Sforza, countess of Imola and niece to Ludovico, begged the Milanese court for a loan of money so as to avoid being driven to accept, she said, 4,000 to 6,000 duc-
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ats for property — probably jewels and perhaps some land — that was worth 25,000 ducats. We cannot say what proportion of total yearly revenues, in any of the princely states, went into the courtly establishment and its largess, into sinecures, new buildings, food, dress and jewels, donations, travel and stables, not to speak of marriages, births, and deaths. No doubt much of this could be viewed as ordinary and necessary expense. But if we estimate a varying figure of 12 to 20 per cent, we may not be far wrong, all the rest going for regular government expenditures — administration, salaries, upkeep, troops, and fortifications — and into the interest on public debts. One order of extraordinary expenditure requires some words apart because, like war, it could make for fiscal havoc: special occasions — marriages, state visits, and the purchase of titles and legitimacy. A minor event of this sort was Borso d'Este's purchase (1452) of a ducal title for a yearly disbursement of 4,000 ducats and a jeweled collar valued at 40,000. His imperial fiefs, Modena and Reggio, were raised to the status of a duchy by the Emperor Frederick III. But the reinvestiture of a later Este duke, Ercole II, and guarantees of the succession, cost the duchy 180,000 ducats, paid to the pope in 1539. We do not know the cost of Borso's trip to Rome in 1471 to be created duke of Ferrara by Pope Paul II. He flashed his way to the city with a train of more than 500 mounted noblemen, many hundreds of liveried servants, and 150 pack mules, and spent twenty days on the road. A very rough idea of the cost of such a trip may be gleaned from figures relating to the duke of Milan's brilliant and much larger cavalcade to Florence in the same year, a spectacle that first awed and then scandalized the Florentines. He led a company, of thousands in a train that included 2,050 horses, 200 pack mules, 5,000 pairs of hounds, and twelve covered carriages. Everywhere were gilded horse trappings and cloth of gold, silver, and velvet. The reported cost, doubtless exaggerated, was 200,000 ducats. In 1493, Ludovico Sforza made a trip of this sort to his father-in-law's Ferrara, and although the train went with only 1,000 horses, he and his young wife made it a point of honor to overwhelm the Ferrarese court by their splendor. Lucrezia Borgia's bridal journey from Rome to Ferrara (January 1502), at the head of a cortège of 700 courtiers and servants, was debited to the papacy. Our information concerning the dowry is more precise. She took 100,000 ducats in cash to Alfonso of Ferrara, about as much again in lands pilfered from the diocese of Bologna, another 75,000 ducats in jewels, plate, clothes, linen, and tapestries, as well as a reduction (from 4,000 to 100 ducats) in the annual tribute due from Ferrara to the papacy. Only one dowry of the age surpassed this: the 400,000 ducats for Bianca Maria Sforza, niece to Ludovico, on the occasion of her marriage to the emperor-designate, Maximilian; and she got another 100,000 ducats in jewels, plate, and other fineries. The dowry was payment for Ludovico's accession to the duchy of Milan, making him the first 154
Sforza to receive imperial recognition and titles. In 1491 another of Ludovico's nieces, Anna, took a dowry of 100,000 ducats to Ferrara, in addition to thousands more in eye-catching fineries. The Este themselves, however, and the Gonzaga in this period, bestowed dowries in the range of from 30,000 to 40,000 ducats. If arms and money were the front line of the courtly establishment, there was then all the life behind, arrayed around the prince and his family. During the third quarter of the fifteenth century, one of the smallest of the important courts was at Urbino, under the government of Count Federigo da Montefeltro, who was raised to the ducal dignity by the great nepotist Sixtus IV, in partial reward for Federigo's agreeing to marry off one of his daughters to a nephew of the Holy Father. The court of Urbino had a staff and household numbering about 355 people. 6 Among these were forty-five counts of the duchy, seventeen lesser noblemen and gentlemen, five major secretaries, twenty-two pages, nineteen grooms of the chamber, nineteen waiters at table, thirty-one footmen, five cooks, fifty stable hands under five masters, and more than 125 other servitors and lackeys. Batista, Federigo's wife, had seven ladies-in-waiting. The contemporary biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci noted that the court had 500 mouths to feed — probably no exaggeration, in view of Federigo's reputation for hospitality. Political advisers to Federigo, as well as his lawyers, ambassadors, and captains, figured among the listed counts and gentlemen. Craftsmen, artists, musicians, and others were a staff apart, only partly included among the unspecified group of 125 because others of their sort were also hired temporarily or for particular jobs. A clever condottiere, Federigo served as captain-general to three popes, two kings of Naples, two dukes of Milan, and several Italian leagues. He added much to his ordinary revenues by his military stipends, collected over a period of thirty-four years. About 1510, during Castiglione's years at Urbino, the reduced grandeur of the court continued to put a heavy burden on its fragile economic foundations. In the 1520s and 1530s, Mantua, a court of medium rank, had a staff' of 800 people. Since an estimate of the 1540s found that a saving could be made of 3,500 ducats per year by discharging 45o of the 800,7 a saving which averaged just under eight ducats per head, we may suppose that most of the 800 'familiars' were servants with minimal skills — footmen, pages, and other liveried helpers. Figures for the richest of the courts, Milan, are sketchier than those for Urbino but still suggestive. In the 1470s the Sforza stables had 500 horses and mules for the use of court personnel. About eight were reserved for the duchess and her retinue. The duke alone had, 'for the service of his person', forty chamberlains (as against nineteen at Urbino) and more than ten supplementary and still other sub-chamberlains. As some of the noblemen at court served him in this capacity, the duke was clearly surrounded 155
by a whole hierarchy of attendants. Hundreds of servants were attached to the kitchen, dining hall, and stables, with the result that a little world of hierarchies was to be found in each of these. Lowest of all were the runners (galoppini), who raced around doing chores and commissions. The dining hall had stewards, servants in charge of the silver service and majolica, table setters, and dispensers of food. The domain of the falconers was elsewhere, among the leopard keepers, dog handlers, and lackeys for the ducal hunting parties. The cruel and violent Galeazzo Maria (assassinated 1476) was a glutton for music and retained thirty-three singers from northern Europe, one of whom, the renowned Giovanni Cordier of Bruges, boasted a salary of 100 ducats per month — a phenomenal sum, considering that he could in theory have retired on an investment of six months' wages, giving him a yearly return of thirty ducats at a modest 5 per cent. Most workers and many an artisan lived on half of this. In the 1490s, Ludovico seems to have made economics by simplifying the organization of service, but he retained musicians and a large choral group, stepped up the ostentation in dress and jewels, and added a company of Mamelukes captained by a count. His first secretary, Bartolomeo Calco, an able and learned functionary, commanded a team of thirty men: eight secretaries, seven assistants, a keeper of seals, four recorders, and two archivists, as well as treasurers and doorkeepers. This cluster of men was entirely separate from the secretaries and clerks attached to the duke's high council of state, the secret council. Accordingly, when we say of a rich and powerful oligarch, Lorenzo de Medici, that he was a prince, we should keep in mind the great differences in power, ritual, and pomp that divided him from Ludovico. Courtly life was organized around the prince. Everything went to serve him. This meant not only the physical fact that he was flanked by teams of servitors and servants, but also that consciousness itself was turned his way. Men were there to carry out his wishes: they had no social identity apart from the one profiled in the fundamental relation at court, that between service and lordship. This condition was envied because it was joined to that of the prince, than which there was no higher identity The basic lexicon on the one side was in the vocabulary of obedience and adulation, on the other in that of command and expectation. From this, from the subtle play between the two, a whole courtly literature took its rise. The more we look into the princes Este, Gonzaga, Sforza, Medici, and Montefeltro-Della Rovere, the more we come on individual and dynastic egotisms that knew no bounds. But this was a luxury dearly paid for. The judgement of princes was often impaired by flattery, and since princes liked to be liked, the easiest if most dangerous way for them to be liked, as Ludovico frankly noted in his political testament, was to open up their hands and give - like Borso d'Este on his royal way to Rome, 'throwing handfuls of silver coins to people as he entered and left cities '. Normally, the lion's share of the prince's largess went into the grasping hands of courtiers. 156
Court favorites got their rewards, but the next tier of servitors farther down was less well satisfied, and the tiers below these, again, saw the insecurities and burdens multiply. Fiscal shortages were immediately reflected in the suspension of pay, notably at the lower levels, often for months on end, and this affected all servants who lived out or who had outside dependants. A musician might suddenly be sent back-to his remote village for playing dissonantly. In 1475, in the middle of a letter about other matters, the duke of Milan casually ordered a tailor thrown into prison because he had 'spoiled the doublet of crimson silk' belonging to one of his courtiers. Duke Ercole of Ferrara, in 148o, commanded one of his ambassadors, in the name of service to the duke, to stop mourning his spouse's death, adding that he, Ercole, would find 'fresher flesh' for him a new and younger wife. Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, got a brilliant young scholar, Niccolò Panizzato, to transfer himself to Mantua in 1492 to tutor her in classical literature. He was offered a stipend of three ducats per month, plus family allowances. But no sooner had he arrived in Mantua than he was dismissed because Isabella decided that she was, after all, too busy to resume her studies. The young man was bitterly disappointed. On an earlier occasion, while on a visit to Ferrara, she terrified a painter, Luca Lombieni, by twice threatening in letters to have him jailed in the dungeon of Mantua if he failed to finish a particular commission before her return, or if he failed to satisfy her. Perhaps this will make you more anxious to please us in the future. In 1503, when Castiglione left the service of the marquis of Mantua for the court of Urbino, the marquis, although he had coldly granted his permission, was so angry that for some years Castiglione did not dare enter Mantuan territory to visit his mother. In December 1505, even with the credentials of an ambassador, he was forced at the Mantuan border to turn back to Urbino. Years later, having finally forgiven the courtier, the Marquis Francesco picked a spouse for him from the house of the Torelli counts of Mantua. A different aspect of the play between service and lordship, especially as it pivoted on the egotism of the prince, appeared in relations between Titian and Francesco's son, Federico, the first duke of Mantua. Thanking the artist in 1531 for a picture of St Mary Magdalen, Federico declared: 'I recognize that in this magnificent work you have tried to express both the love which you cherish for me and your own excellence. These two things have enabled you to produce this incomparable figure.' The prince's anger knew no laws. Francesco Maria della Rovere, when seventeen years old, killed his sister's lover; later, as duke of Urbino and again with his own hands, he killed a cardinal — and got away with it — for alleged abuse to his honor. On occasion, lawyers lost their offices in the state for moving legal action against favorites. Goldsmiths might find themselves in prison for failing to satisfy their lords. Alfonso 157
d'Este, duke of Ferrara, once had the eyes crushed and face trampled of a notary who had sought to have a lawsuit transferred out of Ferrarcse territory to Rome. And in 1508 he had one of his soldiers assassinate a leading courtier, the lame and muchscented Ercole Strozzi, who seems to have encouraged an exchange of sympathies between Alfonso's wife (Lucrezia Borgia) and brother-in-law, the marquis of Mantra. In all these instances the prince justified his action on grounds of honor or the service and loyalty due him. These matters were paramount, and transgressing servitors or subjects might be deemed worthy of the most brutal punishment. Power radiated out from the prince, but the process was not altogether one-sided. By their importuning flattery and self-interest, courtiers and favorites spurred the prince on to grab what he could, to bestow favors and graces, thus at times disrupting the course of justice. Accordingly, though the prince was the animating force of the courtly establishment, courtiers exercised some force upon him, and this made for a more complicated dialectic. A PARADISE FOR STRUCTURALISTS The prince was the centerpoint of the courtly order of consciousness. Around that point (lordship) all life revolved (service), all the dominant forms of thought, passion, and entertainment. If we know how to find the radii, how to read the variety of relations that ran between circle and center, we shall see that courts were a paradise for structuralists. The fifteenth century was an age of strident self-assurance for the governing Êlites. Lorenzo de' Medici and his circle bullied and swaggered. The first duke of Ferrara, Borso d'Este, tried to build a mountain. The oligarchical core of the Venetian patriciate looked upon all Italy as fair game. Popes reconstituted their authority in Italy. And Ludovico Sforza believed that he could manipulate the leading powers of Europe. Never before had Italian ruling groups owned so much faith in their ability to control the perceived reality of the surrounding world. In this psychological environment, the interest in self-images, at once direct and devious, became one of the leading pleasures of the day, nowhere more than at the courts. The richesse of painted and sculpted portraits was only the most obvious sign of this interest. Painters at court spent much time executing portraits of princes, of the favorites of princes, and of their favorite pets, mainly dogs and falcons, more rarely horses; here already there was an entry into the realm of roundabout self-images. The striking of commemorative medallions — those sharply incised profile portraits of princes and lesser worthies — affords another example of the interest; they were usually cut to celebrate a triumph. The taste spread to rich bourgeois circles with humanistic or aristocratic pretensions, but it began or first prevailed in the strutting courts of the Este, Visconti, Malatesta, Gonzaga, and- others. 158
In imitation of Roman models, the profiles were occasionally crowned with laurel wreaths or given Roman shoulder and neck dress, thus associating the portrait (a selfidentification) with the power that was Rome and so converting even Rome into a roundabout self-image. But the biggest self-image of the age, in company with Michelangelo's unfinished tomb of Pope Julius II, was promised by Ludovico Sforza in the gigantic equestrian statue commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci for the main Milanese square. It was a statue of the dynasty's founder, the .condottiere Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's father. In November 1493, to celebrate Bianca Maria's marriage to Maximilian and to impress the German visitors, Leonardo's clay colossus was raised onto a triumphal arch and set in the piazza before the castle. The lyric praise of poets followed. But as the duchy was heaving toward deep financial difficulties, the statue, meant to be cast in bronze, was never finished; and after Ludovico was overthrown, his enemies destroyed the clay model. Here, art in our terms was hated propaganda in theirs. Next, there was the rich scatter of refracted self-images to be found in the objects around: in court tapestries, playing cards, decorated earthenware, embroidered silks, wedding chests, engraved arms and armor plate, and even a variety of sugar confections for special banquets. Courtiers saw images in these of hunting parties, lush gardens and exotic animals (akin to those collected by certain princes), cavaliers and ladies, battle scenes and mythological cycles, such as the Fall of Troy or the Labors of Hercules. Standing before the latter, princes could imagine mythological ancestors and the Este lords with the name Ercole (Hercules) could playfully seek themselves. And if they were short in imagination, adulators were not. As the satirist Panfilo Sasso (fl. 1s00) observed, even parvenus were ready to claim descent from Priam, Pyrrhus, and Alexander the GreatÂť Faience and sets of cards depicted sainted knights, patron saints, fortified cities, fair Justice holding her scales, and armorial bearings, as well as personal devices and mottoes, a fashion then much in favor with princes. The margins of Lascaris' Greek grammar composed for the child Gian Galeazzo Sforza, later duke, were decorated with colored Sforza devices and heraldic bearings. Borso d'Este once dressed his pages in livery adorned with a motto about 'fidelity'. 'Alpha' and Omega', in Greek lettering, said the motto on the suit of white satin and gold brocade worn on a famous occasion (Rome, 1512) by the twelve-year-old heir to the Gonzaga titles. His mother, Isabella d'Este, was flashing her allegiance to humanism. Ludovico Sforza's wife, Beatrice d'Este, was enamored of a dress cut from a brocade (price about eighty ducats per square meter) embroidered with the two towers of the port of Genoa. The image was very much to the point, for in his political testament, her husband, lord of that city too, declared, 'Genoa is of the highest moment, not only for [the sake of our] reputation but also for the preservation of this, our primary state [Milan].' At major banquets the 159
courts often produced sugar confections done up in the shapes of cities, castles, birds, and animals: the very devices that symbolized the lordship and hunting interest of princes. These devices were also much depicted in painting at court after about 1420 or 1430. Humanist programs for frescoes caught fragments of self-imagery. In 1522 the humanist Mario Equicola suggested that each of the five roundels in the bedroom of his warrior lord, Federico Gonzaga, be adorned with pictures of Victory, Virtue, Bellona (goddess of war), and Hope, while the fifth and big roundel in the middle would depict Fame. Evidently the program was intended both to summarize Federico's qualities (a flattery) and to be a spur. The courtly quest for, and delight in, self-images was endless and could take the most circuitous routes. When Pope Alexander VI died in 1503, the marquis of Mantua, who was with the French army just outside Rome, wrote to his wife saying that 'his funeral was such a miserable thing that the wife of the lame dwarf of Mantua had a more honorable burial than this pope.' That is to say, a lowly dwarf — whose wife alone was lower — was the exact opposite of a prince, the very image of power and grandeur. Thus, with an oddly perfect taste, the Gonzaga had introduced dwarfs into their court and in the sixteenth century ordered built, in their own residence at Mantua, a famous suite of miniature rooms. This game, however, of opposite but twin images also fused the two, for the stunted creatures were dressed, like their masters, in lush cloth of silver and gold. When in November 1515 the Venetian ambassadors to Milan passed through Mantua, they found the Marquis Francesco, disabled by syphilis, lying on a couch in a richly adorned room. His favorite dwarf, attired in gold brocade, attended him. Three pages stood near by, as well as three of his pet greyhounds. Some of his falcons, reined by leashes, were also in the room; and the walls were hung with pictures of his favorite dogs and horses. In short, the room was a cache of tuned, circuitous, and refracted self-images. Some years before, his head had been shaved clean to help heal a battle wound, whereupon his courtiers shaved their heads to keep him in countenance and to reflect his. The damaged image of the prince had its consolation in reflections. At Milan, instead, such mimicry was for prize falcons, which were shown off, as if in imitation of the prince, wearing 'a little hood trimmed with some pearls and with one much larger on the peak', said the ambassador from Ferrara. The cardinal Ascanio Sforza had a different sort of petted bird: a parrot (price 100 ducats) able to recite the Credo entire. Imaginative literature at court was on the same track, where power turned all things into figments of itself or into symbolic scraps of the things that were central to its interests and delights. We need only mention the torrents of accolades in verse produced by poets, among them the best of the age: Poliziano, Boiardo, Bembo, Ariosto, and Tasso. 160
From doggerel of the sort occasionally written by Bellincione at the Sforza court, up to the sustained encomia in Orlando Furioso, there is a stream of honeyed words and adoring sycophancy for princes, their wives, mistresses, favorites, and for all the best-placed around these, not excluding pets. Ludovico Sforza commissioned the poet and courtier Gaspare Visconti to write verses on the death of a favorite falcon. The best-known of such poetizing was occasioned in 1512 by the death of Isabella d'Este's little bitch, Aura. The marchioness grieved, and commemorative elegies, sonnets, epitaphs, and epigrams, in Latin as well as Italian, poured into Mantua from different parts of Italy, and many survive in manuscript. The equivalent in stone was the sumptuous tomb designed in 1526, by none other than Giulio Romano, for one of Federico Gonzaga's dead pets, also a bitch. The method of tracking self-images, as a way of delineating the operations of consciousness; shows that we should be on the lookout for the impact of power even in the most unlikely or prima facie innocent activity. Not however, that Duke Ercole d'Este's 'seeking of his fortune' was innocent. Once a year he went around Ferrara with cap in band, humble airs, and a crowd of courtiers, begging food at the doors of citizens. Whatever he gathered — pies, capons, gamebirds, and cheeses by the hundreds — was given over to feed the city's poor. The exercise made a candid use of power, but it was interestingly combined with a self-image turned upside down, as in the pairing of prince and dwarf. The prince put on mock airs and became a beggar. Power became theater and ritual. But all the provisions collected by the begging Ercole went to prop up his magnanimity: a weak if sincere gesture that could not make up for an oppressive fiscal machine, as Ercole (d. 15o5), in the course of his reign, stepped up his political ambitions and splashed his resources around on grand building schemes. The courts cast a perfect profile in their orgiastic splendor. All public occasions allowed for a display of luxury. Marriages, births, funerals, state visits, the reception of ambassadors, carnivals, special fêtes, and religious processions: these were occasions for the courts to dress up and show off their splendor. Princes, courtiers, and their ladies w e n t f o r t h i n c l o t h o f g o l d a n d b l a z i n g w i t h j e w e l s . A t t h e i r best, in an Este expression of the period, they thought they looked 'like angels from heaven', never suspecting that they imagined angels in their own image. High points in the march of finery were the Aragon-Este marriage of 1473, the Este-Sforza marriages of 1491-2, Ludovico Sforza's visit to Ferrara in 1493, Bianca Maria Sforza's marriage to Maximilian late in 1493, Lucrezia Borgia's arrival at Ferrara in 1502, festivities for the king of France at Milan in 1507, and the coronation of the emperor at Bologna in 1530. A half-dozen other marriages and state visits were not far behind in their pomp.
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And marriages often went with the raising of triumphal arches, where again we see the self-glorifying taste of the courts. All the grand occasions drew great crowds of people, among them many from the country. They came to gawk at ornamented horse carriages, chariots, and long files of caparisoned horses; at collars of chained gold on the necks of the rows of gentlemen; gold-fringed sleeves worth thirty ducats each; accessories of hammered, filigreed, laminated, and scaled gold; dresses - Lucrezia Borgia's - striped with fish scales of woven gold; other dresses valued up to 5,000 ducats; headpieces and coronets with assemblies of jewels; and cascades of diamonds, pearls, rubies, and emeralds. There was a meaning to all this finery that went beyond the mere show of wealth. None knew this better than the actors themselves. More than once there was competition between courts, each yearning to show off the heaviest collars of chained gold. Chroniclers were impressed. Letters were dispatched with precise estimates of the collars in ducats. In a letter to her husband on Lucrezia Borgia's first arrival in Ferrara, the Marchesani of Mantua (an Este) said, underscoring her own father's luster, that seventy-five of Duke Ercole d'Este's gentlemen 'wore golden chains, none of which cost less than 500 ducats, while many were worth 800, 1,000 and even 1,200 ducats.' When Beatrice d'Este went to Venice in May 1493, on an important mission for her husband, Ludovico Sforza, she took her most resplendent jewels and dresses, aiming to dazzle the hardheaded Venetians. Noting their reaction at receptions and in the streets, she mimed it in a letter to Ludovico: 'That is the wife of Signor Ludovico. Look what fine jewels she wears. What splendid rubies and diamonds she has!"' He was delighted. The display of wealth peaked in the exhibition of the prince's treasure, a practice best exemplified at the Sforza court but also observed in Venice. Ambassadors and dignitaries, who were likely to report what they saw, were taken by Ludovico to see the ducal treasure: a store of more than a million ducats in gold, gems, plate, and statues of gold and silver. Visitors came away stunned by the marvels seen. Luxurious ostentation at the courts was a display of power. Without such an exhibition, there was somehow no sufficient claim or title to the possession of power. Therefore the need to show. At the same time, to show was to act out a self-conception: I am prince and I can show it. The more I show it, the more I am what I claim to be. It was a dialectic or ambition and being. Luxurious ostentation was converted into an identity essence. But it was also the naked swagger of power, all the more so in that the mime took place — a deadly serious mime — within sovereign cities whose close spaces magnified pageantry. Princes went so far as to make no secret of borrowing silver plate and tapestries of satin and brocade for the grand occasions, so eager were they to strike the eye. 162
The fifteenth century was, we have noted, an age of vigorous optimism and tremendous self-assurance for the ruling classes. Paradoxically, these were the very qualities in princes that could make for insecurity as to legal titles and the preservation of power. Sigismondo Malatesta once set out for Rome to kill the pope. Este brothers and bastards at Ferrara were ready to take power from close relatives, and so they had to show power through pomp. At Urbino the Montefeltro and Della Rovere took their start from bastards and from upstart, nepotist popes; hence they also had to show. At Milan the Sforza were a new dynasty, not recognized by the empire until Ludovico's purchase of the ducal title, and even he pushed a nephew and grand-nephew out of the way. Therefore the Sforza showed. The Borgias, made by the papacy, never stopped showing. And hemmed in by grandeur, the Gonzaga also hit on a more flattering identity in the practice of showing. The self-assured readiness for political adventure injected an element of insecurity into the life of the courts and turned ostentation into an identity need. But there was another front of pressures that also drove the ruling groups toward unprecedented luxury: the growing concentration of wealth, the slow rigidifying of the social order, and the gradual freezing of the groups at the top. This process of hardening encouraged luxury as a means of calling attention to status in a world of deepening social differences. Of course princes could favor whom they pleased, so that there was always an insignificant rise of new men into the ĂŠlite ranks of government, but their descendants rarely endured, or they were absorbed into the aristocracy. In any case, the vast majority of leading political and ecclesiastical posts went to the rich old families, which did much to help keep them rich. The show of riches and the pursuit of self-images, and the show of riches as the acting out or miming of a self-image: these operations, working around the prince, gave a centralized structure to the whole range of activities at court, a paradise for structuralists. Ritual too was brought to bear: it went to frame and amplify the power of the court. Public occasions meant the sound of trumpets, cannon, drums, pipes, and the air trembling with bells. Duke Ercole produced eighty trumpeters for Lucrezia Borgia's arrival in Ferrara. At Milan the major public festivities began with the duke's arrival, the rolling of drums and the sound of trumpets and pipes. In the late 1480s, when Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and his new wife, Elisabetta Gonzaga, visited their subject towns of Cagli and Gubbio, they were greeted by trumpets, bells, cannon fire, and rows of children in long white dress, shouting, 'Duca, Duca! Gonzaga, Gonzaga!' Milan's bells rang for days on the occasion of the birth of Ludovico's first legitimate son. A joy to the prince was a joy for his subjects.
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When the French invaded Italy in 1494 and again in 1499, Italian princes and courtiers were surprised and repelled by the disorder' — the lack of ceremony — in the French court. Cardinals were not shown all due respect. The king's counselors ate, played cards, or casually sat around in his presence. He was swayed t00 easily and without ceremony. There was chaos and filth in the stables. Instead, the Italian courts were sharply conscious of rank, protocol, and organized households that made for tidiness. The kissing of the prince's hand was de rigueur. Ludovico Sforza insisted upon the epithet 'Illustrissima' for his wife when she was still the duchess of Bari, not yet of Milan. There was a punctilious use of titles in letters between brothers, between children and parents, and between husband and wife. Castiglione always addressed bis mother as 'Magnificent and honored madam, my mother.' The first duke of Urbino, Federigo (d. 1482), specified three degrees of hospitality for the three orders of visitors: great, middling, and of small account. He also left a volume of rules touching the conduct of court ladies, the ducal table service, and the dress and cleanliness of servants. In the 1460s the Gonzaga were astonished by the bad manners of German noblemen and ambassadors; but they were cool realists in matters of power, and though they would not bend the knee to the powerful upstart Sforza family, meetings with them were a choreography. Regarding a forthcoming meeting at Reggio in June 1465, the Gonzaga marchioness of Mantua wrote to her son Federico: I think it well to warn you how to behave. First of all, as soon as you see the Milanese party approach, you and your wife must dismount and advance to meet them with outstretched hands and courteous reverence. Be careful not to bend your knee before them, but salute the illustrious duke and duchess, and shake hands with Filippo and Ludovico [younger sons], and also with Galeazzo [Maria, the eldest], if he is present and offers to shake hands. Dorotea [Federico's sister] must also give him her hand and curtsey to him, but if he does not come forward, let her not move a step. Then we will take the duchess up in our chariot and you must all three of you pay her reverence. Instructions are also given regarding Dorotea's dress. The scene speaks for itself. Direct contact with power required ritual, a tribute paid in gestures. Publicly, power itself was also expressed through ritual and thus magnified. There was an appropriate language too, seen never so much as in letters addressed to princes. The glossary of ritual terms highlighted loyalty and flattery, and centered on the notions of service, obeisance, and self-sacrifice. Here are two expressions: 'My life is at your service.' 'I live only insofar as I am in your excellency's graces.' Another: 'Nothing in the world pleases me more than your commands.' And another: 'The sum of my every desire everywhere, always, and in every respect and turn of fortune good and bad is to carry out whatever your most illustrious lordship commands.' The variations were innumerable, and some crystallized into formulas. Courtly language also invaded 164
literature and spilled out into more workaday human relations. In the 1520s and after, satirists began to attribute the fashion for deferential expressions and the runaway use of the epithets 'lord' and lordship' claimed, it was said, by every lowborn adventurer to the cursed impact of the Spanish hegemony in Italy. But this was moralism, not analysis. The fashion sprang from Italian society itself: with its ailing economy, widening social differences, enhanced emphasis on status, and accelerating rentier or courtly consciousness among the ruling groups. From this changing society and changed upper-class identity had come a seductive educational idea, first fully enunciated by Castiglione. He wrote to his mother from Rome on 26 April 1524, urging her to get his son of six years, Camillo, to close his letters to Castiglione with the phrase 'obedient son and servitor, so that he shall learn from an early age to be courteous [humano]'. In context, humano (echoing humanism) meant polite, courteous, courtly: a condition which, whether in service to the prince or not, recognized and paid tribute to rank. Power girded itself with ritual to exact obeisance and to seem more imposing, more overbearing. Taking a leaf from the papacy's notebook, the Italian courts would have raised ritual to a science. They combined it with pageantry — spectacle of the sort which serves, especially in difficult times, to captivate the senses and cloud the critical faculties. In this t00 the princely courts excelled. Leonardo's equestrian giant, commemorating Francesco Sforza, had promised to be the boldest self-image of the age. There was a contender, also never finished: Pope Julius II's dream of his own tomb — sculptor, Michelangelo." And here we touch upon the Renaissance rage for building. Art historians bury the why — and hence the sociology — of buildings by their excessive emphasis on questions of form and style. Most of the great building projects of the Italian Renaissance, whether commissioned by a Cosimo de' Medici (oligarchprince), by Stanga counts (Cremonese aristocrats), or by a Pius II, had behind them the urge to exhibit now: to exhibit an identity, to show the power or piety of the man and his family dynasty, and to carve out a space in the city that would belong to that name, that individual and dynasty, for all times. In Ludovico Sforza's time the churchmonastery of the Certosa of Pavia, started by the Visconti a hundred years before, was so clearly his ward that no visitor would have failed to associate the Sforza name with it. At Ferrara, having battened on the corrupt fruits of office, the rich ducal councilors from the Strozzi, Trotti, and Taruffo families fired the city's hatred for them by building grand palazzi where they entertained princes. At Rome, about 145o, certain men in Pope Nicholas V's entourage already noted the ideological power of 'majestic buildings' and advanced the view that papal patronage could thus be used to catch the admiration and fidelity of the unlettered multitude. Pope Sixtus IV (d. 1484 spread the attendant benefits by establishing the right of rich clerics in Rome, chiefly cardinals and 165
leading curialists, to build and bequeath houses to their heirs – which triggered a building boom in the city. All princes who could afford to do so — and many who could not —were big builders. They erected residential palaces, villas, fortresses, new government buildings, churches, and convents; they also restored and renovated. Thus the Visconti and Sforza, Sigismondo Malatesta, Federico da Montefeltro, Borso and Ercole d'Este, Federico II Gonzaga, the Farnese and Medici in Rome, and princelings like the Correggio, Stanga, Bentivoglio, Ghisilardi, Bottigella, Trivulzio, and Borromeo. Men of this stripe felt so compelling an urge to build that, taking the few for the many, writers and architects came to believe that the desire to build on a large scale sprang from a basic human instinct. The swagger of grandiose building was the dance of wealth old and new, and at the courts, it was a mark of power held and dynasty prolonged. In the fifteenth century, when power in the cities was secure beyond any precedent, élite contact with perceived reality was self-assured, with the result that taste in grand architectural activity lay closer to a criterion of use and practical reason. It was an age of manifest achievement. But in the sixteenth century, after the sovereign controls over political reality had been torn from the hands of the big builders, then, in compensation and evasion, princes won by losing: they boasted in their building projects. The architectural accent became pompous or ultra-refined, showy and with a bent for the irrational. A kindred transformation was to be found in much upper-class art and literature; the latter emphasized status and romance. But there was also a strong undertow of literary satire, which focused on the chaos and cynicism in government and leadership. The foregoing review of courtly life has traced self-images in portraits and in surrounding objects such as tapestries, playing cards, sugar confections, dwarfs, pets, ostentatious luxury, the pageantry of public occasions, and the compulsion to build grandly. It remains to consider a few other interests that served the egocentrism of the courtly space. Art collections entered nicely into this space because they required large outlays of wealth and were a special kind of looking-glass: expensive hobbies to while away the time, subjects of polite conversation (Castiglione), and repositories of novelties and antiquities that reflected signorial tastes. The Medici, the dukes of Urbino, Ludovico Sforza, Isabella d'Este, and the first duke of Mantua, Federico II, were among the chief collectors of the time. There were also a few private collections, or their beginnings, among connoisseurs at Rome, Florence, and Venice. Art objects were an ornament, shown to the best advantage in the rooms of princes and rich collectors, in effect much like the fashionable plaquettes cut by leading goldsmiths, such as Caradosso, to be worn by gentlemen on their luxurious caps. When Piero de' Medici fled from Flor166
ence late in 1494 and the Medici collection was threatened, Ludovico Sforza quickly had his ambassador there make inquiries, particularly about the objects that had been in Lorenzo the Magnificent's personal study: 'precious and portable things, that is, cameos, carnelians, medallions, coins, books, and such like gentilities [gentilezze]'. A generation later, at a sumptuous banquet given by the younger Ippolito d'Este in Ferrara, the host drew things from 'a silver boat' and gave out 'necklaces, bracelets, earrings, scented gloves, little scent boxes, and other gentilezze. Gentilities: a revealing use of the word, meaning small objects fit for people of refined taste and gentle blood. But the objects in Ludovico's list above were collected together with pictures, sculptures, and wellwrought glass, as in Isabella d'Este's famous apartments. All these and princely libraries too — since books could also be gentilezze — were an ornament used to affirm a lordly identity. As it happens, after the death of his wife, Beatrice d'Este, Ludovico Sforza always used an official seal engraved with her image, a carnelian. The main amusements at court, apart from the antics of buffoons, were cardplaying, chess, a game of ball, music, hunting, and more rarely jousting. The preferred courtly songs, sung to the lute or to other stringed instruments, were often drawn from Petrarch's sonnets; hence they were love songs of elevated, delicate, and at times playful sentiment. The joust was an urbane war dance done with horse, lance, and sometimes sword. At its best it kept courtiers fit for mounted combat, which was, in tandem with statecraft, the true office of the prince and courtier. At its worst, jousting was little more than the occasion to dress up in gleaming armor and brilliant colors: a mime of war that gratified and flattered the court while it dazzled the assembled crowds. Hunting was the best-loved pastime, done during as much of the year as possible, often in large parties that rode out to special grounds and villas. These were appointed to impress and delight distinguished visitors. Women as well as men took passionately to the sport. The Este and Sforza sometimes rode thirty miles in a day. They employed f Icons, hunting leopards, and scores of dogs, as well as nets and great sheets of tough cloth. They killed boar, wolves, bear, stag, deer, goat, hare, quail, and varieties of large birds. The sheets were used to cut off and direct the course of fleeing animals. In bourgeois Florence and Lucca, hunting on horseback was seen as the signorial sport par excellence. Done as at the courts, it could be nothing else. It required horsemanship, training, much time, and great expenditure, all of which would have been time and capital filched from the counting-house, shop, and craft. As in their passion for jousting, accordingly, the Medici after Cosimo enhanced their lordly ways by their love of hunting, but even Lorenzo the Magnificent's hunting cavalcades were very modest exercises compared to expeditions at Milan, Ferrara, Mantua; and Rome. Any well-dressed horseman seen bearing a falcon on a gloved hand was almost, by that fact alone, a signore: lord, courtier, or gentleman with estates in the country. For fal167
coning, deemed the most 'noble' part of hunting, had a rich nomenclature, a place for well-paid experts (falconers), a ritual, and a variety of specialized hawks, such as peregrine, lanieri, astorelli, and altani. Alfanechi were imported from as far away as Russia and the Near East. The imagery of falconing penetrated courtly verse. Something of the falcon's soaring grace, speed, and fierce eye made a vivid appeal to the courtly selfimage. It would be odd indeed to draw parallels between princes and birds of prey, or to make moralistic comments about the court's callous attitudes toward poverty, its expenditure on game preserves, and its severe laws against poaching.' To moralize would be to fail to see the element of necessity in social identity at court. Princes and courtiers could not be other than they were. One observation, however, needs emphasis. There was a tight, organic link in consciousness between the self-centered, domineering outl00k of the court and its spontaneous assumption that the g00ds of the earth existed first and foremost for its own enormous appetites and delectation. As Beatrice d'Este said to her sister, the marchioness of Mantua, in a letter of 18 March 1491, written from the Sforza hunting ground at Villanova: 'Every day I am out on horseback with dogs and falcons and never do we return, the lord [Ludovico Sforza] my consort and I, without our having had infinite pleasures falconing ... There are so many hares, leaping up from all sides, that sometimes we know not which way to turn to have our pleasure, for the eye is incapable of seeing all that which our desire craves and which the country offers US of its animals.' The age had another speciality: bastardy. The fifteenth century in Italy has been called the golden age of bastardy. It might more accurately be called the age of golden bastards. Niccolò III d'Este (d. 1441) is alleged to have peopled Ferrara with them; he acknowledged more than twenty. Francesco Sforza had at least twenty-five; his son, Ludovico, four at least and very likely more. Such children were often brought up at court, together with the children born in wedlock. They sometimes appeared in group portraits and came into substantial estates or handsome- life incomes. Honorable and occasionally brilliant marriages were arranged for them. Otherwise, for the boys, there were rich benefices and a career in the Church. The treatment accorded to the natural children of princes and wellplaced men goes yet once more to point up the fifteenth-century's psychology of flaunting self-assurance at the level of the upper classes, where courtiers and rich men happily acknowledged bastards and often had them legitimized by papal dispensation. But major honors went to the offspring of princes and rich aristocrats because this is where the titles and estates were; also because the shameless parading of power proudly singled out the bastards and thereby the potency of the father. Princesses and court ladies had no such license, reaching for which they faced the penalty of death. And if Ludo168
vico Sforza's mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, was honorably married off to Count Ludovico Bergamini, a feudatory from the Cremonese, the whole world knew that she went to him with jewels, estates, and the hard promise of continuing favors. The fidelity of women was all, but power and money, come from the prince and filtered through courtly pomp, could work the miracle of toleration and the alchemy of repristinated honor. Something like this, though without the mysteries, also took place in middleclass circles, when a poor girl, got with child by a bourgeois of 'good family', was dowered and put out in marriage to a humble working man in the country. Bastardy, however, was no substitute for the guarantees of legitimacy. Although courtly life and pleasures circled around the prince, the courtly establishment had its security in marriage, in the promise of legitimate heirs whose existence eased the succession and promised the continuation of the dynasty. Marriage also made important friends and helped to solidify the existing rule. Indeed, the forging of political alliances was the fundamental fact about princely marriages in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Never was marriage arranged with a colder eye for political and dynastic interests. Parents and guardians disposed fully of their children and wards. Frequently the prince made the dowry arrangements and chose the spouses of courtiers and their daughters or nieces. In this fashion he also sealed loyalties and looked to the dynasty's future servitors. Isabella d'Este's marriage to Francesco Gonzaga was the binding together of two old houses and two neighboring states. Her sister's marriage to Ludovico Sforza lent the burnish of an ancient house to the ambitious and 'illegal' Sforza, but in return the Este picked up a powerful ally, or so it very much seemed in 1491. They had also made a strong bond in the south, with Duke Ercole's marriage (1473) to Eleonora d'Aragona, eldest daughter to King Ferrante of Naples, though this was to wrench Ferrara's ties with Venice. Pope Julius II bought respectability and distinction of stock for the Della Rovere upstarts in the marriage (1509) of his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino, to a princess of the Gonzaga house; the purchase price was a cardinal's hat for Sigismondo Gonzaga, brother to the marquis of Mantua. And Ludovico Sforza bought Milan's ducal title with a dowry of 400,000 ducats on the occasion of his niece's marriage to the emperor designate, Maximilian. But the most methodical use of marriage was made by Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia, for whom Lucrezia, respectively daughter and sister, was an instrument in the Borgian carving out of a state for Cesare. In the sixteenth century, in response to the shock and insecurities of the Italian Wars, Italian princes aspired to strong alliances still and so to ties of marriage with the French and Spanish royal houses. Of all the court's occasions and activities, marriage was the one most strictly determined by the interests of the prince; it was the fulfillment of an inherited self-image. 169
Here the prince stood in his most distinguishing guise, the holder of power, taking the first real step towards preserving the dynasty and transmitting that power.
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SECTION 3
Timothy McCall, Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy’s Quattrocento Courts BRILLIANCE AND OTHER QUALITIES of light—including glamour, resplendence, luster, and splendor—were essential courtly ideals that constituted aristocratic authority by emitting distinction and nobility in fifteenth-century Italy.1 Light radiating from the hair, complexion, clothing, jewels, and armor of flesh-and blood princes manifested their status and virtue. In fresco cycles, poetic descriptions, and public spectacles, courtly, signorial bodies were blanched, fair bodies— beautiful, bright, and good—and they were clothed and adorned in luminescent splendor. These bodies marked by privilege gave visual form to authority by conveying immediately accessible and politically significant, although by no means unitary, messages about social status and sovereignty to widely varying audiences. These illustrious bodies were charismatic, drawing gazes and desire toward them; they seduced and captivated viewers and convinced audiences that those represented and displayed ruled rightfully. This essay explores and interprets the ways in which lords achieved the brilliant clothing and bodily adornment that confirmed signorial status in the eyes of their peers and subjects.2 Fifteenth-century courtly values of expenditure and display such as splendore (splendor)—the Latin verb splendere means to “shine, be bright; to gleam, glitter, glisten”—betray the contemporary significance of radiance.3 The honorific titles with which lords were addressed in letters and, presumably, life, such as illustrissimus and spettabilis, further indicate both that ideals of nobility often related to light (for the former) and that visual attention should be directed to these men (for the latter). Signori were often described in glowing terms as glorifying their city with light and with the material splendor of their patronage, with what Adrian Randolph astutely called, in a Florentine context, the “luster of authority.”4 Bodily adornment and somatic beauty were filtered through expectations of radiant nobility in written texts.5 According to Francesco Filelfo, Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, was a star emitting “shimmering luster” who “shines brilliantly.”6 Borso d’Este was described by a courtier and poet as “joyful and jocund and lordly and resplendent with his imperial appearance ornamented by gold and gems . . . in all ways refulgent.”7 His eyes, according to the humanist Ludovico Carbone, were “resplendent,” and his face was bright enough to “obscure the sun” even at midday.8 The body of the young Milanese prince Galeazzo Maria Sforza was lauded as pulito (polished), lustre, candido, 171
aureato, and splendido, by a poet who praised the lord’s luce, bianchezza, and splendor and who compared him to a “living sun” and elsewhere to a sun surrounded by “shining stars.”9 Brilliant literary propaganda had its counterpart in the visual representation of lords. In the gold and azurite camera d’oro of Torrechiara Castle (near Parma), the nearly fifty year-old Pier Maria Rossi is represented as an idealized courtly warrior, youthful and fair-haired (fig. 1). This “bel signore” (as he was called by a court poet) delicately grasps the baton of command and sports two long swords at his side.10 Enclosed in shining armor, the “beautiful lord” stands forcefully but gracefully, with his impossibly slender waist fit within the gleaming metal plates. Bodies are never completely natural. Indeed, they have been considered “the cultural product,” sites of “social, political, cultural, and geographical inscriptions, production, and constitution.”11 Renaissance bodies were not mere flesh but rather social bodies constructed by the clothing and accessories that not only adorned but also constituted and reflected ideals of gender and class.12 By means of a sustained and resolutely historicist examination of the clothing and ornamentation of fifteenth-century aristocratic men, in what follows I investigate the ways that lords attained brilliant bodies. Concomitant with art history’s expanding notions of material culture, I inventory and scrutinize a wide array of light-reflecting and skillfully crafted clothes, decorations, and accessories, exploring, in succession, gems and pearls (both genuine and fake), sumptuous necklaces and golden chains, belts, gleaming fastenings such as buckles and buttons, applied metallic ornaments, shining armor, and, finally, scintillating brocaded garments. Both the material artifacts of courtly bodies and their visual representations possessed remarkable agency. They produced and not merely reflected meaning; they shaped and not merely embellished political power. Critical attention will be drawn primarily, but not exclusively, to courtly men and their array. Precisely because of widespread suspicion of, or inattention to, male ornamentation, the bodies of Renaissance signori have not received the fine grained analysis that the current study proposes. By looking in detail at the dominant class of a relatively circumscribed time and place—the lords of northern Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century—we can denaturalize widely held assumptions about male adornment and fashion before what has been called the “great masculine renunciation of fashion.”13 If the focus of this essay seems narrow, I hope its implications will be broad. Indeed, the fact that women’s clothing and adornment have received much more attention in Renaissance studies obscures men’s fashion and allows it to remain, too often, “an unmarked category, inconspicuous and unexamined.”14 Contemporary popular culture, however, pays increasing attention to men’s fashion and to the performance of maleness, and studies of masculinity are flourishing in the academy in general. My focus on men is not intended to be merely an overly schematic corrective or to 172
present “fashionable refigurings of a very familiar male-dominated history” but rather to unclothe (to divest) masculine privilege through an examination of apparel and adornment.15 By scrutinizing male bodies, this study challenges the diminishing yet still resilient tendency to assume that only women are gendered or sexed, whereas men have standard or essentially human bodies. Constructions of gender were and are interdependent and interrelational, and studying women in isolation from men—or vice versa, of course—produces “a fragmented and partial understanding of the workings of sexual difference in society.”16 Without sustained, critical interrogations, patriarchal power maintains its privilege of seeming inevitability and generates the impression that it is entirely natural. As crucial as gender is as a category of analysis, however, it cannot serve as a sole interpretative key. Not all Renaissance men were equally privileged, of course; differences of rank, age, profession, and economic status inter alia allowed men to wield control over other men.17 Any individual’s power, agency, and visibility were shaped by and contingent on a number of overlapping and potentially conflicting circumstances and categories of identity that intersected with the power dynamics of gender. Age, body type, and vocation could also inform sartorial choices. Bodily ideals and forms of clothing and adornment changed as one became increasingly mature and corpulent, for instance. Some lords, as they grew older, increasingly eschewed conspicuous ornamentation and abandoned formfitting doublets for looser, flowing garments. A religious calling, moreover, also dictated one’s dress.18 This study will emphasize noble status and lordship. Although aristocratic ideologies were shaped by intersecting and mutually constitutive expectations of gender, James Schultz, a literary historian of medieval romances, has convincingly argued that alluring bodies were more typically marked by status—their courtliness—than by gender, through an investigation of aristophilia, love of or for the courtly aristocracy.19 Both sexes, of course, were lavishly ornamented, and courtly women were commonly described as radiantly noble in similar ways to their male counterparts. Distinct conventions of display and dress—rather than somatic morphology or transhistorical truths about bodies, fashion, or adornment—typically accounted for the varying ways that courtly men and women were viewed and evaluated. It is well known, moreover, that differences between modes and conventions of masculine clothing and ornamentation in courts and republics could be stark, as in the contrasting cuts, colors, and materials worn by the ruling classes of cities like Milan or Venice or in varying ideologies of aristocratic expenditure on adornment in Ferrara or Florence. Yet, one must also acknowledge that dominant families of Italian republics—the Medici of Florence, for instance, but also the Bentivoglio of Bologna—often expressed signorial ambitions through the deployment of radiant bodily adornment in similar, al173
though by no means identical, ways as did the peninsula’s signori. For instance, Giuliano de’ Medici—lordly if not strictly a lord—was covered in pearls from head to toe during a joust held in Florence’s Piazza Santa Croce in 1475. Rhetorically addressing Giuliano, one spectator commented that it would be “impossible to describe the quantity of jewels and pearls that glitter (risplendono) on your person, on your company, and on your mounts.”20 Both courts and republics, of course, were ruled by aristocratic families who comprised, fought against, and cooperated with civic institutions also made up of privileged oligarchies of wealthy, often noble men. Nobility was manifested somatically, moreover, not only by the prince but by the entire court: courtiers and officials, wives and mistresses, and particularly the crowds of beautiful young men, or boys, who often surrounded the signore, as in the frescoes of Schifanoia’s Salone dei Mesi painted in the late 1460s. Courts, of course, were social arenas in which distinctions of rank were displayed and embodied, in the process simultaneously constituting and illustrating ever-shifting hierarchies enacted by economies of favor, access, and status.21 Gatherings of illustrious men redounded honor not merely on the prince but on the wider court and even the city at large and on courtiers and important guests who might turn nearness to the prince to their own advantage. As Galeazzo Maria Sforza reminded men whose attendance he had requested in Milan for the Christmas season in 1468, through their presence, both “the prince himself stands out more, and the noble and excellent men who are in a state of favor in the prince’s eyes grow in grace and increase in honors.”22 Indeed, the connections among power, magnificent clothing, and vicinity to the prince were crystal clear to men at Galeazzo’s court. A group of courtiers acknowledged in a letter that Galeazzo “dressed the camerieri that find themselves following the person of Your Excellency,” but they —“not having been dressed for not being remembered”—now implored the duke to clothe them decorously, to “deign to have them dressed too.”23 Displays of courtliness and power were “collaborative rather than purely individual” efforts in fifteenthcentury Italy. Thus to understand signorial power, we must describe the bodies of not just the lord but those who (visibly) surrounded him.24 Although today they are most familiar to us frozen in frescoes, for fifteenth century audiences, courtly bodies were not always still; they moved through space, walking or on horseback, and thus we attend to their multisensory phenomena: reflections, reverberations, and sounds produced by clanking, rattling metals, shining gems and jewels, and metallic threads. Light radiating from the body would have been even more spectacular and attention-grabbing as it glistened while the individual moved under different forms of illumination. This essay conceptualizes the material culture of the signori not as scraps of fabric in museum storerooms, or jewels in acrylic cases, but rather as lustrous garments draped over dynamic bodies. By investigating in detail the material174
ity of signorial bodies, additionally, we can begin to appreciate the effort that went into the presentation of these living images of power. Not only was the expense great, but the prince’s discomfort could be too. Metal-infused garments weighed heavily on the body, and adornments changed the ways that their wearers might have stood or sat. Gleaming swords and scabbards proclaimed knightly status tinged with the threat of violence, and they likewise would have changed the way that men walked.25 Luminous, metallic fabrics, “especially in their constant interplay with light and movement, . . . defied normal experiences of colour constancy” and drew further attention to their wearer.26 The “flashing and sparkling” fifteen-year-old Galeazzo Maria Sforza thus seemed to be “shining more than the morning stars” when he moved, according to an anonymous poet.27 Deploying metaphors of light, Filarete compared princes to lustrous gems, saying that each should be “splendid and luminous without any stain,” even if subjects might approach and even touch them.28 Indeed, the clothing worn by signori inescapably drew gazes toward them, as toward precious jewels. The entire Medici clan—both “young and old, female and male”—stared at the scintillating Galeazzo, “just as the ostrich stares at her egg until her chick hatches,” according to a poet echoing avian lore that rays of heat from an ostrich’s unwavering gaze accelerated the egg’s hatching. “Gazing on him is like running with your eyes fixed on the sun,” the poet continued; the young count, like the sun, “dazzles so that nothing else is visible in between.”29 Brilliant, courtly male bodies were cynosures sparkling and glimmering with every move, whether in the sun or under torch or candlelight.30 These garments, ornaments, and trappings were, of course, immensely expensive. Lords spent more money on brocaded clothing and personal adornment (e.g., jewels, weapons, and golden belts) than on panel paintings or frescoes. Brilliant bodies consumed scarce natural resources that possessed both intrinsic and conventional value. Gems, in particular, were endowed with magical, talismanic properties, and of course gold and other precious materials literally manifested wealth. Indeed, not just meanings but also potential values (social, exchange, or monetary, among others) were multiple. Here, however, we will primarily explore the symbolic and representational meanings of brilliant materials and surfaces rather than their strictly economic values or their magical ones.31 Of course, representational significance was not entirely distinct from monetary worth; symbolic meanings perceived in specifically noble bodies were augmented by the literal wealth that adorned them, and certain gems were both valuable and marvelous because they came from Arabia, Persia, or India. Glittering surface effects and precious metals marked privilege by differentiating lordly from common bodies. Clothing suffused with gems and metallic threads drew attention to the signore, particularly because most subjects would have worn coarse, undyed, and dully colored clothing.32 Authority attracted, communicated to, and over175
whelmed viewers and subjects through material extravagance, conspicuous and even wasteful consumption, and the symbolic economy of light-emitting properties that signaled noble status. Indeed, fifteenth-century nobility was visualized not so much through sprezzatura (the calculated and affected nonchalance that has come to dominate discussions of Renaissance courtliness) as through material signs of wealth and status such as clothing, beauty, and ornamentation.33 By adopting luminescent clothing and displaying his glamorous body, the lord proclaimed his courtliness and authority. Indeed, it was the duty of these princes to dress extravagantly. Such adornment and expenditure confirmed their exceptional, signorial status, as they were well aware. As Galeazzo Maria Sforza told the Mantuan ambassador in Milan with understated humor, “I am a little bit ostentatious, but that is no great sin in a lord.�34 GALLERY 3.1
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The bodies of princes radiated courtliness and aristocratic privilege from head to toe—or, better, since heads were often covered and toes nearly always were— from helmet to spur. On the lower body, calze, shoes, and spurs, for example, could be adorned with gold and light-reflective metals, although for considerations of length this study’s critical gaze will remain primarily fixed on princes’ upper bodies.35 To conclude this investigation of the ways that resplendent surfaces powerfully broadcasted power in the fifteenth century, moreover, we also must reckon with the less pervasive aristocratic practice of dressing in black, a notable exception to the rule, and one that calls attention to polysemous complexities that operated through signorial clothing. This essay will thus conclude with a brief reflection on the intermittent adoption of dark, and specifically black, clothing by fifteenth-century Italian aristocrats, before black dress became the conventional choice for lords and their courtiers. Although it is both more familiar to students of Renaissance (art) history and closer to our own ideals of masculinity, sixteenth century distrust of brilliant clothing and adornment must, I submit, be recognized as a reaction to—among other cultural and historical phenomena—the invasions and foreign occupation of Italy. Cinquecento moralizing and often exhortatory discourses against the bejeweled—and only from a later perspective, effeminate—lords of the quattrocento should not be indiscriminately mapped onto the earlier period.36 ADORNED MALE BODIES: JEWELS AND PEARLS, BUCKLES AND MAGETE Princes and their consorts achieved signorial radiance by wearing pearls and jewels. As they did for charismatic, adorned, and adored cult images, gems manifested and augmented authority for Renaissance signori. Jewels were so closely associated with courtly status that, for instance, when Caterina Sforza’s were temporarily in pawn, she refused to travel to Milan as promised because she would not be seen in public without “le zoye.”37 Caterina’s father Galeazzo Maria owned a pair of sleeves with over three thousand pearls and forty rubies, and another brocaded garment worn by the lord used two sparkling rubies as the eyes for the dove of the radiant razza emblem.38 A sleeve embroidered with gems and pearls worn by his brother Ludovico had an estimated value of 50,000 ducats, and 418 rubies were sewn into a brocaded garment for Teofilo Calcagnini, an Este courtier.39 The double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro, lord of Urbino, in lustrous armor with his son Guidobaldo displays countless pearls and gems of various shapes and sizes (fig. 2).40 Pearls would have reminded viewers of the idealized purity of youths such as Guidobaldo, as they were intended to do in contemporary portraits of brides.41 Pearls cover, and perhaps weigh down, the young lord, in the form of numerous brooches arranged on his lavish goldbrocaded robe, an exquisite 177
necklace, and what appears to be a tangled mass of pearls serving as a magnificently lustrous belt. Whether irregularly shaped, polished, or carefully cut, gems and jewels shone and reflected light during the day and by candlelight.42 Precious stones and pearls were worn as components of necklaces, brooches, and other jewelry, and they were integrated into clothing in various ways. Jewels were bought, sold, loaned, given as down payments, and put into and taken out of clothes worn by men as well as women. Letters among and between Ludovico Gonzaga, Barbara of Brandenberg, and various officials at the court of Mantua provide evidence of gold, silver, pearls, and jewels being offered to and acquired by the Gonzaga and then turned over to embroiderers for the production of clothing.43 After the death of Bianca Maria Sforza in October, 1468, ducal goldsmiths in Milan were given a number of rubies plucked from her clothing and from garments owned by her son the duke and his sister Ippolita in order to create new jewelry.44 Indeed, aristocratic clothing in fifteenth-century courts was rarely merely cloth but was typically enhanced by jewels, pearls, and metals and was saturated by metallic threads.45 In 1456 Borso d’Este paid the conspicuous sum of 12,000 ducats for “uno diamante notabilissimo,” perhaps one that he wore on his collar, shoulder, or berretta and had represented in panel, fresco, manuscript, and medal portraits (fig. 3).46 Sante Bentivoglio of Bologna possessed diamonds, rubies, and pearls mounted in gold along with golden rings bearing balases or sapphires.47 Indeed, Renaissance princes often showed off rings adorned by gems and jewels. Sforza inventories and letters from the fifteenth century document scores of rings with diamonds, chalcedony, mother of pearl, jacinth, pearls, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, among other precious materials—and likewise their brooches were set with balases, diamonds, rubies, pearls, sapphires, and emeralds.48 Galeazzo Maria Sforza—who often relied on Francesco Pagnani for advice on the purchase of jewels—had rubies, pearls, and diamonds set into brooches shaped into recognizable emblems including the biscione, the prominent Visconti and then Sforza viper insignia.49 As a teen, this “signor bello” displayed around his neck a fine gold chain with “beautiful intaglios” and a pendant gem and, on his berretta, a gold brooch adorned with pearls and jewels and “worth a treasure.”50 Precious stones drew attention to noble bodies of both sexes. Beatrice d’Este, for instance, described Venetians who “fixed their gaze on the jewels” that she wore on her head and “inspected” those on her chest.51 A stone adorning Beatrice on this trip to Venice was the large balas (a red gem sometimes confused with a ruby) similar to the one worn two decades prior around the neck of her brother-in-law Galeazzo Maria, in his portrait by Piero del Pollaiuolo circa 1471 (fig. 4). One Sforza balas nicknamed “spigo” (“lavender” in English) had been previously owned by Alfonso of Aragon, king 178
of Naples, and it was particularly valued by the lords of Milan.52 By the end of the 1490s, the embattled Ludovico il Moro was forced to pawn “il Spico” along with other precious stones, including a balas with a portrait of the lord and a number of additional named jewels.53 However, because they were costly, many of the jewels and pearls worn by signori were not genuine, although of course counterfeit products sparkled too. In actuality, “gems” might instead be colored glass or paste, tinted crystal, or doublets—layered (i.e., doubled) glass or stones with colored foil placed behind or between them.54 Doublets and fake gems pervaded late medieval and early modern Europe. The sixteenthcentury goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini associated the manufacture of doublets with Milan—although Paris and Venice were also acknowledged centers for the production of false jewels.55 Gems both real and fake, moreover, might be tinted or dyed with ingredients including heated olive oil and resin. The fashion for brilliantly colored gems was such, in fact, that even true diamonds might be tinted with indigo.56 In Milan, “the art of making counterfeit gems” (l’arte da fare geme contrafacte, according to one quattrocento document) had been practiced since the fourteenth century and received ducal protection and regulation in 1488.57 Here, glass paste was commonly used, as were mixtures made from grated rock crystal, varieties of which existed in abundance near Lake Como. Counterfeit jewels were of course carefully cut, as were true gems, and their price was dictated as much by the sophistication of the cut as by the material of the stone itself (whether actual or simulated). The mirrors and foils placed behind and between (often doubled) stones and pastes further reflected light, of course, and they were not uncommonly produced by the same artisans who manufactured metallic foils for brocades.58 Even Leonardo da Vinci got in on the action. His recipes included those for the fabrication of precious stones, and as Paola Venturelli has shown, he was particularly interested in ingredients that would augment luster and sheen.59 We can here only begin to consider fake gems in relation to discourses of authenticity in Renaissance culture, but it is worth noting that typically for civic authorities, more troubling than the display, possession, or even production of doublets and manufactured gems was the danger that they might be mistaken for genuine items by those who bought or wore them, rather than by those who saw them worn. In many European cities it was illegal for goldsmiths to set counterfeit jewels in gold. In 1396, Milanese statutes forbade “gold, doubled crystal, or counterfeited stone” to be encased in gold, and this prohibition was reiterated in the regulations of goldsmiths (and those of their guild—scuola—of Saint Eligius) in 1468, 1479, and 1492.60 A certain Ludovico da Foligno was denounced in Ferrara for deceptively gilding fake diamonds in 1458,
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and the Venetian Senate decreed later in the century that a goldsmith guilty of such an infraction could be perpetually banned from practicing the craft.61 The young Gian Galeazzo Sforza impressed audiences with a pearl “fatter than a round hazelnut” in 1489, and indeed the great variety of descriptive language used in fifteenth-century documents to describe the size, shape, and quality of pearls indicates contemporaries’ familiarity with them.62 The multitude of “pearls” adorning quattrocento men and women had diverse origins. Many were true ocean pearls from the Indian or Pacific Oceans that had entered Italy through Venice, although others were freshwater “Scotch pearls” harvested from mussels native to Scottish rivers.63 A substantial number, however, would have been colored glass beads or otherwise counterfeit, manufactured objects; for instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s notes from the court of Milan in the 1480s include a recipe for artificial pearls made from a paste of lemon juice and egg whites.64 Leonardo also recommended the use of a lathe (a rotating tool) and a burnisher equipped with crystal, chalcedony, or animal teeth, to polish the pearl and maximize its luster.65 A formula from a fifteenth-century Bolognese source called for molded orbs composed of a mixture of powered crystal or glass, egg whites, and snail slime to be pierced with a hog’s bristle, baked, and then quenched in water. Indeed, most concoctions called for egg whites and fish glue, and often a quantity of small pearls (whether true or manufactured) would be crushed up to produce large ones. Other ingredients from fourteenth through sixteenth-century recipes included cheese, fig tree sap, linseed oil, white wine, various salts, fish eyes, mercury, goat’s milk, and boiled parchment clippings. One procedure instructed that pearl paste should be baked in a fish’s belly, “as if it were a pie.”66 To polish fake pearls, one could feed them to a bird, where, it seems, they would be rubbed smooth inside the creature’s stomach, much like gizzard stones (gastroliths). Chickens and doves were preferred, and the bird was to be slaughtered to recover the false pearls after a prescribed period of time.67 Such were the lengths taken to obtain the materials needed to make the courtly body appear lustrous and brilliant. Francesco Ariosto asserted that Borso d’Este’s “imperial appearance” was “ornamented by gold and gems,” and indeed signori enhanced nobility by wearing gold and silver jewelry and trimmings, in addition to jewels and pearls.68 Men at court often showed off golden necklaces, particularly in the final decades of the fifteenth century. Ludovico Sforza, who displays a weighty necklace of linked circles in the Pala Sforzesca, presented expensive chains to courtiers and was described sporting around his neck a golden collar ornamented with a balas and a “bellissima et grossa” pearl.69 Isabella d’Este, back in Ferrara in 1502 for her brother Alfonso’s wedding to Lucrezia Borgia, tellingly described the necklaces worn by courtiers with more precision than she de180
scribed the men themselves: “Behind these [musicians] were the courtiers and Ferrarese nobles in no particular order. Among them seventy gold chains were counted, none of which was valued at less than five hundred ducats; many were worth eight hundred, and some even up to twelve hundred.”70 Luster was also amplified by the precious metals stamped into fabrics in foil or other forms and by the silver and gold threads woven into thin ribbons to be used as borders and trims hanging from and flowing off of the head, arms, or shoulders.71 In Pisanello’s tightly framed portrait of Leonello d’Este painted circa 1445 (fig. 5), metal florets used as mounts for luminous pearls glisten and reflect light, as did the actual silver rosettes enameled in azurite that were produced by an Este goldsmith to decorate a brocaded garment in 1442.72 In the panel, these adornments line the lord’s crimson tunic, which is draped over the lavishly textured, gold-brocaded doublet and is fashionably backed by fancifully fringed ribbons. Gold and silver belts were popular as well. Sante Bentivoglio, for instance, possessed a number of crimson silk belts, one of which was ornamented with golden rings.73 Such belts were required gear for Renaissance princes and their male retainers both because they held outer garments close to the body and because they holstered daggers and other weapons. Buckles of precious metals likewise adorned Renaissance lords. The Este goldsmith Amadio da Milano crafted various gilded bronze clasps and buckles for armor, and in 1446 he forged silver buckles for belts made of black silk intended for Gurone and Rinaldo d’Este, two younger brothers of the lord of Ferrara Leonello.74 A few decades later, the Este courtier Teofilo Calcagnini had the silver furnishings of a belt repaired by yet another Milanese goldsmith in Ferrara, and Ludovico Magnano produced a silver and niello buckle for Nicolò di Meliaduse d’Este in 1465.75 Much armor in a fifteenth-century Medici inventory, moreover, was outfitted with silver buckles.76 Buckles, buttons, bolts, and other fastenings not only reflected light but also rattled.77 Effulgent male bodies on display were audible as well, with armor and metals clanking. Both visually and aurally they announced the body’s presence and status from a distance, even before individual faces could be discerned. Metal buttons, which were introduced into Italy in the thirteenth century and proliferated in form and style in the following two centuries, not only shone but also drove important changes in fashion, notably the increasing tightening of men’s clothing.78 These buttons could be stamped, cast, or pressed into molds and were made of gold, silver, enamel, or base metals covered with gold leaf.79 Bottoni (also called maspilli) might be functional, or they might be decorative spheres attached to clothing, and fifteenth-century Sforza inventories reveal that they could be made of or adorned with gold, diamonds, rubies, or emeralds.80
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Indeed, all manner of fittings and trimmings whose function was originally utilitarian could be made of or covered in metal, further enhancing the shimmering appearance of the lord’s raiment. Small, thin fragments of worked metal that hung from fringes, chains, or threads were also called tremolanti (from tremolare, to tremble or shake) because of the visual and aural effects these dazzling ornaments produced as bodies moved in various types of light.81 Giovanni Artone of Modena, for example, fabricated for Teofilo Calcagnini a spectacular helmet crest decorated with peacock feathers and “tremolanti” in 1462.82 In 1459—in a joust organized by the ten-year-old Lorenzo de’ Medici for the visit to Florence of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, five years his elder—the twelve participants wore garlands with “silver scales” and golden feathers on their helmets, each of which was as “polished and resplendent as a star.”83 Both the eyelets (magete, also magiete or magliette) through which lacings or strings were threaded and the punte or aghetti applied to the ends of the strings could be gilded or sheathed in other metals.84 Although they were originally designed to protect fabric edges from being frayed by laces, magete—similar to bezants, in contemporary England, or to sequins or paillettes—soon spread around the surfaces of clothing worn by both men and women, although they best survive today in rare textile paintings.85 These sequin-like trimmings could be made of various metals—iron, brass, copper, or silver—and were typically finished in either silver or gold. Magete were manufactured in enormous quantities in Milan, where their quality was regulated, although the complicated production of magete was not a particularly profitable enterprise for Milanese artisans.86 One of Leonardo da Vinci’s hypothetical machines seems to have been intended to stamp magete; additionally, he seems to have purchased “magliette” for a mantle intended for Salaì.87 Magete and comparable metal trimmings came in various shapes and forms. They could be flat or convex and might hang from fabrics on small strings. Like buttons they could be decorative and functional, serving to fasten and hold clothing tight, all the while suggestively glittering and sparkling. The Sforza chancellor Cicco Simonetta, for instance, possessed a string of gilded silver “magiete,” which he could have worn, perhaps, around his neck or attached to a garment.88 Cicco’s lord Francesco Sforza (fig. 6) exhibits dozens of magete suggested in paint by small, overlapping, semicircular shapes aligned vertically and horizontally on the front of his tunic, at about chest level. This possibly posthumous portrait, now in the Brera and conventionally attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, provides clear evidence of the profusion of metallic magete that we know adorned both men and women’s clothing at court.89 In Francesco’s portrait, these rows of magete likewise visually recall the forms and effects of chain mail often worn by lords. Indeed, it is to the princely integration of cloth and armor that we now turn.
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RIDDLED WITH “GILT”: LORDS IN SHINING ARMOR AND SHIMMERING BROCADE Fifteenth-century lords fashioned brilliant bodies not only by bedecking themselves in jewels and applied ornaments but also by wearing armor, armored apparel, and brocaded garments. Metal in varying forms was incorporated into many types of fabrics, and much Italian armor was lined or covered with gilded leather or brocaded velvet, to present an appropriately signorial countenance and attract the viewers’ gazes, and likewise to protect the body from direct contact with heavy metal plates.90 Indeed, signorial armor and clothing were not strictly differentiated from one another, and courtly bodies presented a variety of reflective textures and surfaces to their audiences. Renaissance lords wore individual elements of shining armor, particularly mail and corazze or corazzine (cuirasses or breastplates often armored with leather or metal), underneath and on top of clothing for both fashion and defense. This effect is suggested, for instance, in Andrea Mantegna’s votive depiction Francesco Gonzaga after the battle of Fornovo dressed in resplendent armor, with a goldbrocaded tunic worn tight over his upper body and a lance rest conspicuously displayed for the viewer (fig. 7).91 In Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano now in London (fig. 8), the hero Niccolò Mauruzzi da Tolentino sports both plate and chain mail underneath a lavish gold-brocaded crimson tunic made out of what seems to be the same material as his more famous hat. This large panel painting and its companions now in Paris and Florence are covered in gold and silver leaf coated with various colors and types of glazes, and like contemporary armors, they are intricately incised—both freehand and with punch tools—to produce animated reflections of light and other surface effects.92 Niccolò is not the only warrior dressed in both luxurious cloth and luminous armor. A charging knight likewise in the painting’s center is encased in shining armor over which he wears a frilled tunic.93 Niccolò’s page, moreover, dons an expensive gold-brocade surcoat over a golden doublet. This perfectly postured, beautiful blonde youth displays for the viewer his lord’s resplendently metallic red and golden helmet, at the ready for when he will require reinforced headgear. Lords did not limit their use of protective garments to the battlefield; these were often worn during ceremonies and chivalric games and for personal protection. In a letter of 1452, for instance, Francesco Sforza requested that he be sent two cuirasses “furnished all in mail” that had been left in Cremona.94 Chorazze and chorazzine in the Medici armory were outfitted with silk, damask, and variously colored velvets, together with hunks of metal including lance rests, while at least one doublet owned by Lorenzo was “full of mail,” and other mails are described as covered with black damask or brocade.95 Indeed, would-be assassins embraced Giuliano de’ Medici early on the day of the Pazzi conspiracy to determine whether he was wearing armored clothing.96 He 183
was not, although perhaps not even the toughest armor would have saved him from the nearly twenty dagger blows that caused his demise in Florence’s Duomo. When Galeazzo Maria Sforza was assassinated exactly sixteen months earlier, he too had entered a church not wearing protective upper-body garments.97 Galeazzo had been acutely aware of threats against his life and had taken steps to keep safe, even deploying mounted guards armed with swords when hunting deer.98 The duke had sent his brothers Ludovico and Sforza Maria away from Milan, to France, ostensibly to “see the world” (andare a vedere il mondo) but in part to curtail their potential to attract rival claims to his rule.99 He even threatened astrologers predicting his death: two in Bologna were warned to cease calculations involving Galeazzo or else the prince would “show them our displeasure about the prognostications, and they will regret it.” Additionally, a Ferrarese astrologer who forecast trouble for Galeazzo had been menacingly informed that despite his predictions about others, he was blind to his “own imminent dangers.” Two men, moreover, had been sent from Milan to “cut him to pieces,” although it is unclear whether the detailed description of the assailants sent to the astrologer was genuinely intended to provide him fair warning or rather merely to convince him of the legitimacy of the threat and keep him continually looking over his shoulder.100 Despite his heavy-handed attention to potential threats, Galeazzo met a bloody demise in December 1476. There was a “bitter cold” in the air the day after Christmas—the feast of the protomartyr Stephen, a particularly important day in Milan—and the duke had recently been troubled by a series of omens: a comet, a fire in his chamber at the castle in Pavia, and three black crows flying over his head.101 Nevertheless, according to the courtier Bernardino Corio, just before Galeazzo left the castle for the fatal mass at Santo Stefano, he put on and then took off his corazina, saying that he thought it made him look “too fat.”102 Indeed, Galeazzo’s death was hastened by the fact that he could not bear to be seen by his subjects as overweight, perhaps precisely because he was discomfited by the contrast between his thickening flesh and the ubiquitous (and all too efficacious) images portraying him as an ideally slender prince visible in frescoes throughout his palaces.103 Assassinated while celebrating the feast of the first Christian martyr, and in his church, we might consider Galeazzo himself to have been a protomartyr, for fashion. Signori and their attendants wore brilliant armors and armored garments to protect themselves not only against assassins but additionally from the violence of jousts and battles. When Bartolomeo Colleoni began preparations for a duel with Galeazzo Maria Sforza, he ordered cuirasses, pennants, lances, and a huge quantity of velvet tunics embroidered with his coat of arms.104 Of course, such displays created the visual
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impression that lords and their men were properly masculine, bellicose, and courtly, even though it was equally important to downplay concern about potential threats. Lords flashed armor in public spectacles and parades celebrating jousts, feast days, aristocratic weddings, and entries of all types. Even the gout-stricken Piero de’ Medici owned a brilliant ensemble of armor “complete with everything” and “all of it with gilt decoration,” and many of the individual armor elements owned by the Medici in the fifteenth century were likewise finished in gold.105 Several components of Alberto d’Este’s armor were consigned to Ottolino dalle Arme in 1468 to be “burnished” (brunite), providing additional evidence that quattrocento knights wanted to be seen by audiences dressed in specifically shining armor.106 Gilding applied to and cloth of gold sewn into armors increased their splendor, and the charisma of the armor’s wearer would have no doubt been amplified by its tactile qualities, brilliance, and variations in texture, surface, and reflection.107 One of the helmets of Pandolfo Malatesta III, lord of Fano, Brescia, and Bergamo, was gilded and enameled by the goldsmith Antonio da Medda, and, for a tourney held in 1462, Sigismondo Costa covered Alberto d’Este’s helmet in silver and gold and outfitted it with a phoenix.108 Splendid headgear was so desirable that in 1469 Galeazzo Maria Sforza awarded the armorer Antonio Missaglia a mill on an important Milanese canal in return for an annual tribute of a helmet furnished with gold and silver.109 Armor gleams in artistic representations as well, of course, as in the portrait of Federico and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (fig. 2). Images of armor could be as politically efficacious, and certainly cheaper, than actual metal, as Carolyn Springer argues.110 As she points out, the vibrant luster of real armor frustrated artists who attempted to re-create its sheen in painting through applied metals or oil paint. Giorgio Vasari, for instance, lamented that he “almost went out of [his] mind trying to make the burnished surface of the armour look shining, brilliant, and natural” in his Uffizi portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici. Vasari was hardly reassured by his rival Pontormo who, upon sizing up both the painting and the armor used as a model, commented that fictive armor can only pale in comparison to real metal since iron is “stronger and more lustrous” than any pigment.111 Even more so than armor, however, courtiers’ shimmering, metal-infused cloth of gold typified the array of brilliant display, as did the many Milanese “consiglieri” and “zentilhuomini” dressed in gold and silver brocade who impressed the visiting duchess of Ferrara with their “grande representatione” in 1491.112 Brocade, essentially, is cloth embroidered with metallic threads (typically as the weft), and various techniques can be employed to accomplish this.113 Fifteenth-century Italian brocades scintillated because of loops of gold weft threads described as allucciolato (lit up like fireflies), which reflected light as their wearer moved—or even remained still on display, depend185
ing on the light—and which likewise provided a dense texture to clothing.114 These coils and twists of gilded thread, while integral to the fabric, bore a close relation in both form and function to magete and other sorts of metallic embellishments that we should perhaps avoid conceptualizing as ornaments distinct from or merely supplementary to the clothing itself. Men and boys outfitted in brocades made visible radiant courts in fresco cycles such as Schifanoia’s Salone dei Mesi or those intended for Sforza palaces in Milan and Pavia.115 For instance, Milanese luminaries were to be attired in armor and brocades in Galeazzo Maria’s frescoes planned in 1471 for the upper floor of the Castle of Porta Giovia depicting a magnificent procession of the court from the castle to the Duomo and back to celebrate the feast of Saint George. Numerous chamberlains (camerieri da camera) sported breastplates lined or covered with crimson velvet, while the “unarmed courtiers” wore lustrous garments: damascened velvets, fabrics embroidered by gold and silver threads, and silks of diverse colors.116 White silk brocaded with golden thread was decidedly popular at the Sforza court and was commonly worn by members of the dynasty on momentous occasions.117 Galeazzo Maria Sforza donned brilliant white damask, for instance, when he assumed the signoria of Milan at age twenty-two.118 This lord continued to select his wardrobe carefully. The apparel portrayed by Piero del Pollaiuolo (fig. 4) seems to have been fabricated in Milan for the prince’s visit to Florence in 1471. A letter to the duke discusses an upper body garment “brocaded with lilies” in September 1470.119 A dispatch to the Sienese signoria, moreover, mentions a doublet worn in Florence the following March and brocaded with “lilies, the device and arms of France.”120 Galeazzo was keen to show off his connections to transalpine royalty after marrying Bona of Savoy, whose sister Charlotte was married to the Valois King of France Louis XI. Significantly for its original audiences, of course, lilies are also among the emblems of Florence. Galeazzo’s tight doublet, which as we have seen served as background for the display of a prized balas, was almost certainly embroidered by Giampietro Gerenzano, although all that remains of this heavy, metal-infused garment are descriptions in word and paint.121 A surviving fragment of crimson and white cut-pile velvet now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (fig. 9), however, recalls the fabric of Francesco Sforza’s doublet in the Brera portrait (fig. 6).122 The fabric itself subtly simulates accents of cloth of gold suffused with coils of metallic threads, and in the painting lordly opulence is figured additionally by a variety of gilded spangles adorning the lord’s tunic, most noticeably on the garment’s fringes and in the rows of magete lining its front. Artists painstakingly represented fictive brocades in painting and sculpture, revealing, we can presume, sometimes faithful attention to detail but no doubt their own inventive 186
fancy. Not surprisingly, artists at court provided sketches for luxury cloth, among the wide variety of material and visual culture that they were expected to design or fashion. As Lisa Monnas has recently shown, a drawing of brocaded velvet by Pisanello now in the Louvre reveals a sophisticated understanding of recent developments in the manufacture of brocades using hundreds of loops of gilt thread producing the glistening allucciolato effect.123 Magnificent brocaded velvets and other lustrous fabrics, moreover, were often used as a form of currency or payment, as was the crimson damask brocaded with silver intended to be made into a doublet that was given to the soon-to-be-brilliantly-attired painter Andrea Mantegna in 1459.124 Expensive brocades were often granted as gifts at and between courts and were awarded as prizes at horse races, jousts, and other festivals and competitions.125 The familiar, tactile materiality of brocaded fabrics, moreover, provided metaphors that the men and women who wore them would have well understood. A poet, for instance, asserted that being in the presence of Galeazzo Maria Sforza multiplied his fame “more than all the threads we find in rich brocade.”126 CONSUMPTION, DISPLAY, AND PRODUCTION The display and consumption of the materials from which brilliant bodies were fashioned was inextricably linked with courtly economies of production and exchange. Milan, in particular, was a hugely important center for the production of armor, and armor forged there was purchased by or granted as gifts to lords as far away as Norfolk, Denmark, and Tunisia.127 Milanese armorers were active in Lyon, and in 1466 Francesco Missaglia of Milan was in Paris fashioning armor for King Louis XI.128 Many of the Milanese armorers working in France had fled there, however, because of heavy debt and difficulties collecting money owed them by Milanese clients, including the Sforza.129 Many Sforza courtiers invested heavily in the manufacture of luxury cloth and metallic threads.130 These commercial enterprises were closely linked to the Milanese silk industry, which developed rapidly after having been initiated by Filippo Maria Visconti only in the early 1440s, and they involved artisans including battilori (gold beaters) and filaori or filatrici (gold thread spinners).131 These diligent and talented workers were often women, and they produced heavy, densely metallic threads and garments, the likes of which have not been created for a number of centuries, as Chiara Buss has recently reminded us.132 A number of statutes protecting merchants and weavers of silk and cloth of gold were approved by Francesco Sforza, and these measures were extended by his sons.133 Moreover, many of the numerous embroiderers active at Borso d’Este’s court in Ferrara were Milanese, and Florentines also attempted to lure battilori 187
away from Milan.134 Perhaps not surprisingly, Leonardo da Vinci experimented with techniques and methods for producing golden thread and brocaded fabrics while at Ludovico il Moro’s court.135 Indeed, Milanese production of brocade was intimately connected with the Sforza court and the dukes who spent stupendous amounts to clothe their adherents. Galeazzo Maria Sforza, for instance, ordered some four hundred brocaded velvet tunics decorated with Sforza devices for the feast of St. George in 1468, which was the “most beautiful display ever remembered,” according to the Mantuan ambassador in Milan.136 In 1473, in a bid to appease the aristocracy, the duke enlarged the ranks of courtiers (particularly aulici and camerieri), each of whom was dressed in crimson velvet.137 Signorial imperatives to dress the prince and his court decorously weighed heavily on the Sforza state. Although the motives of Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s assassins have been much debated, and they were legion, the extraordinary taxes and debilitating forced loans levied on the Milanese aristocracy to pay for this lord’s expenditures on clothing have been identified as factors contributing to his assassination by three courtiers on December 26, 1476.138 Galeazzo’s death put a dramatic, if temporary, halt to the manufacture of luxury cloth in Milan. Two months later, the Gonzaga ambassador to Milan had to recommend that the Mantuan court “take the road to Venice” for cloth of gold because in the Lombard capital, “to tell the truth, brocades were no longer being produced” in the size and quantity that they had been.139 By the mid1480s, however, production returned to a significant level as Ludovico il Moro consolidated his rule, and once again Ferrara’s court was importing brocades from Milan.140 By the end of the decade, Stefano da Castrocaro described to Lorenzo de’ Medici Milanese and Neapolitan courtiers in Milan who comprised the “most beautiful and worthy spectacle the likes of which I have never seen. All the men were dressed in silk and brocade, and similarly the women.” In the same letter, this Florentine emissary gushed over the approximately one hundred courtiers dressed in silver and gold, surrounding the duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, and he directly associated brilliant clothing with lordly magnificence: “everyone seemed to be dressed in either gold or silver—and many are of the opinion that the court was never quite as magnificent as it is today.”141 This was no small feat since the court of this lord’s father had been deemed “one of the most resplendent (resplendente) in the universe,” truly “splendid beyond measure” (oltramodo splendidissimo).142 Princes and their audiences were sensitive to distinctions of rank marked by clothing. Particular layers of brocaded satin worn by Galeazzo Maria Sforza during a visit with Emperor Frederick III in Trier were individually characterized as either “ducal” or “regal.”143 In 1472, Sforza outfitted nearly twenty of his camerieri with blue doublets and crimson apparel brocaded with silver. The garments given to the four courti188
ers who had previously been knighted, however, were enhanced instead by gold brocade, to distinguish these men from the others.144 According to the blind poet Francesco Cieco, the garments worn in a joust by Giulio and Carlo Malvezzi, members of a Bolognese dynasty that rivaled the Bentivoglio in midquattrocento Bologna, were “made of such beautiful work / that they seemed lords and not vassals.”145 Thus, it seems, even a blind man could discern hierarchical distinctions visualized by sumptuous clothing. Put simply, clothing broadcast status in Renaissance Italy; it indicated one’s worth and rank, much like a shop sign, to borrow Bernardino da Siena’s moralizing metaphor.146 It was incumbent on members of the upper ranks of society to wear clothing that clearly articulated their privilege. If a bishop celebrated mass dressed as “a poor chaplain,” the people would lose “half or more” of their devotion, a French royal advisor commented in the late fourteenth century.147 The aristocratic necessity to clothe and display oneself and court appropriately in public is illustrated by the lengths taken by Ginevra Sforza to marry Sante Bentivoglio in Bologna in 1454. Because Ginevra and her attendants were dressed in gold brocade in violation of Cardinal Bessarion’s recent prohibition against its use by women, they were turned away from the basilica of San Petronio. Rather than change clothes, they immediately proceeded to San Giacomo, where the couple was married despite risking excommunication for their apparel.148 In certain contexts, displays of brilliance were indeed considered immoral in fifteenthcentury Italy. Bernardino of Siena, for one, chastised the bride who “glows with gold,” and Pope Pius II criticized Borso d’Este’s bejeweled adornment and attention to appearances.149 Brashly colored and gilded array, particularly when it was multicolored, often came under criticism as well.150 To adapt the analogy first framed by the early Christian theologian Tertullian, if God had wanted us to wear colored garments, he would have made crimson and golden sheep.151 FADE TO BLACK; OR, IS BLACK THE NEW GOLD? Not all quattrocento signori, however, adopted golden garb; certain Italian lords donned rich, black garments instead, often to suggest humility and simplicity.152 Ercole d’Este favored black to stress his modesty and piety and, no doubt, to distinguish himself from his opulently attired half brother and predecessor, Borso. Ercole is depicted in black clothing and berretta—although wearing golden jewelry—in a number of manuscript illuminations.153 In the final years of the fifteenth century, the cut and color of Ercole’s clothing would be moralized as “solemn” and “without ostentation” by Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, although without quite the consternation that would characterize similar judgments in subsequent decades.154 Ercole did not, however, invariably present himself “without ostentation.” He spent much on jewels for his 189
personal adornment, and at Belriguardo this “most illustrious” lord was “depicted from life” wearing a gold chain, a “most rich” gem hanging at his chest, and on his berretta an “exceedingly large and noteworthy oriental pearl,” perhaps its size or some other visual quality suggesting foreign origins.155 Ercole’s nephew Francesco dons black clothing and a gold necklace in Rogier van der Weyden’s striking portrait now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 10).156 This bastard son of Leonello d’Este had spent much of his life at the court of Burgundy, where as we will see below, black was fashionable throughout the fifteenth century. The young prince Ercole Bentivoglio of Bologna also commonly wore black, at least according to Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti’s Le porretane composed circa 1480.157 Of course, black could also indicate a period of mourning. Antonello Petrucci explained to Lorenzo de’ Medici, visiting Naples in April 1466, that the entire Neapolitan court wore black because of the recent death of their ally Francesco Sforza.158 Noblemen and women, moreover, customarily wore black clothing at lords’ funerals, as did Pandolfo Malatesta III at that of Giangaleazzo Visconti in 1402.159 Black clothing also could express religious austerity, as in Savonarolan Florence.160 And it might additionally embody both republican ideologies and political distinctions, as in Venice, where ordinary citizens and patricians alike wore dark clothes, and dazzlingly colored garments were reserved for senators and high officials. In the 1501 portrait by Giovanni Bellini (fig. 11), Doge Leonardo Loredan wears an iridescent white damask mantle brocaded with golden threads and adorned with large golden buttons that, like his silverand gold-brocaded, horn-shaped hat of state, were required components of the dogal regalia that proclaimed his princely status and distinguished him from more ordinary Venetian citizens.161 Although the debate regarding the precise geographic and temporal origins of the courtly fashion for wearing black in Renaissance Europe continues, a few general comments can be made.162 Since at least the fourteenth century, in the aftermath of the Black Death, black clothing had communicated temperance, penitence, and restraint, as it would in subsequent centuries, following chromophobic Protestant reformers and solemn merchants suspicious of both bright colors and novelties of fashion.163 Moreover, the choice of black in northern Italy’s fifteenth century signorial circles was not merely inspired by Spanish models as is often claimed. In fact, the fashion for black was not pervasive in Spanish courts in Iberia and abroad until the sixteenth century, although it would remain the dominant color of Spanish kings’ wardrobes through the eighteenth.164 When the Neapolitan princess Isabella of Aragon married the magnificently bejeweled Gian Galeazzo Sforza in Milan in 1490, she was described as dressed “alla spagnola” (in the Spanish style), but Isabella was not wearing black, nor did her clothing suggest austerity. Quite the opposite, she wore a white silk mantle over a white 190
garment brocaded with gold, and she was radiantly adorned with such a quantity of pearls and jewels that she, “beautiful and polished,” was compared to the sun by the Ferrarese ambassador.165 One Italian noble, the Marquis of Pescara Fernando Francesco d’Avalos, made a stunningly dramatic entrance dressed in black at a sixteenth-century Neapolitan wedding at which the other guests were “covered in gold.”166 This event, adroitly interpreted by Amedeo Quondam, was recounted by Benedetto di Falco in 1538, almost twenty years after the fact, more than a decade after this war hero’s tragic death, and in the same year that poetry celebrating Fernando penned by his famous widow Vittoria Colonna was published. This incident has served as a foundation myth for the Italian aristocratic fashion for black clothing, heroicizing d’Avalos and, by extension, Colonna. The anecdote was also used as a moral exemplum, in the words of Benedetto di Falco, against “ostentation and vain riches that in the end gave way to virtue,” and such affirmation of her husband’s uprightness—sartorial and otherwise—poignantly reinforced the widow’s pious reputation, of course. Told decades after the invasions of Italy, the tale of Fernando Francesco’s sensational black clothing was thus one of the many exhortatory discourses chastising the glittering—and from their standpoint, effeminized—princes of the quattrocento, familiar from the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli and Baldassare Castiglione among others.167 As Gerry Milligan has convincingly argued, accusations of effeminacy were deployed in these sixteenth century texts as rhetorical tools that served to discipline male adornment and behavior, and concerns about fashion were inextricably enmeshed with political realities of foreign invasion and occupation.168 I would insist, moreover, that we bear in mind the distance between Benedetto di Falco’s account of d’Avalos’s entrance and the act itself and also that between cinquecento literary texts and the princes we have examined throughout this essay. Needless to say, both foreign fashions and masculine adornment meant very different things to lords and their audiences in 1460 and in 1520. In the fifteenth century, the princes most likely to wear black were northern Europeans. Although he founded the Order of the Golden Fleece, Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, was nevertheless often portrayed in black. In various portraits associated with Rogier van der Weyden and his workshop, for instance, the duke shows off a hefty chain adorned with the chivalric order’s pendant (perhaps most familiar to modern audiences as the symbol of the American clothier Brooks Brothers).169 The golden sheep, like the jeweled collar from which it is suspended, stands out prominently against Philip’s dark clothing. For the signori of fifteenth-century Italy, as for Philip, the act of wearing black at first derived its visual power from the prevailing princely convention of dressing in cloth of gold. As studies by Amedeo Quondam and Michel Pastoureau have argued, 191
astonishment was predicated on the ubiquity of the norm it opposed, as a potent exception to the (golden) rule.170 Fifteenth-century audiences, moreover, understood black to flatter fair complexions, to highlight bleached hair, and to intensify the brilliance of gems, brocades, and ornaments like Philip’s golden collar and pendant or Ercole d’Este’s “grandissima . . . orientale” pearl. In Lorenzo de’ Medici’s commentary to his own sonnet “Quell’amoroso e candido pallore”—to give but one example—the Florentine poet suggested that a beautiful pearl seems all the more “chiara e candida” and possesses a “vera e perfetta bianchezza” when seen against a black or dark ground.171 Even in the sixteenth century, when black frequently replaced golden fabric as the principal costume of princes and courtiers alike, it was usually garnished by jewels and gold detailing, as indeed was Fernando Francesco d’Avalos’s metal-star-studded and goldbrocaded burial garb.172 It is important to note that wearing black was hardly a rejection of opulence. Although it might seem unassuming to modern eyes, the black cloth worn by lords including Francesco d’Este and the Marquis of Pescara was often exceedingly costly, not least because of the complicated dying processes. Signori’s black garments were lustrous and glossy, and particularly so when compared to the coarse and undyed clothing worn by the vast majority of Renaissance men and women. Fifteenth-century black hues could appear as shiny, seductive, and vibrant as opulent blues and crimsons, and contemporaries appreciated their luminous sheen.173 Indeed, just as Renaissance humanists knew two Latin words for white (albus and candidus) differentiated by the intensity of their luster, so too did they distinguish a more radiant black (niger) from a more matte version (ater). Of course, black’s reign over (men’s) apparel did not end with Reformation clerics and Counter-Reformation princes; black clothed the Romantics as suitably melancholy and in post-Revolutionary France it materialized égalité. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution until today, black has announced a sober and serious work ethic, expressed in the twenty-first century by the dark suits of businessmen and women. Black too signifies a sleek and cool modernity, from Coco Chanel’s little black dress, to bikers’ black leather jackets or the late Steve Jobs’s turtleneck, to the model on the runway or the artist in the gallery dressed head to toe in black.174 For many today, it is black and not gold that represents fashion itself, seeming to be, at once, natural and timeless, sleek and modest, severe and chic. In the fifteenth century and the twenty-first, however, black clothing produces multivalent and contradictory messages, signaling—in both periods—gravity and sobriety but also a fashionable, even glamorous, sensibility or position. Presenting oneself as austere and disciplined could and can be done fashionably, even ostentatiously.
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Yet gold, the most precious of metals, retains its power to enchant, as it always has. In the fifteenth century, Italian court cultures comprised a literal “golden age,” saturated with brilliant bodies, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that radiated power, wealth, and lordship. Lavish and lustrous sartorial displays materialized signorial authority, as in Ferrara, where they comprised the essential apparel for rituals marking the assumption of the town’s signoria.175 An epitaph on the tomb of Pietro Rossi of Parma from that town’s church of Sant’Antonio Abate announces that he wore gold brocade when alive, powerfully communicating this necessity to posterity, and, indeed, chroniclers and other commentators often asserted that Italian lords were not seen by subjects dressed otherwise.176 Whether or not this was strictly true, contemporaries’ insistence that signori always wore cloth of gold clearly demonstrates the indispensable role of brilliant clothing in the display and manifestation of aristocratic power. While Pietro Rossi’s tomb inscription lamented the transient nature of life, not even death eclipsed a lord’s obligation to embody courtly radiance. Indeed, chroniclers and other sources confirm that fifteenth-century lords were customarily exhibited posthumously, and then buried, in lavishly brocaded clothing.177 The gold-brocaded garments worn to the grave by Sigismondo Malatesta were described when his body was exhumed in the mid-eighteenth century, and the velvet funeral doublet of Sigismondo’s father Pandolfo Malatesta III was recently removed from the lord’s embalmed body, carefully restored, and put on display in Fano’s Museo Civico (fig. 12). Pandolfo’s tightfitting but also padded garment was dyed an expensive crimson, and many of its wooden buttons wrapped in velvet are still attached.178 Nicolò d’Este, son of Leonello (fig. 5), was one of the many fifteenth-century noblemen to be laid in state in gold brocade, although his was no ordinary funeral. Nicolò di Leonello, in fact, had been beheaded after a failed revolt against his uncle Ercole, and subsequently his neck and head were washed and seamlessly sewn together, “so that it did not seem that his head had been cut off ” and so that he would be exhibited “a modo di principe.”179 Nicolò was given a magnificent funeral procession attended by all strata of Ferrarese society and was then buried in the church of San Francesco, along with many members of his dynasty, among them his uncle Ugo who had been beheaded fifty years prior for adultery with his father’s second wife.180 Among Nicolò’s mourners was the duchess Eleonora of Aragon, who “was not able to contain her very strong tears,” even though she had been recently terrorized by him, hiding in the Castelvecchio with her young children as Nicolò and his men rode through Ferrara screaming and rousing the popolo.181 Nicolò had arrived from Mantua with five boats loaded with soldiers, many of whom would be hanged. More than twenty corpses, in fact, were suspended from the windows of the Palazzo della Ragione and from the merlons of Ferrara’s castle, although of course it was essential that the noble body receive alto193
gether different treatment.182 Nicolò’s remarkable funeral highlights the importance that his dynasty, and court culture more broadly, placed on the appropriate display of adorned and clothed aristocratic bodies. This final view of Nicolò di Leonello d’Este, wearing gold brocade and a signorial silk berretta, was the image that subjects expected of a lord, as diligently fashioned in death as in life or in art and constructed through prodigious effort and expense. Notes Copyright of I Tatti Studies is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. 1. For brilliance and earlier European contexts, see Sarah-Grace Heller, “Light as Glamour: The Luminescent Ideal of Beauty in the Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 76, no. 4 (2001): 934–59; James Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago, 2006), 29–40, 80–88. We should be attuned to inflections relating to light in Italian words such as pulito (polished, in addition to clean) or chiaro (more luminous than merely clear) and in the modern English words and phrases that have lost this aspect of their meaning in general usage: splendid, luminary, illustrious, brilliant, glamorous, or to shine as in to perform exceptionally well. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 16, number 1/2. © 2013 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 2. This study is intended to complement foundational investigations of the primarily architectural virtue of magnificence, by shifting attention to the materialization of lordship through bodily display, adornment, and representation. 3. James Lindow, The Renaissance Palace in Florence: Magnificence and Splendour in Fifteenth Century Italy (Aldershot, 2007), 2. For one construction of splendor, see Evelyn Welch, “Public Magnificence and Private Display: Giovanni Pontano’s De Splendore (1498) and the Domestic Arts,” Journal of Design History 15 (2002): 211–27. 4. Adrian Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, CT, 2002), 83–85. 5. In a wider study, “Brilliant Bodies: Men at Court in Early Renaissance Italy” (unpublished manuscript, Villanova University, 2013), I investigate brilliant somatic beauty as an ideological tool wielded by signori. 6. Francesco Filelfo, Odes, ed. and trans. Diana Robin (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 4–5, 104–5, 150– 51. 7. Francesco Ariosto, Dicta de la Fortunata e Felice Entrata in Roma de lo Illustrissimo Duca Borso, quoted in Enrico Celani, “La venuta di Borso d’Este in Roma: L’anno 1471,” Archivio della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria 13, nos. 3–4 (1890): 361–450, 401: “il nostro divo, pio et excelso signore succedea tutto lieto e giocondo e signorile e respiandente cum quel so cesareo aspecto ornado d’oro e giemme, su quel magno dextriero tuto refulgente.” 8. “quegli ochi risplendenti, quella faza serena che a mezzo il giorno oscureria il sole”: Ludovico Carbone, Facezie e Dialogo de la partita soa, ed. Gino Ruozzi (Bologna, 1989), 77. 9. This anonymous Florentine poet entertained courtly literary aspirations, as Nerida Newbigin convincingly asserted. The “lucenti stelle” referred to the brilliantly attired men and women surrounding Galeazzo at a dance: Nerida Newbigin, ed., “Le Onoranze fiorentine del 1459: Poema anonimo,” Letteratura italiana antica 12 (2011): 17–135, 101. For the other descriptors of
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Galeazzo and his body parts, see ibid., 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 104. I thank Nerida for kindly providing me with her English translation of this text. 10. Gerardo Rustici, Cantilena pro potenti d. Petro Maria Rubeo Berceti comite magnifico et Noceti domino, Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS Parm. 1992 (1463), fol. 9v. 11. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN, 1994), 23. 12. For Renaissance accessories, see Evelyn Welch, “Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 3 (2009): 241–67; Bella Mirabella, ed., Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories (Ann Arbor, MI, 2011). For social bodies and historicist conceptions of embodiment, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993), 4–5, 27–28; Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 2011). The bibliography on Italian Renaissance bodies is immense; to begin, see Katharine Park, “Was There a Renaissance Body?” in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence, 2002), 321–35; Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families, and Masculinities (Manchester, 2010); Julia Hairston and Walter Stephens, eds., The Body in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore, 2010); Simons, Sex of Men. 13. See, usefully, Heller, “Light as Glamour,” 958; David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley, CA, 2002), 50, 116. 14. Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit, 6. 15. For the traps of studying masculinity in isolation from women, see Canning, Gender History in Practice, 10; Karen Adler, Ross Balzaretti, and Michele Mitchell, “Practising Gender History,” Gender and History 20, no. 1 (2008): 1–7, 2–3; Diane Watt, “Why Men Still Aren’t Enough,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 451–64, 452. 16. Canning, Gender History in Practice, 6, 62. See, also, Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC, 1998); R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 43, 68–71. 17. In general, see Connell, Masculinities. For fifteenth-century Europe, see Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003). 18. For religious dress, see Cordelia Warr, Dressing for Heaven: Religious Clothing in Italy, 1215– 1545 (Manchester, 2010). 19. Schultz, Courtly Love. 20. For Giovanni Augurelli’s description, see Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 200–201. 21. Gregory Lubkin, “Christmas at the Court of Milan, 1466–1476,” in Florence and Milan: Comparisons and Relations, ed. Craig Hugh Smyth and Gian Carlo Garfagnini, 2 vols. (Florence, 1989), 2:257–70, 260–61, 266; Evelyn Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven, CT, 1995), 206–9. 22. Lubkin, “Christmas at the Court,” 2:258, 267n. 23. Gregory Lubkin, A Renaissance Court: Milan under Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Berkeley, CA, 1994), 129. 24. Welch, Art and Authority, 244. 25. Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia, 2006), 58, 67; Angus Patterson, Fashion and Armour in Renaissance Europe: Proud Looks and Brave Attire (London, 2009), 63. 26. Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010), 83. 27. “vezzosi ne’ lor movimenti, / lustrando più che stelle mattutine / e tanto scintillanti e splendienti”: Newbigin, “Le Onoranze fiorentine,” 73. 28. Antonio Averlino (Filarete), Trattato di Architettura, ed. Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi, 2 vols. (Milan, 1972), 1:75–76: “i signori, che come queste pietre son fine e belle e non per 195
maneggiare perdono il lor colore neanche la loro virtù, così il signore debba essere, splendido e chiaro, sanza alcuna macula, benché da molti sia maneggiato e toccato.” 29. “Cosmo, i figli, il nipote con chiar fronte [i.e., Lorenzo], / ed i grandi e picchin’, femmine e maschi, / son sempre innanzi al gran signor Visconte. / Par che ciascun di quel mirar si paschi / perché lo miron fiso, come l’uova / lo struzzol fàce infin che ’l figliuol naschi . . . Chi mira lui fa come quel che corre / con gli occhi fisi al sole: ond’egli abbaglia / perché la vista non si può interporre”: Newbigin, “Le Onoranze fiorentine,” 69. 30. For a fifteenth-century Ferrarese recipe book traditionally attributed to the medico Michele Savonarola and full of methods to brighten, blanche, and generally increase the sheen of all manner of surfaces, see Pseudo-Savonarola, A far littere de oro: Alchimia e tecnica della miniatura in un ricettario rinascimentale, ed. Antonio Torresi (Ferrara, 1992). 31. For jewels, clothing, and various types of wealth and social values, see Adrian Randolph, “Performing the Bridal Body in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” Art History 21, no. 2 (1998): 182–200; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge, 2000); Evelyn Welch, “New, Old and Second-Hand Culture: The Case of the Renaissance Sleeve,” in Revaluing Renaissance Art, ed. Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd (Aldershot, 2000), 101–19, and Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven, CT, 2005); Leah Clark, “Transient Possessions: Circulation, Replication, and Transmission of Gems and Jewels in Quattrocento Italy,” Journal of Early Modern History 15, no. 3 (2011): 185–221; Catherine Richardson, “‘As my whole trust is in him’: Jewelry and the Quality of Early Modern Relationships,” in Mirabella, Ornamentalism, 182–201. 32. For the clothes of the lower classes, see Françoise Piponnier and Pierre Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven, CT, 1997), 39–54, 87–88. 33. For trenchant criticism of overreliance on sprezzatura in discussions of fifteenth-century art, see Stephen Campbell, “Cosmè Tura and Court Culture,” in Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara, ed. Stephen Campbell and Alan Chong (Milan, 2002), 1–30. 34. “sonno pomposo un pocho, e non è gran pecato in un signore”: Welch, Art and Authority, 216–17, 316; Franca Leverotti, “Lucia Marliani e la sua famiglia: Il potere di una donna amata,” in Donne di potere nel Rinascimento, ed. Letizia Arcangeli and Susanna Peyronel (Rome, 2008), 281– 311, 281. 35. The display and adornment of courtly men’s legs (and calze) is a crucial focus of my larger study (McCall, “Brilliant Bodies”). 36. For such rhetoric, see n. 167; for exhortation against effeminate masculinity in the sixteenth century, see Gerry Milligan, “The Politics of Effeminacy in Il cortegiano,” Italica 83, nos. 3–4 (2006): 345–66. 37. Evelyn Welch, “Women in Debt: Financing Female Authority in Renaissance Italy,” in Arcangeli and Peyronel, Donne di potere, 45–65, 52–53. For more on pawned and exchanged jewels, see Randolph, “Performing the Bridal Body”; Clark, “Transient Possessions.” 38. Paola Venturelli, Gioielli e gioiellieri milanesi: Storia, arte, moda, 1450–1630 (Milan, 1996), 168–69. 39. For Ludovico, see Chiara Buss, “Silk, Gold, Crimson,” in Silk Gold Crimson: Secrets and Technology at the Visconti and Sforza Courts, ed. Chiara Buss (Milan, 2009), 55; for Calcagnini, see Adolfo Venturi, “L’Arte a Ferrara nel periodo di Borso d’Este,” Rivista storica italiana 2 (1885): 689–749, 741. 40. For the portrait, see Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann, eds., The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini (New York, 2011), 287–90. For young Guidobaldo in general, see Marcello Simonetta, “Guidobaldus Dux Urbini: Ritratto del Principe da Giovane,” Humanistica 4, no. 1 (2009): 11–18. 196
41. For a complex reading of pearls’ multivalent significance, see Karen Raber, “Chains of Pearls: Gender, Property, Identity,” in Mirabella, Ornamentalism, 159–81. 42. For a great variety of cuts and shapes of jewels described in Milanese documents, see Paola Venturelli, Glossario e documenti per la gioielleria milanese, 1459–1631 (Milan, 1999), 62–63, 85–87, 113, 136. 43. See documents 1, 25, 47, and 49 in Arturo Calzona, “L’abito alla corte dei Gonzaga,” in Il costume nell’età del Rinascimento, ed. Dora Liscia Bemporad (Florence, 1988), 225–52. 44. Venturelli, Gioielli e gioiellieri milanesi, 72, and Glossario e Documenti, 148–50. 45. Dora Liscia Bemporad, “Il rapporto gioiello abito nel costume del Rinascimento,” in Bemporad, Il costume nell’età del Rinascimento, 59–66. 46. Venturi, “L’Arte a Ferrara,” 740. Images of Borso and his adornment in a wide variety of media will be discussed in depth in a forthcoming study. 47. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale: Vesti e società dal XIII al XVI secolo (Bologna, 1999), 144–45. For jewels in the inventory of Pandolfo Malatesta III, see Anna Falcioni and Antonello de Berardinis, eds., L’età di Pandolfo III Malatesti: Mostra storico-documentaria (Fano, 2011), 60. 48. Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 27–30, 69–71. 49. Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 120–21, 137. For additional viper-shaped jewelry, including Francesco Sforza’s brooch in the form of a “white serpent,” see Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 29, 125, 141, 150. For brooches in general, see Ronald Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewellery: With a Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, 1992), 136– 87. 50. Newbigin, “Le Onoranze fiorentine,” 72: “Avea una collana il signor bello / di belli intaglio e tutta d’oro fine, / con un bel vezzo d’un ricco gioiello . . . nella berretta il sir decoro / una brocchetta d’or, perle e gioielli / che per richezza valeva un tesoro.” 51. Of course this audience may have been transfixed because of Venetian strictures surrounding personal adornment. For Beatrice’s report, see Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, 183–84; Paola Venturelli, “‘Novarum Vestium Inventrix’: Beatrice d’Este e l’apparire; Tra invenzioni e propaganda,” in Beatrice d’Este, 1475–1497, ed. Luisa Giordano (Pisa, 2008), 147–59, 157. 52. For “spigo” see Venturelli, Gioielli e gioiellieri milanesi, 68, and “Novarum Vestium Inventrix,” 157; Clark, “Transient Possessions,” 194–95. 53. For the inventory of these pawned gems, including the “Balasso chiamato il Spico estimato ducati 25000” and the “Balasso cum la effigie de lo illustrissimo Sig. Duca Ludovico,” see Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 157–58. 54. Benvenuto Cellini, Due trattati, uno intorno alle otto principali Arti dell’Oreficeria, l’altro in materia dell’Arte della Scultura (Florence, 1568), 4r–6r; Mary Merrifield, Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting, 2 vols. (London, 1849), 2:506–15; Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewellery, 17–22; Maria Paola Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti: Organizzazione del lavoro e conflitti sociali nella Milano sforzesca, 1450–1476 (Florence, 1996), 121–29; Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 10–11; Maria Paola Zanoboni, “‘Non c’é inganno a questo mondo che renda maggior guadagno’: La corporazione Milanese dei fabbricanti di pietre false,” in Rinascimento sforzesco: Innovazioni, tecniche, arte, e società nella Milano del secondo Quattrocento (Milan, 2005), 119–32; Stuard, Gilding the Market, 180, 222; Marian Campbell, Medieval Jewellery in Europe, 1100–1500 (London, 2009), 16. 55. Cellini, Due trattati, 5r; Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewellery, 18–20. 56. Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti, 124–27. 57. Zanoboni, “Non c’é inganno,” 119–21. 58. Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti, 125–26, 141. 59. Ladislao Reti, Le arti chimiche di Leonardo da Vinci (Milan, 1952), 23–25; Licia Brescia and Luca Tomio, “Leonardo da Vinci e 197
il segreto del vetro cristallino, pannicolato, flessibile e infrangibile,” Raccolta Vinciana 28 (1999): 79–92, 90–92; Paola Venturelli, Leonardo da Vinci e le arti preziose: Milano tra xv e xvi secolo (Venice, 2002), 92–93; Zanoboni, “Non c’é inganno,” 125. 60. Zanoboni, “Non c’é inganno,” 121–22. 61. For Ferrara, see Venturi, “L’Arte a Ferrara,” 740. For the Venetian decree of 1487, see Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewellery, 18–20. 62. For Gian Galeazzo, see Rachele Magnani, Relazioni private tra la Corte Sforzesca di Milano e Casa Medici, 1450–1500 (Milan, 1910), 83. For some sense of the imaginatively descriptive language in Milanese documents, see Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 104–9, 139. 63. Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewellery, 11, 17. For the early modern pearl trade, see Molly Warsh, “Adorning Empire: A History of the Early Modern Pearl Trade, 1492–1688” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009). A “schozexe” pearl is mentioned in a late fifteenth-century Sforza inventory: Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 105. 64. Reti, Le arti chimiche, 27–28; Venturelli, Leonardo da Vinci, 105–10, 116. 65. Venturelli, Leonardo da Vinci, 107, 116. Popular teeth for such tools included those of dogs, wolves, and boars. 66. For these formulas, see Merrifield, Original Treatises, 2:508–13; Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewellery, 20–21; Pseudo-Savonarola, A far littere de oro, 149–51; Venturelli, Leonardo da Vinci, 112–21. 67. Venturelli, Leonardo da Vinci, 113–14. 68. Ariosto, Dicta de la Fortunata e Felice Entrata, 401 (as in n. 7). 69. Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri, La Corte di Lodovico il Moro, 4 vols. (Milan, 1913), 1:344–45. 70. See Isabella to Francesco Gonzaga, February 2, 1502, in Deanna Shemek’s forthcoming volume of translations of her letters (Isabella d’Este, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Deanna Shemek, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series [Toronto, forthcoming]). I thank Deanna for generously sharing her research with me. For the Italian, see Carlo D’Arco, Notizie di Isabella Estense, Moglie a Francesco Gonzaga: Aggiuntivi molti documenti inediti che si riferiscono alla stessa signoria, all’istoria di Mantova, ed a quella generale d’Italia (Florence, 1843), 303. For gifts of gold brocade surrounding the wedding festivities, see Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale, 250. 71. Stuard, Gilding the Market, 43, 155–57. For further on ribbons (filetti and stringhe in particular), see Jacqueline Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy, 1400–1500 (London, 1981), 216, 228. 72. For the portrait, see Christiansen and Weppelmann, Renaissance Portrait, 205–7. For the actual rosettes, see Adolfo Venturi, “Relazioni artistiche tra le corti di Milano e Ferrara nel secolo xv,” Archivio storico lombardo 2, no. 2 (1885): 225–80, 239. 73. Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale, 142–43. For men’s gold belts, see Stuard, Gilding the Market, 28–29, 40, 46–57. 74. Venturi, “Relazioni artistiche,” 276; Thomas Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d’Este, 1471– 1505, and the Invention of a Ducal Capital (Cambridge, 1996), 255. For further on buckles and fastenings, see Elizabeth Birbari, Dress in Italian Painting, 1460–1500 (London, 1975), 74–79. For Amadio da Milano in general, see Venturi, “Relazioni artistiche,” 237–45. 75. Venturi, “L’Arte a Ferrara,” 739, 742; Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 255. 76. Mario Scalini, “The Weapons of Lorenzo de’ Medici: An Examination of the Inventory of the Medici Palace in Florence Drawn Up upon the Death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492,” in Art, Arms, and Armour: An International Anthology, ed. Robert Held (Chiasso, 1972), 26, 28; Richard Stapleford, Lorenzo de’ Medici at Home: The Inventory of the Palazzo Medici in 1492 (University Park, PA, 2013), 153, 190. 77. For Milanese makers of metal hinges and similar fastenings and supports, see Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti, 151–57.
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78. Stuard, Gilding the Market, 24–28, 162–63. These changes in masculine fashion are addressed in my forthcoming study of men at court in fifteenth-century Italy (McCall, “Brilliant Bodies”). 79. Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy, 210; Paola Venturelli, “L’abbigliamento della donna,” in Milano e la Lombardia in età comunale, secoli XI–XIII (Cinisello Balsamo, 1993), 197–201. 80. Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 37–39. 81. Similar spangles might later be called tremblants. Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy, 228; Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 131. In Milan, tremolanti also referred to decorative aglets hanging from women’s headdresses: Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti, 110. For these ornaments on early modern English hats worn by men, see Mary Hayward, “Male Headwear at the Courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI,” in The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (London, 2010), 114–31. 82. Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 256. 83. “A guisa di mazzocchio una ghirlanda / di scaglie d’ariento addorna e bella / con penne d’oro che ssù dritte manda / avea ciascun dintorno alla pianella; / la qual pianella ogni armeggiante ha ’n testa, / pulita e rilucente quanto stella”: Newbigin, “Le Onoranze fiorentine,” 110–11. 84. In modern English, these eyelets are often called grommets, and aghetti—which were also referred to as gugielle, punte, puntali, and tremolanti—aiguillettes or aglets (which might also be the name for the entire laces, especially those connecting calze to doublets). For the fifteenth century, see Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy, 222–24; Buss, “Silk, Gold, Crimson,” 51–52. 85. Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti, 110–14. For additional examples, see Buss, Silk Gold Crimson, 143, 148–53, 170. For bezants, see Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2003), 46, 49–51. 86. Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti, 112–14; Buss, Silk Gold Crimson, 180. 87. Venturelli, Leonardo da Vinci, 129–31, 140–41. 88. Venturelli, Glossario e documenti, 151. 89. For the portrait, see Christiansen and Weppelmann, Renaissance Portrait, 253–54. 90. Patterson, Fashion and Armour. 91. For the Madonna della Vittoria and the circumstances of its commission—forced on the Jew Daniele da Norsa by Francesco Gonzaga—see Dana Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia, 2008), 40–68. 92. Dillian Gordon and Ashok Roy, “Uccello’s Battle of San Romano,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 22 (2001): 4–17. 93. For the armor, see Lionello Boccia, “Le armature di Paolo Uccello,” L’Arte 3, nos. 11–12 (1970): 58–91. 94. “quale sonno fornite de tucta maglia”: Emilio Motta, “Armaiuoli milanesi nel periodo visconteo-sforzesco,” Archivio Storico Lombardo 41 (1914): 187–232, 205. 95. Scalini, “Weapons of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” 22–26; Stapleford, Lorenzo de’ Medici at Home, 72, 93, 137, 151–52. 96. Scalini, “Weapons of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” 18–19. 97. For the assassination, see Bortolo Belotti, Storia di una Congiura (Milan, 1950); Vincent Ilardi, “The Assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza and the Reaction of Italian Diplomacy,” in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200–1500, ed. Lauro Martines (Berkeley, CA, 1972), 72–103; Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 239– 41; Monica Azzolini, The Duke and the Stars: Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 126–34. 98. Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 235–36. 99. Azzolini, The Duke and the Stars, 128, 277n. 100. Ibid., 108–9, 130–31. See, additionally, Isabella Lazzarini, “L’âge des conjurations: Violence, dinamiques politiques et ritualités sociales aux cours de l’Italie du Nord à la fin du XVe siècle” (Rennes, forthcoming). 101. Bernardino Corio, Storia di Milano, ed. Anna Morisi Guerra, 2 vols. (Turin, 1978), 2:1398– 99; Azzolini, The Duke and the Stars, 128. 199
102. Corio, Storia di Milano, 2:1399: “il duca se misse una corazina, quale cavò dicendo parebbe troppo grosso, puoi se vestì una veste di raso cremesino fodrata di sibelline e cinto con uno cordono di seta morella la biretta.” 103. Elsewhere I will discuss the pressure and emotional violence visited upon lords who were expected to meet courtly, masculine ideals of slender bodily form. 104. Luigi Fumi, “La sfida del duca Galeazzo Maria a Bartolomeo Colleoni,” Archivio storico lombardo 39, no. 36 (1912): 357–92, 378. 105. Scalini, “Weapons of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” 24, 26; Stapleford, Lorenzo de’ Medici at Home, 151–52. 106. Venturi, “Relazioni artistiche,” 232. 107. Carolyn Springer, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto, 2010), 94. For recent, theoretically ambitious approaches to Renaissance armor, see Amedeo Quondam, Cavallo e Cavaliere: L’armatura come seconda pelle del gentiluomo moderno (Rome, 2003); Patterson, Fashion and Armour; Springer, Armour and Masculinity. 108. Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara, 255; Anna Falcioni, Il costume e la moda nella corte di Pandolfo III Malatesti: Con particolare riferimento ai Codici Malatestiani della Sezione Archivio di Stato di Fano (Fano, 2009), 79n. 109. Motta, “Armaiuoli milanesi,” 212–13. 110. Springer, Armour and Masculinity, 158–61. 111. Giorgio Vasari, Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, et architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1906), 7:657: “E mi ricorda che, oltre al ritratto, il quale somigliava, per far il brunito di quell’arme bianco, lucido e proprio, io vi ebbi poco meno che a perdere il cervello: cotanto mi affaticai in ritrarre dal vero ogni minuzia . . . perciochè, sebene la biacca è il più fiero colore che adoperi l’arte, nondimeno più fiero e lustrante è il ferro.” See, additionally, Springer, Armour and Masculinity, 145–47. 112. “tuti li consiglieri et altri zentilhuomini et magistrati quasi tuti togati cum tanti brochati d’oro, argento et cremesino che facevano grande representatione”: quoted by Marco Folin, “La corte della duchessa: Eleonora d’Aragona a Ferrara,” in Arcangeli and Peyronel, Donne di Potere, 508. Eleonora of Aragon—in Milan for the wedding of Anna Sforza to her son Alfonso d’Este—described these men in a letter to her husband Ercole d’Este. 113. Studies of Italian brocaded fabrics are proliferating; to begin, see Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy, 66–96; Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation and Research (Bern, 1988), 105– 55; Lisa Monnas, Merchants, Princes, and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300–1550 (New Haven, CT, 2008); Rembrandt Duits, Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting: A Study in Material Culture (London, 2008); Buss, Silk Gold Crimson; Lisa Monnas, Renaissance Velvets (London, 2012). 114. Monnas, Renaissance Velvets, 18–20. In England, brocades with such loops were referred to as cloth of gold of tissue. 115. For Pavia and Milan, see Evelyn Welch, “Galeazzo Maria Sforza and the Castello di Pavia, 1469,” Art Bulletin 71, no. 3 (1989): 352–75, and “The Image of a Fifteenth-Century Court: Secular Frescoes for the Castello di Porta Giovia, Milan,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 163–84. 116. Luca Beltrami, Il Castello di Milano (Castrum Portae Jovis), sotto il dominio dei Visconti e degli Sforza (Milan, 1894), 365–66; Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 216–17. 117. Buss, Silk Gold Crimson, 114. For another example, see Magnani, Relazioni private, 82. 118. Magnani, Relazioni Private, 43, xxxiv. 119. Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri, “Ricamatori e arazzieri a Milano nel Quattrocento,” Archivio storico lombardo 19 (1903): 34–63, 44.
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120. Alison Wright, “A Portrait for the Visit of Galeazzo Maria Sforza to Florence in 1471,” in Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, ed. Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann (London, 1996), 65–92, 65–66. 121. Maria Paola Zanoboni, “I Da Gerenzano ‘ricamatori ducali’ alla corte sforzesca,” in Rinascimento sforzesco, 23–86, 35–36. 122. Monnas, Renaissance Velvets, 86–87. 123. Ibid., 27-29. 124. Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna (Oxford, 1986), 76. For another example, see Welch, “New, Old and Second-Hand Culture,” 109–10. For the price of brocaded fabrics, see Monnas, Merchants, Princes, and Painters, 23–28. 125. Leverotti, “Lucia Marliani,” 282–83. For gifts of expensive cloth, see Joanna WoodsMarsden, The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello’s Arthurian Frescoes (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 140; Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 48, 51, 57, 129, 184, 220. 126. Newbigin, “Le Onoranze fiorentine,” 71: “ma la presenza suol minuir fama, / ed in costui raddopia in vie più doppi / che non son fili imbroccati di trama.” 127. Motta, “Armaiuoli milanesi,” 189, 196, 198, 213; Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 182, 212. 128. A few years later, Louis sent a French armorer to Milan to learn the craft: Motta, “Armaiuoli milanesi,” 190, 210, 213–14. 129. For the economic difficulties of Milanese armorers, see Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti, 145–51. 130. Malaguzzi Valeri, “Ricamatori e arazzieri”; Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 161. 131. Malaguzzi Valeri, “Ricamatori e arazzieri”; Luigi Brenni, L’Arte del Battiloro (Milan, 1930); Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale, 231; Monnas, Merchants, Princes, and Painters, 7–8; Buss, “Silk, Gold, Crimson,” 50–51; Monnas, Renaissance Velvets. 132. Chiara Buss, “Silk Art and Technology in the Service of the Sforza Dukes” (presentation at the conference The Power of Luxury: Art and Culture at the Italian Courts in Machiavelli’s Lifet i m e , U n i v e r s i t y o f M e l b o u r n e , Fe b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 ) ; t a l k a v a i l a b l e a t http://www.artinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/past _events/the_power_of_luxury. 133. Brenni, L’Arte del Battiloro, 53; Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200– 1500 (Oxford, 2002), 49; Buss, “Silk, Gold, Crimson,” 44, and Silk Gold Crimson, 180. 134. Venturi, “L’Arte a Ferrara,” 744; Venturelli, Leonardo da Vinci, 140. 135. Venturelli, Leonardo da Vinci, 129. 136. Franca Leverotti, “Governare a modo e stillo de’ Signori . . .” osservazioni in margine all’amministrazione della giustizia al tempo di Galeazzo Maria Sforza duca di Milano, 1466–76 (Florence, 1994), 30. For excessive expenditure on Galeazzo’s celebrations of the feast of Saint George over a number of years, see Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 214–18. 137. Franca Leverotti, “The Organization of the Sforza Court and Silk Production,” in Buss, Silk Gold Crimson, 22. For further on Galeazzo dressing his courtiers, see Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 55, 99, 128–30, 135; Marcello Fantoni, “Le corti e i ‘modi’ del vestire,” in Storia d’Italia, 19: La Moda, ed. Carlo Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti (Turin, 2003), 737–65, 737–38; Monnas, Merchants, Princes, and Painters, 29, 341. 138. Zanoboni, Artigiani, imprenditori, mercanti, 168, and “I Da Gerenzano ‘ricamatori ducali’”; Leverotti, “Organization,” 21; Monnas, Renaissance Velvets, 10–11. See references in n. 97 for varying motives for his murder. 139. Marsilio Andreasi to Barbara of Brandenberg, February 13, 1477, from Milan: “io non farò altro de quello brochato d’oro come scrive la vostra signoria, et credo sera meglio che la piglii la via de Vinesia per far fare quello panno d’oro. Qui, a dire il vero, non se lavorarà più troppo brochati né altri drappi, perché non gli serà fin ad un pezzo chi facia largiesse come se faceva”: Car-
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teggio degli Oratori Mantovani alla Corte Sforzesca, 1450–1500, ed. Gianluca Battioni (Rome, 2008), 10:495–96. 140. Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy, 94. 141. Magnani, Relazioni Private, liv. 142. “Havea a caro se potesse dire con il vero la sua corte fusse una de le più resplendente de l’universo . . . e ne la corte sua oltramodo splendidissimo”: Corio, Storia di Milano, 2:1409; Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 87; Welch, Art and Authority, 218. 143. Grazietta Butazzi, “Some Considerations on Late-15th-Century Fashions at the Sforza Court,” in Buss, Silk Gold Crimson, 27. 144. Lubkin, Renaissance Court, 135, 156, 178; Leverotti, “Organization,” 20. For clothing and distinction at the court in Milan, see also Fantoni, “Le corti e i ‘modi’ del vestire,” 742–44. 145. Francesco Cieco, Descrizione del gran torneamento di M. Giovanni Bentivoglio di Bologna: “sopraveste facte a si bellopre / che parean signore e non vasalli,” quoted in Georgia Clarke, “Giovanni II Bentivoglio and the Uses of Chivalry: Towards the Creation of a ‘Republican Court’ in Fifteenth-Century Bologna,” in Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City, ed. Stephen Campbell and Stephen Milner (Cambridge, 2004), 162–86, 165, 181. 146. For this metaphor, see Welch, “New, Old and Second-Hand Culture,” 103. For fundamental studies of clothing and identity in early modern Europe, see Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing; Caroline Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (Baltimore, 2002); Stuard, Gilding the Market; Rublack, Dressing Up. 147. Rublack, Dressing Up, 85. 148. Various members of the bridal party were subsequently excommunicated: Diane Owen Hughes, “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge, 1983), 69–99, 81; Catherine Kovesi Killerby, “‘Heralds of a Well-Instructed Mind’: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defence of Women and Their Clothes,” Renaissance Studies 13, no. 3 (1999): 255– 82. For more on the opulent clothing of the populous wedding party and the rich garments worn by other Bolognese brides and grooms, see Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale, 254–55. For Sante’s brilliant array in general, see Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale, 139–45. 149. “alluccica d’oro”: quoted in Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (New Haven, CT, 2008), 27–29, 266. Moralizing discourses about fashion, gender, and sartorial expenditure—in general and within the context of Pius II’s relations with Borso d’Este—are discussed in my wider study (McCall, “Brilliant Bodies”), although see Graeme Murdoch, “Dress to Repress? Protestant Clerical Dress and the Regulation of Morality in Early Modern Europe,” Fashion Theory 4, no. 2 (2000): 179–200; Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric, trans. Jody Gladding (New York, 2001); Ribeiro, Dress and Morality; Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ, 2009). 150. Pastoureau, Devil’s Cloth; Ribeiro, Dress and Morality; Amedeo Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero: Moda e cultura del gentiluomo nel Rinascimento (Costabissara, 2007), 101. 151. Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law, 18. 152. This conclusion will be expanded as the epilogue to a book-length study of courtly men and their bodies (McCall, “Brilliant Bodies”). For essential sources on black clothing in early modern Europe and beyond, see Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley, CA, 1975), 365–90; John Harvey, Men in Black (Chicago, 1995); Daniel Miller, “The Little Black Dress Is the Solution, but What Is the Problem?” in Elusive Consumption, ed. Karin Ekström and Helene Brembeck (Oxford, 2004), 113–27; Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero; Pastoureau, Black. 153. Joseph Manca, “The Presentation of a Renaissance Lord: Portraiture of Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1471–1505),” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 52, no. 4 (1989): 522–38, 532–33; 202
Daniele Bini, “Genealogia dei Principi d’Este,” in Gli Estensi, ed. Roberta Iotti (Modena, 1997), 95–146, 144– 45; Federica Toniolo, ed., La Miniatura a Ferrara: Dal Tempo di Cosmè Tura all’Eredità di Ercole de’ Roberti (Modena, 1998), 314–18. 154. Werner Gundersheimer, Art and Life at the Court of Ercole I D’Este: The ‘De triumphis religionis’ of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (Geneva, 1972), 50–51. 155. For a large purchase of jewels made by Ercole, see Venturi, “Relazioni artistiche,” 247. For Belriguardo, see Gundersheimer, Art and Life, 61–62: “con dolce piacere vidi la tua illustrissima Signoria naturalmente depincta, torqueta d’oro, con richissima gema pendente al pecto et in la biretta grandissima e speciosissima margarita orientale.” 156. For Rogier’s portrait and Francesco’s adaptation of Burgundian dress and hair style, see Ernst Kantorowicz, “The Este Portrait by Roger van der Weyden,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3, nos. 3–4 (1940): 165–80; Christiansen and Weppelmann, Renaissance Portrait, 208–10. For an illuminated portrait of Francesco in black, see Bini, “Genealogia dei Principi d’Este,” 136–37. 157. Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, Le porretane, ed. Bruno Basile (Rome, 1981), 41–42. 158. Marcello Simonetta, Rinascimento segreto: Il mondo del segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli (Milan, 2004), 176. For black clothes and mourning, see Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, 373, 382; Harvey, Men in Black. 159. Falcioni and Berardinis, L’età di Pandolfo III, 34. 160. Pastoureau, Black, 104. 161. For the portrait, see Lorne Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian (New Haven, CT, 2008), 108–9. For Venetian fashion distinctions and dogal clothing in general, see Stella Mary Newton, The Dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525 (Aldershot, 1989); Marin Sanudo, “Praise of the City of Venice, 1493,” in Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630, ed. David Chambers and Brian Pullan (Oxford, 1992), 4–21, 6–7; Harvey, Men in Black, 66–67; Patricia Allerston, “Clothing and Early Modern Venetian Society,” in Riello and McNeil, Fashion History Reader, 93–110, 96–98; Monnas, Renaissance Velvets, 39. 162. Harvey, Men in Black, 41–113; Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero; Pastoureau, Black, 95– 110. 163. Harvey, Men in Black, 68–69, 85–91, 118–47; Murdoch, “Dress to Repress?”; Pastoureau, Black, 102. 164. Harvey, Men in Black, 72–82; Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero, 119–37; Pastoureau, Black, 100, 103, 159; Hilary Davidson, “Fashion in the Spanish Court,” in Riello and McNeil, Fashion History Reader, 169–71. Elsewhere (McCall, “Brilliant Bodies”) I will discuss the complicated question of the quattrocento Neapolitan court’s reputation for wearing black, best known to scholars from a Florentine source famously interpreted by Michael Baxandall, Vespasiano da Bisticci’s tale of the arrogant Sienese ambassador made to look a fool by Alfonso of Aragon’s courtiers rubbing against and damaging his brocades. 165. Isabella “era bella et pulita che pareva un sole”: Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale, 258–59. 166. Fernando Francesco d’Avalos is also known as Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos. For Benedetto di Falco’s text and an extended discussion of the anecdote, see Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero, 27– 30: “l’illustrissimo segnor Marchese di Pescara, segnor di giusta persona e d’una segnoril bellezza, con un marzial viso degno d’imperio, con un portamento onestissimo, vestito di nero, come usano vestire gran re e imperatori, con sua virtuosa spada. Vedesti in un momento, all’apparir de sì gran marchese, tuti que’ prencipi e duci, ch’erano coperti in oro . . . io, ch’era presente, ringraziava Dio che le pompe e le vane ricchezze alla fine davano luoco alla vertù.” 167. Castiglione, e.g., asserted that black possessed more “grazia” than clothing of any other color. For examples and discussion of this rhetoric, see Muzzarelli, Guardaroba medievale, 249; Amedeo Quondam, Questo povero Cortegiano: Castiglione, il libro, la storia (Rome, 2000), 381– 88; Harvey, Men in Black, 71; Milligan, “Politics of Effeminacy”; Gerry Milligan, “Masculinity 203
and Machiavelli: How a Prince Should Avoid Effeminacy, Perform Manliness, and Be Wary of the Author,” in Seeking Real Truths: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Machiavelli, ed. Patricia Vilches and Gerald Seamon (Leiden, 2007), 149–72; Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero, 21–22, 35–36; Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus, “Introduction,” in The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain, ed. Gerry Milligan and Jane Tylus (Toronto, 2010), 13–40, 17–19, 24– 25; Springer, Armour and Masculinity, 15–21. 168. Milligan, “Politics of Effeminacy.” 169. For Philip and the order, see Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “Portable Propaganda: Tapestries as Princely Metaphors at the Courts of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold,” Art Journal 48, no. 2 (1989): 123–29. See also, Harvey, Men in Black, 52–58; Piponnier and Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, 71–73. 170. Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero; Pastoureau, Black. 171. Lorenzo de’ Medici, “Comento de’ miei sonetti,” in Tutte le opere, ed. Paolo Orvieto, 2 vols. (Rome, 1992), 1:523–24; Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero, 106. 172. Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero, 48. 173. Harvey, Men in Black, 55–56; Buss, Silk Gold Crimson, 110–11; Pastoureau, Black, 90–92, 100; Hayward, “Male Headwear at the Courts,” 116; Monnas, Renaissance Velvets, 23–25. 174. Useful guides for black clothing in modernity include Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, 374–90; Harvey, Men in Black; Miller, “Little Black Dress”; Pastoureau, Black. 175. For the investiture of Leonello and Borso d’Este, see Charles Rosenberg, The Este Monuments and Urban Development in Renaissance Ferrara (Cambridge, 1997), 53, 73, 81. 176. “Aurea quem vestis redimebat tempora vitae / Nunc Rubeum Petrum aspera petra tegit.” 177. For Sigismondo Malatesta, see Giorgio Sangiorgi, “Reliquie tessili rinvenute nella tomba di Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in Rimini,” Rassegna d’arte antica e moderna 21 (1921): 93–100; Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation and Research, 440–41, 454–57; for Pier Maria Rossi, see Angelo Pezzana, Storia della città di Parma, 5 vols. (Parma, 1837–59), 4:300; for Borso d’Este, see Ugo Caleffini, Croniche, 1471–1494 (Ferrara, 2006), 5; for Federico da Montefeltro, see Marcello Simonetta, The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded (New York, 2008), 186; for Gian Galeazzo Sforza, see Buss, Silk Gold Crimson, 114. 178. Claudia Kusch, Patrizia Mignani, and Raffaella Pozzi, eds., Redire 1427–2009; Ritorno alla luce: Il restauro del Farsetto di Pandolfo III Malatesti (Fano, 2009), 17–60; Falcioni and Berardinis, L’età di Pandolfo III, 104–7. 179. Caleffini, Croniche, 1471–1494, 186: “vestito tuto de pano d’oro seu brocato d’oro cremisino et soto una coperta da lecto, tuta de brocato d’oro cremisino, lo prefato messer Nicolò da Este, morto como è dicto, al quale era stato lavato il colo et insieme poi cosito, a ciò non paresse li fusse stato taiato la testa, con una bereta de roxato in capo.” Corio, Storia di Milano, 2:1395: “fu decapitato e puoi a modo di principe col capo presso al busto vestito di drappo d’oro fu tumulato contiguo a li altri marchesi defuncti.” For the rebellion, see the Diario Ferrarese dall’anno 1409 sino al 1502, ed. Giuseppe Pardi, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 24, no. 7 (Bologna, 1934–37), 91– 93; Caleffini, Croniche, 1471–1494, 180– 88; Lazzarini, “L’âge des conjurations.” 180. Diario Ferrarese, 92: “et fu sepulto a hore xx a li frati de Sancto Francesco. Et fuli tuti li gentilhomini a fare honore et ge fu facto uno bello exequio.” Ugo’s adultery with his stepmother Parisina Malatesta (wife of Nicolò III d’Este)—a story that would be adapted by writers from Matteo Bandello to Lord Byron to Gabriele d’Annunzio—will be discussed in a forthcoming study (McCall, “Brilliant Bodies”), although see Alfonso Lazzari, Parisina (Florence, 1949). 181. Caleffini, Croniche, 1471–1494, 186: “madama duchesa per lo primo che piangesse, quando lo vide dal suo pozolo non se potè contenire de lacrimare bene forte.” 182. Diario Ferrarese, 92: “Et xx homini furno appicati a le fenestre del Palazo de la Ragione, et cinque ne furno appicati a li merli del Castello Vechio, fra li qualli ge fu Bortelamio di Siviero fer204
rarexe, cancellero de messer Nicolò da Este, et Marco Tosego, suo camarlengo. Et la nocte sequente, che fu a dì 4 del dicto, fu taiata la testa a messer Nicolò da Este.”
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